Dr. Stéfan Sinclair, Associate Professor of Multimedia at McMaster University.
Dr. Stéfan Sinclair, Associate Professor of Multimedia at McMaster University.
The good folks at the Center for History and New Media have initiated (yet another) fantastic resource in the form of Digital Humanities Now, a real-time, crowdsourced publication. It takes the pulse of the digital humanities community and tries to discern what articles, blog posts, projects, tools, collections, and announcements are worthy of greater attention. I’m especially happy to hear that part of the motivation for DHNow is to explore how, as Dan Cohen puts it “some version of this idea could serve as a rather decent new form of publication that focuses the attention of those in a particular field on important new developments and scholarly products”. Though perhaps not itself a quantifiable object in terms of hiring, tenure and promotion, it can certainly function effectively in that ecology to promote noteworthy content and projects. I see this as akin to participating at conferences: there’s a kind of intangible value ascribed to it by committees wanting to judge the scholarly activity of an individual (that can enhance the perception of other work). We can’t just wait for administrators to “get it”, we need to be more proactive, by providing them with other tools by which to assess the value of digital humanities scholarship. It’s partly for this reason that I think it’s so important to think, as a community, about how we can get DHNow (and similar initiatives) right.
One of my first reactions was to ask how the algorithms could get a good diversity of languages if – as I’d falsely assumed – there was linguistic analysis happening in the filtering and grouping process. It turns out that DHNow uses a much simpler and more elegant mechanism for gathering content: it (via Twittertim.es) analyzes common URLs, which really makes it language and context independent (though still likely very relevant if several DHers mention the same URL).
The URL-centric approach is useful for converging on a unique resource, but there’s a lot of discussion on Twitter that’s not oriented towards URLs (and of course there’s also a lot of DH discussion that’s not on Twitter). One huge advantage of the URL approach is that it usually produces a nice, coherent title to represent a set of tweets – it may be difficult to generate an expressive title from a tweet in the absence of a URL. In any case, what could be some possible (relatively simple) strategies for capturing a broader range of topics and discussions?
Other ideas? Tweet me @sgsinclair (with this URL http://tr.im/FnOI ;-)
I have another motivation for wanting DHNow to work optimally: I’m already overwhelmed by digital information from email, blogs, Twitter, and so on. I’m not especially keen to add yet another source of information, unless I have confidence that it will allow me to drop something else. Any filtering and aggregation obviously means compromise and loss – but if anyone should be up to the challenge of a technical and social problem, it’s the digital humanities community.