Roger T. Whitson, Ph.D

Information for #cwcon presentation on “Invention Mobs”

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May 162012

Here are some quotes and a bibliography of sources that Leeann Hunter and I came up with for our Computers and Writing 2012 presentation on “Invention Mobs: Recreating Creativity and Collaboration in the Writing Classroom.”

The most creative among us see relationships the rest of us never notice. Such ability is at a premium in a world where specialized knowledge work can quickly become routinized work–and therefore be automated or outsourced away.
-Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind (2005)

Smart mobs consist of people who are able to act in concert even if they don’t know each other. The people who make up smart mobs cooperate in ways never before possible because they carry devices that possess both communication and computing capabilities.
-Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (2002)

[I]nnovative extensions often emerge when artists are exposed to other conventions besides the ones that they have been gifted in applying, inspiring or forcing creativity.
-Brian Uzzi and Jarrett Spiro, “Collaboration and Creativity: The Small World Problem” (2005)

The process of unlearning in order to relearn demands a new concept of knowledge not as a thing but as a process, not as a noun but as a verb, not as a grade-point average or a test score but as a continuum. It requires refreshing your mental browser. And it means, always, relying on others to help in a process that is impossible to accomplish on your own.
-Cathy Davidson, Now You See It (2011)

[C]reativity generally involves crossing the boundaries of domains, so that, for instance, a chemist who adopts quantum mechanics from physics and applies it to molecular bonds can make a more substantive contribution to chemistry than one who stays exclusively within the bounds of chemistry.
-Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (1996)

DiSC Presentation on Voyant

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May 152012

I created a pretty cool – but not perfect – screencast of my Voyant presentation at DiSC today. Check it out, and also make sure to look at the slides at the bottom.

View this document on Scribd

DiSC Summer Workshops

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May 112012

As I transition between my job at DiSC and Washington State University, I’ve decided to offer a series of summer workshops on digital text analysis, online curation, and multimodal scholarship. For those of you in Atlanta, please consider attending one, some, or all of them.

5/15: Voyant. Voyant is an easy distant reading tool that allows you to perform analytics and visualizations on books and other corpora. We’ll gander a definition of distant reading, perform some basic visualizations on Voyant, and brainstorm some research and student projects using the tool.

6/5: Report from Computers and Writing 2012 – Agile Project Development. AGILE is more a philosophy than a specific tool, that specifies iterative and incremental development. Those of you who are interested in learning about managing large-scale digital projects (or project management) should check it out!

6/19: Report from THATCamp CHNM (Center for History and New Media) – Omeka. Each year, the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University puts on THATCamp, an unconference stressing digital collaboration. I’ll be reporting from the workshops on Omeka that I’ll be attending at THATCamp.

6/26: Scalar. Scalar is a powerful platform for designing multimodal scholarly projects. It allows you to seamlessly integrate images and video along with recursive and non-linear formats for your work.

7/10: Topic Modeling 1: What is Topic Modeling?. Topic modeling assembles groups of words that appear with one another, with the intention of uncovering possible themes among large amounts of text. This workshop will look at the philosophy and history behind topic modeling and serve as a very brief introduction to the tools that one can use when attempting topic modeling.

7/17: Topic Modeling 2: Mallet. Mallet is a particularly powerful tool to use when attempting topic modeling. We’ll introduce you to the basics of using Mallet, as well as perform some analytics using Mallet.

Theses on the Open Humanities

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May 072012

On 25 and 26 April, Brian Croxall and I had the opportunity to visit the University of Florida on the invitation of Laurie N. Taylor, Digital Humanities Librarian in the George A. Smathers Libraries. We had the opportunity to learn about the work of UF’s Digital Collections and attended UF’s Research Computing Day, where got to see the some of the work done by UF’S High-Performance Computing Center. On the way to the latter, we stopped in at the protest about the proposal to eliminate UF’s Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering, signed petitions, and offered to take any willing computer scientists back to Emory with us.

The following day, we had the opportunity to attend UF’s Spring 2012 Interface Faculty Seminar and first Digital Humanities Day. We heard about different pedagogical strategies being deployed in courses across the university, including social media, wikis, and resources for sharing pedagogical materials. We also heard from about some innovative and long-running digital humanities initiatives at UF, including the amazing Digital Epigraphy Toolbox, which will allow scholars around the world to preserve epigraphic inscriptions using a simple desktop scanner.

Brian and I were flattered to be asked to deliver the keynote for the Interface + Digital Humanities Day event. Given the theme of the event–Open Resources, Open Possibilities–we decided to be as polemical as we could and titled our talk “Theses on the Open Humanities.” We couldn’t find anything to nail them to, alas.

It was an interesting experience for us to figure out how we would compose and deliver a joint keynote. What we didn’t think would be a problem was the Twitter backchannel. In a desire to make the talk as open as possible, we reached out to colleagues to watch the live stream of the event and to tweet along with the talk and the participants in Florida. Unfortunately, our first hashtag got deluged by spammers. As did the second hashtag. We managed to make it through the rest of the talk on the third hashtag. If you want to see the archived Twitter conversations, I captured them (sans spam) via Storify.

Our address has likewise been archived, so you can watch us and our slides. In the interest of making the presentation as accessible as possible, however, we decided to cross-post an approximation of the presentation on our blogs, along with our slides.

Teaching as Scholarship: THATCamp Piedmont

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May 062012

Hacking en-route...yes, we rule that much.

I just got back from a wonderful weekend THATCamp-ing at Davidson College. I enjoyed meeting new people, talking geek with Shante Smalls (though I live in hope that she’s absolutely wrong about The Avengers). I found myself reflecting more than not about the differences between THATCamps, especially since I’ve been to six this year. How does that happen?

At any rate, CHNM is the hacker’s camp, the camp where really cool stuff is going on and you sometimes don’t really feel like you fit in. Southeast (I went there twice, for those of you who are counting) is the librarian camp, where you learn about really interesting new advances in data curating and collections. Pedagogy is, well, it obviously speaks for itself. MCN had the benefit of connecting me to Culture Hack Day. And Piedmont? Piedmont introduced me to a lively, curious, but also skeptical group of researchers and instructors attempting to incorporate the digital humanities into a liberal arts institution. And their perspective introduced me to issues surrounding THATCamp and DH that I hadn’t previously considered.

I found many of the sessions to be absolutely fascinating. George Williams wanted to create a DH jump drive that students who did not have constant access to the internet could use to engage with online applications like Omeka, GoogleDocs, and TextWrangler. The Davidson faculty reminded me that some students were so anxious about grades that they wouldn’t automatically approach digital assignments with a playful attitude. Erin Templeton and Mark Sample headed a session based upon his Deformed Humanities blog post, where we tried to figure out how breaking stuff fit into a humanities curriculum. (As an aside, I referenced Derrida in that session, and really didn’t know what to that meant about “deforming THATCamp.”) And we also brainstormed with Leeann Hunter’s ideas about unteaching and what it might mean to apply the principles of the unconference to the classroom. Here are a list of some great tweets from #thatcamp #pmt.

Review of Alien Phenomenology by Ian Bogost

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Apr 272012

Alien Phenomenology, Or, What It’s Like to Be A Thing. Ian Bogost. U of Minnesota Press, 2012. pp. 168. $20. ISBN: 978-0816678983

My father’s dog died soon after I finished reading Ian Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology. And I also found myself angry with Ian’s discussion of The Wire in his final chapter, the displacement of the seriousness of social realism with the battered-realism of Cake Boss and Good Eats. I don’t know how, but those two events seem tethered in my brain at the moment, because I feel that (for a number of reasons that I am not conscious of yet) Alien Phenomenology is a game-changer. Ian’s book represents a real turning point in object-oriented philosophy. Whereas Latour and his lists abound in several of the books published by Bryant, Harman, Bennett, and many of the other OOO-philosophers, their work has still been primarily about human philosophers. Ian’s book forced me to wonder: could an engine piston actually practice philosophy?

I say this as someone who talks to animals. When I carried one of my childhood cats into the vet for the last time to euthanize him in 2004 (he had been suffering from a number of increasingly intense strokes, was crying softly. And my mother was whispering to him “almost there, almost there”), I remember feeling guilty for having treated him as a child – for having, in Deleuze and Guattari’s words – oedipalized him. I don’t know if it was a case of Bennett’s strategic anthropomorphism or not, but I kept apologizing to him – over and over again. Even as I heard the news on Facebook from my father, I tried to understand what feelings Leo had for our family, what it was like to smell the scents he smelled everyday, how it felt to be petted. He was named after the Spartan king Leonidas – but wasn’t like him at all.

Cats, dogs, and animals are, of course, not the only thing Ian covers in his book – but the idea that both of my pets withdrew from me (yet also communicated with me) is at the heart of the work Ian does. When, in the last chapter, he critiques the brand of social realism espoused by The Wire and celebrates the “unseen stuff of cookery,” he opens up a strange world where our most cherished humanistic values are overturned in ways that seem flippant, even irresponsible. And yet there is a bizzare, and powerful, ethical stance underlying the book. Consider the following:

Storify from “Theses on the Open Humanities”

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Apr 272012

Twitter Roundtable from 4/26/12′s “Theses on the Open Humanities” talk at the University of Florida

Making a Scholarly Website with WordPress

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Apr 232012

A few years ago, I decided that I needed a more robust online presence. Brian Croxall and Miriam Posner have blogged about how to curate your online presence (remember the basic principles of familiarity, consistency, and participation), and I have discussed the benefit of having an online website on Karen Kelsky’s blog The ProfessorIsIn. But I’ve never really gone through the process of how to make a professional academic website with WordPress. So, here goes:

