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.
University Affairs has a story by Tim Johnson on the latest MLA Style Manual, titled “MLA changes course on web citations”, where they quote me about the new MLA recommendation that URLs aren’t needed in citations (because they aren’t reliable.) I had a long discussion with Tim – being interviewed when they have talked to other people is a strange way to learn about a subject. In retrospect it would have been more useful to point out the emerging alternatives to URLs, some of which are designed to be more stable. Some that I know of:
In short, we don’t have a clear standard that has emerged, but we have alternatives that could provide us with a stable system.
I should add that the point of a citation is not what is in it, but whether it lets you easily find the referenced research so that we can recapitulate the research.
I 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.)
The A Companion to Digital Literary Studies edited by Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman is available online in full text. This is tremendous resource with too many excellent contributions to list individually. Chapters go from Reading on the Screen by Christian Vandendorpe and Algorithmic Criticism by Stephen Ramsay.
There is a good Annotated Overview of Selected Electronic Resources by Tanya Clement and Gretchen Gueguen with links to projects like TAPoR.
I’m at the State of the World: Information Infrastructure Construction and Dissemination for Humanities and Social Science Research conference at the University of Alberta. This conference was organized primarily to reflect on the Canadian Century Research Initiative which has been developing “a set of interrelated databases centered on data from the 1911, 1921, 1931, 1941 and 1951 Canadian censuses.” Peter Baskerville, the organizer, yesterday took us through how one can use census data to make inferences about a young girl in Edmonton in 1911. Some of the interesting ideas:
Dan Larocque from Open Text spoke on “Private/Public Ventures in the Digital World: Open Text and the Canada Project”. The mission of the Canada Project is to “To advance Canadians’ awareness of and access to accumulated knowledge through mass digitization of Canada’s published heritage.” The project is to put all Canadiana online and to create a user experience that allows all Canadians to use the content from genealogist to children interested in a historic hockey game. Dan also talked about the Stratford Institute which is a collaboration between the town of Stratford, Waterloo University, Open Text, and the province to create a digital media focused campus.
I spoke at this conference on “Cyberinfrastructure: Mashing Texts and Tools in TAPoR”.
Ray Siemens and friends have put up a TEI Encoding of Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues on YouTube as “socio-cultural representation” of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) to counter the various videos of Tei, a popular Korean signer. There is a blog on the widget hosted by the ETCL at Victoria which explains the origins and authorship of the video.
I just noticed that the CH Working Papers have a new look and structure. They are using the Public Knowledge Project Open Journal Systems to good effect. I’m impressed how they have ported over the legacy content like the article I co-authored with John Bradley on Eye-ConTact: Towards a New Design for Text-Analysis Tools. The only wrinkle is the first letter of the authors’ names in the bibliography and small subheadings.
Matt sent around a link to ThoughtMesh, an original idea about how tag-rich online publishing might work. You can get an account and upload an essay (it encourages you to divide into chunks) or self-publish so your essay is meshed. I’m not entirely sure how it works, but it gives you contextual tag clouds to use to see related stuff.
Here is what Jon Ippolito says in his essay, ThoughtMesh Author’s Statement,
When Craig Dietrich and I set out to build ThoughtMesh, we asked ourselves how an ideal publishing tool for scholars would behave. We decided that we wanted a system that was distributed–not siloed away in a single database, but able to be published on any Web site anywhere. We also wanted all the essays to be connected to each other, by something less random than search returns, but more serendipitous than intentional hyperlinks.
The World of Dante is a totally renovated site from the University of Virginia (IATH) on Dante. It has some neat features. They use an image by Domenico di Michelino of Dante Reading from the Divine Comedy as a visual introduction to the site. You roll over the parts of the image and get an introduction to the project. The project also has a lot of media, including music that was commissioned to connect to references in the text to music. I heard some of this music at the New Horizons conference. This is a gem of a project even if sometimes paging the texts is slow – I’m told that it has to do with caching – just be patient.
Once I notice one comic being used to introduce computing issues I’m told of another. Google commissioned the Chrome comic, Gordon Duncan of Appropriation Art has released an interactive comic book 51st State that is about copyright reform in Canada and freedom of expression. It appropriates images and words from the internet and has links back out to information. A remarkable demonstration of how graphic arts can be political and provocative.
Thanks to Erika for this.