The Nebraska Digital Workshop

Posted on 2007-02-22 by smahony

See on Humanist:

Call for Proposals
The Nebraska Digital Workshop
October 5 & 6, 2007

The Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) at the University of Nebraska’s Lincoln (UNL) will host the second annual Nebraska Digital Workshop on October 5 & 6, 2007 and seeks proposals for digital presentations by pre-tenure faculty, post-doctoral fellows, and advanced graduate students working in the digital humanities. The goal of the Workshop is to enable the best early career scholars in the field of digital humanities to present their work in a forum where it can be critically evaluated, improved, and showcased. Under the auspices of the Center, the Workshop will bring nationally recognized senior scholars in digital humanities to UNL to participate and work with the selected scholars. Selected scholars will receive full travel reimbursement and an honorarium for presenting their work at the Nebraska Digital Workshop.

Selection criteria include: significance in primary disciplinary field, technical innovation, theoretical and methodological sophistication, and creativity of approach.

Please send proposed workshop abstract, curriculum vitae, and a representative sample of digital work via a URL or disk on or before May 1, 2007 to: Katherine L. Walter, Co-Director, UNL Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, at kwalter1@unl.edu or 319 Love Library, UNL, Lincoln, NE 68588-4100. For further details, see the Center’s web site at https://cdrh.unl.edu.

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Symposium: The Future of Electronic Literature

Posted on 2007-02-20 by Gabriel Bodard

Seen in the Academic Commons blog:

Registration is now open for the Electronic Literature Organization and Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities’ public symposium on The Future of Electronic Literature.

Date: Thursday, May 3, 2007
Location: University of Maryland, College Park
Symposium URL: https://www.mith2.umd.edu/elo2007/index.php
The symposium is co-sponsored by the University Libraries, Department of English, and Human-Computer Interaction Lab at Maryland.

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Gentium resurgens: refined Cyrillic, Unicode 5, smart rendering

Posted on 2007-02-19 by Tom Elliott

From Victor Gualtney, on the latest regarding the Gentium font by way of the Gentium-Announce List (links mine):

Update #4 – Gentium project revived, Cyrillic, Charis

Dear friends of Gentium,

No – there’s not a new version out yet. 🙂 But we’re pleased to report that Gentium is under development again after a while in hibernation. We’re actively refining the Cyrillic, adding support for Unicode 5, and preparing the font for the addition of smart rendering support using three different smart font technologies – OpenType, Graphite and Apple AAT.

If you want to see the target character, glyph set and behavior we’ll be supporting in the next version, you can take a look at our Doulos SIL and Charis SIL fonts:

Gentium will support every character and behavior that these fonts do, plus Greek. This also means that if you’re wondering whether the next version will support a specific character, see if it’s in Doulos SIL or Charis SIL. Note that since these fonts do not support full Greek, some of the Greek improvements (digamma, etc.) will not be there, but will be in Gentium.

Because we want to get this major upgrade to you as soon as possible, the next version will still be only regular and italic. We hope, however to get it to you sometime mid-year (that’s 2007, if we’re able to keep on track).

One more little note: Since Gentium has been released under the SIL Open Font License, it has gained lots of support in the GNU/Linux community. It has also made its way into some Linux distributions, and even has been shown on the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child). There’s a good pic (in both large and small resolutions) of Gentium Greek on the OLPC at:

Thanks for your continued interest in Gentium!

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Promotion and Tenure Criteria for New Media

Posted on 2007-02-16 by chuckjones

The University of Maine has produced an argument for redefining promotion and tenure criteria for faculty in new media departments of today’s universities. It seems to provide an excellent point of departure for a discussion of how to include a proper assessment of new media contributions in the tenure and promotion processes in Humanities and Social Sciences. [With thanks to Dan Cohen for the reference].

-Chuck-

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Theoretical Approaches to Virtual Representations of Past Environments

Posted on 2007-02-08 by Gabriel Bodard

There are some places available for this all-day seminar taking place at Goldsmith’s College on 7 March.

For further details, or to register, visit https://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/activities/workshops.html or email neil.grindley@kcl.ac.uk.

THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO VIRTUAL REPRESENTATIONS OF PAST ENVIRONMENTS

A seminar run by Kate Devlin, Goldsmiths College, University of London (7 March 2007)

Computer graphics have become a popular way of interpreting past environments, for educational and entertainment value, and also as an aid to research, but they are not subject to the same scrutiny that text invites. Without supporting data to indicate the motivations for particular representations of data, the images may merely be one subjective picture of the past.

Something that proves particularly difficult when creating 3D computer-generated representations of past environments is how to provide context of an intangible nature, such as a social, temporal or even emotional interaction with the representation. For example, many representations are sterile, empty spaces, devoid of the people who would have built and used them. We need to look at ways that allow us to convey the information outside of the physical structure of a scene.

This seminar will address the issues above and other questions including:

  • Why are virtual representations being created and are they really being used?
  • How do we reconcile the work of computer scientists with the work of archaeologists?
  • How do we introduce non-visual and intangible elements to our representations?
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Interview: Knowledge to the people

Posted on 2007-02-02 by smahony

Article seen in the New Scientist:

Interview with Jimmy Wales the founder of Wikipedia.

From issue 2589 of New Scientist magazine, 31 January 2007, page 44-45

Questions include:

Was Wikipedia a fully formed concept right from the start?

When did you realise the old way wouldn’t work?

What happened with Wikipedia and China?

And many more.

online at

https://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg19325896.300

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PDF Specification released to AIIM/ISO

Posted on 2007-01-31 by Gabriel Bodard

Seen (via Slashdot) in Technoracle:

Adobe announced it will release the entire PDF specification (current version 1.7) to the International Standards Organization (ISO) via AIIM. PDF has reached a point in it’s maturity cycle where maintaining it in an open standards manner is the next logical step in evolution. Not only does this reinforce Adobe’s commitment to open standards (see also my earlier blog on the release of flash runtime code to the Tamarin open source project at Sourceforge), but it demonstrates that open standards and open source strategies are really becoming a mainstream concept in the software industry.

So what does this really mean? Most people know that PDF is already a standard so why do this now? This event is very subtle yet very significant. PDF will go from being an open standard/specification and defacto standard to a full blown du jure standard. The difference will not affect implementers much given PDF has been a published open standard for years. There are some important distinctions however. First – others will have a clearly documented process for contributing to the future of the PDF specification.

(See full article at source.)
Does this have implications for the takeup of XPS in the future?

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100 Alternative Search Engines

Posted on 2007-01-31 by Gabriel Bodard

Seen in Read/Write Web (by Charles S. Knight):

Ask anyone which search engine they use to find information on the Internet and they will almost certainly reply: “Google.” Look a little further, and market research shows that people actually use four main search engines for 99.99% of their searches: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com (in that order). But in my travels as a Search Engine Optimizer (SEO), I have discovered that in that .01% lies a vast multitude of the most innovative and creative search engines you have never seen. So many, in fact, that I have had to limit my list of the very best ones to a mere 100.

But it’s not just the sheer number of them that makes them worthy of attention; each one of these search engines has that standard “About Us” link at the bottom of the homepage. I call it the “why we’re better than Google” page. And after reading dozens and dozens of these pages, I have come to the conclusion that, taken as a whole, they are right!

Worth investigating these. There used to be several search engines that touted themselves as academic resources (Northernlights?), or as having cleverer algorithms than the big ones (Teoma?). I wouldn’t know what to look for any more, though. Do we actually need cleverer search engines, or is raw power all that matters?

Posted in General, Tools | 2 Comments

Online “Middle English Compendium”

Posted on 2007-01-31 by smahony

See on Humanist posted by Paul Schaffner | PFSchaffner@umich.edu

The University of Michigan announces that under new arrangements worked out between the University Press and the University Library, all components of the online “Middle English Compendium,” including the online version of the Middle English Dictionary, are now freely accessible without fee, password, or any other impediment to access:
https://ets.umdl.umich.edu/m/mec
The MED has hitherto been available only on a subscription or password-protected basis, till the Press recouped its substantial contribution to the original conversion costs. This has now been accomplished, and we are grateful for their agreement that the time has come to liberate it.

It was always our hope and intention to open the MED when we could, both in the general interest of public access (to which as a public university library we are dedicated), and with the expectation that open access will facilitate eventual interlinking amongst sibling dictionaries and between MED and other projects (e.g. online editions, which are now free to link lexical lookups to the appropriate MED entry).

The official press release is here:
https://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=3125

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Visualizing Bibliography

Posted on 2007-01-29 by Tom Elliott

Bill Turkel has been hacking on his Readings in Digital History list to see what he can see. He visualizes and discusses the signatures of monads, dyads, clusters of “classics,” bridges and the subclusters they link to, and bestsellers.

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Humanities Computing Links from TAPoR

Posted on 2007-01-29 by Tom Elliott

Geoffrey Rockwell has put up a collection of tagged links to online works about humanities computing. It’s a good complement to Bill Turkel’s Readings in Digital History. And, best of all, it’s TAPoRized, so you can search the collection and run its contents through any of the TAPoR text analysis tools.

Posted in General, Publications, Tools | 1 Comment

Google maps and millions of books

Posted on 2007-01-26 by Tom Elliott

It was only a matter of time: Google has added overview maps for full-view books in Google Book Search.

Even though Google is not the first organization to employ geoparsing technologies and autogenerated maps in the interface to a digital library, they certainly are the biggest media darling to do so. Consequently — and because of the prominent role Google plays in web search, earth visualization and on-going mass digitization efforts — the average person is likely to be introduced to this class of information interaction via Google’s new feature.

But what good is it? Will it get better? Why should humanists care?

I’m contemplating a series of posts offering some idiosyncratic answers to these questions … but first off, let’s just focus on what it does …
Continue reading →

Posted in General, Tools | 1 Comment

“For God sake, you’re in college; don’t cite the encyclopedia”

Posted on 2007-01-26 by Tom Elliott

What’s all this fuss about? The Middlebury College History Department’s so-called Stand Against Wikipedia is just an implementation of the seven-month-old advice of Wikipedia’s own founder.

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ANNOUNCING: TWO E-LEARNING CONFERENCES, OXFORD UNIVERSITY

Posted on 2007-01-23 by smahony

Seen in Humanist:

Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2007 06:46:56 +0000
From: Michael Fraser
Subject: e-Learning events at Oxford

ANNOUNCING: TWO E-LEARNING CONFERENCES, OXFORD UNIVERSITY
22nd and 23rd March
Said Business School

The Shock of the Old 6: The Shock of the Social
One-Day Conference on Educational Technologies

Said Business School, University of Oxford, March 22nd 2007
https://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/events/shock2007/

The Learning Technologies Group at Oxford University Computing
Services is pleased to announce its sixth annual one-day conference
on educational technologies.

Shock 6 will explore the issues arising from the rise of social
networking tools, Web 2.0 software and related collaborative
technologies, and how best to make use of these innovative tools in
teaching, learning and research.

For more information and online booking please visit:

https://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/events/shock2007/

Beyond the Search Engine

Said Business School, University of Oxford, March 23rd 2007
https://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/events/beyond2007/

Beyond the Search Engine continues the successful ‘Beyond…’ series
of talks and debates hosted by the Learning Technologies Group at the
University of Oxford. This year the theme is plagiarism and academic
integrity in the modern world of social networking and private learning.

* Does the ready provision of information in the public sphere
detract from students’ ability to develop their own knowledge?
* Does the pressure to perform undermine students’ academic integrity?

The day will consist of talks by experts in the field, and two debates.

This event follows on from the Shock of the Old conference on ICT in
Teaching and Learning, 22nd March 2007, held at the same venue and
with similar charging.

For more details and online booking please visit:
https://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/events/beyond2007/

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Second Life experient in social copyright

Posted on 2007-01-21 by Gabriel Bodard
I spotted this several weeks ago in Wired magazine, but have only just gotten around to taking it in fully. The scenario:

Businesses in Second Life are in an uproar over a rogue [ed. note: modified from Open Source] software program that duplicates “in world” items. They should be. But the havoc sewn by Copybot promises to transform the virtual word into a bold experiment in protecting creative work without the blunt instrument of copyright law.

Linden Labs, the owners of Second Life, decided against employing DRM (which “won’t work”) or adjudicating copyright disputes themselves, but instead have added creator and creation-date indicators to all items.

The next phase of Linden’s response is more interesting. The company plans to develop an infrastructure to enable Second Life residents and landowners to enforce IP-related covenants within certain areas, or as a prerequisite for joining certain groups. In effect, Second Life’s inhabitants will self-police their world, according to rules and social norms they develop themselves.

There are some interesting comments in the full article about the innovation incentive value of copyright, and the possible success of social norms as against enforcible law as a means of controlling this.
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