Category: Digital Humanities

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Basics of Creating a Scroll Kit Narrative

My Digital Labor, Urban Space, and Materiality class will be using the drag-and-drop framework Scroll Kit to create multimedia “device narratives.” Here’s the tutorial I’ve created to teach them to use Scroll Kit. You’re welcome to download these instructions as a PDF or as a Word document, in case you’d like to modify them. 

This is my first Scroll Kit tutorial; the second covers the parallax effect.

With Scroll Kit, you can create multimedia works in a scrolling format suitable for long-form narratives. It’s easy to drag and drop elements to create interesting effects. Your project will have a unique Scroll Kit URL, so you can share your project widely (or you can export the code).

Some examples of projects created with Scroll Kit:

Continue reading “Basics of Creating a Scroll Kit Narrative”

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New course for winter 2014: Digital Labor and Materiality

[Edit: the website for this course, including the syllabus, is now available here. And here’s a little story about our class field trip to One Wilshire, the largest Internet exchange point on the West Coast.]

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

— John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” (1996)

Wireless internet, cloud-based data storage, devices that fit in the palm of your hand: the language of the digital evokes an airy immateriality, as though digital technology has only the barest physical manifestation. But just out of our sight, hulking server farms eat up mammoth amounts of power, huge satellite arrays feed our information addiction, and ropes of wire coil under the streets and beneath the ocean. Farther afield, people comb through our discarded technology to reclaim precious metals even as workers in great factory-cities churn out new iPhones. This course examines the material manifestations of digital technology, from devices to infrastructure to environmental impact, and asks who performs the labor necessary to maintain the illusion of digital immateriality.

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What Alt-Ac Can Do, and What It Can’t

This is a cleaned-up, lightly edited version of a talk I gave on November 22, 2013, as part of a panel on “Digital Humanities and the Neoliberal University” at the American Studies Association annual meeting in Washington, D.C. 

Our original proposal for this session read like a lot of attempts to grapple with controversy in the digital humanities. “Is digital humanities complicit with the neoliberal impulse in the modern university?” it asked. “Some say it is, citing A, B, and C. Others say it isn’t, citing X, Y, and Z.” The framework, if unoriginal, had the benefit of being easy to write.

My copanelist Natalia Cecire pushed us to think beyond this cliché. “Let’s start with the premise that it is complicit,” said Cecire, citing Alan Liu’s “Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?” “Else why would it be so obviously attractive to the neoliberal university? Let’s start with that and talk about what we then do.”

Borrowing Natalia’s framework, I want to complicate a discourse about labor that has emerged from and become identified with the digital humanities. The term for this work is “alt-ac,” which stands for “alternative academic.” [1]My critique is not altogether new. Liana M. Silva aired some of these concerns in April. Martha Nell Smith has levied similar critiques of DH centers’ hiring practices, and Bethany Nowviskie has … Continue reading Jason Rhody, a senior program officer for the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities, coined the term in 2009 to describe the scholarly work performed by many of us in and in the orbit of the academy who do not hold traditional faculty jobs but do perform scholarly labor. [2]For a history of alt-ac and a snapshot of how graduate programs might equip students for these jobs, see the excellent “Humanities Unbound: Supporting Careers and Scholarship Beyond the Tenure … Continue reading

Continue reading “What Alt-Ac Can Do, and What It Can’t”

Footnotes

Footnotes
↑1 My critique is not altogether new. Liana M. Silva aired some of these concerns in April. Martha Nell Smith has levied similar critiques of DH centers’ hiring practices, and Bethany Nowviskie has dealt with a number of these concerns in “Toward a New Deal.” I am moved and inspired by this vision of a WPA for the humanities, but I feel that my fundamental objection to some of the rhetoric about alt-ac — that it rests on the flawed assumption that the academic jobs crisis is caused by an overproduction of Ph.D.s — has yet to be answered.
↑2 For a history of alt-ac and a snapshot of how graduate programs might equip students for these jobs, see the excellent “Humanities Unbound: Supporting Careers and Scholarship Beyond the Tenure Track,” prepared by Katina Rogers for the Scholarly Communication Institute.
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A dead-simple weekly email: A little workflow for bringing people together

UCLA’s Digital Humanities program, which I coordinate, is interdisciplinary in the extreme. Unlike some other programs, which sit in English or History departments, UCLA DH is an entity unto itself: a standalone minor and graduate certificate housed within the division of the humanities. In a lot of ways, this is great: We have no particular allegiance to any one department, and our students and faculty come from all over the university.

But they’ve all got a lot of stuff going on, and in many cases, they see their primary home as a different department. (I’m the only person at UCLA who’s dedicated full-time to the DH academic program.) We don’t have a dedicated community space just for the DH program, and while I organize as many events as I can on our limited budget, people just don’t have a ton of time to hang out or attend events.

And yet part of my job is to create a sense of community for the program. What to do?

I’m still working on it, but I have come up with one modestly successful tool: a weekly email digest that gathers events, job opportunities, fellowships, CFPs, and resources relevant to UCLA digital humanities, prefaced by a little introduction from me.

Here’s what one looks like.

This is why I do it:

Continue reading “A dead-simple weekly email: A little workflow for bringing people together”

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How did they make that?

(Cross-posted on UCLA’s DH Bootcamp blog)

Edit: Dot Porter made a Zotero collection for this post! Thanks, Dot!

Many  students tell me that in order to get started with digital humanities, they’d like to have some idea of what they might do and what technical skills they might need in order to do it. Here’s a set of digital humanities projects that might help you to get a handle on the kinds of tools and technologies available for you to use.

I’ve tried to include a few different types of projects, but it’s hard to provide a really representative list. If you’d like to see more digital humanities projects, you can find directories at art-humanities.net and DHCommons. Continue reading “How did they make that?”

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Using Mozilla Popcorn Maker to Create an Interactive Video

I’ll be teaching a workshop on Mozilla Popcorn Maker soon and, as is my habit, I created this step-by-step tutorial. Here’s the tutorial in handout form as a PDF, and here it is in Word, in case you’d like to modify it.

Mozilla Popcorn Maker allows you to enrich a video with interactive maps, images, and webpages. Your video could be different every time it’s played, because it pulls in dynamic content and allows your “viewer” to interact with it. Here, we learn how to use it to enhance an archival video.

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Digital humanities and the allure of the absurd

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 “Digital humanities and the allure of the absurd”

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Up and Running with Omeka.net

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 “Up and Running with Omeka.net”