A recent issue of the [Humanist Discussion Group][hdg] noted the following publications:
Side note: Underlining titles and linking them presents interesting style issues, n’est-ce pas?
A number of vendors, like Apple and Adobe but I’m sure others as well, provide a range of free on-line seminars that not only are instructional in how to create content — and even think about content creation — but are examples of that creation themselves. A good example is this pairs of presentations by Brian Storm of Storm Media that is directed at photojournalists and how by adding audio then can not only enrich their content but also potentially reach new markets, and thus new revenue streams. The first presentation focuses on why someone might want to do this and the basics of gathering inputs and the second on working in Final Cut Pro.
The Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford was not necessarily a ready reference or me, but its evolution — it lived from 1970 to 2005 in print and is now being brought back as an on-line publication — is interesting:
The Journal of the Anthropological society of Oxford (JASO) was originally launched in 1970 as a hard copy journal; it ceased publication in that form in 2005. It has now been re-launched to coincide with the Centenary of the Oxford Anthropological Society in 2009. The new online journal, called JASO-Online, will be a joint collaborative project between JASO, the Society, and the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, which is hosting the website. Thus we hope it will appeal to all branches of the School, staff and students alike, and that it will be an active forum open to all for the discussion of anthropology and issues of interest to anthropologists. For the time being, at least, JASO-Online will be available as a free download, though we reserve the right to levy a charge at any time in the future. Contributors will not be paid for their contributions.
What I’ve been thinking about is how easy it is to publish a journal on-line. As numerous commentators have pointed out over the past decade: the costs of printing and distribution acted, at the very least, as a kind of test of resolve. Now, one only needs a connection — numerous publishing platforms are free. And so, the real problem is to have a readership, an audience. I think this will be the strength of learned and professional societies going forward. In creativity studies, this is described as the field, and within those studies the field is test bed for ideas introduced into the domain by an individual. (This is the DIFI model.) The conventional understanding is that the field in some way is the test for innovation, that an innovation is that which is not already in the domain but is still recognizable by the field as being a relevant extension or revision of the domain.
But, clearly, you have to have a field. I just wonder about the number of journals popping up that don’t have a field, an audience. They may describe a new domain, and it may be better than the extant domains, but without a field, one is perhaps talking quite loudly with no one around really to hear.
It turns out I wrote down the wrong day for the annual rice field day at LSU’s Rice Station west of Rayne, and so I am home, with my cold, working on various Project Bamboo tasks.
The first thing I got done was to draft a value statement for scholarly / professional / learned societies:
The central focus of the learned society remains the pursuit of reliable knowledge and its effective communication within and without the society. Cyberinfrastructures expand the communicative modalities available to learned societies and their members. However, these same infrastructures threaten some of the most venerable revenue streams, emphasizing the importance of maximizing the return on investment in the digital realm. What learned societies need are at least interoperable, if not common, infrastructures that allow members to communicate and collaborate, in a trusted fashion, with other scholars, be they mutual members of the same society or in an adjacent field. By participating in a common technological ecosystem, learned societies can leverage their investment to give their members the tools and content they need to advance their own scholarship, and thus the impact of the society itself.
This has now been posted on the Bamboo Wiki. (N.B. I believe the wiki is currently private, so that link will probably not work.)
The second thing I did was to add a potential new case statement to the proposal that focused on the outreach / public relations potential of Bamboo:
Bamboo’s goal of increasing the visibility and accessibility of digital tools and content to humanities scholars themselves will necessarily not only radiate out to graduate and undergraduate students who will thus be able to participate in and work with these materials and methods but it will also increase the visibility of the work of humanities scholars to an increasingly connected public who are often in search of humanities content but are often stymied in their search for trusted materials and ideas.
[You could think of this as something like Stanford’s SEE (Stanford Engineering Everywhere) program. One-upping to a definite article: the THE (The Humanities Everywhere). Maybe.]
I remember a conversation from graduate school where students were trying to hash out where they thought the field was going. One of our cohort finally spoke up and said, “Well, I don’t know where the field is going, but I do know where I want to take it.” Perhaps, Project Bamboo is something like that for those of us at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
We have taken a multi-level approach to our efforts:
- At the base level, there is an enormous benefit for an university like the University of Louisiana simply to be among the founding members of anything of the scope and scale as Project Bamboo. We are the only university from the Deep South to have participated throughout the process.
- Building from such a base, we have already, as it were, used the fact of our participation in Bamboo to leverage state funding of a “digital humanities lab.”
- Moving from an institutional scope to one focused more clearly on the humanities, we have emphasized the inevitability of the IT revolution and the ability to be in control of one’s own destiny to which Bamboo aspires to discuss with faculty not only our involvement in the consortium but also to begin to make them aware of the possibilities contained within under the rather diffuse rubric of the “digital humanities.”
- At the level of particular disciplines, my involvement in Project Bamboo has also helped me steer a parallel project, the design and development of a new website / communications platform for the American Folklore Society, of which I have been named editor.
- Finally, at a personal level, there can be no doubt the enormous professional development I have enjoyed thanks to the incredibly challenging conversations we have had as a result of the mixing of humanists, technologists, and archivists / librarians. The multi-disciplinary discussions have been amazing.
An amazing talk by a molecular biologist:
As I began work on the analysis of the Scholarly Narratives deposited in the Project Bamboo planning wiki, I found I needed the occasional footnote to explain a few items that didn’t really deserve space in the text proper but still deserved to be addressed in some fashion. Such extra-textural information can customarily be contained in notes of some kind, either foot or end.
Fortunately, the variation of Markdown that I am using, MultiMarkdown by Fletcher Penney, contains note functionality.
All I have to do to embed a note into the text is to add [^1] in the body of the text and then at the end of the text add a mate [^1]: Followed by the body of the note. Simple, n’est-ce pas? The HTML it creates looks like this:
<a href="#fn:1" id="fnref:1" class="footnote">1</a>And later:
<div class="footnotes">
<hr />[footnote text here] ↩
</div>Note how the MultiMarkdown script generously creates a link to return you to the spot where you were reading in the text proper. Thank you, Mr. Penney.
But all of this, it turns out, opens up a larger can of worms that has been poked at by a number of individuals with sticks that reveals that there really is no terribly good solution to the problem of notes in HTML — this despite the fact that one would think that the very links that saturate HTML texts would do the job.
Well, they do, but not quite in the same way that footnotes do the job. One of the great advantages of footnotes, one that they have over endnotes to my mind and why I have always preferred footnotes, is that the reader doesn’t really leave the space, the cognitive space if you will, within which they are operating. If a number or symbol indicating a note is available is paired with an item that piques the reader’s curiosity, all she has to do is flick her eyes to the bottom of the page. Thanks to a pretty decent spatial memory built into the human brain and to the fact that the note you’ve just read had a particular symbol paired with it, returning to the approximate spot in the text from whence the reader came is usually not so difficult a task that it breaks the reader’s sense of flow. (I do not find that endnotes accomplish this at all, by the way, and I’m sorry that my own discipline has chosen endnotes over footnotes.)
But a web page is not a page except in name. The comparable physical space is really a screen.
The compromise has been for the most part to treat the web page as a page and to place notes at its distant, and sometimes unknown (from the reader’s point of view) bottom. The convention that the Markdown script follows, in giving a link back to where you were in the text, is also a common one. The idea is to achieve via technology what the reader used to do themselves physically. I don’t find the effect to be as smooth and it is likely, at least for this reader, at least half the time to result in me losing track of where I was.
There is a really terrific description of all this by Paula Petrik in a post where she also gives some really concrete and practical advice on how to construct notes according to one’s own preferences.
From the Wired article:
NASA is taking the rare step of reaching out to the public for help. The space agency is looking for the best way to analyze and electronically catalog a precious collection of notes that chronicle the early history of the human space flight program.
“We’re looking for creative ways to get it out to the public,” said project manager Jason Crusan. “We don’t always do the best with putting out large sets of data like this.”
The notes are those of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, the fist director of NASA’s Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama and are typed with copious hand written notes in the margin. According to the official request for information, NASA needs ideas on what format to use, how to index the notes and how to create a useful database.
One of the things I continually harp on my graduate students about is how they make presentations. For the majority of them, their idea of a presentation comes from their days (and days and days — they are graduate students after all) spent in the classroom where they have established themselves as the kind of people who enjoy classroom lectures. And so one of their first impulses is to re-create the classroom lecture.
But that doesn’t mean they have necessarily experienced, and thus are in a position to recreate, great classroom lectures. (One doesn’t have to have encountered excellence in a genre to be an established fan of the genre — more on this perhaps another time.) The same goes for the other presentational form that grad students have likely experienced, the conference paper. While the lecture format typically assumes something like 45 minutes to make its point, the conference paper is constrained to 20 minutes, or sometimes 15 minutes. However, that does not necessarily encourage authors/presenters to get to the point. I have, no lie, witnessed individuals read from article-length or chapter-length papers, somehow believing that there ideas are so compelling that the audience is willing to withstand their speed reading and such qualifications as “I can’t go into todepth here due to lack of time.” (I don’t think I have ever seen a “stage rush” at the end of such a performance with gobs of new fans breathlessly pressing for the skipped-over idea.)
I’m not picking on just academics here, but on presenters in general. I have, while in the business world, sat through many a PowerPoint slide stack which consisted of nothing more than slide after slide of bullet points, many of which were nothing more than read off the slide by the presenter. This is the scene of revolution, or at least revolt, for more sites and speakers/authors who seek to revise or refine presentational forms. One of the first of such sites I came across was Presentation Zen, a site I have regularly recommended to grad students — a recommendation, I can tell from their presentations, that most of them have ignored. From there, I have suggested they explore not only the form but also the content of the TED talks.
