I’ve uploaded the talk I gave last week at Digital Humanities 2009, “Library as Agent of [Re]Contextualization.” Its text is here [PDF], and the slides are available on SlideShare.
Archive for the ‘dh09’ Category
DH09: Funding the Digital Humanities
Thursday, June 25th, 2009Last session of the conference, and a good thing, because I’m just about burned out on the intense blogging for hours on end. The sadness over this exciting, inspiring, fun conference ending will set in in a few hours.
Claire Warwick makes an announcement about the poster competition: the award for outstanding poster goes to “Bringing Southern Oral Histories Online” by Natasha Smith and her group from UNC Chapel Hill! Congratulations!
Next up, Harold Short and Julia Flanders, presidents of ALLC and ACH respectively. They thank the organizers, it’s truly been a fantastic conference. Harold invites us to London in July 2010 for DH10! Kings College London will be hosting. KCL is situated right on the Thames, is culturally partnered with BL, BM, Tate, Globe, National Theatre, National Gallery, Guildhall School of Music & Drama… what’s not to like? Conf co-hosted by Centre for Computing in the Humanities and the Centre for e-Research; conference itself takes place on the Strand campus of KCL. Affordable student accommodations at $55/night! (Holy cats, that’s fantastic for the center of London!) All roads lead to DH10, 7-11 July. And check out the website.
The conference after that, Digital Humanities 2011, will be at 2011, with local hosts Glen Worthey and Matt Jockers.
Neil Fraistat presents the last dance: “we have the best chance of keeping you the longest if we put the money at the end.” Each panelist speaks for up to 7min, discussing an actual grantee or a few important challenges that their grantees have tackled, or identify what they see as the 2-3 most important challenges to the field at present. When presentations are done, floor will open for general discussion.
DH09 Thursday, session 3: terminology, text as gamespace, architecture
Thursday, June 25th, 2009Walked in in the middle of Stuart Moulthrop’s talk; a big shame–I’d been looking forward to it. Right now he’s talking about cranky digital poets, like for example John Cayley who reportedly has a problem with people making distinctions between literature and the literary.
DH09 Thursday, session 2: computational stylistics, Memmott, Pynchon
Thursday, June 25th, 2009Louisa Connors is up first; “Complementary critical tradition and Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam.”
Proposition: a computational stylistic analysis of function words in two sets of texts from the same period and related genres can support more traditional approaches to literary analysis of those texts.
DH09 Thursday, session 1: libraries!
Thursday, June 25th, 2009The first paper was mine; naturally, I’m not going to blog it. But I’ll post a link to a PDF version of my talk here, and will Tweet it too. Stay tuned.
DH09 Wednesday, session 4: hermeneutics, transcription and dead projects
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009First up, Stan Ruecker and Alan Galey (Stan presenting), “Design as a Hermeneutic Process: Thinking Through Making from Book History to Critical Design.”
DH09 Wednesday, session 3: tools for text analysis
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009Oh, this’ll be good.
DH09: ACH general meeting
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009The Association for Computers and the Humanities wants YOU to be a member. You get an OUP journal subscription out of it! And ACH, one of the organizations putting on this conference, is funded by its membership dues. Do it, folks.
Stefan Sinclair, chair of the ACH jobs effort, is putting on a jobs slam! Like speed-dating, but different. Job seekers are going to spend 30 seconds each presenting themselves, and perhaps they’ll get hooked up with jobs. But first, job opportunities:
DH09 Wednesday, session 1: managing information
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009First up, Melissa Terras of University College London. “Digital Curiosities: Resource Creation Via Amateur Digitization”
Melissa has spent a lot of time studying images, and in most cases was studying images in/from institutions. But what about collections (of all sorts, not just images) created by people who aren’t affiliated with institutions? They’re actually quite interesting, and Melissa studied them using the following methods:
DH09 Tuesday: Christine Borgman keynote
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009[note to self: read Gibson's Spook Country.]
[OK, I'll admit: I'm tired and punchy. Hopefully, I'll do some justice to Borgman's talk.]
“Scholarship in the Digital Age: Blurring the boundaries between the sciences and the humanities.”
Borgman’s Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure and the Internet was published by MIT Press in 2007. Well received and worth reading. What’re you waiting for? Here it is! Encourage your local library to get a copy! And now, on to the talk.
DH09 Tuesday, session 4: collaboration, XML geekDOM, collaborative modeling
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009Oooh, late to the Julia Flanders talk, “Dissent and Collaboration.” I’ll do what I can.
We have an implicit contract with future scholars, who need to know how we did what we did.
Is there a conduit through which collaborative negotiation can take place? There’s data itself, potentially a schema for the data; hopefully documentation of both; and an implicit agreement (social contract) to use a common language, and to use it according to its accepted usage.
These agreements, in a human world where scholarly expression has a high value and standards are still being developed, aren’t enough to ensure perfect collaboration. So what we need is not a common language but a common mechanism for the creation of such a language. TEI provides this: it’s a mechanism not for collaboration but for the creation of a common language.
DH09 Tuesday, session 3: Use Cases Driving the Tool Development in the MONK Project
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009MONK Project is “a digital environment designed to help humanities scholars discover and analyze patterns in the texts they study. The MONK project has been generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, from 2007-2009. All code produced by the project is open source. MONK has a publicly available instance with texts contributed by Indiana University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Virginia, and Martin Mueller at Northwestern University.” So now you have context.
DH09 Tuesday, session 2: Supporting the Digital Humanities: Putting the Jigsaw Together
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009[OK, not putting information copied from slides in quotes: no time. Thank you, panelists, for concise wording in your slides! If you want specific attribution, let me know.]
The big questions to be addressed by the panelists, as Martin Wynne proposes in his introductory remarks:
1. What specific problems have you identified, and how are you seeking to address them?
2. What services, if any, will you provide?
3. How might you link with other related initiatives?
4. What are the further elements of the jigsaw puzzle which are needed to create a coordinated and more complete research infrastructure?
(more…)
DH09 Tuesday, session 1: Preserving Virtual Worlds: Models & Community
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009[Again, live blogging with all its pitfalls and disclaimers. I almost certainly won't get most or all of the live discussion, in particular; if you remember the Q&As, please put those in comments.]
This panel is put on by members of the Preserving Virtual Worlds project, a multi-institutional collaboration “funded by the Preserving Creative America initiative under the National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP) administered by the Library of Congress.” (quoted from the PVW site) (more…)
DH09: opening plenary by Lev Manovich
Monday, June 22nd, 2009I’m in College Park, MD, at Digital Humanities 09, the annual international digital humanities conference put on by the Alliance for Digital Humanities Organizations. It’s my home conference; I first attended it in 2001, and have been in love with this crowd ever since. It’s the most fantastically supportive bunch of people I’ve found in academe. More: this year’s conference is hosted by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, and the mood so far is downright festive.