South Jersey Digital

Back in March, there was a brief flurry of discussion about regional networks in the digital humanities. Mary Litch of Chapman University, part of the active digital humanities community in Southern California created a blog that served as a central clearing house for conversation and event listings in the region. A community of about thirty scholars from more than a dozen schools grew up around the initial post. Shane Landrum of Brandeis tried to do something comparable for the digital humanists of New England, noting that he kept meeting people who were the sole digital humanities representative in their department or campus, so he wanted to build “a space where we can all find one another.” The New England site never achieved the critical mass of the Southern California site, though it did generate enough connections to sponsor the New England THATCamp, scheduled for November 13-14.

I’m sorry that the “Digital Humanities in Boston and Beyond” community (from external appearances) never took off in the way that Shane envisioned. It’s perhaps not surprising that virtual community building through social media has done more to link digital humanists than has physical proximity. Aside from my Stockton colleagues, I have spent more time in the physical presence of people from CHNM, MITH, and Scholar’s Lab, than I have my digital humanities neighbors in the Greater Delaware Valley. But, regional community building was always part of what we wanted to achieve with the founding of SJCDH.

It was, perhaps, somewhat presumptuous of us to label our center the South Jersey Center for Digital Humanities rather than, say, the Stockton Digital Initiative.fn1 But we deliberately wanted to evoke the regional identity “South Jersey” for two distinct reasons. The first reason is the one that prompted Mary Litch and Shane Landrum to reach out. I know that there are a number of interesting digital projects going on in the area and expect that there are many more that I am unaware of. We want to provide a (sometimes virtual) space for digital humanists in South Jersey, and indeed in the Greater Delaware Valley, to learn about what is happening in the region and build a community around it (If you are a local digital humanist on twitter and wish to be included in our SJerseyDigital list, be sure to contact us and let us know!). The second reason also concerns community  building, from the perspective of those people who want to know more about the region “South Jersey.” As one of a handful of colleges in South Jersey Stockton is a repository of information about the region that we want to make available to scholars everywhere. The existence of SJCDH gives those scholars an (again sometimes virtual) space to connect to one another and present findings to the world.

Regionalism in the digital humanities should take account of both aspects of “location” and “community.” We need to connect to others in the vicinity who share a commitment to digital projects; we also need to connect worldwide with those who want to know more about our region.

So, if you are resident in the Greater Delaware Valley and interested in digital humanities, we want to hear from you. If you are interested in the distinctive environment and culture of southern New Jersey, even if you don’t live near here, we want to hear from you as well.

fn1 The term Digital Initiative seems to have emerged to signify a more modest commitment to digital humanities than a whole “Center.” There is, understandably, a question about just how dense a landscape of digital humanities centers the field as a whole can sustain. See, for instance, Mark Sample’s “Death of the Digital Humanities Center“.

As Digital Humanities becomes a more prominent presence at small liberal arts colleges it raises the issue of how participation in social networking should be evaluated as part of professional development. A recent post by Bill Wolff of Rowan University gives what I think is a very sensible guide of how he presented his own work in blogging and twitter as part of his tenure and promotion package. Wolff’s approach should be particularly useful for Stockton faculty, since Stockton operates under a similar Memorandum of Agreement.

Wolff places most emphasis on how blogging and tweeting contributes to excellence in the classroom, as I expect most Stockton faculty would as well. Indeed, he is surprisingly conservative in making the case for including blogging and tweeting in his service and scholarship components. The case for social network publications as service in the same sense as other forms of local outreach seems obvious. And while one would not want to rest the case for scholarship primarily on blog posts and tweets, I can certainly see mentioning particularly influential posts as evidence of scholarly engagement.

Wolff is submitting his tenure file this fall. He is being very transparent about how he is assembling his case and pdfs of his statements (currently as drafts) can be linked to from his post. Good luck to Bill as a test-case of open source tenure applications.

Sometimes, there is a powerful illustration of how Twitter is transforming how ideas circulate. In early July, Scott Hamlin, Director of Technology for Teaching and Research at Wheaton College posted a thoughtful blog post with the same title as this one (but without the question mark). (Oh, and note the snazzy WordPress Theme. Great small liberal arts colleges think alike…) The post name checks several small liberal arts colleges where digital initiatives are underway (though not Stockton, alas) and discusses some of the reasons why digital projects are catching on. It concludes with a call for more collaboration between smaller colleges to make up for the comparatively smaller budgets for computing.

All in all, it’s a sensible post. And the sentiments it expresses fit well with our goals at SJCDH.

