The Yonderist

All those who wander are not lost.

Tag: humanities Page 3 of 4

One Potential Publishing Future

2009-06-11

work

At lunch time today I decided that instead of heading outside and chatting with my fellow Fellows and then taking a turn around the campus to stretch my legs that I would stay in the EVIADA break room, eat quickly, and get back to work. (The size of my task is beginning to become more clear, and the time that I can dedicate wholly to it more precious.) I ended up spending my entire lunch in conversation with Andrew Albrecht, who is one of the coders for the Annotator’s Workbench application. It turns out Albrecht got his BFA in Fine Arts, and then decided that the world of modern art didn’t interest him all that much. He decided instead to go back to school and get a BS in Computer Science.

And now he’s building software for humanists. It’s a good fit, and Albrecht is a thoughtful interlocutor. Our conversation rambled around quite a bit as we explored mutual interests, but at some point we, of course, talked about what the EVIA Digital Archive might mean for scholarship and scholarly publishing/productivity. We pursued some of the usual speculations, but at one point our conversation ran over the well-worn ground of the scholarly monograph.

Now, a lot of folks have weighed in on the future of the monograph, including the MLA (warning: links to PDF). The general consensus is that it will soon be distributed digitally and available as a physical artifact via some sort of print-on-demand technology. (Whether that will be at the point of distribution, a la University of Michican Press, or your local point of purchase is not yet terribly clear.)

I’m not sure I am prepared to keen and wail over this. I remember, once here on this very campus where I now sit, applying for a job at the Victorian journal housed here at Indiana, Victorian Studies. They were looking for a copy editor. I had sent in my paper work, and I was lucky enough to get called in for an interview, where I sat before three men. Two of them were fairly young. They struck me as fellow graduate students, but perhaps they were junior faculty. I don’t remember them at all. The third man I remember, he was (and is) Don Gray. What he said that day explained a great deal to me, and it echoes somewhat in my head now.

As the interview unfolded, I could not help but reveal my confusion about why a journal dedicated to Victorian literature needed a copy editor. My experience of Victorianists had been of some of the most fastidious people I had ever met, both in person and in prose. Sure there is not much work for a copy editor for such a journal? Up until the moment that question escaped my lips, Gray had been content to let the other two men do all the talking, but my naivité, or stupidity, demanded that such an error quickly be set straight.

“Oh, no,” he said. “We don’t get good manuscripts like that anymore. No one submits good articles anymore. Good articles are expanded into mediocre books. We only get mediocre articles, and they require a great deal of copy editing.”

Gray was being something of a wit in that moment, no doubt. I have come to know him over the years, bit by bit, and he has both a grasp of the tough nuts that make up the most interesting things about the world and a very fine grasp of the ability of language to convey the toughness of the nut in a very compressed fashion.

Nonetheless, there was also some truth in what he said, and perhaps the demise of the monograph should not be so heavily attributed to the decline of library budgets, as it often is. No one who wants to stay in business over the long haul allows themselves to get trapped into serving only one market. (A quick search of businesses that have found themselves bound to Walmart, and only to Walmart, will reveal the danger in such a relationship.) Robust businesses seek out multiple audiences.

It all comes back to diversity. We seek it out in biological ecosystems. We advocate for it in cultural ecologies.

Where is all this going? To this: my proposition to Albrecht was that the demise of the printed monograph was a potential boon to the humanities. As the more technical or specialist document becomes a currency passed among specialists and scholars within a field, then the synthetic or cross-over document that can reach larger audiences and thus be viable as a printed commodity garners, potentially, some value. At least it will do so from the point of publishers and one can imagine that that will translate to some degree to the academy. Or maybe it won’t be a synthetic or cross-over document but simply a text-of-some-kind (to be discovered as Dick Bauman was fond of saying) of reaching out to more than the current too small pool of potential purchasers.

World Oil Consumption

2009-05-25

work

For those of who haven’t seen it yet, or if you haven’t seen some of the things you can do with Google Earth, one terrific example of the applications capabilities and also a way of letting people “see” data in compelling illustrations is the one the shows world oil consumption by nation. Note bene: the link is to a Google Earth (KMZ) file which will either download to your computer or will download and open in Google Earth. You have to have the Google Earth app installed to see this. (The application is free.)

Open Access Bibliography

2009-05-13

work

Digital Scholarship maintains an open access bibliography which includes not only a list of journals but also guides to setting up open access materials:

The Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals (ISBN 1-59407-670-7) provides an overview of open access concepts, and it presents over 1,300 selected English-language books, conference papers (including some digital video presentations), debates, editorials, e-prints, journal and magazine articles, news articles, technical reports, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding the open access movement’s efforts to provide free access to and unfettered use of scholarly literature. Most sources have been published between 1999 and August 31, 2004; however, a limited number of key sources published prior to 1999 are also included. Where possible, links are provided to sources that are freely available on the Internet (approximately 78 percent of the bibliography’s references have such links).

Free Fonts

2009-03-01

work

Most people I know are content to use the fonts that came with their computer, and thus the ubiquity of Times and Verdana. Occasionally you come across a Mac user who cannot let go of Palatino. There are people, like me, who can’t quite seem to give up Helvetica, which I use on this blog if only because one can be fairly certain that almost every computer in the world has it or the Microsoft equivalent, Arial.

Most Macs also come with a few nice looking faces like Gil Sans, Hoefler, and Garamond. Over the years, I have also invested in a few faces that I regard as basic: Adobe’s Minion Pro, for a change of serif face, and Myriad Pro, because it is a nice sans serif alternative to Helvetica and is in widespread use on signs and diagrams: people respond to it well.

Too many people I know take type faces for granted or, perhaps worse, don’t realize that type faces are not necessarily to be shared liberally. There is a way around this: acquire and use quality free type faces. And since you asked, I do have some recommendations:

  • Gentium is an open source font — using something called the SIL license — that allows for a wide range of uses, including commercial applications, that comes in both a a face that contains a full range of glyphs as well as Gentium Basic which has the most commonly used glyphs found in Western European alphabets. There is also a slightly heavier version of the latter, Gentium Basic Book. Download it. Use it.

  • Another open source font collection is Bitstream’s Vera. It comes with a full range of faces, including a monospaced face that I use on my Macs while working in Textmate. Here’s the Bitstream sampler graphic:

vera

Bitstream’s Sampler of the Open Source Vera Type Face

In addition to these, what I could consider core, faces, I also recommend checking out the following sites or pages:

And, of course, you can always make your own free font.

UCLA’s Manifesto for the Digital Humanities

2009-01-29

work

Those folks at the Mellon Foundation are a busy lot. Apparently they have funded a seminar at UCLA on the digital humanities. The manifesto that the seminar has produced/is producing currently runs 20 paragraphs, with an additional 4 paragraphs that have “REMARKS ON THE FINITUDE OF DISCIPLINES.” They offer up a new departmental regime for the humanities:

  • Department of Print Media Studies: Replacing literature departments, the purpose of this department is to study the materiality of texts, constructions of authorship, linguistic forms, the history of the book and book publication, antecedents to and descendents of print, as well as the relationships and tensions between print culture and digital culture.
  • Department of Discourse Analyses: The purpose of this department is to study the history of the triangulation of knowledge/discourse/power, paying particular attention to discursive structures, knowledge making, and the specific media forms in which knowledge is produced, disseminated, encountered, and valued.
  • Department of Comparative Media Studies: The purpose of this department is to study sonic, visual, tactile, and immersive media through a comparative framework. This department replaces the division of humanities departments by media form (departments of art history, musicology, film, etc).
  • Department of Digital Cultural Mapping: The purpose of this department is to examine the junctions between space/time, information, and culture. It brings geographic analyses together with historical methods, visual analysis, and the presentation of knowledge. It also examines the cultural and social impact of digital mapping technologies and the significance of these mapping technologies for understanding cultural phenomena.
  • Department of Cultural Analytics: The purpose of this department is to bring quantitative analyses from the math and sciences together with large-scale, complex social and cultural datasets.

