IT Business has an article by Shane Schick on Canadian computing pioneers have issues with IT education (10/19/05). The article reports on IBM’s Centers for Advanced Studies: CASCON – CASCON 2005 conference where they brought together Canadian pioneers (those who got their Ph.D. before 1973 and spent time doing computing at Canadian universities.)
A short list of the pioneers that were featured is here.
Continue reading Canadian pioneers and education
What is high performance computing?
On Wednesday I was at a meeting to discuss the National Platforms program which is part of the new CFI programs. Here are the details or the proposed program:
National Platforms Fund (NPF)
The National Platforms Fund provides generic research infrastructure, resources, services, and facilities that serve the needs of many research subjects and disciplines, and that require periodic reinvestments because of the nature of the technologies. The Fund is established to deal first with High Performance Computing, but may be applicable in other cases.
Working with the HPC folks raises interesting questions about what HPC is and whether it has applications in the Humanities.
Continue reading High Performance Computing
ATLAS.ti! is a “Knowledge Workbench” for the qualitative analysis of texts, images, audio and video. It looks like a PC program that lets you annotate large quantities of materials for interpretation, coding, and clustering.
I saw this years ago, but it has matured and now handles multimedia. I should add that it is for sale, not free, though they have a trial version.
Continue reading ATLAS.ti
Alex Sevigny pointed me to a post on the Linguist List (16.2917) about Ask-an-Expert System: Digitizing Lang Documentation. The announcement is for a system run by E-MELD, which is a project dedicated to the preservation of endangered languages data and documentation, for people to Ask an Expert. This is not a bot, the questions go to real human experts. Interesting way to support the community.
I just stumbled on this little gem of a History of Humanities Computing by Michael Fraser. It was prepared for a presentation in 1996 and focuses mostly on developments in the UK (it doesn’t mention TACT, for example), but it provides precise dates for early projects from Busa on.
According to a story in the Daily Telegraph online titled “Sony’s game’s up“, an electronics “geek” won a ruling against Sony to the effect that there was noting illegal to mod chips that overide the region specific coding that lets Sony control prices by region.
Last week I was at a Summit on Digital Tools for the Humanities organized at the University of Virginia. The Summit produced an interesting set of recommendations for next steps in tool development. See my wiki conference notes on the WikiTADA. The final session that I helped with came up with a neat idea for what to do about web-wide exploration that Roy Rosenzweig wrote up with my help. See Exploration of Resources – ToolCenter.
The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University has a developed a collection of
Tools including H-Bot (an automated historical fact finder that uses Google to try to answer “when did …” questions) and the ToolCenter which is a wiki about tools.
Continue reading History Tools
Nines project is developing some neat tools. One of the most interesting is Juxta which is a collation tool with a brilliant interface.
It has a histogram of differences between texts.
Continue reading Juxta
Well, Google now has a Blog Search that is in beta. It searches an index of feeds. You can’t submit a blog for them to index, but they are checking other updating services like Weblog.com. Most of the blogs they are tracking have been indexed since June, so you can’t search older entries. See the story, Google Launches Industrial Strength Blog Search.