Digital copyright: it’s all wrong

June 11, 2008 at 9:40 pm · Filed under creative commons, internet, open source, social media

A draft treaty proposes draconian measures to protect copyright.

THE forces of reaction are fighting back. As they often do, they are carrying out their planning in secret, in the knowledge that if more people knew of their activities they would not be allowed to get away with it (link)

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Project Bamboo

June 5, 2008 at 1:05 pm · Filed under collaboration, digital humanities, e-science, eresearch, humanities computing, internet, web2.0

Bamboo is a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary, and inter-organizational effort that brings together researchers in arts and humanities, computer scientists, information scientists, librarians, and campus information technologists to tackle the question:

How can we advance arts and humanities research through the development of shared technology services? (link)

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JISC Conference 2008: Enabling innovation

April 9, 2008 at 11:03 am · Filed under digital humanities, e-science, events, humanities computing, internet

Start date: 15 April 2008 09:00

End date: 15 April 2008 16:00

Venue: International Convention Centre, Birmingham

Follow the conference online

If you’re not attending the conference, you can follow what’s happening on the day (15 April) with:

• Live video-streaming⁵ of the opening and closing keynote speeches
• Conference social networking site⁶ so you can network online
• Micro-blogging of the parallel sessions (Twitter) conference tag: jiscconference08
• Live image sharing of the conference day (Flickr)
• Podcasts of interviews and recordings of parallel sessions

Plus, after the conference there will be:

• Screencasts of parallel session presentations (PowerPoint and audio – Slideshare)
• Videos of some of the more popular parallel sessions

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Developing the UK’s e-infrastructure for science and innovation

October 12, 2007 at 1:01 am · Filed under collaboration, creative commons, digital humanities, e-science, education, humanities computing, internet, open source, technology, tools, web2.0

Produced by the Office of Science and Innovation (OSI) e-Infrastructure Working Group, the report - Developing the UK’s e-infrastructure for science and innovation - sets out the requirements for a national e-infrastructure to help ensure the UK maintains and indeed enhances its global standing in science and innovation in an increasingly competitive world (link)

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Texts into databases: The Evolving Field of New-style Prosopography

July 20, 2007 at 8:12 pm · Filed under digital humanities, humanities computing, internet

This is a paper delivered by Harold Short and John Bradley at the ACH/ALLC conference Athens Georgia 2003

At King’s College London, we are embarked on three major historial projects that violate almost all of the guidelines evidently considered to be fundamental by Townsend, Chappell and Struijy� for an appropriate application of relational database technology. The Prosopography of the Byzantine Empire (PBE) (recently renamed Prosopography of the Byzantine World — PBW), the Prosopography of Anglo-saxon England (PASE), and the Clergy of the Church of England Database (CCE) (All are funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Board) run as collabroative projects between King’s Centre for Computing in the Humanities and discipline specialist at King’s and elsewhere. The goals of these three projects are ambitious. PBE’s goal is “to record in a computerised relational database all surviving information about every individual mentioned in Byzantine sources during the period from 641 to 1261, and every individual mentioned in non-Byzantine sources during the same period who is ‘relevant’ (on a generous interpretation) to Byzantine affairs.” (from website, see references). PASE’s aim is “to provide a comprehensive biographical register of recorded inhabitants of Anglo-Saxon England (c. 450-1066).” (from website). CCE intends to create a “database of clergymen of the Church of England between 1540 and 1835″. (from website). These three projects, then, are all broadly prosopographical in orientation and, if we apply Digitising History’s guidelines, seem inappropriate for relational database technology, indeed for PBW and PASE perhaps extremely so (link).

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A Blog Philosophy

July 20, 2007 at 12:33 am · Filed under art, blogs, collaboration, communuity informatics, digital humanities, humanities computing, hypertext, internet

If a blog can have a philosophy, then the philosophy of this blog is that there is nothing particularly radical about the new. The new may be radical to some, but the new can only be new in the context of the old (or their ‘old’). Some of the old may be threatened by the new, but then again if the new isn’t new, the the old is only threatened by what it already knows, or what it has already learnt the hard way (remember Nuremberg). The new never follows what is new, the new leads in the context of ‘olds’ and what it keeps is a sign of how civilised it is, and what it discards, is often a sign of how lazy it is.

