Category: Uncategorized

Back in February, the HASTAC group Digital Collections hosted a webinar on the use of Omeka in the classroom. As Fordham has recently acquired a license for Omeka, this webinar was incredibly useful in navigating the basics of both Omeka.org and Omeka.com.

One of my current projects attempts to use Omeka to curate a large manuscript tradition with copies spread around the world. The webinar made Omeka much more navigable, and I encourage anyone interested in using Fordham’s license to take a look at the video.

The link to the webinar video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV9xcJMiZ8Y

-David Levine

Topics in Digital Mapping:
Bringing it all together: CartoDB

We look forward to seeing you tomorrow for the final Topics in Digital Mapping event of our four-part series.  No need to have attended the earlier sessions: we will provide a recap and meet and greet from 2-3pm.

Georectifying Maps
MapWarper and how to find digitized images of old maps

Lincoln Center Lowenstein Building 1017

2:00pm for a recap of Palladio and previous sessions as well as discussion of your projects
3:00pm for Georectifying Maps

Debates in the Digital Humanities!
Wednesday, February 4, 1-3pm, FMH 220.

Next week we’ll be discussing Debates in the Digital Humanities, an excellent DH-project-and-ebook about the concept of Digital Humanities research and projects, which is centered around debates in the field.

The meeting will discuss three chapters from the book:
The Digital Humanities Moment, by Matt Gold
Time, Labor, and Alternate Careers in Digital Humanities Knowledge Work, by Julia Flanders
The Resistance To Digital Humanities by David Greetham

Attendees are encouraged to read one or all of the chapters with the following questions in mind:
How are the authors in question defining DH? Is their use of the term already dated? Is DH an “Alt-Ac” career field, or a natural extension of humanities research? Is DH necessarily humanities-only?

Attendees are of course encouraged to also bring other, new questions, comments, and opinions.

Last October, I co-led a seminar on Spatiality and Digital Mapping. We focused on the conceptual side of digital mapping, going through concepts, theory, and the evolution of the field. Our aim was to expose the audience to the concepts and programs with the intention of following up with one or more intensives on the programs garnering the most interest. Afterwards, there were clear winners: CartoDB and ArcGIS. with secondary interest in Google Earth/Maps.

For anyone who has worked on these programs, do you think it would be worthwhile to teach intensives on each program separately? Or are the concepts close enough? My plan now is to separate them, but to advertise the courses for specific audiences. CartoDB, for example, would be with people who really just need visual analysis and little to no high-level analysis. For ArcGIS, the intended audience would be those less interested in publically-accessable visualizations and more interested in quantifiable analysis. Google Earth could go either way, though I think that course could be taught much more quickly than the other two – certainly faster than Arc.

Does this make sense? and would there be interest in the NYC area for non-Fordhamites to attend these courses?

-David Levine

Response from Jessica Breen:

I’d suggest teaching them separately, with the ArcGIS session followed by a CartoDB workshop. Folks who just want to plug and chug some data into a good-looking map aren’t likely to want to devote the time needed to learn Arc, but just because somebody wants to use the analytic tools of Arc doesn’t mean they don’t want an attractive map at the end…and Arc is useless for making anything even remotely as attractive as what CartoDB makes just by default.

I’d also encourage you to maybe look at QGIS instead of ArcGIS if you’re going to teach a desktop GIS. I switched the intro to GIS course I teach over to QGIS from Arc this semester and it’s been great. All of my students are able to use the program on their home computers regardless of what operating system they run and instead of losing access to the program when their student license runs out, they can keep Q forever since it’s FOSS. It has meant that I had to learn a couple of QGIS quirks…projections are treated entirely differently than in Arc and Composer, the map editor in QGIS, is just as wonky as the editor in Arc, though in it’s own unique way…but that’s the case with any software package.

As for non-Fordhamites who might be interested in attending, you might get in contact with the MapTimeNYC folks. They hold regular community meetups for learning web mapping tools and techniques. They’re on Twitter as @MapTimeNYC.

by Jacquelyne Thoni Howard
PhD Student, History Department, Fordham University

       In August 2013, I was assigned as the graduate assistant to The Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). The project provides a digital voice to African Americans who lived and contributed to the Bronx, and it seemed an exciting opportunity to me. After the first meeting with Dr. Mark Naison, Professor of African and African American Studies and founder of the BAAHP, I concluded this was no usual desk job. My project responsibilities include managing the digitalization of the oral history interviews and the student workers who have been hired to help.  Dr. Naison directed me to a cabinet which stored the entire project and suggested I start with an audit.  Keeping this in mind, I created a 10-month project plan, and started the audit. From there, the challenges began.

Finding Solutions to the Challenges

The Media. When conducting the first audit, I found a plethora of media in different formats. This cabinet, a time capsule of the media era, illustrated how the project adapted over time to new media. Thus, VHS, cassette tapes, mini-cassettes, CDs, DVDs and digital media via iTunes housed the approximately 300 interviews of Bronx residents. Many of the interviews existed in different, and duplicate formats. Summaries and transcripts, if they existed, had been saved in different places and formats. I could not begin the digitization until all the material—almost 900 pieces—was first placed in a logical order. I created an organizational system using Microsoft’s SkyDrive, which allowed me to inventory each item and its components (interview, transcript and summary) for future upload into the library’s Digital Commons, a digital research repository. In the past six months, our student workers replaced or created missing summaries and transcripts, and readied over 30 interviews based on establishing and creating missing components.

The Platform. I worked with Fordham University’s Walsh Library at Rose Hill to set up a space for the collection in Digital Commons. This digital repository stores media and document sources for research purposes. The library staff helped set up the site and customized it with project bios, pictures, folders, and established naming conventions. But herein lies another challenge. Whenever I need to make a change to the project, I have to go to through the library staff. Sometimes it may take weeks to make changes because the staff has many other obligations in addition to managing Digital Commons. 

Management. A large, digitized project such as The Bronx African American History Project presents the challenge of needing an overseer with both project and people management skills. This project provided opportunities to hone my project management skills, and to improve my people management skills. As a project manager, I ask questions and provide answers, and track benchmarks. As a manager of people, I’m concerned with the daily interactions of the workers. I also conduct meetings, manage work times and assignments in person, via phone, email and Google+.

The Workers. I confront another problem involving the constant rotation of student workers and graduate assistants. A good project plan helps the next group pick up the pieces in an environment with an revolving workforce of people. Therefore, I create clearly defined turnover reports and attempt to organize the project for easier turnaround. However, establishing standard operating procedures and organizational systems takes time away from the actual production of digitalization.

Also, workers and assistants need to be trained on how to utilize the technology to load the media sources consistently. In other words, I need to determine beforehand within the system how and where to place digitalized information so that it is coherent. I train students to place information in specific, though sometimes illogical places (For example, we place the full name in the First Name data field box. By manipulating data fields to meet a certain criteria, our project achieves a certain look. However, this approach challenges the accuracy of the project now and in the future.) To ensure quality, after students load the interview into Digital Commons, I check it before publishing to the web.

Additionally, each of the student workers possesses different strengths and interests. I provide them with additional responsibilities to keep their motivation up, which sometimes ends up stalling the project. This experience, however, reaffirms that it is okay to take risks to empower workers, and to refocus the project when the risks do not take the intended path. Whenever I refocus, I propel the project forward by revising my project plan and in the process created a better organizational system for the next graduate assistant.

Other Challenges. Other challenges include departmental researchers, such as faculty and graduate students, who place holds on interviews they do not want published. This presents additional questions regarding how to organize this additional data set. The volume of the interviews and corresponding media makes these holds difficult to honor. This makes organizing media more challenging, considering that many media components, such as transcripts, summaries and the actual interviews, are missing. To combat this problem, the student workers load everything that is ready, regardless of its “hold” status, but we do not publish it until the hold is lifted. This approach allows for the time-consuming work to be completed upfront even though the students’ labors are not seen right away.

The last challenge deals with advertising the repository for future researchers. The answer lies with social media, Google and the BAAHP website. By posting strategic messages within these media formats, we connect followers to the repository. Additionally, googling The Bronx African American History Project, or specific interviewees’ names, also provide access. I am still considering other ways to communicate the repository beyond these outlets. Promotion suggests a common problem in digital archiving. How do institutions with digital collections indicate what they have available so that researchers have access to ongoing digital additions? Is posting a catalog on the institution’s website enough?

Linking Challenges to a Larger Discourse in Digital History

     For digital history projects, careful planning such as creating project plans, entrenching organizational systems, and authoring current and future communication strategies, are essential. However, student workers need proper management from the graduate assistants, by providing them with smaller chunks of information and directions, and taking risks in order to motivate and empower them.

Using the BAAHP as a case study, digital archiving emerges as an important field. While it is true that research methods change as researchers bring the digital age to the field of history, the actual logistics of creating access to research materials also need to adapt. Archivists and institutions must force this change through careful planning. Digital archiving means housing sources so that materials are more accessible, providing tools that makes research more efficient, less costly and time-consuming, and keeping history meaningful in a world where values are changing.

The BAAHP provides an accessible voice to a group of people who might not possess other communication outlets within a historical context. It provides valuable research information to researchers. Additionally, this project provides an example of how to manage a large-scale digitization project. Lastly, it also contributes to the on-going discourse questioning the challenges, goals, risks, rewards and ethics of digital history.

visualization: a glossary

• metadata: information about information. You’ll use metadata to describe attributes of your items, like their dates of creatine, sizes, etc.
• Dublin Core: a specific kind of metadata used by Omeka. Dublin Core keeps descriptions consistent.
• omeka.net (compared to Omeka.org): there are two kinds of Omeka sites. Omeka.net is already hosted, meaning that you don’t have to install anything. Omeka.org is customizable, but you have to be comfortable installing Omeka on a server.
• GIS (Geographic Information System): an integration of hardware, software, and data designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage and present all types of geographical data.  GIS is a “tool-centric” approach to digital mapping.
• neogeography: combines the complex techniques of cartography and GIS and places them within reach of users. Neogeography is a “user-centric” approach to digital mapping.
  

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  gamification: a glossary

• achievements: accomplishments such as exemplary performance on specific assignments
• add-ons: expansion packs that adds new material, such as additional stories, new areas of exploration, new items, or more levels.
• avatar: the character a player directs through a game.
• dungeons: complex spaces that must be explored before they can be unlocked.
• Easter egg: a hidden feature of a game
• extrinsic motivation: motivation by means of tangible rewards or pressures, rather than pleasure (e.g. intrinsic motivation).
• game choice: the pedagogical model. Justin Hodgson argues that, more than course readings, game choice shapes “content, structure, assignments, [and] activities” (50). Hodgson borrowed his Quest Line structure from World of Warcraft, whereas Benjamin Miller modeled his class on the gameplay of Legend of Zelda.
• Game Master: the person who acts as an organizer, authority of rules, arbitrator, and moderator for a multiplayer game. Lee Sheldon discusses how a Game Master isn’t necessarily synonymous with a Game Designer: “A teacher need not be a game designer to be a Game Master, but, in most case, must be the Game Master. Just as you are in charge of the development, you continue to be in charge of the classroom” (220).
• gamification: the application of game mechanics to non-game activities.
• gild: a community in a role-playing game. Guilds can be comprised of any number of players, depending upon common goals and play style of the game.
• hack: a clever or quick fix to a problem. It can also refer to a modification that allows users access to otherwise unavailable features (which might give the player an unfair advantage over opponents). McKenzie Wark wrote the book (A Hacker Manifesto) on it.
• level chart: allows players to see one another’s scores. Scores are sometimes posted anonymously; other times, Game Masters use avatars to induce competition.
• postmortem: a game development term, borrowed from medical examiners. In the game development, a game’s features, design, and development are autopsied. In a class, the corpse is the class itself. Teachers often schedule a postmortem for the last session to create a space for conversation about what worked and what didn’t.
• quest: the levels through which players acquire skills.
• random factor: ensures that the outcomes of player choices are not always predictable. Some teachers integrate dice to randomize groupings of students into GILDS, for example.
• scaffolded instruction: guides students from smaller, simpler skills, to larger, more complicated ones.
• stuckpoints: a term coined by Peter Elbow as a way of recasting failures as essential to writing development.
• walkthrough: a step-by-step guide to obstacles, puzzles, or bosses. Players create walkthroughs for other players.
  

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  gamification: related concepts

• active learning: “experiencing the world in new ways, forming new affiliations, and preparation for future learning” (Gee 23).
• critical learning: “learning to thinking of semiotic domains as design spaces that manipulate us in certain ways and that we can manipulate in certain ways” (Gee 43).
• semiotic domains: “any set of practices that recruits one or more modalities to communicate distinctive types of meaning” (Gee 18).
• multimodality: “In multimodal texts (texts that mix words and images), the images often communicate different things from the words. And the combination of the two modes communicates things that neither of the modes does separately. Thus, the idea of different sorts of multimodal literacy seems an important one. Both modes and multimodality go far beyond images and words to include sounds, music, movement, bodily sensations, and smells” (Gee 14).
• disruption: somewhere between intervention and subversion, a “creative act that shifts the way a particular logic or paradigm is operating” (Flanagan12)
• intervention: a specific types of subversion that relies upon direct action and engagement with political or social issues, a “‘stepping in,’ or interfering in any affair, so as to affect its course or issue’” (Flanagan 11).
• subversion: “the turning of a thing upside down or uprooting it from its position; overturning, upsetting; overthrow of a law, rule, system, condition” (OED).
  

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  gamification: a bibliography

• Alberti, John. “The Game of Reading and Writing: How Video Games. Reframe Our Understanding of Literacy.” Computers and Composition 25.3 (2008): 258–269. Print.
• Bogost, Ian. “Gamification Is Bullshit.” Ian Bogost. Web. 8 Apr. 2014.
• Bogost, Ian. How to Do Things with Videogames. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Print.
• Colby, Richard and Rebekah Shultz Colby. “A Pedagogy of Play: Integrating Computer Games into the Writing Classroom.” Computers and Composition 25.3 (2008): 300-312. Print.
• Dignan, Aaron. Game Frame: Using Games as a Strategy for Success. New York: Free Press, 2011. Print.
• Elbow, Peter. Writing without Teachers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Print.
• Flanagan, Mary. Critical Play: Radical Game Design. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009. Print.
• Hodgson, Justin. “Developing and Extending Gaming Pedagogy: Designing a Course as Game.” Eds. Colby, Richard, and John Alberti. Rhetoric/ Composition/play through Video Games: Reshaping Theory and Practice of Writing. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 45-62. Print.
• Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print.
• Juul, Jesper. The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013. Print.
• McGonigal, Jane. Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. New York: Penguin Group, 2011. Print.
• Miller, Benjamin. “Metaphor, Writer’s Block, and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Writing Process.” Eds. Colby, Richard, and John Alberti. Rhetoric/ Composition/play through Video Games: Reshaping Theory and Practice of Writing. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 99-112. Print.
• Sheldon, Lee. The Multiplayer Classroom Designing Coursework as a Game. Boston: Course Technology/Cengage Learning, 2012. Print.
• Kapp, Karl M. The Gamification of Learning and Instruction: Game-Based Methods and Strategies for Training and Education. San Francisco: Pfeiffer, 2012. Print.
• Wark, McKenzie. A Hacker Manifesto. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Print.