Tag Archives: clioF11

Week 13: Scholarly Communication and Open Access Open Source

20 Sunday Nov 2011

Posted by in Clio Wired Fall 2011, General, Social

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When I started my Masters program at the University of Edinburgh, I had an idea – an ideal – of what Grad School would be like. I envisioned intellectual conversations about history, art, theatre, literature, and science happening in the flat at dinner, over a cup of coffee, or a late night beer. I believed that to enter Graduate School was to enter a realm of scholarly discussion and inquiry.

The reality of my MSc was that, outside of class, these conversations happened only with a handful of people: a few fellow students, occasionally one who lived in my block of flats, and frequent conversations about culture and cultural differences with my friends, a computer programmer and a translator.

I wanted to open with the above not to complain but to point out the importance of scholarly communication. Most academics/scholars benefit from and crave conversation with other scholars, about the topics which we study and about intellectual subjects in general. One of my main activities on Twitter is following conversations about digital history and humanities.

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Week 10: Data Mining and Distant Reading

30 Sunday Oct 2011

Posted by in Clio Wired Fall 2011, Digital Humanities

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This week Jeri and I are leading the discussion. She has already posted an excellent overview of the readings, so I thought I would look at the sites and tools.

With Criminal Intent was a response to the Digging into Data challenge in 2009. It combines a specialized API with a personal research environment and visualization tools. The data is all from the records of the Old Bailey.

Let me just say that Dan Cohen is right about the importance of a good API. It makes a huge difference. I mucked around with the Old Bailey website when I was working on my Masters in Edinburgh – we talked about its utility in a class on material culture in 18th century Britain. It was fun to poke around but hard to get anywhere.  The API developed for With Criminal Intent is so much more useful, because you can drill down so quickly.

Compare the two search pages:

Old Bailey Search

Old Bailey search

The old search page ( top left) was oriented more towards punishments, verdicts and specific persons. The API (bottom left), on the other hand, looks more towards general categories and helps you narrow down to subcategories of punishment or offense.  Moreover, once you’ve started the search you can further narrow by the existing categories, based on what the results are.

Old Bailey API

To explain: I ran a search for offence category Theft, subcategory shoplifting, where the victim is female. I was then able to see the rate of punishments for qualifying crimes – the top being transportation with 144 sentences. From here I can further narrow my search, view results, or move the data into Zotero or Voyeur.

What this API allows me to do that the old search did not is to generalize while still narrowing down. Not only did the creators of the API make gender a category for analysis, but they also defined for the users the subcategories of offences, verdicts, and punishments.

With Criminal Intent is, in my opinion, a good model for data mining in history. Note that  from the API you can directly access the raw source, the actual entries.  While a historian using the site can look at larger trends they can also zoom in on each and every instance if they want.

Compare that functionality with Google’s Ngram or Moretti’s graphs of novels. As Moretti points out, on the graphs each work is only “tiny dots in the graph of figre 2, indistinguishable from all the others.”1 From Google NGrams you can move to book search for a year or set of years, probably best done by opening a window. You cannot, however, narrow the search beyond the date and the general language corpus.

What do we make of these sites? What do they make of history? Which are tools and which are methodologies? Any advanced search option gives you choices of which parameters to narrow, but those parameters are pre-defined.

Do these tools, or methodologies, change the way we formulate and ask questions of our historical data? If nothing else, it certainly alters what we can discover, in very little time.

  1. Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London, New York: Verson, 2005), 8. [↩]

Week 9: Digital Scholarship

23 Sunday Oct 2011

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The readings which most resonated with me were the reports from the 2007 Working Group on Evaluating Public History Scholarship and the 2007 essay by William G. Thomas III, “Writing A Digital History Journal Article from Scratch: An Account”. They are relevant not only to the course, but to my future as a historian (academic/public/digital), and I suspect I’ll reread these over the next few years.

Even if digital history isn’t implicitly public history, I think that the recommendations of the working group for evaluating public history work create a very helpful template for digital historians. The emphasis to community engagement is in particular is worthy of attention. One, because public history and publicly-accessible digital history works are a way of engaging with the community, and can especially help foster connections between a local group and the college/university, breaking down barriers which might otherwise exist. Secondly, because I think historians sometimes forget about the communities with which they could engage; if we keep that in mind as one of the assets of our work, it is harder to neglect those ties. Continue reading »

Week 6: Digital Collections and Digital Preservation

01 Saturday Oct 2011

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Some of the readings this week address concerns and questions about digital preservation which I’ve had for a while, and although they didn’t provide answers I am at least more positive than I had been, albeit cautiously.

It seems to me very easy to get caught up in the possibility of digital history, in all the exciting opportunities before us and forget to think about the durability of the sites or projects we create. We’ve talked in class about websites which show their age in terms of the user interface, and I’m glad that we’re addressing the basic accessibility or readability of the underlying data to future users. Just because something is digitized now doesn’t mean it will be usable 10 years down the line.

I might be a bit hyperaware of this – I know that I drew pictures of my cat, Middy, using MacPaint on our computer when I was a kid. I don’t know where those files are, and even if I could find them, would there be a program to open them? My father brought home a QuickTake camera in the 1990s; in the early 2000s he decided to try and open the files, and it took him about three years to find an application which could do so.

In addition to these personal examples, I remember reading about the efforts of the National Security Archive to ensure that presidential records from the 1970s and 80s would/will be readable by the time the confidentiality restrictions were/are lifted on them. I think that the authors of the article on digital forensics were not far off the mark in the predicting that there may be a need for engineers/developers who specialize in making older forms of born-digital or digitized content readable. While some individuals and institutions might make the effort to migrate as formats evolve, it’s unreasonable to expect that everyone will.

I wonder how much auto-generated metadata will be lost in the translation?

Which brings up another point from this week’s reading, specifically from Cohen and Rosenzweig – Document! Document! Document! Build the metadata into the code of your website or project, and track your changes in some sort of readme! Not only will be this be useful to scholars 10 or 20 years in the future, it will also be useful to the next person who works on your project! Or even to you, when, in six months, you try to remember why you built something the way you did.

Week 5: Public History (on the web)

24 Saturday Sep 2011

Posted by in Clio Wired Fall 2011, Courses, Digital Humanities, museums

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The title of this week in Clio Wired is Public History and the bulk of the reading list is web sites where the general public can engage with history. The sites are:

Two of the sites – Deerfield and Freedom – use a pre-content site, a sort of splash page. The image and text presentation is decidedly reminiscent of the initial physical encounter with a museum exhibit: a wall with text summarizing the exhibit and a representative image or two. Both of the sites were developed by museum groups, so the transfer of layout theory makes sense. As a web user, I don’t know that I like having to take an additional click to start exploring content, although to be fair you can go from the first page of Freedom to the collections. However, I can see how the layout might create a mental note for the user “This content comes from a museum”; which could increase the users’ trust of the site content, given Rosenzweig and Thelen’s 1998 finding that Americans trust museums for “truth” in history.1

Three of the sites are very clearly about mapping history, geolocating photographs and the like: Cleveland Historical, History Pin, PhillyHistory. Of these, I find myself most frustrated by HistoryPin because it has the least amount of information about each image or object in its collection. Cleveland and Philly’s provide contextual information for each image, Philly going so far as to provide quotes for some of them. These all have mobile app versions of their content, and I would be curious to find out how much of the text data is displayed in the mobile versions. I can see that someone developing a purely mobile app might think photos were the best way to engage people in history, and yet I can’t help but think that the addition of context allows for a richer experience.

In fact, that’s my overall impression of these sites. The ones with more context, more ability to “dig down,” as they say, are more engaging to me. What is the object or image, where did it come from, how did it end up on the web site, what does it mean? As a historian, I’m used to asking these questions and figuring them out for myself, but as a curator one of your jobs is to provide some guidance to your visitors. For me, It’s not enough just to put things on the web. You have to give clues, at the very least, to help visitors understand why it was worth digitizing and putting online in the first place.

