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New Directions
in Humanities Research

2006-2007 "Entering the Stream"

How is humanities research changing as more and more scholars leverage the internet and web-based tools for their research?

Alan Liu
Knowledge 2.0? -- The University and Web 2.0 Alan Liu gave a talk on the relationship between scholarly knowledge and so-called "Web 2.0" (the recently formulated, second-generation paradigm of the Web). The talk moved from practical issues to the larger social and philosophical implications of how knowledge is being reconfigured in the age of blogs, wikis, social networking and the other Web 2.0 technologies of "collective intelligence." In the era of Google, Wikipedia, and other Web 2.0 exemplars, is all knowledge destined to be just "good enough" (satisficing) knowledge? Is user-contributed knowledge a more robust paradigm than expert-produced knowledge? Does the unstable relation between scholarly knowledge and Web 2.0 merely reveal underlying problems-and potentials- in the adaptation of the academy to general society that have lain dormant since Web 1.0? About the speaker »
Sherry Turkle
Cyberintimacies "Sherry Turkle probably understands better than anyone how people transfer their emotions onto the Net: sometimes they go through the Net to other people, but sometimes they just stop at the Net and start having an emotional involvement with the Net itself." (Esther Dyson) About the speaker »
John Unsworth
Colloquium on Collaboration
Thomas Finholt, the keynote speaker, is director of the Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work, research associate professor, and adjunct assistant professor of psychology. Finholt researches how collaboratory systems affect users. He is also active in the Space Physics and Aeronomy Research Collaboratory, in which he conducts basic research on the impact of SPARC itself on its user community. His research focuses on the impact of computer communication technology on information processing in organizations; distance learning; and the design of collaborative computing environments.
About the speaker »

2005-2006 "Point of View"

As technological advances allow for more and more user participation, how will such participation change the user's point of view? In this series we explore two developing technologies with the potential to greatly expand user participation in research and publishing, as well as a Media Studies perspective on how this change affects our point of view in a space where we are at once producers and consumers.

Sophie Authoring Tools
Bob Stein, the Director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, reviewed the trajectory of electronic publishing since the 1980s and how he came to develop Sophie: a tool for reading and writing electronic books. The Sophie project is part of the Mellon Foundation's programs in Research in Information Technology and Scholarly Communications. More »
Convergence Culture
Presenting material from his forthcoming book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Prof. Henry Jenkins discussed how the role of content consumers has changed, enabling us to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content and how producers of content are exploiting these changes. More »
Croquet
Dr. Julian Lombardi demonstrated Croquet on two linked laptops to show interaction between two users. Croquet is an immersive 3D environment built upon objects and peer-to-peer systems. It allows users to share the same virtual space. The idea is to let a conference room or classroom be the model for our computing, rather than a flat desktop. More »

2004-2005 "What's in the code?"

In the first year of the New Directions lecture series, we touched on four areas in which computing and the internet are having a significant impact on humanities research: intellectual property, text analysis, text encoding, and browser tools for library collections. This series was jointly sponsored by the Humanities Center, the Department of English and Academic Computing.

Browser Tools for Digital Image Collections
David Rumsey, the Director of Luna Imaging, is a map collector with one of the largest private map collections in the United States. In 1995 he made is collection public. He digitized all of the maps at an extremely high resolution and went on to explore sophisticated browser tools to make the most of the maps. (www.davidrumsey.com)
Text Encoding
Julia Flanders from Brown University is the Director of the Brown Women Writers Project and the chair of the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) Consortium. Julia's research focuses on text encoding and how it transforms textual information into data, giving it new cultural meaning. Many of the students in attendance were from the newly created undergraduate Digital Humanities concentration.
Text Analysis
Professor Stephan Sinclair from McMaster University demonstrated tools from the Canadian TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research) site and explained how he applies them in his reasearch.
Creative Commons
Director of Creative Commons, Glenn Brown, introduced faculty and students to the mission of Creative Commons and the benefit of managing one's own copyright licenses.