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June 16, 2007
American English Corpus
A new 100+ million word corpus of American English (1920s-2000s) is now
freely available at:
The corpus is based on more than 275,000 articles in TIME magazine from
1923 to 2006, and it contains articles on a wide range of topics -
domestic and international, sports, financial, cultural, entertainment,
personal interest, etc.
The architecture and interface is similar to the one used at the British National Corpus (see http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc)
Posted by hag at 2:23 PM | Comments (0)
June 15, 2007
Journal: Digital Humanities Quarterly
"Digital humanities is a diverse and still emerging field that encompasses the practice of humanities research in and through information technology, and the exploration of how the humanities may evolve through their engagement with technology, media, and computational methods. 
DHQ seeks to provide a forum where practitioners, theorists, researchers, and teachers in this field can share their work with each other and with those from related disciplines. "
"DHQ is an open-access, peer-reviewed, digital journal covering all aspects of digital media in the humanities. Published by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), DHQ is also a community experiment in journal publication, with a commitment to:
* experimenting with publication formats and the rhetoric of digital authoring
* co-publishing articles with Literary and Linguistic Computing (a well-established print digital humanities journal) in ways that straddle the print/digital divide
* using open standards to deliver journal content
* developing translation services and multilingual reviewing in keeping with the strongly international character of ADHO
DHQ will publish a wide range of peer-reviewed materials, including:
* Scholarly articles
* Editorials and provocative opinion pieces
* Experiments in interactive media
* Reviews of books, web sites, new media art installations, digital humanities systems and tools
* A blog with guest commentators"
Available at: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq
Posted by hag at 1:23 PM | Comments (0)
June 14, 2007
UMD Best Practices Guidelines
Recently revised:
University of Maryland Libraries has published its Guidelines for Digital Collections. This comprehensive 81-page (pdf) file covers copyright, selection, standards, metadata, methods, etc.
The site also links to their Administrative Metadata Tag Library and their Descriptive Metadata Tag Library, as well as to a digital imaging primer.
Posted by hag at 4:24 PM | Comments (0)
Common-Place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life
"Common-place is a common place for exploring and exchanging ideas about early American history and culture. A bit friendlier than a scholarly journal, a bit more scholarly than a popular magazine, Common-place speaks--and listens--to scholars, museum curators, teachers, hobbyists, and just about anyone interested in American history before 1900. 
Common-place is a common place for all sorts of people to read about all sorts of things relating to early American life--from architecture to literature, from politics to parlor manners. And it's a place to find insightful analysis of early American history as it is discussed not only in scholarly literature but also on the evening news; in museums, big and small; in documentary and dramatic films; and in popular culture."
The latest issue, titled "Revolution in Print" focuses on graphics in Nineteenth-Century America.
Posted by hag at 11:15 AM | Comments (0)
June 13, 2007
textbooks (and more) online
NYU College of Dentistry Takes Textbooks Online
The article discusses NYU Dentistry's partnership with VitalSource/Bookshelf to put course materials online. The concept is one that has long been touted (by tech promoters), anticipated (by students tired of lugging glossy 20 pound textbooks) and resisted (by several groups). This adds to the "textbooks online" idea by making available other materials, access to online databases, and linking it all from with BlackBoard.
Of special interest to me are these paragraphs from the above-linked article:
"The materials are submitted yearly to a company called VitalSource Technologies, which creates online versions of the content for the college in its Bookshelf product. The electronic textbooks are complete with hypertext links to references and the ability to search, print, highlight, organize, and add "sticky" notes.
Students are also given, through VitalSource, access to the NYU College of Dentistry library, and to other faculty-reviewed and -approved items.
Over the last seven years of working with VitalSource, the College of Dentistry, located in the heart of New York City, has created a vast digital library of textbooks, papers, lectures, and other internal and externally produced scholarly reference materials, all available to its students and faculty through VitalSource. For reference, a graduating student retains access to content that was current during his or her final year of school."
also
"As use of the Internet has evolved, so has student use of Bookshelf, according to Leila Jahangiri, chair of the Department of Prosthodontics at NYU. "Students' experience with computers is changing," she said. When the e-textbook program was first introduced, printing out material to read, study, highlight, and retain was much more common. Today, she said she sees little of that. "Students are now accessing all their course materials on Bookshelf." Faculty members, she said, now tend to be the ones printing out content much more often than students. . . The easy access to online materials helps counter students' tendencies to go online to the general Internet for every answer, Jahangiri said."
"At the beginning of the academic year, Jahangiri explained, every department in the College of Dentistry submits books or other content they would like to see added to VitalSource. The college began the program originally with textbooks only, but over time has gradually added faculty lecture materials, PowerPoint presentations, PDF documents, manuals, selected educational sites, and online access through VitalSource to the Waldmann Dental Library at NYU.
"Students who need to access electronic journals and various other materials that are in the library ... can just go online and click," Jahangiri said, to access materials through the VitalSource platform.
Students can download those textbooks they need and use regularly; to save space, others can simply be accessed online as needed. Essentially, students and faculty can create their own personal bookshelves each academic year, downloading the basic books required, along with other materials they might use often."
And they have integrated it with BlackBoard:
"The College of Dentistry uses Blackboard as its course management system; each course offered by the college has a Blackboard-created page with the course syllabus, then links to information that can be found in Bookshelf. A syllabus line describing a Monday lecture can contain a link directly to the chapter that will be referenced, along with the PowerPoint presentation itself and other internally produced material, all stored in Bookshelf."
"Copyright is not a problem; VitalSource secures a copyright that allows unlimited use of material for academic purposes."
Posted by hag at 3:39 PM | Comments (0)
XML.com: XQuery, the Server Language
Good article on eXist, XQuery, some ideas and info on how to implement.
Posted by hag at 9:23 AM | Comments (0)
June 7, 2007
Rethinking Workshops
A book from the library's "new books" shelf caught my eye this morning. The title is "Taking Science to School: Learning and Teaching Science in Grades K-8."* I picked it up because my daughter and I have been discussing science education this week. (She concludes that science should be an elective instead of a required course, because it is boring and because all it is is memorizing jargon and facts and then taking a test on that. )
However, one of the findings discussed in the book resonated with some discussions we've had about how to structure the contents and delivery of our faculty and student workshops, particularly our 3 day workshop for Mcnair scholars for whom we are supposed to be providing technology tools to enhance and devlope their research and scholarship.
The finding states:
"Many standards and curricula contain too many disconnected topics that are given equal priority. Too little attention is given to how students' understanding of a topic can be supported and enhanced from grade to grade. As a result, topics receive repeated, shallow coverage with little consistency, which provides a fragile foundation for further knowledge growth." (213)
Now, we don't usually have follow-up workshops so we can't address the "repeated, shallow coverage" aspect (though I wouldn't be surprised if this is the actual experience for people who take multiple workshops from both us and other sources).
The first statement, though, the "disconnected topics given equal priority" is the one I think we can be mindful of and can use. How might we re-frame the segments of our workshops to provide what the same authors call "successively more sophisticated ways of thinking about a topic that can follow and build on one another."
For example, we could turn the EndNote section upside down. That is, instead of starting from EndNote per se, we could jump in to EndNote, skip over the basic "how-to's" and go right to Connecting to a database. This is a bit tricky given EndNotes limitations but I think we could structure it so that it would work. (I plan to try it out at the next EndNote workshop so I'll let you know how it works out.) Once the students understand the 'why' we can go back and pick up some of the 'how.'
Or, to conceive of the workshop overall and map it to specific tasks, we could follow a progression something like this:
1) do research (through EndNote)
2) write about the research/present the research (EndNote, Word, blog, PowerPoint)
3) connect the research to the researcher (blog 'about me')
4) enhance the presentation of the research and the researcher (blog tech add-ons/formatting, Elements, video)
5) move beyond this research project to the next stage of professional development, including tapping into the community of fellow scholars (blog, video, resumes/cv...)
We started to do this by stating objectives, but I think we need to "connect the dots" more.
Of course, we would have to give some thought to how time and technology might work against this progression, or how we might reconcile the two. For example, to create a video you need both some experience with structuring a video and with using the equipment. You need a good idea of what your end-product will be before you start to shoot, which argues for placing the video-making segment later in the workshop, but you also need sufficient time to shoot and edit which argues for beginning it early on.
Thoughts?
* Duschl, R.A, H.A. Schweingruber, A. W. Shouse, eds. "Taking Science to School: Learning and Teaching Science in Grades K-8." Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2007.
Posted by hag at 11:16 AM | Comments (0)
June 5, 2007
Digitizing in Little Bits
CMU Researcher Uses eCommerce Tool To Digitize Books
6/4/2007
By Paul McCloskey
A researcher at Carnegie Mellon University has found a way to turn the process by which people register at commercial websites into a method for digitizing books, the Associated Press reported.
The method involves putting the time and effort people spend deciphering the short word puzzles used to confirm a registration to better use by having users key-in print materials that need digitizing.
The word puzzles are known as CAPTCHAs, short for "completely automated public Turing tests to tell computers and humans apart."
Computers can't decipher the letters and numbers, ensuring that real people are using the websites.
CMU researchers estimated about 60 million CAPTCHA puzzles are solved every day, taking about 10 seconds each. Researchers have now come up with a way for people to type in snippets of books when registering at a site to help speed up the process of putting texts online.
"Humanity is wasting 150,000 hours every day on these," said Luis von Ahn, an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon, who helped develop the original system.
Von Ahn is working with the Internet Archive, which runs several book-scanning projects, to use CAPTCHAs for this instead. The Archive scans 12,000 books a month and sends von Ahn image files that the computer cannot recognize. The files are split up into single words that can be used as CAPTCHAs at sites all over the Internet.
Paul McCloskey, "CMU Researcher Uses eCommerce Tool To Digitize Books," Campus Technology, 6/4/2007, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=48372
Posted by hag at 9:02 AM | Comments (0)