Burns Day 2012, January 25th, I was drumming my metaphorical fingers on all the desks I could find. My due date had been the 19th; another day or two, and they wouldn’t let me give birth at the Birth Center anymore. This risking out business was annoying! But that was where the bureaucracy won, and I was going to play along whether I liked it or not.
I was giddy with impatient anticipation. Felt like an amazon. Wanted haggis. Molly and I briefly fantasized about going to get the really good stuff somewhere in Jersey, but that wasn’t in the cards. I had itchy feet, though, and Molly is the platonic ideal of my traveling companion.
“Wanna go have dinner in Maine?” Do I!
Duckfat. I’d heard about it, but had never been to the Portland place with amazing-sounding fries. Two hours away is far enough to be a road trip, but totally close enough to get back if, you know.
This was it. Last chance to kick start labor and probably avoid a hospital setting. Mid-afternoon, I went to the store and got blue and black cohosh drops. I took some while parked outside of Molly’s workplace in Cambridge, waiting for her to come down.
At a gas station half an hour out of town, I went to the bathroom and stared at a tiny wet spot on my jeans. Slight incontinence is a common travel companion in late pregnancy, but this felt different.
Getting back, I said, “I think my water just broke.”
Molly stared at me. “Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure. There wasn’t a dramatic gush or anything, but yeah.”
“…Is it bad that my main thought is, drive faster?” We laughed.
“Bad, no! It’s why I love you.”
So we went on to Portland. I hadn’t thought to bring pads with me, and further didn’t even think to buy any at the gas station. So the moment we were seated at Duckfat, I said to our waitress: “So… My water broke, and I’m in labor! I’m totally fine, or we wouldn’t be here. But I need a pad. I don’t suppose you have any here?”
Her eyes got momentarily wider, but she kept her cool. “Congratulations, wow. Uh… *I* don’t have any, and the rest of the staff are dudes. Let me take a look in our first aid kit.” Moments later she was back with a big packet of gauze. “Best I can do.” It was good enough for the moment.
Dinner was delicious. Creamy soups, duckfat poutine (!!), duck rillettes, salad with duck confit. I had a blood orange and lemon curd shake that left me speechless. We texted Mark, who was at a company party. Molly posted pictures of our food, one of them captioned: “Tomato-fennel-basil, cream of onion, PS Vika’s water broke.” Our local internet erupted in good wishes.
The contractions started very slowly, sometime over dinner. After, we drove to a pharmacy and got real pads. The cashier at the pharmacy walked with me to show me where the bathrooms were. On the way there she suddenly called out, “Whoo! Hot flash!” I laughed and explained to her why I needed pads and a bathroom. We shared a sweet moment.
I drove us home. I wanted to see how far I could get, driving through mild contractions, and it turned out–all the way! Molly livetweeted, of course. We chatted about everything. We’ve had some great conversations over the years, but that evening’s was one of the best.
Got home in a beautiful dusting of snow, sometime between 11 and midnight. Mark was parked by my place, and we handed me off. Molly walked home, just down the hill. Mark and I went inside, puttered a bit, prepared things to take to the birth center when the time came. He snapped some pictures. We went to bed around midnight.
I got up at 2:30am with stronger contractions, and here things get hazy. The intensity of the contractions increased pretty rapidly. I tried to keep hydrated with water and tart juices (can’t stomach sports drinks), but couldn’t keep any of that down. Over the next hour I proceeded to get mildly dehydrated, which worsened the contractions and pushed them closer together, though I didn’t draw the connection then.
Around 4am we went to the birth center. The midwife on duty there, Laurie, wasn’t anyone I’d met before, and had easily the worst bedside manner I’d encountered in that place. She was displeased that we’d come, despite the fact that Mark had been on the phone with the center and we’d been told to come. She gave me an internal exam and used a speculum, which hurt like a mofo, and the entire time she was as gently disposed as sandpaper.
I wasn’t dilated enough, she said. A few centimeters. A non stress test showed no reason for worry, and an ultrasound confirmed that baby was head down. We should go and keep laboring at home. And, oh, drink lots more fluids.
Arrrrgh. Everything they tell you about how much it sucks to ride in a car while having contractions is true. And the pavement quality on Beacon Street between my house and the birth center is infamous with local bicyclists for its potholes. I felt every one, plus all the cracks in the road.
We went home at 6am, and the next several hours are a haze of pain and further dehydration. I might have slept a little bit. Throughout the night and morning, Mark was wonderfully supportive, but I don’t remember interacting much around the actual contractions — that seems to have been something I felt the need to deal with on my own.
He timed them, though. Things progressed, too slowly. There was a lot of pain. We talked to the birth center once or twice more, and were encouraged to stay the course. But at some point I couldn’t. Sometime close to noon I told him we were going in. He didn’t argue.
We got in around 12:15, and discovered that they couldn’t admit me unless they checked me again, and I was so dehydrated that they couldn’t check me until I rehydrated. So for the next hour and a half I lay on the thin narrow couch in the “family room,” a sort of tiny interstitial room, hooked up to an IV saline drip and trying with varying degrees of success to roll with it. Mark intermittently held my hands and made sympathetic noises, and was a generalized rock-solid loving presence. The contractions got bad enough that at some point I remember telling him, “I don’t know if I can do this. I’m close to giving up.” I was afraid, and later decided that this was the beginning of transition into the final stages of labor: often that time is marked by fear. But in the moment, of course, I didn’t remember that, and concentrated on my loved one and the kind nurse encouraging me to get through the rehydrating stage and find out where we really are, because what if we’ve progressed a lot? Would be a shame to check into the hospital with no need, since that’s a thing I wanted to avoid if possible.
Fair point, and the baby was doing just fine, so I kept on breathing.
Two liters of saline later they took me to get checked out. I actually started crying at the thought of another speculum exam. “No speculum,” the midwife on duty promised. I’d never met her either, but she was different from Ms. Mousy Sandpaper. She was solid and reassuring and full of warmth, and she helped me breathe more easily in the midst of labor. So when she mentioned a student midwife and asked me if it would be ok to have her along, I didn’t think twice. I love student medical practitioners. They’re sweet and brave and interested. And let me tell you: Kate ended up taking over the entire thing including my postpartum visits, and was amazing.
But that was later. For now, the senior midwife (whose name I no longer remember) checked me without a speculum. “Oh! You’re at 7.5 centimeters.”
Holy crap! Turns out my body had been laboring hard and productively. “Does this mean I get admitted?” Oh yes. Ohhh thank all the deities.
They took me to an honest-to-goodness laboring room. With a BATHTUB. I got to float in the warm water, easily the best thing to happen all day up to that point. My birth-center-provided doula was summoned (did I mention I loved my experience at the Cambridge Birth Center?), and spent some intense time with me getting to full dilation without pushing. She had to really work on me, there. The urge to push was strong with this one.
This whole time Mark was with me, being a rock star, best birthing companion I could’ve wished for. Later I heard that when he finally left us the next day, he sat in Molly’s kitchen and ate peanut butter straight from the jar for a while, recharging and staring off into space. Plenty deserved.
The midwife was covering both the birth center and the hospital delivery ward next door, so we spent some time waiting for her to come back and check me again. Ages later she came back, checked me quickly, and pronounced me fully dilated. But, surprise! The warm tub water was too cool for the baby to be delivered into, so they wanted me to come out.
I just looked at them all in disbelief. I remember feeling flickers of rage, but the whole thing was so preposterous—I mean, couldn’t they just turn on the damn hot water faucet?—that there had to be something I didn’t know. I couldn’t use words at that point, so I turned to Mark, who proceeded to be my lungs and mouth. Couldn’t we turn on the hot water? They answered him as they were hustling me out, so I didn’t catch the answer, but he told me later: no, they said. There wasn’t time. This baby was coming too fast.
Whee! Everything’s a blur. Here’s what I remember: they got me on the bed and put down some disposable towels. I think I pushed in earnest a total of four times. Then I had a baby.
I’d been admitted sometime around 2pm on January 26th. By 3:50 he was out. I was on all fours, and they put him on the bed under me. We stared at each other. He screamed with shock and indignation. I cried and laughed. Mark cried.
Everything they tell you about the pain disappearing into a haze on account of the endorphins is true. It was the best, cleanest high I ever expect to experience. Someone helped me turn around and sit, reclined, on the bed. They cleaned up my baby and put him on my belly. Sometime in there I delivered the gorgeous root structure of the placenta, which I had no interest in keeping but was fascinating to see. I had a tiny tear that didn’t need any stitches. They cleaned me up. Everything got a lot more quiet.
We rested. Babe-a-licious got checked out and pronounced perfect (7lbs 9.9oz, 21.5 inches). Nobody once suggested taking him out of the room: there was no need. I think I had toast and tea, courtesy of the lovely doula lady. We tried to get him to latch on with some success. Mark snapped some photos. We got a visit from Molly, ate sushi for dinner, drank a vodka toast to his arrival and a long and wonderful life, and picked out his name. Nico Alexander Zafrin. I called my mom. There was another exam (his blood is B+, by the way), and then we napped the nap of the smugly accomplished.
They don’t let you stick around for long at the birth center, and I didn’t feel like transferring to the hospital without true need. Around midnight we went home in a dusting of fresh snow.
On my list of things to do writing a blog post about my experiences with teaching Public Health Science Communication to graduate students at the University of Copenhagen has been high-up for a while. However, moving to Bonn, Germany and other minor things have somehow managed to overrule the writing of this post. But its time – also to avoid the experiences being stored too far back in my mind to be brought forward.
