Category: Media and News

University Affairs: MLA changes course on web citations

University Affairs has a story by Tim Johnson on the latest MLA Style Manual, titled “MLA changes course on web citations”, where they quote me about the new MLA recommendation that URLs aren’t needed in citations (because they aren’t reliable.) I had a long discussion with Tim – being interviewed when they have talked to other people is a strange way to learn about a subject. In retrospect it would have been more useful to point out the emerging alternatives to URLs, some of which are designed to be more stable. Some that I know of:

  • TinyURL and similar projects let you get a short (“tiny”) URL that redirects to the full location.  A list of such tools is at http://daverohrer.com/15-tinyurl-alternatives-shorten-your-urls/
  • The Digital Object Identifier (DOI®) System allows unique identifiers to be allocated and then has a resolution system to point to a location(s). To quote from their Overview, a DOI “is a name (not a location) for an entity on digital networks. It provides a system for persistent and actionable identification and interoperable exchange of managed information on digital networks.”
  • The WayBack Machine grabs copies of web pages at regular intervals if allowed. You can thus see changes in the document over time.

In short, we don’t have a clear standard that has emerged, but we have alternatives that could provide us with a stable system.

I should add that the point of a citation is not what is in it, but whether it lets you easily find the referenced research so that we can recapitulate the research.

CaSTA 2008: New Directions in Text Analysis

CaSTA 08 LogoI am at the CaSTA 2008 New Directions in Text Analysis conference at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. The opening keynote by Meg Twycross was a thorough and excellent tour through manuscript digitization and forensic analysis techniques.

My notes are in a conference report (being written as it happens.)

University Libraries in Google Project to Offer Backup Digital Library – Chronicle.com

Hathi Slogan and LogoFrom Bethany I discovered this story by the Chronicle of Higher Education about the HathiTrust, titled University Libraries in Google Project to Offer Backup Digital Library (Jeffrey R. Young, Oct. 13, 2008). “Hathi” is the hindi word for elephant suggesting memory and size. Here is a quote from the HathiTrust site:

As a digital repository for the nation’s great research libraries, HathiTrust (pronounced hah-TEE) brings together the immense collections of partner institutions.

HathiTrust was conceived as a collaboration of the thirteen universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation and the University of California system to establish a repository for these universities to archive and share their digitized collections. Partnership is open to all who share this grand vision.

The repository, among other things, will pool the volumes digitized by Google in collaboration with the universities so there is a backup should Google lose interest. Large-scale search is being studied now and they expect in November to have preview version available.

AHRC ICT Methods Network: Final Report

I just came across the AHRC ICT Methods Network Final Report edited by Lorna Hughes. It is one of the most thorough final reports of its kind and nicely designed. There is a bitter-sweet conclusion to the report by Susan Hockey and Seamus Ross as the AHDS (Arts and Humanities Data Service) seems to have had its funding cut and therefore cannot renew the Methods Network (or support the Oxford Text Archive either.) As the home page of the AHDS says, “From April 2008 the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) will no longer be funded to provide a national service.” The conclusion by Susan and Seamus states unequivocally that,

In conclusion, the activities of the Methods Network demonstrated not only that ICT methods and tools are central to humanities scholarship, but also that there was ‘a very long way to go before ICT in humanities and arts research finds its rightful and needed places’. The investment in ICT in the arts and humanities needs to be much greater and it needs to reflect better the particularities and needs of individual communities. Researchers who do not have access to the most current technological methods and tools will not be able to keep
pace with the trends in scholarship. There is a real need for support and infrastructure for distributed research. (page 74)

Interestingly they propose a “flexible co-ordinated network of centres of excellence as the best way forwards”. (Page 74) I also liked the report because it kindly mentions TAPoR,

The group looked at how collaborations are fostered and supported, how partnerships are brokered in the first instance, and how this work is rewarded and evaluated by the different communities. Geoffrey Rockwell, Project Director of what is almost certainly the largest collaborative humanities software development project in the world, the TAPoR (http://portal.tapor.ca/portal/portal) project in Canada, shared his experiences of how the development of a collaborative and inter-institutional set of tools for text analysis was managed within the project. TAPoR was funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation and succeeded in its overall goals in providing general purpose text analysis tools. The TAPoR site reports that its tools were run over 5000 times in November 2007. TAPoR provides strong evidence that networked collaborative tool development can succeed. (Page 63)

TheStar.com | Federal Election | Web outrage marks shift in Canadian politics

Alex Sévingy drew my attention to an article by Linda Diebel for the Toronto Star, Web outrage marks shift in Canadian politics (Sept. 12, 2008) that argues that Green leader Elizabeth May owes here inclusion in the upcoming debates to rapid voter reaction over the Internet.

Suddenly, in a very public way, ordinary citizens were empowered through their blogs, vlogs (videos) and online comment to the mainstream media, and they got what they wanted.

Alex himself is quoted in the article suggesting that it was Stephane Dion who broke the impasse.

“For the first time in Canadian election history, a grassroots activism influenced a leader to take a stand against the others,” he said. “As a result, the traditional media regulators had to concede that the populist approach was right.”

Adds Sévigny: “An authority figure opened the door. But, in my view, this is one of the last times the blogosphere needs validation of someone in authority.”

Given how short Canadian elections are one wonders if the speed of the Internet is the only way for voters to participate in the process, rather than just the vote.

New York Times: The Lessons From the Kindles Success

Well, I was wrong. I thought the Kindle, like other attempts at e-books would be a failure. According a New York Times story by Saul Hansell (Aug. 12, 2008), The Lessons From the Kindles Success argues that while the market of readers may be small, there seem to be a enough readers who read a lot and want the convenience of loading it up on a device. I suspect the ease of use is also a feature.

It seems that Amazon.com’s Kindle is not the flop that many predicted when the e-book reader debuted last year. Citibank’s Mark Mahaney has just doubled his forecast of Kindle sales for the year to 380,000. He figures that Amazon’s sales of Kindle hardware and software will hit $1 billion by 2010.

TAPoRware and the Digital Humanities Quarterly

Screen capture

The latest version of the Digital Humanities Quarterly is out and they have done something neat. They have included some of the TAPoRware tools in the bar at the top of articles like Wendell’s reflections, Something Called Digital Humanities.

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This is someone anyone can do. We provide instructions on the code to put in your HTML on the TAPoRware Add Tools Demo page. There are different models. You will also find code on the documentation pages for individual tools on the TADA Documentation Pages.

Kriegspiel: Debord Game

Image from Game

The New Yorker (May 5, 2008, pages 25-6) has a nice short story “War Games” in Talk of the Town about a computer game Kriegspiel based on a game that Guy Debord designed in 1977. The game, “Le Jeu De La Guerre” was published first in a limited edition with metal pieces and then in 1987 it was mass produced. The game has a board of 25 X 20 squares and each side has basic military pieces that can be played according to rules designed to simulate war. The computer implementation, which can be downloaded for free, is by Radical Software Group (RSG) which is associated with NYU.

The New Yorker story talks about how the estate of Debord has been sending cease-and-desist letters to the RSG folk, which is ironic since debord objected to copyright. Debord is author of The Society of Spectacle.

Farewell McMaster

Picture of Andrew and Geoffrey

With regrets I’m leaving McMaster and going to the University of Alberta. McMaster threw a wonderful farewell party on Monday. Dean Crosta spoke, Andrew Mactavish gave a moving speech, Liss Platt talked, Stéfan Sinclair played Alberta tunes and I was presented with a plaque that will go up on the wall of Togo Salmon Hall where previous digital humanities people at Mac have been recognized. See a small photo set of pictures taken by Stéfan here on Flickr.