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(#Alt-)Academia

Data visualizations: Learning d3.js

[Cross-posted at scholarslab.org]

The SCI study on humanities graduate programs and career preparation is humming along, and while survey responses come in, I’ve been working on determining how best to translate the data into meaningful graphics. After a lot of experimenting, I think the winner is d3.js. Short for for Data-Driven Documents, D3 is Michael Bostock’s creation; a quick glance at his gallery shows the kinds of beautiful and complex visualizations it’s capable of. It’s a low-level tool, though, which means that learning to use it even in a rudimentary way has already involved picking up some html, css, and javascript along the way. It’s a lot to chew on, but I think I’m starting to turn a corner as a blurry whirl of concepts, terms, and commands are slowly resolving themselves into some clarity.

While I don’t have anything that cool that to show yet, I’m excited that I do have a little something. Here’s the fruit of everything I’ve learned so far:

Continue reading “Data visualizations: Learning d3.js”
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Personal

On the sanctity of (some) life

This morning’s news about the shooting in Aurora has left me deeply unsettled, and while I’m not sure how well I can articulate my thoughts about it, I’m too distracted by them not to try. Fair warning: this is a personal post, and it’s driven by emotion and experience rather than by research.

Aurora is terribly close to home for me. I have immediate family members living there (the closest mere blocks from where the shooting took place), and it’s very near to where I grew up. I know that my family is ok, but I’m still worried about second-degree connections: my brother’s friends, people I knew growing up. I’m trying not to imagine the people getting bad news instead of comforting news today, because it’s too hard to think about.

Looking back on the many years I spent in Colorado, I realize that it felt like an extraordinarily safe and sheltered environment, and that my community of family and friends actively thought of it as a safe and happy place. My family worried when I moved away for the first time; they worried even more when I moved to New York. But from a distance, Colorado doesn’t appear so safe. It isn’t just this incident; it’s the recent shooting in City Park, where EF heard the gunshots that killed a police officer; it’s Columbine, where my cousin was a high school senior trapped in a music room; it’s the 23-year-old shot and killed in a random attack just blocks from my family’s home in 2009. I don’t know anybody that has witnessed first-hand this kind of violence in New York. In Colorado, I know far too many people who have.

Continue reading “On the sanctity of (some) life”
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Personal

Bear with me…

I’ve just transfered this blog to a self-hosted site, which is a whole new world for me. I did it in part because I want the increased flexibility that a self-hosted site provides (I kept getting jealous of all the WordPress plug-ins I couldn’t install when my site was hosted at wordpress.com), and also so that I have a place to play around with some of the new things I’m learning. This site will probably fluctuate a lot over the next couple of weeks as I figure out what I want to do with it. As you already know if you follow me on Twitter or Facebook and saw the deluge of links I mistakenly posted, I am new at this and trying to figure things out on my own.

I’m happy to say that I’m at least making progress. I’ve successfully moved everything over to the new self-hosted site, and from here (I think) it should be a matter of refining. Thanks for your patience!

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(#Alt-)Academia Higher Ed SCI

Announcing a new SCI study on alternative academic career paths

[cross-posted at scholarslab.org]

I’m pleased to announce that the Scholarly Communication Institute is conducting a study on career preparation in humanities graduate programs. As part of this study, we have launched two confidential surveys: the first is for people on alternative academic career paths (that is, people with graduate training in the humanities and allied fields working beyond the professoriate); the second survey is for their employers.  The surveys will be open until October 1, 2012.

Humanities scholars come from a wide array of backgrounds and embark on a variety of careers in areas like libraries, museums, archives, higher education and humanities administration, publishing, research and technology, and more. SCI anticipates that data collected during the study will contribute to a deeper understanding of the diversity of career paths we pursue after our graduate studies, while also highlighting opportunities to better prepare students for a range of careers beyond the tenure track.

The surveys complement the public database that we recently created as a way to clarify the breadth of the field, and to foster community among a diverse group. If your work represents the diversity of the broad #alt-ac community, it’s not too late to tell us about yourself!

