Month: April 2017

Peter of Poitiers’ Historical genealogy of Christ

Peter Poitiers Genealogy of Savior

Reading Cartographies of Time by Rosenberg and Grafton, I was struck by one early visual presentation of time by Peter Poitiers. It has both the features of a family tree or genealogy and a timeline. It is spread over pages in a manuscript with text in between vertically flowing lines. there are little portraits of the people. What can we learn from the imaginative designs of past designers of time charts?

This English manuscript was created in the early thirteenth century soon after the death of its author, Peter of Poitiers, theologian and Chancellor of the University of Paris from 1193 to 1205. It is an early copy of his text, the Compendium historiae in genealogia Christi. Intended as a teaching aid, the work provides a visual genealogy of Christ comprised of portraits in roundels, accompanied by a text discussing the historical background of Christ’s lineage.

Source: Peter of Poitiers’ Historical genealogy of Christ at the Walters Art Museum.

Robert Taylor, Dies at 85

Robert Taylor

The New York Times has a nice article about how, Robert Taylor, Innovator Who Shaped Modern Computing, Dies at 85. As director of the Information Processing Techniques Office, part of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, Taylor commissioned the development of what became the ARPANET and then Internet. He later led the group at Xerox PARC that developed the Alto computer, a early imagining of what personal computing could be. He also supported J.C.R. Licklider and wrote a paper on The Computer as a Communication Device with him. That paper starts with,

In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face.

Naylor Report in Voyant

Correspondence Analysis (ScatterPlot) View

The Naylor Report (PDF) about research funding in Canada is out and we put it in Voyant. Here are some different

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Busa Letter Outlining Textual Informatics

Page 1 of “Conditional Agreement” by Father Busa

Domenico Fiormonte has recently blogged about an interesting document he has by Father Busa that relates to a difficult moment in the history of the digital humanities in Italy in 2002. The two page “Conditional Agreement”, which I translate below, was given to Domenico and explained the terms under which Busa would agree to sign a letter to the Minister (of Education and Research) Moratti in response to Moratti’s public statement about the uselessness of humanities informatics. A letter was being prepared to be signed by a large number of Italian (and foreign) academics explaining the value of what we now call the digital humanities. Busa had the connections to get the letter published and taken seriously for which reason Domenico visited him to get his help, which ended up being conditional on certain things being made clear, as laid out in the document. Domenico kept the two pages Busa wrote and recently blogged about them. As he points out in his blog, these two pages are a mini-manifesto of Father Busa’s later views of the place and importance of what he called textual informatics. Domenico also points out how political is the context of these notes and the letter eventually signed and published. Defining the digital humanities is often about positioning the field in the larger academic and public political spheres we operate in.

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Virtual reality all over again

Time magazine cover on VR

Virtual reality, after bombing in the 1990s is back again. We have a Time cover, affordable headsets, and some games.

Jérémie pointed me to a couple of interesting links on VR. One is a short story by Stanley G. Weinbaum titled Pygmalion’s Spectacles from 1935 that tells the story of spectacles that can immerse you in another world. The BBC has created a virtual reality experience of being a Syrian refugee called We Wait. Vice has a short documentary Stepping Into the Screen that emphasizes the potential psychological and ethical impact of VR. To my mind the attention to impact is a way of hyping VR. Is it really that different or are we just hoping it will be?

In the 1990s many of us got sick trying VR headsets which has me wondering if anything is different this time?