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Creating the Room to Fail in Order to Succeed

– August 21, 2017

With every new project, one thing will continue to be true: It will always take longer than you think. With my podcast plan in hand and weeks of summer before me, I thought at this point I would have a dozen episodes recorded and edited, a website up and running, and a launch date in sight for my podcast, tongues of the ocean. HA! Not even close.

In fairness, I have come a long way, since I started with almost no experience in audio recording and editing. Most of my time during the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio Fellowship has been spent writing scripts, getting comfortable with recording, experimenting with different recording and editing methods, and building a brand for the podcast. Considering that at the beginning of June I had nothing but a name and idea and goal, these are still big achievements for a humble Luddite.

In between sorting out the main challenges of audio recording and editing—which we will get to in a minute—I held weekly meetings with Cydne Coleby, a graphic designer based back home in The Bahamas who helped me to form the branding of the podcast. I’ve learned that having a good product is only half of the project—branding and distribution is the other half. When I launch, I want to make sure the visual presence of the podcast is strong, and that means building an engaging logo, website, and social media presence. Cydne helped me to re-brand my press, Poinciana Paper Press, a few years ago, and I was thrilled to work with her again.

I firmly believe that when one builds a brand in the Caribbean space, one must avoid the trap of nostalgia. There isn’t enough room in this blog post to provide an entire history of the problematic representation of Caribbean spaces. I’ll just say that when Cydne and I sat down to brainstorm, we stayed far away from steel pan drums. The Caribbean space is as brutal as it is beautiful—far more so for those who live there—and this duality is what drove our direction: bold colors, strong graphics that speak to Caribbean nationals rather than visitors, and a fragmented aesthetic that pays tribute to our myriad identities. I feel the final result matches the kind of podcast I saw myself creating: literary offerings from a region rich with vibrant stories about Caribbean realities.

Branding aside, the main problem I faced with this project is the same problem we have always faced as a region of creative individuals scattered across a series of isolated islands—how can we come together in the best way possible without actually physically relocating ourselves? In my case: how can I record my guests in clear, rich, and engaging sound, as if they were right there in the studio with me, instead of thousands of miles away, hunched over a computer microphone in a room with all the windows shut tight, praying the potcakes or parrots hold their tongues for a brief twenty minutes?

It took me the entire summer to face this answer: I can’t. Sure, I entertained several ideas—have them record on their mobile devices! Form partnerships with willing radio stations on each island! Mail a Zoom recorder island-to-island with instructions! Mail everyone a headset with a mic!—but they were all prohibitive due to the necessary investments of time, money, and energy. At the end of the day, I needed to design a project that I could sustain while earning my MFA and teaching, and this requires strict boundaries and clever time management. Additionally, I do not want to ask much of my guests, either—having them record themselves independently or take on the time and cost of receiving and mailing special recording equipment around the islands (notwithstanding the very real possibility of such equipment “getting lost” through customs) is asking too much. The show is not meant to be a burden, it is meant to be inspiring.

So once I faced that I couldn’t get it perfect (oh, the horror!), how could I make it work? I took some kind advice and instruction from Deborah Anzinger, who through her space, NLS Kingson, records the podcast “IN”, featuring conversations with visual art practitioners across the Caribbean. They use Google Hangouts to record interviews with artists who are not present in Jamaica to record with them, and it seems to work very well for them. So every week, I explored recording on Google Hangouts via a “go live” option on YouTube, making many errors and discovering many drawbacks, but ultimately finding it the best option for my podcast, too.

The second challenge came with editing. I figured that this was where the magic, if any, could happen. Perhaps through some clever tricks, I could lesson the disparity between my voice—recorded through the sweet mic set up that the University of Iowa provides in their podcast recording studio—and the voices of my guests, which came through over computer or phone mics. I hoped that I could edit on YouTube, but it turns out that YouTube, while providing what seems to be great video editing options, does not have much to offer by way of audio editing. You probably knew this was coming. But guys, I was really, really hoping YouTube would come through for me on this. I was dreading the daunting task of learning an entirely new audio editing program. But this is where the project took me, and if I am being honest, I think I knew deep down that I was going to have to get over this fear eventually to make a worthy podcast.

So I turned to the one person who had been giving me advice the whole summer as I explored this new territory: my brother, Liam, who is an audio engineer and music producer. Once the Fellowship was over and I went home to The Bahamas for a quick visit before the fall semester began, he sat down with me and gave me a crash course in the audio editing program, Studio One. Sure, that feels like I didn’t get to know the program as well as I could if I had, for example, earned an entire degree in audio engineering—but hey, considering my long journey with InDesign began ten years ago when a graphic designer gave me a five minute crash course and this semester finds me teaching a class on InDesign, there is potential to learn and get comfortable enough with the program over time that I make it work for my needs. Plus, Liam kindly offered to fine-tune each episode for me after I did what I could on my end, which is a major relief.