1 Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelan, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Week 4: Design, Standards, and Usability

18 Sunday Sep 2011

Posted by in Clio Wired Fall 2011, Digital Humanities, museums

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I enjoyed reading the various essays from A List Apart regarding design and usability, but the piece for the week which most engaged me was the article by Elings and Weibel regarding shared metadata standards for museums, archives, and libraries.

My job at the historic house and what I am now doing with CHNM both came down to assigning keywords, metadata, to historic documents and (at the house) objects. One of my roles at the House was to propose, evaluate, and define new keywords for our relational database. As a result, I’m aware of the benefit of a controlled vocabulary, as well as the challenges which accompany it.

As I think about it, the challenges fit well with the readings about design and architecture of websites. Both situations force the builder or implementer to look at the audience, or audiences, they plan to serve, and how the audience(s) will interact with the data they provide.
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Week 3: What Is Digital History?

11 Sunday Sep 2011

Posted by in Clio Wired Fall 2011, Digital Humanities

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(For those not in the class, the syllabus is online.)

The readings for this week took me from familiar ground to unfamiliar and back again. Some of them touched on some topics I’d been wanting to blog about but hadn’t quite gotten a hold of, including the history and nature of hypertext and the illusion of permanence of digital media. I will talk about hypertext in a moment, but I want to reflect on the question of presentation of information which is raised both by Cohen and Rosenzweig in Digital History and in the JAH article “The Promise of Digital History“.

Both of these works include discussions about how the material (source, image, analysis) is presented to the user. While design and layout is an element of print publishing, it seems to me a less vital element in that medium than it is for digital history. In fact, the need to consider interactivity, presentation, and layout when creating digital history are part of why I feel that it has many similarities to museum work. Creating an exhibit in physical space and creating a digital history require the curator/historian/team to tackle many of the same questions.

There are design questions: font choices and color schemes, and how long captions/label text should be. There is the inevitable uncertainty of whether anyone will read your text at all, because they might simply look at your lovely objects/pictures and move on, completely missing the carefully crafted context you’ve provided. Then there are questions about layout (how do we want to organize the flow? rooms in a line or independent path creation?) and interactive/hands on elements (do we use them? what do they do if we add them?)

Interactivity and layout for digital historians lead my thoughts to  hypercard. The first personal computer I ever interacted with was the Apple Macintosh (IIe, I think) that my Dad brought home. Most of my first experiences in digital narrative were built using hypercard; as a result I tend to conceptualize digital text in hypercard form, at least in the draft stages. “The Promise of Digital History” and the chapters from Digital History made me realize that I have been thinking in an essentially traditional manner and also inspired a model for alternatives.

How I had been thinking was very linear narrative. If it were a museum exhibit, you would go in via a door or space marked “Entrance” and all the rooms would have only two doors, one in and one out; guided like a historic house or self-guided like many Smithsonian exhibits. There might be hyperlinks which opened small windows of commentary, but the history would otherwise progress in the traditional way.  My hypercard model is a copy of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide omnibus edition  that technically belonged to my older sister. There may have been some hyperlinked words with sounds or images, and I believe there was a built-in standard dictionary, but the only interesting deviation from a published version was that file opened to a window with a large red button reading Don’t Panic which you clicked to open the text.

The other hypercard experience I remember is a definite contrast. Its physical layout was more a group of rooms opening onto each other in a variety of ways, some of them utterly unexpected, and the stories you uncovered ran every which way, overlapping and underlapping in truly delightful ways. It was a game-story called The Manhole.1 Although the stories were set, the fact that you could discover them in your own order at your own pace was exciting. Simply the fact that the story was discovered and not just in front of you was exciting.

Reading Adams’ work on the computer was entertaining, but playing The Manhole was interesting. Which is why I think it’s worthwhile for digital historians to consider Peter Gallagher’s comment regarding “a pursuit of content versus a delivery of content.”2 The digital medium has such potential to engage users in a pursuit of content, and while it may not always be feasible, it must  not be forgotten.

1 Some images from the game can be seen at Smackerel.net.
2 “The Promise of Digital History,” Journal of American History, September 2008. The comment is in response to a question regarding similarities between museum exhibits and digital history, located roughly halfway down the page.