I attended the OpenTech ’09 forum on Saturday; organised by the UK Unix Users Group and friends at the University of London Union (ULU). For those interested in the social and political aspects of computing; this is an excellent forum to discuss new modes of political communication, privacy, advocacy and other issues that arise from the broader computing movement. There was an excellent talk on the two cultures of science/technology and the humanities from Bill Thompson who compared CP Snow’s pioneering work to present social circumstances. Bill basically argued that technological literary needs to rise considerably; especially in the political classes, otherwise we are doomed! He argued that many people in senior positions (as well as the broader public) do not understand the ‘power in code’ and this is perhaps why so many large government systems have failed in the UK (I just ordered CP shows book on Amazon for 10 quid).

Another interesting session was from a representative from the Guardian newspaper who discussed their experience of reporting the Ian Tomlinson death at the G20 protests earlier this year. The speaker explained how the video footage was released immediately  on the web rather the usual slower way through the print-edition. Although the analysis of this technique was not well communicated by the speaker, he did made the interesting observation that the Guardian in this instance had used their online distributing power to ‘crown source’ news rather than simply publish it. They had allowed others to use the video of Tomlinson’s death in Blogs and Youtube etc. rather than slowly releasing it thorough the print edition.

Another speaker from the Guardian talked about the paper’s very bold initiative to make much of their data open to the public. They have RSS feeds, an API system, and a sophisticated tagging system. I found their DataBlog one of the most interesting initiatives in that many of the facts that are researched by journalists have been aggregated for later use and open to the public. http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog

The Guardian’s initiative to crowd source the expenses claims-documents of MPS was also discussed; along with the limitations and opportunities of this approach. http://mps-expenses.guardian.co.uk/

Although the author of this blog does not condone the use of police batons for sexual pleasure, the author does believe that Copyright legislation, especially as it manifests itself in the US, does not support artistic endeavours, cultural nor technical innovation.  The balances are all wrong. I particularly recommend the work of Stanford’s Laurence Lessig and the Creative Commons initiative.

Many artists, including my good friend Andrew Garton, advocate the use of Creative Commons as an alternative means to combat the innovation lock-down of corporate bully boys.

And although this history is somewhat simplified (and US centric); do a search on the history of FM radio online.  This tragic history has many parallels with the history of file swapping (link).

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)

http://siepr.stanford.edu/programs/OpenSoftware_David/Economy-of-Regard_8+_OWLS.pdf

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).

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 Stéfan 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).

David Adams talks to four Australians who have helped to build the collaborative online giant that is Wikipedia.

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.

‘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)