RIP Chrysler

April 30, 2009 at 10:32 am · Filed under gadfly

When I was a Kid in Tasmania my mother owned a mission brown Chrysler Valiant VIP. It was as big as a whale. In the back seat it had pull down trays and spot lights like an aeroplane. It had a huge roaring motor that drank fuel like there was no tomorrow. My mother would drive this great boat at hight speeds around the winding roads of Tasmania making me want to vomit in the back. We lived in a house next to the beach with a steep drive-way and when it rained, the whale would struggle to make it to the top. Once when we were trying to put our horse Jetta into the horse trailer, Jetta reared up and kicked the beloved VIP in the door. The dent was repaired but my mother continued to talk about it for years. My mother dated the car-sales man who sold her the VIP. His name was Rox. I liked him a lot. He always brought me Coke and chips and arrived in the newest, flashiest Chryslers. He would park his cars on top of the drive near the neighbours legendary Chrysler V8 Charger. The VIP remained with us for a few years but was eventually replaced by a pissy little green Mitsubishi.

Comments

JISC Digitisation projects

April 29, 2009 at 12:39 pm · Filed under Virtual Reseach Environments, digital humanities, digitisation, e-science, eresearch, humanities computing

JISC (the Joint Information Services Committee) fund a number of digitisation projects with content that spans nearly five centuries of British history.  Some notable examples include British Newspapers 1620-1900 and the 19th Century Pamphlets Online. The manifold importance of digitisation is that the records are made easily accessible to scholars and the general public, and two once the records are ‘data’ they can be used in new ways to gain fresh insights from the data (especially in a large-scale quantitative sense such as parsing 2 centuries of Legal or Parliamentary records).  The UK is fortunate in that it has invested so heavily in digitising some of its immense human history so that now this ‘data’ can be imaginatively used in new ways. As new computational tools and methods are developed, more usages of this data will be found (as long as the data is structured and preserved in a useful way).

(this is just a crappy JPEG I have used as an example. Not the real deal).

Comments

Mapping the worlds photos

April 28, 2009 at 12:36 pm · Filed under digital humanities, digitisation, e-science, eresearch, humanities computing

This article from David Crandall et.al at Cornell University may be of interest. An historian asked me the other day what were the majore concerns of the Digital Humanities. I tried to explain that once there is a lot of data; like all the books in the 19th Century being in digital form, or all the court records of the Old Bailey for 200 years, or millions of digitised books within the Google Books project, then things start to get interesting. This is one such project.  Although the research question may not be that imaginative, the method of finding it out holds much promise for other applications. Here is the paper:

We investigate how to organize a large collection of geotagged photos, working with a dataset of about 35 million images collected from Flickr. Our approach combines content analysis based on text tags and image data with structural analysis based on geospatial data. We use the spatial distribution of where people take photos to define a relational structure between the photos that are taken at popular places. We then study the interplay between this structure and the content, using classification methods for predicting such locations from visual, textual and temporal features of the photos. We find that visual and temporal features improve the ability to estimate the location of a photo, compared to using just textual features. We illustrate using these techniques to organize a large photo collection, while also revealing various interesting properties about popular cities and landmarks at a global scale (link).

(A photo from Flikr. This is Eiffel’s Bridge in Porto. I stood on this on the weekend. This may not be one of the world’s most popular places to photograph, but who cares!)

Comments

CeRch awarded 1.3 Million Pounds in JISC funding

April 25, 2009 at 8:48 am · Filed under digital humanities, e-science, eresearch, humanities computing

(A VRE is a Virtual Research Environment…like a blackboard, well not really)

The following press release is from the Centre that I work within at King’s College; London. A lot of these projects won’t be of that much interest to researchers (as they are infrastructure grants, not research), however the TEXTvre project may be of extraordinary interest to researchers.  Although JISC (Joint Information Services Committee) does not fund research as a matter of course, on occasions the projects undertaken under its auspices are in fact research. The TEXTvre project is one of these and is a collaboration between CeRch and our sister organiastion the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH).  It is the aim of this project to build a Virtual Research Environment to encode texts using the TEI (Text Encoding Inititaive) standard. I will blog about this project more as it develops.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments

New Book: World Wide Web of Research

April 23, 2009 at 12:51 pm · Filed under books, digital humanities, digitisation, e-science, education, humanities computing

A new book will be released soon titled: World Wide Web of Reseach: Reshaping the Sciences and Humanities (Cambridge; the MIT Press). It is edited by Bill Dutton and Paul Jeffreys, both of Oxford. Dutton is Director of the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) whilst Paul Jeffreys is Director of IT at Oxford. I believe the book will be focussed upon the issues of eResearch in the Sciences and Humanities; very important issues for the Digital Humanities. The eResearch aganda primarily encapsulates data-reuse and research collaboration through such systems as VREs (Virtual Research Environments). We have a progamme in this field here at King’s called AHESSC (Arts and Humanities eScience Suport Centre). I look forward to the book; I tried to pre-order it on Amazon but with no luck. You can find Bill Dutton’s blog here..

(as researchers, perhaps we are spiders stuck in a web)

Comments

Seminar on new forms of Doctorates

April 22, 2009 at 2:28 pm · Filed under digital humanities, education, eresearch, humanities computing

This seminar in London on new styles of PhDs will be of interest to educators and students within the Digital Humanities who are grappling with the question of how to include digital components within their work as part of the PhD assessment. As someone who started a practice-based PhD way back in 1998 and successfully completed it in 2003 ( minus a few limbs), I would not  recommend it unless you have an academically strong,  and socio-technically aware research environment.  Technology is neither good nor bad nor is it neutral; so the application of computing technology within a PhD is neither good not bad nor is it neutral.  Succinctly, some technologists may not always have your best interest in mind (and as the Digital Humanities is inherently inter-disciplinary; non-technologists may  have a superficial or negative understanding of research computing)  . A PhD is always an academic qualification and any innovation must always advance the nature of the qualification; not unwittingly undermine it. As a learning process for the Digital Humanities the inclusion of digital components within a PhD adds to its educational worth, not lessens it.  See  Arts-Humanities.net for details of the seminar…

Comments

Therac-25: the killer of all case studies

April 22, 2009 at 1:26 pm · Filed under software

Those involved in writing case studies or teaching ethics to ICT  students may find the Therac-25 case of great interest. Basically it is about a medical machine that delivered a lethal dosage of radiation. But rather than being the fault of an individual; it was an entire systems fault. In other words if you have ever doubted the importance of a socio-technical perspective you practical beast you, think again! Well worth a read (link).

Comments

Roy Rosenzweig fellowship for innovation in digital history

April 21, 2009 at 1:40 pm · Filed under digital humanities, history, humanities computing

(Roy Rosenzweig is the founder of the Centre for History and New Media at George Mason University in the US. The centre is progressive in both its approach to history and technological innovation. This fellowship may be of interest to you budding digital humanists out there).

In 2009, George Mason University and the American Historical Association will offer the first Roy Rosenzweig Fellowship for Innovation in Digital History. This award was developed by friends and colleagues of Roy Rosenzweig (1950–2007), Mark and Barbara Fried Professor of History and New Media at George Mason University, to honor his life and work as a pioneer in the field of digital history.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments

Digital Futures London 2009

April 21, 2009 at 12:43 pm · Filed under digital humanities, digitisation, humanities computing, internet, social media

This workshop is conduced periodically by my colleague at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH), Simon Tanner. It is designed for those who manage or wish to undertake digitisation projects.  It is an extensive course and includes topics such as applying for funding, metadata and most importantly, the  sustainability of digital resources (link).

Comments

New Book: Digital Scholarship

April 21, 2009 at 11:10 am · Filed under books, digital humanities, digitisation, humanities computing

A interesting new book on Digital Scholarship was released in December called ‘Digital Scholarship’; edited by Marta Mestrovic Deyrup. I haven’t ordered, read, and reviewed  this book as yet (it doesn’t come cheap at 57 pounds).

What I see as one of the grand challenges of digital resources and scholarship is developing an explicit understanding of how they are actually incorporated into humanities research practices (and please, not through counting things!).  This requires an empathy towards humanities researchers so as to understand how they establish meaning from these resources.   Also, the concept of interdisciplinarity really needs to be interrogated socially and politically in the digital scholarship field, as at times, it is applied as a utopian buzz word lacking context and thus meaning and reeks of new-right anti-intellectualism. Here is a blurb from the dust-cover.

Collecting important original essays by librarians and archivists – all of whom are actively engaged in building digital collections – Digital Scholarship details both challenges and proven solutions in establishing, maintaining, and servicing digital scholarship in the humanities. This volume further explores the ways in which the humanities have benefited from the ability to digitize text and page images of historic documents, mine large corpuses of texts and other forms of records, and assemble widely dispersed cultural objects into common repositories for comparison and analysis–making new research questions and methods possible for the first time.

The ten notable scholars included in Digital Scholarship offer a balanced view of the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches to digitization, reporting both progress and problems, examining new business models, new forms of partnerships, and the new technologies and resources that make many more library and archival services available. Librarians and library staff everywhere will find Digital Scholarship an essential text for the modern library and an illuminating resource for anyone looking to understand the changing face of research in the electronic age.

Comments

GRIT 02: Illusions of Homogeneity

April 20, 2009 at 4:37 pm · Filed under art, eresearch

Let’s hope that the grand dreams of eResearch aren’t about ‘research homogeneity’ as cultural homogeneity may have become the case in other areas of cultural activity (thanks to Andrew Garton, the performer, for the link).

GRIT 02 examines the death of analogue broadcasting by way of readings from numerous sources describing the process of enclosure on public spectrum, the airways and the cultural diversity it affords humanity. The digital spectrum promises to further the spread of sameness the world over.


GRIT 02: Illusions of Homogeneity / Illusionen von Homogenität from andrew garton on Vimeo.

Comments

‘I believe in the genital organs of great men and women…’

April 20, 2009 at 2:38 pm · Filed under gadfly

The sad death of a great humanist. RIP JG Ballard. (Thanks to Gabriel B for the link)

Comments

Twitter activism

April 19, 2009 at 1:34 am · Filed under political communication, politics, web2.0

(picture from the Independent)

This story is from the Guardian, then to the Melbourne Age, then to this  blog. I am not sure if this was truly ‘twitter activism’ as the story claims; but still the nativity in which many institutions approach Web 2.0 and its potential for political mobilisation astonished me.  All technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral.  All people are neither good nor bad nor are they neutral.

THE woman behind the mass protests which rocked the capital of Moldova last week has gone into hiding after the so-called “Twitter Revolution” forced a recount of the general election.

Natalia Morar, 25, a Moldovan who has already been banned from Russia for opposing the Kremlin, feared arrest after organising a flash mob which ended with 20,000 people storming the parliament building (link).

Comments

What the #hashtags

April 18, 2009 at 9:19 pm · Filed under web2.0

Hash tags (#) are a way of aggregating posts on twitter or facebook or other social software applications.  They are driven by the community and have been used to great effect recently by the G2o protesters in London (#g20) and for the Amazon censorship of gay literature fiasco (#Amazonfail). I would imagine that they should only be used in emergencies; so use with caution because you never know when you may need your freedom of expression!

Here is a site that aggregates Twitter hash tags (link).

Comments

Look at this *ing hipster!

April 18, 2009 at 2:41 pm · Filed under gadfly

Ok, who says blogging has to be serious? (thanks to Mary-Anne Breeze (Mez), facebook).

Comments