Programming – Page 4

Sample on Randomness

Mark Sample has posted his gem of a MLA paper on An Account of Randomness in Literary Computing. I wish I could write papers quite so clear and evocative. He combines interesting historical examples to a question that crosses all sorts of disciplines – that of randomness. He shows how the importance of randomness connects to poetic experiments in computing.

I would recommend reading the article immediately, but I discovered, as with many good works, I ended up spending a lot of time following up the links and reading stuff on sites like the MIT 150 Exhibition which has a section on Analog/Digital MIT with online exhibits on subjects like the MIT Project Athena and the TX-0. Instead I will warn – beware of reading interesting things!

A Thousand Words

The Texas Advanced Computing Center has created an Advanced Visualization for the Humanities tool for a project A Thousand Words. The tool, called Most Pixels Ever: Cluster Edition is a library that extends Processing and is designed for large-scale tiled displays. Very neat.

The Old Bailey Datawarehousing Interface

The latest version of our Old Bailey Datawarehousing Interface is up. This was the Digging Into Data project that got TAPoR, Zotero and Old Bailey working together. One of the things we built was an advanced visualization environment for the Old Bailey. This was programmed by John Simpson following ideas from Joerg Sanders. Milena Radzikowska did the interface design work and I wrote emails.

One feature we have added is the broaDHcast widget that allows projects like Criminal Intent to share announcements. This was inspired partly by the issues of keeping distributed projects like TAPoR, Zotero and Old Bailey informed.

Perlin: Interactive Map of Pride and Prejudice

As I mentioned in my post on the GRAND conference, Ken Perlin showed a number of interesting Java apps that illustrated visual ideas. One was a Interactive Map of Pride and Prejudice. This interactive map is a rich prospect of the whole text which you can move around to see particular parts. You can search for words (or strings) and see where they appear in the text. You can select some text and it searches. The interface is simple and intuitive. You can see how Perlin talks about it in his blog. I also recommend you look at his other experiments.

Umea: Flux Shop

Last week I was in Umea, Sweden at the HumLab run by Patrik Svensson. I gave a paper on “Making theoretical things in the digital humanities.” While wandering around Umea I came across an amusing conceptual art shop – Flux Shop – Erase the boundary between art and life. The shop is a front for an ad firm, but you can buy conceptual art and I ordered a work.

Debates in the Digital Humanities

The University of Minnesota Press has published Debates in the Digital Humanities, a collection edited by Matthew K. Gold that I contributed to. Stephen Ramsay and I co-wrote a chapter titled, “Developing Things: Notes toward an Epistemology of Building in the Digital Humanities.”

Modkit – Software

Garry send me a link to a very cool project which has developed a visual programming language for the Arduino called Modkit. Watch the screencast to get the idea.

I’ve seen a number of visual programming environments and this one reminds me of the old programming environment for Lego Mindstorms. What is new is that it runs off the web the way Design By Numbers does.

Whether it actually makes programming the Arduino easier or, as is often the case with visual programming, turns out to be slower and still as complicated, remains to be seen. It has a nice code view so you can switch to writing code if you get irritated with clicking around for stuff.

Could we build a visual programming language like this for text analysis?

Kinect Hacking and Art Round Table: Why it Matters, What You Need to Know

There is a lot of excitement about the Microsoft Kinect and the potential for adapting their vision technology. Wayne sent me a link to this Music Motion Noise blog entry on Kinect Hacking and Art Round Table: Why it Matters, What You Need to Know.

Time to get one.

2nd Edition of Icon Programming for Humanists

I just got a notice that the 2nd Edition of Icon Programming for Humanists (PDF) by Alan D. Corré has been up (and its free). This has been made available by Jeffery Books who will also sell you a paperback copy. Donations go to promoting Icon and Unicon programming languages and systems.

I read Icon Programming for Humanists ages ago. It was one of the few how-to-program books that were aimed at humanists with text manipulation examples. I thought the book excellent and was only held back because I couldn’t find an Icon interpreter for the Mac when I looked.

This edition has 2 new chapters that deal with Unicode (so you can analyze texts in different languages), and Markup (so you can work with TEI encoded texts.)

There is a recurring issue that crops up as to whether we should be teaching humanities students to program or just to use tools. Corré’s book would make a good textbook for teaching programming.

IMS Open Corpus Workbench

John pointed me to an interesting open source project, the IMS Open Corpus Workbench. This project has developed tools are for “managing and querying large text corpora (ranging from 10 million to 2 billion words) with linguistic annotations.” Obviously it has a linguistics bent, but the tools seem to be well documented and usable.

You can see an example of an interesting interface to the Corpus Workbench at BwanaNet – a wizard-like interface where you go through 5 steps to get results on an English, Catalan, and Spanish corpus.