Online Democratic Deliberation in a Time of Information Abundance

September 14, 2007 at 11:17 pm · Filed under collaboration, communuity informatics, deliberation, design, digital humanities, gemeinschaft, governance, humanities computing, political communication, politics, social media, software, web2.0

This article of mine recently appeared in the journal, Fast Capitalism.

The intensified use of the Internet by civil society groups and governments for political purposes has left many questions unexplained—especially in terms of the Internet’s effects upon deliberative democratic processes. The Internet was first imagined as a means to revitalize deliberative processes. However, poor design and lack of usability research meant that many ambitions went largely unrealized. With a new wave of Internet technologies, ‘deliberative design’ has become even more important to stem what many claim is a trend towards political fragmentation and disaggregation. In a time of ‘information abundance’ mounting political communication online may also undermine collectivist, deliberative democratic processes, distinct from the ambition to renew these processes. There is therefore a pressing need to design Internet technologies that serve deliberative democracy, rather than unwittingly undermine it (link)

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Cyberinfastructure for Collaboration and Innovation (selected papers)

August 3, 2007 at 2:41 am · Filed under collaboration, communuity informatics, deliberation, design, humanities computing, web2.0

selected papers from the conference 29-30 January 2007 (link to First Monday)

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How to create a virtual museum

July 5, 2007 at 1:04 am · Filed under design, digital humanities, humanities computing, hypertext

A good introductory article from the Relics and Selves Archive produced here at King’s College.

This virtual exhibition originated with the idea of deconstructing the rarefied and sanctified museum atmosphere, and thus subvert the order and cataloguing of objects which were important to the consolidation of national imaginaires in 1880s Argentina, Brazil and Chile. The Relics and Selves project, then, seeks to take these items out of their cases and the order imposed on them, so that visitors themselves can un-order and re-order them. Using database and Internet technology, we can bring together thousands of images it would be impossible to handle via traditional publication methods (link).

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CHArt (COMPUTERS AND THE HISTORY OF ART) TWENTY-THIRD ANNUAL CONFERENCE

May 28, 2007 at 11:47 pm · Filed under art, conferences, design, digital humanities, events, history, humanities computing, web2.0

DIGITAL ARCHIVE FEVER

Thursday 8 - Friday 9 November 2007
Central London Venue to be confirmed

Museums, galleries, archives, libraries and media organisations such as publishers and film and broadcast companies, have traditionally mediated and controlled access to cultural resources and knowledge. What is the future of such ‘top-down’ institutions in the age of ‘bottom-up’ access to knowledge and cultural artifacts through what is generally known as Web 2:0 - encompassing YouTube, Bittorrent, Napster, Wikipedia, Google, MySpace and more. Will such institutions respond to this threat to their cultural hegemony by resistance or adaptation? How can a museum or a gallery or, for that matter, a broadcasting company, appeal to an audience which has unprecedented access to cultural resources? How can institutions predicated on a cultural economy of scarcity compete in an emerging state of cultural abundance?

For the twenty-third CHArt conference we are looking for papers that reflect upon these issues, particularly in relation to visual culture. We particularly welcome contributions from those working in either ‘traditional’ cultural organisations or those involved in new forms of cultural access and distribution.

We welcome contributions from all sections? of the CHArt community: Art Practice; Art History; Museums; Galleries; Curation; Archives; Libraries; Education; Media and Broadcast Production; Cultural Assets Management and Access; Hardware; Software; Theory.

CHArt also hopes to offer a bursary scheme again this year (supported by the AHRC ICT Methods Network) to Post Graduate students presenting papers.

Please email submissions (a three hundred word synopsis of the proposed paper with brief CV of presenter/s and other key figures) by 30 June 2007 to Hazel Gardiner (hazel.gardiner@kcl.ac.uk).

Dr Charlie Gere
Chair, CHArt

CHArt
c/o Centre for Computing in the Humanities Kings College, University of London Kay House
7 Arundel Street
WC2R 3DX

- CALL FOR PAPERS - DEADLINE EXTENDED TO 30 JUNE 2007 -? CALL FOR PAPERS -

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Spam Trap

April 3, 2007 at 2:06 am · Filed under art, design

Thanks to Bill Shackelford for the link (I like this project a lot).

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2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web

April 2, 2007 at 11:10 pm · Filed under deliberation, design, events, web2.0

A European conference for you pragmatic deliberators out there.

THE PRAGMATIC WEB CONFERENCE is a unique forum to envision and debate how the emerging social, semantic, multimedia Web mediates the ways in which we construct shared meaning. While there is much research and development into topics relevant to this challenge such as collaboration, usability, knowledge representation, and social informatics, the Pragmatic Web conference provides common ground for dialogue at the nexus of these topics.

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Summit on Digital Tools in the Humanities

February 16, 2007 at 11:35 pm · Filed under design, e-science, education, events, humanities computing, software, technology, web2.0

This site from IATH (the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities) at the University of Virginia contains the findings of a summit held in 2006 about digital tools in the humanities. The report is excellent reading; and points to the need for innovations in the humanities such as ICT Guides (link)

Digital tools are enabling and enriching scholarship in the humanities to a great extent. Within the past few years, humanities scholars have begun to design, develop, and apply digital tools for their own scholarship. Both the tool-building and tool-using communities are growing, and there is a need for a summit that can assess the state of development of digital tools for humanities research, as well as the effectiveness of the supporting and integrating cyberinfrastructure.

What defines a digital tool? How are they used by the humanities community? What are the best tools? What tools are missing? How can we develop a common vocabulary so that we can develop and share tools across various communities? What does the community need to do so that these tools are more interoperable? What are the grand challenges for building digital tools for humanities research?

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What is a good Digital Humanities project?

February 8, 2007 at 9:51 pm · Filed under design, humanities computing

If you were wondering what a good Digital Humanities projects is, then check out the LAIRAH project at University College London that has produced a succinct check list: (link)

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Usability Design for e-Science

February 3, 2007 at 12:30 am · Filed under design, e-science, humanities computing, internet

This report funded by JISC is an audit of the ‘human factor’ in the design of e-science applications. It is for a specialst audience, but other designers may be able to gleen some useful key points from the work (link).

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