Week 3/Feb 22: Let’s all get it done together

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What does what OR How to get things done OR Let’s all get it done together

As Sara notes, 37 Signals, Getting Real (2009) definitely operates in the discourse of start-up. The text is snappy and feels like a pitch. It certainly presents an image and tone for agile development. While I appreciate many of the strategic impulses (not tying yourself down to padded check ins, establishing a minimum version for the sake of getting things done and testing them, finding a common “enemy”, and making things in a spirit of passion not tedium), I find the flashy presentation a bit off-putting. The fact that they preemptively address this potential resistance in the caveats does not, in my mind, let them off the hook.  I think Sara is onto something when she raises the concern about what people this approach may or may not encourage. The in-and-out quick model is easier to support if you are more accustomed to fallback securities — it’s easier to fail from a place of privilege. I would also argue that letting the users have a say is a way of outsourcing focus-groups. The way statistics and feedback are built into tools is a personal pet peeve. I once received a promotional email that claimed “people need to hear what YOU think”…on clothes?  The way the burden of feedback is put on the user strikes me as a devious redistribution of labor. I am now responsible for improving the tools I use? I can’t just pick out my tool at the store and consider the transaction finished? The app after app after app culture with constantly evolving features promotes this “user-oriented” development that seems to displace a lot of assessment, much the way we are the product in the free tools we use, we are the developers in the tools we comment on.

In academic development, I feel less cynical about the shared responsibility of use and revision. Without the paranoia about who is profiting from my feedback (because education as profit seems to me universally worthwhile), I am more forgiving in academic loops. Miriam Posner’s digest of digital tools, How did they make that?, is an amazing resource. The question of what to learn to make the things you want is persistent in Digital Humanities. When I revisited Bamboo DiRT, I revisited my sense of possibility and subsequent panic. I have poked around DiRT many times and I am continually overwhelmed by the breadth of tools and the degrees of use and disrepair of certain projects. DiRT is looking much better than when I first went on a year and a half ago, and the Assignment-in-a-box demonstrates a reciprocal action of use and evaluation that might be dubbed agile development in 37Signals. Are these built-in measures which invest students in the outcomes of their tools part of what we were talking about in terms of dynamic teaching last semester? Or is just a productive way to get conscientious feedback?

I find that these catalogs can be less terrifying when you start to meet people at events like Media Res (1&2), last week’s NYCDH events, and the GC Digital Research Bootcamp (everyone should apply for June). The community in NYC is remarkably open and encouraging, and the GC is such a vibrant part of that. I’m really looking forward to hearing former ITP students  Sarah Litvin, Christina Shane-Simpson, and Pamela Thielman talk about their Independent study projects!

Response and motivating thought:

I would like to sound a rallying call for us to work together!

I think the working group evenings (Mondays (2/29) and (3/21) 6:30-8:30, (4/18, 2-4pm NOTE TIME CHANGE)) are going to be a really excellent way for us to share our learning and build our projects. I also figured I would bookmark the remaining Digital Fellows Office Hours:

Mondays in the Digital Scholarship Lab, Room 7414

  • February 22 (2:00): Michelle & Patrick Sweeney
  • February 29 (5:30): Mary Catherine & Ian
  • March 7 (2:00): Michelle & Jen
  • March 14 (5:30): Ian & Jeremy
  • March 21 (2:00): Patrick Sweeney & Keith
  • March 28 (5:30): Mary Catherine & Jeremy
  • April 4 (2:00): Jen & Keith
  • April 11 (5:30): Hannah & Jeremy
  • April 18 (2:00): Patrick Sweeney & Ian
  • April 25: Spring Break – No office hours
  • May 2 (5:30): Hannah & Jeff
  • May 9 (2:00): Michelle & Keith
  • May 16 (5:30): Hannah & Jeff

 

 

 

Stay lean, scale back…

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Since the late 2000s boom in Silicon Valley, self-help style mantras for start-ups have truly proliferated and seeped into business and popular culture. I am thinking about this scene in HBO’s Silicon Valley where it is proclaimed, satirically, that “Failure = Success.” And the “Move fast and break things” posters hanging up at the Facebook headquarters.

