Fake your friends

February 27, 2007 at 8:09 pm · Filed under internet, social media, technology, web2.0

In the superficial world of online social networking, popularity has become a commodity that is bought and sold.
FakeYourSpace.com – a companion service for MySpace, Friendster and Facebook – will from March 1 allow customers to buy attractive “friends” for displaying on their profile pages (from the Melbourne Age).

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What is Annodex (hypertextual video)?

February 27, 2007 at 2:28 am · Filed under digital humanities, humanities computing, media, social media, software, video, web2.0

This fantastic film annotation (ie. hypertextual video) project is being developed by the CSRIO in Australia and other institutions.

When http, html and URIs were invented, the World Wide Web took its shape. With the technology provided here, we extend the Web to audio-visual data: Annodex, cmml and temporal URIs allow the creation of Webs of Videos. They also enable Web search engines to crawl and index audio-visual content. Just apply anything you know from the Web to audio-visual content – that’s Annodex (link).

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UK Government Restrictions on Street Photography

February 27, 2007 at 1:51 am · Filed under governance, political communication, politics, social media, software, technology, web2.0

(the software for No 10 was developed by MySociety.org)

Signing up to ask the Prime Minister to Stop proposed restrictions
regarding photography in public places

The UK Govt are about to propose restrictions on photography in
public places which could make street photography and documentary
photography against the law. There's a petition on the Downing St
website against the Government's proposals to restrict the use of
photography in public areas. Sign up to the petition now. (thanks to Nettime for the link)

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Photography/

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Peer review and evaluation of digital resources for the Arts and Humanities

February 27, 2007 at 12:26 am · Filed under art, digital humanities, humanities computing, journals, pedagogy

Here is a report done in the UK to help advance peer review processes for digital work in the arts and humanities. Peer review is a problematic issue, especially in Australia, in that many academics who don’t invest any intellectual energy into advancing digital work for humanistic purposes are (ironically) rewarded more than those academics that do advance it (ie. only peer-reviewed journal articles and books are quantifiable as ‘research’ whilst digital scholarship is marginalised). Another related problem is that many academics ‘critically’ understand popular and commercial software at the expense of a more scholarly appreciation of academic software. Let’s hope that these emerging peer-review processes can foster more well-rounded research. Peer processes not only need to recognise digital-scholarly-output, but they also need to make sure that academics are not unduly rewarded (through promotion, tenure, and other rewards) for not investing in digital technology.

The mechanisms for the evaluation and peer review of the traditional print outputs of scholarly research in the arts and humanities are well established, but no equivalent exists for assessing the value of digital resources and of the scholarly work which leads to their creation. This project proposes to establish a framework for evaluating the quality, sustainability and impact over time of digital resources for the arts and humanities, using History, in its broadest sense, as a case study (link).

Also, check out the criteria for promotion and tenure guidelines developed by the University of Maine, in the US:

Recognition and achievement in the field of new media must be measured by standards as high as but different from those in established artistic or scientific disciplines. As the reports from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Modern Language Association, and the University of Maine recommend, promotion and tenure guidelines must be revised to encourage the creative and innovative use of technology if universities are to remain competitive in the 21st century (link).

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Fast Facts Found Online

February 23, 2007 at 8:41 pm · Filed under education, internet, media, open source, social media, technology, web2.0

This article appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald today. There is a small quote from myself on the use of Wikipedia for research.

David Adams talks to four Australians who have helped to build the collaborative online giant that is Wikipedia.

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What is TAPor?

February 23, 2007 at 1:04 am · Filed under digital humanities, humanities computing

I haven’t played with this tool as yet but I would be intereted to hear your ideas…

TAPoR is a gateway to tools for sophisticated analysis and retrieval, along with representative texts for experimentation (link).

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Humanities Computing Links

February 23, 2007 at 12:20 am · Filed under blogs, digital humanities, humanities computing

Here is a list of links that are useful for humanities computing research. Thanks to Geoffrey Rockwell for the (link).

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The Circus in America

February 23, 2007 at 12:00 am · Filed under humanities computing, internet

One of my favorite projects from IATH (the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities) at the University of Virginia is the Circus in America project; spanning the period from 1793-1940.

The Circus has been one of the most significant forms of popular entertainment in America. Between 1793 -1940 the circus evolved from a small operation managed by the performers, into a major business. This academic study produced by the Institute of Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia is the first major study of the circus in America during this formative 150 year period. It examines the role that the circus played in American society through the growth of American popular culture. The site concentrates on six major circuses that were chosen for their impact upon broader cultural industries. The site contains much primary evidence; digital artefacts collected from museums and archives as well as artefacts from private collections. Some of these artefacts including books, posters, newspaper clipping, and oral histories have been brought together for the first time. The archive and extensive analysis makes it possible to study the important contribution that the circus made the American society.

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The Nora Project: Humanities Text Mining

February 22, 2007 at 2:26 am · Filed under humanities computing, web2.0

This is what can be done with existing digital libraries:

The goal of the nora project is to produce software for discovering, visualizing, and exploring significant patterns across large collections of full-text humanities resources in existing digital libraries.

In search-and-retrieval, we bring specific queries to collections of text and get back (more or less useful) answers to those queries; by contrast, the goal of data-mining (including text-mining) is to produce new knowledge by exposing unanticipated similarities or differences, clustering or dispersal, co-occurrence and trends.  Over the last decade, many millions of dollars have been invested in creating digital library collections: at this point, terabytes of full-text humanities resources are publicly available on the web. Those collections, dispersed across many different institutions, are large enough and rich enough to provide an excellent opportunity for text-mining, and we believe that web-based text-mining tools will make those collections significantly more useful, more informative, and more rewarding for research and teaching (link).

