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Archive for September, 2009

Explore 44,500 selected recordings of music, spoken word, and human and natural environments

(A wonderful new resource from the JISC Digitisation Programme)

Previously unpublished recordings of Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA)
talks from the 1980s online go online today at the JISC-funded Archival
Sound Recordings website of the British Library at <http://sounds.bl.uk>

Featuring talks and debates with top cultural, artistic and political
figures of the day, this latest addition the archive offers a chance to
explore in detail cultural directions in the UK from 1981 to 1994.

Alistair Dunning, JISC’s digitisation programme manager, said: “The rich
intellectual heritage embedded in the spoken word is an often neglected
source for research and learning. JISC is delighted to support the British
Library to release the vivid ideas, resonant discussions and crucial issues
that make the ICA Talks such a powerful library of ideas.”
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Report back: ‘Tools for Scholarly Editing over the Web’ Birmingham, 24 September

I attended the ‘Tools for Scholarly Editing over the Web’ workshop on Thursday (24 September) organised by the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing at the University of Birmingham. There were presentation by many leading figures of electronic textual editing from the US, Canada, Germany, Italy, Australia, Ireland, and Britain. The workshop was organised to discuss the movement towards online collaborative tools for scholarly editing and the problems and opportunities associated with this. Peter Robinson the Director of the Institute of Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing and organiser of the event outlined the major issues as 1) ownership and control, 2) sustainability, and 3) interoperability (these were discussed in detail at a separate session on the second day) .

Joris van Zundert from the Huygens Institute in The Hague spoke first about moving humanities tools towards ‘networked services’. Many tools are developed for individual projects and are not often re-usable within other projects. By providing  tools online (or ‘micro services’ that can be plugged into a generic software frameworks), other projects may use them to say, parse TEI XML texts, tokenise texts, or apply other methods required to transcribe and annotate text. His vision,  shared by many projects, is for scholars to obtain their text from digital repositories, pipe it through a number of micro-services, and then end up with annotated and transcribed data. The particular content that Zandert is working with is critical editions of Middle Dutch; not easily automated through Optical Character Recognition Systems (thus a collaborative translation system is required).

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The Text of Dot Porter’s “Reading, Writing, Building: the Old English Illustrated Hexateuch” Now Available Online

(an excellent paper that challenges the British Library’s crappy page-turning software)

3 February 2009 – The text of Dot Porter’s talk, “Reading, Writing, Building: the Old English Illustrated Hexateuch,” including accompanying slideshow and example videos, are now available on the DHO website. Ms Porter, Metadata Manager at the DHO, presented this paper at the Royal Irish Academy on 26 January, and it was simultaneously webcast as part of the Culture and Technology European Seminar Series sponsored by the Humanities Advanced Technology And Information Institute (HATII) at the University of Glasgow. Her talk focused on the expression of physicality in digital projects, proposing a new model for editions of text-based objects.
(thanks to Dot P for the link)

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event: Imagining a History for the Future of the Book (London Seminar in Digital Text and Scholarship)

(Punters should come to this if in London. Ray is Good!)

No form of human knowledge passes into a new medium unchanged. Digital
technology is fundamentally altering the way we relate to writing,
reading, and the human record itself. The pace of that change has
created a gap between core cultural and social practices that depend on
stable reading and writing environments, and the new kinds of digital
artefacts – electronic books, being just one type of many – that must
sustain those practices into the future. This paper will discuss work
toward bridging this gap by theorising the transmission of culture in
pre- and post-electronic media, by documenting the facets of how people
experience information as readers and writers, by designing new kinds of
interfaces and artifacts that afford readers new abilities and by
sharing those designs in online prototypes that implement new knowledge
environments for researchers and the public (link).

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The Internet as playground and factory

Patrica Clough interviewed at a recent conference at the New School, NY. The interview is a bit of a hot-air rant that lacks any form of evidence, but there are some good ideas buried in there. Thanks to Trebor S for the link

The Internet as Playground and Factory - Patricia Clough from Trebor Scholz on Vimeo.

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Google Earth climate change 3D map

Explore the potential impacts of climate change on our planet Earth and find out about possible solutions for adaptation and mitigation, ahead of the UN’s climate conference in Copenhagen in December (COP15). Choose a tour from the list below and click the play button to see it unfold, or you can also view these tours on YouTube (link).

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Social Media vs the Dictator – Clay Shirky

Lessons learned. The social context of technological-use is as important as the technology itself (try telling that to the practical minded Dictator!)

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Quick Response: Oxford Social Media Convention 2009 #oxsmc09


(Transcript below if you can’t follow my polemical prose; and sorry but the synchronisation in this clip has a mind of its own).

I attended the Oxford Social Media Convention 2009 on Friday (18 September) at the Said Business School. The theme of the Convention was ‘assessing the evolution, impact and potential of social media’; a fairly monumental tasks for a one day convention with speakers from both sides of the Atlantic and from the Academy, business, media, and politics. The Convention was ordered around panel discussion with a lot of participation from the audience. At times subversive and always humorous ‘tweets’ from the audience were also projected on the wall behind the speakers (we voted to do this earlier in the day).

Rather than divide my time between all the speakers, I will concentrate on two of the most distinctive speakers that hopefully convey the timbre of the conference. The first speaker is Mathew Hindman, an academic at the University of Phoenix and author of the recently published ‘The Myth of Digital Democracy (Princeton University Press; 2009). The other speaker I will discuss is Kara Swisher, the Technology Correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.
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Last day at King’s College London…

It crept up a lot quicker than I expected, but it is my last day at King’s College London tomorrow.  It was a enriching and worldly experience, full of dramas and triumphs and highs and lows and new experiences. The world got a hell of a lot bigger and through King’s, I discovered something special about London, its institutions, and its people, whist hopefully discovering something special about my self. London is a wild social labyrinth full of dead-ends, choices with no choice, and potentially lethal social structures that test the limits of any reasonable education. A hardened blinkered conservatism tried to enter my soul, but I resisted it and took no prisoners.
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Progressive state reformers v ideological state retrenchers: framing the electoral choice between Labour and Conservative

(The LSE have a number of public events with high-profile academics and public figures. The recording of these events are available as PodCasts Online).

Speaker: Lord Mandelson
This event was recorded on 14 September 2009 in Old Theatre, Old Building
With less than a year to go before the next general election there is an urgent need for progressive policy debate and discussion in the Labour party to show it has the ideas necessary to meet the social, economic and political challenges of the next decade. Peter Mandelson, one of the government’s key figures, will launch Progress’s autumn lecture series by setting out how he sees the political divide between the main parties. Lord Mandelson is First Secretary of State, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation & Skills, and Lord President of the Council. He was previously European Commissioner for Trade, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, and Secretary of State for Trade & Industry.
Available as: mp3 (25 MB; approx 56 minutes)

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Headsup

(Another online political engagement innovation from the Hansard Society).

HeadsUp is a moderated, online space for under 18s to debate the political issues important to them. Young people share viewpoints with their peers and decision-makers up and down the country (link).

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Ask The Leyland Brothers!

I was sad to hear that Mike, one of the legends of ’70s Australian television, died recently. Fantastic to see all the condolences on YouTube.

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Number 10: Turning story Number 1

Treatment of Alan Turing was “appalling” – PM

The Prime Minister has released a statement on the Second World War code-breaker, Alan Turing, recognising the “appalling” way he was treated for being gay.

number10

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TheyWorkForYou.com

On of the best online political engagement sites in the UK is the TheyWorkForYou.com which is a system that monitors your local Member of Parliament’s voting patterns/speeches (in my case Meg Hillier in Hackney South/ Shoreditch).

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State of the Blogosphere

Here is the annual Technorati State of the Blogosphere (2008) report:

Welcome to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 report, which will be released in five consecutive daily segments. Since 2004, our annual study has unearthed and analyzed the trends and themes of blogging, but for the 2008 study, we resolved to go beyond the numbers of the Technorati Index to deliver even deeper insights into the blogging mind. For the first time, we surveyed bloggers directly about the role of blogging in their lives, the tools, time, and resources used to produce their blogs, and how blogging has impacted them personally, professionally, and financially. Our bloggers were generous with their thoughts and insights. Thanks to all of the bloggers who took the time to respond to our survey (link).

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