Category: Humanities Computing

Workshop On Application Programming Interfaces For The Digital Humanities

This weekend I was at a workshop on Application Programming Interfaces for the Digital Humanities. See the philosophi.ca wiki conference report.

The workshop looked at the possibilities and issues around APIs for digital humanities resources. I think it is fair to say that lots of projects have been exposing APIs but they aren’t being used much. We need to encourage projects to develop mashups that take advantage of the APIs.

This workshop, more than any other I’ve been at was heavily twittered (#apiworkshop) which was interesting and annoying. At times people seemed to space out and not participate as they rushed to document what was happening or contribute some bon mot. I should admit that I am part of the problem – I posted a few and was writing my conference report live which was just as distracting. I guess we all have develop an etiquette for situations where you are not just part of an audience, but are expected to participate.

Peter Nicholson: The Changing Nature of Intellectual Authority.doc – Powered by Google Docs

Peter Nicholson of the Council of Canadian Academies has an interesting paper that he has given on The Changing Nature of Intellectual Authority. His thesis is:

People today are much less prepared to defer to the experts. But at the same time, we are being swamped with data and information – a glut that cries out for analysis and summary. So there’s a dilemma. Who to turn to? Increasingly the answer is – Well, to ourselves of course, as individuals empowered by a world wide web that has rapidly evolved into a social medium. More specifically, it is a medium that today supports massively distributed collaboration on a global scale that – we can only hope – will help us make sense of it all.

He talks about the “decline of deference” to traditional authorities (from the church to academic experts) and talks about it taking place recently. I suspect its been happening since the enlightenment began and might be a general feature of modernity and improved communication (and democratic institutions.) What is new is the ability of the many to replace authority with a distributed or networked authority. People now believe things are true if they have been negotiated by a community. Something is true enough if it won’t get you in trouble because your crowd has authorized the truth. Most of the time such negotiated truth is fine (with enough eyeballs someone will point out a flaw), but other times the community misses something and is satisfied with not-quite-good-enough.

Princetonian: Kindles yet to woo University users

Thanks to Sean for pointing me to a story about Princeton’s experiment with Kindles replacing textbooks. In a pilot program students in certain courses were given a Kindle DX with all their course readings. Princeton was partnering with Amazon.com (Bezos went to Princeton) as part of a sustainability initiative to save paper. The problem is that the students didn’t like using the Kindles.

Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs,” he explained. “All these things have been lost, and if not lost they’re too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the ‘features’ have been rendered useless.

Stan Katz (who was one of the instructors experimenting) is quoted in the Princetonian story supporting the student view. He found the Kindle hard to annotate and he found that without page numbers it was hard for students to cite accurately.

The Kindle doesn’t give you page numbers; it gives you location numbers. They have to do that because the material is reformatted,” Katz said. He noted that while the location numbers are “convenient for reading,” they are “meaningless for anyone working from analog books.

There is a Slashdot summary with lots of comments too.

Philosophy 366: Student digital ethnography

Derek, Kat and Yosuke in my Philosophy 366, Computers and Culture class voluntarily put together a short video summarizing a survey they took of the classes use of computing. See Philosophy 366 Ethnography. I like the variety of ways they showed the information from having characters talking in WOW to other students holding sheets of paper. I can’t put my finger on it, but there is more information in the video than just the summary information on the cards. Short videos are becoming an argumentative form.

Ruecker’s One Minute Movies

Screen of Mandala Browser
My colleague Stan Ruecker has been create short online movies of humanities computing software tools he is involved in like the Mandala Browser and the Digital Profiles rich prospect browser. These are in the tradition of videos like A Vision of Students Today from the Digital Ethnography folk. There is also the TEI Encoding of Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues. Neat idea – we should get more comfortable with YouTube as a way of conveying ideas.

A Collaborative Research Commons

Computing With The Infrastructure At Hand is an essay I wrote last weekend and have been editing that tries to think about how to do humanities computing if you don’t have grants and don’t have lots of support. I ended up trying to imagine a Collaborative Research Commons that imagines crowdsourcing digital humanities work.

While research as a gift economy may seem idealistic, I’ve been surprised by the extraordinary collaboration you get when you set up a structured way for people to contribute to a project. The Suda On Line project first showed (me at least) the potential for social and volunteer research. I’ve had luck with the Dictionary of Words in the Wild and the upcoming Day of Digital Humanities. This last project has yet to happen, but we have close to 100 participants signed up. My point is that we can imagine ways to research that don’t start with how to get a grant before we can talk.

Beyond Analogue: Graduate Research at Alberta

This Friday I attended a full day conference Beyond Analogue: Current Graduate Research in Humanities Computing. See my Conference Report. Daniel O’Donnell (who gave a great paper) told me in conversation that he could see from the graduate research the emergence of a “school” of humanities computing at U of Alberta – that we have a commonality of issues and research practices around implementation, interface and visualization that distinguishes us. Could a sign of the maturity of the field be that different schools of approaches are emerging?

Digital Humanities Observatory of Ireland

DHO Logo

I am today at the Digital Humanities Observatory in Dublin Ireland. The DHO provides research and teaching standardization, consultation, outreach, training, and services to digital humanists in Ireland.

The Digital Humanities Observatory (DHO) is an all-island digital humanities collaboratory working with Humanities Serving Irish Society (HSIS), national, European, and international partners to further e-scholarship. The DHO is a knowledge resource providing outreach and education on a broad range of digital humanities topics. It provides data management, curation, and discovery services supporting the long-term access to, and greater exploitation of, digital resources in the creation of new models, methodologies and paradigms for 21st century scholarship.

In these cases it is always interesting to see what the media make of this project – see €28 m observatory to digitize history.

I’m not sure where the term “observatory” comes from, but it is cropping up as a new term for centers. Actually, it suggests the opposite of a centralizing centre; an observatory looks out and presumably supports rather than centralizes.