The first breakout session I’m attending is, as will be obvious from the title, is Libraries and Web 2.0. People attending include “straight-up” librarians, digital humanists, a programmer at NCSA even. Let’s see if I can capture what we talk about.

The European Navigator was originally intended to show people what the EU is, in general. But then teachers started using it in classrooms, with great success, and later began asking for specific documents to be added. The site talks about historical events, has interviews and “special files”, has a section devoted to education, and one for different European organizations. The interface is intricate yet easy to use, and uploaded documents (some of them scanned) are well captioned.

Teachers are asking for more on pedagogy/education, but the site’s maintainers feel they don’t have the skills to oblige. [vz: So are teachers willing to contribute content?] The site is having a bit of technical problems: the back end was based on an Access database exported into SQL (exporting is painful! quality control of exports takes a lot of time), and the front end is Flash (slow); they’ll be changing that. It’s made as a browser, which means a navigator within a navigator (which, Frederic Clavert says, is bad, because it doesn’t lend itself to Web 2.0 tool addition — vz: plus accessibility is pretty much shot, and they haven’t created special accessibility tools), and they have to ask users to contribute content, which ends up being too biased.

They do know who their audience is: they did a study of their users in 2008. That’s a great and important thing to do, for libraries.

They’re migrating to the Alfresco repository, which seems to be popular around the room. They want annotation tools, comment tools, a comment rating engine, maybe a wiki, but ultimately aren’t sure what web 2.0 tools they’ll want. They’re obliged to have moderators of their own to moderate illegal stuff (racist comments, for example), but for the most part it seems that the community will be able to self-regulate. Reserchers who are able to prove that they’re researchers will automatically have a higher ranking, and they’re thinking of a reputation-economy classification of users, where users who aren’t Researchers From Institutions but contribute good stuff will be able to advance in ranking. But this latter feature is a bit on the backburner, and — vz — I don’t actually think that’s a good thing. Starting out from a position of a default hierarchy that privileges the academe is actively bad for a site that purports to be for Europe as a whole, and will detract from participation by people who aren’t already in some kind of sanctioned system. On the other hand, part of ENA’s mission is specifically to be more open to researchers. They’re aware of the potential loss of users, and have thought about maybe having two different websites, but that’s also segregation, and they don’t think it’s a good solution. It’s a hard one.

On to the Library of Congress, Dan Chudnov speaking. They have two social-media projects: a Flickr project that’s inaugurating Flickr Commons, and YouTube, where LC has its own channel. YouTube users tend to be less serious/substantial in their responses to videos than Flickr users are, so while LC’s Flickr account allows (and gets great) comments, their YouTube channel just doesn’t allow comments at all.

They’ve also launched the World Digital Library, alongside which Dan presented the Europeana site. Both available in seven and six languages, respectively (impressive!). WDL has multi-lingual query faceting; almost all functionality is JavaScript-based and static, and comes out of Akamai, with whom LC has partnered; so the site is really really stable; on the day they launched, they had 35 million requests per hour and didn’t go down. Take-away: static HTML works really well for servability and reliability and distributability. Following straight-forward web standards also helps.

Good suggestion for Flickr Commons (and perhaps Flickr itself?): comment rating. There seems to be pushback on that; I wonder why? It would be a very useful feature, and people would be free to ignore it.

Dan Chudnov: the web is made of links, but of course we have more. Authority records, different viewers for the big interconnected web, MARC/item records from those, but nobody knows that. More importantly, Google won’t find it without screenscraping. What do you do about it? Especially when you have LC and other libraries having information on the same subject that isn’t at all interconnected?

Linked data, and its four tenets: use URIs as names for things; use HTTP URIs; provide useful information; include links to other URIs. This is a great set of principles to follow; then maybe we can interoperate. Break down your concepts into pages. Use the rel tag, embed information in what HTML already offers. So: to do web 2.0 better, maybe we should do web 1.0 more completely.

One site that enacts this is Chronicling America. Hundreds of newspapers from all over the country. Really great HTML usage under the hood; so now we have a model! And no “we don’t know how to do basic HTML metadata” excuse for us.

Raymond Yee raises a basic point: what is Web 2.0? These are the basic principles: it’s collective intelligence; the web improves as more users provide input. Raymond is particularly interested in remixability and decomposeability of it, and into making things linkable.

So, again, takeaways: follow Web 1.0 standards; link to other objects and make sure you can link your own objects; perhaps don’t make people get a thousand accounts, so maybe interoperate with OpenID or something else that is likely to stick around? Use encodings that are machine-friendly, machine-readable — RDF, JASN, XML, METS, OpenSearch, etc. Also, view other people’s source! And maybe annotate your source, and make sure you have clearly formatted source code?

There’s got to be a more or less central place to share success stories and best practices. Maybe Library Success? Let’s try that and see what happens.

(Edited to add: please comment to supplement this post with more information, whether we talked about it in the session or not; I’ll make a more comprehensive document out of it and post it to Library Success.

This post will also be cross-posted to the THATCamp blog and wiki, when I find my login credentials; I’ll collate from all three sources, so use whichever you want.)

Claire Warwick makes an announcement about the poster competition: the award for outstanding poster goes to “Bringing Southern Oral Histories Online” by Natasha Smith and her group from UNC Chapel Hill! Congratulations!

Next up, Harold Short and Julia Flanders, presidents of ALLC and ACH respectively. They thank the organizers, it’s truly been a fantastic conference. Harold invites us to London in July 2010 for DH10! Kings College London will be hosting. KCL is situated right on the Thames, is culturally partnered with BL, BM, Tate, Globe, National Theatre, National Gallery, Guildhall School of Music & Drama… what’s not to like? Conf co-hosted by Centre for Computing in the Humanities and the Centre for e-Research; conference itself takes place on the Strand campus of KCL. Affordable student accommodations at $55/night! (Holy cats, that’s fantastic for the center of London!) All roads lead to DH10, 7-11 July. And check out the website.

The conference after that, Digital Humanities 2011, will be at 2011, with local hosts Glen Worthey and Matt Jockers.

Neil Fraistat presents the last dance: “we have the best chance of keeping you the longest if we put the money at the end.” Each panelist speaks for up to 7min, discussing an actual grantee or a few important challenges that their grantees have tackled, or identify what they see as the 2-3 most important challenges to the field at present. When presentations are done, floor will open for general discussion.

First up, Brett Bobbley from Office of Digital Humanities, at the National Endowment for the Humanities. They give grants. To people like us. To start off, the Start-Up Grant program. One thing that’s cool about it is that it’s seed money for innovation. High-risk, high-reward model: if you have an interesting, innovative project, they give you money to get your act together. Some projects will fail! And failure is ok, this is the high-risk part. Failure is the new success. But other projects will succeed, and this is exciting because it’ll help them go for the big grants.

Another program: institutes program. Is about methodological training. If your campus is really good at something in the digital humanities, host a summer institute and train people on it. Text encoding, HPC, gaming, tool building, GIS, what’s next? You tell NEH, they’ll throw money at it.

More/other funding for international collaboration. DH is so collaborative and interdisciplinary in nature, they don’t want you doing your project alone. Many granting programs for this; check out the ODH website for more information.

Next is Helen Cullyer from the Scholarly Communications Program, Mellon Foundation. It’s clear that what digital humanists need is integrated environments for doing digital scholarship. Interoperability, tools and research use cases are all good. Mellon supports the creation of such environments on two scales: huge (Project Bamboo) and more specific disciplinary projects. An example of the latter is Integrating Digital Papyrology project. Go ahead, take a look. I’ll wait.

Ready? OK. It was funded because: it’s driven by scholarly needs; it incorporates existing electronic resources into an interoperable environments; software developed for it can be used in other projects; it has a standards-based approach; its approach to building a digital environment is broken down into stages; and finally, it is using resources and tools developed and sustained by a number of funding agencies and institutions, of which Mellon is just one.

On with Rachel Frick, National Leadership Grants, Institute of Museum and Library Services. IMLS established in 1996, is an independent federal agency, and is primary support source of federal support for 123K libraries and 17.5K museums, with a $270M annual budget. They give projects $40K all the way up to $1M for projects in categories such as research, demonstration projects, advancing digital resources, library and museum collaborations, collaborative planning grants. Annual deadline is Feb. 1, awards announced in September. They’re also interested in education for digital stewardship, digital preservation and curation; they preach collaboration, are looking for other ways to collaborate with other funding agencies and with scholars; and are keenly interested in sustainability, open access and institutional repositories.

Up comes Murielle Gagnon, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC, pron. “shirk”). One of the challenges for SSHRC is that they fund both the social sciences and the humanities, and they have a limited budget. So what to do with limited funding? Offer a limited scope of what they can do, and they’ve actually been able to achieve quite flashy results with their scholars, whom they need as champions for SSHRC.

Strategic research themes: image, text, sound and tech; environment and sustainability; north; aboriginal research; culture, citizenship and identities; management, business, finance. They have a partnership strategy and an international strategy.

In DH, they’re funding in three programs:

- Image, Text, Sound and Technology (ITST) program — seed grants;

- Research/Creation (not limited to technology, directed at profs in arts, perf arts, literature departments, $250K over three years to really go in depth in a research project in which practice informs theory); and

- the Digging into Data Challenge (new, with the NEH).

Ultimate message from SSHRC: keep applying, but keep fighting [for more funds from both governments and the private sector, for DH projects]!

Next: Stephen Griffin, Division of Information and Intelligent Systems, National Science Foundation. Some ideas for us to contemplate, to give us a sense of the NSF culture. Is there something in our species that draws us to stories? One NSF PI (Lou Lancaster?) is investigating. It’s this sort of thinking where masses of digital information have an advantage.

They want us to discern new things, and enable new knowledge and wisdom. [vz: I am partial to that wording.]

Human expression takes many forms, and what’s on the internet was originally focused on text, and still is, but expanding in more directions now. Humanities present much bigger computational challenges than the sciences. You can run a computer forever along a parameter space; but you can use it in more interesting ways. This summer, a US group over at the Sorbonne is looking at some scrolls that Napoleon brought back from Herculaeum, which were superheated but not burned. They’ll take ~20 micron slices and then digitally “unroll” the text and read it. That’s a computationally hard thing to do: we can unroll stuff with no problem; the problem is discriminating between the medium and whatever was used to write with. They’re thinking of using a particle accelerator to see whether they can elecromagnetically distinguish between the two.

[How cool.]

NSF funds things according to how loud the people wanting the funding are. Seriously, go to the higher-up NSF people and talk incessantly about yourselves. [vz: Good to know!]

Final note: be creative. Think in directions that people haven’t thought in for a long time.

Penultimate presenter is Dr. Christoph Kummel, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). (German Research Foundation, Library Svcs Division) Three important challenges to the field, according to them: information infrastructure; standardization; internationalization; methodological innovation; getting “passengers” where they want to go when they don’t necessarily know it themselves.

Finally, we hear from Prof. Shearer West, Arts and Humanities Research Council. Quickly about what AHRC does: baby of the UK Research Councils; look after humanities and arts in particular.

They’re into funding sandpits: lock a group of five people into a hotel for five days; whoever comes out alive, gets 3M GBP to innovate and research.

Digital Economy is another focus of theirs. Sorry, I didn’t catch what that’s all about, but here’s a link.

Sustainability, open access, impact, interdisciplinarity, collaboration, open innovation very important. Humanities can be a too-small voice in these systems, and they want to find a way to get the Humanities’ voice loud and clear so that they can stand up to their scientific collaborators.

Discussion time! As has become my convention for these posts, I won’t blog this but instead participate in it live. Hope you enjoyed this series, and please do add to it, whether information or questions/comments.

Stuart Moulthrop, “Literature, ‘The Literary,’ and the Dataworld.”

Now he’s talking about the wake-up call we all got last fall when budgets were cut, furloughs were imposed, dubious times. Radical notion of uncertainty in the economy. Stuart wants to do something to that doubt — bring it home to his own and Cayley’s confrontation with digital media and/or digital humanists. We’re in a system where value is up for grabs. Text, digitized, is said to be unstable, and instability is said to be less valuable, but Wikipedia *works* (says SM, knowing that some disagree).

Paul Krugman says that in order to stabilize the economy again, we need banks to become boring again. Is there a cultural equivalent of boring banks? Is the eruption of social media the cultural equivalent of our financial crisis? Is making new media safe for traditional humanism a future for the digital humanities?

If we want to avoid the hysterical outcome, what happens? Where do we go instead? Blind resistance (like that in the 1990s) probably won’t play anymore in the financial OR cultural sector; boring banks aren’t an option anymore. We can’t shut the ‘net down with a switch.

Things keep moving. Another time is coming. From system-modelling to systemic media: ubiquitous instrumentality of data. An early precursor of this: Context Free Art (mix culture, socially emergent genetic phenomena)

Bruce Sterling, “Mariek Neko” and The Caryalds: oh no, we’re reverting to being readers of books again. (We don’t need to justify this. We read the Old Medium.) SM reads but also codes. Reading and coding is a hybrid, and digital humanists are literate/technical hybrids. Are we then able to escape the fossilization of media? Maybe, but more importantly: you need hybrids like us because systemic post-media could fossilize in ways print never managed. Those who understand the fossilization of print culture and its overcoming are uniquely suited to resist this process in newer media.

Another future for digital humanists: we’re ironically literate. [Someone fill in here?]

Are we, at last, the heroes of our own story? Maybe, but not so fast. Last year’s crash means we should be thinking about our own practices, where they’re coming from, where they’re going. Systemic doubt may be useful; how, we’re still working that out.

Steven Edward Jones, “The Social Text as Digital Gamespace: or, what I learned from playing Spore.”

To what extent did a time-shiifted social model become the backbone of the development of Spore?

Steven is a traditional textual scholar by training, so starts by comparing texts in games — not in terms of their content, but formally, as structured systems for sharing and continued re-editing of their content objects.

The objects of our academic attention exist as chains of events. McGann: models [of texts, of discourse] come to us these days through games and role-playing environments. Games are inherently social; their meaning are in their playing, or performance that’s based on the dynamics of improvisation. (Most obvious example are MMORPGs, but even playing on stand-alone PCs keeps to this.) Rules constrain you, but give you freedom to improvise within them, bouncing off of them. [vz: this is why constrained writing is attractive to me.]

Talks about improvisation games in the theatre, the “yes, and…” model of playing, accepting whatever went before and going with that. Mateas’ and Stern’s game Facade was explicitly based on theatrical improv. Dialogue is produced procedurally by the computer based on what happens in the game. Facade consciously explores what author believes to be the improvisational nature of all games. In some way or another, all games consist of seeking out intelligent life — sets of computer algorithms, bots, AIs, etc.

Spore goes through the stages of cell – creature – tribe – civilization – space. Creatures made starting from graphical primitives (blob, limbs, mouth, etc) and are procedurally animated (the animation is improvised based on your choices of body parts). The player is part author, part editor; she structures and re-structures objects to allow possibilities to emerge.

Talks about SETI. Started out kinda nutcase-like, then became both PR-friendlier and more computational. Carl Sagan mentioned, and “billions upon billions of stars.” Spore is a game played in a proliferation of parallel universes. Distributed, time-shifted content creation and sharing. (Sharing: players who create characters can upload those characters to a Spore website, and download other people’s characters into their own games.) Steven encounters other people’s creatures in his own games, can cooperate with them or kill them or whatever, and doesn’t affect other people’s game worlds.

Rather than an MMO (Massively Multi-Player Online Game), Spore is a Massively Single-Player Online Game.

Game was in dev’t 2005-8, precisely at the time social media were flourishing.

The time-shifted editorial improvisations of objects (creatures) are called “evolution” in Spore.

Things like TextArc, which process and visualize texts and then present results in interesting shapes, are doing what computer games have been doing for decades.

Games such as spore offer a social and a structuring space. Creating and editing content objects makes it seem like they exist in parallel universes, and yet they are all able to interact with each other. Likewise, people in textual studies work in parallel universes, yet interact with each other.

The idea is to collect and protect peer-reviewed “seed text”, safely expose it to annotation and manipulation. Many different kinds of markup on the same text result in many different changed texts. That’s what Spore does, too.

Spore has stuff to teach us. It remains fundamentally coherent, with a stable backbone, while allowing players authoring and editorial power.

Meanings we produce together are new, but not generated out of nothing: they are generated out of seeds left by others.

Nicoletta Adamo-Villani, with her paper “Digital and Virtual Architecture: a review of two projects,” isn’t here. So floor is opened to questions. I’ll publish this so that perhaps people can supplement it.

Proposition: a computational stylistic analysis of function words in two sets of texts from the same period and related genres can support more traditional approaches to literary analysis of those texts.

Computational stylistics — issues: lack of interest by traditional humanists; appears to sacrifice contextual and social elements in favor of formal and llinguistic properties; no disciplined way of interpreting what the extracted language data mean, when they’re out of context.

Quantitative approaches look at tendencies and not at absolutes; so how do you study attribution in that context? Using cognitive linguistics and function words, we can think about how attribution works and why.

Louisa’s study is of 60 tragedies, 1580-1641, 48 for the stage and 12 closet tragedies from the Sidney circle. The sample size is approximately 1m words. She regulated spelling, expanded contracted forms, and did not tag homographs.

Using Intelligent Archive, she extracted word frequencies within and across plays, and transferred the data into SPSS for further function word analysis.

About closet plays: they were written for private circulation withiun an elite literary culture, intellectually superior to and more politically radical than commercial drama. Women writers present in closet drama! Stage plays, on the other hand, are Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe.

In commercial plays, we see a lot of personal interaction (thee, thou, him, me), and in closet plays the language is much more discursive. In general, stage plays draw the participants into the discourse world, and closet drama is more about ideas, not action.

Mariam is the most theatrical of the closet plays: frequent use of pronouns, particularly anaphoric pronouns, emphasizing shared nature of discourse space and creating a certain intimacy. Mariam, in a soliloquy, refers to herself several times by name, in third person, placing the conception of “Mariam” on the metaphorical stage shared between speaker and addressee: there’s an implied conceptual distance. It’s as though she is observing herself from an outside position.

Concluding, the role of function words is primarily said to be a matter of construal: an expression’s meaning isn’t just the concept it evokes; it’s equally important how that content is construed. [vz: If this doesn't make sense, I apologize: this is another talk that went over my head.]

Elizabeth Anne Swanstrom is next, presenting “‘Terminal Hopscotch’: Nativating Networked Space in Talan Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia.” [vz: N.B.: LtP reportedly breaks Firefox. Oddly enough, use IE instead. If you're not familiar with the work, be prepared to be overwhelmed and disoriented. But persist, and you will be richly rewarded.]

Are reading practices in flux as a result of recent technological innovation? Is deep reading on a computer impossible? Liz says, no. Deep absorption doesn’t only happen with the printed word, ink, paper.

NYT Paper Cuts blog, 4.21.09, asks: “Who’s Killing ‘Deep-Focus Reading’?” The answer seems to be Kindle. But, Liz says, the medium doesn’t preclude deep reading, and LtP requires both of the reader: a deep reading, and the ability to browse, or “hopscotch” (Memmott’s term).

LtP: created in 2000, four large sections, each very very dense, combining snippets of code, text and images. DHTML and JavaScript. Starts out deceptively simple; mouseovers trigger complex layers. Intriguing use of space.

Earlier interpretations primarily focus LtP’s linguistic elements; Liz is analyzing the use of space and its role in identity.

Bachelard: house provides a shelter for the I, the non-I that maintains and protects the I. LtP’s lack of home and hearth forces the reader into continual motion. Though patient clicking transports you to Ka-space, which is experienced differently from LtP’s manifesto-like spaces. There we can rest; there’s not so much dispersion.

Spatial characteristics of the network don’t fit easily into the strategic layering Memmott does. He layers code over text, and the story of Echo and Narcissus over the work.

Layered grids, which Memmott uses, are emblems of the modern in art. Memmott, though, uses grids as perspectival and dislocating: we aren’t given reference points. Memmott says he thinks of them as something of a visual anchor; as screen becomes more complex, grids add noise but also don’t change.

Multiple points of focus on every screen. Can read in many directions, incl. diagonal. Many points of transition and hidden passageways. Until the reader becomes very familiar with the text, she is subject to its processes. Initially disorienting, the grid actually provides straight lines along which to measure navigation.

Beginning of “Exe.Termination”, last part of LtP: beginning is calm and simple, gradually building up to a frenzy that loops and never ends. The climactic point of the text never really ends; there’s no closure. We’re left moving, the feeling of terminal hopscotch persists.

Ed Finn follows, with “Cultural Capital in the Digital Era: Mapping the Success of Thomas Pynchon.”

This is Ed’s dissertation research, and is ongoing, so put away your weapons, y’all [he requests].

What is it that allows commercially *and* literarily successful authors succeed in both of these spheres, each of which seems to aim to exclude the other?

Cultural capital: a set of tools or signs that participants in a field must master to interpret and engage cultural products in context. (Bourdieu) Compelling metaphor, but not the best one for Ed’s work, because it puts focus on heavy philosophical issues (like value), and ultimately we spin off into an untenable debates. You can’t spend it or trade it.

Instead, let’s talk about ideational networks: webs of ideas, interactions as cultural passageways.

Reading is a social act: we make cultural choices, have conversations, experience the lives of others around reading. This is especially true online: email, blogs, commenting, sharing.

Ed’s data: book reviews of Pynchon’s works 1963-2008, both professional and Amazon reader reviews; recommendations on LibraryThing and Amazon’s recommendation engine; PMLA citations; and book availability as reflected in WorldCat, Amazon and LibraryThing.

Why Pynchon? Well, he has this postmodern, anonymous fame. He’s the most famous active anonymous author in the U.S. His only officially sanctioned photo is his bag-over-head cameo on The Simpsons. He hasn’t retreated into rural seclusion mode; he lives in Manhattan, does what other people do, lunches with authors, has net presence — he’s just cultivated an aura where people willingly read his stuff without a bio or known personality.

Another reason: his style of the paranoid sublime. He writes about the challenges of intersubjectivity; communication and noise; and consumerism as anxiety of connection [advertisements --> purchases].

Finally, Pynchon is interesting because he trains readers to question causality, history, social norms of temporality, and to seek connections everywhere — to adopt our own paranoid style. His novels are posthistorical metafiction.

Ed presents two Wordle images — one of professional reviews of Gravity’s Rainbow, the other — of Amazon reviews. I’ll try to find the images.

Pynchon MLA citations graph: citations started taking off after Gravity’s Rainbow. After he started publishing, there’s been a consistent level of annual attention, though also peaks and valleys (that follow similar timeframes between books).

A bunch of other graphs; I wonder if Ed’s slides will be online. Some surprises with Amazon recommendations: Pynchon novels clump with other Pynchon novels; but, for example, Toni Morisson’s novels don’t clump with other works by her. Also: Amazon thinks that people who buy Gravity’s Rainbow tend to also buy Alan Moore’s The Watchmen. This implies a strong cultural connection, and if you believe this rhetoric, then this is evidence of cultural capital in action.

William Kretzschmar and William Porter, presented by WK, “Library Collaboration with Large Digital Humanities Projects.”

“If you stand still, you die” is nowadays a proverb in American business. The phrase has become popular also in computer role-playing games, where it’s literally true. Turns out, it’s also relevant to DH projects. They might be completed, but they need continued support — for sustainability, which is a huge issue and has been discussed at DH conferences and in DHQ. This paper continues the theme of sustainability. Proposes that collaboration with the library is the only realistic option for long-term sustainability in university settings.

Stand-still-and-die problem, for us, is twofold: 1. Digital environment keeps changing, and shows no sign of stopping. 2. We need to have continuous access to new financial and human resources just to keep up with the changes in media and operating environments.

Here’s an example of a big institutional project: Linguistic Atlas Project. Started in 1929, has been at U of Georgia with Bill since the 1980s. Each of the stages of gathering and digitizing/converting data has required funding. The Atlas is lucky to have a small endowment, which provides money for student developers to upkeep the computers involved. Another asset for the Atlas project is Bill’s status as a faculty member. The project’s financial needs are increasingly large with time, and he’s spent a lot of time fundraising.

Five years ago: another option emerged. Georgia created Research Computing Service. High-performance processing, with some storage and web services. Intended as an institutional resource, but the funding structure changed and it became a fee-based service for research with annual external funding. So the Atlas needed to find external funding, or else rely on indulgence from colleagues in better-funded fields. The univ. has declined to fill in the financial gaps between the Atlas’ needs and its funds, so the Atlas re-acquired a server and continued on its own.

In comes Bill Potter, the University Librarian, and says the library is expanding multimedia collections and needs a TON of storage space, so perhaps the Atlas’ 20Tb of audio files (and even more image files) could be hosted by the library. But who’ll pay for it, and who’ll do the work?

They’ve created an archive. Storage: LTO-4 computer tape instead of spinning disk. Refresh cycle by Library staff allows for updated tech. Atlas resources create original tapes, and distribute copies as requested. Atlas grant funding can provide equipment in the Library and in its research office.

Atlas will generate & store research & operational metadata, including OLAC as a public resource. The library will create a database for the Atlas staff to populate. The primary burden for creation and maintenance of metadata remains with the Atlas project, not with the Library.

As for the Atlas’ web presence on the Library’s servers: the website is pretty complex, heavily used. So: one problem with any interactive site is the need to work on the scripting required for interaction. That’s different from regular site maintenance. So they’ve said two things: there’s no expectation of programming maintenance by Library IT staff; and the new site’s maintenance will be distributed: basic web access provided by the Library; highly scripted interactive functions (like GIS for mapping) — by the project, which will extend the life of existing tools and look for new ones. Content distinguished from tools. Library archives content but the Project maintains the website and tools.

Security: the Atlas will use VM to separate the Atlas site from the other Library web services. Its operating invironment will be integrated with what the library is already using. That means no Flash server, no Cold Fusion, but yes specialized software and scripts.

Themes in collaboration have emerged:

-Integration is central: alignment of digital work of the Library and Atlas.

-Content and tools are different: information should last forever, but tools can only be temporary

-Resources: the collaborators have to respect the different resources of the Library and the Atlas

The answers to these questions lead the authors toward an institutional repository.

Hamed Alhoori et al., presented by Richard Furuta, “Supporting the Creation of Academic Bibliographies by Communities through Social Collaboration.”

[Before he starts on his paper, some remarks on previous papers in the session:] There exist a couple of different levels to collaboration. Authors are based in CS dept, and have been working w/people in other fields for ~15yrs now. Their belief: an effective collaboration involves three partners: someone who is interested in computing, someone who researches a particular area, and the library. N.B.: CS is no richer than anyone else, are willing to share resources, and also appreciate when others share resources with them.

When you say computing, you don’t necessarily mean CS. CS departments have many people who are hard to get along with, just like humanities depts. There’s a view of computing that’s monolithic, but needs to be broken down: need people willing to find a common language with collaborators.

The authors’ work says that when we start talking about social collab/mechanisms, we don’t fully understand what’s going on. We can build a site by throwing in interesting elements found on other sites, but understanding why those elements are effective is a different thing.

Authors are working on a testbed (emphasized as a testbed, not yet a product but a thought piece) for scholarly bibliographies. The two students involved are both CS PhD students, interested in the tech and educational aspects of Web 2.0.

Motivation for this came out of thinking about the central nature of scholarly bibliographies to broad dissemination of academic results. Problem: too many sources to track (2.5m articles published yearly in 25k peer-reviewed journals). Also, papers not available digitally are becoming invisible.

Traditional models of bibliography editing centralize evaluation and consistent quality. High price to pay: delay of months or years. Authors’ key questions: can users who benefit from bibliographies also contribute to it? And if yes, can quality be retained?

Crowdsourcing naturally comes to mind.

Research premises: yes, can use social collab. can support and reduce costs of creating a scholarly bibliography while ensuring its accuracy. It can also be used to create new features (tools?) for the bibliography.

Existing bibliographies (Cervantes Project, World Shakespeare Bibliog., Galileo Project, Whitman Archive): tend to be multilingual; may or may not be annotatable; tend to not allow saved searches; and don’t, as a rule, allow for social collaboration.

Authors put together an experimental interface using the existing Cervantes bibliography, adding personalization features: can create personal pages; blog features; identification of related items; export and import; make connections between items.

Added multilanguage capability (on-the-fly translation) for interface elements (automatic) and for content (automatic/manual) using a Google API. Acceptable, but not great. There’s also a moderation process: editor can decide what to do with an individual entry. Can approve, disapprove, delete or (to some degree) modify. Not as simple as might appear: once you approve something, what happens when someone modifies it? Sticky issues.

Looked then at other systems that allow social citations: CiteULike, Connotea, social bookmarking, BibSonomy. Several problems: citations tend to be redundant; there’s spam; there are phantom author names and phantom citations. All these are not a good sign of scholarly research, and would affect the significance (impact factor) of a journal or other publication.

Thinking about having a combination of an amateur bibliography created by non-professionals, and one that meets the requirements of the professionals.

Social citations sites tend to have different types of groups: private (nobody knows about it); closed (special need to approve a member, which tends to create bottlenecks), and open (which tends to require a lot of editing/moderating).

Overall sketch of the authors’ approval: there’s a graduated way of getting into a community. Users can read and post anything but their citations won’t be included until they’re approved; Collaborators are allowed to approve; and finally, Moderators can edit. In deciding who is who, they’re looking not so much for pre-existing fame but for accuracy and relevance of contributions, and for people who remain active in the process. Hoping to evaluate these qualities automatically.

Some drawbacks on relying on manually selected moderators: time consuming; people lose interest/become inactive; and, in interdisciplinary bibliographies, it can be hard to decide whether a citation is spam.

This is reputation-based social moderation. Approval of the contributions can happen by a moderator of by some determined number of collaborators.

How to move from one level to another: how many citations have they put in, and how often do they do this? how much have they tagged, rated, reviewed, translated or filtered?

Initial evaluation of this project: Cervantes Project worked with the system and both manually. The developed system behaved just about as well as manually developed bibliographies. So yes, you can start to build social systems that would behave about as well as manual ones. The catch is, you need to evaluate these systems, and do a lot of study.

Project has got potential. More extensive evaluation needed. There’s a need for new assessment metrics: do you compensate a user for finding bad entries? how would demoting people work, if there’s already promoting, and what effect will that have on the community? Also need to identify hidden spam to get statistics to automate the process of filtering and adapting existing work.

Stan’s specialty: interface design; Alan’s: book history. So they’re thinking: what does it mean to evaluate interfaces? They looked at tool building traditions and interpretive traditions of both UI design and book design. Prototypes are theories, and editions (some say) are theories. In what ways can the UI design process interact with critical interpretation? What does the UI try to convince me of, and how do I engage with that?

Materialist Hermeneutics. People are distinguishing between computer and computing, and — in book history — authoring and manufacturing.

Digital objects can be remediated, born-digital, single-author and and collaborative, patterns related to cultural analysis, human-computer interfaces, visualization tools. Not all digital objects are making an argument.

Design comes in different flavors too: critical design (around the notion of the chair: how about several different chairs you can’t sit on?); hermeneutic design.

This is an opportune moment to be having this discussion about design: there are now scholarly journals (such as DHQ, frex) where you can access digital objects. So tools and other objects can support your argument, and a reader might jump out of the article, view the object, and come back.

What’s an argument? It’s contestable; defensible; substantive; has a cultural warrant (conventions). See also Booth, Collomb and Williams, The Craft of Research.

How does an object argue? Probly not syllogistically; it doesn’t have words. Maybe with visual rhetoric; through being situated within what we already understand. As with verbal arguments, visual arguments require unpacking, testing, ruminating, which can be done with words or other visual arguments. Not everyone will know all applicable contexts, like with texts.

Designers, like authors, are not always the best critics of their own work (and arguments).

Stephanie Posavec created a literary organism. She went through Kerouac’s On the Road and drew flowers in different colors and in clusters, to represent themes in the book. What arguments is she trying to make? An infographic can be both meaningful and eautiful; and, a prospect on the whole text is a worthwhile thing to have.

Is her argument contestable? Oh yes: writing without words. Is it defensible? Stan doubts it: access to the words is a significant factor that should be included. Is it substantive? Stan says, a perspective without tools (like pie charts) is of limited utility.

Another example: Throwing Bones, by Kirsten Uszkalo. Arguments it makes: a tool, like a website, should be customized, and the customization should help attract domain experts. She also says that for early modern English witchcraft reserachers, the piles of images that are at the core of the tool are appropriate.

Her argument is somewhat contestable (there are other custom tools); potentially defensible (visual evidence may not be sufficiently compelling); and substantive: it could represent a new approach to the design of research tools.

Another example, by Cheok: Poultry Internet. A way to interact with your pet chicken when you’re away from home. Chicken has a jacket, you have a doll; you stroke the doll, the chicken feels it.

Arguments it’s making: tech can be used to intervene on cases of previous inhumane action. Tech should support animal-human relationships. Warm-heartedness is a research objective. (Apparently, the chickens do enjoy this, experimentally.)

Contestable: yes. Defensible: perhaps not, this is an ideological work. Substantive: yes! Insofar as animal-human relationships are significant (and it’s far). Certainly made Stan think: I’ve never done a thing for chickens!

Michael Sperberg-McQueen, “What is transcription? (part 2)” [Oh, I am NOT going to do justice to this. A lot of it is going to be over my head.]

Describes the state of progress of an ongoing project aiming to represent concepts as formulae through some formal logical notation.

We read a transcription, and learn about the exemplar it transcribes. How does that happen? Propositional content changes hands, and the transcription makes assertions or licenses inferences from the exemplar. Authors model these assertions, and model disagreement as logical contradiction. But contradictions need to be made harmless by being relativized, so the authors add a second level in which there aren’t any contradictions, only different readings.

Assertions model 1: transcriptions *convey* logical content.

Assertions model 2: document level. Documents have tokens of particular types. Tokens are basic or compound. Types are basic or compound. Disagreement among transcriptions is contradiction in their assertions. Assertions may underspecify the document.

Assertions model 3: readings level [that second level mentioned above]. Readings *attribute* tokens of particular types to documents. A reading of a transcription generates a reading of the exemplar.

The document level: it’s a level of description; it’s a language for talking about documents, provided by the documents themselves (see above).

Tokens and types: basic tokens map to basic types (letters of an alphabet); token sequences map to text flows (word sequences?); and regions map to structural units (texts?). These notions can be formalized (and have been; anyone have the URL?)

In an ideal world, every documents are determinate and univocal. Tokens are easily distinguished, maps to exactly one type, token sequences have exactly one sequence per set of tokens each, etc. But in fact, some documents are indeterminate. A single token may map to more than one type, and that’s not always because we are ignorant of something; sometimes that’s intentional. (See Scott Kim’s Origami.)

How do we solve this? We might postulate special kinds of types, which are themselves a disjunction or conjunction of other types.

There follow a bunch of very technical examples of formalized readings. I’ll point you to the slides later. Am in way over my head.

In conclusion: a lot of further work to be done, and today is Quebec Day. Bonne fete, Quebec!

Geoffrey Rockwell and Shawn Day, presented by both, “Burying Dead Projects: Depositing the Globalization Compendium.”

Geoffrey first. How do you end a digital project? Today we talk about the end of a particular compendium project, Globalization and Autonomy.

Project background: got a Major Collaborative Research Initiative grant of 2.5M in 2002. Major print outcome is a 10-volume academic edition. Funding ended 2007. But is the project really done?

Objective: to investigate the relationship between globalization and the processes of securing and building autonomy.

Process: Word documents submitted; document encoded and linked; references checkd; document uploaded to server; full articles generated. Technologies: XML (TEI), MySQL, HTML, CSS, XSLT. There’s a perpetual issue of updating the links to glossary issues, and another of maintaining the bibliography; massive iteration problem. Operating questions: what’s the Compendium? What do we deposit?

The problem: What is the legal requirement? “All research data collected with the use of SSHRC funds must be preserved and made available for use by others within a reasonable period of time.” Oof, hard. How can we do this better? We can design for closure.

Shawn Day’s turn. The Questions: What do we deposit? Where do we deposit it? Project authors documented their thinking process here.

First, they identified the deposit components: content; code; process; user experience. The deposit package wants the best of these components; with the code, this isn’t very clear (though the fact that it’s being extracted for documentation and not for preservation probably made that easier). They’re not depositing a working system; databases not stored in native format; no tarball of the whole site. Instead, they gave enough info to recreate the whole compendium if needed. The purpose of deposit is not only this, but so that people can study the compendium and use it in perhaps unexpected ways.

They’re trying to recreate the experience in as simple a form as possible, and so captured the user experience in HTML and PDF files. Interaction is limited, but you are *able to gain the interactive experience*. Archiving the project in a more tech.complex way might become obsolete sooner, and you wouldn’t have any interactive experience.

So, in the end, here’s the deposit solution: create deposit package; document the experience; have it in multiple formats and multiple deposit locations. And bury it; sever your emotional ties; go on to the next thing.

There’s a problem with funding, where people run out of money and time before they’re done, and projects get undead; so maybe that’s a good argument for adequate funding.

Talk about undertaking and cemeteries as services for long-term preservation; repositories. People seem to like that comparison.

Geoffrey Rockwell presents a paper he wrote with Stefan Sinclair, Piotr Organisciak and Stan Ruecker, “Ubiquitous Text Analysis.”

How do you connect texts with appropriate tools? The recent Tools for Data-Driven Scholarship workshop concluded that:

1. Tools need to work better with other tools.
2. Tools need to connect better with content and use content in a more robust way.
3. Tools need better mechanisms for discoverability by the scholars who need them.

Humanists are used to looking at documents, not at using them as tokens to be processed by tools. A pipe-and-flow diagram is too abstract for most humanists. The TAPoR project workbench is better than a diagram, but still too abstract for some people who didn’t quite get the paradigm. So they surveyed users, and added an “analyze this” view: text on one side, tools (including suggested compatible tools) on the other. Does same thing as workbench, but allows you to view the text at the same time as you view the processed data.

But you still had to create an account and choose a text to study. So they’ve abandoned the user-account model, and are thinking more about ubiquitous text analysis.

From the beginning, TAPoR was conceived as a broker for tools as text services. They provided information for users interested in embedding tools into their projects. It also occurred to them to provide custom HTML, like for example a collapsible, discrete toolbar embedded into an online project. This is documented and other people can use it, but it tends to conflict with other CSS and JavaScript, so not so easy to embed into new project.

Now they’re developing a YouTube-inspired application, originally called FlashTAT (Flash Text Analysis Tool), but now called TAToo (temporary tattoos forthcoming). Doesn’t conflict with existing JS/CSS, interface simple and encourages you to explore further. It’s easily embeddable, though not extensively tested.

You can change some things, like the endpoint URL (on your server, if you don’t want to depend on TAPoR’s), links to new CSS stylesheets so you can make the tool look like the rest of your project, and identifying the root directory for specific text analysis.

Next tool Geoffrey presents is a Facebook plugin called Digital Texts 2.0. Social bibliography: what you’re reading, what other people are reading, and so on.

Another new tool: Voyeur. A set of tools embedded right into the prose of an essay. Not so much for content providers as for research authors.

So what do we learn? Tools are discoverable by users, but perhaps in unexpected ways. Authors’ approach is to embed tools right into text (see Voyeur link above). That way they’re hard to miss; on the other hand, they don’t connect with each other very well.

Embedding these tools into larger projects with a lot of data presents challenges that are in the process of being addressed. One way to deal with that is for people to install the tools on their own servers, but then we have a code forking problem.

Embedded tools, esp. opaque ones like the ones that use Flash, are difficult to customize, particularly in terms of graphic design, and don’t blend into their host sites.

Embedding tools is well and good, but tools need to be clearly distinguished from the original object, in part so that they don’t confuse other tools.

Most difficult challenge ahead: good, productive interaction between the cultures of digital libraries (which are about services [and implied stability of content and long-term maintenance]) and digital tool development (which is about experimenting and innovation [and implied changeability of content, and moving on to other projects]). One solution might be to hand the code of an innovative project over to a library, or better yet, to an entity that’s set up to run cyberinfrastructure in the long term.

Geoffrey Rockwell presents (again, joined by his co-authors) a paper written with Patrick Juola, Stefan Sinclair and Stephen Downie, “T-Rex: A Text Analysis Research Evaluation eXchange”

Problem of tools: we’re reinventing them over and over. No one disputes the need for reliable tools that enable us to ask interesting questions about content. The problem is that we keep asking for The Perfect Tool that will scratch our itch, but The Perfect Tool isn’t there. Nor is it forthcoming!

If a problem doesn’t go away, it’s a fact. Suppose development was a fact of DH research; what then?

Hermeneutical assuptions: the dev’t of analytical tools is interpretative, practice iteratively, not service work but can inform such work with innovation. How, then, may we think through analytics for community?

Authors propose a way we can reinvent tools together through evaluation and exchange.

First round of the TADA research eXchange competition (T-REX), spring 2008: idea was to start developing reserach conversation where tools could be documented, evaluated, compared and researched. Categories in the competition: best new web-based tool; idea for a web-based tool; idea for improving a current web-based too; idea for improving the interface of the TAPoR Portal; and experiment of text analysis using high performance computing.

They got eleven submissions, judged by a panel of three judges. Seven of the submissions were recognized as contributing to the imagination of the field.

What would a mature community like that look like? Stephen Downie talks about MIREX (Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange). It began in 2005, meant to be an evaluation exchange and not a contest. Its tasks are defined by community debate. Data sets are collected and/or donated to MIREX; participants submit their code to IMIRSEL, and then meet at ISMIR to discuss results. Data is then posted to a wiki. Also, MIREX has a dedicated and mandatory half-day poster session at ISMIR.

The MIREX model: they have a standardized set of queries/tasks; standardized collections; and standardized evaluations of results. Since 2005, when MIREX was started with a suite of 10 tasks, they’ve grown healthily to 18 tasks in 2008, with 168 processing runs. That’s a lot of music information retrieval, used for a lot of research.

Tasks are stuff like audio artist identification, audio cover song identification (I give you Dylan, can you find me covers of his stuff?), score following, symbolic key finding, many others.

Ongoing issues:

People still have a contest mentality, even though it’s not a contest. So they keep coming up with new metrics that willl help them score best in some category. As a result, data warps.

Buggy code. Leaving task definitions to the last minute; expediency over the interesting/meaningful. Lack of qualitative evaluations. Need stronger community leadership in tasks.

In the end, this is about people, not algorithms, so you have to get people to play with the tool.

Patrick Juola up next, talking about T-REX 2009. This year T-REX hopes to follow the MIREX format more closely; get community input on challenge problems; create a testbed for evaluation of working systems; and keep an open-ended forum for ideas. Sounds good.

Tasks: identify challenge problems; develop framework for eval; establish community buy-in; create and distribute results (DH10?), and hold kaffeeklatch for gossip and discussion.

Challenges: critical mass of participants; clear challenge definitions; platform independence; forum availability.

Timeline: Sept-Oct: discussion; Nov: challenges complete; Feb: submissions; Mar-Apr: evaluation; May: results; June: posters.

If it’s not clear by now, they want YOU to participate. Won’t you? Contact Patrick Juola, use the wiki, go to the 2009 T-Rex website. Come play, they say.

Piotr Organisciak presenting a paper he co-wrote with Geoffrey Rockwell and Stan Ruecker, as well as Susan Brown and Kamal Ranaweera (are you seeing a collaborative authorship trend in this session?): “Mashing Texts: Supporting collections level text analysis.”

Piotr is here to inform us, not impress us. Got it.

2005 Summit on Digital Tools in the Humanities, we asked: how can we easily locate documents (in mult. formats and multiple media), find specific information and patterns across large numbers of diferently formatted documents, and share our results with others in a range of scholarly disciplines and social networks?

JiTR [pron. jitter]: Just-in-Time Research. It’s a Mashing Texts prototype, which allows you to manage collections of digital items and run tools to gather, clean or analyze them.

Texts are wrapped into collections [much like Omeka]. They’re operating on a Personas and Scenarios model: personas are imagined possible users that “act as stand-ins for real users”. If the end goal is value for users, why not begin with them? The main deliverable, at this time, is conceptual.

The model itself goes like this: personas –> scenarios [actions they'd want to achieve; tool features connected to contexts] –> wireframing [layout hypotheses without design] –> mockups [adding design] –> coding [translation of mockups into a product].

Example of a scenario: Kate, an independent resercher, creates a shared collection; runs some processes to auto-populate it; labels new items and annotates them; and is emailed whenever someone adds new stuff.

[demo demo demo. I wonder if Piotr's slides will be online.]

Implications of this project:
-Ecological fit–compatibility with existing tools and innovations–is important.
-Need to reconcile the editing and the just-in-time collection crowds.

Stefan Sinclair, chair of the ACH jobs effort, is putting on a jobs slam! Like speed-dating, but different. Job seekers are going to spend 30 seconds each presenting themselves, and perhaps they’ll get hooked up with jobs. But first, job opportunities:

Brett Bobley: NEH digital humanities center fellowships! NEH pays both you and the center to get you set up, and you do research for a year. *sigh* Dream job. If only I didn’t already have a dream job, I’d totally apply.

Neil Fraistat: MITH has a job opening, another assistant director in charge of web programming and proofreading! Get in touch with them if you are such a person or know of such people.

Claire Warwick: University College London has a postdoc fellowship in user experience of digital reading, connected with the INK project. A year; all being well [funded], five years. They want someone with a background in user studies.

Stefan Sinclair: McMaster University has a digital humanities/high performance computing postdoc fellowship. First position of its kind, one year with other possibilities. They want to prototype not only larger-scale text analysis that takes weeks, but also on-demand HPC.

Now, for job seekers.

Amanda French… isn’t here! PhD in English, studies the villanelle and other poetic forms, website design, information architecture, usability, DH curriculum development.

Sarah Toton! PhD in American Studies expected this December. She’s experienced in digital project planning, project management, information architecture etc. She’s writing a dissertation on robots!

John Murray. His B.S. is in Digital Narratives. He’s a programmer, writer and artist… and he has a job already! Nice.

Tanya Clement! PhD in English Lit, experienced in TEI text encoding, visualizations and text analysis. Matt Kirschenbaum, her dissertation supervisor, says: “Tanya is the best.” Well said (see also her presentation on Gertrude Stein, that I blogged earlier).

Paula Chesley! Doctor, linguist, studies statistical methods in linguistics, natural language processing, Romance and English linguistics, and psycholinguistics. “Basically, what I’m interested in is words.”

Joshua Sternfelt is a postdoc at UCLA, got his doctorate in history from UCLA and transitioned to digital history. Interested in pedagory, oral history and sound technology, and digital theory [what exactly does that mean?..] Seems to be fantastically involved in several communities and events.

Matt Wilkens is a literature PhD, right now a Mellon postdoc fellow at Rice. He studies contemporary American fiction, corpus methods in literary criticism and history, and literary and rhetorical theory.

Jeremy Douglass is a postdoc at UC San Diego. Others have spoken, but too softly for me to hear, and too quickly for me to record. Sorry, guys; feel free to augment.

Stefan asks: so what can ACH, as an organization, do to help you find jobs? And people who have recently hired other people, what is most important for candidates to know, besides the basics?

Dot Porter is an American recently hired to work in Ireland, and the process was a bit different from one in the States. In the US, you go for a couple of days of interview, meet everyone, it’s all stressful. In Ireland, she went for a day, had an hour an a half long interview with specific and probing questions, and it was still stressful but felt good. Another thing: after Dot came on board in October, they hired other people. An applicant with a wonderful application, great CV, great references… and the phone interview was terrible. Like it was a completely different person from who was on the CV. So if you put past experience on your CV, someone might ask you about it, and you should be prepared to talk about it! Otherwise it’s just embarrassing.

Stefan’s tip for anyone going into a “traditional” discipline with a strong DH focus: it’s very tough, if you get an offer, you don’t want to compromise that — but do try to get DH production in the contract, and it won’t be limited to publications, but important scholarship in non-traditional ways (projects, for example) should be considered.

Bethany Nowviskie makes a good point: get your job description broken down into percentages of time dedicated to each kind of activity. That way, you may be able to negotiate time for research. Particularly important for people who aren’t on the tenure track or tenured.

Matt Wilkens reminds us of MLA’s recent undertaking, that of creating recommendations for digital research evaluation for promotion and tenure. Perhaps ACH could create something similar that job candidates could then point to, as a tool that would interviewers evaluate candidates’ digital work. Many nods from the audience; “that’s a super suggestion.”

Claire Warwick and Melissa Terras beg you to keep your covering letter short, and also tailor both your CV and your covering letter to each individual job. Common sense and widely known, but people still don’t do it.

Lev Manovich says: research the campus, the program, the faculty and their research interests. Show that you’re really interested, invested, in being at that specific place and working with those specific people. Neil Fraistat is surprises by the number of applications he gets for MITH jobs from people who don’t even seem to know what MITH is. So, yeah, do your research.

John Unsworth: once someone has made you an offer, the game starts over, and at that point you have bargaining power that is also likely your last opportunity for a number of years. So use it, though don’t overplay the game. :) But at that point, you are no longer the supplicant, so do shift gears.

On to the more usual general meeting. Julia Flanders, president of ACH, updates us on recent happenings. In the last year, ACH has focused on funding student bursaries, both for this conference and for the DH summer institute in Victoria; working on a project of making the history of DH research more accessible, and they’re digitizing and TEI-encoding all conference abstracts going back to the very beginning. Edward Vanhoutte and Melissa Terras are also hunting down all kinds of materials — meeting minutes, Humanist list posts, abstracts, articles. blog posts… Maybe all this can be data-mined! In the future, ACH would also be interested in proposals for how this data may be used.

ACH has also been supporting the Digital Humanities Quarterly, which is, frankly, the coolest DH publication I know of. Do check it out; two issues are already out this year, and a third issue will be released hopefully at the end of the summer, with another in the fall.

ACH also supported a manuscript editing workshop in London, and sponsored a TEI meeting. This is something they’re interested in expanding: supporting small events. Not a lot of money, but perhaps seed money that can “leaven the DH dough.”

In the coming year, ACH website will be redesigned.

Another topic this year is that the job-search-related events will hopefully be expanded. Have suggestions? Contact Stefan Sinclair.

After four years, Melissa Terras is stepping down as The Membership Person. Instead, there will be a more generic membership email address, emails to which will be answered by a more distributed group of people. In the past four years, the LLC journal subscription has risen 68% to just under 300 subscribers. Cool! Paul Caton proposes a prize designated for the 300th member. This could be you!

Announcement: The Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre at Cambridge will be turning 45 in October, and its director of 35 years John Dawson will retire then. They’ll be celebrating! If you’re in Cambridge then, do join them.

The end.

Melissa has spent a lot of time studying images, and in most cases was studying images in/from institutions. But what about collections (of all sorts, not just images) created by people who aren’t affiliated with institutions? They’re actually quite interesting, and Melissa studied them using the following methods:

-Digitization literature survey (almost nothing written about personal digital collections!)
-Review of 100 stand-alone, self-identified “museums” on the internet. (Many people use flickr as a platform for presenting their personal museums of barbed wire and owls and whatnot.)
-Reviewed a bunch of groups and pools on flickr (which at this point has 3.6 billion pictures)
-Will present an overview of memory institutions interacting with user created content
-Interviewed 10 creators of online museum content [in their spare time]
-Surveyed contributors to flickr pools
-Surveyed academics: are they paying attention to this? [sort of, but they don't necessarily admit to it formally: see below]

The internet is full of people with way too much stuff on their hands. Individually produced “museums” are produced by people ranging from nutters to people who know all about metadata and produce great collections that are also well documented.

We have a habit of discounting amateurs, but many museums were *started* by amateurs, grew up from cabinets of curiosities. Foundation of Astronomical research, research on British flora, ornithology, languages, weather observations, field archaeology, field sciences, genealogy/family history etc are done by amateurs — that word doesn’t mean you’re rubbish at what you do, but rather that you don’t get paid for what you do. [N.B.: genealogy is not so much about objects as about information, so Melissa is not focusing on that today.]

Self-defined museums, themes emerge: they want to make stuff public; recognition through networked community, shared values. Topics emerge: ephemera (advertising, packaging, nostalgia), comics, technology, personal and “embarrassing” collections, genealogy. Scope emerges: collections are self-delineated, time frame of collections is influenced by the age of the author (people are interested disproportionately in stuff that has been produced within their lifetimes). Finally, the usual platforms for such things are static HTML, blogs and Flickr. Particularly on Flickr, there’s a pretty good amount of basic metadata, which is actually augmented by other users.

Creators are self-motivated, enthusiastic, dedicated. They are diverse in interests and practices. They aren’t so much interested in standards, but do create intuitive methadata. Some are not amused by the patronizing term “amateur”, but are enthusiasts.

Users are aware of site visit stats. They’re good at finding stats and publishing them. Reserachers contact them because they’re visible. They interact with their user communities via email, comments, blog updates — they’re promoting stuff actively. They are aware that people are interested in their stuff because researchers contact them to ask for permission to use images for illustrations, research purposes, etc.

Memory institutions (like Smithsonian) are starting to become aware of, and participate in, the same venues. Smithsonian is on Flickr Commons. The Tate has Flickr groups. The Victoria and Albert museum has a Flickr gropu as well. The Oxford U Great War Archive has its own digital archive, but also goes out to Flickr and reaching out to people and trying to get them to contribute their own artifacts to the archive.

Flickr is the Grand Central Station of information.

Technology advances change amateur research radically.

Melissa is interested in studying the psychology of collecting — what’s an archive vs. a collection? She plans to engage in further dialogue with creators and users.

We need to start preserving these things — flickr phto

Conclusions:

Museums and memory institutions are not the only hosts of worthwhile digital objects. Ephemera and pop culture are better served by online pro-am community, which is better at using networking tools. Interactive sites have better stats. (Better evidence of use?)

Memory institutions can learn from this. We need to start interacting with our user community. It’s not ok to scan and dump. We need to do outreach using flickr, facebook etc. Heck, it’s free to use such resources, and they already have usable platforms! So we don’t have to create them.

Academics use these resources in very creative ways! For example, a researcher studying a partic. sculpture will look for the 500 photos of it on Flickr that show it from all kinds of possible angles. Interestingly, researchers don’t acknowledge (or admit to) these activities in their papers.

Peter Williams [presenting], Ian Rowlands, Jeremy John. “Digital Lives: how people create, manipulate and store their personal digital archives.”

(Bunch of 3.5″ floppies on his opening slide, all sepia and graduated in colors. Ware art.)

We need to respond to the transition from paper-based personal collections to increasingly digital memories [of famous people, too: Harold Pinter has a huge email collection]. We need to better understand how people actually manage their own digital collections.

Enter Personal Information Management (PIM), which draws across several disciplines: comp science, info science, human-computer interaction.

Stuff like “what kinds of file names do you use? how do you back up?” is boring. So they conducted in-depth ‘narrative’ interviews, and people enjoyed talking about their digital lives. They also did an online survey, about which later.

There were 25 interviewees, both established (an architect, authors, a playwright, a web designer, a molecular biologist, a geophysicist, etc.) and emerging (a digital artist, a theatre director, etc.) [vz: uh. Looks like "established" == "academic", and "emerging" == *pat on the head* "amateur". They couldn't possibly mean that, right? Dooce, for example, is not at all emerging.]

Document manipulation: you can create information actively (write a Word document) or passively (the metadata in a Word document); both are very useful to people studying your work.

Once you created the information, are you going to keep it active, modify it? (Frex, is it a book?) If yes, there’s one life cycle that ends either in discarding (into trash) or storage. If no modifying, you can again trash it or store it. At every stage there are decisions to be made.

Individuals’ personal policies reflected practical considerations (will I need this sometime in the future?); whether it’s a record of professional/academic value; whether they wanted to create and augment and maintain portfolios of their lives’ work; keeping things as contextual and/or emotional reminders.

People have romantic notions of media! Floppy disks with correspondence with an ex-girlfriend on them. (Hello, romancing the floppy).

Email is a huge part of most people’s digital collections. A typical example of a single user: university accounts; gmail/yahoo (Flickr) account; mails via facebook; LinkedIn mails… a large number of ways to communicate and be visible. So what do people do with those accounts? They use them as file storage systems; as appointments diaries; to send memos to themselves; to forward messages to themselves; to keep records of their work and contact; to use different accounts for different purposes (shopping, social, work etc.). People also maintain “defunct” accounts by “dummy mailing” (so you periodically send messages to yourself just to keep accounts that would otherwise expire).

Some problems with email: multiple uses of multiple accounts are confusing; email doesn’t tend to get backed up; email exists often only server-side; mails are infrequently culled; subject headings are inappropriate to wandering topics.

Conducted two online surveys, one of academic researchers and one of “general public” (slight overlap between the two). They were asked about how versed they are in IT, whether they’ve had catastrophic data loss; what strategies they have for organizing and preserving digital collection; whether they have made arrangements in case of death or disability; and why they archive in the first place.

People early-middle aged, pretty gender-balanced, with generally good IT skills, relatively low experience of major data loss had a relatively high data security dimension to their archives. They back up monthly, are good organizers.

Mature users, predominantly male, excellent IT skills, high incidence of Mac users, back up religiously (often daily), are exceptional organizers.

Younger users: more women than men, backup rarely if ever, are poorly organized, low experience of major data loss, report difficulty locating files, pay little attention to file naming, rarely use desktop search, little use of email for PIM.

Peter draws a connection between how well organized you are with your life on the computer, and incidence of Alzheimer’s, but I didn’t catch what this connection is.

One free-response question got this answer: “I don’t consider myself to have a ‘digital life’ any more than I consider myself to have a ‘washing machine life’… The computer is just a tool that I use but don’t think about very much.”

[vz: Interesting talk, but their sample is not very good. The difference between "established" and "emerging" interviewees is sketchy, and they don't seem to have paid much attention to people who are professional internet presences. I'm thinking of Heather and John Armstrong, for example. Would be interesting to see a similar survey conducted, involving more than 25 poorly selected people.]

Neil Audenaert, Texas A&M, “BiblioMS: Project-Scale Bibliography Management.”

This is an experiment looking at project-scale bibliographies. Neil’s objective was to find out editorial needs, define commonalities among bibliographies, and design and implement a bibliography management system.

Does the world really need another bibliography manager? No, there already is one. But we can look at existing tools and group them into personal (BibTeX, EndNote, Zotero) and crowd-sourced (CiteULike, Connotea). [vz: though Zotero is quickly becoming crowd-sourced!]

Neil’s project scale: he’s interested in not so much the personal side of organizing and finding biblio records, but what we in DH do about organizing bibliographies for our projects. Our bibliographic projects are notably public; bibliographies are intended to be useful not to the larger project’s creators but general public. Our projects are also scholarly in nature (Cervantes Project, Shakespeare Bibliography), bibliographies intended to map a field or domain. Bibliographies’ focus is discursive (bibliographies are often annotated); they’re edited in a collaborative fashion; and they’re integrated into a larger project.

Examples of bibliographies Neil has studied: comprehensive (Cervantes Int’l Bibliography Online); documentary (Nautical Archaeology Digital Library); and Special Collections (Digital Donne). They support DH projects and make scholarly contributions (and thereby involve editorial selection and organization). Attribution and authority are very important: who is creating this bibliography and making all the decisions?

Common issues in the bibliographies Neil has studied: genres, organization, editing and access. Collections have special needs (unique aspects), and need to provide methods for effective communication (filtering by user). Needs change. Sometimes different collections are related, and that’s important to synchronize. Need tools for search and browsing, for discovery of related entries, for the creation of taxonomies and controlled vocabularies. Bibliographies also need to accommodate multiple perspectives.

Editorial teams tend to have multiple levels of authority and utilize revision and versioning. Management issues arise out of all of this.

Bibliographies need to be accessible. These are components of a broader DH projects, and need to not be stuck in a corner but accessible from throughout the project site. Bibliography tools need to be integrated into the editing interface for the “main” part of the project.

BiblioMS is a tool Neil and colleagues created. Its primary priorities are user-defined genres, collaborative management and integrated access throughout a project. Secondarily, searching, relationships and multi-faceted organization. [Secondary not because they aren't important but because of time constraints.]

[vz: Neil talks about the architecture and gives a demo, but there doesn't seem to be a public site for it, nor a demo online. If you know of web resources on BiblioMS, please comment.]