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April 12th:Available Tools:
Free, Cheap, and Premium(and how to navigate choosing between
them)
While there are many different
digital platforms you can use, in the end, all tools
are visualization
tools.
When you choose a tool, you’re
choosing how you want to see your
data.
Metadata: data about data
What are the components of the objects you work
with?Book: words, pages, author(s), editor(s), publisher(s), reader(s),
physical edition(s), digital editions, reader responses
Performance: sound/video file, performer, venue, date/time, program
This:Book: words, pages, author(s), editor(s),
publisher(s), reader(s), physical edition(s),
digital editions, reader responses gets broken down even further.
<text xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" xml:id="d1"><body xml:id="d2"><div1 type="book" xml:id="d3"><head>Songs of Innocence</head><pb n="4"/><div2 type="poem" xml:id="d4"><head>Introduction</head><lg type="stanza"><l>Piping down the valleys wild, </l><l>Piping songs of pleasant glee, </l><l>On a cloud I saw a child, </l><l>And he laughing said to me: </l></lg>
TEI Encoding of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence(from TEI By Example: http://www.TEIbyexample.org)
Once you have data, you need
to find a platform to use
it with.
Important Considerations
Licensing•Did you pay for the tool/platform that you want to use?
•Did you have to pay for it once, or do you have to renew it annually?
•How will your users interact with the platform?
Licensing, continued• Case 1:
• You probably produce many documents in Microsoft Word, and send them to other people (or print them out to give to people.)
• Case 2:
• You produce documents in Microsoft Word, and you want other people to edit those documents with you, using Microsoft Word’s collaborative editing features.
Ownership•In what space was your project built?
•Your personal site?
•The university’s webspace?
•Where is the project supposed to “live” after completion?
•Where did the funding for the project come from?
Platform Support & Lifespan
•Who made the platform you want to use?
•Is it open source?
•What kind of user support is available?
•How is maintenance of the platform (not your project, but the platform itself) funded? (Grants? Donations?)
•Is it new and shiny? Or old and reliable?
Who is your audience?
•You
•Specialized scholarly audience
•Other digital/multimodal scholars
•Students
•The general public
Flexibility•Can you import your data (i.e., prepare it outside of the platform?)
•Can you export your data?
•In a way that allows other people to see what the platform does?
•In a way that allows you to use the data in other platforms?
Robustness• For a platform to be “robust,” it
needs to be able to handle unexpected input or actions in a way that allows the user to fix the problem and continue with minimal fuss.
• While this definition of robust is generally agreed upon, the precise standards for robustness are essentially subjective.
Is it robust?•If something goes wrong, does the platform return a blank screen, or crash entirely?
•If something goes wrong, does the platform provide an error message that allows you to figure out what part of your input caused the problem?
NOT ROBUST!
ROBUST!
Alpha & Beta• Alpha: programs and platforms that are
in early development, and are still highly error/crash-prone. Usually alpha programs are released to a limited audience who agree to provide feedback.
• Beta: programs that are still in development, but released to a wider audience. These programs may not have full functionality, but are meant to be relatively error-free.
Hosting• If a platform is web-based (sometimes referred to as
“server-side”), then someone else is making sure that the platform works, and gets upgraded.
• Pro: you don’t have to install or maintain it.
• Con: you’re dependent on being online for the platform to work.
• If the platform is locally hosted (sometimes referred to as “client-side”), then it’s on your computer.
• Pro: you don’t have to be online! (this is handy anytime you’re demonstrating your project outside of your home institution)
• Con: you may need to have more programming skills to install and maintain the platform on your own machine/server.
Visibility•Some platforms may allow you to use them for free, provided you make your data public:
•Are you concerned about other people accessing your data?
•Could your data be considered someone else’s property?
The choices you make in choosing tools are an
essential part of your
documentation.
On with the tools!
• Mapping/GIS tools(Community Walk, Google Maps, Google Earth, ArcGIS, Neatline, Quantum GIS)
• MIT Simile
• Data visualization (ManyEyes, Gephi)
• Display (Scalar, Omeka)
• Project Management (Pivotal Tracker)
Mapping Tools!
Community Walk: Free (Ad Revenue)
Pros• Free!
• Web-based
• Reasonable range of functionality
• Allows multiple maps to be created in one account
• Unique site login can be shared without compromising online persona
• Can’t block ads
• Awkward User Interface (UI)
Cons
Google Maps: Free
Pros
• Free!
