Gary Hall: Digitize this book

A couple of weeks ago I posted a blog entry about Gary Hall’s book Digitize This Book! I noted that I couldn’t find a digitized copy of the book and asked if others knew of one. To my surprise Gary wrote me back and pointed to the items listed below. Now that is the Internet at work! He is trying to get the publisher to allow a digital copy to be posted online, but in the meantime pointed out online versions of what became chapters in the book:

(2003) ‘Digitise This’, Mediactive, Vol. 1, No. 1 (pp. 76-90); republished in (2004), The Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1, January-March (pp. 23-46) at http://scm-rime.tees.ac.uk/VLE/DATA/CSEARCH/MODULES/CS/2006/03/0147/_.doc (MS Word Document)

(2007) ‘IT, Again: or, How to Build an Ethical Virtual Institution’, in Experimenting: Essays With Samuel Weber, edited by Gary Hall and Simon Morgan Wortham (Fordham University Press: New York) (pp.116-140) at http://scm-rime.tees.ac.uk/VLE/DATA/CSEARCH/MODULES/CS/2008/01/0740/_.doc (MS Word Document)

Gary Hall says that “Since the book came out I’ve also published a new piece on open access publishing and the humanities” at http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/issue/current. A video of him presenting it as a talk is available at Pirate Philosophy – Steal This! .

I take back any irony in my previous post. (Can one take back irony? Perhaps I can only apologize for being ironic to early.)

What Is Infrastructure?

I’ve written another essay. It seems to be what I do in Sundays. This time I’m trying to work out What Is Infrastructure and how it is different from supplies? The question is a way into trying to understand the role of big projects like TAPoR or Bamboo, both of which I am involved in (at very different levels.) As I thought about it I came to a couple of conclusions:

  • Defining things as infrastructure or cyberinfrastructure is a political move that tries to change how we frame services so we can propose different (and ongoing) ways of funding them. To be more blunt, defining a service as infrastructure moves it from something you ask for a limited grant for to something you ask for ongoing funding for (or something you set up a consortium to provide ongoing funding for.)
  • I can imagine a lighter way of weaving infrastructure out of existing industry provided stuff that we should take seriously.
  • Humanities research infrastructure should be public as in available to everyone and available internationally. Not only can the public participate in humanities research, but opening it up to the public is away of engaging them. Perhaps the relevance of the humanities lies not in their products, but in their participatory processes. Philosophy is not a science best done in a lab that will eventually produce a cure for ignorance. Philosophy is a love of wisdom we should share because we never owned it and we were never appointed its keepers.

Why not crowdsource the humanities? What would it take to make the (arts and) humanities the public disciplines? What sorts of infrastructure would engage the broader public?

Edupunk: DIY for educational technology

Thanks to Don I discovered an interesting idea being worked out across the web: Edupunk or DIY instructional technology that avoids corporate tools like PowerPoint and Blackboard. The Chronicle has two stories on this, Frustrated With Corporate Course-Management Systems, Some Professors Go ‘Edupunk’ and Technologist Who Coined ‘Edupunk’ Defends the Term in a Video Debate.

The Wikipedia article on Edupunk links to a great example from UBC where a course on Murder, Madness, and Mayhem: Latin American Literature in Translation took a bunch of Wikipedia articles on Latin American literature to Featured Article and Good Article status. They wrote some and edited others using the Wikipedia as their DIY course environment. Neat idea that strikes me as scalable, especially in the case of grad courses. It is a way of using what is at hand, in this case the Wikipedia, and using it for an authentic instructional purpose. It has the advantage that it contributes something to the larger community and can benefit from the community.

Taco Lab Blog: Siftables and American Shanzhai?

Two images of cellphone cigarette package

The Taco Lab who are probably best known for the Siftables (small cookie-sized tile computes that sense each other) shown at TED have a blog with some interesting posts like this one on American Shanzhai?. Shanzai literally means “mountain fortress” or the hideout of bandits and it refers to pirate activities like hacking cheap copies of consumer goods (that are heavily marked up.) It is now beginning to refer to a creative subculture of improving or altering electronics outside state (and IP) control. Thus the image above is from the Taco Lab blog and is a example of this creative shanzai – in this case a cell-phone/cigarette pack whose value is in its uniqueness. This got me thinking of all the open projects out there that make it easier to hack things like:

  • TuxPhone – a project to develop open hardware and software for a cell phone.
  • Arduino – an open electronics prototyping platform that’s great for interactive art projects
  • LilyPad Arduino – an open device that is light enough for wearables and e-textile projects
  • William Turkel’s Fabrication Lab – a unique (to my knowledge) humanities lab

A Collaborative Research Commons

Computing With The Infrastructure At Hand is an essay I wrote last weekend and have been editing that tries to think about how to do humanities computing if you don’t have grants and don’t have lots of support. I ended up trying to imagine a Collaborative Research Commons that imagines crowdsourcing digital humanities work.

While research as a gift economy may seem idealistic, I’ve been surprised by the extraordinary collaboration you get when you set up a structured way for people to contribute to a project. The Suda On Line project first showed (me at least) the potential for social and volunteer research. I’ve had luck with the Dictionary of Words in the Wild and the upcoming Day of Digital Humanities. This last project has yet to happen, but we have close to 100 participants signed up. My point is that we can imagine ways to research that don’t start with how to get a grant before we can talk.

Beyond Analogue: Graduate Research at Alberta

This Friday I attended a full day conference Beyond Analogue: Current Graduate Research in Humanities Computing. See my Conference Report. Daniel O’Donnell (who gave a great paper) told me in conversation that he could see from the graduate research the emergence of a “school” of humanities computing at U of Alberta – that we have a commonality of issues and research practices around implementation, interface and visualization that distinguishes us. Could a sign of the maturity of the field be that different schools of approaches are emerging?

Monty Norman and the James Bond theme song

A couple months ago I stumbled on an intriguing connection. Monty Norman who is credited with the theme song for James Bond apparently adapted it from the score for Bad Sign, Good Sign, a tune that he had written for an ill-fated stage version of Naipal’s “A House for Mr Biswas.” See Monty Norman – The first man of James Bond music. That the James Bond theme song turns out to be based on a song meant to be sung by Mr Biswas is some sort of post-colonial irony.

Here are the lyrics to Bad Sign, Good Sign start,

I-I was born with this unlu-ucky sneeze and what is wo-orse I came into the the wo-orld the wrong way round. Pundits all agree that I-I’m the reason why…

Webilus.com: the best of the images of the web

Diagram of email and wiki work

Webilus.com :: le meilleur des images du web is a French web site that gathers images and visualizations of the web and computing culture. The image above, for example, compares e-mail collaboration to wiki collaboration showing how much more work it is to use e-mail.

The site is a blog curated by Frédéric COZIC and it has a widget you can install to see the most recent images on your blog.