Engagement and the Professoriate

SSHRC in their Transformation added the new value of “interactive engagement” to what social science and humanities research should involve. At McMaster we discussed how researchers can engage the broader public better and more. It is not as easy as it sounds. Intellectual Entrepreneurship: The New Social Compact by Richard A. Cherwitz (Inside Higher Ed, March 9, 2005) is a short opnion piece that nicely sets out the challenges. He argues that professors are becoming (should become) intellectual entrepreneurs – something I have heard in other contexts regarding intellectual property and research. Cherwitz believes,

Public intellectual practice is a noble quest – one that doesn’t inherently or automatically require us to choose between a commitment either to research or service or between disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge.

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Digital Posters at the MLA


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.
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MLA Language Map

mlamap.jpg
French in the North East of the USA
The Modern Languages Association has a nice Language Map that you can use to see the distribution of different languages by county in the US. It uses census data from 2000. They also have tools for getting data for states and cities to compare language use.

Humanities Cyberinfrastructure

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!

Games and Lawsuits

Courtesy of Slashdot, an article, Trials and Tribulations by Nadia Oxford (Dec. 14, 2005) on the history of video game lawsuits. The history concludes,

As long as there is money to make, personal morals to uphold (however noble or whacked) and profits to defend, courts will never lack for activity. Gamers and non-gamers alike have reason to shake their heads as the strong foundation of Democracy is smothered by frivilous and petty lawsuits launched by weasels looking to get rich quick. But it’s undeniably important–as well as interesting–to review those historic copyright lawsuits that formed the prosperous industry of today.

A bit facile .. but true. The law is a form of commerce; another game for some.

More on the Wikipedia

More on the Wikipedia fuss. watching wikipedia watch is a blog entry on how Daniel Brandt of Wikipedia Watch outted the author of the false Wikipedia entry on Seigenthaler.

In an earlier story if:book, a group blog, comments on a Nature article comparing Wikipedia to the Encyclopedia Brittanica – they found them equivalent in terms of accuracy, though Brittanica articles were generally better written.

Wikipedia: Game or Reference?

What is it with Wikipedia? by Bill Thompson of the BBC summarizes the recent fuss about the accuracy of the Wikipedia. For example John Seigenthaler wrote an opinion in USA Today titled USATODAY.com – A false Wikipedia ‘biography’ about the prank biography in the Wikipedia which suggested he was tied to the Kennedy assassinations. In his opinion piece he wirtes about his attempts to track down the joker who defamed him.

Today Google News had as a top story a joke news story in The Register by critic Andrew Orlowski that Wikipedia founder ‘shot by friend of Siegenthaler’. Orlowski references the Wikipedia on the shooting, though I can’t find the reference now. Working my way back through the Wikipedia history for the Jimmy Wales entry shows that today (Dec. 18) there have been an unuasual number of edits on the page including spurious ones with graphic pictures. His entry has become a site for contest and Orlowski is mocking it/Jimmy for and with this. Orlowski compares the Wikipedia to a roleplaying game for wannabe encyclopedia writers, but there is another game afoot which is more serious, and that is the game of the hack.

Is this the end of the open Wikipedia? Will it be hacked into forcing people to register to edit? Is it the nature of open systems that if sucessful they get vandalized?

iPods and Hearing Loss

iPod’s Popular Earbuds: Hip Or Harmful? is one of a number of articles on hearng loss and iPods. The problem is the length of time people listen to iPods (they last longer than earlier devices like the Walkman), the lack of distortion at the high range (analogue devices would distort at the high end), and the bud-type earphones that further raise the volume. In Europe the iPods are sold with the a lower maximum volume for these reasons. See also Macworld UK – Experts warn of iPod hearing loss.

I’ve found myself listending at almost full volume, especially in noisy situations where I want drown out sound. Hmmm …. What did you say? Speak up.