The MLA has released its long-awaited guidelines for evaluating digital scholarship: http://www.mla.org/guidelines_evaluation_digital
The following guidelines are designed to help departments and faculty members implement effective evaluation procedures for hiring, reappointment, tenure, and promotion. They apply to scholars working with digital media as their subject matter and to those who use digital methods or whose work takes digital form.
My Research Assistant, Kaarina Mikalson, has just posted a lovely blog piece on copyright over at the EMiC blog. She shares some great resources with the community (especially for Canadian scholars): http://editingmodernism.ca/2012/04/fun-with-copyright/
You’ll note there isn’t a lot of activity on my blog at the moment, but this isn’t to say that there isn’t a lot going on at EMiC. I’ve been spending some time at the University of Prince Edward Island researching and learning the Islandora Digital Asset Management system for the EMiC Digital Humanities suite.
There’s some exciting news about the DH suite that we will unveil at this year’s Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Victoria. Susan Brown’s CWRC team has been at work building the CWRCwriter, a browser-based TEI editor with an easy-to-use interface. We’re exploring how to wrap this powerful Javascript tool in Islandora’s Drupal framework so that EMiC scholars can create and edit TEI documents directly in the browser. This will also provide teachers a powerful tool in the teaching of TEI in the classroom.
I’m also preparing a Modernism and Digital Humanities course for the winter term at Dalhousie. We’ve got quite a waiting-list, which indicates to me the desire of our students to engage with literature in online environments. While prepping for the class, I came across Anouk Lang’s DH course at the University of Strathclyde. What impresses me most about this particular syllabus are the learning outcomes of the course:
By the end of the class, you should
- be able to articulate some of the benefits and the drawbacks of using digital tools to approach literary analysis and humanistic study more generally
- be able to situate developments in digital technology of the past several decades within the broader historical context of textual technologies, extending back to the printing press
- possess a working knowledge of a collection of digital tools that you can use to help you in your studies
- be able to critically interrogate the way you use the internet to get information, produce content and interact with others
- have attained a high degree of digital literacy, including the ability to critically evaluate online sources and navigate efficiently through large amounts of information
Transferable skills that you should develop
- the ability to express yourself across a range of written genres (eg. informative prose suitable for an encyclopedia entry; scholarly argument; writing appropriate to informal online discussions)
- the capacity to critically evaluate information
- a range of IT skills (including basic HTML, text mining applications, georeferencing applications, organising information using tags, using a blogging platform such as WordPress, and learning Boolean search terms)
- the ability to work with others in a digital environment (through collaborative activities such as co-constructing a document)
This encapsulates the power of DH in the classroom, where we can teach our students the literacies of paper and screen and prepare them for 21st-century reading and work environments.
Originally posted on 24 Sept. 2011 at EMiC
I have been a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with Editing Modernism in Canada for just over a year now, so it gives me great pleasure at this midpoint in my position to announce two major partnership agreements signed last week. First, EMiC has finalized it contract with Islandora at the University of Prince Edward Island to build our very own Digital Humanities module. Second, EMiC has partnered with another DH project with which I am involved: The Modernist Versions Project. Both partnerships promise to provide resources, training, and infrastructure not only EMiC scholars, but to the DH community as a whole.
1. Integrated Digital Humanities Environments: Islandora
Anyone who has been in DH for a while knows that there is a long history of tool-creation for our scholarly endeavours. Some of these projects have been successful (The Versioning Machine, Omeka, etc.), and some, unfortunately, have not. One “problem” we face as DH’ers is that there is simply so much to do. Some of us are interested in visualization software and network relations (Proust Archive), some are interested in preserving disintegrating archives (Modernist Journals Project), and others of us are firmly rooted in TEI and textual markup. Moreover, with the growth of GIS software, mapping texts has become a great way to have students interact with texts in spatial terms and to communicate with a non-academic public using a language most of us are familiar with: maps.
But what happens in DH when we move into the classroom?
I recently read a stunning syllabus created by Brian Croxall at Emory University, in which he provides his students with a solid (and diverse) introduction to the Digital Humanities. But one thing researchers and teachers like Brian, or any other DH’er faces, is providing students integrated learning environments where they can edit texts in a common repository AND have all the tools they need at their disposal in the browser. If you want to teach TEI right now, you have to buy Oxygen (a life-saving program when it comes to XML markup); For versioning, you must install Juxta or The Versioning Machine. For publication/exhibition you must install Omeka. But what if we had ALL of those things in one learning environment, in one common and open system? This is what we’re trying to accomplish with the EMiC Digital Humanities Sprout.
EMiC Digital Humanities Sprout
An issue EMiC faces in providing tools for our researchers is the sheer diversity of work being undertaken right now by EMiC scholars who have varying levels of experience with digital environments. EMiC needed to find a way to allow its members to preserve, edit, and publish digital editions of archival material in an intuitive way; moreover, we wanted to make to sure our archival practices conformed to international standards. Moreover, most of us are teachers too. How do we teach our students what we are doing in our research? Enter Islandora.
Islandora
Nine months ago, I Googled the phrase “TEI, ABBYY, XSLT” on a whim (actually, I was being lazy: I was looking for an XSLT sheet that would transform ABBYY HTML to simple TEI). The first result listed was a page from the University of Prince Edward Island—just down the road so-to-speak. Not knowing much about Prince Edward Island outside of L. M. Montgomery, I keep browsing, and to my amazement, found that the library at UPEI had created a project called “Island Lives,” a resource developed using the home-grown Islandora digital repository. Mark Leggott, Donald Moses, and others, had built precisely what I was looking for: a digital asset management system using a Fedora Commons repository wrapped in Drupal shell. Islandora allows users to easily upload an image of text to its database, edit that image (TEI), and then “publish” a complete text (book, pamphlet, etc.) to the web. Dean Irvine and I realized that if we could expand this system to fit EMiC’s needs, we could create a Digital Humanities module that would serve our members perfectly. We decided to focus on the core issues facing EMiC editors: Ingestion (including OCR based on Tesseract), Image Markup, TEI editing, Versioning, and Publication (for the full list of what we’re building, see below*). Moreover, Islandora is tested and true and is being used by NASA, the Smithsonian, among many other institutions.
Thank You, DH.
We have years of successful work to emulate for this DH module. And just as the DH community has given to us, we expect the give back to the DH community by keeping the DH module open to use. Yes, we plan on creating an EMiC/Islandora DH install that you can download and use in your classrooms.
If you’re interested in what we’re building, please email Dean Irvine or Matt Huculak with your questions.
As part of this initiative, I have moved to Prince Edward Island to work with the Islandora crew as we develop this module. There’s some other news about what I’ll be digitizing there to “test” our system—but you’ll have to wait to hear about that. In the meantime, we are planning unveiling our functioning module at DHSI2012.
2. Modernist Versions Project
If you haven’t been to the Digital Humanities Summer Institute hosted by Ray Seimens at the University of Victoria, do plan on going! It is an incredible week of DH training, and it is one of the most memorable “unconferences” I have ever attended. One wonderful result of this year’s camp was the creation of the Modernist Versions Project (MVP), an international initiative to provide online resources for the editing and display of multiple witnesses of modernist texts. In what was truly a conversation over coffee, Stephen Ross shared with me his desire to create the MVP. Having served the Modernist Journals Project (MJP) at the University of Tulsa and Brown University for over six years, I said, “Stephen, let’s do this!” And we did. With the help of James Gifford, Jentery Sayers, and Tanya Clement (who along with Stephen and I serve as the Board of the MVP), we have secured tremendous support for a major SSHRC application this fall. The MVP promises to be an important project in the field of Digital Humanities and modernism.
But what does this have to do with EMiC?
I am impressed by two aspects of EMiC. First, the recovery of modernist Canadian texts in our project is truly spectacular. Second, the training EMiC facilitates at the University of Alberta, Dalhousie University, The University of Victoria, and Trent University (among many other institutions) is edifying. Just look at our graduate student editors who are engaged in serious textual editing projects across Canada: http://editingmodernism.ca/about-us/. We are really building the future of Canadian studies here.
As an international scholar, I am concerned, like many of you, with the networking of Canadian modernism across the globe. How does Canadian modernism fit into the greater narrative of modernity across the world? (this is a topic we’ll be exploring in Paris 2012: http://editingmodernism.ca/events/sorbonne-nouvelle/).
