Theoreti.ca

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.

At the Digital Humanities Summer Institute I participated in a three day advanced consultation on “Scaling Digital Humanities. I posted my conference report here, but I have just finished editing the short presentation I gave on Institutions In The Digital Humanities. This is an outline of work I am doing to document the history and institutions in Canada supporting the digital humanities as part of a project led by Dr. Michael Eberle-Sinatra looking at The Academic Capacity of the Digital Humanities in Canada.

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.

At Playing with History I met Jeremiah McCall, an innovative teacher at the Cincinnati Country Day School who uses games extensively in his teaching. I was struck by how creative and low tech he was in adapting anything at hand to teaching through play. He has just launched a new web site, Historical Simulations in the Classroom.

Willard McCarty in Humanist drew our attention to the Anthony Grafton article, “Britain: The disgrace of the universities” (New York Review of
Books) about “what is happening now to British universities, King’s College London in particular”.

Accept the short term as your standard—support only what students want to study right now and outside agencies want to fund right now—and you lose the future. The subjects and methods that will matter most in twenty years are often the ones that nobody values very much right now. Slow scholarship—like Slow Food—is deeper and richer and more nourishing than the fast stuff. But it takes longer to make, and to do it properly, you have to employ eccentric people who insist on doing things their way. The British used to know that, but now they’ve streaked by us on the way to the other extreme.

It seems we are passing some threshold like the boiling frog. In the humanities we got used to being slowly starved in a genteel fashion that left us keep some dignity like the frog in slowly heated water. The drama in the UK and elsewhere, where cuts are deep and vicious, should provoke us to think about the humanities and its defense. In humanities computing we smugly feel immune to the cuts as we are the “newest new thing” that shouldn’t get cut, but we could find ourselves alone, without the vital neighboring fields like paleography, philology, and philosophy that we depend on.  Actually, I don’t think we are any longer the new new thing – we just pretend to be so out of habit. Perhaps we should start preparing to be the tired recent thing that can be discarded to make room for the newest new thing.

How then to make the case for the humanities when we have so little experience advertising our wares and so much distaste for marketing? Are we doomed by our very fastidiousness and critical stance?

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.

The recent issue of the CAUT Bulletin has a great article by Elizabeth Hodgson titled A Rant on Excellence. She rightly noticed how “supersaturated” excellence has become in the academy. We all pretend we want to be excellent or world-class, but realistically we are just good enough.

These incidents suggest to me, as a literary critic, that “excellence” (with its cognate “world-class”) has become a supersaturated term like “patriot” or “family values,” a word that means both everything and nothing. This word “excellence” seems to have acquired both an indefinable and yet profound value to senior administrators, as if they know what it means, and what it looks like, as if its value is immeasurable and its attainment all-important — and therefore as if anything or anyone not excel­lent is therefore worthless.

Hodgson concludes with the effects of the cult of excellence which include the proliferation of measurements of excellence which have the effect of turning us towards measurable activities. The measurable activities that prove we are excellent ironically distract us from what we are good at and therefore make us less than excellent.

I would like to see a study of university mission statements and the effect of excellence-talk on them.

The Mellon Research in Information Technology program is being closed according to a Chronicle of Higher Education story by Marc Parry titled, “In Potential Blow to Open-Source Software, Mellon Foundation Closes Grant Program.” (Jan. 5, 2010.)

Mellon described the change as part of an effort to “consolidate resources” and concentrate on core program areas like the liberal arts, scholarly communications, and museums. RIT will merge into the Scholarly Communications program, which will manage its existing grants.

This program funded a number of really cool projects like Zotero, SAKAI, and Fedora. I wonder what will happen to ongoing projects like Bamboo that are not yet off the ground?

Update: Bamboo has been “smoothly migrated into the Scholarly Communications program.”

The Digging Into Data (DID) grants awards have been posted. The “Using Zotero and TAPoR on the Old Bailey Proceedings: Data Mining with Criminal Intent” project which I am part of was one of the ones funded. From the description:

Description: This project will create an intellectual exemplar for the role of data mining in an important historical discipline – the history of crime – and illustrate how the tools of digital humanities can be used to wrest new knowledge from one of the largest humanities data sets currently available: the Old Bailey Online.

This program is significant in a number of ways:

• It encourages (forces) international cooperation. Brett Bobley and the others involved in the councils deserve a lot of credit for developing a model for international programs and overcoming all the differences between funding agencies in record time. We all know that good research is often international, but this program rewards such cooperation. I hope the next round involves other countries – this is a model to be extended and emulated.
• One of the things that made a difference is that this program had a single evaluation process. The respective funding agencies agreed to work with one international assessment committee, thereby relinquishing a certain amount of control. This is significant because other attempts have kept separate panels which leads to projects being approved by one and not another. (This happens even within Canada.) DID shows that our councils are cooperating and willing to release control for the good of research – we should recognize that and encourage more.
• It focuses on using large data-sets and they negotiated access to a number of data-sets to support this. The work they did convincing content providers to provide access to full-text collections was beneficial in and of itself.
• It focuses on demonstrating research results from “digging into data” where computational techniques are applied to data. It isn’t a tools program, but a “what can you do with tools and lots of data” program. The time was right.

The number of letters of intent and applications is indicative of how successful this program was in identifying a research support need. As researchers we usually only think only about our work and ignore the host of conflicting demands of councils. Grant councils are also answerable – the design of programs  is an administrative art that is rarely recognized by those who benefit. DID stands out in my mind as a successful experiment. If anything is was too successful – the low success rate shows they underestimated the number of applications and many deserving projects weren’t funded. Now the challenge to the councils is to scale up and build on this to meet the demand. The challenge to those of us funded is to live up to the potential and show that this works in order to make room for all the other deserving projects.