Faculty Advisory Council Memorandum on Journal Pricing § THE HARVARD LIBRARY TRANSITION

From Slashdot a story about how the Faculty Advisory Council to the Library (of Harvard) sent around a Memorandum on Journal Pricing arguing that periodical subscriptions are not sustainable and that faculty should therefore publishing in open-access journals.

The Faculty Advisory Council to the Library, representing university faculty in all schools and in consultation with the Harvard Library leadership, reached this conclusion: major periodical subscriptions, especially to electronic journals published by historically key providers, cannot be sustained: continuing these subscriptions on their current footing is financially untenable. Doing so would seriously erode collection efforts in many other areas, already compromised.

Whistleblower: The NSA is Lying–U.S. Government Has Copies of Most of Your Emails

According to National Security Agency (of the USA) whistleblower William Binney, the NSA probably has most of our email. See the video Whistleblower: The NSA is Lying–U.S. Government Has Copies of Most of Your Emails. The question then is what they are doing with it? He mentions that the email can be “put it into forms of graphing, which is building relationships or social networks for everybody, and then you watch it over time, you can build up knowledge about everyone in the country.” (see transcript on page). In other words they could (are) building a large social graph that they can use in various ways.

In the transcript of the longer video Binney talks about various programs developed to filter out all the information:

Well, it was called Thin Thread. I mean, Thin Thread was our—a test program that we set up to do that. By the way, I viewed it as we never had enough data, OK? We never got enough. It was never enough for us to work at, because I looked at velocity, variety and volume as all positive things. Volume meant you got more about your target. Velocity meant you got it faster. Variety meant you got more aspects. These were all positive things. All we had to do was to devise a way to use and utilize all of those inputs and be able to make sense of them, which is what we did.

Binney goes on to talk about the code named Stellar Wind program that Bush authorized and then was forced to change after a revolt of some sort in the Justice Department in 2004. Stories tell of senior Bush advisors trying to get Ashcroft to sign authorization papers for the program while he was in the hospital.  As for Stellar Wind, it seems to be mostly about metadata – the date, to, and from of emails that you could use to build a diachronic social graph which is what Binney was talking about. Strictly speaking this would be social network analysis rather than text analysis, but they might have supplemented the system with some keyword capabilities. Another story from Time points out the problem with such analysis – that it generates too many vague false positives. “Leads from the Stellar Wind program were so vague and voluminous that field agents called them “Pizza Hut cases” — ostensibly suspicious calls that turned out to be takeout food orders.”

Either way, these hints give us a tantalizing view into how text and network analysis is being experimented with. Are there any useful research applications?

Globalization Compendium Archive

I have been working for a while on archiving the Globalization Compendium which I worked on. Yesterday I got it archived in two Institutional Repositories:

In both cases there is a Zip of a BagIt bag with the XML files, code and other documentation from the site. My first major deposit.

A walk through The Waste Land

Daniel sent the link to this YouTube video, A walk through The Waste Land, that shows an iPad edition of The Waste Land developed by Touch Press. The version has the text, audio readings by various people, a video of a performance, the manuscripts, notes and photos. I was struck by how this extends to the iPad the experiments of the late 1980s and 1990s that exploded with the availability of HyperCard, Macromedia Director and CD-ROM. The most active publisher was Voyager that remediated books and documentaries to create interactive works like Poetry in Motion (Vimeo demo of CD) or the expanded book series, but all sorts of educational materials were also being created that never got published. As a parent I was especially aware of the availability of titles as I was buying them for my kids (who, frankly, ignored them.) Dr. Seuss ABC was one of the more effective remediations. Kids (and parents) could click on anything on the screen and entertaining animations would reinforce the alphabet.

Continue reading A walk through The Waste Land

Leximancer

Susan pointed me to Leximancer which is a commercial text analysis tool that creates mind maps of your information. I’m struck by how compelling people find mind maps.

Leximancer enables you to navigate the complexity of text in a uniquely automated fashion. Our software identifies ‘Concepts’ within the text – not merely keywords but focused clusters of related, defining terms as conceptualised by the Author. Not according to a predefined dictionary or thesaurus.

The Concepts are presented in a compelling, interactive display so that you can clearly visualise and interrogate their inter-connectedness and co-occurrence – which is as important as the Concepts themselves – right down to the original text that spawned them.

 

Battle for the internet

The Guardian has a great series on the Battle for the internet. This includes a number of interventions by Tim Berners-Lee including Tim Berners-Lee urges government to stop the snooping bill and Tim Berners-Lee: demand your data from Google and Facebook. There is an article, Web freedom faces greatest threat ever, warns Google’s Sergey Brin, about the dangers of walled gardens like FaceBook and Apple’s App Store. One might say the same about Google.

