glia — neuronal jelly with network sauce — 2009.

Picture 3

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.

Collaboration: Digital Humanities And Computer Science

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

Digital Humanities And Computer Science colloquium

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.

Federation of American Scientists :: National Summit on Educational Games

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.

Wapedia – Wiki: Stewart Butterfield

Apparently Stewart Butterfield, one of the co-founders of Flickr was a philosophy major. He got his BA in philosophy from the University of Victoria and an MA from Cambridge. Did philosophy make a difference? Hard to tell, but he gives a talk on How to Make a Fortune with your Liberal Arts Degree according to the Lavin Agency that represents him. The site quotes him to the effect, “You can always pick up how to figure out profit and loss, but it’s harder to pick up the other stuff on the fly.”

His co-founder and partner Caterina Fake, now working on Hunch, studied English and has a thoughtful blog here.

Just goes to show how useful the humanities are.

Philip Roth predicts novel will be minority cult

The Guardian online has a story about how novelist Philip Roth predicts novel will be minority cult. According to the story by Alison Flood (Monday 26th of October, 2009),

He said it was “the print that’s the problem, it’s the book, the object itself”. “To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don’t read the novel really. So I think that kind of concentration and focus and attentiveness is hard to come by – it’s hard to find huge numbers of people, large numbers of people, significant numbers of people, who have those qualities,” he said.

I wonder if it true that screens take less concentration than books. I can believe it about television, but not about doing things on the screen like programming or even playing a console game. I can finish most books much faster and with less hard work than playing a console game (which may say something about my gaming skills.) Is it really the form of the object (screen vs book) or the content (typical TV show vs difficult novel)?