This is a project in which I was involved over the weekend at GovHack (in Melbourne). It was a really good event. The two guys in the video did all the hard work; I was the story teller (and was at a wedding most of the weekend whilst they did all the coding).
The Demo is here:
Also, check out the other entries:
What Party Am I from Bryce on Vimeo.
Last night something pretty bad happened.
We lost a friend,
All shocked and broken,
Shut down, exploded.
JED-E3 is what we first called him.
Then it was “Jed,”
But Jed’s system’s dead.
Therefore, so’s Jed.
We assembled him in the Kitchen,
Made out of this and
Made out of that and
Whatever was at hand.
When we finished Jed we were so proud.
We celebrated,
We congratulated,
At what we’d created.
Jed could run or walk, sing or talk, and
Compile thoughts, and
Solve lots of problems.
We learned so much from him.
A couple years went by and something happened.
We gave Jed less attention.
We had new inventions.
We left for a convention.
Jed had found our booze and drank every drop.
He fizzled and popped,
He rattled and knocked,
Finally he just stopped.
(Grandaddy)
The Australasian Association for Digital Humanities (aaDH) is pleased to announce that Perth, Western Australia, has been selected as the location for the second Digital Humanities Australasia conference.
“DHA2014: Expanding Horizons” will be held 18–21 March 2014, co-hosted by The University of Western Australia and iVEC. The local organisation committee will be chaired by Professor Jenni Harrison of iVEC and the program committee chaired by Professor Hugh Craig, aaDH and The University of Newcastle.
The Call for Papers for DHA2014 will be posted soon.
There are some really interesting political developments at the moment in Australia. And I suppose they are digital humanities related in someways, at least in terms of making humanities (ie. political) information more widely available in new and challenging ways on the Internet. And I do worry that the humanities in Australia has become bogged down in a 1960s style politics that conveniently aligns with a certain time in US hegemony, but hasn’t really developed the intellectual nor digital tools to confront the complex and challenging international information-politics of today (ie. the politics of engaging with digital technologies on our own terms at the highest possible level so we can tell the nation’s stories political or otherwise through and with them). Maybe I am being too general here (and maybe not generous), but hey it is a blog post, call the police!
The WikiLeaks Party is a very interesting development in terms of rocking the boat a little; of reminding people that the usual political narratives of Australia are often an impoverished lens to view and address the many political challenges of today. The great unspoken history of Australia, our dirty little secret, is that our nation is dull, in fact on new global ranking that I just developed, we are the world’s second most boring nation and only Norway is more boring. Let’s hope that my calculations are wrong and that something interesting happens in the Australian parliament to remind us that its view of the world has severe limits.
I recently attended a seminar at UWS on Friday 26 April, 2013 led by Lynne and Ray Siemens of the University of Victoria in Canada. The theme of the event was collaboration in the humanities and in particular; how digital humanities projects exemplify effective collaboration in the broader humanities. This is because digital humanities projects often cross-disciplines and geography and the often more demanding collaborative terrain of computer science, computational methods and the humanities.
Lynne Siemens, specialises in project management and team building. She stated that people aren’t always well-trained to work together and outlined some of the positives and negatives of working in teams. She claimed that some people are better able to collaborate than others, often because they have developed skills of listening, are flexible, can negotiate, and can compromise. Lynne described these as the ‘soft skills’ of effective collaborative teams. A team approach often produces more diverse and possibly higher quality ideas (and is a good way to learn new skills and perspectives), but some projects are better done as an individual (but of course, some projects are beyond the scope and skills-sets of individuals).
Lynne outlined some of successful team interactions she had observed, partly through research she had undertaken through case –studies. Good communication skills are vital, as is project management, and the ability to think across technology and the humanities and indeed, culture and language. Also the objectives of the team, the outcomes, and the individual tasks need to be clearly described with not too many grey areas that may be potential areas of conflict. And teams operate within institutional contexts so there are certain contingencies to negotiate either within or between institutions. Still, one of the best ways to build teams is through casual conversations, lots of face-to-face meetings, and large bottles of rum (I put in the last one).
Ray Siemans is a Professor of Humanities Computing at the University of Victoria in Victoria, Canada and is well known for his work in the Digital Humanities and in particular, through the founding of the annual Digital Humanities Summer Institute (that I attended 2 years ago and now attracts around 500 participants). He discussed the important work of the digital humanities, particularly around content modelling and computational analysis of content (a core form of scholarship within the field). He also discussed the typology of curriculum development in the digital humanities either through stand-alone degrees or through digital humanities inflicted programs and in particular, the highly successful Summer Institute model.
DHSI (Digital Humanities Summer Institute) http://www.dhsi.org/
ETCL (Electronic Textual Culture Lab) http://etcl.uvic.ca/
The term interdisciplinary is used a lot, often unthinkingly and uncritically. I asserted in the last post that the ”socio-technical’ is a false dichotomy and that technical production is also ”social” and technology advances within its own understanding of ‘the social’ (grounded by the laws of physics). And the separation of the two modes of thinking is unproductive.
It is this idea of ”unproductive” thinking that needs to be explored, especially in fields that exist in the gaps, ie. interdisciplinary fields such as ”STS” or the ‘Digital Humanities”. Understandings of ”the social” and the tools and methods we use to do this advance rapidly. And tool and methods to understand the world through computer science change rapidly as well (ie programming methods change rapidly). It is easy to get stuck in one camp and make claims that one is interdisciplinary whilst falling behind in one of the disciplines that are important for your particular ”interdisciplinary” practice. I see this all the time in fields such as cultural studies that are advanced in the finer skills of academic practice, but the technical objects of their study are often many years behind contemporary technical research . And some technical areas such as eResearch tend to be bogged down in some very old-fashioned ideas of utility and are often unable to contribute to humanities research in a meaningful way because it is far too distant from it and lacks a sophisticated understanding of it.
Interdisciplinary requires deliberation and also empathy towards what one does not know. It is often very difficult if not possible to stay on top of a number of fields, but one can recognize this in ones-self and develop the skills and strategies to make good contributions to the interdisciplinary space that are both balanced and informed and aware of the key work and technical advances across fields.