The Digital Humanitiesʼ resources and projects may be displayed and promoted to the wider community with the use of a wide variety of technological tools. Pinterest becomes a very convenient and accessible option because, on the one hand, it provides a series of “boards” that function as exhibition areas that support the display of projects, books, films, exhibits, conferences, lectures and competitions related to the DH field; and, on the other hand, it encourages the tagging of all these resources with “pins” in order to interconnect them with the wider world.
Ms. Whsyel expressed that Pinterest is an important technology tool for the DH community because it provides an opportunity to showcase exhibitions within a high traffic environment. Noreen Whyselʼs event Pinterest as Exhibition Gallery included a one-hour introductory explanation followed by a one-hour of workshop for all its participants.
Category: Resources
Basics of Statistical Literacy: an Event Review (NYCC DH Week)
As part of the NYC Digital Humanities Week Spring 2016 festival, Dr. Irene Lopatovska lead a session titled, “Understanding Numbers: Basics of Statistical Literacy” at Pratt’s Manhattan campus. After an introduction to four types of numeric data scales, types of statistical analyses were reviewed in terms of their applicability to the numeric scale types. These analyses included measures of central tendency, dispersion, standard deviation, and more. Throughout the overview, examples were given in excel. Dr. Lopatovska also provided a brief overview of inferential statistics, which can be studied further in her class “Data Analysis and Publication”.
“Typography for [Digital] Humanists” Amy Papaelias, NYCDH Week 2016 Fordham University, February 12
“Typography for [Digital] Humanists” was a workshop lead by Amy Papaelias, Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at SUNY New Paltz. Her workshop, presented during NYCDH Week 2016 at Fordham University, focused on basic typographic design principles and how they can be applied to digital humanities projects. The workshop also explored various typography resources available online, including Typecast.com, and the challenges and concerns digital humanists might face when trying to apply typographic principles to their projects. With the increase in research and projects, digital humanists will have to find ways to stand out, and typography seems to be a great place to start.
Digital Art History in Practice Lightning Talks Review
On February 10th, New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts held their Fine Arts Digital Art History Day as part of the 2016 DH Week. Presenters included Emily L. Spratt from Rutgers University, Louisa Wood Ruby, Samantha Deutch, and Ellen Prokop from the Frick. The day’s activities included a morning of engaging lightning talks with art historians and art research professional on their work that incorporates digital tools. The second half of the day featured a series of workshops on DH related tools such as CartoDB, Cytoscape, D3.js, and Zotero.
NYCDH Week’s Digital Art History in Practice: Digi Café, NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, 2/11/16
“Digi Café,” a workshop session of “Digital Art History in Practice” that took place at NYU’s Institute of Fine Art, embodied an “unconference” in that it was casual, welcoming to any and all professionals, and maintained an underlying theme of the importance of inter-disciplinary collaboration. At their own leisure, attendees were able to have intimate discussions with experts of open-source software (such as Zotero, CartoDB, D3.js, and Wordpress) as well as proponents of major DH projects–the PHAROS consortium project and “Mapping Video Art.” The PHAROS project, spearheaded by the Frick, aims to craft a tool that aggregates images of art across institutions within the consortium and “Mapping Video Art,” created by NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, is an interactive visualization of the movement of video art across space and time.
“Digital Art History in Practice” Panel, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, NYCDH Week, February 11, 2016
These presentations focused on a number of DH methods used in art-historical projects. Emily L. Spratt presented on digital reconstructions of world heritage sites after their destruction and the use of computers in analyzing aesthetic preferences in art. Dr. Louisa Wood Ruby presented a tool that uses linked data to facilitate access to images of art from different photo archives and a tool that mimics the functionality of a table for arranging and sorting images in the digital environment. Samantha Deutch’s presentation focused on data scraping tools. Ellen Prokop presented on the use of GIS technologies for art-historical research.
