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Many thanks to the University of Kansas and all of the organizers of the Digital Humanities Forum! In the spirit of THATCamp, I wanted to share my notes from all of the sessions—Thursday-Saturday—that I was able to attend. Please feel free to do with these what you want: reuse, remix, add, etc. Apologies for any misspellings or inaccurate quotations; please leave any edits in the comments section and I’ll update accordingly. Notes after the break . . .

Voyant for Text Analysis and Visualization 

• Geoffrey Rockwell, University of Alberta, Philosophy
• Voyant Tools: voyant-tools.org/
• Presentation script: hermeneuti.ca/node/242
• Draft chapter on intro to text analysis: The Measured Words.pdf
• Cirrus
  • Word cloud
  • Stop words: list of high-frequency function words (the, and, etc.)
  • Add and edit stop word lists by clicking gear icon
  • Color, shape and position is random
  • Clicking on specific words brings up concordance/KWIC tool
• KWIC
  • Concordances
  • Keyword highlights, contextual text to left and right
  • Can change amount of context
  • KWIC, Loon from IBM in 1960s
  • History of digital humanities built on concordances (40s-60s)
  • Does not allow for wildcrards (ex. theor*) at this time
• Skin
  • Particular combination of tools
  • Add new columns in Words in Entire Corpus Trend > Columns
  • Heart icon adds favorites
  • If you want a custom skin, you can ask for a custom name and URL
• Other tools
  • TACT for DOS: projects.chass.utoronto.ca/tact/
  • CATMA/CLEA: www.catma.de/
  • Tapor: taporware.ualberta.ca/~taporware/htmlTools/extract.shtml
  • More on the hermeuniti.ca site
• Using Voyant with Large Corpora
  • Adds new panel called Corpus
  • Words in documents: breakdown by particular texts within corpus
  • Name corpora properly to have them appear in diachronic order
• Export
  • Bib citation
  • HTML
  • URL
  • iframe of specific tools
  • XML, tabular data, etc.

Visualizing Humanities Data Sets in Improvise 

• Chris Weaver, University of Oklahoma, Computer Science
• Improvise: www.cs.ou.edu/~weaver/improvise/index.html
• Tutorial + download: www.cs.ou.edu/~weaver/improvise/tutorial-ku/
• Visual analytics
• Re-inject scholarly interpretations back into the data set
• “Digital” about collecting and managing and browsing data
• Visualization methods help complete digital workspace for scholarship
• Visualization as bridge between human mind and computation
• Improvise
  • Full blown development environment (requires programming skills)
  • “Excel” for visualization
  • Supports live design of visual tools (build as you work)
  • Each visualization is a document (.viz)
  • Facilitation tool to explore data more broadly (still requires close reading & investigation)
  • Strong for computation, quantitative analysis, mostly social sciences
  • Needs advanced training to do, would need to find programmer to work with

Keynote: Humanities in a Digital Age

• Gregory Crane, Tufts University, Classics
• Perseus Digital Library: www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/
• Importance of undergraduate research experience (happening in STEM, not in Humanities?)
• Digital Humanities?
  • Separate niche field—safely sequestered
• “The instructor is not there to serve the student. Rather, both student and instructor are there to serve Wissenschaft.” —Wilhelm von Humboldt (1809)
  • Pericles’s funeral oration: www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/pericles-funeralspeech.asp
• Goals:
  • How do we advance the intellectual life of humanity?
  • What are the metaphors we might use?
    • A global republic of letters?
    • A dialogue among civilizations?
• Not books or artifacts but data . . . (slide: DataConservancy, dataconservancy.org/)
• Language is the great barrier, not space.
• The Digital Walters: www.thedigitalwalters.org/
• TEI production and soldiers: Humanists need to treat students as adults
• The past is hyperlingual
• Discovering a new world, no longer acting/studying in isolation
• The Mission of the Library is essential in a culture of fragmented departments
  • Only organizations that capture totality of cultures, languages, etc.
• Do we want to reach 1,000 research libraries and their subscribers? Or billions of humans?
• Movie > Wikipedia > Primary Sources
  • Note: what’s missing from that chain? SCHOLARLY PUBLICATIONS. (because we remove them)
• Where is your labor?
  • Clever systems (translation tools)
  • Advanced researchers
  • Library professionals
  • Citizen scholars
  • Student research and a lab culture
• Only 11 historical languages with enrollments of more than 50 (96% of those are Latin, Greek, Hebrew)
• Virtuous Cycle of Learning and Contribution (WANT TO SEE THAT SLIDE)
• e-portfolios (instead of branded transcript)
  • What have you contributed?
  • What skills have you developed?
  • Note (his): grades are inadequate
• To create a radically new and deeply traditional form of education (back to Humboldt)
• Dialogue is a process that lowers the probability of evil and violence

Workshop: XSLT Basics & Visualizing Structural Similarity with Plectograms and XSLT

• David Birnbaum, University of Pittsburgh
• obdurodon.org/ku/2012-09-21_ku-plectogram.html
• XSLT
  • stylesheet for transforming XML
  • Declarative programming language
• XPath is the that part XSLT that tells you what things are
  • / = whole document
• Core of XSLT is template rule xml:template match=
• apply templates is code for look inside an element and do stuff
• XPath predicate filters results
• pretty print = indent button
• refer to variable with $
• { } turns from literal to calculation
• XPath by default only looks within

Workshop: Quantitative Analysis of Literary Texts with R

• Jeff Rydberg-Cox, University of Missouri-Kansas City
• daedalus.umkc.edu/?page_id=29
• R: www.r-project.org/
• Interactive “calculator” with lots of functions you can build on
• Variable = single value
• Vector = list of values
• Frame = table of values
• Not so good at aggregating, good at graphing (Perl and Python good at aggregating)
• Most of the work with data is prepping, pre-processing
• could need stem/lemmatizers (for english stanford coreNLP: nlp.stanford.edu/software/corenlp.shtml)
  • wow!
• nameofcommand( )
• Book: R in Action www.manning.com/kabacoff/
• Stefan Gries, corpus linguistics with R / statistics with linguistics using R
• Are they including these in publications?
  • Have included data as supplementary, put on website
  • Wants: central repository, data set, documentation

Workshop: Advanced Omeka

• Can map metadata to existing Dublin Core set OR add new fields
• Items
• Collections
• Exhibits = interpretations

Keynote: False Positives: Opportunities and Dangers in Big Text Analysis 

• Geoffrey Rockwell, University of Alberta, Philosophy
• 2 types of data
  • Information at Rest (large databases)
  • Information in Motion
• DataSift: datasift.com/
• Brunet and the Grand Corpus
• Opportunities
  • Filtering and subsetting (Cornel WebLab)
  • Enrichment
  • Sequence alignment (Horton, Olsen, Row – Digital Studies 2:1, turnitin.com/)
    • Follow the expression of texts over time
  • Diachronic analysis (Google Ngrams)
  • Classification and clustering (Voyant)
  • Social network analysis (Voyant)
  • Life-tracking (Wolfram: Quantified Self)
• Ian Lancashire, Forgetful Muses
• Predictive Data Mining: doesn’t work
  • lots of data leads to lots of false hits
  • never believe data, always investigate and verify
• Conjecturator
• Dreyfus, intelligence is embodied (again artificial intelligence)

Reading Genres

• Benjamin MacDonald Schmidt, Princeton University, PhD Candidate History
• sappingattention.blogspot.com/
• Harvard Cultural Observatory: www.culturomics.org/cultural-observatory-at-harvard
• Digital sources contribute knowledge beyond individuals
• Metadata lets us look at social structures
• Humanists need to be more involved in designing algorithms (not just social scientists)
• OCR is not important: scientists have always been able to work against biases
• Working on something like Google Ngrams but users can set own categories
  • Bookworm: bookworm.culturomics.org/
  • API lets you present data in all shapes
• His research is on “the history of attention”
  • Using concordances to search words preceding “attention”
  • Looking at geographical patterns of language (via newspapers)
• “All digital history ends in 1922.”
• Integrate big data in with other analyses in order to get greater comfort with results before we trust these types or results entirely on their own.
• Evidence may not be novel, but it certainly is new.
• Humanists need to be patient with data results; not everything is instantaneous

A World in a Grain of Sand: Uncertainty and Poetry Corpora Visualization 

• Katherine Coles & Julie Lien, University of Utah, English
• Poems as multidimensional living things (a single poem as large data set)
• “Complex capta”
• Joanna Drucker, Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display, DHQ 2011 5.1
• Myopia at DH2012