So how did it go? Did the students find it useful? What went well? Would I repeat a course like this again? And if so, what would I do differently? There are lots of questions to answer, so I thought I’d go through them one by one.
How did it go?
Overall, I think it went quite well. At least all students passed and it wasn’t criticized apart by the students. I’d even like to think that the students learned something new and useful. And just as important: I learned a lot! Both about science communication in relation to public health and about teaching public health science communication.
Did the students find the course useful?
It is very often difficult to get a clear impression of whether students found a course useful or not, and the fact that only few students filled in the online evaluation questionnaire and that only about half of the class attended the last module, where we did a short oral evaluation of the course, makes it even more difficult. However, based on the students who did participate in the evaluation I think it would be alright to conclude that the students on the whole were happy with the course. From the online evaluation most of them indicated that the study objectives of the course were met (and I assume they to some extend joined the course on the basis of these), and they rated their overall study-relevant benefit as ‘very good’ or ‘good’. I was also very happy to see that a most of the students who filled in the online evaluation found the course very relevant to their general Public Health education.
From the oral evaluation the comments were also in general positive. The students expressed that it had in many ways been a very different course, with much less hardcore theory than many of their other graduate courses. Some also mentioned that the fact that the centre of attention to a much higher degree than in other courses had been on themselves as individuals and researchers, had been interesting but at the same time a challenge. They expressed that they were more used to focus on the objective of Public Health, which is usually the public and not so much on their own role in this. I found this interesting, and recalling my own time as a Public Health student it is true that it was rarely about ourselves and our current and future roles in public health (one could talk about our subjective role), but much more about all the other players in public health, of course including the public itself.
Another thing I found interesting, was that when asked about the syllabus, the students in general seemed happy with the selected literature, except many of them expressed that they found the blog posts too chatty and recommend them taken out in future courses. I myself had put a lot of thought into allowing different kinds of literature. In part to illustrate that science communication is not just about text books and peer-reviewed journals. I guess they as university student have by now just been a little brainwashed to prefer good old scholarly texts over the more ‘chatty’ and personal writing styles…
What went well?
In my own opinion, many things went well. The balance between having myself as the main lecturer and great guest lectures (thank you to them!) was good (I taught about half of the modules). The field trips also worked well and were a nice change from the class room. One to trip went to Videnskab.dk, a Danish popular science news website, and the other to Medical Museion.
I’m happy also that I chose to make a compendium rather than assigning a textbook. Partly due to the fact that there isn’t yet a book out there on Public Health Science Communication, but also because it was good to be able to through different kinds of texts to illustrate the many forms of science communication.
Another things I found was successful was trying to use as many real life examples. Ranging from case studies (although it would have been nice to have more), to YouTube clips, podcasts, blogs etc.
Despite some worrying comments from some of the participants prior to finishing the exam, I also think that the task of writing an introductory chapter on Public Health Science Communication worked well. Some students expressed that they found that an exam more focused on actually trying to communicate a specific public health challenge would have been more appropriate and useful instead of what they regarded being an assignment to refer theory of science communication. I (of course) tend to disagree. Writing an introductory chapter on Public Health Science Communication is also an example of communicating a scientific field – it just happened to be a field (and a way of thinking) that was new to them.
What would I do differently?
It is funny what time does. Looking back at the course now, with some months having passed, I have a hard time recalling all the things I would have changed. Because at one point I thought there were many. However, some do come to mind:
I think I would have tried to include more real life examples of science communication – both good and bad examples, and perhaps have challenged the students to analyse both and suggest why they worked and why the didn’t.
Despite having the primary focus on the communicator (the public health professional) rather than looking at the receiver, I think I would in a future course try to incorporate a little more on how publics benefits from public health science communication, and perhaps try to allocate some more time to going through how one can become better at understanding and writing to a specific target group. This will present a different challenge, because the course is not a writing course.
Actually, I found the that finding a balance between being a course on principles, trends and theories in science communication and a writing, hands-on course quite difficult. I am sure that in a repetition of the course, this would again be a difficult balance to get right.
It’s always difficult to get students to discuss, but in a future course I’d try to make room for more discussion and student involvement. My own take-home message from teaching this course, is that I should keep in mind, that science communication is not an exact science and that I, despite being the teacher, does not have all the answers…
Would I repeat a course like this again?
Yes, I think I would. For many reasons. One, I thought it was fun and inspiring to teach. Second, I was confirmed in my belief that introducing public health students to the importance of science communication is very much relevant – if not essential. And finally, I learned a lot from the process and I would love to see how a version 2.0 of the course would go about.
Did I forget to mention something important in the post? Probably – but I promise to add them (or do an additional post) if and when things come to mind. I also welcome my students to share their views and correct me if I’m wrong, and I would be happy to answer questions from anyone interested in hearing more of my experiences with teaching Public Health Science Communication.
