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 global north/global south disparity regarding things like access to the internet - so any conversation about 'universal accessibility' regarding DH tools, at least the conversations we've been privy to, seem to by default exclude a considerable portion of the world's population. Perhaps this is demonstrative of socioeconomic/class issues being ignored/not considered in a broad conversation about DH. I'm really glad you brought this up - even a 'universally' accessible tool like Twitter is, in fact, contingent on things like permitted access (Turkey) or access to a device & the technical savvy to navigate the interface. I personally have had challenges using the tools we've learned about this term - early on, while working on one of the smaller projects, I encountered tools that were no longer maintained, as Ridha has noted; further to that, in working towards a final project, I've encountered tools that require a request for permissions to utilize the beta version, and so on - which led me to seek out other tools rather than submit this request.
Thanks so much for bringing this up.

In yesterday's great discussion on games & simulations, a bit less attention was paid to de Peuter and Dyer-WItheford's Marxist critique of immaterial labour. Having worked in the high-tech/startup environment a few times over my short career, this article spoke to me pretty profoundly. Not only were the critiques that de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford scathing, but they were accurate - not just of the game development world, but indeed of many if not most companies in the high-tech and startup world. In my incessant trolling of Reddit, I happened upon a pretty timely blurb written by a programmer - really in keeping with this article on immaterial game labour - here's the link: http://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/2026bq/reduce_the_workweek_to_30_hours_nyt/cfzlgiw

I thought I'd link to this repost of a blog article that's related to this topic too - interestingly, it circulated around my workplace (which could be the topic of her article, as could any number of similar outfits) and spurred some really interesting debates within the company around culture, work-as-play, gender, and overtime/unpaid work. Worth a read: http://betabeat.com/2013/02/what-your-culture-really-says-shanley-kane-toxic-lies-afoot-in-silicon-valley/

M

Mark Sample notes that "The student essay is a twitch in a void, a compressed outpouring of energy…that means nothing to no one." and quoting Randy Bass, "…that nowhere but school would we ask somebody to write something that nobody will ever read." (Gold 2012). Now, this is to preface his comments about making student writing public, and it echoes a sentiment that Shawn Graham brought up in one of his talks with our group. I bring it up here as a way to preface my own comments about evaluative criteria in DH - in reviewing criteria discussed by Shannon Christine Mattern, Todd Presner, Geoffrey Rockwell, and the MLA, some common elements arise, and some of these I'll use in suggesting criteria. I think it fundamentally important that, alongside the evaluation of media and context and linking which I'll touch on, that sound scholarship, strength and clarity of argument, and academic integrity be cornerstones of evaluative criteria. Of course, if the nature of the scholarly enterprise in question is not the traditional written document, the criteria for its evaluation will be novel. The form itself will have to be subject to evaluation - does the form suit the concept or detract from it somehow, is technology utilized effectively or gratuitously, and so on.
Conventional criteria of assessment remain useful to the extent that they apply. Consider that some assessment criteria of written assignments serve to train a student to adhere to a set of standards and formats - somewhat arbitrary - which arguably do one of two things: (i) allow for ease of reading and simplicity in evaluating sources; and (ii) prepare a student for later exercises in academic writing - grant applications, publication, and the like. Now, for as long as that model persists, then the conventional criteria of assessment will remain useful. Likewise, as models of publication change (becoming online, open source, collaborative, multimodal), then the criteria of assessment so too must change, if only to remain relevant. It would, I think, be equally absurd to evaluate a conventional essay's capacity for linking out and being linked to, as it would to evaluate an online multimedia project on the merits of its page numbers or 12 point Times New Roman.
I see few implications of the criteria I suggest above for my own primary field of study, anthropology - mainly because I propose nothing radical in the above paragraphs. Rather, I suggest that conventional evaluative tools remain in use so long as they suit the medium, and appropriately suitable means be employed as media changes. Academic rigour, for instance, is an underlying quality of a scholarly undertaking - the calling for it is not something that I think should be subject to change. In anthropology, still so tied up in ethnographic projects, participant observation, and the lived experience of those with whom the researcher works, there is always this tacit understanding that research will be tied up in subjective experience - criteria is always changing, and though there exist methodological underpinnings for how to conduct one's self in the field, the end result might be so fundamentally different that what the researcher set out to accomplish that there indeed must be a different set of criteria applied for the evaluation of this work. Of course, ethics, academic integrity - these qualities remain as part of this criteria, even when the media changes from what James Clifford calls 'partial truths', these metaphorically 'fictional' ethnographies, to something altogether different (Clifford 1986; Ortner 1995).
Works Cited
Clifford, J. 1986. 'Introduction: Partial Truths', in J. Clifford and G. E. Marcus (eds.), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics ofEthnography, 1-26. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gold, Matthew K., ed., Debates in the Digital Humanities. http:://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates
Ortner, Sherry B. 1995. Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal. Comparative Studies in Society and History 37 (1). 173-193.

This paper will engage in a brief discussion of three text analysis tools: WordSeer (http://wordseer.berkeley.edu/), Juxta (http://juxtacommons.org/), and Google Books Ngram Viewer (https://books.google.com/ngrams). In terms of my own research projects, the most applicable text analysis tool reviewed is WordSeer, although I was unable to experiment with it thoroughly since the newest version, 3.0, is not yet available for use. I viewed a number of the tutorial videos, and of particular note was WordSeer's 'word tree' feature. With WordSeer, the user inputs the data (in the case of the video example, the data set consisted of editorials from The New York Times with the subject of China or Japan since 1980 [approximately 5000 editorials]) and WordSeer automatically builds a word tree from the data set around the most frequently occurring word or a designated search term. The word tree's presentation of preceding and succeeding words, which can be selected for further branch-like expansion, all the way to the 'root' text (to continue the metaphor) has powerful implications. I imagine the employment of such a tool in the analysis of a broad range of texts in my field, looking to narrow on thematic elements for closer review. Specifically, my research interest on the performance of identity in the process of cultural creation amongst Indigenous people focuses on the incorporation of modern and emerging technology into the process. I could employ WordSeer to conduct a text analysis across a corpus of anthropological and sociological literature, as well as post-colonial, arts, and other work, to gain a sense of what sort of scholarship exists in my specific research area and what connections have emerged so far. From there, a more in depth review could be undertaken. Like Jean-Baptise Michel et al have pointed out regarding 'culturomics', a text analysis tool of this kind "...extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena...", but of course, the challenge lies in the interpretation (and, I imagine, the closer review) of the results (2011:176,181).

Perhaps less useful for my field, but a powerful tool indeed is Juxta. I have yet to conduct a research project in anthropology that would require a close review of two versions of the same text. Nonetheless, I was taken with a number of its features; the user experience in general was straightforward and intuitive (while many other text analysis tools are downright difficult to run). The heatmap interface, with its ability to showcase not only revisions across two versions of the same text, but the nature of those revisions at a glance (addition, deletion, so on) is a testament to how useful Juxta would be in a comparative analysis of any two versions of the same text. All the same, I could not see how to apply a tool like this in my own research projects, due to its fundamental purpose being for analysis of multiple versions of one text.

I explored the Google Ngram viewer as well, and (like most of Google's products) found it simple in both its employment and purpose. Able to track instances of word and phrase usage over time, up to a maximum 5-gram, the tool plots a simple graph charting frequencies of words and word-sets. I ran what I consider to be anthropologically salient term-searches, in an attempt to graph cultural or linguistic trends in the spirit of Michel et al.'s paper this week (2011). The first searched three 1-grams, and one 2-gram, charting usage of common terminology used in the anthropological literature for First Nations people (Indian, Aboriginal, First Nations, Native). The second searched three 1-grams and one 2-gram, this time charting usage of common problematic terminology for the category of the marginalized and often colonized 'other' in anthropological literature (primitive, traditional, pre-contact, and savage). The Ngram Viewer had difficulty with a hyphenated 2-gram in this second search, and I was required to eliminate the hyphen altogether. The searches show what one would imagine: the decline of the frequency of terms which have come to be seen in the discipline as 'problematic', accompanied with an incline in the new and more fashionable or appropriate terms.

Despite the predictable findings, I could see the Ngram Viewer being useful in ruling out a taken for granted supposition, or for conducting more insightful searches. It is worth noting that an observation like that of Michel et al., in which the use of the term 'The Great War' declined along with a co-incidence of the increase in 'World War' terminology, could mislead researchers into looking for a cultural phenomenon that is in fact more linguistic in nature (2011). Juxta, while powerful, is useful for projects comparing versions of texts over time, something that I have yet to find purposeful in my own discipline of anthropology. WordSeer's word tree function and ability to potentially identify common threads or themes across a corpus of texts, linking back to the root text with only a few clicks, piques the most interest in me regarding potential employment in research projects.

Works Cited
Michel, Jean Baptiste et al. "Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books," Science Vol. 331, 176 (14 January 2011).

In our last discussion, Jordan posed a question as to why there isn't a sort of 'Pirate Bay' for pirated journal articles & the like...
Though not exactly what we were discussing, I stumbled across this on Reddit today and thought it was worth a look...I've only had a perfunctory glance at the links so far...
http://www.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/hrgmv/tracker_with_pdfsebooks_of_college_textbooks/c1xrq44

I'd like to echo the sentiments around Devin's presentation - it was really well done, and what I found perhaps most compelling about it was they way you managed to explore Manovich in relative depth and get at the narrative/database discussion by way of killer examples from your own field of study. Kudos.

