2nd Edition of Icon Programming for Humanists

I just got a notice that the 2nd Edition of Icon Programming for Humanists (PDF) by Alan D. Corré has been up (and its free). This has been made available by Jeffery Books who will also sell you a paperback copy. Donations go to promoting Icon and Unicon programming languages and systems.

I read Icon Programming for Humanists ages ago. It was one of the few how-to-program books that were aimed at humanists with text manipulation examples. I thought the book excellent and was only held back because I couldn’t find an Icon interpreter for the Mac when I looked.

This edition has 2 new chapters that deal with Unicode (so you can analyze texts in different languages), and Markup (so you can work with TEI encoded texts.)

There is a recurring issue that crops up as to whether we should be teaching humanities students to program or just to use tools. Corré’s book would make a good textbook for teaching programming.

Cultivated Play: Farmville | MediaCommons

Thanks to Erik (again) I was pointed to this essay on Cultivated Play: Farmville by A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz in MediaCommons.

The essay starts by asking why Farmville (a plug-in game for Facebook) is so popular. Why is harvesting virtual pumpkins (lots of clicks) fun for Facebook users? Patrick argues that Farmville is popular because we are polite people who want to be good to each other,

The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness. We play Farmville, then, because we are trying to be good to one another. We play Farmville because we are polite, cultivated people.

Liszkiewicz goes on to argue that Farmville resembles work, but it is Zynga (and Facebook) that benefit. This game takes advantage of our natural civility and sense of neighborly obligation to exploit us. He ends up calling ita “sociopathic application” because it exploits our sociability to control us.

As someone who quit Facebook in a huff over how they were exploiting my information I can’t play Farmville and therefore I’m not sure that it has no redeeming qualities. I do, however, agree that we must examine what we are doing and quit those social sites that exploit us.

Glass

Thanks to Erik I have discovered an interesting web annotation feature called Glass. At the moment they are in beta and you have to get an invitation code to get an account, but they aren’t that hard to get.

Glass lets you add glass slides to web pages that you can invite other Glass users to see. These slides can hold conversations about a web site. You could use it to discuss an interface with a graphic designer. There might be educational uses too.

The interface of Glass is clean and it seems to nicely meet a need. Now … can we make a game with it? Can we do with it what PMOG (now called the Nethernet) was doing?

Text Analysis in the Wild: Steve Jobs’s Android Obsession Analyzed

I came across this example of text analysis in the wild using a wordle, Steve Jobs’s Android Obsession Analyzed. The short article is by David Zax in Fast Company (October 19, 2010.) Based on “Android” coming up as the highest frequency content word Zax reads obsession.

So yes, the Android weighs heavily upon Jobs’s mind; and his dreams are more than likely populated with ravenous green robots consuming everything in their path.

Arduinome@UofA

Garry Wong has finished my first Arduinome. This is a monome built with Arduinos with some customizations. Garry, Calen Henry, Patrick Von Hauff, and Huiwen Ji developed a version of the Arduinome for research into interactivity. They designed a case that can enclose the Arduinome and prototyped some interactive uses for it including a game. Now they are refining the case so it can be ordered from Ponoko by others who don’t have access to a shop. Now we have to come up with ideas for the experiments using the Arduinome.

Transcribe Bentham

The Transcribe Bentham is an interesting crowdsourcing project in the humanities that has built an environment to involve people in the transcription of some 60,000 papers of Jeremy Bentham. The project is supported by University College London’s Centre for Digital Humanities.

I’m impressed by how they have adapted tools to develop the participatory environment rather than developing from scratch. The transcription environment is MediaWiki which has been adapted so that you can manipulate a manuscript using Zoomify. They have changed the WYSIWYG editor so that the toolbar available while transcribing corresponds to the tagging they want users to use. Using a wiki gives them the basics of user accounts, versioning, and editing. They also use WordPress for the site about the project and they have added discussion forums to the MediaWiki. There is a nice feature Random Page that takes you directly to a random page in need of editing.

Tom McCarthy: International Necronautical Society

One of the people short-listed for the Man Booker prize is Tom McCarthy who, among other things created the International Necronautical Society. This “semi-ficticious organization” reminds me of OULIPO. They are “in our house” and recruiting. They have a lovely Joint Statement on Inauthenticity. A necronaut according to the Urban Dictionary is an “Annoying hacker and general asshole in Counter-Strike and other online games.” Or it could be someone who navigates death.

They have a Twitter feed, twitter.com/necronauts

Cluster hires in digital humanities

Thanks to Michael I have found out about two different cluster hires in the area of digital humanities/new media:

  • UI’s next cluster hires will be digital public humanities | Iowa Higher Education. The University of Iowa is hiring a cluster of 6 positions over 2 years in “digital public humanities.” These will be partly funded by the Provost and partly by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. This is their second cluster.
  • Georgia State University has a Second Century Initiative that targets areas for cluster hiring. Faculty and deans submit thematic proposals that are then evaluated. “New Media” is the theme of one of the eight winning proposals. There are 4 positions around New Media including New Media and Documentary Investigation, Interactive Media Design, Digital Humanities and Digital Music Technology.

There are a number of interesting facets to these cluster hires:

  • Universities are no longer hiring just one digital humanities person to get things going – they are hiring clusters of related positions. As the digital humanities and new media fields evolve it is becoming clear that no one person can cover the entire field. This is a sign of maturity and the explosive interdisciplinarity of the digital. Further, it is now clear that a university can’t expect to do digital humanities at a leadership level with just one person.
  • These positions look like they will go into traditional departments while still staying linked in an interdisciplinary thematic area. Much could be said about the advantages and disadvantages of this model (how exactly do you keep the hires from spinning back into their discipline in order to get tenure?), but politically it is much easier to sell to departments in times of stress. This way departments get some renewal, even if the person hired is for a new interdisciplinary area. Ideally the person also acts as a catalyst in the department linking them into the thematic area.
  • Digital humanities is being integrated into new media, electronic music, and interactive media design. This makes sense since the digital humanities has always had a constructive and creative side. It has been a field that is about the poesis – the making – of multimedia works as much as about the critique of cyberculture. In our practices and need for infrastructure we have more in common with visual artists, composers, and new media designers. The Multimedia program I help develop at McMaster took exactly this approach and we were a richer unit for it.

IMS Open Corpus Workbench

John pointed me to an interesting open source project, the IMS Open Corpus Workbench. This project has developed tools are for “managing and querying large text corpora (ranging from 10 million to 2 billion words) with linguistic annotations.” Obviously it has a linguistics bent, but the tools seem to be well documented and usable.

You can see an example of an interesting interface to the Corpus Workbench at BwanaNet – a wizard-like interface where you go through 5 steps to get results on an English, Catalan, and Spanish corpus.

Twitter, Facebook, and social activism

Malcolm Gladwell has a nice essay in the New Yorker titled Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted (October 4, 2010.) He argues that social media are not well suited for sustained activism despite the stories told about Twitter and Tehran. He argues that activist movements tend to be discplined, strategic, hierarchical and built on strong ties. Social media, by contrast, support weak ties where lots of people do just a little (at no risk to themselves.) Social media are not likely to provide the strong social ties that gets people out to a sit-in. Social media don’t support the sort of strategic planning and hierarchical division of labor needed for activism. Finally, social media don’t support the discipline needed by, for example, non-violent tactics. You can’t train all your volunteers over Twitter. He concludes:

It (social media) makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.