December 2014 – Trevor Owens

December 27, 2014December 27, 2014

Digital Library Infrastructures, Cosmos Exhibition, Digital Folklore & Dissertation -> Book: 2014 in Review

Another year. Another chance to push the pause button for a bit and try and make some sense of what it is I’ve been doing. As I did in 2012 and 2013, I am taking a few minutes to try to sift and categorize. So if you are interested in a recap of things I’ve done this year this post is for you, if not, I imagine you have already decided to stop reading.

Digital Infrastructure for Libraries and Archives

An image of me gesturing into space with a cartoon mecha archivist from the Radcliffe alumni magazine.

The bulk of my work this year falls under the broad category of exploring/improving digital infrastructure for cultural heritage institutions. I published 13 posts on this blog, including pieces on the leadership roles that digital archivists should play, how research questions work in the digital humanities and a knowledge infrastructures in digital humanities centers. If you search for my name in the Library of Congress and restrict it to the year 2014 you find there are 74 things I’m associated with from the year. That includes a mixture of blog posts, reports, and in a few cases people mentioning me in videos of talks from the Digital Preservation conference I served on the planning committee for. Below I’ve tried to break up some of the things I worked on this year into a few different areas.

Packed house for a presentation on the NDSA levels of preservation at Webwise in February

Improving National Capacity for Digital Preservation: I contributed to a series of projects focused on the state of digital preservation in the country and how to build national capacity for digital preservation. As a co-chair of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance Infrastructure working group I was part of the team which authored the second National Digital Stewardship Agenda. Along with several colleagues, I presented on the agenda in a session titled The 2014 National Agenda For Digital Stewardship: What Works In Digital Preservation, And What Is Needed at the Coalition for Networked Information’s Fall Forum. I also helped shepherd along some guidance on the best practices for how and went to check fixity of digital collection materials. In the spring, I gave an extended invited lecture on Digital Preservation’s Place in the Future of the Digital Humanities at the University of Pittsburgh’s iSchool.
Building Out the Digital Preservation Knowledge Base: This point could well have been rolled up under the last one, but I think the professional knowledge base is important enough to warrant it’s own bullet point. Along with colleagues from the Open Preservation Foundation and the Innovation Working Group of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance I helped to launch Digital Preservation Q&A, a free and open knowledge base application to help foster sharing of knowledge and expertise in digital preservation. I also gave talks on getting started in digital preservation using the NDSA levels of digital preservation at the IMLS webwise conference in Baltimore and at the Computers in Libraries conference in Washington DC.
The table at the Crowdsourcing Consortium for Libraries and Archives Kick off summit.

Crowdsourcing for Digital Collections: I continued to work on the role that broader publics can play in the work of cultural heritage institutions. In September I was invited to participate in the Inaugural Working Meeting of the Crowdsourcing Consortium for Libraries & Archives as a result of which I helped to co-author a forthcoming working document on Evaluating Crowd Contributions: Quality Assurance & Control for User Contributed Items and Metadata. Along with that, Crowdsourcing our Cultural Heritage came out, which ends with my essay titled Making Crowdsourcing Compatible with the Missions and Values of Cultural Heritage Organisations.
Microscopes and Distant Reading of Collections: I continue to believe that computational methods for exploring relationships and trends in data sets, corpora, archives and collections have a ton to offer both scholars and archivist/librarian/curators. In December I gave a talk on Macroscopes and Distant Reading: Implications for Infrastructures to Support Computational Humanities Scholarship at the lengthy named Fostering Transatlantic Dialogue on Digital Heritage and EU Research Infrastructures: Initiatives and Solutions in the USA and in Italy summit. I represented the Library of Congress at a National Academies Board on Research Data and Information event focused on big data which I reported out on for the Library of Congress digital preservation blog. I also wrote a post on the reasons to prioritize offering bulk access to digital collections.
Computer Aided Archival Description for Born Digital Materials: I was invited to share some of the thinking behind an experimental piece of software Ed Summers and I worked on that used topic modeling on born digital archival collections at the The Radcliffe Workshop on Technology and Archival Processing. The event prompted the Harvard Gazette to describe me as “a millennial who displayed affection for the word “awesome” during the panel.”

Cosmos Online Collection Launched

An example item from the cosmos collection.

January saw the launch of Finding Our Place in The Cosmos, an online collection/exhibition that I spent the previous year curating and project managing.

As part of the launch of the collection I did a lot of writing about it for various communications channels at The Library of Congress. I interviewed astronomer David Grinspoon about his connections and relationship with his mentor Carl Sagan, I wrote about some of Sagan’s course materials for the Library of Congress science blog. I wrote about notions of technology and progress evident in primary sources for science teachers for the library of congress teachers blog. I wrote about Carl Sagan’s childhood writings on science and poetry for the Poet Laureate’s blog.

