Vol. 2, No. 3, Summer 2013 on Journal of Digital Humanities

Big? Smart? Clean? Messy? Data in the Humanities

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This paper is about data in the humanities.¹ Most of my colleagues in literary and cultural studies would not necessarily speak of their objects of study as “data.” If you ask them what it is they are studying, they would rather speak of books, paintings and movies; of drama and crime fiction, of still lives and action painting; of German expressionist movies and romantic comedy. They would mention Denis Diderot or Toni Morrison, Chardin or Jackson Pollock, Fritz Lang or Diane Keaton. Maybe they would talk about what they are studying as texts, images, and sounds. But rarely would they consider their objects of study to be “data.” However, in the humanities just as in other areas of research, we are increasingly dealing with “data.” With digitization efforts in the private and public sectors going on around the world, more and more data relevant to our fields of study exists, and, if the data has been licensed appropriately, it is available for research.² The digital humanities aim to raise to the challenge and realize the potential of this data for humanistic inquiry. As Christine Borgman has shown in her book on Scholarship in the Digital Age, this is as much a theoretical, methodological and social issue as it is a technical issue.³

Digital Humanities Keywords: A Collaborative Community Web-based Project

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Poster

Download (PDF, 373KB)

Abstract

As the field of digital humanities has expanded dramatically in recent years, it has also struggled to define—or perhaps more correctly, to redefine—itself across a seemingly divergent set of its practitioners’ backgrounds, interests, priorities, methodologies, and institutional settings that yet still have something fundamental in common. From critical code studies to corpus linguistics to tool creation to online pedagogy, digital humanities practitioners surely share the digital and the humanities yet may work within different fundamental paradigms, asking different questions and using different methodologies in the service of achieving very different final goals (Gold, Kirschenbaum). How, beneath the shared surface of this broadly cast “big tent” of digital humanities, can such a diverse community of practice come together in fruitful and mutually beneficial ways? What can we as scholars do to facilitate this convergence in a broad discursive space where the ethic of “more hack, less yack” can sometimes discourage the meaningful exchanges of ideas that still need to happen, the collective negotiations of purpose that so often serve as the source of new insights?

Local Programs, Global Audiences

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

In the scholarly communication ecosystem, lectures and conference roundtables offer valuable opportunities to share one’s on-going research and reflections with an engaged audience. Although social media, online conference programs, and slideshare sites now boost the signal of scholarly work, talks at conferences are still often limited by the time and place of their delivery. Even as digital humanities forges wider global connections, travel funding at universities and other public humanities institutions is on the decline. Everyone must make increasingly strategic decisions about how and where to invest travel time and money, often to the exclusion of professional events that might be interesting or thought-provoking. Digital networks and the open web, however, transcend boundaries of location and time by allowing for the rapid, broader distribution of transcripts, slides, posters, and audio and video.

Data Curation as Publishing for the Digital Humanities

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

“Publishing” has assumed a large role in discussions of how scholarship is changing. One reason is that, in these discussions, the mechanisms of publishing come to stand in for the larger and more complex processes of creating, vetting, and circulating knowledge. Some of the sense of unmet need that arises in considerations of the emerging, alternative publishing methods for those working in digital humanities comes from the problems with this shorthand.

Networking the Belfast Group through the Automated Semantic Enhancement of Existing Digital Content

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Poster

Download (PDF, 1.63MB)

Abstract

There is increasing work on and interest in social networks in the digital humanities community (Meeks 2011). Analysis is frequently done on digital content—including images (Akdag Salah et al. 2012); email (Hangal et al. 2012); and citation networks (Visconti 2012) — because the data lend themselves to aggregation, conversion, and analysis. Yet despite this flurry of activity, the possibility exists for an exponential jump in network analysis. After all, the holdings and catalogs of galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs) include traces of vast paper-based networks, but the data are locked away in forms that don’t easily lend themselves to analysis. What if we could open up that content? In this poster, we will report on an attempt to provide tools for archivists to expose the information embedded in the descriptions of their collections as well as a test case for analyzing that data: an examination of the networks of the Irish poets collectively known as “the Belfast Group.”

