HCMC Blogs

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

Stayed late getting the last of the thumbnails built for ColDesp.

LW sent an update to one of the course listings, so I rebuilt the document again, and caught a couple more oddities which I fixed. It's still not elegant -- there are widows and orphans, etc. -- but for a rapidly-changing doc it's not bad.

CC came by with some text documents (PDF page-scans) along with one new image. I've processed the image (cleaned it up and produced three different formats) as detailed elsewhere in the blog, created an IMT XML file for it, and added some basic metadata; waiting for proper details from CC.

The JPEGs 800px wide are all now ready, and I've started a second batch job to create the thumbnails (based on the 800px JPEGs, so that PS doesn't have to load huge TIFFs each time). They're going at the rate of about one every two or three seconds, so this will run into tomorrow; I'll also be able to do the full-size JPEGs tomorrow, if there aren't too many interruptions. Once that's done, I'll burn them to disk as backup, and also put them up on one of the servers. I'm not sure about location for that.

The next version, 1.8, will have two basic changes: first, the bug reported by JC will be fixed (@facs attributes will begin with a hash), and there will be a boolean field applied to categories which defines them as transcriptional or non-transcriptional. The former is a straightforward change, and I've begun work on it by first updating the schema and ODD file (no changes except in documentation and filenames), and then by writing all the XSLT conversion files for the new version.

The next stage will be to plan for the handling of @corresp vs @facs. I need to figure out whether I should store a value in the category definition itself (a rendition element, which has no @type attribute).

Received a request from LW in Philosophy to update the PDF booklet Studies in Philosophy, on the dept site. It turns out the booklet is built from five sections, which are maintained as distinct Word files by LW; in the past, Stew has combined these to create one file, and then built a PDF from it. I archived previous versions with dated file names, then brought the old DOC file over into OpenOffice (my MS Office can't create PDFs). I replaced the altered section with new data. At the same time, I noticed that the page numbers in the TOC of the document were all wrong, presumably dating from a previous incarnation, so I fixed those, and in the process I combined a number of arbitrary "sections" that seemed to exist in the document, for no apparent reason. I also deleted some chapter number fields which were showing up in the output, and fixed a bug in page numbering near the end (it jumped from 53 to 23 for some reason). I rebuilt the PDF file and uploaded all the changes, and archived versions, to the Website.

If this document is to be updated/maintained regularly over the long term, I think it would be a good idea to adopt some kind of formal system which makes updates easier. I'm not sure what would be the best way to do that, though.

The large TIFF files from the thousands of page scans are currently living on the Data volume on Radish. I need to convert these to three formats: thumbnails, 800px-wide JPEGs, and full-size JPEGs. I started the process today.

First, I tried doing the job with ImageMagick, thinking this might be the quickest option. I downloaded and installed the binaries following the instructions here. Everything seemed to work fine, although I couldn't do the final "display" test because X11 doesn't seem to be installed on Radish. I then tried converting files from the TIFF format to JPEG. No joy. It turns out the ImageMagick on OSX has some problems with some TIFF file formats, and ours are of the problematic ilk. Curses. Possible solutions include installing Mac Ports and building IM yourself, but even that may not work, so I gave up. I left ImageMagick installed, though, in case we can use it for something else.

So I went back to PhotoShop instead. I created an Action (Windows / Actions) by recording the resizing and saving of a loaded file, then used File / Automate / Batch to load files from the Data volume, convert them, and save them to a folder on the Storage volume. It's processing the first folder of scans right now, and seems to be working OK, so I'll process one folder at a time until it's done.