Classics in the Million Book Library

Posted on 2006-11-15 by scaife

A Mellon-funded working group that met immediately after the recent Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science (dhcs.uchicago.edu) has now issued a position paper, Classics in the Million Book Library.

The goal is to consider how the future of publication in Classics may relate to the massive book digitization projects now being undertaken by Google, the Open Content Alliance, and others.

For anyone interested, our position paper is available in pdf and doc formats from the link under “Pages” at the upper right corner of this blog.

Posted in Call for papers, General, Projects | 1 Comment

Teaching and learning scenarios for Google Earth

Posted on 2006-11-14 by scaife

EduCause has a two-pager, and Google has its own page for educators.

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Open source withstands antitrust scrutiny

Posted on 2006-11-10 by Gabriel Bodard

Seen in Slashdot today:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has issued an opinion in which Judge Easterbrook declares, “[t]he GPL and open-source have nothing to fear from the antitrust laws.” The case is called Wallace v. IBM., No. 06-2454. [Download a copy of the opinion.] Internet Cases covered the lower court’s decision from last December here.

Plaintiff Wallace filed an antitrust suit against IBM, Red Hat and Novell, arguing that those companies had conspired to eliminate competition in the operating system market by making Linux available at an “unbeatable” price (free) under the General Public License (“GPL”). The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana dismissed the case, finding the plaintiff had suffered no antitrust injury. The Seventh Circuit affirmed.

Full article at InternetCases.com.

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CHE on historical visualizations

Posted on 2006-11-07 by scaife

With Digital Maps, Historians Chart a New Way Into the Past: A push to make historical data more visual could yield a better understanding of events

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OED changes with the times

Posted on 2006-11-07 by scaife

Worthwhile piece in the NYT on the OED today. An excerpt:

The job of a new-words editor felt very different precyberspace, Paton says: “New words weren’t proliferating at quite the rate they have done in the last 10 years. Not just the Internet, but text messaging and so on has created lots and lots of new vocabulary.” Much of the new vocabulary appears online long before it will make it into books. Take geek. It was not till 2003 that O.E.D.3 caught up with the main modern sense: “a person who is extremely devoted to and knowledgeable about computers or related technology.” Internet chitchat provides the earliest known reference, a posting to a Usenet newsgroup, net.jokes, on Feb. 20, 1984.

The scouring of the Internet for evidence — the use of cyberspace as a language lab — is being systematized in a program called the Oxford English Corpus. This is a giant body of text that begins in 2000 and now contains more than 1.5 billion words, from published material but also from Web sites, Weblogs, chat rooms, fanzines, corporate home pages and radio transcripts. The corpus sends its home-built Web crawler out in search of text, raw material to show how the language is really used.

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Carthage in Wikipedia

Posted on 2006-11-07 by scaife

Amusing blog entry involving Carthage at Infocult, Wikipedia delenda est.

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Firefox extension for humanities scholars

Posted on 2006-11-03 by Gabriel Bodard

Zotero is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work — in the web browser itself.

Has anyone tried using this? Is it actually useful?

Posted in Open Source, Tools | 5 Comments

Audio Files: History and Archaeology Expert Seminar

Posted on 2006-11-01 by Gabriel Bodard

Audio files from the Methods Network Expert Seminar ‘Virtual History and Archaeology’, held at the Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield, 19-21 April 2006, are now available.

The following audio files are currently available.

  • ‘Using GIS to Study Long-Term Population Change’, Ian Gregory, Queens University Belfast, Northern Ireland. (mp3)
  • ‘Spatial Technologies in Archaeology in the Twenty-First Century’, Paul Cripps, University of Southampton, UK. (mp3)
  • ‘Imaging of Historical Documents’, Andrew Prescott, University of Sheffield, UK. (mp3)
  • ‘Finding Needles in Haystacks: Data-mining in distributed historical data-sets’, Mark Greengrass and Fabio Ciravegna, University of Sheffield, UK. (mp3)
  • ‘Digital Searching and the Problem of the Ventriloquist’s Dummy’, Tim Hitchcock, University of Hertfordshire, UK. (mp3)
  • ‘Using Computer-Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDAS) in Historical Research: Some methodological issues from the experience of the ‘Health of the Cecils’ Project’, Caroline Bowden, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. (mp3)
  • ‘Crossing an “Information Divide”: The OASIS project and its use of XML schema’, Catherine Hardman, University of York, UK. (mp3)
  • ‘”Oh, to make boards to speak! There is a task!” Towards a Poetics of Paradata’, Richard Beacham, King’s College, London, UK. (mp3)
  • ‘Constructing a Corpus of Material Objects: The case of the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland’, Anna Bentkowska-Kafel, Courtauld Institute of Art, London, UK.(mp3)
  • ‘Virtual Restoration and Manuscript Archaeology: A case study’, Meg Twycross, University of Lancaster, UK. (mp3)

More audio files and podcasts to come from MethNet.

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Sanity

Posted on 2006-10-27 by scaife

Emphasis added:

For better or for worse, Wikipedia has become the first destination for many a student researcher. Does the site’s ubiquity mean that professors have a responsibility to contribute? “I feel I have an obligation to do so, at least within my field,” said Alexander M.C. Halavais, an assistant professor of communications at Quinnipiac University, during a live Chronicle chat yesterday. “Public scholarship…is an important part of being a professor,” Mr. Halavais said. “Since Wikipedia is probably the single most visible source of knowledge for many today, it strikes me as an important place to engage in that role. I would love to see universities and tenure committees embrace that role, but I am not holding my breath.” A complete transcript of the chat — in which Mr. Halavais discussed Wikipedia’s strengths and weaknesses, and the role of the encyclopedia as a research tool — is now available online.

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Alouette

Posted on 2006-10-23 by scaife

hangingtogether.org comments on the newly announced Canadian digitization effort called AlouetteCanada. Some of the juicy bits:

Billed as an “open digitization initiative,” Alouette shares some common features with the Open Content Alliance (OCA) — not altogether surprising, since founding members of the Canadian project (including the Universities of Toronto and Alberta) are also contributing content to the OCA’s open library… What really sets Alouette apart from other large-scale efforts in the mass digitization arena, I think, is its commitment to enabling smaller, specialized research collections (like historical societies and museums) to participate in the virtual land-rush and secure a little habitat of their own… Will Alouette Canada generate the same kind of excitement and national pride as its space-age namesake? Will it achieve its vision of “harness[ing] the will and energy of every library, archive, gallery, museum, historical society or institute of record to create a comprehensive collection of digital resources for the benefit of its citizens�” Only time will tell…

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On the limits of collaboration

Posted on 2006-10-23 by scaife

There’s a provocative entry by Bob Stein at the if:book blog today on the enduring value of a strong, identifiable point of view.

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EPSRC Research Studentship

Posted on 2006-10-20 by ioannisg

Human-Computer Interaction VESSEL Project (Village e-science for Life)

Bursary £12,300 pa incl.Three year post

Ref: PHD

We are seeking a postgraduate research student to join the VESSEL Project (Village e-science for Life) a EPSRC-funded research project commencing in October 2006. The aim of VESSEL is to explore and develop participatory methods for developing novel solutions for ICT in rural communities in sub-Saharan Africa, with particular emphasis upon the educational barriers. The initial normal place of work will be the Slough Campus but you will have the opportunity to spend some periods distributed over the project life within an African context, as well as site visits to Kenya. You should have a good BSc or MSc degree in a computing discipline with a significant HCI component. You should also have a keen interest in understanding African cultures and knowledge of KisSwahili would be an advantage.

Informal enquiries can be made to Professor Lynne Dunckley (Lynne.Dunckley@tvu.ac.uk) or Dr. Jose Abdelnour-Nocera (Jose.Abdelnour-Nocera@tvu.ac.uk) In return, TVU offers you the benefits of a final salary pension scheme, excellent financially supported development opportunities and generous holiday entitlement.

For further details and an application form, please contact www.tvu.ac.uk/vacancies or the Human Resources Department on 020 8231 2321 (24 hour voicemail) or e-mail hr@tvu.ac.uk quoting the appropriate reference number.

Closing date for the post: 3 November 2006.

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On the power of CC licensing @ Flickr

Posted on 2006-10-19 by scaife

Mark Glaser of MediaShift:

Creative Commons + Flickr = 22 Million Sharable Photos

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Excellent suggestion: self-help

Posted on 2006-10-17 by scaife

if:book discusses the progress Microsoft is making towards its book search portal, and sees a big risk:

But more important, we should get to work with OCR scanners and start extracting the texts to build our own databases. Even when they make the files available, as Google is starting to do, they’re giving them to us not as fully functioning digital texts (searchable, remixable), but as strings of snapshots of the scanned pages. That’s because they’re trying to keep control of the cultural DNA scanned from these books — that’s the value added to their search service.

But the public domain ought to be a public trust, a cultural infrastructure that is free to all. In the absence of some competing not-for-profit effort, we should at least start thinking about how we as stakeholders can demand better access to these public domain works. Microsoft and Google are free to scan them, and it’s good that someone has finally kickstarted a serious digitization campaign. It’s our job to hold them accountable, and to make sure that the public domain doesn’t get redefined as the semi-public domain.

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“naturally more expressive digital object focus”

Posted on 2006-10-13 by scaife

This Object Reuse and Exchange initiative looks like a project to keep an eye on:

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI), with the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, announces a new effort as part of its mission to develop and promote interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) will develop specifications that allow distributed repositories to exchange information about their constituent digital objects. These specifications will include approaches for representing digital objects and repository services that facilitate access and ingest of these representations. The specifications will enable a new generation of cross-repository services that leverage the intrinsic value of digital objects beyond the borders of hosting repositories.

The goals of ORE are inspired by advances in scholarly communication and the growth of scholarly material that is available in scholarly repositories including institutional repositories, discipline-oriented repositories, dataset warehouses, and online journal repositories. This growth is significant by itself. However, its real importance lies in the potential for these distributed repositories and their contained objects to act as the foundation of a new digitally-based scholarly communication framework. Such a framework would permit fluid reuse, refactoring, and aggregation of scholarly digital objects and their constituent parts – including text, images, data, and software. This framework would include new forms of citation, allow the creation of virtual collections of objects regardless of their location, and facilitate new workflows that add value to scholarly objects by distributed registration, certification, peer review, and preservation services. Although scholarly communication is the motivating application, we imagine that the specifications developed by ORE may extend to other domains.

ORE is funded by Mellon for two years beginning October 2006. It is coordinated by Carl Lagoze of Cornell University Information Science and Herbert Van de Sompel of the Los Alamos Research Library….

OAI-ORE will co-exist within the Open Archives Initiative with the Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), the widely deployed standard for exchange of metadata. We expect that the naturally more expressive digital object focus of OAI-ORE will complement the narrower metadata focus of OAI-PMH….

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