How to subvert structures in a field that should be inclusive and interdisciplinary?

We all have ingrained ideas about how one should learn – how do we reverse those if structures aren’t working? Expand our outlooks/ worth with rather than against our own biases

Also, how to reform outside academia as well as within. You can “rebuild your own house.” Don’t need to be shaped by the conventional academy

Have to confront problems of “the old way” when creating a “new way”

democratization of information – in an ideal world, you don’t have to have a degree to go outside the academy to critique the academy

Do digital projects get peer reviewed? You still get stuck in the tenure-track mentality. And conversely, if you want to be on the tenure track, digital projects don’t always get counted.

If your project has a public audience, how do you readjust your metrics of success? It’s not like a scholarly book when you’re successful if you get published.

-You need metrics of success to get funded

Even if you’re outside the academy, you will probably still be in dialogue with the academy

National Museum of African American History is getting scholars to peer-review their exhibits

-But the public can also respond to it

-Also rely on individual knowledge and stories of community voices

-Not just an object is, but what it means and what stories are associated with it (rethinking the museum/exhibit)

Do you research and publish because you care about it/feel a moral duty or something else? Objectivity is an issue – sometimes you’re really excited about a topic and miss things. Expressing your research in different ways (digitally and in print, or in an exhibit) shows multiple sides and can create a more complete picture

Move from research to action – research can inspire social movements (public sociology). Also you can bring learning and activities to communities

Franz Boas Association – group of anthropologists and historians trying to do things with Franz Boas’s works, but also giving information back to Native Americans

-they have an indigenous advisory board

-undo the imperialism of anthropology

website: www.franzboaspapers.uwo.ca

While we’re on the topic of scholars sitting in a room talking about marginalized groups – let’s notice that we’re in a pretty non-diverse room – how did our ThatCamp get that way?

-Twitter might be helpful in reaching people who couldn’t be here – so THATCamp isn’t perfect, but it might be a step in the right direction. As it is, camp has been mostly publicized at the school, where there is not as much diversity as there might be.

There are a lot of situations where your intentions might be good, but the outcome is less than desired – for example, affirmative action primarily benefits white women (which is great), but not other marginalized groups (not great)

Eleanor Roosevelt Papers confronts the problem of being able to get the papers online, but the budget is not there, and it would not be in the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt to put the papers behind the paywall. Information should be open access, and they hope to move towards democratization of information, but having trouble getting there

access is a huge problem – some databases cost hundreds of dollars to access, and some people can afford it – but many cannot!! (For a lot of students even, they’re only accessible if the library pays)

Do the rights of the public supercede the rights of the donors who gave the money or the documents? Issues when donors place restriction on collections

Students at GW are often required to have computers for classes, or they can’t take them – might alienate students who can’t afford computers. ProQuest also charges to make your dissertation open-access at Gelman, which makes students pay $200 (kind of a barrier to making everything open-access).

“You both have to live in the situation you’ve got and change the situation you’re in.” Idea of individual rather than collective responsibility can be problematic, but individual action might have to be the way to start on the right track

“Sharing data is like being seen without your pants on” – stigma makes open access scary to some people

Question at DH meetings ALWAYS seems to be about funding – have to build a community that is passionate about being open and sharing resources, to make the project more successful

Emilie Davis diary (davisdiaries.villanova.edu) – transcribed, annotated, made public access (great!) BUT a publisher came forward to give a book deal, so now the digital project doesn’t get updated in the same way, faces the problem of migration in a way it might not have if it had not been prepared for publication

In the academy you have an obligation to research and say “here’s reality,” but outside you can say “I don’t like that reality, let me try to change it.” (You hit a wall though, trying to fix reality in ways such as getting people to stop being jerks on the internet)

(Twitter and other platforms actually get help from trolls – hey, their site is getting a lot of hits! Oops

So maybe going corporate and trying to help platforms get rid of trolls might be even harder than you think.)

Digital Collections Outreach

Methods

• Wikipedia
  • Cite back to collection/website
• Kringla
• “athons”
  • Events of various durations
• Reddit AMA’s
  • AMA about the Shoah foundation brought more traffic to online collections.

