We have upgraded the TAPoR Portal to version 1.1 (the Dundas version.) The upgrades include:
I’ve posted two sets of photos on my Flickr account, Buffalo Again are pictures taken downtown Buffalo. The other set is of silos on the Buffalo waterfront.
Domenico Fiormonte drew my attention to an interesting seminar coming up next week in Valencia at the Menéndez Pelayo International University (UIMP) on Editando al autor. El escritor en la sociedad de la communicación (PDF). The seminar brings together editors, authors, new media researchers and philologists on the subject of the writer in a society of communication.
Domenico has an interesting web site Digital Variants which makes available various the writings (and variants) of various contemporary Italian and Spanish authors. On the Digital Variants site they are experimenting with systems of frames to allow readers to compare variants. Here is one example of a Vincenzo Cerami Variants Machine
created by Mario Macciocca.
Diane M. Zorich prepared A Survey of Digital Humanities Centers in the United States for the Council on Library and Information Resources that is critical of the lack of collaboration between DHCs in the United States. The Executive Summary (pages 4-5) noted three “features of the current landscape of centers that may inadvertently hinder wider research and scholarship:”
- The silo-like nature of current centers is creating untethered digital production that is detrimental to the needs of humanities scholarship. Today’s centers favor individual projects that address specialized research interests. These projects are rarely integrated into larger digital resources that would make them more widely known and available for the research community. As a result, they receive little exposure outside their center, and are at greater risk of being orphaned over time.
- The independent nature of existing centers does not effectively leverage resources community-wide. Centers have overlapping agendas and activities, particularly in training, digitization of collections, and metadata development. Redundant activities across centers are an inefficient use of the scarce resources available to the humanities community.
- Large-scale, coordinated efforts to address the “big†issues in building humanities cyberinfrastructure (such as repositories that enable long-term access to the centers’ digital production) are missing from the current landscape. Collaborations among existing centers are small and focus on individual partner interests that do not scale up to address community-wide needs. (pages 4-5
It is worth noting that TAPoR is an example of a network of centers that avoids some of the problems, though not all. The report reads to me like a library view of how to support digital humanities. While centers have problems they are also excellent at supporting individual projects. Large scale services tend to not support any one innovative project as well.
The report has some interesting things to say about tools:
Of all the products DHCs offer, tools have received considerable interest of late among the digital humanities research community. As digital scholarship grows, centers are increasingly taking on a developer’s role, creating new tools (or expand existing ones) to meet their research requirements.
In the interests of furthering research and scholarship, DHC-developed tools are made freely available via various open source agreements. However, there is some concern that the efforts expended in DHC tool development are not being adequately leveraged across the humanities. A recent study commissioned by CLIR (and included in its entirety as Appendix F to this document) found that many of these tools are not easily accessible. They are “buried†deep within a DHC’s Web site, are not highlighted nor promoted among the center’s products, and lack the most basic descriptions such as function, intended users, and downloading instructions.
The reason for this state of affairs may be related to how tool development often takes place in DHCs. Centers frequently develop tools within the context of a larger project. It may be that, once the project has been completed, the center becomes involved in other activities and does not have the resources available to address usability issues that would make the tool more accessible for others. The unfortunate end result is that significant energy is expended developing a tool that may receive little use beyond a particular center. Funding agencies who support tool development among centers, and who make it a requirement of their grants that the tools be open source, may wish to develop guidelines and provide support for mechanisms that will help enhance the usability of existing tools and expose them more prominently to the humanities community. It may be that funding tool development as a piece of a larger center project is not in the best interest of the humanities community, as individual centers seem unable to maintain these tools beyond the life of the project. (page 42)
Included as Appendix F is a report, “Tools for Humanists Project; Final Report” by Lilly Nguyen and Katie Shilton.
As of July 1st I am in the Department of Philosophy of the University of Alberta. I will be teaching mostly in the MA in Humanities Computing. My new contact information is:
Department of Philosophy
3-67 Assiniboia Hall
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta
Canada T6G 2E7
Phone: (780) 248-1209
E-mail: Geoffrey.Rockwell (at) ualberta (dot) ca
We know now that there is much more than text. “Texts,” as Geoffrey Hartman, has observed, “are false bottom.” The implications of scholars’ blindness to the nontextual and of their recent discovery of their own blindness have still not been worked out entirely. Textual squint is still with us, and, in some ways, with deconstruction has become more disabling in certain quarters at the very time that its diagnosis has become easier. The way to overcome textual squint is not to devise theories, which textualism promotes ad nauseam, but to call attention to reality, to the relationship of texts to the full human lifeworld, …”
Page 2 of “MLA 1984 Literacy Studies”
This passage is from the second page of a five page edited typescript at The Walter J. Ong Collection. The web site notes that “Ong’s notes indicate that this talk was part of the ‘What is Literacy Theory’ session (program item #190) of the 1984 MLA Convention.” I wonder what Ong would make of the Dictionary of Words in the Wild? I don’t think Ong had wild text in mind as a way of overcoming the “textual squint”; the hand notation “Alice Springs” in the left-hand margin suggests what he thought would be an example of nontextual human lifeworld.
Man can even reflect upon his own earlier reflections as these are registered in books and elsewhere. All this is what ultimately the humanistic subjects deal with: Mankind’s life world, [page break] everything around and in men and women insofar as it affects or is affected by human consciousness.
The humanities–and I think we should get this clear–are not defined by being set against a field of science and technology presumably hostile to them. This is a fashionable, but essentially cheap, way of treated both fields.Walter Ong, “Defining the Humanities for Congress”
Browsing through the Notes from the Walter Ong Collection I came across an extended quote from Ong’s address to Congress from 1978 when he was president of the MLA. The address was in support of a resolution to authorize the President to call a conference on the humanities. Walter Ong quotes a definition of the humanities which he wants to play with,
The joint resolution introduced by Mr. Brademas on October 27, 1977, in the House of Representatives follows Congress description of 1965 in stating that:
“The term “humanities†includes, but is not limited to, the study of the following: language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history, jurisprudence; philosophy; archeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism, theory, and practice of the arts; those aspects of the social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods; and the study and application of the humanities to the human environment with particular attention to the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of national life.â€
He then goes on to conclude,
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.
Ong, Walter J. “Statement of Rev. Walter J. Ong, Professor of English and Professor of Humanities in Psychiatry at St. Louis University; and President, Modern Language Association of America.†White House Conference on the Humanities. Joint Hearings before the Subcommittee on Select Education of the Committee on Education and Labor, House of Representatives, and the Subcommittee on Education, Arts and Humanities of the Committee on Human Resources, United States Senate, Ninety-Fifth Congress, First and Second Session, on H.J Res. 639 to Authorize the President to call a White House Conference on the Humanities. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978. 684-88.
The latest version of the Digital Humanities Quarterly is out and they have done something neat. They have included some of the TAPoRware tools in the bar at the top of articles like Wendell’s reflections, Something Called Digital Humanities.
This is someone anyone can do. We provide instructions on the code to put in your HTML on the TAPoRware Add Tools Demo page. There are different models. You will also find code on the documentation pages for individual tools on the TADA Documentation Pages.
Just found this delightful, simple, slightly addictive text toy called Wordle.
This example is a big chunk of text from Corporate Ipsum, my new favourite dummy text generator.
Found at ouroboros.
Monday we had convocation (and I took pictures.) I was right behind the Chancellor’s chair. Deepa Mehta was the speaker and she talked about multiculturalism in Canada. She talked mostly about how she is treated by customs and immigration every time she comes back to Canada (she gets pulled aside and questioned).
This was my last convocation at Mac – the last round of students. Like every year, I was blessed with exceptional students. It was good to see them one last time in their moment of celebration.