Tag: digital humanities

Posted on

The Occasional Mentor: On Computing Resources in Digital Humanities

THE OCCASIONAL MENTOR
A monthly-ish column based on questions I’ve answered on Quora, heard on Slack groups, and other career advice I’ve given over the prior month. Hope you like it, but feel free to challenge me in the comments, if you have a different experience. Below are questions I answered in July.

What Should I Learn About Computer Science for Studying History with Digital Humanities

Answered on July 25, 2018

I recommend visiting HASTAC.org. It is a group of academics and practitioners working in digital humanities. There are resources including local events, national conferences, blog posts, discussion lists and trainings.

You can look for digital humanities institutes and departments at local universities to see if they offer public programming. Many do. Where I live in NYC, Columbia and CUNY Graduate Center offer public programs. CUNY has an open access social media platform for digital humanities. Their digital humanities resource guide is pretty comprehensive: CUNY Academic Commons Wiki Archive.

I’ve seen some pretty interesting uses of text analysis, 3D printing and modeling to analyze historic texts and artifacts. Researchers at Rutgers used 3D imagery to scan Roman coins that they 3D printed. The scans offered a finer representation of the relief than the naked eye can see and the 3D prints (similar to photocopies of paper documents) allowed people to hold and examine the object without damaging the original. When I was in the Digital Humanities program at Pratt Institute School of Information I made a presentation on digital tools for archaeology. We learned about a professor at Indiana University who recreated an Ancient Greek archaeology site in Second Life, complete with a toga wearing avatar of himself as a guide. (I’ll add links if I can find them).

Text analytics and statistical/rendering software (like R) can help examine documents by displaying frequency of terms or associating phrases. Researchers have used these tools to render social networks or do sentiment analysis, for example one could study court decisions or news articles to see how action and opinion related to a social or political topic changes over time. Some basic Python, JSON and statistics are helpful.

Posted on

The Occasional Mentor: On Data Science in UX, Content Strategy vs UX Writing and the Durability of Digital Humanities

THE OCCASIONAL MENTOR
A monthly(ish) column based on questions I’ve answered on Quora, heard on Slack groups, and other career advice I’ve given over the prior month. Hope you like it, but feel free to challenge me in the comments, if you have a different experience. Below are questions I answered in June.

How are the user experience design and data science professions connected with each other?

June 6, 2018

According to Wikipedia:

“Data science is an interdisciplinary field that uses scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract knowledge and insights from data in various forms, both structured and unstructured, similar to data mining.”

A data scientist is a person who is skilled in quantitative research and can formulate a study, analyze the results and create reports to inform other people about the topic of study. They may work with spreadsheets, statistical programs, graphical interfaces, and programming languages like Python, Java, JSON, R, SQL, MATLAB, SAS, C and F#, among others. They may also work with text analysis software, geographic information systems (GIS) and visualization tools like Tableau and Gephi.

UX designers use the results of quantitative research, created by data scientists and UX researchers. The reports help the designers understand user behavior, based on data collected from digital product user logs, web analytics, or quantitative user research tests. These data may describe typical user paths and places where users tend to drop off or bounce away from the app. It could include the results of A/B tests, card sorts, heatmaps, user flow diagrams and demographic and conversion data.

UX designers may also use the output of data studies in the content of the products they are designing for. These studies would be relevant to the subject of the product, not user generated data. For example, an infographic or other visualization that illustrates aspects of the product: weather maps, income disparity charts, election results.

What is the difference between a content strategist and a UX writer?

June 6, 2018

A content strategist creates a plan for all of the company’s reusable content assets. This can include graphics, text, labels, photographs, charts, PDFs, videos, audio files, documentation, directories, etc. The content strategist creates policies and manages the programs that house and govern content. This could include inventory, storage, workflow and governance of content (such as who has access to what type of content, who is responsible for updating or archiving content, who can delete or create new content).

A UX writer prepares written content for use in any number of media, including advertising, apps and websites, video/audio/animation, PR, etc. with a focus on maintaining a consistent user experience across all channels. This can include articles, product descriptions, documentation, headings, headlines, labels, microcopy, essentially anything that needs to be written in words.

Is the digital humanities an enduring movement or a trend?

June 6, 2018

I think it will endure. Academics need to create original research. Digital projects and analysis represents an exciting way to discover new things about subjects that otherwise seem to be studied to death. Applied to art, literature, history and other subjects in the humanities, digital projects open up a whole frontier of analytics and visualization where computational study used to be rare. This can take the form of text analysis, network diagramming, geographic information systems, 3D printing and even the creation of virtual worlds.

Where it can hit a road block is the fact that people who pursue humanities don’t often have the skills or competence required to utilize computational tools in their research. This isn’t their fault, it just happens to be rare in humanities curricula. That is why many universities are investing in developing IT and library staff who have these skills.

