The Yonderist

All those who wander are not lost.

Category: work Page 5 of 24

Web Publishing Platforms for the Humanities

2009-07-08

work

As I continue to work on the scholarly narratives for Project Bamboo, I have gleaned the following platforms that people are using, or would like to use, in the service of humanities projects:

  • Omeka is brought to you by the same folks who brought us Zotero and is described as “a free and open source collections based web-based publishing platform for scholars, librarians, archivists, museum professionals, educators, and cultural enthusiasts. Its “five-minute setup” makes launching an online exhibition as easy as launching a blog. Omeka is designed with non-IT specialists in mind, allowing users to focus on content and interpretation rather than programming. It brings Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to academic and cultural websites to foster user interaction and participation. It makes top-shelf design easy with a simple and flexible templating system. Its robust open-source developer and user communities underwrite Omeka’s stability and sustainability.”
  • CONTENTdm is described as digital collection management software. Its blurb is “CONTENTdm® makes everything in your digital collections available to everyone, everywhere. No matter the format — local history archives, newspapers, books, maps, slide libraries or audio/video — CONTENTdm can handle the storage, management and delivery of your collections to users across the Web.”
  • Pachyderm is “n easy-to-use multimedia authoring tool. Designed for people with little multimedia experience, Pachyderm is accessed through a web browser and is as easy to use as filling out a web form. Authors upload their own media (images, audio clips, and short video segments) and place them into pre-designed templates, which can play video and audio, link to other templates, zoom in on images, and more. Once the templates have been completed and linked together, the presentation is published and can then be downloaded and placed on the author’s website or on a CD or DVD ROM. Authors may also leave their presentations on the Pachyderm server and link directly to them there. The result is an attractive, interactive Flash-based multimedia presentation.” It appears to be available in three versions: hosted, as a managed deployment, and as a DIY open source download.

Publications in/on/among the Digital Humanities

2009-07-07

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A recent issue of the [Humanist Discussion Group][hdg] noted the following publications:

Side note: Underlining titles and linking them presents interesting style issues, n’est-ce pas?

Higher Education in Louisiana

2009-07-07

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Long time readers of this site know that I rarely comment on political matters. In part, I don’t write about politics because doing so can too often lead to unintended imbroglios that really aren’t how I want to spend my time. And, too, it’s amazing how sensitive people can get about political matters. I pulled a previous version of these on-line notes because one person was offended by one post and wanted to make more of it than there was to make. Again, it’s just not how I want to spend my time.

Nevertheless, no one in the state of Louisiana has been able to ignore the huge budget deficit, the product of the perfect storm of the larger national economic crisis, the drop in oil prices, and the end of the Katrina federal funds. Because of the peculiarity of the Louisiana budget, a peculiarity that seems to suit many legislators, most parts of the budget are protected except for two: public hospitals and higher education. (In a rare moment of something, the arts are actually protected in Louisiana.) As things built to a head in the fall, the state cut 5% out of the higher education budget, which meant that a number of programs that were about to get underway, suddenly disappeared. In the spring, our illustrious governor sent a budget to the legislature that included another 14.5% in cuts to higher education. My assumption was that he was trying to force a re-thinking of the way budget works, to unprotect some areas and make it so higher education and hospitals aren’t always taking the fall for the state’s larger woes.

Worse, another 20% in cuts was proposed for the following year.

During the negotiations, it became increasingly clear that the conventional wisdom among the state-level policy wonks was that higher education itself must be “re-structured” and/or “consolidated.” The governor was remarkably silent on all matters, and really it was the work of a handful of state senators who saved higher education in the state from the worst of it. The end result was that universities and community colleges will absorb a 7% cut, in addition to the 5% cut made mid-year, for a total of 12% for the year.

What finally drew me to write this note was an editorial by Raymond Blanco in today’s Daily Advertizer in which he pointed out that Jim Tucker, speaker of the state House of Representatives, is the largest antagonist to higher education, making a number of menacing comments over the course of the budget negotiations. This is especially troubling since Tucker is, by all accounts, the real power behind the scenes, at least on the Republican side of things. (How much more power he has I leave for others to discover and/or speculate about.)

It’s already the case that faculty working in Louisiana pay a price in terms of their long-term financial stability, given the remarkable difference in benefits between Louisiana and other universities with which I am familiar. I fear for the future of higher education in a climate where one of the most powerful men in the state clearly seeks to diminish what little place higher ed has. I am making absolutely no predictions nor evaluations. Politics is what it is. Louisiana is what it is. Each of us tries, I hope, in our own way to make things better.

Track the Space Station and Then See It Pass Overhead

2009-07-06

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If you have a child in love with space as we do, then it’s really kind of cool that NASA makes it possible to keep up with its various missions as much as it does. This page is a great way to get directly to the news and information you want. If you click on the link for the Space Station, you’ll find yourself on a page with the latest press release. In the right-hand column, you’ll see a link which will take you to this page which will let you determine when the next “fly-over” of the space station is for your area. (You can track other objects as well, though I don’t think the clandestine NSA spy satellites are listed. Check your local spy listings for that.)

Apple’s On-Line Seminars

2009-07-06

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A number of vendors, like Apple and Adobe but I’m sure others as well, provide a range of free on-line seminars that not only are instructional in how to create content — and even think about content creation — but are examples of that creation themselves. A good example is this pairs of presentations by Brian Storm of Storm Media that is directed at photojournalists and how by adding audio then can not only enrich their content but also potentially reach new markets, and thus new revenue streams. The first presentation focuses on why someone might want to do this and the basics of gathering inputs and the second on working in Final Cut Pro.

JASO Revived On-line

2009-07-04

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The Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford was not necessarily a ready reference or me, but its evolution — it lived from 1970 to 2005 in print and is now being brought back as an on-line publication — is interesting:

The Journal of the Anthropological society of Oxford (JASO) was originally launched in 1970 as a hard copy journal; it ceased publication in that form in 2005. It has now been re-launched to coincide with the Centenary of the Oxford Anthropological Society in 2009. The new online journal, called JASO-Online, will be a joint collaborative project between JASO, the Society, and the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, which is hosting the website. Thus we hope it will appeal to all branches of the School, staff and students alike, and that it will be an active forum open to all for the discussion of anthropology and issues of interest to anthropologists. For the time being, at least, JASO-Online will be available as a free download, though we reserve the right to levy a charge at any time in the future. Contributors will not be paid for their contributions.

What I’ve been thinking about is how easy it is to publish a journal on-line. As numerous commentators have pointed out over the past decade: the costs of printing and distribution acted, at the very least, as a kind of test of resolve. Now, one only needs a connection — numerous publishing platforms are free. And so, the real problem is to have a readership, an audience. I think this will be the strength of learned and professional societies going forward. In creativity studies, this is described as the field, and within those studies the field is test bed for ideas introduced into the domain by an individual. (This is the DIFI model.) The conventional understanding is that the field in some way is the test for innovation, that an innovation is that which is not already in the domain but is still recognizable by the field as being a relevant extension or revision of the domain.

But, clearly, you have to have a field. I just wonder about the number of journals popping up that don’t have a field, an audience. They may describe a new domain, and it may be better than the extant domains, but without a field, one is perhaps talking quite loudly with no one around really to hear.

Formatting and Outputs

2009-07-03

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I do much of my non-scholarly writing in a text editor, but I still need to share what I do with others. Preferably pretty. I like to keep my options open on how to move out of MultiMarkdown into a styled output:

  • XSL:FO stands for Extensible Stylesheet Language Formatting Objects. Update: The link to the W3Schools no longer works and the good people at Who Is Hosting This offer their own materials as a suitable substitute.
  • DITA is an XML architecture for designing, writing, managing, and publishing information.

