The unthinkable!

My hard drive’s dead. Long live the hard drive!

Luckily, Ethan had the foresight to sit me down to make a bootable backup a couple of months ago. Most of the important information from this semester has been recovered; my browser bookmarks, though, have not. I’ll survive, for sure.

This comes on the heels of Thanksgiving, which was a challenging time in itself. We were three, my mom and Ethan and I, and although we love each other fiercely, mom and I don’t actually get along very well. We managed to get through it, and now there’s a clean and orderly apartment as a bonus.

It’s been a hectic week-and-a-half: conference, then immediately mom last week, then a weekend of recovery, clean-up and hard drive woes. I’ll be picking up again both here and at okno shortly.

Hyperlist(e)s

Jenna Wells, a student at McMaster, is presenting a site that hadn’t been on my radar previously, but is actually somewhat similar in concept to Roland^HT. The site, written entirely in French, is Hyperlistes, and treats a body of medieval French poetry. Apparently, listing things in your poems was a popular thing to do; the project’s participants have encoded items in these lists and cross-referenced them by theme. Nifty.

EDIT, with notes to self: just talked to Madeline Jeay, originator and brain behind Hyperlistes. She mentions that street poets in Brazil did something called poésie de cordel, in which… I think they hung sheets of paper off of ropes in sequence and then sang the songs. Or something. I must research this further, because Madeline seems to remember some of those stories being about Roland. She says that Paul Zumthor’s Introduction a la poésie orale may mention it; she vaguely remembers Zumthor talking about it when she studied with him. (!)

Modeling the humanities

I’m at The Face of Text, a conference at McMaster University in Hamilton, near Toronto. Only half of the first day has passed, and already I could spend the rest of the day blogging my thoughts. Luckily, I’m taking careful notes, and plan to write more later on tonight, or this weekend (although the fun over here lasts through Sunday).

Meanwhile, a short comment on John Unsworth’s keynote, titled Forms of Attention: Digital Humanities Beyond Representation. During the thought provoking, hour-long talk, he has mentioned what he sees as a problem with visualization of knowledge in the humanities. The prettier it gets (think QuickTime movies showing the reconstruction of a temple from blueprints or archeological data), the harder it is for the viewer to know what is actually known, and what is hypothesized. That’s a fair criticism, and it seems to me that the problem is easily remedied. More than that: there already exist a number of ways to remedy it.

The simplest is documentation. Humanities computing projects suffer from appallingly sparse documentation. Tell me what is known and what is hypothesized, before, during and/or after I view the pretty movie.

Then there’s the CAVE. These 3D modeling environments are gorgeous but hugely expensive to build and maintain. There are, I think, six publicly accessible CAVEs in Europe (one of them at the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria). None of the several CAVEs in the States are publicly accessible. So, even though there are at least a couple of humanities projects being done there, for now there remains a problem of dissemination and real dialogue based on these projects.

At least one of them, however, addresses precisely the issue of what is known vs. what is hypothesized. The ARCHAVE, based on a temple excavation project in Petra, Jordan, takes as a central premise the idea of modeling as a way of making an argument. They’re excavating, they find a shard of pottery, and they reconstruct what the vessel must’ve looked like. Then they place that vessel in the same place, inside the virtual reconstruction of the temple, where the original shard was found. The idea is, when they’re done, to invite archeologist colleagues and encourage them to play around, pick up objects, contest their placement, etc. Modeling as argument at its best – at least it seems that way. We’ll see if it works.

Until CAVEs are at least as accessible as personal computers, there are ways (besides documentation) to make your pretty model transparent with regard to that crucial difference between what is known and what – debated. John kindly pointed me to a proof of concept they did at the University of Virginia: the Pompeii Forum Project. Apparently, it involves layers of images that make certainty differences more obvious. I’ll have to check it out later: the next session has already begun.

“Sorry, everybody.” — “Ah, don’t worry about it.”

Apologies accepted. This was obvious before, but it’s nice to have sweet confirmation that the world doesn’t unequivocally hate us.

I was in Dobbs Ferry, NY for most of this week, helping out with some family logistics in the mornings and evenings and getting mad amounts of work done in the daytime. I’m pretty satisfied, all told. Now it’s back home with my love (oh, reunions are sweet)… and more work. Good stuff, though. I’m happy with how the week has gone; got to spend a decadent amount of quality time with my brother, hang out with the best nephew in the world, and, uh, miss my sister-in-law, whom I saw only briefly before she left on a business trip.

It’s hunkering-down weather. Frozen rain is scritching the air conditioner’s metal butt outside my window. More work to do today, and this weekend I’ll catch up on the world’s happenings.

Mmmuppets!

The US Postal Service (not to be confused with The Postal Service, which is apparently being allowed to keep its name in exchange for some advert appearances… but that’s another story) is releasing new stamps in 2005.

MUPPET stamps. Aiiieee the cute!

Migrated!

With supremely patient help from Ethan, my blog is now WordPressed. Erm, sorry if that renewed all your RSS feed posts. But it’s worth it, oh yes it is.

While we were at it, I have redesigned the entire site; the main blog is now at the root, and there are some other changes. If you use a smart RSS aggregator, it’ll update the URL for the feed automatically (and there’s a permanent redirect in case it doesn’t). If you want to do it manually, and/or subscribe to the comments feed, look in the lower part of the left-hand column for links.

I’ve also started another blog, for matters geopolitical. It’s called Okno, and the first post contains more information on its raison d’être.

Creative Commons and the academic endeavor

Looking back at October’s CIT Infobits, I see an entry abstracting Andrea Foster’s article about the use of Creative Commons licensing in academe. I was curious and checked it out. It’s a pretty short article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a blurb really, and it says nothing new: Creative Commons has existed for a while now, and is catching on very slowly in academic circles.

Sure, no surprise. I know humanist academics who still don’t really use email or the web much, certainly not for research purposes. Inertia (which, to be fair, is mentioned in Foster’s write-up) is a huge part of the academic way of doing things. Even if authors do know their options with regard to copyright, many academic publishers have not yet had time to evolve to the point where they include such licensing in their vision of what publishing is. While not immutable, currently tenure reviews are what they are: people have been talking for a long while about the need to revise that process so that credit may be given for work performed electronically, but that too will take time. In the meantime, authors are often faced with the choice of either publishing their work online under a Creative Commons license, or having it published on paper and acquire the necessary gravitas in the eyes of their employers, but not both. In this case, the choice is clear: print publication takes precedence, especially since print publishers will often allow authors to publish their works online following a specified time period after the print publication comes out.

Not having published a whole lot in print yet, I haven’t looked into the issue too closely. Are any of the established print publishers amenable to working with an author to allow for the release of an article in electronic format, concurrently with the publication date of the print version?

reading for the soul

Emily, who claims she thinks too much, writes beautifully about the ministry of truth.

Help me find sources.

I am looking to start a small project, for which I’d like to find a few reputable sources of information. By reputable I mean written by decent people whose main interest is the truth, with as little spin as possible. I’d like to get to points of view that aren’t normally in my field of vision, so I need a conservative publication or two (besides Andrew Sullivan’s blog, which I haven’t been reading until now, but will) and a publication that is sympathetic to the Republican party. They don’t need to be separate publications necessarily, but I’d like to find a total of at least a couple. Syndication feed availability for their news articles would be a big plus. If they’re local or regional, that’s at least as good as national. Too much liberal- and/or Democrat-bashing would be a minus. I don’t care for partisanship, I want their point of view.

Suggestions, anyone?

voting ways and means

By now y’all must’ve heard already about Black Box Voting. Aside from being an interesting site in general, it also posts a link to Votergate the movie. It’s 30 minutes long, and very much worth watching.

alien

For as long as I’ve been in the states – 14.5 years and counting – I’ve never been able to call myself an American. Well, it looks like that isn’t changing anytime soon.

I’m not disappointed that Kerry lost the election, per se. (Although I am horrified that Bush will get four more years to screw me personally and the rest of this country sideways, and the rest of the world too, for as long as it lets him.) I am numb, because more than half of this country’s active voters have clearly stated that their value systems are more or less polarly opposed to mine. This state of affairs is unlikely to change in my lifetime.

Ethan points out that, as far as places to live go, we’ve got it pretty good: Rhode Island has a long and mostly noble history of respectful dissent and relative freedom. We are surrounded by hard-working people who think and are mostly informed, and who see and understand the wide world beyond U.S. borders, which is more than I can say for the majority of this country. And still, I feel an alien.

This country has given me more opportunities than my home, that’s for sure. I am well educated, well fed and have certainly had my mind blown by art like nowhere else. Thanks for that. But while the house I live in is my home, and Ethan is my love, the country that surrounds us isn’t home, and I am not a patriot.

There you have it, I didn’t realize I needed to say that. I am not a patriot of this country any more than I am a patriot of any other. I’m deeply touched by the events here, but ultimately no more so than I am by events in Uzbekistan; except, of course, that the brutalities of the Uzbek government do not impact my life directly, while Bush’s religious-right moral agenda does.

The upshot is, I won’t change this country. I make a bad political activist, and in fact want all those sixty million people to feel and do whatever they feel like doing with their lives. If they want to teach creationism in Alabama schools, fine. Teach it. I think it’s a crock of shit, and I don’t want my children learning it exclusively at all as a truth, but they should be able to do it. That’s the point. Too bad that sort of thinking also leads to beatings of gays to death, but the answer isn’t trying to persuade those people to soften, it’s to get the hell away from them.

Easy for me to say, I don’t have a home here. Many do. There are gays in Georgia who just got a big old fuck-you from their home state, who don’t want to leave it. They, in fact, love it as patriots do. I can only wish them the best of luck, and strength for the long road ahead. I can’t fight the juggernaut that has always been here.

I want to move away. Not defect, not even entirely unpatriotically – hell, I might end up teaching English sometime, and the English I’d teach would certainly be American. But I want to move to a place filled with people whose core values more closely approximate mine. Preferably an entire sovereign entity like that.

I’ve resolved to keep a better eye on national politics, not only during election year but always. More, though, I’m interested in getting to know the national newspapers of the top contender countries for such a move. Take the time to find out what they’re really about, and limit my political activism here to donating money to organizations that will be better activists than I.

Home is where the heart is; my home is with Ethan and with my other friends and family, but my heart is not with America. It rejects me again and again; it’s not my home.

NaNoWriMo

Am I nuts? Perhaps (see SAD, earlier – and still, but no matter right at the moment). But I’m not about to write a novel, either. Instead, I’ll pretend that the National Novel Writing Month is actually the National November Writing Month. In the following way: I will write, every day of November including today but not including Election Day, a thousand words of material relating to humanities computing. It may be paper proposals, or code, or weblog posts; it may relate to VHL or to my Roland work. None of it will be fluff. At the end of the month, I’ll have twenty-nine thousand words.

Whee!