digital humanities graduate seminar || hsci 5970 || spring 14

Investigation into the Origins of Child Restraint Technology Using a Recursive Strategy and Employing a Variety of Digital Resources

My project is an exploration and development of a digital research methodology using a variety of digital resources to begin an investigation of the emergence of a safety technology. I chose to look at child restraint systems, as I have extensive experience with this technology stemming from both my engineering work and my personal life. The work has included conducting full-scale car-to-car crash testing of modern car seats in California, sled testing in Ohio, and lab testing here in Oklahoma. I performed analyses of failed designs and have testified in court on their defects. I also worked for a company creating new child restraint designs and have patents in this area. The first federal motor vehicle standard for child car seats, FMVSS 213, was enacted in 1971. In this paper I used the Google patents database, the United States Patent and Trademark Office database, the Google Ngram viewer, the Internet... Read more →

The Wylde Scholar in its Natural Habitat

Scholars sometimes escape the manicured lawns and sculpted lanes of academia and grow into the wild. Some even thrive there, continuing to work in their learned style outside the peer review and reward structures that taught them. Take the case of this treatise On Sage. This work is a 21st century creation written in 16th century style which references many 16th and 17th century works on the form, functions, and habitat of the herb sage. The dedication section even makes a case for the right of a woman to write such a work according to period-appropriate logic and sources. A pdf version contains a bibliography and notes that indicate the author, Jennifer Heise, has academic training. This piece was not written for an academic audience. It was made for the Society of Creative Anachronism, a group that commonly calls itself a “non-profit educational group”, and that academia would likely refer... Read more →

Archives in a Digital World II

Historians rely on the existence of archives for that ever-essential primary source material, and yet not everything hoped for will be found in an archive. Archivists cannot "save everything", the impossible dream that comes up again and again as historians write about their use of archives. It's impossible because of the massive quantities of information -- of documents -- that are being produced. Archivists make decisions on what to keep and what to let go based on guidelines and practices and always seasoned with the quirks of the materials, the particular archive, and the archivist doing the work. The result is that a small slice of the possible has been selected for the archive. Historians bring their particular perspectives and interests as they encounter an archive and discover the presence or absence of what they seek. This encounter with a small slice of the possible happens again when primary-source materials... Read more →

Does the Author Exist, and Other Questions

Siva Vaidhyanathan is ostensibly the author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity, but that, it turns out, is an interesting question. His book generates several interesting questions for me, although some of them are not explicit in it. The first one is the nature of authorship and in what ways that reacts on copyright law. One thinks of an originator of something. But what counts as the something and what counts as original? If culture is cumulative (and authors have a context) how can anything be original? And what are the consequences of legally binding up the raw material of cultural expression as virtual commodities on the ledgers of corporations around the globe? Is authorship defined by conferring meaning? That would suggest some kind of stable aspect to ‘meaning’, but it is easier to argue that meaning is formed in the mind... Read more →

What is in an Education? A Preliminary Notion

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a student in a classroom must be in want of an education. And, irregardless of the student’s actual feelings on the subject matter, the student knows that a teacher necessarily has beneficial information of which to impart. The task of education, then, is to provide the proper environment in which the student and teacher may experience such an exchange of information. Does this sound like your college educational experience? Probably not. If your experience was anything similar to mine, then you began by choosing a degree, next looked at degree requirements, and then considered the available course options. Then, like arrows cast through the night, you launched yourself on a trajectory with projected targets on the other side of the process. Along the way, in moments of quiet reflection, you wondered about the jobs on the other side of the journey, and perhaps... Read more →

Many Goodly Creatures

I’ve been leading discussions in the undergraduate class I TA for on Brave New World for the past few lessons. Today, as the students prepare to write a critical paper on the novel, I outlined some of the ways they might find an “in” to the the text that connects to the course material. My suggestion- though I didn’t realize it immediately- was laden with objects and ideas that are at the heart of this course and of Digital Humanities in general. First, I pointed them to the (uncommonly thorough) WIkipedia entry for Brave New World, specifically the section that lists the references Huxley makes in the names of his characters (Bernard Marx = George Bernard Shaw + Karl Marx). I mentioned that many of these references are easily located in our class lectures thus far- Malthus and Darwin were topics of discussion in just the last few weeks. Upon... Read more →

Curious Conference...

Over the weekend, I attended the Midwest Junto for the History of Science at Truman State University. In general, the format and presentation content was what I expected. I met and talked with several students and faculty from different institutions. The topics of discussion ranged from criticisms of Whiggish history to a re-evaluation of technological transfer in the Japanese fermentation industry in the 1950s and 1960s. (There were even a few presentations on integrating the "digital humanities" in research.) The most productive and useful part of the entire weekend for me was talking through my projects and receiving new feedback from new people. After making this reflection, I have begun to question why I need a conference to receive feedback from new people. (I don't really think I do, but there is something different about going to a conference, for me at least. But what exactly, I cannot yet answer.)... Read more →

Apocalypse Archive

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation is essentially a scifi novel about a history of science archive. At least it is when you read it as a HSCI grad student studying digital humanities. In the story, the death of humankind’s galactic empire is predicted by a “psychohistorian” – basically a social historian who does mathmagic (my word) to the big data of history to predict outcomes of mass human behavior. No one will listen so he uses his information to set up “Foundations” in remote edges of the empire with vast archives of history, science, and secrecy-laden experts with a plan to build humanity back from the nearly pre-space depths of its fall. Yes, only history of science will save us all. We’ve all had those “what would I do if the zombies came” conversations. My dad enjoys recreational apocalypse planning exercises and tells me regularly of his master plan and my place... Read more →

Would We Know a Good (or Bad) Online Education Experience if We Saw it?

It’s 1848. You are Lucy King, a 14-year-old slave in Kentucky. Will you find a path to freedom? So begins an actual historical online education experience called Mission US, created by WNET Thirteen New York Public Media. It is an example of a real online education platform and it offers something to critique-and to paraphrase John Unsworth, “If an online educational project can’t fail, then it isn’t worth a damn”. But to critique it we need some benchmark to compare it to. Some kind of guideline. Any kind of guideline. Looking for an answer to that I have perused Online Learning: a Manifesto by Jesse Stomel, Why Online Programs Fail, and 5 Things We Can Do About It by Sean Morris and Jesse Stomel, and The Failure of an Online Program, and The Early Days of Videotaped Lectures by Audrey Watters. I found little to work with. That should be... Read more →

Context, Containers and Loss

Untitled Evidence, 1977 : Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel I have found myself referring to the different ‘containers’ afforded to scholars by digital means often in the last few months. The boundaries, adjacencies, depth and permeability of these containers, I believe, are largely constitutive of the meanings we are able to construct around our projects. This language of containers- in digital humanities, the language of platforms, tools, portals, collections, databases, libraries and archives- is essentially the language of context. In art, we are taught the importance of context (container) by experimenting with various augmentations, removals and additions of contexts and containers for images, objects, works of art or entire modes of practice. My favorite example, and arguably the seminal example, of deliberate decontextualization in order to construct meaning is Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel’s project Evidence. Evidence is a collection of photographs, of visual non-sequiturs, culled from archive collections of... Read more →

The Rhetoric of the Digital Humanities

As I mentioned in my first post, developing from my experience as a teacher I am naturally inclined to the educational aspects of the digital humanities. The particular school I taught at was a classical school, which means pedagogically it made use of the trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Basically this consisted of learning the appropriate vocabulary for a subject (grammar), the way the vocabulary connects together (logic), and the way in which the vocabulary may be beneficially expressed (rhetoric). And the first time I read about the digital humanities it seemed to me like a debate about rhetoric: How do we beneficially express the information? How does information take root in the world? To put all of this more succinctly: What does it mean to combine the potential of the internet with the power of information? What can be produced with such a synergy, and what real impact might... Read more →

Napalm and (Words Other than Silly Putty)

Burning bodies so perfectly assume. Nothing Can change that; she is burned behind my eyes And not your good love and not the rain-swept air And not the jungle green Pasture unfolding before us can deny it. - Bruce Weigl "Song of Napalm" Napalm- a highly flammable sticky jelly used in incendiary bombs and flamethrowers, consisting of gasoline thickened with special soaps. Napalm is not an unfamiliar word. I would venture to guess that virtually anyone you asked would answer some semblance of the common dictionary definition. As with most words, we can engage in a semantic discussion about what Napalm means. Do people mean to refer to Louis Fieser's benzene, sawdust, aluminum napthinate, and aluminum palminate concoction, know as napalm-B? (The substance used in Vietnam) Are they talking about the gasoline and rubber compounds used in the Pacific theater by the United States in World War II? Or perhaps... Read more →

What does “Digital Humanities” mean to me?

Spring break! The season to reflect on life’s great mysteries, such as: How does all this DH stuff relate to my life? At least, the first day back to class inspires such thoughts. Much of our reading so far mentions DH as involved in methodological debates within humanities, preservative vs interpretive uses of DH, and the importance of gaining marketable work skills through DH. As a historian-of-science-in-training, I find our discipline tends to be less inclined to experiment with methodologies than other humanities, tends to value leaving preservation to the museum and librarian experts, and still searching for a way to integrate DH as marketable skills for both profs and students. It is still new-ish on the history discipline scene, and therefore conservative – a scholar applying a new economics theory or new textual quantification may get less HSCI street-cred than a more traditional scholar. Preservation doesn’t really tell historical... Read more →

Archives in a digital world

Here are some of the questions I am posing to myself as a result of reading about archives, use of archives by historians, archival absence, and digital representation of archives: Digital humanists seek to create new knowledge by asking questions that could not previously have been asked or, perhaps, imagined, before digital tools. Could archives enable new questions or answers by being accessible digitally? Does digitization enable new understandings of an archive? What information provides enough context for digital objects, whether born digital or digitized -- not physically handled in a folder, in a box, from a shelf, as part of a physical collection? In what new ways can archivists and scholars collaborate in a digital world? How are old ways of working together impacted by digitization of archival collections? I'm really aiming to come at this from an archival perspective rather than a historian's perspective, to see what's different... Read more →

Archive and Artifact : "Great" Images and American Spaceflight

Christa McAuliffe in the Vomit Comet More and more, my peculiar research interests lean toward the historiographic. Indeed, my central research question revolves around the well-worn trope of a “golden age”, which must certainly be a historiographic phenomenon in most cases. In this case, that is the case of the ‘golden age of American spaceflight’, I suspect that the notion of ‘space age’ itself is an artifact, one that is intimately tied to what records remain of it. At least, this is what was stirring in my brain when I read “Archives, Memory and Interfaces with the Past” by Margaret Hedstrom. Of particular importance to the construction of spaceflight’s golden age, I think, is the extraordinary quantity and quality of photographic documentation that was generated to record the first three crewed American programs. Hedstrom applies her argument about the contingency of the archive to photography in a way that reminds... Read more →

A Beginning Framework for Online Education & Its Relation to the Digital Humanities

“The first mistake of many online classes and the majority of MOOCs (so far) is that they try to replicate something we do in face-to-face classes, mapping the (sometimes pedagogically-sound, sometimes bizarre) traditions of on-ground institutions onto digital space.” - so writes Jessie Stommel in his article “Online Learning: a Manifesto” in the digital Journal Hybrid Pedagogy. As I mentioned in my last blogpost, “Online Education,”for the rest of the semester I plan to narrow my digital humanities reflection in the way in which it is manifested in online education. A first question to consider, then, is this: What does online education have to do with the digital humanities? As I began this larger project in earnest this week I quickly ran up against the vastness of it, especially as the term “online learning” has quite a range of meanings. I soon realized that from a historical perspective, it seems... Read more →

Location, location, location

First Item: “Users will be able to judge the authenticity, reliability, and weight of documentary evidence for themselves using the tools, norms, and methodologies of their time, if we provide the contextual information about appraisal and description that they will need to make these judgments.” (Hedstrom, 43) I found these lines from Hedstrom’s article to be representative of many of the suggestions made in this weeks reading over the archive. Until recently, I considered the archive to be a tool that I used rather than system I had the potential to influence. These readings made clear the hand that any scholar has in shaping the form of the archive, which is something I hope to take into to greater account in future research. I do think that these articles could have discussed the location of the archives. . Prior to Internet archives, and even today, the location of an archive... Read more →

I was doing history, I just didn’t know it.

Anne Knowles asked in Placing History “What could Lee see at Gettysburg?” and it seemed very familiar to me. I had asked in 1994 what the bus driver could see before she collided with a tractor trailer rig in a horrific accident that strew eight school children in a ditch and killed three of them. Like Knowles, I used line of sight out of the bus structure and the local terrain, but I also accounted for her movement through time and space up to the stop sign she said she obeyed, and then up to that fateful impact. I arrived at the dusty scene in Southeast Oklahoma about a year after the accident. I constructed my question after sifting through the witness testimony and researching the geometry of the make and model of bus involved. I was doing history, I just didn’t know it. In that case and every other,... Read more →

Online Education

7.1 million. That’s the number of post-secondary students in the US who were enrolled in at least one online course in 2013, according to the research conducted by the Babson Survey Research Group and the College Board in this report. According to the same research, this means that 33.5% of all higher education students took at least one online course in 2013. While we might quibble over the process of doing statistics on such a large scale, as this article by The Chronicle points out, it is difficult for me to quickly bypass these statistics. There is a significant amount of education that is occurring in an online platform. Yet amidst such seeming success, some are still questioning it. Consider this article published by Mark Edmundson, an English professor at the University of Virginia. As he writes, “online education is a one-size-fits-all endeavor. It tends to be a monologue and... Read more →

Design Literacy for Digital Historians

Ellsworth Kelly, Dark Grey with White Rectangle II, 1978. Our seminar discussions about data visualization in the past few weeks have led me, inevitably it seems, back to the same position- historians need design training. When faced with the notorious learning curve of tools like GIS, it seems almost cruel to suggest that we need to learn even more skills, but it seems to me that design literacy underlies all of the conceptual challenges of visualization. You can, for instance, make a technically competent visualization that woefully underserves or misrepresents the objective of your research. Design is about making thoughtful choices to serve an objective. Design literacy is about understanding how to make those choices, and how to predict their outcome. The skills to systematically plan and realize these choices are the foundational skills of the designer, and they’re taught to first-year art students almost everywhere. There is nothing mysterious... Read more →