October 15, 2007
Roy Rosenzweig (1950-2007)
In the early 1990s, when we were juggling laserdiscs, hypertext, CD-ROMs, gopher, and wondering if this thing called the web would ever take off, the big question was how would all this translate into educationally useful models and materials. The technology continues to change, the big question remains the same, but one of the people who provided concrete examples of what was possible is now gone.
Roy A. Rosenzweig was one of the authors of the "Who Built America?" CD-ROM,* a wonderfully rich example of the power of that new media applied to education. It used an expanded textbook model that incorporated images, primary source surrogates, and a well-written text, and became a model for what digital history could be. Perhaps more importantly, it was an eloquent and tangible example of how the digital could be applied to help the study of history. It was one thing to indulge in the usual theoretical musings or 'future talk' about the power of technology, how it would change reading, writing, publishing, teaching or learning, etc. but to be able to pull "Who Built America?" off the shelf and actually show someone the possibilities was a far more powerful way of engaging with these issues.
Rosenzweig went on to start the Center for History and New Media, which continues to explore the application of the digital to the historical. Through this and his articles and publications, he proved to be an effective and inspirational advocate for digital historians. The tributes and comments now appearing are testament to his influence on digital historians. He will be missed.
*Who Built America? From the Centennial Celebration of 1876 to the Great War of 1914. Roy Rosenzweig, Steve Brier, and Joshua Brown, American Social History Productions. New York, NY: Learning Technologies Interactive/Voyager, 1995. CD-ROM. PC and Macintosh.
Posted by hag at 10:38 AM | Comments (0)
October 5, 2007
We won't write it for you but...
ResearchBitch.com offers a service to "do the drudgery of research for you." Claiming that they use a "patent pending search technology -- there is nothing quite like it on the web," they will take an assignment, a phrase, a page, or any block of text, up to 1,000 words, feed it through their search process, and return a list of sources for you to read.
For those of us who find the research to be the best, most fun, part of any project, this approach sounds off-putting. For those of us who are interested in the murky continuum between original scholarly work, plagiarism and paper mills, this site provides more fuel for discussion. It appears that all the sources found by Researchbitch are being drawn by way of Google, so for those who decry student use of Google as a sole search option, that fuel for discussion might be quite combustible.
What do you think? Should researchbitch be seen as evil incarnate, or as a reasonable place to jump start your research?
Posted by hag at 9:43 AM | Comments (0)
October 1, 2007
Conference: Distributed Ignorance and the Unthinking Machine: The Challenges of Teaching History and Computing
Under the rather provocative title, the Association for History and Computing, UK branch, has gathered a day-long conference that explores the role and uses of information (computing) technology in higher education history teaching and research.
Of particular interest is where such things as digital history methods belong. Should they be taught? At what level? How? Should students be 'absorbing' this information on their own? How will students, when they become researchers and teachers, know how to apply digital history methods if these skills are not taught?
http://www.hatii.arts.gla.ac.uk/confweb/2007/conf07.htm
Presentations include:
- Postgraduate Research Training and ICT: the Roles of Computing in the PhD
- How do you know it is true? Digital Diplomatics for the History Syllabus
- Using ICT in degree-level history teaching: issues of progression and differentiation
- 'It's not what you know it's the way that you know it' - key skills in history and computing
Posted by hag at 1:00 PM | Comments (0)
September 11, 2007
IT Infrastructure: Where Do Teaching and Learning Fit In?
The Educause Current Issues Committee, composed mainly of CIOs and IT Directors, recently published the results of a survey on issues in IT infrastructure in Higher Education. According to the report, "survey participants—the primary representatives, typically CIOs, of EDUCAUSE member institutions—were asked to check up to five of thirty-two IT issues in each of four areas: (1) issues that are critical for strategic success; (2) issues that are expected to increase in significance; (3) issues that demand the greatest amount of the campus IT leader's time; and (4) issues that require the largest expenditures of human and fiscal resources." The top ten issues to emerge were:
1. Funding IT
2. Security
3. Administrative/ERP/Information Systems
4. Identity/Access Management
5. Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity
6. Faculty Development, Support, and Training
7. Infrastructure
8. Strategic Planning
9. Course/Learning Management Systems
10. Governance, Organization, and Leadership for IT
(from Educause Review, vol. 42, no. 3, 12-33)
Given the original survey and its participants, it is perhaps not surprising that these top ten say little or nothing about teaching, or learning.
This lack has not gone unnoticed.
Educators such as historian Dan Cohen wonder how to bridge the apparent gap between IT infrastructure and educators while Geoffrey H. Fletcher, editorial director of T.H.E. Journal, expresses a similar concern in an article that reports on a session at the recent Campus Technology conference. The session focused on the changing role of IT in education and the presenters discussed "organizational changes—or lack thereof—that have been made at their respective institutions to account for IT's new dual and often shifting roles." They also noted that "IT has traditionally been charged with deploying infrastructure, but not with understanding and applying principles of teaching and learning." Fletcher concludes that "No one denies the importance of either function—you must have an infrastructure to deliver information and instructional tools to students and teachers, and the infrastructure would be wasted to a large degree if it were not used by students and faculty in teaching and learning."
The "Top Ten" list does include the item "Faculty Development. Support, and Training" and quite a few colleges and universities have Centers for Teaching and Learning. How do the efforts of IT organizations and CTLs mesh? How do universities' implementations of IT support and enhance their visions for teaching and learning? This is not a new issue, but it seems to be a perennially perplexing one.
Posted by hag at 11:41 AM | Comments (0)
August 15, 2007
E-Portfolios: Next Steps
First it was Robert Biral from the Honors College who had questions about electronic portfolios during last week's WebCT workshops. Then along came Mary Cox who is part of a group in Engineering/Math looking for "an e-portfolio program." Then, of course, there is Education's current implementation of its e-portfolio system, TaskStream. A couple other mentions of the topic from various faculty this summer have me wondering if this is the year for e-portfolios, and, if so, what LRG's role might be in this.
One idea that seems to be consistent is that "we need a software program that will help us do e-portfolios." Now, as we know from experience, too often the process of finding a solution to a given problem starts with the question "what software?" instead of with the more important questions: what are you trying to do? how do you define or perceive what you are trying to do? how will it be implemented? who will implement it? what are the hoped for outcomes?
The topic of e-portfolios can be particularly murky. Is an e-portfolio a way for students to conceive of, coordinate, reflect on, and build upon their own learning? For example, would an e-portfolio allow them to gather all course materials together (syllabus, course notes, papers, projects, etc.) in a way that they could refer to them from course to course and begin to understand the connections. Is an e-portfolio seen as a place to store "best examples" for assessment purposes, both their own and their professor's or even their colleges for accreditation data? Or is it a place for students and even faculty to display their accomplishments to the rest of the world, the so-called "super resume" model?
In terms of use, would an e-portfolio project be adopted across department? across a college? or is it seen as an integral part of a student portal system? Would students be expected to use it on a course by course basis or across all courses?
As various constituents grapple with this topic, can the CTL/Acad Comp or LRG as a whole, assist in the process? Would a round-table work? I'm envisioning something slightly more formal than a tea, with invitations to those in Education who have already implemented an e-portfolio system.The purpose would be to give participants a chance to refine their ideas about what e-portfolios are, about what IT options exist, and to consider how they would actually implement an e-portfolio program. Our role would be as facilitators, not solution experts!
Posted by hag at 10:44 AM | Comments (0)
August 7, 2007
Google News
Google is offering three new services to educators:
1) The University Research Program for Google Search," is designed to give university researchers "high-volume programmatic access to Google Search, whose huge repository of data constitutes a valuable resource for understanding the structure and contents of the Web." More at Google Univ Research Program
2) Google Translate, will allow researchers "programmatic access to Google's translation service," including "detailed word alignment information" and "a list of the n-best translations with detailed scoring information."
3) One to definitely keep an eye on, is Google's leap into the fray of keeping CS students and interested others current with the 'how-tos' of new technologies. They have put together a website with tutorials, samples, and video lectures. Current topics include AJAX programming and Distributed Systems. Also included is the Google Curriculum Search that "will help you find teaching materials that have been published to the web by faculty from CS departments around the world. You can refine your search to display just lectures, assignments or reference materials for a set of courses."
Posted by hag at 9:03 AM | Comments (0)
July 10, 2007
BIGWIG Social Software Showcase Unconference
The Social Software Showcase is an online unconference occuring around and during the time of ALA Annual 2007 (June) to showcase and discuss social software by librarians and leaders in the field.
Presenters/topics include
* David Free and David Lee King: Twitter
* Casey Bisson
* Lichen Rancourt: Web 2.0 and why libraries should care
* Michael Casey: AudioIndex
* Michael Porter: facebook and libraries
* Tim Spalding: LibraryThing
* Tom Peters: Web Conferencing Software
* Iris Jastram: Meebo Rooms
* Jessamyn West: portable software applications
* Simon Spero: folksonomy
* K.G. Schneider: LOCKSS
Main Page - Social Software Showcase
Posted by hag at 11:22 AM | Comments (0)
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)
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)
May 21, 2007
DH 2007 Abstracts
As has been the case for the past 18 years, this year's Digital Humanities Conference (formerly the AHC/ALLC Conference) has a wealth of interesting presentations. The conference has posted the abstracts online at:
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dh2007/abstracts/
Posted by hag at 10:59 AM | Comments (0)
May 18, 2007
Armadillo: Historical Data Mining
Armadillo: Historical Data Mining
"This project examines new ways of extracting ('mining') relevant information from unconnected electronic sources. It is an attempt to answer the question of how to locate and interpret information contained in distributive online research datasets effectively, using criteria acceptable to the Arts and Humanities community."
They will be presenting at the Digital Resources in the Humanities conference, Sept. 2007
Posted by hag at 9:46 AM | Comments (0)
WMatrix: text analysis + semantic analysis
Text Analysis programs that can do word frequency, KWIC, concordancing, etc. are fairly well-established (cf: Harald Klein's text analysis informational pages or U of Alberta's TaPOR site).
WMatrix is a web-based tool that does the standard analysis but, like more recent knowledge mining applications, "extends the keywords method to key grammatical categories and key semantic fields." It also adds a log-likelihood tool to "perform a comparison of the frequency list for their corpus against another larger normative corpus such as the BNC sampler, or against another of their own texts." And does all of this on tagged (HTML, SGML, XML) texts that you upload to their site. Only downside: after the free subscription runs out it costs £100/yr to subscribe.
Related Links
1) GATE: General Architecture for Text Engineering, University of Sheffield
2) Nasukawa, T. and T. Nagano, "Text analysis and knowledge mining system"
3) Overview of natural language processing at wikipedia
Posted by hag at 8:53 AM | Comments (0)
May 4, 2007
O'Reilly Rough Cuts
In January 2006 O'Reilly debuted their "Rough Cuts" program. Here's how they describe it:
"When you buy a book on the Rough Cuts service, you get access to an evolving manuscript. You can read it online, download as a PDF, or print. Once you've purchased a Rough Cuts title, you have a chance to shape the final product - you can send suggestions, bug fixes, and comments directly to the author and editors."
"You have your choice in the Rough Cuts program of purchasing just online access, just the print book when it releases, or the best of both worlds - online access immediately and the print book later."
This is a great model for infotech books, which often suffer from the speed differential between paper-bound publishing and techno change.
Of particular interest is the option to comment on the book as it is being written, a sort of collaboration between author and reader that might seem distasteful to literary traditionalists but is eminently useful in the case of technology books. How would a similar model work in the humanities, I wonder?
Posted by hag at 9:36 AM | Comments (0)
April 27, 2007
U Wisc CMS: Xythos
U Wisconsin Expands Content Management to 7 Campuses
...The University of Wisconsin recently expanded its licensing agreement with Xythos, developer of content management software, to include seven campuses...
...According to Xythos, the content management technology was used to create My WebSpace for faculty to manage research projects and share materials for the classroom. Other ways the university used Xythos include:
* Student hosted websites and e-portfolios;
* Processing job applications;
* Coordinating K-12 charter programs; and
* Assisting visually impaired students with accessing information...
Posted by hag at 10:08 AM | Comments (0)
IT Literacy
Report Profiles IT Training at U.S. Universities
"Dublin, Ireland-based research firm Research and Markets has released a new report that tracks how various institutions of higher learning in the United States are trying to improve the computer literacy of their faculty and students."
Some universities' approaches:
1) design a major that is more than IT training, but not hard-core CS
2) integrate IT into every course
3) haave workshops for faculty and students together
Posted by hag at 10:01 AM | Comments (0)
April 26, 2007
CONF: Res and training Perspectives: Canadian Digital Infor Strategy
Workshop on Research and Training Perspectives on the Canadian Digital Information Strategy
http://www.gin-ebsi.umontreal.ca/stra_num/index1.htm
The blog for discussion and postings on these topics is at:
http://blogues.ebsi.umontreal.ca/stra_num/
"The aim of this meeting is to discuss and integrate the academic perspective on digital information and also to present both Canadian and Québec major projects in this field...This workshop will:
■ inform the participants of key priorities that were identified at the national Summit (content, preservation and access to numerical information);
■ identify research initiatives concerning the priorities;
■ identify concerned research groups and create a Canadian research community working on the national priorities;
■ discuss academic and training programs necessary to meet the various needs in the field of digital information.
Posted by hag at 10:32 AM | Comments (0)
April 24, 2007
Book: Computing in Humanities Education
Fully Online Book:
Computing in Humanities Education: A European Perspective
http://helmer.hit.uib.no/AcoHum/book/
Edited by: Koenraad de Smedt, Hazel Gardiner, Espen Ore, Tito Orlandi, Harold Short, Jacques Souillot, William Vaughan
Chapters include:
1. Introduction
2. European studies on formal methods in the humanities
3. European studies on textual scholarship and humanities computing
4. European studies on computational linguistics
5. European studies on computing for non-European languages
6. European studies on computing in history of art, architecture and design
7. Conclusion
Includes background, conclusions and recommendations in each chapter.
Posted by hag at 11:55 AM | Comments (0)
April 18, 2007
LMS: Outsourcing CMS in Iowa
Outsourcing CMS in Iowa
4/18/2007
By Linda L Briggs
The Iowa Community College Online Consortium (ICCOC), made up of seven community colleges, is using an outsourced learning management system to offer its online courses to students across Iowa. The learning management system, eCollege, is specifically designed for managing online learning programs, and helps makes course development and management far easier for colleges within the consortium.
eCollege's learning management system differs from products like Blackboard or WebCT in that it is offered as an outsourced service. That means colleges don't buy and install the product on their own computers; rather, they license use of eCollege from the company, which maintains the application remotely on its own servers. That allows schools to avoid heavy upfront capital costs, as well as the cost of adding technical support staff, since eCollege handles all support issues. The company says eCollege is run from computers in various locations, to ensure fast and continual service, and includes multiple levels of redundancy, backups, and an up to date database infrastructure.
Complete article at:
Outsourcing CMS in Iowa
Posted by hag at 9:50 AM | Comments (0)
April 5, 2007
CFP: Xtreme Markup Language
Extreme Markup Languages®: a friendly, technically challenging, intensive, thought-provoking, argumentative, welcoming, obstreperous conference on markup, managing information, and information structures
THE MARKUP THEORY & PRACTICE CONFERENCE
August 7-10, 2007 Montréal, Canada
http://www.extrememarkup.com/
Extreme is the leading international conference on markup theory and practice. If you have interesting markup applications, difficult markup problems, or intriguing solutions to problems related to the design and use of markup, markup languages, or markup tools; if you want to know what the leading theorists of markup are thinking; if you are the house markup expert and want to spend time with your kind, then you should plan on attending Extreme Markup Languages® 2007.
About the Conference
Extreme is an open marketplace of theories about markup and all the things that they support or that support them: the difficult cases in publishing, linguistics, transformation, searching, indexing, and storage and retrieval. At Extreme, markup enthusiasts gather each year to trade in ideas, not to convince management to buy new stuff. At Extreme we push the edges of markup theory & practice.
* WHEN: August 7-10, 2007
* WHERE: Montréal, Canada
* HOST: IDEAlliance
Posted by hag at 12:02 PM | Comments (0)
Ockham Alerting Service
Ockham Alerting Service
Ockham Alerting Service is a current awareness service based on National Science Foundation Digital Library content. It demonstrates a standards-based method for collecting content, providing access to it, and disseminating it on a regular basis in the form of an alerting service. The method includes:
1. identifying OAI repositories with content of interest
2. using OAI to harvest content and store it in a central pile
3. indexing the content of the central pile
4. providing an SRU interface to the index
5. allowing users to save the SRU URL's as "profiles" (RSS feeds)
6. allowing users to have the profiles executed on a regular basis
7. making the results of searches available as HTML, email, RSS, etc.
8. returning to Step #1
Posted by hag at 11:54 AM | Comments (0)
March 25, 2007
CFP: TEI Annual Meeting
The TEI Members' Meeting
1-3 November 2007
University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA
*TEI@20*: 20 Years of Supporting the Digital Humanities
The Organizing Committee of this anniversary TEI Members' Meeting invites individual paper proposals, panel sessions, and poster/tool demonstrations on the theme, broadly conceived, 'The TEI@20: 20 Years of Supporting the Digital Humanities'. Topics might include but are not restricted to
* Building and using tools for TEI-based text encoding
* Teaching TEI: Challenges and Opportunities
* TEI as a theory of text
* TEI: the next 20 years
* New career opportunities for those using the TEI
* Lacunae and omissions: new directions for the TEI
Paper presenters will be allocated 30 minutes to speak, 25 minutes for
delivery, and five minutes for questions.
Alternatively, group sessions can be organized for 1.5 hours each and
may be of varied formats, including:
* A working papers session (pre-circulated papers)
* A round-table discussion
* Software demonstrations
Of the formats described above, a working paper session might be more
appropriate for a smaller group, all of whom have all read the
pre-circulated papers in advance. This type of format may span more than
one session and will be held concurrently with the general session.
Submission Procedure
/Individual paper proposals/: submit a title, brief abstract (no more
than 500 words), the name of the presenter, institutional affiliation,
and email address.
/Panel sessions/: submit a session title, brief overview of the session
(no more than 300 words), abstracts of each of the papers (no more than
500 words each) OR a 500 word abstract for a panel discussion, the names
of each of the participants, their institutional affiliations, and email
addresses.
/Poster Session/Tool Demonstration/: submit a title, brief abstract (no
more than 500 words), the name of the presenter, institutional
affiliation, and email address. The local organizer will provide a flip
chart and a table for each presenter, along with wireless internet
access. All poster session participants will have an opportunity to
participate in a poster slam immediacy preceding the poster
session/reception.
All submissions should be sent to Conference Chair, Sebastian Rahtz
Conference papers will be considered for a *TEI@20* Proceedings. Further
details on the submission process will be forthcoming.
Posted by hag at 11:46 AM | Comments (0)
March 23, 2007
TEI at Kalamazoo
Dot porter announces that there will be two TEI-related sessions at Kalamazoo this year taught by James C. Cummings of Oxford
The Medieval Academy of America Committee on Electronic Resources is
pleased to announce two TEI workshops to be held at the International
Medieval Congress, Kalamazoo, MI, in May 2007. Both workshops will be
on Thursday, May 10 (sessions 32 and 138; see
http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/sessions.html for complete
conference schedule).
1) XML and the Text Encoding Initiative Workshop I: Introduction to TEI Encoding
This workshop offers an introduction to best practices for digital scholarship, taught by a medievalist, James C. Cummings, specifically for medievalists. Instruction includes introductory-level XML and structural encoding, as well as new TEI P5 standards and guidelines, markup concerns for medieval transcription, and a brief consideration of XML Editors.
2) XML and the Text Encoding Initiative Workshop II: Advanced TEI Encoding and
Customization
This workshop offers advanced instruction in advanced topics in TEI encoding and the customization of the TEI for an individual project's needs, taught by a medievalist,
James C. Cummings, specifically for medievalists. Instruction includes metadata
for medieval manuscript description, advanced-level concepts of TEI P5 modularization, schema generation and customization for individual projects, and a brief survey of related technologies.
Posted by hag at 3:45 PM | Comments (0)
Conf: U-Learning
Voyaging into a new decade!
TCC WORLDWIDE ONLINE CONFERENCE
April 17-19, 2007
Pre-conference dates: April 3-4, 2007Conf: TCC Online: U-Learning
http://tcc.kcc.hawaii.edu/2007/tcc/welcome.html
INTRODUCTION. E-Learning is passe. U-learning is the new wave
globally in higher education. Ubiquitous learning encompasses e-
learning and emphasizes learning anytime, anywhere and anyway in both
formal and informal lifelong learning environments. As u-learning and
Web 2.0 technology evolve, social interaction, intercultural
communications, and global collaboration increases in importance.
Social networking and learning communities are integral components of
u-learning.
Through online social networks, young adults today gain a sense of
community that is important in their daily and social life. How can
we learn from this? How can we learn from our students?
What is the status of social networking (Facebook, Mixi, etc.) and
online learning communities today? Have they succeeded or have they
withered away? How can we complement our students' prior experiences
with interacting socially online? How can we assess learning in this
new environment? Will mobile phones become synonymous with u-learning
as proponents advocate? How do we train faculty and staff and engage
them to support productive learning communities? Will learning
communities help bridge the Internet divide? How do we "feed and
weed" effective learning communities or social networking systems in
the U-learning era? Will virtual worlds such as Second Life become a
new learning environment?
THEME. TCC will offer papers and presentations on the evolution,
trends, successes, or failures of learning communities and social
networking systems in higher education. The coordinators, however,
are interested in a broad range of topics that highlight the use of
educational technology, including but not limited to the following:
* Online, hybrid, blended or other modes of technology enhanced learning
* Distance learning including mobile learning
* E-learning and ubiquitous learning
* Student success factors in online learning
* E-portfolios and other online assessment tools
* Technology implementation and services in learner centered
environments
* Emerging technologies for teaching and learning (blogs, wikis,
podcasts, etc)
* Creating and delivering multimedia including learning objects
* Building and sustaining learning communities
* Student orientation and preparation
* Open content and open source
* Accessibility for persons with disabilities
* Global learning and international education
* Professional development for faculty and staff
* Gender equity, the Digital Divide, and open access
* Online student services (tutoring, advising, payments, etc)
* Technology use to enhance communication and collaboration
* Institutional planning and change catalyzed by technology advances
* Educational technology use in Asia & the Pacific, Europe, South
America, and Africa.
Posted by hag at 3:34 PM | Comments (0)
UVM Web Redesign
The report produced by M. Stoner re: the UVM web redesign can be found at:
http://www.uvm.edu/webguide/redesign/?Page=updates.php
The opening page has some interesting recommendation. (UVM name/password required on first visit)
Updates on the progress will be posted to the webteam blog:
http://webteam.blog.uvm.edu/
Posted by hag at 3:24 PM | Comments (0)
Book: Companion to Digital Humanities
Now Online: The Companion to Digital Humanities, eds. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth.
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/
Chapters/articles on:
Part I: History
1. The History of Humanities Computing
2. Computing for Archaeologists
3. Art History
4. Classics and the Computer: An End of the History
5. Computing and the Historical Imagination
6. Lexicography
7. Linguistics Meets Exact Sciences
8. Literary Studies
9. Music
10. Multimedia
11. Performing Arts
12. "Revolution? What Revolution?" Successes and Limits of Computing Technologies in Philosophy and Religion
Part II: Principles
13. How the Computer Works
14. Classification and its Structures
15. Databases
16. Marking Texts of Many Dimensions
17. Text Encoding
18. Electronic Texts: Audiences and Purposes
19. Modeling: A Study in Words and Meanings
Part III: Applications
20. Stylistic Analysis and Authorship Studies
21. Preparation and Analysis of Linguistic Corpora
22. Electronic Scholarly Editing
23. Textual Analysis
24. Thematic Research Collections
25. Print Scholarship and Digital Resources
26. Digital Media and the Analysis of Film
27. Cognitive Stylistics and the Literary Imagination
28. Multivariant Narratives
29. Speculative Computing: Aesthetic Provocations in Humanities Computing
30. Robotic Poetics
Part IV: Production, Dissemination, Archiving
31. Designing Sustainable Projects and Publications
32. Conversion of Primary Sources
33. Text Tools
34. So the Colors Cover the Wires : Interface, Aesthetics, and Usability
35. Intermediation and its Malcontents: Validating Professionalism in the Age of Raw Dissemination
36. The Past, Present, and Future of Digital Libraries
37. Preservation
Posted by hag at 12:32 PM | Comments (0)
Digital History Reader
Digital History Reader: Teaching Resources for European and United
States History
http://www.dhr.history.vt.edu
The Digital History Reader is a free, online set of resources for
teaching university courses in United States and modern European
history. These materials are available online: www.dhr.history.vt.edu.
The eighteen modules in the Digital History Reader address critical
questions appropriate for survey courses and advanced analysis in United
States and European history. An introductory module, “How to Use the
DHR,” provides instructors and students with an overview of module
structure as well as suggestions in how to approach each section. The
individual modules all follow a standard structure. A short Introduction
defines the historical question for the students to consider throughout
the module. The Context section contains an approximately 2,000-word
narrative that provides the historical background necessary for the
students to understand the central question and to be able to place the
primary documents within a larger framework. The Evidence section is the
heart of the module; it includes a broad range of primary source
materials, including texts, photographs, political cartoons, posters,
songs, video clips, and recorded speeches, that allow the student to
explore possible answers to the initial historical question. After
students complete the evidence section, the Assignment section allows
students to gauge their own comprehension with a self-test and offers
suggestions for written and in-class exercises. The Conclusion returns
to the central question and asks students to consider the larger
historical significance of the evidence they have contemplated. Finally,
the Resource section lists published and online sources that allow
students to further explore the topic. All DHR materials are available
for free, and are fully contained with this website, hosted by the
Virginia Tech Department of History. Faculty contributors are Tom Ewing
(Project Director), Robert Stephens, Marian Mollin, David Hicks, Amy
Nelson, Hayward “Woody” Farrar, Kathleen Jones, Mark Barrow, Daniel
Thorp, C. Edward Watson, and Jane Lehr. For more information about the
modules, see the “About DHR” page: www.dhr.history.vt.edu/about.html.
Questions may be directed to the Project Director, Tom Ewing, email:
dhr@vt.edu.
Posted by hag at 12:22 PM | Comments (0)
Library of Congress RSS Feeds
The Library of Congress has launched a series of news feeds using the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) technology. http://www.loc.gov/rss/
The Library's RSS service has launched with the following feeds:
* News, a bulletin service of the latest news from the world's preeminent reservoir of knowledge, providing resources to Congress and the American people
* Upcoming Events, a listing of the dozens of free concerts, lectures, exhibitions, symposia, films and other special programs offered at the Library on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.
* New on the Web, updates on new collections, features, reference materials and other services available on the Library's award-winning Web site
* New Webcasts, the latest webcasts and podcasts of lectures and events sponsored by the Library
* News from the John W. Kluge Center, featuring updates on lectures, presentations and other news from this center for scholars within the Library of Congress, established to bring together the world's best thinkers to stimulate and energize scholarly discussion, distill wisdom from the Library's rich resources and interact with policy-makers in Washington.
* And What's New in Science Reference, new products and services on the subject of science and technology from the Library's Science, Technology & Business Division.
These feeds join four existing RSS feeds from the U.S. Copyright Office in the Library of Congress on current copyright related legislation; announcements, rules, proposed rules and other notices published in the Federal Register; NewsNet (alerts on hearings, deadlines for comments, new and proposed regulations and new publications); and updates to the Copyright Web site at www.copyright.gov.
The Library will launch additional feeds in specific content and subject matter areas in the coming months. All new RSS feeds will be available from key content pages within the Library's extensive Web site, as well as from a central RSS Web page at www.loc.gov/rss/.
Posted by hag at 12:18 PM | Comments (0)
AAHC Conference: Open Source History: Making History Public
Open Source History: Making History Public
http://theaahc.org
The American Association for History and Computing (AAHC)
2007 Annual Conference
In association with the Brown University Public Humanities Program
Providence, RI
April 19-21, 2007
Join the American Association for History and Computing and Brown University’s Public Humanities Program for an innovative look at how technology is allowing for a shared public dialogue between historians and a broad public audience. This conference will be of interest to anyone who is charged with bringing history to a general audience, including museum professionals, archivists, librarians, historic preservationists, filmmakers, as well as academic historians. The conference will explore:
• The role of technology in breaking down the barriers between historians and the larger public
• Ways that historians have used digital technology to communicate with diverse public audiences
• Ways in which the practice of "academic history" is altered when made public
• The "wikipedia-ization" of history
• New forms of collaboration between historians, archivists, librarians, historic preservationists, teachers and students
• New forms of display and historical representation
All presenters must be current members of the AAHC. For more information about membership, please visit our website http://theaahc.org
Posted by hag at 11:36 AM | Comments (0)
TAPOR XML Tools
TAPOR XML Tools: http://taporware.mcmaster.ca/~taporware/xmlTools/summarizer.shtml?
TAPOR. the Text Analysis Portal for Research, has been developing text analysis tools for many years. A recent addition are xml tools, including a tool that makes a visualization of the tree structure of any xml file for which you provide a URL. You can then click/drag/explore the structure of the file.
Other XML tools that they have available are:
- list elements and attributes
- extract text
- list words
- co-occurrence
- concordance
- collocation
- tokenize
- distribution
- summarizer
...and more
Posted by hag at 11:22 AM | Comments (0)
Academic Blog Portal Wiki
A wiki that lists and categorizes academic blogs:
http://www.academicblogs.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
Posted by hag at 11:00 AM | Comments (0)
March 15, 2007
Google Ocropus
New Google Project in the Works:
http://code.google.com/p/ocropus/
ocropus
open source document analysis and OCR system
OCRopus is a state-of-the-art document analysis and OCR system, featuring pluggable layout analysis, pluggable character recognition, statistical natural language modeling, and multi-lingual capabilities.
Background
The OCRopus engine is based on two research projects: a high-performance handwriting recognizer developed in the mid-90's and deployed by the US Census bureau, and novel high-performance layout analysis methods.
OCRopus is development is sponsored by Google and is initially intended for high-throughput, high-volume document conversion efforts. We expect that it will also be an excellent OCR system for many other applications.
Release dates throughout Q1-Q3, 2007.
Posted by hag at 12:05 PM | Comments (0)
March 8, 2007
ICT/AHDS: Digital Collections, Best Practice Descriptions
ICT (Information and Computing technology) Guides is a new service being offered by the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) at King's College, London. It seeks to promote the use of ICTs in research and learning through cataloging best-practice
digital arts and humanities projects, along with the tools and methods they employed.
The site includes links to many projects, along with indications of what disciplines they are most appropriate to. Each item contains a description of the project. More importantly, each description lists the tools used to create it, as well as the methods employed. As such it provides a good picture of how digital projects are being created.
http://ahds.ac.uk/ictguides/projects/allProjects.jsp
Posted by hag at 9:59 AM | Comments (0)
March 5, 2007
NINES: 19th century scholarship
N I N E S stands for a Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship, a scholarly organization in British and American nineteenth-century studies supported by a software development group assembling a suite of critical and editorial tools for digital scholarship.
In NINES you can:
* search and browse more than 60,000 peer-reviewed texts and images in 19th-century studies
* build your own collections of documents, articles, images, and ephemera;
* organize, add keywords, and annotate your work;
* discover lines of critical inquiry related to your own;
* and (coming soon!) create syllabi, annotated bibliographies, illustrated essays, and timelines.
NINES integrates material from the following major research archives:
British Women Romantic Poets
Chesnutt Archive
Collective Biographies of Women
Dickinson Virtual Reference Shelf
Letters of Christina Rossetti
Letters of Matthew Arnold
Romantic Circles Praxis
Romanticism on the Net
The Ambrose Bierce Project
The Poetess Archive
The Rossetti Archive
The Swinburne Project
The Walt Whitman Archive
The Willa Cather Archive
The William Blake Archive
Victorian Studies Bibliography
Whitman Bibliography
Forthcoming are contributions from JSTOR, the Whistler
Correspondence, the journal 19, the Nineteenth-Century Serials
Edition, Virginia's Victorian Literature and Culture Series, and the
Wright American Fiction Project, as well as updated and expanded
information from the Dickinson Project, Romantic Circles, and
Romanticism on the Net.
Posted by hag at 11:28 AM | Comments (0)
February 25, 2007
CFP: Nebraska Digital Workshop
Call for Proposals
The Nebraska Digital Workshop
October 5 & 6, 2007
The Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) at the University of Nebraska's Lincoln (UNL) will host the second annual Nebraska Digital Workshop on October 5 & 6, 2007 and seeks proposals for digital presentations by pre-tenure
faculty, post-doctoral fellows, and advanced graduate students working in the digital
humanities. The goal of the Workshop is to enable the best early career scholars in the field of digital humanities to present their work in a forum where it can be critically evaluated, improved, and showcased. Under the auspices of the Center, the Workshop will bring nationally recognized senior scholars in digital humanities to UNL to participate and work with the selected scholars. Selected scholars will receive full
travel reimbursement and an honorarium for presenting their work at the Nebraska Digital Workshop.
Selection criteria include: significance in primary disciplinary field, technical innovation,
theoretical and methodological sophistication, and creativity of approach.
Please send proposed workshop abstract, curriculum vitae, and a representative sample of digital work via a URL or disk on or before May 1, 2007 to: Katherine L. Walter, Co-Director, UNL Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, at
kwalter1@unl.edu or 319 Love Library, UNL, Lincoln, NE 68588-4100.
For further details, see the Center's web site at
http://cdrh.unl.edu.
Posted by hag at 11:42 AM | Comments (0)
February 15, 2007
Stanford Syllabus Tool
"Stanford Syllabus is a central, online repository for Stanford class syllabi. It is a project from Stanford's Committee on Undergraduate Standards and Policy and developed by Academic Computing. The goal is for students and their advisors to browse through syllabi to help select the courses that are right for them."
The FAQ: http://www.stanford.edu/group/syllabus/faqs/
Faculty or their designates can upload their syllabus as a .txt, .doc, .rtf, .pdf, or .html to the tool, which then makes them searchable by term and discipline. They can also point the tool to a URL. This is useful because the tool does not talk to other course management systems. Thus, the faculty member can keep one copy of the syllabus as the 'live' copy, and point both the syllabus and their course management system (ex. WebCT) to one URL. That file could easily be updated via WebDav, obviating the need for multiple editing/uploading that hampers many current attempts to make living syllabi available.
Posted by hag at 11:45 AM | Comments (0)
February 13, 2007
Google Books, Google Maps: hist-mash
Google is digitizing books from University of Michigan. UMich is a founding member of the "Making of America" project, a digital library of 19th century materials. What could make this partnership even better? Google Maps.
Here's an example: take a classic work like "Illustrated New York" published in 1888. Search it for things that look like street addresses, then map those to a street map of New York City. Voila! That's exactly what they have done at:
http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC57700799
Check it out.
(and if you find any other books at Google where this has been done, please let me know.)
Posted by hag at 10:40 AM | Comments (1)
February 10, 2007
TEI Day, Kyoto 2006 Proceedings
East Asian Center for Informatics in Humanities
Proceedings available at:
http://coe21.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/tei-day/tei-day2006.html
Topics:
* TEI Day in Kyoto and activities of the TEI
OHYA Kazushi (Tsurumi University), Christian Wittern (Kyoto University)
* Why was and is TEI unknown in Japan and will it be better known there?
TUTIYA Syun (Chiba University)
* Languages with scarce textual materials and markup technologies
MATSUMURA Kazuto (University of Tokyo) abstract
* Marking up spoken dialog corpora
TUTIYA Syun (Chiba University), ITAHASHI Shuichi (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, National Institute of Informatics), OHSUGA Tomoko (National Institute of Informatics)
* Markup problems: Syntactical analysis and steps to their resolution
OHYA Kazushi (Tsurumi University) abstract
* TEI: An overview
Syd Bauman Brown University and Lou Burnard, Oxford University abstract
* Towards an internationalized and localized TEI
Sebastian Rahtz, Oxford University abstract
* XML mark-up of biographical and prosopographical data
Matthew Driscoll, University of Kopenhagen abstract
* Presenting TEI texts using topic maps
Conal Tuohy, New Zealand Electronic Text Centre abstract
* Exploring TEI XML documents with XQuery
James Cummings, Oxford Text Archive abstract
Posted by hag at 3:27 PM | Comments (0)
January 30, 2007
Wikipedia: Bane or Boon for History Courses
Middlebury College History Dept.'s announcement banning citing of Wikipedia in student papers has resulted in a flurry of articles and posts. While many teachers see this as a "teaching moment" others consider Wikipedia yet another teaching roadblock thrown up by technology. Questioning the Middlebury decision, these three teachers explain why Wikipedia offers a "teaching moment" rather than a roadblock:
Roy Rosenzweig suggests that history students need to learn the role of encyclopedias, either paper-bound or electronic, in research. (In the article he actually compares wikipedia to traditional encyclopedia entries on several topics, with surprising results.)
Jeremy Boggs is incorporating a section into his History 120 course on critical thinking and historical research that will use Wikipedia as examples. T. Mills Kelly has gone one better and has removed the textbook, which he faults for its encyclopedic "just the facts" approach, from his Western Civ class altogether. His arguments for doing so show that Middlebury and others are missing a great opportunity.
During the second week of class he has the students write an entry for Wikipedia. This entry is edited by other students in the class and then posted. At the end of the semester they write a reflection on what happened to their Wikipedia article over the course of the semester. Meanwhile, the remainder of the course is "centered on five historical monographs and the course is structured around a discussion of the differences between analytical history (in the monographs) and the “just the facts” history one finds in encyclopedias."
On the Middlebury ban he says:
"To me this seems like such an odd position for historians to take, given that so many of the sources we work with every day are highly contested as to their veracity, their meaning, their provenance. Every time I open a folder in the archives and look at a source, I reflexively ask myself “Who created this?”, “Why did he/she/they create it?”, “Is this an original, a copy, or even a forgery?”, “Is this the complete source or was it edited and if so who might have edited it and why?” Responsible historians must ask these (and many more) questions every time we look at a source. But apparently, if we are to follow the policy of our colleagues at Middlebury, we do not need to teach this same reflexive scepticism to our students."
Why? He continues:
"You see, I’m a firm believer that we can deny, deny, deny that new forms of content delivery are undermining all that we find comfortable, but denial just never seems to work in the end. I know (and so do you) that students are going to use Wikipedia regardless of what I tell them they can and can’t do. Even the folks at Middlebury admit this–students there are allowed to use Wikipedia for their research–they just can’t cite Wikipedia in their papers (explain that one to me). So, it seems to me that as educators we have an obligation to teach our students how to make appropriate use of the
resources they are using and I’m not sure how a ban on citation will teach them anything worth knowing."
Cited refs:
Rosenzweig, Roy. “Can History Be Open Source?” Journal of American History.
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/93.1/rosenzweig.html
Jeremy Boggs discusses his use of Wikipedia for History 120 at George Mason:
http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/26659.html
T. Mills Kelly blog postings:
http://chnm.gmu.edu/history/faculty/kelly/blogs/edwired/?cat=14
Wikipedia's own advice: "Wikipedia classroom assignments on the Rise"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-12-26/Wikipedia_and_academia
Posted by hag at 11:30 AM | Comments (0)
January 24, 2007
What did he say?
Text Analysis has long been a staple of the humanities computing diet. Its use, however, is not limited to scholars of literature. Here's an example of how text analysis in a graphical presentation can provide some interesting data.
The New York Times has published a page that allows one to search President Bush's State of the Union addresses for any keyword. It then displays the word count as a number and a graphic, and the location of the word in the speech. Clicking on the word's location displays the word in context in its paragraph.
While this posting is making no political statements, it is easy to see how powerful visualizing words in this manner can be.
(Click for larger screen shot)
The page is at the NYTimes web site (free subscription required to view):
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/washington/20070123_STATEOFUNION.html?
Posted by hag at 9:02 AM | Comments (0)
December 6, 2006
E-Portfolio: Purpose, Successful Implementation
What Is the Purpose of an Electronic Portfolio? Is the Answer the Key to Your Successful Implementation?
" As the director of Spelman’s newly-instituted Electronic Portfolio Project (SpEl.Folio), I’ve come to realize that a central question of our project is, “What is an electronic portfolio?” Is it a medium? Is it a genre, or a set of genres? Is it a delivery system? Is it an assessment tool? Is it a means to reflection and learning? Is it a savvy career move? Is it a flashy new container for the work students already are doing? Is it a pain in the butt?
Readers of SmartClassroom have thought about these questions, and probably have well-developed responses to them. But the audience that concerns me most is the students and teachers at Spelman, a historically black liberal-arts college for women. They sometimes seem to view the electronic portfolio as a flashy container and/or pain in the butt. It’s this audience, and the perceptions they ultimately form, on which the success of Spelman’s project relies. And, as frustrated as I might get when explaining for the hundredth time that an eFolio is not simply in Kathleen Yancey’s memorable phrase “print uploaded,” I must pay attention to these responses. For, if the users and authors of SpEl.Folio view it merely as a flashy container or pain in the butt (or both), that’s exactly what it will be. "
Complete article at:
Posted by hag at 9:38 AM | Comments (0)
December 1, 2006
MITH Digital Dialogues
Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) has begun podcasting their Digital Dialogues seminar series:
http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/digitaldialogue/podcasts.php
Three available so far:
- Rice University's Chuck Henry on scholarly electronic publishing,
- Brown University's Vika Zafrin on collaboration in the digital humanities, and
- game studies from media theorist and author Stuart Moulthrop.
Posted by hag at 11:17 AM | Comments (0)
November 10, 2006
Report: Using Digital images in Teaching and Learning
"Using Digital Images in Teaching and Learning: Perspectives from Liberal Arts Institutions," details the results of an intensive study of digital image use by more than 400 faculty at 33 liberal arts colleges and universities in the Northeast.
Commissioned by Wesleyan University and the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE), the study focuses on the pedagogical implications of the widespread use of digital formats. But, while changes in teaching and learning were at the core of the study, related issues concerning supply, support and infrastructure rapidly became part of its fabric.
The report suggests how the teaching profession as a whole can better harness these new resources, and it makes recommendations for optimizing their deployment on campus.
The full report and an executive summary are available at Academic Commons, an online forum for new technologies and liberal education:
Posted by hag at 11:43 AM | Comments (0)
Zotero: The End of EndNote?
Just before the web burst into public consciousness, historian Roy Rosensweig demonstrated the power of multimedia to make history come alive with his CD-ROM "Who Built America." Continuing to explore the possibilities of applying technology to scholarship, in 1994 Rosezweig founded the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. As part of its mission to "combine cutting edge digital media with the latest and best historical scholarship," the CHNM has created several tools useful for scholars. Zotero is the latest of these tools. It is described as a "next-generation research tool that makes it easy to gather, organize, annotate, search, and cite materials you find online and off" and is being called the "EndNote replacement" by many.
Like EndNote, Zotero can be used to store references to books, articles, and other forms of information. Unlike EndNote, it is integrated directly into your web browser, making this process easier. According to the Zotero web site (http://www.zotero.org) Zotero is a "free, easy-to-use research tool that helps you gather and organize resources (whether bibliography or the full text of articles), and then lets you annotate, organize, and share the results of your research. It includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote)—the ability to store full reference information in author, title, and publication fields and to export that as formatted references—and the best parts of modern software such as del.icio.us or iTunes, like the ability to sort, tag, and search in advanced ways. Using its unique ability to sense when you are viewing a book, article, or other resource on the web, Zotero will—on many major research sites—find and automatically save the full reference information for you in the correct field."
I took it for a spin and found that it does what it claims, in an easy, direct way. Like other Firefox add-ins, Zotero sits in the corner of your browser window, available to be used when needed. Like EndNote, it allows you to create multiple libraries to store your references. These can be information about books, articles, web pages, or any number of resources. It can also store entire web pages, snapshots of pages, your own notes, and attachments like PDF files.
Its most interesting feature is the ability to "sense" reference information from a web page. For example, if you are looking at a book in Amazon or Google Scholar, Zotero will display an icon in the URL bar. Click on the icon and Zotero will automatically capture the reference and store it in the library of your choice. More importantly, it can do this for other sites as well, including most of the major online databases like WorldCat, etc. It can even grab reference information from sites that EndNote cannot, like JSTOR, the popular Arts and Sciences database. It cannot yet "sense" reference information from UVM's catalog, Voyager.
Here's a sample image of Zotero in action. The top half of the window shows a book listed in the Library of Congress' online catalog, while the bottom half shows how Zotero has "sensed" the bibliographic information and pulled it into the library.
Is it ready to replace EndNote? Not quite. Still missing is the powerful "Cite While You Write" feature that lets you use EndNote from within Word to capture reference information in your documents as you type. However, this is the feature that Zotero is currently working on and promises to implement next.
In the meantime, Zotero provides an easy way to capture reference information. You can then export it to EndNote for use in the Cite While You Write feature.
You can download it from http://www.zotero.org. The installation is fast and easy. Give it a try! And let me know how you like it.
Posted by hag at 11:25 AM | Comments (0)
November 9, 2006
ELO Electronic literature
Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One Released
College Park, Maryland, October 26, 2006 — The Electronic Literature Organization today released the Electronic Literature Collection,Volume One. The Collection, edited by N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, and Stephanie Strickland, is an anthology of 60 eclectic works of electronic literature, published simultaneously on CD-ROM and on the web at collection. eliterature.org. Another compelling aspect of the project is that it is being published by the Electronic Literature Organization eliterature.org under a Creative Commons License Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5), so readers are free to copy and share any of the works included, or for instance to install the collection on every computer in a school's computer lab, without paying any licensing fees. The Collection will be free for individuals.
The 60 works included in the Electronic Literature Collection present a broad overview of the field of electronic literature, including selected works in new media forms such as hypertext fiction, kinetic poetry, generative and combinatory forms, network writing, codework, 3D, and narrative animations. Contributors include authors and artists from the USA, Canada, UK, France, Germany, and Australia. Each work is framed with brief editorial and author descriptions, and tagged with descriptive keywords. The CD-ROM of the Collection runs on both Macintosh and Windows platforms and is published in a case appropriate
for library processing, marking, and distribution. Free copies of the CD-ROM can be requested from The Electronic Literature Organization.
The Collection will also be included with N. Katherine Hayles'
forthcoming book, Electronic Literature: Teaching, Interpreting,
Playing (Notre Dame University Press, 2007).
The editors can be contacted to discuss the project via email: N.
Katherine Hayles (hayles@humnet.ucla.edu), Nick Montfort
(nickm@nickm.com), Scott Rettberg (scott@retts.net), and Stephanie Strickland (strickla@mail.slc.edu). Contributing authors will also be available for interviews.
The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization established in 1999 to promote and facilitate the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature. Since its formation, the Electronic Literature Organization has worked to assist writers and publishers in bringing their literary works to a wider, global readership and to provide them with the infrastructure necessary to reach each other. The Electronic Literature Organization is a national organization based at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH).
Posted by hag at 9:38 AM | Comments (0)
November 3, 2006
Postliteracy
"Post-literate society" is not a new term, but here is an article that takes a more accepting stance. Note thesource, though!
What is the worth of words? - The Practical Futurist - MSNBC.com
excerpt:
"December 25, 2025 — Educational doomsayers are again up in arms at a new adult literacy study showing that less than 5 percent of college graduates can read a complex book and extrapolate from it.
The obsessive measurement of long-form literacy is once more being used to flail an education trend that is in fact going in just the right direction. Today’s young people are not able to read and understand long stretches of text simply because in most cases they won’t ever need to do so. "
Posted by hag at 9:48 AM | Comments (1)
October 30, 2006
INTUTE: Internet for Historians
According to its site:
"Intute is a free online service providing you with access to the very best Web resources for education and research. The service is created by a network of UK universities and partners. Subject specialists select and evaluate the websites in our database and write high quality descriptions of the resources."
A recent addition to the site is its tutorial "Internet for Historians." The tutorial provides a tour of history sites, tips for searching, guides to analyze sites, links to best practice sites, and links to other INTUTE tutorials.
INTUTE is a service of JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), a UK group that has been around for a long time providing wonderful online services to scholars.
Posted by hag at 9:45 AM | Comments (0)
October 1, 2006
NELINET: NECOL
NECOL: New England Collections Online
http://necol.nelinet.net/search/
"SOUTHBOROUGH, MA, September 19, 2006 – NELINET is pleased to announce the launch of New England Collections Online (NECOL), a new online service that will provide member libraries and institutions all over New England with the infrastructure to make their digital collections more visible to Web users in New England and beyond.
NECOL will be released in two phases. The first phase, now operational, allows New England institutions to contribute metadata from digital collections hosted at their institutions to a centralized site that will provide unified search access across the collections of all participants via an OAI harvester. Contributing metadata to the NECOL Harvester will increase the visibility of an institution's digital collections and improve its chance of discovery via the Web. NELINET will help member institutions prepare their metadata to meet the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) standards as an added service."
The second phase, to be completed in 2007, will be the implementation of a Digital Repository (DR) which will offer NELINET members a hosted solution for storing, managing, and providing access to their digital collections. This solution is ideal for any institution that does not have the resources to mount and manage digital collections on their own, but do have collections that would provide great value to scholars and the public. The collections in the DR will also be accessible through the NECOL OAI Harvester.
Posted by hag at 11:03 AM | Comments (0)
September 22, 2006
Performancing: Firefox blog add-on
Our Movable Type blogs come with a handy utility named Quickpost (look for it on your opening blog admin page). It adds a bookmark to your Firefox toolbar that, when clicked, opens a login window to your blog, starts a new message, then grabs the URL of the web page you are on and inserts it in the message. It's a quick and easy way to send a web page to your blog, but it's also a quick and easy way to get to a new message window so you can create a blog entry.
That's what I've been using to create most posts to my blog. Until today.
Wesley forwarded a link to a Firefox add-on named "Performancing." Like all Firefox add-ons, this installs in just a few seconds. Once installed, you'll see a little icon at the bottom of the screen. Click it, and after filling in the obligatory install settings (see below), you get an HTML editor that lets you create a post, choose the blog or sub-blog to post it to, even choose a category.
It gives you all the standard basic HTML editing features: bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, increase/decrease font size, lists, links, images, justification, color. You can edit in "source code" mode, and you can preview. It does not appear to let you do tables, but this is for creating blog entries, so that's not a big lack.
Optional settings let you choose to enable draft mode as the default instead of publish mode, and to save a local copy of the post after it is sent to the blog.
Does it work? Well, I created this post with it!
Note: when installing, choose Manually Configure, Custom Blog, select Movable Type as your blog, then put your blog address where they have myserver.com. So, if your UVMNet ID is jsmith your regular blog address is http://jsmith.blog.uvm.edu, and here's what you would type for the setting:
http://jsmith.blog.uvm.edu/mt/mt-xmlrpc.cgi
Posted by hag at 2:24 PM | Comments (7)
September 7, 2006
Digital Library: Villanova
Villanova Digital Library: http://digital.library.villanova.edu
Andrew Nagy of xml4lin announces:
The staff of Falvey Memorial Library proudly announces the grand opening of the Villanova University Digital Library.
The Digital Library is a repository of many digitized items from our Special Collections as well as other donated items and partnering institutions. The repository was developed by library staff and built from an open source platform. The repository uses a native XML database, eXist, to store and organize our digital objects encoded in the METS format. The web site allows for users to search and view all of the items stored in the repository by using many of the wonderful XML technologies such as XQuery and XSLT.
Noteworthy initial digital collections include: the complete collection of Cuala Press Broadsides, notable as a primary source for many folk songs and for the illustrations of Jack Yeats – brother of the Poet laureate; a signed and edited copy of Memoranda During the War by Walt Whitman; personal letters and books from the Joseph McGarrity Collection dealing with Irish and Irish-American History, an illuminated manuscript of selections from the Holy Koran, and plenty more!
Posted by hag at 10:25 AM | Comments (0)
August 24, 2006
journal: teaching and learning
Online journal on teaching and learning. They plan to publish "articles, essays, and discussions about the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) and its applications in higher/tertiary education today."
In their request for articles they request research-based, not opinion, pieces.
International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Watch for the conference program, conf in early November
Posted by hag at 1:57 PM | Comments (0)
Publishing: Little Steps
Finally, some of the ideas discussed at "Paying the Piper" are dancing their way into reality.
This one presents a nice amalgam of traditional and modern publishing possibilities: keep it virtual until someone requests and is willing to pay for physical. But otherwise the model is the traditional model of editing, review, and self-contained objects of scholarship (books).
Rice University | News & Media
Posted by hag at 11:44 AM | Comments (0)
August 17, 2006
e-Portfolios: the big questions
In a previous posting (Aug. 8, 2006: e-portfolios, preliminary thoughts) I summarized the state of eportfolios, provided some links to colleges that are using them, tried to map out a definition, and asked some questions.
Two of the over-arching questions are not technical, though how they are answered might drive the technological decisions about which applications to pursue:
1) who owns the portfolio
2) who is the audience
For example, if the portfolio is to be owned by the student both while at UVM and beyond, it cannot be hosted by a system or within an account that expires after the student leaves UVM.
If the portfolio is to reflect the student's entire UVM career, it cannot be composed in a system that ties the portfolio to a single course. (Blackboard/Vista's portfolio program seems to have finally figured out the limitations of a course-based approach. The demo appears to show that each student has a MyPortfolio folder to which they can save material from any of their Blackboard courses. That material can then be presented, as desired, to a number of outside constituencies. Bears further exploration...can one also save materials from courses that have no corresponding Blackboard component?)
If the portfolio is to be used for assessment as well as reporting for accreditation purposes, it should easily integrate with UVM's current student information systems.
And none of this addresses how to build a "portfolio culture" within UVM...
Posted by hag at 1:06 PM | Comments (0)
August 16, 2006
Change, teaching, CTL
"All Things Considered" on NPR ran a marvelous story yesterday that resonates nicely with the remarks from Dr. Rosenthal, one of the candidates for CTL Director. The story was described by ATC as follows:
"August 15, 2006 · Robert Sapolsky, a distinguished neuroscientist in his 40s, had a young assistant who played different music every day, from Sonic Youth to Minnie Pearl. That made Sapolsky crazy -- and curious about why his aging ears still crave the music he loved in college. Is there a certain age when the typical American passes from the novelty stage to utter predictability?"
NPR : Does Age Quash Our Spirit of Adventure?
The concusions were, essentially, that people (and other mammals, apparently) have a window of time when they actively seek out, or at least do not avoid, trying new things. For humans that window is generally the few years before and after 20.
Now, the common perception is that people get "set in their ways" as they get older, but the story had some additional insight into this process, especially how it is not a general resistance to any change. It is pockets of resistance to some kinds of change, or rather, a desire to cling to some areas of the familiar. The 'resonation' with Dr. Rosenthal's remarks is this:
mid-career teachers may know that they need to adapt and change in their teaching. They may even want to. But to do so they must overcome a natural discomfort with, and resistance to, change in certain areas. (Technological change is probably one major area.)
The question thus becomes: how can the CTL shape its offerings so that they start from, or are mindful of, this phenomenon? In other words, when we work with faculty to determine what we offer can we frame those offerings in ways that start from their point of comfort rather than ours?
As a group of ed-techies, trying new technologies is obviously not our particular area of resistance to change. We're comfortable with that and so may often feel frustrated that others are not. ("Why wouldn't anyone want to jump in and try xyz? It's so cool! Can't they see how it would benefit teaching and learning?")
What specific approaches can we take to ensure that we are starting from a place that is comfortable for more faculty but that leads to experimentation with or adoption of all those "cool, new" teaching ideas that may involve new technologies?
Posted by hag at 10:05 AM | Comments (0)
August 8, 2006
e-portfolios: preliminary thoughts
The subject of electronic portfolios has surfaced again here at UVM. Meanwhile, clearing out some old stacks of folders, Steve came across a flyer for the 1997 Graduate Student Reception activities that included this session: (It was an abbreviated version of one I had taught for EDSS395)
"Portfolio Design: Make the Web work for you. Many graduate students maintain a portfolio on the Web to organize or display their work. This 1/2 hour session will describe a sample graduate portfolio and outline the steps involved in creating and maintaining one."
As is usual with ideas that have been developing over time, 'everyone knows' what an e-portfolio is, while in actuality the definition is mutable, malleable and sometimes misunderstood. This seemed like a good time to check out the current climate on e-portfolios. How are they defined now? How are they used? Is there software available for making e-portfolios? Does that software emphasize one definition of portfolio over another?
What are portfolios? According to current definitions, they fall into several categories, based on their perceived use and audience:
Assessment - the portfolio consists of samples of students' work that evidences their evolution of learning over time. Materials are compiled based on students 'best work' and often are chosen to highlight mastery of core standards. These portfolios are also used as evidence of student achievement, for institutional reporting purposes.
Reflection - the portfolio is a place for students to gather their work and then provide commentary on it, reflecting on what they have learned and using that reflection to shape future learning. In this sense the portfolio acts as both a self-assessment tool and as an environment that helps students synthesize what they have learned.
Presentation - the portfolio is geared toward an outside audience. It displays the best work of the student and is shaped to highlight achievement. In that sense it acts as an annotated resume, and indeed is often used as such.
Organiziation - the portfolio is for the student's private use. That is, it is a place where students gather all their work, all assignments, papers, bibliographies, projects, even class syllabi, etc. and stores them as an archive. This archive is then used for future reference both in the creation of new work and as a source for drawing out "best work" to be used for externally-directed portfolios as described above. (The Portfolio Design workshop mentioned above defined portfolios in this way.)
Of course, combinations of all these are also possible. In recent years, pre-service teacher education has been at the forefront in developing the Professional Portfolio that combines the assessment, reflection and presentation models. In 2003, the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative defined electronic portfolios as:
* a collection of authentic and diverse evidence,
* drawn from a larger archive representing what a person or organization has learned over time
* on which the person or organization has reflected, and
* designed for presentation to one or more audiences for a particular rhetorical purpose.
How are portfolios created?
The evolution of e-portfolios mirrors the evolution of available technology tools. An examination of papers and conference sessions on e-portfolios in education finds that early portfolios were usually digital surrogates on non-digital works: scans of images, photographs of projects, etc. As hypercard applications gave way to web applications, portfolios followed suit, being composed of 'born digital' artefacts linked together and presented in web form. More recently, social web applications and spaces like blogs, or MySpace and Facebook have provided yet another arena in which to build portfolios, though these are often misconceived as "non-professional" spaces.
The last few years have also seen the development of commercial and open source portfolio creation tools. Some of these tools take the constructivist approach to e-portfolios, where the portfolio is seen as a student-created work to aid student reflection and learning, while others emphasize the positivist appraoch, seeing portfolios as assessment tools that can also be mined to provide institutional data to support accreditation reporting. In "Conflicting Paradigms in Electronic Portfolio Approaches," Barrett and Wilkerson explore these conflicting approaches, pointing out the difficulty for a single software product to reconcile these disparate functions. They point to the following institutions as models for how this might be acheived:
Teacher Education Programs
* assessment portfolio
* Directed Response Folio example
Campus-wide implementations
Other commercial products that have recently leaped into the frey are:
Demo site: http://eportfolio.d.umn.edu,
OSP Initiative site: http://www.theospi.org
recent SAIKAI/OSP conference
Resources:
Electronic Portfolios in Teacher Education, dissertation, by Carla Hagen Piper - Chapter 2 is especially useful for an overview of the interplay between the 'multiple intelligences' theories in cognitive research, the performance-based assessment movements of the 1990s, and federal and state education initiatives of the past decade.
http://www1.chapman.edu/soe/faculty/piper/EPWeb/
Conflicting Paradigms in Electronic Portfolio Approaches, by Dr. Helen Barrett -
http://electronicportfolios.com/systems/paradigms.html
Introduction to Electronic Portfolio Assessment, by Dr. Helen Barrett
http://ali.apple.com/ali_media/Users/147/files/others/intro.pdf
Open Source Portfolio Initiative
http://www.osportfolio.org/
Handbook of Research on Electronic Portfolios, ed. by Ali Jafari and Catherine Kaufman - a book, but also e-book, that UVM doesn't have. However, the chapter titles and author names should provide leads.
http://www.idea-group.com/encyclopedia/details.asp?ID=5072&v=tableOfContents
More to come...
Posted by hag at 10:36 AM | Comments (0)
teaching portfolios: some links
A brief summary of kinds of portfolios including links.
Posted by hag at 10:31 AM | Comments (0)
July 13, 2006
JISC/CNI Conferences 2006 Proceedings
Proceedings for the 2006 JISC/CNI Conference are available.
Topics include digital libraries, repository interoperability, etheses, massive digitisation, Fedora, etc. and many of the usual suspects including Wilkins, Lynch, Choudhury.
Posted by hag at 10:15 AM | Comments (0)
July 12, 2006
DRH
Digital Reseach in the Humanities and Arts conference
The one, the best, maybe next year...
Posted by hag at 9:27 AM | Comments (0)
california digital library tools and guides
Inside CDL: Digital Library Building Blocks
Good guides, best practices and links to tools. Ex:
7train: An XSLT 2.0-based tool for generating METS files from standardized XML inputs (e.g., CONTENTdm Standard XML exports, OAI records, etc.).
From Paul Fogel, CDL, note to METS list:
Version 1 of the open-source, platform-independent tool is
available via Sourceforge at http://seventrain.sourceforge.net.
7train was designed to transform XML documents into METS
files conforming to a specific METS profile. This initial
implementation was designed with the goal of transforming
exports from the CONTENTdm digital asset management tool
(Version 4.0 and higher) into the CDL 7train METS profile,
available at http://www.loc.gov/mets/profiles/00000010.xml,
which is suitable for inclusion in CDL repositories.
However, the tool can be customized to produce METS files
from any kind of standardized XML document (e.g, OAI records).
The tool was developed through the CDL's work in the
"California Local History Digital Resources Project", a
multi-year LSTA grant-funded project that explores a model to aggregate, preserve, and provide permanent public access to digitized local history content via a statewide online access point.
Posted by hag at 8:55 AM | Comments (0)
June 26, 2006
UMN Virtual Library: Musings on Student Portals and research
I recently visited UMN's University Virtual library (http://www.lib.umn.edu/undergrad/ or, for a description of the various features http://www.lib.umn.edu/undergrad/external). This is a "portal" page for aiding students in doing research projects. Three things about this site are intriguing:
- it provides a variety of search options to circumvent the student impulse to simply search on Google, and redirects that impulse towards the library's holdings and subscribed databases
- it includes a helpful tool in the form of an assignments calendar, an open-source gadget that makes a timetable for projects and offers e-mail reminders for stages in that timetable. Another tool is a reference/bibliography manager.
- it contributes to community building by offering links to university blogs (and might be said to encourage blog use by making those links to those blogs that have been most recently active--competitive blogging, as it were). It also offers some useful Quick Links.
So, there is one model for a library portal that maintains a fairly tight focus: it doesn't try to be a general student portal (there are no links to general university services like financial aid, etc.).
However, describing yet another portal is not quite why I am writing this note. Over the years there have been quite a few discussions of potential student portals. Much of the discussion has focused on two things: what is the right software to do the job, and, what should go on the "front page" of the portal (with the chimeric concept of "one stop shopping" being the avowed goal).
Instead of addressing those two issues, I think it would be useful to consider another approach, not necessarily as an alternative to the above, more as a complement to it.
UVM already offers a good mix of tech/IT literacy tools. We have WebCT, web space for all, blogs for all, and a growing list of online databases for research. We also have people-to-people support in the form of the Writing Center, Ask A Librarian, the various programs of the CTL, Helpline, etc. And then there are the multiple guides and helps that are scattered throughout the UVM web. TOne intent of a portal would surely be to tie these all together in a way most useful for our students.
But here's the question that's generating this note: what would improve the chances of a portal actually succeeding in helping students become better students? What processes would build a better content back-end to such a portal? Or, even if UVM never adopts a formal portal, what kinds of things could we do to tie together our current offerings in a way that would make them work more powerfully to aid student learning?
Especially, what could we do to build a community of practice across multiple support groups (LRG, CIT, libraries, faculty, etc.) that emphasizes reuseable modularity?
Some considerations:
- as the content that might help students would probably come from several sources within UVM, are there processes, standards, or models that we could develop together to ensure that that content is more useable? This could include the simplest things: making sure that all documentation is dated and has an author, to more complex things like communicating efforts in order to avoid reinventing wheels, or gathering input from our community before implementing solutions.
- what kinds of marketing and support strategies would work? Direct to students? Via a Library web site? Through Library education? Working with faculty to in specific courses?
For example, any UVM student (or faculty member) can create a blog. On the blog.uvm.edu page they are provided with information on how to do that. If faculty want to they can attend a CTL event that gives them ideas about how blogs are currently being used. But what can we learn from the UMN site, or from that current "god" of web practice, Amazon? The UMN site provides links to most active blogs first, and then to a blogroll of all blogs at UMN. By doing so they help guarantee that new bloggers won't have to sift through umpteen blogs with one posting that says "welcome to my blog" before they find an example of an active blog.
In practice it is analagous to Amazon's "people who bought x also bought y" strategy. By taking that one extra step they turn the focus away from a simple "how to" and aim it squarely back at UMN "this is what we do here." A subtle but effective emphasis on UMN as an active and learning community.
Posted by hag at 4:05 PM | Comments (0)
Planned modularity; aiding the student learning experience
I recently visited UMN's University Virtual library (http://www.lib.umn.edu/undergrad/ or, for a description of the various features http://www.lib.umn.edu/undergrad/external). This is a "portal" page for aiding students in doing research projects. Three things about this site are intriguing:
- it provides a variety of search options to circumvent the student impulse to simply search on Google, and redirects that impulse towards the library's holdings and subscribed databases
- it includes a helpful tool in the form of an assignments calendar, an open-source gadget that makes a timetable for projects and offers e-mail reminders for stages in that timetable. Another tool is a reference/bibliography manager.
- it contributes to community building by offering links to university blogs (and might be said to encourage blog use by making those links to those blogs that have been most recently active--competitive blogging, as it were). It also offers some useful Quick Links.
So, there is one model for a library portal that maintains a fairly tight focus: it doesn't try to be a general student portal (there are no links to general university services like financial aid, etc.).
However, describing yet another portal is not quite why I am writing this note. Over the years there have been quite a few discussions of potential student portals. Much of the discussion has focused on two things: what is the right software to do the job, and, what should go on the "front page" of the portal (with the chimeric concept of "one stop shopping" being the avowed goal).
Instead of addressing those two issues, I think it would be useful to consider another approach, not necessarily as an alternative to the above, more as a complement to it.
UVM already offers a good mix of tech/IT literacy tools. We have WebCT, web space for all, blogs for all, and a growing list of online databases for research. We also have people-to-people support in the form of the Writing Center, Ask A Librarian, the various programs of the CTL, Helpline, etc. And then there are the multiple guides and helps that are scattered throughout the UVM web. TOne intent of a portal would surely be to tie these all together in a way most useful for our students.
But here's the question that's generating this note: what would improve the chances of a portal actually succeeding in helping students become better students? What processes would build a better content back-end to such a portal? Or, even if UVM never adopts a formal portal, what kinds of things could we do to tie together our current offerings in a way that would make them work more powerfully to aid student learning?
Especially, what could we do to build a community of practice across multiple support groups (LRG, CIT, libraries, faculty, etc.) that emphasizes reuseable modularity?
Some considerations:
- as the content that might help students would probably come from several sources within UVM, are there processes, standards, or models that we could develop together to ensure that that content is more useable? This could include the simplest things: making sure that all documentation is dated and has an author, to more complex things like communicating efforts in order to avoid reinventing wheels, or gathering input from our community before implementing solutions.
- what kinds of marketing and support strategies would work? Direct to students? Via a Library web site? Through Library education? Working with faculty to in specific courses?
For example, any UVM student (or faculty member) can create a blog. On the blog.uvm.edu page they are provided with information on how to do that. If faculty want to they can attend a CTL event that gives them ideas about how blogs are currently being used. But what can we learn from the UMN site, or from that current "god" of web practice, Amazon? The UMN site provides links to most active blogs first, and then to a blogroll of all blogs at UMN. By doing so they help guarantee that new bloggers won't have to sift through umpteen blogs with one posting that says "welcome to my blog" before they find an example of an active blog.
In practice it is analagous to Amazon's "people who bought x also bought y" strategy. By taking that one extra step they turn the focus away from a simple "how to" and aim it squarely back at UMN "this is what we do here." A subtle but effective emphasis on UMN as an active and learning community.
And then there is WebCT, the closest thing we have to an across the board portal application...but first....
Comments?
Posted by hag at 12:21 PM | Comments (0)
June 19, 2006
History lectures (casts)
" WGBH Forum Network Live and Archived Webcasts of Free Public Lectures in Partnership with Boston's Leading Cultural and Educational Organizations. Presented by WGBH in association with the Lowell Institute."
This links to the lectures in the History section:
History | WGBH Forum Network | Free Online Lectures
Posted by hag at 2:43 PM | Comments (0)
June 15, 2006
online books
Google is doing it, Microsoft is too:
Microsoft finds partners for book search project - Network World
So once there are millions of books online? Here's a conference designed to address that question:
Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science
"Chicago, November 5th & 6th, 2006
Submission Deadline: August 15, 2006
The goal of this colloquium is to bring together researchers and scholars in the Humanities and Computer Sciences to examine the current state of Digital Humanities as a field of intellectual inquiry and to identify and explore new directions and perspectives for future research."
Posted by hag at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)
social networking, pentagon
Big Brother really will be watching:
New Scientist Technology - Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites
Posted by hag at 11:32 AM | Comments (0)
May 31, 2006
McCarty Humanities Award
Humanities Computing 'Wizard' Honored for Scholarship
The National Humanities Center, a private institute for advanced study in the humanities, awarded Willard McCarty its 2006 Richard W. Lyman Award in recognition of McCarty’s contribution to the field of “digital humanities.” The $25,000 award honors Richard Lyman, who was president of Stanford University from 1970-1980.
McCarty is a reader in humanities computing at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College London. He is a theoretician of the area of “digital humanities” and founder of the "Humanist,” a Web site that brings together scholars working on the confluence of computing and the humanities. In his latest book, Humanities Computing, McCarty makes the case for elevating the field as a separate academic discipline. “We tend to construe computing in the humanities in terms we understand – as an efficient helper or mechanical aid to existing fields like history, literature, or philosophy," he said.
James O'Donnell, provost of Georgetown University and chair of the award selection committee, called McArty, “a doer, a thinker, and perhaps a wizard.” O’Donnell added that McArty’s “explorations in the practical and theoretical dimensions of the application of information technology to the problems of humanistic learning have made him a widely recognized international leader."
Posted by hag at 8:44 AM | Comments (0)
May 19, 2006
BSAD/SoE TabletPC Grant Award
External Research & Programs: Tablet PC Technology, Curriculum, and Higher Education 2005 RFP Awards
BSAD and S of Engineering have received a grant from MiscroSoft re: Tablets with which they will, in part "ocus groups will be conducted in BSAD and SoE to ascertain what about the tablets is effective and why. These results will be disseminated within UVM through workshops and nationally through conferences and journals in both disciplines. This work will also develop training seminars on Tablet PCs and associated software. Both schools expect to gather a better understanding of methodologies for using Tablet PC technology."
Posted by hag at 10:05 AM | Comments (0)
May 18, 2006
O'Gorman course: running posthuman
Bodies/Technologies II - Schedule
Author of E-crit (see previous posting), here is the syllabus for O'Gorman's recent course:
"While tech corporations sing the praises of our increasingly "mobile" way of life, America is actually growing more immobile each day. . . Perhaps the single greatest cause of this immobility is the screen interface for TV's and computers. . . This course asks you to explore strategies for re-embodying information. That is, how can the body can be reintegrated into communications technology? We will answer this question by developing experimental projects that draw on the metaphor of "running."
Also fun because he uses "class content time" to teach them several apps (hooray) and offers the opportunity to display good final projects in a "real life" venue.
Posted by hag at 12:16 PM | Comments (0)
book: E-Crit: Digital Media, Critical Theory, and the Humanities
"In E-Crit, Marcel O�Gorman takes an ambitious and provocative look at how university scholarship, pedagogy, and curricula might be transformed to suit a digital culture."
Posted by hag at 12:07 PM | Comments (0)
May 16, 2006
Google notebook: Humanities Computing Resources
Here's my public Google Notebook of Humanities Computing Resources. A beginning...
Posted by hag at 11:58 AM | Comments (0)
May 15, 2006
Article: Scan this Book
Scan This Book! - New York Times
The article discusses the global library, scanning all books, etc., and how search and connections will remake the knowledge of the world.
Kevin Kelly is the "senior maverick" at Wired magazine and author of "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World" and other books.
Posted by hag at 9:42 AM | Comments (1)
May 4, 2006
MS Word and XML
Brian Jones: Open XML Formats
The blog discusses implementing XML in Word, especially how the upcoming version uses XML. Includes tips and developments.
Posted by hag at 11:21 AM | Comments (0)
April 28, 2006
tei p5
Encoding for Interchange: an introduction to the TEI
The "Green Books" manual revised for P5
Posted by hag at 10:40 AM | Comments (0)
Convert P4 to P5
An XSLT stylesheet for converting P4 to P5
http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/META/p4top5.xsl
and some additional advice, and a book recommendation from David Sewell:
>> a) all the references to TEI element names need namespacing, ie prefixing
>> with tei:. This is hard to automate (think of //p[1]/emph[@rend='foo']/@id)
>> I believe XSLT 2.0 might make a 2-in-1 stylesheet possible.
XSLT 2.0 has one great advantage for people wanting to adapt P4-based
stylesheets to P5 TEI-XML: the
attribute "xpath-default-namespace" that specifies the namespace to
use for unprefixed elements. So starting a stylesheet with
eliminates the need to insert all those "tei:" prefixes. (Even if
prefixing can be 100% automated, unprefixed XPath is easier for human
readers.)
It's true that there is (for practical purposes? or genuinely? I'm not
sure) just one implementation of XSLT 2.0, Michael Kay's Saxon 8
(www.saxonica.com), but it's an awfully good one, it comes in a
platform-independent Java version, and the basic Saxon-B version is open
source and free.
[begin rant] I would urge, exhortate, plead with, annoyingly evangelize
anyone who uses XSLT 1.0 at all heavily to learn about version 2.0. It is
so much more powerful that you'll never look back once you've started
using the new features. For the TEI community's purposes, a lot of the
difference is the vast improvement in string handling from the new
functions introduced in XPath 2.0 (which underlies both XQuery 1.0 and
XSLT 2.0).
So much so that the best way to transition to XSLT 2, I think, would be to
work through the core chapters of Michael Kay's book "XPath 2.0:
Programmer's Reference".
Posted by hag at 9:43 AM | Comments (0)
April 27, 2006
Canterbruy Tales Project
The Canterbury Tales Project: home page
Posted by hag at 10:51 AM | Comments (1)
April 12, 2006
Will Richardson: Blog in Ed
Will Richardson's blog on blogs and ed. He also has a book out "Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms"
Posted by hag at 10:32 AM | Comments (0)
April 11, 2006
METS navigator
Jenn Riley announces:
The Indiana University Digital Library Program is pleased to announce the release of METS Navigator 1.0 Beta, a METS-based system for displaying and navigating sets of page images or other multi-part digital objects. More information, documentation, and downloads are available at
Posted by hag at 10:53 AM | Comments (0)
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 (1)
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
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)
February 20, 2006
Wiki conference
"Wikimania is an annual international conference devoted to Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation projects. Wikimania is both a scientific conference and a community event, bringing together the various Wikimedia projects."
Posted by hag at 10:45 AM | Comments (0)
February 14, 2006
podcast from ppt and lecture
Humble Daisy introduces ProfCast for Mac OS X | MacMinute News
Humble Daisy introduces ProfCast for Mac OS X
Humble Daisy today introduced ProfCast, an all-in-one presentation to podcast tool for the Mac that allows lecturers to create podcasts from their lectures. ProfCast offers an integrated workflow that makes creating, recording, and publishing podcasts easy.
Posted by hag at 9:10 AM | Comments (0)
February 7, 2006
Humanities computing journal ADHO
Wendell Piez online humcomp journal
Posted by hag at 3:09 PM | Comments (0)
January 25, 2006
Google article
LRB | John Lanchester : The Global Id
Excellent article on history, mystery, mastery, and implications of Google.
Posted by hag at 8:52 AM | Comments (0)
January 20, 2006
cool japan
2006_01.swf (application/x-shockwave-flash Object)
e-text as flash--right! but sent to Sarah for fun
Posted by hag at 9:23 AM | Comments (0)
January 19, 2006
Educating the Net Generation
The article discusse the book but focuses more on the fact that, gee wiz, it's an online book with print on demand options (this is new??). But may be worth a look...
Posted by hag at 3:07 PM | Comments (0)
January 13, 2006
kurzweil
ACM: Ubiquity - SINGULARITY: UBIQUITY INTERVIEWS RAY KURZWEIL
Posted by hag at 9:56 AM | Comments (0)
January 3, 2006
semantic web, ambient findability
thanks, Steve:
Peter Morville, "Ambient Findability : How what we find changes who we are." (O'Reilly, September, 2005)
Part of the Safari Books Online Series : http://tinyurl.com/c8564
For an accessible description on how the web-world has co-opted the language of, or implemented the ideas of, taxonomies, ontologies, metadata, folksonomies, and the semantic web, see chapter 6: The Sociosemantic Web (esp. 6.2: The Social Life of Metadata).
I imagine it would be especially interesting to those creating "outward directed" websites, i.e. sites that are created to attract visitors.
And, in remembrance of Foucault, considering all these classification/searching schemes in terms of Borges' "Chinese Encyclopedia" animals list (http://www.multicians.org/thvv/borges-animals.html?1) the chapter might be even more interesting...
Posted by hag at 2:32 PM | Comments (0)
December 13, 2005
HaperCollins digitizing books
HarperCollins Will Create a Searchable Digital Library - New York Times
Posted by hag at 9:06 AM
December 9, 2005
Michael Sperberg-McQueen quote
Mike always has the best quotes:
"Texts cannot be put into computers. Neither can numbers. Computers can contain and operate on patterns of electronic charges, but they cannot contain numbers, which are abstract mathematical objects not electronic charges, nor texts, which are complex, abstract cultural and linguistic objects."
Michael Sperberg-McQueen, 'Text in the Electronic Age: Textual Study and Text Encoding with examples from Medieval Texts.' Literary and Linguistic Computing, 6/1 (1991): 34-46. (34)
This can be expanded for use with all kinds of computing technologies: remembering the distinctions between the computer and what we construct on/with it.
Posted by hag at 10:27 AM | Comments (0)
December 1, 2005
Rahtze: TEI XSLT
talk-transform.pdf (application/pdf Object)
Sebastian Rahtze's excellent slides on TEI/XSLT/XPATH, how to do it, syntax, what it means.
Posted by hag at 2:20 PM
November 21, 2005
cylender recordings: early 20th century music
Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project
Check out "Ev'ry little bit" "Take me back to New York Town" dreamland. mockingbird and so many more!
Andrew B. Sterling and Harry von Tilzer, too
Posted by hag at 12:28 PM
November 17, 2005
Flytop Pen
The Pen Gets a Whole Lot Mightier - New York Times
The toy is interesting, but what is also interesting is the way it integrates reading/writing/sound. The concept of silent and personal reading is, after all, fairly new. Are we seeing a return to a more oral/aural society? A different kind, though, one where memory/memorization is not key--the computer holds your memory...
the Fly Pentop Computer.
...
The Fly is so fat because it contains an AAA battery, a computer chip, a speaker and, mounted half an inch from the ballpoint tip, a tiny camera. For all of its educational, interactive tricks, the Fly pen requires special paper whose surface is imprinted with nearly invisible micro-dots. As you write, the pen always knows where it is on the page, thanks to those dot patterns and the camera that watches them go by.
...
incarnation, which is aimed at "tweens" (8 to 14 years old), no PC is required or desired; instead, you get crisp, instantaneous audio feedback from the pen's speaker.
STAGGERING possibilities await a pen that can read software right off the page as it moves, and the Fly package comes with a sparkling sampler. For example, as you tap countries on a world map, the pen pronounces their capitals or plays their national anthems. On a glossy, fold-out mini-poster of a disc jockey's setup, you can tap buttons to get music samples, or tap turntables to produce record-scratching sounds; then you can record your own compositions or compete, memory-game style, against other players. There's even a sheet of stickers that, when tapped, produce appropriate sound effects. (For my two elementary-schoolers, the belching mouth alone was good for 20 minutes of hilarity.)
The Fly also comes with something called Fly Open Paper: a sheaf of blank pages that permit a much more free-form range of creative activities. You indicate which program you want by writing its initials in a circle.
For example, in Notepad mode (draw an N in a circle), you can write up to three block-letter words at a time; the pen then reads back what you've written. In Scheduler (circled S), you can write "Tuesday 3:45 P.M. student council"; at the specified time, the pen will turn itself on and speak the appointment's name.
Then there's the Calculator (circled C), which is for nerds what "Pinocchio" is to wooden puppets. As you draw a set of calculator buttons, they come to life, speaking their own names when tapped and announcing the mathematical results ("one hundred sixty-nine, square root, equals thirteen").
Fly Tones (circled FT) is an unforgettable demonstration for both parents and children. You draw a piano keyboard, complete with black keys if you like - and then you can play it. You can even draw and operate buttons that change the instrument sound, adjust the tempo, record and play, and so on. Talk about brainstorming on a napkin!
These starter programs are stored in a white plastic cap on top of the pen. But the Fly can accommodate additional cartridges - sold separately, of course ($25 to $35 each).
Each comes with appropriate pads, sheaves or books of the specially printed paper. There are hits and misses among these add-ons (which include Spanish, math and spelling), but the good ones break some interesting new ground.
Fly Through Math, for example, is dedicated to multiplication and division. You write the digits of a math problem into the squares of the included graph paper. Like a watchful parent or teacher, the Fly's little voice-over elf comments immediately when, for example, you forget to carry the 1 or misplace a decimal point. This in-problem feedback is far more helpful than a computer program that just tells you that your final answer is wrong.
Then there's Fly Through Tests. From a Web site (flypentop.com), your sixth- through eighth-grader can download multiple-choice quizzes in PDF format that correspond to the chapters of specific popular published textbooks (math, science or social studies). You print them onto the blank paper that comes with this cartridge, and voilà: instant interactive tests, specific to the textbook you're using in class.
Fly isn't solely about academics. The original software cartridge includes games, jokes and even Easter eggs (secret features). You can also buy kits like Flyball (interactive baseball cards that let you manage a team), Fly Journal (a lockable diary with daily writing prompts) and Fly Friends (girlie activities pertaining to shopping, fashion and boys).
...goes on to describe some of the problems...
Posted by hag at 9:45 AM
November 10, 2005
The New Facebook Frenzy - News
Basic article about pros and cons of Facebook. I didn't realise you must use a .edu address to join.
Posted by hag at 6:25 PM
2 thoughts for the day
I. Sketchy Notes on Enduring Tropes (and pet peeves?) of adoption of emerging technologies:
1. recurring trope: confusing personal practice with general use -
"no one will want to x (read text on a computer screen, listen to a podcast, listen to music on a phone, etc.) so we shouldn't do it
[in this case "no one" = "I"]
2. (corollary of 1.?) recurring trope: culture clash
- assignment: put yourself out there on the blog!; consequence: get fired, get disciplined, get embarrassed 5 years later. It is the nature of the technology that only the things you don't want to lose are lost. When your understanding of appropriate and open conflicts with someone else's (and there is probably a correlation between a person's level of tolerance and their desire to object to other's actions) what happens?
3. people who use IT in education
"'THEY' don't understand the pedagogical value of emerging technology x. They think is is no different than technology y." (Well why the hell should they when you are using PowerPoint to demo it??)
4. "heard here first" or, Andy Warhol strikes again - notice how rapid pace of emerging technologies is paralleled by the positive frenzy to be the first to name the new. Google on podagogy.
5. online optimism and self-fulfilling prophecies: "he who says the most has the most to say"
5. and there was another one but 2 phone calls broke the train of thought and I've got to get back to preparing for class
II. Writing across the Disciplines/Curriculum/Community and podcasting:
for many, writing is hard, talking is easy. For understanding some things, sometimes reading is the better (faster?) vehicle, for others, audio. Will decisions related to which to use in a given educational setting be determined by the pedagogical value or by expediencey? (well duh) Will claims about which is "better" be made based on one or t'other? From scholarly books to articles to ??? (Also, books as a physical artefact are obviously not dead. But take fiction/fun-non-fiction and textbooks out of the mix? What's the health of what's left?) (Read any 17th century prose lately?)
Listening Across the Curriculum...
Posted by hag at 12:45 PM | Comments (0)
November 7, 2005
writing across the curriculum - wac - online journals
WAC and Writing Journals
From Colorado States WAC program
Posted by hag at 1:01 PM
November 4, 2005
web 2.0
XML.com: Microformats and Web 2.0
Posted by hag at 4:19 PM
Google Print, current state
Official Google Blog: Preserving public domain books
Posted by hag at 11:44 AM
November 2, 2005
CTLDOC Wiki
Posted by hag at 9:46 AM
October 28, 2005
Using Images in classroom
Images Can Make Powerful Slam Dunk Digital Lessons
Criteria for selecting images, generating questions/brainstorming around an image.
Posted by hag at 11:01 AM
Book: Digital History (creating)
Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web
Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig do it again, this time as a "how to" book (entire contents online at the link) on creating digital history projects.
Posted by hag at 9:28 AM
October 21, 2005
NYTimes: NYPL Illuminated Manuscripts
Illuminated Pages Capturing a Fading World - New York Times
Though Feb. 11, NYPL displays 100 illuminated books. Also displays some books with additional monitor "page-turner" viewers. Includes a girdle bok, "in this case a breviary in a second wood binding designed to be strung from a belt. It is bound upside down so that it resembles a blocky mallet, and it is one of only two dozen known to exist."
Posted by hag at 9:06 AM
September 28, 2005
NERCOMP: Institutional Repositories
NERCOMP: Institutional Repositories: How are They Evolving
http://www.nercomp.org/sigs/0506/092605ContentRepos/ContentSched.html
Sept. 26, 2006
Speakers discussed five digital repository experiences/tools:
* ContentDM at Mt. Holyoke
* DigitalCommons at UConn
* DigiTools at Brandeis
* dSpace at Harvard Science Libraries
* Fedora at Tufts
Some overall conclusions:
* Institutional is correct: for the most part the collections grew from small funded projects where the emphasis was on local creation and access. Though the results are on the web there is little regard for connections to other institutions' collections, cross-collection access, or tie ins to other possibilities.
* Repositories is also correct: most collections were built as a storage facility for individual objects. Search within a collection, find an object, look at an object. Very little concern about connections between multiple objects within or without the collection. Some OAI implementation but the model was very bricks-and-mortar library-like.
Attendees appear to have been mostly library folk with some CIO/Acad Computing directors as well. A handful of "techies."
1) Content DM, Bryan Goodwin, Mt. Holyoke
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/lits/ris
http://www.artstor.org/info
Original project created for Western Civ. course. Combines ArtStor with in-house scanned objects. Objects downloaded from ArtStor so they can produce combinations of objects for specific classes.
Specific course metadata is added to make that happen, for example, they have created a field for "week one" "week two" etc. They didn't immediately standardize on format: some items tagged "week 1" "week two" etc. oy.
ArtStor had promised stable URLs but then changed the URLs without notification due to internal political pressure. ArtStor images are jpgs but their metadata is stored as HTML. The project team had to cut and paste each objects elements into ContentDM.
2) Digital Commons/ProQuest, Jonathan Nabe, Agriculture and Natural Resources Librarian, UCONN
http://digital commons.uconn.edu
Outsourced their collection efforts to ProQuest because they didn't want to get involved in server maintenance.
Pros: training, support, it works as described
Cons: have to do updates in multiple places, uses proprietary programming language, poor reporting,
Big Con: really limited metadata (not even Dublin Core): seems to be only author, title, random uncontrolled keywords, abstract
Promised enhancement: RS feeds, LDAP authentication, personal research pages...real soon now...
3) DigiTools (ExLibris), Susan Pyzynski, Brandeis
http://lts.brandeis.edu
http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/digitool.html
Began with a $250,000 IMLS grant to digitize the Daumier Lithograph Collection. Despite the $$ they didn't want to use an Open Source product because they did not want to devote additional tech support to it. They already had ExLibris's Aleph product. (They had heard that some organization had made so many customizations to dSpace that they couldn't upgrade to the next version.)
DigiTools is a cataloging program with thumbnails tacked on. So it allows for great metadata, good searching, but limited display and doesn't do much else.
Upcoming version 3 promises to be more like a robust digital repository program.
Pros: metadata expressed/stored in XML, robust rights/security/access, can now support complex objects (ex: video running in one window, transcription running in the other), LDAP authen., can set up groups, students by course (manually, not tied to SIS)
Cons: No Mac entry client, no usage tracking, only depositor or staff--no robust entry divisions
v. 3 may incorporate SCORM, may have WebCT tie ins
4) dSpace, Michael Leach, Physics Research Library, Harvard
Goal: "support the transformation of scholarly communication" (Hooray--someone thinking outside the institutional silo!)
Objects:
* test a new model of participation
* 5 digital objects: articles (pre-, post-, and current-print); theses; video (streaming and static); serials; datasets; learning objects, broadly defined
* study implementation of Dublin Core
* study work flow and work load analysis
* test scaling
* research interface
* user needs analysis
* marketing and publicity
* policy development
Why dSpace:
* $$ Open Source
* accepted by libraries
* collections-based, not subject-based (they wanted to mirror Harvard's highly decentralised dept. structures)
* integrated with what they have (Apache, Tomcat)
* metadata support (plus possible METS support in future)
* unicode
Faculty response: all over the map ("but I already have my stuff on my web site"), but archival persistence became a big selling point along with search capabilities
Publisher response: trying to integrate dSpace with publishers sites so when faculty submit to publisher a simple button click will also dump materials into dSpace. cool.
Policies: they are working on these up front. What faculty rights? what publisher rights? etc.
Work flow issues: will be published soon (and request that other dSpace users publish theirs), also realigning some tech positions to accommodate
Training: working on best practices
Metadata: expanding what is "in the box"
Tech Challenge: unresolved firewall/handles issues
Other: looking for Harvard consolidation, consortial opportunities, may outsource it to BioMed Central after all
5) Fedora, Eliot Wilczek, Tufts
http://dca.tufts.edu/
http://www.fedora.info/
Fedora is obviously the most sophisticated in terms of concept. Generally its strongest point is its weakest: it is not a system but an architecture. You can swap out your own front-end, management, storage, dissemination, access, validation, and search functions always assuming you already have them.
It's repository "plumbing."
One surprise: they've gone from METS to FOXml, their own system.
Policy Issues: using a matrix approach, from highly formatted, top level, top accessibility objects to simple storage of wacky formatted objects.
Sustainability: won't happen without institutional commitment
Questions/Other Notes:
Only Fedora and dSpace guys were familiar with TEI
DigiTools 3 and now dSpace might go with METS
Check out what Coalition for Networked Info is doing (Clifford Lynch)
Should UVM consider a "grey literature" repository?
Posted by hag at 4:13 PM
September 21, 2005
Alice B. Neal Haven
Posted by hag at 1:14 PM | Comments (0)
September 16, 2005
heymath:model resource
HeyMath! Because every student counts
Posted by hag at 10:05 AM
September 14, 2005
Everton: Accessible Archives
Everton's Home Page - Genealogy, Family History Research
According to one blog, this organization gives you subscriber access to Accessible Archives for less than AA does itself, plus you get geneology info. Not bad.
Posted by hag at 9:14 PM
August 29, 2005
art and computer science
Fine arts scholars join computer scientists to explore cultural creativity
Project 66, Kabakov
Posted by hag at 4:25 PM
August 22, 2005
cs005 wiki
Have set up a wiki for CS005 to do some collaborative writing. This time I have remembered to post the URL here so I don;t forget where it is!
http://www.wikispaces.org/user/view/hopegreenberg
Posted by hag at 3:20 PM | Comments (0)
August 16, 2005
CFP: wikis book
The time has come for an edited collection of essays on wikis
entitled The Wild, Wild Wiki: Unsettling the Frontiers of
Cyberspace.
Wikis are without a doubt one of the most interesting and
radical of the new writing media available to the wired
society, yet they also one of the most misunderstood. Many of
us know of them only by encounters with "that wacky website
anybody in the world can edit," the (in)famous Wikipedia, that
is showing up more and more in our students' works cited
lists. For others, wikis represent the incarnation of the
openness, decentralization, and collaboration dreamt of by the
Internet's founders. For those of us in the computers and
writing community, wikis represent a fertile field for
rhetorical analysis and one of the richest opportunities for
teaching writing in the classroom.
The time has come for an edited collection of essays on wikis
entitled The Wild, Wild Wiki: Unsettling the Frontiers of
Cyberspace. Editors Matt Barton and Robert Cummings would like
to invite you to submit your thoughts for a volume on the
theory, politics, future, and application of wikis for
teachers of college composition (and beyond). These essays
will be organized into the following three categories:
* Theory and Politics: 12-25 page essays that discuss wiki
issues from theoretical perspectives. Such essays might
examine how knowledge gets constructed and legitimated in
wikis, or how wiki users negotiate authorship. Do wikis
liberate or erase identities? What roles, if any, should
copyright laws play in the regulation of wiki discourse? Why
is that the most famous wiki happens to be encyclopedic; could
other types of discourse flourish in wikis? How do wikis
remediate other media, old or new? What can you do with a wiki
that you can't do with any other media? Should we think of
wikis as related to the open source phenomenon through
Commons-Based? Peer Production and, if so, does this predict
how and where wikis will expand? Do wikis fundamentally alter
the practice of revision? The concept of collaboration?
* Applications: 8-12 page essays that examine how teachers can
use wikis in the classroom. This includes assignments
involving Wikipedia, but also creating new wikis specifically
for classroom use. The essays here will look at practical
applications as well as limitations and technological matters
(How hard is it to install a wiki? What kind of support is
needed? What are the differences among the many wiki servers
now available? Can a classroom wiki achieve critical mass or
low cost content integration? What are the ethical
implications of asking students to write in a wiki where
writers, other than their teachers, make editorial decisions
about their text? Do contributions by student writers, as part
of a class assignment, differ substantially from those offered
freely by self-selecting wiki contributors?)
* Lore: 6-12 page narratives that describe teachers'
experience using (or reacting) to wikis in their classrooms.
How have you been using wikis in your writing or teaching?
What went right and what went wrong? What would you do
differently next time? How have you assessed writing in wikis?
We also plan to "eat our dogfood" during this project--in
other words, we will be using wikis extensively to plan,
draft, review, and revise the essays in our collection. All
authors will share in the reviewing and editing process. We
also hope to secure a publisher who will allow us to publish
under a Creative Commons license rather than traditional,
full-blown copyright. Our goal is to produce a volume of
accessible and engaging works that will help secure wikis a
prominent place in composition.
Tentative Timeline:
Abstracts: October 10, 2005
Abstract acceptances: October 17, 2005
Submissions Deadline: May 1, 2006
No simultaneous submissions. We also cannot accept previously
published essays. Send your enquiries, queries, or abstracts
to either of the co-editors:
Matt Barton
mdbarton@stcloudstate.edu
(320) 308-3061 (phone)
(320) 308-5524 (fax)
Dept of English
720 Fourth Avenute South
St. Cloud, MN 56301-3061
Posted by hag at 2:24 PM | Comments (0)
Academic Commons
Academic Commons
investigating and defining the role that technology can play in liberal arts
education. Sponsored by the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash
College
reviews, interviews, showcases of innovative uses of technology, and
vignettes that critically examine technology uses in the classroom. Academic
Commons aims to share knowledge, develop collaborations, and evaluate and
disseminate digital tools and innovative practices for teaching and learning
with technology. We want this site to advance opportunities for
collaborative design, open development, and rigorous peer critique of such
resources.
Academic Commons also provides a forum for academic technology projects and
groups (the Developer's Kit) and a link to a new learning object referatory
(LoLa). Our library archives all materials we have published and also
provides links to allied organizations, mailing lists, blogs, and journals
through a Professional Development Center.
Highlights of our First Edition
The first edition of Academic Commons features essays by Richard Lanham
("Copyright 101"), Michael Joyce ("Interspace: Our Commonly Valued
Unknowing"), Patricia O'Neill and Janet Simons ("Using Technology in
Learning to Speak the Language of Film"), and Michelle Glaros ("The Dangers
of Just-In-Time Education"), and an interview with Gerald Graff. The issue
also includes two teaching and learning "vignettes," a good handful of
reviews (websites, hardware, and software) and showcases (exemplary academic
web projects), and links to a variety of interesting teaching, learning, and
technology projects. We've already formed a number of groups onsite and look
forward to more participation. The complete Table of Contents is at
http://academiccommons.org/august2005/.
Posted by hag at 9:42 AM
Oxford Journals online
OUP Journals - Journals by Title
Searchable full text. Mostly medical, but has some music, early music, opera, Literary and Linguistic Computing, American Literature.
Posted by hag at 9:36 AM
August 15, 2005
CFP: Site 2006
>> Call for Participation Deadline: October 18 <<
** Join with 1,200+ Colleagues from 50 Countries **
* Please forward to a colleague *
http://site.aace.org/conf/
______________________________________________________
SITE 2006
Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education
International Conference
March 20-24, 2006 * Orlando, Florida
1. Call for Papers and Submission & Presenter Guidelines, Deadline Oct. 18th:
http://site.aace.org/conf/call.htm
http://site.aace.org/conf/submitguide.htm
http://site.aace.org/conf/PresenterLounge
2. Scope & Major Topics: http://site.aace.org/conf/topics.htm
4. Presentation Categories: http://site.aace.org/conf/categories.htm
5. Proceedings & Paper Awards: http://site.aace.org/pubs/
6. Corporate Participation: http://site.aace.org/conf/corporate.htm
7. For Budgeting Purposes: http://site.aace.org/conf/rates.htm
8. Orlando, Florida: http://www.aace.org/conf/Cities/Orlando
9. Deadlines: http://site.aace.org/conf/deadlines.htm
INVITATION:
SITE 2006 is the 17th annual conference of the Society for Information
Technology and Teacher Education. This society represents individual
teacher educators and affiliated organizations of teacher educators in all
disciplines, who are interested in the creation and dissemination of
knowledge about the use of information technology in teacher education and
faculty/staff development. SITE is a society of AACE.
You are invited to participate in this international forum which offers
numerous opportunities to explore the research, development, and applications
in this important field. All proposals are peer reviewed.
SITE is the premiere international conference in this field and annually
attracts more than 1,200 leaders in the field from over 50 countries.
-----------------------
To submit a proposal, complete the online form at:
http://site.aace.org/conf/submitguide.htm
For Presentation and AV guidelines, see:
http://site.aace.org/conf/PresenterLounge
-------------------------
PROGRAM ACTIVITIES:
* Keynote Speakers
* Invited Panels/Speakers
* Papers (Full & Brief)
* Posters/Demonstrations
* Corporate Showcases & Demonstrations
* Tutorials/Workshops
* Roundtables
* Symposia
SCOPE:
The Conference invites proposals from the introductory through advanced level
on all topics related to:
(1) the use of information technology in teacher education, and
(2) instruction about information technology in
* Preservice
* Inservice
* Graduate Teacher Education
* Faculty & Staff Development
Proposals which address the theory, research and applications as well as
describe innovative projects are encouraged.
MAJOR TOPICS
>> PT3 SPECIAL TOPIC <<
http://site.aace.org/conf/pt3/
PT3: Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers for Technology:
PT3 sessions will enable presenters to demonstrate and discuss research,
development and applications in progress, to gain feedback and to establish
connections with those engaged in similar activities.
GENERAL TOPICS:
* Assessment and E-folios
* Corporate
* Distance/Flexible Education
* Electronic Playground
* Equity and Social Justice
* Evaluation and Research
* Information Technology Diffusion/Integration
* International
* Latino/Spanish Speaking Community
* Leadership
* New Possibilities with Information Technologies
* Graducate Education and Faculty Development
* Video Cases
* Web/Learning Communities
* Workforce Education
CONTENT AREA TOPICS:
* Art Education
* Human Languages Education
* Information Technology Education
* English Education
* Mathematics Education
* Middle School Education
* Science Education
* Social Studies Education
* Special Education/Assistive Technology
* Young Child Education
PRESENTATION CATEGORIES:
http://site.aace.org/conf/categories.htm
The Technical Program includes a wide range of interesting and useful
activities designed to facilitate the exchange of ideas and information.
These include
keynote and invited talks, paper presentations, roundtables,
poster/demonstrations, tutorials/workshops, panels, and corporate showcases.
PROCEEDINGS:
Accepted papers will be published by AACE in the Technology and Teacher
Education Annual proceedings series. Books in this series serve as major
source documents indicating the current state of teacher education and
information technology. this proceedings will be published as a searchable
electronic book on CD-ROM. In addition, the Annuals also are distributed on
ERIC microfiche and through the SITE/AACE Digital Library
(http://www.aace.org/DL)
First and second paper authors are limited to two papers published in the
Annual.
PAPER AWARDS:
http://site.aace.org/pubs/
All presented papers will be considered for Best Paper Awards within
several categories. Award winning papers may be invited for publication in
the Journal of
Technology and Teacher Education (JTATE) or the online journal,
Contemporary Issues in
Technology & Teacher Education (CITE), and will be highlighted in the AACE
online periodical
AACE Journal, and SITE/AACE Digital Library.
CORPORATE PARTICIPATION:
http://site.aace.org/conf/corporate.htm
A variety of opportunities are available to present research-oriented
papers, or to showcase and market your products and services. For
information about Corporate
Showcases (30 minutes) and Corporate Demonstrations (2-hours, scheduled
with the Poster/Demos),
click here.
FOR BUDGETING PURPOSES:
http://site.aace.org/conf/rates.htm
http://site.aace.org/conf/hotel.htm
The conference registration fee for all presenters and participants will be
approximately $295 (members); $340 (non-members). Registration includes
Proceedings on
CD, receptions, and all sessions except tutorials.
Posted by hag at 11:46 AM | Comments (0)
August 5, 2005
METAe metadata engine project
http://meta-e.aib.uni-linz.ac.at/
The METAe Engine - marketed by CCS GmbH. under the brand name docWorks/METAe Edition is a innovative, effective and user-friendly software which understands the structure and layout of documents and translates it into reach XML files. METAe dramatically eases the digitisation process of printed material especially from the 19th and 20th century.
Posted by hag at 11:21 AM | Comments (0)
August 3, 2005
blog, wiki, drexel
Blog: Drexel CoAS E-Learning
Post: evolving from blog to wiki
Link: http://drexel-coas-elearning.blogspot.com/2005/07/evolving-from-blog-to-wiki.html
Posted by hag at 8:18 AM | Comments (0)
July 31, 2005
HerBlog
The feminine blogstique
Santa Clara forum focuses on closing journal gender gap
- Carrie Kirby, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, July 30, 2005
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/07/30/ MNGD2E0IPP1.DTL
Blogging is supposed to be democratizing the world of information, empowering the individual.
And it is -- especially for male individuals.
In this fast-growing community of people using the Internet to self- publish journals on a broad range of topics, half of all bloggers are women, according to surveys. Yet the most popular blogs are created overwhelmingly by men.
The top 10 blogs, ranked according to the number of other Web sites linking to them by the Web site Technorati, are created by 23 men and only four women. At conferences for bloggers, female writers find themselves in a very small minority, attendees say. And so, like in many social movements before this, women are gathering to do something about it.
Three Bay Area bloggers -- Lisa Stone, Elisa Camahort and Jory DesJardins -- are holding a conference today in Santa Clara in an effort to raise women's prominence in the blogosphere. The BlogHer conference started with -- what else? -- a blog, where the organizers posted ideas for the event. Feedback from other bloggers quickly materialized.
The resulting event is as much about community building and sharing skills as it is about getting attention.
"This is a conference that the community built," said Camahort. For example, two rooms at the event are given over to sessions conceived, organized and run by the participants themselves. Sessions in these rooms include "Feminist Hip-Hop Bloggers," "Blogs in Academia" and "MommyBlogging."
The conference maxed out its capacity with 300 registrants, 85 percent of whom are women, the organizers said. Half of them hail from outside the Bay Area. A few will come from as far as Europe.
These women have blogged about feminism, politics, business and technology. They've blogged about their innermost thoughts, their children's antics and -- although this has caused problems for many -- their jobs.
Some women involved in the conference write informative blogs, such as Forrester analyst Charlene Li's blog about new gadgets and the latest technology research. A number of the participants write blogs as a paid marketing service for clients. Some write blogs that are largely unquotable in a daily paper because of obscene language and content. Believe it or not, a lot of the more profane blogs fall into the "MommyBlog" category.
Conference blog
Participants have even blogged extensively about today's conference, discussing what should be talked about, mulling the event's significance, sharing information about local baby-sitting services, and yes -- wondering what to wear.
"Women dress to impress other women," mused Meghan Townsend, a panelist for the MommyBlogging discussion, in a recent blog entry.
"What the hell does one wear when hobnobbing with hundreds of witty savvy women from all over the freaking globe?"
After all this writing, reading and linking, is there anything left to talk about?
Plenty, from a look at today's schedule of discussions. One session, "How to Be Naked," addresses how blogs are "recalibrating our definition of personal." Participants will talk about how they cope when online confessions upset family members, or when strangers post "flames," or angry comments, about the bloggers' very personal decisions. One panelist in that discussion, Heather Armstrong (www.dooce.com), was the recipient of a surfeit of flames when she wrote about weaning her then 6-month-old baby because she was taking antidepressants.
Meeting an online friend
For many participants, the conference is a chance to bring electronic relationships into the nondigital world. Miriam Verburg, a college student from Montreal who writes a blog called the Flink (www.flinknet.com/theflink/), is staying with a local conference volunteer whom she has never met offline. During her trip, she's also staying with a blogger in San Francisco that she became friends with through mutual blog commenting.
Verburg raised eyebrows when she told a border guard she would be staying with friends she met online.
"To him, meeting someone on the Internet seems really risky," Verburg said. "But to me, it's like meeting someone who lives down the street."
Verburg is not the only attendee who's getting help from online friends, said organizer Camahort.
"I know one person who got Paypal donations and frequent-flier-mile donations," to make the trip, Camahort said.
Verburg was able to attend the conference for free because she volunteered to organize an important part of the event: the bloggers. Each session will be recorded and posted to the Internet as it happens, with both audio and text, by "live bloggers." Since registration for the event is closed, this is the only way that many will get to experience it.
E-mail Carrie Kirby at ckirby@sfchronicle.com.
Page A - 1
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/07/30/ MNGD2E0IPP1.DTL
©2005 San Francisco Chronicle
Posted by hag at 9:17 AM | Comments (0)
July 25, 2005
Wikis
Confluence
- http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/default.jsp
Courseforum / Projectforum
- http://www.projectforum.com/
HyperOffice
- http://www.hyperoffice.com/
Posted by hag at 8:45 AM | Comments (0)
July 23, 2005
CFP: History in the (Net)work
Call for Papers / Call for Sessions
.hist 2006: Geschichte im Netz - Praxis, Chancen, Visionen
.hist 2006: History in the Net(work) -- Practices, Possibilities,
Visions
Deadline for CfP: 4 September 2005
Conference will take place from 22 to 24 February 2006
The German history internet project Clio-online
the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, is pleased to announce
the conference .hist 2006: History in the Net(work) -- Practices,
Possibilities, Visions. The aim of the conference is to examine the
growing importance of new media for historical scholarship in both
senses of the word "network": as a technical infrastructure enabling
new forms of interaction, of research, of communication, and of
publication; and as the harbinger of a new form of social and
scholarly space, which, through adaption, experience, and practice,
is beginning to displace the old.
The conference will continue the dialog between historians,
archivists, librarians, and other persons working and thinking at the
juncture between history and new media begun three years ago during
the conference .hist 2003. It seeks to act as a forum to examine the
best practice models, present the newest technical developments, and,
most importantly, to reflect on the state of the art.
Working languages of the conference are English and German. Papers
can be presented in either language but, due to cost considerations,
simultaneous translation cannot be provided.
The full Call for papers (in German) can be found on our homesite,
For more information, please contact:
Max Voegler
voeglerm@geschichte.hu-berlin.de
Projektkoordinator, Clio-online
Institut für Geschichtswissenschaften
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Tel. ++49 (30) 2093 2541
Fax ++49 (30) 2093 2544
Posted by hag at 1:45 PM | Comments (0)
July 21, 2005
Learning with Weblogs: An Empirical Investigation
DOI Bookmark: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/HICSS.2005.387
Abstract
The study investigates the impact of weblog use on individual learning in a university environment.
Weblogs are a relatively new knowledge sharing technology, which enables people to record their thoughts in diary form and publish those diaries as web pages, without programming or HTML coding. The research sought to empirically determine whether the keeping of on-going (web based) learning logs throughout a semester would result in better overall student performance. This was hypothesized, because web based learning logs appear to promote constructivist learning, provide reinforcement, and increase accountability (non-anonymous idea sharing). Results from an information systems undergraduate course with 31 students indicate that weblog performance is a significant predictor for learning outcome, while traditional coursework is not. Weblogs appear to have highest predictive power for high and low performing students, but much less predictive value for medium performers. Results also suggest that there is a learning effect for weblog authoring.
Posted by hag at 9:40 AM | Comments (0)
July 20, 2005
photomuse (eastman photography museum)
PHOTOMUSE.org - ICP GEH
George Eastman House and International Center of Photography Alliance, NYC, are creating an online photo musuem to provide thousands of images.
Posted by hag at 9:22 AM
July 14, 2005
Article: GIS use examples
APPA
Several examples of GIS use at universities for planning, amnagement and communication
Posted by hag at 9:41 AM
July 13, 2005
conference: social software
Missed the Social Software in the Academy conference.
SSAW Program
Some good topics:
Panel: A Conversation on Social Software and Traditional Scholarly Communication
Panel: Pandora’s Blog? What Happens When College Students Take to Social Software in the Classroom
Mary Ellen Bertolini, Middlebury College
Barbara Ganley, Middlebury College
Piya Kashyap, Middlebury College
Eugene Lee, Middlebury College
Paper: Using Weblogs for Collaborative Research
Session III: Renovating the Ivory Tower: Blogs and Wikis in Academic Practice
Paper: Experiments in Backchannel
Discussion: Blogging the Degree: The Value of Blogs for Research, Information Sharing, and Community Building in the Academy
Session III: Renovating the Ivory Tower: Blogs and Wikis in Academic Practice
Discussion: Wikis for Academic Research: Collaboration and Coordination
Discussion: Social Software Meets Campus Life
Paper: Blogging Together: Digital Expression in a Real-Life Academic Community
The Learning Portal Project at Emerson College
Mediabase
The Practice of Wiki: Challenges of Academic Collaboration
Scape: The Socially Connected Academic Peer Exchange
Connexions: Social Software for Scholarly Publishing
A Juxtaposition of Technologies: VUE, PurpleSlurple, Wikalong, & Del.icio.us
Subversive Social Interfaces: The Wiki and Beyond
Posted by hag at 10:35 AM
AIIM, ECMS content management
ECMS may be directed to business solutions, but this site has many of the same issues/technologies that digital libraries and collections have:
Posted by hag at 8:50 AM
July 11, 2005
NORA: data mining humanities texts
the nora project - project description
" The goal of the nora project is to produce software for discovering, visualizing, and exploring significant patterns across large collections of full-text humanities resources in existing digital libraries."
The goal of the nora project is to produce software for discovering, visualizing, and exploring significant patterns across large collections of full-text humanities resources in existing digital libraries.
Posted by hag at 12:01 PM
ETS ICT assessment test
ETS's ICT literacy assessment which
ICT - About the ETS Literacy Assessment for Information Technology and Digital Communication
"The ICT Literacy Assessment is a comprehensive test of ICT proficiency specifically designed for the higher education environment. It uses scenario-based assignments to assess all the ICT skills required of today's higher education students - not just knowledge of technology, but the ability to use critical-thinking skills to solve problems within a technological environment:
Define
Access
Integrate
Manage
Evaluate
Create
Communicate
Purports to measure problem-solving skills but privileges web(library)+MSOffice skill set, which is OK, but rather limited
mentioned: web searches, database searches, word processing, spreadsheets, graphs, presentations slides
not mentioned: blogs, wikis (how to manage shared communication environments), creating images or video
Posted by hag at 11:40 AM
ETD Bibliography
DigitalKoans � Blog Archive � Electronic Theses and Dissertations: A Bibliography
Posted by hag at 11:17 AM
CFP: WWW2006
WWW2006 CALL FOR PAPERS
Fifteenth International World Wide Web
Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland on May 22nd-26th 2006.
http://www2006.org/
The technical program will include refereed paper presentations, special interest tracks, plenary
sessions, panels, and poster sessions. Tutorials and workshops will run before and throughout the conference. A Developers track, devoted to in-depth technical sessions designed specifically for web developers, will run in parallel throughout the conference.
The conference will also be running a programme of high-level, non-technical presentations for professionals in media, government, education and commerce to inform and debate the issues relating to the latest Web technology developments.
REFEREED PAPERS TRACK
WWW2006 seeks original papers describing research in all areas of the web. Topics include but are not limited to:
# E* Applications: E-Communities, E-Learning, E-Commerce, E-Science, E-Government and E-Humanities
# Browsers and User Interfaces
# Data Mining
# Hypermedia and Multimedia
# Performance, Reliability and Scalability
# Pervasive Web and Mobility
# Search
# Security, Privacy, and Ethics
# Semantic Web
# Web Engineering
# XML and Web Services
# Industrial Practice and Experience (Alternate track)
# Developing Regions (Alternate track)
Detailed descriptions of each of these tracks appear at
http://www2006.org/tracks/
Submissions should present original reports of substantive new work. Papers should properly place the work within the field, cite related work, and clearly indicate the innovative aspects of the work and its contribution to the field. We will not accept any paper which, at the time of submission, is under review for or has already been published or accepted for publication in a journal or another conference.
New for WWW2006: We solicit submissions of "position papers" articulating high-level architectural visions, describing challenging
future directions, or critiquing current design wisdom. Accepted position papers will be presented at the conference and appear in the
proceedings. Both "regular papers" and "position papers" are subject to the same rigorous reviewing process, but the emphasis may differ
--- regular papers should present significant reproducible results while position papers may present preliminary work rich in implications for future research.
All papers will be peer-reviewed by reviewers from an International Program Committee. Accepted papers will appear in the conference proceedings published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and will also be accessible to the general public via
http://www2006.org/. Authors of all accepted papers will be required to transfer copyright to the IW3C2.
POSTERS
Posters provide a forum for late-breaking research, and facilitate feedback in an informal setting. Posters are peer-reviewed. The poster
area provides an opportunity for researchers and practitioners to present and demonstrate their recent web-related research, and to
obtain feedback from their peers in an informal setting. It gives conference attendees a way to learn about innovative works in progress
in a timely and informal manner. Formatting and submission requirements are available at http://www2006.org/posters/.
TUTORIALS AND WORKSHOPS
A program of tutorials will cover topics of current interest to web design, development, services, operation, use, and evaluation. These
half and full-day sessions will be led by internationally recognized experts and experienced instructors using prepared content.
Workshops provide an opportunity for researchers, designers, leaders, and practitioners to explore current web R&D issues through a more
focused and in-depth manner than is possible in a traditional conference session. Participants typically present position statements and hold in-depth discussions with their peers within the workshop setting. For more information and submission details see http://www2006.org/workshops/.
PANELS
Panels provide an interactive forum that will engage both panelists and the audience in lively discussion of important and often controversial issues. For more information and submission details see http://www2006.org/panels/.
IMPORTANT DATES
Conference: May 22nd-26th 2006
Submission Deadlines:
Paper (regular): November 4, 2005
Paper (alternate track): November 4, 2005
Poster: February 14, 2006
Panel proposal: November 4, 2005
Tutorial/Workshop proposal: October 1, 2005
Acceptance Notification:
Paper (regular): January 27, 2006
Paper (alternate track): February 10, 2006
Poster: March 21, 2006
Panel proposal: January 27, 2006
Tutorial/Workshop proposal: November 1 2005
Posted by hag at 10:22 AM | Comments (0)
DRH 2005
**Digital Resources for the Humanities** conference (DRH 2005)
4th-7th September 2005
Lancaster University, UK ( http://www.ahds.ac.uk/drh2005/ )
REGISTRATION for DRH 2005 is now open: see
http://www.ahds.ac.uk/drh2005/registration.php.
Posted by hag at 10:20 AM | Comments (0)
CFP: SSAWW (conf. and book)
A publisher has contacted me and would like me to submit a book proposal on my proposed SSAWW panel titled "Popular Nineteenth-Century Women Writers and the Literary Marketplace." Though I can only accept four papers for the conference, I need about ten papers for the book. I would like to get the book proposal out before the end of this year; therefore, please note the deadline listed below.
The focus of the book will be on the American marketplace and how women writers dealt with their editors ("gentlemen publishers"). In other words, how did the woman writer's relationship with the publisher influence or change her work? The book is open to poets, short story writers, novelists, playwrights, and women editors. Other topics related to the marketplace are also welcome, and I will "zero in" on specific topics when looking through the proposals. I include my original call for papers below. If you are interested, please send a 200 word proposal and a short cv to me by November 30, 2005. You may send an email to writeearly@yahoo.com or mail your proposal to me at the address below.
Popular Nineteenth-Century Women Writers and the Literary Marketplace
>>
>>We invite papers on any aspect of popular nineteenth-century women
>>writers and the literary marketplace for a round-table discussion. Of
>>particular interest though, is how the marketplace influenced women
>>writers' creations (writer/editor relationship, author/audience,
>>author/other writers). Please send 200 word abstracts to Earl Yarington
>>(writeearly@yahoo.com) within an email message by November 30, 2005.
Earl Yarington, Assistant Professor
Neumann College
Room 302 W, Division of Arts and Sciences
One Neumann Drive
Aston, PA 19014-1298
Posted by hag at 10:18 AM | Comments (0)
Book: From Gutenberg to Internet
Announcement from the author, Jeremy Norman
From Gutenberg to the Internet: A Sourcebook on the History of Information Technology
(Amazon link)
ISBN 0-930405-87-0.
- 63 original readings from the history of computing, networking, and telecommunications
- basic discoveries from the 1830s through the 1960s
- trace historic steps from the early nineteenth century development of telegraph systems-the first data networks- through the development of the earliest general-purpose progammable computers and the earliest software, to the foundation in 1969 of ARPANET.
- review early developments and ideas in the history of information technology that eventually led to the convergence of computing, data networking, and telecommunications in the Internet.
- illustrated historical introduction concerning the impact of the Internet on book culture.
- compares and contrasts the transition from manuscript to print initiated by Gutenberg's invention of printing by moveable type in the 15th century with the transition that began in the mid-19th century from a print-centric world to the present world in which printing co-exists with various electronic media that converged to form the Internet.
- a comprehensive and wide-ranging annotated timeline covering selected developments in the
history of information technology from the year 100 up to 2004
- introductory notes to each reading.
Posted by hag at 10:11 AM | Comments (0)
Preservation Metadata
Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata and related materials
http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/pmwg/
Posted by hag at 10:08 AM | Comments (0)
Book/Site: Electronic Textual Editing
Electronic Textual Editing
The complete text of the forthcoming MLA volume, Electronic Textual Editing, co-sponsored by the Text Encoding Initiative and the Modern Language Association's Committee on Scholarly Editions, is now available for free, on the redesigned TEI web site.
http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/ETE/
The volume's contents include:
1. Prefatory material
1. Foreword
2. Editors' introduction
2. Guidelines for Editors of Scholarly Editions
1. Guidelines for Editors of Scholarly Editions
2. Guiding Questions for Vettors of Print and Electronic Editions
3. Annotated Bibliography
3. Principles
1. Principles: Burnard, O'Keeffe, Unsworth
4. Sources and Orientations
1. Critical Editing in a Digital Horizon: Buzzetti and Jerome McGann
2. The Canterbury Tales and other Medieval Texts: Peter Robinson
3. Documentary Editing: Bob Rosenberg
4. The Poem and the Network: Editing Poetry Electronically: Neil
Fraistat and Steven Jones
5. Drama Case Study: The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson: David Gants
6. The Women Writers Project: A Digital Anthology: Julia Flanders
7. Authorial Translation: The Case of Samuel Beckett's Stirrings Still / Soubresauts: Dirk Van Hulle
8. Prose Fiction and Modern Manuscripts: Limitations and Possibilities of Text-Encoding for Electronic Editions: Edward Vanhoutte
9. Philosophy Case Study: Claus Huitfeldt
10. Electronic religious texts: the Gospel of John: D.C. Parker
11. Multimedia Body Plans: A Self-Assessment: Morris Eaves
12. Epigraphy: Anne Mahoney, Perseus Project & Stoa Consortium
5. Practices and Procedures
1. Effective Methods of Producing Machine-Readable Text from Manuscript and Print Sources: Eileen Gifford Fenton (JSTOR) and Hoyt N. Duggan (University of Virginia)
2. Levels of transcription: M. J. Driscoll (University of Copenhagen)
3. Digital Facsimiles in Editing: Kevin Kiernan (Electronic Beowulf, University of Kentucky)
4. Authenticating electronic editions: Phill Berrie, Paul Eggert, Chris Tiffin, and Graham Barwell (Australian Scholarly Editions Centre, Australian Defence Force Academy, University of New South Wales; University
of Queensland; University of Woollongong)
5. Document Management and File Naming: Greg Crane (Perseus Project, Tufts University)
6. Writing Systems and Character Representation: Christian Wittern (Kyoto University)
7. How and Why to Formalize your Markup: Patrick Durusau (Society of Biblical Literature and Emory University)
8. Storage, Retrieval, and Rendering: Sebastian Rahtz (Research Technologies Service, Oxford University)
9. When not to use TEI: John Lavagnino (King's College, London)
10. Moving a Print-Based Editorial Project into Electronic Form: Hans-Walter Gabler (Institut fuer Englische Philologie,
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen)
11. Rights and Permissions in an Electronic Edition: Mary Case (Office of Scholarly Communication, Association of Research Libraries) and David Green (National Initiative of Networked Cultural Heritage)
12. Collection and Preservation of an Electronic Edition: Marilyn Deegan (King's College London)
Posted by hag at 9:51 AM
TEI Publisher
Eric lease Morgan has created a TEI Publisher. The app is at SourceForge:
http://teipublisher.sourceforge.net/docs/ and some writing about it is at: My personal TEI publishing system / Eric Lease Morgan
http://teipublisher.sourceforge.net/docs/.)
Posted by hag at 9:34 AM
May 26, 2005
Conf: Face of text, Nov 2004
I encourage you to see the new Media page at the Face of Text web site. We
have mounted a Quicktime application with streaming video synchronized with
slide images and texts of selected speakers (like Julia Flanders, Jerome
McGann, Stephen Ramsay and John Unsworth) from The Face of Text conference
that was held in November of 2004.
http://tapor1.mcmaster.ca/~faceoftext/media.htm
You can also try audio podcasts of keynote presentations.
Yours,
Geoffrey Rockwell
Posted by hag at 10:30 AM | Comments (0)
May 19, 2005
Digital library: Summary of Tools
Summary of tools for building a digital library, posted to diglib:
Software used to build and present digital collections:
- Greenstone
- Fedora (http://www.fedora/info) ;
- a very comprehensive and extended comparison of features and functionality of open source software is available at http://www.soros.org/openaccess/software/
- a less detailed comparison between DSpace, Fedora, and the commercial CONTENTDm is available at http://staff.oclc.org/~levan/docs/ContentDM%20vs%20DSpace%20vs%20Fedora.ppt#256,1,CONTENTdm
- commercial software to consider as well : DLXS (built and used for instance for Making Of America http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/moagrp/), CONTENTdm, ENCompass (Endeavor), DigiTool (ExLibris)
- a list of open source and commercial software is available at http://www.bcdlib.tc.ca/tools-software.html
Standards to structure digitized pages in books: METS or TEI
Besides, one may find at http://ldp.library.jhu.edu/projects/repository (at the "Documents" tab) a summary of an on-going study (by Johns Hopkins) on how different databases/user interface can co-exist and connect with each other thanks to an intermediate 'interface layer' (maybe more for IT specialists).
Best regards
Cécile Gass
ULB - Bibliothèque Electronique
Posted by hag at 10:59 AM | Comments (0)
May 15, 2005
Fedora Conference Proceedings
May 2005 Fedora Users Confrence at Rutgers: conference abstracts and slides:
http://www.scc.rutgers.edu/fedora_conf_2005/program.html
Posted by hag at 10:34 AM | Comments (0)
May 3, 2005
Serna, wysiwyg xml editor
XML to PDF editor?
Syntext Serna: Portable True WYSIWYG XML Editor
Posted by hag at 12:56 PM
Oxford VRE
"Oxford University has been awarded significant funding from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to develop infrastructure and tools for the next generation of collaborative research environments." Virtual Research Environment Projects at Oxford University
Oxford University has been awarded significant funding from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to develop infrastructure and tools for the next generation of collaborative research environments.
Posted by hag at 11:02 AM
April 28, 2005
Site: TEI and Topic Map
I am pleased to announce the release of our new TEI and Topic Map based website, which you can view at http://www.nzetc.org/. Our digital library collection is delivered using a Topic Map, an authority file (MADS), TEI encoded documents, XSLT, and Apache Cocoon. The result for the online user is a series of "topics" which create a dynamic web of semantic relationships between all of our texts, manuscripts, and images.
Posted by hag at 4:51 PM | Comments (0)
April 17, 2005
SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator
SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator
Posted by hag at 1:57 PM | Comments (0)
March 18, 2005
CFP: SSAWW
CFP: Society for the Study of American WOmen Writers:
We invite SSAWW members to submit /proposed/ topics for panels, round tables, or workshops for the third SSAWW conference to be held November 8-11, 2006 at the Sheraton-Society Hill in Philadelphia.
We welcome sessions on authors and themes from the 17th through the 21st century, hoping to promote connections among members from diversified backgrounds and locations.
Proposed topics should include a tentative title, brief description, and name and address of a contact person (maximum 50 words). Please send within an email or MS Word attachment to Dawn Keetley (dek7@lehigh.edu). They will be published on the SSAWW website (www.ssaww.org).
The deadline for /final/ proposals for sessions and individual papers will be January 31, 2006.
Posted by hag at 11:41 AM | Comments (0)
February 14, 2005
Women's voices, blogs
In the article
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/women_and_children.html
Women and Children Last: The Discursive Construction of Weblogs
Susan C. Herring, Inna Kouper, Lois Ann Scheidt, and Elijah L. Wright, Indiana
the authors suggest that:
"In keeping with the Androcentric Rule, male authors historically have been more highly valued than female authors (Spender, 1989). Moreover, personal journal-writing, traditionally associated with women, is generally not considered “serious” writing (Culley, 1985; McNeill, 2003)."
The question of gender ownership of serious writing was being hammered out in the 1850s. Can VT letters, journals, publications of that time provide any indications about the perceptions about women's writing in these venues. How did people value this writing, what assumptions were made about it, what were women saying in writing? An amorphous question but could be refined into something...
(A larger excerpt is available in the humanitiescomputing blog.
Posted by hag at 9:47 AM | Comments (0)
February 4, 2005
blogging, discourse, women
Excerpts from:
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/women_and_children.html
Women and Children Last: The Discursive Construction of Weblogs
Susan C. Herring, Inna Kouper, Lois Ann Scheidt, and Elijah L. Wright, Indiana University at Bloomington
Discussion
Women and young people are key actors in the history and present use of weblogs, yet that reality is masked by public discourses about blogging that privilege the activities of a subset of adult male bloggers. In engaging in the practices described in this essay, participants in such discourses do not appear to be seeking consciously to marginalize females and youth. Rather, journalists are following “newsworthy” events, scholars are orienting to the practices of the communities under investigation, bloggers are linking to popular sites, and blog historians are recounting what they know from first-hand experience. At the same time, by privileging filter blogs, public discourses about blogs implicitly evaluate the activities of adult males as more interesting, important and/or newsworthy than those of other blog authors.
Many of these participants (including most of the journalists) are themselves female. Nonetheless, it is hardly a coincidence that all of these practices reinscribe a public valuing of behaviors associated with educated adult (white) males, and render less visible behaviors associated with members of other demographic groups. This outcome is consistent with cultural associations between men and technology, on the one hand (Wajcman, 1991), and between what men do and what is valued by society (the “Androcentric Rule”; Coates, 1993). As Wajcman (p.11) notes, “qualities associated with manliness are almost everywhere more highly regarded than those thought of as womanly.” In this case, discourse practices that construct weblogs as externally-focused, substantive, intellectual, authoritative, and potent (in the sense of both “influential” and “socially transformative”) map readily on to Western cultural notions of white collar masculinity (Connell, 1995), in contrast to the personal, trivial, emotional, and ultimately less important communicative activities associated with women (cf. “gossip”). Such practices work to relegate the participation of women and other groups to a lower status in the technologically-mediated communication environment that is the blogosphere, and more generally, to reinforce the societal status quo.
. . .In keeping with the Androcentric Rule, male authors historically have been more highly valued than female authors (Spender, 1989). Moreover, personal journal-writing, traditionally associated with women, is generally not considered “serious” writing (Culley, 1985; McNeill, 2003). This may explain why weblogs are being discursively constructed so as to exclude women and young people (also assumed to be incapable of “serious” writing), and why journal-style blogs receive little attention despite being the most popular form of blogging for all demographic groups.
Conclusion
We began this essay with an apparent paradox: Why, given that there are many female and teen bloggers, do public discourses about weblogs focus predominantly on adult males? The observation that men are more likely than women and teens to create filter blogs provides a key: It is filter blogs that are privileged, consistent with the notion that the activities of educated, adult males are viewed by society as more interesting and important than those of other demographic groups. However, the blogs featured in contemporary public discourses about blogging are the exception, rather than the rule: all the available evidence suggests that blogs are more commonly a vehicle of personal expression than a means of filtering content on the Web, for all demographic groups including adult males. It follows that more attention needs to be paid to “typical” blogs and the people who create them in order to understand the real motivations, gratifications, and societal effects of this growing practice. This would require advancing a broader conception of weblogs that takes into account the activities of diverse blog authors, considering personal journaling as a human, rather than exclusively a gendered or age-related activity, and conducting research on weblogs produced by women and teens, both for their inherent interest and to determine what differences, if any, exist among groups of bloggers.
Are weblogs inherently “democratizing,” in the sense of giving voice to diverse populations of users? The empirical findings reported for gender and age at the beginning of this essay suggest that they are. Yet public commentators on weblogs, including many bloggers themselves, collude in reproducing gender and age-based hierarchy in the blogosphere, demonstrating once again that even an open access technology—and high hopes for its use—cannot guarantee socially equitable outcomes in a society that continues to embrace hierarchical values.
Posted by hag at 11:34 AM | Comments (1)
January 31, 2005
typewriters, word processing, Google Desktop
Will we ever get away from the "word processor as typewriter"? Here's an article that ponders the effects of Google Desktop on writing and thinking...
NY Times, January 30, 2005**
**Tool for Thought **
* By STEVEN JOHNSON *
One often hears from younger writers that they can't imagine how anyone managed to compose an article, much less an entire book, with a typewriter. Kerouac banging away at his Underwood portable? Hemingway perched over his Remington? They might as well be monastic scribes or cave painters.
But if the modern word processor has become a near-universal tool for today's writers, its impact has been less revolutionary than you might think. Word processors let us create sentences without the unwieldy cross-outs and erasures of paper, and despite the occasional catastrophic failure, our hard drives are better suited for storing and retrieving documents than file cabinets. But writers don't normally rely on the computer for the more subtle arts of inspiration and association. We use the computer to process words, but the ideas that animate those words originate somewhere else, away from the screen. The word processor has changed the way we write, but it hasn't yet changed the way we think.
Changing the way we think, of course, was the cardinal objective of many early computer visionaries: Vannevar Bush's seminal 1945 essay that envisioned the modern, hypertext-driven information machine was called ''As We May Think''; Howard Rheingold's wonderful account of computing's pioneers was called ''Tools for Thought.'' Most of these gurus would be disappointed to find that, decades later, the most sophisticated form of artificial intelligence in our writing tools lies in our grammar checkers.
But 2005 may be the year when tools for thought become a reality for people who manipulate words for a living, thanks to the release of nearly a dozen new programs all aiming to do for your personal information what Google has done for the Internet. These programs all work in slightly different ways, but they share two remarkable properties: the ability to interpret the meaning of text documents; and the ability to filter through thousands of documents in the time it takes to have a sip of coffee. Put those two elements together and you have a tool that will have as significant an impact on the way writers work as the original word processors did.
For the past three years, I've been using tools comparable to the new ones hitting the market, so I have extensive firsthand experience with the way the software changes the creative process. (I have used a custom-designed application, created by the programmer Maciej Ceglowski at the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, and now use an off-the-shelf program called DEVONthink.) The raw material the software relies on is an archive of my writings and notes, plus a few thousand choice quotes from books I have read over the past decade: an archive, in other words, of all my old ideas, and the ideas that have influenced me.
Having all this information available at my fingerprints does more than help me find my notes faster. Yes, when I'm trying to track down an article I wrote many years ago, it's now much easier to retrieve. But the qualitative change lies elsewhere: in finding documents I've forgotten about altogether, documents that I didn't know I was looking for.
What does this mean in practice? Consider how I used the tool in writing my last book, which revolved around the latest developments in brain science. I would write a paragraph that addressed the human brain's remarkable facility for interpreting facial expressions. I'd then plug that paragraph into the software, and ask it to find other, similar passages in my archive. Instantly, a list of quotes would be returned: some on the neural architecture that triggers facial expressions, others on the evolutionary history of the smile, still others that dealt with the expressiveness of our near relatives, the chimpanzees. Invariably, one or two of these would trigger a new association in my head -- I'd forgotten about the chimpanzee connection -- and I'd select that quote, and ask the software to find a new batch of documents similar to it. Before long a larger idea had taken shape in my head, built out of the trail of associations the machine had assembled for me.
Compare that to the traditional way of exploring your files, where the computer is like a dutiful, but dumb, butler: ''Find me that document about the chimpanzees!'' That's searching. The other feels different, so different that we don't quite have a verb for it: it's riffing, or brainstorming, or exploring. There are false starts and red herrings, to be sure, but there are just as many happy accidents and unexpected discoveries. Indeed, the fuzziness of the results is part of what makes the software so powerful.
These tools are smart enough to get around the classic search engine failing of excessive specificity: searching for ''dog'' and missing all the articles that have only ''canine'' in them. Modern indexing software learns associations between individual words, by tracking the frequency with which words appear near each other. This can create almost lyrical connections between ideas. I'm now working on a project that involves the history of the London sewers. The other day I ran a search that included the word ''sewage'' several times. Because the software knows the word ''waste'' is often used alongside ''sewage'' it directed me to a quote that explained the way bones evolved in vertebrate bodies: by repurposing the calcium waste products created by the metabolism of cells.
That might seem like an errant result, but it sent me off on a long and fruitful tangent into the way complex systems -- whether cities or bodies -- find productive uses for the waste they create. It's still early, but I may well get an entire chapter out of that little spark of an idea.
Now, strictly speaking, who is responsible for that initial idea? Was it me or the software? It sounds like a facetious question, but I mean it seriously. Obviously, the computer wasn't conscious of the idea taking shape, and I supplied the conceptual glue that linked the London sewers to cell metabolism. But I'm not at all confident I would have made the initial connection without the help of the software. The idea was a true collaboration, two very different kinds of intelligence playing off each other, one carbon-based, the other silicon.
IF these tools do get adopted, will they affect the kinds of books and essays people write? I suspect they might, because they are not as helpful to narratives or linear arguments; they're associative tools ultimately. They don't do cause-and-effect as well as they do ''x reminds me of y.'' So they're ideally suited for books organized around ideas rather than single narrative threads: more ''Lives of a Cell'' and ''The Tipping Point'' than ''Seabiscuit.''
No doubt some will say that these tools remind them of the way they use Google already, and the comparison is apt. (One of the new applications that came out last year was Google Desktop -- using the search engine's tools to filter through your personal files.) But there's a fundamental difference between searching a universe of documents created by strangers and searching your own personal library. When you're freewheeling through ideas that you yourself have collated -- particularly when you'd long ago forgotten about them -- there's something about the experience that seems uncannily like freewheeling through the corridors of your own memory. It feels like thinking.
//
/Steven Johnson is the author, most recently, of ''Mind Wide Open.'' His new book, ''Everything Bad Is Good for You,'' will be published in May.
/
/http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/review/30JOHNSON.html?ei=5070&en=b7b8fb7c34744540&ex=1108184400&pagewanted=print&position=
/
Posted by hag at 8:49 AM | Comments (0)
January 6, 2005
Google, searching, how much data, microsoft
Will Microsoft challenge Google in the search wars? In the article "What's Next for Google," Charles H. Ferguson discusses the possibilitites http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/01/issue/ferguson0105.asp?p=1
Whoever wins the standards/architecture battle will win the search war. Microsoft has deep pockets and a record of winning this type of battle. However, it doesn't always win (ex. Adobe, esp. PhotoShop) and it has become a bit of a slow moving behemoth.
" Thus, while Google provides an excellent service for searching the public Web and has made a good start on PCs with Google Desktop (the hard-drive search tool) and Google Deskbar (which performs searches without launching a browser), the search universe as a whole remains a mess, full of unexplored territories and mutually exclusive zones that a common architecture would unify."
“Microsoft effectively disbanded the Internet Explorer group after killing Netscape,” [an anonymous MS exec] said. “But recently, they realized that Firefox was starting to gain share and that browser enhancements would be useful in the search market.” He agreed that if Microsoft got “hard-core” about search (as Bill Gates has promised), then, yes, Google would be in for a very rough time. "
" Why? Because in contrast to Microsoft, Google doesn’t yet control standards for any of the platforms on which this contest will be waged—not even for its own website. Although Google has released noncommercial APIs—which programmers may use for their own purposes, but not in commercial products—until recently, it avoided the creation of commercial APIs." It may feel it does not need to. The author believes this would be a mistake. Or, it may feel they are not the most important concern. " There is, however, another possibility: Google understands that an architecture war is coming, but it wants to delay the battle. One Google executive told me that the company is well aware of the possibility of an all-out platform war with Microsoft. According to this executive, Google would like to avoid such a conflict for as long as possible and is therefore hesitant to provide APIs that would open up its core search engine services, which might be interpreted as an opening salvo. The release of APIs for the Google Deskbar may awaken Microsoft’s retaliatory instincts nonetheless. For Google to challenge Microsoft on the desktop before establishing a secure position on the Web or on enterprise servers could be unwise. "
"Google should first create APIs for Web search services and make sure they become the industry standard. It should do everything it can to achieve that end—including, if necessary, merging with Yahoo. Second, it should spread those standards and APIs, through some combination of technology licensing, alliances, and software products, over all of the major server software platforms, in order to cover the dark Web and the enterprise market. Third, Google should develop services, software, and standards for search functions on platforms that Microsoft does not control, such as the new consumer devices. Fourth, it must use PC software like Google Desktop to its advantage: the program should be a beachhead on the desktop, integrated with Google’s broader architecture, APIs, and services. And finally, Google shouldn’t compete with Microsoft in browsers, except for developing toolbars based upon public APIs. Remember Netscape.
When Google’s Peter Norvig was read this list—presented not as recommendations, but as things that Google would do—he did not deny any of it. "
" Whether Google or Microsoft wins, the implications of a single firm’s controlling an enormous, unified search industry are troubling. First, this firm would have access to an unparalleled quantity of personal information, which could represent a major erosion of privacy. Already, one can learn a surprising amount about people simply by “googling” them. A decade from now, search providers and users (not to mention those armed with subpoenas) will be able to gather far more personal information than even financial institutions and intelligence agencies can collect today. Second, the emergence of a dominant firm in the search market would aggravate the ongoing concentration of media ownership in a global oligopoly of firms such as Time Warner, Bertelsmann, and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation."
"If the firm dominating the search industry turned out to be Microsoft, the implications might be more disturbing still. The company that supplies a substantial fraction of the world’s software would then become the same company that sorts and filters most of the world’s news and information, including the news about software, antitrust policy, and intellectual property. Moreover, Microsoft could reach a stage at which its grip on the market remains strong, but its productivity falls prey to complacency and internal politics. Dominant firms sometimes do more damage through incompetence than through predation."
"Indeed, as so many have noted, much of Microsoft’s software is just plain bad. In contrast, Google’s work is often beautiful. One of the best reasons to hope that Google survives is simply that quality improves more reliably when markets are competitive. If Google dominated the search industry, Microsoft would still be a disciplining presence; whereas if Microsoft dominated everything, there would be fewer checks upon its mediocrity."
And here's an interesting chart from the article that describes where data is stored:
Posted by hag at 10:04 AM | Comments (0)
January 3, 2005
McKiernan: Wiki bibliography
"WikiBibliography is devoted to significant articles, presentations, reports, as well as audio and video programs, Web sites, and other key "publications" about Wikis in general and their select applications and uses"
WikiBibliography is compiled and maintained by Gerry McKiernan, Science and Technology Librarian and Bibliographer, Science and Technology Department, Iowa State University Library
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/WikiBib.htm
WikiBibliography is a companion resource to SandBox(sm): Wiki Applications and Uses, a categorized registry of select applications and uses of wikis.
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/SandBox.htm
Posted by hag at 8:41 AM | Comments (0)
December 17, 2004
Article: invention required for tenure
Erich E. Kunhardt: "Necessity as the Mother of Tenure"
NYTimes, 14-Dec-2004
There's an interesting op-ed in the Times today calling for colleges to encourage inventing by making it a requirement for tenure.
He sees the US declining number of patents and wants to get away from the "research only" mindset of the past 100 years (starting with Johns Hopkins 'research as a requirement for tenure' 1876)
He doesn't mean inventing things with great commercial value, just the idea of inventiveness itself.
Posted by hag at 9:33 AM | Comments (0)
December 14, 2004
Google Digital Library
Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database
By JOHN MARKOFF and EDWARD WYATT
Google plans to begin converting the holdings of leading
research libraries into digital files that would be
searchable online.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/14/technology/14google.html?th
"Google
the operator of the world's most popular Internet search service, plans
to announce an agreement today with some of the nation's leading
research libraries and Oxford University to begin converting their
holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web.
It may be only a step on a long road toward the long-predicted global
virtual library. But the collaboration of Google and research
institutions that also include Harvard, the University of Michigan,
Stanford and the New York Public Library is a major stride in an
ambitious Internet effort by various parties. The goal is to expand the
Web beyond its current valuable, if eclectic, body of material and
create a digital card catalog and searchable library for the world's
books, scholarly papers and special collections.
Google - newly wealthy from its stock offering last summer - has agreed
to underwrite the projects being announced today while also adding its
own technical abilities to the task of scanning and digitizing tens of
thousands of pages a day at each library.
<>Although Google executives declined to comment on its technology or
the cost of the undertaking, others involved estimate the figure at $10
for each of the more than 15 million books and other documents covered
in the agreements. Librarians involved predict the project could take at
least a decade.
Because the Google agreements are not exclusive, the pacts are almost
certain to touch off a race with other major Internet search providers
like Amazon
Microsoft
and Yahoo
Like Google, they might seek the right to offer online access to library
materials in return for selling advertising, while libraries would
receive corporate help in digitizing their collections for their own
institutional uses.
"Within two decades, most of the world's knowledge will be digitized and
available, one hopes for free reading on the Internet, just as there is
free reading in libraries today," said Michael A. Keller, Stanford
University's head librarian.
The Google effort and others like it that are already under way,
including projects by the Library of Congress to put selections of its
best holdings online, are part of a trend to potentially democratize
access to information that has long been available to only small, select
groups of students and scholars.
Last night the Library of Congress and a group of international
libraries from the United States, Canada, Egypt, China and the
Netherlands announced a plan to create a publicly available digital
archive of one million books on the Internet. The group said it planned
to have 70,000 volumes online by next April."
The rest is at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/14/technology/14google.html?th
Posted by hag at 10:34 AM | Comments (0)
November 29, 2004
UVM Libraries: literature and technology subject heading
Posted by hag at 1:35 PM | Comments (0)
Book: Writing Machines
Posted by hag at 11:05 AM | Comments (0)
November 22, 2004
T.R. Young's Syllabus
T.r. Young's wonderful syllabus for Sociology. Wonderful ideas for how to structure assignments and grading.
gfclcIndex
Posted by hag at 8:32 AM
November 18, 2004
Google Scholar
http://scholar.google.com
Google introduces a new service for academics. Weighted towards sciences now, but more to follow. Search on books and papers, including citations. What will this do to the acadmic world, I wonder?
Posted by hag at 12:56 PM | Comments (0)
November 17, 2004
Book: O'Reilly, Real World Web Services
Here's an interesting O'Reilly book:
Real World Web Services
Will Iverson
Publisher: O'Reilly
ISBN: 0-596-00642-X, 222 pages, $29.95 US, $43.95 CA
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/realwws/
"The core idea behind "Real World Web Services" is simple: after years of
hype, what are the major players really doing with web services? Standard
bodies may wrangle and platform vendors may preach, but at the end of the
day what are the technologies that are actually in use, and how can
developers incorporate them into their own applications? Those are the
answers this book delivers."
"The heart of the book is a series of projects, demonstrating the use and
integration of Google, Amazon, eBay, PayPal, FedEx, and many more web
services. Some of these vendors have been extremely successful with their
web service deployments. For example, eBay processes over a billion web
service requests a month."
"Iverson focuses on building 8 fully worked-out example web applications
that incorporate the best web services available today. The book
thoroughly documents how to add functionality like automating listings for
auctions, dynamically calculating shipping fees, automatically sending
faxes to your suppliers, using an aggregator to pull data from multiple
news and web service feeds into a single format or monitoring the latest
weblog discussions and Google searches to keep web site visitors on top of
topics of interest by integrating APIs from popular web sites."
"Real World Web Services" doesn't engage in an intellectual debate as to
the correctness of web services on a theological level. Instead, it
focuses on the practical, real world usage of web services as the latest
evolution in distributed computing, allowing for structured communication
via internet protocols. As you'll see, this includes everything from
sending HTTP GET commands to retrieving an XML document through the use of
SOAP and various vendor SDKs."
Posted by hag at 3:02 PM | Comments (0)
November 15, 2004
Echo online history tool center
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 18, No. 358.
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 06:59:11 +0000
From: John Unsworth
Subject: developer's wiki
From Roy Rosenzweig:
http://echo.gmu.edu/toolcenter-wiki/
ECHO TOOLS CENTER: The number of historians interested in using digital tools to facilitate their work has been rapidly expanding, as has the
number of researchers developing online tools for the humanities. In order to facilitate contact between these two groups, Echo would like to announce the beta launch of its new Tools Center, an experimental, comprehensive resource for scholars interested in the nuts and bolts of online history.
Just as Echo's Research Center offers a guide to thousands of history websites, the Tools Center is envisioned as a central directory of the myriad pieces of software and other tools available to contemporary historians. Built using the same open-source software that powers sites like Wikipedia, the Tools Center is a specifically collaborative resource, enabling developers to post descriptions of their products, and users to
apply their own expertise to build and expand its entries.
Posted by hag at 9:23 AM | Comments (0)
November 11, 2004
Page Turner App
The most beautiful page turner app I've seen. I only wish it were less expensive to implement!
Posted by hag at 4:55 PM | Comments (0)
November 10, 2004
Digichromatography: Restoring Prokudin-Gorskii's Photographs
Digichromatography: Restoring Prokudin-Gorskii's Photographs: 100 year old Color Photographs
According to the site:
"Born in St. Petersburg and educated as a chemist, Prokudin-Gorskii devoted his career to the advancement of photography. In the early 1900s, he developed an ingenious technique of taking colour photographs. The same object was captured in black and white on glass plate negatives, using red, green and blue filters. He then presented these images in colour in slide lectures using a light-projection system involving the same three filters."
These beautiful images have a strange effect: we are so used to seeing old B&W photos that we envision the world they depict in those sepia or grey tones. To see the same age in vibrant color makes it, in some ways, less realistic--my reaction is that this must be a modern reproduction/reenactment. But then when you really look at the images and look for the details--amazing. Even the digital reproductions found at this site are wonderful.
Posted by hag at 12:41 PM | Comments (0)
October 8, 2004
Book: Companion to Digital Humanities
Coming in November. Looks to be quite useful. Have sent in request to library to order it.
A Companion to Digital Humanities - Book Information
Posted by hag at 11:26 AM | Comments (0)
Site: Innovate ed tech journal
A new journal that features research and practice in IT in education. Looks like it's a blog, too. Innovate - October/November 2004
Posted by hag at 9:24 AM | Comments (0)
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
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)
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
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
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)
August 3, 2004
MDID Digital Image Database
MDID 2 NOW AVAILABLE!
We are very pleased to announce that the initial release of the new version of the Madison Digital Image Database (MDID 2) software is now available to the general public. Developed at James Madison University, the MDID system brings the digital image library into the teaching and learning process. Visit the MDID web site (http://mdid.org) where you can have some fun playing with the MDID 2 online demo, find more information about MDID 2, and download the software. Continuing the tradition of a shared educational software resource, MDID 2 is distributed free of charge under an open source license.
New Features in MDID 2
• Multiple collections and custom catalogs
• Cross-collection searching
• Personal collections and favorites
• Enhanced light table
• Flexible slideshow management
• Enhanced slideshow viewer
• Packaged slideshows for offline viewing
• Data exchange through XML
Posted by hag at 10:04 AM | Comments (0)
August 26, 1998
the eternal question: scholarly value of encoding
Greenberg Response to Stuart Lee
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 12, No. 178.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1998 10:24:57 +0000
Subject: Re: 12.0177 response to The Tagging Challenge
Stuart Lee wrote:
> Many thanks to those who replied to my challenge about tagging
> Owen's 'Futility'....so far!. . . I was particularly struck by Francoise's recent posting
> which likened the creation of the text on the manuscript to a performance.
> . . .
> However, what is striking from the responses I've received is a reluctance
> to embrace any SGML encoding (to put it politely).
While reluctant to try my hand at encoding the Owen text, thank you for the challenge because it brings up a problem I've been wrestling with.
I'm searching the literature (various online searches, ACH/ALLC conference abstracts, and back issues of Computers and the Humanities) looking for. . .well, let's be honest, looking for things to use in evangelizing efforts. (will soon be doing a series of talks for our faculty on electronic texts, TEI, etc. trying to recruit interested parties to give it a whirl)
Some of the scholarly benefits for encoding texts, particularly in ways that provide meta data and web-accessibility, are pretty obvious by now.
Accessibility issues like making rare materials available, making multiple versions available, bringing obscure works to light, making materials findable and searchable, and standards issues, have all been treated pretty thoroughly. Contributing to the emerging global brain is
usually seen as a good thing. The benefits of collaboration, both in the creation of these projects and as a result of their creation, are also generally accepted as being positive. The jury is still out on how working with electronic texts impacts things like promotion and tenure,
although the question is at least acknowledged as legitimate.
There are also the teaching reasons: providing texts for your students to work with, helping your students learn the process involved in encoding because they'll need to know for the future, etc.
These should probably be enough reasons for a reasonable person.
Sometimes I'm not reasonable.
Most of the text encoding projects I have encountered have been "big projects" dealing with how to put large collections online, often
undertaken by libraries, humanities computing groups, or specially funded projects. That is, they have fit well with the accessibility,
collaboration and teaching angles. It seems obvious that libraries and other groups should be providing these texts. But what of the individual
scholar? and students? Is there a benefit beyond those mentioned in encoding a text? a "personal" benefit? At lunch the other day, while trying to convince a computing colleague that we should be pouring more resources into helping faculty and students learn about creating these texts, I said something like "there is value in encoding a text because you engage it in more meaningful ways than other forms of studying it."
I'm glad he didn't ask for clarification because I realized a moment later I certainly didn't have any basis, beyond my own experience with texts, for assuming that to be true.
Is there a fundamental and important difference between the close work you do with a text when you encode it and the close work you do with a text in other ways? Or is it that encoding a text is just one of many ways to "get into" a text, and one that just happens to have all the added benefits of making it more accessible to others, or using it as a focal point for collaboration and teaching? Is there something intrinsically valuable about "encoding as performance art?" I would hope this group has some ideas on this, as many have worked on texts through a variety of computing models (yes, Stuart, I was at your "Break of Day in the Trenches" ACH/ALLC'93 presentation!).
According to Rogers (The Diffusion of Innovations) and Geohegan (What Ever Happened to Instructional Technology), technology leaders and early
adopters need little encouragement to work with new technologies, but the majority of scholars need personally compelling reasons to disrupt
their usual practices and use new technologies. What can I tell faculty and students to convince them that they themselves, not their libraries or publishers or computing staff, but they themselves should experience the "joys" of encoding? (Beyond saying "this is the way to get your favorite obscure works out in the public eye and make them available for posterity?")
Or to put it another way, if I wanted to compile a bibliography on "how the TEI makes me a better scholar" and didn't want to include the accessibility, collaboration and teaching issues, what could I put on the list? (I've got McGann/Rosetti and the Orlando Project)
- Hope
------------
hope.greenberg@uvm.edu, U of Vermont, http://www.uvm.edu/~hag
(and experiments temporarily at cit.uvm.edu:6336/dynaweb)
Posted by hag at 11:08 AM | Comments (0)