listening to repeating

Yesterday, on the University of Washington’s Seattle campus, our local group of HASTAC scholars facilitated a conversation on “Evaluating Digital Scholarship: Expertise, Storage, Design.”

I was glad to see a wide array of folks (from various departments and programs) attend.  Now, a day after the event, it strikes me that the question of where digital scholarship is stored (and how it’s stored) especially resonated with the group, as well as the question of what are the standards for digital scholarship.

And I know “standards” can be off-putting for some; nevertheless, there’s a lot to be learned about them from the work of Susan Leigh Star, Geoffrey Bowker, and others in the field of Science and Technology Studies.  Put pithily, standards (e.g., metadata standards) aren’t static or inflexible.  Of course, they change over time, and those of us who are engaged in digital scholarship might gain a lot from studying how, exactly, standards emerge and how they affect our respective fields, not to mention our everyday lives (for better or worse).

Read the rest of this entry →

As part of the panel, “Gaining a Public Voice: Alternative Genres of Publication for Graduate Students,” I’ll be giving a talk at this year’s MLA Convention.  The talk’s titled, “Animating Audiences: Digital Publication Projects and Their Publics.”  Scheduled for Tuesday, December 29th, the panel begins at 7:15 p.m., in room 405 of the Philadelphia Marriott.  Here’s the abstract:

How do the authors and designers of digital publication projects in the humanities imagine audiences for new research, and how do the audiences who actually emerge differ, if at all, from the audiences initially imagined? With these questions in mind, this paper explores the ever-shifting role of target audiences and actual audiences in three of my current digital publication projects: a co-authored article and “geoblog” prototype published in the online journal, Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy; a co-authored digital book chapter on metadata standards; and a digital-only chapter of my dissertation, which is on the influence of sound technologies on Anglo-American literature.  I demonstrate how these digital projects altered how I perceive the writing and research process, namely because they resituate expertise as a phenomena shared between academics and their publics.  This shared expertise by necessity reconfigures how graduate students, like me, publish their work, keeping in mind how audiences access and feed back into humanities research.  I point to the relevance of the digital book chapter on metadata to technology professionals and of the Kairos article to geographers and non-academics in the Seattle area.  I then explain how the demands of these audiences map digital humanities research onto the public humanities, to conclude with an analysis—and a brief demonstration—of my digital-only dissertation chapter.   The chapter, which is the only chapter in my dissertation not intended for print, is an attempt to “animate” the other four chapters of my dissertation.  By “animating,” I imply not only visualizing the arguments and evidence from my print-oriented chapters through a blend of Flash, PHP, CSS, MySQL and XHTML.  I also imply engaging audiences, including non-academics, in ways that print may not necessarily afford.  Put this way, digital publication projects move beyond simply re-presenting information in new media.  They enable the production of new knowledge.

Looking forward!

Just a quick note: Zotero has a WordPress plugin that (per their website) “embeds a COinS tag in each blog post, making relevant metadata visible to Zotero (post title, author, date, blog title, categories, and URL).”

I’ve installed the plugin for this site, and it seems to work like a charm.  If you use Zotero (p.s., it’s fantastic), then—when visiting this site—you should now see the appropriate blog icon on the far right of your browser’s address bar.  When clicking on that icon, you will grab the bibliographic metadata for any page or post on this site and add it to your Zotero collection.  Nice! Nerdy! Lifelogging!

Read the rest of this entry →

Curtis and I are whipping up a website for Friday’s “Composing with Metadata in Mind” presentation at the 2008 Watson Conference.  It’s still in the making, but here’s the URL.

Go team. That includes you, too, Bono.

Aside from SLSA, I’m also happy to say that I’ll be presenting at this year’s Watson Conference, “The New Work of Composing,” at the University of Louisville, October 16-18.  Here’s the schedule, as well as the lineup of featured speakers.

Together with Jamie Bono (University of Pittsburgh) and Curtis Hisayasu (University of Washington), I’ll be participating in a panel entitled, “Composing with Metadata in Mind.”  And below’s the description of what we’ll be doing—or at least attempting to do:

From marginalia to markup, metadata plays an increasingly ambiguous role in how we understand composition, revision, and collaboration. In fact, there’s apparently no end to metadata in the “second generation” World Wide Web: seemingly infinite tags mapped onto a photo, one blog entry alone in fifty categories, and a long list of Google-baiting comments underneath a video all have equal claim on the term. That said, how should metadata function in networked writing environments? How, when, and for whom is it productive? And how does foregrounding it change the work of composing? Unlike approaches that consider metadata as little more than an organizational afterthought, this panel explores options for positioning metadata as an emergent part of composition. From the vantage of instructors in English composition and digital media, we contextualize metadata’s potential as a critical and creative tool. Focusing on gebologging, in particular, the first panelist attends to metadata as a means of “localizing” compositional practices, such as digital photography, and mapping them onto larger socio-political landscapes. Through a discussion of folksonomic tagging, the second panelist addresses metadata’s ability to facilitate dynamic collaboration and form organic discourse communities by creating symbolic links between texts. The third and final panelist returns to geoblogging, but from a different angle, by unpacking how geospatial data and the desire for precision intersect with capturing, documenting, and situating everyday events.

I’m in the process of looking for any research on how “ALT” attributes and metadata, generally speaking, influence the search for images and video online. Particularly, I’m interested in the digitization of race, gender, and sexuality and how often they are included in tags.

If you know of any such research, then let me know. I’d like to use it for the technoculture studies course I’m teaching in the fall, as well as for facilitating some undergraduate research. What’s more, I can’t find much, at least in relation to race, gender, or sexuality, and I’m honestly surprised. Maybe, ironically enough, I’m using the wrong search terms?

Here’s more on meta tags and searching, and below is a video (from Google), featuring Matt Cutts, on “ALT” attributes and search optimization: