I’d really like to see your visualization, but it’s not appearing in the post. Can you check the post?

That slideshow can be seen here:

chnm.gmu.edu/resources/permissions/

Link to the map

I am interested in visualization tools, possibilities for text mining, and perhaps creating a “Zotero for Dummies” or “Omeka for dummies” in Spanish for colleagues in Argentina.

This wiki collects information about tools and resources that can help scholars (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) conduct research more efficiently or creatively. Whether you need software to help you manage citations, author a multimedia work, or analyze texts, Digital Research Tools will help you find what you’re looking for. We provide a directory of tools organized by research activity, as well as reviews of select tools in which we not only describe the tool’s features, but also explore how it might be employed most effectively by researchers.

If you are unfamiliar with some of the jargon, please see our Glossary page.

Yvonne, I think the evangelism point is really good. My personal interest stems from talking with people who, in 2013, have little or no awareness of DH, but I think there remains a “DH divide” — not in terms of pro-/con-, but organizations where it’s well-integrated vs. not at all. There’s enough exposure that there’s pushback, as Tad mentioned, but Fish (or Snarky anti-DH memes) may not mean that there isn’t still need of “missionary” work.

Then how does the viewer/screen/page that we see things out of scale also change our interpretation (mobile device, projected on a large wall, the Little Printer, et al).

Great idea!

Early arrivals are also welcome to stop into CHNM before 5 or so!

Meanwhile archival “best practices” for scanning DPI are hardly future-proof– I think current standards will be seen as woefully insufficient in less than ten years– and many archivists are worried about loss of archival control of the image if they give it away at full size.

The big image transforms the image into something with added value. The “web standard” 72dpi or what have you actually transforms the image by REDUCING value to users.

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Yvonne– I actually used the word “evangelism” in my first pre-draft of this post. 🙂 I decided to drop it just because the term has different connotations for different crowds. Can one be an evangelist without being uncritical? It’d really depend on who you asked.

That said, “evangelize” and “evangelist” seem to be used most frequently in the academic quarters of DH. I would have said “evangelize” a couple years ago, definitely. After a little while working in the world of museums and libraries, I’ve picked up their jargon. I probably picked up “outreach” from working in museums, especially museum educators. And “advocacy” is a huge buzzword in libraries.

I’d actually say that, to a certain extent, academic DH has turned away from evangelism in the last couple years– when I’m feeling glib, I describe it as the “Fish Effect.” So many influential articles on the Digital Humanities in the 2000-2011 period were evangelist in nature. They promoted DH by arguing for the legitimacy of the techniques, and the place of these techniques within the humanistic tradition. These were papers, articles, and books that argued that DH was real, it was valid, and it was exciting. At a certain point, though, there was a shift, and more of the top articles now are about application of digital methods, deepening the theory that undergirds DH, issues like that.

There was a move, I’d argue, away from advocacy and outreach, at least in what constituted the most exciting additions to the DH corpus. If I’m looking for a tipping point, I’d look to Stanley Fish’s 2012 series of (negative) articles about DH for the NYT Oppinionator blog. If Fish, who the anti-theory defenders of New Criticism have been pointing to for years as an example PoMo faddishness, is dismissing DH as simply a fad (and doing so without irony)– well, then, the tipping point’s been reached, DH has made it, advocacy seems passe.

Or at least that’s my (extremely flip) take on it. But the thing is, even if we are all on board with the notion that we need to push DH publishing and scholarship past evangelism, that evangelism, or advocacy, or outreach, or whatever you want to call it, is still part of the project. And in jobs that relate to DH it’s often part of the job description, either officially or unofficially. You’re often being brought in to push people or institutions in a direction. So maybe it’s more informal and ad hoc, but it’s still a big part of the “work” of DH.

…And I’ve completely gone off on a tangent, now.

…

((ahem…))

((Strike all the above.))

Yvonne– Yes! I used the word “evangelism” myself, in an early draft of this post!

I think this is something that could spark further conversation if this becomes a panel!

Perhaps folks who are interested in this session might consider submitting an essay idea or commenting on our open-access book-in-progress, Web Writing: Why & How for Liberal Arts Teaching & Learning, sponsored by Trinity College, CT (CFP through June 15th, with subvention awards). WebWriting.trincoll.edu

www.zotero.org/groups/dhsyllabi

I’m also wondering how we can make better use of existing platforms by making them work better together to help build public digital scholarship.

Labeling Face Images in the Wild Link

Label Me: Link

Learning from a Visual Folksonomy: Automatically Annotating Images from Flickr Link

Unlike these projects which are more general, the data from digital books should have more structure and information allowing for generation of good descriptive texts.

As THATCamp.org web administrator I am hereby taking under advisement the proposal to make your categories “exhibitionism” and “shaming” part of the general pervasive infrastructure.

@Zach: great question. i’ll supply a few trivial sets of texts for us to play with, but it would be fun to have your own as well, even if just a handful of to get practice working on a new set.