The proposal introduces a simple classification scheme for digital tools for the Digital Humanities, and explores how the classification scheme introduces issues about tool building in the DH.
Digital sustainability: how to move beyond the oxymoron
Can digital art be made to last in a sustainable way? It is no surprise that artists are keen to use and respond to new material in their practices. With every new invention, throughout the years, museum conservators tried to follow and adapted their working methods to the new challenges. Similarly, with the rise of digital artworks conservators try to think of solutions to preserve the collected artworks. While this works well in some cases, in many cases changes to the artwork happen as most hardware and software follow the design of planned-obsolescence. As a consequence endless migration and/or emulation projects are set up to prolong the working of digital art. It makes sense to use upgraded technology to keep an artwork going. Yet this enduring rat race becomes questionable when thinking about the environmental impact of digitals. In this presentation I want to discuss the oxymoron ‘digital sustainability’. By acknowledging this inherent contradiction, in my research I aim to critically inquire what it means for digital technology to support sustainability and how humans and technology can work together optimally for a more sustainable future. As a first step, I'll explore the potential of ‘networks of care’ to create, build and maintain digital cultural heritage in a sustainable way.
A key-note presented at Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences in february 2014 about how philosophy of "embodiment of human being" can help design the Smart City. Instead of making the city digital, how can we use digital processing to make for a better experience in the actual, concrete world in which our bodies are situated?
The 3D world is your stage, part of Birds of a Feather session "The Tyranny of Distance" dha2014, @UWA Perth, with Matt Munson. Christof Schoch, Toma Tasovac (they were virtually present from Europe).
Digital sustainability: how to move beyond the oxymoron
Can digital art be made to last in a sustainable way? It is no surprise that artists are keen to use and respond to new material in their practices. With every new invention, throughout the years, museum conservators tried to follow and adapted their working methods to the new challenges. Similarly, with the rise of digital artworks conservators try to think of solutions to preserve the collected artworks. While this works well in some cases, in many cases changes to the artwork happen as most hardware and software follow the design of planned-obsolescence. As a consequence endless migration and/or emulation projects are set up to prolong the working of digital art. It makes sense to use upgraded technology to keep an artwork going. Yet this enduring rat race becomes questionable when thinking about the environmental impact of digitals. In this presentation I want to discuss the oxymoron ‘digital sustainability’. By acknowledging this inherent contradiction, in my research I aim to critically inquire what it means for digital technology to support sustainability and how humans and technology can work together optimally for a more sustainable future. As a first step, I'll explore the potential of ‘networks of care’ to create, build and maintain digital cultural heritage in a sustainable way.
A key-note presented at Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences in february 2014 about how philosophy of "embodiment of human being" can help design the Smart City. Instead of making the city digital, how can we use digital processing to make for a better experience in the actual, concrete world in which our bodies are situated?
The 3D world is your stage, part of Birds of a Feather session "The Tyranny of Distance" dha2014, @UWA Perth, with Matt Munson. Christof Schoch, Toma Tasovac (they were virtually present from Europe).
due casi di cocreazione realizzati da TTV: il nuovo sito Nesquik per i genitori (in partnership con Now Available), i cui progettisti sono stati gli utenti della rete, e lo spettacolo Huggies (finalizzato alla creazione di un nuovo posizionamento, in partnership con JWT), frutto della collaborazione delle mamme blogger, autrici teatrali per un giorno.
Updated credentials from The Talking Village projects and clients. Enjoy the best collaborative conversations online: ask us for a free consultation or a trainign workshop.
due casi di cocreazione realizzati da TTV: il nuovo sito Nesquik per i genitori (in partnership con Now Available), i cui progettisti sono stati gli utenti della rete, e lo spettacolo Huggies (finalizzato alla creazione di un nuovo posizionamento, in partnership con JWT), frutto della collaborazione delle mamme blogger, autrici teatrali per un giorno.
Updated credentials from The Talking Village projects and clients. Enjoy the best collaborative conversations online: ask us for a free consultation or a trainign workshop.
In this paper we suggest a design research method for eliciting
affordances and new meanings for Smart Objects in the Internet of Things Era.
After an introduction to the topic and the description of some open issues, we
propose to adopt a Critical Design approach, where the role of Ambiguity is
twofold: on the one hand, it is the objective of the observation for defining a set
of ambiguous objects or affordances; on the other hand, it is the result of a
design conceptualization of smart objects aiming at provoking cognitive
dissonance and finalized to understand people adaptation processes and
behaviors.
Slides from a series of talks for the IET's IoT India Congress and some associated events - SRM Chennai, PES Bengaluru, Srishti Bengaluru. I used different subsets of the slides in each talk - this is the whole deck.
