The Linking Open Data Cloud Diagram, by Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch

I’m thinking through many of the interesting conversations occurring around Twitter and the DH blogosphere recently. First, Miriam Posner had a really powerful post about learning code and gender, where she argues that the broad exhortation to code covers up gender and diversity inequity. The large number of coding institutions, she cites Wikipedia as an example, are overwhelmingly male-dominated. ”[M]en — middle-class white men, to be specific — are far more likely to have been given access to a computer and encouraged to use it at a young age. I love that you learned BASIC at age ten. But please realize that this has not been the case for all of us.” In a particularly thoughtful response in the comments, Steven Ramsay describes the environment in a meet-and-greet session with male developers as “like a locker room. I counted three women in a group of at least fifty men, but that wasn’t even the worst of it. Porn joke? Check. Sports and warfare metaphors? Abounding. Do-or-die, you-win-or-you-suck vibe? Very much in evidence.”

Meanwhile, both Katherine Harris and Lauren Klein show how archives are often silent when it comes to the representation of minorities, and Lauren (in one of the most powerful instances of topic modeling I’ve found in recent criticism) shows how digital technology can think through those silences. You can check out Natalia Cecire’s Storify of the conversation I had with them.

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H/T to Carrie Smith, who put the Storify together.

One of the most important aspects of project management is - no surprise here - tracking the progress of your project. If you have a complex project that includes many technical steps, you’ll want to be able to have a formal system that tracks accomplishments, allows you to make adjustments along the way, and can help you set priorities.

At DiSC, we are currently moving from one tool for tracking digital projects to another. In this post, I’ll talk in detail about both projects, their benefits and problems.

The Trac Project

The Trac Project. Emory currently uses The Trac Project for its tracking software. The main benefit of The Trac Project is its wiki format and its open source software. These features allow you to have almost complete control over how you want to structure your projects. In our site, milestones are treated as first level headers, user stories as second-level, and individual tasks with point values as the final level. Check out my first post on project management if you are unfamiliar with user stories. Visually, the trac site for our project keeps the details of each milestone structured and easily scannable.

Other features of the site include a Trac Timeline, which creates a timeline of important milestones in your project; RSS support, which allows you to send updates to any RSS reader; Trac Ticket System, which allows you to keep track of reported bugs on the site; and the Trac Repository Browser, which gives you the ability to visualize specific revisions to the plan.

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I just put together a research and teaching portfolio! Warning, it’s a .pdf file.

Photo by mbrochh

Welcome to a new year at Python for Humanists! I’d like to use this post to point out a few things that commenters have shown me since I last posted. John Case wrote a very good rejoinder to a few of the ideas I presented in my last post, saying “[a]s a developer, I’d like to say, generally, if extra lines of code makes it easier to understand how the code works, use the extra lines of code! It’s incredibly frustrating to try to reverse-engineer someone else’s code because they were trying to be too clever and would end up with some abomination that’s impossible to debug or modify.” John makes a great point. The whole point of Python is to create code that others can easily use. And sometimes being too simple can end up making your code more difficult to read. So, while simple is generally better than complex, don’t create code that others cannot read or understand.

Second, David Haeselin recommended MIT’s OpenCourseWare’s Intro to Computer Science class, which he says “teaches Python.” Here’s the first lecture on beginning to understand computational concepts lead by Eric Grimson and John Guttag. The beginning of the video discusses the logistics of the class, and the discussion of computation begins around 16:19.

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I can’t help but admire my colleague Miriam Posner. As voices go back and forth after #aha2012 and #mla12 about whether DH is too utopian, not critical enough, not oppositional enough, too postmodern, too meta, too religious, etc. etc. etc.,* Miriam offers a wonderfully concise and powerful account of why the digital humanities inspires those who practice it. In a response to Andrew Hartman’s claim that THATCamp, and DH in general, suffer from an unwarranted utopianism, Miriam writes:

Hartman enjoyed himself but wondered if the scholars attending THATCamp evinced an unwarranted utopianism about the prospects of technology to transform the practice of history. It’s a good question, and an understandable reaction, but I don’t think it’s altogether accurate. First, I think that what Hartman understood as utopianism may in fact have been an attempt by the participants to make newcomers like Hartman feel welcome. If there’s a utopianism present at THATCamp, I think it’s more about the possibilities of new forms of interacting with each other, not the technology itself.

Miriam later argues that “history has a humility that I love,” and indeed Miriam’s dedication to humility is part of the reason why I’ve learned so much from her. From her reflections on project management to sharing her research tools and thinking about academic accessibility for people with disabilities, Miriam has shown me the power of valuing different contributions and approaching academic work with humility.

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I really enjoyed my time at the MLA this year. Apart from the usual meeting of colleagues, the eating of good food, and the enjoyment of the great atmosphere of Seattle (I went on a Twin Peaks walk!), I found that the culture of the MLA has really changed. People introduced themselves, seemed genuinely interested in each other’s projects, and were more willing to collaborate with one another to tackle some of the larger problems we face as a discipline. I ran into Laurie Taylor, a graduate school friend and colleague, who I consider to be a pioneer in alternative academic careers.

Laurie and I talked about graduate school, how I remembered being completely baffled why anyone who finished a PhD would ever want to work in a library (she graduated in 2006) and how I, interestingly enough, now work in a library. I realize now that my confusion was really an elitism borne from a culture of graduate education that only favored a certain type of discourse that was performed in a very specific way.

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Here’s a storify of the tweets and pictures taken at Kathi Inman Berens’s and Brian Croxall’s The “Building Digital Humanities in the Undergraduate Classroom” roundtable and Kathy Harris’s “Digital Pedagogy” roundtable at #MLA12.

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