I attended the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Victoria!  This was made possible by the DHSI and by my dean, and I’m grateful to both.  The Institute’s ninth year was my first time attending, and it was an intense experience.  Something like 35 hours of instruction over five days; evening plenary talks and early-morning graduate student presentations for four of those.  I took the large project planning and management course with Lynne Siemens. It was even more exciting and useful than I’d expected it to be. Who would’ve thought I’d be into project management?  But bring industry-born ideas about cat herding resource wrangling into academe, and I’m there.  We talked about juggling (often too-little) money and time and people, getting folks to be as excited about your ideas as  you are, getting your head around a project in the first place.  We had guest speakers in almost every class and got to plan our own projects.  All of this delightfully low-tech: I’m bringing back large sheets of flip-chart paper with wild scribbles and post-it notes.  Now to get grant funding for this thing.  (Grant application is in, but we don’t find out for a couple more months.  If we don’t get funded, I imagine we’ll apply again.  In any case, the training will be applicable in other contexts, not least of them the everyday juggling of activities at work.)

The best part, of course, were the people.  I saw some old friends and acquaintances, and finally got to spend a bunch of time around Julie Meloni, who is moving to Victoria to work as a postdoc at UVic’s Electronic Textual Cultures Lab. (ETCL folks put on the Institute every summer—and let’s pause for a second to appreciate the work they do, and their success at it.)

Talking to Julie, and to Jentery Sayers, and Jon Bath, and Susan Brown, and the many other folk I met at UVic,  one thing is clear: networked technologies are finally at a stage where they can be reliably and cheaply used for long-distance collaboration in the digital humanities.  There’s no substitute for in-person interaction, but it’s also increasingly easy to work together over arbitrary distances, meeting in the same place every once in a while.  This is changing our work process.  It’s no longer just that we can email Word documents back and forth.  We can use combinations of text/audio/video chat, collaborative editing environments, remote file upload and syncing venues, online project management systems, even bibliography and research sharing systems to work on projects either synchronously or asynchronously, as circumstances permit, at times across many timezones.  All of these tools have been available for some time, but have been clunky or expensive or not easily interoperable.  The recent explosion of networked tools and services (some of them created by and for academics) is a perfect storm for academic collaboration.

At the beginning of the DHSI week I got pretty discouraged about my self-imposed geographic restriction to Boston.  All this activity swirling around me, watching people who have found inspiration in working with one another, felt like being on the outside looking in.  Which is pretty ridiculous, all things considered: nobody can do everything, and I have a job in Boston that’s at least nominally a digital humanities/digital libraries job.  But it does get lonely at BU sometimes.  There isn’t much DH activity either at the university or generally in New England. (Sure, Brown University is just an hour away, and THATCamp New England has just opened for applications.  But given that we’re in CollegeTownUSA land, there’s still woefully little DH work going on around here.  It’s ramping up, but slowly.)

Well, seems like there’s nothing like a little live interaction to get things going.  Seems I’m about to get involved in a couple of projects that will feed me in ways that will supplement the satisfaction I draw from current in-person work.  This is good both for me and for my workplace.  Information will flow through more channels, inspiration can be distributed. Perspective allows serendipity to do its unpredictable future thing.

I love Boston, and have good reasons to live where I live. This has meant passing on multiple opportunities to apply for jobs I’d no doubt enjoy. But I’ve placed a high priority on being near my people. It was a hard decision to make when I made it, but the rewards are constant and significant. And now, the trade-off doesn’t seem as big as it did even only three years ago.

Being a free agent in the age of networked communication is pretty exciting.

It was a great time! I was heartened to see so many people thinking so creatively about classroom technology. Distance ed may not equate to using technology (networked or not) in the classroom, but there’s a lot of crossover, so I was asked to reprise a talk I’d given few months ago through the Center for Excellence and Innovation in Teaching.

I’ve taken recent thinking about slide presentations to heart, so looking at my slides wouldn’t yield anything particularly coherent: there’s little text on them. So I’ve inserted the slides here instead of putting them on SlideShare; click on a slide to see it full-size.  Alas, I haven’t figured out yet how to open the full-size images in the same page, with a gallery-like overlay (is there a WordPress plugin for this?), so—apologies—they’re set to open in a new window.

This gets long; here’s hoping the LiveJournal crosspost can deal with the more tag. If it can’t, sorry, LJLand—I don’t do this often…

WHY NETWORKED TECH?

A definition of social media is probably in order, and I like the one used by the European Commission in the EU Internet Handbook—social media are “tool[s] to communicate with specific target audiences.” Fair enough! But, the EC says, it’s more than that:

Social media cannot be treated as a traditional distribution channel. Social media are in their essence a two-way communication tool, and therefore you must know how to respond and what you want to do with the voiceback that is generated from users’ comments or reactions. Not following-up/responding to voiceback can have adverse and sometimes disasterous effects.

Thinking of education as a conversation, rather than a process of imparting knowledge from high atop a hill, this definition sounds about perfect.

But really, why use social media in teaching and research? Well, for me part of the answer is — because I am in the humanities, and that’s what humans are doing these days. Not only are educators increasingly converging on where their audiences and their colleagues are (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube), but all the ways in which people interact with each other (and with new knowledge) using social media — are themselves part of what we study. The notion that somehow this is what people do in addition to, or in lieu of, their real lives doesn’t make any sense. It is real life. And although less than a quarter of the world’s population is online, we can’t pretend the internet isn’t there. Like with telephony, we are never going back, only forward.

Also, consider this about obscurity. I think it applies to academics, and to education—and this will later lead me to talk about the reputation economy within which we operate:

WHAT I WILL TALK ABOUT

So, today I’ll focus on four categories of tools: blogs, microblogs (specifically Twitter), photo sharing sites (Flickr), and Google’s collaboration tools. These tools provide mostly for asynchronous communication: conversation doesn’t have to happen in real time. This seems to be a great advantage, simply because more people end up participating when it’s on their schedule.

So let’s move right on to…

WEBLOGS

Some people still think of them as journals, but they’re not so much journals as a publishing *and commenting* platform. Posts are normally chronologically arranged, with the most recent first. Different blog publishing platforms handle security differently, but most do allow you to only make posts available to certain people if you wish it. Blogs can have one or more authors. And, of course, most have syndication feeds, so I can “gather” the 55 blog sites I read regularly in one news reader, instead of having to visit the sites themselves.

WHY BLOGS

How do people use blogs in classrooms? Educators post writing prompts. Students write week-in-review posts; respond to readings; post the results of fact-finding missions they’re assigned. Students might also critique a website, be it a news site, a political site or an artist’s gallery. They might critique each other’s writing. In other words, they practice public rhetoric and social annotation of resources.

Like all forms of social media, blogs can act as personal learning networks. Students find topics that interest them, and post questions, which their peers then answer in comments.

On the research side, peer review has been conducted in blog comments, too.  A good example of that is Planned Obsolescence, a book by Kathleen Fitzpatrick.  It’s published using the popular platform WordPress, with the CommentPress plugin installed.    CommentPress allows readers to comment on an entire page, or paragraph by paragraph.  Comments can also be threaded, and become conversations—here’s a good example of that.  (Take a look at the comments on paragraph 2.)

I have some other examples, particularly of classroom use, which I’ll be happy to share later with anyone interested. I will briefly mention Looking for Whitman, “A[n NEH-sponsored] multi-campus experiment in digital pedagogy,” not only because it’s a stellar example of the use of blogs for teaching, but also because it showcases the use of WordPress as something halfway to a content management system. So a blog doesn’t have to be just posts and comments: this one houses multiple self-contained projects, as well.

WHY NOT BLOGS

OK, so why not use blogs? Well, for one thing, they can be intimidating to some students, and to some instructors!

But also, because anyone with an internet connection can see most blogs, unless you password-protect yours, you have to be ready for unforeseen participation, including by people who are just looking to start an argument. (Although it’s worth noting that in order to participate in your discussion, someone has to first find the blog, and let’s face it, not many people will unless you advertise it. Plus, you can restrict commenting to registered users, close posts to new comments automatically after a certain period of time, and moderate comments. So there are tools for dealing with trolls, and more control than we often think of when we think of the wild wild internet.)

MICROBLOGS

So that’s blogs. Moving on to microblogging, and its most famous instance: Twitter. A quick overview:

• Anyone can get a free account and make posts.
• Each post must be 140 or fewer characters in length.
• You can follow people—or entities, like the Chronicle of Higher Ed, or the U.S. Supreme Court, or BU—whose tweets you’d like to read, and all of those tweets are aggregated on your Twitter home page.
• There are certain community conventions: for example, an @ sign and a username signals to that user that you’re talking (publicly but) directly to them.

WHY MICROBLOGGING

OK, so why use microblogging? For me, the initial use was for research, not pedagogy. A hash mark (#) with an agreed-upon abbreviation—called a hash tag—allows people to search for all posts associated with a particular topic.  Or a particular event! At this point I’ve virtually attended and contributed to three or four conferences to which I wasn’t able to travel. I’ve also tweeted conferences myself, giving others the opportunity to virtually attend.  Handy.

Another handy feature: you can have anyone’s posts sent to your phone via SMS. When the NEH Office of Digital Humanities posts something, I want to know right away, in case it’s time sensitive and about grants.

A youth pastor I spoke with likes the stronger sense of community that arises from using Twitter. The 140 character limit encourages concise and effective writing. One educator said, “Twitter offers a medium that helps those who hesitate and lose the opportunity to provide input during a classroom session.” So students can use Twitter to float ideas, post links to relevant materials, raising new topics if they’re reluctant to do so in class.

Note that scholars who have left studentship are also using Twitter to float ideas, post links to interesting new materials, ask questions of their colleagues. I got pointers to some valuable information from my Twitter followers even as I was preparing this presentation.

Here’s an example of someone using Twitter in teaching. Twitter content is more informative and less analytical than blog content, but some rudimentary analysis does go on — a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, or a short note explaining who in particular might benefit from a linked resource. This can translate into rich and concise information sharing. Of course, it can also degenerate into meaningless quips. David Silver, who teaches digital media courses at the University of San Francisco, draws students’ attention to the informative potential of Twitter by distinguishing between thin tweets (which provide a single layer of information: “Just read an interesting study on library funding”) and thick tweets (two or more layers, “XYZ study on library funding says libraries need more money, here’s a link“).

WHY NOT MICROBLOGGING

There are, of course, reasons to not use microblogging in academic settings. Students who don’t participate might end up invisible to their professors. There’s concern that students attending multiple courses that require the use of Twitter will be overwhelmed by the relentless stream of tweets they have to follow and process. There’s concern that, like so many social media sites, Twitter will be short-lived (although so far that doesn’t seem likely). Some people are wary of microblogging replacing face-to-face conversations in the classroom, and of the distraction of Twitter during classtime. Finally, like any networked technology, Twitter is only handy when the participant has a reliable network connection. What about students on field placements in rural settings?

Other concerns seem to be in the process of being addressed by the fact that Twitter recently gifted all its contents to the Library of Congress. These concerns revolve around the search feature, which only goes so far back, and the fact that tweets “expire,” so teaching past conversations suffers. We have yet to see exactly how the Library of Congress will choose to make tweets available, but the possibilities for data mining are pretty exciting.

PHOTO SHARING: FLICKR

And speaking of the Library of Congress, it’s been making great use of the photo sharing site Flickr. For those of you who haven’t played with it, here’s a quick overview:

• Accounts are free, unless you want to display more than 200 of your photos at any one time, in which case they’re about $25 a year.
• Users can post photos and short videos using any number of venues, including the website itself, standalone desktop applications, and smartphone applications.
• Uploads can have prose descriptions and tags associated with them, and parts of images can have notes attached.
• It’s possible to automatically cross-post uploads to a blog.
• People can tag their own creations as well as others’.
• Photos and videos can be organized into sets and collections.
• And there are groups whose members post on particular themes—everything from cats to artistic nudes to New York history—to volcanoes and the UK General Election.
• Finally, Flickr provides for easy copyright declaration: users can post all-rights-reserved, or attach Creative Commons licenses to their work.

