The Yonderist – Page 6 – All those who wander are not lost.

Earlier today I forwarded to family and some friends here in Louisiana, from whom I get the occasional e-mail of a conservative nature a piece on Ars Technica that summarized a recent Pew Trust study of the difference between public belief in scientists and science in general and the divergence that occurs on particular topics. In response, my dad asked me if I considered myself to fit in any of the categories. I wasn’t quite sure of his question, and so I ended up writing this:

Which categories? Scientist? Perhaps. I sort of work under the same rubric. (More on this in a moment.) Independent? Probably. I’m not a conservative (who apparently believe that the answer to everything is big churches and big business) nor a liberal (who believe the answer to everything is big government and big dreams).

I’m not a scientist, per se, but I certainly operate from an evidence-based approach to investigating the world, which often puts me in conflict with some of my fellow humanists who wish to bend the world to their particular point of view. This is not as ideological, in terms of secular humanists or liberal ideologues as you might want to believe. Some of my fiercest arguments when I first got here were with Barry Ancelet who wanted to paint everything in south Louisiana as Cajun, when in fact large chunks of Cajun culture are clearly African. (The smaller chunks that were German or Italian had slowly come to be acknowledged as Cajun studies matured.) And now the African dimension of the story is slowly becoming part of the discussion, which makes things a lot more complex but also potentially a lot more confusing.

In general, I don’t like it when anyone tries to boil down things to something simple just because thinking about complex stuff is hard. Some things are simple. Keep them simple. Some things are complex, let’s keep them complex. Evolution at the so-called micro level is demonstrably true and everyone in the U.S.A. knows at least one person saved by it. Evolution at the macro-level is also demonstrably born out by what we know of the archeological record. Science seeks to describe the world as we know based on things we can know. Sometimes those things are simple and obvious. Sometimes they are complex and take a long time to get a grip on.

I do what I do for the long term good of my fellow travelers in this world. This is not the way to advance oneself quickly in a career, but I take, on faith, that my task is to be humble before creation and not to imagine myself better than it. There are moments when I feel God in my life, or at least think that I do, and I embrace them. Once upon a time I questioned what was true and what was simply a byproduct of being raised Christian. Now I don’t worry about it. I accept when I feel God’s grace and I don’t worry whether it’s simply psychological or is in fact a moment of transcendence. Some may believe this makes me a poor Christian, and they would probably be right. I don’t think that Jesus Christ was actually the son of God. Instead, I think he was, as the historical record would seem to indicate, a Sadducee who saw the potential for good in more people than traditional Judaism would allow and that he recognized the power of love. What he did and the things he said were profoundly true then and are still now. I think in the years that followed a number of people, for various and probably good reasons, needed to simplify the story to make it more easily told and Jesus was transformed over time to become something as powerful as his message. I no longer worry if such a point of view puts me at odds with others, because I find that I pay less and less attention to what people say — I’ve seen too many Godly men and women do unethical and/or immoral and sometimes evil things — and I pay more and more attention to what people do. I like hanging out with Gerard Olinger not because he is a faithful Catholic but because he is a profoundly good man. I like and respect you not because you are Christian but because you are a profoundly good man trying your best to do the right thing in a world where all too many others try to take shortcuts. I try to do the same myself.

That is a long answer to your short question. You caught me a post-lunch contemplative moment.

Technology is much less about the large machines of Heidegger’s day and much more about the smaller machines that permeate our daily lives. They feel personal but they are not, which perhaps goes some way to explain the rise of “making” and its almost cult-like status.

2009-07-13

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The “Digging into Data” Challenge

2009-07-12

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This looks like a terrific idea but it has a steep entry price. I could see UL putting something interesting together with a university in Canada or France focusing on our strength in Francophone studies, but there’s a lot of writing and negotiating to be done and I just don’t think we have the staff for it. Nevertheless, I am posting the link to the site here to encourage others and in case I change my mind:

The Digging into Data Challenge is an international grant competition sponsored by four leading research agencies, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) from the United Kingdom, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) from the United States, the National Science Foundation (NSF) from the United States, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) from Canada.

What is the “challenge” we speak of? The idea behind the Digging into Data Challenge is to answer the question “what do you do with a million books?” Or a million pages of newspaper? Or a million photographs of artwork? That is, how does the notion of scale affect humanities and social science research? Now that scholars have access to huge repositories of digitized data — far more than they could read in a lifetime — what does that mean for research?

Applicants will form international teams from at least two of the participating countries. Winning teams will receive grants from two or more of the funding agencies and, one year later, will be invited to show off their work at a special conference. Our hope is that these projects will serve as exemplars to the field.

A Brief Note about Bamboo

2009-07-08

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From my note today to Sarah Spell — via Facebook:

It looks like Bamboo is largely going to be a consortium seeking to establish common APIs and services, with perhaps some standards for things like metadata in and through which a digital infrastructure for humanities research can get built. There are already a lot of pieces out there, but nothing/noone has woven them together into something coherent yet. Imagine something like JSTOR, another Mellon initiative, which is an incredible storehouse of humanities research — and beginning to take on the task of storing data as well, but imagine that kind of infrastructure for tools and ideas. It will immediately make a lot of data and ways to examine that data available and accessible to a wide variety of scholars. More importantly, that kind of accessibility will immediately be felt by students, who will find themselves capable of making contributions, though perhaps on very small scales, to real knowledge. Finally, such accessibility has the capacity to reach beyond the boundaries of campuses and to expose the good work of humanists and humanistic research to a larger public, which has shown itself interested in such topics but has had its collective hands tied in getting access to quality information, since that information is so often found in university libraries or in hard to find journals.

Web Publishing Platforms for the Humanities

2009-07-08

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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:

the Digital Humanities Quarterly,
the Digital Document Quarterly,
and the most recent issue of the Journal of Scholarly Publishing On-line.

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.