we’d like to see the field blossom and take advantage of resources such as Google Books that are becoming increasingly available. We’re pleased to announce that Google has committed nearly a million dollars to support digital humanities research over the next two years.
Understanding the ‘Capacity’ of the Digital Humanities: The Canadian Experience, Generalised (HTML Link to Abstract)
Some of the themes that are coming up at the conference are:
Inclusion. At the ACH AGM we had a conversation about how to explain the field and things like posters to people new to it. Elsewhere we discussed who is included or not. This year there was a THATcamp before DH which was, by all accounts, inclusive and lively. (While I didn’t participate, I’m judging the Developers Challenge.
Graduate Consortium. The idea of creating some sort of graduate consortium where graduate students could meet and organize activities is coming up in different contexts.
Historicizing the Field. I’m seeing more and more reflections on the history of computing in the humanities. Of particular note is the archive of conference abstracts being put together by John Unsworth and others. I see this as an example of how the field is trying to document itself to its own standards.
Embroidered Digital Commons. There were some neat projects run in parallel with DH. I participated in the Embroidered Digital Commons, an artwork faciltiated by Ele Carpenter as part of the Open Source Embroidery project. I love these participatory projects.
Jobs. The ACH ran a neat Jobs-Slam at its Annual General Meeting. Jobs are becoming an issue as the field expands and people see humanities computing as a source of alternative para-academic careers. I was surprised how many jobs were promoted at the AGM.
On the subject of jobs, Stéfan Sinclair shared two places where jobs are being posted that were new to me:
I have spent yesterday and today at the centerNet 2010 summit as I am on the steering committee. See my conference report at, philosophi.ca : Center Net 2010. An interesting question we are struggling with is what centerNet’s mission should be and how it is different from other organizations in ADHO. We are trying to also figure out how centerNet can do things without become a heavy centralized organization (which may be ironic since we all have centres at our universities with all the baggage and virtues of centers.) My view is that centerNet should do very little itself – instead its philosophy should be to empower and support centers or collaborations to do things for the rest of us. We should, in effect, centersource things in the sense of crowdsourcing by centres.
I came across this older article by Tom Jenkins from Globe and Mail that makes the case for investment in digital content. The article, It’s time for Canada’s digital revolution (Monday, March 2, 2009), is by Tom Jenkins, executive chairman and chief strategy officer of Waterloo’s Open Text Corp. He is also on the SSHRC council.
The Obama administration has made IT infrastructure and digital content a top and multibillion-dollar priority. The European Union has just launched a massive expansion in European digital content as part of its digital commercialization strategy. With only 1 per cent of Canada's content on the Web, we are falling behind the rest of the world as other countries pull ahead in the race to put their information online. Canada must keep pace in the fast-moving digital revolution. …
Library and Archives Canada, with strong support from the private and university sectors, has a plan to digitize Canadian content and is ready with the digital equivalent of a shovel-ready knowledge infrastructure project. It is time to implement. To succeed, we have to move quickly to take advantage of our strengths and opportunities.
This is the first public mention I’ve seen of an initiative to digitize Canadian content on a large scale. There has been discussion that OpenText (which got started with the New OED project) would support such a project. Let’s do it!
Supercomputers seek to ‘model humanity’ (Omar El Akkad, Focus Seciton, F4). The online version of the story, unlike the print version, includes a screen shot of the Conjecturator that Patrick Juola is leading.
The article quotes me extensively from an interview after the Mind the Gap workshop. The article focuses on the Digging into Data projects in Canada including the With Criminal Intent project. At least one quote attributed to me, however, must be from someone in the classics Digging project.
One thing that became clear from the meeting is the diversity of support available across Canada. I have been developing a definition of what I consider to be basic support for research computing in the humanities:
Access to a social lab with specialized workstations, digitizing equipment and software. Labs with lots of computers will be underutilized (unless you use them for training) as most of us have our own laptop; what is needed is the specialized stations to support conferencing, and specialized tasks like video editing, book scanning and so on.
Access to digitization facilities to able to acquire evidence for research.
Access to support that can quickly set up basic off-the-shelf web research utilities from distribution lists, blogs to wikis.
Access to a virtual machine where projects can install the tools they need for specialized projects and not have to worry about standarization or conflicts with other projects. Providing humanists with a locked-down CMS which you can only use to publish static pages does not allow us to use the wealth of open source tools and languages out there to create innovative research environments. Neither should security or standardization rule any longer. Humanists should be able to get a virtual machine set up with sufficient storage for any project that has the programming support needed.
Finally, and most importantly, access to good advising and technical support so as to be able to develop projects, apply for funding, and get project management support without being a humanities computing expert.
