Hope's Centre-Table

Digichromatography: Restoring Prokudin-Gorskii’s Photographs: 100 year old Color Photographs
According to the site:
“Born in St. Petersburg and educated as a chemist, Prokudin-Gorskii devoted his career to the advancement of photography. In the early 1900s, he developed an ingenious technique of taking colour photographs. The same object was captured in black and white on glass plate negatives, using red, green and blue filters. He then presented these images in colour in slide lectures using a light-projection system involving the same three filters.”
These beautiful images have a strange effect: we are so used to seeing old B&W photos that we envision the world they depict in those sepia or grey tones. To see the same age in vibrant color makes it, in some ways, less realistic–my reaction is that this must be a modern reproduction/reenactment. But then when you really look at the images and look for the details–amazing. Even the digital reproductions found at this site are wonderful.

Coming in November. Looks to be quite useful. Have sent in request to library to order it.
A Companion to Digital Humanities – Book Information

A new journal that features research and practice in IT in education. Looks like it’s a blog, too. Innovate – October/November 2004

‘Recasting the Past: Digital Histories’
The aim of the conference is to explore how the ever increasing number and variety of digital and electronic sources have changed the way in which history, and historical sources, are created, selected, researched, taught, written, presented and used. Even historians who do not use computer methodologies are likely to encounter sources in digital form or have their access to analogue sources mediated electronically. Whilst the digital form can transcend the constraints of time and space it brings new problems and challenges to historians and historical research.
AHC-UK/RHS 2004 Conference Main Page

A Review of Richard Lanham’s The Electronic Word

From Steve:
The September 24th issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education is running it’s Information Technology column as a special pull out section focusing on Open Source issues in the university IT enviornment. They include a catalog of 18 open source projects – a list that leaves out some of the most interesting areas of development (e.g. blogging, instant messaging, p2p collaboration, etc).
Course Management
+ moodle : http://moodle.org : A software package to help professors build Web sites for their courses. Its developers say Moodle is better suited than other course-management systems to help foster a “social constructionist” style of teaching, which focuses on having students learn actively or teach one another by working in groups. The software’s interface is available in 40 languages.
+ Pachyderm : http://www.nmc.org/projects/lo/pachyderm.shtml : A software package designed to help users build flashy online “museum” exhibits or course Web pages. The resulting Web pages can be used within course-management systems like Blackboard or Sakai.
+ Sakai : http://www.sakaiproject.org : A comprehensive software system to help professors build course Web sites. The project is led by four universities: Indiana University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and Stanford University. It is supported by a $2.4-million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Sakai’s leaders have formed a partnership with uPortal, so that programmers for both projects will try to make their software work together seamlessly.
Libraries and Archives
+ DSpace : http://www.dspace.org : Software for setting up digital library collections on the Web. DSpace is used mainly by universities to create “institutional repositories,” where research by an institution’s faculty members is stored and usually available free to others. Library officials hope such repositories will offer an alternative to traditional scholarly publishing in high-priced journals.
+ E-Prints : http://www.eprints.org : Allows users to create their own online archives of data, called “self archives,” to be shared with others.
+ Fedora : http://www.fedora.info : A digital-repository management system developed by Cornell University and the University of Virginia supported by $2.4-million in grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
+ Kepler : http://kepler.cs.odu.edu : A system designed to help build small archives of academic papers or other documents in a way that is easily searchable by library search engines. Developed by Old Dominion University Digital Library Research Group, with a grant from the National Science Foundation.
+ Digital Document Assembly Kit : no URL yet : A tool to create and view electronic books that include images and other rich media. Being developed at the University of Southern California’s Institute for the Future of the Book, with a $1.4-million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Expected in fall 2005.
Web Portals
+ uPortal : http://www.uportal.org : Software that helps colleges set up customized campus portals, which are Web gateways for students and professors. A typical campus portal gives students a one-stop Web page to access information on their courses, transcripts, financial records, campus announcements, notices of events, and links to other campus resources. A nonprofit organization called the Java Architectures Special Interest Group, known as JA-SIG, which promotes the use of the Java programming language in higher education. The software was developed with a $770,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. uPortal’s leaders have formed a partnership with Sakai, and programmers in both projects will try to make their software work together.
+ CampusEAI ‘Portlets’ : http://www.campuseai.org : A set of modular software plug-ins for campus portal software, called “portlets,” which add features to existing campus Web services. The abbreviation in the name stands for Enterprise Application Integration.
Student Portfolios
+ Open Source Portfolio Initiative (E-Portfolio) : http://www.theospi.org : The framework for an institution to offer students or others a tool to build personal portfolios of their work on the Web. It is designed as a way for college students to track and showcase their academic and extracurricular work so that prospective employers and graduate schools can review the candidate’s output. Being developed by the University of Minnesota, the University of Delaware, and the R-Smart Group, a Phoenix-based company that offers technical support for users of open-source software.
Productivity Tools
+ Chandler : http://www.osafoundation.org/Chandler_in_higher_ed_TOC_3002_05_13.htm : A personal-information manager that provides and integrates e-mail browsing, calendar, contact management and task management, notes, and instant messages. Being developed by the Open Source Applications Foundation, a nonprofit group developing open-source software that was begun in 2001. The project has won a $1.5-million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and $1.25-million from the 25 colleges and universities that are part of the Common Solutions Group, an informal organization supporting technology in higher education.
+ LionShare : http://lionshare.its.psu.edu/main : A peer-to-peer file-sharing network that allows organizing and searching of academic information within groups. From the Pennsylvania State University, with a $1.1-million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Administrative Tools
+ Kualu : http://www.kuali.org : A financial-information system for colleges designed to help an institution manage accounting, billing, e-commerce, budgeting, and other campus functions. Expected in 2006.
Security
+ Shibboleth : http://shibboleth.internet2.edu : Provides “authentication” for Web sites, the mechanism that asks users for an ID and password and allows only authorized users to gain access to the sites.
+ Pubcookie : http://www.pubcookie.org : Creates a common authentication system for different Web-server platforms. Being developed by the University of Washington, with support from Carnegie Mellon and the University of Wisconsin, as well as an Internet2 grant.
+ Signet : http://middleware.internet2.edu/signet : Works with authentication software to help determine how much information on a Web site each registered user should have access to. From Stanford University and the National Science Foundation’s National Middleware Initiative.
Scientific Computing
+ Globus : http://www.globus.org : Provides technologies needed to build computational grids that allow software to integrate instruments, displays, and computational and informational resources. Argonne National Laboratory’s Mathematics and Computer Science Division, the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, the University of Chicago’s Distributed Systems Laboratory, the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and the Swedish Center for Parallel Computers.
http://chronicle.com
Section: Information Technology
Volume 51, Issue 5, Page B5
http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v51/i05/05b00501.htm (subscription required)

Flogged by the blogs
By Tony Blankley
Sunday, September 19, 2004
http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/opinion/columnists/guests/ s_252066.html
Once said British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead: “The major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.” That observation came to mind as I watched Dan Rather struggle violently like a proud old marlin caught on a hook by the young Internet fishermen.
Twisting and turning, the great fish only drives the hook in deeper. Plunging and rising, it only exhausts itself — while the exuberant fishermen carefully manage the line and grab for the powerful hand hook with which they will end the great fish’s sea-life.
I like a good fish dinner, but I’ve never cared much for fishing, as I hate to see a noble creature in its death agony. Yet that is what we are observing. It is Dan Rather and CBS News, through their failed effort to prove the legitimacy of their forged Bush National Guard documents, who are being revealed as hapless, helpless victims of an anarchic, swarming, overwhelming Internet blog technology. Soon, other great news institutions inevitably will be revealed for their inadequate capacity to fully report the news.
As in all revolutions, first, the old order must be destroyed, then we will learn both the strengths and the shortcomings of the new order. We’re now getting a glimpse of the Internet bloggers’ strength.
For three quarters of a century, when CBS News entered a fight it had been an unfair mismatch for its adversary. The credibility, research capacity and gate-keeping monopoly of the network would overwhelm its victim. It was breathtaking to see, moment by moment, the bloggers’ advantage.
CBS did what it has always done — produced and broadcasted a highly polished segment in which the argument was magisterially framed to their advantage, with the facts favorable to It cherry-picked for presentation. Annoying contrary facts were ignored. Carefully edited, prime-time quality interviews of their supposedly authoritative expert witnesses were laid in. The whole package was opened, narrated and concluded with dignified contempt for their victim by their star asset, uber-anchor Dan Rather.
Then the bloggers went to work. From the four corners of humanity, experts started deconstructing the “truth” that CBS had presented. Who knew that there are experts who specialize just in the history of IBM Selectric typing balls or the kerning capacity of computer printing?
As each of these experts added their information to one blog, other bloggers would monitor it, pass it on, add a new fact, reorganize the analysis and synthesize new information. If new information proved wrong, it was corrected by yet another expert in the blogosphere. Mistakes were cheerfully admitted and instantly corrected. People who had filled out such forms 30 years ago added their analysis.
Both technical and historic information constantly came in — ever-increasing the fullness of understanding on the topic. It was like watching time-lapse photography of a cell dividing and growing. It was as if the very mechanism for establishing truth was a living, pulsating force.
CBS had one handwriting expert against the bloggers’ legions of subspecialists. It was pathetic. The bloggers’ advantage is that the experts find the bloggers. There are just millions of smart people all over the world sitting at their computers, ready to join the quest. The bloggers themselves often add powerful analytical capacity to the process. They picked CBS’s story as clean as a school of piranhas would pick clean some poor water buffalo that wandered into their river.
Bloggers have had this capacity for a few years. We had a taste of it in the Trent Lott affair. But what has made the bloggers a strategic component of national politics is that their readership now includes many senior reporters, editors and producers in the old media. There are enough self-respecting old media journalists who simply cannot see the cornucopia of valid information on the Internet and then ignore it in their reporting.
Instead of the bloggers only reaching the few million of their readers, they are reaching the larger mass public through the old media. The old media is becoming complicit in its own demise, just as some French aristocrats supported the revolution against their own ancient regime.
Count me a supporter of the revolution. But revolutions are messy affairs where much of value is lost as well as gained.
Tony Blankley is editorial page editor of The Washington Times.