Category: Humanities Computing

Project Gutenberg: The Killer App

Michael Hart of Project Gutenberg, wrote a provocative answer to Willard’s question (Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 21, No. 495) about the “killer-app” of digital humanities that I reproduce here verbatim:

True, you can’t convince the skeptics. . .you still can’t say that digitial music has wiped out analog music because a few places still make analog records which are really better, not that a true skeptic needs those last few words.

Even when there are more eBooks than paper books, no way.

Even when there are 100 times as many eBooks, not happening.

It’s not going to matter what they SAY about eBooks, reality is going in that direction and paper books will never reverse that trend, simply because you can /OWN/ MILLIONS OF eBOOKS IN A TERABYTE DRIVE [costing under $200].

Before Gutenberg the average person could own zero books.

Before Project Gutenberg an average person could own 0 libraries.

It’s literally as simple as that.

The cost/benefit ratio for eBooks is too much better than paper.

Thanks!!!

Is he right?

The Mind Tool: Edward Vanhoutte’s Blog

Edware Vanhoutte, who has done some of the best work on the history of humanities computing (though much is not yet published), has started a blog. In his first entry, The Mind Tool: Edward Vanhoutte’s Blog, he summarizes early text books that were used to teach humanities computing. It would be interesting to look at how these 70s and 80s books conceive of the computer and how they differ from the 50s and 60s work like that of Booth.

Building understanding: Our best investment for the future

Chad Gaffield, the President of SSHRC wrote an Op-Ed piece for the National Post on how, Building understanding: Our best investment for the future. Here is a quote related to information technology.

Canada’s new science and technology strategy, Mobilizing Science and Technology to Canada’s Advantage, promises to help us meet this challenge. We need more than ever the highly trained, creative and innovative individuals who can contribute in diverse ways across the public and private sectors.

He also has an Op-Ed in the Hill Times (PDF) about “Forging a new kind of literacy” that mentions InterPARES, CRKN/Synergies, and the History of the Book project. It is good to see digital humanities projects getting such attention.

Harley: The Journal of Electronic Publishing

The Journal of Electronic Publishing has an artile, The Influence of Academic Values on Scholarly Publication and Communication Practices, which nicely summarizes the state of perceptions about electronic publishing. The article doesn’t talk much about how they arrived at their conclusions, but the conclusions strike me as likely. Some of the conclusions worth noting for digital humanists:

  • Peer review is still important for tenure and promotion, which makes it difficult for un-reviewable works to be treated as scholarly contributions.
  • Academics are worried there is too much stuff on the web and that lower costs of publication lead to lower standards. Therefore print peer reviewed publications are still taken more seriously and online peer reviewed publications are still viewed as less important.
  • Online publication is seen as a way to make a name, while print publication is seen as how you get tenure.
  • Print is seen as more archival and therefore the best place for finished work while online publication is seen as less likely to survive and therefore better suited to scholarly communication. This, by the way, accords with The Credibility of Electronic Publishing report that I contributed to. Print does seem to last longer and therefore is better suited to final archival publication.

Evaluating Digital Media for Tenure and Promotion

I am giving a talk today at the MLA organized ADE/ADFL meeting in Montreal on evaluating new media research work. I prepared this cheatsheet for the participants, Evaluating Digital Work (PDF). The short answer is:

  • Communicate Early and Often
    • Be clear about expectations starting with the job ad
  • Recognize the Administrative Work
    • Don’t ask them to run a lab or fix your computer without recognition
  • Statement of Purpose
    • Have author describe the original reseach
    • Get documentation
  • Have it Reviewed by Experts
    • In the content field, and
    • Technical experts
    • Have it reviewed in original form

Digital Humanities Trip Report Update

I have updated my trip report on Digital Humanities 2007 with some general thoughts:

  • There were more graduate students and young scholars attending and giving papers, which is a good thing.
  • A number of sessions and papers dealt with issues around large scale computing – what to do with large collections of evidence. The sessions that Mark Olsen chaired (and presented in) on text mining with Philomine, for example were looking at thousands of documents. Bethany’s paper on NINES dealt with issues around the management and collation of heterogeneous materials. In short we are shifting from issues around the representation of single works or single author corpora to issues around the study of large collections.
  • There were a number of sessions around visualization and representation. Visualization and interface design seem to be an accepted part of the discipline now.

It is hard to say when one only attended particular sessions whether this conference represents a general turn to large scale analysis and representation, but that was my impression. Our conferences used to mostly project reports, now we are seeing more mature papers that use a project to introduce larger issues.

Davidson: Data Mining, Collaboration, and Institutional Infrastructure for Transforming Research and Teaching in the Human Sciences and Beyond

Cathy Davidson has a summary article in CTWatch Quarterly titled, Data Mining, Collaboration, and Institutional Infrastructure for Transforming Research and Teaching in the Human Sciences and Beyond. The article makes some good points about how we have to rethink research in the humanities in the face of digital evidence.

Bibliographic work, translation, and indexical scholarship should also have a place in the reward system of the humanities, as they did in the nineteenth century. The split between “interpretation” or “theoretical” or “analytical” work on the one hand and, on the other, “archival work” or “editing” falls apart when we consider the theoretical, interpretive choices that go into decisions about what will be digitized and how. Do we go with taxonomy (formal categorizing systems as evolved by trained archivists)? Or folksonomy (categories arrived at by users, many of which offer less precise organization than professional indexes but often more interesting ones that point out ambiguities and variabilities of usage and application)?

We also need to rethink paper as the gold standard of the humanities. If scholarship is better presented in an interactive 3-D data base, why does the scholar need to translate that work to a printed page in order for it to “count” towards tenure and promotion? It makes no sense at all if our academic infrastructures are so rigid that they require a “dumbing down” of our research in order for it to be visible enough for tenure and promotion committees.

Davidson talks about a first generation digital humanities and then makes a Web 2.0 argument about the overwhelming amount of data being gathered and new paradigms. I’m not convinced she really understands the achievements of the first generation, if there is such a clear generational division, there is no mention of the TEI or the work on literary text analysis and publishing.