The Guardian has a nice story on educational uses of podcasting, A soundtrack for study by Shola Adenekan (Aug. 17, 2005.) It mentions McMaster’s use for recruiting students.
Buzztracker: News location visualization
buzztracker is an interesting visualization of Google News that is mapped onto a map of the world to show the places in the news and their relationships.
What is an electronic text?
I came across a thoughtful blog entry responding to somethng I wrote with Ian Lancashire about electronic texts and text analysis in WRT: Writer Response Theory ª Forms of Electronic Texts.
The author, Christy Dena, points out the focus on material characteristics (that an e-text is an electronic version of a written work etc.) and inconsistencies. To be honest I wasn’t trying to come up with a typology with a “continuity of variable.” I was trying to describe the variety of things we call e-texts. Time for a better definition and asking whether we want to use “electronic text” for anything that can be read and has/had an electronic form.
UK Arts and Humanities ICT Map
Note: This site and map has since been moved. You can find an archived version of the July 2006 ICT Map here.
The Arts & Humanities Research Council in the UK has put together a great introduction to the main providers of support for ICT (Information and Communication Technology), see ICT Map for Arts and Humanities Research and the diagram at ICT Map for Arts and Humanities Research. We need one for Canadian support to guide people through.
HUMlab Guest Blogger
If you’re wondering why I’m not blogging much – see The HUMlab blog – I am a guest blogger there.
Geoffrey Rockwell
Wolfram Tones
Stephen Wolfram, author of A New Kind of Science has published a site that explores automatic music composition using Mathematica algorithms. See About WolframTones – try out the music generator. I like the visualization that shows the pattern generating music. This is thanks to Alex SÈvigny.
Academic Commons
Academic Commons is a new online forum around technology in liberal arts education. It is sponsored by the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College, which makes it sound like a local initiative that is being scaled up into a pseudo-journal.
Continue reading Academic Commons
Altered Books
From the Ivanhoe project I heard about this neat site on altered books. The idea is:
Cut the bindings off of books found at a used book store. Find poems in the pages by the process of obliteration. Put pages in the mail and send them all around the world. Lather, rinse, repeat. This site is a chronicle of a very specific set of collaborations between the artists listed below working on the titles listed below.
They have a number of images of altered pages that are reminiscent of Tom Phillips: A Humument.
MP3 Player Sales
I was wondering what the sales of MP3 players is – are there enough out there to see a change in audio consumption habits? Or, are MP3 players and iPods a niche phenomenon? Some figures and proedictions were reported in Electronic News – MP3 Market to Nearly Quadruple by 2009. These are based on market analysis from iSuppli Corporation which predicts that MP3 player sales will go from 36.8 million units shipped in 2004 to 132 million units shipping in 2009. At that rate I think it safe to say we have a widespread phenomenon. How then will it change audio listening and consumption? Will radio be replaced by podcasts? Will online music stores replace storefronts?
CaSTA Working Papers published
The Working Papers from the First and Second Canadian Symposium on Text Analysis Research (CaSTA) have been published online at the Computing in the Humanities Working Papers. It includes a paper by my on “MIMes and MeRMAids: On the Possibility of Computer-aided Interpretation” which is also coming out through Text Technology.