CMC Research Collective

Link: http://www.imaging.org/conferences/archiving2009

IS&T is pleased to announce the Archiving 2009 Call for Papers. The deadline for submitting presentation abstracts for Archiving 2009, to be held May 4-7, 2009 in Arlington, VA., is *December 21, 2008*. A PDF of the Call for Papers can be found at http://www.imaging.org/conferences/archiving2009

Paper proposals should be submitted according to the process described at http://www.imaging.org/conferences/archiving2009/authors.cfm

The IS&T Archiving Conference brings together a unique community of imaging novices and experts from libraries, archives, records management, and information technology institutions to discuss and explore the expanding field of digital archiving and preservation. Attendees from around the world represent industry, academia, governments, and cultural heritage institutions. The conference presents the latest research results on archiving, provides a forum to explore new strategies and policies, and reports on successful projects that can serve as benchmarks in the field. Archiving 2009 is a blend of invited focal papers, keynote talks, and refereed oral and interactive display presentations. Prospective authors are invited to submit oral and interactive presentations by the December 21^st deadline.

Proposed program topics include:

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sHYDfITjHY

We released it [our TEI widget video] yesterday, and already there have been more than 2000 youtube hits on it, and it got blogged and redistributed in other ways very well; at one point, it was being viewed so much so frequently that we heard news that it was the top-viewed Canadian youtube video . . . at the moment it appears to be #83. Such is fortune fickle ;).

If you didn’t see the finished product, it is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sHYDfITjHY.

We’ll be spending the coming few weeks in various stages of examining the larger context of our release of the video widget, but it is reassuring to know that such an impact could be made. I’m thinking of trying to find a way to represent it as a literary-critical intervention into contemporary social-computing culture . . . but think that could be a diversion from the purpose of our work, which is to measure such interventions and, more importantly, map a community of practice.

I would like to inform you that FQS 9(3) -- "Visual Methods" (http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/issue/view/11), edited by Hubert Knoblauch, Alejandro Baer, Eric Laurier, Sabine Petschke & Bernt Schnettler -- is available online. Articles are dealing with "Interpretative Visual Analysis", "Mobilising Visual Ethnography", "Using Video for a Sequential and Multimodal Analysis of Social Interaction" and many other issues.

In addition to articles relating to "Visual Methods", FQS 9(3) provides a number of selected single contributions (on "Methodological Considerations for Conducting Qualitative Interviews with Youth Receiving Mental Health Services", on "The Role of the Researcher in the Narration of Life" to mention just two examples) as well as articles belonging to various FQS sections, as f.e. a "Book Review Symposium: Between Reflexivity and Consolidation -- Qualitative Research in the Mirror of Handbooks".

FQS is an open-access journal, so all articles are available for free. Since January 2000, 29 special issues with all in all 1.135 articles by 1.063 authors from all over the world had been published (see http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/issue/archive for former issues, http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/search/titles for a list of titles, and http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/search/authors for a list of authors who published in FQS).

Once a month a newsletter is distributed to currently 9,300 subscribers, informing about new articles published in FQS, about coming conferences, open access news and other topics of interest for qualitative researchers (visit http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/user/register to register).

Please do not hesitate to contact me if there should be any questions.

All the best,

Katja Mruck

From the blog Gene Expression, some graphs based on the frequency of certain keywords in the JSTOR archives. These keywords include "social construction," "psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic,""Postmodern or postmodernism," "postcolonialism," "orientalist or orientalism,""narratol*," "marxist or marxism," "hegemony,""feminist or feminism," "deconstruction." The title tells all: "Graphs on the death of Marxism, postmodernism, and other stupid academic fads."

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Link: http://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/pkp/index.php/pkp2009/pkp2009

Harbour Centre - Simon Fraser University

July 8, 2009 – July 10, 2009

The conference will provide opportunities for those involved in the organization, promotion, and study of scholarly communication to share and discuss innovative work in scholarly publishing, with a focus on the contribution that open source publishing technologies (such as, but not restricted to, PKP’s OJS, OCS, OMP, Lemon8-XML, and OA Harvester) can make to improving access to research and scholarship on a global and public scale.

Please find [below] a Job announcement for a position of Science Officer in the Humanities Unit at The European Science Foundation.

With copyright issues become more complex, the UVic Faculty Association, Royal Roads Faculty Association, CUFA/BC and CAUT are pleased to be co-sponsoring a workshop for Faculty, Librarians and Graduate Students about the importance of copyright in teaching and research at our universities and the implications of fair dealing, and other copyright issues brought into question by Bill C-61 (An Act to Amend the Copyright Act).

The workshop is scheduled for Wednesday, October 22, 2008 from 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm, Snowberry/Honeysuckle Rooms, University Club. Refreshments will be served.

Please RSVP uvicfa02@uvic.ca by October 15.

Who says real philosophers eschew digital technologies? Not me. I'm a fan of the Philosophy Bites blog, from David Edmonds (co-author of Wittgenstein's Poker and a BBC radio documentary writer) and Nigel Warburton, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University.

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Whether the need to write by hand is an ingrained generational habit or a rich and rewarding cognitive process, to handwrite--or not--is still one of the great watercooler debates among people who, uh, write for a living. As Simon Fodden at Slaw.ca puts it, there's writing and there's writing.

Which may explain why TUL Pens invented the marvellously funny Dr. Gerard Ackerman, Graphologist. The gag here is that you write on a piece of paper “I need a new pen.” And then, under the guidance of the good doctor, you analyse your own handwriting, in order to discover how it reveals your personality.

The thing is wonderfully done. Using Flash, Ackerman pontificates at you and dead pans some really funny lines. This is the sort of advertising that is a real treat to encounter. Makes me almost want to place an order for some of their pens. I think retractable pencils might make sense… or perhaps the gel ink ones…

From the University of Durham, The Graduate Junction aims to bring together Masters, Doctoral and Postdoctoral researchers from across disciplines and around the world to create an online global research community.

