"In real life there are not many heroes." - Stef Scagniola

Today we heard from Stef Scagniola, an Italian researching Dutch military history. Her project is a collection of stories from Dutch veterans from all the conflicts from May 1914 to the Afghanistan war. She noted that since this time, there's actually been "a lot of conflict for people who perceive themselves as peacemakers,” a nation working as mediator between fellow nations.

Stef is collecting stories from all these conflicts, but not using them for research herself. Her interest is in the technical side of things: the database used to store and retrieve and access the stories, on enhancing the possibility for qualitative researchers, who can use the database to do things like: Compare veteran’s experience in various roles during several conflicts, like interviews with mechanics, cooks, or chauffeurs, to see the changes in such roles over time.

A random cool feature of this database is the ability to search for words within video and go straight to the word in a specific video. Amazing.

Stef noted that older veterans tended to be conscripted and serve for longer periods of time, so there are notable differences between them and younger veterans, who usually serve for 4 months and who are often professionals. She also talked about adding to the archive things like family photos and other documents you are often given when people tell their stories. The quote about heroes came from her noting that it's often so much easier to talk about stories of heroism as opposed to stories where one has done things one is highly ashamed of, especially in war.

Some people are extremely gifted at framing discussions that draw out a lot of good thoughts, and Stef is one of those people. She started by setting oral histories in a research context, how they might be useful and also how collected and accessed, and then moved into an awesome discussion.

She asked us to share stories of history we'd grown up with and then think about how those stories meshed with what we were taught in school, which spun into discussion on the democratization of history, which we all got into, and then she left us with this fabulous thought about how soldiers immediately after being in a conflict, don't talk about it, nor does society, about how often we need a lapse in time or history to talk about uneasy issues - she said this amazing thing: "...taboos are functional because they put away something dangerous so that people can connect to each other." Whew. I've been thinking about that one ever since she said it.

It felt like this class touched both on the practicality of what technology can do - the accessible database of oral histories - and also the importance of that technology for the people involved, the veterans, the researchers, and for your average Dutch citizen looking for stories.

“You might dress up like a potted plant in the corner. Some of you have the figure for that.” - Trent Hill

Trent did not expand on which of us had the figures to look like potted plants, but he did finish his lectures with us discussing interviewing options and further distinctions between qualitative and quantitative options. I do believe I would like to do qualitative research. Not only because math and I are not best friends, but because I love getting into the depth of things and thinking about the stories and reasons behind the numbers, understanding particular and specific areas. I do think numbers have a lot to tell us, and can paint the broad brushstrokes we need as well as the localized ones, so maybe in my perfect dream study, there would be a mix of words and numbers. Sort of like a Phantom Tollbooth sort of story. Except, you know, in a thorough and complete research project.

(Picture from the National Library, Den Haag, 9.06.)

"Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character..." - Tennessee Williams

I made a pilgrimage to see Vermeer's Girl with a Peal Earring at the Mauritshuis in Den Haag. I've been wanting to go for a long time, and today felt like the time. I am still not feeling quite up to snuff, so it was my big adventure for the day. I sat and looked at her for a good long while next to an elderly Dutchman who was watching her longingly.

One thing I am learning on this trip is that art is not the same in reprints as it is in real life. In reprints, the girl looks a bit interesting, but in the real life portrait, she looks downright mysterious. She's intriguing, she's got a secret, she loves the painter, perhaps even respects him, but she knows some things he doesn't, and he knows it.

Not much is known about the painting, although there's a lot of speculation about it. I did read the novel of the same name a few years ago. I enjoyed it as a story, but no one really knows what happened.

That's something that keeps coming up in class, actually, how people's memories are notoriously unreliable, yet during research we expect people to remember things exactly. There's this interesting gap between how we perceive ourselves and how we want others to perceive us, and between truth and reality. And what we remember about a certain event is not how others remember it at all. Anyway, I like Tracy Chevalier's interpretation of what might have happened, and I wish there were some others to think about as well. Any budding novelists out there? Get on this one.

Visualization with Andrea

Our 2^nd class with Andrea was as awesome as the first one. We discussed visualization projects: taking all the data amassed during research projects and making it real in ways you can see. I loved the sample projects Andrea had posted around the room: a huge map of the most frequently edited Wikipedia articles, a color coded U.N. chart of world poverty levels, a grid of cell phone usage at a train station in Milan over a 24 hour period. (See right.)My favorite – well, let me clarify by saying it is not my favorite in the sense that I liked it, more in the sense that I think it is a super powerful way of seeing what we value as a nation – was the 2007 version of Death and Taxes by Jess Bachman. You can see his 2011 version here. It brings the U.S. budget to light. Go look at it and think about how to vote next time you have the opportunity.

"It's okay if a leg falls off, as long as we still have it." - Marieke van Erp, on specimens

First of all, I would like to say that the majority of Dutch people I have had interactions with are hilarious. Deadpan and hilarious.