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E-Science within the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences: Enabling Collaboration through Sakai

February 22, 2007 at 2:10 am · Filed under e-science, education, humanities computing, web2.0

Collaboration is fundamental to scholars in the arts, humanities and social sciences. It has deep roots through the production of co-authored works, the analysis of text and cultural objects, and the peer dissemination of research results. Collaboration is also essential in the formation and advancement of scholarly ideas through collaborative discussions at conferences, seminars, tutorials and other dialogical exchanges.

The recent emergence of the field of e-science within the humanities promises to facilitate a new type of collaboration that may in turn facilitate new types of scholarship. E-science does in part; enable the application of high capacity ‘grid’ technologies to arts, humanities, and social sciences problems. Grid technologies allow the parallel processing of complex computational problems through the shared use of CPUs that models a ‘virtual computing architecture’. This also allows the sharing and storage of vast amounts of heterogeneous data. Grid technologies are already applicable to many fields of research within the arts, humanities, and social sciences including linguistics, archaeology, history, and geography. Some of the applications include the collaborative analysis and annotation of text, the distributed access to high quality images, the visualisation of historical data, and the historical mapping of the impact of climate change upon the British Isles.

A key message to emerge from e-science within the arts, humanities and social science community so far is that the ‘transforming impact’ of its vision will be realised in part by collaborative virtual tools and environments. By providing researchers with access to these tools from their desktops, they will be able to teach, research, and cooperate in new ways. A system that already facilitates this is the SAKAI system that has been developed and adapted for use on the UK National Grid by a team of researchers within the ReDress Project at the University of Lancaster.

At the heart of Sakai is a workspace where multimedia resources can be stored and manipulated; and various third-party tools (as long as they are standard-compliant) can be plugged in to either work with the suite or independently. A range of basic collaborative functions are available which can be used by research projects: a chat room facility; a scheduler, and wiki and blog tools. There is also a range of more advanced plug-ins (Link).

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Vidipedia

February 21, 2007 at 11:37 pm · Filed under media, social media, software, technology, video, web2.0

After 640-802, many professionals think that it is of no use to write 70-290 as well. This is why they skip it and go for 646-204 directly. Although this makes them eligible for 642-901 , but majority flunks the real exam.

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A wiki for video…check out this research at the the University of Newcastle (UK) in the field of ‘media computing’ within computer science (thanks to Tobias for the Link)

Releasing the hidden value contained in the tens of millions of hours of the world�s media archives is dependent on the widespread of these collections in order to facilitate access. However, archive owners are reluctant to commit to the costs of digitization until two key enablers occur: (a) A cost effective mechanism to annotate the collection such that potential users can search audio/video content to identify items that will satisfy their information need; and (b) A working business model that supports the costs of digitization by demonstrating new revenue streams as a result of making the collection available. The Vidipedia project seeks to address these needs by examining the potential for community based annotation and identifying a business model that supports it. The project will create a tool that will address the challenges of archiving, search and discovery for producers and consumers of multimedia content. Vidipedia will also enable interoperability at the semantic level between services and systems that support inter-enterprise.

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timeXchange Project

February 20, 2007 at 7:45 pm · Filed under software, web2.0

Another interesting application from the Web 2.0 world is timeXchange.net based in Chicago. For the increasing number of us whose work is project oriented, this system offers a easy way to manage and track expenses. Thanks to Joe PieKarz for the (Link).

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What is the Haystack Project?

February 20, 2007 at 4:00 am · Filed under social media, software, web2.0

The Haystack Project is investigating approaches designed to let people manage their information in ways that make the most sense to them. By removing arbitrary application-created barriers, which handle only certain information “types” and relationships as defined by the developer, we aim to let users define their most effective arrangements and connections between views of information. Such personalization of information management will dramatically improve everyone’s ability to find what they need when they need it. We are currently exploring these ideas…(link)

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UK E-Science: All Hands Conference

February 20, 2007 at 3:18 am · Filed under conferences, e-science, humanities computing, web2.0

The UK e-Science All Hands Meeting (AHM) provides a forum for discussion and demonstration of a broad range of e-Science projects from all disciplines. The conference features many excellent opportunities for networking through presentations by researchers who are active in e-Science projects, poster sessions, workshops and demonstrations. The schedule also includes a number of invited Keynote speakers involved in leading Grid and e-Science activities worldwide. This popular and well established conference is now in its sixth year and attracts delegates from many discplines and organistations, including senior decision makers working in research and IT using advanced computing techniques and technologies. It also attracts distinguished members of the UK academic community and all eight UK Research Councils exhibit at the event. As a sponsor you can reach UK and International researchers to form collaborations and have early access to new ideas (link).

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Fidel Castro Search Engine

February 19, 2007 at 7:29 pm · Filed under internet, media, political communication, politics, technology, web2.0

Cuba built an internet search engine that allows users to trawl through speeches by Cuban leader Fidel Castro and other government sites, but does not browse web pages outside the island. The search engine (www.infosoc.cu/buscador) unveiled at a conference last week underscored restrictions on internet access in communist-run Cuba, which the government blames on US trade sanctions (from the Age link)

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