DH IndiviJournal #3
This week in TANDEMland, we have been working up a storm. While it might seem that cookies are my primary order of business, really my procrastibaking is a stress relief. My chief stress in this project continues to be my technological deficit. I feel I must better understand the technical parameters of TANDEM in order to be at all effective at outreach.
My initial outreach, consequently, has been to digital fellows to get a grasp of the functions of OCR and feature extractor and to understand a little more about how to follow similar projects on Git and via twitter. So far, I’ve talked to Patrick Smyth and Evan Misshula about relevant folks and projects to look into. I talked to Michelle Johnston about the implications of words and pictures in childhood literacy (25 month productive vocabulary predicts 3rd grade reading level predicts high school completion — new reasons to understand word to picture ratio in picture books!. I talked to Alice Lynn McMichael about art historical applications and she recommended I look into John Ressig’s work on Ukiyo-e wood blocks (now I’m following him on Git). I also reached out to academic friends to see if they know folks who might be interested in this sort of tool. I reached out to my friend Long LeKhac who is at Stanford and worked with Matt Jockers to see if he knows people doing these sorts of projects. I spoke with my friend Susan McGregor at the Columbia School of Journalism about how TANDEM might be beneficial in digital graphics for journalism and about how she might otherwise find the tool useful. Her response to the project was positive. My friend Graham Sack, who has been doing a fair amount of DH as part of his English PhD at Columbia, recommended I swing by the Studio@Butler — which I had heard about in the fall when I met Alex Gil at his open source outreach booth. Apart from getting a sense of what’s going on with Columbia DH and discussing a potential collaboration with him, I met Sierra Eckhart an English PhD and a man named Grant. Grant mentioned a former mentor, Bill Gleason, who is apparently working on tagging picture books. I have to track them down.
The outreach plan is coming together, even as the outreach is already in full swing.
As a fun way to keep TANDEM on Twitter and to build its image in relation to picturebooks, I have set up the hashtag #picturebookshare. Every day, I choose an illustrator and post a picture. It’s been helpful to keep our eyes on corpuses (corpi?) for future analysis as we trudge through the darker details of the backend of TANDEM. We’ve also had response from a number of contemporary illustrators — including the incomparable Jon Klassen himself! For Oscar Sunday, I’ve been posting various illustrated Oscars (the grouch, Mr. Wilde, a couple cat Oscars).
Trying to keep up with outreach and understand what I can do to keep our team steaming ahead.
Over and out,
Jojo
Jumped into Outreach
