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Christina Stokes

Small Assignment #1 - 25 views

The text analysis tools selected are Voyant and AntConc. These tools were mentioned on Shawn Graham's website "The Historian's Macroscope of Big Digital History." Initially I wanted to conduct a te...

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

Ridha Ben Rejeb

Textual Analysis tools beyond the technical pecularities - 10 views

Following last week's class topic Text and Discourse Analysis, I thought to invigorate the discussion around this particular topic of interest , given my academic background in applied linguistics ...

started by Ridha Ben Rejeb on 10 Feb 14 no follow-up yet
Chris Milando

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

  • 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.
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  • 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
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    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").
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

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...

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...

Chris Milando

Debates in the Digital Humanities - 3 views

  • The alternativeness of careers in digital humanities has in fact been a subject of long debate and much concern; many early researchers in what was then termed “humanities computing” were located in liminal and academically precarious institutional spaces
  • how and whether this domain could become a discipline, with its own faculty positions and academic legitimation.
  • And although those faculty positions and degree programs are starting to appear, many jobs in what is now called “digital humanities” are still para-academic, though their funding and institutional position has been consolidated somewhat
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  • The phrase “alternate careers” is thus remarkable at second glance not for suggesting that there are alternatives but for the centrality it still accords to those academic careers that are not alternate. This centrality is not just an effect of graduate study and not only perceptible within the academy; it shapes the way universities are understood as workplaces even by those who stand outside them.
  • strongly defined intellectual and professional career trajectory that, as Alan Liu astutely observes in The Laws of Cool, may no longer be characteristic of modern knowledge work: “to be a professional-managerial-technical worker now is to stake one’s authority on an even more precarious knowledge that has to be re-earned with every new technological change.
  • These “alternative” or “para-academic” jobs within the academy have a great deal to teach us about how academic labor is quantified, about different models of work and work product, and about the ways that aptitude, skill, expertise, and productivity are weighed in assessing different kinds of work.
  • the significant parameters were essentially these. My pretax income for the academic year was $12,500, and my formal work responsibilities were to prepare and teach two undergraduate writing courses of my own design. The time commitment for my teaching responsibilities was assumed to be approximately twenty hours per week. In addition, it was assumed that I would undertake my own research and make progress toward my PhD.
  • the research I conducted as a student (preparing for professional advancement through field exams, writing conference papers, and participating in the intellectual life of the department by attending public lectures and university seminars) was not considered work, or at least not compensable work.
  • Students are positioned as net gainers from, rather than contributors to, the reservoir of knowledge the university contains, and the fellowship stipends they receive are characterized as “aid” rather than as compensation
  • I was accountable for all my time to the PhD program I was in, not just for my paid duties or even for a standard forty-hour work week, but potentially all the hours not devoted to sleeping and eating.
  • this erosion of a boundary between the professional and personal space is a familiar and very common effect of graduate study, and (even more anecdotally) I would observe that the people who typically enter a graduate program are likely to have the kind of personality that lends itself to this erosion: highly motivated with a strong sense of duty and an established habit of hard work and deferral of personal pleasure (or an ability to experience hard work as pleasure)
  • I tended to feel that the research work required of me was effectively limitless: that no amount of effort could be sufficient to really complete it and that therefore no time could legitimately be spent on anything else.
  • Each hour of project work, in other words, stood on the back of a fairly substantial apparatus that was necessary to make that hour possible. Without the e-mail, the payroll, the servers, and so forth, project work wouldn’t be possible. However, for many collaborators and funding agencies, this model appeared not only counterintuitive but deeply troubling because it made our work look much more expensive than anyone else’s
  • Running in parallel to this entire narrative is another with an entirely different developmental trajectory. Since 2000, my partner and I have had a small consulting business through which we have worked on an eclectic range of projects, ranging from simple database development to digital publication to grant writing
  • Almost all our projects have some connection with digital tools, formats, or activities,4 but it is not our purely digital expertise that is most important in these projects but rather our digital humanities expertise: in the sense that our literacy in a range of humanities disciplines and our skills in writing, strategic planning, and information design are essential in making our digital expertise useful to our clients
  • one client said that what she found valuable about our intervention was that it mediated usefully between purely technical information on the one hand (which did not address her conceptual questions) and purely philosophical information on the other (which failed to address the practicalities of typesetting and work flow)
  • The value of this kind of consulting work—for both the consultant and the client—is the self-consciousness it provides concerning the nature of the work being done and the terms on which it is conducted
  • For the client, self-consciousness results from having to bring all of this to articulation, and the result is often a better (because more explicit, transparent, and widely shared) set of intellectual configurations within the client’s project or environmen
  • For instance, work processes might be explicitly documented; latent disagreements might be brought to the surface and resolved; methodological inconsistencies or lacunae might be examined and rationalized.
  • it is interesting to observe that digital humanities, as an institutional phenomenon, has evolved very substantially out of groups that were originally positioned as “service” units and staffed by people with advanced degrees in the humanities: in other words, people with substantial subject expertise who had gravitated toward a consulting role and found it congenial and intellectually inspiring. The research arising out of this domain, at its most rigorous and most characteristic, is on questions of method.
  • Mark selected text as Mark
  • our technical expertise (in this case, familiarity with markup languages and XML publishing) had an obvious relevance and importance, but arguably more important was the ability to understand and explain the editorial significance of technical decisions and to serve as a bridge between the two strands of the project: the project’s editorial work (conducted by senior humanities faculty) and the project’s technical implementation (overseen by professional staff at the MLA who manage the production of the editions in print and digital form but for whom the XML is largely unfamiliar terrain).
  • The discourse around the use of XML was substantially instrumental: it concerned the practicalities of supporting a digital interface and generating PDF output and similar issues.Treating this work as information modeling, however, has produced a subtle shift in these relationships.
  • Where in the print production process the editorial manuscript was taken as the most informationally rich artifact in the ecology (whose contents would be translated into an effective print carrier for those ideas), in the digital process the editorial manuscript is a precursor to that state: the XML encoding brings information structures that are latent or implicit in the manuscript into formal visibility.
  • what has proven most useful (and what students most remark on in their evaluations of the class) is the kind of embedded knowledge I represent: the understanding of methods, approaches, and strategies that arise out of real-world experience at a functioning digital publication project
  • The course I teach covers a number of highly technical subjects (schema writing, XML, metadata), but its emphasis is strongly on how we can understand the significance and contextual utility of these technologies within a set of larger strategic concerns. Although on paper I only became a plausible hire with the completion of my PhD, the credential that really grounds the teaching I do is actually the fifteen years I spent not completing that degree and working instead in the variety of roles detailed earlier.
  • for the typical humanities faculty member, most of these paradigms of work are equally alien; only the first will look truly familiar (the adjunct faculty position is familiar but not to be identified with).
  • what characterizes mainstream academic work is two qualities. The first is the unlimitedness of the responsibility: work interpenetrates life, and we do what is necessary. For instance, we attend conferences without there being a question of whether it’s our “own” time or our employer’s time;
  • The second, related characteristic is the way time is conceptualized as a function of work practice. Time for academics is not regulated in detail, only in blocks. (For nine months you are paid; for three months you are free to do other things; at all times you should be working on your next book.)Most digital humanities work, however—as performed by library staff, IT staff, and other para-academic staff who are not faculty—is conceptualized according to one of the other models: hourly, by FTE, or as an agenda of projects that granularizes and regulates the work in quantifiable ways. Increasingly, the use of project management tools to facilitate oversight and coordination of work within IT organizations has also opened up the opportunity to track time, and this has fostered an organizational culture in which detailed managerial knowledge of time spent on specific tasks and on overhead is considered virtuous and even essential.
  • The importance of qualitative rather than quantitative measures of work is similarly a kind of class marker: the cases in which specific metrics are typically applied (e.g., number of students and courses taught, quantity of committee work) are those that are least felt to be characteristically scholarly work. Quantifying scholarly output can only be done at the crudest level (e.g., number of books or articles published), and the relative and comparative nature of these assessments quickly becomes apparent: a monumental, groundbreaking book is worth much more (but how much more?) than a slighter intervention, and it takes a complex apparatus of review to establish, even approximately, the relative value of different scholarly productions.
  • In particular, I wonder whether the digital humanities may cease to operate as a locus of metaknowledge if (or, less optimistically, when) digital modes of scholarship are naturalized within the traditional disciplines.
  • the tension between quantitative and qualitative measures of productivity was a constant source of methodological self-consciousness.
  • This last formulation—accomplishing the same task with available resources—reverses the narrative of academic work that is on view at liberal arts colleges and research universities, in which a thoughtful person pursues his or her original ideas and is rewarded for completing and communicating them. In this narrative, the defining and motivating force is the individual mind, with its unique profile of subject knowledge and animating research vision.
  • The managerial consciousness turns this narrative on its head by suggesting that in fact the task and available resources are the forces that most significantly define our work and that the choice of person is almost a casual matter that could go one way or another without much effect on the outcome.
  • the effect of this model of work is to treat people as resources—as a kind of pool from which one can draw off a quantum of work when needed. The result of this fractionalization may be felt as a positive or negative effect: either of fragmented attention or of fascinating variety. But in either case it constitutes a displacement of autonomy concerning what to work on when and how long to take
  • What is the effect of this fungibility, this depersonalization of labor on the para-academic staff? What is my life like as a worker (and a self-conscious manager) in these conditions?
  • Our expectations of what work should be like are strongly colored by the cultural value and professional allure of research, and we expect to be valued for our individual contributions and expertise, not for our ability to contribute a seamless module to a work product. Our paradigm for professional output is authorship, even if actual authoring is something we rarely have enough time to accomplish.
  • But in 2025, what will the now-commonplace jobs (web programmer, digital project coordinator, programmer/analyst, and so forth) look like as professional identities, especially to people who may never have imagined themselves as scholars in the first place?
  • What are the larger effects of accounting for time and regulating it in these ways? One important effect is that time and work appear fungible and interconvertible. The calculus of time and effort by which we know the cost and value of an hour of an employee’s time is also the basis for assessing how those resources could be used otherwise. On the spreadsheet that tracks the project, that unit of funding (time, product) could be spent to purchase an equivalent quantum of time or product from some other source: from a vendor, from an undergraduate, from a consultant, from an automated process running on an expensive piece of equipment.
  • Will a new set of credentials arise through which these jobs can be trained for and aimed at, avoiding the sense of professional anomaly that (in my experience at least) produces such a useful form of outsiderism?
  • most PhD candidates the idea of accepting a job other than a tenure-track faculty position is tantamount to an admission of failure. The reason why Mr. Silva assumed that I was Professor Flanders—the reason that no alternative is visible to him—is that no alternative can be articulated by the profession itself.
  • And yet the vast preponderance of actual work involved in creating humanities scholarship and scholarly resources is not done by faculty.
  • As we already noted, for every hour of scholarly research in an office or library, countless other hours are spent building and maintaining the vast research apparatus of books, databases, libraries, servers, networks, cataloguing and metadata standards, thesauri, and systems of access.
  • If the academic mission, in its broadest sense, is worth doing, all parts of it are worth doing.
  • I think one of the most interesting effects of the digital humanities upon academic job roles is the pressure it puts on what we think of as our own proper work domains.
  • In the archetypal digital humanities collaboration, traditional faculty explore forms of work that would ordinarily look “technical” or even menial (such as text encoding, metadata creation, or transcription); programmers contribute to editorial decisions; and students coauthor papers with senior scholars in a kind of Bakhtinian carnival of overturned professional usages.
  • For technical staff, these collaborative relationships produce a much richer intellectual context for their work and also convey a sense of the complexity of humanities data and research problems, which in turn makes for better, more thoughtful technical work. For students, the opportunity to work on real-world projects with professional collaborators gives unparalleled exposure to real intellectual problems, job demands, and professional skills across a wide range of roles, which in turn may yield a more fully realized sense of the landscape of academic work.
  • With these benefits in mind, there are a few things that we can do to encourage these interactions and to develop a professional academic ecology that is less typecast, that obscures less thoroughly the diversity of working roles that contribute to the production of scholarship (digital or not):
  • Make it practically possible and professionally rewarding (or, at the very least, not damaging) for graduate students to hold jobs while pursuing advanced degrees. This would involve rethinking our sense of the timing of graduate study and its completion: instead of rushing students through coursework, exams, and dissertations only to launch them into a holding pattern (potentially for several years) as postdocs, finished but still enrolled students, or visiting assistant lecturers, graduate programs would need to allow a bit more time for the completion of the degree and ensure that students graduate with some diversity of skills and work experience.
  • Devote resources to creating meaningful job and internship opportunities at digital humanities research projects, scholarly publications, conferences, and other professional activities with the goal of integrating students as collaborators into these kinds of work at the outset.
  • Encourage and reward coauthoring of research by faculty, students, and para-academic staff. This involves actions on the part of departments (to create a welcoming intellectual climate for such work) and on the part of journals, conferences, and their peer review structures to encourage and solicit such work and to evaluate it appropriately.
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    Julia Flanders explores what "work" means within academia, what is considered payable labour in comparison to what needs to be done first (that is not paid for and done on our own time) . She discusses means of redefining academic labour, what (and who else) it involves and strategies for changing the relationships between students, faculty and para-academic staff.
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...

Alessandro Marcon

Tools and Humans - 14 views

Although I had wanted to write this reflection at the end of the first week, it, for some reason or another, eluded me. I'll try to formulate some of the ideas I was, and still am, thinking about w...

started by Alessandro Marcon on 25 Jan 14 no follow-up yet
Dmitry Lytov

Visual Rhetoric and Visualization Tools - 9 views

All the visualization tools can be classified as related to qualitative, quantitative or mixed data. Most of the tools are focused on qualitative research, and can to certain extent be considered a...

started by Dmitry Lytov on 24 Feb 14 no follow-up yet
Kayla Cuggy

Video Games as Problem Spaces - 10 views

I agree that the use of problem spaces in games like "Over the Top" offers a really useful alternative to the assigned readings and textbook discussions that we usually get in elementary school as ...

Game Cat

Hacking the Academy - 2 views

shared by Game Cat on 04 Jan 14 - Cached
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    A book crowdsourced in one week, May 21-28, 2010
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