Alex Sevigny pointed me to a post on the Linguist List (16.2917) about Ask-an-Expert System: Digitizing Lang Documentation. The announcement is for a system run by E-MELD, which is a project dedicated to the preservation of endangered languages data and documentation, for people to Ask an Expert. This is not a bot, the questions go to real human experts. Interesting way to support the community.
History of Humanities Computing
I just stumbled on this little gem of a History of Humanities Computing by Michael Fraser. It was prepared for a presentation in 1996 and focuses mostly on developments in the UK (it doesn’t mention TACT, for example), but it provides precise dates for early projects from Busa on.
Mod chips legal in Australia
According to a story in the Daily Telegraph online titled “Sony’s game’s up“, an electronics “geek” won a ruling against Sony to the effect that there was noting illegal to mod chips that overide the region specific coding that lets Sony control prices by region.
Virginia Tool Summit
Last week I was at a Summit on Digital Tools for the Humanities organized at the University of Virginia. The Summit produced an interesting set of recommendations for next steps in tool development. See my wiki conference notes on the WikiTADA. The final session that I helped with came up with a neat idea for what to do about web-wide exploration that Roy Rosenzweig wrote up with my help. See Exploration of Resources – ToolCenter.
History Tools
The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University has a developed a collection of
Tools including H-Bot (an automated historical fact finder that uses Google to try to answer “when did …” questions) and the ToolCenter which is a wiki about tools.
Continue reading History Tools
Juxta
Nines project is developing some neat tools. One of the most interesting is Juxta which is a collation tool with a brilliant interface.
It has a histogram of differences between texts.
Continue reading Juxta
Google Blog Search
Well, Google now has a Blog Search that is in beta. It searches an index of feeds. You can’t submit a blog for them to index, but they are checking other updating services like Weblog.com. Most of the blogs they are tracking have been indexed since June, so you can’t search older entries. See the story, Google Launches Industrial Strength Blog Search.
Podcast Learning
The Guardian has a nice story on educational uses of podcasting, A soundtrack for study by Shola Adenekan (Aug. 17, 2005.) It mentions McMaster’s use for recruiting students.
Buzztracker: News location visualization
buzztracker is an interesting visualization of Google News that is mapped onto a map of the world to show the places in the news and their relationships.
What is an electronic text?
I came across a thoughtful blog entry responding to somethng I wrote with Ian Lancashire about electronic texts and text analysis in WRT: Writer Response Theory ª Forms of Electronic Texts.
The author, Christy Dena, points out the focus on material characteristics (that an e-text is an electronic version of a written work etc.) and inconsistencies. To be honest I wasn’t trying to come up with a typology with a “continuity of variable.” I was trying to describe the variety of things we call e-texts. Time for a better definition and asking whether we want to use “electronic text” for anything that can be read and has/had an electronic form.