Digital Humanities @ Stanford

DLCL ATS round-up, summer 2025

Quinn Dombrowski — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · September 19, 2025

Fall quarter starts on Monday, so it's time for what I've been up to lately!

Textile Makerspace

The Textile Makerspace was busy all summer, with crafters undeterred by the locked doors of Pigott Hall. Even less-commonly used machines like the Cricut found an audience, and I've enjoyed seeing some of the projects that people have put together.

There's a lot of change going on with Making@Stanford, the organization that brought together and funded a diverse set of makerspaces across campus. The program staff who were the driving force behind it -- in terms of fundraising, coordination, and on-the-ground support with troubleshooting and repairs -- are no longer there, as the result of budget cuts and funding constraints. The creative making courses in Mechanical Engineering that had enormous waiting lists, such as the silver pendant class, are no longer being offered. The space manager for the large Product Relization Lab makerspace was one of the victims of campus layoffs. Making@Stanford has been my primary funder since 2022, covering supplies, new equipment and -- most significantly -- student staffing. The Textile Makerspace doesn't have an ongoing operating budget beyond the year-by-year grants we received from Making@Stanford. We haven't spent down everything we've received already and can make it through this year, but trying to secure more reliable funding in an already challenging budgetary time has to be at the top of my to-do list this year.

The news isn't all grim, though: Mark Algee-Hewitt, the new director of our local digital humanities center, CESTA, invited me to open a second location for the Textile Makerspace on the 4th floor of Wallenberg. We've done a lot with the little computer lab I was given in 2018, but it's crowded, and it's nearly impossible to run any sort of workshop or activity without needing to book the larger room down the hall.

After seeing the runaway success of an event in the History department where staff and others got together with some catered lunch and learned basic crochet and knitting (or brought their own craft projects), it seemed like a sensible split would be to take the yarn-based crafts (knitting, knitting machines, crochet, weaving) and move those to the new space in CESTA. There's lots of seating, plenty of tables for the large knitting machines (including an adjustable-height one that will be perfect for knitting machine work), couches, and a kitchen. The space is also open all day and has multiple coffee machines, making it the perfect spot for people to drop by and do some casual crafting alone or with friends.

All the sewing supplies and equipment will stay in the original Textile Makerspace, which now has more room to spread out without accommodating all the yarn crafts. We got a new serger over the summer, a donation from Mary-Ellen Petrich. I'm hoping to give hand embroidery more room in the Textile Makerspace as well.

The GSE Makery, a makerspace that's always been well aligned with us and who we've shared staffing with in the past, is moving to a new location too, just across the street from us. Over the summer, I learned how to use the TC2 digital loom, where my practice project was to make some signage for the new space in CESTA: "Text* Lab", to encompass both the YarnLab and a book digitization station that will be sharing the space. We've also been working more with Zach Lannes and the MakerBar program at Terman Library, where they're ready to add more looms to the collection of equipment that people can check out. We wrapped up the summer with a well-attended station at the Engineering Library Open House.

In addition to my "Data Visualization with Textiles" class in the spring, I'm looking forward to teaching some weaving and embroidery as part of Kathryn Starkey's winter course "Making the Middle Ages: Objects and Meaning Then and Now".

Despite the funding uncertainties, I'm optimistic about this year for the Textile Makerspace and new YarnLab. It would be disingenous to underplay the importance of the funding we got from Making@Stanford, but I do think there's something to the idea (as the cliché goes) that the true Making@Stanford may have been the friends we made along the way, and nothing can stop us from talking to each other and working together.

Existing projects

Over the summer, the Data-Sitters Club collaborated with Anastasia Salter and John Murray on a new book about AI and vibe-coding, DSC 23: Dawn of the Coasting AI. Since publishing it, we've been running a little survey about people's attitudes about AI, which we'll be discussing (along with our own takes) for DSC 24. DSC 25 is also in the works, probably on fine-tuning BERT for classification problems.

Ty Davidian won the local Wreden Prize for book collecting, which made him eligible for a national competition sponsored by the Antiquarian Booksellers of America and the Library of Congress. His Futurist Archive project won first place, and will be celebrated in an event in DC later this month. A couple years ago, he and I walked through developing a spreadsheet for him to gather metadata about items in his collection. The plan at that point was for me to use Wax to generate a static site out of the spreadsheet. But since he needed something to demo sooner rather than later, Ty sat down and learned to use WordPress and built the site himself from the ground up. As much as I enjoy teaching people how to make things with digital tools, hearing this news from Ty was one of my prouder moments as a teacher. I'd helped him get started with thinking about the data, and he just... ran with it. He went and figured it out, the same way I did at his age. Picked a tool, learned enough to make a thing, and learned a lot more as he made it. I've got my own feelings about WordPress, as someone with a certain set of priorities and goals when I make websites, but it's a perfectly reasonable choice given where he's at and the nature of his project, and all the more so since it empowered him to sit down and make a thing in a short period of time. That's a kind of authentic, old-school digital humanities experience that makes me happy to see my students encounter.

This summer I continued working with Cécile Alduy on modernizing the workflows for French computational text analysis that my predecessor set up, as part of her project on news discourse about the murder of an 11-year-old in France. I expect I'll be continuing to revisit and refine the Jupyter notebooks I put together for her, and tweaking them to work with future projects.

I've also continued working with Davis Tantillo on a couple projects related to French book reviews, and we've started exploring various research questions related to French- vs. English-language Wikipedia. For both of these, it's been striking how much help genAI plugins for coding have been. Web scraping and sorting out the syntax for APIs I don't know well go much faster with help from LLMs. I'm still a little wary of turning people with little to no coding experience loose with vibe-coding -- even if you're being careful, the code that gets generated is often the laziest, quickest solution with side-effects to match (especially when working with non-English text) -- but for certain kinds of coding tasks I've always hated and struggled with, it's been a game-changer.

The Global Medieval Sourcebook feels like it continues to be asymptotically close to done, but I sorted out a few things this summer including how to extract the full text from the beautifully-formatted PDFs for some kind of screen-based display and searchability. Once all the final PDFs are ready, it shouldn't take terribly long to build the new static site and retire the aging Drupal version. But so far, saying it'll be done this quarter has reliably jinxed things, so it'll get there when it gets there.

There hasn't been much progress on the website for the Jewish cookbooks project with competing priorities on the library end, but I'm hoping to meet with Eitan Kensky this quarter and come up with a plan. He'll be hiring a student assistant to help with bulk collections, including additional cookbooks, so I see this one as an ongoing project with a lot of interesting potential angles for new research and tool development.

There are a number of projects with Adrian Daub, around the history of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies courses at Stanford, letters to Christine Blasey Ford, and cancel culture articles on Wikipedia that are progressing at their own pace, with some articles in the pipeline, and some interesting upcoming opportunities for data analysis.

SILICON had numerous summer interns working on interesting projects, and I was able to attend and take notes at one of the Script Encoding Working Group meetings. It's taken some time, but I'm starting to feel pretty comfortable with the note-taking -- I can get through most meetings now without having to backchannel ask questions about jargon, either on the language side or the Unicode process side. I get a lot of satisfaction being able to put my semi-transcript note-taking skills to use as part of a slow, deliberative, careful infrastructure.

It's unclear where things stand with the Browsertrix Cloud pilot, or web archiving in general after the library's web archivist position was eliminated in the campus layoffs. At the same time, there continues to be a fair bit of interest in web archiving, and Browsertrix Cloud is a compelling option as a DIY or library-facilitated tool. This project exists in a complex landscape of priorities, goals, and funding constraints, but I hope to continue to advocate for it, and for clarifying to what extent we're using it as an internal tool vs. an offering for researchers.

A simpler, but similar, case is Transkribus: there are quite a few people using it, I facilitate access to our campus subscription seats, but it's an informal word-of-mouth situation rather than a specific service offering in the library. At the retreat for the Research Data Services group I belong to on the library side, I advocated for the group being clearer about what is and isn't a service, and then promoting and managing those things that are services accordingly. But these sorts of changes take time to implement.

A lot of the folks I work with have been traveling over the summer, so I'll be catching up with those projects in the fall: Flamenco letras (Tania Flores), Network Analysis of Vsesvit (Georgii Korotkov), Ukrainian Poetry on Social Media during the Russia's Full-Scale Invasion Against Ukraine (Alyssa Virker), Eva Biss in Ukrainian and diasporic canons (Ali Karakaya), and the Senegalese Countercultural Movements (Fatoumata Seck).

This summer I've been chipping away at DLCL corpora, trying to compile computationally-usable versions of the texts on the MA reading lists for each of the sub-departments. It's been a fascinating and often frustrating look at different cultural practices around creating digital editions of classic literary works -- or leaving them in the print realm. This project continues to push the boundaries of my skill on the library degree side (wrangling different editions, sleuthing down copies in various formats), data wrangling side (creating metadata, file management, OCR on buggy virtual machines), and DH pedagogy side (what should this look like to be maximally useful to students)? On the other hand, it's been a good opportunity to collaborate more with the subject-area librarians who work with my departments. The DLCL dissertations/syllabi project is another piece of this larger project, but I made less progress than I hoped as I was working on finding and digitizing the reading lists.

And finally, I lost some time this summer dealing with a laptop that would no longer charge, where the fix involved replacing the hard drive as well. Restoring data from the cloud backup has been slow and buggy and incomplete, and I expect I'll be dealing with reconstructing and digging up missing data for some time still. Once a week or so, I still run into packages that are missing or software that's still not configured the way I need it.

Writing

The Data-Sitters Club put together a couple short pieces this summer, one for a handbook fo DH and children's literature, and another talking about toolbuilding and infrastructure.

Beyond that, there hasn't been a lot of writing this summer, though I continue to gather materials for the Handbook of Textile Dataviz that I'm hoping to use in the spring.

Talks and events

I've dreamed of going to DEFCON since I was a child, and it was an honor to get a talk on SUCHO accepted this year as part of the Policy track. I attended DEFCON instead of DH 2025 as my conference for the year, and it was an absolutely remarkable, generative experience. I was surprised at how much DEFCON overlapped with the Makerspace side of my job, with a culture of making exemplified by electronic badges but also other creations. I met some people interested in expanding the makerspace "village" (community activity center) to include textile making, and I can definitely imagine returning to DEFCON in the future for some inspiration at the intersection of data and craft.

I also participated in the Open Space Day of the Digital Academy at Bielefeld University, talking about workflows for digital humanities, and how actually talking to and understanding the needs of your collaborators underpins successful projects.

Yesterday was the orientation for the new group of grad students, who seem like a particularly dynamic bunch. There's a lot of uncertainty in the world at large, and on campuses everywhere, as we go into the fall (and quite a lot of work ahead, for instance, in completely rethinking my #DHRPG project management class, now that there are no longer meaningfully NEH grants to use as a final writing assignment). Still, it feels like meaningful work with good people, and I'm grateful for that.

DLCL ATS round-up, spring 2025

Quinn Dombrowski — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · July 1, 2025

I was on leave for much of winter quarter, so this update catches up on work projects for the rest of the 2024-2025 academic year.

Textile Makerspace & Classes

While I was on leave, Jacob Ramirez from the GSE Makery stepped in to help manage the Textile Specialist students shared between our two programs. While I wasn't able to do as much with it as I'd hoped this year in terms of shared programming, it was a useful step towards imagining what alternate makerspace staffing models might look like more generally. Differences in HR processes between our two units came up a few times, and would be something worth smoothing out for a broader program.

Spring is always a busy time for the Textile Makerspace, with lots of students coming in for the Data Visualization with Textiles class. I had about 20 students this year, and more from the humanities than in the past. Anne Ladyem McDivitt, Mary-Ellen Petrich, and Snowden Becker helped out by running workshops for the students. A more detailed writeup of the end-of-the-quarter showcase and the final projects students were willing to share is forthcoming, but I was impressed with all the varied and thoughtful work that the students did, spanning machine knitting, weaving, crochet, knitting, embroidery, and sewing. The students' midterm assignments -- where they had 90 minutes to make, from start to finish, a visualization of some part of the gender data for Stanford faculty -- were particularly good this year, and ended up being a major part of the showcase.

At the end of the quarter, Zach Lannes from the Terman MakerBar borrowed our guestbook loom for part of their end-of-quarter de-stressing activities for students. We've got tentative plans for joint workshops next academic year.

Existing projects

Just in time for a presentation at the ACH 2025 virtual conference, the Data-Sitters Club published DSC 22: Lee Skallerup Bessette, Zine-Sitter, which includes an interview with Julia Evans and Marie LeBlanc Flanagan of Wizard Zines, home of my favorite tech zines.

The grad student projects that were presented at the fall ACH conference -- The Futurist Archive (Ty Davidian), Flamenco letras (Tania Flores), Network Analysis of Vsesvit (Georgii Korotkov) and Where is the world for Montréal? (Chloé Brault) -- have been making incremental progress on their own. The ACH 2025 conference (held 7 months after the last one, due to scheduling issues) featured Alyssa Virker's work on Ukrainian Poetry on Social Media during the Russia's Full-Scale Invasion Against Ukraine. Awkwardly, I introduced Tania to Sara Arribas Colmenar at Penn State, who also works on dance and networks -- using a really beautiful #DHmakes angle of physicalizing these networks through yarn. Small world that academia is, they already knew each other, but I always find it joyful to discover that the work I help support exists in a broader community where it's not the only digital project.

I've continued working with Ali Karakaya on his Eva Biss project from fall quarter as part of the CESTA Fellows program, and for a number of conference presentations.

The Senegalese Countercultural Movements (Fatoumata Seck) project has been on hold, other than helping enhance the resolution of some images for the related book project. Global Medieval Sourcebook (Kathryn Starkey) is in wrap-up mode, with an eye towards a less labor-intensive process for future expansion. The final, painstakingly-formatted PDF files are almost entirely ready, and we should be able to fully switch over to a static site version and decommission the long-suffering Drupal instance by the end of the summer.

Taking time away from work in the winter gave me the chance to reflect on some of my unfinished projects, and I've come to the conclusion that the Multilingual Harry Potter Fanfic is not going to be one I devote more time to. It started 6 years ago, was an excellent learning experience on multiple technical and data-wrangling fronts, I still think the topic is fascinating and fanfic is a great environment for doing multilingual work, but everything J.K. Rowling does now is too hateful for me to want to work on it. On top of it, one of my original collaborators on the project, Masha Gorshkova, just graduated this year, so it's really time to officially put this to bed, even without an article or data set to point to. On the other hand, while I haven't made much progress on the DLCL Dissertations/Syllabi ideas that I was bouncing around with grad students in the fall, I'm hoping to take a fresh look at that over this summer.

Spring included some useful discussions with Hannah Frost about the future of the Browsertrix Cloud pilot and how we might move things forward. With Alix Keener no longer being at Stanford Libraries and no replacement on the horizon for her position, there's fewer people around to help pitch in on the tasks that would go into service development. Even having a dedicated student-type assistant on it would go a long way in terms of being able to run experiments and do quality control. But I continue to use it and advocate for it as part of our toolkit, where I can.

For various reasons, the Jewish cookbooks exhibit was only on display for a short time, but the project continues to amuse and delight through presentations that Eitan Kensky and I have given at SF State and ACH 2025. Our digitized corpus has expanded a bit with help from student assistants, and I'd like to put together a draft version of a website for the project by the end of the summer.

SILICON continues apace, with the Face/Interface conference in January right before I was on leave, a large cohort of summer interns in partnership with UNESCO and Unicode, and also just the ongoing maintenance work of adding new characters to the standard, prepping code charts for the fall release, and a million small tasks in between. Due to various conflicts I was only able to take notes at one of the Script Encoding Working Group meetings this spring, but it's always a pleasure to do.

Off and on, I continue to get requests for access to the Transkribus seats that come with our membership, as well as additional pages. I have a summer project going with Rebecca Wingfield and Chloé Brault Mackennon to see what we can do to train a model on the hands used to catalog Alan Ginsberg's library.

I've continued helping out on Adrian Daub and Connor Yankowitz's project looking at the history of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies courses at Stanford. The data they're working with is extremely messy, and every new inquiry feels like it needs a new way to wrangle the data. It makes me wonder whether it might be worthwhile to invest some thought and time in remediating at least some of the Stanford course registry data sets to facilitate future work.

SUCHO continues, with the meme wall continuously expanding, and funding going out to the Ukraine Heritage Monitoring Lab for expanding their mobile digitization kits.

New projects

This quarter I've been working with Davis Tantillo on what started off as a project on autofiction, but it's evolved into looking at reader response to award-winning French fiction via popular book review sites. It's been a good reminder of the utility of the Data-Sitters Club work, where I've got pieces written up that I can pull out at a moment's notice when we're wrestling with questions like "What should I put in a corpus?" or "How do I make sense of all these texts?"

Towards the end of the quarter, I got to work with Cécile Alduy on a project looking at media discourse around the murder of an 11-year-old French schoolgirl. The text analysis workflow set up by my predecessor had finally reached its end-of-life (involving software that no longer would run at all), so I wrote some Jupyter notebooks for her to do similar things, and showed her how to run them using Google Colab. Even though it too is getting a little old and buggy, Shifterator was a really useful package here, along with Antconc and Principal Component Analysis.

Writing

The article Adrian Daub and I wrote on "Cancel Culture" articles on Wikipedia is now going through revisions. I haven't done much new writing this quarter, though I've put a fair bit of thought into how I want to structure the Handbook to Data Visualization with Textiles, and I hope to start writing on that over the summer.

Talks and events

At ACH 2025, I presented with Eitan on the Jewish cookbook project, and participated in a #DHmakes session at the "care fair" on the last day. While I got a piece on DH failure accepted into the international DH 2025 conference, I decided against traveling internationally this summer. Instead, I'll be talking at DEFCON in August about SUCHO and opening up data rescue efforts to a larger group of volunteers (under the conference theme "Access Everywhere").

DLCL ATS round-up, fall 2024

Quinn Dombrowski — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 16:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · January 7, 2025

Textile Makerspace

This fall was the first chance for the Textile Makerspace and GSE Makery to pilot a joint textile-specialist staffing program. We got off to a bit of a slow start after our initial staffing plans fell apart the week before the quarter began, but by the end of the quarter we had three new student assistants onboarded and holding regular hours, in addition to one of my returning students from last year. With any luck, we'll be on steadier footing with staffing this quarter.

The logistics involved with getting the necessary spinning wheels have been non-trivial, but Anna Jerve (from Stanford Libraries / Doerr School) and I have continued working towards our "fleece to fiber" spinning club idea, which is now likely to debut as an optional track as part of the Data Visualization with Textiles class in the spring.

Classes

This fall I taught my non-English text analysis class on a condensed schedule, helping students make progress on projects ranging from Ukrainian poetry social media, to Japanese literature, to multilingual corpus building as scaffolding for several future projects. DSC 19: Shelley and the Bad Corpus continues to be one of the most useful Data-Sitters Club books to give to students getting started. This was also the first time I attempted to teach some basic Python for literary analysis using the path of of LLM prompting with Codeium. It was an interesting and useful experience, and good food for thought for how I might teach similar things in the future.

Existing projects

During the fall, the Data-Sitters Club published DSC Super Special #1: The Data-Sitters Debate at Dartmouth, which is a near-verbatim transcript of an argument we got into when we met in person in March 2023 about the nature of the project and what we're trying to accomplish with it. If you ever wanted to be a fly on the wall for a project meeting with a mix of enthusiasts and skeptics of computational text analysis, here's your chance. That debate also led to a new spin-off series, Data-Sitters Little TL;DR, aimed at beginners, with our starter book, DH Curious?.

It was great to see The Futurist Archive (Ty Davidian), Flamenco letras (Tania Flores), Network Analysis of Vsesvit (Georgii Korotkov) and Where is the world for Montréal? (Chloé Brault) presented at the ACH conference this fall. As a small point of pride, my own department (DLCL) made up a majority of the Stanford representatives at the conference. It feels like I've actually gotten some traction on increasing the visibility of the multilingual DH work that goes on here, over the course of the last 6 years.

The Senegalese Countercultural Movements project, Global Medieval Sourcebook, Multilingual Harry Potter Fanfic, and letters to Christine Blasey Ford were all more or less on hold during the fall.

We finally had the Browsertrix Cloud pilot project debrief, where we decided to continue the pilot for another year and start exploring better pipelines for getting the data from the Browsertrix cloud servers into the Stanford Digital Repository. I think this is going to be an invaluable tool for meaningfully preserving a lot of website-based DH work in my department and beyond.

Collaborating with Eitan Kensky, Simon Wiles, and Kristen Valenti, the first phase of the Jewish cookbooks project is near completion. Due to assorted delays, the exhibit wasn't fully installed by the end of fall quarter, but it will be up in the beginning of the winter. Our exploration of the data we have so far has definitely motivated Eitan and me to continue building out that data set and interrogating it in different ways. I'm hoping to put together some kind of web-based version of the exhibit to share some of the fun things we've found and solicit ideas for future directions.

During fall quarter, I participated in a strategic planning meeting for SILICON and gave summer interns feedback on their presentations for the Unicode technology workshop. I've also been participating in the Script Encoding Working Group meetings, mostly as a notetaker, but I'm hoping to get more involved later this year. I also helped sort out what Stanford can offer around computing resources for building and running inference on language models, as part of the SILICON Practitioners' Program.

Interest in Transkribus continues, with periodic requests from people throughout campus to get access to the user seats that would enable them to access the more powerful large models, and I'm happy to oblige.

I did some more work with Adrian Daub and Connor Yankowitz, looking at the history of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies courses at Stanford, helping clean and otherwise wrangle their extensive data set of course descriptions from across the 20th century.

Following the results of the 2024 election, SUCHO returned to a place of prominence in my work life: both in relation to our ongoing work with Ukraine, and as a model for capturing other at-risk data. SUCHO and Webrecorder collaborated on a couple of web archiving workshops at the end of the year, co-sponsored by ACH, and we worked with Amanda Visconti on a zine capturing the highlights.

Finally, the ACH AI working group met at the ACH conference and discussed some concrete things that we can do together. One idea that came up as a way to capture some of the conversations we've been having on our own campuses was a zine, and we had a couple co-working sessions at the end of the year. I'm hoping to finish that by the end of the month.

New projects

Since spring of last year, I've been exploring a Multilingual DH Co-Op, with a mix of workshops, co-working / debugging, and informally sharing what we've been working on. As usual with starting up something new, figuring out the scheduling was a major challenge. There was also some question about what the way in could be for participants who don't currently have a DH project of their own. The answer turned out to be the DLCL dissertations project: grad students in my department were very interested, as well as interested in related data sets that are not currently compiled (or necessarily easily compilable), around course offerings / syllabi and reading lists. In a moment where at least one of my sub-departments (Slavic) is talking with grad students about reshaping things like program requirements and reading lists, the students were very interested in the potential of a data-driven perspective on those issues. Realistically, we won't be picking up this thread until spring, but I'm hoping to make some progress on getting some of the course data (or at least getting a sense of what is possible to get) in the meantime.

Writing

As part of the upcoming IMLS National Forum Data Speculations: A National Forum on Library Digital Stewardship for Copyrighted Contemporary Culture, I wrote a position paper on what we lose when in-copyright data is not available to us in a computable (and shareable) format. I'll be discussing it at the forum later this month.

Adrian Daub and I also finished up an article on "Cancel Culture" articles on Wikipedia.

Talks and events

At ACH 2024, I presented on a #DHmakes roundtable, talking about data visualization with textiles, and was one of the speakers on the panel on "Emerging Pathways to Supporting Digital Humanities Research on Copyrighted Literature". I also revisited my "Taxonomy of Failure" 2018 talk for the HERMES doctoral network in Germany, at a virtual event on error culture. Finally, I held a community event on data visualization with textiles at UCLA at the end of the year, organized by Cindy Nguyen, an assistant professor at UCLA who I worked with at UC Berkeley when she was a grad student.

Upcoming

For the first time, I won't be writing an ATS round-up for winter 2025. I'll be taking leave in February and March -- the first time I've taken any sizable amount of time off in my entire life. I'm looking forward to picking things up in spring, teaching Data Visualization with Textiles, continuing with the Multilingual DH Co-Op, along with ongoing project work.

DLCL ATS round-up, summer 2024

Quinn Dombrowski — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · September 24, 2024

The summer was a relatively quiet period, and a much-needed break after the spring.

Textile Makerspace

Thanks to Jordan Minion and Kelsey Chen, we were able to hold open hours at the Textile Makerspace for much of the summer, including partnering with Stanford Summer Sessions to help fund student staff hours as part of their programming.

The Textile Makerspace hosted a crochet workshop for folks from the Mills Legal Clinic, organized with Candice Adams. It was a vindicating moment for the circular knitting machine, which I brought out for the one participant who was struggling after insisting they weren't a crafty person. Cranking a handle was totally doable, though, and they were the only participant who walked away with a finished scarf.

We received a donation of canvas and zipper stock from Craig Milroy, a Making@Stanford colleague in the Product Realization Lab. In the process, I learned that a forklift can squeeze through the bike lane and avoid the Duena St. gate.

I've got plans coming together with Anna Jerve (also from Stanford Libraries and Doerr School) to pilot a "fleece to fiber" spinning club this fall. We've identified a real interest that spans students and staff, and I can see points of intersection with the developing Environmental Humanities program in DLCL as well.

There's been an outpouring of interest in the joint textile specialist program with the Makery, and we'll have to make some hard choices about staffing for this upcoming year. But I'm excited about the potential of this collaborative staffing model.

Classes

For this upcoming year, I'm teaching a compressed version of the non-English DH class in the fall, taking the winter off, then textile data visualization in the spring. I've been giving some thought this summer to what it might look like to teach a more coding-oriented version of non-English DH using generative AI plugins, but we'll see what the students' needs and interests (and languages) are.

I'll also be running something we're calling the DH Co-Op throughout the year, focused mutual support for people who do non-English DH projects. I've built a very simple starter website, and have been mulling over different workshop and activity options for the group.

Existing projects

As the summer wrapped up, I finished the next piece for The Data-Sitters Club, DSC #21: Quinn and the Trouble with Environments. We've also got DSC Super Special 1: Data-Sitters Debate at Dartmouth almost ready to go, along with a new sub-series for beginners.

The Senegalese Countercultural Movements project, Global Medieval Sourcebook, Multilingual Harry Potter fanfic, and letters to Christine Blasey Ford projects have been on hold over the summer, and The Futurist Archive and Flamenco letras have been progressing on their own.

I revisited the DLCL alumni data this summer to create handouts for fall visits to potential grad program applicants, and got to beta test them as part of new student orientation. Progress has been slow on revisiting the DLCL dissertations but I've had some better ideas recently for how to process that data than last time I worked on it.

Off and on through the summer, I've been working with Eitan Kensky and Kristen Vallenti on the Jewish cookbooks project. It's been a lot of fun to think through different "data questions" that could be answered by a data set of ~70,000 recipes from assorted Jewish community cookbooks. We're in the process of getting the exhibit together right now, and I'm hard at work at crunching all the data to see what answers turn up.

SILICON continues to be a source of joy in my list of work projects. Audrey Gao has done an amazing job wrangling a team of summer interns, planning for the Face/Interface conference in 2025 is well underway, and I've become the primary note-taker for the monthly meetings of the Script Encoding Working Group (SEW). Because I needed a new symbol gesturing to my beginnings as a Slavic medievalist, I got tattoos this summer of my favorite problem-child Unicode character, Cyrillic multi-ocular o, in its original form and in its Unicode character representation. It's manuscripts, it's whimsy, it's reality vs. data, it's Unicode, and it captures a lot of the things I love about my work.

We haven't yet had the debrief meeting after the first year of the Browsertrix Cloud pilot but I'mo hopeful we'll be able to continue subscribing to the tool as a resource particularly for archiving complex digital humanities sites before they begin to decay.

There's been ongoing interest in Transkribus throughout the summer, both for library-internal things (e.g. better accessibility for special collections materials) and for faculty projects (e.g. Alice Staveley's work on Virginia Woolf and Hogarth Press.) There's no shortage of AI-powered handwritten text recognition tools available now, but I really appreciate what Transkribus is doing to create a very low-barrier-to-entry, accessible tool for even non-technical scholars to do this work on their own, using models trained on data you can feel good about. I think Transkribus, and HTR workflows in general, have a lot of potential as a pragmatic use of AI in libraries, actually driven by user needs.

I didn't get very far on the list of website accessibility issues across various sites; I suspect that may end up being a winter project.

Over the summer, Richard Tsai (president of the Taiwanese Association for DH) visited Stanford and gave a talk on his work developing a Mandarin-language LLM specifically for use in Taiwan. It was inspiring to see what people can accomplish when training models to level the playing field for specific linguistic cultural contexts. There was some ad-hoc discussion related to the ACH AI working group at the DH conference this summer, and we have an upcoming meeting and a panel slot at the virtual ACH conference in November. Also at the DH conference, I wrapped up my responsibilities as secretary of the ADHO Constituent Organization Board,

At the beginning of this month, Roopika Risam and I passed the ACH presidency torch to Lauren Tilton and Andy Janco. It's one of the first times I've ever been able to hand something big over to someone else. It was strange but very satisfying writing "presidential transition" emails that spelled out what I had gotten done, what I hadn't managed to finish, and where various initiatives were. While I'm no longer the voting representative of ACH on the ADHO Constituent Organization Board, I'm still serving as secretary through the DH conference this summer. I think this marks the first time I'm not formally involved in running any DH professional organizations since 2014.

New projects

There was enough to do on my existing projects, plus writing obligations I'd signed myself up for, that I actually managed to not start any new projects this summer!

I did get to spend a day at the D-School's new print shop as it was in development, though, and had a wonderful time learning about how their printing press works and trying out various donated plates, including some from Stanford Libraries (as well as the East Asian library, under its older Chinese name), many from the Hoover Institute, and lots of whimsical assorted things.

Writing

This summer, the Data-Sitters Club finished editing our piece for the Journal of Electronic Publishing. Also with the Journal of Electronic Publishing, this summer an article came out on the history and future of multilingual publishing, with a focus on the early computing years and transition to Unicode. "Encoding Multilingualism: Technical Affordances of Multilingual Publication from Manuscripts to Unicode and OpenType", with Manish Goregaokar, Ben Joeng (Yang), and Abeera Kamran, ended up being a pared down version of a truly wild rabbit hole I went down early in the year, that initially included brief histories of the typewriter and printing press across several scripts. As far as I know, it may also be the first publication that's used materials from Stanford's Unicode Collection of materials, the first collection I was involved in acquiring.

"Voices from the Server Room: Humanists in HPC", a collaboratively-authored piece with many DH folks who do/did DH support for HPC and the potential of that role as a career path for humanists, came out as part of Computational Humanities, ed. Jessica Marie Johnson, David Mimno, and Lauren Tilton.

I wrote a about the Textile Makerspace and the Data Visualization with Textiles class as a "statement of practice" piece for the Journal of Modern Craft.

And, despite several delays (that I joked were just me honoring the theme of the edited volume), I managed to write a piece entitled "Stop Lying to Yourself: Collective Delusion and Digital Humanities Grant Funding" for the volume Reframing Failure, ed. Michael Donnae and Anna-Maria Sichani.

Talks and events

DH 2024 was busy, between my remaining duties as ADHO secretary and the four things I'd gotten accepted to the conference: a poster for SILICON, a workshop on teaching machine learning in the humanities, a #DHMakes mini-conference, and a one-shot campaign of the #DHRPG I created for my project management class. Unfortunately, everything but the poster ended up double-booked with ADHO secretary responsibilities, so I recorded a video about my Future Text class from last year, scared up some friends/dopplegangers to run the #DHRPG (huge thanks to Paige Morgan and Brandon Walsh for that), and dropped into #DHMakes during the break (and wove a shawl in solidarity while taking notes for ADHO).

DLCL ATS round-up, spring 2024

Quinn Dombrowski — Sun, 16 Jun 2024 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · June 17, 2024

This spring was busy, between making progress on projects, teaching Data Visualization with Textiles, and laying the the groundwork for next year.

Textile Makerspace

The Textile Makerspace continues to thrive, with five student staff in the spring supporting the students in the Data Visualization with Textiles independent study, as well as the many people who come by to make and mend things.

This quarter has involved some struggles with equipment: our coverstitch has been acting up, and what I thought was a catastrophic digital knitting machine failure turned out to be an issue with the Arduino-based USB interface. This summer I want to actually get the digital knitting machine up and running with a new Arduino. It's a pity that we weren't able to diagnose and fix it in time for the students in this year's class to use, since there was a lot of enthusiasm for the digital knitting machine, but here's hoping I can get it working by the fall. It turns out that one of the developers for the open-source software you use to control the Arduino component lives in the Bay Area, and I'm hoping we can meet up at some point.

I started work on a handbook of textile data visualization early in the quarter, but work on it stalled due to more pressing deadlines. I've already reached out to some of the students about including some of the things they've made and written about as part of it, and I'm hoping to have some kind of preliminary draft ready in time for next year's class.

This quarter I was part of submitting a panel proposal to ACH 2024 around textile making, and work has begun on planning the #DHmakes pre-conference event at DH 2024 this summer.

The memorial service for my colleague John Giammalva was at the end of May, and I organized a few sessions for people who knew him to come by and write (or in the case of the ambitious, embroider) a message on a quilt square. I assembled all the squares into a quilt -- the second I've ever attempted -- as a gift for his widow. During the reception, the quilt and markers were on hand for people to add more words of remembrance and thanks. I was quite happy with how the whole thing came together: from the initial idea the day of the first memorial gathering after his passing, to the final implementation.

This was the last quarter for Akasha Hayden and Ciara Siobhan; Akasha has been by right-hand person for some time now, and Ciara did some marvelously transformative organization work in the space during their time in the Makerspace. Thanks once again to the generosity of the Making@Stanford initiative, Jacob Rodriguez from the Makery and I received funding for a pool of "textile specialists" we can share between our spaces next year. Over the summer, Jordan Minion will be staffing the space for regular hours, and Kelsey Chen will be doing a kickoff for Summer Session and staffing additional hours. I'm happy we're at a point where summer hours are viable for the Makerspace, since it's a better time for many people.

Classes

This is the second year I've offered Data Visualization with Textiles, and despite setting the cap at the same number of students I had last year (18, which far exceeded my expected 5) and doing nothing to advertise the class, my inbox started filling up with requests to get into the class as soon as registration opened, as it hit the cap immediately. This year I just said yes to everyone who asked, and after the churn of the first couple weeks, I ended up with 24 students. Because the Makerspace has been getting popular, we had to set aside certain hours as "office hours" for just those students in the class, with a sign-up sheet and a cap of 5 people, indicating what they were working on so that we wouldn't end up with a long line at the embroidery machine or what-not.

The students' final projects are still coming in, but the ones I've read so far have been an absolute delight in the data the students chose and prepared, how they thought about transforming it into textiles, and what they ultimately created. At the end of the quarter I worked with the folks at Hohbach Hall to organize an end-of-the-year showcase of student work and other textile creations from the Stanford maker community, along with some remarkable textile-related pieces from Special Collections, including a recently-acquired silk-woven book. Huge thanks to Erin Thajudeen who took care of all the logistics for the Spec materials while I was juggling other pieces of the event. In the end, only a few of the students' pieces were done in time for the showcase, but next year I'll plan further ahead and set that as a deadline. It's definitely an event that I'll be repeating.

I also had the chance to talk with Hideo Mabuchi, Nilan Ram, David Schneider, and Aaron Straight about how we teach data visualization / physicalization, and do some dreaming about what some larger interdisciplinary version of that might be in the future.

In addition to the data visualization class, I ran the usual DH Practicum this quarter, which was a really enjoyable opportunity to work with students I haven't done much with before on a new set of projects.

Existing projects

I've been the roadblock for a lot of things with The Data-Sitters Club, which I will rectify this summer by posting all the things I've got queued up. In the meantime, the group wrote a piece for a special issue "On Gathering" of the Journal of Electronic Publishing edited by Katina Rogers.

The project on Senegalese Countercultural Movements has been in a holding pattern for the quarter, but there's been some movement on the Global Medieval Sourcebook and we have a plan in place to simplify the site and finish editing the content during the summer. I was happy that Ty Davidian submitted a proposal to the ACH conference for The Futurist Archive and Tania Flores did the same for her Flamenco letras project.

HPC for Humanists and DLCL dissertations continue to be on hold, but I'm looking forward to revisiting it as part of a new initiative I'm organizing starting this summer in the DLCL. DLCL alumni data is mostly done, with a few revisions needed as part of promotional materials for the department.

Multilingual Harry Potter fanfic continues to be my most-stalled project that I'm still unwilling to give up completely on. I'm hoping that mid-August might be the time I can actually focus and wrap it up, as a way to get the work that's been done on it out in the world.

It's been a much better quarter for the Jewish cookbooks project with Eitan Kensky. I wrote some code to (very roughly) parse the OCR'd cookbooks into recipes, and threw together a proof-of-concept prototype interface for the recipes that Simon Wiles quickly turned into something much more functional. Data cleanup work will continue over the summer, and Eitan and I are working with Kristen Vallenti on an exhibit of Jewish food cultures in Hohbach Hall in the fall that will incorporate some material from these cookbooks.

I've continued working with Chloé Brault Mackinnon on her project "Where is the world for Quebec", analyzing geospatial references in Quebecois literature.

Having Audrey Gao as the SILICON project manager has been fantastic -- in no time at all, she's organized a summer intern program, organized our files, is working through various paperwork issues, made a new website, and is taking care of all the things that all of us who've been working on SILICON as part of 20 other things have been too stretched to do. I'm really excited about how that project is coming together, and I put in a proposal for the students to speak about their projects at the ACH conference in the fall. I've continued attending, as schedules permit, meetings of the Script Encoding Working Group, and it has been both fascinating and deeply enjoyable to learn more about how the group operates.

The Browsertrix Cloud pilot continues to be a tremendously useful resource, both for library-internal use (e.g. as part of working on a NEH-funded project exploring what would be involved in recovering data from, or at least archiving, scholarly websites) and for faculty research use.

Despite considerable progress and a clear set of next steps, the Arabic OCR work stalled in the spring after Research Data Services discontinued funding the student assistant, and CESTA funding didn't happen fast enough to prevent the project losing momentum. It is starting up again this summer, and I look forward to participating. Meanwhile, Transkribus interest on campus continues to grow: I've had consultations with Amanda Whitmire (who's using it for typewritten theses), Anna Jerve (looking to use it for metadata cards from the geology collection), and Alice Staveley (who has a longstanding project on Virginia Woolf) about it recently. I connected Amanda with Simon Wiles who put together a Python script for batch processing with Transkribus.

Progress has continued on the development of the Environmental Humanities minor, and I'm excited to have the Textile Makerspace be part of the vision for that program.

I've largely punted the website accessibility issues off to the summer, along with the AI working group, out of consideration for various collaborators' deadlines.

New projects

With everything else going on, I can't say I minded having last quarter's new projects get off to a slower start, and for once I managed to avoid adding many more new projects to my plate. One of the only new ones involves working with Adrian Daub and Bethany Nichols on analyzing a corpus of letters to Christine Blasey Ford, which poses more than a few interesting challenges for my go-to methods, given their diversity in length and content. Another is Òscar Ferrer i Bech's project compiling data about opera houses and articles about the operas that were performed there, in Cuba and beyond.

One thing that I did start exploring, though, was the idea of a "DH Co-Op" (a working title, may be renamed) centered on non-English languages and literatures. The current vision, based on a handful of conversations and a survey of likely participants, is for biweekly or monthly meetings with a mix of workshops, project co-working, and Q&A. I'm imagining, too, using this group to test out my HPC for Humanists instructions, building corpora, and maybe collaborating on a project or two. I'll be trying to pilot it this summer with whoever happens to be around, and then refining it a little starting in the fall.

Writing

The article with Lauren Tilton on ACH DMCA advocacy came out in Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, and the piece on data visualization with a circular knitting machine came out in DH + Lib. I managed to do somewhat considerable revisions on the Unicode article for the Journal of Electronic Publishing, which is now moving forward with publication. Thanks to a very long flight delay, I also wrote a piece with Amanda Visconti and Claudia Berger tracing the development of #DHmakes for the inaugural issue of the new journal of the Korean Association of Digital Humanities. Thanks to their astonishingly efficient peer review turnaround time, it should be coming out this summer. I'm also working with Adrian Daub on an article wrapping up our examination of different language Wikipedia articles on "cancel culture".

I didn't succeed at all in regular blogging, but did write one blog post on the joy of maximalist pedagogy in DH.

Talks and events

I was invited to give the Windsor Lecture at my library school alma mater, the University of Illinois, and it was a pleasure to get to return there, and to share some thoughts about how libraries can be made more sustainable for the people doing the work by thinking differently about library leadership and how staff can support one another in exploring the ideas they're passionate about.

I also had the opportunity to talk about multilingual corpus building with Transkribus at the University of Washington, and get to know the people and projects going on up there. I'm excited about the possibilities for more west coast collaboration.

I attended Phil Gleissner's talk on "Queer Digital Humanities for Precarious Times: The Project kvir_izdat", which also has some potential for ongoing collaboration with the growing group of Slavic DH folks here at Stanford. It'd be nice to have a reason to return to the Russian feminist / lesbian zine The Island, the full run of which we had digitized prior to the pandemic.

In May, there was a celebration of 10 years of the Authors Alliance at the Internet Archive, and it was a joy to attend wearing the shawl I wove out of a text analysis of their petition to expand the DMCA exemption for text and data mining, and the responses from copyright holders.

I organized the textile data visualization showcase at the end of the quarter, and plan to make that an annual event.

Other things

I served on the advisory board for the Mathematical Humanists NEH-funded program, helping select participants for the first round of workshops.

Finally, it was an honor to have been nominated for the Amy J. Blue award, honoring "staff members who are exceptionally dedicated, supportive of colleagues and passionate about their work".

The joy of maximalist pedagogy in DH

Quinn Dombrowski — Thu, 16 May 2024 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · May 17, 2024

I have not been great at blogging lately, though I don't have Brandon Walsh's excuse of an infant around the house. Still, I read with interest his piece on Maximalist Digital Humanities Pedagogy a little while ago, and think I might have a few missing pieces to add to this discussion.

It's hard to find much to love about maximalist DH pedagogy via the list of traits he enumerates, including "many tools, few decisions", "more readings", "the greatest", "tech tech tech", "overwhelm". Some of the other points feel like a gray area that could be the basis for a different take on maximalist pedagogy: "dwelling only in possibilities", "no constraints", "no prior experience necessary", "yes, and".

Maybe it was that the picture Brandon chose illustrating "maximalism" resonated with my own visual aesthetic, but reading this piece made me recognize that, honestly, "minimalism" isn't my vibe in any context, ever. But my maximalism isn't "all the latest tools and tech and readings and assignments", either. So what is it?

I have to start by saying that my maximalism is only possible because of the unusual nature of my job, and the place I work. I'm not an adjunct with a crushing course load and huge classes. My biggest class ever was last fall's AI course, with 60 students, a co-instructor, and two TAs. I taught multilingual DH to 20 students in fall 2020, asynchronously. This quarter, I have 25 students in "Data Visualization with Textiles", but it's a one-credit independent study. My job is to support DH primarily within my department (non-English literatures) -- which includes hands-on project work, collaborating with grad students, matching people with resources, thinking and working on infrastructure (like OCR / HTR workflows) for multilingual DH and my department's other programs, and also teaching. In quarters when I'm teaching an intensive class, people are generally understanding if some of the project work takes longer. I'm in an incredibly fortunate position here, where I get to do a lot of different things that I love, where my work on projects and infrastructure informs my teaching, and vice versa.

In some sense, my job itself is maximalist. Maximalist jobs most often appear in bad forms: jobs with impossible expectations and an absurd scope. But I've had the good fortune to land in a maximalist position with a long history -- the Academic Technology Specialist program dates to the 90's. My department has had arguably the best track record with these roles, recognizing that different people bring different things to it, but it's a valuable contribution to the department in whatever form it takes. The job itself is "dwelling in possibilities" and "no constraints" and "yes, and" -- I support DH (defined very broadly) for the department. It's not "no experience necessary", but I came into it with basically no ability to code, and most of what I do day-to-day on a technical level anymore I've learned over the last few years. I love all these things about my job, and what they've enabled me to do: start a Textile Makerspace, teach project management using a D&D-style role-playing game, build non-English corpora, develop pedagogical materials using the Baby-Sitters Club books. Having a less-maximalist job would feel constraining; I think I'd suffocate in a faculty position where I was expected to develop a focused research agenda, write a book, and teach some core courses for several years.

I can tell a sensible story about the DH pedagogy landscape here, about how there's enough people who want exposure to some kind of DH training, and being the person who offers the one non-English-oriented text analysis class means that I owe it to the students to make the class work for whatever language they bring me. A minimalist approach would mean making decisions to support one set of languages and not another, and/or limit the scope to a certain set of methods. I do that to some extent (we don't cover digital exhibits, for instance) but I think of my non-English DH class as something like a scaled-up version of the project consulting I do for my grad students, except I can do it for students outside my department. How frustrating would it be to show up with a set of questions that you want to ask an expert, and instead they talk about something else? But because it's a class with usually 5-10 people, each with their own languages and interests, I try to find a way to make at least the methodological stuff interesting and thought-provoking for everyone, even if not every method makes sense for every student's intended project.

The #DHRPG class (Project Management and Ethical Collaboration for Humanists) has its own kind of maximalism: it's run as a simulation of a year in the life of a DH project, and stripping that experience down to a "minimalism" version, I believe, would do students no favors. The real world, and collaborating with real people, is messy and complicated. There have been other DH project management simulations (like DH Quest), but the choices necessary to turn the DH experience into something you can play as a simple web-based game inevitably strip it down to something that no longer resembles what it actually is. I want the students to be able to make choices for their character -- a broad universe of choices, including not working on the DH project at all -- and then for the whole project team to live with the consequences of these individual choices, all piled on top of one another. The difficulties and compromises that are unavoidable if you're going to work with real people and try your best to do right by them -- that's the biggest takeaway I want the students to leave with. I don't think you can get there through minimalism -- or if there's a path, I don't know it.

The Data Visualization with Textiles independent study takes openness and flexibility to the maximum. It's structured so most of the "class" is just the students spending time in the Makerspace, learning and exploring different equipment and techniques. There's a weekly check-in assignment, and a few others along the way (actually make a data set based on data you compile from your life! spend 90 minutes making a textile data visualization based on one of three data sets I give you!), but it's a lightly structured framework for students to actually make time to learn a craft. The crafts that speak to them vary widely: some are doing hand embroidery, some are sewing garments, some are doing crochet or weaving. There absolutely are more focused textile craft classes on offer at Stanford: in Theater and Performance Studies, there's a class focused just on developing a solid set of core sewing techniques. I'm very glad it exists; as a student, I would have hated it and quite possibly concluded that sewing wasn't for me.

The times I'm staffing the Makerspace during open hours it's wild: bouncing between several groups of students, helping each debug their problems just enough that they can move forward on their own, until they hit the next roadblock, while I work with someone else on their project -- sometimes involving an entirely different machine or craft. When I've spent a whole afternoon that way in the Makerspace, I feel completely wrung out but happy. And based on the students' midterm assignments, I've been really pleased with how this quarter has been going overall.

I describe these three classes I teach as examples of maximalism, as if there's some sort of well-considered pedagogical underpinning for why they are the way they are. I think I can do a reasonable job justifying them in an post-hoc way, but if I'm honest with myself, my classes are like this most of all because I'm like this, and I'm in a position where I can run my classes as I see fit.

Would I recommend maximalist pedagogy? Probably not, considering the circumstances under which most DH teaching takes place. If you don't have time and support and a lot of flexibility with the rest of your life, and ways to connect it with your other responsibilities, I can imagine adopting maximalist pedagogy the way I do it in my classes being a gasoline can on the fire of academic burnout. But for me, given my job, non-teaching responsibilities, and my way of existing in the world as a person, it's a beautiful thing, and I'm proud of what I manage to do with it.

DLCL ATS round-up, winter 2024

Quinn Dombrowski — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · March 28, 2024

This winter I got to revisit my best class, DLCL 205: Project Management and Ethical Collaboration for Humanists, AKA the #DHRPG course, and juggled work on several projects, as well as starting to wrap up my service as ACH co-presient while also launching a new ACH working group on AI.

Textile Makerspace

The Textile Makerspace is where I work. Textile Makerspace has been busy this quarter, especially with the annual FashionX fashion show in February. We've been able to hold regular hours and a few events, and I participated in a promotional video for the Making@Stanford initiative. There's been more efforts -- centralized and distributed -- to coordinate across the different makerspaces. We've been developing shared documentation / wiki resources, defining safety standards based on the actual equipment different makerspaces have, and having informal knowledge exchange days. I got to learn the basics of the risograph from Owen Hipwell from the D-School this quarter, and Jacob Ramirez at the Makery (part of the School of Education) has been a wonderful partner for the Textile Makerspace, taking extra supplies off our hands and hosting events when they exceed our space or staffing capacity.

Thanks to Making@Stanford funding, I was able to purchase three folding rigid heddle looms (knitters looms) and two inklette looms for circulation via the Terman MakerBar program. Thanks to Mike Nack for getting the items cataloged! Once they sort out some storage constraints, I look forward to adding needle felting kits to their equipment available for check-out.

The highlight of the quarter for the Textile Makerspace was the pop-up weaving exhibit Thread Control at the Roble Arts Gym, which coincided with the visit from the DLCL's admitted grad students (and I was able to bring them to see it). The weavings on exhibit were mostly work done on the digital TC2 loom at the Product Realization Lab, but two of my pieces from the knitters loom were on display too: #CIDR-Coeur (a visualization of my library group's conversations in our Slack channel) and Future Text (a visualization of the AI class I taught in the fall).

Classes

The first time I taught DLCL 205: Project Management and Ethical Collaboration for Humanists (the #DHRPG course), the class ended with final rolls on Zoom as campus shut down due to the pandemic. It wasn't a particularly satisfying conclusion, but I do have an article forthcoming with several of the students in an upcoming Debates in DH volume.

I'd revised the syllabus thoroughly for the version of the class that ended up not running in fall 2021, and a little bit more before teaching this winter. We used Hannah Alpert-Abrams's Finding Your Purpose workbook as a major set of activities, and I'm really proud of the work and thought that the students put into their NEH grant assignments. What I discovered, though, is that having 8 people playing the DH RPG means that there's no way we'll get through the arc of the whole year: in the end, we played the last two quarters as one turn apiece. That said, all of the students really ran with the characters they created in wonderful and memorable ways, and I loved how committed they were to these characters from the very first round. I will miss the class a great deal, and plan to weave something to commemorate it, in a way that I can share some piece of the weaving with the students.

When registration time rolled around, my class for next quarter, DLCL 203: Data Visualization with Textiles, filled up immediately, and my inbox filled up shortly thereafter with requests to join the class. When I realized I have enough money to staff it, I decided to open it to the whole wait list, so now it looks like I'll have somewhere around 25 students for that 1-credit independent study next quarter. I'll also be teaching the DH Practicum next quarter, as a path for students to work on their own DH projects.

While these weren't associated with any class as such, this quarter I also taught a workshop on Transkribus for CIDR, as well as a workshop on DH for dissertations for the DLCL. One thing that came out of the latter was realizing that multiple students have needs around corpus-building via book scanning. Thanks to support from the department, we now have a document camera scanner (like I have and use at home to scan books, also with the support of the department) that students can check out from me and take home to use. It's a much better use of their time to scan book that way, than to do it in the middle of the day at the library when they could be doing more mentally-intensive work.

Existing Projects

I got a piece for the beginning of a new Data-Sitters Club sub-series from Roopika Risam right before going to a conference in Las Vegas, but I came down with covid when I got back and I still need to post it, along with its accompanying main-series piece. Something to start spring quarter with! In the meantime, though, I managed to get DOIs for the DSC, as well as a WorldCat record that will make it appear as part of our library catalog.

The project on Senegalese Countercultural Movements with Fatoumata Seck soft-launched as Archiving Revolution 221, but work on that site is ongoing. The Global Medieval Sourcebook continues to be on hold, but pressure from central IT around accessibility for the old site may accelerate the timeline for switching over to the new static sit in the next quarter. Data entry work continues on The Futurist Archive, and ADHO's multilingual DH working group continues its work under the leadership of Merve Tekgürler and Till Grallert. HPC for Humanists has also been on hold this quarter. While I worked on some improved visualizations for the DLCL alumni data, the dissertations project has remained on hold, but I feel like I have a better handle on how to revisit it since doing the Data-Sitters Club book on topic modeling in the fall.

We actually did make some progress on the Harry Potter multilingual fanfic, adding Jaj Karajgikar to the project team as an Anglophone fanfic expert, prepping the data for topic modeling, and presenting some of the work that's been done so far as part of Lab Day at the Stanford Literary Lab.

Similarly, I finally got somewhere with the Jewish cookbooks project with Eitan Kensky, OCR-ing the scans and writing some code that parses most of the books into individual recipes, then doing a little bit of topic modeling as an initial exploratory step. I'm looking forward to doing more work on that one, including doing some kind of basic interface for navigating the corpus.

Tania Flores's database of Flamenco letras project is underway; in the last week, we've talked through some data modeling questions and issues, and I'm excited to see what emerges as she and her team start to enter data into PocketBase.

This quarter, I started attending Unicode Script Ad-Hoc meetings on behalf of SILICON (Stanford Initiative on Language Inclusion and Conservation in Old and New media). We also did interviews for the SILICON project manager position, and look forward to having someone on board soon. In addition, we reviewed applicants for the summer internship program, and I'm looking forward to working with both these students and the mentors who will be participating in the program.

I've been grateful to have the Browsertrix Cloud pilot in place, and have used it for things ranging from the old Global Medieval Sourcebook site to statements from the Russian government about US citizens no longer allowed in Russia, as a form of historical documentation.

I continue to be fairly involved in DH 2024 planning as the ACH representative to ADHO, but I've also begun to plan for passing those responsibilities to Lauren Tilton this summer. ADHO has some challenges stemming from the way it's organized and the inhuman dedication of people who have taken on poorly scoped roles with ballooning responsibilities. I hope we can confront the tension between what the organization does and the amount of volunteer labor it can request in good faith. In the meantime, in my ACH co-president hat, I wrote up a detailed description of how we often prepare texts for computational analysis as a way to support the petition for an expanded DMCA exemption for text and data mining. I used the petition itself and the opposition's responses as the texts, and wove a data visualization of the material, submitting images of the weaving along with the narrative to the US Copyright Office.

New projects

There are various small-scale new student projects, ranging from the use of images in African newspapers to documents associated with Chernobyl. I've also been working with Sergio Rey on digitizing and making searchable an extensive bibliography of Spanish pornography prior to the 20th century, with the potential of linking this database to the original source texts. I've also been talking with Davis Tantillo about some of his project ideas, as part of the DH project management class. A project in potentia with Cristian Soler about medieval cartography is likely to become a real project in the next quarter or so.

This quarter, I was involved in a pilot project with AJ Naddaff exploring possibilities for using state-of-the-art computer vision models for Arabic OCR, funded by my broader group within the library, Research Data Services. The pilot phase went well, with Merve Tekgüler and Umar Patel exploring fine-tuning models using data from Nora Barakat's projct, with help from my CIDR colleague Peter Broadwell. I'm optimistic about being able to continue in the spring and wrap it up this summer, as a way to accelerate Arabic-script OCR beyond what we can do with Transkribus.

With regard to Transkribus, I'm also planning to push ahead a bit further with what it might look like to try to get all digitized materials run through Transkribus or similar OCR/HTR tools. It seems like there's no shortage of DLCL-relevant materials that have been digitized already, and getting it turned into text that's usable for computational text analysis is a matter of mostly a small amount of manual work -- less if I put in the time to write some code against the Transkribus API. This is a dream I've had since 2019, and it feels like this is the moment when there might be a window to make it happen, at least at a limited scale.

I've also been involved with my department's efforts to launch an Environmental Humanities minor, largely in the role of project management coach, but also synthesizing notes, trying to ask questions that can get to the real issues at hand, and generally supporting the project team. It's been interesting to see the overlaps between at least some forms of Environmental Humanities and DH, especially with the shared point of intersection of makerspaces.

This quarter, Meredith Martin (Princeton) and I organized the first meeting of the ACH AI working group that was approved in the fall. It was wonderful to see how many people had shared interests and goals, and we were graced with the presence of a real, live, non-stochastic parrot on the call thanks to Andrea Reyes Elizondo.

Finally, the quarter ended with several official requests from IT to deal with accessibility-related issues on sites that I'm responsible for, so I imagine no small part of next quarter will be spent dealing with those.

Writing

My aspirations of biweekly blogging completely fell apart this quarter; I will try again next quarter.

I managed to get the piece on Unicode for the special issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing (JEP) submitted in time, although vastly over word count. The library writing group gave me some good feedback, along with an artisanally printed copy of the overgrown original, and I'm looking forward to doing the revisions as much as anyone ever is.

A piece from SUCHO about rapid-response DH initiatives is moving along the publication pipeline, with a final draft coming soon. The piece with Lauren Tilton on the DMCA exemption has had its final proofs approved, so should be published very soon. The Data-Sitters Club got a piece accepted to the "On Gathering" special issue of JEP, which we'll be writing next month. I also have an abstract on failure accepted to an edited volume on the same, reflecting on the degree to which most grant programs require engaging in a sort of collective delusion about what's actually likely or feasible in reality with a DH project. I have revisions due soon for a piece as part of a DH + Lib special issue on making praxis, and I'm hoping to go more in depth on what I'm doing with my own textile data visualization as pat of a piece for the new journal that the Korean Association of Digital Humanities is launching.

Talks and Events

This quarter, I found out that all my ADHO proposals were accepted (SILICON poster, DH RPG mini-conference / play session, DH Makes mini-conference, workshop on teaching machine learning). Since this year's project management class was such a source of inspiration, I'm especially looking forward to revisiting the game at the conference, as well as DH Makes: I continue to dream of a DH fashion show with live music from The Hard Modes, but we'll see what can be arranged.

I did class lectures / interviews / visits for a course on "Digitizing Cultural Heritage in Greater China" at the University of Hong Kong, and for "Critical Making for Humanist Scholarship" at the University of Central Florida with Anastasia Salter. I also gave a talk on SILICON as part of the Global DH Symposium earlier this month.

I attended the AATSEEL conference to support Eric Kim, Alyssa Virker, Georgii Korotkov, and Ostap Kin (along with Anna Ivanov from Harvard) presenting their projects that combine computational methods with Ukrainian studies. It was wonderful to see these projects come to fruition in a public form and get the recognition they deserve, after having watched and supported them off and on for a few years, in some cases. The resonances between these projects were a good reminder to revisit the idea of regular Slavic DH Zoom meetings, to facilitate more cross-pollination.

Laura Wittman and I organized a DLCL Symposium on AI and the Humanities as the closing event for our admitted grad student visit, bringing together a group of faculty and grad students who are doing work at that intersection of technology and scholarship. It was well attended, with a robust discussion that continued into the closing reception. Laura and I also presented as part of "Who Wrote That Paper? Teaching Humanities Writing in the Era of Generative AI', a lunch workshop organized by CTL and H&S.

Other Things

Shortly before the visit by the admitted grad students, my colleague John Giammalva, who managed grad student affairs, passed away suddenly. He was the kind of person who always left you feeling better when you happened past his office. It's been a tremendous loss for the department, and I'm hoping to host a few afternoons in the Makerspace next quarter to work on a quilt for his widow, with some of the wisdom he shared with us all over his couple years in the department.

DOIs for DSC

Quinn Dombrowski — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 16:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · January 30, 2024

The first month of the quarter has been busier than I imagined, kicking off a new class of the DH RPG (Project Management and Ethical Collaboration for Humanists) and wrapping up a paper on the history of technical infrastructure for multilingual publishing (tl;dr honestly, handwriting is still easiest and most drama-free, though with Unicode and OpenType we're getting better.)

With those wrapped up, I've been able to knock off a few lingering things on the to-do list, including getting DOIs for the Data-Sitters Club books. Programming Historian was an inspiration here, as a long-running digital serial publication that's managed to get DOIs for all its lessons. I made some inquiries locally about what might be possible, knowing that DOIs could be minted for things submitted to our institutional repository, which led to some productive myth-busting conversations. The policy had been that DOIs could be minted for digital publications (not just repository submissions), but only ones hosted by Stanford and at a stanford.edu domain. Shifts in the hosting landscape have meant that not everyone uses a stanford.edu domain for their projects, and not all stanford.edu domains resolve to Stanford-hosted websites; GitHub pages, for instance, is a popular option that we also use for the Data-Sitters Club. The concern, understandably, is that DOIs are permanent, and you don't want broken URLs for DOIs, even if the website is no longer maintained. So I worked out an arrangement with Hannah Frost, our Associate Director for Digital Library Services: I'd deposit a PDF for each DSC book into the repository, fill out all the metadata (including a link to the live DSC book page on our website), and on the back end they'd switch the DOI pointer to go to the DSC website. Then, if something happens to the DSC website someday, they'd be able to revert the links to the PDF version as a guaranteed backup.

The PDF-ification of the DSC books was pretty easy, since JupyterBook has a "download as PDF" button built in. What took longer was futzing with the CSS to hide some screen-oriented artifacts that showed up in the PDF version in a way that covered some of the actual text. CSS is perhaps my least-favorite thing to wrangle, but as usual, when I sat down to do it, it was less of a nightmare than I was expecting.

The whole process, for 24 of our 25 books (yeah, I somehow missed #11 -- will remedy that soon!), took a couple hours, but had the positive scholarly communications side effect of getting one of the Data-Sitters and a guest Data-Sitter to sign up for an ORCID.

Now that it's done, and we have a process in place for future books, it feels surprisingly good to know that this little project that's found its way onto syllabi and other reading lists has some version preserved for the long haul, that we can credit people in a more visible way via ORCID, and that it is more formally part of a broader network of digital publications through having DOIs. In March, we should also be able to get it cataloged with a MARC record so that the Data-Sitters Club will show up in our online library catalog, and your library can add it too. I was a little skeptical it would work out, but I'm grateful to Hannah for her flexibility and creative problem-solving here, and Amy Hodge for doing the back-end data shoveling to make all the pieces work. If you've got a DH project that looks like a publication, it's worth reaching out to your schol com and/or institutional repository folks to see if you can do something similar.

DLCL ATS round-up, fall 2023

Quinn Dombrowski — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 16:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · December 20, 2023

This fall, I got my first experience teaching a large class, helped launch a major new Unicode project, and got excited about the possibility of weaving as a medium for data visualization.

Textile Makerspace

It's been a great fall at the Textile Makerspace, which I incorporated into the Future Text: AI in Literatures, Cultures, and Languages class (more on that below). We've been having regular hours thanks to student staff, and have picked up a few additional volunteers and staff for the winter who will help out with more hours.

I've declared this year to be the Year of the Loom, and we've picked up a few new ones: a folding rigid heddle loom, an inklette loom, and a giant inkle loom that doubles as a warp board for the standing loom that replaced my desk earlier this year. We finally replaced the steel heddles on the standing loom with texsolv that doesn't chew up the warp threads, and it was such a joy to get it warped and ready for use. I've got a student next quarter interested in using it for the DH Practicum.

I've been learning how to use these looms, too, and have mostly been working with the rigid heddle loom. I've put together weavings based on Slack messages in the CIDR channel (my group in the library), Star Trek novels, the AI class data, and Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. It's quickly becoming my favorite craft, though it comes with risks like staying up far too late when I'm working on one.

In keeping with the loom theme, I've had the chance to get to know some other weavers on campus, and borrow a table loom from Prof. Hideo Mabuchi in Physics (because, of course, at Stanford there's stash of table looms in medium-term storage in a physics professor's office.) I also put in a Making@Stanford equipment grant for some of the folding rigid heddle looms that could be checked out through the library, but I'm still waiting to hear back.

I also got to meet Owen Hipwell from the D-School, who's their new makerspace person and who is setting up a new letterpress and other print (Risograph!) studio on campus, with public open hours planned. This is going to make for great collaborations, since they have the kind of space that supports screenprinting -- and what's more, print studios seem to be having a moment in DH circles more broadly.

Classes

DLCL 103: Future Text: AI and Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, which I taught with Laura Wittman and with Eric Kim and Andrew Nepomuceno as TAs, was the biggest thing I was working on all fall. I've never had anything close to a 60-person class, or a topic that was changing so quickly. We had put a fair bit of thought into the weekly readings and assignments, but hardly a week passed without us radically overhauling the readings because of breaking news or new writing that we'd come across. Discovering that the author of one of those readings was a Stanford undergrad, and another was someone whose kids had gone to the same daycare as mine, meant we got to have special guest visitors. Towards the beginning of the quarter, we took field trip to the Making Global Computing exhibit at Green Library and the Textile Makerspace, and I was happy that a few students took us up on the offer of doing a creative project with a textile angle.

About 50 of the students in the class were CS juniors and seniors taking it for their humanities core distribution requirement, which made for very different vibes than I'm used to. I've got more thoughts about the class and the final projects to write up at the beginning of next quarter, but one way I've been coming to grips with the class has been through my own final project: a weaving of the class data. I'm looking forward to finishing the second part of the weaving over the break; the data was only finished as of yesterday, with submission of final grades. The final syllabus is on GitHub.

Existing Projects

This fall we published a Data-Sitters Club book I've been excited about for a while: "Xanda Rescues the Topic Modeling Disaster". Topic modeling is often thrown around as a method, but I never loved my results when I tried it, and over the course of this book I came to understand it a lot better thanks to Xanda Schofield. I've also got a book on environments half drafted, and the Data-Sitters Club is ready to start 2024 with a new fun sub-series.

There's several other projects that have continued to be on hold, either because they're not yet ready to move forward (Senegalese Countercultural Movement, Global Medieval Sourcebook, The Futurist Archive), or because the AI class ate enough of my time and organizational energy that I couldn't get the meetings together to wrap things up (Harry Potter multilingual fanfic.) I also haven't made much progress on the multilingual DH working group activities or Jewish cookbooks. I've been working on Jewish cookbooks this quarter. But the latest Data-Sitters Club book has given me some good ideas for how to wrangle the DLCL dissertations. I also did some accessibility remediation work on French revolutionary data, which I haven't touched in a while.

At the same time, it's been a big quarter for SILICON (Stanford Initiative on Language Inclusion and Conservation in Old and New media). We had a soft launch event, Encode/Include in October, and a two-day conference, Face/Interface at the beginning of December. We got a project manager position approved and posted, and have begun reviewing the applications. This fall has included a team crash course on fonts, text input UX, and Unicode, and an incredibly useful group discussion with a panel of experts before the Encode/Include event where we tried to identify a set of significant stumbling blocks for the improving the text stack for digitally-disadvantaged languages. Out of those conversations, we've laid the groundwork for a summer intern program, as well as a series of proof-of-concept activities between now and then.

The Browsertrix Cloud pilot came to fruition this fall, with funding from DLSS. I'm really excited to have Browsertrix Cloud in our toolkit, at least for capturing digital scholarship projects. The old Global Medieval Sourcebook site is on my list as a test for how this might work.

I've been working with Annie Lamar and Brad Rittenhouse on more material for the HPC for Humanists resource, and we're looking towards doing a workshop on how to scale up some common form of DH analysis using the HPC cluster sometime in the winter or spring.

My role as ACH representative to ADHO has gotten a little bigger than I anticipated, since I've also had to be involved with program committee and local organizer discussions around the DH 2024 conference in Washington, DC. ADHO got its first official Code of Conduct approved and posted this fall. On the ACH side, I've mostly been trying to facilitate conversations around publications, and helping wrangle some of the infrastructure, including getting the ACH members site migrated to the ADHO server with help from my colleague and ADHO infrastructure chair Simon Wiles.

New projects

This quarter I've been working with Tania Flores on getting her database of Flamenco letras set up for data entry. At Simon's suggestion, we're using PocketBase, which we can host on Stanford Domains, and provides a relatively intuitive interface for both data entry and tweaking the data model we iterated on together. It lets us kick the can down the road when it comes to the web interface for the project: we could potentially create a static site based on the data, or migrate the data to some kind of content management system, and/or just export the data for analysis and visualization and archiving.

I worked with Ostap Kin on visualizing his data on Ukrainian translations of Dovid Hofshteyn's poetry, and we talked about digitizing the texts themselves for future text analysis. AJ Naddaff also has a corpus of texts in Arabic he'd like to digitize, as does newly-appointed faculty member Andrei Pesic, so it looks like OCR/HTR will be back in my life in a major way in the near future. Planning out my teaching for the next year or two also led me to return to the project of getting a computationally-usable version of the different departmental reading lists, and I made some progress with the Russian list. I expect I'll be back to book scanning in earnest in the winter, with an upgraded replacement for my 2020 book scanner that should be much better for books with glossy pages.

Writing

What We Teach When We Teach DH, ed. Brian Croxall and Diane Jakacki, just came out, with a chapter co-authored by my colleague Alix Keener, "Sharing Authority in Collaborative Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Library Workers’ Perspectives", and "Bringing Languages into the DH Classroom" by me. My chapter needs a contextualizing blog post, but there'll be time for that in the winter.

A piece I'm much happier with is "The Librarian, The Computer, The Android, and Big Data" (on the depiction of data-work in a corpus of Star Trek novels), co-authored with Nichole Nomura, which recently came out in the Vectors journal and I ended up assigning in the AI class to complement a piece low-key complaining about archivists' lack of enthusiasm for an AI project.

I didn't manage to write a blog post every two weeks like I intended (as prompted by Brandon Walsh from the UVA Scholars Lab), but I managed more than one per month. There was a write-up of an event at the Internet Archive where I presented with DLCL grad student Alyssa Virker. I wrote up my own AI class final project proposal for a weaving with the class data. I updated my popular post about how to write an ADHO conference proposal. And finally, I reflected on the joy of geeking out at the SILICON Face/Interface conference.

I've got a few new things early in the pipeline, including a piece on Unicode for a special issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing (JEP) on multilingualism, where I'll be drawing on the Unicode Archives and co-authoring it with Manish Goregaokar and Ben Joeng (Yang) from Unicode. There's also a response to an edited volume from a 2020 multilingual DH event, and probably another piece on failure in the near future. The Data-Sitters Club also submitted an abstract to another JEP special issue "on gathering".

Talks and Events

This fall was light on talks and events -- happily, since the task of delivering a 90-minute lecture weekly in the AI class took up a lot of mental space and energy.

I did submit a couple things to the DH 2024 conference: a "mini-conference" (alternate format) for #DHmakes with Claudia Berger and others, another "mini-conference" to organize a #DHRPG play-through at the conference, and I was added to a workshop on teaching NLP organized by colleagues at the Princeton Center for DH.

Other Things

Yesterday, ACH announced its exit from Twitter. I've personally been off it since its acquisition last fall, but this quarter I completely deleted and relinquished my account. Bluesky may not have all the people doing all the things (looking at you, AI people), but it has become a very solid replacement for DH Twitter (and many other flavors of Twitter I cared about). The number of requests on the DH Bluesky invite code form dropped off considerably over the fall, but the form is still open and being checked occasionally. Please fill it out if you'd like to join!

Geeking Out at Face/Interface 2023

Quinn Dombrowski — Tue, 12 Dec 2023 16:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · December 13, 2023

Fonts, like fountain pens, are a locus of intense, niche geekery — one I've only ever dabbled in, but where I can imagine my life being different very if I stumbled into digital typography at the right moment. Likewise with script encoding: when I learned about Debbie Anderson's Script Encoding Initiative while working at Berkeley, it made me wish I could go back in time and become and undergrad volunteer. The new SILICON (Stanford Initiative on Language Inclusion and Conservation in Old and New Media) project I've been working on with Kathryn Starkey, Tom Mullaney, and Elaine Treharne has been a source of great joy lately. It feels like a second chance to dive into some of these latent niche passions. The Face/Interface conference at the start of December, organized by Tom Mullaney, served as the official kick-off for SILICON. It was a wonderful celebration of language, script, interface, and design, 40 years after a conference on "The Computer and the Hand in Type Design", held shortly after the founding of Stanford's short-lived digital typography program.

The program, as described in the opening and closing keynote by co-founder Chuck Bigelow, was a collaboration between the Art and Computer Science departments. In the end, it was the Art department's decision to withdraw from the arrangement that led to the program's demise after less than a decade. But during those years, Bigelow's mathematician collaborator Donald Knuth refined MetaFont (a vector-based type design description language) and developed TeX, which underpins and handles the layout for LaTeX. Donald Knuth was at the event as well. I'll confess I knew him better for his "literate computing" programming paradigm, which I'd referenced in my Programming Historian tutorial on Jupyter notebooks and whose concept of "tangled" code executed by a computer and "woven" formatted documentation speaks to me even more now that I regularly untangle and weave things physically. And the students of the program went on to be key players in the ongoing development of digital typography in Silicon Valley and beyond.

I had decided in advance that I wasn't going to do a detailed livepost of the conference, especially since all the talks were being recorded. But there were so many remarkable moments that I did end up posting a few of them on Bluesky. Ariq Syauqi's talk on his work developing fonts for Javanese and Balinese raised fascinating, messy challenges like how you handle a concept like "bolding a word" when the script is a syllabary, where a syllable can be split between two words? The way that these scripts — which can involve no small amount of vertical stacking — get cut off and otherwise mangled in text-input fields of web forms was also thought-provoking.

Arshia Sobhan Sarbandi's experiments with AI-generating Perso-Arabic script showed how badly Dall-e 3 fails on it, even though it's improved dramatically for Latin. What's worse, these pseudo-script images are likely to end up in future training data sets, making the situation worse rather than better. He drew a connection to the use of "Arabic" script in Orientalist European art, like the background of Jean-Léon Gérôme's "The Snake Charmer".

I'll confess that AR tech has never spoken to me much, but nonetheless, Niteesh Yadav's talk about typography in AR was striking. In short, it's bad, but it's bad because today's AR is based on game engines, which are stuck in the 90's with how they render text: lots of bitmaps, where the texture and fuzziness is visible when you get "close".

We got a fascinating peek into the process of font designers, including Fernando de Moraes Caro's numerous revisions of his font for Dives Akuru, an extinct script, trying to balance "rationalizing" and embracing the irregularities inherent in calligraphy. Alexandre Bassi amazed the audience with his assemblage of examples of the Mayan jaguar glyph, and a video showing step-by-step his sketch of that glyph for his font — fresh off his digital pen, as apparently he'd been sketching in the car on an outing to San Francisco the day before.

Shani Avni & Liron Lavi Turkenich's talk took the interplay between technology and script in a different direction, showing how easily-broken wood type led to a shortened default ascender for Hebrew: a change not everyone was happy about, but one which put it into better vertical alignment when typeset with Latin script..

Manish Goregaokar and Ben Joeng (Yang) demystified the Unicode script proposal process by acting out a scenario for a script "from a small island off the west coast of Europe", which had to spell out and explain features like capital letters, and justify why certain glyphs like c and g shouldn't be unified. It was a wonderful moment of flipping the English default on its head for a moment, and I plan to use that video clip in a future non-English DH class. The pair's introduction slides were multilingual and multi-scriptural, giving their names in a variety of languages and scripts and showing an IPA transcription. During the coffee break, we talked about how the registration form for the event in the future should include two name fields: one for your name as used in English, and another with your name in your preferred script/language, or just another that you like.

Hrant Papazian teaches font design at Cal State LA, noting that the school's motto "ranked #1 in the nation for upward mobility" has a dark side: you can only get that kind of mobility starting from the bottom. The examples he showed of his students' work were beautiful; they learn to make fonts for non-Latin scripts, including ones for languages they don't personally know. He acknowledged that the money is in fonts for the Latin script, but he described advocating for non-Latin scripts nonetheless, drawing from his own pride in the Armenian script. This led to one of the most heated moments of the conference in the Q&A, which turned into a debate between Papazian and an attendee of Basque heritage about the value of a language having a distinctive script, especially in light of the technical challenges involved in having a non-Latin script. In this discussion, Peter Bilak also noted, drawing from his work on fonts for indigenous languages, that "in the absence of geographic autonomy, graphic autonomy is meaningful."

Kourosh Beigpour's poetic reflection on the Farsi type of Los Angeles added another perspective on script and identity. He took us on a tour of shop signs, neon lights, and gravestones in the Persian-speaking (but also vibrantly multilingual and multi-scriptual) neighborhoods of Los Angeles, often in the same, plain typeface but it was what they had 50 years ago when a community had to reconstruct their identity in a new place. Having signs in Persian, even without aesthetic fonts, signals "an Iranian is living or working here"; as he put it, "We are carriers of language. A script is a reflection of culture and heritage."

The conference was live-streamed, and all the recordings will be available online in 2024, which I really appreciate as a way to make the event more accessible from the perspective of the talks themselves. But it was likewise a reminder of how few examples come to mind of virtual spaces that recreate the playfulness that comes out in informal moments in person at a conference. One of my fondest memories was playing a game of "what's the glyph drizzled onto the soup" with Chuck Bigelow and other folks at my table, including Abeera Kamran.

SILICON is hoping to have Face/Interface be an annual event — keep an eye out for a CFP next year, or consider joining us in person or online!

How to Write an ADHO DH Conference Proposal in 2023

Quinn Dombrowski — Mon, 13 Nov 2023 16:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · November 14, 2023

Four years ago I wrote a guide to writing DH conference submissions, a blog post that got a fair bit of traction and seems to be passed around every time there's a new CFP.

The problem is, it's not good advice anymore for the international ADHO digital humanities conference. I've been the ACH representative to ADHO since summer 2021, and one of the major initiatives that ADHO has undertaken has been to rework the review criteria for the conference. Previously, a lot was left to the discretion of the individual program committees, meaning that there could be a lot of variability from year to year in terms of the taxonomies used to classify papers, the review criteria, and even whether your bibliography was properly formatted (see Jennifer Guiliano and Laura Estill, "What gets categorized counts: Controlled vocabularies, digital affordances, and the international digital humanities conference" for a closer look at the taxonomy issues). The changes from year to year were usually small (though enough to potentially make a difference in your overall score), and because the following year could bring a totally new set of changes, I never saw the need to rewrite that blog post.

That's different now. Christof Schöch, who led the review criteria revision work, wrapped up that project over the summer, drawing upon feedback from relevant committees (like the Conference Coordinating Committee) as well as a survey of DH conference attendees and the community more broadly. Christof is the current president of the Constituent Organization Board, made up of representatives from all the constituent organization, which collectively provides leadership and direction for ADHO -- which is to say, these review criteria were developed not for this year, but as a set of criteria that we can hopefully work with long-term. I'm sure they'll eventually evolve once put into practice, but this is what we're currently working with.

The goal of the new review criteria was to elicit constructive feedback and not just negative comments, and functionally make reviewers justify their numeric choices through their text comments.

The criteria

The evaluation criteria are as follows:

Does the submission include a sufficient description of the current state of knowledge and best practices in the area(s) relevant to the work, and is that description backed up by useful references? (20%)
Does the work described in the submission go beyond the current state of knowledge and best practices in the areas(s) relevant to the work? This may concern method, approach, application domain, or findings. (20%)
Does the submission describe its approach or method with sufficient detail for readers to understand what was done and why it was done, within the limitations of the abstract format? (20%)
Does the submission support diversity, in the sense that it describes work that increases the range of topics, approaches and perspectives presented at the DH conference, and/or does it give adequate recognition to a broad range of relevant scholarly work, including by members of disadvantaged or under-represented groups? (15%)
Is the submission well-structured and clearly written in a way that supports readers in understanding the submission? (15%)
Overall recommendation. Based on the evaluation criteria overall, but also taking into account any additional criteria or issues you may consider important for the evaluation, do you recommend that this submission be accepted for presentation or not? (10%)

For workshops, the second two points are a little different:

Does the submission describe the contents of the workshop (topics, issues, methods, tools) in sufficient detail for readers to understand what will be taught? (20%)
Does the submission describe its didactical approach, the materials to be used, and the progression of topics over the course of the workshop with sufficient detail for readers to understand how the workshop will be taught? (20%)

Structure of a DH submission

Based on these review criteria, here's how I'd approach structuring a DH submission in 2023:

Disciplinary context & broad description

What are you doing, broadly speaking, and what makes it interesting or different or new? Don't overthink this too much: doing a pretty standard DH project on a new corpus, archive, or subject matter counts as interesting, if you can convey what's special or important about that corpus, archive, or subject matter. Maybe you're bringing in a new audience (the public, children, retirees), or the subject matter is in a language other than English, or you're working texts in a genre that's under-studied, or there's some connection to current events. Maybe it relates to something that's really important in your discipline. For anything disciplinary, lean towards over-explaining it. You might get a reviewer from a very different discipline, for whom it isn't at all self-evident what the major debates are in your field. Explain this like you would to an educated but non-academic relative over the holidays. Even things like questions of DH labor that don't necessarily seem disciplinary in nature often depend on different academic cultures that vary across countries, and you can't assume you'll automatically share that context with your reviewer. If you were writing a grant proposal for your thing, why should it be funded? That's similar to your pitch here. This portion is also a good place to address the question of diversity -- and for a lot of projects, the "what makes this new" is basically the same as "how does this contribute to diversity". If you want to draw the reader's attention to this very clearly (which helps them out as they're writing the review), you can be explicit about how some aspects of your project would make it contribute to the diversity of the work presented at the conference.

DH context and citations

Make sure you contextualize what you're doing within the field of DH, and have citations. Do a little research in DH journals and the Index of DH Conferences. It's fine to also talk about what you're doing in the context of your disciplinary field, but I'd guess that there will be some expectation that you have some idea what's going on in DH that's relevant to your proposal -- after all, it's a DH conference. Also, don't just cite the usual go-to figures in the history of DH. Citing a more diverse group of scholars -- ideally, not just from the US and UK -- also contributes to the diversity parameter.

Detailed description

What are you doing -- concretely, and specifically? With DH conferences, you can and should assume that people are much more technical, or at least technically-inclined, than the reviewers at your disciplinary conferences. Don't go overboard with detail: you don't need to list every library you're using in your code, but please do talk about technical specifics! If there are multiple algorithms you could be using for your task, you can say which one you've picked and why. You can mention which NLP library you're using, or any interesting or significant choices in processing your data. One of the things about DH being an interdisciplinary field and conference is that the technical section is likely to be more immediately accessible to your reviewer than the disciplinary piece of your proposal. In short, you don't have to define what NLP is, but the trade-off is that your reviewer will want you to say specifically what you're doing and "text analysis" won't cut it.

Note that at least for DH 2024, there's an option for requesting a "technical" reviewer, whereby the DHTech SIG will try to find you a reviewer with specific technical expertise to review your proposal. So if you really want to go all in on technical detail, you can do that this year for the first time without it being a total dice roll whether the reviewer will be able to follow you down that rabbit hole.

Stakes

I like wrapping up abstracts with a clear reiteration of the stakes. Again, why is this important? What new perspective or knowledge does it offer? How is this going to be relevant for scholars who don't work on exactly what you do (or may only share a few methods in common with you, while working in a very different field, institutional context, and national context).

What if the project isn't done?

It's rough having to submit something in December for a conference next August. The safest route is to write up a project that you're already done with, where you can clearly state what you did and the outcomes. Personally, though, I hate doing that: if I'm done with a thing, I'm probably bored with it, and writing a proposal about something I'm done with is boredom that promises future boredom when I have to prep slides late next summer.

The wisdom of putting in a proposal for an unfinished project depends on how much your confidence can make up the gap in the work that's done. If you've done a fair bit of work on something and have gotten a sense for the shape it's taking, it's a smaller bluff than if you put in a proposal for something you haven't started yet. (I've done both!)

If you're writing up work that isn't done yet, don't use the future tense. That makes the situation too obvious. I'll often use the present tense (e.g. "In this project, we use topic modeling on a corpus consisting of..."). If you're proposing something completely new, give yourself some leeway by not picking one single method, because then it'll be very awkward if it turns out that doesn't work for some reason. You can talk about "using a range of techniques, including..." and list a set of viable things that you've used before and can talk about competently in the detailed technical description section. If everything else is in order with your proposal, you can probably get away with some hand-waving when it comes to the details of your actual findings if you can say something vague. It's probably a fair bet that they'll be complex and will reveal something -- you can riff on that.

DH 2024, at least, will have a meaningful hybrid component, so even if Washington, DC in August isn't your idea of a fun trip, you can still share what you're working on with the international DH community! It's a joy to see presentations from students and folks who are new to DH but are doing interesting things. Don't be intimidated, put in an abstract!

(I shouldn't have to say this, but I will anyway: please, please do not try to get ChatGPT to write this for you, even prompting from the outline. There's a lot of DH folks who've been playing with LLMs and the odds of getting someone who's very familiar with the kind of language they use are not small. Plus, it sucks at the kind of specific, concrete detail you'll need for a successful proposal. If you're not a native speaker of English, by all means have ChatGPT do a copyediting pass but write the thing yourself.)

And if this conference still feels like a bit much, there'll be a virtual ACH conference in fall 2024 with in-person "hubs". The vibes of those review criteria are different, and I'll probably write another explainer in the spring when the ACH CFP is posted.

AI class final project proposal

Quinn Dombrowski — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 16:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · November 8, 2023

Week 6 of "Future Text: AI in Languages, Literatures, and Cultures" has me approaching more familiar ground than the quarter so far. The class, like my non-English DH course, has a final project component. With 60 students, two instructors, and two TAs, we've split the students into four groups for final project support and advising, and I took the 20 students doing projects that are in some way technical, or involve hands-on crafting. For a class that's often felt disorienting (I'm not used to so many, particularly so many who for much of the quarter have been so reluctant to talk at all, willing to push Brandon Walsh's tips to the breaking point), supporting 20 students to whatever extent they want in doing a technical or creative thing feels like a shift to something I'm more comfortable with. I've had 20 students before, both in last spring's "Data Visualization with Textiles", and nearly 20 in fall 2020's non-English DH class. I might even have a prayer of learning at least these 20 students' names before the quarter is over.

I've been more careful than usual when it comes to taking on things this quarter, given the scale of the class and how much time and space it takes up in my calendar, on my to-do list, and in my head. Other DH projects are going more slowly when they involve a sizable investment of time on my part. Some things are on hold until winter. I'm behind on planning workshops at the Makerspace. But the shift towards final projects and Thanksgiving on the horizon have left me feeling like we might actually pull this off, and I can risk indulging myself in one of my favorite things to do when assigning final projects: do one myself. This belated blog post (it's okay, I checked with me and granted myself an extension) is my project proposal, for my own amusement and yours.

For my final project I'm going to try to grapple with what we did with this AI class. Because the topic we're covering is rapidly changing, new things are being written, and we had to rethink the format of the class given the students' reluctance to talk, not all the readings were things I, at least, thought long and hard about -- even when they were readings that I was changing to at the last minute. I wanted to take a moment to actually engage with them on a different level, individually and as a whole. Similarly with the students: there are a lot of them, and I don't have the luxury of getting to know them better in smaller groups like the TAs do in section. I have access to systems with data about them -- their major, their grades on assignments, their attendance -- but struggling with names particularly for the students who never talk in class, all the data seems more like a pile of facts than anything I have a feel for on any level. So I'm going to try to weave the class and make something beautiful, or at least striking, out of it.

I've discovered this quarter that I really love weaving, and if I have a rigid heddle loom project going, it takes a lot of willpower to not stay up far too late working on it. This will likely come in handy on this project, because some of it will necessarily be last-minute work. I'm going to work with four sets of data: student majors, readings / lecture slides, attendance, and assignments. (Final project type -- analytical, creative, or technical -- might be a fifth.)

The first time I tried to weave data on the rigid heddle loom, it was my library group's Slack messages, and I warped the loom using the same solid color all the way across. I soon learned how limiting this was, but I'd already put in a whole evening figuring out how to warp a loom in my kitchen and I wasn't going to start over. So that project wound up being all color and stripes. And I liked it, but I wanted to do more with warp/weft interplay and patterns, so my second project (currently in progress) has a more thoughtfully crafted warp (depicting what Star Trek series are represented in the novels, in what proportions). But then the data wasn't sorted the way I thought it was, and I didn't notice until 100+ rows in, so it'll end up doing something a little different than I was planning.

Because I wanted to do the Star Trek data at least somewhat in chronological order, I was limited in what I could mix and match to get different patterns at the intersection of warp and weave. With the AI class, weaving the data in different orders is actually beneficial, as a way to enhance student privacy. Unusually for me, for this weaving I'll be working with a more limited palette of colors than I would otherwise, in order to maximize the possibilities for interesting patterns to emerge as the colors intersect with themselves. Colors will carry different meanings depending on where they occur in the weaving. The colors themselves aren't my usual favorite blues, greens, and purples: for this weaving, it'll be yellow, orange, red, white. It feels like the world is on fire, AI discussions often escalate to hitting the panic button -- and it's a small nod to the knitting I've been doing on the days when Laura Wittman does the lecture, using a yarn from Republic of Yarnia dyed to represent a fire-breathing dragon.

As I worked on putting together a spreadsheet with the data, I realized I'm going to have to grapple with issues of scale. I'm counting not individual lecture slides (those numbers were boring, landing consistently in the 25-35 range) but words on the lecture slides (500-2,200). I was thinking of lopping off two zeroes and weaving 5-22 rows for those slides, but that's not going to work for the readings, where the Stephen Wolfram piece on how ChatGPT works comes in at 20,700 words. I'm not weaving 207 rows for that reading; I'm thinking of scaling readings to a row per thousand words, even though it means reducing favorite pieces to two rows with some generous rounding.

Working with the student major data has led to some discoveries about how my university is set up. Just about half the students are CS majors; more if you include the several math + CS majors. CS is part of the Engineering division, along with various other flavors of engineering, including mechanical engineering, management science & engineering, and bioengineering. Altogether, folks affiliated with the engineering division are 2/3 of the class. I was vaguely aware on some level that the sciences have a closer organizational kinship with the humanities than CS, but I rarely think about the fact that biology and physics are in the divisional bucket as my non-English literature department. The student majors, I've decided, will be the warp threads, and I'm hoping to show those divisional relationships in how I map majors to colors: things in the red zone for engineering, yellow for humanities, orange for sciences, and white for undecided.

Scale is relevant for the student data, too. To get the number of warp threads I want, 60 students is for once not enough: each data point will be represented twice. I managed 90" warp threads by warping the loom in my office across two long tables, which will help me pack in the data about attendance and student assignments: even using a thin yarn for student data, each assignment takes up a lot of space with 60 students.

The question I kept going back to when reviewing student final project proposals was, "How does this connect to the themes of the class?" It would not have satisfied me, in my instructor hat, for the answer just to be that this weaving is a representation of the class. There's three points that I think make this work:

My relationship to this data: we've talked about Books3 and how clearly some thought went into its construction (so much "Magic Treehouse"!) but we don't have access to that decision-making logic. One of the things that's struck me in talking with the CS students is their attitude towards data: they casually reference grabbing data sets off of Kaggle. With the kind of digital humanities I do and teach, data is never something you can just grab somewhere. Odds are, you're building it -- slowly, painstakingly, and with a great deal of thought and care. You end up with a very different relationship with data that way. I want to apply that kind of thoughtfulness to the data created by this course, considering issues like scale and how it maps to color, and incorporate those elements deliberately into the weaving. If I get Dall-e 3 access before the end of the quarter, I might try dumping in the data and asking it to generate some art and explain it as a point of comparison.
Where your data ends up: the conversations you have with ChatGPT go back into its training data, though you often don't think about it. (The API can be different, but the chat interface is still the primary one for many people.) It's easy to put that out of your mind, but having your data show up in front of you as a physical object (anonymized, but I imagine students can find threads that represent themselves and their work if they look) is much harder to forget about.
Following AI instructions: I tried to ask ChatGPT for weaving advice, as a fairly new weaver. As usual, it wrote superficially fluent prose, and even got fairly detailed, but the actual information about how to implement different designs did not line up especially well with the handbook I picked up from my local library. Add another craft to the list of dubious ChatGPT topics -- honestly, it's kind of amazing it sounded as plausible as it did, given the older age skew of weavers and the amount of information online compared to, e.g. knitting or crochet.

I had a moment of panic when I finished warping the loom that I had created some kind of abominable hot dog with a condiment buffet.

I consoled myself with the idea that I could write it off as a homage to the hot dog / not a hot dog app in Silicon Valley, or maybe there's a story here about how the humanities is treated like some mustard on the hot dog of a CS undergrad education.

Now that I've started adding the actual data, though, I'm more curious than despairing.

One row at a time, it's coming together.

Ukrainian Memes at 'AI at IA'

Quinn Dombrowski — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · October 19, 2023

On October 12th, I presented the SUCHO Meme Wall at the Internet Archive with Slavic department grad student Alyssa Virker, as part of the "AI at IA" event. The Meme Wall project is led by Anna Rakityanskaya, a Slavic librarian at Harvard, and the wall itself and its technical workflow were developed by my CIDR DH developer colleague Simon Wiles. On one level, it was an odd fit for an event highlighting the innovative projects happening at and around the Internet Archive that leverage AI tools, developing corpora at scale, and exploring shifts in societal attitudes towards AI. The SUCHO Meme Wall is richly annotated and entirely hand-curated by people who can read the text and interpret the context of these memes. Even the most cutting-edge tools do an uneven job at best at the same.

As a test before the talk, I worked with Jamie Joyce from the Internet Archive to run a couple memes through Dall-e 3, asking it to explain them. It completely failed on a meme that is one of my kids' favorites. (Operation Z is a Russian name for their war; the meme came out around the time Ukraine sunk a Russian battleship.)

That meme had always struck me as one of the most straightforward ones: very easy to explain to the kids, who still giggle when they see it. When we gave Dall-e 3 what I thought of as a more complex meme, it did better:

The image contains three segments, seemingly referencing a meme format. The text is in Ukrainian. Here's a breakdown:
Book Cover:
Top and bottom images depict a book with the title "Володар Перснів" which translates to "Lord of the Rings" in English.
Center Image:
Depicts two characters from "The Lord of the Rings" standing on a modern fighter jet (Lockheed Martin F-35).
Text: "Володар Перснів, якби у Фродо і Сема був Локхед Мартін F-35". This can be translated as "Lord of the Rings, if Frodo and Sam had a Lockheed Martin F-35".
Book Spine:
Text: "Володар Перснів, якби у Фродо і Сема був Локхед Мартін F-35 обіцяний штатами, але вони були змушені чекати на підтвердження передачі мусили ще пройти навчання". This translates to "Lord of the Rings, if Frodo and Sam had a Lockheed Martin F-35 promised by the states, but they had to wait for transfer confirmation and still had to undergo training". It's a humorous take on the idea that if the characters from "The Lord of the Rings" had modern technology, their journey and challenges would be considerably different. The joke seems to also touch upon the complexities and delays associated with military equipment transfers and training.

My takeaway from this, as with many AI experiments, is that in choosing what tasks to pass to AI challenges our human-oriented ideas of what's "easy" or "hard", and care and recalibration are essential for AI to be more use than hassle.

Alyssa spoke movingly about the power that these memes have as a vehicle for communication, self-expression, and solidarity across Ukraine and the Ukrainian diaspora. We both touched on the ways that people love these images and want to see them preserved. Capturing and annotating these memes-- whose existence online is ephemeral, passing swiftly into the unqueryable depths of algorithmic feeds -- is an act of resistance to Russia's attempt to extinguish Ukrainian culture. And on one level, it's deeply satisfying to know that this celebration of Ukrainian language, culture, and humor in dark times is (we think) the largest extensively hand-annotated meme corpus on the internet, and may well contribute to the future development of language and image models that are better at interpreting memes. In its own way, our Meme Wall is as much a hopeful and forward-looking contribution to the discussion of AI as Peter Wang's talk about AGI and ethical alignment: we're imagining a future of training data done differently, much as Lila Shroff does in her recent post "Datasets as Imagination", which quotes Anna Ridler in describing dataset creation as craftwork: "repetitive, time-consuming…but necessary in order to produce something beautiful". (This very much speaks to me, as someone who runs a Textile Makerspace. Thanks to Pam Lach for the pointer to that piece!)

To learn more about the SUCHO Meme Wall, check out Anna Rakityanskaya's article in Slavic & East European Information Resources. You can also check out the video of the Internet Archive event on YouTube; our portion starts around the 46 minute mark.

DLCL ATS round-up, summer 2023

Quinn Dombrowski — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · September 26, 2023

I've never needed summer as badly as I did after this spring, and this summer's conferences, family time, and relatively quiet lulls were just what I was looking for.

Textile Makerspace

Summer brought a few quiet days that allowed me the time to clean up the Makerspace, organize a few things, and spend time with new equipment that I couldn't quite make sense of at first. I've decided this will be the year of the loom at the Textile Makerspace, and we've picked up an inkle loom and a knitter's loom (a folding variation on the rigid heddle), in addition to getting serious about dressing the floor loom that's been in my office since last spring.

Thanks to Making@Stanford, I've got funding for students this whole upcoming year, as well as funding for some basic supplies like thread and needles that we go through a lot of. Eric Kim also got funding for a Makerspace component to his winter course, ## SLAVIC 149: Tails from the Russian Empire: Animals in Russian and Yiddish Literatures, and we have one in our AI course as well. I'm really looking forward to thinking about how to support those courses in the Makerspace, in addition to what we do week by week.

Classes

While I wasn't teaching during the summer, I did spend months tracking the news and discourse around AI in anticipation of the fall class I'm teaching with Laura Wittman and Eric Kim, DLCL 103: Future Text: AI and Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. We'd prepared a syllabus for WAYS approval in the spring (which became an interesting fight about the relationship of AI-generated creations to the humanities), but recognized we'd need to revise it before the start of fall, and probably during the quarter in response to any breaking news. So that course was never far from my mind as I spent time online in the summer. I expected a large turnout but was not prepared to have to look for new discussion section rooms when we raised the cap overall to 60 students, then hit that limit. (Hats off to Judy Nugent for her room-hunting prowess!)

Existing Projects

Over the summer, we finally published the next Data-Sitters Club book, about how to think through building corpora and the implications of those choices. We've got a couple more books waiting in the wings, including the DSC Super Special, the book with Xanda Schofield about topic modeling, and another book in progress about environments.

We were able to launch a basic version of the Senegalese Countercultural Movement website over the summer as a proof-of-concept, with the materials from the Front Culturel Sénégalais accessioned to the Stanford Digital Repository, but for the moment we're holding off on a splashy launch until a few more things are in place.

The Multilingual Harry Potter fanfic project was on hold for the summer, but I expect we'll wrap it up this fall.

There were some delays with the new Global Medieval Sourcebook launch, but we have a plan in place for this fall once all the data is ready.

I still have several things on my to-do list related to the Multilingual DH working group, led by Merve Tekgürler from Stanford and Till Grallert. But the DH 2023 conference included an in-person meeting of many interested folks who had made it to the conference, and it was an inspiring reminder of both how large this community is, and how much work remains to be done.

In my role as ACH representative to ADHO, I attended something like 20 hours of (un-air-conditioned in the heat of summer) meetings at the DH 2023 conference, which included the joyous task of welcoming two new constituent organizations, the Korean Association of DH and DHARTI (based in India). I was talked into serving as Secretary of the Constituent Organization Board, so I have more early morning meetings in my future for this upcoming year as we continue to try different angles on the question of what and who ADHO is for.

This summer, I sorted out a workflow for going from scanned Jewish cookbooks to OCR'd text, and a student assistant has helped make it happen. Once we have a few more plain text files, I'll be working on Python scripts for parsing the data into a Django database. Likewise, the historic TAPS costume collection is going to be a December effort, due to how the summer has gone for the TAPS folks.

This fall I'll be returning to the DLCL dissertation project, which will be enriched by some data about career outcomes gathered by Phoebus Cotsapas.

Towards the end of the summer, we presented the work of the Web Archiving working group to library leadership, which decided that it would make the most sense for us to each continue our own work separately, rather than trying to fit it all into a single cohesive program. After consulting with my fellow Academic Technology Specialists, we've put forward a proposal for continuing the Browsertrix Cloud pilotwith a focus on digital scholarship.

This summer, a new exhibit at Hohbach Hall about "Making Global Computing" was installed, and it was delightful to see the work Simon Wiles and I had done on the exhibit text manifest itself in signage and reading material. The exhibit will receive its due recognition and celebration at the Encode/Include event on October 27th, part of the new SILICON (Stanford Initiative on Language Inclusion and Conservation in Old and New media) initiative created by Kathryn Starkey, Tom Mullaney, and Elaine Treharne. Launching SILICON has been no small part of what I've been up to this summer, and I'm really excited about where this project is going as a way to support digitally-disadvantaged languages through font and keyboard development, working on OCR algorithms for newly-encoded scripts, corpus-building, as well as pathways into tech for humanists and general advocacy for language as an important factor for tomorrow's tech leaders to be thinking about.

New projects

Other than SILICON, there haven't been many new projects over the summer, though I've been advising Ty Davidian on his project The Futurist Archive, which is likely to become a Wax 2.0 site once the data is compiled.

Writing

A few longstanding papers have come together over the summer, including a write-up of a talk I gave with Lauren Tilton in 2022 about our work to expand the DMCA exemption, where we dealt with a few requested edits. The Debates in DH volumes on pedagogy, graduate education, and computation are moving along at their respective paces, and I have pieces coming out in each of them. And finally, a piece with Nichole Nomura for Vectors about "The Librarian, The Computer, The Android, and Big Data" (or, the depiction of data-work in a corpus of Star Trek novels) will be published soon.

Thanks to Brandon Walsh from the UVA Scholars Lab, I've been inspired to try to take up a more regular blogging practice, though it may be spread across the DH at Stanford blog, the Textile Makerspace blog, and my personal blog. Over the summer, I've written about Missing Threads in a DH Origin Story, #DHMakes, grief, regret and distance, coming to terms with IDEs, finding 'close enough' text and deformance and the library strategic directions.

Talks and Events

Over the summer I attended both the virtual ACH 2023 conference, and the international DH conference in Graz, Austria. As in 2019, the differences between the two conferences were striking, but it's a topic for its own blog post. At ACH 2023, I did the "#DHMakes Alternate Format Presentation" with Claudia Berger, Alix Keener, Jojo Karlin, Anne Ladyem McDivitt, Amanda Visconti, and Jacque Wernimont -- basically, we hung out in a surprisingly-enjoyable virtual space, talking crafting with people who came by and showing off the long-distance collaborative-making artifact we made together, each contributing a piece. We also curated social media posts with the #DHMakes hashtag across multiple social media platforms during the conference. I also presented as part of the Digital (Humanities) Trace Data: Critical Approaches to Platforms, APIs, and Metrics for Studying DH Communities panel, where Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara and I talked about the database of DH abstracts and what it tells us about the US DH community's engagement with the international conference. (Take-away point: there's about 20% of ACH that regularly presents at the ADHO DH conference.)

Being part of that 20% (and, in fact, the only person to have presented at every ACH and DH conferences since 2019), I had several things going on at the DH conference. There was a workshop on the TaDiRAH taxonomy organized by Luise Borek that felt like a family reunion, with many people who had worked on the project over the last decade. (I was there at its beginning when I was working on the DiRT tool directory, but left it in good hands and moved on.) I gave a short presentation as part of the roundtable Exploring the Borderlands: A Revolutionary Potential for DH, organized by Luise Borek and Sarah Lang, and my 5-year-old's stuffed elephant Ellie (who she sent with me to "see the world") filled in for Melissa Terras, reading her remarks as she got caught in travel delays. I brought my small e-spinner with me up on stage for that panel, engaging in another kind of "revolution" (that produces yarn) until the drive band broke.

Alex Wingate and I presented a poster about SUCHO, while Lauren Tilton and I presented on the 2021 DMCA exemption as part of a panel on Legal Issues in Digital Humanities, which touched on several interesting developing challenges around AI in addition to those issues with text and data mining. Finally, I presented as part of a panel I organized on Readers, Tropes, and Translations: Directions for Digital Research into Youth Literature, with Agnieszka Backman, Joanna Byszuk, Anouk Lang, and Nichole Nomura. My own presentation felt a bit like a bad joke that my fall 2022 self had played on my summer 2023 self: can we use computational methods to identify Shakespeare-derivative YA books (which usually make a big deal of being Shakespeare-adjacent, as it helps with acceptability by adults)? I tried several methods, focusing on Romeo and Juliet, which (I thought) would be the "easiest" Shakespeare to identify. In the end, nothing worked to tell self-proclaimed Romeo and Juliet derivatives from any other romance YA, but in the discussion someone had what felt like a promising suggestion to try network analysis. Perhaps in another paper. Finally, I unofficially brought the #DHMakes to the DH conference, carrying around different colors of yarn as well as plastic mesh, asking people to share with me their favorite slide, and re-interpreting those slides in micro-projects I would make while listening in conference sessions, before gifting them to the source of the inspiration. That effort also deserves its own blog post, so I'll leave it at that.

My last major event of the summer was the iPres digital preservation conference, where I was the closing keynote. It was the first time I'd had the chance to spend much time with digital preservation folks, whose work feels like a cousin to digital humanities. My conclusion was that I'm grateful that people are thinking through these issues in depth, but it's not quite my thing. But also, so many digital preservation people are wonderfully crafty, and I want to be making-friends with all of them. It was also my first chance to meet new but non-local Stanford library colleague Snowden Becker, and hang out with Dorothea Salo in person, being a big online fan of hers for years. The conference was at UIUC, where I did library school almost 15 years ago now, and since then they've also hired several DH friends into or adjacent to the I-School. Visiting with them was the best way to wrap up the summer.

Other Things

The DH migration to Mastodon seems like it never quite worked. There's a few people who found a good home there, and I have more than a little fondness for it, where the vibes are "secret coffee shop behind the last bookshelf on the left at the quirky local bookstore". But it never became a replacement for DH Twitter.

I was a relatively early Bluesky adopter late in the spring, but I didn't use it much at the beginning because my feed was all chatty celebrities. Once there were more librarians and DH people, Bluesky started feeling more like DH Twitter of the 2010's. As things have continued to get worse on Twitter, Brandon Walsh and I got together to run a form for sharing and requesting invite codes, to try to get more Twitter hold-outs over to what is at least for now a better place. As of today, we've helped over 400 people join Bluesky, and the generosity of the DH community is a beautiful thing to see. (Want to check it out? We've got you covered with invite codes.)

Deformance and the Library Strategic Directions

Quinn Dombrowski — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · September 20, 2023

The Library Strategic Directions arrived shortly before last week's all-staff meeting: a single slide formatted into four columns, each offering a big-picture statement, a couple sentences of italicized context, and a series of bullet points. It was the kind of document where you can either let your eyes glaze over after the first few sentences, or scrutinize every turn of phrase looking for clues about what it suggests about where the organization is actually going.

My upcoming fall course Future Text: AI and Literatures, Cultures, and Languages was on my mind when this email arrived, and I was struck by a different idea: a world of algorithms that are hit or miss on facts but excellent at vibes opens up some delightful possibilities for "deformance", in ways Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels could hardly have imagined in 1999.

What if you recast a document like this as a series of haiku? For starters, the syllable count will be regularly off because of the words at play ("accessibility" is 6 syllables just by itself), and you can forget about the traditional seasonal reference, but precision in form isn't the point: we're looking for short poetry with some clever or cute twist. And the algorithm delivers. A few examples from the 18-poem cycle:

Research lifecycle's guide,
Data services expanding wide,
Fulfilling needs with pride.

Operations transform,
Responsive services take form,
Innovation's the norm.

Accessibility,
Campus partnerships we see,
Promote equity's plea.

Expectations clear,
Roles and processes sincere,
Thriving staff we cheer.

I shared this around to colleagues in a range of roles in the library, ultimately posting the whole cycle in the library's general Slack channel during the meeting. And it occurred to me through the conversations that followed that this kind of vibe-check for the strategic direction could actually make for a good management exercise when developing a document like this. Which dry bullet points become poems that you could, in good humor, print out and put up in your office? Which poems can your staff only read sarcastically? The latter point to areas that need work.

There were other reframings that shed different light on the document. What if it were an ad for a video game?

Are you ready to embark on an epic quest for knowledge, innovation, and equity? Introducing "Library Innovator: Chronicles of Knowledge," the thrilling video game inspired by Stanford Libraries' visionary strategic plan!

🔍 Explore the Changing Scholarly Landscape: As the Library Innovator, your mission is to support Stanford researchers in navigating the shifting sands of scholarly communication. Uncover hidden resources, forge strong campus partnerships, and lead the charge in redefining the future of academia.

📊 Master the Research Lifecycle: Dive headfirst into the world of data services! Expand your capabilities across the entire research lifecycle, from data acquisition to analysis. Conquer challenges, unlock new tools, and become the ultimate data maestro!

📚 Build the Ultimate Collection: Your quest isn't complete without the perfect collection! Strategically curate resources that advance Stanford's research mission. Balance acquisition, processing, and discovery as you assemble a legendary library that stands the test of time.

🚀 Innovate in Library Operations: Transform library operations and create new, responsive information services. Think outside the book, harness cutting-edge technologies, and lead the charge in shaping the future of libraries!

🧙‍♂️ Strengthen Your Team: As the Library Innovator, you're not alone! Strengthen staff diversity, collaboration, and well-being. Build a diverse, motivated team that's ready to take on any challenge. Invest in their training, support their growth, and promote inclusivity and belonging.

...and on it went in that manner.

Is this, perhaps, a little dramatic? I'm not sure our jobs would actually make a particularly thrilling video game. But the focus on action in the prose made me reflect more about what the strategic directions would have us do than the bullet points in the original document.

I'll close with two of the "Buddhist sutras" derived from the slides, which also take the form of bullet points, albeit with a very different style.

Sutra of Innovation for Scholarly Wisdom

In the ever-changing tapestry of knowledge, Innovation is the path to meet evolving needs. By creating new services and enhancing the old, We nurture teaching, research, and strong partnerships.

We guide Stanford researchers through shifting tides of knowledge.
We weave data services into the fabric of research life.
We prepare the campus to share wisdom openly with all.
We partner to support growing knowledge disciplines.
In library operations, we innovate to serve with wisdom anew.

Sutra of Collections for Future Insight

In the scrolls of information, both digital and physical, We seek the wisdom to address the scholars of today and tomorrow.

Distinctive collections we shall build to serve our mission.
In the dance of acquisition and discovery, balance shall we maintain.
Digitize we must, to meet the needs of seekers.
Through repositories and light, we shine upon the wisdom gathered.
Spaces and events we create for seekers' intellectual journey.

Finding 'close enough' text

Quinn Dombrowski — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · September 7, 2023

For people new to text analysis, it can be hard to wrap your head around the gap between what's completely obvious to you as a human and what's easily detectible by a computer. Especially when working with humanities data, there's a lot of "almosts". Is Pale Fire the same as Pale Fire: A Novel? Unless you're researching the nuances of book titles (or rather, book cover conventions that can find their way into metadata), those are functionally the same -- but if you search for duplicate rows in your spreadsheet, this pair won't come up because they're not exactly the same.

One of my favorite Python libraries for finding these near-matches is the adorably-named FuzzyWuzzy, which has some simple and effective options for "fuzzy string matching", the name for the problem we're trying to solve here. It uses Levenshtein distance -- a way to measure the difference between two sequences -- to calculate a score between two strings, or pieces of text. The simple ratio (fuzz.ratio) gets you the distance between your two pieces of text in their entirety, so if one of them contains extra information (e.g. The Baby-Sitters Club #1: Kristy's Great Idea vs Kristy's Great Idea), it will push the score down because that information is missing from one of the texts, which makes them less similar. What I usually use instead is the partial ratio (fuzz.partial_ratio), which takes the shortest piece of text, and scores to what extent that text exists (in its entirety, or altered) within the longer text.

As an example, I've used this with a metadata sheet that has a column with what a matching filename should look like (author last name, hyphen, then the title with words lower-cased and separated by underscores). I've compared the values in the metadata sheet with the actual list of files that actually exist in a directory (which may have some extra cruft attached, like book series or series number), and then had the code print out all matches above a certain threshold -- 90 to start, then skimming the results for 80 to pick up anything I missed (if fuzz.partial_ratio(line, file) > 90:)

Data cleaning is always a slog, but FuzzyWuzzy cuts down on the pain by bringing the computer's evaluation of what's "the same" to something a little closer to mine.

*Cross-posted to Quinn Dombrowski's blog.

Coming to Terms with IDEs

Quinn Dombrowski — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · August 23, 2023

This week Brandon Walsh finished up his summer of blogging, a series I very much enjoyed following along with. It was a refreshing reminder that a blog post doesn't need to be a whole production: jotting down and sharing a few thoughts or a tip or a workflow can have a lot of value for yourself and others. So much of that kind of casual writing ended up on Twitter over the last decade, where it now sits in people's individual archives, has been deleted, or is juxtaposed with increasingly dubious ads on something called "X".

I've been greatly enjoying my time over on Bluesky (where Brandon and I have been working on getting invite codes to any DH folks who want them), but there's no denying the increasingly fractured nature of the broad DH community, and I'd rather write things in a place that are easier to find and reference in the future. So, a return to deliberate blogging -- with any luck, at the "once every two weeks" pace Brandon suggested.

Today's anecdote and DH pro-tip come out of my own efforts to learn to code, which I've written a lot about over on the Data-Sitters Club (DSC 12: The DSC and the New Programming Language especially, but "learning to code" is also one of the longest entries in the DSC index) and elsewhere, including arguing that learning to code should be weighed against learning myriad other things for people interested in DH.

I've written about Jupyter Notebooks and shortly after DSC 8 we switched to publishing the Data-Sitters Club using Jupyter Book, but I've never talked about IDEs or the software I use to write code because... I didn't use one. For the last five years, I've been writing all my code using the Jupyter Notebook environment. No plugins, nothing fancy, not even a whiff of autocomplete. Except when I was in a hurry, I wouldn't let myself copy and paste code from Stack Overflow: if I wanted to use it, I had to retype it. This, I reckoned, was how I learned human languages, and this was how I was going to learn to code.

If you've seriously studied another human language, you'll remember that passive recognition is much, much easier than production. The less thoughtfully produced Duolinguo courses (looking at you, Duolinguo Ukrainian) cut corners in the same way: in all the exercises, the answers are already there in front of your eyes. You just need to string the words together in the right order, or form a plausible translated English sentence. If you have the vaguest sense of what any of the words are, you'll rack up the gamified points.

Staring at a blank page and trying to summon from the depths of your brain what the word is -- and then sorting out the right form of the word and producing it from nothing, one letter at a time -- is an entirely different experience. Doing that same thing, but faster and verbally, is another challenge. And I thought to myself that if I was ever going to get good enough to do what I imagined to be the coding equivalent of fluent speech, I could allow myself no shortcuts. No copy/paste, no autocomplete, certainly no spicy AI autocomplete. It had to be me staring down a blank screen.

I can't say it didn't work: I am, after several years of work, much more comfortable and capable with writing code. During some phases of the year, I do it regularly; like most things, to keep your skill you have to practice. But it can be a bit of a mental stretch, especially when I return to it after a break. How many equals signs do I need here? What was the syntax for wrangling those CSVs? I've written enough code by now that I can crib from older projects, but I have to fight inertia to get started. There is a particular kind of energy and focus I need to want to tackle writing code, and its supply is far from infinite or reliable.

It felt like defeat, or at least indulging in some kind of heresy that would surely lead to perdition, when I mentioned my coding setup to my DH developer colleague Simon Wiles and his first response was to encourage me to use an IDE. How would I get better at writing code myself if I accepted becoming a thrall of code completion? But on the last night of the DH conference in Graz, we sat down together and he patiently showed me around VS Code (which I had spurned for years, associating it with bad high school programming classes that taught Visual Basic .NET), and helped me find useful extensions to install. Because Simon is usually the one to straighten out my code when I've caused a bigger wreck than a child with a wooden railway set and Godzilla fantasies, I promised to use VS Code in order to give him code disasters that were at least reasonably formatted.

This morning I found myself struggling with the latest Data-Sitters Club book, needing to extract 100 rows from a spreadsheet where the filename column matched a list of filenames. I kicked myself for not simply flagging them all in OpenRefine when I had looked them up yesterday, which would've made an export easy. I seriously considered doing it manually on the train. It's not that I didn't know basically how to write the code-- it's just that I dreaded sorting out all the punctuation and fiddling with it until it went from "basically right, should more or less work" to "actually does the thing".

I opened VS Code. I wrote a couple lines to open my source CSV and output file. I typed reader and began scratching my way through the recesses of my brain, trying to remember the syntax for reading in a CSV that way.

The rest of the code appeared in gray. The Codium plugin I had installed had seen this story before, more times even than I'd heard scholars say, "I want to build a database", and it filled in the rest of the story.

I hit tab and accepted the additions.

In three minutes -- where it probably would have taken me 15 -- I had a new file with the 100 rows I needed and could get back to work on the actual project.

I had my qualms about using an IDE with code completion, and on some gut level, it still makes me squeamish. (My oldest kid is very into Baldur's Gate 3, and code completion is the closest thing to Illithid Powers in my daily life.) But ultimately, I write code in order to accomplish things, not to pull off parlor tricks. My awe at people who can code fluently without reference materials doesn't make that a sensible end goal for myself. As Simon pointed out, "There's no situation where you'd have to write code without an IDE" -- and short of some kind of super-minimal computing post-ecological-disaster scenario, I imagine he's right. If this setup lowers the mental hurdles I have to navigate to sit down and produce some code, it's a good one, given my actual goals and priorities. If I'm going to wrack my brain to produce something from scratch, let it be Ukrainian, not Python.

Cross-posted to Quinn Dombrowski's blog

DLCL ATS round-up, spring 2023

Quinn Dombrowski — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · June 21, 2023

Attempting to restore some order to my inbox reminded me what a busy quarter this spring has been, with a combination of teaching, travel, and on-campus events.

Classes

This quarter I ran two independent studies: the DH Practicum, where students work on their own DH project with support from me, and "Data Visualization with Textiles", a new class where students spend time at the Textile Makerspace during its open hours, learn one or more textile methods, then do a project using those methods that also incorporates a data element.

I've done the DH Practicum before, though never with this many projects at the same time. I worked with Merve Tekgürler on their project exploring the lemmatization capabilities of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 for Ottoman Turkish, as well as models they could fine-tune. With help from Sebastian Majstorovic of SUCHO, I worked with Alyssa Virker on her project gathering and analyzing TikTok videos featuring Ukrainian poetry. Chloé Brault MacKinnon worked with her CESTA intern Claire Chua on a project comparing historical and recent news articles about Pierre Vallières and his book Nègres blancs d'Amérique.

The 1-credit "Data Visualization with Textiles" class was an experiment, and one that turned out better than I could have reasonably expected, especially since I planned for 5 students and ended up with 20 and a full waiting list. The Textile Makerspace can't physically fit that many people at once, so students were invited to come by during any of the Makerspace open hours. (Still, somehow, there were days when it felt like half the class managed to show up at once!) As a result, the Textile Makerspace staff -- Akasha Hayden, Shaina Kaye, Cristyn Filla, and Kavya Srikanth -- deserve so much credit for making this class work, as co-instructors when students came to the Makerspace during their shifts.

I ran a couple specific topical workshops as part of the textile dataviz course, on how to read sewing patterns, and on how to think about incorporating data. I had in-person, one-on-one meetings with almost all the students in the middle of the quarter, to check in and talk through any questions about their final projects. The final projects were diverse and delightful, from turning seven years of selfies into a scarf with custom-made yarn capturing changes in hair color over that time, to a string-based visualization of obsessive thoughts, to hand-embroidery capturing an immigration journey. I'm really looking forward to teaching it again next year.

Textile Makerspace

This quarter I completely rebuilt the Textile Makerspace website, which now includes profiles for each of our pieces of equipment... written in the first person, as a way to center the personalities and quirks of these tools.

The Textile Makerspace has a couple more new acquisitions: the Studio Mod 360 punchcard knitting machine and a Brother KH-940 knitting machine. The KH-940 is a digital knitting machine with a built-in computer that has over 400 patterns, but Akasha gave it an electronic brain transplant by hooking it up to an Arduino with a custom shield, and now it can knit any B&W image thanks to the open-source All Yarns Are Beautiful software. After development stalled for a few years during the pandemic, AYAB is now approaching a 1.0 release, and I've been enjoying following along in their Discord channel.

Loom setup continues to be a struggle, since none of us really know what we're doing, frankly. I'm hoping some focused effort at the end of the summer can get us something usable in time for fall.

We got some generous yarn donations from my mother-in-law, Mary Dombrowski, which led to several creative student projects. As one student quipped, "I wish I could marry into yarn!" The yarn bins have overflowed this quarter, also with a donation from the Arts Council to fund a stash of yarn for projects that they're not able to individually fund, as the number of textile-based project proposals has grown dramatically in recent years.

Wrapping up the full cycle of an academic year at the Textile Makerspace, I've discovered that during the last couple weeks of spring quarter, the embroidery machine is in near-constant use as graduating seniors make goodbye gifts and embroider graduation stoles. I also worked with Chloé to embroider several pin-on embroidered patches using the grad student union logo, to hand out at graduation.

The Makerspace will be on summer hiatus until mid-August, at which point I hope to finish the documentation project I've begun, putting QR codes on every machine that takes the viewer directly to the machine's profile page, with quickstart instructions.

Existing Projects

The Data-Sitters Club has been stuck this quarter, with several pieces in progress and nothing complete. DSC Super Special 1 is basically done, but not the accompanying new website. The topic modeling book with Xanda Schofield is almost there, but first I need to finish the corpus book, where I've been struggling to find a good example for a case study. I suspect we'll be able to get through all of these this summer.

At the same time, this was the quarter that got the Multilingual Harry Potter fanfic project unstuck, thanks to the patience and skill of Valeria Korotkova and support from Francesco Bacci as our Italian data expert. Lera has worked wonders on data wrangling and network visualization, and for the first time publishing this project doesn't feel like a pipe dream.

Towards the end of the quarter, with CSS design help from my colleague Simon Wiles in the library, I was able to put together a Senegalese Countercultural Movement website with Fatoumata Seck, and get the materials she's gathered from the Front Culturel Sénégalais accessioned into the Stanford Digital Repository with support from Geoff Willard in the library.

Global Medieval Sourcebook has a projected wrap-up date of this summer, and I've got a list of design changes to make before the final data import. It's the very last of the lingering Drupal projects from my predecessor, and I'm looking forward to having all of them migrated in time for my 5th anniversary here.

Another longstanding Drupal project was the Entitled Opinions podcast, recently migrated to a modern WordPress site hosted by WordPress itself, which handles updates. This quarter there were two small miracles: we successfully regained access to both Apple Podcast instances of the show, neither of which was originally connected to any account that anyone on the project team had access to. Bless Apple for actually having phone support with humans who can help you figure out what part of that giant organization you should file a help ticket with in bizarre situations like this one. I'm also grateful to central IT for bending their rule of not giving people access to email addresses that don't comply with the current username policy -- like the one we needed in order to create an Apple account to prove that we owned the podcast.

The Multilingual DH working group, led by Merve Tekgürler from Stanford and Till Grallert. I didn't get far on the various projects I planned for it, including updating the multilingual list of computational text analysis resources, but it's exciting to finally get past the bureaucracy stage. It's a small thing, but I recently saw that a GitHub issue I filed over at Voyant with students during last quarter's non-English digital humanities class -- where the language detection algorithm wasn't correctly detecting Chinese -- was resolved because they've replaced the language detection code. I'll keep this handy for next time I teach that class, as an example of how you can do things to make our shared tooling better.

I've continued in my role as ACH representative to ADHO, where this quarter I've managed to arrange for program committee co-chairs (Jaj Karajgikar and Andrew Janco) for DH 2024, as well as Alex Wermer-Colan as our program committee representative for ACH. The whole process has required learning a lot more about the extensive rules that underpin the DH conference. Also in my ADHO hat, the ADHO Identity Project was not successful as I had created it. I'd hoped to get every constituent organization to write up something about their organization, their values, what they thought ADHO was, and what they thought it should be doing. The larger purpose here was the fact that ADHO faces several difficult decisions about how to prioritize resources, how to decide among recommendations from the Intersectional Identity Task Force, and how to evolve in response to criticism, such as a recent piece on the DH conference. This identity project was one of the responses ADHO mentioned in its response to that piece; getting all the organizations on the same page about what ADHO is, what it's for (and for whom), and its goals and priorities seemed like a necessary first step in moving the organization forward. On the ACH side, we put together a survey and sent it out to members, getting some very thought-provoking responses about how people see ADHO vs. ACH. But several organizations didn't participate at all, and most of the responses didn't get much more concrete about ADHO than generalities about the value of internationalism. Since the initial model didn't work out, ADHO turned towards Lisa Spiro's classic "This is Why We Fight: Defining the Values of Digital Humanities" and doing what she suggested at the end: putting together a shared document that people can edit and comment on, as an attempt to find some shared vision. I'll be trying to see if we can get anywhere with that approach at the international DH conference this summer.

My part of the DLCL dissertation project has been on hold this quarter, but my conversations with Xanda Schofield about the topic modeling Data Sitters Club book have given me a lot of food for thought that I'd like to apply to the project as it resumes this summer.

It's been a slower road to recovery for my injured hand than I was hoping, which has impacted my book scanning, since that requires exactly the hand position I've struggled with. Corpus-building has taken on a new role in the context of AI projects, described below.

Jewish cookbooks have been on hold this quarter due to delays in getting them scanned, but I have all kinds of ideas for them, including ones that might take the shape of embroidery. It'll likely be a later summer project, along with the various Django databases, including the project on the historic TAPS costume collection.

The Script Encoding Initiative project decided to take a different direction, but the interest in better supporting "digitally disadvantaged languages" is coalescing in a shape that better connects with existing expertise on campus. I'm hopeful that the pieces will come together this summer, in a way that has synergy with a new exhibit at Hohbach Hall about "making global computing". Simon Wiles and I worked with Kristen Valenti from the Silicon Valley Archives on selecting some materials from the Unicode Archives for the exhibit, and writing up some narrative around them. It's such a joy to get to geek out about scripts and encoding, which have been pet topics of mine for a long time.

This quarter we presented the Browsertrix Cloud pilot at the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), and the discussions as we prepared for that talk led me to conclude that the biggest challenges are administrative, policy, and financial, rather than technical. This has continued to play out in discussions since the conference. What are the expectations around bibliographers' web archiving? Should we be prioritizing creating our own web archives as part of our collections? Currently the bibliographers have to pay for their own ArchiveIt accounts. ArchiveIt also stores all the data, though there are workflows to get web archives accessioned to the Stanford Digital Repository. Currently there are no workflows to get web archive data from Browsertrix Cloud or anywhere else into SDR, so while anyone is free to use any tool they want, there is infrastructural support only for ArchiveIt, making alternatives a dead end without a lot of additional labor on the bibliographers' part. Does continuing the pilot make sense without also doing the infrastructural development to make it comparably functional to ArchiveIt in terms of ease of accessioning the data to SDR.

This year again, the undergraduate peer mentors curated a collection of creative undergraduate works for their Ingenio publication, and I spent a day updating their Jekyll-based website with the new material. I also wrangled together blurbs about active DH projects for the annual DLCL Year in Review.

I've had the opportunity to revisit the HPC for Humanists project with the arrival of Brad Rittenhouse in Stanford's Research Computing group. It's a beautiful thing: his role there is exactly what we describe in a forthcoming piece in Debates in DH: Computing about what we foresaw to be a rise in support staff roles for facilitating humanities and social science people's access to HPC clusters. Brad was planning to build out documentation for things that humanities and social science people wanted to do, so we're going to collaborate on expanding the HPC for Humanists resource. I've also been talking with him about piecing together the code and fiddly library installation setup for fine-tuning large language models using Sherlock, and it's really coming together.

Finally, there was a whole week in May where we brought to the Bay Area my SUCHO co-organizers, Anna Kijas and Sebastian Majstorovic, along with long-term core volunteer Andreas Segerberg and Ulia Gosart who has been our connection to the Cherkasy Regional Library where we donated the high-end digitization scanner and equipment purchased with the funds from the Pearl Jam Vitalogy Foundation. That visit, which included a trip to the Internet Archive, was the subject of its own write-up on the DH at Stanford blog.

New projects

While there was some planning last quarter, the three-part workshop on large language models and their impact on teaching (especially language teaching) took place at the beginning of this quarter. From there, Laura Wittman and I put together a course that we'll be offering in the fall called "Future Text", on large language models, machine generated art, and their impact on society along with their entanglements with languages beyond English. For the final project, there'll be a technical track where students can fine-tune a model, build a corpus, or do other hands-on work with data and/or computation, as well as a critique track where they can write a paper, and a creative track where they can do a creative project (e.g. at the Textile Makerspace) in collaboration with, or in some other way engaging with "AI".

It took some intervention from Alexander Key, the DLCL Director of Undergraduate Studies, to get this course approved for the Aesthetic and Interpretive Inquiry (AII) WAYS (the undergraduate distribution requirement that roughly corresponds to "humanities courses"); the committee was willing to approve it for the Exploring Difference and Power (EDP) WAYS, but the comments from the committee were that AI has no intentionality, so it can't create art, so it's inappropriate to apply aesthetic and interpretive inquiry to it. On the contrary, we argued, that issue shouldn't be treated axiomatically, but engaged with in a course such as ours, since it may in fact be one of the most pressing questions of aesthetic and interpretive inquiry for our times. With the course approved for two different WAYS categories, I expect we'll have the largest enrollment I've ever had this fall.

Writing

I haven't done much writing this quarter in the form of papers, but I have put in an effort to get back to more regular blogging on the DH at Stanford blog beyond the quarterly DLCL round-ups, which are all I've managed since 2020. I wrote up the AI and pedagogy workshop, SUCHO week, and the New Horizons in Digital Humanities and Cultural Data Science workshop in Hong Kong. In addition, I've been writing up projects and events over at the Textile Makerspace blog.

Talks and Events

In April, I participated in a virtual event at San Jose State University on "Ukrainian libraries during the wartime: a year in review", talking about SUCHO. I also had the chance to return to where DH all started for me, at the University of Chicago, to give a talk as part of their lecture series. In addition to the talk and workshop I did in Hong Kong, I had the honor of giving the keynote for the Carleton College Day of DH event. It was the middle of the night in Hong Kong when I gave the talk, but it seemed to go okay, at least judging by Rebecca Moss's incredible live-doodle of the talk, which perfectly captured how I do DH. I loved it so much I printed it on fabric and will sew a dress with it.

Other Things

The trip to Hong Kong led me to an uneasy truce with Twitter, which I had been completely off (save the occasional DM I noticed) since November. A fair amount of information that's valuable for me to follow is shared primarily or exclusively on Twitter -- however disappointing that may be. And yet, when I started dropping back in from time to time (to lurk; I can't see myself posting much if at all), it isn't what it used to be.

That said, nothing is what DH Twitter used to be. Active Mastodon use has plateaued at a fairly low level. I managed to get a BlueSky invite and has a more Twitter-like look and feel, but the most active users seem to be celebrities. Following every single librarian I could find (still not a terribly large group) helped a little, but it doesn't feel like a very active place (not unlike Mastodon) but also posting things doesn't seem to lead to much conversation (unlike Mastodon.) That's not even all the platforms in the mix: I've been seeing more folks posting DH things to Facebook and Instagram.

For ACH 2023 later this week, I've wrangled together a group of people -- Claudia Berger, Jojo Karlin, Alix Keener, Anne Ladyem McDivitt, and Amanda Visconti -- for an "alternate format" contribution around #DHmakes (DH-inflected crafting). A core part of this submission is attempting to aggregate #DHmakes posts from across all the social networks. Who knows, maybe that process itself will turn into a textile data viz down the road.

Finally, moving from global to very local networks, I was able to attend the DLCL graduation this year for the first time. I've almost been here five years now, which means that the students I've worked with are starting to gradaute. It was really meaningful to be able to be present for that, congratulate them in person, and meet some of their family. Seeing students take what we've done together and bring it to new places is one of the most satisfying things about this work.

New Horizons in Digital Humanities and Cultural Data Science

Quinn Dombrowski — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · June 14, 2023

From May 29-June 2, the Bachelor of Arts in Humanities and Digital Technologies program at the University of Hong Kong hosted a workshop on New Horizons in Digital Humanities and Cultural Data Science, organized by Javier Cha and Anya Adair. It was a joy to participate as one of the speakers, presenting on Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online and the stakes of digital humanities, as well as running a hands-on workshop with Melanie Walsh on multilingual DH and NLP. While I've been at other in-person gatherings since the pandemic, this was the largest DH-oriented event I've been to since 2019, and it was a vivid reminder of how far we have to go in creating viable online spaces for people who don't already know each other well to meet and build the kind of rapport that could foster future collaboration.

The opening remarks from the dean, Derek Collins, put the workshop into an institutional context: HKU is looking to build a digital humanities program that would be a peer to any of the major programs across the globe, but with a distinctly Asian perspective. It's refreshing to see this that this view has evolved into the kind of common wisdom that appears in a dean's remarks: there is no monolithic "DH", and whatever we do is shaped by the many facets of our own personal, local, and regional context. This point was again emphasized by Gimena del Rio Riande in the first presentation of the workshop, when she stated explicitly that an "international DH" does not exist. Trying to make one, in practice, amounts to nothing more than codifying one set of (typically Anglo-American) practices as "international DH" and imposing them on everyone else as a standard that may make no sense in other regional contexts.

Working across several fields and languages in DH meant I was lucky to already know most of the speakers. The lineup included folks from computer science, information studies, and East Asian studies, who were involved in the international DH scene to varying extents. Jing Hu's presentation on historical Korean social mobility was the kind of thing I really enjoy about DH events: learning about a topic I'd likely never be exposed to otherwise, embedded in a discussion about a tool I might be able to incorporate into the projects I support in a different field. Similarly, Mark Byington's talk on using GIS and historical imagery to recover "lost landscapes" (and places with restricted access, like North Korea) got me thinking about the materiality of historical images, and marveling at the engineering that went into clandestine 20th century aerial photography rigs.

Graph databases and networks were a shared theme across multiple presentations and workshops. Tim Tangherlini spoke about network methods for understanding conspiracy theories, and Jeff Tharsen presented on the OCHRE platform which atomizes and links knowledge across several UChicago projects and will be the basis of a broader project / data publishing initiative. Jeff's workshop on identifying and visualizing intertextuality, building upon UChicago's ARTFL Project, got me thinking about potential uses across several of my projects, in multiple languages.

Large language models were a focus of several talks and workshops, and sat in the background for others, including mine. Wayne de Fremery considered the different meanings of "deep learning" (both the technical jargon and something like PhD training). Tim Tangherlini's hands-on workshop involved using BERTopic for narrative analysis. David Mimno's talk was a deep dive into some of the current major LLMs, and an insightful take on the relationship between cutting-edge work on model training and what humanists are looking for from their tools. His hands-on workshop led us into the bizarre world of LLM training, where cutting the training iterations in half (due to time constraints) left us not with the extracted entities we were going for, but instead, a halfway decent translator of prompts into German. As someone planning to teach a course on AI in the fall with Laura Wittman, I was excited to hear about new materials coming from the BERT for Humanists project over the summer.

There was also a thread of creative making that ran through the event, which was a particular delight given where my head has been this quarter while teaching a "Data Visualization with Textiles" course. On Monday, I held a brief lunchtime session on textile data visualization, and over the course of the whole week, I collaborated with attendees on a data viz that I wrote up on the Textile Makerspace blog. Wayne's talk on deep learning also included a series of creative explorations of the Unicode code space, with Korean texts rendered as images, 3D printed jewelry, and even a virtual reality landscape. As it often happens, it takes a trip across the world to meet your neighbors; I'm looking forward to future collaboration with Wayne, who's also based in the Bay Area.

The first cohort of students have wrapped up their first year in the Bachelor of Arts in Humanities and Digital Technologies program, and there was an interesting roundtable discussion on curriculum and how these programs should be structured. The students had an introductory crash course on all things DH with Javier Cha before continuing their coursework in "regular" stats and coding classes. It's a lot to ask of undergrads, who also have to choose an area of the humanities to focus on, but the students I met had risen to the occasion. I was surprised to learn that the students who helped run the event were all early-stage undergrads, and not grad students.

It's exciting to see a program like this at its beginning, and to be part of the conversations that will likely shape its direction. I'd love to have the opportunity to go back for a summer program at some point, or collaborate in other ways. (Once their DH lab is set up, if they add a creative making component, maybe they could be pen pals with the Textile Makerspace!) I'm grateful to Javier for the invitation, and for his support given the potentially sensitive nature of what I was presenting (i.e. protecting Ukrainian cultural heritage, as well as a data set of uncensored multilingual fanfic). With spring wrapping up, this trip was exactly what I needed to get excited again about the projects I'm working on, and face the summer with enthusiasm, new ideas, and new avenues of collaboration.

SUCHO week

Quinn Dombrowski — Wed, 17 May 2023 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · May 18, 2023

The week of May 8th was the culmination of this year's DLCL "Cultural Heritage at War" research unit, bringing the co-founders and several volunteers from Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) together for several events throughout the Bay Area. Co-founders Anna Kijas and Sebastian Majstorovic attended from Boston and Berlin, respectively; long-time volunteer Andreas Segerberg came from Gothenburg; and Ulia Gosart joined the group from Los Angeles. The events were generously co-sponsored by Stanford Libraries and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.

(Left to right: Quinn Dombrowski, Andreas Segerberg, Anna Kijas, Sebastian Majstorovic, and Ulia Gosart at Stanford University.)

On Monday, members of the group engaged in public humanities work by giving a presentation at Malcolm X Elementary in Berkeley, where the PTA hosted a web archiving workshop for families last year shortly after SUCHO started. The group taught the children in Jennifer Adcock's first grade class how to write their names in Ukrainian Cyrillic, and about geography and the war using Ukrainian children's drawings from an art contest at the Cherkasy Regional Library. Scans of the drawings will soon be available in the SUCHO gallery, and will be on display in Hohbach Hall.

Andreas Segerberg at Malcolm X Elementary school displaying children's drawings from the Cherkasy Regional Library.

On Tuesday, the team gave a talk at CESTA, joined virtually by Erica Peaslee from College Station, TX. In this talk, "Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online: Socially-Engaged Digital Humanities", the group covered the work SUCHO has done to date, the importance of open culture for facilitating data rescue work, and the need for ongoing support for cultural heritage workers in Ukraine, including digitization equipment and batteries that can not only power digitization equipment and charge patrons' phones, but also ensure that security systems remain functional to prevent looting. As part of the Humanities and Area Studies special collections pop-up event in the Library with the theme of "Travel", the Textile Makerspace hosted a special DIY Ukrainian embroidery session. The day ended with a DH happy hour with DLCL grad students and CIDR staff.

Sebastian Majstorovic presenting at CESTA and Quinn Dombrowski with children's drawings from Cherkasy

HannahZoe Chua-Reyes and Alyssa Virker at the embroidery pop-up, and SUCHO team and CIDR staff and DLCL grad students at the DH happy hour event

Wednesday featured planning meetings between the SUCHO visitors and members of the DLCL who are involved in different facets of the project, including PhD student Alyssa Virker who is documenting Ukrainian poetry TikTok videos as part of her DH project. Alyssa also joined the team for organizing a workshop on website and social media archiving in Hohbach Hall. The group wrapped up their time on campus with lunch with Slavic grad students, including Georgii Korotkov who was deeply involved in scraping library catalogs using the IRBIS system, as well as Prof. Yuliya Ilchuk and visiting artist in residence Andrii Kurkov.

SUCHO team with the opening slide for the web and social media archiving workshop

Ulia Gosart shows Cherkasy children's artwork to Yuliya Ilchuk and Andrii Kurkov

On Thursday, the SUCHO visitors were joined by a large group of grad students, librarians, and DH staff for a trip to the Internet Archive (IA). Founder Brewster Kahle gave the group a personal tour of the impressive space, including the real servers with Internet Archive data in the sanctuary, several art exhibits, playable vintage video games, and 78 RPM records. After lunch, Mark Graham demonstrated some recent developments, including automated transcription, transliteration, and summarization of TV news from several countries including Ukraine, Russia, and China. This led into an open-ended discussion about how the Internet Archive can further support efforts like SUCHO, as well as other digital projects at Stanford and beyond. Enhancing the metadata for uploaded Ukrainian books came up as one priority for SUCHO. Partnering with the IA on developing or enhancing large language models for non-English languages was another promising area of mutual interest.

Brewster Kahle gives a tour of the Internet Archive

A conversation with Mark Graham and visitors from Stanford and the SUCHO team

On the final day of the trip, the team developed a list of follow-up tasks after the Internet Archive meeting, and discussed scaling the museum-oriented "Memory Savers" program -- which will put Ukrainian students into museums to assist with digitization and digital projects -- to include libraries as well. The group also discussed the possibility of aggregating metadata about the digital books in the Internet Archive's collections, and offering it as a digital data source that can be added to Ukrainian libraries' digital catalogs.

This summer, SUCHO team members will be presenting their work at the international Digital Humanities conference in Graz. Numerous projects in the DLCL connected with SUCHO will be continuing their work into next year; an application to revive the Slavic Digital Humanities research unit in order to support those projects is currently under consideration.

Spring AI and Pedagogy Workshop

Quinn Dombrowski — Sun, 30 Apr 2023 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · May 1, 2023

At the beginning of spring quarter, Laura Wittman and I organized a three-part workshop on AI and pedagogy. Workshop 1 (slides available here) began with an explanation of what large language models like ChatGPT are, how they're made, and how they actually work. While machine-generated text has only recently reached mainstream public awareness with the release of these large language models, the idea of algorithmic text generation is over 100 years old, with the mathematical theory behind another approach, Markov chains, dating to the early 20th century.

The training data commonly used to create these models poses a challenge for scholars working in languages other than English. Furthermore, the fact that the latest models (GPT 3.5 and 4) have mysteriously come leaps and bounds in their ability to competently produce text in non-English languages -- just as OpenAI has stopped talking about what has gone into their training data for recent models -- is particularly frustrating for scholars working multilingually.

The first workshop also addressed common myths and misunderstandings about large language models: it doesn't (currently) have internet access, so if you put in a URL and ask it to summarize, it might draw on its training data if it's an old link, or it might make things up based on the URL title. All it can do is generate plausible-sounding text; there's no filter for it to check if what's plausible and what's true are in alignment. The reason it "doubles down" when challenged on a false statement is because getting into an argument is a more plausible response based on a giant corpus of human-generated text than "I'm an algorithm with no concept of truth." The models do well with "languages" they have seen a lot of (the most common human languages on the internet, computer code, etc.) than ones they have seen less of (e.g. indigenous languages, the language of crochet patterns, etc.) And finally, considering that a sizable chunk of its training data includes speculative fiction, fan fiction, and similar writing, it's not difficult to get large language models to say sci-fi things that make it sound sentient. It doesn't mean that it is, just that's the most plausible text based on its training data.

The second workshop (slides available here) looked at how people are already using large language models in the classroom and in their research, including using it to describe and imitate writing style (Mark Marino), using it as a first draft of a final paper (Alex Gil), and using it as a research assistant to reason about the passage of time in literature. In the second workshop, we played with it for reformatting references in different bibliographic style, including going to and from more "lossy" formats (e.g. Harvard, which only has a first initial -- it was surprisingly accurate at going from a Harvard citation to an MLA citation with the correct first name.)

The third workshop invited participants to actually try coming up with their own assignment that would use large language models, which we then tried out together during the workshop. Assignments ranged from comparing human and machine translations of less-well-known texts (including some with unusual loanwords or other tricky lexicon), to using ChatGPT as a conversation partner. However, even with a plausible concept, actually creating a prompt that gets the kind of result you're looking for is more difficult than everyone in the workshop expected.

We spent some time working with the idea of ChatGPT as a conversation practice partner, beginning with the prompt:

Pretend you are a native French speaker who is having a conversation with a first-year student of the French language about her eating habits. Ask her what she usually eats for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and then ask relevant follow-up questions, and talk about your own habits to model correct language use.

This instruction led to paragraphs of response at a difficulty level too high for a beginner, with many different questions mixed in:

Bonjour, comment ça va? Je m'appelle ChatGPT, et je suis un locuteur natif de français. Comment se passe l'apprentissage de la langue française jusqu'à présent?

Je suis curieux de savoir, que mangez-vous habituellement pour le petit-déjeuner, le déjeuner et le dîner? Pour le petit déjeuner, est-ce que vous préférez des céréales ou des œufs? Pour le déjeuner, est-ce que vous aimez manger des sandwiches ou des salades? Et pour le dîner, préférez-vous les pâtes ou le poisson?

Personnellement, pour le petit déjeuner, j'aime manger des tartines de pain grillé avec du beurre et de la confiture, accompagnées d'un café noir. Pour le déjeuner, j'aime généralement manger une salade avec des légumes frais et du poulet grillé. Et pour le dîner, j'aime manger des plats plus copieux comme du bœuf bourguignon ou du gratin dauphinois.

Et vous, avez-vous des plats préférés pour chaque repas? Et est-ce que vous avez des habitudes alimentaires particulières, comme manger végétarien ou éviter les aliments sucrés?

We tried another variation on the prompt:

Pretend you are a native French speaker. You are talking with a beginner French student who does not know very much French. Ask her what she usually eats for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and then ask relevant follow-up questions, and talk about your own habits to model correct language use.

While the language level was more suitable this time, the nature of the exchange still wasn't what we were looking for:

Bonjour! Comment ça va? Je suis ravi(e) de parler avec vous aujourd'hui. Comment s'appelle-t-il/elle?

Qu'est-ce que vous mangez habituellement pour le petit déjeuner, le déjeuner et le dîner?

Pour le petit déjeuner, est-ce que vous mangez du pain et de la confiture? Ou préférez-vous les céréales avec du lait? Peut-être un croissant avec du café?

Pour le déjeuner, mangez-vous souvent des sandwichs ou préférez-vous un repas plus substantiel comme une salade ou un plat chaud?

Et pour le dîner, est-ce que vous aimez les pâtes, le riz ou les pommes de terre avec une source de protéines comme le poulet ou le poisson? Ou peut-être vous préférez la cuisine végétarienne?

Personnellement, pour le petit déjeuner, j'aime prendre un café et manger un croissant. Pour le déjeuner, j'aime manger une salade avec des légumes frais et du poulet grillé. Pour le dîner, j'aime préparer des plats de pâtes maison avec une sauce tomate fraîche et des herbes. Et bien sûr, j'aime boire du vin avec mon dîner!

Et vous, quelle est votre nourriture préférée pour chaque repas?

We tried to correct the structure with a new prompt:

Pretend you are a native French speaker. You are talking with a beginner French student who does not know very much French. Start a conversation about food with the student and only ask one question at a time.

And what we got back was... a list of questions.

Bonjour ! Comment ça va ? Est-ce que tu aimes la cuisine française ? Quels sont tes plats préférés ? As-tu déjà goûté les escargots ou le foie gras ? Qu'est-ce que tu aimes manger pour le petit-déjeuner ? Est-ce que tu préfères les plats salés ou sucrés ? As-tu déjà mangé une baguette ? Qu'est-ce que tu penses du fromage français ? Est-ce que tu aimes boire du vin ? Quel est ton vin préféré ?

We tried again:

Pretend you are a native French speaker. You are talking with a beginner French student who does not know very much French. Start a conversation about food with the student and only ask one question at a time. Wait for the student to answer before asking the next question.

This time, ChatGPT just made up both sides of the conversation:

Bonjour! Comment ça va aujourd'hui? Student: Ça va bien, merci. Et toi? Je vais bien, merci. Est-ce que tu aimes la nourriture française? Student: Je ne sais pas, je n'ai jamais essayé de nourriture française. Quels sont les plats français populaires? Il y a beaucoup de plats français populaires, comme les croissants, les crêpes, les escargots, le fromage, le vin, le coq au vin, le boeuf bourguignon et la ratatouille. As-tu déjà entendu parler de ces plats avant? Student: Oui, j'ai entendu parler de quelques-uns d'entre eux. Quel plat recommanderais-tu à quelqu'un qui n'a jamais essayé la cuisine française? Si vous n'avez jamais essayé la cuisine française, je recommanderais d'essayer des croissants frais au beurre et une tarte Tatin aux pommes pour le dessert. Ce sont des classiques français qui sont délicieux! Qu'en penses-tu?

Our efforts to come up with a starting prompt that would orchestrate the kind of conversation we were looking for eventually switched into French after a round where ChatGPT printed both its French responses and a translation in English in parentheses. When we grew tired of fruitlessly coming up with variations on this prompt, we tried to get ChatGPT to talk about art and artists using probable and less-probable combinations of language. Whether we asked about the Russian band DDT in a relatively common (and computationally well-resourced) language like Russian or Italian, or a less-common language like Albanian or Persian, we got fairly similar text back: a flat, Wikipedia-style description of the band, its style (broadly correct), its singers (often wrong, sometimes confused with real singers from other Russian bands), and its major hits (usually wrong). Grammatically, the model made very few mistakes across all these languages.

Participants imagined what research and pedagogy uses of large language models might be possible with models developed by scholars, without the X-factor of unknown training data. Laura Wittman and I have proposed a DLCL research unit around AI for the fall, along with an undergraduate course exploring AI models and languages, literatures, and cultures. We also anticipate exploring the possibilities of data gathering and model training to have a point of contrast with ChatGPT and similar models from OpenAI.

DLCL ATS round-up, winter 2023

Quinn Dombrowski — Thu, 30 Mar 2023 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · March 31, 2023

Winter 2023 was the quarter that everything came together for the Textile Makerspace, from infrastructure to staffing to events. A lot of things still feel uncertain in the broader DH-sphere, from social media migration to the future of other forms of social infrastructure, and I think my unease there came out in this round of my non-English DH course. In the meantime, I've made solid progress on several projects old and new, and I'm looking forward to where they go in the spring.

Classes

This year's instance of the non-English DH class (DLCL 204) felt like it never quite clicked for me the way previous versions had, even during the all-online fall 2020 session. We went down several rabbit holes together, some of which worked all right, some of which just surfaced more challenges for doing non-English DH text analysis. (Looking at you, HathiTrust data capsules.) When I was feeling a little down about how it all went before the last day of class, my ACH co-president and fellow Data-Sitter Roopika Risam reframed it for me: what I'd actually given the students was an experience of what it's like to do DH. And that felt exactly right. I usually try to bifurcate those experiences in the classes I teach, with the hands-on technical portion (this class) separate from the simulation of doing DH work (my DH RPG class). When we did our usual "here's three takes on what we've learned this quarter" wrap-up at the end of class, the students insisted they had gotten a lot out of it -- if only as a set of tools to dig more deeply into in the future as the need arises.

I've already got several students enrolled in the DH Practicum independent study for next quarter who weren't able to make the time slot of my course this quarter, and I'll need to figure out a balance of helping them work on their project and get a basic crash course on tools and methods they might find more broadly useful.

Also looking ahead to next quarter: the Making@Stanford initiative that's funded the Textile Makerspace strongly encouraged us to consider offering actual courses in our spaces, not just workshops. I put together a proposal for a 1-credit independent study "Data Visualization with Textiles" course, and intended it to be capped at 5 students. It was an experiment, I didn't even advertise it -- and due to a registration system error, I ended up with about 20 students and a full waitlist. I'm floored by the response, and it's going to require a little rethinking of how I'm going to run it, but I've got some ideas and I'm pretty excited to see how this goes.

Textile Makerspace

At this point, the Textile Makerspace seems worth elevating to its own sub-header on these quarterly write-ups. The unused, unloved computer lab I inherited from my predecessors has come into its own, between the space-reorganization help from the TAPS Costume Shop folks, furniture from Surplus, an anonymous donor gift that covered both new infrastructure (e.g. embroidery machine) and supplies (thread, yarn, crochet hooks), and now a Making@Stanford grant that's covering a little more infrastructure (shelving, computer) and the last missing piece: staffing. At this point, I have three student employees and one staff volunteer covering evening hours five days a week, each bringing their own expertise and interests.

The Textile Makerspace hosted a volunteer activity for Library staff and DLCL folks, where people knotted together fleece into "no-sew" blankets -- unless they wanted to kick things up a notch and appliqué something onto the blanket, which we were very happy to facilitate. Over the course of the quarter, we've also done three "Mobile Textile Makerspace" pop-up events at the Library, both as an add-on to the Humanities & Area Studies pop-up exhibits and as part of Love Data Week in February. Several library colleagues and I also used the Textile Makerspace in the run-up to Love Data Week to make "Valentines" promoting the Stanford Digital Repository, and to make matching outfits using fabric printed with Data from Star Trek as a little team-building activity and inside joke.

I organized a special drop-in session for the first-year DLCL grad students -- just for them to have a chance to explore the space and play. And a few weeks later, I did the same for the group of visiting students as an official part of their schedule of activities. It's been wonderful to see how visitors react to the space; it's not a huge room, but it has good vibes and seems to immediately put people at ease.

This quarter has brought some new acquisitions for the Makerspace, too: two circular knitting machines (one of which I've been using to make "data scarves"), an 80's/90's vintage knitting machine, and a c. 1960s standing LeClerc Mira loom. The last of these was a victim of a 3rd floor water fountain catastrophe that led to soggy ceiling panels in my 1st floor office collapsing directly upon the loom, but thanks to some quick work and advocacy by my DLCL colleague John Richardson, it seems to have suffered no long-term damage and my Makerspace assistant Akasha Hayden has been hard at work on dressing it during spring break.

Over the course of the quarter, I've had the chance to meet more people in the Making@Stanford community and work on connecting the Textile Makerspace into the larger making network. We've received an additional $1,000 grant from the Arts Council to buy yarn to accommodate student projects that they can't fund directly (apparently a lot of people are applying with yarn-related projects these days). And around the same time I got my loom, I got to help out at the PRL as they assembled their own, much fancier digital loom, shipped from Norway on a palette.

Finally, a trip to Dartmouth for the Data-Sitters Club retreat at the end of the quarter gave me a chance to visit Jacque Wernimontt's Digital Justice Lab, and talk with Molly Morin about her KnitLab work there. That visit was really helpful in thinking through what the Textile Makerspace can be in the context of DH at Stanford, and the broader DH landscape.

Existing Projects

This quarter wrapped up with the Data-Sitters Club retreat at Dartmouth, where we promptly got into a debate about who and what the project is for (which I transcribed and we turned into Data-Sitters Club Super Special 1: Data-Sitters Debate DH at Dartmouth). This argument launched a new sub-series, Data-Sitters Little Tl;DR, which will feature concrete pointers and tips for getting started with DH. We've got books in progress on corpus-building and topic modeling, and hope to publish those in the spring.

This quarter has had a surge of interest in Transkribus, between a student using it in my course (and recommending it to his friends), Alice Staveley from the Modernist Archives Publishing Project planning to revisit it in the summer with tabular data, Fiona Griffiths considering using it and/or ABBYY FineReader on various medieval documents, and Ella Hitchcock in the GSB Library looking into it for transcribing some materials in the archives of the founder of Stanford's GSB. It comes at an awkward time from the Transkribus end: they've recently moved away from the proprietary algorithm that was the basis of most of their models, to the open-source PyLaia. This has broken things like the text/image aligner algorithm you could previously use to semi-automatically align images with previously-created transcripts. I'm hoping that will get sorted out soon, though, and this marks the beginning of a community of Transkribus users on campus and broader use of the tool.

I remain dedicated to writing up something on the 2019 Multilingual Harry Potter fanfic project, though the venue and timeline are still unclear. I'd hoped to be able to follow along on the LitLab's R crash course at the beginning of this quarter, because I can imagine it being easier than Python for wrangling what is ultimately tabular data, but I wasn't able to keep up with it. I'm hoping a couple new collaborators might help breathe life into the project in the spring.

The Global Medieval Sourcebook wrap-up remains on hold pending the final data prep work, but I have it on my list for spring.

Things have been quiet on the Cancel Culture Transfer project this quarter, but research assistants are continuing work on additional visualizations, and I imagine I'll be continuing to consult on it on and off.

This quarter marks a major milestone for the Entitled Opinions podcast, which has relaunched on a modern, externally hosted WordPress site with a podcasting plugin. No longer will the grad student assistants have to manually edit an XML file on Stanford's antiquated AFS hosting infrastructure to add new episodes: we've got a WordPress plugin that handles it all automatically when shows are added via the WordPress interface. My CIDR developer colleague Simon Wiles worked a small miracle with the WordPress CSS so that the site looks just like a fresher and more modern version of its previous Drupal incarnation. These website changes also help us reduce our use of legacy infrastructure and platforms, which is always a relief.

Le Front Culturel Sénégalais project has been on hold this quarter, but I'm looking forward to getting back to it next quarter.

Getting DARIAH, the European DH infrastructure, to recognize Alíz Horvath and Maroussia Bednarkiewicz's Multilingual DH working group has helped nudge things along with establishing a similar group through ADHO, the international organization of DH organizations. Merve Tekgürler (a History PhD student working on Ottoman Turkish at Stanford) and Till Grallert (who runs an active German Multilingual DH group) will be the coordinators of the group. Towards the end of this quarter, I've laid the groundwork for restarting Around DH 2020, which profiled a handful of non-English DH projects at the beginning of that year (as a follow-up to Alex Gil et al's "Around DH in 80 Days" from nearly a decade ago) before the world ended. The other ADHO intrest group I run, DH-WoGeM, has had less success getting to the top of my to-do list, but I'm hopeful that DH 2023 this summer will provide the infusion of energy I need to wrangle together a program of activities for it.

When Chloé Brault MacKinnon's digital humanities project took a different direction than we'd initially discussed, my DLCL dissertation project went on hold; I was struggling with, among other things, identifying and parsing the bibliographies, which were interfering with my efforts to cluster the texts by named entities. But from what I've been seeing in colleagues' experiments with ChatGPT gives me hope of being able to parse and use the bibliographies after all. I'm hoping to make time to revisit the DLCL dissertations, perhaps as a set of experiments for my Data Visualization with Textiles class.

Corpus-building came to a sudden halt at the beginning of the quarter when the Windows laptop I used for ABBYY FineReader OCR died, and it took a sizable chunk of the quarter to manage to get a new laptop, and get the software approved, purchased, and installed. My scanning hit another roadblock later in the quarter when I fell, injuring my hand and giving myself a concussion. While I recovered fairly quickly from the concussion, scanning is the one activity that I haven't been able to find a comfortable workaround for that isn't painful for my hand. For the moment, I'm hoping that giving myself a break and scanning while my hand fully heals will be the best route forward.

The Star Wars project with the LitLab that returned in the fall had its moment as I was teaching this quarter, where I was able to reuse code I'd written for that project (on finding "distinctive character verbs") with my students' languages.

No progress this quarter on the various Django databases I've been building, but the summer will be better for at least the historic TAPS costume collection database. After successfully OCRing a couple of the Jewish cookbooks I did test scans of in the fall, Eitan Kensky and I secured funding for a student assistant to scan more cookbooks for a data project. Hana/Connor Yankowitz wrote up a blog post about their work on the feminist and gender studies classes at Stanford last summer.

Early in the quarter, I finished rebuilding Debbie Anderson's Script Encoding Initiative project site, as part of her moving the organizational home for the project to Stanford. I've been involved in some of the discussions around what kind of administrative arrangement makes sense for SEI this quarter, and I'm excited about the direction that's shaping up for that project.

On the library side of my job, I've ended up on the Web Archiving Service Team, where we're wrapping up the Browsertrix Cloud pilot with a video presentation for the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), whose online conference will take place in May. The pilot was a useful experiment in what it might look like to add a tool to our standard toolbox that better supports archiving social media data, along with other dynamic sites (including, for instance, many legacy DH projects.) The next few months will bring the more challenging work of figuring out what it would look like to support it longer-term, and using what technical and financial resources.

In my ACH co-president hat, I've mostly been working on establishing several memorial awards in honor of colleagues who have passed away in the last few years, along with maintaining (and documenting) the ACH technical infrastructure. I've been involved in planning a project to get input from the community about their needs and interests around publishing in a variety of venues. I also surveyed our members about their perceptions of ADHO, the international DH umbrella organization we belong to, as part of an effort to get constituent organizations to articulate what they think ADHO is and should be. We had a robust slate of 19 nominees for the ACH exec this year, and it's wonderful to see how the direction we've taken the organization seems to resonate with the community.

This quarter marked the one year anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, as well as SUCHO. Around then, we gave several talks: a presentation for the Comics: More than Words DLCL research unit, an event on Ukraine for the University of Tennessee, and a keynote for the German DH association conference. As I keep explaining to people, the work continues -- we're not sitting around waiting for the war to be over. There's memes to capture, digitization equipment (and arguably more important right now, power banks) to get delivered, and curation on the web archives. I've also been working on the logistics for a week of SUCHO events in the spring at Stanford and elsewhere in the Bay Area.

New projects

Between teaching the non-English DH class and attending a session for the CESTA Graduate Fellows, I've done a fair amount of limited-term consulting on various projects this quarter. Of these projects, the only one that's involved much hands-on work has been Chloé Brault MacKinnon's CESTA fellowship project looking at the reception of Pierre Vallières's Nègres blancs d'Amérique through digitized Patrimoine québécois sources from the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. It's been a good opportunity to dust off the web scraping code I originally wrote to gather multilingual fanfic; BAnQ doesn't have a convenient API for accessing their holdings, but they also don't forbid scraping, which is handy.

I've also been planning with Laura Wittman to offer a three-part workshop for grad students on the latest AI technologies and their implications for teaching. The first part will be basically explaining what the current generation of large language models is, how they work, and their quirks and limitations. The second part will survey some of the things that people have been doing with these models in an academic context (especially pedagogically). As homework, participants will design their own assignment for a language or literature class that either uses a large language model in a creative way, or is designed to be "AI-proof". In the third part, the participants will test out their assignments on one another, both in good faith and "adversarial mode" to see how well they work and/or fall apart.

Writing

I haven't done much writing this quarter other than lots of emails -- including dealing with contract sign-offs for several pieces I wrote pre-pandemic that might make it to print in the next year or so.

Talks and Events

In addition to the SUCHO talks mentioned above, I was a panelist for the University of Buffalo Digital Scholarship Studio & Network event "We've Been Here All Along": DH and Invisible Labor. I also presented on "(Re)Considering Digital Preservation 10 Years after Bamboo" as part of workshop on long-term sustainability at the DH Nordic/Baltic conference. At the same conference, Agnieszka Backman (a postdoc at Stanford in 2019-2020) and I presented on the Swedish translations of the Baby-Sitters Club.

It feels awkward to mention in a year when apparently the discourse on Twitter is all about how many long-time DH scholars were rejected from DH 2023, but a panel I organized on youth literature (including Antonia Murath, a visiting student at DLCL this quarter) was accepted, along with a poster on SUCHO, and several other things others wanted me to participate in: a panel on copyright issues, a panel exploring DH "borderlands", and a pre-conference workshop on multilingual taxonomies.

Other Things

I've been off Twitter since November, and at the end of January published the results from the academic Mastodon survey I conducted in November. It's been a strange and disorienting time, given how central Twiter was to how I did my DH work for the longest time. I still have some of that dynamic on Mastodon, where I've resumed live-posting talks and events, but it feels different. I can't see myself going back to Twitter, even though there are many people I miss who haven't (or haven't meaningfully) migrated. I continue to be surprised at how personal the takeover of Twitter feels, not least because it's a local company, and so many of the people laid off in the most chaotic, careless way are in some sense my neighbors. I've never felt much kinship with the local Tech Crowd in the Bay Area, but something about this is different. I struggle to viscerally understand how so much of DH Twitter is still there, but I can only conclude that maybe for people farther away from it, it's just another awful tech company, like so many we use every day despite awfulness.

I'll be curious to see what the dynamic is like at the international DH conference this summer. It seemed like -- to my great surprise -- our SUCHO keynote for the German DH association actually made an impact on people and organizations (like the German organization itself) vis-a-vis moving to Mastodon. But there's a difference between making a gesture of moving, and staying active in a new space. For myself, once the API paywall was announced, I used the last few days to delete all my tweets, after downloading my own archive. It's hard to know how things will shake out with DH in the social media platform landscape, but Twitter isn't something I can imagine being a part of anymore given its leadership and trajectory.

Spring is going to be busy, between the DH Practicum and Data Visualization with Textiles courses, several projects re-activating, some travel, and preparations for the summer's conferences. I'm looking forward to seeing how it all works out.

Academic Mastodon Survey, November 2022

Quinn Dombrowski — Sun, 29 Jan 2023 16:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · January 30, 2023

In late November 2022, I drafted an email in English to 49 Mastodon server admins, looking for academically-oriented instances on various lists of extant servers, asking if they would be willing to fill out a survey set up using Framaforms. The survey got 22 responses. All fields were optional, and there was a mix of free-text and multiple-choice questions. There was also a field for respondents to indicate whether they'd be open to having their free-text responses quoted directly and attributed; all other responses would be summarized in the results.

Recency and size of academic Mastodon servers

18 of the 22 responses were from servers that had been created in 2022 — 5 in October, 13 in November. The majority of the servers were small, with under 500 users; even the three servers created prior to 2022 had under 1,000 users. Nonetheless, a few of these new servers — particularly ones with a scientific orientation — had managed to rapidly build a user base of several thousand users.

Hosting location, legal concerns, liability

France was the most popular hosting location for the survey respondents (6 responses), followed by the US (5), and Germany (4). Several left the server location question blank, or stated that they didn't know. The popularity of France is likely related to the fact that a widely-used Mastodon-specific hosting service (masto.host) is based out of there.

The kinds of legal concerns that academic server admins had were not tied particularly closely to server location. Two respondents with servers hosted in the US, and two with servers in Germany, indicated they were concerned about the US DMCA law or other copyright issues, vs. 1 hosted in France. Three respondents with servers hosted in France, two with servers in Germany, and two with servers in the US indicated they were concerned about the GDPR / privacy laws. Illegal speech was a concern for two servers in France, three in the US, and one in Germany.

Of the respondents, only one had liability insurance. 14 respondents said they did not, and 6 indicated they were looking into it.

Technical setup

With a single exception, all the survey respondents were running Mastodon software as such, rather than another fork or variant like Hometown. Half of the survey respondents (11) said that they were installing and running it themselves; 9 respondents use a Mastodon-specific hosting service that handles app-level configuration and updates; several mentioned France-based masto.host, noting they wouldn't have time to run the server if they were responsible for all the technical upkeep involved in running it themselves. FOSSDLE Social shared a link to a blog post describing their configuration setup with Docker and Ubuntu. Several mentioned using a VPS, which may also be in use to run other open-source packages.

With regard to technical specs, several mentioned hosting their server at Digital Ocean, but many other hosting providers were also mentioned.

Storage

The question about technical specs was free-text, so different respondents focused on different things. One parameter that was frequently mentioned was storage space. The range of storage specs was wild, and even more so when taking into account the number of users. One server with around 800 users had 4 TB of storage; another with a similar number had 800 GB. Another with over 3,000 users had only around 400 GB of media storage. None of the respondents mentioned Jortage or any other effort to reduce the inevitable storage costs of media duplication.

Relevant for storage capacity is the server's storage philosophy: is the server intended for ephemeral conversation, or is it part of the scholarly record that should be preserved? The following chart shows storage capacity and user base, color-coded by storage philosophy.

The survey included a question asking about the server's philosophy about storage. 9 of the 21 responses to this question were that the server was mainly for ephemeral conversation, and there was no guarantee of long-term storage. Another 7 said they were unsure, and would see how things develop. Only 3 identified long-term storage as a priority.

Affiliation

13 of the 22 responses said that their server was not affiliated with an organization, though one planned to establish a nonprofit that would offer the server as one of its services. The remaining responses were affiliated with a variety of organizations, including a student IT group at a university, a state library, an academic professional organization, a couple open source organizations, and a couple organizations oriented towards developing scholarly infrastructure for the humanities.

The servers affiliated with an organization were typically funded from the operating budgets of those organizations, though multiple server admins reported volunteering their time.

Costs and budget

The monthly costs that respondents reported for running the server varied, but the majority were in the $30-$50 range, regardless of whether respondents were running the server themselves or using Mastodon-specific hosting.

Because most of these servers were very new, some respondents had a sense that costs would likely increase, but they weren't sure how fast or by how much. One mentioned that their users tend to be late adopters of tech, and it wasn't clear whether the portion of that scholarly community that remained on Twitter after the initial Mastodon migration waves were likely to be there permanently, or if they'd eventually end up joining later, which would increase costs. Rising energy bills were also cited as a potential reason for cost increases, and some respondents were not currently paying moderators but expressed a desire to do so.

Other admins had taken a maximalist approach to their initial setup in order to accommodate the surges of the Twitter migration, and anticipated they might even scale back their technical infrastructure (and related costs) — or that they would keep them the same, and felt confident about running well under capacity.

For the servers that were not supported by an organization, most respondents reported funding it themselves — out-of-pocket, from their research budget, or splitting the funds with other founders.

Not many respondents had set up a crowdfunding option, with several citing reasons including it being unnecessary due to the low cost of running the service, seeing it as a service they wanted to provide to incentivize people to join their organization, or seeing it as part of members' dues. One was concerned about what liability, taxes, or other issues they would open themselves up to by taking donations. One server that did have a crowdfunding option indicated they were one month into the year, and on track to cover the annual costs that way. Another mentioned receiving $1,000 in donations in conjunction with Giving Tuesday (the Tuesday after US Thanksgiving in late November), but was unsure how many of the donations would be recurring.

Language

The language(s) that a server uses for its documentation and other communication with users has an impact on who is likely to use it. It also has implications for moderation, which can be more challenging for content in languages where no one on the moderation team can read those languages.

None of the servers had rules on language use as such, though several noted they preferred or encouraged the use of particular languages other than English. Two servers used German for their user-facing and moderator-facing documentation, and one used Spanish with the plan to add Portuguese soon.

Noteworthy rules

One open-ended question asked about any noteworthy rules on the server. Multiple servers had guidelines for licensing, so that posts on the server would automatically be licensed with a Creative Commons license. One of these servers had chosen a license compatible with "free cultural works" (CC-BY-SA, but users could choose a more liberal license); another went with CC BY-ND.

Several servers had rules intended to clarify misunderstandings about goals or audience — e.g. banning ghostwriting services or predatory journals, or emphasizing that the server is for the academic discussion of things that the general public is interested in, in different ways. Multiple scientific servers had moderation rules in place for science-related posts, roughly amounting to "no quackery". One respondent mentioned doing research to see what rules other servers had, and adapting and building on those examples to align with their goals for their server.

Sign-ups

The vast majority of the academic servers represented in this survey have an application step as part of signing up. For some, it was as simple as giving a plausible reason for joining the server; others did more research on applicants, looking for evidence of some academic connection. One was limited to full-time, employed academics with an institutional affiliation; adjuncts were directed elsewhere. One institutionally-affiliated server required applicants to use an email address from that institution.

Moderation

Most respondents mentioned having between 2-4 moderators, often with server admins contributing to moderation as well. Several mentioned a desire to grow their moderator pool, in order to cover more languages, time zones, or cultural perspectives. Several responses mentioned moderators working together and conferring when reports are filed.

All the responses about moderation load indicated that it had, to date, been very minimal. No one cited numbers greater than 10 moderation reports in the previous month. Some mentioned account creation moderation during the Twitter migration waves taking some time. The highest time estimates were 4-5 hours/wk dedicated to moderation; several others estimated it was a few minutes per week. A couple respondents mentioned needing to ban a couple accounts that were clearly bots, spammers, or other bad actors, but this was rare.

There was an additional question about how the servers handle block/moderate lists of other servers; the responses were a mix of blocking servers due to observing trends of bad behavior by their users, and using blocklists borrowed or adapted from other places (mastodon.social and chaos.social were mentioned). Multiple mentioned using information from #fediblock, but one respondent noted that it's "a lot" to try to keep up with #fediblock.

Challenges

The answers to a question about the biggest challenges were a mix of social, administrative, and technical factors. Several respondents noted technical challenges, sometimes in great and painful detail: servers crashing, challenges in connecting resources, registration emails going to junk mail, sidekiq tuning, memory leaks, challenges adapting the documentation to running the software in a different environment. Beyond that, there were issues ubiquitous in academia — dealing with the volume of email, balancing this with other work, keeping cool when people don't follow instructions. One mentioned dealing with some cultural rifts within the field about to what extent people should limit themselves to "professional content".

The future

When asked about their hopes for the server, almost all respondents mentioned growth— not surprising, given how many of these servers had been running for no more than around a month. Some had specific goals; several mentioned wanting to have 1,000 users after a year. Others hoped to grow in technical scope, either operating other Fediverse software for their users, or doing more with ActivityPub. One server mentioned more real engagement: wanting people to commit to actually using their "stub" account, or move along to a server that better suits their needs if they were only there as a "landing place". Multiple people mentioned a desire to recreate the best of what their field had done on Twitter by way of community and conversation, without the toxicity of Twitter.

To get to this future state, several server admins mentioned being part of the Matrix chat group for Mastodon mods, and some wished for an academic-specific admin channel of communication. One mentioned that particularly smaller academic servers would benefit from being part of a network that could set up relays with one another, to give new users a more active federated timeline. Multiple respondents indicated their desire for more guides, advice and support around legal issues, which were under-documented compared to technical issues around running a server. Guides for moderation best practices, similarly, were mentioned, along with the possibility of academic servers collaborating to apply for grants that would benefit them all.

In conclusion

It's been two months since people responded to this survey — life very much got in the way of my intended turnaround with the results! No doubt the situation for each of these servers has evolved somewhat in that time. It's hard to guess what the academic Mastodon landscape will look like this November; in my own field of digital humanities, I'll be very curious about social media platform use during this summer's conferences. There are several opportunities for academic servers to work together, even as there is also the potential for competition around user base. Realistically, I'm not in a position to try to facilitate academic Mastodon collaboration, but I hope servers take the initiative to reach out to one another and make some of that work happen. Perhaps I'll repeat the survey in the fall to see how things are going?

DLCL ATS round-up, fall 2022

Quinn Dombrowski — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 16:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · December 20, 2022

Fall 2022 was a whirlwind of travel -- both personal and for work -- and promising developments for the Textile Makerspace. SUCHO also continued, with a set of in-person meetings in Europe, and new connections within the DLCL.

Classes

I'll be teaching my non-English DH class in the winter, and towards the end of this quarter I've started revising the syllabus from 2020. A lot of things hold up; several do not, at least not the way I framed them then. The last time I taught, the DH community had just been dealing with the meltdown of the Humanist listhost; now that feels like ancient history as Twitter melts down, although there are common threads between them and I may end up teaching them together. How much moderation do we demand from the platforms we use as the basis for our community? How much misalignment with our values will we accept for practicality's sake, before we draw a line? Despite some scheduling conflicts, I'm happy with the enrollment so far, and I'm excited to have the chance to work with at least one language I haven't done anything with before.

