Research Collaborations: Where to start?

Today, I have to say a few words about collaboration at a lunch-time Arts Research Group gathering. I thought I would gather them here:

  • First, collaboration needs to be explicitly discussed to go well. Don’t assume that everyone knows who is doing what or that they share your sense of the goals. Err on the side of saying too much too often.
  • In some cases a formal charter is a good idea. The iterative design of a project charter for interdisciplinary research.
  • One thing you need to work out explicitly is how credit will be apportioned. Discuss it and then follow what you agree to. Always be generous with those with less power than you in the collaboration.
  • Collaborations are not necessarily friendships between like-minded folk. Collaborations often cross disciplines and research practices. Collaborations are often between people with different levels of support, power, and engagement. Try to share support with collaborators (if, for example, you get a grant.) Be ethical in your collaborations with those with less power. Be careful not to ask too much of those not engaged in the whole project.
  • If you want to collaborate with someone ask them. Invite them out for a coffee and explain what you want to do. Try to figure out how this would be useful for them and build that into the collaboration.
  • There are lots of tools you can use for managing communication and collaboration, but none of them are a substitute for regular attention. I frankly find a weekly meeting is the best way to keep things on track.
  • There is lots of advice our there on collaboration and even grants to facilitate developing collaboration. Developing a collaboration takes time, so avail yourself of support to do it.

 

Can You DIG It? 2014

The Humanities Computing Student Association is putting on a neat conference, Can You DIG It? 2014. The conference will take place on March 14th at the University of Alberta. There will be panels and workshops on:

  • Digging Mobile Media: Topics in Emerging Tech
  • Digging New Lines: Topics in Digital Mapping
  • Digital Representation: Women in Video Games
  • Hearing the Digital: Topics in Sound Art & Music

Find out more and register here.

Early Selfie (1865)

There was a discussion on Humanist about selfies and Emma Clarke on behalf of the Letters 1916 Project team posted a link to this holding of the National Library of Ireland, Augusta Caroline Dillon and Luke Gerald Dillon with camera on tripod reflected in a large mirror.

The two were apparently skilled amateur photographers who experimented with photographs like this. If one goes beyond photographs to paintings, I wonder if Las Meninas would qualify as a selfie.

Humanities Visualization Service at Texas

Texas A&M University held a Humanities Visualization Service Grand Opening at the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture. One of the visualizations they showed used Voyant (see above.) It is interesting to think about how visualizations should be designed for large screens seen by groups of people. With others I presented on this subject at the Chicago Colloquium – see The Big See: Large Scale Visualization. I am not convinced that very high-resolution screens/projectors and tiled data walls (like what they have at the IDHMC) will become the norm. We need to develop visualization tools so that they can scale up to walls and for groups.

Text classification tool on the web

 

Michael pointed me to a story about how Stanford scientists put free text-analysis tool on the web. The tool allows you to pass a text (or a Twitter hashtag) to an existing classifier like the Twitter Sentiment classifier. It then gives you a interactive graph like the one above (which shows tweets about #INKEWhistler14 over time.) You can upload your own datasets to analyze and also create your own classifiers. The system saves classifiers for others to try.

I’m impressed at how this tool lets people understand classification and sentiment analysis easily through Twitter classifications. The graph, however, takes a bit of reading – in fact, I’m not sure I understand it. When there are no tweets the bars go stable, and then when there is activity the negative bar seems to go both up and down.

Conference Report: Digital Infrastructure Summit 2014

I have just finished participating in and writing up a conference report on the Digital Infrastructure Summit 2014 in Ottawa. This summit brought some 140 people together from across Canada and across the stakeholders to discuss how to develop leading digital infrastructure in Canada. This was organized by the Digital Infrastructure Leadership Council. For this Summit the Council (working with Janet Halliwell and colleagues) developed a fabulous set of reference materials that paint a picture of the state of digital infrastructure in Canada.

You can see my longer conference report for details, but here are some of the highlights:

  • Infrastructure has been redefined, largely because of SSRHC’s leadership, as big and long data. This redefinition from infrastructure as tubes to focus on research data for new knowledge has all sorts of interesting effects. In brings libraries in, among other things.
  • Chad Gaffield (President of SSRHC) made the point that there is a paradigm shift taking place across many disciplines as we deal with the digital in research. As we create more and more research evidence in digital form it is vital that we build the infrastructure that can preserve and make useful this evidence over the long term.
  • We have a peculiarly Canadian problem that most of the stakeholders are more than willing to contribute to any coalition, but no one is jumping in to lead. Everyone is too polite. No one wants a new body, but no existing body seems to want to take the lead.
  • There is a lot of infrastructure already in place, but they are often not bundled as services that researchers understand. Much could be made of the infrastructure in place if there were a training layer and “concierge” layer that connects to researchers.

Silly Gamification: Code Kwondo

I just came across this silly gamification, the Microsoft Developer Movement – Code Kwondo. The idea is that developers get points (and belts) if they learn Windows Phone and Windows 8 programming techniques. This competition is only available to residents of Canada and it includes challenges. I can’t tell if this is simple way of getting Canadian developers creating apps for Windows or if it is patronizing to developers. The imagery is reminiscent of Bruce Lee with nunchuks or Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid. Either way they are playing with the Old Martial Arts Master trope. The title “Code Kwando” sounds like someone replaced the “Tae” in “Tae Kwan Do” with “Code” to get “Code Kwan Do.” My understanding of the Korean is that Kwan means “fist” and Do means “art” or “path of”. Thus we have a project that is the Path of Fist Code or Code Fist Art. Not sure they put a lot of thought into this, or perhaps they did.