“Remember me amigos? I was here when Prism was static!”

Honestly it has been very nice to see Prism come together while I was in Spain. I am also proud to see all my Praxis fellows transform into real code monkeys. I had a very quick and grainy glimpse of a functional Prism page when I attended a Praxis meeting about a month ago via webcam, but last week I got the full tour. In a lot of ways I am in a unique position to appreciate how far Prism has come because the software was a squalling infant when I left. Prism is all grown up now, and it is time to send it into the world to socialize with others so it doesn’t end up too “home-schooled.”

While my contribution to Prism was almost entirely reserved to designing static templates, I can confidently say I feel very connected to the final product that the group executed. I spent a lot of time in the the Scholars’ Lab during the Fall and early part of the Spring semester, and I hope to be around just as much in the future. Leading up to this Fall, I was far from a rookie when it came to applying graphics solutions to humanities subjects, but until this year, I was entirely at the mercy of a mouse. I am not going to claim I am a huge fan of VIM, but programming is no longer something I try to avoid when I consider how to solve a DH problem.

Finally, I’d like to thank the entire Scholar’s Lab staff for their help and patience. I’m sure the first few weeks of Praxis seemed like you adopted too many puppies, but we are house trained now and github is always willing to play fetch with us.

I know, as Bethany eloquently explains in her Chronicle article and her blog that Prism and much of DH is focused on creating and enabling new hermeneutics rather than on advancing critique. For that reason, I’m not yet imagining a digital component to my dissertation, but that doesn’t mean I’m not a digital humanist. Praxis has shown me a different, collaborative model of scholarship. Prism as it exists now could use some supporting research and theorization, especially about what kind of hermeneutics our working visualization instantiates or suggests, but it’s still a starting point for many possible readings or arguments to which many people can contribute.

I may not be creating a digital dissertation chapter like Annie or a whole digital edition like Alex, but I did manage to learn enough about HTML and CSS this year to style a decent looking website, and I think I can figure out how to style one that looks even better. I could have kept tinkering with Prism for much longer and I know it’s not the most sophisticated or aesthetically pleasing site you’ve ever seen, but I’m still proud to have been part of making it look how it looks. I will continue to seek out opportunities to become a better designer and to work on projects that interest me, and I’ll soon be starting design work with the wonderful UVa English department folks behind redschoolhouse.org. And that means I’ll probably stop into the Scholars’ Lab every so often for design advice from Jeremy and technical help from Wayne and Eric. I know I’ll see Sarah and Annie in the English department, and I hope to run into Ed in line at the dumpling truck. I wish Brooke and Alex all the best next year wherever they find themselves. I have learned so much from and with all you wonderful people, and the technical stuff is the least of it.

Skip forward a decade, and I now use a dizzying array of frameworks, tools, occasional tricks for any given project. As a case in point, look at any of the plugins our group have been developing for Omeka: we write the code in PHP, then use tooling written in Ruby, Java, and nodeJS.  The real question of how to explain exactly what goes on in a modern web-based application is one I, personally, struggled with over the last year. There’s typically a database tier, a presentation tier, business logic, external libraries, and framework idioms and vernacular to explain. Even once you get an OK grasp of how a programming language functions, the jump from making a simple loop to a building a web application that ‘works’ is quite a feat. On top of this, add the softer skills of translating the intent of a feature into actual code and coordinating changes with multiple people working in the same places in the code base, and even what it means to work together in a productive way can be challenging.

Just to give you an idea of the complexity of the things swimming around in the various heads of the team that developed Prism, this is a visualization of the library dependencies in the project:

With a system this complex, true collaboration is needed, with different people taking on different tasks and responsibility for sections of the code, and working together.

University of Virginia Library Scholars' Lab

Workshops

From January through April twice every week my colleague Chris Gist and I welcomed faculty, staff, and students to our free “no experience required” hands-on spatial workshops. The picture below gives you a glimpse behind the curtain at our master workshop list on the left.   In case you missed one, our handouts, datasets, and workshop presentations are all available here: http://www.lib.virginia.edu/scholarslab/resources/class/Spring2012GIS/ 

Though our workshops have been popular for many semesters, we shook it up this spring with new sessions based on questions we’ve been asked, trends we’ve spotted, or mappy topics we wanted to get to know better.  And what a treat it was to collaborate with friends and colleagues from the Scholars’ Lab  Research and Development team (thanks Eric Rochester), UVA Facilities Management (thanks Drew MacQueen and Artie McDonough), and the UVA Library (thanks Tim Morton).

For all 24 workshops, folks turned out from across disciplines, asked lots of questions, shared their mappy stories, and learned new skills after a hands-on hour.  Later this summer we’ll announce our Fall 2012 workshop series.

Classes

Like us, students get excited when they see their datasets come alive on a map.  Some of our best experiences working with geospatial resources in the Scholars’ Lab come from collaborations with faculty to develop specialized training for their courses.  American Studies, Architecture, English Criticism, Urban Planning, Environmental Science…we worked with them all this spring.  Check our whiteboard again and on the right side you’ll see some of our Spring 2012 faculty partnerships.  Now we’re meeting with faculty to prepare for Fall 2012.

Spring 2012 American Studies 3559 - Mapping Shantytowns

Support in the Scholars’ Lab

In the Scholars’ Lab, we relish a “GIS Emergency”.   Typically a student visits the lab to work on a project, hits a roadblock, and contacts us for help.  So we drop what we’re doing and spring into action.

“How do I use this cool historic map in my GIS project?”

“I don’t know exactly where it happened, but I need to show it on a map”

“I have a Mac.  I want to run ArcGIS.  Help.”

“We’re leaving for Guatemala tomorrow. May I borrow a GPS?”

“US Census data from 1950…where do I find it?”

“How can I compare solar exposure for my study sites in the French Alps?”

Combining drop-in support with email queries, our official tracking system, and pre-arranged meetings gives us a great view of how spatial topics are increasingly visible across academic disciplines.  And it means I have 1,495 emails in my GIS Support folder since Jan 1, 2012.

On The Horizon

Soon we’ll end the spring semester by hosting Scholars’ Lab grad fellow Ed Triplett for our last Scholars’ Lab mappy event of the Spring.  And we’ll start the summer with Mapping Yourself for Reunions Weekend.   Though our two hard-working GIS students will be gone for the summer, one having graduated and one home to China, we’ll continue our spatial work at James Madison University where we’ll lead two sessions at the 4th National Summit on Geospatial Technologies in K-14 Education.  And our online work continues with contributors and reviewers as we add new content to Spatial Humanities Step By Step, a peer-reviewed series of tutorials and guides to getting things done in teaching and research with spatial tools and resources.  We’ll train a new group of students for summer fieldwork at Mountain Lake Biological Station and keep an eye on the sky as we pursue do-it-yourself remote sensing.

Have a very mappy summer!

- We fixed a few bugs in the import process from the TEI Header to Omeka’s Dublin Core fields. Additionally, we created a map detailing which fields correspond to which elements. This map also explains how users can customize the import process if the current setup is not optimized for their documents.

- The main XSLT stylesheet now supports every element in the TEI Lite customization. We also reorganized it, adding headers to correspond with the headers in the TEI Lite documentation where particular elements are discussed, so that those who are familiar with XSLT can find and edit elements easily. At a minimum, in the transformation process each tag is given a <span class=”TagName”>, and many have additional styles as well. This way, we guarantee that a defined set of elements will render in the document. Users unfamiliar with XSLT can also use these span classes to customize the style of their documents using CSS.

- Some of the elements that have been styled for more than just a span class may special requirements in order to render, such as specific attributes that need to be included in the TEI text. We have written a series of formatting tips to help users understand what the XSLT is looking for when it attempts to render the documents.

- The plugin now has functionality to link TEI text to corresponding page images. This is done using the @facs attribute with the <pb> element. Further details on how to use this feature are provided in the documentation.

- We outlined a number of small changes that a user can make outside of the plugin code itself in order to improve functionality. For example, when displaying longer documents, users might wish to create an anchor that allows readers to jump directly from the top of the page to view the item metadata, which is usually at the bottom. This is done on one of the Omeka PHP documents, so it isn’t officially part of the TeiDisplay package, but we include the appropriate code in our documentation and describe where to put it.

- We’ve written a number of troubleshooting tips, as well as a more detailed guide to installing the plugin and updating documents.

I’m very happy with the changes we made to the plugin, but I think that overall, they were not as extensive as I expected going in. I think the real value added with this project was the extensive documentation we’ve created, as well as a demo site that gives examples of the plugin in action. Armed with this documentation, users will not only be able to better understand how the plugin works with their documents out of the box, but they will also be better able to customize it to fit their needs.

Over the coming months the Scholars’ Lab will be conducting more rigorous testing of the plugin as well as making some other additions. Hopefully, the final product will be ready late this summer.

Thanks very much to Wayne and Bethany at the Scholars’ Lab, and to our adviser Tanya Clement at UT, for giving us the opportunity to be a part of this project!

As I discussed in an earlier post, the census has a dual purpose: First, it will serve the many individuals who are employed in (or considering) alternate academic roles by showing the breadth and depth of career trajectories that can follow graduate work in the humanities. The resulting database may help people to discover others with shared interests, find potential project collaborators, or open up new lines of inquiry. Second, it serves as an important first step towards the survey that SCI will conduct, which aims at better understanding career preparation and #alt-ac employment in relation to humanities graduate programs.

I’d like the database to be as broad and truly representative as possible, which means I’ll need help in extending its reach. Please forward the link widely and encourage the #alt-academics you know to contribute–the database becomes more useful as more people join in.

This census is part of a suite of new content and features at #Alt-Academy; the announcement is restated below. Please read, contribute, and circulate!

—

We are very happy to announce a new phase of publication at #Alt-Academy, an open-access online project at MediaCommons. #Alt-Academy was launched last summer with 24 essays by 33 authors, highlighting the role of “alternative” academic professionals in the humanities and related fields. The four projects joining #Alt-Academy today promise to open the publication to an even richer and more diverse set of voices.

I’m sure it has not escaped your attention that Prism plays a sweet prank on the discursive class. The premise: graduate students collaborate to build a hermeneutic tool while learning much-needed technical and managerial skills their hermeneutic training made invisible. The punchline: Except for the cast of characters witnessing its birth, the tool the students make renders the hermeneut invisible.

Prism yanks the out-of-line hero in Aeschylus right back into the incredibox where he came from. Your username is only visible to you. Once you register for the first time, it descends to the MySQL underworld, effectively re-enacting the Eleusinian Mysteries that preceded the birth of Greek tragedy. “You can check out anytime you like/But you can never leave.” Brilliant!

BUT, the playful prank is not without use or merit, and we are laughing with you, not at you. Heck, I AM one of you. Yes, Prism abstracts interpretative labor (c.f. Baudrillard on Symbolic Exchange and Death), but it does so without foul. I’m guessing most folks would find the momentary anonymity quite refreshing. Truth be said, we don’t need to doodle our signatures on every wall. (c.f. Derrida… No? You don’t have to).

Furthermore,  and as David shows by example on his recent post, many new avenues of research open up with Prism. The tool does not replace, but sits to the left of other hermeneutic approaches. To pick one question of the many new questions that Prism opens up:

Given that anonymity changes the way we enact readings; and, given that the ruling ideology in Amerika would have us believe that racial identity is a thing of the past: How does the invisible subject react to symbolic Law?

Obviously, that is not the only new question Prism can ask, nor the first to come to mind for most users. We worked hard to make it generic enough that many disciplines could find plug-n-play uses for it. And then again, what else could Prism lead to, but renewed interest in interpretation as a microscopic-practice?  Yes, the lovely texts! Don’t be fooled by the promise of macroscopic understandings of difference. That is just a (mc)lure.

One of the reasons that programming is so invigorating is that software is constantly leaning forward into further elaboration and complexity. Every feature is the precursor of a hundred possible new ones. Code is always the double-delight of what it is and what it could become.

Prism currently occupies the place in the evolution of a software project where there’s enough functionality in place to really engage with the shape of the idea, but still enough unfinished that there’s space for broad, exploratory thought about the future direction of things. Annie did a fantastic job implementing a core interface that allows users to apply concept verticals (“highlighters”) to texts. Looking forward, the motivating question is how this capability can be leveraged to produce concrete scholarly outcomes – ideally, new understandings of texts.

The first public release seems like an excellent opportunity to start trying to whittle down this question to a set of specific research goals to guide future development. To me, Prism points towards two general lines of inquiry:

1. How can experiments in collaborative markup capture uncommon or dissenting readings? The concept of crowdsourcing – and, really, the social internet in general – has proven highly adept at extracting majority opinions, at taking the pulse of a group of people. What is “liked” by the community of participants? Where is there agreement? Always implicitly contained in the data that yields these insights, though, is information about how individuals and dissenting groups diverge from the majority consensus.

   Usually, in the context of the consumer web, these oppositions are flattened out into monolithic “like” or “dislike” dichotomies. Tools like Prism, though, capture structurally agnostic and highly granular information about how users react to complex artifacts (texts – the most complex of things). I think it would be fascinating to try to find ways of analyzing the data produced by Prism that would illuminate places where the experimental cohort profoundly disagrees about things. These disagreements could be interesting irritations into criticism. Why the disagreement? What’s the implicit interpretive split that produced the non-consensus?

2. Continuing on the concept of the “experiment.” Prism points at the provocative possibility that literary study could literally take the form of experiments, similar in structure to the “studies” conducted in disciplines like research psychology, sociology, and experimental philosophy. Literary criticism generally asks questions about how texts can be read. The critic conjures highly creative statements of meaning that often stake their value claim on the extent to which they are unexpected, unanticipated, not obvious, or atypical.

   Prism, meanwhile, provides information about how texts just are read. I think it would be fascinating to take this to the next level and stage formal experiments in which subjects are presented with a text and asked to mark it up with a small number (even just one) of carefully-selected, highly-controlled terms. Done responsibly, and with a healthy aversion to the sugary siren call of Data in a field that’s fundamentally in the business of studying art, I think that this could provide fascinating insights about everything from the concept of Kantian “expertise” in the formation of aesthetic judgments to the questions about how people of different ages, ethnicities, genders, and disciplinary affiliations engage with texts. How does a college freshman read differently than a 6th year English graduate student? How do physicists read differently from philosophers?

Either way, I can’t wait to see where it all goes.

Dr. Kenneth Dean, Lee Chair in Chinese Cultural Studies in the Department of East Asian Studies at McGill University, spoke as part of the Digital Humanities Speaker Series on March 29.

The Digital Humanities Speaker Series is co-sponsored by IATH, SHANTI, and the Scholars’ Lab

As always, you can listen to (or subscribe to) our podcasts on the Scholars’ Lab blog, or on iTunesU.

It’s kind of frightening to realize how much you don’t know, and once you realize this, it then becomes frightening to make and share something. But I’m starting to understand, more than I ever have, that this is all part of the process of collaboration, that it’s good to feel this way, and that it shouldn’t debilitate us from learning and doing. Collaboration should provide some relief, even confidence, but it should not abdicate us from learning how to do new things. It demands that we pay attention when we don’t know something, and obligates us to look for further clarification. It requires us to respect the skills and perspectives our collaborators bring to the table. It doesn’t mean you have to learn everything. That’s impossible and silly. But it also doesn’t mean you should avoid learning something. Collaboration is yaking and hacking, then yaking and hacking some more, all the way down.

I’m not exaggerating when I say I’ve never been more uncomfortable about things, and more excited by that feeling, than I have the last few months working in the Praxis Program. Most of the stuff we covered was brand new to me, too, so I was every bit as much a student during the process. My lack of comfort with many of the technical topics was completely countered by the studio-like atmosphere the Praxis Program team managed to create by simply working together.

We’re all collaborating, all the time; if you don’t think you’re collaborating, you’re probably not paying attention. In the spirit of that, the folks in the Praxis program have made a thing and shared it. I hope I speak for everyone when I say, I hope you’ll collaborate with us.

Our workshops were scheduled for Wednesday morning, April 18 and Thursday afternoon, April 19.  Unfortunately, it started raining hard just before our Wednesday session and we were forced to go to Plan B. We decided to fly the balloon in the mural hall located inside Clark Hall.  The ceiling in there is two stories high.  We did get some interesting images from that “flight.”

Although we think we made the point with the flight inside the building, we hoped for much better conditions the next day.

On Thursday, the weather was much better but there was more wind than we hoped.  We knew the images wouldn’t be great but decided to fly anyway.  It was quite an event, NBC 29 (news video) and UVa Today (lots more pictures and story) came.  We did two new things for this flight.  First, John Porter lent us a GPS to put on the balloon rig.  Second, we inadvertently switched the camera to video mode when loading into the balloon rig.

The GPS addition turned out to be a great thing.  It gave us a 3D profile of our flight which we converted to KML for viewing in Google Earth.  Please feel free to download it here.

The mistakenly-created video is interesting in places but is not good for those among us who may have motion sickness issues.

The Space Stare

Next up was the THATCamp Virginia Workshop.

We had about ten THATCampers and decided to fly over Nameless Field.  And since our GPS experiment went so well, it now has become a permanent fixture on our flights.  We got a lot of great shots of the tennis courts.  If you look closely, you can see the crew working to prep the surfaces for new paint.

We have a KMZ of the flight available here.

Next was the art installation being created on UVa Foundation property on 29 North.  A group of students working with Prof. Megan Marlatt are painting the below in the parking lot.  They are filling in the cat image with stencils of a bunch of other cats.

Here is our documentation of their work.

Of course, we have a KML of the whole mission (two flights) and some images and the original conceptual plan.  Please download it here.

Our next big balloon event will be teaching some DIY aerial photography and the STEM conference for k-14 educators in June.

Oh and by the way, someone asked how we get that large balloon though rather small doorways.

Image courtesy Bethany Nowviskie

This is a blog post (one of many) celebrating the release of Prism. This project and web site are the outcome of the Praxis Program, an experiment in graduate methodology training that we’ve been conducting at the Scholars’ Lab.

Well, Prism is one outcome of the Praxis Program. The most visible, at the moment. But also the least important.

For one thing, post-launch can be one of the most stressful phases of a project. Surprise! Everyone hits your shiny new site, and it falls over like a house of cards. Then the world watches as you panic and scramble to put it back together. It’s good for character and a good learning experience. But not much fun.

Also, the senior members of this collaboration—the fulltime faculty and staff of the Scholars’ Lab—have always had a different goal for this project: the students themselves. Over the course of the last year, they’ve received learning opportunities that I wish I’d had when I was a graduate student. We’ve tried to equip them to conceive of and plan large, interesting research projects; to evaluate and learn the technologies required to implement those projects; and to administer and manage them from inception to completion. Unfortunately, the most we can do is point out the outlines of the task before them and point them in (hopefully) the right direction. This is a journey they’ll have to travel for many years. But whatever their career paths—whether tenure track faculty, adjunct faculty, alt-ac, or private sector—these skills will be needed.

And in this sense, both Praxis and Prism are just getting started.

Although I wasn’t an absolute newbie to the DH and programming world when Praxis began, I’m still amazed by how much more I know now.  When I began, I knew HTML, CSS, and a smattering of javascript, and now I also know Ruby, Rails, coffeescript, much more javascript, and how to write tests in RSPEC and Jasmine.  I’ve also become better at thinking like a programmer; when I started, it took forever to figure out how to do basic programming tasks, like creating loops or methods, but now it feels straightforward.  I’ve also become much better at trouble-shooting.  I remember when we were all having trouble installing everything we needed for Rails and Ruby, I had no idea what the lines I typed into the terminal meant, and I had no idea what to do when it gave me error messages, but now I understand the error message and know how to fix the problem, or know where to look to find the answers, and I feel much more confident working from the command line instead of the GUI.  The most gratifying experience for me as the developer came from building the highlighting and visualization functionality; it was incredibly empowering to go from having no idea of how to split the task into its component parts or how to then reconnect those parts, to understanding it in the abstract, to actually building the working code.  I especially loved learning how d3.js worked and writing one short algorithm that fundamentally changed the appearance of our text.

I also had a fantastic time working with the rest of the team.  We all learned to work together, to help each other solve problems and design Prism, and to laugh together when things didn’t quite go according to plan.  It’s been a pleasure and an honor to work alongside them, and I’ll definitely miss the group next year.

Although we’ve worked hard and had our stressful times, Praxis has been an incredibly rewarding experience, and I’m grateful to the Scholars’ Lab for giving me the opportunity to be a part of such a fantastic program.

In case you are new to this blog, you should know that Prism is the practicum project of the first cohort of Praxis Program Fellows at the University of Virginia Scholars’ Lab. Six of us have been interning with Scholars’ Lab faculty and staff for the 2011-2012 academic year, as part of a pilot project in team-based graduate methodological training. Praxis aims to produce humanities scholars with practical experience in the work that will underlie theoretical advances in the digital age: the formal representation of knowledge, the design of software and user interfaces, and the management of collaborative teams and complex projects. Over the course of the year, we have been meeting weekly to learn what it takes to theorize and to build a DH project, with the ultimate goal of releasing our own–Prism.

Prism is an experiment in visualizing many readings of a common set of texts, using concepts shared by its users–“the crowd.”  While the Praxis Program itself makes an intervention in graduate training, Prism is an intervention in the concept of crowd-sourcing, which until now has mostly made fact-checkers and copy editors of the crowd.  One of the fundamental questions behind Prism is: what happens when the crowd is asked to imagine and interpret, rather than merely transcribe? The goal of Prism is not to replace individual interpretations, but to produce aesthetic provocations, that is, collective visualizations that incite and encourage conversation.

Now that you know what Prism is, who made it, and why, we invite you to go use it! We welcome conversation (we are humanities grad students, after all), so feel free to share your thoughts, feedback, or suggestions in the comment field below. If you encounter a bug, please report it on our GitHub page where you can also find our open source code and documentation.

And stay tuned for further blog posts from Praxis Program team members this week, reflecting on what we’ve learned and looking forward to what’s next.

–Sarah Storti and Brooke Lestock, for the 2011-12 Praxis Team

• Cecilia Márquez, History
• Chris Peck, Music
• Claire Maiers, Sociology
• Gwen Nally, Philosophy
• Shane Lin, History
• Sophia Gu, English

We’re particularly excited about the diversity of backgrounds and experiences of this new cohort.  While they may well end up extending the Prism tool developed by this year’s project participants, they will bring their own unique combination of disciplinary perspective and technical and social know-how to the program and we look forward to seeing where we end up going together.  We can’t wait to get started with them in the fall.

As always, Praxis 2012/13 will be a journey shared in the open: follow developments at praxis.scholarslab.org.

This is just a quick post to share two bits of news about our Praxis Program at the Scholars’ Lab. The first is that I’ve written an op-ed on Praxis and our Fellows’ practicum project for this year’s Digital Campus special issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The piece was originally titled “Praxis, Through Prisms” — now “A Digital Boot Camp for Grad Students in the Humanities.” It’s pay-walled, for now, but I’ll re-publish it in open access format in 30 days.

by Chad Hagen for The Chronicle

Check it out to learn more about the program, get a sneak peek at Prism (launching this Tuesday, which is the second newsflash! congrats, team!) and find out what I see as the great project of humanities computing / digital humanities. Spoiler: it’s “the development of a hermeneutic–a concept and practice of interpretation–parallel to that of the dominant, postwar, theory-driven humanities: a way of performing cultural and aesthetic criticism less through solitary points of view expressed in language, and more in team-based acts of building.”

Or, in other words, the kind of thing our amazing grad students and diverse crew of scholar-practitioners are working on at Praxis. Through Prism(s).

I’m incredibly proud of the UVa Library staff who have devoted so much energy to teaching and mentoring Praxis Fellows this year (Wayne Graham, Jeremy Boggs, Eric Rochester, David McClure, and Eric Johnson) — and even more proud of our first six Fellows themselves, who have built Prism independently. These are Sarah Storti, Brooke Lestock, Annie Swafford, Lindsay O’Connor, Alex Gil, and Ed Triplett. And in fact, they’ve built Prism from scratch, on time, in public (perhaps the scariest part), with great good humor, and having started with very little practical experience in digital humanities design and development. Lately, I haven’t been able to stop myself from interrupting everything in our weekly Praxis meetings to make exclamations like, “Look at you guys! Look what you can do!”

So I hope you’ll stay tuned through this week to the Scholars’ Lab blog, the Praxis site, and to our @PraxisProgram and @ScholarsLab Twitter feeds, for posts on the launch of the Prism beta, an announcement of our 2012-13 Praxis Fellows, and reflections by current Praxis grad students and the rest of the team.

Jasmine is a BDD framework for testing javascript.  It basically does for javascript what RSpec does for Ruby.  It took over a week to get it set up, and we had to also learn to use a few more ruby gems (jasmine-jquery and  Guard), but we finally got it to test our javascript.  It’s incredibly useful, not only because it gives an error message when something fails (which is how I learned that our eraser functionality wasn’t working properly), but also because it encouraged me to rewrite some of my javascript.  I discovered that I needed to do some refactoring to make the tests easier, and now the code is much clearer.

The next project was tweaking the visualization page: I had built it so that users had to click on the categories to see the visualizations, but the team  pointed out that users would probably rather see a visualization from the start.  I was able to change our code so that users will always see a visualization for the first category of any given text as soon as the page loads.

Finally, we needed to include error messages for Devise, our ruby gem that handles user authentication.  Although we had already written a bunch of error and notification messages (ie. “Invalid Password” or “Your password has been emailed to your account”), we hadn’t added the necessary code to make it work.  After adding a partial file and rendering it on the main application page, and then styling it with CSS, I was able to make all our error and notification messages show up!   Now, the design team will make them look attractive and Alex will add internationalization for the messages, and we’ll be all set!

It’s been a busy week, but it looks like we’ll be able to make our deadline!

For the past couple of weeks, I have been working instead on the small stuff that needed to be done to roll Prism into production. Enter the plumbing. What I thought would be a series of small tasks turned out to be a major time vacuum. At issue was getting Heroku to play nice with what we had built in the development branch. The first two weeks, Heroku would not even display our site. A series of ‘Application Error’ messages was all I got. The culprits, in no particular order: the Asset Pipeline, Devise and Jasmine. Eventually, with help from above (i.e. E. Rochester and W. Graham), we got the site running …and then the Herokulypse.

Once in a while a bug comes, so uncanny, so daunting, that it makes you want to become a novelist. That was the Herokulypse. I obsessed about it for three days at the expense of my dissertation and everything else, with no results. The great obi-wayne-kenobot finally found the problem. To my relief I was on the right track trying to solve it. I just didn’t figure out the part about disabling page caching on the pages controller. Live and learn, and learn I did: Plumbing is real.

I found the lesson timely at a moment when we are debating the obstacles and affordances of coding for digital humanities. The experience with the Herokulypse really brought home for me the idea that code is labor, and that the digital humanities really puts pressure on our notions of leisure, labor and power. I am still working out these issues –issues which all my predecessors seem to have encountered in one way or another– and will be sure to report back to the public when I have more insights.

In the meantime, I won’t ask you to be careful of what you wish for. On the contrary, I will encourage you to scurry down the rabbit hole of code, that you may never think yourself superior to anyone who leans on the side of hack over yack.

Our visualizations now display with the correct colors! This change was surprisingly complicated, since it involved adding yet another function in our d3.js algorithm, but it made a huge difference.

I also made another important change that will improve the user experience. On the right-hand side of the page, we have a key that shows which categories correspond to which colors: each category appears to the right of a little colored box. I wrote javascript that adds a black border around the correct colored box when a user selects a category to make it clearer which category has been selected. We decided to make this change instead of changing the cursor to look like a highlighter.

Our final update involves user accounts: originally, users had to log in to access the sandbox (a sample text that users can highlight as a way of practicing before they highlight our three main texts), but I was able to find a way to bypass the login system, so now everyone can use the sandbox without logging in.

The next step is to write tests for my javascript with Jasmine, which I will learn how to do today! Once we have this task completed, I think we’ll just have design work left, since we have all the functionality we want for this version of our tool. We’ve almost finished building Prism!

So, what is it exactly that I’ll be doing? At this point I’m thinking of my role as having two main streams. The first stream focuses on understanding and reforming methodological training in humanities graduate programs, and consists of two related projects: a census and a survey. Through the census, which will become a part of the #Alt-Academy website, I will seek out humanities-trained scholars who self-identify as working in alt-ac roles; the results will be displayed as a dynamic and searchable directory on #Alt-Academy. It’s important to me that the census cast a wide net in order to get as complete a picture as possible of the constellations of people working in alt-ac positions.

The census, useful in its own right, will also be a stepping stone leading towards another goal: working from the census, I will be administering a survey of alt-academics in order to determine opportunities for improved career preparation and refined methodological training in humanities programs. The survey responses, which will be strictly confidential, will help us to move beyond the anecdotal and gain concrete understanding of the skills that advanced humanities programs currently provide relative to the needs that graduates of the programs experience in their careers. Once it’s complete, a report on the survey results will be published by CLIR.

The second work stream involves supporting and sharing outcomes from a series of meetings that SCI will be convening on reforming humanities graduate education and on the continued development of new models of scholarly publishing and authoring. The meetings focusing on graduate education reform will be held in partnership with CHCI and centerNet, and will probe more deeply into questions raised by the results of the survey mentioned above, as well as many other issues surrounding graduate education. The meetings on scholarly publishing and authoring are in partnership with three outstanding projects from the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, PressForward, and the Modern Language Association’s program in scholarly communication. For each of these meetings (the first of which takes place in early May), I’ll be providing research support and documenting the substance of the conversations. Needless to say, I’m very much looking forward to taking part in both sets of meetings, which include extraordinary people.

I’ll post updates here from time to time, so watch for more as the weeks go by! I’ll also continue posting to my personal blog and my Twitter feed, so if you’re interested in the topics I’ll be working on, you may enjoy keeping an eye on those unofficial channels as well. Finally, I’ll be seeking input for the census and survey over the coming weeks (both in terms of who to include and what questions to ask), so if you have thoughts or questions, please feel free to connect with me directly.