The technology sphere in general has generated a number of conventions. Guy Kawasaki has his own 10/20/30 rule. And there are presentations like this one by Dick Hardt at OSCON on which even talented presenters like Lawrence Lessig have commented. (Lessig is a presentation dynamo in his own right, and his free culture talk, which speaks directly to the heart of folklore studies and the larger philological project, is well worth watching. Please also note that his book is available, in its entirety, as a free download at that link.)
And so it should come as no surprise that O’Reilly, so often at the vanguard — almost too consciously so sometimes — has come up with Yet Another Presentation Format (YAPF). It’s worth checking out Scott Berkun’s meta-presentation on the format, if only for its suggestiveness:
As we wrap up our sojourn in Louisiana, we are, as I noted previously, spending our last weekend in the Indiana Memorial Union. Our fellow guests are mostly older folks, many look like they are probably retired, who are here to attend a mini university. I don’t know what their curriculum looks like, but I do know they are having a great time. I’m guessing that a good portion are alumni, who are simply enjoying a return to campus — not entirely unlike ourselves, so we have enjoyed watching them walk and reminisce.
They are having a great time, and, from what a young woman in the IMU Bookstore told Yung, then spend a lot of money. (We ourselves bought a few tee shirts as well as baseball caps for me and Lily.) Walking around this evening, cooling off after a final supper at Little Tibet, we saw a few of them settled into the first floor lounge of the IMU, reading. One of them was reading on a Kindle. Seeing that, I couldn’t help myself. My exec ed days kicked in, and I turned to Yung and said:
The smart thing to do would be to roll the price of a Kindle into the overall package and hand each of them one with all their readings already loaded onto the thing. Throw is a laser engraving with the IU logo or a leather carrier with the logo and you’ve given them a great keepsake and a terrific calling card for the university. (Not to mention the fact that the Kindle’s adjustable font sizes are probably going to be appreciated, too.)
Such a “gimmick” probably has only a limited life-time while we all wait for the e-reader platform to develop, but while the opportunity exists, I would certainly use it. I would imagine that at least some exec ed programs are already doing this. Yung later read something in USA Today about a number of high-end hotels doing something similar.
I’ve been thinking about the nature of writing that I have been doing for my collections going into the EVIA Digital Archive. As I noted in a previous post about my time at EVIADA, the challenge has been to switch gears to write to the new form of publication.
As I wrote that last sentence, I wanted to use the word medium, but that doesn’t quite work with the web, does it? The web is a kind of meta-medium, as I have noted elsewhere. The great thing about the web as a distribution channel is that it allows for static print forms, like the scholarly article or monograph (more on the latter later), as well as other media forms — images, audio, video — that are, no matter what dreamy-eyed web prophets prattle on about — essentially static as well. Sorry, static here means the content does not change in relationship to the reader/viewer/user, which is essentially adhering to the terminology already used by most folks to distinguish between static html sites and those sites driven by some sort of web application — like the one, for example, that drives this blog, Word Press, that allows users to tweak the content they see or to interact with the content by creating comments. (Okay, so I haven’t turned the latter functionality on, because I don’t like dealing with comment spam. But if anyone has anything to say, e-mail me and I’ll post it and credit you with it. No one’s reading this, yes? Good. I can keep blathering on then outside these parentheses.)
The danger of the new medium and of the interactivity that makes it possible is that the dreamy-eyed web prophets want everything to be that way. So one can imagine that somewhere someone is tempted to say that the EVIA Digital Archive is the way of the future. That in that future scholars will spend less time producing long, tedious tracts often arguing arcane theoretical points and more time sticking close to the very stuff that makes their fields interesting in the first place. (Wow, that sounded pretty convincing.)
Nonsense. (See also: balderdash, blather, bunkum, claptrap, drivel, garbage, idiocy, piffle, poppycock, rigmarole, rubbish, tomfoolery, trash, twaddle.)
And I don’t think the good folks at EVIADA mean it that way either. But it does open up possibilities, and in the process of opening up those possibilities, it opens up news of interacting with data, which can only be a good thing. Certainly one of the things that I enjoy about studying material folk culture is that it requires me not only to describe it in words but to photograph it, measure it, draw it. Every time I engage the material with which I work in a different modality, I have the opportunity to see it from, well quite literally, a new perspective. The kind of close attention that the Annotator’s Workbench requires of a depositor underlines that. I have glimpsed things in the Mermentau Mardi Gras that I knew were there without really being able to say what they were. And I’ve been following that run for about 10 years now.
One of the things I did notice about the Annotator’s Workbench is that it is ideological in nature: it enacts the performance studies paradigm. When I first sat down to work with it this past Monday, I turned to Alan Burdette, who directs EVIADA and who, I believe, led humanist side of the project’s development, with a kind of slack-jawed wonder, and he just smiled at me and said, “I know. It’s everything we talked about in graduate school.”
So, hats off to Alan.