Announcement: DHA2014: Perth 18-21 March, 2014

May 142013
 
 Posted by on May 14, 2013 digital humanities, events No Responses »

The Australasian Association for Digital Humanities (aaDH) is pleased to announce that Perth, Western Australia, has been selected as the location for the second Digital Humanities Australasia conference.

“DHA2014: Expanding Horizons” will be held 18–21 March 2014, co-hosted by The University of Western Australia and iVEC. The local organisation committee will be chaired by Professor Jenni Harrison of iVEC and the program committee chaired by Professor Hugh Craig, aaDH and The University of Newcastle.

The Call for Papers for DHA2014 will be posted soon.

Rocking the boat

May 112013
 
 Posted by on May 11, 2013 gadfly, politics No Responses »

wlp_logoThere are some really interesting political developments at the moment in Australia. And I suppose they are digital humanities related in someways, at least in terms of making humanities (ie. political) information more widely available in new and challenging ways on the Internet. And I do worry that the humanities in Australia has become bogged down in a 1960s style politics that conveniently aligns with a certain time in US hegemony, but hasn’t really developed the intellectual nor digital tools to confront the complex and challenging international information-politics of today (ie. the politics of engaging with digital technologies on our own terms at the highest possible level so we can tell the nation’s stories political or otherwise through and with them). Maybe I am being too general here (and maybe not generous), but hey it is a blog post, call the police!

The WikiLeaks Party is a very interesting development in terms of rocking the boat a little; of reminding people that the usual political narratives of Australia are often an impoverished lens to view and address the many political challenges of today. The great unspoken history of Australia, our dirty little secret, is that our nation is dull, in fact on new global ranking that I just developed, we are the world’s second most boring nation and only Norway is more boring. Let’s hope that my calculations are wrong and that something interesting happens in the Australian parliament to remind us that its view of the world has severe limits.

Review: Seminar, Training, and Large Collaborative Projects, Lynne and Ray Siemens

May 012013
 
 Posted by on May 1, 2013 collaboration, digital humanities, education No Responses »

I recently attended a seminar at UWS on Friday 26 April, 2013 led by Lynne and Ray Siemens of the University of Victoria in Canada. The theme of the event was collaboration in the humanities and in particular; how digital humanities projects exemplify effective collaboration in the broader humanities. This is because digital humanities projects often cross-disciplines and geography and the often more demanding collaborative terrain of computer science, computational methods and the humanities.

Lynne Siemens, specialises in project management and team building. She stated that people aren’t always well-trained to work together and outlined some of the positives and negatives of working in teams. She claimed that some people are better able to collaborate than others, often because they have developed skills of listening, are flexible, can negotiate, and can compromise.  Lynne described these as the ‘soft skills’ of effective collaborative teams. A team approach often produces more diverse and possibly higher quality ideas (and is a good way to learn new skills and perspectives), but some projects are better done as an individual (but of course, some projects are beyond the scope and skills-sets of individuals).

Lynne outlined some of successful team interactions she had observed, partly through research she had undertaken through case –studies.  Good communication skills are vital, as is project management, and the ability to think across technology and the humanities and indeed, culture and language. Also the objectives of the team, the outcomes, and the individual tasks need to be clearly described with not too many grey areas that may be potential areas of conflict. And teams operate within institutional contexts so there are certain contingencies to negotiate either within or between institutions.  Still, one of the best ways to build teams is through casual conversations, lots of face-to-face meetings, and large bottles of rum (I put in the last one).

Ray Siemans is a Professor of Humanities Computing at the University of Victoria in Victoria, Canada and is well known for his work in the Digital Humanities and in particular, through the founding of the annual Digital Humanities Summer Institute (that I attended 2 years ago and now attracts around 500 participants).  He discussed the important work of the digital humanities, particularly around content modelling and computational analysis of content (a core form of scholarship within the field). He also discussed the typology of curriculum development in the digital humanities either through stand-alone degrees or through digital humanities inflicted programs and in particular, the highly successful Summer Institute model.