Digital Humanities in Italy: Tito Orlandi

I just got a complementary copy of La macchina nel tempo: Studi dei informatica umanistica in onore di Tito Orlandi (The Time Machine: Studies in humanities computing in honour of Tito Orlandi) which I blogged about before. This got me wondering how much of Prof. Tito Orlandi’s writings are available online and what his legacy is. It turns out that Orlandi has put together a list of his publications with links to online versions where possible. There are even some in English like the excellent Is Humanities Computing a Discipline?

But how might one summarize Orlandi’s contribution? In his prefatory “Controcanto,” one of the editors of The Time Machine, Domenico Fiormonte, writes about first encountering Orlandi in a bunker where Fiormonte then spent a summer. During that summer he learned 3 things:

  1. Everything that in the humanities is taken for granted (starting with the concept of text) has to be formalized in informatics.
  2. The passage from analogue to digital is process of profound redefinition for the “cultural object”.
  3. Thus, every act of encoding (or digital representation) presupposes (or forces us into) a hermeneutical act. (p. VI, my translation)

These three lessons seem about as good a starting place for the digital humanities as any. They also suggest some of what Tito Orlandi was interested in, namely formalization, redefinition, and interpretation. But surveying Orlandi’s writings, using the list of digital humanities publications from his personal site, you can see other themes. He believed that we needed to develop the theoretical foundations of humanities computing and that we should do that from the mathematical model of the computer, not how it works practically. (See Informatica, Formalizzazione e Discipline Umanistiche (in Italian.)) He believed that would help us understand how one can model culture on a computer. He discussed the importance of modelling before Willard McCarty did in Humanities Computing – something that should be recognized out of fairness to the pioneering work of Italian digital humanists since Busa.

Reading Orlandi and about Orlandi I also sense an impatience with those that follow him. This is what he writes in an unpublished talk given in London in 2000. He is talking about discussions by other scholars on the digital humanities.

I feel a sense of inadequateness, even disorder, in the overall change as presented by the same scholars. In fact, when they proceed to propose a definition of humanities computing, they tend to consider the products of computation, be they hardware (the Net) or software (applications like concordance programs or statistical packages), rather than the first principles of computing.

Orlandi wanted to ground the digital humanities in mathematics – a language common to informatics, science and potentially the digital humanities. That the digital humanities wandered off into hypertext, new media and so on seems to have annoyed him. He was also irritated that ideas he had been teaching and writing about for years were being ignored in the English-speaking world. Take a look at The Scholarly Environment of Humanities Computing: A Reaction to Willard McCarty’s talk on The computational transformation of the humanities. This web page discusses an outburst of his at a paper by McCarty with what Orlandi felt were ideas he had been discussing for a decade at least. It is instructive how he sets aside his pride to get at the issues that matter. He might be irritated, but he also wants to use this to reflect on more important issues.

Perilli and Fiormonte have done a great job bringing together a festschrift in honour of Orlandi. The Time Machine isn’t really about Orlandi’s thought so much as about his legacy in Italy. What we need now is for his foundational works to be translated and a retrospective interpretation of his contributions.

Google Art Project

An article in the New York Times led me to the Google Art Project. This project doesn’t feel like a Google project, perhaps because it uses an off-black background and the interface is complex. The project brings together art work and virtual tours of many of the worlds important museums (but not all.0 You can browse by collection, artist (by first name), artworks, and user galleries. You can change the language of the interface (and it seems to change even when you don’t want it to in certain circumstances.) When viewing a gallery you can get a wall of paintings or a street view virtual tour of the gallery. Above you see the “Museum View” of a room in the Uffizi with a barrier around a Filippino Lippi that is being treated for a woodworm infestation! In the Museum View you can pan around and move up to paintings much as you would in Google Maps in Street View. On the left is a floor plan that you can also use.
This site reminds me of what was one of the best multimedia CD-ROMs ever, the Musee d’Orsay: Virtual Visit. This used QuickTime VR to provide a virtual tour. It had the sliding walls of art. It also had special guides and some nice comparison tools that let you get a sense of the size of a work of art. The Google Art Project feels loosely copied from this right down to the colour scheme. It will be interesting to see if the Google Art Project subsumes individual museum sites or consortia like the Art Museum Image Consortium (Amico.)

I find it interesting how Google is developing specialized interfaces for more and more domains. The other day I was Googling for movies in Edmonton and found myself on a movies – Google Search page that arranges information conveniently. The standard search interface is adapting.

Collaborative Research in the Digital Humanities by Marilyn Deegan and Willard McCarty

A new digital humanities collection focusing on collaboration, Collaborative Research in the Digital Humanities, has been published by Ashgate. The collection is edited by Marilyn Deegan and Willard McCarty and was developed in honour of Harold Short who retired a few years ago from King’s College London where he set up the Humanities Computing Centre (now called the Department of Digital Humanities).

I contributed a chapter on crowdsourcing entitled, “Crowdsourcing the humanities: social research and collaboration”.