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.
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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?

Blogger’s Code of Ethics

On CyberJournalist.net I found A Bloggers’ Code of Ethics. This code was adapted from a journalists code, so I am not sure if it should be applied to research blogs, but most of it reads right. Is there a research blog code? How would it be different?

Note, the link is no longer functional. Here is a different Code of Ethics from Morten Rand-Hendriksen. How to start a blog was also recommended to me as a place to get advice on setting one up.

TAPoRware Features

We are releasing version 1.0 of the TAPoRware Tools. (You can get the version 1.0 now, but we there are some loose ends to clean up.) That got me thinking about the next version. Stan Ruecker and Zachary Devereux of the University of Alberta gave a paper at the Face of Text on Scraping Google and Blogstreet for Just-in-Time Text Analysis which showed the potential for certain tools and included a list of features they would like. Stan kindly sent me the list so I could weave it into my list.
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The Da Vinci Effect: Carnegie Mellon Gift Tour

The Da Vinci Effect is a fundraising campaign by Carnegie Mellon that is touring the US and which bills itself as a “multisensory theatrical event”. From the digital video is seems to involve an actor dressed up like Leonardo who coordinates a multimedia show.
What is interesting is how Carnegie Mellon is focusing on the intersection of arts and technology and using Leonardo as an iconic figure for that interesection. They aren’t promoting Italian studies or Renaissance studies, but the combination of entertainment and technology. I wonder what Leonardo would have pushed as a curriculum for effect?
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Guildhall Game Certificate

The Guildhall at SMU (Southern Methodist University) offers a 18 month certficate in digital game development. They seem to have a serious facility and faculty complement. The program allows students to specialize in Art Creation, Level Design and Software Development. The program appears to have been designed with industry people and aims to be responsive to the industry. I don’t see a lot of theory or narrativity, but the curriculuar sections are behind a password.
This came to me from Paul Taylor.

Text Analysis Spiders

One of the most exciting directions in text analysis is the adaptation of spiders, trackers and aggregators so that they can gather just-in-time texts (jitexts) for further analysis. This could open up text analysis to cultural studies researchers and make it a playful way to comb the internet. Most of the tools out there start with Google as their spider – do we need to create our own index so as to avoid depending on Google?
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Text Analysis and Alzheimer’s

Both The Globe and Mail and CBC ran stories about researchers who compared word lists from Iris Murdoch’s books looking at word variety. See CBC News: Iris Murdoch novel may be evidence of Alzheimer’s. Now that computers index our files (a feature in Tiger, for example), could we get them to warn us when our word variety goes down? Could my e-mail client or blog be fitted to alert me to changes in my use of language?
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