Hi all,
I started a THATCamp set on flickr – so far it only has one picture, but I’m sure it will grow.
If any of you upload pictures to your own accounts, please use the “thatcamp” tag.
Archive for May, 2008
THATCamp on flickr
Saturday, May 31st, 2008Zotero hacking, making big collections hackable, intro to hacking with Processing
Friday, May 30th, 2008Is it obvious I’m a total hack?
The project I wrote up in my application was to demo adding Zeroconf to Zotero, with the goal of having a little tool for anybody with a Zotero collection to run to let them instantly see and “borrow from” the collections of people nearby, like in the same office, or in the same coffeeshop, or in the same part of the library stacks. I’ve made a lot of progress on this and with the help of a few Zotero- and otherwise code/network-savvy campers I think we can finish this well enough to pull off a compelling demo of the idea.
If you’re not already a coder, but might like to learn to hack some, I recently started a video tutorial series called learn2code. The goal is to introduce basic concepts of programming using the Processing computer art platform. Processing is very easy to learn and incredibly fun to use, and can make a magnificent platform for data visualization and interaction. I’d love to do a quick session introducing Processing, since it might be a tool you can use in your work, and it really is a lot of fun!
Also, I spend most of my time working on something called the World Digital Library. We’re prepping for a spring ‘09 release, but in the meantime, we’ve learned a lot about how to build an app like this (multi-lingual faceted search with Solr was a big one), and I’d enjoy the chance to give a tour of what we’ve done so far. More importantly, though, I’d like to learn from you what we might be able to do at the Library of Congress (where I work) to help make our resources like WDL and others more useful in digital humanities work.
Visualization and Interface for Variorum and Critical Editions, Text and Video
Friday, May 30th, 2008How do we move from print versions of variorum editions, to marked-up versions, to basic and (yet non-existent but imaginable) sophisticated visual interpretations of them?
A project I’m currently working on seeks to bring together several existing standards and tools some of which – (TEI) standards for markup of digital texts, collaborative annotation, and timelines – have been proposed for discussion. I would like to offer some of our thoughts about possible directions for visualization in collaborative variorum and critical editions, as well as ask for suggestions.
I’m working, with Sean Gurd, a classics scholar at Concordia University in Montreal, on a tool for collaborative comparison and annotation of classical (and potentially any other) texts. Such a tool would display a visual timeline of a given classical text, with versions of it from antiquity to our own time, with translations, linked to commentaries made in published sources, plus ongoing users’ comments.
The idea takes off from Sean’s work on different versions of Iphigenia at Aulis by Euripides, where he argues that in most cases there are no “originals” for classical texts – they are often known only in excerpts, translations, or annotated versions that are much younger than the missing “original.” In such cases, versions, translations, and commentaries constitute the work itself. A digital representation of such a “work in progress” would make real something that so far exists only as an abstraction.
When we looked for interface models for this project, we couldn’t find them at such major classics websites as the Perseus Digital Library or the Thesaurus Linguae Graeca – these are great compendiums of texts but have minimal user interaction features. Neither the wiki versioning interface in Wikipedia, nor the Simile Timeline seem entirely adequate. Sadly, the most evocative versioning/timeline interface so far seems to come from the timeline of backups in Leopard Mac OS. And while there is nothing wrong with borrowing from major industrial designers – Zotero borrowed some of it interface features from iTunes – ideally digital humanities should try to develop their own comparably elegant interface designs.
Elena (of Concordia Digital History Lab, Concordia University, Montreal)
P.S. I’m also interested in crashing a related suggested session on analyzing video/audio and critical video editions because I work on Vertov, the video analysis tool that came up in the discussion.
International infrastructures for digital history?
Friday, May 30th, 2008I want to think a bit broader about digital history and the wider historical community, particularly in an international setting. In the US, digital history has definitely gained momentum, whereas in for instance Norway, the term “digital history” has not even been used. We have some projects that would classify as digital history, but in general these are one-way digital presentations of material rather than truly collaborative web 2.0-style projects.
I am working on a Norwegian-language article on digital history for the major history journal in Norway, and I find it quite challenging to translate much of the context of doing digital history. Since we don’t have many large, visible digital history projects, showing the relevance of digital approaches to mainstream historians is hard. Being at THATcamp will hopefully give me some help here, but for now I’d be interested in thinking about ways to make digital history more international. The Zotero people have done a great job here (I have translated parts of Zotero to Norwegian), but I think digital history projects that want to be truly open to the larger community has to consider the localization issue.
The humanities research process – what could the future look like?
Friday, May 30th, 2008Looking at the range of interests represented so far on the blog, I also wanted to share an idea that caught my imagination raised recently by Geoffrey Rockwell, digital humanist and TAPoR director, at last week’s New Horizons in Teaching and Research 2008 Conference at the University of Virginia. The humanities research process has made quantum leaps in terms of widespread access through mass digitization efforts such as Google Books and the Internet Archive, and the development of citation tools like Zotero and text analysis tools. These enabling tools have and are making significant impact on the discovery and selection stages in the humanities research process. These however are discrete steps in the whole process. Geoffrey envisioned the day when there would be a comprehensive tool or suite of tools that would carry research data from the very beginning stages of search & discovery, through selection, text analysis, and right through to publication. He painted a future where humanities scholars can move and relate research material through the entire research cycle, not just portions of it. What would a tool or suite of tools like that look like?
Research commons for scholars
Friday, May 30th, 2008I’m intrigued by Chris Blanchard’s Pronetos project. At the International Center for Jefferson Studies (ICJS) at Monticello, we’ve been exploring ways to build an online community of Jefferson scholars, historians and research fellows (past, present & future), where they can identify and link up with other scholars working in similar topics relating to the life, times, and legacy of Thomas Jefferson. We think of it as an extension of the physical space and community we provide at Kenwood for scholarly exchange and discourse, and a means for fellows and scholars from all over the globe to continue conversations beyond their time at ICJS. We’ll like to see a research commons emerge that incorporates collaboration, sharing of sources, critiquing of draft papers, joint development of conferences & symposia, reviews & recommendations, a repository of research papers, toolkits for historical analysis, etc.
I can definitely see the potential of creating a social network built around a specialized focus, but linking out to a wider network of Early American historians, and then also to scholars in Pronetos and other scholarly social networks.
I’d be interested to learn from folks about other F/OSS like Pronetos out there. What do folks think about adapting Facebook, or Mediawiki to do something similar? Is there a good way to manage different discussion threads over time so there’s some coherence? How do we encourage scholars who are less comfortable with technology to participate? How do we incentivize participation, contribute content, and share research? In other words, how do we enlarge participation beyond the 20% who contribute 80% of the content? And how do we remove real and perceived barriers to participation from the remaining 80% of folks whom we want to draw in?
Development practices
Thursday, May 29th, 2008This probably falls at least partly under the general heading of sustainability, but I would be interested in a mini-session or discussion about development practices and patterns for small teams in academic settings.
My development team was recently expanded from myself to myself and two undergraduate programmers, and we’re currently in the process of setting up a system with a few basic tools: Mercurial for distributed revision control, Trac for bug tracking, task management, and documentation, and some ad-hoc mod_rewrite sorcery so that we can easily deploy and try out our own revisions and each other’s.
I would be curious to hear about other people’s experiences in similar situations. What worked? What didn’t?
a moveable feast
Thursday, May 29th, 2008I’m coming late to the blog party, and can’t believe what an amazing group of people we have here! Dan, can we all crash for the week?
My initial proposal to THATcamp was to set up a kind of birds-of-a-feather session on policy and management issues around open source development in higher ed — so I was glad to see that Tom is thinking more broadly, but along similar lines. (And of course all the sustainability talk fits right in here.)
My department at UVA supports and contributes to a number of open source faculty projects, and we also have a few of our own going on right now: Blacklight (which my colleague Bess may present), Fathom (a kind of showcase/social networking portal project being built, at least initially, for the digital humanities community at UVA), and a new, still nameless, web-services framework for delivering GIS data for a variety of scholarly applications. (Can’t link to the latter two yet; developers would squeal, but sneak peeks are possible.)
These are three projects coming out of the same lab, but with radically different institutional / policy-level situations regarding their open-source status. We’re in a situation where patent and IP policies designed for big pharma can squelch digital humanities development without even noticing. It’s a vexing issue at UVA — and I suspect more broadly, too. Would anybody be interested in helping me do a kind of a survey and see if we could share approaches, successes, horror stories, etc?
