Academitron

The Past’s Digital Presence, the conference Heather, Jana, Molly, Taylor, and I have been working so hard on, took place this last weekend, and the consensus seems to be that it was a success. The papers were fantastic and our invited speakers were inspiring. Edward Ayers, the historian and president of the University of Virginia, called the conference a “watershed,” and Willard McCarty, one of the founders of the field of digital humanities, called it “exhilarating.” So that is all fantastic and exciting. The best part, for me, was meeting people who are active in the digital humanities, both speakers and attendees. It was great to trade stories and references.

We’re hoping to keep the momentum going by publishing the conference proceedings in some form, as well as by posting video and audio recordings to the conference website. Jana has already posted the podcast of the conference’s closing roundtable with Willard McCarty, Edward Ayers, Rolena Adorno, and George Miles.

I took over tweeting duties for the conference (we’re PDP2010), and you can follow all the conference tweets by searching for #pdp2010. It was an interesting experience. I really enjoyed watching momentum gather as the conference progressed, but I do have concerns about the way that tweeting encouraged me to hunt for soundbites in speakers’ talks.

Willard McCarty posted a very complimentary review of the conference on Humanist, a digital humanities listserv. That was terrific, but I was especially interested in a very thoughtful response to McCarty’s post by Amanda Gailey. Gailey points out that, amidst all our post-conference self-congratulation, we shouldn’t forget that state schools have been doing digital humanities for quite awhile, and with a great deal of success. She writes,

I simply want to suggest that to my mind, the conference may be a watershed, but not because DH has finally earned the benediction of the Ivies. Instead, it is quite possible that a hitherto unproven field, within which smart people not housed at the most selective and expensive universities could actually earn influence and rewards, is becoming less egalitarian.

I think this is a real danger, and I’m glad Gailey made the point. I’ll be thinking about it as we move forward with the momentum the conference has generated.

I am so happy to report that I’ve just accepted a new job. Beginning June 15, I’ll be the Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow for the Digital Scholarship Commons at Emory University. I’ll be working to coordinate, promote, and integrate Emory’s existing digital resources, as well as helping to design a physical space for a digital scholarship program. I couldn’t be happier about this: on my visit to Emory, I was blown away by the resources, ideas, and (especially) the people Emory has devoted to the digital humanities. I loved what I saw of Atlanta and felt convinced that Andy and I (and Beatrice) could have a good life there.

After years of fretting about the job market, I found myself in the totally unexpected, totally surreal position of having to decide between two great offers. The other, for a teaching postdoc at a wonderful small liberal-arts college, was a very attractive, more conventional academic position. It was a difficult decision, and hard for me to subvert expectations by foregoing the traditional academic route, but I really believe that Emory’s program will help to build a place for a hybrid digital humanist and scholar.

On a personal level, I think it was important for me to be finally faced with a real choice between a professorial job and one in the digital humanities; it was the manifestation of a more abstract decision I’ve been trying to make for years. As soon as I made my choice, I knew it was the right one. We are celebrating in the Posner household!

Here’s a curiosity I can’t resist sharing: the first National Science Fair in 1950 had a girls’ division and a boys’ division.

Taken from "First National Science Fair," Science News Letter, May 27, 1950: 326

Yale’s Film Studies program is old-school in certain ways, and one of those ways is that we have an exam at the end of our Ph.D. program to test our knowledge of various essential films and film scholarship. We students have nicknamed it the “canon exam,” although it seems as though the professors avoid calling it that.

I was remembering how, the summer before I started grad school, I wondered what films I should watch to make myself conversant with other film students. I think I just ended up checking out every Criterion Collection movie I could find.

I thought you might be interested to see what we’re drilled on, and I don’t think the canon exam is a private affair (quite the opposite, actually, since it exists in part to assure prospective employers that we’ll be up to speed on the canon). So I’m posting the film list below. I’ll post the reading list later.

As to the politics of a “canon,” or the wisdom of these particular choices … well, I’ll save that for another post. Suffice it to say that I don’t think this is a bad list, though it’s missing a lot of my favorite movies. (And the movies it does contain are so somber!)

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I was thinking about my last post, in which I said my experience with The Temple of Moloch was my first encounter with Internet-ty Scholarly Synergy. I remembered, though, that this is actually untrue. Back when I worked at the Museum of the Moving Image, I had an awesome and totally nerdy online encounter with a patron about the Museum’s model of a spacecraft from the film 2010.

