TravelBlog: The Erotic Life of Data, or LOD-LAM and the Pursuit of Compatible Data

Linked Open Data Summit meeting planning board, Day 1

“Sharing is caring, but linking is loving.” 
— Laura Smart, June 3, 2011

Spoken with the acoustic equivalent of a wink, Caltech metadata librarian Laura Smart’s wrap-up in the closing circle of the LOD-LAM Summit captured that unspoken je ne sais quoi that infused the two-day conference on Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives and Museums Summit. Organized by Jon Voss and Kris Carpenter Negulescu, with support from the Sloan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities, and the Internet Archive, a certain juicy enthusiasm for the possible permeated the meeting that otherwise revolved around the more technical matters of the relative merits of XML, JSON, and RDFa. A hankering for limitless understanding and knowledge, akin to the promise of the apple in the Garden of Eden, imbued the meeting with something like desire without an object, something like what the Lacanian psychoanalysts might call a feminine jouissance. The idea of everything linked to everything else, of infinite connectivity, has that expansive pre-Oedipal appeal that can make anything less seem petty, vulgar, even obscene.

Just after the June 2-3rd LOD-LAM meeting wound down, three major search engine players — Google, Microsoft Bing, and Yahoo — announced that they had agreed to conform to the new standards developed by schema.org. And two weeks later, at a panel on funding opportunities at the DH-2011 conference (notably marked with a psychedelic pink and orange “summer of DH-love” theme), NEH-ODH Director Brett Bobley observed that, “Linked open data is getting really hot.” In the month of June, linked open data was just about everywhere one turned, often accompanied by its delightfully disruptive partners open source code and open access repositories. The possibilities for linked open data and an emerging semantic web were beginning to unfold as realities.

But what does linked open data mean for us, for you and me? As one LOD-LAM Summit participant pointed out, linked open data may sound awesome, but do you really want your banking data to be linked and open? Maybe not so much. How about those medical records that are rapidly going online? Hmmh. Probably not. Linked open data holds within it the possibilities for the machine-reading of vast quantities of data, yielding results that we can’t possibly foresee. The promise of the view of everything, the ultimate digitally-enhanced panopticon, arrives without ethical boundaries. Completely transparent data leaves open the possibility not just of the bliss of connection, but the paranoia of exposure.

So what is the middle ground here, between the eros of linked open data and the terror of naked exposure? Between the boundless, possibly unnavigable sea of open data and the Babel of incompatible coding, proprietary silos and paywall obstructions?

The breakout group convened by Eric Kansa of UC Berkeley’s I-School arrived at a moderate plan. We crafted an agenda for making data linkable rather than necessarily linked. Kansa described the context we’ve been working with: in 2002 there were 35 different projects created in response to the cultural heritage crisis in Iraq precipitated by the U.S. invasion of that nation, yet none of these projects had interoperable data. This led the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to respond by developing a focus on interoperable data for digital collections and content and prompted Kansa and his colleagues to develop the Open Contexts project for cultural heritage data.

Our LOD-LAM breakout group developed a measured, incremental proposal. We proposed a set of readability standards that all might be applied to all online data to support link-ability. Among the recommendations:

  • (X)HTML and CSS be validated code (devoid of those funky little coding errors that allow it to run, but hang it up when moving from platform to platform) 
  • code has a mobile version (via CSS) 
  • code be ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) compliant 
  • pages have a print version (via CSS) 
  • pages be machine read-able – in XML, RFD or JSON 
  • all coding to use a mark-up with metadata standard and relevant to the specific field (VrayCore, DarwinCore, and other community vocabularies and schemas) 
  • all objects have unique permalink 

Our goal was compatibility, or interoperability, among various data rather than immediate linked open data. In the overall erotics of data, if linking is loving, then linkable is loveable. The goal of compatible or interoperable data is to ensure that the data remains linkable/loveable even as fashions in programming, metadata, and platforms change with time. Linkable, loveable: that’s compatible data.

All you need is love.  And data standards.

•   •   •

This is the second of several blog posts chronicling a June of DH Travel. Next up: “On Place and Space,” reporting on site visits to Georgetown University’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, and the University of Virginia’s Scholar’s Lab. 

Please note: Opinions expressed in the TravelBlog briefs of the Fordham Digital Humanities do not necessarily reflect the views of my home institution. 

—Micki McGee

TravelBlog: My Month of DH

Landed at SFO for Linked Open Data Summit

June has turned out to be My Month of DH.  I’ll be traveling more than half the month, finding out as much as I can about digital humanities with the pragmatic goal of working with colleagues to assess how we can best foster DH scholarship at a Fordham and the theoretical goal of deepening my understanding of what Pierre Bourdieu calls the formation of cultural fields.

As part of this research I’ll visit some digital humanities centers, spend a week at DH-2011, sit-in on the Digging into Data Conference at the NEH next week, interview some DH folks, and head out to San Francisco just now to attend the (LOD-LAM) Summit. LOD-LAM = Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives, and Museums, and has has a close connection to the Compatible Databases Initiative that I’m working on with colleagues across the country.

Somewhere in the weeks leading up to this month of travel, Jason Rhody at the NEH suggested that I blog my DH travels as an open access means of sharing what I learn about digital humanities and the places that digital humanities scholarship thrives.  Hence a new tab on this website: the Research Travel Blog.  Watch for new posts there.  Please note that the opinions expressed in the travel blog do not necessarily reflect the views of my home institution.

News: FCLC Senior Working on DH Project Wins Prestigious Beinecke Scholarship

Cristina Vignone, a senior at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, recently won Fordham’s first Beinecke Scholarship for graduate study in the arts, humanities or social sciences, a $34,000 award she will use after she graduates in 2012 with a double major in History and Anthropology. In her junior year Vignone undertook a digital humanities project that reexamined the Salem Witch Trials through visual representations of the relationships shared by various trial participants. Vignone developed the project under the guidance of Fordham Digital Humanities Working Group member and history professor Roger Panetta. The project was presented at the Fordham University Research Fair in Spring 2011 and at the 2011 Lower New York Regional Conference for the National History Honor Society, Phi Alpha Theta, at Marist College. It was also selected for further digitization by graduate students of the Information Visualization course at the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University. Congratulations to Cristina!

Open Access Advocate Kathleen Fitzpatrick to Keynote 2011 Faculty Technology Day

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Ph.D.

The Digital Humanities Working Group could not be more pleased that Kathleen Fitzpatrick, a pioneer in developing new forms for scholarly publication, will speak on the topics of “Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy” as the keynote speaker at Fordham’s annual Faculty Technology Day. Sponsored by Fordham’s Instructional Technologies | Academic Computing Group, Dr. Fitzpatrick’s talk will consider the impact of digital technologies on publishing and the academy.

Dr. Fitzpatrick is a Professor of Media Studies at Claremont College and the author of The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television (Vanderbilt University Press, 2006), and of Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, forthcoming from NYU Press and previously made available for open peer review online. She is co-founder of the digital scholarly network MediaCommons. In mid-April MediaCommons and New York University Press were awarded a major grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in support of a year-long study of peer-to-peer (P2P) review. Fitzpatrick was also recently appointed as director of the newly created Office of Scholarly Communication at the Modern Language Association.

Faculty Technology Day runs from 9:30–5:00 pm on Monday, May 16th at Fordham’s Lincoln Center Campus, Lowenstein Building, 12th floor. Fitzpatrick’s keynote is scheduled for 10:00 am. The Lowenstein Building is on the northwest corner of 60th Street and Ninth Avenue. ID is required for entry. This event is free, but registration is recommended. Map: Fordham University–Lincoln Center.

News: NEH Digital Start-Up Grant Awarded for Fordham-Initiated Compatible Data Summit

The National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities awarded a nearly $25,000 Digital Start-Up grant to Fordham University Sociology and Anthropology professor Micki McGee to convene a September 2011 meeting on fostering open access interoperable data. The Compatible Data Initiative, or CompDB, was one of just 22 projects funded in the competition. CompDB aims to focus scholars working in digital network mapping projects on developing conventions that will will make their data interoperable to allow for cross-project connections.  

Scholars from the University of Nebraska, the University of Southern California, the University of California-Berkeley, Indiana University-Bloomington, Lehigh Univerisity, and the University of Virginia will meet to brainstorm on data standards. This project has been developed in collaboration with The Corporation of Yaddo, one of America’s oldest and most distinguished artists’ retreats, and the New York Public Library’s Division of Manuscripts and Archives, where Yaddo’s records are housed. 

News: Fordham Graduate Student Chosen for Prestigious Digital Fellowship

Elizabeth Cornell, a doctoral candidate in the English Department and Project Coordinator for the Keywords Collaboratory, has been selected as a fellow of the 2011 NEH–Summer Institute on Digital Approaches to American Studies hosted by Vectors and the University of Southern California’s Center for Transformative Scholarship.  While in residence at USC in July and August she will be working on the re-design of the Keywords Collaboratory website that just moved to Fordham. The revamped site will launch in 2012, coinciding with the publication of the second edition of Glenn Hendler and Bruce Burgett’s Keywords for American Cultural Studies.  Congratulations to Elizabeth, Glenn, and Bruce!

Growing Digital Research at Fordham

Fordham’s commitment to fostering scholarship in the service of others was underscored at last week’s Growing Research panels, where a series of public digital humanities projects directed by Fordham faculty were profiled. Organized by James Wilson, Director of Faculty Development, “Crossing the Digital Divide” showcased an array of digital humanities projects with a shared commitment to open access.
Growing Digital Research: Micki McGee introduces
panelists Patrick Hornbeck, Roger Panetta,
Barbara Mundy (partly hidden) and Damian Lyons.

Sociology professor Micki McGee introduced the panel by providing an overview of the burgeoning field of digital humanities, highlighting both recent developments and the field’s surprisingly deep roots in the pioneering mid-20th century computational linguistic scholarship of Italian Jesuit Roberto Busa.

Project presentations by professors Patrick Hornbeck (Theology and Medieval Studies), Barbara Mundy (Art History), Roger Panetta (History), as well as by McGee (Sociology and Anthropology) highlighted the breadth and depth of collections and open research access tools in development by Fordham faculty. Ranging from a digital repository of Hudson River historical documents to a searchable online edition of the Latin works of 14th-century theologian John Wyclif, from the bi-lingual digital curation of thousands of Spanish American colonial artifacts to a social network mapping tool for charting artists’ communities, these projects share a commitment to open access scholarship as a service to the community.

Computer scientist Damian Lyons, chair of the Department of Computer and Information Sciences, served as a respondent, along with Fran Blumberg (Psychological & Educational Services) whose scholarship includes “video-game learning”; Leonard Cassuto (English), General Editor of the Cambridge History of the American Novel; Young Eun Lee (Information & Communication Systems), who researches the antecedents for and impacts of online communities; and Kristen Turner (Curriculum & Teaching), who is investigating Digitalk: The digital writing of adolescents. The afternoon concluded with discussion of the transformative effect of digital technologies on every aspect of higher education, from research, to teaching, to academic publishing.

Dr. Barbara Mundy presented Vistas,
a digital resource of colonial
Spanish American artifacts.
Dr. Roger Panetta discussed the breadth of
resources available in the DigitalHudson collection at
Fordham’s Walsh Library.
Dr. Patrick Hornbeck, who co-chairs
Fordham’s Digital Humanities Working Group,
 presented on The Latin Works of John Wyclif.
Fordham University
Press Director Fredric Nachbaur raised
questions about the future of the book.




All photos by Bruce Gilbert.

Seed Money: Provost Awards Discretionary Grant to Fordham’s Digital Working Group

The March 9th meeting of Fordham’s Digital Humanities Working Group meeting got off to an exciting start when Catherine Buescher of the Office of the Provost dropped by to let us know that our request for discretionary funding from the Provost was approved. The nearly $78,000 award supports research on model digital humanities centers at peer and aspirant institutions and provides seed money to take seven digital projects by Fordham faculty to their next iteration.

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