<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div>On Oct 29, 2007, at 6:53 PM, Chris Prather wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"> <div> <!-- Converted from text/plain format --> <br><p><font size="2">On Oct 29, 2007, at 10:45 a, James Smith wrote:<br> <br> > creating/<br> > running workshops<br> <br> Does this mean you're responsible for setting up Dahutcon::NA?<br> <br> ::grin::</font></p></div></blockquote><br></div><div>Very likely. :-)</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>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).</div><div><br></div><div>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., <a href="http://beautifulcode.oreillynet.com/">http://beautifulcode.oreillynet.com/</a> or Perl Best Practices), but this opens up ways to be rigorous without using the straitjackets of syntax and IDEs. </div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>We envision a mix of technical and academic talks interspersed with keynotes and break out sessions.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>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. </div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>Any ideas? Anything you would want if you attend? Thoughts in general? We're completely open to suggestions on all aspects of this.</div>--<br><div apple-content-edited="true"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div>James Smith <<a href="mailto:jgsmith@tamu.edu">jgsmith@tamu.edu</a>></div><div>Texas A&M University, College of Liberal Arts</div><div>Digital Humanities Lead Developer</div></div></span></div></body></html>