Dawn Childress

Toganoo Collection of Esoteric Buddhism

2018-09-11T00:00:00-07:00

A case study exploring the description and presentation of Japanese classical texts in a TEI / IIIF ecosystem

Below are the slides and text of a short paper co-presented with Tomoko Bialock, Hiroyuki Ikuua, and Kiyonori Nagasaki at the Japanese Association of Digital Humanities (JADH) Conference in Tokyo, September 11, 2018

[Slide 4]

TEI/IIIF in the Toganoo project context

I’m sure I don’t need to go into the merits of TEI here, but I’ll just give a quick overview of the TEI features that are important in the context of our project:

Since much of the important data relates not only to the works included in the collection, but also to their history, provenance, and physical evidence thereof, we’ll make heavy use of TEI’s manuscript description module.
We’ll also use TEI to encode surfaces in order to connect information about the volumes to their digitized images
TEI also allows us to encode multiple types of information - including contextual information about entities, physical characteristics and evidence, as well as any structural or editorial information
For all its standardization, TEI is flexible and can adapt to meet project needs (this can also be one of its downsides, especially when working towards interoperability across many projects)
And of course, TEI is great for more narrative descriptions when basic bibliographic information isn’t sufficient

[Slide 5]

So, why IIIF?

Interoperability! IIIF will help us achieve interoperability with other institutions or collections. It’s important to think about the Toganoo texts as a discrete collection, but equally important to be able to consider these texts in the larger collection of Buddhist texts or early modern Japanese texts too.
Since IIIF treats hosting and presentation of images separately, IIIF allows us to co-locate the Toganoo texts with other IIIF-hosted materials to remix and reimagine our collection set. Individual scholars will be able to pick and choose which volumes, pages, or even regions of pages to assemble into their own focused collection.
Also, super zooming and faster loading of hi-res images…

[Slide 6]

TEI/IIIF: Some challenges and possibilities

There are definitely some challenges ahead – TEI and IIIF compliment one another and together can be powerful way to open up and share collections and their accompanying data, but as far as we can tell approaches to TEI/IIIF interoperability are very project specific right now, like the work that Jeff Witt is doing with the SCTA. There is no standard way to achieve TEI and IIIF integration at this point. There is also currently no place for TEI in the IIIF presentation layer or in the primary IIIF viewers.

We hope the Toganoo collection can serve as a useful case study to help determine use cases and strategies for bringing TEI and IIIF together in a scalable way in the UCLA Digital Library.

[Slide 7]

Connecting IIIF canvases in TEI:

We need standards for embedding IIIF canvas ids into TEI documents to connect manuscript and witness information to an image. We’ve looked at a few examples of how other have done this and have mocked up a few possibilities for us, but nothing we feel is worth showing at this point. This isn’t a difficult task, but it would be great if we could come up with a uniform way of doing this at the community level.

[Slide 8]

TEI as source data:

Like many projects, we’re looking at TEI as the canonical data source. We want scholars to be able to direct download the TEI for their research. We can generate the metadata needed for search, browse, and display in our digital library system from the TEI and use the TEI to populate some of the IIIF manifest data. But use of metadata in a IIIF manifest is limited and we prefer to keep the manifest clean and focused on the presentation data. So what do we do with all that great TEI? …and how do we connect it to a users viewing experience in practice?

Unfortunately, current IIIF viewers do not have a place for metadata, especially something as rich as TEI. Right now we can display the TEI in a web page next to an embedded IIIF viewer, or we could convert the TEI to a IIIF-friendly data format, like JSON that we could potentially display in the something like Mirador’s Index panel. Neither of these options really connect the TEI and IIIF layers though; it’s just migrating to other formats and likely flattening much of our detailed descriptions.

To see how we might bridge this gap, we’re working on creating a prototype IIIF viewer with a built-in metadata panel. Ideally, the panel would format TEI or MODS (or another schema) for display. We would also like to see if we can create a plugin for Mirador that would add a TEI tab to the current Index panel.

[Slide 9]

Working with TEI in the IIIF environment

Another experiment explores how we might work with TEI directly within the IIIF environment. We are working on a module that would allow annotators to generate TEI from the Mirador annotations feature.

Finally, this isn’t something we are working on now, but I hope we can work on a system that will allow us to reference or link back to specific parts of a TEI description using Open Annotation from within the IIIF environment.

Mirador example - IIIF Workshop (DHSI 2018)

2018-06-06T00:00:00-07:00

UC DLF: Participatory Digital Collections

2018-02-15T00:00:00-08:00

Below are the slides and speaking notes for our Collections Lab presentation on “Participatory Digital Collections: Opportunities for Enhancement, Experimentation, and Transformation,” presented at the 2018 UC DLF at UC Riverside.

Participatory digital collections and the Collections Lab

When we talk about “participatory collections,” we are often discussing the projects that facilitate user engagement through crowdsourcing of new data, such as transcriptions, tagging, and description. For this talk, we expand on this understanding of “participatory” to include all forms of engagement that encourage the creation and/or reuse of collections data for teaching and research, as well as efforts to contextualize or reinterpret collections through new interfaces and access points.

The UCLA Library Collections Lab is a space to promote more participatory collections and encourage the library and its users to consider our collections as data. Here, we experiment to enhance our collections and build out our “collections as data” program through both crowdsourcing, computational, and design approaches. We don’t currently have the open digital library system of our dreams (although we’re working on that) - until we do, the Collections Lab is a space for:

Highlighting collections where there are no (or fewer) restrictions on reuse – we’re making collections data available via GitHub, provide a form for users to request collections data as needed, and provide scripts to download data from a few other digital collection repositories
Computational and machine-learning experiments to enhance metadata and process collections so that they are more amenable to computational research methods (Pete and I will discuss a few of these shortly)
Researcher and classroom projects, such as the “Los Angeles: The City and the Library”, where students digitize and give context to Los Angeles-related materials from UCLA’s special collections
Crowdsourcing projects, like the William Sachtleben travel diaries transcription project

Collections Lab & BuildUCLA

Machine-learning experiments: Book Annotation Classification Engine

One of our BuildUCLA / Collections Lab experiments is the Book Annotation Classification Engine, a

With so many institutions coalescing around IIIF, we wanted to start thinking of other ways libraries and users could “act” on our digital collections in this sphere. The ability of IIIF to pull disparate collections together using IIIF manifests and viewers really opens up the possibilities for users to engage across multiple collections and institutions.

One of our current projects with UCLA’s Clark Library is the Annotated Books project, an NEH funded project to digitize, describe, and publish annotated books from the Clark collections. In addition to the book catalog data, the descriptions also include data about the annotations themselves. This got us thinking – how great would it be if we could get a machine to find all the annotations for the researchers and maybe even classify them? — and could we do this within the IIIF ecosystem?

Pete and I had just started working together on BuildUCLA, so a joint BuildUCLA / Collections Lab venture was inevitable. We recruited some talented computer science undergrads and a few colleagues to start experimenting. The resulting product will (hopefully) allow users to apply the trained models to any IIIF collections that have manifests enabled. These collections then can become platforms for machine-learning based discovery and extraction of latent collections data.

To make this work, we need loads of training data. I’m new to machine-learning, so did not initially realize how much training data was needed to get us started. For the training data, we started by making use of existing digital collections to create datasets.

The students have been busy with the collection, organization, and cleaning of collections data to prep for the work ahead. They are also experimenting with various approaches and are seeing some small successes while they learn more about machine-learning and computer vision approaches.

We are also employing crowdsourcing to build training data sets using the Zooniverse platform. We plan to reach out to communities that might be interested in book annotation and we invite anyone to contribute by tagging annotations on uploaded page images to help generate additional training data. Of course, the data will be made available for anyone to use.

