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]

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

Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media, University of California, Santa Cruz; member of University of California Digital Arts Research Network (DARnet) (more…)

• Judith Green, Professor, Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, UC Santa Barbara (Conversation Roundtable 3)
• Robert Nideffer, Associate Professor of Studio Art & Information and Computer Science, UC Irvine
• Warren Sack, Assistant Professor of Film and Digital Media, UC Santa Cruz (Conversation Roundtable 2)
• Bob Stein, Director of the Institute for Future of the Book; Chairman of Night Kitchen. (Conversation Roundtable 1)

(updated June 2, 2005)

Director of the Institute for the Future of the Book; Chairman of Night Kitchen (more…)

UC Santa Barbara’s Television Production (a service of UCSB’s Instructional Resources unit) is recording the 2005 Transliteracies conference (“UCSB Conversation Roundtables on Online Reading”). An edited program of the conference will appear on UCTV – University of California Television, and other parts of the recording may be made available on the conference Web site.

Rooundtable participant Christiane Paul will also be joining George Legrady and Schoenerwissen (Marcus Hauer and Anne Pascual) in “The Art of Online Reading” session on Saturday, June 18th, 9:15 — 10:45. Christiane is Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art; a faculty member of the MFA Computer Arts Department at the School of Visual Arts in New York; and Director of Intelligent Agent. She will discuss works of new media art related to reading that she has curated, written about, or otherwise finds interesting and relevant to Transliteracies.

[Link]
“We experience a world of ever-expanding websites, CD-ROMs and other digital electronic media led by the developed industrial nations today. What will become of the paper-printed media of books in relation to the rapid evolution of this new media?

Much has been discussed about digital media in the context of multimedia and its interactive features, but not in relationship to carrying printed words and characters. If they were discussed at all, a negative outlook has been very pervasive. Is there any way we can expect a positive effect of the new media on books?

Can books only exist in the paper-printed media? Can the text be separated from paper to be reused as a book through digital media? Is such a discussion relevant to the subject of books?

What is the future of the book? This round table discussion [from the August 1998 premiere issue of The Book and the Computer: The Future of the Printed Word] invites participants from countries of different histories and cultures—Japan, France, China, Thailand and America—each facing different issues on books (such as shortage of paper, distribution, penetration of audiovisual media, literacy, etc.) to discuss the new form this durable medium may take.”

Participants:

• The Transformation of Written Culture
  Roger Chartier (France)


• Electronic Books and Reading
  Liu Zhiming (China)


• The New Online Book Community
  Howard Rheingold (USA)


• Text Makes a Comeback: The Power of Words
  Ueno Chizuko (Japan)


• The Oral Tradition in the Digital Age
  Thanes Wongyannava (Thailand) < / < /li

Professor, Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, UC Santa Barbara (more…)

Organization formed to consider the way technology can work in conjunction with scholarship.

“The Public Knowledge Project is dedicated to exploring whether and how new technologies can be used to improve the professional and public value of scholarly research. Bringing together scholars, in a number of fields, as well as research librarians, it is investigating the social, economic, and technical issues entailed in the use of online infrastructure and knowledge management strategies to improve both the scholarly quality and public accessibility and coherence of this body of knowledge in a sustainable and globally accessible form….” The Project is creating prototype Web sites, publishing or conferencing systems, and tools that “will be used to learn more about how interface design, data architecture, and software tools affect the professional and public engagement with educational research. ”

Starter Links: The Public Knowledge Project

UCSB is within sight of the Santa Barbara Airport, and takes about 3 minutes by cab. If driving, head south on Moffett Place and merge onto Highway 217 South (Ward Memorial Blvd.). Continue to the East Gate of the University. Proceed straight through the gate, and merge right onto Mesa Road. Three lighted intersections later, turn left onto Ocean Road. Bear right at the stop sign to stay on Ocean Road, then take your first left at the El Colegio intersection. The road terminates in three parking lots. Turn into the right parking lot, and the HSSB Humanities and Social Sciences Building (the site of the June 17-18, 2005, Conference) is immediately on your left. All sessions will be held in the McCune Room, 6020 HSSB. Parking passes may be purchased from the electronic kiosks in the lot.

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.

Information about the Transliteracies project and its activities are written/edited by project leader Alan Liu, with help from research assistants Susan Cook, Gerald Egan, and Melissa Stevenson.

Rita Raley is the lead contributor to the project Links page.

Other postings and comments on the site are by individual project participants or working groups.

The Transliteracies site is based on WordPress. Original site design by Schoenerwissen/OfCD.

Schoenerwissen/OfCD conducts research and development in computational design. This includes original interdisciplinary research in information technology, human-computer interaction and social sciences. Their projects oscillate between web applications, visual software and communication design — for a broad range of public institutions and private clients.

The award-winning nomad design office is led by Anne Pascual and Marcus Hauer, and is currently based in California, where both pursue research in the Media Arts and Technology Program at UC Santa Barbara. Furthermore they are regular contributors to the design section of De:Bug Magazine in Berlin.

Links: Home page | txtkit – Visual Text Mining Tool

Conference Assistants

• Melissa Stevenson, Graduate Student, UC Santa Barbara English Department. Stevenson is the main research assistant for Conference 2005: UCSB Conversation Roundtables on Online Reading. Her interests include contemporary American literature, cultural studies, film theory, new media studies, short fiction, and children’s literature. She is completing a dissertation titled Conversations with Ghosts and Machines: Encounters with Technology and the (Re)definition of the Human in 20th Century Science Fiction about the shifting definition of humanity in response to technological change across the twentieth century.
• Gerald Egan, Graduate Student, UC Santa Barbara English Department. Egan is the technology research assistant for Conference 2005: UCSB Conversation Roundtables on Online Reading. His interests include 19th century British literature, print culture and the history and materiality of the book, and electronic text and images.
• Other conference research assistants: James Hodge (graduate student, English, UCSB), Kimberly Knight (graduate student, English, UCSB), Lisa Swanstrom (graduate student, Comparative Literature, UCSB)

Other Support

• Finances: Karen Cisneros, Financial Assistant, English Dept., UCSB
• Technical Support: Brian Reynolds, Computer Systems Specialist, English Dept., UCSB
• Television: Ray Tracy, Production Manager, Principal Producer/Director, Televlision Services, Instructional Resources, UCSB
• Sound and Carpentry: Kevin Kelly, Senior Producer/Director, Sound Recording, Instructional Resources, UCSB

Susan Cook, Graduate Student, Department of English, UC Santa Barbara
In connection with a grant proposal written in April 2005, Susan Cook assisted in preparing abbreviated c.v.’s and some of the bios for Transliteracies project members and participants (including some of the bios that appear on the project site).

Holly Unruh, Assistant Director, Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, UCSB
Dr. Unruh assisted in researching grant opportunities for the Transliteracies Project.

June 17-18, 2005
McCune Room (HSSB 2020), UCSB

This conference marks the start of the University of California Transliteracies research initiative. Launched by the UC Digital Cultures Project in affiliation with the UCSB Transcriptions Project, UCSB Center for Information Technology and Society, and UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, Transliteracies brings together teams of researchers from the humanities and arts, the social sciences, and engineering to study the practices of online reading in both historical and contemporary contexts. (Conference site…)

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