Guidelines for tool development

"Software changes ... one has invested in the "old" software ... learning something new becomes a burden and a barrier. So much time to invest in learning new software is a very serious disincentive to use." (Ex 1, 1b-C)

"the payoff question technologies aren't neutral; should interrogate the values built into tech. change over time is something RDB's can't represent well "i like tools, tend to get caught up in the tools" but the investment in tools often doesn't pay off in terms of scholarship. technological imperatives at odds with the ways scholars, teachers want "quick easy dirty access"" (Ex 2, 1d-F)

"Built TextGarden, allows it to be done; probably very few people have heard of it (local institutions, local tools, local faculty interest) > programmer left 6 years ago, probably no one uses that programming anymore. How do you create something that can survive the loss of the programmer? Humanists need very specialized things, so you build the tool > hard to sustain, maintain, make available more broadly. Tend not to do these one-off projects anymore; don't have the resource or know that in three years, we won't be able to go into the code and changes. Would have to keep old computers around to use them; they were very beautiful when they were done" (Ex 2, 1d-F)

"Tend to use all the features of version X.X because scholars want to do complicated things; these are very vulnerable to software change" (Ex 2, 1d-F)

"Could I just dump my Word files into something and do data mining on it? We have a lot of data in digital form, but we can't get beyond doing searches on your hard drive. It's context more often than not; brittleness of tools. Towards more flexible/interactive; machine surfaces set of information; preliminary filter pass. By the time I did all the text encoding, I would've figured it out already" (Ex 3, 1c-D)

"scholarship in hum. is seen as cumulative. tool building and use which is not cumulative is problematic." (Ex 3, 1d-F)

"analytical results are missing context, feeding them an example can be helpful -- digital tools need to consider how a scholar might verify and analyze the assumptions of the tool itself" (Ex 4, 1b-A)

"work with experimental technology and the most sophisticated systems in service of the humanities with no end in sight -- partnership with the highest-end technologies." (Ex 6b, 1b-A)

"Roadmap/model for how to provide digital humanist tools, infrastructure" (Ex 7, 1b-B)

"we're forced to work together because the digital is ubiquitous but must be highly structured. ubiquity does not mean independence. must be thought out in advance. "fascist" program of commonality, uniformity. potential objection: in doing this we are blinding ourselves, limiting ourselves... if we could all be google apps in the big google world... i don't think this precludes idiosyncrasy" (Ex 7, 1d-E)

"design principles for digital scholarship - how to design tools so that they are more intuitive for traditional scholars?" (W2, Education and Training, questions and concerns, group 2)

"How can we get tools to integrate better with the content? What are the common characteristics, aspects, or capabilities of tools that will facilitate enablement of practices-of-interest ... could PB describe such c, a, or c as a contribution to toolmakers? Citation/provenance to enable incentive." (W2, Tools and Repository Partners, questions and concerns, group 12 notes)

"Time to get beyond the one-off project - how do you get this into the heads of stubborn, local programmers? Will this whole deliberative process help us get beyond it, or just create more layers?" (W2, Tools and Content, plenary notes, plan)

"Identify rewards/incentives so content providers would trust tool developers. Tool interoperability (but standards group is doing this) 0 this is important. Don't want to reinvent wheels. What was incentives for institutions - building tools PB wants, not just what you want. Making something Bamboo-compliant could mean sacrificing exactly what you want to do" (W2, Tools and Repositories II, risks and rewards, plenary notes)

"What I would like to have readily available is a method for tracking the history of user activities within any given system. If I have a customizable way to store whatever someone does that changes state, ideally grouped by minor and major state changes, I can use it for three things: providing the user with an un-do/re-do, or else a forward/back mechanism; providing the user with a way to share state with other users; providing the researcher with a log mechanism." (SN-0005 A History Mechanism, Stan Ruecker, 1/6/09)

"1) Importance of classroom. reliability and simplicity: I'm interested in the use of visual materials, but [I] really only want to use them if ... I'm not going to have technical problems, which does still happen more than I like. And [specific support organization] is great but making things as simple as possible in the classroom is critical ... our classes are so short. 2) Make sure tools foreground visual materials, not the software. I want only a full screen, I don't want any toolbars or anything that distracts me from the image. ... That is very important for me to not have anything about the computer or the hardware showing. ... That is something that I want to master. 3) Portability and durability of presentations. The wonderful thing about PowerPoint is that I come up with a slide presentation and then it's always there on my machine. And so, I just put it on a thumb drive and bring it to class. I want to make sure I'll be able to save those presentations, after I've put a lot of work into creating them ...." (SN-0037 Group Presentation, Andrea Nixon)

"In the capsule description for 4.1 we say: 'will benefit faculty, librarians, funders, institutional leaders, technical architects, and service developers'. In the following paragraph the list changes to: 'to help funding agencies, university leaders, scholars, technologists, and technology vendors'. Both lists are accurate, although the order of the first version is bottom-up and begins with the faculty (scholar/teacher) while the second begins with (national and international) funding agencies and proceeds later to the individual scholar and technologist. To the extent that order matters, perhaps the two lists should parallel each other more closely. How one prioritizes audiences also has a effect in designing software services." (Shared Services working group, Program Document Sec 4 - Discussion Draft of 9 March 2009, Michael Spalti, 3/11/09 comment)

"The tools for manipulation have been familiar to corpus linguists and experts in information retrieval for decades. Their introduction into the domain of the humanities has its problems for a variety of technical and cultural reasons. The SEASR project is the most aggressive effort to speed up that introduction. Three things are very clear to me. First, these tools are very powerful and promising. Second, their application in a different domain will require many adjustments in the tools, in their use, and in the treatment of the data on which they are used. Third, new tools are nearly always more successfull if they are deeply embedded in an environment of old and familiar tools." (Tools & Content Partners working group, Analyzing Scholarly Narratives, Martin Mueller, 3/27/09)