Notes

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graphic recordings done by Barb Siegel look2listen.com

Dig pedagogy

Dataviz

DH for newbies

Crowds

DH For Newbies – Session 2 Room 210

  • Newbies and Experts assemble to expand their horizons on DH
  • Emilie Davis Diary (davisdiaries.villanova.edu/) started as a small class project for transcription and developed into the website and they learned as they go
  • Great learning tool is networking, if you do not know or your university/school does not have a DH center there are many out there to help you along the way
  • How to gain visibility for those independent scholars who dont have a website ending in .edu
  • dirt.projectbamboo.org/ great resource for people who do not have knowledge of a technology service to do (______)
  • dhcommons.org/ collaborate and resources to help you advance your project
  • Besides these great websites DH has a community on twitter #DH #digitalhumanities, find people and follow them, tweet them, follow conversations
  • Biggest thing is to have a project to work on to keep your skills sharp…the old adage if you dont use it you lose it is true for DH
  • Hard to visualize version 1.0 when you see a finalize project…how to translate ideas to very rough beta version
  • Is the project useful only now or forever…who will upkeep it…how will it look and be used when the technology changes???? (Dont Worry About It – Expert)
  • Projects do not have to be large things that need grant money…you can start small and build upon it
  • Academics should take “risk” and put things out there in DH even if its a WordPress Site
  • Technology and coding is scary but there are tutorials out there to help you
  • Paper –> Digital transition might take time but imagine use for Control “F” to search for names, topics, etc etc
  • Networking through social media: Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, etc
  • Google Ngram is another great tool
  • fromzerosandones.wordpress.com/ is another great website
  • I dont know is okay…learn from mistakes…admitting what you do not know is okay to grow

Entrepreneur Fishbowl – Session 1 Room 210

○ Examples of cultural entrepreneurship

○ What is cultural entrepreneurship?

○ How do we connect from the nitty gritty of research and artifacts to the

 Amnesty house has strong ties to France and the French embassy

□ Used their connections and relations with France to create

 Pi day was created by a woman  history tour guide for einstien’s

birthday

□ Recruited local pie shops and bakeries to get in on the action

□ Now a national phenomenon

 Using information reservoirs like archives to connect local

businesses and bring money to the community

 DC especially has a big connection to local history

□ Ex Ghost of DC blog, Ben’s Chili Bowl

 creatively using local history and archives to find new ways to raise

money

 Thinking outside of the box, instead of using larger entities for

funding things like museums(federal government) using cool local

tours or looking smaller and appealing to individuals

 DC museums feel more egalitarian

□ Partly because they’re free

 Across the cultural heritage sector, a lot of people either don’t have

artifacts or won’t give them up

general public?

 Broadcasting‐Storycore by the Library of Congress, helped by NPR

 Crowdsourcing‐instead of looking for a few large donors, find a lot

of small donors

 Huricane digital memory bank‐handed out mardi gras cups with

their website on it

 Difficult to locate a core of enthusiasts

□ Easier to find lincoln enthusiasts as opposed to james

□ Perhaps a lack of crossover between enthusiasts and those

□ Depends how interconnected a subject is

French themed events to bring in money

buchanan enthusiasts

who would share their research

 Ex. Lincoln is connected to the civil war and both are

large interest groups

○ How can museums and culture insittutions make money off of these

○ Using social media and internet culture to educate

 New York Public Library Menu project

□ Entirely crowdsourced, really took off

events?

 Auction off some artifacts, talk up digital collections during

 Look for “little  pots of money” to make them yours

□ Find an enthusiast who also works in digital collecttions or

 Using something like kickstarter has the same issue with finding

large donors, only targets a specific audience (digitally literate and

old rich people respectively)

 Identify an audience and go to where they are (forums, meetings,

websites)

 Using hashtags and youtube videos to supplement education in the

classroom

 “If you’re interested in X, check out the #X to see videos and articles

all about it”

 Democratization of education

□ Using MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses)

web design, get them to work for you as a side project

□ Ceded the term entrepreneur to the business and science

 Huge classes with 90% fail rates

 Lack of feedback and face to face engagement

 Used as a way for universities to cut costs and faculty

world

 Not just about financial value, entrepreneurship is a way

to do new things in brand new ways

 May not make millions of dollars, but can be used to

better the world through education

 Humanities teaches imagination, how to seek

opportunity and build on unexpected consequences

Digital Publishing – Room 208 Session 1

  • Post colonial literature in multi-lingual forms
  • Limited access to sources in countries especially for Western scholars
  • Database created, however, dated and needs updating
  • There are gaps in graphs and data due to lack of these papers in other languages
  • Instead of rebuilding wheel with MLA seeing how it can be adapted to this database
  • Making works digital or…
  • Primary sources get ignored
  • Balance between primary and secondary sources
  • One shouldn’t lag behind the other
  • How is this looked at world wide…open access journal vs the old school (even though there is peer reviewed)
  • Impact Factors – number of citations and prestige of the journal
  • People assume a lower impact factor to open access…anyone can publish etc etc
  • Times are changing and academy can be viewed as a business vs institution, access is easier with internet and tagging those who want the knowledge will find it
  • Scholarship is becoming digital what are the additions that help…dont get rid of the old but defiantly add the new
  • Highers up in university point fingers at who do not want to accept digital scholarship, whether it is deans/provost or department chairs
  • People sometimes judge articles by impact factors and may not even read them…where is the scholarly-ness in that
  • Sharing abstracts in english of other language articles very helpful…what about for less academic purposes translate.google.com???
  • Digital humanities should not be technophobic
  • Besides language somethings do not translate well such as occupation classification and colloquialisms
  • To Be Continue….

 

Dork Short Notes

That Camp Council

  • Grant money ran out = YAY?!?
  • Lets make That Camp sustainable and long lasting
  • The council was created to be a support system
    • Forums to help other
    • Keep on creating and developing That Camp
      • It’s a living being….

National Endowment for the Humanities Dork Short – Office of Digital Humanities

  • Grants and how to leverage resources
  • www.neh.gov
  • Jefferson Lecture coming up @ Kennedy Center
  • Database of Funded Projects (great starting place)
  • Professional Development Opportunities

DH Now

  • A Collaborative weekly “crowd source” publication
  • Follow 700 RSS feeds (“that’s a lot”)
  • Web publication that picks 2-4 pieces a week
  • Nominate more RSS feeds (as if 700 wasn’t a lot)
  • We love volunteers do not need to be an expert

Remembering Lincoln

  • First Ford Theater project (150 yrs post Assassination)
  • Bringing together primary assassination of people’s reactions
    • Make a national event more localized
    • They cannot search social media #1865problems
    • People are uploading their sources and helping expand their stories
    • Some items are already on the map, go check it out
    • More than institutions and private collectors, regular people are helping

National Digital Stewardship

  • Combine theory and practice of digital curation
  • Great opportunities to combine people with programs

The Zombie Archive

  • Scholars and lover of zombies can go and find it all (Zombie Walmart)
  • Data mining, more archive creation
  • Map to track outbreak and creatures
  • Lets grow this and develop this more

Entrepreneurship

  • Online collection of articles
  • Sorry for this dork short note being so short, was having some technical difficulties at the time 🙁

Sunlight Foundation

  • A quick look at tools and projects that Sunlight provides
  • Mostly government tools and data
  • Very cool charts and maps
  • Lots or archiving and moving forward

 

Social Network Analysis

  • NSA knowledge to Classic History knowledge
  • Using the tools to track terrorist post 9-11 being brought over to history
  • Seeing who knows who in Ancient History
  • Alexander the Great knew who and who was a central hub of people besides him
  • Great visualization for readings and primary sources to see who knows who, whether they are male/female, ethnicities, rank, location
  • Can be used for any people…Socrates, Plato, or more modern perhaps
    • (“Bernstein and Woodward using this for the Watergate break-in????”)

 

4 Responses to Notes

  1. 207 Session 1: Sunlight Foundation: Data Visualization
    Amy Ngai, Amy Cesal, Ben Chartoff

    – “Make gov transparent and accountable through data, tools, policy and journalism”
    – free, open-source; staff of designers social scientists, reporters, policy, developers, comms
    sunlightfoundation.com/api/community: projects to assist with!

    What not to do:
    – Data can be pretty, but does it SHOW anything
    – No key, no introductory texts, no clear message of the data
    – “Number art” pretty, but doesn’t tell you information
    – No scales, labels, titles

    “Data pervs”
    – Notion that something is pretty, so it must “mean” something
    – But this can mean that just because something is aesthetically appealing, people might not look deeply into it/question it
    – “WTF Visualizations: Visualizations that make no sense” Tumblr page

    “Squint test”
    – Graphics that tell the story on the first glance
    e.g. informative headlines, notable images like red lines indicating increase/decrease
    – Use context: what are themes that people commonly understand? E.g. take numerical data and put it in the context of how it would fill a football field
    ^ most people have an estimate of the size of a football field; makes abstract data more accessible

    Disseminating data
    – Reporters can take screenshots of data graphics
    – Reporting for reporters; making it more bite-sized for reporters to quickly understand information
    – Social media shares

    TOOLS:

    Maps
    – Show geospatial trends e.g. where are political fundraisers happening?
    www.mapbox.com

    The R Project
    – Data visualization coding tool online
    R-project.org

    Tableau
    – Basic coding

    Developers/Coders:
    github.com/sunlightlabs

    Sunlight Foundation Data Visualization Style Guide

    Be open to and flexible with whatever tools are available! If it gets the job done, use it

  2. Alex DeLarge says:

    DH in the classroom (digital pedagogy)

    Group Bibliographies
    – annotated bibliographies
    – shared bibliographies (e.g., through Zotero)

    Transcriptions
    – permanency
    – skill-neutral

  3. Alex DeLarge says:

    DH SHOW & TELL
    What are some useful tools for academic research?
    TurboScan
    Pocket
    Evernote
    Perseus.Tufts.edu
    Prezi
    Newsdiffs
    Dropbox
    SpiderOak
    Carbonite
    MediaFire
    Lynda.com (tutorials)
    PDF Expert
    Writecheck
    Safeassign

  4. Room 210, Session 4: Creating Crowd Sourcing Transcription for oral and video history

    – Smithsonian transcriptions
    – Crowdsourcing: cost efficient
    – Question: how do you translate this to oral and video history?
    – Video history: a lot of it is restricted, but some examples of video content:
    – Manhattan Project
    – Small arms history (including history of AK-47)

    – Take reel-to-reel material on digital recorders
    – Audio cassettes
    – Sent to contractor to be transcribed

    – Funds: sketchy

    Challenges of oral transcriptions:
    – Ensuring accuracy: accents, misheard words
    – Tedious: pause, rewind, play, pause, rewind, play, repeat…

    How do we accommodate for these problems?

    – becomes more manageable if you break it up into segments: 30 seconds every 10 minutes
    ^ improves accuracy
    – in a crowdsource context, divide it up by time stamps and assign people minute blocks
    – recognizable people and recordings: entices people to participate
    – have a notes portion: people can make notes of time stamps and confusion about language understanding
    – But if there are unknown figures, contextualize them: e.g. why was this person important to xyz movement? How did this person influence xyz public figure?
    – time stamps: makes it really clear where a project stopped
    – tools to slow down speech

    Potential tools:
    – iTunes, Express Scribe, YouTube, iMovie (Mac; can alter pitch, speed, tone)

    Data visualization:
    – If you get demographics of digital volunteers, you can map where they are and what content they tend to be interested in
    ^ future donors and fundraisers can come from this

    Why do you transcribe oral histories?
    – Accessibility
    – data mining: make it accessible to new research techniques
    – social network analysis: transcribe and make conclusions about relationships
    – preservation: if it’s recorded on a cassette or something that might be hard to digitize, you have the words forever
    ^ also an argument for keeping cassettes and similar media; notion that this is valuable oral content

    Is there a way to build an online tool where once an oral history exists online, it can automatically enter a data mining program?
    – there should be a way once an oral history is approved, you can send it directly through a code which submits it in a data context
    – could be multistep, but you could build a single online forum for it

    Failure is success: you rule out dead ends and apply it to your next effort

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