Then, as we worked on a particularly problematic file together, smoothing out its rough edges, I began to feel—could it be?—that the light at the end of a dark tunnel had arrived. I heard my voice come through—“Hello, and welcome to tongues of the ocean, a podcast for Caribbean Literary voices”— and heard my guest’s poems reverberate through the room, and felt like this project could finally be possible.

And the reason this is possible is because this summer fellowship with the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio gave me the motivation and means to finally roll my sleeves up and make this project a reality. It helped me to get real about my time, face my anxieties, and gave me the room to fail enough that I could eventually succeed. I am so grateful for how this fellowship has helped me to grow this summer—not only my skill set, but also my platforms for sharing Caribbean literature. I now see how pushing into the audio realm can support my physical and digital book publishing realms. I can’t wait to launch this podcast before the year is over!

Small Summer Successes in the Land of Motion Capture

aruss

– August 18, 2017

This summer was filled with plenty of (dare I say it) failures, but enough successes to illustrate the evolution of my work in the studio. And while I had hoped to have a kind of concrete something to evidence the labors of my summer here, much of what I am leaving this fellowship with seems to be base skills that I would have otherwise never had the time to learn.

In my first blog post I wrote about the frustrations of figuring out how to make systems talk to each other. A lot of my early work in the studio included troubleshooting different programs and figuring out ways around various road blocks—programs that were outdated, for example, and no longer interacted with other systems needed for motion capture; and how to explore motion capture without purchasing thousands of dollars-worth of motion capture accessories.

After several weeks of exploring many different systems and programs, I finally found the right combination that allowed me to begin my work. By using a program called Delicode NI mate, I was finally able to capture skeletal data and send the information to my node-programming software, Isadora:

NI mate captures skeletal data from Kinect and sends to Isadora.

NI mate allowed the Xbox Kinect to capture data from skeletal data points, sending the information to Isadora where the data could be manipulated to trigger or inform given events within the program. Now, as the screenshot illustrates, you can see that there are some inaccuracies in the way the Kinect picks up skeletal positioning in space. It tends to get confused when body parts move too quickly, and when body parts not well-defined. This way of picking up movement created problems when I started to explore movement as it pertained to the manipulation of digital particles on a screen; sometimes the Kinect would start to glitch similar to the picture above, which would cause the digital imagery on the screen to start to act up as well. Below you can see an example of this in the particle generator I created in Isadora. I chose blooming flowers (made in AfterEffects) to be the “particles” that responded to data that influenced their x,y, and z coordinates as well as the particles’ velocity, transparency, etc. The first example shows the particles responding to movement data in an uninterrupted pattern:

Once the skeletal tracking program gets a bit confused, the manipulated data within Isadora can look something like this:

Figuring out the solution to this problem was challenging, and truth be told I haven’t quite discovered how to eliminate the error in skeletal data tracking with the Kinect-yet. I am continuing to fine-tune the way this particle generator interacts with skeletal data sent from the Kinect. My main goal is for the particles to react smoothly to the skeletal data, moving realistically according to the assigned body parts. Perhaps this goal isn’t totally attainable with my current set up-maybe I need an upgrade in the sophistication of my systems. That’s okay. Thanks to the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio, I now know how to troubleshoot and problem solve within these programs, and can work on bringing what I learned this summer to life.

Periodizing Big Data: Reintroducing Punctuation Back Into Corpus Analysis

ajashland

– August 8, 2017

Here is a snapshot of Whitman’s correspondence as it is represented by punctuation only. To achieve this effect, I ran a python script which moved all of these elements into a separate .txt file. This was an important step when considering the character count of these documents. Word counts alone could exceed upwards of 300,000, and Microsoft Word was simply not equipped to handle calculations on such a large scale. Removing just the commas (18,000 in the correspondence alone) it would take nearly 30 minutes, sometimes longer.

When it comes to corpus analysis, scholars have tended to focus on stylistic or linguistic patterns in an author’s work. Punctuation is often excluded from these conversations, yet it is not entirely clear as to why this is the case. Periods, commas, hyphens, etc., are meaningful units of expression, and they can typically serve as a kind of signature by which to identify an author’s more nuanced expression. Not only that, but they can tell us important things about the social, cultural, and historical conditions under and through which a text was produced.

All too often, though, these elements of language are the first things to go when using digital software to analyze big data. The tutorials that I have found often view punctuation as entirely expendable units of expression. The same is true of stopwords, or those elements of language which most programs seem to categorize as “nonessential.” Here, I am thinking of the ways in which word clouds are generated according to a “weighted” vocabulary the program deems more important than others. Moreover, the same appears true in most sentiment analyses which pull data from a lexicon containing “significant” words with clear positive and negative connotations.

