ECHO Blogging Central

I’ve increasingly felt that digital journalism and digital humanities are kindred spirits, and that more commerce between the two could be mutually beneficial. That sentiment was confirmed by the extremely positive reaction on Twitter to a brief comment I made on the launch of Knight-Mozilla OpenNews, including from Jon Christensen (of the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford, and formerly a journalist), Shana Kimball (MPublishing, University of Michigan), Tim Carmody (Wired), and Jenna Wortham (New York Times).

Here’s an outline of some of the main areas where digital journalism and digital humanities could profitably collaborate. It’s remarkable, upon reflection, how much overlap there now is, and I suspect these areas will only grow in common importance.

1) Big data, and the best ways to scan and visualize it. All of us are facing either present-day or historical archives of almost unimaginable abundance, and we need sophisticated methods for finding trends, anomalies, and specific documents that could use additional attention. We also require robust ways of presenting this data to audiences to convey theses and supplement narratives.

2) How to involve the public in our work. If confronted by big data, how and when should we use crowdsourcing, and through which mechanisms? Are there areas where pro-am work is especially effective, and how can we heighten its advantages while diminishing its disadvantages? Since we both do work on the open web rather than in the cloistered realms of the ivory tower, what are we to make of the sometimes helpful, sometimes rocky interactions with the public?

3) The narrative plus the archive. Journalists are now writing articles that link to or embed primary sources (e.g., using DocumentCloud). Scholars are now writing articles that link to or embed primary sources (e.g., using Omeka). Formerly hidden sources are now far more accessible to the reader.

4) Software developers and other technologists are our partners. No longer relegated to a secondary status as “the techies who make the websites,” we need to work intellectually and practically with those who understand how digital media and technology can advance our agenda and our content. For scholars, this also extends to technologically sophisticated librarians, archivists, and museum professionals. Moreover, the line between developer and journalist/scholar is already blurring, and will blur further.

5) Platforms and infrastructure. We care a great deal about common platforms, ranging from web and data standards, to open source software, to content management systems such as WordPress and Drupal. Developers we work with can create platforms with entirely novel functionality for news and scholarship.

6) Common tools. We are all writers and researchers. When the New York Times produces a WordPress plugin for editing, it effects academics looking to use WordPress as a scholarly communication platform. When our center updates Zotero, it effects many journalists who use that software for organizing their digital research.

7) A convergence of length. I’m convinced that something interesting and important is happening at the confluence of long-form journalism (say, 5,000 words or more) and short-form scholarship (ranging from long blog posts to Kindle Singles geared toward a more popular audiences). It doesn’t hurt that many journalists writing at this length could very well have been academics in a parallel universe, and vice versa. The prevalence of high-quality writing that is smart and accessible has never been greater.

This list is undoubtedly not comprehensive; please add your thoughts about additional common areas in the comments. It may be worth devoting substantial time to increasing the dialogue between digital journalists and digital humanists at the next THATCamp Prime, or perhaps at a special THATCamp focused on the topic. Let me know if you’re interested. And more soon in this space.

Last week, I did something I hadn't done in ten years. I walked into a boxing gym. In college, I'd boxed a bit recreationally, and it seemed like a good time to pick it up again. In the fall I bought a Groupon to a local gym. Four months later, here I was, ready to take my first class.

The gym was full of young men working out, pushing themselves, and generally having a great time. The vibe was friendly and aggressive. I'd called the day before and knew what to expect. Despite this preparation--and the years I'd spent in similar gyms as a college student--it took almost all my willpower not to turn around and walk out the door immediately after entering.

I'm glad I didn't; the class was excellent. But I was struck by the incredible stress that comes when you jump into an unfamiliar situation or subculture. There was nothing threatening about the people at the boxing gym. And yet I felt threatened, uncertain of whether I was up to the challenge, ready to be the newbie, willing to be a novice woman among men.

We often talk in cultural institutions about reaching out to new audiences and helping them break through the threshold fear that may accompany first-time museum or cultural experiences. And yet for many cultural professionals, "threshold fear" is a hazy term. How could a person possibly feel intimidated, truly frightened, of entering a museum? How scary or confusing could it be? We can't fathom that kind of fear, and so we demean or disregard it.

If you're a museum person and you want to understand threshold fear, don't go to a museum. Go to a boxing gym. Go to an uberhip bar. Go to a place of worship that is not your own. Go to a tattoo parlor. Find a place where you feel an incredible urge to bolt out the door the minute you walk in.

Go there alone. See what makes sense and doesn't to you. Consider what intimidates you and what you feel comfortable with. Note the people, areas, or experiences you gravitate to as safe starting points.

And then go back to your own institution and try to see it through that lens. Hold on to your pounding heart, and imagine carrying that adrenaline through your own front door.

This is incredibly difficult. I can't do it with my imagination alone. But what I can do is put myself in those uncomfortable situations and perceive the raw power of the stress that accompanies them. What I can do is find people who feel that way about my institution and travel the halls with them as my guide. Threshold fear is very real. If we're going to overcome it, we've got to respect it.

Domenico pointed me to an entry on InfoLet (a blog he and others keep in Italian on informatics and literature.) The entry announces a book La macchina nel tempo: Studi di informatica umanistica in onore did Tito Orlandi that brings together many of the top digital humanists in Italy to celebrate Tito Orlandi’s contribution to the field. You can order online at http://www.lelettere.it. Here is the blog entry translated into English:

Tito Orlandi was one of the founding figures in Italy and Europe of the Digital Humanities, known in Italy as “Informatica Umanistica”, an expression coined by Orlandi himself in the late 80s.  To celebrate his stuture and his outstanding contribution to the field, a group of scholars of different humanities backgrounds collected their contributions in this book not only to pay homage to the discipline but to give an account of its state of the art.

