What’s Happening? New Twitter Question Makes More Sense for Digital Humanities — Yesterday Twitter changed its update prompt from “What are you doing?” to “What’s happening?” There is a lot of subtle speculation on what the change means for Twitter and how it does or doesn’t reflect changes in user behavior over time. But at least for the digital humanities crowd, which uses Twitter largely as a place to share links, content, and news—rather than simply to provide personal status updates—the new question seems more appropriate.
I went to my 10 (soon to be 11) year-old’s talent show on Friday night. As a compulsive viewer of American Idol, X-Factor and So You Think You Can Dance (Dance, Dance…), I am a big fan of this kind of thing. I love watching the American Idol auditions in particular, to witness the culmination of decades of high praise from a mother or father for a kid who is completely talentless. I think its the total disbelief in their eyes, which is hard to fake, when they’re told that they can’t sing a note, that makes it compelling viewing for me. I blame the parents.
However as it happens, my 10-year-old is hugely talented. Her role as third-zombie-from-the-left in the expertly choreographed “Thriller Redux” – a far superior re-imagination of Michael Jackson’s ground-breaking Thriller video – was a sight to behold. Naturally, all the other kids were far outclassed in stage presence, style and zombie-grace.There was some amazing talent on display during the show. The kid playing “You Are My Sunshine” on the harmonica while bouncing on a pogo stick was, in all honesty, worth giving up my Friday night for. As was the Recorder duet with Elvis Presley singing “Love Me Tender”. I have no idea what the kid with that hat and that round thing was attempting to do, and in truth I don’t think he or the teacher’s did either. But it was compulsive viewing.
This talent is wasted in the Multi Purpose room of an elementary school in the Los Angeles ‘burbs and its the second time I’ve seen talent wasted in the space of two weeks. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know I was at MCN last week presenting with Messers Edson and Iannacone from the Smithsonian, both of whom are awesome talents. Mike talked about the Smithsonian 2.0 initiative and how they brought in peers and colleagues from outside the SI walls to help them think through the issues of being a cultural institution in the 21st century, particularly how they engage with their audiences.
The immensely talented SI staff have spent a considerable amount of time thinking this through themselves already and so it should come as no surprise that one recommendation from this outside group was that SI should listen to their in-house talent on the topic, since they had already made deeply smart, thoughtful and perceptive recommendations about all of this stuff.
This was an underlying theme that I picked up on at MCN which is both troubling and insulting: the propensity for museum executives to bring in outsiders to comment or advise on issues in areas of expertise that the museum already has. WTF? The hiring process can be lengthy and time-consuming, presumably a museum selects the best talent from the applications they get for the position they want to fill. The implication is that they trust the employee that they’ve picked to do the job that they need. So what is it about bringing in a consultant to validate or invalidate a talent that you already claimed was the best talent?
I’m not rubbishing consultants, I’ve been one, they provide much needed expertise to our field, we use them ourselves for expertise that we don’t have, but I just don’t get what it is about bringing someone from outside when that skill and expertise is already there. Can’t blame the parents this time…
Share:CONTENTdm 5.2 Released — OCLC has released version 5.2 of its popular digital collection management software, CONTENTdm. Among the new features, CONTENTdm 5.2 includes improved PDF print support and reduced indexing times for text collections. Version 5.2 is available at no additional charge to current license holders.
Think ChromeOS is Competing with Linux? Think Again. — It would be easy to see Google’s announcement of Chrome OS—a lightweight, web-focused operating system—as a shot not only at Microsoft and Apple, but also at popular Linux distributions, especially those focused on the netbook experience like Ubuntu Netbook Remix and Mobiln. In fact, Canonoical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu has announced it is “contributing engineering to Google under contract” for Chrome OS and its open source code base, Chromium OS. Noting that “open source development is as much about co-operation as it is about competition,” Canonical says Chrome OS is “a positive development, bringing choice to the consumer.” In this case, Canonical says the choice will be between Ubuntu, which “will continue to be a general purpose OS running both web and native applications such as OpenOffice,” and Chrome OS, which will provide an entirely web-based user experience. We’ll have to wait and see how this goes down with the Linux community at large.
I’m probably not the only person who has a soft spot for unknown collections, especially if they turn out to be rich and reasonably well-curated.
