"Using the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) 2008, we apply mapping techniques previously developed for mapping journal structures in the Science and Social Science Citation Indices. Citation relations among the 110,718 records were aggregated at the level of 1,157 journals specific to the A&HCI, and the journal structures are questioned on whether a cognitive structure can be reconstructed and visualized. Both cosine-normalization (bottom up) and factor analysis (top down) suggest a division into approximately twelve subsets. The relations among these subsets are explored using various visualization techniques. However, we were not able to retrieve this structure using the ISI Subject Categories, including the 25 categories which are specific to the A&HCI. We discuss options for validation such as against the categories of the Humanities Indicators of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the panel structure of the European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH), and compare our results with the curriculum organization of the Humanities Section of the College of Letters and Sciences of UCLA as an example of institutional organization."

"The High Throughput Humanities satellite event at ECCS'10 establishes a forum for high throughput approaches in the humanities and social sciences, within the framework of complex systems science. The symposium aims to go beyond massive data aquisition and to present results beyond what can be manually achieved by a single person or a small group. Bringing together scientists, researchers, and practitioners from relevant fields, the event will stimulate and facilitate discussion, spark collaboration, as well as connect approaches, methods, and ideas.

The main goal of the event is to present novel results based on analyses of Big Data (see NATURE special issue 2009), focusing on emergent complex properties and dynamics, which allow for new insights, applications, and services."

"Menand focuses on the elite institutions that still concentrate on providing an education in the arts and sciences, and argues that they have failed to respond to these and other painfully obvious problems because they remain stuck in patterns that were set a century and more ago. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he explains, scholars set out to create a limited free space in which they could set standards for the fields they practiced and for undergraduate and graduate training--a professional space dedicated, like the legal and medical professional spaces that took shape at the same time, to pursuing the general good rather than personal gain."

"Another common thread in the grad students’ stories was dissuasion, both passive and active, from engagement with the digital. From bureaucratic hassles to tepid advising to being actually barred from computing facilities built for faculty (think about that for a moment; it’s appalling on so very many levels), the message goes out loud and clear: technology is a toy, it’s a diversion, it’s fine for the classroom, but it’s not how you do your work."

"In fact, their dismissal of history is a direct consequence of their version of Darwinism, which is focused on demonstrating how the actions of literary characters provide illustrative examples of human biological nature. While they give no end of homage to the idea that actual human behavior is subject to environmental influence – as far as I can tell, no one seriously doubts this – they seem to have no interest in investigating how behaviors and environments amplify into history. Literary Darwinism is paradoxically static, the examination of flies caught in amber, and Darwin himself has become a Platonic fetish to ward off the evils of change, of history."

"I think there’s a counter to this phenomenon… but Project Bamboo won’t like it. I think the counter is to forget about the Old Guard altogether; they’re a lost cause. Instead, focus on the third-wayers and the graduate students. This isn’t a fun thing to do, because third-wayers and grad students don’t have the kind of institutional power that funds and runs a Bamboo Consortium. Much creative thinking about sustainability will be required. However, third-wayers arguably get more bang for their buck for participating in Bamboo than any of the Old Guard can, since the Old Guard is mired in traditionalist tenure-and-promotion practices, and the third-wayers tend not to be. (I’m sure not, for example.) There’s a road here; it’s just a rocky one."

"... Their procedures took the physical object as the unit of reproduction. Because the Barrett copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was collected in the form that it was, I photographed each newspaper number within it in order. When it came time to plan my own digital project, which included a facsimile reproduction of the Barrett object and a transcription of Stowe’s text, I had multiple choices. But I had already completed a digital reproduction of the Barrett object that included photographs of covers, end papers, and the pages of numbers that lacked installments of Stowe’s text. The theory, I would submit, is an effort to deal thoughtfully with an institutional procedure of reproduction that contrasted with my own interest in the transcription. Had I been in charge of the reproduction–not forced to engage against institutional practices–I might well have decided to reproduce only those pages that include Stowe’s text..."

One wants to know how set boundaries may be made fluid again. One wants, I think, to let people do what they enjoy. There are enough of us for that.

I'm slower. I hadn't heard about the anti-Moretti backlash.