The post got pushed into general conversation a couple of days ago, when Dan Cohen of the Center for History and New Media happened to note it on Twitter, adding only that “I’ve noticed this too.” His tweet must have touched a nerve, because it was retweeted and Hamlin’s post began circulating here (I’ve had it forwarded to me from a couple of different sources) and presumably at other liberal arts colleges. It will be interesting to see if that one tweet animates a discussion about the role of digital humanities centers at small liberal arts colleges nationwide.

Meanwhile, the visibility of digital humanities at small liberal arts colleges will take another step forward in the spring. Plans are underway for a THATCamp designed specifically for small liberal arts colleges organized at St. Norbert College in Wisconsin.

Stockton has its own plans to host a THATCamp in the Spring. More details on that in a future post.

It’s funny how local news sometimes slips past you and you have to play catch up. I learned via Twitter that the Washington Post recently published an article on archaeological excavations at a pre-Civil War African-American community in Westampton Township called Timbuctoo. The Timbuctoo site is near Rancocas Creek in Burlington County, though its precise location is being kept secret to avoid disturbing it.

Caleb McDaniel, a Rice University professor who gained a following in the early academic blogosphere with his blog Mode for Caleb, has started a new blog, and one of his first posts is dedicated to the question of why several early African-American sites were named after Timbuktu, connecting New Jersey’s Timbuctoo to another community in New York state associated with the abolitionist John Brown. He has announced that this piece is part one of a two-part analysis of how and why places acquired the name Timbuctoo.

Meanwhile, folks interested in the black small town experience that places like Timbuctoo represent can check out Stockton photography professor Wendell White’s wonderful online portfolio Small Towns, Black Lives – though he doesn’t include Timbuctoo in his portfolio.

Today has been technology bootcamp day at Stockton. Linda Feeney, Bob Heinrich, Roberto Castillo, and Carolyn Gutierrez have been giving an overview of basic tech resources to old and new faculty. Looks as if there are a few potential new bloggers in the session Bob is running on blogging using WordPress.

Russ Manson, Associate Professor of Computational Science,  and Lisa Rosner, Professor of History,  have been awarded a Summer Research and Professional Development Grant to develop a model of the complex human-ecological system of the Mullica watershed. This model will be presented in a series of Google map layers, using the set of 19th century maps of southern New Jersey recently donated to the Stockton College Library.

Manson specializes in modeling watersheds and the effects of land use change, and Rosner has expertise in the environmental history of southern New Jersey. Together, they seek to investigate one of the truisms of watershed modeling, that “everything flows downstream.” While that may be true as far as effluents are concerned, the commercial history of the watershed region indicates the reverse: products from the pinelands – oysters, cranberries, even the human population – have moved from rural coastal districts upstream towards urban markets.

Recent visitors to the Stockton Library have had the rare opportunity to examine a set of wonderful New Jersey atlases that have been donated to the College. Published at the end of the 19th century, they provide town and county plans for many of the southern counties of New Jersey as well as for the entire coastal district. They show property lines within individual towns, making it possible to find out who owned what plot of land on any given street corner. They provide images of long-vanished public and religious buildings. And they make it possible to chart the growth of southern New Jersey’s human population across its rivers, bays, and coastline. These unique resources provide a wealth of information for both the human and environmental history of the eco-region. The maps reveal complex, dynamic relationships across and through the hydrological and ecological systems. The social and geographical features on the maps can be interpreted as the result of a myriad of decisions made by individuals throughout time: a community’s impact on the land, and on the waterways, add the complicating factors of socio-economic drivers, culture, and historical context to the existing land and water forms. The maps represent the emergent properties of a complex adaptive system.

Interdisciplinary research is only now beginning to comprehend the interdependencies within and between these systems. The complexity of the structures, the many positive and negative feedback loops that exist in growth and maintenance, and an uncertain backdrop of changing climate and land use continually challenge social historians and scientists. This research therefore will to develop a new systems approach to understanding and modeling for South Jersey’s rural coastal catchments and how they have evolved over time.

Thanks to Lisa’s tinkering, I was in many places at once. My physical self was at George Mason University, participating in the third THATCamp “unconference” organized by the Center for History and New Media there. My virtual self was here at South Jersey Digital’s blog, where the twitter stream of notes I posted from the meeting was captured as individual posts and an omnibus post.

So I won’t repeat myself with observations about what I saw and heard at the conference. I was, however, eager to experience THATCamp first hand. The “unconference” format is becoming fashionable and the Chronicle of Higher Education today has a report on the THATCamp I was at.

The central idea of the unconference is that participants don’t write papers, but post general comments on what they are interested in talking about. The program “self-assembles” in the first half hour of the conference on the basis of those comments or any new ideas that people come up with spur of the moment. As a newbie, I found the process of self-assembly a bit more opaque than I would have liked. I remembered cool ideas from individual posts before the conference, but couldn’t always attach those cool ideas to the labels of sessions that appeared on the bulletin board. On the other hand, the culture of the unconference makes just about any session enjoyable, even when I was in over my own head trying to figure out an intro to Java Script. The ethos is very hands on. The watchword “More hack, less yack.”