Few things are truly new and even the ‘new’ has a history of ‘newness’. Thus finding what is new and applying it to positive and progressive tasks, is far from a walk in the park. A blog is not an end in itself, it is a way of gaining perspective over-time, a cognitive perspective on what is new, what is useful, and how this can progress our knowledge (and make it new). Fundamental to the advancement of knowledge, is moving through knowledge, sharing knowledge, and imparting an alternative perspective to those who don’t look for it and to those who should.

What is new about new media, the Internet, and hypertext? It depends who you ask. In that famous line from 1972, Henry Kissinger asked the Chinese Foreign Minister, Zhou Enlai, for his views on the French Revolution of 1789. He responded, “It’s too soon to tell.”

Blog on, we might learn something.

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The world’s most hated blogger

June 19, 2007 at 7:44 pm · Filed under blogs, internet, politics, social media, web2.0

The man known on the internet as “the world’s most hated blogger” is cooling his heels at an undisclosed location near Sydney, working on a way to climb back out of the very deep hole he now finds himself in (link)

From the Melbourne Age

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Report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences

June 6, 2007 at 2:31 am · Filed under digital humanities, humanities computing, internet, web2.0

“Cyberinfrastructure” is more than just hardware and software, more than bigger computer boxes and wider pipes and wires connecting them. The term was coined by NSF to describe the new research environments in which high-performance computing tools are available to researchers in a shared network environment. These tools and environments are being built, and the ACLS feels it is important for the humanities and social sciences to participate in their design and construction. Of course, scholarship already has an infrastructure: that infrastructure consists of the libraries, archives, and museums that preserve information; the bibliographies, finding aids, and concordances that make that information retrievable; the journals and university presses that distribute the information; and the editors, librarians, archivists, and curators who link the operation of this structure to the scholars who use it. This infrastructure was built over centuries, with the active participation of scholars (link).

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What is InscriptiFact?

June 3, 2007 at 1:35 am · Filed under digital humanities, e-science, education, history, humanities computing, internet

I am at the e-science earlier adopters forum for Arts and Humanities researchers at NCSA (the National Centre for Supercomputer Applications)� where this project is being presented. It is possible to search the photographs in this project by inscription. Pretty nifty huh?

The InscriptiFact Project is a database designed to allow access via the Internet to high-resolution images of ancient inscriptions from the Near Eastern and Mediterranean Worlds. The target inscriptions are some of the earliest written records in the world from an array of international museums and libraries and field projects where inscriptions still remain in situ. Included are, for example, Dead Sea Scrolls; cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia and Canaan; papyri from Egypt; inscriptions on stone from Jordan, Lebanon and Cyprus; Hebrew, Aramaic, Ammonite and Edomite inscriptions on a variety of hard media (e.g., clay sherds, copper, semi-precious stones, jar handles); and Egyptian scarabs. These ancient texts represent religious and historical documents that serve as a foundation and historical point of reference for Judaism, Christianity, Islam and the cultures out of which they emerged (link).

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What is Internet 2

May 18, 2007 at 8:06 pm · Filed under digital humanities, humanities computing, internet, social media, stubs, technology, web2.0

Ok, you have heard of Web 2.0, but what about Internet 2.0? Internet 2 is a new style of high-capacity networking.

Internet2 is working with Level 3 Communications to provide the U.S. research and education community with a dynamic, innovative and cost-effective hybrid optical and packet network. The new network is designed to provide next-generation production services as well as a platform for the development of new networking ideas and protocols. With community control of the fundamental networking infrastructure, the new Internet2 Network will enable a wide variety of bandwidth-intensive applications under development at campuses and research labs today. The new network is one component of Internet2�s �systems� approach to developing and deploying advanced networking for the research and education community: Network Technologies, Middleware, Security, Performance Measurement, Community Collaboration (link).

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International Workshop on Virtual Research Environments and Collaborative Work Environments

May 18, 2007 at 1:52 am · Filed under conferences, digital humanities, e-science, events, humanities computing, internet, web2.0

The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers working in the areas of virtual research environments¹ (VREs) and collaborative work environments (CWEs). Both concepts are characterised as providing consistent and dependable work environments for particular kinds of work organisation, emphasising the dynamic establishment of collaborative work contexts between independent partners. Further aspects such as the mobility of work activities and requirements such as security and confidentiality also play a role in both concepts. Despite these similarities, it would seem that the development of research programmes and the establishment of research communities within these fields has to date progressed independently. As a consequence, there is a danger of wasteful duplication of effort, conceptual divergence and technical incompatibility. The workshop�s aim is to address these concerns by soliciting contributions from the research community dealing with topics such as (link).

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Darwin’s letters on the Web

May 17, 2007 at 6:52 pm · Filed under digital humanities, history, humanities computing, internet

The AHDS (Arts and Humanities Data Service) provided some of the initial advice for this project. And boy did Charles Darwin write a lot of letters!

Evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin thought the voyage of the Beagle was a “magnificent scheme” allowing him to spend time “larking round the world”. His delight at the five-year cruise is chronicled in a letter, available online for the first time.The note is one of nearly 5,000 from and to the scientist held in a database at the University of Cambridge (link to BBC).

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Video Google: A Text Retrieval Approach to Object Matching in Videos

April 20, 2007 at 9:37 pm · Filed under art, digital humanities, humanities computing, internet, video, web2.0

We will demonstrate an approach to object and scene retrieval which searches for and localizes all the occurrences of a user outlined object in a video. The object is represented by a set of viewpoint invariant region descriptors so that recognition can proceed successfully despite changes in viewpoint, illumination and partial occlusion. The temporal continuity of the video within a shot is used to track the regions in order to reject unstable regions and reduce the effects of noise in the descriptors. The analogy with text retrieval is in the implementation where matches on descriptors are pre-computed (using vector quantization), and inverted file systems and document rankings are used. The result is that retrieval is immediate, returning a ranked list of key frames/shots in the manner of Google (link)

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Scrap the internet, start over

April 16, 2007 at 6:49 pm · Filed under internet, technology

This will never happen; but interesting story none the same (from the Melbourne Age)

Although it has already taken nearly four decades to get this far in building the internet, some university researchers with the US federal government’s blessing want to scrap all that and start over.
The idea may seem unthinkable, even absurd, but many believe a “clean slate” approach is the only way to truly address security, mobility and other challenges that have cropped up since UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock helped supervise the first exchange of meaningless test data between two machines on September 2, 1969 (link).

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Ted Nelson (1965): Complex information processing: a file structure for the complex, the changing and the indeterminate

March 16, 2007 at 9:31 pm · Filed under digital humanities, humanities computing, hypertext, internet, journals, social media, web2.0

This paper written in 1965 by Ted Nelson is one of the most famous in the history of the computer revolution. It introduces his concept of ‘hypertext’ (or links); the central concept of the web. Also, you may wish to read this 1995 article in Wired magazine called ‘the Curse of Xanadu‘; looking at the history of Ted Nelson and his project. One of the companies that they refer to in the article, Autodesk, funded Nelson for quite sometime at the same time I was working for them.

THE KINDS OF FILE structures required if we are to use the computer for personal files and as an adjunct to creativity are wholly different in character from those customary in business and scientific data processing. They need to provide the capacity for intricate and idiosyncratic arrangements, total modifiability, undecided alternatives, and thorough internal documentation. I want to explain how some ideas developed and what they are. The original problem was to specify a computer system for personal information retrieval and documentation, able to do some rather complicated things in clear and simple ways. In this paper I will explain the original problem. Then I will explain why the problem is not simple, and why the solution (a file structure) must yet be very simple. The file structure suggested here is the Evolutionary List File, to be built of zippered lists. A number of uses will be suggested for such a file, to show the breadth of its potential usefulness. Finally, I want to explain the philosophical implications of this approach for information retrieval and data structure in a changing world (link)

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