Yesterday I gave a talk called “Group and Method: Collaboration in the Digital Humanities” at Case Western Reserve University’s Freedman Center Colloquium on “Exploring Collaboration in Digital Scholarship.” Drawing on my research for “Computing and Communicating Knowledge” and for a series of blog posts, I discussed why collaboration is so common in digital humanities (although of course not all DH work is necessarily collaborative); explored the significance of collaboration in projects to build digital resources, devise new research methods, and promote participatory humanities; and explored challenges to collaboration. I also described how my experiences as a grad student in English convinced me of the value of collaboration–particularly my membership in a dissertation group (I was thrilled that my fellow diss group member Amanda French also gave a talk at the colloquium) and my work at Virginia’s Etext Center.
Here is the pdf of the slides.
In my research on the use of social media in emergency management and communication and my hunt for good case studies, I have come across a knowledge hub, that I thought I’d share with you. I was of course introduced to it by wonderful people on Twitter (thank you Eva Alisic).
The website is called The Australian Emergency Management Knowledge Hub and is still a BETA version of the Knowledge Hub, but a good BETA version. It provides easy access to evidence-based research and other research as wells as news relevant to emergency management, including statistics and information, photos, video and media about past disaster events. You can read more about the rational and the organisations behind the website on their ‘about’ page.
The website has lots of well thought out search tools. You can search for information about specific emergencies through a combined map and timeline. It will provide you with basic data about the event and links to resources related to the event in the research database.
You can also go directly to the research database and search here on the topic you seek information. You can even filter or sort it by the kind of document (case study, website, report, journal article, blog, wiki etc.), date and disaster category.
Although I haven’t yet tried it out, there is also a community forum space where people working with emergency management can register to discuss ideas and issues affecting the emergency sector.
As the name of the knowledge hub implies, the majority of the resources relates to Australia and its closest surrounding countries, but it is no way exclusive. I have mostly been looking at things related to social media and it seems to me that Australia is first-mover country when it comes to integrating social media into emergency management.
The Knowledge Hub also provides access to resources in the Australian Emergency Management Library.
Users of the hub can contribute to the hub’s continuous development, by recommending additional resources, share upcoming events, photos, videos and join in on the discussions.
The Australian Emergency Management Knowledge Hub is of course also on Twitter (@AEMKH), which they use very actively.
Several years ago I took a group of Mason students to Prague, Vienna, and Budapest. Among the things I’d planned for them was a visit to the Klementinum in Prague where the Codex Gigas (the “Devil’s Bible“) was on display. Needless to say, when I told them we were going to a library to look at a book, they were decidedly underwhelmed. Until they saw it up close and personal.
At 90cm x 50cm and weighing in at 75 pounds, it’s quite a book and was unlike anything they had seen or expected. More intriguing to them, though, was the legend surrounding the work. Created sometime between 1200 and 1230 in a monastery in Bohemia, the story that goes with the bible is that the devil himself helped a monk create it in just one night. In exchange, the monk included an image of the devil as part of the text decoration. Despite their earlier reluctance to go look at a book, the students pronounced the whole thing kind of cool.
I was reminded of that trip the other night during a tutorial I’m leading with four of our most talented doctoral students. One of those four, Jeri Wieringa, asked one of those questions students ask us with regularity that makes us think really hard. I’ll paraphrase what she asked: “If we digitize texts and present them to students as just so many pixels, are they losing an essential connection to the text as a historical artifact?”
This question led to an energetic discussion around our table. On the one hand, there are obvious advantages to digitizing texts. At the most obvious, the texts, especially those before the age of the typewriter, become much more legible and so therefore accessible to a wide audience. Anyone who has taught pre-typewriter texts knows just how reluctant students can be when it comes to trying to make sense of handwriting from back in the day. Even excellent tutorials like the one on decoding Martha Ballard’s diary can reinforce the notion that such handwriting is essentially unreadable except by experts or code breakers.
A second obvious advantage is that the text becomes fully searchable in ways that it can’t be when it is just an image of a document. Our Papers of the War Department project here at RRCHNM is a great example of the advantages of having transcribed texts to sort through and analyze using the text analysis algorithm of your choice.
Finally, making the text available in this way opens up any digitized collection to crawling by the various search engines, thereby opening up the collection to a much larger audience.
But, and this was the but that we got stuck on in our discussion, the artifact itself can disappear from the view of the researcher if an image of the original is not also available to the researcher. We really liked the War Department project because that image is there for users to see any time they want. [NB: I edited this paragraph because in the original, my wording made it sound as though images weren't available on the War Department site.]
