From Humanist, an essay on Computing or Humanities? The Growth and Development of Humanities Computing which mentions what is happening at King’s and Willard McCarty and Harold Short’s map of a Methodological Commons.
I tend to take a very different view where Humanities Computing is not an area of computing methods and tools useful to the humanities, but a discipline that brings humanities inquiry to and through computing. The radical idea I would put forward is that computing (or at least multimedia) is a new discipline of the humanities that draws on traditions of the more established disciplines.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute program in Game Design
Grand Text Auto has a blog entry about, Another undergraduate game program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Thanks to StÈfan for this.
50×15 project from AMD
Matt Patey has drawn my attention to the 50×15 Initiative by AMD to create a PIC (Personal Internet Communicator) that is low-cost and easy to use so that by 2015 we could see 50% of the world’s population connected to the Internet. For a story on this see, AMD’s PC to increase online world / Low-end Internet model would assist emerging countries.
I, like Matt, have problems with the technology choices (Windows CE in a closed box with various preinstalled apps for media viewing.) This is a recipe for expanding the base of consumers not for empowering people to participate as creators on the net. The idea, if I understand AMD’s slides, is to market this through the telecommunication companies – reminds me of Minitel.
While Linux may not be the cure for all ills, why not imagine a project like this based on a cheap Linux laptop like the Wal-Mart $500 linux laptop.
Make Viruses Not Screen Savers
It has been reported in the media that fake software is being circulated on the Internet under the "makelovenotspam" name, which is actually not a screensaver but a computer virus. Please note that the "makelovenotspam" initiative has been discontinued. There is no point in trying to obtain a copy of the screensaver, as it will not function anymore. Moreover, you may be offered a computer virus which has nothing to do with the original campaign, and may actually be harmful to your computer and the data stored on it. You are therefore advised not to download or install any software purporting to be the "makelovenotspam" screensaver, and to remove any copy you may have on your PC.
So ends the first chapter in the sorry make LOVE not SPAM initiative. From screensaver to virus.
Second Chapter
What is interesting is the suggestion from kuro5hin.org – namely that such DoS attacks could be decentralized and built into personal tools like our e-mail clients. Imagine if everyone could set their client to hose servers that annoy them. Imagine if iDoS (personal Denial of Service) systems were widely available and easy to use (just drag an offending spam message to the “harass for a month” applet). A radical idea of the “give everyone a gun and there will be no crime” variety, but an interesting idea none the less. My guess is that taken to an extreme this would slow the Internet down to the point where major players would have to implement a solution to both spam and counter-spam.
Tufte: Visual and Statistical Thinking
Visual and Statistical Thinking is a “textbooklet” by Edward Tufte that Lorna got me (along for a replacement for my missing The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. It looks closely at two examples of how graphs were used to think through a problem in order to recommend action; first John Snow’s analysis of the Broad Street cholera epidemic, and then the decision to launch the space shuttle Challenger. Tuftewrites that his “general argument is straightforward”:
An essential analytic task in making decisions based on evidence is to understand how things work – mechanism, trade-offs, process and dynamics, cause and effect. That is, intervention-thinking and policy-thinking demand causality-thinking.
Making decisions based on evidence requires the appropriate display of that evidence. Good displays of data help to reveal knowledge relevant to understanding mechanism, process and dynamics, cause and effect. That is, displays of statistical data should directly serve the analytic task at hand. (p. 3, copyright 1997, Graphics Press, Cheshire, Connecticut).
Text visualization in the humanities is not, however meant to guide decisions. Literary analysis guides interpretation which does not lead immediately or causally to decisions. What then is point of interpretative analysis (visual or not)? An extreme view would be that it is an art; the art of creating new aesthetic works of a particular genre called intepretation that stand in a particular relationship with other works. Interpretations are made or crafted from abstract matter, namely other works of art. Their appreciation is predicated on knowledge of the “original”.
Continue reading Tufte: Visual and Statistical Thinking
Wal-Mart sells $500 linux laptop
InfoWorld: Wal-Mart breaks price barrier with Linspire Linux laptop is a story about a laptop from Linspire for $498 USD for sale at Wal-Mart. While it isn’t a Mac titanium, it has 128 MB of memory, 30 GB hard drive, a 14.1″ LCD panel, and a VIA C3 processor, 1.0 GHz. See the Walmart.com – Balance 14.1″ Notebook Computer with CD-ROM Drive catalog entry.
SuprNova.org movie site closed
According to Reuters story, Download Site SuprNova Closes Amid Hollywood Crackdown (Dec. 21, 2004), one of the major sources of links to pirated movies, the SuprNova.org site in Slovenia, was closed down after pressure from the Motion Picture Association of America. Essentially the same process of legal pressure followed by the RIAA is now being used by the MPAA to discourage the growing P2P sharing of movies. Will we see the same incentives like iTunes to legitimate acquisition of movies online? I think the general principle is, “if the pirates show that it works then its time for a service.”
SuprNova apparently used the BitTorrent “tit-for-tat” file distribution technology which is described in a paper on the The Official BitTorrent Home Page and is analyzed at The Register in an article on The BitTorrent P2P file-sharing system by Johan Pouwelse, Dec. 18, 2004. BitTorrent has legitimate and pirate uses.
Google Library Scanning
According to a BBC story titled, Google to scan famous libraries (Tuesday, Dec. 14, 2004, BBC News, UK Edition), Google, working with the University of Michigan, will scan selected books from the libraries of Michigan, Stanford, Harvard, Oxford and the New York Public Library. The scanned books will be mostly books out of copyright, and the online pages may have some links to Amazon. The full collection of seven million volumes will take six years to digitize at Michigan.
Continue reading Google Library Scanning
International Cultural Studies at Aalborg University, Denmark
International Cultural Studies is an interesting program at Aalborg University that is offerred in multiple languages and which is taught through Project Themes:
Projects take their starting point in practical problems or theoretical topics, which are related to your course work. Each study programme investigates a different topic each semester. Lectures and seminars are offered to prepare students for project work on problems within that topic.
Apparently 50% of the instruction is through project work around themes. They seem to have short two week intensive themes and longer ones. A colleague in Political Science pointed me to this program.
CiteULike
CiteULike: A free online service to organize your academic papers is a social (or public) bookmarking and referencing project similar to del.icio.us which I blogged before. The focus in CiteULike is citations to papers; such a service could replace private EndNote bibliographic databases. Looking at it quickly, I am not sure it can generate a reference for a paper I am writing using different styles the way EndNote can, but that must be coming. The added value is that you could have other people writing sharing notes (since the main issue with reference databases is remembering what the hell the reference was about a year later) that would help you remember what you have supposedly read. Another added value would be to provide a persistent citation to something where I could cite the CiteULike page in addition to the online doc. Now … I wonder if this could be connected to the Internet Archive so that cached versions of papers from when I read the paper could be called up?