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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What is VeRSI?

February 23, 2010 at 10:27 am · Filed under collaboration, data, e-science, eresearch

Overview of VeRSI from VeRSI on Vimeo.

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DHO Summer School 28 June – 2 July 2010, Trinity College, Dublin

February 22, 2010 at 10:26 am · Filed under collaboration, digital humanities, humanities computing

Registration is now open for the 2010 Summer School. Please see the registration page for further details.

The Digital Humanities Observatory in conjunction with NINES and the EpiDoc Collaborative is pleased to offer the DHO Summer School 2010. It will bring together 60 Irish and International humanities scholars undertaking digital projects in diverse areas to explore issues and trends of common interest. Workshops and lectures will offer attendees opportunities to develop their skills, share insights, and discover new opportunities for collaboration and research. Activities focus on the theoretical, technical, administrative, and institutional issues relevant to the needs of digital humanities projects today.
The full summer school package offers participants four week-long workshop strands to choose from, a second day–long workshop and two lectures all on innovative topics by leading experts and theorists in digital humanities with additional options of private consultation time with a digital humanities specialist and evening social activities.
For those unable to attend the full Summer School, it is possible to register for the one-day workshop and/or one or both of the lectures (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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Report back: ‘Tools for Scholarly Editing over the Web’ Birmingham, 24 September

September 29, 2009 at 7:04 pm · Filed under Virtual Reseach Environments, collaboration, digital humanities, e-science, eresearch, events, humanities computing

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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‘Tools for Collaborative Scholarly Editing over the Web’

September 7, 2009 at 12:41 pm · Filed under Virtual Reseach Environments, collaboration, digital humanities, digitisation, web2.0

University of Birmingham,24-25 September, 2009.

This workshop will review and address the making of tools for collaborative scholarly editing over the web. The workshop leaders joins partners in the COST-ESF Interedition project (http://www.interedition.eu), which is focussing – as is the JISC-funded Virtual Manuscript Room project — on Europe-wide creation of infrastructure and tools for collaborative scholarly editing. The Australian Aust-e-Lit project will bring advanced experience of the making and working of collaborative tools with in for a national scholarly digital library. The workshop will allow key participants in Interedition, Aust-e-Lit, and in similar enterprises outside Europe to exchange information with UK scholars active in the area, and to explore common problems and possibilities for further collaboration (link).

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eResearch Australasia Newsletter

September 7, 2009 at 10:20 am · Filed under Virtual Reseach Environments, collaboration, eresearch, web2.0

The eResearch field in Australasia produces a monthly newsletter to inform punters of developments in the field. It is published online and via email.

A monthly newsletter carrying items of interest to the Australasian eResearch community is published via the mailing list eresearch-announce@eresearch.edu.au and archived here.  If you would like to subscribe, send a plain text message to majordomo@eresearch.edu.au with the words subscribe eresearch-announce in the message body. You can unsubscribe at any time.

If you have an item you would like to include in the newsletter, please send it to newsletter@eresearch.edu.au.  The newsletter is published the first business day of each month, and submissions are due two business days prior to that.  Each item should be no more than 150 words of plain text with a link for further information (link to newsletter)

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Humanities text-mining in the Digital Library (MONK)

August 26, 2009 at 1:37 pm · Filed under Virtual Reseach Environments, collaboration, web2.0

Abstract

MONK (Metadata Offer New Knowledge) is a digital environment designed to help humanities scholars discover and analyze patterns in the texts they study. It supports both micro analyses of the verbal texture of an individual text and macro analyses that let you locate texts in the context of a large document space consisting of hundreds or thousands of other texts. Shuttling between the “micro” and the “macro” is a distinctive feature of the MONK environment, where you may read as closely as you wish but can also practice many forms of what Franco Moretti has provocatively called “distant reading.”

Website

http://www.monkproject.org/

Principal Investigator
John Unsworth
Funding
$999,883, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

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Survey: Virtual Reseach Environment Collaboartive Landscape Study

August 25, 2009 at 1:47 pm · Filed under Virtual Reseach Environments, collaboration, web2.0

What is a VRE?

