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September 29, 2004
HST287: AHC-UK/RHS 2004 Conference Main Page
'Recasting the Past: Digital Histories'
The aim of the conference is to explore how the ever increasing number and variety of digital and electronic sources have changed the way in which history, and historical sources, are created, selected, researched, taught, written, presented and used. Even historians who do not use computer methodologies are likely to encounter sources in digital form or have their access to analogue sources mediated electronically. Whilst the digital form can transcend the constraints of time and space it brings new problems and challenges to historians and historical research.
AHC-UK/RHS 2004 Conference Main Page
Posted by hag at 8:34 AM | Comments (0)
September 23, 2004
Review: Lanham, Electronic Word
A Review of Richard Lanham's The Electronic Word
Posted by hag at 10:14 AM | Comments (0)
Chronicle. Open Source Initiatives
From Steve:
The September 24th issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education is running it's Information Technology column as a special pull out section focusing on Open Source issues in the university IT enviornment. They include a catalog of 18 open source projects - a list that leaves out some of the most interesting areas of development (e.g. blogging, instant messaging, p2p collaboration, etc).
Course Management
+ moodle : http://moodle.org : A software package to help professors build Web sites for their courses. Its developers say Moodle is better suited than other course-management systems to help foster a "social constructionist" style of teaching, which focuses on having students learn actively or teach one another by working in groups. The software's interface is available in 40 languages.
+ Pachyderm : http://www.nmc.org/projects/lo/pachyderm.shtml : A software package designed to help users build flashy online "museum" exhibits or course Web pages. The resulting Web pages can be used within course-management systems like Blackboard or Sakai.
+ Sakai : http://www.sakaiproject.org : A comprehensive software system to help professors build course Web sites. The project is led by four universities: Indiana University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and Stanford University. It is supported by a $2.4-million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Sakai's leaders have formed a partnership with uPortal, so that programmers for both projects will try to make their software work together seamlessly.
Libraries and Archives
+ DSpace : http://www.dspace.org : Software for setting up digital library collections on the Web. DSpace is used mainly by universities to create "institutional repositories," where research by an institution's faculty members is stored and usually available free to others. Library officials hope such repositories will offer an alternative to traditional scholarly publishing in high-priced journals.
+ E-Prints : http://www.eprints.org : Allows users to create their own online archives of data, called "self archives," to be shared with others.
+ Fedora : http://www.fedora.info : A digital-repository management system developed by Cornell University and the University of Virginia supported by $2.4-million in grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
+ Kepler : http://kepler.cs.odu.edu : A system designed to help build small archives of academic papers or other documents in a way that is easily searchable by library search engines. Developed by Old Dominion University Digital Library Research Group, with a grant from the National Science Foundation.
+ Digital Document Assembly Kit : no URL yet : A tool to create and view electronic books that include images and other rich media. Being developed at the University of Southern California's Institute for the Future of the Book, with a $1.4-million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Expected in fall 2005.
Web Portals
+ uPortal : http://www.uportal.org : Software that helps colleges set up customized campus portals, which are Web gateways for students and professors. A typical campus portal gives students a one-stop Web page to access information on their courses, transcripts, financial records, campus announcements, notices of events, and links to other campus resources. A nonprofit organization called the Java Architectures Special Interest Group, known as JA-SIG, which promotes the use of the Java programming language in higher education. The software was developed with a $770,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. uPortal's leaders have formed a partnership with Sakai, and programmers in both projects will try to make their software work together.
+ CampusEAI 'Portlets' : http://www.campuseai.org : A set of modular software plug-ins for campus portal software, called "portlets," which add features to existing campus Web services. The abbreviation in the name stands for Enterprise Application Integration.
Student Portfolios
+ Open Source Portfolio Initiative (E-Portfolio) : http://www.theospi.org : The framework for an institution to offer students or others a tool to build personal portfolios of their work on the Web. It is designed as a way for college students to track and showcase their academic and extracurricular work so that prospective employers and graduate schools can review the candidate's output. Being developed by the University of Minnesota, the University of Delaware, and the R-Smart Group, a Phoenix-based company that offers technical support for users of open-source software.
Productivity Tools
+ Chandler : http://www.osafoundation.org/Chandler_in_higher_ed_TOC_3002_05_13.htm : A personal-information manager that provides and integrates e-mail browsing, calendar, contact management and task management, notes, and instant messages. Being developed by the Open Source Applications Foundation, a nonprofit group developing open-source software that was begun in 2001. The project has won a $1.5-million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and $1.25-million from the 25 colleges and universities that are part of the Common Solutions Group, an informal organization supporting technology in higher education.
