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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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

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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A Day at Oxford

February 14, 2007 at 10:53 pm · Filed under education, humanities computing, technology

I spent yesterday at Oxford University learning XML-TEI. Oxford Computing Services has a number of fantastic courses and rather than simply being service-orientated-computing as in most institutions, the Oxford Computing Service has a research agenda as well (with a much deeper focus upon computing in the humanities). The course was taught by Lou Burnard; one of the founders of the TEI schema 20 years ago and founder of the Oxford Text Archive. Check out their ROMA system for generating TEI templates for use in XML editing applications such as OXygen.
I have never been to a university with it roots dating back to 1096 before and Oxford is unusual not only for it age (oldest university in the English speaking world) but also because it is a federation of self-governing colleges (sort of like the University of London but on a much smaller scale). There are some good pubs in Oxford, but the students wear slacks!

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What is UK e-science?

February 2, 2007 at 10:03 pm · Filed under education, humanities computing, technology

There is an active research community in the UK termed ‘e-science’. It has only been around for about 6 years (talk about emerging fields) and has already developed a pretty impressive portfolio of projects. E-science’s main goal is promote technologies and applications that work on the UK’s research grid (which is a high-speed and high-capacity national network to share resources and computational power). One example of the work of e-science is the Digital Curation Centre that provides techniques to manage the digital research output of scientists in the UK and internationally.

Where I work at the Arts and Humanities Data Service (ADHS) at King’s College in London, the Arts and Humanities e-science support centre seeks to promote e-science and the use of grid technologies in the Arts and Humanities. One such application are VREs or ‘Virtual Research Environments’ that assist Humanities researchers with online collaboration tasks. The centre also provides training and seminars (and other activities) to promote the use of the grid.

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Private Images and Public Debate

October 10, 2006 at 2:10 pm · Filed under internet, key points, politics, social media, technology, web2.0

(Published by myself in the Age , Opinion section today . The recent discovery of a number of videos of young Australian soldiers brandishing military weapons and skylarking on the popular video sharing system, Youtube, perhaps comes as no surprise given the shear volume of material now contained on services such as this. From the bedroom to the battlefield, increasing amounts of seemingly innocent everyday occurrences are now recorded and distributed by individuals not always aware of the context in which their productions may be received, reported upon and politicised. 

Read the rest of this entry »

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The Death of Email (Blog Art)

July 3, 2006 at 4:29 pm · Filed under art, blogs, internet, technology, web2.0

A lot has been said about the death of email. I don’t think that email will actually die, but it will probably fragment into more sophisticated systems and applications (if it hasn’t already). I had some rare spare time recently, so I made my very own ‘blog art’ called ‘the death of email’. I sifted though some of my oldest emails (ouch) and put something together. Anyway, here is is. http://www.craigbellamy.net/death

Also, here is a good article by Kevin Werback called ‘Death by Spam ‘.

One-third of the 30 billion e-mails sent worldwide each day are spam. That’s 10 billion daily pitches for herbal Viagra, Nigerian scams, and genital-enlarging creams piling up in our inboxes. Neither legislation nor litigation against spammers has stemmed the tide, and they’re not going to have much of an effect in the future, either. It’s time to give up: Despite the best efforts of legislators, lawyers, and computer programmers, spam has won. Spam is killing e-ma

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