How to Make an Interactive Network Visualization

How to Make an Interactive Network Visualization.

This uses CoffeeScript (a simplified version of JavaScript). I want to try this because I want to make a visualization tool for my George Eliot Workspace (or maybe a GE semantic web).

The Expression of Emotions in 20th Century Books

The Expression of Emotions in 20th Century Books

This is an interesting study of emotion-words in 20th century books, computed from data contained in the Google Books datasets, and using a tool called WordNet Affect, which has developed a taxonomy/ontology of affect-related words and semantic linkages. Something like this tool would be useful for me in my research on shame in nineteenth century texts. The article explains the methodology:

For this study we assessed the emotional valence of the text in books using a text analysis tool, namely WordNet Affect [37]–[39]. WordNet Affect builds on WordNet [40] by labeling synonymous terms which may represent mood states. Six mood categories, each represented by a different number of terms, have been analyzed: Anger (N = 146), Disgust (N = 30), Fear (N = 92), Joy (N = 224), Sadness (N = 115), and Surprise (N = 41). The text analysis was performed on word stems; the latter were formed using Porter’s Algorithm [41]. Both WordNet Affect and Porter’s Algorithm are considered as standard tools in text mining and have been applied in several relevant tasks [24], [42]–[46]. We obtained the time series of stemmed word frequencies via Google’s Ngram tool (http://books.google.com/ngrams/datasets) in four distinct data sets: 1-grams English (combining both British and American English), 1-grams English Fiction (containing only fiction books), 1-grams American English, and 1-grams British English.

Unit 13 – I’ve learned a lot this semester!

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I have learned so much this semester, it’s hard to know where to begin. But I guess I need to begin with metadata and taxonomy. Early in the semester I posted that “I read some articles this week that made me realize that much of what added value librarians provide to collections is in the form of metadata. I guess I always thought of librarians mainly as reference librarians or subject specialists — not as experts in classifying and indexing information.” But now I know (a little) about the value of good metadata, and taxonomies, and I’ve learned about metadata standards such as Dublin Core, that help to standardize metadata usage over the entire web. I’ve learned about the semantic web, and the idea of linking data and building ontologies that describe the relations between concepts. I’ve learned about the contrasting benefits of controlled vocabularies versus “folksonomy” (i.e., tagging). And I’ve learned a little about harvesting metadata, using PKPHarvester to harvest metadata from several databases and data providers.

I’ve also learned more about the Open Access movement, and open access initiatives; and about the issues of “freeing” information from behind paywalls. The main obstacle to this is that knowledge (and its associated data) is a currency that has value, and that making it freely available will necessitate basic structural changes in academia and in academic publishing.

Those structural changes include major changes in the role of the library and librarians in the production and preservation of knowledge. These changes present sigificant challenges to libraries in managing, curating and preserving digital materials and data. Librarians are increasingly expected to have the technical skills to design and select Content Management Systems for their libraries, to design, create, and maintain digital collections and digital repositories, and to train other librarians to do the same, often with limited technical staff and limited budgets. Open Source software is a boon to the small library or non-profit or museum that needs these types of functionality; but again that requires technical knowledge and skill on the part of the librarian to install, configure, and maintain operating systems and small in-house servers.

In order to gain those technical skills, I learned how to create several virtual machines with linux stacks of various sorts, and to install and configure four different content management/digital repository software systems (Drupal, DSpace, Eprints, and Omeka). I created a sample digital collection in each one, and used the experience to compare each system’s strengths and weaknesses, and then to decide which sorts of digital collections (and environments) each system is best suited for. I then chose which system to use to host my digital collection, set up the system, entered the records and created the metadata, and then wrote a paper on the process, which will contribute toward my digital portfolio. In my case, I decided upon Drupal as the system I want to use for my digital collection. Drupal has a steep learning curve, and I really learned a lot about Drupal in a short time through the process of designing my collection, downloading and installing extra modules to provide the functions I needed, and troubleshooting the installation. I’m proud of how well my prototype digital collection works, but I already have plans to keep working on the prototype to get it working even better, and to extend its functions, and to redesign certain features. I’m turning into a Drupal geek already.

Librarians are also expected to conduct outreach to their various communities, in order to make the services of the library more accessible and useful. This seems to be especially needful for the humanities scholar community. We read many articles about the obstacles that keep humanities scholars from embracing digital initiatives, and from using digital resources (and those articles confirmed my own observations). We learned about how humanities scholarship, data, and workflows are vastly different than those of the scientific community; identified some of the obstacles that prevent humanities scholars from using (or producing) digital resources, including digital repositories; and read about several digital humanities initiatives, both in the U.S. and in Europe.

I think one of the most enjoyable aspects of the course for me was just the chance to see so many different examples of digital collections; to interact with my fellow students over their collections and interests; and to explore what is already being done, what is possible and useful.  A find that was very helpful to me was the UK Reading Experience Database (RED). This is a database that contains much of the same sorts of data that I wanted to collect in my own digital collection, so it gave me some assurance that I was on the right track with my ideas.

Finally, I have included a slideshow of some screen shots from my project.

Semantic Web Standards.  I just want to post this link for future reference.

Unit 7 – Experimenting with Fedora Commons

We will not be covering Fedora Commons as a digital repository, so I wanted to experiment with it a little. I am interested in creating more of a semantic web than a traditional digital repository, and Fedora is designed to enable this data model.  According to their website under the section “Fedora Basics,”

“While Fedora can easily be used to model digital collections of surrogates of traditional, catalog-based collections, it has been designed to be able to support durable web-like information architectures. Because each object completely contains all of the content, metadata and attributes of a unit of content, and can assert any number of relationships to any other object, it is easy to support schemes in which objects have multiple contexts with no dependencies upon each other.”

Fedora supports an RDF-like data model, where

“Relationships are asserted from the perspective of one object to another object as in the following general pattern:

<subjectFedoraObject> <relationshipProperty> <targetFedoraObject>

The first Fedora object is considered the “subject” of the relationship assertion. The relationship, itself, is considered a property of the subject. The target Fedora object is the related object. Thus, a valid relationship assertion as an English-language sentence might be:

<MyCatVideo> <is a member of the collection> <GreatCatVideos>”

They have an online sandbox environment that you can test. I will post more when I get the chance to play around.

News: The Promise of Digital Humanities – Inside Higher Ed.

I want to play “Desperate Fishwives”!

“While we have been anguishing over the fate of the humanities, the humanities have been busily moving into, and even colonizing, the fields that were supposedly displacing them,” wrote Stanley Fish, the outspoken professor of humanities and law at Florida International University, on his New York Times blog in June.

…

Some were oriented to teaching history via role-playing games. Heidi Rae Cooley, an assistant professor of new media studies at the University of South Carolina, presented one such project, called “Desperate Fishwives.” The game “intends to introduce students to the kinds of social and cultural practices that would have been in play in a 17th Century British village,” Cooley explained. Students will be tasked with accumulating resources, completing social rituals, and solving some societal ill “before church or state intervene,” she continued. Afterward, students would render a prose account of their experiences — “and thereby learn of the nature and complexities of historiography.”

Lisa Rosner, a professor of history at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, presented her concept for a role-playing game called “Pox in the City.” The game has similar educational goals to “Desperate Fishwives,” although Rosner’s has to do with public health in 19th-century Edinburgh. Players can assume the roles of doctor, patient, or smallpox virus.