ATLAS.ti! is a “Knowledge Workbench” for the qualitative analysis of texts, images, audio and video. It looks like a PC program that lets you annotate large quantities of materials for interpretation, coding, and clustering.
I saw this years ago, but it has matured and now handles multimedia. I should add that it is for sale, not free, though they have a trial version.
Continue reading ATLAS.ti
Alex Sevigny pointed me to a post on the Linguist List (16.2917) about Ask-an-Expert System: Digitizing Lang Documentation. The announcement is for a system run by E-MELD, which is a project dedicated to the preservation of endangered languages data and documentation, for people to Ask an Expert. This is not a bot, the questions go to real human experts. Interesting way to support the community.
I just stumbled on this little gem of a History of Humanities Computing by Michael Fraser. It was prepared for a presentation in 1996 and focuses mostly on developments in the UK (it doesn’t mention TACT, for example), but it provides precise dates for early projects from Busa on.
According to a story in the Daily Telegraph online titled “Sony’s game’s up“, an electronics “geek” won a ruling against Sony to the effect that there was noting illegal to mod chips that overide the region specific coding that lets Sony control prices by region.
Last week I was at a Summit on Digital Tools for the Humanities organized at the University of Virginia. The Summit produced an interesting set of recommendations for next steps in tool development. See my wiki conference notes on the WikiTADA. The final session that I helped with came up with a neat idea for what to do about web-wide exploration that Roy Rosenzweig wrote up with my help. See Exploration of Resources – ToolCenter.
The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University has a developed a collection of
Tools including H-Bot (an automated historical fact finder that uses Google to try to answer “when did …” questions) and the ToolCenter which is a wiki about tools.
Continue reading History Tools
Nines project is developing some neat tools. One of the most interesting is Juxta which is a collation tool with a brilliant interface.
It has a histogram of differences between texts.
Continue reading Juxta
Well, Google now has a Blog Search that is in beta. It searches an index of feeds. You can’t submit a blog for them to index, but they are checking other updating services like Weblog.com. Most of the blogs they are tracking have been indexed since June, so you can’t search older entries. See the story, Google Launches Industrial Strength Blog Search.
The Guardian has a nice story on educational uses of podcasting, A soundtrack for study by Shola Adenekan (Aug. 17, 2005.) It mentions McMaster’s use for recruiting students.
buzztracker is an interesting visualization of Google News that is mapped onto a map of the world to show the places in the news and their relationships.