Category Archives: Events

January Digital Boot Camp for Dickinson Students

Student applications to Digital Boot Camp 2016 are due Friday, November 20, at 5:00 PM. Please invite students who may be interested in this two-week, paid opportunity. This year’s program includes an all-day “humanities hack-a-thon,” and the theme will be “Humanities at the Crossroads of Tradition and New Technologies.” The application form is available on the website, DBC 2016.

Out of the dozens of applications we received last year, eleven students were accepted into Dickinson’s Digital Boot Camp held in Waidner-Spahr Library (January 12-16). Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Dickinson’s Digital Boot Camp 2015 was a two-week series of tutorials and on-campus workshops designed to help students develop the skills to produce and display, organize, and analyze digital content and information online.

Based in current Web technologies, students learned fundamentals of using Drupal (CMS) to design and display content, ArcGIS (Geographic Information Systems) for identifying and analyzing geographic relationships in humanities-based research, and Gephi (an open-source data visualization software) for mapping large complex sets of data for visualization, discovery, and network analysis.

This year’s upcoming program (January 11-22, 2016) will mark the third anniversary of DBC @ Dickinson, and be the first in which students have the opportunity to interact in Waidner-Spahr Library’s two new digital humanities workspaces, the Willoughby Digital Scholarship Lab and the <TEI Lab/>. Here they will be learning last year’s application technologies in addition to XML encoding and the markup language of TEI, which support the next-generation Web technologies that are already shifting scholarship away from today’s Web of Display to tomorrow’s Web of Data and Meaning.

For an example of Web 3.0 collaboration in the humanities, see the ARC BigDIVA (Big Data Infrastructure Visualization Application), a dynamic catalog of over 200 research projects in the digital humanities which students at Dickinson have been involved in building through textual markup of early 20th-c. magazines and internships in the <TEI Lab/> this year.

“The taxonomies we develop [through ARC] will be taken up by contributors to our nodes and could potentially become one of the standards for the semantic web. This is a big responsibility: we can at this moment have an impact on the way that literature is found on the Internet, not just by search engines but by data-mining and information systems that create encyclopedic definitions of the world. We are participating in the emergence of knowledge organization for the future, beyond Dewey and Library of Congress schemes.” — Dr. Laura Mandell, Professor of English, Texas A&M University, Director of ARC, 18thConnect and General Editor of The Poetess Archive.

Read what students last year are saying: Student Experience and Kristina Rodriguez’s Article from The Dickinsonian (Oct. 25, 2015); and learn more about the National Endowment for the Humanities and support for humanities computing, The Rise of the Machines

Patrick Belk

Cliff Wulfman on Skunks, Shmoos, and the Future of DH

[The following slides and presentation notes are from Cliff Wulfman’s talk, “Thinking Big,” which took place Thursday, April 2, 2015 in Stafford Auditorium on the campus of Dickinson College. The Digital Humanities Advisory Committee thanks Dr. Wulfman for his permission to share them–PSB].

Slide01

I want to thank Chris and Patrick for inviting me to speak with you this afternoon.  I’m a close reader by training and inclination, so I can’t start a talk like this without “problematizing” our terms:

“Successful Digital Humanities Project Development”

Indeed, I’m going to use those terms as the framework for exploring these five steps, though not in syntactic order.

1. DIGITAL: Let’s begin with the term digital, and its verbal derivation, digitize.

Slide03

The term digital is, of course, treacherously polysemous.  It has become a metonym for the discrete values modern computers use to represent information, and so to digitize is to represent information by means of discrete values.  Digital data is simply information stored as ordered sequences of discrete states.  These ordered sequences are often called files or streams, and they come in many varieties, but at the most basic level they are all the same: audio files, image files, text files are all just sequences of bits.

So the digital in digital humanities refers to the binary representation of information as bits.  It does not, in other words, connote numerical or mathematical so much as it does symbolic, or semiotic.

Slide4

It is about representability.

So digital humanities is not equivalent to statistical humanities, although the showiest face of digital humanities is the visualization of maps, graphs, and trees derived from the application of social-science methods to texts and to phenomena of interest to historians of various types, literary and otherwise. The rhetorical impact of these visualizations is undeniable, but at bottom they are simply a way of displaying quantitative information, and computation is not equivalent to quantification. Computation also entails the application of procedural logic and heuristics: using an encoded knowledge base and a reasoning algorithm, for example, to diagnose an illness from a set of symptoms.

Nor is digital humanities equivalent to making web pages.

Slide5

For scholars in the humanities, in most cases, web sites are akin to publications: they constitute the presentation of research, not the research itself.  So in almost all cases, creating a web site does not constitute a digital humanities project.