Ultimately, schools will include more and more digital studies electives in humanities programs. So like art and art history programs now may include chemistry and material science in units on art preservation, and English departments will have more an more computer scientists on hand to help with digital humanities projects.

Posted on

Press Mentions: Beta Phi Mu Initiation Speech

New Initiates and Guest Speaker Noreen Y. Whysel

Noreen Whysel addressing the 2017 Initiation Class of Beta Phi Mu Theta at Pratt Institute School of Information

“A lovely Initiation Ceremony and Dessert Reception were hosted by the Beta Phi Mu Theta Chapter on May 17, 2017.

“Guest Speaker Noreen Y. Whysel (SILS ’14) gave a fantastic keynote speech, which she described below:

Dreams, Resilience and Making a Difference
Our goal as we embark on our journey as Pratt SILS graduates is to make a difference. Whether we leave Pratt to become a school librarian, a legal librarian, a UX designer, or an archivist, we stand as a gateway between a deluge of Information and the people we serve.

“Using an example of a proposed 9/11 geographic archive, Noreen Whysel explained how between our dreams and our goal of making a difference is resilience.”

The full talk transcript and presentation slides

Posted on

Data Detox: A Journey into My Digital Past

What Strange Wonderful Things Lurk in Your Digital Footprint?

While running a Data Detox, I came across a review of my 2016 DH Week Workshop, “Pinterest as Digital Exhibition” from Pratt student, Akaya Sato. 

This was interesting. I did the detox primarily in the hopes of reducing my data footprint. I knew I might find strange and potentially, dare I say, scandalous (or at least worrisome) information about myself that I didn’t want out there. Once upon a time a boss of mine informed me that my posts to a maternity forum and at least one post I made to a video game cheat code list were easily findable in a Yahoo! search. So yeah, pretty embarrassing. I certainly wasn’t expecting to find clues to a mini Noreen Whysel fandom. At the risk of expanding my data footprint ever so slightly, here’s a peek at Akaya’s review and some background.

For the workshop, I presented a set of Pinterest boards that I have been curating for the research group, Architecture_MPS. These boards focus on conferences and journal issues published by Architecture_MPS as well as topics the group covers, such as Housing – Critical Futures and the Mediated City. Additional boards cover events, exhibitions, books, films and political issues around architecture and related design.

“By providing these Pinterest boards, AMPS emphasizes collaboration with other institutions. With their contributions, many users, including architecture firms, can recognize the significance of AMPS and raise awareness about architecture. Institutions and nonprofit organizations utilizing social media advance the public awareness by collaborating and highlighting community engagements over the same field.”

I knew some of the attendees would be from the museum community so as an exercise, we created an example set from my MetIllumination project, covering devotional art represented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We explored many ways to document and annotate art objects by pinning links to articles, provenance records and other related materials that describe the artifacts and encourage discussion and sharing.

“Since many of the attendees were staff members from institutions and museums, the ‘Fire and Light: Illumination in Religious Art‘ website demonstrates a great example for archivists and librarians to utilize Pinterest and display visual images of the institutions ephemera.”

When I did the data detox, I expected to find things that needed to be removed, deleted or forgotten. I certainly wasn’t expecting to find a review of a small talk at a digital humanities event. In any event it was nice to find someone gleaned enough from my little workshop, that they posted a review for their fellow classmates. But it also made me wonder what else might be out there that is good, but hidden among my digital footprint.

So I kept looking and found a couple other things that I found delightful, including two published books where I was mentioned in acknowledgements, one that I knew about: Andrea Resmini and Luca Rosati’s book Pervasive Information Architecture, where I somehow made it above Bruce Springsteen (but below Richard Saul Wurman) in the thank yous. Quite an accomplishment. The second was Aaron Irizarry and Adam Connor’s Discussing Design, which I own and have read, but somehow missed my name being mentioned in the acknowledgements. (Thanks, Guys!)

I won’t tell you about the things I found that weren’t so delightful. I am working through the Data Detox advice to reduce the prominence of these items.

Have you done a data detox recently? What have you uncovered?

Read Akaya’s review: http://dh.prattsils.org/blog/resources/event-reviews/noreen-whysels-pinterest-as-an-exhibition-gallery-at-metropolitan-new-york-library-council-21016/

Pinterest as Digital Exhibition (DH Week slides, February 10, 2016): https://www.slideshare.net/nwhysel/dh-week-workshop-pinterest-as-exhibition

Pinterest as Digital Exhibition (IA Summit poster, May 7, 2016): https://www.slideshare.net/nwhysel/pinterest-as-digital-archive-ia-summit-2016-atlanta

Data Detox: https://myshadow.org/ckeditor_assets/attachments/189/datadetoxkit_optimized_01.pdf