Category: History of Computing and Multimedia

2nd Edition of Icon Programming for Humanists

I just got a notice that the 2nd Edition of Icon Programming for Humanists (PDF) by Alan D. Corré has been up (and its free). This has been made available by Jeffery Books who will also sell you a paperback copy. Donations go to promoting Icon and Unicon programming languages and systems.

I read Icon Programming for Humanists ages ago. It was one of the few how-to-program books that were aimed at humanists with text manipulation examples. I thought the book excellent and was only held back because I couldn’t find an Icon interpreter for the Mac when I looked.

This edition has 2 new chapters that deal with Unicode (so you can analyze texts in different languages), and Markup (so you can work with TEI encoded texts.)

There is a recurring issue that crops up as to whether we should be teaching humanities students to program or just to use tools. Corré’s book would make a good textbook for teaching programming.

JSTOR: Journal of Educational Sociology, Vol. 23, No. 4, (Dec., 1949)

In 1944 the Journal of Educational Sociology had an issue on “The Comics as an Educational Media”. The Editorial by Harvey Zorbaugh began by quoting Sterling North of the Chicago Daily News who wrote,

Virtually every child in America is reading color “comic” magazines- a poisonous mushroom growth of the last two years. …

Badly drawn, badly written and badly printed – a strain on young eyes and young nervous systems – the effect of these pulp-paper nightmares is that of a violent stimulant. (p. 193-4)

Zorbaugh and the other authors of the articles collected in this issue are, however, interested in how comics can be leveraged for learning. Zorbaugh ends his editorial with,

It is time the amazing cultural phenomenon of the growth of the comics is subjected to dispassionate scrutiny. Somewhere between vituperation and complacency must be found a road to the under- standing and use of this great new medium of communication and social influence. For the comics are here to stay.

I was struck reading this journal issue how we are going through the same motons with videogames. We have public anxiety about video games, we worry that videogames are violent stimulants, and yet we recognize they are here to stay. Someone gets the bright idea then of trying to create serious games that stimulate the mind, not violence. Academics (like me) follow. Here is the argument from one of the other articles in the issue,

In recent decades, invention and technology have developed motion pictures, the radio, and, latterly, the comic. The first two have already been harnessed to the purposes of education. It is appropriate to examine from the standpoint of educational method this most recently ar- rived entertainment device that has attracted such an extraordinary following. Any form of language that reaches one hundred million1 of our people naturally engages the attention of educationists, whose major activity is communication. (W. W. D. Sones, “The Comics and Instructional Method”, p. 232.)

What then happened to serious comics? I can’t think of any educational comics even though I collected comic books as a kid. Were serious educational comics a failure? If they were, what does that suggest for serious games? It is tempting to say that the lesson of educational comics is that serious games too will vanish as another educational fad. I suspect there are other answers:

  • Perhaps serious comics did work. There were, after all, educational comics like GE’s Adventures in Electricity. Perhaps they were effective educational (and promotional) tools even if never as popular with youth as action comics. Now, of course, we have a wealth of serious graphic novels like Maus by Art Spiegelman.
  • Perhaps textbooks learned from comic artists and began to use graphic elements where they illustrated the point. Many of the books I read my children like those by David Macaulay (Castle, City, Cathedral, and The Way Things Work) were drawn, though they didn’t use all the comic conventions. The comic may have evolved as it got serious.
  • Society eventually finds a way to manage new media. No one thinks comics are poisoning our children any more. Something happened and now comics are not the threat. Hence we don’t need to tame them any more … or perhaps they aren’t the threat because we tamed them?

Internet Archaeology: Whatever happened to GeoCities

Whatever happened to geocities and all those exuberant web pages? It turns out the service, which at one point was the third most popular on the web, was bought by Yahoo! in 1999 and shut down in 2009 (October 26th-7th of 2009.) GeoCities was a Web 2.0 social site before its time. Yahoo! just couldn’t figure out how to make money off it.

One of the things that has happened to GeoCities is that various projects have archived parts of it. Internet Archaeology, for example, has archived the graphic art, the gif animations (like the Welcome above) and even some of the home pages like Welcome to Avalon.

Institutions In The Digital Humanities

At the Digital Humanities Summer Institute I participated in a three day advanced consultation on “Scaling Digital Humanities. I posted my conference report here, but I have just finished editing the short presentation I gave on Institutions In The Digital Humanities. This is an outline of work I am doing to document the history and institutions in Canada supporting the digital humanities as part of a project led by Dr. Michael Eberle-Sinatra looking at The Academic Capacity of the Digital Humanities in Canada.

One thing that became clear from the meeting is the diversity of support available across Canada. I have been developing a definition of what I consider to be basic support for research computing in the humanities:

  • Access to a social lab with specialized workstations, digitizing equipment and software. Labs with lots of computers will be underutilized (unless you use them for training) as most of us have our own laptop; what is needed is the specialized stations to support conferencing, and specialized tasks like video editing, book scanning and so on.
  • Access to digitization facilities to able to acquire evidence for research.
  • Access to support that can quickly set up basic off-the-shelf web research utilities from distribution lists, blogs to wikis.
  • Access to a virtual machine where projects can install the tools they need for specialized projects and not have to worry about standarization or conflicts with other projects. Providing humanists with a locked-down CMS which you can only use to publish static pages does not allow us to use the wealth of open source tools and languages out there to create innovative research environments. Neither should security or standardization rule any longer. Humanists should be able to get a virtual machine set up with sufficient storage for any project that has the programming support needed.
  • Finally, and most importantly, access to good advising and technical support so as to be able to develop projects, apply for funding, and get project management support without being a humanities computing expert.

Chronologie des supports, des dispositifs spatiaux, des outils de repérage de l’information

Christian directed me to a fascinating chronology of information technology (in French) by Sylvie Fayet-Scribe. It is called Chronologie des supports, des dispositifs spatiaux, des outils de repérage de l’information. and the web design isn’t the best, but it seems detailed and annotated. It seems like a good place to start if you want to understand the types of information aides from encyclopedias, indexes, and so on. Here division of time into epochs is also interesting. The bibliography is also good.

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?

Peter Baskerville, Worth of Children and Women

Peter Baskerville spoke today on “Worth of Children and Women: Life Insurance in Early Twentieth Century Canada” as part of the CIRCA Colloquium. He talked about changes in perceptions regarding children in the early 20th century. They went from being perceived as economic assets (you can send you kids to work) to being seen as worthwhile in and of themselves (you can enjoy them as children.) He looked at census data about insurance as the Canadian census up till 1921 asked questions about who had insurance. Insurance gives you a sense of what people valued. I’m amazed how much one can infer from census data along with contextualization.

Peter found a startling number of children (1 in 10) were insured and for kids under 15 there was no difference between the percentage of boys and girls. When asking why, he noticed that French Catholics were far more likely to insure their kids than other ethno/religious groups. French Catholic kids under the age of 10 are statistically the most likely to die, which may be due to the fact that French Catholic mothers stopped breast-feeding earliest which meant that kids were switching to water or non-pasteurized milk younger. This would suggest that parents were insuring kids to be able to pay of burial costs. Burial fees were also a source of income for RC parish priests so they had pragmatic reasons to encourage parishioners to take out insurance.

He also thinks that insurance is symbolically important. It shows the regendering of the public sphere as women value themselves through insurance.

The General Inquirer

Reading John B. Smith’s “Computer Criticism”, (Style: Vol. XII, No. 4) I came a reference to a content analysis program called the The General Inquirer from the 1960s. This program still has a following and has been rewritten in Java. See the Inquirer Home Page. There is a web version where you can try it here (DO NOT USE A LARGE TEXT).

The General Inquirer “maps” a text to a thesaurus of categories, disambiguating on the way. The web page about How the General Inquirer is used describes what it does thus:

The General Inquirer is basically a mapping tool. It maps each text file with counts on dictionary-supplied categories. The currently distributed version combines the “Harvard IV-4” dictionary content-analysis categories, the “Lasswell” dictionary content-analysis categories, and five categories based on the social cognition work of Semin and Fiedler, making for 182 categories in all. Each category is a list of words and word senses. A category such as “self references” may contain only a dozen entries, mostly pronouns. Currently, the category “negative” is our largest with 2291 entries. Users can also add additional categories of any size.

As they say later on, their categories were developed for “social-science content-analysis research applications” and not for other uses like literary study. The original developer published a book on the tool in 1966:

Philip J. Stone, The General Inquirer: A Computer Approach to Content Analysis. (Cambridge: M. I. T. Press, 1966).

Ritsumeikan: Possibilities in Digital Humanities

The last week and a bit I have been in Kyoto to give a talk at a conference on the “Possibilities in Digital Humanities” which was organized by Professor Kozaburo Hachimura and sponsored by the Information Processing Society of Japan and by the Ritsumeikan University Digital Humanities Center for Japanese Arts and Culture.

While the talks were in Japanese I was able to follow most of the sessions with the help of Mistuyuki Inaba and Keiko Susuki. I was impressed by the quality of the research and the involvement of new scholars. There seemed to be a much higher participation of postdoctoral fellows and graduate students than at similar conferences in Canada which bodes well for digital humanities in Japan.

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