Category: Humanities Computing

Rebooting Computing Manifesto

On the subject of manifestos, one of my students pointed me to a project Peter Denning is leading that has a Rebooting Computing Manifesto. The project is sponsored by the National Science Foundation (of the USA) and is aimed at trying to reinvigorate computer science in the face of dramatic drops in enrollment.

It is a time of challenges for the computing field. We are tired of hearing that a computing professional is little more than a program coder or a system administrator; or that a college or graduate education is unnecessary; or that entering the computing field is a social death. We are dismayed that K-12 students, especially girls, have such a negative perception of computing. We are alarmed by reports that the innovation rate in our field has been declining and that enrollments in our degree programs have dropped 50% since 2001. Instead of the solo voice of the programmer, we would like to hear from the choir of mathematicians, engineers,and scientists who make up the bulk of our field.

I like how this is articulated as a challenge. I also like the can-do approach of gathering and coming up with ideas.

A Digital Humanities Manifesto

The UCLA Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities has come up with a A Digital Humanities Manifesto which is worth reading. It starts with,

Digital humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent practices that explore a universe in which print is no longer the exclusive or the normative medium in which knowledge is produced and/or disseminated.

I am reminded of the Victoria Manifesto that a bunch of us put together at the University of Victoria. Manifestos are a particular type of document that can be used to convey a call for change.

Digging Into Data: New International Program

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The NEH has announced a new program with SSHRC called Digging Into Data. The program is innovative in a number of ways. It is addresses the challenges of large data collections and their analysis. It is also international in that it brings together the granting councils from three countries. Here is what the program says,

The idea behind the Digging into Data Challenge is to answer the question “what do you do with a million books?” Or a million pages of newspaper? Or a million photographs of artwork? That is, how does the notion of scale affect humanities and social science research? Now that scholars have access to huge repositories of digitized data — far more than they could read in a lifetime — what does that mean for research?

Applicants will form international teams from at least two of the participating countries. Winning teams will receive grants from two or more of the funding agencies and, one year later, will be invited to show off their work at a special conference. Our hope is that these projects will serve as exemplars to the field.

This feels like a turning point in the digital humanities. Until now we have had smaller grant programs like the ITST program in Canada. This program is on a larger scale, both in terms of funding available and in terms of the challenge.

The SSHRC announcement is here.

Beyond Analogue: Current Research in Humanities Computing

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Beyond Analogue: Current Graduate Research in Humanities Computing is a conference being organized by the Humanities Computing graduate students at the University of Alberta on February 13th. Daniel O’Donnell from U of Lethbridge and Paul Youngman of U of North Carolina-Charlotte will be the keynote speakers. If you are grad student you might want to submit a proposal for a poster or paper. Either way you are welcome to attend the full day conference if in Edmonton that day.

Blog: Infolet – Informatica e letteratura

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My friend Domenico Fiormonte at l’Università di Roma Tre, Dipartimento di Italianistica, has a blog I just found out about with Paolo Sordi called, Infolet – Informatica e letteratura (Informatics and Litterature.) They write longer thoughtful entries (in Italian) rather than my short ones.

In an entry Dai margini dell’Impero (From the margins of the Empire) Domenico criticizes “anglonorthern” computing humanists at DH 2008 for excessive specialization and excessive focus on electronic texts (and a particularly narrow version of text at that.) He goes on to say that we have known there is an anglo-american hegemony (of two or three centres) in the management, both political and scientific of the digital. (See the paper, “The international debate on humanities computing: education, technology and the primacy of languages” PDF in English for a longer discussion of this). These are strong words that, at the very least, reflect a sense of marginalization of researchers working in the European South on Romance languages and coming from a philological tradition.

I am torn as to how to respond to Domenico, but respond we should because he is willing to say things that many feel. Whether we believe the colonialization rhetoric or not, we should be willing to talk about internationalization internationally (and in multiple languages.) My response to the entry and the subsequent comments can be read in the comment I left.

The issue of internationalization and marginalization resonates partly because I work in Canada and here we have a close, but not always equal, relationship with researchers in the US and the UK. To be fair, I think we feel in Canada that we are welcome in digital humanities societies and that US colleagues are more than willing to collaborate. We also are aware of our own fetish of the issue that can distract from meaningful collaboration. If anything we may have a greater role internationally than the size of the population would merit. Our problem is that we ourselves can get caught marginalizing our Québécois colleagues. We have our own two-nations version of this marginalization problem – how to foster a truly bilingual research community avoiding “two solitudes” of research silos, an English rest-of-Canada community and a francophone Québécois community? Our Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour l’étude des médias interactifs is a real and sustained attempt to address bilingual research. Ray Siemens and Christian Vandendorpe deserve a lot of credit for their ongoing efforts in this regard, but we have a ways to go.

Globe and Mail: 1858: How a violent year created a province

The Globe and Mail yesterday had a full page story on 1858: How a violent year created a province. This story about the birth of British Columbia 150 years ago draws from the University of Victoria site Colonial Despatches which has images and text of the despatches. Neat project.

It’s remarkable, what a slender thread British authority hung by,” UVIC history professor John Lutz, who helped give birth to the new website, bcgenesis.uvic.ca, said in an interview.

State of Science & Technology in Canada

Stan pointed me to the 2006 Council of Canadian Academies | Conseil des académies canadiennes report on The State of Science & Technology in Canada (Summary and Main Findings, PDF 2.6 mb). The report tries to identify Canada’s strengths and weaknesses in the Science & Technology field, though they have a broad understanding of S&T. There is good news for arts and technology.

