Hi all,<br>
<br>
I tend to agree on Martin Holmes point. Apparently however, he's
talking from a luxurious position. Wow, having your own Humanities
Computing Centre, with stable funding and reliable job opportunities
for researcher/programmers. Brilliant, I'm truly jealous! In The
Netherlands (and I guess in other countries too) we're only having a
toehold on stable funding for computational aspects in Humanities. Most
programming, research and development in Humanities Computing is still
ad hoc and moreover ad hoc funded. Imagine: lone researchers that
somewhere along the way grasped the potentials of information
technology cowboy coding away. Do not even think of stable coding
environments, shared languages, good programming practices and
standards compliance! (Okay, I might be exaggerating somewhat for the
benefit of clearness:)<br>
<br>
It's of course only in proving the added value of computational
approaches that we should be able to gain firmer ground. But in that
case it would clearly help us a lot when building tools would also
benefit one's academic esteem.<br>
<br>
Having said that, I totally disagree with Martin's last point. Open
sourcing is not about abandoning your source code. It's about giving
the Humanities community insight in what you are doing for benefit of
academic review and control. Research based on computation should
always be reproducible and controllable by peers. Also peers should be
able to do code review to control the exact and correct working of any
algorithm. That can only be accomplished by open sourcing your code
bases. <br>
<br>
y.s.,<br>
Joris van Zundert<br>
<br><br>