Category: Post

Katina Rogers (The Futures Initiative, Graduate Center, CUNY) has posted her position paper for an upcoming Council of Graduate Schools workshop on the future of the dissertation. In it, she links the changes and challenges afoot for dissertations with those facing the greater landscape of scholarship and scholarly publishing.

The same questions of values, methods, and impact are at the heart of the changing landscape of scholarly publishing systems, and new developments in one domain will undoubtedly affect norms and expectations in the other. With that in mind, a discussion about new opportunities for the dissertation must also touch on ways that innovative scholarship is received and recognized at later stages of a scholar’s career, including expectations set out in the tenure and promotion process. I would argue that placing greater emphasis on public engagement, collaborative work, and creativity in both dissertations and other scholarly work, while also maintaining an open stance toward technological innovation, will result in meaningful research whose reach extends far beyond the academy.

She goes on to provide of examples of dissertation projects that challenge traditional notions of the form and she theorizes the impacts of such work on the academy.

As partners in the scholarly communication process, academic librarians and other information professionals will appreciate Rogers’s consideration of the complexities of digital publishing and can bring her perspectives into conversations around providing support for new modes of research and publication at their own institutions.

Leo Stezano (Columbia University Libraries) wrote a post for the LITA Blog entitled Agile Development: Building an Agile Culture. In the post, Stezano outlines some tips for fostering a successful agile development shop in a library setting. Additionally, he provides links for further reading on agile development teams and the broader discussion of institutional culture issues at play in software development.

Agile development necessitates a specific set of skills that are not intrinsically related to coding mastery: flexibility, teamwork, and ability to take responsibility for a project’s ultimate success are all extremely important. Once the team is formed, management should work to bring team members closer together and create the right environment for information sharing and investment.

Librarians will benefit from Stezano’s tips as they consider the ways in which they may contribute to an environment in which agile development of digital projects can flourish.

DHers use topic models because it seems at least possible that each individual topic can offer a useful operationalization of some basic and real element of humanities vocabulary: topics (Blei), themes (Jockers), or discourses (Underwood/Rhody).¹ The word embedding models offer something slightly more abstract, but equally compelling: a spatial analogy to relationships between words.

Summers concludes with a call to provide feedback on the new open source system: “… your query may prompt another user or developer to create a solution, or we may put it in our list of ideas for further improvements, once we have the resources.”

Hosting tools and content that matter on your own domain protects you from changes software creators make. For example, I host my WordPress blog on my own domain. This means if WordPress disappears tomorrow or make a bad update, I have control over keeping my site as is, untouched. If I find a better blogging tool to WordPress, people would still be able to find me on my domain. This does, of course, come at the annual cost of the hosting and domain name itself (for some reason, you have to pay annually to keep your domain name, you can’t just buy it one-off). But it’s a price I’m willing to pay.

The Library and Information Technology Association (LITA) Blog has published a post by Jacob Shelby (Iowa State University), “A Linked Data Journey: Proof of Concept.” In this second installment of his series aiming to clarify the concept of Linked Data, Shelby walks through the process of how he created a Linked Data catalog record, including hyperlinks to the completed record, a visual graph of the record, and the code. In particular, the visual graph representation may be useful to readers; as Shelby explains:

“In case this still seems foreign to you, I would recommend taking a look at  a visual graph representation of the record. All of the little bubbles represent RDF resources that I am linking to. Clicking on one of the bubbles will expand that resource and will show other metadata about the linked-to resource. This is what Linked Data is about!”

He goes on to discuss challenges he encountered in writing PHP code and using metadata with multiple data models.

Scott Weingart (Carnegie Mellon University) has published a post on his blog reflecting on the “materiality and cost” of Holocaust remembrance, following a tour of the USC Shoah Foundation. Weingart ties his interest in acting as his family’s historian and genealogist into a larger reflection on the institutional workings of preservation, particularly in a digital sense. As Weingart explains, the Shoah Foundation focuses on remembering Holocaust survivors and witnesses, which means that the foundation “conducted video interviews: 100,000 hours of testimony from 50,000 individuals, plus recent additions of witnesses and survivors of other genocides around the world. Where Yad Vashem remembers those killed, the Shoah Foundation remembers those who survived.  What does it take to preserve the memories of 50,000 people?”

