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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The Digital Future is Now: A Call to Action for the Humanities

November 20, 2009 at 10:18 am · Filed under digital humanities, e-science

This paper is based upon the Keynote lecture given at Digital Humanities 2009 in Maryland, USA by Professor Christine Borgman (link).

ABSTRACT
The digital humanities are at a critical moment in the transition from a speciality area to a full-fledged community with a common set of methods, sources of evidence, and infrastructure – all of which are necessary for achieving academic recognition. As budgets are slashed and marginal programs are eliminated in the current economic
crisis, only the most articulate and productive will survive. Digital collections are proliferating, but most remain difficult to use, and digital scholarship remains a backwater in most humanities departments with respect to hiring, promotion, and teaching practices. Only the scholars themselves are in a position to move the field forward. Experiences of the sciences in their initiatives for cyberinfrastructure and eScience offer valuable lessons. Information- and data-intensive, distributed, collaborative, and multi-disciplinary research is now the norm in the sciences, while remaining experimental in the humanities. Discussed here are six factors for comparison, selected for their implications for the future of digital scholarship in the humanities: publication practices, data, research methods, collaboration, incentives, and learning. Drawing upon lessons gleaned from these comparisons, humanities scholars are “called to action” with five questions to address as a community: What are data? What are the infrastructure requirements? Where are the social studies of digital humanities? What is the humanities laboratory of the 21st century? What is the value proposition for digital humanities in an era of declining budgets? (original link to paper).

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Open Science and Data

November 10, 2009 at 11:00 pm · Filed under Virtual Reseach Environments, data, e-science, eresearch

As part of JISC’s ‘Research 3.0 – driving the knowledge economy’ activity
which launches at the end of November, a new Open Science report released
today trails key research trends that could have far-reaching implications for
science, universities and UK society.

The report written by UKOLN at the University of Bath and the Digital Curation
Centre, identifies open-ness, predictive science based on massive data
volumes and citizen involvement as being important features of tomorrow’s
research practice.

It is hoped that this document will stimulate and contribute to community
discussion in the UK, which is ranked second in the world for its output of
quality research, but also fuel the open science debate on the global stage.
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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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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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Scientific Collaborations on the Internet

August 12, 2009 at 3:32 pm · Filed under books, design, e-science, eresearch

(A fantastic book for e-Science buffs!)

Modern science is increasingly collaborative, as signaled by rising numbers of coauthored papers, papers with international coauthors, and multi-investigator grants. Historically, scientific collaborations were carried out by scientists in the same physical location—the Manhattan Project of the 1940s, for example, involved thousands of scientists gathered on a remote plateau in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Today, information and communication technologies allow cooperation among scientists from far-flung institutions and different disciplines. Scientific Collaboration on the Internet provides both broad and in-depth views of how new technology is enabling novel kinds of science and engineering collaboration. The book offers commentary from notable experts in the field along with case studies of large-scale collaborative projects, past and ongoing (link)

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JISC Projects start-up meeting: Information environment 2009-11 and Virtual Research Environment, Leicester, 8 July 2009.

July 9, 2009 at 2:58 pm · Filed under Virtual Reseach Environments, digital humanities, e-science, eresearch, humanities computing, social media, web2.0

The JISC Virtual Research Environment (VRE) III kick-off meeting was held at the University of Leicester 8-9 July 2009. Representatives from JISC attended as well as representatives from the projects that had won funding in the last JISC VRE III and Information Environments funding round. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/inf11/inf11startup.aspx

The highlight of the meeting was certainly the project presentation segment. New project presentations can be a pretty tedious affair, especially when there are 60 new projects, so even if each project had been given 5 minute to strut-their-stuff, it would have taken 5 hours! So rather than torture the audience for 5 hours, the JISC in its wisdom, allowed each project team a mere 30 seconds!
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what is the eSAD Project?

June 30, 2009 at 2:27 pm · Filed under digital humanities, e-science, humanities computing

(The magnifying glass is perhaps a form of ‘Interpretation Support System’.

The eSAD project is another ambitious and well-conceptualised project from AHRC-EPSRC-JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Initiative (sorry, an overly complicated set of acronyms here…my acronym is bigger than your acronym!)

Anyhow what particularly attracts me to this project is its use of the concept of a Interpretation Support System.  What I think this means is that the systems is designed to help researchers make decisions about what is presented to them on the screen and feed it back into the system. I like this a lot as it put the researcher’s tacit knowledge at the centre of the task because after all, the digital humanists are also tools in the digital humanities.

The Image, Text, Interpretation: e-Science, Technology and Documents project (also known as eSAD: e-Science and Ancient Documents) aims to use computing technologies to aid experts in reading ancient documents in their complex task. The four year project, being undertaken at the University of Oxford with input from University College London, is funded under the AHRC-EPSRC-JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Initiative, and will run until the end of 2011.

The project will work on creating tools which can aid the reading of damaged texts like the stilus tablets from Vindolanda. Furthermore, the project will explore how an Interpretation Support System (ISS) can be used in the day-to-day reading of ancient documents and keep track of how the documents are interpreted and read. A combination of image processing tools and an ontology based support system will be developed to facilitate experts by tracking their developing hypotheses.

The system will also suggest alternative readings (based on linguistic and palaeographic data) as they undertake the complex reading process, aiming to speed the process of understanding a text. The project also aims to investigate how the resulting images, image tools, and data sets can be shared between scholars.

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The influence of Web 2 on eResearch and computing infrastructures

June 16, 2009 at 3:28 pm · Filed under Virtual Reseach Environments, digital humanities, digitisation, e-science, humanities computing, web2.0

There is a lively debate in the UK about the influence of Web 2.o on eReseach and new computing research infrastructures.  The eScience institute in Edinburgh has a theme relating to this which is led by Professors Mark Baker and David De Roure.

The number of Web 2.0 services and applications, widely used by Internet users, academics, industry and enterprise, are growing rapidly, which demonstrates its solid foundations. These technologies and services are based on the open standards that underpin the Internet and Web, and are used in many forms, e.g. blogs, wikis, mashups, social websites, podcasting and content tagging. This field is having a significant impact on distributed infrastructure and applications, and on the way users and developers interact (link).

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eSI Public Lecture: “How Web 2.0 Technologies and Innovations are Changing e-Research Activities” by Mark Baker

June 12, 2009 at 2:46 pm · Filed under e-science, web2.0

(This lecture will be web-cast live and available on demand)

The e-Science Institute Public Lecture Announcement
—————————————————
The e-Science Institute is also delighted to host a public lecture by Prof.
Mark Baker. The public lecture is again open to all interested parties in
academia and industry. There is no need to register for this event and those
attending the lecture are invited to join us for tea and coffee at 17:00.

Speaker: Prof. Mark Baker
School of Systems Engineering
University of Reading

Topic: “How Web 2.0 Technologies and Innovations are Changing e-Research
Activities”

Date and Time: 16:00, 16 June 2009
Place: Newhaven Lecture Theatre
e-Science Institute
15 South College Street
Edinburgh
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/960/

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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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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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jill/txt writing with a little help from your friends

May 27, 2009 at 3:38 pm · Filed under blogs, digital humanities, e-science, eresearch, humanities computing, internet, web2.0

One of the blogs I try and read regularly is by Jill Walker’s from the University of Bergen in Norway .  Jill’s research is within the ‘new media’ field and in large, offers analysis of the use of popular technologies  such as blogs, wikis, and other social software applications within the public sphere (a blog about blogs) .  She is an active participant online and her well-written and insightful blog is well-know in the broader new-media research field  (I wish I had more time to write like this!).  Plus she has been a tireless blogger since 2000;  a good three years more than this blogger.

A recent post on ‘collaborative authoring’ caught my eye.  She is writing a article about social patterns that appear online through Time, Relationships, Context, and Geography.  I like how she relates these to trends to ’stories’ although I am still having a few problems making the leap;  perhaps it is because I am surrounded by people who insists on counting things! (link).

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