The THATCamp idea has proven sufficiently popular that satellite camps have taken place in various parts of the country, and even abroad. Six camps have already been held and another seven are scheduled before the end of this year. If you read the Chronicle piece carefully, you’ll note that among the regional THATCamps under consideration  is Jersey Shore. That’s us. We’ve spoken with the coordinator of THATCamps, Amanda French and also with some experienced Campers in Philadelphia. We’re still in preliminary planning stages, but think that Spring 2011 might be a promising time, so if you want to have input on how (or even if) we should do this please let us know.

This post highlights Marion Hussong’s digital edition of Franz Kain’s short stories and essays. As she writes,

I started translating Franz Kain’s texts in 1998 because I wanted to teach his stories about Austrian resistance and responsibility to American college students. Kain’s work has become well known to generations of my students and is a regular part of the curriculum at the Literature Program and the undergraduate and graduate programs in Holocaust & Genocide Studies at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. My students are surprised when they learn that this immensely readable, pioneering author is not well known in his native country.

The fact that Kain is not as appreciated in Austria as he should be, considering the quality of his literary oeuvre, has much to do with the way in which Austria repressed its conflicted past. A Communist author and resister who survived Nazi persecution and made it his mission to write about Austria’s complicity in Hitler’s regime was not necessarily popular in a country that wanted to put a conflicted part of its history to rest.

What can we gain from reading Franz Kain’s works? The reader will experience a literary tour of one of the most troubled chapters in and Austrian history. Written in rhythmic, precise prose, Kain assumes a frog’s perspective on Austrian history and society. He adopts the point of view of people who were at the bottom of the social ladder yet risked their lives to curb the excesses of an inhuman regime. In a poetological essay, Kain explains his approach: “How did the tragic events of Austrian annexation, the preparations for war, and the outbreak of World War II affect those at the bottom of society, as the winds of fear swept over the mountains and entered their shacks?” [2] The short stories Before the Storm and Under the Fever Tree are vignettes of the oppressive mood that gripped those who saw Hitler’s regime for what it was: a direct path to immense destruction. The Name, The Blind Man, and Emperor Franz Joseph Before the People’s Court afford us glimpses of an inhumane judicial system that swallowed up everyone who went against the regime’s totalitarian order.

It is my aim to make Franz Kain’s prose accessible to English-speaking students and scholars of literature and history. The annotations serve as a portal to the historical context of Kain’s world. They also provide insights into Austrian life and culture during World War II.This project is strictly scholarly and educational in nature. Readers may feel free to use the texts for personal enrichment or for teaching purposes.

The following description of a new Digital Humanities course has been sent in by Adeline Koh, Assistant Professor of Literature, Stockton College.

The goal of the course is for students to develop, with the guidance of the professor, a digital resource for research on postcolonial studies at Richard Stockton College. The project is inspired from models such as this one: (http://www.postcolonialweb.org/)

In summer 2010, students will focus on the specific area of postcolonial studies and feminist theory. In subsequent summers, depending on the outcome of this project,  students will look at different aspects of postcolonialism (each SIRE course will be “postcolonialism and x, y, z”; for example, “postcolonialism and modernism”; “postcolonialism and political theory”; “postcolonialism in Asian Studies,” etc.

For summer 2010, each student will be assigned a different sub-field of postcolonial studies and feminism to research. S/he will be responsible for developing the content of their specific sub-field.

Students will be responsible for 1) creating annotated bibliographies on their sub-areas, which will become a public resource through the use of the zotero bibliographic management software (people around the world will be able to access their annotations, which will be credited to them), 2) Weekly 2 page reviews of research covered for the week,
which should articulate questions/motifs which have come up during their course of research; 2) eventual write-ups on their sub-area (short literature reviews on movements of the field, and questions/reflections of the sub-area in relation to the larger area), 3) to design their own part of the website which will reflect their sub-area, and 4) to write a four page reaction paper on their research experience. For example, if student X is assigned “African feminism”, s/he will design both a part of the postcolonialism website which introduces visitors to African feminism, its relationship to postcolonial studies, trends within African feminism, and a bibliography on this sub-field.

Students will also showcase the results of their research through a presentation of the digital resource either in a LITT conference or at Day of Scholarship in Fall 2010.

Essential Objectives for this course: Students by the end of the course will have
1.      Learned to analyze and critically evaluate ideas, arguments and points of view regarding the development of intellectual history within a variety of fields.

