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Announcement: Transliteracies Work Plans

Planning Events and Documents in 2008-2009

In 2008-2009, Transliteracies continues to pursue its turn in the direction of “social computing” issues by bringing its three research working groups (Social Computing, History of Reading, New Reading Interfaces) into conjunction around the topic of the collective dimensions of information, reading, and annotation. Research activities this year include:

  • Planning and working meetings of the research working groups (including the graduate-student Bluesky Group associated with the Social Computing Group)
  • The Bluesky Innovation Competition on “Social Computing in 2020”
  • High-priority research reports on current humanities and other text-mining initiatives with an eye on suggesting additional social-computing functionality
  • Development of a plan for a graduate research and training program in social computing
  • A possible design workshop or charette related to the relation between expert knowledge (e.g., scholarly knowledge) and networked public knowledge (e.g., Wikipedia).
  • Additional lectures and workshops.
  • Possible collaboration with the Canadian Public Knowledge Project and or INKE.

    Current general-purpose planning documents include:

  • Planning slides for Transliteracies activities in 2008-2009 (year-four-plan-short.pdf)
  • Planning timeline for 2008-2009 (planning-timeline-2008-2009.doc)

Transliteracies Revised Work Plan, v. 1.1




— from Alan Liu, Project Director,
to Transliteracies Project Members

(Oct. 8, 2005)
The following is version 1.1 of the Transliteracies Revised Work Plan. Version 1.0 was posted for comment on 16 Sept. 2005. Suggestions from project participants have been folded into this version 1.1. Some of the most substantive of the suggestions are: encouraging faculty to supervise independent studies courses for graduate students wishing to participate in the project; adding a comparative case study to the supporting materials for the “White Paper”; additional detail on the mission of the project publications advisory group; additional known examples of graduate courses that will contribute to Transliteracies; and an example of faculty research interests feeding directly into “reports” for Transliteracies.
—-Best wishes, Alan        
Amtrak Coast Starlighter
Further down
the track

Go to Work Plan v1.1 (more…)

Transliteracies Revised Work Plan, v. 1.0

— A letter from Alan Liu, Project Director,
to Transliteracies Project Members

(Sept. 16, 2005)

Amtrak Coast Starlighter
On track

          Since late July, when I last wrote to you with the news that Transliteracies had officially received funding for five years as a UC Multi-campus Research Group (at $70,000 per year, including cost sharing), I have been engaged in consultations and budget-planning meetings to shape a revised work plan for the project. I want to share with you now the results of my planning so far. Below is a brief rationale followed by the draft of the revised work plan, which I expect will continue to evolve as I gather your feedback. I am interested in any thoughts you may have about the broad shape of the plan or about details of implementation (including how the plan might plug into your existing programs, courses, mentoring activities, and research at your campus). In the near future, I will follow up by asking who might be interested in taking on specific tasks in the plan, whether you can nominate graduate students for the research assistant positions, and whether you are teaching any graduate courses that might feed into the project.           I know that we are all busy ramping up for the beginning of the new academic year, so short, unsystematic responses are just as welcome as fuller ones. While it won’t be possible to fold every suggestion into the plan without losing focus, I have found the process of thinking about everyone’s suggestions enormously productive so far.           (You can email responses to me or use the comment box at the bottom of the document. Use the “forgotten your password?” feature in the login if you have forgotten your password as a project member.)

—-Best wishes, Alan        
Go to Revised Work Plan (more…)

UC Multicampus Research Group (MRG) Proposal, May 2, 2005

Download MRG proposal:
transliteracies-mrg-proposal-abbrev.pdf

This proposal for a UC Office of the President Humanities Multicampus Research Group (MRG) award (maximum grant: $35,000/year for five years from UC Office of the President, plus equivalent cost-sharing from UC Santa Barbara) is the first of an anticipated series of grant applications for the Transliteracies Project. For this particular proposal (see MRG proposal call), only University of California faculty are listed as project members—though in the future Transliteracies plans to recruit researchers from other institutions as well as possibly to affiliate with other research programs. Also, due to the nature of this proposal, the rationale statement emphasizes the perspective of, and benefits to, the humanities. Future grant applications—whether for overall implementation of the project’s intended technology initiative or for specific technological, social-science, or humanities aspects of the project—will expand upon other perspectives.

Participants in the 2005 Conference: UCSB Conversation Roundtables on Online Reading are asked to read this grant proposal before the event’s closing planning session. The proposal will serve as the basis of discussion and revision at the planning session.