Update: Aegean Bronze Age in Google Earth

Posted on 2006-05-27 by scaife

I’ve added many more placemarks and grouped them by category (e.g. palaces, peak sanctuaries, Cycladic sites) in subfolders which may be turned on or off (depending on what you want to see) in the left panel of the Google Earth user interface.  The project continues to be available from the Gooogle Earth Community forum.

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Picasa for Linux

Posted on 2006-05-26 by scaife

Google releases a version of its image managment system for Linux.

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Pottery processing

Posted on 2006-05-25 by scaife

Posted at the request of Peter Pavúk:

Dear friends and colleagues.

We would like to invite speakers for our joint session on modern approaches to pottery processing. For full abstract check out the following link, please, but do not hesitate to contact me for any further information:

https://cracow2006.e-a-a.org/pavuk_horejs_jung.pdf
Continue reading →

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What is computer literacy?

Posted on 2006-05-24 by Gabriel Bodard

Discussion started in Slashdot today:

By Cliff on where’s-the-on-switch

rbannon asks: “Computer literacy is becoming an increasingly used term in education, and more and more schools are being asked to set computer literacy goals for their students. Unfortunately for too many, it means being able to use Microsoft products, and that’s all. However, I see it much differently, and I cannot help but think that computer literacy is all about using computers to be able to communicate more effectively. With that in mind does anyone have any recommendations for computer literacy goals, and how to measure them?”

The discussion that follows is good, but doesn’t really address the question I would like to ask: what should we define as adequate computer literacy in the context of teaching Digital Humanities at university level? (Teaching all humanities students, not just the Applied Comp specialists…)

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Minoan Crete in Google Earth

Posted on 2006-05-22 by scaife

Today I spent some time associating placemarks for Minoan sites with scholarly resources. The file could obviously be developed much further but even now it may have some utility. I posted it to the Google Earth Community forum, whence it may be downloaded and displayed in your copy of GE. In several cases it’s possible to zoom in all the way to visible excavations.
People have asked in the comments section how such a file might be deployed. I plan to try using it in the classroom in the fall, as the portal to texts and images related to the sites we are studying. The choice of “front-end” should place a desirable emphasis on geographic and topographic considerations.

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Historical placemarks in Google Earth

Posted on 2006-05-21 by scaife

Browsing through the message board for the Google Earth Community shows that various enthusiasts have been busily creating themed sets of placemarks.

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Jane Austen’s Life and Works

Posted on 2006-05-20 by scaife

An interesting example of Google Earth put to use for literary history.

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Baidu Baike

Posted on 2006-05-19 by scaife

from a CHE piece on a rip-off of Wikipedia in China:

It’s worth noting that China’s censorship policies make it virtually impossible for a true open-source encyclopedia to exist.

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Open Access & Anti-élitism

Posted on 2006-05-19 by Gabriel Bodard

From Academic Commons:

Michael Carroll, Law Professor at Villanova University School of Law , Creative Commons Board Member, and Blogger, turns up the heat in the on-going debate over pending federal legislation that would force open access to research supported with federal money. He suggests that publishers, not content to settle for the obvious economic arguments against open access, have begun working a less savory side of the street: an appeal to elitism. He writes:

“The elitist argument holds that taxpayers cannot be trusted with open access because they might harm themselves by misreading or misunderstanding an article written by specialists for specialists. In the case of biomedical research, the argument goes, open access could lead non-specialist members of the public to self-treat, to fail to seek medical attention, and/or to disobey doctor’s orders.”

Sometimes the debates around technology’s future feel like tilting at windmills. Arguments like Carroll’s remind us that the stakes are high, and that there are in fact genuine consequences to the outcomes of what often feel like arcane technical debates.

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New Mellon prizes

Posted on 2006-05-17 by scaife

from the CHE:

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is seeking nominations for the 2006 Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration, a new contest that will recognize leaders in the field of open-source software. The awards will recognize nonprofit groups that have made great strides in collaborative software development over the past year. And the winners will collect handsome (and, the foundation hopes, helpful) prizes: Noteworthy projects will receive grants of $25,000 or $100,000, depending on how widespread their appeal is. The Mellon Foundation has recruited a virtual who’s who of computing experts to judge the entrants. The panel includes Vinton G. Cerf, a key figure in the founding of the Internet, and Timothy J. Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web.

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Pisidian Antioch in Google Earth

Posted on 2006-05-17 by scaife

From The Kelsey Museum of Archaeology comes Building a New Rome: The Imperial Colony of Pisidian Antioch, including lots of photographs and models, as well as an overhead view of the 3D restoration of Antioch mapped over the location of the city on the globe.

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New AJAX development tools

Posted on 2006-05-16 by scaife

from the Google blog:

AJAX has the power to make your site more compelling and more dynamic, but AJAX development is often complicated, with much of the development time spent working around browser quirks and the fragility of AJAX components. Trust us, we know–the development of our own AJAX apps, like Google Maps and Google Calendar, caused us no small amount of AJAX-induced frustration.

That’s why we’re bringing you Google Web Toolkit. GWT is a new publicly available software development tool that makes creating AJAX applications much easier. With GWT, you can develop and debug your own AJAX applications in Java code using the Java development tools of your choice. When you deploy your application to production, the GWT compiler simply translates your Java application to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.

Check it out over on Google Code.

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Public education

Posted on 2006-05-16 by scaife

from the Google blog:

In my day, we thought calculators were neat

5/16/2006 02:55:00 PM

Posted by Aidan Chopra, Program Manager, Education

The Maine Learning Technology Initiative is an innovative program that equips every one of the state’s public middle-school students with a laptop computer. This fall, more than 36,000 students will receive brand-new Apple iBooks pre-installed with great software.

We think the whole thing sounds terrific, so we’re donating Google Earth and SketchUp Pro to Maine for installation on every public-school computer in the state. They accepted, and now it looks like Maine will be the first state in the US to have Google Earth, SketchUp Pro, and the 3D Warehouse available to every student, teacher, librarian, and administrator who wants it.

Information about the SketchUp for Education program can be found here. Government agencies that would like to follow Maine’s lead are welcome to drop us a line at education@sketchup.com.

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A new translation of Euripides’ Medea, bearing a CC license

Posted on 2006-05-16 by scaife

Celia Luschnig has produced a new translation of the Medea as part of the Diotima anthology. Special thanks to John T Quinn, Translation Editor for Diotima, for his help. (There’s also a pretty-print PDF version.)

This work bears a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

Other works by Celia Luschnig:

And by John T. Quinn:

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Speakers at Convocation on Humanities Warn About Privatization of Materials (CHE)

Posted on 2006-05-15 by scaife

(An excerpt from an article by Richard Byrne in the CHE — subscription needed)

A joint convocation held by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Association of American Universities to assess the state of the humanities drew over 200 scholars and administrators — as well as two prominent Congressional advocates for arts and letters — to a hotel here on Friday.

The convocation, which was pegged in part to a 2004 report issued by the association, “Reinvigorating the Humanities,” eschewed much of the doom and gloom that has surrounded such gatherings in recent decades. Speakers largely agreed that scholarship in the humanities was vigorous, but that the disciplines still faced serious challenges posed by the digital revolution, a rigidity in academic organization, and a lack of public outreach.

Ideas that struck the strongest chord at the convocation included a call from some speakers to resist the increasing privatization of the raw material of scholarship by corporations as such material is digitized.

Changes in copyright law to extend the length of time that material remains in copyright and efforts by companies such as Google to digitize books into privately controlled databases have increasingly placed the source material that scholars in the humanities use in private control for longer periods of time. Both access to such material and permission to reproduce it in published scholarly work have been tightened significantly.

Paul N. Courant, a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, argued that such trends are leading to “a pervasive inaccessibility of cultural materials.”

“The humanities are at risk here,” he said at one of the convocation sessions. “We risk losing our own source material. There will be a hole in our history.”

He recommended that universities wage an aggressive campaign to defend and extend the “fair use” provisions of copyright law.

“Scholarship is fair use,” Mr. Courant declared. “Period.”

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