A New Yorker blog takes on the hype of Big Data (and equivocates)” Gary Marcus, “Steamrolled by Big Data”

Welcome back from spring break!  It is finally starting to act like spring around here. As promised, we resume our exploration of spatial DH with a guest presentation by CUNY GC’s own Steven Romalewski (Center for Urban Research) Please take a good look at his links  in advance of  class on Monday at 11:45am, and please come prepared to take in his demos and try some things out at home.

DH awards 2012

In news that is now wilting away (being more than a week old, 18 Feb to be precise), 
James Cummings (Oxford) solicited nominations and votes on the first-even DH awards.
Looking through these awards provides at least two types of insight directly relevant
 to our course: (1) What are some terrific humanities resources out there (which happen 
to be digital)? (2) And a cultural insight: What does this field currently value? I'll 
be interested to hear which of these align with what you see as valuable in the field.

Source:  Humanist 26.792

Digital Humanities Awards 2012 Results

The winners of the Digital Humanities Awards 2012 are as follows.
Once '€˜accidental'€™ duplicates were removed there were 4101 ballots
cast by members of the public over two weeks voting for one or
more of the categories. The full list of sites nominated is still
available on the website. Sorry if your favoured resource did not
win. Open public votes are popularity contests and some of the
contestants certainly did seem to campaign more than the others.
Feedback I have received indicates that this has raised awareness
of DH in the wider community and awareness of little known
projects inside the DH community. The candidates were nominated
by the public and voted for by the public.

The winners of the awards receive no cash prize, only the respect
and honour of the DH community. They can also use the icons
available at http://dhawards.org/dhawards2012/results/ on their
websites if they wish.

Congratulations to all the winners! Thanks to all those who voted!

*Best DH tool or suite of tools*
Winner: Omeka http://omeka.org/
1st Runner Up: Paper Machines
https://github.com/chrisjr/papermachines
2nd Runner Up: Isidore http://www.rechercheisidore.fr/
Total votes in category: 877

*Best DH blog, article, or short publication*
Winner: Digital Humanities Now http://digitalhumanitiesnow.org/
1st Runner Up: Leonardo Flores: E-Poetry
http://leonardoflores.net/
2nd Runner Up: Will Self (et al.): "Kafka€'s Wound: Re-imagining
the Literary Essay for the Digital Age"
http://www.thespace.lrb.co.uk/
Total votes in category: 1494

*Best DH visualization or infographic*
Winner: A Thousand Words: Advanced Visualization for the
Humanities http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/tacc-projects/a-thousand-words
1st Runner Up: e-Diasporas Atlas http://maps.e-diasporas.fr/
2nd Runner Up: ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of
the Roman World http://orbis.stanford.edu/
Total votes in category: 1099

*Best professional resources for learning about or doing DH work*
Winner: Digital Humanities Tool Box
http://www.scoop.it/t/digital-humanities-tool-box
1st Runner Up: Livingstone's 1871 Field Diary: A Multispectral
Critical Edition: Project History, pages starting from
http://livingstone.library.ucla.edu/1871diary/initial_history.htm
2nd Runner Up: Bamboo DiRT http://dirt.projectbamboo.org/
Total votes in category: 1048

*Best DH project for public audiences*
Winner: CEISMIC: Canterbury Earthquake Digital Archive
http://www.ceismic.org.nz/
1st Runner Up: La Biblioteca Virtual de la Biblioteca Luis Ángel
Arango http://www.banrepcultural.org/blaavirtual/indice
2nd Runner Up: Dickens Journals Online http://www.djo.org.uk/
Total votes in category: 3161

*Best use of DH for fun*
Winner: The Future of the Past http://newspapers.wraggelabs.com/fotp/
1st Runner Up: DigitalNZ magic squares
http://wraggelabs.com/shed/magicsquares/
2nd Runner Up: 10 PRINT ebooks https://twitter.com/10print_ebooks
Total votes in category: 911

Dr James Cummings
DH Awards (Founder)

Leaping gracefully from spatial data and GIS to textual data, on Monday 4 March and 11 March, we will have a two-course sequence in XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language). These courses provide a small but powerful foundation for the preservation, analysis, querying, styling and sharing of textual and other resources. And I promise to make it both useful and comprehensible!

I’ll be teaching the XML introduction on the 4th, and University of Pittsburgh Digital Humanist Professor David Birnbaum (obdurodon.org) will be teaching the XSLT introduction on the 11th.

For Monday, Mar 4 :

• Have a trial version of the software <oXygen/> installed on your laptop

• Please look over the syllabus’ readings:Text Encoding  by Allen Renear (Ch 17 of this volume), An even gentler introduction to XML by David Birnbaum.  If you are burning with curiousity about the Text Encoding Initiative, you will get an eyeful here: TEI P5 guidelines .
  
• If the XML seems foreign, you might consider pre-reading the html basics article I mention below, which will highlight html’s similarities to and differences from xml.

For Monday, Mar 11:

• Come back to class with <oXygen/> still installed on your laptop
• One of our main exercises will be an XML-to-HTML transformation. While not required, it would be helpful to look over an introduction to html, html basics
• If you want to get a head start on what will be discussed, you can look at David’s pages on XSLT Basics and his Introduction to XPath.

Looking forward to these classes!

Here we go…