I know there’s been a bit of dicussion back and forth about the best ways to get to and from GMU, but I thought I’d try to get it all together in a central location.  I’m told by the folks at the Hampton Inn (where I’ll be staying, and I’m sure there are others as well) that it’s best to take the Orange Line (presuming everything is more or less normal on it after yesterday’s news) to Vienna/GMU and take a cab.

I’m sure there will be a few people gathering in the lobbies of both hotels Saturday and Sunday mornings – will people be sharing taxis to the campus, or is it walkable?  Google Maps offers a bit of a zigzag walking path and I wondered if there was a short cut.

I saw that the shuttle to GMU from the Metro is normally reserved for students – do they let conference attendees aboard?

Anyway, I’m just looking to get some advice from locals – I’m sure others have similar questions.

Thanks!

I mentioned briefly in my original post that we have a good deal of 19th-century textual material in what are now fairly obscure German dialects; we have scanned the originals and had parts translated, but we have two further goals with this project: 1) encourage more translations of other related material and 2) create a resource/destination for researchers to debate and discuss the materials.  (A further goal is to start digitizing our snazzy Paracelsus collection, once we have this in place as a test case – but that’s down the road).

We have the scanning and digital object handling well underway (or would, if our server upgrade were finally finished, but that’s another story – I may not be able to show off much from this collection, but can demonstrate how we are set up with some other materials), but we are looking for inspirations and ideas for the other two goals.  Since we’re looking for low IT involvement, creating a blog highlighting some of the materials and encouraging discussion in the comments is one idea, but we’d like to avoid creating an additional digital ‘space’ that we’d require users to navigate to (especially since we already have a blog for our collections in general).

Is anyone using a more interactive plugin (or similar more modular feature) to create spaces for discussion in a way that’s still tied to the digital object?  One of our concerns is that there may be a steep IT learning curve for a high percentage of scholars in this particular subfield and we’d like to make sure they all feel welcomed, so ease of use is key.  We are also looking to use the project to reach out to other scholars who might not currently be aware of the materials (likely language scholars and historians in related fields) and feel pretty confident about putting that plan in place once we know what sort of sandbox we can offer them.

Anyway, I would love to hear what suggestions everyone has and am definitely looking forward to seeing some examples of what everyone else has done.

Here is the original submission I made to THATCamp followed by some additional background ideas and thoughts:

Forget the philosophic arguments, I think most people at THATCamp are probably convinced that in the future scholarly manuscripts will appear first in the realm of the digital, I am interested in the practical questions here: What are born digital manuscripts going to look like and what do we need to start writing them? There are already several examples, Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolescence, Wark’s Gamer Theory, but I want to think about what the next step is. What kind of publishing platform should be used (is it simply a matter of modifying a content management system like WordPress)? Currently the options are not very inviting to academics without a high degree of digital literacy. What will it take to make this publishing platform an option for a wider range of scholars? What tools and features are needed (beyond say Comment Press), something like a shared reference manager, or at least open API, to connect these digital manuscripts (Zotero)? Maybe born digital manuscripts will just be the Beta version of some books which are later published (again i.e. Gamer Theory)? But, I am also interested in thinking about what a born digital manuscript can do that an analog one cannot.

Additional Thoughts:

So I should start by saying that this proposal is a bit self serving. I am working on “a book,” (the proverbial tenure book), but writing it first for the web. That is rather than releasing the manuscript as a beta version of the book online for free, or writing a book and digitally distributing it, I want to leverage the web to do things that cannot be accomplished in a manuscript form. It is pretty clear that the current academic publishing model will not hold. As I indicated in the original proposal above, I think that most participants at THATCamp are probably convinced that the future of academic publishing is in some ways digital (although the degree to which it will be digital is probably a point of difference). But, in working with this project I have come to realize that the tools for self digital publishing are really in the early stages, a pre-alpha release almost. Yes, there are options, primarily blogs, but for the most part these tend to mimic “book centered” ways of distributing information. To be sure there are examples of web tools which break from this model, namely CommentPress, but I am interested in thinking about what other tools might be developed and how can we integrate them. And at this point I think you have to be fairly tech savvy or have a “technical support team” to be able to do anything beyond a simple blog, or digital distribution of a manuscript (say as a downloadable .pdf). For me one of the early models we can look to is MacKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory, but he had several people handling the “tech side.” For me I can get the tech help to do the things I cannot on my own, but is seems pretty clear that until the tools are simple and widely available digital publishing will either remain obscure or overly simple/conservative (just a version of the manuscript).

So, what tools do we need to be developing here? Should we be thinking about tools or about data structures and than developing tools around that? (I realize this is not an either or proposition.) I am imagining something like WordPress with a series of easy to install plugins that would open up web publishing to a much wider range of scholars. Perhaps a “publisher” could host these installs and provide technical support making it even easier for academics. I have a fairly good idea of what I personally want for my project, but am interested in thinking about/hearing about what other scholars, particularly those from other disciplines would need/want.

I’d like to share some work we have done at NC State to bring digital collections to the mobile environment. Now that libraries have made large parts of their photograph and image collections available in digital form on the desktop, the next step is to deliver them via mobile devices that, through the integration of (relatively) large touch screen, faster processors, high-speed connectivity and location-awareness, are becoming an increasingly attractive platform.

“WolfWalk,” a prototype application for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch, is our attempt to leverage these technologies to provide access to a small subset of our library’s digital collections, in this case historic images of buildings on the NC State campus. Users can access these images, together with short descriptions of the buildings, through an alphabetical list or a map interface. Instead of having to access print photographs in a controlled library environment or viewing digital surrogates on the desktop, “WolfWalk” allows users to view these images “in the wild,” i.e., they can view them while at the same time experiencing the real object. Also, by (eventually) making use of the device’s location awareness, we can add a serendipitous aspect to the process of discovering images. Instead of having to browse through a search interface or a virtual representation of our campus, the campus becomes the interface when the application shows users buildings, related images and descriptions in their vicinity.

I’d be interested in hearing what others think about the impact of the mobile medium not only on digital collections, but also how these new technologies and practices could be leveraged in other contexts related to work in the digital humanities.

I would  like to lead a session on the application of Freebase.com to the humanities.  Freebase is “open database of the world’s information”, with an API that allows for integration with other applications (such as Zotero).    I’ve been experimenting with using Freebase.com in the realm of government data, specifically to create PolDB, an “IMDB for politicians” (though my progress has been meagre so far.)   I would like to share my experiences on that front, speculate on the usefulness of Freebase for applications in the humanities (particularly art history), and foster a discussion about the application of other “semantically oriented” techniques beyond Freebase.

I hope I’ve not missed the boat on the pre-un-conference-idea-generating-posts! In brief, I’d like to meet up people interested in a web project visually weighting by color simple semantic relations in literary texts and/or putting together an NEH grant for said project. Caveat: I’m not an expert on this. Here’s my initial proposal, though in retrospect it looks rather stilted and sad:

For the past year or so, I’ve been interested in putting together a small team of like-minded folks to help bring to fruition a data visualization project that could benefit less-prepared college students, teachers in the humanities, and researchers alike. Often, underprepared or at-risk educational populations struggle to connect literary study with the so-called “real world,” leading to a saddening lack of interest in the possibilities of the English language, much less literary study. I am currently working with Doug Eyman, a colleague at GMU, to develop a web application drawing on WordNet—and particularly the range of semantic similarity extensions built around WordNet—to visually mark up and weight by color the semantic patterns emerging from small uploaded portions of text. This kind of application can not only help students attend more fully to the structures of representation in literature and the larger world around them—through the means of a tool emphatically of the “real world”—but also enable scholars to unearth unexpected connections in larger bodies of text. Like literary texts to many students, the existing semantic similarity tools available through the open source community can seem inaccessible, even foreign, to a lay audience; this project seeks to lay open the language that so many fear, while enabling the critical thinking involved in literary analysis. Ultimately, we hope to extend this application with a collaborative and growing database of user-generated annotations, and perhaps with time, to fold in a historically-conscious dictionary as well. We are seeking an NEH Digital Humanities startup grant to pursue this project fully, and I’d like the opportunity to throw our idea into the ring at THATcamp to explore its problems as well as possibilities, even gathering more collaborators along the way.

