Trevor Owens

How You Can Help Launch a Digital Preservation Q&A Site

2012-04-30T18:34:51Z

TL;DR- Please consider clicking the commit button for the proposed site. The biggest hurdle is getting people who already participate in stack exchange sites to commit, here are three ways you can help with that.

1) If you have over 200+ rep on any stack exchange site we really need you, please commit.

2) If you don’t, consider answering, asking and commenting on any one of the 80 some stack exchange sites that relate to your other interests. It won’t take long to get 200 rep and you will learn about the system. After answering and asking two questions on the Academia site I had more than two-hundred rep.

3) Please send a link to the proposal out to others in your organization or email lists that you are on. In particular, please share this with groups of folks at your org likely to have participated in stack exchange sites, like software developers, system administrators, and folks in the sciences who you think might be interested.

Now for some Background on this Idea

A few of my colleagues at a range of different national and international organizations working on digital preservation have put together a proposal for a new Stack Exchange question and answer site focused on Digital Preservation. You can see the initial definition for the site below.

At different conferences, and different projects I’m associated with I keep hearing a lot of the same kinds of questions. I feel like there should be a place where I can point folks to a solid Q&A knowledge base. While there is an abundance of good research on digital preservation, great standards documents, and a range of different levels of solid technical guidance there isn’t really a place to go where you can ask and find answers to the kinds of straightforward questions seen below.

Why Stack Exchange?

I’ve talked with folks about starting our own site, like what DH Answers did. However, in further discussion we thought it would be better to first try and see if we could get something started through the Stack Exchange process. Here are some reasons to do this thorough Stack Exchange.

Built in network effects: Many of the existing stack exchange sites, while very distinct from digital preservation, have people who overlap between them. Being on Stack Exchange means being in an integrated network of sites that others already participate in.
Open Data Dumps and CC-BY Knowledge: Importantly, all the content of Stack Exchange sites is open data in several levels. We can take it, move it, share it and build from it.
Not having to support technical infrastructure is nice: Stack Exchange has a dedicated staff working on refining and enhancing their platform, so the folks who want to participate can focus on the Q&A.
Outreach and Big Tent Digital Preservation: Promoting the proposal is a chance to reach out to members of other professional and technical communities to raise awareness of digital preservation. Further, if the site is launched, being part of Stack Exchange’s network would help to generate more traffic to discussions and could help lead to a broader base of digital preservation professionals.
The process of proposing the site helps conceptualize it: I already think of this as a win. Just the existing prioritized list of questions that folks have is a great resource in and of its self. Even if the proposal fails and we end up needing to think about standing up our own Q&A site the process we went through on Stack Exchange will be helpful.
Getting some seasoned Stack Exchange folks involved will help digital preservationists cut their teeth on best practices for participating in Q&A sites: There is an art to composing good questions and a related art to composing good answers. Getting some seasoned Stack Exchange folks in the mix would be helpful in getting us to do this in the best and most useful way.

Background on Stack Exchange

For anyone unfamiliar with Stack Exchange their about page is a nice quick read. I’ve copied some of their info below to give a bit of context for how they describe themselves.

Stack Exchange is a growing network of individual communities, each dedicated to serving experts in a specific field. We build libraries of high-quality questions and answers, focused on each community’s area of expertise. From programmers sharing answers on parsing HTML, to researchers seeking solutions to combinatorial problems, to photographers exposing lighting techniques, our communities are built by and for those best able to define them: the experts and enthusiasts.

Other ideas? Places to Reach Out To?

If you have some other ideas for how to make this happen I want to hear them! Are there other groups to contact? I bet there are, share your ideas in the comments and I will follow up with them, or just take the lead and go contact some folks yourself.

The New Aesthetic and the Artifactual Digital Object

2012-04-13T15:00:37Z

I’ve had a lot of fun following The New Aesthetic and I think there are some neat parts of this that relate to digital preservation. If you haven’t seen much on this neologism, the post colon part of the recent SXSW talk is a bit more explanatory, The New Aesthetic: Seeing Like Digital Devices. For further reading I would suggest this, this, or this. In my work on digital preservation I tend to spend a good bit of time thinking about digital objects, and there are a few points of connection between that I wanted to spend a moment teasing out.

The part of the New Aesthetic that I am excited about is the recognition that the digital is fundamentally artifactual, not simply informational and that the formal and forensic materiality of digital and material objects leaves traces that offer potential for aesthetic, interpretive, and potential evidentiary provocation. The characteristics of mediums, of processes, of interfaces are all offering this potential.

Digitization is an Act of Artifact Creation Not of Information Translation

People (quite justifiably) love to get in a huff about poor scans in google books. We are losing considerable informational qualities of the books in the poor scans, or poorly processed scans. With that said, the information translation part of the project is only part of what is happening. The Art of Google Books does a great job at getting us to think about the artifactual qualities of the newly created digital objects and the process through which they were created. I find it particularly amusing that we use the term “artifact” in computing, in the sense of compression artifact to generally signal a failure to represent the thing. The New Aesthetic can be a way to think about those artifacts not as defects, but as an aesthetic in and of themselves.

