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Steve Ramsay has put an interesting video essay about live coding up at Algorithms are Thoughts, Chainsaws are Tools on Vimeo on Vimeo. He provides commentary to the live coding of Andrew Sorensen which in turn is controlling electronic music. Very neat!
Thomas Crombez on his Doing Digital History site has a post on Publishing scholarly projects using Google Sites « Doing Digital History. His argument and instructions make a lot of sense. The idea is that you use something like TEI to encode your scholarly data and then you publish it on Google Sites instead of setting up something fancy at your university or lobbying for research infrastructure that doesn’t exist. Google provides stable infrastructure that you don’t have to maintain at an unbeatable price that is “off-campus” (which can have advantages) and which is as likely to survive as a university service.
Either way — running your website on a university server, a private hosting solution, or your own server — you are basically into self-publishing. Will you use an established platform aka CMS (Content Management System, e.g., WordPress or Drupal) or do you prefer to grow your own HTML/CSS? What is the most advantageous and flexible place to host it? If you run your own server, when does it need to be updated? Do you really need that latest Apache update? If you are doing a dynamic website, will the database continue to behave as it does today? When to update your database software? Is it possible that your website will one day attract a lot of traffic, necessitating more than one server? What search engine do you use for your collection of texts? Do you simply plug in a Google search box, or do you want some more searching power for your users? If so, what software do you choose?
I see more and more people moving to Google (and other commercial solutions) as a way of doing projects quickly and with modest resources. I call it Computing With The Infrastructure At Hand.
Thanks to HUMANIST I came across the UK Digital Curation Centre which is creating a great site on digital curation and preservation. They have short briefing papers that are great starting points on issues like persistent identifiers and they have a partly completed manual with in-depth information.
I was just sent an invitation to IconoTag by an old friend, Jame Turner. It is a multilingual image tagging research project where you choose a language and tag 12 images in that language. I’m not sure what the research is, but it reminds me of the Google’s Image Labeler which seems loosely based on Luis von Ahn’s work – projects like CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA.
Reminder to all friends in the area of tomorrows HuCon 2010: Current Graduate Research in Humanities Computing. We have Jon Bath and Yin Liu giving keynotes and speakers from U of Alberta and U of Saskatchewan.
“The best DH conference of the prairies!”
Well, we are starting up the second Day of Digital Humanities project. You are invited to participate!.
You can see what we did in last year’s project here. The idea was to have digital humanists blog one day of what they did and then combine it all into a dataset that can be studied. We call it “autoethnography of a community.” It was fascinating and stressful to run last year. I’m hoping I can enjoy it more this year.
The project will run on March 18th, 2010. We are hoping that we will get more graduate students and more colleagues from outside North America!
Informatica Umanistica has just published a paper of mine on digitization titled, “Interrupting Digitalizatin and Thinking about Text”. The article starts,
One of the memes of new media is that the form of communication determines the content. As McLuhan puts it the medium is the message, and therefore, as we digitize the evidence of human culture from the Roman forum to Hamlet we inaugurate not just a new edition of our knowledge, but a new knowing and with it a new way of thinking. This paper will not engage the question of technological determinism, instead it will assume that the enthusiasts are right and ask then what is digitization? or what is the message of the digital form? Asking such questions is an interruption in the rush to digitize everything; imagine the scanner has broken down for a moment letting us pause and ask if we really understand the digital, if we understand what is gained and lost, and if we understand the possibilities before us or how we are constrained.
Seamus pointed us to a great animation on YouTube, Digital Preservation and Nuclear Disaster. They nicely dramatize the challenges and need for digital preservation.
Scott Smallwood came to talk to our interactives group about his work on musical instruments. Scott was involved with the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) and demonstrated one of the hemispherical speakers that they designed so that laptop musicians could join and play with others. The idea was that a laptop musician, instead of plugging into a sound system (PA), should be able to make sound from where they are just like the analogue instruments. I wonder what the visualization equivalent is? Will these new pocket projectors we can begin to imagine visualization instrument that are portable. Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry’s demo of SixthSense at TED is an example of creative thinking about outdoor interface.
Peter Baskerville spoke today on “Worth of Children and Women: Life Insurance in Early Twentieth Century Canada” as part of the CIRCA Colloquium. He talked about changes in perceptions regarding children in the early 20th century. They went from being perceived as economic assets (you can send you kids to work) to being seen as worthwhile in and of themselves (you can enjoy them as children.) He looked at census data about insurance as the Canadian census up till 1921 asked questions about who had insurance. Insurance gives you a sense of what people valued. I’m amazed how much one can infer from census data along with contextualization.
Peter found a startling number of children (1 in 10) were insured and for kids under 15 there was no difference between the percentage of boys and girls. When asking why, he noticed that French Catholics were far more likely to insure their kids than other ethno/religious groups. French Catholic kids under the age of 10 are statistically the most likely to die, which may be due to the fact that French Catholic mothers stopped breast-feeding earliest which meant that kids were switching to water or non-pasteurized milk younger. This would suggest that parents were insuring kids to be able to pay of burial costs. Burial fees were also a source of income for RC parish priests so they had pragmatic reasons to encourage parishioners to take out insurance.
He also thinks that insurance is symbolically important. It shows the regendering of the public sphere as women value themselves through insurance.