At the same time, the World Wide Web has evolved, from a collection of lightly encoded text files linked together by the HTTP data-transfer protocol, into a network of data and services. So creating a trove of carefully prepared data in machine-readable format — a digital edition encoded in the schema of the Text Encoding Initiative, for example, or a biographical dictionary encoded using the standards of linked open data — does constitute a digital humanities project.

So the first step to successful digital humanities project development is understanding what it means for something to be digital.Slide06

2. PROJECT: Next: Defining a project.

Slide07

As a researcher, you may already have disciplinary knowledge and traditional practice guiding and constraining your conception and realization of a project. What makes a scholarly or academic project a digital humanities project?

Defining a project isn’t always straightforward in the humanities.

Slide8

These endeavors are not always product-oriented; even when they are, the product is frequently intangible: an idea; an argument; an analysis; a method; a critique; etc. I’m leaving aside articles and monographs as direct products of research: they are secondary instruments of dissemination

Sometimes there is tangible product, though: editions; transcriptions; databases; instruments for research and analysis.

When thinking in terms of a project, then, it is important to learn to think strategically:

Slide09Think about the outcomes you want to want to achieve, and why they are important: what will the consequences of this work be?

Think about the resources your work will require. Particular materials, in particular forms? Tools for accomplishing specific tasks?  Whose time and attention will you be drawing upon, and for how long?

How difficult is your project? What are the risk factors: what sorts of things might go wrong, what sorts of events might interfere with the successful completion of your project? What are your contingency plans? Can your project produce partial successes, or is it all or nothing? (Not a good idea.)

Try to organize your project into phases, each of which has its own success criteria, and each of which builds on the preceding phases.

If it sounds like I’m telling you to learn to think like an engineer, I am.

3. HUMANITIES:

Slide10

Earlier, I talked about what it means for something to be digital. Chiseling a definition of the term digital is easy; sharpening the meaning of the term humanities is much, much more difficult – so difficult and contentious, in fact, that I’m not going to address it directly at all, other than to suggest it has more to do with subject-matter than method.  Instead, just as I have tried to complicate the popular conflation of digital humanities with social science, I want to take this opportunity to distinguish digital humanities from digital librarianship.  Once again, these endeavors often overlap significantly, but they are different.

From one perspective, a library is a hoard of physical artifacts whose principal function is to be looked at. Seen from that perspective, digitization is an image-making activity: rendering surfaces on which drawings and inscriptions appear into sequences of bits that a computer can use to produce a reflection of that surface. From another perspective, a library is a gathering of texts whose principal function is to be read. From this perspective digitization is a linguistic activity: rendering words or other symbols into sequences of bits that a computer can use to create linguistic symbols that can be analyzed and compared.

It is the scholar’s privilege to regard the library from the latter perspective; it is the librarian’s burden to view it from the former, and in large measure the job of libraries is conservative digital photo-duplication: not creating a digital library so much as digitizing an existing one.

Thus the work of the digital scholar depends on that of the digital librarian, and in some aspects overlaps considerably with it, but it is not the same work. Likewise the work of the information scientist; the software engineer; the computer scientist (all different sorts of work, often done by different people).

This is part of the reason the digital humanities are so often hyped as being collaborative: quite often, work in DH requires knowledge and expertise from a variety of fields.  By bringing in many different perspectives you necessarily get many different priorities, points of view, cutting across different traditional academic disciplines, but focusing on humanities questions.

So, step three in developing a successful digital humanities project is to conceptualize your work in the context of an interdisciplinary framework of humanistic endeavor.

Slide11

4. SUCCESSFUL: Defining success isn’t always straightforward in the humanities, and in research in general.

Slide12

I’m going to hazard the following measure of a good DH Project:

“a good DH project uses domain knowledge and intellectual labor to create digital objects that can be curated and shared with others through standard formats and services.”

That last criterion (accessibility) strongly implicates the world wide web, but it needn’t always. And it certainly doesn’t necessitate a whizzy web site.

Slide13

But defining success is a useful discipline nonetheless. For one thing, it can help you focus your work by articulating specific outcomes you want to achieve.

What specific goals do you expect to meet with this work?  A full and compelling argument?  An insightful biography?  A meticulous accounting of an event, or an object, or an archive?  If there are products of your work, what are they?  On what basis can you or others evaluate their quality, their success or failure?

Of course, this kind of outcome-orientation isn’t appropriate at all stages of research, but the point at which you can articulate goals and deliverables is the point at which research becomes a project.

Slide14

Defining successful outcomes also helps to organize time and effort.  Most of us know the value of setting intermediate goals and deadlines; organizing these around success criteria can help make them realistic.

Let me give you some examples (this is a highly opinionated list) of “Bad (or Meh) DH Projects”:

Slide16

Slide17

Slide18

Slide19

Now another, equally opinionated, list of “Good (or Exemplary) DH Projects”:

Slide20

The Text Creation Partnership to improve the OCR of 18th century typography is a good DH project.  Good DH projects are those whose products or outcomes can be used in multiple ways by others.

