The Journal of Urban Typography is a project like the Dictionary of Words in the Wild that “is dedicated to the documentation and study of signs, word fragments, and typography created with utilitarian intent in urban environments.” Many of the images are beautiful – the author of the site calls it a journal but it is more of an art book. The interface is intriguing as if it were a bunch of polaroids. You can dismiss some and rearrange them. This is built on Tumblr, an online blogging or service that you can adapt to collecting different types of things. Thanks to Peter O for this.
Vice President Al Gore
Peter O sent me a link to the original 1994 web page for Vice President Al Gore kept by NARA, the National Archives and Records Administration (of the USA.) What is amusing is that this copy of Gore’s page looks really dated and positions him as a pioneer of the Internet:
Vice President Gore, having first coined the term “information superhighway” 17 years ago, is the recognized public leader in the development of the National Information Infrastructure (NII).
Not quite the same as saying he invented it. To see the page Gore’s page linked from go to the White House page. Many of the links work, though not Clinton’s page.
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)
i hardly know her: Flickr view
I Hardly Know Her (IHKH) is an alternative way to view Flickr photostreams that is simple and effective. You just add your account name to “ihardlyknowher.com” – for example, my stream at geoffreyrockwell. Mouseover the images to get info, click to get a bigger one. Thanks to Peter O for this.
EMiC: Editing Modernism in Canada
EMiC] Editing Modernism in Canada is a neat project that was funded by SSHRC as a Strategic Cluster. Dean Irvine at Dalhousie leads it and the idea is to produce “critically edited texts by modernist Canadian authors”, especially those out of print. It has a nice link to learning in that one reason for editing modernist Canadian texts is to make them available for teaching and learning. Deeper than that, however, is what seems to be an apprentice model of involving (graduate) students in editing. The network of partnerships is impressive too.
DAEDALUS PROJECT: MMORPG Research, Cyberculture, MMORPG Psychology
A student in my Computers and Culture class drew our attention to the DAEDALUS PROJECT which is led by Nick Yee at PARC. The Daedalus Project is a blog about MMORG research with longish entries written like short articles that are gathered into issues. There is also The Daedalus Gateway that organizes the articles in a more thematic fashion.
The articles are fascinating. The graph immediately above was taken from a study on Game Choices that looks at what sorts of characters players choose.
Many of the articles on The Daedalus Project are based on voluntary surveys (see his methodology). It is impressive that Yee is getting between 2000 and 4000 respondents and there is something to be learned by how he returns results, informs people of the survey and so on. I feel that The Daedalus Project represents some sort of new paradigm that crosses method, publication, and outreach.
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
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.
Project Bamboo
I attended Workshop 3 of Project Bamboo in Tucson Arizona this week. I think I’m beginning to understand it, though understanding what Bamboo is was one of the favorite subjects of conversation of the meeting (so I’m conscious that . There is a deliberate ambiguity to the project since they are trying to listen to the community in order to become what we want rather than what we suspect. Some of my takeaway thoughts:
- It is being structured as a consortium. Thus the long term sustainability model is that universities (and possibly associations and individuals) will contribute resources into the consortium and get back services for their faculty. This seems the right way to get to a level of broad support.
- One thing Bamboo will do is develop shared services that participating universities can use to deliver research support.
- One of the challenges is figuring out how to listen to the community. The stories are the mechanism being used for this. Scholars are contributing stories of what they do and what they want to do. In some cases the stories are being contributed by people who talk to faculty.
- Recipes (like those we developed for TAPoR) will be a key way to connect stories to the shared services. A recipe is a way of abstracting from a lot of stories something that can be used to identify the tools and content needed by researchers to do useful work.
- Bamboo probably won’t build tools, but they will build and run services with which others can build tools. Bamboo may be the project that runs SEASR as a service for the rest of us, for example. We can then build tools with SEASR for our research projects.
- Bamboo is talking about running the shared services in a cloud. I’m not sure what that means yet.