Hope's Centre-Table

News Update
Humanities Computing ‘Wizard’ Honored for Scholarship
The National Humanities Center, a private institute for advanced study in the humanities, awarded Willard McCarty its 2006 Richard W. Lyman Award in recognition of McCarty’s contribution to the field of “digital humanities.” The $25,000 award honors Richard Lyman, who was president of Stanford University from 1970-1980.
McCarty is a reader in humanities computing at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College London. He is a theoretician of the area of “digital humanities” and founder of the “Humanist,” a Web site that brings together scholars working on the confluence of computing and the humanities. In his latest book, Humanities Computing, McCarty makes the case for elevating the field as a separate academic discipline. “We tend to construe computing in the humanities in terms we understand – as an efficient helper or mechanical aid to existing fields like history, literature, or philosophy,” he said.
James O’Donnell, provost of Georgetown University and chair of the award selection committee, called McArty, “a doer, a thinker, and perhaps a wizard.” O’Donnell added that McArty’s “explorations in the practical and theoretical dimensions of the application of information technology to the problems of humanistic learning have made him a widely recognized international leader.”

External Research & Programs: Tablet PC Technology, Curriculum, and Higher Education 2005 RFP Awards
BSAD and S of Engineering have received a grant from MiscroSoft re: Tablets with which they will, in part “ocus groups will be conducted in BSAD and SoE to ascertain what about the tablets is effective and why. These results will be disseminated within UVM through workshops and nationally through conferences and journals in both disciplines. This work will also develop training seminars on Tablet PCs and associated software. Both schools expect to gather a better understanding of methodologies for using Tablet PC technology.”

Bodies/Technologies II – Schedule
Author of E-crit (see previous posting), here is the syllabus for O’Gorman’s recent course:
“While tech corporations sing the praises of our increasingly “mobile” way of life, America is actually growing more immobile each day. . . Perhaps the single greatest cause of this immobility is the screen interface for TV’s and computers. . . This course asks you to explore strategies for re-embodying information. That is, how can the body can be reintegrated into communications technology? We will answer this question by developing experimental projects that draw on the metaphor of “running.”
Also fun because he uses “class content time” to teach them several apps (hooray) and offers the opportunity to display good final projects in a “real life” venue.

UTP Publishing
“In E-Crit, Marcel O�Gorman takes an ambitious and provocative look at how university scholarship, pedagogy, and curricula might be transformed to suit a digital culture.”

Humanities Computing
Here’s my public Google Notebook of Humanities Computing Resources. A beginning…

Scan This Book! – New York Times
The article discusses the global library, scanning all books, etc., and how search and connections will remake the knowledge of the world.
Kevin Kelly is the “senior maverick” at Wired magazine and author of “Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World” and other books.