ECHO Blogging Central

In this episode the usual suspects, Mills, Stephen, Amanda, Dan and Tom gathered for yet another lively discussion. The episode began with a discussion on the trend toward opening data as several big players, the Getty, Twitter, Microsoft and the Public Library of Science took steps toward greater accessibility of their resources. The hosts also highlighted the subject of virtual conference attendance, looking at the “dopplebot” conference attendance model. From big changes to a historical look back, the group switched gears to discuss a Pew Report that looks back at 25 years of internet use, broad discussion of changes and how the internet has become an indispensable facet of our lives. Nothing demonstrates that more than the next topic of discussion, the $19 billion dollar purchase of WhatsApp.

They were joined by Sharon Leon, director of Public Projects at CHNM for an announcement about two upcoming summer institutes at CHNM for Art Historians and American Historians.

Related Links:

Opening access to data

• Getty – http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/new-virtual-library-offers-over-250-art-books-for-free-download/
• http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/lod/
• http://dataliberate.com/2014/02/getty-release-aat-vocabulary-as-linked-open-data/
• Twitter – https://blog.twitter.com/2014/introducing-twitter-data-grants
• Microsoft Research – http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/2/5371232/microsoft-research-open-science-announcement
• PLOS – http://blogs.plos.org/everyone/2014/02/24/plos-new-data-policy-public-access-data/

Virtual Conference attendance:

• Bryan Alexander goes to EDUCAUSE as a “doppelbot” – http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/futurist-attends-educause-conference-via-doppelbot/50215

PewReport – http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/02/27/summary-of-findings-3

WhatsApp acquisition for $19 billion

• http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2014/02/20/whatsapp-facebook.html
• http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/23/5439398/whatsapp-founder-apologizes-for-our-longest-and-biggest-outage-in
• http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/20/5429536/facebook-buys-whatsapp-16-billion-quest-to-conquer-messaging

Sharon updates on Art Historians & American Historians institutes

• http://arthistory2014.doingdh.org/
• http://history2014.doingdh.org/

Running time: 41:08
Download the .mp3

Let's say you create a station where visitors contribute content. You want their stories, their feedback, their colorful drawings of the future.

How do you measure success?

We've started using a very simple measure: the number of people who actually respond to the prompt. We look at the visitor contributions, and we code them either as responding to the prompt or doing something unrelated. Answer the question, and you're in. Make a scribble, and you're not. That's it.

Obviously, this does not give us the holy grail of success for a visitor talkback station. Each talkback is different. Sometimes success means deep, personal stories; other times, we value speculative argumentation or creative expression. Sometimes it means a large volume of responses; other times, we are looking for people with specific expertise to respond.

But in all cases, we want people to respond "appropriately"--whatever appropriate might mean for a given talkback.

The measure of whether people respond to the prompt appropriately is really a measure of us, not them. It measures whether the design of the talkback is sufficiently clear and compelling. This is especially useful in exhibitions or areas with multiple different talkbacks; it allows us to do A/B comparisons across talkbacks and learn which of our designs worked best (presumably, for the same group of visitors).

Consider three very different talkbacks in the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History's fall exhibition, Santa Cruz is in the Heart: cocktail napkins, rear view mirrors, and refrigerator certificates.

Each of these talkbacks was very different.

• The cocktail napkins were in an area about the demise of a beloved dive bar in Santa Cruz. We invited people to slide up to a bar and use a napkin to scrawl an answer to the question "How do you deal with loss?" This was the most popular talkback, with 541 responses in the three months of the exhibition.
• The fridge was in an area about unsung heros in our community. We invited people to sit down at a modified kitchen table and make a certificate of accomplishment for someone they felt deserved to be honored. These certificates were less than half as popular as the napkins, with 221 completed. They took awhile to make, though--this was definitely the longest talkback activity. 
• The rear view mirrors were mounted on the wall next to a story in a simulated car about looking back and seeing the past differently from an adult perspective. We offered people markers and invited them to write directly on the mirrors to complete the sentence "I look back and remember..." This was the least used talkback, with 120 responses. It wasn't easy to write much with a marker on the mirrors, and you had to be creative to come up with a response in just a couple words.

Here's the data on how people responded to the prompts (with thanks to Brandt Courtway, intern extraordinaire):

• Cocktail napkins: 541 responses, 51% appropriate
• Rear view mirrors: 120 responses, 52% appropriate
• Fridge certificates: 221 responses, 72% appropriate

Clearly, the fridge was the big winner. While it was not the most-used talkback, it was the one where people were most likely to actually do what we asked of them.

This information surprised us. We used the data to interrogate what was unique about the design of the fridge talkback: the fact that it required a longer time commitment, that it had more involved setup and design, that the prompt was in the form of a "fill in the blank" instead of a question, and that the content was positive/uplifting (as opposed to the others, which focused more on nostalgia and sadness).

We consider this a good measurement because it is easy to collect the data, the result is non-obvious, and the result is useful in helping us improve our design techniques. A good measurement doesn't need to exhaustively answer every single question about a project. It just needs to provide information you can actually use to do better.

I'm curious what "single measure" tests you are using to compare projects and improve your practice. What simple number has changed your work?

Also, a sidenote. We asked Brandt to also count any responses that were "aggressive"--swear words, violent language, etc. Total number across all three talkbacks: 0.

Next month, Jan Eric Olsén is co-organizing a workshop titled “Touching The Tactile” here at Medical Museion.

The aim of the workshop is “to approach the sense of touch via a series of hands-on investigations and discussions that will take place within the context of art and museum practices”.

By focusing on touch, the workshop draws attention to features that are often overlooked in the fabric of art exhibits and museum displays. More particularly, the workshop will unfurl the experience and knowledge that comes with touch and the things that we touch. These are experiences that span from intimate relationships, over the skills of diverse crafts and the knowledge of specific materials to pedagogical methods and artistic positions that entail the actual touching of objects and works (e.g. museum exhibits for visually impaired people and artworks such as Gonzalez-Torres candy spills). The question is, among others, what kind of knowledge do we speak about with regard to touch? What kind of remembrance is invoked? Is it conceptual, can it be conceptualized or does it rather stand in opposition to concepts and visuality? Likewise, what difference does the actual touching of artworks and museum objects make?

Preliminary programme:

Medical Museion, Thursday 10 April

• 13.00 – 13.20
Welcome: Thomas Söderqvist, Director, Medical Museion
Introduction to the workshop theme: Jan Eric Olsén, Medical Museion

• 13.25 – 14.10
Roundtable presentation, 4 minutes each: background, interests, perspectives…

• 14.15 – 15.00
Teresa Nielsen (Vejen Art Museum): “Vejen Art Museum: a project for the blind – to the delight of many others”.

15.00 – 15.30
Jan Eric Olsén (Medical Museion): “Tactile extracts from the blind-historical collection”.

• 16.00 – 16.45
Lucy Lyons (London): “Touch but don’t touch: touching by proxy”.

• 16.45 – 17.30
Ane Pilegaard Sørensen (Medical Museion): “Between bodies: exhibiting medical materialities”.

• 17.30 – 18.00
Erik Hippe (Copenhagen): Demonstration of medical palpation.

Royal Academy of Arts, Friday 11 April

• 10.00 – 10.45
Zoe Laughlin (Institute of Making and the Materials Library Project, London): Title TBA

•11.15 – 12.00
Michael Renner (Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst, Basel): “Ceramics: intersection of the tactile and the visual”.

•13.00 – 13.45
Tony Hildebrandt (Instituto Svizzero, Rome): “Drawing blindfolded: on the relation of touching and memory”.

• 13.45 – 14.30
Jakob Bak, Jamie Allen, David Gauthier (Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design): Title TBA

• 15.00 – 15.45
Anette Stenslund (Medical Museion): “Touching absence: the smell of nothing”.

15.45 – 16.30
Interlude on touching

• 16.30 – 17.15
Laura Liv Weikop (Danish Design Museum Copenhagen): “The Exhibition Lab : from glass cases to affect”

• 17.15 – 17.45
Final discussion

Contacts: Associate professor Jan Eric Olsén, Medical Museion, jeon@sund.ku.dk.

A few years ago I made a commitment to Open Access - in an attempt to reach a wider audience for my academic work, and to tell people about research as it was happening (not three of four years later once it was locked behind a paywalled journal). I'm really pleased to have something new to talk about once again, and this time I can share it with you before it even comes out in print. Allied to this are a few spin offs from the project in question - Transcribe Bentham, which aims to make the work of the the philosopher and reformer, Jeremy Bentham (1748 – 1832) available via a
 double award-winning collaborative transcription initiative, which is digitising and making available digital images of Bentham’s unpublished manuscripts through a platform known as the ‘Transcription Desk‘. There, you can access the material and—just as importantly—transcribe the material, to help the work of UCL’s Bentham Project, and further improve access to, and searchability of, this enormously important collection of historical and philosophical material. [Link]First, the article: a pre-publication version which will be published in April in a special issue of the International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, from Edinburgh University Press. In it, Tim Causer and myself talk about crowdsourcing transcriptions of Bentham's writings, the impact of Transcribe Bentham on the work of the Bentham Project, and the use of volunteers to help us with tasks traditionally associated with lone academic researchers. We give particular examples of new Bentham material transcribed by volunteers dealing with the subjects of political economy, animal welfare, and convict transportation and the history of early New South Wales, which has further clarified and widened our understanding of certain aspects of Bentham’s thought. You can go and get it here:
 Causer, T. and Terras, M. M. (2014) "Crowdsourcing Bentham: beyond the traditional boundaries of academic history". International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, 8 (1) (In press). Link to PDF version in UCL Repository. I'm pleased it is up there quickly, and openly, and free for all to see. Its one of the aims of the Transcribe Bentham project, of which I am only a small cog, to make Bentham's writings more well known, accessible, and searchable, over the long term. Allied to that is the ethos in involving a wider group of society in contributing to the project - this is about "co-creation" (as it gets called in Gallery, Library, Archive, and Museum (GLAM) circles) rather than academic broadcast. It would make no sense for us to take the product of something developed in online crowdsourcing, and lock it back in the academic ivory tower, given we asked for help to understand and find the material in the first place. We're finding our way with how to credit transcribers along the way (some of them are named in the article above, and we did ask their permission to do so) and to carry out crowdsourcing in as ethical a way as possible (something which is also of concern to others figuring out crowdsourcing in GLAM as we go). All in all, open access here is part of the Transcribe Bentham product: make it free, make it open.

