Jekyll2021-05-18T20:21:46+00:00https://francescagiannetti.com/feed.xmlFrancesca Giannettiportfolio website for Francesca GiannettiFrancesca GiannettiA Privilege2021-02-16T16:00:00+00:002021-02-16T16:00:00+00:00https://francescagiannetti.com/a-privilege<p>I let my promotion with tenure (Librarian II at my institution) pass without comment last year because it was a dreadful year in which some of my colleagues lost jobs and I felt more than ever like I had won some kind of a lottery just by happening to be in the right place at the right time. With that said, though, I know a lot of work goes into evaluating tenure cases, and I am grateful to my Rutgers colleagues and to my external referees for their careful attention and support. I also felt the need to share some of what went into my dossier, because I know how hard it is to articulate one’s value in a newer academic library role. I am the first digital humanities librarian at my institution and I am also subject librarian. I was acutely aware that DH looks a bit different at every institution and I was perhaps overly sensitive about the gaps in my own portfolio vis-à-vis whatever shared understanding of digital humanities could be said to exist. It was a profound help to me to be able to read other people’s professional statements as I was preparing my own, including those of <a href="https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.3413698.v2">Heather Coates</a> and <a href="https://ryancordell.org/statements">Ryan Cordell</a>. Huge props also to <a href="http://kalanicraig.com/dossier/">Kalani Craig</a> for publishing her statement after she submitted (and before hearing the result!). So with this post, I would like to share my own personal statement, in case others can benefit from seeing how I made sense of the various threads of my professional responsibilities.</p>
<p>It may help to preface this with the gap that concerned me the most. Project development or management is often among the more highly prized skills of digital humanities librarians.<sup id="fnref:fn1"><a href="#fn:fn1" class="footnote">1</a></sup> Due to the way my job is configured, and the way digital infrastructure works at my institution, I could not get too heavily involved in the management of collaborative digital research projects. I can consult, and I can train, but I often cannot be the one to manage the day-to-day and week-to-week labor of these projects, as this kind of work is extremely time-intensive, and, like more and more of us, I juggle many roles at my institution. And while I may have some misgivings about this fact, I am also grateful of the chance to consult on several smaller digital projects, and to develop a few of my own, which have become opportunities for the mentorship of student scholars interested in digital methods. Although it has taken me a while to settle into this truth, there is no one way of doing the job of a digital humanities librarian. We rely on our own professional interests and strengths, and the needs and interests of those with whom we regularly work, to shape our paths.</p>
<p><em>Personal statement, submitted August 9, 2019</em></p>
<h2 id="librarianship">Librarianship</h2>
<p>My greatest aim as a hybrid librarian active in digital humanities and subject liaison work is to bring both sides of my librarianship work into constructive, mutually beneficial dialogue, with the goal of reinvigorating public services librarianship through a critical understanding of twenty-first century challenges like authority, information overload, and intellectual property. As the first person to occupy the role of digital humanities librarian at Rutgers–New Brunswick, my work has contributed to many firsts for the Libraries. My interpretation of digital humanities librarianship emphasizes 1) fostering opportunities to learn diverse digital methods that will improve research and teaching, and 2) creating a community of practice in which experts on campus can connect and collaborate with each other. Defining digital humanities as the use of digital tools and methods to study the humanities, I have used my musical background as a disciplinary lens through which to communicate a range of research activities, such as the capture, creation, enrichment, analysis, and interpretation of data. At the same time, I possess the language expertise required to be a subject liaison in Comparative Literature, French, and Italian, and I have found many fruitful points of contact between my subject and functional library roles.</p>
<p>My activity as a digital humanities librarian focuses to a great extent on pedagogy. I am one of few librarians or technologists at Rutgers who collaborate with disciplinary faculty to deliver lectures and trainings on digital research methods in term courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels; I have created original material for courses in the fields of literature, history, musicology, and Latino and Caribbean studies. Humanities faculty interested in exploring digital humanities in partnership with a librarian constitute a new audience for the Libraries. I plan, organize, and teach stand-alone workshops in the libraries on the sources and methods of digital humanities in order to create and grow collaborations. These workshops have attracted broad participation from over 30 academic departments and programs in the humanities, the social sciences, and the sciences. Via these embedded and stand-alone workshops and lectures, I have reached nearly 1,500 students and faculty in the past five years. I teach a Byrne seminar called “Data Mining in the Humanities” that introduces digital humanities to first-year undergraduates; the <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6MW7B">syllabus</a>, deposited in the Big Ten DH group of Humanities Commons, has been downloaded over 200 times. I continue to develop my personal digital skill set, which includes humanistic applications of XML technologies, statistical programming, and Geographic Information Systems, through regular attendance of workshops, courses, and intensive summer institutes. As a result of my work, I was invited by faculty of the English department to help develop a new 300-level, team-taught course called “Data and Culture,” scheduled to be taught in 2020-21, that will provide a broad theoretical and practical overview of various topics in digital culture. I was also invited by senior administrators in Rutgers Global and the School of Arts and Sciences (SAS) Honors Program to develop a two-week seminar in Spain on the topic of text encoding and manuscript studies for the summer of 2020.</p>
<p>Digital humanities community building and research infrastructure inform my work on several library task forces and working groups. I helped launch, and I currently oversee the Digital Humanities Lab in Alexander Library, a cross-disciplinary research space supported by the Libraries and the School of Arts and Sciences, where students, faculty and staff meet to work on projects and learn about digital methods. I have served as chair and a member of the system-wide Libraries Digital Humanities Working Group. My work with this group involved the development of a Libraries-hosted digital publishing service that allows scholars to use WordPress and Omeka for course projects and the sharing of informal research; this service has been used by over 200 faculty and students across New Brunswick, Newark, and Camden. As a steering member of the Libraries’ Graduate Specialist program, in which graduate students supplement library-based consulting and training in advanced digital research methods, I supervise the work of a digital humanities graduate specialist who provides specialized assistance in text analysis methodologies using the R programming language. Together with graduate student conveners, I hosted a digital humanities reading group, running in Fall 2017, in which a core group of participants from across the humanities and social sciences explored the topic from a variety of perspectives including race and gender theory, pedagogy, and digital project development. I work with the Geography department, and the Rutgers Undergraduate Geography Society, among others, to host an annual mapathon in which participants contribute geospatial data to the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap platform to aid disaster relief efforts around the globe. I have sought to further the libraries’ important role in advanced research through my service as leader of the Research Spaces team, which studied specialized research spaces in academic library settings, and as a current member of the Research Data Services, Digital Projects, and Copyright teams.</p>
<p>As part of my liaison duties, I have met with faculty and graduate students in Classics, Comparative Literature, French, and Italian to discuss scholarly communication topics, such as open access, self-archiving, digital publishing, and author rights in their individual disciplines. We have discussed Scholarly Open Access at Rutgers (SOAR), the interface for depositing scholarly articles, and the relaunch or conversion of several departmental journals to a new digital platform. I have helped contacts in Art History, Comparative Literature, and Italian to transition their graduate student journals to the user-friendly WordPress platform, thereby facilitating the onboarding process for new student editors, extending the longevity of the publications, and providing a venue in which to practice digital publishing skills (see <em>Digital Projects: Project Consultant and Trainer</em> section of CV). I have advised graduate students in my liaison areas and in other departments on the creation of digital projects related to their doctoral research, and on secondary topics of interest, and I have helped these students to acquire new skills, develop their research agendas, and in a few cases start careers in digital humanities. Influenced in some part by my work with their graduate students, the Italian department has sought to expand their involvement in digital humanities by offering DH mini-seminars, taught by visiting professors, and by hiring a DH post-doctoral fellow.</p>
<p>I manage the collections for the departments of Classics, French, and Italian, and the program in Comparative Literature, in consulation with the faculty and graduate students of those disciplines, and I have applied data analysis skills acquired through my research activity to analyze library patron preferences in support of collection management work. For example, by analyzing logs of requests for interlibrary loan books, I discovered a high number of requests for books about digital humanities, as a result, I successfully argued for the creation of a special fund code for the acquisition of monographs in this area. Through similar analyses of requests for literature and literary criticism, I found a high volume of requests for public domain authors like Shakespeare, Virgil, and Euripides, whose texts are freely available online, indicating most likely that Rutgers users are requesting specific editions and translations, or they prefer the print medium for more immersive, cognitively demanding reading. This has, in turn, influenced my selective uptake of e-books in the humanities. I have developed and created subject-specific research guides in all of my liaison areas. I also help students conducting multilingual research to navigate the Libraries’ collections, external web resources, and citation styles and tools. In spite of a difficult environment for collection development at Rutgers, I have been able to make strategic additions to our film, monograph, and serials collections, providing enhancements in the areas of Francophone Caribbean and African literature and culture, French Early Modern literature, migration studies, Italian women writers, history of science, and ecocriticism and environmental humanities.</p>
<p>I participate weekly or biweekly in all forms of library public services, including chat, email, and desk reference at Alexander Library. In addition to delivering information literacy instruction in my liaison departments, I also teach library sessions for the Honors College, the SAS Honors Program, and the Rutgers Writing Program.</p>
<p>As a digital humanities librarian and subject specialist, I provide research expertise across multiple domains. I look forward to developing new collaborations in support of cross-disciplinary computational research, including one with the Rutgers Office of Advanced Research Computing (OARC), and to my continued work on the above-mentioned pedagogy projects with the School of Arts and Sciences.</p>
<h2 id="scholarship">Scholarship</h2>
<p>In my scholarship, I pursue topics at the intersections of information studies, digital humanities, and music in support of the activities of emerging interdisciplinary research communities. Applications of computing in music and sound studies are relatively rare, and often challenging because of the non-textual nature of most music information. My work aims to improve the dissemination of high-quality digital research outputs in music, broaden awareness of digital methods in the humanities more generally, and develop frameworks for the evaluation of such resources, with the goal of facilitating new, cross-disciplinary modes of inquiry. Across these topics, I seek to bring newer and established media into critical dialogue with each other by discussing how, for example, social media data can inform the digital preservation programs of archival collections, and demonstrating how the study of manuscripts and print culture can be enhanced by data modeling and the creation of online scholarly editions. In keeping with the interdisciplinary nature of my research, I have been cited by scholars in the fields of music business, music technology, science and technology studies, computer science, and literary studies. The open access versions of my work in RUcore, the Rutgers institutional repository, have been downloaded 200 times by researchers in 20 countries. My research intervention is twofold: advocacy for researcher training that includes material and theoretical engagements with technology, and documentation of the evolving nature of library work in connection with digital humanities research and teaching.</p>
<p>I take a particular interest in non-textual formats that are underutilized (as measured in citations) when compared to other library and archival sources, and have devoted a portion of my research activity to exploring the impact of digital sound recordings among researchers and the general public. I published an empirical study (<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/asi.23990">A Twitter Case Study for Assessing Digital Sound</a>) on the interactions of Twitter users with digital archival sound in the <em>Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology</em>, a first quartile journal in information science (<strong>source</strong>: Scimago), and among the top three publication venues for information school faculty. My study characterized a range of user interactions that pointed to impact that was not captured in the citation record. Since communicating the benefits of digitization programs is a <em>sine qua non</em> of successful funding at cultural heritage institutions, I sought with this study to model an approach to the capture and analysis of social media data that could be adapted by researchers with similar objectives.</p>
<p>I am committed to the inclusion of digital methods in the education and professional development of students, faculty, and librarians. A thread of my research deals with the subject of digital humanities pedagogy and the introduction of digital methods and tools. My article, <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10691316.2017.1340217">“Against the Grain: Reading for the Challenges of Collaborative DH Pedagogy,”</a> published in <em>College and Undergraduate Libraries</em>, describes the common challenges of collaborative digital humanities pedagogy with the purpose of building a foundation of shared knowledge upon which DH practitioners can build. In <a href="https://acrl.ala.org/dh/2017/08/04/what-im-reading-this-summer-rebecca-dowson/">a post</a> published in the <em>dh+lib Review</em>, Rebecca Dowson of Simon Fraser University wrote of this article, “as Giannetti points out, critical reflections on the challenges of this work have not yet been a focus of scholarship. This gap in the literature is a shame… I hope others will take up Giannetti’s call to share our failures with each other…” This article was recently republished in a monograph entitled <em>The Digital Humanities: Implications for Librarians, Libraries, and Librarianship</em>. My article on text markup, data modeling, and pedagogy (<a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2019.05.001">“‘So near while apart’: Correspondence Editions as Critical Library Pedagogy and Digital Humanities Methodology,”</a>) was recently published in the <em>Journal of Academic Librarianship</em>. In this article, I present two case studies on the pedagogical applications of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), and the value of librarian involvement in the process and products of TEI editorial work. As a pedagogical exercise, text encoding is an especially compelling way of introducing students to topics such as editorial theory and digital remediation, and librarians have unique knowledge of their collections the technical skills to make such pedagogical interventions successful introductions to the use of primary sources in historical and cultural research.</p>
<p>With colleagues at institutions in the U.S. and the U.K., I am developing a digital research environment called Music Scholarship Online (MuSO), a contributing node of the Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) at Texas A&M University whose aims are to improve discovery of digital scholarly outputs in music as well as develop a peer review framework for the evaluation of digital work in musicology. Our case study entitled <a href="http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/13/1/000381/000381.html">“Music Scholarship Online (MuSO): A Research Environment for a More Democratic Digital Musicology”</a> discusses the problems of a closed canon, the underutilized potential of the digital medium, a reward system tied to print publication, and siloed research communities that continue to impact the adoption of digital research methods in musicology. This article was published in <em>Digital Humanities Quarterly</em>, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal covering all aspects of digital media in the humanities. In this article, we outline the ways in which MuSO plans to improve the dissemination of digital outputs in music, and thereby strengthen community standards in music representation, promote data reuse, and create possibilities for new research that expands the musicological discipline. As the MuSO project team pursues additional digital aggregation projects and forms an editorial board to implement standards of digital peer review, I am studying musical genre and form tags as a music-specific method of information retrieval in big digital libraries and databases. As part of this work, I have undertaken qualitative research on the information-seeking preferences of music scholars to develop a holistic model of musical genre for MuSO. In support of this work, I received a fellowship from the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers–New Brunswick to participate in their 2018-19 Classification Seminar.</p>
<p>I present at national and international conferences, and I publish my work in a variety of open access venues and repositories in order to expand the visibility of my research. As an example, on the basis of a conference talk at the joint International Association for Music Libraries/International Musicological Society Congress, which I subsequently <a href="https://francescagiannetti.com/musical-multimodal-meanderings/">published on my blog</a>, I was invited to submit an article (<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10588167.2016.1166842">“A Review of Network Approaches in Music Studies”</a>) introducing humanistic applications of social network analysis, published in <em>Music Reference Services Quarterly</em>. I review books on digital humanities in libraries to extend the reach of the scholarship of my peers. I anticipate several upcoming conference talks and appearances to further develop my work on TEI pedagogy and musical genre in online information systems.</p>
<h2 id="service">Service</h2>
<p>My service is an extension of my librarianship and scholarship activity; I help to build community, capacity, and infrastructure in digital humanities, often at the interstices of music studies.</p>
<p>As part of my engagement with the global digital humanities community, I have sought service roles across disciplines that create opportunities for the cross-fertilization that I believe will enliven these fields. I am a founding member of Music Scholarship Online (MuSO), described above, for which I participated on an international team to crosswalk metadata for eighteenth-century music objects from Europeana, the EU digital platform for cultural heritage, to the music-specific data model developed for MuSO. For three years in a row, I have served as a member of the international program committee for the Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology, a cross-disciplinary presentation venue for researchers working on, and with, large-scale digital libraries and databases in the domain of music and musicology. I have worked on advisory committees for grant-funded projects at Big Ten institutions supporting the creation of a computational text analysis curriculum for academic librarians (<a href="https://teach.htrc.illinois.edu/">“Digging Deeper, Reaching Further”</a>) and the development of a data capsule appliance for non-consumptive research on the copyrighted corpus in the HathiTrust Digital Library. I write peer reviews for the major national and international digital humanities conferences, as well as for several serial publications on digital libraries and music librarianship, and I have served on a review committee for the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities. My editorial role with the <a href="https://nimbletents.github.io/">Nimble Tents Toolkit</a>, directly related to the mapathons described earlier, involves reviewing new contributions on the organization of rapid response teams and grassroots events to address urgent climate and political challenges involving free or widely used digital tools and platforms.</p>
<p>As part of my ongoing involvement in the Music Library Association (MLA), I have helped plan and organize several pre- and post-conference activities involving a range of hands-on trainings and presentations in digital methods at the annual meetings. One of my workshops, <a href="https://francescagiannetti.com/a-workshop-on-maps-and-timelines/">“A Workshop on Maps & Timelines,”</a> which I subsequently published online, has been highlighted on the website of the Stanford Humanities + Design lab as a testimonial of their software application, Palladio. I have served on the MLA Emerging Technologies and Services Committee, and as the current convener of the Digital Humanities Interest Group, I have led an effort to create a comprehensive list of digital libraries, digital archives, open datasets, and digital humanities projects in music.</p>
<p>My involvement as a steering committee member of the Rutgers Digital Humanities Initiative (DHI) has been a focal point of my local service activity. As the only librarian on the steering committee, my work with the DHI is discipline-neutral, and involves building a research community through the gathering, synthesis and dissemination of information on key events, lectures, conferences, and opportunities available at Rutgers and in the Greater New York area. In addition to organizing local workshops, many of which I also led, I have also planned lectures, open house events, and an annual symposium showcasing the digital humanities research of students and faculty at Rutgers and at member institutions of the New Jersey Digital Humanities Consortium. I ensure that materials from all workshops are archived and freely available online. These materials continue to generate interest well after the date of the event; one of the most visited pages (700 unique page views) of the Rutgers DHI website is the workshop I developed on <a href="https://dh.rutgers.edu//thematic-maps-in-qgis/">“Thematic Maps in QGIS.”</a> In addition, I have served on an interdisciplinary review committee for the award of digital humanities seed grants, funded by the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences, to support the early stages of digital project work by Rutgers graduate students and faculty. This committee disbursed grants to ten recipients, whose work is presented at the annual symposium (“DH Showcase”) and on the <a href="https://dh.rutgers.edu/projects">DHI’s website</a>.</p>
<p>I take pleasure in mentoring and advising students working with digital methods. I have worked with Rutgers Future Scholars and Aresty Research Assistants on projects relating to text encoding and digital editions of correspondence collections. I also served on the Research Database Task Force, which examined ways of expanding and promoting undergraduate research opportunities at Rutgers–New Brunswick.</p>
<h2 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h2>
<p>As a digital humanities librarian with subject liaison responsibilities, I have sought to emphasize the commonalities of digital research methods with longstanding humanistic scholarship practices to transform teaching, learning, and research in a range of disciplines. Due to my interventions in pedagogy and outreach, I have helped to establish the Libraries as one of very few places at Rutgers for students and faculty to develop technical skills that are rarely taught in academic units. I have promoted the use of unique library collections and computational methods of analysis among scholars and students, and I have demonstrated their significance in peer-reviewed publications and presentations. I look forward to contributing to the ongoing transformation of library and humanistic practices at Rutgers University, among library professionals and researchers locally and globally in the years to come.</p>
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> We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.[^fn1]
Lastly, I do not take lightly the privilege of comparative job security in a period when so many accomplished and smart people are struggling to find meaningful work. Since I am a bit shy by nature, I know that I have benefited from bucketfuls of privilege and luck to enjoy this modicum of professional success. And I am cognizant of the fact that I have a duty to use my voice to protect and promote the interests of my fellow library workers and those of the more precariously employed early career digital humanists who are facing one of the worst hiring seasons on record. So I've got my eye on projects like the [Visionary Futures Collective](https://visionary-futures-collective.github.io/), [Bearing Witness](https://bearingwitness.github.io/), and the [Academic Job Market Support Network](https://hcommons.org/groups/academic-job-market-support-network/). I am working with Grant Wythoff at the Princeton Center for Digital Humanities to get [Humanist Mutual Aid](https://humanistmutualaid.com/) up and running. And in my library and digital humanities activity, I cite the work of scholars of color, of women of color in particular, in part because I've been doing some catching up with this literature and it's on my mind, and in part because I find that the work is trenchant and exciting and compassionate, and we all deserve to see more of it. Although it's always time to invest in understanding the perspectives of different people, that activity is vitally important now. There have been a handful of scholars who I reliably read, no matter what the genre. They include Brittney Cooper, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Jessica Marie Johnson, and Marisa Parham. Lately, I've added Audrey Lorde, bell hooks, and Toni Morrison to the mix, in addition to... alright fine, I will out myself as a romance reader... Courtney Milan, Rebekah Weatherspoon, and KJ Charles (not a BIPOC author, but she writes mostly LGBT romance). One of the marvelous things about having this eclectic mix of voices floating around in my head is...
