I’ve put up two sets of photos on Flickr. Montreal 2008 is 17 photos taken in Montreal during the Just for Laughs festival. Check out the pose of Professor Rockwell. Pukaskwa is a set taken in Pukaskwa National Park, one of the most beautiful parks to hike, even if the mosquitoes are terrible. Below is picture of the Moose we saw wading out.
I got an announcement about a A Workshop on Humanities Applications for the World Community Grid (WCG) being hosted by IBM. The WCG is a volunteer grid that uses the BOINC platform and is “powered” by IBM. These volunteer projects fascinate me – they are not our father’s computing where the danger was computers getting smarter than us and taking over and the paradigm was AI. Now the symbiosis of humans and computing is on a social scale – grids of processors and teams of people. Here is what the WCG says about their project:
World Community Grid’s mission is to create the largest public computing grid benefiting humanity. Our work is built on the belief that technological innovation combined with visionary scientific research and large-scale volunteerism can change our world for the better. Our success depends on individuals – like you – collectively contributing their unused computer time to this not-for-profit endeavor.
What sorts of humanities problems could we run on a grid like this? Do humanities projects “benefit humanity” or is medicine (curing cancer) the last human research left? My instinct tells me we could do internet mining for concepts where we gather, clean and analyze large numbers of documents on concepts like “dialogue”. Perhaps someone wants to submit a proposal with me.
There is a nice collection of essays on CH Working Papers on Reassembling the Disassembled Book. These are some of the papers that were presented under that theme at the Society for Digital Humanities meeting in 2007 in Saskatchewan which I blogged before. One paper I was pleased to read because it went by too quickly at the conference is Richard Cunningham’s Dis-Covering the Early Modern Book: An Experiment in Humanities Computing. This paper describes and theorizes a one day experiment Richard and others tried in taking apart an early modern book, scanning it, and reassembling as a electronic book. I love these “what can you do in a day experiments.”
Bad enough we had all agreed, before gathering in Victoria, to disassemble one book; in the end we discovered we would need to dismantle two books to achieve our representational goals. This need to use (or perhaps more appropriately abuse) two books rather than one was a direct result of the planning we undertook prior to entering the ETCL. We began with the basic idea of digitizing an early modern book and defining the project so that it could be completed in a single day. The opportunity for this project came in the form of a selection of early modern books that had been rescued from the discount bins of a couple of London’s antiquarian book stores. (Richard Cunningham, Dis-Covering the Early Modern Book: An Experiment in Humanities Computing)
There are links in the paper to a number of videos and images, including a long video that shows them cutting the pages. Not unlike my Text in the Machine series of photos, but for a far more important purpose.
Well, I was wrong. I thought the Kindle, like other attempts at e-books would be a failure. According a New York Times story by Saul Hansell (Aug. 12, 2008), The Lessons From the Kindles Success argues that while the market of readers may be small, there seem to be a enough readers who read a lot and want the convenience of loading it up on a device. I suspect the ease of use is also a feature.
It seems that Amazon.com’s Kindle is not the flop that many predicted when the e-book reader debuted last year. Citibank’s Mark Mahaney has just doubled his forecast of Kindle sales for the year to 380,000. He figures that Amazon’s sales of Kindle hardware and software will hit $1 billion by 2010.
The New York Times has a disturbing story, Before the Gunfire, Cyberattacks that suggests the Russians may have practiced cyberattack techniques against Georgia before the surface attack in what is the first case of a “known cyberattack had coincided with a shooting war.”
the attacks against Georgia’s Internet infrastructure began as early as July 20, with coordinated barrages of millions of requests — known as distributed denial of service, or D.D.O.S., attacks — that overloaded and effectively shut down Georgian servers.
Georgia, however, doesn’t seem to have noticed as they don’t have that many internet sites and don’t use it much in everyday life/business. One wonders how a successful shutdown of the Internet in Canada would affect us … what would break down?
The Dictionary of Words in the Wild now has over 3000 images and almost 4000 unique words.
I’ve just finished 4 days hiking in the wilds of the northern shore of Lake Superior (Pukaskwa National Park) on one of the most spectacular back country hiking trails I know of. What struck me in the woods an on the shores of Superior was that there are no words in the wild unless scratched on a tree or rock. The only words I saw were all the logos on our clothing, tent, sleeping bags and so on. It really isn’t wild if there are words.
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.