Category: Humanities Computing

Responding To Surfdom

The internet has revolutionised humanities research. But has the development of ever-more sophisticated online resources freed up scholars to explore new ideas, or made them slaves to the digital machine?

This is the start of the Matthew Reisz article in Time Higher Education titled Surfdom which asks questions about the digital humanities. I was sufficiently annoyed when I read the article that I sent a response to the Humanist Discussion Group, Responding To Surfdom. I’ve now posted the response to my wiki here. Reisz raises questions about whether digitization is driving scholarship. He doesn’t really elaborate on the questions raised, but they are important to think through anyway.

Paper at Hiroshima

This last weekend I gave a paper to the Hiroshima Seminar of Digital Humanities for the Dickens Lexicon Project. Dr. Nagasaki also spoke at this event and Dr. Imahayashi organized the event.  This seminar was hosted by the English Research Association of Hiroshima (ERA), and supported by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research and the International Institute for Digital Humanities. I spoke on Text Analysis and the Digital Humanities. I showed Voyant.

The Dickens Lexicon project was new to me. I quote from a report Imahayashi wrote (PDF, English) online:

the Dickens Lexicon Project, which was organised in 1998 and consists of twenty scholars who graduated from Hiroshima University and Kumamoto University. The ultimate aim of the project is to compile the Dickens Lexicon from the cards Dr Tadao Yamamoto (1904-91) elaborately drew up and left to us. The Lexicon is expected to be released as “The Dickens Lexicon Online” on the internet website with the multifunctional search engine in the near future.

The Lexicon project goes back to before the war when Yamamoto started gathering materials for the first time.

On the 6th August 1945 the Atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, owing to which his house was completely destroyed and all the cards and materials for the Lexicon were burnt to ashes.

Yamamoto, fortunately survived and he was able to restart the project, though he didn’t finish it.

The day after the seminar I visited the Peace Park and A-Bomb Dome in Hiroshima. Words don’t convey the emotions of visiting this site.

MLA Profession 2011: On the Evaluation of Digital Media as Scholarship

My paper “On the Evaluation of Digital Media as Scholarship” has just been published online in MLA: Profession 2011 (pp. 152-168). The PDF is freely available. The abstract reads,

As more and more scholarship is digital, we need to develop a culture of conversation around the evaluation of digital academic work. We have to be able to evaluate new types of research, like analytic tools and hypermedia fiction, that are difficult to review. The essay surveys common types of digital scholarly work, discusses what evaluators should ask, discusses how digital researchers can document their scholarship, and then discusses the types of conversations hires and evaluators (like chairs) should have and when they should have them. Where there is a conversation around evaluation in a department, both hires and evaluators are more likely to come to consensus as to what is appropriate digital research and how it should be documented.

This is part of a collection put together by Susan Schreibman, Laura Mandell and Stephen Olsen about Evaluating Digital Scholarship. McGann and Bethany Nowviskie, among others, also have papers in this issue of Profession.

Research Infrastructures in the Humanities

The European Science Foundation has released a report on Research Infrastructures in the Humanities. The report has a nice Introduction on the origins of Research Infrastructures like the library and museum. It presents a taxonomy and a number of case studies. By and large the report argues “that digital RIs offer Humanities scholars new and productive ways
to explore old questions and develop new ones.” (Foreword, p. 2) The report is by the European Science Foundation and is designed to encourage appropriate development of digital infrastructure for the humanities which bridge to traditional resources.

Digital infrastructures are developing rapidly but unevenly, and there is an urgent need for coordination, standardisation and sharing of experience to prevent unnecessary duplication and the atomisation of good initiatives. (Foreword, p. 2)

I’ve only skimmed the report, but it doesn’t seem to raise the question of exactly what is suitable as infrastructure and what should stay open research. The report concludes with a nice set of priorities including the need for evaluation systems.

Conference Report on DH-JAC2011

I am at the 2nd International Symposium on Digital Humanities for Japanese Arts and Cultures, DH-JAC 2011.  I am writing a live conference report here on philosophi.ca. Yesterday I presented a response to Mitsuyuki Inaba’s survey of the work of the Web Technologies group (PDF) of the Global COE Digital Humanities Center for Japanese Arts and Cultures.

Continue reading Conference Report on DH-JAC2011

INKE Research Foundations For Understanding Books And Reading In A Digital Age Text And Beyond

Today I was at the INKE Birds Of a Feather conference here in Kyoto. I wrote a conference report at, INKE Research Foundations For Understanding Books And Reading In A Digital Age Text And Beyond. It was a great day with lots of discussion thanks to the BOF format where papers were distributed beforehand so we could only talk for 5 minutes.

Motion Capture and Noh

On November 10th I was invited by Dr. Kozaburo Hachimura to watch as his graduate students capture the motion of a master Noh performer. The motion capture was run in a special lab that was specifically built for this. They have a floor that was built to Noh theatre standards and we had to take our slippers off to protect the wood. There is a rig on the ceiling with the motion capture cameras and a sound booth in the back. When not in use for motion capture the room is used for seminars and meetings.

Continue reading Motion Capture and Noh

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.