Private communication with stakeholders is a criterion for judging whether or not a grant should be funded. Hence, communication with stakeholders combined with project planning is key.

User evaluation before a project can sometimes be equally helpful as a user evaluation after the project.

Audience

Understanding your audience is very important

• You have to distinguish between a specific audience and the general audience.

Sometimes you don’t know who your audience is going to be so it’s best if you test it out first.

• Social media is a risk free way to send out information and see the type of audience it attracts.
• It’s also dangerous as there will be a lot of exposure and you might attract people you don’t want to.

There is an important distinction between outreach and crowd sourcing.

Purpose of Outreach

• Audience building
• Collections building
• Social media growth
• Serendipity

Word of warning with Outreach, you have to understand who you’re sending content to and be wary of copyright laws.

• Watermarking images might be a way to protect the content.

You can’t be too cautious either because otherwise it won’t be too accessible. It needs to be easily accessible online for students, teachers etc.

• If you are trying to reach a high school student or an undergrad, they won’t be too motivated to spend long hours sifting through online databases to find what they want.

Measuring outreach

• Calculating the number of Google searches.
• Sometimes the metric doesn’t make sense and obscure documents could have a large impact.
• Metrics can sometimes act as a trap
  • 100 google random searches doesn’t equal one dedicated search made by an enthusiast
  • How do you make meaningful decisions based on metrics?
• Outcome evaluation is very difficult as some collections gain traction through citation years after it’s initially published.

• Session 3: 1:30-12:20

  Born Digital

  Alice Prael, UMD Libraries

• Categories of born digital media
  • Email
  • Websites
    • E-publications
    • Blogs
  • Legacy media
    • Floppy discs
  • Oral histories
  • Music
  • Art
  • Movies
  • Games
  • Code
• How do we curate our own digital archives?
  • Social media profiles as primary sources
  • We don’t necessarily control what we are producing and that may disappear
• Preservation of oral history
  • Can we adopt preservation procedures to other forms of history?
  • CDs and other forms of media don’t last as long as anticipated
  • Anna: “fallibility of CDs/DVDs”—what does this mean for information recording, storage, submission, transfer etc?
  • Ironically, the most long-lasting format is paper
    • Transcribe as quickly as possible; the thought of dating and migration and formatting is sometimes an obstacle
  • Limited grant funding for archives and large institutions
  • Sometimes people consent to having their interviews transcribed with the stipulation that no one sees the transcription—only hear the audio
  • Transcription software tends to be better for audio than video
  • Is a transcription considered a primary source if it is derived from audio?
    • How do we account for errors?
    • You lose data when you transcribe it—miss tonality, inflection, dialect, etc. Interpretation is required when you do that
  • There are problems with analog formats in any field lasting longer than digital formats
    • Constant migration of formats
• Issues of discovery
  • “People’s minds don’t work the way databases are structured”-Glenn
  • How can data be reorganized for purposes of discovery?
• Race against obsolescence—by the time something is digitized or preserved, the means of preservation will be obsolete
  • You can’t just save a file, you have to save the whole ecosystem
  • Virtual environments to simulate older operating systems
  • Emulation is another layer of artificiality, but can extend the half life
    • Software is pretending to be hardware but it can never perfectly copy what hardware can do
• Is preserving 99% of the data better than migrating the data every 10 years?
  • Is using an emulator going to combat data loss?
  • What are acceptable preservation rates?
    • Illusion of what the rate should be based on letter writing habits of earlier generations
    • Juxtaposition of being able to keep much less of much more material
  • Cost-benefit analysis
• LOC National Digital Stewardship Group
  • Project now being outsourced?
• How does globalization affect digital information?
  • It’s easier to disseminate and reproduce information
  • CERN has so much digital storage that they said they would hold all of the records of the EU government
    • BUT they’re not performing any kind of curation! Oh no!
• Is it really necessary to digitize everything?
  • Even ephemera from years ago are still sources of information about the past—historians can find value in anything
    • Does this mean we have to preserve all of our ephemera today?
  • Documentation is disappearing in rush to meet quotas
  • We need things digitized at a quick rate but people don’t want to pay for labor
  • Government obligations? Security and trust?
    • What is the responsibility of information professionals?
    • Deleting emails—malicious?
  • Emails present issues of appraisal—what’s important and institutional?
    • Who has time to sort through emails?
  • Archivists believe different things to be important—curation is subjective
• What gets preserved is inherently a political act
  • Is it anybody’s job to preserve the Internet?
  • Robots.text files
  • How, if at all, can we trust people to appraise and preserve digital records?
• We’d be horrified about smashing artifacts or burning books, why not deleting digital records?
• Lower thresholds about what is/isn’t significant

Tumblr, Flickr, and tools used by digital humanists

How do researchers think they might want to use Tumblr and Flickr information?

People don’t work with these sources because there is no access to that data, so what would the data be used for?

Ways digital humanists want to use digital technology, tools to make it accessible

Twitter- textual

Flickr- visual

Tumblr- mix

Scholarship on visual culture- researchers use images to visualize themes rather than use a mix for a more complex method

LOC twitter archive- unable to use because question of capacity

Maybe looking for stuff already known is out there

Look at what other fields and for profit companies use it for

Look at tweets to follow hashtags and subjects, see what they point to

Ex for project- undergrad looking for 100 tweets for a paper 0m #bringbackourgirls, candidates for office, social science research, ebola rumors,

Ed Summer’s work on tweets about Ferguson

Boston Marathon Bombing tweets video

Flickr- people who are not from professional archives post on Flickr

Instagram doesn’t allow the same sorting as Flickr

Gelman- open source project for Tumblr and Flickr

How easy is it to start a feed manager on twitter since a hashtag starts right at an event?

Tools-

Topsy- Twitter sentiment analysis

Eleanor Roosevelt Papers- looking for audio format to use for a source and online format

Transcripts

Audio preservation

Digitizationguidelines.gov

Nodegoat- mapping tool

Gigapixel

Neatline

Bamboo

Storymap

Easy tools to create interactive maps- Storymap for the classroom

Utilizing other digital history projects within the classroom

Interactive options to engage the public

Cursive and handwriting issues with reading- crowdsourcing to transcribe

Skills people would like to learn-

Text and coding, TI, XML

Novice understanding, but learning TI would give confidence and help digital projects

Courses on coding at institutions to advance projects

Do you want to use more tools?

Problem- digital humanists don’t know the tools so they can’t make a project without learning the tools

Balancing- how accepted are these type of projects for grad school applications, tenure, job applications?

Better to have a project relevant to your work

Gelman- tech department resources for help with TI infrastructure and other options

• Supporting other people’s DH projects with Meg
  • At times its hard to stay connected with other projects because of the size of a university
• • What do you do when there are a diversity of documents when they are in a wide array of languages?
  • How, as a librarian, can she help support other projects?
    • Reaching out to other projects
    • There is an interest in how information is dispersed without going to things outside your work
  • WE NEED A DIGITAL HUMANITIES “RIDE BOARD”
    • Postings asking other to contribute to their projects
      • Libraries are not the best way of doing this
        • What is the genesis of something like this?
        • What should be recorded
          • Skill level
          • Type of project
        • What do we want?
          • Inclusiveness and accessibility
            • Needs to be open to people who aren’t just digital humanists too
            • Need to look OUTSIDE of academia
              • Not everyone feels welcome in academia
            • Needs to project based and goal based
          • Who will maintain the repository of information?
            • People are enthusiastic but its up to the professional groups who will maintain it
              • Responsibility of the organization to foster the idea
            • Who will be the person who funds this?
          • Could it be “service” to the profession?
            • Problem: work can be seen as service only and not research
            • People don’t want to invest the time unless it will benefit their career
          • Puzzle between getting funding, sustaining it all, getting the people to contribute
          • A lot of responsibility to be in charge of digital projects because of the migration element
          • Maintenance of the site is the most important thing to think about
          • DH commons
            • Developed out of a THATCamp (list of projects and collaborators)
              • About collaboration availability
                • How do you ensure meaningful participation
                  • Marketing and evaluation
                    • Google analytics is a way to do this
                  • Funding
                    • Kickstarter
                      • Not like grant money from an institution that is exempt from taxes
                    • Local historical associations
                      • Successful at getting grants (considering they still exist)
                    • Libraries may be helpful for this (great resource!)
                    • Universities and academia are having problems because there is a need for marketing but academia is against it
                  • How are projects found?
                    • Marketing and outreach is needed on the creators part to get the word out
                    • Most useful is stepping out of your fields/institutions/cultures/etc
                  • The best way to support other projects is to find out about them!!
                    • But the ability to do serendipitous finding of programs is very difficult
                  • Database for projects
                    • Database that remains static is needed
                      • ORCID (project)
                        • Similar to DOI
                        • There would be too many dead links
                        • Someone would need to be responsible for maintaining it
                          • Academics are overworked and don’t have time
                            • Need to create meaningful and ongoing engagement
                          • Engagement is based on interest and passion
                          • Who would partake in this project?
                            • Grad students?
                              • Have it be required for class?
                                • Who will review their postings?

