Digital Humanities Questions & Answers » Tag: meta

Digital Humanities Questions & Answers » Tag: meta - Recent Posts http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/tags/meta Digital Humanities Questions & Answers » Tag: meta - Recent Posts en-US Sun, 30 Dec 2018 17:59:28 +0000 http://bbpress.org/?v=1.0.2 <![CDATA[Search]]> q http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/search.php briancroxall on "What other types of questions can we be asking here?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-other-types-of-questions-can-we-be-asking-here#post-2029 Wed, 12 Jun 2013 14:15:20 +0000 briancroxall 2029@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ This is a fascinating question, Josh. I agree that we could expand the categories for posts on the site, although I don't know that it's feasible to go back through and re-tag a large quantity of posts that have already happened on the site. DH loves crowd-sourcing, but that seems a bit unwieldy. I'll agree with Bethany, however, on my belief that the site should remain steered by questions and the community's attempts to answer those questions. In this way, it seems a fitting service of the ACH for fostering and growing the community of people who work on the humanities using / with computers somehow. But there's no reason why an Alan Liu can't come along and ask a question to the effect of "whither cultural studies and digital humanities?" Or someone who has just read one of Steve Ramsay's pieces could ask, "Do I need to learn to code to be a digital humanist." What wouldn't seem appropriate—to me—would be for Alan or Steve to ask that question in a rhetorical way and then to proceed to answer it. A blog or a journal, in other words, this ain't. Patrick Murray-John on "What other types of questions can we be asking here?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-other-types-of-questions-can-we-be-asking-here#post-2028 Wed, 12 Jun 2013 14:11:16 +0000 Patrick Murray-John 2028@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ I see a virtue in keeping an emphasis here on exchanges that really can be Question and Answer, as opposed to the broader discussions that are happening in blogs, DHPoco, twitter, and elsewhere. The virtue of this site, as I see it, is the ability for newcomers to DH, or to a particular topic or tool in DH, to get a quick survey of the knowledge lurking in the DH community. It addresses an important issue in DH that has come up at many THATCamps, the tendency of assumptions about technical knowledge to exclude newcomers. Having used and moderated a variety of fora, I find that it is helpful to the community -- whatever community is involved -- to have distinct places to go for different kinds of questions. It makes it easier to respond to a question on Twitter, for example, to be able to say DH Q&A is a good place to ask a question like "Can you point me to projects that have made good use of R?", and DHPoco is a good place to ask more social- or theory- centered questions. Vika Zafrin on "What other types of questions can we be asking here?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-other-types-of-questions-can-we-be-asking-here#post-2027 Wed, 12 Jun 2013 13:24:46 +0000 Vika Zafrin 2027@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ Interesting question to think about. The kinds of discussions you're talking about, Josh (and Bethany), are pretty dear to my heart. I like food for thought. It's also nice to have a platform that attracts pragmatic content. This doesn't mean technical questions and answers only: the military/defense funding thread is a good example. I'd love to see more (broadly speaking) cultural DH discussion here, and I'd love for that discussion to be ruthlessly pragmatic. Common good as applied in cyberinfrastructure recommendations. Diversity, how to do it (not why we need it, which I think is pretty much settled). DH's relevance to coders in terms of actively understanding other humans. Humanities disciplines are all pragmatic at heart, but writing about them is often too esoteric. DHAnswers seems like a good venue to shift that (im)balance a little. Ethan Gruber on "What other types of questions can we be asking here?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-other-types-of-questions-can-we-be-asking-here#post-2026 Wed, 12 Jun 2013 00:49:00 +0000 Ethan Gruber 2026@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ To be honest, I will probably stop reading this forum if it becomes overrun with "cultural" questions. Bethany Nowviskie on "What other types of questions can we be asking here?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-other-types-of-questions-can-we-be-asking-here#post-2025 Tue, 11 Jun 2013 22:36:57 +0000 Bethany Nowviskie 2025@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ Hi, Josh -- these are great questions! I'm very interested to hear what others think, but I can also share some observations about DH Answers as one of its founders and moderators. I'd love to see more conversations like the ones you cite happening here. One of the reasons <a href="http://ach.org">ACH</a>, the <a href="http://scholarslab.org">Scholars' Lab</a>, and <a href="http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/">ProfHacker</a> developed the site a couple of years ago was to encourage deeper and more easily-followed and -discoverable responses to questions than we were seeing on Twitter. To be honest, the initial idea (after watching people try and fail to troubleshoot each other's code and software installations on Twitter and in blog comments) was a more tech-oriented forum (something similar to the then-nascent Stack Exchange, and not quite as geeky and offputting as pastebin-like gists on GitHub might seem, to people new to DH) -- but we very quickly discovered how much people wanted to use the site to ask broader questions and have deeper conversations, which was something we embraced. As you observe, the initial categories never got revised to encourage that explicitly. That's something that could be easily remedied, if people want to propose new ones and suggest posts that should be migrated over into them. Or we could do it in a more grassroots way, by encouraging people to re-tag older posts (now that there are enough of them!) to form new categories and ways of navigating from the ground up. We could then modify the front page to highlight those. Most of the more meta-conversations have wound up in the category on <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/forum/project-management">projects and professions</a>, but you can also find a bunch by searching for "<a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/search.php?search=theory&forum-id=0">theory</a>," and similar terms, and paging through the results. See, for instance, threads on <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/doing-dh-v-theorizing-dh">practice vs. theory</a>, <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/faircite-who-should-we-cite-in-collaborative-dh-projects">how to credit collaborators</a>, the <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/should-dh-matter-to-coders">relevance of DH</a> to tech culture, its <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/whats-the-difference-between-digital-humanities-and-new-media">relationship to media studies</a>, the <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-are-resources-that-address-the-idea-of-the-good-in-digital-humanities">common good</a>, <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/where-might-i-find-resources-and-literature-regarding-diversity-and-dh">diversity</a>, and <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/has-anybody-written-a-history-of-the-digital-humanities">its own history</a>. That was just from a quick search on one term -- and if you click through, you will certainly observe that the conversations never got as in-depth as they could and should! But the potential is there. My sense is that we got more of that type of question in the early days of the site than lately. It would be interesting to see if the community found value in bringing the more in-depth debates that have been happening elsewhere, mostly in blog comments, to this space -- and what changes that might bring. Speaking only for myself, I do, sincerely, hope that Q&A threads here will always begin with a genuine Q. That is, from the beginning, I imagined DH Answers as a place that could facilitate friendly offers of help (sharing of experiences and perspectives, as well as simple "answers"), and keep the grand-standing ("this is more of a comment than a question") to a minimum. But that's just my taste -- and I don't think it's at all incompatible with in-depth, meaningful discussion. For a number of reasons, the ACH caretakers of DH Answers (now, mainly Stéfan Sinclair, Jeremy Boggs, and me) have been exploring alternate platforms recently, more in the Stack Exchange line -- but this custom-hacked-together implementation of an open source discussion forum platform does have the advantage of encouraging longer responses (case in point! for better or worse!). What's the will of the community? This is everyone's space. We'd love to know where you all see it going. Josh on "What other types of questions can we be asking here?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-other-types-of-questions-can-we-be-asking-here#post-2024 Tue, 11 Jun 2013 21:03:05 +0000 Josh 2024@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ I would like to interrupt our regularly scheduled questioning here at DH Answers and get a little meta. DH Answers is a fantastic resource, but it tends to be very tool and tech centric, and I wonder it isn't time to find ways of facilitating other types of non-totally-unrelated discussion here. Recently, some really great discussions have been happening on Twitter and sites like <a href="http://dhpoco.org/">DH Poco</a> that have arisen in response to more social, political, and cultural questions, events, prompts, and provocations in relation to DH. I feel that some of these questions—of gender, labor, disciplinarity, and others—might be even more illuminating when embedded within other, more dominant, discourses, like those around available tools, technologies, and methodologies. I also think that, due to issues of scope and scale on Twitter and the epic-scrolling and searching that needs to happen to stay up-to-date on the latest of 150+ blog post comments, we might need to seek out a better mechanism for supporting these important discussions. I don't mean to say these discussions shouldn't be happening anywhere and everywhere—of course they should!—but I also think that the way DH Answers was originally set up makes folks less likely to bring these types of discussion here. (Or maybe it's something else entirely? Discuss!) For instance, a quick look at the categories one has to choose from when posting a question (this one is filed under "About DHAnswers" which may or may not makes sense) reveals how much we are privileging technical questions about tools and technologies, and while there's certainly nothing wrong with that (the tools and tech, not so much the privileging) it unfortunately, I'd argue, suggestively narrows the conversation considerably. "1 Year Ago" Matthew Kirschenbaum asked the DH Answers community, <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/should-dhers-accept-militarydefense-funding#post-1239">"Should DHers accept military/defense funding?"</a> which he tagged with, among other things, "ethics" (not a single "Popular Tag" explicitly deals with any of these "other" issues). It was also filed under the category "Project Management & DH Profession," which seems to be the catch-all for questions that don't fit strict the limitations of the tech-centric discourse. I think the question Matthew raises, due to everything from recent events (see: PRISM) to the history of humanists working in military research, makes this a very pertinent and important question worth exploring, especially in this particular digital space. And while before and after that post there have been several of a more political or ethical nature, there have not been many, and that seems, at the very least, worthy of concern and some discussion. So, LONG STORY SHORT, I'd like to see what others think about this by asking the following questions (along with all of those implicitly and explicitly raised above): (1) Can and should DH Answers be a place for social, cultural, political, etc. discussion (as it seems it at times has been)? (2) What types of categories can we add that would make folks more comfortable feeling such questions are welcome? (3) How can we continue to further integrate discussions happening in other venues—Twitter, DH Poco, personal blogs, MLA Commons, etc.—with DH Answers? Arno Bosse on "How can we improve the DHanswers site?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/how-can-we-improve-the-dhanswers-site/page/3#post-1296 Thu, 21 Jul 2011 08:50:49 +0000 Arno Bosse 1296@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ Replying to @Bethany Nowviskie's <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/how-can-we-improve-the-dhanswers-site/page/3#post-1283">post</a>: Aha, yes, I can see the green check mark on the left - I had missed this earlier, thanks (I take it the check mark I see renders a page as green but does not flag the question/topic itself with a checkmark? As in this thread?). I do follow the reasoning behind no best or closed answers. Conceptually, I fully agree. Just, I think I was coming more from a perspective where the presence of a check mark on the DH Answers homepage on just a handful of articles makes it "look" as if the others haven't been answered yet. This is reinforced a little bit (not much, because the link isn't immediately apparent) by the "Questions With No Answers" link at the bottom left under Find Answers. Another suggestion might be to remove the checkmark to the left of existing articles to avoid creating the impression that some haven't been answered (and not use this feature anymore in the future) but leave in place a means to mark some responses as "green" for exactly the same reasons you cite above. Alternatively, if you do eventually decide to move to a more complex system (DH Answers becomes a victim of its own untamed, untrammeled, runaway success :^) you might want to look at the new Atlassian Q&A site (<a href="https://answers.atlassian.com/" rel="nofollow">https://answers.atlassian.com/</a>) as one possible model. They're using an open-source product from <a href="http://www.osqa.net/" rel="nofollow">http://www.osqa.net/</a> It still looks too fidgety for my taste, but perhaps there's a way to turn off various bells & whistles as needed. elotroalex on "How can we improve the DHanswers site?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/how-can-we-improve-the-dhanswers-site/page/3#post-1289 Wed, 20 Jul 2011 19:37:51 +0000 elotroalex 1289@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ Count on me for Spanish. Bethany Nowviskie on "How can we improve the DHanswers site?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/how-can-we-improve-the-dhanswers-site/page/3#post-1283 Fri, 15 Jul 2011 21:30:33 +0000 Bethany Nowviskie 1283@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ Replying to @<a href='/profile/kintopp'>kintopp</a>'s <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/how-can-we-improve-the-dhanswers-site/page/3#post-1280">post</a>: Thanks for the great suggestion about adding multilingual "welcome" posts! I think we should really make this a priority -- and we'll probably need to call for volunteers to help out. On the question of "best answers" and closed-out versus "open" questions: DH Answers admin and the original poster of each question should have the ability to designate one or more answers in a thread as "best answers" by clicking a "best answer?" link with a little green check-mark next to each post. If you are not seeing this for questions you posed, please let us know! We actually decided that we don't want "best answers" in DH Answers to "close" our questions (which is one of the reasons we're using this discussion-forum platform over some other available choices). Many of the issues being discussed here will never have a single, correct answer -- but the green highlight is a useful indicator of quality content and a nice way for question askers to acknowledge when a particular answer really hits the mark! Arno Bosse on "How can we improve the DHanswers site?" http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/how-can-we-improve-the-dhanswers-site/page/3#post-1280 Thu, 14 Jul 2011 19:37:48 +0000 Arno Bosse 1280@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ I see that some replies to questions are marked in green as "best answer" but I can't see a way to do this myself for the questions I've posted. Have I overlooked something? I think the ability for questioners to "close out" a question (with or without a best answer) would be very useful. As it stands now, the ratio of open questions to closed questions is skewed heavily to towards the former, which I don't think properly reflects reality, and leaves a bad impression besides. Another, unrelated suggestion is to offer shorter versions of the sticky "So, what is this forum?" post in several languages to encourage people to pose questions or to reply in French, Italian, German or what have you.. alternatively, simply encourage people to do it anyway in the existing Q&A. I suspect many in the DH community in Europe or Asia have no difficulty reading English but might feel hesitant to respond in writing in a non-native language. Shane Landrum on "Who supports DH at your institution? An impromptu survey." http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/who-supports-dh-at-your-institution-an-impromptu-survey#post-1075 Thu, 24 Mar 2011 20:12:07 +0000 Shane Landrum 1075@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ Replying to @<a href='/profile/hopegreenberg'>hopegreenberg</a>'s <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/who-supports-dh-at-your-institution-an-impromptu-survey#post-953">post</a>: At my small research university, there's a combined library-and-technology-services organization, and someone in that department would be responsible for DH support for faculty. As a doctoral student here for... a while, it's never been precisely clear to me whether there's a single point of contact for DH-related questions. I sense that most of the DH-competent people are staff in the instructional technologies group, supporting things like WordPress blogs for courses. For my own research needs, I've ended up basically supporting myself and seeking advice outside my home institution. hopegreenberg on "Who supports DH at your institution? An impromptu survey." http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/who-supports-dh-at-your-institution-an-impromptu-survey#post-1072 Wed, 23 Mar 2011 19:14:37 +0000 hopegreenberg 1072@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ Thanks Michelle for continuing the questions and Bethany for those links which I had missed earlier. At the moment I'm trying to write up a "holistic approach to integrating DH into the undergraduate curriculum." (Actually, that title is almost longer than what I have written so far.) I'm envisioning this as two things: a list or series of increasingly sophisticated ways of using DH methods and technologies, combined with a description of an infrastructure of support. The series begins with what I consider simple IT literacy or pre-DH "consumption and organizing" activities like skilled online research techniques and bibliographic management skills. It continues into the realms reflected in many of the projects that we see being done in the DH world that seem so out of reach to many. The simple things can be