The post Catherine Knight Steele Digital Dialogue appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

A list of the most-used annotations tags on the InfinteUlysses.com site

Infinite Ulysses, the participatory digital edition of James Joyce’s challenging novel Ulysses, is now about one month into its open beta-testing period. In this post, I’ll describe how I went about user-testing the edition, and share some early statistics about the edition’s use.

On April 4, 2015—about one month into the open beta—the site had 356 members. Site users other than me authored 159 annotations on the novel; combined with my 247 annotations, the total number of annotations on the novel was 406. 137 unique tags on annotations were in use, helping filter annotations to readers’ interests and needs. Although the site had a fair number of visitors during the first weeks of the open beta, only a very few readers also added annotations to the site. There were two fairly active users on the site (adding 60 and 19 annotations), with 9 users authoring 5 or more annotations, 19 users authoring 2 or more annotations, and 27 site users authoring at least 1 annotation.

I used a variety of tactics to understand the experience of the edition’s users:

1. Informal (hallway testing, tweeted questions)
2. Talk-aloud observation (single or paired)
3. Participatory design (sketching ideal layouts)
4. Site contact form feedback & emailed feedback
5. GitHub issue queue
6. Open beta soft launch survey (March 5th, 16 participants from non-academic/non-DH backgrounds)
7. Open beta survey responses (March 9-30, 16 participants, many from academic and/or DH backgrounds)
8. Google Analytics
9. Aggregated mapping (heatmaps, scrollmaps, clickmaps; e.g. the highlighting over the word “Chrysostomos” on the first page of the book was clicked 111 times between March 7-21)
10. Drupal statistics on frequency and authorship of annotations

Charts showing number of visitors and geographic locations of InfiniteUlysses.com visitors

I used Google Analytics to capture anonymous, aggregated data about the edition’s user experience. Note that the following figures represent the period from January 1, 2015 through March 21. Only the front page of the site and “about” pages were accessible to anyone (except a small group of invited early beta-testers) until the beginning of the open public beta on March 9th, so most of the site activity described here comes from the two-week period from March 9th to the 21st, 2015, as you can see from the “Visits” timeline. I’m continuing to gather site analytic data as the site sees more readers and begins to be used in classrooms; the stats here can give us a sense of the first weeks of a new public and participatory humanities project.

The spike on March 9th in the “Visits” chart shows how initial open beta publicity brought hundreds of people the site (with 1,579 unique site visitors during this two-week period), but only a relatively small number of readers stayed to make repeated use of the site during the first two weeks of the open beta. Visitors were mostly from the United States (857), followed by Great Britain (162), Canada (85), Ireland (66), and Brazil (60), with smaller counts from other countries. I discussed the site via email with one reader in Korea, and I discussed the site’s predecessor UlyssesUlysses via Twitter with a reader from Norway in the past. More work will need to be done to reach readers in other countries and make the site accessible to those who don’t speak English as their first language.

Charts showing exit count from most popular book pages, total time spent on most book pages, pageviews by site page, and pageviews on the most popular book pages. Regrettably presented as screenshots of Google Analytics visualizations instead of HTML tables.

There were 2,056 total sessions of site use, with 7,616 total pageviews (pageviews are the total number of pages viewed; repeat viewings of the same page are included). Sessions are individual visits to the site; for example, if James Joyce visits the site at 1pm today and reads 3 pages of the site before doing something else, and then visits the site tomorrow and views one page before leaving the site, those count as two distinct sessions.

79.86% of site sessions were referred from a social media site (i.e. clicked a link that took them to Infinite Ulysses). In particular, Twitter was responsible for 487 site sessions and Facebook for 350. These numbers speak to the usefulness of social media for getting the word out about academic projects. The Facebook number is interesting in that I don’t have an account on that site; my only publicity activities were on Twitter, my LiteratureGeek.com blog, the MITH blog (responsible for 42 sessions), and my older prototype UlyssesUlysses.com (45 sessions), but mentions of the project ended up on that network as well.

Chart showing number of site visitors by number of returning visits to the site.

New visitors made up 88.3% of site users, with only 11.7% of users returning for a second or further visit. Unfortunately, the data doesn’t capture what percent of non-return visitors were potential Ulysses readers who decided not to use the site, versus people interested in the project but not interested in reading Ulysses at the current time. The “Number of visitors by number of returning visits” chart shows how many sessions were from users who visited the site 1, 2, or more times (see the “Count of Sessions” column); we can see, for example, that 72 users returned to the site twice, and that 22 users each visited the site 5 separate times.

Filtering the statistics to just the pages of the book lets us see where users were reading; “Users on most popular book pages” shows the number of times a page of the book was viewed (pageviews) and how many users saw that page (users; note one user might view a page multiple times). From the popularity of pages 3 (the first page of the print book were the novel begins, and correspondingly the first page of the book on the digital edition), 4, 5, and 6, we suspect that most visitors began the novel at the beginning. Pages 24 and 25 (the first and second pages of the second episode of the novel) were also popular; perhaps returning readers jumped to the second episode to see what a page would look like that hadn’t been most people’s first choice to read and annotate. “Total time spent on most popular book pages” shows the cumulative attention (in time spent on a page) from site users on book pages. Page 3 (the first page of the novel) shows a considerably higher time, probably not because of its difficulty as a reading page but because it was the first page many readers encountered, where they would still have been learning to use the site’s features. “Exit count from most popular book pages” (above) shows for how many users a given book page was the last page they viewed before leaving the site. We see that page 3 was a point where many users left the site (though not necessarily after spending significant time reading and testing features on that page).

Visualization showing the user flow on InfiniteUlysses.com (e.g. people who entered the site on x page went on to y and z pages)

Additional information such as user flows (the above image is an example) will help add nuance to these statistics; information from the other forms of user testing will also round out my understanding of user motivations and experiences on the site. All this information helps me know what features of the site are useful and should receive refinement (e.g. the sorting and filtering feature pictured below was often praised on user surveys) and which I should remove from the site or redesign (e.g. the old, buggy site tour was replaced by a slideshow, and user surveys indicated that the site interface was intuitive enough that they didn’t seek a tour of the site). If you’re interested in more statistics about edition testing or a more nuanced discussion of these statistics, I’ll be sharing a white paper about the project in a few weeks which contains a discussion of these results.

The current filtering and sorting features on InfiniteUlysses.com

Amanda Visconti is the 2014-2015 Winnemore Digital Dissertation Fellow at MITH.

The post Early use data on a participatory digital edition appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Since my last post in January, I’ve used feedback from generous beta-testers to bring the Infinite Ulysses participatory digital edition up to where I’d hoped it would be by the end of my dissertation. In the past, I invited users in small batches from a list of readers who signed up to beta-test. I wanted to continue testing early and often, slowly ramping up the formality of my testing from the informal conversations I used during the previous year to formal survey metrics.

Private beta ends, public beta opens

As of last week, I’ve soft-launched an open beta of the site, and I’m now publicly inviting everyone to come give the site a try. Interested readers can now create a site account for themselves and immediately begin using all the site’s features without needing to wait for an email invitation.

Now that I’m wrapping up the site work that’s in scope for completing the dissertation, I’ve shifted from full-time design and development to writing a whitepaper report on the project.

This piece will pull together all the pieces that exist beyond the InfiniteUlysses.com site—things like a literature review for precedents to my project, user study results and analysis, and a return to my original research questions with what the project has helped me learn.

The front page of InfiniteUlysses.com uses these visuals to show the site’s highlighting, annotation, and customization features (see credits for remixed vector images here).

Current site features

These screenshots offer a quick overview what you can do on Infinite Ulysses:

Screenshot 1: Highlight words and phrases and type in an annotation related to that highlight (comment, interpretation, question). You can add tags to the annotation to help readers filter in annotations that help or interest them, and filter out annotations that aren’t useful for them.

Screenshot 2: You can read annotations left by other readers by clicking on any of the highlights. Deeper yellow highlights mean a word or phrase has more than one annotation on it.

Screenshot 3: The sidebar initially shows random annotations for the whole page. Clicking on a highlight makes just the annotations tied to that highlight appear in the sidebar.

