While it is early on the East coast, and earlier still in the West, Day of DH is here.

Check out the 'activity stream' to stay up to date with posts http://dayofdh2014.matrix.msu.edu/activity/

It is recommended that twitterers tweet #DayofDH to join the twitosphere. Even if you're a twittcrastination or a twitterati, it's interesting to see what others are saying (especially those that we have been reading of all semester).

See http://dayofdh2014.matrix.msu.edu for more.

Without a doubt. Color threads for new posts would be great.

Does anyone have a link to the posts created from our last workshop for 'Day of DH'?

That is really cool. How many layers can you make for the images? It would be great if you could put 10 images on top of each other to make a sort of flip book animation. Nice project.

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 humanities questions with the use of computing technologies (Fitzpatrick 2011). This week, I worked alongside the assigned group to explore some of the architectural, social, historical, and visual elements of Ottawa's Lansdowne Park. Inspired by the work of historical sociologist scholars (see Abrams 1982), I was eager to know more about this area, as I had no knowledge of Lansdowne's history or its importance to the surrounding communities. After briefly investigating its rich historical roots, it was troubling to witness the disturbances taking place by the pernicious influence of vacuous public/private sector partnerships. Accordingly, our group sought to explore the history of this public space despite the vicissitude of Ottawa's beloved Park.

To visualize our group's research and findings, we employed the StoryTrek authorware to map out the connections among the political, social, historical, and visual elements of the Park. In the interest of time, we followed the path of least resistance and captured the "front stage" public discourse (Piche 2012: 235) of the surrounding area through open source materials. This included newspaper articles, blogs, a thesis, and imagery of the grounds located online. Assembling these various elements, our group mapped out a brief aspect of Lansdowne Park's past, present, and future. This approach was carried out by crowdsourcing materials of the Park among group members and subsequently distributing our findings across the grounds. Creating a division of labor proved to be the most feasible methodological approach for this project. In summary, we produced over 20 nodes that provided short, but rich and accurate description of how this space has moved in and out of various roles throughout its history, how spaces on the grounds have become repurposed overtime, and how recent changes are harming preservation efforts. Moreover, we explored the problems of enclosing this space and how efforts to create surplus value to financially profit private sectors is being done at the expense of community and with significant harm to surrounding businesses and denizens. It is perhaps on that last note where future research and more exploratory projects can be undertaken.

A project worth undertaken around the Lansdowne Park would be to map the controversy surrounding the appropriation of the land through various human and non-human actors. Inspired by the work of actor-network theorists, particularly Bruno Latour (1987, 2005), many scholars have recently taking up his ideas through his project "Mapping Controversies on Science for Politics" (MACOSPOL). The idea behind MACOSPOL is to explore and visual the complexities of modern society by using computing technologies to understand how controversies get taken up by different actors (human and non-human) while refraining to make assumptions around relations (i.e. networks) a priori (see Callon 1986). One case study in particular by the Manchester School of Architecture (MSA) could serve as a model to understand the controversies surrounding Lansdowne Park's architecture and design. Recently, the MSA took up a project entitled "Ongoing Controversies: The Design of the London Olympic Stadium", which "mapped [the] ongoing controversy surrounding the design and development of the [London] stadium and visualized the controversy in terms of actors, concerns, and intensity" (MSA 2011: N.P.). The timing of such a project would be worthwhile to take up as the controversy is currently ongoing and there exists a plethora of data on the subject (e.g. newspaper articles, interviews, images, etc.). Further, given that it is a project delegated by the City of Ottawa, the municipality would be subject to Freedom of Information Requests, which would allow the researchers to move beyond the "front stage" and gain partial access to the "backstage" of government activities. This could provide a more comprehensive understanding to emerge surrounding this controversy beyond public discourse, which is often carefully prepared and presented to the media.

Works Cited:

1. Abrams, Philip. 1982. Historical Sociology. Cornell University Press.
2. Callon, Michel. 1986. "Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen. Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge." Pp. 57-78 in Technoscience: The Politics of Interventions, edited by Asdal, Kristin, Brita Brenna, and Ingunn Moser, 2007. Oslo Academic Press.
3. Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. 2011. "The Humanities, Done Digitally" in Debates in the Digital humanities: 12-15.
4. Kirschenbaum, Matthew. 2011. "What is Digital Humanities and What's It Doing in English Departments" in Debates in the Digital humanities: 3-11.
5. Latour, Bruno. 1987. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Harvard University Press.
6. Latour, Bruno. 2005. "Third Source of Uncertainty: Objects too Have Agency" in Reassembling the Social by Bruno Latour. Oxford University Press: USA.
7. Manchester School of Architecture. 2011. Mapping Architectural Controversies: "Ongoing Controversies: The Design of the London Olympic Stadium". http://www.mappingcontroversies.net/Home/PlatformLondonCaseStudy
8. Piche, Justin. 2012. "Accessing the State of Imprisonment in Canada Information Barriers and Negotiation Strategies" in Brokering Access: Power, Politics, and Freedom of Information Process in Canada.

