Theoreti.ca – Page 104 – Research notes taken on subjects around multimedia, electronic texts, and computer games.

NY Times: Humanities Scholars Embrace Digital Technology

The next big idea is data according to a New York Times article, Humanities Scholars Embrace Digital Technology by Patricia Cohen (November 16, 2010.) The article reports on some of the big data interpretation projects like those funded by the Digging Into Data program like the Mining with Criminal Intent project I am on.

Members of a new generation of digitally savvy humanists argue it is time to stop looking for inspiration in the next political or philosophical “ism” and start exploring how technology is changing our understanding of the liberal arts. This latest frontier is about method, they say, using powerful technologies and vast stores of digitized materials that previous humanities scholars did not have.

I’m not sure this is a new generation as we have been at this for a while, but perhaps the point is that the new generation is now looking away from theory towards the large-scale data issues.

What stands out about the projects mentioned and others is that the digital humanities and design fields are developing new and subtler forms of large-scale data mining and interpretation that use methods from other disciplines along with a sensitivity to the nature of the data and the questions we want to ask. The image above comes from Stanford’s Visualization of Republic of Letters project. There is nothing new about visualization or network analysis, but digital humanists are trying to adapt methods to messy human data – in other words interpreting the really interesting stuff so that it makes sense of something to someone.

Perhaps we may be able to show that following theses are true and important to the broader community:

Interesting data has to be interpreted to be interesting. Someone has to pose the questions that make data useful.
There is too much of data and it is messy; therefore it can’t by interpreted automatically. Real world analysis always involves questions, choices, data curation, mixing techniques, and iterative interpretation of results to generate knowledge.
Interesting data always has to be explained to someone in some context. Results are only useful knowledge if they are published in some fashion that makes them accessible to an intended audience.
Humanists have been the curators and interpreters of information which is why the subtle skills of questioning, curating, editing, analyzing, interpreting and representing are all the more needed now. Without humanists (and I include librarians and archivists in this category) who are comfortable with digital data and methods we will have only too much data and too many unused tools.

Thanks to Judith for pointing me to this NYT article.

Save The Words: Adopt a Word

Save The Words is a neat social project set up by the Oxford University Press where you can “adopt” a rarely used word like “egrote” (to feign an illness). If you adopt a word then the idea is that you will use it in various ways. The site suggests you could name a pet with the word, get a tatoo, walk around with a signboard and so on.

Old words, wise words, hard-working words. Words that once led meaningful lives but now lie unused, unloved and unwanted.

You can change all that. Help save the worlds.

The interface to the project is also worth noting. The Flash interface has a wall of words in different fonts and on different surfaces as if photographs of words in contexts. A faux version of our Dictionary of Words in the Wild.

The Escapist : Video Galleries : Extra Credits : So You Want to be a Game Designer

Shannon pointed me to an animation on The Escapist about So You Want to be a Game Designer. The animation provides advice on what people should learn starting with “everything” (as in you need to learn everything.) More realistically the animation suggests that you develop these skills:

Communication – so you can communicate with a diverse team
Listening – because you won’t design the game others will with you
Introspection and ability to take criticism – because there will be lots of criticism
Disciplined study of games – because playing lots doesn’t make a good game designer
Understand costs and scope – because games need to be finished and on budget

The animation goes on to discuss how important a knowledge of literature, philosophy and mythology.

Montréal Games Summit 2010

I’m at the Montréal International Games Summit 2010 (MIGS) for today and tomorrow. My conference notes are at Philosophi.ca – MIGS conference report.

Crowdsourcing Knowledge

Today we held an event at the University of Alberta around developing a new form of collaboration. Peter Robison from the University of Saskatchewan organized the day’s discussion and we had participants from across the country, though most were from the medieval editing community in Western Canada.

Peter started us off by arguing that we need intelligent documents and the way he is doing that is working with RDF. He believes “the interface is the enemy” of researchers trying to study across documents. He believes that XML/TEI isn’t enough; we need intelligent documents that carry assertions that can help other users of the data. I’m intrigued by this idea of “assertions” and I know Allen Renear has been working on what can be said about a document.

Dan O’Donnell argued that we should think about interchange rather than interoperability. He pointed out that most people want access to the data of others to do their own analysis and repurpose for their own. Brent Nelson talked about his Digital Donne project and bringing traditional researchers into digital projects. He then talked about his cabinet of curiosities project. Allison Muiri talked about her Grub Street project and legal issues around involving a larger community.

One issue that we went back and forth on was the place of interface. I’m convinced that the idea of the separation of form and content is just one assertion among many. In some situations it makes sense to talk about separating interface, in others it doesn’t.

One thing we are all struggling with is essentially the human processes. Computers are really not the issue, what we need is support for changing the research culture:

– How do you get participation?
– How do you encourage openness to interchange?
– What will our universities allow us to do?
– How will we get credit for what we are doing?
– How can we run production services or who can run them for us?

Yin Liu talked about how we are here because we have failed. This was in response to Peter’s claim that we were here because we had all succeeded. Yin also said that she would like to no longer list herself as a digital humanist but as a medievalist. The time may come when we are all digital humanists – that, of course, is the culture change we are interested in.

Meagan Timney talked about linking – linking of people, linking of digital humanities to traditional disciplines, linking to training of undergraduates. Dean Irvine talked about how to pitch editing outside of the humanities. Training became a keyword – editing is a way to train students in informatics.

We ended by brainstorming about a partnership that could bring together many of the players in Canada while providing an inclusive culture for new scholars. What could a new type of organization look like?

UK: Graduate employment not where you expected

The Guardian has a story about (university) graduate employment and unemployment, Graduate unemployment at highest level for 17 years (Jessica Shepherd, The Guardian, November 1, 2010). What interested me was the statistics about how different types of degrees fared.

Those who had studied Chinese had the highest starting salary at £24,540 a year, while fine art graduates started on the lowest wage at £14,625. …

The government describes engineering degrees as “strategically important” for the economy. But 11.9% of civil engineering graduates were out of work six months after they graduated, as were 11.8% of mechanical engineering graduates. Geography and psychology graduates were least likely to be unemployed. Some 7.4% and 8.3% were out of a job respectively.

The author is well aware of the irony that the statistics don’t support the British government’s assumptions about which programs are valuable and therefore worthy of funding support. Arts and humanities are likely to see deep cuts. As for informatics, the article reports that,

Graduates with degrees in IT fared worst. One in six – or 16.3% – were unemployed six months after graduation. The previous year, 13.7% were out of work after the same period.

So you Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities

Thanks to Colette I came across a pointed xtranormal animation titled, So you Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities. The animation is of a dialogue between a student who wants a letter of reference to graduate school and a burnt out prof. The students is idealistic and insists on going for a PhD in order to be a college professor. The professor is trying to dissuade her. The dialogue seems well written, though the automatic voices sometimes miss the timing needed to get the barbs.

Nigerian scam,Scam checker tool,419 scam ,scam baiting,scammers database,scam,avoid scam mail tips and awareness

I just found an interesting site about Nigerian scams. The site has some history, it has a bibliography of books on the subject, it has an archive of example emails, and it tracks people who seem to be fraud artists. While the site at times seems to have an amateur side it has a lot of information.

I must admit that I’m interested in this as I’ve begun to think of spam as a form of creative writing. Spammers have to tell a story that will entice people to start up a dialogue so that they can ask for an advance. Who writes these stories? What sorts of people maintain the dialogue? What do these stories tell us about ourselves? Why Nigeria?

2nd Edition of Icon Programming for Humanists

I just got a notice that the 2nd Edition of Icon Programming for Humanists (PDF) by Alan D. Corré has been up (and its free). This has been made available by Jeffery Books who will also sell you a paperback copy. Donations go to promoting Icon and Unicon programming languages and systems.

I read Icon Programming for Humanists ages ago. It was one of the few how-to-program books that were aimed at humanists with text manipulation examples. I thought the book excellent and was only held back because I couldn’t find an Icon interpreter for the Mac when I looked.

This edition has 2 new chapters that deal with Unicode (so you can analyze texts in different languages), and Markup (so you can work with TEI encoded texts.)

There is a recurring issue that crops up as to whether we should be teaching humanities students to program or just to use tools. Corré’s book would make a good textbook for teaching programming.