How the Digital Humanities are using Slack to support and build a geographically dispersed intellectual community.

Slack is a web platform aimed at improving team communication and offers some promising features for academic communities. Amanda Visconti shares the experiences of the Digital Humanities Slack. With chat rooms organised by theme, users share resources with colleagues, discuss specific theories or projects, and find out more about what people are working on. With a code of conduct in place, the DH Slack has become a safe and welcoming space for the disparate community

"Songs of Innocence and of Experience:" Amateur Users and Digital Texts

Digital texts promise to allow learning beyond that possible with traditional resources. Purpose-built digital texts are crafted for specific research purposes, with developer-users and devoted academics comprising their primary, "scholar" audience. A secondary, "amateur" audience of learners with less digital text experience also relies on theses purpose-built resources. Does the promise of new learning from digital texts extend beyond scholars to amateurs, or does the design of purpose-built digital texts, by focusing on more experienced users with direct lines of communication to digital text developers, prevent this extension of benefits? This study gauged one subgroup of amateur users' perceptions of the value of digital texts in terms of answering self-generated research queries. The participants, graduate students from the University of Michigan's information master's program, worked with a digital text and completed a survey assessing their experience of digital text features and perception of their learning success. An analysis of the survey data produces an introductory understanding of amateur users' perceptions of their digital text use, their design needs, and their success or failure at learning through digital texts. The narrative responses suggest that while the idea of new learning from digital texts is foreign to the amateur audience, their assessment of digital text features was not particularly marked by their amateur status. This result suggests that designing purpose-built digital texts to serve both digital text scholars as well as some amateur subgroups is a reasonable task.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/71380/1/ViscontiThesisSI.pd

"How can you love a work, if you don't know it?": Critical code and design towards participatory digital editions

Scholarly editors are integral to the continuum that keeps the stories of the past available to and understood by the present--but that public of readers beyond the academy whose interest keeps the humanities alive and relevant is just as important. What if we build a digital edition and invite everyone? What if millions of scholars, first-time readers, book clubs, teachers and their students show up and annotate a text with their "infinite" interpretations, questions, and contextualizations? My dissertation pursues this speculative experiment through the creation of the Infinite Ulysses digital edition; I've studied how to improve the design and functionality of a key artifact of the digital humanities--the digital edition--through this unlikely hypothetical. First, I designed, coded, and publicly released an actual digital edition of James Joyce's Ulysses with various experimental interface features. Second, I conducted user testing and analyzed site analytic data with real readers and researchers. Third, I used the results of the experiment to build on knowledge from fields with a stake in digital social reading: literary studies, textual scholarship, information science, and visual design rhetoric. I'm using this speculative experiment to dream big about the public humanities, produce something practically useful, and capture data to support critical responses to the challenges of a more public digital humanities. Three research areas were explored through these methodologies: 1. How can we design digital editions that are not just public, but invite and assist participation in the scholarly love for the nuances of a text's materiality, history, and meaning? Are there ways to design for meaningful participation that don't necessarily scaffold critical participation? 2. How can we design participatory digital editions to handle an influx of readers and annotations? What might we learn about digital editions and their texts from the accompanying influx of site use data? 3. Can we separate the values of textual scholarship from the physical manifestations of these values? How might this clarification help us imagine new types of digital edition that hold true to those values? A whitepaper serves as a report on the dissertation's process and products

Building Community And Generosity In The Context Of Graduate Education

The academy trains students in complex intellectual work and tends to reward the performance of one's own intelligence, both in coursework and in conferences. But in collaborative digital projects, this sort of focus on the individual is detrimental to the group dynamic, which necessarily needs to take shape around more than just the individual. In the Scholars' Lab's Praxis Program, a year-long introduction to digital humanities by way of project-based pedagogy, we consistently noted this tension in our fellowship cohorts. Each year, we consistently struggled to promote healthy collaboration centered on shared buy-in and generosity. While these are important needs and understandable desires, we hoped to use the year with us as an opportunity for them to work beyond this framing. We eventually realized that the problem was in expecting the students to act in a way different than they were used to acting in other parts of the academy. In short, we realized that the problem was one of training - our students were trained to perform in seminar-type environments in a particular mode, and it was a mistake to expect them to do anything else. This talk discusses workshops and exercises for our graduate student fellows that encourage students to reorient their collaborative practices away from a focus on the self and towards creating more generous and kind community spaces. We will discuss, in particular, a series of activities focused on community and collaboration for our students that discusses questions of de-centering yourself, building up rather than deconstructing, leading from trust and kindness, and more. The whole process is meant to help the students recognize that these conversations deserve a space in academic discourse, that academic practice can be different than they find elsewhere, and that this conversation can be a space in which to, in some small way, begin to shape a different kind of scholarly work

