Notes from a six-day workshop with Johanna Drucker at MIT (April 2012) 

[ALL APOLOGIES FOR MIS/INFORMATION BELOW. THESE ARE UNEDITED NOTES WRITTEN IN THE MOMENT AT MIT HYPERSTUDIO]

  • JD WORKSHOP
    • practical experience -
    • CASE PROJECTS:
    • Sunset boulevard
      • IDEAS
        • communities
          • communities participating
            • CONTRIBUTORS LEAVE TRAILS for analytics
            • CONTRIBUTORS
              • amateur to expert
            • USERS
          • communities represented
        • Display environment
          • movement/location
            • basic routes
            • movements
            • navigation and conventions
            • (e.g. car culture: can this be a podcast / low-freq radio)
        • Layers
          • Material geography
          • imaginative geography
        • Input (contribution) vs. Access (consumption)
          • Authoring platform
            • mobile authoring
            • fuller authoring
        • QUESTIONS
          • who is it about
          • who reads it
          • what information
            • data types
        • Content types
          • Created
            • Knowledgebase of lived experience
            • Knowledgebase of stored information
              • information problem
                • incommensurate ontologies
                • meaning making
          • Accessible
            • Curation
              • Data
              • Metadata
            • data sets
              • expertise
              • pools of data
              • extant data sets
      • TASKS
        • 1
          • USERS AND PRECEDENTS
          • define users
            • let these be distinct enough to define the shapes of data
          • find precedents
          • use cases
          • define administrative structure
          • immersion
            • in relevant work
            • in virtual archives of materials
              • what’s it like to find those materials and bring them into the project
        • 2
          • define functionality
          • information architecture
      • DEFINE OUR USERS
        • NOVEL
        • LOCAL
          • expert in diversionary activities
          • axes
            • mobility
              • walking
              • lives on central boulevard
              • does something every day
                • leaving a trail
                • habits
          • PERSON 1
            • new to the place
              • frequent proximity
              • uses the site frequently to gather information, to explore
              • can explore the area from home (large screen, flaneur)
                • desktop / home computer
                  • contribution
                  • sharing stories
              • can explore with access to devices
                • automobile
                  • audio
                  • gps
                • pedestrian
                  • traffic
                  • present tense
                  • access
              • sees the present state of the place
                • might know some hollywood
          • PERSON 2
            • Larissa,
            • retired, woman, remembers history of the place, has stories, has lived in the area quite some time
              • has been a local a long time
              • has a few stories to share
              • met someone who had added stories and showed her one of them
              • exploration by map
                • density of information around
                • neighbors talking to each other
                • taking a longer walk
                • like a bunch of conversion
              • connections between people
                • interested in making friends
                • meeting neighbors
              • habits and routines
                • pedestrian
                • automotive
                • dogwalk
              • hardware
                • has a history to share
                • browses on a not-so-new computer
        • TOURIST
        • RESEARCHER
        • REENACTOR
        • JOURNALIST
        • TEACHER
    • Day 2
      • Annotation and Collaborative Writing
      • https://digitalresearchtools.pbworks.com/w/page/17801672/FrontPage
      • I have a design problem and am looking for
        • New Node
      • analytics, computation, certain tools
        • thinking almost in analog terms, but with digital access, tols
        • haven’t fully integrated daily business ways of thinking that rely on digital means
        • “do we need those computational tools?”
          • productive relationship
          • useful relationship
      • conversation clock
        • exchanges in conversation
          • tagging
      • Yanni
        • mapped conversation
          • “trace how control is negotiated between humans and machines” (moment to moment)
            • lunar landing visualiation 1969
          • timestamp is spine of data
      • Vanessa
      • Visuality on the web involves temporality —JD
        • humanistic temporality
        • versus human time as a given
      • non-representational geography
      • tickets / data
      • Hye Jean
        • film production
          • global mapping
          • transactional mapping
        • compositing layer
        • assuming a map (traditional) or generating one of what the data shows
        • “what’s involved in the product you are consuming” –jd
      • miximize
      • things
        • socialbook
        • reading
        • pinboard
      • anthologies
        • “before they really knew what they were doing”
        • readlists
          • “The paradise of dainty devices”
          • contain:
            • lyrics (lyric poems)
            • ballads
            • (meant to be read aloud)
            • participation in court culture by proxy
            • commonplace book
            • “The Garden of the Muses”
              • all the plays he has at hand, all the poems— one or two lines
              • legal privelege
              • remix culture
                • 1.0
                • mixtapes
      • Juan Jose
        • platform software
      • demoscience.org
        • mapping controversy
        • demoscience.org
        • discourse analysis
          • complexity of language
          • context
        • “reification of misinformation” —JD
          • “turns complexity into a thing”
            • “it is” is always a fallacy
            • even as I’m passionately fascinated by visualization, it is reification of misinformation”
              • anything that takes apart the singularity of interpretation/information
      • Erin
      • ME
        • i am very good at feature requests
        • I want to see tools built, better
          • trying to map multiple paths of “usefullness” and see which tools/steps are missing.
            • “ecology of tools”
        • Looking at the Memex feedback loops of reading and writing
          • increasing frequency of iteration
          • decreasing barriers to participation
          • making the private (“marketable”) trails evident, useful
            • serendipity
            • conversation
            • connections
        • messaging systems, social networks,
        • show
          • social book
          • reading.am
          • readability
      • Allen
        • highlighting / annotation / discussion
        • online / offline
        • steve mambert
    • Day 3 – temporal modeling
      • • the gathering together of our own activity — the pull it together and post it out
      • place and space
      • reading and interpreted processes
        • by self-consciousness of collaborative annotation
      • how we engage with collaborative writing processes, how we annotate, and how we are informed by conventions whose
        • by Friday, go back to thinking about a mockup of platform
      • collaborative authoring tools
        • x
          • book blog
          • write together anywhere
          • etherpad
          • match ware
          • google wave
        • graphical formats and schemes of web writing and screen writing
          • what do they say about the argument
          • scroll forms
          • bulletin board forms
          • New Node
        • collaboration has always been part of scholarship
          • the canon is a corpus of collaborative work
          • informed, vetted, reliable
          • witnesses: documents and evidence
          • ex: greg crane perseus project
        • Vincent Van Gogh
          • interfeact shows you what the argument is and how to use the interface
          • legibility – downside is data’s locked into the interfacce
            • why not also a JSON api
        • narcissism is one of teh great pedagogical tools and so is competition.
          • competition
            • should there be a game economy with points and the like?
          • “Don’t think about the novel as it is; think about how you would change it.”
            • Where would you intervene?
          • Ivanhoe
            • how do you support collaborative interpretation
            • what kind of interventions
            • overview and navigation
            • always seeing it from somebody’s point of view
              • NO OVERVIEW
              • NO OMNIVIEW
              • always situated within some
              • assumption of ALWAYS being at some point of view
              • every version of every player’s interventionw as kept
                • every move was logged
                • sort by player or sort by date
            • what would
              • tactical, physical, graphical arrangement that lets you make your argument… visible
              • the annotation space, the workspace, how it would extend the capabilities…
                • New Node
              • TIME AND SPACE
                • is time a container into which things are put OR is it a
                • tmeporaility is almost never unidirectional homegeneous and ____
                  • almost always multidirectional, hetereogenous
                • representation of space and time in humanist documents
                • relationship among documents.
                  • the way documents in aggregate _____ temporality
                • where does the dividing instant belong?
                  • “actions and events in Interval Temporal Logi
                  • “is there any logical sort of temporality that isn’t covered by their logic
                  • Cartographies of time
                  • Pantographia – Fry
                    • timelines of temporalities, relative
                    • let a temporality emerge from the text, rather than assume a temporality
                    • “as a factor of time travel”
                  • Georectification
                    • republic of letters
                    • what were the routes, what were the times, what percentage was recieved.
                      • shannon, smr,
                      • “why can’t they engage with the more nuanced and imaginative”
                      • “It works great, but what’s the rhetoric?”
                        • semantic web and topic maps / pull different modes into play
                        • “Most visualizations are a reification of misinformation”
                  • EXAMPLES
                    • photosynth
                    • jonathan harris
                    • all the things i posted to reading
                      • lisbon circulation
                      • yanni’s class projects
                    • npr mississippi river
                      • New Node
                    • mit lab
                      • sensible city
                    • green book of segregated hotels
                  • The difference between:
                    • rending non-visible information on known maps
                    • versus the problem of historical maps
                    • humanistic / empirical
                      • is humanist a distortion of “the real map”
                      • a problem of authority
                        • a problem of cultural authority
                      • “how experience becomes coded back into landscapes and then landscapes carry the coding”
                        • embedded in the imaginary understanding of real places
                        • real effects on the way people experience those places
                        • crisis situations
                          • accumulative shared experiences
                  • Production produces a different set of insights.
    • homeworks
    • Day 3 – Narrative and Navigation and Orientation and Cognition
      • network sciences
        • what are?
      • NARRATIVE telling/told
      • NAVIGATION <–> WAYFINDING
      • COGNITION (FRAMES)
        • Aspen project
        • We can navigate through _____ without telling ourselves a story.
          • not just a path through the telling as a navigation, but an implied “told”
        • Navigation can often be done outside _____ experience.
          • WAYFINDING is ergodic
        • modularities of experience
          • synthesis
      • conventions
        • organizing discourse for the purpose of access/retrieve chunks of ______
        • FLOW
      • “DAY” by KG
        • graphic forms and graphic structure …. meaning
      • people are forgetting things but remembering how to find them.
        • great, so long as those don’t decay / delete
        • memory theaters
          • the uploading of ____ and the holding of it “in mind”
            • cog studies: much more about cues that trigger your understanding of what might come next
            • you know how to find your way home
            • New Node
        • cabinets of curiousity
        • blood in the gutter
          • cognitive frame jump
            • changing reference frame (as well as point of view in the narrative)
            • more workload / connections across the brain
          • cognitive reference frame jumps
          • power of scale
        • cognition is a distributed/integrated experience/process
          • the extent to which we’ve diminished that to focus on the screen – need to re-integrate the embodified part of that
        • constantly processing different temporal frames,
          • linguistic processing
        • how do we register
          • where
          • use
          • die fackel
            • image of book spines
          • WHERE ARE YOU when you’re in the Archive?
          • MRA = NO navigation of time, of journey, of distance, of increasing *remove* from that experience of presence
            • GROUP?
          • STRUCTURE of data materials for ready absorption
            • without fixing too tightly the combinatorial possibilities
        • the standard information system and the idiosyncratic one
          • associative memory
      • structure as affordance
        • “if you have a display structure, that’s organizing the relations between one unit and another, that’s part of the telling.” “but at what level does it operate at the level of the told” —
          • differentiation vs. the story I’m telling myself.
          • “and what’s the told?”
          • two units of iconic, semantic value.
            • “structures of justaposition hierarchy are CONSTANTLY in flux”
            • the structure of the database
      • knowledge of construction
        • fluency / transition from other media
        • experiential difference of media
          • literacy / fluency
        • “In that hour, I learned to watch film. Was taught, in effect, by the film itself.”
        • Gibson, William (2012-01-03). Distrust That Particular Flavor (p. 59). Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.
        • how something is made versus what is said
        • technique / technology
          • turtles the whole way down
        • bodyknowledge
          • you start where you start
    • Day 4
      • SCALE
        • Powers of Ten
          • where are the cues that let you know frame change
          • how many steps do you need to go from
            • n america
            • to city streets
              • sunset boulevard and
              • New Node
            • to guide someone graphically.
              • ALLEN
                • nation » state area » water » highways » streets » location
            • changing scale with graphical means of soemthing that’s not inherently graphic
              • distinctive features
              • references
          • what kind of large scale visualition is this good for and waht kinds of tools are good for finding
            • lots of largescale data visualizations
              • how: legibility to be made useful for some purpose
              • does it helps us to drill into data.
            • parameters, terms, scale,
              • Entities
              • so much of the semantic __ of large scale ___ visualizaiton ___ the __ screen realestate
                • level the nuances of distinction
                • correlate among more
              • “we will read towards continuity where no continuity exists”
              • what are the tasks to which these things can be used
            • Comedie-Francaise Register Project
              • you start [an inquiry] because you see a pattern
              • query tool
                • “Its an analytic query tool because it takes the information into relationships” JD
            • treemap
              • uses area
              • most common data deception in terms of area
              • “do data share party walls?”
            • network analysis diagrams
              • to what extent asre the spatical parameters merely an artifcat of constraints of display
            • circles
              • “It sounds conservative, but type is meant to be read in horizontal
            • http://corpus1.aac.ac.at/fackel/
              • tone, hue — contrast — graphic contrast between frames and what’s in the frames should never overwhelm the detail of the content you’re looking at —
                • when you do, you’re negating the visual
                • “It’s not that it’s (just) beautiful, but its beauty is at the service of a particular function” JD
            • what was cultural analytics good for
              • representative image
              • corpus
              • what kind of visual analysis or analysis of visual corpora can be made legible through this kind of visual display
                • pigments
                • datasets
                  • instagram
                  • har
                  • images in newstopics
                  • where is there a pile of images?
                  • presidential archives
                  • house photos
                  • eye tracking charts
                  • proportions
                  • changing footprints of
                  • painting dimension
                    • collections you can never see at once, and never will be
                      • from there studios, costs of productions, collection
                      • multiple collections that are disparate and will never be collected
                  • page size
                    • textblock to margin
                  • perse archive
                    • ink samples
                    • arrangements
                    • by ink sample groups
                  • handwriting / manuscript
                • DISPAPAD = disintscholplataugpublishauthoringdisplay
                  • FEATURES
                    • GPS, Mapping, Gero-Interface Temporal guide to experience/planner
                    • Search, research area
                    • Geo-location
                    • INDICES
                    • EDITING
                    • ACCESS TO PRIMARY MATERIALS
                    • MAP INTERFACE
                    • AREA FOR STORAGE
                    • ETC
                      • Analytics
                      • Visualization
                      • Annotation
                      • Versioning
                      • Text Processing
                      • Data Mining
                      • Topic Modeling
                      • Semantic Maps
                    • + emergent features
                  • + DIRT site
                  • What’s a minimum you want to give them and at what point do you want to say “you need something else”
                  • THINK ABOUT full-featured Dispapad
          • BUILD/SKETCH/DESIGN
            • FEATURES GPS, Mapping, Geo-Interface Temporal guide to experience/planner
            • FEATURES: search, research area
            • FEATURES Geo-location of information historical, fictional, factual; timeline for access
            • FEATURES Indices, search, geo-location
            • FEATURES editing, production, creative work, avatar production, character programming, narrative, extra-textual editing, augmented reality
            • FEATURES: access to high level authentic primary materials as well rich data sets
            • FEATURES Map interface, seeing maps, location links, film archive access
            • FEATURES Area for storage, collection, publish into the system, support student production/editing as well with geo-location to reconnect to physical space
            • Analytics? Information Visualization? Annotation? Versioning? Text Processing? Data Mining? Topic Modelling? Semantic Maps?
    • THURSDAY LECTURE
      • digital humanities
        • success at: repositories, open and available
          • 20 years project
            • international
            • aggregation
            • geographic crossings
            • labors of love
            • density of information gathering
            • interface achievements
          • examples
            • shakespeare quartos
            • po.ex
              • multimedia
              • labor of love
                • ubu
        • thesis: most humanist scholars feel that the repos are places to seach, not responsibilities to build
        • projects by JD / in line with this project
          • Temporality modeling /
          • temporal graphing
            • time
              • not linear
              • not homogeneous
              • not continuous
            • model temporality differently in accord with humanistic principles
            • how do you begin to analyze [temporality]
              • conceptual primitives that will give rise to models
              • ask: history of conceptions of temporality across disciplines and worldviews
              • “Now slider”
                • “now is to time as here is to space”
                  • “I mean, I didn’t make that up” JD
              • modeling as
                • elements
                • entitites
                  • point
                  • interval
                  • event
                • behaviors
                  • what can an event do?
                  • what can a point do?
                • actions
                  • what can a user do (in the system)?
                • ** FUN ** to do
                  • — modeling narrative
                  • — modeling…
                  • exercise of having to come up with a content model
                    • testing iteratively through a series of designs
            • built in flash by Jim Almond
          • Ivanhoe
            • all user actions as interpretation, as subjective POV
            • final display mode
              • all actions are logged
              • all actions are inter-related
              • aggregate of all actions and interactions == visualized
                • picture of actions of interpretations
              • the kinds of problems we gave ourselves were very different than the problems of archiving / repositories
          • New Node
          • Artist Books Online
            • http://www.artistsbooksonline.org/
            • DIY
              • JD built it
                • XML
            • taxonomy
            • what I was trying to learn online and extract from a community
              • osmosis
              • abduction
              • What is the field?
            • structure the fields (data/metadata) to structure the QUESTIONS in the forms themselves
              • coercive metadata
            • aesthetic issues
              • inspiration
              • related works
              • etc
            • every page of the book should be scanned
              • natural unit of the book is th eopening
            • thickness of metadata
            • asking questions that spur thinking about the field
            • [github the DTD]
          • Museum of Writing
          • Personal projects
            • All the books I ever wanted to write or wrote and never published
              • limits of one’s knowledge
              • database memoir
            • table of contents
              • database affords lateral manouvering
              • points of entry
              • references
              • writing to the requirements of the XML structure
                • imprint of the collector/author
                • imprint the collectorauthor
                  • another author (me) writing about myself
            • letterpress
              • “when will I have that kind of fluency in the digital environment?”
              • “I want to be able to arrange things”
              • “I want to be able to write diagramatically”
                • flexible scale
                • bifurcation
                  • multiple
                  • not either/or
                  • IF
              • New Node
        • conceptual/intellectual toolset for humanists working in construction of ____
      • DESIGN SKILLS for HUMANISTS
      • q/a
        • “I’m a believer that thinking and doing are related” — the feedback loop on thinking by making has been tremendous
        • the things you can’t do
          • show
            • how the tool structures your argument
        • prototyping
        • collaboration
          • shared credit
          • shared intellectual credit
          • “Knowing how to talk to someone about what you want done is a mutual education process.”
          • You can’t think those things outside the making.
            • thinking about novelty
            • (like film)
            • even if it’s an xml scheme, a classification system— it gets you inside the problem
        • alanlytics
          • how is it made
          • for whom is it made
          • what are the formal properties
          • what are the social conditions
          • “It’s not my field, but I know that someone who knows computer languages would tell me you want to teach these principles and how to learn them.”
        • do digital humanists ever do user studies? — no
          • huge blindspot in history of digital humanities but less bad now than it once was
        • skills
          • statistics
          • visual theory and criticality
            • behaviors, tasks, public. prvate life — lived in a visual mode
            • the screen is our interface to so much of the world at the point
          • writing modularly
            • granularity
            • design of rhetoric
          • learning to use the repositories
            • using information to enhance (not replace) critical methods
            • I think aesthetics is a way of knowing
            • “Do I care or not care. That’s the first decision you have to make.”
    • FRIDAY
      • 1
        • Platrforms that aren’t built around the contnet and content that’s not locked into the platform
          • so you can have activities behaviors and use that aren’t built around the
        • map
          • navigation scale doesn’t have to be study scale
          • “become narrative lines”
            • but pull up different information
          • 2.5 dimensions
            • New Node
        • how will I know what data is in here?
        • platform
          • you can make your own project on
            • maker interface
          • series of exemplary partnerships
          • data
            • temporal data
            • spatial data
            • cultural information
              • films and novels
            • expose categories that are available to be worked with
            • ex: zoning and tax base
              • how’s it going to appear to me?
            • reverse image lookup
          • “the map”
            • array of maps and documen
          • some kind of lens as a data refractor
            • how the data has been arrived at
          • Q: What is a publication based on all of this?
            • original sources, citations, commentary
            • heatmap of most edited
            • do each of these arrive as a wiki?
              • versions?
            • iterative instance that’s a fixed snapshot in time
            • wiki relation of
            • pointers to things in other repositirories and …. only has a reference point in other repositories
            • what are the methods of weighting and sorting and sifting
              • heatmap
              • …
            • psychology visualization
            • AUTODESK projects
      • WHAT ARE THE FLUENCIES THAT WILL
        • INTERSECT WITH A PRACTICE OF MAKING
        • zone of new media studies
          • act of making
          • that allows you to get inside the decision
          • Digital Humanities curriculum document
            • “What are the challenges as educators that we are trying to address in introducing topics of expertise and experience that weren’t there before?” JD
            • “Who will teach the people to scan?”
            • “What are the ways we’re preparing students to do the work we see ahead? — as researchers, individuals, and in the world around us”
            • defamiliarize the process of watching media
              • produced artifact
              • “I’m dedicated to ideological deconstruction. It’s how I was raised.”
                • “In whose interest?”
                • “How is it constructed?”
                  • old fashioned russian formalism
                  • “The more something looks like nature, the more it’s culture.”
            • -
              • what is digital humanities
                • comp ling
                • repo building
                • New Node
              • interface
                • interface design
                • interface theory
                • theories of
                  • flow
                  • subjectivity
                  • who is speaking and who is spoken?
              • structured data
                • xml + ti
                • classification systems and typologies
                • “what is this? and what is this?…”
                • forensics exercise
                  • identifiers
                • database exercise
              • graphs
                • any lists
                  • then every kind of graph
              • GIS
                • google maps GIS exercise
              • networks
                • network analysis
              • design workshop
                • html
                • webmonkey
                • omeka
                • balsamiq
                • project:
                  • omeka or html
                  • if html, at least three layers deep
                    • navigation
                    • organization
                • a class that could be taught parse/fail
              • draft of an NEH project
                • because it came before lab, they were making projects that weren’t grounded in making
                • New Node
            • the difference between the book and the kitchen and the restaurant critic
    • thinking
      • presence
        • announcing presence vs. hiding presence
      • io
        • input output / feedback loops, iterations and feedback loops
      • somatics and dance
        • tools for healing / collaborating / support
      • public/private /semi—
      • portfolio work
      • links to send johanna
    • Temporality and Space
    • Navigation and Narration
    • SATURDAY
      • looking at design (challenges)
        • what kind of (network) environment
          • make available specialized knowledge
          • New Node
        • sunset boulevard
          • historian of los angeles
          • interested in comparative studies that come out of — build a
          • use the course to get students involved in cultural geography by looking at “a trip”
            • a bus route
            • an itinerary
            • an experience
          • students decode the cultural landscape and add to the base of knowledge.
          • √ material
            • integrate current web tech with deep repo
            • huge amount of photographs, maps
            • cultural materials
        • away from project based activity that builds a custom infrastructure
          • towards making a shared platform
        • analytic tools
          • process information at a next level
            • into an analysis that’s done compytationally
        • an argument
          • a configured navigation through an arrangement of
            • infinite number of constellations in a night sky
            • infinite number of constellationary arguments
        • capturing an interrogation process
          • how do you get from interrogating the data » publishing
          • “1 more step” JD —
            • back to panorama view
            • topicmap array of materials that are related to the GPS point or a fair topic
            • you could capture a scholar’s work as part of that
          • How do you formulate questions
        • conversation to discuss rather than sequester one’s findings.
        • WHAT IS THE THING?
        • exploration
          • motivating exploration
          • “the addictive quality of angry birds”
            • tracking the wild parrots
            • ergodic play
            • ludic aspect
        • NEXT STEPS
          • functiona
            • quickly sketched up
            • motivate people to become involved
            • design competition
              • some kind of incentives
              • DESIGNING THE DESIGN COMPETITION
                • DESIGN THE CALL
                • un-competition
            • existing systems
              • map the route from where you are to where you can be
              • these are the elements and object we want to support
                • so what kind of data do we need to support
                • we want to support people doing interesting work rather than ask for free work
                • coordinating design committee
                • DPLA
                  • this is the model they’ve been using to develop their technology
                  • put out a call for people to submit very large or very small (or anythign) pieces of what the technology should be/do
                    • an they’re ebing put together noe
                    • now still building, now still involved in the project
              • GROPING TOWARDS SOMETHING
                • people come to the conference to see the presentations
                • knight
                • startup proposal
                • Brooklyn Beta Summer Camp
                  • betaworks
                    • chartbeat, bitly, findings, socialflow, etc.
              • What’s the least amount of framework that can be added to what’s already out there?