Posts filed under 'community'
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
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
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
The Institute for the Future of the Book was generous enough to let me write a post on their blog, which can be found here:
http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2007/02/ecclesiastical_proust_archive.html
The post was picked up by RSS feeds all over the world. Thanks!
In addition, Dave Davison, who has a blog called Thoughts-Illustrated, posted a comment comparing this archive to his project of “editorially segmenting and tagging encapsulations of longer serial archives such as recorded speeches, audiovisual/video content, and finally ‘Networked Books’”. Admittedly, I haven’t had time yet to read his blog in depth, but what I’ve seen so far is a series of very interesting posts on annotating visual media for better reading and reducing Constant Partial Attention, a term he picks up from Linda Stone.
With the explosion of technologies like RSS and Web 2.0, it’s very important that educators help students think critically about managing information. That might include using technology to tag longer pieces used in courses — whatever media might be used — and evaluating research sources.
I’ve seen a demonstration of courseware that takes this into account at Columbia’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CNMTL). One of CNMTL’s applications, VITAL (Video Interactions for Teaching and Learning), is an environment that allows students to play digitized movies and music, select segments, annotate those segments with as much text as they like, and file the segments with annotations for when they write their integrative multimedia essays — all in the courseware. Granted, this type of activity occurs in controlled learning environments where the media are pre-selected by the professor. I wonder if the courseware allows students to import, segment, and annotate media they’ve garnered through research — or even digitize it. Applications like VITAL (but with the ability to act upon any media the reader might import, including text) ought to be readily available to students as stand-alone tools, especially now that much of their research will involve multimedia.
I could see using such a technology to teach novels. It would enable students to archive, tag, and illustrate passages, connect them to articles and other sources they’ve researched and imported into the environment, and so on. This might spark a radical (and possibly unfortunate) change in the English major. One of the unquantifiable skills that the English major has been touted to impart is the ability to see the Big Picture in a complex, hazy jumble of information and ideas. At the center of that is a highly flexible memory that is both detail-oriented and conceptually driven.
It’s important, as technology is increasingly appropriated to our intellectual pursuits, not to become too dependent on it. But if it’s used in such a way that it enhances those personal skills, then so much the better.
Obviously, one task accomplished by the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive is to serve as the memory for the vast amount of material I want to study but couldn’t physically remember in its entirety. Sure, my unaided memory will recall the most important material: the early descriptions of the Église St-Hilaire at Combray, of Marcel’s epiphany with the twin steeples of Martinville, and sundry short passages that made impressions on me while reading the Recherche. And I’ll remember where to find them when I need to write about them. The usefulness of this archive, however, is a virtue of its “narrow” focus that keeps the field of information from assimilating and ballooning endlessly, like The Blob. (I say narrow, but really — this archive comprises 336 passages, 184,181 words, over 700 associations, and roughly 500 images.) The focus on churches keeps the project thematically and conceptually unified.
I’m starting to think, as a result of writing this post, that opening this archive to the inclusion of passages and paratextual information not related to churches is probably not the way to go. (Read this post and this post for more on that topic.) There’s enough that could be done under the church rubric — say, a variorum of different translations and editions — to make it textually and scholarly interesting. The vast jumbled archive of editions, translations, articles, books, pamphlets, websites, films … … is already there. One could simply use a wiki, perhaps with customized search tools, to make sense of all of them, which would be great. But this archive is really a tool for narrative and textual analysis.
February 14th, 2007
About two weeks ago I met with a few folks from the Institute for the Future of the Book to talk about starting collaborative communities. Right before our meeting I had a couple of ideas about creating commentary space within the archive search results and making the whole thing more editable by readers. So I went to the Institute’s place in Williamsburg thinking we’d have two “separate” discussions about community and interactive functionality. But once the brainstorming session got going I was struck by how intimately the two were bound together.
One of the recurring points was that this archive, as currently constructed around the church motif, is “my reading” of Proust. I began to see that it would probably be difficult to interest others in participating when their readings of the Recherche — re: gender, airplanes, phenomenology or whatever — would have little impact on the archive itself. There was also a sense that it would be difficult to form a community around a project that an individual has already brought to a fair level of completion.
Most literary digital archives provide scholars with material but go no further. The value here would lie in taking the next step of providing commentary space within the search results themselves — not just in the blog and discussion board spaces. The ability of readers to add images, tag passages, or even add new passages would take that principle even further and make the archive itself a collaborative reading of the Recherche. And of course making the commentary searchable would add yet another dimension.
But why bother? What purpose(s) does this archive serve? What would it contribute to the field of literary scholarship?
Put plainly, The Archive has changed. The traditional model of humanities research commonly identified as ‘the lone scholar in the archive’ has been opened by digital networks and social software. This has been the case for years, especially since blogs and wikis became popular. Yet scholarly blogs tend overwhelmingly to be individuals’ personal web journals, which means that the model of the lone writer — despite post comments — still persists. That’s not a bad thing, and I’m not saying it should go away, but neither is it an effective use of the advantages offered by the technology.
The distributed, long-term conversation that has been happening in articles, books, conferences, and classrooms over the years will continue, of course, and it should. But social software allows us to publish at will, to communicate with similarly interested scholars wherever they are, whenever we like, and thereby to generate and hone ideas collaboratively as they are being developed.
A couple of interesting experiments along this line have been tried by Mitchell Stephens, a journalism professor at NYU who has been collaborating with the Institute for the Future of the Book. He put up a blog where his book on the history of atheism, Without Gods, was discussed, challenged, corrected, and questioned by readers during the composition process. Similarly, he put up a paper designed as a discussion: The Holy of Holies features a more effective commentary space, developed by the Institute, that ties comments to specific paragraphs. I could see working something like that into the search results of this archive. There was word, too, of making that comment functionality a WordPress plugin, which would be very useful for a number of projects.
This archive could take some lessons from the collaboration of Mitchell, his readers, and the Institute. I envision the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive as a more open-ended work of collaborative literary criticism, one that has the purpose of thinking and writing about Proust for its own sake, of developing ideas in conversation, but also as a space for spawning other projects. That is to say, blog members need not write about Proust and churches, but as long as there’s some focus on Proust or other related topics such as technology, media, publishing, theory, and so on, it could have that eclectic interest but guided by a common thread. And one of the possibilities could be that people working on books or articles might develop them collaboratively at the archive.
That suggests to me that the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive could instead become something with a broader focus, where people can enter and tag passages, images, and other media to influence the structure of the archive with their own readings. The issue of copyright (I had to pay for the use of the text featured here) is a can of worms I don’t have space to address in this post. Regardless, the amount of development required to expand this archive as mentioned would likely necessitate substantial funding. So probably a preliminary group would need to figure out what needs to be done in order to apply for a grant and then take it from there.
But the point is that if this is to become a useful resource where people think and also learn by doing, it will have to become editable by readers in some form or other, and by that very admission I can’t determine it all by myself.
So, this is a preliminary step to see what kind of feedback is out there. I would greatly appreciate any thoughts, suggestions or criticisms. And I would especially like to thank Ben Vershbow, Jesse Wilbur, Eddie Tejeda, and Dan Visel for taking the time to meet with me. If anyone is interested in participating somehow, please don’t hesitate to contact me at jdrouin@gc.cuny.edu.
January 29th, 2007
This is a site for researching and discussing Proust. It provides a searchable database of all church-related passages in the Recherche along with related images. Many of the images depict the original churches described in the novel or a scene that otherwise evokes something in the passage to which it is attached.
The site also features image galleries of the churches included in the search engine, and more. While only the blogging staff may post to the homepage, there is a discussion forum that anyone may register for and use.
Please be sure to read the about and rationale pages for more information about this site’s purpose and uses.
November 29th, 2006