To Pete…

Discussion: Now that we’ve talked about some of our projects and how we see these contributing to more participatory / dynamic digital collections, we’d like to move into some discussion on how we might set ourselves up for success. This often begins with selection: what criteria are we considering when we decide to digitize? Many of our digital collections have been curated/built on principles of “special-ness” - those high profile, unique, or beautiful items – or to increase access to hidden collections or provide surrogates for materials that get lots of traffic or are in need of preservation. These are great reasons to digitize; however, we’d like to discuss ways that we might extend these criteria to foster more participatory collections – What new criteria might we consider when selecting items or collections for digitization? And what criteria might we use when considering whether to adopt, build, enhance born-digital collections or those that were previously digitized? Here are a few points to get the conversation started:

Digital Collection Criteria to promote more participatory collections:

Does the collection, if digitized, lend itself to computational approaches?
Is there potential for generating new data if digitized?
What are the transformation possibilities if digitized?
Does the material have appeal beyond a small scholarly community or to a community that would take advantage of crowdsourcing/enhancement opportunities?
Is the collection sufficiently large that digitization will allow for computational methods that will open up new lines of research not possible by individual scholar/analog approaches?
Would a community benefit from having the collection digitized and open so they could reimagine / re-present the collection in a new way?

We might also discuss what it takes to encourage the types of user participatory engagement/behaviors that the panelists touched on in their presentations. For example:

well-defined crowdsourcing and user-contribution features – the infrastructure should encourage user contributions but also prevent the collection from turning into grandma’s attic
computational access should be provided (ideally) via bulk access APIs/downloading features, or at least a means of addressing individual items online in formats that are most amenable to computational processing (e.g., full texts rather than PDFs, cropped images rather than full-platen scans); if these features can’t be provided for copyright, privacy or technical reasons, then sophisticated server-side searching, annotation, visualization features are preferred

Towards Speculative Catalogs (DH 2017)

2017-07-20T00:00:00-07:00

This is a paper given at the Digital Humanities 2017 Conference as part of the panel Beyond Access: Critical Catalog Constructions, July 2017, Montréal.

My talk today focuses on framing our session theme of Beyond Access: Critical Catalog Constructions by outlining three potential areas of inquiry or exploration:

Understanding the historical context, cultural biases, technical and other artifacts inherent to catalogs
Rethinking our understanding of the catalog “reader”
Moving toward the notion of “Speculative Catalogs”; or, how might we achieve points of access that facilitate active reframing and interrogation of our collections by “readers”

Understanding the historical context, cultural biases, technical and other artifacts inherent to catalogs

Catalogs have been created for a variety of different reasons: they often provide information on library holdings or document publishing or reading histories, they might document exhibitions or detail auction or bookseller offerings. And what about the digital collections and “archives” of the last decade and a half, some of which are constructed from their earlier analog counterparts? Early catalogs (and recent digital endeavors, for that matter) differ significantly in how they are constructed based on their function and the specific needs of the library, institution, scholar, or cataloger that created them. Inevitably, each of these constructions comes with its own organization, set of standards, and biases.

Likewise, as the forms of these catalogs have been transformed by new technologies such as printing, databases and MARC records, and now graph structures, new uses, standards, and the artifacts of old and new technologies colliding are potentially imposed upon the catalog — as well as new cultural, institutional, or disciplinary frameworks.

There is much we can we learn from these constructions, from the decisions that were made at the catalog’s inception or transformation, that would provide crucial context for the work of scholars. How does the record reflect the function and perspectives of its creators? What were the motivations behind the decisions of what to record? Do the structures reflect an implied hierarchy or world view? And so on…The point I want to make here is that these constructions and artifacts are as much a part of the catalog and the historical record as the descriptions contained within. I think we’ve reached a point where we no longer make assumptions about the neutrality of our records, whether catalogs or archives, (or at least I hope so) - that we recognize that the structures, standards, and vocabularies we choose are in fact non-neutral and that they carry assumptions and bias.

Understanding and examining these constructions becomes even more important as we put catalogs to new uses that go beyond discovery and access — whether it is transcribing and encoding a handwritten catalog, using OCR and R packages to “read” a print catalog, or harvesting records from an API-accessible datastore. Furthermore, since the data-driven methods we are talking about here, that “zoomed-out” macro view, creates distance between the scholar and the source materials, scholars would be well-served to zoom back in to understand the conditions under which these catalogs are constructed as they mine these stores of information for new insights and to expose patterns undetectable at the human scale.

Rethinking our understanding of the catalog “reader”

In addition to considering the catalog’s constructions, we might also explore our understanding of the “reader” of a catalog. Who were the implied (contemporaneous) users of early catalogs and (how) has this implied user changed over time and migration? How might we trace the connections between users and uses, and how catalogers approached their task? As catalogs age and become valued more as historical records than as points of access and discovery, or, as they move from analog to digital, they also potentially open themselves up to new readership or transcend their original purpose. For example, as Lindsay DiCurci [1] points out, as early American catalogs were transformed from manuscript to print, reprinting and dissemination opened these catalogs up to new readers beyond the library and therefore to new uses. The catalogs began functioning as reading lists that raised the profiles of certain books within their circles.

In the context of catalogs that are created or make their way to the digital, especially in the context of data-driven research, we are experiencing to some degree a collapse of the distinction between cataloger and reader. Thomas Padilla notes a “blurring” between the people who create collections and the people who use them.[2] This is in the context of their Collections as Data project, which is quite analogous to the way we are approaching “catalogs” here.

Also from Katherine Bode: she remarks ”If a history of transmission offers one way of discussing the multiple things and people that make collections, I think data-rich research is already creating collaborations between those who use and those who build collections; or more accurately, that these contemporary conditions of research are collapsing the distinction between those groups.[3] “ She goes on to describe how her work of describing the documentary record of Trove (the National Library of Australia’s catalog of digital items) is fed back into the catalog to become part of that same record — collapsing the roles of cataloger and reader.

Alongside this blurring of the distinction between creators and readers, comes the introduction of a new type of “reader”: the computer. While very few catalogs have been created with this user in mind (as these were not designed as sources for data intensive research), OCR and text mining tools, as well as the transformation of catalogs like ESTC to digital platforms has facilitated the rise of computational methods on these once analog sources. Catalogs are transformed into rich data stores for consumption by computers. How do we go about considering this user, and how do we construct our catalogs so they can be read by human and computer alike?

Towards Speculative Catalogs

Here is where we come to the idea of Speculative Catalogs, or the transformative promise of the digital as we reconstruct catalogs in new forms and formats. I choose the term “Speculative” here to purposefully lean on Bethany Nowviskie’s notions of Speculative Collections. In her talk on Speculative Collections, Nowviskie considers how infrastructure and interface in our digital collections might support or facilitate active reframing and interrogation of our collections by users.[4] This notion of interfaces and data models that allow us to embrace the multi-faceted complexity of cultural histories and lived experiences is a recurring one, and one that a number of presentations at the conference this year are attempting to address through their work.

Some things we might consider are: How might recent developments in the construction of catalogs make it possible to open the creation of the historical record to the broader community? How do we build infrastructures and interfaces that allow for multiple, simultaneous interpretations? How might we leverage current and emerging systems of practice for descriptive standards and data models to record and examine lacunae, erasures, and bias - as well as reframe, repair, and reconstruct the historical record and cultural memory? As we consider the effect of the values underlying the historical catalogs, we must also consider the net effect of the decisions we make today as we recreate catalogs in new forms or create new ones.

Before we can transform catalogs into the “improv platforms they should be” (Nowviskie), we must first explore and document the technical artifacts and functional or cultural biases that we might need to mitigate. Creators and users alike (especially the creator/user, since we’re seeing that these roles are collapsing) can begin by reflecting on and interrogating our processes, documenting decisions, and understanding how standards and technological frameworks impact reading and reception of the catalog and the data contained within. It’s time I turn this over to my colleagues, Molly and Paige, who are doing just that. ___

Lisdsay DiCurci. “A Copy Among Rubbish”: Cataloguing and Recovery Work in the Early U.S. Archive,” part of the Technologies of the Catalog panel, SHARP Conference, Victoria, BC. 2017
Thomas Padilla, from the Digital Humanities Slack, 2017
Katherine Bode, from the Digital Humanites Slack, 2017
Bethany Nowviskie. “speculative collections,” Blog post. Bethany Nowviskie. October 2016 http://nowviskie.org/2016/speculative-collections/

Re-Imagining the Stack: Minimal Computing at Scale in the Digital Library

2016-11-10T00:00:00-08:00

Below are the slides and edit-for-print text of a talk I gave as part of the “Minimal Computing in Libraries: Case Studies and the Case for” panel at the 2016 DLF Forum in Milwaukee, November 2016.