2.      Learned fundamental principles, generalizations and theories in relation to postcolonial studies and feminist theory

3.      Gained a broader understanding and appreciation of intellectual/cultural activity in the form of the development of social, political and literary history through their engagement with scholarship in these fields.

Important Objectives:
1.      Developing specific skills, competencies, and points of view needed by professionals; in particular, being able to create and manage a resource database of information

The Digital Humanities Tourist: Narrating the Visual, Visualizing the Narrative

Earlier this month I had the pleasure of attending the multi-disciplinary, multi-media conference “Narrating the Visual, Visualizing the Narrative” at North Carolina State University. My thanks to hosts Sandria Freitag and Stephanie Spencer, supported by History Department Chair Jonathan Ocko. It turned out to be one of those great experiences, where a combination of interesting topics, engagement with the materials, and, well, academic chemistry all worked together to create the perfect set of digital humanities conversations among faculty and students.

I had the awesome responsibility to give the first presentation, about virtual walking tours of Edinburgh at my Burke and Hare website. After my talk, Jan Reiff, UCLA, described her use of Hypercities with WPA guides to create a rich, textured analysis of race and class in 20th century Chicago. The third presentation in the opening panel approached narrative from an Art History perspective. Catherine Asher from the University of Minnesota placed the visual and written iconography of Jaipur’s Hindu and Muslim temples in their social and political contexts.

In the second panel of the morning, Matthew Booker, NC State, described his experiences at Stanford’s Spatial History lab. He worked collaboratively with both undergraduate and graduate students to trace the impact of environmental change on Native Americans in the San Francisco region. Documentary filmmaker Yousuf Saeed came next to present the equally collaborative project, Tasveer Ghar, a digital archive of South Asian popular culture, featuring images, artifacts, and interpretive essays.

During a working lunch – we digital humanists are no slackers – Yousuf presented several of his films on South Asian popular culture. Sandy Freitag followed up with an illustrated presentation of her essay on everyday life, based on the Tasveer Ghar materials.

The day concluded with Craig McConnell, California State at Fullerton, showing the migration of images of space-time from popular culture to physics texts, and Susan Close, University of Manitoba, exploring gender and art in the photography of Mattie Gunterman (see Susan’s book, Framing Identity: Social Practices of Photography in Canada (1880-1920))

But wait, there’s more. Day Two of the conference opened with two presentations of landscapes, real and constructed. Will Kilmer, NC State, showed how 19th century illustrations constructed tropical countries as “exotic,” a construction that permeated natural history texts. Stephanie Spencer decoded the social and imperial meanings of Francis Bedford’s photographs of Wales.

Susanna Lee, NC State, gave conference participants a tour of the Valley of the Shadow archive, demonstrating the kind of primary source research it does, and does not, allow in courses on Civil War history. Judy Kertesz presented 19th century images of Native American burial grounds, forever altering our sense of American history and literature.

The final set of papers –once again continued right through lunch! – showed the power of digital technologies to recreate lost architectural worlds. Caroline Bruzelius, Duke University, described a team-taught course that resulted in graduate students recreating the medieval Franciscan convent of Folloni, near Naples, Italy, and the sculpture of the ancient city of Aphrodisias in Turkey. We watched in awe as Caroline played the animations created by the students, reconstructing sculpture from fragments of torso, and narrating the complex building history of a medieval cathedral from an 18th century plan. Anne Beamish, MIT, gave a tour of ArchNet, an international online community centered on an extensive digital archive of Islamic architecture. Glaire Anderson also used animations and architectural plans to present a commentary on a villa in Islamic Spain, juxtaposing the visual with archeological evidence. And our final presenter, Wei-Cheng Lin, raised the possibility of digitally creating the afterlife, in his discussion of the outside-in character of 10th-13th century Chinese burial architecture.

As you can see, the conference brought together people working in different disciplines, geographical areas, and eras. It was a model of what one hopes for in an interdisciplinary conference.

All in all, it was a terrific two days, with thoughtful questions, commentary, and discussion from Anapama Rao, Barnard, Abigail McGowan, University of Vermont, Mary Sheriff, UNC Chapel Hill, Akram Khater, UNC Chapel Hill, Lee Ann Ghajar, George Mason, and Kristin Antelman, NC State. The large turnout of undergraduate history majors remained attentive throughout.

…And to make a great conference even better, the Raleigh/Durham airport has not one, but two bookstores: a well-stocked and friendly Borders and an excellent used book dealer, 2nd Edition Books.

