The Digital Humanities Summer Institute this summer took a number of us aside and asked us to answer four questions about the digital humanities on video. The collection of streaming video clips makes interesting viewing as they chose a representative sample of people from myself to a software architect. You can stack the rows of video clips and compare different answers, which is nice.
One of our students Joel Clemens gave a demonstration of his impressive fourth year project, Virtual Wiiality Redux. He used common consumer components like the Sony SIXAXIS controller, which has motion sensing, to create an virtual reality system. In the picture above you see me with the helmet (with the SIXAXIS velcroed above) experiencing the 3D space (a version of our lab with a gaping chasm below my feet.) The strange broom thing was Joel’s solution to tracking where I am in the space. It has a small bowling ball with rollers to capture movement. The broom “floor mouse” didn’t work as well as the head tracking set, which was very responsive. With hackers like Joel and cheap motion tracking controllers, DIY VR may be a real “wiiality”. Check out his extensive web site.
From Hugh McLeod’s blog gapingvoid.com I discovered McGill Management prof, Henry Mintzberg. Anyone who has a page dedicated to beaver sculptures deserves to be praised, but Mintzberg writes clear, wise, and critical essays like Beyond Selfishness (with Robert Simons and Kunal Basu for the Sloan Management Review, Fall, 2002). Beyond selfishness takes aim at the “greed is good”, heroic leadership, shareholders’ value ideology that seems to keep on surviving evidence that none of this is good for society. Mintzberg makes obvious that we want robust and friendly not lean (skinny) and mean companies, schools and governments. His Leadership Beyond the Bush MBA asks an interesting question, “Has there been much public discussion at the Harvard Business School about the possible effect of its education on the conduct of his presidency?” (Bush is the first president with an MBA.) The issue isn’t really Harvard so much as management education, and in Mintzberg’s view, the way management students are taught decisiveness over experience of the situation.
Compare the announcement of KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology) KAUST’s Unique Vision to John Maeda’s vision for the Rhode Island School of Design, risd’s next president. KAUST will be a new university with a large endowment that is for graduate students only. RISD is a design school that has just hired one of the leaders in design and technology away from MIT’s Media Lab. They are both exciting developments, but different in so many ways. Here is part of the vision of the new president of KAUST:
to conduct high impact research unconstrained by disciplinary boundaries, to create a new ecosystem for research unfettered by organizational strictures, and to build meaningful partnerships across communities, cultures and continents. (President’s Acceptance Message)
Thanks to Alex for the KAUST link and to Shawn for the RISD link.
Carnegie Mellon is going global with their Masters in Entertainment Technology program. They have a campus in Adelaide, Australia and are adding new ones in Japan and Singapore. The High Concept is project based learning where people from an arts or technology background learn to work together and deepen their understanding of entertainment technology. It has the virtue of weaving arts and computing students together rather than segregating them.
The “high concept†behind both the Entertainment Technology Center and the Masters in Entertainment Technology degree is that we are based on the principle of having technologists and non-technologists work together on projects that produce artifacts that are intended to entertain, inform, inspire, or otherwise affect an audience/guest/player/participant. The masters degree is focused on extensive semester-long project courses. This focus allows us to tackle the much larger challenge of effectively bringing together students and researchers from different disciplines.
We do not intend to take artists and turn them into engineers, or vice-versa. While some students will be able to achieve mastery in both areas, it is not our intention to have our students master “the other side.†Instead, we intend for a typical student in this program to enter with mastery/training in a specific area and spend his or her two years at Carnegie Mellon learning the vocabulary, values, and working patterns of the other culture.
Is global programs simultaneously offered in different regions an answer to distance education? After all it is cheaper for instructors to move than students. Could faculty find they are part of multi-university programs instead of affiliated with one university?
The site also has a good list of similar programs elsewhere, which I think is generous. More programs should be honest about the alternatives.
Chad Gaffield, the President of SSHRC wrote an Op-Ed piece for the National Post on how, Building understanding: Our best investment for the future. Here is a quote related to information technology.
Canada’s new science and technology strategy, Mobilizing Science and Technology to Canada’s Advantage, promises to help us meet this challenge. We need more than ever the highly trained, creative and innovative individuals who can contribute in diverse ways across the public and private sectors.
He also has an Op-Ed in the Hill Times (PDF) about “Forging a new kind of literacy” that mentions InterPARES, CRKN/Synergies, and the History of the Book project. It is good to see digital humanities projects getting such attention.
PocketMod: The Free Disposable Personal Organizer is a cool web site where you can make small booklets for your pocket from a printout. They have Flash tool where you drag out the types of pages you want and then it prints the PocketMod so all you have to do is cut and fold into a booklet. Saves on cute little pocket organizers as they have a variety of pages you can use. A great way to recycle paper too.
The Journal of Electronic Publishing has an artile, The Influence of Academic Values on Scholarly Publication and Communication Practices, which nicely summarizes the state of perceptions about electronic publishing. The article doesn’t talk much about how they arrived at their conclusions, but the conclusions strike me as likely. Some of the conclusions worth noting for digital humanists:
I am giving a talk today at the MLA organized ADE/ADFL meeting in Montreal on evaluating new media research work. I prepared this cheatsheet for the participants, Evaluating Digital Work (PDF). The short answer is:
- Communicate Early and Often
- Be clear about expectations starting with the job ad
- Recognize the Administrative Work
- Don’t ask them to run a lab or fix your computer without recognition
- Statement of Purpose
- Have author describe the original reseach
- Get documentation
- Have it Reviewed by Experts
- In the content field, and
- Technical experts
- Have it reviewed in original form
The Canadian Association of University Teachers recent Bulletin has a timely story about Email Outsourcing Threatens Privacy & Academic Freedom. The story is about Lakehead University switching over to Gmail. The switch means that students and faculty now have gigbytes of email space as opposed to the megabytes they had from the campus run service (a situation similar to what we have at McMaster.) The switch also raises privacy concerns because Google’s terms of use includes the following:
As a condition to using the Service, you agree to the terms of the Gmail Privacy Policy as it may be updated from time to time. Google understands that privacy is important to you. You do, however, agree that Google may monitor, edit or disclose your personal information, including the content of your emails, if required to do so in order to comply with any valid legal process or governmental request (such as a search warrant, subpoena, statute, or court order), or as otherwise provided in these Terms of Use and the Gmail Privacy Policy. Personal information collected by Google may be stored and processed in the United States or any other country in which Google Inc. or its agents maintain facilities. By using Gmail, you consent to any such transfer of information outside of your country.
As Google ads functionality so that they can offer more than just email I suspect this problem will be more acute. Soon we might see universities outsourcing calendar, word processing, spreadsheets, and web site functions.