And future doors line up ahead of us to walk through. This week we hit over 7000 manuscripts transcribed via the Transcription Desk, and a few months ago we passed the 3 million words of transcribed material mark. So we now have a body of digital material with which to work, and make available, and to a certain extent play with. We're pursuing various research aims here - from both a Digital Humanities side, and a Bentham studies side, and a Library side, and  Publishing side. We're working on making canonical versions of all images and transcribed texts available online.  Students in UCL Centre for Publishing are (quite literally) cooking up plans from what has been found in the previously untranscribed Bentham material, unearthed via Transcribe Bentham. What else can we do with this material?

And other doors open. I've talked before about reuse of the code behind Transcribe Bentham - in use by the Public Record Office of Victoria, and parts of it (the Transcription Desk bar, since you ask) has since been used in the Letters of 1916 transcription project, too. We're also in talks with other collections who are thinking of doing crowdsourcing, and who may use the Transcription Desk: watch this space. Again, this is part of the same trajectory: make it free, make it available.

And other doors open. The development of systems to read handwritten material (more advanced than Optical Character Recognition, which to date really only has success on printed, clean material) depends on having datasets of images of handwritten texts, plus checked validated transcripts of their content in a useful format, to train and test systems and algorithms. Transcribe Bentham is pleased to be part of the Transcriptorium project (as am I!), looking into Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technologies, and a set of 433 pages of Bentham's manuscripts plus the crowdsourced transcriptions are this year making up the "ICFHR 2014 Handwritten Text Recognition on the tranScriptorium Dataset" - to evaluate and test the current algorithms on Handwritten Text Recognition. How great is that. Did any of us sitting round the table first discussing crowdsourcing and Bentham back in 2009 ever expect we (and our transcribers) would be creating a benchmarked dataset in which to train handwriting recognition technologies? No. It is wonderful.

Create. Involve. Research. Make it available. Some of this by planning, some of this by happy accident. I now see the Open Access ethos underpinning all of this, and driving forward the direction of my research into the use of computing in culture, heritage, and the humanites. So, enjoy the article. We have access to and did and found out some cool stuff, you know - and we made it freely available. 

Dreaming of a summer filled with learning, community engagement, and sea lions? Time to stop dreaming and start doing.

This is the last week to apply for MuseumCamp 2014, a professional development experience in which diverse people from the arts, community activism, and social services will measure the immeasurable together. Our focus is on assessing social impact in communities, and we will encourage teams to look at complex outcomes--like safety, cohesion, compassion, and identity--that are not commonly covered in standard evaluative practices. We will do this by defining impacts of interest, identifying indicators of those impacts, developing creative ways to measure the indicators, actually doing the measurements, and reporting on the results. And we'll do this all in three days on July 30-August 2, 2014 in Santa Cruz, CA. The application period closes Friday, February 28... so get on it.

And, if you want to join us in Santa Cruz for more professional hijinks, consider an internship at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. These internships all run from June 25 - Aug 26. There are seven different types available, and you are welcome to apply for more than one. Special additions this year include:

• MuseumCamp internship. Bring out your closet camp director and help coordinate this killer professional development event.
• Community Engagement internship. We're expanding our engagement with Latino families in our community, and we want your help with our first partnership in a multi-year effort.
• Guerrilla Marketing internship. Want to cover the town in paper flowers with our street team? Yes you can.

All of these internships are unpaid. I know that is controversial, and believe me--we are well aware of the complexity of the issue. We offer unpaid internships for three reasons:

1. We prefer to focus on developing paid opportunities for people who are in our community and can be a part of the museum for a long time. We have been slowly expanding paid entry-level positions here with a focus on local people from diverse backgrounds. We are also expanding paid opportunities for local artists. When we really thought about the options when it came to incremental dollars, we chose to spend them locally in this way.
2. The demand is very high. We get many, many solicitations from people who would like to come intern, shadow, volunteer, etc. 
3. We provide interns with opportunities to do real projects that (we think) they can't do anywhere else. We support our interns and their future careers both with the experiences they have here and relationships that stretch on after they leave. We feel strongly that we are following the requirement that unpaid interns get more than they give... though we prefer to think about it as a situation with shared benefits and sacrifices.

If you want to know more about what the intern experience is like at the MAH, check out their blog on Tumblr.

And finally, if you'll be at the California Association of Museums conference next week and you want to get together, please let me know.

Every day for the past two months, a man has entered the largest gallery in my museum. He takes a crowbar out of a Swiss Army backpack. He smashes a sculpture of an animal.

This is not a crime.

The man is artist Rocky Lewycky, whose work is part of a group show of visual artists who have won a prestigious regional fellowship. His project, Is It Necessary?, blends sculpture, repetition, and ritual performance in a political statement about the genocide of animals in factory farms.

Sometimes, Rocky lets visitors join in on the smashing. It's a powerful experience for those who participate. It also complicates the question of what is acceptable in a museum. If an artist can come into a museum and smash stuff, what does that tell visitors? If visitors can smash stuff when anointed to do so by an artist, but not otherwise, how do they understand that action?

I thought about all of this when reading about the recent incident at the Perez Art Museum Miami, where artist Maximo Carminero smashed a vase by Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei in an unauthorized act of visitor participation. The vase was itself an appropriated/ritually-vandalized object: a centuries-old vase that Wei Wei had dipped in commercial paint. One of Ai Wei Wei's most well-known pieces was a performance in which he dropped a Han Dynasty urn, smashing it to pieces.

While some in the art world are heralding Carminero's act as expanding the role of art to disrupt and make political statements, I feel that this is a pretty straightforward issue of a criminal act. It is not acceptable to walk into a museum and destroy another artist's work of art. Period.

But does the fact that Ai Wei Wei smashes work himself complicate the issue? Definitely. Do I worry that a visitor might see what's happening in Rocky Lewycky's project at my museum and be confused about our museum's approach to protecting artwork? Absolutely. Is all of this confusion worth it? Yes.

These performances and incidents are artifacts of a shift in art museums towards being "living" institutions. Art museums have often been criticized by some for being mausoleums for art, with conservators serving as unctuous morticians. A practice-based artist once colorfully described art museums to me as "places where art goes to die."

But art museums are coming back from the dead. They are hosting performances, exhibitions that morph over time, artists who work in practice-based media, who break the fourth wall with the audience, who invite participation, and who deliberately disrupt museum conventions.

All of these developments are exciting to me. But these shifts come with necessary questions about how to scaffold the visitor experience in a "living" space so people understand what the heck is happening, how they can participate, and what is out-of-bounds. Whether it's a "please touch" label or a gallery host who invites you in and sets the ground rules, the scaffolding is essential. I've seen participatory artworks that lay untouched by visitors because the invitation to participate is not explicit enough. I've seen other projects that are so hemmed in by fear of "what visitors will do" that they can't bloom.

Unfortunately, instead of clear scaffolding, what I often see are institutions shirking their responsibility, closing their eyes and letting visitors figure it out. It's unreasonable to imagine that visitors will intuitively understand which rules apply to which areas and artworks. The rules of museum-going are already opaque. Throw in a few participatory elements, and suddenly you have visitors trying to arbitrate amongst themselves. I've seen visitors yell at each other for participating in exhibitions in ways that the institution was actually trying to encourage. I've seen visitors watch each other participate with confusion, wondering if that other person was "getting away" with something they too would like to try.

All of this confusion is harmful and unnecessary. Scaffolding can both clarify new opportunities for engagement AND define the limits of that engagement. It doesn't have to be complicated or involve release forms. It just needs to be clear. I know I could do a better job of making sure we scaffold the more unorthodox projects at our museum. Some of my biggest mistakes have come when we didn't scaffold and contextualize enough. We keep thinking about what we can do to help people understand what is happening and what is possible with clarity and confidence.

In the best cases, art museums are able to "live" in ways that honor the diversity of creative expression and ways that artists engage with their artwork and their audiences. This requires acknowledging and engaging with the messiness of the work, anticipating the challenges, and communicating new opportunities. This kind of scaffolding won't eradicate destructive criminal acts. But it will open up the possibility for participation and experimental work with less fear.

One of the benefits of being Jewish is the opportunity to work over the Christmas week in peace. It is the most focused time of the year for me--a great time to close out projects and prepare for the new year. For me, the end of 2013 coincided with a clear need to improve my general approach to list-making, task-recording, and note-taking. In 2013, I found myself constantly shaking my notebook and hoping that the needed bit of information would drop out. Until I figure out how to turn a notebook into a magic deck of cards--or at least embed a Command-F function into it--I need a better system.

There's a whole industry of tools and tips for getting things done, and I don't intend to add this blog to that empire. But I figure that we all have come up with tools that help us, both individually and in teams, to organize our work. I wanted to open up this post to your favorite approaches, especially simple things that don't require specialized software etc.

