Gender. Coding. Libraries. Digital Humanities. And Timelines

Gender. Coding. Libraries. Digital Humanities. Where to begin?

Let's start with a Timeline.

Yesterday, out of nowhere really, I came to a particular insight to why Facebook was transitioning its users to the Timeline profile format. It suddenly became clear to me that users will eventually find it very difficult to leave Facebook once they realize that a significant portion of their lives and the lives of their friends and family have been so well captured and expressed and - I suspect - made unexportable -- by Facebook.

I think of leaving Facebook myself from time to time. So I thought I should make my own Timeline outside of Facebook now in the present, so I could kill my Facebook self off in the future without losing the digital artifacts of my past. I remembered that Peter Rukavina had written about Timelines some months ago and went off to investigate whether the software that he recommended was out of closed beta...

This morning I received an unexpected email from memolane of a picture that I took five years ago. A surprise from my past from my personal timeline of pictures and words. It felt good.

At this point I'd like to point out something obvious: digital photography has completely transformed the nature of photography. In doing so, it has transformed how we represent ourselves and others, and you could arguably make the case that it has transformed who we are.

I like to say, "we are all librarians now"  but maybe it's a more powerful statement to say, "we are all archivists now."

Meanwhile, both Katherine Harris and Lauren Klein show how archives are often silent when it comes to the representation of minorities, and Lauren (in one of the most powerful instances of topic modeling I’ve found in recent criticism) shows how digital technology can think through those silences. 

The quote above is a quotation from a post titled, DH, Archival Silence, and Linked Open Data., a post that is begins with this:

I’m thinking through many of the interesting conversations occurring around Twitter and the DH blogosphere recently. First, Miriam Posner had a really powerful post about learning code and gender, where she argues that the broad exhortation to code covers up gender and diversity inequity. 

This post you are reading is, in essence, another response to Miriam's post but it didn't start with it. I've been thinking about re-visiting gender and technology ever since last week when a couple tweets and posts from libraryland struck a discordant chord within:

One of the most important blog posts for librarians to read this year: nicolasmorin.com/?p=1135
— Roy Tennant (@rtennant) February 27, 2012

The "important blog post" referred to above exhorts librarians to be more like engineers in a start-up. While others evidently have critiqued this post using the lens of gender, my more immediate concern is that it guilelessly reduced the profession to "identify problem, test minimal viable product, find product-market fit, validate business model, grow."

So.... illiteracy === opportunity!!!

The best response I have heard to this line of thinking comes from Bret Victor and he addresses the paucity of problem solving in engineering/computers/design in this recent keynote:


Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle from CUSEC on Vimeo.

If you are unable or unwilling to spend an hour on this remarkable video, here's the short version from Bret Victor's bio:

"There is no 'Technology'. There is no 'Design'. There is only a vision of how mankind should be and the relentless resolve to make it so. The rest is details."

(Mankind? Who uses that word anymore? Ah, yes, let's get back to the matter of gender, technologies, libraries, and digital humanities.)

Bethany Nowviskie wrote a wonderfully humane post called "don't circle the wagons" partly in response to the outpouring of response to Posner's "Some things to think about before you exhort everyone to code".

I bring attention to that humanity, because these days when the conversation turns to technology and libraries,  it's not always there :

Librarians who say they "aren't techy types" might want consider changing that rather than using it as an excuse for not doing things.
— Emily Clasper (@eclasper) February 28, 2012

At this point I'd like to point out something obvious: digital text has completely transformed the nature of libraries. In doing so, it has transformed how librarians represent ourselves and others, and you could arguably make the case that it has transformed who we are. 

While the tensions within/betwixt /between the humanities and the digital humanities are real and worth concern, I would make the case that they are, dare I say it?, are academic compared to what is currently being played out within libraries and librarianship. Simply put, we may not survive.

Or, on the other hand, we might be at the beginning of a golden age of librarians.  Even so,.

But what I fear it represents is a sense that we cannot stop doing all of the things that our librarians are currently doing in order to address the challenges of dealing with digital materials, so we are going to create one position and get some smart and energetic librarian who can handle everything associated with digital. And then the rest of us can continue doing the essential jobs that we are doing and not have to worry about all that weird stuff.

But if we are not all thinking of ourselves as digital services librarians, we are in trouble.

We are in trouble. Too many of my colleagues think that you can just hire and boss around a programmer to do all the necessary grunt work to support and visualize their theoretical aspirations. But, as Bethany Nowviskie has repeatedly had to point out: digital work is theory in manifest.  Also,

DH is slightly uncomfortable territory for programmers, as I've written in the past, at least it is for people like me who mostly program rather than academics who write code to accomplish their ends. I speak in generalities, and there are good local exceptions, but we don't get adequate (or often any) professional development funding, we don't get research time, we don't get credit for academic stuff we may do (like writing papers, presenting at conferences, etc.), we don't get to lead projects, and our jobs are very often contingent on funding. All this in exchange for about a 30% pay cut over what we could be earning in industry [Scripto Continua: A spot of mansplaining].  

On a local listserv, a colleague from another university asked a question that has been sitting with me like a splinter beneath the skin, "Are those with web skills obliged by management to do the digital work of colleagues with no skills?" (my paraphrasing).

My friends, this is the crux of what I am trying to reconcile.

Do I exhort my colleagues to learn how to code? Do I tell them, it's a program or be programmed world? Do I tell them that it's our responsibility to create online services and spaces that embody and extend the highest values of our profession and of citizenship? Do I try to make the case that we need to pass on a proficiency with tools that handle data deluge rather than paper-bound scarcity? Do I warn them that general purpose computing is at stake? That those without their own server space will be forever be second class citizens of the web?

No, I do not.

Sometimes I find - especially when the conversation turns to gender, or class, or race and culture, that speaking in generalizations just isn't useful. Sometimes I find times when conservations need to leave the level of abstraction and to come honestly from the individual and the personal.

Let me tell you why I am learning how to code.

I want to learn to program because of people like Peter Rukavina. I'm inspired by his civic data projects, by his PEI Wind Energy Dashboard, and for his experiments in curiosity such as "How much do I cost the health system"?  There are so many other people I know and respect who also have a relentless resolve to understand, to celebrate, and to make the world better. They share a generosity of time and spirit and I want to live up to their examples.

I want to make it clear that gender issues in relation to computing and relating to power is very important and it's still very important to me.

It's still on my Timeline.

Making Links and Open Linked Data at The Great Lakes THATCamp

Usually I wait a couple days after a conference before I try to write down and share what I’ve learned. But because it will only be two short days until I’m on my way to code4lib North and because I have two deadlines to bravely confront before then, I have to write down what I have learned from this weekend’s Great Lakes THATCamp *right now* for better or for worse.

I was going to work on the aforementioned deadlines on Friday night as I would be holed away in alone in a hotel room in East Lansing, but the workshop that I had attended that morning - Jon Voss’s workshop, Intro to Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives & Museums (#lodlam) - had triggered an epiphany...

About half-way through the morning's workshop, Jon had told a story of when he and some “computer people” had visited the folks at the Library of Congress. Jon and his friends had been collecting data by screen-scraping the Library of Congress website and the folks at LoC were surprised and asked them why they didn’t just collect the data through z39.50 or OAI-PMH. And, to paraphrase the response, they were all like wot’s dat?

I mention this because the same thing happened to me during Jon’s session. Because I was coming from a library context, I did not recognize the tools of those working with the semantic web. But once I was introduced to them, I recognized them. Let’s see if I can help you can recognize them too. One caveat: what follows is what I understand about open, linked data and that’s not necessarily reality. If I am mistaken about something, feel free to school me oh pedantic web. 

Ok. Let’s start with z39.50. Generally a user will visit a library website to search a library catalogue, but there is a standard that exists called z39.50 that allows a user (or a computer program) to search a library catalogue from outside of the website. This is the protocol that allows users to search library catalogues from within citation managers such as RefWorks and Endnote and allows for users to search multiple library catalogues is such services as RACER.

Next, OAI-PMH. This stands for Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. Instead of library catalogues, OAI-PMH is designed for Digital Collections, like institutional repositories. The idea is that if you make your individual repository open for “harvesting”, another service can gather information about your collection. You might know about one particular service that uses OAI to harvest metadata from repositories. It’s called Google Scholar.

Now, we are entering the exciting new world of linked, open data. And it’s early days - like 1997 all over again. And people and organizations are starting to provide open, linked data... for programs that haven’t been written yet. 

Well, there are some programs that have been written... but I’ll get to them in just a moment. 

If you’ve read through Jon’s presentation on Linked Open Data, you know that linked, open data relies on descriptions that are meant to be read by machines. If you want to earn 5 stars of open, linked data you can create a FOAF to introduce yourself to code.Here’s Ed Summer’s FOAF  (firefox will display the file but chrome and safari might attempt to download it -- so I’ve provided a screenshot below). 

(You can create one yourself using it as a template or you can find a FOAF generator to make one yourself).

Now, imagine that you are responsible for creating a staff directory for your institution of higher education. You *could* create individual FOAF’s for your staff. If you go this route, you would of course first check to see if there is an established way to semantically describe departments and programs in higher education, so you don’t re-invent the wheel and so you will make it easier for future machines to make connections between your staff and the staff of other institutions. Here’s one for UK institutions that I found via Patrick Murray-John’s post, Thoughts Toward a Giant EduGraph. Or, you could download an application that creates a directory of researchers and their research interests and works that automagically produces semantic descriptions for you. Like VIVO from Cornell University Library.

During the workshop, I asked Jon the question, “If you download VIVO onto your own server, will your information would be available to be searched like the other VIVO instances” and he replied that he thought so as, VIVO would presumably have a SPARQL endpoint. And I replied,wot’s dat?

And that’s when I learned SPARQL is the query protocol that is like SQL but for semantic information in RDF. In other words, it’s like the z39.50 that connects and queries library catalogues and OAI that connects and queries digital repositories.

Now, I know that it’s more complicated than that. I suspect that semantic data can be harvested without SPARQL. I think this because on Friday night I was fiercely determined to use my improved understanding of open linked data to find out how Drupal 7 incorporates RDF. And my persistence paid off because I found this illuminating screencast, The story of RDF in Drupal 7 and what it means for the Web at large. And by watching this one hour presentation, I learned of a tool called Sindice Inspector that makes visible the semantic descriptions of a given webpage.  And using this tool, I found RDF descriptions in Drupal 7 that I had already been creating without even knowing it. 

So the Next Action is now clear. I need to read up on semantic drupal and to muck about to find out how I can create sound semantic data using Drupal 7. I suspect that I will be writing up these adventures in my workplace blog about our website development. 

I hope I will be able to write a little bit more about the other wonderful things that I learned at the Great Lakes THATCamp. The semantic web runs on love. And so does THATCamp.  

Only connect.

An unconference runs on love - The Great Lakes THAT Camp

I’m not the type of person to live-tweet bon mots during conferences and other get-togethers . I need the time to ruminate my experiences. It’s been over 72 hours since the end of The Great Lakes THAT Camp and it’s only now that the impact of what just happened has hit me with full force.

This was my first unconference I’ve attended and I tried to pay special attention to how the event was set up because I’ll be organizing my first unconference in a little more than a month. And I have to say that this experience with the format has only confirmed how powerful such an event can be.

I think a large part of this power came from the fact that a THAT Camp is an embodiment of gift-culture. Attendance is voluntary. The registration fee is voluntary. Your session attendance is voluntary. Your contribution to the conversation is voluntary. Consequently, every exchange and every conversation feels like a gift. Furthermore, when I arrived at the Great Lakes THAT Camp, I felt I was showered with gifts: a t-shirt, personalized QR codes, stickers, papercraft, lunch tickets, and the all-important drink ticket. The internet runs on love. So does an unconference.

Here are some of the design decision I noticed that I think help make the event such a success.

First, by asking individuals to tell about themselves and to write a session description before they attended, campers were given an opportunity to start the process of getting to know each other and to start to see connections between their work and their interests with those of other people. If you look through the profiles of the Great Lake campers, you can see some of the common threads: oral history, maps museums, text mining, archaeology, games libraries, and educational technology.

Future campers beware! There is an inherent desire for participants to ask for broad-based sessions and even streams of sessions around such threads. At least, there were such desires at the Great Lakes THAT camp. But if you can, resist this temptation. It’s not that these broad-termed sessions were poor - far from it. But I make the recommendation based on my personal observation that, as counter-intuitive as it seems, narrow topics tended to bring out wide themes while broad themed discussions forced participants to address a series of narrow ideas. My gut feeling is this is because there broader topics are too closely aligned with allegiances of scholarly disciplines. A session on “educational technology” will tend to fill a room with people who teach.

One of my favourite sessions was one dedicated to “material culture.” Stated as such, it brought together museum folk, archaeologists, historians, teachers, and librarians, among others and this mixture fermented a heady brew of ideas. And if you ever find yourself in such a room with so many different experiences and points of view at the table, try to take advantage of it and ask the room a really hard question like, “How would you digitize a steam engine?”

Understand that there’s a bait and switch going on. You are asked to submit a session and describe yourself and your work, but at a THAT Camp you are expected to use that work as a starting point for discussion. To curb constant self-promotion in conversations, an outlet is provided to allow campers to concentrate on conversation and collaboration: the unfortunately named, Dork Shorts. At Great Lakes THAT Camp, these 2 minute elevator pitches were held at the end of the two day event but I’ve heard that at other camps, they are held earlier on in the schedule.

Another unconference design feature that I thought well of was the “Room of Requirement”. It was a room were you could sit down with your own thoughts or a place where you could converse with others outside of the formal informal conversations being taken place elsewhere. Every conference should have such a space.

I also appreciated that this THAT Camp (I love saying “this THAT Camp”) opted not to post a live “twitterfall” of ongoing tweets inside of each discussion room. Erik Marshall told us that his experience has been that such a set up tended to continually distract the speaker. But that being said I found that having access to a live Twitter feed was invaluable. Those campers who were live-tweeting the event informed others on what subjects were being spoken to in real time. So, when I learned that a conversation about coffee shops and libraries was gearing up in the room next door, (while the conversation in the my room as gearing down) I exercised the law of two feet.

Today I learned that there is to be a Toronto THAT Camp but it’s restricted to only members of the University of Toronto “community.” I find this very disappointing and I hope they reconsider their decision because it seems to be not not in the spirit of a gift culture. And I hope they do it for their own sake because otherwise they are going to deny themselves joy.