EXEMPLARY PROJECTS

The Valley of the Shadow is one of the first digital humanities projects.

Slide22

Begun in 1993 by Ed Ayers and Will Thomas, at Uva, it is an electronic archive of two communities in the American Civil War–Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennyslvania. The Valley Web site includes encoded, searchable newspapers, population census data, agricultural census data, manufacturing census data, slave-owner census data, and tax records. The Valley Web site also contains letters and diaries, images, maps, church records, and military rosters.

What makes it particularly important, to my mind, is that it was designed not as a showcase but as a working research tool.

Ayers and Thomas published a web-based hypertext article that explicitly uses hypertext and full-text encoded archival material to make an argument.

The Shelley-Godwin Archive is another exemplary archival project.

Slide23

It features transcriptions of manuscripts that are deeply encoded to allow users to study the composition history of the materials.

Mapping the Republic of Letters is another.

Slide24

Based at Stanford, this project gathers meta data about the networks of correspondence among the luminaries of the Age of Enlightenment and uses it to produce wonderful visualizations of them.

5. DEVELOPMENT: So how do you go about doing this? How do you develop a DH project?

Slide25

Talk with people.

We’ve already talked about the almost inherently collaborative nature of the digital humanities.  There simply is not (not yet, anyway) a strong, documented track record of digital humanities methods and approaches; they are in any case highly interdisciplinary and under rapid evolution.

The proliferation of DH centers at universities testifies to the anxiety on the part of researchers to acquire new competencies as part of their academic work.  So seek out others in your field who have already had some experience, and ask them how they did it; seek out colleagues in other fields to talk with you about methodologies and approaches.

Climb the steep hill.

Slide27

This is really important. Ask yourself if you are willing to take the time to learn something new, different, and possibly outside your comfort zone.

Be prepared to acquire a more than superficial understanding of computational practices and methods.  Not that you have to become a master programmer; but you should understand the fundamentals of programming and computer science: data structures and algorithms; inputs and outputs.

Just as you would not undertake a professional study of Homer without learning Greek, learn the the language of computer engineering: how could I represent the objects of my study in machine-readable forms? Can I develop models of things and events? How might I manipulate those representations? Could I describe procedures, techniques, tricks for analyzing them, generating them, enhancing them, expressing them in different forms?

Deploy project-oriented thinking.

Slide28

In developing your project, employ the project-oriented strategic thinking we discussed earlier:  Try to lay out your project as a series of incremental steps and accomplishments.

Be flexible.

Unless your project is very straightforward and extremely well defined, it is likely to change in response to external events (funding, personnel) and internal evolution (discoveries made in the course of the project).

But, don’t just go chasing rabbits down the rabbit-hole. It’s very tempting to let the scope of your project expand over time as you learn about new things, see someone’s nifty tool, and so on.

Scope creep founders projects.

At the same time, though, don’t hobble your imagination or your ambition based on what you can see from here, today.

Don’t be afraid to think big.

Slide29

Let me share with you a little thought experiment.  A few months ago I was asked to speak on a conference panel entitled “Modernism and Big Data.”

The so-called “digital humanities” are at this early stage of engagement as much a series of considered poses, or deliberative positions, as anything else.  So to hold a panel on “Modernism and Big Data” was to propose a consideration of “Humanism as Big Science,” to position ourselves, to imagine ourselves, as big scientists asking big questions, knowing all the while that we were “playing pretend”.

In what follows, I am going to pretend that the collective textual remnants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries have all been processed into a machine-readable textual corpus. We don’t have it now, but it is not so far-fetched to imagine that we will be able to capture a significant portion of the written record, at least that portion already under institutional control in libraries and archives. It wasn’t all that long ago that the Google Books project seemed absolutely preposterous.

And besides, we’re just playing.

Slide30

Big Science asks big questions, such as “what is the nature of matter?”  The enormity of the question and the value of obtaining an answer (both practical value and intellectual value) drive research, collaboration, funding — they provide the energy that turns the wheels of research.

Perhaps, in this big-science fantasy we’re indulging ourselves in for the moment, we can imagine what such a Big Question might be, and speculate on what sort of engine posing it might awaken.  In our context I can imagine no bigger question than Raymond Williams’ question, ”When was Modernism?”

This seems a reasonable — and somewhat preposterous — Big Question to start with.  But we could just as easily ask something just as grandiose, like “WHAT was Modernism?”  — answering which is a precondition to answering the “When?” question, or “WHERE was Modernism?”

Slide31

These questions share the playful, tantalizing precision of Virginia Woolf’s famous aphorism from “Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown.”

Less often quoted is her qualification. Nevertheless, let’s succumb to temptation and take Woolf’s assertion at face value.  How would we go about proving or disproving her hypothesis? Could the immensity of Big Data help us, and if so, how?