As is usual with many of these humanities manifestos — it’s certainly present in some of the Project Bamboo discussions — there is interlarded in these various assumptions that the humanities only study in detail the realms of arts and literature. Ordinary humans seem consigned, in this particular matrix, to only be worth examining as part of a large dataset. So much for my own interests in material folk culture and folklife. Cultural anthropology, too, would seem to be outta here.

The Future of Scholarly Publishing from an Individual Perspective

2009-01-29

work

I’ve been thinking about the future of scholarly publishing rather intensely for the past year or so. Before then, I was simply an individual scholar pursuing my own career, trying to make the best of not only a changing landscape (in terms of what remains print and what goes digital) but also a bewildering interdisciplinary landscape — a humanist who studies material culture that isn’t conventionally artwork has to search a lot of niches.

I got more involved in the future of scholarly publishing, which is a phrase I’m going to stick with for the time being, when I was asked to sit on the Publications Committee of the American Folklore Society. My participation in that group led to the development of a plan for a new website (set to “go live” on May 1) of which I now find myself editor. Since then I have become my university’s liaison to Project Bamboo, a Mellon Foundation initiative to develop a digital infrastructure for humanities research.

So I’ve spent a fair amount of thinking about scholarly publishing from an institutional perspective, but now I want to re-turn the tables and think again from an individual perspective. My thinking really began with a simple forecast — and one I should be sure to emphasize that is only my own and does not in any way reflect the American Folklore Society or my own position as editor of the new site: that the Journal of American Folklore will one day simply be absorbed into the larger communications platform that the Society maintains.

How did I arrive at that forecast? I imagined the publication/communication landscape of the future from the point of view of an individual scholar. From the point of the view of the individual practitioner — we’ll leave groups for another time — there are three obvious places where one’s work should be featured:

  • A personal site
  • An employer’s site
  • A professional organization’s site

Or, to concretize things a bit. There are three places an interested reader should be able to go to find my work:

Publishing, or cross-linking, to those three pages should be a central part of my work-flow as a scholar. Two of those three allow for green sources and the third for gold.

The Cultures of Intellectual Property

2009-01-28

work

TechDirt has an interesting write-up and commentary about a recent Brookings Institution conference on software patents. The writer suggests the real problem is that the members of the different fields present — lawyers on the one hand and economists and technologists on the other — simply have very different experiences, and thus understandings, of the nature of the work and of the problems associated with it. One commenter to the write-up pointed out that a fourth field, businesses that pay for software to be developed, is implied and that it probably falls in line with the lawyers.

I have yet to make my way through Zizek’s Parallax View, but I suspect that it’s describing a similar phenomenon.

“I Love Alaska”

2009-01-28

work

In 2006 AOL mistakenly released the searches of thousands of its subscribers. As I understand it, the information was anonymized, in that no names were used, but still identified: an individual subscriber had a number attributed to them. AOL quickly “retracted” its release, but by then the information had been copied all over. Two Dutch filmmakers pored over the information and discovered that the information we submit when we search for information reveals things about us that we perhaps would rather not be known in composite. The searches of one particular individual, user 711391, told a particularly interesting story all on their own.

They released their documentary as a series of short videos, each one nothing more than an image of an Alaskan landscape, shot in HD video, while a woman’s voice reads out, fairly flatly, the contents of each search. If you watch the videos in sequence, the searches unfold chronologically and reveal that the searcher is a woman with a snoring husband, who has conducted an affair over the internet, and is looking to escape her life in Houston by going to Alaska.

Her searches are interesting in that they are often phrased as rather personal questions or statements: “Has anyone ever praised you for being who you are?” The starkness of the represented Alaskan landscapes would seem to reflect the starkness of the searcher’s life, as she seeks to live life more fully.