For the past 4 or 5 years, I have been experimenting with and employing minimal computing practices in digital scholarship and pedagogy projects. I had no name for it at the time and it didn’t have the cachet that it might today [I’m going to say it has a certain cachet — Stuart basically said we are the hipster Avant Garde]; Rather, it was a means to an end, borne out of necessity; an attempt to mitigate many of the issues inherent to a thick technology stack in libraries — In my context at the time, the biggest issues revolved around: 1) access to servers and technology, 2) steep learning curves, 3) funding and capacity issues, 4) lack of commitment to supporting projects (justifiably so), and 5) long-term preservation of these projects. Today I’m going to talk about a few of the ways that we are using minimal computing in the context of the digital library.

[slide2]

Minimal platforms

One of my first fully-realized minimal computing projects was developing a framework for an upper-level French course at Penn State where the students engaged with a literary cartography project to map Maupassant’s Bel-Ami and other Belle Epoque French novels.

The first iteration of the project was in Wordpress. Working in groups, students chose a place in the novel, writing essays exploring the significance of place and space from political, socio-economic, and other perspectives. They also curated contemporary images like paintings, early photos, posters, and playbills to further illustrate their chosen places. Their essays and images took the form of blog posts and students dropped pins on an embedded map of Paris.

After two semesters of using Wordpress, we wanted something different: 1) we wanted the map, text, and images to appear together on the page; 2) the instructor wanted students to start encoding parts of the texts for names and concepts; 3) we thought students could benefit from more hands on with technology; and 4) we grew tired of WordPress updates — we wanted less infrastructure and more flexibility — I mean, who doesn’t, right? I also thought about what might happen to the project if I were to leave Penn State — I wanted the project to stay in the hands of the instructor. With all this in mind, we decided to develop a new framework, building and hosting using GitHub. GitHub’s collaborative workflow was a good fit, and the fact that it would allow us to expose the framework, develop and publish in one place, and easily change ownership were big pluses.

We later generalized the framework and made it available via GitHub under the name “Boulevardier”. The framework is customizable, open source, and easy to fork to start one’s own project. It does have its issues and I’m working to make it even more minimal. Mapping Maupassant’s Bel-Ami was developed out of necessity, but working this way got me thinking more about using environments like GitHub and client-side web technologies instead of thick technology stacks — and how we can leverage this approach to reduce barriers and get more content up faster, with fewer resources, and with more control by the content creators.

[slide 3]

Re-imagining the Stack

I brought this mindset along to my position at UCLA, and we’ve since used Boulevardier and similar approaches successfully in a number of classroom projects in lieu of things like Drupal. By using minimal computing and infrastructure, we can embrace a “build and release” model to support digital scholarship and digital pedagogy projects. In this way, we can encourage researchers and instructors to take charge of their own projects — taking some of the pressure off of the digital library.

This is also informing how I’m thinking about digital libraries now and I want to explore how digital libraries might make use of minimal computing: What gains might we see at the enterprise level? Where can we reduce technical infrastructure, especially related to maintenance and labor costs? I don’t have answers to these questions yet, but we’re working on it some of it.

In UCLA’s Digital Library, we are experimenting with moving from a thick digital library stack with many dependencies and working parts to a lighter version, making use of heavy infrastructure only when necessary, preferring client side frameworks and APIs in place of resource intensive CMSs in some cases. Obviously we will need a robust infrastructure to maintain assets and metadata, (UCLA has over 2.3 million digital assets with their metadata, and this is growing exponentially), but perhaps the publishing side can be more fluid. We don’t want to lock ourselves into one method of publishing and hope to build and reinvent often on a more staid storage infrastructure. For access and browsing, we are working with client-side frameworks like Angular to publish our collections and to create special or “boutique” projects without recreating the stack. This should allow us to iterate more quickly, not feel married to our choices, and allow us to focus on development and experimentation and less on how we are going to maintain another 5 Drupal sites indefinitely.

I’ve also been thinking about “minimal workflows.” I don’t really know what that means yet, but I’m trying to identify steps or processes in our DL workflows that we don’t need, could be done better (or automated), or have bad cost-benefit ratios - basically achieving our goals in the simplest manner possible. This usually means a bit of up-front work in order to save many hours down the road. One of my new fav quotes (newly discovered by me, that is) is

“Automate like you are going to live forever, document like you are going to die tomorrow” - Michael Sperberg-McQueen.

I suspect this principle is foundational for a minimalist workflow…

[slide 4]

Minimal + Adaptive

Some projects have access issues that go beyond what our minimal computing efforts can solve. UCLA is working with a number of international communities to digitize and provide global access to their materials; however, in one case, due to the local technology environment, we are providing access to everyone but this community.

Cuba, one of the partner countries for UCLA’s International Digital Ephemera Project, has little infrastructure for internet access; so, despite our efforts to publish their materials online, very few people or institutions in Cuba can access these collections - and, what access exists is both limited and expensive. Cuba is not as cut of from the global digital community as one might expect though — in lieu of internet access, semi-legal “sneakernets” have developed where TB drives of data (from movies and music, to books and scholarly articles) are copied, delivered, and passed from person to person.

In order to make the digitized collections available to users in Cuba, we’d need to adapt to the way information is shared here. I wondered: how might we develop a more “adaptive computing” model, one that seeks to better understand how information is transmitted/shared within a community and adapt a delivery model that meets local needs; — how might we model publishing and dissemination of these digital assets and their metadata on these sneakernets?

For the short term, we have deployed a somewhat minimal version of the collections from Cuba’s Cinemateca — we’ve prepared a laptop running Collective Access locally and loaded assets and metadata. We’ve also configured the laptop to function as a hotspot to serve up the collection to those nearby. Getting more sophisticated equipment into Cuba for a better local wireless network is not possible right now, but first impressions of our preliminary setup are promising. My colleague and project manager for the IDEP project, T-Kay Sangwand, returned from Cuba a few weeks ago and reported that the Director of the Cinemateca thought it was great that she could access the collections from her phone. It’s too soon to say how it’s working with users though and this is a still very much a work-in-progress.

I’m currently outlining a plan to move to clone-able external drives with a lightweight, functional database and simple browser-based interface for querying and viewing the collections. This drive could then be cloned and shared with other institutions and plugged into laptops that serve as local hotspots… and cloned and shared again! As we digitize and add more assets, we can push these into the sneakernet and let them circulate.

For me, this is a pretty cool project on a number of levels. One in particular is the response from the LIS graduate student that has been working on the project with us, Niqui O’Neill. Niqui has been working hard to set up the local laptop environment and she’ll be helping with development of the external drives too. She told me recently that this is some of the most meaningful work she’s done in library school and she wanted to know if it was OK if she wrote her thesis on it. So, the project isn’t only about access to materials in Cuba - it’s about getting new professionals experimenting and thinking creatively about solutions to the myriad problems related to access, infrastructure, and so on.

SHARP 2016: Translating Networks

2016-08-13T00:00:00-07:00

Below are the slides and (sort of) reconstructed text of a talk I gave as part of the “Status of Translators” panel at SHARP 2016 in Paris, July 19, 2016. Slides appear at the end.

Today I’m going to share some of the work we doing on our Translating Networks project. I’ll start with a short intro, the genesis and purpose of the project, then talk in more detail about the data work that we are doing and our preliminary research. I’ll conclude with ideas for next steps — some of which are in the planning stages, some perhaps more aspirational.

In The World Republic of Letters, Pascale Casanova argues that the relative importance of a “national” literature on the world literary stage depends not so much on the number of great writers in the language, as on the number of effective mediators from the original language to the target language.[1] This perspective calls for a methodology that considers world literature as a system, a system that is the work of many hands and that supersedes national boundaries. “Many hands” here implies not just a listing of names, but the delineation of a network of translators, original authors, publishers, places, institutions, prizes, and so on. With this in mind, Translating Networks seeks to explore and better understand the communities, connections, and influences in literary translation through graph theory while attempting to assemble a database that documents not just translated works and their bibliographic data, but the communities and conditions within which the translated works are created, disseminated, and evaluated. The project is also very much about exploring the application of network analysis and other computational methods to translation studies, as well as to book and publishing history research more broadly.

So, what are we doing right now? We are currently collecting new data through a variety of methods and enhancing the datasets with new facets and classifications (which I’ll get to in more detail). As we collect new data and expand on what we have, we are also exploring and analyzing the data as we go. This is helping us to further define our research questions and rethink the types of data we’d like to collect now and in the future. We’re also working toward building the infrastructure for a translation database platform. We are still in the research and planning stages on this one, but we have made a few decisions and some basic work is underway.