So, in Woolf’s spirit, and since one must be arbitrary, let us call our Big Science endeavor…

Slide32

We’re talking Big Science here – REALLY BIG – like the Manhattan Project, or the search for the Higgs boson. So let’s keep playing dress-up and imagine an alternative reality where the Institutions of Power actually thought these questions were as important as finding out whether a subatomic particle actually exists or not, or how to blow up the planet. That is, we would have access to REALLY BIG RESOURCES, with really big expectations.

What would it mean for us, institutionally and professionally, to address ourselves collectively to answering such a question?  What would happen to the current models of promotion and tenure, department composition, teaching, publication? Who would have to be involved?

We would inevitably want some Theorists.

Slide33

We want to describe a state change: for some definition of human character, we want to be able to say that before some point (the “December 1910 Moment”), human character was in state H and after that point it was in state H′.

We might then call Modernism a function which, when applied to Human Character H, transforms it to H prime.

As with so much theory, the discussion quickly becomes highly arcane.  So I’m going to leave the theorists to do their thing for the moment and turn to the Empiricists.

Slide34

They’re the ones who get to play with the big toys, the big machines, the big data. Sometimes they get to play pirate, or skunks – more about that in a minute.  The linear accelerator model: building a ginormous machine that you can use to produce humungous amounts of data, which you can then search for traces in. The ginormous machine is history, which has left a humungous data trail of artifacts and documents in its wake.

How might the Empiricists use that Big Data to locate the December 1910 Moment?

Well, statistical topic modeling seems pretty tantalizing. If Woolf’s hypothesis is correct, we should expect to find topic models after the December 1910 moment that do not exist before that moment. The simple existence of the moment doesn’t explain what caused the change: that is, it doesn’t explain what the Modernism function is.  That’s the problem with History: it isn’t testable. You can’t change the factors in some equation and re-run events to see how the factors affect them.

Slide35

The Empiricists include scholars like Greg Crane, who ask what do you do with a million books, and Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, who asks us to imagine capturing the entire human record in digital form, and Stephen Ramsay, who articulates the Screwmeneutical Imperative to subvert the academic orthodoxies and ideologies of method and form an anarchic version of The December 1910 Project, a “community of practice” that valorizes Roland Barthe’s playful writerly text.

Now, right about now you’re maybe getting a little tired of playing dress-up. But before we pooh-pooh these visionary questions, let’s recall the remarkable thing Google did with its Google Books project. Sure: it isn’t perfect, and it leaves lots of things out, and it’s texts are really, really dirty.

But this is how *big* works.  It isn’t small acts of perfection: perfectly crafted editions, for example.  Big works through iterative refinement, each iteration changing the state of things in such a way as to open opportunities for further refinement.  Unattended OCR, the holy grail: a machine that can read printed text as well as a trained human being.  We don’t have it yet, so today the results of unattended OCR are dirty.

But OCR algorithms continue to improve (need citations). In fact, the principal value of generation X digitization projects like the Google Books project is the /page capture/.  If those pages were photographed well, the OCR can always be re-run, and over time the cost of processing and re-processing will decline.

So, on the one hand, we must develop research methods that tolerate noise, while at the same time anticipating improvements in the accuracy of text recognition.

Slide36

The larger message I’m trying to convey is this one.  The most valuable part of the December 1910 Project is the social and institutional infrastructure that supports, promotes, protects, and preserves human effort..  Put your emphasis on the stuff that machines need but can’t do. The most expensive, most valuable part of digital humanities work is the work done by trained human beings.  That’s the work that can’t be re-processed cheaply, no matter how little you pay graduate students.  Don’t treat it lightly! Don’t stick it in a Word document and forget about it.  Spend some time thinking about the best ways to capture that intellectual work so that it can be re-used in today’s scholarly world: that may not be a verbal argument published in a scholarly monograph, but a data set – a formal marshalling of evidence – represented in a way that can be taken up by reasoning machines as well as reasoning people.

Don’t become slaves to the machine: hack the machine, or partner with people who can. Make the machine work for you by giving it information it can use.

Give it highly crafted, machine-actionable metadata: not just the usual library metadata – names, titles, dates of publication and so on.

Slide37

We will need granular structured analyses of complex pages, like those in newspapers and magazines.  Not slabs of undifferentiated text, but pages that have been decomposed into their structural regions, mult-page articles that have been joined together into discrete wholes. Much of this work can now be automated, but it still needs human assistance.

Give the machine descriptions of nuanced relations and assertions that it can read.