Making Digital: Visual Approaches to the Digital Humanities

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The Making History Project is an attempt by artists and archaeologists based within the University of Southampton to collaboratively develop innovative uses for 3D technologies. Techniques such as high resolution data capture and 3D printing represent a new era in digital imaging. As these technologies become increasingly affordable they are coming to play a more significant role in archaeological and artistic practise. Both art and archaeology are currently involved in attempting to realise the full implications and potential of these technologies. This paper describes a project undertaken by the Archaeological Computing Research Group and Winchester School of Art at the University of Southampton which seeks to address this moment of technological disruption in order to collaboratively develop creative and methodologically innovative approaches to the use of these technologies.

Programming with Arduino for Digital Humanities

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Poster

Download (PDF, 92KB)

Background

The department of library, archive, and information studies at Tsurumi University provides courses on computer science for humanities students. The courses include one introductory and two intermediate programming courses. There are project-based courses on Digital Humanities instead of an advanced programming course. In the introductory course, Scratch was used and in the intermediate courses, Java has been adopted.

Difficulties in teaching programming in an introductory course to humanities students have been to let students find interest or enjoyment in (1) symbol manipulation and (2) grouping tasks with functions or other similar units.

RDF: Resource Description Failures and Linked Data Letdowns

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

The topic of the Semantic Web, more recently rebranded as Linked (Open) Data, has been in discussed in digital humanities and related disciplines since its inception. Now, more than a decade later, the technology has had more than enough time to run through the hype curve towards the Plateau of Productivity. But where are we really in that timeline? Some sectors have embraced it, and others are catching up quickly, but significant obstacles to adoption remain.

Text Mining Tools in the Humanities: An Analysis Framework

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Poster

Download (PDF, 3.56MB)

Abstract¹

The most extensive compendium of text mining tools to date includes 71 tools and summarizes each based on ten criteria.² While extensive, this listing of tools and their properties is general in its review criteria and does not offer any testing-based observations to help users assess actual usability. Humanists looking to try text analysis, visualization, and mining tools for research need better information that is relevant to their needs and reviews of tools that help them make choices. This poster presents the testing framework developed for the TAPoR 2.0 portal reviews. The poster will cover:

Voyant Notebooks: Literate Programming and Programming Literacy

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Poster

Download (PDF, 676KB)

Abstract

Some thirty years ago Donald Knuth, a computer scientist, proposed literate programming as a better way of organizing narrative and code (1984). Knuth argued that more emphasis should be placed on explaining to humans what computers are meant to do, rather than simply instructing computers what to do. Knuth was especially interested in weaving together macrostyle code snippets with prose that provided a larger narrative context, not merely functional comments of specific lines of code that are the distilled remnants of an intellectual process.

Architecture to Enable Large-Scale Computational Analysis of Millions of Volumes

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Poster

Download (PDF, 1.5MB)

Abstract

The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) is a collaborative research center that provides Digital Humanities researchers access to not only millions of volumes from the HathiTrust (HT) digital library, but also cutting-edge software tools and cyber infrastructure to perform advanced computational analysis over the corpus at an unprecedented scale.

The corpus at the HTRC currently consists of over 3 million public domain volumes and anticipates access to an additional 6 million in-copyright volumes. In their raw form at the HathiTrust, these volumes are stored as files on special hardware using an internal Pairtree structure. The internal HathiTrust structure is optimal for its primary function of the digital page image delivery to digital library patrons for viewing; however, it does not support well the large-scale computational analysis which is the primary function of the HTRC. Navigating the Pairtree and uncompressing the text data would encounter major performance and scalability issues. While researchers from other scientific communities have been addressing aspects of the “Big Data” problem with success, the large corpus that HTRC hosts to support computational analysis presents a unique setting in that it consists of a massive number of small text-based files, whereas most solutions from the scientific communities are tailored towards large files and non-text-based content. In this poster, we will present the approach the HTRC takes to solve this problem — the HTRC keeps the Pairtree only for the purpose of synchronization with the HT, and processes and pushes the volume data from the local Pairtree to a NoSQL storage cluster using Apache Cassandra hosted on conventional hardware during the ingest process. In order to balance the data store and ingest workload, the developers at the HTRC and the HT also devised a very simple yet effective way to parallelize the rsync of the single source Pairtree at the HT on all Cassandra nodes by starting rsync at lower branches instead of at the root.

