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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Who Killed the Electric Car (the Sinclair C5)…

April 7, 2009 at 9:51 am · Filed under gadfly, technology

This is a 1980s English version of an electric car; the Sinclair C5. (I think the term ‘car’ is quite generous as it looks more like a go-cart). I am told by my friend Simon at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities that it ran on a washing machine motor (and it was perhaps understandably a commercial disaster and only 12,000 were sold). No license (nor helmet) was required to ‘drive’ the C5. I found a number of them on eBay if you are game; here is a link from an enthusiast (link).

(from BBC web site)

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Google: global search trends

December 14, 2008 at 3:26 pm · Filed under governance, internet, open access, political communication, technology, web2.0

Google has released some of its search results. Releasing results like this is extremely important as it gives citizens access to some of the ‘meta-narratives’ that influence our lives. If large corporation such as Google only have acesss to these ‘meta-narratives’; it means that they can manipulate these trends and patterns to their own advantage (link)

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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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The (Opensource) Economy of Regard

August 3, 2007 at 2:09 am · Filed under digital humanities, humanities computing, open source, software, technology, web2.0

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

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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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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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BBC 15 Web Principles

March 14, 2007 at 9:14 pm · Filed under digital humanities, education, humanities computing, internet, media, social media, technology, web2.0

Tom Loosemore, the head of the BBC’s Web 2.0 project, talked at a conference that I gave a gave a demo of ICT Guides at yesterday (called the JISC Conference) on the BBCs web initiative. He has developed a set of good practice principles for the BBC’s Web 2.0 initiatives, which respects the web as a medium in its own right and not something to be civilised by ‘old media’.

Now if we could only get the academic community to stop imposing print publishing ‘ontologies’ on the Web and respect it as a medium in its own right!

1. Build web products that meet audience needs: anticipate needs not yet fully articulated by audiences, then meet them with products that set new standards. (nicked from Google) 2. The very best websites do one thing really, really well: do less, but execute perfectly. (again, nicked from Google, with a tip of the hat to Jason Fried)

3. Do not attempt to do everything yourselves: link to other high-quality sites instead. Your users will thank you. Use other people’s content and tools to enhance your site, and vicversasa.

4. Fall forward, fast: make many small bets, iterate wildly, back successes, kill failures, fast.

5. Treat the entire web as a creative canvas: don’t restrict your creativity to your own site.

6. The web is a conversation. Join in: Adopt a relaxed, conversational tone. Admit your mistakes.

7. Any website is only as good as its worst page: Ensure best practice editorial processes are adopted and adhered to.

8. Make sure all your content can be linked to, forever.

9. Remember your granny won’t ever use Second Life: She may come online soon, with very different needs from early-adopters.

10. Maximise routes to content: Develop as many aggregations of content about people, places, topics, channels, networks & time as possible. Optimise your site to rank high in Google.

11. Consistent design and navigation needn’t mean one-size-fits-all: Users should always know they’re on one of your websites, even if they all look very different. Most importantly of all, they know they won’t ever get lost.

12. Accessibility is not an optional extra: Sites designed that way from the ground up work better for all users

13. Let people paste your content on the walls of their virtual homes: Encourage users to take nuggets of content away with them, with links back to your site

14. Link to discussions on the web, don’t host them: Only host web-based discussions where there is a clear rationale

15. Personalisation should be unobtrusive, elegant and transparent: After all, it’s your users’ data. Best respect it (link to ToLoosemoreses blog)

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Enterprise Wiki

March 6, 2007 at 8:26 pm · Filed under social media, technology, web2.0, wiki

OK, lets kill email. Here is an article for the Age iin Melbourne about enterpirse wikis.

Sean Killeen works the wiki way.

Like many modern executives Mr Killeen – the head of global product management at Australian hearing implant maker Cochlear – gets hundreds of emails a day, half of which are destined for the Deleted Items folder, unread and unanswered.

But there is one email he searches for early every morning: the summary of changes to the in-house wiki.

Wiki (Hawaiian for “quick”) is well known as the technology behind the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. But it is also becoming a serious corporate tool (link)

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Fake your friends

February 27, 2007 at 8:09 pm · Filed under internet, social media, technology, web2.0

In the superficial world of online social networking, popularity has become a commodity that is bought and sold.
FakeYourSpace.com – a companion service for MySpace, Friendster and Facebook – will from March 1 allow customers to buy attractive “friends” for displaying on their profile pages (from the Melbourne Age).

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UK Government Restrictions on Street Photography

February 27, 2007 at 1:51 am · Filed under governance, political communication, politics, social media, software, technology, web2.0

(the software for No 10 was developed by MySociety.org)

Signing up to ask the Prime Minister to Stop proposed restrictions
regarding photography in public places

The UK Govt are about to propose restrictions on photography in
public places which could make street photography and documentary
photography against the law. There's a petition on the Downing St
website against the Government's proposals to restrict the use of
photography in public areas. Sign up to the petition now. (thanks to Nettime for the link)

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Photography/

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Fast Facts Found Online

February 23, 2007 at 8:41 pm · Filed under education, internet, media, open source, social media, technology, web2.0

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.

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Vidipedia

February 21, 2007 at 11:37 pm · Filed under media, social media, software, technology, video, web2.0

After 640-802, many professionals think that it is of no use to write 70-290 as well. This is why they skip it and go for 646-204 directly. Although this makes them eligible for 642-901 , but majority flunks the real exam.

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A wiki for video…check out this research at the the University of Newcastle (UK) in the field of ‘media computing’ within computer science (thanks to Tobias for the Link)

Releasing the hidden value contained in the tens of millions of hours of the world�s media archives is dependent on the widespread of these collections in order to facilitate access. However, archive owners are reluctant to commit to the costs of digitization until two key enablers occur: (a) A cost effective mechanism to annotate the collection such that potential users can search audio/video content to identify items that will satisfy their information need; and (b) A working business model that supports the costs of digitization by demonstrating new revenue streams as a result of making the collection available. The Vidipedia project seeks to address these needs by examining the potential for community based annotation and identifying a business model that supports it. The project will create a tool that will address the challenges of archiving, search and discovery for producers and consumers of multimedia content. Vidipedia will also enable interoperability at the semantic level between services and systems that support inter-enterprise.

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Fidel Castro Search Engine

February 19, 2007 at 7:29 pm · Filed under internet, media, political communication, politics, technology, web2.0

Cuba built an internet search engine that allows users to trawl through speeches by Cuban leader Fidel Castro and other government sites, but does not browse web pages outside the island. The search engine (www.infosoc.cu/buscador) unveiled at a conference last week underscored restrictions on internet access in communist-run Cuba, which the government blames on US trade sanctions (from the Age link)

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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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