I-CHASS|MON 7/28 @NCSA
As promised, here is the first of a series of posts blogging ICHASS 2008 at UIUC - one per week day.
Vernon Burton – Professor of History African American Studies and Sociology and Associate Director for Humanities and Social sciences - introduced the event with a challenging speech that energized us all for the full week ahead. He then introduced the first panel with himself, Thom Dunning, and Mike Ross.
The highlight of Thom Dunning's talk was the announcement of an NCSA grant of up to 1million CPU hours for Humanities projects.
Mike Ross (Director of the prestigious Krannert Center for the Performing Arts ) was next and started by thanking Dunning - "It’s very reassuring to know that the director of this building [NSCA] welcomes domains outside those domains that naturally NCSA would be associated with." This is particularly important as Humanities, the Arts and the Social Sciences tend to be under-resourced, and under-funded. Ross also announced a new institute - IACAT. The core of this institute is NCSA. The research teams include among others:
- Simulation of natural and engineered systems
- Advanced info systems (science and engineering, moving towards environmental observatories)
- Computing and creativity Ross also mentioned a cultural informatics proposal where Donna Cox, Bob Patterson, and Allyson Clark among others, have been looking for ways to engage creative thinkers, to advance strategic rules...
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Burton had initiated a very dynamic introduction of the participants to the workshops and by this time we resumed it. We had folks coming from many US campuses and also from Canada, Belize, Mexico, the UK and Costa Rica. UIUC was present through some very strong research teams, such as the one behind the excellent "Papers of Abraham Lincoln" research initiative funded by the Office of the Provost, NCSA and UIUC.
****Mike Ross concluded by stressing Donna Cox’s work in data visualization as the corner stone foundation for much of the thinking in this new Institute ICAT.
Finally Vernon Burton warned that Humanities especially, social scientists to some extent and he is unclear about the Arts -have been told to be "silos" – they work alone. However, we had to change this mentality and need to learn how to collaborate.
This was off to a great start! We headed out for coffee and when we came back Loretta Auvil was ready with her intro to text analytics and description of SEARS. A hands-on workshop with this tool would take most of the afternoon. Very exciting! During the afternoon, Auvil told us about the interface they are developing at NCSA in this area - text analytics - where they are trying to mashup the tool with news feeds, google maps, etc. We then discussed the meaning of "mashup" as an application that uses two different data sets and uses one data set to plot it somewhere else (another different dataset). By the way, "mashups" are identified on the Horizon Report 2008 - a collaboration between the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative – as one of the 6 key technologies that will have a major impact in education. The best part was for me to see example of work conducted at UIUC. My favorite was NEMA - a Dynamic Visualization of Music Classification Systems - a sort of an audio genre classifier. As the music plays a complex algorithm measures its mark of jazz, blues, rap, pop etc - as the tune plays! After this great workshop we had a presentation by Susan Noakes with the intriguing title:"Globalization of medieval ages"
I must confess I had been looking forward to this presentation since I fist read the program but it went beyond my expectations. Noakes is working with Geraldine Heng (University of Texas at Austin) on this project that will eventually result in an important web presence - MAPA MUNDI or "globalization of medieval ages"- and in other formats that both Heng and Noakes are interested in discussing in venues such as the I-CHASS meetings. Whatever the form of that digital presence, it will be loaded with "texts, timelines and other structures for organizing chronological data, maps and interactive itineraries, visualizations, especially of key cities, wikis, and blogs".
I had never thought of how "medieval- charged" terms are being politically used (such as G. Bush's mention of the Iraq War as a crusade).Oakes identified the obstacles in addressing the problem as being:
o perception of vast quantity of material to be identified, organized, analyzed, debated , disseminated
o Disciplinary and sub-disciplinary fragmentation creates isolated debates, lack of access to global terminology for research and teaching Noakes, Heng and Aytes learned about SEASR in the ICHASS meeting of March 2008 and the two former scholars develop Gazetteer - a keyword list. The Minnesota Center for Medieval Studies funded the development of an initial data base on Africa, the Asias, and the middles East.ca. 500-1500 C.E (ca. 1200 documents) and the data analysis is currently in progress.
And the evening came too quickly! We headed to the campus cafeteria where excited students were getting ready for their last week of classes.
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