Here’s a hand-colored version of something like what I’m thinking; I used WordNet::Similarity to generate the numbers indicating degree of relatedness, and then broke those numbers into a visual weighting system. Implementation hurdles do come out pretty clearly when you see how the numbers are generated, so I’m hoping someone out there will have better insights into the how of it all.

To a related, larger point: I always have the sneaking suspicion that this has been done before–Jodi Schneider mentioned LiveInk, a program that reformats text according to its semantic units, so that readers can more effectively grasp and retain content. This strikes me as simlar, as well, to the kinds of issues raised by Douglas Knox–using scale and format to retrieve “structured information.” Do the much-better-informed Campers out there know of an already-existing project like this? I wish the checklist of visual thinking tools that George Brett proposes were already here!

A tweet by @WhyHereNow (Brooke Bryan) “thinking about how we create tools to do things, then the tools come to change the things that we do. #thatcamp” spurred me to suggest a discussion about using visualization tools like mind maps or concept maps or other graphical diagrams to augment research, information management, collaboration, as well as other work processes.

I have personally used mind maps to brainstorm ideas for a long time. Lately I take the early model and expand it into a visual notebook to store collected materials as well as do quick show and tell for colleagues. Recently I learned how to use multi dimensional maps for analytical purposes using the Issue Based Information System methodology.

Mind maps can be much more than quick brainstorm sketches. The available range of stand-alone and networked applications, along with a host of Web 2.0 mapping tools continue to expand. The many ways these tools are being used, with the tips and tricks of the experts, and with advice about which one to use for what result are bits of information that really ought to be shared.

So, I’m proposing an informal session that could grow into an online annotated check list of tools, or at least or at least contribute to another resource like Digital Research Tools (DiRT).

I’ve been putting this off for a while now, especially after seeing some of the really impressive projects other campers are working on.  My job is not research-oriented; much of what I do revolves around operationalizing and supporting faculty projects in the History Department where I work.  What follows is a rather long description of one such project in which students, in the context of a local history research seminar, are tasked with digitizing archival items, cataloging them using Dublin Core, and creating Omeka exhibits that reflect the findings from their traditional research papers.  Despite the fact that the students are typically Education or Public History majors, they are expected to carry out these tasks to standards which can be challenging even to professional historians and librarians.

I’ve written about some of the practical challenges in projects like this here.  For a full description of the project at hand, click through the page break below.  What is intriguing me right now are the questions such projects raise, particularly those relating to content quality and presentation.

What are realistic expectations for metadata implementation?  Is enforcing metadata standards even appropriate in the context of humanities education?  Many trained librarians aren’t even competent or consistent at cataloging, how can we expect more from undergrad History students?  It’s not that they don’t gain from it (whether they like/know it or not), it’s just that poor metadata might be worse than none.  Information architecture is another challenge, even when students have no role in the initial site design.  They can still confuse the navigation scheme and decrease usability through poorly organized contributions.  Likewise, the content students create is not always something we want to keep online for any number of reasons.  Where do you draw the line between a teaching site (as in, a site designed and used for training projects) and one which is distinctly for use by the broader public?  It’s very blurry to me, but I think how you answer that dictates what you are willing to do and what you end up with.  We really want to create something that is generated entirely by students but with a life outside the classroom.  Ultimately though, we will make decisions that best serve our instructional goals.  I think the value is the process, not the result (though it would be nice for them to match up).  We have done some very ambitious and high quality projects working with small, dedicated teams, but working with large class groups has led to some interesting and unforeseen problems.  I wonder if anyone has any idea about how we might be able to replicate that small team experience and quality on this significantly larger scale.

Has anyone out there done a similar project?  I’d love to hear some experiences and/or suggestions on pedagogy, standards or documentation?

I think this fits in to some degree with Jim Calder’s post and Amanda French’s post, among others (sadly, I have yet to read all the posts here, but I will get to it soon and maybe hit some people up in the comments).

(more…)

At THATCamp ’08 I learned how to draw a smiley face with a few geometric programming commands.

Dan Chudnov demonstrated how to download Processing, a Java-based environment intended for designers, visual artists, students, and others who want to create something without being full-time professional programmers. Dan’s purpose was to show librarians, scholars, artists, and free-range humanists that getting started with simple programming isn’t as hard as people sometimes think. You don’t have to be a computer scientist or statistician to develop skills that can be directly useful to you. Dan posted a version of what he was demonstrating with the tag “learn2code.”

I’m not a trained programmer, was not new to programming altogether, but was new to Processing, and for a while I didn’t have much reason or time to do more with it. But last winter I found myself highly motivated to spend some of my spare time making sense of tens of thousands of pages of text images from the Internet Archive that were, for my purposes, undifferentiated. The raw, uncorrected OCR was not much help. I wanted to be able to visually scan all of them, start reading some of them, and begin to make some quick, non-exhaustive indexes in preparation for what is now a more intensive full-text grant-funded digitization effort (which I will also be glad to talk about, but that’s another story). I wanted to find out things that just weren’t practical to learn at the scale of dozens of reels of microfilm.

Processing has turned out to be perfect for this. It’s not just good for cartoon faces and artistic and complex data visualizations (though it is excellent for those). It is well suited to bootstrapping little scraps of knowledge into quick cycles of gratifying incremental improvements. I ended up cobbling together a half-dozen relatively simple throwaway tools highly customized to the particular reading and indexing I wanted to do, minimizing keystrokes, maximizing what I could get from the imperfect information available to me, and efficiently recording what I wanted to record while scanning through the material.

Having spent plenty of hours with the clicks, screeches, and blurs of microfilm readers, I can say that being able to fix up your own glorified (silent) virtual microfilm reader with random access is a wonderful thing. (It’s also nice that the images are never reversed because the person before you didn’t rewind to the proper spool.) And immensely better than PDF, too.

At THATCamp I would be glad to demonstrate, and would be interested in talking shop more generally about small quasi-artisanal skills, tools, and tips that help get stuff done — the kind of thing that Bill Turkel and his colleagues have written up in The Programming Historian, but perhaps even more preliminary. How do you get structured information out of a PDF or word processing document, say, and into a database or spreadsheet? Lots of “traditional humanists,” scholars and librarians, face this kind of problem. Maybe sometimes student labor can be applied, or professional programmers can help, if the task warrants and resources permit. But there is a lot of work that is big enough to be discouragingly inefficient with what may pass for standard methods (whether note cards or word processing tools), and small enough not to be worth the effort of seeking funding or navigating bureaucracy. There are many people in the humanities who would benefit from understanding the possibilities of computationally-assisted grunt work. Like artificial lighting, some tools just make it easier to read what in principle you could have found some other way to read anyway. But the conditions of work can have a considerable influence on what actually gets done.

More abstractly and speculatively, it would be interesting to talk about efficiencies of reading and scale. Digital tools are far from the first to address and exacerbate the problem that there is far more to be read and mapped out than any single person can cope with in a lifetime. Economies of effort and attention in relation to intellectual and social benefit have long shaped what questions can be asked and do get asked, and to some extent what questions can even be imagined. Digital tools can change these economies, although not in deterministically progressive ways. Particular digital applications and practices have all too often introduced obfuscations and inefficiencies that limit what questions can plausibly be asked at least as much as microfilm does. Which is why discussions even of low-level operational methods, and their consequences, can be of value. And where better than THATCamp?

Hello, everyone! I’ve been reading over everyone’s posts and comments, and letting it all percolate – but today’s my day to finally post my own thoughts.

Here’s my original proposal:

“Digital collections of material culture – how to make them, share them, and help students actually learn something from them!