Along with writing on it for more general audiences, I also put together two reflective pieces about the process of working on the exhibition including a draft style guide for digital collection hypertexts, and a piece on the role that worked through how I used pinterest to open up the process of identifying and selecting items for the exhibition. I loved working on this project, the opportunity to explore the collections at LC, to dig deep into Sagan’s papers, to think through the best way to assemble the technology to tell the story and the chance to work with so many smart people from across the institution.

Becoming Dr. Owens and From Dissertation to Book

A hat, a hood, and a large document to commemorate the end of 23 years of school.

In February, I successfully defended my dissertation. I checked the box to provide my dissertation directly from George Mason University’s digital repository and that in no way held back in landing a book contract. So ends my continuous 23 years of schooling.

In spring of 2015 a revised version of my dissertation study is on track to be published as a book in the New Literacies and Digital Epistemologies series which Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel edit.

I’m thrilled. I’ve been following Colin and Michele’s work on new literacies for nearly ten years, and books in the series like Rebecca Black’s Adolescents and Online Fan Fiction played a significant role in informing the study. My dissertation research on the history, structure and ideology of software platforms enabling online communities was informed by this body of scholarship and I am excited to see that it will end up as part of this list.

After receiving some feedback on the state of the dissertation itself, I took six months of weekends and evenings to revise and further transition it into more of a book form. After receiving approval on the text by the series editors I recently reviewed a copy edited version of it and will likely be looking at proofs in the next few months. So it sounds like everything is on track for the book to come out in the middle of 2015.

Born Digital Folklore and Vernaculars

A screen shot of an archived copy of Memegenerator in the Library of Congress web archives.

One of the best parts of working in NDIIPP has been the opportunity to connect with the various custodial divisions of The Library of Congress to work through their issues in particular born digital content domains. This year it was my pleasure to collaborate with some of my colleagues in the American Folklife Center to explore the role that cultural heritage organizations can play in collecting and providing access to records of digital vernaculars and folk cultures.

I was able to plan, host and co-unchair Curate Camp Digital Culture with Folklorist Trevor Blank and Tumblr’s Meme Librarian Amanda Brennan. The camp was both a ton of fun and enlightening. It was a distinct pleasure to help guide NDIIPP’s junior fellow, Julia Fernandez through her fantastic work conducting a series of interviews I had started off a few years back exploring these issues. All told, the 13 interviews we did on this topic are functionally a brief 35,000 word book on the subject. In them you can find serious discussion and exploration of everything from Bronies, to deviantArt, to an exhibit of animated GIFs, yelp reviews of restaurants and LOLCats.

Informed by the unconference and the interviews, I was able to help the American Folklife Center develop some new collections. Of the many ideas we explored, two seem to have really had legs so far. First, I’ve been able to make some significant contributions to scoping the Library of Congress Digital Culture Web Archive. So whatever else I do in my career, I’ve been instrumental in making sure that the a bunch of reaction gifs, meme images, creepypastas, and sites that document the meaning of various emoji and facebook symbols persist as part of the Library of Congress web archives. I’ve even helped contribute to the Library of Congress’ illustrious collection of bibles with the acquisition of The Lolcat Bible.

An Award Wining Year

Aside from all of this, I won two awards this year! The Society of American Archivists proclaimed me the Archival Innovator for 2014 and I won the C Herbert Finch Award for an Online Publication for my work curating/managing the Finding Our Place in the Cosmos Online Collection.

Looking back on 2014 I feel incredibly lucky to have had the opportunities I’ve had. I’ve been able to work with some amazing people, on a range of projects that I think are the right fit for my talents and interests.

To that end, I’m looking forward to the new adventures that 2015 has in store.

December 12, 2014December 12, 2014

Curating in the Open: Martians, Old News, and the Value of Sharing as you go

The Salt Lake Tribune speculates about "vast thinking vegetable" on Mars — Speculation about the “vast thinking vegetable” on Mars from The Salt Lake Tribune

This is ultimately a story about how doing research for an online exhibition ended up sparking articles on Boing Boing, i09, and The Atlantic which explored a theme from the exhibit eight months before the exhibit would launch. I think the story has some lessons for thinking about the future of digital collections and exhibitions.

Finding our place in the cosmos

I spent 60% of my time at work in 2013 curating an online exhibition/collection/hypertext contextualizing the Carl Sagan papers in the history of astronomy and life on other worlds as evident in objects from across the Library of Congress collections. I’ve written before, about what I think that project has to say about how to compose such online things, but I haven’t shared much about how I went about identifying and selecting materials for it.

Through the process of working on the collection, I think I stumbled into something that has considerable potential to impact the way we should go about doing the work of creating such thematic narrative explorations of content in digital collections of libraries, archives and museums.