Slide38

Statements in first-order predicate logic are a start.  Here is a portion of a graph describing the publication of Bayard Boysen’s “Lake” in the first issue of Broom, a description that captures the complex relationships among abstract entities (“the magazine Broom”, “a poem called ‘Lake’”) and concrete realities – a copy of the first issue of Broom, housed in Firestone Library, and a set of electronic files that embody various representations of it. These sorts of assertions – encoded in some sort of standard schema, like RDF – are the raw material of the knowledge base the so-called “semantic web” promises to become. There are lots of problems with the semantic web, just as there are problems with Google Books, but it is for now by far the best place to start putting our scholarly effort.

Slide39

I want to conclude with a nod to three pioneers of computer science, Vannevar Bush, Douglas Englebart, and J. R. Licklider. At the dawn of the computer age, these men, all three engineers and administrators, each had a vision of the computer that was profoundly humanistic.  Bush’s Memex, often cited as the precursor to the world wide web, was a machine that enabled people to link and track the vastness of human knowledge more efficiently.

Doug Englebart, inventor of the mouse and a variety of other ground-breaking technologies, saw in computers the possibility of augmenting the human intellect.

R. Licklider, director of the Defense department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, from which the Internet sprang, envisioned a “human computer symbiosis” in which humans and machines partner to extend the reach of human thinking and decision-making.

For each of them, the computer was not an enormous calculating machine, but an empowering system that people could engage to increase the store of human knowledge. If you can develop projects that participate in, extend, and augment this vision, they will indeed be successful digital humanities projects.

Which brings us to skunks.

Slide40

I read with great pleasure and sympathy Bethany Nowviskie’s blog post entitled ‘a skunk in the library’.  Nowviskie traces the term to Lockheed Martin in the 1940s, where it was used to describe a “rogue team” of engineers who functioned outside the usual corporate culture in order to accomplish special things, and she applies it to to the Scholar’s Lab at UVa, which she directs.

Nowviskie mentions parenthetically that the engineers took the term “skunkworks” from Al Capp’s L’il Abner, but she doesn’t pursue the allusion, staying with the meaning that has evolved from the Lockheed Martin appropriation: a group of elite creatives who get special license to do wonderful, innovative things.  Following this etymology, those creative people are the skunks.  And who wouldn’t want to be a skunk?  These skunks are like the kids in the Gifted and Talented program: they may be misfits, some of them, but they’re precious and special, and they smell bad only to Department Chairs, who don’t savor liberty and innovation.

The thing is, that’s not how things were in the hillbilly hamlet of Dogpatch, and I want to conclude with that.  (I also want to claim the right to use the term “hillbilly”, as I was born and bred in West Virginia and am proud to be called one.)

In the world of Li’l Abner, the “Skonk Works” was a toxic chemical factory on the outskirts of Dogpatch, where the lone operator, “Big Barnsmell,” crafted a mysterious concoction called ‘skonk oil’ by brewing dead skunks and old shoes in a still.  Dozens of Dogpatch residents died every year of the toxic fumes.

According to Ben Rich, the second director of the Lockheed Martin skunk works, the group got its name because the original facility was located next to a toxic-smelling plastics factory and one of the engineers likened their own secretive operation to factory in the Al Capp cartoon.

Slide41

So there are several things to think about here.  First, the skunks aren’t in charge.  They aren’t the workers in the “Skonk Works”; they are the raw material.  Second, the work of the skunk works isn’t benign “creative innovation”; it is industrial pollution.  Nowviskie acknowledges the unease occasioned by use of the term “skunkworks”: “there’s a level of honesty and self-awareness involved in not calling them snuggly bunnies.”

There’s a larger story here about papering over the toxic effects of the digital revolution, literally, as in the waste byproducts of microchip manufacture, and figuratively in the effects of automation on an underclass of workers (the denizens of Dogpatch) and the fact that the Lockheed Martin operation designed war planes.  These bunnies are not snuggly at all, and they aren’t even amusingly off-beat: they are fodder for a noxious process of commodification.

I’m afraid that to expect academia to work like Lockheed Martin, or like Silicon Valley start-ups, or even like a forward-looking library, is naïve. From what I’ve seen, the skunks are the graduate students, the adjuncts, and the alt-acs who do the work but don’t get the credit; who build the intellectual playgrounds Steve Ramsay describes but aren’t allowed inside.  To call them skunks is to give them a roguish tang; in fact, they risk becoming that other legendary Al Capp creature …

Slide41

The Shmoo, which exists to be a commodity: delicious to eat, and eager to be eaten.

The Digital Humanities, Big Data: these highfalutin terms promise much, and we can fantasize about the opportunities they open up, the roles they may let us play, the discoveries they may enable. But let’s not allow our dress-up fantasies to become wish-fulfillment. Higher Education is in crisis; intellectualism is in decline; graduate education is in a death spiral. Let’s not pretend that DH is going to solve all these problems: even more, let’s not let DH become part of the problem.

Thank you.

DH Boot Camp Poster Session January 29, 2015

Here is the merry band of Dickinson students who came back to campus a week early to participate in the second annual Digital Boot Camp.

