Guardienne of the Tomes

Discovery, Collaboration, and Dissemination: Lessons Learned and Plans for the Future Digital Humanities Summer Institute William R. Bowen Iter: Gateway to Middle Ages and the Renaissance . Just passed 20th anniversary, looking forward to 25th. Iter Bibliography, Community, and Press. Iter's mandate is online, Iter meaning a journey or path in Latin, not-for-profit, advancement of learning in study and teaching of Middle Ages and Renaissance through the development and distribution of online resources. Created 1995, incorporated 1997 as a nonprofit partnership. Academic society partners (CSRS, ISAS, MAA, MOISA, RSA, SCSC); projects (DHSI, ETCL, INKE, IRCPS), research centers (ACMRS, CRRS), faculty of information studies (Toronto), U of Toronto Libraries. Marriage of expertise in subject area with info studies and new technologies. Iter planning. Many planning exercises, collaboratories. Inital Steps, Following a Larger Vision: A Feature oriented Pilot Proposal (APril 2009). D...

It's the last day of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute. This week I've learned a ton about e-lit from Dene Grigar, I've built a draft of an exhibit in Omeka , and am currently fooling around again with my Wordpress site (shh, don't tell Blogger). Last week, I was steeped in making decisions about data. It has been wonderful to flip things and be a student with my colleagues from all over the globe, and I can see how what I have learned will be applicable back home. Right now, though, I'm ready to go home, hug my dog, and go to bed.

Digital Humanities Summer Institute Workshop #2 Documenting Born Digital Creative and Scholarly Works for Access and Preservation Day 2 a.m. What can you walk away with in a week? What resources do you have to complete your vision (funding, skills, people, knowledge)? Where can you go for further help? What needs to be done for your project to count towards your academic output (RTP)? How do you document what you've done so it counts Barnett's Memory Machines .  Medieval Popular Culture - first time someone collected what the simple folk do, local catechisms, death records, reviving what was happening at ground level in continental Europe. Collecting current ephemera will be valuable to someone.  Virtuality and the Art of Exhibition by   Dziekan - online and physical exhibitions. Looks at teh notion of liveness. All digital objects are digital, but not all digital are virtual. Liveness/Virtuality has 3 characteristics: participatory, interactive, exp...

"Indigeneity, Conceptualism, and the Borders of DH" by Jordan Abel National identifications can be an indicator of which community/ies we are accountable to. But do not always account for plurality of indigenous existence. During Vancouver's year of reconciliation event, was one of several poets commissioned to write a poem for the event; work the poets engaged was meant to honor Chief Robert Joseph, who challenged his indigenous identity due to pronunciation. Does that mean he's less Niskaa(Sp?)? So many questions about how we define indigeneity. Accountable to intergenerational survivors of residental schools, dispossessed indigenous peoples who cant return to their peoples, urban indigeneity. Colonialism has had and continues to have serious impact, some of that legacy has been discussed, some of that legacy has been silenced.

Digital Humanities Summer Institute Workshop #2 Documenting Born Digital Creative and Scholarly Works for Access and Preservation Afternoon Day 1 Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature: Pathfinders In 90s, understood physical/material thing and ephemeral thing. Thought that digital is immaterial. Not good thinking. In 2002 W riting Machines  notion of digital work not being immaterial. Now we understand digital material has material component, bits rot, etc. Reading: Christyann See 3 types of preservation: emulation, migration, collection. She prefers emulation because is more elegant (she's an artist) - last thing a gallery want to do is show wires and plugs, that's the aesthetic of a traditional gallery. Having computers in a gallery space is counterproductive. Emulation makes sense for those who don't want to show the muck to the public, the bits and pieces that make things work. She doesnt like migration. Really hates collection which is not an e...

Digital Humanities Summer Institute Workshop #2 Documenting Born Digital Creative and Scholarly Works for Access and Preservation Morning Day 1 By Dene Grigar and Nicholas Schiller Syllabus In STEAM - virtual game platform, can put your game up and sell it (Apple store for games), game sits ephemeral on site, do not own it physically. Beyond Eyes Game Tags you would use: third person/God view , game, multimedia, interactive, juvenile, non-violent, indiegames [independent developers], visual novel, visual storytelling, blindness, memory, No one path, how do you represent that in documentation? Walkthroughs try to do that. Limited There's no practical limit to describing things (used to be 3, as many as you could fit on a catalog card). Translation studies: translators betray the text no matter what they do kakamoron - a bad, stupid thing (doesn't capture the stupidity and the badness in the English translation. We are translating for a future audience we don't ...

DHSI Morning Workshop: Regular Expressions by John Simpson Description:  Regular Expressions are a powerful tool for searching text to find patterns of characters. They are often used to extract postal codes, phone numbers, and emails from large sets of documents and when combined with a little bit of scripting they can turn tedious and error prone work done “by hand” into fast, effective, and automatic searching. In this workshop you will learn the basic syntax for regular expressions and deploy them to extract useful information in cases where doing it “by hand” would be tedious. Point browser to  https://regex101.com/ and to gutenberg.org/ebooks/13 Text version of The Hunting of the Snark. Most of the workshop should be discussion dialog. cwrc.ca/rsc-src Regex good for matching patterns of characters A PDF document in background is a lot of XML, lot fo stuff is not helpful, lots of XML vomit of individual lines, but can use to zoom in on a particular piece of tex...

Building, Analyzing, and Mapping Building the ArtTechne Database: New Directions in Digital Art History - Marieke Hendriksen ARTECHNE: Technique in the Arts, 1500-1950. What is technique in the arts? Concept of technique (technik) Google NGrams to track rise of term in relation to another term Aim - database - digitized searchable historical texts; linked open data to link to images and soundbites and dbs of chemical analysis of artworks; search and visualization tools; integrate orphan databases; serves broad community. Ex) database for pigments and paints on server on Planck Institute in Berlin, dead project, eventually will disappear.  Chhosing a data warehousing approach - Drupal (open, fast, multilingual); chose XML as format, bc W3C recommended and free; data warehousing approach; GettyIDs ARTECHNE ontology - enter texts, divide into records (chapter, paragraph, or recipe, persons/authors, translators, etc). Most sources now geographically indexed, timeline functio...

People Documenting Online Lives This is Just to Say I have the in Your : Modernist Memes in an Era of Public Apology by Shawna Ross (Texas A&M) Humanities Commons - the paper is available there. Trigger warning - evocation of people who are known abusers, racists, harassers--not what they've done, but their apologies and what they sound like. William Carlos William "This is Just To Say" was meme-ed on Twitter, blew up in Nov 2017. Proliferation of mashups. Why did this one blow up? Why not his "So Much Depends" which is fewer characters? Why is the shortest story #babyshoes meme mashup with the plums is more popular than #babyshoes alone? Why the surge? Poem's accessibility. Lack of meter and rhyme scheme makes it easy to understand and replicate. Compulsive overeating subject is attractive. Desired consumables - happened between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Wheelbarrow is less seductive than plums. Also people can finally use line breaks in Twitt...

Making Choices About Your Data Digital Humanities Summer Institute #DHSI18 Day 4 (Morning) Paige Morgan and Yvonne Lam Housekeeping The Shock of the Old (D. Edgerton) - People adopt new tech but the old runs alongside for many reasons. (I'd also recommend The Diffusion of Innovations  on top of this.) Class discussion of D'Ignazio and Klein's "Feminist Data Visualization." Colonialist legacies of tabular data. Even JSON's tree structure is hierarchical. What should we use? Jacqueline Wernimont's Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media .  Donella Meadows - leverage points. Instead of massive interventions (which can be most temporary and ephemeral), smaller interventions can be most powerful. Bethany's piece on "The eternal September" of DH - when do you stop explaining yourself to the new but not establish gatekeeping. People have to discover for themselves and discover where they are. --------------------------- Visi...

Making Choices About Your Data Digital Humanities Summer Institute #DHSI18 Day 3 (Afternoon) Paige Morgan and Yvonne Lam Article "Against Cleaning" Committing to giving certain answers when you are cleaning data. How do I make this material discoverable and allow it to intersect more clearly with discoveries being made in this field. You may feel like you need to tune your data so it gives specific answers. But the more you do is not to get project to spit out answers for people, but give answers that help people rethink.  What is the info I wan to surface for people, how do I get my data to surface that? [Much more concern for how *others* are going to use data here with the digital humanists that in my experience with social science, where we collect our data to answer our questions, then fin. Kudos to DH folks!] Expansion without growth - scalability Who is your audience? Who is relying on your workflow or the decisions you made that you can't explain? T...

Making Choices About Your Data Digital Humanities Summer Institute #DHSI18 Day 3 (Morning) Paige Morgan and Yvonne Lam Standardized rights statements: http://rightsstatements.org/en/ Controlled vocabularies Working with Openrefine Free work time Lunch Reading: Against Cleaning Free work time Tomorrow: Meeting with FemDH Controlled vocabulary: a set of carefully chosen words and phrases used to help structure and define information so that it can be easily returned in a search, or parsed by analysis programs. May be the basis for taxonomies and ontologies; can be hierarchical or restricted in various ways. Ex) Pizza vocabulary.  Crust (deep dish; crispy) Sauce (marinara, alfredo, olive oil) Cheese (mozzarella, Provolone, parmesan) Veggies (mushrooms, green peppers, onions, tomatoes, olives) Meat We can say every pizza must have a crust, must have one or more sauces, etc. Can add another layer and say there are 'veggie pizzas' and 'm...

Making Choices About Your Data Digital Humanities Summer Institute #DHSI18 Day 2 Afternoon Paige Morgan and Yvonne Lam Find and share datasets at: Figshare Humanities CORE repository Data is Plural Twitter (datset #dataset) GitHub Documentation Data dictionaries a record of what data is and isn't supposed to do, definitions, usage similar to a codebook, used more by folks working with coding languages that define different functions, how was it done in this experiment. Data dictionaries do the same for humanities What are your categories meant to cover? Workflows Set of instructions/rules (doesn't need to be a table, can be a list - what to do for each thing, what not to do) see smartdraw,com For tomorrow: Openrefine.org is free, works on Windows and Linux (use 2.8, not the beta)

Making Choices About Your Data Digital Humanities Summer Institute #DHSI18 Day 2 Morning Paige Morgan and Yvonne Lam Clean data vs tidy data Cleaner data is grouped in fewest 'boxes' possible, categories. makes data more interoperable and legible to their agencies. Think 'race/ethnicity' - either few checkboxes/labels, or open where folks can write in anything at all (where running analysis would be difficult). Ambiguity and complexity. Ambiguity is - how does having more or less ambiguity in your data/project affect where the work goes?  Limited categories is legible and understandable to others. If you are studying something that manifests differently among categories, you'd need the 'messier' more detailed data.  machine parsable non machine parsable less accurate more accurate representation of complexity Book recommendation: Sorting Things Out - death causes and diseases data. Dataset originated for people working on merchant ...

Digital Humanities Summer Institute #DHSI18 Day 1 Afternoon Paige Morgan and Yvonne Lam [ #wrangledata ] Are you in it for the process or the product? Need to be sure you and your tenure committee and chair are on the same page. Ex - Old Bailey online is most successful. Over 300 years of records from London's criminal court. Can search all sorts of facets. Project has several controlled vocabularies for offenses, verdicts, sentences, etc. This successful project was funded by UK grantign agencies that grant within high 6 figures into low 7 figures (pounds, not dollars) - that's the kind of money it takes for a source project. Depending on wher you get news of DH from, you'll hear about different types and aspects of DH. Twitter: cool projects, I'm looking for this kind of tool, omg this tool is failing, small projects and struggling with DH. Not going to hear that from the elite and official sources - if reading from mainly elite official sources, your first o...

Digital Humanities Summer Institute #DHSI18 Day 1 Morning Paige Morgan and Yvonne Lam [ #wrangledata ] Goals Spreadsheet of data and metadata you can take to librarian or developer Clearer idea of what research questions you can ask of your data Better sense of what tools would be a good fit for your data; or what you would need to do to your data to make it work better with certain tools Start of specific plans about work that you want to do ON your data So much depends on what you're going to prioritize because you are not going to learn all the things at once. Encouragement ot think carefully and realistically and generously with selves about setting goals of what we're going to learn. Goals, milestones , FemTechNet MEALS Framework Idea is to poke a little bit at assumptions we have about technologies work and good ways of using them, what's an acceptable thing to apply technology to (mostly discussing digital tech). Not only is there this idea of ho...