I’m at the Methods Commons workshop and Kirsten Uszkalo presented the WEME project (Witches in Early Modern England.) She showed (for the first time) the Throwing Bones interface which allows one to search the database and survey results as small decks of cards. Each deck has a different set of cards depending on the features of the hit. (See an example below.) You can use these sets to explore the hits. Very neat!
Well my vacation is over and I’m facilitating a retreat on text methods across disciplines. (See Towards a Methods Commons.) With support from the ITST program at SSHRC we brought together 15 linguists, philosophers, historians, and literary scholars to discuss methods in a structured way. The goal is to sketch a commons that gathers “recipes” that show people how to do research things with electronic texts. Stay tuned for a draft web site in about 6 months.
Google has announced the first projects they are funding to use Google Books and have announced a commitment to the digital humanities of nearly a million dollars. See Official Google Blog: Our commitment to the digital humanities.
we’d like to see the field blossom and take advantage of resources such as Google Books that are becoming increasingly available. We’re pleased to announce that Google has committed nearly a million dollars to support digital humanities research over the next two years.
I’m at the Digital Humanities 2010 conference in London, England. The conference is taking place at King’s College London. I’m on two panel and giving a paper (with others):
Some of the themes that are coming up at the conference are:
Jobs. The ACH ran a neat Jobs-Slam at its Annual General Meeting. Jobs are becoming an issue as the field expands and people see humanities computing as a source of alternative para-academic careers. I was surprised how many jobs were promoted at the AGM.
On the subject of jobs, Stéfan Sinclair shared two places where jobs are being posted that were new to me:
Arts & Humanities Net: http://www.arts-humanities.net/jobs
HASTAC: http://www.hastac.org/forums/announcements-and-opportunities/fellowship-and-employment-opportunities
I have spent yesterday and today at the centerNet 2010 summit as I am on the steering committee. See my conference report at, philosophi.ca : Center Net 2010. An interesting question we are struggling with is what centerNet’s mission should be and how it is different from other organizations in ADHO. We are trying to also figure out how centerNet can do things without become a heavy centralized organization (which may be ironic since we all have centres at our universities with all the baggage and virtues of centers.) My view is that centerNet should do very little itself – instead its philosophy should be to empower and support centers or collaborations to do things for the rest of us. We should, in effect, centersource things in the sense of crowdsourcing by centres.
I came across this older article by Tom Jenkins from Globe and Mail that makes the case for investment in digital content. The article, It’s time for Canada’s digital revolution (Monday, March 2, 2009), is by Tom Jenkins, executive chairman and chief strategy officer of Waterloo’s Open Text Corp. He is also on the SSHRC council.
The Obama administration has made IT infrastructure and digital content a top and multibillion-dollar priority. The European Union has just launched a massive expansion in European digital content as part of its digital commercialization strategy. With only 1 per cent of Canada's content on the Web, we are falling behind the rest of the world as other countries pull ahead in the race to put their information online. Canada must keep pace in the fast-moving digital revolution. …
Library and Archives Canada, with strong support from the private and university sectors, has a plan to digitize Canadian content and is ready with the digital equivalent of a shovel-ready knowledge infrastructure project. It is time to implement. To succeed, we have to move quickly to take advantage of our strengths and opportunities.
This is the first public mention I’ve seen of an initiative to digitize Canadian content on a large scale. There has been discussion that OpenText (which got started with the New OED project) would support such a project. Let’s do it!
Supercomputers seek to ‘model humanity’ (Omar El Akkad, Focus Seciton, F4). The online version of the story, unlike the print version, includes a screen shot of the Conjecturator that Patrick Juola is leading.
The article quotes me extensively from an interview after the Mind the Gap workshop. The article focuses on the Digging into Data projects in Canada including the With Criminal Intent project. At least one quote attributed to me, however, must be from someone in the classics Digging project.
At the Digital Humanities Summer Institute I participated in a three day advanced consultation on “Scaling Digital Humanities. I posted my conference report here, but I have just finished editing the short presentation I gave on Institutions In The Digital Humanities. This is an outline of work I am doing to document the history and institutions in Canada supporting the digital humanities as part of a project led by Dr. Michael Eberle-Sinatra looking at The Academic Capacity of the Digital Humanities in Canada.
One thing that became clear from the meeting is the diversity of support available across Canada. I have been developing a definition of what I consider to be basic support for research computing in the humanities:
SSHRC has just issued a call for proposals with a very short deadline (as in, proposals are due July 2nd.) See Knowledge Syntheses Grants on the Digital Economy. This is an important call because it will build a humanities and social science response to the government’s Digital Economy initiative. It is important that the arts and humanities be represented in this initiative.
Last week was the SDH/SEMI 2010 conference at the Congress in Montreal. We had one of our best conferences with significant graduate student presence. I have posted my reflections on the conference at my Society For Digital Humanities / SEMI conference report.