Category Archives: Techie

"Everyone’s a Coder Now": a presentation at 4Cs

A couple weeks ago I presented at the 4Cs (Conference on College Composition and Communication) as part of Session H18: “Writing text, writing code, writing connections”. My co-panelists were the lovely and talented Annette Vee and Brian Ballentine, and the panel was chaired by the inimitable Dennis Jerz. We had a good turnout—something like 25 people, and not all of them were our close personal friends (!!).

Here’s the panel intro:

An underacknowledged relation of composition and rhetoric is code studies, the critical examination of source code that comprises computer software. Yet the expertise we have in pedagogy, rhetoric, speech acts and narrative offer potential contributions to this new field. This panel plumbs the connections between two important means of communication—written text and written code—to update our understandings of composing with computers. We map productive inroads to code studies by way of rhetoric, Speech Act Theory and narrative theory and collectively argue that code is already central to the discipline of composition and rhetoric.

Here’s the abstract for my part (I was first up):

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went to MITH, did a little song and dance…

Yesterday I had the pleasure of spending time with friends/colleagues at MITH (the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities), as they invited me to say a few words for a session in their Digital Dialogues speaker series.

I took the opportunity to say a few words about something fundamental to my work here at UVa Library, and that is the Hydra Project. The abstract for my talk read as follows, and I actually discussed most of the things listed here:

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Project Management BootCamp at THATCamp PNW 2010

At the 2010 version of THATCamp Pacific Northwest, I facilitated a BootCamp session on project management. While not nearly as sexy as the 3D modelling or the “Zotero Love Lab” bootcamp sessions, project management is important, gosh darn it, and something I’m apt to geek out about (things that make Julie geek out is an admittedly long list, but again, project management is important!).

The full bootcamp session title was originally “Bootstrapping Your Digital Humanities Project: How to Pull Together a Team and Work Collaboratively (Virtually or Otherwise) throughout a Project Lifecycle” but when I put out a call for participant input into the types of things people wanted to learn, the e-mail replies I got made me shift to more of a general project planning and management sort of thing—less about specifically working with teams and more about how to get started, the role of the project manager, and the sorts of things that one might (and should) expect to write about/plan when managing a project.

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Blogging for Ada Lovelace Day: Bethany Nowviskie

For the 2009 version of Ada Lovelace Day, I blogged about Martha Nell Smith. At the beginning of that post I talked about techie women in my previous professional life—or lack thereof—and how it was the switch to academia that brought to light some truly inspiring women oriented in some way toward technology (in that case, the Founding Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH)).

Bethany's self-meriting merit badge

I’m keeping it in the academic family for this one. Have you met Bethany Nowviskie? She’s a force of nature, that one. Super awesome geeky nature.

She has a technology named after her—ok fine, so I renamed it, but still…it’s warranted.

She has the proper toys in her office.

She will teach you how to hack your clothes.

And it turns out she’s shaped my scholarly-technical foundation and my future. Good job, @nowviskie!

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My Yale PDP 2010 Presentation

Below is the text that I read at The Past’s Digital Presence: Database, Archive, and Knowledge Work in the Humanities, a graduate student symposium held Feb 19 & 20, 2010. I was lucky enough to be selected as one of the 24 presenters in the eight sessions held on Saturday. Before the sessions we were given the treat of wonderful talks by Jacqueline Goldsby and Peter Stallybrass, and after the sessions the closing roundtable featured Rolena Adorno, Ed Ayers, Willard McCarty, and George Miles. These esteemed scholars didn’t just pop in for their talks and then leave—they were with us in sessions, asking questions, learning stuff along with everyone else. They all seemed like incredibly nice people (and those I spoke to directly I know are incredibly nice people).

I was speaker #2 on a panel called “Theorizing the Digital Archive” with Stewart Campbell (Columbia) who presented “Eugène Atget and the Digital Archive” and Alexandre Monnin (Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne) who discussed “What is a Tag: Digital Artifacts as Hermeneutical Devices”. Our panel was moderated by the esteemed Jessica Pressman (Yale) who is just super cool.

Although the title of my talk (no slides, just talking) was “Toward a Realization of the n-Dimensional Text” but as I told some people, the secret title was really “Archives: Ur Doin it Wrong”.

Links are included in the text below for anyone who finds them useful. I use [emphasized text in brackets] for more info; it wasn’t spoken or anything like that.

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Thanking and Donating to the Developers Who Make Everything Possible

A few weeks ago I read with interest the post “Is WordPress A Thankless Community?” and my immediate reaction was “probably so, but no more than any other.” Then I lamented my cynicism and remembered my own hypocrisy. It wasn’t a good day.

I promise this isn’t going to be a “kids these days!” post, but I do think there’s a generational aspect to all this. We read lists like Wired’s “100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About” and the annual Beloit College Mindset List that lists the “cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college” for that year. At least I always read that list because I often teach freshmen and need to know how many of my jokes are going to fall flat that semester (answer: most of them).

But the point of bringing up age is to note that in the U.S at least (and this info is from a Pew study), Generation Y (18-32yo) is the largest group of adults online (30%), and somewhere around 90% of all people aged 12-24 are online. That 12-24yo group accounts for most of the activity in Web 2.0 and social networking spaces—using tools, creating blogs, customizing their internet experience. [alert! grand sweeping generalizations follow!] For those 12-24 year old users—a category which I should note that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg fit into until a few months ago—this stuff has always been free, they don’t have the same sense of the history of the web and the developer ethos that some of us have, and the dot-com boom and bust pre-Web 2.0 is nothing but a Wikipedia article and certainly wasn’t something they lived through as working adults. This is the age of user generated content, consumer generated media, and crowdsourcing; remember that the 2006 Time person of the year was “You.”

So it comes as no surprise to me that “You” (or “Us”) sometimes forget—or maybe never realized—that the tools that enable us to do all those things online, customized the way that we want, are created by individuals.

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Conference Abstract for Presentation on "Digital Natives"

The day abstracts were due for the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association conference (Nov 6-9, 2009 in San Francisco), I whipped up an abstract for the “teaching with technology” panel. I am assuming, based on similar conferences I have attended, that the audience will consist of people mostly unfamiliar with technology but willing to learn; these are the late majority, definitely, and in some cases laggards (in the language of the technology adoption lifecycle by Rogers et al.

My goal is to dispel some myths, orient people toward work already done/going on, and provide some “best practices” (which actually riff off Jeremy Boggs’s Three Roles for Teachers using Technology post from February. I wrote this more like an evangelist than an academic, hence the lack of a colon or parentheses in the title.

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Keep Inflexible Technophobes Out of the Online Classroom

When I read the Chronicle piece, “I’ll Never Do it Again“—about one professor’s experiences teaching online—I thought to myself, “Great! Don’t. More work for the rest of us.” I hope there’s a Chronicle piece in the works by someone who enjoys teaching online and whose students perform well. I could name at least fifteen people without even trying who could write such commentary—including myself although my sample size is (admittedly) in the single digits. Are there problems with purely online courses? Sure. Are there problems with purely face-to-face courses? Sure. Are there problems with hybrid courses? Sure. Conclusion? Teaching and learning are challenges faced by all instructors and students everywhere. This isn’t news.

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ASLE Roundtable on Space & Place Blogging

Last week I was at the biennial ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and Environment) conference. Those of you who know me purely online or as a digital humanities geek might be surprised to know that I do a lot with literature and the environment (specifically Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir), or Western American literature, but there it is. I do. So, I’ve been looking forward to this conference for two years, and I’m already looking ahead to 2011 when ASLE is at Indiana University in Bloomington. After the experience I had this week, there’s no way I am going to miss it ever again (if I can help it). But that’s for another post.

This post is about the roundtable I was part of: “The Virtues of the Virtual: Using Blogs to Communicate Place across Space”

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Continuing the Conversation: More on Digital Humanities Theory and Praxis

After I wrote my post about going from industry to academia, Barbara Hui followed up with a great post on her own path. In her post, Barbara shifted our discussion from trading war stories about industry life to actual theory and/vs praxis in Digital Humanities. For the purposes of the conversation, she categorized three types of DH scholars:

1. Some DH scholars don’t create any digital tools themselves at all, but rather, for example, read and theorize about literature that has been written in the digital medium, and/or that references the digital medium in some way. (pure theory)

2. Other DH scholars don’t theorize at all, but instead, for example, might have a background in a “practical” discipline like Library and Information Studies (or a humanities degree they have “left behind”) and now work on creating digital reference or archival tools for use by humanities scholars. (pure praxis)

3. Yet others do a mixture of both: for example a literature and media studies scholar creates a new media mapping platform to serve as a multi-purpose tool for both teaching and theorizing about city-spaces. (theory + praxis)

She then asked a series of very good questions: “Which of these scholars is the most authentic DH scholar? Or is DH all of these things? Is the DH scholar who can’t/doesn’t write code a true DH scholar? Or should she instead be called a literary and/or (new) media theorist?”

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