Today I had the pleasure of being invited to a talk at The National Museum by Jonathan Wichmann from Maersk Line. I got the invitation from Ida Gustav and Linea Hansen, so kudos to them
Maersk Line have had immense success on social media and reaching levels of fans/likes/engagement that the rest of us can only dream of. For example, they have more than 700,000 fans on Facebook. During the talk which lasted around an hour, another 500 people clicked like on their page. And their business is shipping containers around the would on ships. Okay. I’m amazed.
Anyway, one thing that really surprised me was that Maersk Line apparently also outrank major brands such as Disney, Shell, Ford, McDonald’s in terms of Facebook engagement. This statistic is based on a metric developed by Jonathan Wichmann himself. I’ve borrowed some numbers from him shown here:
I found the formula and couldn’t help having a go at it myself. So without further ado, here are the Facebook “engagement scores” of a few of our friends:
(the calculations are based on the 10 most recent posts on the respective Facebook pages – you can see the raw data here)
I’m going to leave these numbers without interpretation for now. But what do you think?
(image credits: Bird Houses by See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / CC BY-SA 2.0)
Now that I’m back in my old department (after four years in administration) I’m back up to a full teaching load and I’m happy that this semester is an all digital, all the time semester. That does not mean that I’m teaching online. Far from it. Instead, it means that both of my regularly constituted undergraduate courses and the readings uncourse I’m conducting with four of our PhD students all have heavy digital components. In fact, all three are organized around digital history.
The first of my undergrad courses is my version of our historical methods seminar. I call the class “Dead in Virginia” because we’re using local family cemeteries as the starting point for our learning about historical methods. The digital component of the course is built around an Omeka installation in which the students will deposit the results of their research and through which they will build their final presentations. As the syllabus makes clear, the focus of the course is learning historical methods through actual historical research. This is the second time I’ve taught the course and I’m looking forward to it very much.
The second undergrad course this semester is our newish course designed to meet the university’s general education IT literacy requirement. Long-time readers of this blog will remember that several years ago I was engaged in a long running stand off with our general education committee over the approval of this course. Well, the course was approved at last and has been taught twice by Dan Cohen, and once by Amanda French. I’m teaching it for the first time and have a few tricks up my sleeve, none of which is reflected in the syllabus, which is heavily derived from Dan’s and Amanda’s…at least this first time through. Sharon Leon is also teaching the class this semester and her version is different from mine, which will give us a chance to compare notes throughout the term.
Finally, I’m teaching a small group of our PhD students in a modified version of my grad course Teaching History in the Digital Age…modified because we’re meeting in as a small group around a table at CHNM rather than in a formal course setting. Our work this semester will be built around the Zotero group of the same name that students in my grad course have been building over the past few years. You can follow along if you like by signing on to the group. For now, it’s not open to outside editing, but my plan is to open it to the world after the semester to try to build a much larger and more comprehensive annotated bibliography of sources on teaching history in these digital times.
I’m very glad that my reconnection to full time teaching is so heavily digital. While I was making the final edits to my forthcoming book, I had a lot of time to think about teaching digital history, but because of my administrative duties, not much time to implement those ideas. This semester I’ll finally get to try out some of those new ideas.
Here are some of the objects that were demonstrated (touched, fingered, fondled, caressed, stroken etc.) during the touching seminar yesterday.
Here are bundles of hair from an often-caressed cat:
At least two participants brought coffee/tea mugs, and two of us chose to bring small objects that they like to play with to distract their thoughts, a chestnut and some paper clips:
A cool computer mouse, of course:
And so on and so forth:
And I, finally, brought my office chessboard, to illustrate the question whether chess is a purely cognitive game, or if the enjoyment is enhanced by playing it tactically:
This seminar was an appetiser only. We’ll soon be back with discussions about tactile aesthetics in museums in general and science and medical museums in particular.
Next scheduled event in the material aesthetics meeting series is the workshop IT’S NOT WHAT YOU THINK: COMMUNICATING MEDICAL MATERIALITIES, which we organise here at Medical Museion 8-9 March with about 30 participants.
From January 25th, Medical Museion will house an open biohacking laboratory, pieced together from recycled furniture, IKEA cabinets, and cheap “hacked” instruments made by do-it-yourself biologists from BiologiGaragen and Hackteria. At a series of hands-on events and discussions, visitors are invited to step inside the world of practical biotechnology, and encounter the dreams and realities of open science.
Two of our partners in the project, Sara Krugman and Martin Malthe Borch, have made a video trailer explaining some of the ideas behind the exhibition, events, and the biohacking movement.
Locals are invited to join us for a ‘hacked’ exhibition opening on Thursday 24th January at 7.30pm. The lab installation will then be open during normal museum hours, Wednesday-Friday and Sunday, 12-4pm, and more info on the hands-on events and symposium is here.
Two related problems have been bedeviling the current discussion of new modes of academic work. First, it remains unclear to many academics how we can effectively assess digital scholarship, given its many shapes and sizes and often complex, collaborative production. This problem is receiving so much attention right now that we devoted our entire last issue of the Journal of Digital Humanities to it.
