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)
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)
An excellent article about why the open source software movement works by Dalle, David, Ghosh, and Wolak and presented 2 years ago at the Oxford Internet Institute.
http://siepr.stanford.edu/programs/OpenSoftware_David/Economy-of-Regard_8+_OWLS.pdf
This workshop is being held as part of the Open Grid Forum in Manchester next Monday May 5.
Andreas Aschenbrenner (TextGrid), Stephen Beck (HASS-RG), Tobias Blanke (AHeSSC), Allison Clark (HASS-RG), Stuart Dunn (AHeSSC), Peter Gietz (TextGrid), Mark Hedges (AHDS)
The first session will be a Birds of a Feather session - presenting the work of TextGrid in Germany, the Arts and Humanities e-Science Initiative in the UK, and related projects in the US.
The second session will discuss how to cooperate better on emerging standards and tools for eHumanities and eArts.
In the first session interested projects present their work, find common interests, discuss about desirable service structures for research in the Arts and Humanities, and detect areas of standardization needs.
Agenda:
Session contributors include:
- David de Roure (Southampton) will speak about the usage of Semantic Grid technologies in musicology research support
- Andreas Aschenbrenner (University of Goettingen, TextGrid) will introduce the concept of e-Humanities and the new European research infrastructure to support arts and humanities research (http://www.dariah.eu)
- Peter Gietz (TextGrid) will present the work at TextGrid (http://www.textgrid.de), a virtual workbench to support research in textual studies
- Alex Voss (NCeSS) will present on collaboration support for virtual research communities (link).
TaPOR, the distributed text analysis system being developed in Canada has some fantastic notes (or recipes) on studying electronic texts.
This page describes common or interesting sequences of actions, or recipes, for the TAPoR portal. They are organized according to the objective of the recipe. Recipes fall into the three categories of location and identification of ideas, themes or specific terms; analysis of textual devices or themes; or the construction of new entities or corpus. There are also a set of three tutorial recipes included to introduce three common and specific tasks using TAPoR Tools.
The TAPoR community benefits from shared experience and learning how others make use of the portal. You can share your experience by adding your own recipes to the collection. More information about recipe and exercise structure and authoring is available on the RecipeStructure page.
If you feel you can improve a recipe, or find a problem with an existing recipe, please edit the existing recipe and indicate your name and the date at the bottom of the modified recipe or exercise. To edit a recipe you must be registered with TADA, but this is a relatively painless task and can be accomplished simply by messaging St้fan Sinclair. If you have hints, tips or would simply like to comment on how a recipe has worked for you, please add a comment at the bottom of the page in the comments box. This does not require a TADA account (link).
This article appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald today. There is a small quote from myself on the use of Wikipedia for research.
David Adams talks to four Australians who have helped to build the collaborative online giant that is Wikipedia.
For many people, the days when checking a fact meant taking a dusty encyclopedia volume off a shelf are gone. Now their first port of call is a collaborative internet site such as Wikipedia that not only provides a constantly expanding and updated resource but allows you to change information or add to the entry.
Founded in 2001 by US internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia has become one of the most popular websites in the world.
With entries on everything from the Azerbaijani people to Zeppelin airships, the Wikipedia juggernaut had 1.6 million articles on its English-language site by the start of December. To get an idea of how fast it’s expanding, Wikipedia grew by 30 million words in July alone.
Mr Carsen discovered the site while surfing the web early last year and decided to start contributing after finding gaps in information about Melbourne’s suburbs.
He spends three or four hours each week contributing to whatever subject happens to catch his interest, whether it’s the Nokia 6820 mobile phone (he owns one) or AFL-related subjects. A Collingwood supporter, he is a member of the Wikiproject expounding on all things AFL.
Look at his entry on United Petroleum, for example. Mr Carsen decided to write it after noting that his local servo sold CSR ethanol-enhanced fuel. “I typed it into Wikipedia and there was nothing about it so I figured, ‘OK, I might as well make an article about it’,” he says.
However, while Mr Carsen describes the site as “really the best source of information available to anybody today”, Craig Bellamy, who teaches media and communications at Melbourne University, says while Wikipedia might be a good place to start your research, it’s “not a good place to end it”.
“The term ‘encyclopedia’ doesn’t always sit well with me,” Dr Bellamy says. “Wikipedia is really good for technical stuff, if you’re building a website for example, and it’s really good for popular culture - you know, references to the history of Pacman - but with the sort of scholarly stuff that encyclopedias traditionally included, it’s not as strong in those areas.” (link)
Based at Oxford University, OSS Watch advices UK higher ed on the use of open source software (link)
OSS Watch promotes awareness and understanding of the legal, social, technical and economic issues that arise when educational institutions engage with free and open source software. It does this by providing unbiased advice and guidance to UK higher and further education.
This foundation based in South Africa is doing some very interesting work with Open Source software.
‘If we are to lift Africa from her current circumstances, we will need a generation of learners that are gifted with curiosity about the world in which they live, and the tools to understand and shape that world’
(link)
OSFlash is a watering hole for open source Flash developers and users to meet, talk about and contribute to new and existing open source projects for the Flash Platform.OSFlash supports the development community by providing open source projects with free source code hosting and project management tools as well as a web presence on the OSFlash wiki.As such, we provide a service that is similar to other sites such as SourceForge but perhaps in a smaller, more intimate setting that is focused on open source projects for the Flash Platform (link).
