Blogs of Interest (updated daily), by
Melissa Terras
Tue, 01 Jul 2008 20:26:00 +0000Anthony Robert Terras Ostler, born on Friday 27th June. That'll be me on maternity leave then - will start posting again when I catch up on the zzzzzzzzzzs......
Mon, 09 Jun 2008 10:07:00 +0000... and leaving.
Am going to be a little quiet over the next few weeks, as I'm on leave from UCL. Posts may be few and far between, but I'll be back....(Image, Piet Mondrian, Gray Tree, 1911, Oil on Canvas, Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague.)Tue, 03 Jun 2008 10:56:00 +0000UCL has just launched a platform on iTunes, containing guest lectures, links to news, etc.
Is it ok to say I live in fear of hearing one of my lectures played back to me? I shall have to learn to watch my tongue in future, methinks...
Matthew Kirschenbaum
2008-06-30 14:25 mgkJust finished Paul E. Ceruzzi's Internet Alley: High Technology in Tyson's Corner, 1945-2005 (MITP 2008). I've heard Paul (who is a curator downtown at the Smithsonian Air and Space) give bits and pieces of this before in talks, and it's...2008-06-29 18:56 mgkMy "pecha kucha" presentation at Softwhere 2008....2008-06-22 23:05 mgkJust had this one pointed out to me, Jan Baetens in Leondaro On-Line. Wow....
Geoff Rockwell
Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:16:47 +0000 GeoffreyDiane M. Zorich prepared A Survey of Digital Humanities Centers in the United States for the Council on Library and Information Resources that is critical of the lack of collaboration between DHCs in the United States. The Executive Summary (pages 4-5) noted three “features of the current landscape of centers that may inadvertently hinder wider research and scholarship:”
- The silo-like nature of current centers is creating untethered digital production that is detrimental to the needs of humanities scholarship. Today's centers favor individual projects that address specialized research interests. These projects are rarely integrated into larger digital resources that would make them more widely known and available for the research community. As a result, they receive little exposure outside their center, and are at greater risk of being orphaned over time.
- The independent nature of existing centers does not effectively leverage resources community-wide. Centers have overlapping agendas and activities, particularly in training, digitization of collections, and metadata development. Redundant activities across centers are an inefficient use of the scarce resources available to the humanities community.
- Large-scale, coordinated efforts to address the ''big'' issues in building humanities cyberinfrastructure (such as repositories that enable long-term access to the centers' digital production) are missing from the current landscape. Collaborations among existing centers are small and focus on individual partner interests that do not scale up to address community-wide needs. (pages 4-5
It is worth noting that TAPoR is an example of a network of centers that avoids some of the problems, though not all. The report reads to me like a library view of how to support digital humanities. While centers have problems they are also excellent at supporting individual projects. Large scale services tend to not support any one innovative project as well.
The report has some interesting things to say about tools:
Of all the products DHCs offer, tools have received considerable interest of late among the digital humanities research community. As digital scholarship grows, centers are increasingly taking on a developer's role, creating new tools (or expand existing ones) to meet their research requirements.
In the interests of furthering research and scholarship, DHC-developed tools are made freely available via various open source agreements. However, there is some concern that the efforts expended in DHC tool development are not being adequately leveraged across the humanities. A recent study commissioned by CLIR (and included in its entirety as Appendix F to this document) found that many of these tools are not easily accessible. They are ''buried'' deep within a DHC's Web site, are not highlighted nor promoted among the center's products, and lack the most basic descriptions such as function, intended users, and downloading instructions.
The reason for this state of affairs may be related to how tool development often takes place in DHCs. Centers frequently develop tools within the context of a larger project. It may be that, once the project has been completed, the center becomes involved in other activities and does not have the resources available to address usability issues that would make the tool more accessible for others. The unfortunate end result is that significant energy is expended developing a tool that may receive little use beyond a particular center. Funding agencies who support tool development among centers, and who make it a requirement of their grants that the tools be open source, may wish to develop guidelines and provide support for mechanisms that will help enhance the usability of existing tools and expose them more prominently to the humanities community. It may be that funding tool development as a piece of a larger center project is not in the best interest of the humanities community, as individual centers seem unable to maintain these tools beyond the life of the project. (page 42)
Included as Appendix F is a report, “Tools for Humanists Project; Final Report” by Lilly Nguyen and Katie Shilton.
Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:42:48 +0000 Geoffrey
As of July 1st I am in the Department of Philosophy of the University of Alberta. I will be teaching mostly in the MA in Humanities Computing. My new contact information is:
Department of Philosophy
3-67 Assiniboia Hall
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta
Canada T6G 2E7
Phone: (780) 248-1209
E-mail: Geoffrey.Rockwell (at) ualberta (dot) caMon, 30 Jun 2008 21:36:49 +0000 Geoffrey
We know now that there is much more than text. “Texts,” as Geoffrey Hartman, has observed, “are false bottom.” The implications of scholars’ blindness to the nontextual and of their recent discovery of their own blindness have still not been worked out entirely. Textual squint is still with us, and, in some ways, with deconstruction has become more disabling in certain quarters at the very time that its diagnosis has become easier. The way to overcome textual squint is not to devise theories, which textualism promotes ad nauseam, but to call attention to reality, to the relationship of texts to the full human lifeworld, …”
Page 2 of “MLA 1984 Literacy Studies”This passage is from the second page of a five page edited typescript at The Walter J. Ong Collection. The web site notes that “Ong’s notes indicate that this talk was part of the ‘What is Literacy Theory’ session (program item #190) of the 1984 MLA Convention.” I wonder what Ong would make of the Dictionary of Words in the Wild? I don’t think Ong had wild text in mind as a way of overcoming the “textual squint”; the hand notation “Alice Springs” in the left-hand margin suggests what he thought would be an example of nontextual human lifeworld.
Grand Text Auto
Sat, 28 Jun 2008 19:29:40 +0000 scottQuick link — the pioneering electronic literature author Deena Larsen has been putting together a site for high school and introductory college teachers of electronic literature as a creative writing or rhetoric course called Fundamentals: Rhetorical Devices for Electronic Literature that does a great job of describing some of the basics of how the electronic media can change the way that literary artists communicate with their audiences. Nice tool for writing teachers of all stripes.
Sat, 28 Jun 2008 15:53:06 +0000 noahLast month UCSD hosted SoftWhere 2008 — the first software studies workshop in North America. It was a great experience compressed into a short time period, with one afternoon for an overview of the broad variety of work being done by participants and one morning for a set of focused discussions on the state of the field and possible future projects.
Now there are online videos available for a number of the presentations, each in a punchy “Pecha Kucha” style (under 7 minutes). They can be downloaded in QuickTime form at the workshop page and are becoming available on YouTube and in other forms.
Some videos are from our off-campus visitors: Ian Bogost, Geoff Bowker, Benjamin Bratton, Anne Helmond, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Peter Lunenfeld, Mark Marino, Michael Mateas, Nick Montfort, Warren Sack, Phoebe Sengers, Cicero Silva, and Tristan Thielmann. Others are from UCSD folk Amy Alexander, Jordan Crandall, Kelly Gates, William Huber, and Stefan Tanaka. And, of course, there are three from the organizers: Lev Manovich, Jeremy Douglass, and yours truly. I hope you enjoy watching us try to work in this constrained form — I enjoyed engaging with it!
Sat, 28 Jun 2008 00:27:13 +0000 nickRemember the Codework workshop at WVU - the one about the relationship between creative writing and programming? Maybe not, but my posts on on Emmett Williams’s IBM Poem and programs Ted Nelson likes were from there. Nineteen short position papers from the workshop are now available online in PDF. Although the index is somewhat uninformative, listing only the participants’ names, there is a good store of material for those interested in investigating what transpired at the workshop. I’m not up to playing favorites right now and suggesting any reading, and I’m certainly not up to writing a summary of all nineteen papers, but please drop a note on here if you find something particularly interesting in this pile. I’ll try to do the same as I revisit these in the future. I know from participating in the workshop that there are a lot of interesting arguments and discussions in there.
Stéfan Sinclair
Sun, 18 May 2008 22:18:37 -0400 sgs
Geoffrey Rockwell and I have just completed our first full experiment in pair text analysis: Now Analyze That. Using text analysis, we wanted to try to say something interesting about a corpus of texts, and I think we succeeded; the point wasn’t to do a thorough and theoretically meticulous reading of the corpus (as both of us are trained to do), the point was to use analytic tools to relatively quickly identify some potentially interesting directions for further study. Actually, we had more objectives than that:
- experiment with doing pair text analysis (one person at the keyboard, one person focusing on the bigger picture, as per principles of pair programming)
- experiment with a form of rhetoric that harmoniously combines prose and analytic evidence (or even embedding tools directly into the analytic text)
- begin a series of mini analytic exercises that could serve as methodological examples (for teaching purposes, etc.)
- work with our analytic tools (Taporware and HyperPo) to identify their strengths and weaknesses for this type of analysis
Geoffrey and I will be doing more experiments with the rhetoric of text analysis and tools methodology…
Tue, 08 Apr 2008 19:08:28 -0400 sgs
The Text Analysis Developers’ Alliance is a very loose kludge of coders (to coin a collective noun) - actually, it’s not just coders, but designers and users of text analysis tools as well. The group, founded in 2005, has as a mission to encourage collaboration among researchers and to provide useful resources to developers and users. TADA has slowly but surely been expanding its Wiki, which now includes a wide array of information of potential interest to those involved in text analysis.
Shawn Day, who wrote most of the very useful TAPoR Recipes, has just completed a nice redesign of the front page of the wiki - thanks very much to him for that.
TADA is currently planning a tools contest - watch this space for more information about that very soon.
Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:26:04 -0400 sgs
I ordered my MacBook Air soon after they were announced in January 2008 - I needed to upgrade, and I was intrigued by the ultra-thin and light form factor, as well as the idea of having an SSD, flash-based drive (similar to memory cards in digital cameras), which I’m convinced will be the norm in a couple of years. I’ve been thoroughly delighted by my choice: this machine is precisely what I wanted. I don’t miss the integrated optical drive (I have the external one), the machine is plenty fast (faster than my previous Intel-based MacBook Pro on most things), and - a bit to my surprise - I don’t even miss the larger screen (13.4” instead of my previous 17”). I can even live with the minimalist ports (a mere three: audio out, USB, external display), though life requires a bit more patience without Firewire 800.
Unfortunately, my drive died. Some drives are simply lemons, and it certainly doesn’t help that this is a newer technology as applied to internal drives for computers, but the irony is that Apple trumpets the reliability of SSD, which has no moving parts for enhanced durability.
Fortunately, I’ve learned my lesson before, and I’m pretty diligent about making backups, especially now that it can be fairly automatic with Time Machine and my Time Capsule (wireless base station with integrated drive for backups). Automated backup has been fairly trivial for desktop machines for quite a while (with scheduled software and an external drive), but the magic of the wireless solution is that it works so well for laptops as well, since it backs up whenever it can and tolerates interruptions.
Which isn’t to say that there weren’t any problems (which is actually the main motivation for this post). One challenge I was aware of is that Time Machine backs files up, but it doesn’t create a bootable drive, which can make accessing the backed up content a bit difficult (there are solutions to having having Time Machine co-exist with bootable disks, though I’m not sure any of them are as tolerant to the mobile nature of laptops and transient connections). Another challenge is that Time Machine backups made through a wireless connection aren’t directly browsable - the sparse bundle disk image can’t be navigated as easily as when Time Machine works directly with an external drive, because it’s actually using network storage. For whatever reason, I couldn’t get “Browse Other Time Machine Drives” to work properly either, perhaps because it was a network backup (that option is available when you Ctrl-Click on the Time Machine icon in your Dock - it’s not available from the menu bar or from the preference pane). The best work-around I could find was the following:
- start the migration assistant application (in your Utilities folder)
- select migration from Time Machine backup
- select the correct drive and connect (don’t migrate)
- open Terminal (also in your Utilities folder)
- type:
ls /Volumes- note the likely name of the Backup image
- type: open
/Volumes/[backup image name above](type in the first couple of letters of the drive and press tab to auto-complete the rest)- browse into “Backups.backupdb”, the name of your computer, the backup you want…
Not the easiest procedure, but it will allow you to retrieve files in a pinch, if - like me - you can’t navigate to them otherwise.
Anyway, I did finally get my MacBook Air back with a new drive and I performed a full restore from the Time Machine backup, which worked fairly smoothly. (Again, there were a couple of hickups: you can only restore when booting from the installation DVDs, but the DVD drive takes up the one USB port on my MacBook Air that I’d prefer to keep free for my Ethernet dongle in order to restore faster from the network drive - I should have tried my USB hub but didn’t. When I booted with the DVD in another machine, which is now possible for MacBook Airs, I was unable to mount the network drive properly (permission issues that weren’t a problem when booting locally). So I had to boot from the external DVD drive and complete the backup over wireless, which was slower, but that’s ok since I was sleeping through most of it.)
As reported elsewhere, Apache didn’t work properly until I manually created the needed logs directory
sudo mkdir /var/log/apache2(the logs directory deliberately isn’t backed up by Time Machine). Also as noted elsewhere, Mail had to re-index all my mailboxes, but failed to do so properly, which would have left me without a huge number of my messages (some messages were simply corrupted, but for some reason all the messages added since my previous migration to the MacBook Air weren’t imported properly). The best solution I found was to open the relevant directory in Time Machine (~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/Archives) and to restore the directory as it was before the disk crash, and then to manually rebuild the index (Click on the Mailbox file menu and choose rebuild).Finally, if I were starting over, I’d probably try these instructions to avoid Time Machine starting a backup from scratch after the restore instead of just continuing from where it was.
Sorry for the longish post - hopefully someone will find some tip of use if they run into any of the same problems that I did. And now I’m back from the dead.
Romantic Circles
HeadlinesPlugin ERROR: 404 Not Found
Stoa Consortium
Mon, 26 May 2008 12:01:19 +0000 Dot PorterDavid Pritchard, “Working Papers, Open Access, and Cyber-infrastructure in Classical Studies” Literary and Linguistic Computing 2008 23: 149-162; doi:10.1093/llc/fqn005.
http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/23/2/149?etocPrinceton-Stanford Working Papers in Classics (PSWPC) is a web-based series of work-in-progress scripts by members of two leading departments of classics. It introduces the humanities to a new form of scholarly communication and represents a major advance in the free availability of classical-studies scholarship in cyberspace. This article both reviews the initial performance of this open-access experiment and the benefits and challenges of working papers more generally for classical studies. After 2 years of operation PSWPC has proven to be a clear success. This series has built up a large international readership and a sizeable body of pre-prints and performs important scholarly and community-outreach functions. As this performance is largely due to its congruency with the working arrangements of ancient historians and classicists and the global demand for open-access scholarship, the series confirms the viability of this means of scholarly communication, and the likelihood of its expansion in our discipline. But modifications are required to increase the benefits this series brings and the amount of scholarship it makes freely available online. Finally, departments wishing to replicate its success will have to consider other important developments, such as the increasing availability of post-prints, the linking of research funding to open access, and the emergence of new cyber-infrastructure.
Sat, 24 May 2008 11:29:08 +0000 Tom ElliottMiguel Helf, writing in the New York Times, reports:
Microsoft said Friday that it was ending a project to scan millions of books and scholarly articles and make them available on the Web … Microsoft's decision also leaves the Internet Archive, the nonprofit digital archive that was paid by Microsoft to scan books, looking for new sources of support.
The blog post in question (by Satya Nadella, Senior vice president search, portal and advertising) indicates that both Live Search Books and Live Search Academic (the latter being Microsoft’s competitor with Google Scholar) will be shut down next week:
Books and scholarly publications will continue to be integrated into our Search results, but not through separate indexes. This also means that we are winding down our digitization initiatives, including our library scanning and our in-copyright book programs.
For its part, the Internet Archive has posted a short response addressing the situation, and focusing on the status of the out-of-copyright works Microsoft scanned and the scanning equipment they purchased (both have been donated to IA restriction-free), and on the need for eventual public funding of the IA’s work.
This story is being widely covered and discussed elsewhere; a Google News Search rounds up most sources.
Fri, 16 May 2008 21:11:01 +0000 Dot PorterBy way of the Humanist.
Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary
http://ojs.gc.cuny.edu/index.php/glossator/Glossator publishes original commentaries, editions and translations of commentaries, and essays and articles relating to the theory and history of commentary, glossing, and marginalia. The journal aims to encourage the practice of commentary as a creative form of intellectual work and to provide a forum for dialogue and reflection on the past, present, and future of this ancient genre of writing. By aligning itself, not with any particular discipline, but with a particular mode of production, Glossator gives expression to the fact that praxis founds theory.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Call for Submissions online for the first volume, to be published in 2009:
http://ojs.gc.cuny.edu/index.php/glossator/