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!

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.

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 work.  Because 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.

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

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.

• University of the People (UoPeople) is the world’s first tuition-free, online academic institution.  It is a partnership between The Information Society Project (ISP) at Yale Law School and UoPeople. Students learn through peer-to-peer teaching with the support of instructors.  Currently, the school is NOT accredited.The Information Society Project at Yale Law School is an intellectual center addressing the implications of the Internet and new information technologies for law and society, guided by the values of democracy, human development, and social justice.
• Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative
  These courses includes self-guiding materials and activities, and are ideal for independent learners.  One of my favorite courses is Visual Communication Design, a short course that teaches students how to design successful documents by establishing effective visual hierarchy and groups of information by using visual variables such as type size, type weight, and spacing.
• Utah State OpenCourseWare
  Similar to MITopencourseware, a valuable resource.
• Notre Dame OpenCourseWare
  Free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners.

• Wikiversity
  A Wikimedia Foundation project devoted to learning resources, learning projects, and research for use in all levels, types, and styles of education from pre-school to university, including professional training and informal learning.
• Wikibooks
  A Wikimedia community for creating a free library of educational textbooks that anyone can edit.
• The Internet Archive’s library of Open Educational Resources
  A library of free courses, video lectures, and supplemental materials from universities in the United States and China, many of which are available for download.

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!

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.

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:)

NEVER MIND SETTING UP! GRAB THE STICKERS!

Enjoy.

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

• BaconCamp by TedDombrowski  – Food Tech
• Developing your first iPhone app by Paul Reynolds – Programming
• Wild Edibles of the Lowcountry by calweb  – Environmental
• Beyond Twitter and Facebook by Jared – Social Media
• Building a community-powered website with Drupal by chrys  – Software
• Technology Tools for the Changemaker by calweb Non-Profit
• Creating and maintaining a rock star portfolio by katiejohnston  – Web Design

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

We hope to see you there!