Posts Tagged: digitalhumanities

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30
Dec 10

The Reliability of Blogging Platforms

Royal Pingdom has the results of their monitoring of five popular blogging platforms: Blogger, WordPress.com, TypePad, Posterous, Tumblr (spoler alert: listed in order of reliability). Ordinarily I would let this pass, but I am considering using a publicly available blogging platform for my digital humanities seminar. Why a public service? I want students to have something that can continue beyond their years at university: using our Moodle installation can’t do this. I am currently leaning towards WordPress.com because

  1. I use it and am familiar with it
  2. It’s open source
  3. A number of digital humanities projects, e.g. CUNY’s Academic Commons, are built on it — or the other open source CMS, Drupal. (CUNY’s effort should not be confused with the other Academic Commons, which is equally interesting, but I don’t know if it’s built on WordPress CMS.)
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8
Dec 10

Portable Copy Stand

This morning’s ProfHacker, now part of the Chronicle of Higher Education, has a write-up by Konrad Lawson on his portable copy stand that lets him quickly set up his camera to photograph book pages in archives and libraries.

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22
Nov 10

Digital Humanities in the New York Times

Not a bad write-up.

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10
Sep 10

The Many Dimensions of Data Visualization

The NEH Institute on Networks and Networking in the Humanities opened with a multi-day salvo aimed at getting participants to think about the importance of visualization. Journalist David McCandless in the embedded TED Talk below, makes a case for how visualization is one form of analysis:

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9
Sep 10

NY Times article on R

A year and a half ago the New York Times had a nice write-up on R that still serves as an introduction to the software/programming language. I know, I know. I am beginning to speak a different language. I blame it all on Tangherlini.

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8
Sep 10

The things you end up teaching yourself

One of the applications to which we were introduced at the NEH Institute on Networks and Networking in the Humanities — which goes by the hash tag nethums by the way — was a Carnegie-Mellon application called ORA. It and its companion application, AutoMap, are very useful tools for network analysis and visualization.

My difficulty with the applications was simply in getting them to run on my MacBook Pro. The problem was, is, that ORA, AutoMap, and their installers require an older version of Java than is included with Mac OS 10.6. With 10.6, Apple dropped the versions of Java 1.4 and 1.5 that they had been carrying and only provided 1.6. Java 1.4 is still available, but navigating Oracle’s site to get it, and getting it onto my MacBook was a longer road than I wanted to travel.

Now that I am back home, I got the good word that ORA had been updated. Great news! I headed over to the site only to learn that the Windows and Linux versions had been updated to version 2.2.2 but the Mac was still back at 1.6.9.

Sigh.

Two routes now lay open to me, if I wanted to run one of the newer versions on my Mac:

  1. Pick up a copy of VMWare Fusion or Parallels and run either Windows or Linux in a virtual machine, or
  2. Determine if there was a way to run the Linux application on Mac OS X (which is also a certified *nix now).

I had just spent a fair amount of money on corpus linguistics text — I’m working on refining a notion of “corpus folkloristics” — and so the idea of spending more money on virtualization software as well as for a copy of Windows is less than appealing. (I am already about to buy a copy of Windows 7 for our home desktop, but Microsoft offers now family pack the way Apple does, and so multiple copies of Windows is a little out of my price range for now.)

So, let’s go with the second option: run Linux apps on my Mac.

A page on Simple Help promised me a complete walkthrough of the process, the first step of which is getting Fink on my MacBook. (I had been using MacPorts before upgrading to 10.6, but the upgrade had broken it and so I was okay switching to Fink.)

Oops, no binary installer for 10.6. I was going to have to install it from source. Luckily, the Fink Project has a page up that walks you through installing from source. It does a pretty good job of getting you through everything, and it even tells you to run:

/sw/bin/pathsetup.sh

which would suggest to a command-line novice — I’m not quite a noob! — like me that, well, my path is going to be setup for me, which makes it all the more maddening when you enter:

fink selfupdate

and get the command not recognized response. Uh oh. And so I double-checked my PATH environment:

echo $PATH

and got all the usual suspects: 

/sw/bin:/sw/sbin:/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:  
/usr/local/mysql/bin:/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:  
/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/subversion/bin:/usr/bin:  
/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11/bin:  
/opt/local/bin:/usr/local/git/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin

What’s going on? I closed the terminal and started doing some reading up on editing my PATH when I decided to double-check my work and ran fink selfupdate again. What do you know, it worked! Here’s the trick: I forgot to follow the directions and open a new terminal window after the initial installation.

And so I taught myself to follow directions.

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19
Jul 10

Folklorists in the Digital Humanities

Congratulations go to Tim Tangherlini for quite a coup: he and Peter Leonard were one of o 12 projects led by 23 researchers at 15 universities to be awarded Google’s Digital Humanities Research Awards. Their project is entitled “Northern Insights: Tools & Techniques for Automated Literary Analysis, Based on the Scandinavian Corpus in Google Books.” Here’s the link

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16
Jul 10

TEI By Example

For those of us still struggling with all the complexities, riches!, of TEI, the Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies[ctb] of the Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature, the Centre for Computing in the Humanities[cch] of King’s College London, and the Department of Information Studies[dis] of University College London, have created TEI by Example.

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4
Oct 09

Virtual Vermilionville

This fall the director of our premiere cultural heritage site, Vermilionville, came to me with an interest in upgrading their inventory systems. As we sketched out various possible uses of such a database, from rich inventory management (by location, by type) to ticketing and tracking of work orders related to inventory, we began to realize that the rich documentation required of such an infrastructure could be used for an entirely different purpose: to create a virtual Vermilionville that would not only allow visitors to view the facility from afar — thus allowing one of the site’s principal users, area teachers, to perform previews and follow-ups with students — but also allow the facility to expand beyond its current scope, since it would be unbounded by its physical constraints: you can only do so much with so many acres containing only so many houses with so many objects. Curation and interpretation are not so limited on-line, where houses can, in a sense, be returned to their original place and curation be addressed by multiple layers with multiple access points. E.g., a classic Cajun house can be returned to its original location, virtually, with its bayou orientation and all its accompaniments no longer simply explained as context but now as full-fledged texts to be examined in and of themselves. Such a virtual facility expansion would also allow Vermilionville to address dimensions of history that it does not currently have room to house: the role of other ethnic groups in the construction of Cajun and Creole cultures, how the changing landscape has changed the social base for these cultures, what happened before as well as after the facility’s current focus on the late nineteenth century.

Our goal is to construct the best possible infrastructure that will allow Vermilionville to continue to “build out”. What we would like to offer up is a detailed description of the facility, its mission, our vision for this project, and our initial sketches of this information architecture in hopes of getting feedback on what we have missed and where we can contribute to the ongoing enterprise of finding the best possible mix of off-line/on-line curation. We hope that such an infrastructure will not only open the village up and out but also the data as well. E.g., We’d like to see Google Earth mashups and re-interpretations of artifacts in SketchUp as well as open up the facility so that visitors can layer their own stories onto the site — we want not only to reach a new generation but in doing so we want them to seek out the older generations and discover the latter’s stories and memories for themselves.

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22
Feb 08

Teach Yourself to Program in/with Scheme

The good folks at MIT and MIT Press have made the influential computer-science text Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs available on-line with sample code and the instructor’s manual. It’s all here.

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