A big part of the interesting story about the idea of life on other worlds is that, for a good while, it was completely reasonable, if not expected that there would be intelligent life on the other planets in our solar system. One great episode in this story is the history of the Martian canals. Knowing how big of a topic this would be for popular press I realized I could just turn to Chronicling America, the website for a partnership between the NEH, LC and a network of libraries and archives from around the country to provide access to millions of digitized newspapers. I knew there would be a good bit of material here, and I was thrilled to find that a search for “martians” in the millions of digitized newspaper pages from 1836 to 1922 turned up a trove of pieces to explore. So I noted the pieces in this search that were particularly relevant for the collection. Instead of keeping these in a document on what my institution lovingly calls a “workstation,” I went ahead and just used Pinterest to keep track of them.

Work in Progress on Pinterest Progresses the Work

So I made Pinterest boards for each of the thematic sections of the collection I was working on. Below is an image of the Pinterest board I created on free and publicly available materials from across LC’s digital collections related to ideas of life on Mars. I liked using Pinterest for this as it created a visual way for me to track and organize these things. A big part of the project was to find what I could do with already publicly available digitized content, so it seemed like it would be fine to track these public materials using a personal Pinterest account. It had an interesting side benefit too.

I started using Pinterest for this purpose because it was easy, but it being public had an interesting secondary effect. As you can see from the image below, the board I started on Mapping Mars & Life on Mars ended up with 191 followers. It’s not a part of any official anything, but it turned out that many of the historians of science and history of science curious who follow me on twitter were interested enough to review and share some of the raw material I was pulling together on Pinterest. I needed to do this kind of aggregation for my own work for the essays and online collection, so it made sense to keep that up and out there for others to benefit from.

What Vast Thinking Vegetable of Mars Taught Me

Which brings me to the vast thinking vegetable that lives on Mars. One of the newspaper pages I found ended up showing up in my feed reader on Ptak Science Books.

If you don’t read John Ptak’s blog and you are into cool quirky history of science object stuff you are missing out. He is always sharing interesting finds. As you can see above, one day he found the article I found. It wasn’t just a coincidence, either. As you can see from the image below, John credited both the Chronicling America site and my Pinterest board in the post.

That alone was a hoot. What a success. I set out to use Pinterest to keep track and organize materials I might work with, but in the process I found an audience interested in the topics on Pinterest and that rolled into John getting in there and not only sharing what I had found but digging in and interpreting and explicating what about that article was interesting. While I hadn’t provided any interpretive frame, the things that I found interesting about the article were the same that John focused on. But it didn’t stop there. It turned out that Alexis Madrigal also reads John’s blog and that he thought this was interesting enough to take it to an even larger audience. It also hit BoingBoing and io9.

From my Pinterest board, to Ptak’s blog and from there to The Atlantic. At this point, the Atlantic article ended up generating a surge of web traffic to the Chronicling America Website. So much so, that one of the project leaders noted the spike and went looking to see where it was coming from. The work I was doing to organize my notes, on at that point a project that had yet to be announced, had helped to punch a bunch of traffic and eyeballs back onto the content. That is, eight months before the launch the research process itself was hitting home a core objective of much of our work, spurring engagement and use of the collections. The traffic was nice, but importantly, it also had the effect of promoting thinking about the exact set of issues that the essays I was working on were focused on.

Both Ptak’s blog post and Alexis Madrigal’s piece on The Atlantic are brief but substantive. They contextualize and explore the issues of what it was and wasn’t reasonable to think about the existence of life on mars in the early 20th century. To this end, before I had even gotten close to publishing my essays, simply sharing the way I was organizing my resources and tweeting about them had prompted public scholarship exploring the same issues in the same resources.

Succeeding before You’ve Even Launched

So, before anyone had even formally announced this project, I was already meeting many of my objectives to spark conversations about the history of ideas of life on other worlds and generating significant use of the Library of Congress collections. I see a few different implications of this process.

Defaulting to sharing serves the mission: The research that goes into preparing a thematic collection/exhibition is itself something that can be made into a public project that contributes to the objects of exhibiting materials. Using Pinterest to organize my research made that research into it’s own resource. While you can’t plan to have this kind of thing happen, you can plan to enable the possibility of it.
There is great stuff on the cutting room floor that can have a life of it’s own: It ended up that I didn’t even use that giant vegetable eye story for the exhibition. It wasn’t the right fit in the end. The Pinterest boards I made are loaded with items that didn’t make the final cut but they still found their own audiences. This is to say, If I hadn’t shared the process there is little reason to believe this story would have gotten much attention. Just think about all the objects that someone considered featuring. Just the fact that it was considered is likely an interesting link that someone might be interested in following.
Sharing Objects in the Research Process Encouraged Deeper Use: In the thematic essays, I work out what the objects mean and people scroll through and read that. However, just sharing the items I was working with in progress ended up inviting others to take those materials and interpret and explicate them on their own. Intriguingly, less became more there. It helped encourage others to explicate and contextualize.