ECHO Blogging Central

In the spirit of this weekend’s workshop It’s Not What You Think in Copenhagen, I am posting a few observations from my visit to the Medical Museion last April.

The trip originated from a discussion about a contemporary museum for the blind in Kaunus, Lithuania and what we (the sighted) could learn from an institution that devoted all its energies towards such a radical shift in visitor experience. One of the high-lights of my April visit, therefore, was a tour by Jan Eric Olsén and Emma Peterson to the former Danish Museum of Blind History.

The blind collection was once part of a historic teaching and therapy collection for blind students dating back to 1811. The Medical Museion acquired the entire collection in 2011, and it has just been moved from the basement of the current Danish Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Hellerup (just outside Copenhagen) to the museum’s new storage facilities.

Touch murals in the hallway of the Danish Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired

The Blind Institute is a low, sprawling building with long corridors lined with playful, multi-layered touch murals. We experimented with the walls and slowly made our way into a basement museum (now closed), and then we passed an entrance hallway with fairly traditional historical labels and some curious artifacts.

We then entered what could only be called the Pompeii of blind pedagogy – rooms of objects and instruments that had been part of a creative and ambitious effort to teach blind children subjects such as biology, art history, mathematics, literature and manual skills and crafts.

It is a collection with few equals in the world. We looked at many recognizable items that the educators had bought, adapted or made for tactile learning. There were large insects and plants for learning natural history; there were globes for learning geography; there were specialized technologies for writing and calculating.

The visually stimulating environment, however, seemed to dampen the real story here – the essential role of touch in this community. In the spirit of a demonstration for curators, developed by Thomas Söderqvist and Jan Eric Olsén in 2007,  I shut my eyes and proceeded to examine a number of objects by hand. Jan Eric and Emma happily provided an assortment of challenges.

Plaster bust in the former Museum for the Blind History

I post here an excerpt of my ten-minute examination of a plaster bust and my struggles to describe and make sense of it. My favorite part comes near the end when I recognize two nostrils and with them a sense of the bust’s sudden and surprising tactile symmetries. The exercise was not about how inadequate I was at tactile examination, but rather the opposite – how tactile processes are so deeply ingrained, so taken-for-granted, that I had no way to articulate them, get distance from them and think about them. This was liberating. After the bust examination, I was in a room filled with the hidden experiences and culture of touch, making and learning, a vital lesson for work in any collection.

My entire week last April was about experiencing the familiar in new ways. I had the privilege of participating in the opening of Lucy Lyons’s exhibition Experiences of Ageing,where we speed-sketched everyday objects and technologies related to ageing. Instead of passively enjoying Lyons’s exhibition, we were able to comprehend actively the beauty and dignity of these common items.

In the second session, following the lead of artist Mette Bersang, participants photographed overlooked spaces and features throughout the museum. Again, we discovered value in unexpected places. In the next session we explored “fragility” through Joanna Sperryn Jones’s ‘Breaking is Making’. The latter included a visit to the storage room with medieval skeletons from the Æbelholt monastery, followed by the breaking of Jones’s intricately casted, bone-like plaster twigs. The Ageing event was a model for what museums can do best by combining collections, visitors, exhibitions and a unique museum space into a transformative experience.

Ion Meyer holding a glass monaural stethoscope

These activities derive from a diverse, talented community at the Medical Museion that actively engage their proximate and challenging collection. My guide through the collections, Ion Meyer, spoke regularly about the artifacts and their relations to other artifacts, the unique spaces in the Museion building complex, and the events and exhibitions that take place there. Each object can be seen in the material, medical or collection context, but of equal importance is the immediate presence and multiple potentials for display.

You can see this pre-occupation in the Balance and Metabolism exhibition, which has a strong selection and arrangement of artifacts that reflect on the relations and tensions between these two themes in the collections.

At the Medical Museion these approaches have seamlessly moved into contemporary collecting and display. Thomas Söderqvist and Mikael Thorsted‘s installation Genomic Enlightenment illustrates in a simple, powerful presentation of suspended beadchips the sublime within everyday laboratory genomics. Installations and contemporary art often point to new ways of looking at the cultures of science and medicine far better than we do in science museums.

I thoroughly enjoyed bringing these issues and observations together in discussions with Thomas. There is a collective focus at the Medical Museion to take seriously the immediate presence of artifacts, the surprising insights that follow, and the ways we can share these experiences with the public. What emerges is a museum devoted to the direct, creative and unpredictable dynamic between visitors and a collection.

Two weeks ago, Roberto Bedoya asked several arts bloggers, including me, to write a post reflecting on Whiteness and its implications for the arts. I am in no way an expert in issues related to racial and ethnic representation in the arts. I write this piece in good faith about the organizations I know best: museums.

As a feminist, when I really think about this issue, I realize that it's not solely one of Whiteness. It is one of privilege, and so for the most part, I'm going to cast it in that way.

The vast majority of American museums are institutions of white privilege. They tell histories of white male conquest. They present masterpieces by white male artists and innovations by white male scientists. The popular reference point for what a museum is--a temple for contemplation--is based on a Euro-centric set of myths and implies a white set of behaviors. Other reference points for museums--as community centers, as place-based narrative vehicles, as social or performance spaces--are suspect and often branded as "unprofessional."

Three quick lenses on Whiteness and privilege in museums:

1. Whiteness is in the language we use to describe the objects that we show and the programs we produce. When non-white stories are told, they are always flagged as such--an exhibition of Islamist scientific inventions or women pioneers or African-American artists. I will never forget walking through a major art institution in San Francisco and being shocked by the fact that artwork in the African and Oceanic sections was often labeled with modifiers like "beautiful,"--words intended to legitimize that only exacerbated the sense that these objects were not legitimate artworks in their own right. I never saw comparable adjectives used in the European art labels at the museum. I remember a photography exhibition in Boston where one photograph of three young ballerinas was labeled with their names. A second image, of three ballerinas with Down Syndrome, were labeled with their difference. The message, when museums produce targeted campaigns or events or exhibitions for non-white audiences is: we acknowledge you as others in our midst. Not as humans, or artists, or scientists, or dancers. As others.
2. Whiteness is in the way professionals react to non-white projects. I wrote an angry response post two years ago to Edward Rothstein's New York Times denunciation of "identity museums" as inappropriately attention-seeking and "me"-oriented. As if every white museum is not itself an "identity museum" of the privileged, white "me." The insidious thing about privilege is the opportunity to stop using a modifier like "identity" or "white" and instead refer to your culture as canonical.
3. Whiteness is in the behaviors we expect of our visitors, volunteers, and staff members. I recall one particularly ugly incident in St. Louis in which museum marketers required staff members to delink a signature youth program's web presence from the main site because the kids involved were "too black" for the brand image of the institution. Just last month, there was the story of the low-income family kicked out of a Paris museum for being "too smelly." Privilege sanctions white institutions to make ugly assumptions and choices at cross-purposes to their messages about diversity and inclusivity.

The white privilege frame distorts the extent to which museums can represent and reflect the diversity of humanity. This distortion is not merely political or theoretical. The sad irony is that the Whiteness of museums is crippling their future--not just for multi-racial or marginalized audiences, but for everyone. When the NEA reports twenty years of declining participation in traditional arts institutions, it's not portraying a mass exodus of African-American and Latino audiences. It's talking about white people. One of the odd artifacts of white privilege is the privilege to ignore the fact that an increasing percentage of white people don't find museums relevant.

