Decoding Digital Humanities (Melbourne Chapter)

July 23, 2010 at 2:43 pm · Filed under digital humanities, humanities computing

In conjunction with University College London’s Centre for Digital Humanities, Decoding Digital Humanities is an informal monthly get together in the pub to discuss all things digital in the humanities.  This is an opportunity to meet others working on digital projects and is open to staff, students, and faculty.

The first meeting of this semester will be held at the Prince Alfred Hotel, 191 Grattan Street

Date: Thursday  29 July 2010

Time 530-730PM

To kick off this semester, it is suggested that we engage with the same material as our colleagues at UCL. Melissa Terras from UCL gave the closing plenary at the recent Digital Humanities conference in London which is online as text and video and would be a good point to start the informal discussions. This is from UCL’s Centre for Digital Humanities web site.

The annual Digital Humanities 2010 conference held this year at King’s College London was brought to a close on 10 July with a plenary speech by Dr Melissa Terras (UCL). Due to the topical and timely nature of issues raised in the speech, we felt it would make an excellent focus for discussion. The assigned reading for our meetup on the 27th will be:

“Present, Not Voting: Digital Humanities in the Panopticon”. Text available here. Video available here.

Have a look at the video and text and come along and discuss at the pub. If you have any suggestions for articles, software, funding opportunities any ‘digital humanities’ ideas drop us a line and we will put it on the agenda.  The meeting is organised by Craig Bellamy and Conal Tuohy of VeRSI. craig.bellamy@versi.edu.au, conal.tuohy@versi.edu.au

Decoding Digital Humanities Dates 2nd Semester:

• July 29 (Thursday)
• August 26 (Thursday)
• September 23 (Thursday)
• October 21 (Thursday)
• November 18 (Thursday)

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DH2010, Review, #DH2010

July 21, 2010 at 2:09 pm · Filed under conferences, digital humanities, humanities computing

(Opening Address, Digital Humanities 2010)

Digital Humanities 2010, King’s College London, 7-10 July, 2010.

Members of the VeRSI team attended the Digital Humanities Conference at King’s College London (7-10 July); the annual conference of the Association of Digital Humanities Organisations.  The conference in its various guises has been running for 22 years or 37 years if the first conference of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing is incorporated.  This year’s Digital Humanities Conference was significant as two of the elder statesman of the field, Professors Harold Short and Willard McCarty are both retiring. Professor Short has been head of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s for many years and received a long, standing ovation from the 400 plus delegates at the Conference dinner. Professor McCarty is one of the strongest critical voices in the field and has built a thriving Doctoral programme in Digital Humanities at King’s and has published widely on the application of computing technology to the understanding of human culture.

This year’s conference also included pre-conference workshops on various applied subjects such as text-mining for Classicists, text analysis, peer reviewing of digital work, and even how to design a Digital Humanities Lab. Also before the conference, a THATCamp was held; an informal user-generated ‘unconference’ about humanities and technology. Subjects such as what is computing analysis for an historian, geography in text, and even a manifesto for the Digital Humanities were robustly discussed (a ThatCamp will be held in Canberra, 28-29 August 2010 http://thatcampcanberra.org )

The main conference includes papers on the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and various encoding techniques, Music Encoding within Musicology, Digitisation in Japan, and a number of papers on the state of the field in various regions of the world. The conference was well-recorded including the lively closing plenary by Dr Melissa Terras from University College London’s Centre for Digital Humanities about the state of the field online ( http://www.arts-humanities.net/video/dh2010_keynote_melissa_terras_present_not_voting_digital_humanities_panopticon

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As a discipline, we suck online (boo! to Times Higher Ed)

July 16, 2010 at 5:23 pm · Filed under digital humanities

The UK Times Higher Ed published an article about the closing plenary lecture at the Digital Humanities conference in London. But I feel that there is some miscommunication happened. Something was lost from what the speaker, Dr Melissa Terras, perhaps intended and what the author of the Times Higher Ed article wrote.

Since when does the Digital Humanities make web pages? Any one can make a web page and it doesn’t take a classically educated scholar which a PhD and 3 books to do this well.

It takes about 1/2 day to make a web site look good (depending on the size and complexity of the site and the skills of the creator). Someone doesn’t get it.  A dentist has to wash the front window of her/his surgery just as a Digital Humanist has to spell correctly (apologies for my tardy blogging). But this isn’t the whole story.

(Link to Times Higher Ed article)

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THATCamp Canberra: Applications Closes July 23

July 16, 2010 at 5:05 pm · Filed under digital humanities

Just a reminded that applications for THATCamp Canberra; the Humanities and Technology Camp (28-29 August), closes on July 23. These are excellent events and I would encourage digital humanists to attend. I just attended THATCamp London and there were a diverse range of sessions and lots of rigorous debate.  The application process is simple; just log onto the web site and fill in the details. The main thing it to have something to bring to the event as they are highly participatory. Here is the link.

