In the last session we took the metadata games app pulled in a bunch of images from astronomy books up on project gutenberg (It’s easy to find the image files in their books) and stood it up as a way to crowdsource identification of images from these books. Read about metadata games here. In the session our group worked up some details on how this might work more broadly, but we were actually able to stand the thing up with metadata games as the beginnings of a proof of concept.

Here it is and it totally kinda works!

Kurt Luther’s Demo instance of AstroTag

In the rich soup that is digital humanities, there are a few ingredients that lend a special flavor. One of these is collaboration: far from being taboo, collaboration is the encouraged mode of working. Another ingredient is open source: we borrow and build on each other’s code and data to make even more interesting things. A third ingredient—one we haven’t quite added enough of—is credit. Digital humanists believe that everyone who contributed to a project should get full and fair credit.

These DH values are the impetus behind my contribution to the maker challenge: a plugin for Omeka called Honor Thy Contributors.

Honor Thy Contributors is intended for Omeka sites that have multiple collaborators who have added items to the project. It extends the Omeka open-source platform. It’s primary feature is to give credit to the contributors by making transparent what each person’s contribution is.

The plugin finds out the names of the people who have contributed and how many records they have added to the database, with a link to all those records. It displays that information in a table on a page, and adds a link to that page to the public navigation. Here is an example from the American Converts Database:

The plugin lets you edit the title, the URL slug, and the text before and after the table of contributors.

For now the plugin uses a method to calculate the number of contributions that is convenient for the way we do things at the American Converts database, but I’m currently working on an update that makes it more congenial to the way things are done on every Omeka database, especially sites that use the excellent Contribution plugin.

The code is on GitHub. Check out the develop branch for ongoing development, but download the stable version from the master branch. Here is the link to a ZIP file of version 0.1.1, the working version as of the Saturday afternoon of THATCamp. Once the plugin is sufficiently tested I’ll send it to the good folks at Omeka for public display.

Over the last 3 years I have been the unofficial keeper of the THATCamp Google Documents folder. After each THATCamp I could keep track of, I tried to collect all the Google Docs available publicly into a public folder. Later I began to archive them as a zip file to avoid losses from people accidentally moving the items out of the folder.

With this THATCamp’s move to Participad it seems like Google Docs will become a thing of the past. But the years of notes, links, ideas, session proposals and generally nifty stuff are still out there, and it would be a shame if they were lost to the shift of tools.

So, using Sigil, I’m taking the entire current store of Google Docs from THATCamps and converting them into an organized, sorted eBook.

That eBook will include all the notes that I have access to, as well as the two Twitter Archives I maintain control of. It will be free, easy to download and ready to become the next big reference book on your Kindle.

So vote for this project below and perhaps you’ll get a iOS bookshelf version too.

Here’s the eBook, version 0.5, EPUB Edition: THATCamp the Google Docs Archive | Read it in your browser right now!

Hey everyone! Here is my post for the Maker challenge!

I was really inspired by the limericks that everyone shared for the first session so I created a website that shares all of the poetry that I have written for THATCamp. It is all written about my experiences at the camp!

I am still working on it, since it is still going on. But here is the link: baumab.wix.com/thatcamppoetry

Please vote for me!

My entry for the Maker Challenge is WP DPLA, a WordPress plugin for displaying related items from the Digital Public Library on your blog posts.

The DPLA has lots of cool content, and WP DPLA is a way to help your readers discover and explore that content. It takes the tags you’ve assigned to your post – say, cheesehead and Packers or pizza, beer, and nachos – and fetches four random items from DPLA’s partner collections, and displays them at the bottom of the post.

WP DPLA in action

The plugin has a couple of nifty features:

• Getting an API key from DPLA requires sending a cURL request. WTF, you say? The WordPress plugin has a button that’ll send the request for you, and a handy form where you can enter the API key when you’ve gotten it via email.
• For the sake of variety, the items will cycle. But for the sake of speed and efficiency, they don’t cycle on every pageview – only every five minutes.
• Don’t want items at the bottom of your posts? There’s a Settings page in the Dashboard where you can turn the feature off, and use the bundled sidebar widget instead.

Check out the plugin in action at the demo site (click through to individual posts). The code is hosted on Github (if you clone the repo, make sure you init and update the submodules). And if you’d like a zip download to try on your own WordPress blog, download it here.

People have requested a way to update plugins from the admin side of Omeka for a while. This approach takes a round-about approach, depending on GitHub.

In the dashboard, you now have a panel like this

The “Update plugins” page gives:

Click Update….aaaaannnndddd…..

Ta-daaa!

In an effort to make a space for digital historians to communicate and collaborate, I created a “Commons in a Box” site: digitalhistorians.org/.

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.

I'll admit it, what I spent my day creating is completely useless, but it was fun to make! Click the link to get to the full five page comic.

<a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/jq39aglfp29erub/Retro.pdf">https://www.dropbox.com/s/jq39aglfp29erub/Retro.pdf</a>

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To make this, I used an ipad and its camera, the app called Comic Life, and dropbox. The whole flow is easier on a computer than an ipad, but it was fun to see if I could do the whole thing on the fly.

So I did it: I made a beta of a contract repository. It’s a work in progress, but check it out, free your contracts by contributing them, and leave suggestions in the comments. Oh, and favorite this if you want to vote for it in the Maker’s Challenge!

For some context, see my earlier post pleading for assistance. My hope is that this prototype can be developed into something that will be more robust once I find an institutional partner to spearhead it.

Long long ago….
Once upon a time…

Digital storytelling is buzzy right now, and I think it would be interesting to gather and talk about what that means for the way humanists communicate with the public. This could be in terms of personal or organization branding or presenting research. I’d also like to dig into why scholars revert to common narratives and how thinking with the lens of storytelling can disrupt those narratives for better(?) engagement. There’s an increasing number of storytelling tools (Cowbird and Backspacesto name two) that are circulating as ways for people to tell their own digital transmedia stories. So how do scholars take this into account in how they present themselves and their work?

I propose a session in two parts. First, talk about what’s out there, how ideas of digital storytelling can/cannot help scholars communicate, and then a second part where individuals or groups put together their own short digital stories. At the end we could share the stories around a campfire (or maybe just circle around a screen with this).

As a complement our discussions about new forms of scholarship and scholarly publication, I’d like to propose a session about how digital tools are already transforming the academic production of knowledge. Despite recent transformations, I think most scholars in the humanities still follow a research and writing model that goes back at least a hundred years:

1.) Collect information
2.) Organize information
3.) Write scholarship

As a history graduate student knee-deep in dissertation research, I’ve been surprised how little my advisors and my peers’ reflect upon their method. I suspect that their approaches to steps two and three have changed very little in the past twenty years. For most, Microsoft Word and notecards still seem to be the “tools of the trade,” with perhaps a nod to citation software (Zotero/EndNote) and data backups (DropBox).

In this session, I’d like to discuss how 21st century scholars should approach both the organizing process and (on good days) the writing process as well. Everyone has their own system I’m sure; this would be an opportunity to share our tips and tricks. How do people fit their messy data –archival photos, interview transcripts, and odd notes– into searchable databases? Or do they? Have people ditched Word for plain-text files or Scrivener? Do people hide their data away on their personal drives, or publish it online? When are digital tools helpful, and when are they just, well, fiddling? Hopefully our conversation will generate some useful guides and blog posts.