built into a course with little help from others (ah yes, the old lone scholar/teacher image). More sophisticated projects need an infrastructure of support that includes: a) people with knowledge (of the tech, of the humanities, and of teaching); b) the tech infrastructure (tools, servers, programming support if needed, etc.); c) inspiration or learning opportunities (workshops, awareness of what's being done in the field); and, d) worker bees (ex; students who can do scanning and markup, etc.). We've applied for a small instructional incentive grant to help us design the model for use in two classes, then develop it from there. All very nebulous as yet but I hope to have something more concrete soon. Bethany Nowviskie on "Who supports DH at your institution? An impromptu survey." http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/who-supports-dh-at-your-institution-an-impromptu-survey#post-1069 Wed, 23 Mar 2011 17:47:44 +0000 Bethany Nowviskie 1069@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ Replying to @michellenevada@gmail.com's <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/who-supports-dh-at-your-institution-an-impromptu-survey#post-1068">post</a>: Hello, Michelle, and welcome to the forum! Without getting into the polemics of digital humanities (definitions, degrees of attention paid by various practitioners -- it's a big field! -- to the technical or interpretive side) or the question you raise of what constitutes a "digital humanities person" (which I think always generates more heat than light), let me refer you to a couple of threads on this site: <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-is-digital-humanities#post-289">What is digital humanities?</a> <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/how-do-we-introduce-undergraduates-to-the-digital-humanities#post-69">How do we introduce undergraduates to the digital humanities?</a> <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/new-to-the-life-of-digital-humanities-best-ways-to-start-getting-my-feet-wet#post-362">New to the life of digital humanities - best ways to start getting my feet wet?</a> and <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/whats-the-difference-between-digital-humanities-and-new-media">What's the difference between Digital Humanities and New Media?</a> The overall topic of this particular discussion thread is the landscape of local support for DH (writ large) at individual institutions -- but those supporting groups are almost invariably working with people who take a variety of approaches to the digital humanities -- so I am (as one of our volunteer moderators for the site) going to keep this query where it is, rather than move it to another thread. In ways, it focuses Hope Greenberg's original question nicely: not only "what are we doing?" but "for whom?" michellenevada@gmail.com on "Who supports DH at your institution? An impromptu survey." http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/who-supports-dh-at-your-institution-an-impromptu-survey#post-1068 Wed, 23 Mar 2011 17:27:22 +0000 michellenevada@gmail.com 1068@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ B"H A lot of digital humanities stuff, right now, is too heavy on the "digital" and not heavy enough on the "humanities." I think of myself as a techy humanities geek who teaches with a lot of technology (especially compared to my peers), but I am lost when I access these sites. I'm an English professor, not a computer programmer. Do I have to be both? Can I use easily accessible technology for the benefit of my students and still be considered a digital humanities person? I use Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress, InSite, Engrade, and even Second Life in my classroom, yet I am lost when I access a website like this. I feel between two worlds. I can only imagine what my less techy peers feel when they think they want to get involved in this movement! Is there room for me? Is there room for them? Jason Boyd on "Who supports DH at your institution? An impromptu survey." http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/who-supports-dh-at-your-institution-an-impromptu-survey#post-1028 Thu, 10 Mar 2011 01:48:49 +0000 Jason Boyd 1028@http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/ This is an issue that has been greatly exercising me at my institution. I formed the grass-roots Digital Humanities Collaboratory (<a href="http://digitalhumanitiestoronto.wordpress.com/)" rel="nofollow">http://digitalhumanitiestoronto.wordpress.com/)</a>, and recently DiSc, Digital Scholarship (a Drupal Commons site), to find who is doing DH or DScholarship at my institution. My philosophy has been: we should turn to and rely on each other if there's nothing else to rely on. Mobilize! And I will add to Patrick and Bethany: DH faculty hires without alt-ac and developer roles is very problematic, and shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what contributes to the success of DH projects.