NHH - FRONT LINES ON ADOPTION OF DIGITAL AND AI-BASED SERVICES
November 5, 2023
Speaker: Jim Spohrer (https://www.linkedin.com/in/spohrer/)
Host: Tor Andreassen (https://www.linkedin.com/in/tor-wallin-andreassen-1aa9031/)
Companion presentation: https://www.slideshare.net/issip/nhh-20231105-v6pptx
Lugović, S., Čolić, M., & Dunđer, I. (2014, January), Znanstveni pristup dizajnu informacijskih sustava, Design Science and Information Systems, Overview of Design Science models over the years presented @ International Scientific Conference On Printing & Design 2014
keynote at the European Conference on Educational Research in Cádiz, pre-conference on emerging researchers. About networked learning for lifelong learning for all
During the presentation of the paper examples for information visualizations were shown. How users react to information and data - how they react and interact with it and make sense of abstract data through the use of visual interfaces, or so called mental models. These </span>mental models are an emerging topic for research on the comprehension and designing process in information visualization. <span>Different design features can accomplish this in the field of political communication and its complex data.
Discovery and the Age of Insight: Walmart EIM Open House 2013Joe Lamantia
Discovery is the most important business capability in the emerging Age of Insight - it's the missing ingredient that makes Big Data a source of value for businesses and people.
The Language of Discovery is an essential tool for providing discovery capability, whether at the scale of designing a single discovery application, determining the value proposition of a new product or service, or managing a strategic portfolio of technology and business initiatives.
This presentation outlines the Age of Insight, and suggests deep structural and historic precedents visible in the Age of Reason, especially in the central parallels between Natural Philosophy and the emerging discipline of Data Science. We then review the language of discovery, and consider widely visible examples of products and services that demonstrate the language.
We review our own usage of the framework as an analytical and generative toolkit for providing discovery capability, and share best practices for employing this perspective across a variety of levels of need.
Capturing and expressing REED's (Records of Early English Drama) essence in a digital future. Given at Envisioning REED in the Digital Age 4-5 April, 2011. University of Toronto
PBW: Possible Futures and technical directionsJohn Bradley
How the Prosopography of the Byzantine World could fit with a "digital ecosystem" to support Byzantine Studies. Invited presentation at full day seminar PBW and its place in Byzantine Scholarship. Keble College, University of Oxford. 7 October, 2013.
What's in and what's out? Invited presentation at workshop for the project: Standards for Networking Ancient Prosopographies: Data and Relations in Greco-Roman Names. King's College London, 31 March, 2014.
How they might connect in a digital context. Invited keynote presentation in DARIAH workshop Practices and Context in Contemporary Annotation Activities. University of Hamburg, 29 October, 2015.
Climate Science Flows: Enabling Petabyte-Scale Climate Analysis with the Eart...Globus
The Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) is a global network of data servers that archives and distributes the planet’s largest collection of Earth system model output for thousands of climate and environmental scientists worldwide. Many of these petabyte-scale data archives are located in proximity to large high-performance computing (HPC) or cloud computing resources, but the primary workflow for data users consists of transferring data, and applying computations on a different system. As a part of the ESGF 2.0 US project (funded by the United States Department of Energy Office of Science), we developed pre-defined data workflows, which can be run on-demand, capable of applying many data reduction and data analysis to the large ESGF data archives, transferring only the resultant analysis (ex. visualizations, smaller data files). In this talk, we will showcase a few of these workflows, highlighting how Globus Flows can be used for petabyte-scale climate analysis.
Multiple Your Crypto Portfolio with the Innovative Features of Advanced Crypt...Hivelance Technology
Cryptocurrency trading bots are computer programs designed to automate buying, selling, and managing cryptocurrency transactions. These bots utilize advanced algorithms and machine learning techniques to analyze market data, identify trading opportunities, and execute trades on behalf of their users. By automating the decision-making process, crypto trading bots can react to market changes faster than human traders
Hivelance, a leading provider of cryptocurrency trading bot development services, stands out as the premier choice for crypto traders and developers. Hivelance boasts a team of seasoned cryptocurrency experts and software engineers who deeply understand the crypto market and the latest trends in automated trading, Hivelance leverages the latest technologies and tools in the industry, including advanced AI and machine learning algorithms, to create highly efficient and adaptable crypto trading bots
Providing Globus Services to Users of JASMIN for Environmental Data AnalysisGlobus
JASMIN is the UK’s high-performance data analysis platform for environmental science, operated by STFC on behalf of the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). In addition to its role in hosting the CEDA Archive (NERC’s long-term repository for climate, atmospheric science & Earth observation data in the UK), JASMIN provides a collaborative platform to a community of around 2,000 scientists in the UK and beyond, providing nearly 400 environmental science projects with working space, compute resources and tools to facilitate their work. High-performance data transfer into and out of JASMIN has always been a key feature, with many scientists bringing model outputs from supercomputers elsewhere in the UK, to analyse against observational or other model data in the CEDA Archive. A growing number of JASMIN users are now realising the benefits of using the Globus service to provide reliable and efficient data movement and other tasks in this and other contexts. Further use cases involve long-distance (intercontinental) transfers to and from JASMIN, and collecting results from a mobile atmospheric radar system, pushing data to JASMIN via a lightweight Globus deployment. We provide details of how Globus fits into our current infrastructure, our experience of the recent migration to GCSv5.4, and of our interest in developing use of the wider ecosystem of Globus services for the benefit of our user community.
