CRKN and Cyberinfrastructure

Last week I presented on “Cyberinfrastructure: Reflections from TAPoR to Tools at the Canadian Research Knowledge Network Annual General Meeting 2008 (they have a PDF of the slides.) I was part of a panel on cyberinfrastructure that included an interesting presentation by Walter Stewart of CANARIE who made the point that the big issue is people. While many still don’t have access to the technical infrastructure that would facilitate their research, the big challenge is professional staff/collegial support for digital research. If one looks at the life span of a typical project one can see where people are needed:

  • Conception: when colleagues in the humanities are imagining a project that might have a digital component they need good advice.
  • Application: if they go forward with a grant application they need help articulating the digital component so that it is clear and technically accurate.
  • Modeling: if they get a grant they need help training the students who do the work, they need help making the technical decisions that affect downstream research, and they need help managing the implementation. Most colleagues don’t have the experience needed to bring a digital project to completion within budget and on time.
  • Virtualization: most digital humanities projects go out to the web and projects need help delivering them to the web and virtualizing the service so that it can be maintained as a stable machine. Typically a project will get funding to pay for the programming needed, but not for ongoing maintenance. We have found that one way to stabilize a project so it doesn’t need constant updating is to create a virtual server with all the layers of applications (lets say a certain version of Ruby and MySQL) frozen so that updating something on the server doesn’t break the service. This takes professional server support that is ongoing so these projects can be migrated from machine to machine over time.
  • Maintenance: even virtualized projects need occaisional maintenance if bugs are found or if new data needs to be added. If the programming was done by a graduate student who has long since gone, as is usually the case with grant funded projects, then the cost of maintenance can be exorbitant. The solution is not to use only professional programmers as work on projects is one of the best forms of apprenticeship in the digital humanities for graduate students. What we need is permanent programming staff who oversee digital projects, guiding the graduate students, and making sure that code is documented so it can be maintained. These project manager level programmers then provide the long term knowledge so that a new student could be hired to fix something and guided around the project.

In short I think we can begin to articulate a baseline of cyberinfrastructure and support needed at research-intensive universities to support a culture of digital humanities projects:

  • Servers: Research-intensive universities (RIU) need to run flexible servers capable of hosting the development and deliver of projects. These need to flexible in the sense that service models that limit service to specific applications (we only support PHP) almost always fail to evolve at the speed of projects leading projects to spin-off their own servers outside the support umbrella.
  • Labs: RIUs tend to see a proliferation of labs “owned” by particular projects. Given how most of us and our students have laptops we no longer need labs specifically for work. Instead labs are becoming places for access to specialized tools (large format scanners, special software, and visualization displays) and places for social research. Labs, in my experience, are becoming places where people work together whether meeting over an interface or testing a project. I would argue that labs should be “socialized” and brought together so that projects share space so they can learn from each other. That said, labs are still needed.
  • Project Managers and Technical Staff: Most important, following the outline of how knowledgable people are needed I would argue that RIUs need to have a mix of technical staff with project management experience to guide projects through from conception to long-term stability. Such staff can be in the library, faculty or computing center, but they should be coordinated. These staff do not replace the grant funded people brought on to work on projects, but they provide the advice to get the grant and oversight to manage contract staff.

YouTube – TEI Encoding of Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues

Ray Siemens and friends have put up a TEI Encoding of Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues on YouTube as “socio-cultural representation” of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) to counter the various videos of Tei, a popular Korean signer. There is a blog on the widget hosted by the ETCL at Victoria which explains the origins and authorship of the video.

Night Danger: Dictionary of Words in the Wild over 3500

Moose Danger Sign

The Dictionary of Words in the Wild has now over 3,500 images and over 4,500 words. Willard McCarty delivered a paper at the University of Western Sydney reflecting on the Dictionary, “Stepping off the edge of the world or into it: The Dictionary of Words in the Wild as research?” Willard is the star contributor, but I’m catching up with pictures taken on the move across Canada including the moose danger sign above which is seen frequently on the Trans-Canada in parts of Ontario and Manitoba.

Urban Dictionary

I just came across this Urban Dictionary where people provide definitions for new urban words and then vote the definitions up or down (with commentary). The social site allows people to upload images that capture the word; for example, the first definition of “scene” has 332 images. These are not images of the word but images evocative of the word. What is interesting is that further down on each page is an embedded visual Google ad (as in a small image rather than text ad.) The ad is pulled based on the word so you get a different type of image of the word. For “scene” there was this linked animated GIF for a dating service where you can “Find out who is waiting for you at the Goth Scene”:

Image of Ad

Of course the book is being mined by the editor for a Urban Dictionary book compiled by Aaron Peckham. When you read the Terms of Service you will find the following:

When you post Content on the Website, you agree to grant the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, fully sublicenseable, non-exclusive license to copy, distribute, sell, publicly display, publicly perform and make derivative works of your Content on the Website, on services affiliated with the Website and elsewhere (including but not limited to print, video, audio or computer media), regardless of the form of media used or of whether such media or services now exist or are developed in the future. By posting Content to the Website, you hereby represent and warrant that you have the right to post that Content and to grant the foregoing rights to the Company.

