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Scav hunt or Art? (a guessing game)

7 May, 2012

When spring comes to the University of Chicago campus, there are two annual events that inject a certain whimsical randomness into my work week: Scav Hunt and FOTA (Festival of the Arts). In the last few years, these events have occurred one after the other-- an ordering that helps people like myself who found a kindred spirit in the author of the blog post I'm Sick of Pretending: I Don't "Get" Art. My rule of thumb has been: "If it's still there on Tuesday, it's probably FOTA, not Scav leftovers."

Not that FOTA hasn't graced the campus with some rather lovely, and unambiguously artistic, things. I still fondly remember Weiling Lu's paintings depicting UChicago's different seasons. Last year there was a charming spirit by Botany Pond, and the year before there was a series of paintings on the main quad that I found quite striking.

Still, there's also been no shortage of... "installations"... that have given me pause on the Monday after Scav Hunt. Conveniently, in past years FOTA has had a website with information about what Arts have been placed around campus, and where, which allowed me to confirm whether I was looking at the remnants of lazy Scavvies, or a Work of Art. Alas, not only has the FOTA website not been updated this year, the art event has been scheduled the same week as Scav Hunt. Presumably, anything peculiar spotted on the quads between now and when Scav starts on Thursday morning should be interpreted as Art, but later in the week, this appreciator of odd out-of-place things will almost certainly be rendered unable to differentiate Scav-sourced weirdness from Art.

I've been assured by the creator of the FOTA Village art (both a FOTA artist and a Scav Hunt judge!) that I'll be able to tell the difference. But I'm highly skeptical. To make clear my concerns, I present to you a guessing game: Scav or FOTA. Answers at the bottom, but no peeking.

Exhibit A: Moai Statue or Commentary on Work/Life Balance?

Exhibit B: Shopping Cart Monster or the Dangers of Consumerism?

Exhibit C: Illustrate your Physics Problem Set or Nostalgia for Cat's Cradle?

Exhibit D: Googly Eyes or Concerns About University Surveillance?

Exhibit E: Fountain Protector or Stuff You Can Do With Bedsheets?

Exhibit F: Ball Gown for a Giant or ... Commentary on Unrealistic Body Expectations for Women?

Exhibit G: GargoyleNutz or Criticism of the Male-Dominated Administration at the University of Chicago?

Answers: A) Scav, B) Scav, C) FOTA, D) Scav, E) FOTA, F) FOTA, G) Scav

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Please don't ask me for permission

10 February, 2012

A few weeks ago I stumbled upon a blog post by Nina Paley, the cartoonist perhaps most famous for Sita Sings the Blues, that emphatically made the point that, with Creative Commons licenses, yes means yes. I don't think I could put it better myself.

Seeing as I'm not famous, I don't interpret these permission requests as a cry for attention, and I recognize that people do it with the best intentions, but I hate seeing people waiting on replies from me before using photos I've already given them permission to use. The fact is, dealing with permission requests is extremely low on my priority list, when I've got myriad projects for my job, and outside my job, also waiting on replies for me. Unlike requests for permission I've already granted, those projects are legitimately stalled until I reply. (I won't even get into the number of personal emails that sit unanswered for days, weeks or months, for lack of energy at the end of the day.)

I love getting emails that say "hi, I used your stuff in this way, come take a look/can I send you a copy?" It means the system has worked, the things I've made have found another life somewhere without being encumbered by legal barriers, and I can read/reply to those whenever I've got the bandwidth. Nothing is stalled until I reply.

I have these additional caveats (which make reuse even more free) on my Flickr profiles, but to reiterate here for the record:

Even though all of my licenses use "Share Alike" (which technically restricts you to using that very same license), you have permission to use any other Creative Commons license so long as it includes either "No Derivatives" or "Share Alike". For the sake of clarity, this means any of the following licenses:

Attribution-ShareAlike

Attribution-NoDerivs

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs

I'm not comfortable with the possibility of a derivative of a derivative work being locked down by full copyright (please don't contact me to ask, the answer will almost certainly be "no"), but you have permission to use any of the licenses above for derivative works, instead of my Attribution-Share Alike license, if you prefer.

So please don't ask and wait for me to reply. I want you to use my creations for anything, that's why I used a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license (and if I used a more restrictive non-commercial license, it's because of restrictions beyond my control, like the San Diego Zoo prohibiting commercial use of photographs taken on their premises). Happy remixing, with the permission I've already granted you.

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"Drupal for Humanists"

27 January, 2012

One question I continue to hear from digital humanists and higher ed IT folks is "what book should I pick up to learn Drupal?" I never have a particularly good answer-- not because there aren't any good books out there (I assume there are), but because I've never used one. I learned Drupal 4 through trial and error, while not paying attention in a biology class I needed to fulfill a distribution requirement that I'd put off until my last year of college. I figured out Drupal 5 and 6 (much like Drupal 4, but greatly improved) because I needed a CMS for a project and I ended up learning a lot in the process. Every time I need to do something new with Drupal, I Google until I figure it out, and then I know one more thing.

Not the most helpful response for people who prefer to have a book on hand as they're learning.

What's surprised me is that when I shrug and tell people there's stuff out there but I can't recommend any titles from personal experience, the reply has often enough been, "Why don't you write one?" I was pretty dismissive of the idea at first-- I'm generally inclined towards just posting things online-- but after enough repetitions of this conversation, I started to consider it. There's something to be said for a book with a clear presentation of Drupal, arranged in a coherent and logical way, covering "why Drupal?" and when to not use Drupal, and everything from installation to Display Suite magic for the adventurous. I really do think that anyone can build sites in Drupal, even the tech-hesitant, if someone does a good enough job walking through the process. Unlike WordPress, Drupal isn't inclined to hold your hand, but maybe a book on Drupal geared towards humanists (digital or not) and the techies who work with them could bridge that gap.

I consulted with fellow Drupal guru Elijah Meeks (whose work on spatial Drupal blows my mind), and we decided we're going to co-author "Drupal for Humanists" and get it published. The first part of the book will cover how to build Drupal sites in general (including modules, content types, site design, etc.), and the second part of the book will be case studies, looking at what modules and configuration settings go into the kinds of sites that are particularly relevant for humanists. Each case study will conclude with a section about how that kind of site might evolve, based on our experience building them.

We're looking for feedback on the case studies (especially the one on multimedia) and suggestions for anything we missed, so if you have a moment, please check out the Google Doc with the case study outlines and leave some comments.

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Where's the credit? Attribution in digital humanities slides

22 June, 2011

I've been at Digital Humanities 2011 since Sunday, and it's been as delightful and inspiring as always. This is the first time I've actively followed the tweet stream at a DH conference while I've been there in person, and while the extent to which it has added value has varied depending on the session, it may have been one of the most fascinating aspects of yesterday's plenary (Chad Gaffield's "Re-Imagining Scholarship in the Digital Age"). The audience was highly impressed that Gaffield walked around the stage and gave a talk, rather than reading a paper from the podium, which seems to be the common practice. His use of slides with a single interesting image, with fewer text-heavy or (as commonly seen here) screenshot-heavy slides, was also notable.

What struck me, though, was the lack of any credit line for most or all of the images. At least one of the charts had some burned-in metadata indicating its source, but the origin of the images remained opaque. At first, I thought he was using stock photos that he'd purchased (in which case no credit line would be necessary, though I'd still like to know something about the source). But unless the standards for stock photo companies have plummeted, I don't think that can account for all of his images. There were a couple photos-- charming, if not great on the technical level-- of students sleeping that really got me wondering.

For a talk that made reference to the importance of managing open data and copyright towards the end, I find it ironic, but not unexpected. Managing credit for slides takes work. There's no equivalent to the WordPress plugin that lets you find Creative Commons licensed images within the post-writing screen, and inserts them for you with a reasonable credit line. The easiest way to find images for a talk is to do the Wrong Thing^TM and just hit up Google Images. A presentation with a wide variety of images, and no credit line for any of them (besides, possibly, what's burned into the images) generally suggests that's how the image sourcing happened, and there's no social censure.

I've seen a few different approaches to doing image sourcing right, with "right" meaning both legally and in accordance to the ideals espoused by DH-ers (including the importance of giving others credit for their work, given the essential role that credit plays in our professional lives). In the slides for her talk on DH syllabi, Lisa Spiro included the URLs on Flickr for the images she used, and put a Creative Commons Attribution license on her own slides, too. I like that approach better than an alternative I've seen (though not at this conference), where all the credit names/URLs are piled together in a tiny font on the last slide. Doing it that way loses the connection between the image and its creator, and it feels a little bit begrudging. For myself, I think I'm a bit unusual insofar as it's been a long time since my personal stash of 55,000+ Creative Commons licensed images didn't suffice.

What I'd like to see, ideally, would be some sort of presentation software plugin that-- like the WordPress plugin-- would easily let you search Creative Commons licensed and public domain images without having to switch to your browser and copy-and-paste. The likelihood with which people will adopt legal practices is a lot better if it's more convenient than the common illegal alternative. This software would insert the image into your presentation, with a small, unobtrusive credit line that pulls from the cc:attributionName property in the HTML license, or whatever the closest equivalent is in the data available from the hosting service (e.g. I don't think Flickr includes the Creative Commons properties such as attributionName, but "username/Flickr" might be the closest equivalent.) Not putting the full Flickr URL on the slide itself would reduce the amount of extra text, make it clearer who the creator is, and probably not be any less useful-- how often do people actually type out those long URLs while the slide is visible?

As a final step I'd like to see such a plugin generate a webpage that shows a thumbnail of and link to all the images that were used in the presentation, with full information (including information about, and a link to, the Creative Commons license used/public domain information). The plugin would automatically insert a link to this page on the last slide. There is, admittedly, some hand-waving necessary here about where such credit pages would be hosted, but some kind of (initially, at least, grant-funded) service for scholars seems not inconceivable. The service could also provide information about the most commonly used images, both as material for scholars studying scholarship, and for those who are less interested in browsing the wide world of CC-licensed images and would prefer to choose from images that someone else has already deemed to be of high enough quality to merit inclusion in a presentation. Since none of the images would be hosted there in any way, the number of bits needed for any page would be tiny. Of course, if such a service were to exist and then go away, the impact of the link rot on the traceability of the images used in the presentation would be non-trivial. That said, given how willing people are to use link shorteners just to get URLs to fit within the arbitrarily small character limits of Twitter, it doesn't seem like an image credit/connector service that could make reusable multimedia more accessible and better-cited should be immediately ruled out due to the possibility of link rot.

