Salman Rushdie in Guelph

On Sunday I went up to Guelph to dine with friends and hear a Salman Rushdie reading from his new book, The Enchantress of Florence.

After reading a section he was interviewed by Guelph professor and former CBC star of “The Dead Dog Cafe”, Tom King. King, who is of native descent, made jokes about Columbus searching for India and finding (American) Indians. To King’s question about what is most noble Rushdie talked about thinking and the importance of learning how to think and having the time to think. In answer to a question from the audience on the effects of the fatwa on his writing, Rushdie talked about how at first he wanted to keep on as if it hadn’t happened, but that instead he learned about power which has seeped into his writings. In meeting politicians around the world to get support to lift the fatwa Rushdie learned about how they think about and use power. This, in turn, has influenced his work – for example, the machiavellian side of The Enchantress of Florence.

The reading, one of two in Canada, was partly in support of the Bookshelf a Guelph bookstore + cafe + cinema that is celebrating its 35th year.

Krazy: Vancouver Art Gallery

Cover to Catalogue

While in Vancouver for the Congress, I went to the Vancouver Art Gallery to see the show Krazy! The Delirious World Of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art which brought together in one exhibit significant works from Anime, Comics, Graphic Novels, Manga, Video Games, Animation and Art. The show was better than I had expected reading the article in the Globe and Mail. For each section they got curators with a background in the field. For example, Will Wright (of SIMs fame) did the video game section.

The challenge of such an exhibit is how to show stuff like comics that are meant to be consumed in another form. The video game section was particularly problematic – they had inkjet printouts of Spore (upcoming game by Wright) screens and characters (that weren’t much better than a good screen), but it wasn’t like the comic section where they had original art and sketches. To exhibit in an art gallery the types of work that are consumed in other contexts was more an exercise in legitimation – telling us these should be thought of as art. The selection of what was important was what was really being exhibited – a “best of” list of lists with commentary on the walls.

What are the digital humanities? DHSI video clips

Screen capture of two video boxes

The Digital Humanities Summer Institute this summer took a number of us aside and asked us to answer four questions about the digital humanities on video. The collection of streaming video clips makes interesting viewing as they chose a representative sample of people from myself to a software architect. You can stack the rows of video clips and compare different answers, which is nice.

Digital Humanities Summer Institute

DHSI LogoI am now at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria where I am going to present an Institute Lecture tomorrow. I have been updating a small Conference Report (that is in progress and covers mostly the lectures.)

In particular it was interesting to hear how Synergies has evolved into a truly national knowledge-mobilization project with good ideas about how to make SSH research accessible to the broader public.

Signs of the Times – Now, Analyze That – Reprinted

George Loper, who heard me speak at the University of Virginia New Horizons talk, has posted a “reprint” of our Now, Analyze That essay, under the title, Signs of the Times – Now, Analyze That: Obama and Wright on Race in America.

It is interesting to see how the essay looks reposted in a different environment. Loper has focused on the essay, not the interactivity, as that is his interest.

Parallel Word Processing

Well, that’s what Textflow calls their not-yet-in-beta collaborative editing system. It certainly looks attractive, it even looks like it might be nice to use. I have only had a quick look, but it claims to offer more than just multi-user document editing; instead of requiring editors to check-in/check-out portions of a document (hence locking their edits), Textflow chunks the document down into a database of edits and revision pieces of arbitrary size and maintains all the pieces of a document simultaneously over many editors. Its killer feature might be the ability to import several versions of a Word file and build a revision history with a ‘final state’ copy ready to commit or roll-back edits.
Faces stiff competition from Google Docs and ThinkFree (among others), but they look to be raising the bar.

New Horizons Conference

New Horizons LogoSo I’m at the New Horizons Conference where I’m going to be on a panel on Thursday between the Open Library and Google Books.

The opening talk was by Dan Cohen of George Mason and Zotero. Zotero (Albanian for “I learn”) stands out as a phenomenal success for digital humanities (and he talked about the challenges of that success). Their server talks to about million instances a day, they have a very active user group, they are in alliances with various organizations to extend the project. Now they have figure out how to get ongoing support to keep on improving it.

See my Conference Report (which is being written as I attend.)

Now, Analyze That: An Experiment in Text Analysis

Image from Visual Collocator

Stéfan Sinclair and I have just finished writing up an essay from an extreme text analysis session, Now, Analyze That. It is first of all a short essay comparing Obama and Wright’s recent speeches on race. The essay reports on what we found in a two day experiment using our own tools and it has interactive handles woven in that let you recapitulate our experiment.

The essay was written in order to find a way of write interpretative essays that are based on computer-assisted text analysis and exhibit their evidence appropriately without ending up being all about the tools. We are striving for a rhetoric that doesn’t hide text analysis methods and tools, but is still about interpretation. Having both taught text analysis we have both found that there are few examples of short accessible essays about something other than text analysis that still show how text analysis can help. The analysis either colonizes the interpretation or it is hidden and hard for students and others to recapitulate. Our experiments are therefore attempts to write such essays and document the process from conception (coming up with what we want to analyze) to online publication.

Doing the analysis in a pair where one of did the analysis and one documented and directed was a discovery for me. You really do learn more when you work in a pair and force yourself to take roles. I’m intrigued at how agile programming practices can be applied to humanities research.

This essay comes out of our second experiment. The first wasn’t finished because we didn’t devote enough time together to it (we really need about two days and that doesn’t include writing up the essay.) There will be more experiments as the practice of working together has proven a very useful way to test the TAPoR Portal and think through how tools can support research all the way through the life of a project, from conceptualization to publication. I suspect as we try different experiments we will be changing the portal and the tools. too often tools are designed for the exploratory stage of research instead of the whole cycle right to where you write an essay.

You can, of course, actually use the same tools we used on the essay itself. At the bottom of the left-hand column there is an Analysis Tool bar that gives you tools that will run on the page itself.