The humanity in Digital Humanities

I had an epiphany of sorts the other night, summed up by the following set of tweets: 

 

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

 

I really think that’s true. Part of the project of digital humanities has to be thinking about how electronic content is produced. I don’t mean just thinking critically about authority, or even about what “New Media” might mean. That’s part of it. But we need also to approach digital material with the same eye toward history and accountability with which approach material texts and the material world in general. 

I started out thinking about the idea of “human-powered search,” and that set off a train of free association that ended with Google’s old “PigeonRank” April Fool’s prank. What makes PigeonRank funny is that no one outside of a few mathematicians really understands how search works. Unless you hang out with cryptographers and AI hackers (or programmers under NDA with Google), even the most tech-savvy person you know only kind of understands how it all works. As far as most people are concerned, it may as well be a flock of pigeons in a warehouse. When we throw people into that equation, it starts to get scary.

Google, of course, has their famous “don’t be evil” policy, and the pioneers of human-powered search over at Mahalo are good people. I used to be lead blogger at one of Jason Calacanis’ other properties, and Mahalo’s ex-Editorial Director is going to be my best man. I’ll vouch for them.  The history of technology, though, tells us that good ideas end up moving offshore for production, and that greed eventually trumps all other production concerns. In the inevitable cycle of merger and acquisition, how long before some adolescent in China is answering questions about trivia in between sewing shoes and gold farming for the Warcraft black market? When will the algorithm stop finding Jesus and start finding sweatshops in Guam?

What then?

Of course, I’m being a little hyperbolic, here, but a successful digital humanities will eventually require a fusion of critical theory and canny consumerism.

I’m Voting Republican [Not]

I’d say this about sums it up. It’s too bad there is no mention of the RIAA/MPAA, though.

[via 1FPS

Puerto Rico Trip

I don’t usually talk about work per se here, but so much time and effort has gone into this that I want to mention it.

It’s been a busy, international week for me and my staff. As I was getting back from San Salvador, one of my technologists was heading off to Puerto Rico to accompany one of our biology classes on a field trip to study tropical ecology. Trying to wrap up the details from a continent away was a bit of a logistical challenge, especially since equipment problems and arcane airline regulations (who knew you needed media credentials to travel with more than 100 lbs. of A/V equipment?) caused some last-minute panic; I really don’t know how we functioned before Skype. In the end, though, we got everything and everyone we needed down there in working order.

The goal was to do daily video podcasts starting last Sunday, but a hectic production schedule and unreliable network have meant we didn’t get the first episode up until today. It’s up now though, and the rest should be following soon, so you can follow the adventure at home at http://itac.edublogs.org/category/podcast/tropical_ecology/.

Going unpro: that blog won’t hunt

DSCN2806-bw.JPG
Originally uploaded by daggerquill

Watching the flood of CES and Macworld posts the last few weeks has really brought it home that, really, I’m not a professional blogger anymore. It’s been a long time since my name showed up in a byline on Download Squad, or anywhere else.It’s a shame; I really enjoyed working on DLSQ, and before that TUAW and DPGuru, and I’m proud that I was even a small part of making TUAW and DLSQ what they are today. I feel extremely honored to have worked with so many wonderful people in the time I spent with Weblogs, Inc. I also feel far less up-to-date than I did when part of my income depending on have tech news to post at regular intervals.Lately, though, despite my telling myself I’ll get back to it, it’s become increasingly clear that the increased responsibilities that came with the new job mean I don’t have time for both DLSQ and and chipping away at the dissertation. And in that situation I know what the choice has to be. I haven’t told Gant or Victor officially (not that they haven’t noticed), but I don’t see how much longer I can postpone the inevitable.

Banging my head against the writing on the Blackboard

I’ve always thought I hated Java. Turns out, the language isn’t actually that bad. I still don’t think much ofong.silly.descriptors.connected.with.completely.superfluous.dots or idioticCamlCase. Nor do I care for a typed language whose compiler can’t keep track of its own typing. Seriously, people. If someObject.String returns, well, a string, then typing things like String someCopy = someObject.String is just silly infuriating. It’s tempting to refer to Java’s designers’ insistence rules over simple common sense in a way that would invoke Godwin’s Law. Beyond those annoyances, though, writing Blackboard building blocks is less frustrating that I thought it was going to be, at least on the Java end.

Blackboard itself is a different story. The API is one of the most poorly-documented I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen some doozies. The worst part is that they lure you in with a false sense of professionalism. There is nice, hefty Blackboard Building Blocks Developers Guide with the complete spec for the manifest XML. There is also a wonderful getting started guide that walks you through your first module.

There is nothing bridging the two.

The getting started guide walks you though creating a hello world module that can be added a course tool. It covers data access and documents the most common methods Bb provides. It presents several was to handle data persistence. It is, in other words, a good piece of documentation.

However, I don’t want to create a course tool. I want to create, in Bb’s jargon, custom content. I know I can do this. I’ve seen it done. I know that module creation routines have to accept certain parameters. It’s all in the manual. What isn’t there is a description of the action the building block has to take to actually insert the content into a page. Persist to a data store? Print to STDOUT? Submit a POST to some url?

Probably it’s in there somewhere, and I’m just missing it. I’ll get it out of the docs eventually. That’s fine. What’s really bugging me is the great example that told me absolutely nothing I need to know. There was agreat deal of time and effort put into showing me how to replicate functionality the system already has, and in a way that neither I nor most users care about. Blackboard is a content management system. Why is there no documentation on how to actually create content?

I’d be a lot less ticked off right now if they’d just said “sorry, can’t be bothered” up front, instead of letting me find out at the end of several hours of work that they’d only pretended to tell me what I need to know.

Tweets for 2007-04-27

• From the mouths of grad students: “Just think of it like a marriage: the first time was just the run-through, the second time is for keeps #
• Firefox crashing requlary. Seems to be flash plug-in? #

Powered by Twitter Tools.

Tweets for 2007-04-25

• pre-comp caffeination #

Powered by Twitter Tools.

Tweets for 2007-04-22

• Great mashup of Dow’s “Humen element commercial and images from Bhopal: http://urltea.com/eu5 #
• Human, even #

Powered by Twitter Tools.

Tweets for 2007-04-21

• Just back from reading in the NYBG. Beautiful day in NY. Finally. #

Powered by Twitter Tools.

Tweets for 2007-04-20

• Even I can only read so much poetry at a go. #

Powered by Twitter Tools.