dm-l August 2005

dm-l@uleth.ca

12 participants
8 discussions

ACLS OPENS COMPETITION FOR DIGITAL INNOVATION FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM
by Daniel Paul O'Donnell 15 Sep '05

15 Sep '05

**EXTRA! THE LATEST NEWS FROM THE ACLS**=20 =20 =20 ACLS OPENS COMPETITION FOR DIGITAL INNOVATION FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM =20 The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is pleased to announce its new Digital Innovation Fellowship program, in support of digitally based research projects in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. These fellowships, created with the generous help of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, are intended to support an academic year dedicated to work on a major scholarly project of a digital character that advances humanistic studies and best exemplifies the integration of such research with use of computing, networking, and other information technology-based tools. The online application for the fellowship program is located at http://ofa.acls.org <http://ofa.acls.org/> ; applications must be completed by November 10, 2005 (decisions to be announced in late March 2006). =20 This is the first national fellowship program to recognize and reward humanistic scholarship in the digital sphere, and to help establish standards for judging the quality, innovation, and utility of such research. Many scholars have been working in the humanities for years with such tools as digital research archives, new media representations of extant data, and innovative databases-and now the ACLS sees an important opportunity to start identifying and providing incentive for distinctive work, on a national basis. "Information technology can be the means for scholars to answer new and old questions that have so far resisted our curiosity and our effort. This program will support a rising generation of scholars in making exactly that kind of progress," says James O'Donnell, provost of Georgetown University, Chair of the ACLS Executive Committee of Delegates, and author of Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace (1998). =20 Up to five Digital Innovation Fellowships will be awarded in this competition year, for tenure beginning in 2006-2007. As this program aims to provide the means for pursuing digitally-based scholarly projects, the fellowship includes a stipend of up to $55,000 to allow an academic year's leave from teaching, as well as project funds of up to $25,000 for purposes such as access to tools and personnel for digital production, collaborative work with other scholars and with humanities or computing research centers, and the dissemination and preservation of projects. =20 The ACLS criteria for judging applications include the project's intellectual ambitions and technological underpinnings, likely contribution as a digital scholarly work to humanistic study, satisfaction of technical requirements for a successful research project, degree and significance of preliminary work; potential for promoting teamwork and collaboration (where appropriate), and articulation with local infrastructure at the applicant's home institution. =20 Applicants must be citizens or permanent residents of the United States as of the application deadline date and must hold a Ph.D. degree conferred prior to the application deadline. However, established scholars who can demonstrate the equivalent of the Ph.D. in publications and professional experience may also qualify. =20 =20 Applications for the 2005-06 ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship Program Deadline: November 10, 2005 Contact: American Council of Learned Societies, 633 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Phone: (212) 697-1505 E-mail: sfisher(a)acls.org Web: www.acls.org/difguide.htm

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Re: [dm-l] Should Medievalist Graduate Programs require a humanities computing course?
by Dan ＠ PDA 02 Sep '05

02 Sep '05

I think Abdullah and James are talking about two extremes of the question I was asking. Before posting, I took a look around and saw *graduate* humanities courses on how to use word and frontpage (which seems to me to be a misuse of resources) and on quite detailed aspects of advanced HumCom. But what prompted the question was the sense that a conceptual, transferable understanding of things like markup, networking, database design and the like might now be as necessary as research methods are now thought to be in many places. So many medievalists are now proposing digital projects of one kind or another. How one thinks about a new project depends to a large extent on what one already understands the possibilities to be. Since (unlike research methods) a conceptual understanding of how the magic box works is not something one can necessarily expect to pick up in the department by osmosis, my question is really whether a conceptual overview might not be increasingly essential. The focus might be different that what a CompSci or IT department would offer, since we don't need to turn everybody into a programmer; but it would be nice if more in our field had a realistic understanding of what options are available as they plan new projects. There is BTW an article on how CompSci departments are moving away from this in today's New York Times. -dan -- Daniel Paul O'Donnell [/pda] Department of English University of Lethbridge Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4 Canada Tel. +1 (403) 329-2377 Fax +1 (403) 382-7191 E-mail daniel.odonnell(a)uleth.ca Web http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/ -----Original Message----- From: James Cummings Date: 22/8/05 23:40 To: Digital Medievalist Community mailing list Subj: Re: [dm-l] Should Medievalist Graduate Programs require a humanities computing course? Abdullah Alger wrote: > Anyway, now that I am at the University of Manchester I see that there is > an enormous gap that needs to be filled. Some of the students here cannot > even copy a file correctly or do simple tasks in Word. We do have some > courses that enable some students to understand some basic concepts, but > if you ask them what HTML is or how to write a web page there will be > question marks written all over their faces. Is it really the job of humanities departments to provide this education? These tasks are basic computer literacy which has little to do with 'Humanities Computing' per se. Almost every university in the UK has some provision for IT training should students require it. Even at the University of Manchester where you are students can take courses via the IT Services: http://www.itservices.manchester.ac.uk/trainingcourses/ Surely what you should be doing on any course which requires basic IT skills (or heaven forfend more advanced skills!) is stating this as a prerequisite and directing students to the IT Services to receive training in these skills. If teaching a course (say on use of XML for producing critical editions or general text encoding) I don't think that we should feel any compunction in listing basic familiarity with HTML as a prerequisite, as long as students have access to training in that area. (I'm not suggesting you say they must have taken specific course X, simply that they are aware that it is a prerequisite and so they should have learnt it somewhere.) It just seems to be an inefficient waste of resources for us to duplicate training that is already available to most students. Great, offer topics which use a higher level of technology to drive the learning process, but where it isn't the end in itself (teaching palaeography on computer is a good example of this). If increasingly all the interesting courses list 'At least basic computer literacy' as a prerequisite then students will start to make sure they have these skills. But of course, I was using mainframes at the age of 8, so my perspective may vary from yours. ;-) -James _______________________________________________ Digital Medievalist Project Homepage: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org Journal (Spring 2005-): http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal.cfm RSS (announcements) server: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/rss/rss2.cfm Wiki: http://sql.uleth.ca/dmorgwiki/index.php Change membership options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l Submit RSS announcement: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/newitem.cfm Contact editorial Board: digitalmedievalist(a)uleth.ca dm-l mailing list dm-l(a)uleth.ca http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l