Decisions, decisions, decisions
There are so many decisions that go into what kind of website you should make. On TheProfessorIsIn, I mentioned that I

I downloaded my own WordPress package from WordPress.org and use a site called Hostmonster to be able to have my own domain name. While WordPress.com hosts websites, WordPress.org gives you the WordPress program to set up your own website whereever you want. Some people are fine with having http://yourname.wordpress.com, but I like the idea that people can easily remember my URL(“http://www.rogerwhitson.net”). You can pay for WordPress to host your domain name, but there are further advantages to using WordPress.org. These include the ability to extend the functionality of your website using plugins. I use several plugins on my site including Blackbird Pie, which allows me to embed Tweets into my site;WordPress GoodReads Bookshelf, which displays images of the books I’m currently reading; and Vimeo Quicktags, which allows me to embed videos uploaded to the Vimeo site easily. Some scholars also use Drupal, code websites themselves, or hire a professional developer but these are solutions that are often too complex and/or expensive to really help individual scholars. I am also able, should I decide to do so, to change the design of my theme by using CSS in the Editor on the WordPress dashboard.

All of this is great. But what’s the step by step process for setting up a wordpress.org site? Continue reading »

Why Twitter is Conversation

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Apr 222012

I’ve been reading Sherry Turkle’s most recent article for the New York Times, and I have to say that her position is misinformed. The article also reminds me why arguments about “losing humanity” are really mourning shifting cultural values and the loss of privilege, as if “humanity” were anything other than a label determining who matters and who doesn’t. Here was a particularly poignant moment from the article that convinces me that Turkle simply doesn’t get it.

One of the most haunting experiences during my research came when I brought one of these robots, designed in the shape of a baby seal, to an elder-care facility, and an older woman began to talk to it about the loss of her child. The robot seemed to be looking into her eyes. It seemed to be following the conversation. The woman was comforted.

And so many people found this amazing. Like the sophomore who wants advice about dating from artificial intelligence and those who look forward to computer psychiatry, this enthusiasm speaks to how much we have confused conversation with connection and collectively seem to have embraced a new kind of delusion that accepts the simulation of compassion as sufficient unto the day. And why would we want to talk about love and loss with a machine that has no experience of the arc of human life? Have we so lost confidence that we will be there for one another?

My ICR 2012 Presentation

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Apr 182012

Folksonomies, Mechonomies, and Natural Selection:
William Blake’s New Aesthetic on Fickr and YouTube

Social media and the digital humanities have questioned the traditional role of scholars and editors in the production and collection of research. Taxonomy, in which expert knowledge informs the structure of the collected edition, has been challenged by folksonomy, in which a vast number of experts and non-experts alike have the opportunity to influence online publications through tagging. Folksonomies have contributed to a bizarre scholarly media ecology, typified by a vast flood of publications and ephemera that interact with the more traditionally curated work of online journals. Even more strange, intellectual movements like the New Aesthetic have started to consider how folksonomies are – themselves – mediated by computers and machines who are starting to exhibit more agency in archival matters. As James Bridle points out, ⅔ of the most active editors on Wikipedia are bots or algorithms, and complete the majority of editorial duties. I argue that editorial theories associated with 19th century authors, from Jerome McGann’s notion of “social text editing” used in the The Rossetti Archive to Wayne C. Ripley’s vision of collaborative “delineation editing” in the The William Blake Archive do not account for the rapid development of what I call “machine editing”: the increasingly influential role of machines in curating and producing online content.

But machine editing needs to be disconnected from its association with the simplistic assumptions about mechanical reproduction frequently underlying scholarly editorial practice in the humanities. My presentation outlines how online communities on Flickr and YouTube use William Blake to articulate their complex relationship with technology, and critique the separation between nature and culture often invoked in traditional theories of editing. One example of this phenomenon is Karen Tregaskin’s Flickr image “Eternity in a Grain of Sand,” which associates Blake’s Auguries of Innocence with the building of the Hadron Collider, the search for the Hoggs-Boson, and the microscopic structure of sand. Tregaskin says that her image was based “on a quote somewhere that once they get the protons spinning around, this huge amount of energy flying around 27km of tunnels…there will still only be enough matter to fill one tiny, fine grain of sand.” Blake’s pantheistic argument in Auguries would seem to contradict the fundamental assumptions about nature voiced by the creation of the Hadron Collider, and yet Tregaskin’s illustration shows how the material ecologies of sand are reflected in the hidden universes and fundamental particles of the collider itself. Close and distant readings of Blakean remediations on YouTube and Flickr can help us reconceptualize authors as not discourses or people, but complex ecological networks that survive due to a wide variety of creative and critical efforts – most of which are lost, forgotten, or trashed.