At the time of this paper, we were a team of four: Thomas O. Beebee, Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Penn State, and I began the project as an exercise in a Network Analysis workshop led by Elijah Meeks at HILT. After securing some funding from CHI, Tom recruited Penn State graduate student, Sean Weidman, to the project. Sean is adding more data about publishers, authors, and translators to the database and working along side Tom and I to think through data modeling issues and research questions. Earlier this summer Martin Klein, a data scientist in UCLA’s Digital Library Program, joined the team. Martin brings loads of experience using linked data to connect datasets to other datasets and is interested in how we can leverage graph databases in this type of project. This is probably a good time to emphasize the importance of the team in a project such a this one - each team member brings experiences, skills, and motivations that enrich the project and its outcomes - it also helps to spread the work around! No one person can do it all and we are all continually learning from one another.

Before diving into some of our preliminary findings, I’d like to talk for a few minutes about the data that we’re working with and our attempts to collect and enhance new datasets. The project began with Three Percent’s Translation Database. Three Percent is a resource for international literature at the University of Rochester. In 2008 they began collecting data on original translations of fiction and poetry published or distributed in the United States. The database includes titles, authors, translators, publishers, dates, and genre for the years 2008 to 2016. To supplement the Three Percent spreadsheets, we’ve started harvesting data about authors, translators, and publishers from sources such as DBPedia, the Library of Congress, and VIAF - each of these with varying degrees of success. In a side note, this data harvesting is also highlighting the marginal position of translators in the publishing record. Of course this comes as no surprise, but we are taking note of how rare it is to find a translator listed in a DBPedia record, even rarer to find a translator field that is an access point or link to the translators own record. In addition to harvesting data, we are working to manually enhance the existing data. So far we’ve added gender and nationality where possible, whether or not the translation is of contemporary or older work, and whether or not publishers are focused on translation.

Other enhancements to the data require us to define or codify aspects of our entities. For example, we are interested in looking at correlations by publisher types, so we’ve defined five publisher types and assigned to our publishers accordingly. We are also interested in defining translator types — some translators are scholars, some are poets or writers in their own right, and some are lucky enough to make their careers out of literary translation. Other facets we are hoping to add include retranslations, scholarly vs. popular reading translations, and institutional affiliations.

Now, a bit of background. Our project humbly began as an exercise in network analysis. Tom and I were participating in a week-long network analysis workshop at HILT and it happened that I had the Three Percent spreadsheets on my laptop. We went to work organizing our data, creating node and edge lists, learning about Gephi, and familiarizing ourselves with the various types of centrality in a network. It did not take long for themes and communities to emerge from our data, narratives that reinforced what we already knew or suspected about contemporary translation communities (gender, big players, and so on). Right away we began lamenting the lack of dimension in our dataset. We were missing key data that would help us get at those underlying, less obvious narratives - those questions we now wanted to explore in more detail. It was decided then that we would begin a small “project” and that we’d need to beef up our data.

While planning our approach, we first considered questions on the historical and typological nature of translation communities. What is the makeup of a particular translation community? And how might they differ between Original Language communities? How do communities change over time? Most of the data collected and our enhancements revolved around the translated texts, but we wondered how far could / should we look beyond the texts? As Hoyt Long put it, how might we capture data on “ideological forces, social relations and institutions, and the expanding systems of circulation, diffusion, and influence”?[2]

In addition to the questions about the subject matter (translation communities), I also became very interested in how we might “operationalize” the research (a term from Franco Moretti)[3] – how we might use computational methods to help bridge the gap between literary theory and texts - moving back and forth between concept and measurement. Moving forward, we will explore both the historical and typological nature of translation communities - how these communities have changed over time and what factors define, influence, and characterize these networks, as well as how methods like network analysis are applied and applicable to book and publishing history more broadly.

Now we’ll look at some of our initial graphs. In our first graph [German translation communities, 2008-2014] we can see a number of discrete communities forming, sometimes around publishers, in some cases around translators. To detect communities we use “modularity”. From wikipedia: “Modularity measures the strength of division of a network into modules. Networks with high modularity have dense connections between the nodes within modules, but sparse connections between nodes in different modules.” We can also see that some nodes are much larger than others in this graph. The larger the node, the more they can be said to have “betweenness centrality”. This type of measurement helps us to determine potential important players in a network. Again, from Wikipedia: “Betweenness centrality is an indicator of a node’s centrality in a network. It is equal to the number of shortest paths from all vertices to all others that pass through that node.” - in other words, these nodes can potentially function as “bridges” in a network.

Let’s zoom in a little. In this graph [German translation communities, 2008-2014, zoomed], most of our detected communities center around a publisher with a higher betweenness centrality, like we see here with Amazon Crossing; but we also see a few translators that dominate their part of the network, like Anthea Bell. We’re hoping that the data we collect on publisher and translator types will allow us to zoom in on these relationships and discover patterns that provide further insight into the make-up and nature of translator dominated-communities vs. publisher-dominated ones. We are noticing that within some language groups there are larger numbers of individuals with high betweenness centrality, while some others tend to be dominated by publisher defined communities. This is not necessarily surprising, but will get a closer look as we enhance the data. **It’s also important to note that high betweenness centrality is a measure of the “potential” for serving as a bridge or conduit for transmission; the degree to which this position in the network is leveraged is another matter[4].

In this next graph [German publisher single-mode network], we’ve taken the German translation communities graph above and collapsed the author and translator “nodes” into the edges, creating a publisher single-mode network. Leaving the original communities intact, we can see the Anthea Bell community comprises small press publishers which retain their many network connections to one another. In contrast, our Amazon Crossing community, despite having the highest number of publications and edges, is fairly isolated when you collapse the authors and translators into our network edges.

Our final graph [German publishers by focus on translation] shows which publishers have a focus on translation by our “ publisher type” category. The publisher types are color coded — blue is academic, green is independent, yellow is self-publishing, red small press, and purple is trade. The larger node size denotes a focus on translation. I just want to reiterate: the current data represents a simple publishing record, network connections are defined by transaction and do not necessarily reflect influence or importance. The detected communities we are seeing are bound together by the publishers that accept manuscripts, or in some cases by well-known translators. Some questions we have: Do the entities with higher centrality scores make use of their position? What are other points of contact (besides publishers) that influence or bind a translation community together? Do different translators tend to associate with different venues exclusively, or do they cross over? Do certain authors or translators play the role of “broker” between translational small worlds? These initial questions are driving the current data collection and enhancement, but digging through this data will of course result in new questions and new directions for data collection.

To hold all this new data that we are collecting, we’re building an open database. Currently we’re experimenting with a graph database model, specifically Neo4j. With a graph database, scholars will have more flexibility in how they query or visualize the data and it should be easier to further define and add more nodes and relationship types over time. We will also be experimenting with graphical interfaces for exploring the data within. Our hope is that with these interfaces, users will be able to explore data as an interactive visual network as well as contribute to and / or query the data. I also like to think that, in addition to the platform and dataset, we are building two things: 1) a network of scholars and technologists interested in exploring translation communities; and 2) a praxis-based project for researchers and students who want to learn about theories of literary communities, network analysis, databases & ontologies.

Moving forward, we will continue to focus on analysis and publication and continue to enhance our existing data. We also plan to expand the temporal scope of the project backward and to other time periods (say, Early Modern). The current dataset is limited to monographs, so we hope to include translations in journals and other serial forms. For our translators, authors, and publishers, we are looking at how we can collect and capture data about memberships and affiliations, such as academic institutions, translation organizations, and scholarly societies. We may also begin looking into circulation statistics, sales, appearance on reading lists, reviews, prizes, and so on. Our biggest hope, however, is that we will be able to open the project to scholar-sourcing of data in the near future. We welcome researchers interested in working with this data to participate in defining scope, collecting data, and using the data and platform for their own research. We, of course, extend this invitation to the international community. Partnering with international researchers to add data about the authors, translators, and publishers of works translated into languages other than English is our ultimate goal — the international context will be key to the long-term success of the Translating Networks project.

