I am now at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria where I am going to present an Institute Lecture tomorrow. I have been updating a small Conference Report (that is in progress and covers mostly the lectures.)
In particular it was interesting to hear how Synergies has evolved into a truly national knowledge-mobilization project with good ideas about how to make SSH research accessible to the broader public.
So I’m at the New Horizons Conference where I’m going to be on a panel on Thursday between the Open Library and Google Books.
The opening talk was by Dan Cohen of George Mason and Zotero. Zotero (Albanian for “I learn”) stands out as a phenomenal success for digital humanities (and he talked about the challenges of that success). Their server talks to about million instances a day, they have a very active user group, they are in alliances with various organizations to extend the project. Now they have figure out how to get ongoing support to keep on improving it.
See my Conference Report (which is being written as I attend.)
The 2008 Congress programme for SDH-SEMI is up. It looks like the conference on June 2nd and 3rd will be good. I will be giving a couple of papers and participating in panels:
Stéfan Sinclair of TADA has put together an exciting evaluation exchange competition, T-REX | TADA Research Evaluation Exchange. This came out of discussions with Steve Downie about MIREX (Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange) and our discussions with the SHARCNET folk and then DHQ. The initial idea is to have a competition for ideas for tools for TAPoR, but then to migrate to a community evaluation exchange where we agree on challenges and then compare and evaluate different solutions. We hope this will be a way to move tool development forward and get recognition for it.
Thanks to Open Sky Solutions for supporting it.
The Globe and Mail today had a story about a humanities computing project, the Old Bailey Online – The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913 – Central Criminal Court. The story is titled, A crime time machine (Tuesday, April 29, 2008, Page A2) and is really quite nice. That the story appears on the second page of our national newspaper shows how humanities computing projects are of general interest (especially if they are about criminals.) The introduction on the web site reads,
A fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court.
One thing that is interesting is that they have Google Ads down the left-hand side, which is unusual for an academic project.
Bravo to the team that developed it!
I came across a long quote from Walter Ong in 1978 when he was president of the MLA – Defining the Humanities for Congress. It is interesting to look back at this and how clearly Ong saw the humanities and technology.
The humanities depend on writing and on print as well as, less directly, on newer media and although oral speech, on which all verbal communication is always ultimately based, is not a technology, writing, print, and the electronic media are all technological developments. The printing press constituted the first assembly line. The humanities need technology.
However, if the humanities need technology, technology also needs the humanities. For technology calls for more than technological thinking, as our present ecological crises remind us. Technology demands reflection on itself in relation to the entire human life world. Such reflection is no longer merely technology, it includes the humanities even though it needs to be done especially by scientists and technologies.
See also the Technology category of this Notes from the Walter Ong Collection. I particularly like the quote “Nothing is more human than artifice.“
Siegried Zielinski’s Deep Time of the Media (translated by Gloria Custance, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, c2006) is an unusual book that pokes into the lost histories of media technologies in order to start “toward an archaeology of hearing and seeing by technical means” (as the subtitle goes.) Zielinski starts by talking about the usual linear history of media technologies that recovers what predicts what we believe is important. This is the Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson type of history. Zielinski looks away from the well known precursurs towards the magical and tries to recover those moments of diversity of technologies. (He writes about Gould’s idea of punctuated equilibrium as a model for media technologies – ie. that we have bursts of diversity and then periods of conformity.)
I’m interested in his idea of the magical, because I think it is important to the culture of computing. The magical for Zielinski is not a primitive precursor of science or efficiency. The magical is an attitude towards possibility that finds spectacle in technology. Zielinksi has a series of conclusions that sort of sketch out how to preserve the magical:
Developed media worlds need artistic, scientific, technical, and magical challenges. (p. 255)
Cultivating dramaturgies of difference is an effective remedy against the increasing ergonomization of the technical media wolrds that is taking place under the banner of ostensible linear progress. (p. 259)
Establishing effective connections with the peripheries, without attempting to integrate these into the centers, can help to maintain the worlds of the media in a state that is open and transformable. (p. 261)
The most important precondition for guaranteeing the continued existence of relatively power-free spaces in media worlds is to refrain from all claims to occupying the center. (p. 269)
The problem with imagining media worlds that intervene, of analyzing and developing them creatively, is not so much finding an appropriate framework but rather allowing them to develop with and within time. (p. 270)
Kairos poetry in media worlds is potentially an efficacious tool against expropriation of the moment. (p. 272)
Artistic praxis in media worlds is a matter of extravagant expenditure. Ist priviledged location are not palaces but open laboratories. (p. 276)
Michael Hart of Project Gutenberg, wrote a provocative answer to Willard’s question (Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 21, No. 495) about the “killer-app” of digital humanities that I reproduce here verbatim:
True, you can’t convince the skeptics. . .you still can’t say that digitial music has wiped out analog music because a few places still make analog records which are really better, not that a true skeptic needs those last few words.
Even when there are more eBooks than paper books, no way.
Even when there are 100 times as many eBooks, not happening.
It’s not going to matter what they SAY about eBooks, reality is going in that direction and paper books will never reverse that trend, simply because you can /OWN/ MILLIONS OF eBOOKS IN A TERABYTE DRIVE [costing under $200].
Before Gutenberg the average person could own zero books.
Before Project Gutenberg an average person could own 0 libraries.
It’s literally as simple as that.
The cost/benefit ratio for eBooks is too much better than paper.
Thanks!!!
Is he right?
Edware Vanhoutte, who has done some of the best work on the history of humanities computing (though much is not yet published), has started a blog. In his first entry, The Mind Tool: Edward Vanhoutte’s Blog, he summarizes early text books that were used to teach humanities computing. It would be interesting to look at how these 70s and 80s books conceive of the computer and how they differ from the 50s and 60s work like that of Booth.
Chad Gaffield, the President of SSHRC wrote an Op-Ed piece for the National Post on how, Building understanding: Our best investment for the future. Here is a quote related to information technology.
Canada’s new science and technology strategy, Mobilizing Science and Technology to Canada’s Advantage, promises to help us meet this challenge. We need more than ever the highly trained, creative and innovative individuals who can contribute in diverse ways across the public and private sectors.
He also has an Op-Ed in the Hill Times (PDF) about “Forging a new kind of literacy” that mentions InterPARES, CRKN/Synergies, and the History of the Book project. It is good to see digital humanities projects getting such attention.