“…a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) is an an online framework of collaborative tools and resources that allow researchers to share and re-use data, combine services, and undertake tasks to promote new collaborative research practices….”

The VRE Collaborative Landscape Study project is one of several studies commissioned by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to research on-line research collaboration in Virtual Research Environments (VREs). The focus of our study is to scope developments in VREs around the world and set them in relation to the activities in the UK.

The study aims to stimulate debate about the benefits of research collaboration facilitated by Virtual Research Environments so as to assist the JISC to provide services and strategies to support it.

The project is being undertaken by the Centre for e-Research at King’s College London and the Oxford e-Research Centre at the University of Oxford.

If you are a user, developer, or provide technical support for VREs, your input would be most welcome .

http://www.survey.bris.ac.uk/kcl/vrelandscape

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Christine Borgman lecture@OII

June 9, 2009 at 8:49 pm · Filed under collaboration, digital humanities, e-science, eresearch, humanities computing

Christine Borgman gave an interesting lecture at OII (Oxford Internet Institute)  recently (she is one of the Keynote speakers at this years Digital Humanities Conference.  One of the major points that I retained from this talk is that Data is not objective fact. Data is simply the ‘alleged evidence’ as one researchers observations may differ from anthers (this is almost always the case in the humanities). The lecture is available online.

Capturing and curating data for reuse is a key challenge of cyberinfrastructure: Christine Borgman compares developments in scholarly information infrastructure and cyberlearning, reflecting on the implications for scholarship in the digital age (link).

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Digital Humanities Observatory (DHO) wins NEH Grant

June 8, 2009 at 4:46 pm · Filed under Virtual Reseach Environments, collaboration, digital humanities, e-science, eresearch, web2.0

(The new Digital Humanities Observatory in Dublin has some innovative projects. This new ‘VRE’ (Virtual Research Environment) collaborative-style of project may be of interest to viewers).

A collaborative project between the Digital Humanities Observatory, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), and Indiana University Bloomington has been selected to receive a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Preservation and Access: Humanities Collections and Resources program (research and development focus). The project, Text-Image Linking Environment (TILE) will over two years develop a new web-based, modular, collaborative image markup tool for both manual and semi-automated linking between encoded text and image of text, and image annotation. Dot Porter, DHO’s Metadata Manager, will lead the team at the DHO.

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The Internet as Playground and Factory

June 5, 2009 at 11:26 am · Filed under Virtual Reseach Environments, collaboration, communuity informatics, conferences, web2.0

(This conference about Labour online may be of interest.  From my rudimentary understanding ‘free’ labour online is a fairly contentious issue as online labour may be pooled by large commercial interests and used to accumulate profit without distributing the fruits of this labour to users).

Dear all,

You can now join the discussion about topics of user “labor” related to the conference “The Internet as Playground and Factory.”

Introduction:
http://www.digitallabor.org/

Join the list and introduce yourself:
http://is.gd/OdX0

Follow the conference on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/idctweets

A few questions from the introduction:

* Is it possible to acknowledge the moments of ruthless exploitation while not eradicating optimism, inspiration, and the many instances of individual financial and political empowerment?

* What is labor and where is value produced?

* Are strategies of refusal an effective response to the expropriation of value from interacting users?

* How is the global crisis of capitalism linked to the speculative performances of the digital economy?

* What can we learn from the “cyber sweatshops” class-action lawsuit against AOL under the Fair Labor Standards Act in the early 1990s?

* How does this invisible interaction labor affect our bodies? What were key steps in the history of interaction design that managed to mobilize and structure the social participation of bodies and psyches in order to capture value?

* Most interaction labor, regardless whether it is driven by monetary motivations or not, is taking place on corporate platforms. Where does that leave hopeful projections of a future of non-market peer production?

best,
Trebor Scholz
– iDC

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New Group: Social Software in the Digital Humanities

June 1, 2009 at 2:25 pm · Filed under Virtual Reseach Environments, collaboration, e-science, education, social media, technology, tools, web2.0

(This new group on Arts-humanities.net may be of interest to punters.  It is primarily focussed upon ‘social software’ theory, techniques, and applications within the Digital Humanities.  As it is a new group, we are more than open about its skippering within the choppy Web 2 sea).

The aim of this group is to critically discuss and share thoughts about the use of social software applications, techniques, and principles within the Digital Humanities. Join this group here http://www.arts-humanities.net/deliberative_humanism_social_…

For the purpose of this group, the Digital Humanities is defied as the application of computational methods and associated tools to address specific humanities research problems. Distinct from general computing approaches, the banner term ‘Digital Humanities’ is an ‘attitude towards computing’ that is embedded within the research concerns of the disciplines and sub-fields that make up the humanities. The methods employed in the field may be used to uncover new knowledge about corpora or to visualise research data in such a way as to uncover additional insights and meaning. Succinctly the Digital Humanities (or Humanities Computing) is about structuring, analysing and communicating humanistic knowledge in a critical way using computing technology.

And as in many fields, the social and participatory architectural frameworks associated with ‘social software’ is increasing a part of the Digital Humanities. Social software is usually web-based and is a way for researchers to share data and research-labour that comprises of a series of debates about tool, socio-technical design, and concept choice. Social software may be one way to open up new styles of collaboration in the Digital Humanities between software developers, humanists, and audiences. Join in the conversation!

*Suggested topics may include*:

*Collaborative labour arrangements for researchers (collaborative work functions)

*Maintaining on-line communities

*APIs, web services, and mash-ups

*Trends in the blogosphere

*New Social Software Applications

*Community annotation and tagging

*Computer mediated communication

*Service oriented architecture

*Governance (bottom-up or top Down)

*Work-flow analysis

*Designing Research Deliberation

(This images; utilising a matrix approach to critically understanding Web 2.0 design can be found at the medienpaedagogik blog at: http://medienpaedagogik.kaywa.com/social-software/index.html )

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Podcast/Press Release: ‘HE in a Web 2.0 World’ report

June 1, 2009 at 1:50 pm · Filed under collaboration, communuity informatics, deliberation, digital humanities, eresearch, humanities computing, web2.0

JISC recently released a report on ‘Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World’. The aim of the report is to critically assess recent Web-based developments commonly termed ‘Web 2.0′ and assess them in relation to education and pedagogical practice. The report is available on-line and in hard-copy; plus some of the key findings are discussed in a podcast with David Melville, one of the report’s authors.

Some of the key findings of that report are that students may not be developing the critical skills to evaluate information and that ‘Web 2.0′ may be promoting shallowness. And although Melville discusses Web 2.0 as a solution to all sorts of social ills from those associated with multiculturalism and globalism to a ‘collaborative’ deficit in education, I do worry that the report itself is not critical enough as many technologies are produced within commercial and other contexts that may not have the unique interests of education in mind.

The report and podcast is available on the JISC website; discussions in this forum are most welcome.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2009/05/podcast80heinaweb

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How to improve your Twitter voice!

May 27, 2009 at 4:54 pm · Filed under collaboration, social media

I have to admit that my twitter voice could be a lot better.  I have just started ‘twitting’ and sort of get it, but don’t quite understand how twitter fits into the social world (and who reads it?).  Still, it is comforting to know that so many of my Digital Humanities colleagues have found my tweet address (and I suspect that this is because I feed my tweets  into my blog and facebook).

And I am watching a live seminar online at the moment from an ad agency that is demonstrating to charities and non-profit organisations how to use Twitter and other social media effectively.  I will get back to you on that one;  but the main thing to remember that social software is fundamentally about people so it helps if you are one in the first place (oh, and thanks to Andy W for the Tweet link).

The tag for the event is:  #NFPtweetup

And check out Twitter analyser. It is a way in analysing your twitter voice (or lack of one!) http://www.twitteranalyzer.com

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