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-time video of Earth from space.

Check out this video of planes landing in Beijing: https://www.mapbox.com/blog/video-of-beijing-from-space/

Also, keeping in line with our visualization and mapping lecture, check out CartoDB's data driven geospatial data mapping applications: http://cartodb.com

Check out this case study: https://blog.twitter.com/2013/mtvhottest-generates-166-million-tweets-with-a-single-hashtag and http://cartodb.github.io/tweets_mtvhottest/

There is a free version available from CartoDB that may be of use to some of you. I will be playing with it over the weekend and encourage others to as well.

It appears that he fears the "Death of Power" rather than the "Death of Expertise". He, personally, does not feel "acknowledgement". This is a desperate act and call that will likely fall on deaf ears, especially on the Internetz. He argues that the "death of expertise... is a very bad thing". For who? The public? Those who stand to benefit from their expertise?

In an attempt to demonstrate expertise, he appeals (and consequently) compares his expertise to that of a doctor: a heavily regulated profession that is dominated by standardization and evidence-based approaches. Can we hold the same positivist expertise of the medical community to the post-positivist, non-scientific expertise that he yields from the social sciences? It is doubtful.

It is odd to see his call to "science and rationality" as if these were value-free, or objective. He continues "competence is sorely lacking in the public arena"; an interesting claim for a positivist who presents no empirical evidence.

Given the fact that he argues "every discussion must take place within limits and above a certain baseline of competence", I wonder: who does he have in mind to set that baseline? Surely, it would be "experts" and surely he has an answer for it. The implications of this argument alone are beyond the scope of this blog post.

I was finally glad to see that he engaged with questions of evidence. But he does so by insulting anyone with a lower level of "expertise" (as compared to him) and almost insulates himself by making this argument since he can say "see, look, he - the layman - asks for evidence". It would be at this point that the "ordinary interlocutor" would have to cite his or her credential(s) and demonstrate his or her "expertise". This is all very lulzy. The funniest thing about this article (and I am going to assume that Tom Nichols is trolling - in fact I hope he is trolling) is that he is making a relativist argument.

I hope "layman's" don't accept his arguments entirely (and definitely don't accept mine since I claim no expertise). Although, an expert did once tell me that one should always think critically. In any case, it appears that Nichols' "expertise" is expertly discredited once you open up the link to his "Snowden, Manning, and Screwtape" article, which he cites in the "The Death of Expertise". He begins the Snowden and Manning article with: "Well, we're at the beginning of the end of the Snowden and Manning sagas - or at least, to borrow Churchill's phrase, at the end of the beginning. Since just about everything that could be written about these hapless boys has already been written, I'm going to be a bit philosophical at this point. Bear with me." So, I guess we can at least deduce that he is not an expert on Snowden (or Manning), lacks an ability at times to wait things out before jumping to conclusions, and that hindsight sucks.

Last thing: he cites his expertise in relation to the areas of "specifically social science and public policy"... hmmm... that is not specific whatsoever and means nothing. But, then again, I am not an expert and probably only an Übermensch would understand what he meant. By the way, the posts on his blog are "personal opinions" and do not reflect his professional affiliations. Can personal opinions be "expertise"? I wish he could weigh in.

The ethos of the contemporary Digital Humanities (DH) community is one that collectively values "collaboration, openness, nonhierarchical relations, and agility" (Kirschenbaum 2011:N.P.). It is also a community whose primary aim is to foster innovation, advance knowledge, and serve the public by creating tools and information that is openly accessible (Spiro 2011:N.P.): Given the fact that some argue how DH has the "potential to reshape fundamental aspects of academic practice" (Gold 2011:N.P.), questions around how scholarly projects in the digital humanities should be evaluated arise.

Evaluative criterions for scholarly digital humanities projects are fundamentally imperative if DH seeks to receive recognition and approval from the larger academic community. Considering the diversity of DH projects, a one-size-fits-all-approach to evaluation would be inadequate. Nevertheless, commonalities for evaluation among variegated DH practices and projects are necessary in spite of the fact that such pursuits are often complex and context dependent. Accordingly, a proposed series of evaluative criteria is explored in figure 1.1. This criterion reflects a balance between traditional scholarly evaluation and prototypical digital humanities projects. Conventional criteria of assessment are a useful starting point as DH has been described as a "jumping-off point for the building of a scholarly identity" (Waltzer).

The implications of these evaluative criteria are that contemporary academic institutions will need to place greater emphasis on computing strategies and techniques. Within the field of Sociology, computing does not hold prominence or precedence as a methodological research tool. Instead, most researchers in this field utilize interview techniques, participation, observation, etc. Accordingly, this field would need to embrace a hybrid approach (e.g. social computing) in order to reflect current scholarly projects and technologies within DH. Finally, given the complexity and diversity of DH projects, current standardized measures and practices within academia may need to be restructured or abandoned altogether (see Sample 2011).

Figure 1.1: Do the developers of a project connect theory and praxis? Does the project adhere to a coherent and logical argument that is supported by empirical evidence (Rallis and Rossman 2012)? Does the project succeed in addressing its stated goal? How are practices recorded and described throughout the research process? To what extent does the project adhere to practices within the DH community? How are the evaluators of scholarly projects reviewed? What kinds of ethical practices drive the research for the project? What role did reflexivity play within the process of developing the project? Does the project provide the "greatest good for the greatest amount of people" (ibid:74)? Who does the project benefit and what is its contribution to the DH community? What are its anticipated effects and how did it meet this projection? In what ways is this project interdisciplinary (Manoff 2004:22) and how can it be transferred for use by other academic disciplines? How is the developer of the project engaged with the community of practice and the community of discourse? How is the project open and accessible for academic and public review? How does this tool help students "critically produce, consume, and assess information during their college years and beyond" (Waltzer 2011)? Who is being represented in the work of the project? Does the final project represent all individuals contributing to the production of knowledge fairly and accurately?

Works Cited:

Kirschenbaum, Matthew. 2011. "What is Digital Humanities and What's It Doing in English Departments" in Debates in the Digital humanities:3-11.
Spiro, Lisa. 2011. "This is Why We Fight: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities" in Debates in the Digital humanities:16-35.
Sample, Mark. 2011. "What's Wrong with Writing Essays" in Debates in the Digital humanities:406-408.
Gold, Matthew. 2011. "The Digital Humanities Moment" in Debates in the Digital humanities:xi.
Manoff, Marlene. 2004. "Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines," Libraries and the Academy 4.1:9-25.
Rallis, Sharon and Gretchen Rossman. 2012. The Research Journey: Introduction to Inquiry. The Gilford Press.
Waltzer, Luke. 2011. "Digital Humanities and the 'Ugly Stepchildren' of American Higher Education" in Debates in the Digital humanities:335-349.

Definitely agree with carrying out debates / a blog post with a prescribed word limit. Short, clear, and concise arguments. This would allow others to read entries in full and readily engage with others while drawing up the most pertinent information.

Powerful Reddit.

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 financially profitable as most private sectors. However, there are certainly a few institutions (mostly American) which bring in over several tens of billions of dollars per annum.

It is inspiring to see an influx in free e-books and other publicly available publishing formats. However, on the note of the private sector-much of the academic work is inherently private when it comes to academic publications and journal articles. As our readings have consistently pointed out, publishing houses are often gatekeepers to 'public' generated knowledge and academic knowledge production. (For the sake of argument) fortunately and unfortunately, there is a decent amount of private sector and private funding in most North American universities. As such, notions around what it means to be a 'public institution' arises.

A quick note on copyright and intellectual property: when an author publishes an article with a journal or publishing house, the author generally delegates the rightful ownership of that work to the publisher. As such, this becomes protected under intellectual property law agreements. Therefore, if there was such an attempt to create a 'Pirate Bay' for academia, there would most likely be a significant push back from this interest group. The implications of such copyright infringement and the interest to protect intellectual property has recently been reflected in policy proposals in the United States, such as the acts PIPA (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property) and SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act). In addition, attempts to download academic articles and the ramifications that can ensue are reflected in the recent tragedy and treatment of Aaron Swartz by the US federal government.

The first textual analysis tool explored was "List Words - HTML (TAPoRware)" by Geoffrey Rockwell. Initial interest in this tool derived from Rockwell's "What is Text Analysis, Really?" (2003), which explores the importance of developing tools that create new possibilities of interpretation by linking theory of texts and analysis in practical every day applications. The essay explored was John Perry Barlow's (1996) "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace". Curiosity, however, quickly translated into disappointed as the tool specified, "certificate verify failed" (i.e. does not compute). The cause of this relates to the fact that the tool does not read HTTPS communications protocol. Given the popularity and widespread distribution of this particular text online, another copy was located and "submitted" for textual analysis. Disappointment subsequently ignited a spirit of inquiry as the prototype carried out its delegated role. Certainly, TAPoRware is a useful tool for measuring words according to its frequency in a given text written in HyperText Markup Language. TAPoRware's quantitative approach may help facilitate initial research inquiries by acting as a starting point for textual analysis. This tool can be used across disciplines in grounded theory methodology where a researcher is attempting to create categories and establish a "relationship between theory of texts and analysis" (Rockwell 2003:217). Nonetheless, given the inability to read HTTPS websites, its design has a significant drawback. For instance, a research project that utilizes publicly available information on security intelligence websites-which often employ the security of HTTPS-would be hindered from data collection with this tool. Alternatively, the developer has a plain text and XML tool that would overcome this barrier as a prospective researcher could copy and paste segments of text. This is perhaps an insignificant obstacle that can be overcome. Nevertheless, it reflects the need to further develop this prototype to enhance usability and inclusion of both S-HTTP and HTTPS communication protocols.

The second textual analysis tool utilized was Bookworm's "ChronAm", an open-source collection of American historical newspaper pages from 1866 to 1922. A search was conducted for all articles in this period for the keywords 'war' and 'buy'. Within seconds, a colorful line graph emerged to reveal spikes in war activity and a gradual rise in newspaper articles for the latter search word. Sharp increases for the keyword 'war' coincided with the Navajo Wars, American Civil War, Great Sioux War of 1876, Spanish-American War, and the First World War (WWI). Overlap between both search words during WWI was particularly interesting. Upon further investigation, it appears there was a significant amount of advertisements from the federal government to the public encouraging purchase of "War Savings Stamps" and "Liberty Bonds" to help finance military efforts. This tool highlights variegated uses for big data repositories. It also reveals how the Internet has "allowed for a new common infrastructure for accessing textual information" (Rockwell 2003:214). This tool reiterates Lev Manovich's (2011) call, highlighting the importance of employing social computing techniques for social sciences and humanities research. However, no reading this week demonstrated how crowdsourcing might be useful for annotating newspaper articles. Further, each article lacked arguments pertaining to the need for crowdfunding open-source textual analysis applications to improve similar technologies (see Tanya Clement et al. 2009). The importance of such an effort is imperative, as Rockwell (2003) discusses how the private sector and open-source community rarely develop tools designed for academic "research practices" in mind (214).

Works Cited:
Barlow, John Perry. 1996. "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, February 8, 1996."
Clement, Tanya, Sara Steger, John Unsworth, and Kirsten Uszkalo. 2008. "How Not to Read a Million Books." Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
Manovich, Lev. 2011. "Trending: The Promises and the Challenges of Big Social Data" in Debates in the Digital humanities:460-75.
Rockwell, Geoffrey. 2003. "What is Text Analysis, Really?", Literary and Linguistic Computing, Vol. 18, No. 2:209-219.

That is an incredible piece of wearable technology. This 'augmented book' has the potential to animate the reading experience beyond the longstanding ink-on-paper ritual and recent e-book adaptation. The news article reminds me of other wearable technologies that are perceived to enhance every day life (e.g. Google Glass or MotionX). It also recalls more invasive 'wearable' technologies where some people have gone so far as to implant magnets under their skin in order to 'feel' nearby magnetic fields.

Thanks for sharing this. I have always enjoyed technology news but more so particularly when it comes to advancements that reflect human and nonhuman actors as 'fitting' symbionts. In particular, one quote from the article stands out: "Instead of asking the reader to empathize with its heroine, the book uses physical stimuli to enforce that connection." This is a powerful statement, which certainly iterates notions of power/knowledge that is all too common among Foucauldians. In this sense, accepting that nonhuman actors can "enforce" connections physically, perhaps Bruno Latour is accurate when he discusses how "objects too have agency". However, with poor literacy rates in certain parts of the world (e.g. "nearly half of [Detroit's population is] functionally illiterate"), might this approach to reading be harmful for early readers? Or should we think of this wearable technology as something that is more so geared toward 'adult consumption' given its perceived full-body experience?

Works Cited:
Latour, Bruno. 2005. "Objects too have agency" in "Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory", Oxford University Press
Huffington Post. 2011. "Nearly Half of Detroit's Adults Are Functionally Illiterate, Report Finds"

A very interesting discussion has arisen from Christina's blog post. Along with the others, there is definitely some 'food for thought' here to chew on. In terms of Kayla's post, I agree with you that paratext appears to function as both a narrative and a database. Hayles reiterates this notion as she considers each to be 'natural symbionts' (i.e. interdependent). Perhaps we should consider this often complementary data of the paratext to be a part of a 'paranarrative' whereby one observes multiple voices within a given text . In any case, paranarratives deriving from paratext (e.g. "deleting scenes, interviews…, commentary") generally do not appear to have any effect on the primary narration. Instead, it simply provides an additional perspective, which ultimately does not impact the story (or narrative) at hand as it is voluntarily activated (for the most part) by the actor (i.e. consumer) themselves. In terms of considering a "publication to be a form of database", I would argue that it is. Although, Manovich appears to have referred to database as if it were something digital, "a new symbolic form of a computer age".

In terms of Alessandro's post, this idea of "storytelling" within the banking community is fascinating. It reminds me of how Canadian bank tellers report 'suspicious activity' to FINTRAC (Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada) when a single deposit greater than $10,000 is made. In this sense, employees are encouraged to police the activities of its banking members as such transactions supposedly tell a story on their own about 'those who make such large transactions'. In other words, such sums infer nefarious intent or activities. Interestingly, in this case, narration derives from a nonhuman actor (but that is nothing new).

Quick note about Monday's class. The presentation will focus on the first two chapters of Kathleen Fitzpatrick's "Planned Obsolescence". Specifically, attention will be centered on debates around peer review process, community-based filtering, publishing and the academy, as well as issues around tenure as it relates to authorship and digital publishing. I hope that this approach will be conducive to our discussions and help draw out some of the broader implications addressed later on in the final chapters.

To further unpack this debate, a short note on the concept of 'community' might be relevant. There is a practical, working definition around the concept of community. Without needing to ask, everyone appears to be familiar with its meaning. The concept of community has presented itself in a growing body of scholarly literature that has problematized it within context of neo-liberalism. Generally, those who conceptualize or articulate notions of community pay attention to its social or technical structure. Politicians tend to focus on economic processes and security, sociologists on the social interaction between individuals, and anthropologists on culture and human development. However, there is no general agreed upon definition of what 'community' actually is.

Unfortunately, digital humanities (DH) has not escaped from this recurring conceptual and rhetorical debate as each article this week consistently invoked the concept of 'community' within its 'discourse' (for a lack of better words). According to Matthew Kirschenbaum (2012), DH is a "culture that values collaboration, openness, nonhierarchical relations, and agility" (n.p.). Lisa Spiro (2012) reiterates this notion as she describes DH as a collaborative approach, which aims to foster innovation, serve the public, and advance knowledge (n.p.). Equally, Patrik Svensson (2012) argues that "we should think of [DH] not as a tent but rather a trading zone and meeting place" (n.p.).

As it relates to the discussion on patents, perhaps Yale's entrance into the DH 'world' would only be antithetical if such patents were proprietary. In the case where patents embraced open-source culture and were protected under creative commons agreements, this would not be problematic to the general ethos of DH. However, if DH is conceptualized as a 'community' we must be aware of the fact that communities are inherently exclusive in theory and praxis. For individuals the concept of community might create "fuzzy, warm, reassuring feelings; for others it conjures up concerns about people operating at the margins of society to create networks of hatred or support for deviant behavior" (Preece 2001:348). It is also arguably "both something nostalgically remembered and magically created" (Blackshaw 2008:342). For that reason, perhaps we (collectively) should avoid the use of conceptualizing DH as a 'community' as this rhetoric cannot avoid notions of exclusion, which run contrary to the (proposed) values of collaboration and openness in the digital humanities as outlined by this week's readings.

Works Cited:

Blackshaw, Tony. "Contemporary community theory and football." Soccer & Society 9, no. 3 (2008): 325-345.

Kirschenbaum, Matthew. "What Is Digital Humanities and What's It Doing in English Departments?" in Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew Gold (2012).

Preece, Jenny. "Sociability and usability in online communities: determining and measuring success." Behaviour & Information Technology 20, no. 5 (2001): 347-356.

Spiro, Lisa. "This is Why We Fight" in Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew Gold (2012).

Svensson, Patrik. "Beyond the Big Tent" in Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew Gold (2012).