Category: Media and News

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.

Dialogue РPublished by SSHRC/Publi̩ par le CRSH

Having written a book on dialogue, (Defining Dialogue) I’m always intrigued when others call for dialogue or name some initiative dialogue.

Well, SSHRC has just published the second issue of its online e-newsletter, Dialogue and I’m going to rise to the bait.

Here goes. What is interesting about things named “dialogue” is that they are usually so named because “dialogue” is supposed to be good. In fact, it may be the last good left in an intellectual climate where there are no certainties or grounds to stand on. All that is left is some form of interaction, and dialogue is the good form of interaction (as opposed to gossiping, bickering, or fighting.)

The problem with this is that the models we have inherited for dialogue in the humanities, from Plato to Heidegger, are not quite so comfortable. This is seen especially in Plato where usually one of the interlocutors leaves unenlightened and irritated with Socrates. Dialogue is rarely good for those in it. The dialogues of Plato are aggressive, they portray posturing and misunderstanding, and they are designed to be interesting to those listening in, not the interlocutors.

So … what sort of dialogue then is SSHRC’s newsletter? Is it a scrappy Socratic tussle in front of us? No, it is a gracious praising of researchers who got grants! Is it SSHRC the gadfly engaging people who claim to know something so as to show them (and us) that they (and we) know nothing? No, SSHRC wouldn’t dare. Is it SSHRC engaging us with questions that force us to think about what we know. No, there is only a call for comments, which is about as interactive as asking what I did for my summer vacation.

In short, SSHRC has published another Dialogue that is innocent of the history or theories of dialogue. What Dialogue really is for SSHRC is public relations or advertising. Perhaps it is what Socrates taught in Aristophanes’ Clouds? Why shouldn’t SSHRC be honest and call it something like “Braggadocio“?

To be fair ,there is a sense in which what Dialogue does is document the activities of the humanities and social sciences. These activities have been called a conversation by Michael Oakeshott; in that sense Dialogue is not a dialogue with us or with anyone, but a record of great moments in the Canadian academic conversation.

As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an enquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves. (Oakeshott, The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind, p. 11)

If you are interested I have a copy of my thesis about dialogue, from which the book evolved, here in PDFs of the chapters. Read it and you too can get cranky when people propose dialogue.

The potted expert on CHCH

Image off video

I’ve just used up 5 of my 15 minutes of fame as a local computer games expert in Hamilton. CHCH, our local television channel has a segment on Grand Theft Auto IV yesterday and they interviewed me and Jacob. (See the video here.)

They should have interviewed Andrew Mactavish, but he is on leave and I’m teaching his games course. My sense from following the news is that the story is not playing out in the mainstream the way I expected – the mainstream news are more intrigued by GTA 4 and its reception in the gaming community. Of course, as Andrew pointed out in a conversation, Rockstar could have hidden some provocative parts to be discovered which will stir things up.

I note that the interview with me was taken in the Lyons Instructional Media Centre‘s game viewing room. How many libraries have one of those?