Theoreti.ca – Page 110 – Research notes taken on subjects around multimedia, electronic texts, and computer games.

Britain: The Disgrace of the Universities

Willard McCarty in Humanist drew our attention to the Anthony Grafton article, “Britain: The disgrace of the universities” (New York Review of
Books) about “what is happening now to British universities, King’s College London in particular”.

Accept the short term as your standard—support only what students want to study right now and outside agencies want to fund right now—and you lose the future. The subjects and methods that will matter most in twenty years are often the ones that nobody values very much right now. Slow scholarship—like Slow Food—is deeper and richer and more nourishing than the fast stuff. But it takes longer to make, and to do it properly, you have to employ eccentric people who insist on doing things their way. The British used to know that, but now they’ve streaked by us on the way to the other extreme.

It seems we are passing some threshold like the boiling frog. In the humanities we got used to being slowly starved in a genteel fashion that left us keep some dignity like the frog in slowly heated water. The drama in the UK and elsewhere, where cuts are deep and vicious, should provoke us to think about the humanities and its defense. In humanities computing we smugly feel immune to the cuts as we are the “newest new thing” that shouldn’t get cut, but we could find ourselves alone, without the vital neighboring fields like paleography, philology, and philosophy that we depend on. Actually, I don’t think we are any longer the new new thing – we just pretend to be so out of habit. Perhaps we should start preparing to be the tired recent thing that can be discarded to make room for the newest new thing.

How then to make the case for the humanities when we have so little experience advertising our wares and so much distaste for marketing? Are we doomed by our very fastidiousness and critical stance?

Humanities Computing Research Colloquium – Taporwiki

Willard McCarty is here at the University of Alberta as a Distinguished Visiting Speaker. He is speaking on:

April 7th, 7:00 – 8:30 pm, Telus 236 – A Pisgah-Sight of Readers and Texts
April 8th, 11:00 am – 12:00 pm, Arts 326 – The Profits of Anxiety and Failure: Critics and Computing 1949-1991
April 9th, 2:00 – 3:00 pm, Arts 326 – Emergent Theory: Writing a Recent History for the Present
April 12th, 2:00 – 3:00 pm, Humanities Centre 2-37 – Excitement Elsewhere: Cybernetics and Complementarity
April 13th, 11:00 am, Arts 326 – The Future: What's Going On? What's To Be Done?

For more details see, Humanities Computing Research Colloquium – Taporwiki.

His talks seem to be the first outcomes of the historical work he has been doing on computing.

Google Starts Grant Program for Studies of Its Digitized Books – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a story about a Google Grant Program for Studies of Its Digitized Books. Many of us have been encouraging Google to open Google Books to research projects, including crowdsourcing projects that could improve the content. Google should be congratulated on creating this program and actually providing support for experiments.

Understandably some worry about humanists becoming dependent on Google Books – the worry is that we will “lock-in” our new research practices to one data-set, that of Google. I doubt this is really going to be a problem. It is still early in the development of new analytical practices to see lock-in. Further, the quality of the Google texts is poor (the price of doing it on a large scale was that there was no correction and no markup), that there is room for other data-sets from commercial ones to open projects.

Arduino – HomePage

Some Humanities Computing and Industrial Design students put on an Arduino workshop on Saturday. Once again I’m struck by how much fun it is to get simple things working with an Arduino. There is something integrative about making physical interactives that appealed to everyone at the workshop – you have to program, you have to wire things, you have to understand a bit about circuits and you have to fiddle. How can we weave such learning into our humanities computing courses?

U of A text mining project could help businesses

Well, I made it into the computer press in Canada. An article on the Digging Into Data project I am working on has been published, see U of A text mining project could help businesses (Rafael Ruffolo, March 25, 2010 for ComputerWorld Canada.)

It is always interesting to see what the media find interesting in a story. They usually have a better idea of what their audience wants to read about so they adapt for that audience.

Oxford English Dictionary: The first crowdsourced humanities project?

As we think about how to use crowdsourcing in humanities research it is useful to look back at the pre-digital projects that used networks of volunteers to assist in research tasks. The development of the Oxford English Dictionary is an early example that comes to mind as it benefited from volunteer support in the time-consuming work of reading works to find early uses of words.

The OED makes a useful example to think about for a number of reasons:

First of all, looking at pre-digital projects lets us see the importance of how people are managed, motivated, and trained. According to the Wikipedia article, for example, “Furnivall then became editor; he was enthusiastic and knowledgeable, yet temperamentally ill-suited for the work.Many volunteer readers eventually lost interest in the project as Furnivall failed to keep them motivated. Furthermore, many of the slips had been misplaced.” It is easy to think that the technology is what makes crowdsourcing, but I suspect that often it distracts us from the ways we chunk the problem (for volunteers), bring them in, motivate them, manage them and recognize them.
It is an example in the humanities with an outcome that we recognize still as useful and relevant. It was initiated by a scholarly society, the Philological Society, and was actually an important project to switch to digital methods when they worked with the University of Waterloo to develop the SGML-based New OED.
There is a literature about the human dimensions of the project including The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary which tells the story of a prolific and mad contributor, W. C. Minor. Thus we can learn from the stories told about the human aspects of the project.

Of course, it probably isn’t the “first” such project. What are some other examples? Can we recover a history of the human in the development of humanities resources.

Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come

I’m at a conference organized by Jerome McGann, Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come: Schedule at the University of Virginia. The focus is on sustainability and Mellon is supporting the conference. My conference report is at http://www.philosophi.ca/pmwiki.php/Main/ShapeOfThings.

Algorithms are Thoughts, Chainsaws are Tools on Vimeo

Steve Ramsay has put an interesting video essay about live coding up at Algorithms are Thoughts, Chainsaws are Tools on Vimeo. He provides commentary to the live coding of Andrew Sorensen which in turn is controlling electronic music. Very neat!

Note (April 2020): The video is no longer available. There is an Electronic Book Review essay Critical Code Studies Week Five Opener – Algorithms are thoughts, Chainsaws are tools that talks about the original video essay, but it too links to the missing Vimeo video.