Consider, “Image mistaken as the finger of an employee, with attempted autocorrect.” The piexlated section of the image that is removed tells us a bit about how the algorithm sees the image. We can try and fill in the gaps with our mind and think about what it was about this particular illustration that made Google think that he was a finger that should be removed.

Similarly, a “Black-and-white frontispiece photographed in color and through tissue” creates fundementaly different ways of seeing the black and white image. The accidentally colored in image looks great, and in the context of a black and white book is completely unexpected. The ghostly image through the tissue paper almost looks like a kind of static problem in the scanning process, but in context we know that we are actually seeing an attempt to scan through tissue paper. What is one supposed to do to digitize tissue paper? In both cases, we are reminded that digitization is not simply copying information, that through digitization we can see the pages of the book through different physical and computational processes.

Reading the Products of Reading Machines

Similarly, as our devices further bring our ability to read the world, to layer information on top of the world, the products of that layering can also be captured and reflected on.

So when I used Word Lens to attempt to translate things it shouldn’t translate I ended up learning about both how WordLens sees and found serendipitous reinterpretations of texts and environments. So Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism from translated from Spanish (a language it is not in) became Reading Machetes. Personally, I think reading machetes is a perfectly serviceable alternate title for the book. The image capture of that moment sort of captures part of the meaning of the book. We are now reading a text with a machine that is about reading and deforming texts with machines.

What is particularly fun about Word Lens is that it can even read non-text. For example, here is Word Lens attempting to read the mirrors above the mantel in my living room. What exactly is it that describes the grape? I’m not sure, but what I do know is that when you flip Word Lens on, turn it to the “wrong” setting and walk around the world you start to see how it sees. You start to see that you can get rows of square things to be read as text, and you start to be able to guess how it might read.

The Authenticity of Performing Music on the Gameboy

There is also something here about the recursive loop wherein particular computing devices, like game boys, become imbued with an authenticity. A really strange kind of authenticity. For example, when people compose chiptunes on Little Sound DJ on gameboys they are using the actual physical device to create the sound, but at the same time using a program that is not something from the era of the gameboy. While you can emulate the device, we end up wanting to see the video of the performance on the gameboy to really know that it was actually played on the gameboy.

I’m just excited to see these kinds of things being herded together, and optimistic that it is part of a broader move toward thinking about and playing with the thingy-ness of things.

Crowdsourcing Cultural Heritage: The Objectives Are Upside Down

2012-03-10T16:27:26Z

Still not the droid... By Stéfan: Our crowdsourcing conversation is upside down, much like how Calculon is holding these stormtroopers upside down.

Some fantastic work is going on in crowdsourcing the transcription of cultural heritage collections. After some recent thinking and conversation on these projects I want to more strongly and forcefully push a point about this work. This is the same line of thinking I started nearly a year ago in Meaningification and Crowdscafolding: Forget Badges. I’ve come to believe that conversations about the objective of this work, as broadly discussed, are exactly upside down. Transcripts and other data are great, but when done right, crowdsourcing projects are the best way of accomplishing the entire point of putting collections online. I think a lot of the people who work on these projects think this way but we are still in a situation where we need to justify this work by the product instead of justifying it by the process.

Getting transcriptions, or for that matter getting any kind of data or work is a by-product of something that is actually far more amazing than being able to better search through a collection. The process of crowdsourcing projects fulfills the mission of digital collections better than the resulting searches. That is, when someone sits down to transcribe a document they are actually better fulfilling the mission of the cultural heritage organization than anyone who simply stops by to flip through the pages.

Why are we putting cultural heritage collections online again?

There are a range of reasons that we put digital collections online. With that said the single most important reason to do so is to make history accessible and invite students, researchers, teachers, and anyone in the public to explore and connect with our past. Historians, Librarians, Archivists, and Curators who share digital collections and exhibits can measure their success toward this goal in how people use, reuse, explore and understand these objects.

In general, crowdsourcing transcription is first and foremost described as a means by which we can get better data to help better enable the kinds of use and reuse that we want people to make of our collections. In this respect, the general idea of crowdsourcing is described as an instrument for getting data that we can use to make collections more accessible. Don’t get me wrong, crowdsourcing does this. With that said it does so much more than this. In the process of developing these crowdsourcing projects we have stumbled into something far more exciting than speeding up or lowering the costs of document transcription. Far better than being an instrument for generating data that we can use to get our collections more used it is actually the single greatest advancement in getting people using and interacting with our collections. A few examples will help illustrate this.

Increased Use, Deeper Use, Crowdsourcing Civil War Diaries

Last year, the University of Iowa libraries crowdsourced the transcription of a set of civil war diaries. I had the distinct privilege of interviewing Nicole Saylor, the head of Digital Library Services, about the project. From any perspective the project was very successful. They got great transcriptions and they ended up attracting more doners to support their work.

