digital humanities

“Are you a math person? You look like a math person.”

shrouta

Having submitted my dissertation for review, I find myself with some time on my hands.  While many people have suggested that this would be an opportune moment to relax my father, who is also an academic, suggested that it merely freed up time to begin new projects! Write articles! Learn new skills!  Having taken one morning off this week to drink cocoa and read a novel, I think I’m all done relaxing and ready to get started.

A few years ago, after a thrilling session on network analysis at the AHA, I decided that I was going to teach myself network analysis.  That, much like undergraduate attempts in stat classes on linear regression analysis populated by econ majors, didn’t go quite as planned, and I mostly gave up and began to rely in IBM’s online ManyEyes software, which produces nice, if slightly clunky visual representations of data.  But just yesterday, I received notice of Indiana University’s free MOOC on information visualization (referred to as IVMOOC, which is really quite fun to say), which is offered just when I need something to occupy my time/keep me from compulsively re-editing a document I’ve already turned in.  The preliminary survey for the course suggests that it’s mostly geared towards people who already have data-driven backgrounds, so for the next eight weeks, I expect to feel much like I did when confronted with Chi-squared problems in my senior year of college – completely over my head, but having loads of fun.

At the same time, I also hope to get acquainted with the open source Quantum GIS software, which seems like it would be a pretty nifty way to deal with the map-making problems I’ve been confronting recently.

Also revising one article.  Also writing another article about the movement of information in the mid-nineteenth century, which hopefully utilizes some of what I’ve picked up from IVMOOC and Quantum GIS.

At any rate, the enthusiasm made possible by my new-found time must have been obvious to the woman sitting next to me during my novel-reading/cocoa-drinking morning off.  As she got up from her seat next to me at the cafe, she turned and said “Are you a math person?  You look like a math person.”  We’ll see.

Quick note on breakfast cereal

shrouta

I love playing around with the idea of realizing different projects in different genres – exemplified for me, by Douglas Adams’ quip about starting a new project:

People wanted me to do a CD-ROM of Hitchhiker’s, and I thought, “no, no.” I didn’t want to just sort of reverse-engineer yet another thing from a book I’d already written. I think that the digital media are interesting enough in their own right to be worth originating something in. Because, really, the moment you have any idea, the second thought that enters your mind after the original idea is, “What is this? Is it a book, is it a movie, is it a this, is it a that, is it a short story, is it a breakfast cereal?” Really, from that moment, your decision about what kind of thing it is then determines how it develops. So something will be very, very different if it’s developed as a CD-ROM than if it’s developed as a book. (From an interview with the Onion AV club, reprinted in The Salmon of Doubt)

Well, the playwright Lucy Prebble just published a piece on the New York Times‘ ArtsBeat blog about gaming and narrative and form and argument.  It’s quite good.

Quick note: “Snow Fall”

shrouta

The New York Times has been pushing “Snow Fall,” a multimedia article about the February 2012 avalanche in the Cascade Mountains.  It’s a six part story, much like one of the NYT Magazine‘s feature articles, but supplemented with video interviews, interactive maps, and other material designed to bring the story to life.  It takes some time to get through, but is, I think, worth getting into, because it seems like one direction that newspapers might take in this “digital age” of reduced print circulation.

That being said, I’m not convinced that the story really needed all of the bells and whistles.  The story itself – of 16 professional or semi-professional skiers caught in an avalanche – is compelling enough on its own.  Interviews with survivors are heart-wrenching, but for me the most difficult part of the piece was the narrative reconstruction of the victims’ loved ones’ reactions.  Many people are familiar with print analogues to stories like these – the Magazine’s story last week about Barney’s, for example – which could be augmented with digital material, and I suppose there’s an argument that says that the more information included, in as many different mediums as possible, the better.  And some parts of “Snowfall” worked really well.  As you read each part, the text scrolls over background images – in some cases of snow, in others of trees destroyed by the avalanche, and, perhaps most effectively, over maps which highlight the position of the skier being discussed at the moment.  But in other places, the information feels superfluous, or not fully integrated – digital content for the sake of novelty, rather than for the sake of telling a better story.

I hope to see more of this kind of thing from the Times, because I think that it charts some rich terrain for the future of journalism (and I’d frankly love to play around with something like this for history writing).  I also have to wonder whether some kinds of stories are suited to this treatment more than others.  Because I’m a disaster studies nerd, I did find myself thinking that disasters are particularly well-suited to these kinds of pieces (I was actually reminded a couple of times of the “Murder on Beacon Hill” documentary and app – which, if you live in or near Boston, is really worth checking out).  Disasters (or in the case of the Beacon Hill piece, murders) often feature a discrete cast of characters, a series of events easily fit into narrative form, and take place in a limited enough space to make things like maps useful.  I’d really love to see the “Snowfall” treatment applied to a more data-driven story though, because I think a lot of great work has been done recently with visual and interactive representations of information that could really enhance readers’/viewers’ experience of a story.

Maps, maps and maps

shrouta

I’ve been playing around with a data set of 95 donors whose names were published in the Charleston Mercury and Charleston Courier.  I’m a data/census nerd, so there’s a lot of fun to be had with lists like these.  So now I’ve got this database that tracks where donors lived, how much property they held, what jobs they held and how many enslaved people they owned.  I’ve been plotting the donations with google maps, which is fine for showing just how widely appeals circulated, but doesn’t really do much else for visually describing the data.
[googlemaps https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&msid=214677819635357292007.0004d08361291f904d1c3&ie=UTF8&ll=34.016263,-82.283671&spn=3.169364,6.305034&t=m&output=embed&w=425&h=350]
I’d love to do something more with this – either plotting the data on an older map, or figuring out some way to code the markers to indicate amount of donation, or slaveholding/non-slaveholding, or profession.  A few years ago, after an AHA panel on network analysis, I decided that I was going to learn to code network diagrams over winter break.  I’ve similar aspirations for learning GIS, but I’m not holding out hope for it being an easy, or quickly doable task.

