South Jersey Digital

In my on-going effort to aid faculty in piloting new technology teaching tools, I am experimenting with the Twitter micro blogging service this semester. My hope is that this initiative will help in assisting faculty at Stockton with competence development in using this service to support instruction. In my Fall 2009 Microcomputer and Applications Course, I will be having my students respond to questions that I pose to the group using this tool. As an alternative to the discussion tool within the BlackBoard Course Management System, my students will respond over the course of the week and engage in debate with fellow classmates. Since the student responses are limited to 140 characters, I have asked them to respond at least three times each week, however I anticipate that they may likely do it more frequently.

During my in-class lab meeting last night I introduced the tool and had the students who did not already have accounts create one. I found that approximately 20% of the students already had an account and a good number of the students were knowledgeable about what the service was but had no prior interest in creating an account. Once all 34 students were logged in and setup with an account, I introduced some of the basics of the interface. Students immediately began creating tweets with little to no trouble. Many immediately caught on as I saw my number of followers suddenly went up. I demonstrated how you can use special characters to send reply messages, re-tweet another message, and send direct private messages. I introduced the use of a hash-tag for categorizing posts to make it easier to keep the class together.

Unlike BlackBoard, it will be necessary to manually track the students participation. In order to accurately assess the students efforts, I asked them to send me their user-names that they are using on Twitter.

Before releasing the students to start their tweets, I also introduced the TweetDeck application that runs on both the Windows, Mac, as well as the iPhone. I demonstrated how this application makes it easy to setup a column with your search group. It also integrates a tool to perform URL shortening. As the experiment continues, I will provide further updates on how things are progressing. You are welcome to follow the hash-tag #csis1180 if you want to see the action live. If you are interested in learning more, feel free to contact me at robert.heinrich@stockton.edu.

Jamie Cromartie, Associate Professor of Entomology, has recently contacted the Stockton community about opportunities presented by J. Scott Lee, the Executive Director of the Association for Core Texts and Courses (ACTC).

The first opportunity is becoming involved in the ACTC annual conference in New Brunswick in April 2010. Stockton College will be co-sponsoring this conference. Among the benefits that accrue to co-sponsors include an “all-institution” panel, where those faculty at RSC who are interested in core texts can form one panel and explain their use of core texts in their classes. Stockton’s efforts would also be publicized in the ACTC newsletter, and the ACTC makes every effort to recognize the work of an institution on behalf of ACTC and core text, liberal arts education.

A second opportunity is for Stockton to join the ACTC Liberal Arts Institute and participate in the Institute’s general education review process. The Institute is composed of leading institutions, including Columbia, St. John’s College, and Saint Mary’s College of California, that support the Institute well beyond the annual contribution of membership in ACTC. The Institute has a Board (which is under the governance of the entire ACTC Board) that recommends initiatives, informs supporting institutions of our activities, and helps to make our initiatives a reality through participation in various projects.

This is particularly timely as Stockton is undertaking a general education review. One of the projects which the Institute frequently undertakes is general education curriculum review, sometimes involving reviews of specific core text programs. The Institute has available a national database of 81 institutions which captures much of the evolutionary activity in general education between 1978 and 2004 in 81 institutions across the United States. It also has a ongoing research efforts in the field of general education.

Jamie Cromartie believes that expanding our involvement as a member institution of ACTC to a higher level would allow us access to data and expertise that is generally not available at such a reasonable cost. He asks that interested faculty contact him at Jamie.Cromartie@stockton.edu, and also communicate their support to Stockton’s Senate and to colleagues involved in 2020.

As I sifted through the twitter stream for DH09, I discovered that I missed a chance to get in to ThatCamp after all, because a couple of participants had to drop out at the last minute. Initially, ThatCamp was my first choice for immersing myself in the digital humanities community, ahead of DH09. ThatCamp is structured as an “unconference.” Instead of having people write papers and present them to an audience on a schedule developed by a program committee, ThatCamp asked people to write in about what topics they were interested in and then assemble a program Just-in-Time at the conference itself. People will spontaneously assemble themselves in discussion groups and all people in the panel participate directly. Some people may indeed spend 20 minutes (or more) showing off some new tool that they have developed, but there is room for lots of flexibility in how things get presented. I thought that the give and take of such a group would give me an even better sense of where the exciting work is being done. But alas, the ThatCamp unconference was so popular that they had to turn away potential participants, one of whom was me. Indeed, that seems to be the down side for the unconference format. Because everyone is a potential presenter, there is an upper bound to how large the groups can be. In a regular conference, the bigger the audience is, the better.