• Web-based
• Unobtrusive ads
• Reasonable range of functionality
• Linked to Google Account for easy portability/access
• Designed for navigation
• Linked to existing Google Account
• Lack of functionality
• Dependent on Google maintaining the tool
Cons
Google Earth: Free (Paid Upgrade: Premium)
Pros
•Free!
•No ads
•Historical map integration
•Robust functionality
• May need to pay for pro-account, depending on your goals
• Not web-based
• May be more complex than you need
• Dependent on Google maintaining it
Cons
ArcGIS (Super-Premium)
Pros
• It does EVERYTHING
• No ads
• Robust functionality
• Expensive!
• Not web-based
Cons
Quantum GIS
Pros
• Has all the functionality of ArcGIS in an open-source format
• No ads
• Robust functionality
• Compatible with Google Earth
• Not compatible with ArcGIS
• Shorter development history (displays typical open source bugginess)
Cons
Neatline
Pros
• Allows tracking and display of points in space and time
• Creates flexible custom timelines, maps
• Compatible with Omeka and Simile
• Not standalone (i.e., you need to be working with Omeka in order to run it)
• Still in development (but generally well-supported)
Cons
MIT Simile Widgets (Free)
Pros
• Free!
• Open access for easy collaboration
• Web-based or locally hosted
• Unique (no current rivals)
• Highly customizable
• Data can be stored in GoogleDoc
• Open access and always in development (stability issues)
• Requires HTML, more programming skill for customization
• Documentation is spotty
Cons
Many Eyes (free)•Free text and numerical data visualization engine, made by IBM (http://www-958.ibm.com/)
•Creates word clouds, tree diagrams, and phrase nets from plain text files
•Usable on Mac/PC, but only in browsers that run Java (i.e., not Google Chrome)
Pros• Easy to try out
different visualizations using the same text
• Easy to upload datasets
• Allows visualizations to be saved and emailed to other people who can view them without a login
• Access to everyone else’s data set
• Only accessible online
• No export capability
• Dependent on Java
• No privacy: your data is everyone’s data
Cons
Gephi (free)•Network/data visualization software for exploring connections between objects
•Works with data that you create yourself (from any source), or download from sites like Facebook
•Will produce complex visualizations if you devote time to learning how to structure your data
•How-to posts available from various sources online.
Scalar (Free)
Pros
• Free!
• Web-based
• Unique in its capability for creating non-linear paths
• Customizable
• Supported by investment and use of multiple organizations
•It’s in open beta, and still new
•It requires you to host material on the Scalar website, but does not currently have an export feature
•Documentation is not yet extensive
•Dependent on continued funding
Cons
Omeka (free/cheap)
Pros
• Available free (if you have your own server), or hosted for a small fee.
• Robust functionality, full documentation available
• User-friendly interface
• Compatible with Neatline GIS suite
• Large community of individual and institutionally-based users
•Works best with data that is a mixture of images and texts (i.e., it’s less effective for data analysis projects)
•New features are released while in development, and may still be buggy at first
Cons
Pivotal Tracker (Free/Cheap)
Pros
• Free (for public projects, and non-profit/academic projects)
• Supported by paid users
• Customizable
• Sophisticated, friendly user-interface
• iOS compatible
•It’s project management software -- not a project platform
•Dependent on your willingness to make your project public, continued funding, or academic/nonprofit status
Cons
Just a few of the many places you can check for tools:
https://www.washington.edu/itconnect/wares/uware/
http://dirt.projectbamboo.org/
http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/
New: DH Office Hours! (Alternate Thursdays in OUGL 230 – check
dmdh.org for more info)
Using (new) digital tools means that you will inevitably need help at some point.
Learning how to ask for help is
important.
Learning how to Google for it is
vital.
In the end, you are only as good as your data
set.
Using tools doesn’t make you
a digital humanist – the
critical thinking does.
Q: What makes a good data set?A: Knowledge of its components;
and accessibility of
metadata.
Depending on the decisions you make regarding your
data, people will be able to do
different things with it.
Your decisions may impact the
compatibility of your data with
other tools/platforms.
This is why we emphasize that DH is a highly social and
collaborative field.
DH Values (in review)
What do you need, as possible
practitioners of digital
humanities scholarship?
(breakout session)
Take part in the #DMDH September Showcase!
(Show the UW community what you’re learning)
Thanks to the Simpson Center for the Humanities for its ongoing sponsorship
of DMDH!