Though distinctive in nature and authorship, the essays composing this book are connected one another through the principle of methodological homogeneity with original studies in classical philology, modern archeology, linguistics, formal logic, musicology, history, textual analysis, and library sciences. All the essays provide interesting insights and reflections that go beyond the boundaries of the single disciplines of reference pointing out decisive, and still currently unsolved, knots such as the relationship between information studies and humanities or the concept of encoding as a passage from the world of analogical objects to the world of digital ones.

Almost paradoxically, nowadays the great achievements in the field of information technology seem to coincide with the great concerns of the Digital Humanities: the superficiality of the applications, the lack of transparency in the processes of digitalization, the linguistic and geopolitical supremacy of a restricted part of the scientific community, and last but not least, the risk of loss or manipulation of cultural memories.

The very topicality of the above-stated concerns shows, just like the contributions contained in this book do, that the Digital Humanities is “alive” more than ever and ready to pick some of the most important fruits of its labors. Still open, instead, is the fascinating and ambitious challenge issued by Tito Orlandi himself in the 80s: the quest for a convergence between natural and cultural sciences capable to go far beyond the mere applicative horizon.

(trans. by Federica Perazzini with edits by Geoffrey Rockwell.)

ESSAYS and CONTRIBUTIONS

Edoardo Ballo and Massimo Parodi, “Strumento e teoria”.

Domenico Fiormonte and Teresa Numerico, “Le radici interdisciplinari dell’informatica: logica, linguistica e gestione della conoscenza”.

Dino Buzzetti, “Oltre il rappresentare. Le potenzialità del markup”.

Fabio Ciotti, “La rappresentazione digitale del testo: il paradigma del markup e i suoi sviluppi”.

Gino Roncaglia, “Alcune note su modelli diversi di organizzazione ipertestuale”.

Claude Cazalé Bérard, “Ritratto dell’Ipercritico da giovane”.

Maria Guercio, “Gli archivi digitali”.

Lorenzo Perilli, “Filologia ieri, oggi … e domani”.

Alberto Cadioli, “Dall’ipersaggio” all’archivio”.

Nicola Tangari, “Informatica, musica, musicologia”.

Serge Noiret, “Storia Digitale: sulle risorse di rete per gli storici”.

Paola Moscati, “Venti anni di «Archeologia e Calcolatori». Aspetti e momenti”.

Maurizio Lana, “Un database testuale per il latino tardo”.

Ilaria Bonincontro, “Edizioni critiche in formato elettronico”.

Francesca Tomasi, “Informatica Umanistica: iniziative, progetti e proposte”.

Rather than focusing on a new technology or website in our year-end review on the Digital Campus podcast, I chose reading as the big story of 2011. Surely 2011 was the year that digital reading came of age, with iPad and Kindle sales skyrocketing, apps for reading flourishing, and sites for finding high-quality long-form writing proliferating. It was apropos that Alan Jacobs‘s wonderful book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction was published in 2011.

Indeed, the relationship between reading and distraction was one of the things that caught my eye reading Daniel Kahneman‘s essential Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman speaks of two systems in the mind—he eschews “intuition” and “reason” for the more neutral “System 1″ and “System 2″—with the first making quick, unconscious assessments and the second engaging in much more studious, and laborious, calculations. Since our minds (like our bodies) are naturally lazy, we prefer to stick with System 1′s judgments as much as possible, unless jarred out of it into the grumpier System 2.

In the fifth chapter of Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman addresses the act of reading, and the impulse—even in what is normally thought of as the most cerebral of human acts—to fall back on System 1, to associate the ease of reading with the truth of what is read:

How do you know that a statement is true? If it is strongly linked by logic or association to other beliefs or preferences you hold, or comes from a source you trust and like, you will feel a sense of cognitive ease. The trouble is that there may be other causes for your feeling of ease—including the quality of the font and the appealing rhythm of the prose—and you have no simple way of tracing your feelings to their source.

Thus the context writing exists in and other aspects unrelated to the actual content are critical to the reception that writing receives. In addition to studies on the effects of different fonts on credibility, Kahneman also cites experiments that show the importance of the quality of paper (for printed materials), of the contrast between a font and its background, and of the presence of distractions that reduce the cognitive ease of reading. In short, environments that make it easy to read also make it easy to believe what is being read. Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of this mixture of context and content is that is it extremely difficult for you to separate the two.

So legibility and the absence of distractions are not just design niceties; when a reader chooses to move an article into an app like Instapaper, they are strongly increasing the odds that they will like what they read and agree with it. And since readers often make that relocation at the recommendation of a trusted source, the written work is additionally “framed” as worthy even before the act of reading has begun.

Commercial publishers may not like the use of Instapaper or Readability, which strip the distractions otherwise known as ads from a cluttered website to focus solely on the text at hand, but they are an unalloyed good for writers.

How long can a conference continue after it has ended? I don’t know the answer, but I know that Science Online 2012 is definitely not over yet, despite the fact that the last plenary session ended more than two weeks ago. On the Wikipage of the conference the list of blog coverage after the conference just seems to keep growing, and on Twitter #scio12 tweets keeps rolling in. People I didn’t meet at the conference, I am now meeting two weeks later, meaning that I can still add names to the list of “people I met at Science Online”. Quite amazing.

It is great to read other people’s reflections on the conference, their follow-up sharing and their excitement over Science Online 2013, although it is almost one year away (a wikipage for planning Scio13 is already going strong).

As many of the Science Online related blog posts already portray, it is easy to become a fan of this little big unconference. Even though this was my first experience with the original Science Online conference (I attended Science Online London 2011), I felt so very welcome and almost automatically as member of a group or family I didn’t know I was a part of until I joined them there live, in Raleigh, NC.

The hundreds of interesting topics which came up during Scio12 could fill hundreds of blog posts, but here I’d just like to share two things that I really like about the conference, and articulate two of the weaknesses which I encountered.

Science Online 2012 pluses (two reasons why Science Online is great!)

• It is full with passionate people. People who have a passion for communicating science, whether they are scientists, journalists, editors, communication officers etc. Beginners, longtime experts – they are all there with a passion which they are willing to share!
• Titles are not important. On the name tag what is important is communicated (a great example of science communication to the point!). And this it not what your title is, which institution you represent, or where in the world you are from. Your first name is central (because this is by which you should approach other people). Second comes your last name, so that you actually have a fair chance of finding people later on; and third of course their Twitter name, so that you can contact them! Especially the non-existence of titles and affiliations makes you feel equal with your fellow conference participants. No worries in approaching someone who then might turn out to be your favorite blogger or head of communication in the coolest organization.

Science Online minuses (A little bit of critique)

• The conference brings together enthusiasts of science and communication. Most of them are either already good communicators or are thriving to become so. This provides a basis for valuable sharing of experiences and ideas, but not in all cases does it create a forum for fruitful for discussions. The eternal ‘battle’ of the ‘mean journalist’ and the non-communicating scientist often ended up dominating the discussions. And without the presence of either the bad journalist or the narrow-minded scientist, the discussion could at times end up a bit cliché and useless (or ‘in a rabbit hole’ as one of the people I follow on Twitter wrote). This was a shame for some of the discussions. I (perhaps naively) expected that at a Science Online conference focus would be more forward-looking and centered around how the social web might improve this journalist/scientist relationship. If the other discussion is wanted it might be better to bring in some bad journalists and some scientists who prefer staying hidden away in their lab or behind their desk and have them participate in the discussion.
• What is science? To my knowledge there is no rule to how broadly science at Science Online should be defined. And that is how it should be. However, despite having met participants at the conference who do research in language, risk and other less ‘fact-based’ science, many of the discussions I participated in tended to centre around science which can be done in a lab, can be boiled down to numbers or relates to theoretical science like physics and math. These are often difficult topics to communicate, so they deserve all the attention on the communication side that they can get. However, it would sometimes have been nice to have a more articulated discussion about how to communicate the much less fact-based science. I come from the area of public health. An area where there a lots of facts, but even more theories and unknowns. Ethical concerns, moral values, personal opinion, theoretical stand points all matters and makes communication of research in for example the wellbeing of asylum children, the best approaches to prevent stress from causing disease, behavior change’s role in preventing obesity etc. extremely difficult. It would be great if the challenges of communicating less ‘fact-based’ research could be discussed also at Science Online. Or at least that it is made clear that science is a broad thing and that the discussions may become blurry when they are all put under the one hat of “science”.

I guess my two ‘minuses’ could actually be converted into a suggestion for future sessions at Science Online 2013. For example the “Health/Medicine track” is still empty. Maybe this was a occation to make sure that the less medicine-oriented side of public health is also represented at Science Online. Will let the thought boil a little bit in my head..

In a fit of agility, I added a page for mobile devices to get some of the d8taplex news info: d8taplex.com/m/hapaxPage.html. This shows the articles crawled from Reuters which are getting a reasonable amount of bit.ly juice. Note that currently you have to navigate there explicitly.

The page is extremely simple.

Check out Jeremy Singer-Vine's page as well for top headlines. In comparison to using click data to determine 'top' articles, it uses the editorial position of articles on the news sources it crawls.

For some reason, a number of projects are coming out of the closet this week. I mentioned Reuters 'Social Pulse' briefly already (not to self: write post describing how while many Reuters journalists have twitter accounts, no-one is tweeting...). Here is another : topheadlin.es (via Nieman Journalism Lab).

The site is, reportedly, a side project by Jeremy Singer-Vine, from The Wall Street Journal. The site, designed for mobile form factor, aggregates 'top' headlines from a small number of sites. From a motivation and design perspective, I really like it - keep it simple, tell me what I need to know. However, from an analytical side, it suffers from not really understanding the content that it is aggregating.

For example, right now it looks like this:

Did the Giant's win (something)?

My experimental site - d8taplex news - attempts to avoid this problem by (currently) sourcing from a single news agency, and by using some simple clustering. That being said, I should probably work on a mobile version of the page if I want to compete!

In class this week, we are reading Mary Anne Warren's classic "On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion." For readers unfamiliar with the article, she argues against the following basic argument against abortion:

(1) It is prima facie wrong to kill human beings.
(2) Fetuses are human beings.
---------------------------------------
Therefore, it is prima facie wrong to kill fetuses.

Warren claims this argument commits the fallacy of equivocation: "the term `human' has two distinct, but not often distinguished, senses. This fact results in a slide of meaning, which serves to conceal the fallaciousness of the [above] argument ... For if `human' is used in the same sense in both (1) and (2) then, whichever of the two senses is meant, one of these premises is question-begging. And if it is used in two different senses then of course the conclusion doesn't follow.

Thus, (1) is a self-evident moral truth,' and avoids begging the question about abortion, only if `human being' is used to mean something like `a full-fledged member of the moral community.' (It may or may not also be meant to refer exclusively to members of the species Homo sapiens.) We may call this the moral sense of `human.' It is not to be confused with what we call the genetic sense, i.e., the sense in which any member of the species is a human being, and no member of any other species could be. If (1) is acceptable only if the moral sense is intended, (2) is non-question-begging only if what is intended is the genetic sense." Warren does not explicitly call 'human' ambiguous between 'person' (= 'full-fledged member of the moral community') and 'Homo Sapiens' (what she thinks of as 'having a genotype within a certain range,' though that's not how biologists think about species), but I don't think it's too much of a stretch to attribute that view to her.

The pedestrian question I want to ask is: is the word 'human' really ambiguous between 'person' and 'Homo Sapiens'? Linguists have developed tests to determine whether a word is ambiguous or not, and I'm not sure 'human' comes out ambiguous on these diagnostic tests. Here are three tests linguists consider useful.
1. The other languages test. Do other languages have distinct words for the various meanings of the supposedly ambiguous word?
2. The unrelated antonyms test. Does a word have two unrelated antonyms? E.g. the ambiguous word 'light' has both 'heavy' and 'dark' as antonyms.
3. The conjunction reduction test. Consider the sentence 'John and Jane each have a bat.' This could mean they both have baseball bats, or it could mean they both keep flying mammals as pets. However, it cannot (ordinarily/ without punning) mean that John keeps a pet bat and Jane has a baseball bat. That is, so-called 'crossed readings' are impossible, if the word is ambiguous. (This is called the 'conjunction reduction test' for the following reason: if John keeps a pet bat (but has no baseball bat), 'John has a bat' is true. If Jane has a baseball bat (but has no pet bat), then 'Jane has a bat' is true. But the reduced conjunction sentence 'John and Jane both have bats' is untrue, unless you are punning/ joking.)

The question now is how 'human' fares on each of these tests.
(Before proceeding to the official tests, it might be worth noting that, at least for me, 'human' does not intuitively/ pre-theoretically feel similar to 'bank' or 'light'.)
1. (other languages) Though I think 'human' apparently comes out unambiguous on this test for the languages I know, I don't know enough languages to be comfortable making a definitive pronouncement about this.
2. (unrelated antonyms) I think 'human' fails this ambiguity test too -- though I am open to evidence to the contrary. (hmmm... How unrelated do the antonyms have to be?)
3. (conjunction reduction) Suppose someone is 4 weeks pregnant, and she decides to name the fetus 'Pat'. Further suppose that we are at some point in the future where aliens are full-fledged members of our moral community. Call this alien 'Gordon Shumway.' (If you prefer robots to aliens, that would work too.)
For me, we can't even get the ambiguity test off the ground: 'Gordon Shumway is (a) human' (or 'Johnny Five is (a) human') are both false, according to my semantic intuitions. And if there is no true reading of 'Gordon Shumway is human,' then thinking about 'Pat and Gordon Shumway are human' won't reveal anything.

The (purported) fact that 'Gordon Shumway is human' is false suggests that belonging to the species Homo Sapiens is a necessary (but perhaps not sufficient) condition for being human. If that is correct, then we should not say that the traditional anti-abortion argument above trades on an ambiguity in 'human': there is no purely 'moral sense' of the word 'human' (i.e. full standing in the moral community is insufficient for humanity).

However, this is not a real problem for Warren's criticism of the traditional anti-abortion argument, as long as we think that "It is prima facie wrong to kill any member of Homo Sapiens" stands in need of some justification -- i.e. we think that we need some justification to think that the biological facts of species membership have anything to do with moral rights and obligations. And how to argue from biological premises to moral conclusions has been an extremely contentious philosophical issue.

Daniel and I just finished a meeting on the topic “how to plan a workshop day for our colleagues about Web Outreach”. The task was given to us by our director Thomas Söderqvist, who formulated the reason for having such a day like this:

If we shall be able to convince scientists about the importance of communicating science, we need to practice what we teach. In other words, we need to develop an exemplary communication practice that others can learn from (and others include not only scientists, but also curators in other museums). Telling others outside the museum what we are doing is an *integral* part of our work. It’s simply a part of everybody’s work description. We need to explore what it means to communicate ‘museum work in practice’ rather than ‘ready-made museum work’. Our online platform [e.g. this blog] is basically finished – now we can begin to produce content together.

With this in mind Daniel and I began contructing a program. We thought we could begin with a discussion on pros and cons in communicating our work online. Afterwards we were thinking of presenting ten examples of good use of social media, having people talking about their own experiences and how they benefitted from it. It all seemed easy and interessing… sort of… and then we realised, that this exercise would propably not get us any closer to what we wanted, namely creating a common culture of exploiting social media as daily working tools. Just talking about it would probably not evoke the action we need. What to do?

Consequently we moved our meeting to the media of Twitter and began sending each other tweets across the table instead of talking, and we decided that the next step would be for me to go and write this blog post. As a direct outcome of the tweeting we developed a name for the day. It is no longer “A web outreach day” – we call it “Museion & the Web” (with a loving thought to the Museums & the Web conference, which Daniel BTW is attending in April) . Also we created a logo – and made a video about the creative process, which is now published on YouTube:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsyMM7MwjwA

The future process of deciding the program for the day we will excecute here online. Let’s see if we can involve our colleagues – or others if they find it interesting enough to interact with us – in putting together a program. So I will end this post by posing a question: “If you think of it as a worktool – what is your best social media experience?”

Do term papers have to be written with pen and paper? No, luckily not anymore. Is it necessary to hand in a printed version of your exam paper? No, universities (at least in Denmark) now let you submit online. Would most people use programmes like Word etc for writing their assignments? Probably yes. But how about putting it all online? And making it public. By using a blog format?

The idea seems very relevant in a course on Public Health Science Communication, which will also cover how social media can play a role in communicating science. At least the idea is very inviting to me. And several universities have already tried out the concept. For example the University of British Colombia used student blogging for their course on Social Media in Health and Medicine.

Since I myself have no experience with using blogs in teaching situations, I was happy to learn that Science Online 2012 had several sessions relating to using the blog as a tool in lecturing. Unfortunately, I only managed to make it to one of the four sessions that circled around the topic. Blogging in the Undergraduate Classroom. As with other sessions at #scio12 there was no ‘fixed’ agenda or presentation, but more an informal sharing of experiences, ideas and questions, led by two moderators (Jason Goldman and John Hawks), who both have used blogs in their teaching.

