end/line Weekly Diary: 19 March

By Tom Lewek | Published: March 20, 2017

After multiple weeks of communicating the project’s purpose, organizing the makeup of our team, and establishing concrete deadlines, it’s time to show our (early) work. During Wednesday class, it became clear that I had few different—though equally important—threads of work to coordinate as project director and project manager.

First, while we had already established a Twitter account, Commons blog, and had begun to encourage potential users to sign up as beta testers, we still needed to refine and standardize our outreach campaign. To that effect, Michael drafted some uniform copy explaining end/line to post across our platforms (endlineproject.org, Twitter, and our GitHub repository). We also decided to move our shared Commons blog onto endlineproject.org and rename it to “News.” Most importantly, we all agreed that, although we have two dedicated community management team members, outreach should be a communal responsibility and that we should all contribute items to this “News” section.

Second, we had to deploy the site, and it needed, at least, a modicum of content and a more visually-striking design. Michael’s uniform copy helped out with this, as did the decision to transform the blog into the site’s “News” section. Greg also helped out by writing the site’s Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Meanwhile, I worked on revamping our logo to make the look and feel of our project a little less text-heavy—in fact, I wrote about this process in more detail. By the end of Sunday, we had the front- and back-ends configured and ready to deploy.

Third, thus far, we’ve had to put aside work on the key functional features of the site. Over the next week, we’ll need to turn our attention to building and testing our XML validation script and our two-encoding comparison display. We have established our database tables, however, and remain in decent shape with respect to both front- and back-end development.

Fourth, and finally, we now have an external consultant, Kate Singer from Mount Holyoke. Her essay in The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy prompted much of the thinking that went into this project’s proposal.

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end/line: week 4

By Iuri Moscardi | Published: March 18, 2017

The discussion during the last week was close to the kind of expertise I provide for my team: indeed, me and Michael are responsible for the Community Management development of end/line.

Last week’s readings emphasized the relevance of the image for a digital project, especially if the audience to reach is made of academics or scholars or teachers (this is the case for end/line). Me and Michael are working following two different directions: he is indeed working on the aspect of the app as it will appear to our potential users through our communicative devices, such as our Commons blog and our Twitter account. I am instead responsible to establish potential connections between end/line and the TEI community.

During last week, I tried to increase the number of potential testers for end/line by reaching people involved in the TEI community. First of all, I engaged with the TEI listserv by launching a call for applicants: the results were not so bad, because I received emails from the US and from different European countries. In the email I sent, I inserted the links to end/line blog and to our Twitter account; moreover, I also posted the same text used for the call on our blog, and I tweeted it. This connection between email, blog and post resulted in a positive communicative circle, because one guy from UK asked to be considered as tester by commenting the post I wrote.

Following prof. Rhody’s advisements during last class, I also tried to follow other strategies. I found other groups of TEI scholars on the Web, and I subscribed to their mailing list: this allowed me to repeat the call for participants and to gain other 5 or 6 testers. I also contacted directly some people I know, who I considered potentially interested in experimenting with end/line: this allowed me to find another scholar interested. Finally, I checked all the TEI project enlisted on the TEI websites, contacting the professors or scholars directing those projects (and following them on Twitter, if they have a Twitter account). I have also subscribed to Digital Humanities Slack.

To involve unknown people in a project they don’t know is an important reputation matter. Until now, the description of the project I inserted into the call, as much as our blog, convinced the potential testers to be part of the project. This seems to prove that our communication strategy is working and should allow us to reach our goals.

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Sticker Mule

By Jenna Freedman | Published: March 17, 2017

This is just some information sharing. I love Sticker Mule! I’m partial to their die cut stickers, which always seem to come out cheaper than the price listed.

Here is some of their handiwork:

person wearing red nail polish holding a set of six bear stickers

Maggie Simpson with a Barnard B sweater sticker on a folded dollar bill, for size

Sticker Mule is in NYC, and their turnaround time is fast.

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end/line Week 3 — Diary and Biography

By Brian Hamilton | Published: March 15, 2017

The last week for me has been about two things: provisioning the PostgreSQL database and making strides towards implementing the EJS back-end infrastructure that Greg will need for the front-end. For those that don’t know, EJS is a templating language built on top of JavaScript. It’s very simple to use and works similarly to how PHP handles templating and dynamic rendering.

I also provisioned the database on Heroku, wrote the build queries, and set up the environment to connect to it on Heroku and the development environment. Everything tests out perfectly so far. I’m at the point now where I can start writing queries and binding them to REST (GET/POST) requests.

Biography:

Brian Hamilton is a MALS student at the CUNY Graduate Center, studying digital humanities and data visualization. He has a B.S. in information technology and web science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, with a concentration in civil engineering. Currently, he works as a web developer for New York City Transit and builds full-stack web applications in his spare time. For end/line, Brian is working as the back-end developer. He is responsible for building and maintaining the database, handling the routing of the site, and creating the TEI XML validation scripts.

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Lauren Biographical Statement

By Lauren Kehoe | Published: March 15, 2017

As an early-ish career librarian in a small liberal arts inclined academic library, I have wanted to develop my technical skills in support of library functions by participating in digital humanities projects and scholarship.  This is currently being accomplished through the pursuit of a second masters degree from the CUNY Graduate Center’s MALS in Digital Humanities.  My undergraduate degree is in Dramatic Literature from NYU and I received my MLIS from Pratt Institute in 2009.

Specifically, with the two part Digital Praxis course and by working on the Zine Union Catalog (ZUC), I have been exposed to the theoretical and practical implications of doing DH.  The ZUC project will explore database design & implementation, metadata workflows & aggregation, and user interface/usability by building a union catalog that aggregates the metadata of zine collections from disparate cultural and academic institutions.  This project is an important contribution to making zine collections more visible to scholars, researchers, librarians, and zinesters.  My contribution to the project will be to standardize the various metadata schema of the different institutions contributing to the catalog (in addition to ensuring that the metadata is rich and discoverable) and to document the internal and external workflows of this project to assist current and future participants of the ZUC.

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end/line Weekly Diary and Biographical Statement

By Tom Lewek | Published: March 15, 2017

Everything keeps moving—that has been the most important aspect of the past week. Steve Zweibel’s visit to class last Wednesday was informative, and his presentation encouraged me to articulate, in our data management plan, how we can document our conversations and development processes for those interested in the project in the future. Brian’s sketch of the Postgres database tables required to execute end/line was also extremely helpful. Greg’s work on the wireframes, meanwhile, and his decision to use Bootstrap and EJS has also proved useful for front-end development.

This week, however, we’re turning to outreach and scholarly communication. Iuri has been great reaching out to potential users and beta testers, and Michael has our social media and Commons presence up and running. But while we have a functioning Twitter (and some back-and-forth with the Zine Union Catalog) and a project blog, I think we’ll need to think more deeply about design and communications this week. We need consistent styles across platforms (Twitter, Commons blog, endlineproject.org) and clearer editorial guidelines for different audiences (e.g. there’s a difference between witty tweets for followers and technically-precise emails to potential beta testers). As we delve deeper into these details, I expect that community management and development work will diverge for a few weeks. Keeping these two groups on track, and informed of how the work of one influences the work of the other, will be my biggest challenge as project manager.

Biographical and Research Statement

At the CUNY Graduate Center, Tom Lewek is a MALS student whose work focuses on the intersections of the digital humanities and twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry and poetics. He proposed end/line, a web application for encoding and comparing encodings of poetry with TEI XML, in January 2017 and currently serves as its project director and project manager. These roles entail establishing, refining, and communicating the project’s humanistic importance and working with the community management and development teams to deliver it.

Outside of the Graduate Center, he is the head of online production at the Modern Language Association where he coordinates the content management and web development of mla.org, the Literary Research Guide, various MLA publications on Humanities Commons, and other digital products and properties.

