Posts filed under 'social software'
In addition to my written summary, you can find the resulting action plans, poll data, and Twitter commentary here:
https://wiki.projectbamboo.org/display/BPUB/Workshop+4
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23pb4
OVERVIEW
I think Bamboo Workshop 4 went well overall and I was very glad to attend. To my surprise, pedagogy seemed to be one of the areas with the most energy and support behind it, and from various quarters including IT, Librarians, and — to a *lesser* extent — faculy. The meeting polled the constituents several different times on institutional interest and willingness to commit to working on the areas of the planning document. I marked us down as willing to be leaders in the Education and Curriculum section, and understand from George that we might be willing to lead on others.
The Bamboo organizers worked very hard to change the agenda on the fly
according to the needs and input from the meeting constituents.
My sense of the plan is mixed. I definitely think it’s a good idea, and I’m enthusiastic about working on it, but budgetary restraints in these economic times are going to introduce difficulties for overstretched IT departments who might be called upon to allocate personnel or financial resources to Bamboo.
My other main concern was that Bamboo might replicate or rebuild some existing services (like MERLOT or SAKAI), but by the final reporting session on day 3 it was clear that much thinking and planning had been done to avoid that. The question is how to do it. This should be more clear below.
The meeting resulted in sets of principles, 1st year, and 2nd year action plans for all sub-sections that can be viewed on the wiki. The following page will give you a strong sense of the meeting’s results, as it contains the poll numbers on the various sections, as well as the action plans, and notes on the discussions taken by Bamboo folks:
https://wiki.projectbamboo.org/display/BPUB/Workshop+4
You can also view the Twitter discussion (#pb4) here:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23pb4
Following is my summary of the days’ events.
DAY 1
Goal of the workshop is to generate a proposal for the 1st 3 years, as a series of one year proposals. Resources are starting to come into focus. They need to know who (institutionally) will take part, and what kinds of resources they can allocate to the project.
PB4 worked toward PB5, seeking our input on major program elements, the consortial model, etc. through non-binding polls and discussions. The following will happen immediately after PB4:
- Program staff mtg in Chicago Mon/Tue to debrief + digest
- Create straw man of first phase implementation proposal
- Schedule conversations with institutions and organizations to guage interest and commitment.
- Refine and edit Bamboo program
- Develop and refine the Implementation Proposal
- Have something up and operational in 12-month timefrime (what Mellon wants)
- Meet June 17-19 Washington DC, at UC Berkeley center there, right before digital humanities 2009.
After PB5, they wil:
- Finish + finalize Bamboo Program
- Finish + finalize Implementation Proposal
- Finalize conversations with institutions and organizations (what we can contribute and particpate in: a “sign on the dotted line” kind of moment; who’s in, who’s going to wait and see?)
Chad and David would like an email on Sunday from institutions about what kind of roles and commitments they might like to make in the project. I am thinking we could commit to the Education and Curriculum part of it (at least I’d like to be actively involved in this), and possibly others?
OVERVIEW OF DOCUMENT
1. Vision
2. Scope of work — the idea of moving a big multifarious project forward but not as a single monolothic object — has to be broken up some how with various semi-autonomous elements (the Cloud)
- How to make this happen at the technology layer (Cloud)
3. Major Activities
- The Forum - the are already mature efforts (SAKAI, Fluid) that are humanities led, so we need to be careful not merely to replicate these.
- Bamboo would take a step back and somehow connect some of these, but also lead where identified needs are lacking in resources
- Bamboo would be a kind of glue for a longer term infrastructure
- Social model where different people can be in leadership roles
- But not proposing own social networking environment like Facebook or SAKAI, rather a way to connect them and still allow you to find project related to your disciplinary work, etc. (learned societies).
4. The Cloud
Infrastructure for sharing services, gadgets that minimizes risk, is inherently redundant, low in cost, and introduces the potentional for broad adoption across institutions, organizations and georgraphical boundaries in a sustainable and reliable manner.
Q&A
Constraints - financial? Ballpark figures have changed to around $1m per year for first three, could be more or less. I assume this is a diminished figure from what was initially offered by Mellon.
