The end of the Digital Humanities Observatory

As of August 30, 2013 the activities of Digital Humanities Observatory have ceased.

I just got an email today announcing the end of the Digital Humanities Observatory of Ireland. The DHO Home Page has the same text. As I was on the external board for a few years I’m sorry to see this neat Observatory end. (No more two day trips to Ireland in December.) Like many units set up with grant funding it was probably inevitable, but it is still a shame, especially since they were running useful infrastructure for the discovery of Irish projects, DHO:discovery and DHO:DRAPIer.

Others have noted the importance of learning from endings in a field where we make a lot of noise when starting things. Honest appraisals of why things ended are few and far between. This summer I heard Quinn Dombrowski talk about “What ever happened to Project Bamboo?” at DH 2013. (You can see my conference notes on DH 2013 and her talk here.) What can be learned from the spectacular rise and now closing of the DHO? Here are some lessons:

  • Anything funded by a time-limited grant as the DHO was is bound to run out of money. Units on soft money can survive over time, but they have to find new revenue streams.
  • Grant funded units that build things (like DHO:Discover and DRAPIer) that are meant to be useful over the long term should build succession planning into their development. Don’t count on getting more money just because you built something neat. There is a neat paper waiting to be written about how one can build for succession or hand-off.
  • Give yourself time at the end to properly archive what you have done. Make sure that the useful knowledge gathered is saved and accessible.
  • Tell people that the project is over, as the DHO has done. Don’t just close the site – put an announcement up.
  • Write an obituary, if you can, so that others can learn from the project.
  • Grieve don’t hide. We often want to slink away when something closes, but we should be allowed to grieve the passing of centres, projects and so on. I’m sad that the DHO is closed, even though I was only looking in from the outside.

The full text of the message continues:

Over the past five years, the Digital Humanities Observatory (http://dho.ie) has been a crucial component of the Humanities Serving Irish Society initiative funded under PRTLI 4. The DHO has carried out an extensive programme of lectures, workshops, summer schools, symposia and public lectures. These have been eagerly received and we have hopefully contributed to raising the level of digital humanities scholarship amongst Irish scholars, enhancing skills and reputations not just in Ireland, but also in Europe and around the world. We have developed and deployed creative, and innovative digital platforms such as DHO:Discovery (http://discovery.dho.ie) and DHO:DRAPIer (http://dho.ie/drapier) that have embraced the needs of HSIS scholars and established a strong and respected Irish position in the Digital Humanities leading to Irish participation in exciting new European initiatives such as DARIAH. In an effort to explore the possibilities of Digital Humanities online, and in collaboration with our HSIS partners, we have also built many cutting-edge digital editions and catalogues such as Saint Patrick’s Confessio Hyperstack (http://www.confessio.ie/), the Doegen Records Web Archive (http://dho.ie/doegen/) and Reading East (http://www.ucd.ie/readingeast/).

In the immediate term the assets of the DHO will be maintained directly by the RIA. Please use the contact form (http://dho.ie/contact) should you need to be in touch with the those maintaining the DHO assets.

Strong Irish engagement and participation in European projects is one of the many testaments to the success of the DHO and of the HSIS consortium. In the future the newly formed Irish Humanities Alliance (https://www.ria.ie/about/our-work/policy/irish-humanities-alliance.aspx) will be fulfilling a role of humanities advocacy on behalf of Irish higher education institutions. The investment in HSIS and the DHO has put Irish humanities scholars in a solid position to continue to grow this valuable community and allow it to flourish in the future.

Digital Environmental Humanities

This weekend I was at a neat workshop on Digital Environmental Humanities organized by Stephanie Posthumous at McGill University. You can see my workshop notes here, Digital Environmental Humanities Network. I was struck at the importance of research and activism from the humanities on the issue of the environment. Too often issues are framed as scientific or policy (social scientific). The humanities bring a historical, philosophical, ethical, and critical perspective that is needed.
The workshop brought together folks working in environmental humanities and others (like me) in the digital humanities to see if we could articulate a common research agenda. I was struck by similarities in the evolution of these two applied fields – including the tensions around interdisciplinarity. By the end I could see a useful collaboration to develop a suite of outreach venues for environmental humanities including:

  • An environment for curators to pull together “issues” that include different media. This would have some of the features of the Journal of Digital Humanities, but not necessarily be a journal.
  • One of the types of “issues” gathered could be e-books with media components suitable for teaching about the environment and culture.
  • Another type of “issue” could be documentation from an arts intervention.
  • Many of these issues and interventions could be designed from the beginning to have a hybrid existence. For example, documentation from an arts performance could be gathered in the curatorial environment and later edited into a catalogue for print publication.
  • A related idea would be a NINES-like federated repository for finding, reviewing, and curating digital interventions.
  • Crowdsourcing or citizen science type interface to bring other publics into the discussion.
  • Online conferences to minimize the impact of our research on the environment. The idea would be to look at the impact of our research itself and try to find alternative ways of connecting while also asking about how we think about the impact of research on the environment.

CIFAR: Do you have a question?

Back in the Spring I blogged about how CIFAR was launching a new programme that might be open to humanists called, Do you have a question with the potential to change the world?. CIFAR doesn’t have much of a track record supporting arts or humanities research as their own reports note. An open call for questions would surely attract some questions that humanists would recognize. Alas, no.

Despite getting 280 Letters of Interest not one of the seven selected comes from the arts, humanities or social sciences. The closest is the Brain, Mind, and Consciousness project which is based in neuroscience and will apparently involve philosophers and ethicists. Here is the list of the seven selected for the next round:

  • Biology, Energy, and Technology
  • BrainLight: Cracking the Sensory Code
  • Brain, Mind, and Consciousness
  • Life in a Changing Ocean: New Perspectives on Marine Functions and Services
  • Making a Molecular Map of the Cell: Towards a Direct Determination of the Structure-Function Correlation of Biological Systems
  • Microbes and Humans
  • The Planetary Biodiversity Project

It is time to ask the question, Why doesn’t CIFAR support the arts and humanities? (In previous programmes they have supported the social sciences.) It is unbelievable that they did not get interesting questions from the humanities. Either no one bothered to submit an interesting question (which I happen to know is not true) or they aren’t interested in the questions we ask. Here are some of the some of the possible explanations I can think of for CIFAR’s ignorance:

  •  None of the 280 LOIs were of the quality of the seven selected.
  • The panel was composed primarily of scientists and engineers. The one humanist was Pauline Yu.
  • The type of questions they were looking for were not the sort we ask in the humanities. They were looking for questions that could be answered with a bit of money rather than the questions we deal with that may never be answered.
  • Their idea of “questions with the potential to change the world” does not include questions about government, race, democracy, culture, art, education or literature.
  • This programme wasn’t really intended as a way to bring in new areas of research as I was told when I asked about the dearth of humanities support.

I think it is time CIFAR be honest with the larger community and admit that they are focusing on support for research in Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine with some forays into the Social Sciences. No one would blame them for focusing their support. Deep in their reports they admit that “the growth of its programs in the social sciences and humanities has not kept pace with growth in the natural sciences” (Final Report CIFAR Performance Audit and Evaluation) though I frankly don’t see any growth at all.

Perma, and Figshare

Thanks to Twitter I’ve come across a number of new online tools of use to academics:

Perma comes from Harvard Law and allows you to create a permanent archive of something you are linking to. You go to the site, enter a URL that you want archived and it gives you a new URL for the Perma version which lets you see what the page looks like now and what it looked like when archived. This allows us to quote web pages that may either disappear or be changed. Here is the link to the archived version of Theoreti.ca: http://perma.law.harvard.edu/0f8ojk5Phmc – this is a version before this blog entry.

Figshare is a cloud based archive for academic data. You upload data and then provide metadata for the dataset. People can comment on it, download the data and so on. It seems to do in a fairly clean fashion what university repositories do. I’m not sure of their business model. I uploaded Wendell Piez’s electronic edition of Frankenstein to try it out.

 

Lessons Learned from Vanderbilt’s First MOOCs

Derek Bruff of the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt has posted a nice essay on the Lessons Learned from Vanderbilt’s First MOOCs. They have run three MOOCs starting with one on Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture for Concurrent and Networked Software. With this one they found only 7% were awarded some sort of statement of accomplishment (which is a measure of how many finished the course in some fashion.) They had better luck with the next two MOOCs on leadership and nutrition.

The essay then discusses a number of lessons learned (which I quote):

  • Teaching online is a team effort
  • There’s more to MOOCs than lecture videos
  • Open content is our friend
  • The cognitive diversity seen in MOOCs is far greater than in closed courses
  • MOOC students are well-motivated students
  • Cognitive Diversity + Intrinsic Motivations = Crowdsourcing Success
  • Accommodating students on different time tables can be challenging
  • Instructor presence is important

They have a MOOC coming up on Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative which I think I’m going to take. This raises the question of how many students of MOOCs are other pros wondering how MOOCs work.

Master’s Degree Is New Frontier of Study Online

The New York Times posted a story on online Master’s Degree Is New Frontier of Study Online. The story is a balanced discussion about how the Georgia Institute of Technology is going to offer a master’s in computer science through a MOOC. The story rehearses the usual opportunities and concerns. No one is really sure whether there will be significant savings for comparable quality.

I tend to think that free non-credit MOOCs are really just more content (to be compared with book or other web sites) that won’t do more than act as branding for institutions. It is the credit courses, and even more importantly credit programmes offered online or in hybrid formats that are worth watching as they could change access, costs, and the international distribution of higher education. For this reason the Georgia Institute for Technology experiment is worth watching. It is also worth remembering that there a number of online or distance graduate degrees already in place – MOOCs have drawn attention to the issue of scale and faculty attention, but distance access isn’t new.

“Online is a scale game, so the Georgia Tech thing is interesting,” said Phil Regier, executive vice provost of Arizona State University Online, which takes in $90 million annually in revenue. “What we’re seeing is different price points for different levels of faculty involvement. If you want no touch, or very little touch, they’ll deliver that for $6,000. If you want a higher-touch program, taught and graded by regular faculty, with a lot of faculty interaction, it’s going to be more expensive.”

I came to the story from Twitter post by Ian Bogost pointing to his blog entry WHAT GROWS WHEN MOOCS GROW? where he moves from commenting on the financial speculation behind MOOCs to asking what sort of growth we would see if there similar investment in other forms of growth,

The growth of private MOOC companies is driven almost entirely from financial speculation, speculation with an interest in private, short-term gain via industrialized scale. It’s worth imagining what other kinds of growth might be possible if we had the stomach for a different kind of speculation meant to benefit long-term social institutions like schools instead of just the market.

Reshaping New York

The New York Times has a fabulous new interactive visualization called Reshaping New York that shows how Bloomberg has changed the city of 12 years. It shows new buildings, the rezoning, the introduction of bike lanes, and the celebration of the waterfront. The visualization is more of a tour that combines a 3D model of the city with images of before and after Bloomberg.