Blogs of Interest (updated daily), by
Melissa Terras
Fri, 03 Oct 2008 13:16:00 +0000The new advert for the Nintendo Wii on youtube is genius. Keep watching...Mon, 29 Sep 2008 09:04:00 +0000In the Spring, we invested in a decent Digital SLR. Ironically, I was too busy to get to grips with it, given I was working all hours (on top of the day job) to finish the book on Digital Images before the arrival of The Wee Man. Now, I'm enjoying having the time - and a captive subject to play with - to experiment with it a little.
Photography and children go hand in hand. Susan Sontag saidCameras go with family life. Not to take pictures of one's children, particularly when they are small, is a sign of parental indifference&hellip Those ghostly traces, photography, supply the presence of dispersed relatives. A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family (Sontag 1979, On Photography, p. 8-9).A child born today will probably have more photographs taken of them in the first year than a child born 50 years ago would have had in their lifetime, given the affordances of point-and-click digital cameras. The silent problem, though, is that folks are so lackadaisical in their approach to long term maintenance of personal digital image collections, that most of these digital images will not be around in 50 years time. Discuss.
"Official" photography of babies is still big business, even in the digital era. In the UK, a few hours after giving birth, you are accosted by the "Bounty Lady", sponsored by the government and industry, to provide you with all the forms you need to register the birth, sign up for child support benefit, and get your hands on child trust fund money. In return for all your details, you also get a bag full of samples of pampers and fairy liquid and the enviromentally-unsound like (and research shows that folk tend to stick with the brands they are presented with when their baby is first born. Kerching!). Then the Bounty Lady sticks a Digital camera in your baby's face (oooh, fancy), and for the bargain price of only £30 or so you can have a Digital print of your wee lamb. At least, I think that was the cost of the smallest package - I was still out of it, having been awake for 3 days by that point.
We smiled smugly and pointed out our range of digital cameras and camcorders which we had with us, and neglected to pay the inflated fee for the snapshot. (You'll have to be my friend on facebook to see such video classics as "Thumper throws shapes" and "Rhythm is a Dancing Baby".) Every single other new mother on the ward stumped up for the costly point and click snap.
In a few weeks, the Bounty Lady (or other commercial equivalent) is turning up to mother and baby group, again, to take a snapshot of all the babies, and charge inflated prices for photo-printed tat just in time for xmas. I'm tempted to take along the DSLR and practice my photography skills with other folk's kids for free. Then they can trot down to the interweb and get whatever they want printed up themselves at normal prices. But maybe that's not the way to win any new friends (or get a free pack of environmentally-unsound pampers). Just say cheese like everyone else...Mon, 29 Sep 2008 09:02:00 +0000"Away with him, away with him! he speaks Latin!"
-Shakespeare, Henry V Part II.
Matthew Kirschenbaum
2008-09-24 13:57 mgkYou're here because of this. Read the contributions from Scott Rettberg, Dene Grigar, and Rob Kendall in the original article's comments thread, they pretty much sum up my thinking....2008-08-03 14:13 mgkLike many people, I watched Randy Pausch's "Last Lecture" when it was making the rounds last fall, and followed his story off and on since, checking in on his Web site (always fingers crossed, but feeling like a voyeur nonetheless,...
Geoff Rockwell
Tue, 07 Oct 2008 17:46:27 +0000 Geoffrey
Peter sent me a link to this Google in 2001 site where you can search the Google index as it was in 2001 and “View old version on the Internet Archive” where it is available.
Google has also put up a timeline of their history. All this is to celebrate their 10th anniversary of incorporation.
Mon, 06 Oct 2008 22:49:04 +0000 GeoffreyStan pointed me to the inaugural issue of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research which has a number of fine articles.
- “Cityspace, Cyberspace, and the Spatiology of Information” by Michael L. Benedikt is a reprint of a classic paper where he argues that,
If we wish to reach deeply into the ''nature'' of ''space itself'' then, I believe we must allow into it, as it were, a substance of some sort: not the æther of nineteenth-century science perhaps, but a registering, tracing, questioning, remembering substance, spread as thinly as we can imagine, but present nonetheless, and definitive of here versus there because of how it pools, how it vibrates, how it scatters difference, différance. (p. 2)
That substance is information. As he puts it later, “ultimately, the space in information and the information in space are one.” (p. 15)
- “Toward a Definition of ‘Virtual Worlds’” by Mark W Bell is a short “Think Piece” defining “virtual worlds” as “A synchronous, persistent network of people, represented as avatars, facilitated by networked computers.” (p. 2)
These two pieces make an interesting contrast since Benedikt focuses on space and Bell manages to define virtual worlds without any reference to space. Benedikt calls for architects to engage in the design of virtual spaces while Bell focuses on the network of avatars - or the people within the space (and persistent time.)
