Category: Visualization

Digital Scholarship and Digital Libraries

Image of Slide

At the beginning of November I was asked to give a keynote for a Digital Scholarship/Digital Libraries symposium at the beautiful of Emory Conference Centre. My talk was titled “The Social Text: Mashing Electronic Texts and Tools” and my thesis was that we needed to forge a closer relationship between scholarly projects and digital libraries. This is a two-fold call for change:

  1. Scholars develop new methods to analyze and study texts need deeper access to the digital libraries that hold the texts they want to study. On the one hand we need to be able to discover and aggregate study collections that span (often incompatible) digital library collections. On the other hand we need to be able to plug in our tools instead of using the analytical tools built into the publishing engine. I proposed that we look seriously at OpenSocial as a model for hosting social applications.
  2. Scholars editing or creating digital texts need to be willing to accept a much more prescriptive set of encoding guidelines so that their texts can be brought into large digital library collections which then could make the discovery and gathering of study collections possible. Smaller scholarly craft projects will not scale or play well over time – that is a function digital libraries should lead.

A copy of the slides in PDF is up for FTP access. The file is 15 MB.

OpenSocial – Google Code

OpenSocial ImageTwo days ago, on the day of All Hallows (All Saints), Google announced OpenSocial a collection of APIs for embedded social applications. Actually much of the online documentation like the first OpenSocial API Blog entry didn’t go up until early in the morning on November 2nd after the Campfire talk. On November 1st they had their rather hokey Campfire One in one of the open spaces in the Googleplex. A sort of Halloween for older boys.

Image from YouTube

Screen from YouTube video. Note the campfire monitors.

OpenSocial, is however important to tool development in the humanities. It provides an open model for the type of energetic development we saw in the summer after the Facebook Platform was launched. If it proves rich enough, it will provide a way digital libraries and online e-text sites can open their interface to research tools developed in the community. It could allow us tool developers to create tools that can easily be added by researchers to their sites – tools that are social and can draw on remote sources of data to mashup with the local text. This could enable an open mashup of information that is at the heart of research. It also gives libraries a way to let in tools like the TAPoR Tool bar. For that matter we might see creative tools coming from out students as they fiddle with the technology in ways we can’t imagine.

The key difference between OpenSocial and the Facebook Platform is that the latter is limited to social applications for Facebook, as brilliant as it is. OpenSocial can be used by any host container or social app builder. Some of the other host sites that have committed to using is are Ning and Slide. Speaking of Ning, Marc Andreessen has the best explanations of the significance of both the Facebook Platform phenomenon and OpenSocial potential in his blog, blog.pmarca.com (gander the other stuff on Ning and OpenSocial too).

Republican Debate: Analyzing the Details – The New York Times

Screen Image The New York Times has created another neat text visualization, this time for the Republican Debate. The visualization has two panels. One shows the video, a transcript, and sections. You can jump the video using the transcript or section outline. The other is a “Transcript Analyzer” where you can see a rich prospect of the debate divided by speeches and you can search for words. What is missing is some sort of overview of what the high frequency words are and how they collocate.

So, I have created a public text for analysis in TAPoR and here are some results. Here is a list of words that are high frequency generated using the List Words tool. Some interesting words:

People (76), Think (66), Know (48), Giuliani (42), Clinton (33), Reagan (13), Democrats (16), Republicans (11)

Health (45), Government (35), Security (35), Country (25), Policy (16), Military (15), School (15),

Marriage (23), Insurance (23), Conservative (23), Private (22), Let (21), Gay (12)

Iraq (13), Iran (12), Turkey (7), Canada (2), Darn (2), Europe (5),

Immigrants (5), Citizens (2)

Man (7), Mean (7), Woman (4), Congressman (25)

Answer (10), Problem (10), Solution (5), War (12)

Continue reading Republican Debate: Analyzing the Details – The New York Times

Bible-copying Robot

Image of Robotboinboing has a short entry about a German robot that is exhibited writing out the bible. The robot is a RobotLab project (site in German.) The image comes from Marc Wathieu’s Flikr set for the RobotLab where the description of the project reads:

The Kuka robot is silently writing a version of the martin luther bible, which was originally printed in a early font called “Schwabacher”, retranslated here by RobotLab into calligraphy. “Wolfgang von Kempelen, Mensch-[in der]-Maschine” exhibition, ZKM, Karlsruhe (D).

From the lab site it seems they have also programmed it to draw portraits.
Thanks to Lynn for this.

Wayfaring

LogoWayfaring is a site where you can create personalized maps using the Google Map system. You could create a map of your favorite Indian Restaurants.

Like many social networking sites, Wayfaring has commenting and tagging features. Maps can be shared, and they can be dropped into other web pages like YouTube videos.

The interface is slow, and the search is bizarre, but Wayfaring is young.

Locative Art

Following the last post I thought I would blog some locative text and art projects.

Image of FieldHello, world! is a work mowed into a field that encodes in Semacode the universal programmers greeting, “Hello, world!”

Image of SunsetEternal Sunset shows you webcam images of the sunset wherever it is happening at the time you visit. (This one is from Norway.)

Grafedia ImageGrafedia is a site where people can send emails with a word they have seen written in blue and underlined on the street. They then get back images associated with those words.

LogoAbout Google Maps hacks for Sonar is just one post from a group blog with a lot of posts on the category locative.

Screen ImageGutenkarte is built on MetaCarta and lets you see a map with the locations important to a text as Google Books does. They process the text, identify locations in the text and then map them. It would be neater if they let users run a text through.