2015 DH Boot Camp participants met in the Waidner-Spahr Library at Dickinson the week of January 12, 2015

2015 DH Boot Camp participants met in the Waidner-Spahr Library at Dickinson the week of January 12, 2015

Led by Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Patrick Belk, the eleven students completed online tutorials at home the week of January 5, and convened on campus for further instruction and to work on their own projects. Other instructors included Michael D’Aprix, Daniel Plehkov, Leah Orr, and Don Sailer. Topics included ArcGIS, Drupal, XML, and discussions of metadata and other DH principles (full schedule here). Most of the projects they are working on represent collaborations with faculty, departments, or student organizations on campus.

Make sure to stop by the digital poster session, at which the students will show off what they have accomplished in this intense period of work and discovery.

What: Digital Boot Camp Poster Session

When: Thursday January 29 12:00-1:15 p.m.

Where: HUB Social Hall East

Here is a list of the students and their projects linked here (still works in progress):

Masculinity in Advertising
Victoria DeLaney
Sophomore
English, Spanish

Mapping Sustainability at Dickinson College
Jackie Goodwin
Sophomore
Environmental Studies, Sociology

Cultural Mapping: A Documentation of Yarmouth Maine
Wesley Lickus
Sophomore
Environmental Science

The Peddler
Nick Bailey
Junior
International Business, Management

Maryland Folklore Project
Andrew McGowan
Junior
Biochemistry, Molecular Biology

EDDC Archive: Digital Library for the English Department
Harris Risell
Junior
English

Renaissance Music Database
Maurice Royce
Junior
Computer Science, Mathematics

Student Curation at the Trout
Anna Leistikow
Senior
International Studies

Education Reform
Melissa Pesantes
Senior
Italian Studies, Anthropology

Mapping the Aeneid
Katherine Purington
Senior
Classical Studies

Exploring the Invisible Universe
Olivia Wilkins
Senior
Chemistry, Mathematics

The Digital Boot Camp @ Dickinson was made possible by a generous grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It was supported by members of the Digital Humanities Advisory Committee (or DHAC), and Archives & Special Collections, Waidner-Spahr Library. The students, instructors, and organizers taking part in this year’s boot camp would like to thank the following people: Dan Confer, Ryan Burke, Jim Ciarrocca, Chuck Steel, Maureen Dermott, Meredith Brozik, Tricia Contino, Dottie Warner, and Malinda Triller Doran.

Digital Humanities at MLA 2015 (Vancouver)

The digital humanities is well represented at this weekend’s 130th annual Modern Language Association Convention (Vancouver, BC; January 8-11). A simple keyword search of the 2015 Program displays 43 sessions that match the criteria “All text: digital humanities”; 6 sessions match “All text: DH,” and 32 sessions are listed under the program’s Subject heading:

General Literature–Electronic Technology (Teaching, Research, and Theory).

Because it reminded me of Chris’s thoughtful (and provoking) post on Desmond Schmidt’s article two days ago, I wanted to first bring attention, and share the link, to a session held yesterday: 204. Text Tools in the (Digital) Humanities (Friday, 9). Here’s a case being made by David Hoover for “plain text” alternatives to XML, which also focuses on inter-operability, and shares some of the concerns in Schmidt’s article that Chris discussed Thursday. Abstracts of all 3 papers for session 204 are posted at 204 Abstracts. The top-most abstract is Hoover’s paper, titled “The Promise of the Plain: Plain Text and Plain Tools in the Digital Humanities.”

I won’t even try to briefly touch on all 43 sessions, but another that caught my attention, and I wanted to share because it looked interesting, was this morning’s roundtable: 448. Disrupting the Digital Humanities (Saturday, 10). Last night while browsing the program, I paused at this one in particular, because I saw that participants included Sean Michael Morris (presiding) and Jessie Stommel (final speaker), who are co-directors of Hybrid Pedagogy, an online blog/ peer-reviewed journal that I follow. According to the program’s session description:

All too often, defining a discipline becomes more an exercise of exclusion than inclusion. This roundtable rethinks how we map disciplinary terrain by directly confronting the gatekeeping impulse of many academic disciplines. Participants investigate the edges and open the digital humanities more fully to its fringes and outliers.

For papers featured at this morning’s roundtable discussion, go here: DisruptingDH.

Sessions, abstracts, and (some) papers from DH-related events at this year’s MLA can be found through links in the Full Program. Relative to other methodologies and content areas, the digital humanities remains the annual mega-conference’s MVP (Most Visible Player)-as Pannapacker called it, “The Thing”-five years running. The 204 and 408 sessions give a good idea of the kinds of wide-ranging approaches being taken, moreover. DH at this year’s MLA–from textual analysis and close reading to LOL cats and critical queer theory–is thriving, and scholars in languages and literature are doing some pretty meaningful work across diverse areas of research.