The project also succeeded in dramatically increasing site traffic. As Nicole explained, “On June 9, 2011, we went from about 1000 daily hits to our digital library on a really good day to more than 70,000.” As great as all this is, as far as I’m concerned, the most valuable thing that happened is that when people come to transcribe the diaries they engage with the objects more deeply than they would have if transcription was not an option. Consider this quote from Nicole explaining how one particular transcriptionist interacted with the collection. It is worth quoting her at length;

The transcriptionists actually follow the story told in these manuscripts and often become invested in the story or motivated by the thought of furthering research by making these written texts accessible. One of our most engaged transcribers, a man from the north of England, has written us to say that the people in the diaries have become almost an extended part of his family. He gets caught up in their lives, and even mourns their deaths. He has enlisted one of his friends, who has a PhD in military history, to look for errors in the transcriptions already submitted. “You can do it when you want as long as you want, and you are, literally, making history,” he once wrote us. That kind of patron passion for a manuscript collection is a dream. Of the user feedback we’ve received, a few of my other favorites are: “This is one of the COOLEST and most historically interesting things I have seen since I first saw a dinosaur fossil and realized how big they actually were.” “I got hooked and did about 20. It’s getting easier the longer I transcribe for him because I’m understanding his handwriting and syntax better.” “Best thing ever. Will be my new guilty pleasure. That I don’t even need to feel that guilty about.

The transcriptions are great, they make the content more accessible, but as Nicole explains, “The connections we’ve made with users and their sustained interest in the collection is the most exciting and gratifying part.” This is exactly as it should be! The invitation of crowdsourcing and the event of the project are the most valuable and precious user experiences that a cultural heritage institution can offer its users. It is essential that the project offer meaningful work. These projects invite the public to leave a mark and help enhance the collections. With that said, if the goal is to get people to engage with collections and engage deeply with the past then the transcripts are actually a fantastic byproduct that is created by offering meaningful activities for the public to engage in.

Rationing out Transcription

Part of what prompted this post is a story that Ben Brumfield gave on crowdsourcing transcription at the recent Institute for Museum and Library Services Web Wise conference. It was a great talk, and when they get around to posting it online you should all go watch it. There was one particular moment in the talk that I thought was essential for this discussion.

At one point in a transcription project he noticed that one of his most valuable power users was slowing down on their transcriptions. The user had started to cut back significantly in the time they spent transcribing this particular set of manuscripts. Ben reached out to the user and asked about it. Interestingly, the user responded to explain that they had noticed that there weren’t as many scanned documents showing up that required transcription. For this user, the 2-3 hours they spent each day working on transcriptions was such an important experience, such an important part of their day, that they had decided to cut back and deny themselves some of that experience. The user needed to ration out that experience. It was such an important part of their day that they needed to make sure that it lasted.

At its best, crowdsourcing is not about getting someone to do work for you, it is about offering your users the opportunity to participate in public memory.

Crowdsourcing is better at Digital Collections than Displaying Digital Collections

What crowdsourcing does, that most digital collection platforms fail to do, is offers an opportunity for someone to do something more than consume information. When done well, crowdsourcing offers us an opportunity to provide meaningful ways for individuals to engage with and contribute to public memory. Far from being an instrument which enables us to ultimately better deliver content to end users, crowdsourcing is the best way to actually engage our users in the fundamental reason that these digital collections exist in the first place.

Meaningful Activity is the Apex of User Experience for Cultural Heritage Collections

When we adopt this mindset, the money spent on crowdsourcing projects in terms of designing and building systems, in terms of staff time to manage, etc. is not something that can be compared to the costs of having someone transcribe documents on mechanical turk. Think about it this way, the transcription of those documents is actually a precious resource, a precious bit of activity that would mean the world to someone. It isn’t that any task or obstacle for users to take on will do, for example, if you asked users to transcribe documents that could easily be OCRed the whole thing loses its meaning and purpose. It isn’t about sisyphean tasks, it is about providing meaningful ways for the public to enhance collections while more deeply engaging and exploring them.

Just as Ben’s user rationed out the transcription of those documents we might actually think about crowdsourcing experiences as one of the most precious things we can offer our users. Instead of simply offering them the ability to browse or poke around in digital collections we can invite them to participate. We are in a position to let our users engage in a personal way that is only for them at that moment. Instead of browsing through a collection they literally become a part of our historical record.

The Important Difference between Exploitation-ware and Software for the Soul

Slide from Ruling the World

As a bit of a coda, what is tricky here is that there is (strangely) an important and but somewhat subtle line between exploiting people and giving people the most valuable kinds of experience that we can offer for digital collections. The trick is that gamification is (for the most part) bullshit. You can trick people into doing things with gimmicks, but when you do so you frequently betray their trust and can ruin the innately enjoyable nature of being a part of something that matters to you, in our case, the way that users could deeply interact with and explore the past via your online collections. What sucks about what has happened in the idea of gamification is that it is about the least interesting parts of games. It’s about leaderboards and badges. As Sebastian Deterding has explained, many times and many ways, the best part of games, the things that we should actually try to emulate in a gamification that attempts to be more than pointsification or exploitationware are the part of games that let us participate in something bigger. It is the part of games that invites us to playfully take on big challenges. Be wary of anyone who tries to suggest we should trick people or entice them into this work. We can offer users an opportunity to deeply explore, connect with and contribute to public memory and we can’t let anything get in the way of that.

