"Shock and Awe" Graphs in Digital Humanities

As you can see here, this graph, representing ten million points of data, plotted logarithmically against seven million other points of data in a counter-clockwise fashion, with a smoothing value of 3 and scaled by a function of the distance from my elbow to my fingertips, designed by a particularly gifted graphic artist at Bewilderment Inc., CLEARLY shows that eighteenth century cattle had a strong preference for south facing barns.

Can't argue with that. But I will anyway.

Over the past two years I've been noticing a rise in what I like to call "shock and awe" graphs in digital humanities, designed to overwhelm their audience and perhaps even to evoke doubt in one’s own abilities to compete in the same scholarly conversation. These graphics are both incredibly complex representations of data, and incredibly beautiful. If we got rid of the axes, we might even be tempted to hang them as art. A colleague of mine used the term "poster graph" to describe these works. The idea behind that name was that the graph looked nice enough to blow up and put on a poster. Implicitly, this colleague suggested that represented in this manner, the data was likely to impress and captivate. Great. But are complex graphs good for scholarship? 

Scholarship shared between academics is not inherently meant to impress. It is meant for making discoveries. And so, while complex graphs are beautiful, they have a time and place.

Exploring data is certainly one of those times. Complex representations of data are sometimes the only way we can make some types of discoveries. Our eyes are, after all, great at noticing patterns. In a recent example (of which I was quite openly critical), trends in a set of data only became evident when it was plotted logarithmically. This graph then led the researchers on the trail of some interesting discoveries that would not have otherwise been possible. I have no issue with this. I have no issue with quantitative analysis.

I also have no issue with attempting to engage an audience who might not otherwise be interested in the research. I'm always thrilled to see historians, archaeologists, and mathematicians discussing their work on TV or on radio. That's fantastic. And in those cases, a "shock and awe" graph is probably appropriate. After all we have to sell what we do if we hope to compete with the Hollywood pros and the increasingly popular data journalists in major news outlets for the scant attention of the masses.

But I do have issue with shock and awe graphs sneaking into work intended for academic colleagues – particularly in peer reviewed work, and particularly when the complexity of the graph is not absolutely necessary to the conveyance of information. I do have issue with the fact that many very intelligent people who are responsible for evaluating the truth of these claims do not have the skills to interrogate these complex visualizations. These graphs have seemingly come out of nowhere for many who have spent their entire careers working almost exclusively with text and perhaps only simple numbers. For interdisciplinary work, there is a good chance that the first time many researchers will come across a "shock and awe" graph is when they have been handed a paper to review for a journal.

Understandably it can be embarrassing to realise you do not have the skills to critically assess the work in a field to which you have devoted your life. By handing someone a graph you know they likely cannot appraise, you are deliberately playing towards their sense of insecurity. It is easy to say the problem is numerical literacy but we must remember these are extraordinarily complex visualizations. It takes a lot of skill and a lot of learning before someone can create these graphs. It takes a comparable amount of time to learn how best to interpret them. And not everyone has had the luxury of focusing his or her time on that skill. In some cases surely the reviewer passes the graph through the filters unchecked. It’s less embarrassing that way. 

I don’t believe this is just a matter of numerical literacy levels. I’d go so far as to suggest that these graphs are often intentionally overwhelming and unnecessary for making the argument. But this is not my greatest worry. From the perspective of good scholarship a shock and awe graph is impossible to test. And therein lies the biggest problem. You plot tens of thousands of points on a complex multi-coloured, multi-dimensional scatter plot. The reviewer gets a static image. How do you test that exactly? How do you know there hasn’t been a dramatic mistake in the way the information was put on the graph? How do you know the data are even real?

You can't. You don’t. And I believe too often their creators know this and hope that in an effort not to expose one's own weaknesses, a reviewer will overlook parts he or she does not fully understand. Shock and awe becomes one way to increase the chances you will get a publication for your CV. I suppose we can’t blame people for looking out for their own career development. But, one day someone will take advantage of this knowledge and will cheat. That is, if they have not already.

Cheating in academia is not altogether unheard of. The humanities have long battled with plagiarism. Famously, Saif Gaddafi was accused of having parts of his thesis ghost-written while studying at the London School of Economics, leading to the resignation of LSE's director Howard Davies shortly thereafter. Plagiarism is a war that may always persist. But with the introduction of digital humanities in collaborative efforts with more traditional humanist fields, we now have to watch out for the faked results that researchers like Jatinder Ahluwalia have been accused of committing.

Ahluwalia recently made headlines after allegedly faking research results during his PhD work at Imperial College London and later during a Post-Doc at University College London. The investigation into Ahluwalia's work led to the embarrassing retractions of papers in the Journal of Neurochemistry, Nature, and a parting of ways between Ahluwalia and his employer, the University of East London.

We now need safeguards to protect the integrity of the good work out there, and to allow people to critically evaluate our results. One way to do that is to be hyper-critical of the very graphs we love to look at so much. Do they convey the data in the most straightforward way possible? Are they produced in a way that allows the data to speak for themselves, or are colour, size, shape, scale, orientation, or any other number of variables manipulated in a way that seeks to draw the reader to a conclusion that may not be the correct or only interpretation? Even something as simple as the order in which data points are put on a scatter plot can drastically change how one interprets the results. Points that are put on first may be covered up by later points, thus hiding or highlighting a trend that may not exist.

There will always be people who distrust numbers or who scoff at digital humanists as a bunch of bean counters. That can be frustrating, but it is also invigorating to know that there are those out there who will be sceptical of what we produce. We need this scepticism and we need to meet it head on if our work will be accepted. We can either work towards quelling this type of scepticism by ensuring our graphs present necessary information as transparently as possible, or we can attempt to silence it through a policy of shock and awe, with ever-complex representations of increasingly intricate datasets.

We'll likely make more friends if we take the former approach.

So before you publish a visualization, please take a moment and step back. As in the cult classic, Office Space, ask yourself: Is this Good for the Company?

Is this Good for Scholarship?

Or am I just trying to overwhelm my reviewers and my audience?

photo credit: “Swirling a Mystery” by garlandcannon 

Tricks for Transcribing High-Contrast Historical Reproductions

If you spend enough time as a historical researcher, you're bound to come across the black blob. The blob - also referred to by its more technical name: "those letters I can't make out because of the stupid contrast levels on the reproduction" - is far more common than many of us would like, especially in online databases containing copies of original historical materials. It may not be the fault of the digitizers; the problem may have first occured decades ago when the source was transferred to microfilm or microfiche. Whatever the cause, it forces many a historian to squint and hypothesize about what lays behind. This post will provide a possible solution to the blob, using free software and straightforward techniques. It will not work in all cases, but it may conquer some blobs.

The above image is an unadulterated screenshot of a Vagrancy Removal Record from Middlesex County in the 1780s, found on the London Lives website. The original source contains lists of names of those forceably removed from Middlesex County. We've clearly got an Elizabeth "Eliz" and a Joseph here. But the contrast on the image is too high to make out their surnames. London Lives does offer full transcripts of everything on the website. Unfortunately, the transcribers were unable to decypher the names and left these particular entries incomplete. We too could pass them by, but if we are interested in what's underneath we can turn to a photo editing program to make an attempt.

This tutorial uses GIMP, a free open-source image processing program not unlike PhotoShop. Feel free to use the program with which you are most comfortable.

Step 1: Save the Original Image

I was using a Mac, so I took advantage of the handy screen capture feature (Cmd + Shift + 4), which allowed me to snag only the part of the image I was interested in correcting. Alternatively you could save the whole image by right-clicking it and using the "Save As" feature.

Step 2: Open the Image in an Image Processing Program

As mentioned above, if you do not already have an image processing program, try out GIMP. It is free after all.

Step 3: Adjust Brightness / Contrast

Open the "Brightness/Contrast" box located under the "Color" menu. Increase the brightness and contrast. In this example I've changed brightness by 118 and contrast by 103. Play with the sliders to get a result that works best for your particular source. You may even find it works better for you if you decrease one or the other. If you max out the values and need even more brightness or contrast, click OK and re-open the same dialogue box. This will allow you to repeat the process. You should notice some of the black blob beginning to fade and reveal hints of what might be underneath. This will probably occur first closer to the edge of the blob. You may now have all the information you need to finish the transcription. If so, great. If not, keep reading.


Step 4: Colorize

This feature is also located under the "Color" menu. This will help us to make the hidden letters pop out from amidst the shades of grey and black. Feel free to play with the sliders here to see if you can brighten up the results to the point where you are comfortable reading them. Sometimes I find it helps to decrease the "lightness" value while increasing the "saturation".

If you are still having trouble reading the words you can go back and repeat the process by again adjusting the contrast and brightness, and fiddling with the colours even more. If that doesn't work, you can move on to step 5.