Fall 2014 Digital Dialogues season at MITH

 

The Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland in College Park has announced the lineup of speakers for their Fall 2014 Digital Dialogues season. The seven speakers come from a wide variety of research specialties ranging from Women’s Studies, Film & Digital Media,  Information Studies and gaming culture. They are:

Tuesday September 30, 2014: Alison Booth

Tuesday October 7, 2014: Stephanie Ceraso

Tuesday October 14, 2014: Marisa Parham

Tuesday October 21, 2014: Alexis Lothian

Tuesday October 28, 2014:  Andrew Johnston 

Tuesday November 4, 2014: Darius Kazemi

Tuesday, November 11, 2014: Alex Wright

Read more at Save the Dates! Here are MITH’s Fall 2014 Digital Dialogues speakers.

Mining Data Gold

GISPresentation_20140506_4148_700w

STUDENTS WRANGLE BIG DATA DURING ANNUAL SYMPOSIUM

 

by MaryAlice Bitts-Jackson

There’s a superabundance of data out there and growing demand for those who can mine it effectively. On May 6, 16 students showed them how it’s done during the GIS (geographic information system) Exhibition and Poster Session, an annual event showcasing the ways students apply powerful technology to recent or ongoing research.

“It’s a reasonably complicated computer program to learn, but it’s definitely worth the learning curve,” said Jill Hautaniemi ’14 of the software, which provides a framework to store and analyze geographically based data.

MAPPING NEAR AND FAR

The students, all part of an advanced GIS-applications course, presented data that had been recently gathered in points near and far. A double major in environmental science and biology, Hautaniemi cross-referenced data she’d collected for her senior biology-research project with elevation data sets from a government Web site, and found correlations between elevation levels and the health of hemlock trees in the Carlisle region.

Jenna LaRiviere ’14, an archaeology major, married historical and construction data about barns in Pennsylvania with the geological makeup of the ground on which each barn stood. “By integrating location with foundational materials, we can get insights about the economic, political and practical reasons why they chose these materials, and this tells us something about the people who lived there,” says LaRiviere, who will pursue a master’s in museum studies at the University of East Anglia in the fall. “It adds a whole new dimension to our understanding of their histories.”

Environmental science major Jack Bryan ’14 examined stream-remediation options in nearby Michaux State Forest, using raw data collected by the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and by students in a conservation seminar. By creating elevation and relief profiles of the watersheds, he was able to identify the areas most in need of cleanup, and he’ll make the project available to stream-monitoring volunteers.

 

Students present GIS projects during the annual symposium. Photo by Carl Socolow '77.Photo by Carl Socolow ’77.

“Hopefully, they’ll build on this, and as they do, they’ll be able to recognize patterns and use different variables in tandem, combining data they might not think to combine,” Bryan said.

Taylor Thompson ’14 presented student-faculty research on the effects of temperature on sex determination in painted turtles born in 2010 at a local pond. She inputted temperatures recorded at 16 turtle sites with the precise locations of each nest, the makeup of the soil on which they rested and the sex of the turtles born there. Nests built on natural soil, which stabilizes slight temperature fluctuations, yielded a roughly even number of male and female turtles, whereas nests built on a soil-gravel mix did not. “Because the information is displayed spatially, you can see the patterns emerging,” she said.

Other locally based projects included Michael D’Aprix ’14’s geodatabase for Dickinson’s campus, Anna McGinn ’14’s produce-access map of the Carlisle area, Anne Dyroff ’14’s qualitative map of Carlisle running routes, Mary DiGiorgio ’14’s analysis of campus trees and Christine Burns ’14’s study of trees in downtown Harrisburg.

Projects rooted farther from home included a crime-rate analysis of North Philadelphia (Amanda Vandenburg ’14), a basin analysis of a state park in Maine (Elizabeth de la Reguera ’14) and a trail map of Michaux State Forest (Tucker Deady ’14), while Will Kochtitzky ’16 and Leslie Milliman ’14 went global, creating a map of lake vegetation in Bolivia and of weathering on an island in Guadeloupe, respectively.

“It’s amazing how many different applications there are, as you can see in the variety of subjects represented here,” said Thompson, an environmental studies major who plans to apply GIS technology to her analysis of trail connectivity as part of her job with the Doylestown Heritage Conservancy, which begins after her graduation in May.

“And we’re just scratching the surface,” added Bryan. “It’s essential to know how to apply basic skills in new contexts. And this is an incredibly useful and powerful tool.”