Existing Projects

This fall I've been holding regular hours to the extent I can at the Textile Makerspace, and we had a nice turnout for Alix Keener's friendship bracelet workshop early in the quarter that has led me towards more thinking about friendship bracelets as a medium for data visualization. Our friends at the TAPS Costume Shop have been amazing with helping us secure furniture that makes more sense for what we're doing in the space.

This quarter the Data-Sitters Club published two books: DSC 17: Cadence's Archives Mystery and DSC 18: The Data-Sitters' HathiTrust Mistake, respectively authored by and with Cadence Cordell, our summer intern who explored the Ann M. Martin papers at Smith College as well as HathiTrust. The first is a wonderful guide to doing archival work for students new to archives, and the second is the guide to HathiTrust-- particularly its data capsule option -- that I wish I had at several points over the last decade when I've struggled to use the service.

I was clearly over-optimistic about getting an article written on Multilingual Harry Potter fanfic with several grad student colleagues before the calendar year was over. Perhaps the academic year, instead? Interest in the intersection of DH and fanfic seems to be growing, especially in computational literary labs based in Europe, and I'd hate for the work we did on this in 2019 to be lost from that conversation.

There's still some data prep work left to be done on the Global Medieval Sourcebook, but I'm hoping to wrap it up no later than spring.

Throughout the fall, I've been working with Adrian Daub on things related to "Cancel Culture Transfer", his book on cancel culture discourse in Germany, which was published in November. We've explored a corpus of German books about cancel culture (i.e. those playing a role in drumming up the moral panic), as well as news articles from a number of sources available through LexisNexis. AntConc has played a big role here, as has some Python code I've written, building on some of the methods in Data-Sitters Club 8: Text-Comparison-Algorithm-Crazy Quinn. Even though work on the book is finished, there's still an associated website in the works to house some of the data visualizations, along with material to gather and process for future Substack pieces connected with the book, so I imagine I'll be continuing with this one for a while.

With everything else going on this fall, I didn't end up scheduling the Animal Crossing: New Digital Humanities events I'd hoped to hold. Maybe we can get back to it in the winter? The virtual island is lovely in the winter with all the snow.

Likewise, scheduling challenges have continued to get in the way of getting up to speed on the current state of the art with Persian and other Arabic-script HTR, to inform what we do in that space with Transkribus moving forward. I'm excited to see some of the progress happening on the Transkribus side with the browser-based interface and with table recognition, which will be transformative for a number of projects. Also, David Wrisley was able to visit Stanford this quarter, giving us a chance to talk about potential multilingual corpus collaborations as I showed him around the Textile Makerspace.

I've been working on the Entitled Opinions podcast migration from an old and unsupported Drupal platform to a modern, WP-hosted WordPress site with a podcasting plugin. It's been an adventure in data wrangling, massaging the podcast-flavored RSS feed export from Drupal into something that would successfully import with all the data. I'm optimistic that we can relaunch the new website next quarter, which will enable it to be listed in Spotify, Stitcher, and other platforms beyond Apple Podcasts, which has been the cause of several challenges.

Fall ended up being busier than I expected, and I wasn't able to resume scheduling ] DH-WoGeM events, nor meetings for Multilingual DH. On the Multilingual DH front, Alíz Horvath and Maroussia Bednarkiewicz accomplished a tremendous feat of bureaucracy in getting a Multilingual DH working group established through DARIAH, the European DH infrastructure. I'm hoping we can use that as leverage to get a working group approved through ADHO as well, and resume regular meetings in January. There's already been some discussion about kicking off the year with some discussion about multilingualism on Mastodon -- more on that platform later.

This fall I've had some useful conversations with Fatoumata Seck on her Le Front Culturel Sénégalais project, as well as a Zoom call with one of the members of the movement. We're still working out the terms of accessioning the materials to the Stanford Digital Repository as well as creating some kind of website presenting the materials, to make them more accessible.

There's been no news on the French Revolutionary Digital Archive front, but perhaps there will be further developments in the winter!

I've continued wrangling 20 years of DLCL dissertations, running into one interesting problem after another: first, separating things by language (which isn't as easy as it sounds -- some dissertations mostly in English include extensive quotes in other languages); then, trying to extract named entities -- but citations and bibliographies introduce a sort of noise I need to deal with. Happily, next quarter I'll be working with Chloé MacKinnon on her project looking at dissertations as data. While we're each looking at slightly different things, having someone to meet with regularly to work on the dissertation wrangling will be helpful.

Corpus-building didn't get very far this quarter, but I'm looking forward to getting back to it in the winter, perhaps as part of the non-English DH class. Related to corpora, I didn't manage to write much on the HPC for Humanists project designed to make the Library's Google Books data more accessible while respecting the legal restrictions on the material, but I'm looking forward to working with DH Librarian Alix Keener on it in the winter.

A project from spring 2021, looking at a corpus of Star Wars novels, had a brief return this fall through another LitLab presentation, and some work to improve some initially-sketchy data to the point where it could be published. Some of the computational techniques used by that project are really interesting for reconciling references to characters including doing coreference resolution using David Bamman's new BookNLP code. Given the BookNLP models in development for several languages, I'm excited about the possibility of using this same method for projects in the DLCL.

Not much progress happened with the various Django databases I've been playing with building -- the one for the folks in the TAPS Costume Shop with their historic dresses-as-data, nor the metadata for YRDL.

Due to student assistant availability, there hasn't been much to report on the Library's history of feminist and gender studies classes at Stanford nor Jewish cookbooks this quarter.

I've made some progress on the website for Debbie Anderson's Script Encoding Initiative project, which we're rebuilding for her as part of her moving the organizational home for the project to Stanford. Her work ties in nicely with the Unicode archive that I helped acquire a couple years ago, and I'm looking forward to presenting Unicode -- and her work on it -- as an early part of the non-English DH course in the winter.

During the fall, I've been figuring out what my involvement with the Library's web archiving task force will look like. A hybrid workshop on Browsertrix Cloud was a hit, enough to justify moving forward with a 3-month pilot, but we ran into some delays over how, logistically, to pay for it. Between one thing and another, by the time we got all the pieces sorted out it was almost winter break, so we've postponed the pilot for the new year.

On the ACH presidency front, we've been getting used to the new meeting schedule, and how to work best with the Officers group and our co-VPs. Jim McGrath and Katina Rogers held the first in a series of professional development events for the year, on "Discerning the Kind of Work You Want to Do". We've opened the CFP for a virtual conference next summer I hope several DLCL grad students will present at, and we'll be putting together a survey in January to get more member input about issues including the kinds of publications they'd like to see ACH supporting and ACH's relationship with ADHO. For the latter of those, I'm wearing two hats as the ACH rep to ADHO and the ACH co-president; all the constituent organizations are filling out a survey about their organization, mission, and how they relate to ADHO. Understanding where each organization is coming from -- and perhaps giving those organizations a reason to reflect on those questions for the first time -- seemed like a necessary first step towards addressing some of the challenges in decision-making at the ADHO level. While it's unlikely that all the COs will ever be entirely in agreement about ADHO, making more of people's unspoken assumptions explicit might help us find common ground in a set of at least mostly-shared priorities.

And finally, SUCHO continued to be a large part of my work this fall. In October, we had the first in-person meeting of the three co-organizers, plus Andreas Segerberg, who has been deeply involved with the project since the beginning. We gave two talks together, one at the University of Gothenburg and one at the Center for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage in Vienna, and my 8-year-old junior archiving assistant Sam joined us for the talks to share his perspective on involving kids in projects like SUCHO. Georgii Korotkov helped migrate our web archive data from our (in)famous giant Google spreadsheet to Baserow, where Andreas has continued work on curating, clean-up, syncing the metadata with our filenames, and enriching the entries with structured geographic data. There's been a lot of work on the SUCHO gallery over the fall, as well as migrating documentation to the SUCHO wiki when our free Slack plan expired. The SUCHO meme wall continues to grow under Simon Wiles's technical stewardship; we've got one team out of the SourceLab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign working on presenting a collection of that material, and the memes have also been used as part of a class at a university in Ukraine. The meme wall has become a major source of web traffic, including a recent day with 14,000 hits from Russia (all apparently human, according to Cloudflare). It was also the locus of an unexpected connection with the DLCL research unit on comics, where we'll be presenting the meme work as part of their winter schedule after getting to know their work at the DLCL research unit symposium in the fall.

New projects

With everything else going on, I've thankfully managed to keep the new projects to a minimum this quarter! I was able to put ABBYY FineReader to work on speeding up the initially-manual data transcription for Georgii Korotkov's database of Ukrainian literature, and I've enjoyed talking with Tania Flores and Alyssa Virker about some of their project ideas, potentially for next quarter's non-English DH class. With Tania, I've been happy to be able to put to use some term-finding code I initially wrote for YRDL, along with the Spanish lemmatizer I used the last time I taught the non-English DH class. Among her projects is one with the tricky challenge of comparing narrator voice between two works written in different languages, so I'm continuing to mull over ideas (beyond translation) to make that work.

As a short-term project in October, I participated with Nichole Nomura in the Library of Congress Labs Data Jam, trying out a collection of digitized books that they made available, and giving them feedback on the challenges we encountered as digital humanists.

The department website underwent a major transformation, and I served as a liaison with the library, ensuring the old version was comprehensively web archived before the switch-over. I also wrote some prose for a new professional development page, highlighing the department's DH offerings.

It's not exactly a new project, but I worked with Amanda Whitmire from the Miller Library at the Hopkins Marine Station, and Zac Painter from Terman Library on a proposal for making@stanford to fund a trio of Library-affiliated makerspaces, including my Textile Makerspace. The proposal was funded, and now I'll be able to hire some students to keep the makerspace open for more hours -- including evening hours -- and also pick up some additional equipment like a better setup for hybrid workshops. As a result of the grant, I've also ended up on the Making Council, which had its first meeting right before winter break. It's been great getting to know people who run makerspaces with some degree of overlap with mine; I learned, for instance, that a fancy digital loom is coming to the Product Realization Lab soon. There's a lot of energy and excitement around makerspaces and giving students creative outlets, and I'm happy to be part of it.

Writing

The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities was published this fall, with two chapters I (co-)authored: one on multilingual DH, and another on whether it's necessary to learn how to code. I'm looking forward to reading more of the final version over the holidays and assigning parts of it as part of next quarter's class.

Along with Anna Kijas, Alex Gil, and Carrie Pirmann, I wrote a piece on the role of libraries in rapid-response DH, using SUCHO as a case study, as part of Isabel Galina and Glen Layne-Worthey's volume on Libraries, Archives, and the Digital Humanities.

Along with other members of the ADHO constituent organization board, I helped author a response to a critique of how ADHO runs its international conference.

With Nichole Nomura, I coauthored a piece on "The Librarian, The Computer, The Android, and Big Data" for Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, looking at the representation of librarians, "the computer", and data-wrangling labor in a corpus of Star Trek novels. The way the computer in Star Trek appears to handle new languages, in particular, is one of the aspects of that universe requiring the greatest suspension of disbelief.

Talks and Events

In addition to talks about SUCHO in Europe, this quarter I gave a talk about computational analysis of youth literature as part of the Newcastle University Animating Text speaker series, presented on a panel about "Designing user-friendly Platforms and Toolkits for Digital Humanities" as part of the Western Sydney University's Building Digital Humanities event, and was a panelist for the "Reframinig Failure" seminar organized by the Digital Humanities Research Hub at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. For the Siberian Federal University's "Цифровая среда" lecture series, I spoke about "Directories as Utopian Infrastructure", and ended the year giving a virtual presentation for CNI about SUCHO, grateful for the organizers' exception to the otherwise in-person-only event.

I've been enjoying participating in the events organized by my library colleagues in HAS+, highlighting the Library's collections. The theme for the November event was textiles, so I brought along our skeleton mascot for the Textile Makerspace, along with some images from the Library's collection of weaving manuals, and perler beads for people to use as a way to reinterpret and adapt old textile patterns.

I submitted a number of proposals to DH 2023, but haven't yet heard the results. I did recently hear that the talk that I submitted for DHNB (Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries) with Agnieszka Backman on the Swedish translations of the Baby-Sitters Club was accepted, so that's a talk to look forward to early next year.

Other Things

Twitter has been core to how I do digital humanities; I first joined the platform around the time of my first DH conference in 2007. It's hard to imagine doing this work without the networks of colleagues and conversations I've had there, but it became much more imaginable, very quickly, after Elon Musk bought it at the end of October. I had experimented a little with Mastodon starting in April this year when a sale seemed possible, but in the last month and a half since the sale went through, I've been trying to do my part to help with some semblance of a community migration to Mastodon and re-connection there, creating a list of digital humanists on Mastodon, encouraging people to switch, and following the emergence of several new servers oriented towards scholars. I've been blogging a bit about it on my own site (A Week with Mastodon, A Second Week with Mastodon: Lessons from University IT, Of Mastodons and Musicals, and A Month of Mastodon: What Are We Doing Here, Actually?).

In late November, I put together a survey of academic-oriented servers, and I'm hoping to write about the results over the holidays. I am hopeful about a path forward for what was the DH Twitter community, but digital communities don't create or sustain themselves. I imagine the landscape will become clearer over the next 4-6 months, but I'd like to do my part to try to nudge it in a direction so that the networks I valued and tried to bring interested grad students into (e.g. via social media workshops and the like) continue to exist, if transformed in some way.

Digital Humanities Across Borders (DLCL 204)

Quinn Dombrowski — Sun, 27 Nov 2022 16:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · November 28, 2022

Digital Humanities Across Borders (DLCL 204, CompLit 204A) will be offered winter 2023, Mon/Wed 1:30-2:50. If you're interested in exploring computational methods for humanities research -- anything from digitizing text and turning it into data, to transcribing manuscripts, to searching for phrases across text corpora, to using different metrics for text similarity, to visualizing networks of people or places -- and you work with a language other than English, this class will give you the skills you need to use these methods with your language.

A reading knowledge of at least one non-English language (modern or historical) is required, but no prior technical or coding experience is needed.

In previous years, students have brought the following languages, but new languages are always welcome!

Arabic
Chinese (+ Cantonese)
French
Greek
Italian
Japanese
Latin
Malay
Ottoman Turkish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish

Here's some examples of final projects students have done in past years:

Courtney Hodrick, German: "From Plato to Hitler: A Computational Approach to Hannah Arendt's Histories" (2020)

view poster (PDF)

This project explores whether Hannah Arendt’s political histories can be computationally distinguished from her intellectual histories by examining the figures mentioned. It explores the disciplinary boundaries often taken for granted in humanities scholarship by looking at the actors and the actions undertaken.

Didi Chang-Park, Spanish: "How to Read a Poem: Networks in “Muerte de Narciso”" (2019)

view poster (PDF)

What does it mean to read a network representation of a poem?

Michaela Coleman, Spanish: "Juárez Revisited: Comparative Analysis of Violence Against Women in 2666 and Huesos en el Desierto" (2019)

view poster (PDF)

This project aims to examine the representations of the 90’s era femicides in Juárez, Mexico from both fictional novel perspectives and investigative journalistic approaches.

Quinn Dombrowski, Russian: "The Magical Word Vectors of Harry Potter and Tanya Grotter" (2019)

view poster (PDF)

The Harry Potter series is a global phenomenon, having been translated in over 70 languages. Two years after Harry Potter was officially translated into Russian, Dmitry Yemets released the first book in the Tanya Grotter series. While the first book in the series mirrors tropes found in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (a mistreated orphan living with relatives is whisked away to a school for magicians), the choices to use a female protagonist and antagonist, locate the story in Russia, and draw secondary characters from Slavic and Greek mythology result in a distinctly different story. Time Warner sought to obtain a cease and desist order in the Netherlands, where the first translation of Tanya Grotter was to be published, after being rebuffed in Russian courts. Yemets and his publisher argued that Tanya Grotter was a parody, a protected class of derivative works, and that Harry Potter itself drew heavily on folklore. Nonetheless, Time Warner won the case, preventing the official translation and distribution of the Tanya Grotter series outside of Russia. Can computational text analysis bring a new perspective to the question of how to quantify the similarity between the magical worlds of Harry Potter and Tanya Grotter? This project uses word vectors as way of comparing these fictional worlds.

Melissa Hosek, Chinese: "Locating Lu Xun: A Spatial Analysis of his Short Stories"

view poster (PDF)

Lu Xun, the father of modern Chinese literature, is known for using a dual-narrator and first-person perspective of an “outsider” to create the critical lens through which his short stories are composed. While scholars have taken interest in this narrative form, few have questioned where these intradiegetic narrators come from and what kind of place they recount experiences from. This project rises to the challenge of introducing spatial analysis to the corpus of Lu Xun research. I ask whether there are any meaningful patterns to be observed in the selection of setting locations and movement of characters across the short stories. If so, do they contribute to the exploration of “wandering” (彷徨, lit. “to walk back and forth, undecided--the central theme of his second collection of works? The project as it stands today reflects my initial findings after looking at three of Lu Xun’s most notable stories: “A Madman’s Diary,” “Kung I-chi,” and “My Old Home.” I use R, Cytoscape, and Palladio to visualize the who, what, where, and when of characters’ movement.

Ricky Huang, Chinese: "熊仔: Taiwanese Rap Music"

Jupyter notebook for counting repeated tones

Tones are such an integral element of the Chinese language, and although they seem to melt into the flow of the music when the words are sung, I have been curious about how they might indirectly affect the flow itself. Therefore, I have run a tone analyzer on a couple of Taiwanese lyrics texts to identify patterns with more than two consecutive words in the same tone, in hopes that I can detect some noticeable correlation between the tone-patterns of the lyrics and the pitches in which the words are sung. Throughout the process, I have found that rap music offers more flexibility than other forms of music for singers to play around with the tones, and that the rap artist 熊仔 really takes advantage of this linguistic feature. In his songs, he would often adjust his flow to the tone groupings of his lyrics, not essentially to mimic the tones with musical pitches, but to build upon the musicality of the Chinese language. These findings have opened my eyes to a novel aspect of Chinese-language music that I hope to continue examining.

An Interview with the New History ATS, Anne Ladyem McDivitt

Anne Ladyem McDivitt — Mon, 10 Oct 2022 17:00:00 +0000

Anne Ladyem McDivitt · October 11, 2022

This fall we’re welcoming Anne Ladyem McDivitt to Stanford, the History department, and the Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research (CIDR) in the Library! Inspired by the Princeton CDH’s interviews with their new staff, I’m delighted to bring you an interview with Anne Ladyem.

– Quinn Dombrowski, DLCL ATS

Tell us about your role at Stanford

I’m the Academic Technology Specialist (ATS) for the Department of History, and I am a part of the Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research (CIDR) in Stanford University Libraries. My goal is to work with the faculty and students in the History Department to explore Digital History in exciting, innovative, and accessible ways!

How did you get started with DH?

My entry into digital history/digital humanities is not actually that bizarre or unusual. I was in a MA program focusing on public history, and I have a big interest in making good academic work accessible for broader audiences. Near the end of my program, I took an introductory course to Digital History, and this was a game changer for me. I saw opportunities to do the work I was interested in with new methodologies. With some very minor DH projects under the belt (VERY MINOR!), I took a chance and applied to George Mason University for my PhD. I got in, and I was a Digital History Fellow for two years at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. The rest, as they say, is history!

What is your specialty in DH?

Given my interest in making academic work more accessible, it’s really no surprise that I gravitated towards digital storytelling as a specialty in DH. This can incorporate many types of methods and tools, and the goal is to tell narratives through digital methods. Ultimately, as historians and humanists, we make arguments and tell stories, and digital storytelling can make for innovative and compelling stories in a variety of formats. It’s always exciting to me to see how these stories can be told!

Do you have a favorite project you've worked with?

In my previous position as the Digital Humanities Librarian at the University of Alabama, I worked with an English class that was tasked with recreating locations from Beowulf in the video game Minecraft. I participated as the Minecraft expert. (Leaning into my other expertise as someone who plays video games and a video game historian!) The goal was to research how the architecture historically would look, as well as thinking about the importance of place and space to the narrative of Beowulf. The students were so creative with what they came up with for the final products, and several folks who were hesitant at first put so much love and effort into the project.

Where should I start if I am interested in DH?

It can actually feel a bit intimidating if you’re coming into DH for the first time. It’s such a broad topic, and that can make it overwhelming. Luckily, Stanford has a lot of support for people who might be interested in getting started with DH! If you’re in the Department of History, I have open office hours on Wednesdays (9-10am/2-3pm), you can email me any time, and I also have a QR code on my office door (Lane History Corner, Room 316) with a resource list for getting started. I am always happy to try and point you in the right direction. There are also many opportunities for learning through workshops and events through CIDR and CESTA.

DLCL ATS round-up, summer 2022

Quinn Dombrowski — Sun, 18 Sep 2022 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · September 19, 2022

Summer 2022 brought with it some major organizational changes in the library. Nonetheless, the work continues: with SUCHO, getting back to everything else I was doing last winter, and taking on additional responsibilities.

Classes

This academic year, I'm going back to teaching my annual class in the winter, and an independent study in the spring. I'm hoping that having the fall quarter to advertise will help drum up enrollment. It'll be my third time teaching the non-English DH class, and as usual, it'll need reinventing since the last time was asynchronous and online in fall 2020. But I have until January to sort all that out, and I'm hoping it'll be the nudge I need to update things like the multilingual DH resources list that largely fell victim to the pandemic.

Existing Projects

This summer has been big for the Textile Makerspace, where we've started holding events again (thanks, Mary-Ellen Petrich, for the crochet lessons!), even if hybrid maker-events take a little more work to arrange. We've made some friends at the TAPS Costume Shop who helped us reimagine and reorganize our space, especially now that we have some new infrastructure, like an embroidery machine and some looms. We're looking forward to holding regular hours in the fall; keep an eye out for updates on hours and events.

I've been chipping away at Data-Sitters Club book 15 on and off for much of the year, and we published it last week. It's been a fun collaboration with Dainy Bernstein and Mark Algee-Hewitt, looking at the Orthodox Jewish BSC knock-off series BY Times, which has a more complex relationship with mainstream 90's girls books than it initially seems. We also discovered that text classification -- even for things that you'd think would be, like, totally easy like "valley girl" speak -- is actually harder than it sounds. Check out DSC 15: Little Miss California Stereotype... and the BY Times. Another long-term book, Anastasia's Secret Language on software studies, came out today, along with an DSC Index to make the project easier to navigate. DSC 16 gave us the chance to explore the Emulation As A Service Infrastructure (EAASI) developed by the Software Preservation Network, where Stanford is a partner. And we've got a few more books coming up soon, including one on Cadence Cordell's trip to the Ann M. Martin Papers at Smith College, and one on HathiTrust.

Multilingual Harry Potter fanfic hasn't gone anywhere this summer after the DH Unbound conference presentation in the spring, but I still hope we can get an article written up and submitted before the end of the calendar year!

The Global Medieval Sourcebook has mostly been on hold this summer, but it's nearly complete and we're looking forward to a fall launch!

As the summer has ended, I've been helping with wrap-up for Adrian Daub's book on cancel culture as a moral panic in Germany and France, which has included digging into some of the library's news-related data sets (New York Times, Washington Post, various newspapers available through LexisNexis). It's been fun to put some of the text analysis methods we've explored as part of the Data-Sitters Club to work in a faculty research context, and I'm looking forward to taking some of the material that didn't fit in the book and making it available on the book website this fall.

Animal Crossing: New Digital Humanities resumed this summer with a special presentation on SUCHO as part of the DH 2022 Tokyo Commemorative Lecture Series video available here). In August, we were joined by Brandon Walsh and
Greg Weaver from The Hard Modes, who presented their new album and taught us about how they think through reimagining video game music as jazz. I'm looking forward to scheduling more talks for the fall.

Speaking with some grad students about their data needs, it seems like there's some interest in improving access to our collection of scanned Arabic-script manuscripts (including those in Persian and Ottoman Turkish). This has been a useful focus for Transkribus work, as I've been in touch with Kioumars Ghereghlou, the Curator for Middle East Collections, about how we might go about doing that with manuscript images he's collected.

A lot of the early summer was spent trying to sort out various departmental websites that had been built using the Drupal 7 Stanford Sites services, which was being shut down in favor of a new version with limited functionality. There haven't been good alternatives for everything; we're still trying to sort out a ticket queue or something similar to substitute for a site we'd used to handle poster requests. There were also a few kinks in the notification chain for sites created under previous ATSes, where emails inquiring about their disposition went to H&S IT instead of me, leading to some last-minute scrambling. But now Cécile Alduy's Decoding Marine Le Pen's Rhetoric and Marisa Galvez's Performing Trobar are available as static sites.

Continuing the theme of infrastructure shifts, I've begun working on another migration for the Entitled Opinions podcast, from a another custom Drupal 7 site that predates my time at Stanford, to hosted WordPress with a podcasting plugin. My hope is that this should significantly curtail the amount of maintenance required moving forward.

I have not yet succeeded in arranging regular DH-WoGeM activities, nor regular meetings for Multilingual DH, but both are on the list for the fall.

I don't have much yet to show yet on Fatoumata Seck's project on Le Front Culturel Sénégalais, a 1970's Maoist cultural movement, but I'm hoping to get the materials accessioned to the Stanford Digital Repository this fallwith a web presentation to follow.

The French Revolutionary Digital Archive project has returned, both through needing to migrate its website, and through starting to explore the possibility of migrating the French Revolution Analysis System (FRAS) to a modern database and interface, as described by my A Day in the Life of a DLCL ATS blog post.

Wrangling 20 years of DLCL dissertations (with different rules and restrictions for digital access) has taken a back seat to other projects, but I've begun putting together some code for extracting named entities from the dissertations. One challenge I've encountered: all things being equal, I'd like to remove the entities on what were originally the cover sheet, as well as the bibliography, but there's a fair bit of variation in how that data (especially the bibliography) is structured. Also, there are more dissertations in languages other than English than I expected, which throws a wrench into the easiest versions of this plan.

Corpus-building this summer involved some preparation for a new LitLab project looking at color and colonialism, including amassing a corpus of Yiddish books available online via the Yiddish Book Center. I've also been working on building a corpus of Ukrainian literature with Yuliya Ilchuk.

And on top of it all, this summer there has been no shortage of SUCHO work as we transition into phase two and work on sorting out the supply chains for getting digitization equipment to Ukrainian cultural heritage institutions, in addition to curating the web archive data. I've also started work on the Handbook of Emergency Web Archiving, which has been a striking reminder of how much I've learned in the last year, including about insomnia-busting topics like managing finances internationally.

New projects

For once, I haven't had many new projects crop up over the summer -- I've been keeping plenty busy with the ones already on my plate.

In my Research Data Services hat, I've been talking with the folks at the Costume Shop about their amazing early-pandemic project to data-ify their historical clothing collection. That data set and the images associated with it (scanned from the physical binders that have long served as a kind of database) deserve to go somewhere safer than Google Docs for the long term. As an early proof-of-concept for what it might look like to make the data accessible in a visual way, I munged some of the data into a template that my colleague Simon Wiles designed for the SUCHO meme wall, and called it Jane's Closet. As a small side-project, I'll be continuing to work with them on getting the materials accessioned into the Stanford Digital Repository, along with thinking through possible interfaces as an excuse to learn some Django.

I've been talking with Judaica librarian Eitan Kensky about another fun data project: Jewish cookbooks, building on a proof-of-concept from 2015.

Over the summer, I worked with University Archivist Josh Schneider and his summer intern Connor Yankowitz, looking at the history of feminist and gender studies classes at Stanford. In the process, I learned quite a bit about old course bulletins, and how things that you might assume would be universal (like course numbers) are ... not necessarily. We fantasized about what a historical Explore Courses app might look like, and the uncertainty about the data from the last few years (since they stopped printing paper versions) made me nervous. But that's a data problem for another day.

As an extension of our acquisition of the Unicode Archives, Stanford Libraries will be adopting Debbie Anderson's Script Encoding Initiative project, which has been housed at Berkeley, running on software that she can't easily use to edit the website herself. Porting it over to a modern static framework should only take an afternoon or so, and is on my list for the fall.

Another consequence of SUCHO is that it's led me into conversations about the library's strategic plans and infrastructural investments around web archiving. I'm co-organizing a workshop this Wednesday to present Browsertrix Cloud (one of the tools we used to put web archiving in the hands of everyone from children to retirees) as a potential pilot tool for the library, and lead a discussion about people's interest in web archives as research data.

Also on the data front, I've managed to get access for myself and the other ATSes to Stanford's collection of books digitized as part of the Google Books project. There are restrictions on how people can use those scans (namely, they need to do their computation on Stanford-run infrastructure), which has led me to work on drafting a humanist-friendly guide to understanding and using high-performance compute clusters.

Finally, it's not quite a new project, but this summer has marked the start of my term as co-president of ACH (the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the US-based DH professional organization), as well as its representative to the international DH organization ADHO.

Writing

This summer, I wrote a short piece on SUCHO for Text and Image: Essential Problems in Art History, a Ukrainian journal. I was happy to be able to submit something to support this special issue on protecting cultural heritage during the war. There was an interview with a number of SUCHO volunteers that was published as "A Conversation with the Organizers of Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO)" in the Journal of Library Outreach and Engagement.

Also, "Minimizing Computing Maximizes Labor" was published in a special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly.

Talks and Events

This summer had a few SUCHO events, including a Coherent Digital ALA Breakfast presentation "The extraordinary story of SUCHO: Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online", the FCSI 2022 closing keynote "Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) and the Future of Archivable Scholarly Communication", and a hybrid (with Sebastian Majstorovic in person) public lecture for the European Summer University in Digital Humanities, "Collaborative Volunteering in the Digital Humanities: Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO)".

At the all-virtual DH 2022 conference based in Tokyo, I presented a short paper with Nichole Nomura, "Quantifying Representation of Asian Identity in 21st-century Anglophone Fiction", and was on a panel with DLCL grad student Eric Kim, "The (Im)Possibilities of Multilingual DH in Theory and Practice: Translation, Metadata, Pedagogy", where he presented work on pogrom references in Russian and US news magazines that he'd done as part of the DH practicum course last year, and I spoke about multilingual DH pedagogy.

Other Things

This summer, CIDR welcomed a new History ATS, Anne Ladyem McDivitt. It is a joy to have someone in the "history version" of my job, and it's been a fun challenge to expand all the acronyms and explain all the organizational context in the library Zoom meetings. I'm looking forward to working with her in the months and years ahead!

A Day in the Life of a DLCL ATS

Quinn Dombrowski — Mon, 29 Aug 2022 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · August 30, 2022

With a hard-to-explain job title like "Academic Technology Specialist", I've often gotten the question, "What's a normal day like for you?" Every day is different, but yesterday felt like a reasonably representative, busy day in the life of the ATS for the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. In order to have an answer for next time I get the question, I've written it up.

8:30 AM

I had a half-hour between dropping off the kids and the first meeting of the day, so I decided to tackle some email: ADHO things (I'm the representative for ACH, as one of the co-Presidents), replying to a planning email for an event in Vienna in October related to SUCHO, replying to an email about some sample METS XML files for books scanned as part of the Google Books project, a quick email about a course schedule change, an inquiry about IRB requirements related to a project I'm doing through ADHO, and confirming that everyone who needs to be is in touch regarding an upcoming grant opportunity.

I saw some activity on SUCHO Slack in the digitization channel, and amplified a question about flatbed scanner recommendations on Twitter, where we got a great assortment of tips and suggestions and pointers to existing resources and tutorials.

9 AM

9 AM was a meeting with Sarah Connell and Avery Blankenship to sketch out an outline for our Programming Historian lesson on word vectors. It's a method I first got into shortly after I started at Stanford, and I taught it -- somewhat haphazardly -- the first time I taught non-English DH. There's good materials on it here and there (including a nice series of posts by Ryan Heuser), but something that covers both the conceptual and practical bases is a gap in the Programming Historian offerings, as well as in my syllabus for when I re-teach non-English DH again this coming winter. A Twitter conversation last year or the year before led to this particular collaboration, which builds on materials from the Women Writers' Project NEH workshop series on word vectors.

Before the next meeting, I checked in on the responses to the Twitter posts, shared some of them back to SUCHO Slack, and dealt with some travel logistics for the October SUCHO trip.

10 AM

10 AM was a deep dive into retro-DH (Humanities Computing Era edition) with the French Revolution Analysis System (FRAS), originally a DOS-based database containing 1,108 cahiers de doleances (notebooks of grievances, AKA requests/demands), prepared by electoral assemblies in France in 1789. We had gotten one of the copies of this software running on a Windows XP emulator via Virtualbox, but couldn't make heads or tails of how it actually worked, given its super-minimal text-based interface and the complex coding system that underpinned its query engine. The 10 AM meeting was with James Stinchcomb, an independent scholar in Cincinnati and a long-time user of FRAS, who walked us through how the system works and what the metadata means. The original creator has passed away, and registered the software with the US Copyright Office, so there's some issues of getting permission from his heirs to reimagine the software and make it publicly available. But if we can do that, it would make a great addition to the set of resources under the French Revolution Digital Archive led by Dan Edelstein in the DLCL. Watching FRAS in action left me with tremendous respect for folks who undertook the precursors to modern DH work without modern tools -- either for developing software like this, or from the user side, e.g. being unable to easily preview your results without having to export the data outside the program first. That meeting ran up to and beyond the hour, at which point I had to hop over to another Zoom room...

11 AM

... to talk resources and tutorials for web archiving with Melody Kramer, who's worked as a journalist and is developing a toolkit for journalists as part of her MLIS program. She's found the tutorials we put together for SUCHO to be useful, and we talked through the pros and cons of different technologies and options, weighing factors like cost (long-term storage of huge web archives can get expensive) and accessibility for minimally-technical users.

After that brief call, I had a chance to finish the self-paced online course portion of the IDEAL Learning Journey, required diversity, equity, and inclusion training program at Stanford, register for the follow-up synchronous workshops, and send out a Doodle poll for a future meeting about Persian handwritten text recognition.

12 PM

Another Zoom call, this time with Antonia Murath, who will be visiting my department during winter quarter to work with Prof. Kathryn Starkey on a medieval DH project. We talked about the database she's putting together, different visualization options, the affordances you can add to qualitative coding if you have access to full-text, what I'm planning for the non-English DH class in the winter, and the Data-Sitters Club.

After that call, I followed up on some more scheduling emails, including meetings with visitors this fall, and a planned visit to Stanford Surplus to pick up some more tables and other equipment for the Textile Makerspace. I threw some cheese sticks in the air fryer and then ate them while reading a draft of a delightful short piece by Claire Battershill for the Endings Project (featuring one of my favorite children's books, "We are In a Book" by Mo Willems). Sent another email following up on when/where it will be published, because I want to teach with it, which took me right up to the next Zoom call.

1 PM

This was a large meeting, with the other DH ATSes, the head of CIDR (my sub-organization within the Library), the head of the Stanford Digital Repository (SDR), and other folks from SDR and metadata to talk about how ATSes like myself could access information about what's been digitized through Google Books, and submit requests for our researchers to be able to access that data under the conditions that have been defined for its use. The plan going into the meeting was that I'd get a dump of 2.4M METS XML metadata records, and parse what I thought would be useful into a spreadsheet that we could query, but the conclusion was that it would make mores sense for us to use an existing backend library metadata querying tool, which sounds like an improvement to me! During some of the more in-the-weeds discussion, I worked on some file wrangling, PDF-ifying books that I've scanned for YRDL to make it easier to do bulk OCR.

2 PM

I've been trying to come up with a substitute for public transit (my most-effective writing spot) when I'm working from home. The hammock on the back patio has proven to be a workable alternative, and I've been setting aside time to work on various writing projects (including the SUCHO Handbook of Emergency Web Archiving, a guide to HPC for humanists, and the next Data-Sitters Club book). Today, it was proofs for two chapters for The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities (on multilingual DH and whether coding is necessary to do DH), then rereading the latest version of Data-Sitters Club book 15, and working towards weaving in the code components.

3:30-5

An email came in while I was writing, with the news that the Library Systems folks had rolled out a patch that enabled an export of up to 10,000 library catalog records (instead of the previous 20) as JSON (instead of bibliographic formats). So I dove right into trying to export the 30,000 results I needed, then using OpenRefine to munge the data into a spreadsheet, and figure out which of the many, many metadata columns contained the information I actually needed.

Meanwhile, I was brainstorming with fellow Data-Sitter Katia Bowers how to get access to the full text and metadata of Slavic department dissertations from 2000-2020 for a named-entity extraction project, which parallels some work I've been doing on dissertations from my department from that same period, as a way to visualize for prospective students what our grad students write about. This led to some Slack messages with Kate Barron, our library Data Curator, about better routes than downloading the dissertations one by one.

At the same time, I was exploring an online collection of Ukrainian literature, with an eye towards writing a web scraper for an upcoming multilingual text analysis project through the Stanford Literary Lab, with Prof. Yuliya Ilchuk and a number of grad students.

Not the end

I didn't finish any of those things before it was time to go pick up the kids. But they'll be waiting for me tomorrow, along with the unfinished writing, the websites that need migrating, the summer projects and grad students who have been quiet lately and maybe could use some checking-in-on, the 200 emails in my inbox that need to be responded to or filed away, the new Slack messages that will come in overnight from SUCHO, and probably ten other things that aren't at the front of my mind but will, undoubtedly, show up in my inbox or Slack workspaces or DMs or text messages. Such is the nature of the job.

Welcome Anne Ladyem McDivitt, New History ATS

Quinn Dombrowski — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · July 6, 2022

The Department of History and the Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research (CIDR), part of Research Data Services at the Stanford Libraries, are excited to announce that Anne Ladyem McDivitt will be joining us as the new Academic Technology Specialist (ATS) in History starting August 8th. The ATS positions are a partnership between the Libraries and a department which embeds a technology specialist with deep disciplinary expertise in a particular domain, in order to cultivate a local, digital methods-aware community through courses, workshops, consulting, and hands-on digital scholarship support for the department faculty and students.

The ATS position brings Anne Ladyem back to History, after serving as the Digital Humanities Librarian at the University of Alabama, where she advised and managed digital projects spanning a wide range of disciplines since 2018. Anne Ladyem received her PhD in History from George Mason University in 2018, with a focus on US history and a minor in digital history. As a graduate student, Anne Ladyem worked as a Digital History Fellow at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. Her interests span from video game history to digital pedagogy to digital storytelling and public history. Anne Ladyem’s office will be in History Corner (Bldg. 200, Rm. 246) Please keep an eye out for further information regarding events to welcome her to campus.

DLCL ATS round-up, winter & spring 2022

Quinn Dombrowski — Tue, 14 Jun 2022 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · June 15, 2022

In almost four years at Stanford, I've never missed one of my quarterly round-ups, but March 2022 was unlike any other month of my life. When Russia invaded Ukraine at the end of February, I ended up getting together with Anna Kijas from Tufts and Sebastian Majstorovic from the Austrian Center for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage to co-found Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO), a rapid-response DH effort that's brought together over 1,300 volunteers from around the world to archive Ukrainian cultural heritage websites. Especially for the first six weeks, it consumed my life day and night; writing up winter quarter wasn't a priority. But summer starts this week, and before I get too caught up in summer plans, it's time for a look back over the last half-year.

Classes

Winter quarter started with the worst COVID surge so far, though if we had better testing we'd probably be there again right now in the Bay Area. Between daycare closures, then getting COVID myself, the quarter was well underway by the time I was on campus regularly, and the DH independent study I was teaching, with three students, was comfortably settled into a series of remote coworking sessions. During winter quarter, I was also supporting visiting Slavic faculty member Kat Hill's "Russia in Color" class, which had a DH project component. It was an ongoing source of randomness and whimsy to see the student meetings show up on my calendar, never knowing what language, what medium, or what angle on color the student would be interested in exploring. I learned some things about how the library's digitization workflow works when a student needed a Winnie the Pooh DVD digitized to compare the color to what was used in the Soviet "Vinni-Pukh". I also learned about teachable machines, when Eric Kim was interested in training a "horse/not-a-horse" model for processing manuscript images. And I learned some things about different color modes when working with images computationally, thanks to Georgii Korotkov's final project. The class final presentations were held a few days after SUCHO started, but I made it in-person for the first set, and virtually for the second. I'm hoping to share some of the students' work (with permission) over the summer, but sadly, it's not a class that's likely to repeat, as Kat left the University after winter quarter. My days of working on computational analysis of Russian periodicals may be over for now, but I'll continue to keep an eye on work going on in computational periodical space elsewhere in DH.

During spring quarter, Victoria Zurita joined me once again for the DH Practicum independent study. I'm happy to include her project, on Rubén Darío's archives, as part of our revamped DH project gallery on the new DH at Stanford website.

Existing Projects

Things are coming together for the Global Medieval Sourcebook despite a few delays, but we'll absolutely be wrapping everything up for the relaunch this summer. In conversations on Twitter about migration from database-backed CMSes to static sites, I've been happy to have GMS (and its documentation) to point to as an example of a Drupal-to-Jekyll conversion.

Things have gotten complicated with the various departmental-support websites that I've built and continue to support as Stanford Web Services is retiring their D7-based Stanford Sites in favor of a more recent version with much less functionality, by the end of June. I built a lot of sites using that platform because it was free and centrally-maintained, and it's been a bit of a scramble to try to find alternatives for everything in a relatively short time. Most likely, there'll be a number of sites that need to go onto paid medium-term hosting, and/or be rebuilt with more limited functionality on the new system.

Transkribus has taken a back seat over the last two quarters; the honors thesis idea didn't quite take off. But discussions with the latest cohorts of grad students have again ignited some possibilities I'll pursue this summer, and developments in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish models have made me optimistic about possibilities in that area.

We had a long dry spell with the Data-Sitters Club, beginning DSC #13: Goodbye Friends, Goodbye in November, but it was hard for everyone to make the time, especially in these times, to work through emotionally-taxing writing. But we managed to get it done in time for the DH Unbound 2022 conference, when we published two new books in one week: our wrenching tribute to DH friends who recently died young, and DSC #14: Hello, DMCA Exemption explaining what the new exemption to the DMCA for text and data mining does (and doesn't) mean for DH scholars. That book also formed the basis for a roundtable at DH Unbound 2022 with Rachael Samberg, Erik Stallman, and Lauren Tilton.

Masha Gorshkova and Steele Douris and I got a proposal for Multilingual Harry Potter fanfic accepted to the DH Unbound conference. The time I'd hoped to work on the project between getting the proposal accepted and the conference itself mostly went to SUCHO, but some of the preliminary new results we were able to share -- related to how people wrote fanfic during the great fanfic-writing surge of 2020 (which happened after our original data collection in 2019). Long story short: Italian Harry Potter fanfic writers vented their angst, while Russian Harry Potter fanfic writers went for happy endings. Seeing those kinds of striking differences was enough to inspire me to add the project to my summer to-do list, in hopes of finally writing something up.

Animal Crossing: New Digital Humanities has been on hold since last year, first due to scheduling challenges, and then because of SUCHO. But we're planning on bringing it back this summer, including giving a talk for a Japanese DH lecture series in Animal Crossing, about SUCHO.

I was hoping to reopen the Textile Makerspace in winter with a good air purifier, but it took a while before I was regularly on campus... which didn't last long before I was off campus for a while because of SUCHO. But more than a few students reached out to me over the last couple months, and I'm feeling good about the summer, especially with some volunteers helping keep it open on days I'm not around. An influx of new equipment thanks to an anonymous donor and a retro knitting machine will give us something mechanical (and pre-digital) to explore.

I took the occasion of Day of DH to put together a little survey of how people are feeling -- especially about virtual/hybrid conferences and other accommodations -- after two years of the pandemic, as a way to get back to DH-WoGeM. This Women and Gender Minorities in DH group was approved shortly after the pandemic started, and ironically, ongoing childcare disruptions have meant I haven't been able to do much with it. But there's a few people interested in lending a hand with coordinating it, and I'm hoping to get things back on track in the summer.

Some of the work I did in the fall with Cécile Alduy on French far-right political rhetoric turned into a book... that also turned up on my desk one day! It's always a joy to see this work turn into something meaningful out in the world.

Corpus-building took a few tentative steps forward early in the year, as I continued to work on amassing book lists across different languages, but I didn't get nearly as far as I hoped to by the end of the academic year. The project suffered a big setback when I explored with Sarah Sussman what it would take to get the equivalent of the NYT bestseller list data for French and was quoted a ludicrous number. I did give a talk in May as part of the CIFNAL Speaker Series (Collaborate Initiative for French Language Collections) about the need for such corpora and tools to work with them, where I got to preview a forthcoming Data-Sitters Club Multilingual Mystery about the limitations of the French spaCy NLP model compared to English.

The corpus-building work is partially a response to nice things they have in English, including a corpus (both text and scans) of women's magazines, that formed the basis for a LitLab project on domestic appliances. I ended up being a fly on the wall for the project, but it was really interesting to see what kinds of approaches they were able to try through a combination of querying metadata and parsing the texts. Some new projects have taken me into comparative spaces that have given me an excuse to work more with English, and enjoy the comparative ease afforded by nice metadata.

New projects

This spring, I started working with Adrian Daub on some data for his upcoming book on cancel culture as a moral panic in France and Germany. The New York Times data set has been useful for points of comparison (especially around "political correctness" in the 90's and into the 21st century), and I've gotten to explore the landscape of newspaper access across languages and countries. Suffice it to say, research using German newspapers (which are typically behind paywalls) isn't easy, and while there are news aggregator sites, pay-per-article and convoluted (i.e. non-scrapable) code takes that off the table. We've got a few more options to try, though, including working with the Internet Archive; looking forward to writing more about that this summer.

A relatively new project that took some time to get started due to negotiations over the terms for accessing and disseminating the materials is with Fatoumata Seck, on a Maoist cultural movement called Le Front Culturel Sénégalais dating to the 1970's. The songs, poems, translations, and other materials will be accessioned to Stanford Digital Repository for long-term storage, and will also be presented on a website that may incorporate maps, timelines, and network visualizations tracing the history of the movement, depending on the resources available.

As part of the DLCL's efforts to improve transparency about graduate placement, I'm working with some internal data to present aggregate visualization summaries of career trajectories. We had an idea to look at the corresponding dissertations, and with some help from Andrew Berger in DLSS, I now have (non-consumptive, computational use) access to almost all the dissertations from my department in the last 20 years. This summer I'm interested in seeing what I can get out of them, and sync it up with data like dissertation committee.

Of course, the metaphorical elephant in the room on my "new projects" list is SUCHO. Even locally, it's been more than just me: around 20 Stanford grad students and library staff have helped out, at one time or another, in different capacities. On the DLSS side, Yuliya Ilchuk has been there for all our translation needs with communicating with cultural heritage workers on the ground in Ukraine, and is incorporating work on SUCHO into her next book project on memory. Slavic grad student Georgii Korotkov made a huge contribution to the project by reading through all the documentation for a post-Soviet library system called Irbis, and writing a scraper to be able to capture the library catalogs from Ukrainian libraries that use that software. On the library side, special thanks to Ed Summers and Laura Wrubel in the DLSS group (Laura has been babysitting my Twitter scraping for three months now, rebooting it every time it collapses), and to Simon Wiles for everything from debugging volunteers' web crawling to taking on large crawls himself, to now building the public-facing gallery (and internal-facing data entry interface) for our more recent meme collection work for SUCHO. Simon has also been the developer for an adjacent project to SUCHO, called ForFutureUse. Developed in partnership with a number of Slavic scholars and librarians, ForFutureUse is a way to provide free storage (and a publication venue, if desired) for dissident creatives in Russia and Belarus, as well as anyone displaced in Ukraine. There is much more to be said about SUCHO, and writing some of it up -- including in an open-access Handbook of Emergency Web Archiving -- is on my to-do list this summer.

Writing

I haven't written much this year so far, though I have a few pieces I've ushered through a couple rounds of edits and tweaks in prepration for publication later this year.

I did get a proposal about SUCHO accepted to an upcoming edited volume about DH in libraries, edited by Glen Layne-Worthey and Isabel Galina. It'll be a collaborative effort with a handful of SUCHO volunteers.

Talks and Events

Winter was relatively quiet, with just two talks: at the Australia National University's "Digital Approaches to Multilingual Text Analysis", a talk called "Non-English DH is Not a Thing" argued that #MultilingualDH is a rhetorical device that have pragmatic utility in some contexts (e.g. "please pay attention to language here"), but once you get into practical implementation, there's no single "multilingual DH" that you can support -- much of the work that needs to happen is language-specific, and has to be done with thought and care as to which languages you actually want to support. In late February, right before Russia invaded Ukraine, Nichole Nomura and I gave the DHARTI conference a sneak preview of the Young Readers Database of Literature (YRDL), which had its proper birthday in late April at a LitLab talk.

Since then, though, there's been a lot of SUCHO talks -- including a lot of talking to the media about the project, which was pretty new for me. In April, I was invited to give a talk about SUCHO at the Fiesole Retreat in Athens, Greece, which was my first time at an in-person event since the pandemic. Other venues have included the Internet Archive's Library as Laboratory talk series, an IFAR panel, Charleston In-Between, and the IIPC Web Archiving 2022 conference. In the midst of all this have been a keynote for Day of DH 2022 at the University of North Texas ("Taking Fun Seriously" -- which turned into a SUCHO talk), and a CUDAN Open Lab Lecture for Tallinn University. I gave them a title in the fall ("Coding, Childcare, and Badly-Behaved Tools: Adventures in Multilingual 'Data-Sitting'"), and couldn't have imagined SUCHO then or how it would fit into that picture.

Other Things

This year really did not work out the way I planned with the Slavic DH working group -- which is to say, between COVID and the war and generally the state of things, it never quite got off the ground. We reframed it in our proposal for a new research unit in the fall, more around the SUCHO work, also with the goal of organizing some kind of SUCHO event at Stanford around the first anniversary of Russia's invation, with additional support from the library.

During the winter, the Library hired Peter Leonard as the new Assistant University Librarian for Research Data Services (the group I report through in the Library). We also went through the hiring process for a new Academic Technology Specialist for History-- same job as me, in a different department. I'm looking forward to being able to share good news soon on that front.

Looking ahead, there are some conversations in play between SUCHO, Stanford Libraries, and UNESCO about roles, partners, and goals for SUCHO in the shorter-term, and a National Digital Library of Ukraine in the longer term. These discussions tend to move slowly, as does our advocacy work, coming out of SUCHO, for more proactive web archiving of cultural heritage materials around the globe. Much as I never thought of web archiving as really "my thing" before this, I suspect this is a thread of work I've now picked up for the long haul.

There's a lot in flux right now: a new DLCL chair, new faculty member in Slavic, new AUL for Research Data Services, and numerous other departures, arrivals, and reorganizations. Perhaps by the fall some of the larger context for what I'm doing here will be clearer. In the meantime, there's work to be done.

DLCL ATS round-up, fall 2021

Quinn Dombrowski — Wed, 15 Dec 2021 16:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · December 16, 2021

This fall was not at all what I planned. The DH Role-Playing Game class I'd spent 18 months planning for and thinking about only had one student enroll. That bad surprise (which will, in its time, find its way back into a future iteration of the DH RPG guide) was soon followed by the announcement of a major library reorg that moved me and my group into a new AUL-led group, Research Data Services. As part of this process, I was able to arrange for a second dotted-line report back to the Humanities & Area Studies (HAS+) librarian group that I'd informally been joining for meetings on and off during the pandemic. Officially being part of HAS+ has meant invites to more library meetings, but getting that perspective has been eye-opening and I can honestly say it's helped me do my job better. Having a joint position with a department has put me on the periphery of the library, which means a lot of how things work has been a mystery. This includes how things get prioritized for funding; I hadn't appreciated how being both "digital" and "humanities" represent different kinds of power in the library. Particularly as the new Research Data Services unit, which concentrates a lot of the "digital" power, takes form, I've been thinking a lot about how to bring others in and share the power and resources, and be mindful of the labor implications (often for other people) of any grandiose data plans.

This has become a recurring theme in a lot of the things I've been writing about DH lately. DH, fundamentally, comes down to how we choose to allocate labor.

Here's how I've spent my quarter.

Existing Projects

The relaunch of the Global Medieval Sourcebook was pushed back to January, and this quarter has involved an iterative process of tweaks to the new static website and the gradual addition of the remaining content. An article on the Global Medieval Sourcebook that Mae Velloso-Lyons, Kathryn Starkey, and I wrote on the project came out in the journal "Seminar" (hit me up if you need access). I finished up the documentation for the site, in the spirit of Miriam Posner's classic "How did they make that?", and the project was used as a model of a streamlined, static-site approach to creating simple websites for CESTSA projects.

From time to time, I've continued to tweak various departmental-support websites (like the course poster request system), and serve as a translator and guide when cryptic and confusing emails come in from central IT.

Progress with getting materials digitized using Transkribus has been slow, but it was a hit when I demoed it for the Comp Lit honors thesis class this quarter, and it seems to have lit a spark for a couple other scholars who I've gotten set up with it. Among my more hopeful ideas for the Library's new Research Data Services group are thinking about how to connect Special Collections in via things like handwritten text recognition. But it, like all things, will take time.

The Data-Sitters Club published two "books" this quarter, DSC #11: Katia and the Sentiment Snobs, and DSC #12: The DSC and the New Coding Language. The first is an in-depth look at sentiment analysis, where we tried multiple tools and concluded that it sounds like a great idea, but unless you're looking at reviews or other opinion pieces where the point is to convey good / bad, computational sentiment analysis as it currently exists lacks the nuance you need for it to give you anything meaningful. Layering fancy visualizations over it may hide some of the mess, but it's still too much mess to be valuable. In DSC #12, we shared our own "coding stories", and I talked a bit about working on learning R starting from a base of Python. It seems to have really struck a chord with people who work in various languages (I had to add a footnote contextualizing a snarky comment I made about LaTeX), and we added a "Dear Reader" section at the end for the stories other people shared with us.

Multilingual Harry Potter fanfic, which has been on hold since March 2020, has sprung back to life. While bringing the whole team together synchronously has been a challenge, individual chance encounters with everyone on the Harry Potter team has led to the decision that we'll try to actually write something up for that project. My Python skills have improved considerably since I last worked with this data in 2019, and I've written much more sophisticated web scrapers that produce much cleaner data. I've successfully re-scraped most of the data and I'm hoping the cleaning will be trivial enough that the pieces will fall together for a DH Unbound conference proposal in January.

New Projects

This quarter has been an exciting one for new projects. Visiting Slavic faculty member Kat Hill has given me an excuse to get into exploring computer vision for the first time. My flailing about with OpenCV (which inverts the red and blue channels of images by default) even led to a new fabric design that will debut in some dress next quarter. Her project led me to wrangle together some code for detecting pixels within a specified color range, then calculating what percentage of the total pixels are in that range. I figured out how to do that for an individual image, and could turn that into a loop, but a conversation on Twitter with William Mattingly (who had created a Streamlit app pipeline for IIIF images, with an eye towards OCRing them) made me think bigger. He was kind enough to wrestle my code into his Streamlit IIIF processing framework and added an option for uploading a single image, creating an app where you can submit a IIIF manifest or upload an image, define your own color ranges or use a pre-baked one, and see the % of pixels of a specific color for each image in the manifest. We were able to debut it as a demo as part of Kat's ASEEES panel in November.

My visit to the Comp Lit honors thesis class led to a short-term project helping a student access and process some of the library's data collections for a final paper. It was a moderatechallenge for me, even as someone reasonably familiar with this data set (the Chadwyck-Healey poetry collection); I don't know how she would have done it on her own, though. Certainly food for thought as we consider what Research Data Services might be able to do, concretely, to make data more accessible.

I had the opportunity to work with Cécile Alduy on text analysis of right-wing French political writing. It was a good opportunity to refine some of my named-entity recognition code for French, and expand my understanding of different methods for comparing texts, and when they should be used (e.g. depending on corpus size and nature). I'm grateful, as always, for the generosity of DH colleagues around the world who chime in with clarifications, suggestions, and help. I would not be able to do my job without the distributed network of DH Twitter folks. (Check out this thread with my TF-IDF question and the responses for an example.)

While I've spent time at the Literary Lab since I started at Stanford, this quarter I tried to make a push to get more of the computationally-interested grad students directly involved in projects under development. That didn't pan out as I'd hoped, but I've continued to sit in on the development of one of the Lab's classic large, amorphous projects that iteratively takes shape, and I've learned a lot from the process. The most striking thing is the extent to which metadata shapes what is possible with large data sets. I was already a big metadata fan, but even I underestimated it. Even as more non-English journals are digitized, metadata at the issue level isn't enough to be able to do the kind of work the Lab has been doing on this project, which relies on article-level metadata. Doing that kind of work as part of digitization is time-consuming, expensive, and dependent on linguistic and cultural expertise -- it's no surprise that it's available in an expensive vendor-provided data set, and not a library DIY undertaking like when we digitized the full run of a Russian feminist zine in 2019.

Relatedly, I've been working on gathering metadata and building corpora that I hope will eventually span the languages of the DLCL. The Library has recently acquired a large data collection from the New York Times, and this quarter I tried to extract the New York Times bestseller lists from 2000-2020. It was more of an adventure than I expected; the format for structuring this data changed 2-3x over the course of two decades, in ways that required writing new code for each. In parallel, I've been calling up these retroactively-bound issues of "Livres Hebdo" from off-campus storage, scanning them, and trying to use the HTML output of my OCR software (ABBYY FineReader, always) to parse the listings into something I could use to sample from for corpus-building. Russian has been more challenging, but I've found various lists online that I've been able to scrape.

I've been working on other corpus-building projects, as well -- trying to get a computation-friendly version of everything on the Slavic and French reading lists. It's been a mix of searching the web, and scanning and OCRing things. I'm hoping in the winter, when both our new Slavic grad students will be on campus, I'll be able to experiment with my "computational reading list" idea, to give early-stage grad students some exposure to DH methods (including what I've come to refer to as "stealth DH", using the power of lemmatization for leveled-up Ctrl+F searching and Voyant) in a way that supports their prep for quals.

Finally, I've been talking with grad student Nelson Endebo about what I can do in my role to support grad students who want to focus on non-academic jobs, particularly in the tech sphere. There's some precedent within my division (e.g. BiblioTECH in 2013, as David Palumbo-Liu described to me) but there hasn't been a lot of activity on that front in recent years. As a starting point that could serve students with a variety of different goals, I've signed up to teach a DH Practicum independent study this quarter -- and perhaps every quarter that I'm not teaching one of my main classes. In some sense, it's just a little more paperwork on my end for the job I already do, but on the student's end, it buys them some space to focus on a project that interests them.

Writing

I haven't written much new this quarter, though I did recently put in an abstract for "Debates in DH: Critical Infrastructure Studies". I've done some edits for two pieces for the Bloomsbury Handbook of DH on coding and on multilingual DH, and I'll soon be finishing final edits for "Debates in DH: Computational Humanities" and "Debates in DH: Futures of Graduate Education".

Talks and Events

I didn't give any talks this quarter, but we did hold two as part of our "Animal Crossing: New Digital Humanities" series: Hannah Gunderman in October on "How to Avoid a Research Data Management Nightmare" and Ravynn K. Stringfield in November on "Thinking Like a Digital Black Feminist".

Looking ahead, in the last couple weeks, I've put in three 2022 conference proposals related to looking at explicit references to nationality in a large corpus of 21st literature for young readers that I've been working on for the last year, as an extension of the Data-Sitters Club.

Other Things

I did a four-week workshop on how to use HathiTrust resources, which was a gap in my knowledge that had gone on far too long. I'll be writing up what I learned in a Data-Sitters Club book, and experimenting with putting it to use next quarter.

Towards the end of the quarter, I cleaned up the Textile Makerspace and attempted a soft-reopening, which ran into various scheduling complications. I'm hoping to have regular hours next quarter, and there are definitely more exciting announcements in the works there for 2022.

Finally, to end on some kind of celebratory note, one of the big developments of this quarter was the Librarian of Congress granting a petition for an exemption to the DMCA that would make text and data mining possible in new ways, with a lot of caveats and in limited circumstances. Those caveats and limitations are enough to throw a wet blanket on my optimism for the usability of the exemption as it stands, but at least it paves a path forward for further advocacy.

I'm surveying my office before I leave today, hoping we'll all be back at the beginning of January as planned, but not wanting to leave behind anything I couldn't stand not having access to for a while. We'll see what the new year brings.

Russian Computational Periodicals

Quinn Dombrowski — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · October 19, 2021

PI: Katherine Hill Reischl, Slavic Languages and Literatures

This ever-growing project seeks to transform the complexities of early Soviet journals’ graphic environments into useable data. The current iteration of the project’s corpus includes twenty-six distinct titles containing over a hundred thousand articles, poems, editorial commentaries, advertisements, theater listings as well as images representing a variety of genres and media. Through the abstraction of journal elements as data, we seek to produce representations that will make not only the journals’ contents but also big picture structures available to distant reading and analysis for researchers.

We ask: What can we ask of periodicals that we might not of other digitized media? What can machine learning tell us about these journals that might be overlooked in ordinary or habitual reading practices? What patterns can we discover across a collection? What types of images or subjects appear and disappear in the history of publication? Are there unexpected points of continuity or difference between a diverse set of journals published at the start of the twentieth century?

This Stanford-based extension of the project, begun at Princeton University and in collaboration with ITMO University in St. Petersburg, focuses particularly on the diverse images featured in the journals’ pages. Having begun with the articulation of rudimentary image typologies and applied computer learning to the image corpus (identifying illustrations, photographs, caricature, advertisements as well as subjects), we are currently looking for new ways to extract data related to color values and quantity across the journal runs.

Image top: Training the model in document segmentation to predict constituent parts of a journal page, from 30 dnei

Image bottom: Example of a color mask for an image in the journal 30 dnei

DLCL ATS round-up, summer 2021

Quinn Dombrowski — Sun, 26 Sep 2021 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · September 27, 2021

Summer always disappears too quickly, especially when it involves navigating childcare gaps at various points. I spent almost the whole summer at home, but started to go back to campus regularly after Labor Day. It's been a delight to have an office of my own for the Data-Sitters Club art by Claire Chenette, and the werewolf saint by Miles Smith, even if I haven't figured out how to hang them on the walls just yet.

Existing projects

There was a tremendous amount of content work done on the Global Medieval Sourcebook this summer, creating beautifully-formatted PDFs of each text for download along with the XML. We also worked out some technical details with the project's ingestion into the Stanford Digital Repository and the creation of MODS records for the major text collections. I wrote up the process of going from Drupal to a static Jekyll site, which we'll publish along with the new version of the site. I also spent a lot of time trying and failing to wrangle the elaborate SASS code pile from the site we cloned into something that looked the way the team wanted. Thankfully, I was able to barter my way out of this dilemma: Karin Dalziel fixed everything, and I'll be sewing her something in exchange. We'll be launching the new version of the site this quarter.

I've continued supporting my department in various ways around websites: working through a few bugs in the poster-request system we rebuilt on more stable infrastructure, helping research units migrate to platforms that are a better fit for their aesthetic goals, answering questions about how to do certain content updates on our department's very elaborate Drupal site that predates me.

Most of the grad students' projects from the CESTA Grad Fellows program were on hold over the summer, though I anticipate some of them will resume later this year. I did consult with a few undergrad CESTA interns over the summer on data-wrangling topics, and undertook a large data-wrangling project myself, trying to extract metadata from ID3 tags on MP3 files and reconcile it with existing metadata and song variations for Marisa Galvez's "Performing Trobar" site.

Along with my Data-Sitters Club colleagues, we published two "books" this summer, one on principal component analysis (with guest Data-Sitter Heather Froehlich) and one on the process we used to find food references in the corpus and see how they were translated (introducing our Belgian Data-Sitter, Isabelle Gribomont). I continued working on the corpus of translations, and finished preparing the data for the larger multilingual team (including Maria Massucco, Courtney Hodrick, Masha Gorshkova, and Ella Elbaz from the DLCL) to annotate for our EADH poster presentation.

I've been working on other corpora as well, including a computer-readable version of all the texts on the Russian literature comps reading list -- all 19 pages of it. Visa delays for one of the incoming grad students have bought me some time to finish it this fall.

After being mired in indecision for a number of months, I decided to dive into experiments with digitizing Stanford Library's special collections holdings. One of the things I love about Transkribus is the growing collection of handwritten text recognition (HTR) models that work pretty well out-of-the-box for the kinds of materials we have. (I've got a list with samples here, that's easier to browse than the Transkribus interface.) I was surprised, for instance, at how decent the results came out when I used my phone to take pictures in the Special Collections reading room. My next step is to identify texts that have been officially digitized, and try running the IIIF images through Transkribus, with the hope of exporting the results as something compatible with IIIF annotation.

A few projects are still on hold. This quarter should be a decision point for the Harry Potter fanfic: whether to re-scrape the data, now that I know how to do it better, and try to write something on it; or call it a learning experience that's over. (Alternately, it could evolve into something else, as the English Harry Potter fanfic project has at the LitLab.) Text mining JSTOR for Solzhenitsyn has gotten another influx of energy from Kat Hill, a visiting faculty member in Slavic, who is interested in Solzhenitsyn's social networks and literary references to those networks. I haven't yet revisited the data, but I'm looking forward to it this quarter.

New projects

Over the summer, I started learning some R, which I wrote some about in Data-Sitters Club #10 and will write more about in #12 (forthcoming). When Matt Jockers's Text Analysis with R for Students of Literature first came out, I tried and failed to work through it. Now, with a solidly intermediate knowledge of Python under my belt, I'm finding it much more accessible, and I appreciate its focus from the beginning on doing the kinds of things I'm interested in, instead of starting from the most basic programming concepts.

Some of Henry Lowood's new acquisitions (including a gorgeous manual on textiles) have gotten me thinking about potential exhibit or event ideas, possibly as a partnership with the Textile Makerspace.

Writing

This summer I finished a round of edits for the "Debates in DH: Computational Humanities" piece with my former DH HPC birds-of-a-feather group. I also did edits for a piece on minimal computing, which led to a great conversation and cross-pollination with another piece submitted to the same cluster. Complaining about Jekyll on Twitter turns out to be a great way to engage collaborators.

I wrote up my spring keynote for the El'Manuscript conference, on rethinking the focus of medieval Slavic investment from comprehensive editions of important manuscripts, to adequate annotation of more diverse materials, with the goal of unlocking a great number of overlooked manuscripts.

Early in the summer, J.D. Porter did a hero's job cohering the work he, Yulia Ilchuk, and I did on a project about texts in translation into a paper with a clear focus and argument; my contribution was a modest "applications" section. It underwent peer review through the Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities and we just published the formatted, final version.

In another heroic write-up effort, Matt Warner put together a paper out of the Star Wars talk we did with Mark Algee-Hewitt and Nichole Nomura for Digital Frontiers: Realizing Resistance Episode II: Uncharted Galaxies. We've refined some of the analyses, and it's been thought-provoking to grapple with some name-clustering and coreference-resolution tools for English that are highly imperfect, but still a huge step up from what's easily available for other languages. (At least so far; I'm very enthusiastic about David Bamman's NEH grant to rebuild BookNLP and train models for many of my division's languages.)

Talks and Events

At the beginning of the summer, I gave a keynote at the virtual Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) with Erica Cavanaugh, on graceful degradation in collaborative relationships. I also attended and livetweeted the other keynotes (which happened daily), winning a Twitter award from DHSI in the process.

The major conference of my summer was ACH 2021, which was held online. In addition to moderating a number of panels (including one by Merve Tekgürler from Stanford's History department, about Ottoman Turkish HTR), I was on a panel with Lisa Spiro, Geoffrey Rockwell, Frank Fischer, Edward Gray, and Alex Gil about DH directories. Admittedly, though, my favorite talk was an "other presentation format", where Liz Grumbach, Merve Tekgürler, and I did a "report from the field" where we interviewed people about their DH work while running around in a grassy field in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. I also decorated my Animal Crossing island as a real conference space, with different lunch options each day and a large coffee station.

Continuing in that spirit, we also gave a presentation -- again in Animal Crossing, projected as my Zoom video -- about the "Animal Crossing: New Digital Humanities" talk series for the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities (JADH) conference in September. Those were our only two ACNDigHum events for the summer, but our schedule is filling up for fall talks.

Finally, this summer I also got to experience my first (virtual) book launch event, for "We are the Baby-Sitters Club" (ed. Marisa Crawford and Megan Milks), where the Data-Sitters Club wrote a chapter. I also got to enjoy the eerie experience of hearing your own words (a personal childhood narrative, no less) read by another person in audiobook form. (Whichever of the many readers was assigned my segment did an excellent job.)

Other things

I did a daylong Intermediate Tableau workshop this summer, which inspired me to offer at some point this year a more focused Tableau workshop specifically for scholars visualizing research. I also did a couple workshops on machine learning classification algorithms, which I'm hoping to put into practice for a couple different projects.

I attended talks and sent feedback on the job searches for the Middle East curator and Scholarly Communications Director positions in the Library.

Finally, this writeup would be incomplete without mentioning two major losses within the US-based DH community this summer, both from cancer: Rebecca Munson and Scott Enderle. I knew them both from the internet, but it's a reminder that internet friendships are still very real. Rebecca is the reason my hair is partly purple; Data-Sitters Club #8: Text-Comparison-Algorithm-Crazy Quinn wouldn't have been possible without Scott. Matthew Lincoln has written a beautiful tribute to Rebecca, and Ben Schmidt has done the same for Scott; both are very much worth reading and remembering.

I kicked off this fall with having to rethink my major plans, after not getting enough enrollment for my DH RPG project management course. As such, the fall remains very much a work in progress, but one I look forward to sharing here.

Conferencing from Home: ACH 2021 and !!Con

Quinn Dombrowski — Tue, 27 Jul 2021 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · July 28, 2021

In 2019, I wrote a blog post about the experience of going to the DH conference in Utrecht, followed by the ACH conference in Pittsburgh. Two years later, it's time for another ACH write-up, with a very different point of comparison: !!Con, a tech conference celebrating "the joy, excitement, and surprise of computing". While I've attended and presented at other virtual events this year (including the CSDH-SCHN conference), as co-VP of ACH I was particularly committed to attending as much of that conference as I could, and volunteering as a chair, online respondent, and livetweeter. !!Con was a more serendipitous discovery thanks to a tweet from Scott Weingart. It was the first non-academic conference I've presented at, and while differences in both scale and nature make it hard to compare directly with ACH, there were some aspects of !!Con that may serve as useful provocations for how to run virtual or hybrid academic conferences.

ACH

ACH 2021 was the second modern instantiation of a conference run by the US-based DH professional organization. Originally slated to be in Houston (in a summer when the ADHO DH conference was slated to be in Tokyo -- both of these in-person events have now been rescheduled for next year), ACH 2021 pivoted to being entirely virtual prior to its CFP last December. Roopika Risam and Jen Guiliano took the lead on organizing this virtual event, and did a tremendous job. A major goal of the ACH conference is to serve as a more accessible venue for the kind of DH scholarship that takes place in the United States, and the program reflected those priorities through a very thoughtful balance of work focused on social justice, Black DH, pedagogy, the intersection of archives and identity, multimedia, multilingual DH, and computational text analysis.

!!Con

!!Con (pronounced "bang-bang-con") is a typically New York-based in-person event consisting of a series of ten-minute talks spread over two days. It's been running since 2014, and !!Con West ran in Santa Cruz in 2019 and 2020. The event is usually held in May, and thanks to COVID, !!Con 2020 was an "experimental remote conference". The "Exclamation Foundation" (the organization that exists solely for the purpose of running this once-a-year event) designed !!Con 2021 from the beginning as a virtual and international event. Much as the priorities of ACH were evident in the topics of the presentations, the structure and infrastructure of !!Con reflected its focus on supporting whimsy and serendipity for people spread (at a minimum) across the US and Europe.

Presentation modes

At ACH, there was a mix of presentation types, ranging from lighting talks and posters (ideal for work in progress) to long papers, roundtables, and "alternate formats" (like a session I ran with Liz Grumbach and Merve Tekgürler that was held in Animal Crossing and streamed to Twitch). The conference ran for three days, and it was no doubt challenging to fit in all the submissions that fared well in peer review. Presenting at a conference like ACH is an important professional milestone for people not only in grad school or faculty roles, but for librarians and staff as well. To mitigate the time crunch, a private Humanities Commons group was available for registered attendees, and session chairs encouraged participants to continue the conversation there. The poster session was carried out entirely on Humanities Commons, with presenters uploading their materials to a discussion "topic" specifically for that purpose.

!!Con talks are 10 minutes long, except for a couple 30-40 minute keynotes. There's no peer review process the way there is with ACH; the organizing committee just chooses which proposals to accept. At this point in my life, I can practically write a DH conference submission in my sleep (especially a 250-500 word one) -- I've even written a guide to how to do it. But !!Con was different: they wanted a specific and detailed description of how you would fill the 10 minutes. Since my proposal was about the Data-Sitters Club, I had plenty of material to draw from, but piecing together an exactly 10-minute talk (complete with breakdowns of how many minutes / seconds would be spent on each section of the talk) required a fair amount of effort.

Registration & schedule

!!Con was a pay-what-you-want conference; the recommended ticket price was $64, but if that was a lot, you could pay nothing. If you did pay something, a !!Con t-shirt or sweatshirt (you could pick your favorite size and color from a webstore) was part of the deal. Tickets were released in two batches, and both sold out promptly. Accustomed as I am to academic conferences, I was shocked that as a speaker, I would not only get free registration (and a shirt), but also an honorarium.

While ACH registration was comparable to !!Con's ($35-$90, depending on whether you were a student and/or member), the sponsors of ACH were academic institutions and programs. In contrast, the sponsors of !!Con were tech companies (which, I'll confess, I had never heard of with the exception of Mapbox). This, plus the smaller number of talks, presumably made it feasible for !!Con to not only offer the shirts and honoraria, but also AV professionals, live captioning, and streaming. To my surprise, all the talks were streamed live for anyone who wanted to watch from the !!Con website. What's more, the schedule was arranged in such a way that every talk was broadcast twice: first live (in the early evening / post-work hours on the east coast), and again the next day as part of a "syncwatch" during the early evening hours in Europe. (The talks were also edited and posted to YouTube shortly after the conference.) To make life easier for participants, the schedule on the !!Con website automatically displays using the correct time zone for wherever you are, based on the detected time for your computer. I'm so unaccustomed to schedules being in my own time zone that I initially subtracted three hours when putting events on my calendar.

I ran into the same problem of mis-calendaring my talks with ACH, but this time it was due to subtracting three hours instead of two. DH conferences worldwide seem to put a lot of symbolic value on the time zone where conferences are hosted, which has gotten me in trouble more than once with submission deadlines. I know a few east coast colleagues who, accustomed to having everything in their time zone, were caught off-guard by the ACH schedule being in Central time. A bit of Googling suggests that it’s possible to get ConfTool to show times and dates in your time zone, but it involves more than a little user configuration.

Because ACH sessions started at 8 AM Central, I resigned myself to simply missing the first two hours (with the exception of one day when I dragged myself onto Zoom at 6 AM for a discussion about software papers). It would have been really nice if there were a way to have an equivalent of the “syncwatch” for the sessions that worked out to be very early in my time zone. The late session ran until 7 Central, which made it possible for me to attend then go pick up kids, which was convenient. But it was strange, and a little exhausting, to spend the days immersed in Zooming and then … nothing. On one hand, I definitely needed a break from Zoom, but I missed having some kind of space for opt-in social engagement. Obviously, dinner and drinks isn’t going to happen with a virtual conference, but the way !!Con made up for the social gap left me with a lot to think about.

Social spaces

Since all the talks were streamed publicly, one might wonder what incentive there was to register for !!Con. The answer, again to my surprise, was the social aspect of the conference, particularly Discord. I'd used Discord as the voice-chat platform for the Animal Crossing: New DH talk series, but I'd never seen Discord used to cultivate community before !!Con. Every talk had its own channel, and the Q&A (as well as cheering, commentary, and general positive vibes) for each talk took place in that channel. The commentary and Q&A from the syncwatch rebroadcast the following day was just a continuation of that chat. Because people were already in those channels engaging with the talks, there was much less friction to continue the conversation, compared to having to log into Humanities Commons, look for the thread for a presentation, and re-initiate a synchronous conversation asynchronously at ACH.

But that wasn't all! There were also Discord channels for the sorts of things that one might talk about over coffee or drinks. There was an introductions channel, a pets channel, a job-seeker channel, a crafting channel, and others. People were active in those spaces (as well as the voice channels) throughout the day and night. I ended up hanging out in the crafting channel one evening and had a great conversation about sewing with someone else from the west coast. It worked far better as a drop-in, conference-like social space than I could have imagined.

In addition to Discord, there was also a more experimental virtual space / social interaction platform, Skittish, that was used for the official "hallway track" events and unconferencing sessions. I didn't feel like I had the mental bandwidth to try a new, experimental platform (even one with cute barnyard animal avatars) so I sat those out, but there seemed to be a lot of energy around it from what I could see on Discord.

Community norms

While a conference on "the joy, excitement, and surprise of computing" is going to select for a certain kind of attendee to begin with, I was impressed with the way the !!Con organizers went about setting expectations around community norms. They reached out to all the speakers and asked us to flag any difficult topics in our talks (e.g. racism and sexism) and offered to run through our talk with us to share pointers for covering those issues in a sensitive way. Again, size matters here -- it’s hard to imagine there being enough volunteer labor to support a similar initiative at ACH, but maybe something a little more scalable like a written guide or a set of people speakers could reach out to for support might fill some of this need.

There were codes of conduct for both ACH and !!Con which covered similar ground on the "do-not's", but !!Con's included a set of "do's" with a pointer to more detail from the Recurse Foundation's social rules that I bookmarked for future reference. Both !!Con and Recurse are explicitly tech-oriented spaces, and not all of these guidelines (like "assume that all your fellow conference-goers are technical") would work equally well if applied directly to DH contexts. But a lot of them might -- maybe academic conferences would be more welcoming spaces if they adopted guidelines like "no 'well-actually's" and "no feigning surprise" (e.g. "You don't know who Foucault is?!").

Imagining the best of all physical and virtual worlds

A survey went out to ACH attendees immediately after the conference, seeking input on people's preferences around conference modality for ACH 2022. Even when in-person conferences become a reliable option again (which may not be 2022 at this rate), I expect that hybrid conferences will continue, at least for organizations that prioritize access in the face of travel costs, care responsibilities, and other factors that can make in-person conferences challenging for some attendees. Organizing either a physical or a virtual conference well is a massive undertaking; attempting to organize an event that does both at the same time and in some integrated manner is even more daunting. But while there are differences in the audience, professional function, and scale of a disciplinary conference like ACH compared to a whimsical, niche tech conference like !!Con, I think there's still practices from !!Con that may be worth exploring, specifically for the networking / social aspects of the conference.

Twitter is an active social space for DH, but by being open to the world, it’s hard to enforce community norms. Grad students and people new to DH may be (understandably!) reluctant to just jump in. Having a closed space, covered by the code of conduct, that nonetheless supports casual conversation across time zones would be a helpful addition to virtual and hybrid academic conferences. Not everyone will participate (just as not everyone participated in conference-organized social activities in the before-times), but just as there were volunteers to lead the ACH “newcomer” dinner groups, I expect there would be volunteers willing to participate in virtual social spaces with the goal of fostering community.

There could also be something generative about rethinking the physical social spaces in a hybrid conference to reflect the setup of virtual social spaces. If there’s a “pets” Discord channel, would it be possible to project some of the pet pictures from Discord in one corner of the reception area, to encourage in-person participants to add their own pictures and engage with the online participants? Or imagine an “Animal Crossing” channel where people could arrange times to offer tours of their virtual island to both in-person and remote participants, using Discord for audio? I did a little of this in an unofficial way, wrapping up the conference with an Animal Crossing hangout session, in addition to our official Animal Crossing presentation, where Liz Grumbach, Merve Tekgürler and I interviewed conference attendees in-world, either through their character visiting or by finding them a virtual object to use as an avatar.

All of this depends on volunteer labor, which can already be a strain to find enough of when running a conference. But those of us who have established professional networks thanks to DH conferences owe it to the next cohorts to invest in creating spaces where they can do the same, whether or not it’s feasible for them to fly across the country.

DLCL ATS round-up, spring 2021

Quinn Dombrowski — Thu, 08 Jul 2021 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · July 9, 2021

Spring quarter gave me the first chance in a long while to take some time off. The first week of the quarter was my kids' spring break, which we spent in a cabin in the woods near Mt. Lassen with just the right amount of internet: enough to quietly keep an eye on email, not enough for Zoom. We've taken some other long weekends, and there's been periods when school has been closed for one or more kids. Nonetheless, here's where things stand at the end of spring quarter.

Existing projects

I've been continuing to refine the static, Jekyll-based site for the Global Medieval Sourcebook, with a few CSS tweaks left to do. I had the opportunity to present what we've done so far with Mae Velloso-Lyons (and Elizabeth Honig, the faculty member behind a Jan Brueghel Catalogue Raisonné I worked on at UC Berkeley) at Stanford's WebCamp in April. This summer, a group of undergrad research assistants at CESTA have been doing a tremendous job adding new material to the old site, which will give me the chance to test how reproducible my data extraction, cleaning, and Jekyll-friendly transformation code actually is. We plan to launch the static version of the site before fall quarter.

I'm still sorting out the current state of things with the Mapping the Republic of Letters site, but hope to work on updating its visualizations to use Simon's Palladio webcomponents this summer.

I've continued to help DLCL research units navigate the different options for web hosting infrastructure at Stanford. There's been some changes to the central IT recommendations (e.g. attempting to move all WordPress sites towards Stanford Domains instead of the older AFS hosting), and those changes will likely mean more shepherding site migrations in the next year.

On and off during the spring, I've been working with Katia Bowers on the next installment of the Data-Sitters Club, on principal component analysis. But the bigger development has been that our poster for EADH (the European DH Association) was accepted, and during spring quarter I managed to expand our translation data (through scanning, OCR, and text alignment) to include Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Dutch, German, Portuguese, Hebrew, and Russian, in addition to three French translations. We've got a huge Multilingual Mystery team for this poster, including Maria Massucco, Courtney Hodrick, Masha Gorshkova, and Ella Elbaz from the DLCL, along with other colleagues beyond Stanford. I'm looking forward to presenting our work on the different translation strategies for American foods and brands into these various cultural contexts.

Thanks to a new data source acquisition by Sarah Sussman, RetroNews, I've started exploring what might be possible for amassing data about French publications and book reviews, as a step towards the work that Cécile Alduy proposed for an internal grant on creating text corpora in the languages of the DLCL. While we didn't receive funding for that last winter, it hasn't been far from my mind. Another step I'm taking in that direction has involved talking with Gabriella Safran, chair of the Slavic department, about a little pilot program to give the two incoming Slavic PhD students a "computational reading list" -- not an additional reading list of computational scholarship, but preparing a version of their 18-page Russian reading list that they can analyze computationally. I'll also hold a couple short workshops for them on how to get started with doing computational text analysis in Russian.

Other projects that remain on hold include the Harry Potter fanfic project, text mining JSTOR, and ensuring that the Entitled Opinions podcast is accessioned into the Stanford Digital Repository. I didn't manage to get very far on digitizing Stanford Libraries Special Collections materials with Transkribus, mostly due to feeling stuck on what to start with. Hopefully I'll be able to collaborate with subject area curator colleagues this summer to identify what might be the most valuable.

New projects

During spring quarter, I was able to consult with multiple DLCL grad students who were finishing up their CESTA fellowship for the year. I talked with Victoria Zurita ("Insurgent Aestheticisms: fashioning individuals and communities in fin-de-siècle France and Spanish America") about web scraping and data cleaning, with Laura Menéndez Gorina ("Building a Home: Narratives of Houses and Ruins from Barcelona and Havana") about how to organize the data she had been collecting, and Lakmali Jayasinghe ("Towards Legal but Humane Border-Crossings: A Literary and Filmic Engagement with Visa Law and Policy") about various issues related to scraping and analyzing tweets about visas, which built on some work from my non-English DH class last fall.

I've been in conversation with colleagues in DLSS in the Library about the new version of Mirador, and I've put them in touch with a number of grad students who might benefit from these technical developments.

Yulia Ilchuk and I put together a proposal for a Slavic DH research unit next fall, with input from Eric Kim and others. We also received the good news that it was funded, and I'm excited to do some preparation for it this summer, between surveying the landscape of tools and corpora, and thinking about strategies for engaging a broader range of participants, including language-learners and speakers of Slavic languages in other departments, like computer science.

Writing

Edits are ongoing for the Debates in DH: Computational Humanities piece that I put together with a group of DH + HPC folks I used to collaborate with at Berkeley; hopefully those will be finished this summer. I submitted two chapters for a DH edited volume, one on the relative importance of coding and one with Pedro Nilsson-Fernàndez on multilingual DH. I did revisions on a piece I wrote about the first iteration of the DH RPG course, and wrote up a summary report from last summer's online asynchronous discussion about multilingual DH and NLP (which should be published soon).

Talks and Events

Between technical problems and scheduling challenges, Liz Grumbach and I only managed to do one talk in our Animal Crossing: New Digital Humanities series this spring. But we did get a presentation accepted to this summer's ACH conference, where we'll be reporting "from the field" -- talking with DH people about their work while they run around in a grassy field catching bugs and fishing and such.

As part of the ACH mentoring offerings, I organized a discussion about decoding job ads.

Along with Mark Algee-Hewitt, Nichole Nomura, and Matt Warner, I presented at the LitLab and at Digital Frontiers: Realizing Resistance Episode II: Uncharted Galaxies on Star Wars novels in English. The work I did on that project, using the spaCy NLP library, I adapted into a tutorial for how to identify verbs associated with particular characters, in Spanish, which I presented as a webinar/workshop for INTELE in Spain.

I recorded a lightning talk for the follow-up to the DH Goes Viral digital workshop, reflecting on how the massively-multilingual Data-Sitters Club extension has created unexpected opportunities to connect people this year, including bringing grad students into larger networks. I also presented the first iteration of the multilingual Data-Sitters Club food-translation work (along with Isabelle Gribomont and Lee Skallerup Bessette) at the CSDH-SCHN (Canadian DH Association) conference.

I gave a talk at CESTA as part of the DH Long View series, where I put their support for Unicode to the test with the title "Humanités numériques, цифровые гуманитарные науки, デジタル・ヒューマニティーズ: Histories and Futures of Linguistic Diversity in DH". I also live-tweeted many of the talks in the series.

I also gave a keynote at the El'Manuscript 2021 conference online, a digital medieval Slavic conference that brought me full circle to where I started with DH in the early 2000's.

One of my more random engagements this spring was a talk at !!Con (pronounced "Bang-Bang-Con"), a tech conference celebrating the joy of computing. It was one of the more successful online events I've been to during the pandemic, and I look forward to sharing more thoughts on it soon.

Looking forward

Serving on the search committee for a joint CESTA/CIDR position was another major part of spring quarter for me. It's been wonderful to welcome Alix Keener to Stanford in that role, and begin working with her towards the end of the quarter.

Summer has already begun to disappear quickly, and there's a lot to do to get ready for the fall, between the Slavic DH Research Unit, revising my "Project Management and Ethical Collaboration for Humanists" course materials, preparing the computational reading list for Russian, and working with the large multilingual team on the Data-Sitters Club poster for EADH in September. And especially with the return to campus this fall, I hope to settle back into a more regular routine of blogging here, beyond the quarterly updates. We'll see where it takes me.

DLCL ATS round-up, winter 2021

Quinn Dombrowski — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · March 24, 2021

Winter quarter was a time of consolidation and slow progress, without much to share by way of exciting new developments. I worked on a lot of things that I expect will bear fruit down the road, but I can't point to anything concrete yet. Here's where things stand as of spring break 2021.

Existing Projects

With some advice from Matthew Lincoln at Carnegie Mellon, I'm close to finishing the migration of the Global Medieval Sourcebook into a Jekyll site fashioned after CMU's DH Literacy Guidebook. It's been a multi-step process, including some XSLT, some Python, some OpenRefine, and I've kept notes along the way. I'm planning to write it all up during the spring, if only as a set of tips for people considering migrating from Drupal to a static website.

Thanks to the tireless nights-and-weekends work of my CIDR colleague Simon Wiles, we launched the reimagined Palladio bricks (embeddable Palladio) as Palladio webcomponents this quarter. There was a lot of enthusiasm from the broader DH community about the possibility of being able to embed Palladio in other webpages, and we also got the go-ahead to start work on reimagining the Mapping the Republic of Letters site using this new version of Palladio. I'm looking forward to working more on that next quarter.

Migrating the metadata and files for the recent "Entitled Opinions" podcast to the University Archives is on hold until the summer.

Over the course of this quarter I've been involved with ongoing discussions in a number of the DLCL's research units (interdisciplinary working groups) about website infrastructure, which ties into larger departmental discussions about the same. The challenges of balancing aesthetics, information needs, archiving, and findability are still very real, and difficult to negotiate.

This quarter Anouk Lang and I published The Ghost in Anouk's Laptop, a new Data-Sitters Club book on GPT-2, machine learning, and text generation, thanks to some generous feedback and consultation with Annie Lamar, a grad student in Classics at Stanford, and Jeff Tharsen from UChicago. I'm really proud of this one, particularly the way we came up with some new and different analogies for explaining machine learning (e.g. no references to cars or baseball)! It's hard to believe we've been working on it, on and off, for an entire year. I've also got a new Multilingual Mystery half-completed with Lee Skallerup Bessette and Isabelle Gribomont, looking at the adaptations of food words across the various French translations. (Scanning, OCR-ing, and aligning those corpora was its own adventure!) The Data-Sitters Club gave talks for the Stanford Literary Lab and for UIUC's Center for Children's Books. More than anything we accomplished, though, I'm excited about what we've got in the pipeline for the Data-Sitters Club, especially on the multilingual front. Our Multilingual Mystery team has exploded this quarter, now including numerous DLCL grad students and recent grads, along with colleagues abroad. We're waiting to hear back about an EADH poster proposal that would expand the work on French food translation to include Italian, peninsular Spanish, Hebrew, German, Dutch, Catalan, and/or Portuguese. I'd love to have the excuse to introduce so many people to one another and collaborate on something as fun as adaptations of 90's snack foods like s'mores, Gatorade, and Spaghetti O's.

Thanks to the mentorship of Henry Lowood, I had the chance to go through the whole administrative process of acquiring a new collection for the library this quarter, with Ken Whistler's Unicode archive. I can't wait to explore some of these early materials about the Unicode consortium, and incorporate them into my teaching in fall 2022 with the next multilingual DH class.

Sadly, in February we got word that the proposal Cécile Alduy and I submitted on behalf of the DLCL, for creating text corpora in the major DLCL languages, didn't receive an internal humanities grant. I've been thinking about ways to move the project forward nonetheless, including trying to gather information about records of French publications and publication reviews, to try to construct -- for at least one of the DLCL languages -- the kind of metadata, and corpora, that colleagues have access to in English.

Other projects that are still on hold include the Harry Potter fanfic project, text mining JSTOR, and cleaning up the OCR for the Ostrov zine (though now we're imagining ways of working with that text without having to break it up into sub-articles). Something to take up in the spring or summer, perhaps?

New Projects

This quarter I've been playing a bit with corpora of middle-school and YA novels in English (with Nichole Nomura and Jennifer Wolf), as well as Star Wars novels in English (with Mark Algee-Hewitt, Nichole Nomura, and Matt Warner). The former corpus came in handy on a new project where I've been able to support Nick Fenech in an investigation of how Stanford gets referred to over time in different kinds of text corpora. I've found it helpful to have a few English-language corpora to experiment with, to help me wrap my head around different computational methods and techniques, and then work on adapting those to the other languages of the DLCL.

I also had the chance to talk with Ben Albritton in Special Collections about workflows for ingesting transcriptions of special collection material created by Transkribus, and adding it to the Library catalog records for those digital objects. I haven't had the chance to try it out much yet, but I'm hoping to make it part of my regular workflow in the spring.

I got to learn something about the TEI Publisher platform by answering some questions from Johannes Ruhland about his digital edition project. Once again, Elisa Beshero-Bondar from Penn State Behrend is a benevolent genie of expertise when it comes to TEI and the quirks of systems that process it.

Writing

This quarter was the due date for revisions to the Debates in DH: Computational Humanities piece I put together with colleagues from a former DH + HPC birds-of-a-feather group I started at my former job at UC Berkeley. Next week is also the deadline for two pieces for a DH edited volume, one on whether coding matters (tl;dr: not as much as other things), and one on multilingual DH with Pedro Fernandez (tl;dr: it's a good thing that mainstream DH should support better). I also got the final revisions in for the Debates in DH 2021 piece with Patrick Burns about multilingual DH, and heard the news that the Debates in DH volume with my obituary for the defunct DiRT (Directory of Research Tools), which I wrote while at Berkeley, will be published later this year. Along with J.D. Porter and Yulia Ilchuk, I helped draft a piece about our translation project from 2019, and it was satisfying to be able to wrap that up in some form.

Talks and Events

I've been enjoying the opportunity to participate in events around the world, but I'll confess the early scheduling of everything is starting to get exhausting. There are only so many times one can get up at 5 or 6 AM to watch (or, worse, give) a talk. This quarter I was up especially early for DHARTI (the Indian DH association), talking about the opportunities for doing computational text analysis on popular culture materials in non-English languages.

Liz Grumbach and I continued our Animal Crossing: New Horizons DH talk series, with two talks: one by Camille Villa from Stanford Library's DLSS group about incorporating IIIF images into Animal Crossing, and one by Allie Alvis from Type Punch Matrix on communicating book materiality in digital spaces. Our talk series also won first runner-up in "Best Use of DH for Fun" in the DH Awards 2020.

I presented at a Critical Digital Pedagogies for Modern Languages event "at" King's College London, following up on the tutorial-writing hackathon from summer 2019 (that turned into this paper on preparing non-English texts for computational text analysis).

As part of the ACH mentorship offerings, I organized a discussion with Julia Flanders and Greg Palermo of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Journal of Interactive Technology & Pedagogy about publishing your first article.

I presented for the CESTA fellows on data modeling, databases, and alternatives to databases-as-such. At the beginning of the quarter, we also organized through CESTA a few Python co-learning/co-working sessions, but it was hard to keep up the momentum with shifting scheduling times.

Looking ahead, I put in a proposal for the MSU Global DH conference with a number of students from my non-English DH course last quarter, which we'll be presenting in mid-April. I also gave feedback on multiple students' submissions for the ACH conference this summer. I hope I'll see them there virtually, and also be able to do the collaborative roundtable on tool directories that didn't happen in 2020. Towards the end of the quarter, I had various meetings with potential DLCL grad students. I'm excited to see the level of DH interest among our incoming cohort, as it promises many new and interesting projects down the line. Relatedly, during winter quarter I was involved in the job search for a Digital Scholarship Coordinator (joint CESTA/CIDR position), and I look forward to that wrapping up soon, and having a new colleague to collaborate with before long.

DLCL ATS round-up, fall 2020

Quinn Dombrowski — Sun, 10 Jan 2021 16:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · January 11, 2021

2020 was the first year I taught in the fall -- and I'm very glad to have arranged teaching that way, so I have the rest of the year to continue supporting DLCL students on their projects. Teaching either of my classes (Digital Humanities Across Borders AKA Multilingual DH, or Project Management and Ethical Collaboration for Humanists AKA the DH RPG class) has a way of being all-consuming, and having over 20 students made it even more so! I was excited to explore some new languages with students: Arabic, Latin, Malay, and Vietnamese. The class was held asynchronously, though we started doing Friday hang-outs where I learned some new tricks, too (like changing the UI language in Netflix in order to get access to different sets of subtitles). It was a challenging quarter, with more than one student moving out of the state (or country), multiple hospitalizations, and the stress of the election getting to everyone, myself included. But I'm really proud of everything they managed to do despite it all, and I hope to share some of their work here (with permission) over the next few months.

Existing projects

Progress tends to be slower on my other collaborative projects while I'm teaching. Discussions with the Global Medieval Sourcebook over fall quarter led to the decision to migrate the website to Jekyll (rather than our initial plan to use Wax).

I was excited to work with Lakmali Jayasinghe on her Poetic Media Lab project as part of my class, and we were both grateful to James Jacobs, Stanford's Federal Government Information Librarian, for his help in navigating a FOIA request.

We'd been discussing making sure that the "Entitled Opinions" podcast was properly archived for some time now, so it was wonderful to hear from Hannah Frost that most of the podcast's run had already been accessioned into the University Archives (and propagated out to the world through Calisphere), and we only have to work with them on adding the most recent episodes and updating the metadata.

Another issue of OK ZOOMER, the Stanford Library zine, came out right before Halloween, and I was happy to contribute my early-pandemic green screen hijinks. You can check out the web version or print version.)

It was a busy quarter for the Data-Sitters Club, publishing three new books: "Voyant's Big Day" by Katherine Bowers, "DSC and Mean Copyright Law by Matthew Sag and me, and "Text-Comparison-Algorithm Crazy Quinn" by me. All three of them became class readings as soon as they were published. In addition, the Data-Sitters Club contributed a letter of support for a text mining exemption to the DMCA (which disallows circumventing ebook encryption) put together by the Authors Alliance.

On top of all that, there's a few projects that are still on hold but I hope to revisit now that I'm done teaching for the year: the Harry Potter fanfic project, text mining JSTOR, cleaning up the OCR for the Ostrov zine, and rolling out Palladio bricks.

New projects

Even when consumed by teaching, it's hard to avoid new projects. Fall 2020 being what it was, I kept things modest. I had my first chance to talk with a potential donor, picking up where Glen Worthey left off with the Unicode archives. In my department, we've also started some early planning and discussion around a significant overhaul of the DLCL website. I've also been working with a student undergraduate assistant on some modifications / rebuilding a couple smaller standalone websites using the Stanford Sites platform.

Right before the break, a faculty team led by Cécile Alduy submitted an internal Stanford humanities grant to fund the development of 20th and 21st century literary corpora for the major languages of the DLCL. Inspired by work on the English-only "Chicago corpus", I'd love to see similar resources be made available to all the graduate students in the department, for their particular languages.

Writing

Against all odds, I managed to write a paper about the DH RPG / project management class (as a follow-up to the DHSI pre-conference symposium on project management last summer), and a chapter for a Feminist DH edited volume on issues connected with the graceful degradation of collaborative relationships (itself a collaboration, with my former DHSI co-instructor Erica Cavanaugh). Patrick Burns and I revised our Debates in DH 2021 piece on multilingual DH, and I did my part of the peer reviews for the "Computational Humanities" Debates in DH.

Talks and events

I'm surprised, in retrospect, how many more talks and events can be packed into a quarter -- even when teaching -- when everything is online.

Liz Grumbach and I followed up on the successful summer Animal Crossing event for the online Digital Humanities conference by launching an ongoing talk series. We had three presentations over the course of the fall, plus an Election Night crafting hang-out. I also ran a Halloween costume contest for Library staff in Animal Crossing. These events have been by far my favorite, supporting a kind of meaningful virtual presence and shared space. Visiting friends' virtual islands in Animal Crossing is just about the closest I've come to spending time with people outside my immediate family since the pandemic started, and I'm looking forward to more of it -- maybe even continuing beyond the pandemic?

ACH held a kick-off meeting for this year's mentoring program, to get a sense of what people were most interested in. The answer seemed to be "everything, including experimental things", so we're planning a varied program to see what ends up working best. More locally, we've continued running the CESTA lightning talk series, which gives members of the CESTA DH community at Stanford a chance to get feedback on their ongoing projects.

Lee Skallerup Bessette and I gave a talk for the Flyover Comics Symposium on the Quebecois vs. France translations of the Baby-Sitters Club graphic novels, and how they compare (in terms of their text) with the corresponding translations of the original novels.

For the McGill "Spectrums of DH" series, I gave a talk called "What's a 'word': Multilingual DH and the English Default" where I tried to translate the experience of doing non-English DH through analogies for Anglophone scholars. And towards the end of the quarter, "Language is a Domain: Use the Bender Rule" at TextXD was a lightning talk jeremiad about the tendency for only non-English scholars to bother saying what language they applied their methods to. In addition, I gave a Sawchen Lecture for the University of British Columbia with Andrew Janco about some practical DH techniques for scholars of Russian. (Fun fact: it's challenging to even search a text file in Russian without lemmatizing -- creating a less-than-fully-human-readable derivative with all words in the dictionary form.) Whether or not they use computational methods for their analysis, a little "stealth DH" can go a long way for Russian scholars.

Finally, with help from a bunch of props (including Dr. Cheese Bones, the skeleton who went to Utrecht), I was happy to play the Ghost of Christmas Future and Bob Crachit in the Library's Zoom Christmas Carol.

I'm looking forward to taking a moment to catch my breath after last quarter's teaching, and moving forward with all this work and more in 2021!

Animal Crossing: New Digital Humanities

Quinn Dombrowski — Mon, 05 Oct 2020 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · October 6, 2020

This talk series hosted by Quinn Dombrowski (DLCL ATS at Stanford) and Liz Grumbach (Arizona State University) brings together DH scholars from around the world in the virtual space of Animal Crossing, in order to discuss something new: a new article, a new project, a new book, or another new undertaking.

Anyone who has the Nintendo Switch game Animal Crossing and a Nintendo Online membership can RSVP to the events and attend "in person" in the virtual space. For those who would prefer to watch the event streamed to their computer or device, we'll stream live on Twitch, and anyone with an internet connection can watch there and ask questions.

We're still working out the details, but if you'd like to present your work on the show, please email Quinn at qad@stanford.edu, or get in touch with us on Twitter at @ACNDigHum!

Graphic design and publicity for Animal Crossing: New Digital Humanities is brought to you by Lauren Whitby of the Institute for Humanities Research at Arizona State University.

Past events

January 21st ACNDH event at 2 Eastern / 11 Pacific if you have a Nintendo Switch and the Animal Crossing: New Horizons game. We'll toast with champagne, eat oranges, and light fireworks if things go well on 1/20... or hang out together and process what happened otherwise. Or anyone can watch on Twitch!

Join us Wednesday, December 16th at noon Eastern / 9 AM Pacific for Paul Vierthaler, Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies in the Modern Languages and Literatures department at the College of William & Mary, speaking about his new article "East Asian Studies and the Digital Humanities in 2020," which appeared in History Compass in early November. It is a quick survey of the current state of East Asian Digital Humanities with a focus on broad trends.

Merve Tekgürler, PhD student in History at Stanford, discussed "Ottoman Transkribus: Reflections on the Initial Results of HTR+ Model Training for 18th Century Ottoman Turkish Paleography"! Sign up here to attend "in person" if you play ACNH, or anyone can watch on Twitch!

Dr. Andie Silva, Assistant Professor of English at York College and Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at CUNY Graduate Center, started our series with her paper "Remixing the Canon: Shakespeare, Popular Culture, and the Undergraduate Editor", forthcoming in New Technologies in Medieval and Renaissance Studies vol. 9 (ed. Matthew Davis and Colin Wilder).

DLCL ATS round-up, summer 2020

Quinn Dombrowski — Sat, 12 Sep 2020 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · September 13, 2020

It’s hard to believe that fall is already here. A couple weeks of virtual first grade have given me some time to start preparing for teaching my non-English DH course this fall, but as usual, a lot of it will be worked out in the moment, responding to the students’ own languages, projects, and needs. Before getting too far into the work of fall quarter, here’s the summer 2020 round-up.

Teaching

Over the summer, I held a workshop for CESTA’s summer interns about how to structure and organize data, and consulted with a number of summer projects on various code and data issues. I also had the chance to chat with a number of undergrads, recent grads, and people starting graduate programs in the humanities and library and information science about DH. Most of them had a background in some non-English language. It’s really beautiful to see the interest in DH from people who work in other languages — seeing DH methods make real inroads in non-English languages has been my dream for the last 15+ years, and now it’s happening. I have a great deal of hope for a future where people who want to use DH methods for non-English languages don’t have to justify that choice (beyond what anyone has to justify when doing DH), or feeling like they’re the only person doing that work in their language.

Stanford has extended its pilot of the Hypothesis/Canvas integration through the fall, so I did some outreach work to promote the integration to faculty in my division. I coached a few people through using Hypothesis without that integration last spring, but having it part of Canvas makes a huge difference. (I’m using it as a major part of my own course this coming fall, too, but I may not have bothered if it weren’t for that integration.) I’ve also worked on facilitating access to films and film clips that the library has purchased. More than once this summer, I’ve appreciated the split departmental/library nature of my position, and having a metaphorical seat at both tables.

Understandably, there’s a lot of interest in DH methods among later-stage grad students who are looking at the current (general lack of) academic job market with horror. My division chair, Cécile Alduy, has been taking steps to support professional development for graduate students with an eye towards a broad range of job outcomes, which I’ve personally found inspiring. I’m hoping to get into questions of what “DH” looks like in other, non-academic contexts as part of my non-English DH course in the fall.

Existing projects

Global Medieval Sourcebook

Over the summer, I’ve been working with Danny Smith to add some new texts to the Global Medieval Sourcebook. One of the interesting challenges of this work has involved RTL languages: the Versioning Machine software wasn’t built to handle those. Luckily, I have a generous and brilliant colleague in Simon Wiles at CIDR in the library, and he helped me sort out the CSS necessary for the RTL-languages to be right-justified, and the LTR-languages to be left-justified (for both prose and poetry, which use different encoding).

By the end of the year, we’re hoping to retire the current Drupal site for the Global Medieval Sourcebook and replace it with a static, Wax-based site.

Poetic Media Lab projects

This quarter, I’ve wrapped up my involvement with the Florentine Codex project, after using Transkribus to develop a model that could transcribe a large amount of the text. Compared to having project PI Obed Lira working with undergrads to transcribe the entire manuscript, Transkribus has provided a hugely impactful technical intervention.

I was happy to support Nelson Endebo's Life in Quarantine project officially launching over the summer, as well. This, along with another project focused on the impact of COVID-19 on international students, have benefited from consultation with Josh Schneier, the Library’s new University Archivist, along with Natalie Marine-Street, who works with the Stanford Oral History Program. For project that are trying to capture the present moment, having the input and the support of people with experience in these areas is a huge help.

Over the summer, I also explored the options for doing IIIF-compatible annotation without running an annotation server for Fyza Parviz’s project looking at Arabic astronomy manuscript texts.

Data-Sitters Club

It’s been a relatively quiet summer for the Data-Sitters in terms of publications (other than “The DSC and the Impossible TEI Quandaries”, our “book” on the Text Encoding Initiative with Elisa Beshero-Bondar), but I and others have been working on multiple new “books” that we should be able to publish throughout the fall, on topics including copyright, text comparison, machine learning models for text generation, stylometry, and others.

Lee Skallerup-Bessette and I got a proposal accepted to the “Flyover Comics Symposium” (about different French translations of the Baby-Sitters Club graphic novels), and this fall we’ll be giving talks about the Baby-Sitters Club at a DH symposium at the University of British Columbia, and at Northeastern University (where Ryan Cordell is teaching most of the things we’ve written so far as part of his Intro to DH course).

Projects on hold

There are many projects I wasn’t able to make progress on this summer, including data cleaning for Multilingual Harry Potter Fanfic, JSTOR for research, Ostrov: a Russian radical feminist zine, and Palladio bricks.

New projects

I’ve consulted with professors Marie Hubert and Sarah Prodan about their ideas for new DH projects. As with so much DH work, there’s a long road from gathering the necessary data in a workable format to taking the first step towards analysis.

Writing

As it happens, the summer wasn’t terrible for being able to write up some of the work I’ve done so far, in a format that other people can learn from. Along with a group of current and former high-performance computing (HPC) colleagues, I finished an article for “Debates in DH: Computational Humanities” about the intersection of HPC and DH.

In collaboration with three students from my winter course on project management and ethical collaboration, I wrote a chapter for a “Debates in DH: The Digital Futures of Graduate Study in the Humanities” and undertook peer review for other chapters in that volume.

I also wrote up a piece on minimal computing, for a special issue of DH Quarterly — mostly critiquing how usable “minimal computing” web development methods actually are, and proposing infrastructural interventions that the DH community could undertake to improve the situation.

The peer review process is wrapping up for the “Debates in DH 2021” piece that Patrick Burns and I co-authored about multilingual DH, and I’ll be happy to have it out in the world (relatively) soon. It also benefited from some feedback from colleagues in the library as part of the recently-restarted library reading group.

Meanwhile, the tutorial on preparing non-English texts for computational text analysis methods that I wrote last fall has been published, just in time for me to use it in my class this fall.

Talks and Events

Right after my spring write-up, I attended “Building Legal Literacies for Tex and Data Mining”, an NEH-funded workshop relevant to multiple projects that I support. During the course of the workshop, I had the opportunity to meet Matt Sag, a law professor at Loyola University School of Law and an expert on fair use. Since the institute, we've put together an upcoming Data-Sitters Club piece on copyright that should be published this fall. In addition, I’m hoping to put together a LibGuide on the library website about copyright and fair use.

Along with Kalika Bali (from Microsoft Research), I facilitated a weeklong panel as part of the “Disrupting Digital Monolingualism” through “Language Acts and Worldmaking” at University College London. We brought together a group of scholars and industry folks who work with multilingual NLP, and hope to produce a white paper summarizing their perspectives around opportunities and needs for multilingual NLP.

The international DH conference is my conference, and I was very sad (though sympathetic) that it didn’t happen this year. I didn’t have the time to organize something for most of the things I’d gotten accepted for the mostly-asynchronous manifestation of the conference. That said, I did manage to put together a simple website with opinion pieces about DH directories (in lieu of the “roundtable” panel accepted for the conference). I also live-tweeted the “Demystifying ADHO” roundtable, and presented at the tool criticism workshop sponsored by the Digital Literary Stylstics ADHO SIG.

But my favorite memory of DH 2020 is something that I didn’t submit as part of the usual process during fall 2019. Along with Artjoms Šela and Shawn Moore, I organized a series of lightning talks in the game “Animal Crossing: New Horizons” on the Friday of the DH conference. It felt amazing to be able to be somewhere “in person” (in some sense) with colleagues during the DH conference. And since there’s reason to expect the COVID-induced world of virtual everything will persist for some time, I’ve recently been talking with Liz Grumbach about imagining a DH reading group that meets via Animal Crossing and streams to Twitch.

Towards the end of the summer, I did a week of workshops on statistics, machine learning, deep learning, and NLP through the ICME summer workshop series on the fundamentals of data science. The workshops went better than I expected, and I learned a lot — without the domestic tension that would result from early/late days at work if I’d tried to attend them in their pre-COVID in-person form. I really hope this kind of online training sticks around after we can go back to campus.

I also took a couple weeks of “vacation”, but it mostly amounted to housework and left me eager to return to work.

Working Groups and Organizations

It feels so very ironic that DH-WoGeM (Women and Gender Minorities in DH) got approved as an ADHO (international DH umbrella organization) special interest group during the summer, but the amount of juggling I’ve needed to do around managing childcare has meant that I haven’t been able to follow up on it or have it formally announced. I look forward to having downtime at some point that isn’t interrupted by childcare closures due to smoke.

Meanwhile, while the Multilingual DH group SIG proposal hasn’t been accepted yet, I’ve had some wonderful conversations with Cecily Raynor at McGill University, the incoming head of ADHO’s Multilingual and Multi-cultural Committee, about what that committee might be able to do within ADHO to better support non-English DH work.

I started my term as co-VP of ACH, where I’ve been working on reimagining the mentoring committee and creating a series of working groups that people can use as a way to get involved with the organization.

Over the summer, the Masquaraders (the group of library sewists that Julie Sweetkind-Singer and I coordinated) finished up their task of sewing three masks for every library staff member. We’ll be depositing photos from the project, along with our instructions, in the Stanford Digital Repository for posterity, and Julie put together a lovely write-up on the Stanford Libraries blog.

Finally, the thing I’m proudest of having accomplished over the summer is administrative: I worked through the process of Stanford Libraries joining the READ Co-op that supports Transkribus and purchase a pack of 30,000 pages of transcription for when the per-page cost model starts. The process for joining, the rates, and the payment options (and turnaround time) aren’t nearly as well documented as the software, and figuring out issues of licensing review and financial transfers on our end was similarly challenging. But I’m excited to go into this fall knowing that Transkribus will be able to work its magic for scholars throughout the year.

Photo credit Houda Lamqa, from the ADHO ACNH lightning talks

DLCL ATS round-up, spring 2020

Quinn Dombrowski — Sun, 21 Jun 2020 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · June 22, 2020

In describing this quarter, it’s hard to avoid the cliches of our time, starting with “unprecedented”. Daycare and public schools in Berkeley shut down at the end of winter quarter, and daycare — for my two youngest children, 4 and just-turned-2 — didn’t reopen for 50 workdays. The 6-year-old has been upgraded to “junior coworker”, and all signs suggest that he’ll be home every day for at least the first half of next school year. Our current “new normal” has no shortage of challenges, but it’s been an interesting space for experimentation.

Teaching

I've signed up to teach my non-English DH course online this coming fall, and I’ve started thinking about how to rework it for that new medium. Because the course is now filling in for a medieval DH offering as well, I’m thinking the technical portions of the class will be something of a choose-your-own-adventure — any students working on medieval texts might be very interested in Transkribus for handwritten text recognition, but may be more limited in what they can do out-of-the-box with NLP (though I hope at least some of them can give CLTK a try.) Putting this course together will be one of the major things I’ll be working on this summer.

I held an info session for undergrads potentially interested in DH late in the quarter, and had a chance to talk to a rising junior who had initially considered majoring in comp sci before switching to comp lit. I’m hoping to hold more of these over the next year, and encourage interested undergrads to include a DH component as part of an honors theses.

As much as teaching support is not usually in scope for my position (and we’re fortunate to have really excellent staff at the Center for Teaching and Learning), unusual times meant stepping in to help with the emergency online shift for spring quarter. For a few weeks, I held office hours for anyone who wanted to talk about online teaching, and fielded inquiries ranging from how to demonstrate writing the Persian alphabet via Zoom, to options for students to record their attempts at chanting, to ways to adapt a 3-hour discussion seminar, to tools for discussion via text annotation. I came up with some instructions for how instructors could use Canvas pages + the Hypothesis browser plugin for text annotation, worked with librarians to find the necessary course readings in a digital form, and did a lot of OCR. This summer, the Canvas team is piloting the Hypothesis Canvas plugin, which streamlines the annotation process. If the pilot continues past the summer, I’ll definitely be using it in the fall.

Existing projects

Global Medieval Sourcebook

After scheduling, re-scheduling, and re-re-scheduling, we finally found a time that worked for the project team and all the library groups involved in the new version of this project. We put together a plan for how we can get all the texts and metadata published in the Stanford Digital Repository and make them publicly findable through MODS records for our text collections, all of which should be ready by January 2021.

We got an extension on our paper for the Germanic Studies journal Seminar, which we finally submitted last week. I’m happy with how it turned out, evolving into an honest reflection on what worked and what didn’t, rather than the laudatory project description so typical among these kinds of papers.

French Revolution Digital Archive

Further progress on the user-facing documentation for the new web interface of this project has been on hold.

Poetic Media Lab projects

The Poetic Media Lab has been very active over the spring. I’ve consulted on the new “Life in Quarantine: Witnessing Global Pandemic” project collecting stories from around the world, and discussed technical platform choices for another new project building on student writing. Earlier in the quarter, I ran some Zoom sessions where I shared my screen as I did some WordPress customization work on the Poetic Thinking sites, both to help debug a set of issues and talk through the thought process involved in doing this kind of work.

On the Florentine Codex project, I trained my first Transkribus model which was able to do downright magical things — even on low-res page images.

This initial model was trained on only 60-some pages, but it was enough for bootstrapping more pages. I used it to do a first pass on transcribing another 30 pages, which other team members corrected, and we trained a better model on about 90 pages. I let the model loose on the full 700 pages of volume 1 of the codex… only to discover that most of the pages were rotated sideways, rendering them untranscribable. I’m looking forward to trying again once everything has been rotated correctly!

One of the most useful things I was able to do this quarter was to sit in on a meeting with an external web development company as they discussed what they could offer for rebuilding the Lacuna text annotation platform. Meetings between academics and external developers can easily end with each group leaving with a very different understanding of what was discussed or agreed to. When I was at UC Berkeley, I often joined these meetings as an interpreter, clarifying for both groups what the other was trying to say. This time, I worked more in the background, interpreting what the developers were actually saying through a back-channel text thread, and encouraging follow-up questions. It was satisfying to be able to put my background in IT and web development to use in a way that could inform the early stages of a project (including whether or not to go forward with it), instead of being brought in later to clean up something that had gone sideways.

Other web-based projects

Without access to the recording studio, Entitled Opinions has been re-releasing earlier episodes. Getting their content accessioned to the Stanford Digital Repository has been on hold this quarter.

Multilingual Harry Potter Fanfic

Our data for this project needs more cleaning, and writing Python takes more attention and focus (and quiet) than I’ve managed to get this quarter. So it’s been on hold.

The Data-Sitters Club

This project continues to be one I fall back on for comfort and a bit of fun, during nights and weekends when I’m too tired or scattered to do much else. Early in the quarter, Lee Skallerup Bessette and I finished DSC Multilingual Mystery #3: Quinn and Lee Clean Up Ghost Cat Data-Hairballs, which covers web scraping and data cleaning with OpenRefine. Anouk Lang published DSC #4: AntConc Saves the Day, which I’ve already pointed students to as a resource for getting started with text analysis. For a while, I turned BSC book covers into COVID-19 themed memes, which caught the attention of Elizabeth Redden, a reporter for Inside Higher Ed and childhood Baby-Sitters Club fan with an amazing memory for the series. She ended up writing up the Data-Sitters Club for that venue, which had the dubious honor of being the only non-depressing thing on the front page of IHE for a day or two.

A Czur book scanner, courtesy of the DLCL, has meant that the French part of this project can carry on. My pile of books to scan and OCR has grown this quarter, too; as a sort of birthday present, Lee and I bought a bunch of Quebec translations, and I picked up a few more Belgian translations as well. We’ve also started to compare the older translations from France with the newly-re-released versions, with some interesting preliminary results — more on that in a future DSC Multilingual Mystery.

JSTOR Data for Research

Analyzing the data that Masha Gorshkova and I got from JSTOR has been on hold.

Ostrov: Russian radical feminist zine

Most weeks, I’ve been meeting with Margarita Nafpaktitis and Christine Jacobson (from Harvard) for an attempt at having a reliable time to sit down and work on our data cleaning for our respective projects, including Ostrov. Progress has been hit-or-miss (sometimes these calls devolve into collaborative online fabric shopping), but if nothing else, it’s been a reliable point of social connection with coworkers during the week, which has been valuable in its own right.

Palladio Bricks

My CIDR developer colleague Simon Wiles has had some wonderful ideas for reimagining Palladio Bricks, and has made progress on a prototype. Meanwhile, I’ve been mulling over what it might look like integrated with Wax for static exhibits. That’s about as far as this quarter has let us get.

New projects

Other than the new Poetic Media Lab projects, I haven’t had the time for all my existing projects, let alone anything new. Further Russian NLP group developments are on hold. Around DH 2020 is on hold indefinitely.

Writing

This quarter, I was involved in the peer review process for the Debates in DH 2021 collection, and peer reviewed two articles for Digital Studies/Le champ numérique.

I didn’t manage to write a paper for the DHSI project management workshop, but I’m really happy with the video I put together for the workshop, “Rolling the Dice on Project Management”, talking about the course I taught in the winter.

Along with Agnieszka Backman, Sabrina Grimberg, and Melissa Hosek (who all took the project management course), I got an abstract accepted to a future Debates in DH volume on the future of graduate education, as a short 2,000 word piece. The piece will be on how the course, and the associated RPG, provided a space for the students to directly confront and discuss how universities actually work, and their place within those systems and structures.

Yulia Ilchuk, J.D. Porter, and I made some progress on an article write-up of our translation project, following our LitLab presentation in the winter, but there’s still some work to be done on it.

A few colleagues in the library started a zine, OK Zoomer, that I’ve enjoyed contributing to. So far we have two issues; for our most recent issue on “home economics” I wrote a review of a wacky 80’s sweatshirt pattern.

My former DH HPC colleagues and I are wrapping up our chapter for Debates in DH: Computational Humanities, which is due at the end of the month.

There are a handful of other things I’d committed in the before-times to writing this summer, but mercifully, almost all of them have had their deadlines extended. Academic writing has been the second-hardest thing to get done with kids at home, after writing Python.

Talks and Events

Last summer, I’d committed to giving a talk for CMEMS in April, and I ended up being the first in their series of virtual talks. While notionally being about the Old Novgorod birchbark letters, it took a bigger-picture approach, reflecting on the possibilities for expanding the community of participants in events like CMEMS’s lunch talks to welcome, for instance, medievalists who’d left the academy after getting an advanced degree, but who continue to be interested in these topics.

I worked with CESTA and DH organizations up and down the West Coast to organize a CESTA lightning talk event and a West Coast DH meet-up as part of the global Day of DH 2020 event hosted by centerNet. As a special add-on for parents with kids at home, under the auspices of Stanford’s Textile Makerspace, I ran a coloring contest for Day of DH.

Through a last-minute invite, I ended up giving a 3-minute talk on failure at DARIAH VX in the early hours of the morning.

UC Berkeley’s DH working group invited me to give a talk, and I adapted the talk I gave at the University of Virginia about the Multilingual Harry Potter fanfic work; sadly, the timing didn’t work out for the rest of the project team to join me, but I’m holding out the hope that the day will come when we can all present together.

Over a weekend (which brought no shortage of challenges related to multitasking while child-wrangling), I attended and presented at the DHSI workshop on project management, and attended the DHSI RTL workshop, primarily via pre-recorded videos with discussion on Twitter.

The Canadian DH organization, CSDH-SCHN, held their conference online the same week as DH Benelux. It made for a fascinating, if exhausting, experience watching how two different organizations handled the shift online. I organized an afternoon discussion about Multilingual DH, participated in a discussion around Feminist/Queer/Trans DH, and sat in on some early planning around graduate student mentorship for CSDH-SCHN. And as often happens, the talks about current work underway in Europe (especially around non-English NLP, text analysis, and machine learning) tends to speak more directly to the kinds of work I’ve been supporting and collabrating on.

Working Groups and Organizations

By and large, it hasn’t been feasible for me to continue running most of the working groups and organizations that I’d been involved with in the before-times. We managed one round of CESTA lightning talks for our local DH community at Stanford as part of the Day of DH event. DH-WoGeM has been on hold, along with Danger Noodle Club (the Python co-learning group), the Russian NLP group, the DH reading group for grad students, and Six Septembers: Mathematics for the Humanist reading group. (The one time we tried having a Six Septembers reading group, no one had finished the readings. A pandemic is awful for the focus necessary to understand the math behind machine learning.)

The Textile Makerspace, finally hitting its stride in the winter, is not likely to return anytime soon. Even if everyone were on campus regularly (which shouldn’t, and won’t, be happening), social distancing would be hard in the small, no-ventilation room we use. But there are some new creative opportunities in the works, including the possibility of “carts” of sewing supplies that students could check out from the library. I’ve also been co-leading a project organized through the library to provide 2-3 washable cloth face coverings to every library staff member. The group, named “The Masquaraders” (the QUAR is for quarantine), has been using the #TextileMakerspace Slack channel to trade tips and questions, and we’ve even had some Zoom-based sewing time together (on mute, so the clacking of the sewing machines doesn’t drive everyone crazy). Over 50 people signed up to participate as sewists, and working with The Masquaraders has been one of the most satisfying — and fun — things I’ve done this quarter.

Along with recent history graduate Rachel Midura, I started up a working group for people who use Transkribus for handwritten text recognition. It’s been great to have a place to share the things I’m figuring out about Transkribus, and help folks in the departments and library at Stanford use this amazing tool. I expect it’ll play an important role in growing the Transkribus user community on campus, particularly as we move ahead with joining the READ Co-op that maintains Transkribus.

When I wrote my winter quarter round-up, the ACH election was ongoing, and I was running for VP/president-elect against fellow Data-Sitter Roopika Risam. Before the election closed, we went to ACH with a radical proposal: becoming co-VPs. They accepted our offer, and we wrote a blog post about it. While we’re not “official” until the ACH exec meeting in July, we were invited to participate in the group's ongoing work, such as crafting and following up on the statement on Black Lives Matter, structural racism, and the organization.

The Summer Ahead

It’s still hard to know how the summer will go, though I’m trying to make plans as far as it makes sense to. I’ve been encouraging everyone I work with to “attend” DH 2020, since it’s now online and free. I’ll be preparing materials for my fall course, and supporting my division around digital pedagogy as needed. Faculty and grad student research projects have been starting to pick up again, and I’ll be helping to support CESTA’s undergraduate summer intern program. And The Masquaraders will keep sewing until all the library staff have face coverings. The feasibility of any of this is going to depend on the younger kids’ daycare remaining open — not to be taken for granted as COVID-19 case counts in California continue to rise. We’ll see how it all plays out.

Day of DH 2020 at Stanford

Quinn Dombrowski — Thu, 23 Apr 2020 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · April 24, 2020

CESTA and CIDR are participating in Day of DH, an international celebration of the work that digital humanists do, sponsored by centerNet.

On Tuesday, April 28th at 4 PM Pacific, we'll have the virtual version of our monthly DH lighting talks and meetup. Please register for the Zoom call for the DH lighting talks and meetup here.

On Wednesday, April 29th at 3 PM Pacific, we'll be co-hosting with UC Berkeley, SJSU, and UCLA the West Coast DH hangout for Day of DH. Please register for the Zoom call for the West Coast DH hangout here.

Hope to see you (and any pets, kids, etc. who'd also like to join) there!

Day of DH coloring/art contest

Stanford's Textile Makerspace is proud to host a coloring and art contest for Day of DH 2020! Download one of the coloring sheets below and draw/color on it (digitally or physically), and post it with the #dayofdh2020 and #dayofdh2020art hashtags by April 30th! Contest judges are Quinn Dombrwski and Nichole Nomura from the Textile Makerspace, and Elli Mylonas from centerNet. Depending on the number of entries, we may have an adult & a child winner. Winners will get their image (or another design of their choosing) printed on fabric, sewn into something (cloth masks? something more fun? your choice!), and mailed to them anywhere in the world!

DLCL ATS round-up, winter 2020

Quinn Dombrowski — Sun, 22 Mar 2020 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · March 23, 2020

It is a strange time to be writing my quarter-in-review blog post. The quarter is over (according to the calendar we started the year with, it’s spring break right now) but I feel like a normal sense of time is one of the things that’s already started to dissolve, and the shelter-in-place order in the Bay Area has only been in place a week.

February’s monthly blog post was supposed to be a reflection on the Russian NLP hackathon that we held on Valentine’s Day at CESTA. I’d still like to write that reflection, but I need to think it through some more; the conclusions I’d reached assume a level of freedom of time and travel that we might not have back anytime soon.

In the current working conditions (and I’ve written about my own, here) there’s a balance to be struck between maintaining standing meetings, monthly blog post schedules, and other structures that arose under very different circumstances, and rethinking everything from the ground up, at a point where decision fatigue (and straight-up fatigue) are major factors. Tentatively, I’m inclined to try to keep up my monthly blogging. If nothing else, I’ve always seen these quarterly round-ups as an important form of accountability to myself, my bosses, and my communities, given the very unstructured nature of my job.

Teaching

While I’m anticipating that my teaching quarter will shift to autumn starting next academic year, I taught a new course this winter: “Project Management and Ethical Collaboration for Humanists”. I expect to teach it in alternating years with my other course, “Digital Humanities Across Boundaries”, AKA Non-English DH. This new course covered a lot of ground, including the labor conditions of digitization, what goes into getting tenure and alternative structures of promotion, Gantt charts and how to use them, and what alt-ac careers look like in practice. We spent half of our classroom time discussing readings, and the other half playing a simulation of a year in the life of a DH project — as a Dungeons and Dragons-style tabletop role-playing game, complete with character sheets and dice. I’d hoped that we’d be able to play through the game twice, learning from mistakes made in the first round. Instead, having 8 regular attendees, each with their own character, meant that we weren’t able to get through more than one month of game time per class — sometimes less. Even so, it was an experience that will stay with me for a long time, and from the feedback I’ve received from some of the students, it may have accomplished more than I even imagined.

The syllabus and other class materials are available on GitHub, and one of my small goals over the next few weeks is to update the RPG guidebook to reflect some of things I discovered that I hadn’t initially thought about when designing the game (e.g. the original version of the handbook didn’t have a character skill for teaching).

While the weekly prep for this course was trivial in comparison to last year’s course (where I was writing technical tutorials for multiple languages for much of the quarter), I was still surprised at how much time teaching and teaching-related activities took up. My goal of continuing to make progress on all the DLCL collaborative research projects while also teaching was completely unrealistic. The quarter was largely a scramble from one deadline to another, with every expectation of catching up on everything else as soon as the quarter ended. Suffice it to say, I’m now re-evaluating those expectations as well. Here’s where things currently stand, as of the end of the quarter.

Existing Projects

Global Medieval Sourcebook

The big meeting we had planned with the Stanford Digital Repository folks about the new shape of this project (i.e. accessioning texts into the repository, and adding metadata to make them findable within our own library catalog and WorldCat) had to be postponed. It’s now scheduled for April 20th. Dates more than a month out have always had a sort of imaginary quality to them, but now more than ever it’s hard to fathom what things will look like by then. Circumstances may well push it back further. But in the meantime, I managed to work through all of the tags used by the current Global Medieval Sourcebook, aligning them to Library of Congress Subject Headings. This was an adventure, leading to discoveries such as the fact that there’s no subject heading for “evil”: your only choice is “good and evil”. More immediately, we’re trying to write a paper on the project for the Germanic Studies journal Seminar. The writing was derailed by more immediate deadlines during the quarter, and then all the chaos at the end of the quarter, but I’m hoping to be able to spend some time fishing up my piece in the next few weeks.

French Revolution Digital Archive

The relaunch of FRDA using a combination of a Spotlight exhibit for images, a Philologic searchable-text instance, and a lightweight landing page connecting all the pieces, surfaced large user communities that had been using FRDA in a very different way than the faculty members behind the project, whose needs drove the reformulation of the site. While sophisticated search queries are now better supported on the new site, the interface is more awkward for users who just want to flip through and read the text. French and Italian librarian Sarah Sussman has been fielding queries from these users, and we’ve worked together on trying to develop documentation to help bridge the gap between those kinds of use cases and what the new site can offer.

Poetic Media Lab projects

This quarter, I worked with some of the Poetic Media Lab student (and recent-graduate) collaborators on applying for postdocs, and was delighted to learn that one of them received a prestigious four-year fellowship that will enable her to continue working on her project and develop parts of it into a book. I’d hoped we could meet in person at this year’s convocation, but it’ll have to wait for another time. Still, I’m grateful to have had a chance to meet another long-distance Poetic Media Lab collaborator in person while she was in town, and show her around the Textile Makerspace.

My work on the Poetic Media Lab projects has largely been on hold this quarter, other than corresponding with partners at Bucknell about putting together training data to attempt to train a Transkribus model for the Spanish and Nahuatl hands of the Florentine Codex. Thanks to Diane Jakacki’s brilliance with XSLT, I have the data I need — now to just sort through renaming all the files properly, and actually try to train a model.

Other web-based projects

Apparently Web Services was still on track with their timeline for finding a vendor for supporting WordPress sites as of earlier this quarter, but we’ll see how the COVID-19 situation impacts things. Such a service would be the ideal long-term infrastructure for The Book Haven and Entitled Opinions. This quarter I also met with the Entitled Opinions team about getting all of their content accessioned into the Stanford Digital Repository, which is on my to-do list now that the quarter is over.

Multilingual Harry Potter fanfic

This quarter brought two more opportunities to present on this project: once at CESTA (with Steele Douris and Masha Gorshkova) for the broader Stanford DH community, and one at the University of Virginia, for the Slavic department. While I haven’t been able to make more progress on the data cleaning (again, due to teaching), the UVA talk gave me an excuse to start looking into Archive of Our Own (AO3) as another point of comparison. AO3 is a more recent fanfic archive, and much better supported in terms of existing web-scraping scripts. While I only had a day or so to work with it before the talk, I found a few interesting things in comparing it to fanfiction.net — notably, that AO3 is more Anglophone in its Harry Potter fanfic, but with a very different distribution of non-English languages. Spanish, French, Portuguese, and German appear much less frequently, and Russian, Chinese, and (to a lesser extent) Italian appear more frequently.

The Data-Sitters Club

This autumnal-vacation Anglophone project has taken a turn towards the multilingual with the acquisition of French translations of “The Baby-Sitters Club” books, from Quebec, Belgium, and France. Together, Lee Skallerup Bessette and I wrote two “multilingual mysteries” this quarter: one on metadata, and one on French named-entity recognition. I’ve been scanning and OCRing the French translations we’ve purchased, but wasn’t even halfway through them when I left campus for the last time for … a still-indefinite span of time. They’ll be waiting in my office, whenever I get back.

To my surprise, the Data-Sitters Club was nominated for two DH Awards this year: Best Series of Blog Posts and Best Use of DH for Fun. Figuring we’d have better odds with fun than blog posts, I started posting ads for the project on Twitter, using remixed old book covers, ads, and other retro BSC content. And it seems to have worked! We won Best Use of DH for Fun (in a tie), and got third place (also in a multi-way tie) for Best Series of Blog Posts. You can check out all the ads here.

Perhaps more satisfying, even, than winning the DH Awards was when Dan Sinykin taught the Data-Sitters club as part of his Intro to Digital Humanities course at Emory, and we heard from them on Twitter. Much like with the DH RPG, it’s an incredible feeling to discover that one of your wild, random projects has worked, beyond even what you imagined possible.

JSTOR Data for Research

Shortly after the quarter started, Slavic grad student Masha Gorshkova and I both signed a contract with JSTOR’s Data for Research to obtain a bulk download of OCR’d texts potentially relevant to her research. I was surprised at how easy and straightforward the process was. Less straightforward is the question of what do we do next, now that we have the texts. Fellow Data-Sitter Anouk Lang was wonderful about answering questions and offering suggestions, and I suspect her next Data-Sitters Club book on AntConc, coming out soon, will be a helpful resource as we try to sort things out.

Ostrov: Russian radical feminist zine

I spent a lot of imaginary-world time on this project, since it was the project we “did” in the DH RPG. It was wonderful to have an imaginary project based on real materials that the students could look at, and even have a chance to try to scan one volume on a real flatbed scanner. All the imaginary-world time spent creating metadata, building some sort of web interface, and doing text analysis sadly did not translate into the real world, and between one thing and another we got nothing done on the real-world version this quarter. But as a silver lining, it gives us a great virtual co-working project to chip away at together, and we’ve set up a time every week going forward to work on it over Zoom.

Palladio Bricks

I set myself the goal of trying to have some preliminary documentation for Palladio Bricks ready by the end of the quarter, but got tripped up over the fact that the main Palladio app has been updated to address some deprecated dependencies (thanks to my CIDR developer colleague Simon Wiles), but the individual brick components have not yet. I’m reluctant to write documentation for things that I know will change soon. While I was visiting the Scholar’s Lab at the University of Virginia, we came up with the idea of a DH developer “code-op” (like a co-op) where each DH development group could host a one-day hackathon for all participants, and everyone would pitch in on a particular project. Palladio seems like a great candidate for piloting that idea in the near future.

Other projects

No new developments of note this quarter on Prof. Yulia Ilchuk’s networked novel project, but the Russian NLP hackathon (more on that below) provided an opportunity to brainstorm some ideas for tools we could develop that might shed new light on this work. Also, nothing of note around tools for Japanese text analysis, though I got to put my childhood katakana skills to the test in locating the “download” button in a Japanese corpus interface as part of a web scraping consult. I also haven’t had any time at all to think about what I’ll present at CMEMS in the spring — if there is CMEMS in the spring given everyone’s remote working conditions? Perhaps my contribution may end up being simply supporting the group meeting online nexts quarter.

New projects

I was too busy teaching this quarter to accrue many new projects. I offered to experiment with some computational approaches to analyzing translations, for a project Héctor Hoyos is working on aboutMichael Kohlhaasby Heinrich von Kleist. Due to various data-acquisition delays, and then the world unraveling at the end of the quarter, it’s taking longer than I anticipated, and the graduate student who’s done the comparative work manually has finished her analysis before I’ve even succeeded in aligning my texts. (Ah, digital humanities!) But I’m really curious about what I might be able to find, and even if it takes too long to be useful for this project, I’d like to have a good example of how DH can be useful to translation studies, and ideally, a Jupyter notebook to go with it.

This quarter — albeit with some delay — I launched Around DH 2020 through Global Outlook::DH, which highlights one non-English DH project somewhere in the world every week, through an interview with a person affiliated with the project. The goal of this effort is to raise the visibility of DH work in languages other than English, and I’m hoping that it also opens up opportunities for collaboration.

I had the chance to meet with Alexander Key about the possibility of making DH options more visible and accessible to students pursuing the honors program in the DLCL, especially Comp Lit. It’s hard to know how feasible that would be to roll out this coming fall, given the uncertainty around everything undergrad-related at the moment, but I look forward to future discussions and planning in the coming months.

Workshops

I was scheduled to co-teach an OpenRefine CIDR workshop with Simon Wiles, but I was out sick for a week at the end of January with something flu-like, and couldn’t make it (or do much besides sleep, sweat, and shiver). It’ll be nice to get back to teaching workshops, though I’m not sure yet when that will be, or what it’ll look like. Navigating which services we can offer virtually, and how, is high on the list of CIDR priorities right now.

While it wasn’t exactly a workshop, this was my first year experiencing the prospective student campus visit in DLCL, which took place the week before everything began to shut down and go online. I held office hours for DH-interested students, along with a Textile Makerspace session one afternoon in case any of our guests wanted a creative break from all the interviewing. In what has been one of the most fun assignments I’ve gotten from my department, I made runners for all the tables at the interdisciplinary dinner, each connected to that table’s “theme” (e.g. medieval, digital humanities, poetry, pedagogy, etc.)

Writing

This quarter, Patrick Burns and I wrote our short chapter on multilingual DH for the Debates in DH 2020 collection, and I did some extensive revisions of my chapter on the non-English DH class for Debates in DH: Pedagogy. The original coda, as expected, did not make it through peer review, so I published an expanded version of it on my own blog, entitled “The Stakes of Multilingual DH in the United States”, which incorporates some additional material from a talk I gave at the Scholar’s Lab’s Feminist DH symposium in February.

My tutorial from last summer’s Language Acts and Worldmaking tutorial write-a-thon hosted by Kings College London is in final revisions, and should be published soon.

Along with colleagues from a High-Performance/Research Computing for DH group I used to run, I put in an abstract over the holidays for the Computational Humanities volume of Debates in DH, but haven’t heard anything yet. I’ve had a few more abstracts accepted recently: one about collaboration and failure for Heather Froehlich and Kim Martin’s "Revealing Meaning: Feminist Methods in Digital Scholarship” edited volume, and another for Alex Gil and Roopika Risam’s DH Quarterly special issue on minimal computing, which will raise questions about how widely adoptable minimal computing technologies can be without better tooling or at least much more detailed documentation.

We extended the deadline for “love letters” from women and gender minorities in DH, to pieces of DH scholarship, for the edited volume coming out of last year’s “Women and Gender Minorities in DH” event. Realistically, we’ll probably extend it again — I suspect March is a lost cause for everyone. And I still need to write up my talk from the event as well.

I finished and submitted the “Multilingual DH” ADHO special interest group proposal this quarter, which garnered 39 signatures from scholars around the world by the time it was submitted. It’s the second SIG proposal I’ve sent in this year (after DH-WoGeM), and it seems unlikely that any decision will be made before the DH 2020 conference in July — if the conference ends up happening, and there’s a quorum of CO representatives attending. Meanwhile, we’re also in the process of developing a DARIAH working group proposal for Multilingual DH, as a kind of follow-up to the “DARIAH Beyond Europe” event held at Stanford in 2018, and as a way to draw on the strengths, connections, and resources of two different kinds of organizational infrastructure.

I submitted a proposal for a short paper / presentation at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) weekend workshop on project management, talking about the course I taught this quarter. Even though DHSI has been canceled for this year, the workshops are still going to be held virtually, and it’ll be great to have a chance to share some reflections on this year’s course.

Finally, I’m happy to say that DH 2020 didn’t break my (freakish?) acceptance streak at the DH conference. All five of the abstracts I wrote/ghostwrote were accepted. We’ll see if any of them happen.

Talks and Events

In addition to the CESTA and UVA presentations on Harry Potter fanfic this quarter, I had my first experience with a Twitter conference, presenting on Multilingual DH at the DHARTI (Indian DH organization) Twitter conference on Innovating for DH in India. It’s a conference modality I’ll be trying again in the near future; I was invited to present at “DH in the Time of Virus”, organized by APOLLONIS (the Greek Infrastructure for Digital Arts, Humanities and Language Research and Innovation) and co-ordinated by the Athena Research and Innovation Center, on April 2nd. (I’m very much looking forward to the talk, tentatively entitled “Getting Serious About Fun”, even though I’ll be tweeting at 4 or 5 AM.)

I co-presented with Yulia Ilchuk and J.D. Porter at the Literary Lab this quarter, about our “Translation” project (looking at distinctive features of short stories translated into English from other languages); we’re hoping to make some progress on putting together a paper based on the project’s current state.

All the Academic Technology Specialists in CIDR gave the first all-virtual presentation of the “Concierge” library series, where people from less-well-understood groups in the library talk about their work and how it can connect with the rest of the library.

I virtually attended and live-tweeted a wonderful Berkeley Center for New Media event on Feminist Open Access and Internet Publishing on March 12th. I’d been planning on arranging for transportation to get Stanford colleagues to Berkeley and back when the event was supposed to be held in person, but I was happy that everyone who was available could just call in.

I put in a proposal for giving a talk at Stanford WebCamp, reflecting on the work I’ve been doing to think through sustainable infrastructure for DLCL’s web-based DH projects, and the way that is — and isn’t — compatible with a minimal computing toolset. The proposal was accepted, but my talk is scheduled for this Friday during hours that I can’t work on account of running a kindergarten/preschool at home, and my work hours that day are already filled with online course support, so I’ve had to withdraw.

I was delighted to be accepted to the “Building Legal Literacies for Text and Data Mining” NEH-funded institute hosted by UC Berkeley this June. Thorny, multi-national legal questions are a mainstay of the work I’ve been doing, and I’m still very excited to do it, even though it was just announced this morning that it’s going to be held entirely online.

The Feminist DH symposium at the Scholar’s Lab at the University of Virginia was one of the highlights of the quarter for me: a chance to catch up with old friends and finally, for the first time, see the world-famous Scholar’s Lab right before its renovation. The other speakers, Gabriela Baeza Ventura and Carolina A. Villarroel, are doing amazing work on recovering Spanish-language literature, newspapers, manifestos, and other compelling documents published in the United States, and I wonder what opportunities there might be for students in the DLCL to collaborate with them on a “Spanish NLP” effort modeled after what we’ve done with the Russian NLP research unit this year.

My talk at the symposium, “The 2040 Plan”, was partly an abbreviated version of these write-ups (looking at some of the things I’ve done recently, and whether they worked or not), and partly a reflection on the challenges we’ll see more of between now and 2040 — and what kind of projects and collaborations can help us make it through. Already, it’s a talk that feels prescient, even though at the time — less than a month ago — there was still a solid mental wall between me and how things might change in my own day-to-day life as fall-out from the accelerating number of COVID-19 cases in the Bay Area. It meant a lot to be invited to the symposium, and to be able to make the trip and meet in person with colleagues I usually only see online. It means even more now, knowing that it may have been my only trip outside the Bay Area this year.

Working Groups and Organizations

Stanford DH Community

My fellow DH colleagues in CIDR and I started running a monthly series of consulting hours, lightning talks, and social hour at CESTA for the broader DH community. We managed to hold two of our three planned events this quarter, before things started going virtual. It seemed got a fair amount of initial traction; now we'll have to face the challenge of how to reconceptualize it in an online environment.

DH-WoGeM

I tried to hold the quarterly "Parenting and DH" DH-WoGeM call in January, but only one person came. Since then, I haven’t had much time to organize anything, but with April approaching, I may try another "Parenting and DH (and COVID-19)” call, where everyone is welcome with however many kids they have at home.

Danger Noodle Club

My Python co-learning meet-up group, Danger Noodle Club, was one thing too many to try to schedule this quarter. Things kept coming up, and we eventually agreed to just re-convene in spring. Now it may play a bigger role than I imagined in trying to maintain — however tenuously — at least one corner of the campus DH community while everyone is remote.

Textile Makerspace

The inclusion of the Textile Makerspace in a Stanford News article on campus makerspaces late last quarter continued to pay off, and I feel like this was the quarter where the Textile Makerspace really solidified as a space and organization. Having regular weekly hours (Tuesday, Wednesdays, and Thursdays at lunch time), rather than a set of specifically-scheduled dates, definitely helped, as did having more people around to cover shifts. (We had two undergrads offer to open it for more, non-lunch, hours, and enthusiastically accepted their offer.) German Librarian Kathleen Smith brought in a loom towards the end of the quarter for us to try out weaving, and the quarter’s creations included a giant Pusheen pillow, multiple shoulder bags, the beginnings of an art quilt, numerous stickers, and a few pairs of toddler pants. Of all my on-campus work, I’m saddest about the necessary shutdown of the Textile Makerspace (which doesn’t translate well into virtual alternatives) just as things were starting to really flourish. The departure of almost all the undergrads from campus means it’ll be fall, at the earliest, before we have a chance of getting back to where we were.

Russian NLP

This quarter, we had the culminating event for the Russian NLP Research Unit in the DLCL: a hackathon that brought three participants in the virtual working group to campus, along with Prof. David Bamman from UC Berkeley. I put together a write-up of the event on the DLCL website. I’d meant to follow up on the ideas and work at the hackathon after returning from the Scholar’s Lab trip, but then the world started falling apart. I hope to have a chance to regroup and think through next steps soon.

Six Septembers: Mathematics for the Humanist

It took until early March, but we finally kicked off the second round of the “Six Septembers” reading group, which is scheduled to run through the end of 2020. This time, we’re working through understanding neural networks — both mathematically and practically. There’s a schedule on the webpage, if you find yourself with time on your hands now and would like to catch up and join us in April.

DH Reading Group

The DH reading group for grad students was on hiatus during winter quarter, and it seems unlikely that it will resume this academic year under the current circumstances.

ACH

As mentioned in last quarter’s round-up, I agreed to run for VP/President-elect of the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH), the US-based DH organization. To my surprise, I discovered I was running against my fellow Data-Sitters Club member Roopika Risam. The election window was supposed to wrap up yesterday, but has now been extended until March 30th — and along with it, my series of Baby-Sitters Club book cover remixes that support voting for either of us.

Moving forward from here

For the next two weeks, at least half my working time will be going towards supporting faculty and lecturers in my department as they figure out what they’re going to do for their spring courses. It’s something I’ve done before; I worked in “Academic Technology” (which included instructional support) for six years at the University of Chicago, ultimately leading the IT / instructional design part of the team that developed some of the university’s first MOOCs, back when that was a huge thing. I’m very happy that my job, under normal circumstances, is focused specifically on research support, but in a crisis there’s no question about helping out. Hats off to everyone in the Center for Teaching and Learning who’s been working non-stop for weeks (including answering some questions from me when I’ve gotten stuck when trying to support faculty in my department). What’s left of the time I have will go towards catching up on projects that have been on hold during winter quarter while I was teaching.

After that, we’ll see where people are at, who needs support, what that might look like, and how many kids are still attending my home-preschool. But as we talked about in our “Concierge” presentation in the library, there’s never been a way to describe a typical day in the life of an ATS: every day is something different. So as spring quarter comes, I’ll be sorting through challenges they arise, same as always, even as the number of uncertainties skyrockets.

Palladio

Quinn Dombrowski — Wed, 18 Mar 2020 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · March 19, 2020

Developed at CESTA's Humanities + Design Lab, Palladio is a widely-used web-based tool for visualizing data using networks and maps. You can save your work by downloading a file that you can upload to the Palladio interface when you return to it. While there is currently no easy way to embed Palladio visualizations in websites, CIDR staff are working on the documentation for how to use Palladio's visualizations in a stand-alone way. If you have time to help, please email Quinn at qad@stanford.edu!

Palladio tutorials

We're collecting tutorials, guides, and examples for how to use Palladio -- particularly in the classroom -- to help people who are reconfiguring their courses to be online. If you have examples or write-ups that you're willing to share, please email Quinn at qad@stanford.edu!

Getting Started with Palladio by Miriam Posner. Often cited by other tutorials, this is a wonderful first introduction that first explains what Palladio is useful for (and where it's not as useful -- though a few things have changed since this was written in 2015), then walks through the process step-by-step with lots of screenshots.
Using Palladio and Gephi as Data Visualization Tools by Allan Cho. Blog post considering the pros and cons of different tools, with a series of detailed video tutorials for how to use Palladio.
Using Palladio to Analyze Historical Migration Patterns by Sarah Zheng. Describes a specific research use case, and digs into the question of how Palladio generates node size, with implications for how to understand Palladio graphs.
Using Palladio to Visualize Ads by Clare Jensen, Kaitlyn Sisk, and Aaron Braunstein. An example and tutorial for how to use Palladio to visualize the paths of enslaved people who had run away, based on ads taken out in newspapers.
Text & Data Analysis Part 2: Palladio Tutorial by Taylor Elyse Mills. Blog post has a link to a PDF, step-by-step tutorial for Palladio.
Analyze and Visualize Your Humanities Data with Palladio by Kayla Abner. An overview of the major features of Palladio with examples of how you might use them.

DH lightning talks w/ Russian NLP group + happy hour

Quinn Dombrowski — Wed, 05 Feb 2020 16:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · February 6, 2020

Date/Time: Thursday, 13 February 2020 - 3:00pm to 5:00pmLocation: CESTA (4th floor Wallenberg hall)

Join members of the Stanford DH community, as well as guests visiting for the DLCL's Russian NLP research unit hackathon, for lightning talks followed by DH Happy Hour!

Rebecca Wall on "Slave Liberations in French West Africa, 1850–1905: A (Very) Preliminary Digital Model"

Quinn Dombrowski — Wed, 05 Feb 2020 16:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · February 6, 2020

Date/Time: Tuesday, 11 February 2020 - 12:00pm to 1:30pmLocation: CESTA (4th floor Wallenberg hall)

The end of slavery in French West Africa was a multi-decade process in which enslaved people played an active role in their own liberation. Between roughly 1850 and 1905, thousands of men, women, and children obtained freedom. Many approached French colonial officials to codify their legal status, adding their name, age, gender, time and place of birth, and date and location of liberation to governmental records. This paper discusses an ongoing project that takes a digital approach to working with these sources, now part of the collection of the Archives Nationales du Sénégal. We take demographic data from these liberation records, and ultimately, we plan to construct a visualization of slave liberations, as well as build a database over nearly 30,000 entries. In so doing, we propose a methodology that foregrounds the experiences of enslaved individuals and demonstrates how colonial archival sources can offer keen insights into their experiences and actions.

Rebecca Wall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Stanford University and a 2019-2020 Geballe Dissertation Prize Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. She was a 2018-2019 Digital Humanities Graduate Research Fellow at CESTA. Rebecca studies how West African nations grapple with the fact that key environmental resources, like water, often traverse political frontiers, focusing on the case of the Senegal River basin. She is also interested in interdisciplinary research and has worked with colleagues in public health, engineering, hydrology, environmental planning, and economics.

Generous Thinking January

Quinn Dombrowski — Tue, 04 Feb 2020 16:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · February 5, 2020

January was a rough month, between the last gasps of a too-long family trip over the holidays, getting ready for teaching a new course on Project Management and Ethical Collaboration for Humanists, and then being out sick for a whole week. Amidst this new year chaos came a DH Twitter project that shone a thoughtful light on some of the daily decisions that go into the beginning of the quarter.

Hannah Alpert-Abrams, Mimi Winick, and Amanda Henrichs set out the prompt of a month of “Generous Thinking”, in the spirit of Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s book of the same name. What are concrete steps that we can take — especially those of us in various alt-ac and other staff positions — to make the university a more humane place, and meaningfully engage with broader world?

The timing couldn’t be better for this kind of thought experiment, especially here at Stanford. The new chair of my disciplinary department (the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, DLCL), Cécile Alduy, has named care and generous thinking among the values she wants to cultivate for the division. On the other side of my split position, I find myself in the strange position of being the longest-standing DH person in the Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research (CIDR) in the library, after being at Stanford for only 15 months, following the departure of Glen Worthey (for the HathiTrust Research Center) and Scott Bailey (for the NC State University Libraries). Meanwhile, CESTA is under new leadership as well, with Giovanna Ceserani recently appointed director. This confluence of changes has left us all reimagining what DH will look like at Stanford, how we’ll work together, and how we’ll adapt to bigger changes taking place at the institutional level, including around funding for grad students, and the undergraduate curriculum.

I didn’t manage to share something in the spirit of generous thinking every day in January, but it was often on my mind. Among the things that occurred to me:

We need more experiments — and relatedly, more room for failure — in making the university more humane. This month, my CIDR colleagues and I tried DH lightning talks and discussion as an alternative form of “consulting” at CESTA, followed by a happy hour. I’m grateful that people came, and were willing to experiment with us.
I also continue to be grateful to my students in the Project Management and Ethical Collaboration for Humanists class, who are the first people to try out playing the Dungeons and Dragons style “DH RPG” I’ve dreamed up. I love how human they’ve made their characters, and how generous they are with these characters, letting them live interesting, rich lives, instead of using their characters as an optimized means-to-an-end of trying to “win”.
Dinah Handel, the Digitization Services Manager in the Library, came to visit the class, and gave a very thought-provoking talk about labor and digitization. (This happened the same day as a “hands-on” session for the students, where I had them actually sit or stand at a desktop computer and operate a flatbed scanner, so they could have some idea of what that’s actually like.) For all the years I’ve done digital humanities, and all the digitization I’ve done myself, it’s remarkable how easily I’ve put out of my mind the people doing the work of outsourced digitization. It was reassuring to learn that the person who recently digitized a literary journal for us is based out of LA, and the “Joseph” whose name I saw as the image uploader is the same person who did the scanning, and who talked to Dinah over the phone about the project. Still, it’s work that takes a toll — repeated stress injuries, and the like — even when the material itself (e.g. war crimes documents) doesn’t inflict more damage on the people doing the work. Dinah talked about the decisions they make in the digitization lab: they recently decided against getting a particular kind of light, because it was physically painful to use. But for past projects at other universities, when the digitization work was outsourced, who was overseeing the labor conditions? Did they think about the impact on their workers when they were choosing the equipment? It was a sobering and thought-provoking presentation — how can we extend generous thinking to the collaborators on our projects who we’ll never meet?
We’re having a two-day event for prospective students in the DLCL in March. I’ll hold longer Textile Makerpace hours both those days, to have a no-pressure space open where the prospective students can have some downtime and a creative outlet.
While I was out sick, I spent some time updating a fan wiki for The Baby-Sitters Club with information I’d been able to find as part of my research for the Data-Sitters Club. While Wikipedia edit-a-thons are common enough, I think there are some interesting other avenues of engaging fan communities, for scholars in media and literary studies. Maria Cecire’s January post for the Data-Sitters Club was another instance of generous thinking for that project, where she wrote candidly about the challenges of collaboration, particularly when you’re the disciplinary expert who needs to rein in the over enthusiasm of DH colleagues (like me).
In January, with some help from Simon Wiles and Glen Worthey, I managed to track down why Elijah Meeks’s old blog, Digital Humanities Specialist, had gone offline. (It was tied to Glen’s user account, which went inactive when he left.) It made me reflect on the amount of labor that goes into making sure anything still works, especially after the primary stakeholder leaves an institution. Caring for resources that people use and cite (I discovered it was down when a footnote in a reading I’d assigned my class failed to resolve) is another form of generous thinking, but there is a real question of where to draw the line.
A related act of generous thinking is helping fund infrastructure — even when you feel like it’s the sort of thing some large entity with lots of money should be supporting. I’ve joined the Programming Historian Patreon because they’re doing excellent, thoughtful work: not just publishing tutorials, but thinking about it in a multilingual context. Having failed to run volunteer-only infrastructure (RIP, DiRT directory), I’ve learned the hard way that ongoing funding really does make a difference. In the long run, Patreon alone isn’t going to keep Programming Historian alive, but I felt it was important to join them in this experiment, and invest — even a small amount every month — in the infrastructure I value.
Participating in a DHARTI Twitter conference got me thinking about other models for sharing scholarship and community that don’t depend on travel. What would it look like to invest resources in more inclusive conference forms that could also better support scholars in the Global South, scholars with care responsibilities at home, etc.? What could we give up from our large international in-person gatherings to make it happen?
I got to thinking about connecting with people who have moved on entirely from academia, when my husband got an email from Academia.edu that someone in Europe cited two papers he wrote on a really interesting niche topic. As much as he’s not usually a fan of those spammy emails, hearing that someone, somewhere was building on something he’d worked on made him genuinely happy. What can we build into scholarly networks that we can feel better about (e.g. Humanities Commons) to enable those connections in an opt-in way, that won’t compound negative feelings for people who have left academia more recently, and not by choice?
This “generous thinking” project made me more attentive to some of the generous practices going on around me. Some new staff members have joined my division, and each of them gets a 3-5 paragraph, thoughtful introduction email that includes things like their background, expertise, places they’ve lived, languages they speak, etc. Charo Robinson, our director of finance and operations, sends these emails out to every single faculty member, lecturer, and student in the department. The inclusion of language, in particular, is a thoughtful touch that provides a point of connection and relatability in a modern languages department.

I’m grateful to everyone who shared their own generous thinking ideas and practices in January — it was one of the best things that happened that month. I hope that this conversation continues (if at a less reliable pace) within the broader DH community; you can follow along with the hashtag #GenerousThinking on Twitter.

Alex Wermer-Colan on "The SF Nexus: Digitizing, Curating, and Modeling Mass-Market Speculative Fiction"

Quinn Dombrowski — Wed, 29 Jan 2020 16:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · January 30, 2020

Date/Time: Thursday, 6 February 2020 - 2:00pm to 3:30pmLocation: CESTA (4th floor Wallenberg hall)

The SF Nexus is an ongoing project to restore the "great unread" of mass-market speculative fiction to the literary canon, making a significant proportion of published literature available for emerging research in genre studies and cultural analytics. Situating the SF Nexus within a theoretical shift in the digital humanities that recognizes the constructed nature of corpora, data modeling, and visualization, this talk will outline the project's curation of a copyrighted dataset through all stages of the data life cycle. Presented as a model for its expansion into a collaborative, multi-institutional project, this presentation will overview the digitization of SF novels and magazines, their ingestion and preservation in HathiTrust's Digital Library, their curation through extracted feature sets online, and the development of a legal and technical framework for a distributed system of localized access centers in participating libraries. The presentation will conclude by exploring a new wave of digital curation and analysis, inspired by the collections as data movement, speculating on what can be learned from recent innovations in machine learning for vector space modeling to study the politics of world-building in "New Wave" speculative fiction.

Alex Wermer-Colan is a postdoctoral fellow in Temple University Libraries' Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio, where he directs research and pedagogical projects that bridge traditional and digital methods for cultural studies and analytics ranging from the modernist to the contemporary era. His editorial criticism and scholarly writing has appeared in Twentieth Century Literature, The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, The D.H. Lawrence Review, Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, Indiana University Press, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.

This event is free and open to the public, and tea and coffee will be served.

If you cannot join us in person, please consider watching the broadcast of this seminar via zoom.

DH lightning talks + happy hour

Quinn Dombrowski — Mon, 27 Jan 2020 16:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · January 28, 2020

Date/Time: Thursday, 30 January 2020 - 3:00pm to 5:00pmLocation: CESTA (4th floor Wallenberg hall)

Join us for a new take on DH consulting: lighting talks about project ideas or projects-in-progress, followed by feedback from technical DH staff from CIDR, as well as others with experience from the Stanford DH community. This month, we'll follow up the talks with happy hour at Treehouse (4-5).

If you'd like to give a lightning talk, come a few minutes early to sign up!

DLCL ATS round-up, fall 2019

Quinn Dombrowski — Thu, 19 Dec 2019 16:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · December 20, 2019

It's been an eventful quarter in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages and Stanford Libraries! Writing it up, it's hard to believe it was packed into just three months.

Existing projects

Global Medieval Sourcebook

This quarter, I got the paperwork signed to start accessioning texts from the Global Medieval Sourcebook into the Stanford Digital Repository. At the end of the quarter, we had a meeting with metadata and technical staff about the next steps, and I’m excited to start experimenting with getting these texts into the repository and out to the world via WorldCat. This quarter an opportunity arose to co-author a paper with Prof. Kathryn Starkey and Mae Lyons-Penner on the evolution of the project and our current approach, for a special issue of “Seminar” (a German Studies journal) on digital curation. I’m looking forward to having the chance to articulate the considerations that led to the project’s current trajectory.

French Revolution Digital Archive

It’s been a big quarter for FRDA. Interning at Stanford Libraries, Diane Otosaka migrated the images portion of the project into a Spotlight exhibit. Once that was complete, we were able to replace the legacy, custom FRDA site with a lightweight FRDA landing page created using Stanford Sites, with pointers to the image collection and the Philologic-based interface for the texts. We’ve also got more volumes of the Archives Parlementaires to digitize, and I’ve been working with our French librarian, Sarah Sussman, on navigating the digitization / OCR / TEI markup process for those materials.

Poetic Media Lab projects

Prof. Amir Eshel’s Poetic Media Lab continues to be a hub of DH activity and projects within the DLCL. The fall, I helped edit the technical portions of the prose on the Poetic Media Lab website about the projects, and worked with a couple of the students on DH postdoc applications involving their projects. I had the chance to talk with students across a number of projects (including Transit, MaPaLiterature, and DIALOG דִּיאָלוֹג) about how to scope these projects to have some sort of feasible short-term output that could be expanded in the future. I wrote a Jupyter notebook for doing German named-entity recognition using Spacy for the "Free Speech, Regulation, and Democracy in the Digital Age” project. I read and wrote feedback on multiple grant applications for the Poetic Media Lab this quarter. For the Florentine Codex Project, I’ve been working on trying to access high-resolution page images via IIIF, and create correctly-structured training data for the Transkribus handwritten text recognition software out of the page images and TEI-encoded transcriptions (which has been challenging due to the TEI structure of this bilingual, columnar text, and my XSLT being a little rusty). At the “Fantastic Futures” library AI conference, I used the Florentine Codex as an example both of how we can reuse existing manual transcription work as training data, and of how going from manual, TEI-encoded transcriptions to properly formatted files for Transkribus is not necessarily a straightforward process. Afterwards, I spoke with someone from the Getty where, it turns out, they are also working on transcribing the same text. Prof. Obed Lira at Bucknell will be meeting with the Getty folks in person in March to see if we can arrange a formal collaboration between these efforts.

Other web-based projects

I continue to await the new centrally-supported web platform options from Stanford Web Services, to get Entitled Opinions and Book Haven on steadier technical footing. I’m hopeful that something will be available starting this coming winter.

Multilingual Harry Potter Fanfic

This project has felt like a seemingly endless slog through cleaning three giant, web-scraped data sets before we can actually say anything interesting about them. Steele Douris, Masha Gorshkova, and Antonio Lenzo, and I signed up to give a talk at the Stanford Literary Lab on the project in early December, and having a hard deadline was helpful for getting through it all. What I realized though this process is that the project surpasses the limit of where OpenRefine can reasonably be used, and data cleaning at this scale and complexity really is a job for Python. It’s a testament to how much Python I’ve learned in the last 9 months that I find the prospect of redoing all the cleaning in Python to be tedious but not terrifying — and I even have a rough idea of how to go about doing it. With the caveat that we need to redo the cleaning and analysis before publishing the results, we were able to put together a pretty compelling argument that language and culture (including the cultures and policies of the fanfic archives themselves) play a meaningful role in what gets written in fanfic, even in a single fandom. I’m grateful to Mike Kestemont from the University of Antwerp for his particularly helpful feedback on what we presented. Our next step from here is to revisit the data cleaning using Python, and write up the results for a paper.

Networked novel

This quarter, I had a chance to learn about the Networkx Python package while working with Prof. Yulia Ilchuk on generating lists of network triads from her character conversation network data, along with some Python-based data wrangling to modify the input files she uses with Gephi into something that works better for Networkx. Helping her get started with Jupyter notebooks, even while she was in Ukraine and I was in Palo Alto, was one of my more satisfying accomplishments this quarter.

Palladio bricks

In a brief gap between major projects, Simon Wiles (one of the developers in CIDR) completely rewrote how Palladio gets packaged and deployed, subbing out the deprecated bower system for webpack. I worked with him to test and debug issues with this new version of Palladio that has more modern technical underpinnings, but no new features … yet. There’s some exciting developments on that front coming in the new year. It’s been a struggle to make progress on the Palladio Bricks documentation. Even though I know there are people who’d like to test and use it, I’ve been pulled along this quarter from one deadline to another, and there hasn’t been a deadline, as such, on the Palladio Bricks documentation. Maybe it’s time to come up with one for the winter or spring.

Tools for Japanese text analysis

I’ve continued the conversation with Regan Murphy Kat and others on what better digital support for East Asian languages looks like. It’s been inspiring to see what’s been going on more broadly in that area, including a Japanese language text mining workshop at the University of Chicago next June. Locally, she and I put together a proposal for next year’s sprint planning in the Digital Library Systems and Services (DLSS) group, around adding support for searching in our exhibits platform using East Asian languages.

Machine learning & medieval

I’m still undecided on what I’ll present at CMEMS in the spring — with everything else going on, I haven’t had a chance to explore what I might be able to do with applying machine learning to the Old Novgorod Birchbark Letter corpus (or the watermark catalogs). But I’m hoping that next quarter’s continuation of the “Six Septembers” reading group might give me a more immediate excuse to work on it.

New Projects

Data-Sitters Club

I went on my first real vacation in four years this quarter, and swore off working on non-English DH for the week. But somehow, I still came home with a new project. The Data-Sitters Club is a collaborative project with Roopika Risam, Katia Bowers, Maria Cecire, and Anouk Lang, where we’re working on applying computational text analysis methods to the Baby-Sitters Club book series of our childhoods, and explaining every step of the process in detail — in a chatty, conversational manner reminiscent of the original series. Even though the focus is an English-language series, the methods are largely applicable cross-linguistically. I’m hoping it’ll help people in a situation similar to my own when I started this job, where I was interested in computational text analysis but wasn’t sure where exactly you go from there. This quarter we published two pieces, “DSC #1: Quinn’s Great Idea” and “DSC #2: Katia and the Phantom Corpus”, and written a proposal for the group to become an official Stanford Literary Lab project. The resulting funding has brought the project back to my home base in non-English languages, by enabling us to purchase Spanish and French translation of some of the books as well. I’m looking forward to reading El club de las canguro (“Kangaroo Club”, the rendering of the Baby-Sitters Club in its Spanish translations) over the holidays.

Twitter scraping with Python

This quarter, I had the chance to learn about the Twitter developer approval process, their APIs, and how to work with them using Python, thanks to a new project with Prof. Cécile Alduy where I wrote a Jupyter notebook for scraping tweets from particular user accounts.

JSTOR Data for Research

Exploring new ways of getting data was a recurring theme this quarter. In addition to the Twitter scraping, I’m also working with Slavic grad student Masha Gorshkova on filing a request with JSTOR’s Data for Research. It’s a more complex query than their self-service interface supports, so we’re now in the queue waiting for a response. Once we get all the way through this process, I may write a blog post about the experience.

Ostrov: Russian radical feminist zine

Stanford Libraries has the full run of Остров (Ostrov), a Russian radical feminist literary zine published between 1999-2014. It’s a marvel: a mix of poetry, essays, translations, letters to the editor, lesbian personal ads, and art — all between split covers that sometimes obscure the nudity in the cover art. I’ve been working with Slavic Librarian Margarita Nafpaktitis on getting these digitized (scanned and OCR’d), and detail-catalogued, as a prelude to using this as a corpus for the Russian NLP research unit (more on that below). We’re interested in the ways that these writers adopt western feminist discourse, versus developing a different, particularly Russian way of talking about related issues. This project is a funny one, insofar as it’s a real project I’m doing, but it’s also something I’m semi-fictionalizing for my course next quarter. Which leads me to…

Course planning: “Project Management and Ethical Collaboration for Humanists”

The DH project management course that uses a “Dungeons and Dragons” style tabletop RPG as a major pedagogical device is happening next quarter! The students will create characters based on various institutional roles (assistant professor, grad student, undergrad, librarian), and with the premise that the faculty member has received a grant to do — in essence — what Margarita and I are doing with Ostrov, they’ll play through a year in the life of a DH project. It will be a disaster. Then we’ll play through it again, once the students have learned more about project management and collaboration, and hopefully it will go better. For purposes of the game, it doesn’t really matter what the DH project is (though it helps if it involves methods and types of materials I’ve worked with before — which, at this point, includes a lot of different things.) Since it doesn’t matter, I figure that also means there’s no reason not to run with a queer, modern, Russian-language project. Representation matters. While the class is about the general skills that apply to any project, rather than the particular technical methods we’ll (fictionally) be using in the game, I’m planning on doing some optional hands-on activities that students can choose to do in lieu of other homework that will let them actually experience what it’s like to scan and OCR things, proofread OCR, clean and organize the data, etc., and it’s wonderful that we’ll be able to do that with the real-life materials that their fictional project is based on.

Helping both my organizations

One of the joys of a split appointment (between the DLCL and the Library) is that I can take on small tasks that have a big impact, even when they’re not directly connected to my job. In the DLCL, I held a couple office hours for getting Canvas set up at the start of the quarter, after helping out a couple grad students in passing. I also spent a couple hours using the Stanford Sites Drupal platform to create a DLCL course scheduler web form for instructors to fill out, and reduce the amount of email the department admins have to deal with around course requests.

On the Library side, I did some translation work for some requests that subject area librarian colleagues have for the Digital Library Systems & Services (DLSS) group — around adding CJK searching functionality in the exhibits platform, and supporting collection-level bulk download of digital objects accessioned into the repository. There’s been a long history of understandable frustration on both sides with requests like these, but my unusual background (having spent a decade working in central IT, in groups not dissimilar to DLSS) has made it feasible for me to serve as an interpreter and advocate in both directions.

There’s also been a few non-English requests that have come up this quarter out of History — Persian OCR and Chinese web scraping — that I’ve helped with this quarter.

Workshops

I started the quarter with a Zotero + Tropy workshop for incoming Art History grad students, at the invitation of Art History librarian Vanessa Kam. Our new History ATS, Marie Saldaña, presented Tropy, while I focused on Zotero. It wasn’t without its technical hitches, but was definitely a reminder that Tropy’s Twitter tech support, thanks to Abby Mullen, is absolutely second to none. Later in the quarter, we ran the workshop again under the CIDR workshop series.

At the “Gear up for Data” event in the Library, I ran a workshop on considerations for non-English natural language processing. Finally, at the end of the quarter, I gave a presentation on the text track of the “Fantastic Futures” Library AI conference, talking about Transkribus for handwritten text recognition for many languages and different types of materials.

Writing

This fall, I’ve been working with Elaine Trehane and Glen Worthey on wrangling together papers from last May’s “Women and Gender Minorities in DH” event. One portion of this edited volume will be “love letters” from women and gender minorities in DH, to pieces of DH scholarship. If you’re a woman or gender minority, and would like to write a love letter to a piece of DH (broadly defined) scholarship that’s meaningful to you, please send it to us! All the details about the love letters are available on the DH-WoGeM site.

I finished up and submitted a tutorial on pre-processing considerations for non-English languages, as part of this summer’s Language Acts and Worldmaking tutorial write-a-thon hosted by Kings College London. At the end of the quarter, I got feedback from the peer reviewers, and I’m happy to have just learned that it’ll be published, with a few revisions.

After my non-English DH course last winter, I had a conversation with Adam Crymble (founder of Programming Historian) about writing some more tutorials around doing DH in non-English languages. My first suggestion was that first the site needed a tutorial on Jupyter notebooks, since everything I work with, code-wise, is in Jupyter notebooks, and it’s not entirely intuitive what they are or how they work. I’m really happy to finally have that tutorial on Jupyter Notebooks published on Programming Historian, co-authored with Tassie Gniady and David Kloster, and using Italian Harry Potter fanfic data wrangling as the example. I needed an example of an R notebook, and I was happy to have managed to put together an example using some R code from Andrew Piper’s Enumerations, with some R wrangling help from Shawn Graham. The most exciting part of getting this piece published, personally, was seeing the reception: a French translation was underway within a couple days, and a Spanish translation is also in the works.

I co-authored an abstract with Patrick Burns for the Debates in DH 2021 volume, about multilingual DH, and we were both excited to have that accepted.

Around Thanksgiving, I submitted a full draft of my piece, “Non-English DH Means Resilience”, about my non-English DH course last winter, to Debates in DH: Pedagogy. I’m really pleased with how this piece came together, though we’ll see if the coda (which includes a gut-punch for anyone teaching DH) makes it through peer review intact.

Fall is the time to submit (and review) abstracts for DH 2020. I wrote a guide to writing an abstract for a DH conference on this blog, and then wrote five different abstracts on five very different topics — submitting two in my own name (tool directories and DH-WoGeM), serving as an additional collaborator on one (Russian NLP), and helping shape two others that colleagues submitted (Multilingual DH and Demystifying ADHO). In addition, I coordinated with Global Outlook::DH (where I’m on the Exec Board) and the Multilingual DH group on planning for a pre-conference workshop / tutorial-writing hackathon at DH 2020. I reviewed three abstracts for DH 2020, and five for the University of Michigan’s Global DH Symposium.

This quarter, I finalized and submitted the proposal to ADHO for DH-WoGeM to become an official Special Interest Group (SIG). I also drafted a SIG proposal for Multilingual DH, which we’ll submit early in 2020. In addition, I continue to work with other members of the Global Outlook::DH exec board, and the ADHO admissions committee, on a proposal for GO::DH to become an official constituent member of ADHO.