Second, given that many of these digital genres—multimedia scholarly sites, sophisticated digital collections, long-form academic blogs, and the like—are published directly to the web, a need has arisen for post-publication, rather than traditional pre-publication, peer review. Last week I was on a panel at the 2013 American Historical Association annual meeting on the future of history journals and peer review, and many in the audience were journal editors who were skeptical about the notion of post-publication peer review. Indeed, for many history and humanities scholars, “post-publication peer review” is an oxymoron; the only true form of peer review is the one that occurs before publication, and that helps to determine in a binary way whether an article or book is published in the first place.
Yet there is an obvious form of post-publication peer review already in wide use—awards—and I would like to suggest that we use them even more widely to help solve the problem of how to assess digital scholarship. As they currently stand, academic awards are icing on the cake. The prizes that the AHA gives every year—mostly books, with a few additional categories for articles, films, reference resources, and lifetime work—are wonderful signifiers of highly distinguished work. To receive one of these prizes is a major career achievement. One of the goals of the Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History, awarded by the AHA since 2009, was to validate the very top work in this new field.
One award isn’t nearly enough for our field, however, or for others that increasingly involve digital work. We need to recognize a broad swath of scholarship and innovation using awards, since it’s an effective way to signal creative, good work. Awards can be a clear form of professional validation for digital scholarship that is understandable to everyone in academia (including those outside of digital humanities), and that doesn’t rely on more controversial forms of post-publication peer review such as open review or crowdsourcing. How do we know that a professor’s blog is worthy of significant credit, that it is more than just musings and is having an impact in a field? A certifying scholarly organization or review panel has deemed it so, from a crowded field.
Furthermore, like the Grammys, we need to give awards not just for Record of the Year but for Best Jazz Instrumental and Achievement in Sound Engineering. Knowledgeable review panels with a deep understanding of the composition of digital work should be able to give out both general awards for digital projects and distinct awards, for instance, for outstanding work in user interfaces for digital archives.
Thankfully, there are already initiatives on this front. A new slate of annual Digital Humanities Awards has just launched, with an international review committee. (Nominations due today!) Now we need scholarly societies to back both interdisciplinary and disciplinary awards with their imprimatur. From conversations I’ve had recently, I sense that is likely to happen in the near future.
Of course, we need to be aware of the rather valid objection that awards can be overdone. We should avoid the digital equivalent of an award for Best Zydeco/Metal Duet. (Actually, that sounds incredible.) Last year the Recording Academy sensibly lowered the number of Grammy categories from 109 to 78. Furthermore, it’s important for awards to have some minimum number of entries or nominations every year, and as with book awards, peer review panels must retain the option of giving no award in a year if none of the options are deemed worthy. Awards must be meaningful.
Right now, however, we should think more broadly, rather than narrowly, about giving awards for digital work. There are precious few opportunities for digital projects to receive external validation. I continue to believe that other forms of post-publication peer review are needed as well (especially for developmental editing rather than vetting), but let’s at least start with a larger slate of rigorously determined awards and some (virtual) gold statues.
Recently, I stumbled across a documentary about Auguste Rodin's monumental sculpture La porte de l'Enfer, and decided I could use The Gates of Hell as a metaphor in telling the history of the use of computing in the Humanities and the transfer from Humanities Computing to Digital Humanities as a name for the field. This coincided with my attempts to find an angle for a guest lecture I was invited to give at the Lehrstuhl für Computerphilologie und Neuere Deutsche Literaturgeschichte of the Julius-Maximilians Universität Würzburg (Germany) on 13 December. My last visit to Würzburg as a keynote speaker to the 2011 Annual Conference and Members' Meeting of the TEI Consortium (12 October 2012) had been very enjoyable indeed, but bringing in chocolates again would be pushing it a bit. Moreover, I was not lecturing in the prestigious Würzburg Rezidens, but at the evenly prestigious University of Würzburg, where I met a very attentive audience of students of Digital Humanities.
As it goes with guest lectures, at least in my case, the eventual contents of the lecture hardly ever reflects the title which was communicated way before putting together the lecture. When I sent my title to Armin Volkmann, who invited me to teach in his course, Text and Image based Digital Humanities: providing access to textual heritage in Flanders seemed a good title. However, when I discovered the story behind Rodin's Gates of Hell I changed my mind and elaborated on the metaphor to talk about the history and definition of literary and linguistic computing, Humanities Computing, and Digital Humanities. In order to relate to the previously communicated title, I divided the lecture in two parts:
1. History of the use of computing in the HumanitiesSlides VideoIn the second part, I demonstrated some of the projects we realized at the Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies (CTB) of the Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature (KANTL) in Flanders:
And one project of the Computational Linguistics& Psycholinguistics Research Centre (CLiPS) from the University of Antwerp:
Further workSince I taught at Würzburg, I have elaborated on the metaphor and the themes addressed in the lecture for a forthcoming book chapter entitled: The Gates of Hell: Digital@Humanities@Computing
AcknowledgementsI would like to thank Armin Volkmann for the invitation to lecture in his course, and especially Mareike Laue who took care of all the practical arrangements and who did a wonderful job filming and editing the lecture.