Hypercholesterolemia Impaired Sperm Functionality in Rabbits

Hypercholesterolemia represents a high risk factor for frequent diseases and it has also been associated with poor semen quality that may lead to male infertility. The aim of this study was to analyze semen and sperm function in diet-induced hypercholesterolemic rabbits. Twelve adult White New Zealand male rabbits were fed ad libitum a control diet or a diet supplemented with 0.05% cholesterol. Rabbits under cholesterol-enriched diet significantly increased total cholesterol level in the serum. Semen examination revealed a significant reduction in semen volume and sperm motility in hypercholesterolemic rabbits (HCR). Sperm cell morphology was seriously affected, displaying primarily a “folded head”-head fold along the major axe-, and the presence of cytoplasmic droplet on sperm flagellum. Cholesterol was particularly increased in acrosomal region when detected by filipin probe. The rise in cholesterol concentration in sperm cells was determined quantitatively by Gas chromatographic-mass spectrometric analyses. We also found a reduction of protein tyrosine phosphorylation in sperm incubated under capacitating conditions from HCR. Interestingly, the addition of Protein Kinase A pathway activators -dibutyryl-cyclic AMP and iso-butylmethylxanthine- to the medium restored sperm capacitation. Finally, it was also reported a significant decrease in the percentage of reacted sperm in the presence of progesterone. In conclusion, our data showed that diet-induced hypercholesterolemia adversely affects semen quality and sperm motility, capacitation and acrosomal reaction in rabbits; probably due to an increase in cellular cholesterol content that alters membrane related events

Goodbye Hartmann trial: a prospective, international, multicenter, observational study on the current use of a surgical procedure developed a century ago

Background: Literature suggests colonic resection and primary anastomosis (RPA) instead of Hartmann's procedure (HP) for the treatment of left-sided colonic emergencies. We aim to evaluate the surgical options globally used to treat patients with acute left-sided colonic emergencies and the factors that leading to the choice of treatment, comparing HP and RPA. Methods: This is a prospective, international, multicenter, observational study registered on ClinicalTrials.gov. A total 1215 patients with left-sided colonic emergencies who required surgery were included from 204 centers during the period of March 1, 2020, to May 31, 2020. with a 1-year follow-up. Results: 564 patients (43.1%) were females. The mean age was 65.9 ± 15.6 years. HP was performed in 697 (57.3%) patients and RPA in 384 (31.6%) cases. Complicated acute diverticulitis was the most common cause of left-sided colonic emergencies (40.2%), followed by colorectal malignancy (36.6%). Severe complications (Clavien-Dindo ≥ 3b) were higher in the HP group (P < 0.001). 30-day mortality was higher in HP patients (13.7%), especially in case of bowel perforation and diffused peritonitis. 1-year follow-up showed no differences on ostomy reversal rate between HP and RPA. (P = 0.127). A backward likelihood logistic regression model showed that RPA was preferred in younger patients, having low ASA score (≤ 3), in case of large bowel obstruction, absence of colonic ischemia, longer time from admission to surgery, operating early at the day working hours, by a surgeon who performed more than 50 colorectal resections. Conclusions: After 100 years since the first Hartmann's procedure, HP remains the most common treatment for left-sided colorectal emergencies. Treatment's choice depends on patient characteristics, the time of surgery and the experience of the surgeon. RPA should be considered as the gold standard for surgery, with HP being an exception

The reference site collaborative network of the european innovation partnership on active and healthy ageing

Seventy four Reference Sites of the European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing (EIP on AHA) have been recognised by the European Commission in 2016 for their commitment to excellence in investing and scaling up innovative solutions for active and healthy ageing. The Reference Site Collaborative Network (RSCN) brings together the EIP on AHA Reference Sites awarded by the European Commission, and Candidate Reference Sites into a single forum. The overarching goals are to promote cooperation, share and transfer good practice and solutions in the development and scaling up of health and care strategies, policies and service delivery models, while at the same time supporting the action groups in their work. The RSCN aspires to be recognized by the EU Commission as the principal forum and authority representing all EIP on AHA Reference Sites. The RSCN will contribute to achieve the goals of the EIP on AHA by improving health and care outcomes for citizens across Europe, and the development of sustainable economic growth and the creation of jobs

"Songs of Innocence and of Experience": Amateur Users and Digital Texts

Digital texts promise to allow learning beyond that possible with traditional resources. Purpose-built digital texts are crafted for specific research purposes, with developer-users and devoted academics comprising their primary, "scholar" audience. A secondary, "amateur" audience of learners with less digital text experience also relies on theses purpose-built resources. Does the promise of new learning from digital texts extend beyond scholars to amateurs, or does the design of purpose-built digital texts, by focusing on more experienced users with direct lines of communication to digital text developers, prevent this extension of benefits? This study gauged one subgroup of amateur users' perceptions of the value of digital texts in terms of answering self-generated research queries. The participants, graduate students from the University of Michigan's information master's program, worked with a digital text and completed a survey assessing their experience of digital text features and perception of their learning success. An analysis of the survey data produces an introductory understanding of amateur users' perceptions of their digital text use, their design needs, and their success or failure at learning through digital texts. The narrative responses suggest that while the idea of new learning from digital texts is foreign to the amateur audience, their assessment of digital text features was not particularly marked by their amateur status. This result suggests that designing purpose-built digital texts to serve both digital text scholars as well as some amateur subgroups is a reasonable task

Building a static website with Jekyll and GitHub Pages

This lesson is for you if you’d like an entirely free, easy-to-maintain, preservation-friendly, secure website over which you have full control, such as a scholarly blog, project website, or online portfolio. At the end of this lesson, you’ll have a basic live website where you can publish content that other people can visit—and you’ll also have some resources to explore if you want to further customize the site