Browse Author: Christy Pottroff

Notes from the Field: “Medieval Texts in Omeka and Neatline”

Anyone who has tried to get a DH project off the ground knows that take-off can be bumpy, and the project that members of Fordham’s French of Outremer team are working on for our associated site (www.fordham.edu/frenchofoutremer) is no exception. The goal of the site is to bring attention to French-language texts produced in the Holy Land after the First Crusade, and our team wants to create a timeline that maps the time and location of each text’s creation. On a recent Monday afternoon, we met with Alex Gil, Digital Scholarship Coordinator at Columbia University, who introduced us to the Neatline plug-in for Omeka and moved us one step further to getting our project up and running.

We contacted Alex after an initial workshop he conducted about Omeka here at Fordham last April. At that time, he also mentioned the time-mapping capabilities of Neatline. After our request for a follow-up meeting, Alex created a workshop open to the public to allow other interested digital humanities scholars a chance to see how both Omeka and Neatline function. Since Alex is working in a new space at Columbia’s Butler Library, called Studio@Butler, he was eager to see how the venue would work for DH questions and workshops. We were glad to have benefited from this experiment.

Both Omeka and Neatline are flexible platforms that can help us get our project going. Omeka’s capabilities will allow us to create two different collections; one for texts and the other for the individual manuscripts that contain those texts. We will then match both the text and manuscript collections to the date and location of production, thereby creating a visual history of when and where these French-language writings were produced. Depending on our success, we are planning a similar project to map the French-language writings from late medieval Italy, now featured on our French of Italy site (www.fordham.edu/frenchofitaly). Look for some big changes coming soon and thank you, Alex Gil!

NYPL Labs Founder Ben Vershbow to Keynote Faculty Technology Day

Ben Vershbow, Founder, NYPL Labs

Ben Vershbow, Founder of NYPL Labs, will join us to present the Faculty Technology Day keynote on Hacking the Library on Tuesday, May 21st at the Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus. 

NYPL Labs, which Vershbow continues to lead, is an in-house technology start-up at The New York Public Library that has won numerous awards for its inventive handling of archives and special collections online. NYPL Labs has been responsible for some of the most innovative and community-engaging digital humanities projects of the past five years.

Among the public humanities projects developed at the Labs are the award-winning What’s on the Menu?, a crowdsourced menu transcription project; the Stereogranimator, which invites the public to transform historical stereographs into web-friendly 3D formats; and the Map Warper tool suite, used by library staff and the public to align (or “rectify”) historical maps to the digital maps of today.

NYPL Labs describes itself as “a collaboration among curators, designers and technologists . . . dedicated to rethinking what a public research library can be and do in the new information commons.” Investigating what a library – a public memory organization – can be in the age of the network, NYPL Labs projects invite deep interaction with library materials, collaborating directly with users on the creation of new digital resources, data sets, and tools.

Before joining the library, Vershbow worked for four years with Bob Stein at the Institute for the Future of the Book, a Brooklyn-based think tank exploring the future of reading, writing and publishing. 

Please join us for Hacking the Library, and and the full program for Faculty Technology Day, on Tuesday, May 21st, 11 a.m. at Lowenstein Hall, 12th floor lounge.  While this event is primarily for Fordham University faculty, please be in touch with if you’d like attend. 

This program is made possible by the Instructional Technology Academic Computing Group, the Faculty Technology Centers, the Arts and Sciences Deans and the Digital Humanities Working Group.  Special thanks go to Associate Vice President for Academic Computing Fleur Eshghi for her work on this program.

Upcoming Event: Dr. Eileen Gardiner and Dr. Ronald Musto, Executive Directors of the Medieval Academy of America, to speak on Issues and Debates in the Digital Humanities

Please join us on Friday, December 7, at 6pm, for a talk by Drs. Eileen Gardiner and Ronald Musto on Digital Humanities and Medieval Studies: Issues and Debates. The event will take place in McGinley Center Faculty Lounge, Fordham University, Rose Hill Campus. Drs. Eileen Gardiner and Ronald Musto will address two major questions: what are the digital humanities and why do they matter? 

Dr. Eileen Gardiner
Dr. Ronald Musto

An array of platforms, applications, disciplinary approaches, tools and online collections in the humanities all come under the rubric of “digital.” But are the digital humanities simply another methodological approach to scholarly research and communication in the traditional humanities, are they an add-on to current disciplinary research questions and agendas, or are they a specialized subset within the structure of current humanities departments and institutes? Are all humanists now “digital” to the extent of their acculturation to the new technologies and use of digital resources, or are digital humanists a small circle of cutting-edge theoreticians and practitioners? Where is the work of digital humanities best performed? How is it funded, sustained and evaluated? Is the capital and monetization necessary to digitization dramatically changing the very nature of humanistic discourse? Can we even find a common definition of the humanities in the current academic and technological environment? The answers — though argued by some with great certitude and vigor — are still far from certain.

As publishers of Italica Press and past co-directors of the ACLS Humanities E-Book Project, Drs. Eileen Gardiner and Ronald Musto have considerable experience with new digital media. Dr. Gardiner is the editor of The Holy Land on Disk, and curator of two  websites: one on the history of Hell (www.hell-on-line.org) and the other on a medieval Irish pilgrimage route (http://www.pilgrimswaytopurgatory.org). In addition, she is the author of Visions of Heaven and Hell Before Dante (2008) and a variety of articles, including “Visions and Journeys,” in Dante in Context (CUP, forthcoming). Dr. Musto is the editor www.peacedocs.com and the co-author (with Gardiner) of “The Electronic Book” in The Oxford Companion to the Book (2009) and The Digital Humanities: A Primer to Students and Scholars (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press). Dr. Musto is also the general editor of the five-volume Documentary History of Naples, and co-author of Medieval Naples, 400-1400.  

Gardiner and Musto met at Fordham University while undergraduates. Dr. Gardiner went on to do a Ph.D. in medieval English literature at Fordham while Dr. Musto completed a Ph.D. in medieval history at Columbia University.  
This event is was organized by Fordham University’s Center for Medieval Studies with co-sponsorship from the Digital Humanities Working Group. A reception will follow the talk.

You Online: Developing Your Online Academic Presence

We are happy to report that You Online: Developing Your Online Academic Presence led by Michael Mandiberg is still on for Wednesday, November 7, 11:00 a.m. – 2:30 p.m. despite the disruptions of the Hurricane Sandy disaster. The lecture and workshop will take place at the Flom Auditorium of the Walsh Library at Fordham Rose Hill.

Professor Michael Mandiberg

Michael Mandiberg is a interdisciplinary artist, designer and scholar whose work employs each of these methodologies, in part to investigate the significance of their overlap. He creates conceptual art projects, design objects, and publications that explore themes that include environmentalism, systems of exchange, pedagogy, software art, collaboration, Free Culture, and appropriation. Among his projects: He sold all of his possessions online on Shop Mandiberg, made perfect copies of copies on AfterSherrieLevine.com, and created Firefox plugins that highlight the real environmental costs of a global economy online at TheRealCosts.com. He is co-author of Digital Foundations Collaborative Futures and the editor of The Social Media Reader.

A recipient of residencies and commissions from Eyebeam, Rhizome.org, and Turbulence.org, his work has been exhibited at the New Museum, Ars Electronica, ZKM, and Transmediale. A former Senior Fellow at Eyebeam, he is currently Director of the New York Arts Practicum, Associate Professor at the College of Staten Island/CUNY; and a member of the Doctoral Faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center. He lives in, and rides his bicycle around, Brooklyn. His work lives at Mandiberg.com

Program Details: This faculty and graduate student development program will have two parts.  Part I is an hour-long presentation by Professor Mandiberg on the importance of cultivating an online presence and ways to establish one, including the steps for building a basic website using WordPress. This part will be held in Flom Auditorium of Walsh Library and open to anyone in the Fordham community and their guests. Part II will be a hands-on workshop for thirty graduate students and faculty members. Due to the hands-on nature of this workshop, space is limited and pre-registration for the workshop section was required. Participants will learn to create pages and posts in WordPress, and they will leave with a working site framework. Lunch will be served to the thirty workshop participants.

This event is co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Fordham Graduate Student Digital Humanities Group, the Digital Humanities Working Group with support from the Arts and Sciences Deans of Fordham University, the Medieval Studies Program, the American Studies Program, and the Department of Communications and Media Studies, the Department of English, the Department of History, the Department of Theology, and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology.

Fall 2012 Fordham Digital Humanities Programs Start in October!

Fall 2012 at Fordham includes a weekend of THATCamp, a workshop on developing an online academic presence, and a discussion of recent issues in the digital humanities and medieval studies.  Please join us for some of these upcoming events!

•   •   •

Friday – Saturday, October 5-6
THATCamp NY 2012 at Fordham-Lincoln Center
Lowenstein Hall, 12th Floor
(starts at 3:00 p.m. on Friday and continues Saturday 9:00 a.m.- 6:00 pm)

THATCamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp), the internationally-recognized humanities and technology “unconference,” will take place at Fordham Lincoln Center, Lowenstein 12th floor lounge. THATCamp is a series of free “unconferences” devoted to hands-on work and discussion of the intersection of technology and the humanities. It is hosted by research and cultural institutions multiple times a year. THATCamp NY 2012 is free and open to any one who is interested, but seating is limited so registration is required. Registration begins on September 1, 2012 (http://newyork2012.thatcamp.org/).

THATCamp participants include researchers, students, librarians, archivists, curators, educators, technologists, and others interested in using technology to produce humanities scholarship. Sessions at THATCamp are informal: There are no papers proposed or presented. Attendees pitch potential ideas before the weekend on the THATCamp blog and decide on topics of discussion when they arrive. THATCamp NY 2012 discussions will emphasize the theme of collaboration among members of metropolitan research institutions to strengthen current projects and inspire new digital humanities scholarship. JSTOR, the library database for online academic journals, will host the workshop “Using JSTOR’s Data for Research.” Other multi-level workshops are being planned for participants who wish to learn more about specific tools, skills, trends, and platforms for digital scholarship and pedagogy. Fordham’s participation in this event has been spearheaded by Elizabeth Cornell (Pre-Doctoral Fellow, English).

This event is co-sponsored by the Digital Humanities Working Group, Fordham IT, Hunter College Library, the CUNY Libraries, New York University Library, and JSTOR/Ithaka.

•    •   •

Michael Mandiberg, editor, 
The Social Media Reader

Wednesday, November 7, 11:00 a.m. – 2:30 p.m.
You Online: Developing Your Online Academic Presence
a workshop for faculty and graduate students on cultivating an effective online presence
Walsh Library, Flom Auditorium, Fordham-Rose Hill

Led by Michael Mandiberg, Associate Professor at the College of Staten Island and at the CUNY Graduate Center.

This three-hour workshop will have two components: In the first part, Mandiberg will describe the importance of cultivating an online presence and ways to establish one, including the steps for building a basic website using WordPress. This part will be held in Flom Auditorium and open to anyone in the Fordham community.

The second part will be a hands-on workshop for fifteen graduate students and fifteen faculty members. Due to the hands-on nature of this workshop, space is limited and pre-registration for the workshop section will be required.Stay tuned for a link. Participants will learn to create pages and posts in WordPress, and they will leave with a working site framework. Lunch will be served to the thirty workshop participants. Professor Mandiberg is the author of several books on new media, and the editor of The Social Media Reader (NYU Press, 2012).

This event is co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Fordham Graduate Student Digital Humanities Group, the Digital Humanities Working Group, and others (co-sponsor list is in formation).

•    •    •

Friday, December 7, 6:00 p.m.
Digital Humanities and Medieval Studies: Issues and Debates
A lecture and Q&A with Eileen Gardiner and Ron Musto, Directors of the Medieval Academy of America
McGinley Center, Faculty Lounge, Fordham-Rose Hill

Eileen Gardiner
Ron Musto

Eileen Gardiner and Ron Musto are the Directors of the Medieval Academy of America, the largest scholarly organization of medievalists in the world. They are also the publishers of Italica Press, past co-directors of the ACLS Humanities E-Book Project, and Fordham University alumni. They have spoken and written widely on the humanities and the world wide web, including articles and presentations on Google Books, online publishing (in which they have considerable experience), the electronic book, and search engines. Their talk will focus on recent projects in medieval art history, history, literature, and theology and point to debates in the field about, for instance, text encoding, business models for online publishing, sustainability, and standardization of data across platforms, among other topics.

Organized by the Center for Medieval Studies with co-sponsorship from the DHWG.

Cathy Davidson Speaks About Teaching for the 21st Century at Fordham’s Faculty Technology Day 2012

Glenn Hendler, Cathy Davidson, and Micki McGee at Walsh Library

Post written by Elizabeth Cornell

The average person in school today will change careers 4 to 6 times over the course of his or her lifetime.

Sixty-five percent of fifteen year olds alive today will work in careers that have not yet been invented.
These predictions, offered by Duke University professor Cathy Davidson, probably surprised many people in the audience at Walsh Library on Faculty Technology Day. Over a hundred of Fordham’s faculty, graduate students, and staff gathered to hear Davidson’s talk on May 22, 2012. She used the predictions to introduce what she sees as a major problem in education today: Most institutions and teaching methods still place their attention on training students to become proficient twentieth-century workers. As she writes in her book, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn (2011), “We have schooled a particular form of attention based on a particular set of values for the last one hundred years, with an emphasis on specialization, hierarchy, individual achievement, the ‘two cultures,’ linear thinking, focused attention to task, and management from top down.” These are what Davidson calls “keywords for an industrial age.”

William James and Frederick W. Taylor contributed to twentieth-century ideas about attention and work.

Most institutions still teach and train students as though they will have one career, one specialty, and a small network of contacts. Bleak job climate aside, few American students plan to graduate from college and go looking for factory jobs or expect to manage a collection of workers focused on specific, repetitive  tasks.

Our current social and work environments, as well as aspects of our learning environments, are much different. They require us to multitask. They are filled with distractions. We communicate with people all over the world, instantly and in full color with sound. We gather and exchange information in ways that were, in some cases, unknown even five years ago. Though some people claim multitasking and distractions are what’s “wrong” with our culture, Davidson sees them as opportunities for new ways of thinking, expression, building things, and creating knowledge. She warns that schools are not preparing their students for such a climate. Schools should be training students to participate in projects that require collaboration among individuals with different strengths and talents, not teaching students how to ace a multiple choice test or to work silently and alone, at a single, timed task.

In the digital age, students need to be proficient at following a workflow that is not task specific. Students should become efficient multitaskers, which can be achieved through remixes and mashups. They need to fully engage in process, such as publishing a good draft on a blog or wiki, and revising later based on feedback from the crowd. Learning to data mine is necessary, as well, and that includes “big data,” the visualization of data, and storytelling. Students need to develop blended skills, including  an interdisciplinary familiarity with the front end and the back end (such as code) of things. Our differences are valuable. We should collaborate by difference and crowdsource our skills and ideas. These, Davidson says, are the keywords for the digital age.

Near the end of her talk, Davidson asked: “How are we training students for a Wikipedia world where people share knowledge for free, will change their jobs at least once but probably more times than that, and may work in a job that hasn’t been invented yet?” At that point, the audience knew the answer: We’re not. “What can we do to change our institutions?” Davidson knows this almost is a silly question to ask, but she nonetheless makes educators responsible: “It’s our job, not our administrations’, to make these changes.”

How do we begin? For Davidson, the most important thing we can do is change the focus of our attention: we’re not seeing what she calls “the gorilla in the room” because we have been told to look for something else. That is, we still value the old keywords, but they no longer apply to anyone’s needs today or in the future. Change can take place, as she writes in her book, if we see things differently, in a way “that’s based on multitasking our attention—not by seeing it all alone but by distributing various parts of a task among others dedicated to the same end.” Davidson closed her speech by urging us to “think, learn, and share” with each other so we can discover digital and non-digital solutions for learning and working together in a digital age.

Cathy Davidson’s visit on Faculty Technology Day was made possible by the Information Technologies Academic Computing Group, the Faculty Technologies Centers, the Arts and Sciences Deans and the Digital Humanities Working Group. Special thanks go to Associate Vice President for Academic Computing Fleur Eshghi for her work on this program.

Guest post by Elizabeth Cornell, Pre-Doctoral Fellow at Fordham University’s English Department.

Scalar: An Option for Digital Humanities Publishing

Malibu Beach Surfer, 2011. Photo by R. Goldwitz

This post is by Elizabeth Cornell, a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Fordham University. She’s been reporting on her recent summer residency at the NEH-Vectors-CTS Summer Institute at the University of Southern California. She is also the Project Coordinator for the Keywords Collaboratory, a wiki-based space where students and researchers can collaborate on keywords projects inspired by the book, Keywords for American Cultural Studies, edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler. This is her last installment.

Oliver Wang has written a book exploring the social history of Filipino American mobile DJ crews in the Bay Area, forthcoming from Duke UP. His visual archive contains video footage of that scene and hundreds of different DJ crew business cards. These days, the web is great place to make a book’s visual archive available to readers. But dumping all that multimedia onto YouTube can defeat the critical purpose of offering it in the first place. And building a web site is time consuming and expensive. One solution, as I mentioned in an earlier post, is the publishing platform Scalar, under development at the University of Southern California, which allows for a clean integration of text and multimedia.

On the first day of the Vectors-CTS Summer Institute on Digital Approaches to American Studies, held at USC, Oliver and other participants presented the material they planned to develop with Scalar.

Another project was Carrie Rentschler’s “38 Witnesses: A Media Archive of the Kitty Genovese Murder.” The 1964 murder is well-known, in part because no witness came to the young woman’s aid. In her Scalar project, Carrie’s textual commentary complements archival resources and recent cinematographic attempts from student to professional film makers to show how the life and death of Genovese has been mediated in her life after death. Scalar allows Oliver and Carrie to interface text with image in dynamic, often nonlinear ways, greatly expanding the depth of their arguments.

After seeing these and other presentations with their rich visual, audio, and textual resources, I was elated. But I felt a little glum about my own project, a largely text-only endeavor. I was attending the Institute to explore how Scalar might at some point be used as a companion to Glenn Hendler and Bruce Burgett’s book, Keywords for American Cultural Studies. Another goal was to investigate how the Keywords Collaboratory—a MediaWiki where students around the country produce largely text-based essays on keywords they’re tracing in their coursework—might be transformed by a platform such as Scalar.

Fortunately, my glumness quickly evaporated. At the Institute I had a design team made up of deeply creative individuals: Tara McPherson, leader of the Institute; John Carlos Rowe, American Studies scholar; and Craig Dietrich, one of Scalar’s two main creators. The keywords project interests them because it does not have extensive multimedia material associated with it. They want to see how Scalar might be used in a largely text-based way and, at the same time, leave the portals open for people who wish to add multimedia. They also are interested in how Scalar might serve as pedagogical tool for collaborative work, an essential component of the keywords project.

Scalar does seem promising: Users can easily add text and upload multimedia; no HTML knowledge required. When it comes to collaborating, it’s possible to see who contributed what and when, and to view the project’s version history. The finished project looks clean and is easy to read, whether there’s only text or image on the page, or text and image. Readers and authors can leave comments for each other. Unique tags link to the book’s pages, sources, and images, revealing relationships among seemingly disparate elements and encouraging nonlinear navigation of the article or book.

Scalar still has some kinks that need working out. But for the humanities students who were born wired, Scalar might be the answer to the MediaWiki’s limitations. For the humanities scholar who feels frustrated by current digital publishing platforms, or simply fears the learning curve involved with new technology, Scalar might be the answer, too.

Travel Blog: Finding New Ways to Publish in the Digital Humanities

A visualization of media and their relationships to the pages in a Scalar book.

Post written by Elizabeth Cornell. This month Elizabeth Cornell, a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Fordham University, will be reporting on her summer residency at the NEH-Vectors-CTS Summer Institute at the University of Southern California. She is also the Project Coordinator for the Keywords Collaboratory, a wiki-based space where students and researchers can collaborate on keywords projects inspired by the book, Keywords for American Cultural Studies, edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler. This is the second installment of her report.


•  •  •

For most students and researchers working in the humanities, Microsoft Word is an essential and, when it’s not causing a frustrating formatting problem, transparent tool. But Word’s usefulness is somewhat limited in the digital humanities, where people value collaborating with others; reaching a wide audience inside and outside the academic world; commenting on the work of others; and using multimedia. If Word can do any of these things, it does so in a very limited way.

Of course, there are blogs, wikis, and web sites. They are better at displaying images and pointing readers toward other multimodalities. Readers can comment on blogs and writers can collaborate on a wiki article. Web sites are a more involved product and most researchers would rather be researching and writing than taking the time to plan and design a useful site. The advantage to these forums is that, unlike a book, they are not static; the information they contain can be modified. But what about, for example, a cinema studies paper that needs to draw on a large amount of original source material? What about researchers with access to large, often personal, databases and visual, audio, and digitized print archives? How do you get that multimedia to interface with text and commentary in a seamless, elegant way?

Enter the software platform, Scalar. As I mentioned in my previous post, Scalar is under development at USC and designed specifically for people working in the humanities. It facilitates the kinds of analytical and contextual arguments that have long been central to humanities-based research. Scalar allows for a dynamic exchange between readers and writers. Authors can use multimedia to illustrate their essays or add a visual argument to them. Paths link different pages and sources together in varying configurations, releasing us from the linear, left to right hierarchy of the printed book. Unique metadata such as tags can be added to the pages and media in Scalar, allowing authors to devise their own nuanced systems of categorization and identification. This encourages connections between terms, subjects, and sources that otherwise may not be obvious. In addition, Scalar allows collaboration among multiple authors on a single work. Readers can leave comments and, in some cases, add to the book their own written and visual material.

Scalar makes it easy for users to draw directly from multimedia databases and archives such as Critical Commons and the Internet Archives, two sites with vast holdings of multimedia curated and uploaded by researchers and educators to be used for critical purposes. The material collected on these sites ranges from digitized books in the public domain to video interviews with Holocaust survivors to clips from “The Simpsons.” The use of the material is protected by fair use agreements and a code of best practices for copyrighted material used without permission. (For more information about fair use, see American University’s Center for Social Media website.)

For my next post, I’ll offer more details about my project at the NEH Vectors-CTS Institute in the Digital Humanities, which is to develop into a Scalar book several essays from Glenn Hendler and Bruce Burgett’s book, Keywords for American Cultural Studies.

Skip to toolbar