Sparklines: Bella consults

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Bella consults is a blog which purports to be “musings of the office dog at Bissantz” which I blogged earlier on the subject. So far (as of Friday, Dec. 15th) it is a great summary of what to do and not do with sparklines.

Bella is a Labrador that appears at different ages in a composite picture that Edward Tufte reproduces in Beautiful Evidence (page 43.) Tufte reproduces the image to show how one can create visualizations that combine multiple images where the “measurement labels are place directly in the photograph where they belong” instead of forcing the reader to decode labels. Tufte says everyone should use “Bella reporting standards”. Bella’s blog is presumably a meditation on her standards.

Thanks to Roland Zimmermann for pointing this out to me and also pointing me to his short essays Bissantz ponders.

MLA Report on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure

The MLA has released the report of the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion. The Executive Summary reports,

Even more troubling is the state of evaluation for digital scholarship, now an extensively used resource for scholars across the humanities: 40.8% of departments in doctorate-granting institutions report no experience evaluating refereed articles in electronic format, and 65.7% report no experience evaluating monographs in electronic format. (p. 3)

The 4th recommendation is that,

Departments and institutions should recognize the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media, whether by individuals or in collaboration, and create procedures for evaluating these forms of scholarship. (p. 3)

Bravo! As Scott Jaschik puts it in a story on Rethinking Tenure – And Much More in Inside Higher Ed, departments should

Accept “the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media,” ending the assumption that print is necessarily better. (And to the extent that some professors and departments don’t know how to evaluate quality in new media, “the onus is on the department” to learn, not on the scholar using new media, Stanton said.)

Donna Stanton chaired the MLA task force and provided the briefing for the quote.

Thanks to Judith for pointing me to this.

Changing competencies in the new media environment | TLT Symposium

Changing competencies in the new media environment is a summary of a presentation by Henry Jenkins at MIT. It lists the Classic and New competencies needed by youth. The list is refreshing – it doesn’t list all sorts of technical and business skills. It includes, Play, Simulation, Judgement and Negotiation, among other things.

The PDF of a long paper Jenkins wrote for the MacArthur foundation Digital Media and Learning project expands on this, see Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century.

Svensson Talk

Patrick Svensson gave a talk on Friday, December 1st, about visualization and space in humanities computing. (He blogged the visit here.) At the end he showed 3D reconstructions and fly-throughs of the current HUMlab space and the new extended space. The space is optimized for visualization with screens of different sorts around the walls. It is less of a one-person-one-computer lab and more of a collaborative space for encounters.

I blogged this under Research Notes: Patrik Svensson.

Hypertext Fiction Online

afternoon, a story, by Michael Joyce is arguably the first major work of hypertext fiction and is one of those works most critics deal with. This online version is from Hypertext Fiction Selections – part of the Norton site associated with their Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology (Edited by Paula Geyh, Fred G. Leebron, and Andrew Levy. Norton, 1997.)

Matt K. pointed me to an interesting digression – a report, Hypertext Markets: a Report from Italy, by Walter Vannini, that discusses an Italian translation of afternoon, a story and the state of hypertext fiction in Italy. He draws attention to the proliferation of CD publications. When I was last in Italy I noticed at the newstands a proliferation of hybrid publications – magazines including a DVD or CD. You don’t see that much anymore in Canada.

The interest among mainstream print publishers seems to have settled on electronic titles of a more traditional kind than hypertext, i.e., multimedia, “family entertainment,” and educational/recreational titles, mainly on CD-ROMs. The catalog for such work is fairly rich, even if most of them are quick-and-dirty (and sometimes very dirty) recasts of previously published material. For the moment, most of these titles resemble the worst of documentary television, and require more or less the same amount of interaction (i.e., next to none at all).

Patrik Svensson

Image of HUMlab logoPatrik Svensson Director of HUMlab, Ume?• University, is giving a talk tomorrow here at McMaster.

In this seminar I will start out from a general discussion of the visual in the humanities and in the digital humanities, and a critique of traditional ‘humanities computing’ which tends to be predominantely textual. I will base my further investigation on several projects from different areas including art history, history, antrophology and linguistics. Key points of discussion include the materiality of interfaces, added values, innovation strategies, and the role of the visualization. Among relevant technologies are geographical information systems, multi-spectral analysis and virtual worlds. Digital culture also gives us highly visual study objects such as computer games, social software and electronic literature, and these will be considered. The final part of the talk deals with physical lab and studio spaces for the digital humanities. How is the visual articulated in such collaborative work spaces? It will be suggested that the humanities may benefit from working with many, individual screens in collaborative settings rather than immersive environments such as CAVEs. HUMlab at Ume?• University will be used a case study and I will describe a planned (and funded!) expansion of the lab which will add thirteen new screens to the studio space.

From the descriptions of the HUMlab it sounds like a creative space – they have paid attention to creating a space where people can meet across the humanities and IT disciplines.