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Campus Technology has a useful review of current anti-plagiarism technology, from the familiar Turnitin.com to several free online resources for catching copycats.

From the University of Iowa Libraries, a data visualization and mapping project, designed to let users understand and analyse the distribution of the fifteenth-century book.

The aim of the Atlas of Early Printing is to take this type of information and allow it to be manipulated, while also providing contextual information that visually represents the cultural situation from which printing emerged. Layers can be turned on and off to build a detailed atlas of the culture and commerce of Europe as masters and journeymen printers ventured to new towns and markets seeking support and material for the new art of printing.

The site also includes an animation showing a press in operation, along with bibliographies in print and on the Web.

Link: http://www.dhsi.org

Excellent news this morning from editors Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman that the Companion to Digital Literary Studies (2008) is now freely available online.

The online version of the text is hosted by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations and is made freely available through the generosity of publisher, Blackwell Publishing.

If you haven't already done so, check out this collection of articles by some of the world's most distinguished textual researchers in the field of digital humanities. There's something in this collection for everyone, from beginners to experts, from medievalists to blogger theorists:

Main topical areas cover the history of the discipline, methodologies, and textualities.

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Because Beckett hated to be recorded, this short clip on YouTube may be of interest to Beckett afficionados. Some commentators have noted his rural Irish accent here. Rubbish. His is a typical upper middle-class Dublin accent, often associated with the professional, urban Irish Ascendancy class.

This Beckett clip reminded me of another YouTube classic: Pitch 'n' Putt with Joyce and Beckett, a short short from Bórd Scannán na hEireann (Irish Film Board) in which Beckett and Joyce play pitch and putt while waiting for someone to show up...

• We are all in the dumps
• For diamonds are trumps
• The kittens have gone to St. Paul's!
• The baby is bit
• The moon's in a fit
• And the houses are built
• Without walls.

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CaSTA (the Canadian Symposium on Text Analysis) 2008 will be held at University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, 16-18 October 2008. The conference theme is “New Directions in Text Analysis.” There will also be a pre-conference seminar on “Digitizing Early Material Culture”

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Link: http://www.commoncraft.com/reader

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A report in today's Chronicle of Higher Education about Dr. Mark Marino's use of modular widgets for student submissions on his writing course web page.

Merino, a lecturer in the writing program at the University of Southern California, says that using Web widgets for online course materials furthers the goals of open courseware, efforts by professors and colleges to give away their lecture notes and other teaching materials online.

The main benefit of widgets over traditional Web pages is “portability,” Mr. Marino said in an interview. “We’re kind of saying ‘steal my content — take any piece of this class easily and put it where you want it.'”

Read more about Merino's work at the Writer-Response Theory Blog.

Link: https://nets.uvic.ca/telephony_renewal_unified.html

According to the Network Services site, Microsoft Exchange subscribers at UVic can now take advantage of a service called unified messaging, described as "a single in-basket for email and voicemail."

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Link: http://www.digital-scholarship.org/sepb/sepb.html

Version 73 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship. This selective bibliography presents over 3,350 articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.

http://www.digital-scholarship.org/sepb/sepb.html

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: 2007 Annual Edition (PDF file) is also available.

http://www.digital-scholarship.org/sepb/annual/annual.htm

For a discussion of the numerous changes in my digital publications since my resignation from the University of Houston Libraries (http://tinyurl.com/6xkcvs), see:

http://www.digital-scholarship.org/cwb/dsoverview.htm

Charles W. Bailey, Jr. Publisher, Digital Scholarship

http://www.digital-scholarship.org/

Link: http://www.mith2.umd.edu/dh09/

Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations

Digital Humanities 2009

Call for Papers

Hosted by the Maryland institute of Technology in the Humanities (MITH) University of Maryland, College Park, USA

22-25 June, 2009

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/dh09/

Abstract Deadline: October 31, 2008 (Midnight GMT)

Presentations can include:

1. Single papers (abstract max of 1500 words)
2. • Multiple paper sessions (overview max of 500 words)
3. • Posters (abstract max of 1500 words)

From today's indispensible Humanist listserv, a posting by Dr John Lavagnino, Senior Lecturer in Humanities Computing, Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London, about the appearance of simple text-analysis political sites like Speechwars in the US, analysing candidates' utterances.

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Link: http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/site/cnl2009/

Marettimo Island, Sicily (Italy) 8-10 June 2009

Controlled natural languages (CNLs) are subsets of natural languages, obtained by restricting the grammar and vocabulary in order to reduce or eliminate ambiguity and complexity. Traditionally, controlled languages fall into two major types: those that improve readability for human readers, and those that enable reliable automatic semantic analysis of the language. [...] The second type of languages has a formal logical basis, i.e. they have a formal syntax and semantics, and can be mapped to an existing formal language, such as first-order logic. Thus, those languages can be used as knowledge representation languages, and writing of those languages is supported by fully automatic consistency and redundancy checks, query answering, etc. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_natural_language)

Various controlled natural languages of the second type have been developed by a number of organisations, and have been used in many different application domains, most recently within the semantic web.

This workshop is dedicated to discussing the similarities and differences of existing controlled natural languages of the second type, possible improvements to these languages, relations to other knowledge representation languages, tool support, existing and future applications, and further topics of interest.

Link: http://www.archimuse.com/mw2009/

MW2009 CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: Deadline September 30, 2008.

Museums and the Web 2009

the international conference for culture and heritage on-line

April 15-18, 2009

Indianapolis, Indiana, USA

http://www.archimuse.com/mw2009/

Museums and the Web addresses the social, cultural, design, technological, economic, and organizational issues of culture, science and heritage on-line. Taking an international perspective, the MW program reviews and analyzes the issues and impacts of networked cultural, natural and scientific heritage.

Proposals are invited from professionals and researchers in all areas actively exploring the creation, on-line presentation and use of cultural, scientific and heritage content, and its re-use and evaluation.

