Studying Discourse Online is Studying Designed Experience

Posted on November 6, 2011 by tjowens

Young people participating in fan fiction forums are learning English as a second language. People arguing about Preist tallents in the World of Warcraft forms are participating in informal science learning and reasoning. Hip hop discourse in online forums can help us engineer financial literacy into learning environments. Folks participating in forums for RPG Maker are learning to take and give criticism. Everywhere you look researchers are studying discourse online, but we don’t necessarily know that much about how that discourse is shaped by the people that build and administrate the software that enables that discourse. As I’ve mentioned, this is the subject for a research project I am working on, I wanted to take a moment to share a few early examples and ideas I have on how this might be working.

Discourse on the Web is a Result of Designed Experience

For starters, discussions on the web are the result of designed experience, you shouldn’t study them without taking into account the functionality of the software that enables them. The designers and administrators of those spaces have set them up to enable particular kinds of communication and to ensure that other kinds of interaction do not occur.

For example, here is how Derek Powazek explained the role of software tools in Design for Community: the art of connecting real people in virtual places:

This is all about power. Giving your users tools to communicate is giving them the power. But we’re not talking about all the tools they could possibly want. We’re talking about carefully crafted experiences, conservatively proportioned for maximum impact. ( Powazek, xxii)

So How Do Forum Designers and Administrators Shape Discourse?

So, what do the folks who manage, run, and build web forums think about their end users? Further, how do their theories about the goals, motivations, and desires of those users shape the way that they enable them to interact with each other. One of the places I am looking for answers to these questions is in guidebooks for web forum administrators. I should give a more full rundown of what books I am looking at, but I thought it would be fun to share some of the kinds of examples I have found of how the books are talking about users and the resulting implications for design that they suggest. I am still just at the beginning of this research project, but I wanted to share some of these examples for comment. The following are a few preliminary examples. I will share more examples as they show up, but wanted to put these out there for anyone to react to.

Explicit Public Rules

The most obvious way that community managers influence the content which people share on these sites is through enforcing explicit rules. Practically all of the books in this genre I have read so far explain the importance of having and enforcing these kinds of explicit rules. Here Patrick O’Keefe explains the importance of rules:

Respect is the cornerstone of a good environment. You create a respectful community by requiring that everyone treat everyone else with the respect they deserve. You do this by having written policies and by actively enforcing those policies. (O’Keefe, 219)

Using Design to Filter Who Participates

In  primary lessons for design is to “bury the post button.” He suggests the more effort that is required to get to the point where someone can post a comment will result in higher quality discussion.

Why would this be? because, in this case, the multiple clicks it takes to read the whole story are actually acting as a great screening mechanism. Users who are looking for trouble or aren’t really engaged in your content will be put off by the distance. They’ll drift away. But the users who are engaged by the content and interested in the results of the conversation will stick with it.(53)

In Community Building Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities on the Web Amy Jo Kim gives very similar advice:

“What you want to do is create appropriate hurdles for member contributions, particularly those that extend the public space within your community…It’s up to you to figure out the restrictions that best meet the needs of your members and support the kind of community you are trying to create. (Kim, 71)

Aside from any explicit rules designers of these community spaces are using design as a filter. It is a kind of soft power that shapes the way that we interact with each other online and anyone studying interactions online should think about how the design of the space might be acting as filter

Tricking users and distorting reality

Explaining that “Creativity never hurts when you’re trying to get major league idiots off your community.” O’Keefe provides a few creative ideas.

Sometimes referred to as global ignore, you can incorporate a function that lets the banned user log in but then makes this user go unseen to all users of your community. The banned user cannot receive private messages, and if he tries to send them, they don’t reach the intended users. He can still make his posts, but only he ( and maybe you and your staff) can see the posts– no one else. Basically, in his eyes, the site works as is intended. He will just think that everyone is ignoring him and go away. (O’Keefe, 215)

In this case, an administrator can let a user think they are participating in the conversation when no one else can see what they are saying. Worse than being silenced, the user still thinks they are part of the conversation.

In short, the designed experience of web community spaces is not something that can be read in any straightforward fashion. At the very least, to say something about a community you need to understand the explicit guidelines and rules. But beyond this, without understanding the intentions and tactics of developers and administrators it is going to be difficult to know how exactly they are implicitly shaping the structure and nature of the discourse. It’s my intention to try and work through this relationship between designers, administrators and users in my project.

What are some other examples of ways designers and administrators shape discourse online?

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User Stories as a Genre of Digital Humanities Scholarship

Posted on October 7, 2011 by tjowens
There has been a good bit of discussion about how building things can be thought of as a hermeneutic process. Building things can be the crux of a methodology for at least part of this thing we are calling the digital humanities. The more I have thought about this the more I have started to wonder if there might be another piece of the software development process that could find an even more natural fit with existing practices in humanities scholarship. Specifically, if there might be hybrid forms of writing, something between software documentation and scholarly articles that might serve as the basis for formalizing building as scholarship. Each of the design deliverables that Dan Brown discusses in Communicating Design could serve as the basis for a new mode of scholarly communication. The idea here is that the writing involved in the production and use of software and tools for creating knowledge could serve as the raw materials for scholarship.

Personas and User Stories
User stories and personas strike me as potential forms of software development writing that could be bent into humanities writing. Most user-centered design approaches start with creating personas for users. That is, coming up with what it is that someone wants to do and their background and experiences that need to be taken into account to design something that will let them do what they want to do. User stories are very similar, in this case generally explaining how a particular tool helps a user accomplish their goals. For example, these are some of the Zotero student and faculty user stories I would share with people who were interested in training Zotero users.

How Personas and User Stories Could Become Methodological Scholarship
Most user stories and personas focus on how someone who wants to buy a book on amazon, or how accomplish some other clearly defined task. I am not saying that we should think of these as scholarship. However, in the case of building software for humanities scholars the goal is generaly not a simple discrete task. We are trying to create tools and interfaces that help scholars produce insight and knowledge. That means that a) it is far more difficult to define success and b) the possibilities for deep thought, explorations of context, and considerations of the nature of knowledge production come into the mix. In short, when the goal of a particular software tool is to facilitate the production of knowledge there is good reason to believe that the kinds of thinking that go into using and designing that tool could be good fodder for a kind of scholarly writing and communication. This is partly what Fred Gibbs and I are trying to get at in our feeling that we need to write a lot more about methods in Towards a Hermunitics of Data.

Extent Software Stories are Just as Useful
This isn’t really just about building software, it is also something that we need more of for even just using off the shelf software. User stories have the posibility of becoming the methodological texts of the digital humanities. What did you do, or what do you want to let someone do? What will doing that let you know? This is already happening, for example Cameron Blevins’s Topic Modeling Martha Ballard’s Diary and Rob Nelson’s Mining the Dispatch are personal narratives of research methods. In a less technicaly intense example it is the same kind of thing I tried to do in Mining old News for New Historical Insight. These are simultaneously necessary for establishing the validity of any claims we ultimately make in our research, but they are also essential as a kind of new research methods literature. This kind of work is particularly important, because as Ian Bogost suggests, “technologies themselves make tacit, low-level assumptions that can’t be seen in the light of day.”

I would love there to be a place to put this stuff and find it
My links to examples go all over the web, software documentation, out to blogs, etc. These are great places for us to put these things, but there is a part of me that wishes that we could pool together a bit and aggregate this kind of writing about use, method, interpretation, with tools. Furthermore, it would be great if there was more review and dialog about this kind of writing. I think we are still in the infancy for what hybrid forms of the writing involved in software development and scholarly writing could become.

So what do you think? Should we start thinking about the writing involved in the creation of software as the same kind of  hermeneutic process full of the deep thinking about meaning, context, and interpretation that we put in with scholarly writing writ-large? If so, how do we get from where we are to what these hybrid forms might look like?

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Building The Forum: Or, Help Design Trevor’s Dissertation

Posted on September 29, 2011 by tjowens

In a 2009 interview with ReadWriteWeb, Mark O’sullivan, the lead developer of the open source web forum software Vanilla, was asked if Web forums are still relevant in the era of the real-time-web of Facebook and Twitter. His response offers an important point of entry for understanding the under-explored implications of web forum software, “Do a Google search for anything. How many of those search results are from discussion forums?” When asked if the prevalence of discussion forum threads in search results had to do with a querk in page-rank, Google’s system for evaluating the relevance of pages in any given search, he responded “It has to do with people having real discussions and giving real answers.” Yes, he is defending the relevance of his product in the face of a range of social networking platforms. Still, his response is verifiable. In my own experience, I find myself in the middle of a threaded web forum discussion on nearly a daily basis. We consult this collective knowledge-base on a regular basis, but generally know little about the structures, systems, ideologies and theories of end users involved in it’s creation.

In particular, we know little about the design decisions behind the forum software that enable dialog and discussion online. To be sure, the nature of Google’s search algorithm, page rank, and its approach to caching pages, each play important roles in this experience. However, the first step in the process involves the software tools that enable and shape our discourse online. The structure of the conversations that we engage in on online discussion boards, blogs, and other comment driven platforms are shaped (to some extent) by the Mark O’Sullivan’s of the world, the individuals that create, design, implement and hack on the software that makes the web a platform for community discussion, deliberation and dialog.

Beyond the knowledge-base, web forums are increasingly being explored as places where young and old alike are developing valuable skills and knowledge. Ito and others suggest that these kinds of spaces are where many young people are “learning to navigate esoteric domains of knowledge and practice and participating in communities that traffic in these forms of expertise” (2009, p. 28). Similar things have been said about fan fiction forums, video game forums, and hip-hop forums.The more we think about software environments, like forums, as learning spaces, the morewe need to understand how their design enables and disables particular kinds of discourse.

Welcome to my Dissertation (I Think)

It looks like this is what I am going to write my dissertation about. I intend to blog my way through this process. I have not yet written my proposal, I have drafted a 40 page sketch of some of the conceptual framework I am thinking through. (Which I will not subject you to), but I do not yet have a formal proposal. I plan to work through my research design on the blog and I would like to invite any and everyone even remotely interested in this topic tocomment, critique and share thoughts about how I am going about this. I am largely thinking about this as a project in software studies, platform studies, STS, and distributed cognition.

How to Books and A History of Vanilla Forums

To kick this off I thought I would describe the two primary sets of sources I intend to work with. So far I am focusing primarily on two kinds of source material to develop two kinds of stories.

First I am interested in exploring what how-to and technical guides targeted at people setting up software to create web communities can tell us about tell us about the relationships between users, administrators, and developers.

