Monthly Archives: February 2015

Bio: Patrick Smyth

I’m a third year English PhD student studying the history of science in the 18th and 19th centuries. I also have an interest in new media, particularly new ways of approaching the ebook in general and the scholarly edition in particular. As a Digital Fellow with CUNY DHI, I work on digital initiatives around the GC. The Digital Fellows site is here. We have a blog, Tagging the Tower, and our workshop schedule should be going up soon.

Both my project ideas have to do with the aesthetics of science, including how science is portrayed in literature. The first idea is for an online archive or database of technologies as they appear in various works of science fiction. Visitors could view books by technology and see when new technologies were first introduced in literature. Ideally, they could also compare the advent of technologies in fiction with the real-world development of those technologies. I envision this database as primarily crowdsourced. Not sure how I’ll build it, though I’ve been experimenting with Django, a Python framework for building web apps. I also have some experience working with the Drupal content management system, although for various reasons I’d prefer not to build this project with it.

My second idea is a digital scholarly edition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s memoir, which is titled Memories and Adventures. The book is interesting from a history of science perspective because of the contradiction between Doyle’s invention of Sherlock Holmes and his fascination with spiritualism, psychical phenomena, and the occult. I’d like it to be something of a linearly curated archive, where readers could branch off the central text to explore information about  Doyle, Holmes, the Boer war, and other subjects covered in the book.

I’ve researched a lot of platforms and systems for publishing on the iPad, and most have pretty big drawbacks. I’d have to either bite the bullet and pick one of those frameworks or try to come up with something on my own, which might be tough going.

It’s been great to read about everyone’s background and scholarly interests. Looking forward to class tomorrow evening!

 

Bio // Cailean Cooney

I’m a librarian at City Tech (New York City College of Technology) and in my second year of studies in the MALS digital humanities track. I’m interested in scholarly communications, open access (particularly OERs=open educational resources), critical pedagogy, and social justice in higher education. I’m leading City Tech library’s pilot program which redirects library textbook funds to faculty members who will develop OERs to replace a required textbook in a course. I’m planning to conduct ethnographic research in the classrooms piloting the OERs during the Fall semester.

Bio: Gioia Stevens

I am a second year student in the MALS program in the Digital Humanities track. I am also the Metadata Librarian at the CUNY Graduate Center Library. I am very interested in exploring digital humanities tools  in order to devise new ways to approach user search and discovery tools in digital libraries. I am especially interested in how text analysis and topic modeling might be used to create a new method for subject analysis and structured searching by topic.

Project ideas: Rachel

Project ideas: there are several and they are a bit scattered, but this is where I am right now…

*Develop a digital repository (collective space) for sociological information for GC students

Problem: Lack of institutional memory for Sociology theory exam and orals lists. In Sociology, we have two exams: a written theory exam most of us take after our first or second year and a set of 3 oral exams. When I first started in the program, students had to take two theory exams: a classical and a contemporary exam. A file of notes from 10+ years was passed around to some students (via older cohorts). We now take only one exam and the old set of notes is no longer relevant. In addition, most students in their third or fourth years take their oral exams. The department has two binders full of past orals lists–however, the binders are messy, pages are often missing, and they are not accessible to all students (need to be at the GC during ‘business hours’ to read/copy them). The binders are also not updated—there are more old(er) lists than current one. Creation: To create a digital repository for all this information. New theory exam notes/orals lists can be uploaded and accessed by all GC sociology students (maybe make this public?). I image orals lists separated by topic and committee member and theory exam materials separated in a similar manner. There will also be a space for dialogue–where students can ask questions about the exam or orals. Two preliminary questions — who is going to monitor this from year to year and how do we get students to contribute? —>Do I make this into a bigger space for collaboration with other students outside of CUNY? Are students in other programs looking for a tool like this?

*Twitter data mining project to help me investigate how Twitter can be used as a productive space for social movements. Use Twitter API. Thinking specifically about trans* communities/murders of trans* women of color and/or Michael Brown/Eric Gardner/police violence against non-white communities. I’m specifically thinking about mining for hashtags, like  #allblacklivesmatter or #blacklivesmatter.

*Create an (interactive) mapping project that maps NYC supermarkets/bodegas/other retail food outlets and subway/bus stops–creating a product that is accessible & available for people to add items. A take off on http://veganfoodiseverywhere.com….but different, as this will be localized to NY and also map public transportation. What I like about the vegan website is that anyone can add a dish to the map.

*Develop an app that provides recipes for healthy meals for low-income communities. A take off on what eatfresh.org is doing in California–texting recipes to people (and these are recipes that can be cooked on a stove or on a hotpot). Maybe work with NYC Common Food Pantry to get recipes?

*Develop a set of technology classes for small business owners: twitter, website, blog/wiki development. I know this is needed as many of the small business owners at the Intersect Fund needed this type of help. I found that people often have a product/service/idea to sell, but they need help marketing their brand/events/etc.

*Develop a model for an online conference. I can’t remember where I read about this–only that one academic professional organization was thinking about doing this because the theme of their conference was the environment and they conference organizer wanted to reduce conference attendees’ carbon footprint. Why I like this: ASA (sociology’s annual shin dig) has  (recently) received criticism from members for a variety of reasons including cost, location and timing. While I cannot imagine making a digital ASA, I do wonder if a small-scale conference could effectively be hosted in a virtual space. Creating a virtual conference space is not an in-person conference space–but there are benefits: a more global participation/flow of information and fewer or low costs for participants. I’m not exactly sure what a space like this would look like. Would there be google hangouts? Videos of work(s)? Tweets/hashtags for comments?

 

 

 

Bio and Projects: Sarah Litvin

I’m a second year student in the History program, where I’m working toward starting a dissertation on cultures of Jewish philanthropy in Progressive Era New York. Specifically, I’m looking at poor Jews, rich Jews and art, and the relationships between Jewish givers, receivers, and administrators in arts-based philanthropy. At least that’s what I think I’m doing.

I come to the GC from a career in Public History, and expect to return to work in a Museum after completing my degree. I worked first as Oral Historian at the Institute of Southern Jewish Life in Jackson, MS, and then in education and exhibitions at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum where I was on the project team for the Museum’s most recent permanent exhibit, Shop Life. My role in developing Shop Life included a two-year collaboration with an interactive design company to envision, design, assess, and tweak an interactive table. Coming out of that experience, I had a lot of question about how programmers, designers and “project owners”/humanities folk might better communicate their needs and expectations on these types of projects. I’m really excited to be in Core2 to get a better understanding of the tech and design sides of the process.

I’m starting to think about two project ideas for ITP:

1. One idea centers around a document I discovered last year that I’m so excited about that I went to the archives to visit it last week. It’s a small leather notebook that contains a compilation of charity workers’ notes about their visits to needy Jewish families on the Lower East Side (then known as Little Germany) between 1870-1873. I stumbled across this document last Fall and it turns out to contain information about one of the families featured at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum; a former resident of 97 Orchard. A photocopy of one page is now a part of the Museum’s interpretation. I’d like to make the rest of it digitally accessible; I could see it functioning as both a research tool for me to learn about patterns in philanthropy as well as a public-facing tool for Museum Educators and visitors to the Museum who might be interested in exploring how the experience of the family they learned about did/did not fit into the larger neighborhood patterns.

2. A second idea is to create a website that would be a clearing house for CUNY’s public history resources and research centers/archives—both digital and physical. Few know that Queens College administers the Louis Armstrong House Museum, or that Roosevelt House (which offers guided tours) is an “integral part” of Hunter College. I envision this being useful for History professors, prospective history students,researchers, CUNY’s PR folk and the general public.

I’m working on my 5 W’s and an H for these. More on that to come.

Sarah

Bio: Jeff Binder

I am a 2nd year doctoral student in the English program. My focus is on technologies of reading and writing in the 18th and early 19th centuries; some of the things my work has focused on include the development of the back-of-the-book index, dictionaries and language standardization efforts in the early U.S., and imaginary accounts of poetry-writing machines in the long 18th century. I am interested in bringing these older technologies into dialogue with contemporary computer technologies, including digital publishing and text mining/corpus linguistic techniques.

Before I came to the Graduate Center, I worked as a database and data visualization programmer, first at Nature Publishing Group and then at NYU Medical School. Although I studied literature in college and at the MA level, I also have an extensive background in computers, especially in graphics and compilers/programming language design. The inspiration for the work that I am doing now came in part from my experience working with faculty data in a large university. One of my overall goals is to historicize the roles that databases and other computer technologies play in organizations like universities. What assumptions, I want to ask, underlie the way in which we incorporate these technologies into our institutions at the present moment?

Like many people who have switched from programming to the humanities, I am strongly committed to a humanistic approach, and I am wary of scholarly approaches that straightforwardly attempt to apply computer science methodology to the humanities. What I have tried to do instead is engage with computers as a historically-situated object of study that sits on a level with material from the past. I began taking this approach in my first major project, a collaboration with Collin Jennings in which we looked at the index from the 1784 edition of The Wealth of Nations in comparison with a topic model generated using the text. I also wrote a sort of manifesto about the possibility of a critical approach to text mining for Core 1, and I am hoping to carry on in this vein in Core 2.

On a more practical level, I have been working on developing software to help with scholarship and teaching in the humanities. One project that is fairly far along in its development is the Distance Machine, a program that identifies words in a text that were unusual at a particular point in time based on a statistical model of the Google Ngrams corpus. I also have been experimenting with ways of manipulating outlines of texts using computer logic, either as a way of helping people come up with ideas for writing or for playing with conjectures about the structure of an existing text (this program is not online at the moment, but I have a prototype that I could demo on my computer if anyone is interested). Last but not least, I am a fan of Twitter bots. I created one so far—Coleridge Bot—and I have a few more ideas in the pipelines.

About: Genevieve Johnson

I am a student in the MALS Program in the Digital Humanities track. I am very interested in using art and data to impart information and create visual stories to address critical issues, with outcomes that are beneficial to individuals and society as a whole. Some of these areas include education, autism, the prison industrial complex, income disparity, homelessness, civic awareness, police brutality, and the list goes on. The development of a visual toolbox is necessary to engage viewers and provide opportunities to increase community and social development.

My Bachelors program included the study of visual arts and film, so although I have not concentrated on these areas (medical reasons), I am well aware of the ability to create given the wide array of tools I have used in the past, and I am looking forward to making and building using these and fact based tools.