The Museum had an alert set up so that we’d know if anyone mentioned MMI in a Flickr caption. Someone did, Flickr user beamjockey (Bill Higgins), who posted a photo of the spacecraft along with a caption questioning the Museum’s identification of it as the ship Discovery. Concerned that the Museum was propagating false information, I emailed Bill to get specifics so I could correct the model’s label.

Bill Higgins turned out to be a scientist at Fermilab and an all-around great guy, and he called on his scientist friends to help us identify the model. I helped by watching 2010. After much debate, we decided that MMI’s label was indeed technically accurate, although it showed only a portion of the craft in question.

I was nerdily delighted by the whole thing.

You can read a wonderful (to me) transcript of the whole episode here. And here are some more pictures of the part of Discovery that sparked the Great Debate.

In theory, internet-based collaboration can improve the quality of scholars’ work. Though I didn’t have any reason to doubt this, I hadn’t actually experienced this for myself until recently.

About a year ago I uploaded one of the films I’ve been investigating, Thomas Edison’s 1914 The Temple of Moloch, to the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive is cool because you can not only view videos there; you can also download them.

Someone took the bait! YouTube user markdcatlin, an industrial hygienist in Akron, Ohio, re-uploaded The Temple of Moloch to YouTube as part of his workplace and environmental health and safety film collection. Mark included a great narrative along with the video, explaining that it depicts silicosis, or “potter’s rot,” a disease that had often been misdiagnosed as tuberculosis.

I hadn’t realized this, and in fact I’d wondered why, if TB is transmitted by a bacillus, you’d get it from working in a pottery, as the film seems to claim. I’ve actually presented my research on these films at conferences, but never — obviously — at a conference of industrial hygienists.

So there you go! The internet works! Good job, internet!

(Although I should also mention that, true to YouTube form, Mark’s upload of The Temple of Moloch is followed by a commenter’s xenophobic rant about immigration. The perils of free speech.)

I guess it must be conference season. We grad students in Film Studies are getting ready for our graduate conference on exhibition on January 28 and 29. Here’s the website I designed. It has to be static, since on the Yale main server, but I think it does the trick.

I think the conference is going to be really good. The papers are absolutely top-notch, and the keynote speaker is none other than Rick Altman, whom even new Film Studies students will know as the Big Deal of genre theory (and the author of Silent Film Sound).

Hey, we launched the new site for the digital humanities conference at Yale! You should come! It’s February 19 to February 20, and don’t forget to register.

I was interested in the challenge of building a conference program that’s easy to access. I wanted to make the program pretty dynamic, by which I mean I wanted to make it easy for users to click on individual events or array them all on one page. It was surprisingly difficult to do this, though. I looked at a bunch of other conference websites and they mostly have static pages of event listings. For the sake of anyone else with the same challenge, I thought I’d explain what I did.

I tried a bunch of WordPress plugins — Events, Events Manager, other permutations of the word “event” — but they’re really designed for events that are spread out over many days. Our events are taking place within the space of two days.

Eventually, I gave up on the event plugins. Instead, I made each event a post and created three categories: Friday February 19, Saturday February 20, and See All Events. (Alas, WordPress would not let me add a comma between the day of the week and the month. Don’t think I didn’t try.) Each event is categorized as both the day it falls on and “See all events.”

I then loaded up the SuperSlider-Menu plugin, which creates an accordion-style sidebar menu that lists categories and posts. See where I’m going with this? Each event is accessible via the sidebar menu, and by clicking on “See all events” you can get all the events on one page.

It took some tweaking. I CSS’s out the meta information for each post (like the date posted and the auhor) and used the Custom Query String Reloaded plugin to make the posts appear in chronological, rather than reverse-chronological order.

I think it works. If I have time, I’d like to add abstracts for every paper and bios for every panelist.

Drupal would probably be a better choice for anyone building a conference website, but for various reasons we had WordPress as our starting point. So I hope this will be helpful to other conference organizers using WordPress!

I think this is really powerful: the GLBT History Society and the Bay Area Reporter’s searchable database of all obituaries that have appeared in the Bay Area Reporter (a newspaper that serves the GLBT communtiy) since 1979. I realized this summer that my students, around 19 or 20 years old, talk about AIDS as though it’s something abstract. Can you imagine? I’m very glad they have that luxury, but it also reminds me of how easy it is to forget.

"Cans o Film," by Atomic Jeep

I don’t think it’s any secret (among those who care about such things) that the Film Studies program at Yale is at something of a crossroads. Film studies as a discipline has been increasingly turning into media studies, and Yale’s program, like a lot of programs, is having to decide how much it wants to participate in that shift. It’s been fascinating to be in the middle of this. There are strong opinions on both sides of the debate, but what I’ve really enjoyed is the fact that it hasn’t gotten personal, at least as far as I can tell; it’s a genuine intellectual debate about where film studies should go.