Here are five things I've started doing in 2014 that seem to be working:

1. Added a Today list to my to-dos. I've always had a long task list on my desktop. I used to separate the list into two parts: "This Week" and specific projects. I almost exclusively worked from the This Week list, but it rarely got shorter and it became clear over time that some things on This Week were actually more like This Century. So I've added just one simple component to this list system: a list at the top called "Today." In the morning, first thing when I come in, I move things from This Week to Today and also add other things. I try to truly only include things I think I can accomplish that day, being mindful of my calendar. My rule of thumb is that I should be able to close out the Today list by noon. This means that most days, I finish the Today list, feel good about that accomplishment, and feel ready to "pull up" something from This Week to work on later in the day. I'm amazed at how This Week is getting smaller, even as new projects continue to come up.
2. Blocking time on my calendar to work on projects. My calendar tends to be quite open a few weeks out, but totally packed within the next fourteen days. If it doesn't get calendared, it will get squeezed out. I had blocked time for grant proposals in the past but now have expanded this practice to other work that requires concentrated blocks of time.
3. Separated Tasks from Notes. My notebook used to have both tasks and notes, which made it a mix of big ideas and time-limited, potentially trivial activities. Now, I use the notebook strictly for notes, and I use a mixture of my digital task list and scrap paper for task lists.
4. Added a Table of Contents to my new notebook. This meant doing two things: numbering the pages and leaving a few blank in the front for the Table of Contents. I'm sure I could do this better, but for now, I just put a couple of big ongoing project headings in the Table of Contents and started marking pages on which notes for those projects occur.
5. Started using Follow Up Then. OK, this is a piece of software, but it's free and super-easy to use. FollowUpThen is a system that allows you to forward any email to yourself at a time in the future ("monday" or "march2" or "2pm"). The email will pop up in your inbox at the designated time. I use this tool to clear my inbox of things that I need to follow up on eventually but not now. I get a couple hundred emails each day, and this allows me to focus on what I need to do and not waste time scanning my inbox and re-acquainting myself with things I guiltily feel that I should do. When something pops up from FollowUpThen, I know it's something I should consider to be on my "Today" list.

What do you use to lasso your tasks, goals, and dreams?

Even in academia, where much is done on a voluntary basis, it is generally acknowledged that good work deserves a correct remuneration. A lot of labour is involved in publishing a peer-reviewed scholarly journal and, whether access to the publication is open or subscription-based, there is always a cost involved. In the real world, no one expects anything to be free, except for a smile and the sun, maybe.

Over the last couple of years I have been contacted by a handful of scholars who announced that they do not want to contribute to or review for LLC anymore because they object to 'giving away their research and peer reviewing for free to a publisher who charges readers and makes a profit'. I regret that this point of view diabolizes LLC by romanticizing the ideal of Open Access publication.

In the first part of this editorial, I'd like to take the opportunity to explain why this perspective on LLC is false on at least three points and why a decision not to devote any time or effort to LLC directly affects Open Access publications. In the second part of this editorial I am presenting a report on the past record-breaking year of publishing LLC. The Journal of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities.

1. Three points to consider before turning your back1.1. Ownership & Copyrights

Let me start by emphasizing that LLC is not owned by the Press but by the European Association for Digital Humanities (EADH, formerly known as ALLC). Every five years, EADH re-negotiates the contract or puts the publication of the Journal – not the ownership – up for tender. A very important and substantial part of the negotiations concerns author and readership services, terms and conditions. For example, as an author publishing in LLC, you do not 'give away your research' but you retain all copyrights. All you do is sign a licence which gives EADH the right to have your work published on their behalf by the Press. This is clearly stated in the footer of the first page of each published paper. This means that as an author, you retain any right to make a preprint version of the article available on your own personal website and/or that of your employer and/or in free public servers of preprints and/or articles in your subject area, provided that where possible you acknowledge that the article has been accepted for publication in LLC.

It is true that for the moment, you cannot make the accepted postprint manuscript available in the same way during the first 24 months after publication, but this term is currently under discussion. It is also true that, for the moment, you can never make the PDF of the final typeset and published version of your article available for free, e.g. in institutional repositories, for the simple reason that there is copyright involved in the typesetting by the Press. Just as the Press respects the copyrights of the authors and the licences to the EADH, we should respect the copyrights of the Press. There are legal systems to obey, after all. However, both the EADH and the LLC Editorial Team are in constant discussion. with the Press to see what could be done about these restrictions. One of the outcomes of this ongoing and open discussion has been the freely accessible online publication of the DH2012 conference issue (LLC 28/4) for a period of three months after publication. This will certainly be a recurring initiative which could hopefully be extended to other issues as well.

So what do you get out of it, apart from retaining your copyrights? Well, your publication is included in a highly esteemed scholarly Journal with a long tradition, a wide distribution, and a high appreciation. Further, the peer review process helps to improve your paper and the copy-editing and typesetting helps to improve your paper's readability. Your paper is published both in print and online where reference links to cited work are included and related data files can be linked to the article. Your published paper can be accessed by ca. 600 personal subscribers, and scholars and students in over 3,500 institutions worldwide. Your publication is indexed by the most important indexing/abstracting services in the humanities, including MLA, ISI Web of Science indexes, INSPEC, ABELL, ABES, LLBA, etc. And as LLC is receiving a yearly Impact Factor, publishing in the Journal certainly does no harm to your academic record.

1.2. Subscription Fees & Membership Fees

Subscription fees are collected by the Press on behalf of ADHO and all of its constituent organizations, namely the EADH, ACH, CSDH/SCHN, aaDH, JADH and CenterNet. The subscription rate is agreed upon yearly. Up to 2013, membership of an association of your choice or joint membership of ADHO was by subscription to the Journal only. In 2013, this changed, and it is now also possible to become a (joint) society member and pay the corresponding fee without paying for a subscription to the Journal. Currently, this proves to be popular with student members who have access to the Journal through their institution. It is, however, a misconception that opting for the membership-only fee would only affect the Press's profit. Under the current contract, only 30% of the net profit remains with the Press. The remaining 70% of the net profit goes directly to ADHO and its constituent organisations. However, there is always a fixed cost involved in making a Journal whichever publication model is chosen or whatever the circulation of the Journal – we did agree at the beginning of this editorial that that good work deserves a correct remuneration. The profit which is at stake here is your very own associations' income.

1.3. LLC funds DH (and Open Access)

LLC generates a substantial revenue for all Digital Humanities Organisations represented in ADHO. The total income from LLC received by ADHO in 2013, i.e. 70% of the net profit of 2012, was over 80,000 GBP (ca. 97,000 EUR; ca. 132,000 USD; ca. 146,000 CAD; ca. 151,000 AUD; ca. 13,613,000 JPY). ADHO distributes this income among the constituent organisations using a disbursement system which takes into account the individual and joint memberships and the geographical location of institutional and consortia subscriptions. A huge share of this income is used by ADHO and its constituent organisations to jointly fund, for instance, the publication subventions of DHQ, Digital Studies/Le Champ Numérique and DHCommons, the DH web infrastructure including DHQ hosting costs, conference support, prizes, awards and bursaries, etc. The rest of the income is then passed on to the constituent organisations on the basis of the disbursement scheme. Each constituent organisation uses this income to realize their own programmes and actions to promote, support and further the Digital Humanities.

So, if anyone makes a huge profit from the Journal, it is your very own association. Their income through the Journal allows your association to invest in the Digital Humanities the way you, as a voting member, decide upon.

To put it simply: by supporting LLC as a subscriber, author or reviewer, you support ADHO as well as your own association and you facilitate the funding of many initiatives in DH including the publication of Open Access publications. To put it differently, a subscription to LLC does not only cover the cost involved with the publication of LLC, but also the cost involved with the publication of the other Open Access publications which are offered by ADHO for free.

2. A Year's Work in Publishing LLC

2013 has by all measures been a record-breaking year for LLC. The Journal has never had more subscribers, never received more submissions, never published more papers on more pages, never received a higher Impact Factor, and never generated more income for ADHO and its constituent organisations.

2.1. Figures

In 2013, LLC managed to raise its individual subscriptions again by a healthy 12%. The Journal also received 34.58% more submissions than in 2012. With 144 manuscripts submitted from 34 different countries, LLC confirms the upward trend which started in 2011. The breakdown of the submitted papers per country in 2013 shows that most submissions still come from Europe (74) with the UK (17), Germany (11), the Netherlands (6), Belgium (5), France (5), Italy (5), Switzerland (5), Spain (4) and Greece (4) as the main providers of copy. Other European submissions came from Norway (1), Portugal (2), the Russian Federation (2), Cyprus (1), Ireland (2), Poland (2), Sweden (2) and Turkey (1). The second highest number of submissions came from the US (32). Asian authors produced 20 submissions: China (6), India (4), Japan (2), Malaysia (2), Taiwan (2) and 1 each from Iran, Israel, Hong Kong and Korea. The rest of the submissions were sent in from Canada (8), Australia (5), Africa (3 – Egypt, Morocco & Nigeria), Mexico (1) and New Zealand (1).

This is a very pleasing result which reflects the geographical distribution of the constituent organisations of ADHO which adopted LLC as their official Journal. These figures partially fulfill the objectives I outlined in my editorial in LLC 26/1 with regards to outreach to scholars in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Australia, and the Middle East. However, there is still room for improvement here, and I'd like to call upon your assistance to promote LLC as a publishing venue for all digital scholarship in the Humanities worldwide.

Also, LLC keeps on performing well with respect to speed and acceptance rate. The average time taken between submission and first decision for manuscripts submitted in 2012 was 133.42 days for full papers and 159.76 days for short papers. The average time for first decision for manuscripts submitted in 2013 was 80.20 days for full papers and 66.38 days for short papers. 36.46% of the full papers and 26.7% of the short papers submitted in 2013 received a decision in the same year. The average time taken between submission and final decision for revised papers submitted in 2013 was 32.47 days for full papers and 25 days for short papers. The accepted papers were published in advance access on in under six weeks from the final decision and we are heading towards a five-week mark.

Although these average times are very good considering the growth, size, and scope of the Journal, I am very sensitive to comments of authors who express their wish for a faster review track. A scholarly Journal like LLC is hugely dependent on the availability of peer reviewers, and although the demand to publish in LLC is growing, I observe a declining willingness to review for the Journal. Also, because of the broadening scope of the Journal and the geographical diversity of its authors, many manuscripts are submitted on subjects outside the traditional nucleus of Anglo-American centred literary and linguistic computing. This is no doubt a positive trend for the Digital Humanities, but on a managerial level, it can create delays in the peer review process when a sufficient number of appropriate reviewers cannot be invited. One author even decided to withdraw his submission because he was not able to suggest any subject specialist to the Journal besides himself. In order to improve the peer review process, I'd like to invite anyone who has not already done so to come forward and register as a reviewer by creating or updating your account in the Journal's online system and flagging your areas of expertise.