Phylogenetic Futures: Big Data and Design Fiction 

• Kari Kraus, University of Maryland, Information Science & English
• www.karikraus.com/
• Moving humanities to be future-oriented discipline
  • CP Snow, Two Cultures
• Phylogenetics: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylogenetics
  • collate texts before charting evolution
  • D’arcy Thompson: Fish Deformations (1917)
• Design Fiction
  • The practice of mocking up or prototyping objects that embody our ideas about the future
  • Share Horizons: Data, Biomedicine, and the Digital Humanities
  • mith.umd.edu/sharedhorizons/
  • Conlangs & Alternate Evolution: conlang.org/ & After Man by Dixon
  • Frederic Bartlett, Remembering (1932)
  • Nonobject banko lukic barry katz: nonobjectbook.com/read
  • Jane McGonogal (sp?) alternate reality games
  • Cathy’s Book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathy’s_Book
  • Warning Systems for Posteriry
• Material cultural evolution: what do we know?
  • component analysis
  • tree topology
  • variation
• A lot of design fiction about provocation and not futurity
  • Julian Bleeker’s slow movement
• Franco Moretti: tree of life vs. tree of culture (Graphs, Maps, and Trees)
• Guided Variation: how biological evolution differs from cultural evolution
• nvivo: www.qsrinternational.com/products_nvivo.aspx

Lightning Talks

• Amanda French – Zotero library
  •  Edna St. Vincent Millay Society: millay.org & zotero library
• Arienne Dwyer
  • Uyghur Light Verbs Project
  • Interactive Inner Asia
  • Transcriber 1.5.1: trans.sourceforge.net/en/presentation.php / transag.sourceforge.net/
    • Audio transcription tool

Grounds more relative than this: Critically Harnessing Uncertainty in Digital Literary Studies in Big Data 

• Patrick Flor, University of Kansas, Graduate Student in English
• Gulliver in Laputa — important for DH — frame of words
• Humanities Computing
  • Computation of/from/over humanities artifacts
  • of = generative art
  • from = statistics from a text
  • over = taking texts and making texts about texts
• Critical Humanities Computing
  • Create and choose algorithms, artifacts, results, etc.
  • Natural language processing
    • NLTK (Python framework): nltk.org/
    • Pervert the tools accordingly
• POS tagging
  • Good hook for processing text, but not enough
• Immediately reentering into text, not using computing to abstract from the text (i.e. as visualization does)
  • Computer substituting for failure as reader
• Close reading circling out into broader interpretation

What Are You Going to Do with that Data? Results of Needs Assessment of Humanities Scholars for Digital Collections 

• Harriett Green, University of Illinois, Digital Humanities & English Librarian
• Woodchipper: mith.umd.edu/corporacamp/tool.php
• Unsworth and “scholarly primitives”

Museum Collecting in the Age of Big Data: Opportunities for Collaboration 

• Peter Welsh, University of Kansas, Museum Studies

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About THATCamp
THATCamp.org

Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University”

THATCamp “groundrules”
www.foundhistory.org/2010/05/24/thatcamp-groundrules/

KU Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities
idrh.ku.edu

THATCamp Kansas Blog
kansas2012.thatcamp.org

Twitter
#thatcampks
@IDRH_KU

Google Docs
http://…..?

Schedule & locations
Friday:
—THATCamp: Watson Library 8:30 – 4:00pm
—Keynote Talk: Geoffrey Rockwell, 4:30pm Watson Library 3 West

Saturday: Big Data and Uncertainty in the Humanities
—Kansas Union, Alderson Auditorium, 9:00am – 3:00pm
—Keynote Talk: Kari Kraus, 11:15am

Please fill out and return feedback forms

Lunch
–Kansas Union (Food court, Impromptu Cafe)
–Oread Hotel (BirdDog)

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IDRH is pleased to announce our Fall 2012 Digital Humanities Forum, September 20-22, 2012 at the University of Kansas. The Forum consists of three separate but related programs held over three days:

Update: full schedule now online

• Day One (Thursday, September 20) / WORKSHOPS
  A set of in-depth, hands on workshops on digital humanities tools and topics such as GIS, data visualization, text markup and annotation, and creating online digital exhibits.

   

• Day Two (Friday, September 21) / THATCamp KANSAS
  An “unconference” for technologists and humanists, with conversations about topics defined on-site by the participants.

   

• Day Three (Saturday, September 22) / BIG DATA AND UNCERTAINTY IN THE HUMANITIES
  A one-day program of panels and poster sessions showcasing digital humanities projects and research.

Plenary speakers at the Forum include:

• Gregory Crane, Editor-in-Chief, Perseus Digital Library
  “The Humanities in a Digital Age”
  Thursday, September 21, 4:30 PM, Watson Library
• Geoffrey Rockwell, Professor of Philosophy and Humanities Computing at the University of Alberta, Canada
  “False Positives: Opportunities and Dangers in Big Text Analysis”
  Friday, September 21, 4:30 PM, Watson Library
• Kari Kraus, Assistant Professor, College of Information Studies and the Department of English at the University of Maryland
  “Phylogenetic Futures: Big Data and Design Fiction”
  Saturday, September 22, 11:15 AM, Alderson Auditorium, Kansas Union

Watch this space for more information as schedules, lodging arrangements, and other details are finalized.