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Thanks to Humanist I came across this project that offers bwFLA: Emulation as a Service. This will become increasingly important in the digital humanities and game studies as more and more content-rich projects become unreadable on contemporary machines. Just think of the CD-ROM. How many of us still have a CD drive on our computer? I think I have a USB drive somewhere … not sure where it is though. Emulation projects like this and MAME are becoming more and more important to preservation and history.

Also, take a look at their Use Cases.

Compute Canada just published a story about Voyant with the title, High-powered computing: It’s not just for astrophysics anymore.

Researchers in the humanities and social sciences are using digital infrastructure to help advance their research as well, and a Canadian-made tool called Voyant is allowing those who work with texts to do it with ease.

The story points out that Voyant may have more unique users than any other tool on Compute Canada, which is gratifying to read. This doesn’t mean more research is supported by Voyant, or more important research; comparisons are not really useful. What is more important is that the way humanists use infrastructure is different and being recognized. Humanists typically aren’t doing “big science.” They don’t need thousands of processors and batch interfaces. They want a more interactive and “always on” type of service. Compute Canada has listened and has been supporting our style/pace of infrastructure. Bravo!

Every year the University of Alberta Libraries organizes a Research Data Management Week to bring faculty, staff, students, and community data specialists together around data management. I was part of an panel session today on the subject. One of the issues we discussed with was how to deal with a likely requirement from funding agencies like SSHRC that Research Data Management Plans be submitted with grants. Some thoughts on this:

• Such a requirement will build on the Principles on Digital Data Management
• Researchers will initially need help understanding what a DMP (Data Management Plan) is. The Portage Network DMP Assistant can help, but many will need an introduction to the issues.
• Research universities and libraries will need to develop strategies for supporting projects to meet their new obligations. We will need the infrastructure to match.
• There will be push back from some scholarly associations. Others, like CSDH-SCHN will welcome this as we have policies that support the idea.
• There is a cost to properly curating, documenting and depositing research data. This cost comes typically at the end of projects when the funds are spent. We will need to do a better job budgeting for data management/deposit.
• We need to develop small grants and services for projects to help them go the last mile in curating and depositing their content. At the Kule Institute we developed CRAfT grants in partnership with the UofA Libraries. These grants are meant for prototyping digital archives. Now we need to think about a program to help with the final archiving.

Reading Cartographies of Time by Rosenberg and Grafton, I was struck by one early visual presentation of time by Peter Poitiers. It has both the features of a family tree or genealogy and a timeline. It is spread over pages in a manuscript with text in between vertically flowing lines. there are little portraits of the people. What can we learn from the imaginative designs of past designers of time charts?

This English manuscript was created in the early thirteenth century soon after the death of its author, Peter of Poitiers, theologian and Chancellor of the University of Paris from 1193 to 1205. It is an early copy of his text, the Compendium historiae in genealogia Christi. Intended as a teaching aid, the work provides a visual genealogy of Christ comprised of portraits in roundels, accompanied by a text discussing the historical background of Christ’s lineage.

Source: Peter of Poitiers’ Historical genealogy of Christ at the Walters Art Museum.

On May 4th we will be running our annual online Around the World conference. This year the topic is Digital Media in the Post-Truth Era. Anyone can tune in to hear panels talking on this subject from around the world.

Virtual reality, after bombing in the 1990s is back again. We have a Time cover, affordable headsets, and some games.

Jérémie pointed me to a couple of interesting links on VR. One is a short story by Stanley G. Weinbaum titled Pygmalion’s Spectacles from 1935 that tells the story of spectacles that can immerse you in another world. The BBC has created a virtual reality experience of being a Syrian refugee called We Wait. Vice has a short documentary Stepping Into the Screen that emphasizes the potential psychological and ethical impact of VR. To my mind the attention to impact is a way of hyping VR. Is it really that different or are we just hoping it will be?

In the 1990s many of us got sick trying VR headsets which has me wondering if anything is different this time?

 

There are many scenarios of carnage among the puritan, military budget the orange one is forwarding to Congress. Of the many horrors, the plan to abolish the National Endowment for the Humanities i…

Alastair Dunning has a short and to the point blog post about how The US has been a pioneer in the Digital Humanities.

What his post doesn’t deal with is the long history of NEH investment in computing in the humanities (not that it needed to.) For example the NEH has links to a great documentary they posted to the Internet Archive on Hypertext: an Educational Experiment in English and Computer Science at Brown University. This documentary from 1974 was funded by the NEH and shows early educational uses of hypertext at Brown.

The Globe and Mail had a balanced article on Friday, March 3rd by Simona Chiose on how, As students move away from the humanities, universities adapt. This is actually an older trend. In the 1990s I was involved in developing new programs in Multimedia and Communications for McMaster. Now the focus seems more on adding applied minors and skills to programs, which strikes me as a good idea.

In response to decreasing enrolment in arts programs, schools are trying new approaches, such as adding arts courses to commerce degrees

The article ends by pointing out that the humanities and social sciences provide “more career stability” than the “boom and bust cycles experienced by their colleagues in engineering or computer science” (see the linked University of Ottawa report.) Humanities students earn less, but their earnings rise steadily.

6th AIUCD Conference 2017 Il telescopio inverso: big data e distant reading nelle discipline umanistiche Roma, 26-28 January 2017.

This January I attended the AIUCD Conference 2017 in Rome, Italy. The AIUCD (Association for Humanities Informatics and Digital Culture) is the Italian member of ADHO and the conference brought together researchers and students not only from Italy, but also from Europe.

Continue reading AIUCD Conference 2017

Grant Oliveira has created a social network visualization of A History of Philosophy. That graphs how philosophers influenced each other using information from the Wikipedia. His network uses Kumu and the interactive graph is here. The Daily Nous has a blog entry on the map, A Visualization of Influence in the History of Philosophy.       

Continue reading Daily Nous: A Visualization of Influence in the History of Philosophy –