So… In any case, DH09 was a very rewarding experience and I’m glad I made it there. I’m sorry that I’m not at ThatCamp because it looks as if they are covering lots of fascinating stuff. I’m not sure I would have made it through both conferences without reaching brain lock; they are so overwhelming. I’ll be curious to see what happens to the dozen or so participants in both. While it’s not the same as actually being there, you can get a pretty good sense of just what is going on from various sources, which I will be following intently.

First of all, it looks as if the Twitter Feed from #thatcamp is going to leave the feed from #dh09 in the dust. In half a day, they have half as many entries as DH09 had for the whole three-day conference. Here’s the twapperkeeper link.

There’s also live-blogging on the ThatCamp home page. Here’s a link.

And Vika Zafrin of Boston University, who live-blogged DH09 is also live-blogging ThatCamp at this link.
(and a small note to the Stockton community: Vika recognized the name Richard Stockton College because she knows Scott Rettberg.)

There’s probably more, since this is such a keyed in bunch of scholars, but that’s enough to keep you (and me) going for a while…

So maybe you wanted to learn more about Digital Humanities ‘09 than you could get from my live blogging feeds…

Not to worry! There are plenty of other sources available. There was a genuine Twitter torrent during the conference, which participants have preserved and begun to analyze using some of the tools mentioned at the conference.

Here’s a “twapperkeeper” file of the 1590 tweets using the #dh09 hashtag.
Here’s an analysis of the twitter stream using the text visualization software Voyeur.

Other people were also live blogging the sessions, sometimes in the same sessions, sometimes in the parallel ones. Among them are:

Vika Zafrin at Digilib.
Torsten Reimer and Seth Denbo at arts-humanities.net.

And Geoffrey Rockwell on Jon Orwant from Google Books’ talk.

Meanwhile, many of the same people from DH09, plus a bunch of fresh minds, will be continuing the conversation in a slightly different form at the THATCamp “unconference.” You can follow that conversation here.

Enjoy.

This session is to help all of us at the conference figure out how to pay for our digital humanities projects. Neil Fraistat will moderate presentations by Brett Bobley of the NEH, Helen Cullyer of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Rachel Frick of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Murielle Gagnon of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Stephen Griffen of the NSF, Christoph Kummel of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and Shearer West of the Arts and Humanities Research Council of UK.

Preliminary message is that DH2010 will be in London, July 7-10. Website: http://www.cch.kcl.ac.uk/dh2010/. DH2011 will be at Stanford.

Bobley: Start up grants: have made about 75, in a week or so they will announce another 25. It is seed money for innovation. A big grant can be hard to get because peer reviewers want to be sure that it will work. So innovation can be hard if there is a risk of failure. Example of InPho project on machine learning processing of Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Given $30,000. After their prototype worked, they were able to get $400,000 from preservation and access R&D. Another project is institutes grant for methodological training. Example TEI, Geospatial. Third: International Collaboration.

Cullyer: “Building Digital Environments for Scholarship: Integrating Digital Papyrology as an Example. Support very large cross-disciplinary projects such as Bamboo. But also smaller scale projects with research tools. IDP brings together three already existing collections relating to papyri: Duke, Heidelberg, and APIS. Interested in it not just because in classics. Driven by needs of classicist scholarship. Editing software can be used in other projects. A standards based approach. Built in stages. Sustainable because of multiple funders.

Frick: IMLS is a federal agency established in 1996. Budget is $271 million. Funds research, demonstration projects, advancing digital resources, collaborations. Annual deadline is Feb 1, awarded late September. Also funds fellowships to librarians. Has produced report on “digital stewardship.” Funded “Our America Project” at Rice U.

Gagnon: Focused on Canadian funding. Has limited funding, which limits scope. One part of scope is “Image, Text, Sound, and Technology” which is being realigned as digital humanities. They’ve achieved “flashy” results and they need scholars as champions.

Griffin: Funding ECAI and project on propensity for story in humans by Lewis Lancaster. Also funded large digital objects. See as much of the human record in digital form as possible. Be sure to make yourself heard to shape environment for DH.

Kuemmel: In Library Services Division in Germany. They are part of a major initiative for digital information.

West: The “baby” of the UK research councils. One of seven, the newest. 2% of budget covering 28% of the academic community. They will be running a “Sand Pit” — “a creative space where you lock people in a room together for five days and whoever comes out alive gets 3Million.” Key issues are open access and demonstrating impact.

Fraistat finishes by observing that Digital Humanities is international, but funding is national.

What is the range of definitions of “impact”? West: recently published report on economic impact. Griffin: Government tries to quantify everything. He doesn’t agree with that. Should be more subjective. Bobley: Maximize access. But that can be in depth rather than breadth.

