Call for Nominations for the 2011 Antonio Zampolli Prize

October 27, 2009 at 5:35 pm · Filed under digital humanities, humanities computing

The Antonio Zampolli Prize is an award of the Alliance of Digital Humanities
Organisations (ADHO). Now in its inaugural year, the prize will be given
every three years to honour an outstanding scholarly achievement in
humanities computing. It is presented by the Alliance of Digital Humanities
Organizations (ADHO) on behalf of its constituent organizations: the
Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC), the Association
for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) and the Society for Digital
Humanities/Société pour l’étude des médias interactifs (SDH/SEMI).
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What to do with 30 million books?

October 26, 2009 at 7:07 pm · Filed under digital humanities, digitisation, eresearch, humanities computing

(Posted to that wonderful Digital Humanities list, Humanist).

Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:22:57 +0100
From: Jockers Matthew <mjockers@stanford.edu>
Subject: Possible Text Mining Opportunity at Stanford

Friends,

As I’m sure many of you already know, Stanford has been closely
involved with Google’s book scanning project, and we (Stanford) are
currently preparing a proposal for the creation of a text mining /
analysis Center on campus. The core assets of the proposed Center
would include all of the Google data (approx. 30 million books) plus
all of our Highwire data and all of our licensed content. We see a
wide range of research opportunities for this collection, and we are
envisioning a Center that would offer various levels of interaction
with scholars. In particular we envision a “tiered” service model
that would, on one hand, allow technically challenged researchers to
work with Center staff in formulating research questions and, on the
other, an opportunity for more technically advanced scholars to write
their own algorithms and run them on the corpus. We are imagining the
Center as both a resource and as a physical place, a place that will
offer support to both internal and external scholars and graduate
students. We are looking at creating fellowship opportunities and
post docs as well as other ways of encouraging and supporting
scholarship.

I am writing to you specifically because I think this will be
something you are interested in but also because at this stage of the
proposal we are looking for some external validation that this corpus
would be of value and that the research it would support would inspire
new questions and new knowledge. I have already polled our Stanford
faculty, and the response (especially in the humanities and social
sciences) has been very enthusiastic. My hope is that you might be
able to send a few words (at most a short paragraph) that I could add
to a section of our proposal that is titled “Scholarly Interest and
Research Potential”.

Hope you are all well and getting your abstracts polished for London
in 2010.

Matt

–
Matthew Jockers
Stanford University
http://www.stanford.edu/~mjockers

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Open Access enhances scholarly communication by making the results of research electronically available

October 26, 2009 at 6:15 pm · Filed under data

The rhetoric within this JISC promotion of Open Access is a little naive (ie. as if researchers haven’t always communicated their research results), but still there is some good information here about JISC’s initiatives.  Also, check out the podcast by Harvard Historian Robert Darnton (link).

Opening the knowledge base to all means more researchers can build on it and there is less duplication of effort. Researchers can reach a greater audience and find that their work is more widely read and cited, institutions gain an enhanced reputation as their research becomes more visible, funding agencies see a greater return on their investment, and publishers find that the impact of their journals increases (link).

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Menzies Lecture by Professor Graeme Davison, Monash University, Australia

October 23, 2009 at 9:32 am · Filed under events, history

Professor Graeme Davidson, an Historian from Monash University in Australia, delivered the annual Menzies Lecture at King’s College London on Tuesday Night (20th October).  The lecture is one of the events from the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies at King’s College. In his lecture titled ‘Narrating the Nation’ Graeme discussed the foundation narratives that settlers societies such as Canada, Australia, and the US have in common and the religious undertones of such narratives (I believe the transcript will be online again soon). The event was the first official event held in the Anatomy theatre at King’s recently renovated by the Centre for eResearch (CeRch) and Professor Alan Reid of Theatre Studies.

Professor Graeme Davidson

‘Narrating the nation’

Professor Carl Bridge, Director of the Menzies Centre

Dr Ian Henderson, Lecturer at the Menzies Centre and his partner Kwesi.

