The Fabulator extension for Radiant is forming up well. I’m planning on extracting the core engine from the extension and publishing it as a standalone Ruby library that can be plugged in to other systems. I’ll be working it in to the Writing and Learning Communities software as a way to build assignment modules.
In a post from quite a while back, I talk about eXtensible State Machines, a way to reduce a web application to an XML document. The original implementation was a stand-alone web application environment/framework written in Perl. The web has evolved since that initial work. We now have web 2.0, Ruby on Rails, and content management systems that are easy to extend (e.g., Radiant).
Michael Godwin, General Counsel, Wikipedia Foundation, is on campus today visiting with various digital humanities groups and giving a talk titled, "After the Revolution." I've been thinking about the role of libraries and the Internet and academic responses to Wikipedia.
Since starting in the College of Liberal Arts in November, 2007, as the new lead developer for digital humanities, I've been putting together some design ideas and initial code towards a Digital Resources Workbench.
The NEH and other U.S. federal government agencies are pushing the digital humanities projects to result in something that can be shared. If this is an application that people can use, especially an application that resides on a central server, then the NEH is also wanting provisions for long-term maintenance. Ultimately, digital humanities projects should seek to be a resource that other scholarly work can build on. In this post, I want to explore what this might mean for web-based applications.
SF.OokOok, a science fiction and fantasy characterization project, is based on many of the ideas from the Genre Evolution Project (GEP) but with a different purpose. While the GEP is designed to collect data with a particular question in mind, SF.OokOok is designed to collect data that allows a researcher to prioritize the stories and other resources they may need to study in order to collect the data that they need in order to answer their question. SF.OokOok seeks to build a better card catalog of science fiction and fantasy.
Slashdot recently pointed to an article on CNET News, "Intel: Software needs to heed Moore's Law," that raises the alarm about hardware advancement outpacing software development advancement.
This abstract is for a presentation being made at the Digital Humanities 2007 Conference in June at UIUC.
Academic progress seems to depend on a person's ability to contribute to society as measured by attributable work such as articles and monographs in areas that are interesting to society. These attributions depend on copyrights and patents, the keys to establishing and protecting intellectual property ownership. The various print journals and publishing houses act as a peer-reviewed intermediary. The academy establishes social interest in a project by the project's ability to attract financial support.
Abstract: We explore string comparison, graph theory, and dimensional analysis and their implications in computational textual analysis. In the process, we develop some expectations that can be tested on a large text such as Beowulf, though we only lay out those expectations and do not test them due to the computational requirements for doing so. We draw from Old English vocabulary for our examples.