Posts Tagged: humanities

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5
Jan 10

To Be Human Is To Vary

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.)

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21
Dec 09

Goodbye, InfoBits, and Thanks

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.

Tea Leaves

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6
Dec 09

The MLA Goes Digital to Think about the Digital

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.

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16
Nov 09

Tattoo You

The Text Analysis Developers Alliance has released an embeddable Flash widget which provides embedded TAPOR analytics for the page on which it resides.

Here’s an example of the embedded widget:

Oh, yeah, that tattoo is short for Text Analysis TOOls. (Actually, it gets even worse, but I’m too embarrassed to repeat their version.)

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25
Oct 09

Equipment Guide for Podcasting

Over at HiveLogic, Dan Benjamin has a great guide on Podcasting Equipment, which has been updated for 2009. He distinguishes between four types of users: beginner, entry, mid-range, and prosumer. (Okay, that isn’t a very coherent typology, but the scenarios he provides for each are clear enough to be helpful to anyone curious.)

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23
Oct 09

Notes for AFS Forum on Communications in Folklore

Note for readers: this post is currently in process while I am in Boise for the AFS meeting.

For those who attended the forum at the annual meeting of American Folklore Society in Boise this year, here are a few posts that form the background to my current thinking:

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5
Oct 09

From Virtual to Visceral

I wasn’t at this year’s Museums and the Web conference, but I was checking it out while I was considering applying for the 2010 meeting in Denver. (I did apply, with the hope of getting some feedback on the Virtual Vermilionville idea.) The Indianapolis Art Museum was the host institution this year, and so its director, Maxwell Anderson, gave the opening keynote speech. Anyone who’s been to such keynotes knows they can be fairly divergent in quality, but Anderson’s thoughts, especially on how the on-line realm can open the museum out to visitors and, in effect, invite them in, is a really good one, and one I hope to pursue in this work with Vermilionville.

Here’s the video:

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4
Oct 09

The Future of Content

Paul Graham is proof positive that usually the best writers are some of the best thinkers. (We have done ourselves a terrible disservice by separating the two, but that is for another time.) Not only is Graham one of the best essayists at work today, he is also someone who knows how to find solutions to problems. Witness his most recent challenge:

RFS 1: The Future of Journalism

Newspapers and magazines are in trouble. We think they will mostly die, because we think we know what will replace them, and it is too far from their current model for them to reach it in time.

And yet people still need at least some of what they do. You can’t have aggregators without content. So what will the content site of the future look like? And how will you make money from it? These questions turn out to be very closely related. Just as they were for print media, initially. The reason newspapers and magazines are dying is that what they do is no longer related to how they make money from it. In fact, most journalists probably don’t even realize that the definition of journalism they take for granted was not something that sprang fully-formed from the head of Zeus, but is rather a direct though somewhat atrophied consequence of a very successful 20th century business model.

What would a content site look like if you started from how to make money—as print media once did—instead of taking a particular form of journalism as a given and treating how to make money from it as an afterthought?

(The good news is, we think the writing will actually end up being better.)

Groups applying to work on this idea should include at least one person who can write well and rapidly about any topic, one or more programmers who are good at statistics, data mining, and making sites scale, and someone who’s reasonably competent at graphic design. These functions can of course be combined, and in fact it’s even better if they are. Ex-Googlers would be particularly well suited to this project.

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30
Sep 09

Coding’s Place in the Digital Humanities

An observer of the 2008 meeting of Museums and the Web noted that:

More museums should be building these programming skills in internal teams that grow expertise from project to project. Far too many museums small and large rely on outside companies for almost all of their technical development on the web. By and large the most innovation at Museums and the Web came from teams of people who have built expertise into the core operations of their institution.

I fundamentally believe that at least in the museum world there isn’t much danger of the technology folks unseating the curators of the world from their positions of power. I’m more interested in building skilled teams within museums so that the intelligent content people aren’t beholden to external media companies but rather their internal programmers who feel like they are part of the team and understand the overall mission of the museum as well as how to pull UTF-8 data out of a MySQL database.

About all I can say is that universities in general and humanities in particular could be inserted wherever museums appears above and the statement would be perfect. Ideally, programming would not only be folded into teams but also into individual players. There really is no reason why humanists shouldn’t have at least some exposure to the basics of coding.

To see the quotation above in its original context, you only need to look here.

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18
Sep 09

Digital Humanities and Publishing Reading List

I have a bunch of these links stored up, and I need to begin organizing them. They will get moved to a page one day. For now, I’m collecting them in a post. All of these are summative documents in some fashion:

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15
Sep 09

More Like This Please

The only problem with this clip is that they cut off the discussion that follows that unpacks what McFerrin does on stage. Still, it’s amazing to watch McFerrin at work.

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

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11
Sep 09

A Hundred Hits

So … I think I have only looked at the statistics section of cPanel only once or twice before in the entire time I have been blogging, which dates back to somewhere like 2002 or 2003. (That’s right, before personal blogs jumped the shark.) When I first started maintaining a website, the front page hosted a welter of connections to different pieces of my portfolio: essays I had written, projects I had worked on, documents people could download — like a fieldwork log sheet or a guide on how to ask questions — and the blog was off to the side. All that stuff is there, or soon will be back, but it’s now pushed over to the left, and the blog is front and center … er, right. Or, a little off-center and to the right. (The off-center is probably revealing, and I do like to think that I am mostly right about things I write about, but that’s not my decision to make.)

I should be honest and admit that I haven’t really cared about readers. There were several reasons for this. The first reason was somewhat rhetorical: if I worried about audience, I wouldn’t necessarily write about the things that truly mattered to me, and I wanted to give myself time to discover that, to cast a broad net again and again until I knew for myself what it was I wanted to keep. The second reason was that I wasn’t even sure that I wanted any public to care about my blog. That is, and this is still somewhat the case, I rather liked the idea of the blog simply being my own on-line notebook. There are just so many ideas and things that pass through my hands, pass through my mind, that I really liked having a notebook in which I could catch it all and then search for it later.

I am not entirely convinced that I really want to break from either of those desires, but along the way, I found myself with something I had not planned on … readers.

That’s right. The Webalyzer application built into my hosting provider’s version of cPanel revealed to me that I have readers. Now I knew I had the occasional reader, mostly family and friends, and the occasional stray reader, but neither of those account for the fact that this website is now accruing over a hundred unique visitors a day — visitors that are not robots. (I was, to be honest, searching the logs in hopes of discovering that a certain set of readers had dropped in.)

Now some of you reading this, or “reading” this, are either robots unknown to Webalyzer or comment spambots — and it really must be frustrating to those of you who are spambots that I have comments turned off — but that still can not account for the over 100 hits a day this site is getting. (As of late summer, early fall of 2009, the number is about 140.)

With readers come responsibility. I’m not in search of a readership. I don’t, at least as yet, have any desire to become an independent blogger. And I certainly don’t want to do it by posting about stuff I think readers will want to read about. Rather, I have always wanted to write about stuff that, well, I wanted to write about, and it’s nice to know that there are readers who are interested in reading what I want to write about. That’s not a selfish statement. Rather, it’s a way of foregrounding the idea that I when I write about something I am honestly interested in it and trying to think about it and that you are getting that when you read. If I have posted something, it’s because it matters to me — or is at least interesting to me.

There are more than enough people in this world who are willing to say anything or do anything to curry the favor of an audience. Some began with great integrity and then lost their way, either because they got to be popular and got caught up in the rush or because they are so desperately seeking to be popular, and some never had integrity to begin with. This, by the way, applies to all walks of life and not just bloggers. It applies to the business world and to the academy.

In fact, one of the realizations I have had is that people can be pretty much uncreative everywhere. Which saddens me greatly, but it explains a whole host of phenomena. (I’ll write about this at some point in the future, I promise.)

I hated writing that, but it’s balanced out by what I am about to say: that I am re-focusing this blog a bit. Having blogged now off and on for over six years and maintained this particular version of the site for about a year, I think it’s safe to say that this blog has really been about three things:

  • the digital humanities,
  • thoughts on things that happen in my daily life, and
  • creativity.

I listed creativity last because it has been far less a feature of this blog than I would like — you’ll find it mostly tagged as “making” so far. (Give me a minute to clean up the tagging system and I’ll make that a link to take you to those posts.) I plan to write about these “discovered” foci in upcoming posts.

And thanks for reading.

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2
Sep 09

Digital Virgils: The Digital Library Still Needs Librarians

Sometimes when we imagine the digital future, I think we often imagine it without human beings, at least in terms of trekking through the datasphere, aka searching. The promise of Google is that one can sit down in front of the legendarily simply Google search box and type in a series of queries, perhaps none terribly better phrased or constructed than the one before, until you get something like what you thought you wanted or would get. (The epistemology of search is incredibly fascinating in this way, since our very idea of a successful search is perhaps based on incorrect assumptions about what success will look like. Prior searches might have produced better results, but we were unable to see them.) Google of course has to maintain this appearance, since its entire revenue scheme is based on delivering ads tailored to your searches, placing sponsored links at the top or advertised results to the side. Google’s finances depend upon a fair number of us clicking on these results as successful results.

Add to this the very idea of progress built into almost all Western discourse since the Enlightenment, which is especially forceful in the realm of science and technology, and which frequently figures the diminishing necessity of our fellow human beings, and you get an image of the datasphere largely built on the intelligence of machines who serve our needs dispassionately and objectively. (We always worry about bias and judgement when other people are involved.)

Well, yeah, that could happen, but it would be a really bad place for someone like me. Because sometimes, when you really need a very particular thing, it is revealed to you that perhaps your search results are not as good as you think, and you really need a guide, a Virgil to take you by the hand and guide you through the search purgatory of your own making.

All this comes up because as I sat in line waiting to pick up my daughter from school, I engaged in one of the great pleasures of being stuck in traffic, I listened to a podcast. In this case, it was the Harvard Business School’s IdeaCast (which, truth be known, is rather uneven). This particular podcast was an interview with an author of a recent essay in the Harvard Business Review entitled “Restoring American Competitiveness.” The author, Gary Pisano, argued that one of problems with the American engine of innovation is that it isn’t firing on all cylinders. That we had shut down part of the engine when we outsourced so much of our manufacturing overseas. His argument, it seemed to me, was both a grand one, that making and inventing feed each other, and a fine one, that process innovations can often lead to product innovations.

I need to look up that article, I thought. When I got home later that day, I first searched, yup, Google. I got to the HBR home page and quickly found the way to get to the article on-line. Or at least the first few paragraphs of the article. The rest I could have for $6.50.

I’m not opposed to paying such a reasonable amount for the sake of my own curiosity, let alone my research. Still, one of the purposes of a library is to pool our resources in order to have a common pool of, well, resources. So I got on-line to see if our library carried the Harvard Business Review. My first few searches went awry. I couldn’t find HBR at all. Well, I thought, maybe I’ll have to call in a few favors with the business school folks: surely one of them subscribes. But it just didn’t seem right that our library didn’t have HBR. I better call, I thought.

And so I did and a very patient librarian found our subscription to HBR and the link to the URL that would get me full PDFs. Because I seemed to be trapped in some intellectual-digital acrobatic nightmare, she stayed with me on the phone until I got exactly where I needed to be, which took a while.

And so this post is a tribute to my Virgil, and to the Virgils everywhere, and to let you know that even when Colossus goes live, we will still need you.

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25
Aug 09

Why I Wear a Cap

Some days I drive onto campus with a cap on my head. When I forget to take it off, I regularly get odd looks from my colleagues and/or the occasional question about whether I’m in costume. Something about “going native.”

Leaving aside the fact that I sometimes feel more like a native who has “gone academic” than an academic who has risked “going native,” there are already plenty of costumes on a university campus — college is, after all, a terrific time for young people to try on different identities.

I may in fact have multiple identities — humanist and field researcher for a start — but I do not wear a cap to feel more like one than the other. Rather I wear a cap for the same reason that I keep my hair short: Louisiana summers are hot. And bright.

The bill of a baseball cap is, of course, pretty good at shading one’s eyes, and that’s a good reason to wear a cap, but the real reason that I and so many people working out in rice fields or in metal shops wear caps is that when it’s hot you sweat. Caps are not necessarily all that cool, but their bands are good at catching sweat, and the fabric of the cap’s dome is good at wicking that moisture away. And if you keep several caps on a shelf in your shop or on the floor of the back of your truck, then you can always exchange a wet cap for a dry one and, in the process, feel somewhat refreshed, or at least like you have something of a new beginning, which itself is a fairly welcome feeling when you are up to your proverbial elbows in a dirty, greasy, gripping burning hot metal problem.

And that is why I wear a cap.

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22
Aug 09

17 Years of Thinking Digitally

Apparently I have been at this for a long time. During this morning’s clean-up of the study, an old journal tumbled out and as I flipped through it I caught sight of this diagram for a database I wished to have for keeping notes and quotes:

Database Design from March 1992

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