View the slides in full-screen here: https://dawnchildress.com/presentations/sharp16/#/

Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Long, Hoyt. “Fog and Steel: Mapping Communities of Literary Translation in an Information Age. The Journal of Japanese Studies, Volume 41, Number 2, Summer 2015, pp. 281-316.
Moretti, Franco. “‘Operationalizing’: or, the Function of Measurement in Modern Literary Theory,” Literary Lab Pamphlet 6 (December 2013)
This came from Scott Weingart, but I cannot remember in which of his blog posts I found this.

CfP: Building Capacity with Care: Graduate Students and DH Work in the Library

2016-03-04T00:00:00-08:00

Organizers of the DH 2016 workshop, Building Capacity with Care: Graduate Students and DH Work in the Library, have issued a call for participation for the day-long workshop to be held in Kraków, Poland this summer.

From the website: “Libraries have an increasingly prominent role in the production of digital humanities scholarship through centers, programs, initiatives, and more. As leading scholars in the field like Bethany Nowviskie have repeatedly argued, getting graduate students involved in this work is essential for the future of digital work in the academy, and for the career success of 21st century scholars.[1] Graduate students represent valuable members of digital humanities teams in a variety of institutional and library settings. They collaborate with scholars in labs, as members of project teams, as fellows, interns, instructors, research assistants, principal investigators, and everything in between. […] This workshop will address how libraries and digital humanities organizations can make an ethic of care the foundation upon which their graduate student labor arrangements are built as they look to expand capacity within their institutions and beyond.”

For more information or to submit an application to participate, please visit the “Building Capacity with Care” website. The application deadline is March 31.

[1] “On Capacity and Care.” Bethany Nowviskie, October 4, 2015. http://nowviskie.org/2015/on-capacity-and-care/.

Alternative Infrastructures for Digital Projects

2016-02-27T00:00:00-08:00

This post contains the slides and (rough) transcript of a presentation given with Andy Rutkowski at the DH Infrastructure Symposium at UCLA on February 26, 2016.

Links for projects and resources mentioned are included at the end of the transcript.

Slide 1. Thank you to CDH for letting us be a part of this day of talks. My name is Andy Rutkowski. This is Dawn Childress. We both work in UCLA’s Digital Library Program. We will be talking about alternative infrastructures for digital projects. For this talk we wanted to feature a project that we have been working on here at UCLA using Github in the classroom, then talk more generally about using Github and other alternative environments in the humanities.

Slide 2. To start off with, last quarter we worked with a set of classes in which the basic assignment was to go into the special collections, pick an archival item, and write something about it which would be shared via an online web map. The inspiration for the project was a conceptual art piece created by J Michael Walker called a “Lyrical Map of the Concept of Los Angeles.” Measuring 60” by 290” each foot in the map represented one mile in Los Angeles. Walker used quotations and lyrical images which he superimposed on a conceptual map of Los Angeles. UCLA Professor Colleen Jaurretche adapted the concept of the lyrical map so that it could be an ongoing project-based assignment within lower division writing classes. Students photograph and research LA-themed objects from UCLA Library Special Collections, write essays, and publish to a map framework that grows with each new class that adds to it. Here it is: show the map!

Slide 3. I just want to highlight three things from this process, beyond the fact that we had very little time and resources to create this map. 1) Incredible hands on experience for students working with archival material and thinking through how those materials would be displayed on the web - the project is creating producers of digital content; 2) The students were working collaboratively to create this map; 3) As a result, I was approached this quarter by a faculty member (after the term had already started) who was interested in doing a similar type of mapping project. I was able to show her this framework and we spun it off to fit the needs of her class. Here is the same framework, but adapted to fit a completely different class in an ever shorter amount of time: Barrio Suburbanism

Slide 4. Both “Los Angeles: The City and the Library” and “Barrio Suburbanism” are built on GitHub using “Boulevardier,” a lightweight framework for mapping texts and images in GitHub. For those not familiar, GitHub is a web-based git repository for distributed revision control and source code management - in other words, a place where you can collaborate with others to write and keep track of code. It’s been adopted and adapted by many, including humanists, for other workflows. The framework was originally designed and developed for an upper-level French course at Penn State where the students are engaging in a literary cartography project to map Maupassant’s Bel-Ami and other Belle Epoque French novels. The project started out in Wordpress. Working in groups, students chose a place in the novel, writing essays exploring the significance of place and space from political, socio-economic, and other perspectives. They also curated contemporary images like paintings, early photos, posters, and playbills to further illustrate their chosen places. Their essays and images took the form of blog posts and students dropped pins on an embedded map of Paris.

After two semesters of using Wordpress, we wanted something different: we wanted the map, text, and images to appear together on the page; the instructor wanted students to start encoding texts for names and concepts; we thought students could benefit from more hands on with technology; and we grew tired of WordPress update (we wanted less infrastructure and more flexibility!). I also thought about what might happen to the project if I were to leave Penn State – I wanted the project to stay in the hands of the instructor. With all this in mind, we decided to develop a new framework and host it in GitHub. GitHub’s collaborative workflow was a good fit, and the fact that it would allow us to expose the framework, develop and publish in one place , and easily change ownership were big pluses.

The instructor wanted students to learn some TEI and other DH technology skills, so the framework was built around these requirements. I worked with a programmer, Nathan Day, to develop the framework for Maupassant’s Bel-Ami using TEI, XSL, javascript, and json. We later generalized the framework and made it available via GitHub under the name “Boulevardier”. The framework is customizable, open source, and easy to fork to start one’s own project. It does have its issues and is still under development for fixes and enhancements. We will add Markdown support in addition to the TEI, and plan to add a “digital edition” feature for TEI encoded diaries and historical documents.

Slide 5. While working on this project, I started thinking more about using environments like GitHub and client-side web technologies instead of thick technology stacks – How else could we use these? How are humanists using these now? And what else is out there? We’ll show a few examples that I’ve encountered and find useful or interesting…

Slide 6. Publishing scholarship or personal web pages: Many people use GitHub Pages to publish their scholarship, visualizations, datasets, and other products of their research. Github also supports publishing personal web pages, online profiles, and blogs. There are many tools, models, and examples to help you build and publish your work via GitHub. I use it to build and host my own website and project pages, and any other tidbits or visualizations that I want to share on the web. One example is the Translating Networks project. Here we’re using GitHub to host the project website and as a place to publish findings and visualizations. We are also using GitHub as a repository for the datasets.

Slide 7. Another great use for GitHub is hosting workshop or classroom materials, especially when there is a collaborative or DH component. GitHub makes it easy for instructors/students/collaborators to write code or work on datasets together and make the results easily shared, all while keeping track of versions and who did what. For the upcoming DH2016 workshop, Building Capacity with Care: Graduate Students and DH work in the Library, we are using GitHub to host the website and we will also make all workshop materials available via the GitHub repository. Participants will be able to download or “fork” the materials to their own GitHub account, or, if they choose, they can contribute their own materials to the repository. Our hope is that this work will continue in GitHub well beyond the workshop.

Slide 8. GitHub is also great for collaborative, community, or crowdsourced projects., for example GitLit, a project to parse, version control, and create GitHub repositories for British Library scanned documents. GitLit contains the scripts needed to create git repositories from the British Library scanned and OCRed documents. It also hosts the repositories (books), so you can find and read, or do some textual analysis with the materials here.

Slide 9. Another great GitHub feature is GitBook. GitBook helps to create and organize documentation or other texts, which can then be read online or downloaded as PDFs or eBooks. A great example is Shawn Graham’s Crafting Digital History: Course Workbook for HIST3907o @Carleton_U.

Slide 10. GitHub will, of course, have its own limitations, but there are other options to consider. I’ll touch briefly on a few… For web apps built using Ruby or Python, Heroku is a good cloud-based option for deploying your projects. Another option for Python apps is “Python Anywhere.” Python Anywhere makes it easy to code, host, and run Python in the cloud. If you were here earlier today, you heard other speakers talk about maintaining consistent environments across machines with VirtualBox and Vagrant, as well as using Docker to build and distribute applications in containers (like a Drupal or an Islandora instance).

