So pleased to be able to attend HASTAC 2013. Had a lovely time meeting people, getting new ideas, and sharing my work. I'm beyond grateful for all the support this community has shown me - and only sorry a previous conference commitment cut my time in Toronto far shorter than i would've liked.
I recently attended a seminar at UWS on Friday 26 April, 2013 led by Lynne and Ray Siemens of the University of Victoria in Canada. The theme of the event was collaboration in the humanities and in particular; how digital humanities projects exemplify effective collaboration in the broader humanities. This is because digital humanities projects often cross-disciplines and geography and the often more demanding collaborative terrain of computer science, computational methods and the humanities.
Lynne Siemens, specialises in project management and team building. She stated that people aren’t always well-trained to work together and outlined some of the positives and negatives of working in teams. She claimed that some people are better able to collaborate than others, often because they have developed skills of listening, are flexible, can negotiate, and can compromise. Lynne described these as the ‘soft skills’ of effective collaborative teams. A team approach often produces more diverse and possibly higher quality ideas (and is a good way to learn new skills and perspectives), but some projects are better done as an individual (but of course, some projects are beyond the scope and skills-sets of individuals).
Lynne outlined some of successful team interactions she had observed, partly through research she had undertaken through case –studies. Good communication skills are vital, as is project management, and the ability to think across technology and the humanities and indeed, culture and language. Also the objectives of the team, the outcomes, and the individual tasks need to be clearly described with not too many grey areas that may be potential areas of conflict. And teams operate within institutional contexts so there are certain contingencies to negotiate either within or between institutions. Still, one of the best ways to build teams is through casual conversations, lots of face-to-face meetings, and large bottles of rum (I put in the last one).
Ray Siemans is a Professor of Humanities Computing at the University of Victoria in Victoria, Canada and is well known for his work in the Digital Humanities and in particular, through the founding of the annual Digital Humanities Summer Institute (that I attended 2 years ago and now attracts around 500 participants). He discussed the important work of the digital humanities, particularly around content modelling and computational analysis of content (a core form of scholarship within the field). He also discussed the typology of curriculum development in the digital humanities either through stand-alone degrees or through digital humanities inflicted programs and in particular, the highly successful Summer Institute model.
DHSI (Digital Humanities Summer Institute) http://www.dhsi.org/
ETCL (Electronic Textual Culture Lab) http://etcl.uvic.ca/
I recently attended a seminar at UWS on Friday 26 April, 2013 led by Lynne and Ray Siemens of the University of Victoria in Canada. The theme of the event was collaboration in the humanities and in particular; how digital humanities projects exemplify effective collaboration in the broader humanities. This is because digital humanities projects often cross-disciplines and geography and the often more demanding collaborative terrain of computer science, computational methods and the humanities.
Lynne Siemens, specialises in project management and team building. She stated that people aren’t always well-trained to work together and outlined some of the positives and negatives of working in teams. She claimed that some people are better able to collaborate than others, often because they have developed skills of listening, are flexible, can negotiate, and can compromise. Lynne described these as the ‘soft skills’ of effective collaborative teams. A team approach often produces more diverse and possibly higher quality ideas (and is a good way to learn new skills and perspectives), but some projects are better done as an individual (but of course, some projects are beyond the scope and skills-sets of individuals).
Lynne outlined some of successful team interactions she had observed, partly through research she had undertaken through case –studies. Good communication skills are vital, as is project management, and the ability to think across technology and the humanities and indeed, culture and language. Also the objectives of the team, the outcomes, and the individual tasks need to be clearly described with not too many grey areas that may be potential areas of conflict. And teams operate within institutional contexts so there are certain contingencies to negotiate either within or between institutions. Still, one of the best ways to build teams is through casual conversations, lots of face-to-face meetings, and large bottles of rum (I put in the last one).
Ray Siemans is a Professor of Humanities Computing at the University of Victoria in Victoria, Canada and is well known for his work in the Digital Humanities and in particular, through the founding of the annual Digital Humanities Summer Institute (that I attended 2 years ago and now attracts around 500 participants). He discussed the important work of the digital humanities, particularly around content modelling and computational analysis of content (a core form of scholarship within the field). He also discussed the typology of curriculum development in the digital humanities either through stand-alone degrees or through digital humanities inflicted programs and in particular, the highly successful Summer Institute model.
DHSI (Digital Humanities Summer Institute) http://www.dhsi.org/
ETCL (Electronic Textual Culture Lab) http://etcl.uvic.ca/
I have been undertaking a lot of research of late that involves ‘sociology-technical’ approaches to computing. Whilst the subject matter of the studies is interesting and worthy, I do worry about falling into the academic trap (in which there are way too many) of being ‘socially determinist’. What I mean by this, is exclusively using in the research process, books and related theories that are very distant from the creation and understandings of software. ‘Technical capital’ through exercising technical skills (ie. from the people who built software) does not occur in a social void and the decisions made here are important and are often make by individuals unawares of the social theories that someone else may have about them in some other research context. In other words, the ‘sociology-technical’ is a false dichotomy because it fails to engage with the the technical production of software and the people that do this. They are also ‘human’ and ‘social’ and have their own understanding of this and it is naive to believe that studies that are exclusivity ‘books about books’ are more in tune with the human condition or more ‘social’ (ie they are lacking in wisdom and balance). It would be much better to educate students about socially responsible coding. This is the two-hands of the ‘sociology-technical’ (that are hopefully connected to the same human being). We suffer from the same false dichotomy in the digital humanities and I think that the problem is more acute here in Australia because we import nearly all the software we use, so we are a long way from understanding the context in which it is made. And the people that make it in Germany, the UK, and the USA will continue to make it in their own context.