“Teaching with technology”

shrouta

The NYU teaching workshop last week was all about teaching with technology, and while we talked a lot about the pros and cons of online teaching, we didn’t really move beyond blogs/blackboards as teaching tools.  I’m relatively new to teaching with online components – this semester is the first time I’m using a blog for student posts instead of blackboard – but I’ve been thinking about how to change some of my standard classroom exercises to include online components.

First, the blog.  I should say that I hate Blackboard, which is what both NYU and the U(C) used.  The message boards are clunky, threads are hard to follow, and the interface is so user unfriendly as to be non-intuitive.  This term, I’m trying a wordpress site for student responses, and so far its working pretty well.  I’m asking students to read each others’ posts before class, to link back in their own responses, and to tag each post with three or four key ideas.  I’ve also been pretty upfront with them about the pedagogical intentions of these tasks – this is all new ground for me, but so far I’m pleased with the results.  I think some of them are skeptical of something from “their” world – blogging – being used in academia, but they all seem pretty game to try.

Now, other social media.  This is a pretty unformed idea, but on Friday I was following the live tweet of Agatha Christie’s The Body in the Library.  Now, as a murder mystery fan, I was thrilled with this project – especially how the tweeters (twitterers?) adapted the voice of Miss Marple.  I’ve seen similar approaches to history, like the now infamous (among historians, at least) Facebook news feed of the Hundred Years War.  I’m also a really big fan of this series of youtube videos explaining historial events/eras.  I know some teachers who have their students put together their own historical videos – which I think is a great way of engaging students who are interested in history, but who aren’t necessarily equipped or inclined to write research papers, but I was thinking about how these live tweeted/facebooked events might translate into a classroom setting as well.  One of the exercises I’ve been playing around with recently is something I borrowed from my exams at Trinity.  We were asked to argue for or against certain major events (the Easter Rising, the Battle of the Boyne, the siege of Limerick) as turning points in Irish history.  I really like the idea of having students do something similar at the start and end of the class – identifying what they think are turning points in the history of the United States, the Atlantic World, or American immigration.  The idea is that at the start of the class, this exercise gives me a baseline for student knowledge, and by the end, they’ll be able to use the designation of turning points as a way to make arguments about their interpretation of American history.  I think it might be fun to combine that with the live tweet history/facebook news wall meme.  I’m all for encouraging students to get creative with their relationship with history, and I think it would be really interesting to see how students characterized historical actors in the parlance of the present.

From the AHA

shrouta

I was at the AHA in Boston this weekend, and was able to meet/talk to/listen to a lot of people who are doing really innovative things in historical research and teaching.  I like to treat big conferences like this as an opportunity to think about methods, more than about new findings or interpretations, and the AHA planning committee made this particularly easy by including many many panels on teaching and pedagogy.  I am still sifting through all that I heard from those, and a whole other chunk of my brain is devoted to parsing what I saw on social network theory, so some more in-depth thoughts on both of those will come later.  I do want to play around with some ideas that came out of the coincidence of those teaching panels, some others on the uses of narrative and “reading against the grain” in historical scholarship, and a video podcast walking tour that I stumbled across while looking for something to do in Boston over a particularly long lunch break.

Murder on Beacon Hill is both an iphone app and video podcast, made by the creators of the documentary Murder at Harvard, which is about the murder of George Parkman by John Webster, a Harvard doctor.  The murder and subsequent trial have turned up a lot in my own research, because they were widely reported in both the New York and the Cherokee press in 1849-50.  I had idly wondered who this Webster was that papers kept referencing, but I put it largely out of my mind because the case seemed to have no relevance to Irish famine reportage and relief.  I am a big fan of podcasted walking tours, and also of murder mysteries, and I was trebley happy to find that this particular podcast was dedicated to a relatively un-remembered event that I happened to be familiar with. 

But I think that this thing (podcast, art piece, cultural artifact – I’m not really sure what to call it) also connects in interesting ways with the panels on teaching I’d been attending in the past few days.  It’s creator, Eric Strange, says that he was compelled to make it because

People have told us they now understand connections become the geography of the area and the cultural history, and between the architecture and the social and political climate of 1850s Boston, that they never realized before.  All because of a 45-minute walk.  We want people to take the tour and afterwards never see the streets and buildings the same way again.  I think we achieved that. (Interview with history news network)

A lot of what I try to do as a teacher is to help students to never see the events of the past, or what follows them in the present the same way again.  I don’t mean that in a radical way, but in my ideal world, students who leave my classroom after, say, an intro to British imperial history class will pause when they hear about sectarian violence in Pakistan, and remember what they learnt about the historical circumstances that lead up to that event.  Although at its most basic we might think about Murder on Beacon Hill as entertainment, salacious and murderful at that, it makes me think about alternative approaches to teaching, and the incorporation of the oft-ballyhooed “digital humanities” into the classroom.  Even more so, about the nature of the “classroom” itself.  I am teaching a class on natural disasters in America this summer, and I am trying to find ways to get students out of the physically inscribed space of the classroom, and into the world in which historical events have happened.  It might be worthwhile to think about how to trouble the boundary between academic space and the “real world,” and if troubling that boundary can serve students well by connecting the often dry text of their readings with tangible lives.  C and I are going to play around with the idea of creating an interactive tour of New York this summer – we’ll see how that goes.