Category: Humanities Computing

I’m at the Digital Humanities 2006 conference this week. With Marcel O’Gorman and Rafael Fajardo, I participated in a session on Why the Digital Humanities Need the Digital Arts:

Why the Digital Humanities Need the Digital Arts
Marcel O’Gorman, Humanities Research or Digital Art?
Geoffrey Rockwell, Interactive Matter in the Arts and Humanities
Rafael Fajardo, Videogames and Critical Practice: case studies and a potential future for digital humanities

Marcel gave a great talk going from a discussion of his installation Spleen House to theorizing about design through Derrida. Rafael showed interesting games he and his students have developed that mimic games like Frogger but are about crossing the Mexican/US border.

TAPoR Poster (Click for large image)
Michael Groden of Western organized a session at the MLA Convention on “New Technologies of Literary Investigation: Digital Demonstrations.” I presented on TAPoR at the session which was a great success. Essentially the session was a poster session where the seven presenters each had a table and posters on the walls. Poster sessions are common in computing – they are great way to demonstrate computing projects – we were worried they wouldn’t work with the MLA audience, but I was busy talking the whole hour and 15 minutes. If we had been presenting papers there would have been fewer presentations and less time for discussion.
Continue reading Digital Posters at the MLA

The cultural record is currently fragmented over more or less arbitrary institutional boundariesÔø? for example, the relevant materials for understanding one artist will be held in a dozen different museums, twenty libraries, and ten archives. The resources required for work in the humanities and the social sciences are comprehensive, diverse, and complex, yet these resources are often destroyed, censored, redacted, restricted, or suppressed. When they survive, they are often to be found far away from the site of their creation and use, carried off as spoils of war, relocated in a museum, or hidden away in private collections. At present, we have the opportunity to reintegrate the cultural record, connecting its disparate parts and making the resulting whole available to one and all, over the network.

The ACLS: Cyberinfrastructure Commission has prepared a draft report for the American Council of Learned Socieities’ on Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities and Social Sciences. (Follow link to PDF.) It is an admirable document that makes the explicit case for infrastructure for digital work in the humanities (and social sciences.) I’ve only skimmed it, but it strikes me that what we have had to do through CFI in Canada they are proposing to do systematically. They position the digitization of the cultural record as “a true grand challenge problem”. (They even quote Tony Hoare from the UK on what makes for a grand challenge. See CRA Grand Research Challenges 2002.) We should be so bold!

CHASS – The Center for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. This Center is an interesting partnership between the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications – the folks that brought you Mosaic) and the University of Illinois. It has the potential, given the partners, to do some interesting stuff with HPC and digital humanities. I am of the belief that we have the most complex data sets and problems for HPC, but need to collaborate with the supercomputing folks to imagine how to tackle the problems.

High Performance Computing and Grid Computing are two terms used to describe new approaches to the use of computing in research, primarily in the sciences and engineering. These terms refer to trends at the high end of research computing where often unique systems are put together to solve computationally complex problems faster. Supercomputing, as it used to be called, is focused both on certain grand challenge problems like protein folding and weather modeling where computation can make difference, but is also concerned with computation and processing speed in and of themselves, developing new ways of solving problems quickly through parallel processing on grids and clusters of often off-the-shelf PCs.

Why is this of interest to literary and linguistic research? What is literary about quest for computational speed?
Continue reading High Performance Computing in the Humanities

The SDH-SEMI (Society for Digital Humanities) award for 2006 has been awarded to Isobel Grundy, Patricia Clements, and Susan Brown of the Orlando Project. Bravo.

I should add that I am on the committee, but I blog this because I am increasingly convinced of the importance of recognizing achievement and celebrating colleagues.

I just stumbled on this little gem of a History of Humanities Computing by Michael Fraser. It was prepared for a presentation in 1996 and focuses mostly on developments in the UK (it doesn’t mention TACT, for example), but it provides precise dates for early projects from Busa on.

Note: This site and map has since been moved. You can find an archived version of the July 2006 ICT Map here.

The Arts & Humanities Research Council in the UK has put together a great introduction to the main providers of support for ICT (Information and Communication Technology), see ICT Map for Arts and Humanities Research and the diagram at ICT Map for Arts and Humanities Research. We need one for Canadian support to guide people through.

Academic Commons is a new online forum around technology in liberal arts education. It is sponsored by the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College, which makes it sound like a local initiative that is being scaled up into a pseudo-journal.
Continue reading Academic Commons

Digitalmedievalist.org is a new site for medievalists working with new media. It has news, a wiki, forums and a journal that will be coming on stream soon. Daniel O’Donnell at Lethbridge is one of the people behind it. I particularly like the clean design of the site. Daniel tells me they have not had luck getting people to edit wiki pages which doesn’t bode well for academic wikis.