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Decoding Pasts, Building Futures (Digital Humanities lecture)

October 21, 2009 at 11:33 am · Filed under digital humanities, events, humanities computing

Inaugural Lecture

by Richard Beacham, Charlotte Roueché & Harold Short

Friday 23 October 2009
17.30, Edmond J Safra Theatre, Strand Campus

We have chosen to give a joint inaugural presentation of our work, because we all work in densely collaborative areas, in a manner which is not necessarily familiar to Humanities scholars.

We will be presenting how our individual researches have developed, how we have worked together, and what we hope for the future.

We are particularly keen that this event should inaugurate and inspire new activities among our friends and colleagues (link).

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Clay Shirky on social media, communities, and Open Hack Day

October 21, 2009 at 9:29 am · Filed under collaboration, social media, web2.0

New York University professor Clay Shirky, an expert on social media, kicked off Yahoo!’s Open Hack Day NYC 2009 with a thoughtful keynote on what motivates people to participate in online communities (Thanks to Leigh B. for the link)

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The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery

October 16, 2009 at 3:58 pm · Filed under books, e-science

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Report back: IRCHSS Symposium: Digital Humanities – New Frontiers, Trinity College, Dublin, 14 October 2009

October 16, 2009 at 3:29 pm · Filed under digital humanities, e-science, eresearch, events, humanities computing

A one day seminar was held at Trinity College Dublin on Wednesday 14 October to discuss Ireland’s contributions to the Digital Humanities and the possible futures of the field within Ireland. http://dho.ie/node/634 The seminar, held in a skilfully restored 19th Century Anatomy lecture theatre, was attended by representatives from government, the Irish Research Council (IRCHSS), universities, and industry (Microsoft, IBM, Intel). The keynote speaker was Professor Tony Hey, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s External Research and former head of the UK’s eScience Core Programme. Other attendees included the Irish Minister of Education, the Provost of Trinity College, the Director of the Digital Humanities Observatory Ireland, and representatives from IBM and Intel’s research divisions.

Professor Hey discussed ‘eScience’ and how it may be a new way to do science. He discussed the shift from experimental science to data intensive science. He explained that building datasets, using datasets, and analysing datasets had become a ‘new paradigm’ within scientific research. However, this shift is not exclusive to scientific research and ‘eScience’ offers new opportunities to the humanities as well. But there is a need to put data into a form and create the tools that are useful for the humanities (putting data into a useful form is partly the work of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s and the Digital Humanities Observatory). He showed some of the work of Microsoft including a video presentation, transcription and annotation system called Project Tuva. This project features the work of Dr Richard Feynman, a famous scientist at Cornell, and allows users to search and annotate videos of his lectures. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/ .

Although not really Digital Humanities, he did show some of the other work of Microsoft’s 800 plus research scientists scattered around the world. Some of this work admittedly made me a bit nervous, especially Microsoft’s data centres that are each about the size of Dublin. The data centres represent a shift in Internet thinking from the autonomous computing and storage capacities of desktops (and various institutional computing facilities), to large centralised warehouses controlled by corporations such as Microsoft. Professor Hey touted the benefits of data centres for ‘cloud computing’ (ie. use of tools and services at a remote location), but in my mind, these centres give a lot of control to Microsoft and we must take it on good faith that Microsoft will always have our best interests in mind.

Martin Curley, Director of IT innovation at Intel Information Technology (based in Ireland), responded to Hey’s talk, but unfortunately at times, deferred to the flabby arguments of technological determinism with the usual utopian visions of ‘more computers make things better’ (why do utopian visions never imagine free Guinness?). He did make some interesting points about the ‘grand challenges’ facing the world and how these are, in part, being addressed through European Commissions Framework 7 Programme (focussed upon building the research infrastructure capacities in Europe). Humanists must always work alongside scientists in addressing ‘grand challenges’ as we already know that the ice caps are melting and that the world is running out of oil, but we also desperately need to understand the potentially catastrophic societal dimensions of this (and surly part of the cause is rampant consumerism driven by corporate globalism, but I would never infer such a thing in such company).

