Institutions In The Digital Humanities

At the Digital Humanities Summer Institute I participated in a three day advanced consultation on “Scaling Digital Humanities. I posted my conference report here, but I have just finished editing the short presentation I gave on Institutions In The Digital Humanities. This is an outline of work I am doing to document the history and institutions in Canada supporting the digital humanities as part of a project led by Dr. Michael Eberle-Sinatra looking at The Academic Capacity of the Digital Humanities in Canada.

One thing that became clear from the meeting is the diversity of support available across Canada. I have been developing a definition of what I consider to be basic support for research computing in the humanities:

  • Access to a social lab with specialized workstations, digitizing equipment and software. Labs with lots of computers will be underutilized (unless you use them for training) as most of us have our own laptop; what is needed is the specialized stations to support conferencing, and specialized tasks like video editing, book scanning and so on.
  • Access to digitization facilities to able to acquire evidence for research.
  • Access to support that can quickly set up basic off-the-shelf web research utilities from distribution lists, blogs to wikis.
  • Access to a virtual machine where projects can install the tools they need for specialized projects and not have to worry about standarization or conflicts with other projects. Providing humanists with a locked-down CMS which you can only use to publish static pages does not allow us to use the wealth of open source tools and languages out there to create innovative research environments. Neither should security or standardization rule any longer. Humanists should be able to get a virtual machine set up with sufficient storage for any project that has the programming support needed.
  • Finally, and most importantly, access to good advising and technical support so as to be able to develop projects, apply for funding, and get project management support without being a humanities computing expert.

ubimark.com: around the world with QR tags

Shannon sent me this link to Ubimark.com a project from Purdue that is using QR codes to enhance reading. They created an edition of Around the World in 80 Days with QR codes that allow users to get at supplemental information and social media zones. I’m not sure I like the large QR codes all over the printed page, but the idea of augmenting things easily with QR codes is a good one.

Society for Digital Humanities Papers

With my graduate students and colleagues I was involved in a number of papers at the SDH-SEMI The Society for Digital Humanities / La Société pour l’Étude des Médias Interactifs conference at Congress 2010 in Montreal. They included:

  • “Exclusionary Practices: A Historical Look at Public Representations of Computers in the 1950s and Early 1960s” presented by Sophia Hoosien
  • “Before the Moments of Beginning” presented by Victoria Smith
  • I presented on “Cyberinfrastructure for Research in the Humanities: Expectations and Capacity”
  • Text Analysis for me Too: An embeddable text analysis widget” presented by Peter Organisciak
  • Daniel Sondheim talked about the interface of the citation from print to the web as part of a panel on INKE Interface Design.
  • “Theorizing Analytics” was presented by Stéfan Sinclair
  • “Academic Capacity in Canada’s Digital Humanities Community: Opportunities and Challenges” was presented by Lynne Siemens
  • “What do we say about ourselves? An analysis of the Day
    of DH 2009 data” was presented by Peter Organisciak
  • and I presented on “The Unreality of the Timeline” as part of a panel on temporal modeling at the CHA

As the papers get posted, I’ll blog them.

Historypin

Historypin is a very cool project that lets people attach their historic photographs to locations. It is a partnership with Google that allows images to be pinned on Google Street View and Google Maps.

I like the scale and ambition of this project – it invites a country to document itself. I also like the way they have captured the concept with a name (“Historypin”) and an image of the historic photo pinned over the current view.

SSHRC – Knowledge Syntheses Grants on the Digital Economy

SSHRC has just issued a call for proposals with a very short deadline (as in, proposals are due July 2nd.) See Knowledge Syntheses Grants on the Digital Economy. This is an important call because it will build a humanities and social science response to the government’s Digital Economy initiative. It is important that the arts and humanities be represented in this initiative.

Steel Bananas » The Slandering of Linda Hutcheon: Language Zombies. A Semiotic Virus. What could be more Allegorical Autobiographical?

From Kathryn I found this longish blog entry/essay on the novel Pontypool Changes Everything, Steel Bananas » The Slandering of Linda Hutcheon: Language Zombies. A Semiotic Virus. What could be more Allegorical Autobiographical?. Steel Bananas presents itself as “guerrilla academic”. It is a “a not-for-profit art collective and culture zine”.

It’s Quit Facebook Day. Who will dare delete their profile? – The Globe and Mail

It’s Quit Facebook Day. Who will dare delete their profile? is an interesting story about a movement to quit Facebook. The articles quotes Sarah Braesch who encourages people not to quit,

Despite all the uproar, “people won’t quit over privacy,” she adds. “They’ll quit when something else becomes popular. Everyone is on Facebook. If you’re not, it’s weird.”

That’s the problem, Facebook is peer pressure on a whole new level. The message is, if you’re not on Facebook you’re an outcast (or you outcast yourself.) That’s why people should quit – because we shouldn’t let any social media become so important.