Category: Internet Culture and Technology

Collaborative Research in the Digital Humanities by Marilyn Deegan and Willard McCarty

A new digital humanities collection focusing on collaboration, Collaborative Research in the Digital Humanities, has been published by Ashgate. The collection is edited by Marilyn Deegan and Willard McCarty and was developed in honour of Harold Short who retired a few years ago from King’s College London where he set up the Humanities Computing Centre (now called the Department of Digital Humanities).

I contributed a chapter on crowdsourcing entitled, “Crowdsourcing the humanities: social research and collaboration”.

Luis von Ahn on reCaptcha and Duolingo

Patrizia pointed me to a TEDxCMU talk by Luis von Ahn on The Next Chapter in Human Computation. von Ahn is known for Captcha and reCaptcha (which he talks about in the first 8 minutes of the talk.) In this talk he introduces his team’s new crowdsourcing project duolingo which aims to translate the web while teaching people a second language. Instead of paying $500 for RosettaStone software you can learn a language by translating progressively more complex sentences from the web.

von Ahn also calls this a “Fair Business Model for Education”. (There is actually a slide with this phrase.) His argument is that since most of the world doesn’t have the money for software, duolingo presents a fair way for them to contribute labour in return for learning a language. I note that the fair business model could apply not just to language education, but other types of education. How could you monetize the teaching of philosophy (or ethics)? What would people do to learn that could also benefit someone else?

IBM Sage Computer, 1960 from the Retronaut

Thanks to the Guardian I discovered the Retronaut, a site dedicated to past visions including past visions of the future. They have a number of interesting things like a video of the IBM Sage Computer, 1960 or  Video Games Then and Now. There is a prescient Telecommunications Services for the 1990s created in 1969 for the Post Office Research Station of the UK in 1969.

The machine in time: In honour of Tito Orlandi

Domenico pointed me to an entry on InfoLet (a blog he and others keep in Italian on informatics and literature.) The entry announces a book La macchina nel tempo: Studi di informatica umanistica in onore did Tito Orlandi that brings together many of the top digital humanists in Italy to celebrate Tito Orlandi’s contribution to the field. You can order online at http://www.lelettere.it. Continue reading The machine in time: In honour of Tito Orlandi

Staff to be banned from sending emails

“The deluge of information will be one of the most important problems a company will have to face (in the future). It is time to think differently.” Reading useless messages is terrible for concentration, as it takes 64 seconds to get back on the ball after doing so, according to a recent study by the social and business responsibility watchdog ORSE. “Poorly controlled, the email can become a devastating tool,” it warned.

There is more and more criticism of email and how it can distract you. Here is an article from the Telegraph about a French company where Staff to be banned from sending emails. What is interesting is that the CEO of Atos is advocating using instant messaging and a Facebook-like social network. This is supposed to be less distracting.

Akihabara: Otaku Holy Land

Panorama of Akiba

If you are interested in Japanese otaku culture you have probably heard about Akhihabara or Akiba for short. Akiba is a neighbourhood of Tokyo famous for electronics shops, game shops, maid cafés and arcades. I was lucky to get a tour of Akiba by Michiya Kawajiri and Kiyonori Nagasaki on November 30th, 2011. Akiba is similar to Osaka’s Nipponbashi neighbourhood, but larger and with maid cafés. You can see my photos of Akihabara on Flickr.

Continue reading Akihabara: Otaku Holy Land

Web literature in China

From a story in the Guardian I discovered that online reading is taking off in China. According to China Daily story, Web literature turns a page with profitable storyline a large percentage of Chinese web users are reading long serialized novels for a 30-50 cents per 100,000 words (which is about a dollar for every 600-1000 pages!) The Guardian story Has China found the future of publishing? suggests that the convenience, the price, the type of serialized literature, the economic model (of independent authors and commercial sites), and the proliferation of e-readers has made it a viable business. I’m guessing that serialization is a way of discouraging pirates – people who want the next chapter will pay to get it as soon as possible.

Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory Launch

 

I am at the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC) launch. CWRC is building a collaborative editing environment that will allow editorial projects to manage the editing of electronic scholarly editions. Among other things CWRC is developing an online XML editor, a editorial workflow management tools, and integrated repository.

The keynote speakers for the event include Shawna Lemay and Aritha Van Herk.

Happy Words Trump Negativity in the English Language

Happy Words Trump Negativity in the English Language is an interesting story about a study by Kloumann and colleagues on Positivity of the English Language. They used Mechanical Turk to get people to assess whether the high frequency words used in Twitter, Books, the New York Times and Music Lyrics were positive. Their study showed that overwhelmingly English is a positive language. Thanks to Stan for this.