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VIW6

Inspiring Visualizing Interpretations Workshop with Johanna Drucker

By Kurt Fendt on May 7, 2012

From 23-28 April 2012, Johanna Drucker, professor of information studies at UCLA and well-known theorist of digital humanities, led a series of workshop sessions that engaged more then 20 participants in discussingapproaches to data visualization in the humanities. The workshop, titled “Visualizing Interpretation,” asked major questions that humanists face when working in the digital terrain: How can we create digital models that incorporate ways of knowing that are unique to the humanities? What are the issues facing the longevity and sustainability of digital projects in the humanities? What new opportunities and intellectual tasks do increasingly larger scale data sets present us with? As Drucker summarized the workshop’s questions: “What do humanists need to do our business digitally? And what do humanistic methods and values bring to digital work—and why does that matter?”

The workshop examined these issues from many angles, including problems of visualization, the use of scale, and working with large data sets. In order to ground the discussion in real-world conditions, the workshop revolved around the case study of a real-world design problem: a digital platform, combining archival and social-media features, for use in a course on the cultural history of Los Angeles that will be taught in a future semester at UCLA. The larger goal in developing such a site, Drucker said, is to think about how to create a sustainable set of tools that can be repurposed by other scholars: “What kind of combinatorial, modular environment can we create that will not go out of date? What kind of environment will support this?”

Design sketches and further results from the workshop will be posted here shortly.

Text by Elyse Graham and Jia Zhang.

AnnoStudio

HyperStudio Receives NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant

By Kurt Fendt on April 9, 2012

We are happy to announce that HyperStudio  has received  a Level II Start-Up grant from the Office of Digital Humanities (ODH) at the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for “Annotation Studio – Multimedia Text Annotation for Students”.

Annotation Studio is an open-source web-based application that actively engages students in interpreting literary texts and other humanities documents. Initial features will include:

1) Easy-to-­use annotation tools that facilitates linking and comparing primary texts with multi-media source, variation, and adaptation documents;
2) Sharable collections of multimedia materials prepared by faculty and student users;
3) Multiple filtering and display mechanisms for texts, written annotations, and multimedia annotations;
4) Collaboration functionality;
5) Multimedia composition tools.

While strengthening new media literacies, Annotation Studio will help students develop traditional humanistic skills including close reading, textual analysis, persuasive writing, and critical thinking.

TextVis

Fluid Texts and Critical Archives: Textual Studies in the (Digital) Humanities, 10/14/2011, 1:00 PM

By Ayse Gursoy on October 10, 2011

Hear ye, hear ye!

Join us for “Fluid Texts and Critical Archives: Textual Studies in the (Digital) Humanities” on Friday Oct. 14th, 1:00 – 2:45 pm., in E51-095. This session – free and open to the public – will be introduced by Wyn Kelley (MIT), followed by a presentation of recent work by HyperStudio – Digital Humanities at MIT and will conclude with a panel discussion with John Bryant (Hofstra University), Amy Earhart (Texas A&M University), Kurt Fendt (MIT), Laura Mandell (Miami University of Ohio), and Martha Nell Smith (University of Maryland). This session is part of the three-day Melville Electronic Library Camp (MEL Camp) at MIT.

This session will focus on the concept of “fluid texts”, introduced by John Bryant in his 2002 book, The Fluid Text. Looking at works as “fluid texts” calls attention to the processes that go into the construction of a text, and how these processes are often interactions between a writer and an editor, an editor and an audience, a writer and an audience, and so on. What tools does the digital age give us to study texts as fluid texts, and to capture the dynamism of these texts?

 

The sketches are part of Jia Zhang’s work on textual visualization and reader interaction as a HyperStudio Research Assistant. “They have 2 main objectives, the first is to map interactions recorded on Frankenstein as students/readers/scholars annotate and explore the text to build thicker layers of context around it. The second goal is to be able to express the text as a whole, an object, relating it back to its book format. The end result of this exercise being to design a navigation which will allow people of different levels of expertise to gather around a particular text and to move with ease between the text itself on many scales and different types of supplemental materials.” Jia Zhang is a Graduate Student in Comparative Media Studies (CMS) at MIT.

metaLAB gross

Premiere of Augmented Harvard: openLAB_04. October 6, 6:00 PM

By Kurt Fendt on October 6, 2011

Check out the premiere of Augmented Harvard by our friends “down the road” at Harvard’s metaLAB. It’s a mystery tour across the Harvard campus, full of curatorial experiments, ranging from an archive of ephemeral Cold War films to a mysterious hanging aluminum tube to a collection of participatory stickers that guide journeys across the campus. Full details can be found here. Have fun!

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Video of Michael Cuthbert’s and Matthias Röder’s Talk “Listening Faster – How Digital Humanities is Transforming Music Scholarship” is online.

By Kurt Fendt on May 19, 2011

Please check out the video (QuickTime streaming) of Michael Cuthbert’s and Matthias Röder’s fascinating talk “Listening Faster – How Digital Humanities is Transforming Music Scholarship” given on April 22, 2011 as part of HyperStudio’s humanities + digital conversations in collaboration with Harvard’s metaLAB.

rtsp://penobscot.mit.edu/ListeningFaster.mov

 

Image of a fractal visualization of Philip Glass’ music by Russian artist Tatiana Plakhova (http://www.complexitygraphics.com/)
Screen shot 2011-05-10 at 9.27.37 AM

Talk: Culturomics: Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books, May 10, 12:30 pm Pound Hall, Room 100, Harvard Law School

By Kurt Fendt on May 10, 2011

From the announcement by Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel:

We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. We survey the vast terrain of ‘culturomics,’ focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. We show how this approach can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology. Culturomics extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities.

About the speakers:

Erez Lieberman Aiden is a fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and Visiting Faculty at Google. His research spans many disciplines and has won numerous awards, including recognition for one of the top 20 "Biotech Breakthroughs that will Change Medicine", by Popular Mechanics; the Lemelson-MIT prize for the best student inventor at MIT; the American Physical Society's Award for the Best Doctoral Dissertation in Biological Physics; and membership in Technology Review's 2009 TR35, recognizing the top 35 innovators under 35. His last three papers – two with JB Michel – have all appeared on the cover of Nature and Science.

Jean-Baptiste Michel is FQEB Fellow at Harvard and Visiting Faculty at Google. With Erez Lieberman Aiden, he founded the Cultural Observatory at Harvard, where their team develops quantitative approaches to the humanities and social sciences. Jean-Baptiste is an Engineer of Ecole Polytechnique, and received an MS in Applied Math and a PhD in Systems Biology from Harvard.

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humanities + digital Conversations: “Listening Faster”, April 22, 1:00 pm, room E14-633 (new Media Lab)

By Kurt Fendt on April 18, 2011

Please join us for the inaugural event of the new series "humanities + digital conversations", jointly organized by MIT's HyperStudio and metaLAB (at) Harvard.

"Listening Faster – How Digital Humanities is Transforming Music Scholarship" by Prof. Michael Cuthbert (MIT) and Matthias Röder (Harvard)

April 22, 2011, 1:00 – 2:30 pm, room E14-633 (New Media Lab building, MIT, 75 Amherst Street, Cambridge)

Computers have altered so many aspects of musician's lives, from digital performance, to electronic composition, to how we acquire and share new music, but only recently have they had the potential to transform how we study and analyze music.  Michael Scott Cuthbert (MIT) and Matthias Röder (Harvard) introduce the new world of Digital Musicology by showing the techniques and tools that allow scholars to "listen faster": to examine and analyze large repertories of pieces in the time that a human musicologist could only look at and hear a single work.  Through computational analysis, clustering techniques, visualization tools, and data-mining of musical works, the landscape of our understanding of music is being shaken and new ground created for the wired music scholar.

View Event Poster (PDF)

Photo credit: photobucket
Children Playing

StudioTalk “Learning Through Play”, April 15, 12:00 noon, room E15-335

By Kurt Fendt on April 7, 2011

Please join us for our upcoming StudioTalk by Prof. Eric Klopfer and Scot Osterweil on "Learning Through Play".

Play has no agenda. Children play for their own reasons, and even though their play can exhibit fierce determination, persistence, and a will to mastery, it does so only in the service of goals that children set for themselves. Even as we celebrate the learning that occurs in children’s play, and specifically in digital games, we must acknowledge that such learning looks dramatically different from the world of school. Though starkly different on the face of it, we nevertheless believe the ecologies of play and school can be successfully integrated, something we have witnessed through our own experience as educators and game designers. We will examine these issues through concrete examples of existing best practices, and speculative designs currently under development at MIT’s Education Arcade, and elsewhere.

Lunch will be served. Please RSVP to hyperstudio@mit.edu

Download StudioTalk Poster

Please also mark your calendar for our next HyperStudio Talk jointly organized with Harvard's metaLAB on April 22, 1:00 pm:
Prof. Michael Cuthbert (MIT) and Matthias Röder (Harvard) on "Listening Faster – How Digital Humanities is Transforming Music Scholarship"

Image © Andrew Lapara

cryo_tank

Models for the Future Humanities

By Whitney Anne Trettien on February 14, 2011

Walking through MIT to reach HyperStudio’s home base, you pass man-sized aluminum tanks of cryogenic nitrogen and share elevators with lab-coated technicians escorting racks of test tubes. It can be a bizarre world for a humanities scholar; yet the scientific labs with which HyperStudio shares a building are increasingly put forward as a model for Digital Humanities work — in fact, for the Humanities, writ large.

It’s easy to see why. Labs are collaborative environments where work, writing and credit is distributed. Labs are also “hands on” and experimental: things are poked, prodded and pulled apart; objects are made; hypotheses are tested. And, unlike in the humanities, teaching and research aren’t strongly distinguished in labs, since students — even undergraduates — are often solicited to assist with experiments.

But scientific labs aren’t the only model for future work in the humanities. During MLA, Kari Kraus pointed to the studio arts, emphasizing the role of process, building and design in evaluating Digital Humanities projects. I’m drawn to this idea not only for the kind of physical workspace it imagines humanists collaborating in, but for what it suggests about how humanities scholars should position themselves in relation to the world — namely, as individuals whose curiosity drives them to produce things that sparks the curiosity of others.

Last year, I began keeping a sketchbook in my office. Mentally, it’s the best addition I’ve ever made to my workspace. Whereas ruled lines demand writing, blank paper is an open field; and in the span of the month, I had already filled two books with everything from bored doodles to project designs mindmapping current research.

Mixing a studio arts model with a commune-like living space in the 1950s, Black Mountain College also exemplifies a space where innovation, creativity and play were not opposed to a scholarly work ethic. So many of us — especially in Digital Humanities labs, where delivery deadlines loom large — are overscheduled, throttled by a calendar of back-to-back meetings that leave little time for productive thought, for serious play. (Bethany Nowviskie wrote beautifully on this in her blogpost on DH’s eternal September.) By loosening the reins on scheduling, institutions like Black Mountain College allowed for the kind of movement that oxygenates ideas, breathing new — and more productive — life into the lab.
The commune living space of Black Mountain College provides another model for DH work. In From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, Fred Turner traces the development of the web back to the ideals of mid-century counterculture — a history which pushes back against the (ongoing, increasing) commercialization of code and content on the web. Open source movements keep this link alive, illustrating the methods and means for collaborative work across distances. While many Digital Humanities projects are themselves open source, it would be worth, I think, collectively thinking through what these values mean for the methodologies we employ, as well as the ways and spaces in which we work together. It isn’t just the end result that should embody our ideals, but the many micro-habits and modes of production we participate in every day.

The search for models isn’t just about the kinds of physical spaces we want to work in, but the identities — artists, creators, designers, playsmiths — we choose for ourselves. Like a personal identity, the search doesn’t end: it evolves.

What other spaces inspire you to cross interdisciplinary boundaries? What changes in your methods of work have sparked more collaborative work?

DigitalHumanities2

Digital Humanities 2.0 event at Harvard, February 10th, 2011

By Anna van Someren on February 2, 2011

The Humanities Center at Harvard is hosting Digital Humanities 2.0: Emerging Paradigms in the Arts and Humanities, a conversation moderated by John Palfrey with the following media theorists and scholars:

  • Anne Burdick, chair of the Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design and Design Editor of Electronic Book Review
  • Johanna Drucker, Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA, and  author of SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing, (University of Chicago Press, 2009)
  • Peter Lunenfeld, professor in the Design | Media Arts department at UCLA, whose books include The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine (MIT, 2011) and  Snap to Grid: A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures (MIT, 2000)
  • Jeffrey Schnapp, founder of the Stanford Humanities Lab, prolific author, Berkman Center Fellow, and currently launching a new open source virtual world entitled Sirikata.

Thompson Room, Barker Center 110, 12 Quincy Street Cambridge.  The event is free and open to the public, with limited seating.

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