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"What Next" Meeting

Page history last edited by Rama Hoetzlein 14 years, 6 months ago

 

Congratulations and Thanks

   

 

Tasks & Resources for Spring Quarter 2010

Tasks

 Thinking Through Grant-Writing and Article Writing

  • Grant proposals
    • Google Digital Humanities grant competition (deadline April 15th)
    • MacArthur Digital Media & learning grant competition
    • NEH grant competitions
      • NEH Office of Digital Humanities Start-up grant competition
      • NEH soon-to-be-announced teaching with technology competition
    • NEH / SSHRC / JISC Digging into Data competition (2nd round next year)
    • The Vectors-IML/UC-HRI Summer Institute on Multimodal Scholarship (Summer 2010 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship), deadline march 24, 2010 [watch for theme next year]
  • Possible publications & co-publications
  • Preparation for Transliteracies Project summary report
Resources

Projected remaining funds for Transliteracies: $12,000

  • Project Coordinators: $3,000
  • Programmers & Research Assistants: $9,000

 

Strategizing the Future of RoSE:

(For background, see resullts of the charrette breakout sessions and Roundup Session.  Also see suggestions that have come in since the charrette.)

RoSE target audience ("who is RoSE for?")  Tier 1:
  • K-12 students (and instructors)
    • Example of high-school student assigned to research a bibliography preparatory to an end-of-year extended research paper but not knowing how to start, how to research libraries, how to reseach online resources, how old or new articles should be, what the difference in research value is between (for example) Reader's Digest, Time, Nature, PMLA.
  • Undergraduate researchers (and instructors)
  • The "public"

 

Possible Development Priorities:

  • User Interface
    • Also: inclusion of some conventional commenting and social-network featrures
  • Visualizations
    • Informational
    • "Poetic"
  • Links to full-text data
  • High-quality starter sets of metadata
    1. Automated harvesting of metadata from WorldCat, etc.
    2. "Context"-situated instructor and student addition of metadata
      • Assisted by algorithmic methods of discovering and correlating metatdata across contexts
      • Assisted by algorithmic methods of channeling free-tagging into controlled vocabularies
  • "Time-slider" (ability to move back and forward in a knowledge-scape of people and documents)
    • Ability to track the intervention and moves of a single author or document
  •  
  • Algorithmic means of creating "living" historical author and document pages
    • Also: algorithmic means of clustering authors and documents into "movements"
  • "Narrative engine" (metadata encoding for machine discovery of narrative/argument paths)

Tier 2:

  • Scholars or professional-level researchers
    • Cf., ConceptVista in the geoscience field, whose value for high-level researchers does not emerge until the scale of the system increases to allow for network effects
    • Examples of kinds of questions RoSE might answer that could not easily be answered otherwise: [TBD] 

 

Possible Development Priorities: (in addition to above under Tier 1)

  • Sufficient scale to allow for emergent network effects
  • Bibliometrics and social-network metrics (centrality, betweeness, etc.)
  • Annotation tools
  • "What if" analysis tools (e.g., what if we looked at two apparently unrelated fields--say, string theory and contemporary quilt art--as if they were a single field?  What connections might be suggested?)
Possible RoSE Plan

Staged development:

  1. K-12 and undergraduate audience
  2. Scholarly and professional audience

 

"Chunking" of Development Priorities According to Grant Possibilities:

 

Achievable RoSE development goals in spring 2010 (with remaining funding) ?
Collaborative or individual research publications we can generate from RoSE

 

 

Technical or Data Issues Bearing on Future of RoSE: (in progress)

Narrativity
  • Bearman, Peter S. and Katherine Stovel. “Becoming Nazi: A Model for Narrative Networks,” Poetics 27 (2000): 69-90.  Available online from ScienceDirect <http://www.sciencedirect.com/> [Search on "Bearman" and "Nazi," and access through a UC library proxy server for the pdf file]
  • Franzosi, Roberto, Quantitative Narrative Analysis (Los Angeles: Sage, 2010)
 

 

 
 
   
   

 

 

Suggestions relevant to meeting

(also see results of the charrette breakout sessions and roundup session)

(Click column headers to sort)
 Suggested by: Date: Suggestion:
Krapp, Peter (& Catherine Liu) 02/27/2010 Dear Alan,

Thanks for having Catherine and me up to the RoSE charrette. It was great to join in the conversations about where this can take people's research, and to meet old and new friends. - Catherine just now on the train pointed out that instead of printing a program book, one could have entered each participant into RoSE, with cross-references (contacts such as collaborations, mutual or shared citations, affiliations) to see how it might look for all those in the room. To riff on that, we might have taken half an hour to refine such connections, e.g. between former colleagues at another institution outside UC, or people who wrote on closely related topics, or else assigned each person a historical avatar, as it were, to animate in the system. - Thanks for the hospitality, great food and conversations!
Bulger, Monica 02/27/2010 See Monica's blog post on RoSE and "Affinity Browsing"
Snow, Jeremy
02/27/2010

Alan,

 I'd just like to thank you again for bringing me on board for this project and inviting me to the charette, which I found to be a very interesting and engaging discussion among a lot of really intelligent folks.

 One thing that I would like to discuss with the other graduate students when we get the chance to recap is really trying to tackle those questions of who this research environment is being aimed towards and how we can make it most effective and engaging for that particular audience. During the lunch hour most of the RA's had a very engaged discourse about who RoSE is for and how to mold and direct the project as it moves forward.

 What we don't want to have happen is for this tool to become so distanced from what I felt was the original audience (and arguably the audience most in need of this sort of tool-set): K-12 students. While many of the Professors and other distinguished faculty presented us with a number of very challenging and good points during the feedback session, I think in re-examining what should be done moving forward we shouldn't lose sight of this demographic. Graduate students and faculty have been endowed with, after a great many years of experience, inherent skills and abilities that allow them to pursue research projects, even those subjects to which they are completely foreign, with a certain degree of confidence and authority. K-12 students have not. I do not think that RoSE is just another fun online playground for academics and intellectuals to run around in. There is plenty of that to go around. Instead RoSE should be imagined as the kind of research environment that is conducive to learning for students of all ages.

 I also think that we should have a brief discussion on the nature of "privacy" in the Web 2.0 universe, as that seemed to be of great concern to many of your peers, while I feel as though the definition of privacy is rapidly changing in the eyes of the graduates students that are helping develop this project.

 In any case, that's all I have to say at the moment. I do hope that we get the chance to debrief soon while all of this is still fresh in my mind.

 Feel free to forward this to the rest of the group if you wish for some additional feedback.

Kim, David 03/15/2010 I think there's a lot of potential for developing an "annotation" tool for RoSE, through which (in response to some participants' concern about "reducing" interpretation to "relationship types," regardless of how granular those types may be) teachers, as one possible end-user cateogory, can explain how and why these docs and people are related. As you know already, much of this function is identified as "exhibit building" in sites that primarily use visual materials, with which scholars can "curate" an exhibit with detailed comments and external links.   I see a similar potential for RoSE, if RoSE were to focus more on becoming a digital humanities tool. 

Another practical idea that we talked about briefly in the past is the functionality to move around the "nodes" in our visualization.  Some of RA's talked about how it was difficult to visually follow relationships, because as data accumulates, the visualization becomes too dispersed.  For my presentation at the charette, for example, it was difficult to get a good screen capture to document the end result because the nodes were too spread out.

 

 

Action Items Resulting from Meeting

Immediate Tasks:
  • RA's should send Alan an email indicating if they still want to be involved in the project on a paid or stipend basis
  • Alan to start work on Google Digital Humanities Award proposal
Tasks in Spring Quarter:
  • Design meetings
    • Work out specific K-12 user scenarios
    • Work out development plans in preparation for grant proposals
    • Consult with experts in education and information literacy
  • Publications (Rama to serve as "Chief Publications Encouragement Officer")
    • Create target list of possible journals and other publication venues in humanites, information studies, computer science
    • Suggest individually authored or co-authored article topics
  • Transliteracies Summary Report
    • Prepare material for summary report to be written by Alan in July
 
 
   
   

 

 

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