I have tried to but together a small Storify of the tweets from the session. A link to the Storify is here and at the end of this post. I’m not sure that I managed to capture all tweets, so apologies to those who feel their tweets have been overlooked).

In summary some of my main take-home-messages were:

Advantages

• The goal of having the students blog is to teach them to communicate themselves – it is as simple as that!
• Blogging can also be a tool for teaching students how to read papers! By asking them to blog about the papers they read it teaches them not just about writing but also about reading papers and commenting on them.
• Students are much more aware of their audience (their peers and others who had access) and therefore work harder at their writing. (As someone commented: Their mothers might be reading along!)
• Using blogs, Twitter etc in the classroom makes you the teacher where it’s OK use mobile devices during class – you’re the cool teacher and may create a new classroom culture, which in return can be inspiring/motivating for the students.

Challenges

• Consider the privacy issue carefully. Should the blogs be public or restricted? Should the students blog under their own name etc.
• One of the risks of introducing blogs is that you may end up spending all your time training to use platform, become technical support. Take this into consideration and choose your platform carefully
• In grading it is important to be sensitive to the students technical skills, internet access, time frame for assignment etc.
• The blog may invite to more informal, loose behavior. Make sure to make deadlines for “handing in” assignments – and stick to them.

Suggestions for how to use the blog

• Forming student blogging teams can be an advantage. Eg. in teams of three where on student posts a blog, one person edits it and, one person comments on the final product. It can also be a way of involving the more shy students and give them room to express themselves
• Let the students choose a topic of interest to blog about. They write much better if it is something they have an interest in and care about. Highlight that If they wouldn’t want to read it no one else would!
• Blogs can be used to assign readings and students may be required to post and comment
• Start out with a scaffolding the process, eg. Reading & commenting, later on write blogposts
• Wiki-entries is a good alternative to blogs.

Other experiences

Doing a Google search of using blogs in the classroom, reveals that there are lots of experiences to learn from and also tools made available. (as with any Google search it can be a little chaotic to find out what is useful and what is not). One thing that looks useful that I just came across is something called Edublogs.org, which is an educational blogging services. Will have to explore that some more. There seems to be many ideas and services. And should any of you have experiences, lessons learned etc. you’d like to share they’ll be more than welcome!

 

Link to the Storify (Collection of tweets from the Session Blogging in the Classroom)

[View the story "Blogging in the classroom" on Storify]

A SketchNote

Before I end I thought I’d also just share this SketchNote that, one of the participants in the #scio12 bloggin session (Lali DeRosier) did the below SketchNote:

 

 

 

I am reading JC Beall's Spandrels of Truth this semester as part of an independent study. We've only made it through Chapter 1, but it's great so far: clear and interesting.

I, however, am having unclear (and probably uninteresting) thoughts about it. Specifically, I am wondering whether certain things Beall says are in tension with each other.

(1) "God could use only the T[ruth]-free fragment of English to uniquely specify our world. We are unlike God in that respect; we need a device that enables us to overcome finite constraints. That device is 'true'... [W]ere we God, or even just beings with infinite time or capacities, we wouldn't need to use 'true' in such generalizing contexts [e.g. 'Everything Pat says is true']." (p.1)
So (1a) God (or any other appropriately infinite being) can 'uniquely specify our world' without using the word 'true'. Furthermore, (1b) 'true' is only introduced to overcome a practical limitation.

(2) Our language, which contains 'truth,' gives rise to sentences like the Liar that are true falsehoods: these are sentences A such that both A and ~A are true. Beall calls such sentences 'spandrels of truth': they are unintended byproducts of introducing a truth-predicate.

(3) Beall uses the 'Routley star' semantics for negation. For those unfamiliar with this semantics, all that's needed for present purposes is that in a world where there are true falsehoods, that world's "star mate" cannot be the world itself, and must be an abnormal world (in an abnormal world, there is a sentence A such that neither A nor ~A is true, i.e. abnormal worlds exhibit truth-value gaps). (In brief: B is true in w* iff ~B is not true in w.)

(4) If a language contains no true contradictions, then abnormal worlds are completely superfluous. (We cannot show that the abnormal worlds do not exist, but they would do no semantic work not already done by the normal worlds.)

So now I will try to articulate my thought. If God can completely describe everything without using the predicate 'true,' then abnormal worlds are superfluous for a complete description. And if we subscribe to some sort of Ockhamian principle of parsimony, then such abnormal worlds don't exist. However, bringing 'truth' into our language requires (given Beall's other assumptions) that there must be abnormal worlds. That is unsettling enough: God needn't know about the abnormal worlds, even if God knows a complete description of everything.

Furthermore, the only thing that forces us to introduce abnormal worlds is a predicate that we introduced to overcome a practical limitation on our part. Devices for surmounting practical obstacles don't seem like the kind of thing that should be able to teach us about whether there are abnormal worlds or not.

I guess one response to this is to be a serious instrumentalist about the abnormal worlds: since they are unnecessary for the god's-eye view, we should (at least if we prune 'idle wheels' from our theories) say: they don't really exist, but we cannot give an acceptable semantics for a truth-predicate (satisfying certain conditions Beall finds natural) without them. But this response seems strange to me; though I cannot articulate precisely why, here's a try. If we ask: "Is our actual world's "star mate" a normal world or an abnormal world?", we would have to say 'From a God's-eye-view, no; but if we have a certain kind of truth-predicate in our language, then yes, the actual world's star-mate is an abnormal world.'

Hopefully, there will be further installments in my attempts to grapple with Spandrels... but I'm not making any promises.

Briefly - I just saw that Reuters launched a site which connects the world of journalism with that of the social web: Reuters Social Pulse. This has similarities with what I've been experimenting with at the d8tplex news page which leverages bit.ly data and identifies over 500 Reuters journalists' Twitter profiles.

Tickets are now on sale at PolitikenBillet for our new evening event series, Body | Medicine | Object. Here’s the series description from the event homepage (also in Danish here):

“Come to a late night consultation at Medical Museion, and get closer than ever before to objects from the unique historical collections, ranging from amputation saws to human specimens. Encounter mysterious objects from cutting edge medical research laboratories, and explore the devices that are changing the way we live with disease and disability. Meet scientists, artists, and philosophers all trying to make sense of the body and how we manage, treat, and change it. More than a lecture, beyond a tour… Immerse yourself in the stuff of medicine at a new evening event series.”  

The first event, ‘Making Balanced Bodies: From Leeches to Pills’, will be on Thursday 22nd March at 19.30, when you can meet doctors from the past and present and encounter the tools of their trade. And we have more exciting encounters with the stuff of medicine coming up in April and May, including a hands-on art workshop exploring the everyday aesthetics of medical devices, and a rollercoaster ride through the process of turning samples of saliva and blood into genetic data.

 

What are we trying to do?

 

Like most research groups that study science (though perhaps not like most science museums), we  don’t think of research as involving disinterested scientists following a clearly prescribed method to arrive at true facts, independent of context. Rather, we think of science ‘as culture’ in many different ways – as constantly in dialogue with other ways of understanding the world, from philosophy to alternative medicine; as having particular social, material, and aesthetic cultures of its own; as influencing (and influenced by) media cultures and political discourse, and so on. This perspective presents new challenges for science communication, which has traditionally been defined in terms of the problem of accurately translating technical terms for a monolithic public audience. How can we communicate medical science as culture, and engage people in discussion about the implications for understandings our bodies and health practices? How can we bring to life science-in-the-making; from the complexities of the laboratory to the experience of research participation? How can we talk about social and cultural contexts of medical research without seeming to undervalue its importance in understanding health?

In this event series we are trying one route: a focus on things… The intriguing objects of medicine that attract, confuse, frighten, bore, or repel us – from those we can viscerally imagine in relation to our own bodies, like needles or knives, to ‘black-box’ laboratory equipment that can seem opaque and cold. This focus builds on the fantastic collections at Medical Museion, and on previous events and exhibitions that have focused on their material qualities. It also draws on the research we do behind the scenes – on topics such as the materiality, phenomenology, and aesthetics of metabolic science, the role of health monitoring devices in patient identity, and the representation of the social contexts of science in the media. We’d love to hear from readers of the blog if you have experience with putting together, or attending, similar events.

Below are five goals we’re using as a roadmap, which we’ll be returning to to evaluate the events as we go along – watching out for poor map-reading, and considering when we might need to revise the map itself:

 

• Open up the glass cases of the museum and laboratory, and let the objects out…

• Bring the weird past, the opaque present, and ambivalent future of medicine together.

• Explore medical science as part of our culture, sensation, and everyday speech.

• Unwrap medical science in the making – finding not finished facts but evolving knowledge.

• Matchmake curators, researchers, publics, scientists, artists, doctors, and patients.

 

 

Only two research projects left to talk about in my survey of what I have done previously, and this is the biggy, the blast-from-the-past upon which your star will forever be hung, the doctorate. I cant even say PhD - you get a DPhil from Oxford, which will confuse people evermore.

My doctoral funding came from an EPSRC grant, working on an established, funded, project at the University of Oxford, which was split between The Department of Engineering Science and the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents, as a collaborative project between Professor Mike Brady, and Professor Alan Bowman. They were interested to see if they could use new and novel imaging techniques to try and read the damaged inscriptions on the Vindolanda stylus texts, above. At the start of 1999 I joined them on a 3 year project, where two doctoral students and a postdoc were employed. My role was to work in the space between the classicists and the engineers, given I had a training both in classics (but classical art!) and in computing science.

I'm not going to kid that this wasnt hard work, nor a tough time for me - but looking back, I see its part of the doctoral process that you generally get the stuffing knocked out of you, and then you rebuild yourself and are academically stronger as a result. Essentially, I hadnt done an undergraduate in Engineering, or Maths - but was being examined in Engineering. It was a steep learning curve, and I had a lot of catching up to do, learning a lot both about Latin and Probability Theory, Roman Archaeology and Parallel Computing. I successfully defended in January 2003 - although it took me months to even face doing the (2 hours worth) of corrections, and a further year to go back to the work and turn it into Image to Interpretation, my monograph published by OUP.

I published five pieces on my doctorate, as well as the book. One of them is pretty promissory (in general, something that has the words "Towards" in the title, you think, aye aye.....)
Terras, M (2000) Towards a reading of the Vindolanda Stylus Tablets: Engineers and the Papyrologist. Human IT , 4 (2/3) PDF.
Although the further three pieces are more substantive, the last one contains the maths:

Terras, M. and Robertson, P. (2004) Downs and Acrosses: Textual Markup on a Stroke Based Level. Literary and Linguistic Computing , 19 (3 ) pp.397 - 414 . PDF

Terras, M. (2005) Reading the Readers: Modelling Complex Humanities Processes to Build Cognitive Systems. Literary and Linguistic Computing , 20 (1 ) pp.41 - 59 . PDF

Terras, M and Roberston, P(, Trans.).[]. (2005) Image and Interpretation: Using Artificial Intelligence to Read Ancient Roman Texts. HumanIT, . , 7 (3) PDF.
The final paper is a contribution to an edited volume we were all asked to write a paper for, to reflect what research was being undertaken in our department at UCL, so it has crossovers with these two, above (and there is probably room, at some point, to discuss just how much you can publish in a paper that has already been covered elsewhere, in a different format, for a different audience, as its a pretty murky academic practice):
Terras, M (2006) Interpreting the image: using advanced computational techniques to read the Vindolanda texts. ASLIB Proceedings , 58 (1/2) 102 - 117. PDF.It's only in the most recent couple of years that I've started to focus again on imaging of manuscript material, and how best we can tackle degraded texts. I'm working again with computer scientists and engineers on some fairly gnarly imaging problems, and its very rewarding - although the fun, now, is knowing I wont be examined at the end of it, and I dont have the "what will become of me!" stress that people have to face at the end of their doctorate (even though I am committed to helping my PhD students over those mental hurdles). It's now almost (six months short of) a decade since I handed in my PhD. How did that happen?????

Just back from a flying visit to Groningen, where I presented at a Lustrum which celebrated 25 years of Humanities Computing - or "Alfa-Informatica" - there. I was invited to present about Digital Humanities, and my talk can be summed up in one sentence:

Why dont Digital Humanities folk talk to Computational Linguistics folk, and vice versa?

It was a lovely event - fun, and informative. I particularly enjoyed meeting Eduard Hovy, and hearing his talk about issues in training question and answer systems, and the way they parse questions we set them. I met some good people, and heard some interesting things.

Groningen is a lovely University town, very vibrant. I managed to include a couple of hours in my schedule to have a bit of a wander, which is becoming more important to me as I travel away from home. If you dont manage to see the place at all, it just becomes a veeeeeery long commute to give a half an hour, sometimes hour long, lecture. In my recent trip to Portugal, I managed an hour to go and see the Frida Kahlo exhibition, in Groningen I had an hour to trawl round fleamarkets, finding some cool dutch tat. I have upcoming trips, in the next month, to Edinburgh, Paris and Munich. Its all good - I enjoy the travel, tend to get lots done when I am away from home, get one or two good night's sleep, meet new people - and if I'm lucky, get a wander round a city, and enjoy the chance to explore.

A minor update to the d8taplex news site has

1. An updated set of journalist and editor author identities - now numbering over 500
2. An indication of the number of followers each tweeting author has
3. An indication as to whether the journalist has recently tweeted

The later is indicated by a slightly augmented Twitter logo. Below, we can see that Dan Levine has recently tweeted.

Ultimately, I'd like to see if I can glean useful information from journalits' tweets relating to the stories they report on.

Last week, Douglas McLellan of artsJournal ran a multi-vocal forum on the relationship between arts organizations and audiences, asking:
In this age of self expression and information overload, do our artists and arts organizations need to lead more or learn to follow their communities more? Sixteen arts administrators, journalists, and researchers weighed in on the question over a series of posts. Several decried the oversimplification of the question, arguing that it's not an issue of "lead vs. follow" but a spectrum of forms of participant engagement. A few trotted out familiar arguments for arts administrators as tastemakers (lead) or audience research as incontrovertible (follow). And some made fairly brilliant and impassioned cases for idiosyncratic perspectives. Here are three of my favorites... and a few more thoughts.

Roberto Bedoya: The "Yes And" Argument and its Civic Implications
Bedoya, the Executive Director of the Tucson Pima Arts Council, makes a beautiful statement that arts administrators need to facilitate a multiplicity of leading voices, or as he puts it, "the courage of imagination and the plural." Particularly in an age of cultural and political division, Bedoya argues that leaders in the arts need to responsibly and boldly intermediate among many voices, using a combination of ethics and aesthetics to make policy and artistic decisions. If you care about how participatory art experiences can shape civic processes, read Bedoya's post.

Diane Ragsdale: You Can't Lead if No One is Paying Attention to You
Ragsdale, researcher and author of the terrific Jumper blog, suggests that most arts organizations are not "leading" communities but disregarding and demeaning them. Audience engagement happens strictly on institutional terms, for institutional purposes, and when audience members' views differ from the organization, their perspectives are not taken seriously. Ragsdale equates true following with listening, and acting on listening with leading. It's a good post that is representative of her powerful writing (mostly focused on the performing arts).

Trevor O'Donnell: Leaders Use Their Words 
O'Donnell was not one of the invited bloggers but a commenter from the field (a follower... or a good example of how silly the term "follower" is?). He made a comment on Michael Kaiser's fairly formulaic "great artists lead the nation" post, laying bare the banality of most of the language used to describe and present art experiences to the public. O'Donnell notes that great leaders don't sell their message with generic templates and exclamation points, but with "relevant, meaningful, motivational language that leverages the needs, wants and desires of their listeners." The way we talk about our work helps shape its importance to current and potential audiences.

This whole debate made me think about Adam Lerner, the Director and Chief Animator of the MCA Denver. Adam and I first met in 2008, when we were part of a National Academies think tank-ish thing on the future of museums and libraries. All the participants were asked to write one-page position papers about museums and libraries in the 21st century. Adam and I wrote papers that split dramatically on either side the lead/follow line. Adam argued for museums to become "less visitor-oriented," and I argued the opposite. He said museums were too spineless to project their own voices and so were misguidedly searching for direction from audiences. I said museums were too self-centered and needed to create community spaces with the growing army of people choosing cultural experiences outside of traditional arts institutions.

Turns out we're a lot more alike than I thought at the time. We both believe that institutions should have a strong identity and should boldly pursue and present it with audiences. The problem is three-fold:

• some of our institutional identities are not culturally or civically significant (see Bedoya)
• some of our institutions are too lily-livered to deliver a consistent, strong audience engagement strategy that reflects their unique significance (see Ragsdale)
• some of our institutions are too lazy to develop an authentic and powerful voice for their identity and program blend (see O'Donnell)

Adam concluded his position paper beautifully, writing:
The paradox is that developing a clear, authentic voice doesn’t isolate the institution but infinitely expands its relevance in the life of the city and citizen. It is so clear what the organic supermarket Whole Foods stands for, so they don’t need to worry about just selling food. They sell clothing, books, classes, skin care, yoga supplies, which all relate to the core of who they are. Museums have had difficulty becoming more integral to people’s life because they lost sight of their core, which should be different for each museum. A museum concerned with integrating art into the life of young people might find it appropriate to open a dance club. A museum that believes that it is most suited to be a temple of art can be a truly meditative oasis in the heart of a bustling city. A museum that is committed to childhood education might find it relevant to open a charter school. Museums in suburban locations need to determine how they can integrate themselves into the leisure patterns of their own constituency. Museums shouldn’t change by looking elsewhere; they should change by looking more carefully at themselves. That’s too difficult a task to pass off to visitors. I'd add the caveat that for some institutions, it's too difficult a task to pass off to visitors. In an institution like mine, where the organizational identity is built on participation, the task can and must include them.
In the end, the issue is not who is leading or following, but the fact that we're dancing with our audiences in the same room, together. Not in separate rooms to separate songs.

What did you get out of the Lead or Follow experience? How do you respond to this question?

I'm trying to figure out which camera to go for: the GoPro or the Contour. When I search on Google for help in finding some way to compare, it was suggested to me to ask on Google+:

I then waited for someone to answer. I got nothing. Of course, I'm sure if I had the right set of connections I would have found a sweet expert opinion that could have helped with my decision and so, in a sense, it is my fault for not cultivating my network.

In the USA, a major part of the population's strategy for retirement is the 401K account. This is an account which provides the benefits of tax sheltered investment for retirement. The only catch is that it is up to you to manage your funds to ensure that you will have any money at all when you retire. There is nothing stopping you from making a bad bet and loosing it all. This is in contrast to the more staid approach of entrusting your retirement to some sort of national scheme that guarantees a pension and puts the onus on the government to ensure it.

I'm not an expert in fund management.

If Google were smart, it would have some ability to predict if my connections had the remotest chance of producing an answer (if not, why suggest that I ask the question?). Or else, perhaps it could suggest to me someone directly to ask in Google+?

Finally, let's not forget the hilarity that ensues when one plays with this:

Only three projects left to cover in my retrospective look of papers I have published, now they are all going up on UCL's open access repository. This time, its time to go back, way back, to 2005, when e-science and cyberinfrastructure were all the rage.

A call came out from the AHRC, looking for workshops on this topic - how can we use e-science technologies in the Arts and Humanities? Now, UCL have one of the best Research Computing facilities in the world, so the question was, how could we apply this facility to humanities research? The biggest data set in the Humanities at the time (that I could think of at the time of grant writing) was the historical Census data, held at The National Archives, which was digitised by the commercial genealogy firm, Ancestry. We formed a research collaboration to hold three different workshops to look at how useful, possible, or feasible it would be to analyse the historical census data using the high performance computing facilities at UCL.

I have to say that this is one of the most intellectually stimulating projects I have worked on since completing my doctorate, as we grappled with the academic, technical, managerial, and legal issues when attempting to apply HPC and scientific methods to historical data sets. We brought together disparate expertise on history, records management, genealogy, computing science, information studies, and humanities computing, to ascertain how useful or feasible it would be to set up a pilot project, applying e-science methods to the dataset.

However, whereas scientific data tends to be large scale, homogenous, numeric, and generated (or collected/sampled) automatically, humanities data has a tendency to be fuzzy, small scale, heterogeneous, of varying quality, and transcribed by human researchers, making humanities data difficult (and different) to deal with computationally. The conclusion of the series was that there was not the quantity nor quality of information available to allow useful and usable results to be generated, checked, and assessed. Automatic record linkage was the main thing on the wish list from the historians, but this was impossible given the gaps in the historical information. The problems were not technical (we could mount everything on the system and run matches), but methodological (because of inherent issues with census data, the results of any analysis would be problematic).

Some things to say about this: It would be worth revisiting the historical data that is available soon. Crowdsourcing wasnt a terribly well adopted technique at the time - the FreeBMD had just started, for example, transcribing the Civil Registration index of births, marriages and deaths for England and Wales. Since then, there has been a huge uptake and interest in contributing to these resources - what historical data sets exist nowadays that didnt then? What can we use to do useful research, and what of that research, can we automate across a large scale?

I still plan on doing something, at some point, with Research Computing at UCL. I'm signed up to their next training course so I can get retrained on how to mount data on the system. I still think we need to think carefully about how and why we need to use this level of computing on humanities data - but if there is anyone out there with a huge data set that needs some number-crunching, you know where to find me if you fancy talking collaboration...

The grant was put in in 2005, the research was done in 2006, the paper accepted in 2007, but even for an online journal there was a bit of a time lag and it didnt come out til 2009 - just goes to shows you that online journals dont always publish quicker than print. (I'm one of the general editors of the journal in question, I should say, so its as much my fault as anyone elses).

So here's the paper. It's one of the ones I'm most proud of, even if the result of the workshop series was "its never gonna work!":
Terras, M (2009). The Potential and Problems in using High Performance Computing in the Arts and Humanities: the Researching e-Science Analysis of Census Holdings (ReACH) Project. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 3 (4). PDF.

Claire Warwick has blogged about the, erm, adminstrative snafu that meant no wine appeared
after her inaugural. So its probably ok to post this pic of the team undertaking the wine run to the nearest supermarket (right to left): Me, Simon Mahony, Andy Hudson-Smith and Steven Gray, with Tim Weyrich on camera duty plus wine carrying duty. Also thanks to the Dean, who dealt with payment, and choosing the vintage of the red.

We like to think no-one noticed. Until we told them. and tweeted. and blogged...