Valence is a software program written by Ben Fry to dynamically render complex information as a visual, three-dimensional, and relational representation. It has been produced and installed in multiple versions that take various inputs. The original version, which ‘reads’ novels, was installed in 2001 at Ars Electronica in Austria and appeared in the film Minority Report. The latest version, which visualizes genetic information, was installed in 2002 at the Whitney Biennial in New York and appeared in the film Hulk. Images and quick time movies of various instantiations of Valence can be viewed at Fry’s website

Starter Links: Ben Fry’s home page

Summary:
Valence is a software program written by Ben Fry to dynamically render complex information as a visual, three-dimensional, and relational representation. It has been produced and installed in multiple versions that take various inputs. The original version, which ‘reads’ novels, was installed in 2001 at Ars Electronica in Austria and appeared in the film Minority Report. The latest version, which visualizes genetic information, was installed in 2002 at the Whitney Biennial in New York and appeared in the film Hulk. Images and quick time movies of various instantiations of Valence can be viewed at Fry’s website. (more…)

In the Transliteracies’ research clearing house we’ve been seeing many research reports that focus on reading as a collective activity that brings together a group of readers to one reading locus in the online or new media environment. In such spaces multiple readers have access to the same text–they read it, they respond to it, and they help write it, either explicitly in the case of wikipedia or indirectly (or, at least, differently!) in the case of blog platforms. This is extremely interesting, but I am equally intrigued by the way that reading is not just a collective activity, but a collecting one, a process that not only allows people to come together and gather as a group of readers, but one that also involves the act of gathering, sorting, sifting, organizing, processing, and editing information.

I would like to focus here on precisely this: reading as a collective and collecting activity, reading as gathering. By looking at a few case studies and excerpts from my own research reports, I wish to explore, however briefly, the way collective and collecting reading shift in the online environment and to consider what happens when the act of collecting or selecting becomes an automated or partially automated part of the reading process. (more…)

Call for Papers: Sponsored by the Open University and the Institute of English Studies at the University of London.

Title: “Evidence of Reading, Reading the Evidence.”

Description:Studies centred on the history of reading have proliferated in the last twenty years. They have sprung from several different disciplines, encompassed different periods and geographical locations and chosen divergent methodologies, but their common quest has been to recover and understand the traces of a practice which is central to our understanding of human history, yet notoriously elusive.

One such approach is ‘The Reading Experience Database 1450-1945’ (RED), a project run by the Open University and the University of London . While RED is already proving its worth as a digital resource, its methodological parameters are necessarily limited and its vision therefore partial. What is needed in order for the study of the history of reading to progress beyond the boundaries of specific institutions, disciplines, methodologies, geographical locations and time periods is a forum in which as many diverse approaches as possible are brought into energetic debate.

This major 3-day conference, the first of its type, seeks to provide such a forum. We invite 20-minute papers from international students and scholars of any discipline – both within and outside the Humanities — who are interested in the history and practice of reading in any period or geographical location. Topics may include, but are by no means limited to:

* Theories of reading * Issues of literacy * National and transnational histories * Reading and readers in fiction * Reading communities * Quantitative versus qualitative methodologies * Genre reading * Digital resources and their development * Visual representations of reading * Reading across disciplines/languages * Using historical data in contemporary research fields * The sociology, psychology and neurology of reading experiences * Evidence of reading from private audio recordings and blogs * Finding, compiling, interpreting and preserving the evidence of reading

Type of submission wanted: Paper titles, abstracts of no more than 300 words and short biographies sent to all three organizers.

Deadline: Jan 31, 2008

Contact: Dr Shaf Towheed (S.S.Towheed@open.ac.uk); Dr Rosalind Crone (r.h.crone@open.ac.uk); Dr Katie Halsey (Katie.Halsey@sas.ac.uk).

TAPoR is a web portal for analyzing digital text. The project is based out of McMaster University and includes a project team from six different Canadian universities.

Created by a consortium of Canadian universities, TAPoR is a collection of online text-analysis tools—ranging from the basic to sophisticated—that allows users to run search, statistical, collocation, extraction, aggregation, visualization, hypergraph, transformation, and other “tools” on texts. (The site comes seeded with prepared texts, but users can sign up for a free account and input their own.) TAPoR allows tools to be mixed and matched in a mashup-style “workbench.” Particularly impressive is the “recipes” page, which in step-by-step fashion suggests ways that tools can be combined for particular purposes—e.g., identify themes, analyze colloquial word use, visualize text, explore changes in language use by a writer, create an online interactive bibliography, build a social network map from text, create a chronological timeline from bibliographical text, etc. As regards the general philosophy of TAPoR, which descends from the mature computational-linquistics side of humanities computing (the oldest use of computers for the humanities), project developer Geoffrey Rockwell says at the beginning of his article for the Text Analysis Developers Alliance (TADA) entitled “What is Text Analysis?”:

“Text analyis tools aide the interpreter asking questions of electronic texts:” Much of the evidence used by humanists is in textual form. One way of interpreting texts involves bringing questions to these texts and using various reading practices to reflect on the possible answers. Simple text analysis tools can help with this process of asking questions of a text and retrieving passages that help one think through the questions. The computer does not replace human interpretation, it enhances it…. (1) Text-analysis tools break a text down into smaller units like words, sentences, and passages, and then (2) Gather these units into new views on the text that aide interpretation.”

Starter Links: TAPoR | TAPoR Recipes | Text Analysis Developers Alliance (TADA)

Graduate Student, Digital Arts and New Media , UC Santa Cruz (more…)

Sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Humanities E-Book (HEB) initiative digitizes scholarly books in the humanities. E-books in a range of subjects, from African History to Women’s Studies, are hosted on the Initiative’s site and available via institutional or individual subscription. The site also hosts a number of XML-based books.

“Humanities E-Book is a digital collection offered by the ACLS in collaboration with ten learned societies, nearly 80 contributing publishers, and librarians at the University of Michigan’s Scholarly Publishing Office. The result is an online, fully searchable collection of high-quality books in the Humanities, recommended and reviewed by scholars and featuring unlimited multi-user access and free, downloadable MARC records. HEB is available 24/7 on- and off-campus through standard web browsers” (HEB web site)

Starter Links: Humanities E-book | American Council of Learned Societies