Well, I’m off to the Society for Digital Humanities Conference, 2007 in Saskatoon. I hope to post a conference report as the conference proceeds on TADA if they have wireless. If not, it will be after.
*Update* My trip report is now as complete as it will get. All I’ve left out are notes about my papers (and the ones I missed or failed to take good notes for.)
Cathy Davidson has a summary article in CTWatch Quarterly titled, Data Mining, Collaboration, and Institutional Infrastructure for Transforming Research and Teaching in the Human Sciences and Beyond. The article makes some good points about how we have to rethink research in the humanities in the face of digital evidence.
Bibliographic work, translation, and indexical scholarship should also have a place in the reward system of the humanities, as they did in the nineteenth century. The split between “interpretation” or “theoretical” or “analytical” work on the one hand and, on the other, “archival work” or “editing” falls apart when we consider the theoretical, interpretive choices that go into decisions about what will be digitized and how. Do we go with taxonomy (formal categorizing systems as evolved by trained archivists)? Or folksonomy (categories arrived at by users, many of which offer less precise organization than professional indexes but often more interesting ones that point out ambiguities and variabilities of usage and application)?
We also need to rethink paper as the gold standard of the humanities. If scholarship is better presented in an interactive 3-D data base, why does the scholar need to translate that work to a printed page in order for it to “count” towards tenure and promotion? It makes no sense at all if our academic infrastructures are so rigid that they require a “dumbing down” of our research in order for it to be visible enough for tenure and promotion committees.
Davidson talks about a first generation digital humanities and then makes a Web 2.0 argument about the overwhelming amount of data being gathered and new paradigms. I’m not convinced she really understands the achievements of the first generation, if there is such a clear generational division, there is no mention of the TEI or the work on literary text analysis and publishing.
theStatus.com is one of those great ideas that restore my faith in the web. It is a site where patients facing or recovering from a difficult medical intervention can create a private page that keeps others updated about their status. It is simple – it has none of the fancy features of a social network site – but it has the important things like a guestbook for friends to leave messages and areas for the administrator to leave updates.
Stuart Moulthrop has a delightful articles, Learning, change and the utopia of play in the recent and first issue of Learning Inquiry (Pages 51-7, Vol. 1, No. 1, April, 2007). He discusses how computer game play and learning could be rather than how they might be exploited. He starts by talking about open culture and how games encourage learning through modding and changing meaning in open works which is a more active way of learning. Mouthrop makes an interesting point about the difference between interacting with a game and reading. He goes out of his way to call attention to the ways academics are slipping into talking about “reading” games as if they were “texts”. This point can’tbe overemphasized.
Readers absorb and acquire. Browsers, surfers, interactors, adventurers, players – pathworkers all – explore and experiment. In pathwork, we do not process the symbol system to yield some ultimate, univocal meaning, but rather investigate and perhaps realize some of its possibilities: but always some, not all. Any contingent recognition extracted from the system is framed against a network of alternatives, experienced or imagined. Interactive systems make substantially different demands and inculcate ways of thinking about signs quite distinct from those enforced by writing … It seems very odd, then, to call this reading. (p. 55)
The reason we are tempted to talk about games as text goes back to our academic sense of authorship.
From the dissertation forward, most academic humanists are also trained, evaluated, and promoted as solo performers. So when a professor of literature or media studies works with a software designer, student, or professional, each goes home to a very different social space. The professor repairs to a private office, the designer most likely to a cubicle farm. It is interesting to consider this difference in scenery as the architectural correlative of open versus closed cultures. The professor is expected to reflect and write, a process that for humanists generally ends in some kind of monograph. The software designer either contributes components to a team project, or perhaps manages the team, and the product of these labors comes with many names attached. (p. 56)
Presumably learning through games encourages learners to understand themselves as part of larger projects rather than as Cartesian heroes meditating alone on thought.
What Moulthrop is worried about is how games could be exploited in learning. They could be used as rewards or used to drill skills. In any case we need to consider how a game is not a game when used for a purpose, especially that purpose children dread, learning.
Indeed, games probably appeal to children largely because they are excluded from the formal culture of school. If this distinction is neglected, games might be used simply as extracurricular rewards: learn your lessons, earn playtime. Much worse, they might be brought into the classroom only as delivery systems for reinforcement of narrowly defined goals, i.e., as drill-and-practice resources for standardized tests. Needless to say, both these approaches strip away the dimension of “open culture” or re-creativity, since they would necessarily limit, not realize, possibilities for change. (p. 54)
Tutoring is now available over the Internet from India. A BBC News story Multinationals lead India’s IT revolution (Steve Schifferes, Jan. 24, 2007) reports about how companies like TutorVista are selling tutoring for North American kids at rates like $99 a month, unlimited help.
How long will it be before we have university marking being contracted off-shore?
The same BBC News series includes a story, Here is the US news from Bangalore, about reporters in India covering news in the US.
Blacklight is a neat project that Bethany Nowviskie pointed me to at the University of Virginia. They have indexed some 3.7 million records from their library online catalogue and set up a faceted search and browse tool.