Screenshot 4: In addition to adding tags to annotations, you can up- or down-vote them, favorite them (you can see a list of your favorites on your account page), or report them for moderation. What highlights are displayed on a page can be changed using the filters for annotation text, author, and tag. When a highlight has more than one annotation tied to it, you can prioritize which annotations appear on top in the sidebar by creation date or the annotations’ rankings.

Amanda Visconti is the 2014-2015 Winnemore Digital Dissertation Fellow at MITH.

The post Come read with us!: an update on the Infinite Ulysses participatory digital edition appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

The current front page of InfiniteUlysses.com.

The site will eventually be open to everyone (with a planned public 1.0 release on the upcoming Ulysses holiday Bloomsday—June 16, 2015). Though during the final phase of my dissertational project this spring, I’m keeping a list of interested readers and slowly adding new users to the site from that list over the coming weeks.

This slow beginning will let me fix any really grievous bugs before there are too many users on the site. Adding testers slowly also lets me work more directly with each user as they join the site, gathering their feedback and discussing their user experience. I’m particularly interested in testing the site with people reading in groups, such as book clubs or teachers and their students; some additional site features coming at the end of this month will support group reading and help me test how the edition can support offline groups, and I’ll be adding groups of users to the site at that time. As new users explore the site, I’ve been reading on it myself, seeding the text with more annotations aimed at first-time readers (these build off 215 annotations on the first two episodes I authored for a previous incarnation of this edition).

This project involves both new code (CSS, HTML, PHP, and JS/jQuery as components of a dissertation) and a demonstration of building a new tool through combining and customizing, rather than reinventing, existing digital humanities wheels. As such, my project is indebted to the various open-source code libraries and scholarly projects I’ve built off. A full credits page will appear on the digital edition and on the provenance section of the code repository, but for now I’d like to particularly thank

• Stanford’s Michael Widner, who has generously shared and discussed his code developed for the Lacuna Stories that vastly improves the Drupal versions of Annotator.
• The Modernist Versions Project for their generous Creative Commons licensing of a reliable digital text for Ulysses (I’ve been tracking my edits to this text and sharing website-friendly versions at this repo).
• The MITH Winnemore Fellowship and MITH’s awesome staff, for supporting my focusing entirely on the Infinite Ulysses project this year and encouraging me with great DH conversations.

Infinite Ulysses will share data about reading habits, such as what pages of the book the most people were reading at a given time.

If you’d like to know more about Infinite Ulysses or the dissertational research surrounding it, you can watch a quick three-minute video and read more here, or get the latest by following my regular research blogging at LiteratureGeek.com.

Amanda Visconti is MITH’s Winnemore Digital Dissertation Fellow for 2014-2015 and a Ph.D. candidate in the University of Maryland English Department.

The post An Invitation to Beta-Test the Infinite Ulysses Digital Edition appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

As a web developer and textual scholar, I’m interested in improving interfaces to digital humanities projects: can we design for a more public conversation? MITH is supporting my dissertational Infinite Ulysses project, for which I’ve built a participatory digital edition of James Joyce’s difficult but rewarding novel Ulysses. The website creates a community for discussing the text; users can highlight sections of the text to add a comment, question, or interpretation, as well as read, upvote, and tag others’ annotations. A variety of sorting, filtering, and toggling options customize the experience to an individual reader’s needs, whether that reader knows Church Latin, wants to avoid spoilers, needs extra help as a first-time reader, or is a scholar studying Ulysses‘ puzzles or the function of written material (letters, poems, etc.) throughout the novel.

Besides this design and coding work, I’ll conduct user testing to gauge the use, usefulness, and usability of the edition. Digital editions are a key humanities scholarly form, but often we don’t base our understanding of how they are read and used on data gathered through formal user testing. This project builds on my master’s thesis work at the University of Michigan School of Information, where I explored user testing for the digital humanities, and how digital archives and editions might be designed to include a public audience.

I’ll assess the digital edition site itself, looking at how features drawn from existing, successful online communities that deal with quantity and quality of text (such as Reddit and StackExchange) port to digital humanities platforms. I’ll also use test and analytics data to support the speculative design of the edition as an “infinite” Ulysses conversation. Could the site still produce customized reading experiences while storing an “infinite” quantity of annotations of various quality? What happens to complex texts—especially those authored to be hypertextual, chaotic, and encyclopedic, like Ulysses—when a participatory digital edition places them under “infinite” annotations and conversations? Data on reading behavior—such as what pages of the book take users the longest to read, or receive the most annotations, or the most contentious (both up- and down-voted) annotations—will give me a basis to speculate on questions like these.

I’m finishing up private alpha-testing of the site this month. Beta-testing with individual volunteers will begin at the start of January, with group testing (teachers/students, book clubs) following at the end of the month. To sign up as an Infinite Ulysses beta-tester, share your Ulysses annotations, or inquire about using Infinite Ulysses in your classroom or book club this January, please fill out this form!

I’m grateful to MITH for their support—I’m working this academic year as MITH’s Winnemore Digital Dissertation Fellow, allowing me to focus full-time on the project’s various deliverables. The dissertation takes a unique non-monograph form, consisting of the Infinite Ulysses participatory digital edition (plus a public code repository and documentation on using my code to create your own participatory digital edition); user testing, site analytics, and analysis; and regular research blogging culminating in a scholarly article final draft. For more about the project, check out the quick three-minute video below, read more on the project page, or get the latest by following my regular research blogging.

The post Infinite Ulysses: Designing a Public Humanities Conversation appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Omeka for Textual Scholars. The first stop was the Society for Textual Scholarship (STS) conference in Austin, Texas, which while not purely a digital conference necessarily gravitated toward discussions of digital tools. I began the conference by teaching a workshop, “Zero to Archive in Sixty Seconds: An Omeka Workshop for Textual Scholars” (teaching tools from the workshop are available here). Omeka is a powerful platform for creating digital museums–and if you’re interested in a non-traditional sort of digital literary edition, one that situates a text or texts in a rich discourse field of media related to its creation and reception, Omeka helps you realize a narrative out of an archive of interlinked media. There’s also growing work on plugins specific to creating a more traditional type of edition within Omeka, such as Scripto (transcription crowdsourcing; demo site), TEIDisplay plus SolrSearch (displays TEI files and makes them phrase-searchable), and the TEI Boilerplate (another method of TEI display), all of which we explored during the workshop.

Teaching “Thinking Like an Editor”. Later at STS, I led a panel of editors from varied disciplinary backgrounds (theater performance, education, religion, Arabic language and translation, and digital edition design) in talking about ways to expose more people to “think like an editor”. Starting from Gary Taylor’s suggestion that the function of the editor is to help people get near texts and thereby love these cultural artifacts, we had a lively discussion about practical classroom assignments and digital tools for making our editions more participatory. One example of editing pedagogy we explored was MITH’s recent mentoring of graduate students in Neil Fraistat’s Technoromanticism course; by conceiving the Shelley-Godwin Archive as a teaching site, MITH was both able to bring students closer to a text they’d already come to care about (each student marked up ten pages of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein manuscript with TEI) as well as teach some practical digital skills and workflows (captured in this documentation). In addition to introducing students to “thinking like an editor” around texts to which they already have some emotional connection, we discussed tactics for bringing historical textual artifacts alive such as exploring marginalia for evidence of a writer’s habits and thinking, exposing students to the materiality of old texts, and using performance to teach making editing decisions.