 

DHSI (Digital Humanities Summer Institute) http://www.dhsi.org/

ETCL (Electronic Textual Culture Lab) http://etcl.uvic.ca/

The interdisciplinary gap

Apr 272013
 
 Posted by on April 27, 2013 collaboration, education, gadfly No Responses »

The term interdisciplinary is used a lot, often unthinkingly and uncritically.  I asserted in the last post that the ”socio-technical’ is a false dichotomy and that technical production is also ”social” and technology advances within its own understanding of ‘the social’ (grounded by the laws of physics).  And the separation of the two modes of thinking is unproductive.

It is this idea of ”unproductive” thinking that needs to be explored, especially in fields that exist in the gaps, ie. interdisciplinary fields such as ”STS” or the ‘Digital Humanities”.  Understandings of ”the social” and the tools and methods we use to do this advance rapidly. And tool and methods to understand the world through computer science change rapidly as well (ie programming methods change rapidly).  It is easy to get stuck in one camp and make claims that one is interdisciplinary whilst falling behind in one of the disciplines that are important for your particular ”interdisciplinary” practice. I see this all the time in fields such as cultural studies that are advanced in the finer skills of academic practice, but the technical objects of their study are often many years behind contemporary technical research .   And some technical areas such as eResearch tend to be bogged down in some very old-fashioned ideas of utility and are often unable to contribute to humanities research in a meaningful way because it is far too distant from it and lacks a sophisticated understanding of it.

Interdisciplinary requires deliberation and also empathy towards what one does not know. It is often very difficult if not possible to stay on top of a number of fields, but one can recognize this in ones-self and develop the skills and strategies to make good contributions to the interdisciplinary space that are both balanced and informed and aware of the key work and technical advances across fields.

 

The limits of socio-technical approaches to computing

Apr 212013
 
 Posted by on April 21, 2013 collaboration, education, gadfly Tagged with: , , ,  No Responses »

I have been undertaking a lot of research of late that involves ‘sociology-technical’ approaches to computing. Whilst the subject matter of the studies is interesting and worthy, I do worry about falling into the academic trap (in which there are way too many) of being ‘socially determinist’. What I mean by this, is exclusively using in the research process, books and related theories that are very distant from the creation and understandings of software. ‘Technical capital’ through exercising technical skills (ie. from the people who built software) does not occur in a social void and the decisions made here are important and are often made by individuals unawares of the otherwise important social theories that someone else may have about them in some other research context. In other words, the ‘sociology-technical’ is a false dichotomy because it all-to-often fails to engage with the the technical production of software and the people that do this (so that they may inform each other). They are also ‘human’ and ‘social’ and have their own understanding of this and it is naive to believe that studies that are exclusivity ‘books about books’ are more in tune with the human condition or more ‘social’ (ie they are lacking in wisdom and balance). It would be much better to educate students about socially responsible coding. This is the two-hands of the ‘sociology-technical’ (that are hopefully connected to the same human being). We suffer from the same false dichotomy in the digital humanities and I think that the problem is more acute here in Australia because we import nearly all the software we use, so we are a long way from understanding the context in which it is made. And the people that make it in Germany, the UK, and the USA will continue to make it in their own context.

I think the hardest lesson I learned as a historian is that technology doesn’t need history. And technology certainly doesn’t need an Australian historian; in fact I may just write a book about this! (or learn how to program a machine that writes books without human intervention; the ultimate revenge of the digital humanist).

Liberal Party of Australia, NBN Plan

Apr 092013
 
 Posted by on April 9, 2013 NBN, politics No Responses »

Here is the Liberal Party of Australia’s NBN policy (link).  The policy promises that the NBN will be built more cheaply and more quickly, but the down-side is that it is also an inferior solution. The main contention is that the Conservatives will not offer fiber to the premises and will keep the existing copper network.  Fiber to the premises will only be offered in new housing developments and copper to the premises will be kept when it already exists. The problem here is that if your house is a long way from an exchange, then the NBN Internet connection will be slower (as is the case today).

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