The "temple for contemplation" construct is the most damaging myth about museums in existence today. It doesn't match actual visitor behavior (most people visit museums in groups and self-report that their social experience is one of the top three reasons for their enjoyment of the museum). It doesn't match visitor motivation (John Falk's extensive visitor identity research has shown that "spiritual pilgrimage" fits a small minority of visit motivations). It doesn't match arts engagement preferences for active, social experiences. And yet it looms in the popular culture, preventing would-be participants of all backgrounds from discovering the ways that a museum visit can fulfill other identity-related needs.

Unsurprisingly, the museums that are bucking these trends are those that have embraced a different reference point: one of an interactive, educational, social experience. I'm talking about zoos, aquaria, science centers, and children's museums--all of which do a much better job supporting and stewarding diverse participation than traditional art, history, and science museums. These museums offer more inclusive experiences, and they reach broader audiences.

The most galling artifact of white privilege in museums is expressed in their extreme reluctance to confront the reality of increasing irrelevance. Only an organization in the most privileged position could experience declining participation and argue that its relevance is increased because of its relative rarity. Only an organization suffering from extreme delusion and a healthy endowment could dismiss inclusive forms of engagement as "pandering." I have worked with white museums in majority-black cities that are neither willing nor forced to accept the fact that they are not representative of their communities. The fact that a city or state history museum could blithely disenfranchise the majority of its citizens is shocking. And it's made possible because of the privileged position of Whiteness.

How is this discussion different in 2013 than it was in the 1980s and 1990s, when the "diversity wars" were raging at museums and other arts institutions? When I look back on debates and writings from that time, the statements about inclusion and fairness are just as apt as if they were written today. The difference, I think, is two-fold:

1. On the positive side, there is more data, and therefore more arsenal, to mount an argument that the position of Whiteness and privilege in traditional museums and arts institutions is unrepresentative of our entire population's interests and needs. Shifting ideas about authority, access to information, and arts participation crosses racial, socio-economic, and generational boundaries. White privilege is becoming increasingly antiquated and indefensible. 
2. On the negative side, increased efforts at inclusion have been treated primarily as add-ons and not as necessary changes to the heart of white institutions. Now, when asked about diversity, most white institutions can point to a particular program or initiatives and say, "we've got that covered." In the worst cases, demographically-targeted programs can be used as fundraising shills ("poverty pimping") to protect the white privilege machine that most of the budget fuels. The overall result is that white museums are grossly unprepared to meet the challenge of dramatic shifts in demographics and cultural engagement interests. They've added colorful patches to their garments when the whole cloth needs to change. 

I am a white woman. I cannot change my race or gender. What I can do is acknowledge the privileged frame which I have been granted, and try with humility and openness to relentlessly challenge and expand it. I feel this is something that we have to do both personally and institutionally to make our organizations as relevant and essential as possible.

Have an interest STS and/or digital methods? Curious as to what they are and what the fuss is all about? Want to explore Copenhagen by foot? Enjoy beer? If you answered yes to any of these, then come and take part in the digital methods ‘talk-walk’ on the 8th of March. The idea comes from STS-talk-walkers in Amsterdam and Oxford, two hotbeds for the study of digital methods. It not only provides a chance to discuss digital methods and STS with people from a variety of backgrounds, but by getting off the bicycles it gives a chance to see Copenhagen at a slower pace, from different angles. You’d be surprised what you can discover by just looking up.

Last month was the first walk where the topic was the ‘Digital’. Questions discussed were: What do we mean by the word ‘digital’ and whether and how it is useful or not? I can’t say that we came to any conclusions, but in a world where more and more of daily life is in some way ‘digital’, it was refreshing to be able to take a step back and discuss some issues that as researchers and society we need to be weary of, lest we take them for granted. This all took place while exploring Islands Brygge and ended up in a pub in Christianshavn.

The next walk is scheduled for this Friday, the 8th of March and the topic will be ‘The Link’. How does the (hyper)link or the so-called tie in a network do associative work? In our own work? In other people’s work? The meeting place is the reception of Aalborg University Copenhagen campus, located in Sydhavnen.

Check out the digital methods walks site for more information about time, place and route.

Twenty years ago Roy Rosenzweig imagined a compelling mission for a new institution: “To use digital media and computer technology to democratize history—to incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences, and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past.” I’ve been incredibly lucky to be a part of that mission for over twelve years, at what became the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, with last five and a half years as director.

Today I am announcing that I will be leaving the center, and my professorship at George Mason University, the home of RRCHNM, but I am not leaving Roy’s powerful vision behind. Instead, I will be extending his vision—one now shared by so many—on a new national initiative, the Digital Public Library of America. I will be the founding executive director of the DPLA.

The DPLA, which you will be hearing much more about in the coming months, will be connecting the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums so that the public can access all of those collections in one place; providing a platform, with an API, for others to build creative and transformative applications upon; and advocating strongly for a public option for reading and research in the twenty-first century. The DPLA will in no way replace the thousands of public libraries that are at the heart of so many communities across this country, but instead will extend their commitment to the public sphere, and provide them with an extraordinary digital attic and the technical infrastructure and services to deliver local cultural heritage materials everywhere in the nation and the world. The DPLA has been in the planning stages for the last few years, but is about to spin out of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and move from vision to reality. It will officially launch, as an independent nonprofit, on April 18 at the Boston Public Library. I will move to Boston with my family this summer to lead the organization, which will be based there. It is such a great honor to have this opportunity.

Until then I will be transitioning from my role as director of RRCHNM, and my academic life at Mason. Everything at the center will be in great hands, of course; as anyone who visits the center immediately grasps, it is a highly collaborative and nonhierarchical place with an amazing staff and an especially experienced and innovative senior staff. They will continue to shape “the future the past,” as Roy liked to put it. I will miss my good friends at the center, but I still expect to work closely with them, since so many critical software initiatives, educational projects, and digital collections are based at RRCHNM. A search for a new director will begin shortly. I will also greatly miss my colleagues in Mason’s wonderful Department of History and Art History.

At the same time, I look forward to collaborating with new friends, both in the Boston office of the DPLA and across the United States. The DPLA is a unique, special idea—you don’t get to build a massive new library every day. It is apt that the DPLA will launch at the Boston Public Library’s McKim Building, with those potent words carved into stone above its entrance: “Free to all.” The architect Charles Follen McKim rightly called it “a palace for the people,” where anyone could enter to learn, create, and be entertained by the wonders of books and other forms of human expression.

We now have the chance to build something like this for the twenty-first century—a rare, joyous possibility in our too-often cynical age. I hope you will join me in this effort, with your ideas, your contributions, your energy, and your public spirit.

Let’s build the Digital Public Library of America together.

In this edition of Digital Campus, Tom, Dan, and Mills (Amanda was on a beach somewhere when we were recording) ventured into strange and wild paths of the Internet previously unknown to us, thereby proving that we are, indeed, old in Internet years. After years of talking about Google, Apple, Facebook, and Wikipedia, we set aside those old school web platforms to examine Pinterest and Tumblr. How might humanists, archivists, librarians, and museum professionals make good use of these sites that had (largely) been off our radar all this time? And we wondered whether the fact that traffic on Pinterest now rivals that on Twitter and the growing evidence that young people are moving away from Facebook to services like Tumblr might mean that those of us in the digital humanities ought to be taking a much closer look at how to best utilize these platforms. We also took a look at the 2012 Digital Humanities Award winners and offered up a few favorites from among the many worthy winners and runners up for those awards.

Links:
Maine Historical Society’s Pinterest site
Alan Jacob’s Tumblr blog
2012 Digital Humanities Awards

Running time: 37:02
Download the .mp3

On Saturday, March 2, I gave a workshop on digital (humanities) pedagogy for a group of about 20 faculty and staff at Gettysburg College.  I was impressed by the participants’ energy, openness, smarts, and playfulness.  We had fun!

I designed the workshop so that it moved through four phases, with the goal of participants ultimately walking away with concrete ideas about how they might integrate digital approaches into their own teaching:

1)  We explored the rationale for digital pedagogy (pdf of slides), discussing what students need to know in the 21st century, different frameworks for digital pedagogy (e.g. learning science, liberal education,  social learning, and studio learning), and definitions of digital pedagogy and the “digital liberal arts.” I started the session with Cathy Davidson’s exercise in which audience members first jot down on an index card three things they think students need to know in order to thrive in the digital age, then share their ideas with someone they didn’t walk in with, and finally work together to select the one key idea. (The exercise got people thinking and talking.)

2)   In the second session, I gave a brief presentation (pdf) offering specific case studies of digital pedagogy in action (repurposing some slides I’d used for previous workshops). Participants then broke up into groups to analyze an assignment used in a digital humanities class.

3)   Next participants worked in small groups to explore one of the following:

•  Visualizing Data
•  Mapping Historical Markers
•  Building Digital Collections & Exhibits with Omeka
•  Doing Things with Text or
  
• Creating Timelines

I structured the exercise so that participants first looked at the particular applications of the tool in teaching and scholarship (e.g. Mapping the Republic of Letters and Visualizing Emancipation in the session on information visualization), then played with a couple of tools in order to understand how they work, and finally reflected on the advantages and disadvantages of each tool and their potential pedagogical applications. I deliberately kept the exercises short and simple, and I tried to make them relevant to Gettysburg, drawing data from Wikipedia and other open sources.

4)   Finally participants worked in small teams (set up according to discipline) to develop an assignment incorporating digital approaches.  We concluded the session with a modified gallery walk, in which people circulated through the room and chatted with a representative of each team to learn more about their proposed assignment.

By the end of the day, workshop participants seemed excited by the possibilities and more aware of specific approaches that they could take (as well as a bit exhausted). I got several questions about copyright, so in future workshops I plan to incorporate a more formal discussion of fair use, Creative Commons and the public domain.

Our workshop drew heavily on materials shared by generous digital humanities instructors. (In that spirit, feel free to use or adapt any of my workshop materials. And I’m happy to give a version of this workshop elsewhere.) My thinking about digital humanities pedagogy has been informed by a number of people, particularly my terrific colleague Rebecca Davis.

Looking around on snopes.com for new examples beyond the same old Gödel-Schmidt and Jonah cases, I found this:

I just finished listening to This American Life's incredible two-part series about gun violence at Harper High School in Chicago. It does everything a great documentary story can do: it takes you into another world, introduces you to unforgettable people, defies expectations, and delivers tough realities instead of fairy tales.
 
I've been consuming a lot of documentary stories recently, primarily through Longform.org, my new favorite go-to nighttime reading source. Longform curates superlative non-fiction from a variety of sites and magazines. It has introduced me to corrupt university fundraisers, the true history of Tom Dooley, and the world's oldest marathon runner... and that's just in the last week.

All this delightful non-fiction makes me wonder: why aren't museums great at telling these same kinds of deep, intense stories? Why are exhibitions, which have huge potential as immersive, multi-platform narrative devices, so rarely used to that effect?

Yes, I know that every platform is different, and that the captive attention we afford to radio, TV, and written material doesn't map perfectly to a free-choice wander through an exhibition. But exhibitions have the potential to use all those narrative tools PLUS objects, immersive design, and interactive experiences to tell stories.

Strangely, exhibitions have become incredibly successful at creating immersive environments that tell broad conceptual stories--but not so good at telling tight, focused stories. I've experienced many excellent thematic exhibitions that gave me an overall sense of a story, but few that really dove into a particular object or incident. This seems strange given that museums are organized around objects. Think about how common it is to see an exhibition on a time period, an artistic genre, or a broad scientific discipline that uses a variety of objects and narrative devices as guideposts along a diffuse journey, and how rare it is to see an in-depth experience around just one object or set of objects, as in Peter Greenaway's extraordinary (and fictionalized) delving into Rembrandt's Night Watch at the Rijksmuseum, or Anne Frank's intimate attic hideout.

Too often we pull our punches by using the weakest storytelling techniques--broad generalizations on 50 word labels, an immersive wading pool of narrative bits. We avoid the incredible power that comes from a deep dive into one object, one story, one moment. Social object theory tells us that the most compelling stories exist around individual objects, but we weaken those stories by throwing too much in the same pot. We justify the tradeoff by arguing that we have to tell the broader story, offer more context, integrate more objects.

But tight doesn't have to mean limited. When we experience intense depth, as in the Minnesota History Center's Open House, which explores the stories of residents of one St. Paul home over time, or the Boston Museum of Science's beautiful theater experience about Nikola Tesla, or an incredible single artist show, it stands out. It's unforgettable. The individuals, the nuance, the specificity--the story tattoos itself on your memory in a way that a generalized exhibition cannot. It leads to more interesting conclusions and motivates further exploration. While the story is tighter, the impact is less prescribed, and more powerful.

One of the most surprising versions of this I have ever experienced was in a very small museum in Texas, the Brazos Valley African American Museum. They had a very simple exhibit of single-page laminated stories, transcribed from oral interviews with elders in the community. I was captivated by these first-person accounts because of their clarity and specificity. They led me to places I never would have gone otherwise. The narrative device was almost nil, and yet the content experience was better than I've had in most exhibitions.

Specificity trumps generality when it comes to creating a powerful documentary story. It's easy to imagine a hard-hitting exhibition on teens and gun violence that might tell a "broader story" than that on This American Life--more statistics, more diverse images and voices from throughout the country, more opportunities to reflect and connect. And yet it wouldn't be as powerful as an exhibition on just one story of one high school. It wouldn't be as deep. It wouldn't be as real. And ultimately (and ironically), it wouldn't have the power to expose the bigger issues in the nuanced way that a tight focus can.

When have you experienced this kind of deep dive in an exhibition? What do you think makes it possible, and what do you think makes it so rare?

Dear Nico,

Last month you turned a year old, and I cheated. This month, I’d best come up with something entertaining and new to write, or else face the possibility that you’ll get bored, stop reading these newsletters, and toddle off into the sunset. Happily, for now you’re still not walking independently, my tiny little captive audience.

We had a birthday party for you, which at this age is mostly a party for everyone else. There were so many everyone-elses that we ended up moving the shindig to a nearby frozen yogurt place. This turned out to be a brilliant idea; there was much merriment, which you took in impressive stride given that it lasted three whole hours. You received many fine gifts, most of them letters that we’ll be requesting every year and saving for later reading. (Thanks for the idea, Offbeat Families!)

Baby NAZ, the love you engender in your social world is astonishing. Your first birthday had to be moved out of the house because so many people wanted to attend. I can only hope that whatever magic you carry today will stay with you in the future. But if it starts to wane, there’s always glitter and frozen yogurt.

(Can it really be that I don’t have a single photo from your birthday party? Yes, it can.)

