Remind me to tell you about…

the bookshelf.  In case I forget on Saturday morning.

Beyond Close Reading? Literary Studies in the 21st Century

In the wake of a turn away from nation-based frameworks and toward more regional, transnational, and/or comparative approaches to literary studies, a number of literary critics have proposed alternatives to close reading, a fundamental part of literary studies in the United States since the rise of the New Critics to prominence in the middle decades of the twentieth century.

Franco Moretti’s and Peter Middleton’s calls for “distant reading,” the championing of “not reading” by Martin Mueller and Pierre Bayard, and the search for “communications circuits” pioneered by Robert Darnton are signs that people interested in books are actively working to develop approaches that can bridge a gap between New Critical fidelity to the page and the vast amount of material now available to be read.

If others are interested, I would enjoy the opportunity to discuss this work. Is something like a theory of “not reading” useful or is it only leading the humanities further down the path into obscurity and irrelevance? Where does technology fit in? What kind(s) of skills does one need in order to successfully “distant read” a text? The ability to construct visualizations seems to me to be useful. I’ve been exploring Processing, SIMILE Timelines, GoogleMaps, and ArcGIS in order to see what I might be able to learn about literary history using these tools. How have these tools worked for you?

Sounds Online

I am interested in how sound is shared online and in examining its status in the social media arena – beyond the commercial and promotional purposes connected to the music industry. What are the most effective tools (soundcloud? IA? youtube without images? etc.) and what metadata sets can be used for this?

Prelinger Library Visit and Tour – Sunday afternoon

If anyone would like to roam the aisles and scout the shelves of Prelinger Library while the jets scream overhead, we’d be delighted to welcome them for an extremely informal tour and visit. Bring cameras and flash drives! We’ll figure out the best time together at the meeting.

…and a Bit of (Narrative) Theory

I’m interested in hearing/sharing ideas regarding the structure of online linked data from the point of view of (historical) narrative theory. Some of the questions that I find relevant in looking at how historical sources are available online, disseminated across institutional repositories, commercial enterprises, and the social media jungle, are:

• What are the main “narratives” underlining the presence of digital cultural heritage content online?
• How is “official history” challenged? And, is it really?
• What are the implications of a fragmented authorship model that social media and collaborative tools seem to embody (or at least, suggest and make possible)?
• What are the implications of an expanding use of Creative Commons licenses?
• How do digital literacy and the conditions of online access worldwide  relate to the democratization of knowledge that linked data aims at achieving?
• In other words, “who” is telling “what” (and to whom) in making linked historical data available online?

My main theoretical references are very much rooted in the modernist tradition (Phenomenology, Frankfurt School, Structuralism, but also Dada, Surrealism, Situationism and Punk), and my practices are eclectic and very media-oriented. I am deeply interested to learn of different approaches and problems being faced in a variety of fields, since I do not believe that theory can only exist closed off in a seminar room.

Fleet Week

Fleet Week 1919, from Jesse Brown Cook Scrapbook, The Bancroft Library

I may have neglected to mention that Columbus Day Weekend (this weekend) is also Fleet Week in San Francisco.  The majority of the festivities are on the Fisherman’s Wharf side of the Embarcadero, but Piers 30/32, near us, will have ships docked and open for tours, so please expect a bit more traffic than usual.  If you’re driving, you may want to look at the lots closer to the ball park (good news is the Giants are in the playoffs, but NOT at home this weekend!).

We’ve also pulled some strings with the US Navy and have a very special immersive multimedia presentation for you from 3-4pm Saturday.  We’ll tell you more about that Saturday morning.

Mentoring

Would there be interest in a session on mentoring? I had been looking forward to notes from the “virtual mentoring” session at THATcamp New Mexico last weekend, but I guess that session didn’t happen.

Maybe something like a list of people and projects that would welcome help – something that would make it possible for the less-experienced to gain some, and then then pass that on?

Geographic Analysis + Text Mining + Big, Messy Data

I’m interested in the intersection between geographic analysis and text mining large, messy data sets. I know that a fair amount of work has been done on this in various private and public sectors (maybe the CIA could hold a Bootcamp session for us!), but I’m not sure how much has been done specifically in humanities research. I also want to move beyond metadata-level analysis and into the actual mass of text. How can we map not just the places mentioned in, say, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but all the places in every Irish novel published during the 1910s, along with their relative frequencies and contexts of nearby words and other places?

Think of Google Books, and their automatically-generated map in the About This Book (see an example here) section that gives you a geographic sense of what places are being named. I’ve always found this only superficially interesting, since I have no idea how it was generated and it makes no qualitative distinction between the various places (whether they occur 2 times or 2,000 times for instance, or in what context). Especially in the case of historical research, the quality of the data can often be a limiting factor in applying Named Entity Recognition or place name extraction (to say nothing of disambiguation between identically-referenced places/names/words). What specific techniques are being used most effectively right now? Do we need to use more advanced Natural Language Processing or can we use more inelegant blunt force? How can we apply these techniques in the context of raw, messy, humanistic data?

#Fail

I want to talk about failure!

It’s the thing that keeps us (i.e. me) awake at night: fearing it, replaying past mistakes, obsessing over couldawouldashouldas. So many people (i.e. I) have a negative attitude towards failure when there’s so much more to it. Bumps along the road teach us what didn’t work – and if we’re paying attention, what not to try again. I hate the idea of failing and I know I’m not alone.

Everyone has a fail story to share – whether it’s a project, a manuscript, a relationship, an education… Let’s talk about getting past the fear, getting over the past, and moving towards success in incremental bits. And because sharing my failures isn’t embarrassing enough, I’d like to propose we end with some (low-aerobic) Scottish Country Dancing (link is to youtube). What session on failure is complete without a chance to dance with your colleagues?

Of course, if there’s no interest in #fail we could just dance the whole time. I’d like to find a project linking dancing and digital humanities and maybe something will come up?

[Who am I? Today I’m a sessional (i.e. adjunct) instructor in History and Women’s Studies at the University of Windsor, a social media specialist for Grad Studies and Public Affairs, and a web developer on the side. By training and passion I’m an historian with emphases in feminist, gender, and oral histories. I may be someone else tomorrow.]

BootCamp Session on Software Access to Bib Data?

As someone who works for the largest library cooperative in the world, and a THATCamp sponsor (OCLC), I’d be happy to do a session on how anyone can search our database of over 200 million book and serial records for items in libraries around the world and get the data back in RSS and Atom XML formats for mashing up. This might tie in well with Raymond Yee’s suggested mashup session, either as an example or as a follow-on. Raymond and I go way back.

This same service can also return HTML-formatted citations in all the major citation formats, so users of your local service can simply copy and paste the text into their paper.

We call it the WorldCat Basic API, and it is a machine view of WorldCat.org but without the journal articles (contractual obligations prevent us from making the journal article data available). I will have handouts on it if anyone is interested.

I will also be happy to find out how libraries can better serve the needs of tech-savvy humanists, which I can take back to OCLC Research where I work. With about 50  research scientists, program officers, and software engineers, we are the closest thing there is to a library Xerox PARC.