The overall acceptance rate of all submissions has come down from 40.21% in 2012 to 34.95% in 2013. Of the original submissions, 59.09% were sent back to the authors for revision in 2013 (49.06% in 2012). The rejection rate of original submissions after the first round of peer review has decreased from 31.13% in 2012 to 26.36% in 2013.

Production continues to run smoothly and all four issues appeared ahead of schedule in 2013. Volume 28 published a record number of 59 papers, which is an increase of 119% compared to 2012. Thanks to ADHO and OUP, subscribers to LLC were treated to 58% more pages compared to 2012 at no extra cost. The 2013 volume contained 753 pages compared to 476 pages in the 2012 volume.

The Journal more than doubled its Impact Factor which has increased from 0.431 (June 2011) and 0.333 (June 2012) to 0.717 (June 2013). Although LLC is not purely a linguistics Journal, it ranks at 60th of the 161 journals in SSCI Linguistics (101st in 2011).

2.2. Contents

The contents of volume 28 were as diverse as the DH community itself and mainly consisted of thematic collections of papers. In my editorial to 27/1, I already identified the formation of thematic clusters of interdisciplinary research as the second of four evolutions in the Digital Humanities. The first issue published a thematic collection on dialectometry edited by John Nerbonne and William A. Kretzchmar Jr. This exciting collection demonstrated that the traditional use of computational and quantitative techniques in dialectology co-exists alongside novel developments in the field, such as the application of dialectometric techniques to sociolinguistic and diachronic research questions and experiments with techniques from spatial statistics, geographic information systems, and image analysis. The second issue published the long-awaited collection of conference papers from DH2011 and was edited by Katherine Walter, Matt Jockers, and Glen Worthey. This conference issue reflects the conference theme of 'Big Tent Digital Humanities' and promotes an inclusive view of the Digital Humanities which is at the heart of the Journal. Apart from four unsolicited contributions and five book reviews, the third issue contained a thematic section of six papers coming out of the Interface 2011 Symposium and which highlights the wealth and breadth of early-career research. This thematic section was edited by seven young scholars as a hands-on exercise in journal management: Alberto Campagnolo, Andreia Martins Carvalho, Alejandro Giacometti, Richard Lewis, Matteo Romanello, Claire Ross, and Raffaele Viglianti. The fourth issue presented a collection of papers presented at the DH2012 conference and was edited by Paul Spence, Susan Brown, and Jan Christoph Meister. The thematic and methodological wealth demonstrated in this conference issue is in line with the overall theme of the conference: ‘Digital Diversity: Cultures, languages and methods’. This impressive conference issue was made accessible for free to everyone during a period of three months after publication. This will surely be a recurring initiative, because there is no better publicity for the Journal and the community it represents than to increase the accessibility to its contents.

Volume 29 of LLC promises to be at least as exciting as the previous one, albeit less voluminous. The first two issues will publish a good number of regular, unsolicited copy which is already available in advance access. The last two issues are reserved for the DH2013 issue and a thematic issue on Computational Models of Narratives.
With a growing number of submissions published in advance access, a good part of the 30th Jubilee volume of LLC is filled up nicely, but there are still some slots available. The Journal is already accepting proposals for thematic issues to be published in 2016.

3. A Bright Future

It has been a wonderful year for LLC and the future looks bright, thanks to the many people involved in editing, producing and publishing the Journal. First of all, I should like to thank our authors, book reviewers, anonymous peer reviewers, and guest editors for their important contribution to the Journal and their service to the community. A special word of thanks goes to the production and marketing people at OUP who have done a terrific job in producing and publicizing the Journal. Thanks to Sarah Scutts and Victoria Smith and their publishing team, a special thanks to Sarah Beattie who served as LLC's Production Editor for a year, and a very warm welcome to Deborah Hutchinson who has taken over from Sarah since July 2013. Thanks also to Jane Wiejak and her marketing team.

At the end of 2013 we say goodbye to Ron Van den Branden who has served the Journal over the last three years as its Book Reviews Editor. Ron has invigorated the number and importance of book reviews in the Journal and has done a wonderful job in prospecting, commissioning, and editing reviews. I'd like to thank Ron for all his work and for his ongoing support to the Journal as a member of the Editorial Team. My personal gratitute also goes to our Associate Editors Wendy Anderson and Isabel Galina for their hard work, much of which remains hidden from the readership.

Last but not least, I should explicitly thank the readership for their support and feedback. I'd be delighted to hear back from you and receive any feedback on the Journal or suggestions for improvement. You can do this by including the hashtag #LLCjournal in your tweets or by contacting the Journal via email and you can stay informed by following @LLCjournal on Twitter, find us on Facebook, visit the Journal's website regularly or sign up to be notified automatically whenever a new issue becomes available online.

Thank your once again for subscribing to the Journal and supporting the Digital Humanities organisations.

Edward Vanhoutte
Editor-in-Chief

Disclaimer: all figures and facts presented in this editorial are quoted from public ADHO & EADH reports.

In just a few weeks I’ll be teaching a class on Public Health Risk Communication, as part of the Public Health Science Communication course at University of Copenhagen. Despite the topic being big enough to cover a whole course in its own, it will with 90 minutes available only be possible to give a brief introduction to Risk Communication and public health. To compensate a little for this I have therefore been searching for possibilities for further studying, which I could recommend to the students.

Online course: Emergency Risk Communication

One of my findings is an online course in Emergency Risk Communication offered by the Northwest Center for Public Health Practice, University of Washington. It is free and takes only an estimated 2,5 hours (thus it is also mainly an introduction to the topic). I decided to take the course yesterday before adding it to my list of “further readings and materials in Public Health Risk Communication”.

Background information about the course

The course is very practice-oriented and less theoretical. The developers’ approach to the course and described target audience is that “if you work in public health, during a crisis or emergency, you will be likely to become a risk communicator, even if your job description does not include public information or media relations”. Therefore the course’s main objective is to teach how to plan for an emergency, create effective messages, and interact with the media and community in times of crisis. This is clearly illustrated in the below learning objectives:

After completing this course, you should be able to:

• List some common reactions exhibited by the public during public health emergencies
• Identify some effective communication strategies that can be used during public health emergencies
• Communicate with the news media more effectively during public health emergencies
• Work with the community more effectively during periods of heightened emotion
• Participate in planning processes that can help your organization be better prepared for communicating during an emergency

A well crafted and structured course

All in all I found the course quite useful and very well put together. I felt it gave me a good basic insight into some of the main components of Emergency Risk Communication. It took me about 2 hours to finish, but it has materials for extensively further studying. Throughout the different modules it is full of links to guidelines, templates, check lists, background literature, resource websites etc. useful in developing an emergency risk communication plan or strategy. All the links are also collected in an easily accessible Toolkit, which makes the course even more hands-on-oriented and user-friendly.

Another great aspect of the course is that is makes use of many real life examples and includes for example interviews with public health professionals who suddenly found themselves involved in emergency risk communication. You are presented with a situation similar to what they experienced and is asked what actions you would take. Afterwards you are then presented with their actions and the outcome of that. This works very well and helps in keeping one’s interest and attention. The course also makes sure to use many different cases of public health emergencies covering all from outbreak of infectious diseases, food safety issues, environmental health risk, to natural and man-made disasters. Again, great to keep one’s attention and making it relevant to people working in many fields of public health.

Social media and Emergency Risk Communication

A very positive aspect of the course was, seen from my perspective, that social media and its role in emergency risk communication is given much attention. Many examples of its use is presented and it is consistently mentioned throughout the different modules of the course. Apart from being of course a super important aspect to include it also gives you a feeling of the course being up-to-date.

In conclusion, it’s definitely a course worth spending 2,5 hours on. As said it is not very theoretical or academic oriented, but it has great references if one feels like digging into more of that, and is relevant for students as well as public health professionals proned to get involved in public health emergencies in one way or the other. You get a nice little diploma when passing the final assessment test and can, if relevant also apply for official credits for the course.

Academics in children's picture books tend to be elderly, old men, who work in science, called Professor SomethingDumb. Why does this matter?
Like many academics, I love books. Like many book-loving parents, I'm keen to share that love with my young children. Two years ago, I chanced upon two different professors in children's books, in quick succession. Wouldn't it be a fun project, I thought, to see how academics, and universities, appear in children's illustrated books? This would function both as an excuse to buy more books (we do live in a golden age of second hand books, cheaply delivered to your front door) and to explain to my kids - now five and a half, and twins of three - what Mummy Actually Does.

It turns out it's hard to search just for children's books, and picture books, in library catalogues, but I combed through various electronic library resources, as well as Amazon, eBay, LibraryThing, and Abe, to dig up source material. I began to obsessively search the bookshelves of kids books in friend's houses, and doctors and dentist and hospital waiting rooms, whilst also keeping on the look out on our regular visits to our local library: often academics appear in books without being named in the title, so dont turn up easily via electronic searches. Parking my finds on a devoted Tumblr which was shared on social media, friends, family members, and total strangers tweeted, facebooked, and emailed me to suggest additions. People sidled up to me after invited guest lectures to whisper "I have a good professor for you..." Two years on, I've no doubt still not found all of the possible candidates, but new finds in my source material are becoming less frequent. 101 books (or individual books from a series*) and 108 academics, and a few specific mentions of university architecture and systems later, its time to look at what results from a survey of the representation of academics and academia in children's picture books.

What are academics in children's books like? The 108 academics found consist of 76 Professors, 21 Academic Doctors, 2 Students, 2 Lecturers, 1 Assistant Professor, 1 Child, 1 Astronomer, 1 Geographer, 1 Medical Doctor who undertakes research, 1 researcher, and 1 lab assistant. In general, the Academic Doctors tend to be crazy mad evil egotists ("It's Dr Frankensteiner - the maddest mad scientist on mercury!"), whilst the Professors tend to be kindly, but baffled, obsessive egg-heads who dont quite function normally.

The academics are mostly (old, white) males. Out of the 108 found, only 9 are female: 90% of the identified academics are male, 8% are female, and 2% have no identifiable gender (there are therefore much fewer women in this cohort than in reality, where it is estimated that one third of senior research posts are occupied by women).  They are also nearly all caucasian: only two of those identified are people of colour: one Professor, and one child who is so smart he is called The Prof: both are male: this is scarily close to the recent statistic that only 0.4% of the UK professoriat are black. 43% of those found in this corpus are are elderly men, 33% are middle aged (comprising of 27% male and 6% female, there are no elderly female professors, as they are all middle age or younger). The women are so lacking that the denoument of one whodunnit/ solve the mystery/ choose your own adventure book for slightly older children is that the professor they have been talking about was actually a woman, and you didn't see that coming, did you? Ha!

The earliest published academic in a children's book found was in 1922 (although its probable that the real craze for featuring baffled old men came after the success of Professor Branestawm, which was a major international bestseller, first published in 1933, and not out of print since). The first woman Professor found is the amazing Professor Puffendorf - billed as "the world's greatest scientist" -,  published in 1992, 70 years after the first male professor appears in a children's book. 70 years (although it is frustrating that the book really isn't about her, but what her jealous, male lab assistant gets up to in her lab when she goes off to a conference. More Puffendorf next time, please). There is also a more recent phenomenon of using a Professor as a framing device to suggest some gravitas to a book's subject, but the professor themselves does not appear in any way within the text, so its impossible to say if they are male or female.  Male Professors in children's books have appeared much more frequently over the past ten years: women not so much.


What areas do these fictional academics work in? (There is an entirely different genre of children's books covering the lives of real academics - but that's for another obsessive compulsive mini research project). Here we identify the subject areas of the 108 academics:

Most of the identified academics work in science, engineering and technology subjects. 31% work in some area of generic "science", 10% work in biology, a few in maths, paleontology, geography, and zoology, and lone academics in rocket science, veterinary science, astronomy, computing, medical research and oceanography. There is one prof who is a homeopath, and I wasnt sure whether to put them in STEM or Fiction, so I plumped for STEM as they seemed to be trying to see if homeopathy worked (I like to presume all the academics here have proper qualifications, but who knows if fictional characters can buy professorships online these days). Subjects classed as Fictional were serpentology, dragonology, and magic. Arts, Humanities and Social Science subjects identified are archaeology (6% of the total), and linguistics, psychology, arts and theatre. 27% of those with an academic title make no reference to what type of area they supposed to work in: they are generally just trying to take over the world. Just out of interest, the female academics identify their subject areas as serpentology, maths, paleontology, ecology, and three generic scientists (with two further unknown subjects), so its not as is the women are doing the "soft" subjects in children's books, when they actually appear.

Not all of these academics featured are humans: 74% are human, 19% are animals, 4% are aliens, 2% are unknown, and 1% are vegetable.  There are no discernible trends regarding animals that are chosen to represent wisdom - its not like they are all owls - with three mice, three dogs, two toads, a kingfisher, a gorilla, a woodpecker, a pig, a crow, an owl, a dumbo octopus, a mole, a bumble bee, a shark, a cockroach, and a wooden bird. If you spot any defining similarities there, let me know.

There are some other fun trends to note. 46% of those humans featured are bald (higher than the average percentage?) - no women are bald. 35% had very big, messy hair, and it seems to be that if you are in academia, you should be a bit disheveled, in general. 45% have white hair - but none of the women have white hair. 13% had ginger hair (higher than the average percentage?). 37% had moustaches, and 16% had beards (higher than the average percentage?) - but no women had facial hair.  What they wore is also interesting:
Labcoats, suits (but not if you are female!) or safari suits (but not if you are female!) are the academic uniform du jour.

The names given to the academics are telling, with the majority being less than complimentary: Professor Dinglebat, Professor P. Brain, Professor Blabbermouth, Professor Bumblebrain, Professor Muddlehead, Professor Hogwash, Professor Bumble, Professor Dumkopf, Professor Nutter, and two different Professor Potts. There is the odd professor with a name that alludes to intelligence: Professor I.Q, Professor Inkling, Professor Wiseman, but those are in the minority.

What types of book are they featured in? 82% of the 101 books are fiction stories, and the theme of the stories tends to be "academic is out of touch with how the world works, with hilarious consequences" in the case of professors, or "is evil and wants to take over the world, but is thwarted by our plucky hero (never heroine)" in the case of doctors. 7% of the books are factual, using a fictional academic to explain how science or experiments work, and 1% are cookbooks. The remainder, 10%, are a curious genre I have called "tall tales" - where the fictional academic character is brought in to bring gravitas and explain something, but the explanations are either fictional or bordering on fiction. Its a curious blend of science and fiction: they are not traditional stories, but work in a way which subverts the traditional children's science books, injecting fiction into the process (not very succesfully, in most cases).

What can we draw from this? If you are going to be a fictional human academic in a children's book, you are most likely to be an elderly, old man, with big white hair, who wears a lab coat, has facial hair, works in science, and is called Professor SomethingDumb or Dr CrazyPants, featuring in a story about how you bumble around causing some type of chaos. Close your eyes and think of a Professor. Is this what you see? Or this?  (One wonders how much well-circulated images of Einstein have perculated into the subconscious of writers and publishers to emerge as the obvious representation of an academic in children's illustrated books).


Universities in Children's Picture BooksWhat about the universities themselves? They dont feature as often as the academics associated with them - the focus of children's books is seldom about such an institution that will have an effect so far in the future of the reader, although some characters plan well ahead in advance. Lectures, when depicted, are obviously very boring and impenetrable. University buildings are like castle schools for grown ups or  the site of secret underground lairs or the best holiday park ever. There are a couple of sweet kids books from the USA that attempt to describe the university campus and rituals of specific actual colleges - Baylor University and Boston College.  But in general, the children's books revolve around the characters, rather than the fact they are in a university, per se.

Why is this relevant?  Obviously, this has been a bit of a fun project. Given the lengths gone to to gather this corpus of children's books, it is unlikely that any individual child would happen across all of the books noted. It's actually interesting to think how few children's picture or illustrated books feature academics or academia (at time of writing, Amazon lists 1.3 million books in its children's section, and 101* different books (or books series) were identified in this project). While no doubt there are other books out there not on the list, this has been a darn good crack at finding as many as possible, not only in the English Language. Professors and academic Doctors in children's books are a useful device on occasion, but really are not terribly frequent in the scheme of things.

That said, the difference in gender, and how women and men are represented, and the underepresentation of those who are anything but white in children's books about academia, is shocking, especially given that almost all scientific fields are still dominated by men, and women are frequently discriminated against and although 46% of all PhD graduates in the EU are female, only 1/3 of senior research posts are occupied by women. At a time when researchers are asking if available toys can influence later career choice, can the same be said about books? At a time when it is becoming the parents' job to encourage girls into science and technology - and to educate all children about science and engineering careers - does the lack of anything but white, old men as academics in children's books reinforce the impossibility of anyone other than those making a contribution? At a time when the leaky pipe of academia shows that women are leaving in droves at every level of the academic ladder, should we be worried that there are no female academics in children's books above middle age?  Laugh at this analysis if you will, but sociological analysis of other children's books has shown that
there is a hidden language or code inscribed in children’s books, which teaches kids to view inequalities within the division of labor as a “natural” fact of life  – that is, as a reflection of the inherent characteristics of the workers themselves.  Young readers learn (without realizing it, of course) that some... are simply better equipped to hold manual or service jobs, while other[s]... ought to be professionals. Once this code is acquired by pre-school children... it becomes exceedingly difficult to unlearn.  As adults, then, we are already predisposed to accept the hierarchical, caste-based system of labor that characterizes the... workplace. [link]Another analysis of 6000 children's books published between 1900 and 2000 suggests the gender disparity, and the lack of women characters, sends children a message that "women and girls occupy a less important role in society than men or boys":
The messages conveyed through representation of males and females in books contribute to children's ideas of what it means to be a boy, girl, man, or woman. The disparities we find point to the symbolic annihilation of women and girls, and particularly female animals, in 20th-century children's literature, suggesting to children that these characters are less important than their male counterparts... The disproportionate numbers of males in central roles may encourage children to accept the invisibility of women and girls and to believe they are less important than men and boys, thereby reinforcing the gender system. [link]As for the diversity issue - in general, children's books have been shown to be stubbornly white, even though "children of all ethnicities and races need role models of all ethnicities and races. That breeds normalcy and acceptance, and it's good for everybody. [link]" What we are seeing here in this corpus, then, is a microcosm of what is happening in children's literature in general, although played out alongside an ongoing debate about the involvement of women and minorities in the academy. That doesn't make it ok, mind.

There are wider nuances, though, that dont just involve headcounts of men and women, black and white.  Children's perceptions of scientists have been shown to be based on various stereotypes, and the stereotypes of academics presented and promulgated in these books is the product of writers and publishers who, taken together, quite clearly don't think academics are much cop, which will perculate back to those who read the books, or have the books read to them. Academics are routinely shown as individuals obsessed with one topic who are either baffled and harmless and ineffectual, or malicious, vindictive and psychotic, and although these can be affectionate sketches ("bless! look at the clueless/psychopathic genius!") academics routinely come across as out of touch wierdos - and what is that teaching kids about universities?  In this age of proving academic "impact", it might be not so bad for us to be able to show we were relevant to society? That there is more to academia than science? Or for the kids books I show my kids to have more positive and integrated representations of professors and academics? Perhaps this is not the role of kids books though, and I should just be telling my kids my own tales of academic derring-do. 