And if you cant make it to Canberra don’t worry as there will be another in Melbourne either later this year or early next year. I will keep you informed.

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Google and the Digital Humanities

July 15, 2010 at 11:20 am · Filed under digital humanities

We’ve given awards to 12 projects led by 23 researchers at 15 universities:

• Steven Abney and Terry Szymanski, University of Michigan. Automatic Identification and Extraction of Structured Linguistic Passages in Texts.
• Elton Barker, The Open University, Eric C. Kansa, University of California-Berkeley, Leif Isaksen, University of Southampton, United Kingdom. Google Ancient Places (GAP): Discovering historic geographical entities in the Google Books corpus.
• Dan Cohen and Fred Gibbs, George Mason University. Reframing the Victorians.
• Gregory R. Crane, Tufts University. Classics in Google Books.
• Miles Efron, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois. Meeting the Challenge of Language Change in Text Retrieval with Machine Translation Techniques.
• Brian Geiger, University of California-Riverside, Benjamin Pauley, Eastern Connecticut State University. Early Modern Books Metadata in Google Books.
• David Mimno and David Blei, Princeton University. The Open Encyclopedia of Classical Sites.
• Alfonso Moreno, Magdalen College, University of Oxford. Bibliotheca Academica Translationum: link to Google Books.
• Todd Presner, David Shepard, Chris Johanson, James Lee, University of California-Los Angeles. Hypercities Geo-Scribe.
• Amelia del Rosario Sanz-Cabrerizo and José Luis Sierra-Rodríguez, Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Collaborative Annotation of Digitalized Literary Texts.
• Andrew Stauffer, University of Virginia. JUXTA Collation Tool for the Web.
• Timothy R. Tangherlini, University of California-Los Angeles, Peter Leonard, University of Washington. Northern Insights: Tools & Techniques for Automated Literary Analysis, Based on the Scandinavian Corpus in Google Books (link).

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DH2010 keynote – Melissa Terras: Present, Not Voting: Digital Humanities in the Panopticon

July 15, 2010 at 9:01 am · Filed under digital humanities

Melissa Terras giving the keynote speech at the DH2010 conference, 10th July 2010 (link)

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Back in Melbourne #dh2010

July 14, 2010 at 12:09 am · Filed under digital humanities

I am back in Melbourne after attending the Digital Humanities conference at Kings College London and in my short experience of the event; it was by far the best. I get the feeling that the field is at a pivotal moment in its history and without continued institutional support and strong academic leadership, the field isn’t going to make the transition easily into the next stage (what ever this next stage may be).  We really need to build the field in Australia in a similar way to the Canadians by offering career options, degrees, research funding; all within strong academic departments and centres. The field will always have a service function; this is important, but in Australia we also need to push further into the ‘methodological commons’ and academic research beyond simply delivering someone else’s research from one place to another (or the ‘delivery boy’ scenario). I will write about this over coming weeks. I will try and not aggregate so much on this blog and keep that to 2cultures.net.

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What they are saying’: Political Issue Analysis System (PIAS): Political Issue analysis in an age of the ‘data deluge’

July 7, 2010 at 8:14 pm · Filed under collaboration, deliberation, digital humanities

(This new seeding project has just been accepted for funding from the Institute for Broadband Enabled Society (IBES) at the University of Melbourne. Led by VeRSI and myself, it is a short project with results available towards the end of the year or early next year).

Summary of Proposal

The Internet is recognised as a vital component of our political information systems.  Although extensively used by governments and civil society groups, its effects upon political processes; particularly deliberative political processes, currently remains relatively unknown.  Emerging research suggests that the Internet’s capacity to easily produce information has also led to data overload, undermining its deliberative potential.  With the advent of the National Broadband Network the ‘data deluge’ promises to intensify increasing the need for political information—in its various guises—to be delivered in much more meaningful ways.[1] This is especially important for younger audiences who are increasingly abandoning broadcast media in favour of online political information[2].

This project is an iterative study and design of an online ‘Political Issues Analysis System’ (PIAS) to assist users’ research and analyse political issues. It will deliver information about important political topics (ie. environmental issues, socio-economic issues, immigration, government policy etc.) using important data sources within a coherent ‘deliberative’ framework.  It will evaluate the needs of users to comprehend political issues through the application of a number of semantic indexing and data matching tools and design a prototype system.  It will do this in part through five public workshops using the University of Melbourne’s Usability Lab; each workshop focussing on a particular issue utilising particular tools and methods.[3] It will in tandem uncover recommendations to assist in the design of a unique software tool that fosters user-driven processes to effectively filter and visualise online political information obtained from government data-sets (partly within the ‘Government 2.0’ policy framework), the media, NGOs, historical data, and other user-generated online sources; (blogs, video etc).

The outputs of the research will be a working prototype as well as a report documenting the research outcomes with a series of recommendations for further research. This project may lead to the first major study of online deliberative processes within Australia; competitive within the ARC’s Linkage or Discovery scheme. The work will be of benefit to governments, community groups and other major producers of political sites and the users of such sites. The project is within IBES’s Social Infrastructures and Community theme and in particular, adheres to IBES’s and VeRSI’s shared aspirations ‘to make existing and available data more accessible’. In summary the broad aims of the project are:

• To explore the evolving applications of online political information tools in an Australian and International context (especially in the analysis of broadband-enabled video and audio)
• To examine deliberative processes with a number of stakeholder groups using semantic indexing methods and various communication tools at the University’s IDEA Lab.
• To build, test and provide further recommendations for a ‘Political Issues Analysis System’ (PIAS)

Through these processes we address the following research questions:

• How can we better understand online deliberation in the international and Australian context and what tools need to be developed to assist this?
• How can we better design deliberative ‘ideas’ using data and online analysis tools that will involve people in a meaningful and inclusive way in consequential goal-orientated political processes?

Approach and Outcomes:

The combination of theoretical groundwork, empirical study, and the design and implementation of the PIAS, will make an important contribution to the emerging body of research on the nature of political information on the Internet and in particular, the use of government data within it. Of chief significance is that the research will make explicit and open up to critical analysis the dichotomy between the availability of government and other data sources and effective online deliberative design. By consciously foregrounding information abundance as a condition of the present ‘information revolution’—through a unique fusion of political theory with semantic analysis and clustering tools—new perspectives will emerge and fresh research areas in design will open up.

The approach, then, is both innovative and unique because it combines the theoretical sophistication of Politics and Media Studies with the technical proficiency of Humanities Computing, eDemocracy, and Information Systems to expose important issues of online political information to critique in ways that were previously unavailable. [4] The work will open up theoretical and technological pathways towards a more genuinely identifiable (and sustainable) online political engagement and democratic structuring.

Technology and potential collaborators:

Potential collaborators for this work include the UK’s mysociety.org. They have developed some of the UK’s most well-know sites including TheyWorkForYou.com and its local derivative, OpenAustralia.org.  The open source solutions, API, raw data and results will be collaboratively developed and shared with mysociety and OpenAustralia to complete the PIAS. Likewise, solutions developed through the ‘inquiry into Improving Access to Victorian Public Sector Information and Data’ as well as the Federal ‘e-Government Strategy’ will be investigated and may provide potential collaborators. In essence the PIAS is a ‘parsing’ project; to parse structured government and other data sets to extract and deliver meaningful political information to a general audience. It will explore ways to crawl, cluster and analyse unstructured data contained in blogs and other ‘unofficial’ sources including video and audio (perhaps using XPROC processing).

The broad samples obtained through the PIAS iterative design workshops and subsequent prototype will provide a unique model to analyse web-based dialogue, agenda setting, and responses to official government positions on important political topics. This work may be up-scaled at a later date to include other collaborators; particularly the Pollsters who may be eager to invest in such a system.

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[1]One of the first major agencies to coin the term the ‘Data Deluge’ was the UK’s JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee):  Briefing Paper, Data Deluge: Preparing for the Explosion in Data, 1 November, 2004  <http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/briefingpapers/2004/pub_datadeluge.aspx> (Accessed 14 May, 2010).

[2] See: Clare Kurmond, Readership Decline Continues for Papers, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 14 Mat, 2010

< http://www.smh.com.au/business/media-and-marketing/readership-decline-continues-for-papers-20100513-v1tk.html> (Accessed 14 May, 2010).

[3]Interaction Design Evaluation Analysis (IDEA), Department of Information Systems, University of Melbourne,

< http://disweb.dis.unimelb.edu.au/research/interactiondesign//usability_lab.html> (Accessed 14 May 2010).

[4] Carson, L ‘Avoiding ghettos of like-minded people: Random selection and organisational collaboration’ in S. Schuman, (ed) Creating a Culture of Collaboration, ed. Jossey Bass/Wiley.pp.418-423.

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Materials: THATcamp London 2010

July 6, 2010 at 12:49 am · Filed under digital humanities

Thanks to Gabriel B for the information…(link THATCamp; London)

dataset	format(s)	size	availability	license
Archimedes Palimpsest transcriptions	XML: TEI P5	5.6 MB	http://www.archimedespalimpsest.net/	CC-BY
Archimedes Palimpsest images	TIFF	approx 1 TB	http://www.archimedespalimpsest.net/ or on HD	CC-BY
British Prints Database: http://www.bpi1700.org.uk	MySQL dump + online images	MySQL dump of metadata: 21.7 MB	CD; images http://image.cch.kcl.ac.uk/bpi/ (not to be redistributed)	CC-BY-NC
Centre for History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM) catalogues	bespoke XML + METS	145MB	CD	CC-BY-NC
Clergy of the Church of England: http://www.theclergydatabase.org.uk/index.html	MySQL dump	dump is 474 MB	CD	CC-BY
DEMOS (text of articles)	XML: TEI P5	2.4 MB	CD	CC-BY-NC-SA
Domesday/Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England project	Spreadsheet		CD	CC-BY-NC
Duke Databank + HGV + APIS (papyri transcriptions, translations + metadata)	XML: TEI P5 (EpiDoc)	2.2 GB	git clone http://idp.atlantides.org/git/idp.data.git/	CC-BY (except APIS)
Euripidies Scholia	pseudo-TEI P5	500 KB	http://euripidesscholia.org/sourceFiles/	CC-BY-NC-SA
Greek, Roman and Byzantine Pottery at Ilion	HTML, JPG, RDFa (+KML)	345 MB	http://classics.uc.edu/troy/grbpottery/	CC-BY-NC-ND
Hofmeister	TEI XML + Authority files	115MB +	http://www.hofmeister.rhul.ac.uk/2008/content/reference/thesaurus_download.html	CC-BY-NC-SA
Homer Multitext images	TIFF, JPEG2000, JPG, Pyramid TIFF, +c	>500 GB (TIFFs alone), several TB total	http://amphoreus.hpcc.uh.edu/	CC-BY-NC-SA
Inscriptions of Aphrodisias	XML: TEI P4 (EpiDoc)	6.6 MB	http://insaph.kcl.ac.uk/iaph2007/xml/inscriptions.zip	CC-BY
Inscriptions of Aphrodisias: feeds	Atom	2.2 MB	http://concordia.atlantides.org/examples/iaph2007.atom	CC-BY
Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania	XML: TEI P4 (EpiDoc)	10.2 MB	http://irt.kcl.ac.uk/irt2009/redist/inscr/irt2009_inscriptions.zip	CC-BY
Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania: feeds	Atom	2.2 MB	http://irt.kcl.ac.uk/irt2009/index.atom	CC-BY
Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania: geodata	KML	400 KB	http://irt.kcl.ac.uk/irt2009/redist/maps/tripolitania_earth.kml	CC-BY
Jonathan Swift Archive	bespoke XML	35 MB	CD	CC-BY-NC
Khirbat al-Mudayna al-Aliya excavations	Atom + images + structured data		http://ckan.net/package/khirbat-al-mudayna-al-aliya	CC-BY
Nineteenth Century Serials Edition	Plain text	2.6 GB	DVD	CC-BY
Nomisma.org (ancient coins)	RDFa (+KML)	2.3 MB	http://nomisma.org/nomisma.org.xml	CC-BY-NC
Old Bailey Transcripts	bespoke XML	> 1 GB	FTP	non-commercial (license required)
Perseus Greek and Roman texts	XML: TEI P4	340MB	http://nlp.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/opensource	CC-BY-NC-SA
Perseus Treebanks (grammatical markup)	XML	10 MB	http://nlp.perseus.tufts.edu/syntax/treebank/	CC-BY-NC-SA
Petra Great Temple Excavations	Images + KML + Atom		http://opencontext.org/sets/Jordan/Petra+Great+Temple	CC-BY
Prosopography of the Byzantine World	MySQL dump		CD	CC-BY
Stormont Papers (Hansard): text	XML	47 MB	CD	non-commercial (license attached)
Stormont Papers (Hansard): geodata	KML	78 MB	CD	non-commercial (license attached)
Victoria and Albert Museum Collections	JSON via webservice		API doc: http://www.vam.ac.uk/api	non-commercial (terms online)
Vision of Britain relational data (http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk)	postgres dump	2GB	DVD	CC-BY-NC-SA
Vision of Britain historic mapping	georeferenced rasters		http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/maps	(images not for redistribution)
WGBH OpenVault Vietnam interview transcripts	TEI with SMIL & RDF		internet access via OAI-PMH with Fedora repository at http://openvault.wgbh.org	non-commercial (terms online)
WW1 Poetry Archive	JPG + metadata CSV	60 MB sample; full >10 GB	sample on CD; remainder scrapable from http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit	non-commercial (license attache

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# tag at Digital Humanities 2010

July 6, 2010 at 12:20 am · Filed under digital humanities

#dh2010

This # will be used on Twitter and blog posts for the Digital Humanities 2010 Conference (including workshops; 5-10 July)

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