academic

Paying for College in 1803

February 6, 2017 by admin

When I pay our son’s college tuition I am given a variety of options, from full payment up-front to installment plans, but no matter how I pay I must use U.S. currency. Which raises the question, before there was a standard U.S. currency, how did students pay their college tuition?

I have been reviewing the early laws and records of Rhode Island College (Brown University’s predecessor) and have found a number of unanticipated tidbits unrelated to the questions that I am researching. One such tidbit concerns this issue of currency. In the laws of 1793, most fees are payable in schillings and pence. In the laws of 1835, standard U.S. currency is specified. While the laws of 1803 though, mostly uses dollars and cents, it requires the payment of the tuition in advance of “one hundred ounces of silver.”

This raises two questions for me: (1) what was the status of U.S. currency in 1803, and (2) how much would this have translated into, in our terms? As far as I can tell from the Wikipedia page, the Coinage Act, which established the U.S. dollar as our national currency, was passed in 1792. It appears, though, that there was some suspicion about using the minted silver dollars for fear that they contained less silver than they should have. It apparently took more than a decade to establish faith in the new currency, although a great deflation in 1802 certainly did not help build confidence. According to the conversion chart also there, 100 ounces of pure silver would be worth approximately $118 at that time. Using the formula found here, that equates into $1887 in today’s dollars (which is, curiously, very close to the spot price of 100 oz of silver today). If this is right (could this really be right?) Brown would have been quite affordable to the middle class. Of course, the gym was not as nice then.

Digital Preservation

January 26, 2017 by admin

Over the past few years, institutional digital repositories and more broad-based digital “commons” have proliferated. Many are found at universities (Brown now has one) and sites such as Zenodo and Humanities Commons. Such platforms serve two purposes. First, they provide a (relatively) stable environment that can preserve digital data. Second, they serve as a digital repository through which scholars can make their work freely accessible to others. While it is this latter potential that has largely attracted scholarly attention and enthusiasm (Sarah Bond recently argued that depositing one’s work in a “commons” is far preferable to putting it on academia.edu, a for-profit entity), I have been thinking lately more about the issue of preservation and specifically how it relates to the modern creation of scholarly and artistic works.

The underlying problem is a simple one: most scholarly and creative work today is done digitally. My own file cabinets are almost empty now and are largely uninteresting; my Dropbox folder, on the other hand, is a teeming, semi-organized mess of notes, manuscripts, drafts, correspondence (although most of that is in my email account), grant applications, and the like. Now, I like to muck around in scholarly archives and to read biographies of scholars that are based on such archives. And while I can’t imagine that anyone will be interested in my particular files, I wonder about the archives of scholars and artists who led genuinely creative and interesting lives. What happens to that part of their literary legacy that remains alive only in digital form?

Lest my concern be taken as mere narcissistic rumbling (scholars worried about the unfinished work of other scholars? Who cares?), let me offer a more pointed example. I have had occasion recently to have a series of discussions with archaeologists about their process of publication. Archaeological excavations generate reams of data. Locations of walls and strata changes need to be carefully noted and objects – especially the often enormous quantity of pottery sherds – each need to be carefully logged and catalogued. Pictures are taken. In the past, these records were kept in field notebooks and other written forms. At the end of an excavation, a final report is produced. The data upon which that report was produced were, ideally, filed away in a personal or institutional archive.

As with any scientific data, archaeological data are valuable. Other archaeologists use them to test the reconstructions and hypotheses. Later archaeologists frequently want to ask new questions of the older data. Since archaeology is by nature destructive, often all that remains of a site is whatever previous archaeologists chose to note.

Today, nearly all archaeological recording is done electronically. There is no single way that archaeologists do this recording. Some use off-the-shelf proprietary databases, others might create their own data managements systems. In any case, when the final report is completed and the excavation is wrapped up, all of that data goes… well, where exactly?

Unlike scientists, many archaeologists and humanists have not thought very hard about the preservation of digital data. Scientists routinely deposit their raw data in institutional repositories and are called upon to articulate their digital data management and preservation plan on many grant applications. The paths open to others are less clear.

Digital platforms offer many opportunities for archaeologists and other scholars who wish to more fully document their work. An archaeological report, for example, can be published online and linked with all of this raw data. A literary work can be linked to previous drafts. There are many fascinating attempts in the digital humanities to make the data and process behind completed works more transparent. Such projects, however, generally involve a significant investment of resources. It may be ideal but remains unrealistic to expect that every scholarly product will be disseminated with links to the raw data and process from which it emerged.

It is with cases like scholarly archives and archaeological data that institutional digital depositories and digital commons provide a simple and inexpensive solution. Upon completion of a project (or a career) the entire archive of data can be converted to an accessible format (e.g., XML); bundled together with more or less organization; and then deposited. Each deposit receives a library (MARC) record, which makes it visible to the entire web (especially if the repository is part of the OCLC). One could imagine cases where someone might want to embargo these archives for a time (easy enough to do) but ordinarily such data would then be easy to locate and freely accessible.

The most involved part of this process would be conversion of data into a standard, open format such as XML. Most common proprietary programs (e.g., Microsoft Word), however, already have this capability. In other cases, the software that would perform this transformation is relatively easy and inexpensive to produce. The advantage of this conversion is that keeping the data in a simple, open access format allows future users to reconvert the data to whatever format they find most useful rather than forcing them to find the same proprietary program compatible with older data. The whole conversion process might take a few hours; the final step, for example, of wrapping up an excavation report. Scholars might bundle the XML folder of their work with their email and, voila, an archive is produced.

At worst, such a digital work would sit unaccessed and unused – hardly a unique situation for scholarly works or archives. Yet the costs, in time, money, and digital storage, are low (and continue to drop). It is time to think about digital preservation as a staple of our “best practices.”

Create, Process, Link: Some Final Thoughts on The Big Ancient Mediterranean Conference

June 9, 2016 by admin

Now back home it will take me a while to process what I’ve learned at The Big Ancient Mediterranean Conference, and even longer to work through my new, vastly expanded, to-do list. Here I want only to sketch out a few thoughts. I don’t think that any of them are particularly original but having the intellectual space and dialogue to focus on them helped me to work through and articulate them for myself.

First, I think that it is heuristically useful to think of digital humanities (DH) projects as being of three types: data creation, processing tools, and aggregators or linkers. The data creators (some of the more impressive representatives at the conference were Nomisma, Open Philology, Corpus Scriptorium, and the emerging and impressive Digital Latin Library) make digital data. The tools, such as those that do social network analysis (e.g., Gephi), natural language processing (xrenner), or plotting make that data not just accessible but also useful. And the linkers (Trismegistos, Pleaides) link different sorts of data, most often from different sites, for a variety of purposes. I find that thinking about DH projects this way is useful even if some projects fall between these cracks and most do more than one of these things.

While I think that the “linkers” are some of the more exciting DH sites, it all starts with the data. Data creation isn’t sexy. It also is of limited use if they are created for only one site or purpose. If one is going to go through the laborious process of creating digital data, one may as well try to make them not just accessible but useful. That requires structuring data in a way that existing tools can, with minor modifications, process them; including URIs so that linkers can reuse them; creating APIs to give computing access to them; and encoding them in an open rather than proprietary format so that they will be accessible when software standards change. This also applies, mutatis mutandis, to tools and aggregators. Tools should be designed to apply to a wide swath of structured data and aggregators function at their best when they can harvest or scrape data from a large number of sites.

For Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine, the road has been long and slow in large measure because the site was created ahead of the standard structures and the very existence of URIs. Over the two decades of the projects existence, we have had to transform our data several times. The transformations from SGML to XML and from our schema to EpiDoc were some of the more traumatic ones. Each required not only the custom development of an automated process but also manual cleaning and refining of the data (some of which we are still doing). Now we must add URIs to allow geographical and chronological linking. Each of these transformations was costly and I predict – despite assurances that we now have stable standards – that there will be more to come. These projects, even the data collections, are never fully complete or stable. I’m not sure how one prepares for this but it is an inevitable, and for the scholar frustrating, part of any DH project.

This brings me to a second thought. In the past DH often fell somewhere between the administrative cracks of IT and the library. In recent years the weight has shifted to the library and it has become increasingly clear to me that that is a good thing. Each of these projects – whether a data collection, a tool, or an aggregator – carries within it new knowledge. Hence, it requires preservation. We preserve in an accessible format almost all printed scholarly materials, no matter how useless or bad. The same principle needs to apply to digital projects. With the creation of digital repositories and the low cost of storage this should not be overly difficult. This includes software: Github, now a favorite place to store code and DH data, will eventually disappoint us. Similarly, just as libraries preserve new knowledge so too do they have methods for cataloging and finding it. There are already a bewildering array of digital projects and they are not systematically cataloged, whether they are active, on the “way back machine”, or mothballed. Cataloging and the development of finding aids are desiderata. In the interim, for those who work in classical antiquity. two lists, here and here, are useful although incomplete and imperfect are useful.

A third issue is the very definition of scholarship. Although I am now part of several overlapping conversations that are wrestling with the nature of DH scholarship I cannot say that I am much closer to an answer. Data collection, on its face, shouldn’t be “scholarship” – but then isn’t the creation of print critical editions of texts, which largely involves collation, considered scholarship? Digital tools – programs – are at heart intellectual models: just as in a monograph, you input data and you emerge with a synthesis or intellectual product. One of the key differences, in fact, is that scholars writing books are often not as rigorous or explicit about their assumptions and methodologies as is a computer program. Linkers bring together, even if they don’t synthesize, data in new ways that create research questions and drive our conversations – doesn’t theory do this? I am not claiming that these should all count a priori as “scholarship”, but it points to a critical need for scholars (especially those in positions of power who hire and tenure) to wrestle seriously with possibility that the meaning of scholarship is shifting in a sharp but recognizable way, and that that is not necessarily bad.

A final thought in an already too-long blog post. The issue of audience needs to be taken seriously. A scholarly DH project might justifiably be directed at just a few hundred kindred scholars, just as journal articles or monographs are. I think for most scholars engaged in DH, though, that seems unsatisfying. We recognize the enormous potential of these projects not just to speak to specialists but also to teach students and engage a wider public in intellectual pursuits in which we are deeply invested. The challenge is realizing that potential. Sites need to be designed to address and engage multiple audiences and that is no easy feat. It usually involves creating separate views or portals which is a costly endeavor – the cost of a good accessible interface could run between $15,000-$40,000. Moreover, we do not yet have good usability studies for such projects or often the infrastructure or resources to conduct them. Here perhaps we can better draw on the intellectual resources of our academic colleagues in the business schools and psychology who study and teach such things.

I owe special thanks to the organizers of this conference, Professors Sarah Bond and Paul Dilley. They created a conference that was of high intellectual value, paced humanely, with a collegial environment that facilitated useful interactions, all the while using remote technologies judiciously and effectively. As one who has organized several conferences, I know that this is no mean accomplishment.

The conference tweets have been storified and can be seen here, here, and here.

The Big Ancient Mediterranean: Middle Thoughts

June 8, 2016 by admin

As The Big Ancient Mediterranean Conference begins to wind down, my head is swirling. People are working on amazing things and it is hard not to keep thinking of all the different ways to learn from them in order to better enhance my own project. We will wrap up today and I imagine that I will need some further time to process the conference and to gather some final reflections, but while it is relatively fresh I wanted to jot down four themes that have been raised and that have interested me in particular:

It’s the data, stupid. A year or two ago I was won over to this way of thinking and now I see it as all the more important. I used to see myself as building a site; now I am producing well-structured data. I will, to be sure, have a site that will do what I want to with my data, but the site – which can also draw on data from other sites – and the data itself are more disconnected. My product, as Tom Elliot said, is input for someone else. This would be my primary advice for those beginning new DH projects – separate the conception of data and service and if you are in the data production business, make sure your data is interoperable in ways you could never imagine. That is perhaps where it will make its biggest impact.
Uncertainty. When we present cool visuals, whether heat maps, tables, or social networks, do we risk looking more certain than we uncertainly are? The answer, of course, is yes: even texts do that, although we can mark our uncertainty in footnotes (which readers don’t read at the own peril). The appearance of authority worries some people more than it does me, but I understand the concern. At minimum I think that we all agree that ideally DH projects should have a level of explicitness and transparency that are rare for written work. Somewhere easily accessible I need to specify my data source, my encoding, and whatever code I use to process it. We rarely demand that degree of explicitness in print. Beyond that, I am happy with the production of clean, provocative visualizations just as I am happy with clearly stated, provocative textual arguments. Sebastian Heath’s fascinating project correlating the sites of Roman amphitheaters to major roads, or the Corpus Scriptorium’s tables of frequency of Coptic words are terrific and useful in the way that all scholarship is: they model something important about reality and drive our conversations forward by engaging them in conversation and debate.
Audience. We cannot and should not try to predict the eventual audiences for our data. But we are obligated to do so for our services and sites. Are we building a tool that three dozen scholars will find indispensable but that anybody else who wanders in out of curiously will be mystified, or a site that non-academics will meander through because it grabs their curiosity? Will people even be interested in our sites as wholes, or will they mainly dip in to grab the data that they want? Many of us hope – I certainly do – that our site will mainly be of interest and use to other scholars but that it will spark the curiosity of others as well. I’m sure that both of those things are partially true, but I increasingly suspect that such an ambition is nearly impossible; a bit like the multi-audience scholarly book. The sites most useful to scholars are simply hard to use. I was drawn into the amazing universe of ancient coins at nomisma.org, but only briefly – it’s a sophisticated collection of data and if one can find how to represent that data as a story it is one that requires a great deal of knowledge to interpret. “Wikipedia style” portals, such as the one that agglomerates things dealing with Syriac, are more accessible but perhaps a little less useful to the scholar. The Ancient Roman Graffiti project similarly offers fascinating material; who will use it, though, and for what purposes? What we need is a more deliberate iterative approach to usability studies: how do people use our site and what can we change to make it more open to whatever audiences we are targeting? The same data can be accessed in many different ways and we need to think hard about the needs and desires of different audiences. We have not talked much about this issue at the conference in a sustained way but if we want our sites to have an impact we need to devote more attention to it.
Citation. The gold standard of scholarly contribution is citation. For DH to go “mainstream” its insights must ultimately be citeable and those citations must be trusted (to some reasonable degree). One significant barrier to citation has largely fallen, namely the sense that things digital are ephemeral. The increasingly standard practice of putting digital creations into stable digital repositories or archives with stable access numbers is critical in this regard. More challenging, however, is precisely the more ambitious modeling that DH allows. If I come out with a result from a model (e.g., the fastest vs. cheapest route from point a to b) and want to use that as part of my argument in a book, how do I cite it? Ideally, I would provide the site that runs the model, the date (and/or version) of the model, and all the input parameters. That solves half the problem. The other half, though, is more difficult. Is the model sound? Has it been peer-reviewed, and if so, by whom? There is a very real problem finding reviewers qualified enough in both the subject and technical aspects necessary to adequately “certify” a project. There is thus a level of trust required that is unusual for other scholarly productions. The community needs to figure out ways to assure scholars the the results of DH scholarship are in fact to be trusted – at least to the degree that we trust anything at all.

More thoughts to come, and the twitter feed, #BAM2016 is still live.

The Big Ancient Mediterranean: A Preliminary Thought

June 6, 2016 by admin

I had the good fortune of participating today in a conference called The Big Ancient Mediterranean at the University of Iowa. The purpose of the conference is to discuss ways in which digital projects (including my own Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine) might better use linked open data to facilitate research. There is a nice cross-representation of projects that primarily provide data (like my own) and frameworks or services (like Pelagios) that bring together the data from different projects.

The idea behind linked open data is that different kinds of data (e.g., texts, coins, inscriptions, papyri) can be brought together based on one or more criteria. A simple example might be some connection to a place (as Pleiades does), but a date (or range) or person might be the criterion of selection. For example: Give me everything related to Jerusalem from the late Second Temple period. (This example is a little tricky because it involves defining the “late Second Temple” period. Fortunately, there’s a site, PeriodO, that will soon be able to do this.)

There is a technical issue at the heart of this kind of data gathering on which we have spent, and will continue to spend, a significant amount of time. For any service to gather data from another site according to a criterion it must know how to query the other site. Ideally for these purposes, then, all participating sites need to use a common, controlled vocabulary (or other stable identifier, or URI). Otherwise, if my “Jerusalem materials” are designated as belonging to Aelia Capitolina (the name of the city given by the Roman emperor Hadrian), a search might well overlook them. Having all participating projects use some common linking vocabularies is not impossible, but given both the scattered and often under-funded nature of such projects as well as preferences of individual scholars (never to be underestimated) it is challenging.

The more interesting issue, though, is why bother? Undoubtedly, the gathering of multiple kinds of materials with one search is potentially efficient, especially if I can more or less trust the results. If I want to write about the city of Sepphoris in Late Antiquity, a single search might ultimately bring me the bulk of the materials I need.

For most of the participants (and I include myself) at the conference, though, there is a more exciting if still hard-to-articulate promise to this kind of data selection. It is not just the collecting, but the digital assembling and visualizing of such data that will either answer research questions or pose new ones. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this issue in general terms. How can the use of digital tools not just help scholars to do what they’ve always done as scholars quicker and better but also do something entirely new?

I do not have an answer to that question, but spending the day thinking about linked data has helped me to see better one possible direction. Digital visualization helps to shift the vantage point. Usually, for example, when I create my narratives I start with texts. I branch out from the texts, using geography, archaeology, etc. to enhance or challenge my texts, but the base is usually textual. Think of this as standing in a point (the textual point) at the lines of a web that connect to my other kinds of data. But if I move to another point on the web – say, geographical -and look back out at my web, it will look different. With the click of a button I can make my starting point a map, an inscription, the visual image of an archaeological site, or graph. More or less the same material, but a different view and context.

Transformative? I’m not sure. But I’m intrigued by the possibility of easily changing my vantage point, having my data shuffled, and seeing what new insights or questions emerge.

More to come. In the meantime, there has been an active twitter feed of the conference at #BAM2016. I look forward to tomorrow’s sessions.