Where do I stand? Well, I’ll say this: film studies has given me a lot. Sometimes I’ll emerge from a discussion of Hitchcock or Truffaut marveling that I’ll never think about those filmmakers the same way again. And then I’ll go home and sit slack-jawed in front of my computer for hours on end, like I do every day. When I remember to come up for air, it’ll occur to me what a shame it is that we can’t turn that arsenal of analysis toward the technologies that define a large portion of my life.

I had to fill out an application recently that asked for a 600-word essay on how new technology has affected my discipline. Once I started writing, I was surprised by how much I had to say. So here’s what I wrote about film studies.

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Just recently, a lot of digital humanities momentum has been gathering at Yale. There’s a new DH working group, a new Public Humanities master’s program (which I’ve joined!), a new Theory & Media Studies Colloquium, and now, Yale’s first graduate conference on the digital humanities. It’s called The Past’s Digital Presence: Database, Archive, and Knowledge Work in the Humanities, and it’s scheduled for February 19 and 20, 2010. The organizers, Molly Farrell, Heather Klemann, and Taylor Spence, were generous enough to allow me to come on as Design Chair for the conference, and I’m really excited about the whole thing. Jana Remy is the conference’s Online Media Chair, and she’s been Twittering [edit: Tweeting! You're supposed to say tweeting, right? Gah, I don't even know] about the organization process. Once the conference gets closer to live, Jana will also be blogging and podcasting it.

In the next few weeks I’ll be designing a website for the conference, set to go live on about November 30. My first task, though, was to come up with a logo. I wanted something that looked serious, since DH is still establishing its presence at Yale, but that also had some aesthetic appeal. Here’s the set of logo ideas I came up with:

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As you can surely guess from my long silence, the last few months have been really, really busy for me. I’m plowing through my dissertation, plus teaching, working, and applying for jobs. I wish I were the kind of person who could operate on no sleep.

One of the things keeping me busy was a guest lecture I gave for the class I’m TA’ing, Dolores Hayden’s American Cultural Landscapes. Professor Hayden asked me to develop a lecture from a paper on chain stores that I wrote for her class a few years ago. I was happy to do it, since I think the material is really interesting, and I thought students would be interested, too. I always like putting together lectures, since the visual and sequential format helps me break through any writer’s block I might be inclined to have. Plus putting slides together allows me to indulge my technophilia.

I asked someone from the Graduate Teaching Center to observe and videotape my lecture, so I could get a sense of what I was doing right and what I needed to work on. I was really happy that reactions to my lecture seemed to be pretty positive. Watching the video, though, I can see some things I need to pay attention to. This was my first attempt at lecturing from notes, rather than reading a prepared paper, and in general, I think it makes for a more interesting talk for the audience. I’d like, though, to gain greater fluidity in my extemporaneous speaking, and to eliminate my habit of saying “Um” a lot. I also notice that the upswing in my voice when I end sentences makes me sound more tentative than I really am.

You can watch the video after the jump, although we made the mistake of dimming the lights a little too much — it’s very hard to see me. If I have time, I’d like to do a SlideShare version of the talk so it’s easier to see.

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"Note to Self" by erin m

For me, teaching has become a real pleasure. I feel inspired by my students and I love the feeling of camaraderie that develops in a well-managed classroom. It wasn’t always that way, though. When I first started teaching, I couldn’t believe how much harder it was than I’d imagined. It was all I could think about, and I’d practically have a panic attack before class.

I think professors and administrators sometimes don’t realize how hard it is to start teaching, and how badly we grad students want to do a good job. Unlike K-12 teachers, we get almost no formal training, and what training we do have tends toward the theoretical or the super-specific. The assumption seems to be that we’ve been going to class for eighteen years; it shouldn’t be so hard to make the transition to teacher.

Oh, but it is. It really is. Some people fall into it without batting an eyelash, but we don’t trust these weirdos. For the rest of us, here are some things I wish I’d known when I started.

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"Read OR Listen?" by Suchitra Prints

I spent a year and a half commuting between New Haven and Providence a couple times a week, and over the course of that time I developed a serious addiction to podcasts and audiobooks. For some reason, listening to recordings hits home for me in a really pronounced way. I noticed this when I absorbed a book — John Le Carré’s The Constant Gardener — in three different ways: in print, on tape, and in its movie adaptation. All were good, but for me, the most intense, engrossing experience by far was the audio version.

I thought of this because I had an interesting experience in the writing class I’m teaching.

