The First Draft

Welcome to Season 3, who are we now?, a discussion of Elijah and Jason’s visualizations of a timeline of wars of the United States, the D3.js Slack team, Jason's dissertation research, and superfund sites in Silicon Valley. Show Notes Our Town - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Our Town is a 1938 three-act play by American playwright Thornton Wilder. It tells the story of the fictional American small town of Grover's Corners between 1901 and 1913 through the everyday lives of its citizens. Planet Money: Episode 647: Hard Work Is Irrelevant Patty McCord helped create a workplace at Netflix that runs more like a professional sports team than a family. If you're not up to scratch, you're off the team. Is this the future of work? The Talk Show With John Gruber by Daring Fireball / John Gruber on iTunes The director’s commentary track for Daring Fireball. IBM SPSS software With SPSS predictive analytics software, you can predict with confidence what will happen next so that you can make smarter decisions, solve problems and improve outcomes. Business intelligence - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Business intelligence (BI) is often described as "the set of techniques and tools for the transformation of raw data into meaningful and useful information for business analysis purposes". The term "data surfacing" is also more often associated with BI functionality. Principal component analysis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Principal component analysis (PCA) is a statistical procedure that uses an orthogonal transformation to convert a set of observations of possibly correlated variables into a set of values of linearly uncorrelated variables called principal components. A timeline of wars of the United States by Elijah Meeks For most of its nearly two and a half century history, the United States has been at war. Some of these wars, like the American Civil War, were terrible and bloody and well-remembered. Others, like the Powder River War, were small and mostly forgotten. One was the result of an individual military officer disregarding orders and invading Mexico to retrieve stolen cattle. A timeline of wars of the United States by Jason Heppler I'm not suggesting my view is better than Elijah's; his timeline is making a particular point, and I think makes that point well. The point of his visualiation remains: the United States fights wars, and lots of them. But this view tries to reveal the regions of the world the U.S. fought those conflicts. I also extended Elijah's original dataset, including covert operations run by the United States during the Cold War. The timeline above seeks to provide another view, by looking at the regions of the world where these conflicts were fought as a way to see where the United States engaged over time. emeeks/d3.layout.timeline A layout for band-style timelines List of wars involving the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia This is a list of armed conflicts involving the United States of America since its founding during the American Revolution. Tiki-Toki, Beautiful web-based timeline software Tiki-Toki is web-based software for creating beautiful interactive timelines that you can share on the internet. Timeline JS3 - Beautifully crafted timelines that are easy, and intuitive to use. TimelineJS is an open-source tool that enables anyone to build visually rich, interactive timelines. Beginners can create a timeline using nothing more than a Google spreadsheet. Experts can use their JSON skills to create custom installations, while keeping TimelineJS's core functionality. Topotime A pragmatic data model, D3 layout, and Python functions for representing complex and/or uncertain periods and events. Mark Twain Memory-Builder If you are lucky, in a dusty used book store or flea market, you may someday happen upon a copy of Mark Twain's Memory Builder, a history game developed by Samuel L. Clemens in the mid-1880s and debuted in 1892, an obscure treasure by one of America’s great writers, an old game of memory almost entirely forgotten today. Monroe Doctrine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Monroe Doctrine was a U.S. foreign policy regarding domination of the American continent in 1823. It stated that further efforts by European nations to colonize land or interfere with states in North or South America would be viewed as acts of aggression, requiring U.S. intervention. At the same time, the doctrine noted that the United States would neither interfere with existing European colonies nor meddle in the internal concerns of European countries. The Doctrine was issued in 1823 at a time when nearly all Latin American colonies of Spain and Portugal had achieved or were at the point of gaining independence from the Portuguese and Spanish Empires. The United States, working in agreement with Great Britain, wanted to guarantee that no European power would move in. Elijah Meeks on Twitter "I created a #d3js slack team (http://t.co/xymBSCKjnM) for anyone who wants to talk D3.js. DM me with an email address if you want an invite." Join today! Bay Area d3 User Group (San Francisco, CA) - Meetup d3-js - Google Groups Machines in the Valley: Growth, Conflict, and Environmental Politics in Silicon Valley by Jason A. Heppler Machines in the Valley is a digital history project that serves as a companion to my dissertation. Between 1945 and 1990, the Santa Clara Valley experienced profound environmental change during an unprecedented wave of urban and industrial growth. With those changes came conflict over landscape change. Answering that question means extending historian Kenneth Jackson’s observation that “the space around us—the physical organization of neighborhoods, roads, yards, houses, and apartments—sets up living patterns that condition our behavior.” In Silicon Valley, the attitudes, ideas, and values that people impart on to nature—biological and idealized—reveals how ideas about nature played out in postindustrial American society. By examining the ways that people created place, the politics they engaged in to protect that place, and examining the physical changes to the landscape that resulted, my research argues for the importance of understanding how space creates politics. The story revolves around whose space Silicon Valley would become: A postindustrial trend-setter? A fertile and beautiful agricultural producer? A countryside paradise? A metropolitan leader? Leaflet - a JavaScript library for interactive maps Leaflet is the leading open-source JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps. Weighing just about 33 KB of JS, it has all the mapping features most developers ever need. Hiroshima Cat Street View My Neighbor Totoro - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia My Neighbor Totoro is a 1988 Japanese animated fantasy film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki and produced by Studio Ghibli. The film – which stars the voice actors Noriko Hidaka, Chika Sakamoto, and Hitoshi Takagi – tells the story of the two young daughters (Satsuki and Mei) of a professor and their interactions with friendly wood spirits in postwar rural Japan. The film won the Animage Anime Grand Prix prize and the Mainichi Film Award and Kinema Junpo Award for Best Film in 1988. It also received the Special Award at the Blue Ribbon Awards in the same year. Choropleth map - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia A choropleth map is a thematic map in which areas are shaded or patterned in proportion to the measurement of the statistical variable being displayed on the map, such as population density or per-capita income. List of Superfund sites in California, Santa Clara County - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia This is a list of Superfund sites in California designated under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) environmental law. The CERCLA federal law of 1980 authorized the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to create a list of polluted locations requiring a long-term response to clean up hazardous material contaminations. Superfund Site Overview Fairchild Semiconductor Corp. (South San Jose Plant), Pacific Southwest, US EPA The 22-acre Fairchild Semiconductor Corp. (Fairchild) facility (former South San Jose Plant or Site) is located west of Highway 101 about nine miles southeast of downtown San Jose near the intersection of Monterey Highway and Highway 85. The Site is located in a light industrial and commercial area. The plant was constructed between 1975 and 1977 and used for electronics and semiconductor fabrication from 1977 to 1983. Solvents containing volatile organic compounds were used at the Site. Sunnyvale: EPA plans on testing indoor air quality for vapor intrusion - San Jose Mercury News The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is hosting a community meeting Dec. 10 to engage Sunnyvale community members in plans to test the indoor air quality in some of the schools and homes in the Duane and San Miguel avenues neighborhood. Hetch Hetchy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Hetch Hetchy is the name of a valley, a reservoir and a water system in California in the United States. The glacial Hetch Hetchy Valley lies in the northwestern part of Yosemite National Park and is drained by the Tuolumne River. For thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans in the 1850s, the valley was inhabited by Native Americans who practiced subsistence hunting-gathering. During the late 19th century, the valley was renowned for its natural beauty – often compared to that of Yosemite Valley – but also targeted for the development of water supply for irrigation and municipal interests. Thank you for listening –– @Elijah_Meeks, @jaheppler, @pfzenke.

Two new shows are joining Fiddly.fm, taking time off to write, making effective data visualizations, the deep thinking gap, the 2015 Quantified Self Expo, the Quantified Self movement, the challenges of measuring and visualizing complex things, Elijah’s workshop at Forward.js 3, and the instructor as entertainer. Show Notes Fiddly.fm Our podcast network. Pour Over A new tech podcast by Jason Heppler and Paul Zenke coming soon to Fiddly.fm. The First Draft - S1E9: The Greatest Lie the Writing Devil Ever Told Jason and Paul discuss writing, note-taking, tagging, and outlining with Tree, Scrivener, Gitit, Evernote, FoldingText, Mendeley, Zotero, Editorial, Markdown, Copy, LaTeX, Pandoc, MacVim, TextMate, BibTeX, and DEVONthink. Mac Power Users "Learn about getting the most from your Apple technology with focused topics and workflow guests. Creating Mac Power Users, one geek at a time since 2009." Gestalt Principles for Data Visualization: Similarity, Proximity & Enclosure "But let me suggest that gestalt is very much a pragmatic aspect of creating data visualization, in fact a necessary aspect if you plan to do more than simple bar and line charts (and perhaps even for those simple charts)." Machines in the Valley: Growth, Conflict, and Environmental Politics in Silicon Valley A digital history project that serves as a companion to Jason's dissertation. Steve Jobs By Walter Isaacson "Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than 100 family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson set down the riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. Isaacson’s portrait touched hundreds of thousands of readers." Katz, S. N. (2005). Why technology matters: the humanities in the twenty-first century. Interdisciplinary science reviews, 30(2), 105-118. "Computing and digitisation are transforming not only the conditions of work for humanists, but also the ways in which humanists think and their disciplines are configured. The digital world both enables and compels new ways of thinking. And, significantly, it is just as transformative of teaching as it is of scholarship. Indeed, the most interesting thing about the new digital humanities environment may be that the distinction between teaching and scholarship is itself being eroded. The database is fast becoming the principal site of work in the humanities." The Washington Post - Why Silicon Valley needs humanities PhDs "Quit your technology job. Get a PhD in the humanities. That’s the way to get ahead in the technology sector. That, at least, is what philosopher Damon Horowitz told a crowd of attendees at the BiblioTech Conference at Stanford University in 2011. Horowitz is also a serial entrepreneur who co-founded a company, Aardvark, which sold to Google for $50 million. He is presently the In-House Philosopher / Director of Engineering at Google. Wait, you say, that’s insane. At a time when record numbers of people, among them those with high-level degrees, are receiving public assistance, what kind of fool would get a degree in a subject with no clear job prospects beyond higher education or teaching?" The Frenzy About High-Tech Talent by Andrew Hacker | The New York Review of Books "Pronouncements like the following have become common currency: “The United States is falling behind in a global ‘race for talent’ that will determine the country’s future prosperity, power, and security.” In Falling Behind?, Michael Teitelbaum argues that alarms like this one, which he quotes, are not only overblown but are often sounded by people who do not disclose their motives. Teitelbaum vehemently denies that we are lagging in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, now commonly abbreviated as STEM." A Science of Literature | Boston Review "For some years, humanities scholars have sought to integrate computing technology into their research. These efforts—the “digital humanities”—have inspired public debate well out of proportion to the number of researchers involved or the scope of their findings. P.T. Barnums and Chicken Littles have proclaimed that computation will mark the end of humanistic inquiry. Actual literary research in this vein suggests otherwise." 2015 Quantified Self Expo, QS15 "The 2015 Quantified Self Exposition highlights the wearable devices and apps that give you intimate and direct feedback about yourself, from how you sleep, eat, and exercise, to what triggers fear and joy." Quantified Self - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia "The Quantified Self is a movement to incorporate technology into data acquisition on aspects of a person's daily life in terms of inputs (e.g. food consumed, quality of surrounding air), states (e.g. mood, arousal, blood oxygen levels), and performance (mental and physical). Such self-monitoring and self-sensing, which combines wearable sensors (EEG, ECG, video, etc.) and wearable computing, is also known as lifelogging." Quantified Self, About "The Quantified Self is an international collaboration of users and makers of self-tracking tools." Beeminder "It's reminders with a sting! Or, goal-tracking with teeth. Mind anything you can graph — weight, pushups, to-do tasks completed — by replying with data when Beeminder prompts you. Or connect with a service (like Fitbit or RescueTime) to report automatically. We plot your progress on a Yellow Brick Road to your goal. Keep all your datapoints on the road and Beeminder will always be free. Go off the road and you (literally) pay the price." Beeminder - 1000 Days of User-Visible Improvements "It’s amazing where one trivial user-visible improvement per day will eventually get you to. We’ve made 1000 user-visible improvements (UVIs) to Beeminder in the last 1000 days. [1] We had to or we’d have owed one of our users $1000." stickK "stickK empowers you to better your lifestyle. We offer you the opportunity, through 'Commitment Contracts', to show to yourself and others the value you put on achieving your goals." Pact Getting fit and staying healthy are hard. Pact uses cash stakes to help you achieve your health goals, week after week. The Web We Have to Save By Hossein Derakhshan "I miss when people took time to be exposed to different opinions, and bothered to read more than a paragraph or 140 characters. I miss the days when I could write something on my own blog, publish on my own domain, without taking an equal time to promote it on numerous social networks; when nobody cared about likes and reshares." Nicholas Felton's Personal Annual Reports "Nicholas Felton spends much of his time thinking about data, charts and our daily routines. He is the author of many Personal Annual Reports that weave numerous measurements into a tapestry of graphs, maps and statistics reflecting the year’s activities. He was one of the lead designers of Facebook's timeline and the co-founder of Daytum.com. His most recent product is Reporter, an iPhone app designed to record and visualize subtle aspects of our lives. His work is a part of the permanent collection at MoMA. He has also been profiled by the Wall Street Journal, Wired and Good Magazine and recognized as one of the 50 most influential designers in America by Fast Company." Daytum "Daytum was conceived by Ryan Case and Nicholas Felton as an elegant and intuitive tool for counting and communicating personal statistics." Reporter "Reporter is a new application for understanding the things you care about. With a few randomly timed surveys each day, Reporter can illuminate aspects of your life that might be otherwise unmeasurable." RescueTime RescueTime gives you an accurate picture of how you spend your time to help you become more productive every day. Forward - Web Technology Summits, Workshops and Online Content  "We're at it again. Forward 3 will be held July 29th, 2015 with workshops scheduled for four days around the main event. Join us in the historic Regency Ballroom in the heart of San Francisco." Thank you for listening –– @Elijah_Meeks, @jaheppler, @pfzenke.

Topics: Jason’s HASTAC lightning talk "Networks in the Humanities: An Introduction", following up on @mcburton’s feedback, "F··k It, Ship It", and the challenges of revisiting old projects. Subscribe to our newsletter. Show Notes Home | HASTAC HASTAC is an alliance of nearly 13,000 humanists, artists, social scientists, scientists and technologists working together to transform the future of learning. HASTAC 2015: The Art and Science of Digital Humanities: Full Schedule Jason Heppler: "Networks in the Humanities: An Introduction" What are networks and how have scholars used them? My talk sets the stage by demonstrating the ways humanists have used network analysis to uncover patterns, systems, and relationships. That relationships help us understand the world is not a new idea, but our opportunity to visualize large networks and formalize network methods for academic research is much newer. My talk will quickly give examples how scholars have used networks and address the kind of situations and questions we can ask with network analysis today. @mcburton on Twitter "Listening to @firstdraftcast and want to push back on @jaheppler that the post office stuff IS data. Data does not imply completeness" Beyond Line and Pie Charts: Practical Applications of Complex Data Viz by Elijah Meeks While data visualization has grown in popularity, most of the business application still favors two kinds: charts familiar to everyone (such as pie charts or line charts) or map-based geospatial information visualization. While data viz tools and libraries provide access to more exotic methods, it can be hard to deploy them outside specific domains. This talk will focus on hierarchical data visualization and network visualization and will highlight the strengths and weaknesses of these methods, techniques for gently introducing these methods to potential stakeholders, and best practices for integrating them into data driven applications. "F**k It, Ship It" Before you complete any project that you really care about and show it to the world, you’ll likely be plagued by self-doubt. Will others understand it? Is it missing anything? Can you make it better somehow? At some point, you have to just say "Fuck it, ship it." Spatial History Project Budapest was one of around 150 towns and cities in Hungary where Jews were restricted to urban ghettos in the spring and early summer of 1944, and just one of hundreds of towns and cities across occupied Europe where ghettos were created. The process of ghettoization was profoundly spatial where perpetrators explicitly used tools of concentration, and segregation to carry out their objectives. Elijah’s new personal website Elijah Meeks is a senior data visualization engineer at Netflix where he helps understand how people experience Netflix. Minimum viable product - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia In product development, the minimum viable product (MVP) is the product with the highest return on investment versus risk. Thank you for listening –– @Elijah_Meeks, @jaheppler, @pfzenke.

Topics: Elijah’s talk at the Bay Area d3 Users Group, Sankey diagrams, the Geography of the Post Storybench article, do we need a digital humanities department/center/specialization?, evidence visualization, what is data in the humanities?, "raw data", and data harnessing. Show Notes Bay Area d3 User Group (San Francisco, CA) - Meetup We are all about d3.js! Manning: D3.js in Action D3.js in Action is a practical tutorial for creating interactive graphics and data–driven applications using D3.js. You’ll start with in-depth explanations of D3’s out–of–the–box layouts, along with dozens of practical use cases that align with different types of visualizations. Then, you’ll explore practical techniques for content creation, animation, and representing dynamic data–including interactive graphics and data streamed live over the web. The final chapters show you how to use D3’s rich interaction model as the foundation for a complete web application. In the end, you’ll be ready to integrate D3.js into your web development process and transform any site into a more engaging and sophisticated user experience. Sankey diagram - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Sankey diagrams are a specific type of flow diagram, in which the width of the arrows is shown proportionally to the flow quantity. Sankey diagrams are typically used to visualize energy or material or cost transfers between processes. They can also visualize the energy accounts or material flow accounts on a regional or national level. Directed acyclic graph - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia In mathematics and computer science, a directed acyclic graph, is a directed graph with no directed cycles. That is, it is formed by a collection of vertices and directed edges, each edge connecting one vertex to another, such that there is no way to start at some vertex v and follow a sequence of edges that eventually loops back to v again. Tapping digital tools to study how the west was won | Storybench The U.S. postal system remains an exceptional feat, a system in which a letter can travel thousands of miles in a few days for a fraction of a dollar. Its network of post offices, distribution centers, and mail carriers is the quintessence of modern infrastructure and a public good that many take for granted. But how was it built? And could a digital analysis of its evolution reveal how the American West was settled? The First Draft Podcast S1E7: Humanities Savior Narrative ft. Glen Worthey Glen Worthey, Digital Humanities Librarian, Stanford University Libraries, joins Elijah Meeks, Jason Heppler, and Paul Zenke to discuss his experiences at DH 2014, the popularity of DH projects, the humanities savior narrative, mentorship, Twitter, #dhsheep, linguistic inclusivity at conferences, and the future of DH programs. Capta and Data: Visualization, the Humanistic Method, and Representing Knowledge | Introduction to Digital Humanities While visualization has become an increasingly useful and important tool for humanists wishing to illustrate large aggregations of data that can be shown in such a way that it can be easily viewed and comprehended at a glance, visualization tools pose many challenges and are not without their caveats. This has prompted many scholars to propose new ways of understanding visualization as a humanities-centered tool that on the one hand challenges traditional conceptions of the relationship between visualization and the data being represented in all disciplines, not just those that are humanistic, thus redefining what visualization is and is capable of doing, and on the other hand attempting to accurately represent humanistic data without compromising its situatedness and socially constructed nature. Thank you for listening. –– @Elijah_Meeks, @jaheppler, @pfzenke.

Topics: Elijah’s book (D3.js in Action) is now available in print, TaskRabbit and academic outsourcing, web scraping, creative genius, shipping, ORBIS vs. Neatline, and Left Shark. Show Notes D3.js in Action: Elijah Meeks: 9781617292118: Amazon.com: Books D3.js in Action is a practical tutorial for creating interactive graphics and data-driven applications using D3.js. You’ll start with in-depth explanations of D3’s out-of-the-box layouts, along with dozens of practical use cases that align with different types of visualizations. Then, you’ll explore practical techniques for content creation, animation, and representing dynamic data–including interactive graphics and data streamed live over the web. The final chapters show you how to use D3’s rich interaction model as the foundation for a complete web application. In the end, you’ll be ready to integrate D3.js into your web development process and transform any site into a more engaging and sophisticated user experience. Lincoln Mullen — D3.js in Action What this book does better than almost all technical books, however, is explain what makes for good visualizations (in particular, in the humanities). In other words, the book does show you how do to x, y, or z techniques with D3, but even more it shows you what kinds of visualizations are worth doing. That is much harder to teach. D3 in Action — Jason Heppler I’ve been remiss in pointing out that my buddy Elijah Meeks’ D3 in Action has appeared in print. I’ve been getting chapters of the book through Manning’s early digital access for the last few months that he’s worked on the book and can say that it’s an excellent introduction to D3. If you’re looking to get started with the library and, more importantly, how you can use visualization in the humanities effectively, you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy. Manning: D3.js in Action D3.js in Action introduces you to the most powerful web data visualization library available and shows you how to use it to build interactive graphics and data-driven applications. You’ll start with dozens of practical use cases that align with different types of charts, networks, and maps using D3’s out-of-the-box layouts. Then, you’ll explore practical techniques for content design, animation, and representation of dynamic data–including interactive graphics and live streaming data. D3.js in Action Forum Community feedback on Elijah’s new book. William Playfair - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia William Playfair (22 September 1759 – 11 February 1823) was a Scottish engineer and political economist, the founder of graphical methods of statistics. William Playfair invented four types of diagrams: in 1786 the line graph and bar chart of economic data, and in 1801 the pie chart and circle graph, used to show part-whole relations. Pie chart - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia A pie chart (or a circle chart) is a circular statistical graphic, which is divided into slices to illustrate numerical proportion. In a pie chart, the arc length of each slice (and consequently its central angle and area), is proportional to the quantity it represents. While it is named for its resemblance to a pie which has been sliced, there are variations on the way it can be presented. The earliest known pie chart is generally credited to William Playfair’s Statistical Breviary of 1801. Charles Joseph Minard - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Minard was a pioneer of the use of graphics in engineering and statistics. He is most well known for his cartographic depiction of numerical data on a map of Napoleon’s disastrous losses suffered during the Russian campaign of 1812 (in French, Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l’Armée Française dans la campagne de Russie 1812-1813). The illustration depicts Napoleon’s army departing the Polish-Russian border. A thick band illustrates the size of his army at specific geographic points during their advance and retreat. It displays six types of data in two dimensions: the number of Napoleon’s troops; the distance traveled; temperature; latitude and longitude; direction of travel; and location relative to specific dates. This type of band graph for illustration of flows was later called a Sankey diagram, although Matthew Sankey used this visualisation 30 years later and only for thematic energy flow). TaskRabbit connects you to safe and reliable help in your neighborhood. TaskRabbit allows you to live smarter by connecting you with safe and reliable help in your neighborhood. Outsource your household errands and skilled tasks to trusted people in your community. Slack: Be less busy We’re on a mission to make your working life simpler, more pleasant and more productive. Kickstarter We’re a home for everything from films, games, and music to art, design, and technology. Kickstarter is full of projects, big and small, that are brought to life through the direct support of people like you. Since our launch in 2009, 8.3 million people have pledged more than $1.6 billion, funding 81,000 creative projects. Thousands of creative projects are raising funds on Kickstarter right now. Kimono : Turn websites into structured APIs from your browser in seconds You don’t need to write any code or install any software to extract data with Kimono. The easiest way to use Kimono is to add our bookmarklet to your browser’s bookmark bar. Then go to the website you want to get data from and click the bookmarklet. Select the data you want and Kimono does the rest. We take care of hosting the APIs that you build with Kimono and running them on the schedule you specify. Use the API output in JSON or as CSV files that you can easily paste into a spreadsheet. Prince: Convert HTML to PDF with CSS Prince is an ideal printing component for server-based software, such as web applications that need to print reports or invoices. Using Prince, it is quick and easy to create PDF files that can be printed, archived, or downloaded. import.io | Web Data Platform & Free Web Scraping Tool We are a young startup that’s shaking up the world of data. From our homebase in London, we’re working hard to give people a totally new way to access data from the web. We have an amazing user base and were most recently voted Best Startup by O’Reilly Strata Santa Clara, GigaOM and Web Summit. Backed by top European VCs and Valley-based angel investors, our aim is to make a big impact in the world of data. The Design of Business Most companies today have innovation envy. They yearn to come up with a game-changing innovation like Apple’s iPod, or create an entirely new category like Facebook. Many make genuine efforts to be innovative-they spend on R&D, bring in creative designers, hire innovation consultants. But they get disappointing results. The End of ‘Genius’ - NYTimes.com But the lone genius is a myth that has outlived its usefulness. Fortunately, a more truthful model is emerging: the creative network, as with the crowd-sourced Wikipedia or the writer’s room at “The Daily Show” or – the real heart of creativity – the intimate exchange of the creative pair, such as John Lennon and Paul McCartney and myriad other examples with which we’ve yet to fully reckon. Geography of the Post The U.S. postal system was the nation’s largest communications network in the nineteenth century. By the close of the century the U.S. Post had extended its reach into nearly every city, town, and hamlet in the country. No other public institution was so ubiquitous and so central to everyday life; dropping off a letter or checking for mail at the local post office was a ritual shared by millions of Americans from Connecticut to Colorado. This visualization maps the spread of the postal network on its western periphery by charting the opening and closing of more than 14,000 post offices west of the hundredth meridian. ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World For the first time, ORBIS allows us to express Roman communication costs in terms of both time and expense. By simulating movement along the principal routes of the Roman road network, the main navigable rivers, and hundreds of sea routes in the Mediterranean, Black Sea and coastal Atlantic, this interactive model reconstructs the duration and financial cost of travel in antiquity. Seth Godin’s ShipIt Journal, now in free PDF format Free to print, free to share. Don’t sell or modify. Here’s the thing: If all you do is read this on the screen, IT WON’T WORK. I use all caps with care here. IT WILL NOT WORK. You need to print it and write in it. The audio will help. Good luck. Go ship. Make something happen. Neatline Neatline is a geotemporal exhibit-builder that allows you to create beautiful, complex maps, image annotations, and narrative sequences from Omeka collections of archives and artifacts, and to connect your maps and narratives with timelines that are more-than-usually sensitive to ambiguity and nuance. Neatline lets you make hand-crafted, interactive stories as interpretive expressions of a single document or a whole archival or cultural heritage collection. You can import these documents (georeferenced historical maps, manuscripts, high-res photographs, etc.) from an existing collection, or create a new digital archive, yourself. Every Neatline exhibit is your contribution to humanities scholarship, in the visual vernacular. Catbus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Catbus (referred to in the film as, Neko no basu) is a character in the Studio Ghibli film My Neighbor Totoro, directed by Hayao Miyazaki. It is a large creature, depicted as a grinning male cat with a hollow body that serves as a bus, complete with windows and seats coated with fur, and a large bushy tail. The character’s popularity has led to its use in a spinoff film, toys for children, an art car, and being featured in the Ghibli Museum, among other products and influences. emeeks/d3-carto-map — GitHub d3.carto is a library for creating layer-based maps using D3. It allows you to easily make tile and vector maps that take advantage of D3’s amazing geospatial functionality. The only real star of SB49. Leftshark subreddit. Super Bowl XLIX halftime show - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia During Perry’s performance of “Teenage Dream” and “California Gurls”, she was accompanied by several dancers in various beach-themed costumes, including two dressed as sharks. In their performance, one of the performers, left of Perry on screen, appeared to miss a cue and danced to his own beat instead of the planned choreography. The shark’s outfits, as well as the performance of this “Left Shark”, quickly became an Internet meme. The organizing choreographer RJ Durell stated that the dancers, both long-time stage performers from Perry’s past concerts, were not given rigorous choreography but instead told to mimic Perry’s moves and “to have loads of fun, and bring to life these characters in a cartoon manner”, and concluded that the Left Shark “nailed it”. Various other elements of Perry’s performance, such as her entrance on a mechanical lion, her costumes, and her exit on a flying star (which itself was compared to the former logo of NBC’s PSA segments The More You Know), were all incorporated into humorous images on social media. Tetrad of media effects - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Generally speaking, a tetrad is any set of four things. In Laws of Media (1988) and The Global Village (1989), published posthumously, Marshall McLuhan summarized his ideas about media in a concise tetrad of media effects. The tetrad is a means of examining the effects on society of any technology/medium (put another way: a means of explaining the social processes underlying the adoption of a technology/medium) by dividing its effects into four categories and displaying them simultaneously. It’s settled! Creator tells us how to pronounce ‘GIF’ - CNN.com “It’s pronounced JIF, not GIF.” Thank you for listening. -- @Elijah_Meeks, @jaheppler, @pfzenke.

Topics: The American Historical Association conference, Machines in the Valley, sharing work in progress, open research notebooks, and the myth of the individual scholar. Show Notes Open Notebook History | W. Caleb McDaniel What would happen if historians made their research notes public? What would it look like to make our notebooks "open source"? 129th Annual Meeting (January 2-5, 2015): Digital Pedagogy for History: Lightning Round Using the "lightning round" method of spreading ideas in the digital humanities, this experimental panel features one-minute expositions on innovative projects and cool ideas in digital history for teaching and learning. Five or more panelists will be invited to register via Twitter at the meeting. Audience members will also be invited to join the lightning round. 129th Annual Meeting (January 2-5, 2015): Digital Scholarship, Academic Careers, and Tenure The digital revolution is disrupting long-established systems within the academy for tenure, promotion, and careers, offering both new opportunities and remarkable challenges for the next generation of historians. The AHA, in response, recently charged a committee to draft guidelines for evaluating digital scholarship in T&P. This roundtable will provide a ground-level discussion of the role of digital scholarship in early-career scholars, as session panelists share how digital scholarship fit into their work on the tenure clock, offered them alternative academic careers based on their digital projects, and the nature of peer review after the digital turn. They will also discuss how the MLA‘s publication of guidelines for evaluating digital scholarship could be applied to historians. Amazon.com: The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890: Steven Hahn: Books Despite the vast changes in plantation agriculture following the Civil War and Reconstruction, the lot of small farmers was little improved. Examining the nonplantation region of upcountry Georgia as a microcosm of the South, Steven Hahn showed how farmers were buffeted by such forces as the unravelling of antebellum household economy, the development of market forces, the growth of a new class of merchants-landlords, and rising tensions between town and countryside--and how their resentments fueld the Populist movement at the end of the 19th century. Lincoln Mullen Home I am an assistant professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University, working on digital history and the history of American religions. W. Caleb McDaniel My name is W. Caleb McDaniel. I‘m an assistant professor of history at Rice University and a scholar of the nineteenth-century United States. I am also a Board Member and social media director for Historians Against Slavery. Village Vanguard | History Of New York's great jazz rooms, the Village Vanguard has the edge in terms of historical pedigree, sound, unique physical space, and ever-broadening booking policy, representing jazz across many generations and aesthetic viewpoints. Machines in the Valley Machines in the Valley is a digital history project that serves as a companion to Jason's dissertation. Thank you for listening. -- @Elijah_Meeks, @jaheppler, @pfzenke.

The First Draft will be taking a short break for the holidays, but we look forward to recording new episodes in January. We are grateful for your support. Thank you for listening.    Happy holidays, Elijah, Jason, and Paul

Show Notes Big data - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Big data is an all-encompassing term for any collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process them using traditional data processing applications. Welcome to Apache Hadoop The Apache Hadoop software library is a framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers using simple programming models. It is designed to scale up from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage. Rather than rely on hardware to deliver high-availability, the library itself is designed to detect and handle failures at the application layer, so delivering a highly-available service on top of a cluster of computers, each of which may be prone to failures. Neo4j, the World’s Leading Graph Database Neo Technology, creators of Neo4j, the world’s leading graph database, today announced that for the first time it has been positioned in the 2014 Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems (DBMS). Neo Technology is the only graph database to meet the report’s stringent qualification requirements. Geography of the Post The U.S. postal system was the nation's largest communications network in the nineteenth century. By the close of the century the U.S. Post had extended its reach into nearly every city, town, and hamlet in the country. No other public institution was so ubiquitous and so central to everyday life; dropping off a letter or checking for mail at the local post office was a ritual shared by millions of Americans from Connecticut to Colorado. This visualization maps the spread of the postal network on its western periphery by charting the opening and closing of more than 14,000 post offices west of the hundredth meridian. Postal Geography and the Golden West | Cameron Blevins I want to tell you a story. It’s a story about gold, the American West, and the way we narrate history. But first let me explain why I’m telling you this story. I’m in the midst of writing a dissertation about how the U.S. Post shaped development in the West. The project is a work of geography as much as history. Research Design and Geography of the Post · Jason Heppler After more than a year of work, Geography of the Post is live. I wanted to take a moment at the project’s launch to reflect back on the design decisions we made with the project and to document these changes. The First Draft Podcast S1E6: The Pragmatic Tyranny of Building Digital Artifacts Elijah Meeks, Jason Heppler, and Paul Zenke discuss Jason’s experiences working on the Geography of the Post project, D3.js, and the challenges of designing, and critically engaging with, interactive scholarly works. Western History Association - Home The WHA strives to be a congenial home for the study and teaching of all aspects of North American Wests, frontiers, homelands, and borderlands. Our mission is to cultivate the broadest appreciation of this diverse history. Welcome to the Social Science History Association The Social Science History Association is an interdisciplinary group of scholars that shares interests in social life and theory; historiography, and historical and social-scientific methodologies. SSHA might be best seen as a coalition of distinctive scholarly communities. Our substantive intellectual work ranges from everyday life in the medieval world and sometimes earlier -- to contemporary global politics, but we are united in our historicized approach to understanding human events, explaining social processes, and developing innovative theory. Jerome McGann - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jerome John McGann (born July 22, 1937) is an American academic and textual scholar whose work focuses on the history of literature and culture from the late eighteenth-century to the present. Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web: Jerome McGann: Amazon.com: Books Jerome McGann has been at the forefront of the digital revolution in the humanities. His pioneering critical projects on the World Wide Web have redefined traditional notions about interpreting literature. In this trailblazing book, McGann explores the profound implications digital media have for the core critical tasks of the humanities. Drawing on his work as editor of the acclaimed hypertext project The Rossetti Archive, he sets the foundation for a new critical practice for the digital age. Digital media, he demonstrates, can do much more than organize access to great works of literature and art. Beyond their acknowledged editorial and archival capabilities, digital media are also critical tools of unprecedented power. In McGann’s practical vision, digital tools give scholars a flexible, dynamic means for interpreting expressive works especially those that combine text and image. Radiant Textuality demonstrates eloquently how new technologies can deepen our understanding of complex, multi-layered works of the human imagination in ways never before thought possible. GIS Day 2014 | Stanford University Libraries The event will include a series of lightning talks featuring Stanford faculty and staff, GIS research, student demonstrations of current GIS projects, and a Where in the World contest. Drinks and snacks will be provided. Elijah Meeks (emeeks) on Github Elijah's New Book D3.js in Action D3.js in Action is a practical tutorial for creating interactive graphics and data driven applications using D3.js. You'll start with in-depth explanations of D3's out-of-the-box layouts, along with dozens of practical use cases that align with different types of visualizations. Then, you'll explore practical techniques for content creation, animation, and representing dynamic data including interactive graphics and data streamed live over the web. The final chapters show you how to use D3's rich interaction model as the foundation for a complete web application. In the end, you'll be ready to integrate D3.js into your web development process and transform any site into a more engaging and sophisticated user experience. Dennis Green "They are what we thought they were, and we let them off the hook!" - YouTube Higher Education Video Game Alliance Our mission is to create a platform for higher education leaders which will underscore the cultural, scientific, and economic importance of video game programs in colleges and universities. The key is to create a robust network of resources including unified advocacy, policymaker engagement, media coverage, and external funding in order to incubate and harness the impact of this community in a 21st century learning environment. Practice: Game Design in Detail An NYU Conference PRACTICE is an annual event that takes a close look at the concrete challenges of game design, bridging dialog across industries. Where else can a console developer discuss level design with a tabletop RPG writer? Or an iPhone puzzle creator debate economy balancing with collectable card game designer? Or a professional sports official share secrets with an experimental indie game artist? No other conference brings together such a diverse group of game designers for high-level dialog. Jonathan Blow - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jonathan Blow (born 1971) is an American independent video game programmer and designer. He is best known as the creator of Braid, which was released in 2008 and received critical acclaim. He is currently developing The Witness, to be released in 2014. Braid Braid is a platform game in a painterly style where you manipulate the flow of time to solve puzzles. Jonathan Blow "names" next title "Game 3," may take 20 years to create - Kill Screen - Videogame Arts & Culture. During the development of his forthcoming PlayStation 4 title The Witness, game designer Jonathan Blow hit a creative roadblock. Exhausted by the grinding pace of his work thus far, Blow turned to an unlikely place for inspiration: Thomas Pynchon's legendary opus Gravity's Rainbow. "I read this book again," he said during the opening keynote at NYU Game Center's Practice conference this morning, "When I started reading, I had this attitude, 'This is impossible. How will I finish?'" #practice2014 - Twitter Search Frank Lantz | NYU | Game Center Frank Lantz is the Director of the NYU Game Center, he has taught game design for over 12 years at NYU, SVA, and Parsons and his writings on games, technology and culture have appeared in a variety of publications. Gamergate controversy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Gamergate controversy began in August 2014 and concerns misogyny and harassment in video game culture. While many supporters of the self-described Gamergate movement say that they are concerned about ethical issues in video game journalism, the overwhelming majority of commentators have said that the movement is rooted in a culture war against women and the diversification of gaming culture. Thank you for listening. -- @Elijah_Meeks, @jaheppler, @pfzenke.

S2E4: The University as Rumpus Room In this episode, we are joined by Kenny Ligda, the Academic Technology Specialist for Stanford University's English department. Topics: "Interesting" academic interviews, enjoying literature, alt-ac career tracks, digital humanities and writing, digital humanities methods and copyright, blind sticktoitiveness, and reading and giving voice to all the forgotten books. Subscribe to our newsletter. Show Notes Kenneth Ligda | | Academic Technology Specialists Kenny is the newest addition to the ATS staff, having come on board in summer of 2013. He earned BAs in English and Danish from the University of Washington, taught ESL in Prague, and earned his PhD in English at Stanford. Prior to starting as ATS, Kenneth pioneered the role of Course Coordinator in the English Department, where he acquired considerable expertise in the goals and methods of the Department's new core curriculum. His central mandate as ATS is online learning. Kenneth Ligda (@Kligda) | Twitter Kenny on Twitter Terry Eagleton - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Terence Francis "Terry" Eagleton FBA (born 22 February 1943) is a prominent British literary theorist, critic and public intellectual. He is currently Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University, Professor of Cultural Theory at the National University of Ireland and Distinguished Visiting Professor of English Literature at The University of Notre Dame. Ludwig Wittgenstein's Definition of a Game - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Ludwig Wittgenstein was probably the first academic philosopher to address the definition of the word game. In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein argued that the elements of games, such as play, rules, and competition, all fail to adequately define what games are. From this, Wittgenstein concluded that people apply the term game to a range of disparate human activities that bear to one another only what one might call family resemblances. As the following game definitions show, this conclusion was not a final one and today many philosophers, like Thomas Hurka, think that Wittgenstein was wrong and that Bernard Suits' definition is a good answer to the problem. HIST205F: Digital History This is a hands-on course that introduces students to the use of digital tools and sources to conduct original historical research, analyze and interpret findings, and communicate results. Digital history is an interdisciplinary approach that seeks to bring digital technology into conversation with humanities disciplines and, specifically, seeks to analyze, synthesize, and present knowledge through computational media. A Guide to Authorial London Welcome to Authorial London, created to allow you to explore the lives and locations of some of the writers who lived in and around London. CS+English | Department of English Stanford is excited to be launching a new CS+English joint major for students who want to think across the divide and create projects that fuse science and the humanities. Increasingly, groundbreaking work in literary studies is being done through technology; simultaneously, the world of computer engineering thrives on the creativity and adaptability taught in literature departments. Stanford is uniquely situated to bring together the Bay Area's rich currents of innovation and imagination, and we are happy to invite you to be the first partners in this new integration of the disciplines. Literature and Latte - Scrivener Writing Software | Mac OS X | Windows Scrivener is a powerful content-generation tool for writers that allows you to concentrate on composing and structuring long and difficult documents. While it gives you complete control of the formatting, its focus is on helping you get to the end of that awkward first draft. The First Draft Podcast S1E9: The Greatest Lie the Writing Devil Ever Told Jason and Paul discuss writing, note-taking, tagging, and outlining with Tree, Scrivener, Gitit, Evernote, FoldingText, Mendeley, Zotero, Editorial, Markdown, Copy, LaTeX, Pandoc, MacVim, TextMate, BibTeX, and DEVONthink. The First Draft Podcast S1E8: Liberation Technology Topics: The increasing accessibility of computational tools and methods, systems, networks, data-driven decision making, the key player problem, neotopology, and pushback from specialists. T.S. Eliot "Marina" | Genius What seas what shores what granite islands towards my timbers And woodthrush calling through the fog My daughter. The Hedgehog and the Fox - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia "The Hedgehog and the Fox" is an essay by philosopher Isaiah Berlin. It was one of Berlin's most popular essays with the general public. Berlin himself said of the essay: "I never meant it very seriously. I meant it as a kind of enjoyable intellectual game, but it was taken seriously. Every classification throws light on something." Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek - Multimedia Feature - NYTimes.com The Differences Slavery Made -- Thomas and Ayers -- American Historical Review This article is an applied experiment in digital scholarship. Over the last decade networked information resources have come to play a large role in the work of historians; most of us have become accustomed to augmenting our library research and professional discussion through digital means. Despite these changes, scholars have only begun to craft scholarship designed specifically for the electronic environment. In this article, we attempt to translate the fundamental components of professional scholarship-evidence, engagement with prior scholarship, and a scholarly argument-into forms that take advantage of the possibilities of electronic media. The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War Bonus: George Orwell milking a goat Thank you for listening. -- @Elijah_Meeks, @jaheppler, @pfzenke.

Topics: Elijah has big news, leaving the academy, working in industry, developing marketable skills, supporting the DH community from outside the academy, and making your work accessible to secondary audiences. Show Notes Netflix - Watch TV Shows Online, Watch Movies Online Netflix is the world’s leading Internet television network with over 53 million members in nearly 50 countries enjoying more than two billion hours of TV shows and movies per month, including original series. Members can watch as much as they want, anytime, anywhere, on nearly any Internet-connected screen. Members can play, pause and resume watching, all without commercials or commitments. Netflix Culture Freedom & Responsibility. Bay Area DH (Stanford, CA) - Meetup BayDH is an organization bringing together academics, journalists, tech industry professionals, artists, designers and anyone else who is interested in exploring the intersection between humanities and technology. The focus is building ties between industry, the academy, and the public to promote digital humanities scholarship. About | Digital Humanities Specialist Elijah Meeks works as the digital humanities specialist at Stanford University. The Digital Humanities Specialist position was created to give Stanford faculty access to project design, visualization and software development oriented toward the creation of digital scholarly media. While a formal proposal process is in place for quarterly projects involving scholars or teams of scholars, informal consultation is regularly available. Tweets about #altac hashtag on Twitter versatilephd.com | Helping graduate students and PhDs envision, prepare for, and excel in non-academic careers since 1999 Versatile PhD is the oldest, largest online community dedicated to non-academic and non-faculty careers for PhDs in humanities, social science and STEM. Documenting the reinvention of text: the importance of imperfection, doubt, and failure The title of this conference-"Transformations of the Book"-has already been called into question here, and it is an instance of the rhetorical trope that has come to characterize much of what we say, write, and read about the subject of electronic text, the World-Wide Web, and information technology in general: the trope is one of change, invention, evolution, with overtones of progress and improvement, and with undertones of inevitability and universality. We meet this trope in mass-media news and advertising about computers and communications, in the promotional literature of our educational institutions, in scholarly books and articles about hypertext and digital libraries, and in grant proposals for electronic scholarly projects which aim, or claim, to break new ground, undertake pilot projects, provide models for the future. Benjamin M. Schmidt I am an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University and core faculty in the NuLab for Texts, Maps and Networks. Lincoln Mullen · Home I am an assistant professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University, working on digital history and the history of American religions. You can find a link to just about anything I've worked on in my CV or in the blog archives. Some of my work is described in more detail on the research page, and my syllabi are on the teaching page along with workshop materials. You can write to me at lincoln@lincolnmullen.com. Thank you for listening. -- @Elijah_Meeks, @jaheppler, @pfzenke.

Topics: Elijah visited Stamen Design, Twitch, Let's Play (LP), and working with vendors. Show Notes stamen design | the next most obvious thing Since 2001, Stamen has developed a reputation for beautiful and technologically sophisticated projects in a diverse range of commercial and cultural settings. We work and play with a surprising and growing range of collaborators: news media, financial institutions, artists and architects, car manufacturers, design agencies, museums, technology firms, political action committees, and universities. emeeks/d3-carto-map GitHub A mapping API that uses D3 geospatial functionality. Twitch Twitch is the world's leading video platform and community for gamers with more than 60 million visitors per month. We want to connect gamers around the world by allowing them to broadcast, watch, and chat from everywhere they play. Let's Play (video gaming) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia A Let's Play (often abbreviated to "LP"), is a series of screenshots or a recorded video documenting a playthrough of a video game, usually including commentary by the gamer. An LP differs from a walkthrough or strategy guide by focusing on an individual's subjective experience with the game, often with humorous, irreverent, or even critical commentary from the gamer, rather than being an objective source of information on how to progress through the game. After action report - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia An After Action Report (or AAR) is any form of retrospective analysis on a given sequence of goal-oriented actions previously undertaken, generally by the author himself. BattleTech: 25 Years of Heavy Metal Mayhem. | Even Better than You Remember It. Since its beginnings as the BattleTech boardgame, the BattleTech/MechWarrior universe has captivated millions of fans worldwide. For almost three decades, the collision of interstellar politics and war has rewarded fans with amazingly detailed fiction, captivating characters and fantastic adventure. These dynamics have spawned a host games, novels, toys and more. Clockwork Empires: A Unique Colonial City-Building Simulation Game with Steampunk & Cosmic Horror Elements Take on the role of a Junior Bureaucrat (Colonial Grade), sent forth to seek fame, promotions, and natural resources to feed the ravenous maw of Imperial Industry & Commerce. Build a prosperous colony, fill it with magnificent factories worked by oppressed labourers, and harness the awesome power of steam through fearsome machines invented by determined men and women of Science! History is yours to seize for fame and fortune, for Science, and for the Queen and the glory of the Clockwork Empires! This Guy Makes Millions Playing Video Games on YouTube - The Atlantic The YouTube personality with the most subscribers isn't Justin Bieber (8 million) or Rihanna (12.5 million). That honor goes to a 24-year-old Swede named Felix Kjellberg, better known by his YouTube handle, PewDiePie. Thank you for listening. -- @Elijah_Meeks, @jaheppler, @pfzenke.

Topics: Podcasting, the culture of Tableau, "doing" the tool vs. learning the domain, literacies, and jobs-to-be-done. Subscribe to our newsletter. Show Notes Tableau Desktop | Tableau Software Answer questions as fast as you can think of them with Desktop. Elijah Meeks | Digital Humanities Specialist Elijah's DH blog. About DH at Stanford | Digital Humanities at Stanford The current collective of Stanford digital humanists includes people in many of these organizations, and though we don't currently have a single institutional home, we are united in a desire both to support and to embody DH practice, theory, and training. D3.js - Data-Driven Documents D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG and CSS. D3's emphasis on web standards gives you the full capabilities of modern browsers without tying yourself to a proprietary framework, combining powerful visualization components and a data-driven approach to DOM manipulation. emeeks/d3-carto-map · GitHub d3.carto is a library for creating layer-based maps using D3. It allows you to easily make tile and vector maps that take advantage of D3's amazing geospatial functionality. Explore - Vine Vine is the best way to see and share life in motion. Create short, beautiful, looping videos in a simple and fun way for your friends and family to see. Elijah Meeks - YouTube Elijah's talks on YouTube. Douglas Rushkoff - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Douglas Rushkoff (born 18 February 1961) is an American media theorist, writer, columnist, lecturer, graphic novelist, and documentarian. He is best known for his association with the early cyberpunk culture, and his advocacy of open source solutions to social problems. Gephi - The Open Graph Viz Platform Gephi is an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs. Social and Economic Networks: Models and Analysis | Coursera Learn how to model social and economic networks and their impact on human behavior. How do networks form, why do they exhibit certain patterns, and how does their structure impact diffusion, learning, and other behaviors? We will bring together models and techniques from economics, sociology, math, physics, statistics and computer science to answer these questions. i am, the scottbot irregular historian of science, a data enthusiast, and a juggler, and the scottbot irregular is my central webspace. The First Draft Podcast S1E5: Data Driven Pickup Artists Elijah Meeks, Jason Heppler, and Paul Zenke are joined by special guest Scott Weingart to discuss data science, Facebook's emotional contagion study, natural language processing, research ethics, computational social science, and social media literacy. Clay Christensen's Milkshake Marketing, HBS Working Knowledge The company then enlisted the help of one of Christensen's fellow researchers, who approached the situation by trying to deduce the "job" that customers were "hiring" a milkshake to do. Office Assistant - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Office Assistant was an intelligent user interface for Microsoft Office that assisted users by way of an interactive animated character, which interfaced with the Office help content. Thank you for listening -- @Elijah_Meeks, @jaheppler, @pfzenke.

Topics: Elijah?s workshop at the 2014 Humanities Intensive Teaching and Learning (HILT) Institute, and teaching and learning network analysis. Subscribe to our newsletter. Show Notes Humanities Intensive Learning + Teaching Institute | College of Arts & Humanities The Humanities Intensive Teaching and Learning (HILT) Institute will be held August 4-8, 2014 on the campus of the University of Maryland. Network theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Network theory is an area of computer science and network science and part of graph theory. Goldilocks principle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Goldilocks principle states that something must fall within certain margins, as opposed to reaching extremes. When the effects of the principle are observed, it is known as the Goldilocks effect. Systems thinking - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Systems thinking is the process of understanding how things, regarded as systems, influence one another within a whole. In nature, systems thinking examples include ecosystems in which various elements such as air, water, movement, plants, and animals work together to survive or perish. In organizations, systems consist of people, structures, and processes that work together to make an organization "healthy" or "unhealthy". Systems thinking has roots in the General System Theory that was advanced by Ludwig von Bertalanffy in the 1940s and furthered by Ross Ashby in the 1950s. An Interactive Introduction to Network Analysis and Representation by Elijah Meeks and Maya Krishna This interactive application is designed to provide an overview of various network analysis principles used for analysis and representation. It also provides a few examples of untraditional networks used in digital humanities scholarship. Finally, along with the various methods described interactively here are links to related scholarship. Networks, Crowds, and Markets: A Book by David Easley and Jon Kleinberg Networks, Crowds, and Markets combines different scientific perspectives in its approach to understanding networks and behavior. Drawing on ideas from economics, sociology, computing and information science, and applied mathematics, it describes the emerging field of study that is growing at the interface of all these areas, addressing fundamental questions about how the social, economic, and technological worlds are connected. Centrality - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia In graph theory and network analysis, centrality refers to indicators which identify the most important vertices within a graph. Applications include identifying the most influential person(s) in a social network, key infrastructure nodes in the Internet or urban networks, and super spreaders of disease. Centrality concepts were first developed in social network analysis, and many of the terms used to measure centrality reflect their sociological origin. ARPANET - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was one of the world's first operational packet switching networks, the first network to implement TCP/IP, and the progenitor of what was to become the global Internet. Thank you for listening.

Jason and Paul discuss writing, note-taking, tagging, and outlining with Tree, Scrivener, Gitit, Evernote, FoldingText, Mendeley, Zotero, Editorial, Markdown, Copy, LaTeX, Pandoc, MacVim, TextMate, BibTeX, and DEVONthink. Subscribe to our newsletter. Show Notes The No-Fail Secret to Writing a Dissertation | Vitae Here’s the basic, scalable program that I recommend: Sit your butt down in a chair, preferably in a quiet and distraction-free room. Disable your internet and turn your phone on silent. Come into your writing space having already done the research you need for that day’s writing task. You will not be researching or looking anything up during your writing time (research and editing are discrete tasks, believe it or not, and should be done in separate blocks). Top of Tree - Tree, outliner for Mac OS X. Horizontally expanding outliner. Tree assists you in organizing your information, sketching plans and brainstorming new ideas. Tree allows you to store your ideas and keywords in segments that you can sort, re-arrange and constantly refine. Tree is designed to be a lightweight application that lets you concentrate on your ideas. Literature and Latte - Scrivener Writing Software | Mac OS X | Windows Scrivener is a powerful content-generation tool for writers that allows you to concentrate on composing and structuring long and difficult documents. While it gives you complete control of the formatting, its focus is on helping you get to the end of that awkward first draft. gitit demo - Gitit Gitit is a wiki backed by a git, darcs, or mercurial filestore. Pages and uploaded files can be modified either directly via the VCS’s command-line tools or through the wiki’s web interface. Pandoc is used for markup processing, so pages may be written in (extended) markdown, reStructuredText, LaTeX, HTML, or literate Haskell, and exported in ten different formats, including LaTeX, ConTeXt, DocBook, RTF, OpenOffice ODT, and MediaWiki markup. Evernote | Remember everything with Evernote, Skitch and our other great apps. Evernote apps and products make modern life manageable, by letting you easily collect and find everything that matters. Skitch | Evernote Get your point across with fewer words using annotation, shapes and sketches, so that your ideas become reality faster. On sorting, tagging and other nerdery - BrettTerpstra.com The beauty of tagging, as you may know, is that you can easily assign multiple categorizations and topics to each item, rather than just having them exist at one location which defines it as a type or part of a static collection. I still use the shallow hierarchy of folders that drill down to individual projects and topics, so it’s not a “one pile” deal. I couldn’t function like that; it’s difficult to weed, and if metadata is lost, so is the file, essentially. I use folders to maintain filesystem sanity. I use tags and other metadata to maintain my sanity. Posts Tagged “tagging” - BrettTerpstra.com Create a Zettelkasten for your Notes to Improve Thinking and Writing • Christian Tietze Storing stuff in small-ish notes is the fundamental principle in creating a device called “Zettelkasten” (German for “slip box”, or “card index”). Vladimir Nabokov, Jean Paul and Arno Schmidt wrote their novels’ drafts on index cards. German sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s productivity was increased to epic proportions (70 books, 400 articles) with the help of his Zettelkasten. Posts tagged “zettelkasten” • Christian Tietze How I use Outlines to Write Any Text • Christian Tietze Nowadays, I write all of my texts in outlines. This post is no exception. I found this to be a game-changer when it comes to writing, so I thought I’d share the process. FoldingText — Plain text productivity for Mac users For Mac users who love plain text. FoldingText is the markdown text editor with productivity features. Unlike other editors, FoldingText does outlining, todo lists, and more. Mendeley Mendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network. Make your own fully-searchable library in seconds, cite as you write, and read and annotate your PDFs on any device. Zotero Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources. DEVONthink — Smart document management for Mac - DEVONtechnologies DEVONthink saves all your documents, keeps them organized, and recalls them whenever you need them. Now there's no need to store Office files, PDFs, bookmarks or other information in separate apps. Towards Better PDF Management with the Filesystem | GradHacker My solution was to stop using the everything buckets and rely on the filesystem. All of my PDFs are now stored in a master folder (simply called “papers”) and the filenames follow the Zotero naming template of the author’s last name, year of publication, and short title (e.g., “O’Mara – 2006 – Cold War Politics and Scientific Communities”). Posts on devonthink | parezco y digo As these are by far the most popular posts on this blog, here are direct links to my devonthink posts in order. Write and Cluster Small Texts | William J Turkel Two programs lie at the core of the workflow, DevonThink Pro and Scrivener. When I add a new source to my local repository, I create a bibliographic record for it, then I index it in DevonThink. Once it is indexed I can use the searching, clustering and concordance tools in DevonThink to explore my sources. Editorial for iOS Editorial is a plain text editor for iPad and iPhone with powerful automation tools and a beautiful inline preview for writing Markdown. Editorial Workflows Welcome to the Editorial workflow directory! This is the place to explore what others have created with Editorial. You can share your own workflows directly from the app. Editorial is a Powerful, Flexible iOS App for Text Editing – ProfHacker - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Education Combined with a well designed interface and incredibly powerful workflows built on Python and snippets, Editorial redefined the way I edit text on the iPad. More and more I find myself reaching for Editorial for text editing over anything else, including any apps on my Mac. And pairing it with a Bluetooth keyboard has, with the exception of Scrivener, made Editorial the most productive writing environment I’ve used. Editorial changed how I thought about my iPad. It had largely been about consumption — gaming, reading books and PDFs, catching up on RSS — but Editorial made the iPad a production device for me as well. Byword • Simple and efficient text editor for Mac, iPhone and iPad. Simple and efficient text editing for Mac, iPhone and iPad. iTextEditors - iPhone and iPad text/code editors and writing tools compared This is a feature comparison of text editors on iOS. The information was compiled by the web community on an open Google spreadsheet. I cannot vouch for its current accuracy, but will be verifying everything as I’m able. It’s meant to help you find the most useful way to write, code or take notes for your personal needs. Every editor is geared toward a slightly different purpose, with their own strengths and focus. Pythonista Pythonista is an integrated development environment for writing Python™ scripts on iOS. You can create interactive experiments and prototypes using multi-touch, animations, and sound – or just use the interactive prompt as a powerful calculator. Mac Basics: Automator Automator is your personal automation assistant, making it easy for you to do more, and with less hassle. With Automator, you use a simple drag-and-drop process to create and run “automation recipes” that perform simple or complex tasks for you, when and where you need them. goodreader.com :: products :: GoodReader GoodReader is the super-robust PDF reader for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. Its iPad version was the #1 selling non-Apple app for iPad in 2010 in USA! Mashable describes it as "a Swiss Army knife of awesome!" Reviews worldwide hail it as "essential," "the best," "magnificent" and "the killer app". With GoodReader on your iPad/iPhone, you can read virtually anything, anywhere: books, movies, maps, pictures. Use it once and you'll be hooked. If you work with documents, soon you'll be wondering how you ever managed to use your iPad or iPhone without GoodReader. ZotFile - Advanced PDF management for Zotero Zotfile is a Zotero plugin to manage your attachments: automatically rename, move, and attach PDFs (or other files) to Zotero items, sync PDFs from your Zotero library to your (mobile) PDF reader (e.g. an iPad, Android tablet, etc.) and extract annotations from PDF files. Skim | Home Skim is a PDF reader and note-taker for OS X. It is designed to help you read and annotate scientific papers in PDF, but is also great for viewing any PDF file. Papers for Mac Papers is an Apple Design Award and Ars Design Award winning solution for managing research literature. Now, it's time for Papers 3 to take your personal library of research to a whole new level. Papers keeps your library organized and portable, automatically downloads full-text content for your articles, shows you related content when reading, and lets you sync your library between home and work, whether you're using Mac or PC, iPad or iPhone. Staying organized was never this easy. Amazon.com: On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction (9780060891541): William Zinsser: Books On Writing Well has been praised for its sound advice, its clarity and the warmth of its style. It is a book for everybody who wants to learn how to write or who needs to do some writing to get through the day, as almost everybody does in the age of e-mail and the Internet. Amazon.com: How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing (9781591477433): Paul J. Silvia: Books All students and professors need to write, and many struggle to finish their stalled dissertations, journal articles, book chapters, or grant proposals. Writing is hard work and can be difficult to wedge into a frenetic academic schedule. In this practical, light-hearted, and encouraging book, Paul Silvia explains that writing productively does not require innate skills or special traits but specific tactics and actions. Drawing examples from his own field of psychology, he shows readers how to overcome motivational roadblocks and become prolific without sacrificing evenings, weekends, and vacations. After describing strategies for writing productively, the author gives detailed advice from the trenches on how to write, submit, revise, and resubmit articles, how to improve writing quality, and how to write and publish academic work. The Daily Routines of Famous Writers | Brain Pickings Kurt Vonnegut’s recently published daily routine made we wonder how other beloved writers organized their days. So I pored through various old diaries and interviews — many from the fantastic Paris Review archives — and culled a handful of writing routines from some of my favorite authors. Enjoy. Why (and How) I Wrote My Academic Book in Plain Text | W. Caleb McDaniel I’m writing this post partly to tell you that none of these are insuperable obstacles for the academic historian who wants to use plain text. In fact, I wrote the entirety of my academic book, forthcoming in early 2013, in plain text files. Before submitting the manuscript to my press, I converted all of my plain text files, complete with notes about what to italicize and where to place footnotes, to Microsoft Word documents using a simple program called Pandoc, and the press never knew the difference. I’ve done the same thing now with a conference paper and journal article, too. It is possible to write academic publications in plain text, and in fact, Lincoln Mullen and I are working on a paper that will spell out how to do so in detail. Lincoln Mullen · Historian of American religions Daring Fireball: Markdown Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML). MultiMarkdown MMD is a superset of the Markdown syntax, originally created by John Gruber. It adds multiple syntax features (tables, footnotes, and citations, to name a few), in addition to the various output formats listed above (Markdown only creates HTML). Additionally, it builds in “smart” typography for various languages (proper left- and right-sided quotes, for example). LaTeX – A document preparation system LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting system; it includes features designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation. LaTeX is the de facto standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents. LaTeX is available as free software. Pandoc - About pandoc If you need to convert files from one markup format into another, pandoc is your swiss-army knife. Pandoc can convert documents in markdown, reStructuredText, textile, HTML, DocBook, LaTeX, MediaWiki markup, OPML, Emacs Org-Mode, or Haddock markup. macvim - Vim for the Mac - Google Project Hosting MacVim supports multiple windows with tabbed editing and a host of other features such as: MacVim supports multiple windows with tabbed editing and a host of other features such as bindings to standard OS X keyboard shortcuts (?Z, ?V, ?A, ?G, etc.); transparent backgrounds; full-screen mode; multibyte editing with OS X input methods and automatic font substitution; ODB editor support, and more. Most importantly, MacVim brings you the full power of Vim 7.4 to Mac OS X. TextMate — The Missing Editor for Mac OS X TextMate brings Apple's approach to operating systems into the world of text editors. By bridging UNIX underpinnings and GUI, TextMate cherry-picks the best of both worlds to the benefit of expert scripters and novice users alike. Notational Velocity NOTATIONAL VELOCITY is an application that stores and retrieves notes. It is an attempt to loosen the mental blockages to recording information and to scrape away the tartar of convention that handicaps its retrieval. The solution is by nature nonconformist. lmullen/bibkeys A Ruby utility to list all the citation keys in a BibTeX file. BibTeX The word ,,BibTeX'' stands for a tool and a file format which are used to describe and process lists of references, mostly in conjunction with LaTeX documents. Github - citation-style-language github.com/citation-style-language/styles is the official repository for Citation Style Language (CSL) styles and is maintained by CSL project members. For more information, check out CitationStyles.org and the repository wiki. 19 - co,Co,CougH by Accky on SoundCloud The First Draft theme song. (CC BY-SA 3.0). Please contact us at hello@firstdraftpodcast.com or @firstdraftcast to share comments, questions, or show topic ideas. Thanks for listening.

Topics: The increasing accessibility of computational tools and methods, systems, networks, data-driven decision making, the key player problem, neotopology, and pushback from specialists.  Topic model In machine learning and natural language processing, a topic model is a type of statistical model for discovering the abstract "topics" that occur in a collection of documents. Intuitively, given that a document is about a particular topic, one would expect particular words to appear in the document more or less frequently: "dog" and "bone" will appear more often in documents about dogs, "cat" and "meow" will appear in documents about cats, and "the" and "is" will appear equally in both. A document typically concerns multiple topics in different proportions; thus, in a document that is 10% about cats and 90% about dogs, there would probably be about 9 times more dog words than cat words. A topic model captures this intuition in a mathematical framework, which allows examining a set of documents and discovering, based on the statistics of the words in each, what the topics might be and what each document's balance of topics is. Network theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Network theory is an area of computer science and network science and part of graph theory. It has application in many disciplines including statistical physics, particle physics, computer science, electrical engineering, biology, economics, operations research, and sociology. Network theory concerns itself with the study of graphs as a representation of either symmetric relations or, more generally, of asymmetric relations between discrete objects. Applications of network theory include logistical networks, the World Wide Web, Internet, gene regulatory networks, metabolic networks, social networks, epistemological networks, etc. See list of network theory topics for more examples. Spatial analysis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Spatial analysis or spatial statistics includes any of the formal techniques which study entities using their topological, geometric, or geographic properties. Spatial analysis includes a variety of techniques, many still in their early development, using different analytic approaches and applied in fields as diverse as astronomy, with its studies of the placement of galaxies in the cosmos, to chip fabrication engineering, with its use of 'place and route' algorithms to build complex wiring structures. In a more restricted sense, spatial analysis is the techniques applied to structures at the human scale, most notably in the analysis of geographic data. Web scraping - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Web scraping (web harvesting or web data extraction) is a computer software technique of extracting information from websites.  Voyant Tools: Reveal Your Texts Voyant Tools is a web-based reading and analysis environment for digital texts. Find out more. D3.js - Data-Driven Documents D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG and CSS. D3’s emphasis on web standards gives you the full capabilities of modern browsers without tying yourself to a proprietary framework, combining powerful visualization components and a data-driven approach to DOM manipulation. Information visualization - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Information visualization or information visualisation is the study of (interactive) visual representations of abstract data to reinforce human cognition. The abstract data include both numerical and non-numerical data, such as text and geographic information. However, information visualization differs from scientific visualization: "it’s infovis [information visualization] when the spatial representation is chosen, and it’s scivis [scientific visualization] when the spatial representation is given". Data-Driven Decision Making: Promises and Limits - The CIO Report - WSJ Decision making has long been a subject of study and given the explosive growth of  Big Data over the past decade, it’s not surprising that data-driven decision making is one of the most promising applications in the emerging discipline of data science. Natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is a field of computer science, artificial intelligence, and linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages. As such, NLP is related to the area of human–computer interaction. Many challenges in NLP involve natural language understanding, that is, enabling computers to derive meaning from human or natural language input, and others involve natural language generation. Discourse analysis The objects of discourse analysis—discourse, writing, conversation, communicative event—are variously defined in terms of coherent sequences of sentences, propositions, speech, or turns-at-talk. Contrary to much of traditional linguistics, discourse analysts not only study language use 'beyond the sentence boundary', but also prefer to analyze 'naturally occurring' language use, and not invented examples. Text linguistics is related. The essential difference between discourse analysis and text linguistics is that it aims at revealing socio-psychological characteristics of a person/persons rather than text structure. System - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia A system is a set of interacting or interdependent components forming an integrated whole[1] or a set of elements (often called 'components' ) and relationships which are different from relationships of the set or its elements to other elements or sets. The Key Player Problem by Steve Borgatt The key player problem (KPP) consists of two separate sub-problems, which can be described at a general level as follows: 1. (KPP-1) Given a social network, find a set of k nodes (called a kp-set of order k) which, if removed, would maximally disrupt communication among the remaining nodes. 2. (KPP-2) Given a social network, find a kp-set of order k that is maximally connected to all other nodes. ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World reconstructs the time cost and financial expense associated with a wide range of different types of travel in antiquity. The model is based on a simplified version of the giant network of cities, roads, rivers and sea lanes that framed movement across the Roman Empire. It broadly reflects conditions around 200 CE but also covers a few sites and roads created in late antiquity. Social justice - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Social justice is the ability people have to realize their potential in the society where they live.  Gephi Gephi is an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs. The Programming Historian In this lesson you will first learn what topic modeling is and why you might want to employ it in your research. You will then learn how to install and work with the MALLET natural language processing toolkit to do so. MALLET involves modifying an environment variable (essentially, setting up a short-cut so that your computer always knows where to find the MALLET program) and working with the command line (ie, by typing in commands manually, rather than clicking on icons or menus). i am – the scottbot irregular A historian of science, a data enthusiast, and a juggler, and the scottbot irregular is my central webspace. City Nature Nature is unevenly distributed in and across cities despite the fact that much else about cities scales with population. The City Nature project combines spatial analysis of parks and other natural areas in cities with text mining of planning documents and published historical narratives to explore why. Visualizing Algorithms Algorithms are a fascinating use case for visualization. To visualize an algorithm, we don’t merely fit data to a chart; there is no primary dataset. Instead there are logical rules that describe behavior. This may be why algorithm visualizations are so unusual, as designers experiment with novel forms to better communicate. This is reason enough to study them. But algorithms are also a reminder that visualization is more than a tool for finding patterns in data. Visualization leverages the human visual system to augment human intellect: we can use it to better understand these important abstract processes, and perhaps other things, too. Neotopology | Digital Humanities at Stanford I titled my talk neotopology because I believe that this network turn resembles the spatial turn in more ways than one. One of those ways is the presence of a vibrant community of practice growing outside the traditional domains where in one case network analysis/visualization and in the other case spatial analysis/visualization traditionally occurs. Neogeography, in short, refers to the use of cartographic and spatial analytic tools and techniques by designers, humanists, software developers and others outside of the traditional domains of GIS, GIScience and cartography. It has, at times, caused some consternation and led to fierce claims both in digital humanities and in the tech industry that the geographic information systems being developed by such interlopers are, "Not GIS". It has also elicited, from time to time, angry responses from these traditional domains directed at flaneurs running amok with ArcGIS and Google Maps API. Which itself has also spurred defensiveness. Liberation theology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Liberation theology is a political movement in Roman Catholic theology which interprets the teachings of Jesus Christ in relation to a liberation from unjust economic, political, or social conditions. It has been described as "an interpretation of Christian faith through the poor's suffering, their struggle and hope, and a critique of society and the Catholic faith and Christianity through the eyes of the poor". Detractors have called it Christianized Marxism.   

Glen Worthey, Digital Humanities Librarian, Stanford University Libraries, joins Elijah Meeks, Jason Heppler, and Paul Zenke to discuss his experiences at DH 2014, the popularity of DH projects, the humanities savior narrative, mentorship, Twitter, #dhsheep, linguistic inclusivity at conferences, and the future of DH programs. Subscribe to our newsletter. Show Notes DH 2014 : 7-12 July 2014 | Co-organized by ADHO, Unil (LADHUL) and EPFL (DHLAB) Digital Humanities 2014 official website. Editor’s Choice: Round-Up – Digital Humanities 2014 Conference Papers | Digital Humanities Now A roundup of posts about DH14. The Association for Computers and the Humanities The Association for Computers and the Humanities is your professional society for the digital humanities! Through our activities, conferences, and publications, we support computer-assisted research, teaching, and software and content development in humanistic disciplines. Glen Worthey (gworthey) on Twitter Digital Humanities Librarian @ Stanford ADHO The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) promotes and supports digital research and teaching across all arts and humanities disciplines, acting as a community-based advisory force, and supporting excellence in research, publication, collaboration and training. CSDH/SCHN CSDH/SCHN is the scholarly association for Digital Humanities in Canada and beyond. It is a member of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) and membership is through a subscription to the LLC journal. EADH - The European Association for Digital Humanities The EADH brings together and represents the Digital Humanities in Europe across the entire spectrum of disciplines that research, develop, and apply digital humanities methods and technology. These include art history, cultural studies, history, image processing, language and literature studies, manuscripts studies, and musicology, amongst others. The EADH also supports the formation of DH interest groups in Europe that are de?ned by region, language, methodological focus or other criteria. centerNet centerNet is an international network of digital humanities centers. Japanese Association for Digital Humanities The field of humanities is undergoing a radical transformation in its encounter with rapid developments in the digital domain. In response to this situation, various efforts have been undertaken based on collaboration between the humanities and the information technologies in Japan and foreign countries. Recently, various related activities have been carried out under the rubric of Digital Humanities in Europe and North America. Progress in this area in Japan however, has been hindered in a couple of ways. For example, there have been limits to the extent of the collaboration between Japanese digital humanities specialists and their counterparts in the West brought about by the basic difficulties with the digitization of the characters and texts that compose Japanese resources. In general, the results of digitization efforts in Japan in the humanities disciplines have not been commensurate with the huge effort and expense made heretofore. To begin to resolve such issues, we intend to establish the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities (JADH), which aims to form an environment where international collaborative works are more fully realized. Australian Association for Digital Humanities The Australasian Association for Digital Humanities Inc (aaDH) was formed in March 2011 to strengthen the digital humanities research community in our region and is a member of the international Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations (ADHO). The professional association acts to support and extend links between digital humanities researchers, improve professional development opportunities and provide international leverage for local projects and initiatives. We organise the Digital Humanities Australasia conference every two years as well as provide other opportunities for the application and understanding of digital technologies in the humanities. You can join the aaDH through subscription to LLC. digital humanities in the anthropocene, Bethany Nowviskie What is a digital humanities practice that grapples constantly with little extinctions and can look clear-eyed on a Big One? DataViz: the Digital Humanities Network on Twitter (#DH2014) The graph below represents all the “mentions” contained in the #DH2014 tweets (a tie connects two users when one mentions the other at least once in a message). The size of the circles indicates the number of tweets sent. The intensity of the color depends on the number of incoming mentions (in degree): the more a user is mentioned, the clearer the color (from blue to white between 0-100 mentions, and white for more). Mark Algee-Hewitt | Department of English Mark Algee-Hewitt’s research focuses on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in England and Germany and seeks to combine literary criticism with digital and quantitative analyses of literary texts. In particular he is interested in the history of aesthetic theory and the development and transmission of aesthetic and philosophic concepts during the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. He is also interested in the relationship between aesthetic theory and the poetry of the long eighteenth century. Although his primary background is in English literature, he also has a degree in computer science. As the co-associate research director of the Stanford Literary Lab, he is working to bring his interests in quantitative analysis, digital humanities and eighteenth-century literature to bear on a number of new collaborative projects. Stanford Literary Lab The Stanford Literary Lab — founded in 2010 by Matthew Jockers and Franco Moretti — discusses, designs, and pursues literary research of a digital and quantitative nature. The Lab is open to all students and faculty at Stanford — and, on a more ad hoc basis, to students and faculty from other institutions. Lausanne - Switzerland Tourism Lausanne, the second-largest city on Lake Geneva, combines a dynamic commercial town with the locality of a holiday resort. The capital of the canton of Vaud is also a lively university and convention town. Sports and culture are given a high profile in the Olympic capital. Lord Byron - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, later George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron, FRS (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), commonly known simply as Lord Byron, was an English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement. Among Byron's best-known works are the lengthy narrative poems Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and the short lyric She Walks in Beauty. He is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and remains widely read and influential. Digital Humanities 2013 | University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 16-19 July 2013 Culturomics Erez Lieberman Aiden You've reached the home page of Erez Lieberman Aiden. I am currently an assistant Professor in the Department of Genetics at the Baylor College of Medicine, where I direct the newly-established Center for Genome Architecture, and in the Department of Computer Science and Computational and Applied Mathematics at Rice University across the street. Jean-Baptiste Michel Jean-Baptiste graduated as an Engineer of Ecole Polytechnique (Paris, France) in 2005. Since then, he completed an MS in Applied Mathematics and a PhD in Systems Biology at Harvard University. Jean-Baptiste is interested in quantitative aspects of phenomena directly relevant to human life, such as the evolution of disease-causing cells during pathogenesis, violence during conflicts, or the way language and culture change with time. He currently develops a quantitative approach to the study of trends in human languages and cultures based on millions of digitized texts. Conference video: Closing Keynote by JB Michel and Erez Lieberman | Digital Humanities 2011: June 19 ‘Uncharted,’ by Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel - NYTimes.com To test this evolutionary premise, Mr. Aiden and Mr. Michel wound up inventing something they call culturomics, the use of huge amounts of digital information to track changes in language, culture and history. Their quest is the subject of “Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture,” an entertaining tour of the authors’ big-data adventure, whose implications they wildly oversell. Digital Humanities 2011: June 19 – 22 | Big Tent Digital Humanities The limits of the digital humanities, by Adam Kirsch | New Republic The language here is the language of scholarship, but the spirit is the spirit of salesmanship—the very same kind of hyperbolic, hard-sell approach we are so accustomed to hearing about the Internet, or  about Apple’s latest utterly revolutionary product. Fundamental to this kind of persuasion is the undertone of menace, the threat of historical illegitimacy and obsolescence. Here is the future, we are made to understand: we can either get on board or stand athwart it and get run over. Twitter / Ted Underwood Hey, you haven't really arrived till you get attacked in TNR. Why are such terrible things written about DH? Kirsch v. Kirschenbaum | Digital Humanities at Stanford Last week I read one of the latest and loudest salvos in a sad and very silly war on the digital humanities: Adam Kirsch, in The New Republic, chose to put his pugnacious piece out under not one, but two inflammatory titles: "Technology is Taking Over English Departments: The false promise of the digital humanities." Oh, please. Bay Area DH SF Bay DH is currently an informal group of individuals in the San Francisco Bay Area with a shared interest in digital humanities research, tool and project development, and/or pedagogy. Our goal is to foster a vibrant digital humanities community by raising awareness of local projects, tools and people, as well as promoting events (lectures, workshops, free classes, etc.) held in the region. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH, an applied thinktank for the digital humanities). He is also an affiliated faculty member with the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at Maryland, and a member of the teaching faculty at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School.  Kirschenbaum served as the first director of the new Digital Cultures and Creativity living/learning program in the Honors College at Maryland. Mechanisms | The MIT Press In Mechanisms, Matthew Kirschenbaum examines new media and electronic writing against the textual and technological primitives that govern writing, inscription, and textual transmission in all media: erasure, variability, repeatability, and survivability. Mechanisms is the first book in its field to devote significant attention to storage--the hard drive in particular--arguing that understanding the affordances of storage devices is essential to understanding new media. Drawing a distinction between “forensic materiality” and “formal materiality,” Kirschenbaum uses applied computer forensics techniques in his study of new media works. Just as the humanities discipline of textual studies examines books as physical objects and traces different variants of texts, computer forensics encourage us to perceive new media in terms of specific versions, platforms, systems, and devices. Kirschenbaum demonstrates these techniques in media-specific readings of three landmark works of new media and electronic literature, all from the formative era of personal computing: the interactive fiction game Mystery House, Michael Joyce’s Afternoon: A Story, and William Gibson’s electronic poem “Agrippa.” News | ADHO One new element to this year’s conference is an attempt to facilitate informal and voluntary translation by distributing buttons people can wear indicating what languages they are willing to talk or otherwise assist in. This effort is the result of a collaboration between ADHO’s Global Outlook Special Interest Group and our Multilingualism and Multicuturalism Committee. Please be on the look out for the “I Whisper in  . . . buttons,” and offer to wear one yourself if you are fluent in a language other than English.  They can be found near the registration desk. We are especially grateful to Elika Ortega, Dan O’Donnell, and Alex Gill of GO::DH for helping to organize this effort. Humanidades Digitales - ACERCA DE La RedHD surgió como una iniciativa de un grupo de académicos  y académicas que nos reunimos para discutir de qué forma podíamos impulsar y apoyar la formalización de las Humanidades Digitales en junio 2011. La RedHD se consolidó a partir de cuatro talleres de trabajo en donde discutimos , entre otros, asuntos relacionados con reconocimiento, financiamiento, derechos de autor, promoción, capacitación de recursos humanos, infraestructura, aislamiento. Antonio Zampolli Prize | ADHO The Antonio Zampolli Prize is an award of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations (ADHO). It is named in honour of the late Professor Antonio Zampolli (1937-2003), who was one of the founding members of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) in 1973, and ALLC President 1983-2003. He was a major figure in the development of literary and linguistic computing from the 1960s, and an enthusiastic supporter of the joint international conferences of ALLC and the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH), which were initiated in 1989. He was also a prime mover in the Text Encoding Initiative, both in the initial 11-year project, and in the establishment of the TEI Consortium. The Zampolli award is given to recognise a single outstanding output in the digital humanities by any scholar or scholars at any stage in their career. DHSI | Digital Humanities Summer Institute The Digital Humanities Summer Institute provides an ideal environment for discussing and learning about new computing technologies and how they are influencing teaching, research, dissemination, creation, and preservation in different disciplines, via a community-based approach. Humanities Intensive Learning & Teaching Manuscripts and Machines My name is Michael Widner. I am in the employ of the Stanford University Libraries, where I work as the Academic Technology Specialist for the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages (DLCL). My role is to work with faculty and their research assistants as a consultant, collaborator, and innovator in DLCL-based digital humanities and instructional technology projects. CDRH | Center for Digital Research in the Humanities The Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) advances interdisciplinary, collaborative research, and offers forums, workshops and research fellowships for faculty and students in the area of digital scholarship. This is a life-changing experience for students and faculty alike, leading to new ways of thinking about the humanities. Through the CDRH, faculty and students create research sites and tools that push our understanding of history, literatures, languages, and culture. Digital History Project Digital history is an emerging and rapidly changing academic field. The purpose of the Digital History Project is to educate scholars and the public about the state of the discipline. Brian L. Pytlik Zillig Brian Pytlik Zillig is Professor and Digital Initiatives Librarian at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. Stephen Ramsay | About Stephen Ramsay is Susan J. Rosowski Associate University Professor of English at the University of Nebraska and a Fellow at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. He splits his time between pontificating about digital humanities, teaching humanities majors to program, and designing and building text technologies for humanist scholars. Douglas Seefeldt - Ball State University Douglas Seefeldt is Assistant Professor and Emerging Media Fellow at Ball State University. His research focuses on the intersections of history and memory in the 19th and 20th-century American West. Seefeldt is Senior Digital Editor of The Papers of William F. Cody at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, WY, and Co-Director of the William F. Cody Archive, as well as a co-editor of the Digital History Project. About the CDRH | William G. Thomas, III William G. Thomas III teaches U.S. history and specializes in Civil War, the U.S. South, Slavery, and in Digital History/Digital Humanities. He is currently the Chair of the Department of History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and has served as the John and Catherine Angle Professor in the Humanities at Nebraska since 2005. He earned his B.A. in History at Trinity College in Connecticut and his M.A. and Ph.D. in History at the University of Virginia. University of Victoria - Humanities - About Us - Digital Humanities In Digital Humanities, research and teaching are conducted on texts that are analyzed using electronic tools. Often, these tools have to be created first. Digital Humanists may study old texts (for example, by analysing different versions of medieval manuscripts) or new ones (for example, by second language learners creating wikis). They may study visual texts (for example, by creating enhanced maps). Among other things, DH research looks at how these enhanced digital texts unveil mysteries of the past, how the experience of interacting with these texts changes learning and teaching, how scholarship takes a new direction and in what way this influences our society.Virginia DH (Scholar’s Lab, VCDH) The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities IATH is a research unit of the University of Virginia established by the University of Virginia in 1992. Our goal is to explore and develop information technology as a tool for scholarly humanities research. To that end, we provide our Fellows with consulting, technical support, applications development, and networked publishing facilities. We also cultivate partnerships and participate in humanities computing initiatives with libraries, publishers, information technology companies, scholarly organizations, and other groups residing at the intersection of computers and cultural heritage. The research projects, essays, and documentation presented here are the products of a unique collaboration between humanities and computer science research faculty, computer professionals, student assistants and project managers, and library faculty and staff. The Virginia Center for Digital History at The University of Virginia The Virginia Center for Digital History (VCDH) is an independent center within the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia. VCDH was founded in 1998 by Edward L. Ayers and William G. Thomas, III. At its founding VCDH was charged with creating new forms of historical scholarship and with performing public service and outreach. In these roles VCDH is home to a number of digital projects spanning the range of American history, from the Jamestown settlement, to the Civil War, to the Civil Rights movement. These projects are built to be used by K-12 educators, and the general public, as well as by college students, and scholars. Scholars' Lab At the University of Virginia Library Scholars’ Lab, advanced students and researchers across the disciplines partner on digital projects and benefit from expert consultation and teaching. Our highly-trained faculty and staff focus on the digital humanities, geospatial information, and scholarly making and building at the intersection of the digital and physical worlds. The SLab hosts workshops and a popular lecture series, and supports emerging scholar-practitioners through Graduate Fellowships in Digital Humanities and UVa’s innovative Praxis Program. What the Failed Removal of UVA President Teresa Sullivan Means for Higher Education - NYTimes.com #19 - co,Co,CougH by Accky on SoundCloud The First Draft theme song. (CC BY-SA 3.0) Thanks for listening.

Topics: Jason's experiences working on the Geography of the Post project, D3.js, and the challenges of designing, and critically engaging with, interactive scholarly works.    Subscribe to our newsletter Show Notes Geography of the Post - Spatial History Project From the end of the Civil War until the close of the nineteenth century, the United States Postal System grew into a vast communications network. The Post was one of the century's largest spatial systems, with more than 75,000 offices connecting communities scattered across the continent. Geography of the Post maps this behemoth network on its western periphery: where it spread, how it operated, and its role in shaping the space and place of the region. Cameron Blevins My name is Cameron Blevins and I’m a PhD candidate at Stanford University studying U.S. history and digital methodology. Choropleth map - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia A choropleth map from Greek ("area/region") + ("multitude") is a thematic map in which areas are shaded or patterned in proportion to the measurement of the statistical variable being displayed on the map, such as population density or per-capita income. Business Intelligence and Analytics | Tableau Software On a mission to help people see and understand data. D3.js - Data-Driven Documents D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG and CSS. D3’s emphasis on web standards gives you the full capabilities of modern browsers without tying yourself to a proprietary framework, combining powerful visualization components and a data-driven approach to DOM manipulation. The County Problem in the West | Historying Historians of the American West have a county problem. It’s primarily one of geographic size: counties in the West are really, really big. A “List of the Largest Counties in the United States” might as well be titled “Counties in the Western United States (and a few others)” – you have to go all the way to #30 before you find one that falls east of the 100th meridian. The problem this poses to historians is that a lot of historical data was captured at a county level, including the U.S. Census. College, Inc. | FRONTLINE | PBS FRONTLINE also finds that the regulators that oversee university accreditation are looking closer at the for-profits and, in some cases, threatening to withdraw the required accreditation that keeps them eligible for federal student loans. "We've elevated the scrutiny tremendously," says Dr. Sylvia Manning, president of the Higher Learning Commission, which accredits many post-secondary institutions. "It is really inappropriate for accreditation to be purchased the way a taxi license can be purchased. ...When we see any problematic institution being acquired and being changed we put it on a short leash." Great Pyramid of Giza - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Great Pyramid of Giza (also known as the Pyramid of Khufu or the Pyramid of Cheops) is the oldest and largest of the three pyramids in the Giza Necropolis bordering what is now El Giza, Egypt. It is the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and the only one to remain largely intact. Charles Joseph Minard - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Charles Minard's flow map of Napoleon's March Pie chart - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The earliest known pie chart is generally credited to William Playfair's Statistical Breviary of 1801, in which two such graphs are used. PowerPoint Is Evil - Wired 11.09 Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to make us beautiful but didn't. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: It induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time, and degraded the quality and credibility of communication. These side effects would rightly lead to a worldwide product recall. ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World reconstructs the time cost and financial expense associated with a wide range of different types of travel in antiquity. The model is based on a simplified version of the giant network of cities, roads, rivers and sea lanes that framed movement across the Roman Empire. It broadly reflects conditions around 200 CE but also covers a few sites and roads created in late antiquity. List of Superfund sites in California - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia This is a list of Superfund sites in California designated under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) environmental law. The CERCLA federal law of 1980 authorized the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to create a list of polluted locations requiring a long-term response to clean up hazardous material contaminations. List of Colleges and Universities that have Closed, Merged, or Changed their Names The intent of this exercise is to offer a place that individuals can consult to see if an institution is now closed or if the name has been changed due to a merger or for other reasons. #19 - co,Co,CougH by Accky on SoundCloud The First Draft theme song. (CC BY-SA 3.0) Bonus Links Who Does Your College Think Its Peers Are? - The Chronicle of Higher Education Colleges selected by institutions as peers show the power players in the world of higher education. Those choices also reveal sometimes surprising connections. xkcd: Sandwich A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. Thanks for listening.

Elijah Meeks, Jason Heppler, and Paul Zenke are joined by special guest Scott Weingart to discuss data science, Facebook's emotional contagion study, natural language processing, research ethics, computational social science, and social media literacy.  Subscribe to our newsletter Show Notes i am – the scottbot irregular Scott Weingart's website. @scottbot on Twitter Historian of science, juggler, digital humanist, information scientist, OA advocate. irregular blogger. all views in tweets are somebody else's, I swear. Data science - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Data science is the study of the generalizable extraction of knowledge from data, yet the key word is science. It incorporates varying elements and builds on techniques and theories from many fields, including signal processing, mathematics, probability models, machine learning, statistical learning, computer programming, data engineering, pattern recognition and learning, visualization, uncertainty modeling, data warehousing, and high performance computing with the goal of extracting meaning from data and creating data products. Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks We show, via a massive (N = 689,003) experiment on Facebook, that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. We provide experimental evidence that emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people (exposure to a friend expressing an emotion is sufficient), and in the complete absence of nonverbal cues. Facebook’s Explanation: We Wanted to Make Sure You Weren’t Turned Off By Facebook — The Brooks Review Meaning Facebook caused users to feel better or worse at random, but on purpose. So instead of allowing for natural balance (seeing both good and bad posts) this “experiment” limited some peoples feeds to showing more good, or more bad. That actually does have a f***ing impact on people. Jaron Lanier on Lack of Transparency in Facebook Study - NYTimes.com It is unimaginable that a pharmaceutical firm would be allowed to randomly, secretly sneak an experimental drug, no matter how mild, into the drinks of hundreds of thousands of people, just to see what happens, without ever telling those people. Imagine a pharmaceutical researcher saying, “I was only looking at a narrow research question, so I don’t know if my drug harmed anyone, and I haven’t bothered to find out.” Unfortunately, this seems to be an acceptable attitude when it comes to experimenting with people over social networks. It needs to change. Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks Emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. Emotional contagion is well established in laboratory experiments, with people transferring positive and negative emotions to others. Data from a large real-world social network, collected over a 20-y period suggests that longer-lasting moods (e.g., depression, happiness) can be transferred through networks [Fowler JH, Christakis NA (2008) BMJ 337:a2338], although the results are controversial. In an experiment with people who use Facebook, we test whether emotional contagion occurs outside of in-person interaction between individuals by reducing the amount of emotional content in the News Feed. When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks. This work also suggests that, in contrast to prevailing assumptions, in-person interaction and nonverbal cues are not strictly necessary for emotional contagion, and that the observation of others’ positive experiences constitutes a positive experience for people. The Laboratorium : The Facebook Emotional Manipulation Study: Sources This post rolls up all of the major primary sources for the Facebook emotional manipulation study, along with selected news and commentary. What does the Facebook experiment teach us? — The Message — Medium I’m glad this study has prompted an intense debate among scholars and the public, but I fear it’s turned into a simplistic attack on Facebook over this particular study, rather than a nuanced debate over how we create meaningful ethical oversight in research and practice. The lines between research and practice are always blurred and information companies like Facebook make this increasingly salient. No one benefits by drawing lines in the sand. We need to address the problem more holistically. And, in the meantime, we need to hold companies accountable for how they manipulate people across the board, regardless of whether or not it’s couched as research. If we focus too much on this study, we’ll lose track of the broader issues at stake. The simple reason Facebook’s mood study creeps us out — Wordyard So the true creep-out in Facebook’s study isn’t about research ethics or Skinner boxes; it’s about ownership of space. The “emotional contagion” study dramatically rips off a curtain that separated Facebook’s public face and its backstage. Publicly, Facebook woos us with a vision of a social information stream shaped by our individual needs and networks; backstage, the folks behind the curtain are pulling levers to find more efficient ways to hijack our attention and sell us stuff. Everything You Need to Know About Facebook’s Controversial Emotion Experiment | Opinion | WIRED The closest any of us who might have participated in Facebook’s huge social engineering study came to actually consenting to participate was signing up for the service. Facebook’s Data Use Policy warns users that Facebook “may use the information we receive about you…for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.” This has led to charges that the study violated laws designed to protect human research subjects. But it turns out that those laws don’t apply to the study, and even if they did, it could have been approved, perhaps with some tweaks. Why this is the case requires a bit of explanation. Frame Clashes, or: Why the Facebook Emotion Experiment Stirs Such Mixed Emotion | Tumbling Conduct This split reaction I think shows a clash of different ways the study is framed, which points to the larger issue how we should frame and regulate private entities engaging in scientific research – and even more fundamentally, how to frame and regulate digital entrants to existing social fields. But before we get to that, for the non-academics, let’s quickly review the facts what exactly makes academics irate about the study. Natural language processing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Natural language processing (NLP) is a field of computer science, artificial intelligence, and linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages. As such, NLP is related to the area of human–computer interaction. @TedUnderwood on Twitter  Using machine learning to understand 19th-century print culture at the U of Illinois. Day job as a romanticist. Author of Why Literary Periods Mattered. The Digital Humanists’ (Lack of) Response to the Surveillance State | Manuscripts and Machines A critically-engaged, ethical digital humanities demands that practitioners teach, discuss, and research those areas of life where they are most well-positioned to have an impact, to explain things in new ways, or to provide resources for students, colleagues, and the public so that they can understand and respond to the US government's actions, which I would argue are both misguided and paranoid. While I see my peers doing fascinating work on literature, maps, data visualization, and the entire vibrant range of projects in which we are collectively engaged, I worry that too few have heard the implicit call to put their expertise in service of educating others about the extent of the NSA and other agency's activities and—most importantly—about the history, meaning, and possible futures of these oppressive and chilling activities. Institutional review board - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia An institutional review board (IRB), also known as an independent ethics committee or ethical review board, is a committee that has been formally designated to approve, monitor, and review biomedical and behavioral research involving humans. They often conduct some form of risk-benefit analysis in an attempt to determine whether or not research should be done.[1] The number one priority of IRBs is to protect human subjects from physical or psychological harm. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Department of Health and Human Services (specifically Office for Human Research Protections) regulations have empowered IRBs to approve, require modifications in planned research prior to approval, or disapprove research. IRBs are responsible for critical oversight functions for research conducted on human subjects that are "scientific," "ethical," and "regulatory." Facebook Buys Oculus Rift For $2 Billion Facebook has just announced that it's buying Oculus Rift for $2 billion. Seriously. "Mobile is the platform of today, and now we're also getting ready for the platforms of tomorrow," Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg says. "Oculus has the chance to create the most social platform ever, and change the way we work, play and communicate." Citation analysis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Citation analysis is the examination of the frequency, patterns, and graphs of citations in articles and books.[1][2] It uses citations in scholarly works to establish links to other works or other researchers.[3] Citation analysis is one of the most widely used methods of bibliometrics. For example, bibliographic coupling and co-citation are association measures based on citation analysis (shared citations or shared references). On being a thing | Sarah Kendzior I do not like to write about myself, and I do not like to write about my pain. Today Jacobin put me in a position where I had no choice but to do that. Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age by Douglas Rushkoff The real question is, do we direct technology, or do we let ourselves be directed by it and those who have mastered it? “Choose the former,” writes Rushkoff, “and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make.” OkTrends OkTrends is original research and insights from OkCupid. We've compiled our observations and statistics from hundreds of millions of OkCupid user interactions, all to explore the data side of the online world. Social Networks Can Affect on Voter Turnout, Study Finds - NYTimes.com A study of millions of Facebook users on Election Day 2010 has found that online social networks can have a measurable if limited effect on voter turnout. The Stone and the Shell | Historical questions raised by a quantitative approach to language Ted Underwood's website. Facebook Mood Manipulator Why should Zuckerberg get to decide how you feel? Take back control. Leverage Facebook's own research to manipulate your emotions on your terms. Try the FB Mood Manipulator now! Facebook these days A comic. Explore Teach and learn digital skills and web literacy. The pages in this section are full of fun things to discover, make and teach. Our global community is continually adding new activities, lesson plans and tutorials from across the web that make it easy to learn by doing. Anyone can use these educational resources—they’re free, open and backed by Mozilla’s non-profit mission. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences PNAS is one of the world's most-cited multidisciplinary scientific serials. Since its establishment in 1914, it continues to publish cutting-edge research reports, commentaries, reviews, perspectives, colloquium papers, and actions of the Academy. OK so. A lot of people have asked me about my... - Adam D. I. Kramer I can understand why some people have concerns about it, and my coauthors and I are very sorry for the way the paper described the research and any anxiety it caused. In hindsight, the research benefits of the paper may not have justified all of this anxiety. Impact factor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The impact factor (IF) of an academic journal is a measure reflecting the average number of citations to recent articles published in the journal. Sarah Kendzior (sarahkendzior) on Twitter Writer on politics, economy, media. Columnist for @AJEnglish. Researcher on Central Asia. Recovering academic Facebook, Statement of Rights and Responsibilities This Statement of Rights and Responsibilities ("Statement," "Terms," or "SRR") derives from the Facebook Principles, and is our terms of service that governs our relationship with users and others who interact with Facebook. By using or accessing Facebook, you agree to this Statement, as updated from time to time in accordance with Section 14 below. Additionally, you will find resources at the end of this document that help you understand how Facebook works. ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World reconstructs the time cost and financial expense associated with a wide range of different types of travel in antiquity. The model is based on a simplified version of the giant network of cities, roads, rivers and sea lanes that framed movement across the Roman Empire. It broadly reflects conditions around 200 CE but also covers a few sites and roads created in late antiquity. Milgram experiment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia  The Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram. They measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Milgram first described his research in 1963 in an article published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. Data mining - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Data mining, an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science, is the computational process of discovering patterns in large data sets involving methods at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics, and database systems. Jon Kleinberg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jon Michael Kleinberg (born October 1971) is an American computer scientist and the Tisch University Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University known for his work in algorithms and networks. Unobtrusive research - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Unobtrusive research (or unobtrusive measures) is a method of data collection used primarily in the social sciences. The term "unobtrusive measures" was first coined by Webb, Campbell, Schwartz, & Sechrest in a 1966 book titled Unobtrusive Measures: nonreactive research in the social sciences. #19 - co,Co,CougH by Accky on SoundCloud The First Draft theme song. (CC BY-SA 3.0) Thanks for listening.

Elijah Meeks, Jason Heppler, and Paul Zenke discuss disruption, progress, and the genius myth. Subscribe via iTunes | Subscribe to our newsletter   Show Notes Urban Dictionary: Spacist An individual that discriminates, or holds an unfounded bias against sci-fi movies, books, or fans. Typically anything space-ship, robot, or future related is the target of ridicul or strange looks from Spacists. Mike Bostock Personal website. Mike Bostock (mbostock) on Twitter Purveyor of fine misinformations. Graphics Editor @nytgraphics. Creator of #d3js. Leaked NYT Innovation Report 2014 The internal report from The Times’s new ideas task force headed by Arthur Gregg Sulzberger. The leaked New York Times innovation report is one of the key documents of this media age » Nieman Journalism Lab The leaked New York Times innovation report is one of the key documents of this media age. Disruptive innovation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia A disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually disrupts an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technology. Twitter / Elijah_Meeks: Tonight at "What is … Elijah Meek’s DH Venn diagram. Jill Lepore: What the Theory of “Disruptive Innovation” Gets Wrong : The New Yorker Ever since “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” everyone is either disrupting or being disrupted. The emperor of “disruption theory” is wearing no clothes - Salon.com The New Yorker finds fault with Clayton Christensen, guru of Silicon Valley. The tech moguls are not pleased. Clayton Christensen Responds to New Yorker Takedown of ‘Disruptive Innovation’ - Businessweek Disruption, as Lepore notes, has since become an all-purpose rallying cry, not only in Silicon Valley—though especially there—but in boardrooms everywhere. Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek - Multimedia Feature - NYTimes.com Each snowflake added to the depth, and each snowflake added to the weight. It might take a million snowflakes for a skier to notice the difference. It might take just one for a mountain to move. 2013: The Year in Interactive Storytelling - NYTimes.com From a ship in the South China Sea to the cost of health care in the United States, the range of subjects here is broad, but the common thread is the form of storytelling — an integration of text, video, photography and graphics. Brogrammer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Brogrammer, etymologically a neologism formed as a portmanteau of the fraternity-derived “bro” and “programmer”, is the identifier of a subculture that self-describes as aiming to make programmers more sociable. A simpler definition is that a brogrammer is a macho programmer. Progress (history) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia In historiography and the philosophy of history, progress (from Latin progressus, “an advance”) is the idea that the world can become increasingly better in terms of science, technology, modernization, liberty, democracy, quality of life, etc. Remaking the University: Christensen’s Disruptive Innovation after the Lepore Critique The main point I will make here is that we can’t overcome disruptive innovation unless we realize that it isn’t a theory of innovation but a theory of governance. Well, That About Wraps it up for Clayton Christensen | The Scholarly Kitchen But what about Ford, Jobs, Musk, Bezos? What about ‘em? Sure they are geniuses. Sure their ideas were or are miles ahead of the competition – light years out in fact. Sure they saw clearly what the rest of us can only dimly comprehend, if at all. So what. Here’s the truth. You never hear about the genius who didn’t make it big, who blew all their capital on an equally great idea that never went mainstream and reconstructed the economic fabric of their worlds. Somebody gets lucky. Somebody always gets lucky. The overwhelming majority, well, they are grist to the mill. Alanis Morissette - Ironic (Video) - YouTube It’s like rain on your wedding day. Irony - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Irony (from Ancient Greek ε?ρωνε?α (eir?neía), meaning “dissimulation, feigned ignorance”[1]), in its broadest sense, is a rhetorical device, literary technique, or event characterized by an incongruity, or contrast, between what the expectations of a situation are and what is really the case, with a third element, that defines that what is really the case is ironic because of the situation that led to it. Historical thinking - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Historical thinking is defined by many education resources as a set of reasoning skills that students of history should learn as a result of studying history. Paleofuture - Paleofuture A blog by Matt Novak. Interview with Matt Novak - YouTube Paul’s 2013 interview with Matt. 50 Years of the Jetsons: Why The Show Still Matters | History | Smithsonian Five decades after its debut, not a day goes by that someone isn’t using “The Jetsons” as a way to talk about the fantastic technological advancements we’re seeing today. Atlas Shrugged - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The book depicts a dystopian, post-apocalyptic United States, wherein many of society’s most prominent and successful industrialists abandon their fortunes and the nation itself, in response to aggressive new regulations, whereupon most vital industries collapse. Our Mission | | Academic Technology Specialists Stanford’s Academic Technology Specialists work in alignment with the University’s commitment to excellence in education and its general vision to improve teaching, learning, and research by implementing and developing new technologies. Academic Technology Specialists collaborate with faculty and staff in departments or programs and provide leadership in innovative uses of information technology for education and research. Separatism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Separatism is the advocacy of a state of cultural, ethnic, tribal, religious, racial, governmental or gender separation from the larger group. Danielle Bunten Berry - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Danielle Bunten Berry (February 19, 1949 – July 3, 1998), born Daniel Paul Bunten, and also known as Dan Bunten, was an American game designer and programmer, known for the 1983 game M.U.L.E. (one of the first influential multiplayer games), and 1984’s The Seven Cities of Gold. Seven Cities of Gold (myth) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Seven Cities of Gold is a myth that led to several expeditions by adventurers and conquistadors in the 16th century. It is also featured in several works of popular culture. M.U.L.E. - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia M.U.L.E. is a seminal multiplayer video game by Ozark Softscape. It was published in 1983 by Electronic Arts. It was originally written for the Atari 400/800 and was later ported to the Commodore 64, the Nintendo Entertainment System, and the IBM PCjr[2] Japanese versions also exist for the PC–8801,[3] the Sharp X1,[4] and MSX 2 computers.[5] While it plays like a strategy game, it incorporates aspects that simulate economics. Educational entertainment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Educational entertainment (also referred to by the portmanteau edutainment[1]) is any content that is designed to educate as well as to entertain. There also exists content that is primarily educational but has incidental entertainment value, as does content that is mostly entertaining but have some educational value. The Oregon Trail (video game) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Oregon Trail is a computer game originally developed by Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger in 1971 and produced by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) in 1974. The original game was designed to teach school children about the realities of 19th century pioneer life on the Oregon Trail. Come September | Arundhati Roy Transcription of Arundhati Roy reading and Ms. Roy and Howard Zinn in conversation, Lensic Performing Arts Center Santa Fe, New Mexico, 18 September 2002 Douglas Engelbart - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Douglas Carl Engelbart (January 30, 1925 – July 2, 2013) was an American engineer and inventor, and an early computer and Internet pioneer. Vannevar Bush - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Vannevar Bush (/væ?ni?v?r/ van-nee-var; March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, whose most important contribution was as head of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) during World War II, through which almost all wartime military R&D was carried out, including initiation and early administration of the Manhattan Project. Memex - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The memex (a portmanteau of “memory” and “index”[1] or “memory” and “extender”) is the name of the hypothetical proto-hypertext system that Vannevar Bush described in his 1945 The Atlantic Monthly article “As We May Think” (AWMT). #19 - co,Co,CougH by Accky on SoundCloud The First Draft theme song. (CC BY-SA 3.0) Thanks for listening.

Elijah Meeks, Jason Heppler, and Paul Zenke discuss the new Starbucks College Achievement Plan, and the popular text-based game A Dark Room. Subscribe via iTunes Show Notes College Plan | Starbucks Coffee Company All benefits–eligible partners who are based in the U.S., working in our support centers, plants or at any of our company-operated stores (including Teavana, La Boulange, Evolution Fresh and Seattle’s Best Coffee stores), and do not yet have a bachelor’s degree can apply. Partners admitted as a junior or senior, according to ASU’s admission requirements, will earn full tuition reimbursement for each year of coursework they complete toward a bachelor’s degree. Freshmen and sophomores will receive a partial scholarship and need-based financial aid toward the foundational work of completing their degree. Partners will have no commitment to remain at Starbucks past graduation. Starbucks baristudents should beware the green mermaid bearing gifts | Michelle Chen | Comment is free | theguardian.com The coffee chain wants to help its baristas get a college education. But at what price? Lattes and Letters | tressiemc The gist of it all seems to be that ASU gets a captured student-consumer audience in exchange for tuition discounting at its for-profit online division. Starbucks gets to constrain educational choices of employees that choose to use their benefit to a provider that will never conflict with an employee’s work schedule. It’s prognostication, of course, but it seems that lower income employees who qualify for the most need-based student aid will pay less for the online degree program than will those who qualify for less. Starbucks Will Send Thousands of Employees to Arizona State for Degrees - Administration - The Chronicle of Higher Education Starbucks is teaming up with Arizona State University on an exclusive program that could send thousands of its baristas, store managers, and other employees to ASU Online for their undergraduate degrees, with the coffee company picking up about three-quarters of the tuition tab. In Deal With Starbucks, Arizona State U. Kicks In Substantial Aid - Administration - The Chronicle of Higher Education Mr. Crow said ASU had decided to pursue the arrangement to prove that this kind of financial model, with a corporation covering some of the costs at the tail end, could improve college completion. While he acknowledged that the contribution from Starbucks was small compared with ASU’s, he said, “They’re putting up the incentive to finish, which is not trivial.” From Public Good to Private Good: How Higher Education Got to a Tipping Point - Government - The Chronicle of Higher Education Once embraced as a collective good, a public higher education is increasingly viewed—and paid for—as a private one. Dwarf Fortress - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress, usually shortened to Dwarf Fortress, is a video game set in a low fantasy universe with part roguelike and city-building elements. The game has what is commonly referred to as “two-and-a-half” game modes: Fortress mode, in which the player takes control of a group of dwarves and attempts to construct a successful and wealthy subterranean fortress in a mountain; Adventurer mode, which places the player in the shoes of an adventurer as they wander the world and do battle with various creatures; and Legends mode, which allows the player to view every event that occurred in that world’s entire history. xkcd: Dwarf Fortress The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress - NYTimes.com Dwarf Fortress is barely a blip on the mainstream radar, but it’s an object of intense cult adoration. Its various versions have been downloaded in the neighborhood of a million times, although the number of players who have persisted past an initial attempt is doubtless much smaller. As with popular simulation games like the Sims series, in which players control households, or the Facebook fad FarmVille, where they tend crops, players in Dwarf Fortress are responsible for the cultivation and management of a virtual ecosystem — in this case, a colony of dwarves trying to build a thriving fortress in a randomly generated world. Unlike those games, though, Dwarf Fortress unfolds as a series of staggeringly elaborate challenges and devastating setbacks that lead, no matter how well one plays, to eventual ruin. The goal, in the game’s main mode, is to build as much and as imaginatively as possible before some calamity — stampeding elephants, famine, vampire dwarves — wipes you out for good. A Dark Room Play. A Dark Room: The Best-Selling Game That No One Can Explain : The New Yorker The improbable best-seller is a variation on primordial text adventures like Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork, which helped widen the scope of video games in the nineteen-seventies. Like its forerunners, the game uses words to describe everything that’s happening, transforming language into a landscape that’s only ever visible in isolated pieces that the player must decipher. Townsend says, “I originally wrote A Dark Room to tell its story entirely through environmental cues—no exposition, no dialogue, nothing.” Notch Play. Frog Fractions | Twinbeard Play. Frog Fractions - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Frog Fractions is a 2012 browser game developed by Twinbeard Studios, a company composed primarily of founder Jim Crawford. The game, released on October 25, 2012, has been described as a spoof of the edutainment game genre. Video games as an art form - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The concept of video games as a form of art is a controversial topic within the entertainment industry. Though video games have been afforded legal protection as creative works by the Supreme Court of the United States, the philosophical concept that video games are works of art remains in question, even when considering the contribution of creative elements such as graphics, storytelling and music. Even art games, games purposely designed to be a work of creative expression, have been challenged as works of art by some critics. Video games can never be art | Roger Ebert’s Journal | Roger Ebert Having once made the statement above, I have declined all opportunities to enlarge upon it or defend it. That seemed to be a fool’s errand, especially given the volume of messages I receive urging me to play this game or that and recant the error of my ways. Nevertheless, I remain convinced that in principle, video games cannot be art. Michael Zenke (Zonk) on Twitter I write for videogames. Currently working on @TESOnline. The Myth of Sisyphus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia In the essay, Albert Camus introduces his philosophy of the absurd: man’s futile search for meaning, unity, and clarity in the face of an unintelligible world devoid of God and eternal truths or values. Albert Camus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Albert Camus was a French Nobel Prize winning author, journalist, and philosopher. His views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism. He wrote in his essay “The Rebel” that his whole life was devoted to opposing the philosophy of nihilism while still delving deeply into individual and sexual freedom. French philosophy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia French philosophy, here taken to mean philosophy in the French language, has been extremely diverse and has influenced Western philosophy as a whole for centuries, from the medieval scholasticism of Peter Abelard, through the founding of modern philosophy by René Descartes, to 20th century existentialism, phenomenology and structuralism. Drone music - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Drone music is a minimalist musical style that emphasizes the use of sustained or repeated sounds, notes, or tone-clusters – called drones. It is typically characterized by lengthy audio programs with relatively slight harmonic variations throughout each piece compared to other musics. La Monte Young, one of its 1960s originators, defined it in 2000 as “the sustained tone branch of minimalism”. Zork - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Zork is one of the earliest interactive fiction computer games, with roots drawn from the original genre game, Colossal Cave Adventure. Quest for Glory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Quest for Glory is a series of hybrid adventure/role-playing video games (and later Action/RPG for game 5) designed by Corey and Lori Ann Cole. The series combined humor, puzzle elements, themes and characters borrowed from various legends, puns, and memorable characters, creating a 5-part series of the Sierra stable. Twilight (series) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Twilight is a series of four vampire-themed fantasy romance novels by American author Stephenie Meyer. Grinding (video gaming) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Grinding is a term used in video gaming to describe the process of engaging in repetitive tasks during video games. The most common usage is in the context of MMORPGs like Realm of the Mad God, Tibia, or Lineage in which it is often necessary for a character to repeatedly kill AI-controlled monsters, using basically the same strategy over and over again to advance their character level to be able to access newer content. MUDs, generally sharing much of the same gameplay as MMORPGs, often feature grinding as well. Grinding may be required by some games to unlock additional features. Diablo III Official Game Site Play. Inside Cookie Clicker and the Idle Game Movement - IGN Over the course of 2013 a new type of super addictive, super dumb (and I mean that in the most affectionate way possible) browser game emerged and rapidly took the internet by storm. The genre is so new that it doesn’t even really have name, but some have taken to called them Idle Games. This is the label I’ll be using. Thanks for listening.