100+ Places to Find Funding For Your Research

July 24, 2008 at 12:32 pm · Filed under digital humanities, pedagogy

Whether you’re researching the habits of marine life, ancient texts or just a new way to market products, you’ll likely need some funding to get your studies underway. The Internet is a great place to start looking for sources of funding, and we’ve put together a list here of a hundred or so places where you can get some assistance for your next big research project (link)

Comments

The Death of Mr Practical: The Practical man and Globalisation

July 23, 2008 at 11:08 pm · Filed under gadfly, politics

(An article I wrote in 1995 and published on my blog in 2003…follows from the previous post)

There is a prevailing historical connection between Australia’s colonial experience and our dominant intellectual tradition. Throughout the nation’s short history of settlement, most of our leading intellectuals and rulers have displayed a certain ‘practicality’ that is an Australian adaptation of a British creation. This practicality disguises its hegemony through the doctrines of ‘commonsense’ and ‘factual truth’. Practical thinking has its roots in a form of Utilitarianism that is perpetuated by and primarily beneficial to a powerful Anglo elite (link)

Comments

The Great English Practical Problem (brough to you by Heathrow)

July 23, 2008 at 10:34 pm · Filed under gadfly

All counties have their problems; their institutional problems, their ‘thinking’ problems. Australian intellectuals are often accused of being too broad and general in their thinking, unable to command the towering heights of research-speciality within the rigours of a solid intellectual paradigm. American intellectuals are often accused of being too careerist; doing what is good for the career rather then good for the public knowledge in which they are entrusted to critique, advance, and preserve.

But the great English problem is short-term practical thinking. This is a country that has the institutional strength and wealth to build long-term visions, to navigate itself through social complexity, but instead this is a nation whose institutions stumble from one crisis to the next, limited by the practical constraints of what ever funding is available, mistakes were made, or ideas are fashionable. Heathrow, the train systems, the roads, and universities are all impoverished by a Kafkaesque hell-ride of uncritical social realist practicality; unable to imagine a world that isn’t about filling in one pot hole and then running to fill in the next (then forgetting about the first one and wondering why they need to be filled in anyway because the workers weren’t told about the road).

Whilst most Western countries (notably my own, Australia), used the boom years to pay off Government debt, England went into more Government debt unable to fathom perhaps that economies eventually crumble. So rather than have some money in the bank to navigate through the bad times, a short-term practical solution will now need to be found (borrow more money).

Practicality is a English game; it is theatre, it is the uncritical deference one must make to this culture in order to survive (like one must to ‘Egalitarianism’ in Australia). It is how England got here. Two thousand years of stumbling-practically through the word; learning by doing, then forgetting. Two thousand years trapped in the practical now; the parochial practical present. Sure practicality can be useful, but then again, it needs just a tad more intellectual scaffolding otherwise enjoy your wait at Heathrow.

The views expressed in this blog are always entirely my own and I wrote about this stuff many years ago as an undergrad. Here is the link. The link to ‘the English disease’ (short-termism) and Heathrow was first made by Ken Livingston.

Comments

Crowd-sourcing the eCar

July 23, 2008 at 10:10 am · Filed under collaboration, web2.0

A Finnish internet community is seeking to apply the collective approach taken by online collaborators like the authors of Wikipedia to start converting used petrol-fuelled cars to electric ones, with the first roll-out due this year (link).

Comments

What is the National Centre for Text Mining?

July 17, 2008 at 3:07 pm · Filed under digital humanities, humanities computing

The National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM) is the first publicly-funded text mining
centre in the world. We provide text mining services in response to the requirements
of the UK academic community. NaCTeM is operated by the University of Manchester with close collaboration with the University of Tokyo (link)

Comments

Electronic Textual Centres Hub

July 17, 2008 at 12:32 pm · Filed under digital humanities, humanities computing

At the Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory we conduct original research, develop new ways of disseminating information, and foster the innovative adaptation of existing tools. Our cross-disciplinary work in the areas of data-harvesting, textual content analysis, and document encoding puts us at the forefront of a global conversation about the future of communication (link).

Comments

Is academic ready for web 2.0:?

July 14, 2008 at 12:19 pm · Filed under collaboration, web2.0

As part of its development, the Pre-Raphaelite Resource digitisation project recently commissioned an audience research study to consult users about whether the inclusion of Web 2.0 features on a resource of this type would be useful or important to the education community. The report indicated that:

“there is some readiness among the education community for Web 2.0 technologies but only in the context of academia as a status-conscious, competitive environment. Whilst there are clear benefits to be achieved from providing teachers and students with the opportunity to share ideas in the context of stimulus artefacts, many hold reservations about ‘giving away’ their intellectual property.” (link)

Comments

Metadata in a nutshell

July 8, 2008 at 3:35 pm · Filed under matadata

Metadata is sometimes defined literally as ‘data about data,’ but the term is normally understood to mean structured data about resources that can be used to help support a wide range of operations. These might include, for example, resource description and discovery, the management of information resources and their long-term preservation (link).

Comments

Workshop at eResearch Australasia: e-Research in the Arts, Humanities and Cultural Heritage

June 16, 2008 at 9:49 am · Filed under web2.0

Friday 3rd October, 2008

The workshop aims to stimulate discussions between the UK and Australasian arts, humanities and cultural heritage communities about the use of e-Research infrastructures, services, technologies and methodologies. To this end, it is soliciting contributions (both presentations and papers) on topics relevant to e-Research in an arts, humanities and cultural heritage context.

Details of the workshop and the submission process may be found at http://www.eresearch.edu.au/ahch-workshop

Comments

Adding value to data - Digital Repositories in the e-Science world

June 16, 2008 at 9:49 am · Filed under e-science

Special Session at the 4th IEEE International Conference on e-Science
(http://escience2008.iu.edu/)

December 7-12, 2008, Indianapolis, USA

An Initiative of DReSNet: Digital Repositories in e-Science Network
(http://www.dresnet.net <http://www.dresnet.net/>)

There is a great, untapped potential for synergies between
grid/e-science technologies and a cluster of related systems addressing
the management of digital assets in digital libraries and repositories.
The digital material generated from and used by academic and other
research is to an increasing extent being held in formal data management
systems; these systems are variously categorized as digital
repositories, libraries or archives, although the distinction between
them relates more to the sort of data that they contain and the use to
which the data is put, rather than to any major difference in
functionality. Modern repository systems allow us to move away from the
model of a stand-alone repository, library or archive, where objects are
simply deposited for subsequent access and download. Instead,
researchers are developing more sophisticated models in which these
containers of data are integrated components of a larger e-Science
research infrastructure, incorporating advanced tools and workflows, and
are being used to model complex webs of information and capture
scholarly or scientific processes in their entirety, from raw data
through to final publications. Repositories have been successfully
combined with data grid technologies, and in addition computational
grids seem to offer possible applications in digital preservation and
curation, such as automatic metadata extraction and index creation.
These systems thus could add value to the data-driven research lifecycle
in e-Science.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments

Digital copyright: it’s all wrong

June 11, 2008 at 9:40 pm · Filed under creative commons, internet, open source, social media

A draft treaty proposes draconian measures to protect copyright.

THE forces of reaction are fighting back. As they often do, they are carrying out their planning in secret, in the knowledge that if more people knew of their activities they would not be allowed to get away with it (link)

Comments

Project Bamboo

June 5, 2008 at 1:05 pm · Filed under collaboration, digital humanities, e-science, eresearch, humanities computing, internet, web2.0

Bamboo is a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary, and inter-organizational effort that brings together researchers in arts and humanities, computer scientists, information scientists, librarians, and campus information technologists to tackle the question:

How can we advance arts and humanities research through the development of shared technology services? (link)

Comments

HASS Workshop at UIUC

June 1, 2008 at 4:58 pm · Filed under web2.0

The SC08 Summer Workshop,Information-Rich Environments for Research and Teaching, will give Humanities, Arts, and Social Science faculty, researchers, and students the opportunity for focused dialogue on their research agendas and intensive hands-on experience for improving the quality of their work through access to advanced computing infrastructures and applications. Tools and applications to be considered include those provided by grid and cluster computing as well as social networking, analytic, and visualization technologies. Participants, under the guidance of technical experts, will explore how they can not only scale but transform their work and its potential impact by moving from personal computing to high performance computing; from two dimensional knowledge representations to three and four dimensional ones; from isolated research and learning processes to those fostering collaboration, interdisciplinary exchange, and resource sharing; and from data management to knowledgement management and discovery. The workshop will give HASS community members a springboard for envisioning how they might conduct innovative research and teaching in information-rich environments and provide them a concrete sense of how they can realize those visions, regardless of their institution size or degree of technical expertise (link).

Comments

A scholarly digital edition of Codex Sinaiticus, published on the internet

May 28, 2008 at 1:25 pm · Filed under web2.0

Serious content from the world of Digital Humanities. This project is not on line as yet, but is part of a three year project.

This project will create a full scholarly digital edition of Codex Sinaiticus, one of the two oldest Greek Bibles and the oldest complete New Testament, arguably the most important of all surviving ancient manuscripts. It is part of a larger project to bring together all surviving leaves of the manuscript, divided among four different countries, into a virtual whole, and to provide access at every level from the general reader to the most advanced scholar. Within that larger project, this scholarly edition will focus on the needs of researchers, scholars, and educated readers, offering meticulous detail in image and transcript, with highly-developed tools in a sophisticated interface, to enable research hitherto impossible (link)

Comments (1)

How stupid can university rankings get?

May 25, 2008 at 7:17 pm · Filed under pedagogy, pod casts

This is an indication on just how relative, simplistic, and self-serving the so-called university ‘global’ rating system has become. A university in Melbourne , unable, it seems, to compete on the rather insane ranking system created by newspapers like the London Times, has decided to create its own ranking system. And who comes on top of this ranking system do you think? The city of Melbourne and a university that doesn’t even have a humanities school. Subjective or what? Apples and Pears or what? (link)

Comments (2)