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Palladio: Humanities thinking about data visualization

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A guest post by Mark Braude, Postdoctoral Research Fellow / Project coordinator, Humanities + Design, Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA), Stanford

An Overview of Palladio

Palladio (palladio.designhumanities.org) is a web-based platform that allows any researcher to upload, visualize, and analyze complex and multi-dimensional data, directly in a web browser. The Palladio visualization system combines a primary view with filters to make it easy to query a data set. There is no need to create an account and nor do we store any data. Any work done in the browser can be saved and shared as a Palladio Project, which takes the form of a .json file.

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Reading Herodotus spatially in the undergraduate classroom, Part III

This is the third and last of three posts reporting on the deployment of the Hestia toolkit to teach Herodotus’ Histories in two college classrooms at The University of Texas at Austin. The previous post described the design of an upper-division research seminar, intended for Ancient History, Classics, and Classical Archaeology majors, that integrated Hestia resources with training in historiography and network visualization. This post explores how that course design worked in practice, discussing successes and failures from the perspectives of both students and instructor. It’s a long post, but the conclusions are summarized at the end, so the impatient reader can jump to the bottom.

Most teachers are aware of the gap between the ideal version of a class created during the design process and the way that class unfolds in practice over a semester. For most of us, the practical version includes dead ends, failed experiments, course corrections, and — if we’re lucky — some unexpected successes. In some cases, elements that we initially saw as core components of the class turn out to be less important than aspects that we treated as peripheral when we designed it. In other cases, canonical core material crowds out digressions we hoped to spend time exploring. In this class — officially titled “Watching the Barbarians: Herodotus, Ethnography, and Archaeology” — both of these things happened. This isn’t at all unusual. But what makes this a particular interesting case study is the way digital technologies interacted with the arc of the course.

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Reading Herodotus spatially in the undergraduate classroom, Part II

This is the second of three posts reporting on the deployment of the Hestia toolkit to teach Herodotus’ Histories in two college classrooms at The University of Texas at Austin. This post describes the integration of Hestia resources in the design of an upper-division research seminar intended for Ancient History, Classics, and Classical Archaeology majors. The seminar took the first four-and-a-half books of the Histories as a platform from which to explore historiography, ethnography, archaeology, and network analysis. The third and final post will discuss the successes and failures of this class from the perspectives of both students and instructor.

Adding the Hestia narrative timemap of Herodotus’ Histories to a large lecture course on Ancient Greece in the fall of 2013 was fairly straightforward. The interface itself was already in place, and had been finalized and stable for several years; it worked without any surprises. The course already covered Herodotus, and previous iterations already emphasized the work’s spatial aspect by requiring the Landmark edition and including map quizzes. Thus existing Hestia resources were layered onto an existing course, with minor adjustments to encourage the students to use them (see my previous post). I found this to be a useful experiment, but it fell far short of demonstrating the potential of the Hestia toolkit for student research and exploration. For students in the lecture course, the narrative timemap was still a platform for consumption, and I think that this explains their somewhat lukewarm response. As I argued in the previous post, real engagement with innovative digital resources is more likely to come when students are makers, not just users.

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Why Update ORBIS?

There’s a lot of digital humanities left to be done. There are books that haven’t been digitized that need to be mined to find trends to put on maps using algorithms that haven’t even been designed yet. So, when you consider that the significant effort necessary to put a new finish on a project like ORBIS, you might think it’s a waste of time. I know I get a bit uncomfortable about it when I consider the other projects that were proposed and which lost out on achieving some measure of implementation because of the support for a version 2 of ORBIS. It’s not a zero sum game that we have going in this field, but it does suffer from entrenchment and there are natural inducements to supporting existing, successful work that can foster a rich-get-richer climate.

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Networks, visualizations, and the space-time conundrum

Back in November Hestia2 held its second seminar in a place where the sun really does always shine (see below): Stanford, California. There was a very good reason, in addition to being able to wear a t-shirt in November, for holding a seminar on Digital Humanities in Stanford. With its campus in Palo Alto, Stanford shares a location with a number of high-tech household names, including Apple, Google and Facebook, while smaller start-ups in the San Francisco Bay Area are but a short Caltrain ride away. One of these, Farallon Geographics, has recently worked with the Getty Conservation Institute and World Monuments Fund, to produce an open-source, web-based, geospatial information system for cultural heritage inventory and management, called Arches, showing the massive potential for collaboration between private digital enterprise and the public cultural sector, including higher education.

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Hestia2@Stanford: Visualizing Complex Networks

The Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis is proud to host the next Hestia2 event, on November 4-5 in Wallenberg Hall at Stanford University. During this free one and a half day seminar we will explore network analysis and uncertainty in data from a number of different perspectives. It will also be an opportunity to take a sneak preview of a number of new and exciting projects.

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Maps, stories, lines: a multiple-lane highway

Some of the initial discussions that led to the Hestia project were largely motivated by the growing employment of innovative and alternative mapping techniques in geography – a discipline which, arguably, has provided the main home for theoretical debates in cartography. A number of recent academic papers in human geography journals have provided a more explicit engagement with the relationship between narratives and maps; as they might be of interest to the readers of this blog I have summarized them here.

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Videos Southampton seminar

Last month we organised a seminar on linked data and spatial networks in Southampton. Videos and slides of presentations of the seminar are now available on The Connected Past website. There are hours of footage and books-worth of slides on there for you to enjoy! This was only the first in a series of Hestia2 events. More info on Hestia2, future seminars and online resources can be found on our new website. Looking forward to seeing you at one of our future seminars! 

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On organising the Hestia2 seminar in Southampton

As the organiser of the Hestia2 seminar in Southampton I could write about our initial struggle to find a good format, my fight with the university to book a seminar room in a completely booked out campus, discussions with our financial support staff to figure out a balanced budget, the technical flaws with our livestream feed, and of course the many very human feelings like “no-one will turn up!?!” and “what shirt should I wear?”. But none of that would be very interesting to read, and all of these concerns are now firmly pushed to the back of my mind and replaced by the feeling that this seminar was a success!

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Reflections on the Southampton Workshop

I’ve come into Hestia2 feeling like a bit of an interloper, asked by my former colleague Stefan Bouzarovski to join the original team in order to organise one of the workshops (which we’ll be holding in Birmingham in the new year).  So it was with a little trepidation that I made my way down to Southampton for the inaugural meeting on a baking hot 18 July.  Meeting Elton Barker and other members of the team for the first time further convinced me that I’m part of a really exciting project.

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