A small list of ways in which you are barreling towards toddlerhood:

• You’ve entered the stage of using a single word (in this case an emphatic tah) to mean most things for which you would like to have words. These are: fan, light, lamp, cat, dog, [pick me] up, and others. I hear this is a common thing in baby language development.
• The above notwithstanding, you have actual words! This development is recent: the first one emerged this past weekend while we were visiting our friends in New York. Avocado is cacacaca (Mark points out: it stands to reason that your first food word is four syllables long). Today you managed to create recognizable versions of apple and stuck.
• Besides all this, in the last few weeks you’ve been holding forth in fairly long conversational tirades. A language explosion is just around the corner, or already happening, depending on how much the whole “intelligible” thing matters.
• Your hair has gotten long enough that civilized people would trim it. I, of course, am compelled to clip it away from your face and let it grow out a bit. Did you know that there are no baby-safe hair clips? Choking hazards, all of them.
• One morning a couple of weeks ago I left you sitting in the middle of the living room while I went to pack up the lunch bag. I returned to find you standing on the other side of the coffee table from where you had been, holding on to it and looking at me, all, what? Yeah, I pull myself up now. No big deal. Since then you’ve been practicing pulling yourself up on the big bed every morning, holding on to the headboard, prompting grim visions of you tumbling off the bed on the side where the foam bumpers aren’t.
• Speaking of heart attacks, knowing that your newly found interest in climbing stairs (carpeted and bare) is healthy doesn’t stop me from wishing sometimes I could superglue you to the floor until you’re eighteen.
• Oh gods, the preferences. You know a lot more about what you want, and of course don’t have the language to get it yet, so you do this point-and-whine thing. We’ve stepped up your exposure to sign language, because babe, the whining a thing I can take only in small doses. Happily, you seem on board with the sign language, and you practice too.

Last weekend we got in a car with Mark and Eleanor and drove due west, into New York, to visit Sianna and her kids. The weekend getaway was perfect—a sprawling farmhouse, glorious homey food, a dance party in the living room, and a museum floor full of big boxes. You sat inside your very own tiny fort for something like half an hour, exploring the adhesive properties of duct tape.

There’s more, always, but it’s time for sleep.

Love,
-Mama

(ps more pix, and videos)

Ngoni Munyaradzi is a Master's student in Computer Science at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, working on a research project on the transcription of the Digital Bleek and Lloyd collection. He kindly agreed to an interview over email, which I present below:

Your website does an excellent job explaining the background and motivation of Transcribe Bleek and Lloyd.  Can you tell us more about the field notebooks you are transcribing?

The Digital Bleek and Lloyd Collection is composed of dictionaries, artwork and notebooks documenting stories about the earliest inhabitants of Southern Africa, the Bushman people. The notebooks were written by Wilhelm Bleek, his sister-in-law, Lucy Lloyd and Dorothea Bleek (Wilhelm's daughter) in the 19th century, with the help of a number of Bushmen people who were prisoners in the Western Cape region of South Africa at the time. The notebooks were recorded in the |Xam and !Kun languages and English translations of these languages are available in the notebooks.

Link to the collection: http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like at least in the case of |Xam, you are working with one of the only representatives of an extinct language. Are there any standard data models for these kinds of vocabularies/bilingual texts which you're using?

There are no complete models - the best known models are still only partial.

I suspect that I'm not alone in wondering why these Bushman people were prisoners during the writing of these texts. Can you tell us a bit more about the Bleek/Lloyd informants, or point us to resources on the subject?

The bushman people were prisoners because of petty crimes and a grossly unfair colonial government.  On the Bleek and Lloyd website there is a story on each contributor.  There is information in various books on the subject as well, but I am not sure there is more that is known than what is on the website. see:
http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/xam.html
http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/kun.html

This is the first transcription project I'm aware of using the Bossa Crowd Create platform. What are the factors that led you to choose that platform and what's been your experience setting it up?

In 2011 when our project began Bossa was the most mature opensource crowdsourcing framework that was tailored for volunteer projects available. Due to this Bossa suited well with the project's requirements. The alternative crowdsourcing frameworks available at the time used payment methods.

Setting up the Bossa framework was a relatively straight-forward task. The documentation online is very thorough and with examples of how to set-up test applications. I also got assistance from David Anderson the developer of Bossa.

The Bushman writing system seems extremely complex with it's special characters and multiple diacritics. I see that you are using LaTeX macros to encode these complexities. Why did you decide on LaTeX and what has been the user response to using that notation?

So the project is part of ongoing research related to the Bleek and Lloyd Collection within our Digital Libraries Laboratory at the University of Cape Town. Credit for developing the encoding tool goes to Kyle Williams. And the reason why he chose to use LaTeX was that; using custom LaTeX macros allowed for both the problem of the encoding and visual rendering of the text to be solved in a single step. Developing a unique font for the Bushman script is something we might look at in the future!

Here's a link to a paper published on the encoding tool developed by Kyle Williams: http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-24826-9_28

Overall the user feedback has been good, as most users are able to complete transcriptions using the LaTeX macros. We have gotten suggestions from users to use glyphs to encode the complexities. Currently the scope of my masters research project does not include that. There are talks in our research group to develop a unique font to represent the |Xam and !Kun languages, as this is not supported by Unicode.

User 1 Comment: "I think the palette handles the complexity of the character set very well. This material is inherently difficult to transcribe. The tool has, on the whole, been well thought out to meet this challenge. I think it needs to be improved in some ways, but considering the difficulties it is remarkably well done."

User 2 Comment: "VERY intuitive, after a few practice transcriptions. I actually enjoyed using the tool after a page was done."

This is incredibly useful. So far as I'm aware, yours is only the third crowdsourced transcription project that's surveyed users seriously (after the North American Bird Phenology Project and Transcribe Bentham). Do you have any advice on collecting user feedback at such an early stage?

Collecting user feedback in the early stages will tremendously help project administrators determine whether the setup of the project is easy to follow for participants. One can easily pick up any hindrances to user participation and address these early. From our project, I've found that participants can actually suggest very helpful ideas that will make the data collection process better.

Crowdsourced citizen science and cultural heritage projects have mostly been based in the USA, Northern Europe and Australia until recently -- in fact, yours is the first that I'm aware of originating in sub-Saharan Africa. I'd really like to know which projects inspired your work with Transcribe Bushman, and what your hopes are for crowdsourced transcription projects focusing on Africa?

Our work was mostly inspired by the success of GalaxyZoo at recruiting volunteers, and also the Transcribe Bentham project that explored the feasibility of volunteers performing transcription. I hope that more crowdsourced transcription projects will start-up within Africa in the near future. What would be interesting is to see a transcription project for the Timbuktu manuscripts of Mali. Beyond transcription, I would like to see other researchers adopting crowdsourcing in fields of specialty within Africa.

Thanks so much for this interview. If people want to help out on the project, what's the best way for them to contribute?

Interested participants can simply:

1. Create an account on the project website.
2. Watch a 5 minute video tutorial on how to transcribe the Bushman languages.
3. With that, you are ready to start transcribing pages.

It won’t be long (one month, actually) before Teaching History in the Digital Age is available. But the cover has now appeared on the Michigan Press website and I’m very pleased with the result.

On February 23, I was honored to speak at an Invited Symposium on Digital Humanities at the American Philosophical Association’s Central Division Meeting in New Orleans. Organized by Cameron Buckner, who is a Founding Project Member of InPhO and one of the leaders of the University of Houston’s Digital Humanities Initiative, the session also featured great talks by Tony Beavers on computational philosophy and David Bourget on PhilPapers.

“Join in,” by G A R N E T

One of the central questions that we explored was why philosophy seems to be less visibly engaged in digital humanities; as Peter Bradley once wondered, “Where Are the Philosophers?” As I noted in my talk, the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities has only awarded 5 grants in philosophy (4 out of 5 to Colin Allen and colleagues on the InPhO project). Although the APA conference was much smaller than MLA or AHA, I was still surprised that there seemed to be only two sessions on DH, compared to 66 at MLA 2013 and 43 at AHA 2013.

Yet there are some important intersections among DH and philosophy. Beavers pointed to a rich history of scholarship in computational philosophy. With PhilPapers, philosophy is ahead of most other humanities disciplines in having an excellent online index to and growing repository of research.  Most of the same challenges faced by philosophers with an interest in DH apply to other domains, such as figuring out how to acquire appropriate training (particularly for graduate students), recognizing and rewarding collaborative work, etc.