There is, of course, also presentation versions, like Eric Meyer’s S5 format, which has since been extended. For a more general overview, see the Wikipedia article on S5 I’m curious about the latter, because as this sample code reveals:

<div class="slide">
 <h1>slide title</h1>
 <ul>
   <li>the first point</li>
   <li>the second point</li>
   <li>the third point</li>
 </ul>
 <div class="handout">
  ... additional material that appears
     on the handout
 </div>
</div>

The S5 format is unfortunately oriented toward the standard slide layout.

Statements for Project Bamboo Proposal

2009-07-02

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It turns out I wrote down the wrong day for the annual rice field day at LSU’s Rice Station west of Rayne, and so I am home, with my cold, working on various Project Bamboo tasks.

Value Statement

The first thing I got done was to draft a value statement for scholarly / professional / learned societies:

The central focus of the learned society remains the pursuit of reliable knowledge and its effective communication within and without the society. Cyberinfrastructures expand the communicative modalities available to learned societies and their members. However, these same infrastructures threaten some of the most venerable revenue streams, emphasizing the importance of maximizing the return on investment in the digital realm. What learned societies need are at least interoperable, if not common, infrastructures that allow members to communicate and collaborate, in a trusted fashion, with other scholars, be they mutual members of the same society or in an adjacent field. By participating in a common technological ecosystem, learned societies can leverage their investment to give their members the tools and content they need to advance their own scholarship, and thus the impact of the society itself.

This has now been posted on the Bamboo Wiki. (N.B. I believe the wiki is currently private, so that link will probably not work.)

Case Statement

The second thing I did was to add a potential new case statement to the proposal that focused on the outreach / public relations potential of Bamboo:

Bamboo’s goal of increasing the visibility and accessibility of digital tools and content to humanities scholars themselves will necessarily not only radiate out to graduate and undergraduate students who will thus be able to participate in and work with these materials and methods but it will also increase the visibility of the work of humanities scholars to an increasingly connected public who are often in search of humanities content but are often stymied in their search for trusted materials and ideas.

[You could think of this as something like Stanford’s SEE (Stanford Engineering Everywhere) program. One-upping to a definite article: the THE (The Humanities Everywhere). Maybe.]

Use Statement

I remember a conversation from graduate school where students were trying to hash out where they thought the field was going. One of our cohort finally spoke up and said, “Well, I don’t know where the field is going, but I do know where I want to take it.” Perhaps, Project Bamboo is something like that for those of us at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

We have taken a multi-level approach to our efforts:

  • At the base level, there is an enormous benefit for an university like the University of Louisiana simply to be among the founding members of anything of the scope and scale as Project Bamboo. We are the only university from the Deep South to have participated throughout the process.
  • Building from such a base, we have already, as it were, used the fact of our participation in Bamboo to leverage state funding of a “digital humanities lab.”
  • Moving from an institutional scope to one focused more clearly on the humanities, we have emphasized the inevitability of the IT revolution and the ability to be in control of one’s own destiny to which Bamboo aspires to discuss with faculty not only our involvement in the consortium but also to begin to make them aware of the possibilities contained within under the rather diffuse rubric of the “digital humanities.”
  • At the level of particular disciplines, my involvement in Project Bamboo has also helped me steer a parallel project, the design and development of a new website / communications platform for the American Folklore Society, of which I have been named editor.
  • Finally, at a personal level, there can be no doubt the enormous professional development I have enjoyed thanks to the incredibly challenging conversations we have had as a result of the mixing of humanists, technologists, and archivists / librarians. The multi-disciplinary discussions have been amazing.

The Humanities Need To Be This Good

2009-07-02

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An amazing talk by a molecular biologist:

The 1909 Color Photography of Prokudin-Gorsky

2009-07-01

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I’ve seen these photographs a half dozen times over the years, but every time I see them, I am impressed not only by the richness of the color but also by the view into late nineteenth-century life in Europe. (Obviously, Russia, but I imagine the images of peasant life reflect larger patterns.)

Fishing

And here’s the header note:

In 1909 a remarkable project was initiated by Russian photographer Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky. His mission was to record – in full and vibrant color – the vast and diverse Russian Empire

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© John Laudun