Happy Ada Lovelace Day! A Collection of Essays on Gender and Tech From Your Friends at The Atlantic – Rebecca J. Rosen – The Atlantic

The Atlantic has a great collection of essays on gender and technology gathered in one place, Happy Ada Lovelace Day! A Collection of Essays on Gender and Tech From Your Friends at The Atlantic. The page of stories includes a scan of the 1951 internal memo that allowed IBM female employees to get married (that you see above.) It also includes a story about Etsy’s prioritizing diversity in hiring which led to a significant improvement in the ratio of female to male engineers.

All of this in honour of Ada Lovelace Day!

The Wedding Data: What Marriage Notices Say About Social Change

Reading a collection of stories in the Atlantic about women and technology I came across a story about The Wedding Data: What Marriage Notices Say About Social Change. This article talks about Weding Crunchers – a database of New York Times wedding announcements since 1981 that you can search in an environment much like Google’s Ngram viewer. In the chart above you can see that I searched for different professions. Note how “teacher” takes off, probably because of the popularity of Teach for America.

I can’t help wondering if we are seeing the emergence of a genre of text visualization – the diachronic word viewer. This type of visualization depends on an associations between orthographic words (the actual words in texts) and concepts.

Pentametron: With algorithms subtle and discrete

Scott send me a link to the Pentametron: With algorithms subtle and discrete / I seek iambic writings to retweet. This site creates iambic pentameter poems from tweets by looking at the rythm of words. It then tries to find ryhming last words to create a AABB rhyming scheme. You can see an article about it on Gawker titled, Weird Internets: The Amazing Found-on-Twitter Sonnets of Pentametron.

Fuck Videogames and How to Destroy Everything

Brett sent me links to two great talks about video games. The first, Fuck Videogames are the slides for a talk by Darius Kazemi about how there is nothing special about videogames as a medium and designers should think about different ways of expressing themselves. How To Destroy Everything, Or, Why Video Games Do Not Exist (And How This Is Great For Everyone) is a transcript of a talk by Marigold Bartlett (and Stephen Swift). They talk about the ableist language in game culture like “lame”, “moron”, “dumb” and so on. They talk about “ludonarrative dissonance” (you have to read the essay) and this leads to other reflections. They end with:

We’re not attempting to guilt you. We’re saying if you’re going to celebrate what the amazing things in this medium can do, you have to equally take responsibility for this culture. You have to take responsibility for the things you don’t own. Give up ownership of video games. See them for the social construct that they are. For the sake of others whose voices aren’t being heard, who won’t be heard unless things change.

Video games don’t exist.

We invented them.

And we can destroy them.

 

The end of the Digital Humanities Observatory

As of August 30, 2013 the activities of Digital Humanities Observatory have ceased.

I just got an email today announcing the end of the Digital Humanities Observatory of Ireland. The DHO Home Page has the same text. As I was on the external board for a few years I’m sorry to see this neat Observatory end. (No more two day trips to Ireland in December.) Like many units set up with grant funding it was probably inevitable, but it is still a shame, especially since they were running useful infrastructure for the discovery of Irish projects, DHO:discovery and DHO:DRAPIer.

Others have noted the importance of learning from endings in a field where we make a lot of noise when starting things. Honest appraisals of why things ended are few and far between. This summer I heard Quinn Dombrowski talk about “What ever happened to Project Bamboo?” at DH 2013. (You can see my conference notes on DH 2013 and her talk here.) What can be learned from the spectacular rise and now closing of the DHO? Here are some lessons:

  • Anything funded by a time-limited grant as the DHO was is bound to run out of money. Units on soft money can survive over time, but they have to find new revenue streams.
  • Grant funded units that build things (like DHO:Discover and DRAPIer) that are meant to be useful over the long term should build succession planning into their development. Don’t count on getting more money just because you built something neat. There is a neat paper waiting to be written about how one can build for succession or hand-off.
  • Give yourself time at the end to properly archive what you have done. Make sure that the useful knowledge gathered is saved and accessible.
  • Tell people that the project is over, as the DHO has done. Don’t just close the site – put an announcement up.
  • Write an obituary, if you can, so that others can learn from the project.
  • Grieve don’t hide. We often want to slink away when something closes, but we should be allowed to grieve the passing of centres, projects and so on. I’m sad that the DHO is closed, even though I was only looking in from the outside.

The full text of the message continues:

Over the past five years, the Digital Humanities Observatory (http://dho.ie) has been a crucial component of the Humanities Serving Irish Society initiative funded under PRTLI 4. The DHO has carried out an extensive programme of lectures, workshops, summer schools, symposia and public lectures. These have been eagerly received and we have hopefully contributed to raising the level of digital humanities scholarship amongst Irish scholars, enhancing skills and reputations not just in Ireland, but also in Europe and around the world. We have developed and deployed creative, and innovative digital platforms such as DHO:Discovery (http://discovery.dho.ie) and DHO:DRAPIer (http://dho.ie/drapier) that have embraced the needs of HSIS scholars and established a strong and respected Irish position in the Digital Humanities leading to Irish participation in exciting new European initiatives such as DARIAH. In an effort to explore the possibilities of Digital Humanities online, and in collaboration with our HSIS partners, we have also built many cutting-edge digital editions and catalogues such as Saint Patrick’s Confessio Hyperstack (http://www.confessio.ie/), the Doegen Records Web Archive (http://dho.ie/doegen/) and Reading East (http://www.ucd.ie/readingeast/).