What is faceted searching and browsing? Traditionally search environments like those for finding items in a library have you fill in fields. In Blacklight you can both search with words, but you can also add constraints by clicking on categories within the metadata. So, if I search for “gone with the wind” in Blacklight it shows that there are 158 results. On right it shows how those results are distributed over different categories. It shows me that 41 of these are “BOOK” in the category “format”. If I click on “BOOK” it then adds a constraint and updates the categories I can use further. Backlight makes good use of inline graphics (pie charts) so you can see at a glance what percentage of the remaining results are in what category type.
This faceted browsing is a nice example of a rich-prospect view on data where you can see and navigate by a “prospect” of the whole.
Blacklight came out of work on Collex. It is built on Flare which harnesses Solr through Ruby on Rails. As I understand it, Blacklight is also interesting as an open-source experimental alternative to very expensive faceted browsing tools that comes out of the Collex project. It is a “love letter to the Library” from a humanities computing project and its programmer.
Yep is the best new software I’ve come across in a while. Yep is to PDFs on your Mac as iPhoto is to images and iTunes is to music – a well designed tool for managing large collections of PDFs. Yep can automatically load PDFs from your hard drive, search across them, tag them and let you assign tags with which to organize them. It also lets you move them around (something I wish iPhoto did) and export them to other viewers, e-mail and print.
Thanks to Shawn for pointing me to this.
Today’s Globe and Mail had a story No more Facebook for city employees (Jeff Gray, May 10, 2007) about how (Toronto) city employees will not be able to use Facebook at work despite the fact that “there is no evidence of rampant abuse”. Toronto seems to be following the province of Ontario which is reported to have banned Facebook as it “does not add value to a workplace environment and civil servants should not be wasting office time visiting the site” according to Premier Dalton McGuinty. Do we have evidence that it is not useful to civil servants? Could there be uses of social networking? At McMaster a number of librarians have Facebook accounts that they are using to be more accessible to students on the princple that they should be where their audience is. (Coming soon a WOW librarian.)
Issues of time wasting hide what to my mind is the more serious issue. Two of my students did a multimedia project on
Facing Facebook that deals with privacy issues. There is a Flash opinion piece that Alex pointed me to that similarly asks, Does what happens in the Facebook stay in the Facebook? These deal with the large-scale corporate privacy issues. My previous post, Facebook Ethics looks at the local ethical issues.
We need to avoid being spooked by a new use of technology just because it takes off. (Toronto is apparently the largest community on Facebook.) But, we also have to be vigilant.
A colleague of mine, Phillip Savage, supervised an interesting student research project into the attitudes of McMaster youth towards broadcast and youth media. A group of upper-class students in his Communication Studies courses surveyed students in a first-year class and prepared a report titled, The McMaster Youth Media Study (PDF). What is impressive is that one of the students, Christina Oreskovich, presented this at the “CBC New Media Panel” to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage (today, May 10th, 2007.)
Here is their “composite sketch of the typical student” which nicely captures the results:
She is 18 years old in her first year of a liberal arts program, her parents were immigrants and she speaks English and another home language (mostly with her grandparents now). She has a cell phone with a built-in camera and is toying with the idea of perhaps in the summer upgrading to a phone with a built in MP3 player. She got a laptop computer when she started at Mac in the fall and has broadband access at home, and in certain locations on campus. She downloads music for free from the Internet form a range of sites and although she has an iPod she rarely pays for iTunes. She regularly downloads complete TV programs off the web to watch on the laptop but rarely whole movies. Almost every day she catches one or two items from YouTube (usually sent as attachments to electronic messages from friends). She occasionally uses MySpace for social networking. On a daily basis she keeps up to date with over 100 friends from school, home and work on Facebook. Only occasionally does she look at blogs; and she doesn’t keep one herself – though some of her friends do.
She still watches TV – usually at least once a day. Her favourite channel is City-TV but she also catches CTV, CBC-TV and CH. She regularly listens to radio (very rarely CBC Radio), although she figures she gets most of her music from other sources. She’s heard of people getting satellite radio but since she doesn’t have a car she very rarely experiences – it’s more something her Dad is into. She will read magazines quite regularly, at least once or twice a week.
She doesn’t feel she has the time or interest to follow most news closely, yet. When she does she is as likely to use traditional mass media (TV, newspaper or radio) as internet sources. She prefers TV, radio nd newspapers for national and international news, and the internet for arts and entertainment stories.
She feels strongly that the Internet allows her to both keep in touch with a wide range of friends, but worries a bit that maybe she is spending less face to face time with close friends and family. She is also a bit concerned about whether time on the internet is making her a little less productive in her school work, although she thinks that it really helps her understand quickly about what’s going on in the world and exposes her to a wide range of points of view (more so than traditional mass media). She gets worried at time about her own privacy on the Internet, especially when she spends so much time on Facebook. She’s not really sure if she can find more Canadian information on the Internet versus traditional media. (pages 3 and 4)
I knew Facebook was popular, but didn’t expect it to be this popular. I’m guessing that it is becoming an “always on” utility for many students that aggregates, summarizes and nicely shows what’s happening to their friends. I suspect interfaces like Facebook Mobile will become more and more popular as iPhone type cell phones become affordable.
BookCrossing is a project a colleague librarian Barbara suggested to me as an example of new media and books intersecting. The idea is that people release books into the “wild” with a BCID label and number. Then others who find the book can log on and write in the journal of the book. Users can then watch how books travel around, being caught, read and released. Neat idea – would our library do this on campus? What if we took books being deacquisitioned and released them in departmental lounges or the student centre?