Category: Computers and Education

A Digital Humanities Manifesto

The UCLA Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities has come up with a A Digital Humanities Manifesto which is worth reading. It starts with,

Digital humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent practices that explore a universe in which print is no longer the exclusive or the normative medium in which knowledge is produced and/or disseminated.

I am reminded of the Victoria Manifesto that a bunch of us put together at the University of Victoria. Manifestos are a particular type of document that can be used to convey a call for change.

Project Bamboo

Bamboo LogoI attended Workshop 3 of Project Bamboo in Tucson Arizona this week. I think I’m beginning to understand it, though understanding what Bamboo is was one of the favorite subjects of conversation of the meeting (so I’m conscious that . There is a deliberate ambiguity to the project since they are trying to listen to the community in order to become what we want rather than what we suspect. Some of my takeaway thoughts:

  • It is being structured as a consortium. Thus the long term sustainability model is that universities (and possibly associations and individuals) will contribute resources into the consortium and get back services for their faculty. This seems the right way to get to a level of broad support.
  • One thing Bamboo will do is develop shared services that participating universities can use to deliver research support.
  • One of the challenges is figuring out how to listen to the community. The stories are the mechanism being used for this. Scholars are contributing stories of what they do and what they want to do. In some cases the stories are being contributed by people who talk to faculty.
  • Recipes (like those we developed for TAPoR) will be a key way to connect stories to the shared services. A recipe is a way of abstracting from a lot of stories something that can be used to identify the tools and content needed by researchers to do useful work.
  • Bamboo probably won’t build tools, but they will build and run services with which others can build tools. Bamboo may be the project that runs SEASR as a service for the rest of us, for example. We can then build tools with SEASR for our research projects.
  • Bamboo is talking about running the shared services in a cloud. I’m not sure what that means yet.

Beyond Analogue: Current Research in Humanities Computing

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Beyond Analogue: Current Graduate Research in Humanities Computing is a conference being organized by the Humanities Computing graduate students at the University of Alberta on February 13th. Daniel O’Donnell from U of Lethbridge and Paul Youngman of U of North Carolina-Charlotte will be the keynote speakers. If you are grad student you might want to submit a proposal for a poster or paper. Either way you are welcome to attend the full day conference if in Edmonton that day.

News Overview Inline Listing – MacArthur Foundation

Poking around the MacArthur Foundation site I found an interesting recent study on Teens, Video Games and Civics by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The full report has too much to summarize in a blog entry. Here is their list of “Summary Findings at a Glance”:

  • Almost all teens play games.
  • Gender and age are key factors in describing teens’ video gaming.
  • Youth play many different kinds of video games.
  • The most popular games played by teens today span a variety of genres and ratings.
  • Gaming is often a social experience for teens.
  • Close to half of teens who play online games do so with people they know in their offline lives.
  • Teens encounter both pro-social and anti-social behavior while gaming.
  • The most popular game genres include games with violent and nonviolent content.
  • Parental monitoring of game play varies.
  • There are civic dimensions to video game play.
  • The quantity of game play is not strongly related to teens’ interest or engagement in civic and political activity.
  • The characteristics of game play and the contexts in which teens play games are strongly related to teens’
    interest and engagement in civic and political activities.
  • Playing games with others in person was related to civic and political outcomes, but playing with others online
    was not.
  • Teens who take part in social interaction related to the game, such as commenting on websites or contributing
    to discussion boards), re more engaged civically and politically.
  • Civic gaming experiences are more equally distributed than many other civic learning opportunities. (p. viii)

This study brought in the Mills College Civic Engagement Research Group (CERG) who have released a White Paper on The Civic Potential of Video Games (PDF) which discusses the social and civic aspects of gaming. One interesting result (also found in the Pew summary) is that it seems that teens who play games socially in person “are more likely to be civically and politically engaged than teens who play games primarily alone.” (p. 18) Online gaming seems to be “a weak form of social interaction” (p. 20) compared to in person social gaming. Another finding that contradicts the accepted (parental) wisdom that gaming is bad for youth is that,

The stereotype of the antisocial gamer is not reflected in our data. Youth who play games frequently are just as civically and politically active as those who play games infrequently. (p. 24)

Orion: Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities

Yesterday I gave a talk at the Orion conference Powering Research and Innovation: A National Summit on a panel on Cyberinfrastructure on “Cyberinfrastructure in the Humanities: Back to Supercomputing.” Alas Michael Macy from Cornell, who was supposed to also talk didn’t make it. (It is always more interesting to hear others than yourself.) I was asked to try to summarize the humanities needs/perspectives on cyberinfrastructure for research which I did by pointing people to the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure report “Our Cultural Commonwealth.” One of the points worth making over an over is that we have a pretty good idea now what researchers in the humanities need as a base level of infrastructure (labs, servers and support). The interesting question is how our needs are evolving and I think that is what the Bamboo project is trying to document. Another way to put it is that research computing support units need strategies for handling the evolution of cyberinfrastructure. They need ways of knowing what infrastructure should be treated like a utility (and therefore be free, always on and funded by the institution) and what infrastructure should be funded through competitions, requests or not at all. We would all love to have everything before we thought of it, but institutions can’t afford expensive stuff no one needs. My hope for Bamboo is that it will develop a baseline of what researchers can be shown to need (and use) and then develop strategies for consensually evolving that baseline in ways that help support units. High Performance Computing access is a case in point as it is very expensive and what is available is usually structured for science research. How can we explore HPC in the humanities and how would we know when it is time to provide general access?

Convocation 2008

Photo of the Chancellor’s Chair 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.

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.

Bytes & Bites: e-Portfolios

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Yesterday I gave a talk for McMaster’s Bytes & Bites – e-learning cafe about e-Portfolios: Helping students represent themselves (PDF of Powerpoint). Our way of teaching students to do portfolios is different than how e-portfolios are usually structured as we can expect of Multimedia students that they create a web site from scratch on a server off-campus (where they can update it over time as their career matures.) There seem to me to be two challenges to the use of e-portfolios in learning:

  • Faculty Consensus is hard to secure. E-Portfolios work best if there are meaningful assignments throughout a program where students are asked to put their work in the system. This means your colleagues have to understand and agree to use the system and to encourage the self-reflection portfolios support. But consensus among faculty, especially when half your courses are taught by sessionals, is hard to get.
  • Privacy and Publication. One of the incentives for students to post their work to a portfolio is the opportunity to publish the portfolio when they graduate, but that also raises privacy issues. What rights do students have to not keep stuff they aren’t proud of. We have to make sure they get to choose what to publish and that they have the ability to remove stuff. Further, and this is where our simple go-get-your-own-domain-and-ISP model works well, a structured portfolio system on campus will always constrain the way students can publish their material.

Intute: Researching videogames with Intute

Intute has a nice summary page about serious games, Researching videogames with Intute. The page is just the right length and builds on records in Intute. I note that they don’t mention the Serious Games Institute that I blogged recently.

This is the first time I’ve noticed that Intute is publishing longer guides. They call them Limelights and describe them thus:

Limelight, from Intute: Arts and Humanities, is a monthly feature showcasing individual artists, topical subjects, new and noteworthy websites, or forthcoming events, exhibitions or festivals. Each feature gives information, links to related sites in the Intute: Arts and Humanities database and suggestions for possible searches.

Serious Games Institute

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I just stumbled upon the Serious Games Institute (SGI) at Coventry University. Their aim is, “to become an international centre of excellence for serious games and a model of best practice for regional development through technology innovation.” (About Us) They seem to be focused on developing games to teach business, and the games seem to be fairly sophisticated. (See their Showcase.) It is interesting how serious gaming is being used to revitalize a region. nGen (Niagara Interactive Media Generator), recently announced by Brock, is a similar initiative that is connecting with Silicon Knights to kickstart game development as a way of generating new industry.

The Serious Games Institute seems to use Second Life a lot where they have an island.