I think the hardest lesson I learned as a historian is that technology doesn’t need history. And technology certainly doesn’t need an Australian historian; in fact I may just write a book about this!
On Saturday, March 2, I gave a workshop on digital (humanities) pedagogy for a group of about 20 faculty and staff at Gettysburg College. I was impressed by the participants’ energy, openness, smarts, and playfulness. We had fun!
I designed the workshop so that it moved through four phases, with the goal of participants ultimately walking away with concrete ideas about how they might integrate digital approaches into their own teaching:
1) We explored the rationale for digital pedagogy (pdf of slides), discussing what students need to know in the 21st century, different frameworks for digital pedagogy (e.g. learning science, liberal education, social learning, and studio learning), and definitions of digital pedagogy and the “digital liberal arts.” I started the session with Cathy Davidson’s exercise in which audience members first jot down on an index card three things they think students need to know in order to thrive in the digital age, then share their ideas with someone they didn’t walk in with, and finally work together to select the one key idea. (The exercise got people thinking and talking.)
2) In the second session, I gave a brief presentation (pdf) offering specific case studies of digital pedagogy in action (repurposing some slides I’d used for previous workshops). Participants then broke up into groups to analyze an assignment used in a digital humanities class.
3) Next participants worked in small groups to explore one of the following:
I structured the exercise so that participants first looked at the particular applications of the tool in teaching and scholarship (e.g. Mapping the Republic of Letters and Visualizing Emancipation in the session on information visualization), then played with a couple of tools in order to understand how they work, and finally reflected on the advantages and disadvantages of each tool and their potential pedagogical applications. I deliberately kept the exercises short and simple, and I tried to make them relevant to Gettysburg, drawing data from Wikipedia and other open sources.
4) Finally participants worked in small teams (set up according to discipline) to develop an assignment incorporating digital approaches. We concluded the session with a modified gallery walk, in which people circulated through the room and chatted with a representative of each team to learn more about their proposed assignment.
By the end of the day, workshop participants seemed excited by the possibilities and more aware of specific approaches that they could take (as well as a bit exhausted). I got several questions about copyright, so in future workshops I plan to incorporate a more formal discussion of fair use, Creative Commons and the public domain.
Our workshop drew heavily on materials shared by generous digital humanities instructors. (In that spirit, feel free to use or adapt any of my workshop materials. And I’m happy to give a version of this workshop elsewhere.) My thinking about digital humanities pedagogy has been informed by a number of people, particularly my terrific colleague Rebecca Davis.
Lately, I’ve been reflecting on a few conversations that I’ve had with some friends (fellow grad students in geography) regarding cartography. The thing is, the topic of mapping is often a lowly one among my peers, and generally comes up in conversation via complaining about the mapmaking process. However, as someone who practices and enjoys map design, I’m never offended by their comments, but more curious about why they view mapmaking the way they do. Ok, I get it; we all have our likes, dislikes, and obligations.
Last week I was delighted to be back at my old stomping grounds at Rice University’s Digital Media Commons to lead a workshop on “Doing Things with Text.” The workshop was part of Rice’s Digital Humanities Bootcamp Series, led by my former colleagues Geneva Henry and Melissa Bailar. I hoped to expose participants to a range of approaches and tools, provide opportunities for hands-on exploration and play, and foster discussion about the advantages and limitations of text analysis, topic modeling, text encoding, and metadata. Although we ran out of time before getting through my ambitious agenda, I hope my slides and exercises provide useful starting points for exploring text analysis and text encoding.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a look at the percentage of academic papers published by women, over the past five centuries.
The articles and authors described in this data were drawn from the corpus of JSTOR, a digital archive of scholarly papers, by researchers at the Eigenfactor Project at the University of Washington. About two million articles, representing 1765 fields and sub-fields, were examined, spanning a period from 1665 to 2011. The data are presented here for three time periods, the latest one ending in 2010, and a view that combines all periods.
Percentage of female authors is on the horizontal, and each bubble is a subfield sized by total number of authors. The graphic starts with publishing for all years, but be sure to click on the tabs for each time span to see changes.
The data is based on the archive of about two million articles from JSTOR, and a hierarchical map equation method is used to determine subfields.
The gender classification they used for names seems like it could be nifty for some applications. Gender is inferred by comparing names against the ones kept by the U.S. Social Security Administration, which includes gender. If a name was used for female at least 95 percent of the time, it was classified as a female name, and the same was done with male. Anything ambiguous was not included in the study.
I have been following a number of blogs recently which has prompted me to flesh out some thoughts here.
I'm only five days into teaching Media Collage, a brand new class offering at Glenbrook South HS. On the fourth day, I dropped the following message into the class's shared Google Drive folder: