Saturday, June 18th, 3:30-5:00 (6020 HSSB)
Planning Session Moderator: Alan Liu
(Alan’s introductory outline of planning issues for the session)
This important planning session, which closes Conference 2005: UCSB Conversation Roundtables on Online Reading, will allow Transliteracies Project organizers to consult with conference participants in planning the specific goals, agenda, research participants, and funding strategy for the project.
As a basis for discussion, participants are asked to read the May 2, 2005 Transliteracies grant proposal for a UC Office of the President Multicampus Research Group (MRG) award. This first funding proposal contains an initial vision of the shape of the project, which will be open to discussion and revision at the planning session.
Download MRG proposal:
transliteracies-mrg-oroposal-abbrev.pdf
This MRG proposal (maximum grant: $35,000/year for five years from UC Office of the President, plus equivalent cost-sharing funds 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.
Update, July 20, 2005: notes of the critiques and suggestions offered by conference participants and audience members during this planning session are now available. See notes.
Online comments relevant to the planning session follow below (please feel free to add to the comments).
May 31st, 2005 at 12:07 am
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
about the funding application alan submitted.
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
May 31st, 2005 at 7:28 am
Hi Folks,
I’ll join this thread sideways. As a social scientist I am some distance removed from the McGann-Noto concerns about process, shop-talk, and over-conferencing in the humanities. I can not comment competently on that. But this resonates with a common concern that I share regarding some of the social sciences, namely too great a focus on method. The problem is not that methodological sophistication is itself bad, but that the methods focus – here is the analogue of McGann’s shop talk – often squeezes out the big substantive questions: what do we want to know? what are the unanswered questions? what problems are we trying to solve? what are the great debates? Our own conferences are susceptible methods entropy, in which contests about who has better data or a better equation deflate and diffuse the question of whether we have learned anything about the human condition.
So I’d add to McGann’s endorsement of identifying two or three digital applications important to the humanities a call for keeping an eye on the most compelling substantive questions that these initiatives would serve.
Bruce Bimber
May 31st, 2005 at 12:41 pm
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,â€? 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]
June 18th, 2005 at 2:05 pm
I would be interested in seeing research toward the development of humanities ontologies (or the development of a consortium to develop humanities ontologies) that could be used to house humanities information, and semantic relationships between humanities/historical concepts.
This would allow consumers (readers and scholars) of humanities literature to navigate through distributed information sources via concepts that they are interested in, rather than the objects (information sources) in which they are contained.
In other words, a person interested in all of the ports of call—or captains of the ship Santa Maria, or those interested in the price of a commodity on a given day in the past, could drill down through abstract concepts (codified as an ontological construct) such as “ships”, or “coffee”, and then into the time period that they are interested in, to find examples of the knowledge contained in the original texts (perhaps newspapers, or diaries, etc.).
In my mind, the “New Reading” is about the READER determining the knowledge that they consume—rather than consuming what is spoon-fed to them by an author.
The Gene Ontology’s (geneontology.org) annotation of genes for biological function provides a good example of the power of an ontology. Once humanities artifacts and concepts are codified into ontologies, can they be annotated, and then searched, in simillar ways.
Matthew Lange (mclange@ucdavis.edu)
Chocolate History Project
UC Davis
August 20th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
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 wi