So with this meandering and unorthodox introduction, which through the alchemy of PageRank and SEO can never be separated from what follows (lol), I herewith present my personal statement.
I am deeply grateful for, and indebted to my professional network. Pre-tenure, I remember having had a conversation with my Rutgers friends about whether or not I had submitted any names from whom I preferred external letters *not* be requested. I had not. I don't have professional nemeses (as far as I know) and I have difficulty imagining any senior member of the digital humanities community *not supporting* the promotion of an up-and-coming member of the field. I like my specialization, and the people have a tremendous amount to do with that fact.
I am also cognizant of the fact that I have won a kind of lottery in which the winners are fewer and fewer each year. I did do the work that was required of me for promotion at my institution, but so have countless others who have not yet been successful at securing long-term employment in academic libraries.
comments on odds of being shy and being comparatively successful professionally
impostor syndrome, race, and getting over it to speak and write and do things that need doing
Being a shy person who is able to enjoy a modicum of professional success is yet another legacy of whiteness.
When writing the last article I published before submitting my tenure packet, I struggled. Every day felt like a vicious street fight. Every day for weeks on end, the only product of my struggle was a single sentence or two. I wondered anew about how I had managed to get anything written or published before. And as I got up in the morning and sipped my first cup of coffee while staring blankly at the last mangled sentences on my laptop screen, I would hem and haw about how to continue. Not infrequently, a voice in my head would say: "I don't know what I think about this yet." And then: "HOW CAN I NOT KNOW WHAT I THINK ABOUT THIS YET?" I frequently got in my own way, berating myself for the fact that my thoughts were still taking shape (spoiler: thinking is not only allowed but encouraged when doing research). There were endless walks around my neighborhood trying to sort out my next move. This went on for a long time. Way too long of a time, it seemed to me, but the truth of the matter is that even a sentence a day starts to add up. Eventually, after many months, there was a full manuscript that I gave to a few colleagues to read and comment on. I followed most but not all of their suggestions, submitted to a journal, and received that rarest of academic prizes: an acceptance without revisions.
I've accepted the fact that the research and writing will not get easier. The mere proposition of sharing my work with a public seems to conjure every last insecurity in me. I also know that the fear I face is largely irrational. There haven't been so many social penalties for speaking my mind---or at least not many that I wasn't willing to face---and never a looming threat to my physical safety. I've been lucky in this too.
[^fn1]: Lorde, Audre. 1984. The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action. In _Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches_ 44. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press. [Orig. pub. 1978.]
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<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:fn1">
<p>See Paige Morgan and Helene Williams’s analysis of digital humanities/digital scholarship librarian job descriptions and accompanying visualization at <a href="http://www.paigemorgan.net/the-expansion-development-of-dhds-librarians/">http://www.paigemorgan.net/the-expansion-development-of-dhds-librarians/</a>. <a href="#fnref:fn1" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Francesca GiannettiI let my promotion with tenure (Librarian II at my institution) pass without comment last year because it was a dreadful year in which some of my colleagues lost jobs and I felt more than ever like I had won some kind of a lottery just by happening to be in the right place at the right time. With that said, though, I know a lot of work goes into evaluating tenure cases, and I am grateful to my Rutgers colleagues and to my external referees for their careful attention and support. I also felt the need to share some of what went into my dossier, because I know how hard it is to articulate one’s value in a newer academic library role. I am the first digital humanities librarian at my institution and I am also subject librarian. I was acutely aware that DH looks a bit different at every institution and I was perhaps overly sensitive about the gaps in my own portfolio vis-à-vis whatever shared understanding of digital humanities could be said to exist. It was a profound help to me to be able to read other people’s professional statements as I was preparing my own, including those of Heather Coates and Ryan Cordell. Huge props also to Kalani Craig for publishing her statement after she submitted (and before hearing the result!). So with this post, I would like to share my own personal statement, in case others can benefit from seeing how I made sense of the various threads of my professional responsibilities.Notes CFP: Digital Humanities and Music Pedagogy2020-05-18T20:00:00+00:002020-05-18T20:00:00+00:00https://francescagiannetti.com/notes-cfp<p>The idea of this special issue on digital humanities was first suggested to me by my friend and colleague, Jonathan Sauceda, who is the incoming general editor of <em>Notes</em>. We had worked together with Anna Kijas on a broader call for papers on the methodologies of music research a few years back for the annual meetings of the Music Library Association and the Society for American Music. At that time, we heard many thoughtful papers from colleagues like Bonna Boettcher, Timothy Duguid, David Hunter, Eduardo Herrera, Ellie Hisama, and Carol Oja, some of whom we hope to convince to respond to this updated call focusing on one particular aspect of what was then discussed: the influence of digital methodologies on the formation of music researchers. After integrating his helpful suggestions and comments, I am delighted to share the following call.</p>
<h2 id="call-for-papers--special-issue-of-notes-on-digital-humanities-and-music-pedagogy--deadline-september-18-2020">Call for Papers | Special Issue of <em>Notes</em> on “Digital Humanities and Music Pedagogy” | Deadline: September 18, 2020</h2>
<p>We invite submissions to a special issue of <a href="https://www.musiclibraryassoc.org/page/Notes"><em>Notes</em></a> entitled “Digital Humanities and Music Pedagogy” that will explore the current state of thought and practice at the intersections of the digital humanities and social sciences, music information, and graduate, undergraduate, and continuing education in music. The goal of this issue is to better understand the influence of digital methodologies on the formation of music researchers. To that end, we aim to explore current cross-disciplinary work where information specialists, technicians, ethnomusicologists and musicologists, theorists, performers, and composers strive in tandem to construct learning environments in which new questions, different interpretive angles, wider contextual frames, and humanizing influences are brought to the fore in musical study.</p>
<p>We encourage the following types of submission:</p>
<ul>
<li>Short, 2,000 to 4,000 word position papers on the ways in which the methods, techniques, and collaborative infrastructures of the digital humanities and social sciences further pedagogical work in music, in and outside of the academy</li>
<li>Research articles of up to 10,000 words exploring case studies, best practices, theoretical approaches, and critically examined experiments in digital methods and forms of presentation with students in music and music librarianship</li>
</ul>
<p>Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:</p>
<ul>
<li>Explorations of the implications of the digital humanities and social sciences for the current and future study of music</li>
<li>The intersections of the human and the digital in music study, including constructions of personal and social identity along the lines of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, disability, religion, nation, and age</li>
<li>Examinations of labor equity, power, and precarity in digital humanities/digital musicological pedagogy</li>
<li>(Re)examinations of our approaches to music pedagogy and to the digital at moments of global or local crisis, trauma, and uncertainty, including the COVID-19 pandemic.</li>
<li>Digital humanities and digital social science in the music classroom as an incubator for student-, librarian-, or faculty-led digital projects</li>
<li>Challenges and obstacles to the adoption of digital modes of analysis and presentation among music students, scholars, and librarians, within the library or the academy</li>
<li>Digital pedagogical approaches that center student research questions and foster the creation of student communities of practice</li>
<li>Critical approaches to the curation, analysis, presentation, and preservation of music data and metadata that excavate and make manifest embedded assumptions and biases</li>
<li>Pedagogical explorations of models of music data and of music information systems that reveal the seams of their construction and the tensions of part versus whole</li>
</ul>
<p>Manuscript submissions are due <strong>September 18, 2020</strong>. Questions and expressions of interest may be sent to the guest editor, Francesca Giannetti, Digital Humanities Librarian at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, at fg162@rutgers.edu. For details on citations, figures, and formatting, please see <a href="https://www.musiclibraryassoc.org/page/Notescontributors">“Information for Contributors”</a>.</p>Francesca GiannettiThe idea of this special issue on digital humanities was first suggested to me by my friend and colleague, Jonathan Sauceda, who is the incoming general editor of Notes. We had worked together with Anna Kijas on a broader call for papers on the methodologies of music research a few years back for the annual meetings of the Music Library Association and the Society for American Music. At that time, we heard many thoughtful papers from colleagues like Bonna Boettcher, Timothy Duguid, David Hunter, Eduardo Herrera, Ellie Hisama, and Carol Oja, some of whom we hope to convince to respond to this updated call focusing on one particular aspect of what was then discussed: the influence of digital methodologies on the formation of music researchers. After integrating his helpful suggestions and comments, I am delighted to share the following call.DH Pedagogy for Institutional Change2019-07-26T18:51:36+00:002019-07-26T18:51:36+00:00https://francescagiannetti.com/ach2019<p><em>This is the text of a talk I gave at the Association for Computers and the Humanities conference (ACH2019) on July 24, 2019. I use two examples of text encoding work I did with undergraduate students to reflect on the possibilities of DH pedagogy to push DH from the periphery to the core of what libraries do. After listening to so many wonderful presentations and reading the conference tweets, many of which had to do with the strengths as well as the uneasiness of dwelling in between disciplines, it still feels a little foolhardy to wish for such a thing. Nevertheless, institutions do change. Here, I present one of presumably many strategies for advocating for the future we wish to see.</em></p>
<h2 id="introduction">Introduction</h2>
<p>I am Francesca Giannetti and I work at Rutgers University as their Digital Humanities Librarian. I’ll be speaking to you about two text encoding projects involving correspondence collections that I have worked on with students.</p>
<p>I will be presenting a library perspective on the topics of digital humanities pedagogy and the use of digital methods to push for institutional change.</p>
<h2 id="editor-as-social-agent">Editor as Social Agent</h2>
<p>In this talk, I will walk you through my motivations and strategies as a digital humanist who also exercises a number of more established librarian roles, such as information literacy instruction. My practice is essentially governed by a set of constraints—I’m a librarian who does not have access to a lot of technical or financial support—and an inclination to do interesting digital work that meets some of the demand among our students for rigorous technological engagements. My work always has at least two audiences—the students and my fellow librarians, who are often more interested in seeing how digital humanities work supports longstanding library practice.</p>
<h2 id="innovation-as-a-means-of-transformation">Innovation as a Means of Transformation</h2>
<p>I’d like to share some initial thoughts about the ways in which digital editing with the Text Encoding Initiative can be an innovative form of knowledge production. Text encoding as a practice is itself rather old, dating to the mid 1980s. The TEI is not what anyone would consider cutting edge at this point, so as a method it’s probably excluded from what we might call “emerging.” So that leaves, in my view, two main routes for novelty and innovation in this area of practice:</p>
<ol>
<li>Models (of texts, documents, and processes)</li>
<li>Subjects (of editions)</li>
</ol>
<p>TEI editions capture our attention because they implement unusual or striking ideas about representations, or models, of texts. Humanists who encode texts often place great emphasis on the abstract models that their projects instantiate, whether it has to do with what is or is not considered part of the “work,” the aspects of the source material that have been captured and made machine readable, or the relationships in between items or creators that have been made tractable and manipulable. One twist that I’d like to add, and that is not often brought up in written accounts of digital editions, is that text encoding projects can also implement innovative models of process, namely the manner in which the people on the editorial team get the work done. More on that further on.</p>
<p>The second route for innovation has to do with the subject of the edition itself. By subject, I am referring to the stuff, the work, the documents, sometimes by a known author, sometimes not, that the edition proposes to interpret. In the early days of text encoding, there was some sense that the print canon was being reproduced digitally. However, there was also the Women Writers Project, whose aim was to “reclaim the cultural importance of early [modern] women’s writing and bring it back into our modern field of vision”.<sup id="fnref:fn1"><a href="#fn:fn1" class="footnote">1</a></sup> In the intervening decades, still more editions of works by women have come online. And we are seeing the beginnings of a corpus of digital editions of works by authors of color, including Harlem Renaissance writers edited by Amardeep Singh, Roopika Risam, among others. There has been something of a boom in digital editions of life documents such as letters and diaries. Referring back again to models, among the more interesting implementations of correspondence editions has to do with a maximalist approach in which editors analyze the letters of a social circle, and not just one or two correspondents. As Gabriel Hankins has remarked, digital representations of correspondence allow the editor to “do justice to the larger social fields in which letters were written and […] better represent the social dimension of epistolary thinking.”<sup id="fnref:fn2"><a href="#fn:fn2" class="footnote">2</a></sup></p>
<p>My preoccupation with innovation has to do with the goal of transforming librarian practice and participating in the changes taking place in humanities education. I want revolution—of the bloodless sort—and it’s maybe for that reason that I was drawn to the Bourdieusian concept of autonomy. Briefly, in trying to understand the structure of the literary field in nineteenth-century France, and the agency of individuals within it, Bourdieu ascribes greater autonomy to the pole of cultural production that has the greater symbolic capital, which is to say the rule-breakers, the avant garde, the artists who are the least interested in pleasing readers and most concerned with creating what they view to be great art. The opposite pole is economic capital, where he places most mass market cultural production. These creators are capable of earning more, but they also have less artistic freedom in what they produce. This was a fluid, dynamic system, and one of Bourdieu’s goals in analyzing it was to understand the principles animating it.</p>
<h2 id="the-strengths-of-weak-capital-">The Strengths of Weak Capital (😂)</h2>
<p>A late study of his on literary editing also captured my attention. In this essay, he observes almost a merging of the poles of symbolic and economic capital. The biggest publishing houses were accumulating most of the money and most of the literary prizes, whereas the small, newer publishers could access, at best, a weakened symbolic capital in the form of the esteem of a few admirers in the know. He notes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>These small, innovative literary presses, if they weigh very little on the
fiction market, provide it nonetheless with its raison d’être, its justification for being, and its spiritual point of honor—and in this way <strong><em>one of its principles of transformation</em></strong>. Poor and powerless, they are in some ways condemned to respect the official norms that everyone professes and proclaims.<sup id="fnref:fn3"><a href="#fn:fn3" class="footnote">3</a></sup></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The route by which new voices could enter the field of literary production was primarily through these small, poor literary presses, which Bourdieu seems to suggest were the last meritocratic outpost in the literary field of the 1990s. While the analogy to text encoding is not perfect, scholarly editing not being quite the same as literary publishing, the part about being poor and powerless sounded familiar. While I don’t have any solution to propose to the problems of prestige and capital, I’m happy at least that a strength of occupying this corner of the scholarly editorial field is greater autonomy in the selection of one’s texts. This is even more true of pedagogical text encoding projects. The “virtue” of this position is not only a strength, but it is also a “principal of transformation” as Bourdieu puts it. It’s the way we discover, or rediscover, new and marginalized voices that change our perceptions of a given time period, place, or movement.</p>
<p>While I can’t claim to be virtuous, or even particularly innovative, I will turn now to describe my work on text encoding with students and explain how it fits into this notion of transformation.</p>
<h2 id="tei-projects">TEI Projects</h2>
<p>The first of these projects, an edition of personal papers held by a former slave, is an independent research project involving the participation of undergraduate research assistants. The Peter Still papers are primarily composed of correspondence relating to Still’s efforts to free his wife and three children who were still enslaved in Alabama.</p>
<figure class="">
<img src="/assets/images/still-capture.png" alt="Still Edition" /><figcaption>
<a href="https://stillpapers.org">Peter Still Digital Edition</a>
</figcaption></figure>
<p>While I can’t claim that Peter Still has been ignored by scholarship—there are a handful of articles and books written about him—this manuscript collection is not especially well known outside a handful of specialists. One of my aims in creating this edition has been to make the study of the collection more approachable for students.</p>
<figure class="">
<img src="/assets/images/wsb-capture.png" alt="War Service Bureau edition" /><figcaption>
<a href="https://rutgersdh.github.io/warservicebureau/">War Service Bureau edition</a>
</figcaption></figure>
<p>I designed the second project, based upon letters to and from the Rutgers College War Service Bureau (1917-1919), as a two-week unit in a proposed undergraduate course in digital humanities. The collection contains over four thousand letters between the bureau’s director and Rutgers alumni serving in the armed forces during World War I.</p>
<p>With the exception of Joyce Kilmer, a Rutgers College alumnus who had achieved some fame as a poet before he died in the war, none of the letter writers are especially well known. However, the collection does provide avenues for discussion of institutional history, histories of class and race in the military, as well as microhistorical approaches in which personal records and memories are often used as sources. These letters also provide fodder for discussions of what constitutes history and who gets to write it.</p>
<h2 id="process-modeling">Process Modeling</h2>
<p>I’ll conclude with a few remarks about process modeling.</p>
<p>A chapter by Julia Flanders and Fotis Jannidis briefly notes that there are different forms of modeling, usually divided into two groups: process modeling and data modeling.<sup id="fnref:fn4"><a href="#fn:fn4" class="footnote">4</a></sup> In their essay, they mostly dwell on the topic of data modeling, but it occurred to me while reading that public service librarianship offers a pretty good process model in that we teach students about the research process. I’ll make a few allusions to <em>The Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education</em>, which is one of our core professional texts. While my fellow librarians, including Harriett Green<sup id="fnref:fn5"><a href="#fn:fn5" class="footnote">5</a></sup> and Mackenzie Brooks<sup id="fnref:fn6"><a href="#fn:fn6" class="footnote">6</a></sup>, make arguments for teaching text encoding to develop digital and data literacies, with which I wholeheartedly agree, I sometimes make a simpler argument that text encoding teaches us how to do research.</p>
<h2 id="evaluating-authority">Evaluating Authority</h2>
<p>Placing lesser known figures at the center of one’s research inquiry requires using sources that may appear to be of dubious authority, at least by conventional research standards. Both the Still and the War Service Bureau projects have required basic biographical research to complete the personography entries and analytic annotations. In select cases, the figures in question were well enough known that they could be found in reference books and library databases. Quite a few names were resistant to those techniques. Still received support from some well known abolitionists, but the majority of them were ordinary citizens. One of the undergraduate research assistants I worked with, when she found herself repeatedly falling back on crowdsourced genealogical databases like <a href="https://www.findagrave.com/">Find a Grave</a> and <a href="https://www.familysearch.org/">Family Search</a>, questioned the appropriateness of these sources for historical research. Given that so much academic literature emphasizes traditional notions of authority, e.g. academic credentials, peer review, these sources understandably seemed dodgy.</p>
<figure class="">
<img src="/assets/images/wsb_tooltip.png" alt="tooltip showing student annotation" /><figcaption>
An excerpt of <a href="https://rutgersdh.github.io/warservicebureau/texts/conklinsl-annotated/#earl-reed-silvers-to-elizabeth-j-conklin-january-31-1919">a letter</a> showing a tooltip with a student’s editorial annotation
</figcaption></figure>
<p>We eventually arrived at a more inductive approach to the question of authority: we looked for confirming or contradicting data in our primary sources. When sourcing was provided by these online resources, we evaluated the trustworthiness of those sources. And wherever possible, we cross-referenced our findings with accounts by authors contemporaneous to Still. The information we gathered was inferred and pieced together, with the gaps and silences typical of research on non-canonical subjects. With the limitations and blind alleys we encountered, this approach to our sources drew attention to the situatedness of all information sources, including the authoritative volumes of <em>American National Biography</em>,and the shifting contextual demands of our information need.</p>
<h2 id="information-creation-as-process">Information Creation as Process</h2>
<p>One of the difficult pleasures of text encoding projects is, on the one hand, the need to establish a data model for the project in order to prepare a schema and train encoders, and, on the other, the unavoidable necessity of revising that model as particular features encountered over the course of the work challenge it. An anecdote from the work on the Still papers illustrates how a simple question about encoding a structural feature led to other questions about interpretation, ultimately resulting in the decision to make changes to our model. A question from an undergraduate research assistant about how to encode a pencil-written annotation of Fletcher Webster’s letter of introduction prompted an extended inquiry.</p>
<figure class="">
<img src="/assets/images/webster_ms.png" alt="pencil-written annotation on Webster's letter" /><figcaption>
Annotation from Fletcher Webster’s <a href="https://stillpapers.org/items/show/12">letter of introduction</a> (from the Peter Still papers, 1850–1875, Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries)
</figcaption></figure>
<p>When we initially reviewed her encoding, she asked about representing lists in TEI. Eventually, it struck us that the names of people and the addresses were related and meant to be read across the fold, even if they were written in two different hands. One could imagine, for instance, Still asking Webster for a list of prospects who might be persuaded to help him when presented with Webster’s letter. And indeed, the names of the ministers appear to match Webster’s own hand from the body of the letter. The owner of the second hand is a mystery. While we couldn’t settle this question definitively, it became clear that we wanted to incorporate elements from the TEI manuscript description module for describing changes in hand. In general, the letters of introduction frequently bore one or more postscripts from people other than the principal letter-writer; usually these people wished to convey their support of the letter’s contents. While the initial plan was to capture only the text of these annotations, curiosity about the authors and their motivations—even when the answers to our questions were unknowable—eventually led us to the decision to signal their presence with more robust descriptive markup. In this way, our experience of circling back, reexamining our work, posing new questions, and revising our plan was fundamental to the process of creating the edition, and adhered closely to the Information Creation as a Process and Research as Inquiry frames.</p>
<h2 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h2>
<p>You may be wondering why the first part of my talk dealt with innovation and transformation and the second part addressed this rather well established aspect of public services librarianship having to do with information literacy instruction. The reason for that has to do with my position in a field where we are often in between disciplines and communities. My concern here is with transforming the library community in particular by positioning text encoding and digital editing as a logical bridge between past pedagogical practice and potential present and future roles, one where the data literacies might not be understood as so very specialized and more like the responsibility of many. Since many of us modify our arguments about the value of DH, depending on our (sometimes skeptical) audience, I’d like to conclude by inviting you to comment on your own strategies for persuasion and for transforming disciplinary practices.</p>
<h2 id="postscript">Postscript</h2>
<p>A longer variation of my remarks may be found in an upcoming issue of <em>The Journal of Academic Librarianship</em>:</p>
<p>Giannetti, Francesca. 2019. “‘So near While Apart’: Correspondence Editions as Critical Library Pedagogy and Digital Humanities Methodology.” <em>The Journal of Academic Librarianship</em> 45 (5): 1–11. <a href="https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1ZHKgMYb6I4Uz">https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2019.05.001</a>.</p>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:fn1">
<p>See <a href="https://www.wwp.northeastern.edu/about/history/">https://www.wwp.northeastern.edu/about/history/</a>. <a href="#fnref:fn1" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:fn2">
<p>Hankins, G. (2015). Correspondence: Theory, Practice, and Horizons. In <em>Literary Studies in the Digital Age</em>. Retrieved from <a href="https://dlsanthology.mla.hcommons.org/correspondence-theory-practice-and-horizons/">https://dlsanthology.mla.hcommons.org/correspondence-theory-practice-and-horizons/</a> <a href="#fnref:fn2" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:fn3">
<p>Bourdieu, Pierre. 1999. <a href="https://www.persee.fr/doc/arss_0335-5322_1999_num_126_1_3278">“Une révolution conservatrice dans l’édition.”</a> <em>Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales</em> 126 (1): 11. <a href="#fnref:fn3" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:fn4">
<p>Flanders, J., & Jannidis, F. (2015). Data Modeling. In <em>A New Companion to Digital Humanities</em> (pp. 229–237). Malden, MA; Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118680605.ch16">https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118680605.ch16</a> <a href="#fnref:fn4" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:fn5">
<p>Green, Harriett E. 2013. “TEI and Libraries: New Avenues for Digital Literacy?” <em>Dh+lib</em> (blog). January 22, 2013. <a href="https://acrl.ala.org/dh/2013/01/22/tei-and-libraries-new-avenues-for-digital-literacy/">https://acrl.ala.org/dh/2013/01/22/tei-and-libraries-new-avenues-for-digital-literacy/</a>. <a href="#fnref:fn5" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:fn6">
<p>Brooks, Mackenzie. 2017. “Teaching TEI to Undergraduates: A Case Study in a Digital Humanities Curriculum.” <em>College & Undergraduate Libraries</em> 24 (2–4): 467–81. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/10691316.2017.1326331">https://doi.org/10.1080/10691316.2017.1326331</a>. <a href="#fnref:fn6" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Francesca GiannettiThis is the text of a talk I gave at the Association for Computers and the Humanities conference (ACH2019). I use two examples of text encoding work I did with undergraduate students to reflect on the possibilities of DH pedagogy to push DH from the periphery to the core of what libraries do. After listening to so many wonderful presentations and reading the conference tweets, many of which had to do with the strengths as well as the uneasiness of dwelling in between disciplines, it still feels a little foolhardy to wish for such a thing. Nevertheless, institutions do change. Here, I present one of presumably many strategies for advocating for the future we wish to see.Keeping up with the Minimalists2019-07-16T20:39:00+00:002019-07-16T20:39:00+00:00https://francescagiannetti.com/jekyll/update/2019/07/16/keeping-up-with-the-minimalists<p>Aka new site who dis?</p>
<p>Well, I’ve done it. I’ve joined the static site generator glitterati. Hooboy it was not easy. I updated my version of Ruby so Jekyll would stop giving me warnings and it had the unwanted side effect of completely breaking my Ruby environment. It took me a full day to recover. You Ruby dev types have all my admiration.</p>
<p>A couple of notes on the migration: I tried so very hard to migrate the comments from my old WordPress blog to Disqus, but I just could not get it to work. I’m a lover of the early web when people still wrote comments on blogs. I didn’t have very many on my own blog, so it’s not that big of a hardship, but still. I did try. It was an instance of when some blog post makes it look super easy but then you can’t find anything to address the very specific error you are encountering, even though you activated and reactivated all the plugins and followed all the other troubleshooting advice, whether or not it was relevant. I’ll just conclude by observing tranquilly that commenting has been disabled on my new site.</p>
<p>There are still a few kinks to iron out, mostly having to do with the way images are displaying. I’m pretty excited by the way the <a href="https://mmistakes.github.io/minimal-mistakes/">theme</a> I’m using handles galleries and header images, but I haven’t gotten around to updating all my old posts.</p>
<p>Mostly, I did this to get better at using Jekyll, which many digital humanists use to quickly spin up sites for projects and teaching. I’d like to have much greater flexibility in my web development work, and not be quite so reliant on WordPress and Omeka, not that those CMSs are not also great. The promise of minimal maintenance and minimal internet was also a key part of the appeal for me.<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote">1</a></sup> Although I obviously cannot attest to a “minimal learning curve.” I can only hope that the maintenance costs will eventually offset the high set-up tax, and that I’ll know better how to escape Ruby version hell later on.</p>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>See <a href="https://go-dh.github.io/mincomp/thoughts/2016/10/03/tldr/">https://go-dh.github.io/mincomp/thoughts/2016/10/03/tldr/</a>. <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Francesca GiannettiAka new site who dis?A Workshop on Maps and Timelines2016-03-15T07:56:54+00:002016-03-15T07:56:54+00:00https://francescagiannetti.com/a-workshop-on-maps-and-timelines<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>his post is a partial replication of a workshop I recently led at the Music Library Association Annual Meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio. The data and slides can be downloaded at <a href="http://bit.ly/musiclib2016">http://bit.ly/musiclib2016</a>. The slides had originally been created as a reveal.js presentation, which is available <a href="http://francescagiannetti.com/musiclib2016/#/">here</a>.</p>
<p>Although I haven’t yet had a chance to apply a spatial approach to my own research, I get asked to teach digital maps more than any other digital humanities technique. I’m not quite sure why, but it may have to do with librarians and academic faculty wanting to explore a geographic aspect of their sources in a more purposeful and deliberate fashion. As many researchers have remarked, reading and noting location information is one thing; plotting it on a map may lead to perceptions and insights that were hitherto only intuited, or entirely hidden. Although not quite as straightforward as word clouds, maps may offer a kind of gateway experience to more complex forms of digital or computational analysis. Plus, maps have a lot of appeal to humanities professors wanting to integrate a visual component to their course assignments.</p>
<p>I’ve certainly had fun exploring the PostGIS and PostgreSQL functionality of CartoDB as a way of transforming and filtering datasets. I’ve gathered my knowledge from the CartoDB tutorials (see under Other Resources) and <a href="https://github.com/clhenrick/cartodb-tutorial" target="_blank">various</a> <a href="https://github.com/statsmaths/cartodbTutorial" target="_blank">other</a> <a href="http://www.azavea.com/about-us/staff-profiles/daniel-mcglone/" target="_blank">professionals</a>. If you have any questions or remarks on this material, please do leave me a comment below.</p>
<p>One of the questions I received during the workshop had to do with my software choice. When choosing a mapping tool, the decision really must rest on what one hopes to accomplish. I chose to use CartoDB for most of the workshop because it offers a very generous free plan; one only needs to provide an e-mail address to get started. The visualization wizard provides a nice assortment of options for customization, including pop-up windows in which one can include text and images. The Torque visualization is fantastic for animations (as is Heatmap) if one’s dataset includes a date column. And it is super easy to share and embed CartoDB maps. The one drawback I can think of is that CartoDB does not currently support raster data, which is to say that one could not import a scan of a historic map or schematic plan. For such uses, one might look instead to MapWarper, QGIS, or even Palladio. Incidentally, I mention Palladio under Timelines below, but it is another great, free mapping tool. One thing that is easier to accomplish in Palladio than in CartoDB is the point-to-point visualization, if one’s data include a start and end location (e.g. place of birth and place of death).</p>
<h2 id="motivations-for-using-spatial-and-temporal-approaches-in-the-humanities">Motivations for Using Spatial and Temporal Approaches in the Humanities</h2>
<h3 id="identifying-patterns">Identifying Patterns</h3>
<p><a href="https://web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/viz.php?id=133&project_id=0" rel="attachment wp-att-731"><img class="align-left wp-image-731 size-thumbnail" src="http://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/fever-150x150.png" alt="fever" width="150" height="150" /></a> Modern geospatial approaches owe a lot to the field of epidemiology, which has used maps as a way to detect patterns in the way that disease spreads. This example shows the <a href="https://web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/viz.php?id=133&project_id=0">Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1850</a>. Historians at Stanford created it as a way to explore the lived experience of disease and death. They note that “different temporal aggregations of data can shift interpretations of the spatial pattern of epidemics.”</p>
<p> </p>
<h3 id="charting-a-travel-narrative">Charting a Travel Narrative</h3>
<p><a href="http://enec3120.neatline-uva.org/neatline/show/a-sentimental-journey" rel="attachment wp-att-732"><img class="align-right wp-image-732 size-thumbnail" src="http://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/sterne-150x150.png" alt="sterne" width="150" height="150" /></a> UVA student Kurt Jensen visualizes the travels of Yorick in Laurence Sterne’s <em>A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy</em>. In doing so, he explores the tensions between narrative and chronological time.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3 id="exploring-relationships">Exploring Relationships</h3>
<p><a href="http://republicofletters.stanford.edu/casestudies/franklin.html" rel="attachment wp-att-733"><img class="size-thumbnail wp-image-733 align-left" src="http://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/franklin-150x150.png" alt="franklin" width="150" height="150" /></a> The Franklin case study of <a href="http://republicofletters.stanford.edu/index.html">Mapping the Republic of Letters</a> compares Benjamin Franklin’s correspondence network to that of Voltaire. Using this view of the data, one could make the argument that Franklin was the more cosmopolitan of the two. This finding would likely be rigorously disputed by an Enlightenment scholar.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3 id="modeling-changes-through-time">Modeling Changes Through Time</h3>
<p>Ben Schmidt makes <a href="http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2012/10/data-narratives-and-structural.html">several interesting observations</a> about his work mapping the paths taken by American ships in 1800-1860. This visualization collapses the data into a single year to show the seasonal migration of ships in the Pacific Ocean.</p>
<!-- Courtesy of embedresponsively.com //-->
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<iframe src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/WVnuWXk8w4g" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
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<h3 id="exploring-content">Exploring Content</h3>
<p><a href="http://photogrammar.yale.edu/" rel="attachment wp-att-738"><img class="size-thumbnail wp-image-738 align-left" src="http://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/photogrammar-150x150.png" alt="photogrammar" width="150" height="150" /></a>Maps and timelines can lead to new insights about your collections, but they are also a great way of allowing users to explore content. The <a href="http://photogrammar.yale.edu/">Yale Photogrammar</a> provides an interactive map interface and scrubber bar for exploring thousands of photographs by geography, time period, and creator. See the Labs section for more facets.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2 id="data-formatting">Data Formatting</h2>
<h3 id="part-i">Part I</h3>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Description</th>
<th>City</th>
<th>Country</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Mozart family starts tour</td>
<td>Salzburg</td>
<td>Austria</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>They arrive in Munich</td>
<td>Munich</td>
<td>Germany</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Then they go to Mannheim</td>
<td>Mannheim</td>
<td>Germany</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>Use a header row to describe your data; avoid special characters, spaces and numbers here. Place individual locations on rows underneath the header; 1 row = 1 location. Store each address element in its own cell.</p>
<h3 id="part-ii">Part II</h3>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Street</th>
<th>City</th>
<th>State</th>
<th>Zip</th>
<th>Time</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>35 W Fifth St</td>
<td>Cincinnati</td>
<td>OH</td>
<td>45202</td>
<td>2016-03-05T13:40:00z</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>Store address elements and dates as <u>text fields</u> so that your spreadsheet application does not autoformat them and introduce errors. Use a machine readable format for dates and times, i.e. <a href="http://www.iso.org/iso/home/standards/iso8601.htm">ISO 8601</a>.</p>
<h3 id="part-iii">Part III</h3>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>old_city</th>
<th>old_country</th>
<th>new_city</th>
<th>new_country</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Königsberg</td>
<td>Prussia</td>
<td>Kaliningrad</td>
<td>Russia</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>Geocoding services need contemporary geopolitical information to work well. If you’re working with historical data, add some columns to record where the location is currently.</p>
<h3 id="part-iv">Part IV</h3>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Description</th>
<th>City</th>
<th>District</th>
<th>Country</th>
<th>Certainty</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Beethoven was somewhere around here.</td>
<td>Karlsbad</td>
<td>Karlsruhe</td>
<td>Germany</td>
<td>medium</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>If you’re dealing with uncertainty in your data, record it as a separate element.</p>
<h3 id="part-v">Part V</h3>
<p>Lastly, it’s recommended to assign a unique identifier to each location, particularly if it is important to know the order in which you entered your data. Many mapping applications automatically assign a unique ID to records, but sorting will destroy any original order.</p>
<h2 id="exercises">Exercises</h2>
<p>Create a free CartoDB account at <a href="https://cartodb.com/signup">cartodb.com/signup</a> and log in. Take a few minutes to explore the interface. See: Dashboard, Datasets, Maps.</p>
<h3 id="about-our-data">About our Data</h3>
<p>We will explore a dataset prepared by Michelle Oswell of the Curtis Institute on Breitkopf & Härtel’s Concert Program Exchange, or Konzertprogramm Austausch. B&H began the series in 1893 <a href="http://inconcert.datatodata.com/datasets/concert-programme-exchange-1901-1914/">“as a means to promote current awareness of concert repertories via the circulation of printed concert programmes.”</a> Subscribing organizations sent their programs to B&H for distribution in the series. See Michelle’s <a href="https://prezi.com/ox7uwlp6tila/breitkopf-hartels-concert-programm-austausch/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy">ATMLA presentation</a> for more background on her project.</p>
<h3 id="adding-data">Adding Data</h3>
<p>In the materials downloaded to your desktop, there is a data folder with three datasets. We will add <b style="color: #827807;">austausch.csv</b> to CartoDB by going to the Datasets window of the Dashboard.</p>
<p><em>Note</em>: by your user name in the upper left corner, you should see either <b style="color: #0d6b82;">Maps</b> or <b style="color: #0d6b82;">Datasets</b> with a down arrow next to it. If it says Maps, click the down arrow and navigate to Your datasets.</p>
<p>Click on New Dataset, where you should see a Data file option (default). Click BROWSE and choose <b style="color: #827807;">austausch.csv</b>. Click Connect Dataset.</p>
<p>CartoDB should do a good job of “guessing” your data type (point). In the Data View of your dataset, hopefully you’ll see a new column called <b style="color: #0d6b82;">the_geom</b> with coordinate data. CartoDB will automatically geocode physical locations for you, which is to say it will assign latitude and longitude coordinates, so long as you supply clean address data. Geocoding of administrative regions (city, state, country) is free; geocoding street addresses is capped at 100 per month in the free plan.</p>
<p>Let’s add a second dataset. Return to the Datasets window of your dashboard. Click the little crooked arrow in the upper left side of your screen (next to the title of the dataset) to get back there. Now click New Dataset. Press BROWSE and find the dataset called <b style="color: #827807;">vg2500_geo84.zip</b> in the data folder.<sup>1</sup> Click Connect Dataset. This zipped file actually contains five files. We are only interested in the one called <b style="color: #827807;">vg2500_bld</b>. This stands for Bundesländer, or state. You can delete the others if you want to keep your dataset area clean.</p>
<h2 id="data-wrangling">Data Wrangling</h2>
<p>Returning now to the Austausch data you uploaded, let’s assume that CartoDB doesn’t assign latitude and longitude coordinates to your physical addresses, or it skips a few rows (this will probably happen). If <b style="color: #0d6b82;">the_geom</b> is empty, or if a few cells in this column have null values, go to Edit > Georeference. Navigate to the City Names option; enter <b style="color: #0d6b82;">citymodern</b> as the city, and <b style="color: #0d6b82;">country</b> as the country (skip Admin Region), and click CONTINUE. Then click “Georeference your data with points.”</p>
<p>Here’s something odd. Munich appears a lot in our dataset, but in the map view you’ll probably see that there’s no dot over Munich. This is a peculiar GeoNames geocoding error. Here’s a global fix. Go to the SQL window, paste in this command, and click <strong>Apply query</strong>.</p>
<figure class="highlight"><pre><code class="language-sql" data-lang="sql"><span class="k">UPDATE</span> <span class="n">austausch</span>
<span class="k">SET</span> <span class="n">the_geom</span> <span class="o">=</span> <span class="n">CDB_LatLng</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="mi">48</span><span class="p">.</span><span class="mi">1333</span><span class="p">,</span><span class="mi">11</span><span class="p">.</span><span class="mi">5667</span><span class="p">)</span>
<span class="k">WHERE</span> <span class="n">citymodern</span> <span class="k">ILIKE</span> <span class="s1">'%Munich%'</span></code></pre></figure>
<p>Let’s turn now to the Bundesländer polygons, called <b style="color: #827807;">vg2500_bld</b>. Return to the datasets window and click on it to open the data view. We’re going to add a column to this dataset in which we will include values for the total number of subscribers by German state. Click on the little icon on the bottom right of your screen (it will say ‘add column’ when you hover over it with your cursor) and add a new column. Rename it <b style="color: #0d6b82;">subs_per_state</b>. Change the data type from string to number.</p>
<h3 id="postgis-functions">PostGIS Functions</h3>
<p>Now we are going to count the number of subscribers by German state using the ST_Intersects function. This command is updating <b style="color: #827807;">vg2500_bld</b>, setting the <b style="color: #0d6b82;">subs_per_state</b> column to equal a total (*) count of all the subscribers that intersect with each state. ST_Intersects is the PostGIS function for spatial joining. More information on other PostGIS functions can be found <a href="http://postgis.net/docs/reference.html">here</a>.</p>
<figure class="highlight"><pre><code class="language-sql" data-lang="sql"><span class="k">UPDATE</span> <span class="n">vg2500_bld</span>
<span class="k">SET</span> <span class="n">subs_per_state</span> <span class="o">=</span> <span class="p">(</span>
<span class="k">SELECT</span> <span class="k">COUNT</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="o">*</span><span class="p">)</span>
<span class="k">FROM</span> <span class="n">austausch</span>
<span class="k">WHERE</span> <span class="n">ST_Intersects</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="n">the_geom</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">vg2500_bld</span><span class="p">.</span><span class="n">the_geom</span><span class="p">)</span>
<span class="p">)</span> </code></pre></figure>
<p>Next, let’s draw some lines in between our Breitkopf & Härtel subscribers to get an idea of the subscription network. It may be useful to collect our points by issue first. This would help if we wanted to visualize the subscribers of individual issues of the Exchange Concert Programs (as opposed to all of them at once). We’ll use a PostGIS function called ST_Collect. Click on the SQL window, paste in this command, and click <strong>Apply query</strong></p>
<figure class="highlight"><pre><code class="language-sql" data-lang="sql"><span class="k">SELECT</span> <span class="n">ST_Collect</span> <span class="p">(</span><span class="n">the_geom</span><span class="p">)</span> <span class="k">AS</span> <span class="n">the_geom</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">issues</span>
<span class="k">FROM</span> <span class="n">austausch</span>
<span class="k">GROUP</span> <span class="k">BY</span> <span class="n">issues</span></code></pre></figure>
<p>Next, we’ll draw those lines. Click on the SQL window, paste in this command, and click <strong>Apply query</strong>. CartoDB gives you the option to “create dataset from query.” Click on this option so that the lines can be added as an optional data layer to your map visualization. Change the title of this dataset to <b style="color: #827807;">austausch_subscribers</b></p>
<figure class="highlight"><pre><code class="language-sql" data-lang="sql"><span class="k">SELECT</span> <span class="n">ST_MakeLine</span> <span class="p">(</span><span class="n">the_geom</span> <span class="k">ORDER</span> <span class="k">BY</span> <span class="nb">time</span> <span class="k">ASC</span><span class="p">)</span> <span class="k">AS</span> <span class="n">the_geom</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">issues</span>
<span class="k">FROM</span> <span class="n">austausch</span>
<span class="k">GROUP</span> <span class="k">BY</span> <span class="n">issues</span></code></pre></figure>
<p>If you’re not sick of PostGIS yet, then here’s one more thing you can try. Let’s say we want to draw a radius around the old Breitkopf & Härtel headquarters in Leipzig so it stands out on our map visualization. Go back to your dataset window. Click New Dataset, then Create empty dataset. Call it <b style="color: #827807;">bnh</b>. Double click on the cell under <b style="color: #0d6b82;">the_geom</b> to enter a coordinate pair. Enter longitude 12.3833; latitude 51.3333.</p>
<p>Now click on the SQL window and run this command. This will draw a 50 mile radius around Leipzig that we can then add as a data layer to our map visualization in order to draw attention to this location. We’re converting from the default meters to miles by multiplying 50 times 1609 (1609 meters ≈ 1 mile).</p>
<figure class="highlight"><pre><code class="language-sql" data-lang="sql"><span class="k">SELECT</span>
<span class="n">ST_Transform</span><span class="p">(</span>
<span class="n">ST_Buffer</span><span class="p">(</span>
<span class="n">the_geom</span><span class="p">::</span><span class="n">geography</span><span class="p">,</span>
<span class="mi">50</span><span class="o">*</span><span class="mi">1609</span>
<span class="p">)::</span><span class="n">geometry</span><span class="p">,</span>
<span class="mi">3857</span>
<span class="p">)</span> <span class="k">AS</span> <span class="n">the_geom_webmercator</span><span class="p">,</span>
<span class="n">cartodb_id</span>
<span class="k">FROM</span>
<span class="n">bnh</span></code></pre></figure>
<p>The ST_Buffer function creates a polygon or shape. Click on “create dataset from query.” You’ll see that the resulting dataset has two columns: <b style="color: #0d6b82;">cartodb_id</b> and <b style="color: #0d6b82;">the_geom</b>. Click on the icon on the lower right of your screen (add column). Rename this column <b style="color: #0d6b82;">name</b>. Double click on the cell underneath it and enter the value: <b style="color: #691d0a;">Breitkopf und Härtel</b>. This allows you to use this text as a label in your map visualization.</p>
<h2 id="visualization">Visualization</h2>
<p>Now we’ll put together some of these data layers we’ve created into a shareable, interactive map visualization. Go back to your dataset window by clicking on the bent arrow on the upper left of your screen. Go back to the <b style="color: #827807;">austausch</b> dataset and double click on it to open the data view. Scroll over to the <b style="color: #0d6b82;">time</b> column and make sure that CartoDB has assigned a data type of ‘date’ to it.</p>
<p>Now navigate to the map view of <b style="color: #827807;">austausch</b>. You’ll see CartoDB’s default SIMPLE visualization with the orange dots. Open the tool bar on the right hand of your screen by clicking on the paint brush icon (visualization wizard). Next try the CLUSTER visualization. Experiment with the buckets, the fill color, the transparency value (note: 1 is perfectly opaque, 0.5 is 50% transparent), the marker stroke (white line around the dots), and every and anything else that strikes your fancy.</p>
<p>In other words, press all the buttons. You can’t hurt anything.</p>
<p>Another CartoDB visualization that is open to us with this dataset is TORQUE. Torque is for time series data. Set the time column to <b style="color: #0d6b82;">time</b> (date works too). It may not make much sense for this dataset, but note that you can make the torque visualization cumulative, meaning that the dots fade very slowly so that a cumulative impact over time may be observed.</p>
<p>Yet one more thing to try – HEATMAP – to see all the hotbeds of B&H subscriber activity. Notice that you can animate your heatmap by the time or date column.</p>
<p>Settle on one of these visualization options for <b style="color: #827807;">austausch</b>, and then click on the button VISUALIZE in the upper right corner. Then click: OK, CREATE MAP.</p>
<p>Next, click on the infowindow panel (the icon looks like a cartoon bubble). You can only have infowindows in the SIMPLE, CHOROPLETH and CATEGORY visualizations, so if you didn’t happen to choose one of those, skip to the next slide. Let’s turn on some column names in your infowindows. I suggest creating a hover event for <b style="color: #0d6b82;">cityhistorical</b>. Then maybe create a click event for <b style="color: #0d6b82;">concert_title</b> and <b style="color: #0d6b82;">venues</b>. Note: you can always switch to Data View to inspect the column headers and determine which you want to display in the infowindow. To reorder your fields in the infowindows, just click and drag them.</p>
<p>In the toolbar on the righthand side of your screen, click on the plus (+) button at the top to add another data layer. Add the German states layer, <b style="color: #827807;">vg2500_bld</b>, that we tinkered with earlier. Reorder your layers so that points (<b style="color: #827807;">austausch</b>) are uppermost and the polygons or shapes (<b style="color: #827807;">vg2500_bld</b>) are on the bottom. You can do this by clicking and dragging on the layers in that right-hand toolbar.</p>
<p>When you add the German states layer, CartoDB may default to the CHOROPLETH visualization. But if not, open the visualization wizard while in the <b style="color: #827807;">vg2500_bld</b> layer and select CHOROPLETH. Now we can use that <b style="color: #0d6b82;">subs_per_state</b> column we added earlier during the data transformations. Feel free to change the color ramp, quantification, buckets, and anything else. You can also add a label text to the states by selecting the <b style="color: #0d6b82;">gen</b> column. But it might also make your map a bit cluttered. Now we can see where the highest concentration of subscribers are located.</p>
<p>Now might be a good time to mention <a href="http://colorbrewer2.org/">ColorBrewer</a>, which is a great resource for selecting colors for map visualizations.</p>
<p>If you have the layers to add from the earlier data transformation exercises, try adding either the lines connecting the subscriber locations, or the buffer around Leipzig (Breitkopf & Härtel). I’d recommend stacking the data layers in this order, from top to bottom, for best legibility: <b style="color: #827807;">austausch</b> (points), <b style="color: #827807;">bnh</b> (polygon), <b style="color: #827807;">austausch_subscribers</b> (lines), and <b style="color: #827807;">vg2500_bld</b> (polygons). Note that using all four data layers at once may produce an overly dense visualization, but if you can finesse the colors, transparency and overlays, it just might be possible.</p>
<p>Let’s take a moment to debrief. What have you noticed about this Breitkopf & Härtel Concert Program Exchange dataset through the process of working with it? Are there any patterns or trends you’ve observed? Interesting characteristics? Is there anything missing that you thought would be there? Does it raise any additional questions? Technical questions?</p>
<h3 id="publishing-and-sharing-your-map">Publishing and Sharing your Map</h3>
<p>In the upper left hand corner below the title, select ‘Edit Metadata’ to add a Description and Tags to your map to make it more easily discoverable.</p>
<p>On the Options button on the bottom left hand corner, configure which elements will be on your final shared map. I recommend: Title, Description, Search Box, Share Options and Layer Selector.</p>
<p>Finally, in the upper right hand corner, select Publish to get a public URL for your map. You can share your map using that public URL, or by embedding the map on a website or blog using the Embed iframe and pasting it into your website.</p>
<h2 id="timelines">Timelines</h2>
<p>I want to show briefly some of the features of a different tool developed by the Stanford Humanities + Design Lab: <a href="http://palladio.designhumanities.org/#/">Palladio</a>. Although it doesn’t have the PostGIS and PostgreSQL capabilities of CartoDB, Palladio has a map tool that supports all kinds of visualizations (see <a href="http://miriamposner.com/blog/getting-started-with-palladio/">Miriam Posner’s tutorial</a> for the details). I particularly like the Timeline and Timespan panels.</p>
<p>Let’s give Palladio a whirl with the <a href="http://archives.metoperafamily.org/archives/frame.htm">Repertory Report</a> from the Metropolitan Opera’s MetOpera Database. What we’ll see won’t be substantively different from what <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-same-four-operas-are-performed-over-and-over/">FiveThirtyEight</a> and <a href="http://subyraman.tumblr.com/post/101048131983/10-graphs-to-explain-the-metropolitan-opera">Suby Raman</a> have already shown: the Met isn’t too adventurous with its programming.</p>
<p>Go to <a href="http://palladio.designhumanities.org/#/">Palladio</a> and click Start. Drag the dataset called <b style="color: #827807;">met-operas-clean-geo.tsv</b> into Palladio’s text window and click Load. You’ll probably see a red dot or two next to some of the metadata fields. Palladio wants to verify that any special characters were in fact intended, so click on the red dot to review them. Then click Done. Make sure that Palladio has understood that <b style="color: #0d6b82;">first_performance</b> and <b style="color: #0d6b82;">last_performance</b> are dates.</p>
<p>Click on the Map visualization in Palladio’s upper navigation menu. Click New Layer. Select Map Type: Points (default) and then for Places, select the <b style="color: #0d6b82;">lat_long</b> column. Set your Tooltip layer to <b style="color: #0d6b82;">work</b>. Check the box next to ‘Size points,’ and size them according to ‘Number of untitled’ (total number of works in the Metropolitan’s repertory = 330). Click Add layer. This is a truly dull dataset in terms of geography, since we’ve only got one venue, but next open the Timespan panel on the bottom of your screen.</p>
<p>Timespan is a great feature for exploring datasets with two dates, e.g. birth and death dates, start and end dates for tours, etc. In the Timespan panel, go to Layout and select Parallel. Make sure that Start date is using the <b style="color: #0d6b82;">first_performance</b> column and End date is using <b style="color: #0d6b82;">last_performance</b>. Set the label to be <b style="color: #0d6b82;">work</b>. We don’t really need a grouping key with this dataset, but set Group to <b style="color: #0d6b82;">venue</b> (wouldn’t it be cool to have this repertory data for more than one theatre?).</p>
<p>Parallel lines in the Timespan visualization will mean that the opera had its first and last performance in relatively close chronological succession. Deep diagonal lines indicate that the first and last performances are far apart, which likely means the work is an old chestnut. Hover over the lines with your cursor to see the work titles.</p>
<p>Click on the Timeline button to open a Timeline panel. Set Dates to <b style="color: #0d6b82;">first_performance</b>, Height to ‘Number of Untitled’ (number of repertory works), and Group by <b style="color: #0d6b82;">work</b>.</p>
<p>This timeline gives us another view into the same phenomenon: the bulk of new operas were premiered before 1940. It may however be a bit easier in Timeline (as opposed to Timespan) to hover over the bars and see the work titles. You may discover that some of the post-WWII first performances were not exactly new works (e.g. Verdi’s <em>I Vespri Siciliani</em> and Händel’s <em>Rodelinda</em>). Here’s the <a href="http://archives.metoperafamily.org/archives/frame.htm">Repertory Report</a> again for easy comparison.</p>
<h2 id="other-resources">Other Resources</h2>
<h3 id="other-free-or-free-ish-mapping-tools">Other Free (or Free-ish) Mapping Tools</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.google.com/mymaps">Google MyMaps</a></li>
<li><a href="http://mapwarper.net/">MapWarper</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.mapbox.com/">MapBox</a> and <a href="https://www.mapbox.com/tilemill/">TileMill</a></li>
<li><a href="http://leafletjs.com/">Leaflet</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.qgis.org/en/site/">QGIS</a></li>
</ul>
<h3 id="other-free-timeline-applications">Other Free Timeline Applications</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/">SIMILE Timeline</a></li>
<li><a href="https://timeline.knightlab.com/">TimelineJS</a></li>
<li><a href="http://neatline.org/plugins/">NeatlineSimile</a>, if you’re using <a href="http://omeka.org/">Omeka</a> as your digital publishing platform</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="self-guided-learning">Self-Guided Learning</h3>
<p>CartoDB has the Map Academy and a separate tutorials section, both of which are excellent resources for learning about GIS.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://academy.cartodb.com/">Map Academy</a></li>
<li><a href="http://docs.cartodb.com/tutorials/">CartoDB Tutorials</a></li>
<li><a href="http://docs.cartodb.com/tips-and-tricks/">CartoDB Tips & Tricks</a></li>
</ul>
<hr />
<p><sup>1</sup> Dataset by Joerg Moosmeier of Esri Deutschland Gmbh. <a href="http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=ae25571c60d94ce5b7fcbf74e27c00e0" target="_blank">http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=ae25571c60d94ce5b7fcbf74e27c00e0</a></p>FrancescaText of a workshop I led at the Music Library Association Annual Meeting 2016Musical Multimodal Meanderings2015-06-24T22:35:27+00:002015-06-24T22:35:27+00:00https://francescagiannetti.com/musical-multimodal-meanderings<p>I’m posting below the remarks from my part of a presentation given together with Anna Kijas, Senior Digital Scholarship Librarian (Boston College Libraries), at the joint <a href="http://www.iaml.info/congresses/iamlims-new-york-2015" target="_blank">International Association of Music Libraries/International Musicological Society Congress</a> in New York, held June 21-26, 2015. Her talk and slides are available <a href="http://www.annakijas.com/?p=605" target="_blank">here</a>. In our presentation, entitled “Digital Madeleines and Breadcrumbs: Discovering the Musical Past through Multimodal Analyses,” we spoke about the process involved in creating our digital projects and reflected on the similarities and differences with print scholarship.</p>
<h2 id="introduction">Introduction</h2>
<p>I will be presenting some preliminary analysis I’ve done on an opera libretto written by Felice Romani (1788-1865), and its source play by Honoré-Antoine Richaud Martelly (1751-1817). Romani wrote <em><a href="http://www.internetculturale.it:80/opencms/opencms/it/viewItemMag.jsp?id=oai%3Abid.braidense.it%3A7%3AMI0185%3AMUS0319943&case=" target="_blank">I due Figaro</a></em> in 1820 for a new production with composer Michele Carafa at La Scala of Milan. For this assignment, he chose to adapt what at the time was an immensely popular play, Martelly’s <em><a href="http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5801206d" target="_blank">Les deux Figaro</a></em>, which first appeared on the Parisian stage in 1794 during the French Revolution, and achieved a long-lived success throughout the European continent for the next fifty or so years. Martelly himself had wished to capitalize on the fame of Beaumarchais’s protagonist with this spurious third installment in which the wily servant Figaro gets his just deserts at the hands of his noble masters.</p>
<p>Although I originally wrote an analysis of Romani’s libretto and its source play when I was a grad student enrolled in Dr. Nardini’s music research methods class of the Butler School of Music (UT Austin), it has been on my mind for some time to explore ways of visualizing the process by which a librettist takes a stage play and adapts it for the lyrical stage. Since I have done a close reading, and am now experimenting with digital analysis techniques, I can offer an exploratory report on my findings, as well as remark on some of the differences in approach and process that both techniques entail.</p>
<h2 id="hermeneutics-vs-sandwich-making">Hermeneutics vs. sandwich making</h2>
<p>One of the most difficult aspects about this project was the need to reframe my research questions once I was forced to acknowledge the messy state of my data and the limited resources at my disposal to whip it into the sort of shape where certain data analysis techniques would become available to me. I had initially hoped to perform analyses of the sort where I could extract what Figaro says in the French play as well as in the Italian libretto and run algorithms to detect the most commonly used words, the most frequently mentioned persons, and the quantity of speech he utters in each version, among other things. For this sort of analysis, I needed structured data of the type provided by <a href="http://www.tei-c.org/About/faq.xml" target="_blank">TEI</a>, only that wasn’t available to me. Not only that, there wasn’t even a digital text for either the French play or the Italian libretto. What I did have were two scans of 18th and 19th century editions, with text layers provided by OCR that included text, certainly. But also errors, extraneous characters and hashbangs of the sort familiar to anyone who wrestles with OCR algorithms and historical texts. In short, text analysis would not work for me for such a small corpus, at least not until I could get clean text transcriptions and perhaps structured TEI markup.</p>
<p>So what was left? I did have a couple of ideas that originated from my close reading of the texts that I wished to explore as visualizations. One had to do with the gender balance between the French and Italian texts. The second was a related question about the power and class dynamic among the characters of both texts. The major shifts I observed from reading Romani’s adaptation and Martelly’s play were:</p>
<ol>
<li>A displacement of the conflict between Figaro and Cherubino, the play’s eponymous Figaros, in favor of the love story between Cherubino and Inez, the daughter of the Count and Countess.</li>
<li>A heightening of the source play’s anti-republican message, achieved by ennobling the role of the Count, who is a scoundrel in the French play, and recasting Susanna from a clever but essentially powerless lady’s maid, to a scheming, <em>Commedia</em>-style Colombina, or tricky slave.</li>
</ol>
<p>After tabling the issue of text analysis, I decided that I could proceed with modeling the character interactions in each text. To do so, I turned to social network theory as a possible interpretive framework. Applying the proper vocabulary in this case, the characters become vertices or nodes, and the relationships between them are the ties or edges. I wished to create a weighted network graph, which means the edges have a “strength,” e.g. Figaro has greater number of character interactions than Susanna, therefore his node is sized larger; Figaro talks to the Count more than he talks to Susanna, therefore the edge between Figaro and the Count is thicker. Next came the question of how to qualify and count those character interactions in both texts.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.literaturegeek.com/2013/09/09/dataintogephi/" target="_blank">Amanda Visconti</a> and <a href="http://programminghistorian.org/lessons/creating-network-diagrams-from-historical-sources" target="_blank">Marten Düring</a> have shared their coding schemes for James Joyce’s <em>Ulysses</em> and Ralph Neumann’s autobiography, respectively, in which the ties are weighted by the type of interaction. For dramatic texts, I decided that I could forgo some of this complexity, given that one of the most basic ties was also the most commonly occurring: one character speaking directly to another. In this first pass of the data, I have recorded when one character speaks to another on a per-scene basis. For example, if Figaro addresses Susanna once or twelve times in a scene, it still gets counted only once. Soliloquies and asides are recorded as self-closing loops; in other words, as the character talking to himself. This method has the advantage of expediency, and the shortcoming of being rather simplistic. Revising with text weight could yield a more accurate model, although the soliloquies will introduce a counting problem. For instance, a one-line interjection can be interpreted as the character talking to himself once, but what to make of a three hundred word soliloquy in prose, or an eleven-line aria in rhyming couplets? What should be the unit of speech, and does it matter if it is different for the prose play versus the lyric libretto?</p>
<p>These sorts of questions get to the heart of a problem described at length in an essay by Franco Moretti entitled <a href="http://newleftreview.org/II/84/franco-moretti-operationalizing" target="_blank"><em>Operationalizing</em></a>. Briefly, operationalizing describes the process of taking a question and devising some sort of measurement to arrive at a plausible answer to that question. Frequently, there are many possible measurements, and the selection of this or that measurement will depend on the research question, the availability and pliability of the data, as well as the interests of the researcher. I confess that when I started, I had thought that making a network graph would be something like what Jer Thorp describes in a blog post called <em><a href="https://hbr.org/2013/04/visualization-as-process" target="_blank">Visualization as Process</a></em>, which is to say I thought I’d be making a roast beef sandwich. Sure, there might be small refinements in the selection of this condiment or that bread, but the end result would still basically be a roast beef sandwich. Alternatively, many researchers argue that the real value to be had from visualization is the insight gained during the iterative process of developing a data model in response to a question and interacting with that data model within the chosen analysis framework. The output—the visualization—is the result of a series of decisions about what and how to measure, and each of those decisions can result in a radically different, highly subjective output. The visualization, in short, is only one of many possible interpretations. And the end result may simply be more (or better) questions… which makes for a rather unpredictable sandwich.</p>
<h2 id="feminizing-figaro-or-not">Feminizing Figaro (or not)</h2>
<p>In shifting the focus of the play from a class-inflected battle of wits to a more conventional love story, Romani used some common strategies, including cuts to the male characters, the reappropriation of dialogue to build up the lesser character of Inez, and the elimination of the harsher marital reflections of both the Count and Figaro. It had seemed to me from reading the text that the female characters enjoyed a much more prominent role in the Italian version than in the French, largely because Romani was under the obligation of providing the text of an aria for each major vocal part, not to mention a love duet.</p>
<figure class="">
<img src="http://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/martelly-romani-gender-by-scene.png" alt="Breakdown of character gender by scene in Martelly's play (left) and Romani's libretto (right)" /><figcaption>
Breakdown of character gender by scene in Martelly’s play (left) and Romani’s libretto (right). The ladies are in blue; men in red. Made using the Treemap chart in <a href="http://app.raw.densitydesign.org">RAW</a>.
</figcaption></figure>
<p>The above attempt to visualize the gender balance by scene yielded somewhat unexpected results. While it is clear that there are many more all-male scenes in the French play as compared to the Italian libretto (each floating mono- or dichromatic block represents a scene), there doesn’t appear to be much of an observable difference in gender count across the two texts. Romani’s libretto has a slightly higher number of female characters appearing per scene (31% when the number of female character appearances by scene are divided by the total number of appearances of characters of either gender) compared to Martelly’s play (28%), but it’s not a particularly impactful difference. It is also notable from this visualization that the women in Martelly’s play have several scenes to themselves (without men), whereas in Romani’s libretto they almost never appear without male characters. As far as the reader’s perception is concerned, it could in fact be a decisive factor that so many scenes in Martelly’s play are of men only. But at five acts and 77 scenes, Martelly’s play is also much longer than Romani’s adaptation, which is comprised of only two acts of 36 scenes.</p>
<h2 id="character-networks">Character networks</h2>
<p>The following two visualizations are representations of the betweenness centrality of the characters of the source play and the libretto (this <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrality" target="_blank">Wikipedia article</a> provides a good description of the different measures of centrality). Roughly speaking, betweenness centrality seeks to measure the shortest paths from all nodes to all the others that pass through that node. By this measure, and with the character appearances per scene data that I compiled, Figaro, the Count and Cherubino are the most central characters of the French play, which corroborates my impressions from reading. By contrast, it is immediately observable that the Italian libretto is more of an ensemble piece. Susanna shows a much higher degree of centrality; Cherubino, a lesser degree. And the invented role of the chorus (vassalli, villanelle, paesani) also assumes a prominent position in the Italian text.</p>
<figure class="half full">
<a href="https://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/martelly-betweeness.png" title="Martelly betweenness">
<img src="https://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/martelly-betweeness.png" alt="Martelly betweenness" />
</a>
<a href="https://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/romani-betweeness-3.png" title="Romani betweenness">
<img src="https://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/romani-betweeness-3.png" alt="Romani betweenness" />
</a>
<figcaption>Betweenness centrality of Martelly’s play and Romani’s libretto. Visualized using <a href="http://gephi.github.io/">Gephi</a>.
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Here too there were surprises. For example, Susanna’s centrality in the French play was much smaller than anticipated, since in both texts it had seemed that she was an important bridge between the two groups of schemers: Figaro and Don Alvaro on the one side, and the Countess, Inez, Cherubino and herself on the other. It could be that my operationalization of the variable of character interaction is at fault. On the other, it could also be that Cherubino more effectively performs this bridge role in the French play, whereas Susanna takes it over in the Italian libretto. In this context, her relative isolation in Martelly’s text could be interpreted as a measure of her powerlessness to counteract Figaro’s immoral plot. Similarly, Cherubino’s diminished centrality in the Italian text allows him to get closer to Inez, and thereby create the love story that receives such scant attention in the French play.</p>
<h2 id="conclusions">Conclusions</h2>
<p>My analyses of these two texts are still very much in process, and I may decide that the way in which I have operationalized my questions doesn’t work and find new ways. That said, the process so far has yielded many refinements to my original questions, and more approaches than I had thought possible.</p>
<p>Devising even a rudimentary coding scheme in response to my questions has prompted very careful, and repeated reading, such that I can now say I have a deeper knowledge of the texts. Ambiguities had to be resolved, or discarded, for the sake of developing a rigorously consistent model. I had to decide which character attributes were important to track. For now, it is gender. But going forward, it could also be class and community. Developing and refining this coding scheme, and interacting with the resulting data in the analysis tool, forced me to question my own assumptions and verify impressions from reading the texts.</p>
<p>Working through problem of representing gender and character interaction across two related texts has of course been time consuming, but it has also been a productive exercise in investigating my own biases and understandings. In some cases, my impressions of the texts were confirmed, but in just as many, I have been surprised. Needless to say, the visualizations do not supersede the need of careful reading, since a solid understanding of the underlying data is necessary to interpret the output. But as a complement to close reading, the process of visualization is an informative, not to mention fun, way of analyzing musical and dramatic texts.</p>FrancescaI’m posting below the remarks from my part of a presentation given together with Anna Kijas, Senior Digital Scholarship Librarian (Boston College Libraries), at the joint International Association of Music Libraries/International Musicological Society Congress in New York, held June 21-26, 2015. Her talk and slides are available here. In our presentation, entitled “Digital Madeleines and Breadcrumbs: Discovering the Musical Past through Multimodal Analyses,” we spoke about the process involved in creating our digital projects and reflected on the similarities and differences with print scholarship.A HathiTrust Research Center Primer2015-02-24T15:20:36+00:002015-02-24T15:20:36+00:00https://francescagiannetti.com/a-hathitrust-research-center-primer<p><em><strong>Note added March 3, 2015</strong> –</em> Beth Plale of Indiana University kindly offered me the following corrections on my account of the Data Capsule. The Data API is in fact only available in Secure Mode. I think in my struggle to learn how to use the Data Capsule, it got a bit muddled in my mind when I was in Secure versus Maintenance Mode. She explained the difference as follows:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">
<em>Maintenance mode is where you upload tools and external data from your desktop or the web. You are at this point installing everything you need to do analysis. The Data API is not available in maintenance mode. Solr API is available in maintenance mode.</em>
</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">
<em>Secure mode: once you have external data and tools loaded into VM, switch to secure mode where your scripts run to download texts through the Data API, your analysis tools run, then you store results to a special directory that allows you to get derived results out of the VM. The Solr API is available in secure mode too.</em>
</p>
<hr />
<p>This is a lightly adapted version of a talk I gave in Alexander Library on February 24, 2015. My charge was to describe the <a href="http://www.hathitrust.org/htrc" target="_blank">HathiTrust Research Center</a>, explore the opportunities it provides to the user public, and imagine how we (Rutgers librarians) might work with our users to take best advantage of those opportunities.</p>
<h2 id="just-thefacts">Just the Facts</h2>
<p>The HathiTrust Research Center is collaboration between Indiana University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the HathiTrust Digital Library. It was established in 2011 to enable computational research across the HathiTrust’s vast collection of published works.</p>
<p>The HTRC has been conceived with the digital humanities researcher in mind. The research tools that the HTRC has been engaged in developing aim to surmount some of the technical and logistic challenges inherent to large-scale text analysis. In addition, these tools support algorithmic analyses even when copyright restrictions preclude human-reading level (“consumptive”) access to the text.</p>
<h2 id="htrc-portal"><a href="https://htrc2.pti.indiana.edu/" target="_blank">HTRC Portal</a></h2>
<p>The HTRC portal is separate from the HathiTrust Digital Library interface and requires the creation of an individual user account. The tools and infrastructure of the HTRC are free and open to all researchers (being affiliated with a HathiTrust partner organization has no bearing on your ability to use it).<sup><a href="#footnote">1</a></sup></p>
<div id="attachment_506" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption aligncenter">
<a href="https://htrc2.pti.indiana.edu/"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-506" class="wp-image-506 size-medium" src="http://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-24-at-1.10.13-AM-300x165.png" alt="HTRC Portal" width="300" height="165" srcset="https://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-24-at-1.10.13-AM-300x165.png 300w, https://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-24-at-1.10.13-AM-640x351.png 640w, https://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-24-at-1.10.13-AM.png 946w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /></a>
<p id="caption-attachment-506" class="wp-caption-text">
HTRC Portal
</p>
</div>
<p>From the HTRC portal (sometimes called the production stack in the HTRC documentation), there are two main services: the Workset Builder and Algorithms.</p>
<p>The Workset Builder is a search interface for the HathiTrust public domain corpus (2.7 million volumes). Search results can be saved as a workset, or in other words, a digital study carrel in which you amass a collection of volumes of particular interest to you. Worksets can be made public or private, with the understanding that public worksets can be reused by any HTRC member. The workset is also a means of constraining your data set, so that you perform analyses only on the material of relevance to you.</p>
<p>The algorithms currently offered through the HTRC portal include, on the simpler end, term frequencies and word clouds, and on the more complex end, named entity extraction (person, location, organization, etc.), LDA topic modeling, and Dunning log likelihood, which can be used to compare and contrast two different worksets. When you apply an algorithm to a workset, it becomes a job, and can be monitored for status and results on the Results page. Harriet Green and Sayan Bhattacharyya, both of UIUC, prepared <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByTkFSkY8lF7TGM5dEtPWXlCWTQ/view?usp=sharing" target="_blank">this wonderful handout</a> listing and describing the HTRC portal algorithms.</p>
<div id="attachment_503" style="width: 294px" class="wp-caption aligncenter">
<a href="http://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-24-at-12.55.59-AM.png"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-503" class="size-medium wp-image-503" src="http://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-24-at-12.55.59-AM-284x300.png" alt="Topic model of works by Edgar Allan Poe. Workset compiled by user agorton." width="284" height="300" srcset="https://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-24-at-12.55.59-AM-284x300.png 284w, https://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-24-at-12.55.59-AM.png 564w" sizes="(max-width: 284px) 100vw, 284px" /></a>
<p id="caption-attachment-503" class="wp-caption-text">
Topic model of works by Edgar Allan Poe. Workset compiled by user agorton.
</p>
</div>
<h2 id="htrc-sandbox"><a href="https://sandbox.htrc.illinois.edu/HTRC-UI-Portal2/" target="_blank">HTRC Sandbox</a></h2>
<p>In addition to HTRC portal, there is a sandbox stack with the same tools, intended to help scholars build and test algorithms. The sandbox runs against the non-Google digitized content (250,000 volumes). The advantage of the sandbox is that the <a title="Solr Proxy API Guide" href="http://www.hathitrust.org/htrc/solr-api" target="_blank">Solr index</a> and <a title="HTRC Data API Guide" href="http://www.hathitrust.org/htrc/api-guide" target="_blank">HTRC Data API </a>can be accessed directly, permitting the use of the researcher’s algorithms.</p>
<h2 id="bookworm"><a href="http://sandbox.htrc.illinois.edu/bookworm/" target="_blank">Bookworm</a></h2>
<p>Currently on the sandbox stack is the HTRC instance of Bookworm. Bookworm is a <a href="http://bookworm.culturomics.org/" target="_blank">Culturomics project</a> that is co-directed by Ben Schmidt (Northeastern University) and Erez Aiden (Rice University). Loosely based on the Google Ngram viewer, Bookworm’s browser interface provides a time series view into text corpora that encourages the exploration of large-scale trends. The HTRC’s implementation of Bookworm certainly counts among its most user friendly tools, which is perhaps why Stephen Downie of UIUC recommended it as the first step of a digital pedagogy workflow in a recent <a href="http://d2i.indiana.edu/sites/default/files/organisciak-poster-1.pdf" target="_blank">poster presentation</a>. Although still a prototype over 250,000 volumes, its interactivity and metadata facets make the HTRC Bookworm quite useful for hypothesis forming.</p>
<div id="attachment_518" style="width: 810px" class="wp-caption aligncenter">
<a href="http://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/bookworm.png"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-518" class="size-full wp-image-518" src="http://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/bookworm.png" alt=""guerre" and "amour" in French texts" width="800" height="260" srcset="https://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/bookworm.png 800w, https://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/bookworm-300x98.png 300w, https://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/bookworm-640x208.png 640w" sizes="(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px" /></a>
<p id="caption-attachment-518" class="wp-caption-text">
“guerre” and “amour” in French texts
</p>
</div>
<h2 id="extracted-features-"><a href="https://sandbox.htrc.illinois.edu/HTRC-UI-Portal2/Features" target="_blank">Extracted Features </a></h2>
<p>The Extracted Features dataset is also available on the sandbox for use by scholars. At present, this dataset contains a select set of page-level features extracted from the 250,000 non-Google-digitized public domain volumes. Conceptualized as a non-consumptive analysis tool, the Extracted Features dataset will likely grow to include a much larger subset of HathiTrust volumes.</p>
<p>Pre-extracted features save the researcher much time and effort, since the pre-analysis, including tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, hyphenation rejoining and header/footer recognition, is already performed.</p>
<h2 id="htrc-data-capsule"><a href="https://wiki.htrc.illinois.edu/display/COM/HTRC+Data+Capsule" target="_blank">HTRC Data Capsule</a></h2>
<p>The HTRC Data Capsule permits “non-consumptive” research on HathiTrust’s use protected texts (works in copyright). What is non-consumptive research? As defined by the Google Books settlement: “research in which computational analysis is performed on one or more books, but not research in which a researcher reads or displays.”</p>
<p>The HTRC Data Capsule is currently available through the <a href="https://htrc2.pti.indiana.edu/" target="_blank">main portal</a>, but requires another set of login credentials. It works by giving you your own virtual machine (VM) that runs within the HTRC domain. You can configure that VM as you would your own desktop with your tools, although a number of these tools (R, Python) were pre-installed when I gave it a try. There are two modes of operation for the VM: Maintenance and Secure. In my experience, I needed to be in Maintenance Mode in order to have network access and query both the Solr index and the Data API. You would then need to switch to Secure Mode, in which network and other data channels are restricted, in order to have the results of your analysis e-mailed to you. A <a href="https://wiki.htrc.illinois.edu/display/COM/HTRC+Data+Capsule+Hands-on+Tutorial" target="_blank">detailed tutorial</a> on how to set up and interact with the VM, as well as four use cases, is available on the HTRC wiki.</p>
<p>I find the Data Capsule to be among the most exciting and potentially game-changing tools of the HTRC. At the risk of appearing slightly provincial, I will also go ahead and say that I find it difficult to use. This is one area in particular where I am looking forward to meeting the HTRC UnCampers next month, with whom I can ask questions and put forth areas of difficulty.</p>
<p>To give you an idea of the challenges, before analyzing a text, you first need to procure the volume IDs of the volumes you wish to analyze. You do this by querying the Solr API with a URL encoded string in the VM’s provided browser. Here is a sample query that will look for everything that has the word “fate” in the title and return only the first 20 results:</p>
<pre>http://chinkapin.pti.indiana.edu:9994/solr/meta/select/?q=title:fate&rows=20</pre>
<p>Right now you can query either the OCRed text or the MARC metadata fields (in my experience, the latter works more efficiently). Another difficulty I found was that I could not get keyboard shortcuts to work in the VM, meaning that I had to type out these URLs manually, which probably accounted for at least some of the 400 (“bad request”) error messages I received. The Solr API returns MARC XML records, which you then sift through in order to find the desired volume IDs.</p>
<p>Next, you might want to query the Data API in order to access the content of those volumes. My little <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/" target="_blank">Project Gutenberg</a> experience of computational analysis has not adequately prepared me for the task of calling a data API within an R or Python script, so here I was very grateful for the sample scripts provided on the VM.</p>
<p>I followed the <a href="https://wiki.htrc.illinois.edu/display/COM/Use+Case%3A+Use+HTRC+Feature+API+to+Acquire+Volume+Features" target="_blank">use case on feature extraction</a> using the Feature API, which once again required expressing the query in URL encoding. A sample query to run in the browser of the VM for this specific API:</p>
<pre>http://chinkapin.pti.indiana.edu:9447/feature-api/tdm?volumeIDs=inu.3011012|uc2.ark%3A%2F13960%2Ft2qxv15&dict=true</pre>
<p>Here, be mindful that the raw volume IDs retrieved from the Solr API need to be separated by a pipe character. Some special characters may need to be expressed in URL encoding, which is to say that colons become %3A and forward slashes become %2F. My hope is to spare you a few rounds of 400 errors… Next, I ran the <a href="https://wiki.htrc.illinois.edu/display/COM/Use+Case%3A+Run+R+analysis+on+Derived+Features+from+the+Feature+API" target="_blank">R analysis on the derived features</a> data, which produces a series of visualizations that will be familiar to any users of the R graphics packages (e.g. a word cloud, a histogram, a word frequency distribution, a scatter plot, etc.). Lastly, you’ll need to switch to Secure Mode to e-mail yourself a link to download your visualizations.</p>
<h2 id="other-htrc-affiliated-research-initiatives">Other HTRC Affiliated Research Initiatives</h2>
<p>The <a href="http://novel-tm.ca/" target="_blank">NovelTM</a> partnership seeks to produce the first large-scale cross-cultural study of the novel using quantitative methods.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://simssa.ca/" target="_blank">Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis</a> project (SIMSSA) uses machine learning to enable the search and analysis of musical scores in much the same way we currently search for words in text documents. SIMSSA researchers use Optical Music Recognition (OMR) software to transform digital images of music into searchable representations of music notation.</p>
<p><a href="http://worksets.htrc.illinois.edu/worksets/" target="_blank">Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis</a>: An immediate objective for HTRC is to allow scholars to collect items together for large-scale computational analysis. But the print-based metadata inherited by the HathiTrust was conceived to allow researchers to find books in a building. It does not support the granularity of sorting and work selection that scholars now expect. A goal of Worksets is to enrich the metadata in HathiTrust and augment it with URIs to leverage discovery and sharing through external services.</p>
<h2 id="how-to-get-involved">How to get involved</h2>
<p>The HTRC maintains several listservs, of which I want to mention <a href="https://list.indiana.edu/sympa/subscribe/htrc-announce-l" target="_blank">htrc-announce-l</a> for announcements about workshops, new tools and larger community issues, and <a href="https://list.indiana.edu/sympa/subscribe/htrc-usergroup-l" target="_blank">htrc-usergroup-l</a> for technical discussions.</p>
<p>You can also now register for the third annual <a href="http://www.hathitrust.org/htrc_uncamp2015" target="_blank">HTRC UnCamp</a> on March 30-31, 2015 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I’ve signed up, and I’d love to see some familiar faces!</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The UnCamp is part hands-on coding and demonstration, part inspirational use-cases, part community building, and a part informational, all structured in the dynamic setting of an un-conference programming format.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2 id="future-directions">Future directions…</h2>
<p>So here are a few ideas to introduce the HTRC to the Rutgers (digital) humanities community. At the smaller end, I can conceive of an HTRC LibGuide and/or a web tutorial on how to build a workset and perform computational analyses on that workset using the pre-existing algorithms. An in person workshop on the HTRC portal tools and the Data Capsule would be beneficial to our graduate students and faculty. Perhaps something like what Harriett Green and Sayan Bhattacharyya did with their <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByTkFSkY8lF7ZWk1cFhmYTBJYzQ/view?usp=sharing" target="_blank">Savvy Researcher workshop</a>. Although I would reserve my involvement for after my initiation into all things HTRC at the upcoming UnCamp. At the more complex end of the spectrum, perhaps the Rutgers University Libraries could host hackathon night in which researchers create custom scripts to test in the Data Capsule. Or <a href="http://bookworm.culturomics.org/docs.php" target="_blank">create a Bookworm</a> of a subset of the <a href="http://edison.rutgers.edu/digital.htm" target="_blank">Edison Digital Edition</a> (even if Bookworm is not really an HTRC project)? I’ll be polling you for your needs and opinions…</p>
<h2 id="further-reading">Further Reading</h2>
<h3 id="resources-and-guides">Resources and Guides</h3>
<p>HathiTrust Research Center Wiki. <em>HathiTrust Research</em> <em>Community Pages</em>. <a href="https://wiki.htrc.illinois.edu/display/COM/HathiTrust+Research+Community+Pages" target="_blank">https://wiki.htrc.illinois.edu/display/COM/HathiTrust+Research+Community+Pages</a>.</p>
<p>University Library, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Introduction to HathiTrust Research Center. <a href="http://uiuc.libguides.com/htrcguide" target="_blank"><span class="guideurl">http://uiuc.libguides.com/htrcguide</span></a>.</p>
<h3 id="publications-and-presentations">Publications and Presentations</h3>
<p>HathiTrust Research Center Wiki. <em>HTRC Publications, Presentations</em>. <a href="https://wiki.htrc.illinois.edu/display/OUT/HTRC+Publications%2C+Presentations" target="_blank">https://wiki.htrc.illinois.edu/display/OUT/HTRC+Publications%2C+Presentations</a>.</p>
<div class="csl-bib-body">
<div class="csl-entry">
McDonald, Robert H. “HathiTrust Research Center Data Capsule v1.0: An Overview of Functionality.” Presented at the IU Libraries’ Digital Library Brownbag Series, Indiana University, September 10, 2014. <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/rhmcdonald/hathitrust-research-center-data-capsule-overview-091015" target="_blank">http://www.slideshare.net/rhmcdonald/hathitrust-research-center-data-capsule-overview-091015</a>.