Weingart goes on to detail the preservation process the Shoah Foundation undertook, including digitization of 235,000 Betacam SP Videocassettes and subsequent hours of correcting errors. Of particular note was his breakdown of the costs of this undertaking, which provides a unique inside look into a large-scale digitization process. He then circles back to address the question he posed at the beginning of his blog post:

“So how much does it cost to remember 50,000 Holocaust witnesses and survivors for, say, 20 years? I mean, above and beyond the cost of building a cutting edge facility, developing new technologies of preservation, cooling and housing a freight container worth of hard drives, laying fiber optic cables below ground across several states, etc.? I don’t know. But I do know how much the Shoah Foundation would charge you to save 8 petabytes worth of videos for 20 years, if you were a USC Professor. They’d charge you $1,000/TB/20 years.”

In “Academia, Not Edu,” a post published on the heels of Open Access Week, Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Modern Language Association) argues that scholars should move away from sharing work on proprietary social networks, proposing disciplinary repositories as more ethical, and ultimately, more viable, alternatives. Likening Academia.edu to Facebook, Fitzpatrick writes:

The network, in other words, does not have as its primary goal helping academics communicate with one another, but is rather working to monetize that communication.

While Fitzpatrick is intimately associated with the development of the MLA Commons, her concerns regarding the widespread practice of academics going nominally “open access” through closed systems transcend her specific disciplinary issues. Further, the post raises questions about the relationship between academics, disciplinary repositories, and institutional repositories and the best way to share scholarly work with “the people I hope will read it.”

Peter Organisciak (University of Illinois) has written a short tutorial, “Your First Twitter Bot, in 20 Minutes,” taking readers through the process of creating a twitter account that automatically tweets according to programmatic specifications (a “bot”).

To implement a bot usually requires some programming, some data wrangling, and a server. However, it can be easier. By patching together some open datasets and a hosted version of a generative grammar, I’ll describe how to build a simple bot in 20 minutes.

Organisciak uses a combination of Tracery and Cheap Bots Done Quick, along with Corpora, an working set of thematic corpora collected for use in “the creation of weird internet stuff.”

Miriam Posner (UCLA) has published a post on redesigning the Introduction to Digital Humanities course she teaches. Posner notes that how and why she reworked the syllabus of the course might be valuable to others and shares her rationale:

My version of DH101 is about developing a humanistic attitude toward data. To me, that means the ability to hold in one’s mind simultaneously the value of any particular dataset and its inevitable poverty, compared with the phenomena it purports to describe. I want students to be able to “work” with data — that is, to analyze, visualize, and map it — but also to retain a perpetually critical, interrogative stance toward it.

Posner’s course materials and rethinking could be of particular interest to librarians designing DH courses and workshops. The emphasis on humanistic data is illustrated by a new reading list, and new roles within the class – Posner mentions that grouping students by skill level tends to lead to more equitable division of labor and more learning opportunities: “Experience has taught us that in groups of varying technical abilities, the technical work tends to gravitate to the more experienced students, just out of convenience and efficiency. We want students to push each other and work together.” Students in DH101 will also be able to choose which content management system to use, and whether or not they will preserve their projects after the semester is completed.

In the Library with the Lead Pipe has published “A Critical Take on OER Practices: Interrogating Commercialization, Colonialism, and Content” by Sarah Crissinger (Davidson College). Crissinger’s article critiques Open Educational Resources (OER) using an Open Access lens, and suggests how information professionals can engage with OER in a more thoughtful way. Opening her article, Crissinger writes:

I found that all of the discussions I had engaged in about openness—including Joseph’s presentation—were about shared goals or shared politics. The shared risks were often left unaddressed. I started to consider how openness, when disconnected from its political underpinnings, could become as exploitative as the traditional system it had replaced. I began to reflect on the ways in which I had used, or experienced others’ use of, openness as a solution for poverty or development—often in a way that was disconnected from an understanding of systemic inequality.

Crissinger closes the article with “tangible suggestions for how librarians and other LIS professionals can construct more thoughtful OER practices,” such as: using realistic language, interrogating whose knowledge matters globally, doing outreach beyond the learning object, moving beyond cost, using open pedagogy, and teaching critical openness and labor.