viz. - Collaboration

viz. Collaborations

catherine_c — Fri, 06 May 2011 18:39:50 +0000

Mindmap: Noel Radley with NovaMind

This mindmap reflects a number of of viz.'s connections in 2010-2011 including those with other blogs, photographers, museums, and initiatives, centers and programs both in the DWRL and at UT, Michigan State, and Rice University. Find out more details on our outreach after the jump.

BagNews is a progressive site dedicated to visual politics and the analysis of news images. Editor of the site, Michael Shaw, contacted us last semester, excited by our work and interested in collaborating. He's provided a lot of helpful analysis for our writing and we've communicated frequently regarding posts and potential topics. Last month, Cate Blouke had some of her viz. materials cross-posted on the BagNews site, and we're hoping that the collaboration between viz. and BagNews will continue in coming semesters.

Blanton Museum: Viz. members collaborated with Jennifer Garner, Manager of School and Family Programs at the Blanton, to research the intersections of social tagging and visual rhetoric. Using a tagger provided by the STEVE-in-Action project, the group asked undergraduate students in Rhetoric classes to tag a selection of abstract art from the Blanton's collection. The group will code and review the results of this experiment in order to learn more about tagging as a form of writing.

Department of History, UT: History PhD student Jessica Werneke contributed a blog entry on Soviet photography. This entry contributed an interesting historical perspective, particularly given that viz. often focuses on current events.

DWRL: Immersive Environments project group member Marjorie Foley contributed an entry on QR codes in the Greek and Roman sculpture room of UT's Blanton Museum last October. Immersive Environments is now planning to assist UT's Harry Ransom Center (HRC) with installing QR codes for the Center's 2012 exhibition I Have Seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America which will run from September 11, 2012 through February 3, 2013. A preview of this fascinating exhibition with fullscreen images is available on the HRC site.

Institute of Museum and Library Services: This institution of the federal government might be an important resource for the DWRL in the future.

Jessica Alpern: Local Austin photographer whose work combines fine art photography with everyday, discarded objects in an effort to reconsider what we see as valuable.

Landmarks: The Landmarks program on UT-Austin campus has many important points-of-contact with the interests, practices, and values of the Digital Writing and Research Lab. Landmarks provides free, constant public access to important cultural works by art installations across UT-campus. The Landmarks website provides important multi-media materials to supplement these works with pod-casts, videos, historical context, and bibliographies. Their Drupal-based website has become one of the main exemplars for a viz. website redesign. Their ongoing exhibitions of video art in the Visual Arts Center links with our work in film and video. Finally, the Landmarks program offers an opportunity to collaborate on potential projects using ARGs (Alternative Reality Games), QR codes, or other multi-modal projects. For the past two years, the viz. team has met with Leah Griffin of Landmarks. Landmarks is eager to continue developing a relationship to share resources and provide mutual support. Also of note, see the viz. blog for a recent post on the Landmarks acquisition of an important piece of sculpture by Sol Lewitt.

Michigan State University's WIDE Research Center: We have been in contact with Jeff Grabill and Stacey Pigg of the WIDE Research Center to discuss how to code the data we obtained in our research with the Blanton Museum. The rubric we will use to code the data is a derivative of a rubric Grabill and Pigg produced for their own research.

New Media Consortium: Our relationship with NMC has been coordinated with our work with the Blanton Museum of Art on the STEVE-in-Action project. You can read more about the project on the HASTAC blog and on the most recent write-up on the viz. blog.

Rice University's Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality: We are in contact with Dr. Jennifer Tyburczy a performance studies scholar post-doctorate and at Rice, who helped with a recent viz. post and who has expressed interested in doing an interview regarding visuality, pedagogy, and performance.

TACC: We have been in contact with the TACC about potential visualizations for the STEVE-in-Action study results. Since we recently completed data collection, we can now consider what the resources at the TACC could provide for our evaluation phase.

Twitter: Our Twitter account has grown to over 160 followers. The Twitter account connects us with past DWRL and viz. contributors, current instructors (who often tweet our content to their course lists), and important scholars in visual studies. Our relationship with BagNewsNotes and the lab's account with the online software Dipity both began via Twitter, among other important interactions. A notable number of visitors come to viz. via Twitter.

The Adipositivity Project: Ashley had the opportunity to interview New York based, award-winning photographer Substantia Jones, whose website, The Adipositivity Project, has achieved cult status in size acceptance and social justice circles.

Mapping and Problematizing Digital Humanities Collaboration

Elijah Meeks — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 14:00:00 +0000

The documentation, representation and analysis of academic networks has a long tradition with, for instance, citation networks having been well-examined. Even here at Stanford, the focus on studying academic collaboration, interdisciplinarity, citation and "the dynamics of knowledge creation" by projects like the Knowledge Creation Lab have led to research and interactive software like the Dissertation Browser, which allows for an exploration of the topic networks formed out of the texts of various dissertations. In my own experience, however, describing the Wild West of Digital Humanities projects, groups, institutes, centers, collaboraties and informal teams is not so easy as downloading and reconciling authors and citations from a friendly and metadata rich on-line journal or aggregator, nor is it deeply embedded enough in network theory to easily sidestep the practical concerns that it evokes. Describing the projects and participants in the Digital Humanities at Stanford using semantic links has produced enormously interesting, as well as enormously problematic, results.

I would wager that Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon was, for many, the first exposure to the power of networks. Its namesake, Six Degrees of Separation, was a play that seemed also revelatory of the power and scope of networks. The popularity of mapping relationships, whether social or professional, continues to grow, and toolsets like Pajek, Gephi and Cytoscape make the creation, representation and analysis of these networks seductively easy. Last year at Stanford I decided to map out the projects and collaboration that fell under my own broad definition of the Digital Humanities. The DH@Stanford Graph has grown ever since, and now consists of over 450 nodes (which can represent individuals, groups or objects) and over 600 edges (the semantic links between nodes). Visually, it can be quite impressive.

My preferred network analytical pack, Gephi, not only allows for a variety of representations and the typical analyses, but also outputs to the various graph standards so that the resulting networks can be visualized or traversed using common web technologies. I prefer Flash for its performance, but the ideological among us can also use JIT or ProtoVis and provide a traversible graph of their network of friends or, in this case, academic collaboration.

It's all so easy and beautiful and problematic. I began to build the DH@Stanford graph so that I could better understand network principles--after all, it would be easier for me to understand betweenness centrality when the rating was applied to people and groups in a network that I was embedded in than it would to understand such concepts when applied to English authors, european intellectuals, Enlightenment tourist traps or species databases. The simple idea of semantically describing the links between people and groups at Stanford quickly ran aground. After all, we could easily describe a project involving three faculty:

And there we have it, everyone "connected" to a project. But the irony inherent in the play Six Degrees of Separation was that even though we were all connected through a chain of people who knew each other, it turned out we didn't really "know" even that first degree of our social network. A graph of friends on Facebook ignores the variety of social relationships one may occupy (are you a real friend, a "facebook friend", or just someone that I approved because my account was new and I wanted to increase the size of my group?). Collaboration in academia is no less complicated.

Semantic links are extremely useful in building networks but, despite how we may cringe at the thought of metrics, we have to categorize and weigh connections for the analysis and representation of these networks to have any real value. Likewise, making these graphs explicit emphasizes the need to track the objects that have been created through these projects and by these collaborators. While we may dislike the idea of tracking academic production, every cv is a list of connections, just as like every 'About' page on every project.

For the Map of Collaboration and Digital Innovation at Stanford, it is also fundamentally important that different stakeholders be allowed to evaluate these connections and products differently to reflect their view of academic production. You may think that blog posts are not academically important, and thus drop their value to 0 on your graph (or remove those nodes and edges), while another scholar may treat software tools as more worthwhile than peer-reviewed journal articles. The results of such distinctions will allow for different topologies of the same map, and make explicit competing views of modern scholarship.

You may have noticed that I didn't call it the DH@Stanford Graph, but instead the Map of Collaboration and Digital Innovation at Stanford. I've always used a broad definition of the Digital Humanities but the term so frustrates certain stakeholders that, despite being the Digital Humanities Specialist at Stanford, I'm happy to step away from it in the production of a resource such as this. I began building this map for practical reasons--to learn how to deal with network data--and I've continued to build it for practical reasons surrounding large collaborative projects that integrate traditional humanities scholarship with digital tools and methods. Regardless of what we call this field or community or movement, it is occuring and its occurence can be mapped and measured and possibly made more efficient.

I enjoy the problematic nature of creating and representing these networks, and I hope to have developed a few more problems and a few more networks with which to entertain participants at DH11 this year, where I'll be presenting as part of the panel Modeling Event-Based Historical Narratives: A Conversation Between Digital Humanists, Information Scientists and Computer Scientists. It is my hope that by the time the conference comes around, we may have a few university networks that we could look at, with which to spur discussion about collaboration itself, as well as the challenges of documentation and representation of collaboration.

PikiWiki: Drag and drop collaboration

John Jones — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 23:09:25 +0000

PikiWiki is a free wiki service that adds drag and drop functionality to collaboratively-edited pages. If you are planning on using a wiki in your visual rhetoric class, PikiWiki might be a good option.