Education and Administration – Page 13

MA in Experimental Digital Media at Waterloo

Thanks to David I found out about the University of Waterloo’s new MA in Experimental Digital Media. The MA looks like something you could do in 12 months, but it isn’t clear. The MA doesn’t have a thesis – instead it has project which can be a prototype with commentary:

The Project is the culminating point of the program, in which students demonstrate a mastery of critical theories and theoretical concepts by embodying them in digital artifacts, environments, or practice. Projects will entail the design, conception or production of objects-to-think-with, evocative objects that focus attention on key cultural and theoretical issues in the humanities.

In many cases the project will remain at a design or prototype stage, although the manufacture of the object is by no means ruled out in principle. The design or prototype itself will be accompanied by a commentary of 40 pages in which the student will describe the theoretical and cultural context of the project and its aims, analyse its feasibility and its functioning, describe its cultural and rhetorical significance, and indicate its possible lines of development.

Bill of Rights for Collaborators: Recommendations Off the Tracks

Paul pointed me to recommendation by the Off the Tracks workshop for a Collaborator’s Bill of Rights. This document nicely starts a discussion about collaboration and credit which is important to the digital humanities. The comments are also worth reading. For example, Adam Crymble raises questions about where we draw the line between collaborators and other forms of support or inspiration. Does an RA for a prof who writes a book deserve to be credited as a co-author? Is the builder of a tool like Omeka a collaborator? My philosophy is generally:

Credit should be discussed at the beginning of a project with RAs, colleagues and programmers. As most of my projects now come out of labs where groups of people meet, we try to discuss credit at the start of any particular project.
In general most projects don’t lead to one outcome. Interdisciplinary projects will often lead to papers written up for different communities. Working with CS folk we have a general rule of thumb that we can each propose and write papers (conference and print) as long as inform others at the start of the writing/proposing and recognize the key players from the other side. Thus I am encouraged to present/publish in my community and I get to be first author on any paper I initiate. The same is true of grad students and other faculty.
Listing co-authored papers on a CV for purposes of merit, promotion and tenure leads to problems at the level of Faculty Evaluation Committees. At U of A you are explicitly asked for each item for which you want merit to specify whether you had co-contributors and what your role/percentage of work was. I try to avoid in my own CV specifying percentages of contribution even though that is encouraged. Instead I try to describe the role I played in a collaborative paper in a consistent fashion. Some of the roles include “led the project”, “wrote the paper”, “edited the paper”, “programmed the site”, “managed the usability research” and so on.
A couple of the comments to this post mention the constraints on programmers and research assistants to starting projects. This is perhaps one of the major reasons I left a nice job in university IT support to take up an academic position – I was tired of waiting for others to initiate projects or trying to be a tail that wagged them. This is the fundamental split in our academic caste system that we have to overcome in the small workings of our labs. In my experience it is often to my advantage to ask research assistants to take leadership and propose things within the context of a research area. The more ideas, the more directions taken, the better the research coming out.

Interdisciplinarity

Thanks to Humanist I came across this Chronicle of Higher Education essay by Myra H. Strober about fostering interdisciplinarity, Communicating Across the Academic Divide (January 2, 2011.) Strober has written a book about interdisciplinarity titled, Interdisciplinary Conversations: Challenging Habits of Thought whose conclusion she summarizes in the essay,

The three common explanations for a lack of faculty interest in interdisciplinary work are that the academic reward system militates against it (hiring, promotion, salary increases, and most prizes are controlled by single disciplines, not by multiple disciplines), that there is insufficient funding for it, and that evaluating it is fraught with conflict. These are significant barriers.

However, while doing research for my new book, Interdisciplinary Conversations: Challenging Habits of Thought, I found an even more fundamental barrier to interdisciplinary work: Talking across disciplines is as difficult as talking to someone from another culture.

I am chairing a committee that is developing a vision for the Office of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Alberta. We have been talking to people, running brainstorming events, and writing up case studies to identify the barriers to interdisciplinarity just in our Faculty of Arts. One thing that is clear is that there are a tremendous number of faculty/students who want to try interdisciplinarity from team-teaching across disciplines to blowing up departments. One of the things that hinders many is the extra effort it takes to get out of the department, to find people, to find the support mechanisms, and to navigate the bureaucracy (which is really oriented around departments.) We need a “front desk” type function where you can get advice and mentoring.

Digitization Day Conference Report

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.

Montréal Games Summit 2010

I’m at the Montréal International Games Summit 2010 (MIGS) for today and tomorrow. My conference notes are at Philosophi.ca – MIGS conference report.

Crowdsourcing Knowledge

Today we held an event at the University of Alberta around developing a new form of collaboration. Peter Robison from the University of Saskatchewan organized the day’s discussion and we had participants from across the country, though most were from the medieval editing community in Western Canada.

Peter started us off by arguing that we need intelligent documents and the way he is doing that is working with RDF. He believes “the interface is the enemy” of researchers trying to study across documents. He believes that XML/TEI isn’t enough; we need intelligent documents that carry assertions that can help other users of the data. I’m intrigued by this idea of “assertions” and I know Allen Renear has been working on what can be said about a document.

Dan O’Donnell argued that we should think about interchange rather than interoperability. He pointed out that most people want access to the data of others to do their own analysis and repurpose for their own. Brent Nelson talked about his Digital Donne project and bringing traditional researchers into digital projects. He then talked about his cabinet of curiosities project. Allison Muiri talked about her Grub Street project and legal issues around involving a larger community.

One issue that we went back and forth on was the place of interface. I’m convinced that the idea of the separation of form and content is just one assertion among many. In some situations it makes sense to talk about separating interface, in others it doesn’t.

One thing we are all struggling with is essentially the human processes. Computers are really not the issue, what we need is support for changing the research culture:

– How do you get participation?
– How do you encourage openness to interchange?
– What will our universities allow us to do?
– How will we get credit for what we are doing?
– How can we run production services or who can run them for us?

Yin Liu talked about how we are here because we have failed. This was in response to Peter’s claim that we were here because we had all succeeded. Yin also said that she would like to no longer list herself as a digital humanist but as a medievalist. The time may come when we are all digital humanists – that, of course, is the culture change we are interested in.

Meagan Timney talked about linking – linking of people, linking of digital humanities to traditional disciplines, linking to training of undergraduates. Dean Irvine talked about how to pitch editing outside of the humanities. Training became a keyword – editing is a way to train students in informatics.

We ended by brainstorming about a partnership that could bring together many of the players in Canada while providing an inclusive culture for new scholars. What could a new type of organization look like?

So you Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities

Thanks to Colette I came across a pointed xtranormal animation titled, So you Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities. The animation is of a dialogue between a student who wants a letter of reference to graduate school and a burnt out prof. The students is idealistic and insists on going for a PhD in order to be a college professor. The professor is trying to dissuade her. The dialogue seems well written, though the automatic voices sometimes miss the timing needed to get the barbs.

Cluster hires in digital humanities

Thanks to Michael I have found out about two different cluster hires in the area of digital humanities/new media:

UI’s next cluster hires will be digital public humanities | Iowa Higher Education. The University of Iowa is hiring a cluster of 6 positions over 2 years in “digital public humanities.” These will be partly funded by the Provost and partly by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. This is their second cluster.
Georgia State University has a Second Century Initiative that targets areas for cluster hiring. Faculty and deans submit thematic proposals that are then evaluated. “New Media” is the theme of one of the eight winning proposals. There are 4 positions around New Media including New Media and Documentary Investigation, Interactive Media Design, Digital Humanities and Digital Music Technology.

There are a number of interesting facets to these cluster hires:

Universities are no longer hiring just one digital humanities person to get things going – they are hiring clusters of related positions. As the digital humanities and new media fields evolve it is becoming clear that no one person can cover the entire field. This is a sign of maturity and the explosive interdisciplinarity of the digital. Further, it is now clear that a university can’t expect to do digital humanities at a leadership level with just one person.
These positions look like they will go into traditional departments while still staying linked in an interdisciplinary thematic area. Much could be said about the advantages and disadvantages of this model (how exactly do you keep the hires from spinning back into their discipline in order to get tenure?), but politically it is much easier to sell to departments in times of stress. This way departments get some renewal, even if the person hired is for a new interdisciplinary area. Ideally the person also acts as a catalyst in the department linking them into the thematic area.
Digital humanities is being integrated into new media, electronic music, and interactive media design. This makes sense since the digital humanities has always had a constructive and creative side. It has been a field that is about the poesis – the making – of multimedia works as much as about the critique of cyberculture. In our practices and need for infrastructure we have more in common with visual artists, composers, and new media designers. The Multimedia program I help develop at McMaster took exactly this approach and we were a richer unit for it.

Erector Set – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I just finished Bruce Watson’s book on A. C. Gilbert, the invetor of the Erector Set titled The Man Who Changed How Boys and Toys Were Made. The book doesn’t quite work as either biography or as social history, but it ends by asking why the Erector sets and other construction toys from Gilbert Toys failed in the late 60s. Watson suggests three changes:

From Edison to Einstein. The first shift was a shift in paradigm from science being about invention (with Edison as the hero) to science being about theory (with Einstein as paradigm.)
After the A-Bomb. The second shift was the change in how we perceive science after the Atom Bomb. Science was no longer a unquestioned good. Watson suggests that Frankenstein’s Monster (the film with Boris Karloff) also contributed to a changing in attitude towards science.
The Cool. The final nail was the emergence of teen culture in the 60s – a culture concerned with the cool. Kids who constructed things with Erector sets were seen not as boys, but as nerds.

Toys like Erector, which in its time was very successful, aimed to appeal to boys. They avoided presenting themselves as “educational” as that would be the kiss of death. Instead they were for tinkering and playing engineer. They appealed to parents as a solution to the “boy problem” of energetic boys getting into trouble (something we solve with drugs today.) With time, playing with Erector sets making bridges ceased to appeal to boys as a manly thing to do. It ceased to be cool and boys began to be seen less as a problem than as a market for which entertainment could be designed. Why solve the boy problem when you could feed the cool boys with rock and roll, television and movies. Toys are now sold in conjunction with TV shows (cartoons or other).

Watson ends the book by pointing out that the videogame industry now sells much more than the toy industry – especially the educational toy industry. Videogames are this generation’s boy toys. What will be next? I can’t help wonder if there is a return to construction with all the interest in Arduino’s, fabrication, and robotics.