Slide 11. Here are just a few examples of projects deployed to Heroku and Python Anywhere:

Prism: a tool for collaborative interpretation of text – http://prism.scholarslab.org
The British Library Machine Learning Experiment: part of their Big Data Experiment, a project to improve their search engine through Machine Learning processes – http://blbigdata.herokuapp.com
Exquisite Haiku: A digital experiment based on Exquisite Corpse, a classic surrealist parlor game from 1920s Paris that involved a bunch of people sitting around a table, passing around a piece of paper, and writing a poem together. http://dclure.org/essays/exquisite-haiku/
Aristotle Metadata Registry: an open source metadata registry representing a new way to manage and federate content – http://aristotle.pythonanywhere.com/

Slide 12. So now that you know about all these different environments, what else can you do? That is the really exciting thing here. You are no longer limited by pre-existing applications but you are free to experiment with all types of different tools in order to create and share your projects. Whether it is a visualization, working with texts to annotate or share them on the web, working with data, creating maps, or whatever else you come up with. I am very quickly going to run through several things…

Slide 13. Plotly

Slide 14. Django Girls tutorial

Slide 15. Annotation Studio

Slide 16. Ed.

Slide 17. Monumental Gifts

Slide 18. Odyssey.js and Geojson.io

Slide 19. So, what do we see as some of the benefits of these “alternative” infrastructures? Avoiding a thick technology stack can speed up development time and make projects easier to maintain over time. Projects built in GitHub are also more portable (for example, one party can build it, then turn over ownership to an instructor or researcher with ease). Sites hosted in GitHub pages are also much easier to preserve than say a site created using a CMS like Wordpress or Drupal.

Aside from these tech-side benefits, environments like GitHub expose the underlying technologies at work and make these available to the average user (no locked down servers, permissions issues, or steep technology curve). This gives agency and responsibility to instructors and students rather than needing ongoing remediation at the institutional level. Finally, I would argue that the openness of the platform also encourages those working within it to embrace the open source/open access spirit. So many of the projects I’ve encountered, and all the examples we’ve seen today, encourage others to reuse and learn from what’s been build and shared.

Slide 20. Thank you!

Slides 21 & 22. Links to sources / resources

Digital scholarly editing: a brief tour of practices, projects, and resources.

2015-10-20T00:00:00-07:00

This is the virtual “handout” for a short introduction to digital scholarly editing for Matt Fisher’s “From the Archive to the Edition in the Digital Age: 21st-Century Textual Criticism” English course.

…the digital “critical representation” of any work “does not accurately (so to speak) mirror its object; it consciously (so to speak) deforms its object… [opening] the doors of perception toward new opportunities and points of view.” –Jerome McGann (Radiant Textuality)

Editorial rationales

Let’s first consider a few historical approaches to scholarly editing:

Literal: documentary editing
Intentionalist (Bowers): idea of the copy-text and the eclectic text (readings drawn from multiple witnesses)
Genetic: more inclusive, pre-publication versions (French school), also Genette’s paratext (that which sits outside the main text)
Social text (McGann): critical of intentionalist editing; texts are social, historically situated, as are the author’s intentions (enter versioning)

In many cases, digital scholarly editing attempts to recreate the rationales of these and other editorial practices, taking advantage of the digital for certain activities, such as: 1) markup and presentation of the text structure and to tag/annotate contextual info like people, places, events, and dates; 2) to give context using links, metadata, and encoded editorial notes; 3) to make the texts interactive with hypertext, hovers and pop-ups for editorial info, and user selected views); 4) and for collation and versioning to compare and analyze texts.

A few example projects

Chymistry of Isaac Newton: Note the use of normalized vs. diplomatic transcriptions.
Lowell’s “LETTER FROM A VOLUNTEER IN SALTILLO”: Note the presentation of multiple witnesses in one eclectic text using TEI’s parallel segmentation.
Shelly-Godwin Archive: Note the choice of views, Mary Shelley’s hand or Percy Shelley’s hand.
Petrus Plaoul: Requires login, but the Index will get you access to some of the text. click on the “Paragraph Menu” at the end of a paragraph and try some of the “Comparison Tools”.
Selected Poems by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven: Example of the Versioning Machine

Beyond transferring editing practices from print to digital, we can expand our understanding of what it is to create an edition. Digital editions might highlight other aspects of a text, such as the physical characteristics of material objects or perhaps place, movement, and/or time using mapping/timeline interfaces, multi-spectral photography, and annotation of illustrations/images. Editions can also make use of the rich store of encoded data (our text is our data, after all) by visualizing contextual information, quires and gatherings, textual variation between witnesses, etc.

Theodore Fontane Notebooks: Here you can view various visualizations generated from the encoded notebooks.

Transcribing or OCRing

T-Pen: web-based platform for transcribing manuscript material
Juxta Editions: publishing platform for digital editions, supports transcription workflow
Tesseract: ope source OCR engine, utilizes training files and language libraries, best for early modern texts, fraktur, etc.
Abbyy FineReader: Commercial OCR software

Encoding and markup

Text Encoding Initiative (TEI): XML schema and guidelines for encoding text
oXygen: XML Editor for use with TEI
Juxta Editions: publishing platform for digital editions, supports encoding workflow
T-Pen: can do pre-formatted encoding of texts while transcribing
TextGrid: repository and collaboration tool for digital editions
GitHub: version control and collaboration; great if multiple people are working on the same files
Sublime Text: Dawn’s text editor of choice
XML Editey: web-based XML editor used with Google Drive

Collation and versioning

JuxtaCommons: web-based collation platform (different from JuxtaEditions)
The Versioning Machine: framework for publishing eclectic texts encoded with TEI parallel segmentation (undergoing an update!)

Publishing

TAPAS Project: repository and publishing platform for TEI encoded texts
Scholarly Editing: open source journal publishing small digital editions; they will work with you to publish your small edition!
Juxta Editions: publishing platform for digital editions
The Versioning Machine: framework for publishing eclectic texts encoded with TEI parallel segmentation
GitHub / GitHub Pages: host, collaborate on, and publish your TEI encoded texts and transformation stylesheets

Editorial Matters: Data, Truth, and Interpretation in the Archives

2015-06-02T00:00:00-07:00

This is a paper given at the Digital Antiquarian Conference & Workshop in response to the Editorial Matters panel on May 29, 2015 in Worcester, MA.

True to the title of our panel “Editorial Matters,” the presenters have explored some of the thornier issues of editorial work, both practical and philosophical. While the papers discuss three very different editorial projects, each with its own set of questions and theoretical approaches, there emerged for me three distinct themes throughout the papers — two of which I’ve been thinking about for some time; the third, a topic I’m now mulling over since reading the papers. For my response, I’d like to situate these themes in a broader context — one where I’m considering the “editorial matters” of digital work more generally, to include not just the discrete digital projects that belong to the domain of the digital humanities or scholarly editions, but the digital collections, databases, text corpora, and other large scale projects of cultural institutions as well. I would argue that these three themes are central to and should actively inform the work of libraries, cultural heritage centers, and other keepers of the record, namely, how we editorialize and expose the work of digital libraries, digital texts, and other digital projects, and how this work can or should support the editorial AND explorative work of scholars.

To introduce the first (and most obvious) theme, I’ll begin with a story — a librarian, archivist, digital library developer, and historian walk into a bar [actually a Napa-esque farm-to-table restaurant where they enjoyed a lovely Malbec]… What did they talk about while sharing their Malbec? — why, archives and data, of course. More specifically, text and document as data and mark-up as data modeling. The conversation mirrored in many ways the trajectory of the papers, touching on the virtues of finding aids, catalog records, and encoded objects as aggregations of discrete data elements; lauding the promise of this data to support new use cases and research questions, and to facilitate the reconstruction, re-interpretation, and re-organization of objects and their contexts; and lamenting that, as Craig put it, the “conventions of print continue to hold sway, making it difficult to liberate and rearrange data elements into new configurations and formats.” All agreed that our digital libraries need to do more than facilitate search and retrieval. Increasingly, scholars see the data of archives and special collections as material for research; from inscribed and linguistic content, physical characteristics, and object context - our descriptions document much of this data. Researchers want to interact with, contribute to, and mine these rich stores that for so long have been in service of the more process-oriented functions like searching, browsing, and filtering.

Sayeed Choudhury has said that data is the new special collections, and this is a trend we are certainly witnessing in libraries. I would like to add, perhaps, given the ever-growing interest in humanities data, that special collections and archives are the new data — “whose counting and indexing power not only opens archival objects to new configurations,” but to new interpretations and methodologies as well.