This is the first episode:


I Love Alaska – Episode 1/13 from SubmarineChannel on Vimeo.

This kind of archeology of ordinary life as it is being lived reminds me of the garbology craze that hit a decade or more ago, where researchers would go through people’s trash, usually in the context of teaching a course on archeology or sociology, in order to show how much we can know about a person through the things they throw away. In both the cases of garbage and internet searches, what I think is really compelling is that we typically think of them as discrete bits of information, which they are, which reveal relatively little about us. Where they become compelling, even disquieting, is in their aggregate:

  • a single piece of garbage reveals relatively little
  • a kitchen trash can reveals a few days of living
  • a household can at the street can reveal an entire week’s worth of living

The same goes for internet searches. Just think how much information Google knows about you — perhaps not you as in named you but about the on-line you, your avatar if you will — from days, weeks, months, even years of searches. Chances are the longer period is possible if you have any Google accounts and tend to log on to check your GMail or for your personalized iGoogle page which gives you local weather and news.

I think I’m going to log out and clear out some of those cookies. Maybe give birth to a new user id. Break my on-line self up into smaller pieces. I might even like Alaska.

A Tale of Two Online Book Sites

2009-01-19

work

For both personal reasons and for professional reasons, I recently signed up for O’Reilly’s Safari Online Books service and I purchased an Amazon Upgrade1 of the Robert Coles’ book I am using in my seminar this spring, Doing Documentary Work.

Personal reasons aside for the moment, my professional reasons were twofold: I wanted both access to the content the two services provided and I wanted to try out the services themselves:

  1. I needed immediate access to the Coles’ book because my own copy went missing and I wanted to finish preparing for my seminar before our first meeting tomorrow. A subscription to O’Reilly’s service would give me access to a number of titles that might play a role in my teaching now or in the future, and the chance to access those books for a relatively small sum — O’Reilly graciously admitted me into their defunct $9.99/month subscription plan while their SafariU goes on holiday — was too nice to pass up. The two titles I am reading now are: slide:ology and The Lean Forward Moment.
  2. As the humanities in particular and all of us in general slowly rumble towards a digitized distribution scheme for practically everything — well, let’s hope nutrients stay off-line (though there’s enough effluvia already passing through the internet’s “pipes”) — I wanted to try out two of the possibilities currently being deployed in the mainstream.

O’Reilly is usually a bit ahead of the mainstream — and often fairly smart — but in this instance, their online reader looks, and acts, a lot like Amazon’s reader. Here are some screen shots:

<img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3104/3223617178_90b391f677.jpg” width=”500″ height=”347″ alt=”reader-amazon” title=”Amazon’s Reader: Cramped />
Amazon’s Reader

reader-safari-1
Safari’s Reader

reader-safari-2
Safari’s Reader scrolled to maximize the page.

As can be seen in all the screen shots, but perhaps best in the last (bottom-most) one above, there is no way to see a whole page on a MacBook screen. (And I had no better luck when I had a 15″ MBP.) There’s a zoom option, but there is no way to zoom out, only zoom in. Safari is a bit more advanced in offering an HTML option for reading, but it doesn’t work on any of the books I have checked out yet. So, it’s an offer, but one you can’t accept.

All of this might be mitigated by the option to go full-screen with these readers, and I hope to explore some way to do this in Firefox, but it’s not built into the readers themselves — if Youtube can do this for videos, why can’t we do this for books?

  1. I tried to link to a generic page about the upgrade program on the Amazon website, but all the URLs I could find were very long and very ugly. Bad, Amazon, bad. ↩

Tools and Content for the Digital Humanities

2008-12-21

work

The following was posted as a comment to the Project Bamboo Tools and Working Group’s main wiki page.

Let me begin by saying how sorry I was not to be able to make it to W2. Having participated in the conference call – thank you Tim for setting that up – I feel like there is some common knowledge within the group that I am missing to enable to glimpse the commonality in the potential demonstrators that have so far been discussed.

