Humanities Computing

blogging, discourse, women

2005-02-04T07:27:00.000-08:00

Excerpts from:

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/women_and_children.html
Women and Children Last: The Discursive Construction of Weblogs
Susan C. Herring, Inna Kouper, Lois Ann Scheidt, and Elijah L. Wright, Indiana University at Bloomington

Discussion

Women and young people are key actors in the history and present use of weblogs, yet that reality is masked by public discourses about blogging that privilege the activities of a subset of adult male bloggers. In engaging in the practices described in this essay, participants in such discourses do not appear to be seeking consciously to marginalize females and youth. Rather, journalists are following “newsworthy” events, scholars are orienting to the practices of the communities under investigation, bloggers are linking to popular sites, and blog historians are recounting what they know from first-hand experience. At the same time, by privileging filter blogs, public discourses about blogs implicitly evaluate the activities of adult males as more interesting, important and/or newsworthy than those of other blog authors.

Many of these participants (including most of the journalists) are themselves female. Nonetheless, it is hardly a coincidence that all of these practices reinscribe a public valuing of behaviors associated with educated adult (white) males, and render less visible behaviors associated with members of other demographic groups. This outcome is consistent with cultural associations between men and technology, on the one hand (Wajcman, 1991), and between what men do and what is valued by society (the “Androcentric Rule”; Coates, 1993). As Wajcman (p.11) notes, “qualities associated with manliness are almost everywhere more highly regarded than those thought of as womanly.” In this case, discourse practices that construct weblogs as externally-focused, substantive, intellectual, authoritative, and potent (in the sense of both “influential” and “socially transformative”) map readily on to Western cultural notions of white collar masculinity (Connell, 1995), in contrast to the personal, trivial, emotional, and ultimately less important communicative activities associated with women (cf. “gossip”). Such practices work to relegate the participation of women and other groups to a lower status in the technologically-mediated communication environment that is the blogosphere, and more generally, to reinforce the societal status quo.

. . .In keeping with the Androcentric Rule, male authors historically have been more highly valued than female authors (Spender, 1989). Moreover, personal journal-writing, traditionally associated with women, is generally not considered “serious” writing (Culley, 1985; McNeill, 2003). This may explain why weblogs are being discursively constructed so as to exclude women and young people (also assumed to be incapable of “serious” writing), and why journal-style blogs receive little attention despite being the most popular form of blogging for all demographic groups.
Conclusion

We began this essay with an apparent paradox: Why, given that there are many female and teen bloggers, do public discourses about weblogs focus predominantly on adult males? The observation that men are more likely than women and teens to create filter blogs provides a key: It is filter blogs that are privileged, consistent with the notion that the activities of educated, adult males are viewed by society as more interesting and important than those of other demographic groups. However, the blogs featured in contemporary public discourses about blogging are the exception, rather than the rule: all the available evidence suggests that blogs are more commonly a vehicle of personal expression than a means of filtering content on the Web, for all demographic groups including adult males. It follows that more attention needs to be paid to “typical” blogs and the people who create them in order to understand the real motivations, gratifications, and societal effects of this growing practice. This would require advancing a broader conception of weblogs that takes into account the activities of diverse blog authors, considering personal journaling as a human, rather than exclusively a gendered or age-related activity, and conducting research on weblogs produced by women and teens, both for their inherent interest and to determine what differences, if any, exist among groups of bloggers.

Are weblogs inherently “democratizing,” in the sense of giving voice to diverse populations of users? The empirical findings reported for gender and age at the beginning of this essay suggest that they are. Yet public commentators on weblogs, including many bloggers themselves, collude in reproducing gender and age-based hierarchy in the blogosphere, demonstrating once again that even an open access technology—and high hopes for its use—cannot guarantee socially equitable outcomes in a society that continues to embrace hierarchical values.

typewriters, word processing, Google Desktop

2005-01-31T08:28:00.000-08:00

Will we ever get away from the "word processor as typewriter"? Here's an article that ponders the effects of Google Desktop on writing and thinking...

NY Times, January 30, 2005**
**Tool for Thought **
* By STEVEN JOHNSON *

One often hears from younger writers that they can't imagine how anyone managed to compose an article, much less an entire book, with a typewriter. Kerouac banging away at his Underwood portable? Hemingway perched over his Remington? They might as well be monastic scribes or cave painters.

But if the modern word processor has become a near-universal tool for today's writers, its impact has been less revolutionary than you might think. Word processors let us create sentences without the unwieldy cross-outs and erasures of paper, and despite the occasional catastrophic failure, our hard drives are better suited for storing and retrieving documents than file cabinets. But writers don't normally rely on the computer for the more subtle arts of inspiration and association. We use the computer to process words, but the ideas that animate those words originate somewhere else, away from the screen. The word processor has changed the way we write, but it hasn't yet changed the way we think.

Changing the way we think, of course, was the cardinal objective of many early computer visionaries: Vannevar Bush's seminal 1945 essay that envisioned the modern, hypertext-driven information machine was called ''As We May Think''; Howard Rheingold's wonderful account of computing's pioneers was called ''Tools for Thought.'' Most of these gurus would be disappointed to find that, decades later, the most sophisticated form of artificial intelligence in our writing tools lies in our grammar checkers.