For example: At a tapas place we went to, when our waiter had disappeared and we wanted to leave, I went up to the bartender and said, "May I pay you?" He said, completely straightfaced, "Well, of course, if you had something to eat, you should pay." 20 seconds later, he smiled. I don't think I am translating the humor well, but it was p.d. funny.

Anyway, this lecture was on text mining and cultural heritage, and it was also AMAZING. Apparently all the smart people in the world are in Holland, and they are not only smart, they are researching cool things and are blond and beautiful as well.

Marieke van Erp is a computer scientist using linguistics and things like the k nearest neighbor classifier. If you want to know what that is, I will find the youtube link that was awesome in explaining it. It's a little tricky and I don't want to mess up anyone's understanding by butchering an explanation.

Anyway, the informatics undergrads were all looking at Marieke like she was a goddess the whole time, and asked more questions than ever, which I was super glad about because sometimes I worry that they are bored with libraries discussion. But this was more about building effective databases and search and retrieval and it was AWESOME. Her recent major research project was around helping scientists at the Leiden Naturalis Museum. Apparently there is a 20 story tower there full of dead specimens important to scientists around the globe, that needed cataloguing and easy accessibility for said scientists. She talked about building that database and what you do with things like "special remarks."

She's currently working on combining access to heterogenous collections from different institutions (like the Rijksmuseum and the NISV), in an easy to search, high-precision catalog. How cool is that?

class at cafe o

In class at a cafe that had amazing fresh-squeezed grapegruit juice - I mean, really, don't you wish you had fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice in all your classes? Wouldn't it help you concentrate more? - we talked about reliability and validity and a bunch of potential variables for a given research project. It was actually more fun than it sounds. Bryan, Molly, and I came up with lots of potential ways to measure how people perceive us in conversation...I'm thinking of trying a few with people I know when I come home.

"Computers are stupid. They are only as smart as the user using them, or the programmer telling them what to do." - Andrea Scharnhorst.

I wish I could have recorded this lecture.

I have never found physics or biometrics to be interesting before - I mean, I could see how they were valuable fields as a whole, but I have never found them personally interesting - but Andrea Scharnhorst is phenomenal. She is a researcher who started as a physicist and is now thinking about other things, but SHE IS FANTASTIC.

She mentioned Bruno LaTour, whom Joe Tennis was a huge fan of in 530, which makes me think I really need to read more of him. And also Paul Otliet, Bradford's Law of Scattering, Derek de Solla Price, Milgram, and Lotka. Wow, I've got a lot of reading to do.

She talked about indicators, impact factors, number differentials, bibliometric evaluation, and I was hooked. I wish all my math teachers had been as interesting, I might have chosen a different field.

And also, she mentioned that story in Matthew where there's three guys who each get some money, and two bury it and don't do anything, and one uses it and gets more, and how if you start out with something you should use it.

Mostly she went a variety of places, but asked lots and lots of really great questions I am still pondering and probably won't have answers to for a long time.

But I really loved this broad sweeping overview of how things are connected to each other in helping us think about how knowledge emerges, how we evaluate it, and how science helps in that process.

"If we don't innovate, we will become obsolete." - Dr. Roeland Ordelman

First of all, the Dutch love color. The archive we visited today is BRIGHT ORANGE, and then royal blue. The building is amazing, it's built into the ground and has drainage pipes in case there's a flood, and a pond outside in case there's a fire that uses recycled water from the toilets, and every single thing about the building is so damn purposeful it's amazing.

The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision has an archive of all Dutch broadcasting. So if anyone ever needs a clip from Dutch radio, they are the place to go, with a very nice customer service center who will probably smile and meet the need you have promptly. They also have a super cool experiential component, and somewhere on the Internet is a video of me, Scott, Jonathan, and Maggie all riding the same bike. Perhaps I will post it when Jonathan e-mails it.

Also, there's a pretty great cafeteria, at which we talked about our childhood experiences with eating meat. A surprising number at our table grew up raising chickens and hating them.

And the best part was a lecture from Dr. O, who was absolutely superb in talking about using social tagging to serve user groups better, and also very easy on the eyes. I swear, this country is full of tall handsome people. I should really learn Dutch.

e-research: scope and implications

the Virtual knowledge studios is AWESOME, and Paul Wouters was really amazing to hear from - he talked to us about how e-search is working at the moment and various approaches social scientists have in viewing technology....covering things like how we are currently swimming in data and have less of a need for models. Also the shift from a scientific method sort of approach, and five areas of research that are emerging at VKS:

• from data scarcity to data flooding: new methods in data analysis
• computational modeling: for those who hate math/science, new solutions for this
• visual culture: "Can you see what I know?"
• telling stories in new media: new formats of communication, publication, and representation
• social neuroscience: pairing brain study with social dimension/behaviors

OMG. Such good stuff to think about. And then he even ate lunch with us and shared more of what he's working on.

I really think great people are those who are welcoming and listeners and want to be fully alive, and Paul Wouters is definitely one of those.

And also, he mentioned at the end that there were more women working at VKS than men, and not to believe anybody who told us that you have to lower quality of work to fill certain spots, because it's not true. And this made me like him more, of course.