I'm glad Christina mentioned the Martin and Quan-Haase look at historians and e-books; reading this piece made me reflect on an experience I had last term in a new light. For the anthropology MA, students are required to take a theories I and a theories II, which is likely common across many disciplines - the course shores up students' knowledge on the key theories and movements in the discipline and so on. One week we read Benjamin Koen's article "My Heart Opens and My Spirit Flies": Musical Exemplars of Psychological Flexibility in Heath and Healing. In this ethnomusicological paper, Koen explores Pamiri devotional music as providing psychological flexibility to devotees, thus priming them for various types of healing. The reason I bring this up, is that the paper's arguments center around a type of music, key to the argument being made. In a somewhat novel turn, the paper ends with links to three supplementary files which contain samples of this devotional music. When discussing the article in class, it came to light that none of the eight students had accessed the supplementary files. At the time I hadn't given it much thought, but it seems to me now that it could be argued that accessing the digital content and reading the less orthodox text, in this case by listening to music, didn't occur to any of us because we're conditioned to consider only the traditional in terms of scholarship, or in terms of what a text consists of. Even for anthropologists, or aspiring ones, who engage in participant observation and are trained to look for meaning in those liminal 'spaces in between', it might be that the incorporation of e-books specifically, and electronic scholarship more broadly faces its share of hurdles.

Not sure if that's a clear association, but it's certainly where my thoughts went after last week's reading and the recent blog discussions, and I certainly think it relates to Ridha's closing remarks.

On that note, I take your point Ridha about academic integrity and the checking of digitized work for plagiarism. Without using a tool like the one you mention, or like the 'Originality Checker' (hilarious name imo) on http://turnitin.com/, I often check the work of students in my TA seminars by performing basic Google searches of snippets of their work, particularly when there's a serious incongruence in quality across their writing. More than once I've had to report instances of plagiarism by employing this technique, so there's certainly a strong argument to be made against those who worry about the sanctity of academic work in the digital age in light of e-publishing and so on.

Cited:

Koen, Benjamin D. 2013. "My Heart Opens and My Spirit Flies": Musical Exemplars of Psychological Flexibility in Health and Healing. Ethos 41 (2). 174-198.

The idea of 'patents which embrace the open-source culture' mentioned in the above post seems to be in keeping with the ethos of DH. The DH Manifesto explains that DH'ers defend the right of content makers to exert control over their creations & avoid exploitation, but not in the sort of way that would exclude the freedom to rework, critique, and use these creations for the purposes of research and education.

I'm reminded here of the story of ecommerce software company Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke (full disclosure - my employer) addressing the problem of copycat SaaS products. In a sort of tongue in cheek attempt to mitigate one copy of his product that had been made available on GitHub, he simply copied the copycat code, deleted it all, & sent back a pull request saying he had 'improved' the code by deleting it, because it was such a blatant copy (http://www.obj.ca/Technology/2012-10-09/article-3086063/Keeping-cool-with-copycats/1). A tool like Shopify, although for-profit SaaS, is open source & accessible, and what makes the 'real' version superior is that it is constantly being worked on & improved to meet the needs of users. When people in the community have created pull requests or contributed to the 'community' in a way that present valid criticisms & improvements, they're often offered positions within the company. I wonder if tools of DH, even if they end up being developed & controlled in a proprietary way, say, by Ivy League schools, would stand up if they're inferior...

I've been thinking about how the idea of failure being useful - leading to new experiments, jettisoning inferior iterations in favour of superior ones, and so on is rather in keeping with the values listed by Lisa Spiro & others regarding DH - openness collaboration, collegiality & connectedness, diversity, and experimentation. But I wonder, as I asked above, if the development of tools in DH will really work this way. Trevor Pinch and Weibe Bijker, who founded the SCOT movement within the sociology of science and technology, describe a multidirectional view of the development of a technological artifact, famously using the development of the bicycle in The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts (1987). Amongst other things, Pinch and Bijker describe the way the bicycle comes to be known as a bicycle, with all its characteristics and constituent parts; along the way, they illustrate that by no means is the end point a necessary one - variations in the technology along the way could have resulted in a very different artifact - but for a variety of reasons, the modern iteration is the one that came out on top. The reason I bring Pinch & Bijker into the discussion is as a counter to my assertion above - that the best tools may win out by merit alone. Do factors like power (think Ivy League here perhaps?), economy, gender, and so on mentioned by Pinch, Bijker, and other folks in STS remain relevant in an age of open-source & collaborative creation?