Category: Markup and Text Representation

The Shape of Things to Come — Rice University Press

Jerome McGann and Rice have published the Proceedings of The Shape of Things to Come — Rice University Press in record time. The conference took place in March and the essays are now up on line and coming out in print. (See my blog entry and conference report on the original conference.)

“Certain questions,” Jerome McGann writes in his introduction, “are especially insistent: How do we sustain the life of these digitally-organized projects; how do we effectively address their institutional obstacles and financial demands; how do we involve the greater community of students and scholars in online research and publication; how do we integrate these resources with our inherited material and paper-based depositories; how do we promote institutional collaborations to support innovative scholarship; how do we integrate online resources, which are now largely dispersed and isolated, into a connected network?”

My paper is titled As Transparent As Infrastructure. I argued that there has been a turn to infrastructure as a way to get sustained funding for things, but that don’t really know what infrastructure is and we are tempted to turn into infrastructure things that are still being negotiated.

Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come

I’m at a conference organized by Jerome McGann, Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come: Schedule at the University of Virginia. The focus is on sustainability and Mellon is supporting the conference. My conference report is at http://www.philosophi.ca/pmwiki.php/Main/ShapeOfThings.

Publishing scholarly projects using Google Sites

Thomas Crombez on his Doing Digital History site has a post on Publishing scholarly projects using Google Sites « Doing Digital History. His argument and instructions make a lot of sense. The idea is that you use something like TEI to encode your scholarly data and then you publish it on Google Sites instead of setting up something fancy at your university or lobbying for research infrastructure that doesn’t exist. Google provides stable infrastructure that you don’t have to maintain at an unbeatable price that is “off-campus” (which can have advantages) and which is as likely to survive as a university service.

Either way — running your website on a university server, a private hosting solution, or your own server — you are basically into self-publishing. Will you use an established platform aka CMS (Content Management System, e.g., WordPress or Drupal) or do you prefer to grow your own HTML/CSS? What is the most advantageous and flexible place to host it? If you run your own server, when does it need to be updated? Do you really need that latest Apache update? If you are doing a dynamic website, will the database continue to behave as it does today? When to update your database software? Is it possible that your website will one day attract a lot of traffic, necessitating more than one server? What search engine do you use for your collection of texts? Do you simply plug in a Google search box, or do you want some more searching power for your users? If so, what software do you choose?

I see more and more people moving to Google (and other commercial solutions) as a way of doing projects quickly and with modest resources. I call it Computing With The Infrastructure At Hand.

Informatica Umanistica: Interrupting Digitization

Informatica Umanistica has just published a paper of mine on digitization titled, “Interrupting Digitalizatin and Thinking about Text”. The article starts,

One of the memes of new media is that the form of communication determines the content. As McLuhan puts it the medium is the message, and therefore, as we digitize the evidence of human culture from the Roman forum to Hamlet we inaugurate not just a new edition of our knowledge, but a new knowing and with it a new way of thinking. This paper will not engage the question of technological determinism, instead it will assume that the enthusiasts are right and ask then what is digitization? or what is the message of the digital form? Asking such questions is an interruption in the rush to digitize everything; imagine the scanner has broken down for a moment letting us pause and ask if we really understand the digital, if we understand what is gained and lost, and if we understand the possibilities before us or how we are constrained.

MagCloud | The Best New Magazines, Printed on Demand by HP

Looking at my Flickr account (where I’m steadily uploading pictures taken in Kyoto) I came across MagCloud, a print-on-demand service for publishing magazines, catalogues and other visual printed works. The idea is that you upload a PDF and then people can come an buy a copy off MagCloud who then print and mail it. I wonder what the quality is like.

Onè Respe is an example of a publication using MagCloud. It is a collection of photographs of Haiti donated by many photographers. The proceeds from sales will go to benefit the victims of the disaster.

Bibliothèque Nationale – a set on Flickr

bnf

A couple of weeks ago I went to Paris for a meeting and was able to visit the new (see my Flickr set on the Bibliothèque Nationale). It is hard to tell from one short visit how it is as a library, but it is a stunning building to walk around. It spoke to me of exclusion – a cave (or inferno) of knowledge that you get progressive access to. The deepest levels are reserved for the true scholars (not tourists like me.)

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.

Adonis Meeting

I was a meeting organized by the Adonis project (See TGE Adonis | Très grand équipement du CNRS pour les sciences humaines et sociales) to look at international collaboration. Adonis is running a number interesting projects:

  • Revues.org is a platform for e-journals in France.
  • Calenda is a shared calendar of events for French academics.
  • Hypotheses is a shared blog environment for news about projects.
  • Lodel is their content management system for publications.

Some other projects mentioned were:

  • Plume hosts and lets people discover open source software from university research projects.
  • SourceSup is a project management and code versioning environment for academic projects.

We are struggling with issues of international collaboration, archiving data, interoperation and so on. We all see the value to large national (or international) digital archives, but the funding is oriented to projects and not long-term archiving. Some of the issues that came up:

  • Lou Burnard made an important distinciton between archiving and backup. A lot of people want backup for their work or their project and think that archiving services will provide this; they don’t really understand that backup is not archiving. That doesn’t mean that backup isn’t important. Apparently in the student riots in Paris last year a number of computers with irreplaceable data were destroyed.
  • The limitations of centralized solutions. We are all tempted by the thought of long-term central funding to run services, but there are dangers to such centralization. If central funding is cut or shifted (as happened with the AHDS) then everything disappears. Can we imagine decentralized solutions? Would they work? I’d like to see more social research initiatives that support decentralized solutions. I think in the current economic climate we have to explore these.
  • David Robey made the point that we have to do a better job of explaining the value of digital resources and services. We need to educate ourselves to gather evidence of value and that includes the opportunity costs.
  • Paolo D’Ivorio argued that there are certain primitive functions that scholarly systems need including Citation (reliable ways to point to other works), Consensus (agreement in a field as to what is of value and how to assess that), and Discovery/Dissemination (ways of finding and getting at scholarship.)

You can follow some of the meeting is you search Twitter for #ADONIS.