Hey DIGH 5000. As a part of my final project for the class I wanted to try and develop a WordPress blog entry describing how to provide instructions on how to use a digital tool in the simplest way possible to make it easier for future students who wanted to use the program.
I was wondering when you get the chance if you could post a comment on the WordPress blog about whether you found my instructions clear and your overall thoughts on the visualization I created (you can say you don't get why it is useful I welcome criticism)! Thanks and I look forward to reading your comments:

http://christinastokes90.wordpress.com/

I currently work at CSTM and have already received some interesting feedback about Technozone. Since the interactives included in the new exhibit were not made to be used by the public they are constantly freezing and not working. Visitors seem to be interested by the projects but frustrated at their malfunction. This brings an interesting debate about whether these types of interactives should be included in a public museum or whether a video describing the projects rather than including interactives would be better and less frustrating for visitors.

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 these are projects in progress and not completed interactives. I can share more of my findings in class today.

I really enjoyed Matt's presentation this week and it got me thinking about different types of accessibility issues in the digital humanities. In George Williams's article for this week "Disability, Universal Design, and the Digital Humanities" he discusses universal design as a framework for digital humanists to design tools that are accessible for a wider audience regardless of physical capabilities or intelligence. In his examples of Universal Design tools he mentions content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress, Drupal, Media Wiki etc. One of the issues of accessibility of these tools that he does not mention was discussed in the week where we looked at Google Earth. Jason Farman used the term digital empire to discuss how applications such as Google Earth are only accessible to certain users depending on their access to free internet access and their computer capabilities. Is it a shortcoming of Williams's article that he does not mention accessibility to internet or technology as a main issue in DH? A part of this argument was inspired through my own work of trying to use ImagePlot. Although my laptop is relatively new it did not have enough RAM to do a majority of the visualizations I would like with my data set. Has anyone else experienced this problem when trying new digital tools and do you agree that this issue deserves consideration?

Hey everyone,

So for this Monday's presentation I am going to focus on the following 4 articles:

1) Causer ad Wallace "Building a Volunteer Community"
2) Losh "Hacktivism and the Humanities"
3)Segeberg and Bennett "Social Media and the Organization of Collective Action"
4) DeLuca "Occupy Wall Street on the public Screens of Social Media"

Feel free to draw on all of the readings in discussion but these will be the main focus of the presentation.

Also, a reminder to bring your laptops to class to participate in the crowdsource activity. I will explain later in class, and we can post our comments here.

Thanks and see you Monday,

-Christina

Hi Ridha,

I did not get a chance to post this until now! Here it is:

http://prezi.com/pa-r0vmh1bjx/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

My two questions were to try and get the class to write their own definitions of crowdsourcing and community at the beginning and at the end of the presentation to see how my presentation might have changed their definitions.

Here were mine:

1) Crowdsourcing (before readings): The use of the internet to complete a task that would normally be completed by one person that would be very time consuming ie. crowdsourcing a book.
2) Community (before readings): A group of individuals who are personally invested to work together to finish a project or common goal. ie a family genealogy project.

1) Crowdsourcing (after readings/presentation): The use of different forms of digital collaboration to complete a project or political initiative in fast and timely matter. Digital collaborations can include a variety of social media: twitter, facebook, blogs etc. However, academic collaborations can be in the form of an online database such as Transcribe Bentham.
2) Community (after readings/presentation): Individuals who are either intellectually, personally/emotionally invested in completing a digital project or using social media to gain political awareness. These tend to be the people directly benefiting from the outcomes of the crowdsourcing.

Hi everyone, so I thought I would post some of the questions I had from the readings that I forgot to mention during class to get some feedback if anyone else was having the same questions.

1) Jason Farman makes the argument that Google Earth privileges those who have free and widely available internet access (Kenya versus Tokyo for example). Couldn't this argument be applied to every digital application? Does Farman really validate this argument in his article? Does this implicitly make every member of the "Google Earth Social Community" the dominant members of a digital empire?

2) This question relates back to our second assignment when we discussed how to come up with an evaluative criteria for digital projects. Ruth Mostern discusses her experience in adding a digital map project on Silk Road to her traditional history seminar. In her findings (paragraph 33) she lists that students received substantially higher marks in the digital map than in the traditional essay. Does this suggest that because this was the first time Mostern evaluated a digital project it was easier for students to achieve a higher mark as there was not a well established rubric/evaluative criteria as there would be for the history essay?

I really enjoyed Jeremiah McCall's article "Historical Simulation as Problem Spaces," and would like to investigate his article further when assessing the utility of historical video games when teaching history. To recap McCall defines a problem space as "...mental map of the options one has to try to reach a mental goal..." I was hoping to start a discussion about some of the history games we have played and how the problem spaces of these games could be useful in teaching history in a classroom setting and also what age group this could benefit.

The game I will analyze is called "Over the Top" and can be accessed at http://www.warmuseum.ca/cwm/games/overtop/index_e.shtml. The game's main problem space is to make the right decision as a soldier in the trenches in the First World War to survive and win the war against the Germans. The main goal of the game is to educate high school students on trench life as it is very text heavy and difficult words are hyperlinked. This game does not teach students about the morality of war but offers an enriched text book understanding of concepts. The player has to click and watch a lot of narrative before making any direct decisions in the game so I would say that the game is not very enjoyable for the average player but still offers an interactive alternative to teaching history in a high school classroom setting.