In the immediate term the assets of the DHO will be maintained directly by the RIA. Please use the contact form (http://dho.ie/contact) should you need to be in touch with the those maintaining the DHO assets.

Strong Irish engagement and participation in European projects is one of the many testaments to the success of the DHO and of the HSIS consortium. In the future the newly formed Irish Humanities Alliance (https://www.ria.ie/about/our-work/policy/irish-humanities-alliance.aspx) will be fulfilling a role of humanities advocacy on behalf of Irish higher education institutions. The investment in HSIS and the DHO has put Irish humanities scholars in a solid position to continue to grow this valuable community and allow it to flourish in the future.

Digital Environmental Humanities

This weekend I was at a neat workshop on Digital Environmental Humanities organized by Stephanie Posthumous at McGill University. You can see my workshop notes here, Digital Environmental Humanities Network. I was struck at the importance of research and activism from the humanities on the issue of the environment. Too often issues are framed as scientific or policy (social scientific). The humanities bring a historical, philosophical, ethical, and critical perspective that is needed.
The workshop brought together folks working in environmental humanities and others (like me) in the digital humanities to see if we could articulate a common research agenda. I was struck by similarities in the evolution of these two applied fields – including the tensions around interdisciplinarity. By the end I could see a useful collaboration to develop a suite of outreach venues for environmental humanities including:

  • An environment for curators to pull together “issues” that include different media. This would have some of the features of the Journal of Digital Humanities, but not necessarily be a journal.
  • One of the types of “issues” gathered could be e-books with media components suitable for teaching about the environment and culture.
  • Another type of “issue” could be documentation from an arts intervention.
  • Many of these issues and interventions could be designed from the beginning to have a hybrid existence. For example, documentation from an arts performance could be gathered in the curatorial environment and later edited into a catalogue for print publication.
  • A related idea would be a NINES-like federated repository for finding, reviewing, and curating digital interventions.
  • Crowdsourcing or citizen science type interface to bring other publics into the discussion.
  • Online conferences to minimize the impact of our research on the environment. The idea would be to look at the impact of our research itself and try to find alternative ways of connecting while also asking about how we think about the impact of research on the environment.

CIFAR: Do you have a question?

Back in the Spring I blogged about how CIFAR was launching a new programme that might be open to humanists called, Do you have a question with the potential to change the world?. CIFAR doesn’t have much of a track record supporting arts or humanities research as their own reports note. An open call for questions would surely attract some questions that humanists would recognize. Alas, no.

Despite getting 280 Letters of Interest not one of the seven selected comes from the arts, humanities or social sciences. The closest is the Brain, Mind, and Consciousness project which is based in neuroscience and will apparently involve philosophers and ethicists. Here is the list of the seven selected for the next round:

  • Biology, Energy, and Technology
  • BrainLight: Cracking the Sensory Code
  • Brain, Mind, and Consciousness
  • Life in a Changing Ocean: New Perspectives on Marine Functions and Services
  • Making a Molecular Map of the Cell: Towards a Direct Determination of the Structure-Function Correlation of Biological Systems
  • Microbes and Humans
  • The Planetary Biodiversity Project

It is time to ask the question, Why doesn’t CIFAR support the arts and humanities? (In previous programmes they have supported the social sciences.) It is unbelievable that they did not get interesting questions from the humanities. Either no one bothered to submit an interesting question (which I happen to know is not true) or they aren’t interested in the questions we ask. Here are some of the some of the possible explanations I can think of for CIFAR’s ignorance:

  •  None of the 280 LOIs were of the quality of the seven selected.
  • The panel was composed primarily of scientists and engineers. The one humanist was Pauline Yu.
  • The type of questions they were looking for were not the sort we ask in the humanities. They were looking for questions that could be answered with a bit of money rather than the questions we deal with that may never be answered.
  • Their idea of “questions with the potential to change the world” does not include questions about government, race, democracy, culture, art, education or literature.
  • This programme wasn’t really intended as a way to bring in new areas of research as I was told when I asked about the dearth of humanities support.

I think it is time CIFAR be honest with the larger community and admit that they are focusing on support for research in Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine with some forays into the Social Sciences. No one would blame them for focusing their support. Deep in their reports they admit that “the growth of its programs in the social sciences and humanities has not kept pace with growth in the natural sciences” (Final Report CIFAR Performance Audit and Evaluation) though I frankly don’t see any growth at all.

Perma, and Figshare

Thanks to Twitter I’ve come across a number of new online tools of use to academics:

Perma comes from Harvard Law and allows you to create a permanent archive of something you are linking to. You go to the site, enter a URL that you want archived and it gives you a new URL for the Perma version which lets you see what the page looks like now and what it looked like when archived. This allows us to quote web pages that may either disappear or be changed. Here is the link to the archived version of Theoreti.ca: http://perma.law.harvard.edu/0f8ojk5Phmc – this is a version before this blog entry.

Figshare is a cloud based archive for academic data. You upload data and then provide metadata for the dataset. People can comment on it, download the data and so on. It seems to do in a fairly clean fashion what university repositories do. I’m not sure of their business model. I uploaded Wendell Piez’s electronic edition of Frankenstein to try it out.