I’m at a conference organized by Jerome McGann, Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come: Schedule at the University of Virginia. The focus is on sustainability and Mellon is supporting the conference. My conference report is at http://www.philosophi.ca/pmwiki.php/Main/ShapeOfThings.
Category: Media and News
HuCon 2010: Current Graduate Research in Humanities Computing
Reminder to all friends in the area of tomorrows HuCon 2010: Current Graduate Research in Humanities Computing. We have Jon Bath and Yin Liu giving keynotes and speakers from U of Alberta and U of Saskatchewan.
“The best DH conference of the prairies!”
Day of Digital Humanities 2010: You are invited to participate
Well, we are starting up the second Day of Digital Humanities project. You are invited to participate!.
You can see what we did in last year’s project here. The idea was to have digital humanists blog one day of what they did and then combine it all into a dataset that can be studied. We call it “autoethnography of a community.” It was fascinating and stressful to run last year. I’m hoping I can enjoy it more this year.
The project will run on March 18th, 2010. We are hoping that we will get more graduate students and more colleagues from outside North America!
Kids consume media as a full-time job—many getting overtime
ars technica has a good summary of the Kaiser Family Foundation Report: Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8-18-Year-Olds. Their story, Kids consume media as a full-time job—many getting overtime (Chris Foresman, Jan. 21, 2010) ends with some good news,
The report notes that kids spend less time reading magazines or newspapers, though online reading has supplanted that to some degree. However, the average time spent reading books has stayed relatively steady, at about an hour per day. Only the heaviest of media users reported increases in poor grades or low levels of personal contentment. And it seems parents that are active about placing restrictions on media use have kids that consume significantly less media than kids without restrictions. Leaving the TV off, limiting hours of TV, video game, or computer use, and having rules about types of content all help curb media use. One final bit of good news: kids on average spent almost two hours a day engaged in physical activity, up slightly from five years ago.
The bad news is that media consumption is becoming a full time job for kids taking up all the time they are asleep or at school. Is there anything other than media consumption?
MagCloud | The Best New Magazines, Printed on Demand by HP
Looking at my Flickr account (where I’m steadily uploading pictures taken in Kyoto) I came across MagCloud, a print-on-demand service for publishing magazines, catalogues and other visual printed works. The idea is that you upload a PDF and then people can come an buy a copy off MagCloud who then print and mail it. I wonder what the quality is like.
Onè Respe is an example of a publication using MagCloud. It is a collection of photographs of Haiti donated by many photographers. The proceeds from sales will go to benefit the victims of the disaster.
HuCon 2010: Current Graduate Research in Humanities Computing
The web site for our graduate conference is up: HuCon 2010: Current Graduate Research in Humanities Computing. This follows on the successful one that students ran last year. We hope to have Jon Bath and Yin Liu from the University of Saskatchewan as speakers. The conference is free thanks to support from our Office of Interdisciplinary Studies and the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta.
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.”
Ridiculous User Interfaces In Film, and the Man Who Designs Them
Gizmodo has a short article on Ridiculous User Interfaces In Film, and the Man Who Designs Them. The article showcases graphic designs by Mark Coleran who did work for movies like Mission Impossible 3, Mr & Mrs Smith, and Children of Men. There is a screen reel that summarizes his work and he responds here in his blog. Thanks to Stan for this.
GRAND NCE funded
The Graphics, Animation and New Media Canada Network of Centres of Excellence has been funded, see NCE News Release.
New Media, Animation, and Games — these technologies are the building blocks of the Digital Age. The Science, Technology and Innovation Council report in 2008 recognized this as a priority research sub-area within Canada’s Science and Technology Strategy. This application responds to the needs identified in that report. The GRAND NCE will undertake a comprehensive research program whose goal is to understand the underlying technologies and to make selective advances in a coordinated, multidisciplinary setting that lead to social, legal, economic, and cultural benefits for Canadians.
This brings significant challenges because the ability to access, manipulate, and disseminate information in its various media forms radically changes on almost a daily basis. The research program will meet these challenges through a dynamic set of interconnected projects built on a conceptual framework of five themes. Three themes focus on the technology clusters identified by the Science, Technology and Innovation Council: (1) New Media Challenges and Opportunities, (2) Games and Interactive Simulation, and (3) Animation, Graphics and Imaging. The other two cross-cut the first: (4) Social, Legal, Economic and Cultural Perspectives, and (5) Enabling Technologies and Methodologies. Thirty projects each explore a different aspect of selected problems. Fifty Network Investigators lead projects, with Collaborating Researchers and Partners from the public and private sectors participating as domain experts and receptors to exploit the resulting new knowledge and technologies. (Executive Summary)
This truly interdisciplinary NCE is led by Kellog S. Booth at UBC and includes network investigators from across the country. The U of Alberta lead is Jonathan Shaeffer. I’m one of the network investigators at U of A and will be working on serious games. Isn’t that grand!
Text Analysis in the Wild
The Globe and Mail on November 13th had an interesting example of text analysis in the wild. Crossing pages A10 and A11 they had a box with the high frequency words in the old citizenship guide and the new one with a word cloud in the middle. Here is what the description says:
Discover Canada, a different look at the country
The new citizenship guide, Discover Canada, is much more comprehensive look at Canada’s history and system of government than its predecessor, A Look at Canada, which was produced under the Liberals in 1995. It’s longer (17,536 words to 10,433), with 10 pages devoted to Canadian history, compared to two in the previous version. Its emphasis also differs, with more attention paid to the military, the Crown and Quebec, and less to the environment.
>> Below is a graphi representation of the most frequently used words in the new citizendship guide. The bigger the word the more often it appears.
I had to fold the page to scan it as it is longer than my scanner, but you get the idea. The PDF is here. I would have preferred the two lists at either edge of the box to be closer to let us compare. Note the small print – they used May Eyes and WriteWords which has a word frequency counting tool.