ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities & Social Sciences

ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities & Social Sciences has released their final report.

Their recommendates are:

  1. Invest in cyberinfrastructure for the humanities and social sciences, as a matter of strategic priority
  2. Develop public and institutional policies that foster openness and access
  3. Promote cooperation between the public and private sectors
  4. Cultivate leadership in support of cyberinfrastructure from within the humanities and social sciences
  5. Encourage digital scholarship
  6. Establish national centers to support scholarship that contributes to and exploits cyberinfrastructure
  7. Develop and maintain open standards and robust tools
  8. Create extensive and reusable digital collections

I note that the development of robust tools is one of the recommendations (along with open standards). See my earlier post Humanities Cyberinfrastructure.

Communications From Elsewhere »

Communications From Elsewhere is a journal (not blog!) by Josh Larios with some interesting text generators including a Postmodernism Generator which randomly generates “completely meaningless” essays using a modified version of The Dada Engine written by Andrew C. Bulhak.

For more on The Dada Engine see the technical report from Monash University, On the simulation of postmodernism and mental debility using recursive transition networks. The Abstract reads:

Recursive transition networks are an abstraction related to context-free grammars and finite-state automata. It is possible, to generate random, meaningless and yet realistic-looking text in genres defined using recursive transition networks, often with quite amusing results. One genre in which this has been accomplished is that of academic papers on postmodernism.

Josh has collected and connected different “Text Generators” to his journal, including an Adolescent Poetry Corner and a Time Cube screed generator. (For an explanation of Gene Ray’s Time Cube theory see DmitryBrant.com ¬ª On Time Cube. The Time Cube site is another story.)

BBC: Text analysis of texting to catch criminals

The BBC have a story on Texting study to catch criminals by researchers at Leicester University in the School of Psychology. They are studying the individual styles of text messages in order to help with forensic investigations. The BBC had previously reported how Text messages examined in Danielle case had helped in the prosecution of the 15-year-old Danielle Jones’ uncle who seems to have sent text messages from Danielle’s phone in order to throw off the scent.

The Leicester University researchers have a web page that welcomes people willing to submit samples. I wonder how useful anonymously submitted messages will be. I imagine, if they get enough messages, it will give them a control sample for the study of particular suspect messages.

mandalabrot.net

Mandalabrot Imagemandalabrot.net is the home of kiddphunk (Ian Timourian) and his visualizations, experiments and remixes. He has a number of Context Free Design Grammar experiments. Timourian also has a photo kiddphunk site with an doubled way of showing images.

Thanks to Johnny R. for pointing me to this collection of “Explorations of Generative Art, Mathematics, Algorithmic Design and the Beauty of Life / Vol 1”.

visualcomplexity.com | A visual exploration on mapping complex networks

Visual Complexity

visualcomplexity.com | A visual exploration on mapping complex networks is a site which surveys over 300 network visualization projects. The site has thumbnails of the projects that link to short descriptions. It has a nicely designed resources page with suggested readings.

VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field. (From the About page.)

I discovered this through the del.icio.us.discover project. We need a comparable collection of text visualization projects.

RDUES: WebCorp: The Web as Corpus

The Research and Development Unit for English Studies (RDUES) of UCE of Birmingham has a tool WebCorp: The Web as Corpus which searches google for a term and then goes to the top 199 documents Google identifies and searches them. It takes a while and works like our Googlizer, but produces more verbose results. It produces a concordance organized by document with links to a full word frequency list for the doc. The advanced search form has some interesting features, including the ability to point it at other engines.

UCE Birmingham is strange place from the web. UCE stands for “University of Central England” and you have to go deep to the At A Glance : History Of UCE Birmingham to find this out. (There’s no point explaining it to outsiders anywhere on the web page.) They seem to have been formed out of all the little colleges, polytechnics and schools in the area in 1992.

Variable Media Network

Variable MediaThe Variable Media Network is joint project by the Guggenheim Museum and the Daniel Langlois Foundation to look at models for preserving “performance, conceptual art, installations and, of course, artwork incorporating technological elements or relying on structures or networks that are themselves very unstable.” The project has online case studies and has published a edited book, Permanence Through Change.

This concept (variable media) suggests considering the description of works independently of the media used to create them. Rather than list a work’s physical components, the variable media approach is to understand the work’s behavioural characteristics and intrinsic effects. (Variable Media Concept as developed by Jon Ippolito, quoted on Fondation Daniel Langlois page.)

The idea if preserving variation and behaviour instead of stable media makes sense as a strategy for documenting interactive works, even beyond new media art, like computer games and electronic literature.