Theses Canada: What you (a graduate student) should know

Being on the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research council my attention was drawn to the issue of what happens to theses. In my day you bound a bunch of copies and one went off to Libraries and Archives Canada where it was indexed, but could not be read online. Since 1997 it looks like they have been digitizing the theses working with contractors. Now they ask graduate students to sign a non-exclusive license that gives LAC remarkable rights. See the page for graduate students, What you should know – at the bottom is the link to the PDF of the license they have to sign which includes the following language:

[I] hereby grant a non-exclusive, for the full term of copyright protection, royalty free license to Library and Archives Canada:

(a) to reproduce, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, communicate to the public by telecommunication or on the Internet, loan, distribute and sell my thesis (the title of which is set forth above) worldwide, for commercial or non-commercial purposes, in microform, paper, electronic and/or any other formats;

(b) to authorize, sub-license, sub-contract or procure any of the acts mentioned in paragraph (a).

I find this language too broad. I can understand why Theses Canada wants these rights in order to be able to run a genuinely useful service that makes Canadian research accessible, but this license is just too broad, especially when enforced by universities that require all graduate students to sign it. There is provision on the Theses Canada site for graduates delaying submission (if they want to register patents, for example) and I’m guessing that most universities would respect a student’s wish to not sign the license.

There is a separate issue around copyright. Part of the License includes this:

If third-party copyrighted material was included in my thesis, I have obtained written copyright permission from the copyright owners to do the acts mentioned in paragraph (a) above for the full term of copyright protection.

I wonder if the accessibility of theses online and the terms of the License might change the willingness of other copyright owners to grant permissions to graduate students.

CH Working Papers

CH Working Papers Logo
I just noticed that the CH Working Papers have a new look and structure. They are using the Public Knowledge Project Open Journal Systems to good effect. I’m impressed how they have ported over the legacy content like the article I co-authored with John Bradley on Eye-ConTact: Towards a New Design for Text-Analysis Tools. The only wrinkle is the first letter of the authors’ names in the bibliography and small subheadings.

AHRC ICT Methods Network: Final Report

I just came across the AHRC ICT Methods Network Final Report edited by Lorna Hughes. It is one of the most thorough final reports of its kind and nicely designed. There is a bitter-sweet conclusion to the report by Susan Hockey and Seamus Ross as the AHDS (Arts and Humanities Data Service) seems to have had its funding cut and therefore cannot renew the Methods Network (or support the Oxford Text Archive either.) As the home page of the AHDS says, “From April 2008 the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) will no longer be funded to provide a national service.” The conclusion by Susan and Seamus states unequivocally that,

In conclusion, the activities of the Methods Network demonstrated not only that ICT methods and tools are central to humanities scholarship, but also that there was ‘a very long way to go before ICT in humanities and arts research finds its rightful and needed places’. The investment in ICT in the arts and humanities needs to be much greater and it needs to reflect better the particularities and needs of individual communities. Researchers who do not have access to the most current technological methods and tools will not be able to keep
pace with the trends in scholarship. There is a real need for support and infrastructure for distributed research. (page 74)

Interestingly they propose a “flexible co-ordinated network of centres of excellence as the best way forwards”. (Page 74) I also liked the report because it kindly mentions TAPoR,

The group looked at how collaborations are fostered and supported, how partnerships are brokered in the first instance, and how this work is rewarded and evaluated by the different communities. Geoffrey Rockwell, Project Director of what is almost certainly the largest collaborative humanities software development project in the world, the TAPoR (http://portal.tapor.ca/portal/portal) project in Canada, shared his experiences of how the development of a collaborative and inter-institutional set of tools for text analysis was managed within the project. TAPoR was funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation and succeeded in its overall goals in providing general purpose text analysis tools. The TAPoR site reports that its tools were run over 5000 times in November 2007. TAPoR provides strong evidence that networked collaborative tool development can succeed. (Page 63)

ThoughtMesh: Tag your writing. Join the conversation.

Screen shot of ThoughtMeshMatt sent around a link to ThoughtMesh, an original idea about how tag-rich online publishing might work. You can get an account and upload an essay (it encourages you to divide into chunks) or self-publish so your essay is meshed. I’m not entirely sure how it works, but it gives you contextual tag clouds to use to see related stuff.
Here is what Jon Ippolito says in his essay, ThoughtMesh Author’s Statement,

When Craig Dietrich and I set out to build ThoughtMesh, we asked ourselves how an ideal publishing tool for scholars would behave. We decided that we wanted a system that was distributed–not siloed away in a single database, but able to be published on any Web site anywhere. We also wanted all the essays to be connected to each other, by something less random than search returns, but more serendipitous than intentional hyperlinks.

A Brief History of Neon — New York Magazine

Image of Camel Ad

In A Brief History of Neon in New York Magazine I came across reference to Artkraft Strauss one of the first and most important makers of neon signs, ads and marquees. Artkraft Strauss dominated the design of neon signs for Times Square including the new year’s midnight ball-lowering. Artkraft Strauss is still around as a design and consulting company and they have a great archive of images of “100 years of commerce, design and Times Square celebrations”. It is a treasure of neon sign design in New York from the first days.