I also enjoyed the De Peuter article but I was wondering if this is still an ongoing issue then why has their not been a strike of EA workers and why is it that the publicity of the injustice of the overtime hours programmers and designers work was from a disgruntled spouse as mentioned in the blog post the "EA: Human Story." One thing that the article did make clear was that companies are dependent on their designers mid way through a project for its completion, then the employee has power to refuse overtime or organize collectively to strike against an unfair system. In my opinion the nature of this industry will not change unless their is an organized petition against these unfair work conditions. The De Peuter and Dyer-Witheford article is a start towards spreading awareness of the unfair work environment but the movement has to start with the workers themselves to change the unfair system of immaterial labor.

As I proposed in class an alternative way to discuss ideas and assignments is to exchange assignments and have another student present another person's work to the class. This would limit the amount of reading we would have to do while getting a chance to receive critical peer review. The one disadvantage of this idea is not having the opportunity to present our own work to the class as we have for past assignments. There is value in being able to present your own ideas to the class and receive feedback. However, as we have seen before with limited time in seminar this does not allow enough time for ample peer review on our work. In this new form of presenting we get a chance to have one person besides the professor provide critical feedback. I was wondering to get a better sense of the opinion of the class which students prefer to present their own work over having someone else present their work to the class?

Hi DIGH 5000,

One of the great things about our class is that we all have different levels of experience using different tools assigned for each week.Unfortunately I am less experienced than most at using most of these tools and thought it would be a good idea to start a help forum for any students that have encountered problems trying new tools to see if other students could offer some insight on how to solve these problems.
This could then be useful to our group but also to other students in DH as we could continue this forum on wordpress and share insights with other DH courses at Carleton such as professor Shawn Graham's Digital History course or Brian's other digital class. This could also be helpful for the future DH Collaboration Cohort.

I thought I would start with the road blocks I have encountered so far to see if I can get any insight. I first started trying to use the ImagePlot tool. I was able to successfully install Image Plot and Image J. I would like to do a montage with pictures I have converted into JPEG but have not been able to figure how to incorporate more than one image. Unfortunately, the instructional videos on Image J were helpful in learning the tools but there were very few that were useful in how to use ImagePlot. I was wondering if anyone in our class tried to use ImagePlot and could offer any direction to how to use the tool?

Here are the videos I have tried that were not very helpful for making a montage:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_Hgfy8vu2k&list=PLA454CA9259872949
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zgvo6GBdX8

The next tool I used was Simple TCT. The installation was quite simple and the tools on the platform are easy to use. The problem I experienced was finding out how to import files. I tried converting files to *txt or *rtf but they would not open in TCT. If anyone has had any success with this let me know!

The online tutorial I used for this platform was:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0KMuQj0o0g&feature=youtu.be

The tutorial was helpful in showing how the platform works but did not offer any insight on how to import word documents or PDFs which is what I could not figure out.

Hopefully I am not the only one who experienced some challenges with these weeks tools and if you have a chance to offer any insight or discuss the challenges you have been experiencing I think it would be helpful for everyone.
The second tool I used was Simple TCT. The online tutorial

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 text analysis on J. Granatstein's Who Killed Canadian History? and Ian Mckay and Jamie Swift's Warrior Nation. However, there is no Google Book preview and both monographs are not available in e-book format. This demonstrates the lack of historical books that are published online. This also stresses the importance of the Universal Books project, which aimed to digitize a million books. This initiative was achieved in 2007 in large part because of Google Books. With the exception of Clement, the authors of this week did not emphasize the lack of books published online as the main obstacle to conducting text analysis. As an alternative to conducting a text analysis of the monographs, I will use book reviews and analyze them in AntConc and Voyant.
Voyant is a text mining and visualization tool and is useful in comparing different word trends and frequencies. When both book reviews were analyzed using Voyant, the reviews shared similar word frequencies after I removed the stop words. In both texts the words that shared the highest frequencies were military, Canadian history and war. The keyword context tool is useful for historians in assessing the arguments of a monograph or conducting a traditional book review. In this instance when the viewer clicks on a term such as history they are able to use the keyword in context tool to retrieve how each author is using history to support their opposing arguments.
Graham's website provides detailed instructions of how to use the Voyant tool and even labels it as "the best textual portal for historians in existence." One of the main problems is exporting the entire findings for the viewer. Although, the URL export tool is useful in sharing individual findings such as specific charts of frequencies it is impossible to get a URL that will export of all the data as displayed on the screen. This feature is overlooked by Graham's description. Since historians are dependent on providing sources for their findings it would be beneficial if you could copy and paste a URL that would show all of the findings.
Second, I used another tool mentioned on Graham's website AntConc. A disadvantage of AntConc that is overlooked by Graham is that in contrast to Voyant it does not accept PDF files. As a result, all files have to be converted to Text files. The text analysis tool is less visually appealing than Voyant but is still useful in comparing two works for a book review. One of the disadvantages is that you cannot remove the stop words. Consequently, the, of, and etc appear with the highest frequencies. The main advantage of AntConc is the word clusters tool, which allows you to quickly see how one word is used in relation to another. This could also be used in this context to draw comparisons between the authors' arguments.
Although, text mining is a useful tool in historical analysis it should not replace historical research. This was not addressed in the readings from this week. As a former Teaching Assistant in a course where Voyant was used by undergraduate students, I was able to observe the challenges historians face when using the tool for the first time. The completed assignments revealed that students were able use the tool to draw comparisons between readings. However, they had greater difficulty in using Voyant to address how each article offered opposing arguments. Thus, text mining should be conducted in addition to traditional research.