For these last few weeks of the summer fellowship, I have been exploring those marginal aspects of language which are often either forgotten or intentionally excluded from most datasets. It was my feeling that a computational analysis of Whitman’s punctuation offers important insights into the ways in which different media formats influenced his work. The comma, for example, serves many functions: it organizes parts of a list, joins together different ideas, and it can even act as a surrogate for other words.

As revealed in the graph, the comma is among Whitman’s most-used punctuation. By itself this is perhaps not a revelatory statement. I’d bet that the comma is probably the most-used punctuation mark in the entire English language. How exactly Whitman employs it in his poetry, prose, and correspondence is worth investigating further. The same goes for other punctuation marks. In Whitman’s correspondence, an increase in em dash usage is particularly noteworthy. Working as a research assistant for the Walt Whitman Archive, much of what I do consists of transcribing and encoding these messages. What I have found is that postal cards in the nineteenth century, even more so than traditional “letters,” contain a tremendous amount of em dashes. A number of reasons can explain this, but the most compelling to me is the smaller physical size of these messages. The materiality of the message itself is just as important as the content these writers are attempting to communicate. In Whitman’s prose, too, we begin to see an increase in em dash usage. It would be interesting to see whether or not the emergence of the postal card in the mid to late nineteenth century had any significant impact on Whitman’s postbellum writing. Continuing this project, I will try to incorporate some temporal dimension that could help track such developments.

The Evolution of Media-cation

Ben

– August 7, 2017

In my last post I described the process I undertook in determining my project’s path and the design steps I had completed up to that point. I am thrilled to say that my work has followed an iterative design process that was continually evolving. This is in large part due to Heidi Wiren Bartlett, Creative Coordinator/Designer at the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio, who was generous in sharing her perspectives on my project and logo design. It turns out I was right to be nervous about sharing my previous logo as it had many flaws that only now in retrospect, I am able to see. Below is the original logo design (top), a draft in transition (middle) as well as the revamped logo (bottom).

Heidi was the catalyst that spurred this transformation, not only of the graphic design, but also in how I conceptualized my scholarship. Not only was she able to show me how to do numerous things in Illustrator like duplicate artboards and add/remove anchor points during our conversations she was able to bring out insights on my research that I had not thought of before. When I began analyzing the research data and this concept of digital media-cation – a cooperative engagement in digital media used to enhance distraction during medical procedures – emerged from the findings I thought that the concept required the term “digital” in order to be understood. Rather, it seems that this term is implied, especially when the findings are translated into an infographic that focuses solely on that type of media. This was a pleasant little epiphany for me when I realized I didn’t need to constantly reinforce that to the reader and allowed the design process to move forward.

Creating this logo helped me to feel confident in the theme that I was fostering for my infographic and spurred a new burst of reformatting and design activity. These activities included creating a style guide that provided consistency throughout while also leaving some flexibility, when needed. I continually tweaked and revised the infographic and finally feel that it is suitable for viewing on a monitor, laptop or even printed as a poster. In line with my original ambition to design something for use on mobile devices I than began the process of translating the full-size infographic to one that could be viewed on a smartphone. This required splitting it up into sections that could be viewed as individual “screens” as well as using design elements and integrating a menu bar for helping the viewer navigate those screens.

However, even as this fellowship comes to an end I know that this project will continue to evolve. I am currently in discussions with the local children’s hospital to possibly integrate these mobile slides into their patient entertainment system whereby parents and their kids could actually access and learn about media-cation in the patients’ rooms. I’m hopeful that I’ll continue to learn new skills in the Adobe suite and sneaking back into the studio whenever there’s a workstation available!

“Scholarship is Scholarship”: Identity Crisis in the Digital Humanities

kewetzel

– August 7, 2017

When I meet someone, our introduction typically goes something like this:

What do you do?
I teach college literature and I’m a graduate student.
Oh, what do you study?
Victorian Literature
Oh, like Jane Austen, and stuff?
…sure.

There is always more we can say about ourselves, our interests, and our work. If I decide that I want to go into greater depth, I might specify to this person that—while I love Austen’s novels—the literature I study typically comes later in the century than Austen’s. In fact, I am currently writing a dissertation that examines late-nineteenth century British literature that deal with issues of social reform and resistance. And if I’m feeling really chatty, I might add that my dissertation uses literary cartography and geocriticism to look at places where particular communities lived, where they were forced to move, and how literary accounts correspond with these maps.
… but I digress.