But if you can get past the catchy slogans, “Getting Real” does seem to offer us budding creators some important advice. I have worked for most of my career in educational organizations where long meetings and consensus building are part of the culture. We are probably less efficient than we could be, but when the goal is to build knowledge and supportive communities with diverse groups of people and constituencies — that approach makes sense. If the goal is to make a product, however, I see the wisdom in following some of the mantras about scaling back, staying lean, reducing the number of meetings, launching on time no matter what, and prioritizing.

At the same time, I wonder if any of the values implied by the advice in the Getting Real text contribute to the dismal statistics on diversity in the tech industry. In a recent episode of the Reply All podcast, the reporters interviewed Leslie Miley, who was the only Black engineer at Twitter for a number of years, as a platform for discussing the differences between how diverse and non-diverse teams operate in workplace settings. They talk about how many start-ups have low diversity stats because company heads make assumptions similar to those in the text about how communication should be free-flowing and teams should be lean — which leads them to hire people who share similar backgrounds and cultures to themselves. Research discussed in the podcast suggested that even if diverse teams take longer to build trust, they are consistently better at solving problems because they come at challenges from many different angles. I only read the assigned pages, but up to there, diverse thinking was not a consideration in the Getting Real text.

Of course, as we all know from the campus protests this year, and statistics and accounts from students and professors of color in higher education, academia struggles with inclusion and diversity as well — so its values don’t always correspond either… but I still wonder…

Provocation 1: As you begin brainstorming your project ideas, how do you reconcile the different / incompatible seeming cultures/values of education/humanities fields and the start-up world? What can/should educators and academics learn from start-up culture and vice versa?

Also —

The juxtaposition of the “Getting Real” text with the readings about specific projects and tools seemed very appropriate. On the one hand, “Getting Real” urges us to keep our ideas focused, and to deliver something limited in scope and simple, but powerful and functional. In browsing through all of the project examples (especially the 1989 feature and the Green Book mapping project), however, my mind started racing from idea to idea, and I felt a case of “scope creep” coming on.

Provocation 2: How, practically, can we keep our visions simple, especially in this exploratory stage? I feel like there’s something useful about a “sky’s the limit brainstorm” which then gets paired down. At this point in the game, if I think too small, I think I limit myself. As my writing teachers have said, it’s easier to cut than to add more stuff… How do we balance both kinds of thinking  — feasible and idealistic?

Intro and Project Idea (?)

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Hello!

My name is Sakina and I am now in my second year as a Doctoral student in the Urban Education program. I was initially interested in this certificate program/area of study because of an academic background in media studies and teaching experience in online education and education technology. It has taken me some time to articulate and think about where all this might be going, so I am not entirely sure what might be most suitable for me as a project. I am only now in the process of defining a dissertation topic, which is still in it’s most embryonic phase. I would ideally like the work I do in this class to dovetail with my thinking and research in my dissertation area. I’ve always been painfully-interdisciplinary in the least productive way possible, and I am now trying to be more cautious and strategic in the decisions I make about what to pursue and how that speaks to future academic/professional aspirations (and what those are!). In the interim, I am enjoying being exposed to more tools and ideas in this program, and hope to be able to refine something out of these opportunities moving forward.

My interests lie (broadly) at the intersection of education (especially higher education), pedagogy, media and information technologies, cultural studies, marxist and feminist frameworks of analysis, and post-colonial discourse. I hope that this will be a productive semester in figuring out where these things can speak to one another in a project in ITP and beyond.

 

Thinking through my project

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Hi, for my project I am thinking of a academic/professional hub for teaching residents, teachers in the induction phase of teacher education, and novice teachers. So often students in teacher education programs as well as new teachers in the classroom feel alone and overwhelmed. This hub will be a place where residents can read or post article, share lesson plans and content information. They can post job opportunities, blog about experiences and post job opportunities.
I originally started using Google + as a classroom hub and then expanded the community to include former students that were either still in Induction or novice teachers. I am thinking of perhaps using perhaps Commons in a Box but am open to suggestions for other platforms.

Project Idea

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Final Project Idea (Anders): For my final project, I would like to build an interactive website for my digital dissertation research using Scalar. My dissertation research in cultural anthropology examines the production of masculinity and the phenomenon of “seduction communities,” including dating coaches and their followers, who train each other in interpersonal skills and ‘charm’ to attract women. This website would act as an interactive online ‘museum’, and a public portal through which to present some digital data (as well as results of my dissertation research), and to connect my work with audiences beyond academia. In many cases, this digital data takes the form of pedagogical media produced by dating coaches and designed to inculcate particular understandings of self and other. Using Scalar (http://scalar.usc.edu/scalar/), this project will invite readers to navigate open-ended, inverted, and non-linear pathways through multimedia archives of data including textual, video, and audio-based media gathered over the course of my research. Specifically, the site would be designed to allow readers to explore connections among—and discover new relations within—ethnographic data (text, video, audio and photography) that will be annotated, tagged, indexed, and deposited in the website. Text-based captions can accompany the multimedia ‘objects’ to explain, contextualize, or critique the objects. By allowing users to create divergent pathways through the archived materials, interact with and comment on pages, as well as to connect and dialogue with other users, the site will hopefully create an online safe space for community building around progressive and inclusive gender identities.

Hello!

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Hello everyone! My name is Anders. I’m a PhD candidate in the anthropology program here at the GC, and I’ll be auditing the ITP Core 2 course this semester. My dissertation research examines masculinity and the phenomenon of “seduction communities,” communities of men including dating coaches and their followers who train each other in social skills to attract women.

Although my research is primarily ethnographic (involving participant observation at training seminars, community meetings, and bootcamps), I’ve become increasingly interested in the capabilities that digital research methods allow for gathering and analyzing data in other formats. I’ve been swimming around in the DH community at the GC for a couple of years now, and from a research perspective I’m specifically interested in natural language processing and network mapping; including things like text-mining and topic modeling the semantic contents of ebooks (of which there are hundreds and hundreds), and also mapping textual features and network relationships among users of anonymous online chatroom forums.

This digital interest has led me to become more interested in interactive technology and pedagogy, both because of the possibilities that technology has in and out of classroom settings and teaching relationships, and also because it relates to the kinds of concerns that my research subjects have about the process of learning, digital social networking, and fashioning identities through digital media that transcends geographical boundaries.

Week 1: Chris Stein’s Contexts and Practicalities

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A General Overview

I am most interested in the ways expediency might affect your goals in digital contexts when you pare your ideas down to fundamental components — do the conveniences of ready-made tools/code and the paralysis in the face of overwhelming quantities of learnable skills corrupt the integrity of the core ideas?

…but I will get back to these concerns in my provocation. First I’ll digest Chris Stein’s blog post a bit and attempt to point out some changes since its publication in 2011.

Chris Stein’s blog post offers a straightforward framework for building a digital project from inception to implementation. Addressing the best ways to simplify questions of use and users, Stein outlines guiding questions for prototyping:

  • why or what need
  • what you should build
  • who is going to use it
  • where you want to put it, and
  • when it will be ready.

Extracting a why (a clear question of what must be solved) from what should be built is a critical point.

In the who category, Stein draws our attention to distinguishing actors (roles of potential users) from personae (archetypical instances of actors). Defining concrete use cases is invaluable. Stein also talks about scale of usage: how many people one might reasonably accommodate with a project varies (Simple Web Site: 1,000’s, Dynamic Web Site: 100’s, Voice, Video Chat, Virtual Classroom, 10’s). There are so many resources available that clarifying these categories of who as early as possible helps narrow your searches.

In the where category, Stein considers where we deploy the tool (online, desktop, mobile, kiosk) and where our audience uses the tool.

When largely addresses practical projections of project completion. The adage “underpromise, overdeliver” will surely come up as we all begin to plan our projects.

Links

I often find links in context too difficult to track. So I pulled Stein’s list into this ref-list and found pdfs of the broken links and seminal articles.

Blog posts about designing your personal development plan:

Jason Santa Maria’s post about fitting design into workflow (July 26, 2010)

‘s Responsive web design (May 25, 2010) (he coined the term. RWD has changed dramatically since this article came out in 2010. Mashable called 2013 The Year of Responsive Web Design)

Alex Williams’s Risks/concessions of free software

Tom Kuhlmann approach to developing ELearning course

Older arguments about software development:

2005 post and comments about this instigating Nicholas Carr article

Fred Brooks’s 1986 article  “No Silver Bullet – Essence and Accidents of  Software Engineering” (FULL PDF) — Brooks talks about accidental and essential complexity (limit the first and acknowledge the second in developing software).