My talk was a remix and updating of my presentation “Why Digital Humanities?” In exploring the rationale for DH, I tried to cite examples relevant to philosophy. For example, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a dynamic online encyclopedia that predates Wikipedia, has had a significant impact, with an average of nearly a million weekly accesses during the academic year. With CT2.0, Peter Bradley aims to create a dynamic, modular, multimedia, interactive, community-driven textbook on critical thinking. Openness and collaboration also inform the design of Chris Long and Mark Fisher’s planned Public Philosophy Journal, which seeks to put public philosophy into practice by curating conversations, facilitating open review, encouraging collaborative writing, and fostering open dialogue. Likewise, I described how Transcribe Bentham is enabling the public to help create a core scholarly resource.  I also discussed recent critiques of DH, including Stephen Marche’s “literature is not data,” the 2013 MLA session on the “dark side” of DH, and concerns that DH risks being elitist. I closed by pointing to some useful resources in DH and calling for open conversation among the DH and philosophy communities. With that call in mind, I wonder: Is it the case that philosophy is less actively engaged in digital humanities?  If so, why, and what might be done to address that gap?

This is my fourth and final post about the iDigBio Augmenting OCR Hackathon.  Prior posts covered the hackathon itself, my presentation on preliminary results, and my results improving the OCR on entomology specimens.  The other participants are  slowly adding their results to the hackathon wiki, which I recommend checking back with (their efforts were much more impressive than mine).

Clearly handwritten: T=8, N=78% from terse and noisy OCR files
Let's say you have scanned a large number of cards and want to convert them from pixels into data.  The cards--which may be bibliography cards, crime reports, or (in this case) labels for lichen specimens--have these important attributes:

1. They contain structured data (e.g. title of book, author, call number, etc. for bibliographies) you want to extract, and
2. They were part of a living database built over decades, so some cards are printed, some typewritten, some handwritten, and some with a mix of handwriting and type.

The structured aspect of the data makes it quite easy to build a web form that asks humans to transcribe what they see on the card images.  It also allows for sophisticated techniques for parsing and cleaning OCR (which was the point of the hackathon).  The actual keying-in of the images is time consuming and expensive, however, so you don't want to waste human effort on cards which could be processed via OCR.

Since OCR doesn't work on handwriting, how do you know which images to route to the humans and which to process algorithmically?  It's simple: any images that contain handwriting should go to the humans.  Detecting the handwriting on the images is unfortunately not so simple.

I adopted a quick-and-dirty approach for the hackathon: if OCR of handwriting produces gibberish, why send all the images through a simple pass of OCR and look in the resulting text files for representative gibberish?  In my preliminary work, I pulled 1% of our sample dataset (all cards ending with "11") and classified them three ways:

1. Visual inspection of the text files produced by an ABBY OCR engine,
2. Visual inspection of the text files produced by the Tesseract OCR engine, and
3. Looking at the actual images themselves.

To my surprise, I was only able to correctly classify cards from OCR output 80% of the time -- a disappointing finding, since any program I produced to identify handwriting from OCR output could only be less accurate.  More interesting was the difference between the kinds of files that ABBY and Tesseract produced.  Tesseract produced a lot more gibberish in general--including on card images that were entirely printed.  ABBY, on the other hand, scrubbed a lot of gibberish out of its results, including that which might be produced when it encountered handwriting.

This suggested an approach: look at both the "terse" results from ABBY and the "noisy" results from Tesseract to see if I could improve my classification rate.
Easily classified as type-only, despite (non-characteristic) gibberish: T=0,N=0 from terse and noisy OCR files.
But what does it mean to "look" at a file?  I wrote a program to loop through each line of an OCR file and check for the kind of gibberish characteristic of OCR and handwriting.  Inspecting the files reveals some common gibberish patterns, which we can sum up as regular expressions:

GARBAGE_REGEXEN = { 'Four Dots' => /\.\.\.\./, 'Five Non-Alphanumerics' => /\W\W\W\W\W/, 'Isolated Euro Sign' => /\S€\D/, 'Double "Low-Nine" Quotes' => /„/, 'Anomalous Pound Sign' => /£\D/, 'Caret' => /\^/, 'Guillemets' => /[«»]/, 'Double Slashes and Pipes' => /(\\\/)|(\/\\)|([\/\\]\||\|[\/\\])/, 'Bizarre Capitalization' => /([A-Z][A-Z][a-z][a-z])|([a-z][a-z][A-Z][A-Z])|([A-LN-Z][a-z][A-Z])/, 'Mixed Alphanumerics' => /(\w[^\s\w\.\-]\w).*(\w[^\s\w]\w)/ }
However, some of these expressions match non-handwriting features like geographic coordinates or bar codes.  Handling these requires a white list of regular expressions for gibberish we know not to be handwriting:

WHITELIST_REGEXEN = { 'Four Caps' => /[A-Z]{4,}/, 'Date' => /Date/, 'Likely year' => /1[98]\d\d|2[01]\d\d/, 'N.S.F.' => /N\.S\.F\.|Fund/, 'Lat Lon' => /Lat|Lon/, 'Old style Coordinates' => /\d\d°\s?\d\d['’]\s?[NW]/, 'Old style Minutes' => /\d\d['’]\s?[NW]/, 'Decimal Coordinates' => /\d\d°\s?[NW]/, 'Distances' => /\d?\d(\.\d+)?\s?[mkf]/, 'Caret within heading' => /[NEWS]\^s/, 'Likely Barcode' => /[l1\|]{5,}/, 'Blank Line' => /^\s+$/, 'Guillemets as bad E' => /d«t|pav«aont/ }
With these on hand, we can calculate a score for each file based on the number of occurrences of gibberish we find per line.  That score can then be compared against a threshold to determine whether a file contains handwriting. Due to the noisiness of the Tesseract files, I found it most useful to calculate their score N as a percentage of non-blank lines, while the score for the terse files T worked best as a simple count of gibberish matches.
Threshold Correct False
Positives False
Negatives T > 1 and N > 20% 82% 10 of 45 8 of 60 T > 0 and N > 20% 84% 13 of 45 4 of 60 T > 1 79% 10 of 45 12 of 60 N > 20% 75% 8 of 45 18 of 60 N > 10% 81% 14 of 45 6 of 60 One interesting thing about this approach is that adjusting the thresholds lets us tune the classifications for resources and desired quality. If our humans doing data entry are particularly expensive or impatient, raising the thresholds should ensure that they are only very rarely sent typed text. On the other hand, lowering the thresholds would increase the human workload while improving quality of the resulting text.
One of the  false negatives: T=0, N=10% from parsing terse and noisy text files.
I'm really pleased with this result.  The combined classifications are slightly better than I was able to accomplish by looking at the OCR myself.  The experience of a volunteer presented with 56 images containing handwriting and 13 which don't may necessitate a "send to OCR" button in the user interface, but must be less frustrating than the unclassified ratio of 45 in 105 from the sample set.  With a different distribution of handwriting-to-type in the dataset, the process might be very useful for extracting rare typed material from a mostly-handwritten set, or vice versa.

All of the datasets, code, and scored CSV files are in iDigBio AOCR Hackathon's HandwritingDetection reposity on GitHub..

A few days ago I received a notice from Youtube about one of our videos. Apparently someone had marked it “inappropriate” and following review by Youtube staff the video was age-restricted.

The video in question is part of a series called “Favourite Things“, in which museum staffers select one of their favourite museum objects and describes it and why it is so special. In this particular video, Collections Manager Ion Meyer, is showing and describing three preparations of a so-called ischiopagus. That is, twins conjoined at the pelvis.

