Category: Education and Administration

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.

Seth Priebatsch: The game layer on top of the world

Seth Priebatsch gave an interesting TED talk, The game layer on top of the world. He lists for game dynamics thatcan be used to motivate people.

  • Appointment Dynamic – you have to return somewhere to achieve something
  • Influence and Status – you play to get badges and other indicators of status
  • Progression Dynamic – you have to work up through levels
  • Communal Discovery – people work together to solve problems

He argues that the last decade was the decade of social and the next is the decade of games. He wants us to develop the game infrastructure right and use it for good. Facebook dominates the social by running what is effectively the great social graph that joins us. Do we want a single company monetizing our game layer?

A related project is XPArena – “a learning experience points platform” that allows educators to define points for learning achievements. This lets educators turn things into a game.

Thanks to Peter for this.

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.

centerNet 2010

I have spent yesterday and today at the centerNet 2010 summit as I am on the steering committee. See my conference report at, philosophi.ca : Center Net 2010. An interesting question we are struggling with is what centerNet’s mission should be and how it is different from other organizations in ADHO. We are trying to also figure out how centerNet can do things without become a heavy centralized organization (which may be ironic since we all have centres at our universities with all the baggage and virtues of centers.) My view is that centerNet should do very little itself – instead its philosophy should be to empower and support centers or collaborations to do things for the rest of us. We should, in effect, centersource things in the sense of crowdsourcing by centres.

Institutions In The Digital Humanities

At the Digital Humanities Summer Institute I participated in a three day advanced consultation on “Scaling Digital Humanities. I posted my conference report here, but I have just finished editing the short presentation I gave on Institutions In The Digital Humanities. This is an outline of work I am doing to document the history and institutions in Canada supporting the digital humanities as part of a project led by Dr. Michael Eberle-Sinatra looking at The Academic Capacity of the Digital Humanities in Canada.

One thing that became clear from the meeting is the diversity of support available across Canada. I have been developing a definition of what I consider to be basic support for research computing in the humanities:

  • Access to a social lab with specialized workstations, digitizing equipment and software. Labs with lots of computers will be underutilized (unless you use them for training) as most of us have our own laptop; what is needed is the specialized stations to support conferencing, and specialized tasks like video editing, book scanning and so on.
  • Access to digitization facilities to able to acquire evidence for research.
  • Access to support that can quickly set up basic off-the-shelf web research utilities from distribution lists, blogs to wikis.
  • Access to a virtual machine where projects can install the tools they need for specialized projects and not have to worry about standarization or conflicts with other projects. Providing humanists with a locked-down CMS which you can only use to publish static pages does not allow us to use the wealth of open source tools and languages out there to create innovative research environments. Neither should security or standardization rule any longer. Humanists should be able to get a virtual machine set up with sufficient storage for any project that has the programming support needed.
  • Finally, and most importantly, access to good advising and technical support so as to be able to develop projects, apply for funding, and get project management support without being a humanities computing expert.

SSHRC – Knowledge Syntheses Grants on the Digital Economy

SSHRC has just issued a call for proposals with a very short deadline (as in, proposals are due July 2nd.) See Knowledge Syntheses Grants on the Digital Economy. This is an important call because it will build a humanities and social science response to the government’s Digital Economy initiative. It is important that the arts and humanities be represented in this initiative.