Digital History Projects 11:30-12:20

Some projects that got us started in digital history

Angela- US Holocaust Museum project Children of the Lodz Ghetto

Dan- Salem Witch Trials social network analysis

Jenna- Digital art history

Kate- tracking Shakespeare acting troupes

Glenn- PBS digitizing clips

Seth- Eleanor Roosevelt Papers looking to publish online

What is digital history- definitions

Using a broad definition to include collaboration and inter-disciplinary methods

New York Public Library Building Inspector- old maps to graph them, has a mobile version- crowdsourcing

Red Lining Project- mapping existing geography for areas red lined by banks

Lots of things are included in digital history

Finding sources born online- an old blog can disappear

Article on problem of Adobe Flash- multiple versions and capturing things on multiple levels of file versions

Archeology of Geocities

Maintaining projects- avoiding the 404 error

Funding issue

How to avoid this problem?

Projects that aren’t accessible to the public

Eleanor Roosevelt Papers- working on accessibility

Putting things online

Vast collections and maintaining that information through a database

Providing the public with the needs to meet their needs

Permission to release information

NYPL- beaker that shows how all digitized collections are connected- time, place, etc…

Learning how to combine disciplines- how to code

Making your project your own but using cross disciplines without jeopardizing your vision

Maybe multiple databases and making them open

Do no harm approach to creating content- opensource software, awareness of copyright, standard description

Insular culture of coding on your own that might make it harder for others to use the project- Good digital history practices

Serve your purpose and serve others through standardization

Retrospective conversion

Sheer number of software outthere to use that create their own parts but not the core. A 101 database for dummies to learn digital history projects

Metadata and software standards- some bibliographies give sites to help with that

Archive of digital history as a master catalogue

Discussing what best practices for digital history would be

White House Office of Science and Technology looking at big data projects- proposals must include support for reuse of the project- maybe using standard formats or reputable digital repositories that has standards to submit

Do No Harm Principle- don’t make it too difficult that no one would want to be involved, the goal is to promote secondary usage

International organizations and programs designed to promote a longstanding lifecycle of materials- digitized or born digital

More repositories and digital archives

Ask before starting to take advantage of repositories to design the project

Before standards- look at different projects

Folger- Shakespeare document- bring scholarship to a website for everyone but everyone at each level wants different things

Citations are different at organizations and conversations need to reflect the numbers of groups so one standard may be too much to ask for- appropriate practice of digital history

Figure out who the audience is and what they want- text, image, object, and encourage visiting to see something or use digital methods to show objects archives can’t let you see

Librarians and digital historians at a different perspective

Communication issue that THATCamp can help fix

Omeka used in some spheres and not mentioned as much in others- what platforms are used

Digital exhibitions, collections catalogue, press releases, events calander- not useful on Omeka or at least IT departments don’t think of Omeka as a resource

Omkea map project- digital history class

Reasonable accessibly- free to a limit of data and less expensive than other sources

How do you predict who sees the site?

Google analytics to see if the audience they want is already there- who visits a site?

UMD- analytics to see who looks at databases- a large viewership from Japan due to a collection related to WWII at the time and then that information helped them consider making the site more accessible to that audience

British Museum- on this day/artifact of the day with an extension saying “explore this collection”

Social media can bring the audience that way- tweets, Facebook posts, etc…

Future of Crowdsourcing

Room 108

10:30-11:20 AM April 18, 2015

crowdsourced.micropasts.org/

www.crowdconsortium.org/

Lots of crowdsourcing project, but what’s next?

How do you define success- provide an outcome that outweighs the cost, is sustainable

crowdconsortium.org – how to measure value of crowdsourcing, where it works and where it doesn’t

in order to get funded, of course you have to define what the outcome will be

There’s value in getting work done – what are some other values?

-crowdsourcing of metadata, items for a collection? For metadata, if there is a goal of public engagement, that works, but if you are “flavor-saving” for the institution, you question whether you are spending too time editing outside information

-BUT of course crowdsourcing can bring in information you don’t know you don’t have

Crowdsourcing has tangible values of labor saving, higher detail records; but there are intangible values of ownership, public scholarship, involving people traditionally outside domain – changing what scholarship is and means

dealing with the question of why we fund the humanities in general

Might be good to track who participates, have those statistics

-there is a spectrum of participation/donation – from volunteer to financial donation; these both can be measures of sucess

Citizen science – there was a (name forgotten) project of public identifying celestial bodies, same platform went on to be used to transcribe coptic documents. These platforms provide opportunities for cross-discipline, bringing science and humanities together. Tools are NOT necessarily one-domain

also Zooniverse started off as a citizen science project, turned into a project of war diaries

Tools aren’t really creating epiphanies of interdisciplinary study, but creating new ways to think of the multiple uses of platforms.

Instead of calling contributors volunteers, it has now been proposed to call them “volunpeers”

-Language fosters community (even if the community is pretty self-selecting)

-Smithsonian does this, creates competition, fun and games – giving people an incentive to participate in transcription

-How to get more people involved who don’t commonly self-select? “Recaptchas” (used for security on websites and to create text and image recognition – people don’t go around saying “hey, I want to help Google,” but they could say “hey, I want to play this game”) could in a way be part of a project, and provide a link for “if you want to do more transcription, go to this site”

-projects directed toward K-12 education (and not just editing Wikipedia for a class day). Transcribing would be great for teaching handwriting and looking at a primary source (at least documents of the “Founding Fathers” might be popular)

-not all students (K-12 or undergraduate) will be immediately engaged, but some might build lasting interests

Have to tap into networking – hope that your project spreads or “goes viral.” You can target groups and hope that they “infect” others with interest for the project. In a way you can only control the first steps – the “going viral” has to come later

-Outreach and marketing: if you build it, they’ll only come if you market it

-Also need evaluation to find what worked and could be used again, or what needs to be changed

We might not be too good at outreach and evaluation yet – some projects have the mentality that any result is a good result, and prematurely congratulate themselves.

-Part of the problem in some cases is of course that libraries are underfunded – they need a different yardstick of success than a large museum would need.

-Humanities don’t traditionally use numbers, so metrics might not need to be numerical. You could use word clouds or other representations. The story isn’t always in the data. Maybe bring people from related fields in to see how we can visualize data

-sentiment analysis, words used in conjunction with others?

-meritology, narrative analysis

-Seems like there is more collaboration between departments than there is between qualitative and quantitative analysis

-Some attempts at programming, like Qualrus? But it’s not quite digital yet, still requires a lot of human input, since people can notice patterns computers can’t.

Have to check, as the Smithsonian does, how much people contribute when they do visit the site. Do they just visit for a few seconds or minutes, or do they interact? Need to build the metrics into the site from moment one.

What are some projects that could be done, or partnerships that could be made, in the foreseeable future?

“Remembering Lincoln” at Ford’s Theater – trying to find where people have their own collections. Still has issues with outreach, realizing that it takes more effort than thought. Could use K-12 outreach

Session 1: 10:30-11:20

Institutional MediaWiki

Meg Brown, Folger Shakespeare Library

• Institutional wiki: Folgerpedia (folgerpedia.folger.edu)
  • 99% of contributors are staff members
  • Scholar pages, playbill collections, seminar information
  • Not a repository per se—Folger also has an image repository called Luna
    • Wiki doesn’t allow for certain file type hosting; future plans to cross-link to other resources
    • Does host MP3 files so podcasts of Shakespeare’s birthday lectures are accessible online
• Issues of audience
  • Folgerpedia is a place where other departments of the Folger come together (exhibitions, public outreach, etc)
• Institutional history
  • Outsiders: keeping track of seminars, fellows, etc.
  • Inside history: collections, possibly tracking all the times the Folger has appeared in film, etc.
• Other wiki spaces
  • Link to time management & scheduling systems
  • Wiki development space—Insights—publish pages in private before putting on Folgerpedia
    • Used for longform pieces
• Other uses for wikis (non-Folger folks)
  • Central location for best practices documents—internal wiki
  • Not always a culture of collective editing/updating
    • ways to foster collaboration?
  • Silos can prevent communication & collaboration
• Many DH groups default to GoogleDocs instead of wiki
  • Is the wiki concept “too much?”
  • Having to use markup language deters people from adding and participating
• Measure of success
  • Reader views, not patron contributions: if people are accessing it, it is useful
    • Readers=people who have applied for reading privileges at the Folger
  • Main page of Folgerpedia has been accessed over 36,000 times.
• Other possibilities of access and formatting?
  • Wiki is great for text and articles
    • Allows for transcriptions
  • Omeka would be better for objects or photos, but with a text-based collection, wiki works
  • Can be an intermediary for learning and creating with regard to public resources
  • Wikipedia doesn’t like institutions posting, so this is a way to take ownership of material and research

• Does the wiki format add to or get in the way of information sharing? (Think linked open data, etc.)
  • “friendlier way to get at linked data”
  • connecting ideas and resources in a non-hierarchical way
    • sometimes tagging can be hierarchical
    • interdepartmental issues can prevent people from feeling comfortable making changes
    • some departments are more proprietary than others
  • institutional wikis require large amounts of staff time
    • can lead to outsourcing
    • not always group consensus and staff input when outsourcing
• Wiki models
  • Business school wiki at UM does both outreach and internal service but most wikis are either/or
    • Intranet
  • Folger is still looking for other models
  • UMD: wiki resources are underused
  • Harry Potter wikis—best models may not be in scholarly communities
  • Monticello—community can comment but not contribute but you still have to apply to be in the community
• Cataloging tag on Folgerpedia
  • Folger’s earliest pages were cataloging pages in efforts of trimming website
    • Getting rid of the extra “u” in cataloging was a problem
  • Seeing what made it from the card catalog to the online and such has helped researchers
  • Scholar pages (920 of them!)
    • Patrons are engaging with the resource and suggesting edits and corrections
  • Potential for growth in the area of provenance and former ownership
    • People get excited about book plates and signatures and identification
    • Random fact discoveries
• Rosetti archive
  • Catherine: “it’s too much”
  • PDFs of every page of every Dante Rosetti poem in literary journals
  • Look at this as an example of a linked data extreme—learn from this for wiki
• Deciding how to do Folgerpedia pages
  • Hamlet the play vs Hamlet the character
  • Who are the focused users? Librarians, catalogers, high-level scholars who may be interested in other things
    • These people fill in for users who don’t have contribution privileges
• Development and crowdsourcing
  • Folgerpedia as a pedagogical tool?
    • Have college students create pages?
• Information architecture
  • What sections do you funnel people into? What are the goals and who ends up keeping track of how the wiki grows?
  • Need for targeted expansion
  • Who moderates? How can institutions prevent vandalism?
    • Folgerpedia is gated because there are academic perspectives the institution does not support (i.e. Oxfordians)
• Folgerpedia is different from Wikipedia because Folger accepts and encourages original research
  • Use of primary sources encourages people to go to the Folger library. Wikipedia only wants citation of secondary sources.
  • Best practices and contributor guidelines
    • Do not have to have a higher degree to contribute to Folgerpedia—all ranges of expertise welcome
    • Not wholly prescriptive
    • Templates created, but require some knowledge of Media Wiki to use
• Stylistic issues
  • Disambiguation issues with scholar pages
    • LOC plugin would’ve broken MediaWiki
    • Middle initials are problematic
  • Everyone should have ORCID records!
    • Unique research identifier number that can be attached to article systems
    • WorldCat supported!
    • AND, facilitates attribution for people who might publish under multiple names
    • Not common in the humanities yet
  • It is possible to make a redirect or disambiguation page if a scholar asks for it, but Folger uses the “most authoritative name” they have on file (i.e. fellowship name)
    • “what do they call you at tea?” (Folger has tea every day at 3)
  • Redirects for people who change the gender they identify with
  • Academics move too much to have biographies
    • When scholars become participants they have the option to add biographies

Social Network Analysis with Dan (10:30-11:20)

• Introductions
• Dan’s Salem witch trial project (wordpress.com)
  • Briefing on his project
    • Biggest problem: How are people connected?
      • Over 900 documents to review
        • SNA is a useful way to keep track of the individuals and track their interactions
      • So far he has over 2000 pairs
    • Question: how is this being created?
      • NodeXL demonstration
        • System of line and node connections
        • Ranks the most central figures
        • First two months of documents have been documented
          • March documents
            • Information recorded in an excel spreadsheet
              • 50 people
              • Over 1000 relationships
            • Input data into NodeXL where the data is prepared through the program
          • Program can track the different clusters
          • Data can be grouped into boxes
            • Tracks the various trial
          • Behind each infividual, the program positions them within the web
            • Degree of centrality-how many people do they know?
            • Betweenness centrality-how many connections are there between individuals
            • Closeness centrality
            • Eigenvector centrality
              • If it is a high number-they can be identified as the most powerful/important people
            • Question: why did they (accusers) accuse so many people?
              • Unknown
                • Various theories
                • Ann Putnam is a 12 year old girl in a puritan society
                  • Believes that her father (Thomas Putnam) is pushing her to do this
                • Question: Have you found anything that you didn’t expect to find?
                  • Past scholarship did not connect different groups but Dan has all of the people connected (everythingis examined through a larger lens)
                  • He has found connections that weren’t previously identified
                • There are many ways that data can be displayed
                  • Harel-Koren
                    • You can see the individuals and their relations “blossom”
                  • Circle
                    • You can see the density of your network
                      • Helps you see who you should focus on (fewer connections vs. many connections)
                    • Spiral (not the best for this project)
                    • Sine Wave
                      • Demonstrates the denseness as well
                    • Question: are you keeping an archive of the documents you record?
                      • So far the information exists in a book
                      • Future plans to scan documents in Salem, MA
                    • Positive feedback by senior Salem scholars
                  • Question: how is the network constructed?
                    • It is important to look at the network as a whole before there is an investigation on a deeper level
                      • These connections would not have been found if there was not a quantitative applications to this history
                    • Question: is there a way to identify this textually? What happens when people are color blind?
                      • Extremely difficult
                    • Question: How do you emphasize people are in contact every day? Can you weigh individual relations in the visualization?
                      • You would make an edge weight (make line between the nodes thicker)
                      • Directional vs. non-directional (identified by arrow)
                        • Demonstrates who is reaching out to who
                      • Question: Is there a good tutorial out there?
                        • Book by NodeXL
                        • Diane Cline’s upcoming book Digital Humanities and NodeXL (coming in 3 months)
                          • Example in book Plutarch’s Life of Pericles
                            • Through the example, there is a step-by-step instructions so that data can be visualized
                              • Extremely detailed instructions
                            • Gender column to track the interactions between male and females
                          • Other SNA projects
                            • Diane Cline’s Socrates project
                              • Students, philosophers, intellectuals, Sophists, etc
                                • Look at the different clusters interaction
                                  • Check it out at dianehcline.com
                                • Connections within Shakespeare’s play
                                • Stanford Lit Lab
                                  • Tracks Hamlet and the relationship between the characters
                                  • Has not been generated in an SNA program
                                • Tina’s oral history project
                                  • Group house of an artistic community in Alexandria (no longer in existence)
                                    • Looks at how artistic communities are anchored by different people
                                      • Mapping of relations between the “creative class”
                                        • What can you see about the creative class of Arlington