Category: Conference

More Conversation, Less Carbon

Today the Kule Institute for Advanced Study (KIAS) hosted a panel discussion on More Conferencing, Less Carbon. The discussion took place on site and online on your YouTube channel.

At this panel discussion Trevor Chow-Fraser of the Office of Sustainability announced the release of Moving Ideas Without Moving People a toolkit on running e-conferences at the University of Alberta. This toolkit was co-authored by Trevor Chow-Fraser, Chelsea Miya and Oliver Rossier and was based on the KIAS experience organizing our Around the World e-conferences.

What is at stake is the greening of research. We need to try and adapt different forms of video conferencing and live streaming to our conference/workshop needs in research. We need to depend less on F2F (face-to-face) conferences where everyone flies in. We need to confront the carbon costs of flights and how habituated we are to flying for research.

Digital Cultures Big Data And Society

Last week I presented a keynote at the Digital Cultures, Big Data and Society conference. (You can seem my conference notes at Digital Cultures Big Data And Society.) The talk I gave was titled “Thinking-Through Big Data in the Humanities” in which I argued that the humanities have the history, skills and responsibility to engage with the topic of big data:

  • First, I outlined how the humanities have a history of dealing with big data. As we all know, ideas have histories, and we in the humanities know how to learn from the genesis of these ideas.
  • Second, I illustrated how we can contribute by learning to read the new genres of documents and tools that characterize big data discourse.
  • And lastly, I turned to the ethics of big data research, especially as it concerns us as we are tempted by the treasures at hand.

Continue reading Digital Cultures Big Data And Society

Canadian Social Knowledge Institute

I just got an email announcing the soft launch of the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute (C-SKI). This institute grew out of the Electronic Textual Culture Lab and the INKE project. Part of C-SKI is a Open Scholarship Policy Observatory which has a number of partners through INKE.

The Canadian Social Knowledge Institute (C-SKI) actively engages issues related to networked open social scholarship: creating and disseminating research and research technologies in ways that are accessible and significant to a broad audience that includes specialists and active non-specialists. Representing, coordinating, and supporting the work of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership, C-SKI activities include awareness raising, knowledge mobilization, training, public engagement, scholarly communication, and pertinent research and development on local, national, and international levels. Originated in 2015, C-SKI is located in the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab in the Digital Scholarship Centre at UVic.

Replaying Japan 2017

Geoffrey Rockwell at Arcade Cabinet
Playing Missile Command at the Strong (Photo by Okabe)

Last week I was at the 5th International Conference on Japan Game Studies, Replaying Japan 2017. You can see my conference notes here. The conference was held in the Strong Museum of Play which has a terrific video game collection and exhibit. (I vote for holding all conferences in museums!)

Continue reading Replaying Japan 2017

2016 Chicago Colloquium On Digital Humanities And Computer Science

I’ve just come back from the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science at the University of Illinois, Chicago. The Colloquium is a great little conference where a lot of new projects get shown. I kept conference notes on the Colloquium here.

I was struck by the number of sessions of papers on mapping projects. I don’t know if I have ever seen so many geospatial projects. Many of the papers talked about how mapping is a different way of analyzing the data whether it is the location of eateries in Roman Pompeii or German construction projects before 1924.

I gave a paper on “Information Wants to Be Free, Or Does It? Ethics in the Digital Humanities.”

Instant History conference

This weekend I gave a talk at a lovely one day conference on Instant History, The Postwar Digital Humanities and Their Legacies. My conference notes are here. The conference was organized by Paul Eggert, among others. Steve Jones, Ted Underwood and Laura Mandell also talked.

I gave the first talk on “Tremendous Labour: Busa’s Methods” – a paper coming from the work Stéfan Sinclair and I are doing. I talked about the reconstruction of Busa’s Index project. I claimed that Busa and Tasman made two crucial innovations. The first was figuring out how to represent data on punched cards so that it could be processed (the data structures). The second was figuring out how to use the punched card machines at hand to tokenize unstructured text. I walked through what we know about their actual methods and talked about our attempts to replicate them:

I was lucky to have two great respondents (Kyle Roberts and Schlomo Argamon) who both pointed out important contextual issues to consider, as in:

  • We need to pay attention to the Jesuit and spiritual dimensions of Busa’s work.
  • We need to think about the dialectic of those critical of computing and those optimistic about it.

CWRC/CSEC: The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory

The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC) today launched its Collaboratory. The Collaboratory is a distributed editing environment that allows projects to edit scholarly electronic texts (using CWRC Writer), manage editorial workflows, and publish collections. There are also links to other tools like CWRC Catalogue and Voyant (that I am involved in.) There is an impressive set of projects already featured in CWRC, but it is open to new projects and designed to help them.

Susan Brown deserves a lot of credit for imagining this, writing the CFI (and other) proposals, leading the development and now managing the release. I hope it gets used as it is a fabulous layer of infrastructure designed by scholars for scholars.

One important component in CWRC is CWRC-Writer, an in-browser XML editor that can be hooked into content management systems like the CWRC back-end. It allows for stand-off markup and connects to entity databases for tagging entities in standardized ways.