How to get in TOUCH with your research?

by Emilie Walsh & Dr Christina Tuke Flanders


Indiana Jones’ granddaughter…

Imagine Indiana Jones getting his hands on a beautiful ancient artefact…

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Originally posted by t3chn0ir

How is he going to archive it and study it? It’s too fragile to be handled on an everyday basis, or to travel across the country to be examined by a fellow scholar… So, what would Indie do? Draw a beautiful board of detailed depiction of the artefact!

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http://anthropology.si.edu/naa/exhibits/strong/strong4.htm

Next generation Indiana Jones Junior would probably just get his digital camera and take a snap of it!

But what would Indie’s granddaughter would do today? 3D scan it and built a beautiful digital 3D model of it, to share with researchers around the globe!

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Data Storytelling

This year at Data Storytelling, we ran workshops for researchers working with Object-based data sets.

What is an object-based data set? It is any collection of three-dimensional objects you are working with for your research. This applies to a wide range of disciplines, from zoologists working with bones or taxidermy, to archaeologists researching ancient ceramic, but also medical or dentistry research, art history and conservation, and so on.

During our two-day workshop, our participant learnt to 3D scan objects, and generate a 3D model than they can then 3D print to have a replica or just visualise online and create beautiful online exhibition with 3D models, to share with other researchers.



Grainger museum at Data StoryTelling

For this event, we partnered with the Grainger museum, who kindly lent some objects from their collection.

@GraingerMuseum collection! Come to #datstory to learn #3Dscanning and online exhibition https://t.co/bGtOVl7Fqb pic.twitter.com/z3VdqrUw5x

— Emilie Walsh (@emilouwalsh) 22 June 2017

We were lucky to dig out some treasure and touch (with gloves!) and play with some of the personal belongings of Percy Grainger!

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The participants were thrilled to get that opportunity and soon started to ask all kinds of questions about this particular denture cast, or an enigmatic lady’s shoe from the 19th century!

#3Dscanning with the @GraingerMuseum collection at #datstory pic.twitter.com/k88hZJktnw

— Annelies Van de Ven (@archaeoa1) 3 July 2017

Instead of looking at photos in a book of Percy Grainger’s artefacts, people were given the chance to directly interact with the real objects. This immediately engaged people because they can get a real life sense of  what these objects feel, weigh and even smell like. It’s a very visceral experience. It triggers the curiosity and get people working together very quickly!

What is object based learning?

Object-based learning has been a way to learn about cultural collections in the museum world for years, but it’s only recently that universities started to show an interest.

I asked our Training Consultant, Dr Christina Tuke Flanders, what are the benefits to bring Object Based Learning into the classroom.

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She explained: “Introducing object based learning to your curriculum can make for a visceral experience for your students by lighting up their five senses. Touching objects that have a direct link to the past can enhance students imagination and therefore an understanding of a topic/concept.

This technique also promotes transferable skills such as teamwork and communication via the discussions that naturally stem from using objects in this way. And lastly, the brain loves novelty in learning, it is helpful to combine traditional learning experiences (lectures/tutorials/workshops) with an Object Based Learning experience.”


Object-based learning at the University of Melbourne

At the University of Melbourne, the new Arts West building has been designed to engage students with object-based learning. the cultural collections of the University are in display in windows across the building, and Arts West is equipped with a Gallery space for exhibitions and several Objects-Lab to engage directly with Artwork and artefact in the classroom

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http://arts.unimelb.edu.au/articulation/editions/2016-editions/december-2016/object-based-learning-a-new-mode-in-arts-west

Case Study: Archaeology

3D printing can also be a fantastic tool for object-based learning. Annelies is a PhD candidate in Archaeology at the University of Melbourne and she has 3D scan some of the materials she works with, such as a Cyrus Cylinder, or some Egyptian statuette at Data Storytelling (Read more about it here).

She 3D printed a fac-simile of her Cyrus cylinder for conservation and pedagogy purposes. How great is it for students to actually get to touch a replica of a 3D artefact! To feel the embossing and engraving in it, to have a precise idea of its size and shape, is the best way to remember it and connect with it through experience.

Think of the potential of 3D printing for communication and teaching: how cool would it be to bring a 3D model at your talk for your audience to have a direct experience of what you are demonstrating!

If you want to organise a workshop on 3D modelling, 3D scanning and 3D printing, be in touch us at research bazaar!

Don’t be afraid and get in TOUCH with your research with Object Based Learning!

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Originally posted by introverts-hideaway

Data Storytelling – Communication & Visualisation Skills for Researchers

by Emilie Walsh

For the second year in a row, Research Platform services is running Data Storytelling event for researchers across disciples. This will be an interactive team-based event, where you will learn with other researchers a range of skills to turn your research and your data into good storytelling material! How often do you need to turn a bunch of data into something coherent that you can communicate about? Or you need good visual communication material to promote and explain your work?Participants will be mentored in groups and supported in answering self-guided research questions with new digital methods, from data collection to visualisation.This will take place in the new digital studio in Arts West, a great collaborative space for researchers keen to up-skill in the digital tools!

Vincent and I will be running the Digital Archives of 3D objects stream. This is for anyone interested in working with objects based data sets : from art historians to zoologists, from dentistry to conservation researchers !


For as long as researchers have been working with artefacts, bones, or any kind of  three-dimensional objects, they have found the need to document their data: from anatomy drawings, to photographs, there is always a need to keep a visual trace of your research material. Some objects are just too fragile to be handled too often, or can’t be moved across institutions to be available for other researchers to work with them. 

Digitising your object based data set can now be a good solution to archive your research, communicate about it, and share it with others.

For our 2-day workshop we have partnered with the Grainger Museum to work on some of their collection. They have shares with us some of their most fascinating artefact, for us to 3D scan them, tinker your 3D model, and archive them online!I went to the Grainger’s storage to help select and pick up these treasures:


In our stream you will not only get the opportunity to use the university 3D scanners, but also learn how to use a range of digital tools to modify it, rescale it, play around with the lighting, and then export it to be displayed online, or even get a facsimile 3D printed!

How cool would it be to have a 3D model printed to communicate about your work, bring to a lecture or a presentation? There is a lot of interest recently around Objet-Based learning, and how we remember better when we get to experience, touch, feel and get a real sense of scale, texture and so on. 

Our Research Platform team have worked in the past to scan and print a replica of a roman coin, for archaeology students to get a better idea of it than with a photo!

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Annelies Van de Ven has also been scanning and printing her cyrus cylinder for communication purposes!

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Learn to do the same at our workshop!

Hurry up and register today!

https://datstory.eventbrite.com.au/

First ResBaz RPRWG grants are a resounding success!

by Paul Mignone

Last year, the Research Bazaar’s Research Product Realisation Working Group (#RPRWG) invited University of Melbourne researchers to apply for the 3D printing mini research grants. A total of 8 grants of AUD 5,000 each were awarded to support impact factor-based research (e.g., publications, exhibitions etc.) in the use of 3D printing alongside its applications across various research disciplines.

As 2015 comes to a close, it is with great pleasure to announce that the majority of RPRWG grants have successfully concluded, producing high-quality research outcomes that can be accessed via figshare digital object identifiers (DOI). A big shout-out and congratulations to our first RPRWG grant recipients!

1)       Christopher Bolton - #PrintedOptics

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1613539

2)      Varsha Pilbrow - #greatapedentalscoringsystem

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4225/49/565BD0B122FC4

3)      Darcy Zelenko and Ravi Bessabava - #optiskel

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4225/49/565BE1B42CB89

4)      Kerry Leonard - #totouchbeauty

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4225/49/5654E2D94C260

5)      Lachlan Whitehead - #PARASIGHT

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.2009034.v1

6)      Amanda Ng - #3DMRIPhantom

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4225/49/5653BB1E9FAF2

Introducing Data Vinci

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by Fiona Tweedie

The Research Bazaar’s ResPlaty mascot has many guises. The patron of the Humanities and Social Science team is Data Vinci. Like her namesake, Data Vinci is multi-talented - whether it’s collecting survey data, analysing text, creating maps, visualising networks or typesetting documents, this Renaissance ResPlaty has it covered!

Our training activities reflect the range of our interests. As part of Research @ Library week, we took a trip down to the VCA to deliver training in Omeka to some of the VCA’s students and some keen members of the library staff. Here’s what librarians Ruth McConchie and Sophie Kollo had to say about the experience:

The Omeka workshop was one of the highlights of our Researcher@Library Week. It was really fun and hand-on experience, with Fiona teaching us one element, then letting us run free testing out the platform with our own material and projects.  Fiona helped us to think through the design of our Omeka pages with Post-its, which was really useful for those who hadn’t designed a website before. Because we are librarians, we were very excited to learn about the Dublin Core metadata standards behind Omeka and the ability to add in fields like attribution and copyright conditions. We are going to use our new skills to build a website to showcase the incredible collection of Architectural Atelier drawings from the University of Melbourne’s Cultural Collections.

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Image ‘Green Eye of the Yellow God: Design for filmset’

We also teach Python’s Natural Language Toolkit, a spin on Python that’s designed especially for those who work with large bodies of test. Most recently, we taught NLTK to a small group of researchers from the Humanities and Social Sciences, who were working on everything from Tony Abbott’s Facebook page to citizen participation in policy design. We explored ways to import and analyse texts, including study of features of formal and informal language and trying our hands at web scraping and extracting data from PDFs (with mixed results). 

See, I said we were multi-skilled!

Keep your eye out for our upcoming trainings in collecting and cleaning data and making maps. And of course we’ll be there in force at the Research Bazaar conference. Because like that other da(ta) Vinci, we believe:

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding

Moving on from the Research Bazaar

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by Fiona Tweedie

It’s true. After nearly two years lingering at the multi-coloured delights of the Research Bazaar, it’s time to load up my camels and set out on the next phase of my journey. And, inasmuch as any of us knows where we’re going, I’ve got my next destination planned - Data Science at the Australian Ballet.

What I’ve learned

When I joined the Research Bazaar family in February of 2014, it was a much smaller group. I already knew Flanders (@DFFlanders), of course. We’d organised GovHack together in 2013. And that’s a lesson right there. You find great people all over, but volunteering with someone is an opportunity to really get to know them. And a big event is a real test of someone’s mettle.

I knew that Flanders moves fast, makes stuff happen, and is always generous with the credit and the spotlight. These are great characteristics in a mentor and made me excited to join his next adventure.

While I’ve frequently felt like I’m running hard to keep up with the technical side of the job, there’s no doubt that I’ve learned a huge amount about coding and managing data. Did I mention that I’m going to be a data scientist? With a degree in Ancient History and four years of experience in policy, this career progression is perhaps unexpected. But in the last two years, I’ve learned and taught Python, CartoDB, and Omeka and played with a host of other digital research tools. More importantly, I’ve gained confidence in my ability to figure things out. I’ve often joked that if you can survive legal Latin, you’re bullet proof. It turns out that code is just another language and that, once you’ve recovered from the shock of something unfamiliar, it can be picked apart in similar ways.

Building a new program and looking after a growing team are demanding tasks. I’m still learning to delegate and to ask for help. I know it’s important to accept that no event is perfect and trust that my team is there and will do a great job.

What I’ll miss

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There’s no doubt, leaving the ResFamily is going to be the hardest part of the move. I’ve been privileged to work with a wonderfully diverse group of people, who are all incredibly smart, committed and creative. We’ve been given a freedom to play and explore in our work, which is rare. I’ve learned a lot technically, but also about building community, working in a team, and leading a complex program. Watching the team gain skills and confidence has been incredibly rewarding and I’m genuinely proud of what we’ve achieved together.

The ugly bits

I’d be lying if I said there aren’t problems I’m relieved to be leaving behind. The pressure on postgraduates and early career researchers to deliver great research, publish, teach and build their professional standing is only going to increase as research jobs become more scarce. It seems we’re just starting to have conversations about mental health in research and there’s no doubt that it’s a tough environment. It makes me sad that there are such high personal costs to pursuing research. And I’m frustrated by how slowly recognition of the next generation digital research we’re supporting seems to be spreading in some areas. I hope to see greater flexibility in the ‘academic’ career path, with more value placed on both the technical skills and breadth of experience that come from different types of work, in coming years.