“See! Now! Our sentence is up.”
That’s the last line of the last page of the last issue of The Invisibles, Grant Morrison’s pop magic comic book master work. That final issue came out right around Y2K, but it’s set on the December solstice of what was then the freaky-sounding future year 2012. All this year, every time I heard somebody cracking wise about the Mayan Apocalypse, I thought, “Unless you’re an ancient Mayan, you’re stealing Grant Morrison’s bit.”
I bought and read every issue of The Invisibles as it came out from 1994 to 2000. It’s the only comic I’ve ever followed so religiously. It’s brilliant and fun and a bit of a mess and it meant the world to me. It worked its way into my life and rewired the way I saw things, which is pretty much what it was intended to do. Yes, it’s dated now, but so am I. I can’t be any more objective about it than I could be objective about my twenties.
My first pointless argument with a stranger on the internet—you never forget your first time—was on an Invisibles fan site, and it was about whether or not the world was really going to end on December 21, 2012. The world of the comic book, that is. There’s much talk in The Invisibles about the End of Days, the Mayapocalypse, Glitterdammerung, you name it, but I figured all along that Grant was going to invoke the “As We Know It” clause—the end of the world wouldn’t be a literal end but just the dawning of a new age, an evolution to a some higher (read: more Grant Morrison-like) state of being. When an early issue featured a flash forward to the year 2051 or so, showing the young protagonist Dane McGowan dying of old age, I said this proved Dane’s world wouldn’t end in 2012. My internet interlocutor said this was a false vision sent by the comic’s demonic baddies to demoralize Dane. I’m not sure how demoralizing it is to be told you will die peacefully in bed at the age of eighty-three, but the Archons of the Outer Church work in mysterious ways.
And when it comes, I think you will agree that the difference between being crushed by the massive palm of the headless body of NUG-SHOHAB on the ruined plain of RAGNAROK versus dying alone in a hospital room with a television flickering images at you of a football player dancing with the stars is so small that it is not worth arguing over.
That’s John Hodgman in what has to be the year’s best apocalypse, That Is All. Now, Hodgman’s not stealing Morrison’s bit. He probably read all about the Mayan calendar back in 1979 in The People’s Almanac or The Book of Lists. Speaking of 1979, here’s Stephen King talking about the appeal of the apocalypse in Danse Macabre (I’ll admit it: King’s red-state apocalypse The Stand was almost as big a deal to me in high school as The Invisibles was to me in grad school):
Much of the compulsion I felt while writing The Stand obviously came from envisioning an entire entrenched societal process destroyed at a stroke. I felt a bit like Alexander, lifting his sword over the Gordian knot and growling, ‘Fuck untying it; I’ve got a better way.’ … In this frame of mind, the destruction of THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT became an actual relief. No more Ronald McDonald! No more Gong Show or Soap on TV—just soothing snow! No more terrorists! No more bullshit!
Pause for a moment to reflect that The Gong Show and Soap were once, apparently, arguments for the destruction of humanity. Today they’d be an improvement over many things on TV. (Come back, Chuck Barris, all is forgiven!) Setting that aside, who hasn’t felt like that, like the end of everything would be a kind of relief? Who hasn’t felt like that this week?
The lure of apocalypse is not just the thrill of destruction. It’s the dream of the blank slate. One stray comet, one deadly plague, one dolorous blow from the headless NUG-SHOHAB, and all our troubles will be over. Sure, the world will be a smoking ruin, but that term paper you have to write, those bills you have to pay, those intractable social problems that we just aren’t up to solving—they’ll all be made moot. Cosmic Do-Over. Tabula Rasa. Inbox Zero.
When I put this weblog in mothballs two years ago, I was feeling depressed about the internet, and all the ways in which it seemed to be falling short of what we’d hoped for it. I said it didn’t surprise and delight me any more. I still feel that way (see Anil Dash’s recent “The Web We Lost“), but I resist the urge to disown the optimism of the 1990s and early 2000s, no matter how naive or embarrassing it all seems in retrospect. That would let us all off the hook too easily for the things we didn’t accomplish. (For the record: the internet still surprises and delights me from time to time.)
Dreams of utopia and dreams of apocalypse are both ways of talking about the future—no, scratch that—they are ways of talking, if only obliquely, about a radically different present. In a society that seems to have given up trying to imagine anything much better than multinational capitalism, you need to sneak up on social criticism. Dress it up with rayguns or zombies. Set it in some freaky futuristic-sounding year like 2012.
That’s fine and all. But what are you supposed to do when the world doesn’t end? What do you do when the flying saucers don’t land, the Mayan star-demons don’t tear us to shreds, the Rapture comes and goes and God doesn’t take a single one of us? Or, what do you do when a revolutionary new technology rewires the world yet leaves all the power structures and patterns that predated it intact? How do you make your way and make a difference in a world that refuses to end, a world neither apocalypse nor utopia, a world where the slate will never come clean?
Toward the end of The Invisibles, one character tries to tell King Mob, the ass-kicking anarchist hero of the series, “Amid all the bangs and the drama and the grand passions, it’s kindness, and just ordinary goodness, that stands out in the end.” In fact, King Mob spends most of the comic shooting people, using time travel to hook up with women from different decades, and reminding everyone how cool he is. But Dane, resolutely unglamorous, saves the world just by being a good person. And the final issue finds Dane doing nothing more dramatic than giving comfort to a dying friend. I know which kind of heroism is more meaningful to me. This week especially.
The end of the Mayan calendar is not an apocalypse at all, of course. It’s just like Y2K–another big odometer rolling over. That can mean as much as or as little as you want it to. What’s the end-of-the-world equivalent of “think globally, act locally”? Think apocalyptically, act… ordinarily? Think as if the world is ending, act as if it isn’t.
I don’t know how many times I’ve read The Invisibles, but I dug out the final issue to write this post and I noticed one more thing I’d never seen before. The final issue is actually set on December 22, 2012. The day after the Mayapocalypse. Suck on that, fourteen-years-ago internet arguer.
The first line on the first page of the first issue of The Invisibles is:
From Melissa and Twitter a great visualization of London Lives on the Line. It shows life expectancy and poverty by the tube stops of London. It shows the rhetorical power of visualization to connect data to our lives.
Gartner has an interesting Hype Cycle Research methodology that is based on a visualization.
When new technologies make bold promises, how do you discern the hype from what’s commercially viable? And when will such claims pay off, if at all? Gartner Hype Cycles provide a graphic representation of the maturity and adoption of technologies and applications, and how they are potentially relevant to solving real business problems and exploiting new opportunities.
The method assumes a cycle that new technologies take from:
Here is an example from the Wikipedia:
I’m at Digital Humanities 2012 in Hamburg. I’m writing a conference report on philosophi.ca. The conference started with a keynote by Claudine Moulin that touched on research infrastructure. Moulin was the lead author of the European Science Foundation report on Research Infrastructure in the Humanities (link to my entry on this). She talked about the need for a cultural history of research infrastructure (which the report actually provides.) The humanities should not just import ideas and stories about infrastructure. We should use this infrastructure turn to help us understand the types of infrastructure we already have; we should think about the place of infrastructure in the humanities as humanists.
Susan pointed me to Pundit: A novel semantic web annotation tool. Pundit (which has a great domain name “thepund.it”) is an annotation tool that lets people create and share annotations on web materials. The annotations are triples that can be saved and linked into DBpedia and so on. I’m not sure I understand how it works entirely, but the demo is impressive. It could be the killer-app of semantic web technologies for the digital humanities.
The French have pulled the plug on Minitel, the videotex service that was introduced in 1982, 30 years ago. I remember seeing my first Minitel terminal in France where I lived briefly in 1982-83. I wish I could say I understood it at the time for what it was, but what struck me then was that it was a awkward replacement for the phonebook. Anyway, as of June 30th, Minitel is no more and France says farewell to the Minitel.
Minitel is important because it was the first large-scale information service. It turned out to not be a scalable and flexible as the web, but for a while it provided the French with all sorts of text services from directories to chat. It is famous for the messageries roses (pink messages) or adult chat services that emerged (and helped fund the system.)
In Canada Bell introduced in the late 1980s a version of Minitel called Alex (after Alexander Graham Bell) first in Quebec and then in Ontario. The service was too expensive and never took off. Thanks to a letter in today’s Globe I discovered that there were some interesting research and development into videotex services in Canada at the Canadian Research Communications Centre in the late 1970s and 1980s. Telidon was a “second generation” system that had true graphics, unlike Minitel.
Despite all sorts of interest and numerous experiments, videotex was never really successful outside of France/Minitel. It needs a lot of content for people to be willing to pay the price and the broadcast model of most trials meant that you didn’t have the community generation of content needed. Services like CompuServe that ran on PCs (instead of dedicated terminals) were successful where videotex was not, and ultimately the web wiped out even the services like Compuserve.
What is interesting, however, is how much interest and investment there was around the world in such services. The telecommunications industry clearly saw large-scale interactive information services as the future, but they were wedded to centralized models for how to try and evolve such a service. Only the French got the centralized model right by making it cheap, relatively open, and easy. That it lasted 30 years is an indication of how right Minitel was, even if the internet has replaced it.