SSHRC has just issued a call for proposals with a very short deadline (as in, proposals are due July 2nd.) See Knowledge Syntheses Grants on the Digital Economy. This is an important call because it will build a humanities and social science response to the government’s Digital Economy initiative. It is important that the arts and humanities be represented in this initiative.
Last week was the SDH/SEMI 2010 conference at the Congress in Montreal. We had one of our best conferences with significant graduate student presence. I have posted my reflections on the conference at my Society For Digital Humanities / SEMI conference report.
From Ray I was led to a lecture at Yale by James J. O’Donnell, Provost and Professor of Classics at Georgetown University, on the Kindle, A Scholar Gets a Kindle and Starts to Read. O’Donnell has been involved for a long time in humanities computing, though he is now a provost, and speaks with experience thinking about electronic reading practices. He started with the question from Hugo of whether “this (the Kindle) will kill that (the book)”. This led to reflections on reading practices. “Devices and technologies predict behavior. This device predicts behavior.” He talk, therefore, was around what practices/behaviors does the Kindle (and ebooks more generally) support or predict.
He gives examples of the limitations of the Kindle.
Annotation: The kindles annotation tools don’t let you manage your notes. O’Donnell uses a blog (like I do) to keep notes, but doesn’t make it public.
Complex Documents: It is not friendly to complex documents with things like footnotes.
Non-Linear Reading: Doesn’t let him compare things (a translation and original.) It is like the old scroll – it drives you away from non-linear reading. All you really are encouraged to do is to scroll and scroll and so on.
Reference Works: Scholars need to be able to use important reference works in standard editions and “that is because books talk to each other.” The Kindle is meant for a person to encounter one book, but not for books to encounter each other.
Lots of Stuff: The Kindle does have the virtue that it can hold a lot of stuff.
What Sorts of Practices: O’Donnell describes different reading practices he tried like downloading lots of stuff for reading in free moments. He was very funny about his bedside table as a reading device that holds good intentions. He seems to see the value of the Kindle in getting books you plan to delete. He has bought various books that he expects to dislike and therefore to skim.
Ludic Reading: He also sees this as potentially for “ludic reading” – the reading of murder mysteries on the train where you don’t expect to keep the book.
Travel Accessory: He only reads on the Kindle when away from home because there is so much better stuff at home. It is a way to save space when travelling.
Old Reading: Strangely, the Kindle supports mostly very old reading practices (scrolling). It doesn’t really support any of the newer non-linear practices. There is no innovation in the device – no interesting indexes. For O’Donnell the Kindle fails to replace the book because it doesn’t really innovate, it just remediates without even supporting the full range of practices a good book does.
I can’t help thinking that the iPad will blow the Kindle away. First, the iPad can do so much more than let you read. If you bring the Kindle when traveling to save space, you still need a cell phone, a lap top and so on. The iPad could replace multiple devices the way my iPhone replace two devices (the iPod and the cell phone.) Second, the iPad is open and will let you easily use many formats and use tools like your blog to write annotations and notes. (Wouldn’t it be neat to have an annotation tool built into WordPress that would let you go from the note back to the right spot in an ebook?) The Kindle seems designed to make it easy to buy books from Amazon.
I too, like O’Donnell, got a Kindle for Christmas and have been trying it. One use that stood out immediately for me was the easy of buying. Like iTunes, the Kindle makes it easy to buy books when the book stores are far and closed. I was in a little town in British Columbia hungry for leisure reading and the Kindle made it easy to spend 10 bucks to get some trash right after brushing my teeth when I want to curl into bed with a “book.” You can also (sort of) read in bed. The Kindle is light enough to hold with one hand, something the iPad may not be. That said, now that I am back at home where I have too many unread books, I don’t use the Kindle much any more. Perhaps O’Donnell is right – one uses the Kindle when traveling – in my case because access to books is an issue.
Another point about buying. I agree entirely with O’Donnell that the cost of books for the Kindle is too high to tempt me to buy anything except what I plan to delete. Anything that I think I want to keep I won’t buy for the Kindle because I don’t want to be stuck with it in one device. I just don’t trust Amazon (or reading devices.)
A final point about the Kindle. Their ranking system encourages groups to spam books into appearing to be popular. Looking for a good sci-fi novel to read I started browsing by popularity (which should be a reliable way to browse.) I bought a book that looked promising and by the first paragraph realized it Christian propaganda sci-fi. Going back to see from the reviews how I could make such a mistake I found buried a review saying just this – don’t buy the book – its popularity is due to a bunch of friends of the author stuffing the reviews section. Amazon needs to change the browsing so that we have more reliable ways to find impulse buys that can’t be manipulated by a community pushing crap.
