The beauty of Science

May 25, 2009 at 8:08 pm · Filed under gadfly, video

This movie (thanks to James C for the link), made my long-weekend. It is all about context;  placing reductive observations about the world in a greater context so as to add to their beauty. You could also apply this to social and cultural phenomena; being able to place fellow humans in a empathetic cultural contexts, beyond the reductive world of consumer choice and taste. The beauty of the Digital Humanities is that the digital exits within the beauty of the human condition.

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What is technological determinism?

May 23, 2009 at 9:06 pm · Filed under digital humanities, e-science, education, humanities computing, internet, web2.0

(Watch out…technological deterministic drones will attack your free will)!

Technological determinism is circulated, maintained, and advanced within the pre-existing hierarchies in the world in which we live. Determinism has its own political agendas, its own rules, its own contexts and hierarchies and antagonisms to an imagined ‘other’. Determinism utilises a proprietary language and culture and although it cloaks itself in ideas of interdisciplinarity, deterministic discourse discourages intellectual critique, dissent, and justifies itself with the high ground of capitalist practicality. Determinist rhetoric is only interested in other knowledge so that it can demonise it, remediate it, appropriate it, make it better, wrestle it out of the hands of the ‘elite’ and make it more ‘democratic’, more in touch with ‘the people’.

I wrote this some time ago (link).  A rather disturbing report I recently read on Web 2 and Education prompted me to re-visit this writing

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Private Sheriffs in Cyberspace: Jonathan Zittrain OII Event: London, 19th May 2009

May 21, 2009 at 4:27 pm · Filed under communuity informatics, creative commons, deliberation, design, digital humanities, events, governance, humanities computing, internet, political communication, web2.0

On Tuesday evening I attended an Oxford Internet Institute sponsored lecture by Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Harvard Law School, Co-Founder and Faculty Director, Berkman Centre for Internet & Society (at the salubrious legal offices of Wragge and Co). Zittrain talked about regulation on-line by major Internet players such as Facebook and Apple and asserted that many of the regulating methods employed by them were outside of the rule of law. His contention was that many ‘Web 2’ companies have immense and increasing social and economic power within the fabric of our lives and are regulating their sites in a rather ad hoc and random way in terms of banning application developers, individuals, and groups that do not adhere to their governance structures. He used a number of examples to support his thesis, plus introduced a simple graph to illustrate emergent styles of governance:

Top-down

Hierarchy >poligarchy

Bottom-up

As an example of a ‘bottom-up’ governance structure Zittrain cited Wikipedia which includes a deliberative system to manage thorny editorial decisions. As a top-down system of governance he cited Facebook; although Facebook is beginning to include the community in decisions relating to its structure and functionality. He used the term ‘social governance’ to describe this bottom-up governance approach and suggested ways in which this approach may be designed into a system (through flagging certain tasks that help tap into the ‘reservoir of good will’ of the community). A well-designed system should have mechanisms to ask users for their input.

Although I tend to agree with many of the arguments of Zittrain, I feel there is a tendency to overstate the importance of sites such as Facebook and Youtube to the broader public. Sure they are popular, but this isn’t the British Library, the University of California, or the Library of Congress we are talking about! They are just large and fashionable web sites; a small part of the fabric of our complex lives. And commercial companies will perhaps always act in their own interests; either commercially or ideologically.

I suppose what is needed is some sort of bill of rights/responsibilities that is general to the operation of the Web within a certain geographical region balanced with the specific values of the site in question. There is nothing wrong with sites asserting behaviour norms upon users; but then again governance structures should be transparent and open; not outside of acceptable norms of the broader public sphere. A site should never assert policies that are deemed racist nor discriminatory (perhaps this is Zittrain’s anxiety when he claimed than many sites operate outside of ‘the rule of law’). The relationship between the community and the platform should always be fair and equitable; especially in large user-based sites such as Facebook. In my mind, governance structures, whether online or off, should always be open and transparent.