But 2005 may be the year when tools for thought become a reality for people who manipulate words for a living, thanks to the release of nearly a dozen new programs all aiming to do for your personal information what Google has done for the Internet. These programs all work in slightly different ways, but they share two remarkable properties: the ability to interpret the meaning of text documents; and the ability to filter through thousands of documents in the time it takes to have a sip of coffee. Put those two elements together and you have a tool that will have as significant an impact on the way writers work as the original word processors did.

For the past three years, I've been using tools comparable to the new ones hitting the market, so I have extensive firsthand experience with the way the software changes the creative process. (I have used a custom-designed application, created by the programmer Maciej Ceglowski at the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, and now use an off-the-shelf program called DEVONthink.) The raw material the software relies on is an archive of my writings and notes, plus a few thousand choice quotes from books I have read over the past decade: an archive, in other words, of all my old ideas, and the ideas that have influenced me.

Having all this information available at my fingerprints does more than help me find my notes faster. Yes, when I'm trying to track down an article I wrote many years ago, it's now much easier to retrieve. But the qualitative change lies elsewhere: in finding documents I've forgotten about altogether, documents that I didn't know I was looking for.

What does this mean in practice? Consider how I used the tool in writing my last book, which revolved around the latest developments in brain science. I would write a paragraph that addressed the human brain's remarkable facility for interpreting facial expressions. I'd then plug that paragraph into the software, and ask it to find other, similar passages in my archive. Instantly, a list of quotes would be returned: some on the neural architecture that triggers facial expressions, others on the evolutionary history of the smile, still others that dealt with the expressiveness of our near relatives, the chimpanzees. Invariably, one or two of these would trigger a new association in my head -- I'd forgotten about the chimpanzee connection -- and I'd select that quote, and ask the software to find a new batch of documents similar to it. Before long a larger idea had taken shape in my head, built out of the trail of associations the machine had assembled for me.

Compare that to the traditional way of exploring your files, where the computer is like a dutiful, but dumb, butler: ''Find me that document about the chimpanzees!'' That's searching. The other feels different, so different that we don't quite have a verb for it: it's riffing, or brainstorming, or exploring. There are false starts and red herrings, to be sure, but there are just as many happy accidents and unexpected discoveries. Indeed, the fuzziness of the results is part of what makes the software so powerful.

These tools are smart enough to get around the classic search engine failing of excessive specificity: searching for ''dog'' and missing all the articles that have only ''canine'' in them. Modern indexing software learns associations between individual words, by tracking the frequency with which words appear near each other. This can create almost lyrical connections between ideas. I'm now working on a project that involves the history of the London sewers. The other day I ran a search that included the word ''sewage'' several times. Because the software knows the word ''waste'' is often used alongside ''sewage'' it directed me to a quote that explained the way bones evolved in vertebrate bodies: by repurposing the calcium waste products created by the metabolism of cells.

That might seem like an errant result, but it sent me off on a long and fruitful tangent into the way complex systems -- whether cities or bodies -- find productive uses for the waste they create. It's still early, but I may well get an entire chapter out of that little spark of an idea.

Now, strictly speaking, who is responsible for that initial idea? Was it me or the software? It sounds like a facetious question, but I mean it seriously. Obviously, the computer wasn't conscious of the idea taking shape, and I supplied the conceptual glue that linked the London sewers to cell metabolism. But I'm not at all confident I would have made the initial connection without the help of the software. The idea was a true collaboration, two very different kinds of intelligence playing off each other, one carbon-based, the other silicon.

IF these tools do get adopted, will they affect the kinds of books and essays people write? I suspect they might, because they are not as helpful to narratives or linear arguments; they're associative tools ultimately. They don't do cause-and-effect as well as they do ''x reminds me of y.'' So they're ideally suited for books organized around ideas rather than single narrative threads: more ''Lives of a Cell'' and ''The Tipping Point'' than ''Seabiscuit.''

No doubt some will say that these tools remind them of the way they use Google already, and the comparison is apt. (One of the new applications that came out last year was Google Desktop -- using the search engine's tools to filter through your personal files.) But there's a fundamental difference between searching a universe of documents created by strangers and searching your own personal library. When you're freewheeling through ideas that you yourself have collated -- particularly when you'd long ago forgotten about them -- there's something about the experience that seems uncannily like freewheeling through the corridors of your own memory. It feels like thinking.

//

/Steven Johnson is the author, most recently, of ''Mind Wide Open.'' His new book, ''Everything Bad Is Good for You,'' will be published in May.
/

/http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/review/30JOHNSON.html?ei=5070&en=b7b8fb7c34744540&ex=1108184400&pagewanted=print&position=
/

Google, searching, how much data, microsoft

2005-01-06T05:54:00.000-08:00

Will Microsoft challenge Google in the search wars? In the article "What's Next for Google," Charles H. Ferguson discusses the possibilitites http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/01/issue/ferguson0105.asp?p=1

Whoever wins the standards/architecture battle will win the search war. Microsoft has deep pockets and a record of winning this type of battle. However, it doesn't always win (ex. Adobe, esp. PhotoShop) and it has become a bit of a slow moving behemoth.

" Thus, while Google provides an excellent service for searching the public Web and has made a good start on PCs with Google Desktop (the hard-drive search tool) and Google Deskbar (which performs searches without launching a browser), the search universe as a whole remains a mess, full of unexplored territories and mutually exclusive zones that a common architecture would unify."

“Microsoft effectively disbanded the Internet Explorer group after killing Netscape,” [an anonymous MS exec] said. “But recently, they realized that Firefox was starting to gain share and that browser enhancements would be useful in the search market.” He agreed that if Microsoft got “hard-core” about search (as Bill Gates has promised), then, yes, Google would be in for a very rough time. "

" Why? Because in contrast to Microsoft, Google doesn’t yet control standards for any of the platforms on which this contest will be waged—not even for its own website. Although Google has released noncommercial APIs—which programmers may use for their own purposes, but not in commercial products—until recently, it avoided the creation of commercial APIs." It may feel it does not need to. The author believes this would be a mistake. Or, it may feel they are not the most important concern. " There is, however, another possibility: Google understands that an architecture war is coming, but it wants to delay the battle. One Google executive told me that the company is well aware of the possibility of an all-out platform war with Microsoft. According to this executive, Google would like to avoid such a conflict for as long as possible and is therefore hesitant to provide APIs that would open up its core search engine services, which might be interpreted as an opening salvo. The release of APIs for the Google Deskbar may awaken Microsoft’s retaliatory instincts nonetheless. For Google to challenge Microsoft on the desktop before establishing a secure position on the Web or on enterprise servers could be unwise. "

"Google should first create APIs for Web search services and make sure they become the industry standard. It should do everything it can to achieve that end—including, if necessary, merging with Yahoo. Second, it should spread those standards and APIs, through some combination of technology licensing, alliances, and software products, over all of the major server software platforms, in order to cover the dark Web and the enterprise market. Third, Google should develop services, software, and standards for search functions on platforms that Microsoft does not control, such as the new consumer devices. Fourth, it must use PC software like Google Desktop to its advantage: the program should be a beachhead on the desktop, integrated with Google’s broader architecture, APIs, and services. And finally, Google shouldn’t compete with Microsoft in browsers, except for developing toolbars based upon public APIs. Remember Netscape.

When Google’s Peter Norvig was read this list—presented not as recommendations, but as things that Google would do—he did not deny any of it. "

" Whether Google or Microsoft wins, the implications of a single firm’s controlling an enormous, unified search industry are troubling. First, this firm would have access to an unparalleled quantity of personal information, which could represent a major erosion of privacy. Already, one can learn a surprising amount about people simply by “googling” them. A decade from now, search providers and users (not to mention those armed with subpoenas) will be able to gather far more personal information than even financial institutions and intelligence agencies can collect today. Second, the emergence of a dominant firm in the search market would aggravate the ongoing concentration of media ownership in a global oligopoly of firms such as Time Warner, Bertelsmann, and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation."

"If the firm dominating the search industry turned out to be Microsoft, the implications might be more disturbing still. The company that supplies a substantial fraction of the world’s software would then become the same company that sorts and filters most of the world’s news and information, including the news about software, antitrust policy, and intellectual property. Moreover, Microsoft could reach a stage at which its grip on the market remains strong, but its productivity falls prey to complacency and internal politics. Dominant firms sometimes do more damage through incompetence than through predation."

"Indeed, as so many have noted, much of Microsoft’s software is just plain bad. In contrast, Google’s work is often beautiful. One of the best reasons to hope that Google survives is simply that quality improves more reliably when markets are competitive. If Google dominated the search industry, Microsoft would still be a disciplining presence; whereas if Microsoft dominated everything, there would be fewer checks upon its mediocrity."

And here's an interesting chart from the article that describes where data is stored:

McKiernan: Wiki bibliography

2005-01-03T08:34:00.000-08:00

"WikiBibliography is devoted to significant articles, presentations, reports, as well as audio and video programs, Web sites, and other key "publications" about Wikis in general and their select applications and uses"

WikiBibliography is compiled and maintained by Gerry McKiernan, Science and Technology Librarian and Bibliographer, Science and Technology Department, Iowa State University Library

http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/WikiBib.htm

WikiBibliography is a companion resource to SandBox(sm): Wiki Applications and Uses, a categorized registry of select applications and uses of wikis.
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/SandBox.htm

colleges invention tenure

2004-12-14T06:51:00.000-08:00

Erich E. Kunhardt: "Necessity as the Mother of Tenure"
NYTimes, 14-Dec-2004

There's an interesting op-ed in the Times today calling for colleges to encourage inventing by making it a requirement for tenure.
He sees the US declining number of patents and wants to get away from the "research only" mindset of the past 100 years (starting with Johns Hopkins 'research as a requirement for tenure' 1876)
He doesn't mean inventing things with great commercial value, just the idea of inventiveness itself.

Google digital library

2004-12-14T06:35:00.000-08:00

Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database
By JOHN MARKOFF and EDWARD WYATT
Google plans to begin converting the holdings of leading
research libraries into digital files that would be
searchable online.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/14/technology/14google.html?th

"Google
,
the operator of the world's most popular Internet search service, plans
to announce an agreement today with some of the nation's leading
research libraries and Oxford University to begin converting their
holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web.

