Education and Administration – Page 14

Britain: The Disgrace of the Universities

Willard McCarty in Humanist drew our attention to the Anthony Grafton article, “Britain: The disgrace of the universities” (New York Review of
Books) about “what is happening now to British universities, King’s College London in particular”.

Accept the short term as your standard—support only what students want to study right now and outside agencies want to fund right now—and you lose the future. The subjects and methods that will matter most in twenty years are often the ones that nobody values very much right now. Slow scholarship—like Slow Food—is deeper and richer and more nourishing than the fast stuff. But it takes longer to make, and to do it properly, you have to employ eccentric people who insist on doing things their way. The British used to know that, but now they’ve streaked by us on the way to the other extreme.

It seems we are passing some threshold like the boiling frog. In the humanities we got used to being slowly starved in a genteel fashion that left us keep some dignity like the frog in slowly heated water. The drama in the UK and elsewhere, where cuts are deep and vicious, should provoke us to think about the humanities and its defense. In humanities computing we smugly feel immune to the cuts as we are the “newest new thing” that shouldn’t get cut, but we could find ourselves alone, without the vital neighboring fields like paleography, philology, and philosophy that we depend on. Actually, I don’t think we are any longer the new new thing – we just pretend to be so out of habit. Perhaps we should start preparing to be the tired recent thing that can be discarded to make room for the newest new thing.

How then to make the case for the humanities when we have so little experience advertising our wares and so much distaste for marketing? Are we doomed by our very fastidiousness and critical stance?

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.

Briefing Papers | Digital Curation Centre

Thanks to HUMANIST I came across the UK Digital Curation Centre which is creating a great site on digital curation and preservation. They have short briefing papers that are great starting points on issues like persistent identifiers and they have a partly completed manual with in-depth information.

A Rant on Excellence

The recent issue of the CAUT Bulletin has a great article by Elizabeth Hodgson titled A Rant on Excellence. She rightly noticed how “supersaturated” excellence has become in the academy. We all pretend we want to be excellent or world-class, but realistically we are just good enough.

These incidents suggest to me, as a literary critic, that “excellence” (with its cognate “world-class”) has become a supersaturated term like “patriot” or “family values,” a word that means both everything and nothing. This word “excellence” seems to have acquired both an indefinable and yet profound value to senior administrators, as if they know what it means, and what it looks like, as if its value is immeasurable and its attainment all-important — and therefore as if anything or anyone not excellent is therefore worthless.

Hodgson concludes with the effects of the cult of excellence which include the proliferation of measurements of excellence which have the effect of turning us towards measurable activities. The measurable activities that prove we are excellent ironically distract us from what we are good at and therefore make us less than excellent.

I would like to see a study of university mission statements and the effect of excellence-talk on them.

Wired Campus: Mellon Foundation Closes Grant Program

The Mellon Research in Information Technology program is being closed according to a Chronicle of Higher Education story by Marc Parry titled, “In Potential Blow to Open-Source Software, Mellon Foundation Closes Grant Program.” (Jan. 5, 2010.)

Mellon described the change as part of an effort to “consolidate resources” and concentrate on core program areas like the liberal arts, scholarly communications, and museums. RIT will merge into the Scholarly Communications program, which will manage its existing grants.

This program funded a number of really cool projects like Zotero, SAKAI, and Fedora. I wonder what will happen to ongoing projects like Bamboo that are not yet off the ground?

Update: Bamboo has been “smoothly migrated into the Scholarly Communications program.”

Digging Into Data

The Digging Into Data (DID) grants awards have been posted. The “Using Zotero and TAPoR on the Old Bailey Proceedings: Data Mining with Criminal Intent” project which I am part of was one of the ones funded. From the description:

Description: This project will create an intellectual exemplar for the role of data mining in an important historical discipline – the history of crime – and illustrate how the tools of digital humanities can be used to wrest new knowledge from one of the largest humanities data sets currently available: the Old Bailey Online.

This program is significant in a number of ways:

It encourages (forces) international cooperation. Brett Bobley and the others involved in the councils deserve a lot of credit for developing a model for international programs and overcoming all the differences between funding agencies in record time. We all know that good research is often international, but this program rewards such cooperation. I hope the next round involves other countries – this is a model to be extended and emulated.
One of the things that made a difference is that this program had a single evaluation process. The respective funding agencies agreed to work with one international assessment committee, thereby relinquishing a certain amount of control. This is significant because other attempts have kept separate panels which leads to projects being approved by one and not another. (This happens even within Canada.) DID shows that our councils are cooperating and willing to release control for the good of research – we should recognize that and encourage more.
It focuses on using large data-sets and they negotiated access to a number of data-sets to support this. The work they did convincing content providers to provide access to full-text collections was beneficial in and of itself.
It focuses on demonstrating research results from “digging into data” where computational techniques are applied to data. It isn’t a tools program, but a “what can you do with tools and lots of data” program. The time was right.

The number of letters of intent and applications is indicative of how successful this program was in identifying a research support need. As researchers we usually only think only about our work and ignore the host of conflicting demands of councils. Grant councils are also answerable – the design of programs is an administrative art that is rarely recognized by those who benefit. DID stands out in my mind as a successful experiment. If anything is was too successful – the low success rate shows they underestimated the number of applications and many deserving projects weren’t funded. Now the challenge to the councils is to scale up and build on this to meet the demand. The challenge to those of us funded is to live up to the potential and show that this works in order to make room for all the other deserving projects.

SSHRC, Yasmeen: “Technopreneurship” and social innovation

Lynne pointed me to a blog entry by SSHRC’s Gisèle Yasmeen on “Technopreneurship” and social innovation.

Canada has a grand history of involvement in developing technopreneurs, and not just in the video-game and hand-held device industry. Indeed, Canada has one of the strongest “digital humanities” scholarly communities in the world, with many of these researchers becoming “technopreneurs” in their own right and working with partners across the public, private and not-for-profit sectors. Many of these scholarly “technopreneurs” had their work incubated by SSHRC in the Image, Text, Sound and Technology (ITST) funding program which began in at the beginning of this millennium. Recently, SSHRC awarded one of its Major Collaborative Research Initiatives to a consortium of 35 digital humanities researchers and 21 partner agencies under the leadership of Ray Siemens at UVIC — an indication of how mature this type of activity has become.

Technopreneurs are those who develop new information and communication ideas. I would like to say that they don’t necessarily commercialize their innovations, but see innovation as a human and social enterprise. The digital humanities are more about the gift of innovation than profit.

Peking/York Symposium

This week I was at the Peking/York Symposium organized by the Faculty of Arts at York University. See my conference notes are at philosophi.ca : York Symposium. The symposium focused mostly on the development of new media programmes and research in arts in the comprehensive university. There were representatives from major Canadian universities with art faculties and two Chinese universities. The challenges in a comprehensive university include how to work with other disciplines like computer science and engineering as computing is woven in. The arts have issues very similar to humanities computing – issues of labs, recruiting faculty, maintaining infrastructure, developing interdisciplinary programmes and fostering interdisciplinary research. While it is easy to call for interdisciplinarity it is harder to develop real structures that support appropriate clusters.

Peter Nicholson: The Changing Nature of Intellectual Authority.doc – Powered by Google Docs

Peter Nicholson of the Council of Canadian Academies has an interesting paper that he has given on The Changing Nature of Intellectual Authority. His thesis is:

People today are much less prepared to defer to the experts. But at the same time, we are being swamped with data and information – a glut that cries out for analysis and summary. So there’s a dilemma. Who to turn to? Increasingly the answer is – Well, to ourselves of course, as individuals empowered by a world wide web that has rapidly evolved into a social medium. More specifically, it is a medium that today supports massively distributed collaboration on a global scale that – we can only hope – will help us make sense of it all.

He talks about the “decline of deference” to traditional authorities (from the church to academic experts) and talks about it taking place recently. I suspect its been happening since the enlightenment began and might be a general feature of modernity and improved communication (and democratic institutions.) What is new is the ability of the many to replace authority with a distributed or networked authority. People now believe things are true if they have been negotiated by a community. Something is true enough if it won’t get you in trouble because your crowd has authorized the truth. Most of the time such negotiated truth is fine (with enough eyeballs someone will point out a flaw), but other times the community misses something and is satisfied with not-quite-good-enough.