One of the respondents to the talk, Ian Brown, a Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute (and author of the recent report Database state) asserted that the relationship between Citizen and State and Cyberspace needed to be reconsidered. He also claimed (from his experience) that that the issues raised by Zittrain are not well-known in the UK;  especially in senior government levels. As an historian (and not a legal expert), my  scepticism relates to the actual significance of the entire debate.  I suppose that the significance of the debates depends on the importance the public places on systems such as Facebook and their governance structures. I may agree with Eric Hobsbawn that Terrorism is more a perceived threat in the UK that an actual threat (to the state), but then again the public is led to believe otherwise so it now painfully significant.  So if the debates about governance are perceived to be important by the public; then they will become important. So we may have a ‘Facebook Parliament’ in the making deliberating about the rise of rudeness on Facebook . They should start with the Tube system!

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Manual Castells at London School of Economics 9 July

May 20, 2009 at 3:35 pm · Filed under media, social media, web2.0

The acclaimed author of the Rise of Network Society, Professor Manual Castells  will be speaking at LSE on 9th July and launching his new book ‘Communication Power’.  I can’t wait for this one; I have wanted to hear Castells speak for years.  As a PhD candidate in the late ’90s, Castells changed how I though about nations and globalism and the way I interact with the world (perhaps I am not the only one!). His main contention is that the logic of globalism is networks; not geographic based industrial capitalism that defined most of the 20th Century.  A wonderful scholar; hope to see you there!

Thursday 9 July, 6.30-8pm, Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building

LSE Summer School lecture with the Department of Media and Communications and POLIS present:

Communication Power

SPEAKER: Professor Manuel Castells

CHAIR: Professor Robin Mansell

This event marks the launch of Manuel Castells latest book, Communication Power, in which he analyses the transformation of the global media industry by the revolution in communication technologies. Manuel Castells is university professor and the Wallis Annenberg Chair Professor of Communication Technology and Society at the Annenberg School of Communication, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and research professor of information society at the Open University of Catalonia, Barcelona.

Info: Ticket from 10am on Tuesday 30 June at www.lse.ac.uk/events or by calling 020 7955 6100.

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Open Tech 2009

May 20, 2009 at 10:04 am · Filed under communuity informatics, digital humanities, humanities computing, internet, web2.0

For those of you in London, this will be an excellent event (and it is only cost 5 quid).  And this is one community that really understands how technology works in the public sphere (if that is your thing).  It is on at ULU.

* Ticket reservations now open – Please Redistribute Freely *

Open Tech 2009
sponsored by 4iP

Saturday July 4th – ULU, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HY
http://www.ukuug.org/events/opentech2009/

Open Tech 2009, from UKUUG and friends,
Saturday July 4th
ULU, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HY

Tickets only £5
Students Free Entry

Totalling 33 talks across 3 sessions covering 7 hours,
some space hijacking and plenty of time to talk in the
bar after sessions which challenge, inspire or talk about
something that makes you want to help how you can. The
last two times we have sold out in advance, so you are
strongly advised to pre-register.

This year’s line up features…
* Two Cultures from Bill Thompson
* Bad Science from Ben Goldacre
* Peace & War
* Making things happen, from those who do
* Web of Power – what’s next for Politicians?
* The Guardian and Ian Tomlinson Story
* Ways our Internet Laws are Broken

The full schedule is at
http://www.ukuug.org/events/opentech2009/

Read the rest of this entry »

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New forms of doctorate

May 19, 2009 at 3:09 pm · Filed under design, digital humanities, humanities computing, pedagogy

I attended an ESRC funded seminar today and organised by the Landsdown Centre for Electronic Arts on new forms of doctorates. This was the third seminar in the series. As someone who undertook a practice based PhD some years back (that admittedly was not altogether a totally a rewarding institutional experience), I found the seminar both stimulating and cathartic. David Durling, a Professor of Art and Design at Middlesex University, discussed the history of the PhD within the Design field emphasising the difference between ‘practice’ and ‘research’. He also discussed the difference between a ‘Doctorate’ and a ‘PhD’ which the former being more professional and vocational whilst the later is research-based. He stressed in his talk is that not all disciplines have identical cognate skills and some require the development of research skills in areas such as visual communication and performance.

The research qualification that is the PhD must provide reliable evidence that is discoverable and re-usable by others. And a PhD must provide an original argument within the rigours of a peer-assessed field and this argument must stand up against competing evidence. If it does this; the form shouldn’t be the major concern as the major concern should be whether the form presented is adequate enough evidence to communicate the tacit knowledge of the researcher and the research endeavour undertaken (and the required cognate skills). Many forms aren’t up to this task.

And I do worry a little that debates about new forms of PhDs may be so complex and un-containable that they are in danger of being hijacked by anti-academic and simplistic discourses such a technological determinism. Not all technical ‘progress’ is in the interest of research and education.

The second speaker, Professor Stephen Boyd Davis, Director of the Landsdown Centre for Electronic Arts, talk was titled ‘Defending the Thesis: why the written thesis is better idea than ever’. He argued that a PhD makes explicit the implicit and makes overt the tacit. I liked his term ‘cognitive performance’; something that is developed though the rigours of arguing a position via a linear, argumentative and evidence-based narrative over a long period of time.

I do worry that new communication devices at times privilege the short term and the practical and research should never shy away from grand and significant questions that may not have a quick and practical fix. I particularly liked how he presented his own thesis to the audience revealing his use of image and text. As he implied; how we understand the ‘traditional’ written thesis has changed considerably, at least in terms of access to it and the content within it. Many theses are now available online that can be searched and parsed by search tools and text-mining tools thus making the text more readily available and perhaps contestable.

Many of these debates are incredibly important to the Digital Humanities as practice is so central to the field. Within the Digital Humanities I prefer the concept of an ‘ETD’ or Electronic Theses and Dissertation as it retains the ‘traditional’ framework of the written thesis but also allows computational digital objects to be embedded within it. It could also be used as a framework to publish critical editions of classical texts whist embedding the critical and argumentative apparatus within it. An ETD could also be published in two versions; one digital and one paper. This is as long as the digital component adheres to digital preservations conventions and standards and the University has the ability to store it (in many Universities the later is not the case).

More information can be found on the seminar series blog: http://newdoctorates.blogspot.com/

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Digital Classicist/ICS Work in Progress Seminar, Summer 2009

May 18, 2009 at 9:22 am · Filed under Virtual Reseach Environments, digital humanities, eresearch, humanities computing, tools, web2.0

This years Digital Classics seminar is due to begin on June 5. The classics field is one of the most active in the Digital Humanities and this years seminar has attracted many international speakers discussing diverse topics from Herodotus, to Philology, to agent-based modelling. For those historians and academics who are not particularly strong in classical thinking (like myself), these forums are still valuable for learning about the computational methods that may be useful for other areas of the humanities. The evening usually ends in lively discussions in one of London’s finest watering holes.

Digital Classicist/ICS Work in Progress Seminar, Summer 2009

Fridays at 16:30 in STB3/6 (Stewart House), Senate House, Malet Street,
London, WC1E 7HU
(July 17th seminar in British Library, 96 Euston Rd, NW1 2DW)

June 5 Bart Van Beek (Leuven)
Onomastics and Name-extraction in Graeco-Egyptian Papyri
June 12 Philip Murgatroyd (Birmingham)
Starting out on the Journey to Manzikert: Agent-based modelling and
Mediaeval warfare logistics
June 19 Gregory Crane (Perseus Project, Tufts)
No Unmediated Analysis: Digital services constrain and enable both
traditional and novel tasks
June 26 Marco Buechler & Annette Loos (Leipzig)
Textual Re-use of Ancient Greek Texts: A case study on Plato’s works
July 3 Roger Boyle & Kia Ng (Leeds)
Extracting the Hidden: Paper Watermark Location and Identification
July 10 Cristina Vertan (Hamburg)
Teuchos: An Online Knowledge-based Platform for Classical Philology
July 17 Christine Pappelau (Berlin) *NB: in British Library*
Roman Spolia in 3D: High Resolution Leica 3D Laser-scanner meets
ancient building structures
July 24 Elton Barker (Oxford)
Herodotos Encoded Space-Text-Imaging Archive

July 31 Leif Isaksen (Southampton)
Linking Archaeological Data

August 7 Alexandra Trachsel (Hamburg)
An Online Edition of the Fragments of Demetrios of Skepsis

ALL WELCOME

We are inviting both students and established researchers involved in
the application of the digital humanities to the study of the ancient
world to come and introduce their work. The focus of this seminar series
is the interdisciplinary and collaborative work that results at the
interface of expertise in Classics or Archaeology and Computer Science.

The seminar will be followed by wine and refreshments.

For more information please contact Gabriel.Bodard@kcl.ac.uk,
Stuart.Dunn@kcl.ac.uk, Juan.Garces@bl.uk, or Simon.Mahony@kcl.ac.uk, or
see the seminar website at http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/wip2009.html

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A Digital Humanities Manifesto

May 15, 2009 at 3:52 pm · Filed under collaboration, creative commons, digital humanities, humanities computing, web2.0

(everyone should have a manifesto!)

I am pleased that UCLA has discovered the Digital Humanities. Here is a manifesto that they published from the Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities (link).

Also, check out UCLA’s  White Paper on the Promise of Digital Humanities Co-authored by Todd Presner (Germanic Studies and Comparative Literature) and Chris Johanson (Classics and Digital Humanities) (link). I will respond to these positions when I get a chance but I need to concentrate on the small picture for a moment as I can’t change the user permissions on our Drupal installation. Damn!

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The Digging into Data Challenge: What to do with one million books?

May 15, 2009 at 3:17 pm · Filed under collaboration, digital humanities, eresearch, humanities computing

This is a opportune international development for those in the Digital Humanities. I am not aware of any involvement from King’s, but would be interested to hear from any other UK institutions who plan to compete!

The Digging into Data Challenge is an international grant competition sponsored by four leading research agencies, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) from the United Kingdom, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) from the United States, the National Science Foundation (NSF) from the United States, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) from Canada.

What is the “challenge” we speak of?  The idea behind the Digging into Data Challenge is to answer the question “what do you do with a million books?”  Or a million pages of newspaper? Or a million photographs of artwork?  That is, how does the notion of scale affect humanities and social science research? Now that scholars have access to huge repositories of digitized data — far more than they could read in a lifetime — what does that mean for research?

Applicants will form international teams from at least two of the participating countries.  Winning teams will receive grants from two or more of the funding agencies and, one year later, will be invited to show off their work at a special conference. Our hope is that these projects will serve as exemplars to the field (link).

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The Milkbar Manifesto

May 15, 2009 at 10:13 am · Filed under digital humanities, humanities computing, web2.0

This is a the manifesto that I wrote in 1999 to accompany my the work Milkbar.com.au (as an angrier man…grrrrr).  I still believe in most of these things; especially the point that I have highlighted.  Passive technological determinism is so engrained in the popular imagination that an entire professional class (many employed in universities ),  manipulate its discourses to make themselves look special, cash in, and reinforce in the popular mind that technology advances in a politically neutral, positive, progressive, and inevitable way.  All technological advancement creates winners and losers and those that tell us we don’t have a say in this can just piss off!

The Milkbar Manifesto: ‘Does Technology Drive History?’(1)

• The proprietor of the milkbar believes that technology advances in a social context. Technology and society cannot be separated; we cannot understand society without communications devices, and technology cannot exist without society (and Historians use technology to communicate understandings of our past)
• Technology is not always important. However, the meanings and opinions embedded within the technology are. Technology is a modern word that combines the Greek techne (skill, metier) with logos (knowledge). Techne crudely translates into the ’skill of knowledge’ and is not just the skill of technique or the skill of creating a form.
• There can be no such thing as a Luddite
• The proprietor of the milkbar believes that no one disciplinary discourse or practice owns the Internet
• The proprietor of the Milkbar believes in the public good model of the Internet
• The proprietor of the Milkbar believes that the set of ideas called ‘cyberspace’ are not that helpful. Technology lives in a place as well as a history of ideas; technology is not placeless, amnesia is not freedom.
• The proprietor of the milkbar believes than technology need not be utilitarian, technology need not be useful, technology need not be rational. Technology is embedded within culture and culture is contradictory.
• The proprietor of the milkbar believes that proselytisation, determinism, monomania, transcendence, ‘vangardism’, neologisms, sophism, solipsism, and ‘e’-separatism are cheap tricks by people who really aren’t that special.
• Beware of the technolgist as condottiere (ie. anything for anybody anywhere)
• The proprietor of the milkbar believes that technology does not always lead, people with technology lead (in this instance, historiographical and methodological approaches lead, combined with technology)
• The proprietor of the milkbar believes that you have a right to be Libertarian, but I also have a right not to be killed (understanding power is a good start in escaping the the iron-cage of post-industrial Libertarianism).
• The proprietor of the milkbar respects process-led learning models, but not without understanding the particular contextual knowledge that the model seeks to advance (ie. History)
• History is an art, not a science (design is something else all together).

(1) Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx (eds) Does Technology Drive History? : The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1994.

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30 Full-time PhD Studentships available

May 13, 2009 at 4:02 pm · Filed under art, digital humanities

This may be of interest to budding undergraduates out there. Especially the most excellent opportunity to work at the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts. Thanks to Julie Tomlie for the link.

Middlesex University is currently advertising 30 full-time PhD studentships, some of which
are in Arts and related fields.

Guardian advert here: http://jobs.guardian.co.uk/job/856185/30-research-studentships-
art-and-education/
Job.ac.uk advert here:
http://www.jobs.ac.uk/jobs/GH572/Research_Studentships_in_Art_and_Education/

Of these, one or two (depending on the quality of applications) may be based in the
Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts, a university research centre working in the
intersection of technology and creative activity. A list of possible themes is here:
http://www.cea.mdx.ac.uk/?location_id=106

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Press Release: Fedora Commons and DSpace Foundation Join Together to Create DuraSpace™ Organization

May 13, 2009 at 10:54 am · Filed under Virtual Reseach Environments, creative commons, digital humanities, digitisation, e-science, education, web2.0

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Tree house party!

May 8, 2009 at 9:17 pm · Filed under gadfly

This weekend I am off to Berlin to visit my old friend Emu (yes, his real name and he isn’t even Australian). He has just built a tree house for his son to live in and he is having a party to celebrate. What better reason to go to Berlin!

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Web 2.0 in higher education

May 7, 2009 at 1:45 pm · Filed under communuity informatics, social media, software, web2.0

There is a belief in some circles that Content Management Systems (CMS) such as Joomla and Drupal are labour saving devices and that their very presence online will spontaneously invoke a community of highly-skilled individuals that will submit content and build the system in a coherent and meaningful way. This idea is a myth as virtual communities require a great deal of maintenance, promotion, and strategy to work in a meaningful way for all. It is almost impossible to make a virtual community work if the main concern is the technology alone. It is an inherently socio-technical exercise with the former being extraordinarily difficult in an institutional environment.

JISC will launch a report on Web 2 in Higher Education next Tuesday 12 May (that I will attend). I also draw attention to a case-study report published on the JISC web site last year that claims ‘The features most associated with a Web 2.0 approach (rate, comment, upload, blog and send to friend) were commonly described with reference to social networking or e-commerce sites and were largely considered non-academic and therefore inappropriate for the Pre-Raphaelite online resource’ (link). In other words, building a virtual community is a very labour intensive and difficult task in HE and almost impossible if there is not at least some attempt at a community building strategy. A virtual community needs a strong sense of community through a coherent and interesting concept, a belief that the labour that the user is contributing to the site is meaningful and consequential, and some sort of reward system. There is no rigid method for making a community site work, but it does take a strategy to grow and foster the community but the one that develops may not always be the one that was imagined in the first instance.

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CeRch Project Portfolio

May 5, 2009 at 12:45 pm · Filed under digital humanities, e-science, eresearch, humanities computing

The centre that I work at here at King’s has an increasing portfolio of projects; some have only recently started and other are either complete or at various stages of completion. Most of the project are digital infrastructure related; some are mass-digitisation projects and a couple are management of digital content related. The projects vary vastly in terms of scope as a couple like DARIAH are large EU funded consortiums, whilst others are small short term projects. The vast majority of the projects are humanities related and we share a close relationship with the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH).

If you want to know anything more about these projects or indeed have any ideas about their critical use within your own scholarchip, feel free to drop me a line (link).

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