Good Bluetooth Headphones
A while ago (Oct 2014) I purchased a pair of bluetooth headphones. This review, only a year and a half later, is just to say they’re good headphones. The sound quality is perfectly sufficient. The battery life seems excellent. They’re pretty comfortable.
Screenshot of the Pleiades Project’s entry for Rome, a good example of second wave digital humanities.
Having finished my PhD and now moving on to the next opportunity, I’m beginning to consider the wider academic world outside of my very small discipline. Because of my future work on the Database of Religious History, the world of digital humanities has become more important in my thinking about my own work and engagement with the wider scholarly community.
Thanks to a talk I attended on the Pleiades Project and gearing up to work for the DRH project I began to think about the progression of digital humanities from a methodology concerned solely with the digitization of textual material for stud, to a generative and collaborative way of working online. I naively called this “Second Wave Digital Humanities” in my own internal narrative as I mused about what these projects look like and might accomplish. Eventual googling led me to a significant amount of scholarship on this exact topic:
The first wave of digital humanities work was quantitative, mobilizing the search and retrieval powers of the database, automating corpus linguistics, stacking hypercards into critical arrays. The second wave is qualitative, interpretive, experiential, emotive, generative in character. (The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0)
In the above quote and other literature the term generative stands out to me as a significant part of what makes these types of projects markedly different from earlier work. The idea that we are no longer merely presenting data in a new form (the digital part) but rather creating new data through collaborative process. The collaborative project of both the Pleiades and the DRH with their open contribution systems of editors and content creators has profound implications the creation of academically canonical knowledge. Opening the doors and letting people contribute using the systems already developed in large projects like Wikipedia are a crucial part of this development. This is of course coupled with advances currently occurring the world of open-access publishing.
While reading about second wave digital humanities I also came across an article encouraging an exploration of what third wave digital humanities could look like. The author, David Berry, posits a computational turn, i.e. that eventually digital humanities will change how we actually engage with scholarship and knowledge both at the individual as well as institutional and societal level. He brings up the idea of streams of data which we now regularly interact with as fundamentally new forms of data not accounted for by the digitization efforts of the earlier digital humanities projects. It’s all very exciting stuff, and something I’m only beginning to touch the surface of.
Even while reading these articles written less than five years ago I found dead links and expired webpages. This is a persistent problem in all forms of digital media, one that curtails longer meaningful engagement with scholarship.
During the final three months of writing my dissertation I tried tracking my productivity by recording in half-hour increments what I was working on, and whether or not I was being productive. I kept all this data in a google sheet for ease of access no matter where I was working. Recording this data actually helped keep me on track, returning to the spreadsheet after 30 minutes of time spend browsing the web, and seeing that the past couple of entries were also “nonproductive” often got me out of a rut and back on track. I also thought that it would be a fun data set to play with when I had more time, i.e. when the dissertation was done.
Well, now I find myself revising the final draft, after successfully defending it in early December, and desperate for something to distract me from the onerous task. So I’ve taken to working with the data, using the pandas library for Python. I completed a coursera course on R a while back, but chose pandas because of a curiosity about data analysis in Python, and familiarity with the language. What I’ve done so far is the most basic of interpreting and plotting data, but still reveals some interesting patterns.
First, a word about the data. I tried to keep it as simple as possible, recording only the date, time (in half-hour increments), general category of work, whether or not I felt I was productive, and finally the task in simple terms. The biggest issue is obviously the subjective nature of “productivity” but since this was a tool to help me get work done, if I abused that categorization the whole idea was moot. Here’s a small excerpt from the spreadsheet:
Exporting the whole thing to a csv file allowed me to import it into pandas and start playing with the data. The first thing I was interested in, was when was I most productive. That was relatively simple to figure out, by separating out the productive column along with the time and doing a count on total values and the sorting by the time. That produced a graph like this:
You can see two obvious peaks in my productivity, one right after I got to the office in the morning when I was feeling optimistic about the days tasks, and a shallower peak in the afternoon post-lunch when I slowly returned to a productive state. I’m guessing the slower rise in the afternoon is due to the varying times I would get lunch, and the inevitable post-lunch tiredness.
I was able then to excerpt the non-productive time and add it to the same graph, producing this:
Now there’s an interesting point to consider here. I only recorded nonproductive time when I thought I should be working. I.e. first thing in the morning I didn’t start marking the time nonproductive if I was eating breakfast and getting dressed. So nonproductive time in this case represents time when I was sitting at my desk hoping to get work done. With that in mind, it makes sense that the majority of nonproductive time occurs either side of lunch and in the afternoon, when I was intending to work but distracted.
There’s obviously a lot more to do with this data, next it would be interesting to look at what days of the week I worked best, and how the length of a lunch break correlated with post-lunch productivity, but now I’ve got to get back to work.
Tables as meta-textual information
One the principal cruxes of my dissertation (and probably most theses) is “so what?” Dissertations are often a chance to collect and curate a large amount of data in new and hopefully meaningful ways. It’s this “meaningful” result which often eludes the writer until the end of the process. I hope that it becomes clearer, or perhaps the true result is often obscured by the lengthy process.
In any case, one of the points I’m narrowing down to in my own work is the process of knowledge transformation as evident in changes in textual format and layout, a meta-textual sort of analysis. A classic problem of looking for evidence of the process in absence of any record of the process itself. Much like the sediment after a flood, the cuneiform texts I work with show remarkably different configurations from earlier versions. The swirling eddies of the editorial process are as ephemeral as the roiling flood waters, but they have left their lasting mark.
But what can we say beyond “See, it happened!” How do we access the meta-textual process behind the evidence? Here’s where I struggle, and I’m sure through more detailed study of the texts themselves and their antecedents some form of analysis will come forward. I’m wary of trying to over complicated the situation by trying to trace all the various threads of textual congruency. This might be productive if all the texts could be weighted equally and accepted as canonical version of the knowledge they represent. However, the real evidence is far from this idyllic situation. In reality, the texts are from many different traditions spanning a huge range of time, written under the influence of different geographical and scribal traditions.
I take some comfort in other scholars work on the para/meta-textual analysis of texts offering up at least evidence of the process and the actors:
” … with this approach we can start seeing the agent behind these bureaucratic devices, the scribes who in such minute ways negotiated their presence and transmitted knowledge.” –C. Tsouparopoulou
I started this blog post with the supposition that our relentless search for productivity was still in full swing. It seems there is no end to the blog posts, magazine articles, and general advice about how to focus and “get things done.” I know that I’ve certainly been a consumer of probably a large percentage of what’s been written about staying productive and on-task. I put a couple of terms into Google to look for the overall popularity of searches and was surprised to find that it was not as I had assumed:
This Google Trend graph shows the slow decline in searches for productivity and the classic book Getting Things Done. As an aside, it’s interesting to note that there are generally two peaks in each year, once the rises with the new year and generally peaks around March. The second, rises at the end of the summer and peaks in October. Are we in a post-productive state. Or, has everyone found what they’re looking for, or rather things that actually work for them. One of the classic overall tips for productivity has to do with not blindly following a top ten list, but finding the techniques that work for you and your particular style. To that end I thought I’d list three things that seem to have improved my productivity:
These three things are what has arisen from too much time spent reading about how to improve productivity. It’s kind of fitting that they all function in different ways and on different platforms. The Pomodoro Technique is independent of a computer and works to manage the time spent doing things. The standing desk serves as a locale for getting work done. And finally RTM, organizes and reminds me of tasks which need to happen. There is no real duplication between the three and they all serve their purpose efficiently. Which I guess is the end goal for any system of productivity. I guess that’s the take-away from all of this, you need to find the productivity tips, techniques, and tools, which function best together in the way in which you work best.
Chatham Harbor Panorama
This is a simple panorama shot from the deck of the loading dock at Chatham harbor out on Cape Cod. I’m using this image to illustrate the ease with which the Nexus 5 phone takes more complicated shots, beyond the traditional simple rectangular photo. In some ways these are simple party tricks that make the phone seem interesting, but they have a greater significance. I’ve now started shooting all of my photos on the phone with the HDR mode turned on. I find that the effect is not at all overdone, and in fact often gives low light or photos lacking contrast more definition.
Similarly, I’ve really come to like the Photo-sphere mode on the phone as well. It is a bit gimmicky in that a massive moving picture with low FOV is not appreciating a vista. However, the really selling feature in my mind is the way in which the phone can be made, via the accelerometer, to move within the panorama. I’ve taken a few photo-spheres of places in Turkey, Venice, and also at Chatham. I can give someone the phone and they can stand, and “be”, in the spot where I took the photo.
Both of these newer forms of photography benefit greatly from the relatively mature operating systems present on these phones. The camera software is able to capture the raw data and then process it into various forms of panorama, or boost the color and/or contrast through increasing the dynamic range. The next step is how to share these, and not surprisingly social media is well integrated into these platforms as well. Despite the advances in social media platforms, we’re still stuck in a method of showing photos slide by slide, with captions and comments. I wonder if this type of presentation is outdated. In order to display Photo-spheres, or even wide panoramas properly we need a new form of presentation, one that takes into account the varying dimensions of the media. In some ways google+’s auto-stories is an attempt to solve this problem, but it’s platform specific.
I wrote the previous post using the webapp Gingko. It’s a neat web-based composition tool. You start with three columns and you can add/write/move around anything between the three. Items are dependent on the column to the left, so it essentially forms a three tiered tree structure. It’s really easy to sketch out a very general overview in the left column, add important points to consider in the middle column, and then write out the actual text in the right column. Since the cells are dependent on the parent cell to their left, it becomes really easy to compartmentalize what you’re writing and also move things around. It uses markdown for formatting, which is fine, and exports as clear text, html, and presentation. It’s got a few more features as well, but just the ability to organize and write all in one pane of the web-browser is useful enough for me.
I recently had to replace my laptop somewhat unexpectedly. I wasn’t entirely happy with the previous machine, it certainly had its problems, but for various reason I wanted to wait a bit longer to buy a new computer. My previous laptop was a Sony VPCSA, I originally bought because it seemed pretty powerful, had good screen resolution, and was relatively slim. It had a quad-core processor and 4 gb of RAM, which seemed like it was going to be plenty for my needs. Before this my work computer was an old Dell netbook, which was not powerful by any stretch of the imagination.
However, with the Sony, I quickly realized that the battery life was not up to par. I would get one and a half to two hours max out of the machine. This, I soon realized was caused by a larger problem. The fan on this machine is position right in the center of the back edge of the base. The hinge for the laptop lid is right above, when the lid is open the hinge partially obstructs the fan outlet. I hadn’t noticed this at first, but it soon became very apparent that this computer had major issues with heat. I did some research online and found many other owners who complained about fan noise and heat. One owner posted a small bit of advice that they found in the manual for the machine, explaining that the laptop should not be used for extended periods of time with the lid open! Near the end of this laptops life it was having a lot of trouble even doing simple tasks, lots of pausing and lag on input. I suspect the constant heat, and inefficient fans were slowly melting components and decreasing its overall speed.
So in looking for a new laptop I had some simple criteria, larger screen resolution, and long battery life. That’s pretty much it, most laptops today are powerful enough for word processing and there are plenty of small light laptops. Looking through the options available however shows far too many computers stuck with 1360×768. There seemed to be a rush to that small resolution a few years ago, probably pushed by manufacturers marketing laptops as wide-screen movie watching devices, rather than work machines. I was also keenly aware of the problem with the previous laptop, so I was looking for a company that has a bit of a better track record for engineering and design.
I ended up getting an ASUS Zenbook-prime UX31A. The screen resolution is: 1920×1080, which is as large as my desktops primary monitor. The battery seems to get at least 4-5 hours on a charge, if not more. And it’s incredibly light. I found the choice particularly difficult because there was nothing that seemed to match my requirements perfectly. The incoming Haswell chips are going to greatly increase battery life, but the computer currently available with the chip are too expensive. There are a glut of computers with the aforementioned lousy resolution. The chromebooks look good, but only the pixel has decent resolution, and then its battery life is sub-par. Basically, there were many choices and none of them were right. I’m fully expecting a more perfect laptop to come out in the next couple months.
The first thing I did when I got the new laptop is stick Ubuntu on it. I flashed a bootable USB with the Ubuntu image and booted into the Ubuntu install before Windows 8 even had a chance to touch the silicon on the motherboard. It’s a pain paying for the inherent windows tax, but I think that’ll change in the near future. One issue I was somewhat worried about was the UEFI BIOS and secure boot. For this computer I had to disable secure boot and fast boot, and enable “Load CSM” then boot the usb drive with the UEFI option. I was a bit worried about wiping and installing, and not being able to boot. But by following the above steps it worked just fine. The good news is everything just works on the UX31A, previous how-to’s and forum posts about this laptop and Ubuntu list a number of work arounds etc… needed to make everything work in Ubuntu, but these seem to have been included in the latest release.
However, I am having issues with Gnome 3.10. I’ve always liked Gnome, and when Gnome Shell came on to the scene with Gnome 3.0. I embraced the changed. I’ve actually gotten very familiar with it and find it very intuitive and efficient. I’m not sure if it’s just Ubuntu packaging gnome 3.10 in a haphazard way, or the most recent release, but there seem to be a number of problems with it. On my desktop, the secondary monitor resets its screen rotation on reboot. The extension Topicons, if enabled, de-activates all of your other extensions on reboot. On my laptop dragging folders or files makes them invisible. There is no graphical setting to control the keyboard layout anymore, specifically the compose key. These are all somewhat minor problems, but they show a lack of polish that is worrying. I know Gnome is trying to simplify and unify the desktop experience, but I feel like they’re leaving things behind as they do.
I’ve been trying to use Zotero for a while now to manage my (growing) bibliography. I first gave Mendeley a try, I think at the time I was attracted by their standalone client (Zotero was still dependent on Firefox running at the same time). However, in Mendeley you couldn’t insert page numbers into a reference, which seemed crazy at the time, so back to Zotero I went. I think Mendeley has since added the feature, but I’ve stuck with Zotero (and was quite happy to see the development of a standalone client soon after). I find Zotero great when writing papers and articles where the established conventions of citation are rigorously codified in a number of styles. The recent work I’ve been doing on my syllabus present a bit of a problem though. I wrote a draft with all my assigned readings as normal Chicago style (author-date) citations surrounded by parentheses. These looked kind of bad, but I didn’t want to go through the trouble of deleting all the parentheses especially if every refresh of the bibliography (an amazing feature of any bibliography manager) would reset all the citations.
Instead I decided to copy the Chicago style style I was using and edit it to take out the parentheses. This of course was a bit of a rabbit hole, and I could see it coming. But I started with the Zotero wiki page on editing, did a quick find for parentheses and saw where they were being inserted for citations and removed them (but kept the parentheses for dates, issue number etc…). Then I foolishly just tried importing my new style file into Zotero, which resulted in an error. So I visited the wiki page on validation, which is actually not Zotero but the citation-style-language project, an open-source attempt to create shared xml citation style. This page led me to two validators, only one of which worked, after a few rounds of validating and fixing errors I was good to go. I re-imported it, changed the syllabus file to use that style, reloaded, and after much crunching and automated moving about the file re-emerged with all the citations missing their parentheses. I did a few checks to see if the citations still updated if I changed something in my database, and all was well.
This was an interesting exercise in guided diversion. I had a problem, managed to fix it after a bit of research and work, and now I’ll have an added tool going forward. Of course having solved this problem I should return to my syllabus instead of writing this blog post…
Credit: Bex Walton
For a few years now I’ve been interested in clay tokens, and specifically how in later periods (1st millennium b.c.e.) they relate to the already existing written tradition. The traditional literature on tokens mentions they’re early role as an antecedent to writing and then neglects to make any comment on their possible use in later periods. My work in Turkey at the site of Ziyaret Tepe has shown that tokens were in use in the 1st millennium b.c.e and they seem to be found in contexts associated with written records.
I initially started by writing a short section in our bi-annual co-authored site report. This kernel then turned into a term paper for a professor here at Brown, which then became a talk at the American Oriental Studies annual conference. From there I make a poster for a conference in Cambridge, England. That conference graciously invited me to publish in their post-conference volume, the article I am now preparing. Finally I was accepted to give another talk at the American Schools of Oriental Research conference this fall. Each step of the way the ideas have change slightly and become more fleshed out. Oh and I forgot to mention, along the way I contributed to a co-authored paper with other members of the dig on tokens in general in the 1st milennium. I’ve certainly received a lot of traction from this one topic, but I think it’s rather important. Up until now it was a completely neglected field of research, the body of evidence remained unpublished and unstudied.
My own take on the issue is that clay tokens were a concomitant technology with writing. The evidence from Ziyaret Tepe shows clay tokens spread in large quantities around a courtyard and rooms, two of which seem to the be the tablet storage for an administrative archive. Also found in this area, were a large weight, and a puzzling clay tag with a written name. The texts found in this area record large quantities of grain and other staples going in and out of the storerooms. The way I see tokens used here, is as temporary storage devices for accounts. The difficulty with clay tablets is that they dry quickly and methods for preserving their surface for writing are spotty at best. Tokens would serve as a perfect tool to keep accounts over a period of time while the transaction was accruing. When all was said and done the account could be recorded on a tablet and filed away. The purpose of the article for the conference volume is to try and explain this method further. In some ways my task is aided by the fact that we found another tablet last season which recorded a tally of sheep, showing that if the tokens were used for arithmetic and accounting they were independent of a specific semantic association, grain, wool, wood etc…
Finally, the end goal for this project is to make some connections between the use of tokens with writing as an entry form of literacy. Too often in past discussions of literacy, the ability to comprehend written characters is restricted to a tiny portion of the population. I’d like to see tokens as a way to breach that divide and start to understand the mental abilities necessary to understand record information and access it at a later point in time.