Archive for the ‘Digital Culture’ Category

LITE Session Today: Harnessing the Real-Time Web or New Frontiers in historical and humanities Research


2010
03.24

Special LITE Guest Star Jared Smith
ReadWriteWeb Extraordinaire: Web Developer and Social Media Experimenter!

Presents:

Harnessing the Real-Time Web – or -
New Frontiers in historical and humanities Research

Beginning in Summer 2008, CHNM will undertake a major two-year study of the potential of text-mining tools for historical and humanities scholarship. The project, entitled “Scholarship in the Age of Abundance: Enhancing Historical Research With Text-Mining and Analysis Tools,” is generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The project will first conduct a survey of historians to examine their use of digital resources and prospect for particularly helpful uses of digital technology. It will then explore three main areas where text mining might facilitate the research process: locating documents of interest in the ocean of online materials; extracting and synthesizing information from these texts; and analyzing large-scale patterns across these texts. A focus group of historians will assess the efficacy of different methods of text mining and analysis in real-world research situations in order to offer recommendations. The most promising approaches will inform two case studies, one based on Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, in collaboration with the ARTFL Project at the University of Chicago, and the other on the correspondence of Victorian mathematicians.

Center for History and New Media: http://chnm.gmu.edu/text-mining/


Download the Session Flyer!

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Teaching


2010
03.18

It is from the cultural context of a work, however shifting, that we separate signal from noise, add the resonance of our own experience, and derive ultimate meaning.”

In the daily interactions that affect my process, I always keep coming back to Daniel Buren’s “The Function of the Studio”.  Buren was one of the first to argue that the institutions of Western art, the studio, gallery and museum, reinforce dominant cultural hierarchies and conventional notions about what art itself is.  I see this reaffirmed in the works of many of the artists I admire: On Kawara’s long series of daily paintings, Cornelia Hesse-Honneger’s deconstructions of scientific authority, Paolo Soleri’s community-centered architecture and Sol Lewitt’s conceptual art. The art and information I discover in my “notebooks” reaffirms my belief that art is about ideas, about process rather than product. My studio isn’t a building or a room. It isn’t even my laptop or “the Cloud”, though they’re both instrumental.  My studio is in my head.  It goes wherever I go.

But the ideas and processes in your head are difficult to hang in a gallery.  Information can’t be framed and left still, deprived of its original context, if it’s going to carry its message.  That context is part of the message.  It can’t be separated.  It is from the cultural context of a work, however shifting, that we separate signal from noise, add the resonance of our own experience, and derive ultimate meaning.


These ideas float around in my head as I get together my syllabus for Art and Anthropology, my web course for summer.  I’m introducing students to visual anthropology, and to a lot of postmodern ideas about culture, context and the construction of meaning.  Instead of treating visual anthropology as the methods of social research applied to artistic endeavors, I will attempt to allow the two to blend into a seamless whole, opening artistic eyes toward new anthropological approaches. I want my students to experiment and be creative as they learn to see in new ways, hopefully changing their ideas about what research and publication can encompass. Anthropologists have made use of photographs and videos as part of ethnographic research for a long time.  The ubiquity of opportunities to create multimedia in our era offers a chance to extend these practices, raising new questions to explore about both the objects of study and the ourselves, the viewers.


The asynchronous, online format of the class will allow motivated students be flexible with their time and their approach to tasks. The course will require a lot of daily interaction, though so we’ll using a lot Web 2.0 tools, including VoiceThread for sharing and commenting on media, GoogleDocs for collaborative writing and a WordPress blog as the class container. As the students go out and do their own research, we’ll come back to talk about what cultural objects and practices they’ve discovered through visual exploration.

Again, even though the products the students will create will doubtlessly be exciting, it’s really about the process.  Buren would be glad that there are no studios here.  On Kawara would appreciate the ephemeral daily process of it all.  Soleri would appreciate the community and attention to structural and institutional factors that affect us daily.  Much like in a drawing class, visual culture is about learning how to see, how to reframe and reinterpret. This is how our budding artists and anthropologists will learn to actively appreciate the production of knowledge in particular cultural contexts through visual realms.

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Research


2010
03.18

My research comes from my daily interactions in life, leading me to ask new questions, find new information, learn new skills and formulate new answers.  Process is an experimental, dynamic, and organic process.”

