iSGTW 13 December 2006

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Issue 5: iSGTW 13 December 2006

Feature: Bringing Arts and Humanities into the Grid

Image from a virtual gallery created with the CITRIS Collaborative Gallery Builder, a project associated with HASTAC.
Image Courtesy CITRIS/University of California

Since 2003, the HASTAC consortium has worked toward the novel objective of developing software and hardware solutions for the worlds of the arts and humanities. HASTAC — which stands for Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory — also advocates the inclusion of thought on the social, ethical and access issues of technology in parallel with its creation.

“The idea was for humanities professors to look at ways to incorporate technologies like grid computing into their research,” says HASTAC Project Leader Jonathan Tarr. “They needed to save humanities from becoming a group of scholars who only work on physical text and weren’t going along with the technology revolution.”

Feature - Events

Beyond Science: Grids for the Media at IST 2006
Media convergence could seem a concept distant from the scientists and IT specialists working on the grid, but it may provide the next application area for grid technology. Broadcasting and the media industry share the need to generate, preserve and manage huge quantities of digital content, which could be facilitated by distributed systems such as grids. These ideas were recently explored at the IST 2006 conference held in Helsinki, Finland, through a session hosted by BELIEF, the Bringing eLectronic Infrastructures to Expanding Frontiers project.

Feature - Science

A Fair Shake for Seismologists
In the Midwestern United States, in the spring, there are weeks when you can't get through an episode of your favorite television show without an alert telling you that your county is under a tornado watch or, more invasive still, the local meteorologist interrupting programming to tell you to head to your basement. It saves lives, and it represents an incredible amount of simulation and data collection — even if you do have to scurry to the Web later to find out how "Lost" ended that week.

Acronym of the Week

GrEnaDE
GrEnaDE, which stands for Grid-Enabled Desktop Environments, is a project that aims to accelerate the rollout of computational grids by addressing the issues of accessibility and visibility directly, through tight integration of grid functionality within the user's desktop. GrEnaDE builds on existing grid and commodity technologies to provide small but tangible improvements to users’ desktop environments.