Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 2014 on Journal of Digital Humanities

An Introduction to Alex McDowell’s “World Building”

Sat, 01 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

An influential designer changes the way others design. A deeply influential designer shifts how we think about design by fundamentally changing the role design plays in the creative process, potentially altering audiences’ expectations of creative work that ranges from architecture to computer games. Alex McDowell is a deeply influential designer.

Drawing on a literary metaphor — “world-building” — to describe his approach to design, McDowell’s methods represent a cultural shift in his industry’s production process. Taking this metaphor seriously, we might be reminded that engaging literary fiction originates less often in plot outlines than it does in imagined worlds. Sometimes these fictional worlds closely resemble our own. Others are speculative and represent realities far-removed from the world we know. Either way, most fictional worlds present us with lenses with which to view familiar aspects of our own that have been accentuated, transformed, and lain bare.

DH@WIT: Digital Humanities for Undergraduate Design, Engineering, and Management Students

Sat, 01 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Poster

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Abstract

Wentworth Institute of Technology (WIT), an independent, co-educational, technical design and engineering college located in Boston, Massachusetts, offers a comprehensive interdisciplinary, project-based education that integrates classroom, laboratory, studio, cooperative and experiential learning. Our department of Humanities and Social Sciences (HUSS) is currently working to develop and promote a digital humanities-inflected undergraduate curriculum. Unlike more traditional humanities programs, we are using digital humanities to prepare students for careers outside of academia. This poster highlights the aspects of DH@WIT that we consider to be unique.

Exploring and Designing Virtual Worlds

Sat, 01 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

What can we learn from the creation and exploration of a virtual world? The impulse to create imagined spaces occupies a longstanding tradition in the humanities. Whether it be Plato’s Cave or Mount Olympus or Yoknapatawpha, virtual landscapes hold out the promise to expand our human capacities to create, to imagine, and to analyze beyond our physical constraints. Advancements in computational media enable the production of increasingly sophisticated, multimodal technologies that in turn raise new ethical, political, and methodological questions for humanities scholars. This eighth issue of the Journal of Digital Humanities offers multiple perspectives on the digital and physical worlds we create, inhabit, and study.

Pudding Lane: Recreating Seventeenth-Century London

Sat, 01 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

In early 2013, Crytek, GameCity, and The British Library teamed up to launch a competition that challenged students to create interactive environments using maps from The British Library and Crytek’s CryENGINE 3, a suite of tools used to develop video games. The six of us, final-year students studying Game Art Design at De Montfort University, Leicester, were invited to take part in the competition, titled Off the Map.

“World Building”

Sat, 01 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Alex McDowell — World Building

Video of this presentation to the Media Systems convening at the University of California, Santa Cruz on August 27, 2012 originally published on September 11, 2013.

Modelling the Interpretation of Literary Allusion with Machine Learning Techniques

Sat, 01 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Poster

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Abstract

A Computational Perspective on Allusion

Most literary allusion, the deliberate evocation by one text of a passage in another, is based upon text reuse. Yet most instances of textual similarity are not meaningful literary allusions. The goal of the Tesserae project is to automatically detect allusion in a corpus of literary texts, primarily Classical Latin poetry. We begin with a large set of textual parallels, and then attempt to model which of these instances of text reuse are meaningful literary allusions and which are not, according to a group of human readers. While initial attempts with a few basic textual features have proven surprisingly effective, here we employ a more complex feature set and machine learning techniques drawn from the field of computer vision in an attempt to improve the results. Novel applications of machine learning, beyond the well known but constrained textual classification tasks of attribution and categorization, have the potential to be transformative for complex analysis tasks in the Digital Humanities.

Transforming the Object of our Study: The Early Modern Sermon and the Virtual Paul’s Cross Project

Sat, 01 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Scholars of early modern England have recently begun to pay more attention to sermons. (McCullough, Adlington, Rhatigan 2011). Scholars have recognized that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Jeanne Shami has put it, sermons were “the mass media of their day,” providing their listeners with reports of “breaking news,” while satisfying “appetites for . . . entertainment, social interaction, politics, and, of course, religious education” (Shami 2011, 323). Since attendance at services of the Church of England was required by law, and sermons figured prominently in the practice of worship, they were inescapable parts of everyday life. Yet their popularity is undeniable; as many as 5,000 to 6,000 people came on their own to Paul’s Churchyard outside St Paul’s Cathedral on Sundays for additional sermons that lasted for two hours (Figure 1).