Step 5: Trace What you Can See

For this step I like to use a USB tablet and pen, which lets me write to the screen in a fashion that's a bit more natural feeling than trying to draw using my mouse. If you don't have one you can do it with a mouse too. Choose the pen tool from the Toolbox and reduce the "Scale" of the brush to something appropriate for the size of the handwriting. Next, choose a nice bright colour that will stand out against the background colours you have chosen. Then, take your time and trace over whatever letters or bits of letters you can see.


As you can see from this example, we have been quite successful. What was once a "man Eliz" and a "ll Joseph" is quite obviously a "Hayman Eliz" and a "Hill Joseph". We did not get every part of every letter, but we did get enough new information to piece together the missing names.

This process may take a few minutes, but it can be worthwhile if your project depends upon decyphering the letters beyond the black blob. Unfortunately, it will not work in all cases. For this technique to work you do need a black blob with some shading variation. Computers store images as a series of coloured pixels with values ranging from completely black to completely white. Many black blobs are actually very dark grey blobs that look black to our eye. If there are shades of grey in your blob, and those shades correspond with the hidden letters underneath, as is often the case, then this technique may help you peel back the black and find what you are looking for.

Happy transcribing.

Citation in Digital Humanities: Is the Old Bailey Online a Film, or a Science Paper?

Recently I was writing a paper for a journal and needed to cite the Old Bailey Online (OBO). Not any particular piece of content contained in the project, but the project itself as an outstanding example of digital humanities work. For those unfamiliar with the venture, it's a database containing 127 million words of historical trial transcripts marked up extensively with XML; still the flagship project of its kind in this author's opinion. I found myself struggling to decide who the authors of the project were; that is, whose names was I bound by "good scholarship" to include in the citation. Who deserved public credit? I happen to meet regularly with one of the project's principle investigators, Tim Hitchcock of the University of Hertfordshire, and raised the issue with him over drinks at the pub - incidently the pub is the most engaging place to discuss topics as dry as citation practices and the discussion becomes increasingly more engaging as the evening progresses. As it happens, the project had over 40 known contributors who actively participated in its creation. His initial response was that the team decided not to include any names when citing the project to avoid leaving people out and focusing credit in the hands of only some of the team members. The resulting citation looks like this:

Old Bailey Proceedings Online. Version 6.0, March 2011. http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/

This is a very noble position for the project leaders to take; however, I do not believe it is the right position. In an effort not to emphasize the contributions of some over that of others, this policy makes most contributors entirely invisible. This is particularly significant for people in the alternative academic (alt-ac) fields whose career progression and in many cases, next meal, depend upon the strength of their portfolios. These people have roles such as project management, database building, and web design, all of which are crucial to ensure the projects themselves are world class. If we adopt the no-names policy across the board, these people will never be cited anywhere, whereas traditional academics may still have books and journal articles on top of their digital project work.

Though we brought our positions much closer together, the issue proved too much for a bottle of wine to solve. We parted ways and Hitchcock took the discussion to H-Albion, a list-serv for historians of Britain and Ireland where many historians and librarians have contributed their opinions. Seth Denbo then brought the discussion to Humanist, another list-serv for digital humanities scholars where a separate conversation has now begun. Rather than contribute to either or both of those conversations, I have decided to address the issue here with the hopes that it can find new contributors who may not otherwise see it in the list-servs.

The most interesting question to arise so far is whether digital humanities projects like the OBO are films or science papers. Not literally of course, but in terms of the model of credit offered to contributors of the finished product. Both films and science journals have developed unique models of credit. In films, the credits run at the end. In science papers, everyone who made a meaningful contribution gets listed as an author and those who made minor contributions get an acknowledgement. I will argue that digital humanists would be doing their field and industry a great service by adopting both models simultaneously. The OBO and projects like it are both films and science papers.

Films

One of the respondants to the list-serv discussion, a retired librarian Malcolm Shifrin, suggested that the point of a citation was to retrieve the source, not to provide credit. In this sense, it does not matter whose names appear in the citation, as long as there is no ambiguity and the item can be identified. However, if that were the case, we could merely cite ISBN numbers, which would drastically cut down on the size of footnotes. Or, in nearly all cases, titles alone would suffice. For example, if I were to task you with finding a copy of the paper: "An alternative definition of the scapular coordinate system for use with RSA" without any further information, I'm entirely confident you would make your way to a paper by my lovely wife, which appears in the Journal of Biomechanics. Citation is not merely about finding an item, it is also about credit; however, as Shifrim points out, it is not crucial that credit appears within a citation. An alternative model is the one used by the film industry in which a portion of the finished product is dedicated to letting everyone know who was involved with its creation.

Most major website projects, including the OBO, already do this. The OBO's "About this Project" page lists 24 of the leading contributors along with their roles and effectively mimics the credits on a film. A listing of this sort is important because it offers an official "in-house" acknowledgement that's difficult to fake without breaking the law and hijacking the website to add your name. This allows everyone to direct future potential employers to evidence of past work that can be independently verified. I would certainly argue that any collaborative digital humanities project should reserve a space on their website for such a page, which has absolutely no cost but can be instrumental to the future career development of your team members. But, I certainly do not think it's enough.

We do not know where the alt-ac world is going, and we would be wise to ensure that as many doors as possible remain open to those people who currently occupy this grey space in academia. Some members may aspire to a future tenure-track position and may find it difficult to convince more conservative senior faculty that film-style credits on a webpage are akin to hits on JSTOR. And because these conservative attitudes change slowly, it would be rash for digital humanists to abandon a well established if perhaps dated model of credit just because we want to rebel in the name of progress. There's a baby in that bathwater.

Science Papers

This is where the model used by the academic science community is particularly helpful. In the humanities, typically if someone got paid to do the work as part of a grant or part-time role, we pretend they didn't exist. The work "was done" rather than "was done by soandso". We don't expect McDonalds to list the names of individual "team members" when they brag about how delicious their french fries are. It doesn't matter who made your fries. They were paid to do so and thereby give up their right to credit.

In the sciences, everyone who makes a meaningful contribution is entitled to a share of the authorship of a paper. Assuming each of the 24 members of the OBO team met those criteria, a citation for the OBO might look like this:

Hitchcock T, Shoemaker R, Emsley C, Howard S, Hardman P, Bayman A, Garrett E, Lewis-Roylance C, Parkinson S, Simmons A, Smithson G, Wilcox N, Wright C, Clayton M, Bankhurst B, Lingwood D, MacKenzie E, Rogers K, McLaughlin J, Henson L, Black J, Newman E, O'Flaherty K, Smithson G. Old Bailey Proceedings Online. Version 6.0, March 2011. http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/

It may be a bit more of an eyefull than the previous example, but at least it's a more accurate reflection of the work people put into the site's creation. The exact criteria for determining a "meaningful contribution" generally rests with the policies of individual journals. A typical example, from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors requires that each author must have made substantial contributions to all of the following:

1. the conception and design of the study, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data
2. drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content
3. final approval of the version to be submitted

Obviously those criteria are designed specifically with a peer-reviewed journal article in mind. However, they can easily be adapted to the needs of a digital humanities web-based project, which typically is split into two parts: the project itself, and the digital infrastructure for allowing the audience to interact with the project. A digital humanities "author" could be someone that must have made substantial contributions to all of the following:

1. the conception and design of the project or website; or acquisition of data or materials; or analysis, transformation and interpretation of data or materials
2. drafting or creating any text, artwork, sound, video, workflow, interface, user experience, or code, that was integral to the success of the project and that would have been substantially different if it had been completed by someone else
3. final approval of the finished product
   

In the case of the OBO, that may eliminate some people from the list of those credited with the project. As I am not one of those people, it is not my place to decide. But it is something I think as a community we should start discussing as soon as project teams are put together. What is the intended output, and how will each person's contribution be credited? It can be an awkward conversation at first, but it's a proactive solution to the elephant in the room for those in the alt-ac community.

Conclusion

The OBO is both a film and a science paper. Project leaders of web-based digital humanities projects would be doing their industry a favour by ensuring projects have both a page of film-style credits which outline contributors and their roles, as well as a science-style listing of substantial contributors or authors that are prominently displayed for anyone wishing to cite.

This two-pronged approach can only serve to help digital humanities to find its place within the academic world. It's the model that keeps the most doors open for those alt-ac members of our project teams who are unsure of which path their career will take in the future. It acknowledges the tremendous teamwork that goes into producing world class digital humanities work, setting them apart from single-authored papers. And it doesn't misrepresent or misconstrue the purposes of either model of credit. The citation may not mean much to a tenured professor, but it can help launch the career of someone in the alt-ac world. And so, the citation may be a bit clunkier if we use the science model, but at least it's an honest reflection.

Photo credit: "Steve Jobs rendered in Applesoft BASIC" by Blake Patterson.

Crymble Awards: Digital History Best of 2011

It's the last day of the year and I thought it'd be fitting to write briefly about the research and projects published this calendar year that's had the most impact on my personal scholarly development. With all the talk of research impact these days, particularly in the UK, I think it's important to acknowledge that not all influential work gets cited. Much of it inspires our own research indirectly by introducing us to new techniques, ideas, or source materials. Here is my own list of my favourites for 2011 in no particular order. I've dubbed these awards the "Crymble Awards", so fee free to put that on your CVs. Unfortunately, that's the only prize. But as my grade 1 teacher always said, "everyone likes a warm fuzzy".

• Tim Hitchcock and William J. Turkel, "The Old Bailey Proceedings, 1674-1913: data mining for evidence of court behaviour" (paper presented at the Digital History Seminar, the Institute for Historical Research. London, 16 May, 2011).
  
  This paper and its accompanying visualisations (see the pdf for the whole paper), takes traditional historical research questions down the path of large-scale analysis. Using the proceedings of the Old Bailey, Turkel and Hitchcock were able to step back from the content of the transcripts, and looked at the proceedings as data rather than something to be read. The result of the study was some interesting new insights into court room practices in the mid nineteenth century that challenged previous conclusions.
  
  These insights were only evident through a large-scale visualisation that plotted the lengths of each trial transcripts by year on a logarithmic scale. That may sound complicated, but it's really quite simple, and that's what makes it so great. Anyone looking at the graph is clearly drawn to the same conclusions as the researchers: something funny is going on in the mid nineteenth century. Unlike with so much historical research, the data told the researchers where the question was, rather than the researchers seeking an answer to a predefined question. This serendipitous approach is something for which I think the world is ready for more.
  
  Obviously as historians we cannot merely stop reading content when forming our conclusions about the past; however, I think this paper demonstrates that content isn't the only way of learning new things. Sometimes, as in this case, it's the word-length of the trial transcripts that points us towards new knowledge. And we shouldn't be afraid to get off the beaten path a little, and experiment with content in ways that it perhaps was never intended to be used by its original creators.
  
  On Twitter: @williamjturkel and @TimHitchcock



• Tim Sherratt, "Discontents" blog.
  
  One of the few research blogs I still actually read. Sherratt has done extensive work combining Python with datamining as a way of extracting useful information from online sources. He lives and works in Australia and has done extensive work with the Trove newspaper database, which contains transcribed versions of historical Australian newspapers. Not only is the work unique, in that he's looking at sources in a way most scholars don't bother, he is very open with what he's doing and how he does it, making the blog an excellent learning tool for those looking to expand into the realm of digital history. This is of course the style of blogging that Bill Turkel championed on his now retired "Digital History Hacks".
  
  Sherratt's work has taught me more this year than just about anything else I've ready and I hope he continues to provide more into 2012.
  
  On Twitter: @wragge



• Ben Schmidt, "Sapping Attention" blog.
  
  Like Sherratt, Ben Schmidt keeps a research blog that chronicles his own work and the challenges that he has to overcome. Schmidt is working on a PhD in history at Princeton and his work into linguistic analysis is both far beyond what I myself am capable of, as well as creative and intriguing to follow, even for a non-specialist like me. Schmidt also has a talent for extraordinarily beautiful visualisations which are both technically complicated, but semantically transparent, supplementing his text with an effective means of showing how the data supports the conclusions. Some great examples are in his posts, "Comparing Corpuses by Word Use" and "Predicting publication year and generational language shift".
  
  I sincerely wish more digital historians - myself included - would keep such open and inspirational research logs as Schmidt and Sherratt that celebrates not only the conclusions that are of interest to historians studying similar topics, but to all digital historians who are interested in learning new ways to interrogate and understand the past.



• Sean Kheraj, "Nature's Past" podcast.
  
  Sean has been producing a monthly podcast for a few years now, which looks at environmental history in Canada. Though his research focus is significantly different than my own, I can't help being impressed by the quality of the work he puts into the project. He does all the writing, recording, and editing himself, and it comes out radio quality both in terms of the sound, and the organization of each episode. If nothing else, Kheraj has showed that if you're going to do something, do it well.



• Jeremy Boggs, "the Praxis Program" Website Design
  
  I have to admit, this one I'm attributing to Boggs though his name does not appear officially as the web designer. It does, however, have all the elements of a Jeremy Boggs website. The fonts move beyond the traditional subset of web fonts, but never take away from the content by becoming too showy, or too difficult to read. The simple, complimentary colour palatte sets the mood, without being distracting, as do the graphics, which are minimalistic but essential to the design.
  
  I've yet to come across anyone in the academic web design community that can put together as elegant a site as Boggs, and the Praxis website is an excellent example of that. May there be many more examples next year.

Congratulations to all of our winners. And thanks for the great work. It's inspired me, even though none of your work had been peer reviewed.

How to Record a Presentation for the Web (Well)

By Adam Crymble

Few things are as ephemeral as speech. It is spoken, and it is gone. This is fine if you have just delivered the worst presentation of your life and want nothing more than to forget it. But, there are speeches worth saving. Research is global; not everyone who is interested in the speaker will be able to attend in person. Not everyone who will be interested is interested now – for example, a first year student may want to hear the presentation four years from now when she is working on her Master’s degree.

Academia has developed a solution to the ephemeral speech and it has become increasingly popular. The recorded lecture, often mistakenly referred to as a “podcast”, is a way of archiving what transpired at an event and making it available online. Many conferences and public lecture organizers are adopting this idea to increase the reach of their event to those outside the immediate room in which the presentation occurs.

However, while the solution is in place, the skills needed to enact it well are not. The recording process is frequently an afterthought, thrown into the hands of an inexperienced graduate student or an already taxed session chair. The recorder is left fumbling with a device he or she has likely never used, hoping desperately that they get it right on the first try.

Predictably, the results are usually poor. Even comparatively good examples often suffer from low-quality audio. Frequently, listeners will feel the recording lacks context and they will be frustrated if the speaker refers to slides that have not been included with the recording.

All this can be avoided with a little bit of planning and practice to ensure your recorded presentations are good recorded presentations that do justice to your speakers and your listeners.

Listen to or Watch a Good Example

Start with the best. No one has better online presentations than TED. “Ted Talks” are live presentations by passionate speakers that have been recorded and posted to the Ted.com website. They have become an Internet sensation and anyone considering archiving a speech should watch at least one Ted Talk. I am not suggesting you do as TED did and hire multiple professional cameramen, a director and a sound editing team. What I am suggesting is that you follow TED’s lead on the following key points.

Talk to your Speaker Beforehand

I do not mean simply get permission to record – although of course this is important and you should get permission in writing. Instead, I mean find out what type of presenter your speaker is. Do they use PowerPoint slides, and if so do they own the copyright or have permission to use all of the material? Do they wander around the room as they speak? Do they ask the audience to participate frequently?

By asking questions about the style of presentation the person intends to deliver you can preemptively find solutions to problems before they arise. If your speaker tells you she likes to move around a lot during the presentation, use this advanced knowledge to track down a wireless microphone that can clip onto her lapel. If your presenter plans to use a PowerPoint presentation with images that violate copyright, suggest he look into using images licensed by Creative Commons so that you can legally share his presentation.

Dedicate Someone

As soon as you decide to record the presentation, find someone whose sole job will be to handle the audio equipment and get him or her to practice. Days before the event, the recorder should know exactly how to use the recording equipment, what volume levels are suitable, and how close to the speaker the device will have to be. If the microphone must be clipped onto the speaker, the recorder should try the mic on a few locations on his or her own shirt to see how placement affects sound quality.

If the chair and the speaker are fairly far apart – more than a few feet – then be sure to check if the device will clearly pick up the chair’s voice. If it sounds like he or she is far away or “tinny” then consider getting a second recording device and record both people independently.

The audio testing should be done in the same room as that in which the presentation will take place, and if required, your recorder should make note of nearby power outlets to determine if an extension cord is needed.

By spending even one hour practicing and preparing, your recorder will be confident when the time comes for them to do their job.

When that time does arise, it is best to push the record button well before the presentation starts. The audio can always be edited later, but once a presentation starts – and often they start unexpectedly – what has been missed is gone. Make sure your recorder gets the speaker introduction, as well as the speech.

If the presenter is using slides, have your recorder note the time in the recording when the slides transition. This will make it much easier to combine the slides and the audio later.

The Context of the Room

A major complaint of listeners who access presentations online is the lack of context. When attending an event in person, you have the context of the physical space, the other people in the room, and even other presentations you have heard or plan to hear at the same event. When you listen online, this context disappears.

The chair of the session or the person introducing the speaker can provide this context, as long as they have been warned ahead of time. Most people in this position do their introduction the same way whether they are being recorded or not. That is, they speak only to those listeners in the room and often seem uncomfortable at the idea that people might be listening that they cannot see. Rather than address this virtual audience, they pretend it does not exist.

To get beyond this barrier, sit down briefly with your chair and give them some pointers on providing context to the online audience. One effective way of dealing with this problem is to have the chair acknowledge both audiences in the introduction. Thank everyone for coming, but also thank your online listeners. Provide a short blurb about the event and why you have gathered for it. The listeners in the room will recognize that your blurb is for the benefit of the online audience and will not be put off.

If you are recording multiple sessions with the same audience present, this can become repetitive and strange. In that case, record this context information later and it can be added to the start of your presentations in the editing stage. If you are not sure what context is missing, ask a colleague to listen to the recorded presentation; they will be able to tell you what needs to be added.

Question Period

Decide if you plan to include the question period in your recording. Often this means seeking the permission of everyone in the audience, but will vary depending on your jurisdiction and university policy. The challenge with question period is that it is often difficult to catch the questions on the recording device, particularly in a large room.

One solution is to require people who want to ask a question to go to a microphone. This can be obtrusive and adds to what is already a complex process, so you may decide to end your recording after the speaker finishes the formal presentation. By ending early, one tends to avoid the chair thanking everyone for coming and inviting them to head to the pub; the result is a more professional conclusion.

After the Fact

The work does not end when the recorder pushes the stop button. The audio will have to be edited. If your presenter used slides, ask for them and plan to create a “slidecast” that will pair the audio with the relevant slides. It is also a good idea to get a one to two paragraph abstract of the talk from the speaker, a one to two sentence bio of the presenter, and a half-dozen keywords that allow online visitors to find the presentation. Search boxes still cannot let us find out what is in an audio or video file, so you will need to provide enough information with the recording to let interested people find it.

Once you have received the slides and contextual information, you are ready to edit. This can be done by anyone and need not be the same person who made the recording. However, if you have more than one lecture it is a good idea to dedicate this job to one person. This will ensure that all of the recordings are consistent.

Editing the Audio

There are a number of good audio editing programs available. Audacity is an open source, free program that you can use to edit the audio and to adjust volume levels if needed. Mac users will find GarageBand, preinstalled on most new Mac’s, a useful tool for achieving the same.

If possible, try to avoid too much “dead air” at the beginning or at the end of a file. It is also a good idea to make sure you end the recording at a suitably calm point. Stopping abruptly in the middle of applause is less professional than fading down the volume or waiting for an appropriate break. MP3 is still the industry standard file format for audio, so if given the choice between formats, MP3 is a safe bet.

Adding the Slides

Often with online presentations if slides are available they will only be provided as a separate PowerPoint file available for download. This is better than nothing, but often it is not clear when the speaker transitioned slides and the listener must fumble to figure out which slide to look at. Because your recorder kept notes while listening to the speech, it should not be difficult to combine the slides and the audio into a video.

Again, Mac users should find iMovie installed on newer machines. This program makes it easy to drag slides and combine them with audio. If you do not have a Mac, SlideShare (http://www.slideshare.net), a website dedicated to sharing slides, now allows you to combine audio and slides, and to adjust timing all within your Internet browser window.

Share it

Once you have finished editing the presentation, you are ready to share it. Post it to your event website, department website, or to a video or audio sharing site. Make sure you let the presenter know it is available, and finally, promote the presentation as widely as possible. By promoting the recorded presentation, your conference or lecture can live on beyond the end of the live event and can continue to engage listeners for years to come.

Taking a few moments to plan and adding a little extra time editing will ensure the recorded presentation is almost as good as the original. Some presentations are worth saving, and those that are, are worth saving well.

Adam Crymble is the Webmaster for the Network in Canadian History & Environment, an organization that has archived over 150 academic presentations. Adam would like to thank Sean Kheraj for his comments on a draft of this article.

Is Digital Humanities a Field of Research?

If you are a Canadian graduate student, the answer is currently: no.

At least according to SSHRC, the Canadian national research funding body. Canadian graduate students applying to fund their studies must choose one of five “multidisciplinary selection committees” to review their proposal. These committees are designed to ensure that someone with an expertise in your field – broadly construed – will be able to critique it fairly. Unfortunately, digital humanities does not appear in the list and SSHRC’s official suggestion is that students choose as best they can from the choices available.

1. Fine arts, literature (all types)
2. Classical archaeology, classics, classical and dead languages, history, mediaeval studies, philosophy, religious studies
3. Anthropology, archaeology (except classical archaeology), archival science, communications and media studies, criminology, demography, folklore, geography, library and information science, sociology, urban and regional studies, environmental studies
4. Education, linguistics, psychology, social work
5. Economics, industrial relations, law, management, business, administrative studies, political science

This puts Digital Humanities students at a distinct disadvantage, as their work will only be deemed valuable if it contributes to history, literature, geography, or some other traditional research discipline, and cannot be judged on its own merits.

Please join me in telling SSHRC that Digital Humanities is an academic discipline, and one that deserves recognition within the SSHRC infrastructure. I have sent the following letter asking for a review of their current practice. If you support the measure, please send a brief, polite message to Roxanne Dompierre, SSHRC Program Officer (roxanne.dompierre@sshrc-crsh.gc.ca), outlining your support or let SSHRC know on Twitter (@SSHRC_CRSH).

Thank you very much

Adam Crymble

***

Ms. R. Dompierre

SSHRC Program Officer

RE: The inclusion of “Digital Humanities” as a category for graduate study

Dear Ms. Dompierre,

I respectfully submit a request to the SSHRC Doctoral Committee to add “Digital Humanities” as a category in one of your multidisciplinary selection committees.

Digital Humanities is a vibrant worldwide community of multidisciplinary scholars with PhD and MA programs in Canada, the US and Europe. This is a rapidly expanding field with more international involvement every year. It is a community that is researching and working within and beyond academia, with traditional peer-reviewed research, community outreach, and government partnerships. Research ranges widely from user studies, to humanities data mining, to digital tool construction.

The value of digital humanities research is clearly recognized within Canada. Recent SSHRC digital humanities funding initiatives for faculty include “Image, text, sound and technology” and “Knowledge Syntheses on the Digital Economy” (2010), as well as “Digging Into Data”, which was jointly funded by SSHRC, the NEH and AHRC. Despite ample funding at the faculty level, funding opportunities for students have not yet caught up with this trend.

The current advice from SSHRC for students studying within this emerging field is that they should apply to an evaluation committee with a traditional discipline that touches on the themes of their research. Working in a multidisciplinary field such as digital humanities, applicants are put at a distinct disadvantage when competing for funding against scholars doing traditional research within a single field. This is particularly the case when the judging criteria asks evaluators to assess how the research will impact that traditional discipline, something which may not be the explicit aim of the multidisciplinary research.

I urge SSHRC to make a positive step towards removing the ambiguity for digital humanists and encouraging the participation of new scholars in this developing research area by explicitly adding “Digital Humanities” to one of the multidisciplinary selection committees.

Thank you for your consideration.

Adam Crymble

SSHRC Applicant

PhD Candidate, King’s College London

Review: Lunch at the British National Maritime Museum

I'm going to give the collections and exhibits at the British National Maritime Museum (Greenwich), a free pass at the moment, because much of it is still under construction for the next few months. I will say I was under-awed at what was there, and frustrated on occasion that the panels were positioned for 6 year olds, not 6 foot tall adults. Nevertheless, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt for now and will leave my comments about the exhibits at that.

What was noteworthy, however, was lunch. I've learned not to expect much from British restaurants. Particularly those in museums. Usually I'm happy if my prepackaged sandwich has wholewheat wonderbread and at least two distinguishable flavours. If I can find a side made with something other than potatos, I'm awestruck.

So, upon visiting the Museum Café, with its beautiful views of Greenwich park, I was completely bowled over at the quality of the food. It was fresh, home made, healthy, and delicious. I had gone in expecting deep fried fish and chips - appropriate for a Maritime Museum I thought - and instead came out with a homemade pork and pickle pie (clearly made by someone who knew their way around a kitchen), and a wonderful toasted pecan and gorgonzola salad. My wife had delicious smoked salmon on a bagel and a slice of perfectly ripe watermelon. To our surprise, and that of everyone before us, the fresh fruit was included with every sandwich, prompting more than one person to put down their bag of chips (crisps).

The tragedy is of course, that a healthy lunch is noteworthy at all. At institutions that focus on drawing families, it's disheartening to see all too often that the only options are deep fried. In one case - Hampton Court - the food was so bad that my family left most of it on our trays and went hungry until we could get home. Museums have the opportunity to act as examples for the community, as cultural centres of sharing and learning. I hope more of them follow in the footsteps of the British National Maritime Museum, and extend that to a good, healthy meal.