Spring is nearly here, the sun is shining, and I realize how much I’ve fallen behind in keeping up the blog. This will be the first of a couple of blog posts about my recent Digital Humanities Excursions. In early February I traveled to the University of Virginia for a wonderfully welcoming and stimulating two days. I highly recommend the University of Virginia as a tourist destination on any Digital Humanities trip. The university is beautiful, as you’d expect from a school designed by Thomas Jefferson, the city is charming with many excellent restaurants and coffee places, and the digital humanists are doing fascinating and innovative work. Virginia is home to some classic digital humanities projects such as The Valley of Shadow and NINES.

I was invited to UVa by Bill Ferster, Senior Scientist at the Curry School of Education, who heads one of the cohorts comprising SHANTI: Sciences, Humanities, & Arts Network of Technological Initiatives. I spent last summer working with the geospatial tool he developed, VisualEyes, using it to draw maps, timelines and animated paths depicting the history of 18th century chemistry (more info here at the Chemical Heritage Foundation website ). I’ve been working on a manual for VisualEyes, drawing on my many-years-previous experience of manual-writing for such programs as dBase III and WordPerfect (remember them, anyone?). I must say it’s refreshing to be able to talk to the developer as I write the manual, and also to get feedback from other users. The SHANTI cohort is working on an eclectic mix of periods and problems, including map cataloging for the Tibetan Himalayan Library, visualization of ancient Roman baths, an American gravestones project, and a visualization of biocomplexity on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.

In the afternoon I met another set of U Va digital humanities folks at the Scholar’s Lab at Alderman Library, directed by Beth Nowviskie. I gave a cooking-show demonstration of the software I’ve been using to create animated walk-throughs of the worlds of Edinburgh’s most famous serial killers, Burke and Hare. That is, I showed project development in each of its stages, finally pulling the completed animation out of the oven – er, playing it on my laptop (here’s the podcast). It was wonderful to be surrounded by so many knowledgeable people asking all the right questions.
My time to savor Charlottesville was cut short by Snowpocalypse, the huge blizzard that crashed into Virginia on February 5. I scurried northward just hours ahead of the storm front, but would be delighted to have an opportunity to return.

In my on-going effort to aid faculty in piloting new technology teaching tools, I am experimenting with the Twitter micro blogging service this semester. My hope is that this initiative will help in assisting faculty at Stockton with competence development in using this service to support instruction. In my Fall 2009 Microcomputer and Applications Course, I will be having my students respond to questions that I pose to the group using this tool. As an alternative to the discussion tool within the BlackBoard Course Management System, my students will respond over the course of the week and engage in debate with fellow classmates. Since the student responses are limited to 140 characters, I have asked them to respond at least three times each week, however I anticipate that they may likely do it more frequently.

During my in-class lab meeting last night I introduced the tool and had the students who did not already have accounts create one. I found that approximately 20% of the students already had an account and a good number of the students were knowledgeable about what the service was but had no prior interest in creating an account. Once all 34 students were logged in and setup with an account, I introduced some of the basics of the interface. Students immediately began creating tweets with little to no trouble. Many immediately caught on as I saw my number of followers suddenly went up. I demonstrated how you can use special characters to send reply messages, re-tweet another message, and send direct private messages. I introduced the use of a hash-tag for categorizing posts to make it easier to keep the class together.

Unlike BlackBoard, it will be necessary to manually track the students participation. In order to accurately assess the students efforts, I asked them to send me their user-names that they are using on Twitter.

Before releasing the students to start their tweets, I also introduced the TweetDeck application that runs on both the Windows, Mac, as well as the iPhone. I demonstrated how this application makes it easy to setup a column with your search group. It also integrates a tool to perform URL shortening. As the experiment continues, I will provide further updates on how things are progressing. You are welcome to follow the hash-tag #csis1180 if you want to see the action live. If you are interested in learning more, feel free to contact me at robert.heinrich@stockton.edu.

Jamie Cromartie, Associate Professor of Entomology, has recently contacted the Stockton community about opportunities presented by J. Scott Lee, the Executive Director of the Association for Core Texts and Courses (ACTC).

The first opportunity is becoming involved in the ACTC annual conference in New Brunswick in April 2010. Stockton College will be co-sponsoring this conference. Among the benefits that accrue to co-sponsors include an “all-institution” panel, where those faculty at RSC who are interested in core texts can form one panel and explain their use of core texts in their classes. Stockton’s efforts would also be publicized in the ACTC newsletter, and the ACTC makes every effort to recognize the work of an institution on behalf of ACTC and core text, liberal arts education.

A second opportunity is for Stockton to join the ACTC Liberal Arts Institute and participate in the Institute’s general education review process. The Institute is composed of leading institutions, including Columbia, St. John’s College, and Saint Mary’s College of California, that support the Institute well beyond the annual contribution of membership in ACTC. The Institute has a Board (which is under the governance of the entire ACTC Board) that recommends initiatives, informs supporting institutions of our activities, and helps to make our initiatives a reality through participation in various projects.

This is particularly timely as Stockton is undertaking a general education review. One of the projects which the Institute frequently undertakes is general education curriculum review, sometimes involving reviews of specific core text programs. The Institute has available a national database of 81 institutions which captures much of the evolutionary activity in general education between 1978 and 2004 in 81 institutions across the United States. It also has a ongoing research efforts in the field of general education.

Jamie Cromartie believes that expanding our involvement as a member institution of ACTC to a higher level would allow us access to data and expertise that is generally not available at such a reasonable cost. He asks that interested faculty contact him at Jamie.Cromartie@stockton.edu, and also communicate their support to Stockton’s Senate and to colleagues involved in 2020.

As I sifted through the twitter stream for DH09, I discovered that I missed a chance to get in to ThatCamp after all, because a couple of participants had to drop out at the last minute. Initially, ThatCamp was my first choice for immersing myself in the digital humanities community, ahead of DH09. ThatCamp is structured as an “unconference.” Instead of having people write papers and present them to an audience on a schedule developed by a program committee, ThatCamp asked people to write in about what topics they were interested in and then assemble a program Just-in-Time at the conference itself. People will spontaneously assemble themselves in discussion groups and all people in the panel participate directly. Some people may indeed spend 20 minutes (or more) showing off some new tool that they have developed, but there is room for lots of flexibility in how things get presented. I thought that the give and take of such a group would give me an even better sense of where the exciting work is being done. But alas, the ThatCamp unconference was so popular that they had to turn away potential participants, one of whom was me. Indeed, that seems to be the down side for the unconference format. Because everyone is a potential presenter, there is an upper bound to how large the groups can be. In a regular conference, the bigger the audience is, the better.

So… In any case, DH09 was a very rewarding experience and I’m glad I made it there. I’m sorry that I’m not at ThatCamp because it looks as if they are covering lots of fascinating stuff. I’m not sure I would have made it through both conferences without reaching brain lock; they are so overwhelming. I’ll be curious to see what happens to the dozen or so participants in both. While it’s not the same as actually being there, you can get a pretty good sense of just what is going on from various sources, which I will be following intently.

First of all, it looks as if the Twitter Feed from #thatcamp is going to leave the feed from #dh09 in the dust. In half a day, they have half as many entries as DH09 had for the whole three-day conference. Here’s the twapperkeeper link.

There’s also live-blogging on the ThatCamp home page. Here’s a link.

And Vika Zafrin of Boston University, who live-blogged DH09 is also live-blogging ThatCamp at this link.
(and a small note to the Stockton community: Vika recognized the name Richard Stockton College because she knows Scott Rettberg.)

There’s probably more, since this is such a keyed in bunch of scholars, but that’s enough to keep you (and me) going for a while…

So maybe you wanted to learn more about Digital Humanities ’09 than you could get from my live blogging feeds…

Not to worry! There are plenty of other sources available. There was a genuine Twitter torrent during the conference, which participants have preserved and begun to analyze using some of the tools mentioned at the conference.

Here’s a “twapperkeeper” file of the 1590 tweets using the #dh09 hashtag.
Here’s an analysis of the twitter stream using the text visualization software Voyeur.

Other people were also live blogging the sessions, sometimes in the same sessions, sometimes in the parallel ones. Among them are:

Vika Zafrin at Digilib.
Torsten Reimer and Seth Denbo at arts-humanities.net.

And Geoffrey Rockwell on Jon Orwant from Google Books’ talk.

Meanwhile, many of the same people from DH09, plus a bunch of fresh minds, will be continuing the conversation in a slightly different form at the THATCamp “unconference.” You can follow that conversation here.

Enjoy.

This session is to help all of us at the conference figure out how to pay for our digital humanities projects. Neil Fraistat will moderate presentations by Brett Bobley of the NEH, Helen Cullyer of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Rachel Frick of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Murielle Gagnon of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Stephen Griffen of the NSF, Christoph Kummel of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and Shearer West of the Arts and Humanities Research Council of UK.

Preliminary message is that DH2010 will be in London, July 7-10. Website: http://www.cch.kcl.ac.uk/dh2010/. DH2011 will be at Stanford.

Bobley: Start up grants: have made about 75, in a week or so they will announce another 25. It is seed money for innovation. A big grant can be hard to get because peer reviewers want to be sure that it will work. So innovation can be hard if there is a risk of failure. Example of InPho project on machine learning processing of Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Given $30,000. After their prototype worked, they were able to get $400,000 from preservation and access R&D. Another project is institutes grant for methodological training. Example TEI, Geospatial. Third: International Collaboration.