Other presentations during the day included more content-specific presentations such as the magnificent 1641 Depositions Project, presented by Dr Marie Wallace, that contains 20, 000 pages of witness testimonials about the massacre of Protestants in Ireland in 1641. Dr Seth Denbo discussed the DARAIH project (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) and its aim to link researchers to important data sets held in major data centres throughout Europe. The project has 14 partners in 10 countries and plans to build a ‘discovery architecture’ so that researchers can find important data resources and incorporate them into their working practices and solve ‘real world’ research problems.

Dr Susan Schreibman, the Director of the Digital Humanities Observatory (DHO), discussed the work of her centre and emphasised the importance of building the human infrastructure as well as the technical infrastructure to support the research community. She explained that the Digital Humanities is not only about technical capacities, it is also about people and practices. I would like to think this is always the case, but often the short-term practical solution, devoid of the critical, contextual, and reflective apparatus of the humanists, triumphs. If we don’t understand the humanistic context of the technologies that we use (ie. how they help us understand human society), then we don’t always know how to apply the right technical solution to the right humanist problem. Computing, if poorly considered, can also damage scholarship and our relationship with the human record.

The seminar ended with a reception at the Provost’s house, Professor Andy Orchard, on the grounds of Trinity College.

Projects/papers/resources presented at the seminar include:

• Project Tuva (Video annotation system), Microsoft External Research,
  http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/
• The Digital Future is now; A Call for Action for the Humanities, Christine Borgman (article),
  http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1232&context=borgman
• DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities)
  http://www.dariah.eu/
• European Commission, Seventh Framework Programme,
  http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/
• 1641 Depositions Project
  http://dho.ie/drapier/node/105
• Digital Humanities Observatory (DHO)
  http://dho.ie/
• Christ on the Cross Project
  http://christonthecross.org/index.html
• The Irish in Europe Project (Virtual Research Environment)
  http://www.irishineurope.com/
• A number of excellent poster presentations were also given at the event (many of the details of the projects can be found on the DHO’s DRAPIer projects database http://dho.ie/drapier/ )

Dr Susan Schreibman with the Provost of Trinity College, Andy Orchard.

Anatomy lecture theatre, Trinity College, Dublin

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Free London’s Data. Now!

October 9, 2009 at 4:35 am · Filed under data

Help us free London’s Data
Saturday 24th October 2009 10.00 am
London’s Living Room
City  Hall
The Queens Walk
London SE1 2AA

The Greater London Authority is currently in  the process of scoping London’s DataStore. Initially we propose to release as much GLA data as possible and to encourage other public agencies in London to  do the same and we’d like your  help!

We want the input of the developer community from the outset prior to making any decisions on formats or  platform. We would therefore like to invite interested developers to City Hall so that we  can talk to you about what we want to do, get your  views, and seek your input on the best way to deliver for  London.

On the  day we’ll be running a requirements specification workshop and a high  level technical design session to explore how we might do this in a way that  makes sense for the end users – you

The event will take place in London’s Living Room at 10 am on the morning of Saturday 24 October. If you would like to attend please register your interest.(link).

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Call for papers:Digital Humanities 2010

October 4, 2009 at 5:14 pm · Filed under conferences, digital humanities, humanities computing

Next years Digital Humanities Conference is to be held at King’s College London (c0-hosted by CCH and CeRch). The call for papers is now out.

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Google Evil Agenda

October 2, 2009 at 9:48 pm · Filed under digital humanities, digitisation, internet

This doco doesn’t really offer any solution to Google’s domination of online search. However, full marks for at least trying to be critical. I will see what else I can dig up and get back to you.

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UK.gov appeals for developers to mashup 1,000 datasets

October 1, 2009 at 5:19 pm · Filed under political communication, politics

UK.gov is calling on developers to consult the Cabinet Office on its prototype website that will open some government datasets to the public.

It wants the developer community to get involved in shaping what apps, data sources and features the website should contain.

“With over 1,000 existing data sets, from seven departments (brought together in re-useable form for the first time) and community resources, we want developers to work with us to use the data to create great applications; give us feedback on the early operational community; and tell us how to develop what we have into a single point of access for government-held public data,” reads a post on the government’s digital engagement blog (link).

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