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Announcement: General Discussion Forum

This is the general discussion forum for the Transliteracies Project. Project members and conference participants can log in to write postings (which by default will appear under this “category” of “Discussion Forum”). Other registered users can log in to add “comments” to existing postings. See Posting FAQ. In the future, there may be sub-categories for discussion set up for the project’s various working groups and other special purposes.

For Conference 2005 (UCSB Conversation Roundtables on Online Reading), users can also comment/reply to the seed questions for the three roundtables. (Also see Roundtable 3 Online Audience Experiment.)

Announcement: Discussion Map


Roundtable 3 Onliine Audience Experiment
General Discussion Forum
Conference 2005 Seed Questions
Conference 2005: Project  Planning Session discussion

Conference 2005 Planning/Critique Session Notes

Planning/Critique Session: Saturday June 18, 2005 McCune Room, UCSB Moderator: Alan Liu

The following notes were taken by James J. Hodge [PDF version of notes]

         [See also the notes taken by Judith Green at the session]

[Disclaimer: These are notes, not a verbatim transcript, of comments at the planning session.]

I. Introductory Comments: Alan Liu, English, UC Santa Barbara:

II. Critiques and Suggestions from Conference Participants and Members of Audience:

Jerome J. McGann, English, University of Virginia *At UVA since 1993–the last 3 years especially–developed 3 kinds of software designed to investigate text and other cultural practices, e.g. Ivanhoe *The great demon: “talk ideas to death and nothing will get doneâ€? *It was a “good thingâ€? that UVA had no money from 1993—2001; one needs money in order to build, not to talk *Advice 1: hire programmers from outside the academy because they are goal directed, work familiarly with timelines and deadlines *Focus made a big difference in deciding what to do with money. *Advice 2: “Don’t spent a penny on conferences.â€? *Question of audience: “what audience are we aiming at?â€? Elementary, post-secondary? UVA focused on post-secondary *Raise money: go after primary and secondary education. Rationale: it is harder to build tools for post-secondary education

(more…)

Results of Online Experiment During Roundtable 3

The online experiment during Roundtable 3 on “Reading as a Social Practice” - in which audience members wrote their thoughts to the conference site during the panel discussion- generated 195 posts from 17 users in 90 minutes, ranging from comments that engaged with the panelists’ remarks to those that reflected on the features of the online experiment itself. One member of the panel (Kevin Almeroth) also actively participated in the online discussion, while a few other panelists were able to read the discussion as it developed—leading to interesting flows of communication between the “backchannel” conversation and the “front channel.” The online discussion was displayed on the screen during the Q&A session after the panel. (See transcript of the online discussion).
      Warren Sacks, who earlier in the day presented his Agonistics project (a visualization filter and reading tool for Usenet or blog discussions), produced an Agonistics visualization of the Roundtable 3 online discussion immediately after the event. (See visualization.)

Roundtable 3 Online Audience Experiment

During Roundtable 3 on “Reading as a Social Practice,” conference participants and members of the audience who have wireless-enabled laptops with them are invited to participate in an experiment in the social practice of conference-going by using the “commentsâ€? section of the Roundtable 3 page to post reflections, questions, or reactions in real time during the roundtable conversation. While these comments will not be displayed on the screen simultaneously with the roundtable conversation (because it would be distracting), they will be shown during the question-and-answer period. They will also remain on the conference site as a record of the audience’s engagement with the roundtable. If you wish to participate in this experiment, please ask the conference organizers during the conference for instructions on logging on to the conference wireless network and add your comments during Roundtable 3.

programming (re: seed questions)

some project programming ideas that come to mind: video conferencing and other ways to foster collaborations, but also the various potential uses of and extensions to the website – which could include, in a modest but pointed way, using, “curating,” and evaluating a variety of text manipulation software, collaborative writing tools (wiki, twiki, orkut, knexus, drupal…), text visualization (text arc, txtkit, and poetry machine et al.), text to sound conversion, etc. (and then, there is metamix, or wimp) – there are lots of different solutions on offer. one I am checking out these days is super collider, an object oriented programming environment for real-time audio and video processing… the learning curve is a bit steep, but it might appeal to some tech-savvy participants in various ways. [peter krapp]

seed questions proposal

dear alan et al,

i write briefly from london to say that, had i been dante noto, i would have written in approximately the same way to criticize the proposal alan made for funding.

and the issue reflects a disfeature of our current humanities disciplines at large, which labor in an excess of conferencing and shop talk.

to reframe shelley’s practical argument a bit, we need to imagine that which we know.

digital technology for the humanities is now quite well developed. we know enough at this point to be able to develop—to conceive and build—useful online resources of many kinds. better and more useful applications can’t come until we actually start to build what we can now imagine, and use the experience to go further. as we know, interesting resources are already being developed in lots of places. but there’s little coordination (which doesn’t need conferencing to be brought about) and little penetration to humanities educators at large (most still work almost entirely in bibliographical frameworks and traditions).

i think we’d do a good and useful thing if everyone coming to this conference prepared a set of two or three digital applications or initiatives—things actually in development at any stage—that seem important and relevant to digital humanities. and annotate each item on the list with a commentary on why you think its development is important as well as how you think development might be promoted and extended.

jerry mcgann