A useful screencast from H. Rheingold on ‘tuning’ resources for research

Thanks again, Howard Rheingold! Take advantage of some of the tools that Howard discusses in this short screencast:

http://screenr.com/Content/assets/screenr_1116090935.swf

New book on personal communication/connection in digital environs…

Some of you may be following the Media Commons blog/site already, but if not, a new book was announced there today. Here is the post. The book is by Nancy Baym, and here’s a blurb about it:

The internet and the mobile phone have disrupted many of our conventional understandings of our selves and our relationships, raising anxieties and hopes about their effects on our lives. This timely and vibrant book provides frameworks for thinking critically about the roles of digital media in personal relationships. Rather than providing exuberant accounts or cautionary tales, it offers a data-grounded primer on how to make sense of these important changes in relational life.

The book identifies the core relational issues these media disturb and shows how the ways we talk about them echo historical discussions about earlier communication technologies. Chapters explore how we use mediated language and nonverbal behavior to develop and maintain communities, social networks, new relationships, and to maintain relationships in our everyday lives. It combines research findings with lively examples to address questions such as whether mediated interaction can be warm and personal, whether people are honest about themselves online, whether relationships that start online can work, and whether using these media damages the other relationships in our lives. Throughout, the book argues for approaching these questions with firm understandings of the qualities of media as well as the social and personal contexts in which they are developed and used.

Personal Connections in the Digital Age will be required reading for all students and scholars of media, communication studies, and sociology, as well as all those who want a firmer understanding of digital media and everyday life.

Pre-order info is in the original post. I’m wondering if some of the insights that Baym offers might also extend into the realm of academic/scholarly communication and publication in the digital realm. At any rate, it looks worth reading!

NERCOMP workshop on “digital scholarship”

Encountered this post on the Academic Commons blog today, and thought it might be of interest to some here. The workshop will be held on Feb. 1, and aims to cover the following questions:

How do campuses support the production needs for student and faculty whose work draws increasingly on the use of multiple forms of media? What strategies are faculty using to assess multimedia-based research projects? How are media projects disseminated? What pedagogical and production frameworks do librarians and instructional technologists need to understand?

Go here for more info/registration.

Fun text-imaging tool….

Just ran across this tool called Wordle. It enables you to generate word clouds based on pieces of text that you paste into the online tool. The resulting image is Creative Commons licensed to you, though the program/code it runs on is not under a CC. More info on the page. Here is an example Wordle cloud I created from my research blog:

AAARG.org

Some of you may know about this resource already, and while I’ve been checking in on it for a while, I’ve only just started doing so in any depth as I prepare a course for next term. Here is the ‘about’ information from the AAARG.org site

AAAARG is a conversation platform – at different times it performs as a school, or a reading group, or a journal.

AAAARG was created with the intention of developing critical discourse outside of an institutional framework. But rather than thinking of it like a new building, imagine scaffolding that attaches onto existing buildings and creates new architectures between them.

Twitter. http://twitter.com/aaaarg

Facebook. http://www.facebook.com/aaaarg.org

RSS/XML. http://aaaarg.org/feeeed

Email Subscribe. http://aaaarg.org/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi

Contact. someone -at- aaaarg -dot- org

One of the ‘issues’ around which people have begun to collect texts is “Sharing and Remixing in the Humanities.” You’ll have to create an account to access any of the texts (or add to the library), but it’s easy and worth it…

UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) proposal calls

Snipped from an email I got the other day from the UCHRI

The University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) invites proposals for various programs.

For more information, please go to:

Residential Research Fellowships 2010-11
Application Deadline: December 15, 2009

Residential Research Groups: Topic Proposals 2011-12
Application Deadline: December 15, 2009

Awards are contingent upon available funding.

Open access/collaborative digital archive

Ran across this on the Academic Commons blog:

Parallel Archive

It’s in beta testing right now, and is described as follows:

Parallel Archive (PA), developed by Open Society Archives (OSA) at Central European University (www.osaarchivum.org), is at once a personal scholarly workspace, a collaborative research environment, and a digital repository.

The Academic Commons post gives a bit more detail:

Parallel Archive… is a space where scholars and students in the humanities and social sciences can upload, store, study, and share their digitized archival sources. It is designed to facilitate individual scholarly research and publication; cross-border and cross-disciplinary collaboration; and a critical approach to documents.

I’ve not poked around in the PA holdings, but it sounds pretty cool!

Digital Humanities & Design seminar @UCLA

NOWCASTING: Design Theory and the Digital Humanities: A Transdisciplinary Seminar
October 16 & 17, 2009  •  UCLA

Website : http://dma.ucla.edu/nowcasting/
Watch : http://dma.ucla.edu/nowcasting/watch.html

“NOWCASTING is the first conference to apply design theory to emerging issues in the digital humanities. Showcasing digital humanities projects at every level from Google mapping to super computing visualization, the Nowcasting seminar proposes that learning from communication design, interaction design, and
industrial design will be vital to 21st century humanistic inquiry.

The Nowcasting Seminar is organized by Peter Lunenfeld + sponsored by University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI), UCLA Design|Media Arts, Digital Humanities + Media Study.”

Blog-based scholarship….a public notebook?

Hello, all- I’ve revamped a blog I started over the summer that focuses on material culture. I’m trying to use it as a ‘public notebook’ of sorts for research-related ideas, as well as a spot to craft my perspectives & writing on aspects (interesting, at least to me) of material culture. You can find it here.

On a related note, this blog is part of a WPMU intallation over at A&AA that we are piloting this year. In order to streamline admin and support, it’s not open to a large number of users at this point. We’ll be sure to keep everyone posted, however, as the work we are doing in terms of customizing the system in order to integrate curriculum, research, and collaborative communication might just end up benefiting everyone on campus in the near future…