Crowd-sourcing the eCar

July 23, 2008 at 10:10 am · Filed under collaboration, web2.0

A Finnish internet community is seeking to apply the collective approach taken by online collaborators like the authors of Wikipedia to start converting used petrol-fuelled cars to electric ones, with the first roll-out due this year (link).

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Is academic ready for web 2.0:?

July 14, 2008 at 12:19 pm · Filed under collaboration, web2.0

As part of its development, the Pre-Raphaelite Resource digitisation project recently commissioned an audience research study to consult users about whether the inclusion of Web 2.0 features on a resource of this type would be useful or important to the education community. The report indicated that:

“there is some readiness among the education community for Web 2.0 technologies but only in the context of academia as a status-conscious, competitive environment. Whilst there are clear benefits to be achieved from providing teachers and students with the opportunity to share ideas in the context of stimulus artefacts, many hold reservations about ‘giving away’ their intellectual property.” (link)

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Workshop at eResearch Australasia: e-Research in the Arts, Humanities and Cultural Heritage

June 16, 2008 at 9:49 am · Filed under web2.0

Friday 3rd October, 2008

The workshop aims to stimulate discussions between the UK and Australasian arts, humanities and cultural heritage communities about the use of e-Research infrastructures, services, technologies and methodologies. To this end, it is soliciting contributions (both presentations and papers) on topics relevant to e-Research in an arts, humanities and cultural heritage context.

Details of the workshop and the submission process may be found at http://www.eresearch.edu.au/ahch-workshop

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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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HASS Workshop at UIUC

June 1, 2008 at 4:58 pm · Filed under web2.0

The SC08 Summer Workshop,Information-Rich Environments for Research and Teaching, will give Humanities, Arts, and Social Science faculty, researchers, and students the opportunity for focused dialogue on their research agendas and intensive hands-on experience for improving the quality of their work through access to advanced computing infrastructures and applications. Tools and applications to be considered include those provided by grid and cluster computing as well as social networking, analytic, and visualization technologies. Participants, under the guidance of technical experts, will explore how they can not only scale but transform their work and its potential impact by moving from personal computing to high performance computing; from two dimensional knowledge representations to three and four dimensional ones; from isolated research and learning processes to those fostering collaboration, interdisciplinary exchange, and resource sharing; and from data management to knowledgement management and discovery. The workshop will give HASS community members a springboard for envisioning how they might conduct innovative research and teaching in information-rich environments and provide them a concrete sense of how they can realize those visions, regardless of their institution size or degree of technical expertise (link).

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A scholarly digital edition of Codex Sinaiticus, published on the internet

May 28, 2008 at 1:25 pm · Filed under web2.0

Serious content from the world of Digital Humanities. This project is not on line as yet, but is part of a three year project.

This project will create a full scholarly digital edition of Codex Sinaiticus, one of the two oldest Greek Bibles and the oldest complete New Testament, arguably the most important of all surviving ancient manuscripts. It is part of a larger project to bring together all surviving leaves of the manuscript, divided among four different countries, into a virtual whole, and to provide access at every level from the general reader to the most advanced scholar. Within that larger project, this scholarly edition will focus on the needs of researchers, scholars, and educated readers, offering meticulous detail in image and transcript, with highly-developed tools in a sophisticated interface, to enable research hitherto impossible (link)

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Colleges, universities and the digital challenge

April 23, 2008 at 3:05 pm · Filed under web2.0

(From the Guardian Education Supplement)

Academic libraries are changing faster than at any time in their history. Information technology, online databases, and catalogues and digitised archives have put the library back at the heart of teaching, learning and academic research on campus.

This supplement starts with the expectations of young learners. The Google Generation Report, commissioned jointly by the British Library and the Joint Information Systems Committee (Jisc) - an independent, publicly-funded body supporting use of ICT in colleges and universities - found young people lacking in critical and analytical skills (link)

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Is writing this blog killing me?

April 7, 2008 at 2:22 pm · Filed under blogs, web2.0

The New York Times reports that two men were so obsessed with internet activity, their health was fatally damaged (Link)

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King’s College London, Centre for e-Research

April 3, 2008 at 3:42 pm · Filed under web2.0

Enhancing and Supporting e-Research King’s College London is pleased to announce the establishment of the KCL Centre for e-Research. Based in Information Systems and Services, the Centre will lead on building an e-research environment and data management infrastructure at King’s, seeking to harness the potential of IT to enhance research and teaching practice across the College. The Centre also has a remit to make a significant contribution to national, European and international agendas for e-research, and in particular to carry forward in a new context the work of the AHDS across the arts and humanities.