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"Web Design" by TheGiantVermin

Since I started messing around with web design, people have been coming out of the woodwork, confessing that they’d like to build a website, too, but don’t know where to start. My own experience has been that figuring out how to begin is much harder than actually building the site. So here’s my attempt to make things more clear for the absolute newbie (as I was myself a year ago).

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"BSOD Stop c218" by Justin Marty

A couple weeks ago, I pulled out my laptop and noticed a suspicious splash of water sandwiched between the plastic case and the computer. Pressing the power button yielded nothing but a sad, whirring fan. I was seriously bummed about losing my expensive laptop, but I took solace in the fact that I’ve been obediently backing up my computer with Time Machine and an external hard drive for the last year.

So imagine my dismay when my external hard drive refused to be read.

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I found these birds' eggs on Providence sidewalks not long before I left.

Things have been pretty busy for me lately! Andy and I made our big move from Providence to New Haven (note to self: I am now too old to not hire movers), my laptop died at about the same time, and a few days later I took off to Victoria for a week to attend the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (more on that later).

As if all that weren’t enough, I’ve started a summer job in Yale’s Instructional Technology Group. I’m an Instructional Innovation Intern, doing web design for Yale professors who want to put course materials online. I love it. In addition to the perks (a snack cabinet! Wii breaks! great coworkers!) I’m learning a ton and improving my CSS/HTML skills. I’ve basically taught myself (with pointers from Andy) everything I know, and it is unbelievably nice to be able to ask someone when I have a question. It saves a ton of Googling and I get the perspective of someone I trust, right away.

I’ll also be starting a summer teaching gig next week — a writing class for pre-meds. While I’m really happy about all these activities, I’ll be busier than I’ve been in a long time, and the big question is whether I’ll actually be able to make any progress on my dissertation. Stay tuned!

"The Geometry of Traveling (by Car)" by Giampaolo Macorig

Over the years, I’ve done a lot of traveling for school. I’ve hit the road for conferences and to do research, and I’ve gone to Chicago, Cleveland, D.C., Boston, New York, Dallas, and Philadelphia. No matter where I go, there’s one inviolable constant: I’m always broke.

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It seems like most sites offer RSS feeds (a method of subscribing to new postings), but every so often I’ll run into a site that doesn’t, but should. For example, say you want to be notified every time a certain company posts a new job listing, or every time a library adds a book on a certain topic.

For those situations, you may find Dapper useful. Dapper is part of a new breed of Web ventures called (unpleasantly enough) “scrapers” — they scrape data from other sites and turn it into usable chunks of information that you can manipulate.

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"A Copyright Will Protect You from PIRATES" by loan Sameli

I was interested to learn (via NPR’s On the Media, funnily enough) that there’s a dispute between the International Documentary Association (IDA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

The dispute is about DVD encryption. Basically, it’s legal for documentary filmmakers to use snippets of copyrighted films in their own movies, under a provision of copyright law known as fair use. The weird part, though, is that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998 makes it illegal for them to break the encryption on DVDs in order to get at the video.

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I’ve been reading Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence, which is a truly bad-humored memoir about procrastination and D.H. Lawrence and depression and some other things. There seems to be something awesome on every page. I was so delighted by some of the passages that I wanted to share. This, on page 2:

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"Panic Button" by star5112

I’ve been working hard to get the second chapter of my dissertation finished before the end of the month. I wouldn’t say I’m panicking, exactly, but I’m definitely feeling a heightened sense of urgency. It’s been funny to watch all my carefully designed notetaking and citation plans get shoved out the window now that I really have to write. All these months I’ve been carefully entering sources into Zotero, only to completely ignore them now because I feel like I can’t spare the time to figure out how to use Zotero’s citation tool.

This always happens to me, and I feel like it’s basically okay. Sometimes, when push comes to shove, I just need to write and not worry about Getting Things Done or workflow or whatever. As it is, I’ve been inventing dates and approximating quotes, knowing I’ll go back and fix them later.

There was a New York Times article recently on the science of concentration. Winifred Gallagher, the author of the book Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, recommends that, when working, “don’t get distracted by anything else, because it can take the brain 20 minutes to do the equivalent of rebooting after an interruption.” For me, this is certainly true, and, while making up quotes is pretty extreme, I’m sure you know what I’m talking about when I say I’ll do whatever it takes to get words on the page.

As a public service, here’s “Going Places,” a 1948 cartoon digitized by the Internet Archive that describes the benefits of capitalism. Others in the series: “Make Mine Freedom” and “Destination Earth” (in which “Martian dissidents learn that oil and competition are the two things that make America great”). Via BoingBoing.