Since the video was published in March 2011 it has had almost 220,000 views. In comparison, the second-most watched video in our Youtube-channel has had less than 10,000 views. The ischiopagus video has also triggered more comments than is usual for our videos. We have tried to respond to all serious comments, but we also chosen not to respond to some, e.g.

Why would any parent let someone do this to their children! They need a proper burial! Bless there souls! <3

If you look at the Youtube guidelines, reasons for placing an age-restriction on a video include

• Sexually suggestive content
• Partial nudity or non-sexual nudity
• Actual violence or very graphic fictional violence
• Gory, disturbing imagery in an appropriate context

However, they also highlight notable exceptions for

some educational, artistic, documentary and scientific content (e.g. health education, documenting human rights issues, etc.), but only if this is the sole purpose of the video and it is not gratuitously graphic…

Without proper context and explanations I can see how someone could feel the imagery in video could is disturbing. However, it should be clear that the purpose of this video is exactly as described in the exception.

Is the video inappropriate for young audiences? I don’t think so. However, Youtube provides no means of appealing an age-restriction imposed on a video, so it doesn’t really matter what we think. I wonder if other museums have had similar experiences with videos on Youtube?

You can see the video below and judge for yourself.

Steering partners and clients toward simpler web designs is one of the greatest services we can render. In consultations and collaborative projects, I often find myself advocating for less, less, less. This is especially true when it comes to color schemes—historians aren’t easily put off their beiges, navy blues, burgundies, and parchment textured backgrounds. I do not have any design training, so I have just as often been frustrated by my lack of appropriate and convincing language to explain that when it comes to color, less is often more. Until now.

Last week I met a design professor who gave me the words. “When we are teaching color to design students,” he said, “we always tell them to start with black, white, and red.” “You don’t have to stay there, but any time you stray from black, white, and red, you should have a good reason.” “It’s no accident Coca-Cola, Marlboro, and Santa Claus are the world’s most recognizable brands.”

To this list he added the highly stylized opening titles of the fashion setting television show, Mad Men. I immediately thought of Nike Air Jordans, and the covers of Time, Life, Newsweek, and The Economist. I’m sure there are many others. Black, white, and red just work. Please feel free to share additional examples in comments.

[Image credit: ididj0emama]

This guest post was written by my incredible colleagues, Stacey Marie Garcia and Emily Hope Dobkin, with minimal input from me. It started as a handout for a session that Stacey and I are doing at the California Association of Museums, and then I realized it was so darn useful that it was worth sharing with all of you. Can't wait to hear what you think.

The majority of our public programs at the Santa Cruz Museumof Art & History are created and produced through community collaborations. Each month we work with 50-100 individuals to co-produce our community programs.  It’s not unusual for us to meet with an environmental activist, a balloon artist, a farmer, and the Mayor of Santa Cruz all in one day. Every time we collaborate, we learn new ways to improve our process, organization and communication.

We never received a “how-to-guide” for collaborating with community members here at the MAH, but over time, we have acquired some basic tools that have shaped our approach. We realize collaboration differs greatly for each individual and organization. We offer these tools in the spirit of sharing and look forward to learning about the techniques you use in your own community.

Start with and continuously identify your communities.

• Who are they?
• What are their needs?
• What are their assets?
• Who is represented in your museum? Who isn’t?

One way we do this is through C3 (Creative Community Committee) meetings. C3 is a group of diverse community members that meets to creatively brainstorm new forms of collaboration with community members. C3 topics have ranged from exhibition development, community needs, outreach programs, our Loyalty Lab project, and family programs.

Reach out to and continuously seek diverse collaborators--not just the usual suspects. We look for partners who have:

• An understanding of and desire to help meet your community’s needs.
• Incredible assets, skills and resources to offer to your community but they are in need of more awareness, promotion, visibility and representation.
• A genuine enthusiasm for sharing their skills, building knowledge and developing relationships in the community even if they haven’t done it before. For example, a few months ago we had a couple approach us to propose a Pop-Up Tea Ceremony.  Their enthusiasm and commitment charmed us and aligned with our social bridging goals. We invited them to set up the day after we met them and they’ve been Friday regulars ever since.
• Experience working with a wide variety of age groups or teaching in general. 
• Good communication skills and are kind and friendly.
• Large and small (or no) followings. When planning programs or events, we involve a combination of these groups to share and bridge audiences, bringing big, diverse crowds to new artists and ideas.

Openly invite collaboration by establishing and maintaining transparency about your partnerships with the public and fellow staff members.

• On your website: share your programing goals, solicit collaborations in general and for specific events, provide easily accessible staff contact information, clearly state how your collaborations function, give thanks and acknowledgement to your collaborators through your website and on Facebook page.
• At your museum: have your front desk staff aware of upcoming events and collaboration possibilities, always have business cards available for visitors interested in collaborating so they can easily contact staff members.  Be available to talk with people at your events and hand out your contact information to anyone who has an idea they’d like to talk with you about or is interested in helping. Follow up with them later.
• Don’t pass judgment or make assumptions. Always be open to discussing collaborative possibilities with anyone and everyone and then decide if it’s a good fit.  
• Mine your colleagues; ask for ideas and suggestions from staff members for resources. You never know who might have connections to some place or another. For our Art That Moves event, our Membership and Development Director suggested the incredibly popular Tarp Surfing activity.

Always meet your collaborators in person. We can’t overstate how important this is to getting everyone moving in the same direction.

• Clearly explain how your organization collaborates with others before you meet.
• Meet them at your museum so they begin to become more familiar and comfortable with the space and understand how they will fit into the event or program.
• Ask them about their goals for this collaboration and share your goals.
• Find a way, together, to achieve both.
• Brainstorm together your wildest ideas and then scale back. For our 3rd Friday series, we like to have an initial meeting with all of our collaborators and together go over the community program goals tied to the theme of the event. Incredible projects can arise when you have a poet, a librarian, a printmaker, a bookbinder and a teacher all throwing out ideas together. (Radical Craft Night and Poetry & Book Arts)
• Allow time to pass for further individual reflection, for them to share their ideas with other members of their organization and for you to give it further thought.
• Confirm final details with them over phone, email or go to their location this time.

Collaboration is based upon communication. Get ready to talk.

• Be prepared to spend an enormous amount of time communicating with each individual through email, over the phone and in person.
• Make time for them. When you give collaborators more of your time, they will feel more confident about their role in the event, their project/workshop/demonstration will inevitably be stronger and your visitors will be happier.
• When you produce a large event with many individuals, make sure they are all connected through email. This establishes communication across the entire group, collective teamwork, the opportunity to share resources and the possibility of future relationships and connections to develop amongst your collaborators.  Recently, we hosted a PechaKucha night at the MAH, which featured a wide range of community members presenting on eight different topics. These eight people didn't know each other at all before the event. In a pre-event email exchange, one presenter offered up a useful link to help practice giving this kind of talk. That email sparked several messages of appreciation and excitement, creating a sense of comradery.

Even if you can’t financially compensate your collaborators, show your collaborators how much you value them. Many times, we cannot pay our collaborators. For some MAH events, we collaborate with 120 individuals across the spectrum from amateurs to professionals, all of whom have very different expectations about compensation. How do we pay a group of ukulele players, a teenage rock band and a world-renowned musician fairly and on a very limited budget?

Here are some other ways we compensate our collaborators:

• Give them as much press as possible. Suggest them to press for a feature in the local paper.
• Acknowledge them on your website and always link to their website.
• Pay for all their materials.
• Offer food and drinks for them at the event.
• Give them a guest pass.
• Thank them and credit them for their work and volunteered time.
• Refer them if someone asks you for a recommendation.
• Help them learn from the experience. We recently had a group of students creating balloon art during our Winterpalooza Family Festival. New to the art form and the museum, we gave them a gift certificate to reflect over milkshakes at a local burger joint after the event.
• Encourage them to promote themselves/their organization and offer ways for visitors to learn more about their events at your event. It’s a reciprocal appreciation: we are able to showcase and share the amazing talent in our community, and they’re able to share their work with a larger audience, make new connections in the community and learn from their experiences interacting with the public

Your partners are doing a lot of work. Make it as easy for them as possible.