I wish I would have known about this when I was an undergrad and still got assigned textbooks!

I think to start the blog on Jordan's insightful discussion from this week about Pirate Bay as a place to upload pirated journal articles is a great way to start discussion on some of the wider issues of Fitzpatrick's book. One of the recurring themes as her title Planned Obsolescence suggests is that there has to be considerable institutional change from the "academy" before humanities research can progress and take advantage of the digital age. As I can speak from the perspective of a history graduate student change at an institutional level is difficult to achieve. I think that graduate students play a large role in the potential for instituting change. This can be accomplished by choosing to publish in open access journals and using new digital tools to conduct "traditional" humanities research..

However, one of the examples Fitzpatrick mentions is that students also have tendencies to stick to old habits when researching or preparing notes for class. Fitzpatrick uses the example of when she assigns digitized versions of books and PDFs to her students, who in turn print their notes, photocopy the original version of the book and highlight these physical copies before discussion. I thought it would be interesting to get a sense of how students in our class come prepared for readings for class and why?

I am guilty of always bringing a printed copy of my notes and highlighting them. The reason is mostly out of habit but after reading this section of her book I thought I should think about trying a new approach.

I want to start by thanking Devan for a great presentation. It definitely clarified some of the theories Manovich was talking about. Since we spent most of the class focusing on Hayles and Manovich I will focus my entry on discussing the other readings. I have one question open for discussion on Manovich. As we all know the article is a bit dated written in 2001 and Manovich examples of new media include CD-ROMs. Do you think that if Manovich were to rewrite the article in using an IPOD as an example of "new media" do you think he would still be able to argue that all new media excludes narrative?

On the other readings for the week one discussion I found interesting is the implications of digitizing material whether it be archives or academic journals. One example, which is worth discussing is Manoff's reference to the deletion of an online journal article by Elsevier Science that was accused of plagiarism. Manoff discusses that unlike a print journal where it is impossible to delete an article, online journal articles can be permanently erased. This is a constant issue with some online sources as websites get updated. Another example of this is on the Hacking the Academy database. One of the blogs I wanted to read "Exhibitions and Expertise" by Lynne Thomas Dekalb was removed. Does the erasure of documents in the virtual world demonstrate the shortcomings of the digitization of scholarly works?

Finally, as the history student in the DH cohort I thought it appropriate to respond to Martin and Quan-Haase's study of historians use of e-books. In their article I would agree with their findings that very few history university courses use e-books. However, I do not think this is a choice of the instructor. It is more the lack of academic books that have been digitized and available online. As Martin and Quan-Haase mention part of the problem is historians getting accustomed to using e-books. I think the issue is not historians reading e-books for research but historians publishing their books online. If the accessibility of these books increases, they will be more widely used by historians.

In our class discussion the topic of collaboration was mentioned several times as a main definition of DH. Lisa Sporo among many other digital humanists have labelled collaboration as a core value of DH. Although, collaboration is imperative for DH work Patrick Svensson's discussion of whether DH should adopt a "big tent" or "no tent" approach complicates the notion that all DH work is inclusive and collaborative. In particular, I find his discussion of the resistance of digital humanists towards the participation of Ivy League schools into digital humanities particularly interesting to this debate. Svensson refers to the Humanist post to refer to University of Nebraska professor Amanda Gailey's response to Yale's inclusion in DH as "…a worrisome indicator that DH will be locked down by the same tired socioeconomic gatekeeping mechanisms that prevent many people with talent from succeeding in so many other academic disciplines," (Svensson). Do you agree with Gailey's assumptions? Or do you think that the entrance of Ivy League schools into DH demonstrates another theme mentioned in this week's readings that the expansion of DH requires change in the traditional humanities?
I think a part of this tension is due to the fact that other schools such the University of Nebraska have been involved in digital projects before the entrance of DH. Since the movement started outside of Ivy League schools there is a hesitance for some older digital humanists to fit Ivy League schools under the "big tent." A part of the solution is to consider what Dave Perry describes as a third definition to DH which is that "…the digital humanities is an understanding of new modes of scholarship, as a change not only in tools and objects but in scholarship itself," (Perry in Gold 436). This is relevant in the consideration of whether the inclusion of schools like Yale who recently started to offer DH programs compromise the DH open access ethos. If institutions are willing to be members of an already established digital community they must shift their former scholarship practices to adopt a new way of learning and doing the humanities. This means making their research and work available to a wider community.