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end/line week 3

By Gregory Rocco | Published: March 13, 2017

Thankfully, it looks like this project is moving along pretty well. We now have our data management plan in place, and it looks like both the community management and development ends are in the trenches when it comes to the work being done. We’ve also all adapted pretty well to the workflow with Slack and Trello. This week’s main focus is on community management, specifically with outreach and publicity. This definitely going to be big for us because we need to make sure that we maintain our relationship with the TEI, and make sure all our deliverables are on time for the first testing phase.

Related to that, I initially came off to a bit of a frazzled start with the frontend development, but eventually got my bearings. After speaking with Brian about what the site should be based out of, he initially suggested Angular because of its versatility. Unfortunately, I ran into a bit of a rough patch with Angular, so we moved to a combination of Bootstrap and EJS for creating templates. So far it has been going quite well, and I’m currently trying to flesh pages out from the initial wireframe I submitted to the group based on our drawings. That wireframe and comments can be found here.

For now, I’m going to continue to flesh out the pages and work on a few ideas for style on the page. This isn’t necessarily layout style, but fonts, buttons, menus, etc. That is probably going to be a big subject for the next time we meet in class on Wednesday. Until then, I still have a lot of tutorials to burn through, and a lot of files to play with.   

Biographical Information / Research Statement

Gregory Rocco is currently a graduate student at The Graduate Center (CUNY) studying digital humanities through the MALS program. He currently holds a special honors B.A. from Hunter College in English with a sub-focus in environmental studies. His main interest is in exploring the technological potential of interpreting modernist texts. Gregory Rocco is the frontend developer of the project and is in charge of building the site through bootstrap.

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ZUC Data Management Plan

By Lauren Kehoe | Published: March 13, 2017

Summary of Project:

– A cross­-repository resource for zine research, providing access to metadata about as many zines, and in as many ways (linked open data, links to digital content, etc.) as possible.
– A collaborative platform for cataloging zines and their creators, by persons both within and external to the library profession.
– A hub for zine research, where partners can seek inspiration and collaboration.
– A promotional and educational resource for the zine genre.
– A tool capable of supporting projects to incorporate digitized (and born digital) zine (and zine­ related) material into other platforms such as the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).

Roles and Responsibilities
The four principal Zine Union Catalog (ZUC) participants from Spring, 2017 CUNY GC Digital Praxis will initially be responsible for implementing, monitoring, and adhering to the data management plan (DMP), but after the launch of the ZUC, responsibility will transfer to the Project Director working in consort with other zine librarians and zine collecting institutions to adhere to the DMP. A variety of data will be collected, which will be encrypted when necessary (i.e. user credentials), and will be regularly backed up on a local computer in Project Director’s home and a hosted server (i.e. Reclaim Hosting using FileZilla).

Description of the Data
Several types of data will be collected including Collective Access Install files, xZINECOREx metadata schema, catalog record and image files (both sample files and actual user catalog files uploaded to zinecat.org), admin credentials (for ZUC Website, FTP, Social Media, shared Slack, Google), user credentials (those uploading to ZineCat and using the ZineCat to locate zines), logo / social media conversation, read me files, abstract of project, group blog posts and individual posts about development and process of creating ZUC, “Fail” journal so that future creators of union catalogs using Collective Access can trace what did not work about ZUC development, “What do Zine Researchers Want?” survey questions and responses, notes from earlier ZineCat meeting minutes and documented discussion (prior to Praxis ‘17 group), help documentation and materials for users of ZineCat.org. Ongoing data will be collected as the contributions to ZUC grow. Annual review of the data collected and best practices for maintaining the data will be discussed at the annual Zine Libraries Unconference as the DH Praxis participants foresee definite growth to the data collected as more institutions add content to the ZUC. It is recommended that local institutions contributing their metadata files to the ZUC also backup their data on a regular schedule.

Data Storage, Protection, and Access
Various platforms will be used to collect, store, and provide access to the data such as GitHub (Collective Access, Pawtucket, Providence Profile, and ZineCore), Collective Access instance, Reclaim Hosting, local encrypted computer located in Project Director’s home, GoogleSite (created by DH Praxis group), Slack, and social media platforms.
Confidentiality standards will be adhered to by removing any personal identifying information from the data collected. Within Collective Access, a hierarchy is used to limit what level of user sees information (e.g., Administrator, Cataloger, Researcher, Public) to protect personally identifying information.