This brings us around to the second theme: truth in description, or, the ontological/normative vs. the hermeneutical. This theme is less developed for me, but I think the questions raised by the panelists that speak to the problem of “truth in description” are important ones, especially as we begin to consider the work of scholars and libraries in this area in terms of data modeling — we’re engaging in descriptive acts that transcend the ontological/normative framework within which digital libraries and many digital projects necessarily operate, to a level of hermeneutical description that is both the product of and foundation for research.

Our panelists are working in the realm of the hermeneutical as they actively engage in interpreting and re-contextualizing aspects of their subjects; but even a robust standard like TEI, which embraces interpretation, is ruled by norms and presents challenges to editors pushing interpretive and descriptive boundaries, whether it’s overlapping hierarchies or lack of a good data model for giving context to poems reprinted in newspapers. Both the Lowell and Whitman projects are potentially constrained by the encoding conventions of Scholarly Editing and the Walt Whitman Archive, respectively. These frameworks offer a larger context for the project, but the trade-off is restriction of how the data might be modeled and received. In the end, it is the content management system or framework that confines the data to an ontological or normative system of description.

Of course, this shouldn’t stop us from doing the interpretive data work. Jess and Todd ask, “Are 100 reprints enough? Should they build on the work of the Scholarly Editing edition or start anew?” We might ask at what point are they approaching “truth” in the description/depiction of Lowell’s work? of its publication history? A framework that can support hermeneutical description can support multiple interpretations and contexts and iterations thereof. These iterative layers of description lend themselves to new interpretations and visualizations, built on the work of earlier interpreters, and open the door to more reuse and collaboration. As long as the data remains open, the usefulness of the original work can persist. Just as Jess and Todd’s vision for their project seems infinite, so do the possibilities when transforming the work of describing and recording into data work, data that is meant to be interpreted — it frees us to think modularly and collaboratively about archival research.

Two of our papers spoke explicitly about the idea of the “self-aware” text, in Lowell’s Wilbur and in the exposed organization of Whitman’s “Words”; the third could be said to be “self-referential” at the least considering Gilman’s ample documentation of production and process. These texts or assemblages are aware of and even boasting their own editorial or organizational apparatus. Editorial work also results in a self-aware or, at least, self-referential object. We adopt editorial approaches which we outline in prefaces and we record our editorial decisions, revisions, and conventions within the appropriate TEI header tag; but what of the description and organization of finding aids, object in databases, our catalogues? The rationales, interpretations, and contexts behind a finding aid or database structure are buried in the practices of a discipline; apparent to the initiated, but perhaps the underlying motivations long forgotten. From the ontological and normative structures of MARC records and EAD to the notion of respect des fonds, these are not neutral descriptions nor organizational structures, and they carry with them priorities and interpretations of those that defined these systems perhaps decades ago.

The line delineating what belongs to the text has always been a moving target, even before the digital. In the editorial work of the panelists, we see this target as it moves between the author’s intervention, the interventions of previous editors, and those of our panelists. Just as these texts are somehow “self-aware,” shouldn’t our larger ecosystem of digital work, whether database, digital text collection, or other digital project, be self-aware in that they also tell the story of their organization, context, and interpretation, allowing the “reader” to decide for themselves what belongs to the text or object and what belongs to the organizational or editorial process?

The work of our panelists, and of the editors that came before them, are and have been pushing the boundaries of description and what is means to edit and document the cultural record. Cultural institutions should be looking here, and to the work of scholars using these resources, for vision and direction as well as solutions for our institutional digital endeavors.

This is all to say, how we make these collections, this data, available — our interfaces, infrastructure, and search & browse functions — need to catch up with the needs of scholars. Building or adopting platforms or frameworks that allow scholars to build on and contribute to the contextual and interpretive record, work that can be reused, reorganized, and reanalyzed by other scholars would be a tremendous step in the right direction.

Mapping Maupassant's Bel-Ami

2015-06-01T00:00:00-07:00

Mapping Maupassant’s Bel-Ami is a collaborative project developed in the advanced undergraduate course, FR453Y: La Belle Epoque: Société et Culture en France de 1800 à 1914, taught by Dr. Willa Z. Silverman at Penn State University. This project is an example of literary cartography, following the example of similar projects, such as “Mapping St. Petersburg: Experiments in Literary Cartography” and “Mapping Mrs. Dalloway.” The first iteration of the project took place in Fall 2012 and was built using a self-hosted Wordpress site and the Leaflet Maps Marker plugin. A second layer was added to the original site in Fall of 2014.

We are currently working on a new framework for the project using web standards and hosted with GitHub Pages. The framework prototype is up and running and the source code for the new site and the for the app running the framework can be found in the literaryparis and mapsandtexts GitHub repos.

An Introduction to Digital Scholarly Editing with TEI

2015-06-01T00:00:00-07:00

During the week-long Digital Antiquarian Workshop (following the DA Conference), I had the honor of leading a workshop on digital scholarly editing practices, working with a fantastic group of around 20 researchers that made teaching TEI seem easy. I think the context of the session, situated among the other workshops taught by the phenomenal AAS staff and following Michael Winship’s Retrospective of Editorial Standards, was a great way to introduce the topic and I found it helpful to be able to refer back to earlier discussions on various topics such as structural and organizational intention in digital vs. in print, how the editorial process creates a new work, the idea of copy text and witnesses, and questions of editorial choices. Invoking these discussions from the other sessions helped us to ground the practice of TEI and digital editing to the long history of textual studies and to tie this in with questions and issues that come about from doing archival research in this digital era.

You can link to the full-page slides here. I will be posting the exercises and accompanying .xml files soon.

The local digital humanities landscape: understanding and building community, capacity, and infrastructure

2013-07-01T00:00:00-07:00

This is a paper delivered at the 2013 Bibliothekartag in Leipzig, Germany. The abstract, slides, and PDF are available here.

When the ARL SPEC Kit on Digital Humanities¹ came out in 2011, I hoped it might serve as a roadmap on the path to a digital humanities program at my library. At that time, we were attempting to build a new user community with our freshly minted Humanities in a Digital Age initiative, dabbling in various low-resource projects, and had eagerness to spare, but we needed direction and a destination – we needed a plan. The SPEC Kit, with its focus on the staffing models and infrastructure of existing centers and services, helped us imagine where we might want to go and what to think about when we get there; however, the examples covered were far removed from the decentralized, grassroots efforts with which we were experimenting. Most institutions, including my own, have no DH center (with no plans for one in the foreseeable future) and limited or no central infrastructure to support digital humanities work. The question remained, then, how do libraries such as these move beyond grassroots in their efforts to encourage and support new modes of digital scholarship? We thought it best to start such an endeavor with a clear understanding of the current local landscape related to digital scholarship. We wanted to know: Which DH tools or methods are researchers on campus using? How much interest is there in these new forms of scholarship? Where do researchers currently go for help? What community, capacity, or infrastructures already exist that can help support a digital humanities program? Answering these questions would help us set priorities, connect disparate communities and services to create a support network, and plan for immediate and future services.

Of course libraries, like the digital humanities, are collaborative concerns (no, really, they are), sharing experiences and resources and learning from one another. Thus, we wanted to look beyond our institutions to see how our landscapes and communities compared with others, how other libraries approached next steps and determined priorities. By looking at this middle space, we might highlight the distinct contours of DH at our own institutions, as well as uncover foundational steps or common themes that we might share more broadly.

The study

The scope of the study encompasses faculty, graduate students, and other scholars in humanities and social science disciplines. We have also included select undergraduate populations; for example, at my institution we are surveying undergraduate students in the Honors College and undergraduates that self-select by either attending DH programming and training, or by consulting with a librarian on digital humanities projects or tools. We are conducting the study at both Penn State and Oregon State Universities and have since identified two other institutions that would like to participate. The study comprises several methods of data gathering: a variable question survey, in-person interviews, and focus groups, as well as an environmental scan to get a better sense of what capacities or infrastructures are currently in place within the library and the larger academic community.

The Survey

The survey is the primary method for gathering data on the interest and use of digital humanities tools and methods in our local communities. The number of questions varies depending on the respondents experience and interest in incorporating the digital into their research or teaching. The main questions are arranged around four digital tool/method-based categories: (1) digital collections, (2) digital editions and publishing, (3) geo-spatial analysis and mapping, and (4) text/data analysis and visualization. For each of the categories, participants indicate whether or not they have created, contributed to, or made use of projects in the course of their research and teaching, or whether they have an interest in doing so.

This section is followed by queries about existing or needed support and training for digital scholarship. These include questions about which tools and methods participants are most interested in learning; what types of support they would consider useful for digital scholarship; if they receive support for digital scholarship from a department, scholarly society, or other organization; and where they currently go for help with digital tools and methods. Finally, the survey ends with general questions on demographics and an opportunity to participate in individual interviews or focus groups.

Interviews

The interviews provide an opportunity to gather more detailed information about digital humanities tools and methods in research or teaching. The interview prompts focus on: perceived successes, usefulness, or impact of digital methods; the roles of dh in their research, discipline, and in scholarship in general; key challenges to using or adopting dh tools and methods; where users learn (about) new tools and methods; which services, tools, or programs might best help them meet their goals; and how they feel about current issues, practices, or trends in digital scholarship. We are also using the interviews to get a sense of what researchers value most in a digital project: sustainability, reproducibility, immediacy, or the opportunity to learn something new.

Focus groups

In the focus groups, we are directing the conversation to “big picture” topics that have implications for change and for the future. The focus group prompts ask participants: Why do we engage in digital scholarship and what are our goals/values? Which are the most important skills, methods, and services to meet the needs of researchers doing digital scholarship right now and to build on for future scholarship? What are possible training/skilling up scenarios and what are the most effective ways to learn new methods and technologies? Finally, what are the implications of digital scholarship on graduate education and training and on undergraduate education? What do graduate students need to succeed in the job market and what, if any, changes to the graduate curriculum are warranted?

Environmental scan

In addition to surveying the needs and interests of researchers at our institutions, we needed to find out more about the existing resources that we might leverage to build community, capacity, and infrastructure in support of digital humanities programing. The scan is being sent out to relevant units and potential collaborators within the Libraries and throughout the larger institution, as well as to individuals from other units who have expressed an interest in digital humanities. Units that we have identified thus far include library and university IT, Information Science and Computer Science departments, institutes with an emphasis on data collection and analysis, and interest groups on campus such as the HackingScience group at Penn State. The goal of the scan is to determine what services we might already have in place that we can leverage, and which of these resources can be repurposed or extended?

What we’ve learned (so far)

Surveys and interviews

Initial results from the survey and interviews indicate that most of the interest is in digital pedagogy or projects for the classroom. Faculty indicated that they like the idea of students engaging with texts, history, and culture in novel ways and appreciate the value of learning other skills in the process. There is also more of a demand for geospatial projects, especially in the classroom context, and many graduate students are integrating network analysis in their research or would like to. Graduate students also seem to be interested in integrating data (network analysis, visualization, text mining) into their research more than faculty, while faculty are more interested in encoding texts and giving context to works by creating digital editions or collections.

We’ve also found that scholars are interested in learning new technological skills to work on their own projects, but this isn’t always a high priority considering their other commitments. Some participants expressed an interest in partnering with other scholars or technologists, but may not be thinking in truly collaborative terms – their responses indicate they are perhaps looking more for support and relationships with new colleagues having a shared interest in order to discuss and work out problems rather than approaching research with a shared vision. Those researchers with a clear interest in exploring digital scholarship valued solving an immediate research problem over all else, while putting the possibility of learning something new over sustainability.

Still, many faculty are curious about digital humanities, but unsure of its usefulness and impact on scholarship. They want more examples of these methods used in rigorous research and want to see just how this might shed new light on their own research questions. While not expressing an interest in digital humanities for themselves at this stage, most find it useful (and even important) for their graduate students and see the value of integrating digital methods and methodologies into graduate training. They recognize the shift in job requirements and expectations and want their graduates to be successful and experiment with new forms of scholarship – as long as they are able to maintain the expected levels of rigor in the discipline.

Environmental scan

Initial reports from the environmental scan revealed existing services, communities, and infrastructures with which we can begin to collaborate. There are a number of graduate students and faculty in other disciplines with expertise in data analysis and mapping technologies that are eager to work with humanities scholars. There is also an R User’s Group on campus and the GeoVista Lab, both of which have reached out to us to work on projects and training initiatives as a result of the scan. There are also groups forming around digital tools and methods in other disciplinary areas: for example, the HackingScience group and the Academic Computing Fellows. Some of these groups offer training and support for specific tools or approaches and are interested in broadening their scope to include humanities research. The scan has also resulted in new partnerships with both library IT units and the central university IT departments. From a virtual server sandbox to database creation and hosting services, they are beginning to explore new service models in support of digital scholarship.

What we’re doing…

…to build Community

Based in part on the feedback we’ve received thus far and on discussions with colleagues at peer institutions, we have taken some initial steps to build a digital humanities community at my institution. Since many scholars expressed a need for supportive relationships and more examples of DH in action to feel out new technologies, the DH Interest Group was created. A loosely formed community of faculty, students, and librarians, the Interest Group meets once a month for discussion and an “Open Mic.” During the Open Mic, attendees share their projects, ideas, and problems related to digital scholarship and provide feedback and encouragement. The group has started it’s own listserv to communicate upcoming events and relevant news and to ask questions of the community. The next step will be to create an online community, using Commons in a Box or a similar tool, to showcase projects, facilitate discussion, and provide a forum for new tool or methods-based user groups. We have also reached out to other campus groups, such as the R user group and HackingScience, to plan “themed” Interest Group meetings around a particular topic or to offer hands-on training sessions.

…to build Capacity

Steps toward building capacity are happening more slowly than with community building, but we have a few initiatives underway. Some librarians are exploring new tools and methods and even working on their own projects to learn new skills that they might share with others. There has also been an increase in librarian participation and support for attendance at DH related conferences, conference programming, and training opportunities. Based on community feedback, many of these efforts have focused on mapping technologies and network analysis to meet the immediate user needs. In addition to librarian efforts to build up expertise, the Libraries and College of Liberal Arts have partnered to hire a new DH Research Designer, someone who will guide researchers through digital projects and help develop services and infrastructure in support of DH. We would also like to begin bringing in outside experts to lead workshops or to speak about their work in a public forum.

…to build Infrastructure

Talking with faculty about their projects has shed light on some of the challenges in supporting researcher led digital scholarship. Experimental space where faculty and students create and learn with digital tools is hard to come by in academic libraries and university IT units, but is necessary if scholars are to progress beyond the one-size-fits-all tools. To address this, we are partnering with researchers, administrators, and technologist to develop low-barrier, user-centered infrastructure. We’ve begun providing server space and support for scholars wanting to host their own projects or to “tinker” behind the scenes with Omeka, Wordpress, and other platforms and web technologies. We are also exploring services we might offer in support of digital scholarship, from database hosting to digitization and OCR services for faculty projects. Other possibilities that we have discussed include investigating new uses cases for our institutional repository and supporting dynamic, open web publishing alternatives for scholarship in a variety of digital formats.

On balancing priorities

Some of the greatest challenges to supporting digital humanities arise from the seemingly conflicting priorities of traditional library and academic culture and the “maker” mentality of digital humanities. Of the issues and questions encountered along they way, we’ve distilled these into three dichotomous pairs: Sustainability vs. Experimentation, Scalability vs. Use-specific, and Scholarship vs. “screwmeneutics.”² Granted, much of this is changing, but we find ourselves more often that not needing to challenge the emphasis on sustainability and scalability in favor of more experimental or explicit approaches when planning infrastructure and services. If we are to foster digital scholarship in libraries, we must avail ourselves of the opportunities to leverage and expand existing technical infrastructure, while simultaneously working at the periphery to lay new ground. Similarly, while the commitment to scholarly rigor is central to digital humanities work, we must allow for and prioritize play and make room for serendipitous discovery. These pairs are not true dichotomies, rather priorities between which we must balance our immediate and future needs.

¹Bryson, Tim, et al. Digital humanities. Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries, 2011.

²Ramsay, Stephen. “The Hermeneutics of Screwing Around; or What You Do with a Million Books,” 2010.

Dawn Childress

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The local digital humanities landscape: understanding and building community, capacity, and infrastructure

The study

What we’ve learned (so far)

What we’re doing…

On balancing priorities