• Share your resources and connections that can help make their activity/collaboration stronger. A friendly sheet metal company in Santa Cruz provided scrap metal for our Experience Metal festival last summer; we thanked them by donating back the giant robot visitors partly made from the scrap.
• Buy, gather, and prep all the materials you can. This might mean cutting thousands of papers various sizes, wheeling hundreds of library books through downtown, dumpster diving for cardboard boxes and driving up to the mountains to move a 200lb letterpress to the MAH.
• Set up their tables and materials for them before they arrive.
• Have volunteers ready to assist them with set up and break down, as well as coverage during breaks.
• Clearly communicate with them throughout the process, show them exactly where they will be and where everyone else will be, let them know the schedule, where to check in, how and where to find help and assistance and what is expected of them before, during and after the event.

Get collaborators' feedback and give them credit for their contributions.

• Survey your collaborators extensively to find out: ways to improve for next time, what they appreciated, how or if they benefited from the collaboration, and what changes they’d like to see made. Here's a sample collaborator survey from our recent Poetry and Book Arts event.
• Read the surveys and make active and immediate changes based upon their feedback.
• Document the event: Share photographs of the event on social media outlets and always have fully downloadable photographs available for their use.
• Keep in contact with them. These people are now one of your best and most reliable resources and you can be theirs as well. Stay up to date with them about future collaborations or other potential collaborators they may know. Be helpful to them and they will be helpful to you. 

How do you collaborate with your community? What tools and methods have you found beneficial?

Of the many different courses I teach, the one I’ve made the fewest changes in over the past decade is my survey of modern Eastern Europe. Every other course I teach has been reconfigured in various ways as a result of my research into the scholarship of teaching and learning, but for some reason, I’ve never gotten around to altering this course. I’m ashamed to say that when I taught it last semester, it was really not that much different from the way I taught it for the first time way back in 1999.

I could offer various excuses for why that course seems so similar to its original incarnation, but really the only reason is inertia. I’ve rewritten four other courses and have created five others from scratch in the past six or seven years and because my East European survey worked reasonably well, it was last in line for renovation.

The good news for future students is that I’ve taught it that way for the last time.

Like all upper division survey courses, HIST 312 poses a particular set of challenges. Because we have no meaningful prerequisites in our department (except for the Senior Seminar, that requires students to pass Historical Methods), students can show up in my class having taken no history courses at the college level. And even if they had, the coverage of the region we used to call Eastern Europe is so thin in other courses, it is as though they had never taken another course anyway. That means I always spent a fair amount of time explaining just where we are talking about, who the people are who live there, and so on, before we get to the real meat and potatoes of the semester.

And then there is the fact that this course spans a century and eight countries (and then five more once Yugoslavia breaks up), it’s a pretty complex story.

To help students make sense of that complexity, over the years I’ve narrowed the focus of the course substantially, following Randy Bass’s advice to me many years ago: “The less you teach, the more they learn.” We focus on three main themes across all this complexity and by the end of the semester, most of the students seem to have a pretty good grasp of the main points I wanted to make. Or at least they reiterated those points to me on exams and final papers. And it’s worth noting that they like the course. I just got my end of semester evaluations from last semester and the students in that class rated it a 5.0 on a 5 point scale, while rating my teaching 4.94.

What I don’t know is whether they actually learned anything.

This semester I’m part of a reading group that is working its way through How Learning Works and this past week we discussed the research on how students’ prior knowledge influences their thinking about whatever they encounter in their courses. This chapter reminded me a lot of an essay by Sam Wineburg on how the film Forrest Gump has played such a large role in students’ learning about the Viet Nam wars. Drawing on the work of cognitive psychologists and their own research, Ambrose et al and Wineburg come to the same conclusion, namely, that it is really, really difficult for students (or us) to let go of prior knowledge, no matter how idiosyncratically acquired, when trying to make sense of the past (or any other intellectual problem).

The research they describe seems pretty compelling to me, especially because much of it comes from lab studies rather than water cooler anecdotes about student learning. Because it’s so compelling, I’ve decided to rewrite my course around the notion of working from my students’ prior knowledge. Getting from where they are when they walk in the room on the first day of the semester and where I want them to be at the final exam is the challenge that will animate me throughout the term.

My plan right now (and it’s a tentative plan because I won’t teach the course again for a couple of semesters) is to begin the semester with three short in class writing assignments on the three big questions/themes that run through the course. I want to  know where my students are with those three before I try to teach them anything. Once I know where they are, then I can rejigger my plans for the semester to meet them where they are rather than where I might like them to be. And then as we complete various segments of the course I’ll have them repeat this exercise so I can see whether they are, as I hope, building some sort of sequential understanding the material. By the end of the semester I ought to be able track progress in learning (at least I hope I will), which is an altogether different thing than hoping to see evidence of the correct answer compromise.

This project attempted to improve the quality of OCR applied to difficult entomology images[*] by cropping labels from the images to run through OCR separately. In order to identify labels on the image to crop, an initial, 'naive' pass of OCR was made over the whole image, generating both

• A) a set of rectangles on the image defined as word bounding boxes by the OCR engine, and 
• B) a control OCR text file to be used for comparing the 'naive' model with the methodology.

Those word rectangles were then filtered, consolidated, and filtered again to identify the labels on the image, which were then extracted and run through the OCR engine separately. The resulting OCR output files were then concatenated into a single text file, which was compared against the 'naive' output described in A (above).

I'll call this method "ocrocrop". (For more detail on method, see the transcript of my preliminary presentation.)

The results were encouraging. (See CSV file listing results for each file, and the directory containing "naive" output, annotated JPGs, and cleaned output files for each test.)

Of 80 files tested, 20 experienced a decrease in score (see Alex Thomson's scoring service), but most (14/20) of those were on OCR output below 10% accuracy in the first place, and the remainder were at or below 20% accuracy. So it is reasonable to say that the ocrocrop method only degraded the quality of texts that were unusable in the first place.

40 of the 80 files tested showed more promising results, showing improvements from one to twenty percentage points -- in some cases only marginally improving unusable (below 10% accurate) outputs, but in many cases improving the scores more substantially (say from 25% to 35% in the case of EMEC609908_Stigmus_sp).

Most of the top quartile of results saw improvements on texts that were already scoring above 10% accuracy rates (16 of 20), so it appears that the effectiveness of the ocrocrop method is correlated to the quality of the naive input data -- garbage is degraded or only minimally improved, while OCR that is merely bad under the naive approach can be significantly improved.


The ocrocrop method saw the greatest improvement in cases where the naive OCR pass was effective at identifying word bounding boxes, but ineffective at translating their contents into words. Taking EMEC609928_Stigmus_sp, the case of greatest improvement (naive: 18.9%, ocrocrop: 70.5%), we see that all words on the labels except for the collector name were recognized as words (in purple), making the cropped label images (in blue) good representatives of the actual labels on the image.

