Week 7: In other mapping news…

Here is my georectified map of Rome Under Trajan, Anne-sourced by Map Warper. It was quite fun to make. Both this layer and the base map are in a nice conventional Mercator projection so it didn’t contort much when rectified.

All I want to say is that I’m so pleased this tool is out there and free now. The pain known as rubber-sheeting maps (manually or digitally) even six-odd years ago has been lessened for map-people. I want to share with non-mapping people that in past, in order to work a historic map to be able to overlay with a base map and layers in a GIS was a nightmare beyond imagining! (OK, maybe I hyperbole, but it was tedious and time consuming)

This was a great tool to get a handle on in the interest of class project and beyond.

Spatial History (Week 7): Practicum and Reading Reflection

Maps…

I have an old bias regarding maps. It dates back to somewhere between my own roots in scientific training and to further formation in undergraduate GIS and archaeology coursework. Maps are tools of analysis, not necessarily of presentation (unless you’re making maps for use finding roads or in atlases); maps are inherently ideological, and all the more so the more shaped to presentation they become. So, the Richard White article resounded most, and at first glance, only, with the mode I’m used to: use the tool to find out something you couldn’t find through other means, share findings, maybe take some nice screen shots to illustrate your findings, with rich text descriptions to support them, the pictures void of meaning except in the context of the described processes of discovery.

White discusses some of the problems historians and humanities folks in general might have with using a GIS, the analytical mapping tool, for inquiry: they just don’t handle fuzzy data that well. Even a seemingly clearcut archaeological puzzle like mapping clusters of artefacts is ultimately going to call for a tool that understands distance in terms not easily managed by programmes that deal in absolute space and made to handle the parcels of land bureaucrats. We need it to understand the intangibles of Moretti’s Marxist-informed “forces” or the set of liberties and constraints in White’s “motion.” White’s solution was to make ugly maps, essentially: to make maps that defy use as presentation tools, illegible network diagrams, distorted space. I like this. This is not Martin Jessop’s interactive object, manipulable from the end of data or of visualisation; this is a two-headed serpent, where data and visualisation are not discrete, cannot be manipulated separately.

Yet our other readings focused on maps and other spatially driven visualisations as media for the communication of scholarship. The most popular humanities solution to Lewis Mumford’s charge against “asking the kinds of questions only computers can answer” (cited first in our readings in Tim Hitchcock’s “Place and the Politics of the Past”), and maybe also against ‘showing them in a way only a computer (or a specialist) can read,’ seems to culminate in the kind of object we’re calling the DDM (alas, this acronym turns my unresisting brain towards a popular roleplaying games….). I’m not sure I like this.

I experimented with Neatline Sandbox and tried to plot out some temples of Venus in Italy and Sicily (the spread and syncretism of the cults of Venus-Aphrodite-Astarte being one of my pet projects) on the timeline and with images. It was kind of fun, but I’m not sure I see the point. Even with the complete, sophisticated projects featured in Hitchcock and on the HyperCities site and feature article by Todd Presner, I couldn’t get much more out of it than the idea that it was a quaint and charming way of presenting information, as White put it, “discovered by other means” than mapping (and quite expensive to boot as he also said!).* Will someone talk me out of this impression? What am I missing?

*my judgement doesn’t extend to 3D modeling, which, although treated together in Presner’s discussion of good practise, to my eyes, has clearer value as an experimental device for humanities research.

Site Planning and Design, Agile Development (Reading Reflection, Week 4)

Our nuts and bolts week for starting to think about developing projects, I’m glad this reading came towards the beginning. Cohen and Rosenzweig’s chapters in Digital History quickly delineate the considerations one must bear in mind when planning, and do this in such a way that when closer inspection is required, the reader can return to this section, or later chapters can be consulted.

The idea here is to give us enough base knowledge that we can obey the motto for this class meeting and begin planning and designing, and developing, agilely. The idea here, expressed by Cohen and Rosenzweig, is “plan first,” and plan the project before the technology: the technology should be secondary and subservient to the goal. We do, however, need some basic knowledge of what’s possible and how labourious it is before we begin to plan. Do we need a server? Do we have or can we afford the tools to put multimedia online?

Our List Apart selections get into nitty gritty of site planning, evaluation, reevaluation processes long before execution, and not necessarily after getting the hands dirty on the machinery. They confirm the necessity of planning first, and constructing the plan in such a way as to be able to change it easily, agilely, through processes of feedback, testing, and renegotiating.

Planning still hinges on the core question of goal. What do you want your project to do? How have others done it and where could tool choices be improved is the second question. It all comes down to design. I enjoy the slight play inherent in the word “design” when talking about the web: attractive interfaces or architecture? Even though I can map architecture with a simple matrix (hopefully…), and a different visualisation is required to look at interface, these aren’t really discrete categories, just different axes that describe the goal: the form of the argument.

Voyant – at First Glance

At first glance, I wasn’t sure what to do with Voyant the digital text analysis tool. I primarily spend my time working with ancient texts, and there just isn’t that much analysis you can do in translation. Originals for ancient inflected languages require the level of parsing tools built into the wonderful Perseus Project. I instead dropped in some texts I ‘liked’ (GK Chesterton pulled off Gutenberg, etc.) but it wasn’t very productive to find out that the most common word in the Man who was Thursday after articles and proper nouns was “professor.”

Ultimately and somewhat arbitrarily, I decided to compare two translations of fragments from the ‘”Epic of Gilgamesh”‘ (also found in text form on Gutenberg). The Pennsylvania tablet and the Yale tablet are not the same part of the story, the former being an account of the meeting and wrestling of Gilgamesh and Enkidu and the latter, the fight against Humbaba, but the transcriptions and translations were conducted by the same person, so, in theory, there should be consistency of English vocabulary selection, grammatical construction, and versification.

The two texts were clearly not in the same style from a visual inspection of versification alone — no tool needed to tell us that! but playing with word counting a bit yielded some interesting results that, if not novel to the close reader of a mere two texts, suggest some possibilities for the benefits and problems of applying the tools to a larger corpus. For example, I searched the word “god,” which appears 7 times in both texts together. The graphical display of relative frequencies showed two curves for the appearance in sections of the Penn text (organised by my own division of the verses when I copied the text); uses in the Yale text are entirely at the end. The sample is so small (the fragments contain only 2,274 words between them and 599 of those unique, a mere 15 words replicating more than 7 times other than proper nouns), I’m not sure the tool is remotely useful at this scale, but I can see how the tools might guide our attention to neglected details.

The frequencies are made more interesting by the “keywords in context” tool. The Pennsylvania tablet uses the word “god” in the opening and climax of the fragment exclusively as a heroic descriptor: “how like a god.” The Yale tablet, with all appearances at the end, however addresses a god indirectly with respect to prayers or offerings: this is clearly a different poetic form whether it contains a different story or not.

Interestingly, the Penn text’s frequent words produce many double-curve graphs, and the Yale many single curves. One wonders also if the Yale text’s relative incompleteness also affects the visual output (with single examples, any trends though are illusions).

I can see this tool lending great power to text analysis of large corpora, but I do hope that they can be developed to handle ancient texts as well. I tried a little Latin just for fun (Cicero, Somnium Scipionis) but trying to manage the stop words list with an inflected language was too time consuming to test. Wordle supposedly handles Latin words, but the “common Latin words” filter still left me with a goodly number of pronoun forms and pulled words like vita (=life) that although “common” were not what I had in mind to remove!

Data Mining/Distant Reading/Visualisation (Reading Reflection, Week 6)

In the JAH Interviews we read in week 3, Dan Cohen included a cautionary note against commitment to the mode of close reading that ignores new technological possibilities for parsing and retrieving the massive amounts of data now available digitally. Our readings this week explore methods and applications for handling large quantities of data… all of the data. Cohen’s “From Babel to Knowledge,” deals with some methods utilised to mine data, using applications to retrieve data from all public places on the web, making use of the great library of the Web and thereby solving the problem of replicating and storing data (an issue also brought up in week 4, this time the book with Roy Rosenzweig, in the chapter “Getting Started”) in order to perform analyses.

One goal of distant reading is to move eventually, and hopefully smoothly, back into close reading; another, expressed best in Franco Moretti’s text, Graphs, Maps, Trees (Verso, 2005), is to perform and interpret quantitative analyses themselves made possible by the new ability to handle an enormous sample effectively.

Criticisms of both approaches to data centre on continued problems with the sample itself. Tim Burke’s Review of Moretti in the Valve is favourable to Moretti’s project, but expresses concern that a project that purports to handle all of the data has to somehow account for losses — the regular fallout of time, not just objects not yet digitised or stored in an available fashion. Burke may be overstating the problem (for Moretti’s project, a sufficiently representative sample has to yield the same results as a complete body or we have other problems here) but sample representation on the Web does seem to pose a concern.

Ted Underwood’s blog introduction to Text Mining notes the incompleteness of digitisation as a problem. Gatedness poses a problem as well, as does conversely the ability for anyone to publish anything online. In his Library of Babel, Cohen asserts that quantity is better than quality when you can sample so much information that errors are displaced by accurate information by frequency of correct information. I see a concern with that assertion in the problem of mass reduplication of information on the Web (like the reproduction of a Wikipedia article on every informational website). How does this affect the sample especially when errors are reduplicated? In a related vein, the dominance of certain information types over others available online affects sampling in ways that if we cannot control, we need to at least be observant to if we depend on the Web as the wellspring of data.

 

 

 

 

What is Digital History (Week 3)

I remember a few years ago, studying with some CS friends, I probably an old language from a paper book, them running experiments on a machine, a conversation arose about the idea of computers as the “new literacy”: just as the ability to control prose and poetry versus to keep simple accounts and records characterised a distinction between literacy and a sort of user-end literacy in the ancient world, I could check e-mail, but not programme, and therefore was not educated in today’s world! What a bunch of funny guys, right? The concerns beneath our little session of banter however provide the real meat of our first week’s readings. What does it mean to be digital and what command do we need over tools to operate in today’s world?

The question of the hour: what is digital history? We might distill from readings that “it” is a category of discussion, motivated by a desire to apprehend and perhaps to direct the changes in practise that emerge out of the shift to new technologies both by historians and by our history-practising culture at large. As a category of discussion, it also has an economic and financial aspect as practitioners negotiate within a living system of funding, work, and authority. The range of answers we get in “The Promise of Digital History” from historians participating in the JAH interview speak to “digital history” as this kind of deliberation.

Specific answers to the JAH interviews discuss concerns about changes in the tools, presentation, and audience that describe the discipline of history. I think of how print and mass print changed things: how research was done, etc. who had access, who practiced, the development of systems of research developed around the emergence of (more) multiple copies now more economically and widely distributed. These factors surely contributed to the slow replacement of history as creative interpretations of annals with the more rigorous and systematised history we think of today, the characteristics of the print-and-paper system infiltrating and shaping the components of the history artefact — from margins and font to formatted bibliographies.

We might reflect on the William Cronnon reading here as he describes the professional practise of history. What features of his model is digital practise renegotiating? Tim Sherratt’s presentation of his work provides our first example this class of a novel or innovative approach to doing history with new media, using the expanded capabilities of computing to analyse a large body of data. It is an effective and powerful alternative to the close reading and the monograph. As Dan Cohen noted in the JAH interview, the close reading is endangered by the ability to quickly find contradictory or complicating evidence with a quick Internet search. He cautions us not to ignore the power of new modes of research. I should add here that for the Art Historian, the problem is parallel to the historian’s insofar as the close reading of image documents. It seems to me that we must embrace “new literacy” if we are to pursue the degree of rigour we in fact developed digital tools to improve.

There’s an interesting point in that statement though: to date, we have been developing tools to improve tasks we were already doing, but in turn are changed by the tools we use as we use them in new ways. But the idea of literacy itself seems problematic to some of the commentators, especially in the JAH interview as they ask to what degree we should expect graduate students to learn programming. I suppose its the difference between the building and operating a printing press and commanding prose though. Perhaps our goals should be, rather than learning to programme, learning to make use of the growing body of applications that allow a user to develop and analyse digital content and to be informed enough to communicate with developers of tools about the needs of historians This is Cohen’s solution and William Turkel’s, the later with the caveat that “architects know about plumbing”… a lot about plumbing.

Public History/Citizen History Reading Reflection

I was most interested in the reading for today that came from Rose Holley on how libraries, based on well-illustrated examples drawn from other fields, might make use of “crowdsourcing,” perhaps better called “digital volunteerism” in order to perform a variety of tasks. These might include the generation and fleshing out of bibliographic records in a user-networking-type-format where users generate content and have access to content generated by other users.

For my first week’s practicum (post forthcoming) evaluating a pair of sites on the World History Sources site, I looked at two sites on ancient coins that vaguely related to my anticipated course project in mapping numismatic data. Although these sites were general informational sites intended as mere introduction, for school children and the community respectively, to the existence and classification of ancient coins, I was perfectly alarmed by some of the limitations in labeling and description, and most of all by the limits in numbers of coins included. The sites I viewed must be judged as introductory teaching sites, but my alarm certainly reflected anxieties I’ve been having about my own project: if I wish to prepare a mapping tool for analysis of all provenanced Kushan coins, that’s one thing, but where on earth would I get all the data? How could I possibly make what I want within the constraints of the semester? Because the bottom line, folks, is that I want to make this tool because I want to use it myself.

Holley’s article, as well as our articles from Jeff Howe and Roy Rosenzweig and Trevor Owens’ 4 part blog post on user participation on the growth of resources have inspired me to start thinking about my own project in terms of the content and in designing to allow for multi-user participation for growing that content. Holley and Rosenzweig (on wikipedia) both discuss resources grown and enriched by the same individuals who will benefit from the resource — the participant users. Their economy has less to do with ‘giving’ than with sharing and co-developing something useful, and in a more participatory and self-enriching manner than, say, paying your tuition or taxes for library use.

What about when you want your users to be specialists? The Raid on Deerfield site by the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association offers one model for limited user participation. They supplied their digital exhibit developers with a standard web space in which they could comment on structure and content throughout development. This is a limited example because its contributors are in a closed committee of developers and consults, but scholarly generated content might be gleaned following a model that lies somewhere between Wikipdedia and Deerfield.

The bottom line is that the user must be supplied with something they can use in order to motivate participation as Holley and Owens addressed. An example of a successful collaboration in paper (had the project started just a little later, it would surely have been digital instead) is the LIMC (Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae), which drew images when possible and written content from scholars everywhere to compile a comprehensive encyclopedia of the representations of all mythological and religious characters in Greco-Roman art. LIMC was successful because it provided an indispensable tool for the content generators by collating their own combined content.

I am beginning to think about my own project in terms of inviting content generation by providing usability, providing a fully functional GIS base to attract the datasets of others and providing a system of simple data conversion to invite others to more easily share data between systems to attract a body of, not givers but, user-participants.

Review of HistoryPin.com, a project mapping user supplied photographic data

I realised when starting this assignment that, although it seemed it should be obvious, I wasn’t entirely certain what constituted a “popular history website” (recall also that I’m not precisely an historian). Does it refer to any non-professional generated web content or other form of presentation? And if so, what does that say about user generated content sites like HistoryPin.com or PhillyHistory.org that sit overtop of a professionally managed framework?
Scrounging our list of sites for this week to help me find something that we could call “popular,” I started with the PhillyHistory.org site, but was disappointed: although the topics represented seemed “popular,” in terms of local interest and so forth, the content appeared to be managed entirely from the top. HistoryPin resembles much more what Trevor Owens called the “scaffolding” on which users could climb themselves to do work, ergo it better fit the definition of “popular” I’ve been cooking up from this week’s readings.
The site is basically a modern Google street map onto which users can “pin” their own photographs. Judging from my whirlwind tour of the site by places I am personally familiar with, users appear to have been loyal to their understanding of what the site is after, that is “history.” The “how to” page for adding photographs does not contain any specific guidelines for choosing content; this phenomenon happens all on its own. That said, a fair amount of content seems to be coming from local historical groups participating on the open site rather than private individuals.
Beyond pinning photographs, multimedia content can be pinned, and the map can be used with all it’s standard Google maps functionality including modern street views. A feature, oft utilised by the historical groups, allows users to curate collections such as the archive of the Hartlepool bombardment (WWI) featured on the main “Tours & Collections” page. Each of the photographs is pinned spatially to the street map and then collected for presentation as slides.
This site is definitely fun. For example, here is a picture of Queen Elizabeth II in 1971 opening a theatre in Wiltshire that I performed at in the mid-90s.

From HistoryPin.com

I quite enjoyed coming across this image. But is the site successful history? Although a map, it is certainly not a tool for any kind of spatial or historical analysis. I see it’s greatest application in classrooms for student exploration and for travel and tourism. Google already offers a places of interest feature on its Google Earth (and its maps?), but if conveniently paired with this tool, multimedia maps could generate interest and real as well as digital tourism. One change that History Pin might implement to help users is to have a link to “Tours & Collections” where available from individual photos. When I visit the Hartlepool area on the map and select one of the WWI era images, being able to immediately join it with the series on the bombardment would enrich my experience as a student or tourist. Ultimately, the more content users add and organise, the more dynamic and useful a resource it will become.

Intellectual and Technical Autobiography

Greetings, fellow Clio Wired I students!

I am one of our Art History MA student and this course fulfills one of our requirements.

My academic interests lie primarily in the Ancient Old World. I live in the Art History department, but spend an equal amount of my time on archaeology (most practical experience, however, has been here on American sites) and the study of ancient languages (a little Attic Greek and a lot of Latin to date).

I gave my blog this fun name because I’m hoping to work on a project this year exploring coin hordes from the Kushan Empire and what digital mapping and analysis can do for our understanding of their distribution and (socio-political) function…

which leads to my technical experience: quite a mixed bag. I’m just barely old enough that computers at school were still a rarity (received my first email at 21). I lead a relatively technology light lifestyle, but somehow own a laptop and smartphone; I spend as little time as possible on the Internet, but can check email and facebook like a champ. On the other hand, I have taken courses in GIS (Geographic Information Systems), taken surveys and digitised maps for archaeological sites. I have also updated webpages for work and learned a little HTML and the use of tools like Photoshop (the later promptly forgotten) for sundry professional projects.

I’m looking forward to working on a mapping tool this year and also to broadening my technological horizons through our course work. I’m also looking forward to meeting everyone, working with you throughout the semester, and seeing all of the interesting projects folks come up with this year.