Digital Medievalist: Call for Reviewers

We are in the process of compiling a list of referees for our journal articles and reviewers for digital editions and digitally-related books. If you would be interested in acting as a referee and/or reviewer, please write to us at editors@digitalmedievalist.org and give us your position and institutional affiliation, and a brief description of your interests and specializations. This will allow us to assign reviewers and referees based on their fields of specialization and their availability, meaning you can be very precise in what you wish to review and how frequently.

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I was planning to write a back-to-school blog this weekend, with information about some free online tools for students and instructors. ReadWriteBlog has beaten me to it with a great list of this year's most useful web applications for students.

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Applications are invited for two 2 ½ year fixed term positions with the Digital Humanities Observatory (DHO), a national digital humanities centre located in Dublin, Ireland.

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The second HASTAC/MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Competition is now open. The focus is participatory learning.

Awards will be made in two categories:

1. Innovation in Participatory Learning Awards to support large-scale digital learning projects

Applications from Canada are now being accepted in the "Innovations in Participatory Learning" category as part of a pilot international program.*

2. Young Innovator Awards targeted at 18-25 year olds $5,000-$30,000

Full information at: http://www.dmlcompetition.net/

*Participatory learning is **defined broadly: using new digital media for sharing ideas or planning, designing, implementing, or just discussing ideas and goals together. *

* (You can find out about last year's winners at http://hub.dmlcompetition.net/

Link: http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003162.php

The Philosopher's Annual aims to select the ten best articles published in philosophy each year, "an attempt as simple to state as it is admittedly impossible to fulfill".

Against a background of twenty-four volumes in hard copy, the Annual is now available entirely online at http://www.philosophersannual.org/

Just when you thought you had enough browsers to choose from (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Konqueror), Google enters the fray with Google Chrome (currently only for Windows, and, naturally, it's a beta).

This rather impressive comic (http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/) introducing the browser and the rationale for building it is really worth reading, and seems to show that they're doing things slightly differently from the other browser builders, with what seem to be solid decisions on the speed and security front. But having played with it, there are a few things to dislike about it.

For one thing, I can't find any way to put a normal search box on the GUI, so you're forced to use the blended search+URL bar, which I find a bit confusing. More seriously, the cookie handling is rather scary. These are the options:

• Allow all cookies (the default)
• Restrict how third-party cookies can be used
• Block all cookies

In other words, there's no option to have the browser ask you whether to save cookies for specific sites.

The about:memory URL shows the kind of thing they've been focusing on (small memory footprint); it shows you the memory profile of all the browsers you currently have running, including IE and Firefox.

It also has the same bugs as Webkit/Safari (predictably), especially with JQuery UI components. There's no option to change the UA string (as far as I can find), so debugging these things on sites which already browser-sniff to work around them is going to be difficult. But it does have a neat little reporting mechanism for buggy web behaviour; it'll take a screenshot of the current page and send it off to Google with your explanation and the URL, automatically.

My biggest hope for this is that Google will put some developer time into bugfixing in the Webkit engine, which will help clean things up for Safari (and possibly Konqueror) as well as Chrome.

At an experimental Web site, Many Eyes, (www.many-eyes.com), users can upload the data they want to visualize, then try sophisticated tools to generate interactive displays. These might range from maps of relationships in the New Testament to a display of the comparative frequency of words used in speeches by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.

The site was created by scientists at the Watson Research Center of I.B.M. in Cambridge, Mass., to help people publish and discuss graphics in a group. Those who register at the site can comment on one another’s work, perhaps visualizing the same information with different tools and discovering unexpected patterns in the data.

Visit many-eyes.com

Read full article

Link: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/houghton-jan/

If you think information overload is a product of the computer era, think again. According to Sarah Houghton-Jan, Digital Futures Manager at California's San José Public Library, "As far back as the sixteenth century people were complaining about the wide range of information they had to consume in order to contribute to society. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries an intellectual revolution occurred as books and written information became more widely produced and disseminated, while innovations and new relationships in economics and the sciences emerged."

Link: http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003156.php

The Dictionnaire Littré de la langue francaise in now available on-line, free, at www.littre.com. It contains more than 80,000 definitions, 200,000 citations of authors and reference works, and synonyms, conjugations of verbs, etc.

The Robert is planning to go on line, but it will not be free.

On the encyclopedia front, www.Larousse.fr has been revamped to allow contributions from readers, a la Wikipedia,but these are clearly identified by a different colour from the official contents of 150,000 articles and 10,000 illustrations or animations, which are verified and updated regularly

The venerable Quid will not come out in printed form this year, and its on-line site is being revamped to make the content relevant to different age groups, particularly school children.

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Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/27/world/middleeast/27scrolls.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

From PC Magazine, a list of what the editors consider the top 100 undiscovered wesites. The sites (not the editors) run the gamut from multimedia to social networking to travel.

Even if you're not a hardcore geek, you'll probably find a handful of sites to make your day easier or more entertaining.

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I'm probably treading on Ray Siemens's territory here, but as a passionate, print-bound reader, I've been keeping an eye on Amazon's Kindle Reader. And despite the naysayers like Steve Jobs ("“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore”") this week's New York Times heralds the success of the Kindle.

It seems that Amazon.com’s Kindle is not the flop that many predicted when the e-book reader debuted last year. Citibank’s Mark Mahaney has just doubled his forecast of Kindle sales for the year to 380,000. He figures that Amazon’s sales of Kindle hardware and software will hit $1 billion by 2010.

Amazon hasn’t confirmed these numbers, but the e-commerce giant has said that of the 150,000 titles it now sells for the Kindle as well as in paper, more than 10 percent of the sales are in Kindle format.

With the new academic year and course descriptions, classlists, and a new student information management system to be navigated before the weekend, I'm intrigued by the question posted in the Digitaldigs blog: is teaching a creative profession?

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Link: http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3259/why-computer-aided-teaching-works-best-in-large-classes

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, a report of a working paper released last week by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggesting students seem most likely to benefit from computer-assisted instruction in large classes with frequent absences.

While the authors caution against drawing too many inferences from this single study, their evidence suggests that:

insofar as computer-assisted instruction is valuable, the scholars suggest, it is because it allows more individually tailored instruction in large, diverse classrooms where teachers find it hard to target each student with the appropriate level of work.

A British academic, tired of correcting the same spelling errors in his students' work year after year, is now recommending that universities simply accept common misspellings, and treat them as if they were normal spelling variants. He has provided a list of ten common misspellings that we should accept to get us started, including "occured" and "thier".

The gentleman in question is a criminology lecturer at Bucks New University (which used to be known as "Buckinghamshire College of Higher Education" -- is "Bucks New University" a variant spelling?).

Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7557604.stm

Seems those digital nomads (see my earlier blogs on the Economist feature, and on UVic's new oasis for digital nomads) are having an impact on new laptop and notebook design.

The demands of the digital nomad is expected to drive laptop sales to over one billion in the next five years. The prediction by Dell came as it unveiled 10 new laptop models aimed at this emerging working class.

The Stanford Humanities Center seeks to award one Digital Humanities fellowship for the academic year 2009-2010. Faculty fellowships are awarded across the spectrum of academic ranks (assistant, associate, and full professor) as well as to independent scholars. Fellows are in residence at the Center during the regular academic year (September to June) and participate in the Center's intellectual life, sharing ideas and work in progress with a diverse community of scholars from across the spectrum of academic fields and ranks.

The Digital Humanities fellowship online application deadline is October 15, 2008.

The Digital Humanities Fellowship reflects the Stanford Humanities Center's commitment to supporting new directions in humanities research. The fellowship is intended for humanities scholars whose research methods are critically shaped by information technology. Projects should be oriented to producing new research outcomes rather than focusing primarily on the creation of archives or software. Appropriate projects will approach significant questions in humanistic study with the aid of new research tools or methodologies. Especially appropriate are candidates whose research is likely to contribute to intellectual exchange among a diverse group of scholars within the disciplines of the humanities.

Applicants must have a PhD and will normally be at least three years beyond receipt of the degree by the start of the fellowship term. Fellows are awarded stipends of up to $60,000. In addition, a housing and moving allowance of up to $15,000 is offered, dependent upon need.

For the online application and more information, please see our website:

email: shc-fellowships@stanford.edu

phone: (650) 723-3054

In a May posting to her blog, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Lisa Spiro addresses one of the most obvious questions to strike anyone who's interested in learning more about digital technology and texts. Why the fuss about machine-readable texts? Isn't it enough to circulate high-quality human-readable reproductions of texts, and make them more available to scholars? What can you do with machine-readable text (think XML, mark-up etc.) that can't be done with human-readable text?

I’ve had a longstanding, friendly debate with a colleague about whether it is sufficient to provide page images of books, or whether text should be converted to a machine- and human-readable format such as XML. She argues that converting scanned books to text is expensive and that the primary goal should be to provide access to more material. True, but converting books into a textual format makes them much more accessible, allowing users to search, manipulate, organize, and analyze them. Here’s my summary of what you can do with an electronic text. Most of these advantages are pretty obvious, but worth articulating.

Read Lisa Spiro's full post, "What can you do with texts that are in a digital format"

As a follow-up to my get-your-feet-wet posting last week, introducing you to the semantic web, an excellent introduction from one of my favorite blogs, ReadWriteWeb, to the semantic web.

...we'll analyze the trends and technologies that power the Semantic Web. We'll identify patterns that are beginning to emerge, classify the different trends, and peek into what the future holds.

And a tip of my hat to the Digital Campus podcast from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University for highlighting this blog. If you don't already listen to the Digital Campus monthly podcast, you're missing the best podcast I know for digital humanists.

Read the full blog from ReadWriteWeb

Check out the Digital Campus podcast

If Wii Fit can get me off the couch, if the Weight Watcher's web tool can cut down on between-meal grazing, and if Chore Wars motivates me and my family to finish the vacuuming, water the garden, and clean out the fridge, why aren't there more digital games that harness this love of play to encourage us to address issues in everyday life?

That's the question Alternate Reality Game Designer Designer Jane McGonigal addresses in a Wired interview you can read at http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/magazine/15-06/st_arg2

Games can be more than simple entertainment suggests Jane McGonigal. They have the power to fuel scientific research and crowd source real-world problems. A veteran alternate reality game designer and researcher, McGonigal studies the networked communities and how they display collaboration and collective intelligence.

Link: http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB121763115075105923.html?mod=2_1578_leftbox

Today's literary critics have fallen into the unfortunate habit of using the word "voice" when they mean "style." It's easy to see why that metaphorical usage has become popular -- a writer with a strongly individual style often seems to be speaking directly to the reader -- but appearances can be deceiving, at times cruelly so. Take Raymond Chandler, the creator of Philip Marlowe, the hard-boiled private eye with a heart of mush. On paper Marlowe was forever tossing off snappy side-of-the-mouth wisecracks ("He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food"). Humphrey Bogart played him in "The Big Sleep," and you know what he sounded like. But what about the real-life author who put the words in Bogie's mouth? Brace yourself: Chandler's mild-mannered speaking voice bore an uncanny resemblance to the milksop whine of Elmer Fudd.

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/aug/07/research.games?gusrc=rss&feed=science

According to The Guardian, Nintendo's Wii console is not just a toy - one US hospital is using it as a training tool for its surgical residents.

And if there are no Wii-wielding members of your household, you might be interested in learning more about Wii's fitness game, and how some Dalhousie students are researching its effectiveness in turning gamers into gym rats.

Luke Fernandez's recent piece on Moodle and Social Constructivism (blogged here last month and earlier this week) has stimulated some lively discussion in the educational blogosphere about course management systems and student learning.

Jim Farmer's guest blog in e-Literate gives a brisk overview of the development of course management systems like Blackboard, ANGEL, Desire2Learn, Sakai, Moodle, ATutor and Olat, and cites Peter Farkas's recent observation: “Now the choice of an enterprise learning system depends upon reliability, scalability, and ease of use.” And, according to Farmer, responsive technical support when it is needed—a requirement for any enterprise system.

More interestingly for me, at any rate, Farmer argues that eLearning Conferences should now focus on instructional methodology rather than information technology. He observes a gap between technology-focussed e-learning conferences that tend to attract information and education technologists responsible for system development and administration, and on the other side among faculty and instructors, elearning discussions exist as "tracts within the discipline oriented conferences."

Link: http://chronicle.com/media/flash/v54/i47/cheapside/

As a companion piece to its recent coverage of UVic's Early Modern London, The Chronicle of Higher Education has created a slide show entitled "A Virtual Tour of Cheapside," based on Janelle's work and the technical wizardry of HCMC's resident magicians.

A Virtual Tour of Cheapside

What was it like to stand along Cheapside, London's great market street, during a 17th-century parade? An online map of early modern London offers some clues.

A collection of new essays on the topic of "Reassembling the Disassembled Book" has been published by /CH Working Papers/ at http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/epc/chwp/CHC2007/ "The digital technologies represented in this collection enable disassembly and reassembly [of books] in ways that mimic, reproduce, reverse, and expose the original processes that produced the subject texts, thereby extending the scholarly and critical possibilities of analysis and synthesis."

Table of Contents:

1. * Brent Nelson, “Introduction: Reassembling the Disassembled Book.”
2. * Peter Stoicheff, “Putting Humpty Together Again: Otto Ege's Scattered Leaves.”
3. * Yin Liu and Jeff Smith. “A Relational Database Model for Text Encoding.”
4. * Paul Dyck and Stuart Williams. “Toward an Electronic Edition of an Early Modern Assembled Book.”
5. * Richard Cunningham, “Dis-Covering the Early Modern Book: An Experiment in Humanities Computing.”
6. * Stan Ruecker, Milena Radzikowska, Piotr Michura, Carlos Fiorentino and Tanya Clement, “Visualizing Repetition in Text.”

Lovely though these high summer days are, at this time of year our thoughts inevitably if reluctantly turn to September's teaching.

If you're wondering about introducing technology in your courses, Academic Hack: Tech Tools for Academics has a video of a recent presentation, Approaching Digital Literacy: Creating a Networked Culture on Campus.

Even if you don't have the time or inclination to sit through the full video presentation, you'll find some of the links provided are worth following up.

And if you're using Moodle for the first (or second, or third) time, you'll probably benefit from Moodle and Social Constructionism blogged here last month.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/06/technology/06green.html?_r=1&ref=technology&oref=slogin

The New York Times has an article about the non-profit Climate Savers Computing Initiative and their free software to help computer owners cut down on energy use.

In its drive to go green, the technology industry has so far focused mainly on big targets like corporations and especially computer data centers, the power-hungry computing engine rooms of the Internet economy.

Next come the hundreds of millions of desktop and laptop personal computers in households worldwide.

Microsoft, the nonprofit Climate Savers Computing Initiative and a start-up called Verdiem are combining to put a spotlight on the energy-saving opportunity in PCs, and distributing a free software tool to consumers to help them do it.

There's been a lot of talk recently about the semantic web, the successor--or so we're promised--to the current web.

But what exactly *is* the semantic web, and how does it link to digital humanities?

If you're new to the concept, there's a good introduction to the semantic web and the current state of the art in The Economist:

The semantic web (or “web 3.0”, as some people are trying to re-brand it), is the name given to the idea that the pages of the world wide web ought to carry more than just the meaning they are intended to convey to the human reader. They should also, the thinking goes, be tagged and flagged in ways that machines can make semantic sense of, as people make semantic sense of language. That way, machines could make instant connections that would take serious amounts of time for people to see, or might even elude them altogether.

Link: http://www.cngl.ie/vacancies.html

The Irish Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) is a Academia-Industry partnership with over 100 researchers developing novel technologies addressing the key localisation challenges of volume, access and personalisation.

The Centre is currently offering scholarships for post-doctoral and doctoral students, with background and interests in digital humanities.

The academic partners are Dublin City University, Trinity College Dublin, the University of Limerick, and University College Dublin.

Our objective is to produce substantial advances in the basic and applied research underpinning the design, implementation and evaluation of the blueprints for the Next Generation Localisation Factory. Our mission is to revolutionise localisation via breakthroughs in automation, composition and integration, focusing on: * Integrated machine translation technology, * Speech-based interfaces and more personalised speech output, * Multilingual digital content management for personalised multilingual content access and delivery, * Localisation workflows and system integration.

According to an article in the current edition of Nature, the team led by the mathematician and filmmaker Tony Freeth of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project, in Cardiff, Wales, have discovered the device not only predicted solar eclipses, but was used to organize the four-year cycles of the Olympiad, and the month names, inscribed on the device, “are unexpectedly of Corinthian origin,” which suggests “a heritage going back to Archimedes.”

If you have a subscribtion to Nature, you can read the original article here...

Read the New York Times coverage here...

Link: http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/ThingstoDoWhileWaitingfor/46969

The current Educause Review contains a well-annotated case and recommendations for building cyberinfrastructure for the Liberal Arts.

The key premise of authors David Green and Michael Roy is the chicken-and-egg paradox of cyberinfrastructure and digital scholarship:

One of the biggest issues surrounding cyberinfrastructure and the liberal arts is that, overall, a major cultural shift in both the conceptualization and the practice of scholarship is required to take full advantage of what is being offered. Even though National Science Foundation (NSF) Director Arden L. Bement Jr. promises radical, even revolutionary, developments in computing, networking, and storage capacities—from grid computing to huge sensor arrays and data storage to new visualization capacities—individual scientists will not, in general, experience a major behavioral shift. True, more scientists may rely on vast data repositories like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (http://www.sdss.org/) or the GenBank database (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Genbank/) instead of on their own research or experimental data, but for most, the transition will be a quantitative change. But for scholars in the liberal arts—those in the humanities and social sciences, for example, a major paradigm shift is required, both in intellectual outlook and in social organization.

