Hope's Centre-Table

Now Online: The Companion to Digital Humanities, eds. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth.
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/
Chapters/articles on:
Part I: History
1. The History of Humanities Computing
2. Computing for Archaeologists
3. Art History
4. Classics and the Computer: An End of the History
5. Computing and the Historical Imagination
6. Lexicography
7. Linguistics Meets Exact Sciences
8. Literary Studies
9. Music
10. Multimedia
11. Performing Arts
12. “Revolution? What Revolution?” Successes and Limits of Computing Technologies in Philosophy and Religion
Part II: Principles
13. How the Computer Works
14. Classification and its Structures
15. Databases
16. Marking Texts of Many Dimensions
17. Text Encoding
18. Electronic Texts: Audiences and Purposes
19. Modeling: A Study in Words and Meanings
Part III: Applications
20. Stylistic Analysis and Authorship Studies
21. Preparation and Analysis of Linguistic Corpora
22. Electronic Scholarly Editing
23. Textual Analysis
24. Thematic Research Collections
25. Print Scholarship and Digital Resources
26. Digital Media and the Analysis of Film
27. Cognitive Stylistics and the Literary Imagination
28. Multivariant Narratives
29. Speculative Computing: Aesthetic Provocations in Humanities Computing
30. Robotic Poetics
Part IV: Production, Dissemination, Archiving
31. Designing Sustainable Projects and Publications
32. Conversion of Primary Sources
33. Text Tools
34. So the Colors Cover the Wires : Interface, Aesthetics, and Usability
35. Intermediation and its Malcontents: Validating Professionalism in the Age of Raw Dissemination
36. The Past, Present, and Future of Digital Libraries
37. Preservation

Digital History Reader: Teaching Resources for European and United
States History
http://www.dhr.history.vt.edu
The Digital History Reader is a free, online set of resources for
teaching university courses in United States and modern European
history. These materials are available online: www.dhr.history.vt.edu.
The eighteen modules in the Digital History Reader address critical
questions appropriate for survey courses and advanced analysis in United
States and European history. An introductory module, “How to Use the
DHR,” provides instructors and students with an overview of module
structure as well as suggestions in how to approach each section. The
individual modules all follow a standard structure. A short Introduction
defines the historical question for the students to consider throughout
the module. The Context section contains an approximately 2,000-word
narrative that provides the historical background necessary for the
students to understand the central question and to be able to place the
primary documents within a larger framework. The Evidence section is the
heart of the module; it includes a broad range of primary source
materials, including texts, photographs, political cartoons, posters,
songs, video clips, and recorded speeches, that allow the student to
explore possible answers to the initial historical question. After
students complete the evidence section, the Assignment section allows
students to gauge their own comprehension with a self-test and offers
suggestions for written and in-class exercises. The Conclusion returns
to the central question and asks students to consider the larger
historical significance of the evidence they have contemplated. Finally,
the Resource section lists published and online sources that allow
students to further explore the topic. All DHR materials are available
for free, and are fully contained with this website, hosted by the
Virginia Tech Department of History. Faculty contributors are Tom Ewing
(Project Director), Robert Stephens, Marian Mollin, David Hicks, Amy
Nelson, Hayward “Woody” Farrar, Kathleen Jones, Mark Barrow, Daniel
Thorp, C. Edward Watson, and Jane Lehr. For more information about the
modules, see the “About DHR” page: www.dhr.history.vt.edu/about.html.
Questions may be directed to the Project Director, Tom Ewing, email:
dhr@vt.edu.

The Library of Congress has launched a series of news feeds using the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) technology. http://www.loc.gov/rss/
The Library’s RSS service has launched with the following feeds:
* News, a bulletin service of the latest news from the world’s preeminent reservoir of knowledge, providing resources to Congress and the American people
* Upcoming Events, a listing of the dozens of free concerts, lectures, exhibitions, symposia, films and other special programs offered at the Library on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.
* New on the Web, updates on new collections, features, reference materials and other services available on the Library’s award-winning Web site
* New Webcasts, the latest webcasts and podcasts of lectures and events sponsored by the Library
* News from the John W. Kluge Center, featuring updates on lectures, presentations and other news from this center for scholars within the Library of Congress, established to bring together the world’s best thinkers to stimulate and energize scholarly discussion, distill wisdom from the Library’s rich resources and interact with policy-makers in Washington.
* And What’s New in Science Reference, new products and services on the subject of science and technology from the Library’s Science, Technology & Business Division.
These feeds join four existing RSS feeds from the U.S. Copyright Office in the Library of Congress on current copyright related legislation; announcements, rules, proposed rules and other notices published in the Federal Register; NewsNet (alerts on hearings, deadlines for comments, new and proposed regulations and new publications); and updates to the Copyright Web site at www.copyright.gov.
The Library will launch additional feeds in specific content and subject matter areas in the coming months. All new RSS feeds will be available from key content pages within the Library’s extensive Web site, as well as from a central RSS Web page at www.loc.gov/rss/.

Open Source History: Making History Public
http://theaahc.org
The American Association for History and Computing (AAHC)
2007 Annual Conference
In association with the Brown University Public Humanities Program
Providence, RI
April 19-21, 2007
Join the American Association for History and Computing and Brown University’s Public Humanities Program for an innovative look at how technology is allowing for a shared public dialogue between historians and a broad public audience. This conference will be of interest to anyone who is charged with bringing history to a general audience, including museum professionals, archivists, librarians, historic preservationists, filmmakers, as well as academic historians. The conference will explore:
• The role of technology in breaking down the barriers between historians and the larger public
• Ways that historians have used digital technology to communicate with diverse public audiences
• Ways in which the practice of “academic history” is altered when made public
• The “wikipedia-ization” of history
• New forms of collaboration between historians, archivists, librarians, historic preservationists, teachers and students
• New forms of display and historical representation
All presenters must be current members of the AAHC. For more information about membership, please visit our website http://theaahc.org

TAPOR XML Tools: http://taporware.mcmaster.ca/~taporware/xmlTools/summarizer.shtml?
TAPOR. the Text Analysis Portal for Research, has been developing text analysis tools for many years. A recent addition are xml tools, including a tool that makes a visualization of the tree structure of any xml file for which you provide a URL. You can then click/drag/explore the structure of the file.
Other XML tools that they have available are:
– list elements and attributes
– extract text
– list words
– co-occurrence
– concordance
– collocation
– tokenize
– distribution
– summarizer
…and more

A wiki that lists and categorizes academic blogs:
http://www.academicblogs.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

New Google Project in the Works:
http://code.google.com/p/ocropus/
ocropus
open source document analysis and OCR system
OCRopus is a state-of-the-art document analysis and OCR system, featuring pluggable layout analysis, pluggable character recognition, statistical natural language modeling, and multi-lingual capabilities.
Background
The OCRopus engine is based on two research projects: a high-performance handwriting recognizer developed in the mid-90’s and deployed by the US Census bureau, and novel high-performance layout analysis methods.
OCRopus is development is sponsored by Google and is initially intended for high-throughput, high-volume document conversion efforts. We expect that it will also be an excellent OCR system for many other applications.
Release dates throughout Q1-Q3, 2007.

ICT (Information and Computing technology) Guides is a new service being offered by the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) at King’s College, London. It seeks to promote the use of ICTs in research and learning through cataloging best-practice
digital arts and humanities projects, along with the tools and methods they employed.
The site includes links to many projects, along with indications of what disciplines they are most appropriate to. Each item contains a description of the project. More importantly, each description lists the tools used to create it, as well as the methods employed. As such it provides a good picture of how digital projects are being created.
http://ahds.ac.uk/ictguides/projects/allProjects.jsp

N I N E S stands for a Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship, a scholarly organization in British and American nineteenth-century studies supported by a software development group assembling a suite of critical and editorial tools for digital scholarship.
http://www.nines.org/
In NINES you can:
* search and browse more than 60,000 peer-reviewed texts and images in 19th-century studies
* build your own collections of documents, articles, images, and ephemera;
* organize, add keywords, and annotate your work;
* discover lines of critical inquiry related to your own;
* and (coming soon!) create syllabi, annotated bibliographies, illustrated essays, and timelines.
NINES integrates material from the following major research archives:
British Women Romantic Poets
Chesnutt Archive
Collective Biographies of Women
Dickinson Virtual Reference Shelf
Letters of Christina Rossetti
Letters of Matthew Arnold
Romantic Circles Praxis
Romanticism on the Net
The Ambrose Bierce Project
The Poetess Archive
The Rossetti Archive
The Swinburne Project
The Walt Whitman Archive
The Willa Cather Archive
The William Blake Archive
Victorian Studies Bibliography
Whitman Bibliography
Forthcoming are contributions from JSTOR, the Whistler
Correspondence, the journal 19, the Nineteenth-Century Serials
Edition, Virginia’s Victorian Literature and Culture Series, and the
Wright American Fiction Project, as well as updated and expanded
information from the Dickinson Project, Romantic Circles, and
Romanticism on the Net.