All of us owe a huge debt of gratitude to Maida Owens and the Louisiana Folklife Program. She has single-handedly persevered in getting almost all the contents, at least the tables of such if not the content itself, of the entire run of the Louisiana Folklore Miscellany online. Later issues, like the two issues I edited on Cultural Catholicism and In the Wake of the Storms also have the articles available. (The contents are in chronological order with the oldest first, so those issues are toward the bottom of the page.)
My friend Jason Jackson passes on the news that at the annual meeting of the Linguistics Society of America, the following resolution was passed:
Whereas modern computing technology has the potential of advancing linguistic science by enabling linguists to work with datasets at a scale previously unimaginable; and
Whereas this will only be possible if such data are made available and standards ensuring interoperability are followed; and
Whereas data collected, curated, and annotated by linguists forms the empirical base of our field; …
Therefore, be it resolved at the annual business meeting on 8 January 2010 that the Linguistic Society of America encourages members and other working linguists to:
make the full data sets behind publications available, subject to all relevant ethical and legal concerns; …
work towards assigning academic credit for the creation and maintenance of linguistic databases and computational tools; and
when serving as reviewers, expect full data sets to be published (again subject to legal and ethical considerations) and expect claims to be tested against relevant publicly available datasets.
As part of my [evolving relationship with Amazon.com](no link yet), I became aware of Amazon Web Services’ AWS in Education program:
AWS in Education provides a set of programs that enable the worldwide academic community to easily leverage the benefits of Amazon Web Services for teaching and research. With AWS in Education, educators, academic researchers, and students can apply to obtain free usage credits to tap into the on-demand infrastructure of Amazon Web Services to teach advanced courses, tackle research endeavors and explore new projects – tasks that previously would have required expensive up-front and ongoing investments in infrastructure.
With AWS you can requisition compute power, storage, database functionality, content delivery, and other services — gaining access to a suite of elastic IT infrastructure services as you demand them. AWS enables the academic community to inexpensively and rapidly build on global computing infrastructure to pursue course projects and accelerate their productivity and research results, while enjoying the same benefits of reliability, elasticity, and cost-effectiveness used by industry. The AWS in Education program offers: Teaching Grants for educators using AWS in courses (plus access to selected course content resources); Research Grants for academic researchers using AWS in their work; Project Grants for student organizations pursuing entrepreneurial endeavors; Tutorials for students that want to use AWS for self-directed learning; Solutions for university administrators looking to use cloud computing to be more efficient and cost-effective in the university’s IT Infrastructure.
The National Academies Press has just released a 180-page book on Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility, and Stewardship of Research Data in the Digital Age. The link will take you to the book’s page on the press’s website. It’s available as a paperback for $31.46, as a PDF for $27, or as a combo for $41. You can also follow a link on the page to read it on-line for free.
An article in a recent PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) describes the use of stylometry, the study of artwork through math and statistics, to analyze paintings in order to determine if they are authentic to the attributed master, to a student, or are a fake. The paper describes a technique called sparse coding, in which “analysts break down works of art into tiny patches and represent them as a series mathematical functions. By comparing the functions produced with authentic artwork to those from possible imitators, they can produce an objective measure of whether the piece in question is real or fake.” The cover story on Ars Technica explains:
Sparse coding was originally developed for studying how neurons in the brain responded to visuals. It works by breaking down an image—for simplicity’s sake, usually one in grayscale—into mathematical functions, pixel by pixel. The images that are broken down are just small patches of whole works, not much more than a dozen pixels square.
A recent story in the New York Times reveals what all long-time observers of the humanities know already: in the era of careerism, the humanities are a “hard sell.” (The quotation marks are there to emphasize that the irony of using that phrase is quite purposeful.) Kate Zernike’s story profiles a number of universities, one of which is my very own. (The shuttering of the philosophy department is mentioned early in the piece, but there is no further commentary nor mention of UL Lafayette.)
As we begin this new year in 2010 with no new works coming into the public domain, it’s important to think about how exactly two things we like to create and accumulate, knowledge and wealth, get created. Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Press has a great post that lays out some of the dimensions in terms of commerce, but much of what he note applies equally well to knowledge and should be something humanists think about.
A recent trip through old podcasts brought me back to this great interview by David Battino with Peter Drescher, a sound designer who has created some remarkable music that all of us have heard: he’s the guy who makes the default ringtones for various mobile phone manufacturers.
That sounds immediately boring and mechanical and, well, corporate, but he takes his job seriously and all those labels that we are so quick to apply are things he himself knows. His Sisyphian task results in some interesting observations about what makes sound interesting to us, especially musical sounds. One of the things he reminds us is that the kind of ready repetition of music with which we are all now not only familiar but sometimes dependent — that is, recorded music — is really a rather recent phenomena. (The link is to a piece by Peter Drescher entitled “The Myth of Music Ownership.)
Even within recorded music, however, the human mind between the ears seeks variation. Check it out. It’s short and full of great examples: Peter Drescher on Annoying Audio — link is to MP3. (I had an embedded QT player, but I couldn’t get it not to pre-load the audio.)
The last issue of InfoBits was published this month. While I was never a heavy user of the service/bibliography, it was always nice to know it was there, to have it there. Perhaps this marks the beginning on one era of computing/IT in the humanities or perhaps it simply reveals how much such things are functions of particular individuals — to whom we later recognize we owe a debt — or perhaps it reveals only a particular moment in the funding of higher education in the U.S. No telling which way to read these tea leaves.
The Modern Language Association, the dominant professional organization among professors of language and literature, has tried over the past decade to confront the emergence of digital forms of communication from within the ranks of its members. The problem has been, of course, that the people most interested in doing it are usually at the bottom of the power (barrel? pyramid? ladder?) and those at the top often have a hard time grasping why someone would prefer something in the ephemeral ether let alone how they might go about doing it and what it does for scholarship. They have a working group, and they have some working policy documents up. Now they have a wiki.