The Modernist Versions Project is one way of creating networks of modernist textual criticism and production across the world; that is, the MVP is interested in the editing and visualization of multiple textual witnesses no matter where those witnesses were created. Though located in Canada, the MVP’s scope is much larger, and EMiC’s partnership with the MVP will allow EMiC scholars interested in “versioning” to use MVP resources as they are developed. The MVP has already developed partnerships with the Modernism Lab at Yale University, Modernist Networks at Chicago, and NINES, which is letting us use and develop their Juxta software for periodicals and books.
Dean Irvine has been very generous in allocating my Postdoctoral hours towards the formation of the MVP. Once again, EMiC is nurturing young projects and helping create a truly global network of digital modernist studies. And I think I’ll end on this note: EMiC’s primary focus has been collaboration: collaboration among peers, and now collaboration among projects. And by collaborating with other projects around the world, we hope to create tools that will last, be useful, and really change the face of modernist studies.
Welcome to EMiC. Let’s go build something.
*Details of the EMiC Digital Humanities Sprout
Existing Islandora Code
1. Islandora Core
a. Integration with the Fedora repository and Drupal CMS
b. Islandora Book Workflow
c. Islandora Audio/Video
d. Islandora Scholarly Citations
New/Enhanced Functionality for the EMiC Module
1. Smart Ingest
a. Use open source Tesseract OCR engine
b. Integration of TIKA
2. Image Markup Tool
Proofs of concept and models:
Image Markup Tool (IMT)
Text-Image Linking Environment (TILE)
3. TEI Editor
Proofs of concept and models:
Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC) – CWRC Writer
Humanities Research Infrastructure and Tools (HRIT) – Editor
4. Collation Tool
Proofs of concept and models for development:
5. Version Visualization Tool
Proofs of concept and models:
On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces
6. Dynamic Version Viewer
Models:
Hypercities database: Transparent layers interface
7. Digital Collection Visualization Tool
Proof of concept:
http://english.uvic.ca/newsandevents/partnership_agreement.html
“Modernist Versions Project Partnership
The Modernist Versions Project (MVP) is delighted to announce that it has signed a Partnership Agreement with Islandora/DiscoveryGarden. The Agreement provides the MVP with substantial resources and support for its objective to build an integrated digital environment for collating and comparing modernist texts that exist in multiple variants. With this Agreement, the MVP becomes one of the most exciting and innovative projects in the Digital Humanities.
The MVP is based at UVic, and is co-directed by Stephen Ross (UVic), Jentery Sayers (UVic), James Gifford (Fairleigh Dickinson University) and J. Matthew Huculak (Dalhousie University). Islandora/DiscoveryGarden is a spin-off company from the University of Prince Edward Island. Islandora is an open-source software program that allows for ingestion and mark-up of digital or digitized texts. DiscoveryGarden is an open source software provider that provides services surrounding Islandora software. Islandora/DiscoveryGarden counts among its clients the Smithsonian Institute, Oakridge Labs (US Department of Energy and NASA), Berkeley Labs, and the Universities of California (Los Angeles), Manitoba, South Carolina, and Pittsburgh.
The Partnership was enabled in substantial part by MVP’s affiliation with Editing Modernism in Canada. This Partnership Agreement consolidates the support the MVP already receives from the Electronic and Textual Cultures Lab at UVic, directed by Ray Siemens.”
On June 9, 2010, Wired.com ran a story announcing the intention of DARPA, the experimental research arm of the United States Department of Defense, to create “mission planning software” based on the popular tax-filing software, Turbotax.
What fascinated the DoD was that Turbotax “encoded” a high level of knowledge expertise into its software allowing people with “limited knowledge of [the] tax code” to negotiate successfully the complex tax-filing process that “would otherwise require an expert-level” of training (Shachtman). DARPA wanted to bring the power of complex “mission planning” to the average solider who might not have enough time/expertise to make the best decision possible for the mission.
I start with this example to show that arcane realms of expertise, such as the U.S. Tax Code, can be made accessible to the general public through sound interface design and careful planning. This is especially pertinent to Digital Humanities scholars who do not always have the computer-science training of other disciplines but still rely on databases, repositories, and other computer-mediated environments to do their work. This usually means that humanities scholars spend hours having awkward phone conversations with technical support or avoid computer-mediated environments altogether. [read more...]
Matt Huculak and Emily Ballantyne will be presenting a paper on Canada’s first avant-garde periodical, Le Nigog, the Congress of Social Sciences and Humanities in May.