I love research and I still believe that there’s nothing better than being in the room when the ideas are firing, so I have no doubt that I’ll swing by the Research Bazaar again in future. And the lessons I’ve learned here will stay with me, wherever I go.

Natural Language ToolKit meets Mr Fraser

by Fiona Tweedie

Text mining, sometimes called ‘distant reading’ lets researchers analyse large bodies of text and uncover patterns in the language. This sort of work is nothing new, but as digitisation makes the available corpora larger, it would be incredibly labour-intensive to do this work by hand - imagine going through millions of books with a highlighter trying to uncover key words. This is where the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) comes in. A library of the programming language Python, it allows researchers to quickly uncover key features of a text, such as lexical richness and key words, create topic models and present these findings graphically.

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Being able to work effectively with large bodies of text, whether they are online discussion fora or digitised archival records, is increasingly useful for researchers in many fields of inquiry. We started teaching NLTK last year, and have since developed a course that has been taught as far afield as the US, UK and Canada. To demonstrate the power of NLTK, we needed a dataset that would be interesting to researchers from multiple backgrounds and were fortunate to be approached by the University of Melbourne Archives, who had digitised the Radio Electorate Talks from the Malcolm Fraser Archive.

The collection consists of a series of radio talks and press releases addressed to Mr Fraser’s electorate of Wannon, in rural Victoria. As the collection spans the thirty years of his parliamentary career, it makes a great test case for longitudinal analysis. For instance, topic modelling reveals his concerns changing from a rural backbencher, discussing issues of farming, through his time as Minister for the Army (January 19660 February 1968) and Minister for Defence (November 1969 - March 1971), in which the conflict in Vietnam looms large, and eventually his broader concerns as leader of the Liberal Party and Prime Minister (November 1975 - March 1983). 

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This graph shows changes in the modal verbs used in the corpus

There were some challenges in working with the collection. The speeches all come with metadata sections, which contain information such as date, title and genre. However, the metadata isn’t completely consistent and contains variant terms such as Radio Talk, radio talk and radio talks. To a human reader, these are plainly the same thing, but to a computer, they’re distinct. This provides a valuable demonstration to participants in the importance of clean data. The text files themselves have been produced by OCR scanning typescripts of the the speeches, so aren’t as clean as a researcher could wish, either. We talk in the workshop about some of the steps that can be taken to try to clean up text (such as spell-checking).

We got really interested in the speeches and how NLTK can be used to navigate a corpus. Research Bazaar’s Daniel McDonald and Lachlan Musicman built this site to present the speeches, allow searching by bigram and trigram (which are good ways to identify the key topics of a document) and by year and genre. The site also presents the OCR text alongside the scanned typescript, which allows for correction of the text. The site shows how NLTK can easily provide the basis for navigating an archive. All of this exploration is only possible, of course because the University of Melbourne archives made the documents available to be downloaded and explored as plain text as well as PDF. This willingness to digitise the collection then open and share the results opens up the possibilities for reuse and novel research.

This work was made possible by funding from the Australian National Data Service to develop training materials showcasing Australian research data. We are very grateful for this support

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Metadata: harder than it looks

By Fiona Tweedie

Log in to your Omeka account, add some data, attach files and share with the world. Easy, right? Not so fast!

As any researcher who collects data knows, organising it so that it can be interrogated usefully takes forethought. So at the recent Omeka workshop we ran here at the Research Bazaar, we started with hands off keyboards. Instead, participants were asked to create their collection on postit notes, then group the ‘items’ into collections and attach descriptive metadata. In some cases, it emerged that something such as a location was better as a collection of items rather than an item in its own right. In another cases, an artist was entered both as an individual, so that she could be represented as part of an exhibition, but also formed part of the metadata as creator of her works. By exploring how to arrange physical objects before jumping into Omeka, workshop particpants already had an appreciation of the importance of metadata and organising data.

Particpants came from a range of disciplines, from fine art to archaeology and included both professional staff from the library and archives and research students. The diversity of the participants reflects the flexibility of Omeka as a tool. It’s ideal for handling images but also makes a great database for other types of objects, from films to fish!

We’re exploring the possibilities of Omeka as a tool for managing cultural data collections as part of a year-long pilot in conjunction with the library. The resources from the workshop are available here. Thanks are due to ANDS, who funded the development of the workshop materials as part of our Data Carpentry program. And huge thanks to Lachlan Musicman, whose help in unsticking and reassuring participants on the day was invaluable!

Introducing text mining (and myself)

*by [Daniel McDonald](https://twitter.com/interro_gator)* Hullo everyone, I’m Daniel McDonald—a PhD student in Linguistics/Medicine here at the University of Melbourne. My thesis looks at how language use changes over the course of membership in an online support group for bipolar disorder. My background is in stock-standard linguistics—think syntax trees, cardinal vowels, Oxford commas, and wugs. Increasingly, though, my research has led me down the computational path. Because the dataset I’m using in my thesis is over eight million words long, I realised I’d need to do a bit of automatic text wrangling and number crunching to get the job done right. Like many others before me, I headed straight to Python as the language of choice. It fits a grammarian like a glove (enter a Python session and type `import this` if you want to understand why). After a couple of months, I was thoroughly hooked: I’d written [my first library](https://www.github.com/interrogator/corpkit), and irreparably damaged my relationship with my sub-editor brother by proclaiming that Python ‘could probably automate like half your job’. Anyway, recently, I’ve been helping out the Research Platforms gang, writing materials and giving free lessons to postgrads with the inimitable Fiona Tweedie (@FCTweedie) about the juicy intersection between Python, words, grammar and discourse.

Team NLTK at ResBaz

*Team NLTK at ResBaz* It’s perhaps a little bit of an unusual stream within the ResPlat group, because a fair chunk of the people interested in our lessons are from a humanities/social science background—that is to say, a fair chunk of people have never, ever, entered anything into the command line. So, our lessons cover quite a lot of ground: we start with basic Python/programming concepts, but we also try where possible to contextualise what we’re doing with some choice snippets from some of the Big Names, like Firth, Chomsky, Halliday and Widdowson (imagine *that* dinner party, linguists). So, I’m basically writing today to introduce myself (expect more blogs from me in the coming weeks!), and to share an insight I got out of teaching, both at [#ResBaz](https://twitter.com/search?q=resbaz) and at our four-session course that ended last week. (The lesson materials for both courses, by the way, are [freely available on GitHub](https://www.github.com/resbaz/nltk).)

Fiona, my trusty co-pilot, begins our lessons by stressing a particularly fundamental concept in text analysis: that language is data, just like stats—that you can learn things about the world by manipulating and interrogating it. We’re both passionate about this idea, actually: we sometimes repeat it like a bit of a mantra.

What’s interesting is the radically different way in which the Humanities- and STEM- folk in the classrooms react to this idea. Humanities students often roll their eyes a little … ’well, of course language is data’. They’ve never thought otherwise, and are often in our classes because they want training in analytical tools. The people from STEM, however, often seem to have their minds blown, and immediately invent whole new areas of interdisciplinary study to cope: ’My god—are—are you saying we can run Wikipedia articles through a DNA sequencer?!’.

These awesome and opposite reactions to a basic fact about language go a long way to show you the complementarity of totally different branches of research, and totally different kinds of researchers.

In our classes, half of the students come to us having known since birth the difference between integers and floats, and why you can’t parse HTML with regular expressions. These students are wonderful: they can help the others understanding the meaning of a famously vague Python error message, or fix an unexpected encoding error on their instructor’s MacBook if need be (thank you thank you thank you).

The other half of the students bring to the table a totally different kind of knowledge about research: they understand exactly why we shouldn’t conflate a word with the thing it denotes, or mix formal and functional theories of language willy-nilly.

Opposites attract, worlds collide, cliches abound, and many hands make light work: as a group, we’re always far more than the sum of our parts. An interdisciplinary classroom is a superhero, whose only weakness is deadlines.

Informal posters

superlinguo:

Informal Posters is a research project by the Digital Fabulists studying the context, used language, politics, tone and semiotics of informal signage.

This gallery is a collection of informal signs collected for use as the primary resource for this analysis. 

