Evaluating Digital Scholarship: Suggestions and Strategies for the Text Encoding Initiative

As part of a larger pilot study on the evaluation of digital scholarship, we consider what role, if any, the TEI Consortium and user community might play in evaluating scholarship that utilize the TEI tag set. Our rationale for focusing on the role of the TEI Consortium in the discussion of evaluation is twofold. First, the TEI Guidelines represents an encoding standard for texts that is supported by a large community actively interested in the application and development of these standards. Second, feedback concerning evaluation criteria for digital scholarship has not been explicitly gathered from the TEI community and may provide additional understanding of the value, process, and assessment of text encoding. Determining what to evaluate and how to do so reveals the community’s definitions of scholarship in general. The clarification and articulation of evaluation criteria, therefore, remains a high priority as digital scholarship continues to develop

What We're Talking About When We're Talking About Sound

Presentation for the 2013 Digital Frontiers Annual Conference. In this presentation, the author introduces High Performance Sound Technologies in Access and Scholarship (HiPSTAS) and looks at current sound and text technologies

Knowledge Representation and Digital Scholarly Editions in Theory and Practice

In Transition: Selected Poems by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven is a publicly available scholarly edition of twelve unpublished poems written by Freytag-Loringhoven between 1923 and 1927. This edition provides access to a textual performance of her creative work in a digital environment. It is encoded using the Text Encoding Initiative’s (TEI) P5 Guidelines for critical apparatuses including parallel segmentation and location-referenced encoding. The encoded text is rendered into an interactive web interface using XSLT, CSS, and JavaScript available through the Versioning Machine (http://www.v-machine.org/). One aspect of textual performance theory I am exploring within In Transition concerns the social text network. The social text network these twelve texts always and already represent presupposes the notion of a constant circulation of networked social text systems. The network represented by In Transition is based primarily on issues of reception, materiality, and themes which engage and reflect the social nature of the text in the 1920s and now. This is to say two things: (1) that the concept of the network is not new with digital scholarly editions; and (2) that these networks in a digital edition foreground the situated 1920s history of these texts as well as the real-time, situated electronic reading environment. The argument of a digital edition like In Transition is formed as much by the underlying theory of text as it is by its content and the particular application or form it takes. This discussion employs the language of knowledge representation in computation (through terms like domain, ontology, and logic) in order to situate this scholarly edition within two existing frameworks: theories of knowledge representation in computation and theories of scholarly textual editing

The Makings of Digital Modernism: Rereading Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans and Poetry by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

In this dissertation, I argue that digital methodologies offer new kinds of evidence and uncover new opportunities for changing how we do research and what we value as objects for literary study. In particular, I show how text mining, visualizations, digital editing, and social networks can be applied to make new readings of texts that have historically been undervalued within academic research. For example, I read Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans at a distance by analyzing large sets of data mined from the text and visualized within various applications. I also perform close readings of the poetry of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven differently by engaging online social networks in which textual performance, an ever-changing interpretive presentation of text, is enacted. By facilitating readings that allow submerged textual and social patterns to emerge, this research resituates digital methodologies and these modernist works within literary studies

"Printing Fictions"

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Information is not just about contextualizing data. The machines we use to generate, manage, understand, and share our views of the world are also part of how we think critically about the information landscape. This assignment for graduate and undergraduate students is of note because it asks students to consider how information infrastructure errors may be inspirational and spur innovative design. Using Philip K. Dick’s “Pay for the Printer” story of 3-D-printed things as a motivational premise for considering the advantages of machine error, the assignment “Printing Fictions” gives students the opportunity to design their own versions of the deformed artifacts, tools, and objects described in Dick’s postapocalyptic world. Through this assignment, students are introduced to a critical perspective on the value of noticing and interrogating a technology’s breakdown or the moments in which the processes or algorithms of an information system such as a 3-D printer become apparent to the user; more important, they are empowered to use these moments to enact previously unimagined uses for which the machine was not originally intended

"Data-Based Project and Analysis"

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Like Melanie Feinberg’s course, this course usefully engages with information as authored by explicitly asking students to first understand and then to intervene in existing systems or processes in order to create an argument. However, while Feinberg’s course focuses on a specific aspect of information systems (metadata) and a specific theoretical concept (residuality), Klein’s course asks students to discover and articulate their own interests, which might range from forms of visualization to formats of data and from epistemological issues to the social or political. Whether producing a proof-of-concept or proposal, students must think about how their critical arguments intersect with real-world constraints. Projects such as Nicholas Felton’s personal annual reports are especially valuable objects to consider, as they represent uses of data that are personal and emerging, open to a variety of arguments and interventions, as well as concrete and specific, realized in specific technologies that are available to students. One of the interesting tensions running through the assignments collected here is between information as crafted by individuals and information as structured by distributed technical systems and tools, and one of the key pedagogical uses of Klein’s project is in having students experience and negotiate this tension

In vitro fibroblast and pre-osteoblastic cellular responses on laser surface modified Ti–6Al–4V

The success of any implant, dental or orthopaedic, is driven by the interaction of implant material with the surrounding tissue. In this context, the nature of the implant surface plays a direct role in determining the long term stability as physico-chemical properties of the surface affect cellular attachment, expression of proteins, and finally osseointegration. Thus to enhance the degree of integration of the implant into the host tissue, various surface modification techniques are employed. In this work, laser surface melting of titanium alloy Ti–6Al–4V was carried out using a CO2 laser with an argon gas atmosphere. Investigations were carried out to study the influence of laser surface modification on the biocompatibility of Ti–6Al–4V alloy implant material. Surface roughness, microhardness, and phase development were recorded. Initial knowledge of these effects on biocompatibility was gained from examination of the response of fibroblast cell lines, which was followed by examination of the response of osteoblast cell lines which is relevant to the applications of this material in bone repair. Biocompatibility with these cell lines was analysed via Resazurin cell viability assay, DNA cell attachment assay, and alamarBlue metabolic activity assay. Laser treated surfaces were found to preferentially promote cell attachment, higher levels of proliferation, and enhanced bioactivity when compared to untreated control samples. These results demonstrate the tremendous potential of this laser surface melting treatment to significantly improve the biocompatibility of titanium implants in vivo

Audiovisual Metadata Platform Pilot Development (AMPPD), Final Project Report

This report documents the experience and findings of the Audiovisual Metadata Platform Pilot Development (AMPPD) project, which has worked to enable more efficient generation of metadata to support discovery and use of digitized and born-digital audio and moving image collections. The AMPPD project was carried out by partners Indiana University Libraries, AVP, University of Texas at Austin, and New York Public Library between 2018-2021

Differential Host Immune Responses after Infection with Wild-Type or Lab-Attenuated Rabies Viruses in Dogs.

METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: The experimental infection of dogs with TriGAS induced high levels of VNA in the serum, whereas wt RABV infection did not. Dogs infected with TriGAS developed antibodies against the virus including its glycoprotein, whereas dogs infected with DRV-NG11 only developed rabies antibodies that are presumably specific for the nucleoprotein, (N) and not the glycoprotein (G). We show that infection with TriGAS induces early activation of B cells in the draining lymph nodes and persistent activation of DCs and B cells in the blood. On the other hand, infection with DRV-NG11 fails to induce the activation of DCs and B cells and further reduces CD4 T cell production. Further, we show that intrathecal (IT) immunization of TriGAS not only induced high levels of VNA in the serum but also in the CSF while intramuscular (IM) immunization of TriGAS induced VNA only in the serum. In addition, high levels of total protein and WBC were detected in the CSF of IT immunized dogs, indicating the transient enhancement of blood-brain barrier (BBB) permeability, which is relevant to the passage of immune effectors from periphery into the CNS. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: IM infection of dogs with TriGAS induced the production of serum VNA whereas, IT immunization of TriGAS in dogs induces high levels of VNA in the periphery as well as in the CSF and transiently enhances BBB permeability. In contrast, infection with wt DRV-NG11 resulted in the production of RABV-reactive antibodies but VNA and antibodies specific for G were absent. As a consequence, all of the dogs infected with wt DRV-NG11 succumbed to rabies. Thus the failure to activate protective immunity is one of the important features of RABV pathogenesis in dogs