The cropped image was more easily processed by our OCR image, so that we may compare the naive version of the second label:
CALIF:Hunbo1dt Co. ;‘ ~ 3 m1.N' Garbervflle ,::f< '_- ' v—23~75 n.n1e:z.' 9 ._ ’ with the ocrocrop version of the second label:
CALIF:Humboldt Co. 3 mi.N Garberville V-23-76 R.Dietz,'

One of the problems with the OCR-based pre-processing which may be hidden by the scores is that many labels are entirely missed by the ocrocrop if the first, naive OCR pass failed to identify any words at all on the label. In cases such as EMEC609651_Cerceris_completa, the determination label was not cropped (indicated by blue rectangles) because no words (purple rectangles) were detected by the original. As a result, while the ocrocrop OCR is an improvement over the naive OCR (6.6% vs. 6.5%), substantial portions of text on the image are unimproved because they are unattempted.

There are two possible ways to solve this problem. One is to abandon the ocrocrop model entirely, switching back to a computer vision approach -- either by programmatically locating rectangles on the image (as Phuc Nguyen demonstrated) or by asking humans to identify regions of interest for OCR processing (as demonstrated by Jason Best in Apiary and by Paul and Robin Schroeder in ScioTR). The other option is to improve the naive OCR -- perhaps by swapping out the engine (e.g. use ABBY instead of Tesseract), perhaps by using a different image pre-processor (like ocropus's front-end to Tesseract), perhaps by re-training Tesseract.

I suspect that a computer vision approach to extracting entomology labels (or similar pieces of paper photographed against a noisy background) will provide a more effective eventual solution than the ocrocrop method. Nevertheless, the ocrocrop "bang it with a rock until it works" approach has a lot of potential to take entomology-style OCR to bad from worse.

[*]In addition to the difficulties typical of specimen labels--mix of typefaces, handwritten material, typewritten material, text inventory with few overlaps with a dictionary of literary English--the entomology dataset contained additional challenges. Difficulties included the following:

• Images containing specimens and rulers as well as labels. 
• Labels casually arranged for photography, so that text orientation was not necessarily aligned. 
• Labels photographed against a background of heavily pin-pricked styrofoam rather than a black or neutral background. 
• 3-d images including what appear to be shadows, which soften the contrast differences around borders.

I spent the last three days at the iDigBio Augmenting OCR Hackathon working alongside mycologists, botanists, entomologists, herbarium managers, and bioinformaticians to explore ways to improve parsing of digitized specimen labels.  While I'm pleased with the results of my own contribution, I'd like to take a minute to talk about the hackathon process itself before I post them.

This was my first hackathon--a condition which seemed to be the rule among the participants--and I was really impressed with it.  The iDigBio folks defined a clear set of goals (improve OCR parsing of specimen labels) with clear metrics (these datasets, these output formats, this scoring algorithm) a couple of months beforehand, and organized five weekly videoconferences before the event.  Most important of all, the participants were encouraged to prepare a 10-minute lightning talk on their efforts and preliminary results.  (See below for the transcript of my talk, see the notes document for descriptions of all talks.)

In my opinion, these preliminary talks were critical to the success of the project.  The preliminary nature relaxed pressure on participants, so we were able to experiment beyond the target of the hackathon (as I did with my handwriting detection digression, a related, but un-scorable effort).  On the other hand, they did provide enough impetus to get many of us looking at the data, working with the tools, and thinking about approaches.  This meant that even before the hackathon started, many of us were familiar enough with the materials to have a real 'meeting of the minds' experience during the pre-event supper:  "Did you just say 'the contrast difference between the print and the label is higher than the difference between the label and the background'?  We ran into that too, and here's what we did..."

The experience was a real education in OCR for me, and I feel like I picked up techniques I can apply directly to projects I've discussed with clients and potential clients.  In particular, I got a real appreciation for how interrelated image preparation, OCR, and parsing are to each other.  One participant had created separate libraries of regular expressions to clean up each kind of field, having discovered that latitude/longitude coordinates require different error correction than personal names or herbarium catalog numbers do.  Another group had built a touch-screen tool for classifying segments of the image before submitting them to OCR.  My own project required a first pass of OCR to clean images before sending them to a second, 'real' pass of OCR.  A simple 1,2,3 workflow just isn't sufficient!

iDigBio itself is an NSF-funded attempt to advance digitization practices on natural history collections, combining disciplinary "thematic collection networks" and methodologically focused working groups on topics like georeferencing, crowdsourcing, and OCR.  Aware that they're not the only people digitizing things, they have been reaching out beyond the natural sciences to the library and information science community at the iConference this year.  This rejection of "not invented here" siloing was a big part of the hackathon, and I hope that more people from outside the natural sciences will get involved.

As part of the upcoming workshop “It’s Not What You Think: Communicating Medical Materialities”, we are delighted to announce that the pioneering bioartist Oron Catts will be giving a public keynote lecture on Friday March 8th at 17.00 in the auditorium at Medical Museion.

Oron Catts is a prominent and defining figure in the emerging field of bioarts, which examines shifting perceptions of life through the lens of the life sciences. Famous for his work with The Tissue Culture and Art Project, he also co-founded the bioart lab SymbioticA at the University of Western Australia.

Here is the title and abstract for the talk, which can also be found on our seminar page:

The Puzzle of Neolifism, the Strange Materiality of Regenerative and Synthetically Biological Things.

In 1906 Jacques Loeb suggested making a living system from dead matter as a way to debunk the vitalists’ ideas and claimed to have demonstrated ‘abiogenesis’. In 2010 Craig Venter announced that he created “the first self-replicating cell we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer” the “Mycoplasma laboratorium” which is commonly known as Synthia.  In a sense Venter claimed to bring Loeb’s dream closer to reality. What’s relevant to our story is that one of the main images Venter (or his marketing team) chose for the outing of Synthia was of two round cultures that looked like a blue eyed gaze; a metaphysical image representing the missing eyes of the Golem. These are the first bits of a jigsaw puzzle that will be laid in this talk. Through the notion of Neolifism, this puzzle will explore and Re/De-Contextualise the strange materiality of things and assertions of regenerative and synthetic biology. Other parts of the puzzle include a World War II crash site of a Junkers 88 bomber at the far north of Lapland, the first lab where the Tissue Culture & Art Project started to grow semi-living sculptures, frozen arks and de-extinctions, Alexis Carrel, industrial farms, Charles Lindbergh, worry dolls, rabbits’ eyes, ear-mouse, gas chambers, active biomaterials, in-vitro meat and leather, incubators, freak-shows, museums, ghost organs, drones, crude matter, mud and a small piece of Plexiglas that holds this puzzle together…

About Oron Catts:

Oron Catts is an artist, researcher and curator whose pioneering work with the Tissue Culture and Art Project, which he established in 1996, is considered a leading biological art undertaking. In 2000, Oron founded SymbioticA, an artistic research centre in the School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology at The University of Western Australia. SymbioticA won the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica in Hybrid Art in 2007 and a year later became a Centre for Excellence. In 2009, Oron was listed in Thames & Hudson’s ‘60 Innovators Shaping our Creative Future’ and named by Icon Magazine (UK) as one of the ‘Top 20 designers making the future and transforming the way we work’. Oron’s interest is life itself or, more specifically, the shifting relations and perceptions of life in the light of new knowledge and its application. Often developed in collaboration with scientists and other artists, his body of work speaks volumes about the need for a new cultural articulation of evolving concepts of life. Oron has been a Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School and a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University. He is currently the Director of SymbioticA, a Visiting Professor of Design Interaction at the Royal College of Arts, London, and a Visiting Professor at Aalto University’s Biofilia- base for Biological Arts, Helsinki. Oron’s work reaches beyond the confines of art, often being cited as an inspiration in areas as diverse as new materials, textiles, design, architecture, ethics, fiction and food.

Image credit – Crude Matter (2012) by The Tissue Culture & Art Project (Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr), installation detail from “SOFT CONTROL: Art, Science and the Technological Unconscious”, Koroška galerija likovnih umetnosti (KGLU), Slovenj Gradec.