• Building Social Media Infrastructure to Engage Publics

    An interesting new report from the Centre for Social Media at American University is Washington DC. This field report traces how a committed group of volunteers harnessed the micro-blogging tool Twitter to create innovative public media 2.0 experiments—first to actively engage users to report on their voting experiences in the 2008 U.S. election, and then…

  • A vision of Britain through time

    Another fantastic resource from the JISC. The JISC-funded A Vision of Britain Through Time website launches today, giving access, often for the first time, to over two centuries’ worth of facts, figures, surveys, maps, election results and travel writing showing how 15,000 UK places have changed. The changing story of Britain’s towns and villages can…

  • OpenTech ’09

    http://www.ukuug.org/events/opentech2009/ I attended the OpenTech ’09 forum on Saturday; organised by the UK Unix Users Group and friends at the University of London Union (ULU). For those interested in the social and political aspects of computing; this is an excellent forum to discuss new modes of political communication, privacy, advocacy and other issues that arise…

  • Leaping Hurdles: Planning IT Provision for Researchers

    I recently attended a workshop sponsored by the Joint information Systems Committee (JISC) that presented some of the findings from the JISC funded community engagement and virtual research environments (VRE) projects. The three community engagement projects presented were the engage project (engaging researchers with e-infrastructure), the e-uptake project (enabling uptake of e-Infrastructure Services), and the…

  • what is the eSAD Project?

    (The magnifying glass is perhaps a form of ‘Interpretation Support System’. The eSAD project is another ambitious and well-conceptualised project from AHRC-EPSRC-JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Initiative (sorry, an overly complicated set of acronyms here…my acronym is bigger than your acronym!) Anyhow what particularly attracts me to this project is its use of the concept…

  • Digital boost for work of arts

    An article in the Times Higher Education supplement about the Arts and Humanities e Science support Centre (AHESSC) here at King’s College in London. Imagine the research possibilities of being able to view three-dimensional scans of museum objects, write dance moves electronically or study ancient documents that were previously considered too damaged to decipher. E-tools…