top nidhi software solution freedownloadvrstrong314
This presentation emphasizes the importance of data security and legal compliance for Nidhi companies in India. It highlights how online Nidhi software solutions, like Vector Nidhi Software, offer advanced features tailored to these needs. Key aspects include encryption, access controls, and audit trails to ensure data security. The software complies with regulatory guidelines from the MCA and RBI and adheres to Nidhi Rules, 2014. With customizable, user-friendly interfaces and real-time features, these Nidhi software solutions enhance efficiency, support growth, and provide exceptional member services. The presentation concludes with contact information for further inquiries.
Listen to the keynote address and hear about the latest developments from Rachana Ananthakrishnan and Ian Foster who review the updates to the Globus Platform and Service, and the relevance of Globus to the scientific community as an automation platform to accelerate scientific discovery.
SOCRadar Research Team: Latest Activities of IntelBrokerSOCRadar
The European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol) has suffered an alleged data breach after a notorious threat actor claimed to have exfiltrated data from its systems. Infamous data leaker IntelBroker posted on the even more infamous BreachForums hacking forum, saying that Europol suffered a data breach this month.
The alleged breach affected Europol agencies CCSE, EC3, Europol Platform for Experts, Law Enforcement Forum, and SIRIUS. Infiltration of these entities can disrupt ongoing investigations and compromise sensitive intelligence shared among international law enforcement agencies.
However, this is neither the first nor the last activity of IntekBroker. We have compiled for you what happened in the last few days. To track such hacker activities on dark web sources like hacker forums, private Telegram channels, and other hidden platforms where cyber threats often originate, you can check SOCRadar’s Dark Web News.
Stay Informed on Threat Actors’ Activity on the Dark Web with SOCRadar!
Paketo Buildpacks : la meilleure façon de construire des images OCI? DevopsDa...Anthony Dahanne
Les Buildpacks existent depuis plus de 10 ans ! D’abord, ils étaient utilisés pour détecter et construire une application avant de la déployer sur certains PaaS. Ensuite, nous avons pu créer des images Docker (OCI) avec leur dernière génération, les Cloud Native Buildpacks (CNCF en incubation). Sont-ils une bonne alternative au Dockerfile ? Que sont les buildpacks Paketo ? Quelles communautés les soutiennent et comment ?
Venez le découvrir lors de cette session ignite
Cyaniclab : Software Development Agency Portfolio.pdfCyanic lab
CyanicLab, an offshore custom software development company based in Sweden,India, Finland, is your go-to partner for startup development and innovative web design solutions. Our expert team specializes in crafting cutting-edge software tailored to meet the unique needs of startups and established enterprises alike. From conceptualization to execution, we offer comprehensive services including web and mobile app development, UI/UX design, and ongoing software maintenance. Ready to elevate your business? Contact CyanicLab today and let us propel your vision to success with our top-notch IT solutions.
We describe the deployment and use of Globus Compute for remote computation. This content is aimed at researchers who wish to compute on remote resources using a unified programming interface, as well as system administrators who will deploy and operate Globus Compute services on their research computing infrastructure.
Check out the webinar slides to learn more about how XfilesPro transforms Salesforce document management by leveraging its world-class applications. For more details, please connect with sales@xfilespro.com
If you want to watch the on-demand webinar, please click here: https://www.xfilespro.com/webinars/salesforce-document-management-2-0-smarter-faster-better/
How Does XfilesPro Ensure Security While Sharing Documents in Salesforce?XfilesPro
Worried about document security while sharing them in Salesforce? Fret no more! Here are the top-notch security standards XfilesPro upholds to ensure strong security for your Salesforce documents while sharing with internal or external people.