– “quick and dirty” ways for faculty to develop digital collections for the classroom, without giving up on metadata. For the recent workshop we held at Vassar, I’ve been working on demo collections (see grou.ps/digitalobjects/wiki/80338 ) to evaluate 8 different tools,  including Omeka. In each, you can view the same 8 historic costumes and their metadata, with 43 jpeg images and 1 QTVR. I’m developing my work as a template, with support documentation, for others to use.

-how students can use digital collections and contribute to them, without requiring a huge technological learning curve, especially for students with non-traditional learning styles

-the potential of union catalogs”

Of course these issues cross over in many ways with issues that have already been posted. So, I’m not sure if this needs to be a session, or if it’s more about bringing this material culture perspective to other relevant sessions. That probably depends on how many other material culture people are coming – anyone?

Deep Digital Collections / The Thing-ness of Things

Projects that successfully represent 3D objects are still pretty rare. Current systems of image representation are not sufficient – 1 image per object is not enough. Artifacts also continue to defy controlled vocabularies and metadata schema. For example, one of my current projects involves studying a historic dress inside and out – I have over 100 detail images and complex data (see a sample blog post that shows the complexity of the object).

I’m working to create digital access to the Vassar College Costume Collection, our collection of historic clothing, with about 540 objects dating from the 1820’s to today. Just to clarify, in the field of costume history, the term “costume” refers to all clothing, not theatrical costume.  For about 7 years I’ve been exploring different ways of digitizing this collection, giving students access to a database of the objects, and then sharing their research projects, in a variety of digital formats, as virtual exhibitions.

“Quick and Dirty” Classroom Tools / Low Tech Digital Humanities

In my demos, you can view the same 8 historic costumes and their metadata, with 43 jpeg images and 1 QTVR, in Omeka, CollectiveAccess, Greenstone, Luna Insight, ContentDM, VCat, Filemaker, Excel, and GoogleDocs.

My inquiry has developed beyond the initial comparison of different available tools, to explore a kind of “division of labor” in the process. My approach has been very much on the DIY side, but couched in a collaborative experience. I initially created my demos for a NITLE sponsored workshop at Vassar this past March (entitled “Digital Objects in the Classroom”). Our workshop emphasized the importance of collaboration, and we asked participating institutions to send teams of faculty, librarians, instructional technologists, and media specialists. Perhaps ironically, the demos have mostly been my own work (with wonderful help from Vassar’s Systems Administrator and Visual Resources Librarian). I continue to search for the perfect compromise – for faculty and students to be able to quickly and independently get resources both into and out of collections, while administrators feel comfortable with the security and maintenance of the technology involved.

Student Contributions

Even if you’re not working in a traditional academic setting, I encourage you to view your audience as students. We can use technology as part of a suite of pedagogical tools to provide differentiated instruction for different styles of learners.  What I imagine is a way for students to add to the conversation in ways beyond tagging and commenting – to contribute their own images and research.  Our work in the last couple of years has reinforced this in a backward kind of way. We envisioned a large grant might allow us to carefully photograph and catalog much of the collection, which we could then present to students (on a platter?). Such a grant hasn’t come through yet, but the students have kept on coming! So, each semester brings us a new project, with new research about some of the objects, new photographs that students have taken to support their research, new citations of and links to supporting references. And the database grows. And I wonder, if we did present the virtual collection to students on a platter, would they be as inspired to work with the objects doing their own research? Would it seem as fresh to them? We need to keep the focus on our students and not on technology for its own sake.

Union Catalogs / Federated Searches

For each of our collections we’re working hard to structure our metadata and to define controlled vocabularies. But most of the time we aren’t taking advantage of the sharing that structured metadata allows. Either collections aren’t having their data harvested, or if they are, they’re going into giant collections like OAIster where it can be hard to find them. We need more union catalogs for material culture objects that are oriented for specific disciplines. By harvesting for a more specific kind of union catalog, we can transcend the “dumbing down” of data for Dublin Core standards and create variations that allow for richer data in each of our fields. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel, but building on Dublin Core or VRA or CDWA can really benefit our specific fields. For collections that have a strong visual component, some form of image needs to be a part of what is harvested and shows up in the federated search.

I look forward to reading your comments – and to meeting you all in person later this month!