Explore and Share Cultural Heritage Collections with Viewshare.org: Notes for WebWise Talk

2012-02-29T14:48:09Z

This is just a quick post to share the slides and links from the talk I am giving at WebWise today.

Explore and Share Cultural Heritage Collections with Viewshare.org

View more PowerPoint from tjowens

The talk starts by explaining the idea behind the tool. Specifically, how making it easy to make interfaces to cultural heritage collections can help librarians, archivists, curators, and historians both better understand relationships between objects in a cultural heritage collection and how the tool can help them communicate those ideas to audiences. After explaining the kinds of interfaces you can make, I walk through a detailed example of what one of these views can do by looking at a prototype interface created by an Archivist at the National Gallery of Art to the Samuel H. Kress Collection History Database.

I wanted to make sure that everyone had links to all the views I mention. So here are all the links.

NDIIPP Partners Collections Interface:(On Viewshare) (Embeded on NDIIPP’s site): This is an interface to a collection of collections. It acts as a kind of directory for digital collections and it was created from a spreadsheet.

Fulton Street Trade Card View: (On Viewshare)
The Fulton Street Trade Card collection features 245 late 19th and early 20th century illustrated trade cards from merchant’s along the Fulton Street retail thoroughfare in Brooklyn, NY. Using a Viewshare pie chart view, the user is able to run queries and faceted search on the cards’ metadata in ways a simple catalog or scroll would not allow. Using the facets you can limit the chart to a certain element, such as business type, and then get numbers and percentages about the subjects, format, or other elements of the cards’ content.

History of Fairfax County in Postcards: (On Viewshare): A very simple view from a simple spreadsheet. If you like, you can find the spreadsheet this is based in the Viewshare documentation and work from it to get a sense of how the tool works.

Cason Monk-Metclaf Funeral Directors View: (On Viewshare): (My View on Viewshare): (Embeded on East Texas Digital Archives & Collections Site) This is one of the most interesting datasets uploaded to Viewshare. It is a set of data transcribed from historic funeral records.

Samuel H. Kress Collection History Database Prototype View: National Gallery of Art (On Viewshare) This view allows users to explore the relationships between purchase information for a work of art and other aspects of the object, including its current location. This data comes from the Samuel H. Kress Collection History and Conservation Database. The relational database documents the art collection’s acquisition, dispersal, and conservation over time and was created by the National Gallery of Art’s Gallery Archives with funding from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. The data shared here is not complete. Viewshare data and views are intended only for preliminary demonstration of the data and should not be cited in research.

The Value of Design Narratives: The Case of Environmental Detectives

2012-02-17T14:30:09Z

In Please Write it Down: Design and Research in the Digital Humanities I suggested that there are some valuable ways of thinking about the connections between building/designing and creating knowledge and scholarship. In particular, I suggested that those interested in learning through building in the digital humanities might find some value in work in educational research over the last decade which has tried to define what exactly what a design based research methodology might look like.

This is the first post, in what I imagine might be an ongoing line of thought here, to try to put ideas from design based research in conversation with the digital humanities. As a point of entry, I am going to walk through one emerging genre of writing in design based research, the design narrative. Before getting there, however, I would briefly pause to note that the journal this piece appeared in, Educational Technology Research and Development, is itself an interesting note to the digital humanities. I for one, would love to see a journal in the digital humanities similarly situated as a place for sharing and disseminating R&D knowledge.

The Case of Environmental Detectives

In Environmental Detectives: The Development of an Augmented Reality Platform for Environmental Simulations Eric Klopfer and Kurt Squire offer a summative and reflective report on their work developing the augmented reality game Environmental Detectives. The paper makes some valuable suggestions for how we might better design augmented reality games, but I think its primary strength is as an example of a particularly novel and useful genre of design based research report.

Brenda Bannan-Ritland’s article, The role of design in research: The integrative learning design framework offers a robust framework for thinking through how the design process and the research process can fit together. See her diagram below (don’t get lost in the details). The intellectual work that diagram and her approach offers os to illustrate what happens if you mush together the steps in an array of design processes and research approaches. The diagram illustrates how the features of product development, research design, and user centered design can leaf together.

If you look a the top part of the diagram carefully you will notice that practically every step in this process has an arrow that points over to the publish results box. This is a key concept here, the idea behind design based research is not that the design process is itself a research method, but that throughout the design process there are a series of publishable results and lessons learned that emerge which warrant being refined, shared and communicated. Squire and Klopfer’s article is a great example of the kind of piece one would want to write as a summative result of an extended design research process.

Design Narrative as a Genre of Design Based Research Article

Design based research can generate publishable results in any particular research tradition. You can find interviews, ethnographic approaches, micro ethnographic approaches, case studies, randomized clinical trials, and methods from usability studies like eye tracking used at different points in the design and development process. In short, there are any number of ways to use existing research methods approaches to reflect on and report out results of research in the process of informing design. Part of what is particularly interesting about Klopfer and Squire’s paper is that it represents a somewhat novel mode of research writing, the design narrative.