I'd like to hope that the trend towards Creative Commons licenses for scholarship will have the effect of increasing the social pressure for providing reasonable credit, as the implications of not providing credit become personal for more and more digital humanists. Having a tool that makes it easier would be a boon, though. Anyone up for applying for a grant to do something like this?

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Collaborations between R1's and liberal arts colleges will not succeed

12 June, 2011

In the week since the joint session between THATCamp LAC participants and the people at THATCamp Prime, I've found myself reflecting on that conversation a number of times. As I said then (in person, and to the Twitterverse thanks to Rebecca Davis), the collaborations that work well aren’t between institutions, but between people.

When funding agencies state that they want to “fund collaborations between R1 and Liberal Arts Colleges”, there’s a temptation to immediately reach for a consortial solution. Why not have Liberal Arts Colleges join together to form a consortium that can partner with digital humanities centers at R1 institutions as a peer? The problem is, when collaboration is framed as something that happens between entities, people fall back on assumptions. It’s hard to avoid-- how do you, as someone at an R1 tasked with implementing this collaboration, sit down with a Liberal Arts College and find out what it does, what its needs are, and why it wants to collaborate with you? You can talk to representatives on the LAC end, but if your task is to collaborate with an entity as a whole, there’s always a lingering concern that those individuals don’t represent the full range of needs that you must somehow address.

During the THATCamp LAC/Prime conversation, someone on the George Mason end asked-- in honest curiosity, with no intent of malice or condescension-- what LAC’s can bring to the table in a partnership with R1’s. This provoked an understandably strong reaction from the LAC audience, who were taken aback at what was misread as an implication that collaborating with LACs is an act of charity. When it came to light that some THATCamp Prime attendees didn’t realize that a number of LACs have a computer science department, certain LAC attendees were disgruntled at what that misunderstanding suggested about how R1s see LACs. The part of the conversation where participants tried to relate to one another as representatives of a class of institutions, rather than scholar-to-scholar, was colored by a certain awkwardness that I suspect is inevitable given a framing of “LAC/R1 collaboration”.

I think the key to fulfilling funding agencies’ requests for “LAC/R1 collaboration” is to find people who have shared interests and a common goal, set requirements in place (if necessary) as safeguards to ensure the project doesn’t get sidetracked from meeting both parties’ needs, and not make a fuss over institutional affiliation. Certainly, the differences in the incentive structure of R1 institutions and LACs will shape the process, but when participants are able to focus on exchanging ideas and working together towards an outcome, the collaboration is more likely to succeed because the participants see each other as valued contributors, regardless of institutional affiliation. For successful collaboration, the shared interests and goals and desire to work together need to be genuine, rather than (primarily) grant-incentivized. A scholar from an R1 institution who is skeptical of the value of working with an LAC scholar, but needs some grant money to finish a project whose direction he has already determined is unlikely to be a good collaborator if “assigned” to an LAC scholar as part of a “R1/LAC partnership program”. Neither will an LAC scholar who feels resentful towards R1s due to previous failed attempts at collaboration, who hopes that the promise of funding will make R1 scholars do what he wants. Both of these are “worst-case scenario” stereotypes, but not without some grounding in reality.

The TAPAS Project and the Bamboo Planning Project are two recent examples of what a successful partnership between individuals from R1 schools and LACs can look like. During the TAPAS planning workshops, all the participants engaged with the problem at hand as individuals with a unique perspective on a common problem, and a genuine desire to work together to find a solution. Needs specific to LACs were identified, and often worked into the project scope. When consensus determined that some of those needs were outside a reasonable project scope, those of us with useful experience helped brainstorm other solutions that could meet the LAC faculty member’s immediate need.

During the Bamboo Planning Project, there were participants from LACs in every working group, and they actively contributed to efforts such as the Scholarly Narrative Repository. I never had the impression that LAC participants were viewed any differently than R1 participants-- everyone was working towards a common set of goals. That said, “what about pedagogy?” became an oft-repeated rallying cry, and ways of facilitating connections between scholars and making the case for digital humanities at one’s local institution were not in the final proposal. If the Planning Project were run again, with the goal of being an ideal LAC/R1 partnership, I think there would need to be some safeguards in place, perhaps in the form of a mandate that the final project plan must contain a pedagogy component.

This is the digital humanities under consideration. Consortia, centers, institutions, organizations all play an important role, providing centralized hubs for knowledge and resources, organizing gatherings, being the clout behind grant proposals, etc., but they're not the level where meaningful, sustainable collaboration happens. Successful collaboration takes place between humans with mutual interests and a common goal, and I hope upcoming attempts to foster “LAC/R1 collaboration” don’t lose sight of that.

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