To put it another way, the coolness of the text as artifact disappears when all the researcher/student sees is black pixels on a white screen. Yes, it’s much more readable and accessible. But there is a bigger potential problem–and this is the one that really troubled Jeri. An essential task of the historian is to assign greater or lesser value to a particular historical source based on his/her growing expertise in a given subject. Some documents are just more important to a given problem or interpretation than others and it’s up to us to help others see that.
But if all documents are reduced to black pixels on a white screen, they start to seem all the same. Given that students/novice historians often have a difficult time placing sources in a hierarchy of importance that they are developing, if all texts look the same, are we making it more difficult for them to develop this skill of prioritizing some sources over others?
We arrived at no answer in our conversation and despite two weeks of ruminating on the issue, I still don’t have one. I’m just going to have to worry about this one for a while longer.
In the latest issue of the European Journal of Public Health, a wish list for what public health training should look like in the 21st century is giving by Martin McKee, Professor of European Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine: Seven goals for public health training in the 21st century
Having a bachelor and masters degree in public health sciences from University of Copenhagen, I know for a fact that at least in a Danish context public health science communication has not been part of the curriculum for public health students in the later part of the 20th or the first part of the 21st century. None the less, when I saw the headline of Martin McKee’s article, I was hoping that science communication would be an ambition for modern public health training.
Public health science communication is not mentioned directly as one of the 7 goals. In short that goals Martin McKee lists are:
Unfortunately, I was to be a bit disappointed. The article starts out well, stating the need to “prepare people to engage actively in a complex and changing world in ways that improve the health of the population”. So how do you prepare people to engage actively in ways that improves their health? Well, in my world that will require that you as a public health professional and public health scholar can actually communicate what you are doing, what your theories are and what findings come out of your hard work. And that you can engage into conversation and discussion with the public and subgroups of the public (e.g. policy makers, researchers in other fields). In short, that you can communicate public health sciences.
For all seven goals, science communication plays a key role, but is only partly mentioned under goal 6, articulating the need for public health people to be confident to speak up and share their knowledge. The only other time communication is touched upon is as an encouragement for public health professionals to not just stay updated on public health news but go beyond the scientific literature:
“More than ever, the public health professional needs to read the Economist, the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal.”
No suggestion is however broad forward about also contributing and communicating public health through these channels. Shouldn’t public health people aim to let their voice, knowledge and opinions be heard outside the ‘traditional’ public health media?
Another element missing in Martin McKee’s list is the IT reality of the 21st century and how Web2.0 already have and is still changing public health research and practice. He mentions the need for public health people to acquire a great deal more self-confidence and points out how:
“with a fast internet connection, most students could do a much better job of understanding the topics they [politicians and social commentators] addressed”.
But the potential for new ways of communicating and engaging with the public broad forward by social media and other technologies is not mentioned at all.
Make public health science communication the 8th goal
Communication is almost a precondition for all other 7 goals, which is why I would argue that it deserves to be a goal in itself. Public health students should be given competences in communicating what they do, why they do it and taught how communication can benefit not only the people they are trying to help but also their own work (which then again will come to the benefit of the public). Public health is, as Martin McKee opens the article, not just a collection of different disciplines or the goals it seeks to attain. It is much more. Exactly this ‘much more’ however requires communication. Public health science cannot (meaningfully) exist in its own little universe. It only comes to life when it steps out of the public health sphere and meets the rest of the world. This, however, requires that we as public health people are dressed to meet the world and to communicate with it. Let’s make public health science communication skills the 8th goal of public health training in the 21st century.
The article by Martin McKee is unfortunately hidden behind a pay wall, but you read an extract here: Seven goals for public health training in the 21st century.
In another single-topic Digital Campus, we react to the news that Dan is headed to the Digital Public Library of America as its Executive Director (no tears, no tears) by forcing him to tell us all about it. Special guests on the podcast include Berkman Center and DPLA Technical Workstream member David Weinberger, author of Too Big to Know and Everything is Miscellaneous as well as Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows and The Big Switch. Issues raised include Internet centralization, the future of public libraries, and Mr. Potato Head.
Links
Nicholas Carr, “The Library of Utopia,” MIT Technology Review, April 25, 2012. Available at http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/427628/the-library-of-utopia/
Running time: 49:45
Download the .mp3
Regular readers of this blog know that in 2008 I created a course called “Lying About the Past” in which my students studied how, over the past several centuries, a variety of people have created false versions of the past, for fun or profit. The goal of the course was to teach my students much greater skepticism about historical sources, especially online historical sources, and I feel very confident in saying that the course, which I taught a second time in 2012, achieved that goal with flying colors.
What made this course controversial, to a small degree in 2008 and to a much wider degree in 2012, was that in each iteration of the course the students created a historical hoax and turned it loose online for ten days to see if they could fool anyone. Because we were not in the business of creating what a colleague calls “zombie facts,” the students exposed their hoaxes after the allotted ten days and then assessed what had and hadn’t worked in their project and why.
Those who disagreed with the notion that my students should turn their (very innocuous) hoaxes loose for a few days felt that I was teaching my students to behave in very unethical ways, that we were somehow polluting the web, or that we had violated something one critic called the implied “academic trust network” that exists online. Of course, my students and I completely understood these criticisms–they were all issues we discussed in great detail in the course. You had to be there each semester to see the care my students took thinking through these and other ethical issues to understand just how central ethical discussions were to the entire course. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that my students spent more time discussing the ethics of the historical profession in this course than in any other history course they have taken or will take.
In 2012 I proposed to my department that Lying About the Past be made a part of the regular curriculum of the department, by which I mean the course would receive its own number and be added to the university catalog as one optional course among dozens that we offer. The undergraduate committee in my department decided that the proposal could go forward only if I agreed to change the central component of the course–make the hoaxes purely classroom presentations rather than turning them loose online. Because the fact that the hoaxes would be placed in front of an unknown audience is the thing that gave the course its energy, its excitement, and made it fun, changing the format in this way would have turned the class project into yet another abstract classroom only exercise and would have sucked the life out of the course. I therefore declined to make the change and the undergraduate committee subsequently rejected my proposal.
What this means is that I won’t be teaching Lying About the Past any longer at George Mason, which I’m sure will make my critics happy, especially Jimmy Wales, who pronounced himself “annoyed” about the whole thing.
But I also think it’s worth considering what the decision of the undergraduate committee means in terms of how we regulate teaching as opposed to research. In essence, my colleagues (who, by the way, I respect very much) decided that it was acceptable to tell a faculty member that he could not teach a course because they disagreed with the teaching methodology. Can you imagine the furor that would ensue if the word “research” were substituted for “teaching” in the previous sentence?
I asked several of my colleagues who had been at Mason for more than 20 years if they could remember a time when a professor had been denied the right to teach a course as he/she saw fit and none could. It’s an interesting and potentially disturbing precedent my colleagues have set, because it says that teaching methods can be regulated in ways we would never allow when it comes to our research.
I have another course up my sleeve that will be almost, but not quite as disruptive to our notions of how history can be taught as Lying About the Past was, and my department chair has signed off on it. As soon as it is in the schedule of classes, I’ll be sure to post an advance notice here.
[NB: I'm posting this on March 31, not April 1 so that it's clear the entire above message is not a hoax. Trust me, it's not.]
[NB #2:For a recent interview with me about the course, see Aleks Krotoski's piece on DML Central. For how the work of this class fits into a wider framework of mischief making, listen to Aleks's "Digital Human" show on BBC 4 radio from April 1, 2013.]
[NB #3: The Chronicle of Higher Education did a follow story on this post. Read it here if you can get past their paywall.]
[NB#4: This post was republished by the London School of Economics' "Impact of Social Sciences" blog on April 10, 2013.]
Dear Nico,
I had this written two days ago, on time. Then the web host was broken. We can’t win! Except we do, every day, and then I sit down to write these letters and they don’t come out funny like Dooce’s at all. They come out maudlin and sappy. I’m hopelessly in love with you, is what.
You’re beautiful. I think so, the world thinks so, and Molly and her camera think so too. Lucky us, huh?
photo by Molly Tomlinson
A few weeks ago you said your first Russian word. It’s шляпа, shlyapa, which means any kind of brimmed hat. I have no clue where you picked it up, but you clearly knew from the beginning what the word meant, despite there being no brimmed hats around the first couple of times. So I fixed that.
I’ve woken up in the dark morning bedroom to your tiny little voice next to me, whispering with a breathless wonder: shhhhhhhhlyapaaaaaaaa. The first couple of times you might’ve dreamed of it just prior; now, I’m pretty sure you do it partly to make me laugh. In all, not a bad way to wake up.
My belly button with the birthmark perched on its edge has become a weird little comfort object. You never nurse anymore without fidgeting until your hand finds it. Then you go all still (except for the feeding part) and watch my face, or space out.
You’re becoming measured in your old age. More deliberate in your actions. I can see inklings of little kid in the way you ponder flavors. This month was my birthday, and we had a Cheesemas party, which is just what it sounds like, so then there was a ton of cheese left in the house, and man, you love Dubliner. Even more than you love cheddar.
You also love baby broccoli, chicken, rice, teething biscuits, and your babushka’s cooking. And those homeopathic teething pills, which have a faintly sweet nondescript taste and an inexplicable calming effect on you. Mostly I think homeopathy is bunk, but if it’s doing something to relieve your teething pain, who am I to argue?
Speaking of pain: the older you get, the harder it is for you to let go of pain. You’ve begun processing it as deeply unfair. You’re the most pathetic little thing when you’re hurting. On the other hand, the other weekend when you burned your thumb on the oatmeal pot (all my fault), your lip got all trembly for a few seconds and then you forgot about it, even before I was able to see where you’d gotten burned.
Which is ok, because we’re not lacking for big feelings around here. On top of everything else, transitioning to a single nap during the day is an exercise in flexibility and zen.
But who am I kidding, mostly you’re still delighted with the world. You love watching the snow coming down. You turn up your face to feel the snowflakes, and get mad if I put up the car seat hood to “protect” you. You love the car seat, and riding in the car. You love little plastic Easter egg shells, which older kids are only too happy to give you since you ignore the candy stash. You love the Mystic river with its ducks and swans and wind. You love expeditions outside with shoes on, and sometimes march through the apartment right to the front door and demand to be let out. When it gets warmer, I’ll indulge us both.
You continue to charm your now-international audience. Yesterday you met my dear friend Jon, who lives and writes game-stories in that other Cambridge. Predictably, he’s now firmly on team NAZ. Now, if only we could figure out how to see him and his family more often than once every few years. Fancy a trip overseas?
Speaking of tripping: we’re going to Nebraska in July. What do you say we drive?
Love,
-Mama
PS pix
Ken Arnold (Wellcome Collection) and I had a joint sesssion titled “Integrating research, acquisitioning, curation, exhibition making and events in museums” at the Danish national museum meeting in Horsens, two weeks ago. Based on this predistributed session abstract:
Drawing on our experiences from the Medical Museion and the Wellcome Collection, respectively, we suggest that a successful and productive integration of these functions of the museum does not involve creating organisational structures, but rather the cultivation of curiosity and a ‘will to inquire’. A research spirit can stimulate exhibitions, events and curatorship, and vice versa the handling of material objects can give rise to new and interesting research problems.
we gave two short introductory talks followed by a long general discussion. Here’s my (untitled) intro talk.
Ken Arnold and I are running two venues which are in some ways very similar and yet quite different.
Similar in the sense that we address some of the basic questions concerning human existence – questions about life and death, well-being and disease. We’re dealers in the sublime – because we investigate the future prospects of the human body which are simultaneously very frightening and deeply fascinating.
But different in the sense that the Wellcome Collection is extremely well-endowed and situated in one of the busiest roads in a globalised Metropolis with hundreds of thousands of visitors per year, whereas the Medical Museion is placed in a sleepy part of Wonderful Copenhagen with a much smaller budget and one-tenth of their visitor numbers.
However, our venues are also both similar and different with respect to the theme of this conference – in the way we handle the interaction between the activities we mention in the title of this session: research, acquisitioning, curation, exhibition making and events. In this respect, the similarity between is that we see this integration not as a organisational question, but a question of spirit.
The fundamental spirit here is what we call a research attitude. As we say in the abstract, we both think in terms of what we call “the cultivation of curiosity and a ‘will to inquire’”.
This is an attitude that goes both ways. It means making exhibitions, launch events, handle the collections, and bring in new acquisitions in the spirit of curiosity. It means trying to make all such activities inquiry-driven. On the other hand, it also means that the handling of material objects, images and archives, and the making of exhibitions, is a daily generator of interesting research questions.
The slight difference between our venues in this respect is in the way we have moved towards this position. Wellcome Collection started as an exhibition and event venue, and then Ken, very much through his own initiative and his own research background in the history of science and history of museums, brought an attitude of research, curiousity, and playfulness into these public engagement activities.
Medical Museion, on the other hand, grew out of an academic research project, which then gradually broadened to include more and more of the traditional museum activities. I came to Copenhagen a decade ago — to what was then called a medical history museum and basically was a huge collection of medical historical artefacts — as a professor in the history of medicine and with a traditional university mindset, meaning that research and teaching (from undergraduate to PhD level) is the basic rationale for everything one does.
