Open, Writ­ing, Blog­ging, Visu­al­iza­tion, and Ran­dom Bits

One of the ideas behind “The Lurker” cat­e­gory revolves around how we find things in the dig­i­tal realm and how we make con­nec­tions amongst the items we find. Specif­i­cally, I am intrigued with how we come to find and make con­nec­tions amongst the vast array of posts, videos, images, maps, and other dig­i­tal objects we find that relate to our fields of study and that of our colleagues?

I have yet to com­pletely reflect on what I found over the last week of Feb­ru­ary and the first week of March that relates to my inter­ests in DH and the inter­ests of the stu­dents in Human­i­ties 340, and how to visu­al­ize and map out those con­nec­tions. My efforts at using VUE to help me fig­ure out the con­nec­tions between what the stu­dents were post­ing as well as the com­ments those posts elicited did not pan out as I had orig­i­nally thought it might. So I am back, lit­er­ally, to the draw­ing board. Over spring break, I hope to find a bet­ter way to map out and visu­al­ize the con­nec­tions between the seem­ingly ran­dom and at times dis­parate items I find that relate to DH (and quite pos­si­bly EH).

For now, how­ever, click-​on-​through and see what con­nec­tions you think might be found, or not, if there are no con­nec­tions to be had.

Open Data/​Access & Visualization
Alexan­der, Bryan. “Data Ana­lyt­ics in Edu­ca­tion: Emerg­ing Trend?” National Insti­tute for Tech­nol­ogy in Lib­eral Edu­ca­tion, Feb­ru­ary 28, 2011.
Allosso, Dan. “Visu­al­iz­ing His­to­ri­og­ra­phy.” The His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety: A Blog Devoted to His­tory for the Acad­emy and Beyond, Decem­ber 18, 2010.
Alpers, Ben. “Tech­nol­ogy and (Intel­lec­tual) His­tory Open Thread.” U.S. Intel­lec­tual His­tory, Feb­ru­ary 28, 2011.
Carr, Leslie. “Open Access — Who Calls the Shots Now?” Repos­i­to­ry­Man, Feb­ru­ary 27, 2011.
“Data Visu­al­iza­tion Meets Game Design to Explore Your Dig­i­tal Life.” Flow­ing Data, Feb­ru­ary 23, 2011.
“Learn­ing How To Visu­al­ize: Behind the Screens of Infor­ma­tion is Beau­ti­ful.” Infor­ma­tion Aes­thet­ics, Feb­ru­ary 22, 2011.
“Trash Track wins NSF Visu­al­iza­tion Chal­lenge 2010.” Infor­ma­tion Aes­thet­ics, March 2, 2011.
“Twit­ter Dots: Map­ping all Tweets for a spe­cific Key­word.” Infor­ma­tion Aes­thet­ics, Feb­ru­ary 16, 2011.
War­den, Pete. “Gadhfiʼs Speech Tran­script.” Pete­Search, Feb­ru­ary 26, 2011.
— — — . “The Por­traits of Three Nov­els.” Pete­Search, Feb­ru­ary 23, 2011.
On Writ­ing & Writing
Hous­ton, Natalie. “On Writ­ing Long­hand.” The Chron­i­cle of Higher Edu­ca­tion. ProfHacker, Feb­ru­ary 21, 2011.
Grim­s­ley, Mark. “At the Blog­ging Cross­roads.” Blog Them Out of the Stone Age, Feb­ru­ary 22, 2011.
McNeill, Gra­ham. “Talk­ing It Out.” Gra­ham McNeillʼs Weblog, Feb­ru­ary 28, 2011.
Shawn. “Blog­ging Archae­ol­ogy at the SAA – Why Blog?” Elec­tric Archae­ol­ogy: Dig­i­tal Media for Learn­ing and Research, Feb­ru­ary 28, 2011.
Williams, George. “A Sim­ple Hack for Pro­duc­tive Col­lab­o­ra­tive Author­ship.” The Chron­i­cle of Higher Edu­ca­tion. ProfHacker, Feb­ru­ary 28, 2011.
Ran­dom Bits
Hacker, Prof. “How to ‘Gam­ify’ Your Class Web­site.” The Chron­i­cle of Higher Edu­ca­tion. ProfHacker, Feb­ru­ary 21, 2011.
Mann, Mer­lin. “Pro­cras­ti­na­tion hack: ‘(10+2)×5′.” 43 Fold­ers, Octo­ber 11, 2005.
McGowan, Susan­nah. “Build­ing an Under­stand­ing of Dig­i­tal Human­i­ties Through Teach­ing.” HAS­TAC, Feb­ru­ary 26, 2011.
“The Dig­i­tal Human­i­ties: Beyond Com­put­ing.” Cul­ture Machine, 2011.
Young, Jeff. “‘Embed­ded Librar­ian’ on Twit­ter Served as Infor­ma­tion Concierge for Class.” The Chron­i­cle of Higher Edu­ca­tion. Wired Cam­pus, Feb­ru­ary 25, 2011.

The Lurker: A Category

Accord­ing to the “Lurk­ing” entry on Wikipedia:

In inter­net cul­ture, a lurker is a per­son who reads dis­cus­sions on a mes­sage board, news­group, cha­t­room, file shar­ing or other inter­ac­tive sys­tem, but rarely or never par­tic­i­pates actively.

I am a lurker. From Prof Hacker to William J. Turkel, from Smash­ing Mag­a­zine to 456 Berea St (Roger Johans­son), from A New Cen­tury of For­est Plan­ning to Can Enviro Rock? (Lau­ren Wheeler), I tra­verse the world wide web via RSS and links as a lurker, rarely par­tic­i­pat­ing, but always learn­ing and col­lect­ing via Pin­Board, InstaPa­per, and Zotero, and here­after on this blog under the cat­e­gory: “The Lurker.” The major­ity of those items col­lected under “The Lurker” are related to the Dig­i­tal Human­i­ties, Web Design and Devel­op­ment, and Envi­ron­men­tal His­tory. It is prob­a­ble that the act of post­ing col­lected items will negate my self-​imposed moniker, but I hope not. I like being a lurker regard­less of how “inter­net cul­ture” regards the lurker.

On with the lurking …

The Lurker: The Sub­ver­sive, Dis­rup­tive Nature of Readability

Read­abil­ity is a tool that allows the user to turn any web page into a:

com­fort­able read­ing view right in your web browser. Too busy to read right then and there? Read­abil­ity makes it sim­ple to save your favorite arti­cles for read­ing later.

Read­abil­ity is avail­able for Fire­fox and Chrome as an exten­sion. For Safari, Read­abil­ity comes as a core com­po­nent called “Reader” — a but­ton located at the end of the URI bar. Reader for Safari, how­ever, is “avail­able only if you have Mac OS X v10.5 Leop­ard or later, and “the Reader but­ton appears only when a web page con­tains text-​based arti­cles.” For other browsers, like Opera, one may also install Read­abil­ity as a Book­marklet.

I have used Read­abil­ity exten­sively since it came out, and have found it par­tic­u­larly use­ful not just for read­ing reg­u­lar web pages, but also when sav­ing web pages and blog posts in Zotero. Until the other day, how­ever, I did not con­sider any of the broader impli­ca­tions of Read­abil­ity. Beside just improv­ing the read­abil­ity of a text – based page, Read­abil­ity also impacts how we read, how we use a web page, and how we inter­act with not just the visual design of page but also with the writer of that web page. As Jef­fery Zeld­man argues, Read­abil­ity is dis­rup­tive because

Read­abil­ity focuses the user’s atten­tion on the con­tent, cre­at­ing an enhanced – and often much more acces­si­ble – read­ing expe­ri­ence. It also sub­verts the typ­i­cal web brows­ing design par­a­digm, where each web­site offers a dif­fer­ent visual experience

Zeld­man also argues that Read­abil­ity dis­rupts not just “typ­i­cal web brows­ing design par­a­digm,” but also because it dis­rupts con­tent monetization.

For the first time, con­tent mon­e­ti­za­tion is no longer the prob­lem of con­tent cre­ators. Writ­ers can stop being sales­peo­ple, and focus on what they do best: cre­at­ing com­pelling con­tent. The bet­ter the con­tent, the more peo­ple who engage with it via Read­abil­ity, the more money writ­ers will make – with no book­keep­ing, no ad sales, and no has­sle. This is a huge sub­ver­sion of the ad paradigm.

I was struck by the issue of con­tent mon­e­ti­za­tion that Zeld­man brings up. Based on my expe­ri­ence, most human­ists on the web seem to be very much behind the idea of open access and open pub­lish­ing, and con­tent mon­e­ti­za­tion does not seem to have been issue, or at least not one that I have seen con­sid­ered in dis­cus­sions revolv­ing around issues of pub­lish­ing and author­ity. Read­abil­ity, how­ever, does strike me as hav­ing some place within this dis­cus­sion. I could be wrong on this point, see­ing some­thing that is not there, but just out of curios­ity: How should human­i­ties schol­ars — and aca­d­e­mics in gen­eral — view Read­abil­ity and its sub­ver­sion of not just the typ­i­cal web brows­ing expe­ri­ence but that of con­tent mon­e­ti­za­tion? Com­ments, thoughts, issues?