In American naval history, officer promotions have gotten a lot of offhanded comments but little substantive analysis (one exception I just found: Waiting for Dead Men’s Shoes, by Donald Chisholm, a book I look forward to reading at greater length). The commonplace assertion is something like this: After the War of 1812, it became almost impossible for midshipmen to get promoted up the ranks, and even if they did get promoted, the time to promotion was excessively long. This trend continued throughout the 1820s into the 1830s and ’40s. 

I’ve always been intrigued by these assertions, since the evidence to back them up is always anecdotal. But the resources to test the hypothesis are actually available online, for free, from the Naval Historical Center. A few months ago, I created a data set based on the NHC’s documents that included dates of promotion for every single officer in the navy from 1798 to 1849. You can read about that here. But I didn’t have the technical expertise to do the analysis I wanted to do.

Enter my collaborator, Lincoln. This weekend, he did the data analysis and created some graphs in R to show exactly what was happening in the navy regarding promotions. You can find the guts of his work here.

Time to Promotion

We decided that a box-and-whiskers graph would be the best way to display the results of the analysis. So here are two graphs: Time to Lieutenant and Time to Captain.

What we see in these graphs does not exactly follow the commonplace assertions. It is obvious that pre-War of 1812 officers got promoted much more quickly than their post-War of 1812 counterparts. Thus far the commonplace holds.

But what does not hold so well is the idea that the trend of long waits was ever-increasing. In fact, the midshipmen who entered after the War of 1812 received promotion more quickly than those who entered during the war. In fact, by the cohort of 1835, the time to promotion has been reduced by 10 years. Notice also that the cohorts become more tightly knit: fewer outliers and a lesser variance among the main group.

There may be several explanations for these phenomena. First, in a much larger field of candidates, such as the cohort of midshipmen who joined during the War of 1812, one would expect a wider variance, resulting in a longer time to promotion. The midshipmen of the War of 1812 became the peacetime lieutenants and captains of the slave-trade blockade, the commerce protection, and the diplomatic missions to East Asia. None of those duties had the makings of quick promotions–no daring, no battles, no glorious victories. Nevertheless, the long waits for promotion for these men did not necessarily mean equally long waits for the next cohort.

The more tightly knit groups of the later years indicate, I believe, a more concerted effort at standardization and professionalization.

Possibility of Promotion

The other piece of the commonplace, that it was almost impossible to get promoted, can be framed a different way: What percentage of the total midshipmen received promotions all the way up to captain?

Again, the charts tell a story not quite in line with the general assumptions.

As you might expect, attrition of midshipmen in the War of 1812 is quite high. One would expect that, since many joined the navy during war but didn’t want a career of it.

You can see, though, from the midshipmen-to-lieutenant chart, that in the later years, close to half of the midshipmen were promoted to lieutenant. This is remarkable for various reasons which are probably too complicated to go into here, but suffice to say, it’s not the impression that one might get from reading a history of the navy in the 1830s and 1840s.

Fulfilling the Maker Challenge

So, how does this data and analysis fulfill the maker challenge?

I think doing analysis using data crunching and visualization is one of the most exciting features of digital humanities for a historian. This is a different sort of Maker Challenge entry from some of the others. It’s something that’s going to be useful for my future research, and I am looking forward to continuing to work with this data and push back on more commonplace assertions in the field.

The Challenge entry wouldn’t be complete without mentioning my collaborator again–Lincoln Mullen. He’s the one who wrote the scripts and made the pretty graphs.

Like many THATCampers, I’m delighted to see Participad running on THATCamp.org (yay Boone & Amanda and everyone who made this happen!) Now we can create collaboratively-authored documents inside WordPress without Google Docs (or our friends at the National Security Agency). If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check it out at http://chnm2013.thatcamp.org/notepads/

But Participad is a bit of a challenge to install. See wordpress.org/plugins/participad/ and http://participad.org/faqs/  I did not succeed in getting it running on my own self-hosted WordPress.org site a year ago, and would like to collaborate with others who are trying to do the same.

We hope you’ll join the team from the Innovation Office of the National Archives to learn more about the Citizen Archivist Dashboard and take part in a transcribathon!

For the first Transcribathon session (Friday @ 11 am) we’ll do a quick overview of the dashboard and walk you through the National Archives Transcription Pilot and then we’ll get to transcribing!

In addition to the documents already on the site, we’ve uploaded Harriet Tubman Davis Widow’s Pension File — all 112 pages of it! — just for the event.  It’s a fascinating document and we hope you can help us make it more accessible.