“Making the Digital Humanities More Open”: Modeling Digital Humanities for a Wider Audience

Sat, 01 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Poster

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Abstract

“Making the Digital Humanities More Open,” a NEH ODH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant Project, is creating a free and easy-to-use tool that enables end-users with a variety of disabilities and abilities to access online humanities resources, allowing digital humanities projects to share the products of their text-based projects with this often-neglected audience of readers. During the year previous to DH 2013, our team designed and deployed a WordPress-based accessibility tool that created braille content for end-users who are blind or low vision. Specifically, we extended the use of Anthologize — a free and open source plug-in for WordPress that currently translates any RSS text into PDF, ePub, HTML, or TEI — to include the conversion of text to braille. As a result, we not only made it easy for digital research content creators to convert a text into braille, thereby extending humanities content to hundreds of thousands of visually disabled readers, but we also experimented with making braille available visually through the WordPress interface. This tool will also make it possible to translate the textual content of an Omeka archive into braille provided the site — like most that use Omeka — publishes an RSS feed. We conducted initial tests of the tool by translating the existing BrailleSC oral histories into braille, and then reached out to other Omeka- and WordPress-based humanities computing projects to ask for their cooperation and collaboration in translating their content.

Digital Ethnography Toward Augmented Empiricism: A New Methodological Framework

Sat, 01 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

How Do Digital Technologies Deepen Ethnographic Practices?

Culture takes variegated forms, including lived experiences, social interactions, memories, rituals, transactions, events, conversations, stories, gestures, and expressive disciplines like music and dance. These processes and artifacts of social life make an ethnographer’s job as analyst and cultural documentarian dynamic and challenging. The increasing digital mediation in the field of ethnographic inquiry is undeniable. Through the engagement of individual users, governments, corporations, and even grassroots organizations, the ubiquity of computational technology has a far-reaching impact on social life. These technologies mediate culture by documenting, sharing, sensing, tagging, locating, trading, synchronizing, filtering, automating, remixing, and mining the everyday experiences of our research associates. Rather than walking away from the digital, we ethnographers should give serious considerations to software as infrastructure and materiality at the sites of our research. We should also be mindful of our own digital research practices as we utilize digital technology to organize, manage, and publish our field findings.

Media Systems – Envisioning the Future of Computational Media

Sat, 01 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This is the final report of the Media Systems project held at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2012. This gathering brought together field-leading participants working in media-focused computer science, digital art, and digital humanities, located in and across universities, industry, federal agencies, publishers, and other stakeholders in the future of media. Participants focused on diverse aspects of how new media forms are impacting culture, education, the economy, and other areas of national importance, using examples ranging from the World Wide Web to computer animation, and from video games to social media. Surprisingly — despite this diversity of background and focus — rather than struggling to explain our different fields to each other, we found ourselves engaged in deep conversations focused on a coherent set of shared activities. For the purposes of this report, the authors have chosen to name these activities computational media.

Code Appendix for “Digital Ethnography”

Sat, 01 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

require 'rubygems' require 'mechanize' require 'geokit' include Geokit::Geocoders

Abstract

In the past two decades or so, national libraries have been digitising millions of pages of books, newspapers, magazines and other text-based collections. In this digital age, the research landscape is changing rapidly, with scholars able to ask new types of questions and answer them in novel ways by working with a wide variety of materials and in new collaborative modes.

As a national library, the British Library (BL) holds over 150 million items dating as far back as 2000 BC and is responding to this climate by realigning its services and structure, including the creation of a new digital scholarship department, but there are still fundamental changes the Library needs to make in order to allow researchers to fully exploit digital resources. We are passionate about working with researchers and scholars so that they can use our digital collection to create new knowledge.

Encoding Historical Financial Records

Sat, 01 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Poster

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Abstract

A significant number of scholars in Europe and North America are now involved in projects utilizing or encoding historical financial and tabular records. Many of them hope that it will be possible to develop guidelines that account for both the idiosyncrasies of such manuscripts and the semantic information embedded in them.

The call for visualizing “Big Data” has generated a groundswell of interest among historians and humanities scholars, as demonstrated by the international response to the National Endowment for the Humanities’ 2010 and 2011 Digging into Data challenges (Williford and Henry, 2012). Exemplary efforts from the first two rounds of projects, such as Stanford University’s “Mapping the Republic of Letters,” and the University of Nebraska at Lincoln’s “Railroads and the Making of Modern America,” suggest the great potential for visualizing large repositories of primary sources for historical insight.