The complex toolkit has great potential. The course has been frustrating, in part (though not wholly) because SEASR’s documentation is not at all geared toward your average digital humanist, or what I know of my diverse kind, anyway. I thought that the best thing I can do with my class time today was to write some documentation. Here it is. It’s in no way complete; just the beginning of an overview of SEASR for digital humanists. Please feel free to repost, augment, comment here with your augmentations and have me edit this post to reflect them, what have you.

At the end of this post, I propose the beginning of a list of categories into which all components and flows might be subdivided, each component/flow probably listed in more than one category. This would help humanities scholars with no prior experience with SEASR, or even some of the functionality it affords, get oriented in using it.

I also propose that we need a lot more detailed information for each component and flow. The SEASR team has already begun this process, but given the project’s maturity and the fact that it’s in its third year of being taught at DHSI, such (again, humanities-scholar-oriented) documentation is sorely lacking.

I should say that, unless ESTHR or another one of my projects decides to pursue use and development of SEASR, I am unlikely to add to its documentation after the end of this week.  I ardently encourage SEASR’s developers and managers to devote significant resources to documenting this great project, such that it may be usable by the wide diversity of researchers who stand to benefit by it.

OK, here we go with the overview.

WHAT IS SEASR?

It’s a modular multi-tool for working with word-based texts. You can find the project site at seasr.org. From there, you can try it out (see the Documentation section). Or you can download the relevant software (which includes Meandre, a web-based interface for creating and working with SEASR data flows) and install it on your computer or a server.

WHAT IS SEASR MADE OF?

Meandre’s web interface—the Workbench—reveals that SEASR is made up of components and flows. Flows are little applications that can help you ask questions of your materials.

Components are the building blocks of flows, snippets of code that you can string together . At the time of this writing, there are 180 components available. Ideally, each component does a single thing: fetch a document from a URL you specify, for example, or convert all text to lowercase. The more discrete its function, the more broadly a component is applicable.

You can use existing flows with your data, or build your own out of existing components. Thanks to the graphical user interface of the Meandre Workbench, building new flows requires only dragging and dropping existing components, connecting outputs to inputs by clicking, and a basic understanding of other information you might need to provide (like a URL from which to fetch text, for example).

You can also write new components. For someone who knows Java, this is generally not difficult (although, of course, it depends on what you want the component to do).

WHAT KINDS OF QUESTIONS CAN I ASK USING SEASR? HOW CAN I DO THIS?

Theoretically, any questions. In practice, however, many of its components were created in order to answer specific questions in the moment. Because of this, the set of functions that can be performed in SEASR is not a cohesive whole. As SEASR’s developers and the user community contribute more components, the tool will become more robust.

In order to ask a question using SEASR, you have to:

• select a flow that you think might bring you closer to the answer you seek;
• use data in a format that the flow needs in order to operate;
• give the flow any other operands it might need (for example, a Google Maps API key for a flow that’s supposed to map data for you)

WHAT KIND OF DATA AND FILE FORMATS CAN SEASR HANDLE?

That depends on what flow(s) you’re using—but right now, for the most part, text-based data. File formats SEASR can handle include [but aren't limited to—developers, what am I missing?] direct plain text input, PDF (as long as it’s text-based or OCR‘d) and anything text-based that a URL might contain.

WHAT KNOWLEDGE DO I NEED TO USE SEASR EFFECTIVELY?

If you intend to build your own workflows (and it’s likely to be necessary for doing deep research), it would be very useful for you or your collaborators to know Java. SEASR’s components are, for the most part, written in it. It’s certainly possible to use SEASR without knowing Java, but that will only get you so far. This is because, although many of the components are sufficiently well documented, in some cases it helps to look at the code to determine whether the component, in fact, does what you need to do—because if not, you might be in for creating a new component.

HOW DO I GET STARTED?

The easiest way to get started is to use some of the flows available on seasr.org (see the Documentation section). Then, install your own copy of SEASR/Meandre and look at some of the flows. The manual for Meandre is available at . After installing Meandre, you can expect to gain facility with the basic processes of setting up workflows within a few hours. Understanding the intricacies of flows and components will, of course, take longer.

Other useful URLs:

• Meandre Cookbook
• SEASR Wiki

PROPOSED COMPONENT/FLOW CATEGORIES

Only a starting list. What other categories do we need?

• - Working with  XML-encoded texts
• - Working with XML code
• - Working with non-encoded texts
• - Natural language processing
• - Data visualization, graphical
• - Working with time
• - Working with proper nouns
• - Social networks

INFORMATION STILL NEEDED

For each component:

• categories for dh scholars
• dependencies (what other components must this one be used with)
• examples/use cases

For each flow:

• inputs needed (a la GMaps API key)
• external tools/specialized concepts referenced
• categories for dh scholars
• examples/use cases

So much to say about all that. But right now, there’s a more pressing matter. Somehow, in transferring my iPhone to sync with another computer’s library, I lost all my contact records. Did I have your info? Would you like me to? If yes to either or both, please email me to let me know what I should have for you. Thanks!

What was the wisest decision you made this year, and how did it play out?

I’m learning to let go of absolutes. So you’re on notice, #reverb10: I’m going to ignore the acme aspect of many of your prompts. Frankly, the wisest decision I made this year isn’t anyone’s business, and I don’t feel like writing cryptically.

One wise decision I made this year was to apply for a new job. It took me a while to come around to applying, mostly because I haven’t entirely internalized that what appear to be absolutes in academic language are actually quite flexible notions. It took a friendly face and a nudge to apply, and I’m glad I did! First of all because I rocked the interview by making it personal, allowing myself to be openly passionate about the issue at the core of the job: open access to knowledge. The best thing I can do to address my pacifism and liberal socio-political stance is to help people acquire knowledge. I’m ok bringing the Pollyanna if that’s the way to most fully contribute to my world. (There are other worlds than these…)

And second, because it worked. Tomorrow I’ll be starting my new job as BU’s Institutional Repository Librarian. Nifty, eh? Terrifying—and I’m as excited as can be. Here’s hoping I’ll have the wisdom to help move this thing forward. Advice and suggestions — particularly from more experienced repo rats — welcome.

Writing. What do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your writing — and can you eliminate it?

I was at a loss as to how to start answering that, because I don’t think of myself primarily, or even in second place, as a writer. But then a friend reminded me to substitute my own creative mode for writing. Right.

So, here’s what I do every day that prevents me from making new things, whether they be food or web pages or, er, “work” (generating new content as part of my job, but I am lucky enough to not separate “work” from “life”): I escape into others’ stories.

At home, I watch TV. To my occasional chagrin, Hulu and Netflix and YouTube all carry content with good storylines, and I’m a sucker for those. I watch things like Doctor Who and House and Fringe. And Glee, mostly because choir (including show choir, but 30-150 of us instead of a dozen) was my favorite part of the high school experience. And movies, sometimes. These stories are so wholly unconnected to most of the rest of my life that I just tune it all out. The constant noise in my head stops for those fifty minutes. I also watch brain candy, like medical dramas and (until I lost interest, because the stories are too formulaic) Bones. That’s to escape in another way.

Books have good stories too, but I tend to read while commuting. Ever since I became multilingual, first learning English and then almost immediately throwing myself into Italian, reading is a more conscious act than I’d like. Skimming is difficult; most reading processes take a lot more time than they did when I was eleven. Losing myself in a book is hard, so I don’t use them to escape so much as practice diving again and again.

Could I eliminate these compelling distractions? Of course. Here’s the thing, though: I don’t want to eliminate them. Sure, they can siren-sing me into oblivion. And sure, I’m not creating as much as I’d like. But these escapes give me two important tools. One is inspiration; input is at the core of everything. The other is a place and time to let things percolate subconsciously—a restful night’s sleep for creativity. So it’s a matter of finding balance. Balance is difficult for me to find, let alone sustain. The only way I’ve found to deal with this is iteration, practice, which is hard! It’s hard in itself, and it’s also hard because it involves shedding deeply ingrained assumptions of what activities constitute wasting time and, if I’m not careful, carry a dose of guilt (an unproductive time and energy sink).

At work, I read a lot—and sometimes catch myself at reading just for the story, failing to notice when an article (or blog post, or tweet) might lead me to new thoughts and new work. Escaping into stories that way, just to find out what people are doing without reflecting on how it ties into my own work, is no more damaging than escaping into television—but it is more wasteful. So at work, I work on my reading skills and on remembering that all those authors I read are writing about things directly relevant to what I do. Again, practice; but this time, instead of balance, the goal is increased mindfulness.

One Word. Encapsulate the year 2010 in one word. Explain why you’re choosing that word. Now, imagine it’s one year from today, what would you like the word to be that captures 2011 for you?

Grounding.

I feel solid, personally—about time, I tell ya. It’s been a long three years since my separation from my life partner, and that’s ceasing to define me.

I’ve sunk my roots into Boston even further. Home feels like home. People feel like my people. Everything is always in transition, but many days this year I’ve been struck by how living feels. It feels like it did when I was a kid: sometimes, I’m not distracted by whatever’s in my head. Time goes more slowly. My filters aren’t filtering out quite so much of the world. I notice more little things—not beautiful little things, but ordinary ones. The sounds of street traffic, out there, all the time. The shuffle of the old lady passing by my window. People’s movement through Davis Square, in aggregate.

A ton of new knowledge acquired. This grounds me in my profession. Speaking of which: I have a new job. It’s still at BU, and starts in a couple of weeks, at which point I’ll write more about it. The job is also grounding: it will draw much more fully on my skillset, and further solidifies my geographic position.

I keep wanting to write something about Mark, and how our relationship relates to Word of the Year for me—it does in a cardinal, astounding way. But I haven’t yet figured out (again, post-divorce) how much I want to write about my personal life involving other people. So, redacted.

Taking up weight lifting again has helped my body feel more sound. Pun intended!

So: compared to this time last year, much better grounded.

Next year could have so many defining words that would thrill me. One possibility I wouldn’t mind: joy.

There is no frigate, no bus, no plane, no space ship, no car, no train—none of these is like a book, like a song, like an operatic voice, like a painting, like a sculpture, like a drama. To help us imagine other lands and cultures, to help us cultivate that kind of compassion and empathy required for democracy, for practicing equality as a fundamental value, instead of the more primitive ‘better than’.

And also:

We should remind our administrators that the kind of education that enabled broad access to highest quality instruction and research, and made these United States a world leader—that kind of education can never be a gated community. And it must be worldly, reaching beyond any nation-state. Healthy, too, are reminders that business management is really not the best metaphor for knowledge workers. As was noted in a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a better metaphor for knowledge workers is that of gardener. We work in fields. We cultivate.

What I’ve been pointing out is that unless you’re at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values. You don’t know the metaphor and its strength, and its weakness. You don’t know how far you may expect to ride it, and when it may break down with you. You are not safe in science, and you are not safe in history, unless you are at home with the metaphor.

Smith rejects the rhetoric of a crisis in the humanities, a phrase often uttered. For more on the state of the humanities, see Stanley Fish’s recent NYTimes opinion pieces: “The Crisis of the Humanities Officially Arrives” and its sequel, “Crisis of the Humanities II.” I find it more than a little odd that not once does Fish mention digital endeavors of any kind, but can’t say I’m surprised. He didn’t mention them two years ago when asking whether the humanities would save us, either. I don’t subscribe to Fish’s opinions, but the articles and comments on them are thought provoking. Martha Nell Smith’s lecture, on the other hand, I heartily endorse. It’s well worth the hour and ten minutes it’ll take to watch the video.

Meanwhile, though, have a quote from Audre Lorde:

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

Exciting, all of it, but scary. On top of this, my mom is sick. (This is the part I’m compartmentalizing like crazy, because it would easily send me into panic if it were allowed to, and that’s just not helpful to anyone.)

On the plus sides, today was full of social goodness. Went to a brunch-and-Gattaca-showing, which was brilliant. Took a friend (and myself) shopping at a Russian supermarket. We were both sort of unreally happy with the experience, and talked and talked in the car both ways. Housemates were almost as pleased, and partook of the tasties. Then we watched Torchwood.

It’s pouring in every sense but the rainy. The weather is cool enough for sweatshirt and a scarf. All my nerve endings are at attention. Life’s edges are rather ill-defined, and frightening in this. Wouldn’t trade it, even if sometimes I need to be talked down from scraggly fear trees.

Some background first. The school I work at is a theological seminary existing within a Research I university. The students in it are all [post]graduate: Master’s- and doctoral-level. Some degrees are more vocationally oriented; others—more research-oriented. This refers to what the students do after they leave here; all of our graduate programs involve the usual amounts of traditional scholarship. Some also involve field work.

I aim for these to be one-off, two-hour workshops offered to every student near the beginning of their time here. There will be two different workshops, one for most of the Master’s-level students, the other for our advanced Master’s and all doctoral students. The topic list is more or less the same, with different areas of emphasis for each workshop.  For those people writing theses and dissertations, there will be an additional hour-long workshop touching on things like how to properly format things in MS Word (sigh; yes, really—nobody teaches them this stuff!), open access, authorship etc.

These might more rightly be called digital scholarship primers, I don’t know. In any case, “digital research methods” might be a misnomer. I actually don’t think that it is. Implicit in the topic list below is my belief that the use of digital resources that feed you information and the use of digital tools to directly create new knowledge are different skill sets, but both classifiable as digital research.  If you think I’m off the mark here, I’d welcome your reasoning—not to make you justify yourself, but to gain more perspective—and/or suggestions for other workshop titles.

Here’s what I have so far. What would you add? Do you see problems with my thinking that I’m not seeing?

• What digital scholarship is
  • not all scholarship that’s online is digital scholarship
  • not all digital scholarship is online
  • digital scholarship is not equivalent to digital publication
  • major communities in the humanities
  • digital theology, online and off
• Is this real scholarship?
  • you bet
  • but in many places it doesn’t count for promotion/tenure
    • briefly on the herarchy of knowledge production that informs your studies
    • this politics has no bearing on quality, either of digital or paper resources
  • peer review for online resources
  • ultimately YOU have to decide whether it’s worth your time
  • whatever you intend do after STH, you’re a scholar now
• Why do people bother doing it digitally?
  • some things you can’t do analog
  • knowledge dissemination/access
  • the digital cannot replace the analog, and vice versa
• How digital scholarship is done
  • Father Busa and the Corpus Thomisticum
  • semantic encoding
  • 3D imaging of artifacts
  • other [this is a big Other, of course. I'm looking to limit principal examples to ones most relevant to theology, but will also touch on examples from history, sociology, literary studies etc.]
• Why digital scholarship is relevant to you
  • some of it you can’t find anywhere else
  • it’s scholarship in your field. not knowing it is knowing your field incompletely.
• How to find digital scholarly resources
  • searching the internet: more than the Google search box
  • how to evaluate for trustworthiness
  • a special note on Wikipedia: not a scholarly resource BUT uniquely useful.
  • some points of departure (Voice of the Shuttle, Intuit, WorldCat, library databases)
  • there’s a difference between digital scholarly resources and digital tools that let you find analog resources
• How to interact with digital scholarly resources
  • a few resource examples (including History of Missiology)
  • how to know what questions to ask
  • how to evaluate quality
  • peer reviewed resources vs. not-peer-reviewed ones
  • some problems to watch out for
  • data often obscure, particularly semantic encoding
  • how to cite digital resources
• General notes on digital research
  • research is iterative
  • digital research can span vast amounts of information or a single text
  • you can not only utilize what’s already available but make your contribution, too
  • you can use social media for research purposes (here’s how)
• Resources available at BU
  • me
  • new initiatives going on right now
  • look for events around Open Access Week in October

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.