It has been an honor for me to be a part of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) community this spring 2019 semester as the Winnemore Dissertation Fellow. The fellowship has directly supported me this semester as I wrote the draft of my second dissertation chapter, which I sent to my advisor in May upon completion. It was a privilege to have the opportunity to present my research to an audience of scholars at MITH in April and to receive immediate feedback on the project (the video can be accessed here). In the days following this talk, I was able to participate in a public discussion at MITH with Robert Sonderman, a retired Regional Curator for the National Park Service (NPS) who specializes in document and object storage for the NPS, moderated by Ricardo Punzalan and Mary Alexander (co-directors of the Museum Scholarship and Material Culture Program at the University of Maryland iSchool). Discussing my own research in both of these venues served as an opportunity for me to receive invaluable feedback on my own project, and also to contribute to a constructive dialogue. In this blog post, I will take the opportunity to discuss further what the Winnemore fellowship afforded my research, and I will attempt to use this post demystify the dissertation research and chapter writing process for dissertating PhD candidates by providing some productive suggestions that helped me to write this chapter, and that I hope will help future dissertating PhD students.

No one tells you how to write a dissertation, nor can they. Rather, it is a process of continual writing, feedback, and of course subsequent revision. Writing this chapter was an opportunity for me to integrate the lessons I learned from committee members’ remarks on my previous chapter. My project, which sits at the convergence of digital studies, critical information science, and cultural studies, engages with a wide scope—knowing what I wanted to argue at the beginning of the chapter was essential. Chapter writing takes twists and turns—in my previous chapter, when a fascinating informational trail led my attention, I quickly followed it. Yet, a chapter needs clear structure, and a cohesive core argument. A clear (roughly) 50-page chapter must tell a story in a transparent manner—in writing this chapter, controlling those urges to tunnel too far down any single rabbit hole was vital (as fascinating as each of those holes may be…) When writing this current chapter, I began with a regimented outline and schedule (much more so than in my first chapter)—this proved to be essential in my own writing process, which helped me adhere to a single argument. Becoming more self-aware of my own writing process—knowing what habits work, what my own limitations are, and what I can improve on immediately—helped me to make this my most productive dissertation-writing semester, by far. This structure materialized in the formation of my chapter: I divided my chapter into four clear sections from the outset. While I did change some supporting evidence for each of the four sections, I was sure to keep the overall argumentative approach of the chapter intact, which has helped me to write a coherent argument across a 50-page chapter, as opposed to the conference paper length (6-10 pages) or seminar paper length (20-25 pages) graduate students in my field typically prepare for. Writing four connected conference papers proved to be the better model for writing this chapter, advice imparted to me by a committee member. Without falling too deep into the specifics of my chapter, picking four major keywords to ground each section was one technique I adopted to structure my writing. In my case, the entire chapter focuses on programmable storage media, which I read as digital containers. The sections that connect this chapter revolved around four keywords that speak to the concept of ‘containment’—vectors, planes, systems, and circulation. (There was some controlled shift in these terms over the semester, though the ideas behind them remained intact). Each of these terms focused on selected examples of containment, which follow their own trajectory—from physical objects like punched cards and NAND flash memory to virtualized instantiations like Docker containers and containerization within larger cloud compute services. Having regular access to MITH developers like Ed Summers, who I was able to discuss technical concepts with and receive feedback from, substantially helped to deepen my analyses and accelerate the writing process.

In graduate school, time feels like an indulgence—at the dissertation phase, time to visit sites in the field, take notes, conduct interviews, read recent publications, and parse through this mountain of information is impractical without the temporal-freedom to do so. In my five years in my PhD program (and the preceding two years I spent in my MA program), this has been the sole semester I have been funded to support my research (in opposition to compensation for teaching or for working as a faculty research assistant, or RA), which I have been able to use to direct my full attention to my scholarship, an experience that I will remain endlessly grateful for. I decided that with this rare open chunk of time to devote fully to my dissertation, the best use of this time would be to maximize my attention on facilities at the center of my research, many of which are nearby and within the greater Washington, DC area. Moreover, it is the kind of deep dive into research that is near impossible to balance with typical teaching obligations of two courses per semester. Site visits, interviews, and archival research are among the most time intensive aspects of dissertation research, but I knew they would also be the most fruitful for me. So, I arranged site visits at the Library of Congress (Washington, DC), the Library of Congress offsite storage facility (Ft. Meade, MD), the Severn Library offsite storage facility here at the University of Maryland (College Park, MD), the Smithsonian Museum Support Center (Suitland, MD), an Amazon fulfillment center (Richmond, VA), and the Library of Congress National Audiovisual Conservation Center (NAVCC in Culpeper, VA). Moreover, I also conducted phone/skype discussions and recorded interviews remotely with scholars or representatives from the University of Pittsburgh, ReCAP (a major library consortium), and the NAVCC. Over the summer I have plans still to visit sites including ReCAP, the National Archives, and a second Amazon fulfillment center (another location, which is built around a different logistical system). Outside of these major discussions, I had conversations or email exchanges with many other individuals willing to make the time to speak with me about their work. As for almost all scholars and students, regular conference attendance is essential, and my experience at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference this spring further informed my chapter and served as an outlet to discuss my project in both formal and informal conversations. Scheduling as many of my essential visits as early as I could (at the beginning of the fellowship) was necessary, since finding a time that worked for everyone was often more logistically difficult than expected. Knowing that the work I did this semester would have been in a word, impossible, with a full-time graduate teaching schedule at the University of Maryland has made me value the research that has come out of this semester. The research has shaped the entirety of this chapter and it has provided me with a rich trove or research material I will continue to mine in the future. To manage my time, the resource the fellowship afforded me this semester, scheduling long-term (week by week for the semester) and short term (daily & weekly writing goals and reading deadlines), while consistently sticking to these strict, self-imposed deadlines served as a crucial mechanism of self-accountability.

Much of my own work attempts to speak to the hidden roles of containers as information storage objects and their placement within larger infrastructures—the containerization of information surrounds us, bundling together documents in boxes and binding together bits and bytes whirring on hard drives. In this same vein, I hope that this post helps to demystify the process of dissertation chapter writing. In the past four months I have written a full dissertation chapter (the second of four chapters)—writing this chapter and reflecting upon my experience has helped me come to a great many realizations about my own writing style, how to overcome perceived writing limitations, and putting these understandings into practice. My hope is that these humble suggestions will help out another dissertating PhD candidate and provide them with some support during a time that is often a rich time of learning from others, but when writing can feel very solitary. Yet, this is a position that most scholars have previously gone through, which deepened their understanding of their research projects, and helped formed the intellectual foundation of future job applications, book projects, and meaningful careers.

Many excellent resources exist, among those let me suggest Joan Bolker’s Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day as a helpful, practical aid that is worth checking out from your local library. I would also like to thank everyone who made this possible: Trevor Muñoz, Purdom Lindblad, Ed Summers, Stephanie Sapienza, Raffaele Viglianti, Grace Babukiika, and Ricky Punzalan for their wonderful support at MITH and the iSchool. I would like to thank my entire committee for their support of my project for this fellowship, and I would like to thank the many librarians, archivists, faculty, and private industry workers who were willing to take the time out of their day to discuss my project and their professional insights to it.

The post My Time as a MITH Winnemore Dissertation Fellow appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Eligible graduate students must be enrolled in an appropriate terminal degree program (Ph.D. or M.F.A) at the University of Maryland and must agree not to accept any other form of financial support from the University or other fellowships of $2,000 or more during the term for which this fellowship is awarded. Winnemore Fellows are provided  a stipend of $9,929 and a $1,509 contribution toward health insurance fees. Fellows are also provided with work space at MITH, consultation with MITH staff about their project, and technical support (including server space) where applicable.

Fellows are expected to be in-residence throughout the duration of their fellowship.  They are encouraged to attend MITH events such as Digital Dialogues, contribute to the intellectual community of MITH, share their work on the MITH blog, participate in professional development opportunities, and be engaged with the digital humanities more broadly.

Interested applicants should submit:

• a cover letter that includes your name, program/department, college, email, phone, title of dissertation, and advisor’s name, phone, and email. The cover letter should also include the date that you completed coursework and any other degree requirements, the date that you passed your prospectus/proposal examination, the date you advanced to candidacy, and the proposed date for your dissertation defense. All dates should include month and year;
• a current short CV;
• a 250-word abstract written for a general audience including your name and the title of your dissertation or project.
• the proposal itself, which should be no longer than three pages and which should specifically address the following points:
  • the project that you will work on if awarded the fellowship;
  • how the use of advanced technology would help achieve your research goals and contribute to the intellectual outcome
  • a statement of work completed to date;
  • a detailed timetable or work plan for duration of the fellowship including the projected date of completion.
• two confidential letters of recommendation, including one from your dissertation director that outlines how the applicant’s advisor will support the student’s effort for the duration of the fellowship in addition to the merit of the applicant.

A committee composed of digital humanities faculty and staff will review applications. Proposals should specify how a Winnemore Fellowship would be crucial to the dissertation or equivalent project’s development. The committee will place emphasis on projects that center the perspectives of underrepresented or oppressed groups and such proposals are highly encouraged. Also encouraged are projects addressing complex ethical issues inherent to engagement with new media, cultural heritage data, and the digital humanities.

We encourage applicants to consult with MITH regarding their applications. All application materials should be sent in PDF format to Purdom Lindblad, by 11:59 PM Friday, November 2, 2018. Announcement of the Winnemore Fellow will be made by Monday, November 19, 2018.

The post 2019 Winnemore Dissertation Fellowship Call for Applications appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Most folks have no doubt encountered this adage, coined in a 1993 New Yorker cartoon, through one of the many, many cultural riffs and references, or maybe in a reproduction of the original cartoon. The idea, of course, represents public perceptions about anonymity, privacy, and the internet prevalent at the time of its publication: that one’s online and offline presences could be largely disconnected from each other.

When the cartoon was first published, the sentiment certainly seemed more likely to be true in theory (though not always in practice). Particularly throughout the 1990s into the mid-2000s, the internet was thought to be a safe space for engaging in a variety of identity play, and transgender individuals were uniquely poised to benefit. One’s offline identity was not always tightly bound to their online presence, certainly not closely as social network sites like Facebook might wish them to be—a change reflected in a 2015 follow-up cartoon of the dogs reminiscing about their prior anonymity. Online, trans individuals could take steps to disconnect their offline selves from their online identities, where they might adopt different names and gender identities that better reflected their own self-understanding. While I didn’t identify as transgender at the time, I nevertheless engaged in these practices myself as a teenager, often failing to ‘correct’ individuals who, presciently, assumed I was male.

However, my online life at the time was entirely pseudonymous, and I made sure to keep a certain distance between my offline and online selves. This has allowed me to keep my prior online activities (as well as my past opinions on the state of the World of Warcraft endgame) largely divorced from my current online presence. Other individuals, particularly early users whose online access came through an employer or university, may not have been able to maintain such a clean separation. Bits of one’s offline identity—elements of a legal name used for official company email address, differing names between those used in messages and those attached to email accounts, or an “official” email signature—remained connected to online activities, including posting to Usenet. For trans individuals, these traces can reveal distinctly gendered or pre-transition names, employment, or activities they might otherwise wish was not widely known.

As I get closer to a launch-ready version of the Transgender Usenet Archive, much of my attention has been focused on thinking through my ethical responsibility to these users. At the core of the project are two impulses. On one hand, I hope to increase the accessibility and reach of an important, if undiscussed, part of recent transgender history. As a consequence, however, I am giving these posts a new kind of visibility beyond the initial level of access (which, admittedly, you can already get through the Google Groups archive). Given this increased access, I am also deeply invested in conscientiously respecting not only posters’ agency as authors, but also their privacy as individuals, who may have treated their posts as ephemeral communications, not meant for academic analysis.

Because there’s not a lot of guidance for working with Usenet materials, I’ve looked to other instances where archivists faces similar concerns. Tara Robertson’s writing on the ethical implications of Reveal Digital’s scanning and posting of the On Our Backs backcatalogue (since taken down) speak compellingly to the importance of thinking carefully about consent, representation, and digital access. One difference between OOB and other digitized materials is Usenet’s status as the organizing umbrella under which a variety of public fora lived. Usenet newsgroups, and by extension users’ posts, were always ‘public’ in terms of accessibility. However, posts were not archived and made available on a mass scale until DejaNews started collecting them in 1995; the current Google archive, and thus the collections the archive is based on, are made up of what DejaNews collected, along with several other donated collections of pre-1995 material. Following DejaNews’s announcement, users concerned about privacy successfully advocated for DejaNews to adopt the the “X-No-Archive” header, which signalled a post shouldn’t be archived. However, DejaNews’s choice to respect users’ wishes to XNAY (for X-No-Archive: yes) their posts was voluntary—a policy Google (which acquired DejaNews in 2001) has continued to follow to this day.

Nevertheless, the fact users had the option to XNAY posts when they were first written doesn’t guarantee they would want their posts to be publicly available now. With contemporary indexing and archiving tools, what might have seemed “privately public” in 1997 now can be made, in incautious hands, all too public. With some fairly simple Python scripts, I’ve been able to collect, count, and index thousands of user names and emails, including building a whole network of users’ communication.

The Google Groups archive has functionally performed such indexing on a massive scale, making all of these posts (and their attached content, some of it clearly not intended for such a mass audience) available to anyone who wishes to access it. Individuals can request for archived posts be removed, but the process for doing so is opaque at best. As Andy Baio rightly notes, Google’s primary interest here is not in in acting as a good steward of the internet’s past but in maximizing profitability. In a internet landscape dominated by social network sites (including Google’s underwhelming entry into the field, Google+), personal data mining, and algorithmic filtering, Usenet is neither ripe for personal data mining nor very profitable. In fact, it’s the exact opposite: an unstructured, decentralized system now best known as a resource for illegal file sharing. Thus, there appears to be little financial incentive to investing energy into the archive.

In her discussion of the impact of Reveal’s choice to make OOB widely available, Robertson makes it a point to connect this act with the people it most directly impacts: those in the photographs. In reaching out to these individuals for their reactions, her opinion shifts as a result of her own community membership, as “‘the community’ wasn’t an abstract notion, it was the people who gave me those generous quotes. I could see their faces and empathize with their fears and feelings that institutions had screwed them over again.” These moments, Robertson suggests, require archivists, librarians, and others to act with an ethics of care, which Bethany Nowviskie argues focuses a researcher or practitioner on two key areas:

“The first is toward an appreciation of context, interdependence, and vulnerability—of fragile, little things and their interrelation. The second is an orientation not toward objective evaluation and judgment (as in the philosophical mainstream of ethics)—not, that is, toward criticism—but toward personal, worldly action and response.”

I, like Robertson, am both a professional (academic researcher, in this case) and a community member, and these roles shape my thinking. While I’m interested in making these discussions accessible, I also want to recognize and respect their contextual particularities and constraints. Robertson suggests the Zine Librarians’ Code of Ethics as source of guidance, and I’ve drawn on it in designing the Transgender Usenet Archive.

In design, I’ve chosen to take several different steps to preserve individual privacy and encourage good, respectful practice. The archive will be publicly available to anyone who wishes to use it, but accessing the archive will require users to informally agree that they are agreeing to use it for non-commercial personal, teaching, learning or research reasons only. All of the posts included in the archive have been selectively indexed and do not include headers which might contain identifiable information, such as emails and names. However, I have not altered posts’ content in any way, so any message sign-offs and email signatures that were already included in posts will appear in the archive as is.

I’ve also manually removed any 64-bit code for images (such as personal photographs, etc) that include any possibly identifying features (such as full body or face shots); these images have been marked with <IMAGE REDACTED FOR PRIVACY>. There’s a long history of repurposing and reposting trans women’s photos online without their consent, and I don’t want to contribute to it through the archive. Because I can’t determine the particular provenance of these photos (especially given that many were attached to mass-mailed spam), I’ve chosen to err on the side of caution and redact these images.

Lastly, I want to do my utmost to respect and support posters’ right to refusal. Unfortunately, the scale and amount of content in the archive makes attempting to contact individual posters unfeasible. However, this post is meant to offer individuals a chance to let me know if they’d like their posts not to be included. Please feel free to reach out to me via email if you think your posts might be in the archive and would like them removed, or if you have any other questions or concerns. As part of the archive site, I’ll also be offering will be a contact form for individuals whose would like to inquire about if their posts are included in the archive.

The post Archiving Usenet: Adopting an Ethics of Care appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

The post Listening for the Static appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

During the fellowship, Dame will work on the second chapter of his dissertation, which focuses on the ideological meaning of “cisgender” and its role in shaping community sentiment in Usenet discourse. As part of this project, he will develop and launch an archive of posts from several major transgender-related newsgroups, held in the Internet Archives’ Usenet Historical Collection.

Using Critical and Multi-Modal Discourse Analysis, Dame analyzes how users past and present construct “transgender community” in discourse, and the impact of platform-specific affordances on these discussions. Each chapter draws on a different site, including 1990s movement publications, archival data from Usenet newsgroups, ethnographic interviews with transgender-identified individuals, informational websites, and Tumblr. Throughout these different sites, he argues community’s use as a guiding heuristic, and the accompanying emphasis on the term’s positive affective associations, obscures key differences, disconnects, and inequalities amongst discourse participants.

Dame’s work tackles core Digital Humanities questions on the roles organizational architecture, metadata, and standardization play in guiding the flow and direction of discourse. His work and writings on the Transgender Usenet Archive also offers new methodological insights into working with early Usenet discourse in archival form. You can read more about Avery on his MITH staff page here.

The post MITH Welcomes Avery Dame as the 2016-17 Winnemore Fellow! appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Click here for information on how to apply for the 2016-17 Winnemore fellowship. Applications are due by 5:00 pm on Friday April 22, 2016.

The post Call for Applications: Winnemore Digital Humanities Dissertation Fellows Program 2016-17 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.