The point is, in many circles of academia, we’re asked to clearly define our disciplines or areas of expertise: late-nineteenth-century British literature, twentieth-century American history of baseball, biochemical engineering, etc. We often have titles, categories, or topics that delineate our “areas” into nice and neat sound bites. I’ve quickly found that is less true of our work in the digital humanities (DH). What are the digital humanities? Or, better yet, how am I defining DH? When Clifford A. Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), was asked how he would define “digital scholarship?” his response was seemingly evasive, but honest:

“Digital scholarship is an incredibly awkward term that people have come up with to describe a complex group of developments. The phrase is really, at some basic level, nonsensical. After all, scholarship is scholarship” (10).

Even though I know this—that scholarship is scholarship—I’ve still struggled with my relationship with the digital humanities as I work within “the field,” but still feel outside of it. I turn back to the continuous question that many before me have posed: What does it mean to work in the digital humanities?¹

As I look around this morning, sitting at one computer of many in the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio (DSPS), I assume that behind many of the screens my summer fellowship colleagues are busy coding or revising code that they’ve been working on this summer. This seems like the obvious addition to make something digital… get to coding. (Keep in mind I say this with about the same amount of “coding knowledge” as my pet terrier.) I’ve sat in on conversations about “coding concerns,” like: when to write new code, and when to use what’s available; when to take a coding break and focus on thematic and theoretical concerns; and which types of coding are sustainable and transferable across platforms. And yet, the truth is, I don’t code! Sure, I was exhilarated when I figured out how to create a hanging indent in html (as demonstrated in my earlier post); I wanted my bibliographic entries appear in correct MLA format in Omeka.² However, I don’t code and I don’t program; I read, I research, and I analyze.

Fig. 1, Screen shot of record entry in Omeka

My work became “digital” when I applied for assistance to create a map of where characters lived and traveled in William Morris’s utopian romance, News from Nowhere. Then when several of my colleagues assisted with this endeavor,³ my project expanded to analyze the literary cartography and geography of several authors and their work in my dissertation. Most of my time on the “digital” side of things has been simple data entry. I’m working with Neatline (as a plug-in for Omeka), and after I finished importing my first batch of records from an excel spreadsheet (in csv format), I’ve simply been revising records in Omeka and adding new ones (fig. 1).

For a while, I felt self-conscious about this perceived gap between my assumptions about DH and my own skills and my project. I wondered if my records and maps would reveal anything useful and hoped that this wasn’t all a waste of time. I shared my concerns with White, my point person in DSPS, embarrassed to admit my uncertainty and expose my potential for failure. However, she reassured me that almost everyone feels this way at some point, regardless of their expertise: “Working in the digital humanities is about figuring out how to ask the right questions and who to ask.” Basically, it means asking questions all the time to everyone who will listen and being ready to learn.

How is this different from “non-digital” scholarship? It isn’t, really. As a DH project, my work this summer has demanded my attention to process (how and why I enter certain records) and my desperate reliance on others.⁴ Now these demands have been digital-specific—in that I am working with online platforms and plug-ins, and working with a digital librarian (shout out, Nikki!)—but they are not specific to digital work generally. All scholarship requires diligent consideration of process and—although many of us in the humanities try to deny it—scholarship is a collaborative endeavor. As Lynch says, “scholarship is scholarship,” and the tools we use don’t change that. To say that I work in the digital humanities, doesn’t mean that I am a computer guru or can code with the best of ‘em. All it means (for me), is that I have found useful digital tools (created by someone else and used by many others) to address a research question.

Fig. 2, Neatline exhibit for Mathilde Blind

Fig. 3, Neatline exhibit for Mary Macpherson

As I study the work of Mathilde Blind and Mary Macpherson, I am thrilled to see that my data reveals a distinction in the Neatline map between the places these authors lived (London and Glasgow) and the northern Highlands they portrayed in their poetry and political discourse (see figures 2 & 3). I am continuing my research in additional Neatline exhibits to address similar discrepancies between how a place is portrayed and how it is experienced. Neatline allows me to demonstrate these points of interest, but it is only one part of my scholarship puzzle. Similarly, the digital humanities can be useful and impactful, but—as I have found—DH is not a helpful or neat category to describe scholarship; it’s messy and ambiguous. Instead, I adopt Lynch’s statement as an adage for our generation of scholars, remembering that while digital tools and techniques can help us answer our questions: “scholarship is scholarship.”

Notes

¹ For additional discourse on what it means to work in the digital humanities see: Edward Ayers, “Does Digital Scholarship Have a Future?” Educause Review, July/August 2013, pp. 24-34.

² K.E. Wetzel, “When to Work Alone, and When to Ask for Help.” University of Iowa Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio Blog, 13 July 2017.

³ Laura Hayes and Caitlin Simmons are currently working on a larger and more in-depth mapping project on William Morris’s News from Nowhere, for the William Morris Archive (WMA). They are working with Professor Florence Boos, the general editor for WMA; Robert Shepard, GIS specialist with the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio; and additional graduate students at the University of Iowa, including Kyle Barton.

⁴I am gratefully reliant on my project “point-person,” Nikki White, Digital Humanities Research & Instruction Librarian at the University of Iowa DSPS. She assists with the coding and programing side of things, but more importantly she has been a mentor through the “how and why?” issues of my project (e.g. which platform to use, how to structure my archive, the limitations of any given visualization, etc.), so that I can be intentional with how I enter and store my data—and how I use it in my writing and teaching.

Works Cited

Lynch, Clifford A. “The ‘Digital’ Scholarship Disconnect.” Educause Review, May/June 2014, pp. 10-15.

Boos, Florence, editor. The William Morris Archive, url: morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/.

Mediocritas in the Digital Humanities (and in My Life)

marley

– August 1, 2017

…evelli penitus dicant nec posse nec opus esse et in omnibus fere rebus mediocritatem esse optimam existiment.

“They say that complete eradication is neither possible nor necessary, and they consider that in nearly all situations that the ‘moderation’ is best” (Cicero, Tusc. 4.46).

In my last few weeks here at the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio, this thought kept racing back into my mind: mediocritas. My translation for it, “moderation,” is quite poor. In this context, it refers back to the Peripatetic (and generally Greek) concept of the middle state, the mean between two extremes, or the right amount or degree of anything. Today, we know this concept as the “The Golden Mean,” the balance between an extreme of excess and another of deficiency, especially when it comes to virtues and emotions. A soldier must be moderately angry when he runs towards the battlefield. An orator can only effectively argue for his client in court if he’s impassioned by genuine (and moderate) anger and not feigning it.

At this point, I feel obligated to point out that the speaker in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations was a Stoic and therefore believed that the complete eradication of emotions was possible. He was arguing against The Golden Mean. Unlike the Peripatetic soldier and orator, the Stoic sage chooses not to feel anger at all. He chooses to feel very little.

I am not a Stoic sage. I am far from it. Within these past few weeks, I’ve felt (probably too much) anger and frustration as well as elation and tranquility. Even though I have been rather emotionally immoderate this past summer, I keep thinking over and over again about The Golden Mean, not in the context of my feelings but of my errors.

“They say that complete eradication is neither possible nor necessary.” Whether it is truly possible to eradicate all emotions, it is truly impossible to get rid of error entirely in my project. But is it necessary to do so? As Humanists, we are already comfortable with disagreement, with having multiple competing theories at once that are all possible. We may side with one theory over another, mix a few together, or not care for them at all. All of this makes finding the “truth” and validating results impossible.

I wasn’t the only one to ask this question. Andrew Piper, in his blog post commenting on the Syuzhet R package debate between Matthew Jockers and Annie Swafford, wrote: “What I’m suggesting is that while validation has a role to play, we need a particularly humanistic form of it… We can’t import the standard model of validation from computer science because we start from the fundamental premise that our objects of study are inherently unstable and dissensual. But we also need some sort of process to arrive at interpretive consensus about the validity of our analysis. We can’t not validate either” (4–5).

There’s still a need for lessening the margin for error as much as possible. There’s still a need to approach the “truth” as closely as we can and to validate results. We need a Golden Mean.

For me, finding this balance was (and currently is) a struggle. I had to especially keep in mind the idea of “finding the right proportion for everything.”

Earlier this year, I encountered this problem for the first time. I was trying to record the lexical richness of Cicero’s speeches over his career. I tried doing this by finding the Mean Word Use and Type-Token Ratio for all of the speeches. However, these methods did not suit my corpus. Cicero’s orations ranges from less than 1,000 words to over 20,000. It’s a very imbalanced corpus, and the results reflected that. The speeches with the most words had a low lexical richness because the longer the speech is, the more Cicero repeats words. That was essentially what the results showed.

In this case, my “Golden Mean” was the Yule’s K function available through the langaugeR package in R. This function tries to account for length when calculating the lexical richness of a work. And in this way, I was able to get more accurate results.

More recently, my struggle had been trying to find the “Golden Mean” for the span of the Loess filter. The same problem came up again: my corpus was imbalanced. This time, it wasn’t only imbalanced in regards to length but in sentiment as well. I’m conducting a sentiment analysis of Cicero’s orations and am trying to find regular patterns in his use of sentiment. So finding the right setting for the filter is crucial. And as you can see from the graph below, changing the span for the filter makes a huge difference:

Red = 0.10, Green = 0.25, Blue = 0.50

Since all of the speeches vary in length and emotional valence, I was very uncomfortable with the idea of having only one setting for all of them. Luckily, I was able to find a Golden Mean for this too. This time it came in the form of the fanCOVA package for R, which can calculate the optimal span of a vector.

And the following graph is the result of that test:

Hopefully now all of my graphs have the “right proportion.” They might not be wholly accurate, but accurate just enough to stimulate good and productive scholarly work and discussion.

But looking down the line, at the future of my project, I am realizing all of the forms that my Golden Mean can take. I need to find a balance between text mining and traditional scholarship, time spent writing scripts and fiddling with my data sets versus time spent writing my dissertation. I will also need to find a better balance between negotium and otium, work and leisure. And I need to learn to tear myself away from the computer to save my eyes from constantly twitching, which they are doing right now as I’m writing this final blog post.

So while the Stoics may not believe in the Golden Mean, I believe that finding the Golden Mean is critical in my work in the Digital Humanities and life in general. Like Plato once wrote:

…μετριότης γὰρ καὶ συμμετρία κάλλος δήπου καὶ ἀρετὴ πανταχοῦ συμβαίνει γίγνεσθαι.

“For moderation and due proportion are everywhere defined with beauty and virtue” (Plato, Phileb. 64e).

***Finally I would like to extend my gratitude towards everyone at the UIowa Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio for their great help and for being so welcoming. Thank you, Nikki White, for helping me with Gephi and for teaching me about servers. Thank you, Matthew Butler, for aiding me with my R struggles and for introducing me to Python. Thank you, Stephanie Blalock, for being my “point person” and for helping me to stay on task. Thank you, Leah Gehlsen Morlan, for organizing more things for us fellows than I am even aware of. And finally, thank you, Thomas Keegan, for giving all of us this opportunity. I appreciate all of this immensely.

If you are interested in learning more about the debate over the Syuzhet R package, Eileen Clancey has a storified version of it which is available here.

Piper, Andrew (2015, March 25). Validation and Subjective Computing (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.[Blog Post]. Retrieved from https://txtlab.org/2015/03/validation-and-subjective-computing/ (Links to an external site.)

My Summer Journey in Digital Studio Dept.

halalwan

– July 31, 2017

Hello World! Today, I would like to talk to you about my experience with the Digital Studio summer fellowship. One of my PhD project goals is to educate the public about a promising new process to combust hydrocarbon fuels, specifically natural gas, with little to no side effects on the environment. This project is funded by the NSF and aims to find a solution to global warming. To achieve this goal, I have found a lot of support from the Digital Studio staff. The main goal of our collaborative work is to create a web site that can provide essential general information about pollution and the new process, namely Chemical Looping Combustion (CLC), which I have worked to contribute towards.

Nikki White, a Digital Humanities Librarian in the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio, provided me with basic information about creating websites and showed me some of their work. She suggested WordPress as a platform for my work, which the Studio uses for the majority of their websites. There are two versions: WordPress.com, which is hosted online by WordPress, and WordPress.org which can be downloaded and run on a local or self-hosted server. Thus, we had to ask to set up on a library server for me to get access to. The basic functionality of the two versions is the same though the back end does look quite a bit different.

After that Ethan DeGross, a Researcher/Developer at the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio, walked me through the process and taught me how to create pages on my website and other details. The big challenge for me was how to create animated figures that describe the reaction kinetic occurring during CLC process. This is one of the most important things that I wanted to include in the website because it can provide a good visual description for non-specialist. As my adviser always said “one figure is better than a thousand words”.

Therefore, after explaining my aim to Ethan, he gave me training on how to use Adobe Illustrator (AI) to create my images and then referred me to Heidi Bartlett, DESIGNER & CREATIVE COORDINATOR in the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio, who showed me how to create layers in Adobe Illustrator and then save them for the web (as jpg) and insert them into Photoshop software to create an animated figure. I included here, one of the animated figures, which shows how the cobalt oxide (CO₃O₄) particle reduced to CoO and then to Co metal by methane. This mechanism of the reaction is called the nucleation growth model. The basic concept of this model assumes that the reduction initiated by forming a nucleus of the reduced phase and those nucleus grow up in the center of the particle keeping the original phase on the particle surface.

Collectively, I had a wonderful experience this summer and I got good training on different software that will help me in my career!

Final Reflection from this Mad Translator

lakiotis

– July 27, 2017

For my first blog post, I did some reflection on Machine Translation instead of talking about my project, so here is a brief description of what I worked on this summer.

One of my Machine Translation Experiments comparing 3 different online translators; the user can either highlight each set of words at a time and compare it across poems , or highlight all at once (as seen above). The pink color indicates a translation that I believe a human could easily recognize as an incorrect translation, even if they don’t know the original language.

I created my own website, from scratch but using skills I learned from Codecademy and their helpful tutorials, to act as a platform for “digital” translation. I’m not really sure what to call this type of interactive, dynamic text, but because I’ve felt pretty crazy working on my “experiments,” I’ve named the site The Mad Translator.

This is what the open tab looks like with my magician logo.

Unlike many of the other fellows here this summer, this project is not in any way related to my thesis/dissertation/assistantship. I had some goals of what I wanted to accomplish in 8 weeks, and with a few adjustments, I would say I met those goals. There’s still a lot more I can do, one thing I hope to continue to work on in the next semester is better integrating relevant translation theory into each page.

This is essentially my “table of contents” which currently has 8 functional pages.

I gained a ton of skills, including learning about javascript, bootstrap, css, html, jquery, website design, and github. I honed some Photoshop skills and learned how to use the program to create animated gifs.

The gif I made with Photoshop for the home page. What if we take translation, which is imagined as “fixed” due to the long tradition of print publishing, and imagine new ways to engage with it?

After the first two weeks, I took a break from learning to code and instead turned back to theory. I read a number of articles on digital literature and translation, and I scoured through countless online journals to observe how they integrate digital features (or not) into their publications. There’s a lot to say about translation in the digital age; on one hand we have machine translation which feels threatening to translators, on the other hand we have an increased capability to interact with text, given that someone is willing to put the time and effort into coding such interactive capabilities.

The html code for “Erinna and Nossis Epigram Scramble” (screenshot below) which needed a set shape no matter the zoom/platform and I wanted entire sections to change color when any word within the section is clicked.

In addition to trying to break down the mindset of “equivalency” between an original text and its translation, I included some translations that are innovative in their presentation. I owe infinite thanks to Laura Moser and her wonderfully creative translations from Ancient Greek fragments. I first encountered them on paper and imagined that they could have a strong digital presence.

The above code produces this: all the fragments together load with a blue color, giving the illusion that this one large poem; clicking on any word turns the font color of its entire fragment to black, allowing the user to “decipher” the fragments as scholars of Ancient Greek do. The wide range of fragments collected in this way encourage us to consider what happens when words are taken out of context and mixed with others, which again is often the case with ancient text.

While there may be some shortcuts and more efficient methods to coding each unique page on the website, I did my best working with my level of coding. I coded every single word that is clickable, draggable, highlight-able, changeable, etc. Although I prefer working with prose text in my own translation practice, poetry felt a lot more manageable because I was able to select poems with set lengths.

All the screenshots above are from the current state of the website, which is hosted locally on my hard drive. In the final weeks of the summer, I’m excited to work with Studio Staff to make it go live and accessible to anyone online, at which point the formatting may change from what you see here. The website is pretty basic, but given that I created every page from scratch, I’m very happy with this product as the fellowship draws to a close. I started with very little coding experience and now I feel confident that I can keep adding pages in the future and building up this site. Although I won’t be able to work on this as diligently once the semester starts, I hope to continue adding more pages. Who knows, maybe one day there will be more translation sites like this, or more translators will be interested in encoding their work with digital features, or maybe this website will take off!

Big thanks to the Studio and its staff for making this project possible!

When to Work Alone, and When to Ask for Help

kewetzel

– July 13, 2017

I’m not a “tech” person. Naturally, computers (amongst other software and gadgets) make up a normal part of my day-to-day routines, and while I feel perfectly comfortable “tinkering” around with new gadgets and programs, the language of code and other seemingly mysterious components of the “digital” in academia elude me. No, I study stories; I study fiction, culture, and history.

Currently, I’m working and teaching my way through the PhD program in English literature. My dissertation focuses on fictional characters that don’t seem “fit in” in Victorian society in the last few decades of the 19^th century.

So, why am I here? Why am I spending my summer in the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio? For help, of course! I’m working with Digital Humanities and Instruction Librarian, Nikki White, to map geographical references and events from the literature I examine in my dissertation. White more than supplements my digital-inadequacies; however, when it comes to structuring and organizing my data for Memory and Metropole (my mapping project), I’m still “tinkering” my way through Omeka and Neatline, trying to figure out what will work best for me. It’s so easy to feel lost in a massive project like this one. Playing with and learning new methods can be time consuming and feel a little counter productive. There are people here to help, but I need to work through some issues on my own. I’m still figuring out when to work through a problem alone and when to ask for help.

So far, I’ve found it helpful to write down goal, questions, and skills that I’m struggling with and share them at my weekly meetings with White. At our first meeting, we figured out what she could do (short term), what we would work on together over the following week or two, what need additional development before being addressed (long term: e.g. navigation, layout), and what I could learn or investigate on my own (e.g. html coding, appearance preferences, short-code, plugins, etc.). This was helpful, but not necessarily in the way I assumed it would be. I think that I am most motivated by the last: what I could–and should–do on my own.

Since then, I’ve been trying to familiarize myself with the shortcodes for Omeka. My current conundrum: I cannot figure out how to link a specific collection in Omeka to a specific description on one of my simple pages titled, “Collection Description.” Nikki suggested that try to find ways (outside the provided codex) to display more information about each collection through the shortcode. Then, rather than trying to link a typed paragraph description to the shortcode for a specific collection, the description world be contained within the collection image and link. With this alteration, I could simply use the general shortcode for all collections, [collection] and the paragraph description would be included on the page. This seemed like the easiest and simplest method. I haven’t sorted this issue out, but at least I have a direction for my tinkering!

I also figured out how to do hanging indents in my Omeka records. This sounds mundane, but I’m a stickler for details and the left indent for all of my citations was driving me a little insane. All I had to do was google html code for hanging indents and look for the one that looked the easiest to imitate. Seems simple and obvious, but it was really helpful to know I could figure out simple tasks like this for myself. Here is an example of the code I used in the “Source” box of my item:

You can adjust the margins to suit your preference. The example I adapted set the margins at 4, but I preferred 1.5 for the smaller displays I use on Omeka and Neatline. Check out the results:

Mathilde, Blind. Mathilde Blind: Late-Victorian Culture and Woman of Letters. University of Virginia, 2016.

The learning curve for this summer fellowship hasn’t been steep in terms of skills (for my project), but it has challenged my methods and learning style. I like investigating new techniques and new skills, but I can’t work on this project alone. I have to ask for advice and help. Touching base regularly with White, my “point-person,” has been a crucial component of my summer work. I try to have clear notes and an agenda for our meetings in the hope that updating my goals and queries will help me stay on track through new aspects of the project–and “tinker” in the most effective direction.

All Things Digital: Studio, Publishing & Media-cation

Ben

– July 11, 2017

Hello World! I was intrigued when I first heard about the UI’s Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio fellowship as much of my graduate work has focused on how adults and children use digital media in collaboration. Then, shortly after I received notification that I would be one of the fellows in its inaugural cohort, I heard phrases like “digital humanities” were used more frequently without fully understanding what they encompassed. My academic background is in Educational Psychology and aside from taking the required humanities courses as an undergrad, my understanding of the domain was nebulous, to say the least.

Despite this ignorance, I still managed to successfully pitch a project wherein I would be creating an app that could be used by pediatric patients and their families that would enhance their ability to cope with pain and discomfort during medical procedures. My prior experience as a child life specialist and my current research work helped me to better understand the pathways to effectively manage pain and anxiety using digital media. Because of this, I saw an opportunity to empower parents with education about efficient and effective techniques using a tool they carried with them daily – a smartphone or tablet.

Once I began the fellowship and learned more about the ways that digital scholarship benefited its wide and varied audience, I reconsidered my initial pitch. In the past I’ve coded in Processing, LiveCode, and DreamWeaver and quickly gained an understanding that the process of coding elaborate conceptual projects into functional prototypes is often constrained by two main resources: 1) time; and 2) the coder’s knowledge of a given programming language. In my case, I neither of these resources were abundant as I wanted to produce something in the 8 weeks of this fellowship and my coding knowledge was limited. Thus, I decided I needed to pivot.

Gryffin Media

Virgin Pulse

I began concentrating on how I could make the findings from my research work and others more digestible for the general public. I knew that this was an affordance of digital scholarship that I could tap into. To do this, I thought that an infographic might be the best medium for reaching a wide audience. Personally, I enjoy stumbling across an infographic that is both aesthetically pleasing and intellectually stimulating. I began looking for examples that I could compile into an inspirational mood board (see Virgin Pulse and Gryffin Media examples to the right).

After finding these and many more like them, I gained some momentum in the desired direction! Throughout this process I had discussions and brainstorming sessions with my mentor, Ethan Degross, a Researcher/Developer at the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio. Ethan was always enthusiastic about my project and encouraged me to take it in whatever direction I felt would be most beneficial. As I refined my focus he helped me get reacquainted with using the Adobe Suite of tools available. I began using Adobe Illustrator to design the infographic and Ethan suggested using public domain images from Pixabay, a great resource for those on a budget needing scalable graphics. Then, when I struggled with recoloring white and black objects he directed me to Photoshop. It was with his help (and a few online tutorials) that I quickly began layering and compiling the infographic.

I am pleased, albeit a bit nervous, to share with you the latest draft of my title logo (above) for the Digital Media-cation infographic. Digital Media-cation is a term I coined as part of my past research findings and is defined as follows:

a non-pharmacological approach for reducing pain, anxiety, and distress during medical procedures by promoting cooperative engagement in distraction using digital devices.

Currently, I am in looking forward to collaborating with the studio’s Creative Coordinator/Designer, Heidi Wiren Bartlett, to gain her insights on the infographic so that it is both functional and efficient. However, I also wanted to show a couple more snapshots of the infographic that provide a glimpse of what it entails. I am also developing a mobile version of this infographic so that it is accessible for those using smartphones rather than the desktop version.