Talks and Events

This quarter, I’ve given talks for two courses: one on Bible fanfic for Prof. Michael Penn’s course on what didn’t make it into the Bible, and a sort of free-wheeling tour of digital humanities tools and methods for the Modern Thought and Literature graduate seminar. The Bible fanfic talk took the same approach as the Harry Potter fanfic project (scraping, cleaning, and analyzing multilingual metadata around a fandom), albeit only with English and Russian: the Bible isn’t an available fandom in the Italian corpus I’ve been working with, probably due to the site’s ban on content that may offend religious sensibilities.

I also gave a talk through the Library’s Trending series about the multilingual DH course I taught, and pivoted from there to making a broader point about how language matters. If it wouldn’t be acceptable to develop a new library technical feature that throws an error whenever it encounters a female author, is it any more acceptable to build something that chokes on non-Latin characters? It was an expansion of a talk I gave at UCLA last spring, with a lot of local context. The timing turned out to be unfortunate (most of the folks from the digital library group were at a conference, leaving me preaching to a choir of librarians), but it’s a talk I can see reworking for other audiences in the future.

For the first time in precisely a decade, I gave a talk at the disciplinary conference associated with my humanities degree (ASEEES — the Association for Slavic, East European & Eurasian Studies), which was held in San Francisco. Between a sick kid and BART not running until after my roundtable started, I ended up missing one of the things I was scheduled for, and was grateful to Andy Janco for filling in. I did have a chance to present on a panel about DH and migration, where I was the weirdo musing about technical migration in this context. Still, it’s hard to describe how inspiring it was to see 25 people come to — and stay in — the room for the entire panel, when 10 years ago the level of interest in DH was nothing close to that.

In December, as mentioned above, my grad student collaborators and I presented on the multilingual Harry Potter fanfic at the Lit Lab. We’ll be largely reprising the presentation in January at CESTA, for theJanuary 21st iteration of their lunchtime talk series.

Working Groups and Organizations

DH-WoGeM

With everything else going on, DH-WoGeM “conversations" have had to take a back seat this quarter. I organized one about parenthood and DH, this time with a group of people who already had young-ish children. As mentioned above, there’s also the edited volume underway from last May’s event, a DH 2020 submission, and a SIG proposal to ADHO. I’ve also been in ongoing discussions with Zhenya Samoilova, Isabel Galina, and Deb Verhoeven about a global survey of DH and care responsibilities.

Towards the beginning of the quarter, I started up a sort of meet-up group for people who are working on learning Python, R, and other common DH programming languages, dubbed “Danger Noodle Club”. We’ve been meeting more-or-less weekly, right after the Textile Makerspace sessions. I particularly relish the liminal space where some people are still wrapping up their sewing, and other people are getting settled in with laptops — the way that crafting and coding became porous.

Textile Makerspace

Speaking of the Textile Makerspace, it continues to flourish. All quarter, we had a group of three undergrads reliably there every Thursday, learning how to make a tote bag, as research for their project to develop an AR app to teach people how to sew. A library conference brought us some surprise librarian visitors, who made some fun “Untitled Goose Game” vinyl stickers with our Cricut machine. I was able to use the Makerspace in direct service of my department by sewing a DLCL t-shirt as a thank-you present for our outgoing chair, Dan Edelstein. At the very end of the quarter, an interview I did last spring was finally published as part of a round-up of campus makerspaces in Stanford News, with lots of love for the Textile Makerspace. I’m hopeful that it’ll bring more people to our space next quarter, and perhaps arts funding as well?

Russian NLP

The Russian NLP “research unit” / working group in DLCL, co-led with Prof. Yulia Ilchuk and Masha Gorshkova, got underway this quarter, with a mix of faculty, grad student, and librarian attendees from around the country, and the world. It’s been a wonderful group to work with, sharing experiences with different tools and libraries as applied to different kinds of Russian texts. While the last couple months got away from many of us (myself included), due to the ASEEES conference and other obligations, it’s been amazing to see what Andy Janco (the Digital Scholarship Librarian at Haverford) has been able to do with training Spacy models and pipelines for Russian as one example of improving the tool landscape for Russian NLP for DH.

Six Septembers: Mathematics for the Humanist

In December, I wrapped up the first phase of the “Six Septembers: Mathematics for the Humanist” working group, by finishing all six chapters of that book. I’m particularly grateful to my CIDR colleague Peter Broadwell for his help in answering my questions on the material, and translating it into DH contexts. In our last meeting, we talked about where we wanted to go from here to continue to improve our collective understanding of both math and its applications for DH. We decided to spend the next six months on machine learning: both how it ties into the math we’ve learned from “Six Septembers”, and how to actually apply it by building the code up from scratch. Conveniently, it also serves as a good follow up to this December’s “Fantastic Futures” conference.

Multilingual DH

As mentioned earlier, the Multilingual DH group now has a mailing list and an official SIG proposal that we’ll be submitting to ADHO in January. I’m grateful to Jonathan Reeve (a grad student at Columbia) for his help with Jekyll wrangling and translating the site, after I’d been at an impasse for months, trying to make Jekyll work. After I wrote a personal blog post apologizing for all the Drupal on the third anniversary of the publication of Drupal for Humanists, I got into a discussion with Alex Gil about my general befuddlement with Jekyll, and he was kind enough to sit down with me and clear up many of my misunderstandings one morning.

DH Reading Group

I’ve been particularly enjoying attending the grad student oriented DH reading group organized by Mae Lyons-Penner in the DLCL. This quarter we discussed the Lit Lab pamphlet on “Popularity and Prestige”, and Laura McGrath et al’s “Measuring Modernist Novelty”. The latter, in particular, opened up a lot of questions about what would happen if you attempt to look at this same metric for other kinds of texts, and I’m hoping to follow up in time for our next meeting. Modeling this kind of DH behavior — we don’t need to just wonder about things with DH, we can actually go off and try them, particularly when code is made public — feels like one of the more significant things I’m able to contribute to the group.

Global Outlook::DH

I’ve struggled with planning the work for “Around DH 2020”, which will debuting with the start of the year, and the revised quantifying DH infographic, both projects under the auspices of Global Outlook::DH, but closely aligned with the cause of cultivating DH in the DLCL and other areas of non-English work. The lack of immediate deadlines, and the enormity of both tasks, have both been factors. I do have an approach worked out for Around DH, and a set of questions for each participating project, and I’m hoping to bring together the people who’ve expressed interest in the project at the start of the year. The new Quantifying DH project faces the challenge of too many options and ideas. So much has changed in the DH landscape that there isn’t one canonical anything anymore — not a mailing list, not a Twitter list, not a conference. It points to a much richer landscape, but also a much more troublesome one to try to nail down. I’m hoping for some inspiration and clarity over the holidays.

ACH

Finally, after a lot of consideration and uncertainty, I accepted a nomination to run for Vice President of ACH (where I served on the board, 2015-2019), and thought through what I would take up as a platform for the position. Given the opportunity, I’d like to focus on cultivating the community of ACH online. The conference this year was inspiring, but at least for those of us on the west coast, it was a stark reminder of all the things going on in US-based DH that are out of reach for us, even as colleagues along the eastern seaboard are able to have an ongoing cross-institutional exchange, without racking up the carbon footprint (or budgetary damage) of flying everywhere. It would be wonderful if our local students could have more venues for presenting their DH work, and participating in dialogue with colleagues from other institutions, but it’s very difficult to arrange something in-person locally, let alone regionally, and I think there are opportunities to do more community-building in online spaces.

Colleagues

Marie Saldaña started in September as the new ATS for History. But shortly thereafter, it was with both surprise and sadness that CIDR bade farewell to both Glen Worthey (after 20 years, to Hathi Trust Research Center at UIUC) and Scott Bailey (after 3 years, to NC State University Libraries) this quarter. I’ve only been at Stanford 15 months, but that still leaves me the most long-standing person in a DH role in Stanford Libraries. Particularly with the public perception of Stanford DH being so closely tied to people who are no longer here, and the projects they created, it feels like we’re on the brink of a turning point. At CIDR’s strategic retreat last week, it was heartening to hear a reaffirmation of the Library’s support for DH. Suffice it to say, I’ll be doing a lot of thinking over the break about where Stanford DH might go from here, as we start a new decade.

As a closing thought, this entire year — but particularly this last quarter — has reminded me of the many ways in which digital humanities ultimately comes down to people. It's a praxis that, in so many cases, is ultimately centered on people, even though the technology is more likely to get top billing in the discourse. I feel very fortunate to work with many wonderful people on all these projects, at Stanford and beyond, and to have the opportunity to bring students into those communities. I'm looking forward to seeing where it all goes in the new year.

Book Review: "Failing Gloriously and Other Essays" by Shawn Graham

Quinn Dombrowski — Sun, 17 Nov 2019 16:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · November 18, 2019

After 15 years of doing DH in some form or another, opportunities to sit in the company of fellow “veterans”, swapping tales of bygone years and campaigns won and lost, are a rare and wonderful treat. “Remember ‘Second Life’?” “Ugh, it made me so angry to have to virtually walk around to access information when we had this great thing called the ‘web browser’ where you could just search.”

In these conversations, there’s little explanation needed (everyone remembers how it was), and especially after a drink or two, people will start opening up about failure. There’s no criticism or judgement, just commiseration.

The ritual of these conversations is always restricted to “insiders": there’s enough academic job precarity in DH that most people are reluctant to talk about their failures, outside the closed circle of colleagues who are guaranteed to understand. Even among the fortunate tenured crowd, there are promotions to be had, grants to be won, keynote invitations to be accepted. While a more diverse set of voices have gained visibility in DH, the crowd of “old-timers” is still overwhelmingly white and predominantly male, with implications for who gets to see and benefit from this “veteran’s view” of DH. It’s hard to describe my delight in discovering that in his new book, Failing Gloriously, Shawn Graham has captured the kinds of stories that one often shares in these insider conversations, framed in a thoughtful manner that invites the reader’s self-reflection on their own mistakes.

I count Shawn Graham among my Twitter friends — the kind you can rely on chiming in with a helpful idea when you’re venting your frustrations about a technical problem. I’ve learned a good deal from his trials and travails, too. Right before I left on vacation in September, he posted something about finishing the draft of a book with the title Failing Gloriously, and I couldn’t resist inquiring if he might be open to sharing a copy. If there’s one thing I’m known for, it’s probably failure — and it’s been hard to get anyone else to talk about this favorite topic of mine. I started reading it on a plane to Las Vegas, and couldn’t put it down.

The format of the book is unusual: it could loosely be described as a series of essays, but in reality, the material is much more diverse. Some of it is adapted from Graham’s digital archaeology blog, where he has been writing since the early 2000’s. A couple chapters are academic ephemera— an email to a student, a “learning journal” from a graduate student pedagogy program— which Graham has annotated with the wisdom of hindsight. There are more personal pieces, reflecting on the place where Graham grew up in rural Quebec, Canada, and the community there. And there are pieces that are more academic than narrative, like the chapter on the open-access journal he started, Epoiesen. He ties this mix together — in some places more clearly than others — with a common thread of failure.

Graham acknowledges upfront the privilege that underpins his ability to talk so openly about failure. He’s a white man with tenure, which counts for a lot, even if his path to getting a tenure-track job was circuitous and plagued by an ongoing case of imposter syndrome. He also pushes back on the culture of uncritical failure without safeguards, as found in Silicon Valley: “[Failure] is a political idea, and it’s a dangerous idea. It is dangerous in that without a strategy for dealing with the things that break, a strategy for failing productively, a fail is indeed a disaster and causes harm. For instance, the modern university puts all of the risks of innovative teaching on the instructor, with few supports in place. “Move fast and break things,” Facebook’s early mantra, has caused untold damage to civil society. It is political in that who gets to fail and suffer the consequences (or not) is a function of identity and power.” (p. 2)

His opening essay, “Failing Gloriously”, explains the framing of the book as a whole: "Now that you’ve benefited from that privilege, what have you done with it? This volume is my attempt at figuring that out.” Graham also references two frameworks for classifying failure, which he uses throughout the book: Brian Croxall and Quinn Warnick’s, from their piece on “Failure” in Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, and my more meandering thoughts on the matter, from a talk I gave at the University of Alberta’s symposium “On the Benefits of Failure” in 2018, which I meant to be my DH “swan song” before leaving the field forever. (I posted a write-up of the talk, “Towards a Taxonomy of Failure” on my blog.) Croxall and Warnick’s taxonomy is a progressive list going from technological failure, to human failure, to failure as artifact, and finally to failure as epistemology. It covers a majority of the examples in Failing Gloriously, though Graham ends up drawing on some of the more interpersonal facets of failure, such as failure to do right by others, from my musings on the topic. (This book may also be the first example ever of a work that draws on two taxonomies by people named Quinn, which I think is delightful.)

Following the introductory essay, the first part of Graham’s book is an autobiographical tour of the mix of failure and good fortune that led him to his current position. While Graham finished his PhD well before the 2008 financial crisis that is often portrayed as a turning point in the academic job market, his story of stringing together adjunct jobs before eventually landing back where he grew up will likely resonate with many readers — either as their experience, or a real possibility looming over their time in grad school. After a couple stints in educational technology (one involving a failure with long-term consequences vis-a-vis interactions with the US government), Graham was hired as a digital humanist — despite not thinking of himself in those terms, or knowing exactly what that meant. Graham is emphatic in crediting luck and random chance — and the privilege to have the resources to be able to pursue opportunities as they arose— in getting his position. My failure taxonomy filed failure to get an academic job under “arbitrary failure”, and perhaps Graham’s story illustrates its inverse, arbitrary success.

The second part, “Getting over myself”, is a meditation on some of life’s bigger questions: how to live, how to be a good person. In the wrong hands, it could devolve into a tedious bit of moralizing, but Graham does a beautiful job of drawing out his points through poignant depictions of specific individuals, and the broader community in Western Quebec where he grew up. While the stories in the text are those of Graham and his roots, this section feels like an invitation to the reader for personal reflection: what models can you draw on, from your own origins, to provide a framework for the kind of person you want to be? As a small aside, I really appreciate how Graham introduces this section with Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch, a literary reference that is unlikely to be found on a university syllabus. I would very much welcome more acknowledgement that scholars read books that might not be deemed Literature, but can nevertheless be both thought-provoking and enjoyable. (The character he references, Sam Vimes, is one of my oldest kid’s namesakes.)

The third part, “Fits and starts and fumbles”, is really the core of the book from a digital humanities perspective. Even if your disciplinary grounding is in something far removed from archaeology, part three transcends those disciplinary boundaries, very vividly conveying what it’s like to “do DH”, from the perspective of building projects, doing research, teaching, advising, and the experience of being that person everyone sends the misfit students to, if they ever express any interest in technical things. It’s funny, it’s touching, it’s memorable, and at times it’s painful. “How I Lost the Crowd” is a piece I’ll be recommending to anyone who’s about to embark on a CMS-based project. I’ll be assigning “Research Witchcraft” in future iterations of my non-English DH course. “Horses to Water” is an important reminder for empathy when students take an assignment in a direction that is, on the surface, utterly bizarre and counterintuitive. “Letter to a Young Scholar” is a striking reminder of the many times when answering the question we’re asked is, in fact, the wrong course of action. “I Don’t Know How to Do This” brought tears to my eyes, reminding me both of my own struggles in how to support graduate students facing impossible odds in the job market, DH faculty facing an uphill climb for tenure and review, and the urgent need to connect with others in the same position. A colleague Graham didn’t know got in touch with him after he wrote the original blog post this piece is based on: "He was writing to express relief that he was not the only one who felt similarly without a map and compass. The post made it OK for him to acknowledge his concern about his students, to make peace with not knowing what to do, for he was not alone. Doing right by others: sometimes a simple blog post will land where it’s needed, not where you thought it was going.” (p. 97)

For myself, as a DH person supporting non-English literatures, I’ll confess that the fourth part largely felt like a tourist trip into another discipline, with a tour guide more accustomed to locals than visitors. I suspect there’s a lot in part four to appreciate that I didn’t pick up on, not knowing the landscape. If you’re an archaeologist, I imagine you might react to it similarly to how I felt about part three. If you’re not, there’s some interdisciplinary issues at play here that are worth reading about (e.g. about peer review practices in Graham’s open access journal), but at least for me, they were harder to viscerally connect with than the material in part three.

Once Failing Gloriously and Other Essays is published, I intend to keep a copy on my office bookshelf, and a second under my desk, in order to promptly replace the bookshelf copy when it’s been given away to a grad student, staff, or faculty colleague who happens to come by. If you’re a digital humanities “veteran”, you’ll laugh and cry and shudder alongside Graham’s tales of failure. If you’re a grad student or newer to digital humanities, Failing Gloriously and Other Essays provides a rare, honest, inside look into many facets of doing digital humanities.

As Eric Kansa notes in the introduction, openly talking about failure will not, by itself, make survivable failure more inclusive. But at the same time, the aversion to openly addressing failure in digital humanities is pervasive and longstanding: my article on the failure of Project Bamboo has largely gotten cited in the absence of much anything else focused on digital humanities failure. Brett Bobley, the Director of the Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities, once recounted how he wasn’t able to find a single volunteer willing to accept a free trip to Florida in March in exchange for talking about DH failure at the 2008 IMLS Webwise conference — and I don’t think he’d have much more luck in 2019. There is much more work that needs to be done, on many fronts, to encourage, support, and reduce the personal risk associated with thoughtful analyses of failure, for everyone. But it’s hard to start working towards this goal if failure remains such a strong taboo in digital humanities. Shawn Graham’s Failing Gloriously and Other Essays is one step towards that better future. It’ll be released on December 1st; go check it out.

A guide to writing DH conference submissions

Quinn Dombrowski — Tue, 15 Oct 2019 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · October 16, 2019

This year I’ve had the opportunity to try to convince a number of graduate students — both at Stanford and beyond — to submit something to the international DH conference. I’ve been to every North America-based iteration of the conference since 2007, as well as a handful of the European ones, and especially for early career scholars it’s hard to find a better place for getting a broad sense of the field, ideas for possible directions for your own work, and a different kind of interdisciplinary feedback on your projects.

I really appreciate what the DH 2020 program committee has done this year with streamlining the submission process. The word limit is shorter, which makes it more feasible to get a submission together. If anything, it might involve a struggle to be concise. With the exception of long presentations, the maximum word count for any submission type (posters, lightning talks, short presentations, panels, and forums) is 500 words, about one page. But in the course of these conversations with grad students, I’ve been reminded that it’s not the length that’s the barrier, it’s the feeling of writing in an unfamiliar style if you’ve never submitted something to a conference before. You can find many examples of abstracts that were submitted to the DH conference online (e.g. this from the 2019 conference), but not everyone finds it easy to parse their structure.

Since the deadline for DH 2020 has been extended to October 22nd, here’s a brief guide to writing a DH conference submission. In addition to attending the conference for years, I’ve also been a reviewer for about a decade, and with the caveat that I’ve tended to submit things in the less-harshly-reviewed infrastructure/organization/DH-about-DH categories, I’ve never had a submission rejected. Especially as the conference gets bigger and more difficult to get into, though, your mileage with these tips may vary.

Pick Your Format

The folks I’ve talked to tend to gravitate towards long or short paper presentations. They’re the most familiar format based on experience with in-class presentations, or at disciplinary conferences. The problem is that the long paper in particular is highly coveted by people who probably have had a lot more time immersed in the field, its discourse, and their piece of pushing that work forward (i.e. senior scholars). Long papers are described as “deal[ing] with substantial completed research, report[ing] the development of new methodologies; or present[ing] rigorous theoretical, speculative, or critical discussions”. For the close reading crowd, that description should be a big deterrent to grad students, especially when contrasted with the short paper, which is "appropriate for reporting on works in progress, limited scholarly interventions, or for describing a singular tool or project… Short presentations are eligible for the Fortier Prize, which explicitly recognizes early career scholars’ work.” The short paper description essentially has a big GRAD STUDENTS: SUBMIT THINGS HERE sign. But because of that, and the possibility of the Fortier Prize (which isn’t open to other formats), short papers also have a higher bar for acceptance.

Personally, I’m a fan of poster presentations. I’ve submitted more posters to the conference than any other format. If you have a poster at the conference, the poster session gives you an opportunity to talk to lots of different people about your work (which itself is a useful experience, even beyond what you might learn from those conversations). Honestly, posters may be the format that gives your work the greatest exposure: while some sessions have packed rooms, others are sparsely attended — whereas there are no parallel sessions opposite the poster session, and in recent years, posters have been hung up near the refreshments for the duration of the conference. In my non-English “DH Across Borders” class, we talked about poster design. While the DH venue gives you an opportunity to be very creative with your poster (you can even sew it in the form of a dress and bring a skeleton to wear it!), here's an exhaustive, detailed guide to making a poster if you haven’t made one before. You can also print it on fabric (for cheaper than on paper, as little as $18+shipping) on sites like Spoonflower to make your travel less annoying.

Lightning talks are a relatively recent format: a 5 minute "presentation of a single project, idea, technology, or problem. It is intended to either solicit feedback from peers or to advertise the release of a new project, dataset, or tool.” It requires less work than making a poster, and gives you a dedicated audience. For grad students who want to present their work in some form, but don’t want to compete for a short paper slot or wrangle a poster, a lightning talk is a good option.

I’m also fond of panels (with multiple speakers who "focus on a single theme and [are] inherently coherent in presenting a substantial body of research or a research question”) and the new forum format (which “focus[es] on a single thematic or methodological challenge and [is] designed to facilitate a conversation at large with the digital humanities community”), but they take a lot of work to put together the necessary group of people, and aren’t ideal to undertake a week before the deadline. You need to have relationships with people outside your own institution, which is harder for grad students who haven’t been to many conferences or engaged with the broader DH community in other ways. But if you go to the DH conference and have a topic in mind for a panel / forum for a future year, keep an eye out for people who might be interested in joining you.

Paragraph 1: What's Your Problem

When writing a conference submission, the first paragraph should provide some context and catch the reader’s interest. Your presentation should be motivated by some problem. Is there a set of documents that are illuminating for our understanding of something, but they’ve been largely overlooked? Are there major shortcomings in widely-used tools that are impeding some kind of research — or do tools not even exist yet? Do we have a poor understanding of how some literary phenomenon works? Are there sub-communities within DH that could have a fruitful exchange but they’re not connected? Is sustainability and archiving for DH work still a major issue? (Believe me, it is.) Start off your submission by explaining what your problem is.

You also should use this part of your submission to contextualize your problem within DH and/or within your disciplinary field. If you’re talking about how there isn’t a good tool available for a particular method, say a few words about related tools that are out there and how they don’t quite do what you need them to do. If you’re saying that scholarly work hasn’t been done on a certain topic, mention (and cite) similar work that’s been done, and if it’s not obvious, how what you’re doing is different. You want to use this section both to engage the reviewer’s interest and curiosity and, more subtly, anticipate and preemptively deflect possible objections (e.g. where a somewhat naive reader of your work might ask “but what about…?”) It may help to read through the reviewer guidelines before you write this paragraph, because it ties directly to at least 50% of the evaluation.

For a DH conference, it’s worth adding in a few words to explain your references; this will be different for disciplinary conferences, where you can more safely assume that everyone shares more common knowledge about the specifics of your field. For instance, if I were submitting a paper to a Slavic conference, I could just reference A.A. Zaliznjak’s work on Old Novgorod dialect without further explanation. If I wanted to mention that same thing as part of a DH submission, I’d need to explain that he was a leading historical linguist who worked on a series of documents written by and for “ordinary people” between the 11th and 15th centuries, which show a particular set of interesting dialectal traits.

Paragraph 2: What're You Doing About It?

In the first paragraph, you’ve defined some kind of problem. So what are you doing to address that problem? This is the paragraph where you get to talk about your work in a broad way. While the first paragraph is the place to describe previous work that’s been done (scholarship published, tools written, projects undertaken) with a connection — if somewhat tangential — to your work, the second paragraph is the place for you to mention work that you’re specifically building on, expanding, etc. For instance, if you’re doing an extension of something that your advisor started, you can cite your advisor’s work in the second paragraph. Without getting too sidetracked, if there’s an interesting origin story for the project (e.g. how an international partnership came together), you can briefly mention it here, too.

You may be concerned that your project is in too early a stage to submit to the conference. It’s true that if you just have an idea, and you haven’t done any work yet to test out how feasible it is, and you’re not sure what a rough timeline for it will be, it’s a risk to submit it to the conference. But if your project is underway, you have a good handle on the technology and source materials (as relevant), and what you really need to get it done is a little more time and the motivation of a deadline, you can write your abstract with some degree of future projection. You want to be a little bit subtle about it, so it doesn’t sound too much like vaporware, but you can say things like “this project is analyzing…” — even if, in reality, you’re still in the middle of data cleaning, and the analysis is still a few months away.

Paragraph 3: What're You Actually Going to Present?

After you’ve spent a paragraph describing the broad contours of the project and how it’s going to address the problem you specified, you can wrap up your submission by narrowing your focus to what you’re actually going to present at the conference. The first two paragraphs can be reworked slightly from other forms of writing (e.g. grant proposals), but the third paragraph probably needs to be written specifically for this submission, because it needs to map to the submission type you’ve chosen. If you’re putting in a lightning talk proposal, the third paragraph should be succinct: you only have five minutes to present, and saying you’re going to cover an unrealistic number of things in those five minutes will count against you. For a poster or short paper, I’d suggest limiting the number of topics you say you’ll cover to three, or four at the absolute most if you can signal that one of them is brief and straightforward. If you’re submitting a short paper, think about what you actually could realistically cover in ten minutes. For a poster presentation, what could you fit onto a poster and still have it be readable? This is where the benefits of the poster format really become evident: while you should limit what you claim the poster itself will cover, your individual conversations with people who come up to talk to you during the poster session can vary widely, and may go into much more depth than you would’ve been able to cover in a short paper session.

DH Conference Quirks

The reviewers and attendees for the DH conference may be a little different than what you expect from a disciplinary conference. It’s not just faculty, students who aspire to be faculty, and sometimes librarians: there’s a mix of people in a wide range of job positions, with lots of different types of experience. There’s different kinds of librarians, programmers, sysadmins, general-purpose “alt-ac” folks, editors at presses, grant officers, infrastructure people, etc. Far from everyone is a programmer, or would even necessarily self-identify as “technical”, but DH is the place where you can — and should — be specific about the technology you’re using rather than glossing it over with marketing-speak (“state-of-the-art NLP algorithms!”) or generalities (“some NLP code”). Marketing-speak comes off sounding suspicious, and generalities can come off sounding like you don’t actually know how your project works. You don’t need to go into excruciating detail about every single part of your technical stack, but you shouldn’t be shy about saying “Jupyter notebooks” or “Omeka” or “Spacy”. If you’re collaborating with someone else on the technical aspects of your project, ask for their help in writing a sentence or two about the technology.

Angsting About Metadata

I always forget this aspect of DH conference submissions until I’m actually entering them in the system: you have to select terms from a set of controlled vocabularies. These fluctuate from year to year, and the DH 2020 committee has made some significant changes. You should check out the taxonomies in advance and think about how to frame your paper. Your choice of metadata directly impacts who will review your paper, and the folks who tend to do the “text mining and analysis” papers tend to be different (and more interested in a greater level of technical detail) than the "scholarly editing and editions development, analysis, and methods” crowd, even though both groups may be working with the same texts. But I wouldn’t suggest trying to game the system too far, especially if this is your first conference. If you keep going to the international DH conference, you’ll eventually get a sense for what group is the best fit for your work.

In Conclusion

If you’re at all interested in the “how” of digital humanities, the international DH conference is a wonderful place to geek out on those aspects of your work that would get you yawns or glazed-over stares at your disciplinary conference. There’s a number of formats that are particularly well-suited for work in progress, for graduate students, and for folks new to digital humanities. If you’re in North America, this is the closest the international conference will be until at least 2022, and the organizers of DH 2020 are working hard to make it more affordable than some previous (and future) years. There’s still plenty of time to write up 500 words (one page) before Tuesday, October 22nd — so give it a try!

DLCL ATS round-up, summer 2019

Quinn Dombrowski — Sun, 22 Sep 2019 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · September 23, 2019

In my first summer as the DLCL ATS, I have concluded that the quarter’s reputation as a “slow” time is crucially overlooking all the conferences and events that get scheduled, precisely because it’s supposed to be “slow”. It’s certainly been quieter around the DLCL, with most faculty and students distributing themselves throughout the globe as soon as spring quarter ends, but distance has little impact on projects. Before the fall quarter gets too far underway, here’s a look back at the summer.

Existing projects

Global Medieval Sourcebook

Two undergrads, Nina Du and Tina Zhang, joined the project over the summer, courtesy of CESTA’s summer internship program. The direction I’d suggested for their work turned out to be a dead-end: the Versioning Machine performs well enough on mobile, and making further refinement would involve getting deep into the weeds of CSS. Instead, the students primarily worked on transcription and translation, and Nina did some work on a more mobile-friendly theme for the website. More recently, an opportunity has arisen for us to write a paper about GMS for “Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies”. I’m glad to have a deadline for making some progress on the restructuring of the project, focusing on publishing texts through our institutional digital repository rather than as a stand-alone website.

Entitled Opinions

The podcast wrapped up its latest season in the spring, and the team wanted to wait until the fall to deal with the long-term preservation of the recordings through the Stanford Digital Repository and rethinking the website, so this project has been on hold during the summer. I’m hopeful that new developments around how Stanford IT supports content management systems will give us a middle ground between the current site (run on a library server, with me for all technical support) and a minimal-computing option like Jekyll, which is much better for sustainability, but less intuitive for people to add content.

French Revolution Digital Archive (FRDA)

Officially launching the new Philologic-based text search is still on hold until an associated image collection is put in order. In the meantime, we’ve been talking about what will be involved in digitizing (and getting encoded in TEI) additional volumes of the Archives Parlementaires, which include some delightful and exceedingly miscellaneous content that will be a challenge to write a spec for.

Hebrew NLP

I was happy to meet up with Yael Netzer and Renata Keydar in person at DH 2019 in Utrecht. Other than preparing a description for the Poetic Media Lab website, this project has been mostly quiet over the summer, and I imagine work will resume in the fall.

Multilingual Harry Potter fanfic

With my collaborators away from the Bay Area this summer, I haven’t had the deadlines to make as much progress on this as I hoped. Luckily, CIDR had an intern for part of the summer, Christy Thompson, who helped with some of the data cleaning. She was a real trooper, not even balking when I presented her with OpenRefine and Russian. This project continues to be a fun example to bring up when people asked about the kinds of projects I work on. The response is usually pretty positive (and I learned some useful background on how AO3’s metadata is structured from Faith Lawrence at the DH conference), but at the SlavicDH workshop, I had to pull out my speech about fanfic as the literary studies equivalent of “public history” (h/t Kathleen Fitzpatrick), the value of seeing how monolithic, internationally-distributed corporate-controlled franchises fragment in the hands of readers/viewers in different cultural contexts, and the importance of having relatable multilingual data sets for teaching DH.

While our paths didn’t cross in person at the DH conference, it’s been great to be in touch with Federico Pianzola and Simone Rebora, who are working on “social reading” through looking at user comments at Wattpad. Over the summer, I was also introduced to Mike Kestemont, a medievalist at the University of Antwerp who has worked with his text analysis students on Harry Potter fanfic. More recently, it’s been exciting to learn about the ongoing interest in fanfic at the Berkeley Center for New Media, via Gail De Kosnick, which may present an opportunity for meaningful cross-Bay Area exchanges.

Translation

The LitLab also had a number of summer interns through CESTA, and they worked on expanding our corpus of texts for the translation project, which now includes Korean, German, and Indonesian. The group (Yulia Ilchuk, J.D. Porter, and Antonio Lenzo) has considered how to frame a paper on the topic, perhaps for the special edition of the Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities connected to the workshop where we originally presented the idea.

Rosetta

The paper we submitted on a translation dashboard for literary scholars didn’t make it into the Slavic NLP workshop at ACL, but the feedback we received was useful. The project seems to have mostly been on hold over the summer, but the more I look at the state of NLP for non-English languages with smaller speaker bases, the more I’m convinced of the value of what Rosetta aspires to do for turning literary translations into NLP training data.

Performing Trobar

Marisa Galvez held the first instance of her summer course in France using the new Stanford Sites-based website for students to post final projects. I consulted with a few students about their projects, but on the whole, they seemed interested in creative but non-digital projects. I’m happy to say that the largest technical problem encountered by the course seemed to be the poor wifi in the French castle, rather than anything with the website.

Poetic Media Lab projects

The Poetic Media Lab has been in a period of transition, as last year’s postdoc, Daniel Bush, has been moving to a new position at Stanford, and a number of newer graduate students have been stepping up. I’ve talked with them about everything from WordPress themes and plugins for the “Poetic Thinking” site, to Drupal configuration on the Poetic Media Lab website, to data modeling and how to go from manual notes to structured data, to the eternal “what happens next?” question after you’ve spent a lot of time encoding something in TEI.

Automated vs. manual Russian NER

At DH 2019, Yulia Ilchuk presented findings from comparing networks based on the hand-collected named (and unnamed) entities collected by her research assistant, vs. the results from the Natasha rule-based named-entity recognition library for Russian. Chatting with other Slavists at the conference pointed us towards other tools that may perform better for Russian named-entity recognition. As part of the new Russian NLP research unit, we will be collecting information about libraries and tools relevant to Russian NLP, along with reviews about how well they perform under different conditions.

Palladio bricks

The CIDR developer team had an opening in their schedule between work cycles on their major projects, and have recently been able to spend a little time helping update Palladio from using the deprecated bower package manager for deployment, to using npm, and addressing a number of other issues related to out-of-date libraries. Simon Wiles has done an absolutely heroic job working through dependencies and untangling the underpinnings of Palladio. While it’s not as exciting as a release with new features, making these changes are a necessary step for new developments, including documenting Palladio bricks and potentially adding new visualization and analysis components.

Tools for Japanese text analysis

This project has been quiet over the summer, though I’ve been keeping tabs on developments in Japanese DH, and Stephanie Santschi’s DH 2019 presentation on wrangling bilingual XML records for a Hokusai project at the British museum was fascinating. I read and gave feedback on the DLSS SUL Text Search Study Report, which includes a reference to building out support for incorporating Chinese-Japanese-Korean OCR into the search functionality as a “high-impact/longer-term” priority. More recently, Japanese curator Regan Murphy Kao and I have started thinking about how to lay the groundwork for an event with a digital humanities component in 2024 for the hundredth anniversary of the Immigration Act of 1924.

New projects

Bible fanfic

German curator Kathleen Smith connected me with Biblical studies professor Michael Penn this summer, in relation to a course he’s teaching this fall on "What Didn't Make It into the Bible?". Now that I’ve gotten the hang of scraping and cleaning data from fanfic sites, it was easy to grab the metadata from the “Bible” fandom on fanfiction.net and the Russian fanfic archive I’ve been working with, and put together a few visualizations for him. (Sadly, the Bible is not a fandom in my Italian fanfic archive.)

Book Haven

Cynthia Haven’s long-running blog needed a few tweaks — one of which was easy, though the other is looking more complicated. In the medium term, I’d like to get it moved onto a centrally-managed and supported environment, rather than being a stand-alone site. I’m hopeful that the changes to how Stanford IT supports content management systems will help make it a smooth transition.

Machine learning + medieval

By the time I got involved with the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (CMEMS) group last year, they’d already booked all the talks for the academic year. This time, I’m looking forward to being on campus on more Wednesdays for CMEMS lunch talks, and I’ll be giving one on my birthday in the spring. I’d like to try out some machine learning on the handwriting of the Old Novgorod birchbark letters (which might have some value as a library AI experiment as well), but I’ve still got most of the year to sort it out.

One of my most exciting (re)discoveries of the summer was Transkribus. It didn’t seem that relevant to me when I first encountered it as a transcription environment, but new machine learning models that they’ve released for Fraktur and medieval Slavic manuscripts get truly magical results. I demo them every chance I get, and I think they could have a transformative impact on collections with a lot of these materials.

Workshops

CIDR doesn’t run its workshop series over the summer, but at the beginning of September, I was at Princeton for a few days co-teaching the technical hands-on workshops at a Slavic DH event we co-organized with them. This year’s focus on images was less relevant for Stanford’s Slavic faculty and grad students, but I’ll be reusing some of the materials in CIDR workshops later this year. The Slavic DH event also introduced me to a number of folks interested in joining the Russian NLP research unit, and it’ll be great to have their perspectives and experiences in that group.

Writing

My tutorial on Jupyter Notebooks for Programming Historian is currently in review, after a substantive rewrite during the summer. I’m pretty pleased with the new version, which incorporates some Italian Harry Potter fanfic metadata. Once this tutorial is out, I plan to use it as a prerequisite for more language-specific text analysis tutorials.

I participated virtually in a tutorial write-a-thon as part of the Language Acts and Worldmaking project at Kings College London. The tutorial was too ambitious: I was trying to write something on how to create word vectors for texts in non-English languages, but after some useful feedback, I scoped it down to an overview of text cleaning/pre-processing needed for non-English languages. The tutorial is currently under review and should be published later this year or early next year.

There were over 90 submissions to the the “Debates in DH: Pedagogy” volume, and I was excited to learn this summer that mine was accepted. The organization and abstracts for the whole book were recently sent out, and I wonder if my piece on the non-English DH course I taught last winter is going to be a little bit of an outlier (particularly in its section), but I’m happy there’ll be something in the volume that focuses on language.

Talks and events

In July, I talked about the importance of strengthening international collaboration and establishing a network of peer review that extends outside the US if Slavic DH is going to survive, as part of a Slavic DH panel at the international DH conference in Utrecht. I also co-presented a poster for DH-WoGeM, which won the innovative poster award. Late that month, I led a discussion about what affiliation with DARIAH might look like, at the ACH conference in Pittsburgh — and also brought along Dr. Cheese Bones, the skeleton poster. I’ve written more about those conferences on the Stanford DH blog.

Working groups & organizations

For DH-WoGeM, over the summer I wrote and revised a proposal for the group to become an official Special Interest Group (SIG) of ADHO. I’ve also been working with Zhenya Samoilova on preparations for an international survey next year about work/life balance and caring (childcare, elder-care, self-care, etc.) responsibilities in DH. Last week I led another round of the “becoming a parent in DH” discussion.

The Six Septembers: Mathematics for the Humanist reading group got underway this summer, and we’re halfway through the book. Setting up even brief synchronous check-in meetings has been really helpful for actually making me sit down and read through things like basic explanations of linear algebra. It seems like there’s interest in the group continuing even after we finish the book in December, trying to apply some of the underlying principles we’ve learned as we work through actual equations and algorithms used in DH.

Over the summer, I’ve been working on preparations for the Russian NLP research unit. It turns out that we’re not the only people who’ve given some thought to adapting David Bamman’s BookNLP for another language: Patrick Burns (of the Classical Language Toolkit) has an interest in doing it for Latin. If this works out, I’d love to expand it to other languages in the DLCL, so thinking about the project in a more generalized way makes a lot of sense.

Between the pre-conference workshop at DH 2019 on DH in non-Latin scripts, various conversations with folks working on non-English texts, accumulating a list of Jupyter notebooks in a variety of human and computer languages, and talking to other non-English folks about creating a space for that work at the next ACH conference, I think we’re beginning to reach a critical mass for visible DH work in other languages. One of our follow-up steps from the DH 2019 pre-conference workshop was to launch a website and mailing list for multilingual DH, which just debuted this morning. We’ve also begun talking about putting together a proposal for an ADHO SIG for multilingual DH, as well as a DARIAH working group: the former comes with a guaranteed workshop at the conference, and the latter comes with funding opportunities.

It’s been a busy summer on the GO::DH exec board, where we’ve been working on a proposal for the group to become an official Constituent Organization of ADHO. We’re also in the early planning stages for “Around DH 2020”, which will feature a write-up of a DH project somewhere in the world, every week, all year. We plan to have monthly “state of DH in…” pieces that take a broader view of the field (in a region, in a discipline, in a language, etc). Relatedly, we’re working with Melissa Terras to revisit the still-widely-cited “Quantifying DH” infographic from 2012, using more inclusive metrics that better capture the activity going on around the world. I’m hoping to involve my grad student colleagues in writing some of these pieces next year.

The Textile Makerspace was on hiatus for much of the summer, but we’ve recently posted our fall hours. In October, we’ll have a special focus on Halloween costumes; in November, it’ll be reusable holiday gift bags and holiday presents. Anyone with an interest in textiles (including knitting, crochet, and our vinyl cutter for making stickers or iron-on designs) is welcome to come by and learn, and work on a project. We’ve got patterns for all genders and sizes, as well as a great new guide to clothes hacking by Kirin Makker, Grace Hammett, Ethan Leon, & E. Ainsley Rhodes.

Colleagues

It’s wonderful to be starting the year with all the ATS positions filled: Josh Quan joined CIDR as the IRISS (social science) ATS at the beginning of the summer, and Marie Saldaña started her new role as History ATS at the beginning of September. I’m really looking forward to having another DH ATS to work with on helping to build up the DH community at Stanford.

[CANCELED] November 2019 DH Happy Hour

Quinn Dombrowski — Wed, 18 Sep 2019 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · September 19, 2019

Date/Time: Thursday, 21 November 2019 - 4:00pm to 5:00pmLocation: The Treehouse

The November DH Happy Hour has been canceled due to the special meeting of the Faculty Senate about the future of the Stanford University Press. Please join us in January!

October 2019 DH Happy Hour

Quinn Dombrowski — Wed, 18 Sep 2019 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · September 19, 2019

Date/Time: Thursday, 17 October 2019 - 4:00pm to 5:00pmLocation: The Treehouse

Join colleagues from Stanford's digital humanities community for drinks and friendly conversation at The Treehouse!

Technical enough

Quinn Dombrowski — Mon, 02 Sep 2019 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · September 3, 2019

One of the most memorable panels at ACH was the one with DH Developers talking about how they got to where they are. Matthew Lincoln, Zoe LeBlanc, Rebecca Sutton Koeser, and Jamie Folsom all came to their careers in different ways, and work under different conditions. Even the largest shop (Scholars' Lab), with enough staff to have "junior" and "senior" developer roles, feels small, and everyone seemed interested in cultivating more of a community that crosses institutional boundaries. Some folks, including Rebecca, have begun to get involved with the emerging Research Software Engineering scene in the US. At the end, they called for more developers to tell their "origin stories", referencing the 2013 "Speaking in Code" workshop.

I've gone back and forth on whether to write one. Stanford has DH developers (2.5 of them, putting us among the mid-size shops), and I'm not one of them. It's not just a matter of titles: what they know, what they do, and how they work is very different. In my previous job, I kept hearing from my boss that I wasn't technical enough. As supportive as I am of the idea behind the Research Software Engineer movement, the name makes me shudder every time because “Software Engineer” was the title my boss held up as a marker of superiority over all those humanists writing spaghetti code, who don’t know how to properly engineer things. Which is to say, even if I had been able to make time on nights and weekends to become “more technical”, it wouldn’t be enough to get any respect.

I’ve never felt technical enough to stray anywhere close to titles like “developer”, “programmer”, “hacker”, but looking back over the long arc of my involvement with technology, being one has never been my goal (save a brief pubescent fascination with black hat hackers in the mid-90’s). Instead, I’ve just wanted to do things that were only feasible using technology, and I learned what I needed to reach those goals. My father telecommuted for a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company, which meant I was lucky to have technology around the house in a way none of my peers did. I learned how to defrag hard drives, or back up computers using 3.5” diskettes, because I wanted money for doing extra chores, and it was more interesting than folding and organizing my father’s socks. I figured out how to replace a sound card when ours broke, and my computer games weren’t the same without it, but getting around to the repair wasn’t as serious a priority for my parents as it was for me. When I got stuck on my games, I learned how to go onto CompuServ and VERY QUICKLY find the hints I needed, because it was pay-per-mintute. Later, when we got “Internet-In-A-Box” (featuring the Mosaic browser), I wanted to find other Star Trek fans, and learned about the Web and Gopher. When I got into manga and anime, I could find episode descriptions in English, and fan-subbed clips in Japanese — so much easier than trying to convince a parent to drive me a few towns over to the one comic book store that sometimes had a couple imports from Japan. I built an anime fan site for my final project for HTML class in 6th grade (complete with a beautiful starry background that made the text unreadable) — then, when I forgot my disk at home the day the project was due, I convinced my teachers to let me spend the whole day in the computer lab, where I recreated the yearlong project from scratch.

I first learned XSLT first from David Birnbaum, whose digital medieval Slavic projects (now up at http://obdurodon.org/) were an inspiration. I wanted to do that with texts of my own choosing. (Doing XSLT first was a decision with long-term consequences; now that I’m working with Python, I’ve realized the underlying concepts and structures I expect from XSLT just aren’t there. But it was the best option available at the time to people with my background and interests.) I discovered Drupal 4 when I wanted to create a community and research oriented portal for Slavic studies in 2005; I settled on it over PHP-Nuke and ran it locally using XAMPP. Life got easier with the introduction of Drupal 5, and the first sites that got far enough to go into production were in Drupal 6, which was released in 2008.

What’s never worked for me is learning things because I “should”. In the second grade gifted program, we were taught BASIC. I had some vague ideas about wanting to use it to make text adventure games, or educational games to help my sister learn to read, but wasn’t quite able to work out the details of how you’d map out a narrative more complex than the lesson examples and translate that to code. I quickly lost interest.

I wrote a book on Drupal for digital humanities without knowing either PHP or SQL, even after attempting to struggle through various O’Reilly books on the topics. But I didn’t need them: the whole point of the book was that non-technical scholars could use Drupal to build complex web-based projects without writing any code.

I took a Python class as part of my MLIS, and learned very little. The major takeaway of the class was that programming is hard and you have to be exceedingly specific in your instructions — but, once again, there was a gap between the programs we re-write ourselves from the textbook into the IDE, and anything that would actually be useful. The dire warnings I saw about Unicode issues in Python 2 were also uninspiring.

I made the acquaintance of CSS when I started a post-student job in Web Services at the University of Chicago. I spent the weeks before Christmas 2006 adding Lightbox tags to thumbnail image links for the Oriental Institute website. It wasn’t that I didn’t see the applicability of CSS — CSS Zen Garden sold me on that, and everything Web Services made looked very nice. I just hated it. It was extremely fiddly and had these browser-specific quirks, the syntax never stuck in my head, and it requires a level of attention to detail that has always been a challenge for me. I developed a “minimalist aesthetic” because a lot of CSS just didn’t seem worth the hassle. To this day, I try to avoid it like the plague. And don’t get me started on Javascript: been there, tried those tutorials, it never stuck — and customizing what I could get out of various boxes hardly seemed worth the extra whiz-bang.

No PHP, no SQL, no Python, no Javascript, and a blood feud with CSS. HTML since childhood, traces of XSLT, and site-building with content management systems, the major one approaching end-of-life (September 2021 for Drupal 7). A smattering of weirdly specific facts about high-performance computing, but without the ability to put together a full workflow that ends with monitoring a running job. Pretty conclusively not a DH developer, right?

One of my concerns in applying for my current job was that it would just be the same kind of DH work I’d been doing before: building and maintaining websites. I was delighted to discover during the interview process that that wasn’t necessarily the case: this job is to help faculty and students in my division to make good technical choices for their projects, and work with them to realize those projects. For me,that meant was doing fewer websites (in my year in this job, I haven’t started a single website that wasn’t either a static site, or fully maintained technically by our amazing central Web Services group), and more things that look like gathering research materials, transforming them into data, and analyzing that, in a way that can actually be finished, liberating both scholar and DH staff to move on to new things.

When I started this job, I was most definitely not technical enough for the sorts of things I hoped to do. But I’ve learned, and the beauty of the Academic Technology Specialist position, which I’ve heard described as “the best dead-end job you’ll ever have”, is that the lack of anyone to impress for the next promotion means that you’re free to learn things through all sorts of means. This year, learning has often meant publicly performing ignorance: on Twitter, at the Lit Lab, with my actual DH Developer colleagues. It’s meant asking “and then what do you do?” in an attempt to pin down a workflow left implicit, and organizing a math reading group in response to the Nan Z. Da article criticizing, among other things, the math and stats knowledge of people doing the kind of work I want to undertake. (Guilty as charged! Time to fix that.) Having this kind of freedom is a rare luxury, and as I’ve learned things I’ve tried to document as much as possible — writing heavily annotated Jupyter notebooks, creating lists of resources, writing blog posts, starting mailing lists. I’ve got a Programming Historian lesson on Jupyter Notebooks currently in review. My hope is that others can use my public learning-it-the-hard-way into learning it more easily and more privately.

I still don’t know if I count as a DH Developer, but in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at Stanford, I’m the closest thing they’ve got. I get stuck, ask questions, ask for help from colleagues who actually know how to code. Sometimes the answer has to be, “If you really want to build this, you’ll need to apply for a grant, or submit your project to a CIDR Developer CFP, because this isn’t feasibly something I’ll be able to do for you.” But in most cases, I’ve been able to figure something out, with a little (or a lot) of help from a broad network of colleagues. And as I finish writhing this on a train en route to the Princeton Slavic DH workshop ("Digital Humanities and Visual Resources: The Material and Digital Lives of Eastern European and Russian Artifacts"), that’s what I’m really hoping to convey this week: you don’t necessarily have to be your idea of “technical” to undertake this work — by becoming part of a community, you can make it work with curiosity, persistence, and being technical enough.

(Thanks to Rebecca Sutton Koeser for her post last week, "Still Speaking in Code", for nudging me to write this.)

To DH and ACH with a Skeleton in Tow

Quinn Dombrowski — Sun, 28 Jul 2019 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · July 29, 2019

July was the month of digital humanities conferences, with DH 2019 in Utrecht, closely followed by ACH 2019 in Pittsburgh. I was fortunate enough to attend both, and the experience has left me reflecting on the different shapes that community takes within digital humanities.

My DH 2019 started with a workshop on doing DH in non-Latin scripts, which left me grateful that — other than the occasional Unicode issue — the script isn't a major challenge for doing work on Russian. The workshop mostly focused on Near Eastern (often right-to-left) writing systems, with some Chinese, Japanese, and Korean as well. While relatively little of it was directly relevant to projects I’m currently working on, I was glad to get a better sense of the current state of the art for optical character recognition, and approaches to text linking, annotation, and display that are geared towards non-Latin alphabets. Despite the linguistic diversity in the room, the workshop attendees had a surprisingly good rapport; many of us went out for drinks together that evening to continue the conversation. We decided to start an ad-hoc working group with a mailing list, a basic home page and a collection of resource lists that we’ll collectively maintain, including the guide to non-English NLP that I initially put together for a talk at UCLA last spring.

The DH pedagogy SIG workshop that I attended the second day also had a global focus, with brief talks that offered perspectives on teaching DH in Nigeria, in China, at a small branch campus near Pittsburgh, and using Jupyter notebooks for scholarly editions. It was striking how similar the stories were: regardless of the country or context, we all face similar challenges of fitting our work into established institutional structures, getting funding, and building community and capacity. No one, it seems, has really gotten these issues figured out, whether DH has been in “happening” at their institution for five years or twenty years. It makes me wonder, as we work towards shaping the various DH goings-on at Stanford into something resembling a more coherent program and community, if we might find value in partnering with another institution to collaborate on workshop curricula, share what’s working, and encourage one another.

DH 2019 was the biggest conference to date for the field, with over a thousand attendees. From the discussions I followed on Twitter, attendees’ experiences varied widely depending on what sessions they went to, and who they talked with. For me, the need for community (and simultaneously, the different ways that those communities are manifested) were major common themes throughout the conference. This included talks by Francesca Morselli about DARIAH working groups, Martin Grandjean on the development of Humanistica and the Francophone DH community, Gimena Del Rio Riande on an agile regional DH alliance within Latin America, Juan Steyn on developments in digital infrastructure in South Africa (which I watched with envy, given the state of DH infrastructure in the US), Felix Ameka on coming up with new frameworks for ethically analyzing data rooted in African culture and norms, and my own panel on Slavic DH with Yulia Ilchuk — where I spoke to the necessity of cultivating relationships with scholars working on the same languages in their countries of origin, if US-based Slavic DH scholars are going to stand a chance of getting tenure doing digital work. (I’ve posted my remarks on that panel, including calling out ASEEES for not doing more to signal support for digital work in Slavic and Eastern European studies.)

While not named explicitly, community was a major theme for the “out-of-the-box” / innovative poster group I helped organize as well. The poster was about DH-WoGeM, a group we brought into being last fall through the act of submitting conference proposals, which left us with a deadline for following through on the things we promised we'd do. We’ve held a number of synchronous, virtual “conversations” about topics including parenthood, happiness, and disability, and are following up on these topics in numerous ways, including a global survey on caring responsibilities in DH (e.g. childcare, caregiving for elderly parents or ill friends, self-care, etc), and a survey on workplace conflict, among others. When I saw there would be an award at DH for “out-of-the-box” or innovative posters, I knew we could win. I sewed the “poster" as a dress made to the measurements of Katie McDonough (my former History ATS colleague, now at the Turing Institute) — and I brought Cheese the Skeleton (so named by my oldest kid when he was 2) all the way to Utrecht to be the “body” of our “embodied DH” poster over the course of the week, when Katie was busy attending talks. If that weren’t enough, for the actual poster session we put out a call on the DH-WoGeM list for anyone who wanted to join us in a bit of cross-dressing with DH-WoGeM fedoras and ties (the latter becoming a most sought-after memento for male allies). This DH-WoGeM poster was one of the most joyful celebrations I’ve ever been involved with at a DH conference, and our quirky skeleton in the “Gender and Intersectional Identities in DH” dress had people taking and posting selfies — even folks who ordinarily would have nothing to do with the topic of gender. Needless to say, we won the innovative poster award hands-down, and will be putting the prize money (thanks, Gale!) towards a DH-WoGeM reception next year at DH 2020.

For me, the latter part of the conference was all meetings, and a reminder of the value of being able to meet in person. Following up on the “DARIAH Beyond Europe” work from last fall, I met with Frank Fischer of DARIAH and Geoffrey Rockwell (whose TAPoR absorbed my DiRT) about ongoing work on the DARIAH “Marketplace”, which draws upon both those projects. I spoke with Polish text analysis folks (including Maciej Eder and Joanna Byszuk) about the history of Slavic DH at the ADHO conference, making that work visible, and establishing more trans-Atlantic ties around non-English text analysis. A group of Russian DH folks (both in and outside of Russia) convened one morning to talk about how we might leverage existing organizations and platforms for Russian DH (such as the ASEEES-based Slavic DH group, the Sistemny Blok website and group, Moscow Higher School of Economics DH mailing list, and the DH Russia sub-organization of EADH) to build connections throughout our community. I met with Paul Spence from Kings College London about his Language Acts and Worldmaking initiative, and with Ashley Sanders-Garcia from UCLA about her work on French and Arabic named-entity recognition in support of identifying named and unnamed historical figures. At the Global Outlook:DH special interest group meeting, I talked about the upcoming “Around DH 2020” and “DH infographic revisited” projects as ways to highlight DH work in less-recognized places around the globe. Barbara Bordalejo (GO::DH president) and I met with Harold Short and Ray Siemens to discuss what would be involved in GO::DH becoming a full constituent organization of ADHO, and left the conversation optimistic about options ahead for GO::DH.

In the context of the various kinds of multilingual, non-English DH work that I support at Stanford, the international DH conference is inarguably the most useful and productive conference to attend. But this year I’ve also finished up a 4-year term on the ACH exec, just as ACH held its first solo conference since it joined up with EADH to start the annual international DH event. I appreciate all the care, thought, and planning that went into conceptualizing a DH conference that, top to bottom, aligns with the values that ACH espouses, including being welcoming to newcomers. Two Stanford students, an undergrad and a co-term, got their work accepted to ACH this year; one of them got a pretty resounding rejection from the DH conference. Roopika Risam, Jennifer Guiliano, Alison Langmaede, and Jessica Otis, along with many others, put a tremendous amount of work into creating and enacting guidelines and support structures for reviewers, presenters, chairs, and attendees, in order to make the conference an encouraging and inclusive environment for all attendees regardless of age, position, gender, race, ability, or background. Creating that kind of an environment has not typically been an indicated priority at the international DH conferences, and I felt that it was important to be there to participate and support ACH in that undertaking.

It was a noticeably different crowd than at DH, and only a small minority of us had been in Utrecht two weeks earlier. There were panels on embodied data, minimal computing, eco-critical DH and environmental justice, as well as Latinx DH and Asian/American DH. Representatives from US-based professional societies talked about those organizations’ roles in developing and advocating for guidelines for promotion and tenure involving digital work. There was a panel of DH developers talking about their experiences and career paths, which left me thinking a lot about how I structure my own time as, essentially, a DH dev shop of one for my division. Alex Gil organized an impromptu hackathon to document the demonstrations and resignation of the governor in Puerto Rico, there were delightful and creative installations (including a vibrating, tentacled “joy collector”), and the “newcomers' dinner” that ACH has traditionally organized at the DH conference. The connections I made as a "newcomer" (of a sort) at DH 2013 have been the basis for wonderful collaborations in the years since, and I look forward to seeing how things evolve with the new friends I made over dinner this year.

One of my panels, “Whose Infrastructure Is It Anyway?”, was designed to help us get un-stuck with regard to how we should organize ourselves in the US to engage with DARIAH in a collective way, rather than just as individuals. The panel was originally going to be a debate between me and Glen Worthey about how best to go about doing this, until his pre-prepared statement advocating for DARIAH affiliation through ACH convinced me of his position. Instead, with help from Thea Lindquist from the University of Colorado and Abigail Potter from the Library of Congress, plus a small crowd of intrepid attendees who were willing to talk about international infrastructure during the very last break-out session on Friday, we collectively talked through pros and cons of different approaches to collectivity. We considered groups as diverse as ACH, DLF, CLIR, and — more broadly — organizations that bring together different kinds of institutions, such as the American Association of Community Colleges. We’ll have a lot to mull over on our next call with DARIAH in early August.

My other panel, "Lived Experiences: Gender and DH Roundtable", finally brought together in person most of the people involved in organizing the DH-WoGeM conversation to date (Andie Silva, Tassie Gniady, Jen Guiliano, and me), to talk about our work to provide a space for people to safely and openly talk about their experiences with parenthood, biological messiness, precarity, toxic workplace situations, and physical and mental disability. Cheese the Skeleton — who had been specially invited to ACH after her widely-tweeted appearance at DH — joined us, and I talked about how such a “charismatic mascot” can make the difference for people’s willingness to engage on social media with anything related to issues of gender and DH. Anne Cong-Huyen provided a counterpoint to the loosely-organized institutionally-focused work of DH-WoGeM through her tight-knit Situated Critical Race and Media (SCRAM) group. It was inspiring to see a full room of attendees there for the panel, and talking with one another during the Q&A about their own experiences. By the end, I heard from a number of folks, who had been watching the group from a distance, that they were interested in getting involved, which is exactly what we need in order to be able to build on the work to date. The DH-WoGeM group had the great fortune to have Jojo Karlin in the audience, capturing the moment in a beautiful watercolor. That painting is one of the most incredible presents I’ve ever been given.

As much as the DH conference will likely remain the most effective place for me to go to further non-English DH work — if only as a consequence of the significantly greater number of participants from countries that are not primarily Anglophone — it was wonderful to talk in person with a handful of other folks at ACH who don’t primarily work on English. Jennifer Isasi is on the editorial board of the Spanish edition of Programming Historian; Hannah Alpert-Abrams has done work on Nahuatl OCR and studies the circulation of colonial texts in Latin America; Zoe LeBlanc works with historical media in Arabic; Patrick Burns wrangles the Classical Languages Toolkit. And even among the Anglophone folks, there were unexpected gestures of awareness and engagement — like Patrick Juola, giving a talk he worked on with David Berdik (as David was unable to make it), being very direct in qualifying his results as applying to modern English blog posts, and offering to expand the analysis to include other languages, genres, etc. if other people are interested in putting together the data. (It’s an offer I’ll likely take him up on.) All these conversations have me thinking that it’ll be important to work with these and other colleagues to proactively make a place for non-English DH work at the next ACH conference, through a panel and/or workshop. There may not be as many of us in the US as there are English-language folks, but there’s enough of us to form the nexus of a community.

The deadline for proposals for the DH 2020 conference is in mid-October — just a couple weeks after the start of the academic year at Stanford. Attending both DH and ACH has been a good reminder of how valuable and meaningful it is to engage with the DH community at large, beyond any particular institution or academic discipline. I’m looking forward to attending DH 2020 in Ottawa — and, with any luck, bringing more of my faculty and grad student colleagues into these conversations and communities as well. And for the larger pool of DH folks at Stanford — including undergrads — I'm looking forward to raising awareness about ACH 2021 as details emerge.

DLCL ATS round-up, spring 2019

Quinn Dombrowski — Sun, 23 Jun 2019 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · June 24, 2019

My first academic year at Stanford has come to a close, ushering in a summer that promises to be surprisingly busy, despite the relatively empty hallways and offices around campus. Working in central IT, I’d forgotten what it’s like to be so directly impacted by the rhythms of the school year, and the way everyone heads overseas as soon as finals wrap up.

Summer is already underway, with CESTA’s undergraduate interns starting yesterday, and deadlines drawing near for finishing things in time for the international DH conference. But before I get too far into things this summer, here’s what I’ve been up to over the course of the spring.

Existing projects

Global Medieval Sourcebook

The Global Medieval Sourcebook has taken an exciting turn. After mulling over the possibility of applying for a Mellon grant to build the infrastructure to become a (hopefully self-sustaining) publisher, the project team has instead decided to focus our collective efforts on research rather than all the ongoing work involved in soliciting, editing, and publishing translations as the project’s primary goal. We’ve started conversations with the Stanford Digital Repository (SDR) about what it might look like to publish each text and translation in the repository with a full MODS record and as much metadata as the team is able to provide. This could potentially bring medieval texts into conversation with modern research questions and materials. Texts disseminated in this way would share search results with a wide range of content that shares similar metadata in contexts like SearchWorks and WorldCat. By no longer focusing on maintaining our own infrastructure, it frees us up to focus on actually doing computationally-supported research on these and other texts.

In the short term, we’ll continue with the Drupal site until we work out how to publish texts through SDR, and potentially supplemented by a static HTML display using Versioning Machine. Versioning Machine provides a great interface for comparing different versions of a text (including translations, textual variants, etc.), but it wasn’t designed for use on mobile. A trip to UCLA this quarter brought to my attention the growing set of folks who are engaging with digital humanities methods — including at community colleges in the US, and in the Global South — without access to a laptop and the screen space that comes with it. Add to that the number of people who have more frequent access to a mobile device than a laptop (including myself, during my morning commute), and it’s gotten me thinking about how the usability of even our “easy” web-based tools and interfaces start to fall apart in a major way in a mobile environment. It’s an issue I want to pursue further — “how does it work on mobile?” has become my second predictable question, after “does it work on languages besides English?”. Luckily, the Global Medieval Sourcebook project has two summer interns through CESTA, and one of them will be working on designing, and hopefully implementing, changes to the CSS/JS in the Versioning Machine code to make it more usable on mobile devices.

Entitled Opinions

This podcast just wrapped up its most recent season. It’s published through a Drupal website hosted on library servers, but being Drupal means that it needs weekly- to monthly-updates year-round, which doesn’t make sense for a site that’s only actively used three months out of the year. The migration from their previous website to Drupal was a painful one that was poorly managed on the technical side, so there’s some understandable reluctance to migrate again. I’m hoping to spend a bit of time this summer looking at Jekyll-based podcast website options, and put together a proof-of-concept for how that could work as site infrastructure. We’ve also kicked off discussions with SDR to get all the episodes and associated metadata into the repository — a much better place to keep the files safe than everyone having their own backup on their own laptop. This project has been a good reminder that when it comes to digital humanities projects, a lot of effort can get poured into technical systems whose purpose is, fundamentally, to mitigate distrust between the content and the technical sides of the project team. Addressing that underlying issue is a prerequisite for simplifying the technology in ways that make everyone’s life easier.

Performing Trobar

This quarter I got a Stanford Sites website set up for Performing Trobar, and I’m working on migrating the student final projects (but not some of the more ephemeral comments, responses, and other material that is more reflective of the site’s use as a homegrown LMS) to the new site. I’m also migrating a directory of song performances. My goal is to have it up and running by the time this summer’s iteration of the class starts, at which point I’ll be available via Zoom as a technical consultant for the students as they’re working on their own projects.

French Revolution Digital Archive (FRDA)

We’re making progress on replacing the current bespoke search interface for the French Revolutionary Digital Archive with a landing page that highlights current research on the data, a text search for the Archives Parlementaires using Philologic, and a “coming soon” placeholder for the current image search. We’ve considered the Library’s Spotlight exhibit-building platform for it, but it’s not really an exhibit, it’s a data collection, and we want things like CoInS embedded metadata so that people can get meaningful results from saving the records to Zotero. We’ve started experimenting with Stanford Sites as the infrastructure for that, but I’ll be spending more time on it this summer and into the fall.

Marine Biology Theses

By the end of last quarter, I got enough of a proof-of-concept for Amanda Whitmire to present at a conference. This quarter, my CIDR developer colleague Scott Bailey picked up the torch and has helped her try other approaches to getting the data she needs. My role in the technical development of this project may be finished, but I'm looking forward to helping her sew a thematic dress for a conference where she’s giving a talk on the project this fall!

Bulgarian Dialectology as Living Tradition

My longest-running project got one of its first publications this quarter, with a paper accepted to “Slavic and East European Information Resources” describing the site, how we built it (including a frank discussion of labor issues), and where we see it going now that it’s almost “done”. It was published last week, and you can find an open-access version on Humanities Commons.

Hebrew NLP

Three months later, I’m embarrassed to admit that I’m still dragging my feet on learning the Hebrew alphabet. This project has, however, taught me about the Python package Pandas for data wrangling (including its bizarre propensity for eating long strings if you don’t tell it not to), as well as orthographic challenges for correct Hebrew lemmatization (an unpaired quotation mark indicates abbreviations). I’ve been very grateful for Yael Netzer from the Department of Computer Science at Ben Gurion University on this project; her knowledge of both Python and Hebrew have been invaluable.

Through this project I have also discovered the computer-generated poetic wonders that result from sticking topics generated by Mallet into Google Translate as entire lines, forcing the algorithm to attempt to wrestle semantics out of lists of words: "In the end, he was not a crossroads, and there came a name that recalls the hour we were”, "It is not about whether or not an event is what you remember", and "No I am the one who is right to know that omnipotent with anyone can be either garlic or".

Multilingual Harry Potter fanfic

This quarter we’ve started some work on the paper we hope to submit to Journal of Cultural Analytics this fall, about the metadata in Harry Potter fanfic across English, Italian, and Russian corpora. This forced me to sit down and actually figure out web scraping using the Beautiful Soup package. I found it really hard to understand at first, but once I realized I could select things using CSS syntax, things fell into place. The web scraping part of the project inspired me to send a thank-you email to Mary Mathiesen, the elementary school teacher who first taught me HTML.

This summer we’re going to have a lot of data cleaning and normalization to do. The Russian corpus seems to use an uncontrolled vocabulary for indicating character names, so there’s been wild variation (over 3,000 unique names) for Masha Gorshkova to sort out, compared to about 90 in the English corpus, and 184 in the Italian. Once the data has been formatted correctly, we’ll be able to generate a table for each language showing relative character power/agentivity in relationships (i.e. which character gets listed first in pairings); Mark Algee-Hewitt performed an act of true art and craftsmanship in putting together the code for it in R, and I can only dream of being that fluent with any coding language someday. While we’re focusing on the metadata for this phase of the analysis, we’re just starting to think of the kinds of questions we’ll be able to answer in the second phase, when we scrape the full texts of the stories themselves. That work will be the basis for a future LitLab pamphlet. To celebrate the end of the school year and the work we’ve done so far, Masha, Antonio Lenzo (Italian), and Steele Douris (English) and I got together in the Textile Makerspace and sewed Hogwarts clothes. This alone is making me look forward to future presentations!

Translation

I co-presented some initial findings from the translation project with Yulia Ilchuk, Antonio Lenzo, and J.D. Porter at the "Workshop on Digital Humanities to Preserve Knowledge and Cultural Heritage” (as described in this previous blog post). We ended up having to simplify our corpus to 20th century short-stories (including, but not limited to, mystery/noir), to be able to get enough unique authors and translators. In the process of working on this project, I also discovered — to my initial chagrin, and then delight — that what we were doing fits squarely in the field of corpus-based translation studies, making the project less novel, but giving it other work to be in dialogue with.

New projects

Rosetta

The "Workshop on Digital Humanities to Preserve Knowledge and Cultural Heritage” introduced me to the Rosetta project, which is working to use aligned translations of literary text as the basis of developing NLP tools for under-resourced languages. Zheng Zhang (PhD student in Natural Language Processing at Université Paris-Saclay) stayed at CESTA for a month after the conference, and I helped with paragraph alignment for their Slavic corpora. We discussed what a translation studies dashboard might look like for bringing differences within an aligned corpus to the attention of translation studies scholars. I hope to contribute to this project more going forward, and see whether it might be of use to translation studies folks in DLCL.

Poetic Media Lab projects

I’ve started working with a number of students affiliated with Amir Eshel’s Poetic Media Lab group on their individual projects, while they have time for them over the summer. These include overhauling the Poetic Media Lab website, looking into Arabic OCR and diaspora mapping for a project involving Palestinian literature, and exploring ways we can contribute to Prof. Obed Lira’s project on the Florentine codex (described in the blog post on the "Workshop on Digital Humanities to Preserve Knowledge and Cultural Heritage”).

Automated vs. manual Russian NER

Around a year ago, Yulia Ilchuk worked with a student to manually count all instances of character co-occurrence in Anna Karenina. I’ve been investigating what the results look like if you attempt to use a Russian-specific named-entity recognition library, Natasha, to do the same thing. One issue that we’ve quickly discovered is that it doesn’t work at all for identifying characters who aren’t named as such — servants, sisters, etc. What we really need is something closer to the Russian version of David Bamman’s annotated dataset of literary entities, and I'm looking into what it might take to build a similar annotated corpus as a training set for a tagger.

Palladio Bricks

Did you know that the DH visualization tool Palladio can be embedded in any website, because the visualizations are all generated client-side? For a couple years, there’s been work towards this concept of “Palladio bricks”, but it’s needed a little more work and a lot more documentation before it can really be promoted. I’ve started working on the documentation side, hoping to get something usable done this summer, and my CIDR developer colleagues may be lending a hand with a few specific tasks on the coding end.

Tools for Japanese text analysis

I’ve been working with Japanese curator Regan Murphy Kao on a Jupyter notebook that does simple segmentation for Japanese text, which makes it feasible for scholars to use tools like Voyant and Mallet for Japanese. We’re also looking at ways of incorporating full-text search for the Magario family dairies, some of which have been transcribed, but the transcription isn’t currently compatible with the infrastructure that the library uses for full-text search.

Workshops

This quarter I gave two workshops through CIDR’s workshop series: one on Tableau (based on these two tutorials by Miriam Posner), and one on Cytoscape (based on material from last quarter’s class and these three tutorials by Miriam Posner).

Writing

I submitted an abstract to a “Debates in DH” volume on pedagogy, about the “Digital Humanities Across Borders” multilingual DH course last quarter. They received over 90 submissions, which has delayed the timeline for responses, but I hope to hear back about it this summer.

After last quarter’s course was over, I wanted to look into making some of the materials I prepared available in a more widely-usable way. I ended up approaching Programming Historian about it, and started working on developing a lesson on Jupyter notebooks, as a necessary first step towards some of the language-specific work I’ve been doing. I’ve been co-writing it with Tassie Gniady and David Kloster from IU, and we’re close to being done with our first draft.

Talks and events

In addition to the translation talk mentioned above, I gave a talk at this year’s Stanford Drupal Camp (now rebranded Web Camp), "Academic research sites: where do we go from here?", about the mismatch between Drupal 8 and the needs of digital humanities research projects, and how Backdrop is a better fit. It was heartening to see Web Services folks in the audience, who were interested in how they and Stanford Sites can serve the needs of researchers, even as they plan a Drupal 8 migration for the system.

I also participated in a “Digital Brandes” hackathon at UC Berkeley, where I took a multilingual approach to the task and looked at his work in translation.

Miriam Posner and Chris Johanson invited me to their DH pedagogy course at UCLA, where I gave a talk about doing multilingual digital humanities, or at least supporting students who want to work in other languages. In the process, I developed a list of multilingual NLP resources for a wide range of living and dead languages.

I wrapped up the quarter with the Text Technologies “Women and Gender Minorities in DH” workshop at CESTA, which I’d been helping organize through the winter and spring. We were able to bring in a wonderful group of guest speakers from around the country (with a few international participants) for a thought-provoking and engaging event. Before the workshop formally started, I ran a special session of the Textile Makerspace with Miriam Posner and her daughter Dora (both sewists), and we continued the joy of making during the workshop with the vinyl cutter that now resides in the Textile Makerspace. On the last day of the workshop, I gave a personal talk called “Bridges”, about identifying as non-binary, and the ways that language, gender, sexuality, and family impose constraints that we have to work within. We’ll be publishing videos from that workshop over the summer.

Working groups

The DH-WoGeM (Women and Gender Minorities in DH) working group has continued throughout the spring, making preparations for presentations at the international DH conference and at ACH over the summer.

During the fracas over Nan Z. Da’s article “The Computational Case against Computational Literary Studies”, it occurred to me that her critique of the mathematical and statistical competency of people who use computational and quantitative methods in DH absolutely applies to me. For years I’ve been meaning to read Six Septembers: Mathematics for the Humanist by Stephen Ramsay and Patrick Juola, but never got around to it. So, if only to hold myself accountable for doing it, I sent out a poll on Twitter to see who might be interested in a reading group around the book. We’ve got over 50 people (including multiple folks from Stanford) on our Slack channel, annotating the text online using Hypothesis, and coming to monthly synchronous meetings to get through the book between now and December. There’s still time to join, if you’re interested; all the info is on the Six Septembers reading group website.

This quarter I learned that the DLCL funds “research units”: small working groups around a particular topic or area of study. Mae Lyons-Penner put in a proposal that got approved for a graduate reading group around digital humanities, and I’ve attended the first meeting, where we read the first chapter of Andrew Piper’s Enumerations. The students had some questions about his conclusions, wanting to differentiate between the use of single periods and ellipses, whereas he treats ellipses as just a sequence of periods. I inquired with Andrew Piper about it, and hope to have some answers to the students’ questions (about whether the results change if you treat periods and ellipses separately) before the next session.

I also put in a research unit proposal around Russian natural-language processing. The research unit brings together a mix of local grad students and faculty with grad students and faculty in other institutions, who are all using computational text analysis methods on Russian. In addition to holding meetings where we discuss our current work, troubleshoot problems, and discuss details of how to implement certain techniques on Russian, we’re going to work on adapting David Bamman’s BookNLP pipeline for Russian, holding a small hackathon in the winter.

Russian

Speaking of Russian, Rima Greenhill was kind enough to let me audit one of her Russian classes this quarter, to work on recovering some speaking ability with Russian after 13 years of disuse. It was a good, if sometimes frustrating, experience, working on remembering the things I’ve forgotten, and learning things I never quite had down to begin with. My contribution to the Russian cultural night at Russian House was a fashion show of Russian-themed dresses I’ve sewn, and I’m grateful to the other students in the program (and Rima) for modeling.

Global Outlook::DH

This quarter I was elected to the board of the Global Outlook::DH group, which is becoming re-activated after a few quiet years. The group’s focus on highlighting the perspectives of the Global South, and taking a multilingual, international, collaborative approach to DH fits well with the work I’ve been doing in the DLCL, and I’m excited to be part of it.

Textile Makerspace

The Textile Makerspace came into being as something greater than an old computer lab with mostly-not-functioning technology this quarter. I worked with facilities to clean out all the dead computers and equipment, leaving us space for sewing machines and a vinyl cutter. I also replaced the black-and-white film stills on the walls with colorful textiles, embroidery, and other sewing-related items. It’s become a lively space that brings together people from a wide variety of roles, from faculty and grad students to staff and undergrads. During the special event for “Women and Gender Minorities in DH”, I had the chance to talk with Nichole Nomura, a grad student in English, about her background as a maker, and I’m delighted to now have her as the co-director of the Textile Makerspace. We’re going to be exploring options ranging from arts grants to course grants to grad student quality-of-life funds to do more with the Makerspace starting in the fall. The Textile Makerspace will also be included in an upcoming Stanford News article about makerspaces on campus.

Colleagues

Over the course of the spring, I spoke with a number of potential candidates for the History ATS position we currently have open. We had a robust pool of applicants, and are still currently in the interview process. But I’m looking forward to starting the fall with a colleague in history who I can work closely with on building up a digital humanities community at Stanford, beyond our many individual projects.

Brandes in translation: multilingual corpora at the Digital Brandes Hackathon

Quinn Dombrowski — Wed, 22 May 2019 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · May 23, 2019

What do you do when you're invited to a hackathon around a text in a language you can't read? In keeping with my tendency to navigate difficulty by means of additional complications, I added more languages!

Prof. Tim Tangherlini (UCLA) organized the Digital Brandes hackathon at the UC Berkeley Scandinavian department on April 25-26, which brought together the Danish team of Brandes and Danish computational linguistics experts behind an upcoming digital edition of Georg Brandes's groundbreaking work on 19th century literature. While not all the technical folks (which included my CIDR developer colleague Peter Broadwell, Dave Shepherd from UCLA, and Peter Leonard—virtually— from Yale) could read Danish, I was at a double disadvantage by having a background in Slavic (not Scandinavian) linguistics (not literature). The first thing I had to learn was who Georg Brandes was. The second thing I had to learn was what romanticism was, and what followed it, and I'm grateful to Peter Broadwell for his Cliff Notes version thereof.

Not knowing from Danish, Brandes, or 19th century literature, I didn't think I'd be able to get much out of a close examination of Brandes on his own terms, especially when mediated by Google Translate for gisting. But I did quickly discover that the work was widely translated in the half-century after its publication (with more translations subsequently). How accurate are these translations? What, exactly, got translated at the macro level (how many of the six volumes?), the meso level (were chapters or paragraphs omitted?), the micro level (were words or phrases changed in ways that impact readers' understanding of the text?) This sort of translation alignment is one facet of the Rosetta Project I've recently gotten involved with, and I wanted to see how far I could get in replicating it in a short time frame for Brandes.

The first problem with this plan? The hackathon as conceived was intended to apply different DH methodologies and tools (topic modeling, word vectors, Philologic) to the original Danish text, which had been provided in multiple formats (plain text, plain text chunked, TEI-XML). As with so much DH work, my project morphed from being about writing some algorithm that could show off one's skills as a developer (hardly my forte to begin with), into a time-consuming, unglamorous, but very necessary data discovery and remediation job.

Finding translations through a nest of metadata

HathiTrust was my first stop, where I quickly discovered that there are two records for Georg Brandes, and each of these author facets has a different set of languages:

Despite some early musings over working with one of Brandes's other writings (I really wanted to take a look at the Russian and Polish translations of his book on Russia), I realized I'd get the most linguistic overlap sticking to 19th century literature. Tempted as I was by book 5 (French Romanticism, the only volume translated into French), only volumes 1 and 2 of the Russian translation had found their way online, via a moderately blurry PDF that has propagated through all the Russian ebook sites. Add to that the fact that it's the shortest volume at (X) words in the original, and I was sold on "The Emigrant Literature".

Digital humanities work is widely touted for being highly collaborative. Doing multilingual DH, you have to get comfortable asking for help with even the most basic things, like figuring out the title of a text — not to mention more complex evaluations, like telling the difference between not-great OCR and completely unusable garbage OCR. Never have I been more grateful for the network of people with specialist knowledge of obscure things around Stanford than while working on this project. Via our retired Jewish Studies librarian, Zachary Baker, I was able to ask emeritus professor of Armenian James Russell about the one Armenian translation of Brandes in HathiTrust (not 19th Century Literature, but "Armenia and Europe, a Lecture read in Berlin, 2nd February 1903"). Our current Jewish Studies librarian, Eitan Kensky, gave me a rundown on the current state-of-the-art for Yiddish OCR and helped me get a usable plain-text version of a Yiddish translation of 19th Century Literature. What’s more, he was able to map the 11 Yiddish volumes to the 6 original Danish volumes, give me the names of the translators — themselves notable literary critics — and read the introduction, where volume 1 translator Chaim Liberman states that he consulted three translations of Brandes when writing his Yiddish translation, to try to get to the “real Brandes” through the translator signal. (That translation, plus the fact that we have other writings by the translators, has left me wanting to try a Yiddish stylometry project.)

I ended up with seven versions of the text for the hackathon:

Danish (plain text files — but not the ones originally provided for the hackathon; I didn’t want the original text, but the revised edition that was the basis of the translations)
Yiddish (plain text files, one per volume),
English (copied and pasted from the Project Gutenberg HTML, to avoid the line-break artifacts in the plain text version)'
Polish (djvu files from a digital Polish library, converted to plain text using Calibre — a process that completely eliminated the paragraph and chapter breaks)
Russian (blurry PDF, had to be OCR’d)
Spanish (had to be recalled from the UC system's Northern California storage facility by a friend, scanned, then OCR’d)
German (PDFs from HathiTrust with completely unusable Fraktur OCR; re-running Tesseract on them with the fraktur training data had a much better output)

Figuring what text to work with, researching what translations were available, searching for digitized versions, and scanning and OCRing where necessary, probably took in the range of 15-20 hours prior to the hackathon itself.

Text Cleaning The first day of the hackathon was largely dedicated to presentations about the ongoing role Brandes plays in Danish political discourse, the development and state of the Digital Brandes project, an overview of topic modeling for the non-DH attendees from Berkeley's Scandinavian department, and an overview of methods for visualizing and making use of word vectors (e.g. for machine-generation of text) by Peter Leonard, with the caveat that all of Brandes's writings together (under a million words) comprise a small enough corpus that word vectors aren't going to be particularly useful for any kind of analysis.

Meanwhile, I was engaged in light multitasking during these presentations. I'd decided to manually clean up the running page headers in my text files, and split volume one in each of the languages into its constituent chapters. In retrospect, the situation was a good litmus test for where one falls on the humanist / technologist spectrum. It could've been automated, with a set of fuzzy regexes to accommodate the dirty OCR, but figuring out what those regexes should look like would've required more attention and focus (and grumbling and swearing) than would be feasible while multitasking during presentations. Worse, it'd impose a binary status on this aspect of data cleaning: for a given language, it'd be done, or not done. If I ran out of time, I'd have to start jettisoning languages, rather than scoping the project down to the first three or four chapters in each language. I knew I could get enough done if I did it manually; automating it introduced too much uncertainty, and this wasn't a project I planned to do more with, where the work put into automation would pay off at scale.

This process of data cleaning extended into the second day of the hackathon, when the official "hacking" commenced. While my colleagues worked in silence or quiet consultation, I found myself frequently laughing out loud. The Yiddish translators' decision to render "Emigrant Literature" as "French Emigrant Literature" opened the door for all sorts of variations on OCR errors, rendered hilarious by Google Translate.

Frantic inside the immigrant literature (פראַנצו ין ישע עמיגראַנטען ליטעראַטור)
For technical emigrants (פראָנצו זישע עמיגראַנטען ליטעראַטור)
French emigrated liquor store (פראנצױזישע עמיגראנטען ליסעראסור)
Russian emigrant literature (—ראַנצו יז ישע עמיגראַנטען ליטעראַטור)
Annotate emigrant literature (מראַנצו יז ישע עמיגראַנטען ליטעראַטור)
Munches up the big grass of the earth(?!) (מראַנצו יז ישע עמ יגראַנטען לי טעראַטור)

And my two favorites:

"Yeah. Yeah, you emigrants” (פראַנצן יז יע עמיגראַנטען לי מעראַטור) and
"Francis, it is the liquidator” (פראַנצו יז ישע עס י גראַנטען לי עראַטור).

The data cleaning took about seven hours, with half of that time spent multitasking.

Interlude As luck would have it, the 0-2 program at my kids’ daycare closed early the second day of the hackathon to support teacher professional development, so in the afternoon I brought along my junior collaborator, Eliza, who drank a bottle and fell asleep in her stroller while I wrangled the data extraction. Everyone was very kind towards the hackathon’s youngest participant, who woke up in time to sprawl on my lap while I made the visualization, and give her first academic co-presentation on the eve of her first birthday.

Data extraction The data cleaning convinced me of the futility of attempting paragraph alignment (or even paragraph-count alignment) between the texts. Paragraph breaks were lost in converting the Polish text from .djvu, and with the other texts, I’d have needed to write a script to try to get every paragraph onto a single line in the text file. Instead, I decided for an even cruder metric: word counts. They’re not directly comparable across languages (e.g. in Russian and Polish, the grammatical cases and lack of articles

After cleaning up each text and splitting it into chapters, I started copying and pasting each chapter into an online word count tool and manually constructing a table. In that moment, I remembered that I do know how to automate some things, and cobbled together a Jupyter notebook for getting what I needed from my files. Voila — data!

It took about 45 minutes — including a little bit of additional text cleaning — to finish this part of the project, the only code I wrote over the two-day hackathon.

Visualization Earlier in the week, I'd taught a workshop on Tableau — and just previous week, I'd learned some Tableau myself with help from Miriam Posner's wonderful tutorials — so it made an appealing option for doing a visualization of my word count data to use for my final hackathon presentation. Once you've gotten the hang of the major elements of Tableau's visual vocabulary and some UI quirks, putting together new visualizations is quick and easy.

I used the data from the Jupyter notebook to create a heat map table visualization based on the word counts. Putting that together took about 10 minutes (even with my wriggly collaborator periodically requiring attention), which took me up until the beginning of the final presentations.

Presentation For somewhere around 24 hours of work, what I had felt modest, particularly when juxtaposed with word vectors, deep-learning based text generator, or the permutations on topic modeling, or the Philologic instance with Brandes running. It was just a word-count visualization, punctuated by a few examples of the best OCR errors. It’s not, by itself, anything particularly interesting — it’s a distant proxy for what I really would want to look at. It only hinting at the promise of potentially meaningful discoveries that could be possible through much more work. But it was striking that the less-technical Scandinavian scholars seemed to get what I was trying to do, even while appearing to struggle somewhat with how topic modeling or word vectors further scholarship as such. As digital humanists, we commonly fall back on minimizing such questions with words like “exploratory”, but I don’t think that’s a satisfactory answer particularly when presenting outside of DH circles. Andrew Piper’s Enumerations deliberately builds a navigable path through some of these methods for scholars without a technical background, but it’s not something you can easily encapsulate in an answer to a question, or a framing device for a lightning talk. At least for myself, I feel like I need a better set of examples of meaningful — and, if possible, surprising — discoveries that build on digital humanities methods, readily on hand for moments like this.

Post-hackathon I recently finished the aspect of my project that I didn’t have time for during the hackathon itself: using Voyant to compare the translations beyond just the word counts. The distinctive word information is particularly useful: we can see that everything seems to line up through chapter 4, after which point Russian and Polish diverge (together? Note the parallel in some of the not-named-entities like babko/бабушка in Ch. 8) from the rest of the translations, and they start running a chapter behind in named entities (e.g. see констанъ in Russian chapter 8 instead of 7 for constant; элеонора in 9 instead of 8 for eleonore, etc.)

All of the chapter-separated text files for volume 1 are up on Github, along with the Voyant stats, Jupyter notebook, and Tableau file for the visualization. I’ve also stuck in various other text files and PDFs of translations of Brandes’s writing that I came across along the way, but didn’t end up using. Until I hear otherwise from a Scandinavian studies scholar in my division, I think my time with Brandes may have come to an end. Nevertheless, I hope this project and the texts I tracked down may be of value someday for someone else with a longer-term commitment to Brandes and his work.

Graduate DH reading group

Quinn Dombrowski — Wed, 15 May 2019 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · May 16, 2019

Date/Time: Tuesday, 21 May 2019 - 5:00pm to 6:00pmLocation: Pigott Hall (260) room 216 or 252, TBD

This reading group is intended for graduate students, postdocs, and early career researchers with an interest in digital humanities, particularly as applied to literature.

At this inaugural meeting, we will be discussing the introduction and first chapter from Andrew Piper’s Enumerations: Data and Literary Study (2018).

Email Mae Lyons-Penner (maelp@stanford.edu) to RSVP.

Translating Language, Culture, & Form at "Workshop on Digital Humanities to Preserve Knowledge and Cultural Heritage"

Quinn Dombrowski — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · April 18, 2019

On April 15th, CESTA hosted the Workshop on Digital Humanities to Preserve Knowledge and Cultural Heritage, bringing together scholars working with a wide range of materials and methods. The workshop was convened by the Rosetta Project (ResOurces for Endangered languages Through TranslAted texts), a collaboration between Stanford English professor and Director of American Studies Shelley Fisher Fishkin, and colleagues from the Université de Lille Ronald Jenn (Professor of Translation Studies and Digital Humanities) and Amel Fraisse (Associate Professor of Information and Computer Science, Digital Humanities and Language Processing), along with Zheng Zhang (PhD student in Natural Language Processing at Université Paris-Saclay). The project builds on the work of an earlier “Global Huck” project (which aimed to collect and examine all the translations of “Huckleberry Finn”) by using that collection as a large parallel corpus for developing NLP resources.

Obed Lira (Bucknell) spoke about a project he’s developing with a team of students to build a decolonial digital edition of the Florentine Codex that centers the visual “presentations, not representations” of the Aztec world and worldview. He described the Florentine Codex itself as “DH in 16th century Mexico”: it took multiple years, ran out of funding, and the funders grew irritated with the cost overruns, unavoidable due to the importance of getting the exact right pigments for use in the images. He described the Franciscans' surveys and interviews with Aztec elders as a form of “cultural suicide”, but one that nonetheless ensured that the old gods — and the Aztec people’s own narrative of the conquest of Mexico — survived in some form. Lira described the images as a “fingerprint” from the previous Aztec ways of depicting ideas, and highlighted some of the work he and his students have done to identify distinctive glyphs within these images that depict earlier Aztec iconography. In addition to the imagery, the Codex is an invaluable source for early Nahuatl. While not all of the Nahuatl text is translated — or translated reliably by Christianizing translators with their own agenda — it is the only record of numerous words that are otherwise lost. The UI approach of making the images (depicting the Aztec worldview) fixed on the page, even as translations can be opened and closed, is a concrete example of how one can take steps towards decolonizing historical documents in DH projects.

Carrie Schroeder (University of the Pacific) described the Coptic Scriptorium, where she and colleagues are developing NLP tools, dictionaries, and corpora, along with infrastructure for collaboration in Coptic studies. This collaborative infrastructure is particularly important in the Coptic scholarly community because it is widely dispersed — rarely is there more than one Coptic scholar at an institution. A partnership with Amir Zeldes, a computational linguist with a personal interest in Coptic but no professional context for applying that interest, provided an ideal collaboration for the project. The project has adapted a number of existing tools for entity annotation and dependency parsing, and has gotten the Coptic treebank listed on the Universal Dependencies website, which was an important goal for them for increasing the visibility of Coptic.

Samantha Blickhan (Zooniverse) described an A/B experiment they ran on individual vs. collaborative methods of crowdsourced transcription (e.g. can second and third transcribers see what others have entered previously?). The result was that the quality increased slightly, but the engagement and completion rate was significantly higher. She has a forthcoming paper with the full results of the study. For myself, this was a heartening result, as someone who’s tried and failed to run a crowdsourced tool directory, where engaging people to continue contributing (even after I no longer had time or funding to do outreach myself) was the biggest problem.

Robert Alessi (Université Paris-Sorbonne) presented on ekdosis, a LuaLaTeX package for multilingual critical editions. The tool is intended for projects where a professionally-formatted print version is an important output. What struck me as especially interesting about this approach was that the documents are meant to be authored (and validated) in LaTeX, and any valid LaTeX file should generate a consistently-encoded TEI version.

The LitLab Translations project team (Yulia Ilchuk, Antonio Lenzo, J.D. Porter, and myself) presented on initial findings from some exploratory text analysis comparing literary texts translated into English with literary texts originally written in English. There are a number of statistically significant features (e.g. greater frequency of including “that” in constructions like “I think that…” vs. “I think…”) that can identify this “translationese”; we need to do some more work to try to pin down specific traits that can be an identifying signal for a given source language. I put the Jupyter notebook and Excel sheet I used to crunch some of the data up on Github, along with metadata about the corpus (they’re modern short stories, so we can’t release the corpus, but you could recreate it).

Kay Ueda and Lisa Nguyen from the Hoover Archive gave a refreshingly frank talk about the challenges they’ve encountered in digitizing Japanese-language diaspora newspapers, which are widely dispersed across the world, and often have to be OCR’d from poor-quality microfilm because the originals no longer exist. Cultural challenges compounded the technical challenges: in East Asia, emphasis is on 100% accuracy in digitized text, which means manual transcription is strongly preferred over automatic OCR. For their project, access (however imperfect) was a bigger priority, which required managing expectations. Their project includes a crowdsourcing option for text correction, the need for which is even more acute than for Japanese OCR in general — which doesn’t produce great results even in the best circumstances, as I discovered while teaching non-English DH last quarter. Because the readers of these newspapers had not necessarily reached full literacy in standard Japanese (including the use of kanji), many texts include phonetic superscript transcriptions (furigana) that further complicate OCR. Creating visual guides for workers at overseas companies to understand Japanese newspaper text layout and flow has been a useful step towards improving the quality of the results, along with many calls at odd hours to jointly evaluate the output of a test set. The talk ended with a moving image from one of these newspapers: a weeping sun, a laborer bearing the load of exclusion (the Exclusion Act, but also technological exclusion, and the exclusion of Japanese-language materials from national corpora like Chronicling America), and the message, “Be patient and do your best. Some day you will win.”

Giovanna Cesarani (Stanford) noted at the beginning of her talk on the Grand Tour Project that “preservation necessitates curation, and curation is never a neutral act”. Taking the “Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy” as her starting point, she and her team have done a great deal of curation work to create individual entries for people who only appear in passing references (e.g. servants and slaves) or as an aggregate (e.g. “Mr. and Mrs.” so-and-so). As a result, their database now includes records of 900 women, compared to 180 entries in the printed dictionary. They also provide visualizations that aggregate the travels of groups of people who may have never met one another, but whose journey may have been shaped by common forces, such as a shared profession. She asked provocatively, “What does it mean to tell a story about 69 people? Can you name them all in an article?” And noted that visualization preserves everyone’s agency, even if you can’t discuss them individually.

Cecil Brown (writer) spoke about a future digital reconstruction of James Baldwin’s studio in France, noting that “DH allows you to experience places that exist only in the memories of people who were there, and recreate things that were lost” — a particularly poignant thought as images poured in during the workshop of Notre Dame Cathedral burning.

On a personal note, this workshop was only the second time in my adult life that I didn’t skip work / school on my birthday — the first time being for a class in college on endangered languages. The organizers and attendees did not fall short in effecting the ritualistic embarrassment of a group rendition of “Happy Birthday to You”, but perhaps the greatest birthday present of all was the opportunity to find new collaborators and new projects. Zheng Zhang will be spending the next month at an internship at CESTA, and I look forward to working with him on sorting through the Slavic-language translations of “Huck Finn” as a step towards better discovery tools for translation studies scholars.

June DH Happy Hour

Quinn Dombrowski — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · April 17, 2019

Date/Time: Thursday, 13 June 2019 - 4:00pm to 5:00pmLocation: The Treehouse

Join colleagues from Stanford's digital humanities community for drinks and friendly conversation at The Treehouse!

May DH Happy Hour

Quinn Dombrowski — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · April 17, 2019

Date/Time: Thursday, 16 May 2019 - 4:00pm to 5:00pmLocation: The Treehouse

Join colleagues from Stanford's digital humanities community for drinks and friendly conversation at The Treehouse!

Women & Gender Minorities in DH

Quinn Dombrowski — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · April 17, 2019

Date/Time: Wednesday, 29 May 2019 - 4:00pm to Friday, 31 May 2019 - 12:00pmLocation: CESTAEvent Link: Women and Gender Minorities in DH workshop

“Women & Gender Minorities in Digital Humanities” highlights and celebrates the significant scholarly contributions of women and gender minorities in interdisciplinary Digital and Computational Humanities, while serving as a forum to propose, and advocate for, cultural changes to support all women and gender minorities in making their own impactful contributions to DH.

Our main questions for the collegium are: how might our understanding of women and gender minorities in DH be enhanced by taking a more deliberate set of perspectives? What kinds of projects are women and gender minorities developing and directing? What women and gender minorities are themselves the subjects of researchers’ attentions? What fresh light is cast upon the “canon,” our methods and approaches, by considering the work of scholars who are often overlooked and marginalized by the dominant discourses? How can women and gender minorities benefit from the social and intellectual connections to be made through conversation and scholarly exchange?

This is the fifth Text Technologies Collegium at Stanford, and this year it is co-hosted with CIDR. Our speakers include Deb Verhoeven (our keynote speaker), Miriam Posner, Isabel Galina Russell, Anne Cong-Huyen, Jacqueline Wernimont, Alice Staveley, Giovanna Ceserani, Pip Willcox, Alessandra Celati, Rita Lucarelli, Marisa Parham, Mar Hicks, Laura McGrath. Quinn Dombrowski will host a workshop following up on the work of the DH-WoGeM conversations (http://dhwogem.org).

DLCL ATS round-up, winter 2019

Quinn Dombrowski — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · April 2, 2019

Winter quarter 2019 was almost entirely devoured by the time demands of developing and running “Digital Humanities Across Borders”, my non-English textual DH course. I was grateful to be granted the space to do this; fortunately, none of the projects I’ve been supporting had any deadlines at the beginning of the year, and everyone has been very gracious and understanding about delays on my end on account of class prep.

There were two aspects of the class that made time-consuming, "just-in-time" class prep an inevitability: first, I initially packed everything I could imagine doing into the draft syllabus, and asked the students to fill out a survey to help prioritize the topics. Not all of my favorites made the cut (I regret not making them spend more time working through technical documentation), but I wasn’t unhappy with the results overall. Thematic research collections (AKA Drupal/WordPress/Omeka sites) were cut from the revised syllabus, as was TEI. The convenient elimination of those two topics leaves me with some suspicions that my attempt to present all the topics impartially before sending out the survey was not entirely successful. Not knowing what we’d actually cover in the class before it was underway meant I couldn’t easily work ahead with my class prep before the quarter started. Now that I’ve run the course once, I have materials to draw from next time, even if there’s incomplete topical overlap.

The second time-intensive aspect of the class was its core premise that all students should be able to do the hands-on portions of the course in a non-English language of their choosing. I didn’t know until the second week, when it was more evident who would be staying with the course, what that set of languages would end up being. In the end, we had seven: Chinese, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Many of the tools we worked with are not language-specific (e.g. Voyant, Topic Modeling Tool) but that didn’t mean students had the same experience regardless of language. For instance, Chinese and Japanese text has to be segmented (to artificially insert spaces between words), and all texts that use non-ASCII characters (which is to say, every one of the class languages) had to be saved as UTF-8 to word avoid truncation in the Topic Modeling Tool. Then there were our natural language processing class sessions (covering part-of-speech tagging and named entity recognition), which required seven separate tutorials and up to five different tools between them. To my chagrin, I was never able to find a functional NER tagger for Portuguese. Training a model using resources developed for someone’s master’s thesis and posted to Github proved too much for my laptop, and I ran out of time to try it out on the Sherlock cluster. It’s a loose end that still bothers me, and I hope to resolve it this upcoming quarter.

And while it was extra work of my own making during a time when I already had no shortage of things to finish by 1:30 PM on any given Tuesday or Thursday, I can’t say I regret my “20 dresses of DLCL 204” project, where I wore a different topically-linked dress for every day of teaching, thereby realizing my goal of being Ms. Frizzle (of the Magic Schoolbus) of digital humanities. This necessitated sewing 15 dresses, in addition to ones I had already made, and I published photos, metadata, and notes on all the dresses with the rest of the class materials on Github.

I have much more to write about this course, both here and elsewhere, and I hope to bring some of the students’ work to the Stanford Digital Humanities blog (with their permission) in the coming months. I also submitted an abstract about the course to the new “Debates in DH” volume on pedagogy, and a proposal for a tutorial based on some class materials to the “Language Acts and Worldmaking” project, as part of their tutorial writing sprint. For the moment, though, I’ll set the course aside to say a few words about the other things I managed to work on in the margins of class prep, and after the class wrapped up.

Existing projects

Global Medieval Sourcebook

One of the most exciting project developments this quarter has been with the Global Medieval Sourcebook. The project has been at a crossroads, facing multiple options for how to move forward. We considered what a Mellon publishing grant might look like, in order to set up some kind of organization for publishing digital editions of medieval texts, but concluded that the grant funds would end up going towards work created by the grant itself — work that wouldn’t otherwise be on the project’s roadmap. We discussed a summer migration from Drupal to Backdrop with help from a part-time CESTA undergrad intern, and continuing the time-consuming work of soliciting submissions and adding them to the Drupal site. Ultimately, though, we decided to pivot the project towards a closer partnership with the library. Rather than continuing to use and maintain our own database-driven website infrastructure, with all the concurrent pressures to add more content to the site so that it appears active, we’ll be encapsulating the current text collections as a static “online textbook”, and will deposit each text individually into the Stanford Digital Repository (SDR). We’ll work with metadata librarians to develop rich metadata about each text so they can be findable as electronic resources in environments like WorldCat, even by people who may be interested in the topic discussed in the text, but would never think to check a medieval text website for material relevant to their research. Prof. Kathryn Starkey will continue working with graduate students to translate new texts and publish them in this way via SDR, and we can provide a conduit for others working on medieval text translation to do the same, if they wish. While Global Medieval Sourcebook isn’t the first project to take this approach (Thomas Padilla pointed me to the English Broadside Ballad Archive as a precedent), it’s an idea that I think is worth popularizing. Many library systems groups, including Stanford’s, are always looking for opportunities to directly engage with scholars and their research needs. It serves everyone’s goalsto shift the financial and technical burden of infrastructure from scholars building ad-hoc websites to library systems groups that are better staffed to accomplish the same goals in a more sustainable way. Doing so frees up scholars to re-center their time on research questions involving these texts — doing what they do well, rather than being in a position of muddling through technical development and sustainability.

Teaching Human Rights

I worked with the web archiving folks in the library to capture David Palumbo-Liu’s “Teaching Human Rights” site in its current form before it is shut down. I’ve exported all the site’s content in CSV files, and have a backup of the full database and filesystem if there’s ever a need to stand the site back up again. The web archived copy of the site resides (and is findable) via SDR, and the database, filesystem, and CSV exports are in a Google Team Drive.

Entitled Opinions

Late in the quarter, I was introduced to another ongoing project, the “Entitled Opinions” podcast. This currently exists as a Drupal site, the product of a painful migration from an older HTML version. “Entitled Opinions” has “seasons”, meaning the project is only active for a few months over the course of the year. There’s a lot to sort through with this project, including exploring options for moving it to a technical platform that doesn’t require weekly or monthly updates. (I’m heartened by the existence of a Jekyll add-on for podcasts, as one possible option.) Making any major changes as the project moves into production for a new season would be courting disaster, so the goal for now is to ensure the site is stable and secure, and revisit bigger decisions in the summer.

Performing Trobar

I had a co-consultation with Kenny Ligda from VPTL around the future of the Performing Trobar site. We talked with Prof. Marisa Galvez about the pedagogical goals for the course, and how the site as it currently exists supports those goals. Performing Trobar is hosted from the legacy AFS server, and, realistically, needs to be completely rebuilt. At Kenny’s suggestion, I’ll be exploring the degree to which the Stanford Sites Drupal environment might fit the project’s requirements. Even if we have to get creative about how to accommodate some of the content, using a managed service that handles all Drupal core and module updates is a very attractive option. I may end up helping with this course in other ways, including writing tutorials for how to implement certain kinds of projects, and consulting with students remotely via Zoom (the course will be taking place this summer in a castle in Europe). I’m looking forward to seeing how it develops.

French Revolution Digital Archive (FRDA)

With the departure of our History ATS, Katie McDonough, I’ve taken over a project with Prof. Dan Edelstein and French and Italian curator Sarah Sussman on reconceptualizing and rebuilding the French Revolution Digital Archive, which includes both transcripts of post-revolutionary French parliamentary meetings, and digitized images. These collections will probably need to be separated, with the former materials going into a Stanford instance of Philologic that CIDR is setting up, and the platform for the latter remaining an open question. We’re also hoping to make the texts available for download and reuse through a French Revolutionary data site.

French political rhetoric

Another existing project I recently became involved with has involved data cleaning from surveys about people’s associations with certain politically-charged words, such as ordre, égalité, and liberté. The environment that Prof. Cécile Alduy has used for data analysis only accepts ISO-8859-1 encoded ASCII as input, so I wrote a Jupyter notebook for converting Unicode to that format.

Bulgarian Dialectology as Living Tradition

Bulgarian Dialectology as Living Tradition, a richly annotated corpus of transcripts of natural conversations recorded during field work in rural Bulgaria between the 1980’s and 2010’s,officially launched this quarter, after many years in “beta”. The project predates both my time at Stanford and at UC Berkeley, but lessons learned in building and maintaining it have informed a lot of my work since. Many of those lessons are captured in a paper I co-authored with project directors Ronelle Alexander (UC Berkeley) and Vladimir Zhobov (Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski”) tracing the project’s development, for theSlavic & East European Information Resources special edition on digital humanities.

New projects

Marine biology theses

A serendipitous Twitter exchange introduced me to Amanda Whitmire, Head Librarian & Bibliographer at Harold A. Miller Library out at Hopkins Marine Station. She has hundreds of uncatalogued, printed marine biology masters’ theses from past decades that she doesn’t have permission to publish in their entirety, but these theses can contain valuable and reusable data tables, charts, graphs, etc. In a delightful inversion of the typical narrative, the (digital) humanities came to the rescue of the sciences. We talked about scanning and OCRing these theses, and used Voyant to generally explore their contents. Working with Scott Bailey from CIDR, we looked at a few different tools for doing named entity recognition for species names; Scispacy initially seemed like a good option, but it was a challenge to get it running, and it also pulled out lots of things we didn’t want (e.g. “animals”, “experiment”, “results”, etc.) I was able to cook up some regex to pull out abbreviated scientific names (e.g.s. purpuratus), but the biology databases we tried to query didn’t support that as input. We have a number of angles and leads we’re pursuing at this point, including trying to extract tables and graphs from the source images rather than the OCR, and setting up our own NER training data based on the theses themselves.

Hebrew NLP

Prof. Amir Eshel introduced me to Renana Keydar, a former student of his who is now a professor at Hebrew University in Israel, where she’s working on setting up a law and digital humanities center. Together with Hebrew and Judaica curator Eitan Kensky, we’re looking into doing topic modeling and sentiment analysis on modern Hebrew legal testimonies. Academic Twitter has come through once again in connecting us with other people working on modern Hebrew text analysis, including Yoav Goldberg, Reut Tsarfaty, and Yael Netzer. Converting the testimony transcripts from Word files to UTF-8 encoded plain text has given me a new appreciation for the difficulty involved in working with right-to-left languages, particularly when file names mix right-to-left and left-to-right. The project is just now getting underway, so I don’t have much to report yet, but it’s quickly become clear that the first step for me is to learn the Hebrew alphabet so I have some orientation within the text — it doesn’t usually end well when I’m reduced to playing match-the-squigglies.

Multilingual Harry Potter fanfic

This quarter I grafted myself onto an existing LitLab project that is looking at Harry Potter fanfic. Prior to this job, I had little experience with computational literary analysis, and I wanted to get a first-hand look at how it was done, and try to replicate that with a Russian fanfic corpus. During winter quarter, I presented on a few preliminary findings using that Russian corpus as part of the fanfic project’s LitLab presentation. This ultimately led me down the road to using fanfic as a corpus for a few exercises in my “Digital Humanities Across Borders" course, since I was able to find large quantities of Harry Potter fanfic written in all 7 languages. I co-authored an abstract with Steele Douris (who is leading the LitLab project), Antonio Lenzo, and Masha Gorshkova (both students in my course) on a project taking a comparative look at metadata across the English, Russian, and Italian Harry Potter fanfic corpora. The metadata for these corpora is roughly parallel, unlike other corpora that capture fewer attributes about the texts. While the abstract didn’t make it into post-45/Journal of Cultural Analytics special volume on "Computational Approaches to Contemporary Culture”, we’re still going to put together a paper to submit elsewhere this fall.

Translation

The upcoming workshop "Digital Humanities to Preserve Knowledge and Cultural Heritage: Collaborate, Compute, Share and Visualize”, to be held at CESTA on April 15th, provided the perfect deadline to start making progress on a project I had been discussing with J.D. Porter of the LitLab, Prof. Yulia Ilchuk, and Antonio Lenzo. We’ll be taking a look at English translations of texts originally written in other languages, to see if we can meaningfully train a classifier to group the texts by source language. While time constraints are going to limit our ability to implement this aspect of the project in the first phase, we initially planned to build the corpus around genre (sci-fi, noir, and 19th century realism) as well as source language. Noir proved to be comparatively easy, thanks to the Akashic Noir translation series, but the sci-fi involved a lot of inter-library loan requests. Rose Harrington in ILL has been wonderful with helping me sleuth down obscure books from hither and yon.

Workshops

This quarter I taught my first two CIDR workshops: “Documenting Workflow and Data Management” with Ron Nakao, and “Data Modeling: From Research Materials to Data”, which was based on a section of my “Drupal for Humanists” DHSI course, abstracted to talk about structured data in general. Both were well attended, and I was able to follow up on the data modeling workshop through a consult with one of the workshop attendees on how to clean and structure her data (exported chats from WhatsApp) using regular expressions and OpenRefine.

Conferences

While I didn’t attend any conferences during winter quarter, I reviewed abstracts for DH 2019 and the new ACH conference (and did more reviews to pick up the slack). Reviewing extra abstracts, which primarily had in common the fact that one of their reviewers hadn’t finished their assigned batch, was an interesting change of pace. What I usually review is a pretty predictable set of things related to infrastructure — I know about DH infrastructure, I like the topic, and I suspect it’s not a topic where there’s a lot of wiling reviewers. But reading abstracts on other subjects reminded me that I know things about other areas of DH as well, and perhaps I should branch out in my topic selections. With both DH and ACH, I agreed with the decisions made by the program committee on all the abstracts I reviewed, and I’m really looking forward to both conferences this summer. I’ll be presenting a poster at DH on the “DARIAH Beyond Europe” work, and a panel on Slavic digital humanities — using methodology as the basis for building an international community. At ACH, Glen Worthey, Thea Lindquist and I will be organizing a discussion about “DARIAH Beyond Europe” as well: how (through what existing or potential organization, and to what extent) should the US engage with DARIAH? At both DH and ACH, I’m also involved on the side with submissions put in by other folks involved with DH-WoGEM.

DH-WoGeM

DH-WoGeM is a grassroots group centered on women and gender minorities in digital humanities. The group organizes “conversations" about lived experience in DH, through a gendered lens, and advocates for change. During winter quarter, I hosted a conversation on becoming a parent in DH, and Jennifer Guiliano and Roopika Risam hosted a conversation about happiness, security, and compromises. I haven’t been great about following through with the next steps from the parenting conversation (putting together a survey about what kinds of parental accommodations people would like to see conferences and events provide), but I hope to turn my attention to it soon.

Materiality-focused experimental lab

After a successful pilot at the end of fall quarter, winter saw the debut of the Textile Makerspace, which has brought together a wonderful mix of folks from the Library, DLCL, and beyond. On my first day of work at Stanford, I was shown to room 260-238, labeled the “DLCL Digital Humanities Lab”, and was told I could do with it as I saw fit. The ancient Mac towers go into boot-loop (when they turn on at all), and the large display at the front of the room flashes like a rave when you power it up, but the floor and table space are ideal for sewing. I’ve recently started up Twitter and Instagram accounts for the space, to start highlighting some of the things that people have made there. We’re currently looking into finding someone to build a loom compatible with some of the loom pattern books in the library’s holdings, and there’s a sewing machine and a serger (plus a cutting board, rotary cutter, iron, and various scraps that anyone can experiment with). During spring quarter, we even have a special guest visit from Prof. Miriam Posner from UCLA, who has her own sewing blog. The Textile Makerspace is open most Mondays and Thursdays this quarter; check the schedule on the website and come on by!

Colleagues

It’s been a quarter of churn in CIDR, as we’ve said goodbye to our colleagues Javier de la Rosa (developer) and Katie McDonough (History ATS). In the last few weeks, I’ve been involved with the interview processes for the IRISS (Social Sciences) ATS position, as well as the CIDR developer position. I wrote up a blog post describing what it means to be an ATS, as I’ve experienced it. If this quarterly update sounds like the sort of thing you’d enjoy doing, and you have a background in history, check out that blog post and consider applying for our open position!

Goals

In my fall quarterly round-up, I mentioned looking for opportunities to work with folks from Iberian and Latin American Cultures. While I did have two students working on Spanish in my class during winter quarter, I don’t yet have a project going with that department. Here’s hoping spring 2019 will be my opportunity to find one!

ATS Unpacked: Why I love my job and you might, too

Quinn Dombrowski — Sun, 10 Mar 2019 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · March 11, 2019

“Academic Technology Specialist” is one of the most generic titles I’ve ever held — it’s hard to guess whether the position answers LMS help tickets, digitizes media, updates webpages, runs workshops, or any of a hundred other things that fall broadly under “academic technology”. It’s easy for such a position to escape attention — especially from people who aren’t actively looking for jobs (as I wasn’t a year ago). After nearly six months in this role, I’d like to unpack what being an “ATS” has meant for me, and why the currently-listed History ATS position might be worth considering even if you’re not otherwise looking for a new job.

Discipline-focused DH support

The ATS position is a staff role that bridges the library and a department. It is jointly funded by the library and department on hard money. If you're currently in a term-limited position, or if your job depends on your lab continuing to get grants, the shift to hard funding is a major boost for peace of mind. If your heart is set on a faculty or researcher role, being an ATS isn’t what you’re looking for. If you’re invested in the title of “librarian” as such, being an ATS isn’t quite that, either — although you have many opportunities to become part of the community of campus librarians, and I count the librarians whose subject areas overlap with mine among my closest colleagues. If you’ve held a staff job, and are comfortable with that modality of work (e.g. using your expertise to play an important role shaping DH work, while not serving as the lead researcher), it’s not easy to find a staff job that provides as much independence, flexibility, and empowerment as the ATS role.

The History ATS is the go-to DH person for the entire history department. Individual projects may have their own staff (including grad students, external developers, etc.) but if someone wants to do digital humanities research, odds are they’ll end up talking with you about it. (While ATS positions are primarily research-oriented, we also sometimes help out with pedagogy-oriented DH, and collaborate with colleagues in the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learninggroup.) In previous positions I’ve held, we’ve only had funding to provide “consulting” — which is to say, we could give scholars some suggestions and pointers, maybe provide some language for a grant proposal, but hands-on work was out of the question. An ATS works directly with faculty on realizing their projects — not just telling them what they hypothetically could do if they were able to get a grant and find someone with the right expertise. What shape those projects take depends on your expertise, interests, and judgment. While this could lead to sustainability problems (e.g. if an ATS had a penchant for building projects in an obscure framework that no one else could support), fear not: the previous History ATS, Katie McDonough (now at the Turing Institute), hasn’t left any such messes for her successor.

The projects

Here are some of the currently-ongoing DH projects in the history department that you’d be helping with:

Oral History Text Analysis (Estelle Freedman). Project to analyze oral history transcripts as sources where women describe sexual violence and rape. Project has explored initial methodological options for analyzing digitized oral history transcripts. Pilot phase complete for modeling metadata, organizing the corpus, and testing relevance of collected transcripts. Digital workflow in place for creating subcorpora of relevant transcripts, basic text analysis, and automatic TEI encoding. Project currently working on development of a front-end interface to run these tools and semantic analysis of corpus.
Corpus Synodalium (Rowan Dorin). Corpus of transcribed medieval ecclesiastical legal texts. Project has created a basic corpus exploration tool that could be extended to include interactive mapping of query results. Project has designed Philologic TEI header and database for corpus; undergraduate RA has designed a new mapping interface for Philologic queries.
Mapping Ottoman Epirus (Ali Yaycioglu). Geospatial data modeling, gazetteer development, and spatial history opportunities.
Massively Multiplayer Humanities (Tom Mullaney). On campus and eventually online distributed undergraduate course that introduces students to hands-on archival research. Collaboration on digital platforms for course materials and student experiential learning in archives.

As an ATS, you don't have to wait for projects to show up at your office door: you can seek out and encourage the projects in your department that would benefit from your particular skills and interests.

Teaching

Is there a workshop or digital humanities class that you’ve always dreamed of teaching? The History ATS position can be your chance to make that dream a reality. The Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research (CIDR), the library-based parent organization for ATSes, runs a workshop series every quarter. While the schedule was already set when I started this fall, this quarter I had the chance to co-teach a workshop on research data management for the humanities and social sciences, and teach a workshop on how to think through data modeling (based on a portion of my previous DHSI Drupal for Humanists workshop).

In addition to the workshop series, CIDR provides digital humanities consulting, open to anyone on campus, for two hours each week. All the staff with DH experience take turns staffing those slots. It’s a new program this year, and people are still learning that it's available, but it’s a great way to engage with questions and research beyond the department that you’re affiliated with.

If you’re interested in teaching courses, ATSes also have the opportunity to do that if they want. I’m just finishing up my first quarter of teaching a non-English textual digital humanities course that I created myself. This spring, Katie (the previous History ATS) was scheduled to teach a spatial history course. Depending on how the course is listed, you might be teaching undergrads and/or grad students. For undergrads, your courses would count towards Stanford’s DH Minor.

I’ve been amazed at how supportive the library and my department have been with allowing me to build my technical skills. I’ve gotten involved in a project with the Lit Lab in order to better understand how that group goes about doing computational literary analysis — which will add to the toolbox I can offer the scholars in my department. There’s funding available for training, and for attending relevant conferences, even if you’re not presenting. After years of being told in central IT that I needed more programming skills, but not having the time available at work to learn them, I’ve finally started picking up Python. Which is to say: don’t be intimidated by the list of suggested technical experience in the job description. Part of the job is to learn the things you don’t come in knowing as well as you’d like.

There are lots of other opportunities — formal and informal — for sharing your expertise. It’s been my pleasure to talk to the DH Fellows group at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA), in addition to providing advice for students working on DH projects through CESTA’s undergraduate research assistant program. If there’s something you want to do that doesn’t fit into an existing group or workshop series, you have the freedom to start it yourself! This Thursday I’m holding an in-person and virtual poster session for the students in my non-English DH course. I’ve also converted an unused computer lab into a “Textile Makerspace”, where a diverse assortment of librarians, instructors, and students come to sew during lunch a few days a week.

The community

ATS positions sit at the nexus of multiple campus communities, and you have the opportunity to participate in any or all of them as part of your job. You can go to talks in your department; to library special events, meetings, and working groups; to DH events hosted by any of the numerous DH labs and organizations (including CESTA and the Literary Lab); to interdisciplinary workshops and events. Myself, I’ve been frequenting a library reading/writing group, the lunchtime seminar series at CESTA, the biweekly LitLab meetings, the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies lunch meetings, and meetings for a library-based project around the Scaling Emulation and Software Preservation Infrastructure (EaaSI). I’ve found each of those groups, in different ways, to be valuable places to meet people (including people in my own division), build relationships, and contribute in small ways to a diverse set of projects.

Both CIDR and CESTA, in different ways, work towards cultivating an interdisciplinary DH community across campus, where inertia would otherwise lead to the dispersal of DH into lab- or project-specific silos. We’ve alternated hosting a monthly “DH Happy Hour” that brings together a wonderful mix of people with DH interests, including those whose job is primarily something else (e.g. ATSes with a background in the humanities but a job focused on pedagogy or another discipline, or digital library developers).

In contrast to the grinding, always-on nature of my last job, I’ve found Stanford to be very supportive of work/life balance, which has been tremendously helpful as a person with three small children. Last week, a colleague took my DH consulting shift so I could attend my oldest kid’s school performance. Compared to other places I've worked, it feels like the pace of email is typically a little slower — in most cases, if it takes a few days to respond to an email, there's no apology expected with your response. There’s a campus wellness program that will pay you a few hundred dollars a year for setting a personal goal (for your own health or caring for others) and reflecting on your progress. And there’s no shortage of amazing guests, activities, and events on campus at any point in the year that you have the freedom to attend.

The cost of living

If you’re coming from almost anywhere else in the country, the cost of living — especially in the immediate vicinity of Palo Alto — is nothing short of mind-boggling. Particularly if you have a daycare-age child, the cost of rent + childcare is going to require two (or more) incomes to make things work. (In the long term, though, benefits like Stanford's Tuition Grant Program can be a huge boost in covering your kids’ college tuition.)

Palo Alto isn’t your only option for places to live. This has been my first experience working at a “commuter school”, where people truly do live all over the Bay Area. Because long commutes are so common, people are generally understanding and flexible about virtual meetings, and scheduling in-person meetings at times that work for you. It changes the dynamic of some of the activities (it’s harder than usual to get people to attend, since they might be working from home on that day, or have a long commute back if it’s in the late afternoon), but people make it work. Stanford’s new campus location in Redwood City (about 7 miles from the main campus) will go even further in normalizing options like video conferences.

Myself, I live in Berkeley, two hours away from Stanford in each direction (via public transit or car — and the public transit option is more enjoyable). I thought the commute would make it impossible to take this job, but doing it by BART and CalTrain, I’ve honestly come to enjoy the peace and quiet and focused time of the commute. I’ve worked out a schedule where I can get the kids out the door in the morning, and make it home in time for dinner and bedtime more often than not.

Come build DH at Stanford

While CIDR has one cohort of ATSes and other librarians who have been at Stanford for over a decade, the last 5 years have been marked by a lot of turnover in numerous DH positions, including ATSes. Being an ATS gives you a seat at the table for thinking through the future of DH at one of the world’s major research institutions. You have the ability to take action to realize a shared vision. From project development to sustainability and infrastructure planning, from courses and workshops to mentoring, you shape the ATS role — and in turn, that role can have a meaningful impact on building Stanford’s DH capacity and community.

If you’re thinking of applying, or would like to learn more, I’m happy to talk with anyone about the position and answer questions. Grab a time on my calendar, or drop me an email at [qad] [at] [stanford] [dot] [edu] (especially if it’s easier to find a time to chat in the evening; it's no trouble to work around your schedule.)

One note on timing: while we'll be conducting the job search over the next 6 months or so, we anticipate that this position will have a September start date.

"Difficulty manatees" after the swan song

Quinn Dombrowski — Tue, 29 Jan 2019 16:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · January 30, 2019

It’s once again the season for the “DH Awards”, an international DH-themed popularity contest with an award category for “best exploration of DH failure” that debuted in 2014, the year “What Ever Happened to Project Bamboo?” was published. Alas, that year I lost to Melissa Terras’s “Reuse of Digitized Content”, and I haven’t had anything worth nominating in that category since.

This year, I decided to revisit and submit my keynote from last year’s “On the Benefits of Failure” symposium at the University of Alberta, recently made available through their digital repository.

Truth be told, I hate watching videos. I also never write out my talks in advance, so I have nothing written to draw upon, beyond my slides. A text version, then, was only possible as a derivative. I ran the video through YouTube’s auto-captioning, cleaned up the transcript, and did a light edit before posting the text on my website.

This cleanup workflow was well-suited to the failure-centric topic of the talk, producing numerous creative and amusing failures of transcription. In addition to “difficulty manatees” as a rendering of “digital humanities” (which has gone viral on DH Twitter, complete with John Unsworth’s creation of a “You Manatees Computing” image), other gems included:

“Full audit” for Philologic
“Deleuze many projects” for digital humanities projects (props to YouTube for the humanities reference, even if completely wrong)
“Mighty people” for IT people
“Pee eyes” or “API” for PIs
"Law heuristics" for Slavic linguistics
"the business" for linguistics
"Romantic mystics" for Romance linguistics
“Tape work” for TAPoR
“Bone puzzle” for grant proposal
“Dean of Arts vanities” for dean of arts and humanities
“Paralyze” for catalyze

The fact that YouTube’s transcription performs as well as it does is nothing short of remarkable, but I’m nonetheless grateful that I’m not currently working on any projects that primarily rely on videos in need of transcription. Difficulty manatees aside, the substitution of “paralyze” for “catalyze” and similar changes that fundamentally shift meaning, while being undetectable without an attentive manual process of checking against the original video, certainly gives me pause when considering it for research at scale.

“Towards a Taxonomy of Failure” captures a strange, liminal moment: I was nearly 7 months pregnant, and it was my last trip before my youngest was born. What’s more, I meant this talk to be a swan song for my involvement in DH. I make reference to being, in a sense, “post-DH”; I saw my future in central IT and research computing. At the same time, inequities in the expectations and compensation for staff in my group were becoming more difficult to brush off. Watching the video now, it’s painfully evident how hard I was trying to make the best of a situation where I wasn’t happy, but thought I had enough agency to fix things. I wouldn’t realize until months later that I was wrong — that I had, once again, failed to probe assumptions. Because I thought I was done with DH, I took the opportunity to reference a wide range of failures — the collapse of my academic field, my own failed projects, and failures to do the right thing including those I saw perpetuated by well-established DH staffing models and organizations.

It’d be easy enough to let this talk disappear quietly, an un-transcribed video hidden in plain sight in an institutional repository. But, despite my sense of strangeness and estrangement looking back on this talk, I think it still has some ideas worth sharing. Nominating it for a DH Award gives it a larger audience than humanities grad students at the University of Alberta in March, and it transforms what was intended as a final statement into a living challenge to myself to fail better in my new role at Stanford.

Behind the Scenes of Character Encoding with Unicode

Quinn Dombrowski — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 16:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · January 17, 2019

Date/Time: Tuesday, 22 January 2019 - 1:30pm to 3:00pmLocation: Lathrop 120

Debbie Anderson of the Script Encoding Initiative at UC Berkeley will speak about the research that goes into developing a proposal for adding new scripts and characters to the universal Unicode standard. Unicode is essential for ensuring that texts can display correctly across different file formats, digital environments, and devices. This talk will be of particular interest to scholars who work on medieval manuscripts (which can require "non-standard" characters for accurate transcription), scholars who work with minority languages, and scholars doing digital humanities work-- especially in multiple languages.

February DH Happy Hour

Quinn Dombrowski — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 16:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · January 17, 2019

Date/Time: Thursday, 21 February 2019 - 4:00pm to 5:00pmLocation: Treehouse

Join colleagues from Stanford's digital humanities community for drinks and friendly conversation at The Treehouse, and wish outgoing History ATS Katie McDonough bon voyage!

January DH Happy Hour

Quinn Dombrowski — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 16:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · January 17, 2019

Date/Time: Thursday, 24 January 2019 - 4:00pm to 5:00pmLocation: Treehouse

Join colleagues from Stanford's digital humanities community for drinks and friendly conversation at The Treehouse!

March DH Happy Hour

Quinn Dombrowski — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 16:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · January 17, 2019

Date/Time: Thursday, 14 March 2019 - 4:00pm to 5:00pmLocation: Treehouse

Join colleagues from Stanford's digital humanities community for drinks and friendly conversation at The Treehouse and celebrate the end of the quarter!

Introducing "Digital Humanities Across Borders"

Quinn Dombrowski — Mon, 14 Jan 2019 16:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · January 15, 2019

“Digital Humanities Across Borders” (DLCL 204, cross-listed with Comp Lit and English) kicked off last week. As of today, there are seven registered students and three intrepid auditors (including two area studies librarian colleagues).

The Digital Humanities Summer Institute workshops I’ve taught before have a similar number of classroom hours, but packing them into a single week produces a very different dynamic. My DHSI classes focused on one specific, technical topic (Drupal for DH projects), which led to a very different experience of both class preparation and teaching. When it comes to building Drupal sites, there’s a clear set of sequential steps. There’s a set of functionality that are relevant for most humanists, and that’s what we cover. In the afternoons, the students work on their own projects, because we only have five days to build something and giving homework isn’t particularly feasible. I wrote all the course materials and came up with the pacing for the syllabus myself, but it wasn’t difficult to make it all fall into place.

Shortly after starting my current job as the Academic Technology Specialist in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, I offered to teach. Initially I threw out the idea of covering the medieval Slavic literature course, since the Slavic department is short on medievalists and that used to be my disciplinary area. But it was hard to argue when Dan Edelstein, the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages (DLCL) chair, suggested that I perhaps instead teach something that could draw a bigger enrollment. We agreed I’d do “a digital humanities course”, and left it at that.

Being based in the DLCL, it made sense to focus the class on textual, non-English digital humanities. I’ve been surprised — though perhaps I shouldn’t be— at the pervasiveness of English in the pedagogical materials for digital humanities tools and methods. Even in #dariahTeach: while the lesson on TEI has been translated into Hungarian and French, the exercise still involves encoding a poem by William Butler Yeats. In “Digital Humanities Across Borders”, the students bring their own texts, in any non-English language that they can read. We’ve got Chinese (both traditional and simplified characters), Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, German, and Italian. I’m looking for tools and software that claim to work for each of these languages, so the students can try out a range of methods, including topic modeling, network analysis, counting words, and various approaches to NLP.

Familiarity with tools is one step towards “doing digital humanities”, but it felt deeply unfair to throw tools at students and leave them to figure out on their own what it means to be a modern languages person who “does digital things”. Between early exposure to the ADHO DH conference (DH 2007 was held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagin, just as I started the MLIS program there) and the “listening tour” phase of Project Bamboo, I had many opportunities for acculturation to digital humanities at the beginning of my career. Beyond just knowing what kinds of questions to ask using digital tools, and how to operate those tools, I want my students this quarter to have a sense of orientation around how (and to what extent) DH is “done” in their fields. I want them to have an idea for how they can position their research in their field, in whatever “DH group” exists within their field, and in the larger national and international DH communities (ACH, ADHO, and if there’s a DH organization centered on their language or country of specialization.)

There’s no shortage of readings that one could assign for this class, and I’m very grateful to Molly des Jardin for sharing her East Asian Digital Humanities syllabus. That said, these are students who have gotten, and/or will get plenty of practice reading and writing academic-style prose. I want to do something different here. I’m updating the syllabus with pointers to additional readings on all the topics we’re covering (and the syllabus and other class materials are available on Github for anyone to use), the students don’t have to do any reading to prepare for class. Instead, I’m asking them to spend the time they would otherwise be doing readings experimenting with applying different tools and methods to the major text they’re working with in their language. I’m hoping that by the end of the course, they’ll be as comfortable experimenting with tools as they are opening a book — or at least, comfortable enough to work their way through error messages without giving up.

The first two class sessions covered introductions (of ourselves, the course, and that classic question, what even is digital humanities), some of the kinds of questions we can answer using digital tools and methods, and a few examples of how people with backgrounds in non-English languages and literatures have position their work within the landscape of digital humanities.

Today we had our first hands-on session in which we tackled OCR: a timely topic given the recent release of David Smith and Ryan Cordell’s OCR report, “A Research Agenda for Historical and Multilingual Optical Character Recognition” accompanied by Ryan Cordell’s “Why You (A Humanist) Should Care About OCR”, which took care of a large part of class prep for me for today. I assigned installing and experimenting with ABBYY FineReader (which has a reasonably friendly UI) as homework, and together we dove into installing Imagemagick and Tesseract — starting with locating the Mac terminal or Windows command prompt. While only one student left the class today with OCR’d text, many others came close, extracting Tesseract-compatible PNGs from PDFs after working through error messages one after another. “Congratulations, you’re doing digital humanities!” I tried to reassure them as they were copying (or retyping) error messages from the command line and wading into Google’s results. We’ll pick this up again on Thursday.

There was an amazing moment of synchronicity. Melissa Hosek, one of this year’s Digital Humanities Fellows, was able to use what she’d learned about the Windows command prompt at a recent DH Fellows meeting to help her fellow Windows-using classmates when the problems they were running into (including basic syntax for the command prompt) had me stumped. As I ran from one Mac-using student to another, and saw the Windows users all sitting around one table, working together across the linguistic divides between their operating systems (Korean, Portuguese, English), it may have been the first time I’ve ever seen such a vivid simultaneous embodiment of every one of the “values” Lisa Spiro proposed for digital humanities: openness, collaboration, collegiality and connectedness, experimentation, diversity.

It was an adrenaline rush to try to cover installation and use of command-line tools in under an hour, across two operating systems and seven languages. Scampering from one end of the classroom to the other and back again, I had a very visceral memory of my exhaustion at the end of every day the first year I taught Drupal at DHSI without a co-instructor.

But I also had a humbling moment helping one student debug issues with Imagemagick. I wasn’t sure they’d typed the command right, so I asked if I could try it on their laptop. I put my fingers on the keyboard in the places they’ve been trained to go since I was 6 years old, and confidently pounded out the command… and then I looked at the screen, and saw it was all wrong. Every forward-slash I had typed was a hyphen, and there was no hyphen. The Latin characters on the keyboard had drawn me in, and I hadn’t realized that they were arranged slightly differently — especially the punctuation. Typing the commands yourself isn’t good pedagogy, and neither is making snap judgements that “close enough” is anywhere close to right. Most of the materials my students are working with are in languages I can’t actually read (despite recognizing an Indo-European root here, a logograph there). By the end of the quarter, they’ll be a lot closer to knowing what I know about DH tools and communities than I will be to reading many of their texts without assistance. My contribution here is a variety of technical and social approaches to how one might do digital humanities. The questions of why to do digital humanities, and what to do it with, and the evaluation of how well any of these particular approaches work for a specific language or genre are places where I have to defer to the students in their language and disciplinary knowledge.

Today I learned that ₩ (the won sign) is used to represent the path separator () on Korean Windows in the command prompt. With some help from Google and the Internet Archive, I was able to find out some more about the history of that convention, and it all comes down to Unicode, which we’ll be covering with a special guest lecture by Debbie Anderson from the Script Encoding Initiative at UC Berkeley next week. I can’t wait to see what else I learn this quarter.

My first quarter at Stanford (DLCL ATS round-up, fall 2018)

Quinn Dombrowski — Thu, 20 Dec 2018 16:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · December 21, 2018

The “Academic Technology Specialist” (ATS) role at Stanford follows an unusual model for a DH alt-ac job. These positions are jointly funded by Stanford Libraries and a department, and while ATSes report administratively through the library, they typically have their office in the department, and spend most of their time working with scholars there. As an ATS, your assignment is straightforward but expansive: support your department in whatever way you can. The job description has a laundry list of expertise that one should have, but in practice, what you work on is shaped by your actual expertise and interests.

With an eye towards making the reality of the ATS position more comprehensible to both local colleagues and others who might join the organization in the future (since I didn’t have a clear picture of the job when I started, to say nothing of when I applied for the position), here’s what I’ve ended up doing my first quarter here.

Existing projects

Projects built on content management systems need care and feeding, and my predecessor, Mike Widner, built a lot of Drupal-based sites. Some of them were hacked during the interim between his departure and my arrival, and were infected with javascript that uses visitors’ computers to mine cryptocurrency. Others were hacked and tampered with, in ways that didn’t come to light until I tried to do something with them.

Global Medieval Sourcebook

By the time I started at Stanford in late September, Prof. Kathryn Starkey’s Global Medieval Sourcebook had been down for over a month due to a javascript miner infection. The library-hosted server for the live site had been taken offline in response. On my first day, I was told that getting the site back online was my top priority. It took until December 6th, but it was a great crash course in Stanford’s administrative-technical processes. I met Rob Smith, the person in Digital Library Systems and Services (DLSS) who typically deals with dev-ops requests from CIDR (my library organizational home), and I’m grateful for his patience and willingness to help. I made my first ever GitHub page, and managed to put it in place as a “site under construction” page while we finished polishing the Drupal site. Scott Bailey (one of my colleagues in CIDR who is a part-time developer) saved the day that time I got irked at an unending string of cryptic error messages from git, and took Google’s advice that wiping out untracked files might fix things… only to blow away every file that had ever been uploaded to the site via Drupal’s UI. Scott also helped me conceptually untangle SASS and Gulp, and come to the realization that since an undergrad assistant had been directly editing the CSS generated by Gulp, we’ve reached the point where it’s best to treat the theme as simple HTML/CSS and rip out the plumbing that was causing more issues (e.g. security flags for outdated node modules in our GitHub repo) than benefit. Modern development practices are all well and good, but when you have undergrads working on code for a project, and no one around with the expertise to teach them how to use those practices correctly, there’s a benefit to keeping things simple. We ultimately moved the site to Reclaim Hosting to give the project more autonomy with regard to who can update the code: on the DLSS server, the ATS became a bottleneck in being the only person who could pull code from GitHub, which bogged things down further given the necessity of synchronized action in updating code and making database changes in Drupal. Reclaim Hosting support staff, especially Meredith Fierro, were incredible and patient and extremely responsive as I sorted out getting the site migrated and relaunched. In doing so I also learned that purchase orders can take up to 30 days to be processed at Stanford! One significant thing I still have outstanding on this project is writing up comprehensive documentation, in the manner I advocated for in Drupal for Humanists. There are some things the site does (like — it would seem — regenerating the Versioning Machine page for every text whenever you save a text’s profile page) that only became evident once we switched to a shared hosting environment and didn’t have the compute power of a DLSS VM all to ourselves. Sorting through all that will be a project for next quarter.

Teaching Human Rights

David Palumbo-Liu’s “Teaching Human Rights” project was intended to be a Drupal-based platform for bringing together a community around issues related to human rights. It published a fair amount of original material on human rights, but community building and maintenance required significant amount of time and resources. He’s moving on to another project, and I’m currently working through exporting all the content on the site to archive it in the Stanford Digital Repository, before shutting the site down. The site is hosted on its own VM by an external hosting provider, and waking up to the daily email chatter from the server (cron logs, softaculous updates, etc.) means it’s never far from my mind.

Performing Trobar

Prof. Marisa Galvez has used an online environment for publishing her students' digital final projects for her "Performing Trobar" class. It's become a rich collection of audiovisual material as well as maps, timelines, and translations. The site was originally built by my pre-predecessor, Zach Chandler — the first DLCL ATS — and is hosted in Stanford's AFS storage environment, which predates numerous better options. I was able to get an account on the site, but no one involved with it had full admin access, and the admin credentials were lost to time. Over the holidays, I’ll be trying to hack the site: temporarily introducing a horrible bug that elevates the privileges of any logged-in user to admin, before quickly cleaning up after it. Next quarter, I hope to collaborate with the folks with VPTL (Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning) to develop something modern and usable that meets the current needs of the course.

French Revolutionary Data Project

Prof. Dan Edelstein's project on the speeches made during the French Revolution joined my collection of projects late in the quarter. We're working on combining the texts from the speeches themselves (as published by ARTFL) with a database of information about the deputies who spoke. Combining these sources would make it much easier to, for instance, correlate specific parlementary votes with biographical traits (birthplace, age, etc.) My very first digital humanities project, nearly 15 years ago, was done in partnership with ARTFL, so it’s nice to work with them again.

Teaching

This quarter I had my first foray into the process of putting a class together — figuring out a title and sketch syllabus, getting it cross-listed, and getting it advertised. I’m very much looking forward to teaching “Digital Humanities Across Borders” (essentially, non-English textual DH) next quarter. No technical prerequisites are required, just a reading knowledge of at least one language other than English. I’d meant to offer it for 3-5 credits, but a mistake led to it getting put on the books for 1-5 credits. It seems that no one in institutional memory has offered a DH course for as little as 1 credit before, but this accidental experiment has been a remarkable success: I currently have 13 students enrolled, and 6 of them have signed up for 1 credit. I have a lot of course prep ahead of me over the holidays, and I’ve emailed the students asking what language(s) they’ll be working with, and what kind of text, if they know. Based on the departments that the students are coming from, I’m assuming we’ll be working at least with Chinese, Russian, Italian, and Spanish. I'll be posting materials on Github for anyone to reuse.

In getting the “Digital Humanities Across Borders" approved as a core course for Stanford’s DH Minor, I got to learn about the minor program, how it’s worked to date, and what kinds of students have been interested. To make the DH Minor website a more effective resource for attracting new students to the program, I worked with DH Minor Director Alice Staveley to refresh the website's structure and contents. I anticipate it will also support student enrollment for the core course offerings: there are three course offerings this year, in addition to mine, which provides a lot of options, since students are only required to take one core course and a series of electives.

New Projects

The interests of the scholars I’m working with have pushed me to dig into tools and methods that I’d never spent much time with. Talking with Prof. Yulia Ilchuk about network analyses of characters in novels gave me a reason to brush up on my understanding of networks, as well as models for counting character co-occurrences in literature.

Masha Gorshkova is exploring the discourse between contemporary Russian authors and their audiences via their Facebook pages — which has led me down the rabbit hole of Facebook app approval to get access to their Graph API. I’ve had no luck finding anyone local who’s tried to get data from Facebook (to my surprise, since their headquarters are right down the road), so it’s broaching new territory in multiple respects.

Prof. Amir Echel's Poetic Media Lab is working on developing its next major endeavor, and I’m looking forward to continue working with them on identifying a set of compelling projects that can draw on the varied expertise and worldviews of undergraduates and grad students.

Lena Zlock has transformed a Russian bibliographic catalog of Voltaire’s personal library into a massive Google Docs spreadsheet, and we’ve been talking about ways to take the next step towards building a searchable database.

As part of teaching my class next quarter, I’ll be undertaking (and blogging about) a project much like the students’, making a computationally-facilitated comparison of the Russian translation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, and Tanya Grotter and the Magic Double Bass, which has not been allowed to be officially translated or distributed internationally due to a copyright infringement lawsuit by Time Warner, over the author’s protests that it was a parody. Connected to this class project, I’m working on compiling a corpus of Russian-language Harry Potter and Tanya Grotter fanfic. I’m hoping to use it as a point of comparison for a Lit Lab project involving Harry Potter fanfic in English.

Finally, Yulia Ilchuk, J.D. Porter, and I have started gathering bibliographies of literature that has been translated into English, from languages including Russian, French, Italian, and German, with more languages to come. We’re interested in seeing whether we can cluster them by their source language, using methods that don’t draw on semantics (e.g. no looking for “Moscow” vs “Paris”.) I’m hoping that once we narrow down the details, we’ll be able to find scholars in comp lit and translation studies who might be interested in working with us.

Sharing experience

Prior to coming to Stanford, I always worked in organizations where I was the youngest person — a situation that persisted for 11 years, across multiple institutions. It’s been a refreshing change to spend most of my time in a department (rather than a central IT unit) where there are lots of graduate students and even undergraduates who are involved in the daily goings-on. It’s been a pleasure meeting with them, formally and informally, and getting to share the things I’ve learned about academia, interdisciplinarity, career paths, and getting things done. I was also invited to present to the DH Grad Fellows in CESTA about project management, and will put together a different take on a similar topic for the DH undergraduate research assistants next quarter.

Events

Splitting my work week between Stanford and Berkeley (where I live) has made it easy to participate in events at both places. I spent a day at the Bay Area Drupal Camp in Berkeley, attending the Backdrop summit in search of an alternative to Drupal 8 for scholarly research websites. I also attended a morning of “Digital Humanities, Egyptology & Heritage Preservation: A Comparative Perspective”, organized by Prof. Rita Lucarelli, who I used to work with at UC Berkeley.

At Stanford, the CMEMS symposium "Translating Cultures: Multilingualism and Identity in the Medieval and Early Modern World” was the first medieval event I’ve been to in a very long time, with a wonderful lineup of speakers. I met Prof. Ivan Lupić, and we discussed technical platform options for a project he’s starting. I also attended Stanford’s IT Unconference, which was a useful introduction to Stanford’s robust Drupal community. I was surprised and a little dismayed at the lack of teaching and research-related sessions, so I’ve concluded that next year it’s going to be important to show up early — even though that means leaving home at 5:30 AM.

The broader DH world

My Stanford-based re-engagement with the broader DH world began prior to my start date, with the DARIAH Beyond Europe workshop in mid-September. Since then, I’ve been following up on connections with the Medievalist's Sources working group (with an eye towards involving the Global Medieval Sourcebook in some way), the DH course registry (where I added the DH Minor core courses, which literally put the west coast on the map), and the organizers of the workshop itself. We’ve submitted a poster proposal about DARIAH Beyond Europe to next year’s DH conference in Utrecht, and the promo video from the workshop was just published earlier this week.

Princeton invited Stanford to join their grassroots Slavic DH partnership (also including the Herder Institute in Germany), and I’ve been working on helping organize next year’s event, which will bring Stanford scholars to Princeton for a workshop focusing on digitally curating, organizing, analyzing, and presenting images. It’s given me a reason to do some hands-on exploration of Omeka S, as well as various machine learning tools and services for image analysis.

One of the initiatives I’m most excited about for next quarter comes from a group that’s still coalescing around lived experiences of gender and DH. DH-WOGEM (Women and Gender Minorities) is going to be organizing a series of “conversations” (synchronous, Zoom-based meetings) around specific topics relevant to gender and DH, and developing white papers and other practical resources out of those conversations, with further collaboration and input from colleagues across the world. I’ve got a simple webpage in the works (an excuse to finally try out Jekyll), and I’m grateful to Julia Flanders for hosting a mailing list out of Northeastern. We’re still working out the subscription mechanism, so if you’re interested, email me at qad [at] stanford [dot] edu. The first conversation, which I’m hoping to organize for late January or early February, will be about kids: when people have had them, what parental leave accommodations they’ve arranged, etc.

Finally, I’ve revived this website, taking down out-of-date pages, expanding acronyms on the “about” page, and regularly updating this blog. My goal for the new year is to make a concerted effort to get others to join me in this blogging space, to share with the local, national, and international community the DH work going on at Stanford.

Looking ahead

Next quarter, I expect that teaching will take up much of my time and attention, in addition to keeping up with the projects and groups that I’ve gotten involved with this quarter. I’m happy to be working on at least one project with scholars from four out of the five departments in DLCL, but I’ll be keeping an eye out for opportunities to work with Iberian and Latin American Cultures. I’m hoping the Lit Lab project on translations will be an opportunity to connect with people who might not otherwise think of themselves as the sort to do “digital” research.

Tomorrow begins Stanford’s two-week year-end shutdown, but I’m already looking forward to the week of January 7th! Stanford’s DH blog will resume then. Happy holidays to all!

Book review: "New Digital Worlds" by Roopika Risam

Quinn Dombrowski — Thu, 13 Dec 2018 16:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · December 14, 2018

Thanks to some swift book-ordering by Glen Worthey, our Digital Humanities Librarian, Stanford became one of the first universities with a copy of Roopika Risam’s book New Digital Worlds last week. It was recalled before I even picked it up, leaving me with only a week to read it. As it turned out, there was no need to be concerned: Risam has accomplished the rare feat of crafting a monograph that is simultaneously scholarly, engaging, and applicable. Last Thursday, I started reading it on my 2-hour morning commute, continued during lunch, resumed on my 2-hour evening commute, and — with a brief hiatus for a rousing bedtime chorus of favorite cartoon theme songs with two small children (of such things are modern folksongs made) — spent the coveted post-bedtime hours finishing it. It was around lunchtime that I realized that I needed my own copy and ordered it on the spot.

The introduction through chapter 3 feel like a contiguous thread, with chapter 4 pivoting towards the applied through its focus on pedagogy, and chapter 5 taking a different tack to provide a humanities response to data science and associated tools and methods. The relationship between digital humanities and data science is an active area of negotiation, and chapter 5 is a thoughtful contribution to the discussion. It’s now at the top of my list of suggested readings on that topic, though it felt a little tangential while reading through the whole book in one day.

Regardless of what variety of DH you practice — what discipline, what medium, what century, what language — New Digital Worlds has food for thought. One thing I took from reading it is the importance of being clear and precise in articulating what you’re talking about. I've started to be more attentive to sweeping generalizations, either stated or implied, as well as unspoken assumptions about corpora (language, author's gender, etc.) The necessity of explicitly stating these things has become a lens through which I read other scholarship. It's important to not forget that there are materials we won't have access to because they weren’t preserved, and that there are gaps in our understanding of the scope and nature of history, literature, art, culture, and language as a result of colonialist choices that were made by those in power. You should acknowledge the “known unknowns". If you discover something interesting in a corpus of pre-20th-century novels by Americans, published in major American publishing houses, don’t declare it a finding about “literature” — or even “American novels”. It’s worth thinking through and spelling out (to the extent you can) the materials missing from your corpus. In the Stanford LitLab talks I’ve been to on their “typicality in the novel” project, I appreciate the fact that Mark Algee-Hewitt has always made time to talk through the things their (licensed) corpus doesn’t include, and who gets excluded as a result.

I’ll confess that I requested this book with the expectation of using it for just one week of the course I’m teaching next semester on non-English textual DH. On Tuesday, January 29th, I was planning to include a shout-out to postcolonial DH as part of a discussion of thematic research collections, in the context of Mukurtu (which itself gets a nice write-up in New Digital Worlds). Instead, what I have in New Digital Worlds feels like an important conceptual scaffolding and a unifying thread for a course that is very much a product of my own engagement with DH: always in an alt-ac / librarian role (in spirit or in fact), strongly oriented towards “doing” and strongly inclined towards leaving the “theorizing” to someone else.

The introduction and chapter 1 provide background, context, and an explanation of postcolonial digital humanities. In situating it relative to other approaches, disciplines, movements, and individual projects, Risam has done the larger community a tremendous service in compiling a substantial bibliography. Alas, it’s undermined by Northwestern University Press’s regrettable insistence on Chicago-style footnotes and no bibliography as such (I asked Risam about it on Twitter, after getting befuddled by one of the footnotes), but so it goes. There were multiple points where it felt like Risam had managed to anticipate my own to-do list for planning out this course, and preempted my meandering attempt to explain various facets of DH culture (e.g. “hack vs. yack”, anti-neoliberalist criticism of DH, “disrupt DH”, etc.) with a clear articulation of key issues, arguments, and individuals.

One small note on chapter 1: the point is well taken that there are widely-used tools and approaches that have been trained on English, and are unusable with other languages. Stanford’s named-entity recognition, part of the nltk package, is primarily trained on English, though you can separately download German, Spanish, or Chinese models. I was concerned about a reference to the MALLET topic modeling package as one with pernicious results as a consequence of being trained on English — that wasn’t my impression about how LDA topic modeling worked. Following the citation trail, though, it turns out to be a corpus issue: for the “Distant Reading of Empire” project, faculty and students at Swarthmore College used MALLET on 3,000 text files requested from HathiTrust. The presentation notes cited in chapter 1 state that they tried to just get English books but "If MALLET comes across a foreign language it will place all of the words in that language into one topic" — which isn’t exactly what's going on. If MALLET is working with a corpus that’s primarily in English and there happens to be a couple documents in another language, the words that appear in the topic model that aren’t in English will cluster together because they occur with one another, and do not occur with English words. But if you run MALLET on a text that includes code-switching and free interweaving of languages (like Spanish and English in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza), you get bilingual topics because English and Spanish words appear in close proximity to one another. Where one can raise concerns with MALLET on decolonizing DH grounds is the fact that it presupposes that the “words” that make up the topics are separated by spaces. Chinese texts don’t follow that convention, as one example, and the use of spaces in Arabic also doesn't quite align with the expectations of tools like MALLET or Voyant that rely on spaces. Luckily, Stanford NLP has a word segmenter for both those languages, but if the language you’re working with doesn’t separate words with spaces (and this includes medieval European documents written in older varieties of languages whose modern forms use spaces), and you don’t have a way to impose that convention on your documents, MALLET and similar implementations of topic modeling aren't available to you.

Chapter 3, “Colonial Violence and the Postcolonial Digital Archive”, is what I was looking for and expecting from this book. It includes the discussion of Mukurtu, and — to my surprise — a criticism of NINES. Risam notes that the materials that appear there are mostly centered on canonical white writers from the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, and “These omissions appear, unseen in their absence, in NINEs, which does not include nineteenth-century Anglophone writing from Great Britain’s colonies and underrepresented black and indigenous voices… Yet its connections to colonialism have gone unremarked. Colonial violence in NINEs appears in its reipscription of colonial legacies in digital form and the rehearsal of the colonial dynamics of knowledge production that have bothered large swathes of the human population. The erasures within NINES are examples of colonial violence that persists in digital humanities scholarship.” (p. 51)

As someone who’s run directories before (populated through manual data entry or one-time bulk imports, rather than acting as an aggregator of data stored elsewhere), the question of responsibility for gaps in that data is of real interest for me. It also calls to mind — as a consequence of my own background as a Slavist — those “famous Russian questions”: “Who’s guilty?” and “What to do?” Are there 19th century postcolonial projects being submitted to NINES that are being rejected? Do the creators of such projects not even submit them to NINES, due to perceived technical barriers or biases in the approval process? Are people who work in postcolonial DH less likely to be familiar with NINES, or less likely to think of it as a possible venue for dissemination? If it’s an outreach problem, are there things that NINES does in its outreach that are a turn-off to postcolonial DH folks, or is it just that NINES isn’t doing much outreach at all these days? The easiest way to build a resource that draws on information from a wide variety of sources is to work within the networks of people you already know, as it’s difficult to get a general-purpose call for participation to gain traction on Twitter or mailing lists. My own network can largely be traced (in one way or another) back to the first phase of the ill-fated digital humanities cyberinfrastructure initiative Project Bamboo (2008-2010), which has led to a set of connections that are hardly representative of digital humanities as it’s practiced today, and I know I need to work on remedying that. There’s clearly more that NINES could and should to be clear about the colonial context of some of its materials, and there's an opportunity to engage with postcolonial DH projects (including the Bichitra Online Tagore Variorum frequently mentioned in Risam's book), but from the paucity of news, my sense is that NINES is making do, keeping the site running, but the project doesn't currently have funding to do much more than that. If rethinking, reframing, and reworking how to better cover a wider range of 19th century scholarship and acknowledge what’s been lost to colonialism is off the table, it’s much easier to add more materials that are compatible with the current structure of NINES. To that end, the list of partner sites for NINES is more diverse (linguistically, at least) than I expected based on Risam's description. There are multiple sub-listings for the Blue Mountain Project ("a digital thematic research collection of art, music and literary periodicals published between 1848, the year of the European Revolutions, and 1923”) that expand the scope of NINES to include materials in languages including French, German, Danish, Italian, and Czech. The National Library of Bulgaria and National Museum in Warsaw (both via Europeana) are partners. For resources that would appear to engage with postcolonial DH, there’s The Digital Library of the Caribbean, Caribbean Literature (featuring poetry and fiction in "English, French, Spanish, Dutch, and various Creole languages"), and North American Indian Thought and Culture — though it’s important to note the caveat that the latter two collections are freely searchable through NINES, but are commercial resources and full text is only available by subscription. Sustainability is expensive, and even if you can prevent a long-running site from becoming technically outdated, Risam’s critique has left me thinking about how even aggregator-type resources (that aren’t meant to make an argument in and of themselves) should dedicate time to periodically reviewing and updating at least their framing prose to respond to new scholarship and discourse in the field.

In the course I’m teaching next quarter, there are two class sessions that will explicitly deal with national and international DH organizations; the ethos of DH as practiced in the US, and how that’s similar and different from other DH communities; and the ways that DH is similar and different from students’ own disciplinary cultures. I knew this would mean I’d have to spend some time putting together a clear distillation of key groups and organizations, and how they relate to one another, and I was surprised and delighted to see that Risam has done a significant amount of that work for me in chapter 3. What’s more, by coming to DH through a different path than I’ve taken, she has insight into the history of some of these organizations that I didn’t know about. I remember the general zeitgeist when GO::DH started, but I only had a vague idea of the context of its creation before reading this book. Likewise, I hadn’t realized that Risam was the first person of color to be elected to the ACH exec board (she predated me on the board and her time partially overlapped with mine). The degree to which ACH has come to be associated internationally with advocating for diverse vision of DH — along parameters of race, gender, and background, and not just language — is a testament to Risam’s effectiveness on the exec board, and the effectiveness of those she has helped bring into the organization (including Élika Ortega). In addition to a discussion of organizations, chapter 3 contrasts Melissa Terras’s 2012 map of DH centers (which don't show much DH activity in the Global South) to other approaches to mapping DH, such as that used by the “Around DH in 80 Days” project. Whether on the single-institutional level or the global level, it’s remarkable how different your results can be depending on how you “count” or “map” DH, as I’ve been discovering locally over the course of my first quarter at Stanford.

Chapter 4 shifts focus to the classroom, with some concrete ideas and suggestions for implementing postcolonial digital pedagogy. The chapter is largely oriented towards teaching undergrads, and while I only have a few of them in my class next quarter, it nonetheless served as support for the approach I’m taking with assignments. My course will have no traditional written essays, but the students taking the course for the maximum number of credits will be developing a tutorial aimed at others in their discipline for how to a tool or method that we've covered in class, writing conference proposals (one for their major disciplinary conference, and one for a DH conference) to hypothetically present their final projects, and designing a poster for the final poster session, in addition to blogging about their experiences applying the tools we discuss to materials in their non-English language of choice. I’m not sure to what extent I’ll be contextualizing what we do within “the politics of knowledge production laid bare by postcolonial studies” and “the colonial and neocolonial knowledge formations that link both print and digital culture” (p. 94), but it’s something to consider. We’ll definitely be talking about where tool and library development happens, and how people have responded to having their language “left out" — which will be something I’ll also be reading up on in greater depth over the next couple months.

Chapter 5 would make a wonderful article, and I worry that without some “marketing”, it won’t find its way onto the right reading lists: people interested in debates about the intersection of digital humanities with data science may not think to check the last chapter of a book on postcolonial digital humanities. Risam first contextualizes the rhetoric of the “crisis of the humanities” within time (with similar statements dating to the 17th century) and space (through a comparison to European anxiety over the Research Excellence Framework, and South Africa’s crisis-focused report on the humanities in 2011). The challenge of modeling “the human” — as is implicit in many undertakings in data science — connects the chapter to the postcolonial focus of the rest of the book. “In the broader context of these technologies, an area that remains underexplored is the way that the ‘human’ is articulated, produced, and normed in the drive towards emulating ‘human’ processes. At stake is the way that universalist framings of the ‘human’ are produced through natural language-processing software, machine learning, and algorithms … they reinforce the notion that there are normative and singular ways of being human in the twenty-first century.” (p. 125.) Risam also raises ethical concerns about the use of crowdsourced coding labor using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and also calls into question our ability to make universalizing statements using this data without being able to consider the influence of the coders’ identities, cultural backgrounds, and geographic locations. “Failing to identify its own standpoint, the project elides cognitive processes that may be shaped by the particulars of lived and embodied experience." (p. 131). Risam similarly warns against technological “black boxes”, as well as approaches to computational literary analysis such as those that are "tasked with decisions about narratological salience that are themselves subtended by universalist notions of the human, rather than situated in the contexts informing the text. Like other algorithms, they are steeped in the cultural and political implications of computation and code, which are themselves overdetermined by the ontological categories and epistemological processes of the Global North. Furthermore, the datasets and databases used in conjunction with algorithms are themselves constructed and subject to political social forces as well.” (p. 132). I do plan to teach NLP methods next quarter, and I’m involved in a couple research projects that use computational text analysis. I think that, done carefully, NLP can give us information about by-what-means different aspects of literature— be they authorship signals, suspense, genre, etc.— are implemented, but that context (cultural, author identity, temporal, etc.) is crucial for helping us understand and account for variation in that data. And likewise, I don’t think I’ll be renouncing large datasets, but it’s a good reminder to be both clear with yourself and explicit in your analysis regarding the limitations that their scope and the context of their creation places on the scope of the claims you can make.

The conclusion is framed as a call to action, and is one of the more stirring proposals of a vision for digital humanities as a force for good both within the academy, and within the broader world through its engagement, collaboration, and partnerships with communities whose history, literature, and culture have been objects of study. It emphasizes the value of local practices, pushing back against “universals" that stem from the context of the Global North, and calls for more making that draws on epistemologies with different roots. Intervening “in the channels of capital, knowledge, and power in which the academy is implicated” towards the goal of “a digital cultural record that puts social justice at its center — a record that is postcolonial, feminist, antiracist, intersectional” (p. 144) is an inspiring vision and a noble goal. It positions digital humanities to make a unique and broadly meaningful contribution to the humanities, rather than simply opening up a new set of research questions that will be met by the same uneven interest as any other research agenda in the humanities. That said, not everyone is in an equal position to take up this call to action. I don’t think it would end well for me if I took reshaping the digital cultural record as a major vetting factor in what projects I support. There are things I can and should do, like more engagement with the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures (which includes “the literature and cultures of the Iberian Peninsula, Latin America, Brazil, Lusophone Africa, and Latinx communities in the United States”). But for myself, the biggest takeaway point is to get clear about about the scope, audience, goals, and limits of any project, and be explicit about those things in whatever form the project is disseminated.

New Digital Worlds has a thoughtful and refreshingly different read on, and criticism of, digital humanities. There’s something to consider for people in a wide variety of roles, from librarians who develop (or purchase) corpora, to museum and archives folks who directly grapple with issues around cultural heritage materials, to developers who build digital humanities tools and projects, to scholars and instructors engaged with research and/or teaching, to students who are trying to choose a focus for their own scholarship. Even if you don’t agree with everything in it, it is very much a worthwhile read. Now that I have my own copy, I’m looking forward to revisiting it with sticky notes and highlighter, and keeping it close at hand next quarter.

Enterprise tools and DH

Quinn Dombrowski — Tue, 04 Dec 2018 16:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · December 5, 2018

"Can you say something about using enterprise tools for DH?" Annie Swafford asked towards the end of a recent meeting. I think she knew that prompt was like pulling out a chocolate advent calendar in front of a 3-year-old, and I managed to show some restraint by limiting myself to the short form of my usual rant, so that everyone could make it to their next meetings on time.

For over a decade, I worked in central IT, first at the University of Chicago and then at UC Berkeley. There are lessons (positive and negative) that digital humanities can take from central IT, but it's important to think carefully before adopting their tools.

To begin, let's differentiate two kinds of tools in DH: those that we use for the organization, collaboration, and management of tasks, funding, staff, etc. that surround our work (let’s call them support tools); and those that we use for the work itself (project tools).

I’ve found that self-identifying as "enterprise" is a red flag for tools in either category. While this has started to change, the term "enterprise" has correlated with user experience not being a priority. Even as the marketplace has grown crowded with apps and platforms competing for customers, in an "enterprise" context, there is usually one decision-maker behind a large purchase that dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people will be forced to use for years at a time. Even when there's a committee involved, it tends to be made up of people who think differently than humanities scholars do. For instance, at UC Berkeley we had an enterprise purchasing system that apparently the financial people loved, but problems arose when everyone else had to use it, too. To illustrate the absurdity of this system, the first step to pay an invoice from any arbitrary online retailer was to search for "not found" in the supplier field, so that you could select the controlled vocabulary term "supplier not found" and then get on with the rest of the 8-step process.

The UX situation with enterprise tools is improving, if only in the sense that tools developed to compete in the individual-user or small-group market are trying to reach bigger and more profitable customers by developing "enterprise" features and pricing models. The to-do list platform Asana, which I've used for a couple years, comes to mind as an example. Their "enterprise" page highlights features that have to do with authentication (e.g. single sign-on integration, user provisioning/de-provisioning through single sign-on) and control. Some of the control-based options, such as the feature for exporting all data that was ever entered into Asana, could have some utility in a DH context — though data portability is more important for project tools than support tools. Other enterprise features, like blocking Asana’s integration with other apps, have limited relevance for DH projects.

What does it matter if a tool has extra features that a project doesn’t need? As long as its feature set covers the things your project does need, why should extra authentication or security features be a concern? Microsoft Word is the example par excellence of software adopted throughout the humanities, where most people use only a tiny fraction of its feature set. That said, the designers of Word have largely figured out how to include and maintain a large, complex set of features in a manner that does not disrupt the simpler workflows of much of the software’s user base. I was not, and still am not, a fan of the "ribbon" UI when it was rolled out, but I can do most of what I need using just the options in the "Home" tab, while ignoring the rest of the interface.

I’ve found that "enterprise" features are less good at staying out of the way. Institutionally-based single sign-on authentication systems impose paradigms of access that are at odds with the broadly (and cross-institutionally) collaborative models of project development in digital humanities. Yes, tool-internal authentication is less secure than single sign-on, but it makes adding an account for a collaborator trivially easy. If a tool requires the use of institutional single sign-on, you have to hope that your institution offers guest accounts, and enables those guest accounts for authenticating against the tool. And if you’re fortunate enough for that to be the case, you might have the pleasure of waiting hours, days, or longer for the guest account to be approved and created. Whether or not the tool itself imposes enterprise-style restrictions on integrations, enterprise tools often come with policies that that limit customization, plugins, etc. Not being allowed to install a plugin that would simplify tedious tasks of data entry or formatting is a nuisance in the context of support tools, but these restrictions can have serious implications for the kind of data and metadata you can collect, how you can store it, how you can analyze it, and how you can export or publish it in the context of project tools. Enterprise tools are also built with the expectation that they’ll be installed, maintained, and supported in an "enterprise" environment, by some number of IT support staff with specific technical expertise. In a university context, central IT, library, or divisional / local IT staff typically play this role. Being able to delegate the maintenance and support of this software to those kinds of staff positions, rather than funding a grad student or postdoc out of DH project funds to wrangle maintenance of a smaller open-source software package, may make enterprise tools look like a more appealing option. However, problems arise when the scholar leading the project departs for another institution. The new institution may have made different choices about which enterprise platforms to run, leaving the scholar to choose between a migration (time-consuming and expensive, but mostly a one-time cost), trying to run an enterprise tool on their own (complicated and an ongoing expense), or seeking out a software-as-a-service environment (a potentially cost-prohibitive ongoing expense).

The leadership behind every piece of software — be it open-source or proprietary — has to make decisions about which features to prioritize. Particularly for software that depends on purchases or subscriptions (as opposed to consortial membership) for financial sustainability, the enterprise market is alluring. It’s much more efficient to land a handful of large enterprise contracts than pursue leads for many, many small-scale projects and organizations whose needs are more heterogenous than enterprise environments’. This inevitably influences development priorities: given limited resources, would it be more advantageous to develop (or enrich) a relatively predictable set of features for well-paying clients, or tackle the diverse requests of users who may not be a source of revenue at all?

Some software has found a middle ground — content management systems come to mind as an example. For WordPress, there are plugins and ways of configuring it that are geared towards "enterprise", but the core software itself doesn’t lean heavily in that direction. Drupal 7 also took that approach, before its creator decided to actively court "enterprise developers" with Drupal 8 by replacing much of Drupal’s core with the Symfony framework and object-oriented code. The resources directed towards the Drupal 8 rewrite were immense, but the result is a platform that — more than three years after it was released — is still less usable for digital humanities projects than the preceding version. Its PHP memory requirements for even decent performance are noticeably higher than for Drupal 7, and more than what you get by default through inexpensive shared hosting services (though the difference is insubstantial in an enterprise IT context). Writing modules in Drupal 8 may be more intuitive if you have experience with the Symfony framework, but that’s not a widespread skill among DH developers. And that shows in the number of DH-supporting modules available for Drupal 8.

About a month ago, I attended the Backdrop CMS summit at the Bay Area Drupal Camp and was treated to a vivid example of what it looks like to work with open an open source tool whose intended audience, goals, and priorities align with your own. Backdrop CMS is a fork of Drupal 7, and a small team of developers has spent the last three years fixing most of the annoying things about Drupal 7 that I had grown so accustomed to that I’d stopped noticing them. Backdrop is platform that minimally-technical people can use to build sophisticated websites, without having to write code. The developers have integrated some of the features from Drupal 8 (like configuration management) that are directly useful to their audience, and added new features, like being able to search for and install modules through Backdrop’s GUI. The next release is slated to have an optional feature for automatically updating Backdrop core. Having just spent much of my first two months at this job cleaning up hacked Drupal sites that hadn’t been updated, the possibility of automatic core updates seemed transformative. It’s the opposite of enterprise — shouldn’t updates be thoroughly tested before being rolled out in a version-controlled manner to a live site? But particularly for DH projects that are no longer being actively developed or even maintained, the risks associated with automatic updates might be a trade-off worth making.

DH projects aren’t "enterprise". Our goals are different, our audiences are different, our staffing models are different — in substantive ways that can cause friction when we adopt enterprise tools. DH isn’t unique in its divergence from "enterprise" (as I learned during my time working in research and high-performance computing), but it's an aspect of our work that we can't forget about when evaluating tools.

Engaging with DARIAH through MESO

Quinn Dombrowski — Sun, 18 Nov 2018 16:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · November 19, 2018

The first DARIAH Beyond Europe workshop, held at Stanford in mid-September, was for me a reintroduction to both DARIAH (the European digital humanities infrastructure organization) and Stanford’s digital humanities scene. I’d had the opportunity to engage with DARIAH in its early days, through my involvement with the ill-fated US cyberinfrastructure initiative Project Bamboo (and the short-lived CHAIN: Coalition of Humanities and Arts Infrastructures and Networks); and again later, in 2014, when looking for an organizational home for the now-defunct DiRT tool directory (which has been incorporated into TAPoR).

The biggest question for me, coming out of that workshop, was how, specifically, we should get engaged with DARIAH. If we reach out to their working groups, would they be welcoming to interest from somewhat random Americans? Is it useful to anyone to add Stanford-internal courses to their course registry? Do they actually want feedback on the materials in #DARIAHTeach?

At the time, I wrote a blog post about being a “cowboy” and taking the next steps after the workshop, and creating a mailing list on the spot for people who want to try to use DARIAH resources in their research and/or teaching. In the meantime, I’ve been trying to make time to engage with DARIAH, even as I acclimate to this new job, and plan for my digital humanities course next quarter (called “Digital Humanities Across Borders”, which will focus on non-English textual DH). One of the major projects I’ve been working on since I started at Stanford has been Prof. Kathryn Starkey’s “Global Medieval Sourcebook”, which will soon be relaunching. As such, it feels felicitous that the first DARIAH working group that responded to my inquiries was Mediaevalist’s Sources (MESO). Emiliano Degl’Innocenti, the National Coordinator of DARIAH Italy and co-lead of this working group, happened to be attending DigitalHERITAGE 2018 in San Francisco, and I met up with him at a coffee break (where I told him I’d be the one wearing a Glagolitic manuscript) to learn more about the working group, and what we might be able to do together. I wrote it up for the DARIAH Beyond Europe blog; see there for details.

DH Happy Hour

Quinn Dombrowski — Thu, 15 Nov 2018 16:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · November 16, 2018

Date/Time: Thursday, 6 December 2018 - 4:00pm to 5:00pmLocation: The Treehouse

Join colleagues from Stanford's digital humanities community for drinks and friendly conversation at The Treehouse!

Zombie digital humanities

Quinn Dombrowski — Tue, 30 Oct 2018 17:00:00 +0000

Quinn Dombrowski · October 31, 2018

I've been thinking a lot lately about the undead, various forms of afterlife, and how they intersect with digital humanities. As a result, Halloween seemed a fitting occasion to relaunch the blog at Stanford's Digital Humanities website, with further reanimation to come.

First, by way of introduction, I'm Quinn Dombrowski, the new Academic Technology Specialist in CIDR (Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research) and the DLCL (Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages) at Stanford. Which is to say, I support the "doing" of DH in literature (other than English, East Asian, or Classics), in a position jointly funded by that division and Stanford Libraries. My background is in Slavic linguistics, and I picked up a Master's in Library and Information Science along the way.

I stumbled into digital humanities in 2004 when I begged the UChicago Slavic department to let me redesign the departmental website (it had animated GIFs of matryoshkas). In doing so, I tipped my hand that I Knew Things About Technology. When Prof. Daniela Hristova (may she rest in peace) got a grant to do a digital version of the Primary Chronicle, she brought me in to wrangle the technology for the project. Three years later I was interpreting for Russian presenters at the international Digital Humanities 2007 conference, and a year after that, I was on the program staff of a million-dollar Mellon-funded digital humanities cyber infrastructure initiative called Project Bamboo, which has had its own afterlife as a cautionary tale for large consortial infrastructure initiatives.

Between then and now, I've had about five discrete jobs, three of them "in" DH. Before I moved from Chicago to Berkeley and had kids, my nights and weekends could backfill when I didn't have a DH job, allowing me to keep my projects alive. In the last 18 months, the combination of a preschooler, a toddler, and a pregnancy, along with an explicitly non-DH job in research computing, essentially spelled the end of my involvement with DH: the maintenance of my projects (DiRT and DHCommons, rest in peace) and my ability to meaningfully engage with the community.

It's a common lament that people in alt-ac jobs don't have the same level of autonomy as people in academic roles, but the typical examples lean towards the day-to-day or month-to-month. Not having time to do research, not being able to go to conferences. Less commonly cited, though no less true, is the way that the scope and nature of alt-ac jobs can shift dramatically with changes in administrative priorities, funding, and strategy. A library or IT group can publicly declare DH to be part of its mandate, or DH can exist in a gray area, or it can be explicitly out of scope -- and all three can happen at the same institution within the span of a few years. When the DH tide recedes at work, people in these alt-ac positions face a choice of whether to redirect time from other corners of their life to maintain a tie to the DH world, accept going dormant for a time that may stretch out indefinitely, or lean into the new status quo and become something else. There is life after DH.

I was in the last of these camps for the last year and a half. DH was still what I knew best, but there wasn't really a way for me to do it at the institution I was certain I would retire from someday. I was going to do research facilitation for non-traditional users of high performance computing. "Just think of me as Obi-Wan Kenobi," I joked with a DH-oriented colleague at work. "I'll be in that Research IT cave over there, and if you're ever in great need, you can come find me."

Especially during this last year, I'm grateful to the DH necromancers who made porous the barrier between the living and the dead, inviting me to give keynotes and speak on panels, and making it logistically feasible with travel support. It may not work for all DH ghosts (especially those who have jobs entirely outside the academy), but at least in my alt-ac position, it's enough of an honor to be asked to keynote an event that it didn't take much work to convince my organization to spare me for a day or two, if it didn't impact their travel funds. It's a reminder for to me to try to pay those invitations forward to other dearly departed from the field.

I’ve been happily undead for the last month now, and I've been reflecting on what's changed in DH in terms of tools and methods. TEI isn't going anywhere and thematic research collections are still very much a thing, but it’s heartening to see more thought going towards “collections as data”, rather than simply building beautiful websites. I’ve been around long enough to remember the debates about whether blogging about academic topics constituted “digital humanities”. Then came the emergence of Twitter and the decline of blogging as a forum for scholarly discourse. DH dialogue these days seems fragmented across many platforms and channels, but I’ve been heartened to see favorite blogs that had gone dormant (such as Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s) once again light up my feed reader, even as other stalwart blogs have recently met abrupt ends (RIP dear Library Loon).

Returning to digital humanities, I’ve been struck by the usefulness of old blog posts I’ve re-discovered, even those dating back half a decade or more. Scott Weingart’s posts about network analysis, spurred by a post by Elijah Meeks, have been a wonderful refresher on a set of tools I barely dabbled with in my previous DH lives. For seeing what others are working on, I find reading blogs to be much more tractable than trying to stay on top of the tweet stream, and I’m grateful to aggregators like Digital Humanities Now for those times when I need a more concentrated distillation of goings-on in DH. So in the spirit of Elijah Meeks (another of Stanford’s DH-departed, now with Netflix), I’ll be blogging here, and inviting others in the Stanford DH community to do the same. I hope you’ll join me for reanimating the Stanford Digital Humanities blog.

Job opening: Academic Technology Specialist in Literatures, Cultures, and Languages

Glen Worthey — Thu, 24 May 2018 17:00:00 +0000

Glen Worthey · May 25, 2018

The Stanford University Libraries’ Center for Interdisciplinary Research (CIDR) the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages (DLCL) of Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences are seeking an innovative, experienced, team-oriented Academic Technology Specialist to help lead the integration of technology into teaching, learning, and research activities in the digital humanities at Stanford and beyond. This person will consult and collaborate with members of the Stanford community, as well as analyzing, designing, developing, and implementing computational tools for humanities research and teaching. Apply at http://m.rfer.us/STANFORDfjgse.

The Academic Technology Specialist will be based jointly in the DLCL and the Stanford Libraries, where s/he will be part of a distinguished and widely-recognized team of other academic technologists and software developers with combined decades of expertise in the computational social sciences and digital humanities, whose activities support research and teaching in these fields for the Stanford community. CIDR collaborates both with individual faculty and with centers and departments engaged in digital research, such as the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA, incorporating the Spatial History Project, the Literary Lab, Humanities+Design, and the Poetic Media Lab); the Stanford Humanities Center; the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences; and other campus units. CIDR is also a hub for collaboration and communication among social science and digital humanities scholars, library curators, and professional developers, promoting a sense of shared purpose in support of the Stanford mission of research and teaching.

The successful candidate will have a deep understanding of scholarship in the humanities and the digital humanities. She or he will consult and collaborate with faculty and students on scholarly projects to identify technical approaches, processes and tools; evaluate and integrate existing software tools; and design and implement new solutions. That candidate should have both a broad and deep understanding of current the state of the art in the digital humanities, as well as experience working with software for information visualization; statistical and textual analysis; natural language processing; digital content creation, storage, and discovery; network analysis; and other areas.

More details and application instructions at http://m.rfer.us/STANFORDfjgse.

Submit or update a project

Sharon Krossa — Wed, 30 Sep 2015 17:00:00 +0000

Sharon Krossa · October 1, 2015

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2015-2016 CIDR Development Team Call for Proposals

Glen Worthey — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 17:00:00 +0000

Glen Worthey · September 30, 2015

Introduction

The Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research (CIDR), a division of the Stanford University Libraries, is pleased to announce a Call for Proposals from Stanford faculty members for research collaborations in the digital humanities and computational social sciences. Projects should focus on the production of digitally enabled scholarship designed to analyze, visualize, or simulate an interesting problem in the humanities or social sciences. CIDR support in these collaborations will consist of dedicated software development, project planning, and project management efforts.

We expect and encourage proposal submissions that represent the widest range of topics, theories, and disciplines. We welcome ideas that push the boundaries of conventional research and pedagogical methods and that introduce new and sophisticated modes of analysis and visualization. Successful projects will make novel contributions to the scholar’s field, will be theoretically and/or methodologically novel, and will be creative and technically innovative. We will look favorably upon projects that cross disciplines, that engage students, and that produce tools and methods that are generalizable and reusable by others.

CIDR has particular expertise in these and related methodologies, and especially welcomes proposals making use of them:

textual analysis and text mining
historical geographic information systems (hGIS)
network analysis (geographic, social, citation, etc.)
advanced data visualization
computer gaming and the humanities / social sciences

Program scope

The Stanford University Libraries are committed to collaborations with Stanford faculty on innovative research projects in the digital humanities and computational social sciences. The Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research at Stanford includes a team of software developers and digital research specialists who maintain a portfolio of projects that vary in complexity and duration. The CIDR team works closely with a variety of other SUL units such as the Geospatial Center and IT infrastructure specialists (database analysts, systems administrators, development operations managers), and relies on other Library services such as the Stanford Digital Repository in support of selected projects.

Because proposals themselves may vary in complexity and duration, we cannot guarantee award of a specific number of supported projects. We will select a portfolio of projects in the context of our available resources such that SUL can confidently help carry each one to a successful outcome within a reasonable timeframe. The selection process will take into consideration current project commitments and staffing resources.

The size and composition of the team collaborating on selected projects will be determined during the detailed project planning phase, after successful proposals are selected.

Submission and selection process

Brief Statements of Interest (on the order of 1-3 pages) will be received and reviewed by the CIDR team on a rolling basis (but before Oct. 20). The CIDR team will initiate an in-person consultation with each faculty proponent in order to make early-stage assessments of project scope, fitness for the CIDR team’s skill set and overall portfolio, compatibility with SUL technology infrastructure, and other technical aspects of the project. It is appropriate for CIDR team members to review drafts of proposals and make suggestions to the proposing P.I.

Statements of Interest can be fairly informal, and may be based roughly on the format of the full proposal described below.

The Statement of Interest and initial consultation are intended primarily to assist faculty in the crafting of a fuller proposal, including explicit goals, a proposed schedule, and a work plan for the collaboration. The CIDR team will be happy to review drafts before submission, and to consult in the preparation of the full Final Proposal.

Final Proposals will then be evaluated for scholarly appropriateness and recommended for support by members of the CIDR Faculty Advisory Board, for project planning to begin as soon as projects underway now reach conclusion and, therefore, on a rolling basis.

Final Proposals should include the following:

Project title and one-sentence description
Abstract of no more than 250 words
Proposal narrative of not more than three pages
CV for each applicant

Project title and one sentence description: A clear and concise description of the project that describes the work and its intellectual and technological significance.

The Proposal narrative should address the following topics:

Audience: Please describe the intended audience for the proposed work. We are seeking rigorous scholarly work that lends itself to peer review and advances the field, so fellow scholars are almost always one audience. In addition, projects may be intended for the lay public, policy makers, undergraduates, or K-12 education, among others.

Purpose: What are the main purposes of your project? Some possible purposes are: scholarly communication, creation of analytical or exploratory environments, collaboration, or pedagogy. Since a project may have several purposes that may be in competition with one another, we find it helpful to prioritize them.

Presentation: The proposal should detail the intended interface or forms of digitally-enabled scholarship, and depth of interactivity with the data. While the actual interface may still be unknown or loosely conceived, the proposal should establish the feasibility of the project such that achievable milestones can be expressed and a recognizable end-product can be produced.

The intended presentation can be described in narrative as static mockups, or as an interactive or dynamic animation. Visualizations are encouraged, given that visualization of data flow is common in explaining the design and function of scholarly digital work.

Technical requirements need to be clearly defined. If the project is expected to be produced in a particular type of code or to exist in a particular computing environment or platform, then these requirements need to be specified.

Data: The proposal should identify any existing digital or digital-ready content that will be used for the project. The former could be tabular data, images, 3D models/textures, existing pieces of code, et cetera. The latter could be data sources and other media still in a traditional format but readily digitized. Describe any new data to be collected as part of the project, and how it will be collected and processed.

Data management and sustainability: As a project supported by SUL, long term management and sustainability of the project outcomes and data is a critical consideration. The libraries offer long-term data preservation services, and data management support that should be factored into any proposal. In addressing data management and project sustainability please describe the following:

Project lifecycle: The intended duration of the project outputs once the project is complete. For example if the project output is a web application, for how long do you expect the web site to persist, and how will it be sustained?
Licensing and copyright: Describe the licensing or copyright disposition of data used or produced, as well as the scholarly output itself.
Data preservation: Describe your goals and expectations with respect to data storage and long-term preservation of the project’s digital assets and outputs.

Generalizability and reuse: One of the goals of this program is to develop new digital methods and tools that not only advance the research in question, but also extend the digital humanities and computational social sciences infrastructure at Stanford. In this regard we look favorably upon projects that result in tools, methods and platforms that can be reused by students and other scholars at Stanford and beyond, and can be applied to a variety of research and pedagogical questions, possibly in other disciplines. Please describe known work, or speculate on work by peers or others, that may benefit from the outcomes of the proposed project.

Proposal timeline

October 1, 2015: CfP distributed

October 19: Deadline for Brief Statements of Interest

October 19 - November 13: CIDR review and consultation / proposal development with PIs

November 13: Deadline for Final Proposals

30 November – 2 December: Faculty Advisory Board meets to review and select projects

after 2 December: Decisions announced

January 2016: Detailed planning begins for selected projects (NB: Projects may be scheduled serially in order to maintain the team’s portfolio)

Contacts

Send submissions and questions to contact-cidr@lists.stanford.edu

… or contact a member of the CIDR team directly: Stu Snydman and Glen Worthey (CIDR Co-Leads); Karl Grossner and David McClure (CIDR Developers); Vijoy Abraham, Nicole Coleman, Claudia Engel, Jason Heppler, and Mike Widner (Academic Technology Specialists); and Judy Marsh and Ron Nakao (Social Science Data & Software, SSDS).

ePADD: A New Platform for Conducting DH Research on Email Correspondence

Josh Schneider — Thu, 30 Jul 2015 17:00:00 +0000

Josh Schneider · July 31, 2015

Email has become a dominant instrument of modern communication -- its content illuminating people's lives, activities, and transactions. Even email headers reveal deep social networks. The archival email collections of recent authors and public figures can thus provide unique windows into contemporary society. ePADD, a new software tool developed by Stanford University Libraries, relies on natural language processing and other computational analytic methods to provide DH researchers with unprecedented access to these important collections.

Many digital humanities (DH) portals and digital environments (e.g. TAPoR and Voyant) provide researchers with tools to analyze or mine text-based historical sources, such as newspapers, monographs, and other machine-readable texts. This type of extraction enables scholars to gain profound insight into the works of writers and other historical figures, or uncover linguistic and cultural trends. Given the ubiquity of email as a modern communicatory instrument, and its ability to evidence rich social networks through message headers, the email archives of recent authors and other public figures present a medium ripe for similar exploration for DH researchers interested in studying contemporary society.

To date, however, performing DH research on email collections has run from inconvenient to impractical to impossible for two main reasons. First, due to the challenges inherent in reviewing hundreds of thousands of messages to screen for privacy and confidentiality issues, many repositories are simply unable to open up email archives for research. Second, the contextually rich and networked quality of email has made it difficult to harness with existing tools, which are unable to provide for dedicated browsing and visualization of correspondents and named entities mentioned within messages, or promote researcher interaction with the material (such as through annotation or comparative entity analysis). For these reasons, scholars of modern and contemporary history often turn to other sources to support their research, even when the email archive might make methodological sense to include.

Stanford Libraries developed ePADD to help address these problems. ePADD is an open source, downloadable software program that harnesses and develops computational analytic methods to automate the process of reviewing email archives and providing access to them. ePADD’s adoption by academic libraries and cultural heritage institutions will help ensure that email archives are discoverable by scholars—providing a potential goldmine of new resources for research into contemporary society.

How It Works

ePADD relies on natural language processing (NLP), especially named entity recognition (NER), to enable browsing and visualization of named person, organization, and location entities within email archives. Not satisfied with other open source NER engines, including the Stanford NER and Apache OpenNLP, the ePADD development team created their own engine that integrates new logic to help identify and disambiguate correspondents within the corpus. Extracted entities are linked to their occurrence elsewhere in the archive, allowing for on-the-spot browsing as a researcher navigates the email archive. Further, entities are matched according to a relevance ranking to DBpedia entries, which appear as pop-ups to assist researchers with disambiguation. The ePADD NER ensures persons that occur within the email archive who are also correspondents are weighted more heavily in this ranking.

ePADD’s custom NLP also powers a “query generator,” which supports a comparative entity analysis of the email archive and any other textual document. A researcher can upload any text-block (for instance, a Wikipedia entry, an article, even the full-text of a dissertation or monograph) and see in seconds whether there are any matching named entities that appear in both the uploaded text and the email corpus. Interested in 20th century developments in the history of science? Upload the definitive text on the topic to ePADD and let ePADD tell you in one go whether the corpus contains any related correspondence.

ePADD also embeds functionality for archivists to enact donor restrictions and manage privacy issues when making email archives available to researchers. Often, email archives may only be fully accessible in a special collections reading room due to donor agreement limitations, or third-party privacy and copyright concerns. To support making collection materials discoverable online, ePADD is able to automatically redact contextual information, including email addresses, message headers, message attachments, and non-entities contained within the message. Archivists can then generate a redacted copy of the corpus for search, browsing, and visualization on a public discovery website. This means a researcher at home or in her office can still search extracted named entities within a collection, even if the underlying message content is not online—allowing her to determine whether a trip to a reading room to view the full email corpus is warranted.

These automated research features provide a far more robust and interactive way for researchers to discover collection content than using traditional online finding aids, the familiar research guides. Typically these guides provide minimal description for email correspondence, e.g. “Box 5: Email correspondence on hard drive.” At a time when most archival repositories are moving away from providing detailed description of materials due to staffing and budgetary shortages, incorporating natural language processing into the processing and delivery workflows allows for message-level retrieval.

Once a researcher has arrived in the reading room, she can access additional functionality within the application, including the ability to: create searchable and exportable annotations for individual messages; view all image attachments (linked to their accompanying messages) within the application; and create complex, tiered, thematic searches using a customizable lexicon tool. This lexicon enables users to easily perform sentiment analysis and other linguistic analyses across the email corpus, and supports visualization of the resulting data over time.

Researchers can then add the annotated email messages to a cart, which can be requested from the repository depending on the terms of the collection and the policies of the institution. Exported messages can be natively delivered in .MBOX file format, a ubiquitous format for email, enabling a researcher to import the messages into their favorite existing email application.

On the Horizon

ePADD’s initial release provides broad support for new scholarship using email archives, but there is plenty of room to grow. Future developments may include support for the customizable export of message metadata to enable better integration with other analysis and visualization tools, such as NodeXL or Gephi.

Also under consideration: the creation of a discovery site uniting all email collections that have been processed worldwide using ePADD. This would means lexicons that researchers create could be saved for reuse across institutions. The query generator in this context would enable a bulk search across all available collections. Imagine if, instead of uploading an article or monograph in the query generator for a single collection, you simply subscribed to a service that notified you with an alert anytime a new archival collection matched your parameters. Think Google Alerts for archival email corpuses. Of course, these tools can also be used for other born-digital or digitized documents. Which means ePADD brings us one step closer to an integrated knowledgebase for all text-based archival materials.

While these build-outs look forward quite a bit, ePADD helps advance DH research toward a new horizon of scholarship about contemporary history and literature, and is now freely available and customizable for those eager to explore how it can assist with research.

CIDR hosts O'Sullivan geography lecture and geospatial narratives workshop

Karl Grossner — Sun, 07 Jun 2015 17:00:00 +0000

Karl Grossner · June 8, 2015

On May 7th, Stanford University Libraries’ Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research (CIDR) welcomed David O’Sullivan, Associate Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley to the Stanford campus for two events: a panel discussion on geospatial narrative and a guest lecture on spatial simulation modeling.

The slides and audio from David’s lecture: “Simple spatial models: Building blocks for process-based GIS?"

A brief summary of the panel discussion follows.

Geospatial narrative: Perspectives from the humanities, cartography and geographic information science

In order of presentation, the panelists were Karl Grossner (Stanford, CIDR), Anne Knowles and Levi Westerveld (Middlebury College Geography), Erik Steiner (Stanford, Spatial History Project/CESTA), David O’Sullivan (UC Berkeley Geography), Nicole Coleman (Stanford, Humanities+Design/CESTA), and Nicholas Bauch (Stanford, Spatial History Project/CESTA).

Karl Grossner began with an explanation of the motivations that led to the event, and presented a list of discussion points and questions the panelists themselves had jointly gathered beforehand. The publication of geospatial narratives, by the general public and as a scholarly practice, has grown significantly in recent years—evidenced by a growing number of web-based authoring platforms for it, including: Omeka Neatline, MapStory, ESRI’s Story Maps, StoryMap.js, and HistoryPin. Creators of these works (often though not always historical) are also using GIS (ArcMap, QGIS) and other kinds of advanced geospatial software to perform analyses on historical data.

[commented slides: “Geospatial narrative: Perspectives from the humanities, cartography and geographic information science”]

The nature of the data—often sparse, indeterminate, uncertain—and the kinds of questions being asked—qualitative and quantitative in some combination—are considerably different than those for which GIS and spatial analytic software has been developed over the years. For example, representing temporality with a series of snapshots has proven adequate for many applications but dynamic processes are more problematic and in historical studies, space and time (place and period) are often inextricably intertwined. Discussions between humanities scholars and GIScientists concerning new representational and computing requirements does occur, but is sporadic and unfocused. This panel was organized as one effort to make such discussion directed and explicit.

The questions we asked ourselves were:

Does historical simulation open significant untapped avenues for new historical spatial narratives or is it too reductionist to be accepted by/useful to humanists?
Is there a place for performative art in the spatial humanities? Or does art lack the empirical and representational rigor that is necessary to comprehend data and derive meaning?
what does “spatial narrative” mean?
how does it differ from verbal narrative: is that even a meaningful distinction? a genuine binary?
what’s missing or inadequate in existing tools, models, methods?

Anne Knowles and her student collaborator, Levi Westerveld presented work‑in‑progress taking a new and extraordinary approach to historical narrative as part of the ongoing and long-standing Geographies of the Holocaust project. It deliberately departs from many traditional cartographic conventions, but retains distinctive spatial dimensions that foregrounds topology and scale, is “unhinged” from any typical base map, retains geographic orientation and is presented as an animation. They have generously shared an early short video product of the work, and discussed the distinctive design process for it.

In the video, holocaust survivor Paul Schneiderman describes aspects of his family’s activity as an audio overlay to an evocative and artistic animation of spatial elements within the story. Quoting Anne,

“Using a variety of manual and computer-based methods, we have teased out the spatio-temporal information [the recorded testimonies] contain, while also diagramming the narrative structure of each interview. Our initial results demonstrate the value of slow thinking through visualization in the early stages of research, a process we have come to call inductive visualization; the potential to retain the nuance and depth of human experience while seeking spatio-temporal patterns; the serious challenges digital methods pose when working with emotional, narrative material; and the value of developing an intimate relationship with one's historical sources.”

Erik Steiner presented some of his own work on Geographies of the Holocaust that breaks from cartographic norms in a couple of ways. One piece, “Mapping Mobility in the Budapest Ghetto,” a collaboration with Tim Cole and Alberto Giordano, uses a simulation model and interactive animated mapping application to analyze the spatial constraints and implications of temporal restrictions on Jews free movement throughout the city.

David O’Sullivan presented his recent research using complex spatial simulation models of human and ecological characteristics and behaviors (~30 parameters) leading to de-forestation, resource exploitation and species extinction for an island. He and collaborator George Perry used clustering analysis to extract six typical 'narrative arcs,' each of which is associated with a distinctive 'history' of the island. Using principal component analysis (PCA) they were able to identify those parameters most relevant to each cluster/arc.

David characterized their preliminary findings as demonstrating “radical contingency;” namely that any story is possible on any island, and that both environmental and human factors are only weakly determinative of the outcomes.

[slides: “Identifying ‘narrative arcs’ to explain outcomes in an agent-based model of island resource exploitation”]

Nicole Coleman*’s* presentation, titled “Reading and Writing History through Graphs” first addressed the way aesthetically pleasing, even artistic, representations can be instrumental in effectively representing places, then segued to discussing the early stages in development of a new visual analytic tool being developed by her Humanities+Design group, Idiographic. Idiographic is not geographic, but decidedly spatial and temporal, and involves narrative on two levels. First, it allows a force-directed graph representations of relations between people (which could in cases be co-location), and enables researchers to add new nodes (individuals) and links (relations) joining the network over time, and visualize how their introduction impacts the organization of clusters in the existing graph.

[](http://dh.stanford.edu/docs/Nicole 20150507_Geography-Narrative.key)

Nicole related a real-world narrative of knowledge-production: the engagement of a particular researcher with a particular historical dataset and the Idiographic tool, describing the way it enables exploring hypotheses about the nature and impact of dynamic connections between people—for example by introducing new classifications of people according to profession or groups of professions.

[slides: “[Reading and Writing History through Graphs](http://dh.stanford.edu/docs/Nicole 20150507_Geography-Narrative.key)”]

Nick Bauch presented “Digital Spatial Narrative and the Production of Photographic Space at the Grand Canyon,” discussing work Enchanting the Desert, his “born-digital, peer-reviewed, book-length project that offers spatial analysis and historical interpretation of the 40 landscape photographs included in Henry Peabody’s circa 1905 slideshow of the Grand Canyon.” The interactive web publication nearing completion surrounds each photograph with contextualizing material—a labeled version, a viewshed terrain map indicating in the area depicted, and links to those essays in the project relating to the photo. The means for navigating the collection, both freely and in an author‑guided order are provided, the distinctive digital capability “allowing the spatial narrative.”

Enchanting the Desert will be the first in a series of experimental digital interactive monographs to be published by Stanford University Press.

[slides: “Digital Spatial Narrative and the Production of Photographic Space at the Grand Canyon”]

Members of the Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research central in many Digital Humanities projects

Mike Widner — Mon, 27 Apr 2015 17:00:00 +0000

Mike Widner · April 28, 2015

In advance of the upcoming "Humanities + Digital Tools" panel discussion, the Stanford Humanities Center has produced a series of videos that detail the different exciting projects, many of which were created with support from or even led by members of the Stanford University Libraries' Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research (CIDR). Below, I've embedded the videos that feature support from Academic Technology Specialists and Digital Humanities Research Developers, all core members of CIDR. Rather than list the entire team for each project, I have only highlighted the contributions of the CIDR-affiliated members. Please watch the videos (listed in no particular order) to learn more about all the talented individuals who are working on these exciting projects.

Lacuna Stories features Mike Widner, the Academic Technology Specialist for the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages

Palladio features Nicole Coleman, the Academic Technology Specialist for the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA)

Writing Rights also features Nicole Coleman.

Geography of the Post features Jason Heppler, the Academic Technology Specialist for the Department of History.

Çatalhöyük Living Archive features Karl Grossner, Digital Humanities Research Developer, and Claudia Engel, Academic Technology Specialist for the Department of Anthropology.

Humanities + Digital Tools Panel Discussion

Glen Worthey — Mon, 30 Mar 2015 17:00:00 +0000

Glen Worthey · March 31, 2015

Date/Time: Tuesday, 5 May 2015 - 2:00pm to 4:00pmLocation: Stanford Humanities CenterEvent Link: Humanities + Digital Tools

Humanities + Digital Tools

Panel Discussion at the Stanford Humanities Center

Tuesday, May 5th at 2pm

From visualizations of complex information and interactive teaching platforms to digitization projects and textual analysis, humanities scholars across campus are harnessing the power of digital tools to push the boundaries of their research. Likewise, the unique properties of humanities scholarship are pushing the boundaries of digital tools.

In this panel discussion, Stanford scholars and technical experts will talk about their work in the digital humanities. The conversation, which will be streamed live, will be moderated by Stanford Humanities Center Director Caroline Winterer and Zephyr Frank, Director of Stanford's Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA.)

SHC website http://shc.stanford.edu/events/humanities-digital-tools

Russian Formalism & the Digital Humanities

Glen Worthey — Mon, 30 Mar 2015 17:00:00 +0000

Glen Worthey · March 31, 2015

Date/Time: Monday, 13 April 2015 - 9:30am to 6:00pmLocation: Stanford Humanities CenterEvent Link: Russian Formalism & the Digital Humanities

You are invited to attend “Russian Formalism and the Digital Humanities,” an all-day conference to be held Monday, April 13, 2015 at the Stanford Humanities Center.

The conference places quantitative literary analysis within the broader spectrum of 20th c. literary theory by comparing recent work in the Digital Humanities with Russian Formalism — long considered the foundational movement for modern literary theory.

Individual papers consider the place of objectivity in literary theory, the categories of formal analysis, and explore points of contact between Russian Formalist theory and work in the Digital Humanities in poetics, narrative theory, and literary history.

Featured speakers include Galin Tihanov, Ilya Kliger, Peter Steiner, Glen Worthey, Mark Algee-Hewitt, David Birnbaum, Elise Thorsen, Matthew Jockers, Igor Pilshchikov, Gabriella Safran, and Jessica Merrill.

Russian Formalism & the Digital Humanities: Abstracts

Karim Arsalane — Mon, 16 Mar 2015 17:00:00 +0000

Karim Arsalane · March 17, 2015


Monday, April 13, 2015
Stanford Humanities Center

| | **Opening Remarks (9:30-9:50)**Franco Moretti (Stanford University)

Session One (9:50-12:30): Formalist Literary Analysis Then and Now****Chair: Harsha Ram (University of California, Berkeley) Galin Tihanov (Queen Mary University of London)“Shades Of Objectivity: Russian Formalism Before And After The Digital Humanities” My paper examines the claims to scientific rigour and objectivity that both Russian Formalism (RF) and the Digital Humanities (DH) make. I contextualize these claims historically and try to understand both their common ground and the differences that obtain between RF and DH. I am also interested in revealing the complex ecology of knowledge since the arrival of information technology (with virtual reality, simultaneity, and the suspension of the question of the original as its cornerstones) that inflects our interpretation of RF today and offers access to the (productive) epistemological tensions within DH. Ilya Kliger (New York University)“Dynamic Archeology or Distant Reading: Literary Science between Two Formalisms” In retrospect, it is tempting to see the group of scholars, critics and writers who came to be known as Russian Formalists as sympathetic forebears of the current quantitative turn in literary study. Evidently, the two movements are guided by similar concerns. Both claim privileged status for form. Both hope to grasp literary history as a system rather than a succession of individual authors or works. At least in statements of method, both show contempt for the canon, embracing the archive; and for interpretation, preferring analysis. Both see limitations in close reading. Programmatic similarities at times seem so strong that practitioners of quantitative literary analysis may come to pity their precociously rigorous forerunners for not having had the tools at their disposal – available to us through digitalization – to practice their science properly. The Formalists in turn, while surely intrigued by the new technology, might have found digital literary study methodologically retrograde, or at any rate, foreign. What they might fail to recognize in the work of their better-equipped successors are the very meanings of the basic categories of analysis: form, history, method, literature itself. This presentation is motivated by the premise that, when it comes to the two formalisms here at issue, less is lost in translation than in assuming we don’t need one. Peter Steiner (University of Pennsylvania)“Divergence vs. Convergence: Moretti, Tynyanov, Jakobson” My presentation will focus on Franco Moretti’s provocative application of the Darwinian evolutionary model based on the divergence of biological species and their survival through the mechanism of natural selection to literary history. This approach I will juxtapose to the ideas of the two leading Russian Formalists—Jurii Tynianov and Roman Jakobson—whose explanation of linguistic/literary change was programmatically anti-Darwinian, making conversion (conceived, though, in a very specific way) the cornerstone of their respective historiographies. In doing so, they were reacting to the project of historical poetics advanced by the 19th century Russian Positivist philologist, Aleksandr Veselovskii (1838-1906), whose stated goal was to trace the morphological divergences of texts across time and space. Glen Worthey (Stanford University)“How ‘Digital Humanities’ is Made” This paper is a Formalist- and DH-inspired comparative analysis of Russian Formalism and the Digital Humanities as intellectual movements. I discuss several theoretical and practical commonalities between the two movements as critical schools (that is, their "content"); and likewise compare the historical, social, and institutional contexts in which both of them have arisen and thrived (that is, their "form" and "structure"). I rely on both speculative / interpretative and quantitative / experimental approaches, and will likely ask more questions than I will provide answers.

Session Two (1:30-3:30): Russian Formalist Theory meets Digital Humanities Tools****Chair: Mike Widner (Stanford University) Mark Algee-Hewitt (Stanford University)“The Order of Poetry: Information, Aesthetics and Jakobson’s Theory of Literary Communication” In his search for the underlying linguistic principles of literary (and particularly poetic) communication, Roman Jakobson, in a short essay from 1960, entitled “Linguistics and Communication Theory” remarks upon the “striking coincidences and convergences between the latest stages of linguistic analysis and the approach to language in the mathematical theory of communication.” In the essay, Jakobson outlines the ways in which Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s “Mathematical Theory of Communication” can revise our understanding of literary language as a stochastic process that is influenced by hierarchical rules that manifest themselves in the probabilities of word selection. Although promising, his progress stalls because, as he acknowledges, he lacks the computational power to calculate information load at the scale of corpora. In this paper, I return to the questions that Jakobson raises and investigate the work of poetic language through the application of information theory. Here, I move away from the standard uses of information loss as a method to establish abstract distances between individual poems, and instead derive informational metrics as a set of formal characteristics that offer information about the “noisy” process of poetic communication itself. What do metrics like “redundancy” tell us about the ways in which poets communicate information to their audience? Does, as Jakobson argues, the “noise” of poetic language offer a separate method of communication that accompanies, and enhances, the nominal “meaning” of the text? And, taken as a separate linguistic field, does poetry suggest the limits of understanding information transfer mathematically? By calculating a new set of communication-based metrics on a corpus of English poetry, I explore, in this paper, the ways in which contemporary Digital Humanities work can pick up the striking sympathies that Jakobson outlines and offer new ways of understanding aesthetics through information. David Birnbaum and Elise Thorsen (University of Pittsburgh)"Enabling the automated identification and analysis of meter and rhyme in Russian verse" The quantitative study of meter and rhyme in Russian syllabotonic verse has been well-established as a research method at least since Kiril Taranovski's 1953 Ruski dvodelni ritmovi, and has roots that go back even earlier. Much computer-assisted analysis of Russian meter and rhyme, such as that conducted by J. Thomas Shaw in the latter part of the twentieth century, has used computational tools to manage the data, but the preparation of those data for analysis have traditionally depended on the manual human identification and annotation of the poetic corpus. Manual identification and annotation is not scalable, but machine-assisted alternatives are complicated by the fact that meter and rhyme depend on the place of stress, which is not normally represented in standard Russian orthography. This presentation will discuss the development of new computational tools that overcome those limitations and make it possible to describe and analyze the meter and rhyme of Russian verse on the basis of plain-text input in normal Russian orthography. Matthew Jockers (University of Nebraska)“Latent Plot Analysis Using the Syuzhet Package in R” Jockers will discuss his most recent research charting plot structures in a corpus of 50,000 narratives. He'll discuss how he leveraged tools and techniques from natural language processing, sentiment analysis, signal processing, and machine learning in order to develop an R package that extracts latent plot arcs from narrative fiction. The presentation will include an overview of the method, and overview of the Syuzhet R package he's developed, and the major conclusions of the research.

Session Three (4:00-6:00): Points of Contact - Russian Formalism and the Digital Humanities****Chair: Nariman Skakov (Stanford University) Igor Pil’shchikov (Tallinn University/Moscow State University)“The Legacy of the Moscow Linguistic Circle and the Digital Humanities Today” The Moscow Linguistic Circle, which has recently started to attract the attention of the researchers, still remains one of the most understudied phenomena in the history of Russian linguistics and poetics. The role that it played in the fields of linguistic poetics, verse studies, exact scientific methods in the humanities, semiotics and philosophy of language has not been investigated properly, because the proceedings and other materials of the MLC still await publication. The Moscow scholars developed a formal statistical approach to the study of literary language which examines all the levels of the poetic text. They concerned themselves with both synchronic and diachronic poetics, as well as literary genesis, evolution and typology. This plan was not implemented in full due to the political difficulties of that time. Digital and printed publication of the works of the Moscow Linguistic Circle with a detailed commentary and reference apparatus should be included among the priorities for the conservation of the Russian scientific and cultural-historical heritage. Among the unpublished materials of the MLC the most important place should be ascribed to the reports and minutes from the meetings of the Circle, which are now kept at the Vinogradov Institute of Russian Language in Moscow (ca 700 pp.). Another important group of materials includes unpublished papers on general philology, linguistic poetics and verse theory written by the members of the phenomenological wing of the MLC (first and foremost, Maksim Kenigsberg, whose works are preserved in Moscow archives). Filling these lacunae leads to recalibration of our contemporary vision of Russian formalism, which is less impressionistic, more fundamental, and more philosophically based than we used to think. This will enable us to effectively develop the formalist ideas in the context of the 21st century humanities. With the advent of ICT and DH, some of the statistically-based projects that seemed too large-scale and too tiresome eighty years ago (such as Boris Jarcho’s program of synchronic and diachronic statistical study of all levels of literary texts) are now well within our reach. At the same time, the practical needs, which will emerge in the process of realization of such programs, may very well stimulate the development of DH themselves (as is already the case with the computer study of verse). Gabriella Safran (Stanford University)“Victor Shklovsky and Victor Chernov on Effective Words: Toward a Formalist and Quantitative Analysis of Socialist-Revolutionary Rhetoric” Victor Shklovsky’s ties to the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Party – the Bolsheviks’ strongest enemy on the left – color his memoir, Sentimental Journey, and motivated his flight to Berlin during the 1922 SR show trials. His political and literary-theoretical allegiances are linked not only by his rebellious attitude but also by the Formalists’ and the SRs’ shared commitment to understanding what could make language get readers’ or listeners’ attention. This paper reports on an attempt to use quantitative methodology on a corpus of SR rhetoric to test some of the assertions made about effective political speech by the SR leader Victor Chernov, and it reflects on what this experiment suggests about the possibility of using digital techniques to evaluate the validity of Shklovsky’s ideas. Jessica Merrill (Stanford University)“The Verbal Mass and the Database: Defining the Text in Formalist Literary Analysis” The emergence of large corpora of digitalized literary texts has prompted a return to formalism. Digitalization unbinds books, turning texts into a sea of letters or “bags of words.” Faced with this mass of data, scholars have sought to develop tools to search for patterns within this material. This move can be compared to early Russian formalism, whose adherents described their object of study as the “verbal mass” [slovesnaia massa]. The formalists initially approached this material inductively, often setting aside the categories of the ‘author’ and the ‘text.’ In doing so, they drew on nineteenth-century folklore study, which defined its object as a reservoir of traditional, elemental formal units which evolve, migrate, and wax and wane in popularity. This paper asks us to consider whether this folkloristically inspired model might help bridge the gap between the sea of letters and the individual author/text in digital humanities research. |

Schedule

Karim Arsalane — Mon, 16 Mar 2015 17:00:00 +0000

Karim Arsalane · March 17, 2015

Russian Formalism & The Digital Humanities

Schedule of Events for April 13, 2015

Stanford Humanities Center (424 Santa Teresa Street, Stanford)


9:00-9:30 Coffee/Breakfast
9:30-9:50 Franco Moretti, “Opening Remarks”
9:50-12:30 Session One: Formalist Literary Analysis Then and NowChair: Harsha Ram
Galin Tihanov, “Shades Of Objectivity: Russian Formalism Before And After The Digital Humanities”
Ilya Kliger, “Dynamic Archeology or Distant Reading: Literary Science between Two Formalisms”
Peter Steiner, “Divergence vs. Convergence: Moretti, Tynyanov, Jakobson”
Glen Worthey, “How ‘Digital Humanities’ is Made”
12:30-1:30 Lunch
1:30-3:30 Session Two: Russian Formalist Theory meets Digital Humanities ToolsChair: Michael Widner
Mark Algee-Hewitt, “The Order of Poetry: Information, Aesthetics and Jakobson’s Theory of Literary Communication”
David Birnbaum and Elise Thorsen, “Enabling the Automated Identification and Analysis of Meter and Rhyme in Russian Verse”
Matthew Jockers, “Latent Plot Analysis Using the Syuzhet Package in R”
3:30-4:00 Coffee Break
4:00-6:00 Session Three: Points of Contact - Russian Formalism and the Digital HumanitiesChair: Nariman Skakov
Igor Pil’shchikov, “The Legacy of the Moscow Linguistic Circle and the Digital Humanities Today”
Gabriella Safran, “Victor Shklovsky and Victor Chernov on Effective Words: Toward a Formalist and Quantitative Analysis of Socialist-Revolutionary Rhetoric”
Jessica Merrill, “The Verbal Mass and the Database: Defining the Text in Formalist Literary Analysis”
7:30 Dinner at MacArthur Park (27 University Ave, Palo Alto)

Russian Formalism & the Digital Humanities

Karim Arsalane — Thu, 12 Mar 2015 17:00:00 +0000

Karim Arsalane · March 13, 2015

You are invited to attend “Russian Formalism and the Digital Humanities,” an all-day conference to be held Monday, April 13, 2015, at the Stanford Humanities Center.

See also the detailed**schedule** and**abstracts** for conference presentations.

4 Lessons for Digital Humanities Scholars from Donald Rumsfeld

Elijah Meeks — Tue, 26 Aug 2014 17:00:00 +0000

Elijah Meeks · August 27, 2014

As digital humanities scholarship matures, it behooves us to look to thinkers outside the field for help in crafting our research agenda and planning our projects. One of those thinkers is Donald Rumsfeld, the Socrates of Strategery, whose insightful rhetoric can guide us in our treatment of this young field. Some of you might be thinking, “Who’s Donald Rumsfeld?” If you don’t know who Donald Rumsfeld is, you can skip reading this, since you’re not firmly enough ensconced in the fear, uncertainty and doubt that comes from trying to understand the place of humanities scholarship in relation to new technologies, new media, and new modes of engagement.

For those who do know Donald Rumsfeld, you know that he had a way of expressing the complex, postmodern world in a way that was simultaneously accessible and fertile. Like a modern Laozi, his seemingly blaise descriptions of complex systems contain multilayered wisdom of the kind necessary for identifying the key features of such systems.

Lesson 1: Known Unknowns “There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don't know. So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together, and we then say well that's basically what we see as the situation, that is really only the known knowns and the known unknowns. And each year, we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns.”

The experience of digital humanities scholarship invariably includes representation of data and processes on maps and other forms of information visualization. The problem of such representation is that it obscures the aspects of the research that are not amenable to these views. Foregrounding and emphasizing the parts of the dataset that are hidden in these views is a key aspect to a successful use of information visualization as scholarly publication.

If successful, then such material is no longer subject to the tired critiques that are easily deployed in response to digital humanities scholarship that attempt to highlight the inherent quality of data visualization: that it obscures data not easily visualized or preferences data over the processes that produce and modify such data. Representation of the known unknowns and unknown unknowns is one of the key aspects that signals information visualization rather than simple data visualization.

Lesson 2: You go to DH with the data you have “As you know, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”

Building on Lesson 1, we have to realize that there is always more data to be included in any dataset that acts as the material for a project. In my experience, it’s common to hear that a project does not want to move forward with analysis out of fear that a new and significant set of data will become available. This is not to say that data collection and data creation should be ignored, but we have to act to produce some level of research (whether formal publication or not) that can be responded to by related projects or scholars. I’ve long described ORBIS as a terrible network model of the Roman world, but the best that we have right now. If we acknowledge the gaps in our data and the limits of our methods, then even a sparse dataset can produce fertile material for future research.

Lesson 3: Embrace the Complexity “It sounds like a riddle. It isn't a riddle. It is a very serious, important matter.”

Information visualization and statistical summaries often obscure the complexity of the phenomena being studied. Because presentation of such new views of humanities scholarship are still in the process of being formalized, we need to avoid the impulse to treat such representations as either inspirational but opaque symbols of complexity or, on the other hand, gross simplifications of things that are already known or better understood in traditional scholarship. The new forms of publication and presentation available in digital humanities need to be simultaneously as rich and as legible as the old forms--a high standard but one we can achieve by focusing on integration of design principles into scholarly publication.

Lesson 4: Expect and honor intuitive criticism “I read eight headlines that talked about chaos, violence, unrest. And it just was Henny Penny -- "The sky is falling." I've never seen anything like it!”

As a movement with growing visibility, a false binary has been propagated in regard to the response to digital humanities scholarship: Either you embrace it as a fundamentally exciting Savior of the Humanities or you disregard it as a tired rehash of the Quantitative Turn. The popularity of the asking “So what?” in response to some new map or chart, with the implication that digital humanities only recapitulates the most basic truisms well-established decades or centuries prior in humanities research, is allied with the casual criticism of information visualization techniques for being hairballs, infographics or bad maps. Rather than ignoring these critiques and lumping those who voice them into an enemies list, it pays to engage with them and understand the core intuitions being expressed.

As an example, I have to rely on a very specific incident in my early forays into network visualization. One criticism I heard, from a highly respected scholar, was that force-directed layouts produced network visualizations that were randomly rotated, such that, to put it simply, “The thing on the upper left is now on the right.” To me, this seemed like a naive critique, especially since it was used to discard the entire method, and my first impulse was to laugh it off. But in thinking about it more clearly, I realized I was in the wrong. Position is a channel in information visualization, and position, whether relative or absolute, implies meaning as much as size or color. By not explaining this or being prepared to explain it to an audience that might otherwise be prepared to read such a network visualization, either in a legend or other embedded or supplemental form, then it’s the equivalent of representing nodes or edges with some arbitrary shape or color and never explaining that those shapes and colors are meaningless.

Embrace Your Inner The Donald

You can read more of the teachings of Donald Rumsfeld here. But remember that, like all teachers, Rummy can only guide us. It’s up to you to integrate his wisdom into your digital humanities practice.

Responsive Data Visualization

Elijah Meeks — Mon, 18 Aug 2014 17:00:00 +0000

Elijah Meeks · August 19, 2014

The final chapter of my book, D3.js in Action, is focused on explaining using the D3 data visualization library for mobile development. It was a bit of a stretch for me, since I hadn’t done very much mobile development, and I expected to write a short chapter outlining the functions like d3.touches that exist to handle touch interface.

The concept of creating websites that are properly formatted for various screen sizes and interaction methods is known as Responsive Web Design. Applying the same perspective to data visualization can be thought of as Responsive Data Visualization. But as I was researching responsive design as applied to data visualization, I found very little written on the subject and what I found was focused on moving the individual components of, say, a data dashboard so that it could be presented in a long-scrolling window.

The problem with this approach is that, unlike text, different types of data visualization--and any graphical display of information more generally--are more or less suitable for different sized canvases. Charts that are perfectly legible on a 15” screen can end up being useless on the screen of a 4” phone.

This is compounded by interactivity. The interaction available in a web site when accessed from the desktop has fundamental differences when accessed in a touch interface. Clickable icons can be much smaller than touchable icons, and well-established modes of interaction like panning or zooming have sometimes very different interaction expectations on touch compared to a mouse or keyboard.

So, along with using D3 to visualize how touch works, I ended up created a simple demo of responsive data visualization that provides different data presentation and interaction depending on the screen size of the device you access it with.

A disclaimer: This example was created to teach people how to code something relatively accessible in D3. As a result, it’s missing pieces that would make it a successful data visualization. One major missing piece is a legend, to explain what the symbols mean as well as what the colors mean. It’s also missing context, and while the sample real estate dataset I generated is easily engaged with, there is no real answer to the question “Why do people care about this?” Finally, there’s no good explanation of how to interact with the data visualization, so you’ll have to settle for the simple explanation in text that I give here. Were this to be released, it would need those legend, context, and tutorial elements.

Note also that I rely on screen width to detect whether the browser is on a desktop, tablet or phone, you might actually get a phone view from your tablet or a tablet view from your phone, depending on its aspect ratio and the size of the device. With that in mind, I created three distinct views into the data, each with different interaction methods and screen sizes in mind:

Desktop Version

If you access the site from a desktop browser, you should see a simple scatterplot and a list of the various datapoints represented on the scatterplot. This view maximizes the fine control and large screen of a desktop browser, allowing you to mouseover elements on the scatterplot and see their name on the list and vice versa, or click on the symbols to get more information. Obviously, the axes are rudimentary and in a final version they, along with the aforementioned more general elements, would be improved.

Tablet Version

If you access the same site from a tablet-sized screen, you get a very different view of the data. The list is gone because it would take up too much room on an already small canvas size. Instead of a scatterplot, which would be hard to read and difficult to interact with, you get a grid of all the datapoints and two brushes, allowing you to cross-brush by the same attributes that ordered the scatterplot: value and size. Because D3 brushes have built-in touch support, this is relatively easy to implement. What’s missing here is on-touch functionality for the symbols (which have increased in size to be touchable) that would bring up the same details as the modal window in the desktop version. An interesting aspect of this particular implementation is that the cross-brushing is fundamentally a simple implementation of parallel coordinates, and could serve as a gentle introduction to that powerful information visualization method.

Phone Version

Accessing the site via a phone-sized screen gives you a very different view. The datapoints are nested by their location and type attributes, and all the circles are touch-sensitive so that you can click on a circle and zoom to that grouping. Because accurate touch on a small screen requires you to have very large touchable areas, then you can only touch on circles that are one level deeper or at the same depth as you are currently at. This lets the user drill down in the groups, getting averages of size and value as they go, until they’ve zoomed in enough that the individual datapoints are large enough to be clicked and return the attributes of that datapoint. In a full version, there would need to be a mechanism to let you zoom out, as well as a mechanism that let’s you change the nesting priorities. The former could be accomplished with the pinch gesture and the latter with the rotate gesture, which are both now relatively intuitive to touch users.

This Matters

The non-desktop views are hard to design, even when you’re cutting corners on a simple example like this. I think it’s a great challenge to ask yourself what your data would look like on a phone or tablet, and what new affordances and limitations you need to account for to present the most valuable view into complex datasets like these. Responsive data visualization is a hard design challenge, but can contribute not only to making your data more accessible, but to discovery of new views and methods for presenting your data in any form. You’ll notice that there are different capabilities and different visual and interaction rhetoric embedded in each of these views, and so the goal is not to provide the same view into the data, but rather allied views that let users understand a dataset from multiple points of interaction.

Why are such terrible things written about DH? Kirsch v. Kirschenbaum

Glen Worthey — Tue, 06 May 2014 17:00:00 +0000

Glen Worthey · May 7, 2014

Last week I read one of the latest and loudest salvos in a sad and very silly war on the digital humanities: Adam Kirsch, in The New Republic, chose to put his pugnacious piece out under not one, but two inflammatory titles: "Technology is Taking Over English Departments: The false promise of the digital humanities." Oh, please.

It's an important enough piece of writing, published as it is in such a visible venue, and written well enough (lapses in logic notwithstanding); and what hardscrabble up-start academic field wouldn't be proud to have 4,500 words dedicated to it in a periodical of such prestige?

Hey, you haven't really arrived till you get attacked in TNR.

— Ted Underwood (@Ted_Underwood) May 2, 2014

But what's sad is that the author is so willfully ignorant of what he criticizes and so sweeping in his conclusions; that he cherry-picks his quotes for their potential (if unjustifiable) to outrage, then so readily misreads them. It's sad that there's so much better digital humanities writing out there, in much less flashy yet still very easy-to-find places.

Thus before going further, I'd like to mention another article published nearly simultaneously with this one: Matt Kirschenbaum's final installment in an "unplanned trilogy," "What is 'Digital Humanities,' and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things about It?" Kirschenbaum's piece* is written with substantially less fluff than Kirsch's, and it both requires more attention and rewards that attention more richly than the New Republic piece. But it's a perfect counterpart, for the "terrible things" of Kirschenbaum's title are precisely the things that Kirsch proffers for us to believe. Kirschenbaum hilariously quotes some of these things in order to justly mock them:

Digital humanities is a nest of big data ideologues. Digital humanities digs MOOCs. Digital humanities is an artifact of the post-9/11 security and surveillance state (the NSA of the MLA). Like Johnny, digital humanities can’t read. Digital humanities doesn’t do theory. Digital humanities never historicizes. Digital humanities is complicit. Digital humanities is naive. Digital humanities is hollow huckster boosterism. Digital humanities is managerial. Digital humanities is the academic import of Silicon Valley solutionism (the term that is the shibboleth of bad-boy tech critic Evgeny Morozov). Digital humanities cannot abide critique. [...]. Digital humanities does not inhale (easily the best line of the bunch). Digital humanities wears Google Glass. Digital humanities wears thick, thick glasses (guilty). Perhaps most damning of all: digital humanities is something separate from the rest of the humanities, and — this is the real secret — digital humanities wants it that way. (pp. 5-6)

I quote at some length here because it pains me to spend more time with the worse piece — but unfortunately, it's the worse one that requires more corrective commentary. The beauty of reading both is that you'll find in Kirsch clear examples of practically all the silly "terrible things" that Kirschenbaum lists for us! But if you have time to read only one DH article this month, make it the full-throated Kirschenbaum, and not the trivial Kirsch.

But now, sadly, back to the lesser piece.

At the beginning of his essay, Kirsch does the usual dance of claiming that "the question of what the digital humanities is has yet to be given a satisfactory answer." This is hogwash: there are many satisfactory answers, and many satisfying, thoughtful approaches to the perennial "What is DH?" question. Likewise his claim that the field's introspection is "a sign of a field suffering an identity crisis": says who? It seems equally plausible to see the self-conscious or self-explanatory tendencies in recent DH publication simply as a sign of a field that is still new to many readers, and thus anxious to introduce itself; or of a field that it is still young enough to retain some understandable zeal instead of the smugness of the traditional. No matter: Kirsch gives the lie to his own argument when, after beginning by dinging DH for its self-conscious "identity crisis," he ends by smearing it as over-confident ("the militant confidence of the digital").

His misreadings are deliberate and numerous, and perhaps too obvious to detail completely — but let's look at a few: when the authors of Digital_Humanities claim our time as "one of those rare moments of opportunity for the humanities," Kirsch reads the claim as signaling "nothing less than an epoch in human history." No, not "an epoch in human history" — rather, only a much more modest "moment" in an academic discipline. Kirsch claims to sense an "undertone of menace," into which he chooses to read the threat that "we can either get on board or stand athwart it and get run over." Of course, he doesn't have a quote to back up that menace, that threat: it's purely imaginary.

So too is Kirsch's claim that, "Right before our eyes, options are foreclosed and demands enforced; a future is constructed as though it were being discovered." Although the DH authors he cites here may tend toward the more utopian, they certainly do not imply any foreclosed options or enforce (or even make) any demands of any kind: they're just describing their scholarly and pedagogical practice. When he quotes Mark Sample (out of context, natch) about how "the 8-page essay and the 25-page research paper will have to make room for the game design, the multi-player narrative, the video mash-up, the online exhibit and other new forms and formats as pedagogical exercises" — Kirsch claims the menace of a "post-verbal future." Not a future where a multiplicity of forms of pedagogy and scholarly argument is welcome, but one where his one particular preferred form (and mine too, I confess) is simply "foreclosed." This is pure paranoia. No digital humanist I've ever known (and I've been in the field for 20 years, and have known legions) has ever been "post-verbal" in any sense of the word.

Kirsch is decidedly old-fashioned, but not in the ways one might imagine. He complains vigorously about DH's proudly proclaimed collaborative ethos, which traces its philosophical roots in the myth of the solitary genius and the long-accepted idea that knowledge production has always been a collaborative, distributed, social affair. Then this zinger: "as an empirical matter, the solitary scholar laboring on a singular paradigm-shifting work is quite real." No, Mr. Kirsch, it's not. Even Kirsch's examples of great monographs supposedly written by "solitary scholars," and the idea that "you can go the library and check them out (or, if that takes too long, download them)," is both superficial and ridiculous: not only were those books inspired and reviewed and edited and published and collected and cataloged and preserved and made available to that "solitary genius" by real people; not only did real people write, collect, curate, preserve, arrange, describe, and make available all the previous scholarship and all the primary sources those monographs were based on, long before our "solitary genius" set his mind to thinking; but even the magical thinking behind Kirsch's snarky "if that takes too long, download them" idea depends, so obviously, on so many people. The digital humanities' decision (perhaps born of necessity, but still a conscious choice) to pull aside the curtain of scholarship just a little, and to reveal the true collaborative nature of our form of scholarship, only serves to make the pre-digital scholarship a little more honest. There is no "contradiction between individual genius and digital practice," but there is a relationship — just as there has never been a contradiction between individual genius and any scholarly practice.

There are of course some interesting questions raised in this article, but rather than supposed nails in DH's supposed coffin, they're very much the same questions that we talk about all the time in the academic DH community. Kirsch puts one of them this way: "Does the digital component of digital humanities give us new ways to think, or only ways to illustrate what we already know?" That is not a bad question, but contrary to what Kirsch and his fellow DHaters want us to believe, it can be extremely useful to have a digital approach confirm what we already know (or what we think we already know). At the very least, DH can enable a new way of knowing it. New ways of knowing are nothing to sneeze at, even if "the facts" remain more or less the same. (Of course, we'd also like to think — and we have good evidence for thinking — that digital approaches can also produce new facts, and new knowledge.)

What irks me perhaps most about writers like Kirsch (and he's far from the first, or the most interesting) is that they think they've called our bluff: they believe they've revealed the nakedness of some imaginary DH emperor, just because they don't get it, or because they think they already knew everything there is to know about a topic, or because that some particular thing that an algorithm is newly able to demonstrate in a different way is already familiar to them. (A notorious New York Times column a few years ago called this the "Duh!" factor in DH. She claimed to get nothing at all from DH research except for either "Huh?" — for conclusions that she just didn't understand — or "Duh!" — for conclusions that were already obvious before the digital approach. It's a cute way to put it, but hardly a thoughtful set of reactions to scholarship: more like something I heard in junior high.) If these journalists, or anyone not engaged in the scholarship of any field, were to focus their attention on any contemporary humanities scholarship, they could easily have the same two trivial reactions.

DH scholarship is not for everyone, just as the vast majority of all scholarly output is not for everyone. If you don't get it, or you're not interested in it, don't bother with it. We'll get along fine without you! We're certainly not immune to intelligent criticism — in fact, we engage in quite a lot of that ourselves — but the trivialization of an entire field of scholarly endeavor, the all-knowing assumptions about what "the computer can tell you" and what it can't, the glaringly obvious idea that "it takes a scholar with a broad knowledge of literary history" to draw conclusions from data, the ridiculous straw man that "computers cannot think better than human beings" — all of these we can do without. They have nothing to do with the digital humanities, and are poor journalism, too.

Kirsch claims that "humanistic thinking does not proceed by experiments that yield results; it is a matter of mental experiences, provoked by works of art and history, that expand the range of one's understanding and sympathy." Evidently the range of Kirsch's own understanding and sympathy has not been sufficiently expanded to embrace (or even to consider honestly, and without prejudice) newer possibilities in humanities research and teaching. That's a shame, but it's his loss, not that of the digital humanities field. The greater shame is that unsuspecting readers of The New Republic may be led to believe that the digital humanities has been given a fair trial, or even an intelligent introduction or description. It hasn't, at least not here.

* Matthew Kirschenbaum, “What is ‘Digital Humanities,’ and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things about It?” differences 25.1 (2014): 46-63. Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press. Pre-print version available on Kirschenbaum's website.

Digital Humanities and Data Science

Elijah Meeks — Sun, 04 May 2014 17:00:00 +0000

Elijah Meeks · May 5, 2014

I'm proud to announce that Stanford University Library will be bringing on Scott Weingart as a data scientist to help support digital humanities scholarship here at Stanford. Scott is well-known in the digital humanities community for his work on information visualization MOOCs, courses on network analysis, editing the Journal of Digital Humanities issue focused on topic modeling, and work alongside other DH scholars to create The Historian's Macroscope, an online text that provides an exhaustive introduction to the particular flavor of digital humanities that involves bringing a computational lens to traditional humanities research questions. Regardless of the name of the position anyone gave to Scott, it's obvious that his support would be welcomed by digital humanities scholars. So, why data science, and not something a bit less science-sounding than, say, "digital humanities specialist"?

If you're not familiar with data science, then you're not alone. Despite its increasing popularity here in Silicon Valley, it's still not clear if data science is a discipline or a particular set of methodologies, or just a big tent in which to lump a variety of practitioners who take various computational approaches. One of the jokes about data science is that a data scientist "knows more programming than a statistician and is better at stats than a programmer." In other words, data science seems to be what they call digital humanities on the other side of campus.

And while part of Scott's job while he's here is to flesh out what and where data science is in relation to digital humanities, there are very good, practical reasons to bring in an expert in network analysis and information visualization. And even more to give that person a job title that reflects that expertise and focus. Stanford is probably the most vibrant place for digital humanities right now, with multiple projects and individual faculty pursuing a variety of research agendas that involve spatial analysis, text analysis and network analysis directed at traditional humanities scholarship. And practically every one of these projects has some kind of network component, whether that network represents Imperial Roman transportation, character interactions in a play, genealogy, knowledge creation in post-processual archaeology, or a "more traditional" social network analysis of Benjamin Franklin.

I have argued, and will continue to argue, that the use of information visualization and network analysis by interlopers--like digital humanities scholars--is healthy and completely justified. This is why we're working with tech industry professionals (many self-identified as "data scientists") to try to foster collaboration on digital humanities projects with folks outside the academy. Still, there is a practical need to better inform these methods and research with reference to more traditional network and information science. It's not just a practical need, it's a professional need, one that is not well-suited to faculty collaborators in those fields, because they're more focused on their own research agendas and not educating their interdisciplinary partners. That's why we've hired a data scientist to actively support a variety of these projects and identify common types of objects, agendas, and methods in digital humanities approaches to network analysis and information visualization here at Stanford.

The bad news is that we'll only have Scott here at Stanford for the summer, but moving forward, I hope to establish the very real stake that digital humanities has in data science, and how it can further support the research agendas of digital humanities scholars.

Spreadsheets are Information Visualization

Elijah Meeks — Sun, 27 Apr 2014 17:00:00 +0000

Elijah Meeks · April 28, 2014

Like most valuable human experiences, this all started on Twitter, when I used a tired meme to deliver what I thought would be considered radical to folks not involved with information visualization but rather pat to those that were.

As an example, I tweeted along with it what I thought was uncontroversial, that "Even a spreadsheet is a form of information visualization." The point I was trying to make was that data doesn't exist in a "natural state" that you are trying to best visualize, but rather you process it even when you view data in tabular form, and that the processing transforms it from data into information because that processing of the data is embedded in the final product. I realize this is at odds with some epistemologies of data-information-knowledge, but I'm less interested in this from a theoretical standpoint as I am from a practical standpoint. I think, practically, that spreadsheets are information visualization. This was recently demonstrated by Dark Horse Analytic's gif of how to make a spreadsheet more effective visually*:

It is, fundamentally, a layout, much like the various infoviz layouts found in D3 and which I've been thinking about more lately as I write D3.js in Action. By layout, I mean it's rules or a recipe that, when applied to a dataset, returns settings for graphical channels to improve comprehensibility. In the case of a spreadsheet, though, what graphical channels could possibly be available? More than you think, even when you acknowledge (as I do) that the above GIF is correct when it suggests you should leave color mostly out of spreadsheets. You may not notice it, but a spreadsheet has just as many axes as a bar chart or a scatterplot. How you sort a spreadsheet, like any other decision to present information, does not come "from the data" but is rather a decision. The order of columns and rows, especially in large spreadsheets, determines the view into the data. Likewise, font weight, text justification, formatting are all mechanisms for graphically processing data to represent it (either to an audience or to yourself for exploratory analysis). When you factor in the presentation mechanisms for aggregate statistics that takes place as part of the spreadsheet (summing or averaging row or column values) you end up with an information visualization space that's far more feature rich than your typical histogram.

There's another practical reason for which I think we should think of spreadsheets as information visualization: it demystifies the benefits of applying clear graphical rules to the display of information. Rules for better spreadsheets and better pie charts aren't about making them look hip, they're about making them more effective for communication. Too many people deride information visualization as superficial, and contend that when they examine a spreadsheet (or other form of "raw data") that they're not sullying themselves with this hipster field. If we acknowledge that spreadsheets are, like other infoviz, embedded with transformation of data to present it, then we validate other transformations for presentation, analysis and exploration.

Likewise, too many people deride overly complex information visualization under the assumption that all information visualization falls into the category popularized by Tufte: Summaries of complex phenomena for busy decision-makers. While this is a dominant category of infoviz, it is not the only one, and other categories include networks or maps that require the time and investment that a complex spreadsheet or tabular view of a database might.

Spreadsheets have been around for a long time, with apparent examples in cuneiform and from early Egypt. In comparison, the pie chart was invented a little over 200 years ago. So, it's no wonder we think of one as somehow closer to reality than the other. But that distinction is only valuable insofar as it is useful. I think we're better off, as information visualization matures and grows more common, re-evaluating the methods that we've grown so comfortable with as to think them to be "natural" or "raw" representations of data. Doing so is good for the spreadsheet, and good for the network visualization, and good for data literacy more generally.

*It's not lost on me the irony that from Dark Horse Analytic's perspective that this is presented as getting closer to "data" by removing visual cruft.

Neotopology

Elijah Meeks — Sun, 13 Apr 2014 17:00:00 +0000

Elijah Meeks · April 14, 2014

This is part of a talk I gave at #txdhc. It leaves out "principles of interloping in network science" which I'll try to put in a later post.

When I was invited to give a talk at The Texas Digital Humanities Consortium's First Annual Conference about networks and specifically networks in the humanities, I asked myself the same thing I did when I was asked to write D3.js in Action: how can I speak on something for which I don't have a degree? How can I write a book about programming when I don't have a degree in computer science?

Similarly, how can I give a talk about networks when I don't have a degree in network science? Obviously, I have some experience with networks, such as my work representing topic models as a network.

I’ve noticed, in the past, when I’ve given more involved talks or papers dealing with networks, that I find both my audience and myself more comfortable with focusing on network representation, commonly referred to as network visualization. The network visualization of the results of a topic model is rather effective and sophisticated, I think, but I also don't have a degree in design or information science, so once again I'm outside of my domain of credentialed expertise.

So, sometimes I dodge that position and focus on the use of networks in the publication of research. Networks as a rhetorical device, in tandem with text and maps, especially in the genre of interactive scholarly works, like Kindred Britain, and especially its Stories component, that ties together text, maps, networks, and other data visualization.

But I'm not a publisher, and have never worked for a publisher. So, I fall back on my old standby, ORBIS, and instead focus more on transportation networks and especially historical transportation networks.

But I also don't have a degree in geography or in classics. Like many people who shift away from their original domain of expertise into a well-defined field with its own journals and conferences, I begin to feel like there’s really only one subject with which I might treat as an expert: Imposter Syndrome.

But there are examples of successful practitioners working in fields like this with a wealth of established research. After all, Franco Moretti is not a statistician. Or, as you may have heard it stated:

Franco Moretti is not a statistician!!!!!!11!111oneone!one

And while he may not be a statistician, neither is he an imposter. Rather, like me, and like many people in digital humanities, he is an interloper.

And so that’s what I’m here to talk about: Interloping. I think interloping, more than computational approaches or the digital broadly construed as the object of study, defines digital humanities. And scholars are not the only ones interloping. We find ourselves awash in accessible, powerful tools and techniques that seem well-suited for our research and entice us into fields and disciplines with which we haven’t the wealth of domain expertise that we do in our primary fields.

It means that we approach these techniques in a naive manner, but as humanists, we have recourse to this seeming impediment. Yes, when you first begin to model your study of literature using networks, you do so as a beginner. But, as Shunryu Suzuki notes in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, this perspective is open to possibilities in a way that the better versed may not be. This approach is idealistic, I am not. I know, from experience, that the interloper is constantly exposed to critique for using methods naively, for not understanding basic principles of the research method and existing scholarship, and for suggesting narratives that clash with the traditional understanding of a field.

There are, however, several mitigating factors when it comes to the principles of interloping in network science. The first requires a detour into geography. I know you didn’t sign up for a geography lecture, and so I’ll keep it short, but in my defense, I’m always mentioning networks when I talk about geography, so at least I’m consistently disappointing.

I titled my talk neotopology because I believe that this network turn resembles the spatial turn in more ways than one. One of those ways is the presence of a vibrant community of practice growing outside the traditional domains where in one case network analysis/visualization and in the other case spatial analysis/visualization traditionally occurs. Neogeography, in short, refers to the use of cartographic and spatial analytic tools and techniques by designers, humanists, software developers and others outside of the traditional domains of GIS, GIScience and cartography. It has, at times, caused some consternation and led to fierce claims both in digital humanities and in the tech industry that the geographic information systems being developed by such interlopers are, "Not GIS". It has also elicited, from time to time, angry responses from these traditional domains directed at flaneurs running amok with ArcGIS and Google Maps API. Which itself has also spurred defensiveness.

But neogeography has produced incredible work, including the amazing Voronoi experiments that Jason Davies has been creating, satellite projected views of the US/Mexico border by Mike Bostock, and incredible innovation in the tile space, such as base maps that look like wood inlay, or Stamen's watercolor map here enhanced with semi-transparent satellite imagery for great effect:

Add to this online mapping applications developed in fan culture, such as that of the LOTR Project, and we can see a vibrant community of practice in a world once dominated by GIS Professionals and GIScience academics. While neogeography is a product of broad accessibility of GIS tools and techniques, it is further defined by its strong integration with information visualization. Geospatial information visualization refers to something besides maps and atlases, it refers, I would argue, to the primacy of a system or model for which the geospatial data is just one view into that model. There’s another thing that neogeography has in common with neotopology, and which allows me to end my geography detour: humanists are not the only interlopers in the field. In the same way that journalists, designers and software developers and humanities scholars have flooded into spatial analysis and visualization, the same groups are flooding into network analysis and visualization.

Here we see three examples among many. The first is Mike Bostock, creator of the D3.js information visualization library and award-winning journalist at the New York Times, taking a network perspective on the Oscars. The second is designer Christian Swinehart's amazing exploration of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novels, where the network connects passages in the novel based on the decision points at the ends of those passages, with gruesome endings in vivid color. The last is the result of my own look into the way in which TV Tropes works are connected by shared tropes, and what it might mean to bridge the disparate genres explored by that community.

But there are striking differences in the situation surrounding the spatial turn and the situation surrounding the network turn. When the Anne Knowles edited Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History was published, it was 12 years ago. This was four years before Twitter, two years before Facebook and a time when English Wikipedia had only 20,000 articles. In 2002, scholars like Willard McCarty in "Humanities Computing: Essential Problems, Experimental Practice" were not even referring to digital humanities, but rather "humanities computing" and "computer assisted humanities":

...through Galison’s metaphor of the trading zone, it gives depth of meaning to the often ad hoc and ill-understood practice of collaboration in the computer-assisted humanities: it helps us to understand how people from very different fields can do laboratory-based research well--do research better than alone, or at all--while remaining undiluted intellectually…

Most notably for humanist scholars trying to use GIS, they had access to either a very user unfriendly ArcGIS 8, or write their own code. Google Earth was an obscure hermeneutic toy known as Earthviewer 3D, created by a company you likely never heard of. And it's not even fair to peg Past Time, Past Place to 2002, since this volume was a collection of essays that occurred after an enthusiastic adoption from which we can extrapolate an even earlier date of sophisticated engagement. We are so early in the Network Turn that there has appeared, as yet, no comparable volume for networks.

Our only real landmark comparison for Networks in Humanities is Tim Tangherlini’s “Networks and Network Analysis for the Humanities” funded by the NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in Digital Humanities. It included participation by academics such as Katy Borner, Franco Moretti and Dave Blei, but also industry interlopers like Fernando Diaz, then senior research scientist at Yahoo! Research and now at Microsoft Research. In contrast to the bleak situation 12 years ago, we began making this network turn in a dramatically different ecosystem. This is not to say there are not conferences with the aim of focusing on networks in the humanities, such as Arts, Humanities, and Complex Networks, a satellite symposium at NetSci that's been running for five years. Rather, I mean that network analysis in digital humanities scholarship is so early on that it hasn't even managed to put together and publish a single edited volume.

There is another, and for academics sharper, contrast. The network turn, after all, is taking place after the spatial turn. That means it's taking place with a model for how to respond to collaboration and colonization by a method and its attendent experts. And while there are rich reflections on what it means to bring spatial analysis in contact with humanities scholarship it is even more readily apparent in the covers and titles of similar volumes published since Past Time, Past Place, most of which do not have covers featuring maps made with GIS packages but rather word clouds, the Peutinger table (neogeography from the Roman world), or abstract paintings.

As digital humanities scholarship continues to mature, the old call to authority about how to use digital objects, tools and related techniques is not so intimidating. We learned, as we deconstructed GIS and NLP, that we could use these things, too. The spatial turn was not about historians learning GIS, it was about everyone getting access to a host of geospatial data, tools and techniques, and then doing whatever they wanted with it, until they felt perfectly comfortable doing "GIS" or not. It was not that GIS could not handle the fuzziness, incompleteness, and uncertainty of humanities scholarship, but that the practitioners who had built and designed (and to be fair to many, generously taught us) traditional mapping and GIS tools simply had not thought of it. It was up to the interlopers to address these approaches and develop methods to deal with them.

We will not follow the same path with network analysis, because the environment today is thus vastly different. And there’s something even more fundamental about networks that makes us, as interlopers, more equipped to adopt and adapt them: Networks are simple. Networks are whatever you define them as, within a basic set of attributes. While there are best practices insofar as how to constrain and structure a network, it is fundamentally a view of the phenomenon you wish to study--a network perspective. You will often hear that you cannot use, for instance, an n-partite network, or a hypergraph. But that advice is from the perspective of computing across the network to measure centrality, clustering, modularity and other traditional network measures. If you’re using a network as a supplement, as a view into your work that emphasizes the structure rather than the components, and you’re not computing centrality, then it is valid if only as part of a dialectical examination in tension with your traditional scholarship. A network is a view of a system that preferences the importance of connections between objects in that system and the emergent properties of those connections when examined in the aggregate in a way distinct from a demographic or biographic or geographic perspective typical in humanities scholarship.

This is, I think, where we shine as humanists and interlopers. Our work with networks is not our sole methodology or concern, and our engagement with networks reflects that in the same way that our engagement with spatial analysis has. Are more central people more likely to also have stronger metadata? Does betweenness correlate with nationality? And how does it compare to the networks and network structures discovered or created not only by other academics, but by those created by journalists and in fan culture and in industry?

To return to this definition of digital humanities as interloping, it serves to go back to McCarty's examination of the Trading Zone:

In his magisterial study, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, Galison shows us in detail how individuals engaged in a bundle of rather disparate activities came together and successfully collaborated to solve the most difficult experimental problems of their day. His historiography is centred on the machinery these activities had in common (e.g. the devices invented to study subatomic interactions) and the users’ intellectual and pragmatic negotiations of knowledge across disciplinary boundaries. He proposes and develops an anthropological-linguistic analogy for these negotiations, which he calls the Trading Zone. In a typical trading zone people from mutually incomprehensible cultures come together to trade objects of interest. To do that, as in fact happens, they develop a highly restricted proto-language or pidgin for their negotiations. This pidgin allows them to reach agreement among themselves about objects of trade even though outside of the zone, within their own cultures, their understandings and uses of these objects differ radically.

We are, in our engagement with networks, interloping. But network science teaches us that the interlopers, the people who connect disparate, unconnected groups, derive power from that position. I think all of us, after thinking deeply about networks, have had it influence the way that we engage in the networks we take part in. The network turn itself is one of those networks.

Notes from the talk:

There was some controversy over whether network analysis is "the trading zone" and whether one can reasonably refer to a network science. I must admit to using network science in a very pragmatic manner, simply meaning it to stand in as a blanket statement for social network analysis, transportation network analysis, and various disparate but established fields and sub-disciplines that have used networks for decades.
Insofar as I mean "the network turn" I'm not referring to the application of network analysis by any research agenda, since obviously scholars in a number of fields have long been using network analysis. Rather, I refer to the widespread adoption of network analysis and visualization by humanities scholars to address traditional humanities research questions.
Neotopology is a broader category still, embracing the growing prevalance of individuals visualizing their Facebook friends, or of LinkedIn offering just such a service to its subscribers, or of the growing variety of uses that force-directed algorithms are being put to.

The Day of DH

Elijah Meeks — Mon, 07 Apr 2014 17:00:00 +0000

Elijah Meeks · April 8, 2014

Today is the Day of DH, when digital humanities practitioners try to document what a "typical day" looks like in their engagement with digital humanities. There is an official site that hosts blogs from self-identified community members and which, due to technical difficulties, I can't currently contribute to. But that gives me a moment to list the various Stanford folks who are taking part in Day of DH and highlight their blogs:

Linguistics, Philosophy, & Textual Research Librarian Jacqueline Hettel's Day of DH

Digital Humanities Librarian Glen Worthey's Day of DH

Academic Technology Specialist Jason Heppler's Day of DH

Digital Humanities Research Developer Karl Grossner's Day of DH

Digital Humanities Specialist Elijah Meeks' Day of DH

If you are at Stanford and think of yourself as doing digital humanities scholarship, let me know and I will happily add you to the list.

What Makes a Minard?

Elijah Meeks — Tue, 25 Mar 2014 17:00:00 +0000

Elijah Meeks · March 26, 2014

The updated ORBIS is rapidly approaching completion, and with its finishing touches comes the need to describe some of the things that it does. Most of its new functionality, such as the routes or cartograms, are from the earlier version, though with much more control given to the user in their creation. But there’s a new option, which I’ve called a Minard Diagram, that produces an inky, snakey, arterial chart out of the ORBIS network. Here is a Minard Diagram for fastest routes from Athens to the rest of the Roman World.

What you’re seeing is the aggregation of paths from Athens to the rest of the sites in ORBIS based on whatever the priority and other settings were. Because ORBIS is a set of segments (known also as edges or links in network parlance) connecting sites (known as nodes), then we can see when a path from Site A to Site B shares some of the segments as a path from Site A to Site C. The thicker lines indicate more shared segments.

How it works is easier to explain if we deal with a smaller subset, say just the routes from Rome to Antioch, Constantinople, Crete, and Alexandria. Fortunately, ORBIS provides you with the ability to export SVG, which makes it easy enough to export the results of running those four routes and modify them in Inkscape to produce the following diagrams. Each segment is sized by the number of “shared segments” which is to say the pieces of the ORBIS network shared in common by the four routes. This is easier to see if we also encode shared segments with color.

This is, fundamentally, betweenness centrality but aggregated by edge instead of by node. Betweenness is used to discover the nodes in a network along the most frequent paths to identify power brokers or particularly influential papers in citation networks. ORBIS already calculates betweenness based on the individual routes you’ve been running, which leads to sites that are along more routes increasing in size, but calculating all the routes simultaneously from a single site to the rest of the network (in the same way that we calculate all the costs simultaneously to create a distance cartogram) provides, in the aggregate, what appears to be flow.

Whether betweenness is a proxy for flow is a question that occurred after the graphical representation of the results and not before. The creation of this diagram follows a well-trod path, repurposing existing ways of representing systems based on old successes. In this case, one of the most famous and lauded information visualization pieces is known as Minard’s Map, created by Charles Minard and focused on showing Napoleon’s march into Russia.

There are obvious visual cues that led me to referring to the ORBIS function as a Minard diagram. The most straightforward is the variable size of line thickness that implies the difficulty to get to a place, whether that difficulty is measured in denarri or, in the case of Minard’s map of Napoleon’s March, human lives.

Regardless of whether or not there’s a fundamental similarity in what Minard was representing and what is being represented in ORBIS, I think there’s a case to be made for categorizing visualization methods based on graphical appearance. Minard’s Map is a “flow map” according to the Wikipedia entry for flow maps, and therefore if you’re measuring a phenomenon like betweenness, and it’s distinct from flow, then the graphical similarity is not enough to warrant naming it after Minard. But when we try to define information visualization methods based on the type of data they purport to represent, we run into another problem, illustrated with a Google image search of “flow map”:

Which ends up providing us with work that looks like Minard’s Map but also watersheds, simple networks, and org charts. I think, then, that the term Minard Diagram is more appropriate based on the visual similarity between what is being produced by this ORBIS function rather than the more generic flow map. An equivalent argument could be made for referring to this as a Watershed Diagram, given that it indicates a pooling of distant sources into streams and rivers that reach a center.

There’s a strong case to be made that visualization methods should be based on the phenomenon being visualized, rather than the graphical product. In that case, it might seem like the ORBIS Minard Diagram shouldn’t have Minard’s name, since ORBIS does not attempt to correlate temperature or casualties with routes. But Minard made a number of different information visualization pieces that involve maps and line thickness.

Minard, in these cases, is mapping strength of connection based on the aggregation of statistical data. In this case, I think ORBIS is doing the same, though instead of using statistical data, it uses a model to derive the strength of connection. The two end up with the same phenomenon--cumulative strength of ties--using different approaches, but reach the same point. Whether this means that betweenness is flow depends on how you treat information visualization. Data has no natural graphical form, and graphical forms do not come naturally from raw data. This is seen pragmatically in models of processing data to produce information visualization, which act to highlight not only attributes of data but particular relationships between data for the purpose of associating those attributes and relationships with graphical channels like color, position, size, or thickness.

If we think of a Minard Diagram as strictly constrained to the dataset used for his map of Napoleon’s March, then it is an information visualization method narrowly suited for representing flow along a path correlated with geography and some external variable (temperature in the case of the original). But if we think of Minard’s work representing a system through a series of connections from a center (whether Paris or Kaunas) which sees that strength attenuated in a heterogeneous manner that reveals geographic patterns, then suddenly the Minard Diagram is not simply another way of representing flow. Instead, it is a particular way of processing data, in this case data associated with edges, in a system where those edges are laid out in a non-arbitrary geographic manner.

The result of this and other information visualization is as much a graphical representation of the data as it is a representation of the perspective on the data and the methods used to process the data. Graphics, then, are not simply a product or publication, divorced or perhaps distilled from a dataset, but a summation of data and processing and perspective. Whether this is controversial depends on your perspective of data. If you think that information visualization is meant to only show “data”, then processing and perspective are corruptions of the pure data, and graphical similarity is a sign of someone using the “wrong” technique to represent that data. In that case, something like the Minard Diagram might be considered a dishonest attempt to hijack the cultural capital of Minard’s name for a visually similar but unrelated technique. But if the graphical similarity indicates meaningful similarities between the phenomena being represented, then it would indicate that graphical similarity of information visualization is a sign of similarity of perspective and processing in cases where the data is fundamentally different.

DH Presentation - The Map of Early Modern London's Pedagogical Sustainability Model for the Digital Humanities

Jacqueline Hettel — Thu, 06 Mar 2014 16:00:00 +0000

Jacqueline Hettel · March 7, 2014

Date/Time: Thursday, 13 March 2014 - 1:30pm to 3:00pmLocation: 433A Wallenberg Hall - CESTA

The Map of Early Modern London (mapoflondon.uvic.ca) is a 15-year-old multi-layered digital project engaged in historical mapping, TEI textual editing, and scholarly content creation.

Some of its ongoing concerns include:

how is editing a map the same as editing a text?
what is the best way to encode fuzzy historical data?
how do digital projects systematically generate content without compromising on
quantity or scholarly quality?
how do we ensure our projects have a life after the funding runs out?
how can our research inform our pedagogy and vice versa?

This talk by MoEML’s Research Fellow and Assistant Project Director, Kim McLean-Fiander, is designed for librarians, English and History professors, digital humanists, and students. It will examine the community-based knowledge creation and mobilization model, or Pedagogical Partnership, developed by MoEML to ensure its own growth and sustainability. This partnership promotes mutually beneficial collaborations with other early modernists and digital humanists, and provides meaningful and unusually rewarding research and publication opportunities for students of all levels. Please join us March 13th, at 1:30pm in 433A Wallenberg Hall - CESTA.

Visualizing Historical Networks, by Emma Rothschild

Glen Worthey — Thu, 06 Mar 2014 16:00:00 +0000

Glen Worthey · March 7, 2014

Date/Time: Tuesday, 18 March 2014 - 12:00pmLocation: Wallenberg Hall, 4th floor, Room 433A

Emma Rothschild is a the Jeremy and Jane Knowles Professor of History at Harvard University,

and the Director of the Center for History and Economics at Harvard and Cambridge (UK). She is

a primary investigator for the “Visualizing Historical Networks” project at Harvard.

Professor Rothschild will present her recent work on historical networks and Gephi.

Sponsored by the DLCL's Digital Humanities Focal Group and the Center for Textual and Spatial Analysis (CESTA).

The event is free, but space is limited; RSVP to <mikewidner@stanford.edu>

Literary texts and the library in the digital age, or, How library DH is made

Glen Worthey — Mon, 03 Mar 2014 16:00:00 +0000

Glen Worthey · March 4, 2014

The following is a slightly edited version of an invited paper I gave at the 2013 Annual Conference of the American Library Association in Chicago. A few of the audience members asked whether I might share or post the presentation, which I’m happy to do (as well as flattered… and very tardy). It’s obviously not meant as another response to the recent OCLC report on DH centers in libraries (since it came earlier), but as I reread the talk, I see that, in some senses, it could serve as such.

It’s pretty long, so here’s the nutshell version: the digital humanities can and should make a happy home in the library, and this has been true for decades. What? – I hear some ask. – You mean to say that DH has been around for decades? Yes, – I say – and not only that, but DH has some very serious theoretical and practical forebears from almost a hundred years ago: the Russian Formalists, who even today have some important things to teach us not only about DH in general, but also about DH in the library. Oh, and (spoiler alert): Samuel L. Jackson (as Jules Winnfield) puts in a brief appearance as well.

The official description of today’s panel, “Literary texts and the library in the digital age,” reads as follows:

Digital technologies are opening up new possibilities for the investigation of literary and historic texts. They are also changing library spaces and reconfiguring relationships between librarians and researchers. This program investigates new roles for European and American Studies librarians in this emerging physical and virtual environment.

I’m going to try a “slow burn” approach, and not reveal the actual title of my paper just yet. Our panel today is called upon to discuss “literary texts and the library in the digital age.” I suppose it's possible to imagine, based on this title, that the panel is not explicitly about the digital humanities; oddly enough, the widely accepted term of art “digital humanities” doesn’t appear in the panel description at all, although I’ve assumed that you’ve come to hear precisely about that, and that’s certainly what I’ve come prepared to talk about.

Does this reticence actually to name the topic come from a sort of DH fatigue? Or a DH phobia?[1]

I sincerely hope that it’s neither fatigue nor phobia. I certainly see in our panel description all the signs of contemporary digital humanities and digital library discourse: phrases like “digital technologies” and “opening up new possibilities”; loaded terms like “changing,” “reconfiguring,” “emerging,” and “virtual” speak to a current fascination with (or, some may say, even fetishization of) the affordances of technology as they apply to literature and the library.

But I also see other words in the panel description, and these in fact please me more: “investigation,” “literary,” “historic texts,” “relationships between librarians and researchers,” “European and American Studies.” These are good, old-fashioned words about humanities research and “traditional” library work. (Some recent reading, which I’ll mention in a bit, has made me wary of that “traditional” concept, though.)

As I’ve thought about what I might present to an audience of librarians, I decided to go for something that had at least a chance of being new to you – something you may not have thought about, or read from the dozens of truly outstanding writers about the topic of digital humanities in the library. I’m thinking especially of two very recent edited collections of articles that I recommend especially highly: the first is a special digital humanities-focused issue of the Journal of Library Administration, v. 53 no. 1 (of January 2013), guest-edited by Barbara Rockenbach, and with contributions by many of my favorite practitioners and thinkers in the digital humanities and library fields: Bethany Nowviskie, Miriam Posner, Jennifer Vinopal, Monica McCormick, and many others. This special issue is available (behind a paywall) from its publisher; open access preprints of its individual articles were helpfully gathered by one of their authors, Micah Vandegrift.

The other collection, Make It New?, is a set of responses to that same journal issue, edited by Sarah Potvin, Roxanne Shirazi, and Zach Coble, in the outstanding new dh+lib group blog, sponsored by Associaton of College & Researcy Libraries. This collection was originally published as a mini-series of blog posts, and was later compiled, together with the original JLA articles that inspired it, into a very slick ebook.

I can’t recommend these readings, or the thoughtful group of library workers who contributed to both of them, highly enough: for me, the highlight of the dh+lib collection is Trevor Muñoz’s piece on , which he rightly calls a “provocation.” I don’t want to name too many more names, lest I leave somebody out – but the contributors to both of these collections, and to the dh+lib blog in general, are people you should pay attention to if you’re interested in the challenges and rewards of doing (or supporting, or “making”) DH in your library.

In the introduction to the dh+lib mini-series, Potvin and Shirazi put forward an interesting set of binaries, remarkably reminiscent of the description of today’s panel:

“DH as entrepreneurial v. DH as institutional enterprise, DH as disruptive v. DH as contiguous, libraries and librarians as partners or supporters, collaborators or service-providers. What is new, what is traditional, what is novel, what is constant.” (Sarah Potvin and Roxanne Shirazi, Introduction to “Make It New? A dh+lib Mini-Series”)

You may already guess where my preferences fall in most of these binaries; if not, I hope those preferences will be clear by the end of my talk. But I’m not going to talk about these questions, at least not directly. I don’t plan to repeat what these many colleagues have written – and written very thoughtfully and well, in a multitude of texts that you all can read yourselves. Instead, I’ve decided to take full advantage of the “literary text” portion of our panel’s theme by talking about an aspect of the Digital Humanities that you may not have heard elsewhere, that you may not have considered before in your thinking about library and digital humanities work.

How library DH is made

After these over-long preliminaries, here’s the real title of my talk: “How library DH is made.” I intend it to be patently brash and purposefully provocative – and if it sounds a little strange, that’s because it’s meant to, for reasons that I hope will become clear in a few minutes.

My title, and the real inspiration for my talk, both come from an essay that’s nearly a hundred years old: “How Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ is made,” by Boris Eikhenbaum, which itself was obviously inspired by a novella that’s seventy-five years older than that.

Like my title itself, this choice of inspiration – a century-old Russian Formalist essay about an even older comic novella – may appear to be far-fetched for a digital humanities paper at a library conference. In fact, I hope it also sounds a little strange to you. (Believe me, it’s far from the oddest metaphor I’ve relied on in similar situations.) I’ll of course try to convince you that it’s a good inspiration, a good metaphor for what we do in the digital humanities. But even if I don’t succeed, at the very least I will have reminded you of an outstanding short work of comic fiction, illuminated by an outstanding short piece of literary criticism, and I hope you’ll remember them next time you’re looking for something to read. (All false modesty aside, it should go without saying that these two literary texts will surely give you more of lasting value than I ever could!)

Gogol’s 1842 story is about a poor, socially inept bureaucrat – a scrivener – named Akakii Akakievich (and yes, his name sounds just as much like “caca” in Russian as it does in English). Akakii is ridiculed at the office because of his threadbare overcoat. When his tailor tells him that the coat is finally beyond repair, Akakii becomes obsessed with obtaining a new one.

After working obsessively long hours, scrimping, and saving, his obsession finally pays off in the purchase of a newly tailored overcoat. Overjoyed with his new possession, finally secure in the warm, maternal embrace of his new overcoat, he returns to work, where both he and his overcoat are celebrated by his co-workers – which of course only adds new levels of social anxiety.

That angst is greatly intensified when two ruffians steal the new overcoat from Akakii on his way home that very night. His angst reaches its apotheosis when he appeals to the authorities – specifically to a general named only as “The Personage of Consequence” – and is spurned – berated, even – for having approached such an important person with such a trivial complaint. Rejected, wracked with anxiety, naked (or at least overcoatless), Akakii takes ill and dies.

For some time after, the ghost of Akakii Akakievich haunts the St. Petersburg streets, stealing the overcoats of shivering pedestrians. The ghost is pursued by the police, of course to no avail, but is finally put to rest when it manages to steal the overcoat of The Personage of Consequence himself.

It wouldn’t be hard to do an on-the-spot undergraduate interpretation of Gogol’s ghost story. A symbolic reading of Akakii Akakievich’s expulsion from the furry, enveloping warmth of the overcoat into a cold, inhospitable world is one obvious tack. Although it would of course be anachronistic to call this interpretation “Freudian” in the 19th century, Dostoevsky’s famous aphorism, “We all came out of Gogol’s overcoat,” points in precisely this direction, as he assigns the very birth of 19th-century Russian literature to the womb of Gogol’s “Overcoat.”

But most professional readers of the later 19th and early 20th centuries focused on the story as a social critique of poverty and alienation, on the dehumanization of bureaucracy, and so forth – focusing on the very few sentimental and pathos-filled lines bleated by Akakii Akakievich in the midst of his many deprivations.

Eikhenbaum utterly demolishes this reading in his 1919 essay, focusing instead on the highly stylized narrative voice in the story – for which he invented the term skaz (still in current use, even in non-Russian discourse) – with its orality, its grotesqueries, its parody, and embodied in Gogol’s incessant wordplay and “phonetic mimicry. In fact, Eikhenbaum claims that this skaz, this narrative voice, is not even narrative so much as it is “gestural and declamatory” – that in fact skaz is the primary structural element of the narrative: Without skaz, he says, there is no story.

Eikhenbaum argues that Gogol’s “Overcoat” is made not of events, or plot, or characters; it is not some mystical embodiment of the author’s “soul” or “psyche.” Rather, the “Overcoat” is made of the “personal tone of the author,” of skaz, of wordplay, of phonetic gestures, of performative mimicry, of linguistic linkages – in short, it is made of language, and nothing more. As Derrida would proclaim 50 years later, “There is nothing outside the text.”

Eikhenbaum’s great essay is one of the foundational texts of what became known as Russian Formalism. But of course there were other well-known Formalists expositing other Formalist ideas. There was also Osip Brik, a poet and critic who focused even more tightly than Eikhenbaum on the stuff of literary language as he carried out quantitative studies of phonetics in poetry.

And there was Viktor Shklovsky, founder of the most important of the Formalist institutions, the Society for the Study of Poetic Language, who went further than Eikhenbaum in declaring that art is really just “device,” “artifice” – nothing more. In this same 1919 essay, “Art as device,” Shklovsky proposed the idea of “defamiliarization,” or “ostranenie” – making the common appear strange in order to enhance our perception of it. In one particularly pithy 1923 monograph, Knight’s Move, he took the extreme artificiality and non-linearity of the chess knight’s move as a symbol for the peripatetic and defamiliarizing ways devices are deployed as art.

And there was Vladimir Propp, perhaps the best known of the Russian Formalists (at least in the contemporary West) for his 1928 Morphology of the Folktale, focusing on folk-literary systems and relations. I’m especially fond of Propp’s style of network analysis and data visualization.

And we have Iurii Tynianov, who wrote in his long 1927 essay “On Literary Evolution” that that what passed for the study of “literature” before the Formalists was actually only “the study of the generals of literature,” thus advocating for a much broader consideration of the vast sweeps of non-canonical.

Now is the time to fasten your seatbelts as we zoom from 1920s Leningrad to our day. Tynianov’s quip about the scholarly error of allowing only “the generals” to pass for all of literature is precisely the point of Franco Moretti, made anew for our times in in his own foundational essay “Conjectures on World Literature” (New Left Review, Jan./Feb. 2000), which practically inaugurated the 21st-century DH practice of “distant reading” (Moretti coined that term here) of what he called “the great unread” in world literary history.

And when Matt Jockers, in his 2013 monograph Macroanalysis, produces massive network graphs representing his quantitative studies of literary history (such as we see on his book’s stunning dust jacket), his focus is precisely that of the Russian Formalists: namely, form, system, and language. When he presents textual work as a data visualization, as so many contemporary digital humanists do, he is defamiliarizing those texts, making them strange, precisely as Shklovsky advised.

And when the productive and dedicated DH community of stylistics and authorship attribution scholars uses statistical packages to algorithmically cluster digital texts according to style and authorship, they’re just extending Eikhenbaum’s skaz onto a more quantitative and computational footing.

And when the Stanford Literary Lab produced its first research pamphlet a few years ago, it was very clear to them what they were doing, and in whose footsteps they were following: their title was "Quantitative Formalism."

I’m here to proclaim that the digital humanities are a 21st-century version of Russian Formalism of a hundred years ago. Just as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev all came out of Gogol’s “Overcoat,” my claim is that we digital humanists – including us digital humanities librarians – in some sense have all come out of Eikhenbaum’s great essay, and out of the foundational writings, approaches, and ideas from Eikhenbaum’s fellow Formalists.

In approaching the literary text, we focus on “how it’s made” – how literary history, genre systems, narrative lines, character networks, and even language itself are “made.” Like the Russian Formalists, we in the textual digital humanities focus on “The Word as Such” (to use the title of a manifesto by two poets who were close comrades to the Formalists, Aleksei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov); the advantage we claim in a particular digital approach is that we can do that at scale: our focus can be telescopic. But the object in view is very much the same as that of our predecessors.

And what does all this have to do with the library? The library is where the Stanford Lit Lab gets the vast majority of its raw materials: the data that is its lifeblood; the same is true (or should be true) for countless cadres of digital humanists around the world, and for the libraries with which, and in which, we work. Over the years, we librarians have selected it, procured it, curated it, preserved it, and made sure that our licenses are generous enough for us to use it.

The library is also, and always has been, a locus of long-term memory. That core library value comes strongly into play for successful DH as well: more than just a passing fad, acknowledging and proclaiming that DH is here to stay (and has been for a long time already!), we in the library should make long-term, structural commitments to digital humanities work, rather than relying on short-term hires or crudely tacking on new job responsibilities to those of already-busy librarians.

Finally, one of the hallmarks of digital humanities practice has been the desire to experiment, to make things, to dig into our data – to see how humanities “things” are “made.” There is nothing contrary to the library spirit in that desire either: in fact, librarians – perhaps even more than other knowledge workers – have long distinguished themselves with the very gears and cogs of literary production and study: with the book trade; with bibliography and metadata; with the acquisition, organizing, and preservation of textual objects; with a variety of technological means for scholarly discovery. What is all this traditional library work if not an engagement with how knowledge is “made”? And what are we, if not co-makers of that knowledge?

I realize that I haven’t provided many concrete ideas about how DH is done in the library. But I do hope to have defamiliarized the practice of digital humanities (and of digital humanities librarianship) for you somewhat, made it somewhat strange, and challenged your notion of its depth and critical heritage.

[1] This “one more goddamn time…” image has been used by Ted Underwood, and by the Los Angeles Review of Books in a polemic initiated by Stephen Marche late last year (“Literature is not Data: Against Digital Humanities”), among many others; I use it here as the product of folk imagination, without attribution. (If it's yours, please tell the University College London Centre for Digital Humanities, which includes it in a very nice collection of DH memes.) UPDATE: Ted Underwood informs me that "For the record, this super-successful contribution to DH critique was created by @frankridgway back in 2012." Thanks, Ted - and Franklin Ridgway!

Obi-Wan McCarty: Episode 1

Glen Worthey — Tue, 18 Feb 2014 16:00:00 +0000

Glen Worthey · February 19, 2014

At last year’s Digital Humanities conference (DH2013, in Lincoln, Nebraska), Willard McCarty received the sixth Roberto Busa Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Digital Humanities. Professor McCarty (henceforth just “Willard”) is Professor of Humanities Computing in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London, and holds a similar faculty post at the University of Western Sydney, Australia; but he is perhaps best known as the founding and long-time editor – since 1987! – of Humanist, an “electronic seminar” of great historical and continuing current importance to the digital humanities profession and community.

In his introduction to the award and its accompanying prize lecture, U. Nebraska’s Matt Jockers offered a warm, and true, anecdote characterizing Willard as something like the Obi-Wan Kenobi of the digital humanities, and citing a long-ago conversation with me as the source of this metaphor.

Willard is now preparing his Busa Prize address for publication, and his editors have asked whether there is some citable source for his claim to this esteemed sobriquet. This is my attempt to provide such a source, to add one small brushstroke to the canvas of DH history, and to offer a note of personal gratitude not only to Willard, but to the spirit of the community to which he’s made such important contributions.

First, I can confirm the truth of Matt's slightly stylized story, as far as it goes, of our 2001 conversation as the source of the Obi-Wan analogy. But I can also add a bit of the prehistory. The image first came to me many years before that, and has never faded: I first met Willard McCarty at the 1995 CETH Summer Seminar at Princeton. (CETH, the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities, was a Princeton-Rutgers initiative led by Susan Hockey, who had recently come to the States from a long career at Oxford, and would soon become the third recipient of the Busa Prize).

Willard was on the faculty, as was Michael Sperberg-McQueen (a creator and founding editor of the Text Encoding Initiative), Dan Greenstein (then a young professor, soon to be head of Digital Library Federation, and then of the California Digital Library, and now a senior official in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), Geoffrey Rockwell (a rising star, now a tenured professor, at the University of Alberta), Jerome McGann (University of Virginia), and others I remember less clearly. These people were, and are, true DH pioneers.

But I was a lowly Berkeley grad student and library temp, and that was my very first experience with anyone in the Humanities Computing community (aside from the library co-worker who had first introduced me to the mind-expanding ideas of the TEI).

I remember being enormously touched and impressed by the collegiality and ease that all of the CETH faculty had with all of us students (including some other grad students like me, but also librarians, English professors, and academic technology types). We all stayed together in the same spartan dorms, both faculty and participants. On the very first evening, as we were all settling in, someone invited me into a mostly-faculty gathering in somebody else's dorm room, where the very editor of the TEI tried, quite unsuccessfully, to teach me how to drink scotch – and he had apparently brought along the good stuff! – but to no avail. In spite of being an early-stage recovering teetotaler, in spite of my failure at appreciating one of the finer things of life, I felt completely welcome and at ease in that gathering, like a real colleague.

Sometime near the end of our two-week Seminar, I remember a lovely – and rather loftier! – conversation with Willard about the long traditions and beauty of wine in general, and of intoxication in particular. It went way beyond the "in vino veritas" sort of cliche, and almost certainly involved Ovid (Willard’s lifelong passion). Since I had already been reading Willard for a time, observing his wise editorial guidance on Humanist, it seemed an even greater honor to have gotten so much of his attention. (The same was true of my interactions with the other Seminar faculty, and especially with Michael S.-McQ. – who, I like to claim, "got me” my first job a few years after that, at Stanford, with an extremely kind and totally undeserved letter of recommendation. But that's a different story for another time. And I don’t have nearly as striking an analogy for Michael.)

It's funny to realize that I am now certainly older than Willard was in 1995 – and I certainly didn't think of him as an old man then! – but his well-spoken and calm manner; his kind guidance; his equanimity and thoughtful conversations with "us kids" in spite of obvious differences in seniority and "fame"; the part he played in introducing us to the deeper mysteries of humanities computing; the recognition that his was the wise, disembodied scholarly voice of Humanist – and of course his bearded slight resemblance to Sir Alec Guinness – made the Obi-Wan association inevitable for me. (I hasten to add that I was no Luke Skywalker, not even in my youthful imagination.)

The fact that the image meant so much to me at such an important time in my career; the fact that it summed up so well my initiation into the field – that experience of interacting closely with Willard, of course, but also the general atmosphere of collegiality in our field; and the fact that my casual remarking of it to Matt many years later resonated with him for so long: this is the important evidence that it's a good and true analogy.

And Willard is a good and true colleague and mentor – not only to me (and not so significantly, except to me), but to countless others, around the DH galaxy: for our remarkable community, a truly lifelong achievement.

David Blei: Probabilistic Topic Models of Text and Users

Glen Worthey — Sun, 16 Feb 2014 16:00:00 +0000

Glen Worthey · February 17, 2014

Date/Time: Monday, 24 February 2014 - 1:00pm to 2:30pmLocation: Graduate School of Business McClelland Bldg, Room M104Event Link: The Data, Society, and Inference Seminar Series

**TheInstitute for Research in the Social SciencesData, Society, and Inference Seminar Series is pleased to announce a talk by****David Blei, Associate Professor of Computer Science,**Princeton University

Probabilistic Topic Models of Text and Users

Abstract: Probabilistic topic models provide a suite of tools for analyzing large document collections. Topic modeling algorithms discover the latent themes that underlie the documents and identify how each document exhibits those themes. Topic modeling can be used to help explore, summarize, and form predictions about documents.

Traditional topic modeling algorithms take a document collection as input and analyze the texts to estimate its latent thematic structure. However, for many collections, there is an additional type of data: how people use the documents. For example, readers click on articles in a newspaper website, scientists place articles in their personal libraries, and lawmakers vote on a collection of bills. User behavior data about documents is essential for building automatic recommendation systems and, further, gives new ways of understanding how a collection and its users are organized.

In this talk, Professor Blei will review the basics of topic modeling and describe our recent research on collaborative topic models, which simultaneously analyze texts and corresponding user behavior data. His group studied collaborative topic models on a large collection of 80,000 scientists' libraries and the 250,000 abstracts of the corresponding articles. With this analysis, we can build recommendation systems that point scientists to articles they will like and, further, organize the scientific literature according to the discovered patterns of readership. As examples, we can identify articles that are important within a field and articles that transcend disciplinary boundaries.

More broadly, topic modeling is a case study in the large field of applied probabilistic modeling. Finally, Professor Blei will survey some recent advances in this field. He will show how modern probabilistic modeling gives data scientists a rich language for expressing statistical assumptions and scalable algorithms for uncovering hidden patterns in massive data.

Lunch is provided and will be served at 12:40 pm. Please RSVP to kswall@stanford.edu by Friday, Feb 21.

Workshop: Metadata for Digital Projects

Glen Worthey — Sun, 16 Feb 2014 16:00:00 +0000

Glen Worthey · February 17, 2014

Workshop: Metadata for Digital Projects" />

Date/Time: Friday, 21 February 2014 - 1:00pm to 3:00pmLocation: Green Library - SSRCEvent Link: Workshop: Metadata for Digital Projects

Workshop: Metadata for Digital Projects

Topics include a discussion of what metadata is, an overview of why metadata collection and management is vital for digital projects, as well as some best practices and tools for successfully documenting metadata in digital projects.

Open to faculty and graduate students. Register here.

Digital Humanities Curio Cabinet

Elijah Meeks — Sat, 08 Feb 2014 16:00:00 +0000

Elijah Meeks · February 9, 2014

The Online Computer Library Center, or OCLC, submitted the latest in a genre of self-reflection by library leadership focused on where and whether digital humanities intersects with the library. Conveniently, Bethany Nowviskie, head of one of the major alt-ac powerhouses* in digital humanities--the Scholar’s Lab at the University of Virginia--responded with a pointed critique. The OCLC titled their report, “Does every research library need a digital humanities center?” a point to which Nowviskie responds substantially in agreement with OCLC: “where the perception lies that ‘nothing exists’ to support digital humanities scholarship at a particular institution, the whole-cloth creation of a center is never the only — or likely the best — response.”

There’s much more to Nowviskie response than that, and it touches on the important topics of healthy collaboration in the research university, but I want to deal with this basic question of whether or not an actual, formal center is needed. I would agree that a center is never the only or likely best response to perceived need for digital humanities support, as long as it’s amended to add, “...unless they want to be relevant as a research library.”

Now, I do not have the pedigree that either of these parties holds. I am not the head of a long-established center of innovation in digital humanities, nor am I steeped in the long struggle of the digital library. But I have been invited to more than my fair share of research universities in the last two years interested in creating or growing digital humanities support structures. In almost every case, the hoped for solution does not involve large-scale institutional support.

Instead, they want to hire a single position, which goes by a few names but Digital Humanities Specialist is a good one. Or they want to provide one or two interested librarians with a vague portfolio. Or the support will come as a few generic packages from Central IT, and bring with it the onerous but necessary restrictions Central IT is notorious for. And in every case, these responses fall short of an official library-supported center for three main reasons:

Digital humanities support requires long-term investment in the professional staff providing that support. Cyclical funding, especially grant-funding, does a decent job of immersing graduate students and contract software developers in the exigencies of humanities scholarship, and then sending them back into the world at just the point at which they have developed the domain expertise and core skills that you need to drive forward innovation. Unclear collaborative opportunities for existing library staff are quickly discarded when they’re weighed against very concrete Old Library Duties and Old Library Politics.

Every project I’ve worked on has provided me more of the necessary methodological and technical skills to provide not only more robust software development and project management to the next faculty member or group I support, but also the capacity to return to the PIs of earlier projects and suggest improvements on or directly extend the work they’ve done. I couldn’t have done that if I’d had to spend half my time with an eye toward grant deadlines or traditional library support profiles.

Resources in a research university are allocated and driven by charisma, especially when they are as faculty-oriented as professional support for digital humanities scholarship. Part of the appeal of distributed support is that it allows an isolated professional staff to be swallowed up by a faculty member or project. The result is the quasi-faculty status that seems like a step up from “humble” librarianship, but is just a disguised adjunct position with better pay (which, mind you, is a major distinction). As a result, distributed support for digital humanities will always be reactive, because you cannot have a strategic vision for one or two people but you can for a unit, especially from the perspective of a traditional institution like the library.
Libraries at research universities, which was the focus of this report, have mastered the old digital library. They’ve built excellent digital card catalogues and racked up great successes in the digitization of old maps and manuscripts and done a fine job of supporting course management software. But now they need to find out where they fit in a world where research and pedagogy and publication are blurred. If you think you’re fulfilling the requirement to support modern research in the humanities because you have a host of searchable databases, then you’re out of touch. Humanities scholars require everything libraries already provide along with support in leveraging computational methods to do their research, publication of that research in a form that allows readers to engage with it in an interactive form, and long-term archiving of their work such that it can be revisited by the creators or other interested parties in a meaningful manner.

Here at Stanford we have no DH center, in the library or outside, though we have a robust connective tissue of base-funded positions that support that kind of scholarship within the library along with a set of labs or projects that have been supporting digital humanities scholarship since before it was called that. But rather than champion the slow-growth system that’s led to this support, I have always suggested centralized units with base funding. That seems counterintuitive, but these slow-growth success stories came from universities that have been championing this work for years or decades. They also came about during older, more unstable digital ecosystems. A research library getting into the digital humanities business today, which it must or risk slouching into irrelevance as little more than a giant digital curio cabinet, hasn’t got the luxury of slowly developing its support profile. More than that, it has successful examples that can, with vision and a bit more pain, be implemented in some scale at any research library.

* This originally misidentified Bethany Nowviskie as not being a librarian, when the Scholar's Lab is located in the UVa Library. I also misspelled her name, which is absurd given that I know how to spell it.

SUL Digital Humanities Project Support - Call for Proposals

Elijah Meeks — Sun, 02 Feb 2014 16:00:00 +0000

Elijah Meeks · February 3, 2014

The School of Humanities and Sciences and Stanford University Library invite faculty and graduate students in all areas of the humanities to submit a research project proposal. Projects will be selected on the basis of their significance and contribution to the scholar’s disciplinary field, theoretical and methodological sophistication, creativity of approach and technical innovation.

This support does not include any funding. Rather, project support awarded to successful applicants consists of library specialist staff and resources providing software development, project management, data modeling, and research support for a fixed period of time (typically 6-12 months, depending on the scope of the project).

In the past, this support has helped advance research of individual scholars as well as projects such as Mapping the Republic of Letters, and resulted in the creation of interactive scholarly works such as Kindred Britain, CityNature, ORBIS, and Authorial London. The short proposals, which outline the scope and goals of the digital humanities project, are due on April 11th.

Suggested topics and areas include, but are not limited to:

advanced data visualization applications
computer gaming and the humanities
historical geographic information systems (hGIS)
multimedia research
network analysis (geographic, social, citation, etc.)
textual analysis and text mining

Interdisciplinary projects are especially encouraged.

Proposals will be evaluated by members of the Digital Humanities Steering Group/review committee for project support to begin starting in May 2014.

Digital Humanities Steering Group

Debra Satz, Senior Associate Dean for Humanities & Arts

Franco Moretti, Professor of English and Comparative Literature

Caroline Winterer, Director & Anthony P. Meier Family Professor in the Humanities, Stanford Humanities Center; Professor of History and (by courtesy) of Classics

Michael Keller, University Librarian, Director of Academic Information Resources, Publisher of HighWire Press, and Publisher of the Stanford University Press

Questions

Please feel free to contact Elijah Meeks at emeeks@stanford.edu if you have any questions or would like to schedule a meeting to discuss your proposal.

Full Proposal Guidelines Here

Discourse, Design and Disorder: Digital Models for Aesthetic Theory in the Long Eighteenth Century

Glen Worthey — Wed, 29 Jan 2014 16:00:00 +0000

Glen Worthey · January 30, 2014

Date/Time: Tuesday, 4 February 2014 - 5:30pmLocation: Terrace Room, Bldg. 460 (Margaret Jacks Hall)

This talk by Mark Algee-Hewitt (Associate Co-director for Research, Stanford Literary Lab) is sponsored by the Stanford's Department of English and Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.

Amplifying the Past: Material Interventions in the Digital Humanities

Glen Worthey — Thu, 23 Jan 2014 16:00:00 +0000

Glen Worthey · January 24, 2014

Date/Time: Monday, 27 January 2014 - 5:30pmLocation: Terrace Room, Bldg. 460 (Margaret Jacks Hall)

This talk by Whitney Trettien (PhD candidate, Duke University) is sponsored by the Stanford's Department of English and Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.

Raising the Stakes in Arabic Text Handling (Thomas Milo lecture)

Glen Worthey — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 16:00:00 +0000

Glen Worthey · January 23, 2014

Date/Time: Friday, 7 February 2014 - 4:30pmLocation: Green Library - Information Center ClassroomEvent Link: http://library.stanford.edu/news/2014/01/thomas-milo-raising-stakes-arabic-text-…

Join the Stanford Libraries for a fascinating talk by noted typographer Thomas Milo who will describe a project initiated by the Sultanate of Oman.

The project aims to display, search and quote Qur'ān text on the web in a typographically stable and orthographically flawless manner, regardless the operating system or the type of web device. This requires rethinking computer typography. After a general description of the project, two areas will be discussed in more detail:

Scalable Vector Graphics technology will be evaluated as a candidate to stabilise computer typography. Browser deficiencies regarding SVG will be identified; SVG issues with Unicode will be identified.
Typography issues regarding Arabic orthography in general and Qur'ān in particular will be identified, particularly the amphibious letters, not handled by any software to date.
In addition to that a novel analysis of palaeographic Arabic script forms the basis for a new typeface to render the chapter headings.

The event is free and open to the public, but seating is limited. Please contact Sonia Lee <sonialee_at_stanford.edu> if you would like to attend.

Geographics

Elijah Meeks — Sun, 05 Jan 2014 16:00:00 +0000

Elijah Meeks · January 6, 2014

ORBIS is nearly two years old, and the ongoing update to the site has me once again in conversation with a cartographers, geographers, designers, and digital humanists. A new response I get, when describing the growing feature list of ORBIS v2, is some variation of "What do people use this for?" The fact that ORBIS still generates decent traffic* seems even more remarkable than its appearance in gaming forums, college essays and high school courses. The ultimate answer to the question is that most people play with it, running routes and contrasting the results with their own experience or intuition of travel in the regions where they run their routes. But, as has been noted in earlier essays about the project, ORBIS was built for the purpose of displaying dynamic distance cartograms, and the Google Maps interface was just an affordance that came along from developing that functionality. And so one of my major goals in updating ORBIS is to dramatically improve the cartogram functionality, as well as provide mechanisms to improve the use and understanding of what is a very abstract concept. This is as much a design challenge as a coding challenge, especially when it comes to properly distorting the routes that make up the network along with the sites. This post will get into quite a bit of technical detail as far as how that was done, and also touch on the growing integration of graphics and geography in the web mapping world.

First, a quick definition of a dynamic distance cartogram. The image above is a distortion of the geography of the ORBIS network to reflect the amount of time it would take to travel from Rome to the various other 700+ sites in the ORBIS network. This kind of distortion is available from any site in ORBIS v2 by clicking on the site and selecting Cartogram. The terrain map has faded because what we are no longer looking at traditional geographic information, instead we're seeing the combination of geographic position of sites relative to Rome (in that their angle from Rome is maintained) but with the distance from Rome set to represent the relative distance as it would take to navigate to that site along the network. So, Britannia is still up and to the left, while Egypt is still down and to the right, but the individual sites, if you measured their distance from Rome, correspond to the cost it would take to get there. In this case, the cost is time, but that cost may be the expense to ship grain or passengers, or the total length of the routes (which, as you'd expect, produces much less distortion).

Distorting the position of sites is easy, given that each site is a single coordinate (or point, in geogrphic information systems-speak). You just need to calculate the angle from Rome and change the distance while maintaining that angle. But one of the critiques that Scott Weingart made in his review of ORBIS was that the original cartogram does not distort routes, which provide much of the context necessary for understanding a cartogram. As you can see in the example above, the new cartogram handles routes along with sites, and does so with good performance (at least in Chrome and Safari--I've given up trying to build things for Firefox's horrible SVG performance). This is accomplished in D3 by selecting the path elements that represent our routes and calculating new "d" attributes for them (the "d" attribute determines how a path is drawn in SVG) like so:

d3.selectAll("path.links").each(function(d) {

var xposition = -1; var yposition = -1; var lineLength = d.coordinates.length - 1; var cartoRamp = d3.scale.linear().range([d.properties.source["cost"][0],d.properties.target["cost"][0]]).domain([0, lineLength]); cartoPath = d3.svg.line() .x(function(p) {return lineInterpolatorX(p)}) .y(function(p) {return lineInterpolatorY(p)});

function lineInterpolatorX (incomingRoute) { xposition++;return findx(cartoRamp(xposition),incomingRoute[0],incomingRoute[1],centerX,centerY) }

function lineInterpolatorY (incomingRoute) { yposition++;return findy(cartoRamp(yposition),incomingRoute[0],incomingRoute[1],centerX,centerY) } d.cartoD = cartoPath(d.coordinates); })

Each path element is selected and instantiates its own d3.svg.line() constructor to create the new, distorted line. This constructor operates on a set of x/y coordinates, but in the case of the lines we're working with, those x/y coordinates cannot be passed as simple values but instead need to be interpolated based on the distortion of the system that we're representing with the cartogram. A simple polyline, like the kind we're using for the routes in ORBIS, is a collection of coordinate pairs, and each coordinate pair needs to be positions relative to the distortion of the two sites that the line connects. So, we build a linear ramp using d3.scale.linear() from the cost to reach Site A to the cost to reach Site B and map it to the number of points that makes up the line. We use this linear ramp to determine the interpolated cost at each point in the polyline to create a distortion of the route that distorts the points near Site A more like Site A and the points on the route near Site B more like Site B and the points in the middle as some mix based on the order they appear in the line.

But this method has a problem. It assumes that the points that make up the polyline are equidistant. As a result, if you have a route that is significantly more complex on one end or the other (such as switchbacks or other changes in course), then it will have more points to represent that complexity which may not map to actual length of the route.

This happens with the ORBIS route data because the line simplification it uses to create lightweight geodata comes from a GIS focus on resolution and maintaining details given a particular scale, which can result in polygons and polylines maintaining uneven complexity across their surface. There are two ways to resolve this. The first would be to factor the actual length of the line at the point we're distorting and with a cost ramp that was mapped to the length of the route instead of the number of points in the route, then we would see proper distortion. The other way to solve this is to normalize the displayed routes by pairing D3's projection() function with the built-in SVG getPointAtLength function to normalize the routes. I chose this direction because it would also reduce the number of vertices, overall, in the routes and should improve performance. The code to do that:

simplifiedGeoms = [];

d3.selectAll("path.routes").each(function(d,i) { var segLength = d3.select(this).node().getTotalLength(); var simplifiedObject = {coordinates: [], type:"LineString", id: d.id, properties: d.properties}; for (x=0;x<=1;x+=.1) { var segPoint = d3.select(this).node().getPointAtLength(segLength * x); var segPointProjected = projection.invert([segPoint.x,segPoint.y]) simplifiedObject.coordinates.push([segPointProjected[0],segPointProjected[1]]); } simplifiedGeoms.push(simplifiedObject); })

routeG.selectAll(".routes") .data(simplifiedGeoms) .attr("d", path)

Notice that for this to work, we need to have already created the graphical objects that represent the geographic data for the routes. This requires us to project the data and draw it in the DOM. Once we have SVG paths that represent each route, we can take advantage of the built-in SVG functionality to segment the lines equidistantly relying not on their geographic length but on their graphical length. D3's handy projection.invert() function allows us to create the projected coordinates from the graphical coordinates returned by getPointAtLength. The underlying data used to determine route cost and shape is unchanged, and even with dramatic simplification the appearance of the line maintains most of its integrity.

This gif cycles between no simplification of the routes, a simplification to 10 equidistant points along the polyline, and a simplification to 4 equidistant points along the polyline.

The result of simplifying the routes in this manner is not some massive change. As I noted earlier, there weren't any routes troublesome enough to create significant distortion. Compare the initial cartogram at the beginning of this post with the cartogram drawn with lines that have been normalized in this manner and you'll be hard-pressed to spot the differences:

One of the places where you can see a correction in route distortion happens with the routes to Mursa (now Osijek, Croatia) from Siscia (Sisak, Croatia) and from Poetovio (now Ptuj, Slovenia). You can may think that the path from Poetovio to Mursa is less complex than the path from Siscia to Mursa, but the former consists of 56 points, while the later consists of 37 (in two segments).

In both cases, the points are spread unevenly across the polylines. When we distort the network with the center at Rome (with the same settings as with all the cartograms shown in this post) it seems like the path from Poetovio, rather than converging with the route from Siscia as it approaches Mursa (as we would expect) instead crosses and changes position relative to the center, implying that the road from Siscia to Mursa slows down and then speeds up as it approaches Mursa.

This kind of behavior is also visible in the doglegs evident on the Danube to the right of Mursa. We can see these are artifacts of the polyline segmentation when we compare the distortion with the normalized routes:

While the change is minor, and it was my intuition before effecting this normalization that it would be, in the aggregate this kind of error is visually jarring and interrupts an attempt to understand what is already a very abstract spatial representation. What intrigued me more than the technical details was that the first half of this code (the cartogram itself) needed to happen in the browser, since the transformation is dynamic and interactive and subject to the same variety of permutations available for calculating routes. But the second half (the line simplification) could have happened on the backend to produce a static data file. Instead, rather than being some kind of pre-processing technique, the negligible cost to recalculate the simplified routes affords the opportunity to provide level of detail controls that allow the reader to determine, say, the number of points per line if they want. More than that, I found it quicker to address this through dealing with the graphical structures rather than the geodata structures, which suprised me. While we live in an age of readily accessible and robust tools and libraries for geospatial manipulation, we also have simple and effective methods for manipulating graphical data. I'm sure much of my motivation for addressing this with D3 and SVG rather than PostGIS (or Shapely, for you Pythonistas out there) is because I use D3 a lot these days, but the capacity to do line simplification like this (or raster calculations with canvas or other traditional backend GIS) in the browser is revolutionary. What's more exciting than the growing capability to do this kind of thing in the browser is the necessity when delivering dynamic, interactive content like this.

* 3000 visits in the last week, which is small potatoes to a big Internet site, but rather remarkable for a scholarly site that hasn't added any new features for a couple years

Hestia2@Stanford: Visualizing Complex Networks

Nicole Coleman — Wed, 23 Oct 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Nicole Coleman · October 24, 2013

Date/Time: Monday, 4 November 2013 - 12:00pm to Tuesday, 5 November 2013 - 5:00pmLocation: CESTA, 4th Floor of Wallenberg Hall, Stanford UniversityEvent Link: Hestia2@Stanford Registration

Hestia2@Stanford

(REGISTRATION REQUIRED)

Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, Stanford University

450 Serra Mall, Building 160, Rm 433A (Fourth Floor)

November 4, 12:00-5:00 p.m and November 5, 9:00-5:00 p.m.

A free 1.5 day symposium on conceptualizing, visualizing and analyzing complex networks from different disciplinary perspectives.

This symposium will be a forum for new research in network analysis ranging from tracking emerging tech trends at Quid to dramatic networks within plays from ancient Greece and Rome, Renaissance England and France, 18th-century Germany, and 19th-century Norway. We will also showcase three exciting new developments in humanities research: Orbis 2.0, the next iteration of the Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World; Palladio, a graphical interface for expert exploration and analysis of historical data; and Topotime, a software development project aimed at expanding current options for representation of historical events and periods.

PROGRAM

November 4, 12:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m

Augmenting intelligence using text analytics, network theory, and visualization software

Emmanuel R. Yera, PhD, Data Scientist, Quid

Making sense of publicly available information (e.g. news articles, patent fillings, and tweets) is extremely valuable but difficult to achieve due to its unstructured nature, magnitude, and our ability to absorb complex data. Using text analytics and mathematical formulations of text allows us to quickly and effectively find relationships between documents. Projecting these high dimensional relationships onto networks and leveraging network theory and algorithms allows us to more easily understand these complex relationships.

Orbis 2.0

Walter Scheidel and Elijah Meeks

ORBIS 2.0 is a complete rewrite of the interactive components of ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Transportation Network Model of the Roman World. Major changes are implemented in the core technologies, functionality, design and display. ORBIS 2.0 allows for new aggregated functionality to discover regions based on cartogram calculations and discovery high traffic sites (utilizing a simple form of the betweenness centrality network statistic) based on routes run by the user. The most ambitious aspect of ORBIS 2.0 from a UX perspective is the planned-for capacity to save calculations for citation and reuse.

ARCHES

Dennis Wuthrich

Arches is a new open-source geospatial software system for cultural heritage inventory and management, developed jointly by the Getty Conservation Institute and World Monuments Fund. Arches grew out of the collaborative effort to create the Middle Eastern Geodatabase for Antiquities and the widespread need within the heritage field for low-cost electronic inventories that are easy to use and access. Arches combines state-of-the-art software development with the insights and perspective of heritage professionals from around the world.

Tuesday, November 5, 2012, 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.

Palladio

Nicole Coleman and Giorgio Caviglia

“Networks in History” an NEH funded project on interface design for data-driven humanities research. The first phase of this effort, which we have name “Palladio” will be released in beta version at this Hestia2 workshop. The interface design emphasizes the contextualization of data: spatial, temporal, and relational to support interpretation when we lack the metrics for useful quantitative approaches. Workshop participants will

Network Theory and Dramatic Structure

Franco Moretti, Mark Algee-Hewitt and Ryan Heuser

This project compares the dramatic networks emerging from over 300 plays from ancient Greece and Rome, Renaissance England and France, 18th-century Germany, and 19th-century Norway. We are mostly interested in identifying the general properties of dramatic networks – their breadth, density, patterns of growth – and how they change according to genre [tragedy, comedy, historical play] and historical setting [ancient city state and empire, Renaissance court, modern nation-state]. Our latest research in this project, relating to patterns of growth leading to symmetrical and asymmetrical networks, will be presented for discussion.

(A geography of digestion lunchtime talk) Theorizing Material Relatedness in Networks: Two Geographical Case Studies

Nick Bauch

To imagine a network is to imagine what it means for two or more objects to be related. The two case studies presented - a geography of digestion and a geography of medical body sensors - offer ways to conceive of relatedness in the material relationship among bodies and landscapes.

A Tour of Network Maps

G. Salim Mohammed (Stanford Digital and Rare Maps Librarian)

Topotime

Karl Grossner and Elijah Meeks

Topotime (“topological time”) is a software development project aimed at expanding current options for representation of historical events and periods—formally, for computational reasoning, and graphically in timelines. The Topotime data model and graphical layout will accommodate several types of temporal references commonly encountered in humanities scholarship, including fuzzy temporal bounds and cyclical time. TopoTime development has been initiated by Elijah Meeks and Karl Grossner (Stanford University Libraries) and will become an open-source effort by year-end.

Jo Guldi: "Maps Before and After the Smartphone: A Global History, 1968-2013"

Jason A. Heppler — Wed, 23 Oct 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Jason A. Heppler · October 24, 2013

Date/Time: Thursday, 24 October 2013 - 4:15pm to 5:00pmLocation: History Building 200, Room 303

The History Department and Science Technology and Society Program are pleased to present:

"Maps Before and After the Smartphone:

A Global History, 1968-2013"

Jo Guldi

Assistant Professor of History, Brown University

4:15pm, Thursday, October 24th, 2013

History Building 200, Room 303

Digital History at Stanford

Jason A. Heppler — Tue, 22 Oct 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Jason A. Heppler · October 23, 2013

Digital History at Stanford

Last week we went live with Digital History at Stanford, a space where I am trying to centralize information about the various digital research and pedagogy going on in the History Department at Stanford.

The space originally started as a way for me to put projects that were in progress, of which I have a few that are under active development. As these projects grew and I began writing up resources, planning workshops, and learning about other events around campus, I realized we could transform the space into something much more usable for the department and a wider audience interested in digital history. The projects receive a lot of cross-promotion as well, showing up on Digital Humanities at Stanford and on the department's main website.

The Digital History site also helps advertise projects not affiliated with the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA). Many faculty members in the History Department have a connection to the Spatial History Project, but not all projects being undertaken in the department applies to spatial history. So, the space serves as a place for faculty and graduate student projects to live during development and later point to when a project has achieved its final form.

I anticipate future changes to the site, primarily to the section on teaching. Right now the space helps advertise workshops, talks, and events around Stanford that fall under the umbrella of digital humanities. But going forward, I want the space to also include syllabi, course websites, resources from reading groups, and other material used in the teaching of digital history. The resources section will likely expand as well to broadly encompass more digital history methods and approaches.

Digital History at Stanford is in its early stages, so you can expect the site to expand going forward. Tags: digital history

Ada Lovelace Day 2013

Cameron Blevins — Wed, 16 Oct 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Cameron Blevins · October 17, 2013

October 15th marks Ada Lovelace Day, an annual celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths. As I read through posts commemorating the day, it got me reflecting on my own experience. It's not just that I admire Ada Lovelace and the women that followed after her. It's that I quite literally wouldn't be here without them.

Keep reading about the woman most repsonsible for my career.

The Digital Humanities on Ada Lovelace Day

Glen Worthey — Mon, 14 Oct 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Glen Worthey · October 15, 2013

Today, October 15, is Ada Lovelace Day, a day to celebrate the contributions of women in computing (and in other science and technology fields); a time to remember the nineteenth-century's fascinating and brilliant "first computer programmer" Ada Gordon Lovelace; and an excellent opportunity to praise and encourage the Adas of our day.

As a digital humanities "dude," I'm especially lucky and proud to be able to count a great number of computing women as colleagues, friends, and role models in my field. (I'm sorry that I don't have time at the moment to go on linking to more of these modern-day DH Adas, both here at Stanford, and in the big, wide world: I've left out dozens, I know!)

Melissa Terras, a DH colleage at University College London, has just contributed a must-read contribution to this year's Ada Lovelace Day celebrations: "Father Busa’s Female Punch Card Operatives," an account of some of the women (with never-before-published historical photos) who contributed to the efforts of the founding father of humanities computing, Fr. Roberto Busa. If you have limited time to celebrate the day, please stop reading me and go read Melissa's essay.

But if you are still reading, I'd like to point out a few of Melissa's own inspirational contributions to the field. Perhaps most visibly, Melissa presented a stunning closing plenary lecture -- a digital humanities call-to-arms, really -- "Present, Not Voting: Digital Humanities in the Panopticon" at the DH2010 conference at King's College London; even if you weren't among the lucky few hundred people sitting electrified in the room, you can still read the full text orwatch the video.

More recently, as chair of the DH2014 Program Committee, Melissa successfully shepherded a proposal to add a "community keynote" speech to the annual DH conference schedule, in order to encourage and make room for a more inclusive roster of keynote speakers -- an accomplishment that is particularly pertinent as we celebrate Ada Lovelace Day. The selection of that first DH community keynote speaker, announced just a few weeks ago, is equal cause for celebration: Bethany Nowviskie of the University of Virginia, current president of the Association for Computers in the Humanities, a wonderful colleage, and an inspirational "woman of code."

Let us celebrate and honor Ada Lovelace by remembering and encouraging our sister techies past, present, and future.

A House Divided

Jacqueline Hettel — Thu, 03 Oct 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Jacqueline Hettel · October 4, 2013

In this week’s post, I want to address a question that I have been asked quite often since coming to Stanford University Libraries, and one that made its way into a comment of Michael Widner’s recent blog postof the DH reading group's discussion of Matt Jocker’s new book, Macroanalysis: “I’m intrigued by the division within linguistics that Hettel describes; if there were a link to a blog post or something like that explaining it, I’d be interested in following up and learning more.” I searched online to see if someone had already written such a post and came up empty, so to help anyone out there who might want to understand these differences I have drawn a basic portrait of computational language analysis on my blog (linguabrarian.com). Feel free to check it out if you're interested in a reductionist view of two basic divisions within the field of linguistics.

My Alt-Ac Life

Jason A. Heppler — Tue, 01 Oct 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Jason A. Heppler · October 2, 2013

I just wrote a piece on my blog about the kind of digital humanities work I do at Stanford. Given the interest in alternative academic careers, I find it useful to share stories about the sort of work I'm doing, challenges I work on, and the collaborations I engage with in my career. My interest in alternative academic careers stemmed from my interest in digital humanities, hence the reason for this. I won't repost everything here, but head over to the blog if you're interested.

Shakespeare Goes to the Opera Part 1: Scraping Query Results from Opening Night!

Jacqueline Hettel — Mon, 23 Sep 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Jacqueline Hettel · September 24, 2013

A little over a week ago, the Stanford University Library announced the launch of a new collection/tool that was created in collaboration between hText Services and the Music Library: Opening Night! Opera and Oratorio Premieres. It is a Blacklight gem web application (Ruby on Rails application powered by a SOLR index) of the metadata for 38,000 different operas and oratorios when they were first performed between 1589 and 2001. And while I could go on ad nauseum about how amazing Blacklight is as a discovery tool for digital humanities metadata and objects, and that it's not just for the creation of library catalogs like Searchworks, I will save that spiel for another day. This two part blog post series titled "Shakespeare Goes to the Opera" focuses on three things: sharing a methodology for unlocking metadata from query results in an application like Opening Night! via web scraping; sharing how to use Google Fusion tables to create interesting visualizations and analyses; and demonstrating Opening Night! has metadata that is of interest even to those of us without formal training in Music, or more specifically the history of operatic performances.

The first thing I would like to touch on is that the web scraper discussed in this blog post is not the only one. There are many options for web scraping (and many of them are described in detail here). Since I am writing this post with library folks in mind who may or may not have a programming background, I have decided to demonstrate web scraping using a Google Chrome add-on that not only has an easy-to-use UI, but it has a function to export the results as a spreadsheet to your Google Drive account--making it that much easier to share data for collaboration. If you are interested in learning how to do web scraping directly, via a programming language, I can direct you to two pretty good tutorials:

If Ruby is your thing, you can check out Stanford DH'er Jason Heppler's blog post on using Nokogiri for scraping, or
There is as an extremely thorough tutorial on Beautiful Soup, a Python based web scraping suit, at Python for Beginners.

Now, if you haven't already done so, go ahead and download Google Chrome (click here to download it for your operating system) and the Google Chrome Scraper from the Google Store (click here and follow the directions for getting it installed). Once you have this add-on installed, we can begin the reallyeasy task of unleashing data from Opening Night!

Transforming Opening Night! from an obsolete, stand-alone database into a dynamic web application was the first project tasked to me when I joined the Stanford University Libraries team back in February. I will admit that up until right before launching this application I honestly thought the only thing of interest to me (as a PhD in English who specialized in DH and Corpus Linguistics) in this project was the technology, coding, and methodology for wrangling the data, and not the data itself. However, I soon learned that there are aspects of this dataset that are of interest to those of us who are not Music scholars. In particular, literary types will find it interesting that there is a facet on the right-hand side of the application labeled Librettist/Literary Sources. And when you expand this facet, there is a friendly face waiting for English Literature scholars: Mr. William Shakespeare.

After faceting on William Shakespeare, we will notice many familiar titles (Romeo and Juliet, Amleto (Hamlet), Antonio e Cleopatra, etc.), and these titles span multiple countries over 1300 years. Wouldn't it be interesting to take these results and plot them on a google map to see how they Shakespeare's proliferation spread over time? Since there isn't an export function in Opening Night! to do such a task, we turn to web scraping to help us unlock this data and prepare it for our visualizations and analysis.

Before we commence with scraping, let's make this task that much easier on yourself by modifying the search results settings in Opening Night! so that you have fewer pages to scrape. On the right side of your results screen, you will see a drop-down menu that says 10 per Page. Change that to 100 per Page.

What we will want to do first is to right-click anywhere on the first page of our query results and select "Scrape similar...." What this will do is launch the Google Chrome Scraper.

Once you have clicked "Scrape similar...", you should see the Scraper interface.

The first thing you will want to do is make sure that you have selected XPath. We will not be doing any of our scraping with jQuery today. All of the web scraping in this tutorial will be done using XPath expressions. However, you have that option if you ever want to harvest data from a website using this tool in the future.

Once you have confirmed that the Selector is set to XPath, you should copy/paste the following reference into the XPath Reference box:

//div[3]/div[2]/div[3]/div

What this expression does is tell the scraper exactly where to go on the query results page. I won't go into every single aspect of this declaration, but what I will say is that it points directly to each and every one of our Opening Night! results.

Now, we need to identify each piece of information that we want to harvest from the query results page. For the purposes of our study, we obviously wanted the title of each opera/oratorio. Since I have already pointed the scraper to the div container that holds the metadata for each Opening Night! entry, it is really easy for me to extract the individual pieces of information for each book as an array (which the Google Chrome Scraper does automagically and will be really important when we go to export the data). For our study, we wanted to harvest the title, composer, librettist/literary source (for individuals in addition to Shakespeare), genre, year, and the country of the premiere (basically all of the information provided in the short view).

And here are those specific XPath expressions in a format that you can copy/paste into your Scraper:

Title: ./dl/dd[@class="blacklight-title]
Composer: ./dl/dd[@class="blacklight-composer]
Librettist/Literary Source: ./dl/dd[@class="blacklight-librettist]
Genre: ./dl/dd[@class="blacklight-genre]
Year:****./dl/dd[@class="blacklight-year]
Country: ./dl/dd[@class="blacklight-country]
URL: ..//h5/a/@href

The first thing I would like to point out about these XPath expressions for those of you not already familiar with XPath is that they all begin with a period [.]. The Title, Author, Year, Description, and Link XPath expressions are all what we call predicates. And what the period does is tell the scraper that the information we put in the XPath Reference Expression box at the top is the current element to which we would like to append the predicates. Basically, the period [.] saves us more typing. On the other hand, I want to point out that the XPath expression for URL has two periods [..]. This has a slightly different function: the double period points to the parent of the reference expression being that which the predicate should be appended to. Finally, you will notice that the link for URL is relative to the webpage. So if you are going to use the URL for any sort of reference, you will need to do a find/replace to append "http://operadata.stanford.edu".

Once you have copied/pasted all of the XPath expressions into the Scraper for the data you would like to harvest from the query page, go ahead and click the Scrape button to view your data harvest in the preview window.

After verifying that you are harvesting the data you actually want, make sure to save this series of expressions as a preset for you to use later. THis way, you don't have to come back and re-copy/paste everything back into the Scraper. You can do this by clicking the Presets button, assigning a name to this setting, and then hitting Save.

Finally, go ahead and click the **Export to Google Docs...**button on the bottom-right side of the Scraper window to see your query data transformed into a beautiful spreadsheet in Google Drive. From here, you can begin processing your data: confirming if each book actually contains an acknowledgement for your library, or any other transformation of the data that you desire. You can interact with a spreadsheet created from the result of this scraping here.

By using the Google Chrome Scraper with its built-in function of exporting to Google Docs, we have the ability to work with others on this dataset in a collaborative manner, as well as transform our results into dynamic visualizations and maps using Google Fusion Tables and Google Maps or manipulate your data with Google Refine. This topic will be discussed further in Part 2 of "Shakespeare Goes to the Opera."

Update September 25, 2013: Here is the web scraping information for those of you wanting to harvest data from the long records:

XPath Reference Path:****//div

Title: ./dl/dd[@class="blacklight-title"]
Composer: ./dl/dd[@class="blacklight-composer"]
Librettist/Literary Source: ./dl/dd[@class="blacklight-librettist"]
Genre: ./dl/dd[@class="blacklight-genre"]
Opera Subgenre: ./dl/dd[@class="blacklight-subgenre"]
Oratorio Subject: ./dl/dd[@class="blacklight-subject"]
Oratorio Feast Date: ./dl/dd[@class="blacklight-feastdate"]
Premiere Date: ./dl/dd[@class="blacklight-date"]
Theater: ./dl/dd[@class="blacklight-theater"]
City: ./dl/dd[@class="blacklight-city"]
State/Region: ./dl/dd[@class="blacklight-region"]
Country: ./dl/dd[@class="blacklight-country"]

Doing Digital History: Getting Started with Zotero

Jason A. Heppler — Mon, 16 Sep 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Jason A. Heppler · September 17, 2013

Date/Time: Thursday, 17 October 2013 - 12:00pm to 1:15pmLocation: Lane History Corner, Room 307

Jason A. Heppler, ATS for the Department of History, will be leading a series of workshops called Doing Digital History during the Fall quarter. The first session is a basic introduction to using Zotero to manage bibliographic information and insert citations into word processors.

Doing Digital History: Paper Machines, a Talk by Jo Guldi

Jason A. Heppler — Mon, 16 Sep 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Jason A. Heppler · September 17, 2013

Date/Time: Friday, 25 October 2013 - 12:00pm to 2:00pmLocation: Lane History Corner, Room 307

Doing Digital History Workshop: Paper Machines

A talk by Jo Guldi, Assistant Professor of History at Brown University

October 25th at Noon

Lane History Corner, room 307

RSVP for lunch to shari.haun@stanford.edu

In the twentieth century, managing global issues in the era of modern, mechanized creation of reports generated bureaucracies such as the university itself, whose archives dwarf those of early modern Europe and invoke a need for new methodological strategies. Twentieth-century stories take place in the era of too much paper to read. Can digital tools provide shortcuts through these archives?

Jo Guldi will speak about her digital history research in the context of longue duree projects, foregrounding Paper Machines,http://www.papermachines.org, a digital humanities toolkit for generalizing information about large-scale textual corpora.

Hosted by the Department of History and the Academic Technology Specialist Program.

Doing Digital History: Tools for Managing Research Assets

Jason A. Heppler — Mon, 16 Sep 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Jason A. Heppler · September 17, 2013

Date/Time: Thursday, 21 November 2013 - 12:00pm to 1:15pmLocation: Lane History Corner, Room 307

Jason A. Heppler, ATS for the Department of History, will be leading a series of workshops called Doing Digital History during the Fall quarter. The final session will be a talk introducing faculty, staff, and students to a variety of tools useful in managing research material. The talk will briefly introduce the tools DEVONthink, Evernote, Mendeley, and Omeka.

On DHThis, a Slashdot for the Digital Humanities

Mike Widner — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Mike Widner · September 11, 2013

A recently launched site, DHThis, aims to be the Slashdot of the Digital Humanities. I have some reservations about the platform they chose, which I discuss at some length on my blog.

A GeoHumanities Special Interest Group

Karl Grossner — Sat, 07 Sep 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Karl Grossner · September 8, 2013

Today the Association of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) announced the creation of a GeoHumanities Special Interest Group, instigated and co-chaired by yours truly and Kathy Weimer, Curator of Maps and the Map & GIS Coordinator at Texas A&M’s Cushing Memorial Library & Archives. We were simultaneously inspired to get this started at the recent DH2013 conference in Lincoln, after noting that several well-attended sessions featured papers with geographic, spatial-temporal, and what I call “placial” perspectives and related methodologies.

Kathy and I have received an enthusiastic response to the idea, from other attendees and from the ADHO Steering Committee. Our SIG proposal outlines the group’s potential activities, and some of our communication pieces are in place—a preliminary web page, a mailing list and a Twitter account, @GeoHum_SIG. Please do join the list and follow us to learn of future developments! There are plans for a more elaborate web site, the features and functions for which will be worked out in the coming weeks, with input from our own steering committee, our members, and the DH community at large.

The stated goals of the SIG, as expressed in our proposal to ADHO, are:

“… to create a venue for pooling knowledge and best practices for relevant existing digital tools and methods, to foster the collaborative development of shared resources and new tools and extensions to geospatial software, and to keep humanist scholars at large informed about the possibilities and inherent pitfalls in their use.”

I have written more about my personal motivations for helping launch the SIG on my blog, at http://kgeographer.com.

Debating the Methods in Matt Jockers's Macroanalysis

Mike Widner — Wed, 04 Sep 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Mike Widner · September 5, 2013

On September 3rd we had our second meeting of the Stanford Digital Humanities Reading Group, in which we discussed Matt Jockers’s new book, Macroanalysis: Digital Methods & Literary History. Because Jockers is a former colleague, a co-founder of Stanford’s Literary Lab, and a friend to several people in the reading group, I went into this meeting anxious that we might all be too happy with his book to sustain ninety minutes of conversation. I was very wrong. Jacqueline Hettel, whose Ph.D. research focused on text analysis of domain-specific language using corpus linguistics, prompted a vigorous debate about the methods Jockers uses in Macroanalysis. Hettel’s primary critique is that the statistical methods behind topic modeling, word frequencies, and other methods that undergird the book’s chapters are heavily dependent upon a set of assumptions common to NLP, Chomsky, and other primarily American approaches to understanding language.

Topic models, for example, rely on the assumption that Bayesian analysis can accurately describe how language works. When Jockers, in chapter 7 (“Nationality”) relies on the mean usage of the word “the”, he assumes that language has a Gaussian distribution. Hettel prefers a log-likelihood method, among others, owing to her training in the school of linguistic thought exemplified by her major professor William Kretzschmar, who follows John Firth and others in what is known as the “London School”. I am not a statistician nor a linguist, so it did not occur to me that the statistical methods Jockers uses might be controversial or, more importantly, that they make assumptions about the nature of language. This topic led the group to consider the purpose of the book, the audience, and its relationship to more traditional modes of literary scholarship. Is the evidence in support of Jockers’s argument meant to get at some truth, and hence tangled up with the problems of scientism, or, as Blevins asked, is the evidence he presents more akin to the sort we find in a close reading, where the force of argument is driven by a persuasive narrative?

Moreover, Jockers, whose Ph.D. is in English and who is a scholar of Irish literature, is not a linguist or statistician either. Was his use of tools like relative work frequencies, topic models, and part-of-speech taggers a conscious choice that reflects his understanding of the nature of language or an unconscious one borne of an ignorance of this other realm of quantitative studies of language? In using methods that edge so close to those that have been used in linguistics for a relatively long time compared to the newness of quantitative text analysis in digital humanities, Jockers prompts us to think about how such scholarship may overlap disciplines in which we lack enough expertise to even understand what our choices entail. Indeed, my uneasy truce with the use of topic models for literary analysis stems from my keen awareness of how little I understand about the assumptions behind Latent Semantic Analysis.

We must also consider the context not only of the language under study, a point Hettel emphasized, but also the context in which the methods were chosen. Perhaps owing to the work of Stanford’s Natural Language Processing group, led by Christopher Manning and Dan Jurafsky, Jockers was led when he began his work in this area towards tools like the Stanford POS Tagger and others that imply certain language models of which those of us using such tools are not fully aware.

We also touched upon the nature of classification in digital humanities, which Ted Underwood has written about recently on his blog. In Macroanalysis, Jockers regularly classifies texts according to genre, nationality, or gender, but one of these things is not like the others. Genre, as studies in neuroscience and cognitive literary theory have shown (and which is the topic of my own dissertation), is not a static box into which texts may be placed, but instead a network of associations more in line with Jauss’s “horizon of expectations”, which emphasizes the reader’s prior knowledge and the interrelated nature of features in literary works. There is little acknowledgement in Jockers’s book that genres possess an internal structure or that this structure is not accessible via machine-learning classification methods as currently deployed by digital humanists.

This objection returns us to the core question about the book’s audience and purpose. I have seen several people on Twitter note that they could use this book as something like a textbook for a digital humanities course. And, as Worthey rightly noted, Jockers does a masterful job of leading potential skeptics “by the nose” from simple, seemingly straight-forward (though still novel) analyses to the more arcane world of network graphs derived from topic models and stylometrics. I suspect that this book has in mind at least both the audience of skeptics and the already converted who want to know precisely what algorithms he used to derive his findings.

The book prompted an invigorating conversation that touched on these and other issues that, as digital humanities scholars, we should engage with regularly and critically. Our next discussion will focus on the collaboratively-authored 10 PRINT, a very different kind of book. If you are in the Bay Area and free that day, we invite you to join our discussion.

Attendees: Cameron Blevins, Jason Heppler, Jacqueline Hettel, Karl Grossner, Michael Widner, Glen Worthey

Reviews of Macroanalysis:

Mike Kestemont, LLC, http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/08/22/llc.fqt056.full

Scott McLemee, IHE: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2013/05/01/review-matthew-l-jockers-macroanalysis-digital-methods-literary-history

Scott Weingart: http://www.scottbot.net/HIAL/?p=34566

Matthew Wilkins, LA Review of Books: http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/an-impossible-number-of-books/

Digital Humanities at Stanford

Mike Widner — Wed, 04 Sep 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Mike Widner · September 5, 2013

Date/Time: Tuesday, 15 October 2013 - 12:00pm to 2:00pmLocation: Pigott Hall, German Studies Library (Building 260, Room 252)

The inaugural meeting of Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages' new Digital Humanities Focal Group, convened by Dan Edelstein and Michael Widner, will provide an overview of the resources for doing digital humanities at Stanford.

POSTPONED: DH Reading: 10 PRINT

Mike Widner — Wed, 04 Sep 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Mike Widner · September 5, 2013

Date/Time: Thursday, 24 October 2013 - 12:00pm to 1:30pmLocation: Stanford Humanities Center Boardroom

We will be discussing 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10. Join us!

We're rescheduling this event. Sorry!

ORBIS Design Challenge

Elijah Meeks — Mon, 02 Sep 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Elijah Meeks · September 3, 2013

ORBIS Design Challenge

Since its launch in May 2012, ORBIS has always been very popular. This is in spite of breaking some fundamental web design rules, such as placing the key interactive element on a non-descript tab rather than the opening page. But the capacity to calculate travel times and cost for oxcarts and armies in the Roman world is still a "killer feature" and traffic to ORBIS remains steady. As has been noted here and on the ORBIS_Stanford Twitter account, we're building a new version of ORBIS that has improved functionality and some new data. You can find the public prototype of ORBIS v2 here.

This new version adds or improves upon several features that were implemented in the initial ORBIS and ORBIS|via implementations. Cartograms can now be run from any place, and sites are clickable with information (not much right now but more soon), and there are several more involved features that are in their early stages. But the biggest design shift is that the ORBIS route-finding map, cartogram, and ORBIS|via are all now integrated into a single application.

If we examine the analytics to look at how people used the site, we find that half of the visitors to orbis.stanford.edu never opened up the map. Of those, only a third opened up the cartogram, while only 1.5% of all visitors ever saw ORBIS|via. The statistics are even worse on closer examination, because while the route-finding interface is intuitive due to its Google Maps-like nature, the cartogram and ORBIS|via saw steep dropoffs in actual use of their core functionality even after people opened them up. So much functionality was invisible to readers, and that functionality even when available needed to be better described. Exposing this functionality and encouraging the use of it in understanding Roman socio-political geography is the primary design challenge facing ORBIS. To do this, we need to better understand how distorting geography, clustering, site ego networks, and route finding functionality relate to the Roman world and each other. By understanding the theoretical relationships between these functions, we can build a user experience that foregrounds the important perspectives each can give.

My favorite example for demonstrating the contingent nature of space in the Roman world is the route from Rome to London, which changes dramatically based on time of year and priority of travel. A comprehensive redesign of ORBIS should take a reader's request to route a path from Rome to London as a moment not only to complexify their concept of that particular path by offering permutations on that path but demonstrate the effect of those permutations on the concept of space and distance. The most primitive way to do this is to simply prompt the reader with "Do you want to see how this path may be different in a different time of year or with a different priority or vehicle?" or "Would you like to see a cartogram from London?" or "Would you like to see the regions in the Roman world that are closer to London and Rome according to these settings?" I plan to introduce some of this as context-sensitive help but good design would be more seamless and integrated than that.

I'm not well-versed in interactive design and I'm a firm believer in general open source principles, which is why ORBIS v2 is being developed publicly. Anyone who wants to sketch up a possible interface, information architecture, user flow, or other design artifact for ORBIS (whether in Balsamiq or by hand or whatever) is welcome to do so, with the very real possibility that it or elements of it will end up in the final site.

Kindred Britain Techniques 1: Permalinks on a Graph

Elijah Meeks — Tue, 27 Aug 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Elijah Meeks · August 28, 2013

Kindred Britain has a handful of patterns and functions that are rather novel in their creation or deployment. In this series, I'll be exploring the methodology and motivation for them, as well as go into some technical detail as to how they work. The first feature I'd like to focus on is the use of rich permalinks for sharing Kindred Britain. These direct links to particular states of Kindred Britain mean that when you share a link like this:

http://kindred.stanford.edu/#/path/full/none/none/I17722/I17760/

..it doesn't just open up Kindred Britain, but rather it opens up a very particular view of Kindred Britain, in this case the genealogical path from General Robert E. Lee to President Zachary Taylor.

When we built ORBIS, we were surprised at how popular it was with social media, and chagrined to find out that many people who shared it thought they were sharing the map 'tab' but instead sent users to the base website. Oftentimes, the instructions were added in the forum comment or Facebook post, e.g. "Click this link and then go to the 'mapping ORBIS' tab." We wanted to avoid this situation with Kindred Britain, but we also wanted to make it more robust, and allow people to link to specific views in the same way you can link to specific routes in Google Maps. As a result, you can open up a specific family, path, or story with permalinks in Kindred Britain.

You should also notice that the layout of the page is stored in the permalink. Knowledge transmission isn't just about data or even queries of the data, it's also about the particular visual formulation that led to the inspiration to share or cite something. The first three terms in the rather cumbersome URL for each Kindred Britain view are simply the layout of each pane--whether it should be fully open, half open, a third of the screen, or closed entirely. While we experimented with storing more state information than that, it proved too cumbersome to implement for the final site.

From a technical perspective, this is all done rather easily in JavaScript. Each time a query is successfully run or a story is successfully loaded or a pane layout is changed, the code updates the window.location.hash in the DOM to match the current settings. The only tricky step is that you need to rebuild your Twitter button each time and then call twttr.widgets.load() to reinitialize it. Rather than go through the same steps with the Facebook and Google+ buttons, and also to contrast the different ways of sharing things, we kept them keyed to the basic Kindred Britain URL.

That's why you'll see for so many pages. Because that view of the network, the one you're looking at in a very particular configuration, has never been shared on Twitter. While the social sharing is important, what's more important is the idea of citing and deep-linking not just to objects in a database, but configurations of a database or views into a model. These URLs refer not to a particular row in a database or linked data ID but rather a specific query run on the data, or an even more complex state when a story is referred to. This citation form is necessary for the development of scholarship that utilizes interactive scholarly works not only for research but for publication.

Kindred Britain and Scholarship

Emma Honour Mae... — Sun, 25 Aug 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Emma Honour Mae... · August 26, 2013

Redundant as it may seem to say, Kindred Britain is a project that spans generations. Not only the generations of the database’s inhabitants, spread over the last thousand or so years as they are, but the more recent and less distinctly segregated generations of scholars. As an undergraduate research assistant, I was fortunate enough to be one of two people to work on Kindred Britain who was born after the Internet.

Kindred Britain did not, simply on premise, impress me. I’ve read articles for months -- on my personally tailored RSS feed -- about the rise of data visualization and interdisciplinary projects on university campuses. I got my email address at age eight. I can barely remember a time when “Googling something” for the answer was not an option.

It took a little discussion with my superiors for me to fully grasp -- and even now, I’m not sure that someone of my age can -- the significance of a project like Kindred Britain. The professor from whom the project sprang like a regular Athena, Nicholas Jenkins, was trained as a scholar in the ‘90s, roughly around the same time that the commercialized Internet and I made our way into the world, one of us with slightly more impact than the other. He was educated in a world where the spheres of the humanities and technology simply did not touch, nevermind overlap to create a data visualization project integrating traditional scholarly narratives.

Likewise, the digital humanities specialist Elijah Meeks, who was responsible for much of the tech behind the site, was educated in philosophy and English at a time when there was something vaguely “magical” about the humanities. As he described it to me, there was something nostalgic, traditional, loyal about studying literature and writing about literature in the static way -- how noble, to continue the ways of our intellectual ancestry. How full of ethos, to humanize scholarship as it should be, to focus on the human instead of the machine.

I’m not sure if the other research assistant’s experience has been equally disdainful of the humanities, but in the university culture I have experienced, the entire set of subjects is seen as incomplete without a technical, statistical, or somehow computational portion attached. It’s fully expected by most that you won’t have any career opportunities unless you make an effort to integrate tech into your learning. And humanities “scholarship”? Everyone knows that it’s much easier to get an A on a term paper than on an operating system that you built from scratch.

In light of my newfound awareness, I feel that it’s my responsibility to emphasize to my audience of peers how important this is. We’ve all been sent a dozen websites with colors and lights and things that move, or discarded emails from parents or well-meaning relatives who want us to read something or learn something from somewhere in the infinite recesses and infinite wisdom of the Internet.

Clearly, this is a project of tremendous work and value, but how would you classify it? Could this be someone’s dissertation? Hobby? Research? In a world where we’ve decided that anything valuable is quantifiable, we’re struggling to come up with the appropriate language and structure for something that pushes those boundaries and, as Prof. Jenkins mentioned in “Originating Kindred Britain,” “reintroduces narrative and personhood into the scientific discourse.” Embedded in this project are not only questions of identity, family, or relation, but questions of scholarship, and the place for this new material amid the so-called “crisis of the humanities.”

Rather than being a brick of a book that few would ever consult, let alone wade through, Kindred Britain is a site that I can share with friends, family, peers and colleagues. It is something I can consult specifically for research, or explore with, or connect -- genealogically, professionally, geographically -- to my own relations and connections. The transformation of humanities scholarship is at least as interesting as the latest in commercial social networking.

What is the takeaway here? I think it depends on your place in the generational spectrum. For those of us beaten down with the impression that humanities students will be unemployable, take a look at the Digital Humanities and the contributions that don’t necessitate a technical background. For those of us teaching, it might be time to get more comfortable with the integration of data and narrative. For students like myself, consider how you can apply writing, editing, art, design, or history to make them new again. It has been a blessing to discover that though I am proficient in Google search, I don’t know about all of my opportunities.

Kindred Britain: A sign of our times

Elijah Meeks — Sun, 25 Aug 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Elijah Meeks · August 26, 2013

Today marks the public release of Kindred Britain, a new interactive scholarly work that explores the role of family in British culture. Integrating geospatial, temporal, and network information visualization, this project attempts to demonstrate the genealogical interconnectedness of the British elite. In doing so it expands the notion of Britishness, and the notion of society and culture in general, such that through family ties we can see George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, Sigmund Freud, and Kevin Bacon all included among these kindred British. To achieve this took significant effort not only in writing code, but in envisioning how to present so much information of so many different kinds in a way that did not overwhelm a reader. I want to stress the concept of the reader here, rather than a "user" since to create a site like this one has to move away from the stereotype of the user with their short attention span and incapacity to grasp complexity. It doesn't pay to create works for users, and buy into the myth that no one reads anything on the Internet and that a website has to be designed for someone with a ten-second attention span. Works like Kindred Britain and ORBIS not only include much flashy and interactive content, but vast quantities of text. There is an entire sub-section of Kindred Britain, known as Notes from Kindred Britain, dedicated to explaining in long-form linear narrative how the site was built and how it was imagined. Integrated into the main site are various stories, about cultural topics and technical, that are wired into the information visualization elements (a topic I'll explore in detail at this years HTML5 Developer Conference). And each person in Kindred Britain is simultaneously displayed as a temporal signal, a geographic signal, a network signal, and an event signal, with this last aspect conveyed through text. Text is the critical component of Kindred Britain, and its integration not only into the site's design and display but its very information architecture is key to its success in relaying to readers its vision of Britain.

Taking nearly 16 months to plan, design, and build, Kindred Britain is the longest project cycle I've been involved with so far. Kindred Britain began as ORBIS was released in May of 2012, though some earlier explorations of the underlying network took place before that time. But this pales in comparison to the five years put in by Nicholas Jenkins to collect the various pieces of information that Kindred Britain draws from. The site's crisp and elegent design was due to our having the fortune to work with Scott Murray, who literally wrote the book on Interactive Data Visualization for the Web. Besides the prominence of text, the prominence of formal acknowledgment of authorship and collaboration is a key component of Kindred Britain, and reflects the changing nature of scholarly production at the university. The various long-form pieces that I wrote for Kindred Britain are not low-visibility line items on my CV, but prominent components of the project, which is necessary for success in digital humanities scholarship.

In fact, the exhaustive nature of the various pieces that I've written, not only about the cultural implication of the computational methods we've deployed but also about the general development path and nature of the digital objects created, leave little to cover in grey literature such as this. So, rather than recapitulate what is stated more thoroughly and in more detail in Kindred Britain, I'd like to focus on one point that is particularly topical given the attention given to a post by my colleague, Mike Widner, about the responsibility of digital humanities scholars to engage in social commentary about computational techniques used in espionage and otherwise to measure and predict the behavior of people:

In my two "stories" in Kindred Britain, I walk through how computational methods are used to measure importance and tragedy in Kindred Britain. In doing so, I point out that they are remarkably useful, if contingent, techniques for understanding patterns in such a dataset. That contingency, oft-alluded to by digital humanities scholars, is much more comprehensible and much more worrisome to me now, having learned how to deploy it, than it was when it was theoretical. My crude methods for measuring a limited and simple database are a pale imitation of the methods being brought to bear by the NSA or Amazon to measure and understand people. But they are of a similar kind. And in understanding them, like understanding other techniques like topic modeling, I better understand how they mis-measure and reinforce flawed assumptions and, most critically, produce random patterns of correlation that are so tempting to invest with narrative. I tried to explain how these methods were used in Kindred Britain because I thought it necessary and timely to educate not only a scholarly audience, but a public one, about the use and limitations of this kind of computational measurement of people. Just as our Tragedy Index misses tragic Jack Kipling, so does every computational method have significant blind spots. Kindred Britain has quite an audience--scholars and developers and designers and the public--interested in its many aspects--anglophilia, infoviz, data modeling--and it's my hope that along with learning a bit more about the nature of family in British culture, that this broad audience also learns a bit more about how they live as a node within their own database, a sort of Kindred Modernity, and what that means for society and culture.

Text Analysis IN the Library, FOR the Library

Jacqueline Hettel — Thu, 22 Aug 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Jacqueline Hettel · August 23, 2013

For those of you who don't know, I'm still fairly new to Stanford (as well as being new to what I lovingly refer to as "library land"). When I initially started my PhD in English, specializing in Text and Corpus Linguistics and Digital Humanities, I never really thought about how text mining (and more specifically corpus linguistics) could be useful and impactful to the university research library. It also has been extremely refreshing that SUL goes another step beyond just supporting digital humanities research to actually encouraging it to occur within the library. For example, a few months ago, Chris Bourg, the Stanford University Libraries AUL for Public Service, approached me about developing a methodology for text mining acknowledgements as an alternative metric for measuring library impact.

Needless to say, the initial experiment proved extremely fruitful. Now, we're waiting to see what the rest of our colleagues in the library community think about this methodology when we present at Digital Library Federation Forum in Austin, TX, in November. Chris recently posted on her blog why this type of research and inquiry is important to libraries, and it essentially boils down to the fact that "In [Chris'] opinion, acknowledgements provide the most direct measure of the impact of library collections and services on research." As a follow-up to her blog post, I have begun a series of blog posts at A Linguist in the Library outlining the methodology we used for this research project. The series is called "A Method for Measuring Thanks," and Part 1 is titled "A Search for Thankful Candidates." In this post, I cover the intricacies of the Google Books query syntax we used for our proof-of-concept investigation. I invite you to journey on over and check it out. Enjoy!

Women in Programming (or the Lack Thereof)

Emma Honour Mae... — Wed, 21 Aug 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Emma Honour Mae... · August 22, 2013

When I first read Dave Winer’s blog post about the lack of women in programming, I braced myself. He suggests that women are not “very patient,” and that this explains why they are not very present in CS. Unsurprisingly, this does not conform to my experiences.

One of the largest purported CS interest groups is teenage males, who -- at least in the case of personal experience -- have little to no patience. My mother, who raised five children, has incredible patience, and no interest in CS. Patience can’t be the driving factor behind the field.

Then something occurred to me -- most people reading Winer’s post are either men who are interested in CS, or women who are interested in CS. Regardless of their opinions about why women are more absent than men, they’re united by a common interest in the subject.

Most people don’t choose CS, men or women. It requires a highly specialized set of skills -- in my experience, intense focus and a desire to understand how technical things work -- that belongs to a minority of people. More of that minority is men than women, but what separates the group from the masses is their interest, not their gender. The question should not be “why are there so few women programmers?” but “why are there so few programmers in general?” when some level of programming is essentially ubiquitous for navigating today’s digital world with proficiency.

I say this as a person who belongs to the masses with limited interest in CS. Growing up, I thought that programming was just about making video games, which held little to no interest for me. While my brothers sought the next level in Pokemon or Mario, I sought the next chapter in*A Series of Unfortunate Events.*It’s not a matter of superiority of one over the other, since arguably neither the world of Pokemon nor the world of Lemony Snicket is particularly applicable to everyday life, but simply that I had a preference for a certain kind of play, and my brothers a different one. Most CS or engineering projects I encountered growing up were about building moving robots or RC cars, which weren’t exciting for me. It could be that this has something to do with gender, but to me it seems like personal taste. My brothers became interested in CS under the pretense of making games, and I became interested in English under the pretense of making books. It wasn’t that the process was attractive to us -- it was the end goal.

Naturally, if I had no interest in CS, I wouldn’t bother writing. I’ve found end goals that excite me. Web design and computational biology, for example, both require some knowledge of CS. In working on Kindred Britain, I was able to mockup some design elements, but wasn’t able to implement them myself. To some extent I viewed this as the grunt work -- the intermediate steps between having an idea and seeing it actualized. If there was someone else able to take care of that for me, there was no reason for me to figure it out when I could be designing new elements.

At least from my perspective, this is a justifiable lack of interest. In many fields now, a bit of programming is a means to an end, and it is not important to understand code in order to appreciate that end. As a result, I will learn a little CS to keep on top of what we’re doing, but I’m far more interested in generating discussion around the modern family or mapping ancient Rome than learning how to use d3. Even when I eventually become well-versed in the programming I need to know for the Digital Humanities, I will not consider myself a “woman in CS.” I will consider myself a “woman in humanities” for whom CS is a useful tool.

There are many factors that could influence why a person would or would not go into CS, but rarely considered is the idea that they have every opportunity and genuinely don’t want to. Well-meaning and useful organizations that specifically encourage women to code have made me question whether society is really repressing me without my consent, but the bottom line is that I just have other interests.

Winer thinks that “there's something about programming that makes many women not want to do it” --- it’s mostly the same something that makes a lot of people not want to do it. We’re not all algorithm creators. Someone wants to be the engineer, and someone wants to be the architect. The sooner we focus on figuring out what we want, and stop worrying about whether it’s reinforcing a stereotype or not, the better. I guess that’s what we need patience for.

Women in CS (and the Digital Humanities)

Hannah Rose Abalos — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Hannah Rose Abalos · August 21, 2013

According to Dave Winer’s blog post on his website a few days ago, women are a minority in programming because they lack certain qualities – namely patience – that allow them to succeed in the profession. He writes that because men have evolved to be more patient than women, and because of specialization, “programming as it exists today is a mostly male thing”.

Taken by itself, this statement can very easily be interpreted as one made by yet another “old white male” seeking to oppress others. But I think it’s the next sentence that’s worth focusing on, one in which Dave asks, how “can we make it so that [programming] can better-use the abilities of the other half of our species?”

I’m not well versed in the ongoing gender discussion and gender essentialism, but I don’t think that knowledge is necessary for me to disagree with Dave’s suggestion that men have the patience to program that women do not. Patience itself, frequently described as a virtue, seems to me to also be a skill, one necessary for programming (among many other things) – even if it’s a skill just as difficult to be learned as, say, recursion.

So if it’s not a matter of patience or lack thereof, what’s keeping women from going into computer science?

I can’t speak with much authority on what sexism women may encounter in the workplace, as I don’t have any such experience to talk about. But I can speak about one initiative that was created to address the real question that Dave writes about: the problem of too few women in CS. Girls Teaching Girls To Code is a day-long event that took place for the first time earlier this year. Attracting a little over a hundred high school girls (in addition to many more stuck on the waiting list), GTGTC featured a three-hour crash course in programming basics, followed by lunch, and concluded with a three-hour session in which the girls split up into specialized tracks, such as Web Design, and Programming Basics Continued. And all throughout the day, nearly 40 Stanford students – all women with some sort of interest in CS – were available to speak with and mentor these high school students.

It’s true that some of the girls with whom I talked were frustrated throughout the day. Programming takes work, thinking, and a ton of persistence – even if you’re learning the basics from a user-friendly tutorial system such as CodeHS or Codecademy. But the underlying mission of Girls Teaching Girls to Code was not to teach high school students the equivalent of one quarter of CS in a day. It was to empower high school girls, and to help them realize that Computer Science is an opportunity that is open for them to pursue. That all it really takes is the willingness to sit down and write the code – asking for help when its needed – and not to give up.

I hear that in CS courses on other college campuses, there’s a much smaller ratio of female students to male students. Attending an introductory CS lecture at Stanford, however, you’d never guess that was the case. When I took CS 106B, Programming Abstractions, in spring quarter of my sophomore year, the lecturer remarked that based on the number of rooms booked for our midterm, we were probably the largest class on campus – consisting of both male and female students.

I believe one thing is for certain: as an education in computer science becomes readily available to more and more people, there will inevitably be more capable and competent women in CS. Whatever field they are interested in applying their skills to – be that the digital humanities or computational biology – I believe that companies – and indeed, any male programmers who might hold any reservations about women colleagues – will have no choice but to acknowledge the talent that is available for hire.

And so this, I would argue, is one response to the question of why there are so few women programmers in the field. Yes, sexism and the prevailing attitudes of the work environment have to do with it, too, and those will have to change. And I believe that they will.

From what I could learn through a cursory scan of his website, Dave sounds like a friendly guy, and not at all the image of an “angry, oppressive white male who seeks to hold all others down”. I’d like to believe that he truly wants to see more women to succeed in programming.

And that’s not a bad goal we can all work together for.

On Digital Humanities and Surveillance

Mike Widner — Mon, 19 Aug 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Mike Widner · August 20, 2013

Over at my blog, I just posted a piece about the role digital humanists should play in discussions of government surveillance. Some key questions:

Is there a chilling effect already in place? Are we afraid to speak out against the expanding erosion of privacy? Or are we already so reliant on Google, Facebook, and the other digital oligarchs that we have resigned ourselves to being watched by Big Brother's ever-vigilant eyes?

I won't repost here, so go read it there, if you're interested.

Discovering Regions with ORBIS v2

Elijah Meeks — Sun, 18 Aug 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Elijah Meeks · August 19, 2013

A simple demonstration of the kind of higher-level analysis possible with the new cartograms and clustering in the v2 version of ORBIS. This is accomplished entirely within the browser (except for turning it into a gif) first by running cartograms for selected sites (in this case the 9 sites that are labeled by default) according to each priority, then clustering them and then drawing borders around the clusters. Notice the borders are drawn using convex hulls, and so you have overlap on border regions. It may be better (or perhaps provide an interesting alternative) to derive borders using Voronoi diagrams.

ORBIS v2

Elijah Meeks — Fri, 16 Aug 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Elijah Meeks · August 17, 2013

Over the coming months, I'll be spending some time integrating new features, data, and base layers to ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Transportation Network of the Roman Empire. While ORBIS was tremendously successful both in its public appeal and its use in scholarship, there has been a growing list of small and not-so-small features that could improve the model or the user experience of it. Some of these have already been implemented in a prototype version seen in the screenshot above. Rather than wait for the new version to be finished, though, ORBIS v2 will be developed publicly, with the code available on Github. This way, ORBIS will benefit from the user feedback and feature requests of the larger digital humanities and software development community. There are still a few systems administration and database steps that need to occur before this can happen, but when the code and new site are available, the link will be posted here and on @ORBIS_Stanford on Twitter.

But it would be a shame to wait to talk about some of these new features, given that they've already been implemented and allow for fundamental changes in the way you can use ORBIS. A few are purely technical. The ORBIS v2 map is entirely built in D3.js, using the stable but still-in-development geo.tile functionality to serve a MapBox terrain map with a much higher resolution than the locally hosted Natural Earth tiles used in the current version of ORBIS. The additional geospatial capabilities of D3 allow this version of ORBIS to have an SVG layer of 1600 route segments that can be colored by speed, expense, or type (colored by type, above, so that you can see where ORBIS simulates overseas, coastal, river, and road connections) as well as clickable sites allow the user to turn on or off labels or perform other site functionality.

One such piece of site functionality is the ability to remove sites from the ORBIS network and see how the removal of that site changes the route from one place to another. Here you can see the route from Carthage to London, and how it changes with the removal first of Lutetia, then Lugdunum, then Genua and finally Luna. Along with the vehicle and mode constraints of the original ORBIS route-finding, the ability to remove sites can simulate more accurately particular scenarios.

Further variation to routes can occur as a result of the new transfer cost functionality. ORBIS v2 allows the user to set a transfer cost in days to switch from one mode of transport to another, so that any switch from road to coastal, coastal to overseas, overseas to river, or any variation thereof, will cost an additional amount of time. Here the route from Alexandria to Rome takes a direct route through the Straits of Messina with no transfer cost, continues up the western coast of the Italian peninsula with a 2 day transfer cost (thereby making it inefficient to take the "overseas" route from Messina to Portus) and foregoes any overseas travel at all with a grossly inflated 10 day transfer cost. The current development version of ORBIS v2 has a single generic transfer cost, but the final version will have a specific cost for each transfer to a certain type of travel, so that a user could set a 3 day cost to switch to overseas, a 5 day cost to switch to river, and a 1 day cost to switch to coastal.

All these new modifications to the routing function factor into the v2 cartogram, which is now integrated into the route-finding map (making it scrollable and zoomable) and capable of being run from any center with any settings. Here Sarmizegethusa is the center of the cartogram, with 5 day transfer costs and coastal routes disabled in February.

As with the original cartogram, the sites can be seen on the map colored by the cartogram settings. One exciting new feature that becomes available with the capacity to run these dynamic distance cartograms from any site in the ORBIS model is the use of clustering to show which sites are closest to each of these user-defined centers. This clustering can show not only regions within the Roman world around key sites, but also regions around a single site as defined by different transport modes or media.

The cartogram centers, shown in cyan, are surrounded by the sites closest to them, splitting the Roman world into distinct and, critically, user-defined areas. There are other features slated for v2 of ORBIS, as well as the integration of more detailed routes and route information, but hopefully those will be visible in the public development site and not in simple static screenshots like these.

DH Reading Group: "Macroanalysis"

Glen Worthey — Tue, 13 Aug 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Glen Worthey · August 14, 2013

Date/Time: Tuesday, 3 September 2013 - 12:00pm to 1:30pmLocation: Green Library - SSRC

Our occasional DH-themed reading group will discuss former Stanford DHer Matt Jockers's new book "Macroanalysis" (University of Illinois Press, 2013). Open to all.

Join the DH Reading Group mailing list at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/dhreading.

Habemus websitum!

Glen Worthey — Tue, 13 Aug 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Glen Worthey · August 14, 2013

We Stanford Digital Humanists (a.k.a. DHers), scattered as we are across campus, have long talked about uniting under the banner of a collective website. Now we have: here it is, and here we are.

We'll highlight some of the projects we're involved in, whether completed or in progress; we'll introduce ourselves to, our interests, our activities, and our evolving organizational structure. We use this site to announce workshops (like our upcoming series for the Stanford community) and other DH activities, whether at Stanford, in the San Francisco Bay Area, or in the larger DH community.

Welcome!

About DH at Stanford

Jacqueline Hettel — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Jacqueline Hettel · July 3, 2013

The Digital Humanities are a collection of practices and approaches combining computational methods with humanistic inquiry.

Stanford has been involved in the Digital Humanities (under that and other names) since at least the late 1980s. Digital humanities activities are widely distributed throughout campus, including the following organizations:

Stanford Libraries, which is home to:

The Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research (CIDR), which enables digital research and teaching to encourage and inspire innovative scholarship throughout the University. In addition to its team of research developers, CIDR is home to the Academic Technology Specialists who support digital humanities research in History and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages (DLCL).
Digital Library Systems and Services (DLSS), the information technology production arm of the Stanford Libraries that it serves as the digitization, digital preservation and access systems provider for Stanford Libraries, and is the research and development unit for new technologies, standards and methodologies related to library systems.
Numerous other departments and individuals who are engaged with digital humanities.

The Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA), which is home to:

The Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities, which allows graduate students to acquire and deepen their technical and conceptual skills, as well as to strengthen their position in the competitive job market within and beyond the academy.
A Graduate Digital Humanities Fellows program, where graduate research fellows spend the year designing and producing a piece of digitally-enhanced scholarship (an article, dissertation chapter, digital publication, etc.)
The Literary Lab, a research collective that applies computational criticism, in all its forms, to the study of literature.
Humanities + Design, which aims to produce, through the lens of humanistic inquiry, new modes of thinking in design and computer science to serve data-driven research in the humanities.
Spatial History Lab, a place for a collaborative community of scholars to engage in creative spatial, textual and visual analysis to further research in the humanities.
Text Technologies, an interdisciplinary enterprise combining book historical approaches with digital methods and tools to investigate the long history of human communicaton from the earliest times to the present day.
Poetic Media, which designs and builds creative platforms that promote new ways of conducting research, teaching, and learning in the 21st century.
Chinese Railroad Workers in North America, which seeks to give a voice to the Chinese migrants whose labor on the Transcontinental Railroad helped to shape the physical and social landscape of the American West.

The English Department, which administers the interdisciplinary Digital Humanities Minor program for undergraduates
The Music Department, which is home to:

The Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities, which is engaged in the development of large databases of musical and textual materials for applications in research, teaching, and performance.
Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA - "karma"), a multi-disciplinary facility where composers and researchers work together using computer-based technology both as an artistic medium and as a research tool.
Various other department-based groups