Importing Content
The image problem I encountered in Part 1 seemed like a weird thing to have happen, because I’d heard that Anthologize would allow me to gather content from other blogs and turn it into a (e)book.  If remote images caused Anthologize to fail this function would be of limited use.

I really enjoy Nicholas Nova’s blog “Pasta and Vinegar” so I decided to use it as a test.  I entered the RSS feed into Anthologize and it brought back a list of all of Novas’ posts.  And I mean all of them.  Checked. Ready for importing.   I really didn’t want all of his posts, just a few.  A desirable feature here would be a checkbox that flipped the import status of all the posts so that you could select just a few.

After clicking “Import” I was taken back to the main My Projects screen.  I was a little befuddled about where all the imported posts had gone.  I clicked on the last project I had opened and realized that the things I imported were now included in the list of posts (including my local blog posts).  At first I’d hoped that the filters could also be applied to the imported posts (this would make selecting from a large number of imported posts easier).  Unfortunately, the tags and categories are based on the ones from my blog, not the ones imported via the Pasta and Vinegar RSS.   I can’t say this is an Anthologize problem, it looks like the Feedburner feed from P&V doesn’t include any of that information (a quick peek shows that my WP feed does – will have to try this again with a different blog to see if Anthologize recognizes it).

I was able to add the imported posts to a new project and it exported without any troubles – no image errors like I’d seen on my blog.  Although Novas’ posts do include embedded images from Flickr they use a standard img src tag, not the Flickr wrapper .  So maybe my theory above about why my images didn’t work isn’t correct, the extra code for remote embedding maybe causing the problem.  This is causing me to rethink how I post Flickr photos to my blog and consider what some of the longer-term preservation impacts may be.

To test the import feature little further, I went back and imported the feed from Sowing Culture,  IMLS DCC’s blog which does include categories in the feed but they were not recognized by Anthologize.   Even though the image references did point back to Sowing Culture,  the PDF export went off with out a hitch.   On examining the PDF,  I found that the pages were breaking in the wrong place (after the post title, which left the titles dangling on the preceding page). I went back and looked at the other PDFs and found they exhibit the same behavior.   Finding page breaks in a straight run of HTML is a tough nut,  but since these are breaks across different Anthologize library items, I would think it would be possible.  I would only expect the posts to run as a complete text if I’d “Appended” one post to another.

Fortunately I’m not just stuck with the default PDF output,  Anthologize also allows you to export your project in ePub, TEI (with HTML) and RTF.  In Part 3, I’ll take a closer look at each of these to see what’s going on under the hood.

What follows is a kind of “think-out-loud” exercise about my first experience with Anthologize.  I intentionally did not read any of the documentation before trying Anthologize out – I wanted to see how far I could get just using it just based on the interface.

Installation

Although I already downloaded the Anthologize plug-in, there had been a lot of traffic on the development list.  The dev team had already released an update to fix some of the initial bugs.
Anthologize installs like any other WordPress plugin, so I added it to good ole Inherent Vice here.   I was a little wary about this, because I wasn’t quite sure how Anthologize would affect my regular blogging and plugins, etc.  But since it was just a plugin, it seemed worth trying it (I’d backed up my database earlier in the evening before upgrading my WordPress installation to the required 3.0 version).  Once activated, Anthologize added a new panel to my administrative dashboard.

Creating a Project

Under My Projects I created a new project, adding a title and my name as an author.  I thought I’d use Anthologize to gather all the posts I’d made about my Collections Dashboard research.

After adding a project, I was presented with the list of “My Projects” which now included the Collection Dashboard Diary that I’d just created.  It wasn’t quite clear what to do next, but as I hovered over the title of my project a sub-menu appeared. Project Details took me back to the screen I’d just completed with title and author information, nothing new here but nice to know you could change these after creating the project.  I went back to My Projects and hovered over the project title again, selecting “Manage Parts.”

Manage Parts gave me options for Items and Parts.  Items included a filter that would change which posts from my blog were displayed and a list of titles of previous posts.  I assumed I would be able to click on the posts, but nothing happened.  Apparently you need to first create a “Part.” After creating a part it was possible to drag posts from the Items column to the Parts column.  It might be helpful to put something here that suggests dragging. This was a familiar pattern to me, but I don’t know if the interface makes it obvious that dragging is what was required.

Once  posts were added to the Items menu, an additional set of links appeared. I clicked on the Edit link and was taken to the Anthologize edit screen.  Here I was able to make changes to the original post – or so I hoped.  I was a little unsure whether Anthologize would change the original post on the blog,  or whether I was editing a copy of the post.  The title of the WordPress page was “Editing Anthologize Library Item” -  I took this as assurance that I wasn’t editing the original post.  I added some text and saved it,  but I went back to make sure nothing changed in the original post.   Nope, Anthologize had made a copy of the post for me to edit.

The other option was to “Append” items.  I presume that this would combine two blog posts into one Anthologize item – but I didn’t have anything I wanted to combine yet.

Exporting a Project

The only thing left to do was Export my project.   Anthologize walks you though a several step process that lets you select a Creative Commons license (a very nice touch to have this built in) and add a dedication and acknowledgements section.  Lastly you can choose from several different publication formats, page size (8.5×11 or A4), font size and type.

Here’s where I ran into my first problem.  On clicking export I received the following error:

TCPDF ERROR: [Image] Unable to get image: /tmp/img_sm3Fuu

I went back and looked at the posts.  None seemed to have an embedded image with a file path like that.  I did have a Flickr badge in the middle of one post, so I removed it, thinking it could be causing a problem.  No luck.  I looked in the user forum but didn’t see an obvious solution.  There was some conversation on the development group about a similiar problem, but it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the posts I was trying to publish.

I then re-exported the project as a TEI (with HTML) file which went without a hitch.  On reviewing the TEI,  I realized that the posts I was trying to publish had been written on a related blog for the IMLS DCC project and the embedded images actually lived on that blog. The error that had been reported in the dev forums had to do with remote images. Once I’d removed all of the image sources,  the PDF was generated without a problem.

I created a new project and included several posts that I know used local images – these also exported without a problem.   Since I often use the Blog This feature for Flickr to publish posts to Inherent Vice, not being able to include remote images could be a problem for me.  I presume that images located remotely on Flickr will cause the PDF export to break.

This was my first impression of the Unable to Get Image problem.  In Part 2, I’ll explore what’s going on here a little more closely, import some content from another blog.  In Part 3 I’ll take a closer look at the default TEI markup.

Earlier this week Claire Warwick decided to Rain on Anthologize’s Parade; kicking off an active discussion about place of user studies in this kind of digital humanities tool building.

In a tweet earlier today, I suggested not throwing the “user study” out with the bathwater.  I’m realizing now that part of the confusion in this conversation is that “user study” is a somewhat vague term that can mean several things.  In Claire’s post she expressed concern:

I am really pleased that Anthologise had a UX team. But I can’t quite see what serious UX work you can actually do in a week. And this is a problem because if you are going to design something that users really want you need to study them first. You need to talk to them, interview them, observe them, feed back the results of this into the design process, try it again, retest, get more feedback etc.

While there have been several helpful responses from the UX team to Claire’s post (see Kathie’s comment on clarifying that interviews (albeit rapid) were conducted and the expertise of those involved), the comments I’m responding to are the ones that have felt more defensive – along the lines of “but look at all the downloads for @zotero, @omeka, @anthologize!” (sorry Tom) or @clioweb “Most academics write books that other academics haven’t thought of or asked for. No user surveys asking for what they want.”

Maybe it’s unfair to get my feathers ruffled about those (given the work that was done), but there has been less articulation of what sounds to me like a participatory design process.  Rather than gathering requirements, they gathered people who are representative of  users who would want Anthologize. While that’s different than the survey/interview/analysis process, it is a legitimate approach in and of itself.   As is the rapid/agile kind of development  I’ve seen come out of CHNM shops.   I think proudly owning these approaches and articulating them more clearly would be a better response than pointing to the number of downloads or devaluing different approaches.  (and as I’ve been writing, it seems like that’s been happening on twitter).   This isn’t an argument about involving users, but rather what methods should we use?