</div>
</div>
<hr />
<p><sup><a id="footnote"></a>1.</sup> Jeremy York, Assistant Director of the HathiTrust Digital Library, later clarified for me that the proposals of researchers affiliated with HathiTrust partner institutions do receive preferential attention in the HTRC’s <a href="http://www.hathitrust.org/htrc/acs-rfp" target="_blank">Advanced Collaborative Support</a> RFP process.</p>FrancescaRemarks from a talk given at a HathiTrust symposium held at Rutgers in February 2015Lab 2: Making Digital Maps2015-02-18T03:24:18+00:002015-02-18T03:24:18+00:00https://francescagiannetti.com/lab-2-making-digital-maps<p>This laboratory is intended for the students enrolled in Dr. Andrea Baldi’s Italian 368 course, Walking in the Metropolis. We will work with a data set of the locations mentioned twice or more in Henry James’s <em>The Portrait of a Lady</em>.<sup><a href="#footnote">1</a></sup> The plan is to geocode these locations, which is to say we’ll assign longitude and latitude coordinates for each. With the added geospatial data, visualizing those locations in <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/d/?gmp=mpp" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Google My Maps</a> becomes relatively easy. Finally, we’ll embed our custom digital maps into a <a href="https://sites.google.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Google Site</a>, where we can integrate text, images, maps, and most other forms of digital content, into a final digital project that you could submit for a grade.</p>
<h2 id="needed-for-this-lab">Needed for this lab</h2>
<ol>
<li>Your favorite browser</li>
<li>A Google account (Gmail or Scarlet Mail is fine)</li>
<li>The <a href="https://rutgers.box.com/s/wpmdu99rcbbr2k4cmtoc79mcu2qv481r">portrait-of-a-lady-locations.csv</a> data set</li>
</ol>
<h2 id="getting-started">Getting started</h2>
<p>Download the <a href="https://rutgers.box.com/s/wpmdu99rcbbr2k4cmtoc79mcu2qv481r">portrait-of-a-lady-locations.csv</a> file to your desktop by right clicking, and selecting “Save link as…” Open it up in Excel and have a look at the data headers. This data was prepared with some computational assistance, which hugely simplified the process but did result in a few errors and literals that look odd out of context. As an example, Henrietta Stackpole mentions that she is very eager to visit the new Republic, by which she means France’s Third Republic. It is perhaps obvious that “Republic” (line 42) does not correspond to any distinctive current day geographical or political reality. The geocoding service we’ll use won’t recognize it, so in the adjacent columns, this information was modernized and clarified. Under <strong>original-location</strong>, I left what was authentic to the text because we can reuse it in our marker labels. Lastly, because this is a work of fiction, there are some locations, specifically names of private homes, that are not easily mappable. For instance, we know that Gardencourt is Mr. and Mrs. Touchett’s home in England, but unless I am mistaken, we can’t be much more specific than that. Again, the geocoding service won’t recognize it, but it’s okay. Gardencourt is important to the plot, but we can make do without it, at least for the purposes of this exercise. This is one example of the complexities of working with literary data.</p>
<h2 id="next-steps">Next steps</h2>
<ul>
<li>Log into either your Scarlet Mail or Gmail account and navigate over to <a href="https://drive.google.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Google Drive</a>.</li>
<li>We need to create a Google Spreadsheet in order to reuse a bit of code (specifically, a Google Apps Script) that will geocode our addresses for us.<sup><a href="#footnote">2</a></sup> Click New, and select Google Sheets. In the untitled spreadsheet, go to File > Import > Upload and select the .csv file that you copied to your desktop. Click Import, then Open now.<a href="http://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-6.42.59-PM.png"><img class="align-center wp-image-432 size-full" src="http://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-6.42.59-PM.png" alt="Gmaps import file pop up window" width="397" height="531" srcset="https://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-6.42.59-PM.png 397w, https://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-6.42.59-PM-224x300.png 224w" sizes="(max-width: 397px) 100vw, 397px" /></a></li>
<li>Next, we want to add that geocoding script to our Google spreadsheet. Copy this <a href="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mapbox/geo-googledocs/master/MapBox.js" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">source code</a> by clicking Ctrl+A (Command+A on a Mac) to select all, and Ctrl+C (Command+C) to copy. In your Google spreadsheet, go to Tools > Script editor [Note added 2015/11/07: this script no longer appears to work. Use instead <a href="https://github.com/leighghunt/geo-googledocs/blob/patch-1/MapBox.js" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">this fork</a> shared by <a href="https://github.com/leighghunt" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Leigh Hunt</a>, which adds the Google Maps API]. Close the pop-up window that appears. You should see a Code.gs window. Delete that default text</li>
</ul>
<figure class="highlight"><pre><code class="language-javascript" data-lang="javascript"><span class="kd">function</span> <span class="nx">myFunction</span><span class="p">()</span> <span class="p">{</span> <span class="p">}</span> </code></pre></figure>
<ul>
<li>… and paste in the copied code. Go to File > Save. It will prompt you for a script name. You can use james-geo or whatever pleases you.</li>
<li>Go back to your Google spreadsheet and reload it in the browser. A menu called Geo should appear to the right of Help.<a href="http://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-7.43.33-PM.png"><img class="align-center size-full wp-image-447" src="http://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-7.43.33-PM.png" alt="Screen Shot 2015-02-17 at 7.43.33 PM" width="253" height="176" /></a></li>
<li>Now we need to tell the script where our physical addresses are. Highlight all the columns and rows with the modernized location information. This should be columns C through F (current-day-location through country) and rows 2-60. Don’t worry about empty cells. With this area highlighted, go to Geo > Geocode addresses. The script will require authorization to run, and it will need to be granted access to your Google Drive. <strong>Note</strong>: make sure that pop-ups are not blocked in your browser. Next, the script will want you to select a geocoding service. I tend to use the default Mapquest API because it doesn’t require an API key. Click Geocode.</li>
<li>Once the geocoding is done, you’ll notice that a few rows were skipped. It’s really quite understandable that the Mapquest API had no idea what we meant by the rows in question, but by now you should have a workable list of locations with lat-lon pairs to import into <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/d/splash?gmp=mpp&app=mp" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Google My Maps</a>.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="making-a-digital-map">Making a digital map</h2>
<ul>
<li>Over in <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/d/splash?gmp=mpp&app=mp" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Google My Maps</a>, select Create a new map. Click on Import under Untitled layer in the left sidebar. <a href="http://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-10.05.40-PM.png"><img class="align-center size-full wp-image-455" src="http://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-10.05.40-PM.png" alt="Screen Shot 2015-02-17 at 10.05.40 PM" width="317" height="316" srcset="https://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-10.05.40-PM.png 317w, https://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-10.05.40-PM-150x150.png 150w, https://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-10.05.40-PM-300x300.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 317px) 100vw, 317px" /></a></li>
<li>Instead of uploading a data set, navigate over to the Google Drive view and select the Google spreadsheet with the newly geocoded data. Again make sure that you have pop-ups enabled in your browser. In the first menu, Google My Maps will ask you to tell it where your latitude and longitude coordinates are. Pair the geo-latitude column header with latitude; geo-longitude with longitude. Click continue.<a href="http://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-10.10.23-PM.png"><img class="align-center size-full wp-image-456" src="http://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-10.10.23-PM.png" alt="Screen Shot 2015-02-17 at 10.10.23 PM" width="476" height="425" srcset="https://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-10.10.23-PM.png 476w, https://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-10.10.23-PM-300x268.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 476px) 100vw, 476px" /></a></li>
<li>Next, Google My Maps will prompt you for a marker title. Let’s select <strong>original-location</strong>, and click Finish.</li>
<li>Troubleshooting: the Mapquest API should work pretty well on this data set, but it does occasionally produce errors that become obvious in the map visualization. If this happens to you with your own data, a quick way to manually fix the latitude and longitude coordinates is to use regular <a href="https://www.google.com/maps" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Google Maps</a>. When you search for a physical address in Google Maps, the lat-lon pair appears in the URL of the resulting map after the @ sign: <a href="http://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-7.16.23-PM.png"><img class="size-full wp-image-438 align-center" src="http://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-7.16.23-PM.png" alt="Screen Shot 2015-02-17 at 7.16.23 PM" width="225" height="26" srcset="https://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-7.16.23-PM.png 225w, https://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-7.16.23-PM-220x26.png 220w" sizes="(max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px" /></a>When you retrieve the (likely) correct lat-lon pair from Google Maps, you can return to your Google spreadsheet and make the corrections manually.</li>
<li>Google My Maps gives you nine base maps to experiment with. Click on the downward arrow to the left of Base maps and choose one that suits you.</li>
<li>
<p>When Google My Maps loads your data layer, the default view is Uniform style. Let’s instead style by data column. Click on the paint roller icon, and experiment with the options under Group places by > Style by data column, and Set labels. Here’s an example of a clickable, zoomable map visualization of the data. The darker the pin, the higher the frequency count of the location. I am sure you can come up with many others.</p>
</li>
<li>This step is important for sharing your custom map with others on the web. Click on Share in the left sidebar. Give a name and description to your map (this can be changed later). Change the access from Private (default) to Public on the web. Then click Done. Finally, click on the vertical three dots to the right of Share. Select Embed on my site, copy (Ctrl+C) the embed code and click Ok.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="creating-your-digital-project">Creating your digital project</h2>
<ul>
<li>Let’s navigate over to <a href="https://sites.google.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Google Sites</a>. Click on Create. Leave Blank template selected, and give a unique name to your site. This can be changed later, so for now you might choose your first name + Mapping Demo.</li>
<li>Click on Select a theme, and choose one that you like. Then, click Create again to launch the new site.</li>
<li>Click on the Edit icon to edit your site (it looks like a pencil), and change the title of the home page to something more descriptive, like The Portrait of a Lady Project.</li>
<li>While still in Edit mode, place the cursor in an area of the site where you want to embed your map. Embedding your custom map will require opening the HTML editor in Google Sites. It appears as a tiny menu option with the letters HTML in between angle brackets (<>) on the right side of the horizontal navigation bar. <a href="http://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-10.58.56-PM.png"><img class="align-center size-full wp-image-462" src="http://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-10.58.56-PM.png" alt="Screen Shot 2015-02-17 at 10.58.56 PM" width="101" height="70" /></a>This is where you want to paste the embed code that you copied from Google My Maps. Paste it in, click update in the HTML editor, and then click Save to save your work on the site.</li>
<li>Experiment with adding some text to your site, either above or below your map. For now, some <a href="http://generator.lorem-ipsum.info/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">lorem ipsum</a> filler text will do.</li>
<li>Click on the New page icon, and create another web page called Bibliography. <a href="http://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-11.20.46-PM.png"><img class="align-center size-full wp-image-465" src="http://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-11.20.46-PM.png" alt="Screen Shot 2015-02-17 at 11.20.46 PM" width="348" height="120" srcset="https://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-11.20.46-PM.png 348w, https://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-11.20.46-PM-300x103.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 348px) 100vw, 348px" /></a></li>
<li>One last step, which is a repetition of what we did in Google My Maps: you need to make your site publicly viewable, or at the very least viewable by the Rutgers Community. Click on Share in the upper right hand corner. Change access from Private to Public on the web. Then go back to your site and share the URL with as many people as you like!</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="coda">Coda</h2>
<p>There is one data point that Google My Maps doesn’t allow us to visualize very well, and that is the frequency count. This is the number of times that the location appears in the text of <em>The Portrait of a Lady</em>, which is a loose measure of its significance to the plot. Although we won’t have time to go into this today, I want to show you one other tool that does allow us to scale our points by frequency-count: <a href="http://palladio.designhumanities.org/#/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Palladio</a>. Palladio is a browser-based visualization tool that was developed by the Stanford Humanities + Design Lab.<sup><a href="#footnote">3</a></sup></p>
<div id="attachment_400" style="width: 650px" class="wp-caption align-center">
<a href="http://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-2.50.10-PM.png"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-400" class="size-large wp-image-400" src="http://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-2.50.10-PM-1024x504.png" alt="Screen capture of Palladio " width="640" height="315" srcset="https://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-2.50.10-PM-1024x504.png 1024w, https://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-2.50.10-PM-300x148.png 300w, https://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-2.50.10-PM-640x315.png 640w, https://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-17-at-2.50.10-PM.png 1183w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" /></a>
<p id="caption-attachment-400" class="wp-caption-text">
Screen capture of <a href="http://palladio.designhumanities.org">Palladio</a>
</p>
</div>
<p>In this visualization, you can see that England and Rome appear most often in the text, with approximately the same frequency, which makes good sense when you know the novel. James’s text also makes frequent reference to other locations throughout Continental Europe, the U.K., and the Northeastern Seaboard of the United States.</p>
<p>There is one piece of information I want to mention if you decide to give Palladio a go. You will need to rearrange the geographic coordinate data into one column as <strong>latitude, longitude</strong>. So for example, the coordinates for Rome would appear in a cell as follows:</p>
<p><code>41.9100711, 12.5359979</code></p>
<p>This can be easily accomplished with the <a href="https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3094077" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">JOIN function</a> in Google spreadsheets or CONCATINATE in Excel.</p>
<hr />
<p><sup><a id="footnote"></a>1.</sup> To prepare this data set, I used the plain text version of Project Gutenberg’s ebook of <em>The Portrait of a Lady</em>, vols. <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2833" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">1</a> and <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2834" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">2</a>. I then used the <a href="http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/CRF-NER.shtml" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Stanford Named Entity Recognizer</a> to tag all the locations in the text. Finally, I moved all the locations into a separate text document, counted them and sorted them in reverse order by frequency. Lest you think I’m some kind of computational genius, I followed the instructions pretty closely in William J. Turkel’s excellent blog post, <a href="http://williamjturkel.net/2013/06/30/named-entity-recognition-with-command-line-tools-in-linux/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Named Entity Recognition with Command Line Tools in Linux</a>.</p>
<p><sup><a id="footnote"></a>2.</sup> Many thanks to <a href="https://github.com/yhahn" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Young Hahn</a> for sharing his Google Apps script.</p>
<p><sup><a id="footnote"></a>3.</sup> For more information on how to make the most of Palladio, watch this <a href="http://hdlab.stanford.edu/lab-notebook/palladio/2014/06/20/full-video-tutorial/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">video tutorial</a>.</p>FrancescaA literary mapping exercise using Henry James's _The Portrait of a Lady_Lab 1: Finding and Using Library Resources in Italian Studies2015-02-14T22:55:55+00:002015-02-14T22:55:55+00:00https://francescagiannetti.com/lab-1-finding-and-using-library-resources-in-italian-studies<p>This laboratory is intended for the students enrolled in Dr. Andrea Baldi’s Italian 368 course, Walking in the Metropolis. We’re going to work through three research questions as a way to familiarize ourselves with the resources of the <a href="http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank">Rutgers University Libraries</a>, as well as a few other major digital libraries and catalogs. Along the way, we’ll also take a look at how citation managers can simplify bibliographies and footnotes. My hope is that we’ll all learn a few useful things that will make research paper writing a little less burdensome and more fun and interesting!</p>
<h2 id="preliminaries">Preliminaries</h2>
<p>I’ve been developing an <a href="http://libguides.rutgers.edu/italian" target="_blank">Italian Research Guide</a> that I hope will be of assistance to you as you do your research. You can also look there to find my contact information and my availability for research assistance.</p>
<h2 id="research-question-no-1">Research Question no. 1</h2>
<p>You’ve decided to research the critical reception of Roberto Rossellini’s 1945 film <em>Open City</em> (in Italian: <em>Roma, città aperta</em> ). Your professor expects to see in your bibliography: [1] monographs, [2] scholarly articles, and [3] one or two trade or news media publications.</p>
<h3 id="some-questions-to-consider">Some questions to consider</h3>
<ol>
<li>Can you find books and articles in Italian as well as in English? Is there a way to restrict search results to be in either or both of those languages?</li>
<li>How many results do you get in each index? How many look relevant to your topic?</li>
<li>Is there a way to compare the contemporaneous (i.e. post-war) media perceptions of the film to more modern perceptions?</li>
</ol>
<h3 id="indexes-to-use-for-this-question">Indexes to use for this question</h3>
<ol>
<li>The <a href="https://www-iris-rutgers-edu.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/uhtbin/cgisirsi/?ps=f2x6jNEGiK/ALCOHOL/302860027/38/1/X/BLASTOFF" target="_blank">library catalog</a> (for books, media, and serial titles only)</li>
<li><a href="http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank">Articles+</a>, the discovery interface on the home page of the <a href="http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/" target="_blank">Rutgers University Libraries</a>.</li>
<li>The <a href="http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/indexes/ftli" target="_blank">Film & Television Literature Index</a> (FTLI)</li>
<li>The <a href="http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/indexes/mla" target="_blank">MLA International Bibliography</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/indexes/google_scholar" target="_blank">Google Scholar</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/indexes/proquest_historical_newspapers" target="_blank">ProQuest Historical Newspapers</a> for the contemporaneous reception; <a href="http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/indexes/factiva" target="_blank">Factiva</a> and FTLI for the more current media reception.</li>
</ol>
<p>As we work through this question, I will demonstrate how to save bibliographic records of selected books and articles to <a href="https://www.zotero.org/" target="_blank">Zotero</a>, a citation manager that I use for my own research. Some of my RUL colleagues prefer <a href="http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/refworks" target="_blank">RefWorks</a>, but I personally find Zotero to be more user friendly. Zotero works as a Firefox and Chrome plugin (note: the Firefox plugin works best, in my opinion). There are also Microsoft Word and LibreOffice plugins to format footnotes in whatever citation style you require. Zotero is free and open source, so you can keep using it even after you graduate from Rutgers. There are also social features that I enjoy, like crowdsourced bibliographies. You can find out more about the citation management tools that the Rutgers University Libraries support <a href="http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/researchers/citation_management_tools" target="_blank">here</a>.</p>
<h2 id="research-question-no-2">Research Question no. 2</h2>
<p>You’ve chosen the <em>Scapigliatura</em> artistic movement of the mid- to late-nineteenth century as your research topic. To get started, you consult some print reference sources (1-3) and do a Google search and find one Italian website (4). Explain what you find in these sources. How reliable is this information? Would you use these sources for your research paper? Why, or why not? Some factors to consider:</p>
<div id="attachment_353" style="width: 819px" class="wp-caption align-center">
<a href="http://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-14-at-12.34.34-PM.png"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-353" class="size-full wp-image-353" src="http://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-14-at-12.34.34-PM.png" alt="Evaluating Information Resources" width="809" height="207" srcset="https://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-14-at-12.34.34-PM.png 809w, https://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-14-at-12.34.34-PM-300x77.png 300w, https://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-14-at-12.34.34-PM-640x164.png 640w" sizes="(max-width: 809px) 100vw, 809px" /></a>
<p id="caption-attachment-353" class="wp-caption-text">
Evaluating Information Resources
</p>
</div>
<h3 id="tips">Tips</h3>
<ul>
<li>Consider the extent of the entry (e.g., length and depth)</li>
<li>Is there a bibliography? Are the sources reputable? How helpful could the bibliography be for your research?</li>
<li>Is an author named? What is the author’s expertise? (Hint: try a web search for the author)</li>
<li>For the website, you may not find all of your answers on the provided web page. You may have to look at other pages on the site (e.g. About or Home) or search the web for more information about the person or organization that created the site.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="sources-for-this-question">Sources for this question</h3>
<ol>
<li>Caesar, Ann. “<a href="http://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/scapigliatura-oxford.pdf" target="_blank">Scapigliatura</a>.” <em>The Oxford Companion to Italian Literature</em>. Eds. Peter Hainsworth and David Robey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Print.</li>
<li>Dombroski, Robert S. “<a href="http://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/scapigliatura-bondanella.pdf" target="_blank">Scapigliatura</a>.” <em>Dictionary of Italian Literature</em>. Eds. Peter Bondanella and Julia Conaway Bondanella. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. Print.</li>
<li>Marcazzan, Mario. “<a href="http://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/scapigliatura-treccani.pdf" target="_blank">Scapigliatura</a>.” <em>Enciclopedia Italiana di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti</em>. Vol. 30. 1936. Print.</li>
<li>Liceo San Sepolcro. “Scapigliatura.” <em>Rapporto padri e figli nell’eta del Risorgimento, nell’Italia post-unitaria, nel primo novecento</em>. Web. 13 February 2015 <a href="http://www.sansepolcroliceo.it/padri/generale/schede-opere/scapigliatura.htm" target="_blank">http://www.sansepolcroliceo.it/padri/generale/schede-opere/scapigliatura.htm</a>.</li>
</ol>
<h2 id="research-question-no-3">Research Question no. 3</h2>
<p>You are looking for a still frame and a promotional image or film (for example, a poster, a publicity still, or a trailer) of Vittorio De Sica’s <em>Ladri di Bicciclette</em> that you can use in your final digital project. Generally speaking, for digital projects, you want to find still images or audiovisual material that is licensed for reuse, so that you don’t have to worry about infringing on the rights of a third party. Copyright infringement is less of a concern with still frames (considered a small portion of a larger work), but becomes more of an issue with publicity stills and trailers. In this case, we won’t worry about it much, since you are creating the digital project for a class, and can mostly likely argue that your use is <a href="http://copyright.lib.utexas.edu/ccmcguid.html" target="_blank">fair</a>.</p>
<h3 id="search-engines-and-digital-libraries-to-use">Search engines and digital libraries to use</h3>
<ul>
<li>Google Advanced Image Search – <a href="https://www.google.com/advanced_image_search" target="_blank">https://www.google.com/advanced_image_search</a>
<ul>
<li>You can make sure that the images you select from are licensed for reuse by scrolling down to the last field, <strong>usage rights</strong>, and selecting “free to use and share.” Occasionally this will result in too few choices. As long as you are using the visual material <span style="text-decoration: underline;">for the purposes of critique and analysis</span>, you should be okay.<sup>1</sup></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Europeana – <a href="http://europeana.eu/" target="_blank">http://europeana.eu/</a>
<ul>
<li>The Europeana digital portal has facets for rights that appear on the left once you launch a search. You can choose to limit your search to objects that are in the public domain or free to use with attribution.
<div id="attachment_356" style="width: 260px" class="wp-caption align-right">
<a href="http://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-14-at-12.55.34-PM.png"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-356" class="wp-image-356" src="http://francescagiannetti.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-14-at-12.55.34-PM.png" alt="Screen Shot 2015-02-14 at 12.55.34 PM" width="250" height="253" /></a>
<p id="caption-attachment-356" class="wp-caption-text">
Europeana rights facets
</p>
</div>
<ul>
<li>Creative Commons Search – <a href="http://search.creativecommons.org/" target="_blank">http://search.creativecommons.org/</a>
<ul>
<li>Make sure that “use for commercial purposes” is unchecked, since you are not attempting to make money from your digital project.</li>
<li>Search using: Flickr (but you can feel free to try other sources as well).</li>
<li>Experiment with leaving “modify, adapt, or build upon” checked and unchecked. What differences do you note?</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Internet Culturale – <a href="http://www.internetculturale.it/opencms/opencms/it/index.html" target="_blank">http://www.internetculturale.it/opencms/opencms/it/index.html</a>
<ul>
<li>Make sure the <strong>Biblioteca digitale</strong> radio button is selected. The default selection is <em>cataloghi</em> (which is useful in its own right when you’re trying to discover Italian language books on a given subject).</li>
<li>You will find it productive to limit your search results by <strong>formato digitale</strong>: jpeg or <strong>formato digitale</strong>: tiff.</li>
<li>You may also find it productive to search instead on keywords: Vittorio De Sica, and perhaps limiting by <strong>soggetto</strong>: fotografia di set cinematografico, or <strong>soggetto</strong>: cinema. But the results will no longer be about <em>Ladri</em>.</ul></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<p>Although I’ve asked you to evaluate four sources, you only need to select two (2) digital objects for this question. Try to cite them using the MLA citation style, for which you will need at the very least a creator, a title, a date (n.d. is acceptable in case there isn’t one), a medium, and a source (more on the MLA citation style <a href="https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/09/" target="_blank">here</a>). If ever you find an image online for which this information is in scant supply, you can try a reverse image search to see if another website has cataloged the object more thoroughly. I suggest <a href="https://www.tineye.com/" target="_blank">TinEye </a>or <a href="http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/images/searchbyimage.html" target="_blank">Google Search By Image</a>.</p>
<p>What differences did you note between these four sources? How easy was it to collect information like the name of the creator or the date of creation? Where you able to find a video trailer that was licensed for reuse? Why, or why not?</p>
<p><em>Added 2/16/2015:</em></p>
<p>The Douglass Media Library owns many of the major Italian films of the post-war period. As Rutgers undergraduates, you can check most of them out for a 7-day loan period, or you can view them in groups in one of the viewing rooms in Douglass. See <a href="http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/media/services" target="_blank">Douglass Media Center Services</a> for more information.</p>
<hr />
<p><sup>1.</sup> For more context on fair use of images and audiovisual material in an online environment, see Center for Media and Social Impact report entitled <em>Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for OpenCourseWare</em>. Available at <a href="http://www.cmsimpact.org/ocw" target="_blank">http://www.cmsimpact.org/ocw</a>.</p>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>FrancescaA library session for an upper-level undergraduate Italian studies course.A newb DH librarian’s take on DH20142014-07-29T03:15:29+00:002014-07-29T03:15:29+00:00https://francescagiannetti.com/a-newb-dh-librarians-take-on-dh2014<p><span class="dropcap">E</span>re it all exit my head with the return to normal life, I want to shore up my learning from the Digital Humanities 2014 conference in Lausanne by sharing a few notes. Maybe it goes without saying that the conference was a varied and beautifully organized intellectual feast, for which I am already nostalgic. The feasting was at times quite literal, as we often went double-fisted with the hand pulled espressos and mini pâtisseries during the pauses. I often hop on the Twitter for conferences, but never have I seen the tweets unfurl like a maniacal, magic carpet from my Tweetdeck as I did in Lausanne. (Here, I want to take note of Martin Grandjean’s and Yannick Rochat’s awesome <a href="http://www.martingrandjean.ch/dataviz-digital-humanities-twitter-dh2014/" target="_blank">visual analysis of the conference tweets</a>–over 16,000!) Easily one of the best take-aways for me was meeting so many librarians with DH responsibilities with whom I could ask questions, compare notes and discuss workflows and strategies. Incidentally, here’s a plug for new and returning ADHO members: I learned of the soon-to-be-formalized ADHO Libraries SIG (<a href="http://bit.ly/DH_libs" target="_blank">draft proposal</a> and <a href="http://bit.ly/ADHOlibs" target="_blank">sign-up sheet</a>). And obviously, inevitably, DH2014 had its very own meme, called #dhsheep. Hat tip to <a href="https://twitter.com/amyeetx" target="_blank">@amyeetx</a> for the original photo of a dazed looking sheep (goat?) grazing over by the ag school just across from where most of the conference events were taking place, which faithfully captured the way many of us were feeling by Friday morning. Retweets, meme-ification and hilarity ensued. I think my favorite incarnation was:</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p lang="en" dir="ltr">
RT <a href="https://twitter.com/briancroxall">@briancroxall</a>: <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/dhsheep?src=hash">#dhsheep</a> feels his brain is melting. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/dh2014?src=hash">#dh2014</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/miriamkp">@miriamkp</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/lmrhody">@lmrhody</a> <a href="http://t.co/Hnl4QWnlxP">pic.twitter.com/Hnl4QWnlxP</a>
</p>
<p>
— Miriam Posner (@miriamkp) <a href="https://twitter.com/miriamkp/statuses/487709449420034048">July 11, 2014</a>
</p>
</blockquote>
<script async="" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<p>For me, an interesting thread having to do with internally vs. externally focused training programs emerged from the digital pedagogy workshops and presentations. Whereas I, in my first several months at Rutgers, have been focused on the types of training I can provide for students, the focus in several of these talks was on training for subject and reference librarians to prepare them to become better digital collaborators. I want to mention specifically the <a href="http://dh2014.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/dh-2014-workshop-010.pdf" target="_blank">Methods for Empowering Library Staff</a> workshop and Jen Guiliano’s and Trevor Munoz’s paper <a href="http://trevormunoz.com/notebook/2014/07/14/making-digital-humanities-work.html" target="_blank">Making Digital Humanities Work</a>. In the workshop, we explored different DH training programs that were structured either as a project or as skill development. An example of the former is Columbia’s <a href="http://www.developinglibrarian.org/" target="_blank">Developing Librarian Project</a>; of the latter, the British Library’s <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/drjwbaker/dh2014-digital-scholarship-training-programme-at-the-british-library" target="_blank">Digital Scholarship Training Programme</a>. It seems plausible to me that an additional benefit of these kinds of programs is the attenuation of administrative and communication challenges within library units as well as with other academic or administrative divisions when it comes to the practices of digital scholarship. If we have the space and the opportunity to explore digital tools and methodologies, not only will we broaden our work as (subject) librarians and become less likely to pass a “digital” question on to a junior colleague, but we also begin to develop a common vocabulary and understanding of what it means to practice digital scholarship.</p>
<p>On the external-to-the-library side of things, I want to note quickly a concept I captured from Alex Gil on the <a href="http://dayofdh2013.matrix.msu.edu/elotroalex/author/elotroalex/" target="_blank">ephemeral digital lab</a>, which is to say a lab that is attached to a specific course that exists solely to support the technology needs of the faculty member teaching the course (although that is but one variation). Additionally, I particularly enjoyed a session on undergraduate education and DH, including Robert Sweeny’s brutal honesty about the potential for miscommunication, and the importance of starting from where the students are, rather than where we think they should be: “<a href="http://dharchive.org/paper/DH2014/Paper-887.xml" target="_blank">Realizing the Democratic Potential of Online Sources in the Classroom</a>.” The presentations of Diane Jakacki and Katie Faull on “<a href="http://dianejakacki.net/digital-learning-in-an-undergraduate-context/" target="_blank">Digital Learning in an Undergraduate Context: Promoting Long Term Student-Faculty (and Community) Collaboration in the Susquehanna Valley, PA</a>” and Amy Earhart and Toniesha Taylor on “<a href="http://dharchive.org/paper/DH2014/Paper-309.xml" target="_blank">Digital Activism: Canon Expansion and Textual Recovery in the Undergraduate Classroom</a>” were particularly welcome because of the collaborations between university classes and local archives, as well as for the projects’ ongoing, iterative structure (nothing had to be tied up with ribbons by the end of the semester–another class would take up where the preceding one left off). I also had a fruitful Twitter backchannel talk with the authors on giving students the time to experiment with new tools, and the importance of allowing those “wow, that didn’t work” moments to happen.</p>
<p>As far as nifty digital tools are concerned, I want to spend more time exploring <a href="http://sandbox.htrc.illinois.edu/bookworm/" target="_blank">Bookworm</a>, a tool developed by the Hathi Trust Research Center to visualize language use trends in repositories of digital texts. I was thrilled to learn that Voyant Tools can now be locally installed: <a href="http://dharchive.org/paper/DH2014/Workshops-912.xml" target="_blank">My Very Own Voyant</a>. In chatting with Doug Reside, I was excited to hear about a comparative tool he designed called <a href="http://www.nypl.org/blog/2014/04/21/code-walkthrough-libretto" target="_blank">Libretto</a>, which allows readers to compare different versions of a musical text as it develops over time, only to be a little deflated when I learned that it is a native Android app (I am a loyal Apple customer). Also bookmarked: <a href="http://www.annotationstudio.org/" target="_blank">Annotation Studio</a>, <a href="http://ddmal.music.mcgill.ca/diva/" target="_blank">Diva.js</a>, <a href="http://lab.hakim.se/reveal-js/#/" target="_blank">Reveal.js</a>, <a href="http://dh.stanford.edu/topotime/" target="_blank">Topotime</a>, and <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/clipnotes/id565021402?mt=8" target="_blank">ClipNotes</a>.</p>
<p>I want to give a shout-out to some fantastic colleagues who shared resources that I found helpful. DHers are a helpful bunch, so this list doesn’t even begin to cover everything I jotted down, favorited on Twitter, or read in the <a href="http://dh2014.org/program/abstracts/" target="_blank">DH2014 abstracts</a>, but here goes:</p>
<ul>
<li>Dale Askey published all his notes, organized by day, on his blog <a href="http://bibliobrary.net/" target="_blank">The Bibliobrary</a></li>
<li>James Baker did the same on <a href="https://gist.github.com/drjwbaker" target="_blank">his site</a> at GitHub Gist</li>
<li>Anna Jobin posted a couple of rapid fire Vines of many of the #dh2014 posters <a href="https://vine.co/v/MP9T5dTO03L" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="https://vine.co/v/MPVi6tg03qI" target="_blank">here</a></li>
<li>ADHO posted a number of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJvBL1_70IBL2d1GDure01Q" target="_blank">interviews of #dh2014 participants</a> on its YouTube channel as well as its <a href="https://storify.com/adhorg" target="_blank">Storifies</a> of conference tweets</li>
<li>Infoclio, the Swiss digital history portal, posted <a href="https://www.infoclio.ch/de/node/135255" target="_blank">still more interviews</a> of #dh2014 participants via SoundCloud (many in French)</li>
</ul>
<p>Lastly, I am grateful to Yannick Rochat and Alicia Foucart for organizing, and to my fellow DH runners for participating in some therapeutic, muddy, and intensely beautiful morning runs in the hills of Ecublens and along the trails of Lake Geneva. At the end of one such run, four of us even accidentally on purpose fell into the lake, and it was FANTASTIC!!!</p>FrancescaA review of Digital Humanities 2014 in Lausanne, Switzerland