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March 28, 2006
UVic image Markup Tool
The UVic Image Markup Tool Project
Posted by hag at 10:07 AM | Comments (0)
March 23, 2006
Eric Lease Morgan's Digital Library Manual
Designing, Implementing, and Maintaining Digital Library Services and Collections with MyLibrary. See:
http://dewey.library.nd.edu/mylibrary/manual/
A summary by Eric:
"The book is a manual, and its purpose is to outline the principles and processes necessary to implement digital library collections and services. It uses MyLibrary as an example but the principles and processes can be applied to just about any digital library system or application.
The manual is intended to be read by administrators who need to know what and how many resources to allocate to a digital library. It is intended to be read by librarians who are responsible for collecting and organizing content as well as ensuring the library's usability. The manual is intended to be read by systems administrators who are in charge of providing the technical infrastructure for the system. Last but not least, it is intended for programers who will use the underlying Perl API to provide services against the collection.
What the book contains and who helped write it
The book's 200+ pages is distributed in two volumes and freely available in HTML and PDF formats. Co-written by seventeen excellent authors, the book elaborates upon digital library topics including information architecture, content standards, user-centered design, fundamental computer technologies, techniques for initial implementation & ongoing maintenance, and of course the MyLibrary Perl application programmer's interface. Here is an outline of the book's contents:
* Designing, Implementing, and Maintaining Digital Library
Services and Collections with MyLibrary by Eric Lease Morgan
(University of Notre Dame)
* Pioneering Portals: A History Of MyLibrary@NCState by
Keith Morgan (North Carolina State University)
* Information architecture
o First Principles of Information Architecture: "On
your Mark. Get set. Go!" not "Fire, and then Aim." by
Eric Lease Morgan (University of Notre Dame)
o Facets and Terms in MyLibrary by Tom Lehman
(University of Notre Dame)
* The Importance of Content Standards in Digital Libraries
by Leslie Johnston (University of Virginia Library)
* User-centered design
o Usability Testing: a Key to User-centered Designs by
Terry Huttenlock (Wheaton College)
o Surveys by Tom Lehman (University of Notre Dame)
o Focus Group Interviews by Megan Johnson (Appalachian
State University)
o Attracting Users by Michael Yunkin (University of
Nevada, Las Vegas)
o Card Sorting by Terry Nikkel and Shelley McKibbon
(Dalhousie University Libraries)
o Paper Prototyping by Nora Dimmock (University of
Rochester)
o Low-cost Recording of Usability Tests by Martin
Courtois (Kansas State University)
o Communicating Usability Results by Brenda Reeb
(University of Rochester)
o Case Studies by Hal Kirkwood (Purdue University),
Leslie Johnston (University of Virginia Library), and
Alison Aldrich & Vishwam Annam (Wright State
University Libraries)
* Underlying technologies
o What is XML, and Why Should I Care? by Tod Olson
(University of Chicago)
o What are Relational Databases, and Why Should I Care?
by Vishwam Annam (Wright State University Libraries)
o What are Indexers and Why Should I Care? by Peter
Karman
* Implementation and Maintenance by Eric Lease Morgan
(University of Notre Dame)
* MyLibrary Tutorial by Eric Lease Morgan (University of
Notre Dame)
* The MyLibrary Perl API by Robert Fox (University of
Notre Dame)
Colophon
The book is licensed under the GNU Public License and is an example of open access publishing. Author's have retained copyrights to the things they have written. The manuscript was marked up in DocBook XML and transformed into HTML and PDF files using XSLT stylesheets, xsltproc, and fop.
Questions, comments, corrections, criticisms, and clarifications are more than welcome. Send them to mylib-doc@dewey.library.nd.edu.
--
Eric Lease Morgan and Team MyLibrary Manual
Posted by hag at 10:49 AM | Comments (0)
March 17, 2006
ACLS Report: Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities
acls-ci-public.pdf (application/pdf Object)
Report on the "gran challenge" of providing a cyberinfrastructure to build the global digital library. "At present, we have the opportunity to reintegrate the cultural record,
connecting its disparate parts and making the resulting whole available to one and all, over the network."
Posted by hag at 9:25 AM | Comments (0)
NEH Fellowship
Guidelines for Fellowships and Faculty Research Awards
Deadline May 1
Posted by hag at 9:16 AM | Comments (0)
March 9, 2006
HASTAC, video games, Duke
A New Lab Helps Bridge the Humanities and Technology
Also, HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, Technology Advanced Collaboratory): http://www.hastac.org/
Excerpts from the article:
"“We’re not trying to teach people to play games,” said Tim Lenoir, the Kimberly J. Jenkins Professor of New Technologies and Society, who teaches the class, called “How They Got Game.”
“We want to look at the culture from which they emerged and their effect on our culture.”
It’s interesting to understand how video games and interactive simulations affect and are affected by our culture, he said. Students are not only looking at shoot-em-up games, but also Dungeons and Dragons, Zork, Atari and arcade games, and the ancient forbearer of video games, Pac-Man.
Participants can tackle some of the questions the games raise: What kind of social interaction do online gaming communities foster? How are women represented? Do computer-based games encourage violent behavior? How do games fit into what Lenoir calls the “military-entertainment complex”?"
"The star of this class is a seminar-room-turned-lab dubbed IMPS, or Interactive Multimedia Project Space, which opened last month. One of the most technologically advanced classrooms on campus, IMPS is a significant step in Duke’s use of multimedia technology in teaching the humanities, said Pamela Gutlon, director of operations at the Franklin Center.
The new lab allows participants to feed different digital content from multiple sources -- including students’ laptops, the in-room DVD player, or different videogame consoles -- to any of the screens within the room. A whiteboard on one end of the room has a camera to instantly capture the information to the web for archiving and later download. Users can also annotate digital presentations by writing directly on a plasma screen with a digital pen tool. Multiple remote participants can videoconference into meetings. And a specially designed system allows for all these different interactions to be digitally captured and preserved.
“Critical inquiry into gaming is just one of the intellectual projects that we designed IMPS to facilitate,” said Mark Olson, director of new media and information technologies at the Franklin Center. “The space aspires to enable new modes of collaboration and intellectual production, through interaction with and analysis of the ‘stuff’ of the digital age -- text, sound, video and image.”
The lab also will be central to Duke’s involvement in a yearlong exploration of the intersection of technology and the humanities, in connection with the national organization HASTAC (the Humanities, Arts, Science, Technology Advanced Collaboratory)."
:Looking at the relationship between technology and culture is one of the overarching goals of HASTAC (pronounced “haystack”), which was co-founded by Cathy Davidson."
"Gaming is one area of interest for HASTAC because a key question the consortium is does this technology-savvy generation of students learn differently than previous generations? Do they think differently? Do they have different forms of social networking, and different ways of understanding the world?
Davidson said these are important questions for higher education and the workplace that require an interdisciplinary approach."
She added that the humanities face significant technology issues. For example, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the most ambitious astronomical survey ever undertaken, comprises 40 terabytes of information, while Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History project comprises 200 terabytes.
“I just don’t think people are aware of the enormous data needs in the humanities,” she said. “The data demands of the human and social sciences are huge and complex and costly. Most universities are structured around the idea that the humanities are cheap."
Lenoir, who is a co-convener of the FHI seminar on gaming with English professor Priscilla Wald, said playing the games is an integral part of understanding and analyzing them.
“My idea is not to observe them from 30,000 feet, but to actually play games,” he said. “The lab, the teaching, the faculty seminar are all part of a continuous thread of investigation around new media.”
Wald, who is learning to play online games with the help of her teenage son and a graduate student, said she’s looking forward to spending next year exploring how video games can be used in learning, how they function as a form of social interaction and how academics can use them to understand traditional disciplines.
As an English professor, for example, she’s fascinated by the use of language and the storytelling in the games.
“It’s like living inside a novel,” she said. “It’s performance and storytelling.”
Her experience learning to play games also shows that this is an area in which faculty and students can genuinely collaborate.
“The students know a lot that we don’t,” she said. “We know how to frame the questions, but they know the games.”
Posted by hag at 2:45 PM | Comments (2)
March 8, 2006
TEI workshop materials
From Lou Burnard:
Sebastian, James, and I have just finished our annual two day course on
XML and TEI here at OUCS, and all the teaching materials
are, as usual, available from the website at
http://www.tei-c.org/Talks/2006/OUCS/
Posted by hag at 10:36 AM | Comments (0)
Juxta, for comparing and collating multiple witnesses
Jerome McGann announces ARP's Juxta
Our development group ARP (Applied Research in Patacriticism:
www.patacriticism.org) is today releasing the 1.0 version of Juxta.
Anyone interested in online critical editing, whether theoretically or
practically or both, will probably want to look at the tool and perhaps
try it out.
Juxta is an open source cross platform tool for comparing and collating
multiple witnesses of a single textual work. The tool allows one to set
any of the witnesses as the base text, to add or remove witness texts,
to switch the base text at will, and to annotate the comparisons and
save the results.
Juxta comes with several kinds of analytic visualizations. The basic
collation gives a split frame comparison of a base text and a witness
text along with a display of the digital images from which the base text
is derived. Juxta provides a heat map of all textual variants and
allows the user to locate at the level of any textual unit all witness
variations from the base text. A histogram of the collations is
particularly useful for long documents. It displays the density of all
variation from the base text and serves as a useful finding aid for
specific variants. Juxta can also output a lemmatized schedule in html
of the textual variants in any set of comparisons.
This release of the tool comes with demonstration examples from Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, Shakespeare, and Walter Pater.
We've set up a blog for commentary and exchange:
http://www.patacriticism.org/juxta/
We're keen to support a user community around the software and to hear
from you about both its successes and deficiencies. You can download
the installer from the following site:
http://www.patacriticism.org/juxta/download/
You may want to consult the following help page, which includes a link
to our user manual:
http://www.patacriticism.org/juxta/help/
Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns. You can write
to me or, even better, to the following: tecnologies@nines.org
Jerome McGann
Posted by hag at 9:22 AM | Comments (0)
March 3, 2006
Microsoft Office Open XML (odf)
Will it be join 'em or beat 'em? Will it be OASIS ODF or MSOffice O(X)DF? Microsoft has laid out its strategy (the white paper is at http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/developers/fileguide.mspx#top
but appears to be loosening things up with its recent "covenant not to sue" (http://www.microsoft.com/office/xml/covenant.mspx). ECMA has given its blessing, but the article that makes this of particular interest is from today's NYTimes. Move over pdf, here comes some form of odf-ness...
The Times article at: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/03/technology/03open.html?th&emc=th
More info on Open Document Format, ECMA, Office Open XML at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_Open_XML
Posted by hag at 10:18 AM | Comments (0)
Wiki examples in education
Wikis are catching on in the Humanities Computing world and being used in several ways. The most prevalent use seems to be for documentation purposes, but here are a few random examples:
The Digital Classicist (blog at http://www.digitalclassicist.org/) uses a wiki for a FAQ and to track projects and ideas related to the intersection of humanities computing and classical research.
http://digitalclassicist.xwiki.com/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome
A similar effort by TADA (Text Analysis Developers Alliance) can be found at:
http://tada.mcmaster.ca/view/Main/WebHome
The "working" area for the new online version of Digital Humanities Quarterly is being done on a wiki: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/en/DHquarterly
Matt Bowen, with some funding from MITH (Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities) has been working on a community writing site, the latest incarnation of which is at:
http://www.writehere.net/moin.cgi/WriteHere
The idea of using wikis for collaborative creative writing seems particularly appealing to middle/high school teachers, at least, they seem to be the most well-represented group at Wikispaces. You need an account there to see many of them so I won't include links.
Of course, in true web tradition, many of the people talking most loudly about wiki's are educationalists presenting at conferences or publishing in education journals about the POTENTIAL rather than about what they have already done. C'est la vie.
It might be fun to see if any of the "usual suspects" from the MUDer, MOOer, hypertext fiction crowd from the last couple of decades are making the leap into wikis. Eastgate (the hypertext publishers) has a compendium of hypertext courses from various colleges, might be worth a look see.
The wiki model, if not direct application, is also alive and well in the games world, but that's a whole 'nother topic...
Posted by hag at 10:09 AM | Comments (0)
March 2, 2006
CDRH Nebraska
The Center for Digital Research in the Humanities
Ken Price's gang at Nebraska.
"The Center advances interdisciplinary research in the humanities by creating unique digital content, developing tools to assist scholars in text analysis and visualization, and encouraging the use (and refinement) of international standards for humanities computing. CDRH offers forums, workshops, and research fellowships for faculty and students in the area of digital scholarship.
Though the primary responsibility of the Center is to work with humanists, the CDRH will provide advice to faculty in the social sciences and sciences engaged in interdisciplinary projects that may cross over into the humanities."
First conference is in September 2006.
Posted by hag at 10:11 AM | Comments (0)