I find that my day to day life provides me with numerous experiences that influence my art practice.   I strive to situate every aspect of my life  around my guiding principle – be committed to what you believe in.  For me this means have meaningful relationships, creating art within a social context, demonstrating that the process of creating art is as valuable as the product or object itself, and consciously making decisions based on the belief that actions in life should accomplish meaningful social change.  Since I feel this way, I am incredibly happy that I am able to contribute to the field of digital humanities in many aspects of my life, from my work at the Library, to my dedication to my art practice and my fortuitous opportunities to teach information literacy, research methods in expressive culture and computing in the arts at both the College of Charleston and the Art Institute of Charleston.

Today, on Day of DH 2010, I find that I will not be teaching any of these topics.  Instead, I will be answering a large quantity of emails, monitoring library twitter hashtags, promoting LITE (Literacy, Information, Technology, and Education) workshops on Facebook, answering virtual reference questions, assisting students with multimedia projects, and manning the Research and Information desk.  My work at the College of Charleston Libraries continually exposes me to new individuals, questions, information, technologies, outlooks, and perspectives.

The question I found most rewarding today was from a student who had to substantiate their argument that the memorial of Calhoun should not have been erected due to his stance on slavery. It was an interesting argument when taken from their contemporary point of view.  The Civil war and its impacts are a common theme of research at our institution, particularly in light of the layers of history our city is built on.  Fortunately, we have a great Special Collections department with amazing staff.  We were able to locate an original pamphlet containing speeches of John Calhoun and Daniel Webster on the subject of slavery delivered in 1850.  The pamphlet has not been digitized yet for our digital collection but the student was able to physically review the pamphlet in our library.

I’m always surprised how the threads of events lead to more events and how our own actions have subtle yet powerful effects on outcomes.  I like to think of them as if then statements.  In this case the string of events led to a higher probability of the pamphlet getting digitized and put in our digital collections sooner than later, particularily in light of the fact that the student received the assignment from a professor, who assigned it to multiple students and is likely to assign it again.  My interaction with the student led them to the primary source, and their first visit to the special collections department.  The special collections staffs willingness to provide the document when needed influenced the student to choose this resource over a monograph easily located in the stacks at the library.  The demonstrated need for the resource will ultimately get the document archived in the permanent digital collection, making it accessible to even more individuals.


I am grateful for technology and the new methods of interaction it affords. It provides a new canvas for workBecause of projects like this one, we will see an explosion of artistic creation documenting the contemporary social fabric in the years ahead.  As an artist, I see archives of collaborative digital projects giving us a useful common ground for discussing art and society in the future.

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The Art of Daily Life


2010
03.18
“The ephemerality of silence made itself known this morning, sometimes silence doesn’t like to be recorded.  Real practice is messy.” Art that deals with the everyday has always been of primary importance to me. I find daily life to be a source of inspiration. As part of my art practice I collect silence, or what we might at first glance call silence.  I find the textures and nuances of silence intriguing.  I’m not sure what I am going to do with them yet.  My collection practice is directly inspired by John Cage’s 4′33, a piece that consists of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of “silence” in which listeners become increasing aware of the sounds of the environment. The use of materials that are familiar to deal with and themes that are similarly immediate can have direct and powerful effects.  Henri Lefebvre noted in “The Everyday and Everydayness” that the modern world forces us into artificial cycles.  He argued that by making a conscious decision to realize these cycles and return to natural and meaningful cycles, “the artificial mechanism of their grouping is recognized and the fatuousness of their diversity becomes intolerable.” The paradox is that as we preserve something we make it static, and separate the work from its living context. With “silence” the background sounds call attention to that living context that is not quite there, with the distraction of the foreground removed. Being able to speak in the visual vocabulary of real, daily life requires thoughtful collection and archiving of materials. It requires images, objects, and knowledge. An archive is not just accumulated parts. It is selected by a careful process, one that is unique for each archive and archivist. What and what not to include when making a work is an even more careful selection. The art of daily life requires observation and reflection. I’m excited, if a little nervous, to be sharing some of my daily practice here.  Collecting, reflecting and selecting make up a lot of what I do.  These little archives end up driving a lot of my pieces, but like Walter Benjamin unpacking his library, I think the practice is more important than its results.  But then I’ve found that the creative process to me is the real art, moreso than the end product.  The meaning is all somewhere in that daily practice, and it doesn’t necessarily rest cleanly on a wall.  It is messy and iterative, problematic and wonderful.

Preparing for DH Day 2010


2010
03.17

What is it?

Exerpt from: http://tapor.ualberta.ca/taporwiki/index.php/Day_in_the_Life_of_the_Digital_Humanities_2010

A Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities (Day of DH) is a community publication project that will bring together digital humanists from around the world to document what they do on one day, March 18th. The goal of the project is to create a web site that weaves together the journals of the participants into a picture that answers the question, “Just what do computing humanists really do?” Participants will document their day through photographs and commentary in a blog-like journal. The collection of these journals with links, tags, and comments will make up the final work which will be published online.

On March 18th, participants will document and share the events of their day. However participants will also become co-authors, and the direction of the entire project will be influenced by their choices, both before and after the day of documentation. Eventually, the data will be grouped together, undergo some light semantic editing, and released for others to study. We hope that, beyond the original online publication, the raw data will be of use to those interested in further visualization or ethnographic experiments.

In preparation for tomorrow, I am setting up my RSS feed, preparing my blog,   gathering my equipment (flips, digital camera, recorder) and working on a short consent form for photos and videos.  I can’t wait!

- Blog URL: http://ra.tapor.ualberta.ca/~dayofdh2010/jolanda-pieta/

- DH2010 Participants: http://tapor.ualberta.ca/taporwiki/index.php/List_of_Day_of_DH_2010_Participants

- How do you define Humanities Computing / Digital Humanities? http://tapor.ualberta.ca/taporwiki/index.php/How_do_you_define_Humanities_Computing_/_Digital_Humanities%3F

- Twitter Hashtag: #dayofdh (note of interest for later/to feed a twitter hashtag replace the # with %23, i.e. http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23dayofdh

- Twitter Sentiment Search: http://twittersentiment.appspot.com/search?query=%23dayofdh

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Test Syndication Post from DH2010 Blog


2010
03.17
Happiness!  The syndication worked.  I normally syndicate the other way - feeding everything from jpvanarnhem.  For DH day, I'm going to post everything on the DH blog and feed it back. It's so much fun preparing for  Day of DH 2010!
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Preparing for Day of DH 2010


2010
03.17

I’m both excited and a little nervous about participating in Day of DH 2010.  In preparation for tomorrow, I am reviewing my calendar, setting up my RSS feed, preparing my blog, gathering my equipment (flips, digital camera, recorder) and working on a short consent form for photos and videos.  I can’t wait to see the whole day play out.  What a great project to participate in:)

Free and Open Educational Resources


2010
02.01
Lately I have been researching how other institutions deliver online or hybrid courses.  In my search I ran across an interesting and informative article on makeuseof.com by Justin Pot titled “6 Really Good Sites with FREE Video Lectures from Top US Colleges. In his conclusion he states,
The Internet’s changed the world, and the availability of free university courses on the Internet is one of the greatest examples of this I can think of.    Not so long ago the knowledge imparted on students during university lectures was accessible only to those who could afford to pay tuition. Today information is increasingly free, and I for one think society is better for it.
I have to say I agree.  In his article Pot reviewed the following sites that offer free video lectures from Top US colleges that I have looked at and found very useful:
I thought I would add to the list and mention a few other resources I have reviewed recently.
Along with the resources mentioned above, I also want to note a few other great resources I often use when looking for educational materials.

As I find more resources for online educational resources, I will continue adding them.  If you have one that is not on the list, let me know!

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A Fair(y) Use Tale


2009
12.04

A great video from The Center for Internet and Society/Stanford Law.

Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University created this humorous, yet informative, review of copyright principles delivered through the words of the very folks we can thank for nearly endless copyright terms.

Anyone who creates “Transformative Art” from pieces of popular culture, (i.e. remixing YouTube footage with personal interviews, artwork, etc.) should consider whether their work falls within the definition of “Fair Use” and freedom of expression.

Enjoy.

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barcamp CHARLESTON is SOLD OUT and ready to start!


2009
10.23

BARCAMP UPDATE!

Have you seen the video from #barcampchs? Jerry and I made the cut while we were grabbing every sticker we could smash into our pockets:)

STICKERS!

NEVER MIND SETTING UP! GRAB THE STICKERS!

Enjoy.

screenshot_barcampAdSOLDOUT

barcamp CHARLESTON  starts tomorrow.  Registration begins at 8am.  Liked sessions include:

To see the full list, visit: http://www.barcampchs.org/sessions/liked

We hope to see you there!

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