For the second Transcribathon session (Friday @ 1:30 pm), we’ll do a quick overview of the Citizen Archivist Dashboard and demo how to tag in our online catalog and National Archives records in Flickr.  We imagine this session to be a bit more freestyle – you can tag, transcribe, or try out another project on the dashboard.  We’ll answer your questions and assist you as you try out the tools.

We love feedback — let us know on this post or in person!

I’d like to propose a discussion session on the whole issue of collaboration across institutions.  William Pannapacker recently wrote in the Chronicle about the potential value of creating partnerships between research institutions and teaching colleges.  He mentions one good example as his starting point. There are other kinds of examples such as the collaboration between Bryn Mawr, Haverford and Swarthmore.  What are the best examples out there and why have they worked?  What are the impediments to creating cross institutional projects and alliances and how are they best negotiated?  Can such collaborations grow organically, from the ground up so to speak, through small scale collaborations between individual researchers, or do they require institutional level initiatives on a much larger scale?  If there are collaborations between small colleges and large universities, how can we make sure that the institutional cultures, visions, and priorities of the smaller players are equal partners in the project?  How are cross-institutional projects of any sort best sustained over time so that they don’t die off once individual faculty members go in different directions.

I am in the process of working on a collaborative venture with Harrisburg University and my own institution, Messiah College.  We are hoping to bring together a number of different institutions in the Central PA region–the strong liberal arts colleges in the regions, state cultural institutions, possibly Penn State regional campuses–on larger scale Digital Humanities work than we can accomplish working in isolation.  I’m hoping there will be others interested in discussing what has worked or might work or wouldn’t work during the course of such a venture.

Our deified developer, <a href="/author/boone-gorges">Boone Gorges</a>, has rolled out some terrific updates for thatcamp.org just this morning. Notably, when you are logged in to this site, you will be able to Befriend people and to Favorite posts. We're going to use that Favoriting function to collect votes for the <a href="/challenge">Maker Challenge</a>, but it'll also be useful for putting together the schedule tomorrow morning. So, if you read a post you like, be sure to log in and Favorite it! We'll be able to see on the backend how many Favorites each post has gotten. (This'll also help us build the Proceedings of THATCamp this summer.)

Go forth and favorite. 🙂

THATCamp offers a gathering of individuals from many disciplinary and professional backgrounds, and that mix of experiences is one of the things that make it such a great opportunity for collaboration. But, so much work in the digital humanities is driven forward by literary and media studies, I’d like to propose that the historians in the crowd take an hour to talk about ways to form a loose affiliation of those individuals who share our disciplinary commitments and questions.

I think it might make sense to strengthen/create some channels that will let us share questions and methods with others historians (academic, public, independent, and enthusiast). I’m not sure that the outcome of this session might be: a working group? a group blog? an aggregator of conference sessions and meeting events? What do you think we need to grow the sense of community and innovation among digital historians?

N.B.: I began this post before seeing John Glover‘s Shock and Awe proposal. These could easily be combined.

For those lucky enough to have jobs that directly relate to the Digital Humanities, whether you’re working in academia, museums, libraries, or archives, part of your job is to advocate to the unconvinced. While those that created the position may have seen the importance of digital work– or were at least keeping up with trends and understand that DH is the new hotness– many of your colleagues may be less convinced.

We have to find ways to advocate to those in our fields about the advantages of digital work– and persuade them to invest time, money, and energy into digital projects. Likewise, we have to reach out to our audiences and get them to use our digital tools and resources.

I’d like to propose a discussion on best practices for advocacy and outreach. What do you find helps convince your institutions to get onboard with projects you can’t do alone? How do you shift institutional inertia and get people to work together who may be skeptical about DH projects? How do you raise awareness of your projects when they’re ready to go live? How do you convince people outside your institution that it’s worth investing energy and time into your projects?

I see this as a wide-ranging and rather loose conversation, an opportunity people to share across disciplinary, institutional, and other boundaries about what has worked for them, what has not, and why they think that is. Topics might include (but are certainly not limited to):

• How do you persuade the curatorial department of your museum to do the extra work so that your online exhibit might be more than just an online version of the physical exhibit?
• How do you talk to fellow academics who are inveterately analog when you feel they might benefit from DH approaches?
• How do you convince an archive that textual records are important to digitize too– not just the photos that drive a lot of hits?
• How do you work to gain the trust and efforts of a community to contribute materials for an online archive, transcription project, etc?
• Twitter: is it really useful for outreach, or are you just preaching to the choir?
• How do you weigh the need to do advocacy and outreach against the needs to actually produce scholarship/tools/databases/etc?
• Is there ever going to be an end to “What is the Digital Humanities and…” panels at every conference? Is it better to integrate DH scholarship with the rest of the group or to put DH at center stage?
• How do you reach out to other comparable institutions so they know about your projects, and perhaps either send interested parties your way or even collaborate?

…This may not be a super-groundbreaking topic– it’s something we’ve all talked about amongst ourselves. But I think it’s one of those perennial discussions we have to keep having as we all navigate a fairly new and frequently-shifting landscape.

Updated for THATCamp CHNM session on Sat June 8th, 2013, 11am – 12:30pm

Here’s the deal: I’ll teach two key stages of creating a book with open-source WordPress tools, and in turn, will ask participants to post an idea or comment on our open-access book-in-progress, Web Writing: Why & How for Teaching & Learning, sponsored by Trinity College (CT). Sign up to receive free temporary admin account for hands-on PressBooks tutorial.

See demonstration of two tools in WordPress workflow: CommentPressBooks.trinfocafe.org

• CommentPress for developmental editing of draft texts at book, page, and paragraph-level
• PressBooks for publishing across multiple formats (web, PDF, Kindle and ePub readers)

Both tools can run on self-hosted WordPress sites (not WordPress.com), see basics here

See how it works page for system requirements, how to install back-end, and comparisons

Hands-on tutorial with PressBooks temp admin accounts to upload content & create your own book

What works, and what could be improved, with PressBooks? Login & share thoughts on notepad

How can authors and publishers work together to use these tools? See Anvil Academic example

Invitation: shape direction of Web Writing book by sharing essay idea or commenting on others

* * * * * * * *
Original session proposal, June 5th: This scholarly communication session idea expands on Sarah Werner’s proposal on building a repository of publishing contracts, and Joan Troyano’s suggestion to brainstorm new ways to publish humanities scholarship. Can we make a deal to learn from one another? In the spirit of legendary game show host Monty Hall, choose one of these doors to see what you can win at this session:

Door #1: Negotiating with Publishers about Paywalls and Open Access: I have more questions than answers on this topic, and would love to learn more from others’ experiences (see Sarah Werner, Working with a Contributor’s Contract). But in my view, scholars need better negotiating skills as publishers  continue to reposition themselves with respect to the web, and that means (1) understand the motivations of other parties and (2) know your next best option than the one you’re facing at that particular moment. A THATCamp discussion with rich examples might benefit from by my public dialogues with open-access publishers Anvil Academic and my recent exchange with Michigan Publishing/University of Michigan Press, in addition to correspondence, contracts, and reflections in the “how this book evolved” section of Writing History in the Digital Age (co-edited with Kristen Nawrotzki).

Door #2: Hands-on Tutorial with PressBooks: Looking for better digital publishing tools? Hugh McGuire and colleagues recently released the open-source PressBooks plugin for WordPress Multisite, which transforms your content into polished publications for multiple readers: PDF for print, web-book for online reading, Mobi for Kindle, ePUB for iBooks, Nook, etc. My colleagues Carlos Espinosa (Trinfo Cafe) and Korey Jackson (Anvil Academic) and I created a WordPress-based publishing workflow demonstration site at CommentPressBooks.trinfocafe.org. If THATCampers desire hands-on access, I can instantly create sub-site admin accounts and a 5-minute tutorial on creating your own publication in PressBooks, to compare with related tools such as Anthologize.

Door #3: Take a chance on the Mystery Door* (It’s a surprise, just like the game show. Read more about the related Monty Hall Problem.)

So what’s the deal? If you choose any of the doors above, then you agree to post a comment on a book-in-progress, Web Writing: Why & How for Liberal Arts Teaching and Learning. This freely accessible, open peer-review volume explores why & how faculty and students use web-based authoring, annotating, and publishing tools in the liberal arts. My editorial team and I are particularly interested in works that blend the “why & how” by making effective use of the open web platform to blend thoughtful insights with illustrative examples (including links, screenshots, images, etc.). The book’s sponsor, the Center for Teaching and Learning at Trinity College, will award $300 subventions to 5 outstanding proposals, with preference given to authors in greater financial need (e.g. students or faculty not in full-time, tenure-track positions). If you’re a prospective contributor, or just an interested reader, post a comment on our Call for Ideas & Essay Proposals page before June 15th. Full drafts are not due until August 15th, 2013. Learn about our editorial process and timeline for the Fall 2013 open peer review and freely-accessible digital publication, possibly with a scholarly press. See more at WebWriting.trincoll.edu

*Void where prohibited by law. Gambling is not necessarily endorsed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History & New Media, except for spending ridiculous numbers of hours to prepare and submit grant proposals that have very long odds of being funded.

This is a call for help and contributions for a project that (if I get some collaborators) might be part of the maker challenge or might be something that lays the groundwork for a future project.

One of the tricky things about agreeing to and negotiating contracts for publishing something is an unfamiliarity with the options available. Unless you’ve done a lot of publishing, you might not have a sense even of what an author’s contract looks like. Even if you have published a lot, you might not know what a specific publisher offers—are you going to agree to write a contribution to a book only to discover that the publisher demands that you sign over your copyright and isn’t willing to negotiate? (That’s not a hypothetical example, by the way.) I’ve written about negotiating a new contributor’s contract; my experience of doing that and sharing the process suggests there’s a real hunger for advice on what contracts look like and what our options are for publishing.

What I’d like to see is a site where people can upload and share their contracts. There are possibly legal issues to sort through—I’m pretty sure that most contracts aren’t proprietary and therefore we can share them publicly, but I’m also pretty sure that most publishers might not like that. There are technical issues to sort through—what sort of platform is best for a project like this, allowing for public uploads of documents and controlled options for tagging and searching? And there are sustainability issues—this might be a project that is best run by an organization rather than an individual.

I’d love it if there were some THATCampers who wanted to think through these issues with me and to build a prototype of what it might look like. And I’d really love it if there were THATCampers who would be willing to contribute their contracts to it. (If you do contribute your contract, you probably want to black out your name and your publication’s name, but you’ll need to leave the publisher’s name visible.) If you want to contribute your contract, you can leave a link to it below or email it to me (<a href=”mailto:sarah.werner@gmail.com“>sarah.werner at gmail.com</a>)

“A cut section of the sun, showing the spots, Luminous Atmospher, and the opaque body of the sun” An abridgment of Smith’s Illustrated astronomy, 1850. This is exactly the kind of cool images hidden in these books.

We now have a massive wealth of digitized books. Between HathiTrust, the Internet Archive’s Open Library, Google Books and the other range of organizations that have gotten into digitization we have millions upon millions of digitized books. I don’t know about you, but (in general) I’m far less interested in reading these books than I am in skimming them for cool images. The same thing is true of digitized newspapers.

Those books are loaded with amazingly cool images, prints, engravings, woodcuts, pictures, plates, charts, figures and other kinds of diagrams. I tend to keep track of these sorts of things with Pinterest. (My Pinterest is full of images I’ve plucked out of IA books I’m skimming for these kinds of images.) I imagine there are a lot of folks out there who would be happy to play at this kind of visual treasure hunt. Find images, inside digitized items and describe them. I think it would be really neat if we had some basic sort of tool that would let folks who find these things pull them out and describe them so that other folks could find them too and use them as points of entry to the books.

I’d love to scheme with folks about how we could go about systematically tapping into this resource. How can we go about slurping these images out of the books, and getting them described in ways that make the reusable for any number of purposes?  I could imagine something like Pinterest, but that pushed the items back into the Internet Archive or uploaded them to WikiSource and kept a link between the original resource and let someone describe the individual image and keep it connected with the information on the book or newspaper it originally appeared in.

How about this frontspiece, from the 1823 Elements of Astronomy showing a women teaching a young girl to use a telescope to study the moon. It shows up as visual evidence in Kim Tolley’s “The Science Education of American Girls” as evidence for the argument that in the early 19th century science was for girls while classics was for boys.

Or heck, it might be something one could pull together with some kind of marker in things posted to Pinterest. I imagine there are far more cleaver ways to go about this and that is what this session would be about.

I picture us hashing out how something like this might work. We could sketch out what things we might hook together to do this sort of thing.

Here are some things we might talk/work through.

• What would the ideal user experience for this kind of thing look like?
• What would be the best way to stitch something like this together? 
• Should some group host it, or is there a distributed way to do something like this? 
• What groups or organizations might be interested in being involved?

What do you think? Feel free to add other questions we might broach in the session. Oh, and there is nothing stoping folks from blogging out their ideas in advance. Feel free to write up as comments your ideas about how this might work best, or some other use cases you might imagine. Also, just feel free to weigh in and say if you think something like this would be useful.

The graphical world wide web has now been in existence for  over 20 years. Some of the earliest digital humanities sites are almost as old. While some of these sites are tied to people or organizations who update them in one form or another, many are not as funding ran out or creators moved on. We can all think of sites that we’ve run across that are, at a minimum, not up to today’s visual and user experience expectations, and at worst, are simple unusable by some or even all of today’s users.

Since we know that many old sites don’t fade away (though they might blink in and out), but linger on virtually forever (unless they were on GeoCities), what might we do with some of these abandoned or no-longer-funded projects going forward beyond just hoping that the Internet Archive takes some snapshots of them?  How might we build on the work that has already been done, and do so in a way that is more than just an aesthetic facelift for these sites? Is it worth considering ways that we might make such previous work more accessible (both in terms of accommodations and in terms of something that more people would want to use) and usable?

