Over Yonder Where The Lilies Grow

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-vp/3347/thumbnail.jp

Archiving Database Driven Websites for Future Digital Archaeologists: The Archiving of TAPoR

Digital born internet projects in the Digital Humanities and in other fields of study are constantly being started while others are being terminated. Of those that are successful in the long run, they undergo numerous changes over time. Most of these projects and their evolution are not well documented. For many reasons, researchers and scholars are not very willing to self-archive their projects. We cannot rely only on big internet archiving initiatives like the Internet Archive to document for us our digital heritage. With the aim of encouraging the planning and creation of an archive from the early stages of projects, this paper presents the simple process through which an archive of TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research) was created and deposited using existing free to use somewhere and file formats that will ensure that the archive is easily accessible to archaeologists of the future

The Face of Interface: Studying Interface to the Scholarly Corpus and Edition

How can we study the interface of scholarly knowledge across print and digital epochs? To ask about interface across epochs is to take a concept that makes sense in the digital world and anachronistically bring it to bear on print in a way that could confuse both. Nonetheless we need to develop ways of thinking about the relationship between design, knowledge and audience across media, and to do that we find ourselves remediating concepts like interface. This paper takes the category of interface and adapts it to studying the design of the corpus and edition

Interfacing the Collection

The digital age has led to the advent of electronic collections with millions or even billions of items. This paper examines the types of interfaces that are emerging for large-scale collections, specifically addressing what a large collection looks like online and how it can be managed by users.  In examining these questions, we propose some features that we feel are universally desirable in interfaces to collections.  Overall, there appear to be two sets of features that help users effectively use and sort online content: tools to view, organize and navigate collections; and tools to customize and manage user-created sub-collections

Turbulent and numerical mixing in a salt wedge estuary : dependence on grid resolution, bottom roughness, and turbulence closure

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2017. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans 122 (2017): 692–712, doi:10.1002/2016JC011738.The Connecticut River is a tidal salt wedge estuary, where advection of sharp salinity gradients through channel constrictions and over steeply sloping bathymetry leads to spatially heterogeneous stratification and mixing. A 3-D unstructured grid finite-volume hydrodynamic model (FVCOM) was evaluated against shipboard and moored observations, and mixing by both the turbulent closure and numerical diffusion were calculated. Excessive numerical mixing in regions with strong velocities, sharp salinity gradients, and steep bathymetry reduced model skill for salinity. Model calibration was improved by optimizing both the bottom roughness (z0), based on comparison with the barotropic tidal propagation, and the mixing threshold in the turbulence closure (steady state Richardson number, Rist), based on comparison with salinity. Whereas a large body of evidence supports a value of Rist ∼ 0.25, model skill for salinity improved with Rist ∼ 0.1. With Rist = 0.25, numerical mixing contributed about 1/2 the total mixing, while with Rist = 0.10 it accounted for ∼2/3, but salinity structure was more accurately reproduced. The combined contributions of numerical and turbulent mixing were quantitatively consistent with high-resolution measurements of turbulent mixing. A coarser grid had increased numerical mixing, requiring further reductions in turbulent mixing and greater bed friction to optimize skill. The optimal Rist for the fine grid case was closer to 0.25 than for the coarse grid, suggesting that additional grid refinement might correspond with Rist approaching the theoretical limit. Numerical mixing is rarely assessed in realistic models, but comparisons with high-resolution observations in this study suggest it is an important factor.NSF Grant Number: OCE 0926427; ONR Grant Number: N00014-08-1-11152017-07-2

Replicating Fortier's THEME System for Digital Text Analysis

In 1971, Paul Fortier created a computer program to save significant time in analyzing French literary theme words connected to semantic fields. The system, aptly called THEME, harnessed the capabilities of computer-generated keyword concordances with frequency and distribution calculations to create research reports for user-defined literary themes. Fortier's system represents a significant achievement for digital humanities, not only due to its impressive capabilities but also for the precedents the system created in conceptualizing the role of the computer in text analysis. This paper discusses efforts to recover the THEME system and create a working approximation of the system in Python. This effort is part of Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell's Epistemologica project that seeks to recover, valorize, and interpret historical text analysis in the humanities

Spyral Notebooks as a Supplement to Voyant Tools

This paper introduces Spyral Notebooks, a notebook environment that extends Voyant Tools and offers a space for both notating and presenting analysis and for developing JavaScript code that extends Voyant. In the paper we present the design justifications for Spyral, showcase some of the analytical possibilities of Spyral, and address recent criticism of notebook environments. We suggest Spyral Notebooks help teach students to think-through digital text analysis and argue that the design of Spyral makes it rich in potential for the humanities researcher. We also highlight the collaborative possibilities of Spyral and show ways in which Spyral Notebooks have been used for collaborative digital humanities projects. Finally, we discuss future plans for Spyral. Dans cet article nous présentons le Spyral Notebooks, un notebook ou calepin électronique qui étend le Voyant Tools et offre un cadre pour le commentaire et la présentation de l'analyse et pour le développement de code JavaScript. Nous justifions la conception pour Spyral, soulignons des possibilités analytiques de Spyral et discutons des critiques de calepins électroniques. Nous suggérons que le Spyral Notebooks enseigne aux étudiants entendre l'analyse de texte numérique et nous disputons que la conception de Spyral rend prometteur pour les chercheurs humanistes. Nous soulignons aussi les possibilités de collaboration avec Spyral Notebooks. Finalement, nous discussions les directions futures pour Spyral

From Crud to Cream: Imagining a Rich Scholarly Repository Interface

  This article addresses the design of a dynamic repository interface to support numerous scholarly activities. Starting with the four fundamental functions associated with persistent storage — create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) — we tested, as an organizing rubric for the interface, the acronym CREAM: Create (represent, illustrate); Read (sample, read); Enhance (refer, annotate, process); Analyze (search, select, visualize, mine, cluster); and Manage (track, label, transform). Based on a card-sorting exercise conducted with researchers, we conclude that a slightly modified rubric of CREAMS offers a useful starting point that emphasizes the enriched functionality a scholarly repository or similarly complex digital environment requires, as well as the immense challenge of designing conceptually clear interfaces, even for a relatively homogenous community of researchers

Applying an Ethics of Care to Internet Research: Gamergate and Digital Humanities

This article examines key ethical issues that are continuing to emerge from the task of archiving data scraped from online sources such as social media sites, blogs, and forums, particularly pertaining to online harassment and hostile groups. Given the proliferation of digital social data, an understanding of ethics and data stewardship that evolves alongside the shifting landscape of digital societies is indeed essential. Our study involves a primary research archive that is comprised of data scraped from our project concerning the case study of Gamergate, which involved numerous instances of hate speech in various online communities. Doing this type of qualitative research presents advantages for humanities and social science research because it is possible to generate large and rich corpora about subjects of human interest. However, such data scraping has also raised ethical issues around treating social media authors as research subjects and, moreover, as subjects who have provided informed consent. Once researchers consider content creators on these sites as human research subjects, what would best efforts adhering to the directive to “do no harm” look like? While we realize the impossibility for definite rules to exist, we do consider the possibilities for how one can best care for the stakeholders using the challenges in their particular contexts. In this case, the stakeholders included Twitter authors, targets of online harassment, researchers, students, archivists, and the larger academic community. Also under consideration is how the Ethics of Care may be extended to the research community, and especially student researchers in their exposure to toxic material.   Cet article enquête sur les questions éthiques fondamentales qui continuent à se poser pendant le processus d’archivage de données recueillies de sources en ligne, tels que des réseaux sociaux, des blogs et des forums, particulièrement en ce qui concerne le harcèlement en ligne et les groupes hostiles. Vu la prolifération des données sociales numériques, il est effectivement impératif de comprendre l’éthique et la gérance de données qui évaluent conjointement les développements d’un paysage changeant des sociétés numériques. Pour notre étude, il s’agit d’une archive de recherche primaire qui est constitué de données recueillies de notre projet qui s’intéressait à l’étude de cas Gamergate, ce qui a vu plusieurs exemples de discours haineux dans diverses communautés virtuelles. Ce type de recherche qualitative présente des avantages pour les sciences humaines et sociales car il permet de produire de grands corpus riches sur des sujets d’intérêt humain. Cette stratégie de recueil de données soulève cependant des questions éthiques au sujet du traitement des auteurs de réseaux sociaux comme des sujets de recherche, tout comme des sujets qui ont donné leur consentement éclairé. Lorsque les chercheurs considèrent les créateurs de contenu sur ces sites comme des sujets de recherche humain, à quoi les plus grands efforts ressembleraient-ils, qui respectent la directive « ne pas nuire » ? Tout en reconnaissant l’impossibilité de l’existence de règles définies, nous considérons, à l’aide des défis vécus dans leurs contextes spécifiques, les façons possibles pour s’occuper au mieux des personnes intéressées. Dans ce cas, celles-ci étaient des auteurs sur Twitter, qui ont été des cibles de harcèlement en ligne, des chercheurs, des étudiants, des archivistes et des membres de la plus grande communauté académique. Nous considérons aussi les façons dont l’éthique peut s’appliquer à la communauté de recherche, et particulièrement aux chercheurs-étudiants qui font face à des sujets sensibles et néfastes.   Mots clés: éthique; éthique de recherche; cyberculture; jeux vidéo; études des jeux vidéo; environnement numériqu