I mean, who would spend two years gathering a corpus of kids lit for fun, and then count how many beards the people in the books had. Wierdo. Wierdos, the lot of them.

Top Children's Picture Books Featuring Academia Out of all of the books found in this project, there are some which have been read and read again by my boys, and some which got tossed aside as soon as they arrived. There is also one I adore, but the boys are not so interested in. If you wanted to read some children's books which feature academics and universities, you could do worse than start with the following:

1. Dr. Dog, by Babette Cole, Red Fox, London, 1994. Dr Dog is a medical Doctor, but who also does research. It has one fantastic page where Dr Dog goes to conference in Brazil to give a talk about bone marrow, and that one page has explained where Mummy goes when she goes in the airplane, on many occasions. Very useful. For age 2+

2. Professor Puffendorf’s Secret Potions. Robin Tzannes, Korky Paul, Oxford University Press, 1992. The most read story in our house about a Professor. Prof P goes off to a conference and her lazy lab assistant wants to steal her secret potions for himself... (I would have preferred to see more about her, though). 2+

3. Mahalia Mouse Goes to College, by John Lithgow, illustrated by Igor Oleynikov, Simon and Schuster, 2007, New York. Mahalia is a brave little mouse who wants to go to Harvard and study maths, and succeeds. Uplifting. 3+

4. The Rooftop Rocket Party, by Roland Chambers, Anderson Press, 2002. Doctor Gass is a rocket scientist, who doesnt believe a little boy that the water coolers on top of the New York skyline are capable of going to the moon... Delightful.3+

5.  Professor Astro Cat’s Frontiers of Space, by Dominic Walliman and Ben Newman. Flying Eye Books, 2013. This is a lovely, well illustrated, detailed and well written kids introduction to astronomy, which is explained by Professor Astro Cat. Nice paper too, bibliophiles. For age 5+.

6. Professor Wormbog in Search for the Zipperump-a-Zoo (Mercer Mayer Classic Collectible: Little Monsters), by Mercer Mayer, Golden Pr. 1976.  Professor Wormbog is searching for the only thing he hasnt got in his zoology collection... perhaps they are right under his nose all along? 2+

7. Mungo and the Spiders from Space. By Timothy Knapman, illustrated by Adam Stower. 2007, Puffin, London. A rollicking space adventure about a little boy who gets an old book about an evil doctor... and steps into the book... 4+

8. Any of the Octonaut books, by Meomi. Now a popular tv programme, the Octonauts started off as a book series. Professor Inkling shows how he can work with others to, ya know, deliver impact in the field etc etc. The Meomi books (Harper Collins) are delightful, with lots of detail that demand rereading - start of with the Octonauts Explore the Great Big Ocean (but steer clear of the tv spin off books published by Simon and Schuster - they arent a patch on the illustrated books by Meomi). Much, much loved in our house. 2+

9.  The Dr Xargle and Professor Xargle books (he gets promoted at some point, evidently). By Jeanne Willis and Tony Ross, different publishers. Xargle explains various things about human society, or science, to his university class of aliens, with hilarious consequences. 3+

10. Professor Twill’s Travels, written and illustrated by Bob Gumpertz. Ward Lock Limited, London, 1968. A sweet tale of Professor Twill, travelling the world to collect animals. The illustrations in this book are very much of the era - it's just beautiful. A forgotten classic. 1+

And one just for the adults: Jack Dawe and The Professors, Bedtime Stories for Technically Inclined Little Ones, 1964, illustrated by Brian Green. (By "Uncle B", no press listed). An Oxford Professor wrote down and vanity published the tales of academia he told his nieces and nephews. They are absolutely hilarious.

Happy reading. And if you find any more academics or universities that I dont know about in children's picture books... do let me know!


*There were a few characters that appear in series of books, for example Professor Branestawm, Dr Xargle, and Professor Inkling in Octonauts. Only one book from each series was counted: if all the books from series were included, there would be over 140 books in total. Please note, none of the spin offs from the children's film Monsters University were included in this analysis, as we're dealing here with things that started as books, rather than spin offs, and it would take over the corpus, and, hmmm, that deserves an analysis of its very own... uh-oh...

Research and assessment is rare in the arts, and it tends to focus on "proving" our value. Economic impact studies. Studies of how arts participation affects student test scores. This kind of research has two big problems:

1. It puts most of our assessment capacity into research for someone else, on someone else's terms. It is rarely at the heart of what we do best or are most passionate about. As Ben Cameron recently said, "I don't know any artist who started a theater company saying, 'let's go out and improve some test scores!'"
2. It prevents us from focusing on research that could transform our own work. Instead, we use research to try to convince someone else to change their work. And given what I've seen on micro and macro-levels in arts funding and power, I don't think this strategy is working. 

I'd love to see an increase in the arts' commitment to research. But we should stop using it to prove that our work is valuable and start using it to improve the work that we do.

Consider the recent research at the University of Arkansas about the value of school field trips to cultural institutions. Educational reform researchers did a rigorous study of school groups that experienced a single one-hour guided tour of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. They found that students who received the tour--compared against a control group of students who did not visit the museum--retained content, increased their critical thinking skills, increased their "historical empathy" for people who lived in different places and times, increased their tolerance for diverse points of view, and increased their interest in visiting museums. The study was extensive and methodologically robust, and the results are making the rounds of museum and art publications and blogs.

But what is the value of a study that tells us that museum visits make a difference? My sense in reading the reports is that this research was intended partly to "prove" the value of a museum school field trip to policymakers. The "Policy Implications" section of the overview report focuses almost entirely on implications outside the museum, encouraging school administrators to provide resources for tours of cultural institutions and philanthropists to fund them.

In my conversations with administrators about field trips, the educational value of the trips never comes up. That is a given. Everyone would like more field trips. Everyone thinks they are valuable. The conversation is always about resources; money for buses, parents to chaperone, time to get away. When the Crystal Bridges research was published on EducationNext, a teacher wrote in, effusive about the impact of museums on her students. She didn't need data to believe in the value of museums. She needed money. I am very, very skeptical that this research could move the needle on her ability to pay for the bus to get to the museum.

Instead of focusing on policy implications for someone outside our sphere of control, I'd love to see this kind of research used to change policy inside the museum. Reading the Crystal Bridges report, I was struck by several questions:

• All of these test subjects received a docent tour. How do their outcomes differ from school groups who visit but do not have a facilitated experience? Should museums put more resources into docent programs, or fewer?
• The outcomes were significantly higher for students from "less-advantaged backgrounds." In fact, the impact for advantaged students (larger towns, wealthier schools) was "smaller or null." Does this mean we should prioritize offering docent tours to school groups from rural and poorer schools? Should we put resources into those offerings at the expense of offerings to school groups from wealthier schools? 
• If a museum cared about one of these outcomes specifically (i.e. content retention vs. historical empathy vs. tolerance), what could they do to their tour program to "dial up" that outcome?

I'm most interested in measurement that moves an organization forward. There are occasionally instances when measurement can move a funder, or an elected official, or a community. But that movement, especially when it comes to proving the value of the arts, has been slow. I believe that our ability to "prove" our value is most correlated not to our economic impact and test score inflation but to our ability to do what we do best. And to do it most powerfully, we need research that can guide us to better choices and approaches. When we improve our own work, we prove our value. 
At least, that's my hypothesis. I guess we'll have to test it.

As member of the European Public Health Association (EUPHA) I receive a monthly newsletter with relevant Public Health news from the region. I have previously criticized EUPHA for their lack of focus on public health communication (see blog post “European Public Health Association and the missing communication category”). I maintain my critic, but must also congratulate them when public health communication does sneak its way into for example their newsletter.

Thus, in the January 2014 newsletter under Upcoming Courses and Conferences attention is given to the Conference on Communication, Medicine and Ethics (COMET), which will take place in Lugano, Switzerland 26-28 June 2014. The conference aims to bring together communication researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds, ranging from healthcare specialities to the human and social sciences.

The first Conference on Communication, Medicine and Ethics (COMET) was hosted by the Health Communication Research Centre at Cardiff University, UK in 2003 and was attended by more than 200 participants from 20 countries. Based on its success COMET has now established itself as an annual interdisciplinary, international event.

COMET is described as using a problem-oriented approach, and places special emphasis on the dissemination of high quality research in interpersonal, mass communication, and practical ethics which is directly relevant to healthcare practitioners.

The 2014 conference will focus especially on the dissemination of ongoing research in Doctor-Patient communication studies, health communication in the media, as well as practical ethics which engages directly with healthcare practitioners. Looking at the list of proposed topics and keynote speakers, it does seem like especially the doctor-patient communication will be given much attention, but I’m happy to note that themes like “Communicating Risk and Uncertainty”; ” Interprofessional Communication and Hospital Management Systems” and “Media and Health Communication” also figures on the list.

Assessing myself unlikely to attend, I do hope that the conference will set up a hashtag for Twitter and encourage social media activity during the conference, so that a broad audience (including me) can be reached.

The organisers of the conference accepted proposals for either panels or paper presentations (oral or poster) within the main themes up until 31st January 2014, so unfortunately the deadline has been passed, but I look forward to seeing the complete programme once it becomes available.

Last week, I learned that ninety-six elephants are killed every day in Africa.

I learned this at a conference for directors of American zoos and aquaria (I was there to give a talk). I was blown away by these zoo directors' collective focus on a singular mission: ensuring the survival of animal species worldwide. The whole day was spent in passionate discussion about research projects, international crises, and serious, cost-intensive efforts for zoos and aquaria to take action to improve the fate of elephants and other species at risk.

I would guess that most people have no idea that this work is happening at zoos. I certainly didn't. I had a vague sense of how conservation fit into their educational missions, but I didn't realize the extent of the direct advocacy and activism happening every day.

And so, rather than talking about community participation in the context of zoo visits, I asked these directors: how can you involve your 180 million visitors in this important conservation work? How can you invite them to participate alongside you to save species?

In museums (and zoos), we frequently stop the conversation with visitors when it comes to action--especially political action. We give people content and then we say, "you decide." This may make sense in strictly education institutions, but it is ridiculous to stop there in organizations that are already engaged in activist work. If you are taking action to save species, why not invite visitors to join you?

We often stop at the educational message out of a sense that it gives visitors agency to do what they want with the information provided. But that means we also stop ourselves from inviting visitors to join us in the work that matters most. It devalues their potential contribution. It robs them of the opportunity to make a difference--and robs us of the opportunity for increased impact and change.

A clear example of this can be found in the difference between the 96Elephants campaign and that of charity: water.

The 96Elephants website is a dramatic educational site created by the Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs the zoos and aquaria in NYC. The site provides a powerful statement about the slaughter of elephants in Africa, supported with rich media and educational text. But when you get to the part with the call to action, there are two things you can do:

1. "explore the crisis" by reading more about elephants and humans on the site
2. sign a pledge to avoid ivory products and encourage a moratorium on ivory products

These are not exactly life-changing actions.
In contrast, check out charity: water, a non-profit that works to ensure safe drinking water for people around the world. The homepage has three prominent options: 

1. sponsor a water project (which involves making donations of $6,000 - $20,000)
2. start a fundraising campaign 
3. learn about the water crisis

It's no accident that only one of these three is a "learn" box. The first two are opportunities to immediately get involved, either by donating money or raising it. charity: water is incredible at empowering regular people to make a difference. You can donate your birthday to raise funds for clean water. You can track exactly where what projects your money supports. Paul Young, the Director of Digital at charity: water, explains: “We are trying to build a movement of passionate people who are going to form a relationship with us for years…. We want our donors to be advocates. We want them to share content, we want them to feel really connected to their impact and we want them to represent that to all their friends and family.”

A lot has been written about how charity: water stands out online. Just surf through their beautiful site and you'll see how they empower people as participants in raising serious funds for their cause.

Zoos have an entry point that charity: water lacks: the visit. Zoos have millions of visitors--millions of people who care about animals, who are interested in them, and who show up to learn more about them. Some of those visitors, looking at the majestic African elephants, are ready to take action to ensure their survival. They are ready to do more than learn about the crisis and sign a petition. If charity: water can do it for drinking water, surely zoos and aquaria can do it for animals.

Fundraisers often say that "it's an honor to be asked." This can sound disingenuous. But it's true. When we invite people to share our greatest passions, when we invite them to support our most important work, we empower them to be meaningful, powerful participants. That's what building a movement is all about.

Dear Nico,

You haven’t noticed this, because you don’t read my blog yet, but this is the first newsletter I’m writing in three months. It’s also the last public one for a while.

You’re growing so quickly, and I want to write to you a ton. But you’re a much more autonomous person now than you were even just three months ago. I’ve already been shaping your online presence with these newsletters. Maybe it’s time to back off and let you craft your own when the time comes. Up until now, I’ve been justifying these letters to myself as being really about me and my perceptions of you. But it’s getting harder to write amusing trivialities without revealing the person you’re becoming. I want to leave that to you.

Twoddlerhood is in full swing. This appears to be the first age of deafness to my questions, but I can hardly stay grumpy at you for that: it’s mostly because of your total absorption in what you’re doing.

I’m slightly miffed to report that one of your favorite activities is rejecting people. “No Sierra!,” you shout. “No Rio! No Romy. No Mary. No Luke. No… mama. Yes mama.” Well, at least you grudgingly acknowledge the hand that feeds you most often.

You need feeding, for all of those major, major growth spurts over the last few months. Feelings are the biggest every time. You’re sucking down milk like nobody’s business, building bones I would think. You’re moody and have strong preferences. In other words, you’re two.

Some of your newest mad skills:

• You know how to pet the cats so that at least half the time they stick around for it. You also attempt to cuddle the cats and beep them on the nose. Nochka will disdainfully have none of that; Aki is theatrically tolerant.
• You’re semi pro at spoon and fork wielding for anything that’s not liquid. Super purposeful at experimenting with the “wrong” side of the spoon, which gets you more guacamole than it does soup
• You zip and unzip your coat with the best of them. Woe unto anyone who attempts to do it for you, whether intentionally or absentmindedly. (Ask me how I know.)
• Despite all the big feelings, sometimes you ride the emotional wave pretty well. For example, these days you agree to wear scarves and mittens when weather-appropriate without freaking out about it.
• Huge climbing and balancing improvements.
• You know all the letters, and all the numbers 0-10.
• Last week, you “read” (repeated after me while looking at the words, which totally counts) your first two words: FINE and MINE. As in, ooooh, snuggle puppy of mine, everything about you is especially fine.
• You remember names more or less immediately.
• You’re all language all the time. Five word sentences.
• Drawing!
• This has now happened more than once: adventure walks where you push the stroller (or just walk) farther than reasonable to expect. I can’t wait for the forest to get warm and beautiful again.

In the “notable lack of mad skills” department: first and second person pronouns are hard to learn when there are just the two of us. Our conversations are sometimes like Who’s On First.

Your current favorites:

• Foods: flavor-wise, most of them, including spicy and minty. In practice, favorites are anything you can eat by yourself. My heartwarming little omnivore.
• Legos. Just wait till they open that Legoland right near us.
• Music: what you’ll actually request — MIKA OMG MIKA, Jack Johnson, Bob Dylan. Trucks song. Piano song. Dog song. Whoa oh oh song. Rainbow song, at bedtime. Other stuff you will happily listen to — any of Sandra Boynton’s CDs, Elizabeth Mitchell, Patty Larkin, Ella Fitzgerald, Michael Franti, Miles Davis, Jason Mraz.

Miscellany:

• You’ve been asking to have your ears pierced. “Nico eenning. Peas.”
• Speaking of language! Akalilalo means at least a few things: radiator, avocado, alligator. You’ve accidentally figured out that “mixer say whaaaaaa” makes me laugh, and say it a lot now. You slay me with that look of intense concentration while absorbing language from lyrics. Is that why kids like listening to the same song over and over in a row?
• Words: baloom. Row bot cup (which is an actual cup, not sippy or anything, with robots on it). Row bot juice (juice when served in that cup). Ohgoosus (oh goodness). Tolly (totally). Psyche. Pinano (piano). Kidlee (kitty).
• Holy wow, are routines awesome. We have a bedtime routine, a coffee making routine (where you are the one pressing the grinder button), and a routine around getting you to do stuff. You know, the one that goes, “I’m going to count to three, and if X doesn’t happen, Y will,” and variations on it. If you don’t choose a shirt to wear, I’m going to choose one for you. If you zip up your coat, then we can go outside to the car.
• Love is all. You sign “I love you” and triumphantly declare I LOFF OO! You regularly request snuggles. There are spontaneous hugs, transcendent little moments.

The other day we held your second birthday party, themed Trucks and Fans. A smashing success. We colored and assembled “DIY” (pre-cut) pinwheels, we colored little unfinished wood cars with markers made especially for wood (who knew those existed?), we played with Legos. The house was a bustle of joy. The store-bought cake was unexpectedly delicious. Everyone had a good time, and then they were all gone, and you and I giggled our way to bedtime.

I love you so much, Nico. Happy second birthday — and many, many more.

-Mama

PS pix, as usual.

I have started a small experiment on Tumblr. To collect the online culture of Medicine.

Using the simple, but amazing IFTTT (it really does put the internet to work for you!) I’ve set up a number of automated recipes that collect content from a number of sources: Instagram, Youtube, Flickr, and Twitter. The original idea for which I was inspired by the Horniman was to include photos taken by visitors at our museum. But then I thought why not widen the scope. So I decided to look at how people portray medicine in the world of social media.

While setting up the recipes I started looking into what hashtags to follow on Instagram and was quite surprised by a number of facts:

• the sheer volume of #hospital selfies
• #anatomy is mostly about the Grey variant
• Brazilians dominate #biomedicine
• The #scientist is a song by Coldplay
• Instagrammers prefer to smoke their #medicine(!)

There’s a lot of content out there. And this is where IFTTT comes into the picture. Whenever we “like” or “favorite” content from one of museum accounts on these platforms, ITFFF automatically adds the picture or video to our Tumblr queue and it becomes part of the collection. Simple as that!

At the moment I’m not informing people (other than “liking”) nor asking for their permission to include their photos on the Tumblr. Should I be doing this? I do make sure to link back to the original content and include the original description, and in today’s sharing culture isn’t that more or less acceptable? On the other hand, I guess a simple “We like your photo, mind if we feature it on our Tumblr?” could also work. It does make the process a bit more time-consuming, but on the other hand I wouldn’t like to upset anyone.

What do you think of this idea? Any other platforms or hashtags we should be following?

(thanks to Victoria Pearce from the the Horniman Museum and Gardens for sharing the idea of using IFTTT with Tumblr)

Let's say you want to transform an organization. What's more effective: drastic change with incremental progress towards that new vision, or incremental change that builds a new vision?

I'm prepping for a week of talks to museum, zoo, and library folk, and this is the question that is driving some of what I plan to share. Note: if you are in NYC area or Toronto, I have FREE talks in each - see bottom of this post for details. Preparing talks is always a great opportunity to reframe my thinking about what's going on in my work and how it might be relevant to others. And this time, since a couple of the talks I'm giving are explicitly for directors, I'm thinking about leadership and institutional change.

In thinking about some of the changes that have happened at our museum in Santa Cruz, I've realized that they were predicated on setting a clear, big vision first, and then incrementally moving towards that goal. When I write it down, that sounds like a pretty obvious approach. But change doesn't always happen that way. Sometimes there's a new direction but not a known destination. Sometimes an organization noodles with change in many areas and finds itself wobbling into a new place entirely.

Here's my hypothesis: while a top-down approach may seem autocratic, it can be incredibly inclusive and democratic in implementation. When there is a very clear, explicit vision and goals, many people across an organization can become leaders in the change. When the vision is clouded or the goals uncertain, you are stuck with a "I know it when I see it" approach to change that may leave people frustrated or mystified as to how they can make a difference.

I'm struggling with this now as we embark on our next phase as an organization--one with more distributed leadership. That distribution hopefully means more collective ownership. But if we don't do it right, it could also possibly mean more confusion, and, paradoxically, less participation.

I remember talking with a director of a large public radio station about many innovative things happening at his organization. "But you know," he said, "when I'm really honest, I realize that most of these ideas ultimately come from my desk." When I heard that, I wondered if everyone in his organization knew what his vision was for tremendous work. I wondered if he was articulating it clearly enough for others to bring brilliant ideas forward. I wondered what I could do to avoid that kind of feeling.

When I see projects at my museum that I'm proud of, more often than not they are things I have very little to do with directly. They are projects led by staff members, volunteers, and collaborators who are infused with our vision. They can make magic and scale up our impact because they know what we are trying to achieve and they want to be part of it.

So I'm planning to use these talks to encourage people--especially directors--to articulate clear, powerful visions. To fight for those visions, support people who want to further them, and protect those people from detractors. I'm not sure this is the best way to lead institutional change. But it's a way that has allowed our work to get out into our community quickly and powerfully, often without having to touch my desk at all.


If you happen to be in New York/New Jersey or Toronto, I will be speaking:

• JERSEY: Monday January 27 at Seton Hall at 7pm in the Walsh Library, Beck Rooms. I don't really know where that is, but I'm sure we can all figure it out. No RSVP required.
• TORONTO: Thursday January 30 at the Textile Museum from 4-6pm. This is a more informal talk/dialogue. They can only fit 70 people, so you must RSVP to programs@textilemuseum.ca

I look forward to traveling, speaking, and learning with you in the next week.

This semester I’m offering a new course, Improving the Past [syllabus], that is another attempt on my part to capitalize on what we’ve learned from recent research about how young people use digital media. Last year I wrote a series of posts I called The History Curriculum in 2023 in which I argued that within a decade we should be focusing our teaching around four key areas of skill: making, mining, marking, and mashing. Improving the Past takes on the first and last of these criteria.

Last year my department decided that I couldn’t teach my admittedly controversial course, Lying About the Past, in its full form and I chose not to teach it in the version our undergraduate committee proposed, one that would limit my students’ creative endeavor to the confines of our classroom. Because that course had generated so much student enthusiasm, I started thinking about ways to capture that enthusiasm that would also be acceptable to my colleagues. A close friend and former George Mason colleague helped me clarify my thinking on this and had several fantastic suggestions, one of which morphed into the current course.

The basic premise underlying the course is that there is a long history of attempts to “improve” the past, whether it was the sudden disappearance of Trotsky from the history of the Soviet Union, or a more recent claim by a Virginia textbook writer that thousands of slaves took up arms in the Civil War to defend the institution that held them in bondage. And then there are those faked Civil War photographs like the one provided here. Of course, this history of improvement extends all the way to the origins of our profession when, for instance, Thucydides put words into the mouths of his subjects in his history of the Peloponnesian Wars. At least Thucydides was up front about his improving of the past.

Given this long history of improvement of the past — whether with good intent or bad — it seemed to me important that students, whether history majors or not, need to learn to think critically not only about why the past is being improved, by how. How is information altered and woven into compelling new narratives? What role does technology play in both the alteration and the dissemination of such knowledge? How can technological tools help us ferret out distortions of the historical record?

One of the most important takeaways for me as an educator from my experiences with Lying About the Past is that my students learned best when they were making a hoax out of the available (mostly true) historical facts. As a result, Improving the Past is built around making and mashing. In addition to studying the many ways the past has been improved, my students will do some of their own improving. They will select historical texts, images, and maps that they will then alter, preferably subtly, to create a new and improved narrative about the past. Then they will write about why they made the choices they made, how the new narrative might change our understanding of the past, how an improved past might be easier to teach, and what they learned from their experiences.

A glance at the syllabus will show that I’m placing a big premium on collaborative work in the course. There are two reasons for that emphasis. The first is that the work I’m asking them to do is difficult and each student will come to class with a different level of experience with history and with technology. The more they can pool their intellectual resources, the more they’ll get out of the class. The second is that I’m emphasizing the lesson that historical work is heavily collaborative, especially in these days of digital scholarship, and so I want to drive home the idea that by working together they are mirroring what, increasingly, we do in our own work. And lest anyone be concerned, my students’ “improvements” of the past will not be released to the Internet.

I am fortunate that the university has just opened two new active learning classrooms and I was able to grab one for this course (see below). I have not had the good fortune to teach in such a space before and so I’m looking forward to monitoring the ways the classroom design does (or doesn’t) facilitate the kind of work I’m expecting from my students. Given what I’ve written recently about spaces for history teaching and learning, I’m excited to be in such a new and different room. Notice, for instance, the wrap around white boards and the lack of an obvious “front” to the room.

Needless to say, I’m looking forward to the class. I’ll report in later in the semester on whether it’s working or not.

I actually thought I had blogged about it before, but a search through my posts shows me that the #sm4ph Twitter chat has been neglected. So hereby making up for that.

#sm4ph is a Twitter hashtag dedicated to exploring aspects of social media use and how it affects public health, including the academic field of Public Health and the public’s health at large. Until recently it was a monthly chat (although not really active in the second half of 2013) but since January 2014 it has been upgraded to a weekly chat. It is moderated by Jim Garrow, who is director of Digital Public Health in the Department of Public Health in the City of Philadelphia and works like other scheduled Twitter chats: A moderator choses (often based on inputs of other chat participants) a number of questions for discussion, which are then discussed at a designated time. The #sm4ph chat takes place every Wednesday at 9pm Eastern Time (which in central Europe time means at 3am (!))

Due to the time difference I have never been able to take part in the chat, but as with other similar chats an archive is stored and made available through a website (in this case www.phsocmed.wordpress.com). In addition, the hashtag is regularly used, also by myself, for tweets which relate to the topic of social media and public health. Doing a regular check-up on #sm4ph on Twitter is a great way to get updated on new studies, initiatives and people (mostly US-based) related to social media and public health.

Should I next Wednesday night suffer from insomnia, I might try to join the chat. If not I will most likely be checking in on the Storify summarizing the chat afterwards. Of course the topic discussed is not always of interest to me, as my main interest is in public health science communication, but still it is a good way to keep up to date on ideas, initiatives and innovations in using social media for public health.

Briefly - Hopper is something new in the travel  / local space. In their own words:

What if you could plan an amazing trip based on a vague idea — like “spring surfing in California” or “Mediterranean cruise”? What if logistical information popped up right when you needed it, so you wouldn't have to spend hours on research? This is our vision: to make planning a trip an effortless extension of discovering and exploring new places.

We spent several years experimenting with different tools, technology and algorithms to collect, organize and manage massive amounts of travel data. The result is a new kind of trip planning engine, powered by the world's largest structured database of travel information.

I've not remotely explored the site, but I see it as part of a trend which involves rich exploration experiences including plenty of imagery, the social aspect of local and specifically travel combined with smarts involving itinerary planning and travel booking. There are some similarities with the recently acquired RouteSet demo from PerceptLabs and also with the geo-microblog site Findery.

Visually, the exploration of a place on Hopper looks like this:

Which is to say - visually very rich with images provided (I assume) by the community. This wave of modern location products makes one ask the question - how important is the map for (engagement) in local search?

Right now, the site has some issues. As a signed in user I'm told to browse others' experiences and 'save' what I find interesting. Howerver, there is no mention of a 'save' action on any of the posts on the site. Consequently, it is a little hard right now to give a write up of how the site works. I do note posts have a reference to a source. Does hopper crawl these sources? or do the users cross post?

Update: regarding saving - a search on google for 'site:hopper.com save -near' surfaces pages which contain the word save, like this one: http://www.hopper.com/list/cities/-378 . However, the page itself according to Chrome has no instance of the string 'save' on it. Looking at the source for the page shows that there is actually a save button and other mechanisms in place. Not sure what is amiss here. Testing on IE also fails to surface any visible save functionality.

Update: I figured out the save mechanism. There is a star on each entity. Hitting the star *saves* the entity. This is a pretty poor design. Stars are generally used in interfaces associated with the term 'favourite'. Telling users they need to 'save' entities, then using a different metaphor for this action will, if I am any sort of average user, result in a lot of lost opportunity for engaging users.

In 2012, Adam Bencard and I attended the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The conference was full of energy, curiousity-driven conversation, a perhaps unsurprising amount of great vegetarian food given all the animal studies scholars, and interdisciplinary in the manner of a delicious banquet rather than a fragmented and depleted vending machine.

Whilst in Milwaukee, I was also introduced to the European chapter of SLSA, and I’m now sitting on the board and very much looking forward to the 8th SLSAeu conference in Turin, Italy this June. The conference theme is ‘Life, in Theory’, and the website contains a full description and a call for papers under several different thematic strands. Deadline is January 31st, submissions info here or via info[at]litsciarts.eu. From the website:

The VIII European Meeting of the Society for the Study of Literature, Science, and the Arts aims to continue the conversation between science and the humanities on the implications for our projected futures of the manipulation, administration, and governance of life forms. The concept of life today no longer provides sufficient ontological ground to distinguish among different forms of life and to guide ethical, political, legal, or medical actions. Thus, a discussion across disciplinary forms of knowledge and theories of life, and the practices they authorize, is literally to confront issues of life and death.

Alongside paper presentations, roundtables, keynotes from the likes of Prof. Robert Esposito and Prof. Cary Wolfe, Adam and I are organizing a public performance event as part of the conference, and a bioart exhibit is also being planned.

And not least, I ‘m looking forward to adding to my collection of conference badge self-descriptions, adding ‘In Theory’ to ‘Nonhuman’, ‘Not What You Think’, and ‘We are* Our Brains’…

*not just