Theoreti.ca – Page 166 – Research notes taken on subjects around multimedia, electronic texts, and computer games.

National Consultation on Access to Scientific Research Data

The National Consultation on Access to Scientific Research Data produced a final report (PDF is here) calling for a national research data “archive” called Data Canada. This report has a deja vu feel about it as I was on the National Data Archive Consultation (SSHRC and then National Archive project) that produced a Needs Assessment Report (PDF) in 2001 and then a Final Report (PDF) in 2002. Nothing happened as a result of these, so I think SSHRC is now working with the sciences and health to make the case across the disciplines. Why do we need the sciences to make our case?

We recommend the creation of a task force, dubbed Data Force, to prepare a full national implementation strategy, and mount a pilot project to show the value and impact of multi-person and multidisciplinary access to research data. Once such a national strategy is broadly supported and has obtained appropriate funding commitments, we propose the establishment of a dedicated national infrastructure, tentatively called Data Canada, to assume overall leadership in the development and execution of a strategic plan. The plan would encompass and presumably extend the NCASRD‚Äôs recommendations. (p. 3 of the “Executive Summary”)

Deja Vu: (re-)creating web history

Gopher Icon Deja Vu: (re-)creating web history is a site that presents a timeline of browsing history emulations of different browser interfaces. It tries to give you a sense of evolution of the interface. Of course there is the Internet Archive if you want to see old site designs.

TV: the TEI Visualizer

Barry Cornelius has produced an interesting “railroad” visualization of the TEI content models. See TV: the TEI Visualizer. This is from TEI-L the Text Encoding Initiative list.

Thanks to Peter Boot for correcting me on who created this.

Walter Rafelsberger: Rhizome Navigation

Walter Rafelsberger sent me a note about a project similar to the Pathway project I blogged. His project is Rhizome Navigation lets one navigate a space of wiki page titles or blogs in 3d. It uses access logs so it can, I assume, show how users navigate. Very neat – try the demo.

CaSTA 2006: Breadth of Text – A Joint Computer Science and Humanities Computing Conference

I’m at the CaSTA 2006: Breadth of Text – A Joint Computer Science and Humanities Computing Conference at the University of New Brunswick. So far it is a gem of a conference. You can see my conference notes (as they emerge) at CaSTA 06 Conference report. Vika Zafrin has blog entries on the talks at Words End.

Haefner: Kite Aerial Photography

Kite Photo Rig Kite Aerial Photography is a photography site by by Scott Haefner that includes 360 degree panoramas taken from kites. Haefner is a professional photographer and site designer whose site also describes the equipment needed to kite aerial photography. The site itself, along with its companion on his Ground-based Photography, is an example of a well designed photo site. Thanks to Shawn for this.

Electronic Textual Editing

Electronic Textual Editing, edited by Lou Burnard, Katherine O’Keefe, and John Unsworth, (MLA, 2006) is out. Preprint versions of the essays (in TEI XML) show the scope of the collection. It goes from practical “Guidelines for Editors of Scholarly Editions” to theoretical essays like “Critical Editing in a Digital Horizon”.

Thanks to Judy for this.

Feature: Columbine RPG Creator Talks About Dawson Shooting – Kotaku

Columbine RPG Creator Talks About Dawson Shooting is an interview with Danny Ledonne about Super Columbine Massacre RPG and the Kimveer Gill incident. Thanks to Robert’s comment on my previous entry for pointing to this.

I’m of two minds reading this interview. On the one hand Danny Ledonne seems sincere and thoughtful, on the other hand, he doesn’t really explain why he had to create a game about Columbine just because it was such an important event. Probably like most of us he had mixed intentions (and didn’t think to hard about them in the moment) and now is trying to justify what he did retrospectively. Ultimately, of course, all he did was create a game, not shoot anyone, so lets not confuse levels of responsibility. That said, it seems that everyone who wants to justify their creations resorts to claims about deeper messages that are overlooked.

Pathway – Wikipedia Visualization

Pathway is a small custom application (just for Max OS X) that creates a visualization while you browse the Wikipedia. It is not a general pupose browser, it is just for the Wikipedia, but it includes some nice features for reflecting on the “path” you take through the wiki. I should note that paths are a feature Vannevar Bush talked about in “As We May Think” (Atlantic Monthly, July 1945.)

This comes from Matt.

Crazy Egg ‚Äì visualize usage

When I was showing students the Nielsen F-Pattern Alertbox one of them pointed me to Crazy Egg ‚Äì visualize your visitors – a neat service that watches user’s clicks on your pages and then shows you the results in overlays like the heatmap example here.