Hosted by: David M- PHD at George Mason

Excel
Pros:
-Helpful for social media analysis

Cons:
-Information overload

Google Sheets, Google Docs, etc.
Pros:
-Easy to share with a broader community
-Able to receive feedback in real-time
-Can access data from anywhere with a wifi connection
-Free, no costly fees of database subscriptions, software expenses etc.
-User friendly

Cons:
-Runs risk of glitches
-Less shortcuts than excel
-Not as advanced as excel when it comes to visual analyzation ie: pivot tables, etc.

Alternative methods:
-Database(s)
-Open Refined Program (refined.org)
-Sequel

Conclusion:
-All comes down to personal preference
-It is possible to use various programs simultaniously for different needs
-Tailor your user experience to match project needs
-Research alternative methods to expedite process
-Share tools + tips with the digital community for enhanced user experience

How to approach DH?

-Text analysis
-Social network analysis
-Geo-spatial mapping
-Distance reading / content analysis
-Visual/sound analysis
-Visualization

Resources

Dirt Directory (dirtdirectory.org)
-comprehensive website/registry listing resources to help you conduct research
-can be categorized by your approach (text analysis, numeric data, etc.)

Tags (for twitter date collection)
-allows you to collect any tweet you want by the minute
-only need twitter and gmail account
-using twitter’s API including location, vast amounts of data

Voyant (voyant-tools.org) for text analysis
-load your own dataset
-enables you to quantify the humanities into datasets just as scientists and social scientists do
-shows (from left to right) a word cloud, an automatic summary (including words per sentence, frequent words, distinctive words, vocabulary density, etc.), the top five words, and words preceding and following specific words
-tool to exclude phrases you do not want to count as words

Programming Historian (programminghistorian.org)
-valuable especially for isolated regions where resources may be more limited
-always looking for contributors
-tutorials are well-written
-using regular expression to clean OCR text

Open Refine (openrefine.org)

Text grid labs – downloadable application for text analysis
-upload photos of manuscript
-can embed links, etc.

Gephi (gephi.org) for visualization

Palladio (hdlab.standford.edu/palladio) for visualizing historical data
-perfect for exploring and catered to be user-friendly
-partially funded by NEH

Google nGram

Social network analysis
-lots of statistics
-all you need is two columns of two related persons
-difference from Palladio – shows nodes (persons beyond the first degree of separation)
-analysis includes:
-maximum geodesic distance – diameter (“hops” of degrees of separation from one side of the chart to the other side)
-centrality (how many times people have go through you to get to another relation)
-exemplifies “power law curve”
-Eigenvector unit – “proximity to power” (how close you are to people with high scores of centrality)

Oxygen

Omeka
-omeka.org and omeka.net
-free, easy, nice to use
-really good at presenting all the metadata, making it very accessible
-comprehensive source for manuscript, images, audio, video

Zotero
-good for articles, books, embedding
-create things in zotero and you can embed on Omeka using a connecting tool

Transcribed by: Rachel Cousins

• Happy hours for writing letters “write to your happy hour”
• NEH.gov website resources
  • Breakdown of federal funding by state
  • Information of the history of the endowment
• The NEH was at its peak under Nixon’s administration
• The biggest recipients of federal funding are not states you would expect (Vermont, Alaska)
• When lobbying for federal funding it is important to go into a breakdown of programs that would benefit
• National Humanities Alliance
• We need more innovative curriculums that teach problem solving to students of the humanities
• How do you highlight what goes away if you take away national humanities funding?
  • The impact on society
• Using NEH grants to match donors to incentivize them to donate
• Documentary film is having difficulty under the competition of other digital sources for funding
• How do you know whether to trust the information presented in a documentary
  • NEH approval on documentary films provides reliability because of the peer review process
  • Also applies to websites
• The NEH has to be open with their practices to the public because they are funded by taxpayer dollars in a way private foundations don’t have to be
• The National Humanities Alliance
  • They bring people from organizations all around the country to speak to their representatives on the Hill to talk about the importance of their organizations

Notes:

-Best way to find sources- is the source credible? How to verify digital sources

-Marketing skills for the job market in information literacy

-Teaching skills to students: biggest issue- authority is contextual when it comes to sources

-Sources validity depends on the project

-“Authority for sources exists on a spectrum”

-In the classroom- evaluating authority in sources activity — evaluate biases

-Facebook and blogposts can be useful if used in the correct way

-Making research “student central”

-Credibility is variable depending on topic

-Papers and learning how to acquire sources has become less central to learning in college classrooms

-Continuing the process and information literacy through-out entire collegiate careers and as resources throughout professional lifetime

-How can we implement information literacy as an every-day tool?

-Expanding information literacy beyond just English courses

-Gap in conversation between disciplines

-Not just humanities students need these skills— not accepting what is put in front of you, establishing critical thinking skills

-Creating stronger library presences on campuses

-Should we require scopes and methods classes?

-Start information literacy classes younger

-Changing the attitude of educational institutions on the importance of information literacy embedded in course curriculum

-Connection between digital and information literacy: should they be taught as different or the same field of study?

Helpful tools for research:

-Voyant Tools voyant-tools.org

-J-STOR Text Analyzer www.jstor.org/analyze/

-Each library has different digital database which makes teaching different depending on institution

-Strong database presence to counter Google- databases algorithms are not like Google which is hard to teach and be affordable for most libraries and campuses