Read the full article...

Link: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july08/hagedorn/07hagedorn.html

Imagine researching a topic in the biggest library in the world, with access only to the book titles.

It's a crude analogy, but a warning for everyone--particularly scholars--not to rely too heavily on Google.

A recent study published in D-Lib Magazine (July/August 2008) found that fewer than half — just 44 percent — of a sample group of deep-Web pages from scholarly archives showed up in Google searches.

Read the article...

Link: http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/review/moodle-and-social-constructionism

In “learning to be” a social or behavioral scientist or a humanist, one needs to learn to like spending a couple of years (if not a couple of decades) holed up alone in a library carrel or in the midst of musty archives. Digital learners might want to dismiss these solitary and reflective traditions, but they are the way a lot of important scholarship has been produced and will continue to be produced for years to come. If Moodle serves to forward social constructionist pedagogical practices, I hope that a good deployment can also make some accommodations for the more solitary type of learning. It’s fine to coordinate and connect autonomous scholars on campus and to celebrate collaboration and communitarianism. But one shouldn’t lose sight of the virtues inherent in individualism and more solitary forms of scholarship.

The current edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education features UVic's digital humanities and Janelle Jenstad's Map of London in a frontpage article entitled "Literary Geospaces."

According to the article, "Jenstad is an assistant professor of English at the University of Victoria, which has a strong reputation in the digital humanities. Based on the Agas map, a 6-foot-2-inch woodcut of London dating from the 1560s, her Web site lays out the streets and boundaries of the city in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. But Jenstad's goal is to move the user beyond cartography into historiography and what she calls "narrative evidence."

That’s twice UVic has hit digital humanities headlines in The Chronicle in two months. In June, The Chronicle featured Dr. Ray Siemens's Digital Humanities Summer Institute.

I'm an unabashed admirer of CBC Radio's Ideas, and I was thrilled when they started to podcast some of the programs.

Over the past few weeks I've enjoyed two in particular: this week's "Living on Oxford Time," interviews with three Oxford scientists - Roger Penrose, David Deutsch, and Julian Barbour about the meaning of time, and a haunting two-parter by Philip Coulter about the 1838 expulsion of the Cherokee of the American southeast eight hundred miles to the west, to "Indian Territory," an exodus remembered--if at all--as "The Trail of Tears."

Link: http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/public/update.html

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce
 the publication of electronic editions of Blake’s illustrations to John Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” and Paradise Lost. The six “Nativity Ode” water colors were acquired, and probably commissioned, by Thomas Butts in about 1815. This series is now in the Huntington Library and Art Gallery. The group of three Paradise Lost water colors was acquired, and almost certainly commissioned, by John Linnell in 1822. The first two designs are now in the National Gallery of Victoria; the third is in the Fitzwilliam Museum. Both sets are presented in our Preview mode, one that provides all the features of the Archive except Image Search and Inote (our image annotation program). With this publication, the Archive now contains all nine of Blake’s series of water colors illustrating Milton’s poetry.

Link: http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/

Kevin Kelly, Wired Magazine's resident prophet, pulls together some of the strands in the current debate about the continued centrality of the book in Western culture.

This posting links to some of the other combatants in the current debate, and looks back at the first chapter of the debate in the mid-Nineties ushered in by Sven Birkerts's book, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age.

FIDLH the Fall Institute in Digital Libraries and Humanities in Atlantic Canada at the University of New Brunswick Electronic Text Centre at UNB Libraries

September 25th, 26th, and 27th

Cost: $300.00

Agenda:

Chicago literary and private press journal The Caxtonian devotes almost its entire June issue to printers, bookmakers, and private presses in Vancouver.

Thanks to Thinkubator at SFU for getting the word out.

Drool though I may, I won't be getting an iPhone anytime soon. Why not? Because I'm pretty sure the three-year contractual straitjacket means that long before Year 3, I'll be stuck with almost-obsolete hardware.

If three years seems almost an eternity for present-day technology, spare a thought for archivists and librarians, digitizing texts for a 100-year window. Inside Higher Education describes the challenge of planning for digital holdings, "preserving works so that they can be accessed not just today, not just tomorrow, but indefinitely."

Read more...

Conventional wisdom has it that the first generation of Facebook users (AKA college and university students) now hitting the job market want to erase some of their more flamboyant Facebook moments. And Facebook, challenged by fierce competition from Facebook social networking wanabees, is currently rolling out a redesign aimed at simplifying the site and giving users more control over their profiles.

On TED Talks which I'm currently skimming/surfing, Steven Pinker discusses how language works.

A showcase for public intellectuals, TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design--a kind of Oscar night for nerds) demonstrates how quality content, presentation management, and a dash of charisma can transform the standard university lecture format.

If you haven't done so already, you might want to check Searchme.com, a new search engine that's as visually stunning as it's functional.

Searchme moves online searches up a notch or two, particularly for image and video researchers. You enter your keywords, and Searchme's engine will immediately offer various subject categories to help narrow the search.

Click on a section which seems most relevant, and another page opens allowing you to preview the pages you're thinking of surfing.

I did a quick comparison with Google and Yahoo yesterday, looking for an image of a woman reading--a medieval sculpture I remembered seeing in Ennis Friary. Not alone did Searchme produce both the image and useful information in record-quick time, but the search threw up more focussed results.

Read more...

A splendid New York Times review of the current exhibition, “The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats,” in the National Library of Ireland reminded me of my visit there last January. The reviewer, Jim Dwyer, says this marvellous exhibition is "more like a life-size, walk-through Web site than an ordinary museum show. With audiotapes, four short films and software that brings light and breath to aging manuscripts, it amounts to a digital resurrection, allowing Yeats to stride again along the hinge of the 19th and 20th centuries."