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Should Medievalist Graduate Programs require a humanities computing course?
by Dan O'Donnell 22 Aug '05

22 Aug '05

On a number of occasions recently, I have been struck by the basic ignorance of many professional medievalists concerning developments in computing that affect their daily lives. By this I don't mean the latest revisions of TEI P5 and how this will affect the markup of unclear textual variants. Rather I mean much more basic issues such as what XML is and how it is different from HTML or Word; or the relationship between fonts and characters. This has been striking to me because it is affecting basic aspects of these medievalists' work. You don't have to be a 'computer person' to benefit from Unicode, for example, and I have been surprised how many often quite complicated projects seem to be completely ignorant of fundamental aspects of humanities computing that would greatly simplify their work. So my question is this: should there be a basic humanities computing course required of beginning graduate students similar to the research methods course so many universities require or recommend? What should such a course contain? Looking around on the internet, I tend to see two types: very practical courses that concentrate on using current software and techniques (e.g. Macromedia, Excel, Word, etc.) and quite advanced courses that focus on the trivia of building standards compliant editions. I'm wondering if there perhaps is not a need for a more conceptual approach: what is Unicode? what is XML? structural vs. display markup? how the web works. database design. I realise these are not topics that speak to many graduate students in our field--who are, after all presumably interested in their disciplinary subject. But given how many projects now include an electronic component, it seems to me that we may be rapidly approaching the time when a medievalist should be expected to have a basic conceptual grasp of contemporary humanities computing. What do others think? I'm thinking of asking the same question on Medtext and, phrased more generally, on Humanist. But before I do, I thought I'd ask here. I suspect the issue is more important for medievalists and classicists than it is for scholars in more modern periods: more of us seem to work more closely with things that can be digitised. Or is that discipline prejudice? -d -- Daniel Paul O'Donnell Director, Digital Medievalist Project (http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/) Associate Professor of English University of Lethbridge Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4 Tel. +1 (403) 329-2377 Fax. +1 (403) 382-7191 (@webmail)

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TEI and concurrent hierarchies
by Marjorie Burghart 22 Aug '05

22 Aug '05

Dear DMs, Maybe this should be better posted on the TEI list, but I hope some of you could have interesting experience in the field ! I'm encoding an ongoing project in TEI XML, and I'm encountering problems to represent concurrent hierarchies. I'd like to markup some rhetorical elements, that can either be contained in paragraphes (<p> tags), or contain <p> tags, depending on their length and importance. Therefore, I can't use <seg>, for instance. >From a "logical" point of view, it seems to me that <div> tags would be perfect (with a convenient type), but in this case I would have a problem of concurrent hierarchies (possible overlapping of <div> and <p> elements). The solutions proposed in the current TEI Guidelines for the handling of multiple hierarchies would work, BUT I'm afraid they would fairly complicate the processing of the encoded texts with standard XML tools. I thought about customizing the DTD to make <p> tags empty, which would be convenient for my purpose, but the markup wouldn't be TEI compliant any more (as CDATA is not allowed as child of div or body)... In a way, it seems to be the problem too for, eg, the quite seducing HORSE approach recently discussed by S. Bauman reguarding TEI (http://www.mulberrytech.com/Extreme/Proceedings/html/2005/Bauman01/EML2005B…) ? Thanks in advance for your help and experience (especially concerning the efficiency of processing the marked texts) ! Marjorie -- Marjorie Burghart Université Lyon II

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Re: [dm-l] Should Medievalist Graduate Programs require a humanities computing course?
by Larry Swain 20 Aug '05

20 Aug '05

> > Well, of course I'd like to see such classes taught in every > doctoral program -- but from what i know of such programs, I think > most of them would oppose it. Why, it would take time away from > seminars! (sheesh) > > While I understand your concern about e.g. xml vs html - and I know > it is ONLY an "e.g.": at least in the old days medievalists were as > knowledgeable in computer-humanities materials and procedures as > anyone, and probably more so. What has happened ? In the wild and wooly days, there were few specialists in computers: if you wanted it done, you did yourself. While computing has become more general, real computing use for research has become more specialized, more tools need to be learned etc. What has happened? Specialization for one. Just a thought. -- _______________________________________________ Surf the Web in a faster, safer and easier way: Download Opera 8 at http://www.opera.com Powered by Outblaze

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Re: [dm-l] Should Medievalist Graduate Programs require a humanities computing course?
by Norman Hinton 20 Aug '05

20 Aug '05

Well, of course I'd like to see such classes taught in every doctoral program -- but from what i know of such programs, I think most of them would oppose it. Why, it would take time away from seminars! (sheesh) While I understand your concern about e.g. xml vs html - and I know it is ONLY an "e.g.": at least in the old days medievalists were as knowledgeable in computer-humanities materials and procedures as anyone, and probably more so. What has happened ?

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[Fwd: [MEDTEXTL] OCR-software]
by Dan O'Donnell 18 Aug '05

18 Aug '05

---------------------------- Original Message ---------------------------- Subject: [MEDTEXTL] OCR-software From: "Margarete Springeth" <margarete.springeth(a)SBG.AC.AT> Date: Thu, August 18, 2005 3:41 pm To: MEDTEXTL(a)listserv.uiuc.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hello list, the team running the Middle High German Conceptual Database (MHDBDB) is desperately looking for a new text recognition software (OCR) that is well suited for scanning primarily 19th century printed editions. Our old software is still running on DOS-basis and can no longer be adapted to our new hardware/software configuration. The commercially available OCR-packages (like OmniPage, ReadIris, ABBY, etc.) are not well suited for our purposes, since they are only working well with newer print media. We would be well served if someone could supply us with a Windows version of something like Kurzweil, Optopus, ProLector or a similar software that has a very high learning capacity for fonts. Can anyone help us out or direct us to a source that could supply us with what we are looking for??? Price is also a factor, of course! Thanks, Margarete Springeth & Klaus M. Schmidt. ------------------------------------------------------------- Mittelhochdeutsche Begriffsdatenbank (MHDBDB) Dr. Margarete Springeth Universitaet Salzburg Akademiestrasse 22 A - 5020 Salzburg Tel. +43 / 662 / 8044 - 4347 Fax: +43 / 662 / 6389 - 4347 mailto:margarete.springeth@sbg.ac.at http://www.sbg.ac.at/ger/people/springeth.htm -- Daniel Paul O'Donnell Director, Digital Medievalist Project (http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/) Associate Professor of English University of Lethbridge Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4 Tel. +1 (403) 329-2377 Fax. +1 (403) 382-7191 (@webmail)

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[Fwd: Re-visiting Romanesque sculpture in Britain and Ireland]
by James Cummings 10 Aug '05

10 Aug '05

FYI -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re-visiting Romanesque sculpture in Britain and Ireland Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2005 11:13:10 +0100 From: AHDS Visual Arts <info(a)VADS.AHDS.AC.UK> Reply-To: AHDS Visual Arts <AHDS-VISUALARTS(a)JISCMAIL.AC.UK> To: AHDS-VISUALARTS(a)JISCMAIL.AC.UK Romanesque stone sculpture pervades buildings throughout Britain and Ireland. It can be found in parish churches and cathedrals, houses and halls, castles and museums throughout these isles. Rarely, however, do we get to spend time actually looking at this rich part of our heritage in detail. A new resource of over 10,000 images is now available via AHDS Visual Arts that lets you do just that. The Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland (CRSBI) is an electronic archive of British and Irish Romanesque stone sculpture. It exists to photograph and record all the surviving sculpture, making this important part of British and Irish heritage available over the internet. The significance of this evolving project as an authoritative scholarly resource cannot be understated as significant quantities of previously unrecorded material have come to light and there are many examples of sculpture that are being recorded, catalogued and photographed in an academic context for the first time. Records of Romanesque sculpture in Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Cambridgeshire (including Ely Cathedral), Cheshire, Hampshire, Huntingdonshire, Kent, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Sussex, Warwickshire and Worcestershire are already available online. CRSBI complements other AHDS Visual Arts’ architecture and sculpture based resources including the Exeter Cathedral Keystones & Carvings: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculptures & their Polychromy collection (http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/collections/ECKC.html) and the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association collection which contains images and textual information on over 2,300 public sculptures and monuments in Britain (http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/collections/PMSA.html). For more information on CRSBI please go to: http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/collections/CRSBI.html View the CRSBI collection and the entire AHDS Visual Arts catalogue at http://visualarts.ahds.ac.uk -- Dr James Cummings, Oxford Text Archive, University of Oxford James dot Cummings at oucs dot ox dot ac dot uk

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dm-l August 2005