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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...

started by Devin Hartley on 03 Feb 14 6 follow-ups, last by Christina Stokes on 06 Feb 14
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
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").
Chris Milando

»Highlights for Chapman's: Privileging Form Over Content: Analysing Historica... - 0 views

journalofdigitalhumanities.org/...m-over-content-by-adam-chapman

video games digh5000 digital humanities experience information accuracy history form content

shared by Chris Milando on 11 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • At this early stage in the serious study of historical videogames, we must be sure to adopt an approach that privileges understanding the videogame form (and the varying structures this entails) and its integral role in the production and reception of historical meaning, rather than solely, or even primarily, on the content of specific products as historical narratives.
    • Chris Milando
      Chris Milando on 11 Mar 14
       
      This is super important and defines the idea of the form (the experience) as what we look for in a video game.  This is what the genre will be used for in learning about history.
  • Content cannot be separated from its form, just as history cannot be understood separately from the modes in which it is written, coded, filmed, played, read, or viewed.
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • This last concern is integral to understanding games because, unlike the majority of historical forms, videogames have an additional layer of meaning negotiation because they are actively configured by their audiences
  • In essence, when we play we may well be “reading” (i.e. interpreting and negotiating historical signifiers and narrative) but we are also “doing” (i.e. playing).
  • To do so requires an analytical approach that fuses Salen and Zimmerman’s three schemas of games: play, rules, and culture, while allowing the consideration of the player’s role in the negotiation and fusion of this triad.
  • This article calls for academic work on historical videogames to move beyond the examination of the particular historical content of each game (i.e., historical accuracy or what a game ‘says’ about a particular period it depicts) and to adopt an analytical framework that privileges analysis of form (i.e., how the particular audio-visual-ludic structures of the game operate to produce meaning and allow the player to playfully explore/configure discourse about the past).
  • Simply focusing on the accuracy of the game often re-informs us about popular history rather than recognizing the opportunities for engaging with discourse about the past (and the nature of this discourse) that this new historical form can offer
  • the notion of “accuracy” or “truth” is collapsed with and thus taken to mean, “in alignment with the narratives of book-history.”
  • Critiques of particular historical films were assumed to be indicative of some kind of basic structural inability of film to function as a mode of historical expression. Many scholars concluded that film could not constitute “proper history.”
  • historical videogames mostly relinquish the telling of the experiences of specific historical agents, and favour instead typical historical environments, characters, scenarios, and experiences.
  • Obviously the aim of the developers of historical videogames like Civilization or Brothers in Arms (in addition to create an entertaining game), is to create history, not as it can be represented in a book but as it can be represented in a videogame.
  • Analysis on the basis of content alone almost invariably involves comparisons with historical narratives constructed and received in book form, which is often problematically understood as the only form capable of producing “proper” history
  • Most often these narratives are used as the benchmark for establishing truth or accuracy and thus, the examination of content
  • These written interpretations are taken to be history (or more accurately, the past) itself, rather than history as it can be written, which naturally cannot be bluntly compared to history as it can be played
  • The benefit will be more than just increased knowledge of a particular historical representation, but also insights about form (a particular game-structure’s operations) that are transferable to an understanding of games with similar ludic (and audio-visual) elements.
  • Games will likely never produce the same opportunities for discourse as a book, but then why should they?
  • Each form utilizes different structures that, considered alongside one another as part of a larger transmedia meta-discourse, create much more interesting collaborative opportunities for establishing historical understanding than one or the other alone.
  • Examining only content also necessarily involves asking questions about what is included or left out of a particular videogame’s representation. This is rarely a useful question beyond the basis of a general common sense. Historical videogames are, like all histories, mimetic cultural products
  • history on film must be considered on its own terms.
  • how much is to be actually gained by knowing, for instance, that certain shoes were not genuinely available until the 1490s rather than the 1470s, or that a particular character, though historically typical, did not truly exist? Relatively little, compared to the “feel” of a period or location, the life, colour, action, and processes (with which the book can struggle) and which can be easily communicated in games.
  • It is only by focusing on form that we can understand how the game can produce meaning in these, arguably, new ways, that neither book nor cinema can effectively utilize, whilst still remaining engaged with a larger historical discourse.
  • Historical videogames must be understood on their own terms, without relinquishing our understanding of the basic tenets of historical theory as they universally apply to history as a practice within any form (e.g. history is referential and representational).
  • Accepting this challenge requires a new approach to historical videogames, one that involves analysing the structures that produce meaning.
  • These are structures which create opportunities for players to negotiate meaning in the ways that we are familiar with from other more “passive” media but also allow them to actively configure their own historical experience through play.
  • the agency which the player wields and the challenges they confront, which allow a somewhat unique form of engagement with historical discourse.
  • though written logically, are still subjective aesthetics that attempt to represent historical experience through reactively producing signs to be read and responses to be acted upon.
  • In short, in any historical videogame, the aesthetics of historical description also function at a ludic level, producing a form of “procedural rhetoric” that, depending on a particular game’s (or genre’s) structures, can influence virtually all of the other historical signifiers through which the game produces meaning.
  • Having identified combinations of these audio-visual-ludic structures, we can then approach other games that operate similarly with an understanding of what opportunities for historical meaning-making they are likely to offer
  • When we look at the videogame form in this way we can, I hope, begin to create a cohesive understanding of how games represent the past and what structures create particular playful opportunities for players to explore, understand, and interact with these representations.
  • Chris Milando on 11 Mar 14
     
    Quick Summary: Do we need to look to games for historical accuracy? Chapman argues that we don't really - instead, we need to look to them for a historically accurate experience. This is what helps us to understand the context behind the information we get from books.
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
Christina Stokes

Exhibition on Information Visualization at the Science & Tech Museum - 14 views

Yes there is one interactive that includes a tutorial out of three but it does not mention the possible glitches in the project. As a possible solution guides were instructed to tell visitors that ...

digh5000 dh data visualization

started by Danuta Sierhuis on 02 Apr 14 4 follow-ups, last by Christina Stokes on 07 Apr 14
Danuta Sierhuis

InfoVis Presentation Slides - 3 views

Hey everyone, I posted the slides from mypresentation from today on slideshare if you want them: http://www.slideshare.net/DanutaSierhuis/digh-5000-data-visualization-analysis-presentation#

digh5000 information visualization art powerpoint

started by Danuta Sierhuis on 25 Feb 14 no follow-up yet
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
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
Stéphane Lavie

Story Trek Commentary - 7 views

I just wanted to comment on Monday's class regarding the presentations about Story Trek. I thought it was very interesting to observe the different ways that groups had approached the task, and whi...

started by Stéphane Lavie on 02 Apr 14 no follow-up yet
Danuta Sierhuis

Access/Restriction: Art History Grad Conference - March 7-8th - 6 views

Hello everyone, Just wanted to let you know that the Art History Grad Conference that I helped organized is this weekend. The theme is Access/Restriction, and it is a one-day interdisciplinar...

Grad Conference Access_Restriction Art History DIGH 5000

started by Danuta Sierhuis on 05 Mar 14 no follow-up yet
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
Matt Bastin-Millar

Accessibility Issues in the Digital Humanities - 18 views

Christina & Ridha - thanks for the comments. Christina, I'm inclined to agree that the lack of discussion re. internet access is a shortcoming to this entire conversation. There's arguably a glob...

started by Christina Stokes on 03 Apr 14 2 follow-ups, last by Matt Bastin-Millar on 04 Apr 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
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