Second, I am interested in using the content and structure of the vanilla forums development forums, and the archive of those forums available through the internet archive, to explore the relationship between ideologies of users and administrators of the software and the actual software itself.

 

Together, I hope to use these sources to work toward understanding more about how the developers, and administrators of forum software conceptualize their users, and how those conceptualizations of users do or don’t become embedded in the functionality of the forum software itself.

It’s your turn! Take a moment to Opine

I’m mildly interested in what you think about this topic. I am far more interested in what you think about the sources I am considering. What do you think about how-to books and a case study of an open source forum project as the focus of this study? Are there other sources you would think about looking at to explore this? In subsequent posts I will lay out the books I am thinking about looking at and a justification for why I think Vanilla is a particularly interesting case study for this project, but at this point I am particularly interested in hearing feedback about the over all idea behind this area of study and the general kinds of sources I am talking about.


Posted in Research Projects | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

The Digital Humanities Are Already on Kickstarter

Posted on August 13, 2011 by tjowens

I have been talking with a lot of historians, librarians, archivists and curators about the possibility of using Kickstarter to fund digital humanities and digital library, archive, and museum projects. If you are unfamiliar, Kickstarter is a site and tool that anyone can use to fundraise for creative projects.

The Open Utopia project is a great example of a successful DH project on Kickstarter

In several of my conversations with humanists about Kickstarter I have heard back, “but isn’t Kickstarter a place for art projects, not for humanities projects”. The answer to that question is no. Kickstarter is a place for creative projects, specifically, discrete projects in which something is made. For folks on the DIY side of the digital humanities, an attitude frequently on display at events like THATCamp, this is not a problem. If you want to make things then Kickstarter is a great tool.

Best of all, we don’t need to even think about what digital humanities projects on Kickstarter would look like. They are already there. I took the liberty of putting together a short list of projects that i think fit squarely in the areas that I have seen people at previous THATCamps working in.

7 successful Digital Humanities-ish Kickstarter Projects

  1. The Teaching Teachers to Teach Vonnegut project from the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, raised 2,200$ to create and host a free workshop for Indiana high school teachers interested in incorporating the writings of Kurt Vonnegut in their curriculum. They even used as matching funds for a NEH grant.
  2. The Open Utopia: A New Kind of Old Book raised more than 4,000$ to create an open-source, open-access, multi-platform, web-based edition of Thomas More’s Utopia.
  3. </archive> raised more than 900$ to create  an open archive of urban experience built from the street. Using unique QR code tags collaborators can make their personal experiences of the city accessible in physical space.
  4. Open Goldberg Variations – Setting Bach Free raised more than 20,000$ to create a new score and studio recording of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations placed in the public domain.
  5. The Nature of Code Book Project raised over 31,000$ to write and self publish a book on “the unpredictable evolutionary and emergent properties of nature in software.”
  6. Kevin Ballestrini, a classics professor, has raised more than 2,000$ to create an educational card game.
  7. Smarthistory raised more than 11,000$ to create a slate of educational videos for it’s art history website.

The moral of the story here is that Kickstarter is not something that could be useful for funding digital humanities projects, Kickstarter is already something that is useful for funding digital humanities projects.

Importantly, Kickstarter is not a magic button that prints Internet money. If you do decide to use it to raise some funds you should go out and read from the copious amounts of advice on successful Kickstarter campaigns. (See for example this, or this, or this, or this)

If you have project ideas that you want to share and workshop consider posting them in the comments for feedback from other digital humanists.

Posted in Digital Tools, History | 1 Comment

When did we become users?

Posted on August 5, 2011 by tjowens

We live in an era of user experience of user centered design. We have a range of usernames for everything from Facebook to our banking websites. We tacitly sign End-user License Agreements as we click our way around the web. We know what to do because we read User Guides to figure out how to get our software to do what we want.

In short, we are all users.

The user has become such a central way of being that scholars are now reading the idea of the user into the past. In How Users Matter you can read about the users of everything from the Model-T, to Vaccines, to electric razors, to Minimoogs, to contraceptives.

The idea of the user as a way of being is so omnipresent that it is easy to forget that the idea of us as users has a history.

There must, in fact, be a historical moment at which we became users.

So when did we become users?

I don’t have an answer here. I’ve screwed around (hermeneutically) with a few online historical datasets and I would like to invite you (the user) to help interpret, consider and suggest next steps.

Asking a question to a graph

For starters I figured I would see how our various names have fared in the books of the 20th century. Below you can see a chart of the terms user, producer, consumer, and customer as they appear in the corpus the culturomics folks have given us to play with in Google n-gram. I am not a statistician. I will be the first to admit that I do not completely grok the details of their FAQ and supplemental documents. With that said, the naive interpretation of this graph shows the term user beating out producer and consumer in our lexicon in the lat 60s and beating out consumer in the early 80s. Does this tell us anything interesting? Despite all the limitations that come from this sort of data, are there any claims that this at least suggests to you? Are there other terms you think should be included in this? Please link any interesting related n-grams you generate in the comments.

user, producer, consumer, customer in google n-gram

Here is, more or less, the same trending line for user in the Time magazine corpus.

Chart of "user" in Time Mag

Colocating the User

Oh numbers, how you mislead! I can’t forget the drug users.

Thankfully, the really neat thing about Mark Davies corpora is that he lets you dig in and see what words are collocated within a specified number of words of the term you are searching for.

For example, when I search for user in the Time Magazine corpus I can find that “Drug” appears within 4 words of user 32 times. Beyond that, we can see which decades those locates happen in.  Below are the collocates for nouns within 4 words of the word user.  Beyond this we also find a bunch of other cool stuff. Again, as I am far from confident in making assertions about the implications of this kind of data, so I thought I would share it here, offer my naive read of it, and invite you (the user) to tell me what you think the data suggests. Here is the sheet of data I’ve lightly coded as either drug or technology uses of the term user. If you want to recreate this, just do a search for collocates of nouns either four before or four after the word user. You can see what that looks like in a search in the image at the bottom of this post. To talk about these results I have coded them into my own categories, those that have to do with drugs and those that have to do with technology. There are a few at the bottom that I haven’t categorized but which I would most likely call technology uses of the term. I have sorted them first by my categories and second by their frequency. As a last step I have flagged the cells in the sheet with two hits as a dark green and with more than that with a light green to draw attention to the patterns in the data.

What are users using?

The rise of user is also rise of drug user

Throughout the chart users are associated with the general idea of drugs and the specific terms for a range of individual drugs. This would be the user in the “Users are losers” construction. In any event, at least in the case of Time Magazine, the the growth around the term user happened for both drugs and tech at the same time.

The first technology related term that shows up is telephone

The first tech term to show up in this data is telephony. The first thought this suggests the user may have may have less to do with the rise of computing and more to do with the rise of networks. It may well be that we need the concept of the user to describe technology based networks.

Some open questions

  1. How to periodize the history of the user? I have provided a few pieces of evidence. It would seem that this evidence suggests….. If you have other examples of what this evidence might look like I would be thrilled to hear it. Are there other places one would look? Are their other explanations for this evidence?
  2. Was our relationship to technology different before we became users? Or, is the word the only thing that is new here? This is really the crux of the issue. Is this change in language simply an arbitrary neologism? Does the idea of us as users of technology shape our way of thinking about tools and technology? Has it changed how we think about technology? Lastly, what would the evidence look like that would help us answer this question and where would we find it?

Asside: if you want to recreate the search I did for collocates of nouns within four words of the term user it would look like this.

What my search looked like: Click image for bigger pic


Posted in Digital Tools, History, Research Projects | 5 Comments

The digital humanities as the DIY humanities

Posted on July 23, 2011 by tjowens

A few months back I participated in my forth year of the humanities and technology camp at the Center for History and New Media. This year the conference ended with a bake off. Many of the definitions of the digital humanities hinge on the idea that digital humanists like to make things. It looks like they also like to bake things.

We don’t just make for the humanities, we just make

I don’t think it is a coincidence that Amanda French’s twitter bio explains that she is a singer songwriter, that Karin Dalziel of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities blogs about digital humanities work alongside gardening, cooking and photography, or that Jason Kucsma, director of the Metropolitan New York Library Council, worked for years driving around the Midwest to promote a zine he helped create. One of the defining features of some of the best and the brightest in the digital humanities isn’t digital per-say, it has to do with a pervasive kind of scrappyness. It’s about having a do it yourself mindset.

The DIY technical education

Reflecting on my own experience, I think I can say that the most important digital skills and ability to carry things through did not come from my training in the history of science. It came from my attempts, from the age of 14-18 managing a band in Milwaukee Wisconsin.

  • I learned HTML to build a band website. (which is sadly lost to the ages, although the terrible one I had created before that persists at the popup riddled .50megs.com)
  • I picked up Illustrator and Photoshop when we wanted to get our CD pressed and the only templates the press offered were for Adobe products.
  • Over those years I learned a ton about digital audio as we improved our microphones and upgraded from transferring from a real-to-real, to a 4 track cassette recorder, to a digital 8 track and ultimately to working with a all digital studio in the area.

More important than any of the specific tech competencies, I learned that when I needed to figure out what software and hardware I needed to accomplish a task, that I had the wherewithal to figure it out and make it work.

marzapan at summerfest

The band playing at Milwaukee's Summerfest

The Audacity of Doing it Yourself: Renting the American Legion Hall

More important than self taught hardware and software skills was simply taking stock of the fact that if someone was going to do make a given project happen it would be me. Further, that I was going to need to do this with the resources I had at hand. Generally, I think this translates to a lesson that in many situations it is valuable. There is a version of whatever it is that you want to do that you can do right now with only an investment of your time and energy.

There were, more or less, zero options for places to put on all ages shows in West Milwaukee. So I took cash out of pocket and rented an American Legion hall. I think it originally cost me $100. I made up some fliers on colored paper at kinkos, got four other bands to agree to play as openers and negotiated how we would cut any money. I bought a PA system and the bassist picked up lighting equipment circa 1970 at a rummage sale. We used our bassists van to get all of our equipment to the hall. We handed flyers to any and everyone who would take them in an effort to get people to show up and pay 5$ at the door. Our moms collected money at the door. It was exhausting. I was always sick to my stomach that no one would show up to the shows and I would be out the upfront money. But we got up and did it again, and again, and eventually made the money we needed to make to pay for studio time. That is until the band broke up and reformed without me.

The moral to the story is, that instead of waiting for something to happen, or someone to let us be musicians, we just decided we were and started making plans with the resources at hand. If you take a look at many of the most interesting things going on in the digital humanities a lot of them started with just that kind of scrappyness and tenacity.

The Tenacity of the Cockroach or: the Henry Rollins School for Digital Humanists

Required reading for a DIY Humanist

Part of the reason that there are so many DIY folk in the digital humanities is that making things came natural. I think another part of this is that many of us had acquired what Henry Rollins described as “The Tenacity of the Cockroach.” If you want to get your head in this space I strongly suggest reading the edited collection of Onion AV club articles which uses the quote as its title. Imho, the DIY part of this thing we call the digital humanities is the part that is keeping it interesting, lively, and innovative.

Required Reading for the DIY Humanist

Deep down, I think DIY and the web are inextricably linked.

Here the lesson from nerd-folk-rock-troubadour  Jonathan Coulton, about finding and making your own niche is invaluable. QFT

We now have an entirely new set of contexts and they come with a whole new set of tools that give us cheap and easy access to all of them – niche has gone mainstream. It is no longer necessary to organize your business or your art around geography, or storage space, or capital, or what’s cool in your town, or any other physical constraint. And this is not to say that anyone can become a moderately successful rockstar just by starting a blog – success is still going to be a rare and miraculous thing, as it has always been. There are just a lot more ways to get there than there used to be, and people are finding new ones every day.

In the same vein, Robert Krulwich’s  advice to aspiring journalists, that “some just don’t wait” is equally important for the aspiring humanist.

I’ve seen people, literally, go home, write a blog about dinosaurs (in one case), neuroscience, biology. Nobody asked them. They just did. On their own. By themselves.After they wrote, they tweeted and facebooked and flogged their blogs, and because they were good, and worked hard, within a year or two, magazines asked them to affiliate (on financial terms that were insulting), but they did that, and their blogs got an audience, and then they got magazine assignments, then agents, then book deals, and now, three, four years after they began, these folks, five or six of them, are beginning to break through. They are becoming not just science writers with jobs, they are becoming THE science writers, the ones people read, and look to… they’re going places. And they’re doing it on their own terms! In their own voice, they’re free to be themselves AND they’re paid for it!

Going from here

I would love to know if there are other DIY pasts in the closets of other Digital Humanities folk. Is this a general phenomena, or is this just about the company I keep. So if you have DIY pasts please share them in the comments. Further, are there other must read pieces you would suggest for the aspiring DIY humanist?

Posted in Education, History | Tagged , | 8 Comments

On Writing, Making and Mining: Digital History Class Projects

Posted on June 2, 2011 by tjowens

This is the forth post in a multi-post series reflecting on the digital history course I taught last semester at American University. For more on this you can read initial post about the course, the course syllabus, my posts on the value of a group public blog on how technical to get in a digital history course and on how the students content will continue to be a part of future version of the course.

I am a big fan of the idea that building and making is a hermeneutic. Part of what makes the idea of the digital humanities particularly nifty is the idea that we can embrace building tools, creating software, designing websites and a range of maker activities as an explicit process of understanding. Because of this, and in light of my feelings about the necessity for students to develop technical competency, I knew I wanted students in my class to work on a digital project.

With that said I gave my students a choice.

Everyone had to write proposals for both a digital and print project. For print projects they  proposed papers that either used digital tools to make sense of a set of texts or proposed interrogating something that was itself “born digital.” For digital projects students were required to create some kind of digital resource, a blog, a wiki, a podcast, an interactive map, a curated web exhibit, a piece of software, etc.

When I mentioned the structure of this assignment to Tom Sheinfieldt he suggested that I would be receiving 20 papers. One paper from every student. We’ll get back to what I got once I explain my justification for including writing as an option.

Three reasons writing in Digital History is new

Here are three reasons to justify using the limited time in a digital history course to work on writing projects.

The case for writing about mediums

Historians are trained to work with particular kinds of materials and to ask questions which are (to some extent) based on the nature of those materials.  Historical understanding fundamentally requires us to understand how the nature of a given medium shapes and effects the traces of the past it has on it. This requires us to know to think about communication in a letter as a different voice from a speech, and further to recognize that the transcript of a speech is not necessarily  what was said, and does not include information about how it was said. It also requires us to approach different media on the terms on which they were used and the terms on which they function. For an example of some of this kind of work in photography I would strongly suggest Trachtenberg’s Reading American Photographs. Similarly, there is a extensive tradition in “reading” and interpreting everything from tree rings in environmental history, to Long Island parkway bridges in the history of technology, to forks and spoons in Bancroft award winning works of American History. This is all to highlight that there is a long tradition of understanding objects in context in history.  I really want my students to become, to borrow from Matt Kirshembalm borrowing from William Gibson “aware of the mechanisms” they are intrepreting. In this capacity I want my students to do extensive research using and interpreting born digital materials.

The case for writing about data

While history has a long history of working with deeply understanding the medium on which traces from the past are recorded, in my experience, much of that history tends to be focused on close reading. Taking a few examples and digging deeply into understanding them.  In the sciences the question is what do you do with a million galaxies, in the humanities it is what do you do with a million books? In both cases the answer is that we need ways conceptualize and refine ways to do distant reading or at least a hermeneutics of screwing around. In class we looked at a range of examples in this space, nGram, CHOA, tools like Voyer and even things as simple as Wordle.

The case for writing as part of building

Many my students wanted to go into public history. I want them to take the opportunity to deeply explore and reflect on how systems can be created to support their work. Here I am very much in the build things camp, but a big part of building is critically reflecting on what is built. For example, writing about the web presence of a war memorial on Flickr, Yelp, and Tripadviser can offer substantive insights into what and how we should make tools and platforms to support public history. I feel quite strongly that we need a body of design and development literature that deeply engages with analyzing, evaluating, digital humanities projects.

So did I get 20 papers?

I am thrilled to report that many of the students jumped at the opportunity to develop digital skills and build out web projects. In the end I received ten papers and ten digital projects. Several students who built digital projects made comments like “I decided to step outside my comfort zone,” and I was thrilled to see them do exactly that. I think the fact that we worked with so many relatively easy to use platforms for getting web projects up and out there (ie wordpress.com, omeka.net, google my maps, etc.) played a role in getting these projects up and out there. You can browse on the projects page of the site. Both the papers and the digital projects turned out great. From the proposals to the final projects I think you can really see development toward some of the core ideas. With that said there was one interesting trend that I am curious about getting other peoples thoughts on.

No one touched text mining/text analysis:

I thought that some of the students would take the opportunity to use tools like Vouyer or even something as simple as Wordle to work with some of the texts they are already working with in their research. Or, similarly, that some students would use some of the online corpra we looked at to explore some of their research interests in this kind of environment. To take these tools, or to take some of the corpora we were working with and use them to do some historical research. We talked about this a fair bit but no one took these up as a project idea. Instead, all of the papers students worked on explore born digital issues. Don’t get me wrong, students wrote very cool papers, for example, looking at the web presence of different war memorials and examining Fallout’s idea of the wasteland in the context of the history of apocalyptic writing. Further, the web projects turned out great too.

For whatever reason, no one wanted to try to work with the tools like Vouyer or Wordle, and no one took on the opportunity to write something up using Google nGram or Mark Davies Corpus of American English or Time Magazine corpus. In future iterations of this course I imagine I might require everyone to write a short post using at least one of these sorts of things with a set of texts. Thinking about primary source material is data sets is one of the most important things for historians to wrap their heads around.

Is text mining more radical than building for historians?

Students were excited to create digital projects. Students were excited to write about born digital source material. However, no one touched text mining or anything remotely related to distant reading.  Now it is possible that I just didn’t make this sound interesting enough. With that said, we did in fact have a great conversation about distant reading, we did cover some of the very easy to use tools and corpra early in the semester and everyone clearly got it. It makes me think that while in digital humanities conversations the idea of building as a hermeneutic is a hot topic that, at least in the case of digital history, distant reading may well be even more radical. In my own reflection, the kind of data mind set that one needs to develop and deploy in this sort of research feels more distant than the idea that we learn through building.

Posted in Digital Tools, Education, History | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Digital History: The Course That Never Ends

Posted on May 18, 2011 by tjowens

This is the third post in a multi-post series reflecting on the digital history course I taught this Semester at American University. For more on this you can read initial post about the course, the course syllabus, my first post in the series on the value of a group public blog and the second post on how technical to get in a digital history course.

92 blog posts,

195 comments,

20 projects.

This is the digital foot print of my digital history seminar.

I think we learned a lot this semester. My students reviewed and used a range of digital tools and engaged deeply with analyzing and interpreting a range of digital media. This was my first course. When I designed it I did what came naturally. I set up a public course blog. That blog served as our common place to publicly think aloud and work together. It served a valuable role in the face-to-face class. But I think it is going to serve an even more valuable role in the future.

Knowledge Base: Rethinking a course as knowledge production

I am not taking down the site. Like everything, there are varying degrees of quality to the content of the posts and the discussions, but there are some real jems in the posts. Tom Kenning’s reaction to YouTube time machine and the subsequent discussion is not only one of the only reviews of this project but it is also a great introduction to some of very interesting issues that emerge in the differences between academic and amateur (meant in the best possible way) approaches to history on the web. Similarly, Jordan Hillman’s post about the Euclid project started a great conversation about digital interfaces to cultural heritage. The content from this site will persist, and I imagine that in many cases some of this will end up as top hits for idiosyncratic Google searches and continue to provide fodder for conversation in the future.

Like a beaver dam the Dighist.org we built together will house the next generation

In Supersizing the Mind Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension philosopher Andy Clark talks about niche construction, a term he builds off of the evolutionary biology notion of environmental niche construction, as a way to think about how we make use of tools. Niche construction refers to “varying degrees, organisms chose their own habitats, mates, and resources and construct important components of their local environments such as nest, holes, burrows, paths, webs, dams, and chemical environments.” (2008, p.131) In each of these cases, animals behavior has altered their environment, and those alterations then become the basis for further adaptation. One of the primary examples of this is the spider’s web. “The existence of the web modifies the sources of natural selection within the spider’s selective niche, allowing subsequent selection for web-based forms of camouflage and communication.” (Clark, 2008, p.61) The spider’s web is interesting as an example of an individual organism and its tools, but beyond this the example of a beaver’s dam brings in far more complexity. Dams are created and inhabited by a collective group of individual beavers and further, are extended over time, outliving the lives of the individual beavers who occupy them. Further, beavers adapt to the niche which the beavers before them had created and the altered physical landscape which that dam has produced. What matters for Clark in this case is that “niche-construction activity leads to new feedback cycles.” (2008, p.62).

I intend dighist.org to be exactly this kind of beaver dam. While different students register and take the class at different times their thinking and work, as manifest in the structure of the content they have produced, will play an active role in future students that occupy the space.

In other words this course will never end…

Ok, fine. According to American University the course is over. End of semester. Students got their grades. Moving on. But frankly, grades are the least interesting part. Not only am I keeping the content up, I intend to use this same wordpress instance for future iterations of the course. Whoever joins future digital history courses I teach is going to register for this blog and start posting. I will move the current syllabus to an archived syllabus page, and post the next set of student projects right above the existing set.

Some of the particularly interesting reviews of tools and are going to become course content on future iterations of the syllabus. Some of the particularly interesting student web projects are going to become examples. Some of the particularly interesting student papers will become course readings. Students from this first session of the course will be welcome to continue posting if they like and further are invited to continue to comment on the course. When I created my course I said that the blog would be the course readings that we write ourselves. Now, even more, some of that content will become part of the readings for future iterations of the course.

Posted in Education, History, Teaching | 1 Comment

How Technical To Get When Teaching Digital History

Posted on May 7, 2011 by tjowens

This is the second in multi post series reflecting on the digital history course I taught this Semester at American University. For more on this you can read initial post about the course, the course syllabus and my first post in the series on the value of a group public blog.

Technical Skills: Training vs. Education

I decided early on that I would not be teaching HTML, CSS, PHP or JavaScript in my digital history seminar. While I know this kind of technical competency is valuable, the course was not intended to be about technical training. I think that was the right decision.  I also decided I would not require students to buy a domain name and hosting. I wanted student’s projects to lead them to what they would need to do. If a hosted option like WordPress.com or Omeka.net suited their needs they could go ahead and do that. I feel less confident about that decision.

There were several points in course discussions when my decision to not require students to have their own hosting and domain would hit me in waves. For example, when we talked about Omeka and WordPress I explained that these were both software that anyone could run on their own, and further edit and tweak to their hearts content. To demonstrate I downloaded them and opened up the files in a text editor. But I realized that many of the students had never clicked view source on a page before, and thus had no idea what even the HTML in the files meant. I was able to give a quick high level overview of what was going on in the files, but I felt like I really was not doing this justice.

Still, the projects are better because of this lack of a technical focus

With this said, I have no doubt that my students took on more sophisticated projects because they were not focused on developing technical competencies. Students were able to jump right into making some solid historical web projects. That is to say, the students who pick up wordpress.com or omeka.net for their projects did not get bogged down in learning how to use floats in their design, they were not fighting with the projects respective codexes to get a handle on what kinds of calls they can make to the database to display the total number of items or posts. Instead, for the most part, they made decisions about the technologies that were available to them and decided how they could bend those technologies to their purpose. The result is that they spent much more of their time thinking about audience, doing an environmental scan, developing content, and thinking about how they should evaluate their work. This resulted in much more polished, and as far as I am concerned more thoughtful projects than those I have seen come out of courses that started from first principles with HTML, CSS, PHP, etc.

So how do we teach things like HTML, CSS, and PHP when the real answer at this point is to decide on a content management system and bend it to your will?

I am largely happy with how this turned out, but I am concerned about what I have lost by taking out some of that technical focus. While the projects may be better, and frankly the intellectual work I am most interested in having my students engage in (thinking about audience, content, evaluation, and design) I am concerned that my students are not going to take courses that get them to develop deeper core competencies for working on the web. To this end, if/when I teach this course again I am going to require students to get into this at least as deep as cPanel.

I wanted to shy away from spending time on training when the goal of this course was still to serve as part of a liberal education. With that said, I have come around to  Jim Groom’s insistence that students buy hosting and at least one domain of one’s own. In this case, the education part comes from understanding how web hosting works.  In future versions of this course I will require students to buy a year of hosting on a shared host and at least one domain name. In lab sessions I would then require students to install WordPress and Omeka. I still don’t think it makes sense for a course like this to start with first principles and teach HTML, CSS, PHP and JavaScript. I would instead encourage them to play with available themes and show them how to use Firebug to pick out elements in those themes to tweak to bend them to their whims.

What I like about the idea of requiring students to use a shared host is that they get the simplicity of working with any of the hosted services (at this point many shared hosts have one click installs for WordPress and Omeka) but at the same time we can spend a bit of lab time poking around under the hood. We can take a look at the database, and we can make some tweaks to theme HTML, CSS, and PHP. I can take a little bit of time with them to get a working understanding of HTML and CSS in the context of working with these systems. I feel like this strikes a better balance of still letting us, jump right into work with all the benefits these systems provide but still having both the full range of possibilities that working with your own copy of the software provides and also getting a deeper sense of how the web and databases work.

So how technical is technical enough? I think I have a better sense of how I think the balance can work in this course in the future, but how do you think one should try to strike this balance? Further, where do we see the lines between training people to use particular tools and providing an education?

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Why A Public Course Group Blog? Reflections on My Digital History Course

Posted on May 4, 2011 by tjowens

This spring I had the pleasure of teaching a digital history seminar at American University. This post is the first in a multi-post series reflecting on teaching the course. For some context, I have posted the course description bellow. For more on this you can read my initial post about the course and the course syllabus.

This course will explore the  current and potential impact of digital media on the theory and practice of history. We will focus on how digital tools and resources are enabling new methods for analysis in traditional print scholarship and the possibilities for new forms of scholarship. For the former, we will explore tools for text analysis and visualization as well as work on interpreting new media forms as primary sources. For the latter, we will explore a range of production of new media history resources. As part of this process we will read a range of works on designing, interpreting and understanding digital media. Beyond course readings we will also critically engage a range of digital tools and resources.

Group Blogging Digital History on the Public Web

One of my three course goals was for students to “Thoughtfully and purposefully engage in dialog about history on the public web with a range of stakeholders in digital history: historians, archivists, museum professionals, educators, and armatures, etc.” Beyond learning about digital history I wanted my students to do digital history. In that capacity I wanted them to engage with the public web and practice public writing. This, in part, meant developing a voice as a blogger and as a blog commenter. I decided to approach this goal through a group blog. I was excited about the prospect us all working and commenting in the same space. My experience participating in PlayThePast over the last six months has opened my eyes to how powerful participating in a group blog can be and I wanted students to get a taste for that.

Beyond meeting this goal I think this approach brought with it a few other benefits.

Blogging enabled an emergent curriculum

A digital history course is fundamentally different from many other kinds of courses. The field is nascent, there are fascinating developments in digital history on the open web that have little to do with the academy, and novel projects, papers, and online resources are appearing almost daily. I was excited to see the blog serve as a mechanism for enabling a more emergent curriculum as students began to wade in the constant stream of new work and ideas in digital history.

I was thrilled to see this emergent curriculum in the first post, which covered content which was nowhere to be found on the syllabus. One of my students stumbled across Youtube Time Machine and blogged about it. Importantly, the brief conversation we had about Youtube Time Machine on the blog, and subsequently in class broached many of the issues I wanted to get into in the course. It provided a point of reflection on armature vs. academic histories online, and more importantly provided a moment to think about how a seemingly technical detail (assigning a datetime to an object) can itself be a sophisticated hermeneutic problem. (Is this the date the thing is about? The date it was recorded? Should this be the date range of the time the creator worked on it? Should this be the date range of the movement the artist was a part of? What do we do with this remix of a video from 1920 that includes a song from 1980 and was clearly remixed in 2007?).

This site, and our discussion of it, ended up serving as a invaluable point of reference for our later discussions. In future versions of the course I think I am going to plan on building in this kind of “show and tell” component into a formal assignment and require all of the students to, at some point, interject their thoughts on some found content into the curriculum.

Posts as conversation starters and sustainers

Every week we had between 2-5 blog posts reacting to course content. Each of those posts would have 1-4 comments. Students who blogged about a piece of writing were supposed to use their post as a means to kick off discussion of the text. Students who blogged about a piece of software were supposed to demo the software and engage the class in a discussion of the implications of the software for the study and practice of history.  This worked quite well. In particular, it meant there were already lively discussions going on around the texts and tools and that anyone giving a presentation absolutely could not wing it.

Everyone had at least the prop of their post to refer to as they lead discussion or demoed a tool. When I woke up Wednesday mornings and reviewed all of the posts and comments they would generally fit together quite nicely, further if we hit a lul in the conversation I had a list of comments to pull from. Lastly, as I picked all of these tools and texts for a reason, I was able to hit home points that appeared in student posts and bring up  issues I thought were critical that had not emerged in the discussions. In short, the kind of externalized thought embodied in the posts and comments was invaluable for allowing me to start, sustain, and have a sense of what students were taking away from our work.

Class Blogging Brought Out Different Voices

Some of my students talked a lot in class, some of them talked a lot on the blog. By making part of our weekly discussions occur asynchronously online I was able to hear different voices and fold those into our in class discussions. Beyond this, it became clear that some students were developing different voices in their public writing on the blog. Specifically, students were assuming familiarity in class that they were not assuming on the blog. I was particularly happy about this as it represented students embracing the notion of writing and speaking to different audiences.

My course was of a bit of an awkward size and makeup and we met in a bit of an awkward space. I had 20 students, which is a too large for my tastes for a seminar style class. Further, ten of them were undergraduate students and ten were graduate students. The student distribution was a more or less statistically normal distribution (a few PhD students, a good number of MA students, a good amount of advanced undergraduates and a few freshmen). Lastly, our class met in a computer lab, one of those spaces set up for traditional instruction where everyone sits at their computer in rows facing toward a screen. Having students use the blog as another communication channel helped make these classroom discussions work. Further, providing the course blog as another communication channel meant that I heard from everyone, not just the most talkative.

In future versions of this course I think I will make this lesson a bit more clear. First, I will require more commenting. This time around I required everyone to write at least six substantive comments. In the future I think I will require everyone to write a substantive comment on at least one post a week. Beyond that, I intend to make clear in the participation section that talking in class and talking on the blog are both very valuable ways to participate in the course. If students tend to be shy in class I still would encourage them to talk more, but I would also make it clear that they can also put more energy into communicating on the blog.

Note to self: Put more of this on the web

I am feeling that in the future it might be better to explicitly plan the class to generate a certain level of content on an ongoing basis. I would like the class to be generating enough content to not only sustain our conversation with each other but also invite conversation with the broader digital history community. In this framework I would try to schedule this a bit more tightly, having different students stagger posting their project proposals so that everyone could agree to review each other’s work.

Posted in Education, History, Teaching | Tagged , , | 6 Comments