Vol. 2, No. 2, Spring 2013 on Journal of Digital Humanities

Changing Medium, Transforming Composition

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Figure 1: Class Corpus Home Page

Knowing only that they had registered for a first-year writing course, my Spring 2013 students walked into the first class meeting to discover that they had signed up for “Codes: An XML-based Composition Course” (Figure 1). Although most at the time weren’t familiar with extensible markup language or even its acronym (XML), all could infer its nature as some kind of coding language. Popular media often represent code as profoundly illegible to the point that one can “read” it only as an aesthetic object (think of the vertical crush of green symbols that ostensibly constitute the virtual world in the Matrix franchise). My course, however, argued that XML facilitates hyper legibility in the writing class. XML is a deeply rhetorical language, and it presents an opportunity to teach writing as a metacognitive, iterative, and collaborative process.

Expanding Communities of Practice

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The materials featured in this sixth issue of the Journal of Digital Humanities expose “communities of practice” in digital humanities beyond the constellations of people and institutions directly engaged in experimental and digitally-inflected scholarship. Communities of practice, socially constructed groups that form around shared interests or crafts, often generate forms of tacit knowledge that circulate informally. What distinguishes the works herein is their articulation of tacit knowledge produced during the course of project development. While they originate in diverse sites of digital humanities scholarship, these project strategically engage contingent audiences. Furthermore, each details conscious decisions that tailor its approach to collaborative creation and implementation.

Review: Commons In A Box

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

One of my teaching goals is to end the practice of “Cul-de-Sac Pedagogy,” where students travel down sheltered roads, drop off assignments, and then make anxious return loops to collect their grades. Much to the students’ detriment, no one outside the cul-de-sac sees their work. I’ve recently promised my students that all major assignments would invite an audience larger than me, but achieving this goal would require a technological boost: enter Commons In A Box (CBOX), a free software project developed by Matthew K. Gold’s team at the City University of New York (CUNY). In one semester’s time CBOX’s functional versatility, as well as its open, non-proprietary environment, have helped improve the practical and philosophical elements of my teaching.

Code Appendix for “Changing Medium, Transforming Composition”

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Appendix A: Selections from Major Assignment Markup Schemes

Primary Source Analysis

In at least one paragraph match evidence (details) from the primary source with the interpretations you draw from them:

<seg type="ev_interp">

<seg type="evidence">evidence (details) from the primary source</seg>

<seg type="interpretation">interpretation based on corresponding evidence</seg>

</seg>

Tag all research questions at the end of the PSA with unique xml:id identifiers:

<seg type="research_question" xml:id="surname_rq_#">research question</seg>

Tag a moment of the PSA when you complicate the seemingly obvious:

<seg type="complication">text here</seg>

Integrating Architecture into Digital and Public Humanities: Sites and Sounds + MediaNOLA

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

“Did you know @Tipitinas building has been a gym, radio station, juice bar, restaurant, & brothel? Not all at the same time, of course…”¹

In the fall of 2012, I taught an experimental and exploratory upper-level seminar at the Tulane School of Architecture entitled “Sites and Sounds: Public History.” The course grew out of an independent, applied research project that I am conducting through the Tulane City Center, which investigates the cultural geography of New Orleans’ musical landscape. I began the seminar’s conversation on spatial and digital humanities with the above quote, tweeted by Tipitina’s — a music venue in the Uptown neighborhood of New Orleans — on August 16, 2012. Embodied in that quote of 140 characters (or less) is a nuanced and layered understanding of how the site has served the New Orleans community in multiple capacities. My students’ task in the course was to uncover the hidden histories of place at musical sites and to share them through new media techniques with a larger public audience. By presenting their research through MediaNOLA, a “portal for histories of culture and cultural production in New Orleans,” my students foregrounded and contextualized architecture as a central type of culture production.

Encoding Financial Records

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction¹

“[A]ccount books,” business historian Judith McGaw noted in 1985, “are among the most common but least accessible primary sources for historians….” In the intervening twenty-seven years, historians have made use of these rich sources to produce a range of articles and monographs, but few digitization projects have tackled financial records directly.²

Some standardized electronic data has long been available to social science historians. The Minnesota Population Center’s Integrated Public Use Microdata Series provides harmonized data for U.S. and international population studies. The National Historic Geographic System provides data for United States historical geography, as does the Great Britain Historical Geographic Information System for Britain. A current initiative of the European Science Foundation, the European Historical Population Samples Network, seeks “to create a common format for databases containing information on persons, families and households.” And while a strong tradition of monographs and journals in economic history has resulted from investigation of archival financial records, no comparable project exists for their digitization.³

MediaNOLA: A Digital Humanities Project to Tell Stories of Cultural Production in New Orleans

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The primary objective of MediaNOLA in the NEH planning grant was to work towards creating a website that showed the invisible contributions of ordinary people, places, and practices in the creation of New Orleans culture and its representations. The website was to provide an alternative way to examine New Orleans’ culture solely through the lens of its exceptionalism in relation to the rest of the United States. The scholarly impetus motivating the project came from a series of stakeholders invested in three areas of overlapping interests: (1.) the preservation of materials related to local cultures and cultural production; (2.) the public dissemination of local cultural histories that illustrated broad senses of culture and its production; and (3.) the empowerment of ordinary residents as public historians.

Vol. 2, No. 2, Spring 2013 on Journal of Digital Humanities

Changing Medium, Transforming Composition

Expanding Communities of Practice

Review: Commons In A Box

Code Appendix for “Changing Medium, Transforming Composition”

Appendix A: Selections from Major Assignment Markup Schemes

Primary Source Analysis

Integrating Architecture into Digital and Public Humanities: Sites and Sounds + MediaNOLA

Encoding Financial Records

Introduction1

MediaNOLA: A Digital Humanities Project to Tell Stories of Cultural Production in New Orleans

Introduction¹