Source: http://www.dickinson.edu/news/article/1080/mining_data_gold

Alec Ross to Speak at Dickinson on Digital Currency

Alec Ross drove the ground-breaking social media component of the 2008 Obama campaign, and now serves as senior advisor for innovation to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Source: http://bit.ly/1lAEqvx

Alec Ross drove the ground-breaking social media component of the 2008 Obama campaign, and now serves as senior advisor for innovation to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Source: http://bit.ly/1lAEqvx

The Dickinson Student Senate Public Affairs Committee is pleased to announce that Alec Ross, the first Senior Advisor for Innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is coming to speak at Dickinson College. Ross, who spearheaded President Obama’s technology and innovation plan and developed a digital payment platform for soldiers in the Congo, will explain Bitcoin’s origins, operations, and pitfalls, and describe the impact of the rise of digital currency on financial institutions, international politics, and global poverty. Ross will also and examine the implications of broader digital payment structures like Google Wallet, Square, and Simple on the world financial system, and argue that these changes are indicative of the demand for interdisciplinary approaches to banking and digital finance.

Ross will give his keynote address at 7PM in Allison Hall on Wednesday, March 26th, 2014. I hope you can join us!

Annotating with Poetry Genius and House Divided

David Foster Wallace's annotated copy of Don Delillo's Players, from the Harry Ransom Research Center in Austin, TX. http://bit.ly/1ef5ziL

David Foster Wallace’s annotated copy of Don Delillo’s Players, from the Harry Ransom Research Center in Austin, TX. http://bit.ly/1ef5ziL

From scribbled marginalia  to full-scale scholarly treatises that gobble the works on which they comment, text annotation is one of the most basic and diverse activities of the humanities. Its purposes embrace the intensely personal, the didactic, and the evangelical. It serves all kinds of communities, from the classroom to the law court, from the synagogue to the university research library.

The movement of text annotation to an online environment is still very much a work in progress. There are many platforms attempting to marry original text and a stream of added comments, some attractive and functional, some awkward. Crowd-sourced annotation is being tried in many corners, and sometimes it catches on (check out the remarkable wiki commentaries on the novels of Thomas Pynchon), sometimes they build it and nobody comes.

Rap Genius and its sister sites Poetry Genius and Education Genius are the most exciting recent entrants into this field. What distinguishes these sites is first the astonishing ease and flexibility of the interface. The mere selecting of a chunk of text allows one to add not just a typed comment but audio, video, links to parallel passages, embedded tweets, virtually anything digital. The other good thing about the Genius sites is the way they tap into existing communities of fans, readers, teachers, and students. Education Genius is well-funded by venture capital and has a staff that talks directly to teachers, works to make the site useful to students, and builds bridges with other sites and institutions.

A case in point is the emerging collaboration of Education Genius with Dickinson’s House Divided Project. An annotated version of Abraham Lincoln’s 1859 autobiographical sketch is now available at Poetry Genius, and represents the beginning of partnership between the House Divided Project and the Genius platform spearheaded by Dickinson College student Will Nelligan (’14). There is a general annotated guide to the sketch, which was originally written for a Pennsylvania newspaper when Lincoln was a presidential candidate, and also a version especially designed as an open Common Core platform. This is in keeping with the  strong educational outreach of House Divided and its director, Associate Professor of History and Pohanka Chair in American Civil War History Matthew Pinsker.

There is an audio recording of the sketch in the voice of Lincoln as recreated by Todd Wronski, part of a larger multimedia edition of Lincoln’s writings being undertaken by House Divided. In the Genius platform clicking on different colored text brings up an annotation. Here is one with an embedded video player. Note that annotations are fully “social,” in that one can give them a thumbs up or down, share in various ways, and leave a comment on the comment.

Clicking on different colored text brings up the annotation, in this case one with an embedded video player.

Clicking on different colored text brings up the annotation, in this case one with an embedded video player.

Some annotations simply add contextual information. Others, like the one above, hint at an interpretation, as a teacher might, in an attempt to get the reader thinking beyond the surface of the text. Others amount to polite essay prompts:

Lincoln Genius Screenshot 2

One can easily create an account and start annotating.

Lincoln Genius Screenshot  3

House Divided’s annotations often take the form of questions.

The idea of annotating with questions, in addition to statements, is a fine one, helpful to teachers and students alike. Note also the ability to brand annotations with the House Divided logo, which marks them as more authoritative and “verified.” The folks at Poetry Genius understand the power of reputation, and unobtrusively include it in the platform in a variety of ways.

The ease of annotation—one can sign up for an account in a moment and fire away—makes this platform well-suited to “class-sourcing,” the adding of content by students under academic supervision, and in fact that is how these particular annotations were created. High quality content created collaboratively for a well-defined audience in an attractive, open, and flexible format: digital humanities doesn’t get much better than that.

I am delighted to say that Jeremy Dean of Education Genius will be visiting Dickinson on April 17, 2014 to speak with a group of faculty and students about text annotation and to further develop this collaboration between the Genius sites and Dickinson College. If you would like further information about this event please contact me (francese@dickinson.edu).

–Chris Francese