An Evolving Digital Editions Platform. After STS, the next stop was the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) in Victoria, British Columbia, where I took the Digital Editions course taught by Matt Huculak. This course explored the evolving Editing Modernism in Canada project platform Modernist Commons, a tool that offered an interesting counterpoint to the edition options available with Omeka. Modernist Commons is being developed on Islandora, a hybrid of the Drupal CMS and the Fedora Commons repository system; to put it simply, it’s a WYSIWYG tool for creating complete digital editions. The platform includes an ingest and OCR transcription process, areas for both TEI and RDF markup, rectangular and polygonal image annotation, and a shared collection of entity information (i.e. so that naming and events marked in different editions point to the same idea). The tool supports a number of front-end layouts such as the Internet Archive viewer, which allows a book-like appearance with pages that flip as you read, and also allows for the inclusion of born-digital content such as editorial methodologies. EMiC Project Director Dean Irvine described the goals for Modernist Commons as offering both a platform for enriching text meaningfully without necessarily requiring knowledge of TEI (e.g. using simple RDF relationship fields and image annotation) as well as, for more advanced users, a platform that is modular and allows for customization and mass production of a variety of editions. It was fascinating to play around with a tool that was still in development and discuss the choices actively shaping it with its developers.

DHSI and DH. Beyond the Digital Editions course, DHSI was a powerful demonstration of just how many fascinating areas of knowledge the umbrella “Digital Humanities” covers. With seventeen courses covering everything from physical computing (e.g. 3d printers) to digital pedagogy to the pre-digital book, a common theme among attendees was how difficult it had been to decide on just one of those classes to take (in fact, many attendees come back year after year from across the country to take more of DHSI’s course offerings). I was also impressed with how much the Digital Humanities community benefits socially from its allegiance to new technologies. Since everyone is always a novice when working with evolving tools, there’s extra impetus to help one another learn and generally geek and rejoice in the sharing of new knowledge and skills.

STS and DHSI provided a lovely ten days of sharing knowledge about the future of digital editing, and I’m looking forward to repeating the DHSI experience at MITH in January, when we host the first Digital Humanities Winter Institute.

Amanda Visconti is Webmaster at MITH and a Ph.D. student in the University of Maryland Department of English, where she focuses on textual studies, digital humanities practice, and developing the look and function of digital literary tools. For more on the DHSI experience, please see Jen Guiliano’s recent post.

The post What’s Up with Digital Editing Tools? (Summer Conference Edition) appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Team MARKUP collaboratively authored a post on the several phases of the project over on the Technoromanticism blog, so here I’ll address my personal experience of the project.

Six takeaways from the Team MARKUP project:

1. Affective editing is effective editing? One of my favorite quotations—so beloved that it shapes my professional work and has been reused shamelessly on my Ph.D. exams list, a Society for Textual Scholarship panel abstract, and at least one paper—is Gary Taylor’s reasoning on the meaningfulness of editing: “How can you love a work, if you don’t know it? How can you know it, if you can’t get near it? How can you get near it, without editors?”*. My interests focus on participatory editing because I want to help others get near the literature I love. Encoding my editorial decisions with TEI pushed me a step closer to the text than my previous non-encoded editorial experience, something I didn’t know was possible.

The Creature speaks! TEI for the first page of the Creature’s monologue in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

My ten pages happened to be the first pages of the Creature’s monologue; hearing the voice of the Creature by seeing the handwriting of its true creator, Mary Shelley, gave me shivers—meaningful shivers accompanied by a greater understanding of important aspects of Shelley’s writing, such as the large editorial impact made by her husband Percy and the differing ways she crossed out or emphasized changes to her draft. Moving between the manuscripts images and the TEI encoding—so similar to my other work as a web designer and developer—also emphasized the differences in the writing process of my generation and the work that went into inscribing, organizing, and editing a book without the aid of a mechanical or digital device.

2. Project management. Because we didn’t know what to expect from the project until we were in the thick of encoding—would everyone be able to correctly encode ten full pages? how would we control quality across our work? what would our finished pages look like in terms of encoding depth?—we spent most of the project functioning as a large team, which was both sometimes as unwieldy as our large GoogleDoc (trying to find a time when eight busy graduate students can meet outside of class time is difficult!) and sometimes made sense (I was one of the few people on our team comfortable with GitHub and encoding at the start of the project, so I helped with a lot of one-on-one Skype, in-person, and email sessions early on). If I did the project over, I would have held a single Bootcamp day where we all installed and pushed within GitHub and encoded one page of manuscript up on the projector screen, then delegated my role as team organizer by dividing us into three subgroups. I also might have insisted on people agreeing ahead of time on being available for specific in-person meeting times, rather than trying to schedule these one or two weeks beforehand. I do think things worked out pretty well as they did, largely because we had such a great team. Having the GoogleDoc (discussed more below) as a central point for tech how-tos, advice, and questions was also a good choice, though in a larger project I’d probably explore a multi-page option such as a wiki so that information was a) easier to navigate and b) easily made public at the end of our project.

3. Changing schemas and encoding as interpretive. Encoders who started their work early realized that their efforts had good and bad results: because the schema saw frequent updates during our work, those who finished fast needed to repeatedly update their encoding (e.g. a major change was removing the use of <mod type>s). Of course it was frustrating to need to update work we thought was finished—but this was also a great lesson about work with a real digital edition. Not only did the schema changes get across that the schema was a dynamic response to the evolving methodology of the archive, it prepared us for work as encoders outside of a classroom assignment. Finally, seeing the schema as a dynamic entity up for discussion emphasized that even among more seasoned encoders, there are many ways to encode the same issue: encoding, as with all editing, is ultimately interpretative.

4. Encode all the things! Or not. Depth of encoding was a difficult issue to understand early on; once we’d encoded a few pages, I began to have a better sense of what required encoding and what aspects of the manuscript images I could ignore. Initially, I was driven to encode everything, to model what I saw as thoroughly as possible: sums in the margins, different types of overstrikes, and analytical bibliography aspects such as smudges and burns and creases.

Encode all the things… or not. Image created with Quickmeme.

What helped me begin to judge what to encode was understanding what was useful for Team MARKUP to encode (the basics that would apply to future encoding work: page structure and additions and deletions), what was useful for more advanced encoders to tackle (sitting in on the SGA staff meetings, I knew that some of our work would be subject to find-and-replace by people more experienced with Percy and Mary’s handwriting styles), and what our final audience would do with our XML (e.g. smudges and burns weren’t important, but Percy’s doodles could indicate an editorial state of mind useful to the literary scholar).

5. Editorial pedagogy. Working on Team MARKUP not only improved my markup skills, it also gave me more experience with teaching various skills related to editions. As I mentioned above, acting as organizer and de facto tech person for the team gave me a chance to write up some documentation on using GitHub and Oxygen for encoding work. I’m developing this content for this set of GitHub Pages to help other new encoders work with the Shelley-Godwin Archive and other encoding projects. Happily, I was already scheduled to talk about editorial pedagogy at two conferences right after this seminar ends; the Team MARKUP experience will definitely become part of my talks during a panel I organized on embedding editorial pedagogy in editions (Society for Textual Scholarship conference,) and a talk on my Choose-Your-Own-Edition editorial pedagogy + games prototype at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute colloquium in Victoria.

6. Ideas for future encoding work. I’ve started to think about ways to encode Frankenstein more deeply; this thinking has taken the form of considering tags that would let me ask questions about the thematics of the manuscript using Python or TextVoyeur (aka Voyant); I’m also interested in markup that deals with the analytical bibliography aspects of the text, but need to spend more time with the rest of the manuscript images before I think about those. So far, I’ve come up with five new thematic tagging areas I might explore:

• Attitudes toward monstrosity: A tag that would identify the constellation of related words (monster, monstrous, monstrosity), any mentions of mythical supernatural creatures, metaphorical references to monstrosity (e.g. “his vampiric behavior sucks the energy out of you”), and reactions/attitudes toward the monstrous (with attributes differentiating responses to confronting monstrosity with positive, negative, and neutral attitudes). I could then track these variables as they appear across the novel and look for patterns (e.g. do we see less metaphorical references to monstrosity once a “real” monster is more prevalent in the plot?).

• Thinking about doodles: We’re currently marking marginalia doodles with <figure> and a <desc> tag describing the drawing. In our section of the manuscript, many (all?) of these doodles are Percy Shelley’s; I’d like to expand this tag to let me identify and sort these doodles by variables such as complexity (how much thought went into them rather than editing the adjacent text?), sense (do they illustrate the adjacent text?), and commentary (as an extension of sense tagging, does a doodle seem ironically comic given the seriousness or tragedy of the adjacent text?). For someone new to studying Percy’s editorial role, such tagging would help me understand both his editing process and his attitude toward Mary’s writing (reverent? patronizing? distracted? meditative?)

• Names, dates, places: These tags would let us create an animated timeline of the novel that shows major characters as they move across a map.

• Anatomy, whole and in part: To quote from an idea raised in an earlier post of mine, I’d add tags that allowed “tracking the incidence of references to different body parts–face, arms, eyes–throughout Frankenstein, and trying to make sense of how these different terms were distributed throughout the novel. In a book concerned with the manufacture of bodies, would a distant reading show us that the placement of references to parts of the body reflected any deeper meanings, e.g. might we see more references to certain areas of the body grouped in areas of the novel with corresponding emphases on the display, observation, and action? A correlation in the frequency and placement of anatomical terms with Frankenstein‘s narrative structure felt unlikely (so unlikely that I haven’t run my test yet, and I’m not saving the idea for a paper!), but if had been lurking in Shelley’s writing choices, TextVoyeur would have made such a technique more visible.”

• Narrative frames: Tags that identified both the specifics of a current frame (who is the speaker, who is their audience, where are they, how removed in time are they from the events they narrate?) and that frame’s relationship to other frames in the novel (should we be thinking of these words as both narrated by Walton and edited by Victor?) would help create a visualization of the novel’s structure.

I expect that playing around with such tags and a distant reading tool would yield even better thinking about encoding methodology than the structural encoding I’ve been working on so far, as the decisions on when to use these tags would be so much more subjective.

* From “The Renaissance and the End of Editing”, in Palimpsest: Textual Theory and the Humanities, ed. George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams (1993), 121-50.

Amanda Visconti is Webmaster at MITH and a Ph.D. student in the University of Maryland Department of English, where she focuses on textual studies, digital humanities practice, and Modernist novels. This post was a DH Now Editor’s Choice post on April 24th, 2012 and is cross-posted from LiteratureGeek.com.

The post “How Can You Love a Work If You Don’t Know It?”: Six Lessons from Team MARKUP appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

We found design inspiration in images such as Edward Brewer’s dark, estranging presentation of the Statue of Liberty on the front of a 1908 Life magazine, book covers like Kafka’s Amerika, and the iconic photographs of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses. We researched estranged geographies: maps estranging the usual world placing of the United States by moving it from its usual central position or erasing it, showing the U.S. inscribed by bits of foreign textuality (e.g. by a grid of foreign flags or book covers). We thought about the Statue of Liberty in terms of its global history (images of the Statue being built in France or on the boat to the United States) and possible estrangement (perspectives aimed from behind the Statue and away from the U.S., or dividing the wrought-metal grid of the original “flame” into cells filled by flags of foreign nations). We even imagined a counterpart to Robert Buss’s “Dickens Dreaming” painting, with Uncle Sam or the Statue of Liberty dreaming of key figures from foreign literature (way too complex for a logo!).

Throughout our discussions of imagery representing our project, we struggled with ways to indicate focus without dominance, influence without appropriation. Imagery like the melting pot or Manifest-Destiny-era political cartoons, although demonstrating both planetarity and an American focus, was shot down because it carried obvious implications of an imperialist America dominating or improving the literatures of other countries. The current FLA image uses a global map with an only partially imagined America, but we’ll probably transition to using images of circulation or communication (to use Peter’s phrase, “capillary exchange”) for our final logo; imagery involving bloodlines, trade routes, or circulation all speak to global routes passing through American culture. The difficulty with such images is to imply circular movement rather than an omnidirectional power emanating from or draining into the United States; a logo with the effect of a two-headed arrow would help us show a pluralized and opened United States, while at the same time demonstrating the cultural influences flowing in.

A logo is admittedly a small thing, and only one item in a network of web design decisions that will frame how visitors interpret our project. At the same time, it’s the single most visible representative of the goals of our project; we’d be remiss if we didn’t port our close reading skills into our digital humanities design work. Follow us @FLAProject and @UMD_MITH to hear when the FLA’s official site is released and check out the results of our current design work!

Amanda Visconti is MITH Webmaster and a Ph.D. student in the English Department at the University of Maryland; she serves as both a member of the FLA’s founding executive editorial board and its digital liaison. Foreign Literatures in America is a project directed by MITH Faculty Fellow Peter Mallios. Read more about FLA in Dr. Mallios’ recent blog post.

The post Extremely Visible and Incredibly Close Reading of Logos appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Sheet of stickers from THATCamp Games 2012.

THATCamp Games, last weekend’s four-day unconference on digital humanities and gaming, had its origin in a packed “humanities gaming” catch-all session at THATCamp Prime 2011, where we quickly realized that “games” was too broad a topic for a single session. THATCamp Games brought together members of the games industry, games researchers and designers, and games teachers to discuss games in as many genres (e.g. board games, alternate reality games, video games) and areas (e.g. games for teaching writing, game programming, and historical gaming) as possible. Almost one hundred people attended, coming from both the local DC/MD area and states across the country: Washington, California, New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, to name a few. Our first event was one of the first screenings of Lorien Green’s new documentary Going Cardboard, a documentary about the players and designers in the burgeoning eurogaming scene; after the film showing, Green answered questions via Skype. Friday offered a full day of fifteen workshops (“Bootcamps”) divided into three tracks: beginner-friendly introductions to game design (e.g. a “my first board game” prototyping session), a “hack track” for people with some previous game coding experience (e.g. HTML5, Inform 7, and the Kinect), and a track devoted to games in the classroom (e.g. alternate reality games and video games in the classroom). After the workshops, we headed over to MITH (avoiding the grue) for a reception.
Saturday started off menacingly: an overnight snowstorm left sheets of black ice between attendees and the conference. Most of the attendees and all of the coffee managed to make it to the conference building on time, however, and we cast our votes to narrow down almost forty attendee-proposed sessions to fit into five time slots in five rooms. (If you’re not familiar with THATCamps, attendees don’t present papers but instead write blog posts about topics they’d like to discuss, then facilitate sessions on those topics). You can see which sessions got placed on the schedule here; these included discussions on quest-based evaluation schemes, teaching games in the literature classroom, and course game design using learning management systems. We ran a game lounge all-day on Saturday, but since most attendees were busy with sessions then, we also met for game-playing and a Glorious-Trainwrecks-style rapid-prototyping game design jam on Sunday morning. If you weren’t following the overwhelming volume of “#thatcamp games” tweets last weekend, we’re happy to report that the event satisfied both unconference novices and THATCamp veterans, with assessments such as “a truly intellectually (and personally) meaningful event” and “THATCamp Games: totally awesome.” Amidst the sessions, we ran an unconference-long alternate reality game, participated as a group in a spoken text adventure, logged onto an attendee-run Minecraft server, and thought really hard about the puzzle on the backs of the conference shirts. If you’re sad you missed the event, we’re collecting names of potential future attendees via a sidebar form on thatcampgames.org. THATCamp Games was co-organized by MITH Webmaster Amanda Visconti and Anastasia Salter. Follow us on Twitter via @thatcampgames or #thatcamp games.

The post THATCamp Games: Maryland Is For Gamers appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

You can’t have a good games conference without games, so we’ll be running a conference-long ARG, a games lounge/lab where you can take a break and play games with fellow attendees, and a Sunday games design jam where you can show off your latest games work. Following the Bootcamp workshops, MITH will host a reception where you can tour the DH center, hear about UMD’s gaming research, and play games on some of our platforms old and new.

We welcome everyone to apply, whether you’re a seasoned gamer or “n00b”; undergrad, tenured professor, or alternative academic. Applications are open now through 10/31, and the unconference will take place January 20th to 22nd at the University of Maryland in College Park. The event is co-organized by MITH Webmaster and Literature Ph.D. student Amanda Visconti (@literature_geek) and University of Baltimore Assistant Professor Anastasia Salter (@AnaSalter).

Please contact THATCampGames@gmail.com with any questions.

The post MITH Sponsors THATCamp Games appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.