KORA: A Digital Repository and Publishing Platform

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Poster

Download (PDF, 1.92MB)

Abstract

MATRIX has developed an open source application that cultural and educational institutions can use to preserve digital materials and display them online. The application, KORA (http://kora.matrix.msu.edu), is particularly well-suited for working with digital objects of all media types and for easily creating displays of these objects in multiple ways that enhance their educational and research value. MATRIX, a humanities computing research center at Michigan State University, has built and enhanced this application in the course of seven years of research with support from the National Science Foundation.

Textal: A Text Analysis Smartphone App for Digital Humanities

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Poster

Download (PDF, 1.28MB)

Abstract

This poster introduces Textal, a text analysis application for iOS, and text analysis service infrastructure, which is currently in development at UCLDH and UCLCASA and will be freely available beginning Summer 2013. This poster will present findings evaluating the development, launch, and reception of the app, indicating how smartphone technology can increase the potential for public engagement within the Digital Humanities.

Textal (soon to be launched at www.textal.org, currently on twitter at @textal) will be a freely available smartphone application which allows users to create, share, and explore word clouds of a document, website, or tweet stream. Those in visualization and Digital Humanities have tended to sneer at the popular use of word clouds, given we are used to applying robust text analysis tools (such as http://voyant-tools.org/).¹ However, Textal turns word clouds into an intuitive, visually-oriented interface: once a Textal of a chosen text is generated, users can click on words to access underlying statistics, such as frequency and collocates, and so we believe that the pinch, stretch, and click potential in smartphones, along with our judicious design, can fix the elements of word cloud visualization which are currently held to be problematic and act as a bridge between those who have never encountered text analysis techniques, and the more detailed approaches undertaken by researchers in Digital Humanities. All Textal visualizations, including word-clouds, graphs, charts, and word lists, can be shared via social media such as Twitter and Facebook, and the resulting interface word clouds will also be available online. Textal is powered by server-side processing of linguistic data (users can submit any text material they want, by URL, or copy, or paste). The resulting sever architecture will also serve as an API for those wishing to carry out on-the-fly generation of text analysis statistics, which can be used in conjunction with other web services.

TEI Boilerplate

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Poster

Download (PDF, 2.91MB)

Introduction

TEI Boilerplate is a lightweight, HTML5 compliant framework for publishing TEI documents. TEI Boilerplate (TEIBP) is designed to bridge the gap between the browser-friendly features of HTML and the semantic richness of native TEI documents.¹

Although TEI provides mechanisms for describing the design, presentational, and material features of the source document, projects and individual scholars that use TEI are responsible for developing their own methods, or implementing existing solutions, for converting the TEI to a presentation-ready state for the web or print.² Two potential paths to reach this goal are:

Vol. 2, No. 3, Summer 2013 on Journal of Digital Humanities

Big? Smart? Clean? Messy? Data in the Humanities

Digital Humanities Keywords: A Collaborative Community Web-based Project

Poster

Abstract

Local Programs, Global Audiences

Data Curation as Publishing for the Digital Humanities

Networking the Belfast Group through the Automated Semantic Enhancement of Existing Digital Content

Poster

Abstract

Making Digital: Visual Approaches to the Digital Humanities

Programming with Arduino for Digital Humanities

Poster

Background

RDF: Resource Description Failures and Linked Data Letdowns

Introduction

Text Mining Tools in the Humanities: An Analysis Framework

Poster

Abstract1

Voyant Notebooks: Literate Programming and Programming Literacy

Poster

Abstract

Architecture to Enable Large-Scale Computational Analysis of Millions of Volumes

Poster

Abstract

KORA: A Digital Repository and Publishing Platform

Poster

Abstract

Textal: A Text Analysis Smartphone App for Digital Humanities

Poster

Abstract

TEI Boilerplate

Poster

Introduction

Abstract¹