There was a discussion on Humanist about selfies and Emma Clarke on behalf of the Letters 1916 Project team posted a link to this holding of the National Library of Ireland, Augusta Caroline Dillon and Luke Gerald Dillon with camera on tripod reflected in a large mirror.
The two were apparently skilled amateur photographers who experimented with photographs like this. If one goes beyond photographs to paintings, I wonder if Las Meninas would qualify as a selfie.
Texas A&M University held a Humanities Visualization Service Grand Opening at the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture. One of the visualizations they showed used Voyant (see above.) It is interesting to think about how visualizations should be designed for large screens seen by groups of people. With others I presented on this subject at the Chicago Colloquium – see The Big See: Large Scale Visualization. I am not convinced that very high-resolution screens/projectors and tiled data walls (like what they have at the IDHMC) will become the norm. We need to develop visualization tools so that they can scale up to walls and for groups.
On Scribd I found a funny set of slides titled, Dear NSA, let me take care of your slides. The author points out how horrid the design of the NSA slides are, and then goes on to suggest alternative designs.
Michael pointed me to a story about how Stanford scientists put free text-analysis tool on the web. The tool allows you to pass a text (or a Twitter hashtag) to an existing classifier like the Twitter Sentiment classifier. It then gives you a interactive graph like the one above (which shows tweets about #INKEWhistler14 over time.) You can upload your own datasets to analyze and also create your own classifiers. The system saves classifiers for others to try.
I’m impressed at how this tool lets people understand classification and sentiment analysis easily through Twitter classifications. The graph, however, takes a bit of reading – in fact, I’m not sure I understand it. When there are no tweets the bars go stable, and then when there is activity the negative bar seems to go both up and down.
I have just finished participating in and writing up a conference report on the Digital Infrastructure Summit 2014 in Ottawa. This summit brought some 140 people together from across Canada and across the stakeholders to discuss how to develop leading digital infrastructure in Canada. This was organized by the Digital Infrastructure Leadership Council. For this Summit the Council (working with Janet Halliwell and colleagues) developed a fabulous set of reference materials that paint a picture of the state of digital infrastructure in Canada.
You can see my longer conference report for details, but here are some of the highlights:
I just came across this silly gamification, the Microsoft Developer Movement – Code Kwondo. The idea is that developers get points (and belts) if they learn Windows Phone and Windows 8 programming techniques. This competition is only available to residents of Canada and it includes challenges. I can’t tell if this is simple way of getting Canadian developers creating apps for Windows or if it is patronizing to developers. The imagery is reminiscent of Bruce Lee with nunchuks or Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid. Either way they are playing with the Old Martial Arts Master trope. The title “Code Kwando” sounds like someone replaced the “Tae” in “Tae Kwan Do” with “Code” to get “Code Kwan Do.” My understanding of the Korean is that Kwan means “fist” and Do means “art” or “path of”. Thus we have a project that is the Path of Fist Code or Code Fist Art. Not sure they put a lot of thought into this, or perhaps they did.
Ars Technica has a nice collection of 7 classic versions of Windows and Mac OS you can run in a browser. It is impressive how earlier operating systems are being emulated in Javascript and these emulations are much more accessible because they run in the browser. I had fun trying an emulation of a Mac Plus running Mac OS 7 (see above). I wonder if we could load the HyperCard version of Perseus in it.
Speaking of in-browser emulators, there are also NES and SuperNES emulators. They have a number of games available for these Flash Emulators that you can play in-browser.
From Eleni, a short article on coming issues around copyright at MOOCs, The Coming MOOC Copyright Problem And Its Impact on Students and Universities. These issues are not really new. Anyone working on distance education in the 80s and 90s had to face these issues, especially if you were a faculty member creating content. Our University IP approach to copyright has languished as it is not considered as important as patentable IP. University IP boards tend to deal with the types of IP that make money for the university and not those that are usually assigned to faculty. The problem comes when a university invests significant funds in developing a MOOC or Blended Learning course. A university wants to be sure the copyright issues are solved before investment. A university wants some clarity as to who, of a large team of faculty, graduate students, videographers, graphic designers and programmers, really owns anything. A University want to be able to offer the course even if members of the team move on (which faculty do a lot.) The approach I am pushing at U of Alberta is non-exclusive rights so that anyone in the team (including the University) can do what they want with the materials. A prof can take the materials to another university if they leave and rebuild a similar course. All that is expected is that people and institutions are given credit.
D-Lib Magazine has a Featured Digital Collection in this issue. See the right-hand column of the Table of Contents for January/February 2014. The featured collection is DataVis.ca, a terrific site about visualization that has been organized by Michael Friendly at York University. The site is nicely organized and pays attention to the history of visualization. (The image above is the “first (known) statistical graph – from 1644 by Michael Florent van Langren.)
I’m not only impressed by the DataVis.ca site, but also that D-Lib is featuring sites, something I didn’t notice before. This is a nice way to recognize work (web archives) that are difficult to formally review.
From the Jacobin, an article critical of the “Do What You Love” (DWYL) mantra, In the Name of Love. As the MLA wraps up, there have been a lot of articles about adjunct labour in the academy. Graduate students and recent PhDs take on part-time piece work (sessional positions) just to keep alive the dream of a tenure track job. DWYL advice hides the large scale changes that call for political action, not rugged individualism. Who benefits if we all think we are doing what we love? Who is not doing what they love so some of us can?