The ICT field demonstrating the most promise in the view of respondents – i.e., with the highest net upward trend rating – is New Media, Multimedia, Animation and Gaming, where Canada is internationally recognized as a leader, with a number of successful companies as well as a reputation for superb skills training. (p. 9)

They also identify Humanities Computing as a transdisciplinary field of strength,

Survey respondents perceived significant strength in some emerging fields such as nanoscale materials and biotechnologies, quantum informatics and humanities computing. These latter transdisciplinary fields are specialities for which future prospects are seen to be more significant than currently established strength. (p. 10)

Here is a chart from page 39 showing the Humanities and the Arts:

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Ithaka: Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources

The Ithaka organization has released a report on the Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources with support from the Strategic Content Alliance and JISC in the U.K. The report deals with the difficult question of how to sustain all the free online resources we have built in the first enthusiasm of the web.

There is no single formula that Online Academic Resources (OARs) can apply to achieve sustainability, no ‘one-size-fits-all’ plan that any organization can follow to reach a point of financial stability. There are, however, a variety of processes and approaches that can help to improve the likelihood of entrepreneurial success. In an age when traditional content producers – including scholarly publishers and newspapers – struggle to maintain their financial footing in face of the challenges of the digital world, OARs cannot turn to lessons of the past to find their way, but must see themselves as nimble players in a quickly shifting field.

Part of the problem is that we think of the digital as if it were a grant project with a print outcome. You do the research, you develop the resources, you publish it and then you move on. Digital publication seems to be cheaper and faster than print, but the true cost is the sustainability. You can get it up faster, but then you have to maintain it forever. The report argues that the problem is that academics, as smart as they are, don’t know how to think like entrepreneurs.

Clearly the leaders of these initiatives are competent professionals; why do they not rely on processes that have proven effective in both commercial and not-for-profit contexts? We have concluded that a key reason for this is that academic researchers tend to approach these problems from a different perspective, and with a different mindset, than do commercial entrepreneurs. (Page 5)

For this reason the report presents an entrepreneurial start-up model which excludes academics who can’t focus soley on a project (which is most of us):

Running a start-up is a full-time job and requires full-time leadership. The mode of principal investigators, in which they divide their time between overseeing a variety of research grants, teaching courses, and other responsibilities, is not conducive to entrepreneurial success. New initiatives aiming for sustainability require fully dedicated, fully invested, and intensely focused leadership. If a principal investigator cannot provide it, he or she will have to retain a very capable person who can. (Page 7)

This is the second time in a week or so I have heard people calling for the professionalization of academic resource development (the other time being at the Tools for Data-Driven Research meeting where the view was voiced that tool development should be taken out of the hands of the academics.) Reading the report I wonder what the role of academics in scholarly resources is, if any? It reminds me of calls for MBAs to run universities rather than academics. I wonder what it would look like to apply the logic of this report to the university itself (as a type of institution.) I think it fair to say that the university has clearly proven to be longer lasting (more sustainable) than commercial enterprises. For that matter ask how many software companies still exist ten years later (see my blog entry on In Search of Stupidity, over 20 years of high-tech marketing disasters). To be fair I think the report is looking at models for large-scale academic resources like online journals and other non-profit resource organizations that are often run by professional staff already.  Hereis a list of their major points:

  1.  Most OAR projects should not assume ongoing support from initial funders.
  2. Sustainability plans must include and provide for resources to support future growth.
  3. OAR projects create value through the impact they have on users.
  4. Projects should think in terms of building scale through partnerships, collaborations, mergers, and even acquisitions.
  5. In a competitive world, strategic planning is imperative.
  6. OAR leaders must see both the needs of users and the competitive environment as dynamic and constantly changing.
  7. OAR leaders must become fully accountable both to their projects and to their funders.
  8. Catalysing a dynamic environment for agility, creativity, risk-taking, and innovation is imperative.

While I am skeptical of the entrepreneurial thinking the report starts with we can learn from these points about sustainability by looking at the issue from an entrepreneurial perspective still stands. We can and should think about the long term sustainability and we can learn from other perspectives.

The really useful part of the report is “Section 4: Revenue Generating Options for OAR  Projects” which systematically discusses direct and indirect ways of generating revenue including the much avoided approach of allowing ads into academic sites.

Orion: Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities

Yesterday I gave a talk at the Orion conference Powering Research and Innovation: A National Summit on a panel on Cyberinfrastructure on “Cyberinfrastructure in the Humanities: Back to Supercomputing.” Alas Michael Macy from Cornell, who was supposed to also talk didn’t make it. (It is always more interesting to hear others than yourself.) I was asked to try to summarize the humanities needs/perspectives on cyberinfrastructure for research which I did by pointing people to the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure report “Our Cultural Commonwealth.” One of the points worth making over an over is that we have a pretty good idea now what researchers in the humanities need as a base level of infrastructure (labs, servers and support). The interesting question is how our needs are evolving and I think that is what the Bamboo project is trying to document. Another way to put it is that research computing support units need strategies for handling the evolution of cyberinfrastructure. They need ways of knowing what infrastructure should be treated like a utility (and therefore be free, always on and funded by the institution) and what infrastructure should be funded through competitions, requests or not at all. We would all love to have everything before we thought of it, but institutions can’t afford expensive stuff no one needs. My hope for Bamboo is that it will develop a baseline of what researchers can be shown to need (and use) and then develop strategies for consensually evolving that baseline in ways that help support units. High Performance Computing access is a case in point as it is very expensive and what is available is usually structured for science research. How can we explore HPC in the humanities and how would we know when it is time to provide general access?

CaSTA 2008: New Directions in Text Analysis

CaSTA 08 LogoI am at the CaSTA 2008 New Directions in Text Analysis conference at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. The opening keynote by Meg Twycross was a thorough and excellent tour through manuscript digitization and forensic analysis techniques.

My notes are in a conference report (being written as it happens.)