The Digging Into Data program commissioned CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources) to study and report on the first round of the programme. The report includes case studies on the 8 initial projects including one on our Criminal Intent project that is titled Using Zotero and TAPOR on the Old Bailey Proceedings: Data Mining with Criminal Intent (DMCI). More interesting are some of the reflections on big data and research in the humanities that the authors make:
1. One Culture. As the title hints, one of the conclusions is that in digital research the lines between disciplines and sectors have been blurred to the point where it is more accurate to say there is one culture of e-research. This is obviously a play on C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures. In big data that two cultures of the science and humanities, which have been alienated from each other for a century or two, are now coming back together around big data.
Rather than working in silos bounded by disciplinary methods, participants in this project have created a single culture of e-research that encompasses what have been called the e-sciences as well as the digital humanities: not a choice between the scientific and humanistic visions of the world, but a coherent amalgam of people and organizations embracing both. (p. 1)
2. Collaborate. A clear message of the report is that to do this sort of e-research people need to learn to collaborate and by that they don’t just mean learning to get along. They mean deliberate collaboration that is managed. I know our team had to consciously develop patterns of collaboration to get things done across 3 countries and many more universities. It also means collaborating across disciplines and this is where the “one culture” of the report is aspirational – something the report both announces and encourages. Without saying so, the report also serves as a warning that we could end up with a different polarization just as the separation of scientific and humanistic culture is healed. We could end up with polarization between those who work on big data (of any sort) using computational techniques and those who work with theory and criticism in the small. We could find humanists and scientists who use statistical and empirical methods in one culture while humanists and scientists who use theory and modelling gather as a different culture. One culture always spawns two and so on.
3. Expand Concepts. The recommendations push the idea that all sorts of people/stakeholders need to expand their ideas about research. We need to expand our ideas about what constitutes research evidence, what constitutes research activity, what constitutes research deliverables and who should be doing research in what configurations. The humanities and other interpretative fields should stop thinking of research as a process that turns the reading of books and articles into the writing of more books and articles. The new scale of data calls for a new scale of concepts and a new scale of organization.
It is interesting how this report follows the creation of the Digging Into Data program. It is a validation of the act of creating the programme and creating it as it was. The funding agencies, led by Brett Bobley, ran a consultation and then gambled on a programme designed to encourage and foreground certain types of research. By and large their design had the effect they wanted. To some extent CLIR reports that research is becoming what Digging encouraged us to think it should be. Digging took seriously Greg Crane’s question, “what can you do with a million books”, but they abstracted it to “what can you do with gigabytes of data?” and created incentives (funding) to get us to come up with compelling examples, which in turn legitimize the program’s hypothesis that this is important.
In other words we should acknowledge and respect the politics of granting. Digging set out to create the conditions where a certain type of research thrived and got attention. The first round of the programme was, for this reason, widely advertised, heavily promoted, and now carefully studied and reported on. All the teams had to participate in a small conference in Washington that got significant press coverage. Digging is an example of how granting councils can be creative and change the research culture.
The Digging into Data Challenge presents us with a new paradigm: a digital ecology of data, algorithms, metadata, analytical and visualization tools, and new forms of scholarly expression that result from this research. The implications of these projects and their digital milieu for the economics and management of higher education, as well as for the practices of research, teaching, and learning, are profound, not only for researchers engaged in computationally intensive work but also for college and university administrations, scholarly societies, funding agencies, research libraries, academic publishers, and students. (p. 2)
The word “presents” can mean many things here. The new paradigm is both a creation of the programme and a result of changes in the research environment. The very presentation of research is changed by the scale of data. Visualizations replace quotations as the favored way into the data. And, of course, granting councils commission reports that re-present a heady mix of new paradigms and case studies.
A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk at Digital Infrastructure Summit 2012 which was hosted by the Canadian University Council of Chief Information Officers (CUCCIO). This short conference was very different from any other I’ve been at. CUCCIO, by its nature, is a group of people (university CIOs) who are used to doing things. They seemed committed to defining a common research infrastructure for Canadian universities and trying to prototype it. It seemed all the right people were there to start moving in the same direction.
For this talk I prepared a set of questions for auditing whether a university has good support for digital research in the humanities. See Check IT Out!. The idea is that anyone from a researcher to an administrator can use these questions to check out the IT support for humanists.
The other day while browsing around looking for books to read on my iPad I noticed what looked like a dissertation for sale. I’ve been wondering how dissertations could get into e-book stores when I remembered the license that graduate students are being asked to sign these days by Theses Canada. The system here encourages students to give a license to Library and Archives Canada that includes the right,
(a) to reproduce, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, communicate to the public by telecommunication or on the Internet, loan, distribute and sell my thesis (the title of which is set forth above) worldwide, for commercial or non-commercial purposes, in microform, paper, electronic and/or any other formats;
I now just came across this cautionary story in the Chronicle for Higher Education about Dissertation for Sale: A Cautionary Tale. It seems it is also allowed in the US.