+ LionShare : http://lionshare.its.psu.edu/main : A peer-to-peer file-sharing network that allows organizing and searching of academic information within groups. From the Pennsylvania State University, with a $1.1-million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Administrative Tools
+ Kualu : http://www.kuali.org : A financial-information system for colleges designed to help an institution manage accounting, billing, e-commerce, budgeting, and other campus functions. Expected in 2006.
Security
+ Shibboleth : http://shibboleth.internet2.edu : Provides "authentication" for Web sites, the mechanism that asks users for an ID and password and allows only authorized users to gain access to the sites.
+ Pubcookie : http://www.pubcookie.org : Creates a common authentication system for different Web-server platforms. Being developed by the University of Washington, with support from Carnegie Mellon and the University of Wisconsin, as well as an Internet2 grant.
+ Signet : http://middleware.internet2.edu/signet : Works with authentication software to help determine how much information on a Web site each registered user should have access to. From Stanford University and the National Science Foundation's National Middleware Initiative.
Scientific Computing
+ Globus : http://www.globus.org : Provides technologies needed to build computational grids that allow software to integrate instruments, displays, and computational and informational resources. Argonne National Laboratory's Mathematics and Computer Science Division, the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, the University of Chicago's Distributed Systems Laboratory, the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and the Swedish Center for Parallel Computers.
http://chronicle.com
Section: Information Technology
Volume 51, Issue 5, Page B5
http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v51/i05/05b00501.htm (subscription required)
Posted by hag at 8:56 AM | Comments (0)
Article: Flogged by blogs, Rather
Flogged by the blogs
By Tony Blankley
Sunday, September 19, 2004
http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/opinion/columnists/guests/ s_252066.html
Once said British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead: "The major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur." That observation came to mind as I watched Dan Rather struggle violently like a proud old marlin caught on a hook by the young Internet fishermen.
Twisting and turning, the great fish only drives the hook in deeper. Plunging and rising, it only exhausts itself -- while the exuberant fishermen carefully manage the line and grab for the powerful hand hook with which they will end the great fish's sea-life.
I like a good fish dinner, but I've never cared much for fishing, as I hate to see a noble creature in its death agony. Yet that is what we are observing. It is Dan Rather and CBS News, through their failed effort to prove the legitimacy of their forged Bush National Guard documents, who are being revealed as hapless, helpless victims of an anarchic, swarming, overwhelming Internet blog technology. Soon, other great news institutions inevitably will be revealed for their inadequate capacity to fully report the news.
As in all revolutions, first, the old order must be destroyed, then we will learn both the strengths and the shortcomings of the new order. We're now getting a glimpse of the Internet bloggers' strength.
For three quarters of a century, when CBS News entered a fight it had been an unfair mismatch for its adversary. The credibility, research capacity and gate-keeping monopoly of the network would overwhelm its victim. It was breathtaking to see, moment by moment, the bloggers' advantage.
CBS did what it has always done -- produced and broadcasted a highly polished segment in which the argument was magisterially framed to their advantage, with the facts favorable to It cherry-picked for presentation. Annoying contrary facts were ignored. Carefully edited, prime-time quality interviews of their supposedly authoritative expert witnesses were laid in. The whole package was opened, narrated and concluded with dignified contempt for their victim by their star asset, uber-anchor Dan Rather.
Then the bloggers went to work. From the four corners of humanity, experts started deconstructing the "truth" that CBS had presented. Who knew that there are experts who specialize just in the history of IBM Selectric typing balls or the kerning capacity of computer printing?
As each of these experts added their information to one blog, other bloggers would monitor it, pass it on, add a new fact, reorganize the analysis and synthesize new information. If new information proved wrong, it was corrected by yet another expert in the blogosphere. Mistakes were cheerfully admitted and instantly corrected. People who had filled out such forms 30 years ago added their analysis.
Both technical and historic information constantly came in -- ever-increasing the fullness of understanding on the topic. It was like watching time-lapse photography of a cell dividing and growing. It was as if the very mechanism for establishing truth was a living, pulsating force.
CBS had one handwriting expert against the bloggers' legions of subspecialists. It was pathetic. The bloggers' advantage is that the experts find the bloggers. There are just millions of smart people all over the world sitting at their computers, ready to join the quest. The bloggers themselves often add powerful analytical capacity to the process. They picked CBS's story as clean as a school of piranhas would pick clean some poor water buffalo that wandered into their river.
Bloggers have had this capacity for a few years. We had a taste of it in the Trent Lott affair. But what has made the bloggers a strategic component of national politics is that their readership now includes many senior reporters, editors and producers in the old media. There are enough self-respecting old media journalists who simply cannot see the cornucopia of valid information on the Internet and then ignore it in their reporting.
Instead of the bloggers only reaching the few million of their readers, they are reaching the larger mass public through the old media. The old media is becoming complicit in its own demise, just as some French aristocrats supported the revolution against their own ancient regime.
Count me a supporter of the revolution. But revolutions are messy affairs where much of value is lost as well as gained.
Tony Blankley is editorial page editor of The Washington Times.
Posted by hag at 8:44 AM | Comments (0)
September 22, 2004
HST287: paper ideas, musings
Some current trends that may intersect in interesting ways in how we "do" history:
- "information explosion" - a perception (and an increasing reality?) that the amount of collected data is too overwhelming to process by traditional means
- instant information - that the web has or will have "everything"
- instant communication - person-to-person or person to fluid groups (subcategory: polarization)
- the tyranny of "I" - everything revolves around the individual (and "I feel")
- the impact of video (especially post-70s quick cutting TV) on human brain development (cf. recent studies on connection between under age 2 TV viewing and ADHD)
- the refinement of marketing techniques, esp. its role in politics and now a new collaboration between marketing agencies, Proctor & Gamble, etc.
- the changing role, nature, and process of education (esp. "the disciplines", the rise of part-timers, and of course, online learning)
Posted by hag at 9:45 AM | Comments (0)
Sokal, Social Text
Alan Sokal Articles on the "Social Text" Affair
Posted by hag at 9:25 AM | Comments (0)
Review: O'Donnell on Lanham
Review of Richard Lanham's The Electronic Word by James O'Donnell
Posted by hag at 9:09 AM | Comments (0)
eWalks step counter utility
Our utility for tracking steps for the 2004 Step by Step wellness program
http://www.uvm.edu/~dsv/surveys/stepbystep/stepbystep.htm
Posted by hag at 8:34 AM | Comments (0)
September 13, 2004
Virtual Humanities Lab at Brown
From an annoncement on HUMANIST:
The Virtual Humanities Lab at Brown University plans to develop existing and new digital resources into an experimental model for collaborative scholarship and pedagogy.
They are encoding Boccaccio's Esposizioni sulla Commedia di
Dante and portions of Giovanni Villani's Croniche. They are also
beginning work on a new interface, which will provide tools that will
allow scholars to annotate texts online, suggest variant encodings,
and of course participate in discussion using natural languages as
well as code.
Weblog at:
http://brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/vhl/.
Vika Zafrin
Posted by hag at 9:56 AM | Comments (0)
September 9, 2004
wysiwyg xml editor
wysiwyg xml editor
bitflux
Posted by hag at 10:08 AM | Comments (0)
Educause: blogs, wikis, other 2004 teaching/learning
TOC : Educause Review, September / October 2004
http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm045.asp
Educational Blogging
Stephen Downes
The process of blogging - of reading onlin, engaging a community, and reflecting on it - is a process of bringing life into learning.
http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0450.asp
Going Nomadic: Mobile Learning in Higher Education
Bryan Alexander
How are wireless, mobile technologies and their emergent trends, such as swarms, affecting the learning environment, pedagogy, and campus life?
http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0451.asp
Wide Open Spaces: Wikis, Ready or Not
Brian Lamb
The needs met by “wikis”—documents posted online for open editing by all—are simply not being satisfied by present IT strategies and tools
http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0452.asp
Game-Based Learning: How to Delight and Instruct in the 21st Century
Joel Foreman
To learn more about videogames in academe, the author spoke with five leading-edge thinkers in the field: James Paul Gee, J. C. Herz, Randy Hinrichs, Marc Prensky, and Ben Sawyer.
http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0454.asp
Wait, there's more ! A special Web Bonus !
InsurgenceEmergenceConvergence: How to Fold Soup
Did Steve Martin, in his 1979 short story "How to Fold Soup", offer suggestions on how to deal with multimedia.
Enjoy!
http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0453.asp
Posted by hag at 9:18 AM | Comments (0)
LMS Sakai
Learning Management System (LMS), open source
http://www.sakaiproject.org/
Posted by hag at 9:09 AM | Comments (0)
Article: MRAM memory and history
Every move you make could be stored on a PLR
Kevin Maney
USA Today
Posted 9/7/2004 8:51 PM; Updated 9/8/2004 12:03 AM
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/kevinmaney/2004-09-07-plr_x.htm
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Over the years, a number of tech prognosticators
have said that someday many of us will own a device that might be
called a personal life recorder, or PLR.
(goes on to describe new MRAM--Magnetic RAM--chip - more storage, very small)
Going forward, MRAM could open similar possibilities, in time perhaps
giving rise to personal life recorders. Of course, PLRs will create a
whole new set of problems. Like, how would you search all that data to
find the conversation that proves you asked your spouse if it was OK if
your mother came to stay for a month?
Could a lawyer subpoena your PLR? What if Kobe Bryant had one that
night in the hotel room?
I'm worried about what it might do to our minds. Human brains enhance
and put a spin on memories the second they are stored. I might find out
that none of my goals in hockey look anywhere near as exciting as I
recall. That could precipitate some kind of major personality disorder,
couldn't it?
Posted by hag at 8:42 AM | Comments (0)
Article: Tripathi, community
Arun Tripathi, overlong but good resource
Community in the Digital Age
Social scientists and philosophers argue the meaning of our evolving online lives.
http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/book_reviews/v5i28_tripathi-barney.html
Posted by hag at 8:15 AM | Comments (0)
Article: Kelso, feminism technology SF
Shaky (early 90s feminism) but some interesting ideas
The Silver Metal Imagination:
Blueprints for Changing Technology in Women's SF
by Sylvia Kelso
http://www.sff.net/people/eluki/litcrit.htm
Posted by hag at 8:14 AM | Comments (0)
September 3, 2004
CTL talk: adopting/supporting new technologies,
Three separate strands of conversations have intersected in interesting
ways this week: the post "learn...teach...learn...repeat" and Chris R's
response to the Classroom Support thread, along with a discussion
happening on a CIT list. The first has to do with use and promotion of
blogs and the second with faculty reaction (resistance) to new
technologies. The last has to do with how students are reacting to the
new requirement to register their computers via NetReg and the
challenges in integrating them with UVMs network.
In all cases, though, the common theme is how new technologies are
adopted. As Chris M. points out, when every new tech toy is overhyped,
how can one even determine, much less decide to adopt, what will be
useful? Chris R. points out, and rightly so, that technologies can have
a positive impact on teaching and learning, so why should there be such
a resistance to their adoption. The CIT discussion parallels that plight
by bemoaning the lack of interest or amount of confusion among new and
returning students to their computers, and their seeming unwillingness
to do what's needed to provide a safe, virus-free environment for all at
UVM.
For those of us who spend our time at that intersection between new
technologies and hesitant users, this can be a tricky place. Should we
try out every new technology or wait until it has proved itself? Should
we demand that anyone who uses a computer on campus exhibit a particular
level of literacy or should we just "do it for them"? And of course the
age old question: does support mean we'll fix what's broken. Or, to
frame it in terms of the fish/fishing parable, does support mean we'll
feed you fish, teach you to fish, or take you out in fish-filled waters
and throw you off the boat, assured that you'll come up with something.
But I digress. To bring the focus in a bit: blogs. A couple years ago
when I first encountered blogs my reaction was "nice, but I'll wait and
see." Now I think that was wrong. Yes, to invoke the over-used McLuhan
idea, new technologies are not usually going to be much of a departure
from those preceeding them. As such, they may not look like enough of a
leap to get excited about. But it behooves those of us in that
intersection to explore and test not only the new technology as it is,
but the new technology as it might be. In this case, not "what do
current blogs look like, or do" but "what might the blog model lead to
and how can we shape it to be useful."
Unfortunately, though a university environment might seem to be the
perfect place for such experimentation, the fact remains that such
experimentation, with its obvious potential for many failures and
dead-ends, will often be at odds with the need to spend effort fixing
what's already in place. That is, fixing the plumbing leaks often
pre-empts exploring new possibilities.
In the realm of technology, where managing expectations and
communicating possibilities seem to be so difficult, the ability to
successfully adopt and promote a new idea is especially challenging. We
think we know what might be a great idea (using blogs, making sure all
computers have up to date virus software, etc.) but the time to
implement those good ideas is competing with other needs (get ready for
class, navigate conflicting media systems in classrooms, and do your
homework/do your research).
So what do we do? A couple ideas:
1) Continue to experiment. Don't ask for a technology to be proven
before trying it out. Try it. (Yes, I've started blogging...)
2) Don't expect adoption without determing need. Find a way to
communicate that need. People have to believe a technology will fill
their needs before they'll use precious time experimenting with it. For
example, how many people didn't see a need for WebCT before Shirley
showed them some of her uses for it?
3) Hope and pray that the administration will continue to let us
experiment to the extent that we have, even though they don't provide a
heck of a lot of support for what could be some really neat ideas
more...??
Posted by hag at 5:21 PM | Comments (0)
September 2, 2004
Unicode numbers Mac
Mac OS X:
Working with an XML document containing numeric character entities and want to know what they represent? Display any Unicode character your system fonts can display by entering its numeric value, and display characters that are plus or minus any offset you want by doing addition or subtraction
Go to "View - Display Format - Unicode" from the menu.
If you had a numeric value in the previous display, it will be replaced by the equivalent Unicode character. You can display different characters by hitting the Clear button and then entering a new value. (The display will update each time you enter a numeral, since the calculator has no way of knowing whether you're going to enter a 2-digit, 3-digit, 4-digit or whatever value.) You can do Unicode math by hitting the + or - button and entering a value; the display will update to the appropriate offset from the character in the display.
This works for hexadecimal, too, if you start out with the hex
calculator.
(Thanks, David Sewell, for the tip.)
Posted by hag at 1:19 PM | Comments (0)
TEI Projects: Dolley Madison, MEP
From David Sewell:
The University of Virginia Press has released our first online TEI-based publication, THE DOLLEY MADISON DIGITAL EDITION, in the first of two installments comprising all of Dolley Madison's extant correspondence through June 1836. You're invited to take a look:
http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/dmde
For access to interior pages, click on "Login" and use the username
"TEI", password "orgName" (case-sensitive); this will be valid for a
couple of weeks.
All of the documents in this edition were coded in the Model Editions Partnership (MEP) variant of TEI, with introductory and supporting material in standard TEI for the most part. URLs ending in ".xqy" point to XQuery scripts that do the dynamic (or in a few cases static) HTML page generation, with underlying XML data stored in the Mark Logic Content Interaction Server database. The underlying data and code is not accessible via the reading interface, but for an idea of what the underpinnings look like, here is a walk-through based on a prepublication state of the documentary XML and the XQuery code:
http://www.ei.virginia.edu/Unlinked/DolleyDemo/
Posted by hag at 8:16 AM | Comments (0)
September 1, 2004
Robin Netherton Lectures
Historical Costume Lectures by Robin Netherton - 10/16/04 - Washington DC Metro Area
Posted by hag at 5:41 PM | Comments (0)
TEI publication tool: Anastasia
SourceForge.net: Project Info - Anastasia
Posted by hag at 2:41 PM | Comments (0)
Swish-e open xml indexing
http://swish-e.org/
Swish-e is an open source indexer/search engine. It excels at indexing
(X)HTML files, but indexes plain text and XML files almost as easily.
It comes with C, PHP, and Perl API's, and it runs under (over?) Unix as
well as Window's operating systems.
I am/will be using swish-e as the underlying indexer for searches
against TEI documents. Specifically, I have been marking sets of
literature up in TEI. I then convert the sets into a number of formats
such as plain text, XHTML, PDF, various Palm flavors, etc. I then use
swish-e to index the XHTML because swish-e does makes it easy to pull
out the meta tags of HTML head elements and make them field searchable
as well as the body of the text being free-text searchable. I could
have almost as easily indexed the raw TEI files, then then I have to
deal with transforming the XML before it gets to the browser. ("I know.
There are many ways to do that."). See:
http://infomotions.com/alex2/
I have also been fiddling with Plucene, a Perl port of Lucene, a
Java-based indexer/search engine library:
http://search.cpan.org/dist/Plucene/
Unlike swish-e, Lucene/Plucene are libraries. Swish-e is a
indexer/search engine binary as well as a library.
Posted by hag at 9:25 AM | Comments (0)
OAI-PMH Powerpoint slides: Gerry McKiernan
_Open Content and Access for Digital Scholarship_
"The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting
(OAI-PMH) provides an application-independent
interoperability framework based on metadata harvesting. There are two
classes of participants in the OAI-PMH
framework: Data Providers and Service Providers. Data Providers
administer systems that support the OAI-PMH
as a means of exposing metadata from digital collections or
repositories; while Service Providers use metadata harvested
via the OAI-PMH as a basis for building value-added services. In this
presentation we will profile several major OAI-PMH Data
and Service Providers, and describe and discuss their innovative
content, features, and functionalities."
The REVISED and CORRECTED presentation has been self-archived at:
[ http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/OpenContent.ppt
Posted by hag at 9:02 AM | Comments (0)