If you’re wondering how I got so fancy with my instructions on how to make a DVD clip reel, I had a trick up my sleeve. ScreenSteps is an application specifically designed to create software tutorials. It has everything you need packed in: screen capture, image notation, links, and text. Because it’s designed specifically for the purpose of creating tutorials, it’s super easy to use.

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"Archivists are Hot," by katherine of chicago. And they are!

Web-based research is great and all, but sometimes nothing beats talking to a real person. One of my favorite tricks when researching an obscure topic (like a certain kind of microphone) is to pick up the phone and call someone. In my experience, if you get in touch with the right person, he or she will be really excited to talk with someone who’s genuinely interested in the topic. And even though I’m shy and sometimes have trouble with the phone, I always end up really glad I made the effort to talk instead of email.

That’s why I love this resource: the Directory of Corporate Archivists in the United States and Canada. What could be more fun than geeking out on the phone with just the right person?

I’ve been thinking about PowerPoint lately, and about how I might use it productively.

It seems pretty clear that the blizzard-of-bullet-points method is not useful. Who can make sense of such tiny print so quickly? What’s the point of slapping bullet points on a screen?

"Why I Hate Most PowerPoint Lectures," by fling93. I have to admit, though, that I feel for this professor. The poor guy put so much work into his slide!

One popular alternative method is the one Cliff Atkinson advocates in the book Beyond Bullet Points. Atkinson has two basic suggestions. First, he argues that a single, dominating image, plus a trigger word or two is the best approach for any single slide. Second, he advocates crafting a presentation as a narrative, with a clear, logical, problem-resolution structure.

Here’s the thing that bothers me about that, though. Read the rest of this entry »

The National Library of Medicine has just launched a revamped Images from the History of Medicine online catalog, and it’s kind of blowing my mind. There’s a lot there, and a totally redesigned interface.

In theory (and mostly in practice), you can add images to a workspace and then create slideshows and “media groups.” You can then embed these creations in a blog or website, like so:

So that is very cool. My only thing is, the site is awfully slow, what with all the bells and whistles and JavaScript, and the interface could be slightly more intuitive. It’s a bit confusing to get from workspace to presentation or media group.

But, clearly, a lot of thought went into this site and it’s a really fantastic resource. They’ve even done research into the images’ copyright status, and you can download high-resolution versions of these images. I think it’s great that the NLM is treating their images as resources to be shared.

If you’re showing film clips in class, you’ll probably want to make a DVD clip reel — your own DVD with the clips you want preloaded on it. That way you can avoid the frenzied scan through chapter titles and the awkward dead time while you wait for the menu sequence to load. And making a clip reel is easier than you think.

(If you’d like, you can download a PDF manual of this guide.)

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Photo of Columbia University's Minerva sculpture, Alma Mater, by wallyg.

Mark Taylor, the chairman of Columbia’s religion department, has published a New York Times opinion piece that’s sure to cause a splash. “End the University as We Know It” argues that the university’s current incarnation  is obsolete and irrelevant.

Taylor advocates getting rid of the “division of labor” model of academic departments, in favor of “problem-based” ad-hoc departments like “Water” and “Life”; increasing collaboration among institutions; encouraging grad students to produce works other than dissertations (Taylor mentions, oddly, video games); training grad students for jobs other than faculty positions; and abolishing tenure.

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I spent the last couple of days in Cleveland, where I was taking part in the American Association for the History of Medicine annual conference. I gave a talk on a project I’ve been working on, about the largely forgotten twentieth-century tradition of physicians exhibiting for each other at medical conventions. I got some great references to archives during the Q & A, and I was able to meet some people working on similar stuff, so it was exactly the outcome I hope for at these conferences.

Just for fun (fun?), I’ve put my slides up on SlideShare, along with an audio recording of my presentation. I’d wanted to use FlowGram, since it’s supposed to do exactly what I wanted to do (record audio and match it with slides), but I kept getting errors when I uploaded my slides. SlideShare just worked.

I actually design my slides in Apple Keynote, not in PowerPoint, so I was happy to see that SlideShare supports Keynote slides directly, no converting required. Audio was a little trickier, since SlideShare doesn’t host audio files for you. I recorded the presentation using Audacity, converted it to an MP3, uploaded the file to my own server, and then linked it to the SlideShare presentation. SlideShare has a really cool, intuitive tool for synching up audio with slides.

Anyway, here’s the presentation. The topic is obscure enough that I can’t really imagine that anyone who wasn’t at AAHM will want to see it, but it was fun to put it up on the Web. I think I’ll do this again with some more accessible, general-audience presentaions.