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)

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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)

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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.

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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).

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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)

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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).

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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)

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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).

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