Scholarly Narratives working group report — they tried to fill a gap between scholars’ description of work in PB1 and Tech designs in PB2. Met with tech and scholarly people; idea was to provide connection between scholarship and design work. How do we identify and define the needs we’re trying to address? How can we design tools and infrastructure to support that kind of work?
PB needs a map — scholars’ needs must be expressible in terms of tech capability. The tech must be describable in terms of the schoalrly activities they support. PB “tri-group” team envisions such a map.
Sch. Narrative –> Recipe / Activity Definition –> Tools / Content / Services
scholarship <———-> technology
The Scholarly Narratives are often not described as overtly digital or technical; frequently overlap one with another; require deconstruction and analysis.
Recipes are one way to tease out relevant elements of narratives: facilitate processes for other institutions who might need insight in producing their own projects.
The Scholarly Network is ffor managing bibliographies, centralizing resources, seredipitously finding other scholars working on same subject, etc.
The Forum will advance the narrative-recipe-activity service process to become more streamlined and efficient, ie, allow PB to better sort wheat from chaff.
1st Poll assessing our institutional interest in the following sections of area 3.
2nd poll, assessing our institutional interest in the following sections of area 4.
Services Atlas
- Bamboo inviting contributions for user interface design. What will API look like? Etc.
Section 5 - Lab
I don’t remember much about this. Sorry: my attention was failing by this point in the day.
DAY 2
This day began with an activity that broke down the constituency according to their institutional roles: (1) faculty, (2) administration, (3) technology / IT / Library. I was placed in group 3 as a technologist. During our small table discussion, teaching started as the main focus. Some of the librarians (these from the Open University in Britain) felt that expertise in pedagogy seems to have shifted to technology services. Also, teaching is important politically because funding and resource allocation for research projects (esp. in small liberal arts schools) needs to show relevance and impact on students.
I added that if a mission of Bamboo is to facilitate digital humanities research and bring up the next generation, much of that happens through teaching, so I would think PB would have a vested interest in best practices and maximizing learning.
Networking — the IT executives in my discussion group felt that the networking tools proposed for Bamboo would be more of a drain on their staff than a help to their work. However, they also felt that it’s good for technologists, faculty, and librarians to keep getting together like this to discuss it all. The IT execs, though open to the project, seemed to have a less idealistic notion of how the work of Bamboo would benefit their own departments, or even their universities as a whole.
Risk of Bamboo is to demonstrate a clear payoff to researchers (faculty) within a defined timeframe. If Bamboo can’t communicate that, it will be difficult to make it work.
One IT person said that humanities scholarship is an individual pursuit and that the Forum would not take load off him.
The IT folks began to ask whether PB would just become another MERLOT. Facebook is successful because it reached a critical mass. I don’t think MERLOT has the kind of institutional buy-in — and therefore the motivation for continued commitment for development and improvement — that PB is looking for. PB strikes me as being fundamentally a multi-*institution*-driven project rather than a social network of individual humanists.
Q&A re: small table discussions:
If digital humanities is going to flourish, then institutional and disciplinary Silos will have to break down and reform. Linear Recipes might be too narrow — need feedback loop type structure (not sure what was meant by this). Scenarios might be better way to think of Recipes. Why use Bamboo over something like FB for networking? Can we leverage or interoperate with something like FB? Tools etc. are short lived relative to interoperability standards.
Following the Q&A of small table discussions, we took a poll on the level of institutional willingness to commit to the sections of PB in areas 3 & 4.
DAY 3
Small table discussions on what to do next in Bamboo. Establish an integrated core for the first year.
Long range plan has to be to reach beyond that initial group of humanists building Bamboo.
Neil Fraistat: keep humanities scholars engaged in shaping Bamboo at all stages, else the technical/humanities divide will remain.
Elli Mylonas: True partnerships have to go both ways.
Charter: Do we need different versions of it or different schematics to address the different constituent audiences in Bamboo?
April 19th, 2009
While reading Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History, it occurred to me that the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive should do the same within itself. The first step this Winter will be to complete a major information overhaul, marking up and encoding all passages and images rigorously in XML. Then, dynamic real-time visual tools can be used to illuminate the Recherche, narrative, and the manner in which archive users have been interacting with the novel.
Moretti’s use of graphs to illustrate the publishing data about the novel in different times and locations throughout history shows fascinating patterns about its system of subgenres, its rises and falls, and the relationships it bears with politics and economics. Such models could be applied to the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive, but for purpose of illuminating its internal relationships. Graphs could be used to show various aspects of the church motif and how they are patterned throughout the work. Would, say, the rises and falls of particular associations tell us anything about the novel’s exploration of memory or subjectivity, especially anything that might not be obvious in Proust scholarship hitherto? If so, what do these patterns tell us about narrative itself, and of the motif as an element of narrative?
The mapping techniques that Moretti applies to certain English novels reveal interesting patterns in their plot elements, such as the consistency in which certain types of plots form distinct rings around the geographical center of the action. What would we learn from maps of churches in the Recherche, and how they relate to its exploration of subjective memory, national memory, local memory, memorialization through architecture, archives, and narrative? Would the regions of France, their churches, and how the churches signify within the narrative tell us anything new about the Recherche?
Perhaps even trees dealing with associations, categories, or motifs could tell us a lot about the church motif and its operation within the whole narrative.
As well, these kinds of tools could be used to illuminate the relationships between critical discussion on the blog and the text and images in the archive. Which passages get the most attention? The least? Which associations and image properties are most or least discussed? How do these change over time?
A unified, dynamic, and interactive visualization section of the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive could potentially show so much about the Recherche and narrative that has not yet been seen. It could prove to be a new method of inquiry into the novel, Proust, narrative, literary scholarship, and more.
Here are some basic relationships that a visualization application could explore:
Graphs
- Association by pagination location in the novel.
- Association by chronological location in the narrative.
- Association by chronology of composition (would require extensive textual scholarship).
- Association by church.
- Blog categories by association, and/or by image property, and/or by church.
- Real, fictional, and hybrid churches by location in the novel, in the narrative, by image type, etc.
Maps
- Geographical locations of churches.
- Geographical locations of associations and churches.
- Geographical locations of associations by churches, broken down by real, fictional, and hybrid churches.
- Character by geographical location, church, associations, and image properties.
- Any of the above by critical categories in the blog.
Trees
- Breakdown schema of how real and hybrid churches are used in particular associations (say, romantic love or the subject/object distinction).
- Schema of how blog categories explore certain associations or image properties.
- Schema of an image property and the kinds of associations it tends to appear with.
As a note for a future post, in order to make the data more effective in visual applications, a rigorous categorization of the associations (which are non-categorized) will probably be necessary.
November 17th, 2008
It occurred to me as I lay awake last night that Drupal could actually do much of what came out in our discussions at if:book a year ago. Dan Visel suggested allowing users to add their own images and their own passages (permissions nightmares), or to comment on searches, which is interesting. Drupal wouldn’t be able to do a search comment. However, entering each passage as a page or story would enable:
- More images to be attached to passages.
- Commenting on the passages and, perhaps with a module, the images.
- Integration of Proust passages and commentary with services like del.icio.us, twitter, technorati.
- Use of modules to serendipitously or randomly highlight passages, images, and critical content.
The Drupal search tool would recall all of these. However, the downsides would be:
- Less immediate access to the search results, since they’d show up as headlines and teasers instead of displaying all info in a neat table as at present.
- There would be no way to conduct a pagination search for in-depth study of a particular segment of the novel.
Again, as I wrote in the previous post, the archival structure of this site must be “respectful” of the organicity of the novel genre. A Drupal or Drupal-like integrated search engine and Web 2.0 tool would open up possibilities inherent in the digital archive genre, but might go too far in doing violence to the novel genre.
With Web 2.0 (user-produced content), institutional considerations would have to address the topical specificity of the archive, lest it become an encyclopedic, directionless, Proustian wiki. That could mean instituting an archive staff committed to study of the church motif and narrative, which would require a grant or some other financial backing. At the very least it would mean vetting the readers who are allowed to post content (i.e. students, faculty, researches demonstrably focusing on Proust, etc.). But that too is inseparable from what an archive is — a container of information, whose information is controlled, selected, interpreted, and presented by the archon and both the intra- and inter-institutional politics of its time and place.
December 31st, 2007
Thought I would follow up this post with an interview of Michael Palin on Leonard Lopate, WNYC, discussing the All-England Summarize Proust Competition and BBC censorship. I think the golf joke much funnier than the original masturbation one.
October 29th, 2007
While considering a taxonomic versus a folksonomic labeling of passages in the archive, it occurred to me that there are benefits to having both in the search engine and search results.
The taxonomic approach would be a codified and rigorous — and therefore arbitrarily limited — categorization of narrative elements a priori. As a search functionality it would constrain the method in such a way that the selection of narrative elements would form a cohesive set of criteria on which to assess the passages. As a results parameter it would allow the researcher to view the other narrative elements with which a given one coincides and, using analytical tools, to articulate the large- and small-scale patterns in which the church motif operates.
In that respect the archive would function like a moving S/Z, staking the narrative grounds on which to assess the operation of the narrative and following them to their fullest conclusion.
However, what is valuable in the Associations as they currently stand is their haphazard, a posteriori formulation, generated during the act of reading. The richness of threads that continually and unexpectedly enter the mind during reading should definitely be archived as part of the critical response to the text, as an adjunct to the blog and forum.
The folksonomic approach, therefore, would incorporate a tool that enables readers of the archive to annotate passages with their own Associations, contributing another dimension to the architecture of the search engine, the richness of results, and the quality of critical discourse. The folksonomic approach would hybridize the narratological method with a sort of reader-response mechanism, allowing a comparison of both as part of the long-term evolution of the study of the Recherche.
Ideally the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive would become a micro institution, functioning like a cross between an academic periodical and a book with multiple contributors. What form(s) will the full-length study(ies) ultimately take?
September 20th, 2007
I was originally going to post a handful of videos derived somehow from Proust’s work but ended up finding much more — and of better quality — than expected. For now, I’ll post a few musical interpretations. What’s interesting is that almost all of them involve a prominent visual component that constitutes its own narrative. Much of the video out there either parodies, idolizes, or has nothing to do with Proust.
August 31st, 2007
Couldn’t help but post this, from YouTube.
June 21st, 2007
On Saturday March 17th I attended two afternoon panels, Text Work in the Digital Age, Part 2 and the Pedagogy and Textual Studies Round Table. In Text Work in the Digital Age, Part 2, Alice Gambrell, Sandy Baldwin, and Rita Raley all gave presentations that focused somewhat on the future of textual works. I was struck by the fact that most of these forward-looking textual projects were artistic in nature.
Alice Gambrell gave a fascinating presentation on the textuality of workplace media and its subversive uses by artists. A prominent example was David Byrne’s PowerPoint piece (2001-3). But she also referred to a collaborative project she had done a couple of years ago, the Stolen Time Archive, which shows that an archive is an argument that achieves certain effects. In that way, the role of the archivist is to use the archive as a tool for passing information along to others who will use it in unanticipated — and subversive — ways.
Sandy Baldwin had an interesting take on spam, noting that much of it tends toward the literary — an eliteness (i.e. 1337, or leet / “elite”) and a uniqueness that achieves its own erasure as spam. He was referring, as best I can remember, to the kinds of “nonsense” stories and poems that enter our inboxes randomly (or seemingly so) and the pleasure he derives from them. I was pleased to hear someone talking about this experience of textuality at such an important conference because some spam appeals to my sensibility as well as that of others. I think that particular experience of textuality — the randomness with which it goes to the reader (as opposed to vice versa), the mystery of its apparently automatic origin — in large part defines our time. One of the most beautiful haiku (sort of) that I’ve ever read came from a spammer who apparently put something through babelfish several times before disseminating it to probably thousands of individuals:
modern animal
walk appreciate key hoping article
myself black
Rita Raley brought to our attention several new media art projects that seek to improve online reading, develop new reading interfaces, experiment with translation (by machine), and can help us flesh out more fully the history of reading. Her assessment of the projects addressed the following elements.