Struck by timidity of us as a group. It’s odd to settle for 10% of the pie. It’s all digital, so humanities funding should be all digital. To do that funders need real advocacy from digital humanists.

For the final set of panels where I have a choice, I’ve decided to move to the more experimental papers. Maybe this will be more “relaxing” for me.

The conference ends with a open panel of funding for digital humanities, which I’ll also attend.

First up is Stuart Moulthrop of the University of Baltimore on Social Media and Digital Humanities (in the abstract book, it was listed as “Literature, the Literary, and Dataworld”). Starts with a provocation, calls print and broadcast “fossil media.” Social media are important because something is going to change. Not quite sure what the change is going to be. But it is a transition from content to data. Calls himself part of the “crankiest generation,” where ELO “electronic literature organization” will part with OLE “outside the legitimate enterprise.” Current economic crisis helps Moulthrop argue that doubts about the bubble can link back to uncertainty about where social networking is taking us. Imagines homology between securitization of debt and new media and humanism. But “boring new media” is not an option. He sees transition to “systemic media” where there a data streams attached to every object.

Next up is Steven Jones of Loyola University of Chicago on “social text as digital game space; or what I learned from playing spore”. “This talk should be hyperlinked to Stuart’s slide 12.” It follows from his discussion of the as yet unreleased game in his previous book. Starts with his own provocation. Let’s compare texts and games as systems for sharing and reediting their content. He gives a general account of where games fit in recent digital humanities scholarship from McKenzie to McGann. Game Facade developed in 2005 shows similarities between role playing game and improvisational theater. Parts were played by improv actors. Author of spore wanted players to “feel more like George Lucas than Luke Skywalker.” Hybrid model which enables users to populate universe with one’s own creations and interact with other people’s creations without having what you do to other people’s creations affect what happens to their own universes. Calls it a “massively single-player game.” He then circles back to how activities of digital humanities follow some of the same processes as building creatures in Spore.

Q: With emergent processes, how do you recognize something important when it’s there?

CenterNet is holding their general meeting with special guest appearance by Jon Orwant of Google Books.

They anticipated a big crowd for this. The tables that have been in all the rooms have been removed and replaced by theater style seating and most of the seats are filling up.

Announcement that CenterNet will be holding an international summit of digital humanities centers immediately before next year’s DH10 in London. CenterNet will also be meeting with Consortium of Humanities Centers.

Orwant’s title: “What to search for in Google’s 7 million books?” First, why did they do it? Second, where are they going with it? Company motto: “organize the world’s knowledge and make it useful.” First discusses whether current strategy constitutes fair use and status of settlement. There will be opt in and opt out possibilities. For opt ins, Google may be able to arrange sale of digital copies, with interesting questions of pricing. Could also offer subscription service of those books that opt in. Overall about 125 million “works” and 165 million “manifestations” in the world. About 5% is in print. About 75% is out of print but under copyright. The rest are public domain. Creation of a “research corpus” is part of settlement. What that “research corpus” is is still to be defined. He was asked about quality of data from scanned pages (OCR). Says that it is as good as anyone’s, which is not all that great. OCR will never be 100%. What “making research corpus available” means is also still to be defined. Finding the right balance of using tools of digital humanists to do more advanced searches on Google’s API and making information useful for non-tech-savvy humanists. Orwant gives example that if source is too open, a non-tech-savvy user could ask a question that would require decades for the search engine to answer, so have to shield against that, but that makes it hard to integrate user generated tools. Mentioned “contest” to come up with “new uses” for Google Books. Will Google Books metadata be made available? No, because some of it is acquired through proprietary software. What about corrupt metadata? His response is whether this is an urgent issue or not, because it may be overcome by other developments, so hand recoding may not be cost-effective.

I arrived slightly late to the second afternoon session of DH09 because I got distracted looking at two posters during the coffee break. Both were very interesting works on Africa. Hamilton College professor Angel Nieves has produced a living history archive of the Soweto uprising of 1976. It is available at http://www.soweto76archive.org. The second is a wonderful beta for layering information on maps of Africa, produced by Harvard’s GIS lab: http://cga-3.hmdc.harvard.edu/africamap/. Check both of them out.

The first paper of this session is by John Keating and Aja Teehan, who I heard present on a different topic earlier in the conference. This paper deals with delivering a humanities computing teaching module at the undergraduate level. I arrived as they were discussing their theory of learning before they move on to the pragmatics of the course. They derived their ideas of what to teach in part by researching topics from previous DH conferences. Key topics covered in lectures were text and textuality, entity-relationship modelling, tree modelling, SQL and XQuery, UML, metadata standards, and critical evaluation of projects. They required students to build a project using TEI.

The second paper is by Amanda French and Peter Wosh from NYU. They are discussing digital teaching of archives and public history. Wosh provides background on where the program itself came from. As they became more committed to bringing digital humanities to the program, they decided they wanted someone who specialized in digital humanities itself, not in history or archives. That person was Amanda French. French asks whether Digital Humanties’ goal is to “colonize” traditional humanities disciplines. All disciplines are “digital” but their not “digitally literate.” She took a survey of digital skills of incoming students. They were familiar with “the web” (facebook, blogging, etc) but not really able to create digital projects. They have now defined a curriculum sequence to build competencies. One student created an online archive about the culper spy ring and benedict arnold.

Our third speaker was unable to make it to the conference, so we get out a little early this time. That’s a good thing because there will be a presentation by Jon Orwant of Google Books at lunch time. I’ll try to blog that too.

So today is the final day of DH09. The festivities keep going all day and will finish with a round table about funding opportunities for digital humanities by representatives of the main funding agencies in the US and abroad. Sessions are starting slightly late because of an accident near campus that snagged traffic from the hotels. It’s an odd sort of bookend to the conference. The first day was marred by a fatal accident on the Metro Red Line.

Today’s first session is focused on the role of library in digital humanities. It starts with Vika Zafrin of Boston University on the Library as an Agent of Recontextualization. What is role of library when ordering principles can be divorced from actual objects? At BU, they view the library as a “programmatic space” rather than a storage space. BU Theological library has a site on the history of Protestant missions and one on Fichte. They are doing so with the goal of fulfilling ACLS report on cyberinfrastructure.

The second papers is by William Kretzschmer and William Potter from the University of Georgia on library collaboration with large digital projects. Kretzschmer is an English Professor and Potter is a Librarian. Kretzschmer is presenting on how they collaborated. Argument is that the library is the only realistic option for long-term sustainability of digital humanities projects. Most large projects rely on a single developer. Continuity depends on continuing interest of that developer and funding. His example is Linguistic Atlas Project, started as analog project in 1929 and beginning to move digital in the 1980s. Raises the question, how large is “large”, or does it even matter if it is “large” rather than “small”? Library can house content long term, but staff from the project will have to be responsible for tools.

The final paper is by Rick Furuta of Texas A&M on supporting the creation of scholarly bibliographies through social collaboration. To get a project collaboration going you need someone interested in computing, someone who specializes in an academic discipline, and someone who works in the library. Papers that aren’t available digitally are becoming increasingly invisible. Old bibliographic model takes too long. So can bibliographies benefit from input of users? Few projects are thinking about multi-language scholarship. Texas A&M is home to Cervantes Bibliography, which is adding social citation characteristics. Includes moderation function by chief editor. Workflow of this kind of moderation is trickier than it looks. Types of groups able to moderate have strengths and weaknesses: private, closed, open. Use a process of assigning ranks to collaborators.

This afternoon’s panel at DH09 is from members of University of Virginia’s Scholar’s Lab. Presenters are Bethany Nowviskie, Joseph Gilbert, Christopher Gist, Kelly Johnston, and Adam Soroka. UVa Scholar’s Lab is involved in several initiatives connected to GIS. Indeed, the Scholar’s Lab will be an information clearing-house for GIS for humanists.

Kelly Johnston starts with a reminder of why GIS matters to humanities. Urges humanities folks to “think like a geographer.” You don’t have to have precise coordinates to do GIS. ESRI portal tool kit didn’t work so well on their system. So turned instead to Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). Geospatial Data Portal Beta is at Scholar’s Lab.

Adam Soroka talks about the tools available at the lab to develop new GIS. It is built as a “Service Oriented Architecture”. GeoServer translates raster data and GIS to create new maps.

Chris Gist discusses one application of GIS, the Southern History Database. Used to have to do everything by hand; now it can be done using OSGeo suite. Users can get the maps directly in the browser instead of needing proprietary software.

Bethany Nowviskie and Joe Gilbert talk about how non-technical specialists make use of these particular tools. Bring in scanned historical maps to go with vector data. Nowviskie interprets Frances Henshaw’s drawings of maps in her pennmanship book which are transformed into art objects. She calls this an example of “graphesis.” Gilbert follows with a discussion of Google Map Markers as an icon of GIS. Invokes Bakhtin’s notion of the “chronotope” as a model for marking events on maps. What do we need to move forward from cluttered presentation of Google Earth?

It may also be possible to develop applications for imaginary spaces like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County using GIS.

It will be important to see what comes out of the UVa Scholar’s Lab in the next few years.

Note: This is the second set of presentations based on the Prezi presentation software. Prezi zooms in and out a lot and be kind of disorienting.