Next Wednesday the 17th I’ll be in New York, to attend the presentation of the Richard Lyman Award to one of my favorite computing humanists, Willard McCarty. If you are interested in humanities computing, work in it, and/or know Willard, come show your support and appreciation, not to mention meet interesting people:

• 3-5pm Lyman Award recipients lead a discussion of the American Council of Learned Societies’ Report on Cyberinfrastructure in the Humanities and Social Sciences
• 5-6pm Presentation of the Award to Willard McCarty, Reader in Humanities Computing, Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London
• 6-7pm Reception in the Library’s Margaret Liebman Berger Forum

If you’d like to attend, please call Martha at 919.549.0661 ext. 156 to get put on the guest list. (It’s free to attend, but they’d like to know how many people are coming, and if you tell them you’re working on something related, they might be able to introduce you to like-minded souls.) And let me know you’ll be there, perhaps we can meet up!

Last week, Inside Higher Ed published an article by Gina Hiatt titled “We Need Humanities Labs.” Gina is the mastermind behind the Academic Ladder site, and also runs academiblog. She is a psychologist by training and does dissertation and tenure coaching for a living.

Conferences and conventions offer important opportunities for scholarly dialogue, as do online blogs. However, there are limitations to conferences (too infrequent) and blogs. What I am advocating is injecting into the humanities department some of the freewheeling dialogue found in the halls outside the conference presentation or in some of the better scholarly blogs.

[…]

People should be encouraged to attend with partly formed thoughts, poorly written paragraphs, or just an idea they want to develop. The idea is to think of all such scholarly dialogue as a laboratory. Ideas are cooked up, thrown in the test tube, and mixed with human interaction, creativity and motivation. These experiments will produce better written and less painfully produced dissertations or publications, and might engender a “creative humanities hothouse.”

Auspicious, that I only discovered Wikiversity today: voting that will determine whether the project will go ahead will end at midnight UTC!

The purpose of the Wikiversity project, which will ultimately reside at www.wikiversity.org, is to build an electronic institution of learning that will be used to test the limits of the wiki model both for developing electronic learning resources as well as for teaching and for conducting research and publishing results (within a policy framework developed by the community).

More information is at the link above. The idea needs work, and much development and goodwill, but is promising. I would certainly be excited to participate.

Please take a moment to create* a (free) new account and vote if you’re even remotely interested in this; they need a two-thirds majority to launch the beta. At the time of this writing it’s 197 Yes to 83 No, which is encouraging but awfully close.

*The interface for creating a new account is a bit misleading. Just fill in the username and password (and email, if you want) fields, and click on “Create new account.”

Oh rapture! Article in Inside Higher Ed reports that “Blackboard, Inc., said it would acquire its top competitor, WebCT, Inc., for $180 million.” The merger is supposed to take place in the next few months; the new conglomerate will “continue to support both companies’ products for the foreseeable future, to keep disruption to current clients to a minimum, the two companies said.”

Forgive me if I am not thrilled, though if you were reading this blog last year you’ll hardly be surprised. One of the commenters on the above-linked post pointed out that Blackboard is much more flexible than WebCT, and from that perspective the merger may be a good thing; but neither company seems interested in actually disseminating knowledge, as does for example MIT’s Open CourseWare. It’s also telling that all of the dozen or so comments so far on the Inside Higher Ed article reflect a negative attitude toward the news. Some academics are worried about whether the merger signals a monopoly in the works; others are getting the word out about open-source alternatives.

Since many universities, Brown among them, seem enamored of the suboptimal options offered by WebCT, there’s seemingly nothing to be done on an institutional level. On a smaller scale, however, we can work toward better solutions. This requires humanist academics to either learn more about educational software and web design or employ people who are already good at it, or both. Since that learning curve is inevitable these days anyway (just try being full-time faculty and not knowing how to attach a document to an email), all that remains is to not give in to the apparent convenience of commercial course management software and think more broadly. Wouldn’t it be great if, in a few years, people still learned new things from the materials you created for a course you no longer teach?

Monday 17th, edited to add: A follow-up article in Inside Higher Ed asks, “In buying WebCT, did course-management giant vanquish competition, or is open source the real competition?”

Last week I attended the Summit on Digital Tools for the Humanities at the University of Virginia. It was a great time, and in many ways a rather unusual conference. For one, this humanist event was in part sponsored by the National Science Foundation (!!), thanks to the tireless work of Anita Jones and others. Most notably, it was more of a workshop than a conference environment. We were specifically asked to talk not so much about our own projects as about the state of the field and where we, as tool builders, would like to take it. I knew about half the people there from past contact, and was glad to meet so many new (to me) scholars all of whom had interesting things to say.

On Wednesday evening there was a welcoming reception and a keynote by Brian Cantwell Smith, a well-spoken computer scientist at the University of Toronto. Here are some fragmentary notes from his talk.

Digital is a trendy word, he said, second only to like on college campuses.

Descartes was a smart guy. He separated the work, or process, of understanding the world from the world thereby understood.

Around the turn of the 20th century, we discovered that we could fuse meaning and mechanism. An example of this would be us. This idea eventually gave birth to computers.

Computers aren’t anything special, and computer scientists aren’t studying anything special. Or maybe anything in particular. This is liberating: instead of a restricted domain, they have a sort of monopoly on the universe.

We (computing humanists) shouldn’t be party to propagating the dualism between the ostensible “abstract” and the concrete. A server going down loses not the representation of mail, but actual mail. (That is, as I understand it: email, web pages and other electronic artifacts have become so ubiquitous, and so central to everyday life, that we can no longer think of them as fakes, substitutes for physical things. They are just as real.)

Descartes said that we should have clear and distinct ideas. But this isn’t the way the world actually works.

Maybe the tools we build are digital at the level of the bits, but what matters about them is humanistic.

Computers are a historical moment (a long one, which started in the mid-1800s and is still going) in which we are getting past Descartes.

Matter is both a noun and a verb. Material comes from matter.

Computing is allowing us to get past the temporary, 300-year divorce between matter-noun and matter-verb.

Our commitment to what it means to be human shouldn’t be ideological (”if it’s human, it’s good”).

People can be special as in worthy of study and careful consideration, not special as in this is where inquiry stops because there’s nothing more to say.

…..

On Thursday and Friday, we talked. And talked, and talked. Instead of trying to edit my aphoristic scribblings to recap all of what we talked about, I’ll point you to Geoffrey Rockwell’s (and, in small part, my) comprehensive summit notes on the TADA wiki. (TADA is the Text Analysis Developers Alliance whose motto is, endearingly, Real Humanists Make Tools.)

The main thing I came away with is this. There are many people currently building digital tools for the humanities. The tools themselves may be differently specialized, but there are many similarities in what motivates us and what we hope the near future will bring. On our way out of the summit many of us put our names down on one or more of the six (?) major topics discussed at the summit. I hope the conversations, and collaboration, will continue.

Posting the text of an email I’ve received:

ACLS OPENS COMPETITION FOR DIGITAL INNOVATION FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is pleased to announce its new Digital Innovation Fellowship program, in support of digitally based research projects in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. These fellowships, created with the generous help of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, are intended to support an academic year dedicated to work on a major scholarly project of a digital character that advances humanistic studies and best exemplifies the integration of such research with use of computing, networking, and other information technology-based tools. The online application for the fellowship program is located at http://ofa.acls.org; applications must be completed by November 10, 2005 (decisions to be announced in late March 2006).

This is the first national fellowship program to recognize and reward humanistic scholarship in the digital sphere, and to help establish standards for judging the quality, innovation, and utility of such research. Many scholars have been working in the humanities for years with such tools as digital research archives, new media representations of extant data, and innovative databases—and now the ACLS sees an important opportunity to start identifying and providing incentive for distinctive work, on a national basis. “Information technology can be the means for scholars to answer new and old questions that have so far resisted our curiosity and our effort. This program will support a rising generation of scholars in making exactly that kind of progress,” says James O’Donnell, provost of Georgetown University, Chair of the ACLS Executive Committee of Delegates, and author of Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace (1998).

Up to five Digital Innovation Fellowships will be awarded in this competition year, for tenure beginning in 2006-2007. As this program aims to provide the means for pursuing digitally-based scholarly projects, the fellowship includes a stipend of up to $55,000 to allow an academic year’s leave from teaching, as well as project funds of up to $25,000 for purposes such as access to tools and personnel for digital production, collaborative work with other scholars and with humanities or computing research centers, and the dissemination and preservation of projects.

The ACLS criteria for judging applications include the project’s intellectual ambitions and technological underpinnings, likely contribution as a digital scholarly work to humanistic study, satisfaction of technical requirements for a successful research project, degree and significance of preliminary work; potential for promoting teamwork and collaboration (where appropriate), and articulation with local infrastructure at the applicant’s home institution.

Applicants must be citizens or permanent residents of the United States as of the application deadline date and must hold a Ph.D. degree conferred prior to the application deadline. However, established scholars who can demonstrate the equivalent of the Ph.D. in publications and professional experience may also qualify.

Applications for the 2005-06 ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship Program
Deadline: November 10, 2005
Contact: American Council of Learned Societies, 633 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Phone: (212) 697-1505
E-mail: sfisher@acls.org
Web: www.acls.org/difguide.htm

There’s a text analysis summit going on at McMaster University right now. It sounds like loads of fun. Thanks to G Zombie for the pointer to the Text Analysis Developers Alliance blog, adorably (?) subtitled “What Hackers Do When We’re Not Coding”.

I’m not clear on whether this blog is specifically for the summit or a more general enterprise, but regardless, I’m adding it to our list of links. Good reading.

Noah Wardrip-Fruin (over at Grand Text Auto) posted a response to Liz Lawley et al.’s thoughts on academic blogging. Noah asks whether academic blogging is thought of in parallel to any other mode of academic publication. That got me thinking about the VHL blog; here’s what I wrote in a comment:

[T]he Virtual Humanities Lab blog was certainly conceived as a way for us to get feedback from colleagues on a project that is very much a work-in-progress. Having been blogging for a while, I was pretty excited about it, and tend to not be worried about reception.

But that’s not how everyone with an author account on VHL views it. Repeatedly now people have expressed to me a hesitation about putting their thoughts out there. At first glance, this may look like drawing a parallel between weblog and journal publication: there seems to be a heightened sense of responsibility, given that one’s words will be etched… somewhere… for a good long time.

But I think it goes deeper than that. Odd though it may be, humanist scholars don’t tend to sit around in coffee shops talking shop. We might talk about teaching, or paper proposals we’ve submitted, or the very general thematic strokes of our research; but unless we’re specifically getting together for a work session, we don’t idly discuss the minutiae of, say, approaches to text analysis.

I am hoping that this will soon be changing, that the tradition of polished scholarly discourse in the humanities (especially, I guess, in literary studies) will expand into a more fearless exchange of ideas.

To that end, I think blogging is indispensable. But it’ll take some time to re-program ourselves to both give it sufficient attention regularly, and do so fearlessly. The problem of never-enough-time is a serious impediment to the first of those goals; I’d wager that even fewer literary studies departments look at one’s weblog articles during tenure review than would be willing to consider electronic projects in general. But for weblogging to be viewed as a valuable tool it has to be used as such first; and this is one of the principal reasons that the VHL project has a weblog.

Editing one’s posts is, of course, an option, but we are not there yet mentally. It’ll take time. So, I don’t know that I’d draw a wholesale parallel between blogging and other modes of academic expression, Noah; to me, it’s more of a general-mindset issue.

I wonder if non-humanist and non-new-media scientists view and use weblogs differently, more or less than the groups mentioned above?

Comments?

Ben Hammersley links to the Pico Project, with the byline “Pico della Mirandola. The Florentine renaissance bad-ass alchemist mofo.”

It’s the next best thing to being slashdotted.

James Cummings, on the Digital Medievalist mailing list, mentioned this project about the Cistercian Order based at the University of Sheffield in the UK. It’s an impressive, well-done site: informative, visually uncluttered and smooth. Check out especially the Multimedia section, with its informative little Flash movies and picture tours of the abbeys. Well done.

Meanwhile, the call for papers is out for ACH/ALLC 2005.

UC Berkeley has a new Center for New Media. Everything from detailed descriptions of relevant course offerings to an exciting-looking events program (David Byrne talks there next March – oh, wow) to a listing of research projects being conducted in the Center. Definitely worth a look. Thanks for the heads-up, Andrea!

Project Gutenberg has put up Gustave Doré’s illustrations to the first canticle of the Divine Comedy. Here it is.

Today is the first day I’ve looked at Project Gutenberg in months, perhaps as long as a couple of years. The interface has changed, and is more pleasing to the eye; but as the link above illustrates, there’s still much to be desired. List of files without names: which file contains what? Unknown, until you’ve clicked on the link and scrolled down a lot to see the contents.

Don’t get me wrong: I like and appreciate PG. It’s just a shame that they still haven’t mastered simple interface design, after all these years on the web. One of these days, I’d very much like to hear someone say “I love Project Gutenberg” without the usual “but…” Anyone know whether their proofreading procedures have changed recently?