Category: Education and Administration

Faculty Advisory Council Memorandum on Journal Pricing § THE HARVARD LIBRARY TRANSITION

From Slashdot a story about how the Faculty Advisory Council to the Library (of Harvard) sent around a Memorandum on Journal Pricing arguing that periodical subscriptions are not sustainable and that faculty should therefore publishing in open-access journals.

The Faculty Advisory Council to the Library, representing university faculty in all schools and in consultation with the Harvard Library leadership, reached this conclusion: major periodical subscriptions, especially to electronic journals published by historically key providers, cannot be sustained: continuing these subscriptions on their current footing is financially untenable. Doing so would seriously erode collection efforts in many other areas, already compromised.

HUMlab Space – a set on Flickr

The HUMlab at Umeå University is one of the best designed computing labs I have seen. The director Patrik Svensson has created a multi-purpose space out of a library basement. When there in February I took some photos to document the space – see a Flickr set on the HUMlab Space.

Computer labs used to rows of desktop computers all facing a shared projection space. Now that most students have laptops we don’t need those sorts of labs. The HUMlab instead features all sorts of shared spaces with different screens and projectors. The idea is that a lab should support different arrangements of people around shared social screens. You have private spaces, couches, small seminar tables, exhibit screens, and larger presentation spaces.

Voyant at Georgia Tech

Today I Skyped into a class by Lauren Klein on Digital Humanities at Georgia Tech. The students all had to use Voyant for an assignment and they had a great set of questions to ask me. See Questions for Professor Rockwell.

Klein also had her students post short essays on using Voyant on Sherlock Holmes under the category Sherlock Holmes Text Analysis. You can see the range of reactions from frustration with the tool, to “so what”, to students who find the “surfing and stumbling” creative. I’m impressed at how Professor Klein has put together a reasonable exercise in text analysis for undergrads.

In the spirit of Voyant, here is a word cloud of the student assignments on the course blog:


Responding To Surfdom

The internet has revolutionised humanities research. But has the development of ever-more sophisticated online resources freed up scholars to explore new ideas, or made them slaves to the digital machine?

This is the start of the Matthew Reisz article in Time Higher Education titled Surfdom which asks questions about the digital humanities. I was sufficiently annoyed when I read the article that I sent a response to the Humanist Discussion Group, Responding To Surfdom. I’ve now posted the response to my wiki here. Reisz raises questions about whether digitization is driving scholarship. He doesn’t really elaborate on the questions raised, but they are important to think through anyway.

What is the purpose of higher education? Live chat, 16 December

I have been invited to join a live chat on What is the purpose of higher education?. This is being organized by the Guardian Higher Education Network. I’ve never done a live chat like this, so it will be interesting to see how it works. The question we will be addressing is one posed by Aidan Byrne in his live blogging of “The Politics of the Univesity”:

Since the 2000s, academic managers and leaders have adopted the discourse of neoliberalism, presented as neutral truth, ‘common sense’ or realism. ‘Choice’ trumps all other ideas. Universities form businesses, conduct marketing, undertake ‘esteem indications’ and surveys. Private income is lionised. Students are encouraged to pursue self-interest: public service is derided. What of the future?

Research Infrastructures in the Humanities

The European Science Foundation has released a report on Research Infrastructures in the Humanities. The report has a nice Introduction on the origins of Research Infrastructures like the library and museum. It presents a taxonomy and a number of case studies. By and large the report argues “that digital RIs offer Humanities scholars new and productive ways
to explore old questions and develop new ones.” (Foreword, p. 2) The report is by the European Science Foundation and is designed to encourage appropriate development of digital infrastructure for the humanities which bridge to traditional resources.

Digital infrastructures are developing rapidly but unevenly, and there is an urgent need for coordination, standardisation and sharing of experience to prevent unnecessary duplication and the atomisation of good initiatives. (Foreword, p. 2)

I’ve only skimmed the report, but it doesn’t seem to raise the question of exactly what is suitable as infrastructure and what should stay open research. The report concludes with a nice set of priorities including the need for evaluation systems.

Day of Archaeology

Megan pointed me to the ADay of Archaeology project. This project was conceived of during one of our Day of Digital Humanities projects and builds on the idea. It serves partly as community outreach for archaeology:

The Day of Archaeology 2011 aims to give a window into the daily lives of archaeologists. Written by over 400 contributors, it chronicles what they did on one day, July 29th 2011, from those in the field through to specialists working in laboratories and behind computers. This date coincides with the Festival of British Archaeology, which runs from 16th – 31st July 2011.

I also note that they had far more participants in their first year than we had even in our third! We need to learn from them.

#alt-academy: Alternative Academic Careers | a mediaCommons project

 

I’ve been meaning to blog about the MediaCommons collections edited by Bethany Nowviskie titled #alt-academy: Alternative Academic Careers. This collection of essays is long over due and corrects the view that the only way to do the digital humanities is to get a tenure-track job. This collection calls into question the relatively fixed boundaries between academic staff (faculty) and alternative academic staff (alt-ac). I would go so far as to say that humanities computing was a field primarily populated by alt-ac folk that is only recently getting colonized by academics. Anyway, I expect to assign essays from this collection to my students.

From Metadata to Linked Data Summer School | Digital Humanities Observatory

 

This week (July 4th, 2011) I’m instructing at the From Metadata to Linked Data Summer School at Trinity College, Dublin. I’m teaching a half-day hands-on workshop on Voyeur. You can see my workshop script here. I am trying a new version of our workshop script which will include worksheets.

I’m writing my notes at http://www.philosophi.ca/pmwiki.php/Main/FromMetadataToLinkedData – these are not a conference report so much as reflections on stuff I’m learning.