WHY FLICKR

OK, so repeating the pattern: what does a photo sharing site offer to us pedagogically? Well, there’s often something to be said for inviting students to express themselves in a medium they don’t typically associate with classes, or with scholarship. Among the better-known photo sharing sites, Flickr is a particularly good venue because of the huge user buy-in, and also because its versatile interface can also be used to teach Web 2.0 concepts: social tagging, critique, conversation that takes place in and through comments, social annotation.

I’d like to show you just a few examples of how academics use Flickr.

• Here’s a good use of the notes feature. Calls attention to specific costuming details; asks guiding questions; provides links to more information.
• Another example of notes.
• Here’s some visual storytelling.  This sequence seemed to particularly grab the audience, each photograph so striking and beautiful.
• Or how about storytelling with the image title?

Distance education course participants might introduce themselves with Flickr: post photos of themselves and their surroundings, comment on each other’s posts, build community.

This website is also a great library. Thanks to Flickr’s integration with Creative Commons, it allows you not only to attach licenses to photos, but also to search for photos that you can use, say, in a slide presentation. Mine is far from a stellar example, but an important point is: Flickr has revolutionized the slide presentation, taking the focus off of bullet points and encouraging folks to synthesize their thoughts in imagery. Both students and seasoned scholars have already benefited from this, and conference presentations are less likely to lose their audiences’ attention now than they were ten years ago.

WHY NOT FLICKR

Everything has its down side. You do need special equipment to use Flickr, though these days not much: many of us have cameras in our phones, and those are more than adequate to convey an idea. And also, the visual is very different from the verbal, as a mode of interacting with the world. This can be a great thing, but like everything else, may or may not be appropriate for a particular course.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

There are so many social media tools I haven’t mentioned. Virtual worlds, voice over IP telephony, wikis, social bookmarking sites, the list just goes on. And it can seem intimidating, no?

But it is our world.

And our academic world operates in a reputation economy. Or, that’s our hope, right? Eric Raymond, a programmer of open source software who also studies open-source communities, has said that by putting arguments on the network and making them available for hyperlinking, searching and discussion, people “homestead the noosphere.” Raymond’s homesteading paradigm comes from John Locke’s theory of property: if a piece of land is not claimed, you claim it by working the land, investing of yourself in it.

The hacker community Raymond describes is characterized by two main aspects: pragmatism and gift culture. This does not mean that there is no ownership: “[t]he owner of a software project is the person who has the exclusive right, recognized by the community at large, to distribute modified versions.” There are also rewards, the main among them being reputation, which in turn leads to a meritocracy. But the key is making your creations, the fruits of your knowledge, widely available. This is what social media let us do, and let us teach students how to do. This will serve them well in any job that involves making new things, knowledge among them.

Kevin Roberts, who made a ten-minute video called Teaching in the 21st Century, writes: “Teachers are no longer the main source of knowledge. We are the filter. Sure,” he says, “they can use Google. But has anyone shown them how to validate, synthesize, leverage, and communicate information?  How to collaborate and problem solve with information?” Yes, we can do all that without using social media. But that’s a lot like dancing about architecture. The internet’s status as the container of human knowledge will only increase and solidify; we have the means and the opportunity to filter, discuss, analyze and add to this body of knowledge directly, in the midst of it.

And it’s more than just an opportunity; at this point, it’s an obligation if we’re to understand our students. Roberts asks, “how would you answer questions like, what is the most efficient tool for this project?, or what are the newest ideas and innovations I need to keep up with?” Now, “How would your students answer these questions? Have you asked them?” Without knowing their frame of reference—both in theory and in practice—it’s hard to teach them effectively. The understanding most BU students have of even such basic scholarly concepts as authorship, the editing process and reflection is radically different from the understanding that a person who doesn’t use social media would have. Roberts says, “we need to rethink the tools we use and the types of problems we ask students to solve.”

One of the people who have best used social media tools in a university setting is Michael Wesch, a cultural anthropologist at Kansas State. Let me just show you a short segment of a video he and his students made, titled “A vision of students today.” [I only showed the part between 1:01 and 2:15, but the whole 4m44s video is worth watching.]

