Miriam Posner, teacher and coordinator at the UCLA Digital Humanities program, recently presented her lecture “How Did They Make That? Reverse-Engineering Digital Projects” at the CUNY Graduate Center. The aim of Posner’s lecture was to provide techniques for dissecting Digital Humanities projects and for understanding how they were built. Posner stated that these techniques could be useful both for “modeling your own projects” and for “evaluating and understanding other people’s projects”.
Posner explained “the impetus for this presentation came from working with a lot of students who seemed to feel really baffled. They were confronted with this range of digital projects that seemed like black boxes to them. They couldn’t get a sense for how they were built and how they could begin to replicate this process on their own.” According to Rieder and Rohle “black-boxing” occurs when users cannot understand a method and how it works. Some of the issues that prevent understanding are a lack of project documentation, varying levels of ‘code literacy’, and unexpected results produced through machine learning (Rieder, 75-76). Posner’s lecture was centered on learning a basic skillset for determining what lies inside the “black box”. While Burdick et al state that “The field of Digital Humanities may see the emergence of polymaths who can “do it all”: who can research, write, shoot, edit, code, model, design, network, and dialogue with users.” (Burdick, 15), Posner provides an entry point to the field and demonstrates that people of all skill levels can engage in DH projects.
Posner began with some basic principles to work with in simplifying the process of understanding Digital Humanities projects. First she introduced the Taxonomy of Digital Research Activities in the Humanities (TADIRAH). This taxonomy is useful and extensive, but it comes across as being too abstract for the purposes of understanding how to dissect DH projects. With the intent to simplify the basic principles, Posner presented a guide she developed that could be used for categorizing projects. Posner’s “field guide of projects that you might encounter” included the following categories:
- Exhibits
- Digital editions
- Mapping
- Data visualization
- Text analysis
- 3D imaging
- Multimedia narratives
- Timelines
For the purposes of understanding what kinds of projects have already been created Posner’s field guide was more digestible than TADIRAH. However Posner took the basic principles for understanding DH projects a step further. Using inspiration from Johanna Drucker’s book Digital Humanities 101, Posner created a more action-oriented list of techniques that could be used to break down projects into their component parts. Posner suggested that projects could be easily dissected through evaluation at the following three levels:
- Sources
- Processed
- Presented
Sources can be defined as collections of files, images, text, numbers, videos, sound, documents, and artifacts. Processed indicates how collections are manipulated and made machine-readable. Presented indicates how projects are made human viewable.
Using these three levels of evaluation, Posner presented a range of different types of Digital Humanities projects and step-by-step engaged the audience in picking apart these projects until a sense of understanding was achieved. Posner started with a geovisualization project by Ben Schmidt called A Year of Ships. Burdick et al explain that during the process of evaluating digital scholarship “review committees might ask for documentation describing the development process and design of the platform or software, such as database schemata, interface designs, modules of code (and explanations of what they do), as well as sample data types (Burdick, 128).” Posner began by guiding the audience to search for project documentation. The brief documentation that accompanies A Year of Ships includes several terms, which might not be familiar to the average person. Posner suggests “googling” terms to determine if they fall into one of the three categories: sources, processed, presented. This begins to provide a means for understanding how the project was built.
Next Posner presented another geovisualization project called The Negro Travelers’ Green Book Map by the University of South Carolina Libraries. She explains that a green book was a sort of travel guide that listed addresses of businesses where African-American travelers could feel safe visiting during the Jim Crow era. Posner’s first step in understanding how the project was built was to search for project documentation which she finds on the About page. Posner determines that the source for the project was the 1956 Green Book. By taking a look at the layout of the site Posner was able to determine that the project’s sources were processed by transcription, geocoding, and organization in a spreadsheet. Determining the logistics of how the project was presented included both consulting the project’s documentation and viewing the layout of the site. Posner outlined that the project was mapped and presented using Google fusion tables, JavaScript, and Dreamweaver.
The third project that Posner presented was an exhibit called Medical Case Studies on Renaissance Melancholy. Posner’s first step was to view the About page where she found thorough documentation of the project’s sources, processing, and presentation. Posner identified the sources as case studies on melancholy and medicine from the early modern era. She determined that the sources were processed through transcribing, digitizing, cataloging, tagging, annotating, and organizing them into themes. Finally the documentation reveals that an adapted version of the Omeka platform was used for the presentation.
The fourth project that Posner discussed was a network visualization called A Co-Citation Network for Philosophy by Kieran Healy. Posner explains that this network “helps us to understand which philosophers are cited together in a series of articles and philosophy journals.” Unfortunately this project did not include documentation about how it was built, so Posner searched for information about the project outside of the site in Healy’s blog. After reading several of Healy’s blog posts, Posner was able to piece together how Healy built the project. She determined that the sources were bibliographies from all articles published from 1993-2013 in four philosophical journals. Healy processed the content by limiting it to the 500 most-cited items, structuring it to be machine-readable, and subjecting it to a community-detection algorithm. Healy presented his work using D3 to visualize it and he published it on the web. While in the case of Healy’s project there are still some questions left unanswered concerning how he structured the data and how the algorithm works, Posner’s three-tiered methodology for dissecting projects was largely able to demystify what exists inside the black box. Posner’s technique proved to be a useful guide in understanding both how to develop DH projects and how to evaluate them.
A complete list of the projects that Posner reviewed during her lecture can be found on her blog page.
Resources
Burdick, A., Druckler, J., Lunenfeld, P., Presner, T., & Schnapp, J. (2012). Digital humanities. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Rieder, Bernhard and Theo Röhle (2012). “Digital Methods: Five Challenges” in Understanding Digital Humanities, ed. David M. Berry. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 67–84