Matt asked me if we can use TAPoRware tools to compare different texts so I wrote a short recipe on Comparing Two Texts. This assumes that the texts you are comparing are not different versions of the same text, but completely different texts.
It strikes me that we have to think through how the TAPoRware tools could be adapted for comparison.
Scholarpedia is an alternative to the Wikipedia. It is peer reviewed anonymously. It seems to have been seeded by the Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience, Encyclopedia of Dynamical Systems and Encyclopedia of Computational Intelligence. Will it fly as an alternative?
Thanks to Judith for this.
Zone of Influence is a new game studies blog by Matthew Kirschenbaum who has been writing about the digital humanities and electronic literature. The blog brings boardgames, which I used to play a lot, back into focus as important to game studies.
The blog is also a space where I can combine my interest in boardgames (especially board wargames) as a hobbyist and enthusiast with my academic interests in games, simulation, and technologies of representation.
The 2001 report from the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council (of the National Academies of the USA), Innovation in Information Technology, has interesting charts about how key technologies like the Internet benefited from government research support. See Figure 1. The report introduces the Figure thus,
Figure 1 illustrates some of the many cases in which fundamental research in IT, conducted in industry and universities, led 10 to 15 years later to the introduction of entirely new product categories that became billion-dollar industries. It also illustrates the complex interplay between industry, universities, and government. The flow of ideas and people—the interaction between university research, industry research, and product development—is amply evident. (Chapter 1)
Happy Holidays to all my readers. If you’re still looking for gifts you can always check out the U.S. Government Gifts and Memorabilia for Sale page at Firstgov.gov. There is even a web site for the Drug Enforcement Administration shop with holiday ornaments (see image to the left) that come with a “interpretative insert”.
Or you can do text analysis on a small corpus I put together from pages found by Google on the subject of “happy holidays”. See Geoffrey Rockwell’s Links (Holidays) and click on Analyze.
I found a video on Google video of the IBM RAMAC – the first random access disk memory. See the previous blog entry on RAMAC and Interactivity.
Bella consults is a blog which purports to be “musings of the office dog at Bissantz” which I blogged earlier on the subject. So far (as of Friday, Dec. 15th) it is a great summary of what to do and not do with sparklines.
Bella is a Labrador that appears at different ages in a composite picture that Edward Tufte reproduces in Beautiful Evidence (page 43.) Tufte reproduces the image to show how one can create visualizations that combine multiple images where the “measurement labels are place directly in the photograph where they belong” instead of forcing the reader to decode labels. Tufte says everyone should use “Bella reporting standards”. Bella’s blog is presumably a meditation on her standards.
Thanks to Roland Zimmermann for pointing this out to me and also pointing me to his short essays Bissantz ponders.
The MLA has released the report of the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion. The Executive Summary reports,
Even more troubling is the state of evaluation for digital scholarship, now an extensively used resource for scholars across the humanities: 40.8% of departments in doctorate-granting institutions report no experience evaluating refereed articles in electronic format, and 65.7% report no experience evaluating monographs in electronic format. (p. 3)
The 4th recommendation is that,
Departments and institutions should recognize the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media, whether by individuals or in collaboration, and create procedures for evaluating these forms of scholarship. (p. 3)
Bravo! As Scott Jaschik puts it in a story on Rethinking Tenure – And Much More in Inside Higher Ed, departments should
Accept “the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media,” ending the assumption that print is necessarily better. (And to the extent that some professors and departments don’t know how to evaluate quality in new media, “the onus is on the department” to learn, not on the scholar using new media, Stanton said.)
Donna Stanton chaired the MLA task force and provided the briefing for the quote.
Thanks to Judith for pointing me to this.
Changing competencies in the new media environment is a summary of a presentation by Henry Jenkins at MIT. It lists the Classic and New competencies needed by youth. The list is refreshing – it doesn’t list all sorts of technical and business skills. It includes, Play, Simulation, Judgement and Negotiation, among other things.
The PDF of a long paper Jenkins wrote for the MacArthur foundation Digital Media and Learning project expands on this, see Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century.
We have developed a TAPoRware Analysis Tool Bar that can be embedded in any web page. You will find it floating in the upper right of this page. The tool bar code can be placed in a blog or wiki and edited. See our documentation.