Noreen Whysel’s “Pinterest as an Exhibition Gallery” at Metropolitan New York Library Council, 2/10/16
“Pinterest as an Exhibition Gallery” is a convenient platform for institutions to showcase their collections of ephemera with digital imagery on the World Wide Web. Digital Humanities emphasize academic studies and institutions to collaborate by utilizing technology as a way to engage research and teaching. Moving Digital Humanities onto media platforms that are already popular among users can provide a useful place to curate, display, and provide information by using social media applications such as, Pinterest. Although it generally focuses on arts and crafts and visual images, this platform is also a time efficient and convenient source for librarians and archivists to popularize their institutions’ ephemera. It is imperative for institutional staffs, such as librarians and archivists to utilize Pinterest in order to raise users’ awareness about the institutions’ collections, and reach an audience that can span the globe.
Digital Humanities is a subject that highlights innovative technology within the disciplines of the humanities, and provides open access to education. In Lisa Spiro’s This Is Why We Fight”: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities highlights the goals of digital humanities by explaining “digital humanists are beginning to press for open access not only to digital collections, tools, and scholarship but also to educational resources and even course evaluations” (dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu). Digital humanists value public education, nonprofit organizations, and institutions utilizing social media platforms, such as Pinterest to allow users to gain knowledge through the open access articles. Furthermore, Spiro states Ethan Watrall’s argument, “open courseware benefits the global community of learners by making knowledge widely available (‘and is thus ‘the right thing to do’)” (dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu). Non-profit organizations and institutions providing open access journals on Pinterest support the public in gaining more resources and knowledge.
“Pinterest as an Exhibition Gallery” included workshops which demonstrated steps to upload, save, sort, and manage images, or “pins” from the web browser with the pin icon. The pins are managed through collections known as pinboards, providing a categorized source of topics and images placed into one board. Moreover, the pinboards offer a 200 word description allowing users to read a summary about the board. Pinterest also acts as a personalized media platform and users can browse the content of others in their feed. Pinterest users can also personalize their experience with Pinterest by pinning items, creating boards, and interacting with other members as this social media website provides users with their own unique and personalized results. Many professions can also utilize Pinterest including librarians and archivists to pin resources such as ephemera and articles without technical difficulties.
Architecture Media Politics Society (AMPS) is a nonprofit organization providing open access articles to educate Pinterest users. This nonprofit organization is affiliated with the peer reviewed open access online journal published by the University College of London (UCL) Press. The AMPS website states that “its social aims can be defined as: promoting an understanding of the role of architecture and the built environment on communities, public health and society more broadly” (architecturemps.com). AMPS highlights the study and research in architecture within a social context enabling Pinterest users to utilize research articles and operate a forum for the analysis of architecture.
The chapter “Social Media for Digital Humanities and Community Engagement” in the Digital Humanities in Practice by Claire Ross highlights the significance of social media to researchers and global users. “Social media is increasingly attracting the attention of academic researchers, who are intrigued by its affordances and reach” (blogs.ucl.ac.uk). Social media presence is an important way for institutions and nonprofit organizations to become more widely recognized. Ross continues to state, “social networks, blogs, podcasts and crowdsourcing are now central to our work in digital humanities. Because of their ease of use, they offer an opportunity for powerful information sharing, collaboration, participation and community engagement” (blogs.ucl.ac.uk). AMPS use of Pinterest enables users not only to gain access to scholarly articles, but also to view the AMPS Pinterest board. AMPS display boards are relevant to architecture, and include the topics such as “architecture exhibition” which highlights the collection of architectural objects in various museums.
By providing these Pinterest boards, AMPS emphasizes collaboration with other institutions. With their contributions, many users, including architecture firms, can recognize the significance of AMPS and raise awareness about architecture. Institutions and nonprofit organizations utilizing social media advance the public awareness by collaborating and highlighting community engagements over the same field. Moreover, Pinterest also contains a “comment” link where many users can have discussions on the AMPS Pinterest board. This highlights the importance of digital humanities, where many users are able to collaborate and discuss architecture in a social context. The Housing Critical Futures (HCF) project, displayed in the “Conference: Obsolescence and Renovation 20th Century Housing in the New Millennium” board collaborates with various institutions for conferences and events. Users can also collaborate with others by clicking on the “comment” link. Pinterest users and the HCF contributors are able to exchange feedback, and the HCF can create more ideas into this housing project. Pinterest users gain knowledge about affordable housing and many are able to contribute to AMPS housing projects. Since digital humanities highlight collaboration, it is imperative to have many users to participate in community engagements both online and offline.
Noreen Whysel demonstrating the Pinterest board. The screen displays The “Fire and Light: Illumination in Religious Art”, a website Whysel completed as a MSLIS student at Pratt Institute. Since many of the attendees were staff members from institutions and museums, the “Fire and Light: Illumination in Religious Art” website demonstrates a great example for archivists and librarians to utilize Pinterest and display visual images of the institutions ephemera.
Although Pinterest has a reputation for displaying non-academic resources, it is imperative for institutions and nonprofit organizations to engage in social media for sharing resources. Institutions utilizing Pinterest provides global access to many users and gains public awareness. This provides many Pinterest users an opportunity to retrieve the institutional resources provided by AMPS. Utilizing Pinterest contributes to the global access of scholarly articles and many users can also contribute to the institutions’ events through user engagement and communication. Institutions utilizing social media such as Pinterest open up various opportunities for institutions to be recognized as an educational resource, and in the digital humanities perspective, institutions utilizing non-academic sources for awareness, such as Pinterest, challenges conventional methods of expanding ideas to engage the global public.
Citations:
“Housing-Critical Futures.” http://architecturemps.com/, ArchitectureMPS, Dec.1, 2015. Web. 13, February, 2016
“About.” http://architecturemps.com/, ArchitectureMPS, Dec. 1, 2015. Web. 13, February, 2016
Ross, Claire. “Chapter 2: Social media for digital humanities and community engagement.” Digital Humanities in Practice. UCLDH Book Project. n.p. November 2011.
Spiro, Lisa. “This Is Why We Fight”: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities.” Debates in the Digital Humanities (2013): n.pag. Web. 13 February, 2016
Whysel, Noreen. “Fire and Light: Illumination in Religious Art”. Whysel.com http://metillumination.wordpress.com/. 25 Apr. 2014. 17 Feb. 2016
NYCDH Week – Public Participation in Humanities Research: Using APIs and Crowd Sourcing Platforms
On February 8th, I attended a NYCDH Week affiliated workshop led by Dr. Heidi Knoblauch (digital projects coordinator at Bard College) entitled Public Participation in Humanities Research: Using APIs and Crowd Sourcing Platforms. At this workshop we saw how scripts in iPython notebooks accessed through DHBox’s Jupyter Notebook plug-in can be used to pull images from a collection on the Internet Archive and converted into a more easily usable format. We were shown how the platform crowdcrafting.org could have these images uploaded to it so that someone conducting a study could use crowdsourcing in the sorting and classification of the images.
“Digital Humanities: Visualizing Data” NYCDH Week Event Review
On February 10, 2016 the New York Academy of Medicine, in conjunction with NYCDH Week held a workshop entitled “Digital Humanities: Visualizing Data”, co-hosted by Miriam Posner and Heidi Knoblauch. The attendees were largely of scholars and professionals who, through some aspect of their work, have a dataset, collection, or other resource that they felt would benefit from the use of DH visualization tools. The workshop provided a general overview of the field, its method, and its roles and responsibilities in the larger academic realm, and focused largely on familiarizing attendees with large datasets and creating exploratory visualizations using them.
Mapping Visualization Tools: Tableau and/or Google My Maps
Click Image above to watch! Enable Closed Captions to view shared links This mapping skill share tutorial aims to: Introduce beginner/intermediate level users to two mapping visualization tools Compare the visualizations created from Tableau and Google My Maps Explain the tool selection process The Circus Historical Society’s vast collection of circus route data has been on my mind for…