- Textual visualization
- Codex / digital hybrids
- Alternative interfaces and screens (i.e. cell phones for reading novels)
- Immersive text environments (i.e. room installations, 3D simulations, the CAVE at Brown University, the allosphere for textual composition)
- 3D textual environments (projected)
I don’t seem to have notes on all the artists she discussed, so I’ll do my best to recount the more interesting ones.
William Gillespie’s Word Museum is a 3D environment and interface for creating word objects and sculptures. It’s about the transition between legibility and illegibility, looking at text as a sculptural object and reading it — or processing it — from all sides and angles.
jodi.org — a site (reminds me of absurd.org) that subversively expresses the hidden structures of a text. In commandeering the physical behavior of the browser, the site calls attention to the binaries of code/surface, source/interface, and depth/surface. The reader is made aware that code is a deep structure that substantiates a surface. Rita also remarked that works which include code with human language in the same space isolate the screen as a surface.
Ted Warnell’s code poem Lascaux.Symbol.ic similarly lays bare the conditions of textual production. The background horse from Lascaux (circa 15,000 BCE) calls our attention to the “writing on the wall” and the communicative, expressive, semiotic systems that reside in art. The hand evokes tactility, the interface, and presence/absence. It also looks mounted, meaning the cave wall is not the mounting of the painting/poem, as traditionally, but the background of the picture — thereby destabilizing the notions of foreground/background (reminds me of Cubism).
She also discussed several pieces by John Cayley, a London-based poet, translator, and book dealer who also works at Royal Holloway College, University of London, and has directed research at Brown University and UC San Diego.
- “Overboard” - an animated display of a stable text dissembled by algorithms over time. The effect of this contemporary writing experiment is to create a continually moving “language painting” in which the base text occasionally comes into full legibility. Since aspects like word shape are largely preserved as the text changes, the word becomes a lens, a visual threshold.
- “Translation” - a selection of passages from Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past — both the original French and the English translation by Moncrieff and Kilmartin — that rotate in 3D movements. This piece, like many others described above, is about the rising and sinking of the surface, though here it is viewed through the lens of Proust and memory. It’s basically a narrated video in non-Euclidean geometry and a virtual 3D space.
- “Imposition” - was a collaborative, networked, textual/multimedia performance. The room featured a main screen with a primary movie. Twelve laptops were distributed to visitors, who were invited to to interact with text. The ensemble then moves to multiple screens to become a networked performance. The driving question of the project is to see how text competes with other types of media in a multimedia ecology.
The overarching theme of these experimental projects is legibility. They approach text as something to be contemplated rather than read. In that way, they’re more about processing text in non-traditional, unfamiliar ways.
This was a particularly stimulating panel that precipitated a lively Q&A session. The three presentations had in common a forward-looking attitude that implied — if it didn’t directly address — the future of reading and textual production. They all focused on issues pertinent to the projects and discussion that happen at the Institute for the Future of the Book, so I suggested that anyone who didn’t already know about it should check it out.
In the next post I will review the Pedagogy round table that also proved highly stimulating.
April 9th, 2007
First, to finish my entry on the Futures of Scholarly Editing II panel of March 16th. Peter Robinson’s demonstration of the digitized Codex Sinaiticus Manuscript was incredible. The Codex Sinaiticus, a 4th century manuscript with a four-column layout and impeccable handwriting, is one of the only surviving, complete, Greek bibles. Two goals of the project (among others that I failed to write down) are (a) to make a digital version that is as remarkable as the manuscript itself (it’s stunning) and (b) virtually to reunify all its leaves. No scholar has beheld the whole manuscript at once in over 2,000 years. The fragments are currently disbursed among St. Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt, the British Museum, the University of Leipzig, and the National Library of Russia, all of which are collaborating to produce the digital edition.
In order to make the digital edition as remarkable as the original, the interface is as functional as it is beautiful. A gamma image recognition system was used to link high quality images of the manuscript to the digital transcripts — down to the individual letter. Images can be floated over the transcripts in order to have a simultaneous supplement to the original. Now readers can search the centuries of corrections made to the manuscript by scholars over a period of 1,500 years, can add their own commentary to the edition, and can import and export their own bits. It is one of the first scholarly digital editions, I think, to incorporate social software into its design in order to enable discussion and collaboration.
All of this is done through a beautiful, beige, AJAX-y interface that one of the German programmers began to develop after he first saw Gmail (the digital MS previously had a highly functional but clunky looking HTML interface). The interface includes elements that can be picked up and dragged around to suit the ergonomic of the reader. And the functions, which allow the interaction between image, text, and other elements, are arrayed in an intuitive and logical manner. I was deeply impressed by the demonstration and left the room buzzing.
I began writing about the panels I attended on the 17th but there was so much to say that I’ve saved them for the next post.
April 5th, 2007
Today was the first day of panels and plenaries at the conference of the Society for Textual Scholarship, held at NYU. I attended a plenary and a panel in the morning and demonstrated the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive in the afternoon. I’ll only summarize what happened here but will elaborate in more detail later on.
The plenary was titled, “Book History, Textual Criticism, and Bibliography: Relating and Distinguishing the Sub-Disciplines.” Since I entered late, I can’t really summarize it, but it seemed to be about defining the discplinarity of book history. Ezra Greenspan talked about how book histories tend to have a national focus — the history of the book in China, India, the nations of Latin America, etc. — and that there needs to be a transnational focus on geographic trends. He also mentioned that his journal was the first, during the early 90s, to use GIS to map trends in book readership and distribution.
David Greetham asked an astute question about why the term “book” in “book history” seemed to have been ignored. Given the contextualization of studying books as objects in their national, economic, political, and cultural contexts, does it matter whether the book has a substantive essence of its own? What could be the influence of the book itself on its own history?
There was also a palpable disdain of digital text and electronic editing. One audience member mentioned his project that seeks to digitize the papers, letters, notes, and other artifacts of a Canadian writer and make them accessable through a website. He raised the intensely interesting question of how his project relates to the sub-disciplines of book history. There was virtually no response from the panelists, though Katherine Harris, a digital archivist in the audience, made an attempt to further the conversation.
After the plenary I thoroughly enjoyed the panel “The Modernist Material Text: Gender, Politics, Versions,” composed of four grad students from U Michigan. Russell McDonald talked about D.H. Lawrence and cross-gender collaboration. Jenny Sorenson analyzed Virginia Woolf’s play on genre and material text in Flush (a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel). Olivia Bustion discussed gender and priority in versions of three early poems by Marianne Moore. And Jamie Olson focused on cosmopolitanism in Seamus Heaney. All the papers were very good, and I especially liked the Woolf one for its smart discussion of genre.
Questions of genre were prominent in the Q&A during my own panel in the afternoon. It was a fascinating mix. Karsten Kynde and Kim Ravn of the Soren Kierkegaard Research Center demonstrated their archive of Kierkegaard’s papers (http://sks.dk). Jennifer Stertzer, an archivist at UVA, addressed the issues faced during the digitization of George Washington’s papers. Those two presentations contrasted nicely with this site, which archives a motif of the Recherche as opposed to the disparate materials of writer.
The moderator, Peter Robinson, at one point challenged the notion of whether this is really an archive. I thought it was a great question because this site aims to do exactly that (among other things): apply the archival model in such a way that its nature becomes exposed and directly questioned. Can this site be considered an archive if what it collects and makes available are the instances of a narrative motif and images associated with it? I think the answer is yes, as did the audience, to my delight.
After the panel finished I had a really good conversation with a junior faculty memember at my alma mater, Providence College. William Hogan made some interesting points on how this site isn’t quite an archive, not quite an edition, but it’s somewhere in between and more Internet native than the other resources available.
I’ll have more to say on this soon. Time to get some sleep.
March 16th, 2007
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