And so I am going to try to sketch out a framework here and, I hope, in the process back my way into understanding what it is we are up to.

I should begin by noting that I’m a humanities scholar, a folklorist to be exact. Those of you who saw my 4/6 presentation at the Chicago W1 know that my current research focuses on the rise and development of a boat peculiar to south Louisiana, the crawfish boat. But I’ve also done work on a variety of verbal traditions, literature, and done some work in history.

With that as preface, I offer up a sweeping generalization about humanities studies: it is the study of complex artifacts (understood broadly) in service of understanding human nature. (Historians will be somewhat disgruntled by such a definition, but if a census document isn’t a complex artifact, then I don’t know what one is.)

What humanists need, want access to are these artifacts as well as the variety of information clouds that surround them. Now, too often we assume that this stuff that humanists work with is limited to scribed texts of one form or another. What I like about all the proposed demonstrators is that they are clearly not bounded by such precepts: Tim wants to find a way to cite images and their derivatives – I’m assuming the digital form of both. Mark Williams is trying to find a way to make the steady stream of news reporting available for study. And both Ray Larson and Sorin Matei have as one of their proposed demonstrators some form of geographic-aware tool / methodology.

Ray and Sorin’s proposals are particularly appealing to me because as an ethnographic researcher, I have long been interested in some way of “tagging” objects I find in the field and beginning to build a data / metadata cloud around them in their original context – and both objects and contexts being available to other researchers (either in situ or virtually). Objects in this context are stretchy – or “fuzzy” if you prefer. An object could be a town, a building, a boat, a field, et cetera.

So all this is great news. It’s what we’ve long wanted as a complement, not a replacement, for our extant (call them traditional if you like) data structures which were built around centralizing information in places like libraries and museums. One of the promises of the digital revolution is that information focuses on the object itself, which need not be removed from the variety of contexts which give it its multiple meanings.

I stumble upon “promise” here, because I remember working for a short time with a team at Indiana University back in the early nineties which had been commissioned by AT&T to work on what it was calling a “WorldBoard.” (I think the term was supposed to stand in contrast with the electronic bulletin boards of the time, for those who are old enough to remember, in being “location-aware” information.)

Fifteen years later and it doesn’t really seem like we’ve made all that much progress. There is KML and there is the Dublin Core. But there is nothing like a Zotero that allows one either to write data to some sort of common database or to “browse” it.

I bring up Zotero here because I find myself using it and liking it. It’s not the world’s greatest UI, but it offers a fair amount of flexibility for me as a particular researcher and it seems on its way to offering a way to share information with me as part of a greater collective of individuals studying humans as they move through the world. I can even imagine Zotero becoming a kind of front-end for prior Mellon Foundation funded projects like JSTOR and Project Muse.

What I would like to see, and maybe it would be something like what Tim is proposing, is a parallel project to ARTstor which might be something like DATAstor. ARTstor is a great resource for getting access to quality images of physical artifacts that are either drawn from the fine arts or that have been of the kind of nature that they would be acquired by museums. The chief problem is, first, that museums have their own biases (and they tend towards the fine or visual arts) and, second, that the promise of the IT revolution is that we would not be so dependent upon museums for providing metadata about objects.

Interacting with such an infrastructure could mean either making 3D scans or building 3D models of objects and then locating them in time and space. Google has done a great deal towards this, but it does not seem to have caught on. The reasons are probably multiple: First, 3D work is hard. (I know. I have ten thousand images for my current project and only a few primitive models done in SketchUp.) Second, the Google landscape is a bit of a wild west: you’re just not really sure about the quality of the work done there. (Could one peer review within Google Earth?) Third, it is an impoverished infrastructure, at least in my experience, because it principally focuses on geographic concerns with little room, or at least structure, for other dimensions.

Okay, I’m approaching 1000 words, which is probably some sort of limit. I will think some more and write more when I get a chance. I hope this is useful to someone.

Page 3 of 4

Previous

Next

© John Laudun