To that end, the Centre will incorporate the Arts and Humanities Data Service Executive and its related projects, thus providing a secure institutional framework for the projects, and a platform for developing future services and projects when funding for the AHDS ceases at the end of March 2008. The Centre will seek to carry forward the legacy of the AHDS and to use its expertise and skills to explore a new framework and funding model for the support of ICT based around communities of practice, a network of expert centres, and the emerging set of institutional repositories.

The Centre will be directed by Sheila Anderson, currently Director of the Arts and Humanities Data Service. Lorna Hughes (currently Manager of the Methods Network) and Mark Hedges (currently Technical Manager at the AHDS) will join the Centre as Deputy Directors.

Planning for the new Centre began on 1st October 2007 and a major launch event is planned for Spring 2008. Further information and news about the Centre and its activities will be released over the coming months.

Sheila Anderson

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Arts and Humanities Community Platform

April 3, 2008 at 3:41 pm · Filed under web2.0

This is a ‘community platform’ created for the digital arts and humanities community using the popular content management system Drupal. It is housed here at King’s in the Centre for eResearch (CeRch) (link).

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Google rolls out its Facebook killer

April 3, 2008 at 3:41 pm · Filed under web2.0

Google will offer internet developers an open system to create applications across websites, a move that could challenge the features behind the explosive popularity of social network Facebook. Google’s OpenSocial system gives developers standardised tools to build applications and embed them in many sites, eliminating the need for small startups or even one-person shops to customise their programs for each site (From the Melbourne Age, link)

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‘I get the feeling this isn’t about me!’

April 3, 2008 at 3:41 pm · Filed under web2.0

A good review from the Times Higher Education Supplement by William Dutton, head of the Oxford Internet Institute, on the book Republic.com 2.0 by Cass R Sunstein. Sunstein is arguing that too much information is bad for democracy (as I did in the recent paper I published for FastCapitalism. I proposed a way of designing for ‘information abundance’ and am also presenting a paper on this subject next week in Prato Italy at the Community Informatics Research Network Conference).

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Blogging live from Prato

April 3, 2008 at 3:41 pm · Filed under web2.0

I am at the Community Informatics Research Network conference (CIRN) at Prato in Italy. It is still early into the first day of the conference, but I think that the conference will be fruitful in terms of addressing the question that I came here to deliberate upon. This is how do we design software for use in a community context that can is both goal-orientated and deliberative? I am proposing a project to do this in the paper that I am presenting, and there are a lot of people here that have a wealth of experience in the use of social software in various community contexts. Many of the people here are involved in communities with low ‘technical capital’ and are using communication technologies for development and community engagement. I am interested the broader definition of community; such a ‘communities of practice’ and am also presenting a poster from the Methods Network at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College in London on ‘communities of practice’ and their attempt to create a virtual manifestation of this through the content management system Drupal.

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16-Billion Pixel Image of the Last Supper

April 3, 2008 at 3:40 pm · Filed under web2.0

After a week in Italy, this image seems appropriate (link)

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manage a Horse Racing stable!

April 3, 2008 at 3:40 pm · Filed under web2.0

Hi Craig, I’ve recently opened www.trackking.org , an online game in which you manage a Horse Racing stable. The game is FREE to register/play, and operates totally within your browser. The game is built in PHP/MySQL with a smattering of Javascript, and utilises a Flash app which renders XML into a visual output of each race. In the game you can buy/sell horses on Auction, breed and train horses, hire and fire jockeys and general staff, juggle your finances, compete in ‘League’ style racing, Cups and Stakes races, bet virtual money on horses, chat in Forums, and generally socialise between your racing engagements/decisions! The game is easy to learn, yet will take time to slowly build your stable up, progressing through “Leagues” at any one of hundreds of tracks around the world in a bid to become one of the most prestigious stable. The game is open 24 hours a day, and there’s always some racing or training updates about to happen. It is a very rich environment, and makes the perfect “office toy” - it’s the type of thing that you can spend as little as a few minutes a week, or as long as you want on other weeks, in order to manage your stable effectively. It’s designed so that you can be reasonably successful with a minimal amount of “targeted” action, or be obsessively competitive by researching opposition thoroughly!! “Track King” ( http://www.trackking.org/ ) currently has about 275 members from all around the world (approximately half of the user base being Australian) - but my goal is to reach a size about 1,000 times as large! Come check the site out - if you enjoy it, please tell a friend or two! Hope to see you online soon! Tony Carbone http://www.trackking.org/

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