April 2008 Archives

The day starts with George Breslauer, Provost of UC Berkeley, talking to us. Three questions - 1. Impact of new technology - technology can make research more efficient, but how to do this as smart as possible? By the time you implement a new system in the university, you only have 12-18 months before the next cutting edge - whether technology has the capacity to transform the humanistic disciplines? 2. Where will shared technologies work best, and where will individual campuses need to invest? 3. How does Bamboo create a collaborative cultural model to sustain this effort? Making collaboration work depends on non-self-evident cultural factors.

We were broken up into tables of eight people for the morning to discuss scholarly practices. I was at a table with fascinating folks - Ted Warburton from UC Santa Cruz, a dancer who uses 3D motion capture to create new art; Niek Veldhuis from Berkeley, who researches ancient Sumerian from cuneiform clay tablets; Katherine Harris from San Jose State, whose research area is 19th century literary annuals; Sharon Goetz, a medievalist who manages digital publications at Berkeley's Mark Twain Project; Tom Laughner, Director of Educational Technology Services at Smith College; Angela Thalis from UC Santa Cruz; and Michael Ashley, an archaeologist who is the program manager for Berkeley's Media Vault.

The conversation was wide-ranging and captivating, covering how people do their research, how they connect to others in their field, through to publication and professional development. I thought the organizers posed two really good questions to get things flowing: On a really good day, what activities do you do; and in a really good term, what things do you accomplish?

In the afternoon we combined two tables to try to cluster and categorize the practices we identified in the morning. I found that less compelling, perhaps because we lost some of the fascinating details, perhaps because it was harder to have an involving conversation with sixteen people; or perhaps because I just got tired.

It will be interesting to see where this conversation evolves, both through the rest of this meeting and in the following meetings in Chicago, Princeton, and Paris.

Tony asked me yesterday what blogs and other news sources I read. I was going to point him to my list of "blogs I try to read regularly", which is a blogroll from Bloglines, when I realized that my Bloglines subscription list and my Google Reader subscription list (which was originally derived by exporting the OPML list of feeds from Bloglines) had drifted out of sync with each other.

Well, I thought, this should be simple! I'll just export the OPML lists from both readers and sort them and then compare using diff or something, and bring them back into sync, and clean them up a bit while I'm at it.

No such luck.

Bloglines' OPML file uses outline text= for specifying folder names, and outline title= for individual subscription names. Google's OPML file does the reverse.

Bloglines puts all the data for a single subscription on a single line. Google separates elements onto different lines.

Here's an example:

Bloglines:

<outline text="Blogs" > <outline title="Accidental Pedagogy" text="Accidental Pedagogy" htmlUrl="http://accidentalpedagogy.typepad.com/accidental_pedagogy/" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://accidentalpedagogy.typepad.com/accidental_pedagogy/atom.xml" />

Google:

<outline title="blogs" text="blogs">
   <outline text="apophenia" title="apophenia" type="rss"
   xmlUrl="http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/index.xml" htmlUrl="http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/"/>

Guess it's time to break out some Python.

Project brings together a number of different communities supporting research and academic innovation.

Institutional teams - 2-5 participants per institution, including arts/humanities faculty, IT, library reps.

It's to be a Community Design process - this workshop is to be a "listening tour", guided by a framework of broad goals and a commitment to action. Janet Broughton calls it an "upward spiral of conversation". Looking for a search for commonalities - common needs where investment and effort will make sense.

Chris Mackey notes that there's going to be a lot of sausage making going on in this project, and the end results are not likely to be elegant and clean, but could be really useful.

Mellon is interested in the diversity of participation in this project, including community colleges and liberal arts colleges. They are excited about the possibility of an implementation project down the road.

Arts & Humanities are different from the sciences. One way is that you can find world-class researchers in nooks and crannies, unlike in, say, high energy physics. What does an indigenous a&h cyberinfrastructure look like?

In Mellon's experience so far, the smaller institutions have more than held their own, and often act as leading indicators of new and interesting sets of issues.

We'll spend the next two days trying to understand how humanists work and to build out lists of scholarly practices in the arts and humanities with a series of exercises and quick talks (4 minutes of presentation, 6 minutes of questions max).

The question is raised about places in the humanities where digital scholarship is problematic and perceived as not leading to tenure. The organizers are cognizant of the issue, but hopeful that it won't dominate the discussion. Kathleen Woodward notes that the Bamboo Project itself helps lend legitimacy to digital scholarship at our institutions.

Now on to the reception and dinner!

I'm traveling this week to two different meetings, that somehow seem thematically related.

The first is the initial workshop for Project Bamboo, which is:

Bamboo is a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary, and inter-organizational effort that brings together researchers in arts and humanities, computer scientists, information scientists, librarians, and campus information technologists to tackle the question:
How can we advance arts and humanities research through the development of shared technology services?
and then Thursday I'm heading to New Orleans with a crew from KEXP for a meeting about the possibility of creating a national alliance of independent music radio stations.
So what's the relation? Well, if KEXP is at all indicative of what independent music stations are up to, they are producing an incredible storehouse for research in popular culture in present day society, through a rich archive of interviews, live performances, playlists, and the like.
And the fact that we'll be hosted in New Orleans by WWOZ during the second weekend of Jazzfest is pretty sweet too! More blogging as we go!

Microsoft has updated its Live Search Maps to work on Safari and the iPhone. That's very cool because it offers this cool angled bird's eye view (a look at the side of Mary Gates Hall that my office is in):

I'm down in California - had a good meeting yesterday with our colleagues from UC Berkeley about their organizational efforts, the Kuali Student project, and their collaboration tools strategy effort. Great stuff, and great folks!

Now I'm in Cupertino for a meeting of the higher-ed iPhone task force. Should be an interesting day.

At dinner last night I was complaining to Jason Ediger about not being able to manually manage my music on the iPhone by dragging and dropping songs from iTunes. He told me that I was wrong, and that with the iPhone update from January you could actually manually manage music and video on the phone.

And sure enough, he's right!

If you set your iPhone settings to enable this, which you do like so:

You can then drag and drop songs onto the iPhone - as shown below in this clip: