Skip to main content

Home/ DIGH5000-14W/ Group items tagged blogs

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Christina Stokes

Small Assignment #2 - 74 views

I think it's a good idea too, however I'm not sure how we would implement this this late in the semester. It might be a bit tight to do this kind of peer-review presentation for the visual analysis...

digh5000 smallassignment2 evaluation

started by Devin Hartley on 10 Feb 14 18 follow-ups, last by Christina Stokes on 08 Mar 14
Danuta Sierhuis

DIGH 5000 Jan 20 Libraries, Archives and Databases - 28 views

When Christina mentioned that the article she was looking for on Hacking the Academy archive no longer existed, I thought about the issues that digital preservation programs in archives and museums...

started by Christina Stokes on 22 Jan 14 6 follow-ups, last by Danuta Sierhuis on 27 Jan 14
Alessandro Marcon

A short, worthwhile argument for the value of expert knowledge - 24 views

I'm really glad both of you, Danuta and Jordon, weighed in on this.To be honest, I was stuck in a kind of squirming spot between agreeing with and being irked by this article, but more so than agre...

started by Alessandro Marcon on 12 Feb 14 3 follow-ups, last by Alessandro Marcon on 23 Feb 14
Devin Hartley

DIGH5000 Blogs - 92 views

So I know I'm a little late to the party for the first blog post, but to be fair I was somewhat distracted by preparing for my presentation. Also I seem to have a hard enough time keeping up with m...

digh5000 blogs

started by Game Cat on 09 Jan 14 8 follow-ups, last by Devin Hartley on 26 Jan 14
Jordon Tomblin

Real-Time Video of Earth from Space and Geospatial Data Mapping - 11 views

This is really cool. I recently came across this company called Skybox Imaging (http://www.skyboximaging.com/products#imagery) that has developed micro-satelites to display and record real-ti...

digh5000 dh education mapping data geospatial social political digital humanities carleton

started by Jordon Tomblin on 06 Mar 14 no follow-up yet
Chris Milando

Highlights for Gibbs and Owens': Writing History in the Digital Age » Hermene... - 0 views

writinghistory.trincoll.edu/...gibbs-owens-2012-spring

digh5000 history data education play generate

shared by Chris Milando on 11 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • historical scholarship increasingly depends on our interactions with data, from battling the hidden algorithms of Google Book Search to text mining a hand-curated set of full-text documents.
  • Even though methods for exploring and interacting with data have begun to permeate historical research, historians’ writing has largely remained mired in traditional forms and conventions
  • In this essay we consider data as computer-processable information.
  • ...69 more annotations...
  • Examples include discussions of data queries, workflows with particular tools, and the production and interpretation of data visualizations
  • At a minimum, historians need to embrace new priorities for research publications that explicate their process of interfacing with, exploring, and then making sense of historical sources in a fundamentally digital form—that is, the hermeneutics of data.
  • This may mean de-emphasizing narrative in favor of illustrating the rich complexities between an argument and the data that supports it
  • This is especially true in terms of the sheer quantity of data now available that can be gathered in a short time and thus guide humanistic inquiry
  • We must also point out that, while data certainly can be employed as evidence for a historical argument, data are not necessarily evidence in themselves
  • we argue that the creation of, interaction with, and interpretation of data must become more integral to historical writing.
  • Use of data in the humanities has recently attracted considerable attention, and no project more so than Culturomics, a quantitative study of culture using Google Books
  • the nature of data and the way it has been used by historians in the past differs in several important respects from contemporary uses of data
  • This chapter discusses some new ways in which historians might rethink the nature of historical writing as both a product and a process of understanding.
  • The process of guiding should be a greater part of our historical writing.
  • As humanists continue to prove that data manipulation and machine learning can confirm existing knowledge, such techniques come closer to telling us something we don’t already know
  • However, even these projects generally focus on research (or research potential) rather than on making their methodology accessible to a broader humanities audience
  • The processes for working with the vast amounts of easily accessible and diverse large sets of data suggest a need for historians to formulate, articulate, and propagate ideas about how data should be approached in historical research
  • What does it mean to “use” data in historical work?
  • For one, it does not refer only to historical analysis via complex statistical methods to create knowledge.
  • We should be clear about what using data does not imply.
  • Perhaps such a potential dependence on numbers became even more unpalatable to non-numerical historians after an embrace of the cultural turn, the importance of subjectivity
  • Even as data become more readily available and as historians begin to acquire data manipulation skills as part of their training, rigorous mathematics is not necessarily essential for using data efficiently and effectively
  • work with data can be exploratory and deliberately without the mathematical rigor that social scientists must use to support their epistemological claims.
  • historians need not treat and interpret data only for rigorous hypothesis testing
  • To some extent, historians have always collected, analyzed, and written about data. But having access to vastly greater quantities of data, markedly different kinds of datasets, and a variety of complex tools and methodologies for exploring it means that “using” signifies a much broader range of activities than it has previously.
  • data does not always have to be used as evidence
  • knowledge from visualizations as not simply “transferred, revealed, or perceived, but…created through a dynamic process.
  • Data in a variety of forms can provoke new questions and explorations, just as visualizations themselves have been recently described as “generative and iterative, capable of producing new knowledge through the aesthetic provocation
  • It can also help with discovering and framing research questions.
  • using large amounts of data for research should not be considered opposed to more traditional use of historical sources.
  • humanists will find it useful to pivot between distant and close readings
  • More often than not, distant reading will involve (if not require) creative and reusable techniques to re-imagine and re-present the past—at least more so than traditional humanist texts do.
  • we need more explicit and careful (if not playful) ways ways of writing about them
  • teven Ramsay has suggested that there is a new kind of role for searching to play in the hermeneutic process of understanding, especially in the value of ‘screwing around’ and embracing the serendipitous discovery that our recent abundance of data makes possibl
  • historical writing has been largely confined by linear narratives, usually in the form of journal articles and monographs
  • easier than ever for historians to combine different kinds of datasets—and thus provide an exciting new way to triangulate historical knowledge
  • The insistence on creating a narrative in static form, even if online, is particularly troubling because it obscures the methods for discovery that underlie the hermeneutic research process.
  • Although relatively simple text searches or charts that aid in our historical analysis are perhaps not worth including in a book
  • While these can present new perspectives on the past, they can only do so to the extent that other historians feel comfortable with the methodologies that are used.
  • This means using appropriate platforms to explain our methods.
  • It is clear that a new relationship between text and data has begun to unfold.13 This relationship must inform our approach to writing as well as research.
  • We need history writing that interfaces with, explains, and makes accessible the data that historians use
  • the reasons why many historians remain skeptical about data are not all that different from the reasons they can be skeptical about text.
  • We need history writing that will foreground the new historical methods to manipulate text/data coming online, including data queries and manipulation, and the production and interpretation of visualizations.
  • Beyond explicit tutorials, there are several key advantages in foregrounding our work with data:
  • It allows others to verify historical claims;
  • In addition to accelerating research, foregrounding methodology and (access to) data gives rise to a constellation of questions that are becoming increasingly relevant for historians.
  • 2) It is instructive as part of teaching and exposing historical research practices; 3) It allows us to keep pace with changing tools and ways of using them.
  • Dave Perry in his blog post “Be Online or Be Irrelevant” suggests that academic blogging can encourage “a digital humanism which takes down those walls and claims a new space for scholarship and public intellectualism.”14 This cannot happen unless our methodologies with data remain transparent.
  • we should embrace more public modes of writing and thinking as a way to challenge the kind of work that scholars do.
  • Google’s data is proprietary and exactly what comprises it is unclear
  • Perhaps more importantly, this graph does not indicate anything interesting about why the term “user” spiked as it did—the real question that historians want to answer.
  • But these are not reasons to discard the tool or to avoid writing about it
  • Historians might well start framing research questions this way, with quick uses of the Ngram viewer or other tools
  • But going beyond the data—making sense of it—can be facilitated by additional expertise in ways that our usually much more naturally circumscribed historical data has generally not required.
  • Owens blogged about this research while it was in progress, describing what he was interested in, how he got his data, how he was working with it, along with a link for others to explore and download the data.
  • Owens received several substantive comments from scholars and researchers.
  • These ranged from encouraging the exploration of technical guides, learning from scholarship on the notion of the reader in the context of the history of the book, and suggestions for different prepositions that could further elucidate semantic relationships about “users.”
  • Sharing preliminary representations of data, providing some preliminary interpretations of them, and inviting others to consider how best to make sense of the data at hand, quickly sparked a substantive scholarly conversation
  • this chart is not historical evidence of sufficient (if any) rigor to support historical knowledge claims about what is or isn’t a user.
  • How far, for example, can expressions of data like Google’s Ngram viewer be used in historical work?
  • how does one cite data without black-boxy mathematical reductions, and bring the data itself into the realm of scholarly discourse?
  • How does one show, for example, that references to “sinful” in the nineteenth century appear predominantly in sermon and other exegetical literature in the early part of the century, but become overshadowed by more secular references later in the century? Typically, this would be illustrated with pithy, anecdotal examples taken to be representative of the phenomenon. But does this adequately represent the research methodology? Does it allow anyone to investigate for themselves? Or learn from the methodology?
  • Far better would be to explain the steps used to collect and reformat the data; ideally, the data would be available for download
  • Exposed data allow us to approach interesting questions from multiple and interdisciplinary points of view in the way that citations to textual sources do not
  • As it becomes easier and easier for historians to explore and play with data it becomes essential for us to reflect on how we should incorporate this as part of our research and writing practices.
  • Overall, there has been no aversion to using data in historical research. But historians have started to use data on new scales, and to combine different kinds of data that range widely over typical disciplinary boundaries
  • The ease and increasing presence of data, in terms of both digitized and increasingly born digital research materials, mean that—irrelevant of historical field—the historian faces new methodological challenges.
  • Approaching these materials in a context sensitive way requires substantial amounts of time and energy devoted to how exactly we can interpret data
  • we have argued that historians should deliberately and explicitly share examples of how they are finding and manipulating data in their research with greater methodological transparency in order to promote the spirit of humanistic inquiry and interpretation.
  • Historical data might require little more than simple frequency counts, simple correlations, or reformatting to make it useful to the historian looking for anomalies, trends, or unusual but meaningful coincidences.
  • To argue against the necessity of mathematical complexity is also to suggest that it is a mistake to treat data as self-evident or that data implicitly constitute historical argument or proof.
  • Working with data can be playful and exploratory, and useful techniques should be shared as readily as research discoveries
  • Chris Milando on 11 Mar 14
     
    Gibbs and Owens explain that data and information need to be played with. "Data does not always have to be used as evidence" in itself - it can also be used as a springboard for questions and further discovery (data is "generative").
Danuta Sierhuis

DH People over Projects - 2 views

Here is the link to Miriam Posner's blog post and my reaction to it on my blog: http://miriamposner.com/blog/commit-to-dh-people-not-dh-projects/ http://digitalatheart.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/d...

digh5000 dh

started by Danuta Sierhuis on 31 Mar 14 no follow-up yet
Ridha Ben Rejeb

DH further development : Conferences , workshops and so on - 7 views

CROWDSOURCING : This morning, I came across this interesting link that reveals the power of crowdsourcing in our digital world . This is in connection to the vanished Malaysian airplane: Again man...

digh5000 digital Conference dh

started by Ridha Ben Rejeb on 09 Mar 14 1 follow-up, last by Ridha Ben Rejeb on 12 Mar 14
Alessandro Marcon

A Playful Multitude...Redditing again. - 16 views

It seems as though a looser and 'freer' work environment, where employees can spend as much time at work as they please, has two converse effects. On one hand, it allows for an incredible amount of...

started by Matt Bastin-Millar on 11 Mar 14 3 follow-ups, last by Alessandro Marcon on 18 Mar 14
Alessandro Marcon

ImagePlot as a tool for exhibition design - 9 views

Hi Christina, here are some thoughts... I liked the animated montage on the page. It got me was wondering whether there's a way to slow down the flicker speed of the animation. I ask this not beca...

started by Christina Stokes on 07 Apr 14 2 follow-ups, last by Alessandro Marcon on 11 Apr 14
Jordon Tomblin

Pirated Books as per our last discussion... - 42 views

Origins of copyright and intellectual property emerged in concert with capitalist structures and institutions. Ridha is correct in pointing out the fact that the academic community is not as a fina...

started by Matt Bastin-Millar on 29 Jan 14 6 follow-ups, last by Jordon Tomblin on 12 Feb 14
Ridha Ben Rejeb

Looking for Interdisciplinary Perspectives - 19 views

I read your comment with immense interest in your thought provoking questions and critical approach. My reaction to Kirschenbaum's explanation for the strong association between DH and English is t...

started by Kayla Cuggy on 19 Jan 14 1 follow-up, last by Ridha Ben Rejeb on 20 Jan 14
Chris Milando

» Napster, Udacity, and the Academy Clay Shirky - 3 views

www.shirky.com/...apster-udacity-and-the-academy

digh5000 dh MOOC udacity online education

shared by Chris Milando on 08 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • How did the recording industry win the battle but lose the war? How did they achieve such a decisive victory over Napster, then fail to regain control of even legal distribution channels?
  • Hey kids, Alanis Morisette just recorded three kickin’ songs! You can have them, so long as you pay for the ten mediocrities she recorded at the same time.
  • Napster told us a different story. Napster said “You want just the three songs? Fine.
  • ...36 more annotations...
  • hey just couldn’t imagine—and I mean this in the most ordinarily descriptive way possible—could not imagine that the old way of doing things might fail.
  • Once you see this pattern—a new story rearranging people’s sense of the possible, with the incumbents the last to know—you see it everywhere. First, the people running the old system don’t notice the change. When they do, they assume it’s minor. Then that it’s a niche. Then a fad. And by the time they understand that the world has actually changed, they’ve squandered most of the time they had to adapt.
  • Higher education is now being disrupted; our MP3 is the massive open online course (or MOOC), and our Napster is Udacity, the education startup.
  • We have several advantages over the recording industry, of course. We are decentralized and mostly non-profit. We employ lots of smart people. We have previous examples to learn from, and our core competence is learning from the past. And armed with these advantages, we’re probably going to screw this up as badly as the music people did.
  • A massive open online class is usually a series of video lectures with associated written materials and self-scoring tests, open to anyone. That’s what makes them OOCs. The M part, though, comes from the world. As we learned from Wikipedia, demand for knowledge is so enormous that good, free online materials can attract extraordinary numbers of people from all over the world.
  • Last year, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, an online course from Stanford taught by Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun, attracted 160,000 potential students, of whom 23,000 completed it, a scale that dwarfs anything possible on a physical campus.
  • The size of Thrun and Norvig’s course, and the attention attracted by Udacity (and similar organizations like Coursera, P2PU, and University of the People), have many academics worrying about the effect on higher education. The loudest such worrying so far has been The Trouble With Online Education,
  • As most critics do, Edmundson focussed on the issue of quality, asking and answering his own question: “[C]an online education ever be education of the very best sort?”
  • “Why would anyone take an online class when they can buy a better education at UVA?” But who faces that choice? Are we to imagine an 18 year old who can set aside $250K and 4 years, but who would have a hard time choosing between a residential college and a series of MOOCs? Elite high school students will not be abandoning elite colleges any time soon; the issue isn’t what education of “the very best sort” looks like, but what the whole system looks like.
  • But you know what? Those classes weren’t like jazz compositions. They didn’t create genuine intellectual community. They didn’t even create ersatz intellectual community. They were just great lectures: we showed up, we listened, we took notes, and we left, ready to discuss what we’d heard in smaller sections.
  • The large lecture isn’t a tool for producing intellectual joy; it’s a tool for reducing the expense of introductory classes.
  • Higher education has a bad case of cost disease
  • An organization with cost disease can use lower paid workers, increase the number of consumers per worker, subsidize production, or increase price. For live music, this means hiring less-talented musicians, selling more tickets per performance, writing grant applications, or, of course, raising ticket prices. For colleges, this means more graduate and adjunct instructors, increased enrollments and class size, fundraising, or, of course, raising tuition.
  • Cheap graduate students let a college lower the cost of teaching the sections while continuing to produce lectures as an artisanal product, from scratch, on site, real time.
  • The minute you try to explain exactly why we do it this way, though, the setup starts to seem a little bizarre. What would it be like to teach at a university where a you could only assign books you yourself had written? Where you could only ask your students to read journal articles written by your fellow faculty members? Ridiculous. Unimaginable.
  • e ask students to read the best works we can find, whoever produced them and where, but we only ask them to listen to the best lecture a local employee can produce that morning. Sometimes you’re at a place where the best lecture your professor can give is the best in the world. But mostly not.
  • And the only thing that kept this system from seeming strange was that we’ve never had a good way of publishing lectures.
  • Any sentence that begins “Let’s take Harvard as an example…” should immediately be followed up with “No, let’s not do that.”
  • ny institution that tries to create a cost-effective education will move down the list.
  • Outside the elite institutions, though, the other 75% of students—over 13 million of them—are enrolled in the four thousand institutions you haven’t heard of
  • As Ian Bogost says, MOOCs are marketing for elite schools.
  • Clayton State educates as many undergraduates as Harvard. Saint Leo educates twice as many. City College of San Francisco enrolls as many as the entire Ivy League combined. These are where most students are, and their experience is what college education is mostly like.
  • The fight over MOOCs isn’t about the value of college; a good chunk of the four thousand institutions you haven’t heard of provide an expensive but mediocre education.
  • The fight over MOOCs isn’t even about the value of online education. Hundreds of institutions already offer online classes for credit, and half a million students are already enrolled in them. If critics of online education were consistent, they would believe that the University of Virginia’s Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies or Rutger’s MLIS degree are abominations, or else they would have to believe that there is a credit-worthy way to do online education, one MOOCs could emulate. Neither argument is much in evidence.
  • the fight over MOOCs is really about the story we tell ourselves about higher education: what it is, who it’s for, how it’s delivered, who delivers it.
  • How will we teach complex thinking and skills? How will we turn adolescents into well-rounded members of the middle class? Who will certify that education is taking place? How will we instill reverence for Virgil? Who will subsidize the professor’s work?
  • The possibility MOOCs hold out isn’t replacement; anything that could replace the traditional college experience would have to work like one, and the institutions best at working like a college are already colleges. The possibility MOOCs hold out is that the educational parts of education can be unbundled. MOOCs expand the audience for education to people ill-served or completely shut out from the current system, in the same way phonographs expanded the audience for symphonies to people who couldn’t get to a concert hall, and PCs expanded the users of computing power to people who didn’t work in big companies.
  • Those earlier inventions systems started out markedly inferior to the high-cost alternative: records were scratchy, PCs were crashy. But first they got better, then they got better than that, and finally, they got so good, for so cheap, that they changed people’s sense of what was possible.
  • In the US, an undergraduate education used to be an option, one way to get into the middle class. Now it’s a hostage situation, required to avoid falling out of it. And if some of the hostages having trouble coming up with the ransom conclude that our current system is a completely terrible idea, then learning will come unbundled from the pursuit of a degree just as as songs came unbundled from CDs.
  • If this happens, Harvard will be fine. Yale will be fine, and Stanford, and Swarthmore, and Duke. But Bridgerland Applied Technology College? Maybe not fine. University of Arkansas at Little Rock? Maybe not fine. And Kaplan College, a more reliable producer of debt than education? Definitely not fine.
  • Udacity may or may not survive, but as with Napster, there’s no containing the story it tells: “It’s possible to educate a thousand people at a time, in a single class, all around the world, for free.”
  • For people used to dealing with institutions that go out of their way to hide their flaws, this makes these systems look terrible at first. But anyone who has watched a piece of open source software improve, or remembers the Britannica people throwing tantrums about Wikipedia, has seen how blistering public criticism makes open systems better. And once you imagine educating a thousand people in a single class, it becomes clear that open courses, even in their nascent state, will be able to raise quality and improve certification faster than traditional institutions can lower cost or increase enrollment.
  • Open systems are open.
    • Chris Milando
      Chris Milando on 08 Feb 14
       