I proposed a session at THATCamp AHA2012 on this topic where we began to list the issues involved.  This time, however, I’m proposing a session where we come up with a design plan for a team that would work on rescuing (updating) older digital humanities sites, and a specific list of skill sets and tools that would be needed to do so. [In the latter category, I know questions of copyright/permissions are a substantial issue to resolve, as are those relating to the technical aspects of how the material was stored and presented, and how a site might be maintained going forward.]

Ideally, the session would bring together people interested in the project, would identify some potential test cases, and even discuss potential grants or other funding sources.

Anyone else interested in designing a digital SWAT team for rescuing old sites?

Instructor: Sheila Brennan

Requirements
1. Working knowledge of Omeka.
2. Desire to teach others how to use Omeka.

The goal of the workshop is to encourage anyone and everyone to jump in and offer Intro Omeka workshops to help train colleagues and students at their home institutions. In this new workshop, we will work together to build an open training kit for Omeka trainers. I will start by sharing my workshop outlines and will ask for others to share their experiences, so that we can build a master workshop outline with suggestions for accompanying files to make giving Intro workshops easier for all. We will make these materials available either in a Google Group or Zotero (or both) to make it easier for everyone to add, share, and build.

Please add to this public Zotero group with Omeka articles and other resources. www.zotero.org/groups/omeka

David Phillips and Tyler Pruitt, Wake Forest University

What do you need to consider in planning and designing a website for a DH project meant as both a resource for the public and a vehicle for outreach and public input? What strategies can you employ in creating such a site?

We would like to explore and have a discussion about experimental ideas and best practices in creating multi-modal sites that have these goals.

What platforms work the best for particular objectives, and why? What web design tools and platforms are most effective for a public humanities DH project?

If you’re in the early planning stages of site design for a DH public humanities project, come discuss your ideas, your questions and your insights.  We’ll work collaboratively on developing ideas for a ‘matrix’ of solutions that looks at the relative advantages of a variety of API, plug-ins and platforms.

This workshop (Friday at 1:30) will be aimed at working through the practical and pedagogical choices about creating a digital history course. We will explore sample syllabi, discuss potential projects, survey various tools, and identify obvious and not-so-obvious pitfalls to constructing a class that engages students in the scholarship and practice related to digital history.  [Not an historian?  Come join us anyway.  Most of these ideas and approaches apply to incorporating technology into any course.]

Note: while there are no formal prerequisites to this workshop, please come with ideas for a course that you can discuss with the other workshop participants.

There have been sessions at past THATCamps that have explored the use of 3D design to envision historical sites or perhaps to demonstrate relationships of words in a concordance or index. In those cases the examples in most cases were a transference of Atoms (papers, manuscripts, notes from conversations) to bits (program design, programming, data entry, user interfaces). For this session I would like to explore your ideas and mine about the impact of Making, Tinkering, Physical Innovation to create 3 Dimensional Objects in the Digital Humanities.

One quick example: 1) Analog — a historian discovers description, perhaps with an illustration of a piece of table ware or furniture. She notes that it has certain qualities that she’d like to explore more. This is where the project moves into 2) Digital space. The object is sketched, then rendered into a 3D representation. Then that file is may need to be translated into a format that can be used by a 3D printer. The object can be scaled down or up to fit the 3D printer that will be used to “print” the object. Once the object is “printed” it has returned to an 1) Analog object. Now the object can be closely observed to better understand those curious qualities. There are many variations on this theme. Let’s share some of them.

A true story. At the San Diego Super Computer Center at UC-San Diego there was a Laminated Object Modeling (LOM) lab. Their printer used thin paper layers pasted then cut with lasers. They created a small model of the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachian Mountains in the same scale. They were small, hand held objects. A ninth grade class on tour was shown the models and asked what did they learn from seeing these two objects. A young woman was the first to raise her hand. Her answer, “The Appalachians are older than the Rockies because they are worn down and smoother than the Rockies.” She was correct.

So, how could 3D tools and resources for Making or Tinkering be applied to ideas, questions, or the work in the Humanities you are doing?

Why should STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) have all the fun? It is time for the humanities to embrace the studio model as a pedagogical means to foster intellectual curiosity. MIT has NuVu; let’s create THATClass! Bring your ideas on partnerships, collaboration, technology integration, hands-on projects, uncovering content, and ways to apply knowledge and skills rooted in the humanities to develop the future of secondary (and post-secondary) education. ==> Saturday