Dan Cohen - Digital Humanities Blog

For the Thanksgiving Day Digital Campus podcast, Mills, Tom, and I covered a cornucopia of news, including  more on the Google Book Search settlement, some academic challenges to Google’s main search engine, some trouble in the virtual worlds (in a new segment, “We Told You So”), and the end of email service for students at Boston College. We also point the audience to a new site on place-based computing, a couple of easy (or bizarre) ways to write a book, and Processing, a programming language that’s useful in higher ed. An easily digested podcast for those still snacking on turkey leftovers. [Subscribe to this podcast.]

One of the more uncomfortable truths about digital humanities—indeed, likely one of the reasons for resistance to digital humanities among traditional scholars—is that design matters. Those of us who have chosen the life of the mind like to think that ideas and insights will find an audience and make an impact regardless of such superficial things as the vehicle those ideas and insights are communicated through. Design also smacks of marketing, which most professors consider unseemly.

But good design for a website, service, or tool means, as Roy Rosenzweig and I put it in Digital History, that your resource will be useful and used. Useful because your resource will be structured in such a way that a user will be able to fully explore and learn from it; used because the user will be drawn into the resource and highlight its existence to others.

Case in point: Here is the website of the Ringwood (New Jersey) Public Library:

A not atypical website for a local public library. And here is the Ringwood Public Library’s site about the history of Upper Ringwood:

The latter is powered by Omeka. Which of these would you rather spend time with?

Tom Scheinfeldt, co-director of the Omeka project along with Sharon Leon, shares the good news of a major upgrade to both the code and the website for the Center for History and New Media’s online collection and exhibit software on Omeka’s blog.

The new version of Omeka has an even easier way to build an exhibit, wrap it in a design theme, and extend your site with plugins. Improved documentation and user support will help you along the way. For developers and geeks, the revamped theme API and plugin API make it simple to extend Omeka, or you can get involved with the project in other ways. And the Omeka team is about to make it a snap to import digital objects from a variety of repositories and other software.

You can find all of this goodness on the beautiful new Omeka site (below). Congrats to the hard-working Omeka team: Tom, Sharon, Jeremy Boggs, Jim Safley, Kris Kelly, Sheila Brennan, Dave Lester, and Ken Albers.

THATCamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp), which brings together scholars, librarians, curators, technologists, and developers for a two-day “unconference” that interactively explores the cutting edge of the digital humanities, was such a success this year that we’re bringing it back in 2009. Better yet, we are pairing it with the Digital Humanities 2009 conference being run by our friends on the other side of the Washington beltway, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. THATCamp 2009 will immediately follow DH2009 on June 27-28, 2008. Stay tuned to the THATCamp site for a more formal announcement and application guidelines.

I’m delighted to announce that the Center for History and New Media, along with the Stanford History Education Group, has won the 2008 James Harvey Robinson Prize for Historical Thinking Matters. This prize, awarded by the American Historical Association, is offered biennially for the teaching aid that has made the most outstanding contribution to the teaching of history in any field.

CHNM is humbled by this award, especially since it is our third straight Robinson Prize. Our prior winning projects are History Matters and World History Matters. (For a History Matters franchise near you, contact us.)

Congratulations go out to our collaborators from Stanford, including Sam Wineburg and Daisy Martin, and to the CHNM team that did such a terrific job on the site: Sharon Leon, Mike O’Malley, Jeremy Boggs, Stephanie Hurter, Josh Greenberg, Rikk Mulligan, Meagan Hess, and Ammon Shepherd.

After an unplanned month off (our apologies, things have been more than a little busy around here), the Digital Campus podcast triumphantly returns to the airwaves with a discussion of the recent Google Book Search settlement. Also up for analysis are Microsoft’s move to the cloud, the new Google phone, and, as always, recommendations from Tom, Mills, and me about helpful sites, tools, and publications. [Subscribe to this podcast.]

Zotero project Co-Director Sean Takats has the scoop on some great new features of the just-released update to Zotero 1.5 Sync Preview over on his delightfully named blog, The Quintessence of Ham.

George Mason University has just released an official statement about the Thomson Reuters lawsuit over the Center for History and New Media’s Zotero, an open source competitor to TR’s EndNote:

The Thomson Reuters Corporation has sued the Commonwealth of Virginia over Zotero, a project based at George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media (CHNM). A free and open-source software initiative, Zotero aims to create the world’s best research tool and has already been adopted by hundreds of thousands of users at countless colleges and research universities. CHNM announces that it has re-released the full functionality of Zotero 1.5 Sync Preview to its users and the open source community. As part of its formal response to this legal action, Mason will also not renew its site license for EndNote.

As academics themselves, the creators of the Zotero project strive to serve the scholarly community and to respond to its needs in an age of digital research. In line with that simple goal, they maintain that anything created by users of Zotero belongs to those users, and that it should be as easy as possible for Zotero users to move to and from the software as they wish, without friction. CHNM concurs with the journal Nature, which recently editorialized about this matter: “The virtues of interoperability and easy data-sharing among researchers are worth restating.”

CHNM remains committed to the openness it has promoted since its founding at Mason in 1994 and to the freedoms of users of its websites and software. Its ambitious development cycle and plans for Zotero’s future remain unchanged. CHNM will continue to develop and implement new research technologies in the pursuit of better ways to create and share scholarship. CHNM greatly appreciates the many supportive comments it has received from scholars, librarians, and administrators around the globe.

Just announced is the settlement of the class action lawsuit that the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and individual authors and publishers filed against Google for its Book Search program, which has been digitizing millions of books from libraries. (Hard to believe, but the lawsuit was first covered on this blog all the way back in November 2005.) Undoubtedly this agreement is a critical one not only for Google and the authors and publishers, but for all of us in academia and others who care about the present and future of learning and scholarship.

It will obviously take some time to digest this agreement; indeed, the Google post on it is fairly sketchy and we still need to hear details, such as the cost structure for full access the agreement now provides for. But my first impressions of some key points:

The agreement really focuses on in-copyright but out-of-print books. That is, books that can’t normally be copied but also can’t be purchased anywhere. Highlighting these books (which are numerous; most academic books, e.g., are out-of-print and have virtually no market) was smart for Google since it seems to provide value without stepping on publishers’ toes.

A second (also smart, but probably more controversial) focus is on access to the Google Books collection via libraries:

We’ll also be offering libraries, universities and other organizations the ability to purchase institutional subscriptions, which will give users access to the complete text of millions of titles while compensating authors and publishers for the service. Students and researchers will have access to an electronic library that combines the collections from many of the top universities across the country. Public and university libraries in the U.S. will also be able to offer terminals where readers can access the full text of millions of out-of-print books for free.

Again, we need to hear more details about this part of the agreement. We also need to begin thinking about how this will impact libraries, e.g., in terms of their own book acquisition plans and their subscriptions to other online databases.

Finally, and perhaps most interesting and surprising to those of us in the digital humanities, is an all-too-brief mention of computational access to these millions of books:

In addition to the institutional subscriptions and the free public access terminals, the agreement also creates opportunities for researchers to study the millions of volumes in the Book Search index. Academics will be able to apply through an institution to run computational queries through the index without actually reading individual books.

For years in this space I have been arguing for the necessity of such access (first envisioned, to give due credit, by Cliff Lynch of CNI). Inside Google they have methods for querying and analyzing these books that we academics could greatly benefit from, and that could enable new kinds of digital scholarship.

Update: The Association of American Publishers now has a page answering frequently asked questions about the agreement (have we had time to ask?).

Louis Rosenfeld, co-author of the enormously helpful Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, may be right—emotionally, at least—that “web redesign must die.” Anyone who has ever been involved with a redesign of a major website knows that it is a painful and long process, full of compromises.

But a redesign is often more than just a new coat of paint. It can be a time to reassess or reassert the mission of an institution, prioritize projects and features, and look to the future.

At the Center for History and New Media we have recently officially launched the fourth major design of our site in our fourteen-year history, thanks to the hard work of our design team, led by Jeremy Boggs, the information architecture and conceptualization led by Connie Sehat (who is now the Director of Digital Scholarship at Emory), and the oversight of CHNM’s Director of Public Projects, Sharon Leon. At the beginning of 2001, when I arrived at CHNM, our home page looked like this:

Since then we’ve grown ten-fold, adding dozens of employees and many new projects and initiatives, while going through a couple of site redesigns. We used to joke about having “divisions,” back when each employee was their own “division”; now we truly have divisions, i.e., units focusing on education, public history and collections, and research, scholarship, and software, although staff often float between these areas. Our latest design reflects this more lucid view of our own organization, and tries to better project all of the things going on under our roof without seeming cluttered:

I’m not looking forward to the next redesign. But now that it’s done, I’m really glad we did this one.

From CHNM’s Dave Lester, one of founders of THATCamp: The Humanities and Technology Camp, comes WordCamp Ed:

WordCamp conferences are taking the blogging community by storm as one-day events to meet fellow WordPress users in regional communities. WordCamp Ed has been organized to specifically focus on WordPress and Education. The day-long event to take place November 22, 2008, and will bring together a wide-range of institutions of higher-ed, professors, high school teachers, and students.

WordCamp Ed will be hosted at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, and is co-sponsored by the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship at Georgetown University.

Dave and many others, including CHNM’s Jeremy Boggs, have been hacking and creating plugins for the open-source WordPress blogging platform for some time now. This seems like a great opportunity to see what others are doing and to exchange knowledge and ideas.

The second day of the “Digital Humanities and the Disciplines” conference at Rutgers was so full of thought-provoking talks and conversation that it’s taken me a few days to digest it. The highlights:

Chris Kelty (who has recently moved to UCLA’s Department of Information Studies) gave a talk about his book Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software. After providing an excellent history of software from the origins of Unix to Richard Stallman, Kelty, who is an anthropologist by training, argued quite persuasively that free software is far more than a technical movement. In Kelty’s words, free software “creates a public” around the software project, a civic notion that relates directly to the arguments about the public sphere that have permeated academic thinking for the last two decades. Free software is thus important not only for its functionality and its freedom, but also because for a lot of people it creates a consciousness of and participation in the public sphere—and it gives them a set of practices for bringing about that public sphere.

Classicist Greg Crane of Tufts and Perseus fame spoke of many aspects of “Humanities in a Digital Age.” Perhaps his most intriguing point—one echoed by others during the conference—was that the digital humanities allow for a far wider participation in the process and products of scholarship than in the age of paper. Crane fascinated the audience by showing how his undergraduates actually contribute to, not just read about, classics, by adding to a “treebank,” or linguistic database and concordance that Crane and others are building. In other words, in a digital age classics need not be the sole province of the Great Professor/Editor of volumes of Greek and Latin. Crane also spoke of the enormous potential of automated translation and large-scale computational analysis to address complex questions such as the influence of Plato on the Islamic world, a topic that requires language skills and a breadth of reading that few professors, if any, possess.

Martha Nell Smith of the University of Maryland and the founder of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities then shook up the room with her challenging talk, “Enclaves: Perils and Possibilities.” Despite being a promoter of the digital humanities, Smith thought it was important for those in the field to be self-critical. She worried that, as Cass Sunstein pointed out in Republic.com, we might be talking too much amongst ourselves, without competing perspectives. We’ve gotten too swept up with what our technology can do, rather than what the humanities can do. And we need to let critical thought, such as feminist analysis, unsettle the way that the digital humanities has been proceeding. Smith’s talk unsurprisingly touched off a vibrant discussion; thanks to my followers on Twitter for sending me additional comments that I could feed into that discussion. To be honest, I think that much of what Smith was looking for in the digital humanities—e.g., the importance of bringing together divergent views and democratizing the process of authoring and editing a text—has already been factored in, or certainly been factored in far more than in the analog world. After all, this is the medium that gave us Wikipedia. But Smith’s overall point is well-taken; any new field must engage in serious self-criticism. Frankly, this has been an often unmentioned problem with the digital humanities.

David Jaffee of the Bard Graduate Center wrapped up the proceedings with his talk on “Thinking Visually with Historians: The Challenge of New Media for History.” He noted that we tend to forget that visual materials were used in the classroom even before the digital age. The digital age has accelerated the use of such material, but we still haven’t really thought about effective ways to turn the visual into understanding, regardless of the technology. Jaffee argued that we need to think in terms of learning modules rather than slides—i.e., we can’t just put visual material out there and think that students will comprehend what to do with it. He then showed some terrific projects he’s worked on, including the forthcoming Picturing U.S. History.

Aside from a talk from yours truly on new directions in digital history, the first day of the “Digital Humanities and the Disciplines” conference at Rutgers featured a talk by Hilary Ballon entitled “Rethinking the Journal in Multimedia.” Ballon is the Associate Vice Chancellor at New York University and the editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.

She spoke about the complexities of prototyping a new media version of the JSAH. If any field in the humanities could benefit from moving from paper to the web, it is architectural history. The SAH has always been restrained by paper: color images were too expensive for the journal, not to mention the possibilities of dynamic media like video or 3D models. So for the JSAH, the move online will be liberating and possibly even transformative.

The prototype Ballon showed us has an embedded media viewer and a sidebar with all images and architectural plans referenced in the article, so you can jump back and forth from the narrative to the visual evidence. Unlike images in the paper journal, you can also pan and zoom to closely examine the evidence. The prototype also permits linking to external software such as Google Earth (for situating buildings in space).

Beyond the prototype, Ballon made several interesting points about the way in which new media might change the practice of architectural history. She noted that the rise of the slide projector in the early twentieth century not only changed pedagogy in her field, but also led to the centrality of certain formats—specifically, the side-by-side comparison. The 3D models she showed in the JSAH prototype suggest that architectural historians can now do more with the visitor’s experience of a building versus the prior overriding interest in the architect’s vision for the building. (Note here the parallel with the discussion in literary studies about the balance of power between the author and reader.)

Moreover, new media might allow the JSAH to cover and review forms of scholarship beyond the monograph and article. For example, exhibitions by architectural historians are often overlooked even though they are serious scholarly work. JSAH does currently review exhibitions, but not that many and these reviews are often published after the exhibition has closed because of the long time lag in paper publication. The JSAH hopes that web publication will narrow this gap while also allowing new media recreations of the exhibitions so others can witness them.

On Thursday and Friday, October 2-3, 2008 (that is, starting tomorrow, if you’re reading this immediately from my feed) I’ll be at Rutgers University for the conference “Digital Humanities and the Disciplines,” sponsored by the Center for Cultural Analysis. If you’re in the area, please stop by—the conference is open to the public. If I can find some wifi I’ll also do my best to blog the conference and send brief updates via my Twitter feed (which I’ve been neglecting lately; sorry, been a little busy).

No, not that other news.

For those using Zotero 1.5, you can now browse your Zotero library on your iPhone or iPod Touch. (Or from any web browser on a computer or phone.)

Just another way that the Zotero project keeps innovating to serve the academic community. And in case you missed it, we’ve also released over 1000 new bibliographic styles in the open CSL format and now have support for file syncing across computers. To stay up-to-date with all of the exciting Zotero news, subscribe to our blog.

On this episode of the podcast we discuss whether “digital natives,” those teens and twentysomethings who are supposed to understand and use digital technology intuitively, really exist. We also cover Google’s latest digitization project (this time of newspapers), the publishing lobby’s attempt to close NIH’s open access research portal, and two new foundations to support good things on the web. [Subscribe to this podcast.]

Back in January of this year I mentioned in this space that I was participating in an online discussion on digital history for the Journal of American History. That discussion has just been published in the September 2008 issue under the title “The Promise of Digital History.” The discussion ended up being extremely wide-ranging, including research possibilities in the digital age, the future of scholarly communication, training, and teaching. I’m obviously biased since I’m one of the interlocutors, but I believe the article is the perfect introduction to digital history for those who are new to the subject, and it also includes some important debates about where the field is headed. The article is available online at the History Cooperative, which is, alas, gated. Open access is another topic discussed in the article; I hope the JAH will make the article freely available soon.

Many thanks to the seven other digital historians—Bill Turkel, Will Thomas, Amy Murrell Taylor, Patrick Gallagher, Michael Frisch, Kristen Sword, and Steven Mintz—who participated in such a lively exchange!

On our first podcast of the school year, Bryan Alexander, the Director of Research of NITLE, joins us. Bryan closely follows emerging trends in academic technology on his terrific blog, and he lets us know what he thinks the critical trends are for the coming year. Google’s new web browser, Chrome, is the main topic in the news roundup as we try to figure out what impact it will have on academic web design and application development. A wide-ranging podcast covering the web, mobile technology, ebooks, virtual reality and much more. Join us for another year of Digital Campus! [Subscribe to this podcast.]

Looks like another great series of talks at the home of our friends on the other side of the beltway, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. I’m going to try to catch at least a couple of these “digital dialogues.”

We were lucky to be joined this summer by Adam Crymble, a graduate student in history at the University of Western Ontario. And we were doubly lucky since he worked hard to make Zotero compatible with Canadian resources that were not previously compatible. Adam reports the results of his efforts on his blog, which should make Zotero even more attractive to Canadian academics—as well as anyone using the important databases and repositories he worked on. Thanks, Adam!