stéfan sinclair :: scribblings & musings

A recent article from Wired about DARPA contracts to Cray and IBM for supercomputers mentions the possibility of producing by 2010 machines capable of 10 petaflops, or 10,000,000,000,000,000 (10¹⁵) floating-point calculations per second. Raymond Queneau estimates that it would take a human about 200 million years to read his One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems (10¹⁴ sonnets); apparently a computer could do it a bit faster – but would the computer enjoy it as much? :-)

Zotero is a Firefox extension that provides several tools to help gather and organize web-based resources. Among other features, it allows the user to annotate content, take a snapshot, tag (categorize), and reference (with proper bibliographic fields). There are several similar tools out there, but this one is definitely designed by and for academics (though not exclusively useful to academics) – the choice of export formats is a good indication of this bias:

Thanks to Stan Ruecker for sending me this link.

Echo2 looks like a very powerful Java-based framework for developing client-side web applications that look and behave a lot like conventional applications. I have yet to look at it closely, but the demo looks very promising, especially as an alternative to a pure Java application. It seems to almost make developing things like Google Calendar or Spreadsheets possible for the rest of us mere mortals. Thanks to Matt Patey for the link.

Google, which always seems to command a disproportionate number of tech news headlines on any given day, has just launched Google Code Search, a tool that allows you to find instances of terms in source code that’s publicly available. Want examples of AJAX calls in Javascript or tokenize in Ruby? Now you know where to look. Cool.

For the Digital Rhetoric and Communication course that I’m teaching this term, I wanted to show an example of a presentation that I’d seen where there was a very distinctive rapid-fire style. After rummaging in the nether regions of my memory for some time in vain, I finally remembered enough about it to find it through some web searches. Trying to not lose track of such things was one of the main motivations for me to start this blog, so before I forget again: it was Dick Hardt’s Identity 2.0 presentation (inspired in part by Lawrence Lessig). Definitely a memorable style, though maybe a bit tiring after a while.

Since we’re on the topic of presentations, I also want to thank Eric Homich for pointing me in the direction of two interesting books on effective PowerPoint (books that at least recognize some of the dangers of the Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, but that provide more positive and creative strategies for creating slide-based presentations): Cliff Atkinson’s Beyond Bullet Points and Richard Mayer’s Multimedia Learning. See also a previous post of mine on the Art of PowerPoint

It’s that time of year when talented fourth year students are considering graduate schools. The choices can be very difficult, as always, especially for students in the digital humanities, where pathways are less clear (but more fun ;-)). This post will attempt to provide some useful information for students on selected graduate programmes, partly based on prior posts here and elsewhere (also see here). My biases will show through clearly, especially my familiarity with the Canadian and North American terrain – but of course a lot of great stuff is happening elsewhere in the world (send me a message if you have suggestions).

Institutions with Masters programmes in digital humanities or new media:

• Humanities Computing at the University of Alberta (with particular strengths in English, History, and design)
• School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University (“master’s and doctoral degrees at the intersection of art, design, media and technology”)
• Graduate Certificate in Digital Technologies in Design Art Practice at Concordia (Design and New Media)
• M.A. in Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia (English and New Media)
• Digital Humanities M.A. at King’s College London (English and Library Sciences)
• Media Technology and Games at the IT University of Copenhagen (Game Studies)

Other North American institutions with a strong culture of digital humanities (with links to research centres, departments, or institutions, whichever seems most appropriate):

• Canada: McMaster (English, French, Philosophy, New Media etc. – M.A. in Digital Society expected soon), Victoria (English), Waterloo (English), Western (History), Toronto (English, French, library sciences, etc.), Ryerson/York (Communication and Culture) and New Brunswick (English, Library Sciences)
• USA : Maryland (English, New Media), UCSB (English), UCLA (English), Nebraska (English), Florida (English), Iowa (English), Brown (English, Italian, New Media), UIUC (English, Library Sciences)

There’s certainly no shortage of wiki software: out there for editing web content collaboratively, but I recently discovered TiddlyWiki (thanks Karin), which takes a bit of a different approach to wiki management than I’ve seen before (I’ve experimented especially with TWiki, PmWiki, MediaWiki). In particular, everything is contained in one page (no database or back-end setup), and there’s heavy use of Web 2.0 techniques. It’s certainly not as full-featured as other solutions (I especially like TWiki), but it’s something to consider for lightweight situations.

Web-based office productivity suites have come a long way, baby. Many people will already be familiar with Google’s Writely and Spreadsheet offerings, but several other fairly mature office suites are available, like Zoho, Goffice, ThinkFree, and Flysuite (mentioned in a Wired article). I found Zoho especially impressive. Of course there are outstanding alternatives to the MS Office suite, including OpenOffice (or NeoOffice for Mac), but the web-based solutions have the notion of collaboration built-in (at the expense of usually making offline work impossible).

Mark Callahan has posted a fascinating set of representations, called Internet Soul Portraits, of certain highly recognizable websites, such as Google, CNN and MySpace. These somewhat haunting images, devoid of text and image content, demonstrate the importance of colour and layout in web design. Thanks to Infosthetics for the link.

The Institute for the Future of the Book is a must-visit for anyone interested in print and electronic cultures, and particularly the space between them. The if:book blog is a lively and enlightening discussion area with several regular contributors. Almost all the posts are of interest to me, but I’d like to in particular to introducing MediaCommons and On the Future of Peer Review. The Institute is also involved in creating Sophie, designed for reading and writing next-generation electronic books, and though it seems to be still early in the process, the statement on tools is encouraging:

If discourse is to thrive in the digital age, tools are needed that allow ordinary, non-technical people to assemble complex, elegant and durable electronic documents without having to master overly complicated applications or seek the help of programmers. The Institute is dedicated to building such tools. We also conduct experiments with existing tools and technologies, exploring their potential and testing their limits.