The surveys and directory are being administered as part of the Scholarly Communication Institute’s current phase of work — which includes a close concentration on graduate education reform (largely in the North American context) and the preparation of future knowledge workers, educators, and cultural heritage and scholarly communications professionals.

The survey results will help us to make curriculum recommendations so that graduate programs may better serve future students, and anonymized or summarized data will be made available at #alt-academy at a later date. Please contact me if you’d like to know more.

Categories
(#Alt-)Academia Higher Ed

A few thoughts on #alt-ac

I’ve been tuning in to conversations about “#alt-ac” — both the concept and the phrase itself — as much as I can lately as I prepare to launch SCI‘s survey of #alt-academics (more on that very soon). What I’ve noticed is that while the concept is something that people are eager to talk about, and while the term itself has both expanded in meaning and proven useful beyond what Bethany Nowviskie initially imagined, there’s also a certain degree of discomfort with the phrase. Some find that it perpetuates an unfortunate (and false) binary of career options — which, of course, is exactly what it was meant to alleviate. Others simply don’t find that the term resonates for them, considering it too narrow, or redundant with existing categories (primarily public humanities). Still others have expressed concern that #alt-ac is being held up as an unrealistic panacea for the perpetually abysmal job market, yet without necessarily creating new jobs.

These critiques are all valid. Personally, I have found that despite its limitations, #alt-ac is useful as a starting point for conversations about a wide range of issues related to graduate education. I don’t expect the term to be around forever, and I think it’s impossible to try and define the borders of the constellations of #alt-ac communities with much clarity. But I also think that this slight unease and ambiguity is a part of what can help us (as the academic, #alt-academic, or other allied communities) clarify our own thinking on what our academic training means and why it’s valuable.

For me, the most useful move that the term allows is the reframing of what is meant by the term “academic.” Anyone who has completed a PhD or other advanced degree is an academic by training, and brings an academic approach to whatever work she takes on. However, in terms of career possibilities, “academic” tends to signify one thing only: the professoriate. But as is abundantly clear, scholars are working all over the place — in cultural heritage institutions like libraries, museums, and archives; in governmental positions; as journalists and consultants. The positions themselves don’t necessarily make an individual an academic, but neither does an individual cease to be an academic in any of these roles. The academic is the person, by way of the training he or she has received, as well as the style of work — but the term’s narrower signification of someone employed within the professoriate often remains the more immediate reference.

#Alt-academic, then, is not so much a specific job, career, or field, but rather an approach: a way of seeing one’s work through the lens of academic training, and of incorporating scholarly methods into the way that work is done. It means engaging in work with the same intellectual curiosity that fueled the desire to go to graduate school in the first place, and applying the same kinds of skills — be they close reading, historical inquiry, written argumentation, or whatever else — to the tasks at hand. It doesn’t mean an all-new type of work that will heal the problems of the job market. (Issues surrounding the academic labor market are pervasive and serious; they merit a thorough discussion that is beyond the scope of this post.)

The responses that people have provided in the #alt-ac database are telling, as they often underscore the ways in which individuals apply their academic training to unusual roles. I expect that we’ll gain much deeper insight through the upcoming survey, and I look forward to the conversations that the resulting data will provoke. Stay tuned!

Categories
Writing

Playing with visual text analysis using Voyant

As I’ve started to dip my toes into the DH current, one thing I’ve been excited to play with is visual presentations of text analysis. Until I hadn’t had a strong need for it, but with the approaching SCI survey of alt-academics and the analysis it will entail, I finally have a good reason to start exploring what’s out there.