Ever since the Gartner press release saying that “80 Percent of Active Internet Users Will Have A “Second Life” in the Virtual World by the End of 2011″ there has been a renewed interest in virtual worlds. My sense is that the 1990s interest in virtual reality was overblown and ultimately wrong in that people predicted we would be manipulating information inside virtual worlds with VR interfaces, data-gloves, headsets and so on. What has emerged instead is the proliferation of massive multiplayer online environments from games like World of Warcraft to social/creative spaces like Second Life. The headsets and torture apparatus of Lawnmower Man are gone, thank you!
So … what is next? I’ve just finished Halting State by Charles Stross which is a near-future detective story set in Edinburgh where players can move their avatars from game to game in the Zone (something actually proposed by Linden Labs and IBM - see Lohr Free the Avatars - this reference is from the Messinger, Stroulia and Lyons article “A Typology of Virtual Worlds” in the JCWR.) What is more interesting is the way Stross imagines the overlay of virtual and real worlds. Everyone, including cops, wear glasses that provide augmented reality views on the world they walk through, including the ability to see people in their in-game avatar representation while, for example, at a trade fair. Stross does a imaginative job or weaving the virtual into everyday life. (If you like this book you should also read Accelerando - a great accelerating run through the artificial life as it leaves meat behind.)
Sat, 04 Oct 2008 21:11:48 +0000 GeoffreyI’m at the State of the World: Information Infrastructure Construction and Dissemination for Humanities and Social Science Research conference at the University of Alberta. This conference was organized primarily to reflect on the Canadian Century Research Initiative which has been developing “a set of interrelated databases centered on data from the 1911, 1921, 1931, 1941 and 1951 Canadian censuses.” Peter Baskerville, the organizer, yesterday took us through how one can use census data to make inferences about a young girl in Edmonton in 1911. Some of the interesting ideas:
- For many Canadians census data is the only record of their lives. Census data provides a unique picture into the everyday lives of people who otherwise do not show up in publications and the historical record.
- Data, like census data, is significantly enhanced with connected to contextual information from insurance maps to newspaper stories.
- There is an amazing variety of commercial and non-commercial data from opinion polls to buying data. The issue of data is not just about censuses - we need to find way to gather and preserve the variety of data now being generated by cell phone companies, political organizations, megastores and so on.
- Confidentiality is a major issue. We need to find a balance between research access and not harming people.
- Sustainability of digital data/texts. As scholarly digital work and applications are created, how can they be preserved.
Dan Larocque from Open Text spoke on “Private/Public Ventures in the Digital World: Open Text and the Canada Project”. The mission of the Canada Project is to “To advance Canadians’ awareness of and access to accumulated knowledge through mass digitization of Canada’s published heritage.” The project is to put all Canadiana online and to create a user experience that allows all Canadians to use the content from genealogist to children interested in a historic hockey game. Dan also talked about the Stratford Institute which is a collaboration between the town of Stratford, Waterloo University, Open Text, and the province to create a digital media focused campus.
I spoke at this conference on “Cyberinfrastructure: Mashing Texts and Tools in TAPoR”.
Grand Text Auto
Thu, 09 Oct 2008 02:53:11 +0000 Nick MontfortJ. J. Abrams, the creator of Lost, says that it would be “really fun” to develop an all-text interactive fiction.
And, a collector acquires an amazing manuscript: A typed-out text by recently departed Thomas M. Disch, specifying the interactive fiction Amnesia.
Tue, 07 Oct 2008 23:28:15 +0000 Mary FlanaganAnnounced today, the The Games for Learning Institute (G4LI) is a joint research endeavor of Microsoft Research, New York University and a consortium of universities, including Dartmouth College. Tiltfactor will be home to the 3 year research initiative at Dartmouth, where researchers will be evaluating computer games as learning tools. We will be specifically focusing on math and science subjects among middle-school students. The Tiltfactor laboratory anticipates a limited number of student positions in relationship to this research, so please contact us for more information!
Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:42:34 +0000 Nick MontfortProposals for Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art) are now being sought. The deadline is 15 December 2008.
Five writers will be commissioned to develop chapters for a networked book about networked art. The chapters will be open for revision, commentary, and translation by online collaborators. Each commissioned writer will receive $3,000 (US).
Networked Committee: Steve Dietz (Northern Lights, MN) :: Martha CC Gabriel (net artist, Brazil) :: Geert Lovink (Institute for Network Cultures, The Netherlands) :: Nick Montfort (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA) :: Anne Bray (LA Freewaves, LA) :: Sean Dockray (Telic Arts Exchange, LA) :: Jo-Anne Green (NRPA, MA) :: Eduardo Navas (newmediaFIX) :: Helen Thorington (NRPA, NY)
Networked Partners: New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (NRPA) :: newmediaFIX :: LA Freewaves :: Telic Arts Exchange
Check the Networked page at Turbulence.org for all the details.
Stéfan Sinclair
Fri, 03 Oct 2008 20:22:50 -0400 sgs
Johnny Rodgers, lead developer of Digital Texts 2.0 is getting some media love from the School of Interactive Arts & Technology where he’s just started an MA this fall. Johnny will be presenting our work on Digital Texts 2.0 in a couple of weeks at CaSTA 2008.
Mon, 28 Jul 2008 18:39:31 -0400 sgs
We’ve made available a preview release of Digital Texts 2.0, an attempt to experiment with social networking practises in the context of interacting with electronic texts. Although we have a fairly detailed scholarly agenda for this project, one of the things I’m most curious about is whether or not students would be interested in using a Facebook application to interact with texts, whether it be for pleasure or for course work. Similarly, can instructors find innovative ways to incorporate such tools into the classroom?
Some key features currently available:
- Add and browse Texts (via Amazon lookup, or manually)
- Organize your texts into Collections
- Join Groups of like-minded Readers
- Comment on and add Tags to Authors, Collections, Texts, and Groups
- Share your findings with Friends
Some upcoming features (probably by the end of the summer):
- Import/Export feature set
- Citation Generation tools
- Hybrid Searches combining Authors and Readers of Texts
- Text Recommendation system
Are you planning on using Digital Texts 2.0? Please let me know!
Thanks to the Digital Texts 2.0 team and especially to the heroic efforts of Johnny Rodgers, the programmer and designer, and Shawn Day, who has provided outstanding feedback.
Sun, 18 May 2008 22:18:37 -0400 sgs
Geoffrey Rockwell and I have just completed our first full experiment in pair text analysis: Now Analyze That. Using text analysis, we wanted to try to say something interesting about a corpus of texts, and I think we succeeded; the point wasn’t to do a thorough and theoretically meticulous reading of the corpus (as both of us are trained to do), the point was to use analytic tools to relatively quickly identify some potentially interesting directions for further study. Actually, we had more objectives than that:
- experiment with doing pair text analysis (one person at the keyboard, one person focusing on the bigger picture, as per principles of pair programming)
- experiment with a form of rhetoric that harmoniously combines prose and analytic evidence (or even embedding tools directly into the analytic text)
- begin a series of mini analytic exercises that could serve as methodological examples (for teaching purposes, etc.)
- work with our analytic tools (Taporware and HyperPo) to identify their strengths and weaknesses for this type of analysis
Geoffrey and I will be doing more experiments with the rhetoric of text analysis and tools methodology…
Romantic Circles
HeadlinesPlugin ERROR: 404 Not Found
Stoa Consortium
Sun, 28 Sep 2008 18:36:28 +0000 Dot PorterPosted on behalf of David Bamman:
Place: University of Innsbruck, 15. International Colloquium on Latin Linguistics
Date: April 6, 2009Workshop organizers: David Bamman (Perseus Project, Tufts University), Dag Haug (University of Oslo), Marco Passarotti (Catholic University of Milan)
Invited speaker: Roberto Busa, S.J.Classical Studies has long had a history of driving pioneering research in linguistics and literary studies. The great Classical philologists and lexicographers of the 19th century are arguably some of the world's earliest and finest corpus linguists - but we find ourselves now lagging behind the achievements of other languages due in large part to the absence of structured digital resources on which to base our research. While the TLG and the Packard Humanities Institute each released their respective Greek and Latin corpus in the 1970s (only shortly after the release of the Brown Corpus of English in 1967), they remain today - almost 40 years later - two of our most widely used electronic resources. Those ensuing 40 years have seen the rise and widespread development of structured knowledge bases, such as huge treebanks to encode syntactic information in English, Czech, Arabic and over twenty other languages, lexical ontologies such as WordNet, and new corpora being annotated not just with their semantics and syntax disambiguated, but their named entities and propositional data made explicit as well.
We are, however, now beginning to see these same resources being developed for Latin, along with the automatic tools that can exploit them (such as automatic syntactic parsers and morphological taggers) and a new interest in quantitative research that can only exist as a result. As we enter this new era, we must take care to work together as a community going forward - the three organizers, for instance, are each leading the development of independent treebank projects for different eras of Latin (Classical, Biblical and Thomistic) and we recognize that the value of each project is exponentially greater when compatible with the others. This workshop aims to bring together scholars working in the field - both those developing such resources and those conducting linguistic research using them - to share such work and experience.
We invite presentations including the following:
* Electronic resources for Latin in development
* Corpus linguistic research
* Application and evaluation of NLP tools on Latin texts
* Development of corpus driven lexica
* Standards and standardization of annotation styles on different linguistic layers (e.g.,
morphological, syntactic, semantic, propositional)Please submit abstracts of up to two a4 pages to Dag Haug at daghaug@ifikk.uio.no.ignorethisbit before December 1, 2008. Notifications will be sent before January 1, 2009.
Sun, 21 Sep 2008 22:14:25 +0000 Gabriel BodardThis year’s Digital Resources for the Humanities and Arts conference (Cambridge, September 14-17) included a two-part panel on Digital Classicist (sadly divided over two days), organized by Simon Mahony, Stuart Dunn, and myself. Despite some apparently last-minute (and unannounced) scheduling changes, the panel was very successful. I post here only my brief notes on the papers involved, and hope that some of my colleagues may post more detailed reactions or reports either in comments, or as posts to this or other blogs.
Gabriel Bodard
I kicked off the first Classicists’ session on Monday morning with a brief history of the Digital Classicist community and a discussion of the different approaches to studying the use of digital methods in the study of the ancient world (contrasting the historical approach of Solomon 1993 with the forward-looking theme of Crane/Terras 2008, for which authors were asked to imagine their field within Classics in 2018). I talked in general terms about the different trajectories of two very early digital classical projects, the TLG and LGPN, both of which were founded in 1972. The TLG, while a technological innovative project from the get-go, and one which changed (and continues to be indispensible to) the study of Greek literature, has not made a great contribution to the Digital Humanities because of its closed, for-profit, and self-sufficient strategy. The LGPN on the other hand began life as a very technologically conservative projects, geared to the production of paper volumes of the Lexicon, and has always been reactive to changes in technology rather than proactive as the TLG was; as a result of this, however, they have been able to change with the times, adopt new database and web technologies as they appeared, and are now actively contributing to the development of standards in XML, onomastics, and geo-tagging, and sharing data and tools widely. Finally I argued that any study of the community of digital Classics needs both to consider history (lessons to be learned from projects such as those discussed above, and other venerable projects that are still currently innovative such as Perseus and the DDbDP), and consider the newest technologies, standards, and cyberinfrastructures that will drive our work forward in the future.
(David Robey pointed out that Classics has an important and unique position with the UK arts and humanities community in that the subject associations give validity and respectability by their support of and recognition for digital resources and research.)
Stuart Dunn
In a paper titled The UK’s evolving e-infrastructure and the study of the past, Stuart discussed the national e-Science agenda and how it relates to the practices and needs of the humanities scholar, using as a basis the research process of data collection, analysis, and publication/dissemination. The essential definition of e-Science is that it centres around scholarly collaboration across and between disciplines, and the advanced computational infrastructure that enables this collaboration. e-Science often involves working with huge bodies of data or processing-intensive operations on complex material, and the example of this kind of research Stuart offered was not Classical but Byzantine: the use of agent-based modelling by colleagues in Birmingham to simulate the climactic battle of Manzikert. After some general conclusions on the opportunities for advanced e-infrastructure to be used in the study of the ancient world, there was some lively discussion of geospacial resources in the British and European academic spheres.
Simon Mahony
Simon gave a detailed presentation of the Humslides 2.0 project that he is conducting with the Classics department at King’s College London. Building upon the work carried out in a pilot project in 2006-7 to digitise the teaching slide collections of the Classics department (as a pilot study for the School of Humanities), which adopted a free trial version of the ContentDM management system (trial license now expired, and not renewed), the new project will utilize Web 2.0 tools to present and organize some 7000 slides with more metadata and more input from students and other contributors. A Humslides Flickr group has been established, inspired in part by the Commons group set up by Library of Congress and now contributed to by several other major institutions. As well as providing a teaching resource (currently restricted to KCL students until some thorny copyright issues have been wrinkled out), students will be set assessed coursework tasks to contribute to the tagging and annotating of images in this collection.
Elpiniki Fragkouli
Due to illness, Elpiniki’s paper on Training, Communities of Practice, and Digital Humanities was not delivered at this conference. We shall see whether she would be willing to upload her slides on the Digital Classicist website for discussion.