Today I became aware of the odontological collection at the University of Oslo, which goes back to the 1880’s when the Norwegian Dentists Association began acquiring objects; it was handed over to the Norwegian State Institute of Dentistry in 1915 and was later taken over by the Odontological Faculty of the University of Oslo. Parts of the collection is displayed in a hallway in the faculty headquarters (above).
For the last 12 years, parts of the collection has been registered by a group of retired Norwegian dentists — and so far they have put 2266 objects online. See all the objects here. The search function of the database is not without problems and the quality of the descriptions and images is variable at best — but what a great artefact material!
Reminds me that we need to do something about our own in-house odontological collection — so many things to do, so many holes to fill out (pun intended).
::decloaking::
Back in October we went to our local orchard to pick up a nice plump pumpkin to to carve for Halloween. On the way out I snapped this sign. I’d already known about this from a local foodie who tweets, but it was nice to see how they were letting people know about it in their physical location. A few days later, riding the bus to campus I saw an advert (one of the big ones that goes on the back of our buses) for our local historic theater The Virginia. Down in the lower corner, you guessed it, were the Facebook and Twitter logos. It happened again last night at the movies. As I stood waiting for my popcorn, the monitor behind the concession played a National Guard promo – also featuring the Facebook logo.
Wait a minute…this was something different. People are essentially paying to advertise for Facebook, Twitter, etc.. And if you think about it, this kind of promiscuous branding has been part of “web 2.0″ since the start. Please! Steal my logo! Make it go Viral!
I’ve been working since 2001 on various projects that aggregate metadata from many many many different libraries, archives and museums. One of the consistent fears that I’ve heard over the years is that such aggregations will dilute branding of a particular institution. People have asked to make sure their logo was next to images that appeared in the aggregation. This seems like a pretty reasonable request until – as an aggregator – you sit down and try to aggregate logos from several hundred cultural institutions. Which one should I use? Where is it? Here’s one on the home page, but do I have permission to use it? – all the legalize suggests they will kill my family if I touch their logo. The marketing people e-mailed me a 20 page “graphic identity” PDF with rules for using the logo. Aww..frak it’s just embedded in this glitzy header image and it will take me 10 minutes to photoshop it out.
I would love – LOVE – to be able to put together a “logos of culture 2.0″ panel like the one above but my experience suggests that this will be a huge time sink. I know, it’s kinda gimmicky, but I think it would make a nice poster for my office.
Also as we’ve worked on museum dashboard prototypes, people have ASKED us to add the logo from an institution on collection-level descriptions. We’re also working on new prototypes for our Opening History interfaces and have imagined that it would be nice to included a logo from the hosting or contributing institutions. In the current environment, that’s not likely to happen – but what about next generation aggregations/APIs, etc. Can I retrieve your logo to go along with the data I harvest? Really, I don’t want to steal your brand – I want to help promote yours!
I can also imagine trying this using a little bit of hoard.it moxy – essentially scraping anything with a filename that looks like “logo” out of museum websites. I wonder what I would catch in my dragnet.
Not being a marketing type I have a few questions for you, dear reader:
Web 2.0 logos courtesy Ludwig Gatzke
Share:SYNAESTHESIA is a neurological condition in which there is a merging of the senses, so that activity in one sensory modality elicits sensations in another. Although first described by Francis Galton in the 1880s, little was known about this condition until recently. A rennaissance in synaesthesia research began about a decade ago; since then, three previously unrecognized forms of the condition have been described, and hypotheses for how it arises have been put forward.
Two new studies now provide some insight into time-space synaesthesia, the least researched of all the forms of this fascinating condition. One is a case study of an individual whose time-space synaesthesia has an apparently unique characteristic. The second demonstrates that time-space synaesthetes are superior to non-synaesthetes in some cognitive abilities, and suggests that time-space synaesthesia may underly the savant-like abilities of people with hyperthymestic (or "super-memory") syndrome.
Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...In an article posted yesterday under the title 5 Ways Social Media Will Change Recorded History, Mashable co-editor Ben Parr writes,
For the first time in human history, the day-to-day interactions between people are being permanently recorded and formatted in easily organizable segments of information.
I don’t disagree that social media is poised to change the way the history of the early 21st century is written. But I’m not at all convinced social media interactions are being “permanently recorded” or “formatted” in ways that will be useful to future historical inquiry. As a session organized by Jeff McClurken at this year’s THATCamp made clear, there are still lots of unanswered questions swirling around the issue of archiving social media. Indeed, I’m not sure we understand the full range of questions involved—standards and interoperability, privacy and copyright, preserving context, mapping personal networks, etc., etc.—let alone the answers.
For nearly a decade now, my colleagues at the Center for History and New Media and I have been investigating the problems and opportunities that internet ephemera presents for scholars and archivists, exploring and implementing best practices for collecting the born-digital record of unfolding events through projects like the September 11 Digital Archive and the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank. New social media and their traces (Tweets, Facebook status updates) present a new set of questions for this ongoing project. If past experience tells us anything, the full range of those questions won’t be readily apparent until we begin the actual work of archiving social media. It also suggests we have to move quickly.
With that in mind, we are already getting down to business, laying the groundwork for a 2010 workshop of collections professionals, scholars, social media experts like Ben Parr, and representatives from the most popular social networking services to start this project and make sure these unprecedented—but as yet still potential—historical riches are in fact “permanently recorded” and properly “formatted” for scholarly access.
Stay tuned.
"How to Write a Zotero Translator" Now in Print — Another great resource from Adam: his comprehensive guide to building a Zotero translator is now available in print from LuLu. As Adam points out, I was the one who asked for this, so I guess I finally have to get off my backside and learn how to write a translator.
Writing Great Documentation — Jacob Kaplan-Moss of Django has some tips for writing software documentation, including thoughts on what to write, style, and the importance of editors.
Do the digital humanities need journals? Although I’m very supportive of the new journals that have launched in the last year, and although I plan to write for them from time to time, there’s something discordant about a nascent field—one so steeped in new technology and new methods of scholarly communication—adopting a format that is struggling in the face of digital media.
I often say to non-digital humanists that every Friday at 5 I know all of the most important books, articles, projects, and news of the week—without the benefit of a journal, a newsletter, or indeed any kind of formal publication by a scholarly society. I pick up this knowledge by osmosis from the people I follow online.
I subscribe to the blogs of everyone working centrally or tangentially to digital humanities. As I have argued from the start, and against the skeptics and traditionalists who thinks blogs can only be narcissistic, half-baked diaries, these outlets are just publishing platforms by another name, and in my area there are an incredible number of substantive ones.
More recently, social media such as Twitter has provided a surprisingly good set of pointers toward worthy materials I should be reading or exploring. (And as happened with blogs five years ago, the critics are now dismissing Twitter as unscholarly, missing the filtering function it somehow generates among so many unfiltered tweets.) I follow as many digital humanists as I can on Twitter, and created a comprehensive list of people in digital humanities. (You can follow me @dancohen.)
For a while I’ve been trying to figure out a way to show this distilled “Friday at 5″ view of digital humanities to those new to the field, or those who don’t have time to read many blogs or tweets. This week I saw a tweet from Tom Scheinfeldt (blog|Twitter) (who in turn saw a tweet from James Neal) about a new service called Twittertim.es, which creates a real-time publication consisting of articles highlighted by people you follow on Twitter. I had a thought: what if I combined the activities of several hundred digital humanities scholars with Twittertim.es?
Digital Humanities Now is a new web publication that is the experimental result of this thought. It aggregates thousands of tweets and the hundreds of articles and projects those tweets point to, and boils everything down to the most-discussed items, with commentary from Twitter. A slightly longer discussion of how the publication was created can be found on the DHN “About” page.
Does the process behind DHN work? From the early returns, the algorithms have done fairly well, putting on the front page articles on grading in a digital age, bringing high-speed networking to liberal arts colleges, Google’s law archive search, and (appropriately enough) a talk on how to deal with streams of content given limited attention. Perhaps Digital Humanities Now will show a need for the light touch of a discerning editor. This could certainly be added on top of the raw feed of all interest items (about 50 a day, out of which only 2 or 3 make it into DHN), but I like the automated simplicity of DHN 1.0.
Despite what I’m sure will be some early hiccups, my gut is that some version of this idea could serve as a rather decent new form of publication that focuses the attention of those in a particular field on important new developments and scholarly products. I’m not holding my breath that someday scholars will put an appearance in DHN on their CVs. But as I recently told an audience of executive directors of scholarly societies at an American Council of Learned Societies meeting, if you don’t do something like this, someone else will.
I suppose DHN is a prod to them and others to think about new forms of scholarly validation and attention, beyond the journal. Ultimately, journals will need the digital humanities more than we need them.
Letters & Bytes
I finally handed in my dissertation! The defence is scheduled for the 18th of december. I’m both happy and nervous. Happy about finishing it, and nervous about the finality of sending it to the printers. Now I just need to handle the defence…
Technology is everywhere in education: in the seating arrangements in the classroom, in the coordination of work, and in the delivery of lectures. In each and every educational meeting technology shapes interaction, pedagogy, and knowledge. However, technology is not a neutral tool that can be used in any way the teacher sees fit. Technology is permeated with hypotheses about its use, technological solutions, and social interests. Regarded in this manner technology becomes a complex and vital part of structuring educational practice.
Letters & Bytes uses distance education to explore technology as a powerful force that affects education. Through a number of cases the book investigates the history and a possible future of distance education. The historical case is correspondence education in the mid 20th century. The future illustration is Learning Objects, a developing standardized technology for reusing educational material. In exploring these cases the author emphasizes how technology not only shapes educational practice, but also how technology is steeped in economy, markets, education, knowledge, and other technological solutions.
In engaging educational technology, Letters & Bytes has both a theoretical and reflective motive. The point of departure being that techno-advocates often proclaim New Technology as a reformer that will reshape education. This rhetoric draws on two arguments. The first is that technology will reform education from the outside, and the second that technology can be used in any manner that the teacher sees fit. The involvement of technology in complex social and material processes makes these two positions untenable. This book seeks to sort out these fundamental misconceptions.
An online-version of Adam’s, Camilla’s and my essay ”Between meaning culture and presence effects: contemporary biomedical objects as a challenge to museums” is now available on the website of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science.
Here’s the abstract of the paper:
The acquisition and display of material artefacts is the raison d’être of museums. But what constitutes a museum artefact? Contemporary medicine (biomedicine) is increasingly producing artefacts that do not fit the traditional museological understanding of what constitutes a material, tangible artefact. Museums today are therefore caught in a paradox. On the one hand, medical science and technologies are having an increasing pervasive impact on the way contemporary life is lived and understood and is therefore a central part of the contemporary world. On the other hand, the objects involved in medical diagnostics and therapies are becoming increasingly invisible and intangible and therefore seem to have no role to play as artefacts in a museum context. Consequently, museums are at risk of becoming alienated from an increasingly important part of contemporary society. This essay elaborates the paradox by employing Gumbrecht’s (2004) distinction between ‘presence’ and ‘meaning’.
Wish I could put the direct author’s link to the full version here, but Elsevier will most probably sue me if I do — so alas you will have to access it in a pay version (Science Direct) here or through your local university library (which most probably will give you access to Studies through one of their many subscription packages).
The printed version in Studies won’t be out until December or so.
Curators in medical museums that plan to get involved with the powerful practices of contemporary biomedical visualization (we all do, don’t we?) might learn something from the announced ‘Biomedical Visualisations and Society’ seminar and workshop series at the University of Warwick Medical School next spring with the aim
Each of the four two-day workshop will combine a key-note lecture, time for discussion and an opportunity to engage with visualisation in practice. What distingushes this seminar series from many others is exactly the combination of theory and practical approaches.
The only thing that troubles me about this initiative is that the workshop/seminar website is so visually challenged. I mean, this is a scholarly field with plenty of first-class visual material — and then the website that is supposed to lure postgrad students to attend the workshops looks like it’s competing for the UKPVB (UK prize for visual boredom). Maybe they should have added an aim about tthe aesthetic implications as well :-)
Aggregate Your Friends’ Links with Twitter Tim.es — Via @james3neal another great link: The Twitter Tim.es scours your Twitter stream for links posted by your friends, grabs the content of those links, and assembles that content daily in a newspaper-style layout for your reading convenience. Stories are ordered according to how many of your friends have tweeted the link in question, and an RSS feed is provided if you’d rather get the content in your reader. It’s a nice way to keep up with what’s hot on Twitter without constantly watching the stream. For instance, yesterday I hardly checked Twitter at all, yet with Twitter Tim.es I know that six of the people I follow tweeted a link to Mark Sample’s recent post, Digital Humanities Sessions at the 2009 MLA. Now, I already subscribe to Mark’s blog, so I eventually I would have read the post anyway. But not knowing how helpful my friends found it, and not being a lit guy myself, I may not have paid the post much attention. And, of course, if I didn’t subscribe to Mark’s blog, I wouldn’t have caught the link at all.
My second MCN conference presentation was the conference round up session where a group of us got 7 minutes each to recap on a conference we attended during the year. I got TED. No I didn’t get to attend, but I watched it on TV – well, the web at least. I’ve never been to a TED conference but I’ve been near one. We hosted a TED event at the Getty and I accidentally “lost my way” and found myself in the conference. There were lots of people who looked affluent, intelligent and important, but apparently I did not, so I was invited to leave.
In case you don’t know TED, which stands Technology Entertainment Design, is a conference and a community. Its grown to include many disciplines and global and political themes. The annual conference by which it is most widely known by, is held in Long Beach California, gets 1,000 attendees and is normally sold out a year in advance – something most conference organisers would give their left nut for. The conference is a four-day event, with 50 speakers who each get 18 minutes. There are filler pieces of performances, comedy and poetry, but the real draw is the visionary talent that speaks there.
There is also TEDGlobal which is TED’s twin annual conference now held in Oxford, UK – Jolly Good. It has the same format but a more international theme. TEDIndia, a one-off conference “celebrating and exploring the beckoning future of South Asia” just wrapped in Mysore, India.
The annual TED conference is an expensive conference weighing in at $6,000, some say its elitist, including TED, if you check they’re website.
If you’re poor, or just not up to TED’s standards, you could attend the TEDActive conference which is the pauper’s version of the annual conference. Its a live simulcast of the Long Beach conference, its intended to give you the same content of the conference, at the same time, but it keeps the riff raff away from the important people. Watching the conference on T.V. will set you back $3,750, but it is at the Riviera Hotel in Palm Springs. TED’s parent organisation, the Spalding Foundation, is a 501(c)3 which means your membership is tax-deductible.
TED have franchised out their conference format calling it TEDx. Like the Starbucks franchise, they’re on every street corner, 80 are planned before the end of next year in the U.S. alone. I think that makes the MCN conference much more elitist.
If you really are in the poor house and have 10 equally poor friends, you can become a TED Associate Member for less than $1,000. That allows you and your 10 poor friends to watch the live conference webcast from the comfort of your own PC – assuming you’re not too poor to own one.
But even if you have $6,000 that doesn’t get you into the conference. You have to apply to register, then they’ll invite you to the conference, assuming you have correctly filled in your Assistant’s details on the application form and answered some ego-deflating questions such as What have you achieved? Other questions include, What are you passionate about? and Can you share a memorable anecdote that will tell us what makes you tick? Funny you should ask, I was once near a TED conference…
So, is TED worth $6,000 to attend? The only reason for going is to network, because you can watch it all from the comfort of your own home on your expensive PC that you were able to afford from not going to the conference. And even if you did go, don’t think you’ll be able to get close to any of the affluent, intelligent and important people, because they’ll spot you a mile away.
I highly recommend these 18 minute presentations:
Not from this year’s conference but one of my favourite TED videos:
Share:XKCD has some interesting (and humorous) graphics describing the paths that characters in movies (Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Primer) intertwine.
Enterprise 2.0 — I hadn’t heard it before, but apparently the term “Enterprise 2.0” is familiar enough in certain circles to serve as the title for a conference series that began this month in San Francisco. Defined by the conference organizers as a “term for the technologies and business practices that liberate the workforce from the constraints of legacy communication and productivity tools …” making accessible “the collective intelligence of many, translating to a huge competitive advantage in the form of increased innovation, productivity and agility.” So, basically, Web 2.0 for business. Despite being somewhat obvious, however, I think it may be a useful catchall for certain developments Dan, Mills, and I have been following over the past few years on Digital Campus, including the increasing adoption by universities of Gmail and other cloud-based email solutions and the addition of student bloggers to admissions office payrolls.
Adam Crymble on How to Archive a Conference — Noting that conferences and workshops are ephemeral events, especially those that don’t produce a white paper or edited volume, our friend Adam Crymble offers some suggestions for the kinds of things that can be saved of a conference and ideas for how to present those products after the conference has ended. We have tried to do some of this for THATCamp, but Adam outlines a more deliberate and considered approach that we should explore in 2010.
An interesting article on BLPRNT which presents a tool for exploring the differences between two articles (think diff for natural language).
Two Sides of the Same Story: Laskas & Gladwell on CTE & the NFL from blprnt on Vimeo.
My email inbox is continuously inundated with announcements for workshops, seminars, colloquia, conferences and other kinds of academic gatherings, covering all possible shades of the academic spectrum, of the slightest interest for our job here in the museum. I must admit that over and over again I get a feeling of deja vu (”is there still someone who finds this kind of stuff interesting?”) — but sometimes an announcement pops up on the screen that brings me out of the state of boredom. Like the recent call for papers for a postgrad symposium on ’Mediated Memory: Of Monuments, Machines and Madeleines’ at the University of Glasgow, 29 January next year.
Sponsored by the AHRC’s current “Beyond Text” programme (!), the symposium is organised in three panels, all of which are highly relevant for museum people interested in visual and material culture.
One deals with ‘monuments’ — the idea being that we memorialise ourselves and our achievements through the production and archiving of material structures and objects, “including architecture, artworks, music, text, museums and archives”. The panel shall investigate the relationship between the construction of memorial objects and modes of remembrance, and “the processes of creating, transmitting, storing and memorialising narratives through objects of memory”. A must-topic for collection curators.
Another panel centers on ‘machines’ in the form of mediating technologies for remembering, such as photography, video, phonography and the Web. The panel will “investigate the effects of the delegation of memory to machines technologies in a larger sense upon human experience and its consequences for our personal and public past” (also very museum relevant, of course)..
The third panel deals with one of my favourites — ‘madeleines’: “Sights, sounds, smells, tastes, all can transport us instantly”. The panel will explore “how such sensory encounters and chance remembrances inter-relate as well as the wider ways in which unintentional sites of memory participate in the constitution of our lifeworld”. This panel too is a gold mine for museum curators.
<200 word abstracts to m5symposium@googlemail.com by 25th November 2009 (sic!). Further details here.
Cloud Computing in Plain English — In September, I pointed to a definition of cloud computing developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which, though thorough, was also thoroughly unreadable. Now Common Craft—the company made famous for its simple, pencil and paper video explanations of commonplace internet technologies such as RSS—has released a short video explaining Cloud Computing in Plain English. Now this could help your elevator pitch.
Revised Google Books Settlement Filed — Google, the Authors Guild, and the Publishers Association have filed a revised settlement with the court hearing the Google Books case. From my quick first reading the main changes include: placing the orphan works registry in the hands of an independent trustee which will oversee funds generated from their sale; allowing third party companies to license and resell the entire database; providing more room for companies other than Google to negotiate deals of their own with copyright holders; and an agreement to purge books published outside of the U.S., Canada, the U.K. or Australia (i.e. in the EU) from the database. It’s hard to say, but it seems like these concessions should satisfy many of critics.
Book Lending at Twitter Speed: Thoughts from Josh Greenberg — Based in part on ideas raised during his appearance on the latest episode of Digital Campus, Josh Greenberg (@epistemographer) speculates on the future of book lending under the doctrine of first sale in a digital economy where access to copyright material can be lent, returned, and logged at Twitter speed. Assuming a “hyper-efficient distribution system,” if a given book only ever has ten simultaneous readers worldwide, could a print run of ten be enough to serve the whole world? Something to chew on over the weekend.
Jono Bacon on Roadmaps for Successful Collaborations — Ubuntu Community Lead, Jono Bacon, knows something about building communities of collaboration. In this post, he provides some specific guidance (and wiki templates) for using structured “roadmaps” to help manage collaborative projects.