This video showcases collaborative use of Google Docs, the last tool I promised to tell you about. And it also makes an elegant case for educators making an effort to connect with students using their tools, their language, their mindset. All kinds of knowledge work are being done using social media, so that’s—partly—where we need to be.

Thank you.

• ++ Birthday! I had one. I went out to dinner with mom and Vlad, and later had a party. It was well attended by lovely people; Mark supplied lights and gorgeous swathes of cloth to drape around things; the food was appreciated; much merriment was had.
• - Then last Monday I started feeling sick.
• - Then last Tuesday I came in sick to cover library supervision in the evening (until 9pm), and proceeded to lie on the table floor for most of the time I was in, unable even to watch stupid TV online, much less work.
• — Then Wednesday I discovered that what I had was strep throat! I don’t remember whether I’d ever had it before; certainly not since I got to the States almost twenty (!!) years ago.
• + Yet I recognized it for what it must be, went to get myself checked out (thanks for the encouragement, mom), and got
• +++ penicillin, which is a wonder of (semi-)modern medicine, even though it’s kicking my butt by greatly diminishing my baseline energy level. But hey, it’s only for ten days.
• - Meanwhile, I missed my weekly playdate/kid-sitting night with four year old Natalie. SO looking forward to seeing her today.
• ++ On Saturday, I had fantastic dinner with my family, all of them—even brother Zhenya, sisinlaw Jo Ann and nephew Tesher came up for this—as a first, early celebration of my mom’s 70th birthday (coming up in May). I do so like hanging out with them, particularly when it involves food and then sleeping in my own bed.
• + The last two nights, I had excellent dates, with conversations and food and laughing that left me feeling hale and whole.
• + Yesterday, I finally finished up the saga of having had to have a tooth extracted a year and a half ago, then get an implant, then get a crown for the implant. Dentistry has been the bain of my didn’t-grow-up-with-fluoride-in-my-water body, and I’m glad this one’s over.
• ++ Also yesterday, I acquired a physical therapist and a therapy schedule to finally fix a year-and-a-half-old shoulder injury. I like the therapist, and I like that he’s two T stops away from the building where I work. Major win.
• + I’ve been productive and happy at work (except for that miserable evening with the strep throat). We submitted an NEH grant proposal; I’ve been talking to faculty about teaching with technology; we have several IT and digital library projects going; and as terrifying as it is to essentially be my own boss most days, I’m also learning new stuff at a pace I can feel. Mostly learning about managing time and expectations. Valuable stuff.
• - Work is also exhausting and often frustrating. Yesterday I shut down my computer after reviewing and commenting on four long library policy documents, and literally couldn’t think for a while, just let myself be on autopilot going home.
• + Good thing cooking perks me right up.
• - I’ve also been chronically under-sleeping again, mostly by making bad time-management choices in favor of being with good people.
• + Good thing I got plenty of sleep while sick with strep throat!
• + On a different note, I’m participating in a Tufts study on how people manage their personal finances (or at least that’s what they claim the study is about). This got me thinking more deeply about my own personal finances, and once again coming to a conclusion that I can manage them well even if the jam-tomorrow enticements that just keep coming from my ex never materialize, and I have to pay his share of our mutual debts too. I wouldn’t be happy doing it, but not having any choice, find it more pleasant to be sanguine about it. Of course I have a rant about that, but that’s not the point: the point is, this isn’t driving me crazy anymore.
• +This past weekend, I saw a bunch of old friends and acquaintances from my days of hanging out on the interactive fiction MUD.  I also got to see a screening of the excellent documentary Get Lamp, by Jason Scott of textfiles fame, which (both Get Lamp and textfiles) I’m highly recommending if you’re into that sort of thing.
• ++ My house and my life are full of people so good in so many ways, it makes me dizzy sometimes.

And these are just the highlights. Life’s full, and mostly good.

If you’re just tuning in, that’s my dissertation over there.

Scanning by others, scanning by me, institutional repository, faculty computers, dean’s computer, budgeting, classroom tech retrofitting, major website overhaul, planning for student services starting up in the fall. I’m sure I’m forgetting stuff. Oh, and I’ll be on vacation and off the grid for ten days in August, coming back on orientation day.

This couldn’t be happening at a better time, is strangely invigorating, makes me want to work on the weekends. There, I’ve got my groove back.

