Google has release a neat new tool that uses their Google Books database. The Google Ngram Viewer lets you plot the relative frequencies of words and phrases over time.
Information about the tool can be found at, http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/info.
The graph above shows truth (blue) graphed against false (red).
On Thursday we held the first University of Alberta Digitization Day. The idea was to bring projects on campus that are digitizing research evidence from texts to 3D objects. We also invited a number of units on campus that provide research computing services like Library that runs an Education and Research Archive (ERA).
See my Digitization Day Conference Report. At the end is a list of issues that came from the final Lightning Round. Also, I have put up a list of useful links in the Histories and Archives area of the CIRCA wiki.
The CIRCA Histories and Archives group I am part of is organizing the University of Alberta’s first Digitization Day.
This one-day event is a chance for research projects that are digitizing evidence to meet up with each other and with units on campus that provide relevant research services. Projects that are creating digital archives of different sorts will give short presentations as will units on campus that support research.
The idea is to bring a lot of digitization projects together to learn about each other and what is happening on campus. My sense is that we have hit a critical mass on campus and now that we have a trusted digital repository ERA (Education and Research Archive) it is time to start talking and sharing knowledge. Each project should not have to reinvent itself.
Ian pointed me to a cool visualization project by Collins and colleagues at UOIT called Docuburst. Docuburst uses WordNet and visualizes the distribution of words in a WordNet tree starting from a node you select. Their code is made available.
Jon pointed me to an online and illustrated essay Books in the Age of the iPad by Craig Mod that makes an interesting argument about the relative uses of digital reading devices like the iPad. He argues that there are two broad groups of content:
Mod argues that we should start moving Formless Content to digital devices and in the case of Definite Content we should be willing to leave it on the platform it was designed for. Thus art books should stay on paper while cheap novels should be available also in digital forms for mobile reading.
Contrast this to Dale Salwak’s To every page, turn, turn, turn (Times Higher Education, Sept. 2, 2010), an online essay with the Times Higher Education bemoaning the loss of “deep reading.” I have no problem with Salwak’s defense of reading and the reading of books, but I’m not sure that there is anything inherently “deep” about books unless by deep he means longer (than essays on the web.) I don’t see why one can’t have a quiet, deep, reading experience off an iPad, though the argument might be made that the iPad has more distractions available. He ends with an argument I haven’t heard before – that books can be your friends (when you don’t have any?)
We all know that a love for books usually starts early in life. If our students come from homes where the predominant sound is the turning of pages, then from our experiences they will hear an affirmation of their own; if, on the other hand, they come from homes in which books are rarely seen, never talked about and seldom read, they may in time feel angry or cheated by their intellectual void. It is our task as educators and adults to provide a model for the reading life and the rewards and insights it can yield.
“Hold on to your books,” I say. “They will help you through. Let them be your best friend, and they will remain a solace in your life as they continue to be in mine.”
Of course today youth find false friends online not between the covers.
I came across an artist, Sam Winston, whose work often explores language. For example Darwin (see image above) compares Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and Ruth Padel’s Darwin, A Life In Poems.
Some of the panels/pages in Darwin are visualizations, even if hand drawn.
Many of his other works also play with language and language artifacts like Folded Dictionary.
Thanks to Slashdot I have been poking around a project that one of my favorite sci-fi authors is involved in, namely the serially online published project The Mongoliad.This work is being supported by a company Stephenson helped create called Subutai Corporation that has developed a platform called PULP for digital novels that have social aspects and multimedia extensions. The platform looks a lot like a structured wiki. The first materials for The Mongoliad are up and smartphone apps are supposed to be coming. I found it hard to read off the web, but I tend to like my sci-fi on pulp.
It will be interesting to see how they explore the medium for this multi-authored novel.
The New York Times has a good story on the project here.
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!
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!
From Kathryn I found this longish blog entry/essay on the novel Pontypool Changes Everything, Steel Bananas » The Slandering of Linda Hutcheon: Language Zombies. A Semiotic Virus. What could be more Allegorical Autobiographical?. Steel Bananas presents itself as “guerrilla academic”. It is a “a not-for-profit art collective and culture zine”.