Amy Smith (Leif Isaksen, Brian Fuchs)
The paper on Lightweight Reuse of Digital Resources with VLMA: perspectives and challenges, originally commissioned for the Digital Classicist panel, was at the last minute and for unknown reasons switched over into a panel on Digital Humanites on Tuesday morning. Amy presented this paper, which discussed lessons learned from the Virtual Lightbox for Museums and Archives project (discussed in detail in their article in the special issue of Digital Medievalist journal we edited). Some conclusions and discussion followed on the topic of RDF and other metadata standards, and on browser-based versus desktop applications for viewing and organizing remote objects.
John Pybus (Alan Bowman, Charles Crowther and Ruth Kirkham)
John’s presentation on A Virtual Research Environment for the Study of Documents and Manuscripts gave a succinct and very useful summary of the history of the VRE research that has been carried out by the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents and the humanities VRE team in Oxford. The project is one of four demo projects conducted by the second phase of work that begin with a user requirements survey in 2006-7. Built using uPortal, the VRE allows remote, parallel, and dynamic consultation and annotation of texts, images, and other resources by multiple scholars simultaneously. John showed some examples of the functionality of the VRE platform, including: the ability to show side-by-side parallel views of a tablet (different images or different renderings of the same image); the juxtaposition of multiple fragments in a lightbox; the ability to share views and exchange instant messages between scholars.
Emma O’Riordan (Michael Fulford, et al.)
In a paper that discussed another project related to the Oxford VRE programme, the Virtual Environment for Research in Archaeology: a Roman case study at Silchester, Emma discussed the origins of the VERA system in the Integrated Archaeological Database (IADB) that has been in use at Silchester for several years. The VERA system allows almost instant publication of the years results (as compared to waiting several months for paper notes to be transcribed); is cheaper than manual transcription; and more reliable than manual transcription; perhaps most importantly, the system enables live communication and collaboration between the archaeologists in the field and scholars in other parts of the world. Emma stressed one lesson from this project which was the importance of working alongside computer scientists, so that development of functionality can take into consideration the needs of the archaeologists as well as the research and interests of the programmers. It was interesting, however, that she also noted the potential pitfalls of too much tinkering with a tool while at work in the field.
Claire Warwick (Melissa Terras, et al.)
Originally scheduled in the second “Digital Humanities” on Tuesday morning, this paper followed logically on from Emma’s, and discussed Virtual Environments for Research in Archaeology (VERA): Use and Usability of Integrated Virtual Environments in Archaeological Research. Claire focussed on the evaluation of documentation of the unique needs of archaeologists in the field, and some conclusions the VERA team have been able to draw by the use of questionnaires, diaries, and anonymized interviews with the Silchester workers. Learning new IT skills was considered to be a burdern by students who were already having to learn fieldwork skills on the job; there were also new problems with the technology, as compared to the “pencil and paper” methods for which workflow and solutions had been developed over time. We look forward to a full report on the feedback and usability study that the UCL participants in the VERA project are conducting.
Leif Isaksen
Original scheduled for the “Digital Tools” panel, in this paper, Building a Virtual Community: The Antiquist Experience, Leif spoke to a Digital Classicist audience about a parallel community, Antiquist (who focus on digital approaches to cultural heritage and archaeology). The Antiquist community has an active mailing list (a Google group), a moribund blog, and a wiki whose main function is announcements of events. Antiquist boasts multiple moderators, many of whom try to keep the list active, and from the start they actively invited heritage professionals who were known to them to join the community. There is no set agenda, and membership is from a wide range of industries. Over time, traffic on the list has remained steady, with an unusually high percentage of active participants, but the content of the list traffic has tended recently to become more announcement-focussed rather than long threads and discussions. They are currently considering inviting new moderators to join the team, in the hope of injecting fresh blood and enthusiasm into a team who now rarely innovate and introduce new discussions to the group. Compared to many mailing lists, the community is still very active and very healthy, however. (Leif has usefully uploaded his slideshow and commented in a thread on the Antiquist email group.)
Sun, 14 Sep 2008 20:22:54 +0000 Gabriel BodardI posted a few weeks ago on a guide to citing Creative Commons works, and just a short while later I saw this not directly related story about a Practical Guide to GPL Compliance, from the Software Freedom Law Center. Where the CC-guide is primarily about citation, and therefore of interest to many Digital Humanists/Classicists who work with these licenses, the GPL-guide is a subtly different animal. Free and Open Source Software licensing is a more fraught area, since in most cases software is re-used (if at all) and embedded in a new product that includes new code as well as the the re-used FOSS parts. In some cases this new software may be sold or licensed for financial gain, or attached to services that are charged for, or otherwise part of a commercial product. It is therefore extemely useful to have this practical guide to issues of legality (including documentation and availability of license information) available to programmers and to companies that make use of FOSS code. One worth bookmarking.