DH 2010 conference

I’m at the Digital Humanities 2010 conference in London, England. The conference is taking place at King’s College London. I’m on two panel and giving a paper (with others):

Some of the themes that are coming up at the conference are:

  • Inclusion. At the ACH AGM we had a conversation about how to explain the field and things like posters to people new to it. Elsewhere we discussed who is included or not. This year there was a THATcamp before DH which was, by all accounts, inclusive and lively. (While I didn’t participate, I’m judging the Developers Challenge.
  • Graduate Consortium. The idea of creating some sort of graduate consortium where graduate students could meet and organize activities is coming up in different contexts.
  • Historicizing the Field. I’m seeing more and more reflections on the history of computing in the humanities. Of particular note is the archive of conference abstracts being put together by John Unsworth and others. I see this as an example of how the field is trying to document itself to its own standards.
  • Embroidered Digital Commons. There were some neat projects run in parallel with DH. I participated in the Embroidered Digital Commons, an artwork faciltiated by Ele Carpenter as part of the Open Source Embroidery project. I love these participatory projects.

Jobs. The ACH ran a neat Jobs-Slam at its Annual General Meeting. Jobs are becoming an issue as the field expands and people see humanities computing as a source of alternative para-academic careers. I was surprised how many jobs were promoted at the AGM.

On the subject of jobs, Stéfan Sinclair shared two places where jobs are being posted that were new to me:

Arts & Humanities Net: http://www.arts-humanities.net/jobs

HASTAC: http://www.hastac.org/forums/announcements-and-opportunities/fellowship-and-employment-opportunities

centerNet 2010

I have spent yesterday and today at the centerNet 2010 summit as I am on the steering committee. See my conference report at, philosophi.ca : Center Net 2010. An interesting question we are struggling with is what centerNet’s mission should be and how it is different from other organizations in ADHO. We are trying to also figure out how centerNet can do things without become a heavy centralized organization (which may be ironic since we all have centres at our universities with all the baggage and virtues of centers.) My view is that centerNet should do very little itself – instead its philosophy should be to empower and support centers or collaborations to do things for the rest of us. We should, in effect, centersource things in the sense of crowdsourcing by centres.

Jenkins: It’s time for Canada’s digital revolution

I came across this older article by Tom Jenkins from Globe and Mail that makes the case for investment in digital content. The article, It’s time for Canada’s digital revolution (Monday, March 2, 2009), is by Tom Jenkins, executive chairman and chief strategy officer of Waterloo’s Open Text Corp. He is also on the SSHRC council.

The Obama administration has made IT infrastructure and digital content a top and multibillion-dollar priority. The European Union has just launched a massive expansion in European digital content as part of its digital commercialization strategy. With only 1 per cent of Canada's content on the Web, we are falling behind the rest of the world as other countries pull ahead in the race to put their information online. Canada must keep pace in the fast-moving digital revolution. …

Library and Archives Canada, with strong support from the private and university sectors, has a plan to digitize Canadian content and is ready with the digital equivalent of a shovel-ready knowledge infrastructure project. It is time to implement. To succeed, we have to move quickly to take advantage of our strengths and opportunities.

This is the first public mention I’ve seen of an initiative to digitize Canadian content on a large scale. There has been discussion that OpenText (which got started with the New OED project) would support such a project. Let’s do it!

Globe: Supercomputers seek to ‘model humanity’

Supercomputers seek to ‘model humanity’ (Omar El Akkad, Focus Seciton, F4). The online version of the story, unlike the print version, includes a screen shot of the Conjecturator that Patrick Juola is leading.

The article quotes me extensively from an interview after the Mind the Gap workshop. The article focuses on the Digging into Data projects in Canada including the With Criminal Intent project. At least one quote attributed to me, however, must be from someone in the classics Digging project.

Institutions In The Digital Humanities

At the Digital Humanities Summer Institute I participated in a three day advanced consultation on “Scaling Digital Humanities. I posted my conference report here, but I have just finished editing the short presentation I gave on Institutions In The Digital Humanities. This is an outline of work I am doing to document the history and institutions in Canada supporting the digital humanities as part of a project led by Dr. Michael Eberle-Sinatra looking at The Academic Capacity of the Digital Humanities in Canada.

One thing that became clear from the meeting is the diversity of support available across Canada. I have been developing a definition of what I consider to be basic support for research computing in the humanities:

  • Access to a social lab with specialized workstations, digitizing equipment and software. Labs with lots of computers will be underutilized (unless you use them for training) as most of us have our own laptop; what is needed is the specialized stations to support conferencing, and specialized tasks like video editing, book scanning and so on.
  • Access to digitization facilities to able to acquire evidence for research.
  • Access to support that can quickly set up basic off-the-shelf web research utilities from distribution lists, blogs to wikis.
  • Access to a virtual machine where projects can install the tools they need for specialized projects and not have to worry about standarization or conflicts with other projects. Providing humanists with a locked-down CMS which you can only use to publish static pages does not allow us to use the wealth of open source tools and languages out there to create innovative research environments. Neither should security or standardization rule any longer. Humanists should be able to get a virtual machine set up with sufficient storage for any project that has the programming support needed.
  • Finally, and most importantly, access to good advising and technical support so as to be able to develop projects, apply for funding, and get project management support without being a humanities computing expert.

ubimark.com: around the world with QR tags

Shannon sent me this link to Ubimark.com a project from Purdue that is using QR codes to enhance reading. They created an edition of Around the World in 80 Days with QR codes that allow users to get at supplemental information and social media zones. I’m not sure I like the large QR codes all over the printed page, but the idea of augmenting things easily with QR codes is a good one.

Society for Digital Humanities Papers

With my graduate students and colleagues I was involved in a number of papers at the SDH-SEMI The Society for Digital Humanities / La Société pour l’Étude des Médias Interactifs conference at Congress 2010 in Montreal. They included:

  • “Exclusionary Practices: A Historical Look at Public Representations of Computers in the 1950s and Early 1960s” presented by Sophia Hoosien
  • “Before the Moments of Beginning” presented by Victoria Smith
  • I presented on “Cyberinfrastructure for Research in the Humanities: Expectations and Capacity”
  • Text Analysis for me Too: An embeddable text analysis widget” presented by Peter Organisciak
  • Daniel Sondheim talked about the interface of the citation from print to the web as part of a panel on INKE Interface Design.
  • “Theorizing Analytics” was presented by Stéfan Sinclair
  • “Academic Capacity in Canada’s Digital Humanities Community: Opportunities and Challenges” was presented by Lynne Siemens
  • “What do we say about ourselves? An analysis of the Day
    of DH 2009 data” was presented by Peter Organisciak
  • and I presented on “The Unreality of the Timeline” as part of a panel on temporal modeling at the CHA

As the papers get posted, I’ll blog them.

Historypin

Historypin is a very cool project that lets people attach their historic photographs to locations. It is a partnership with Google that allows images to be pinned on Google Street View and Google Maps.

I like the scale and ambition of this project – it invites a country to document itself. I also like the way they have captured the concept with a name (“Historypin”) and an image of the historic photo pinned over the current view.

SSHRC – Knowledge Syntheses Grants on the Digital Economy

SSHRC has just issued a call for proposals with a very short deadline (as in, proposals are due July 2nd.) See Knowledge Syntheses Grants on the Digital Economy. This is an important call because it will build a humanities and social science response to the government’s Digital Economy initiative. It is important that the arts and humanities be represented in this initiative.