      I really like this point. I want to eventually host my own online course, and I think it would be great to have criticism! I come from a writing background, so I know how powerful and wonderful criticism can be. I was in a writers circle a few years ago and we used to completely tear down each other's work. But when we rewrote our stories (with their criticism in mind), they were /always/ much stronger than they had ever been. For something like a massive online course to work, it has to work /well/, so if criticsm can help bring it to the level of quality it needs (to provide the justification for its existence), then that is what we need to employ! I, for one, welcome criticism in everything that I do (so long as it is constructive). The only way to improve is through criticism, and as literary scholars - whose degrees are based on criticizing the work of others - I find it very odd (and wrong) that we cannot take criticism of our own work.
  • The cost of attending college is rising above inflation every year, while the premium for doing so shrinks. This obviously can’t last, but no one on the inside has any clear idea about how to change the way our institutions work while leaving our benefits and privileges intact.
  • In the academy, we lecture other people every day about learning from history. Now its our turn, and the risk is that we’ll be the last to know that the world has changed, because we can’t imagine—really cannot imagine—that story we tell ourselves about ourselves could start to fail.
Jordon Tomblin

Project 4: Lansdowne Undead - 14 views

Small Project 4.0: Lansdowne Undead The Digital Humanities is understood to be a "culture that values collaboration" (Kirschenbaum 2011: 9) while investigating traditional social science and h...

digh5000 dh education history Digital data information

started by Jordon Tomblin on 30 Mar 14 no follow-up yet
Alessandro Marcon

This week's presentation on Crowdsourcing and Community - 29 views

1) Crowdsourcing (before preso): Crowdsourcing is creating a pool of like-minded people engaged in similar or overlapping fields from which practitioners from a variety of disciplines can draw from...

started by Christina Stokes on 22 Mar 14 3 follow-ups, last by Alessandro Marcon on 05 Apr 14
1 - 15 of 15
Showing 20▼ items per page