OH5 Projects


“Between Alexandria and Babel” Dr. Paul Dilley presents at OWU 1

A couple weeks ago, Dr. Paul Dilley visited Ohio Wesleyan as a capstone (of sorts) to Dr. David Eastman’s grant-funded endeavors. Dr. Dilley is himself involved in a number of digital humanities projects at the University of Iowa and beyond, including multi-spectral imaging of ancient books (think here of the discovery of the Archimedes Palimpsest), the creation of Big Ancient Mediterranean (or BAM, an open-access project allowing the exploration and visualization of ancient texts in new ways), and the painstaking transcription and digitization of the Chester Beatty Kephalaia Codex.

Banner image for BAM.Especially in the case of the latter, we might imagine Dilley as any traditional scholar of (and in) the archives, laboriously attending to the minute details of the (barely) visible word, identified only as a trace. In his talk, Dilley led the audience from this imagined space into the virtual space afforded by computational technologies. Indeed, he made this connection explicit in framing his particular brand of digital scholarship as a kind of “digital philology,” which he defines in his forthcoming publication as a set of “[n]ew scholarly interpretive practices that both produce, and are enacted by, the transfer of texts from manuscripts and the printed page to digital files subject to computational analysis and visualization” (“Between Alexandria and Babel,” forthcoming).

The proliferation of these digital textual files affords scholars across disciplines the opportunities to push against the boundaries of traditional scholarly inquiry. Before discussing two ways in which we might do this – rich annotation and distant reading – Dilley underlined the importance of open, clean, and linked datasets. As a case in point he noted how propriety licenses on some collections of digital data may limit a researcher to “keyword search, which reproduces the functionality of the print index.” This, he adds, is to say nothing of the potential unreliability of the search: OCR’d textual data is often suspect, and one never knows what potential search returns may be missing as a result of bad OCR (optical character recognition). [Full disclosure: my last job was with the Early Modern OCR Project at Texas A&M, so bad OCR and/in old books are subjects near to my heart.]

Nevertheless, research opportunities for large corpora will also proliferate, allowing researchers to encode analytical readings into texts and to read them distantly. The latter, you may know, is a way of interpreting from a 10,000 foot view large collections of text that are otherwise unreadable by humans. While it is not dependent upon the former, encoded text, distant reading and other digital research are deepeneded by this brand of “rich annotation.” On this point Dilley cites the “Gentle Introduction to XML“:

“Encoding a text for computer processing is, in principle, like transcribing a manuscript from scriptio continua; it is a process of making explicit what is conjectural or implicit, a process of directing the user as to how the content of the text should be (or has been) interpreted.”

To Professor Dilley’s mind, the kind of large-scale work that one might do on a digital corpus – be it mark-up (i.e. encoding), distant reading, or any other interpretive practice afforded by computational methods – may best be thought of as “extended intelligence”: in no way “artificial,” it is a very real (and heretofore impossible) supplement to conventional literary criticism.

I’m sure Professor Dilley would love to hear from you if you have questions about his specific projects. If you’d like to know more about text encoding or distant reading of textual data (or bad OCR for that matter!), feel free to contact me!


Latinos in Rural America Fosters Student Research and Community Engagement

Clara Román-Odio

Earlier this month I attended the second of four exhibit launches for Kenyon professor Clara Román-Odio’s public humanities project, Latinos in Rural America (LiRA). The material exhibit, currently in the Mt. Vernon Public Library, also has a digital component that is held in Kenyon’s digital repository. As we read in the brief introduction to the project’s digital component,

This project pursues the goal of providing an intimate window into the lives, origins and aspirations of Latinos in Knox County, home to Kenyon College.

The exhibit in Mt. Vernon follows the project’s initial unveiling in December at Kenyon College and will be succeeded by exhibits at the Ohio State University (9 – 23 February) and Miami of Ohio (30 March – 12 April).

Román-Odio has folded LiRA into her Introduction to Chicano/a Cultural Studies as a platform for exemplifying the ways in which community-engaged learning (CEL) strengthens undergraduate research and civic engagement. You can read more about this important union of public humanities and CEL and the students’ work therein in Kenyon’s digital repository, and may I suggest a deeper dive to learn more about the student-led implementation of a program that will help Mt. Vernon Latino/a youth prepare for the college application process.

LiRA takes as its model a similar project by Kenyon professor Ric Shefield, the Knox County Black History Archives, digtized under the Ohio Five Libraries’ previous grant "Next Generation Library." Both LiRA and the Black History Archives are imagined as a part of a unified series of similar local oral history projects that would fall under the banner of The Community Within. In the coming year, Sheffield plans to share the concept of The Community Within with other liberal arts colleges, providing a framework for local oral history projects.

To my mind, one of the great foundational principles of The Community Within, a principle exemplified by both LiRA and the Black History Archives, is the necessity of presenting the projects’ research in a material exhibition within the community itself, in this case the public library. Such a presentation not only ties a Kenyon College research project to the local community, but it also gets to the core of accessibility and digital projects. Indeed, the community-based research is the guiding force here; digital preservation and dissemination are peripheral (though important) concerns. As pedagogical enterprises, projects like LiRA ask students to go beyond the simple reporting of archival material – of known histories – and asks them instead to create and curate an alternative archive of underrepreented cultural material.