This collection of signs and posters will be familiar to anyone who has worked in a shared office space. I’ve submitted a few from around my office, including this nice fluro number from the photocopy room.

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One thing that becomes apparent when browsing the collection is that there are some fairly consistent discourse stance strategies going on in these signs. Styalistically we see a lot of capitalisation, highlighting and san serif fonts. Linguistically, there are lots of imperatives verbs, with some hedging via pleases and thankyous. The tone of these signs is important - they have to convey a message that their creator thinks is serious enough to warrant a notification, but in a way that will most effectively encourage people to go along with the request. It will be interesting to see what patterns emerge as their collection grows.

You can submit signs and posters that you see to the digital fabulists via their website.

We teach Omeka at the Research Bazaar, and we’d never recommend a product we hadn’t explored extensively. This project grew out of our play-testing of Omeka, and an explosion of signs in the Research Platforms kitchen. Thanks to Lauren for this kind write-up and her contributions!

(via superlinguo)

Upcoming Conference: Digital Densities

Our good friends at the Digital Humanities Incubator within the School of Culture and Communications are having a conference! Digital Densities: examining relations between material cultures and digital data will run for one day on 27 March at the University of Melbourne.

They’re inviting 20 minute papers on the theme ‘Digital Densities’ that explore the intersection of digital and material culture. Proposals from scholars with a range of disciplinary backgrounds as well as from archival practitioners are welcome.

Proposals are due on 4 February and should include:

  • Paper title
  • Abstract (150 words)
  • Your bio (100 words), institutional affiliation and contact details

More details (and the full Call for Papers) can be found on the Digital Humanities Incubator blog

Send proposals to Amanda Trevisanut: amandat@unimelb.edu.au

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Wanted! Next generation digital humanists

By Fiona Tweedie

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The research landscape is changing and research can now be more of an adventure than ever. Bringing new technology to research problems in the humanities and social sciences is making new areas of inquiry accessible and changing the scope and scale that’s possible for researchers. Whether it’s using the latest CT scanners to learn more about ancient Egyptian mummies or using text-mining techniques to analyse huge digitised archives, there are whole worlds becoming available to bold explorers. So what do the adventurous new digital humanists look like and what’s in their toolkit?

A domain expert

While the digital tools are exciting, it’s critical that researchers are still experts in their domains and understand the background of their field and its problems. Only someone with deep knowledge of their field is going to know which are the compelling research questions to ask and how to begin looking for the answers. It’s no good going looking for treasure if you won’t recognise it when you see it!

Data-literate

At a fundamental level, the digital humanist gets data. Humanities researchers have always been collecting data, but we haven’t always thought about it like that. Digital tools, however, demand that researchers think much more explicitly about how we collect, manage and structure information. Whatever the object of study, the data itself must be set up correctly to enable the dataset to be interrogated. This means basics like having files in the right formats for the tools and the information structured so that it can be analysed. Want to analyse the dates of letters in an archive? Make sure that the date is in a consistent format in your database. Getting these basics right is essential to being able to work effectively with data.

Going further, the digital humanist needs to know how to process and combine data to get the most out of it. She also needs to understand the limitations of the data she’s using, which sometimes means recognising the challenges and limits of digitisation itself. To be really sure that she’s not going astray, our digital explorer must also understand the tools she uses and their strengths and weaknesses. Like any research methodology, digital tools will return a result but the researcher needs to be critical when interpreting it. Knowing the field, knowing the data and understanding the tools mean that our explorer is less likely to mistake a crocodile for a safe bridge across a river.

Fearless

It sounds like a lot to ask. And it is. Researchers are already under pressure to know and do a huge amount. But digital humanists need to be prepared to strike out into the unknown. Most importantly, the digital humanist is unafraid of technology. She’s willing to try new techniques and lines of inquiry and is excited to collaborate with experts from other fields who bring fresh learning and perspectives to their projects. With a fearless attitude and the right tools and companions, the digital humanist is equipped to go exploring in uncharted territories and bring back new discoveries!

Tesoro de Villena

I was recently fortunate to go to London for Mozilla Festival and meet with a number of digital humanities practitioners. This post grew out of my conversations with them. Special thanks to Ben O’Steen, James Baker, Daniel Pett, Jane Winters, Simon Mahony, Ben Showers, and Mark Hedges for being so generous with their time and thoughts.

Why Code?

By Fiona Tweedie

Someone asked me a while ago why we should learn to code. After all, there are plenty of tools with nice WYSIWYG editors that will give you a fair result while keeping the code all decently hidden. This got me thinking - why do we make anything? As someone who loves making things, it seemed self-evident to me, but it’s precisely when my response is a knee-jerk “because!” that I know I should tease out my reasons. I cook, I craft and I’m starting to code. Why do I think all these things are worth doing when it’s perfectly manageable to go through life without making anything from scratch?

Because it gives you more control

Sometimes, an off-the-shelf product is fine, but sometimes you want to control exactly what’s going into something you consume. If you don’t want a lot of extra sugar or salt in your diet, it makes sense to cook your pasta sauce from scratch, rather than getting it from a jar. Similarly, if you want to style a base-map to show just the features you need, you might have to confront TileMill and learn some CartoCSS. Other times, Google Maps will do the job just fine.

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Because it lets you customise and make alterations

It has happened that I’ve fallen in love with a dress that didn’t fit quite right. Having some basic dressmaking skills means that I can judge whether it will be easy to alter it to fit then make some adjustments. In the same way, being confident to try out some basic code means that you can often alter the default settings to something that works better for you. Want those images centred on your blog? It’s easy enough to edit the html.

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Because it lets you understand what you’re getting

When I learned crochet, there was a woman at the workshop who has a business selling handcrafts. She didn’t really want to do much crochet herself, but wanted to understand better the process of making the items she sold, so she could assess the quality and appreciate the time and labour that goes into a beautiful, one-off piece. Understanding a bit about the diverse skills and amount of labour that goes into creating anything helps you to assess the quality and decide if the price really reflects the value.

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Because it refines your bullsh*t detector

Following on from the last point, knowing a bit about how something is made and being able to assess the quality of the materials will help you judge whether you’re really getting what is claimed. If the label says that dress is vintage but you can see it’s got a modern zipper and finishing techniques, ask a few more questions before you hand over any cash. In this vein, I was interested to see critics of the FaceBook ‘sentiment manipulation’ experiment arguing that the sentiment analysis tool used was not suited to short texts like FaceBook posts. Having a sense of how things work helps you to ask better questions and makes you more likely to pick up when something’s not quite right.

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Metal zip and open seams? This dress is probably from the early 1950s

Because it lets you contribute usefully to the conversation

I Tweeted about this exchange I’d had, and one of my clever geeky friends responded like this:

In the context of digital humanities, this is so important. We Humanities types need to be tech-literate enough to be confident to ask questions. To ask why something is done in a particular why, to ask how it works, to ask what would happen if something were done differently but also to bring our knowledge of history and politics and philosophy and ethics to the conversation. Wearable tech, for instance, talks a lot about the ‘quantified self’, but we’ve been talking about the nature of the self for a while over in the Humanities. Don’t you think we should be adding some of that nuance to the conversation? Just what do we mean when we talk about measuring the ‘self’? And are the metrics offered by devices such as JawBone or FitBit always useful or appropriate or could they actually harm some users?

Not to mention that as people who (by and large) love words and understand the importance of stories, our participation is crucial for turning a clever hack into a compelling one.

Because it’s satisfying

Because, whether it’s finally mastering cable knitting or undertaking analysis of politicians’ maiden speeches to parliament, there’s something pretty satisfying in making something yourself (hey, I even like assembling Ikea furniture). You don’t have to make everything from scratch, you may never build something that changes the world, but sometimes it’s fun just to get in there and make something.

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Speed dating through the Research Bazaar

By Fiona Tweedie

Here at the Research Bazaar, we think of ourselves (sometimes) as matchmakers or even relationship counselors. We love to introduce Melbourne’s researchers to the perfect research tool and help patch things up when researchers and their topics aren’t getting on so well. As part of this strategy, we’re kicking off semester two with two events to help researchers get to know our suite of tools and training a little better.

Just like the other sort of speed dating, on each occasion researchers will have five minutes or so to meet some of our tools, like Python, CartoDB, Omeka and LimeSurvey. If they like what they see, there will be the opportunity to sign up to get to know the tool a little better.

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On Thursday July 31, we’ll be running an event with the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences. GSHSS students can register here:

http://arts.unimelb.edu.au/research-tools-speed-dating

On Wednesday August 13, we’ll be doing it again with the Graduate Student Association, where we’ll be showcasing tools for both the sciences and the humanities. More information and registration is here:

http://www.gsa.unimelb.edu.au/events/2014/research-tools-speed-dating

So come along and meet the research tool of your dreams!

Editing Wikipedia is good for your research [citation needed]

by Steve Bennett

As a researcher, you probably read Wikipedia articles regularly, and you might even rely on it. But have you ever thought about editing it, or writing articles from scratch? The Wikimedia Foundation, which manages Wikipedia and related projects, wants you!

What’s in it for you? You can fix the public record in an area that matters to you, address bias by covering under-represented areas or just improve your own knowledge. Or, if it’s useful to refer to certain Wikipedia articles regularly, why not improve them for your own and others’ benefit? A large number of university and school courses around the world have even incorporated it into their curricula.

Until recently, though, editing Wikipedia has been pretty tough. It required writing wikitext, an arcane markup language which starts simple (“italics”, ==headings==) and quickly becomes an unreadable mess for tables, infoboxes, and templates. However, thanks to the significant resources dedicated by the Wikimedia Foundation to this problem, the Visual Editor has finally arrived. So writing an article is now more like using a word processor.

So, to take advantage of this, ITS Research is teaming up with the University Library to run an experimental workshop. We hope to teach humanities researchers how to edit articles, while staying on the right side of Wikipedia’s rather complex set of policies. You’ll learn how to make minor corrections, start articles from scratch, use categories, infoboxes and images, in areas of interest to you. And in return, we hope to learn whether editing Wikipedia is a valuable research tool for others.

3D printing and the (re)creation of artefacts

by Fiona Tweedie and Paul Mignone

For many of us, the fascination of archaeology is the knowledge that we can hold an object made by another human being thousands of years ago in our hands. There’s something magical about the connection to the people of the past that comes through handling an artefact and wondering about its journey, whether it’s a precious artwork or an everyday utensil. But for numerous reasons, we can’t always get to grips with archaeological finds in the way we’d like to. Some are very fragile while others are hugely valuable. Many can’t be removed from the country where they were excavated. All of these factors limit the ability of archaeologists to work with artefacts but also mean that students seldom get to handle them.

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Seventh century CE shoulder-clasps from the Sutton Hoo burial ship - kept behind glass

There’s much more value in being able to touch and feel artefacts than just feeling like Lara Croft. When studying many objects that were used in everyday life, it’s important to understand what they feel like. How heavy is it? Do you need to be very strong to use it? What’s the most comfortable way to hold it? It may sound silly, but often the best way to really understand how artefacts were used is to try them out.

If you follow this blog, you’ll know that we love 3D printing over at the Research Bazaar, and not just because it makes cool stuff. As we’ve already explored, creating custom equipment can save researchers huge amounts of time and money. 3D printing can also be used to reproduce historic artefacts and we’ve been working with some archaeologists to do just that.

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3D printed enlargement of a Roman period Greek coin

Of course, people have creating reproductions of ancient art and artefacts since antiquity, but there’s some great potential in 3D printing and scanning. By creating scans of objects in the field, archaeologists can then reproduce artefacts at home, while the originals remain in their country of origin. They can produce multiple copies for use in teaching and, if the scan is of sufficient quality, can enlarge objects and reveal tiny details. Archaeologist Simon Young made this short video about his experience scanning and printing an ancient coin with the help of Fiona, Paul and University’s digitisation service.

While there were some challenges getting a scan of sufficient resolution to show all the fine detail of the reverse side of the coin, high resolution printing showed that there’s real promise in using this technology to recreate ancient artefacts for study and enjoyment. In addition, technologies such as the Mcor IRIS can 3D print antiques in full colour, allowing for near perfect replication.

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