Hope's Centre-Table

Call for Proposals
The Nebraska Digital Workshop
October 5 & 6, 2007
http://cdrh.unl.edu
The Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) at the University of Nebraska’s Lincoln (UNL) will host the second annual Nebraska Digital Workshop on October 5 & 6, 2007 and seeks proposals for digital presentations by pre-tenure
faculty, post-doctoral fellows, and advanced graduate students working in the digital
humanities. The goal of the Workshop is to enable the best early career scholars in the field of digital humanities to present their work in a forum where it can be critically evaluated, improved, and showcased. Under the auspices of the Center, the Workshop will bring nationally recognized senior scholars in digital humanities to UNL to participate and work with the selected scholars. Selected scholars will receive full
travel reimbursement and an honorarium for presenting their work at the Nebraska Digital Workshop.
Selection criteria include: significance in primary disciplinary field, technical innovation,
theoretical and methodological sophistication, and creativity of approach.
Please send proposed workshop abstract, curriculum vitae, and a representative sample of digital work via a URL or disk on or before May 1, 2007 to: Katherine L. Walter, Co-Director, UNL Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, at
kwalter1@unl.edu or 319 Love Library, UNL, Lincoln, NE 68588-4100.
For further details, see the Center’s web site at
http://cdrh.unl.edu.

“Stanford Syllabus is a central, online repository for Stanford class syllabi. It is a project from Stanford’s Committee on Undergraduate Standards and Policy and developed by Academic Computing. The goal is for students and their advisors to browse through syllabi to help select the courses that are right for them.”
The FAQ: http://www.stanford.edu/group/syllabus/faqs/
Faculty or their designates can upload their syllabus as a .txt, .doc, .rtf, .pdf, or .html to the tool, which then makes them searchable by term and discipline. They can also point the tool to a URL. This is useful because the tool does not talk to other course management systems. Thus, the faculty member can keep one copy of the syllabus as the ‘live’ copy, and point both the syllabus and their course management system (ex. WebCT) to one URL. That file could easily be updated via WebDav, obviating the need for multiple editing/uploading that hampers many current attempts to make living syllabi available.

Google is digitizing books from University of Michigan. UMich is a founding member of the “Making of America” project, a digital library of 19th century materials. What could make this partnership even better? Google Maps.
Here’s an example: take a classic work like “Illustrated New York” published in 1888. Search it for things that look like street addresses, then map those to a street map of New York City. Voila! That’s exactly what they have done at:
http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC57700799
Check it out.
(and if you find any other books at Google where this has been done, please let me know.)

East Asian Center for Informatics in Humanities
Proceedings available at:
http://coe21.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/tei-day/tei-day2006.html
Topics:
* TEI Day in Kyoto and activities of the TEI
OHYA Kazushi (Tsurumi University), Christian Wittern (Kyoto University)
* Why was and is TEI unknown in Japan and will it be better known there?
TUTIYA Syun (Chiba University)
* Languages with scarce textual materials and markup technologies
MATSUMURA Kazuto (University of Tokyo) abstract
* Marking up spoken dialog corpora
TUTIYA Syun (Chiba University), ITAHASHI Shuichi (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, National Institute of Informatics), OHSUGA Tomoko (National Institute of Informatics)
* Markup problems: Syntactical analysis and steps to their resolution
OHYA Kazushi (Tsurumi University) abstract
* TEI: An overview
Syd Bauman Brown University and Lou Burnard, Oxford University abstract
* Towards an internationalized and localized TEI
Sebastian Rahtz, Oxford University abstract
* XML mark-up of biographical and prosopographical data
Matthew Driscoll, University of Kopenhagen abstract
* Presenting TEI texts using topic maps
Conal Tuohy, New Zealand Electronic Text Centre abstract
* Exploring TEI XML documents with XQuery
James Cummings, Oxford Text Archive abstract

Middlebury College History Dept.’s announcement banning citing of Wikipedia in student papers has resulted in a flurry of articles and posts. While many teachers see this as a “teaching moment” others consider Wikipedia yet another teaching roadblock thrown up by technology. Questioning the Middlebury decision, these three teachers explain why Wikipedia offers a “teaching moment” rather than a roadblock:
Roy Rosenzweig suggests that history students need to learn the role of encyclopedias, either paper-bound or electronic, in research. (In the article he actually compares wikipedia to traditional encyclopedia entries on several topics, with surprising results.)
Jeremy Boggs is incorporating a section into his History 120 course on critical thinking and historical research that will use Wikipedia as examples. T. Mills Kelly has gone one better and has removed the textbook, which he faults for its encyclopedic “just the facts” approach, from his Western Civ class altogether. His arguments for doing so show that Middlebury and others are missing a great opportunity.
During the second week of class he has the students write an entry for Wikipedia. This entry is edited by other students in the class and then posted. At the end of the semester they write a reflection on what happened to their Wikipedia article over the course of the semester. Meanwhile, the remainder of the course is “centered on five historical monographs and the course is structured around a discussion of the differences between analytical history (in the monographs) and the “just the facts” history one finds in encyclopedias.”
On the Middlebury ban he says:
“To me this seems like such an odd position for historians to take, given that so many of the sources we work with every day are highly contested as to their veracity, their meaning, their provenance. Every time I open a folder in the archives and look at a source, I reflexively ask myself “Who created this?”, “Why did he/she/they create it?”, “Is this an original, a copy, or even a forgery?”, “Is this the complete source or was it edited and if so who might have edited it and why?” Responsible historians must ask these (and many more) questions every time we look at a source. But apparently, if we are to follow the policy of our colleagues at Middlebury, we do not need to teach this same reflexive scepticism to our students.”
Why? He continues:
“You see, I’m a firm believer that we can deny, deny, deny that new forms of content delivery are undermining all that we find comfortable, but denial just never seems to work in the end. I know (and so do you) that students are going to use Wikipedia regardless of what I tell them they can and can’t do. Even the folks at Middlebury admit this–students there are allowed to use Wikipedia for their research–they just can’t cite Wikipedia in their papers (explain that one to me). So, it seems to me that as educators we have an obligation to teach our students how to make appropriate use of the
resources they are using and I’m not sure how a ban on citation will teach them anything worth knowing.”
Cited refs:
Rosenzweig, Roy. “Can History Be Open Source?” Journal of American History.
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/93.1/rosenzweig.html
Jeremy Boggs discusses his use of Wikipedia for History 120 at George Mason:
http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/26659.html
T. Mills Kelly blog postings:
http://chnm.gmu.edu/history/faculty/kelly/blogs/edwired/?cat=14
Wikipedia’s own advice: “Wikipedia classroom assignments on the Rise”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-12-26/Wikipedia_and_academia

Text Analysis has long been a staple of the humanities computing diet. Its use, however, is not limited to scholars of literature. Here’s an example of how text analysis in a graphical presentation can provide some interesting data.
The New York Times has published a page that allows one to search President Bush’s State of the Union addresses for any keyword. It then displays the word count as a number and a graphic, and the location of the word in the speech. Clicking on the word’s location displays the word in context in its paragraph.
While this posting is making no political statements, it is easy to see how powerful visualizing words in this manner can be.
(Click for larger screen shot)

The page is at the NYTimes web site (free subscription required to view):
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/washington/20070123_STATEOFUNION.html?

What Is the Purpose of an Electronic Portfolio? Is the Answer the Key to Your Successful Implementation?
” As the director of Spelman’s newly-instituted Electronic Portfolio Project (SpEl.Folio), I’ve come to realize that a central question of our project is, “What is an electronic portfolio?” Is it a medium? Is it a genre, or a set of genres? Is it a delivery system? Is it an assessment tool? Is it a means to reflection and learning? Is it a savvy career move? Is it a flashy new container for the work students already are doing? Is it a pain in the butt?
Readers of SmartClassroom have thought about these questions, and probably have well-developed responses to them. But the audience that concerns me most is the students and teachers at Spelman, a historically black liberal-arts college for women. They sometimes seem to view the electronic portfolio as a flashy container and/or pain in the butt. It’s this audience, and the perceptions they ultimately form, on which the success of Spelman’s project relies. And, as frustrated as I might get when explaining for the hundredth time that an eFolio is not simply in Kathleen Yancey’s memorable phrase “print uploaded,” I must pay attention to these responses. For, if the users and authors of SpEl.Folio view it merely as a flashy container or pain in the butt (or both), that’s exactly what it will be. ”
Complete article at:
SmartClassroom

MITH Digital Dialogues
Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) has begun podcasting their Digital Dialogues seminar series:
http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/digitaldialogue/podcasts.php
Three available so far:
– Rice University’s Chuck Henry on scholarly electronic publishing,
– Brown University’s Vika Zafrin on collaboration in the digital humanities, and
– game studies from media theorist and author Stuart Moulthrop.

“Using Digital Images in Teaching and Learning: Perspectives from Liberal Arts Institutions,” details the results of an intensive study of digital image use by more than 400 faculty at 33 liberal arts colleges and universities in the Northeast.
Commissioned by Wesleyan University and the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE), the study focuses on the pedagogical implications of the widespread use of digital formats. But, while changes in teaching and learning were at the core of the study, related issues concerning supply, support and infrastructure rapidly became part of its fabric.
The report suggests how the teaching profession as a whole can better harness these new resources, and it makes recommendations for optimizing their deployment on campus.
The full report and an executive summary are available at Academic Commons, an online forum for new technologies and liberal education: