Content about Humanities

New computing tools could save graduate students from thousands of hours spent visually inspecting historical maps, quilts, medieval art, and manuscripts.

Humanities researchers use laborious visual inspection of historical materials to determine authorship and artistic lineage for manuscripts, maps, and quilts. A typical research project could take the time of several graduate students two or more years.

“We are interested in understanding how to support these domain scientists so they are more efficient,” said Peter Bajcsy, principal investigator for the Digging into Image Data to Answer Authorship-Related Questions (DID-ARQ) project at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. He added, “We are giving them tools that will automate the visual inspection process.”

Those tools are the product of extensive collaboration between humanities researchers and Bajcsy’s team. To create them, the computer experts engaged in lengthy discussions to determine what questions the humanities researchers seek to answer, and exactly how they would answer them using traditional methods. Their inquiries sought out details such as which image features researchers use – consciously or unconsciously – to identify the author or artist. Then the computer scientists developed algorithms that could rapidly identify those features automatically.

  Link of the Week: Coming to an i-Phone near you Image courtesy Flickr under Creative Commons licence Since the story in iSGTW last year about Cinefilia, the grid-enabled film recommendation service, it creator and sole webmaster, Leandro Ciuffo, says his user base has increased by 27% — without any direct promotion or advertising. Once a user has signed up for a Cinefilia account they can review whether they like or dislike one of hundreds of films on the database. The system then ‘learns’ that user’s preferences and generates personalized recommendations accordingly. (But in order for the results to be accurate a minimum of 20 films must be rated by a user.)   Ciuffo aims to increase the amount of Brazilian films on the database because 95% of users on his site are Brazilian, possibly because there are currently no recommendation systems for Brazilian films. Ciuffo is looking for partners to help him improve the recommendation software algo

Link of the Week: Physics for Poets

Woodblock print of ‘The Sea off Satta,’ from ‘36 Views of Mount Fuji’ by Hiroshige Utagawa. Image courtesy Wikipedia under Creative Commons license

At the scifaiku website, fans of science fiction can express their passion for time travel, spaceships and aliens in haiku.
The rules of this ancient Japanese poetic form are relatively simple: each poem is composed of a maximum of three lines, with 5 syllables on the first line, 7 on the next, and 5 on the last.
But while traditional haiku make a reference to nature; “scifaiku” call for a science fiction reference, such as:
Asteroids collidewithout a sound . . . We maneuver between fragments.
It seemed unfair that science fiction fans should have all the fun, so we tried our hands at this art, focusing on the theme of computing. This can be a challenge, given the distressing number of syllables in phrases such as “distributed computing infrastructur

Announcement - SDH-NEERI, 19-20 October, Vienna, Austria

Image courtesy SDH-NEERI

SDH-NEERI (Supporting the Digital Humanities/Networking Event for European Research Infrastructures), NEERI will be held at the Technical University of Vienna, Austria.
“Supporting the Digital Humanities” is the first conference that is jointly organized by the CLARIN and DARIAH initiatives, which are building the European research infrastructure for the humanities and related disciplines. SDH2010 aims to bring together infrastructure providers and users from the communities involved with the two infrastructure initiatives. The conference will consist of a number of topical sessions where providers and users will present and discuss results, obstacles and opportunities for digitally-supported humanities research. Participants will be encouraged to engage with honest assessments of the intellectual problems and practical barriers in an open and constructive atmosphere.
SDH2010 is organized toge

Feature - NetLogo: A low threshold, no ceiling language

Two fifth grade students use NetLogo to learn about electrical current. Image courtesy Pratim Sengupta.
Front page image: Tiling with squares whose sides are successive Fibonacci numbers in length. Courtesy Wikipedia under Creative Commons license.

Elementary school students may not be able to decipher mathematical models such as Maxwell’s Equations. But given the right visualization and computational modeling tools, they can learn the underlying concepts.
Meet NetLogo, a multi-agent programmable modeling environment authored in 1999 by Uri Wilensky, a learning sciences and computer science professor at Northwestern University, and founder of the Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling.
Remember the turtle?
A generation of adults were introduced to functions and programming through Logo and the “turtle” - an on-screen triangular cursor - that accompanied it. Logo was first created in 1967

Announcement - Early Registration Discount closes 17 May, Digital Humanities

May 17 is the last day that participants are eligible for the reduced registration rate to Digital Humanities 2010, to be held in Kings College London, UK from 7-10 July.
The goals of the conference are to promote and support digitally-based research and teaching across the arts and humanities disciplines. It embraces three constituent organizations, including the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC), the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) and the Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs (SDH-SEMI).
Conference registration fees are (in GBP):

Member - early registration (by 17 May): £210
Member - late registration (after 17 May): £260
Non-member - early registration (by 17 May): £300
Non-member - late registration (after 17 May): £350
Student Member: £60
Student Non-member: &poun

Q&A: Peer-reviewed physics, at the speed of light

Sergio Bertolucci during an interview with a member of the Swedish press. Image courtesy Corentin Chevalier, GridTalk

Sergio Bertolucci is the director for research and computing at CERN. Over the noise of nearby cathedral bells chiming the hour, iSGTW caught up with him on the steps of the University Building in Uppsala during a coffee break at the EGEE User Forum. We asked him about the spate of new papers coming out from the LHC, and what it all means for science.iSGTW: We have heard that a lot of papers have already been published in the time since the start-up of the LHC. Is that right?Bertolucci: Four papers on high-energy physics have already published, and 15 are in preparation as of today, April 14, all based on the collisions that just happened.One week after the first collisions, the first papers were published electronically. And these were all peer-reviewed.
 
iSGTW: That’s very fast, compared to the some

Opinion: What would Linnaeus do?

Carl Linnaeus on his wedding day, holding in his right hand a specimen of Linnear borealis — his favorite plant, said Magnus Lidén, curator of the Uppsala University Botanic Garden. Image courtesy Uppsala University Art Collection

Elizabeth Leake of TeraGrid — the high-performance, distributed computing network in the USA — was a guest at the EGEE User Forum, the recent conference in Europe on high-throughput computing. Here, she gives her impressions about a technology challenge faced by both types of computing: Long-term, persistent storage.
 
One of the highlights of visiting the conference venue in Uppsala, Sweden, was learning about Carl Linnaeus.
Born in nearby Råshult in 1707, Linnaeus  moved to the college town of Uppsala to study, and quickly became a cornerstone of the university. He died in 1778 and was laid to rest in Uppsala Cathedral — largest in all of Scandinavia.
Linnaeus was fam

Lights, camera, action: FilmGrid

Image courtesy FilmGrid

Film-making is a very labor-intensive craft, relying upon the work of many people.
This is especially true of the part known as “post-postproduction” — traditionally, that portion of the process when all the raw film has been shot and is “in the can.” During this phase, all the editing, natural sound, music, background painting, voiceovers, montages, special effects, and everything else take place.
Because so much of post-production is manual, and because so many hands are involved — and because post-production often involves widely scattered individuals and companies — it can often be very difficult to maintain an up-to-date picture of the status of a film production, leading to inefficiencies, unwanted duplication of effort, and complications. In addition, couriers sometime lose hard disks containing footage with terabytes of information, and security can often be difficul

Video of the Week - “Colliderscope,” a light-artwork at the Niels Bohr Institute

Named after the physicist of the same name, the Niels Bohr Institute investigates astronomy, geophysics, nanophysics, particle physics, quantum physics and biophysics. Its researchers explore everything from the smallest sub-atomic particles to the largest galaxies in the universe. Image courtesy Niels Bohr Institute

The light on the facade of the Niels Bohr Institute (above) in Copenhagen, Denmark, is a representation of what scientists might “see” in the collisions of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. More accurately, the light reflects signals from the Transition Radiation Tracker (TRT) of the ATLAS experiment, which detects the tracks of particles  created when protons collide at very high energies.
The TRT detector consists of many straws, which give a signal when a charged particle passes through. When a lot of signals in a row are seen, that means that a particle h