From jgsmith at tamu.edu  Thu Nov  1 14:46:33 2007
From: jgsmith at tamu.edu (James Smith)
Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2007 16:46:33 -0500
Subject: [Dahut-pm] Digital Humanities
In-Reply-To: <AC677B26-061C-4716-8859-0C8AF2144210@prather.org>
References: <FA3F8E69-F171-415D-835D-4E551453370A@tamu.edu>
	<AC677B26-061C-4716-8859-0C8AF2144210@prather.org>
Message-ID: <6820C756-C056-4A50-A383-A3169EC60024@tamu.edu>

On Oct 29, 2007, at 6:53 PM, Chris Prather wrote:

>
> On Oct 29, 2007, at 10:45 a, James Smith wrote:
>
> > creating/
> > running workshops
>
> Does this mean you're responsible for setting up Dahutcon::NA?
>
> ::grin::
>

Very likely. :-)

The College is interested in bringing together the digital humanities  
and open source communities, possibly in a hybrid conference that  
would bring together the best of academic and open source  
conferences.  This conference would likely be a regional event (for a  
sufficiently large region) at Texas A&M University in College Station,  
Texas.

What would we discuss at such a conference?  How would it be  
structured?  We're looking for suggestions.  The following are a few  
ideas that might help get the creativity flowing.

Scaling is one of the problems facing the humanities.  Small projects  
can easily be done by hand or with some help from a computer, but  
large projects that could benefit most from computation are difficult  
because of the amount of data entry and processing required.  Google  
is an example of a company that has managed to find 90% solutions in  
several areas that otherwise would seem impossible (e.g., PageRank).   
The humanities especially need ways to manage data, digitization, and  
semantics that scale better.  Incremental improvement and enlargement  
of a data set should require decreasing amounts of human effort.  Data- 
based projects developed in the digital humanities should have an  
innate ability to learn (e.g., some of the document classification  
modules on CPAN).

Another driving force is the idea that "open source is the literature  
of computer science."  We need to develop a critical tradition of code  
review: what makes beautiful code; how well does code communicate its  
intention to the reader (maintainer or student or computer)?  How can  
we make tests part of the documentation?  How about the code as  
document?  The open source community is working some in this direction  
already (e.g., http://beautifulcode.oreillynet.com/ or Perl Best  
Practices), but this opens up ways to be rigorous without using the  
straitjackets of syntax and IDEs.

We envision a mix of technical and academic talks interspersed with  
keynotes and break out sessions.

Quite a few of you are working in areas that could have an impact on  
the digital humanities or have interesting and provocative takes on  
the issues facing the field.

Any ideas? Anything you would want if you attend?  Thoughts in  
general?  We're completely open to suggestions on all aspects of this.
--
James Smith <jgsmith at tamu.edu>
Texas A&M University, College of Liberal Arts
Digital Humanities Lead Developer
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