To learn more, read the blog: https://www.xfilespro.com/how-does-xfilespro-make-document-sharing-secure-and-seamless-in-salesforce/
Code reviews are vital for ensuring good code quality. They serve as one of our last lines of defense against bugs and subpar code reaching production.
Yet, they often turn into annoying tasks riddled with frustration, hostility, unclear feedback and lack of standards. How can we improve this crucial process?
In this session we will cover:
- The Art of Effective Code Reviews
- Streamlining the Review Process
- Elevating Reviews with Automated Tools
By the end of this presentation, you'll have the knowledge on how to organize and improve your code review proces
A Comprehensive Look at Generative AI in Retail App Testing.pdfkalichargn70th171
Traditional software testing methods are being challenged in retail, where customer expectations and technological advancements continually shape the landscape. Enter generative AI—a transformative subset of artificial intelligence technologies poised to revolutionize software testing.
Modern design is crucial in today's digital environment, and this is especially true for SharePoint intranets. The design of these digital hubs is critical to user engagement and productivity enhancement. They are the cornerstone of internal collaboration and interaction within enterprises.
Experience our free, in-depth three-part Tendenci Platform Corporate Membership Management workshop series! In Session 1 on May 14th, 2024, we began with an Introduction and Setup, mastering the configuration of your Corporate Membership Module settings to establish membership types, applications, and more. Then, on May 16th, 2024, in Session 2, we focused on binding individual members to a Corporate Membership and Corporate Reps, teaching you how to add individual members and assign Corporate Representatives to manage dues, renewals, and associated members. Finally, on May 28th, 2024, in Session 3, we covered questions and concerns, addressing any queries or issues you may have.
For more Tendenci AMS events, check out www.tendenci.com/events
Designing for Privacy in Amazon Web ServicesKrzysztofKkol1
Data privacy is one of the most critical issues that businesses face. This presentation shares insights on the principles and best practices for ensuring the resilience and security of your workload.
Drawing on a real-life project from the HR industry, the various challenges will be demonstrated: data protection, self-healing, business continuity, security, and transparency of data processing. This systematized approach allowed to create a secure AWS cloud infrastructure that not only met strict compliance rules but also exceeded the client's expectations.
In software engineering, the right architecture is essential for robust, scalable platforms. Wix has undergone a pivotal shift from event sourcing to a CRUD-based model for its microservices. This talk will chart the course of this pivotal journey.
Event sourcing, which records state changes as immutable events, provided robust auditing and "time travel" debugging for Wix Stores' microservices. Despite its benefits, the complexity it introduced in state management slowed development. Wix responded by adopting a simpler, unified CRUD model. This talk will explore the challenges of event sourcing and the advantages of Wix's new "CRUD on steroids" approach, which streamlines API integration and domain event management while preserving data integrity and system resilience.
Participants will gain valuable insights into Wix's strategies for ensuring atomicity in database updates and event production, as well as caching, materialization, and performance optimization techniques within a distributed system.
Join us to discover how Wix has mastered the art of balancing simplicity and extensibility, and learn how the re-adoption of the modest CRUD has turbocharged their development velocity, resilience, and scalability in a high-growth environment.
Why React Native as a Strategic Advantage for Startup Innovation.pdfayushiqss
Do you know that React Native is being increasingly adopted by startups as well as big companies in the mobile app development industry? Big names like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest have already integrated this robust open-source framework.
In fact, according to a report by Statista, the number of React Native developers has been steadily increasing over the years, reaching an estimated 1.9 million by the end of 2024. This means that the demand for this framework in the job market has been growing making it a valuable skill.
But what makes React Native so popular for mobile application development? It offers excellent cross-platform capabilities among other benefits. This way, with React Native, developers can write code once and run it on both iOS and Android devices thus saving time and resources leading to shorter development cycles hence faster time-to-market for your app.
Let’s take the example of a startup, which wanted to release their app on both iOS and Android at once. Through the use of React Native they managed to create an app and bring it into the market within a very short period. This helped them gain an advantage over their competitors because they had access to a large user base who were able to generate revenue quickly for them.
Why React Native as a Strategic Advantage for Startup Innovation.pdf
Tools for a whole range of Scholarly Activities (at DH2015)
1. How about Tools for the
whole range of scholarly
activities?
John Bradley (Department of
Digital Humanities, King's
College London)
2. Humanities and DH tools
"only about six percent of humanist scholars go beyond
general purpose information technology and use digital
resources and more complex digital tools in their scholarship"
2005 Summit on Digital Tools at the University of Virginia
Martin Mueller survey of use of "literary informatics" : "virtually
no impact on major disciplinary trends."
Edwards 2012, p 216
"despite significant investments in the development of digital
humanities tools, the use of these tools has remained a fringe
element in humanities scholarship."
(Gibbs and Owens 2012, abstract)
3. "evidence of value ..."
"Our computational tools are at their
core still highly hermeneutically
uninformed and inadequate. That is a
challenge that needs to be shared
rather than that it would be taken as a
cause to incite methodological trench
warfare."
(Joris van Zundert, HUMANIST 28.737
16 Feb 2015)
4. Towards a philosophy for tools
"Tools are artifacts which enable man to
change material objects more than he could
without them"
Feibleman 1967 p 329
"Physical tools are utilized to enhance the
performances of human activities (e.g.
digging a hole in the ground) or do tasks
otherwise impossible (e.g., examining cell
structures of fruit flies).
Kim and Reeves 2007 p 209
6. "the current second wave of Digital
Humanities – what can be called 'Digital
Humanities 2.0' – is deeply generative,
creating the environments and tools for
producing, curating, and interacting with
knowledge that is 'born digital' and lives in
various digital contexts."
Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 (Schnapp and
Presner 2009).
Tools for MakingMaking
7. "Digital artifacts like tools could then be considered
as "telescopes for the mind" that show us
something in a new light."
Ramsay and Rockwell, 2012, p 79
"By taking our sense of sight far beyond the realm
of our forebears' imagination, these wonderful
instruments, the telescopes, open the way to a
deeper and more perfect understanding of nature."
René Descartes, 1637
Tools for ExploringObserving
8. "tools for cognitive activities are
comparable to the physical tools that
are invented for everyday human
activities in that they change and
enhance our way of doing mental
activities ..."
Kim and Reeves 2007, p 209
Tools for ThinkingThinking
9. Engelbart H-LAM/T
"The ways in which human capabilities are thus extended are here called
augmentation means, and we define four basic classes of them:
1. Artifacts—physical objects designed to provide for human comfort, for the
manipulation of things or materials, and for the manipulation of symbols
2. Language—the way in which the individual parcels out the picture of his world into
the concepts that his mind uses to model that world, and the symbols that he
attaches to those concepts and uses in consciously manipulating the concepts
("thinking")
3. Methodology—the methods, procedures, strategies, etc., which which an individual
organizes his goal-centered (problem-solving) activity.
4. Training—the conditioning needed by the human being to bring his skills in using
Means 1, 2, and 3 to the point where they are operationally effective.
The system we want to improve can thus be visualized as a trained
human being together with him artifacts, language, and
methodology."
Engelbart 1962, pg 9
10. For many sciences,
mathematics can be
a cognitive tool
What might this be
for the humanities?
writing
note taking and note
manipulation
Tools for Thinking
http://vecto.rs/design/vector-of-a-smart-cartoon-man-
figuring-out-a-complicated-math-equation-in-his-head-
by-ron-leishman-44335
Thinking
11. Blurring of the classification?
Visualisation Tools
as tools for making
as tools for exploring
The Piano
as a tool for making
as a tool for thinking
12. Further questions...
For several years the focus on toolbuilding in the DH has
largely been on tools for exploring. Is this adequate to
support the continued interests of the DH?
Do we want to also promote tools for making as a kind of
scholarly activity. How do we describe this kind of work
so that it appears plausibly DH? Does it need to appear
as an academic activity?
Tools for thinking is a kind of meta-tool building activity
which has been hardly explored or even noted in the
DH. Is there a place for this? Can we build tools that
work like mathematics (or the piano) in the humanities?
Editor's Notes
Thanks...
My subject today is digital tools in the context of the Digital Humanities.
Although tools built outside the DH community have currently taken our attention – tools for big data analysis, for example – there has been tool building in the DH in specific domains (centred primarily around texts) for a long time – perhaps even 50 years now. Even with all this effort, I think it is fair to say that the influence of these DH-oriented tool efforts has been infinitesimal within the humanities as a whole. Our non-DH humanist colleagues do not seem to be very interested in either the tools we produce, or the perspectives and methodologies that they support.
I have acted as a developer myself for many years: TACT (a long time ago now) as a tool that fit within the DH mainstream vision for tools and I believe had then an influence within our community for some period of time, more recently Pliny (which is definitely outside the DH comfort zone, as it were, and I believe has had no influence within the DH community at all!). Furthermore, at my current department at King's I’ve been a participant for about 15 years in the construction of many digital resources that might be thought of as tools for their particular discipline, and have found that these generally HAVE had a positive influence there.
For the last year or so I’ve been thinking that if we want the digital humanities tool building to take up its proper place within humanities scholarly endeavour, the question of how its tools fit with the range of activities that constitute that scholarly endeavour is an important one. Given the evident failure so far, perhaps some thinking about the fundamentals that underlie that relationship would be worth undertaking.
I don’t think that I’m alone in my views that this thinking about fundamentals underlying tools for humanities scholarship is worth doing. We see this statement in Joris van Zundert's HUMANIST post recently in the topic "evidence of value is evidence of worry". As he says here, part of the challenge we face when thinking about tools from a DH perspective is related to possible theoretical underpinnings behind tool building in the DH. Zundert puts it here as a problem in hermeneutics – we haven't thought enough about how the tools we are interested in connect to what one wishes to understand in the humanities, and what one wishes to do there.
Now, hermeneutics is a big word and it is attached to big ideas and (mixing my metaphors) deep waters. I'm not at all sure that I'm the right person to discuss them even for 10 minutes or so without sounding a little ridiculous! However, as I said a moment ago, I have had a concern about how the tools we build actually fit into the humanities. My first attempt to approach this question – at a presentation I gave at the Irish National University in Maynooth a few years ago left me with the feeling that some significant work was worth undertaking here, and so I have spent a little time since then reading and thinking about what the issues might be. As a result, perhaps I have a right to say something about this kind of bigger picture, even if it can only be rudimentary!
I think I can at least offer a useful overall categorisation of digital tools that might contribute to thinking about the ways in which tools facilitate our understanding of things. I intend today to introduce briefly this tool categorisation model. So here goes...
In an attempt to do proper humanities research on the topic of tools, I did a bit of a literature review, and from this, I found approaches to thinking about tools that seemed to me to open up some pathways towards a "hermeneutical" discussion.
Among the papers I found were a few that proposed a philosophy for tools. James Feibleman's article from 1976 (indeed actually named "The Philosophy of Tools") claims that "although tools are no less important than languages" for supporting human development, that "they have been underestimated". In his paper he goes on to develop something like a basic ontology for tools, which allows him to explore the different roles that tools have played in human society. Some of his ideas have directly inspired what I have to say to you here today.
Feibleman is writing before the significant advent of computing technology into society and so much of his discussion is about physical tools such as hammers, microscopes, or violins. Beumie Kim and Thomas Reeves, on the other hand, write their paper from a context of "Instructional Science" in 2007 where the computer, as a tool itself, and as a provider of tools, had been around for years. They are, therefore, in a position to extend Feibleman's thinking with the significantly different nature of tools in the digital realm. Putting Feibleman and Kim and Reeves thoughts together provides for three categories for tools that I want to talk about.
Here we see both of them defining the idea of what tools are for in a similar fashion – as objects for human enablement or enhancement.
So, out of my reading of Feibleman and Kim and Reeves, I would like to propose a simple 3-category grouping for digital tools. These three categories help us to notice three kinds of places for tools in working with things, and which (as far as I am aware) have not been discussed elsewhere in the DH tool discussion.
What is interesting to us here is the recognition that, based on which type of tool it is, the nature of the interaction with their human user is quite different, and I hope you are not put off by my perhaps simplistic schematic representation of these three kinds of interactions.
The first type, called by Feibleman "tools for effectors", are tools that help us build things. I will call these tools by what seems to me to be a more natural name of "tools for making". These tools, like, say, woodworking tools or violins, allow us to make things like cabinets or musical performances. The picture here shows how they interact with the human user: the human user has an idea – in the head (!) – of something that she wants to make, and then she uses this kind of tool to make that thing "in the world". Through the tools, the user's ideas develop into an outward expression in the world that then exists external to the individual who thought of it.
The second kind, which reverses the roles of the world and the human mind, is called by Feibleman "tools for receptors", and I am categorising them here as "tools for exploring". Tools like scientific instruments are this kind of tool. Here, the human user, instead of creating something in the world, becomes more receptive to something "in the world", and is able to observe better some kind of world phenomena. Whereas for tools for making the human imagination works first, and the in-the-world product follows thereafter, for tools for exploring, the world already has things in it of interest that are perhaps only partially understood, and the tool helps these things to be impressed in the human mind and human imagination. Something in the mind, rather than in the world, is the product of using a tool for exploring.
So, then, what is meant by my third kind, where the head, representing human understanding and imagination, appears on both sides? Here, the human has ideas about things, and the tools work to help their user enhance or improve these ideas. These kind of tools, which were identified by Kim and Reeves as Cognitive tools, I am calling tools for thinking. It is important to understand that this is not about communication between people – the head on both sides of the diagram is the same person – the thinking is in one head only.
