Author Archives: Doing DH Team

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Mining data

Reading the articles for Monday on mining data reminded me of the “revolution” in Classics in the late 80s and early 90s when Perseus was first introduced. At the time, it revolutionized the field: before Perseus, a brilliant classicist was a scholar who knew all the iterations of a particular aorist verb form in Aeschylus and thus knew the meaning and context of the verb. His knowledge (and it was usually his) was based on years of reading Aeschylus (and the other tragedians for context), spending long hours writing verb forms on notecards, and publishing esoteric articles on the language. (We are philologists!) After Perseus, it became so much easier to just find all the iterations of a particular word or words, collate them, contextualize them, and analyze them.  But had the field gone farther?

But first, let me take you to the way back machine. In college in the 70s, I used a typewriter and wrote in by hand my Greek passages for my essays; my husband, who is a sociologist, used punch cards for his research and was considered cutting edge sophisticated. In the eighties, my friends and I in Classics and Art History hacked our machines and got our dot-matrix printers to print Greek AND EVEN THE DIACRITICS!! We were cool, or thought we were. And then came Perseus.

The Perseus project itself recognizes that digital humanities has changed and that there is a huge need for clean data and machine actionable knowledge. It looks like that is happening  at the Perseus site, but not that Classicists are following, at least that I can find. Only last January (2014) was there the inaugural meeting at AIA/APA for the Digital Classics Association; the title of the panel was “Getting Started in Digital Humanities.” There is a CFP for NELA on digital humanities and the classics for May 2015.  Here is an interesting video about the use of computational photography. But this seems to be the seeds of the revolution.

There is lots more that could be done using Perseus digital repository, and it not just focused on Greek and Latin areas of research.

 

Source: Mining data

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Space & Time

Carl Sagan

Millions & billions

Spatial humanities: not the final frontier, but ripe with millions & billions of possibilities. Certainly an exciting prospect for the visual-minded humanist, geospatial visualization comes in many formats. One of the tools we tried, StoryMap, is a narrative tool that demonstrates how powerfully maps can tell stories, especially for communicating with the non-scholarly audience (at least that was my impression). On the other end of the academic scale, the Fletcher & Helmreich project tantalizes with its amazing use of historic maps to reexamine the business of selling art in London through the latter nineteenth century. But isn’t mapping, after all, just another form of data visualization? If data and your research questions are solid, geospatial visualization should be a great vehicle (but Mark Monmonier’s How to Lie with Maps demonstrates just how easy it is to twist your data through cartography), but there are always pitfalls. I’m struggling with the prospect of mapping (that is, geolocating) social data. It would be possible to extract references from city directories and census, but that’s not enough (as the Digital Harlem project shows us). It would take so much more, beginning with information from handwritten archival sources. Amassing a large enough volume of research to reflect meaningful social connections—well, it would take millions & billions of brain cells, more than anything else.

Source: Space & Time

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Mapping Artamanoff

Today was about mapping. We played with several different ways to map and to tell stories with maps. This example was produced in an alpha version of a program called StoryMap. I’m not crazy about it, but it was interesting to make.

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Spatial humanities for an architectural historian

The main reason I am interested in Digital Humanities is because of spatial technologies, in particular mapping and the ability to overlay different data (from demographic information to literary references) over historical and contemporary maps. I have already posted about this regarding my project on the “urban world of Brazilian modernists.” I would also like to apply mapping to a couple of other projects. One of them is on informal urban and architectural projects in Sao Paulo (grassroots urbanism) in the last ten years. I want to plot these projects onto a map of the city and correlate them to socio-economic data and to sites of political street demonstrations. And another project is to map present and past sites of alternative living and art projects in Berlin. Both of these projects are tough in the sense that there isn’t a lot of documentation or data (digital or otherwise) because these were often temporary, ephemeral, and illegal initiatives. Data collection will be one of my biggest challenges; much of it will have to be done analogically and then digitized in some way (entered manually or scanned, depending on the data). I think the mapping platforms we explored (geolocation, Google Maps) will be helpful to create prototypes or early versions of these projects, but I suspect that I might have to explore GIS or maybe a custom solution (in collaboration, of course).

Source: Spatial humanities for an architectural historian

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Day 5

Learning how to use Google Map Engine Lite to map… stuff. Anything with geographical points that are map-able. I created a small Excel spreadsheet with addresses and created this test map of some public sculptures in Bogotá, Colombia. Then I added pictures. Click on the points to see the pictures and addresses! (I did this quickly and couldn’t find the exact address for Bursztyn’s Homenaje a López Pumarejo, so it is not completely accurate.)

Another cool and powerful and easy to use tool.


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Sink or swim

Throwing kid into pool

 

When I was a wee lad of six or so, the intrepid counselors at Robin Hood day camp taught me to swim by a method that, while impressive in its simplicity, would no doubt have made the helicopter parents of today hyperventilate (and, most likely, follow up with a lawsuit): they unceremoniously tossed me into the deep end of the pool. In retrospect, their chosen method must have been an effective one, since I did learn to swim (though I’ve mercifully blocked out the details about how exactly I did so).

The organizers of our summer institute in digital art history at the Center for History and New Media are clearly the successors to those camp counselors of yore. Although it’s only been four days thus far, the group has already been introduced to a dizzying array of new information and resources and we’re tossing around terms that would have drawn a complete blank for me just a few short days ago: CMS, metadata, VRA Core, Omeka vs. Scalar vs. Drupal, and on and on. Along with giving me a whole new set of skills to use in my teaching, there’s another outcome that has delighted me as well: amidst all the technical insights I’m acquiring, I’m also thinking in new ways — and with renewed energy — about my work, after a few months of feeling rather uninspired in that respect. I’m jotting down all sorts of notes about my research and noticing connections I hadn’t before considered, and I’m even thinking about a quick research trip I’d like to squeeze in before the beginning of the fall semester (which will arrive way too soon for my liking!). This is just to say that, while prior to my arrival I was worried that the process of learning about these new digital techniques would totally tamp down my energy for my own (analog, archival, close looking-based) research, the end result has been quite the opposite. It’s always a relief to find that, rather than flailing wildly, one is doggy paddling quite happily around the pool.

Source: Sink or swim

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Platforms, Functionality, Usability

omekascreenshot_smWell, platforms. I guess “out of the box” is helpful & gets your project off the ground quickly. But it boxes things up, too. I experimented this afternoon with Omeka.net. It has an impressive structure that yields some astonishingly quick results and offers simple-to-activate plug-ins. I created a collection & tried adding a few items manually and by ingesting from a csv file, then created an exhibition. It seemed as if the easiest way to pull data from Zotero in (at least according to the Zotero forum discussion that @magpie found, you can export Zotero data as a report (html), then open that file in Excel, then save as CSV. Fine, but the table needed a 90 degree rotation, and I’m Excel-phobic enough to let that deter me. So I ended up hand editing the table, but was able to save it as a CSV and pull the data into Omeka. I’m sure there’s a better way to do that, but it was worth investigating. Omeka.net was, however, a bit disappointing from a visual and usability standpoint. Not sure why each item needs to proclaim so loudly its metadata format. And when navigation is largely verbal, rather than visual, it affects usability. The template styles, while limited, definitely work. Apparently, Omeka.org solves all these issues with lots of customization options, as is clearly apparent in the stunning Peacock Room site. There is much more that can be done with omeka.net, of course, and a two-hour experiment gave only time to explore it briefly—hoping for more hands-on soon!

Perhaps Drupal would provide a more flexible, tabula rasa-style platform for my project. My experience with Drupal has been from a “consumer” point of view, managing the construction of (and providing content for) a web site developed by others with time constraints, rather than from the “producer” perspective, from which all things are possible.

 

 

Source: Platforms, Functionality, Usability

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Omeka?

Finally played with Omeka for the first time after seeing presentations at conferences and considering it as a possibility for our digital project. Pluses and minus. Thinking about how to organize the information gave me a headache, but it wasn’t Omeka’s fault! To collection or not to collection?

450px-Shelves-of-file-folders

 

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“If the platform fits, wear it.”

“If the platform fits, wear it,” with these words Megan Brett assured me that using Pinterest to store blog posts was not a shameful thing.   In fact “no shame” has been a constant phrase of reassurance as the participants in the Rebuilding the Portfolio Institute continue to explore Digital Art History.

There may be no shame but there is plenty of chagrin (at least on my end)… chagrin for the fact that I had no idea what platform the Illinois Women Artists Database uses.   I still don’t but at least I can now make an educated guess:  Omeka.

 

Source: “If the platform fits, wear it.”

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Blogging Guidelines for Institutions

In case my colleagues at Doing DAH are interested, below is a link to the blogging guidelines that my museum’s blog team created. There is some guidance about best practices and image use. Feel free to download.

Blogging for The Phillips Collection_Updated 2013

Also, not to toot my own horn, I published an article on institutional blogging in Art Documentation, Spring 2014. It is available with a JSTOR subscription.

History, Identity and 21st Century Skills: Experiments in Institutional Blogging