Googling around I came across a nice succinct chapter on Information Visualization for Text Analysis from a book called Search User Interfaces by Marti Hearst (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
The chapter goes from visualizations for text mining to concordances and then to citation relationships. It shows some of the usual suspects like TextArc and Wordle.
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.
Lynne pointed me to a blog entry by SSHRC’s Gisèle Yasmeen on “Technopreneurship” and social innovation.
Canada has a grand history of involvement in developing technopreneurs, and not just in the video-game and hand-held device industry. Indeed, Canada has one of the strongest “digital humanities” scholarly communities in the world, with many of these researchers becoming “technopreneurs” in their own right and working with partners across the public, private and not-for-profit sectors. Many of these scholarly “technopreneurs” had their work incubated by SSHRC in the Image, Text, Sound and Technology (ITST) funding program which began in at the beginning of this millennium. Recently, SSHRC awarded one of its Major Collaborative Research Initiatives to a consortium of 35 digital humanities researchers and 21 partner agencies under the leadership of Ray Siemens at UVIC — an indication of how mature this type of activity has become.
Technopreneurs are those who develop new information and communication ideas. I would like to say that they don’t necessarily commercialize their innovations, but see innovation as a human and social enterprise. The digital humanities are more about the gift of innovation than profit.
Ultra-Realistic Modern Warfare Game Features Awaiting Orders, Repairing Trucks
The Onion has posted a story about a Ultra-Realistic Modern Warfare Game Features Awaiting Orders, Repairing Trucks. Now that’s realism.
Thanks to Jason I discovered an interesting collection of animated poetry that plays with type by David Jhave Johnston. See glia — neuronal jelly with network sauce — 2009.. In theory you can embed the animated poems in things, but it didn’t work in this blog. Perhaps they are best seen in glia.
One feature of Johnston’s work is how he plays with type using, among other technologies, Mr. Softie from Obx Labs.
I have now wrapped up my conference report on the Digital Humanities And Computer Science symposium. At the end I was on a panel on collaboration between the digital humanities and computer science. In many ways the DHCS symposium is an example of collaboration and how to build it. Below are the quotes and theses on collaboration that I spoke to.
Continue reading Collaboration: Digital Humanities And Computer Science
I’m at the Digital Humanities And Computer Science (link to my report) colloquium at IIT in Chicago. Garry Wong and I gave a talk on the Big See project and designing visualizations for large-scale information displays. One of things that struck me is that we may be seeing the beginning of the end of digital humanities as a distinct field. Here is what I wrote in the conference report:
The End of Digital Humanities: I can’t help thinking (with just a little evidence) that the age of funding for digital humanities is coming to an end. Let me clarify this. My hunch is that the period when any reasonable digital humanities project seemed neat and innovative is coming to an end and that the funders are getting tired of more tool projects. I’m guessing that we will see a shift to funding content driven projects that use digital methodologies. Thus digital humanities programs may disappear and the projects are shunted into content areas like philosophy, English literature and so on. Accompanying this is a shift to thinking of digital humanities as infrastructure that therefore isn’t for research funding, but instead should be run as a service by professionals. This is the “stop reinventing wheel” argument and in some cases it is accompanied by coercive rhetoric to the effect that if you don’t get on the infrastructure bandwagon and use standards then you will be left out (or not funded.) I guess I am suggesting that we could be seeing a shift in what is considered legitimate research and what is considered closed and therefore ready for infrastructure. The tool project could be on the way out as research as it is moved as a problem into the domain of support (of infrastructure.) Is this a bad thing? It certainly will be a good thing if it leads to robust and widely usable technology. But could it be a cyclical trend where today’s research becomes tomorrows infrastructure to then be rediscovered later as a research problem all over.
We got the Big See project working in the cave at U Alberta. The Big See software has various 3D modes so it can be displayed for viewing in a CAVE.
The Federation of American Scientists held a National Summit on Educational Games that has released a report titled, Harnessing the Power of Video Games for Learning. This is not, despite the sponsor, a scientific report. It is a call for funding for research into educational games. The report, however, slides into hype about American competitiveness. I think the pitch is that games will save American education and keep the country competitive. So, for example, on the first page it reads,
The success of complex video games demonstrates games can teach higher order thinking skills such as strategic thinking, interpretative analysis, problem solving, plan formulation and execution, and adaptation to rapid change.
The phasing may be unfortunate, but I read this as suggesting that financial success demonstrates educational value. Does that mean that the success of Celine Dion demonstrates that pop music can teach higher order skills? Further on they write,
Many companies and industries have transformed themselves by taking advantage of advances in technology, and new management methods and models of organization. As a result, they realized substantial gains in productivity and product quality while lowering costs. No such transformation has taken part in education. Education is not part of the IT revolution. (p. 6)
How can scientists say that education is not part of the IT revolution? Have they been to a school or university recently? For that matter, where are the companies using computer games to teach management methods and models of organization? (Perhaps the financial sector was playing a bit too much World of Warcraft to worry about managing our pensions.) My impression is that gains in productivity have come through automation and inventory control.
My counter proposal would be to invest in board games for teaching higher order skills. Lets bring back Monopoly (or the Landlord’s Game it was based on) as a way of learning about property, mortgages, and bankruptcy. Board games would be cheaper and probably teach the same higher order skills.
I’m sure I’m being unfair, and they do call for more research into what skills games could teach which is needed.