The first tool I’ve checked out is Voyant (developed by Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell as part of their hermeneuti.ca project), which allows you to upload a document, point to a URL, or copy text; it can analyze a single document or a corpus. I uploaded my dissertation as a sample and, after stripping out articles and such (which the tool makes very easy), I got a nifty word cloud:

Below it, Voyant displays a list of words by frequency. Checking boxes next to one or more words gives a distribution of word appearance in the document or corpus. Here are three commonly appearing words charted through the diss:

I found it interesting to see that while I clearly used the word “trauma” a ton, the places where it appeared the most were in the intro and conclusion–suggesting that I relied on the term when I was pulling my argument together, but much less in the actual analysis. A section below the chart shows the context of the selected words in a table that can be sorted in a variety of ways. All the data in each section can be exported in a number of formats, too, for use in other sites or documents. (More than ever, I’m feeling pinched by having my blog hosted by wordpress.com, which doesn’t support things like iFrames; I hope to get a more flexible set-up going before too long.)

There’s a lot more that Voyant can do, and I’m looking forward to playing with it (and other tools) a lot more as I get a clearer sense of what kind of analysis I want to do. More soon!

Categories
(#Alt-)Academia Talks and Events

Learning by destruction

In preparation for my first THATCamp, I’ve been breaking things. I’m new to the DH world, and only recently have I been dipping my toe into the “hack” side of the hack/yack divide. Enchanted by why’s (poignant) guide, I explored a bit of Ruby; then, like many others, I tried (and, by the end of February, failed) Codecademy. Most recently, I’ve been learning a little bit about HTML and CSS (I’m mainly using this book by @jcmeloni).

While the first two attempts to gain concrete technical skills didn’t take me very far, this latest effort is yielding some real results. The difference, I think, has to do with motivation and goals. My first attempts at Ruby and Javascript stemmed from a sense that learning a programming language was something I should do. Though the DH community has taken care to emphasize that coding isn’t everything, my thinking about it hasn’t changed–it’s an increasingly important literacy, and a basic level of knowledge is already important and will become more so, if for no other reason than to understand which problems are hard and which are easy. (My spouse, a programmer, is continually dismayed when he describes some cool new innovation, and I fail to be impressed, not realizing that it solves a very tricky problem.)

I didn’t abandon the lessons because I found them unimportant. I just couldn’t dig into them. This confused me; after all, if I’m good at anything, it’s learning things! Plus, why’s (poignant) guide and Codecademy take such different tacks that if one didn’t work for me pedagogically, it seemed the other should have. But still, I walked away from both of them.

What I’ve come to realize is that without an actual problem that could help me contextualize and apply the new skills, I was having a hard time making the connections I would need to really learn and understand what I was doing. Weeks in, I still didn’t really know what Ruby or Javascript looked like in the wild, and so while I was enjoying making little snippets of code that did things (enjoying it a lot, actually), my interest in both tapered as other priorities came up.

I cracked open the (e-)book on HTML and CSS for completely different reasons. I had been working on the census of #alt-academics that I’ve written about before, as well as the not-yet-public survey that will be its more rigorous counterpart, and I was hitting some roadblocks. Most of these were stylistic: I wanted the logo to appear here, not there, and I wanted it to link back to the site (well, Wufoo wouldn’t let me get past that hurdle, but it wasn’t for lack of trying–and I succeeded on the survey); I wanted a wider margin around the text. In short, I wanted to have more control than the visual editing interface allowed. I picked up the lessons in HTML and CSS because I had a problem I was trying to solve, and that has made all the difference in the way the instruction clicks for me.

My pre-THATCamp efforts have been similar. I’m at a point where I want to start having more control over my site (I am an Order Muppet, after all), so I want to learn more about what I could do with WordPress beyond its ready-made themes; I also want to start doing more with visual and other multimedia materials in my research, so I want to learn more about Omeka. For both of these things, I need to know about web servers and FTP clients, both of which I’m sure are second nature to a ton of THATCamp participants, but they’re new for me. So I have been tinkering, with the guidance of ProfHacker and my stellar colleagues in the Scholars’ Lab.

And along the way, I’ve been breaking things. I had a single triumphant moment in which everything seemed to be working as it should–and then, I went one step further, and managed to completely lock myself out of MySQL, rendering the whole setup unusable.

