Juxta Commons

Vis-icons

From Humanist I just learned about Juxta Commons. This is a web version of the earlier downloadable Java tool. The new version still has the lovely interface that shows the differences between variants. The commons however, builds on the personal computer tool by being a place where collations can be kept. Others can find and explore your collations. You can search the commons and find collation projects.

Another interesting feature is that they have Google ads if you search the commons. The search is “powered by Google” so perhaps that comes with the service.

20 Years Of Texting

It has been apparently 20 years since the first text message was sent according to stories like this one, 20 Years Of Texting: The Rise And Fall Of LOL from Business Insider.

 The first text message was sent on 3 December 1992, when the 22-year-old British engineer Neil Papworth used his computer to wish a “Merry Christmas” to Richard Jarvis, of Vodafone, on his Orbitel 901 mobile phone. Papworth didn’t get a reply because there was no way to send a text from a phone in those days. That had to wait for Nokia’s first mobile phone in 1993.

What is interesting is that texting is declining. FT reports a “steep drop in festive Christmas and New Year text messaging this year…”. With smartphones that can do email, apps on smartphones, and plans that make it affordable to call, we have more and more choices. Soon l33t will become an endangered language.

Japanese Game Centers

One of the things I noticed about Japanese game culture when I was there was the importance of game centers or arcades. I ended up taking a number of pictures at some of the game centers I visited – see Arcade and Pachinko Flickr set. I’ve just found a great MA thesis by Eric Eickhorst on “Game Centers: A Historical and Cultural Analysis of Japan’s Video Amusement Establishments” (Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Kansas, 2006). The thesis is a readable work that covers the history, the current state (as of 2006), Japanese attitudes and otaku culture. One interesting statistic he discusses has to do with housewives,

Surprisingly, the number one occupation listed by survey participants was housewife, representing 17.3% of the total number of respondents. This perhaps unexpected result merits a closer examination of the function of game centers for housewives. In response to the question of why they visited game centers, 38.6% of housewives replied that their intent was to change their mood or as a means of killing time, suggesting that such audiences may visit game centers as a way of taking a break from household duties. The function of changing one’s mood or killing time at a game center was the second most common response among all survey respondents, accounting for 32.0% of answers to that question. (p. 51-2)

D3.js – Data-Driven Documents

Stéfan pointed me to this new visualization library, D3.js – Data-Driven Documents. The image above is from their Co-Occurrence Matrix (of characters in Les Misérables.) Here is what they say in the About:

D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG and CSS. D3’s emphasis on web standards gives you the full capabilities of modern browsers without tying yourself to a proprietary framework, combining powerful visualization components and a data-driven approach to DOM manipulation.

Take a look the examples Gallery. There are lots of ideas here for text visualization.

Theoreti.ca is Back

Faithful readers will have noticed that theoreti.ca has been inaccessible off and on since the summer and that it has not been updated for a while. The reason is that theoreti.ca was hacked and my ISP (rightly) insisted on shutting it down until I fixed it. Over the months I have tried a number of things that seemed to temporarily fix the problem, but ultimately failed. Finally I had to turn to a programmer, Hamman Samuel, who has rebuilt the blog from scratch and the associated philosophi.ca wiki. These were rebuilt on another server so there are various linking problems that we are slowly identifying and fixing. I will be reflecting on this experience in future posts. In the meantime I apologize to readers that it took so long to fix.

Hype Cycle from Gartner Inc.

Gartner has an interesting Hype Cycle Research methodology that is based on a visualization.

When new technologies make bold promises, how do you discern the hype from what’s commercially viable? And when will such claims pay off, if at all? Gartner Hype Cycles provide a graphic representation of the maturity and adoption of technologies and applications, and how they are potentially relevant to solving real business problems and exploiting new opportunities.

The method assumes a cycle that new technologies take from:

  • Technology Trigger
  • Peack of Inflated Expectations
  • Trough of Disillusionment
  • Slope of Enlightenment
  • Plateau of Productivity

Here is an example from the Wikipedia:

 

Conference Report of DH 2012

I’m at Digital Humanities 2012 in Hamburg. I’m writing a conference report on philosophi.ca. The conference started with a keynote by Claudine Moulin that touched on research infrastructure. Moulin was the lead author of the European Science Foundation report on Research Infrastructure in the Humanities (link to my entry on this). She talked about the need for a cultural history of research infrastructure (which the report actually provides.) The humanities should not just import ideas and stories about infrastructure. We should use this infrastructure turn to help us understand the types of infrastructure we already have; we should think about the place of infrastructure in the humanities as humanists.

Pundit: A novel semantic web annotation tool

Susan pointed me to Pundit: A novel semantic web annotation tool. Pundit (which has a great domain name “thepund.it”) is an annotation tool that lets people create and share annotations on web materials. The annotations are triples that can be saved and linked into DBpedia and so on. I’m not sure I understand how it works entirely, but the demo is impressive. It could be the killer-app of semantic web technologies for the digital humanities.