This is just a quick post to share two bits of news about our Praxis Program at the Scholars’ Lab. The first is that I’ve written an op-ed on Praxis and our Fellows’ practicum project for this year’s Digital Campus special issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The piece was originally titled “Praxis, Through Prisms” — now “A Digital Boot Camp for Grad Students in the Humanities.” It’s pay-walled, for now, but I’ll re-publish it in open access format in 30 days.

by Chad Hagen for The Chronicle

Or, in other words, the kind of thing our amazing grad students and diverse crew of scholar-practitioners are working on at Praxis. Through Prism(s).

I’m incredibly proud of the UVa Library staff who have devoted so much energy to teaching and mentoring Praxis Fellows this year (Wayne Graham, Jeremy Boggs, Eric Rochester, David McClure, and Eric Johnson) — and even more proud of our first six Fellows themselves, who have built Prism independently. These are Sarah Storti, Brooke Lestock, Annie Swafford, Lindsay O’Connor, Alex Gil, and Ed Triplett. And in fact, they’ve built Prism from scratch, on time, in public (perhaps the scariest part), with great good humor, and having started with very little practical experience in digital humanities design and development. Lately, I haven’t been able to stop myself from interrupting everything in our weekly Praxis meetings to make exclamations like, “Look at you guys! Look what you can do!”

So I hope you’ll stay tuned through this week to the Scholars’ Lab blog, the Praxis site, and to our @PraxisProgram and @ScholarsLab Twitter feeds, for posts on the launch of the Prism beta, an announcement of our 2012-13 Praxis Fellows, and reflections by current Praxis grad students and the rest of the team.

(Cross-posted from the Praxis Program and Scholars’ Lab blog.)

It’s been an excellent Sunday morning for posts about DH and the profession(s). First, Desmond Schmidt crunches the numbers from a decade’s worth of job postings on Humanist, which is the primary and longest-standing international discussion list for the digital humanities. (If you think there’s a DH boom in the US, check out Desmond’s per-capita analysis.) Interestingly, this survey only took PhD-level positions into account. How have job requirements in this field evolved? Tomorrow’s Humanist should have a response from Dot Porter, citing an #Alt-Academy essay she wrote with Amanda Gailey on “Credential Creep in the Digital Humanities.”

And here’s Kathleen Fitzpatrick in the Chronicle, on what is really required of institutions and departments who encourage junior scholars to ‘Do the Risky Thing’ in Digital Humanities. Kathleen is amplifying and contextualizing a concern frequently voiced in the past two years, around the spate of “cluster hires” in DH — which sometimes seemed to happen without thought given to the suport structures, both departmental and institutional, that new faculty would need. (I remember Patrick MurrayJohn as the first to start squawking about this on Twitter. I couldn’t find his much-earlier tweets, but there’s this thread at DH Answers.) On the Chronicle piece, Kathleen and Ian Bogost make two important further points that may resonate with our Grad Fellows and Praxis group: regarding “mentoring up,” and pressing forward.

Finally, Natalia Cecire responds with the most acute blog post I’ve read on the whole so-called “rise” of digital humanities and its political and professional consequences: “It’s not “the job market”; it’s the profession (and it’s your problem too).”

And what am I doing on a quiet Sunday afternoon (besides linking together this distributed conversation)? I’m following along with our Praxis students as we learn Ruby from the ground up. This has been really satisfying to me, and not only because of every way in which I agree with Steve Ramsay on “building.” It’s also because, like so many digital humanists of my generation, I learned every ounce of what I know on the job, rather than in the classroom or through any formal or institutionally-supported training program — and most of the time my learning involved being confronted with something half-built or even jury-rigged by other humanities scholars who only marginally knew what they were doing. I’m not disparaging this experience! The soft skills and improvisational confidence you learn on real-world collaborative projects are invaluable — but the rationale for addressing programming more clinically may be akin to the one for learning Latin. (Look what has been built upon it — what you will understand! And you’re not really going to pick it up as an exchange student.)

I’ve always felt like I could hack around (read: extend, modify, steal) on the spot with a decent level of fluency — if supplemented by a small amount of magical thinking — but that I lacked the basic and thorough grounding that would serve me well in a variety of situations, and that would make me less dependent on others when starting from scratch. It’s time I did something about that.

The R&D staff of the Scholars’ Lab are providing our Praxis colleagues (and those of us in the SLab who need it!) with exercises, tutorials, lessons, and one-on-one sessions on learning to code. They’re also sharing the materials they create with the wider world. Pretty soon, the Praxis team will move out of lesson-ville and back into on-the-job learning, as they collaboratively design and build a tool called Prism. For now (for me, anyway), taking the time to complete a set of rudimentary Ruby exercises feels like the biggest gift I’ve given myself in a long while.

What does this have to do with Fitzpatrick on risk? With Cecire’s sharp look at the present scene? With Schmidt and Porter & Gailey and the trends? With the title of this post? I’m making a cup of tea and moving off the Praxis site into a third set of exercises — so let’s leave that as an exercise to the reader.

(Cross-posted from the Scholars’ Lab blog. I introduce our new Praxis Program here.)

Our goal in the Scholars’ Lab Praxis Program is to address methodological training in the humanities not just through workshops and courses, but by involving graduate students in digital projects from the ground up. This means learning by creating something — together — with all that entails: paying attention both to vision and detail; building facility with new techniques and languages not just as an academic exercise, but of necessity, and in the most pragmatic framework imaginable; acquiring the softer skills of collaboration (sadly, an undiscovered country in humanities graduate education) and of leadership (that is, of credible expertise, self-governance, and effective project management). All this also involves learning to iterate and to compromise — and when to stop and ship.

To do this, our Praxis team needed a project. We wanted it to be a fresh one, something they could own. It was important to us that the project only be in service to the program — that its intellectual agenda was one our students could shape, that they set the tone for the collaboration, and that — as much as possible — it be brand-spanking-new, free from practices and assumptions (technical or social) that might have grown organically in a pre-existing project and which we might no longer recommend.

In this inaugural year of the Praxis Program, the Scholars’ Lab, in consultation with some colleagues from UVa’s College of Arts and Sciences, is providing the central idea for the project. It’s just too much to ask that students new to digital humanities work invent a meaningful project from whole cloth on Day 1 of the program — especially one that, we hope, will make a meaningful intervention in the current scene of DH research and practice. That said, by the end of this year, our current Praxis team plans to have conceptualized a second project (or perhaps an extension of this one) to pass on to next year’s group.

Here endeth the preamble. What are we up to now?

This year, the Praxis Program is building a web-based framework, codenamed “Prism,” for collective marking of texts according to small and constrained (but flexible) interpretive vocabularies. Prism will enable visualization of those marks — made by many users on the same document — as zoomed-out, rainbow-like spectra. It will also (should we get so far!) allow for comparison and analysis of the results of users’ activity (that is, their collective attention paid to certain passages of text, and the categorizations they make of those passages) by treating them as input for the data-mining techniques we can apply against large corpora of digitized texts. In other words, Prism will be a blunt but very interesting and user-friendly tool for crowd-sourcing humanities interpretation.

The basic concept of Prism is, for me, an old one. It stems from conversations on categories of textual interpretation which I had as a graduate student at SpecLab and a post-doc working with Jerome McGann, and more recent discussions with Alison Booth in the context of her project to define and mark narrative structures in biographies of women. It also stems from a fond memory of some markup games I invented nearly a decade ago for my Media Studies students and my colleagues at SpecLab. These games and discussions fed into McGann’s “Marking Texts of Many Dimensions,” and Jerry and I spoke about our experiences of them last year, in response to a Scholars’ Lab talk on “N-dimensional Archives” by Julie Meloni. At SpecLab, we called this (quite complicated) thing “the ‘Patacritical Demon.”

The version of the Demon I presented to the Praxis team last week as an inspiration for Prism is simpler in scope and beholden more to the material and pedagogical than to the text-theoretical. I’ll say no more here than that the original game involved shared, Xeroxed page images, transparent overlays, dry-erase markers, a common interpretive prompt, and a moment in which somebody yelled “Stop!” and the transparencies were stacked up for discussion.

Members of the Praxis team will be describing their vision for the user interface of Prism in more detail as the weeks and months progress. In our early conversations, the whole team has seemed energized by the potential of the tool for classroom use. But it’s important to say that we’re not just replicating an offline pedagogical exercise in the browser.

Prism updates the concept in some important — and we think timely — ways, some of which are meant as interventions in the current scene of DH project development and conceptualization:

• We recognize that there’s a huge vogue for “crowd-sourcing” in the digital humanities right now, but have been feeling like there’s potential for much more interesting work in this domain. We don’t want to treat the “crowd” only like robots or mechanical turks — asking for transcription labor, or refinement of OCR output, as valuable as those products may be. What would happen if we could systematize, capture, and build collective interpretive energy — on shared understandings and unexpected disagreements?
• We also feel ready to build on design lessons from citizen-science/citizen-scholar projects, like those created by the Zooniverse group, to create a DH tool that appeals to the general public and is easy and fun and effective for pedagogical use. We’d like to be able to use Prism as a laboratory exercise for thinking about design and development in the public humanities, and on the relation of audience and user communities to the questions we can ask in DH research.
• Finally, in an era of mass digitization, we’re keen to engage with big data in the humanities. Once the basic framework for Prism is established, we want to be able to experiment with the flow between user-friendly input and “easy” and attractive visualizations (like our spectra) and the deeper questions that can be asked and harder information design problems that are encountered when we move into computational linguistics & text mining techniques such as sentiment analysis.

This is a tall, tall order — but neither the Scholars’ Lab staff nor our Praxis students are the sort to be attracted to an unambitious project. We hope you’ll follow along this year as we see just how far we can get, and what we can learn along the way.

This is just an early announcement about a session at January’s MLA convention. We now have a timeslot (8:30am on Friday, January 7th), so I thought I’d announce it as people begin to make travel plans!

ACH is sponsoring a highly interactive and forward-looking showcase of digital humanities research, teaching, and publication in MLA’s new “electronic roundtable” (read: poster session!) format. Be there or be square.

New (and Renewed) Work in Digital Literary Studies: An Electronic Roundtable

The Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) is pleased to sponsor an electronic roundtable and demo session featuring new and renewed work in media and digital literary studies. Projects, groups, and initiatives highlighted in this session build on the editorial and archival roots of humanities scholarship to offer new, explicitly methodological and interpretive contributions to the digital literary scene, or to intervene in established patterns of scholarly communication and pedagogical practice. Each presenter will offer a very brief introduction to his or her work, setting it in the context of digital humanities research and praxis, before we open the floor for simultaneous demos and casual conversations with attendees at eight computer stations:

Station 1: Kathleen Fitzpatrick (open peer review with MediaCommons and CommentPress);
Station 2: Laura Mandell and Andrew Stauffer (for NINES and 18th-Connect);
Station 3: Joseph Gilbert (representing four new literary projects at UVA Library’s Scholars’ Lab — on teaching prosody, analyzing collective biographies of women, sharing audio tapes of William Faulkner, and mining 18th-century texts for metaphor — with project directors Chip Tucker, Alison Booth, and (tentatively) Brad Pasanek in attendance);
Station 4: Doug Reside (the TILE project for linking texts and images);
Station 5: John Walsh (extensions to the Swinburne Project);
Station 6: Randall Cream (the Sapheos image-based collation project),
Station 7: Matthew Wilkens (on statistical measures of allegory in literary history); and
Station 8: William Pannapacker and Ernest Cole (using new media in the undergraduate classroom, with “Post-Conflict Sierra Leone”).

We’ll be posting extended abstracts for each of these projects on the ACH site later this semester.

Just a quick post to say that I participated again this year in the Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities “community publication project,” along with these fine folks. This is becoming an annual exercise in which digital humanities scholars and practitioners of all kinds document the ins and outs of a typical day.

My own blog posts and pictures are here, at the somewhat ominously named “Day of Bethany Nowviskie“. Some other folks from the Scholars’ Lab contributed, too: Kelly Johnston, Joe Gilbert, and Wayne Graham.

I’ve been peeking in on the RSS feeds, and am looking forward to reading day-in-the-life posts from many, many friends and not a few strangers all over the world. You can also get a snippet-y sense of the activity by watching the #dayofDH hashtag on Twitter.

Just a quick post to announce a new look, a revitalized blog, and lots of angle brackets at http://scholarslab.org, a site where we’ll trace works in progress at the Scholars’ Lab in the University of Virginia Library. The Scholars’ Lab is the colloquial name of the library department I direct, “Digital Research and Scholarship,” and also the name of the open lab, classroom, common room, and collaborative workspaces we manage. We’ll keep up our real home page, but scholarslab.org will be home to musings and project reports by faculty, staff, visiting scholars, and Grad Fellows affiliated with the SLab. It’s also a place where we’ll launch test versions of the software and websites we’re working on — so be sure to subscribe to our feed. And many thanks to Wayne Graham, head of Digital Research and Scholarship R&D, and Joe Gilbert, Head of the SLab (not “on the SLab”), for their leadership in this new venture!

Check out the site to see what’s going on with Omeka plugins (including Fedora and Solr), EAD, poetic prosody, web services for maps and GIS, text mining for metaphor, TEI on Rails, Xforms, Colonial-era social networks, and more. There’s also a section for “alumni projects,” that have graduated from incubation at the Scholar’s Lab, including one recently featured in the Chronicle.

Last year, the UVA Scholars’ Lab hosted a local, semester-long faculty and grad student seminar on geospatial technologies in the humanities.  We used, as a jumping-off point, Martyn Jessop’s assessment of factors contributing to a surprising “inhibition” of the use of digitized maps and GIS among humanists. That GIS, an important tool for scholarly engagement with space and place across the disciplines, has been slow to penetrate the digital humanities — a population generally receptive to new practices and technologies — begs a discussion of issues at once historical and methodological, institutional and pragmatic. The seventh annual Scholarly Communication Institute, to be held at UVA Library in a couple of weeks, will take this issue up in a concentrated way, as we focus on spatial technologies and tools: the institutional, methodological, and interpretive aspects of GIS in the context of scholarly communication.

The “inhibition” question demands serious engagement by scholars, programmers, librarians, and advocates for shared data and transparent, flexible, open services. To be effective, this engagement must come at many levels simultaneously: we must work to build core infrastructure to support GIS and leverage the strengths of (primarily government and academic) data providers; we must carefully analyze past successes as well as failures in the digital humanities in order to move forward with more robustly-imagined scholarly projects; and we must interrogate both a toolset that has evolved to suit scientific inquiry (that is, positivist models of physical behavior and dense, detailed, precisely-defined data sets, generally synchronic) and our own inherited systems for interpreting the human record within a spatial field. Above all – because place and space, whether specifically geo-referenced or wholly conceptual, are common denominators in humanistic disciplines – we must make a concerted effort at supporting and understanding what it is that we do, when we “do GIS.”

Today, I’m proud to announce that the Scholars’ Lab has been funded by the NEH to host three tracks of an Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, on the theme of “Enabling Geospatial Scholarship.”

We’re especially proud of the fantastic group of faculty and advisory board members who have signed on to the Institute. These people come from libraries, digital humanities centers, a variety of academic departments, and the world of entrepreneurial GIS. Our faculty include: Julie Sweetkind-Singer, Diana Sinton, Anne Knowles, Sean Gillies, Schulyer Erle, Shekhar Krishnan, Andrew Turner, Madelyn Wessel, Josh Greenberg, Martyn Jessop, Todd Presner, David Germano, Benjamin Ray, Bethany Nowviskie, Joseph Gilbert, Christopher Gist, Kelly Johnston, Bess Sadler, Adam Soroka, Wayne Graham. The advisory board for the Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship includes: Dan Cohen, Tom Elliott, Worthy Martin, James Boxall, Scot French, Neil Fraistat, John Krygier, Jennifer Green, Martha Sites, Abby Smith.

A first four-day event will be geared toward library, museum, and digital humanities center professionals, competitively selected from public service and collections stewardship areas as well as information science and cyberinfrastructure support fields, and will aim to shape policy and build the technical capacity of the institutions they represent to support boundary-pushing geospatial scholarship. Their ongoing work in implementing a standards-based, open source infrastructure for discovery, delivery, and manipulation of geospatial data would be supported through an online clearinghouse and open-access community to be maintained long-term by the Scholars’ Lab.

In the second year, the NEH Institute will fund 20 humanities scholars and advanced graduate students, many of whom may be affiliated with participating Round One institutions, to train on and critique the open source and standards-based GIS tools and geospatial approaches to humanities scholarship being developed and documented by UVA Library and its collaborators and peers. As a contribution to the success of the program, the Scholars’ Lab will also independently fund up to 5 short-term scholar- or developer-in-residencies in the two years following the first Institute (a total of $40,000 in funding). These mini-residencies — in which Institute attendees or faculty return to collaborate with the Scholars’ Lab on specific projects — will promote ongoing scholarly engagement, software development, and information sharing around the theme of Enabling Geospatial Scholarship.

The curriculum and outcome of both Institutes and our series of mini-residencies will be made available as part of a planned information clearinghouse, supported by a graduate “online community manager,” who will work closely with the dedicated, full-time GIS staff of the Scholar’s Lab over the course of the next two years. The goal of this clearinghouse is not only to offer technical bootstrapping for libraries and museums new to sophisticated GIS support via Web services frameworks, but also to provide differing scholarly perspectives on GIS for the humanities, from within the coherent narrative of a multi-institutional effort (which we hope this Institute will foster) to build modern infrastructure, support innovative digital projects, and open up dialogue about the causes and conditions of the digital humanities community’s uncharacteristic inhibition toward GIS.

Stay tuned as we nail down the schedule for the Institute and open up the application process for funded attendees!