My colleague Stan Ruecker has been create short online movies of humanities computing software tools he is involved in like the Mandala Browser and the Digital Profiles rich prospect browser. These are in the tradition of videos like A Vision of Students Today from the Digital Ethnography folk. There is also the TEI Encoding of Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues. Neat idea – we should get more comfortable with YouTube as a way of conveying ideas.
HASTAC: Digital Textuality and Tools
Over the last few days I’ve been reading and contributing to one of the HASTAC discussion forms on Digital Textuality and Tools. This is led by Angela Kinney and Michael Widner.
Among other things there was a link to an interesting project, Inventoriana for collaborative annotation of manuscript images.
globeandmail.com: Universities promised stimulus flexibility
From yesterday’s Globe and Maill story Universities promised stimulus flexibility
“My research and development includes humanities,” Mr. Clement told reporters.
Congratulations to those who argued for a loosening of what stimulus funding could be spent on.
Top Gun – CBC News: the fifth estate
CBC: The Fifth Estate has a story, Top Gun: When a video game obsession turns to addiction and tragedy about the death of Brandon Crisp. They overstate the case against video games. Brandon died not from gaming but from a fall from a tree. Yes, he ran away from home angry that his parents wanted him to stop playing, but running away from home is not new to gaming. Nor is climbing trees. The story then gives us a tour through teenage addiction and peer pressure. The worst part is the porn of showing players concentrating on their playing. Why not show readers reading or people watching the TV? Is 7 hours a day of television a balanced life?
A more balanced view would argue that the problem was not the game but the social commitments that Brandon made to other online players. He got into conflict with his parents because of who he was hanging out with, what they were doing, when they were doing it and his commitments to his gaming buddies. In short he was hanging around with the wrong crowd and his parents tried to separate him from the social scene of the game.
Paying attention – Wolfram: Alpha
Wolfram|Alpha comes in May. Will it really compute knowledge? Epistemology in a command line. See Nova Spivak.
Gary Hall: Digitize this book
A couple of weeks ago I posted a blog entry about Gary Hall’s book Digitize This Book! I noted that I couldn’t find a digitized copy of the book and asked if others knew of one. To my surprise Gary wrote me back and pointed to the items listed below. Now that is the Internet at work! He is trying to get the publisher to allow a digital copy to be posted online, but in the meantime pointed out online versions of what became chapters in the book:
(2003) ‘Digitise This’, Mediactive, Vol. 1, No. 1 (pp. 76-90); republished in (2004), The Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1, January-March (pp. 23-46) at http://scm-rime.tees.ac.uk/VLE/DATA/CSEARCH/MODULES/CS/2006/03/0147/_.doc (MS Word Document)
(2007) ‘IT, Again: or, How to Build an Ethical Virtual Institution’, in Experimenting: Essays With Samuel Weber, edited by Gary Hall and Simon Morgan Wortham (Fordham University Press: New York) (pp.116-140) at http://scm-rime.tees.ac.uk/VLE/DATA/CSEARCH/MODULES/CS/2008/01/0740/_.doc (MS Word Document)
Gary Hall says that “Since the book came out I’ve also published a new piece on open access publishing and the humanities” at http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/issue/current. A video of him presenting it as a talk is available at Pirate Philosophy – Steal This! .
I take back any irony in my previous post. (Can one take back irony? Perhaps I can only apologize for being ironic to early.)
What Is Infrastructure?
I’ve written another essay. It seems to be what I do in Sundays. This time I’m trying to work out What Is Infrastructure and how it is different from supplies? The question is a way into trying to understand the role of big projects like TAPoR or Bamboo, both of which I am involved in (at very different levels.) As I thought about it I came to a couple of conclusions:
- Defining things as infrastructure or cyberinfrastructure is a political move that tries to change how we frame services so we can propose different (and ongoing) ways of funding them. To be more blunt, defining a service as infrastructure moves it from something you ask for a limited grant for to something you ask for ongoing funding for (or something you set up a consortium to provide ongoing funding for.)
- I can imagine a lighter way of weaving infrastructure out of existing industry provided stuff that we should take seriously.
- Humanities research infrastructure should be public as in available to everyone and available internationally. Not only can the public participate in humanities research, but opening it up to the public is away of engaging them. Perhaps the relevance of the humanities lies not in their products, but in their participatory processes. Philosophy is not a science best done in a lab that will eventually produce a cure for ignorance. Philosophy is a love of wisdom we should share because we never owned it and we were never appointed its keepers.
Why not crowdsource the humanities? What would it take to make the (arts and) humanities the public disciplines? What sorts of infrastructure would engage the broader public?
Edupunk: DIY for educational technology
Thanks to Don I discovered an interesting idea being worked out across the web: Edupunk or DIY instructional technology that avoids corporate tools like PowerPoint and Blackboard. The Chronicle has two stories on this, Frustrated With Corporate Course-Management Systems, Some Professors Go ‘Edupunk’ and Technologist Who Coined ‘Edupunk’ Defends the Term in a Video Debate.
The Wikipedia article on Edupunk links to a great example from UBC where a course on Murder, Madness, and Mayhem: Latin American Literature in Translation took a bunch of Wikipedia articles on Latin American literature to Featured Article and Good Article status. They wrote some and edited others using the Wikipedia as their DIY course environment. Neat idea that strikes me as scalable, especially in the case of grad courses. It is a way of using what is at hand, in this case the Wikipedia, and using it for an authentic instructional purpose. It has the advantage that it contributes something to the larger community and can benefit from the community.
Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut – Wikiquote
“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is. ” A quote attributed to Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut. In today’s Globe and Mail. How does this apply to questions of theory and practice in humanities computing?
In theory computing in the humanities is neither. But, in practice, it is the implementation of theory.
Taco Lab Blog: Siftables and American Shanzhai?
The Taco Lab who are probably best known for the Siftables (small cookie-sized tile computes that sense each other) shown at TED have a blog with some interesting posts like this one on American Shanzhai?. Shanzai literally means “mountain fortress” or the hideout of bandits and it refers to pirate activities like hacking cheap copies of consumer goods (that are heavily marked up.) It is now beginning to refer to a creative subculture of improving or altering electronics outside state (and IP) control. Thus the image above is from the Taco Lab blog and is a example of this creative shanzai – in this case a cell-phone/cigarette pack whose value is in its uniqueness. This got me thinking of all the open projects out there that make it easier to hack things like:
- TuxPhone – a project to develop open hardware and software for a cell phone.
- Arduino – an open electronics prototyping platform that’s great for interactive art projects
- LilyPad Arduino – an open device that is light enough for wearables and e-textile projects
- William Turkel’s Fabrication Lab – a unique (to my knowledge) humanities lab