While scholars may not conduct a survey to decide what the topic of their next book is (sorry Jeremy),  the book (and it still is a book at this point, no?) that they do write is bounded by currently accepted practice – or it makes a case for a new set of practices.   Perhaps this conversation can open up a new round of discussion about what UX means for the digital humanities,  particularly an exploration of what kinds of UX methods most benefit the kinds of projects we are undertaking.   Talking about “users studies” isn’t very helpful if you don’t know who they are (or who you’d like them to be).   If your developer is just a developer, scratching their itches might not be the best approach. But what if your developer is also a recognized humanities scholar who is blending their expertise to create new tools?  How are the UX methods that have emerged from corporate development environments compatible with humanities scholarship and tools?  UX methods are often grounded in different kinds of social science – quantitative surveys, qualitative ethnography, structured interviews, etc. Is there a humanist UX approach that has been overlooked? (thinking about Johanna Drucker’s critiques of  visualization at the MIT Hyperstudio conference). How do you match the effort at UX with the overall budget of the project (just how much did One Week cost anyway?).  What are the right forums for sharing the scholarship of studying humanities tools?  Kathie says that there will be ongoing work in this direction, I would be interested in hearing more about what that research will look like.

As a final word on this, there are worse ways of going about this.   I’ve worked on projects that did user studies and then ignored much of what was learned to produce inferior (IMHO) products.   My own user-centered work is often hampered because I don’t have the development chops I need to give people what they want.  As much as Anthologize is about a product,  it’s also about building a community that has the ability to support the tool as it grows and evolves.   Already on-board are people who can commit code changes.   What’s the vision for including people conducting systematic UX evaluation and assessment? (as opposed to the anecdotal stream of bug reports and feature requests that will come in.)

View My Museums in a larger map

I’m sure I’ve forgotten some, but I’ll try to keep adding them as they pop into my head. These days I’m using things like Yelp! and Foursquare to check into museums when I go. Wouldn’t this have been a great thing for me to keep track of in the past? But it also makes me wonder what will happen to all the footprints I’m leaving in the digital sand.

ALISE 2010:  Patchwork Prototyping a Collections Dashboard (poster)

iConference 2010: Cultural Heritage Information Dashboards

Stay tuned for more on Dashboards at Museums and the Web 2010:

• Workshop: Building and Evaluating Collection Dashboards (Piotr Adamczyk, Richard Urban, Michael Twidale).
• Demonstration: Design and Development of a Collection Dashboard.

The first milestone of the Open Government Directive was met on January 22 with the release of new datasets on Data.gov. Each major government agency has uploaded at least three datasets in this initial action. The National Archives released the 2007–2009 Code of Federal Regulations and two datasets from its Archival Research Catalog. This is the first time this material is available as raw data in XML format.

Read more on The Secret Mirror

and ArchivesNext:

• NARA calls for public comments on how it can be more “open”
• NARA releases data sets on data.gov, including catalog data and organizational authority records

or Fred2.0

• NARA Archival Research Catalog – Compressed for Your Dowloading Pleasure
• Get the compressed and easily dowloadable data on Simon’s Fred2.0 iBiblio site. (Thanks to Simon and Mark for doing the heavy lifting here!)

Original ARC data is available at data.gov

It’s been a while since I’ve taught an undergraduate course, and I’m quite excited to see the diversity of students who have already enrolled in the course. I’ll be updating the draft syllabus as we go along to fill in some of the details (like exactly which activity I’m using for a particular week).

Thanks to all of you who have posted your digital humanities syllabuses to the web, They’ve been a useful guide as I’ve been revising this one. Thanks also to John Unsworth for sharing his earlier syllabus for this course on which this one is heavily based.

The editors of Library Trends are pleased to announce plans for a special issue titled “Involving Users in the Co-Construction of Digital Knowledge in Libraries, Archives, and Museums.”

This special issue will be guest edited by Drs. Paul F. Marty and Michelle M. Kazmer, College of Communication and Information, Florida State University, with Dr. Corinne Jorgensen (Florida State University), Katherine Burton Jones (Harvard Divinity School), and Richard J. Urban (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).

DESCRIPTION

Many libraries, archives, and museums provide their users with social computing environments that include the ability to tag collections, annotate objects, and otherwise contribute their thoughts to the knowledge base of the institution. Information professionals and users have responded to the transition to a web 2.0 world of user-created content by developing open source tools to coordinate these activities and researching the best ways to involve users in the co-creation of digital knowledge.

This rapid influx of new technologies and new methods of interacting with users has come at a time when libraries, archives, and museums still struggle to share data across their own institutions, let alone between different types of institutions. Information professionals in libraries, archives, and museums had barely begun to make progress developing crosswalks and data interoperability standards when, as social computing became the norm on the web, providing the ability for users to manipulate data changed from a cool toy to a basic expectation. Moving forward — and keeping pace with user expectations — requires the coordination of many different users (in all their variety) as they contribute, participate, shape, and create all types of data in all types of contexts.

We need to consider what social computing really means for the future of libraries, archives, and museums, and think carefully about the future trends and long-term implications of involving users in the co-construction of knowledge online. It is important to have broad-based discussions about what happens when users are involved in shaping and directing and guiding the development of online libraries, archives, and museums and their information resources.

For this issue of Library Trends, therefore, we seek authors who can step back and think broadly about those issues that are raised when we bring users into the mix in various ways and at various points in the data/information/knowledge life-cycle. We are interested in receiving high-level theory pieces, supported by research data of course, but with a focus on the long-term trends involved and their implications for libraries, archives, and museums. In particular, we are looking for papers that explore the future trends and long-term implications of the many different ways in which information professionals in libraries, archives, and museums have, can, and should involve their users in the co-construction of digital knowledge based on their online collections.

Sample questions include, but are certainly not limited to:

• How are libraries, archives, and museums implementing user-contributed data / descriptions of artifacts, objects, or collections on their websites? What are the long-term implications of involving users in the co-description, co-cataloguing of digital knowledge?
• How are libraries, archives, and museums encouraging users to create online collections of personal favorites or similar items on their websites? What are the long-term implications of involving users in the co-creation, co-curation of digital knowledge?
• How are libraries, archives, and museums encouraging users to create / structure their own online environments, designing personalized websites or portals specifically suited to individual needs? What are the implications of involving users in the design and structuring of online interfaces for the development and presentation of digital knowledge?
• How is the education of library, archives, and museum practitioners (and in particular the increase in online and hybrid learning technologies) influencing the ways practitioners subsequently incorporate technology into their user service environments in libraries, archives, and museums?

IMPORTANT DATES

• Optional Abstract: December 1, 2009 (see below)
• Submission Deadline: March 1, 2010
• Review Decisions: May 15, 2010 (all submissions will be peer-reviewed)
• Final Versions Due: July 15, 2010
• Publication: Early 2011

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

All submissions should be emailed directly to Paul Marty at marty@fsu.edu or Michelle Kazmer at mkazmer@fsu.edu.

For formatting instructions, please see the Library Trends Author Guidelines available here:

http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/library_trends/guidelines.html

If you wish, you may submit an optional abstract (by email to Paul Marty at marty [at] fsu.edu or Michelle Kazmer at mkazmer [at] fsu.edu) for feedback by December 1, 2009.

A PDF version of this CFP is available.

More information about Library Trends

309 W. Vine

Recently, the University of Illinois Library digitized a large number of the best resources I used the last time I did this – the Champaign city and county directories.  These, combined with the Champaign County Historical Archives online database, give a nice picture of the early history of our new place wihtout me having to leave the house. I’ll flesh this out a little more when I have a chance to go and read some of the referenced news clippings at UFL. .

Owners

• 1904-1912: future resident Emery (aka Emory) A. Nelson works at University as a janitor. Resides in various locations on Clark St. in Champaign with wife Catherine (after 1908)
• 1912: property not listed, but it is the year that the first resident got married.
• 1914-1916: George W. Snyder (Lora M. – nee Lane); Snyder & Collord Shoes
  Snyder & Collord was located at 312 Hickory. C. (where the patio for J Gould is currently)
• 1918: Emery A. Nelson (Kathyrn); Carpenter & Vernon Alldridge (Mary); Chauffeur for Chester & O’Bryne Transfer Co. (63 Chester St.) [C&O also listed under "horse shoers"]
  
  

  from Champaign County Directory (1923)

• 1925: E.A. Nelson (Katherine);  Carpenter Robesons & Jesse J. Collins (Minnie); trucker IC (Illinois Central?) [the Nelsons must have been taking in boarders, as the names of other couples changes through the years]
• 1927: E.A. Nelson (Kath);  clk (clerk?) F.K. Robeson & Glenn Padgett (Mary);  driver Model Laundry
  

  from Johnson's Champaign-Urbana Directory (1927)

  

  from Johnson's Champaign-Urbana Directory (1927)

• 1930: Raymond and Blanche Nelson reside at 108 S. Poplar St. in Urbana, IL [not sure about the relation between R.B. Nelson and E.A. Nelson]
• 1931: Lora Snyder (nee Lane) dies. March 4, 1931 [She was a city nurse.]
• 1935: Emory A. Nelson; sales Robesons; Ray. B. Nelson (Blanche); switchman Illinois Central & Lawrence L. Weatherford (Gladys); sign painter.  [this is the last year that Emory/Emery Nelson is listed.  Katherine isn't listed in this entry]
• 1936: Ray B. Nelson (Blanche); switchman Illinois Central (IC) & Dale N. Dilley (Ruth); driver Eisner Grocery [Eisners is listed under Wholesale Groceries and was located at 202-204 S. Market St. C.]
• 1938: Ray B. Nelson (Blanche);  breakman  [RBN is listed as the owner]
• 1940: Ray B. Nelson (Blanche);  switchman & Ray B. Nelson Jr.;  clerk
• 1941: Emery A. Nelson deceased Feb. 1941  (born December 6, 1856)
• 1944: R.B. Nelson Jr. served in Patton’s “Ghost” Corps
• 1950: Raymond B. Nelson (Blanche);  delivery man Courier
• 1955: R.B. Nelson deceased (born May 30, 1888)
• 1972: Blanche Cleavland Nelson deceased March 13, 1972 (Woodlawn Cemtery)

The online trail ends here…

The Champaign-Urbana Historic Built Environment Photograph Collection offers a selection from the holdings of the Champaign County Historical Archives, which was established as a department of The Urbana Free Library in 1956. Among its holdings of books, manuscripts, and maps, the archives has preserved over 50,000 photographs of local people and locations. This collection provides a sampling of the rich visual history of Champaign-Urbana’s historic built environment in the 19th and 20th century, including images of residential, commercial, governmental, educational, medical, and religious structures, and thus reflects the notion that historic buildings serve as an entryway into the community’s collective memory.

The Champaign-Urbana Historic Built Environment Photograph Collection is a joint project of the Champaign County Historical Archives at Urbana Free Library and the Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

This was as far as I got on this project:

One thing that was becoming clear is that I needed some easier way to locate the next historic building for me to shoot. Since I was trying to replicate the view in the original photo I’d also need to be able to see it. Champaign has yet to be blessed with 3G, so it was painfully slow to browse to the ContentDM site and try to search for something, scroll through a list, etc. etc. The CUHBE collection DOES include the address of the site when know, but the address has been broken up into two separate fields, neither of which appear in the short display. There had to be an easier way to get to these records.

Piotr was able to build a Pipe that parsed the OAI_DC output from ContentDM (more coming soon from him on this) into various PIPE formats. This was a good step forward, but I still couldn’t see the addresses of the historic buildings. By adding a string builder module to the Piotr’s pipe, I now get the name of the building along with it’s address. Now, what I’d really like to do is put these locations on a map, but the location builder doesn’t seem to like the addresses in here – I’m sure with a little more poking I can get it to work, stay tuned!

Champaign Urbana Historic Built Environment Pipe