Archive for the ‘Research Methods’ Category

  • Distributed Scholarly Collaboration

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    Now that I’m out of the application woods, I’d love to have a conversation about the more difficult DH task I’ve been working on: how to form, organize, and motivate distributed scholarly platforms, like the one I’m contemplating under the “Modernist Letters Project.”  I think building the infrastructure for quicker, more transparent, open-source scholarly knowledge creation  and review will be one of the major projects for the next decade, as it has already been in the case of NINES.  And I tend to think that the new platforms that are successful will be both field and object-specific (thus, in my field, the Modernist Journals Project, now Modernist Versions Project, etc.).

    I’ll work through today referencing and organizing this problem, but it seems to me that first of all this should be approached by examining the following questions: I’d appreciate others’ thoughts about this, or sources to look at.

    A. What has worked (NINES, Whitman Archive) and why?

    B.  What hasn’t been successful?

    C.  What sorts of contracts for collaboration are most succesful? What organizational structures, forms? (I know Lynn Siemens has written a good deal on this.)

    D. How does the work get incentivized?  How credited?  What are good models for developing pedagogical units, etc (an interest of one of my collaborators)?

    E. How do we include the non-digital (native) scholars in the field?  What sorts of  ongoing mechanisms for peer-review could be included?

    I’ll come back and reference this a bit later, as well, once I’ve gone through some of the available material.  Folks interested in participating in the Modernist Letters Project are particularly welcome to get involved here, of course.

  • three thoughts

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    I have three ideas for sessions this year — and will also be keeping one eye on this guy:

    Pinterest Wunderkammer: For years, I’ve fantasized about creating the perfect interface for a digital humanities cabinet of wonders, but never had time to follow through. Have they beaten me to it? I didn’t pay much attention to Pinterest at first, but then started to see some startling collections. I especially find the temporal dimension fascinating: if you follow this woman’s feed, you can watch her move through varying aesthetic obsessions over time — coherent washes of color, for instance, even across diverse assemblages. So it’s fluid, performative collection-building — or beautifully diachronic fixing. There’s plenty to read about Wunderkammern, but I’d like to have a conversation with some immediate implications for building.

    Quantified Self: At past THATCamps, I’ve co-hosted workshops and conversations on physical computing (especially wearables). I also started a Zotero group for research and inspiration on soft circuits. Now I’m getting interested in the “quantified self” movement (see Wolfram for an extreme example) and am thinking about melding the two. My FitBit has an API. My phone knows where I’ve been. Anybody else interested in the intersection of DH, quantified self, and physical computing?

    Rethinking the Graduate “Methods” Course: I wrote this thing. Now I’m hosting these conversations and running this program. I also spend a lot of time thinking about how well qualified lots of these people are to help train the next generation of humanities faculty and knowledge workers. Wanna talk about it?

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