Jack Gordon and Ron Zemke trash the Waterfall Method, ADDIE or ISD Attack on ISD (Instructional Systems Design) (Training April 2000) (BROKEN LINK in Stein) — worthwhile read about how knowing the templated version of instructional systems design is not the most effective — a call for adaptability.

Klein’s Wikipedia glossary:

History Software Engineering 

Waterfall model

Scope Creep

Agile Software Development

User-centered Design — his example Nielsen Norman Group

Useful Image:

Caption from JSM’s post: “The x-axis shows how true-to-browser rendering ranges from approximate to actual, while the y-axis depicts the scope of centralized control over layout and type from local to global. The sweet spot lies somewhere at the intersection of browser-like behavior for—and widespread control over—type and layout elements, while providing a fertile environment for creative thinking.”

Jason Santa Maria discusses how designing for mobile devices presents a remarkable degree of complexity when it comes to aligning software and hardware for the widest range of users. The toolkit he describes has certainly evolved, but the chart helps describe what you should consider when picking your tools.

 

 

Provocation and Motivation

Ok ITP Core 2. I’m ready to discuss. I was sitting with a DH friend who does history of science and had this week’s reading open on my computer. He was distressed to see the apocryphal NASA pen story as a point of entry into the questions of project development. The fact that this example so bothered him struck me as a problem central to what we are doing. Is it okay to use a tool that exists (in this case a popular and memorable example) simply because it is convenient and seems to work? Do we have a responsibility to find better solutions? We are going to have to make many concessions in the interest of time, but does this sort of shorthand of example teach us to be hasty or is it okay because its application and qualifications point to our understanding that the situation is deeper than we have time to address? As students of the humanities and social sciences coming to software development, we cannot expect to teach ourselves the components learned by people who focus solely on software development. As we all conceptualize our work in terms of basic components and get down to our nuts and bolts, I hope we can be conscientious as well as efficient. Perhaps I am over-optimistic, but I look forward to our collective attempts.

👋

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So happy to meet you all (again for most of you)! This is my hands-on semester where all of my courses involve getting my hands dirty with some type of tech/code stuff, and I already feel emotionally safer knowing that I will be around you folks while I suffer.

I have two things in mind right now. Subject-wise, my main interest is the history of internet and its relation with the shaping of contemporary society, and how to look at various dimensions including but not limited to education/knowledge production, gender, governmental policies, disasters, etc. while navigating both in the U.S. and South Korean context.

The other thing I am pondering about is the increasingly popular field of machine learning, and my relation with that field. While I do sense industrial hype being built around it, the increasing access to the computational methods seems to offer some educational benefit and I would be happy to think about and work on ways to harness it in humanities research. I’ll try to elaborate on this in another post.

NYCDH Week of DH free workshops!

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Hi ITP Core 2,

I tried posting this to the Forum, but it wouldn’t let me submit, hence the blog post. I just wanted to let you know about the upcoming workshops through NYCDH! It may have gone out over GC Digital Initiatives or another listserv, but I’m all for redundancy.

So! Check out the awesome events available next week!
http://dhweek.nycdh.org/

At the very least, I hope some of you will come to the kickoff lightning talks at the NYCDH Week Kickoff on Tuesday, Feb 9th at 1:30 pm at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus! Seeing the sorts of DH work people are doing in the city could be really helpful for brainstorming ITP projects, and then perhaps you’d get a better sense of tools you might want to explore in the workshops they have available. I am hoping to catch a couple workshops, so let me know if you want to go!

-Jojo

#ITPCore2 @jojokarlin

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IMG_1816After testing the waters in the Grad Center’s Digital Humanities program last year, I have taken the plunge into the English PhD. I am particularly interested in the ways periods of rapid technological transformation affect memory (cultural and personal). Many tools that seem to displace the burden of memory or alter the responsibility of cultural preservation, shift our sense of ourselves, and I am interested in developing work that tests or represents the ways we share memory across time and space and across the span of technological advances and obsolescence.

I look forward to another provocative and motivational semester with the ITP team!

-Jojo