Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Feb 10, 2009, 02:44 PM

From the New York Times, an article, with video, of the beautiful visualization of the multimedia Tree of Life: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/science/10tree.html "Ever since Charles Darwin first sketched a spindly sapling in 1837, biologists have relied on evolutionary trees to understand the history of life. Today biologists draw evolutionary trees to help them track the emergence of new diseases, identify species at risk of extinction, and trace the history of disease-related genes in the human genome. Within the next few decades, biologists may figure out how the millions of species on Earth are related to one another. But for people to actually see that tree of life, the tree itself will have to evolve.

Biologists have responded to the problem by enlisting the help of computer scientists and software designers from companies like Google and Adobe to find a new way of looking at evolution. Their goal is to create a program that allows scientists and nonscientists alike to fly through evolutionary trees.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Feb 09, 2009, 01:03 PM
The HASTAC Scholars Forum on "The Future of Digital Humanities" led by NEH's Director of the Office of Digital Humanities Brett Bobley and HASTAC Scholars Michael Gavin and Kathleen Smith has brought up some very interesting points about collaboration. In 2006-2007, HASTAC organized the In/Formation Year around eighty institutions co-located at a dozen sites, with one public online event per month. Duke's InFormation topic was "INTERFACE" and our Franklin Humanities Institute Seminar met weekly to work on issues of human/computer interfaces and then worked together on an installation in our Virtual Reality and sensor spaces to visualize collaborative networks. Here is the fruit of that project, archived online: http://vis.cs.duke.edu/Research/interface/index.html. The project was led by Tim Lenoir, Priscilla Wald, Rachael Brady, and Harry Halpin, with input from all of the scholars in the Seminar.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jan 10, 2009, 01:02 PM
It is a beautiful early winter day today and I plan to go for a long walk. Yesterday was rich and full, including a remarkable interview with Curt, an economist and marathoner who happens to be blind, and Jeff, a runner and dad who happens to be Curt's running partner and guide. Patrick, a brilliant doctoral student working on networks and who happens to be my RA, was there too and he and I mulled the conversation over a bit afterward. Today feels like one giant cumulus cloud (photograph mine) forming on the horizon, full of insight and brimming beautiful on the horizon. Now that I have a name for what I do (I learned at the Twitter session that I'm at the cutting edge, a Slow Blogger), let me mull . . .

Submitted by travis on Oct 14, 2008, 11:05 AM

Yesterday's New York Times profile of the work of James Pennebaker is just the latest evidence of a revival of interest in computational stylistics, and I'd be curious to hear other HASTAC Scholars' thoughts on the topic.

I'd be the first to admit that I have something of a counting fetish, and I'd love to see this kind of thing done well, but I can't help thinking that arguments like the following have a touch of the phrenological about them:

Submitted by Lynn Marentette on Mar 03, 2008, 02:33 PM

This set of pictures depict what I found on March 2, 2008 from the WeFeelFine website. I learned about this website in my Visualization class this semester.

Submitted by Lynn Marentette on Mar 03, 2008, 02:33 PM

This set of pictures depict what I found on March 2, 2008 from the WeFeelFine website. I learned about this website in my Visualization class this semester.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Dec 13, 2007, 11:41 AM
If you go to www.sparkip.com, you will find the best searchable database for scientific technologies anywhere. This is SparkIP, an online intellectual property network for the scientific community that was co-developed by historian of science Tim Lenoir and engineer Rob Clark of Duke and Kristina Johnson (formerly dean of the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke and now Provost at Johns Hopkins).

Submitted by Mechelle on Nov 02, 2007, 11:15 AM
CAVE Technology: The Future of Education?

Submitted by Lynn Marentette on Aug 22, 2007, 07:02 PM
Technology Off the Desktop, the "Internet of Things"....