Even if you can't make it to Kildare St.yourself, the Museum's virtual exhibition is a model of its kind.

From Simon Mahony (simon.mahony@kcl.ac.uk) in the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London:

This summer's Digital Classicist/Institute for Classical Studies Work in Progress Seminar series is now about half-way through, and the first several audio recordings of the proceedings are now available as part of the Digital Classicist Podcast.

You can find a list of all seminars in this series, along with links for those that have audio and/or presentations uploaded, at:

http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/wip2008.html

Or you can subscribe to the podcast feed itself by pointing your RSS aggregator, iTunes subscription, aut sim., at:

http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/seminar.xml

We should welcome ideas for further events to add to this podcast series, and/or partnerships to podcast the results of seminar series of interest to Digital Classicists in the future.

Don't laugh. If it sounds like the punchline of a lawyer joke, it's not. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, "a program in the virtual world Second Life, on the application of law in virtual worlds, is counting for continuing legal education credit by the State Bar of California."

The Chronicle joins a chorus of pundits who've been telling us that virtual reality is going mainstream, articles like last week's Wall Street Journal article, "The 3D Internet Will Change How We Live."

Behind this recent headline flurry lies this month's launch of Google's answer to Second Life, Lively.

Some virtual-world scholars are unimpressed by Lively, and you can see and hear their virtual-life responses on the Terra Nova blog.

Link: http://www.ecdotica.org

One of Ecdotica's main goals is to find common points and contacts between the continental traditions and the Angloamerican schools of Textual Scholarship. Thus, in Ecdotica we have published essays by Paul Eggert, David C. Greetham, John Lavagnino, David Parker, Peter Robinson and Peter Shillingsburg, and others by Roger Chartier, Umberto Eco, Daniel Ferrer, Hans Walter Gabler, Roland Reuss or Cesare Segre.

In order to keep moving in the same direction, we are wishing to consider submissions of articles and book reviews. The articles submitted should always have a broad scope, since they should address scholars from different fields. We particularly appreciate surveys and articles on the state of the art on specific issues or areas such as those that have been recently dealt with in this list or in lectures:

1. Markup as theory of text
2. What is the point of book history?
3. Texts as cultural objects
4. Earliest photographic facsimiles
5. Uncovering the Scholarly Edition
6. Copyright and Scholarship
7. Evidence of Reading, Reading the Evidence

We are prepared to consider the publication in Italian or Spanish of updated versions of outstanding essays originally written in English. We also appreciate books which are worth reviewing. Please send contributions and proposals to:

The Department of Computer Science at Trinity College Dublin is looking for applications for one PhD position in the areas of text classification and automatic labelling of text streams.

The positions are part of a large research project "Next Generation Localisation" involving a consortium of leading Irish Universities (DCU, TCD, UCD and UL) and Industry Partners, funded by the Science Foundation Ireland (SFI). The project focuses on Language Technology and Digital Content Management in Localisation. Localisation is the industrial-scale adaptation of digital content to domain, culture and language. Successful candidates will join a team of Postdoctoral researchers, PhD students and research advisors from academia and industry. Details of the advertised posts are as follows:

Read more »

Based on an unpublished Statistics Canada longitudinal study, The Globe and Mail reports that Canadian students are as likely to zizag their way through post-secondary education as they are to follow the straight and narrow.

About one-quarter of college students take time off, take more than five years to graduate or change their minds about their school or area of study. Almost one in five college students do not finish.

For those who go to university, the tendency to switch or interrupt their studies is even higher. More than one-third of students are still on campus after five years or graduate in another discipline or at another place than where they started, the research shows. About 10 per cent leave school without graduating.

Along with the usual discussion, rants and beer we’ll also be announcing the very first of our Expert Talks! Yes, we have secured a special guest star to hang out with us and discuss the finer points of one aspect of our industry. Details will be unveiled at the meeting - see you there. As always, please feel free to bring colleagues, and sign up for our mailing list if you haven’t already.

Link: http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~cpahl/vacancies.html

Candidates are expected to have an interest in pursuing research in foundations and techniques for information architectures. A stipend of € 16,000 per year for initially three years (tax free) plus a generous travel allowance is available for the position.

PhD candidates need to possess a University degree (normally, a four-year Bachelor or a Master degree) in Computer Science or a closely related discipline. Ideally, candidates have a strong background in the foundations of domain modelling and ontologies as well as techniques and methods of information extraction and model generation. Fluency in English (spoken and written) is required.

Read more...

Link: http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/sir-john-a-macdonald/index-e.html

Library and Archives Canada has launched a new online exhibit devoted to the life and career Canada’s first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald:

“As well as presenting an exhibition of photographs, documentary art and other unique records held at Library and Archives Canada, this Web project introduces tens of thousands of pages from Macdonald’s political papers and correspondence that will be made available online for the first time in 2008, enabling all Canadians to learn about Macdonald’s life, career and legacy.”

Kaufmann founded The Linguist Institute Ltd. in 2002 to develop a new approach to language learning using the web. The new LingQ system for learning multiple languages is now available.

This system reflects work on the early stages of language learning done by Prof. Fred Genesee of McGill University:

“When learning occurs, neuro-chemical communication between neurons is facilitated, in other words a neural network is gradually established. Exposure to unfamiliar speech sounds is initially registered by the brain as undifferentiated neural activity. As exposure continues, the listener (and the brain) learns to differentiate among different sounds and even among short sequences of sounds that correspond to words or parts of words…”

Read more...

Link: http://portal.tapor.ca/portal/portal

TAPoR has launched a new, useful portal to showcase its impressive range of digital text analysis resources for scholars, and to provide easy access to its Open Source tools.

You can browse TAPoR projects (including UVic's) to get a sense of the range of possibilities TAPoR offers. If you're wondering how TAPoR can contribute to your research, HCMC staff, who have played a key role in developing TAPoR tools,are delighted to help.

TAPoR is an acronym for Text Analysis Portal for Research, a CFI supported project involving researchers from six universities across Canada, including the University of Victoria, who work with electronic texts and text analysis. The word “tapor” is an Old English form of “taper” − a wick or candle.

I'm interested in how YouTube videos combine cheating advice with a DIY aesthetic in videos like the one above, which also contains advice about using the software program Photoshop.

“The story I now commence is rich in vicissitudes, grim with warfare, torn by civil strife, a tale of horror even during times of peace”. So reads page one of The Histories by the Roman historian Tacitus and it doesn’t disappoint.

Tacitus’ Rome is a hotbed of sex and violence, of excessive wealth and senatorial corruption. His work is a pungent study in tyranny and decline that has influenced depictions of Rome, from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall to Robert Graves’ I, Claudius.

Read more »

Link: http://www.confusingwords.com/index.php

Read more »

From Nicole Allen

Textbooks Campaign Director,

Make Textbooks Affordable Campaign

Hello all:

Some great things are happening in the open textbooks world this summer, so I’m passing along the latest. Please share with others!

Support is growing: The list of faculty members signed onto the Open Textbooks Statement continues to grow past 1,300.  Please encourage colleagues to demonstrate their support for textbook affordability by signing here:

Great example of an open textbook: I encourage everyone to take a look at the open textbook Elementary Statistics on Connexions, even if it is not in your field.  It is a prime example of a high-quality open textbook that can easily be used and customized at no cost, and printed for a low cost.  The book is adapted from Collaborative Statistics, a standard textbook already used by many community college instructors in California.  A few things to point out (see the preface for more):

Read more »

To friends in the US, Happy Independence Day! To friends in Quebec City, Joyeux anniversaire 400, Québec! And to Canadians, who've just celebrated Canada Day (July 1), Way to go, Canada!

A delightful Op/Ed piece in yesterday's New York Times celebrates all the above:

What we might remember today is that Quebec City and Canada grew from another great idea, different from that of the United States, but just as expansive and important, and it too will challenge us for a thousand years.

Read the original...

Link: http://webworkerdaily.com/2008/07/03/who-owns-your-online-documents

Educause's current edition of Infobits publishes the results of its ninth annual survey of information technology issues that affect higher education.

Nine of the ten issues are associated with IT management and funding, but having recently run my first Moodle-supported course with mixed results, I was particularly interested in #9 on the list: "E-learning/Distributed Teaching and Learning."

Educause has linked to a useful-looking list of articles and resources associated with e-learning and teaching as follows:

Read more »

A recent article in The Nation by William Deresiewicz (Professing Literature in 2008) bracketing digital humanities among the Barbarians at the Gates of the traditional English Department provoked a thoughtful response from Wendell Piez in the current edition of Digital Humanities Quarterly:

Not only do we study digital media and the cultures and cultural impacts of digital media; also we are concerned with designing and making them. In this respect (and notwithstanding how many of its initiatives may prove short-lived), Digital Humanities resembles nothing so much as the humanistic movement that instigated the European Renaissance, which was concerned not only with the revival of Classical scholarship in its time but also with the development and application of high technology to learning and its dissemination. Scholar-technologists such as Nicolas Jenson and Aldus Manutius designed type faces and scholarly apparatus, founded publishing houses and invented the modern critical edition. In doing so they pioneered the forms of knowledge that academics work within to this day, despite the repeatedly promised revolutions of audio recording, radio, cinema and television. Only now are these foundations being examined again, as digital media begin to offer something like the same intimacy and connection that paper, ink and print media have offered between the peculiar and individual scholar, our subjects of study, and the wider community — an intimacy and connection (this cannot be overstressed) founded in the individual scholar’s role as a creator and producer of media, not just a consumer.

Read more

Link: http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/volume_9/v9i26_yaffe.html

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/science/17mund.html?8dpc=&_r=2&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

Fifty years before Tim Berners-Lee released the first Web browser, an almost-forgotten Belgian inventor described a networked world, the Mundanaeum, where “anyone in his armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation.”

In 1934, Paul Otlet developed a scheme for a global network of "electric telescopes" that would give readers the power to browse through interlinked documents, images, as well as audio and video material, and to send messages to each other. He called the whole thing a “réseau,” which, as francophones know, is the word we use today for network.

The New York Times has an interesting article about Otlet, about the Mundaneum museum in Mons, and about a group of Otlet researchers and admirers who want Otlet's name added to the Pantheon of primarily Anglo-American WWW pioneers.

Read more...

Link: http://archive.timesonline.co.uk/tol/archive/tol_archive/article4167810.ece

“1832 — August 3, William Jobling, for the murder of Nicholas Fairless. The body was gibbeted on Jarrow Slake on August 6, and at night on the 31st it was stolen and secretly disposed of by some persons unknown.”

The Durham miner’s death, recorded in The Times, is thought to be the last public gibbeting in England — a notable account in the history of crime and punishment over 200 years.

Today that history, along with the unique archive of The Times Law Reports over more than 200 years, is open to the public as part of the complete contents of the newspaper from 1785 to 1985. Readers can access the Law Reports of the past two centuries through Times Online, in the format in which they appeared in the newspaper, as well as accounts of the most famous cases of the day — Oscar Wilde, Derek Bentley and the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial.

Rose Wild, editor of the Times Archive, said: “As well as the law reports, the history of crime and punishment is played out in letters to the editor, in leading articles and comment pages, court reports and trial transcripts.

Link: http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10278643

According to The Economist, a good graphic can tell a story, bring a lump to the throat, even change policies.

This article presents three remarkable charts that broke new ground in the graphic depiction of data:

Florence Nightingale's chart displaying the causes of soldiers' deaths during the Crimea War; Charles Minard's 1861 chart--as poignant today as it was a century and a half ago--telling the statistical story of Napoleon's Russian campaign of 1812, a graphic Edward Tufte (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information) calls "the best statistical graphic ever drawn"; and an 1821 chart by William Playfair, plotting the cost of wheat against average workingclass wages over time.