Alan Liu and others have set up a Knowledge Base for the Department of English at UCSB which includes a neat Toy Chest (Online or Downloadable Tools for Building Projects) for students. The idea is to collect free or very cheap tools students can use and they have done a nice job documenting things.
The idea of a departmental knowledge base is also a good one. I assume the idea is that this can be an informal place for public knowledge faculty, staff and students gather.
MLAde 2007 is a spoof of the 2007 Chicago convention of the MLA. Find out why it wasn’t scheduled in Newfoundland.
Javascript frameworks have been with us for a while now and anyone developing standards-based web interfaces has probably learned to love one or another of them. Beyond abstracting common chores like javascript native object prototype improvements, DOM tinkering, Ajax object management and so on (which, I daresay, is pretty darn appealing on its own), they shield the developer from the maddening caprice of cross-platform/cross-browser compatibility issues.
My favourite from the growing list of libraries has recently been mootools, I like it for it’s consistency, simplicity, and style. Lately, however, I have been checking out Extjs. Created by Jack Slocum, Extjs was originally an extension to the Yahoo UI, but has been a stand-alone library since version 1.1. Ext 2.0 was recently released.
While Ext does pretty much everything the other libraries do, a bit of poking around reveals an astonishing wealth of features. Ext is designed as an application development library, where most of its competitors are better described as utility libraries. Though Ext features a bunch of impressive application management classes like internal namespace management and garbage collection, as well as a vast range of function, object, and DOM extension classes, what draws most developers to Ext is its collection of exquisite controls, most popular of which is probably Ext’s beautiful data grids.
Ext’s grids, trees, form panels and window layout panels all have themable styles included so they look great out of the box. The control classes also feature powerful configuration parameters, like XHR URL fields (where applicable), data store record object reference, data field formatting and so on.
For casual developers, getting past “Hello world” with Ext is intimidating and it requires some persistence to get comfortable with, but the payoff is a serious arsenal of high-performance development tools for producing powerful, stable, good looking web applications. The Extjs site has numerous tutorials and excellent API documentation. Check out Jack’s description of building an Ext app using Aptana, Adobe AIR and Google Gears.
Right after Christmas I was involved in two events at the MLA. I organized and presided over a session on Open Digital Communities which was nicely written up by the Chronicle of Higher Education, Tech and the Humanities: A Report from the Front Lines – Chronicle.com.
I also participated in a newish format for the MLA – what is now being called a digital roundtable on Textual Visualization organized by Maureen Jameson where I showed visualization tools available through TAPoRware and the TAPoR portal.
Martin Mueller and James Chartrand both pointed me to an article in the Economist on volunteer computing, Spreading the load. The article nicely covers a number of projects that enlist volunteers over the web, like those I noted in Tagging Games. They don’t really distinguish the projects like BOINC that enlist volunteer processing from the ones like BOSSA (and the Mechanical Turk) that enlist volunteer human contributions, and perhaps there isn’t such a difference. It is always a human volunteering some combination of their time and computing to a larger project.
What Martin has suggested is that we think about how humanities computing projects might be enabled by distributed skill support. Could we enlist volunteer taggers for electronic texts with the right set up? Would we need to make it a game like ESP to check tagging choices against each other? The only example I can think of in the humanities is the Suda On Line (SOL), a project where volunteers are translating the Suda, “Byzantine encyclopedia known as the Suda, a 10th century CE compilation of material on ancient literature, history, and biography.” (From the SOL About page.) Can that infrastructure be generalized to a translating and enrichment engine for language, literature, history and philosophy?
Stories like this one from CNET, Is this the end of Netscape?, are saying that AOL won’t support Netscape past February. See BBC News and Tom Drapeau’s blog entry announcing this.
Netscape Navigator was created by Marc Andreessen (after he co-authored Mosaic at the NCSA) and released in 1994. When Netscape went public in 1995 marks the beginning of the dot-com bubble. AOL bought Netscape in 1998 for billions of dollars. What were they thinking?
I came across a very nice visualization by Fairyring (Stephanie Hendrick, a student at the HumLab) after finding that she had been experimenting with TAPoR visualizations and posting them to her Flickr account. In her comments she said she had used the visualization system, GUESS: The Graph Exploration System.
Peter O pointed me to a new phenomenon on the web that I’ve been meaning to blog for a while. That is the leveraging of human players for tasks that can’t be easily automated. Perhaps the best example is the ESP Game. The online game is described in “How to Play”:
The ESP Game is a two-player game. Each time you play you are randomly paired with another player whose identity you don’t know. You can’t communicate with your partner, and the only thing you have in common with them is that you can both see the same image. The goal is to guess what your partner is typing on each image. Once you both type the same word(s), you get a new image.
The game (and its Google Image Labeler spin-off) leverages fun to get image tagging done. Remember when we thought computer image recognition would do that? Now we are using online games to make it fun for humans to do what we do best – instant complex judgements about the visual. If you get enough people playing we could make serious inroads into tagging the visual web.
What is impressive about ESP is what a simple and powerful idea it is and this is Luis von Ahn‘s second sweet contribution, the first one being CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA.
While it isn’t quite as clean, a generalized version of the idea of people power is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. The idea is that people can,
Complete simple tasks that people do better than computers. And, get paid for it. Learn more.
Choose from thousands of tasks, control when you work, and decide how much you earn.
Developers can register tasks, people can work on HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) and get paid for the work, and Amazon can become the largest labour market for small tasks.
netzspannung.org is a German new media group with an archive of “media art, projects from IT research, and lectures on media theory as well as on aesthetics and art history.” They have a number of interfaces to this archive, for an explanation see, Archive Interfaces. The most interesting is the Java Semantic Map (see picture above.)
netzspannung.org is an Internet platform for artistic production, media projects, and intermedia research. As an interface between media art, media technology and society, it functions as an information pool for artists, designers, computer scientists and cultural scientists. Headed by » Monika Fleischmann and » Wolfgang Strauss, at the » MARS Exploratory Media Lab, interdisciplinary teams of architects, artists, designers, computer scientists, art and media scientists are developing and producing tools and interfaces, artistic projects and events at the interface between art and research. All developments and productions are realised in the context of national and international projects.
See The Semantic Map Interface for more on their Java Web Start archive browser.
WorldCat Identities is a experimental project by the OCLC that connects to their WorldCat catalogue of libary holdings. Identities presents you with a cloud of authors (identities):
If you click on an author you get publication information about the author, including a publication timeline like the one for Marx above. You can also connect to WorldCat and find a copy of the book near you by giving a postal code, for example.