This “one-head” characteristic – that the source for activity with the tool, and the product from it is in the same head is important. As Jerome McGann reminds us in his article Marking Texts of Many Dimensions, thinking as an activity is an autopoietic system, capable of looping back on itself in ways that have the potential to promote "unique moments of catastrophic change". Thus, tools for thinking, although perhaps not autopoietic in themselves, might facilitate autopoietic processes that, as McGann describes them, can be the agents of more radical changes than the adoption of the other two can have.
Tools for thinking perhaps did not enter Feibleman's model because he did his analysis before computing was much in the consciousness of society. However, as we will see in a moment, there are really important tools-for-thinking that actually predate computing, and at least one of them strongly suggests the potential significance of this kind of tool for our purposes here as well. Nonetheless, I think the nature of computing and computer-human interaction means that the connection between our minds and computing technology has the potential to operate in a particularly intimate and perhaps even autopoietic way.
So where do we DHers stand with regard to these three tool types in the digital humanities?
Tools for Making have been around in the DH for a long time – TuStep is a toolkit that has been around for about 40 years and was, from its conception, aimed at the production of elegant academic publications. The great interest in XSLT within parts of the DH community reflect an interest in this kind of tool as it provides a framework for turning XML materials like TEI documents into complex WWW objects. DHers also have also an interest in tools like Omeka (for producing sophisticated web sites), or Zotero, for producing and sharing bibliographic data.
Perhaps tools for making have been important within DH because of the enormous influence of the World Wide Web as a radically new publishing medium which has dominated thinking within the digital humanities from, let us say, the early 1990s until almost the present day. The focus on the DH until relatively recently on the task of making things is perhaps the reason that the Digital Humanities Manifesto, as recently as 2009, focused on the "generative" character of the DH – making things – as the primary model of the Digital Humanities.
Interestingly, in spite of the focus until quite recently on building things as a primary DH activity, much of the theoretical interest among DH toolbuilders themselves seems to focus primarily on my second kind of tool: the tools for exploring. The analogy often used for this kind of tool is the telescope – used, I believe, as an exemplar of that particular class of tools in the sciences: scientific instruments. We can see this particular perspective pretty clearly in Ramsay and Rockwell's wonderful discussion in the Matthew Gold’s book Debates in Digital Humanities.
Why the parallel with "telescope" here? We can see in Descartes' claim from way back in 1637 that telescopes operate in this "tools for exploring" category: presenting things to us from the world that our unaided senses are unable to detect and that, by showing us things of which we were unaware, allow us to develop new ideas about the world.
Text analysis software started out being conceived of in terms of batch computing, and so was thought of more in terms of tools for making things: like concordances! However, with the introduction of interactive computing at the time of the emergence of the personal computer, text analysis software began to shift towards being thought of as tools for exploration of texts. Indeed, I was consciously aware of this shift towards a focus on exploring when I was creating TACT so many years ago now. Tools for exploring also play a role in more recent DH interests: one thinks of big data or social network analysis software as examples.
For those interested in considering digital toolmaking as potential works of scholarship, perhaps Ramsay and Rockwell, in their "Developing things" contribution, seem to unconsciously focus on this particular kind of toolmaking. By using this particular analogy of "telescope for the mind", they reveal this particular orientation most clearly.
And, the creation of this kind of tool does seem to fit better with the character of humanities scholarship than the creation of tools for making do, since traditional humanities scholarship does seem to be more about exploring cultural objects such as texts than it is about creating them. Indeed, I have heard that even the "making" of things like critical editions is downplayed these days by funding bodies such as the UK's AHRC. Instead, funding application proposers need to talk in terms of research questions – drawing attention much more strongly to the exploring character of the work they want to do. Perhaps this shift in orientation for what constitutes scholarship by the funding agencies is now also reflected in the humanities more broadly, and explains the recent inclusion of digital exploration approaches such as big data into the digital humanities. Creative digital publication (in spite of the Manifesto's playing up of "generative" activities) is no longer the primary conception of the DH.
So, now we consider briefly the third kind of tool that I have proposed: the "tools for thinking", that Kim and Reeves called cognitive tools. In their article Kim and Reeves first draw a parallel between physical tools like woodworking tools and these tools for thinking. Woodworking tools change and enhance our way to do things in the physical environment. Cognitive tools, on the other hand, can be applied to thoughts in our head, and result in new thoughts there too. Thus, in the same way that tools for the physical environment enhance our physical abilities, cognitive tools enhance our mental processes.
It is interesting that this idea is connected in Kim and Reeves to digital tools, and perhaps the digital medium is particularly suited to this. Why might this be? Perhaps the GUI oriented, screen-oriented, "user interface" nature of modern computing should be called a "head interface"! The primary interaction in GUIs is between the user's mind and the computer. Things the computer shows on the screen affect our mind first, and are more likely, therefore, to affect our thinking too.
Technology – particularly since the 1960s digital technology – as a way to enhance human intellectual work, is not a particularly new idea – one thinker from the 1940s that has influenced this approach and predates computing, is Vannavar Bush with his Memex machine. One of the earliest thinkers about the place of specifically computing as a tool for thinking is Douglas Engelbart, who started down this pathway way back in the early 1960s, when he began to think about tools that he called "Augmentation tools" for intellectual work. In his highly influential report on the potential of the computer to support human intellectual work from 1962 he proposed the H-LAM/T model that places these tools in a system involving the human user together with the technology.
Engelbart's work affected hypertext theory, but doesn't seem to have otherwise much entered into the DH consciousness.
Although one can see the reason for thinking of digitally-based tools as the best framework for tools for augmenting thinking in the way that Engelbart imagined it, a few extremely important tools for thinking in fact pre-exist the digital world.
The most obvious example of a non-digital tool for thinking in many scientific domains at least is mathematics. Mathematics expressions provide a precise way of expressing mathematical ideas. However, the notation, and the rules by which it is manipulated, not only provides a way to express mathematical ideas, but also provides a way to work on and think about mathematical problems. The act of writing the mathematics down, and working with it clearly facilitates mathematical thinking and enables a level of thinking that is substantially beyond what could be done by human beings without it. Mathematics notation, then, as well as a way to present mathematical ideas to others, is also a tool for thinking: a tool to facilitate mental mathematical thinking.
Do we already have tools for thinking that operate like mathematics in the humanities? Some people talk about the utility of writing as a tool to support thinking. The activity of writing is not necessarily only for communication with others, but somehow also facilitates the development of clearer thinking about an intellectual issue. When thought of in this role – helping the writer explore ideas by writing about them, the lowly word processor becomes not only a tool for making papers, but also a thinking tool – for helping us to explore our ideas more effectively.
We can perhaps extend this way of thinking about writing into the area of note taking and manipulation – methodologies that many in the humanities claim is helpful to facilitate their thinking. Of course, notetaking is nowhere nearly as formally defined as mathematics is, so its connection to the ideas being worked on is, of necessity, much looser. Nonetheless, the process of taking and using notes is an activity to support thinking, and, indeed, my Pliny project and Pliny tool provides a model for notetaking in the context of a cognitive tool process.
I've presented these three categories of tools as if they were clearly separated classes, but some tools sometimes seem to blur the distinction between the classes.
Visualisation tools, for example, can be most usefully thought of as tools for exploring. Like the microscope, you prepare your sample data, you point the visualisation tool at it and adjust it to work, and hopefully see new things in the sample that you hadn't seen before: a typical "tools for exploring" process. However, there is another way to think about visualisation tools: they can be thought of tools for making: for making visualisations! This particular ambiguity arises, perhaps, from the nature of digital things: both input and output are data structures that the computer must interpret and present to us: it is in the nature of the digital that the same technology supports both the creation and then presentation of materials.
A second kind of blurring between categories might be seen in the piano. A performer might think of the piano as an instrument for making music. The music arises in the performer's head and is presented through the piano to the world. On the other hand, pianos also sit in composers' offices, where they can act as the tool to help make musical fragments that arise in the composer's mind more substantial so that they can be assessed as fitting into a current composition: here the piano is acting as a tool for thinking, in some ways like what mathematics does for some scientists. Do any of our digital tools operate in both these domains? What is it in the nature of the piano that makes it a tool that can function in these two quite different ways?
Having now briefly introduced the three kinds of tools, I think we can see a few questions that might warrant further consideration.
First, much of the theoretical thinking about toolbuilding in the DH has been centered on tools for exploring (things like Voyant), and the "exploring" nature of these tools fits perhaps with the current interest in the "exploring" side of DH: things like big data or social network analysis. Is this the appropriate, or perhaps even only, domain for finding a place for toolbuilding as an academic or scholarly pursuit?
Second, tools for making fit well with the alternative vision of DH as a "generative" activity. However, much of the tool building in this domain has not been conceived of as a scholarly activity, but described in terms of software development practices alone. (most of the talk I have seen about Zotero seems to make this point). Does this matter? Are we able to sustain developers of these kinds of tools in the current academic-centered DH atmosphere?
Finally, tools for thinking is a kind of meta-tool building activity which has been hardly explored or even noted in the DH. Is there a place for this? Is there a place for a tool that fits as well as mathematics does in the sciences as a tool for thinking in the humanities?
Thanks!