humanities as data: projects, visualizations, and emerging methods

Humanities as DataProjects, Visualizations, and Emerging Methods

Kurt FendtMassachusetts Institute of Technology

fendt@mit.edu @fendt

hyperstudio.mit.edu@MIThyperstudio

Outline

• Digital Humanities• Short History• Trends• New Affordances

• HyperStudio - Digital Humanities at MIT• Structure, Principles• Selected Projects

• Berliner sehen• Annotation Studio & Open Source

• Data Visualization - The Comédie-Française Registers Project• Parallel Axis Graph• Combinatorial and Generative Research Visualization Tools• Network Graphs

• Educating Digital Humanists• Project-Based Digital Humanities Course at MIT

• Q & A

Digital Humanities - A Definition

• The digital humanities, also known as humanities computing, is a field of research, teaching, and invention concerned with the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities.

• It is methodological by nature and interdisciplinary in scope.

• It involves investigation, analysis, synthesis and presentation of information in electronic form.

• It studies how these media affect the disciplines in which they are used, and what these disciplines have to contribute to our knowledge of computing.

Wikipedia, s.v. „Digital Humanities“, last modified July 31, 2011, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_humanities

Digital Humanities - A Brief History

Father Busa

Vannevar Bush:“As We May Think” (1945)

Theodor H. Nelson:“Literary Machines” (1965/1981)

Digital Humanities - “The Big Tent”

Digital Humanities - Trends

Big Data: Mapping the Enlightenment The Electronic Enlightenment

database contains over 55,000 letters and documents exchanged between 6,400 correspondents in the Republic of Letters.

How can humanities scholars trained in close reading of individual documents make sense of patterns in large sets of data?

How can historians and other humanities scholars use visualization tools, to examine large sets of heterogeneous historical data with multiple dimensions?

http://www.stanford.edu/group/toolingup/rplviz/

Data Visualization

http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html#

Annotation

Digital Humanities - New Affordances

• Asking and answering new research questions that cannot be reduced to a single genre, medium, discipline, or institution

• New research methods, representational and interpretive practices, meaning-making strategies, complexities, and ambiguities

• Fluid communities of practice• Trans-historical and transmedia approach to knowledge and meaning-

making• Questions of design at the center (information design, graphics,

typography, formal and rhetorical patterning)• Project as the core activity

“A project is a kind of scholarship that requires design, management, negotiation, and collaboration.” Anne Burdick et al.:„Digital_Humanities“, Cambridge, MA 2012, MIT Press

HyperStudio - Digital Humanities at MIT

Berliner sehen - Database Narrative for Education

HyperStudio - Areas

HyperStudio as part of Comparative Media Studies

• One of nine independent research groups within the Department of Comparative Media Studies/Writing (CMS/W)(School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences)

Other CMS research groups include:Center for Civic Media; Education Arcade; E-Lab; Imagination, Computation, and Expression Lab; MIT Game Lab; OpenDocumentary Lab; Mobile Experience Lab; Trope Tank

• Concept of Applied Humanities (Henry Jenkins)

• MIT Motto: Mens et Manus

• HyperStudio: 9 part-time and full-time staff (Graduate/undergraduate students, software engineers, outside contractors, administrator)

HyperStudio - Principles

• Pedagogical and/or scholarly needs drive development

• Co-design with faculty, students, and other partners

• Agile development with integrated feedback

• Students as novice scholars

• Engage learners in process of discovery, interpretation, and collaboration

• Rethinking of pedagogical concepts and roles

Multimedia Text Annotation for Students

“I have never annotated before. But I think I am getting better. I am actually writing down ideas while reading. By writing them down, I am actually looking deeper into the text, not like when I just read the book or something and said, ‘Oh it may mean this.’ Now it is more like, ‘Oh what does THIS mean?’ Then I keep asking questions because I am annotating. I am thinking about the text more.”

Student in a Fall 2012 literature class

Iliad: Venetus, 10th century

Talmud

Pedagogical Approach

• Increase awareness of fluid processes of reading, writing, borrowing, and revision (John Bryant)Engage students as “editors” (Wyn Kelley)Develop traditional humanistic skills (close reading, textual analysis, persuasive writing, critical thinking)Allow students to practice “scholarly primitives”

“ I’m using the term “primitives” in a self-consciously analogical way, to refer to some basic functions common to scholarly activity across disciplines, over time, and independent of theoretical orientation.“

John Unsworth

Discovering Annotating

Comparing Referring

Sampling Illustrating

Annotation Studio Multimedia Text Annotations for Students

Annotation

•Citation(reference to base text plus metadata)

•Comment

•Tags (folksonomies)

•Links to other sources•User information (name, group)

•Date/time

Annotation Across Classroom Practices

• Close Reading• Generating Material: 800 comments on one text• Developing an Argument• Revision• Research and Presentation• Making Connections Across Texts• Peer Review and Social Reading• Reflecting on Processes of Reading, Writing, and

Sharing Work

Future Directions

• Incorporating student-generated texts for annotationDeveloping citation toolsFiltering annotations by student, subject, date, etc.

• Exporting annotations into visual drafting spaceSupporting creative writing and translation courses

• Side-by-side display of texts/media documents

• Annotation across multiple documents

• Annotation of multimedia sources (image, video, audio)

• Customizable visual display of annotations

• Curated repository of media and text documents

• Export and archiving of annotations (Open Annotation Standard)

• Connection to other tools via open API

• Version for mobile devices

Open Source: New Opportunities

• Annotation Studio based on the Annotator by the Open Knowledge Foundation

• Annotation Studio code open source as well (GPL 2)• Rich community of developers• Other groups can fork code, contribute, build upon• Use of open APIs (application programming interfaces) allows new

forms of collaboration, e.g. visualization tools, filter mechanisms• Annotation Studio can be freely installed or run as a service• Basis for other projects, e.g. Lacuna Stories at Stanford U., Hofstra

University, and New York University• Used by almost 150 institutions of higher education in the fall• Open source is a requirement by the National Endowment for the

Humanities (federal US funding agency)

Comédie-Française Registers Project

Project Director: Prof. Jeffrey Ravel, MIT History Department

The Comédie-Française Registers Project

The Comédie-Française Registers Project (CFRP) is a web resource for scholars of 17th & 18th c. French theater to support an exploratory research process.

Three Components

•Archive

•Search tool (faceted browser)

•Interactive data visualization tools

* Original version of the CFRP slides were created by Jason Lipshin

Merging Domain Expertise + DH Methods

The CFRP Online Archive

Significance for domain experts (French theater historians):

•Digitized access to rare materials

•Cultural significance of the time period (i.e. the French Revolution)

•Granular search through extensive archives.

Data Visualization as Methodology

For digital humanists: data viz as part of an exploratory research process.

•”Machine Reading” (Ramsay) – Macro-level analysis and the affordances of computation enabling new research questions.

•“Toggling” (Schnapp et all) – Merging quantitative and qualitative analysis of historical data.

•Combinatorial Research – Dynamically combining parameters as generative analysis.

Archive and Document Dimensions

The Comédie-Française Archive: 1680 – 1793

•Daily records of repertory and box office receipts

•Information on actors’ roles, payment, and playwrights

•Daily Expenses

Register Elements:

• Play title

• Author

• Actors

• Year

• Number of tickets sold

• Ticket price

• Location of seats in theater

• Premiere, first run, or revival

Archive and Document Dimensions

The Comédie-Française Archive: 1680 – 1793

•113 Seasons

•Approximately 320 records per season

•2 plays per day

•4 genre categories

Data challenges and difficulties:

• Troupe occupies 4 different theaters

• Each theater has between 5 and 7 sections

• These sections translate to between 13 and 21 ticket price categories

Visualization: Case Studies

Parallel Axis Graph

• Dynamic relations between all categories recorded in the registers

Theater Mapping

• Diagram of theater layout acts as navigation to the database.

Line Graph (Voltaire’s Mahomet)

• Tracing the history of one play throughout its performance and reperformance.

Network Graphs

• Repertoire decisions, popularity of plays

Visualization: Case Study 1

Parallel Axis Graph

• Dynamic relations between all categories recorded in the registers and external events

Theater Mapping

• Diagram of physical space of theater acts as navigation to the database.

Mahomet ou le Fanatisme: Voltaire

•Tracing the history of one play throughout its performance

•72 instances of Mahomet within the 13 year period between 1780 and 1793.

Future Directions

The Iterative Design Process

•New visualizations based on research questions from domain experts.

•Collaborations with new scholars and institutions: Comédie-Italienne, Broadway, Opéra de Paris.

•Generalizability of tools to other kinds of data.

•New browser tool for dynamic visualization creation (Chris Dessonville)

•Network Graphs to explore repertoire decisions

New Browser Tool

Combinatorial and Generative Research

•The user can select which parameters to compare and the system will automatically generate a list of potential visualizations.

•The visualization will load in the same facet without the need for refreshing.

New Browser Tool

Network Visualization

Project-Based Digital Humanities Course

• Thirteen 4-hour course units, 17 Graduate and Undergraduate Students from Computer Science, Art History, Architecture, CMS, Mechanical Engineering (MIT, Harvard University, Wellesley University, Mass. College of Art)

• Each unit included:

• discussion of readings and introduction to new topics /guest speakers

• small data/tool experiments

• discussion and work on larger group projects

• Four larger group projects primarily with outside partners:Institute for Contemporary Art, Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum, MIT Museum, Comédie-Française Registers Project

Thank you!

fendt@mit.edu @fendtfendt@mit.edu @fendt

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