Ohio Five Digital Scholarship is grateful to have been able to play a part in LiRA and the Knox County Black Archive, but both have come about with the generous support of a number of people and agencies. The LiRA exhibit provides an extensive list of credits and acknowledgements – including Ohio Humanities, a state affiliate of the NEH – but I will take this opportunity to underline the contributions of Jenna Nolt, Kenyon’s Digital Initiatives Librarian who has been creating these projects’ public faces in Kenyon’s digital repository.

What are some of the ways in which you are doing public and/or digital history with your liberal arts students? Let us know on Facebook or post a comment a below.


Winter ’15 Issue of “Away,” Oberlin Travel Journal

Apart/Together

Away Journal, Fall 2015

I think I must have heard somewhere that, in some places, if something happens twice then it has become a tradition. And here we are: the second issue of Laurie McMillin’s travel journal Away is now live. In the Winter ’15 number you’ll encounter pieces by Marco Wilkinson, Richard McGuire, Molly Bradley, Zack Knoll, and Linda Grashoff.

If you have time I encourage you to read more about Away as well.

Enjoy.


OH5 at Bucknell DS Conference

2014.bucknell.wuOn 14-16 November, Ohio Wesleyan’s Ching-Hsuan Wu presented on “Foreign Language Flipped Classrooms – Scaffolding Grammar Knowledge Anytime, Anywhere.” Part of a panel on “Faculty-Student Partnerships in the Hybrid Classroom,” Prof Wu’s presentation was interactive and engaging as she modeled her pedagogy even while presenting on this example of it. Here’s the abstract of her presentation:

The presentation introduces a collaborative pedagogical project that aims to improve and promote the digitalized interface of teaching and learning in studies of foreign languages for liberal arts colleges through the concept of the flipped classroom. The goal of the project is to develop a digital collection of self-directed grammar learning clips through which students study descriptive linguistic facts independently prior to their class meetings, thus creating space for instructors to use face-to-face class time more effectively by focusing on interactive language use and application–skills that often require practice with other speakers of the target languages in appropriate contexts. Motivated by this objective, the project team, including foreign language educators, librarians, students, and information technology specialists, collaboratively design, critique, and revise the materials and discuss plans for disseminating and publicizing this learning resource. The project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, produces a set of thirty five-minute teaching video clips on Chinese grammar points selected and sequenced by frequency and usefulness in authentic language use at intermediate levels. The learning content in the clips is delivered by a professor at Ohio Wesleyan University with guest professors and students from other collaborating colleges to approximate digitally the classroom style of learning that is valued by liberal arts colleges.


In addition, I presented a lightning talk as a part of a roundtable on “Institutional Models for Digital Scholarship and Collaboration.” The gist of my talk — which, as a lightning talk, is mostly gist — was that we mustn’t forget the human elements when we’re collaborating on digital projects. I talked about our efforts in the Ohio Five to connect these distance digital scholars and to bridge silos wherever possible. Removed from context the slides won’t be as useful as one might hope; again, though, the gist should be clear. Maybe.

I’ve been telling anyone who’ll listen about this conference, especially for those in liberal arts colleges and universities who have folded together teams of faculty, students, and technologists of all sorts. There were a great many panels that, when they didn’t actually feature student presenters, directly addressed students’ roles in building these digital projects or in shaping these digital pedagogies. It was an immersive couple of days, but the scheduling created perfect pockets of time for sidebar conversations. It had an active backchannel and the IRL interactions came easy in that crowd.


Ohio Five Group Presents on Digital Scholarship Projects at CWRU Digital Scholarship

Today, I am presenting on a panel with Ohio Five folks at a digital scholarship colloquium at the Kelvin Smith Center at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Carol Lasser (OBE), John Krygier (OWU), Katie Holt (WOO), and Jon Breitenbucher (WOO) are talking about what they’re doing in their courses, while I’m providing some greater context for the work we’re doing in the Five Colleges. Here’s the abstract that we submitted, with a link to PDF version of our collected slides below that.

 

“Building to Scale: Shaping Digital Coursework with Tools and Partnerships”

 

Building on a prior three-year initiative to create curricular digital collections, the libraries of the Five Colleges of Ohio are one year into a new three-year program to partner with faculty in larger, more ambitious curricular digital projects. Under the new initiative we continue to develop faculty- and student-curated curricular collections, but the focus has broadened from thinking of the digital as a presentational medium—from digitization—to thinking with the digital as a pedagogical method. Many of these new projects have more moving parts, and we find ourselves building networks of technological and human resources as we navigate our digital turn.

 

I propose a panel in which I speak briefly and broadly, as the Ohio Five’s Mellon Digital Scholar, about consortial efforts to build these networks, thus framing our panelists’ discussions of their projects and partnerships. Oberlin College’s Carol Lasser will discuss her collaboration with college archivist Ken Grossi as they led students from her course on First Wave American Feminism into the archives to encounter primary resources and the questions arising from their representation both historical and digital. Second, working (and presenting) with Jon Breitenbucher, Director of Educational Technology, College of Wooster’s Katie Holt will discuss how they are exploring mapping both in and of identity formation by asking students to think holistically about “digital citizenship.” Ohio Wesleyan’s Geography professor John Krygier is also asking his students to think about notions of place in a project that has linked communities at OWU, Denison, Ohio State, and the City of Columbus. This team is building a dynamic GIS platform that will allow students to negotiate and interrogate modern spaces in Columbus, OH by bringing digitized historical real estate maps into the field.

Case Western DS Colloquium Slides