*dives deep*

I’ve been blogging the conference–or at least, the sessions I’ve managed to attend. The posts are here; if you’ve been wondering why exactly I’m in love with my somewhat obscure (and yet pervasive and important to all of us, whether we know it or not) profession, this is a good way to find out what excites me about digital humanities.

Oh, and hey, I was lightning-interviewed! Now I have had 1m4s of my 15m of fame.

Thursday was one mad dash after another at work right up until about 6:30pm, and culminated in drinking wine at a reception in our library, chatting with coworkers, then cleaning up and getting a ride home, arriving around 7:45. And immediately turning around to drive the car I time-share to its home, take the bus back, and collapse.

Friday was one mad dash af… well, you know. Ran around almost non-stop 8-6 with a two-hour break for a dental appointment (three cheers for my dentist, again), came home and had a fantastic dinner with this gorgeous babe who is funny and fascinating and has good taste in movies. I showed her An Ordinary Miracle.

Now it’s almost 2am. Not setting an alarm. Still, I’d like to figure out how to live life as fully as I want, and still get anything approximating enough sleep most nights. I feel my immune system wearing down.

Moaned about, got out of bed like an hour late, went to work and stayed there for ten hours, in part because the first half of the day I was mostly useless. (Enh. It happens. It’s SAD season, and I do what I can, and somehow work-blogging after hours feels different, calmer, with nobody around.) And near the end of the business day I found out I’d made some people unhappy, and had to deal with that, and it wasn’t a big deal—in fact, the conversation with a third party was helpful and reassuring—but it’s never a good feeling to know you’ve screwed up. On the other hand, learning experience, and a mild one as such things go.

So by the time I left work at 8pm I was tired. And… not exactly grumpy, just feeling off. But then.

Then I came home, and there was a circus band rehearsing in my living room. Went upstairs, and housemate Coraline was hanging out in the kitchen with her friend Carolyn. I threw my stuff down and—having had no dinner—declared I needed scotch, and to make a casserole. Why? I dunno. I guess I’d had a fantastic casserole at Molly’s the day before, and I’ve had random foodstuffs hanging around the cupboards for forever, AND I’d never made casserole before.

Yeah, really.

So we broke out the bottle of 12-year-old scotch that I’d taken to Burning Man and we’d never gotten around to opening (there was other alcohol around, but it’s not tempting to drink a lot of dehydrating liquid in that climate). And I made a casserole of frozen artichoke hearts, frozen peas, frozen corn, frozen mixed mushrooms (thank you, bulk food ordering, I have a mushroom invasion in my freezer), chick peas, canned tuna, multi-colored potatoes, cream and two kinds of cheese. And I’m probably forgetting other stuff.

All the while, people around me chatted and sipped tasty alcohol and giggled a lot. And later I ate and felt more human, and around 10:45pm Coraline (ok, Johanna) and Eric and I went out against all better judgment, because spectacularly under-advertised Midnight Madness was going on in Davis Square. We gawked at antique bobbles and boutique-y clothes, but mostly we dropped by Dave’s Fresh Pasta, sampled tasty foods, and brought home mozzarella made that evening by a neighbor of theirs (or something).

Oh. my. gods. Homemade mozzarella with crushed pink peppercorns and a drizzle of truffled olive oil. Yeah, I’d say that, combined with hanging out with my awesome housemates, was a win even though it meant that once again I got too little sleep.

Boy, if that was a bad day, bring them on, you know? Speaking of days, I should probly go face mine. The sun’s rising, a warm shower awaits, and today I get to take tasty casserole to work for lunch. Oh, and tonight I get to see both of my favorite small girls (can’t call them toddlers anymore, as they’re skipping and giggling on either side of three years old), and go to the Museum of Science with one of them and her dad. WOE. Woe is me in this sad season.

Today I’m thankful for good people in my life, and for all the weird bipolar days that, in the end, let me know that things are going to be ok.

We are strongly recommending that people here not use MS Publisher, for various reasons. Do you have a favorite desktop publishing application for Windows XP? Inexpensive is a huge bonus.

(Now, if only she were a Mac user… but no.)