Some other thoughts: we’re working a lot with geospatial data in collaborations with faculty and also in figuring out how best to manage and deliver library GIS collections at UVA. I’m a geospatial neophyte (suddenly managing GIS projects) and am eager to learn from Sean and others with more experience.
The temporal is the next dimension poised to smack us in all these geo-referenced projects, and we’re keen to explore some of the special problems around representing time in humanities data. Along those lines, maybe as a part of a session on historical visualization, I’d be happy to share some experiences from the late, lamented Temporal Modelling Project I undertook with Johanna Drucker about six or seven years ago. This was an attempt to create a visual “language” for expressing the kind of inflected temporalities you see in literary and historical documents. Can you put impatience on a timeline? What about déjà vu? Foreshadowing? Regret? (Temp Mod is also an example of an abortive DH project. Why are there so many? Foreshadowing? Regret?)
On with the random notes: if somebody can re-energize me about gaming in the humanities, please do! I used to teach (and do) game development at UVA, but I think I got Ivanhoe‘d out.
Finally, count me in on visualization and aggregation — Jeanne and Laura’s conversation about federating archival data and what you do with it once it’s all there. Collex and NINES have been fruitful, but I’m ready to imagine some next steps.
Introducing Encyclopedia Virginia
Thursday, May 29th, 2008Though I’m way late in doing so, I did want to just introduce my project to the folks here before we all converge (if only hours before). I don’t think it’s covering any drastically new ground but maybe ties in to a number of the different conversational threads that have been going through these posts. I’m happy to demo what we’ve got this weekend, but equally happy to watch & learn from the audience.
Encyclopedia Virginia is a new project of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Quite a few different state and regional encyclopedia projects have cropped up over the past decade; EV is one of the first to do so with a mandate to create entirely new entry content instead of simply publishing online a preexisting print encyclopedia.
We got charged, as I’m sure most of you have been, with creating a web project that would take advantage of the latest & greatest web technologies while also building itself for longterm sustainability (seeing as how an in-depth state encyclopedia like ours could be 10 years in content development alone, so we’ve got to have technology that can nimbly adjust to changing web standards, trends, etc.).
To that end, we’re borrowing a few tricks from digital libraries and archives, and encoding our entries in TEI. In some sense it’s overkill — this content is all digitally-born, so much of TEI’s capabilities w/r/t annotating archival manuscript is lost here. Hopefully, what it empowers down the road is some interoperability between EV content and other regional encyclopedia or digital library content, and some small immunity to the changing web trends over the long course of our content development.
We’ve built a custom CMS that ingests TEI and strips out various elements into your standard MySQL database for web delivery. We perform a similar task for our media objects, creating METS records for each object which the CMS ingests and strips apart. While, again, this in some ways constitutes quite a bit of overkill, it makes more sense when we try to think about the project as both an online encyclopedia and a digital library, and we’re hoping that the flexibility and openness offered by XML will reap benefits for us down the road.
So, a few different things I’d love to talk about over the course of the weekend (not including all of the great things I’ve already read — my curiosity and interest are piqued!):
- What is our responsibility vis-a-vis creating content that is accessible with the technologies of both today and tomorrow? How do we build digital creations that can themselves be lasting archives?
- Are archival standards like TEI and METS appropriate for digitally-born content? Obviously, EV is doing this, but I don’t think it’s a given that it’s always the right choice.
- (one close to my heart) What is the responsibility of digital archives w/r/t copyright and intellectual property? I manage EV’s media objects, finding things we can use in all kinds of archives, and struggle with this every day — as I try to get as many objects as possible delivered to the public, without getting sued. What role can humanities institutions and projects play in this culture battle? I think particularly there may be some overlap with the interest in Creative Commons that was expressed earlier.
See you on Saturday!
Traveling from the northeast
Thursday, May 29th, 2008A side-note to travelers: I heard a report on the radio that the Woodrow Wilson Bridge is going to be down to one lane this weekend. If that’s right, anyone is coming in on I-95 south might want to look for non-95 routes. Anyone know more about this?