Data Format and Documentation
To ensure long term findability and usability of the Zine Union Catalog on the web, the CollectiveAccess platform uses XML schema.
Zine metadata records ingested by the CollectiveAccess run ZineCat will adhere to a modified Dublin Core standard called xZINECOREx. A human and machine readable crosswalk will be used to map between metadata standards used by contributing institutions.
All notes, meeting minutes, and help documentation will be saved in plain text and PDF format to provide greater potential for future software compatibility. Directory and filename conventions will be established to ensure stability.
Any image files will be saved as TIFF files

Data Access, Sharing, and Archiving
The ZUC will operate under open source and open culture principles. Data sharing requirements will adhere to a GNU General Public and Creative Commons licensing: share and share alike. CollectiveAccess is freely available under a GNU Public License. ZUC will not own the metadata, but will openly aggregate it from contributing institutions. The data provided through ZUC will be used by catalogers, librarians, humanities & social sciences researchers, zine makers, among other interested parties. The data will be published upon launch of zinecat.org (on or near May 10, 2017) and regularly updated, shared, and archived as the project grows and more contributions from zine community are made.
The data will be retained with reclaim hosting under a 1 year contract. After contract expires, zine librarians will take over under Project Director’s guidance. Additionally, the data for the development of the CUNY DH Praxis project (zinecat.org prototype) will be housed in the CUNY institutional repository (CUNY Academic Works) and Columbia Academic Commons, for redundancy.

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end/line Data Management Plan

By Tom Lewek | Published: March 12, 2017

Our data management plan is now available via our GitHub repository.

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Data Management for an Information Professional

By Jenna Freedman | Published: March 12, 2017

I wrote this in my diary last week, which I’ve been keeping private because I’m a weirdo, but I just realized the non-journal assignments should go here. 

In my personal and professional practices, I have data, photos, and files in/on (as I think of them):

  1. Dropbox
  2. My work network drive
  3. Work Google drive
  4. Personal Google drive
  5. Facebook
  6. Twitter
  7. Work Flickr
  8. Personal Flickr
  9. Work LiveJournal
  10. Work blog
  11. Personal blog
  12. Work email
  13. Personal email (how many addresses?!?)
  14. Email list archives
  15. Slideshare
  16. Tumblr
  17. A notebook
  18. A desktop sticky
  19. Adium, Pidgin, and GAIM transcripts
  20. Zotero
  21. Photo albums
  22. Texts
  23. Notes on my tablet
  24. Notes on my phone
  25. Notes on my hand

When I want to find something, I have a lot of places to look! Developing a better data hygiene will help me immeasurably as a researcher and as a project manager. I’m not sure what to say beyond that than OMGYES.

I will use the Google Site as the place for new materials, and will be sure to link from it to outside and older materials.

I don’t know if I should plan for archiving social media content, or if I should just set up a system for tracking it–keeping track of metrics like followers and engagement.

I plan to be consistent about which email address I use and create a label for correspondence about the project, including in the shared account.

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  • Archives

  • Welcome to Digital Praxis 2016-2017

    Encouraging students think about the impact advancements in digital technology have on the future of scholarship from the moment they enter the Graduate Center, the Digital Praxis Seminar is a year-long sequence of two three-credit courses that familiarize students with a variety of digital tools and methods through lectures offered by high-profile scholars and technologists, hands-on workshops, and collaborative projects. Students enrolled in the two-course sequence will complete their first year at the GC having been introduced to a broad range of ways to critically evaluate and incorporate digital technologies in their academic research and teaching. In addition, they will have explored a particular area of digital scholarship and/or pedagogy of interest to them, produced a digital project in collaboration with fellow students, and established a digital portfolio that can be used to display their work. The two connected three-credit courses will be offered during the Fall and Spring semesters as MALS classes for master’s students and Interdisciplinary Studies courses for doctoral students.

    The syllabus for the course can be found at cuny.is/dps17.

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