Month: February 2016

Categories
Conference DH Event off campus

Apps, Maps, & Models: A New View

[Crossposted on my personal blog.]

Last Monday several of us here at WLUDH traveled down to Duke University for their symposium on Apps, Maps & Models: Digital Pedagogy in Art History, Archaeology & Visual Studies. I found the trip to be enlightening and invigorating. If you are interested in the event, you can find videos of the talks here and here as well as a storify of the Twitter action here. That the event was so well documented is a testimony to how well organized it was by the Wired! Lab.

Many speakers at the event considered how the tools they were using might relate to more “traditional” modes for carrying out their research. They considered and responded to tough questions with and about their work. Are digital methods for tracing the topography of a surface, for example, fundamentally different in kind from analog means of doing so? If so, are they meant to displace those old tools? Why should we spend the time to learn the new technologies? A related question that comes up at almost every digital humanities presentation (though not at any of these): can digital humanities methods show us anything that we do not already know?

Such questions can be particularly troubling when we are investing such time and energy on the work they directly critique, but we nonetheless need to have answers for them that demonstrate the value of digital humanities work, in and out of the classroom. Numerous well-known scholars have offered justifications of digital work in a variety of venues, and, to my mind, the symposium offered many answers of its own, in part by showcasing amazing work that spanned a variety of fields related to preservation, public humanities, and academic scholarship. Presenters were using digital technology to rebuild the past, using digital modeling to piece together the fragments of a ruined church that have since been incorporated into other structures. They were using these tools to engage the present, to draw the attention of museum patrons to overlooked artifacts. The work on display at the symposium struck me, at its core, as engaging with questions and values that cut across disciplines, digital or otherwise.

Most compelling to me, the symposium drew attention to how the tools we use to examine the objects of our study change our relationship to them. The presenters acknowledged that such an idea does hold dangers – after all, we want museum-goers to consider the objects in a collection, not just spend time perusing an iPad application meant to enrich them. But just as new tools offer new complications, changes in medium also offer changes in perspective. As was illustrated repeatedly at the symposium, drone photography, for all its deeply problematic political and personal valences, can offer you a new way of seeing the world, a new way of looking that is more comprehensive than the one we see from the ground. Even as we hold new methodologies and tools up to critique we can still consider how they might cause us to consider an object, a project, or a classroom differently.

Seeing from a different angle allows us to ask new questions and re-evaluate old ones, an idea that speaks directly to my experience at the symposium. I work at the intersections of digital humanities, literary studies, and sound studies. So my participation in the symposium was as something of an outsider, someone ready to learn about an adjacent and overlapping field but, ultimately, not a home discipline. Thinking through my work from an outsider perspective made me want to ask many questions of my own work. The presenters here were deeply engaged in preserving and increasing access to the cultural record. How might I do the same through text analysis or through my work with audio artifacts? What questions and goals are common to all academic disciplines? How might I more thoroughly engage students in public humanities work?

Obviously, the event left me with more questions than answers, but I think that is ultimately the sign of a successful symposium. I would encourage you to check out the videos of the conference, as this short note is necessarily reductive of such a productive event. The talks will offer you new thoughts on old questions and new ways of thinking about digital scholarship no matter your discipline.

 

 

Categories
DH Project Update Tools

Embedding COinS Metadata on a Page Using the Zotero API

[Cross-posted on my personal blog]

This year I am working with Mackenzie, Steve McCormick, and his students on the Huon d’Auvergne project, a digital edition of a Franco-Italian romance epic. Last term we finished TEI-encoding of two of the manuscripts and put them online, and there is still much left to do. Making the digital editions of each manuscript online is a valuable scholarly endeavor in its own right, but we’ve also been spending a lot of time considering other ways in which we can enrich this scholarly production using the digital environment.

All of which brings me to the bibliography for our site. At first, our bibliography page was just a transcription of a text file that Steve would send along with regular updates. This collection of materials is great to have in its own right, but a better solution would be to leverage the many digital humanities approaches to citation management to produce something a bit more dynamic.

Steve already had everything in a Zotero, so my first step was to integrate the site’s bibliography with the Zotero collection that Steve was using to populate the list. I found a python 2 library called zot_bib_web that could do all this quite nicely with a bit of modification. Now, by running the script from my computer, the site’s bibliography will automatically pull in an updated Zotero collection for the project. Not only is it now easier to update our site (no more copying and pasting from a word document), but now others can contribute new resources to the same bibliography on Zotero by requesting to join the group and uploading citations. The project’s bibliography can continue to grow beyond us, and we will capture these additions as well.

Mackenzie suggested that we take things a bit further by including COiNS metadata in the bibliography so that someone coming to our bibliography could export our information into the citation manager of their choosing. Zotero’s API can also do this, and I used a piece of the pyzotero Python library to do so. The first step was to add this piece to the zot_bib_web code:

zot = zotero.Zotero(library_id, library_type, api_key)
coins = zot.collection_items(collection_id, content='coins')
coin_strings = [str(coin) for coin in coins]
for coin in coin_strings:
fullhtml += coin

Now, before the program outputs html for the bibliography, it goes out to the Zotero API and gets COinS metadata for all the citations, converts them into a format that will work for the embedding, and then attaches each returned span to the HTML for the bibliography.

Now that I had the data that I needed, I wanted to make it work a bit more cleanly in our workflow. Initially, the program returned each bibliographic entry in its own page and meant for the whole bibliography to also be a stand-alone page on the website. I got rid of all that and, instead, wanted to embed them within the website as I already had it. I have the python program exporting the bibliography and COinS data into a small HTML file that I then attach to a <div id="includedContent"> inserted in the bibliography page. I use some jQuery to do so:

<script type="text/javascript">
$(function(){
$("#includedContent").load("/zotero-bib.html");
});
</script>

Instead of distributing content across several different pages, I mark a placeholder area on the main site where all the bibliographic data and metadata will be dumped. All of the relevant data gets saved in a file ‘zot-bib.html’ that gets automatically included inside the shell of the bibliography.html page. From there, I just modified the style so that it would fit into the aesthetic of the site.

Now anyone going to our bibliography page with a Zotero extension will see this in the right of the address bar:

Screen Shot 2016-02-08 at 1.07.04 PM

Clicking on the folder icon will bring up the Zotero interface for downloading any of the items in our collection.

Screen Shot 2016-02-08 at 1.13.09 PM

And to update this information we only need to run a single python script from the terminal to re-generate everything.

The code is not live on the Huon site just yet, but you can download and manipulate these pieces from an example file I uploaded to the Huon GitHub repository. You’ll probably want to start by installing zot_bib_web first to familiarize yourself with the configuration, and you’ll have a few settings to update before it will work for you: the library id, library type, api key, and collection ID will all need to be updated for your particular case, and the jQuery excerpt above will need to point to wherever you output the bibliography file.

These steps have strengthened the way in which we handle bibliographic metadata so that it can be more useful for everyone, and we were really only able to do it because of the many great open source libraries that allow others to build on them. It’s a great thing – not having to reinvent the wheel.

Categories
Publication

Library-Faculty Partnerships Enrich Undergraduate Teaching at Washington and Lee

[Originally published on the Digital Library Federation Contribute blog]

Washington and Lee University (W&L) is excited to be a part of the Digital Library Federation’s efforts, particularly as they pertain to promoting digital humanities on liberal arts campuses. The digital humanities initiative at W&L has grown out of longstanding attempts to connect faculty and staff working in related areas across the university. Our primary goal is to foster communication and training among librarians and faculty at all levels of technical skill in the service of encouraging new approaches to digital pedagogy and research methodology. These efforts grow out of two overlapping groups: the Digital Humanities Working Group, a collective of faculty and staff across the university interested in the intersection of information technology and humanities research and teaching, and the Digital Humanities Action Team, a joint initiative by W&L’s Information Technology Services (ITS) and the University Library that provides day-to-day guidance and training on integrating digital methodologies into faculty teaching and research. By partnering library faculty and staff with teaching faculty, we believe that we can develop undergraduate pedagogy in a way that benefits all participants. We bring digital humanities to bear on a liberal arts context by encouraging faculty research with undergraduate partners, by using digital tools in the classroom as opportunities to promote digital literacy, and by offering new occasions for collaborative teaching.

Undergraduates stand to learn a great deal from working on digital humanities projects, and these students offer enormous energy and resources to their adopted teams. The Huon d’Auvergne project, a digital edition being developed at W&L by Professor Stephen P. McCormick, library faculty, and inter-institutional collaborators, offers one such model for collaboration among faculty, students, and staff that collapses traditional pedagogical hierarchies. While students might begin to learn about the project in the classroom, after a semester course in textual encoding they are given the opportunity to work alongside their professor and digital humanities developers in an actual research setting. We encourage students to take ownership of their contributions to the project. Our students present at conferences, appear as co-authors on papers, and list project contributions on their CV. Through support from the office of the Dean of the College and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we stimulate such collaborations by offering competitive stipends to both the faculty and students involved. By further funding undergraduate research projects in digital humanities through a fellowship program, we provide training for students to explore their own interests with the same sort of support that we might offer humanities faculty.

We carry our support of digital projects and tools in the classroom beyond logistics and mechanics, using them as opportunities to educate students about more traditional information literacy topics. Many of our librarians involved in work with classroom instruction began their careers in cataloging or systems librarianship, but our digital humanities efforts have created a space in which they can translate these experiences into outward-facing pedagogy in metadata, intellectual property, and digital preservation. These teaching opportunities generate collaborations with subject and instruction librarians who already possess extensive training in curriculum design and information literacy instruction. When working with Omeka, for example, our Digital Scholarship Librarian provides students training in digitization, metadata conventions, and sustainability. While the digitization of original material often falls outside the scope of semester-long Omeka projects, she still takes the time to discuss copyright, attribution, and the ethical and legal use of digital materials. These courses often receive joint visits by our Access Services Librarian and Instructional Design Specialist who offer workshops in visual literacy. By dividing labor among related faculty in such a way we leverage expertise in information literacy from a variety of angles and combine them in a rich curriculum for students.

In our efforts to disperse technical knowledge beyond early adopters, we have been experimenting with different models of collaborative teaching. One such model, the “DH Studio,” involves pairing a traditional humanities course with a one-credit lab. The studio courses are taught by library faculty and give students dedicated time and expertise to learn and apply digital methodologies without sacrificing course content. We are also exploring more direct models of co-teaching in which course time and credits are extended to allow for “baked-in” digital methodology and course content. By partnering with French, journalism, and history professors, we have been able to offer courses in medieval French literature and textual encoding, multimedia storytelling and design, and text analysis approaches to histories of British scandal. Such hybrid courses offer students new avenues of study that educate the instructors as well. And by gearing digital assignments toward primary course objectives, we hope to show that digital humanities collaborations, far from detracting from disciplinary material, can actually challenge and enrich them. By working together, in the short term, digital humanities faculty gain disciplinary skills outside their normal area of expertise, and teaching faculty learn digital humanities skills and techniques in which they might not otherwise have training. In the long term, we aim for these same faculty members to develop the skill-sets necessary to teach these same courses and design new offerings without the same level of collaboration and support, allowing library faculty to further develop new courses themselves.

We see the library as the natural home for digital humanities initiatives on the liberal arts campus. The expertise of our faculty and staff in digital technologies and information literacy pedagogy, combined with our close relationships with ITS colleagues and concentration on the practical implications of digital scholarship, stands to enrich the undergraduate curriculum. We offer the library to our students as a space where they can meet faculty and staff as collaborators as well as educators.

Categories
Undergraduate Fellows

Piecing Together the Puzzle

Let me begin by announcing we have finally received the Hills family diaries that accompany the photograph albums! The father, Professor Hills, did not keep a journal, but his wife and daughter both kept diaries.

Moreover, since my last post, I’ve been working on sharpening my understanding of how I want my project to take shape. Particularly, I’ve been focused on a guiding argument and type of interface.

Colonialism still plays a huge role in my project, but I’ve also been considering ideas of regulation, objectification, voyeurism, and what Curtis Keim likes to refer to in his book Mistaking Africa: Curiosities and Inventions of the American Mind, the “Real Africa.” Specifically, I’m looking at the ways photography, film, and words, regulate our ideas of what we envision as the “Real Africa.” This Real Africa is a space rampant with tropes and stereotypes that make a spectacle of difference and deny Africans agency through practices of objectification. I want to show that even this collection of family vacation materials is not neutral. Rather, there is a particular function it serves in a broader social and historical context.

To articulate this point, there are several projects I want to incorporate into a larger exhibit. The webpage I am constructing uses Omeka as an interface, allowing me to separate my materials into a neutral collection with raw materials and a processed collection with an analysis of my findings. These are some of the main projects I aim to achieve:

  1. Digitization of materials (scanned photos, transcribed diary pages, mp4 files)
  2. An interactive map of the journey, tying the materials into a singular, cohesive, and visual narrative
  3. Trope mapping (which may take several shapes)
    1. Trope frequency through a word cloud
    2. The relationships between tropes with the inclusion of examples (picture a spider web map)
    3. Historical tracing of tropes and connections to hierarchy (how a history of colonialism has constructed Africa as a continent of different and singular representation)
  4. A virtual reconstruction of Africa as imagined by the Western eye

The fourth project I listed is very tentative and largely dependent on time constraints. However, I’m going to try to be as thorough as possible. I also want to make a point of demonstrating why exactly my project is important, so I will have a section discussing the consequences of misrepresentation.

I’m really excited about using Omeka, I think the layout will help streamline variation, pull everything together, and section it off in an accessible way. One of the Omeka based projects I’ve been admiring is Swarthmore College’s Black Liberation 1969 Archive. Finally, some of the software programs I’m looking at to help me create the individual projects are Neatline and Bocoup data visualization.

 

 

Categories
Undergraduate Fellows

Digital Humanities as an Agent of Communication

Having conceived of the idea to investigate the impact of the refugee crisis on German identity, my next and most immediate challenge has been to make rigorous abstractions from this research question. Consequently, I devised two approaches:

  1. Understand the refugee crisis
  2. Devise ways to portray important insights digitally in order to attribute meaning to the research question

The former relates to historical, cultural, political, and social considerations, while the latter has led me to contemplate the platform and communication of the research: Digital Humanities. In my readings over the past few weeks, the single, most emerging facet relating to DH has been its profound enrichment of communicating ideas. Observing data or reading words on a page evokes different emotions and levels of understanding than interacting with a concept, be it data, text, or other. Finding creative ways to communicate can enhance understanding and meaning (this is often accomplished by appealing to the five senses).

Contemplating the above, I have since devised a framework upon which I will structure my project via a digital platform. The five interconnected components will each play a role in the overarching theme:

  1. Overview of project (“I am”: Identity)
  2. History of Refugee Crisis (Timeline)
  3. Mapping (Digital Mapping)
  4. Refugees of Germany (Picture: Story)
  5. Field Research (Data Representation)

Finally, I’d like to bridge the distinction between portraying events versus scientific explanation. Ultimately, the intersection between scientific inquiry and digital humanities rings increasingly important: DH is a vehicle with which science can be effectively communicated to and received by all.