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.

“lucidwanderer86″ has been compiling interviews with DH09 attendees asking them what the Digital Humanities means to them. So far, they haven’t caught up to me, but here’s a list of the interviews available to date at youtube.

I’ve reached temporary information overload so am skipping the first afternoon sessions to recharge the brain. I’ll be back to blog the 4pm sessions.

The second morning session today is related to how to mark up “complicated” entities. First up is Charles van den Heuvel of the Virtual Knowledge Studio in the Netherlands speaking on tagging manuscript maps. The potential audience of manuscript maps is fairly wide — up to 85% of users of manuscript maps in Dutch archives are genealogists. His project harvests the energy of these users. Using inquiries from users, existing metadata can be shared with other repositories thus enriching the information streams for both repositories and end-users.

The next speaker is Erica Fretwell from Duke University speaking on Manuscript Annotations in Time and Space. She is working with “Flip Books” which has complex relationships between the different parts, which make production of print versions or annotation very difficult. Concurrent Markup may help overcome some of the problems of “dimensionality” in texts.

The third paper is by Gregory Prickman of the University of Iowa library talking about the Atlas of Early Printing. It took two graduate students six months to populate basic information in the Atlas. The site as a whole is built in flash. It includes a demo of how a printing press works built in Maya. Compare it to Lisa’s Virtual Tour of Anatomy in The Worlds of Burke and Hare. Iowa does not have a digital humanities center, so Prickman had to go around to individuals with expertise in different aspects of the project. Funded by a small internal grant. It shows how small sums can advance a digital strategy.

This morning’s sessions are all related to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). First up is Syd Baumann of Brown University and Dot Porter of DHO, speaking on “In the Header, but Where?” It’s a report on how TEI guidelines are being modified in response to user criticism. TEI guidelines are “really big” (about 1500 pages). Didn’t find much that was systematic, but still thought process of searching for errors was helpful.

Second paper is by Gerald Gannod and Laura Mandell of Miami U. on automating TEI coding. Established a collaboratory for Humanities, Art, and Technology with computer scientists to help faculty develop projects without having to learn coding. Laura Mandell calls herself a “TEI Groupie” because she is so enthusiastic about its potential. Great critics like Northrop Frye had “database minds,” they read everything and remembered everything. TEI helps today’s users achieve that instant recall. Collaboratory at Miami is designed to ease transition from pure Word Document to fully marked up TEI. Newest tool is XSLT authoring tool with three panel presentation.

The third paper is a bit different. It is by Federico Meschini on a project called the Modernist Magazines Project. The project consists of three printed volumes of critical essays plus a website. But what started as a sideline is now become a project of its own. Common metadata standards TEI, DublinCore, and MARC all had limitations for this project because they weren’t rich enough. So used MODS. Ran into problem of coordinating work with scholars unable to fully work with coding. He describes process of finding tools to translate between content expert and code. Many steps involved.

Finding the right balance between clarifying structure for newbies and enabling flexibility for experts and coordinating the two is a real challenge for all text encoding projects.