Digital humanities and the allure of the absurd

Posted on April 17, 2013 by Miriam

Over at MediaCommons, I contributed an answer to a survey on the intersections of digital humanities and media studies. I’m reposting it here:

Multiple stones suspended in a gallery by wire

CC BY NC ND-licensed photo “stones 2″ by Flickr user speedoflight_speedoflight. Source

It is, of course, absurd to claim you can capture the richness of human experience in machine-readable data. Human lives are quicksilver, protean, bent and pulled in a thousand different directions. We think and feel, interpret and surmise, hold contradictory notions, revel in paradox. It’s ridiculous to think that a machine, which thinks in binary, can replicate these shades of gray.

And yet. Media scholars know better than anyone that it is equally absurd to attempt to capture human experience in a photographic narrative. Because we understand the photographic image — its trickery, its inherent limitations, the world beyond its frame — we understand how essentially false is any work’s claim to represent “reality” in all its plenitude and contingency. To argue that a work of media is fully representative is to be unforgivably naïve; we know that every work is constructed, no matter how transparent it appears. Continue reading →

This content is published under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Posted in Digital Humanities | 1 Comment

My “day of digital humanities”

Posted on April 10, 2013 by Miriam
My office at UCLA's Center for Digital Humanities

My office at UCLA’s Center for Digital Humanities

If you’re curious about what I do all day (and I actually do get that question a lot), I’ve documented my day here, as part of the Day of Digital Humanities project.

This content is published under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Posted in Digital Humanities, Life, research, Teaching | Tagged | Leave a comment

Creating an Omeka Exhibit

Posted on March 17, 2013 by Miriam

omeka logoThis is the second part of my beginning Omeka workshop. Here’s part one. Please feel free to download this tutorial as a PDF or as a Word document, if you’d like to modify it.

Now that you’ve added items to your Omeka site and grouped them into collections, you’re ready for the next step: taking your users on a guided tour through the items you’ve collected.

Continue reading →

This content is published under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Posted in Digital Humanities, History & Technology | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Up and Running with Omeka.net

Posted on March 17, 2013 by Miriam

omeka logoYesterday I had fun teaching a beginning Omeka workshop at THATCamp Feminisms West, a really great event at Scripps College. (It deserves a post of its own, but that will have to wait until I have a little more energy. Alex Juhasz has a nice post about it.)

Omeka’s documentation is actually very good, but experience has taught me that students really appreciate handouts. So here’s a digital version of my handout for a beginning Omeka workshop.

I know a lot of people teach these workshops, so feel free to use or modify this material (PDF version, Word version) if it’s useful for you. And here’s a handout that offers a quick Omeka vocabulary lesson and some guidance on whether Omeka’s the right tool for your project.

I also have a post and handout on the next step with Omeka, creating an exhibit.

As an aside, I make these tutorials with Blue Mango’s ScreenSteps software, which I highly recommend.

[Edit: Thanks to Jon Ippolito, who tipped me off to this interactive screencast about building an Omeka exhibition.]

Continue reading →

This content is published under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Posted in Digital Humanities, History & Technology | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

How to accommodate a breastpumping mom at your event

Posted on March 11, 2013 by Miriam
Breast pump encased in black tote bag

A decent daily-use electric breastpump like the Medela Pump in Style will run you $269.99 on Amazon.

Breastfeeding has been a pretty damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t experience for me. I’m in an extremely privileged position, breastfeeding-wise — with relatively generous (for the U.S.) maternity leave and a private office with a door — but it’s still been a challenge. New mothers hear a great deal these days about the expense and health toll (though frankly some of that science is questionable) of formula-feeding (or, as Kaiser’s lactation consultant insisted on calling it, “artificial food”). But breastfeeding also has well-documented and significant financial penalties for women who work outside the home. And people who wouldn’t ordinarily pronounce on a woman’s personal decisions feel no compunction, for some reason, about passing judgment on a mother’s decision about how to feed her baby.1

At the moment, I’m on my way back from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, my first real trip away from the baby. The conference organizers were really helpful to me when I asked for lactation accommodation, finding me a room in the sold-out conference hotel so that I wouldn’t have to miss too much of the event. (Though this, of course, meant staying in the conference hotel, which I usually avoid in order to save money.) Still, it’s been a bit of a logistical challenge, involving trekking across airports in search of remote nursing rooms, sending a pump through security checkpoints, and absenting myself from events every few hours.

In a perfect world, we’d all understand the mechanics of lactation so that we can accommodate women who are breastfeeding. But I’d be pretty wildly hypocritical if I condemned others for their ignorance, having until recently been in the same position myself. A few months ago, I was embarrassed to realize I had no idea where to send a woman who needed to use a breastpump at an event I’d helped organize. I didn’t even really know what she’d need, having never dealt with it myself. Which is to say that I understand why this stuff is confusing. So I thought I’d do my tiny part by explaining why we need what we need for the benefit of anyone who might host a breastfeeding mother.

Continue reading →

This content is published under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Posted in Academic Life, Life | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

Digital humanities and media studies: staging an encounter

Posted on March 8, 2013 by Miriam
Mosaic of close-ups from Vertov's The Eleventh Year

Visualization of all close-ups of faces from Vertov’s The Eleventh Year by Lev Manovich, in “Visualizing Vertov.”

This is the introduction I gave to a workshop on media studies and digital humanities at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference in Chicago on March 8, 2013. Fellow participants: Eric Faden, Hannah Goodwin, Jason Mittell, Jason Rhody, and Jasmijn Van Gorp. Many thanks to the SCMS livestreaming team. You can view the taped event here.

In 2000, the media scholar and digital humanities practitioner Johanna Drucker sat on a panel at SUNY Albany with Jacques Derrida. They were there to discuss digital media, but something totally unexpected happened: failure. Derrida was “unable,” writes Drucker, “to get a purchase on digital media.”1

The problem was not Derrida, but theory itself. Derrida made his observations at a remove, pronouncing at a distance on the changes wrought by digital technology. “This will not do,” Drucker declares, not even for one of the greatest theorists of our time. We must theorize digital technology through critical engagement with the medium itself, through making and breaking and building and reflecting. Pressing the humanistic against the digital, acknowledges Drucker, we fail and fail and fail, and “what is revealed in the processes is not what the machine does not know — but what we have not, until this exercise, been ourselves able to see.”2

Continue reading →

This content is published under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Posted in Digital Humanities | 3 Comments

Dora (or: why I’ve been slow returning emails)

Posted on February 23, 2013 by Miriam
Dora Joan

Dora. Photo by Brad Wallace.

Andy and I welcomed our first child, Dora Joan, on December 15, 2012. She’s absolutely amazing. As you might expect, my world has been very much taken up with baby stuff lately. I’ll be on maternity leave until UCLA’s next quarter begins on April 1. I hope you’ll understand if I’m not great about getting back to correspondents right away.

Dora’s namesakes are her great grandmothers, whom we loved very much: Dora Goldstein and Joan Hildebrant.

This content is published under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Posted in Life | 2 Comments

No Half Measures: Overcoming Common Challenges to Doing Digital Humanities in the Library

Posted on January 28, 2013 by Miriam

I recently published this article in a special issue of the Journal of Library Administration devoted to digital humanities and the library. You can find a non-paywalled copy of the article here. Many thanks to Micah Vandegrift for drafting an open-access addendum to our publishing agreement with Taylor and Francis. Micah has also posted an “alt-TOC” for this issue, with links to the other authors’ non-paywalled essays, along with a great synopsis of how he approached the negotiation with Taylor and Francis.

This content is published under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Posted in Digital Humanities | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Notes on DH and sharing your work

Posted on November 4, 2012 by Miriam
Backlit keyboard with a key labeled "Share"

Creative Commons-licensed photo by Niklas Wikström.

These are notes and links for a talk I’m giving on digital humanities and sharing your work at the University of California, San Diego, on November 5, 2012.

DH projects I discuss

Continue reading →

This content is published under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Posted in Academic Life, Career, Digital Humanities | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Very basic strategies for interpreting results from the Topic Modeling Tool

Posted on October 29, 2012 by Miriam

Written with Andy Wallace, with methods and ideas borrowed from Zoe Borovsky

Many plastic tubs of Play-Doh, each a different color.

As Zoe Borovsky brilliantly demonstrated when she visited my DH grad class, topic modeling starts with the assumption that each document is made up of multiple topics — like lumps of Play-Doh. Photo: “Play-Doh” by dbrekke.

If you’re reading this, you may know that topic modeling is a method for finding and tracing clusters of words (called “topics” in shorthand) in large bodies of texts. Topic modeling has achieved some popularity with digital humanities scholars, partly because it offers some meaningful improvements to simple word-frequency counts, and partly because of the arrival of some relatively easy-to-use tools for topic modeling.

MALLET, a package of Java code, is one of those tools. It’s not hard to run, but you do need to use the command line. For those who aren’t quite ready for that, there’s the Topic Modeling Tool, which implements MALLET in a graphical user interface (GUI), meaning you can plug files in and receive output without entering a line of code.

David Newman and Arun Balagopalan, who developed the TMT, have done us all a great service. But they may also have created a monster. The barrier for running the TMT is so low that it’s entirely possible to run a topic modeling test and produce results without having much idea what you’re doing or what the results mean.

So is it still worth doing? I think so. Playing with the results by altering variables and rerunning the test can be a useful way to get your head around what topic modeling is and isn’t. And, as I recently tried to convince my graduate DH class, screwing around with texts — even if you’re not totally sure what you’re doing — can be a surprisingly effective way of getting a new perspective on a body of work. Finally, seeing how many decisions need to be made about  texts and variables is a great way to understand that topic modeling is not a way of revealing any objective “truth” about a text; instead, it’s a way of deriving a certain kind of meaning — which still needs to be interpreted and interrogated.

But in order to get any of these benefits from the Topic Modeling Tool, you need to be able to make some sense of your results, which is no easy task. The TMT generates some decidedly cryptic-looking files, and as far as I can tell, there aren’t many resources out there to help you make sense of them.

Once you survey the results of the Topic Modeling Tool, it becomes clear why topic modeling often goes hand-in-hand with visualization. The format of the results makes it difficult for a human being to discern patterns in them, and the files aren’t easy to visualize without doing some custom coding.

But say you’re a non-coder using the Topic Modeling Tool to screw around. You feed it some text, you get some files; now what?

What follows are some very basic ways you might begin looking at the results you’ve generated.

Continue reading →

This content is published under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Posted in Digital Humanities, research, Tools | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments