Digital Scholarship Commons

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Mini-conference with Nello Cristianini and Roberto Franzosi

Automatic Discovery of Patterns in Media Content
Nello Cristianini, University of Bristol, UK

What can we learn about the world (and the media system) by analyzing millions of news articles or tweets? Media content analysis has historically been the domain of the social sciences, but recently we are witnessing a strong trend towards the automation of many tasks, paving the way for a new – computational – approach to social science and the humanities. In this talk, I will survey the results obtained over the past 5 years at the Intelligent Systems Laboratory of Bristol, in the area of automating the analysis of news media content. By combining techniques from machine translation, pattern recognition, statistical learning, information retrieval, I will analyze patterns connected to the past US Presidential Elections, to UK public opinion, and to EU cultural biases.

The Social Scientist, the Word, and the World:
What the Words Tell Us about Italian Fascism(1919–1922) and Georgia Lynchings (1875–1930)
Roberto Franzosi, Emory University

The talk illustrates a quantitative social science approach to texts developed by the author, Quantitative Narrative Analysis (QNA). QNA relies on computer-assisted story grammars to analyze narrative, where a story grammar is the simple Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) structure. In narrative, Subjects are typically social actors – individuals, groups, organizations – Verbs are actions, and Objects are both social actors and physical and abstract objects. To each of the three SVO components one can add several attributes to capture the complexity of stories (e.g., name of an individual, number of actors in a group, time and space of action). The talk will illustrate the power of the approach using data collected by the author from newspapers on the rise of Italian fascism (1919–1922) (300,000 SVOs) and Georgia lynchings (1875–1930) (7,000 SVOs). It will show how narrative data lend themselves to cutting-edge tools of data visualization and analysis as network graphs and maps in Google Earth and other GIS software. It will also show how QNA data provide the basis for fascinating digital humanities projects.

Conference Co-sponsors:
The Hightower Fund | The Department of Sociology | The Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Digital Scholarship Commons |  The Institute for Quantitative Theory and Methods | The Emory College Language Center
The Graduate School of Liberal Arts  |  The Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry

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THATCamp Feminisms South  is a free “unconference” for anyone working at the intersection of feminism, the humanities, and technology. It will be held at Emory University's Digital Scholarship Commons on March 15-16, 2013. People of all professions and skill levels are welcome.

THATCamp Feminisms will provide a space for participatory learning through discussion, skills-based workshops, and on-the-spot experimentation. We hope to inject critical conversations about gender and race into the digital humanities, which has been criticized as mostly white and male-dominated.

Because THATCamp is an “unconference,” our participants will determine the ground we cover. Depending on your interests, we may hold sessions on issues in digital scholarship, pedagogy, curation, software demos, or training sessions. In other words, you won’t present formal talks, papers, or panels. Instead, you’ll share your ideas for potential THATCamp sessions prior to the Camp. At the start of the event, we’ll collectively agree on which conversations will take place.

The brief application is available at http://feminismssouth2013.thatcamp.org/register/. Registration is open now, and the deadline is March 4, 2013.

Please email thatcampfeminismssouth@gmail.com with any questions, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter (http://twitter.com/THTCmpFeminisms). We look forward to hearing from you!

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Join us for the first Atlanta Studies Meet Up!  These quarterly meetings will showcase 2 Atlanta focused projects and bring together a group of folks interested in our city. We will provide a few snacks.  Buy your own drinks.

When: 6:30 on Thursday, February 7th

Where: Manuel’s Tavern, 602 N. Highland Avenue

Presentations:

Hannah Palmer will present a mapping project created from her research on places destroyed by Atlanta’s airport.  Her book, “I’m From Here,” is about going home again, or what’s left of it. A work of creative nonfiction, the book combines memoir and investigative journalism to tell the story of her hometown, Mountain View, Georgia, and other erased places surrounding Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the “busiest airport in the world.” Many of the locations explored and documented in the book have been nearly erased from existence, so she created a map.

Michael Page and Randy Gue will present on a project at Emory’s Digital Scholarship Commons (DiSC) to create an application similar to Google Maps for Atlanta from the late 1920s through the early 1950s. Based on the 1928 city atlas, the tool will assign addresses and map all of the 250,000 building footprints in Atlanta and its environs in 1930. Users will ultimately be able to add layers and tag attributes to a series of addresses in the historic city. This combination of GIS technology and unique datasets will change the way Jim Crow Atlanta is studied by allowing researchers to visualize social changes over time.

Michael Page is the geospatial Librarian at Emory University, and Randy Gue is the Curator of Modern Political and Historical Collections at Emory’s Manuscript Archive and Rare Book Library.

The Plan:

6:30 – Grab some snacks (we will provide a few) and order a drink (that’s on you)

7:00 – Presentations and Q&A

8:00 – Networking, chit chatting, order another drink

Organized by: Emory’s Digital Scholarship Commons and Georgia State University’s ATLmaps group.

The Atlanta Studies Network connects scholars, activists and residents with one another around a shared interest in Atlanta. It highlights projects and events around town and around the web that deepen our understanding of the social, cultural and historical fabric of the city. It also strives to incubate and facilitate collaborations between individuals and institutions.

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“Equipping students to work across and within contemporary networked spaces, and to write in a range of genres and a diversity of modes to audiences local and widespread, will serve students in their higher education experiences and in the workplaces of the future.” -- Because Digital Writing Matters

The Emory Writing Program is excited to invite teachers within the Atlanta area to join us on Tuesday, January 29 for a symposium on Digital Publication, Undergraduate Research and Writing.  All of our plenary panelists have tremendous experience at developing program and campus cultures of innovative digital pedagogy. This event is co-sponsored by the Emory College Writing Program, Emory's Center for Interactive Teaching, and Emory University Libraries.

Please join us for this free half-day event. Lunch is free too, but please RSVP.

Tuesday, January 29. Jones Room, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University.

8:30 – 9:30 am  Amy Goodloe (CU Boulder), Pete Rorabaugh (Hybrid Pedagogy), Robin Wharton (Hybrid Pedagogy)

9:30 – 10:00 am Coffee & pastries

10:00 am – 12:00 pm Rebecca Burnett (Georgia Tech), Jim Groom (U Mary Washington), Laura McGrath (Kennesaw U), Tim Owens (U Mary Washington)

12:00 – 1:00 pm Lunch & 5-minute pedagogy blitz presentations

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DiSC is excited to be sponsoring this opportnity for scholars who study Atlanta to present their work and see the work their peers are doing.

Emory University’s Digital Scholarship Commons is excited to invite proposals for presentations at the First Annual Atlanta Studies Symposium. The day-long symposium will be held on April 26, 2013 in Emory’s Robert W. Woodruff Library.

The symposium seeks to convene an interdisciplinary meeting of scholars and community activists concerned with issues related to Atlanta. We are also eager to highlight the the wealth of resources available at area libraries and museums and to enhance connections between scholars, institutions, and libraries.

Some potential themes for presentation topics include (but are not limited to):

• Population and Place
• Metropolitan Ecologies
• Transportation
• Education

Proposals for papers, talks, or round-table discussions should be no more than 400 words. Proposals on any aspect of Atlanta are welcome, but priority will be given to papers that relate in some way to the themes listed above. Preference will also be given to proposals for fully constituted panels. Cover letters for panels should indicate the theme and identify the panel’s participants. We are eager to make this event as engaging as possible and encourage presentations that represent work-in-progress that would benefit from open conversation. Please include audio-video requirements in your proposal.   

Please send proposal via email to disc@emory.edu by 5pm on February 15. Contact Stewart Varner (stewart.varner@emory.edu) with any questions.

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The following is an abridged version of the paper I presented a few months ago at the Georgia Council of Media Organizations meeting in Macon (I added some of the pictures from my slide show). It is based on a presentation that I developed with Erica Bruchko, Emory’s Humanities Librarian, and Charles Forrest, the director of Library Facilities at Emory.

The rise of the digital humanities

The digital humanities has been enjoying significant buzz in recent years. Digital Humanities centers, such as the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia have been producing original and innovative tools and resources for scholars. Organizations like the Association for Computers in the Humanities have coordinated conferences (and un-conferences) and the Chronicle of Higher Education has devoted dozens hundreds of articles and one regular blog (Prof Hacker) to issues related to technology in the academy. This is to say nothing of all the digital projects such as Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database and Visualizing Emancipation that take advantage of emerging technology.

Starting at the end of 2010, the excitement slipped out of the academy when the New York Times began a six part series on digital humanities, the Humanities 2.0 series, which covered such topics as digital maps, text analysis and researching with large set of digital data. Then in January of 2012, two of the largest and most traditional academic conferences in the humanities featured record numbers of panels devoted to digital topics. The American Historical Association’s annual meeting had 24 panels and the Modern Language Association had a total of 57.

The challenge of the digital humanities for scholars and libraries

At Emory, scholars in and out of the library have been inspired and challenged by the rising popularity of digital scholarship. Scholars who want to incorporate technology into their work – or at least want to find out more about what technology can do for them – are often unsure who to turn to for help as the tools and methods of digital scholarship are still new ideas in many departments. Another challenge for scholars is the fact that, like many universities, Emory lacks spaces dedicated to graduate students and faculty in the humanities who want to work collaboratively on advanced research. Though there may be some activity in one department, academic politics are notoriously prickly around issues of territory so finding truly neutral turf for interdisciplinary work has often been a challenge. Another challenge that is related to this lack of collaborative space is the lack of community that leads scholars to think no one else is interested in digital work.

For the library, the rise of digital scholarship is part of a more overarching challenge of moving toward an engagement-centered mission rather than a collection-centered mission. Specifically, it has highlighted the need for a comprehensive approach to supporting digital work. While the library has always been a place where scholars go for help working on their projects, these partnerships have generally been ad hoc in nature, and uncoordinated across the institution.  The lack of established procedures has resulted in occasionally frustrating experiences and the projects themselves have suffered as a result.

These challenges are not unique to Emory. In the summer of 2010, four librarians at Emory created an ARL SPEC Kit (326) which focused on how libraries support digital humanities. The primary finding was that, of those ARL member libraries that support digital humanities work at all, that support was generally defined on a case by case basis and there are very few examples of spaces, policies, and procedures developed to support digital humanities. This lack of coordination means that work is often unnecessarily repeated and critical questions (such as those related to copyright, metadata and framework) are often left unaddressed until significant amounts of time and money have already been spent.

The Research Commons: A place in the library for the digital humanities

In order to begin addressing these challenges, Emory has established The Research Commons in the Robert W. Woodruff Library. Located in a prominent space on the third floor, the Research Commons functions as an open workspace designed with graduate students and faculty in mind. Additionally, the space serves as a public-facing front door to a wide variety of resources and services located in the library.

From its location inside the library, the Research Commons is a truly neutral space where groups of interdisciplinary scholars can meet and work collaboratively. In fact, while the digital humanities play an important role in the library’s thinking about the Research Commons, the space itself is completely and proudly interdisciplinary. In the first year, we have been excited to see graduate students from the medical school and the MBA program make creative use of the space.

As Charles Forrest recounts in his COMO White Paper “Information, Learning, Research: Evolution of the Academic Library Commons” the Research Commons is the latest iteration in a series of experiments in library space. Beginning in the 1980s when research library users started demanding digital resources like CD-ROMs and personal computers some institutions began designing spaces they called “Information Commons.” By establishing these spaces, libraries highlighted their role as learning spaces and not just storehouses for books and periodicals; they were spaces where researchers could find and use all of the tools they needed to produce work. Following along this trajectory, Emory’s Woodruff Library opened the Learning Commons in the 1990s. This stage in the evolution of the space is defined by desktop computers with specialized software and individual study carrels but also by a cafe on the ground floor. With the learning commons, the library focused on individual scholars and their needs defined broadly.

With constantly expanding online resources and a growing percentage of researchers working with laptop and tablet computers, the library continues to move from a collections based mission to a mission that focuses more on user engagement. With online resources diminishing the differences between libraries (and even the differences between the library and other spaces like homes and coffee shops) the library is focusing on what it can uniquely offer users: space to work collaboratively and expert advice.

The Research Commons was conceived of and designed with these strengths in mind. The space is completely open and almost all of the furniture is mobile, enabling users to configure the work areas to suit their needs. This open design also allows scholars to see what other scholars are doing and to be inspired by what they see.  These unplanned and serendipitous encounters, along with more formal events, allow the Research Commons to establish and nurture an interdisciplinary community of scholars interested in digital scholarship.

These concepts of serendipity, experimentation and evolution have been central to the design process.  For example, original plans for the space included several small office spaces forming a spine down the center of the Research Commons. This idea was abandoned because we simply did not know if users would want these kinds of spaces. Instead, we left the area as open and flexible as possible and have spent the past year watching people use it. When we noticed that people were using large marker boards as mobile dividers to define their space, we got more of them.

The Digital Scholarship Commons

Currently, the only permanent resident of the Research Commons is the Digital Scholarship Commons (DiSC); a Mellon Foundation funded initiative to facilitate experimental, collaborative work that takes advantage of emerging technology.  Emory’s Library has a long history of partnering with faculty who use emerging technology in their research, but the recent increase of interest in such projects demanded proactive action to coordinate demand and capacity. From its position in the library, DiSC facilitates a direct connection between scholars and unique collections such as those held in the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL). In partnership with librarians, DiSC recommends tools and processes that minimize redundancies and prepare for long-term maintenance and preservation.

DiSC also aims to inspire the Emory community through events, training and projects. In its first year, DiSC hosted three postdoctoral fellows, three graduate student fellows, three guest speakers, a year-long workshop series, and a symposium on technology and disabilities. Furthermore, it provided expertise and funding for four teams of faculty, students and librarians who were working on digital projects.

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The day that DiSC launched the OWS project site, I, the sysadmin, was away at jury duty.

During my lunch break, I learned the server had crashed, likely because of a spike in traffic. Users trying to see the site were faced with the dreaded 500 error message. From a Waffle House in downtown Atlanta, I pulled out my laptop, got online and logged into our Amazon Web Services account. From there, I stopped the server and increased the size of the instance, which adds more RAM and CPU. I restarted it, and less than five minutes after I’d logged in, our site was running on a larger server that could handle the traffic. The site has run smoothly since then.

If we were in a traditional data center, or even on a virtual machine, the process would have been different. 

Depending on the virtual machine provider, we would’ve requested the provider increase our VM’s size or create a new, larger VM for us. We would move our data over, test and relaunch. The process could have taken a half-day or longer, especially because the sysadmin was doing his civic duty. Alternately, we could have invested more up front for a large server or VM, one that would have been underutilized until the excitement of launch day.

Much of the elastic cloud hype is, naturally, about elasticity -- the ability to scale up or down cheaply, quickly and automatically. In this case, it helped us keep our OWS site running on the anniversary of Occupy Wall Street.
 
DiSC is still a new entity and for now, we run only a handful of relatively low-traffic sites -- at least, most of the time. The scenario with the OWS site could’ve been handled by using AWS load balancers that dynamically create more server capacity based on load. At this time, that would be overkill for what we are doing, but it might work for us in the future.
 
There are other reasons why we chose EC2:
 
AWS shines for our backups disaster recovery needs.
We haven’t needed to use this yet, but when it happens, I’m confident it will work flawlessly. I relied on it when I worked in the corporate world, and don’t lose any sleep over it now. AWS provides the ability for us to copy our data at the block-level, an even more robust backup than at the file level. What does that mean? In the case of data loss, we don’t have to restore the files, we just make a new volume from the snapshot, attach it to our server and go. (Look for more on this in a future blog post.)
 
We can use it on projects large and small.
Say you have a massive dataset and want to have a weekend hackathon where people play with the data. With services like EC2, you can just spin up a cluster of servers for a weekend, or a few hours, and let people have at it. When you’re done, you just shut down the servers and stop paying for them. Any results that should be preserved can be stored locally or in cheap cloud services. The servers themselves can be imaged and started up at a later date, if you want.
 
Most importantly, EC2 has allowed us to experiment.
Paying for servers only when we need them means we can quickly, effectively and affordably try new things. For example, we wanted to see what it would take to run our own instance of DBpedia. Traditional VMs are purchased by the month. Physical servers are for life. EC2 servers are charged by the hour. We created an EC2 instance, installed DBpedia and started experimenting. We spent one day and about $15 trying it out and ultimately concluded that it took a really large server with a lot of RAM, and we couldn’t justify the cost. Still, experimenting wasn’t a waste of time. We had an answer quickly.
 
Once you get into the mindset of infrastructure as a service, you’ll likely come to think of infrastructure as an operational cost, not a capital investment; everything you ever wanted to try becomes feasible. We hadn’t spent time or money on a physical server or VM to test it. (If we had, we would’ve had to guess at how powerful, i.e expensive, the server would need to be.  We would likely be wrong. That money? Wasted.) Sure, our experiment failed. But if you never fail, you’re not trying.
 
Of course, it helps to fail in interesting ways, or near a place with 24/7 wifi and waffles.