Here’s where things got tricky, and a little interesting. I had to find a way to dig myself out, and I had no idea how to do that. Most of the troubleshooting instructions I found on involved the command line–which I do not know how to use, much to my chagrin. (Again, following Prof Hacker’s lead, I’ve learned how to do the simplest of tasks–but really, knowing how to create a text file wasn’t going to get me out of the trouble I was having!). I went down a time-consuming and frustrating rabbit hole. As I tried to figure out what to do, I realized a lot of things–among them, I didn’t totally know what MySQL was, why I needed it, or what had gone wrong.

That sounds bad, but it has actually been energizing. The risks for me are still low at this point, but the potential reward is high. I’m finally starting to get a sense of what I don’t know–whereas before, all I saw was an abyss of confusion. My questions at this point are still incredibly basic (and, to be honest, I’m not always comfortable asking them), but I feel like certain elements are slowly coming into focus.

Breaking things has given me problems to solve, which is where the opportunity and desire to learn seem greatest. This is not new news to most of the DH community–@samplereality has argued compellingly that DH is about destroying things, and @jessifer tweeted about giving his students a problem without giving them the tools to solve it. As a pedagogical strategy, it makes sense: that’s how we learn when we’re doing things on our own–with a sense of urgency and a problem to solve.

As I continue to think about reforming humanities graduate training, my own experience of trying to learn, failing, and then needing to learn and (at least partially) succeeding, will remain at the front of my mind. I still haven’t really figured out what all went wrong, but I managed to get things working again (that counts as hacking, right?) and have a much better sense of what questions to ask my fellow THATCampers. Had everything gone smoothly, I would have learned so much less.

Categories
Writing

On not fully understanding Anne Carson

I received an absolute treasure of a book in the mail this past week: Anne Carson’s new translation of Antigone (called Antigonick). The hardcover book is hand-lettered by Carson, and many of the pages of text are preceded by sheer vellum pages with gorgeous and beguiling illustrations by Bianca Stone. It is a beautiful, beautiful book. (There’s a good preview of it here.)

And I do not fully understand it. I don’t really understand many of the illustrations; I don’t always understand the changes Carson has made to the text. The effect is no less captivating.

This feeling is not isolated to Antigonick; I often feel a sense of disorientation from Carson’s work. Looking through some notes on Autobiography of Red (which I simply loved), I realize the same feeling occurred there: I was utterly puzzled by certain elements and choices. (Especially the final “interview” with Stesichoros–I would love to know how people read that.)

But I relish this feeling of confusion. Carson’s work is so deliberate and intoxicating, that each choice she makes feels like a stone to be worked over in the palm of the hand–slowly, slowly. Not many writers make me feel this way. More often, readerly confusion is indicative of sloppiness on the writer’s part, or else of ego and purposeful obfuscation. The confusion I feel reading Carson draws me in, rather than pushing me away.

So, Antigonick. Why that red spool of thread unwinding over a page that lists “Kreon’s nouns” (“Adjudicate Legislate Scandalize Capitalize”)? Why the domestic images of stove, kettle, rug when Kreon sentences Antigone to death? Why Kreon’s arrival by powerboat? Why, for that matter, Nick? I’ll confess, I don’t know. But I will keep turning those questions over and over in my mind, as I do with so many of her works.

Luckily, I now have a great excuse to spend a lot more time thinking about Carson’s writing, since my paper proposal for MLA13 was accepted. I’m looking forward to giving her work the serious attention it deserves.

Categories
(#Alt-)Academia SCI

Calling all #alt-academics!

[cross-posted at the Scholars’ Lab blog]

I’m happy to announce that a census of alternate academics, the first public-facing component of my work with the Scholarly Communication Institute, is now open to contributions. If you have graduate training in the humanities and work outside of the tenure track, I’d like to warmly invite you to add your information to the growing database. Not #alt-ac? Check out the report to learn more about who we are and what we do.

As I discussed in an earlier post, the census has a dual purpose: First, it will serve the many individuals who are employed in (or considering) alternate academic roles by showing the breadth and depth of career trajectories that can follow graduate work in the humanities. The resulting database may help people to discover others with shared interests, find potential project collaborators, or open up new lines of inquiry. Second, it serves as an important first step towards the survey that SCI will conduct, which aims at better understanding career preparation and #alt-ac employment in relation to humanities graduate programs.

I’d like the database to be as broad and truly representative as possible, which means I’ll need help in extending its reach. Please forward the link widely and encourage the #alt-academics you know to contribute–the database becomes more useful as more people join in.

This census is part of a suite of new content and features at #Alt-Academy; the announcement is restated below. Please read, contribute, and circulate!

—

We are very happy to announce a new phase of publication at #Alt-Academy, an open-access online project at MediaCommons. #Alt-Academy was launched last summer with 24 essays by 33 authors, highlighting the role of “alternative” academic professionals in the humanities and related fields. The four projects joining #Alt-Academy today promise to open the publication to an even richer and more diverse set of voices.

Please consider contributing to:
#Alt-Academy also welcomes proposals for further new clusters and features.  For more information, see “How It Works” on our MediaCommons site.
Categories
(#Alt-)Academia SCI

Coming soon: A directory of #alt-academics

Like everyone, I began January with the best of intentions. My resolution — to write (something, anything!) or take a photo each day — seemed alluringly modest. January was good. February was, too. I saw no reason why I shouldn’t be able to keep going, month after month.

But then, March happened. March, when I changed jobs, and A. and I bought our first home, bringing huge amounts of change to our lives. And suddenly, my goal slipped quietly to the comfy back burner where most resolutions live out their days. The bottom line is that I haven’t been writing much these last few weeks, in part because there’s been so much to do, and in part because I’ve been spending a good deal of time absorbing new information and ideas. It has been a receptive time more than a productive one, intellectually speaking.

So, I’ve been reading and thinking and organizing fixing bookshelves, and took a quick trip to the University of Virginia to check out the actual, physical Scholars’ Lab (my reward for enduring a full-day HR marathon). I have new projects percolating and new responsibilities crystallizing. I am notoriously impatient with transitions — I cannot live in an in-between state for long — so changing both work and home at the same time has taken up a lot of mental energy. The trip to UVa was great in many ways; for one thing, it made the transition to SCI seem a bit more complete, which should help me to stop fussing about changes and spend my energy in more productive ways.

With that, I’m diving into the work. One project — which I’m quite excited about — involves taking a census of people who think of themselves as alt-academics in order to create a directory of the many individuals that work outside of the tenure track. It’s important to me that the census include not only the wonderfully vocal and visible advocates of the alt-ac community, but also the quieter voices that are outside of the Twitter conversations and MLA panels. As I have written about in previous posts, I think (and hope!) such a directory will be hugely valuable for people who are considering, or are already on, career paths that are alt-ac in nature.

The value, I think, will come from a few things: first, I hope that as people demonstrate their willingness to self-identify in an open and public way, the uncertainty and/or stigma that others in similar positions may feel will begin to dissipate. Second, it will be great to see the diversity of career paths that the humanities community has undertaken. Third, the actual names and affiliations may help other alt-ac folks to make connections and perhaps seek out useful allies. Finally, the database will help SCI in our goal of administering a survey of alt-academics in order to determine opportunities for improved career preparation and refined methodological training in humanities programs.

In all, I hope that the directory and the survey will both help the humanities community to have better data to work with, so that we can move beyond the anecdotal and dispel myths in favor of more concrete understanding about our shared field and the opportunities it affords. Alt-academics reading this post, that means you’ll be hearing from me in the not-too-distant future. I know many people have thought a lot about these issues, so one thing I’ll be doing is seeking input about who to seek out for the census/directory that I might not otherwise know about, and also what questions I should be sure to ask on the survey. I’ll post more about that as planning for the project progresses, but in the mean time, please do feel free to get in touch if you have ideas to share or questions to raise. (Also, I’ll be posting from time to time on the Scholars’ Lab site, so watch for updates there, too.)