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.
Convocation 2008
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.
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
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
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.
Conference: Society For Digital Humanities
I’m now at the Society for Digital Humanities annual conference at the Congress of Social Sciences and the Humanities. I am updating a Conference Report on philosophi.ca. More to come.
Digital Humanities Summer Institute
I 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.
The UVic Transformer Project
The University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre have just released version 2.0 of a useful utility for converting old text files, Transformer.
This utility runs under Windows and will do batch conversions of old files. It uses JavaScript as a macro language. It is released under an open source license.
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.