Category: Education and Administration

Digital Humanities Observatory of Ireland

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I am today at the Digital Humanities Observatory in Dublin Ireland. The DHO provides research and teaching standardization, consultation, outreach, training, and services to digital humanists in Ireland.

The Digital Humanities Observatory (DHO) is an all-island digital humanities collaboratory working with Humanities Serving Irish Society (HSIS), national, European, and international partners to further e-scholarship. The DHO is a knowledge resource providing outreach and education on a broad range of digital humanities topics. It provides data management, curation, and discovery services supporting the long-term access to, and greater exploitation of, digital resources in the creation of new models, methodologies and paradigms for 21st century scholarship.

In these cases it is always interesting to see what the media make of this project – see €28 m observatory to digitize history.

I’m not sure where the term “observatory” comes from, but it is cropping up as a new term for centers. Actually, it suggests the opposite of a centralizing centre; an observatory looks out and presumably supports rather than centralizes.

Federation: The Brief to Government on Technology

The Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (known as the Federation) has some interesting briefs for government up on its site. One brief, the Submission to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology: Regarding Mobilizing Science and Technology to Canada’s Advantage (PDF 65KB) April 2008 is a response to the federal government’s science and technology strategy, Mobilizing Science and Technology to Canada’s Advantage. The response, authored by Noreen Golfman, President of the Federation, points out how the humanities and social sciences, “have long contributed in direct and meaningful ways to the achievement of the priorities of the government. The Federation believes that our research contributions are invaluable not only to the economy and the science and technology strategy but also to the cultural and political prosperity of Canada.” (p. 1)

The argument in the response starts with “Creativity and communication are at the heart of our disciplines in humanities and social sciences” and then moves on to show how creativity and communication play out in three “advantages” called for:

  • entrepreneurial advantage
  • knowledge advantage
  • people advantage

It is always strange to read documents that are not about advancing knowledge for everyone, but achieving national advantage. Didn’t they get the “nationalism is out” memo? Of course, that is the game of national policy and I’m sure the academic games appear just as dated from the outside. (“Didn’t they get the idealism is out memo?”) Golfman tries to engage the policy on its own terms and show how the social sciences and humanities are important to the advantages sought. Where I disagree with Golfman is about creativity. I don’t think we actually do a very good job in the humanities and social sciences developing creativity. The arts, especially when practiced, do a much better job. We probably do a better job at “critical” than “creative.” At least that what we tell each other.

Interestingly the response mentions TAPoR at the University of Toronto and IBM under “entrepreneurial advantage” on page 3. TAPoR is one of two examples of projects that have partnered with companies to everyone’s advantage. One of the ways that projects like TAPoR engage creativity and communition is through a particular type of thinking through technology that involves developing technologically rich objects as part of our practices. We don’t just read and critique, we design and craft as they might in the arts. But lets not forget what is important,

The end game is as much about a better Canada as it is about a more economically competitive
Canada. (p. 1)

Rebooting Computing Manifesto

On the subject of manifestos, one of my students pointed me to a project Peter Denning is leading that has a Rebooting Computing Manifesto. The project is sponsored by the National Science Foundation (of the USA) and is aimed at trying to reinvigorate computer science in the face of dramatic drops in enrollment.

It is a time of challenges for the computing field. We are tired of hearing that a computing professional is little more than a program coder or a system administrator; or that a college or graduate education is unnecessary; or that entering the computing field is a social death. We are dismayed that K-12 students, especially girls, have such a negative perception of computing. We are alarmed by reports that the innovation rate in our field has been declining and that enrollments in our degree programs have dropped 50% since 2001. Instead of the solo voice of the programmer, we would like to hear from the choir of mathematicians, engineers,and scientists who make up the bulk of our field.

I like how this is articulated as a challenge. I also like the can-do approach of gathering and coming up with ideas.

A Digital Humanities Manifesto

The UCLA Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities has come up with a A Digital Humanities Manifesto which is worth reading. It starts with,

Digital humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent practices that explore a universe in which print is no longer the exclusive or the normative medium in which knowledge is produced and/or disseminated.

I am reminded of the Victoria Manifesto that a bunch of us put together at the University of Victoria. Manifestos are a particular type of document that can be used to convey a call for change.

Digging Into Data: New International Program

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The NEH has announced a new program with SSHRC called Digging Into Data. The program is innovative in a number of ways. It is addresses the challenges of large data collections and their analysis. It is also international in that it brings together the granting councils from three countries. Here is what the program says,

The idea behind the Digging into Data Challenge is to answer the question “what do you do with a million books?” Or a million pages of newspaper? Or a million photographs of artwork? That is, how does the notion of scale affect humanities and social science research? Now that scholars have access to huge repositories of digitized data — far more than they could read in a lifetime — what does that mean for research?

Applicants will form international teams from at least two of the participating countries. Winning teams will receive grants from two or more of the funding agencies and, one year later, will be invited to show off their work at a special conference. Our hope is that these projects will serve as exemplars to the field.

This feels like a turning point in the digital humanities. Until now we have had smaller grant programs like the ITST program in Canada. This program is on a larger scale, both in terms of funding available and in terms of the challenge.

The SSHRC announcement is here.

Beyond Analogue: Current Research in Humanities Computing

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Beyond Analogue: Current Graduate Research in Humanities Computing is a conference being organized by the Humanities Computing graduate students at the University of Alberta on February 13th. Daniel O’Donnell from U of Lethbridge and Paul Youngman of U of North Carolina-Charlotte will be the keynote speakers. If you are grad student you might want to submit a proposal for a poster or paper. Either way you are welcome to attend the full day conference if in Edmonton that day.

Blog: Infolet – Informatica e letteratura

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My friend Domenico Fiormonte at l’Università di Roma Tre, Dipartimento di Italianistica, has a blog I just found out about with Paolo Sordi called, Infolet – Informatica e letteratura (Informatics and Litterature.) They write longer thoughtful entries (in Italian) rather than my short ones.

In an entry Dai margini dell’Impero (From the margins of the Empire) Domenico criticizes “anglonorthern” computing humanists at DH 2008 for excessive specialization and excessive focus on electronic texts (and a particularly narrow version of text at that.) He goes on to say that we have known there is an anglo-american hegemony (of two or three centres) in the management, both political and scientific of the digital. (See the paper, “The international debate on humanities computing: education, technology and the primacy of languages” PDF in English for a longer discussion of this). These are strong words that, at the very least, reflect a sense of marginalization of researchers working in the European South on Romance languages and coming from a philological tradition.

I am torn as to how to respond to Domenico, but respond we should because he is willing to say things that many feel. Whether we believe the colonialization rhetoric or not, we should be willing to talk about internationalization internationally (and in multiple languages.) My response to the entry and the subsequent comments can be read in the comment I left.

The issue of internationalization and marginalization resonates partly because I work in Canada and here we have a close, but not always equal, relationship with researchers in the US and the UK. To be fair, I think we feel in Canada that we are welcome in digital humanities societies and that US colleagues are more than willing to collaborate. We also are aware of our own fetish of the issue that can distract from meaningful collaboration. If anything we may have a greater role internationally than the size of the population would merit. Our problem is that we ourselves can get caught marginalizing our Québécois colleagues. We have our own two-nations version of this marginalization problem – how to foster a truly bilingual research community avoiding “two solitudes” of research silos, an English rest-of-Canada community and a francophone Québécois community? Our Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour l’étude des médias interactifs is a real and sustained attempt to address bilingual research. Ray Siemens and Christian Vandendorpe deserve a lot of credit for their ongoing efforts in this regard, but we have a ways to go.

Pew Study: Teens, Video Games, and Civics

The Globe and Mail had a story today on Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be Luddites by Patrick White (Nov. 25, 2008) that reports on a MacArthur Foundation funded study on, Living and Learning with New Media. This study looked at how youth participate in “the new media ecology.” (p. 1 of the PDF Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project.) The report describes the “always on” connectivity of youth and their “friendshi-driven” practices. I was intrigued by the description of a subset who “geek out.”

Some youth “geek out” and dive into a topic or talent. Contrary to popular images, geeking out is highly social and engaged, although usually not driven primarily by local friendships. Youth turn instead to specialized knowledge groups of both teens and adults from around the country or world, with the goal of improving their craft and gaining reputation among expert peers. While adults participate, they are not automatically the resident experts by virtue of their age. Geeking out in many respects erases the traditional markers of status and authority. (p. 2 of the Two Page Summary)

The Digital Youth Project led by Mizuko Ito brought together researchers at USC and Berkeley. They have a book forthcoming from MIT Press called Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out: Living and Learning with New Media that is online at the site.

University Affairs: Some graduates question thesis publication requirement

University of Affairs has a story online about how Some graduates question thesis publication requirement. The article gives as examples, students in creative writing programs who obviously want to go on and publish their theses. They don’t mention the serious issue of the license that Theses Canada makes you sign. I wonder if it would be possible for a graduate student to edit the license before signing it?

State of Science & Technology in Canada

Stan pointed me to the 2006 Council of Canadian Academies | Conseil des académies canadiennes report on The State of Science & Technology in Canada (Summary and Main Findings, PDF 2.6 mb). The report tries to identify Canada’s strengths and weaknesses in the Science & Technology field, though they have a broad understanding of S&T. There is good news for arts and technology.

The ICT field demonstrating the most promise in the view of respondents – i.e., with the highest net upward trend rating – is New Media, Multimedia, Animation and Gaming, where Canada is internationally recognized as a leader, with a number of successful companies as well as a reputation for superb skills training. (p. 9)

They also identify Humanities Computing as a transdisciplinary field of strength,

Survey respondents perceived significant strength in some emerging fields such as nanoscale materials and biotechnologies, quantum informatics and humanities computing. These latter transdisciplinary fields are specialities for which future prospects are seen to be more significant than currently established strength. (p. 10)

Here is a chart from page 39 showing the Humanities and the Arts:

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