Some good advice here.

The Future of Writing was a design project commisioned by Microsoft Research Cambridge and the Microsoft Office team from the Royal College of Art in London. In this project five teams of design alumni from the college took a speculative approach to looking at the way in which authorship may change in the future. The result was five very diverse directions, described using video, text, images and interactive prototypes. This document describes the ideas, research and output of this project in detail.

At present, a tremendous enabler of empirical software engineering research is the open-source software movement, which is rapidly generating a freely available accumulation of code along with complete archives of the communications between developers. In an open-source setting, programmers collect around software projects to produce applications that they want to see available for free. The developers are often in different places and time zones, so communication occurs via email and online forums. The code and communication records are accessible to all via websites, so interested developers can join the project at any stage to share expertise, troubleshoot and add to the source code.

These electronic repositories are a software-engineering researcher’s paradise. They constitute a historical record of the life of a project, including all of the dead ends and debates, the task assignments, the development of team structure and many other artifacts. With thoughtful and targeted searches, researchers can explore topics such as how newcomers adapt to a software project’s culture. They can test prediction engines to assess the validity of theories about project structure and code development. Bug-tracking records and the interpersonal interactions involved in solving software flaws serve as a narrative of the incremental improvement of code quality.

The Library's Data Management Committee has compiled this toolkit to help researchers understand the issues involved in data management and provide resources for formulating data management plans.

RTextTools is a free, open source machine learning package for automatic text classification that makes it simple for both novice and advanced users to get started with supervised learning. The package includes nine algorithms for ensemble classification (svm, slda, boosting, bagging, random forests, glmnet, decision trees, neural networks, maximum entropy), comprehensive analytics, and thorough documentation.

As input into the development, design, and improvement of the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), recipients of Google’s Digital Humanities Grants were interviewed to identify issues encountered during their projects. This project was guided by the following goals:
- Increase empirical understanding of how to identify materials for use by scholars.
- Increase empirical understanding of how to provide better access to materials for use by scholars.
- Identify meaningful characteristics of content that affect identification, retrieval, and other parameters.
- Identify data preprocessing and transformation issues encountered by scholars.
- Provide input to inform the architecture of the HTRC related to representation of collections, faceted browsing, identifiers, etc.

Fancy Hands is a team of personal assistants ready to work for you right now. You should focus on what's important, let us focus on the rest.

Washington DC--The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published Digital Humanities, SPEC Kit 326, which provides a snapshot of research library experiences with digital scholarship centers or services that support the humanities (e.g., history, art, music, film, literature, philosophy, religion, etc.) and the benefits and challenges of hosting them. The survey asked ARL libraries about the organization of these services, how they are staffed and funded, what services they offer and to whom, what technical infrastructure is provided, whether the library manages or archives the digital resources produced, and how services are assessed, among other questions.

This survey revealed that library-based support for the digital humanities is offered predominantly on an ad hoc basis. However, as demand for services supporting the digital humanities has grown, libraries have begun to re-evaluate their provisional service and staffing models. Many respondents expressed a desire to implement practices, policies, and procedures that would allow them to cope with increases in demand for services.

This SPEC Kit includes documentation from respondents that describes the mission or purpose of digital humanities centers, the services offered, policies and procedures, examples of digital projects, fellowship and grant opportunities, promotional materials, and repositories for digital projects.

This article investigated whether students' ability to reason with and about documentary evidence is influenced by the composition of the document set they study. Two groups of college students read sets of history documents containing a variety of document types (e.g., historian essays, participant accounts). One group was also given primary documents, and the other group received additional historian essays that cited the primary documents. The students' task was to read the documents, rate their usefulness and trustworthiness, and write a short opinion essay on the controversy described in the documents. Results revealed that the presence of primary documents influenced how students rated the documents and on which criteria they based this interpretation. These results suggest that exposing students to a variety of document types, especially primary documents, within a reasoning task changes how students represent and reason about documents and historical problems.

In 2 experiments, understanding of historical subject matter was enhanced when students acted as historians and constructed their own models of an historical event. Providing students with information in a web site with multiple sources instead of a textbook chapter, and instructing them to write arguments instead of narratives, summaries, or explanations, produced the most integrated and causal essays with the most transformation from the original sources. Better performance on inference and analogy tasks provided converging evidence that students who wrote arguments from the web sources gained a better understanding than other students. A second experiment replicated the advantage of argument writing even when information was presented as an argument.

Extensive training in history results in generalized knowledge of the methods and information sources typical of history problems, that is, discipline expertise. We investigated the influence of discipline expertise on students' reading, evaluation, and use of multiple documents about a historical controversy. Eleven graduate students in psychology (history novices) and 8 graduate students in history (history specialists) studied 2 controversies about the history of the Panama Canal. For each controversy, the students studied a set of documents, wrote an opinion essay, and evaluated the documents for usefulness and trustworthiness. Study strategies did not differ significantly across groups. However, the evaluation of usefulness varied as a function of document type and students' expertise. Furthermore, novice and expert students differed in the way they expressed and supported an opinion in their essay. We suggest that discipline expertise helps history students connect information sources and interpretations to their representation of the situation or problem.

As we work on DocumentCloud, we're constantly building pieces of infrastructure that could be useful for other organizations that work with similar kinds of data. We're releasing as we go by extracting useful components as standalone open source projects. Please follow our work if you're interested in what lies under the hood.

Have we somehow conspired to arrange matters so that knowledge is always what we say about something rather than what we show about it? If so, it would account for the difficulty of using objects as constituting or communicating knowledge. Is the problem that the whole concept of knowledge and research arises out of words rather than actions, or do we simply have too narrow a range of examples, i.e. only lexical examples? Have we defined ourselves into a corner?

Per­haps in  the future, rather than trot­ting out 40 exam­ples, we will sim­ply describe the “infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture” of our searches. Thought­ful prac­ti­tion­ers of his­tory quickly real­ize how the kinds of ques­tions they ask deter­mine the range of pos­si­ble out­comes. All his­tor­i­cal inves­ti­ga­tions depend on a scaf­fold­ing of assump­tions and pre-questions, “met­ta­nar­ra­tives” that we assume in order to make our inves­ti­ga­tions cohere.

In serving faculty and administrators at UNC-Chapel Hill, these policies assist in preparing and submitting proposals for sponsored project funding and managing sponsored funds awarded to the University.

There are hazards of course: and having spent so much of my life working across fields I am feelingly aware of them. I offer some of the hazards to you now to think about (a backhanded present perhaps): how to distinguish what’s central from what’s peripheral in this other zone; how to tap into the hinterland of controversy that lies behind the works on the shelf; how to avoid becoming merely disciples because not in control of a sufficient range of knowledge. I’ve often noticed that those most sceptical in their own field can collapse into a respectful heap in relation to another discipline. The converse of this is true as well: the problems preoccupying those working in another discipline may sometimes (initially, arrogantly) seem quite simple – because we are not familiar with the build up of arguments across time that has reached this moment of dilemma.

RoSE is a research-oriented social environment for tracking and integrating relations between authors and documents in a combined “social-document graph.”

It allows users to learn about an author or idea from the evolving relationships between people-and-documents, people-and-people, and documents-and-documents.

Scientific publishing as it stands is an inefficient way to do science on a global scale. A lot of time and money is being wasted by groups around the world duplicating research that has already been carried out. FigShare allows you to share all of your data, negative results and unpublished figures. In doing this, other researchers will not duplicate the work, but instead may publish with your previously wasted figures, or offer collaboration opportunities and feedback on preprint figures.

Knowledge and its articulations are strongly influenced by diversity in, e.g., cultural backgrounds, schools of thought, geographical contexts. Judgements, assessments and opinions, which play a crucial role in many areas of democratic societies, including politics and economics, reflect this diversity in perspective and goals. For the information on the Web (including, e.g., news and blogs) diversity - implied by the ever increasing multitude of information providers - is the reason for diverging viewpoints and conflicts. Time and evolution add a further dimension making diversity an intrinsic and unavoidable property of knowledge.

Lippmannian device is named after Lippmann, and provides a coarse means of showing actor partisanship.

List of tools for doing research into the "natively digital".

Exploring Disciplines is an exciting one-semester course that introduces PhD students to practical strategies for interdisciplinary research. It enables them responsibly and efficiently to undertake explorations into fields other than their own and so to pursue their dissertation research much more effectively. Its focus is on doing interdisciplinarity rather than theorizing it. Nevertheless the course proceeds by questioning disciplines for their explicit and implicit theoretical presuppositions and at each step reflects on how an outsider may understand a discipline in its own terms.

Exploring Disciplines is based on the idea that academic disciplines are “epistemic cultures” that can be negotiated in much the same way as social anthropologists have negotiated other human cultures. After some consideration of disciplinarity, basic principles of ethnography and gross differences among the major disciplinary groups, it considers seven epistemic cultures as case-studies. For each, core texts from those cultures are discussed.

Stanford CoreNLP provides a set of natural language analysis tools which can take raw English language text input and give the base forms of words, their parts of speech, whether they are names of companies, people, etc., normalize dates, times, and numeric quantities, and mark up the structure of sentences in terms of phrases and word dependencies, and indicate which noun phrases refer to the same entities. It provides the foundational building blocks for higher level text understanding applications.

Stanford CoreNLP integrates all our NLP tools for the English language, including the part-of-speech (POS) tagger, the named entity recognizer (NER), the parser, and the coreference resolution system. The goal of this project is to enable people to quickly and painlessly get complete linguistic annotations of natural language texts. It is designed to be highly flexible and extensible, i.e., with a single option you can change which tools should be enabled and which should be disabled.

Help your students think through primary source documents for contextual understanding and to glean information to make informed judgments.

Social network for Japanese researchers.

"I wonder whether many of the studies on (social) networks that pop up all over the place are hoping to weigh but end up counting again."

Lesson One: As you sort through archival records, keep your eyes open. When you see the words "top secret" on a document, make a copy."Top Secret" marketing firm meeting minutes from the 1980sDocument Analysis: It's not that we need any more proof that the American insurance industry avoids regulation by using dirty methods like buying off mayors and hiring marketing firms to manipulate public opinion. It is fun, though, to hold that proof in your hands - and then put it on the internet.

Surprisingly, there is still no service that provides standardised URIs for temporal periods. This is partly due to the frequent controversy associated in pinning their boundaries down, as well as the contrast between those with relative and those with absolute dating. CommonEras is an attampt to build a community-based vocabulary service, with appropriate visualisation and search technologies, for temporal periods ('the Sixties', 'the Victorian Era', 'the Golden Age of Comics', etc.).

Maximum entropy (aka logistic regression) models are very popular, especially in natural language processing. The software here is an implementation of maximum likelihood and maximum a posterior optimization of the parameters of these models. The algorithms used are much more efficient than the iterative scaling techniques used in almost every other maxent package out there.

"As Bruno Bachimont uses to say, an ontology is mainly a tool to explicit inconsistencies of our knowledge, pointing to new questions for research. After that, you can throw it away."

Intute is a free online service providing you with a database of hand selected Web resources for education and research.

Our goal is to understand what is being seen through the lens of a camera. Through the integration of diverse skills from many disciplines, ranging from cartographic projection, advanced 3D computer graphics and cutting-edge machine vision algorithms we hope to automatically align, generate and visualize geo-referenced meta-data.

These databases integrate information from various projects at the Library and Information Center at Dharma Drum Buddhist College. By providing information on Chinese calendar dates, as well as an onomasticon of person and place names from Buddhist sources they help with disambiguation and geo-spatial referencing of names and dates. The data is openly available through various web-services.

The great disadvantage of testing and data is that you get precise, decisive answers you can and will act on, but you almost never know what question you really asked.

Drop the scientism, HCI! It’s not going to meet our needs and it’s lousy science anyway (all dogmatism is). Good science and good critique should complement and reinforce each other. But as long as we categorically dismiss non-scientific strategies, we’re only fake-interdisciplinary and we’re going to botch our work.

it is important to consider the ways in which digitalization affects how biographical or narrative research can be conducted.

Normative notions of science are being used to dismiss legitimate humanistic work by the very same people who are crying out for better work on the cultural, experiential, and speculative dimensions of HCI’s enterprise. The converse is also true: humanistically marginal work is being accepted because it conforms to the veneer of scientific presentation.

How can we raise, and organize a new generation of technology-aware research that has the guts, and the creativity, to design a comprehensive field of critical concepts that can be implemented into code? We have to stop understanding the Internet, and start to shape it.

The History Engine is an educational tool that gives students the opportunity to learn history by doing the work—researching, writing, and publishing—of a historian.

With JeromeDL's social and semantic services every library user can bookmark interesting books, articles or other materials in semantically annotated directories.

The United States economy has grown faster, on average, under Democratic presidents than under Republicans. If history is a guide, an Obama victory in November would lead to faster economic growth with less inequality, while a McCain victory would lead to slower economic growth with more inequality.

The purpose of this project is to address theoretical questions relating to the digital production and storage of material contributing to the biography of a city, and the co-construction of digital representations of the city and the city itself. Moreover, it studies the web-based participation of experts and non-experts in the future policies, planning and cultural heritage of cities from an international perspective.

The aim of the CREEN project is to develop new methods to recognize emerging critical events in evolving complex networks, coupled networks and active agent networks.

In the First Person is a free, high quality, professionally published, in-depth index of close to 4,000 collections of personal narratives in English from around the world.

Bundler takes a set of images, image features, and image matches as input, and produces a 3D reconstruction of camera and (sparse) scene geometry as output.

The main aim of this task is to explore how hardware or software tools for reading e-books can provide support to users engaged with a variety of reading related activities, such as fact finding or learning.

EU-funded research on digital culture and digital libraries deals with leading-edge information and communication technologies for expanding access to and use of Europe's rich cultural and scientific resources.

We have tried here to give prospective applicants the kind of information they might learn from a short but informative conversation with an NEH officer.

Allows users to interactively browse historical events in a number of ways. It is a generative browser, allowing users to not only view preset collections of events, but to construct their own views of the events based on selected criteria.

Aimed at integrating, combining, and deducing information on the early American history to assist general users or historians in exploring American history by using new technology offered by the Semantic Web.

The case represents a problem-event that has animated some kind of judgment. Any enigma could do-a symptom, a crime, a causal variable, a situation, a stranger, or any irritating obstacle to clarity. What matters is the idiom of the judgment.

Douglas Tudhope leads the research on Knowledge Organisation Systems and Services.

My immediate intention in presenting these is to suggest a list of functions (recursive functions) that could be the basis for a manageable but also useful tool-building enterprise in humanities computing.

Cohen sees the potential for partnerships between the lone professional historian and crowds of helpers, particularly as the quantity of historical material increases.

This wiki collects information about tools and resources that can help scholars (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) conduct research more efficiently or creatively.

The Information Economy MetaLangage (IEML) is a formal language for the expression of semantic sets. It is designed to denote formally - or to address - concepts as semantic sets.

This cultural search engine will give you access to artworks from several museum collections.

We consider the use of Semantic Web technologies for improving the multimedia user experience on the Web.

Many of us are seriously worried about Ohio's March 4 primary. I highly recommend Ned Foley's article, "Administering the March 4 Primary in Ohio", which lists five things we should all keep our eyes on. In the 8th paragraph of Prof. Foley's article, he mentions a bill that the Ohio House was poised to pass on Tuesday. That bill was SB 286, and it did pass on Tuesday with little opposition.

Prof. Foley talks about concerns he has with a particular feature of the bill: a new practice allowing mid-day pickups of ballot materials at the polls. Foley is primarily, and appropriately, concerned with chain of custody issues; that is, the procedures that ensure ballot materials make it from the controlled environment of the polling place to the controlled environment of election headquarters without any additions, subtractions, modifications or damage.

However, there are other aspects of this bill that are troubling. For example, on the issue of mid-day pickups of ballot materials, neither the legislature nor the Ohio Secretary of State seem to fully understand what this process would entail. In order to hand-off ballot materials at mid-day, pollworkers will essentially have to do all the things they normally do at the close of polls. Most importantly, they'll have to reconcile the number of ballots cast up to that point with the number of signatures in their pollbook. This means that the pollbook will be entirely unavailable to voters who arrive at the polling place during this process. Since the various steps of ballot accounting take on the order of an hour (maybe two), this means that the polling places in Ohio that do midday pickups will be closed to voters for this amount of time. SB 286 makes no provisions for the exact procedures involved with this; it appears that polling places in Ohio using central-count optical scan will be shut down for a period of time on 4 March.

One would think that the OH SoS would weigh in and issue a directive about the procedures involved with a midday pickup and chain of custody procedures. In order to keep the polling places open, the OH SoS could specify that two copies of pollbooks be kept so that one is operational during the midday ballot accounting. Or a shadow team of pollworkers could be employed to do the ballot accounting while the pollworkers continue to allow voters to vote. To date, the only thing from the OH SoS' office is a directive (Directive 2008-25) that emphasizes the seriousness of chain of custody, lists some example best practices and provides a chain of custody log (form). We're still waiting to see if a directive is issued with a title like, "Procedures for Midday Pickup of Ballot Materials".

As others have pointed out (See Paul Gronke at Election Updates: Foley's essay on Ohio), there are more problems with SB 286 than just this issue of midday pickups. Here's one example: section 3506.21(A)(3) says:

"If automatic tabulating equipment detects that more marks were made on an optical scan ballot for a particular office, question, or issue than the number of selections that a voter is allowed by law to make for that office, question, or issue, the voter's ballot shall be invalidated for that office, question, or issue. The ballot shall not be invalidated for any other office, question, or issue..."

This appears to ensure that if one contest on a ballot is overvoted (has more choices made by the voter than are allowed for that contest), the other contests on the ballots will still be counted. However, optical scan equipment is notorious for detecting stray marks as "valid" marks. In my own precinct in November 2006, our precinct-count optical scan machines (the Sequoia Optech Insight) detected a single dot, produced when a voter accidentally dropped the pen on her ballot, as a valid vote. This provision, unless it were amended to anticipate voter mistakes, smudges, stray marks, etc., will undoubtedly disenfranchise voters who's votes would otherwise be counted using Ohio's standards for determining voter intent, required by the Federal Help America Vote Act of 2002, outlined in Directive 2006-76.

Anyway, SB 286 is emergency legislation... but it's particularly bad emergency legislation!

[UPDATE 2008-02-21T14:48:09]: Added link to Paul Gronke's post at Election Updates... Sorry, Prof. Gronke, that link should have been in there when I posted this!

Jaql is a new query language being developed for JSON data.

The ultimate irony of Watts's research is that, if you really buy it, the most effective way to pitch your idea is ... mass marketing.

Metafilter has released the metadata for all of their sites, including comments, favorites and contacts. I think it’s excellent that they are taking the time to do this, and hopefully a few academics will recognize the value of such a compact, influential community that has amazing historical data. (via waxy)

Since stories are so powerful by virtue of the fact that their "meaning" is open-ended—very much in the eyes of the beholder—we are interested in how stories might be indexed on the Web.

QVIZ will research and create a framework for visualizing and querying archival resources by a time-space interface based on maps and emergent knowledge structures.

CELT, the Corpus of Electronic Texts, brings the wealth of Irish literary and historical culture to the Internet. It has a searchable online textbase consisting of 935 contemporary and historical documents from many areas, including literature and the oth

Documents of Ireland is an online database of text, images, maps, sounds and video.

The immigration debate in Congress appeared just once as a top-ten story on Reddit, and not at all on Digg and Del.icio.us. The only story with any real traction on the user-generated sites was the release of the Apple iPhone.

Through its core focus on time, space, change and movement, BOREAS aims to bring commensurability to the time scales of geophysics, archaeology and lived human experience.

This site lists the pages in Wikipedia which are receiving the most edits per unique editor over various periods of time.

Its total user base is a little less then 88,000. The amount of attention Twitter gets seems to be much bigger than its number of users. “After an initial period of interest around March 2007, the rate at which new users are joining Twitter has slowed.

Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar to obtain the raw citations

Tinderbox stores and organizes your notes, plans, and ideas. It can help you analyze and understand them. And Tinderbox helps you share ideas through Web journals and web logs.

Imagine having the citation and abstract for every paper in each of your current research areas, organized in an iTunes-like interface for rapid access, and updated automatically every day.

Bookends is a full-featured and cost-effective bibliography, reference, and information management system for students and professionals.

Outline and structure your ideas. Take notes. Track themes using keywords. Export to a word processor, LaTeX, or XHTML.

The Rethinking TimeLines project aims to develop methodologies for modeling and visualising historical events with both temporal (timeline) and spatial (mapping) components.

WikiPrep is a preprocessing script written in Perl that takes an XML dump of Wikipedia, and infers some information that was implicitly present there.

A major component of the proposed work concerns developing the foundations of bi-directional programming languages, in which every program denotes a pair of functions---one for extracting a view of some complex data structure, and another for ``putting ba

ELOKA will provide a data management and networking service for community-based research that keeps control of data in the hands of community data providers, while still allowing for broad searches and sharing of information.