As part of my Technoromanticism final project: a website unbibliography, http://digitalliterature.net/bookhacking, providing a survey of readings on the idea of hacking the book: rewiring, reconsidering, and rebelling against the conventions of the traditional print codex, beginning with William Blake’s masterful Romantic productions. The readings cover the ways in which Blake hacked the book, how formats such as the Total Work of Art and artists’ books have further deformed the standard print tome, and how digital editions—particularly those electronically remediating Blake’s hacked books—themselves function as explosions of the conventions of the book. The readings pay particular attention to the visual design of books and online editions, treating graphical decisions as critical features of these texts and creating a catalog of opportunities and techniques for hacking the book.

It’s the day after Cinco de Mayo, and that means it’s my birthday. In the spirit of Dave Lester’s birthday post, inscribing the blogoweb with five areas I want to focus on over the next year:

1. I have a barrel-full of awesome URLs in differing stages of use (digitalliterature.net, ulyssesulysses.com, AmandaVisconti.com, digitaldospassos.com, and this site), but I need to make more regular use of them, and spiff up the ones that were built years earlier in my web development experience (orange HTML-based digital edition, I’m looking at you). I plan to finally move my portfolio site (AmandaVisconti.com) live, finish my from-scratch theming for this blog, and start blogging on a more regular basis. My blogging will focus on my exams reading, ongoing ARG work, and my DH experiences (working at an awesome, supportive DH center and doing rewarding, enjoyable digital humanities academic work; basically, writing what I’d have loved to read three or so years ago). Relatedly, I’ll be releasing my Ph.D. exams list Zotero collection complete with my reading notes on each item on my textual studies/DH reading list.
2. The year of PHP! Between helping out with a PHP project at MITH and starting to build my own WordPress plugins instead of just tweaking others’, this next year should move me to a point where I can start building tools to help the DH community with participatory websites. I’m looking forward to giving back more to Omeka (through both themes and plugins), WordPress, and Drupal. Also, I miss coding; I haven’t had time to code since my master’s degree when I learned Python and built some roving LMS applets with Google App Engine. Coding is one of the best games, and it looks like my dissertation is going to be based around DH CMS coding. Life is good.
3. Translate more of what I love into teaching, whether that’s via documentation, blog posts, or creating course assignments for future classes. My experiences planning and teaching my own 200-level digital lit course over the past year taught me that this was a powerful way to cement expertise, and I’d like to document all the webmastery skills my MITH work has taught me over the past year. I’d like to do more toward conveying my love of DH, editing, game studies, and web design to the larger world–Wesley’s Wraabe’s recent post on why he’s a scholarly editor was inspiring, and I’d be remiss in wishing more academics wrote short pieces like this if I didn’t write one myself.
4. Safeguard time for personal creative projects. I’m lucky that my professional and academic work involves doing stuff I’d gladly pursue on my own time, but as I develop a dissertation schedule I need to keep oases of unrelated pursuits like getting better at fingerpicking the guitar, singing showtunes, developing my secret e-lit project, and making a more-recognizable e-lit shower-curtain cake.
5. A hazard of having work, school, and hobbies all on the computer is that I need to get out more (my vision will thank me). In the next year, I want to go to the DC Board Gamer Night, DCDH, and HackDC. Hoping to also get together a regular “coding party” group in the UMD area–working on digital projects is more fun when you’re hanging out with other people focused on similar work.

Hoping this post gives me a good place to check in after the milestone of September Ph.D. exams.

Crossposted from the Technoromanticism blog.

I created some webpages with the documentation used by Team MARKUP: http://amandavisconti.github.com/markup-pedagogy/. The content represents almost everything we worked from during the encoding phase of our Shelley-Godwin Archive encoding project, except some administrivia and links/images representing copyrighted content (sorry, no manuscript screenshots!).

I am one of four winners of the 2012 Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) Microgrants awards. ACH Microgrants reward enterprising ideas that serve the digital humanities community; read more about the awards here.

The digital humanities movement is often conceived as a community of practice, with defined networks such as the Digital Humanities Now Twitter list, Digital Humanities Questions and Answers forum, and various journals acting as platforms for sub-genres of DH research. Digital Humanities Quarterly, while a fairly recent journal, attracts more broadly relevant and interdisciplinary work than more focused fora such as Digital Medievalist; this breadth makes DHQ an excellent test case for tracking the flow of knowledge in the digital humanities via attention to the citation networks of its articles. Thisƒ application proposes a visualization of DHQ’s citation networks with an eye toward identifying key digital humanities texts.

DH is no stranger to citation network analysis. A 2009 DHQ article, Neel Smith’s “Citation in Classical Studies”, argued for citations as “descriptive of the subject of study”: “citation is a form of ontology: how we cite the objects we study identifies and describes the material of our domain independently of any technology” (link). Mapping of digital humanities articles across journals is not new (e.g. Salah, Leydesdorff, and Scharnhorst 2010, link), but the focus of such research has been on exploring which journals include DH work, not which individual DH works are cited within journals. Citation network research that includes information sources other than journal articles is not yet widespread in the digital humanities.

This ACH Microgrant will support making the existing DHQ citation content more visible and more easily analyzed through a visualization; the grant also allows MITH to provide code that could be used in future dynamic citation network visualization implementations. MITH Assistant Director Travis Brown assisted me in conducting preliminary investigations with DHQ’s citation data to ensure it is usable in my visualization tool of choice, Gephi. For an example of Gephi used in DH network analysis research, check out Elijah Meeks and Molly Wilson’s ongoing work using Gephi to visualize self-reported digital humanities affiliation at Stanford; my final visualization should combine the visual appeal of Meeks and Wilson’s work with an easy way to drill down and view the individual works and citations involved in the network.

A key issue in my work will be the current size of the DHQ dataset (110 articles), a small amount of articles from which to draw conclusions. However, my visualization work remains useful because my focus is on mapping connections, not asserting significant authority for any individual author or work. Also, my visualization process can provide a foundation for ongoing citation network visualizations as DHQ continues to grow.

The final deliverables will be one or more visual files of the citation network visualizations, the code used to capture and clean the citation data for visualization, and a final report. The final report will both technical and conceptual, documenting my scraping and visualizing process and addressing future paths for network analysis with DHQ’s citation data.

Possibilities for future work include exploring the bibliographic details of what is cited (e.g. publishing format and venue, academic discipline and job title of author) as well as analyzing which academic fields are under-represented and which formats are mentioned within articles but not cited (as is sometimes the case with digital archives and academic blog posts). Linearity (who cites whom) and time elapsed between publication and citation are other interesting places for visualization and analysis. Additionally, I may be able to visualize a meaningful subset of DHQ articles citing other DHQ articles as the DHQ dataset grows. As I explore these possibilities for more detailed visualizations, I will articulate their proposed interpretations, keeping my emphasis on network exploration rather than asserting authority for any individual works or authors. The outcome of this work should stretch beyond these deliverables by offering DHQ a basis on which to eventually create a dynamically updated citation network visualization.