history

On Wednesday morning Michael Meredith didn’t stay as long as usual at the group's breakfast table. He wanted to get ready for his demo of Virtual Vellum, starting at 9AM sharp.

Michael is just a really great communicator. I wish that more CS folks were like him...:) Even in something as serious as Illuminated manuscripts he finds a way to make things fun such as by callin the "Manuscripts Torture Chamber" to the room where they carefully manipulate the manuscripts - most (all?) from France and Belgium.

Peter Bajcsy talked about important trends in the Humanities in the Context of Decision Processes... Questions like “is sampling an appropriate appraisal tool?” were core to his presentation.

July 29 2008 at NCSA was just too big to fit in one single post - Part I here where I blog Meredith's, Lundberg's and Pitard's presentations on Illuminated Manuscripts, the Inscriptifact project and an undergoing project at the Spurlock Museum involing seals and true artistry of ca. 2.500 BC!

As promised, here is the first of a series of posts blogging ICHASS 2008 at UIUC - one per week day.

Not for the faint of heart--an article from the Chronicle on the "true" inventor of the internet (?) led me to the flickr images tagged with Mundaneum. View as slideshow and prepare for cognitive whiplash...

When I descend into cold murky water looking for a shipwreck for historical and archaeological research the quiet and darkness can often make me feel very much alone. But being an underwater archaeologist and the director of an online museum I know I can never do either of those jobs by myself. There is always a team from various sciences there to help raise up the stories of our past from their watery graves.

Innerspace and Interface: Affect and representation are crucial to digital history, music, and dance.

The indomitable David Liu is presenting on his project to create an "affective metaphysics," and by affect he means far more than human emotion, but " anything suffered - physical, mental , or otherwise - by any subject, be it human, iron, or whatever." And to suffer is to interpenetrate, to interface. While it has been said in the past that there are few more mandarin pursuits than metaphysics, the need for metaphysical revival has become pressing as digital technologies tear down our common-sense - or should I say medieval? - divisions of the world into individual objects. This ebb and flow, the collapse of these once-sacred divisions of the world, while first brought to widespread attention by literary criticism, actually has much deeper roots, and any project to revise our metaphysics will require a keen sense of history. The study of "New Media" focuses far too much on the "new": As Liu puts it in his translation of the Hebrew Qohelet, "An age goes, an age comes go, but the earth ever stands."