Humanities Computing – Page 16

Does information wants to be free?

I’ve been thinking about the phrase “information wants to be free” by Steward Brand according to Chris Anderson in Free: the future of a radical price (see chapter 6). Brand originally saw this as a paradox between information want to be expensive and wanting to be free,

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other. (Brand, 1984)

Anderson in Chapter 6 of Free goes back to Brand to find out why he anthropomorphized information instead of saying “information should be free.” (Brand felt it sounded better and that it focused attention on information, not people.)

While the phrase is memorable as it is (and because it ascribes intention to information) I suspect it would be more accurate to say that “information infrastructure is designed to promote free access.” The web was not designed to facilitate payment for information (as Ted Nelson imagined his Xanadu docuverse would be.) The design and economics of our infrastructure brought the cost of publishing and dissemination down to the cost of having an internet connection and an account on a server. That made it easy for all sorts of people who have non commercial reasons for sharing information to publish free information. It did not, however, mean that all information is available free. There are still people who resist sharing information for all sorts of reasons. In particular I am interested in indigenous communities that resist sharing their stories because that would turn them into information. Their stories are meant to be told in a context by someone who has rights to that story to others who are ready for the story. Posting it on the net decontextualizes the story and reduces it to mere information which in its freedom is neither really free or informative as the original telling.

For a useful web page on the phrase, its origin and uses of the aphorism see Roger Clarke’s ‘Information Wants to be Free’.

HuCon 2011: Current Graduate Research in Humanities Computing

The web site is up for HuCon 2011: Current Graduate Research in Humanities Computing. This is a one day conference organized by the Humanities Computing graduate students that will take place on March 11th, 2011.

MA in Experimental Digital Media at Waterloo

Thanks to David I found out about the University of Waterloo’s new MA in Experimental Digital Media. The MA looks like something you could do in 12 months, but it isn’t clear. The MA doesn’t have a thesis – instead it has project which can be a prototype with commentary:

The Project is the culminating point of the program, in which students demonstrate a mastery of critical theories and theoretical concepts by embodying them in digital artifacts, environments, or practice. Projects will entail the design, conception or production of objects-to-think-with, evocative objects that focus attention on key cultural and theoretical issues in the humanities.

In many cases the project will remain at a design or prototype stage, although the manufacture of the object is by no means ruled out in principle. The design or prototype itself will be accompanied by a commentary of 40 pages in which the student will describe the theoretical and cultural context of the project and its aims, analyse its feasibility and its functioning, describe its cultural and rhetorical significance, and indicate its possible lines of development.

Index Thomisticus Glossary

Mihaela scanned for me a page from the manual for the CD-ROM version of the Index Thomisticus. We were able to get the CD-ROM version through inter library loan and capture some screen shots. This page is an English to Latin Microglossary for users providing computer terms in Latin. Click the image to expand.

IBM’s “Watson” Computing System to Challenge All Time Greatest Jeopardy! Champions

Richard drew my attention to the upcoming competition between IBM’s Watson deep question and answer system and top Jeopardy! champions, IBM’s “Watson” Computing System to Challenge All Time Greatest Jeopardy! Champions. I’d blogged on Watson before – it’s a custom system designed to mine large collections of data for answers to questions. Here is what IBM says its applications are,

Beyond Jeopardy!, the technology behind Watson can be adapted to solve problems and drive progress in various fields. The computer has the ability to sift through vast amounts of data and return precise answers, ranking its confidence in its answers. The technology could be applied in areas such as healthcare, to help accurately diagnose patients, to improve online self-service help desks, to provide tourists and citizens with specific information regarding cities, prompt customer support via phone, and much more.

Bill of Rights for Collaborators: Recommendations Off the Tracks

Paul pointed me to recommendation by the Off the Tracks workshop for a Collaborator’s Bill of Rights. This document nicely starts a discussion about collaboration and credit which is important to the digital humanities. The comments are also worth reading. For example, Adam Crymble raises questions about where we draw the line between collaborators and other forms of support or inspiration. Does an RA for a prof who writes a book deserve to be credited as a co-author? Is the builder of a tool like Omeka a collaborator? My philosophy is generally:

Credit should be discussed at the beginning of a project with RAs, colleagues and programmers. As most of my projects now come out of labs where groups of people meet, we try to discuss credit at the start of any particular project.
In general most projects don’t lead to one outcome. Interdisciplinary projects will often lead to papers written up for different communities. Working with CS folk we have a general rule of thumb that we can each propose and write papers (conference and print) as long as inform others at the start of the writing/proposing and recognize the key players from the other side. Thus I am encouraged to present/publish in my community and I get to be first author on any paper I initiate. The same is true of grad students and other faculty.
Listing co-authored papers on a CV for purposes of merit, promotion and tenure leads to problems at the level of Faculty Evaluation Committees. At U of A you are explicitly asked for each item for which you want merit to specify whether you had co-contributors and what your role/percentage of work was. I try to avoid in my own CV specifying percentages of contribution even though that is encouraged. Instead I try to describe the role I played in a collaborative paper in a consistent fashion. Some of the roles include “led the project”, “wrote the paper”, “edited the paper”, “programmed the site”, “managed the usability research” and so on.
A couple of the comments to this post mention the constraints on programmers and research assistants to starting projects. This is perhaps one of the major reasons I left a nice job in university IT support to take up an academic position – I was tired of waiting for others to initiate projects or trying to be a tail that wagged them. This is the fundamental split in our academic caste system that we have to overcome in the small workings of our labs. In my experience it is often to my advantage to ask research assistants to take leadership and propose things within the context of a research area. The more ideas, the more directions taken, the better the research coming out.

Planning for the future of research digitization

Express News (our U of Alberta news unit) ran a nice story on the Digitization Day event we organized with the title, Planning for the future of research digitization. They used a photo of me taken in the stairwell of Assiniboia with the clear blue Alberta sky in the background.

NY Times: Humanities Scholars Embrace Digital Technology

The next big idea is data according to a New York Times article, Humanities Scholars Embrace Digital Technology by Patricia Cohen (November 16, 2010.) The article reports on some of the big data interpretation projects like those funded by the Digging Into Data program like the Mining with Criminal Intent project I am on.

Members of a new generation of digitally savvy humanists argue it is time to stop looking for inspiration in the next political or philosophical “ism” and start exploring how technology is changing our understanding of the liberal arts. This latest frontier is about method, they say, using powerful technologies and vast stores of digitized materials that previous humanities scholars did not have.

I’m not sure this is a new generation as we have been at this for a while, but perhaps the point is that the new generation is now looking away from theory towards the large-scale data issues.

What stands out about the projects mentioned and others is that the digital humanities and design fields are developing new and subtler forms of large-scale data mining and interpretation that use methods from other disciplines along with a sensitivity to the nature of the data and the questions we want to ask. The image above comes from Stanford’s Visualization of Republic of Letters project. There is nothing new about visualization or network analysis, but digital humanists are trying to adapt methods to messy human data – in other words interpreting the really interesting stuff so that it makes sense of something to someone.

Perhaps we may be able to show that following theses are true and important to the broader community:

Interesting data has to be interpreted to be interesting. Someone has to pose the questions that make data useful.
There is too much of data and it is messy; therefore it can’t by interpreted automatically. Real world analysis always involves questions, choices, data curation, mixing techniques, and iterative interpretation of results to generate knowledge.
Interesting data always has to be explained to someone in some context. Results are only useful knowledge if they are published in some fashion that makes them accessible to an intended audience.
Humanists have been the curators and interpreters of information which is why the subtle skills of questioning, curating, editing, analyzing, interpreting and representing are all the more needed now. Without humanists (and I include librarians and archivists in this category) who are comfortable with digital data and methods we will have only too much data and too many unused tools.

Thanks to Judith for pointing me to this NYT article.

Crowdsourcing Knowledge

Today we held an event at the University of Alberta around developing a new form of collaboration. Peter Robison from the University of Saskatchewan organized the day’s discussion and we had participants from across the country, though most were from the medieval editing community in Western Canada.

Peter started us off by arguing that we need intelligent documents and the way he is doing that is working with RDF. He believes “the interface is the enemy” of researchers trying to study across documents. He believes that XML/TEI isn’t enough; we need intelligent documents that carry assertions that can help other users of the data. I’m intrigued by this idea of “assertions” and I know Allen Renear has been working on what can be said about a document.

Dan O’Donnell argued that we should think about interchange rather than interoperability. He pointed out that most people want access to the data of others to do their own analysis and repurpose for their own. Brent Nelson talked about his Digital Donne project and bringing traditional researchers into digital projects. He then talked about his cabinet of curiosities project. Allison Muiri talked about her Grub Street project and legal issues around involving a larger community.

One issue that we went back and forth on was the place of interface. I’m convinced that the idea of the separation of form and content is just one assertion among many. In some situations it makes sense to talk about separating interface, in others it doesn’t.

One thing we are all struggling with is essentially the human processes. Computers are really not the issue, what we need is support for changing the research culture:

– How do you get participation?
– How do you encourage openness to interchange?
– What will our universities allow us to do?
– How will we get credit for what we are doing?
– How can we run production services or who can run them for us?

Yin Liu talked about how we are here because we have failed. This was in response to Peter’s claim that we were here because we had all succeeded. Yin also said that she would like to no longer list herself as a digital humanist but as a medievalist. The time may come when we are all digital humanists – that, of course, is the culture change we are interested in.

Meagan Timney talked about linking – linking of people, linking of digital humanities to traditional disciplines, linking to training of undergraduates. Dean Irvine talked about how to pitch editing outside of the humanities. Training became a keyword – editing is a way to train students in informatics.

We ended by brainstorming about a partnership that could bring together many of the players in Canada while providing an inclusive culture for new scholars. What could a new type of organization look like?