It may be only a step on a long road toward the long-predicted global
virtual library. But the collaboration of Google and research
institutions that also include Harvard, the University of Michigan,
Stanford and the New York Public Library is a major stride in an
ambitious Internet effort by various parties. The goal is to expand the
Web beyond its current valuable, if eclectic, body of material and
create a digital card catalog and searchable library for the world's
books, scholarly papers and special collections.

Google - newly wealthy from its stock offering last summer - has agreed
to underwrite the projects being announced today while also adding its
own technical abilities to the task of scanning and digitizing tens of
thousands of pages a day at each library.

<>Although Google executives declined to comment on its technology or
the cost of the undertaking, others involved estimate the figure at $10
for each of the more than 15 million books and other documents covered
in the agreements. Librarians involved predict the project could take at
least a decade.

Because the Google agreements are not exclusive, the pacts are almost
certain to touch off a race with other major Internet search providers
like Amazon
,
Microsoft

and Yahoo
.
Like Google, they might seek the right to offer online access to library
materials in return for selling advertising, while libraries would
receive corporate help in digitizing their collections for their own
institutional uses.

"Within two decades, most of the world's knowledge will be digitized and
available, one hopes for free reading on the Internet, just as there is
free reading in libraries today," said Michael A. Keller, Stanford
University's head librarian.

The Google effort and others like it that are already under way,
including projects by the Library of Congress to put selections of its
best holdings online, are part of a trend to potentially democratize
access to information that has long been available to only small, select
groups of students and scholars.

Last night the Library of Congress and a group of international
libraries from the United States, Canada, Egypt, China and the
Netherlands announced a plan to create a publicly available digital
archive of one million books on the Internet. The group said it planned
to have 70,000 volumes online by next April."

The rest is at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/14/technology/14google.html?th

google scholar

2004-11-18T08:24:00.000-08:00

http://scholar.google.com
Google introduces a new service for academics. Weighted towards sciences now, but more to follow. Search on books and papers, including citations. What will this do to the acadmic world, I wonder?

Turning the Pages: Best page turner app

2004-11-11T07:22:00.000-08:00

Turning the Pages

The most beautiful page turner app I've seen. I only wish it were less expensive to implement!

Chronicle: list of Open Source Initiatives in Higher ed

2004-09-23T10:00:00.000-07:00

From Steve:
The September 24th issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education is running it's Information Technology column as a special pull out section focusing on Open Source issues in the university IT enviornment. They include a catalog of 18 open source projects - a list that leaves out some of the most interesting areas of development (e.g. blogging, instant messaging, p2p collaboration, etc).

Course Management

+ moodle : http://moodle.org : A software package to help professors build Web sites for their courses. Its developers say Moodle is better suited than other course-management systems to help foster a "social constructionist" style of teaching, which focuses on having students learn actively or teach one another by working in groups. The software's interface is available in 40 languages.

+ Pachyderm : http://www.nmc.org/projects/lo/pachyderm.shtml : A software package designed to help users build flashy online "museum" exhibits or course Web pages. The resulting Web pages can be used within course-management systems like Blackboard or Sakai.

+ Sakai : http://www.sakaiproject.org : A comprehensive software system to help professors build course Web sites. The project is led by four universities: Indiana University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and Stanford University. It is supported by a $2.4-million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Sakai's leaders have formed a partnership with uPortal, so that programmers for both projects will try to make their software work together seamlessly.

Libraries and Archives

+ DSpace : http://www.dspace.org : Software for setting up digital library collections on the Web. DSpace is used mainly by universities to create "institutional repositories," where research by an institution's faculty members is stored and usually available free to others. Library officials hope such repositories will offer an alternative to traditional scholarly publishing in high-priced journals.

+ E-Prints : http://www.eprints.org : Allows users to create their own online archives of data, called "self archives," to be shared with others.

+ Fedora : http://www.fedora.info : A digital-repository management system developed by Cornell University and the University of Virginia supported by $2.4-million in grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

+ Kepler : http://kepler.cs.odu.edu : A system designed to help build small archives of academic papers or other documents in a way that is easily searchable by library search engines. Developed by Old Dominion University Digital Library Research Group, with a grant from the National Science Foundation.

+ Digital Document Assembly Kit : no URL yet : A tool to create and view electronic books that include images and other rich media. Being developed at the University of Southern California's Institute for the Future of the Book, with a $1.4-million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Expected in fall 2005.

Web Portals

+ uPortal : http://www.uportal.org : Software that helps colleges set up customized campus portals, which are Web gateways for students and professors. A typical campus portal gives students a one-stop Web page to access information on their courses, transcripts, financial records, campus announcements, notices of events, and links to other campus resources. A nonprofit organization called the Java Architectures Special Interest Group, known as JA-SIG, which promotes the use of the Java programming language in higher education. The software was developed with a $770,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. uPortal's leaders have formed a partnership with Sakai, and programmers in both projects will try to make their software work together.

+ CampusEAI 'Portlets' : http://www.campuseai.org : A set of modular software plug-ins for campus portal software, called "portlets," which add features to existing campus Web services. The abbreviation in the name stands for Enterprise Application Integration.

Student Portfolios

+ Open Source Portfolio Initiative (E-Portfolio) : http://www.theospi.org : The framework for an institution to offer students or others a tool to build personal portfolios of their work on the Web. It is designed as a way for college students to track and showcase their academic and extracurricular work so that prospective employers and graduate schools can review the candidate's output. Being developed by the University of Minnesota, the University of Delaware, and the R-Smart Group, a Phoenix-based company that offers technical support for users of open-source software.

Productivity Tools

+ Chandler : http://www.osafoundation.org/Chandler_in_higher_ed_TOC_3002_05_13.htm : A personal-information manager that provides and integrates e-mail browsing, calendar, contact management and task management, notes, and instant messages. Being developed by the Open Source Applications Foundation, a nonprofit group developing open-source software that was begun in 2001. The project has won a $1.5-million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and $1.25-million from the 25 colleges and universities that are part of the Common Solutions Group, an informal organization supporting technology in higher education.

+ LionShare : http://lionshare.its.psu.edu/main : A peer-to-peer file-sharing network that allows organizing and searching of academic information within groups. From the Pennsylvania State University, with a $1.1-million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Administrative Tools

+ Kualu : http://www.kuali.org : A financial-information system for colleges designed to help an institution manage accounting, billing, e-commerce, budgeting, and other campus functions. Expected in 2006.

Security

+ Shibboleth : http://shibboleth.internet2.edu : Provides "authentication" for Web sites, the mechanism that asks users for an ID and password and allows only authorized users to gain access to the sites.

+ Pubcookie : http://www.pubcookie.org : Creates a common authentication system for different Web-server platforms. Being developed by the University of Washington, with support from Carnegie Mellon and the University of Wisconsin, as well as an Internet2 grant.

+ Signet : http://middleware.internet2.edu/signet : Works with authentication software to help determine how much information on a Web site each registered user should have access to. From Stanford University and the National Science Foundation's National Middleware Initiative.

Scientific Computing

+ Globus : http://www.globus.org : Provides technologies needed to build computational grids that allow software to integrate instruments, displays, and computational and informational resources. Argonne National Laboratory's Mathematics and Computer Science Division, the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, the University of Chicago's Distributed Systems Laboratory, the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and the Swedish Center for Parallel Computers.

http://chronicle.com
Section: Information Technology
Volume 51, Issue 5, Page B5
http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v51/i05/05b00501.htm (subscription required)

Blog: virtual humanities lab at brown,

2004-09-13T06:41:00.000-07:00

From an annoncement on HUMANIST:
The Virtual Humanities Lab at Brown University plans to develop existing and new digital resources into an experimental model for collaborative scholarship and pedagogy.

They are encoding Boccaccio's Esposizioni sulla Commedia di
Dante and portions of Giovanni Villani's Croniche. They are also
beginning work on a new interface, which will provide tools that will
allow scholars to annotate texts online, suggest variant encodings,
and of course participate in discussion using natural languages as
well as code.

Weblog at:
http://brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/vhl/.

Vika Zafrin

wysiwyg xml editor

2004-09-09T10:06:00.000-07:00

bitflux
http://bitfluxeditor.org/

LMS: sakai

2004-09-09T09:05:00.000-07:00

Learning Management System (LMS), open source

http://www.sakaiproject.org/

MRAM memory and history

2004-09-09T08:42:00.000-07:00

Every move you make could be stored on a PLR
Kevin Maney
USA Today
Posted 9/7/2004 8:51 PM; Updated 9/8/2004 12:03 AM
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/kevinmaney/2004-09-07-plr_x.htm

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Over the years, a number of tech prognosticators
have said that someday many of us will own a device that might be
called a personal life recorder, or PLR.

(goes on to describe new MRAM--Magnetic RAM--chip - more storage, very small)

Going forward, MRAM could open similar possibilities, in time perhaps
giving rise to personal life recorders. Of course, PLRs will create a
whole new set of problems. Like, how would you search all that data to
find the conversation that proves you asked your spouse if it was OK if
your mother came to stay for a month?

Could a lawyer subpoena your PLR? What if Kobe Bryant had one that
night in the hotel room?

I'm worried about what it might do to our minds. Human brains enhance
and put a spin on memories the second they are stored. I might find out
that none of my goals in hockey look anywhere near as exciting as I
recall. That could precipitate some kind of major personality disorder,
couldn't it?

Kelso, feminism technology SF

2004-09-09T08:39:00.000-07:00

Shaky (early 90s feminism) but some interesting ideas

The Silver Metal Imagination:
Blueprints for Changing Technology in Women's SF
by Sylvia Kelso

http://www.sff.net/people/eluki/litcrit.htm

tripathi: internet social aspects

2004-09-09T08:34:00.000-07:00

Arun Tripathi, overlong but good resource

Community in the Digital Age
Social scientists and philosophers argue the meaning of our evolving online lives.
http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/book_reviews/v5i28_tripathi-barney.html

Educause: blogs, wikis, other 2004 teaching/learning

2004-09-09T07:43:00.000-07:00

TOC : Educause Review, September / October 2004
http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm045.asp

Educational Blogging
Stephen Downes
The process of blogging - of reading onlin, engaging a
community, and reflecting on it - is a process of bringing
life into learning.
http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0450.asp

Going Nomadic: Mobile Learning in Higher Education
Bryan Alexander
How are wireless, mobile technologies and their emergent
trends, such as swarms, affecting the learning environment,
pedagogy, and campus life?
http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0451.asp

Wide Open Spaces: Wikis, Ready or Not
Brian Lamb
The needs met by “wikis”—documents posted online for
open editing by all—are simply not being satisfied by present
IT strategies and tools
http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0452.asp

Game-Based Learning: How to Delight and Instruct in the 21st Century
Joel Foreman
To learn more about videogames in academe, the author spoke
with five leading-edge thinkers in the field: James Paul Gee, J. C.
Herz, Randy Hinrichs, Marc Prensky, and Ben Sawyer.
http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0454.asp

Wait, there's more ! A special Web Bonus !

InsurgenceEmergenceConvergence: How to Fold Soup
Did Steve Martin, in his 1979 short story "How to Fold
Soup", offer suggestions on how to deal with multimedia.
Enjoy!
http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0453.asp

Intersections: adopting/supporting new technologies,

2004-09-03T13:29:00.000-07:00

Three separate strands of conversations have intersected in interesting
ways this week: the post "learn...teach...learn...repeat" and Chris R's
response to the Classroom Support thread, along with a discussion
happening on a CIT list. The first has to do with use and promotion of
blogs and the second with faculty reaction (resistance) to new
technologies. The last has to do with how students are reacting to the
new requirement to register their computers via NetReg and the
challenges in integrating them with UVMs network.

In all cases, though, the common theme is how new technologies are
adopted. As Chris M. points out, when every new tech toy is overhyped,
how can one even determine, much less decide to adopt, what will be
useful? Chris R. points out, and rightly so, that technologies can have
a positive impact on teaching and learning, so why should there be such
a resistance to their adoption. The CIT discussion parallels that plight
by bemoaning the lack of interest or amount of confusion among new and
returning students to their computers, and their seeming unwillingness
to do what's needed to provide a safe, virus-free environment for all at
UVM.

For those of us who spend our time at that intersection between new
technologies and hesitant users, this can be a tricky place. Should we
try out every new technology or wait until it has proved itself? Should
we demand that anyone who uses a computer on campus exhibit a particular
level of literacy or should we just "do it for them"? And of course the
age old question: does support mean we'll fix what's broken. Or, to
frame it in terms of the fish/fishing parable, does support mean we'll
feed you fish, teach you to fish, or take you out in fish-filled waters
and throw you off the boat, assured that you'll come up with something.

But I digress. To bring the focus in a bit: blogs. A couple years ago
when I first encountered blogs my reaction was "nice, but I'll wait and
see." Now I think that was wrong. Yes, to invoke the over-used McLuhan
idea, new technologies are not usually going to be much of a departure
from those preceeding them. As such, they may not look like enough of a
leap to get excited about. But it behooves those of us in that
intersection to explore and test not only the new technology as it is,
but the new technology as it might be. In this case, not "what do
current blogs look like, or do" but "what might the blog model lead to
and how can we shape it to be useful."

Unfortunately, though a university environment might seem to be the
perfect place for such experimentation, the fact remains that such
experimentation, with its obvious potential for many failures and
dead-ends, will often be at odds with the need to spend effort fixing
what's already in place. That is, fixing the plumbing leaks often
pre-empts exploring new possibilities.

In the realm of technology, where managing expectations and
communicating possibilities seem to be so difficult, the ability to
successfully adopt and promote a new idea is especially challenging. We
think we know what might be a great idea (using blogs, making sure all
computers have up to date virus software, etc.) but the time to
implement those good ideas is competing with other needs (get ready for
class, navigate conflicting media systems in classrooms, and do your
homework/do your research).

So what do we do? A couple ideas:
1) Continue to experiment. Don't ask for a technology to be proven
before trying it out. Try it. (Yes, I've started blogging...)
2) Don't expect adoption without determing need. Find a way to
communicate that need. People have to believe a technology will fill
their needs before they'll use precious time experimenting with it. For
example, how many people didn't see a need for WebCT before Shirley
showed them some of her uses for it?
3) Hope and pray that the administration will continue to let us
experiment to the extent that we have, even though they don't provide a
heck of a lot of support for what could be some really neat ideas

more...??

unicode numbers Mac

2004-09-02T14:01:00.000-07:00

Mac OS X:
Working with an XML document containing numeric character entities and want to know what they represent? Display any Unicode character your system fonts can display by entering its numeric value, and display characters that are plus or minus any offset you want by doing addition or subtraction

Go to "View - Display Format - Unicode" from the menu.
If you had a numeric value in the previous display, it will be replaced by the equivalent Unicode character. You can display different characters by hitting the Clear button and then entering a new value. (The display will update each time you enter a numeral, since the calculator has no way of knowing whether you're going to enter a 2-digit, 3-digit, 4-digit or whatever value.) You can do Unicode math by hitting the + or - button and entering a value; the display will update to the appropriate offset from the character in the display.

This works for hexadecimal, too, if you start out with the hex
calculator.

(Thanks, David Sewell, for the tip.)

TEI Projects

2004-09-02T07:28:00.000-07:00

From David Sewell:

The University of Virginia Press has released our first online TEI-based publication, THE DOLLEY MADISON DIGITAL EDITION, in the first of two installments comprising all of Dolley Madison's extant correspondence through June 1836. You're invited to take a look:
http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/dmde
For access to interior pages, click on "Login" and use the username
"TEI", password "orgName" (case-sensitive); this will be valid for a
couple of weeks.
All of the documents in this edition were coded in the Model Editions Partnership (MEP) variant of TEI, with introductory and supporting material in standard TEI for the most part. URLs ending in ".xqy" point to XQuery scripts that do the dynamic (or in a few cases static) HTML page generation, with underlying XML data stored in the Mark Logic Content Interaction Server database. The underlying data and code is not accessible via the reading interface, but for an idea of what the underpinnings look like, here is a walk-through based on a prepublication state of the documentary XML and the XQuery code:

http://www.ei.virginia.edu/Unlinked/DolleyDemo/

Swish-e, searching XML/TEI

2004-09-02T07:27:00.000-07:00

http://swish-e.org/

Swish-e is an open source indexer/search engine. It excels at indexing
(X)HTML files, but indexes plain text and XML files almost as easily.
It comes with C, PHP, and Perl API's, and it runs under (over?) Unix as
well as Window's operating systems.

I am/will be using swish-e as the underlying indexer for searches
against TEI documents. Specifically, I have been marking sets of
literature up in TEI. I then convert the sets into a number of formats
such as plain text, XHTML, PDF, various Palm flavors, etc. I then use
swish-e to index the XHTML because swish-e does makes it easy to pull
out the meta tags of HTML head elements and make them field searchable
as well as the body of the text being free-text searchable. I could
have almost as easily indexed the raw TEI files, then then I have to
deal with transforming the XML before it gets to the browser. ("I know.
There are many ways to do that."). See:

http://infomotions.com/alex2/

I have also been fiddling with Plucene, a Perl port of Lucene, a
Java-based indexer/search engine library:

http://search.cpan.org/dist/Plucene/

Unlike swish-e, Lucene/Plucene are libraries. Swish-e is a
indexer/search engine binary as well as a library.

OAI-PMH Powerpoint slides: Gerry McKiernan

2004-09-02T07:23:00.000-07:00

_Open Content and Access for Digital Scholarship_

"The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting
(OAI-PMH) provides an application-independent
interoperability framework based on metadata harvesting. There are two
classes of participants in the OAI-PMH
framework: Data Providers and Service Providers. Data Providers
administer systems that support the OAI-PMH
as a means of exposing metadata from digital collections or
repositories; while Service Providers use metadata harvested
via the OAI-PMH as a basis for building value-added services. In this
presentation we will profile several major OAI-PMH Data
and Service Providers, and describe and discuss their innovative
content, features, and functionalities."

The REVISED and CORRECTED presentation has been self-archived at:

[ http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/OpenContent.ppt

XML Publication tool (TEI) - Anastasia

2004-09-02T07:22:00.000-07:00

SourceForge.net: Project Info - Anastasia

Women Writers Project Encoding Guide

2004-09-02T07:10:00.000-07:00

Women Writers Project Encoding Guide
(TEI, XML, markup)

Greek XML resources

2004-09-02T07:08:00.000-07:00

June 2004
From John Walsh
http://www.letrs.indiana.edu/lib/xml/entities/ISOgrk1Unicode.ent
http://www.letrs.indiana.edu/lib/xml/entities/TEIgrkUnicode.ent

From David Sewell
It looks like the W3C is providing some off-the-shelf XLST 2.0
stylesheets to do this precise job for SGML standard entities and
others. See http://www.w3.org/2003/entities/
especially
http://www.w3.org/2003/entities/iso8879doc/overview.html
(where the stylesheets are linked to "XSLT 2 draft character map".)
Of course this won't do much good unless you have an XLST processor that handles the draft 2.0 spec, like the latest version of Saxon.

U. Washington, TabletPC, Classroom Presenter

2004-09-02T07:06:00.000-07:00

UW Classroom Presenter 1.9.8 -
http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/dl/presenter/

"Classroom Presenter is a distributed presentation system for the Tablet PC. As a distributed system, the synchronized versions of the presentation are shared across multiple machines. The Tablet PC is used as the presentation device because of the high quality ink that it provides. A basic goal of Classroom Presenter is to provide an integration of computer generated slides and ink in a manner that allows instructors flexibility in delivery and interaction with the audience. Classroom Presenter has been used in a range of scenarios including distance education and in-class instruction. In the distance scenarios the instructor has lectured from a Tablet PC which was connected to computer in the remote room which displayed the slides and writing. In the in-class usage, the instructor uses a tablet pc which is connected to another machine which is driving the data projector. In the future, we will develop greater facilities for interacting with student devices in the classroom." (Source: University of Washington)

9s NINES: 19th cent. scholarship site

2004-09-02T07:05:00.000-07:00

9s NINES 9s
"~ nineteenth-century scholarship ~
Over the past ten years a growing body of digital scholarly work has been undertaken, much of it put online, nearly all of it executed without peer review processes, none of it integrated (except by hyperlinking). NINES is a project to found a publishing environment for integrated, peer-reviewed online scholarship centered in nineteenth-century studies, British and American.

~ and a scholarly collective ~
NINES believes it is clearly in the interest of scholars to coordinate our work. We know that the migration of scholarship from paper-based to digital platforms and networks, already underway, will only grow apace. Scholars and educators must act on our own behalf if we are to help shape the form and result of this migration. To that end, NINES is promoting the means and a way for excellent work in digital scholarship to be produced, vetted, (eventually) published, and recognized by the discipline."

Delivering Classics Resources with TEI-XML

2004-09-02T07:03:00.000-07:00

Cover Pages: Delivering Classics Resources with TEI-XML, Open Source, and Creative Commons Licenses.: "Delivering Classics Resources with TEI-XML, Open Source, and Creative Commons Licenses."

U of Washington ContentDM collection

2004-09-02T06:59:00.000-07:00

Here's their example of a ContentDM collection
http://content.lib.washington.edu/index.html

UltraXML 3.3

2004-09-02T06:55:00.000-07:00

UltraXML looks promising as a WYSIWYG XML editor
http://www.webxsystems.com/Registration.htm

EDUCAUSE REVIEW of WIKIS

2004-09-02T06:21:00.000-07:00

You know when Educause has reviewd something it's well established, not new anymore...
EDUCAUSE REVIEW | September/October 2004,�Volume 39, Number 5

Example of wiki-based collaborative writing project

2004-09-01T06:23:00.000-07:00

Matt Bowen's (Matt Kirschenbaum's student) wiki writing project.

FrontPage - writehere.net

Digital Medievalist

2004-09-01T06:20:00.000-07:00

Lisa Spangenberg

IT: Instructional Technology

"As much as I am personally fond of things geeky and digital, quite often I see technology in instruction being used simply because it's there, rather than because it's a better way, or because the technology enhances student learning. I also see a lot of silliness in terms of technology and instruction, where a particular technology is forced on end users and faculty because some manager or administrative person thinks it's cool, or will draw fame and fortune to his career, rather than because it's effective or appropriate. Frequently faculty who would like to use technology are bewildered by the jargon and by the unfortunate arrogance of the technical experts they must work with, who, for all their technical expertise are, not surprisingly, sometimes woefully ignorant about pedagogy, and have no interest or understanding of the humanities."

Alumni Medical Library: EndNote

2004-08-25T14:04:00.000-07:00

Alumni Medical Library: EndNote
Good resource for EndNote workshop info

Rhetoric of Blogging from HUMANIST

2004-08-25T12:23:00.000-07:00

A recent request to the HUMANIST listserv for articles on the rhetoric of blogging resulted in quite a few responses. Here's a summary that may contain some useful "nuggets."

------------
1) "Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs."
Collection of essays, blogs, etc.
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/

2) Members of the Computers and Writing community
http://www.hawaii.edu/cw2004/ and
Conference on College Composition and Communication
http://www.ncte.org/groups/cccc
are studying the rhetoric of blogging as well as teaching with student
and faculty blogs.

3) Kairos (online journal)
http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/

Kairosnews: A Weblog for Discussing Rhetoric, Technology & Pedagogy
http://kairosnews.org/

4) "Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog"
Carolyn R. Miller and Dawn Shepherd, North Carolina State University
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/blogging_as_social_action.html

Carolyn R. Miller seems to have a focus on rhetoric in the digital
domain. See her publications list at:
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~crm/publications.htm

5) Rhetoric as "a persuasive way in which one relates a theme or
idea in an effort to convince." (thanks Wikipedia) as relating to blogs, see
"The Function of Language to Facilitate and Maintain Social Networks in
Research Weblogs"
By Stephanie Hendricks
http://www.humlab.umu.se/exjobb/files/LanguageBlogs.pdf

6) "The Rhetoric of Web Logs" (as well as other blogging info)
By Lisa Spangenberg
http://www.digitalmedievalist.com/it/archive/000075.html

7) Jill Walker, dissertation on blogging at the
University of Bergen, and her own weblog jill/txt is a treasure trove
of information. For example, in the category "blog theorising" --
http://huminf.uib.no/~jill/index.php?cat=9 --
http://huminf.uib.no/~jill/index.php?p=860 ("small-world links in academia")
http://huminf.uib.no/~jill/index.php?p=845 ("paper on blogs")

8) "Blogging and the Politics of Melancholy,"
Michael Keran, Canadian Journal of Communication Vol 29 No 1 (2004)
http://www.cjc-online.ca/viewissue.php?id=106>http://www.cjc-online.ca/viewissue.php?id=106

Blogging Resources

2004-08-25T12:00:00.000-07:00

Scribbling Woman
http://www.unbsj.ca/arts/english/jones/mt/

Barbara Ganley, Middlebury
http://mt.middlebury.edu/middblogs/ganley/bgblogging/

Blogging Across the Curriculum
http://mywebspace.quinnipiac.edu/PHastings/bac.html

Palimpsest
http://www.chlt.org/~gwilliams/teaching/

Danial Gilfillan (Hum Comp and lots of links)
http://www.public.asu.edu/~dgilfill/links.shtml