Constance Crompton's Day of DH

I’m not great at getting myself to do things that I don’t want to do at the end of the day (I must exercise before 8:00 am, for example, or I won’t exercise at all), and so I try to save small treats for the end of the day. In this case I am going to close out by working up a little XLST tutorial.

I have a very diligent RA who, at my request, taught himself various flavours of JavaScript and to populate a Neo4j database in the last two years, all in service of The Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada Project. The project itself is based in TEI & I must say we have got a lot of mileage out of the XML, transforming it into HTML to read on screen, into Gephi’s XML for network visualizations, and cypher to populate the database. I’ve been the XSLT guy on the project this last year, and refused to teach my RA the ropes, expecting that he would have enough to handle with JavaScript, and suspecting that there would be more call for node.js and D3.js than for XSLT when he got out into the workforce. That said, he has started to chafe at the time it takes me to write up transformations, and has even devised some workarounds, so I think it’s time for me to stop being the project’s transformation bottleneck, and get him started with XSLT.

What fun.

Good night Day of DH.

The count down to the DHSI@Congress, a series of 2.5-hour workshops for scholars, staff, and students interested in a hands-on introduction to DH running in Ottawa on May 30th and 31st. It’s a great line up this year from 3D printing and DH pedagogy to text analysis and database development. The DHSI@Congress acts as a type of buffet, allowing folks, if I may mix my metaphors, to dip their toes in before diving into a week-long or semester long course.

We’ve filled 57 seats over two days, but while there is always room for more, I had better get the current registrant lists out to our workshop leaders tonight.

Thanks to the good graces of the funding gods and the support of my department, faculty, and campus, I’ll be starting a DH lab, The Exchange, here at UBCO in the fall.  Renovations are just about to start — I’ve just had a meeting with the Research IT folks to discuss wall mounts for monitors and projectors, and thought I would take the opportunity to include a “before” shot — I hope to be able to include an “after” shot in next year’s Day of DH.

I’ve just had a delightful meeting with Jon Bath from USask and Alyssa Arbuckle and Alex Christie from UVic. We are collaborating on a book chapter together. It is so much easier to write together using Skype and Google Docs than to pass chapter drafts to one another via email.

May is always a bit of a crunch.  Conference season is well underway, and all the writing that I put off until the end of the teaching terms is due.  I would write about it here, but should instead simply be writing. Unto the breach, or close up the wall with our article and chapter drafts….

I am sure that I will accidentally leave some folks out (my apologies if I have), but here is a list of Day of DHers who I expect will be particularly engaging today.

Electronic Textual Cultures Lab http://dayofdh2015.uned.es/etcl/

The Ryerson Centre for Digital Humanities http://dayofdh2015.uned.es/ryersoncdh/

Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture http://dayofdh2015.uned.es/idhmc/

DH Field School at BISC http://dayofdh2015.uned.es/dhbisc/

Today looks as though it will be a rather emailsome day.  I returned to Kelowna, where I hang my hat at UBC’s Okanagan campus, last night after a week at DHSI Atlantic at Dalhousie University.  I always have a particular fantasy about air travel, a fantasy that I will be able to clean out my inbox.  I wandered off into other writing tasks on the plan, and so my inbox, or what Michael Ullyot has wisely called a “to-do list that other people can add items to” awaits.

I am still aglow post DHSI Atlantic.  Based on Ray Siemens’ Digital Humanities Summer Institute model of week-long courses, augmented with plenary lectures (and at Victoria colloquia and poster sessions), DHSI Atlantic featured four courses:  Digitisation Fundamentals, Digital Pedagogy, Knowledge Mobilization and Digital Media, and Text Encoding Fundamentals.  I team-taught Text Encoding Fundamentals with Lee Zickel, from Case Western Reserve U — a welcome dry run for our version of the course, taught with Emily Murphy of Queen’s U, at the DHSI in Victoria in June. I do so love the week-long format: it gives us the time we need to introduce the TEI properly, introduce schema constraint, introduce the TEI community, and talk about larger project-management issues that participants might encounter once they return to their home institutions to work on their projects.

I should turn to that inbox. Jet lag is, happily, on my side today.  I was up at 6:00, but felt as though I had slept in until 10:00. I do love traveling west.

Good morning Day of DH.