Cullyer: “Building Digital Environments for Scholarship: Integrating Digital Papyrology as an Example. Support very large cross-disciplinary projects such as Bamboo. But also smaller scale projects with research tools. IDP brings together three already existing collections relating to papyri: Duke, Heidelberg, and APIS. Interested in it not just because in classics. Driven by needs of classicist scholarship. Editing software can be used in other projects. A standards based approach. Built in stages. Sustainable because of multiple funders.

Frick: IMLS is a federal agency established in 1996. Budget is $271 million. Funds research, demonstration projects, advancing digital resources, collaborations. Annual deadline is Feb 1, awarded late September. Also funds fellowships to librarians. Has produced report on “digital stewardship.” Funded “Our America Project” at Rice U.

Gagnon: Focused on Canadian funding. Has limited funding, which limits scope. One part of scope is “Image, Text, Sound, and Technology” which is being realigned as digital humanities. They’ve achieved “flashy” results and they need scholars as champions.

Griffin: Funding ECAI and project on propensity for story in humans by Lewis Lancaster. Also funded large digital objects. See as much of the human record in digital form as possible. Be sure to make yourself heard to shape environment for DH.

Kuemmel: In Library Services Division in Germany. They are part of a major initiative for digital information.

West: The “baby” of the UK research councils. One of seven, the newest. 2% of budget covering 28% of the academic community. They will be running a “Sand Pit” — “a creative space where you lock people in a room together for five days and whoever comes out alive gets 3Million.” Key issues are open access and demonstrating impact.

Fraistat finishes by observing that Digital Humanities is international, but funding is national.

What is the range of definitions of “impact”? West: recently published report on economic impact. Griffin: Government tries to quantify everything. He doesn’t agree with that. Should be more subjective. Bobley: Maximize access. But that can be in depth rather than breadth.

Struck by timidity of us as a group. It’s odd to settle for 10% of the pie. It’s all digital, so humanities funding should be all digital. To do that funders need real advocacy from digital humanists.

For the final set of panels where I have a choice, I’ve decided to move to the more experimental papers. Maybe this will be more “relaxing” for me.

The conference ends with a open panel of funding for digital humanities, which I’ll also attend.

First up is Stuart Moulthrop of the University of Baltimore on Social Media and Digital Humanities (in the abstract book, it was listed as “Literature, the Literary, and Dataworld”). Starts with a provocation, calls print and broadcast “fossil media.” Social media are important because something is going to change. Not quite sure what the change is going to be. But it is a transition from content to data. Calls himself part of the “crankiest generation,” where ELO “electronic literature organization” will part with OLE “outside the legitimate enterprise.” Current economic crisis helps Moulthrop argue that doubts about the bubble can link back to uncertainty about where social networking is taking us. Imagines homology between securitization of debt and new media and humanism. But “boring new media” is not an option. He sees transition to “systemic media” where there a data streams attached to every object.

Next up is Steven Jones of Loyola University of Chicago on “social text as digital game space; or what I learned from playing spore”. “This talk should be hyperlinked to Stuart’s slide 12.” It follows from his discussion of the as yet unreleased game in his previous book. Starts with his own provocation. Let’s compare texts and games as systems for sharing and reediting their content. He gives a general account of where games fit in recent digital humanities scholarship from McKenzie to McGann. Game Facade developed in 2005 shows similarities between role playing game and improvisational theater. Parts were played by improv actors. Author of spore wanted players to “feel more like George Lucas than Luke Skywalker.” Hybrid model which enables users to populate universe with one’s own creations and interact with other people’s creations without having what you do to other people’s creations affect what happens to their own universes. Calls it a “massively single-player game.” He then circles back to how activities of digital humanities follow some of the same processes as building creatures in Spore.

Q: With emergent processes, how do you recognize something important when it’s there?

CenterNet is holding their general meeting with special guest appearance by Jon Orwant of Google Books.

They anticipated a big crowd for this. The tables that have been in all the rooms have been removed and replaced by theater style seating and most of the seats are filling up.

Announcement that CenterNet will be holding an international summit of digital humanities centers immediately before next year’s DH10 in London. CenterNet will also be meeting with Consortium of Humanities Centers.

Orwant’s title: “What to search for in Google’s 7 million books?” First, why did they do it? Second, where are they going with it? Company motto: “organize the world’s knowledge and make it useful.” First discusses whether current strategy constitutes fair use and status of settlement. There will be opt in and opt out possibilities. For opt ins, Google may be able to arrange sale of digital copies, with interesting questions of pricing. Could also offer subscription service of those books that opt in. Overall about 125 million “works” and 165 million “manifestations” in the world. About 5% is in print. About 75% is out of print but under copyright. The rest are public domain. Creation of a “research corpus” is part of settlement. What that “research corpus” is is still to be defined. He was asked about quality of data from scanned pages (OCR). Says that it is as good as anyone’s, which is not all that great. OCR will never be 100%. What “making research corpus available” means is also still to be defined. Finding the right balance of using tools of digital humanists to do more advanced searches on Google’s API and making information useful for non-tech-savvy humanists. Orwant gives example that if source is too open, a non-tech-savvy user could ask a question that would require decades for the search engine to answer, so have to shield against that, but that makes it hard to integrate user generated tools. Mentioned “contest” to come up with “new uses” for Google Books. Will Google Books metadata be made available? No, because some of it is acquired through proprietary software. What about corrupt metadata? His response is whether this is an urgent issue or not, because it may be overcome by other developments, so hand recoding may not be cost-effective.

I arrived slightly late to the second afternoon session of DH09 because I got distracted looking at two posters during the coffee break. Both were very interesting works on Africa. Hamilton College professor Angel Nieves has produced a living history archive of the Soweto uprising of 1976. It is available at http://www.soweto76archive.org. The second is a wonderful beta for layering information on maps of Africa, produced by Harvard’s GIS lab: http://cga-3.hmdc.harvard.edu/africamap/. Check both of them out.

The first paper of this session is by John Keating and Aja Teehan, who I heard present on a different topic earlier in the conference. This paper deals with delivering a humanities computing teaching module at the undergraduate level. I arrived as they were discussing their theory of learning before they move on to the pragmatics of the course. They derived their ideas of what to teach in part by researching topics from previous DH conferences. Key topics covered in lectures were text and textuality, entity-relationship modelling, tree modelling, SQL and XQuery, UML, metadata standards, and critical evaluation of projects. They required students to build a project using TEI.

The second paper is by Amanda French and Peter Wosh from NYU. They are discussing digital teaching of archives and public history. Wosh provides background on where the program itself came from. As they became more committed to bringing digital humanities to the program, they decided they wanted someone who specialized in digital humanities itself, not in history or archives. That person was Amanda French. French asks whether Digital Humanties’ goal is to “colonize” traditional humanities disciplines. All disciplines are “digital” but their not “digitally literate.” She took a survey of digital skills of incoming students. They were familiar with “the web” (facebook, blogging, etc) but not really able to create digital projects. They have now defined a curriculum sequence to build competencies. One student created an online archive about the culper spy ring and benedict arnold.

Our third speaker was unable to make it to the conference, so we get out a little early this time. That’s a good thing because there will be a presentation by Jon Orwant of Google Books at lunch time. I’ll try to blog that too.

So today is the final day of DH09. The festivities keep going all day and will finish with a round table about funding opportunities for digital humanities by representatives of the main funding agencies in the US and abroad. Sessions are starting slightly late because of an accident near campus that snagged traffic from the hotels. It’s an odd sort of bookend to the conference. The first day was marred by a fatal accident on the Metro Red Line.

Today’s first session is focused on the role of library in digital humanities. It starts with Vika Zafrin of Boston University on the Library as an Agent of Recontextualization. What is role of library when ordering principles can be divorced from actual objects? At BU, they view the library as a “programmatic space” rather than a storage space. BU Theological library has a site on the history of Protestant missions and one on Fichte. They are doing so with the goal of fulfilling ACLS report on cyberinfrastructure.

The second papers is by William Kretzschmer and William Potter from the University of Georgia on library collaboration with large digital projects. Kretzschmer is an English Professor and Potter is a Librarian. Kretzschmer is presenting on how they collaborated. Argument is that the library is the only realistic option for long-term sustainability of digital humanities projects. Most large projects rely on a single developer. Continuity depends on continuing interest of that developer and funding. His example is Linguistic Atlas Project, started as analog project in 1929 and beginning to move digital in the 1980s. Raises the question, how large is “large”, or does it even matter if it is “large” rather than “small”? Library can house content long term, but staff from the project will have to be responsible for tools.

The final paper is by Rick Furuta of Texas A&M on supporting the creation of scholarly bibliographies through social collaboration. To get a project collaboration going you need someone interested in computing, someone who specializes in an academic discipline, and someone who works in the library. Papers that aren’t available digitally are becoming increasingly invisible. Old bibliographic model takes too long. So can bibliographies benefit from input of users? Few projects are thinking about multi-language scholarship. Texas A&M is home to Cervantes Bibliography, which is adding social citation characteristics. Includes moderation function by chief editor. Workflow of this kind of moderation is trickier than it looks. Types of groups able to moderate have strengths and weaknesses: private, closed, open. Use a process of assigning ranks to collaborators.