Drawing from Hoadley’s 2002 piece, Creating context: Design-based research in creating and understanding CSCL, Klopfer and Squire offer a reflective narrative account of their work designing, developing and researching the Environmental Detectives game. Unlike other papers they published, which might report parts of this research in terms of a case study, or the pre-post test scores or the results of a particular evaluative test of the game’s outcomes, this summitive piece serves to reflect on the design process and offer an account of the context and lessons learned in the course of the design process. It is worth reporting on actual structure of the piece.

Review of literature that informed the design: After explaining background on the idea of design narrative Klopfer and Squire offer an account of both the extent literature on augmented reality games and a review of the existing games projects that they looked to which informed their design. This serves to provide the conceptual context that they began from, it sets the reader up to understand exactly where the project started from while also providing information on what theory and knowledge at the time of the projects start looked like.

Retrospective and Reflective Design Narrative: The bulk of the paper then reports out on each phase of their design process. In their particular case they describe six phases of their research, brainstorming, designing the first instantiation, developing a first generation prototype, classroom field trials, classroom implementations, expanding to new contexts, and a sixth phase in which they added customized dynamic events to the game. It is not necessary to go into the details of each section for this review. What matters is to stress that each section begins by explaining how they went about their work in the given phase and reports a bit on what they learned in that phase. What is essential in this approach is that each section explains what worked and didn’t work in any given phase and how exactly Klopfer decided to remedy their approach and design to respond to problems.

As is generally the case with qualitative research, the moments when things don’t go according to plan and exactly how we make sense and work through those moments are generally the most valuable parts of the process. The value in this kind of retrospective account is two-fold. It provides a context for understanding why the game they made does what it does, but more importantly, the design narrative’s primary value is as a guide to other designers on what parts of the design process were particularly valuable. This kind of narrative helps us to refine our ideas not only about this particular design situation, but more broadly about how we can refine our own design practices.

Conclusions and Implications from Reflection: After reporting the design narrative the paper presents a set of technological and pedagogical implications. In much the way that the discussion section and conclusion sections of research reports function, this section attempts to suss out and distill the lessons learned from the work. In their case, they present a range of specific implications for the design of augmented reality games that emerged from their design approach.

The Value of Design Narratives

If you read through their references, you can see that they have published about this work on a few previous occasions. It is not that they are double dipping on publications, instead those other publications report results from subsets of this project, some of the earlier findings, or any of the points in the design process that resulted in interesting findings. This paper is really a summitive report, retracing the design narrative of the entire project.
I see the value of this particular design narrative approach as having two primary values, two values that I think are particularly useful to the still emerging world of the digital humanities. Composing these narratives serves an internal value to designers as part of reflective practice. Sharing these narratives makes the kinds essential tacit knowledge that comes about as part of doing design accessible to others.

Reflective Practice is Best Practice: If you can hold yourself to some sound practices for documenting the stages in your design process (the ideas that you had, how you went about implementing and revising them, and the results), you are in a good position to use that documentation to reflect on your practice. In this sense, the design narrative, the retrospective account of what you did, why you did it, what you learned is an essential piece of doing reflective design practice. When you go back and think through your own process you are not simply reporting on what you learned you are actually making sense out of your trajectory and coming to understand what it is that you actually learned. Like much of qualitative and hermeneutic research, the process of writing is not a process of transmission of knowledge but of the discovery of knowledge. Writing a design narrative is the process by which we come to know and learn from our work.

Making Tacit Practical Design Knowledge Explicit and Available: It is essential that the knowledge developed in the design process is documented and shared. While the individual studies that come out of a design research process provide evidence of the value, or of particular lessons learned in part of a design project, they leave a considerable amount of the bigger picture knowledge off the table. Quite frankly, much of the most essential parts of design are not about explaining that something works, if someone wants to get into design they need access to the deeply pragmatic, heuristic driven, knowledge that develops on over time in the process of design. The design narrative is an essential medium for capturing and disseminating this kind of tacit knowledge.

In short, I would suggest that this particular piece of scholarship serves as a great example of the value of reporting design narratives and an exemplar for others to use as a model for composing their own design narratives.

Reading the Sporum: What Players do with Spore

2012-02-11T15:35:23Z

It appears the stars have aligned and several papers I have had in the works for a while are hitting the streets at the same time. I’m excited to announce that an article I wrote for Cultural Studies of Science Education is now up in “Online First.” I thought I would share the abstract, and one section from the paper where I talk through some of the ways that people role play at natural history in the forums.

Owens, T. J. (2012). Teaching intelligent design or sparking interest in science?
What players do with and take away from Will Wright’s Spore. Cultural Studies of Science Education DOI: 10.1007/s11422-012-9383-5

Abstract: Teaching intelligent design or sparking interest in science?

The 2008 commercial video game Spore allowed more than a million players to design their own life forms. Starting from single-celled organisms players played through a caricature of natural history. Press coverage of the game’s release offer two frames for thinking about the implications of the game. Some scientists and educators saw the game as a troubling teacher of intelligent design, while others suggested it might excite public interest in science. This paper explores the extent to which these two ways of thinking about the game are consistent with what players have done with the game in its online community. This analysis suggests that, at least for the players participating in this community, the game has not seduced them into believing in intelligent design. Instead the activities of these players suggest that the game has played a catalytic role in engaging the public with science. These findings indicate that designers of educational games may wish to consider more deeply tensions between prioritizing accuracy of content in educational games over player engagement.

The Evolution of the Javelin Hawk

I had a ton of fun with this paper. The Sporum, the Spore web forums, is a crazy place and a good time. I think it also turns out to be a great place to test ideas about what people who play sand box games like Spore end up doing as a result of their experiences playing the game. In any event, writing about the ”Javelin Hawk” will likely be my only chance to discuss something that has a “prehensile throat” which it uses to “spear live prey and drink its innards using gastric juices vomited up through the throat”. Enjoy!

Stylistically written to evoke what might be described as, ‘‘textbook language’’ a player describes how the ‘‘Javelin Hawk evolved from the Archeopteryx, an early bird.’’ The player explains, Archeopteryx developed a ‘‘strange mutation in which part of the esophagus was extended into the mouth, resembling a hose.’’ It is important to note that the game itself does not employ the idea of mutation. In Spore, players spend ‘‘DNA points’’ to add features to their creatures. This player brought in the idea of mutation to serve as a layer of explanation for how their creature came about. The player goes on to explain that this mutation ‘‘was usually fatal, until the opening evolved to be prehensile.’’ This is, yet again, a significant addition to the way the game works. Not only is the player using the idea of mutation, she is also presenting mutation as something that, for most of the creatures who exhibited the mutation, is fatal. Only coupled with an additional mutation, the player explains, did these creatures’ esophagi became prehensile resulting in a viable new species. The player explains and names this creature as an intermediate form; ‘‘This creature with a prehensile throat was known as the Perlingua.’’ From there, the player reports, ‘‘Eventually, with the extinction of the succulent plants it fed on in the area, it evolved a larger longue [sic] that was very sharp to spear live prey and drink it’s [sic] innards using gastric juices vomited up through the throat.’’ In this explanation, the player identifies that the loss of the creatures’ food source, the plants, led to it ‘‘evolving’’ a larger tongue with which it could spear live prey. The description here sounds a bit Lamarkian: the extinction of the plants that the creatures ate could have led to their extinction but could not prompt them to ‘‘evolve.’’ Instead, a loss of a creatures’ food source could act as a factor in natural selection.

For those without access to the official copy you can see my personal unofficial archival HTML copy here on my website.

Deforming reality with Word Lens

2012-02-03T16:27:29Z

If you haven’t checked it out already Wordlens is an amazingly cool iPhone app that will automatically translate text on the fly, as you see it.

I’ve had it on my phone for about a month now, but I find that the things it messes up are far more interesting than the things it gets right. Messes up is really the wrong term here. The best parts of wordlens happen when you point it at things you arn’t supposed to point it at or that arn’t in the language you are supposed to be translating.

When you hold it up and pan around your environment it is like the software is uncovering the hidden meanings in your environment. For example, I pointed it at some of the congressional buildings on my walk home and was told that “NEICAH” was apparently ”IN”.
It is a jarring experience to walk around and see these words keep poping up, as if they emerge out of the environment. After using it for a bit you get a handle for what kinds of things you can trick it into thinking are text.

You want to have some clear horizontal lines, but beyond that you want a visual space with some clear visual breaks in it. For example, a flower bed worked great. I couldn’t help thinking that it would be really neat if they would create some explicit vocabulary packs that were focused on this off purpose use. If instead of simply translating text the Wordlens developers gave us a few more fun ways to try and deform and uncover hidden meaning and jokes in reality.

Eventually, I went out and bought the Spanish to English pack. I wanted to see what kind of things it would see when it was working off a English vocabulary. That is when I realized that the Wordlens developers had already given us everything we need. Just flip it on to try and turn Spanish into English and refuse to show it any Spanish and you have your self something between a decoder ring and a reading machine that you can turn to deform any text or potential text for fun and profit. Ok, no profit, but lots of fun. Possibly insight. You can see some of the results of that in the gallery. I most enjoyed what happened when I turned it on some of my books. The following examples are Wordlens attempting to translate books with English language titles from Spanish into English.

Wordlens can be Snarky and Potentially Insightful

I thought some of these were rather funny. When exposed to the Spanish to English filter Debates in the Digital Humanities became “DEBATES IN THE OR DIGITAL ROYALTY.” Something that is particularly humorous given discussion of the digital humanities cool kids table. It felt a little bit like Mark’s “Hacking the Accident” moment. The machine is mangling the text and that deformed text provokes thought and consideration.

Observing the User Experience became Observing Was User experience. Which is in fact totally true. Observers are themselves users observing other users.

Wordlens seems to disagree with Latour’s Actor Network Theory, which it calls “THE Actor-N ERRORS THEORY.” Or I suppose this might actually be a totally different book, one written by Bruno Brassr called “Reassembling Read Social” in which we are introduced to the brand new Actor-NERRORS Theory.

I have saved the best for last. In what seemed particularly topical, Steve Ramsey’s Reading Machines becomes Reading Machetes. Even better, when we flip to the back of the book we learn that it is part of the Mythical Theory Reiterate Studies series. Based off his “CREEP” essay “Toward an Algorithmic Criticism.” From there I think I lose it a bit. Something about his “Thai Wrath.” With that said, I love that literary computing becomes Liberary computing which I assume is a mixture of liberation and library. Importantly, the back of Reading Machetes mentions the GNU operating system, liberary computing at its best. It is also apparently ”Trying” to “Shame” other scholars for their “LETHARGY” Criticism. Ha!

Here is a gallery of a few more images:

Debating the Digital Humanities Gets Real

2012-01-29T06:46:32Z

My author copies of Debating the Digital Humanities came in today. It’s humbling to have some of my words included in such a hefty tome. I’ve been reading and enjoying it, great stuff. Beyond being a useful volume, it’s also neat to see it incorporate a selection of blog posts. The format of the book is itself an argument for how publish-then-filter can work for humanities scholarship.

It is fun and weird to see things I hadn’t intended for print in print. They have a different kind of materiality to them now. As my words ended up in two of the publish-then-filter parts of the book, I thought I might be slightly interesting to take a moment to reflect on how what I wrote ended up making its way in there.

Blogging about Course Blogging Goes to Print

I teach a digital history course at American University, this is my second time around at the course. After teaching my first incarnation of the course I wrote a series of reflective blog posts about the experience. The goal of those posts was to distill and refine my thinking about the role that public blogging can play as an instructional tool. It is particularly pertinent to the digital history course as participating in online public dialog is a core goal of the course. I was both excited and flattered when Matt asked if I would be game for including one of my posts on the course for the book. See below.

It is fun and neat to have a post end up in a book, but it is also a bit disorienting. On my blog it was part of a threaded run of posts about my teaching and writing. I like to think that everything I write here always remains a draft. Everything I write here is something I might return to and revise. Undoubtedly there will be typos in this post that someone will point out that I will fix. But now, reading the post on paper in this volume, it feels completely different. Instead of being my informal thinking out loud on my teaching it has become something much more enduring. Just look at those type faces! Such dignified serifs. It’s no longer some guys words on the internet. It’s a stake in the ground about the place of technology in teaching and learning in an emerging field. I love it.

Seeing the post in print helps further validate the point of the post and blogging in the course. It is one thing to stand up in front of a class of students and say, “hey, this blogging thing is important. It changes how power and publishing works. So take it serious, write good stuff and write it in public so you can claim credit.” It’s something completely different to be able to say, “Oh, and when you do blog, sometimes you say something interesting enough that it warrant’s being included in a really cool book.” When I tell my students about this next Wednesday I will have gone from course, to reflection, to book, to this blog post and back to course in seven months. I for one think that is rather neat.

Day of Digital Humanities Definitions

I have one other small contribution in the book. At the end of the first section are a selection of definitions of the digital humanities that some of us provided for the Day of Digital Humanities. See mine below, again in print, in the book.

What’s funny about this is that it’s a flippant comment, a personal aside. Here is some context. When you sign up to do the Day of Digital Humanities you fill out a web form, more or less a registration form. On the form there was a text box to fill in with your definition. It didn’t say “think about this really carefully, because it might end up in a big thick book.” So what I filled in was just what came off the top of my head at the time. To this end, it is all the more jarring to read something I had to fill in on a registration form printed like this. Jarring in a good way. I’m relatively happy with my definition. I’ll stand behind these jottings. Some of the value in these definitions is that they are not diplomatic. They are the things we had on hand at the moment and there is something that is a bit more direct and honest about those kinds of comments.

Trying to do the Digital Humanities Face

In conclusion, here is my best attempt at doing the debates in the digital humanities face. I should probably have shaved before taking the picture, but there lies the perils of just being able to hit the publish button before anyone else intervenes to stop you.

Tripadvisor Rates Einstein: Traces of Public Memory and Science on the Web

2012-01-27T15:37:43Z

Arguing with Einstein is one of my favorite photos of the Albert Einstein memorial. It encapsulates how some of the sculptor’s intentions, his argument about Einstein and science, manifest themselves in an invitation to argue with a statue. The seated statue invites us to sit on him, climb him, and argue with him, and it is my contention that sites like Yelp, Tripadvisor, and Flickr offer us the ability to explore and examine our relationship to these kinds of monuments and memorials in unprecedented ways.

Photo: Schmidt, C., 2008. Arguing with Einstein, Available at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisbrenschmidt/2190660089/

Its been long in the making but I am excited to report that my paper Tripadvisor rates Einstein: Using the social web to unpack the public meanings of a cultural heritage site is out in the newest issue of The International Journal of Web Based Communities. I did the primary research for this project back in my master’s program in a great course called Museums, Monuments and Memory. That was in the Fall of 2008. (I know, wow that was a while ago my how time flys in the world of academic publishing)

The paper is largely an attempt to parse out the different kinds about sites of public memory that we can tell when we draw on traditional archival collections, in this case using materials from the National Academy of Sciences archives, as opposed to the kinds of stories we can tell when we look at traces of experience and interaction with those sites of memory online. In this case, I find it particularly interesting to try and evaluate how some of the intentions in the design of the monument can be evaluated in the kinds of things that we create online as a result of experiences with the memorial. My hope is that this can serve as both further validation of the value of preserving public discourse on the web and potentially as an example for how other’s might use social sites like Yelp, Flickr, and Tripadvisor to explore and interrogate public memory.

Below is the abstract for the paper. I would love to hear any comments or critiques in the comments. Similarly, if you end up using the paper in any way I would also love to hear about it.

Abstract:

Near the US Capitol, in front of the National Academy of Sciences sits a gigantic bronze statue of Albert Einstein. The monument was created to celebrate Einstein and the sense of awe and wonder his work represents. However, while under construction, art critics and some scientists derided the idea of the memorial. They felt the scale of such a giant memorial did not fit the modesty of Einstein. This paper explores the extent to which perspectives of the monument’s public supporters and critics can be seen in how people interact with it as evidenced in reviews and images of the monument posted online. I analyse how individuals appropriate the monument on social websites, including Fickr, Yelp, Tripadvisor, and Yahoo Travel, as a means to explore how the broader public co-creates the meaning of this particular memorial. I argue this case-study can serve as an example for leveraging the social web as a means to understand cultural heritage sites.

If you don’t have access to the official copy I have my own personal unofficial personal archival copy that you can take a look at.

Defining Data for Humanists: Text, Artifact, Information or Evidence?

2012-02-06T20:44:13Z

Fred and I got some fantastic comments on our Hermeneutics of Data and Historical Writing paper through the Writing History in the Digital Age open peer review. We are currently working on revising the manuscript. At this point I have worked on a range of book chapters and articles and I can say that doing this chapter has been a real pleasure. I thought the open review process went great and working with a coauthor has also been great. Both are things that don’t happen that much in the humanities. I think the work is much stronger for Fred and I having pooled our forces to put this together. Now, one the comments we got sent me on another tangent. One that is too big of a thing to shoe horn into the revised paper.

On the Relationship Between Data and Evidence

We were asked to clarify what we saw as the difference between data and evidence. We will help to clarify this in the paper, but it has also sparked a much longer conversation in my mind that I wanted to share here and invite comments on. As I said, this is too big of a can of worms to fit into that paper, but I wanted to take a few moments to sketch this out and see what others think about it.

What Data Is to a Humanist?

I think we have a few different ways to think about what data actually is to a humanist. I feel like thinking about this and being reflexive about what we do with data is a really important thing to engage in and here is my first pass at some tools for thought about data for humanists. First, as constructed things data are a species of artifact. Second, as authored objects created for particular audiences, data can be interpreted as texts. Third, as computer processable information data can be computed in a whole host of ways to generate novel artifacts and texts which themselves open to interpretation and analysis. This gets us to evidence. Each of these approaches, data as text, artifact, and processable information, allow one to produce/uncover evidence that can support particular claims and arguments. I would suggest that data is not a kind of evidence but is a thing in which evidence can be found.

Data are Constructed Artifacts

Data is always manufactured. It is created. More specifically, data sets are always, at least indirectly, created by people. In this sense, the idea of “raw data” is a bit misleading. The production of a data set requires a set of assumptions about what is to be collected, how it is to be collected, how it is to be encoded. Each of those decisions is itself of potential interest for analysis.

In the sciences, there are some agreed upon stances on what assumptions are OK and given those assumptions a set of statistical tests exist for helping ensure the validity of interpretations. These kinds of statistical instruments are also great tools for humanists to use. However, they are not the only way to look at data. For example, most of the statistics one is likely to learn have to do with attempting to make generalizations from a sample of things to a bigger population. Now, if you don’t want to generalize, if you want to instead get into the gritty details of a particular individual set of data, you probably shouldn’t use statistical tests that are intended to see if trends in a sample are trends in some larger population.

Data are Interpretable Texts

As a species of human made artifact, we can think of datasets as having the characteristics of texts. Data is created for an audience. Humanists can, and should interpret data as an authored work and the intentions of the author are worth consideration and exploration. At the same time, the audience of data is also relevant, it is worth thinking about how a given set of data is actually used, understood and how data is interpreted by audiences that it makes its way to. That could well include audiences of other scientists, the general public, government officials, etc. In light of this, one can take a reader response theory approach to data.

Data are Processable Information

Data can be processed by computers. We can visualize it. We can manipulate it. We can pivot and change our perspective on it. Doing so can help us see things differently. You can process data in a stats package like R to run a range of statistical tests, you can do like Mark Sample and use N+7 on a text. In both cases, you can process information, numerical or textual information, to change your frame of understanding a particular set of data.

Data can Hold Evidentiary Value

As a species of human artifact, as a cultural object, as a kind of text, and as processable information data is open to a range of hermeneutic processes of interpretation. In much the same way that encoding a text is an interpretive act creating, manipulating, transferring, exploring and otherwise making use of a data set is also an interpretive act. In this case, data as an artifact or a text can be thought of as having the same potential evidentiary value of any kind of artifact. That is, analysis, interpretation, exploration and engagement with data can allow one to uncover information, facts, figures, perspectives, meanings, and traces which can be deployed as evidence to support all manner of claims and arguments. I would suggest that data is not a kind of evidence; it is a potential source of information which could hold evidentiary value.