Today I had another (see Ethics of Blogging) interesting discussion about the ethics of using blogs for research with folks from health studies. We taped it and hope to put it up as a podcast. Some of the participants are from a team that is exploring this and they have started a blog, Web Finds. I think there is something consistent in a circular way about a research team using a blog to keep track of, link to, and ping, other blogs they are reading as evidence. They, in effect, make their research trajectory open in the same way as that of their “subjects”.
OCLC: Gamers and Boomers
The Online Computer Library Centre (OCLC) Newsletter (No. 267) has a set of stories about computer games and the difference between Boomers (born from 1946 to 1964) and Gamers (born after the 1970s). The conver story, The Big Bang! (Tom Storey) notes a shift from boomers who are career-driven, independent and idealistic to gamers who are motivated, resilient, confident and analytical. The story presents gamers as sociable (compared with boomers who are independent), which inverts the usual complaint that gamers are loners.
Thanks to Susan for pointing me to this.
Continue reading OCLC: Gamers and Boomers
Leximancer
Leximancer is a text mapping and mining application that creates visualizations of texts that can be made available over the web in interactive form. See the Leximancer Gallery.
Continue reading Leximancer
Google’s Site Ranking Secret is Out
Great Site Ranking in Google The Secret’s Out is an article on how Google ranks sites based on a reading of their US patent application which describes their approach to ranking and how they deal with spam. The article was suggested to me by Matt Patey and is worth reading. Darren Yates, the author, concludes with “Overall keep it ethical and you can’t go far wrong.” (Yates, 6/11/2005, in Buzzle.com)
Topics in the Digital Humanities
Topics in the Digital Humanities is a new book series that Susan Schreibman has announced on various lists. The series will be edited by Ray Siemens and Susan Schriebman and it will be published by the University of Illinois Press.
Continue reading Topics in the Digital Humanities
Stemming and Text Analysis
Another candidate for a fundamental procedure for text analysis would be stemming. See What is Stemming? for example algorithms and applications.
Again, is Stemming a basic procedure for humanities computing?
Levenshtein Distance: Fundamental Algorithms in Text Analysis
What are the fundamental algorithms of text analysis? One candidate from computational lignuistics and (CS) might be Levenshtein Distance. This is used in spell checking, speech recognition, and could be used in text analysis in comparison.
But, are there fundamental procedures for literary text analysis? Could the concordance be represented as such a procedure? Or, is the idea of a fundamental algorithm alien to humanities computing?
See also the talk by John Nerbonne who mentions the Levenshtein distance – Nerbonne: Data Deluge.
OAAG Prize
A project I worked on with Multimedia students and colleagues (see previous post Virtual Cities) won a prize from Ontario Association of Art Galleries. See the
McMaster Daily News story. We got a varnished stick with “Good for you!” on it! Not sure what we will do with that?
Buckets of Grewal
An interesting Canadian example of a political and timely blog is Buckets of Grewal which looks closely at the Grewal controversy and the tapes. Buckets has been systematically tracking the changing transcripts and politics around the tapes. He/She has a very nice use of Flikr to show slides of the trascripts with the differences (between old and new transcripts) hightlighted. See buckets’ Grewal’s meeting w. Dosajnh & Murphy slideshow on Flickr.
CTV.ca | Rookie political blogger tackles the Grewal tapes is a good article about the Buckets of Grewal blog and its reception.
Ethics of Blogging
Today I participated in a meeting of the Bioethics Interest Group in the Faculty of Health Sciences at McMaster University on the subject of ethics and blogging where we had a lively conversation around the use of blogs for medical research. For that I created (with Lisa Schwartz who organized the meeting) a fictional case to problematize the issues. See the extended entry for the case. BIG is a monthly informal discussion of topics related to ethics in health care and biomedical sciences. Some interesting questions that came up:
- What can we assume about a blogger? Can we guess at how they assumed their blog would be used?
- Is quoting a blog comparable to quoting an online article? or should we try to get consent? More generally, what can we compare blogs to was we try to work out the ethics?
- Would getting consent change what was being written?
- Would podcasting conversations like the one we had help develop community awareness around the issues?