At that time I was still thinking of research exclusively in terms of the publication of scholarly books on serious university presses and research articles in peer-reviewed journals (as most of my university colleagues still do). From the university’s and my own point of view at that time, public engagement, including exhibitions and events, were pretty subordinate activities. Not to speak about collections; they weren’t even mentioned in the university’s strategy documents and in my view they were largely a burden and a nuisance.
But during the last ten years, I have gradually widened and broadened my notion of research. I began to think about collecting (acquisitions) and exhibition making, and even public events, not just as outreach, or at best as raw experiences for writing research publications, but as a form of creative research activity in their own right. And from then on I began to think about everything we do in the museum from the point of view of the researcher and in terms of an experimental mindset.
To be experimental here means that we try, as far as possible, to think about all activities at Medical Museion — exhibition making, event making, acquisitions, collection management, organising seminars, etc. – as ongoing experiments. We continuously try to work out new and interesting activities, which haven’t been tried before, instead of applying already existing ideas. That part of the rationale of being a university museum.
To have a research attitude in these and other cases means not only to conceive and perform them as experiments, but also allow time to reflect upon the experiments, and write about and publish them – to bring the experiences into the public sphere. So we still publish a lot in traditional research journals, but increasingly we’ve begun to experiment with the publication medium. So we’re putting a lot emphasis on using a variety of social media – our combined blog and website, Facebook, Google+, and especially Twitter as a medium for discussing the experiments.
Summing up, in my view, museum should, to a much larger extent, become ‘museological laboratories’. Actually, I don’t think museology, or museum studies, should be taught in courses in academic departments separated from museum practice. Museology is not a set of dogmas or principles that can be learned from textbooks and lectures and then applied in museums — it is an experimental and research attitude that must permeat the daily museum work from early morning to late evening.
Visit the new online version of Biohacking – Do It Yourself! and explore the open biology lab at Medical Museion through photos, recipes, texts and videos:
In the online exhibition you can look at pictures and videos from events in the open lab, browse through links to hacker spaces around the world as well as loads of photos, read articles about the exhibition or try our basic biohack recipes and Do It Yourself!
Sometimes opportunities presents themselves out of the blue. When I was asked to give a lecture on social media in emergency settings at the Master of Disaster Management at University of Copenhagen, I didn’t quite feel like an expert on the topic (as I wrote about in an earlier post). But it did not take much research to realised that the combination of social media and disaster/emergency management is super interesting and an example of how social media can play a role in saving lives. It doesn’t get much more public health relevant than that.
Both preparing for the lecture and teaching was a good experience, and I feel I managed in the 3×45 minutes available to get around the topic in a comprehensive way – although with that time frame it can only be an introduction. In addition, I got great feedback from the students who, coming from all over the world, had different experiences with dealing with disasters, which they could contribute with in the discussions.
More than communicating a message
Social Media & Crisis Comm: A Whole New Game
In my experience the first (and sometimes only) thing that comes people’s mind when they think of what social media can be used for in emergency settings is dissemination of information and messages to the public. Social media are simply categorized as yet another communication channel equal to radio, tv etc. But as it is well illustrated in the YouTube video on the right (click the picture) it is much more than that.
With this experience it was important for me in my lecture to highlight some of the other key functions of social media in disasters. Below are four broad categories for the potential use of social media in emergency situations. There are surely other ways social media can be used and as said the four below are quite broad and thus covers lots of sub-functions.
Safe & Well
One advantage of teaching (and of blogging) is that you get so much feedback and suggestions for new things to read, websites to visit etc. I thought I’d share two of these tips with you. The first is a website that a student in the class recommended. It is called Safe & Well and is provided by the American Red Cross. The idea is that after a disaster, people in the affected area can through this website let their family and friends know that they are safe and well. By clicking the button “List Myself as Safe and Well” you register on the site. Relatives can then search the list of those who have registered themselves as “safe and well” by clicking on the “Search Registrants” button. The results of a successful search will display a loved one’s first name, last name and a brief message.
Facebook and extreme weather events
My previous post on social media and disaster management was commented by a researcher from Aarhus University, Andreas Birkbak, who had authored an interesting article about the use of Facebook for informal emergency collaboration during a snow blizzard on the Island of Bornholm in Denmark. A very interesting article that I might use next time I teach. Read the article your self: Crystallizations in the Blizzard: Contrasting Informal Emergency Collaboration In Facebook Group. Thanks for sharing it on the blog, Andreas!
Take home messages
As said, I have quickly come to find social media and disaster management is a very interesting topic and I have a feeling I’ll continue digging deeper into it. This will probably result in more posts on the topic here on this blog, so I think I’ll stop for now. As I ended my lecture I will also end this blog post – with four take home messages: