I am currently in Palo Alto and have spent a couple of days at Stanford meeting with people and engaging in different kinds of conversations. Really exciting. I have had several meetings with people from the Communication Studies department, where there is a range of really good people. I had a great conversation with Fred Turner yesterday – there is quite a bit of overlap between our current projects. Also I visited the School of Education yesterday and talked with Sam Wineburg, whose work and person I find quite interesting.

Last week I spent a day at University of California at Los Angeles and did a talk on cyberinfrastructure for the humanities. Johanna Drucker, whose work is truly excellent and thought-provoking, was my host. There was quite a good turnout for the talk and good discussion. It was also quite useful for me to talk to Christine Borgman about cyberinfrastructural matters, and I have realized I need to frame my argument stronger in the paper in the sense of presenting a call for humanities cyberinfrastructure with a different set of epistemic scope (than the discourse of science and engineering based cyberinfrastructure). It would be quite interesting with critical work on the notion of ditributedness in relation to cyberinfrastructure, and also a typology of different kinds of distributed work (ranging from twitter to optocomputers). I was delighted to meet Peter Lunenfeld – we have been in touch before, but I have never met him in person – and some of his students in the Design | Media Arts program.

The UC Santa Barbara talk went well. Here the topic was the Landscape of the Digital Humanities, and it was quite useful to get to talk about this work and to engage in discussion with faculty and students. I had been invited by Alan Liu and Rita Raley, and it was great see them again and to talk about the digital humanities. I also quite enjoyed talking to a number of Ph.D. students who attended the talk. There was quite a bit of energy and I was quite impressed with the community and dialogue. Among other things, t reminded me of making sure to include a “young researcher” perspective in my work. We are also really happy that we will have  a postdoctoral fellow from UCSB from January 2010.

I also got the catch up with the good work going on at the University of California Humanities Research Institute in Irvine.

And today I bought two new books: delete. The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger (Second Life interview with the author here) and Notes on the Undergound: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination by Rosalind Williams (new edition, Cabinet interview here).

After two intense days in Copenhagen and the conference Private Eyes: Amateur Photography and Collective Memory, I finally find myself in the warm and cosy apartment of a fellow Cultural and Media Studies PhD colleague in Malmö. This is my first opportunity to reflect on all of that has been said and shown and I do hope that I (despite my post-conference fatigue) will be able to mirror it properly.
The conference was arranged by the Department of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen and had participants from several European countries and from a wide range of research fields, arranged into the sub-categories “Family, Affect, Loss”, “ Photography, Performance and Visual Anthropology” and “Web 2.0 and the Construction of Collective Memory”. A multifaceted picture of the ongoing photographic research has been painted and many thought-provoking aspects of the field and challenges related to it have been presented. The first panel contained some highly interesting speeches related to the use of photography in the time of loss and I would especially like to mention Margaret Olin’s (Yale University, US) research on amateur photographs taken in the aftermath of 9/11.

The future of photo theory and the usage of photographic imagery within digital medias was the framework for the panel “Web 2.0 and the Construction of Collective History”. This panel addressed what I would deem one of the most pressing questions within the field of photographic research today, albeit not a new one: How do we deal with the digital photography, both as users and researchers? As one of the key note speakers (Martin Lister, University of West England, UK) pointed out, the photographic theory of today is ill equipped to deal with the new ways people use and perform photography. As researchers, Lister emphasized, we all need to engage in the creation of suitable theoretical framework to deal with the infectiously growing number of private photographs that are now made accessible for a large number of viewers. As one of the other speakers pointed out: there are 700 million new photographs posted on Facebook – every month. A truly mind-boggling number, indeed!
Other questions posed during this session was about documenting, preserving and exploring these types of photography, questions that is hard to answer but increasingly important. In short, there seem to be much to do for everyone who has an earnest interest in contemporary photography, and I hope that we will prove ourselves up to the task.

I want to announce a new research project called DVIS – Domestic Violence and the Internet in Sweden. (or the long name – The role of the Internet as a surrogate social network in situations of domestic violence in Swedish context) The goal of this project is to map how victims of domestic violence in Sweden are using social media both to find information and to connect with networks of people that they may not have access to when living in situations of domestic violence.

This project is planned over three years, and will end with a symposium to which policy makers, victim’s rights advocates, and researchers will be invited in order to start a discussion about domestiv violence victims’ habits online and how we can learn from these habits so as to provide information and support to the people who need it.

One thing that I have noticed, just in the short amount of time since we have begun this project, is how much networking and conversation is going on outside of forums that are dedicated to domestic abuse support. Perhaps this is an issue of safety, as cookies to places like post secret, twitter and Second Life landmarks are not as dangerous as cookies to women’s (and men’s) help organizations. Actually, post secret has a very interesting and active community and when postcards are posted that talk about abuse, there are often many instances of other’s ‘reporting’ or showing solidarity through telling similar accounts.

A particularly interesting case I found was on a postcard where a man talked about touching a young girl inappropriately, and how his life has been defined by this. What I find interesting, however, is the tone of the small conversation that happens below the card.

People have written in both in support of his admittance and effort to make amends, but also describing the victims point of view. The tone is open. While I would say that ‘amicable’ would be overstating the tone, it is neither full of hate nor anger. I need to look more closely at how these messages are selected. I know that there is some moderation by the owner of the site, but looking at their twitter stream and the conversation in the comment section of the twitpics, the conversation still seems to be open and fairly free of the hostility you may expect when you get these two groups in a fairly anonymous (a very loaded notion, which will be explored further later) space.

Another example of this non-intended use is, of course, Second Life. And in this space, there are so many different issues that a book, not merely a blog post, could be written. There are issues of victim’s rights (à la A rape in cyberspace), and ethical issues (when is it abuse if you are abusing an avatar? What about if the avatar is a bot and there is no human on the other end?), or the not uncommon occurrence of therapy in SL. How do you know the therapist is qualified, what kind of support are you getting, and how hard is it to find?

And beyond systems of support, what happens when this technology – that we argue could play an important role in providing a social network when real-world networks have been removed – is used against the victim? If the aide agency does not have a warning, will the user know to clear the browser history? Will the pictures you posted on facebook of your child’s birthday party, which you thought only a select few would be able to see, but due to holes in security when commenting on something, provide a way for your abuser can to find your location?

I started this post with excitement to announce the start this project. And I am excited. Very. Because I feel this is an area that is lacking in research, but also one that is so important. However, with such a sensitive topic the ethical hurdles are immense. For example, I wrote above about twitpics on post secret. Twitter profiles can be anonymous, but there is also a strong perception of anonymity on twitter. How do I keep research subjects as anonymous as possible?

Ethical questions and preliminary results will appear here every so often as I try to work my way though the data. I hope that others will join me in a conversation so I/we can negotiate these ethical pitfalls and results together.

More information about the DVIS project can be found on the project’s website here.

A presentation that we will give to the The Crime Victim Compensation and Support Authority (Brottsoffermyndigheten) tomorrow can be found here (in Swedish)

Hi everyone out there. I am reviewing this website Gallipoli, The first day, a 3D documentary site about the WW1 ANZAC landing at Gallipoli, on 25 April 1915 for a major journal and would like to ask for your input. The site recently won an Australian digital screen innovation award and is visually impressive.

I am interested in reporting on a few specific things. If it is innovative, why? I would like to think about this from the perspective of design, usability, content, interactivity, suitability for mobile media platforms, etc. If indeed it is not so innovative in some ways, or there are things that could be improved, then it would be great to get your feedback. I am thinking of following the ‘commend, recommend, commend’ format. In other words I want to start by identifying its strongest features, go on to make some recommendations/observations on areas for improvement, and then recap on the good points!

I am also interested in an international response to this Australian project. Do international users/viewers find the content accessible, for example? Is it framed well enough to appeal to the general audience it is aimed at, or conversely, is the message simplified too much? The most important thing I want to ask is whether this represents an emerging genre, a continuation of an existing genre or set of established formats, or indeed, whether we don’t yet have a frame for understanding and evaluating such online resources.

How should I evaluate the success or otherwise of this project, and on what terms? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated, here on the blog or by email at pwlarthur@gmail.com .

I will do two talks on the digital humanities over the next couple of days. At UC Los Angeles on Tuesday on “From optical fiber to conceptual cyberinfrastructure” and a talk on “The landscape of the digital humanities” on Thursday at UC Santa Barbara.

I am currently looking at some concordance data for the AoIR conference programs over the last ten years (thank you Emma E) as part of the landscape talk. I am interested in different modes of engagement between the humanities and the digital, and AoIR/internet research would seem to be a fairly strong example of technology/the digital as study object. I was lucky to get to talk to Charles Ess (last week’s seminar speaker in the lab) a little bit about this. Also, I did a similar study of humanities computing/digital humanities conference programs a number of years ago. This is a very simple method (looking at frequency data), but in many ways, rather telling patterns emerge. When you look at two data sets, it would make sense to normalize the data or relate them to some kind of baseline. I need to think about this.

At the same time, I am going through cyberinfrastructure stuff (for the UCLA talk). I will partly use HUMlab as a case study, which is both easy and difficult. I have a very good sense of the story of HUMlab, of course, but I also need to take a step (or maybe several) back. I need to give a sense of the lab without doing a proper presentation of the lab, and I need to focus on ideational grounding, infrastructure, design principles and conceptual cyberinfrastructure. I have some nice pictures and film clips (for both talks). The cyberinfrastructure talk will also offer a criticism of “cyberinfrastructure” and hopefully some tentative ideas about how to implement and strategize cyberinfrastructure for the humanities. All this is great fun and I am looking forward to engaging with seminar participants and others at both UCLA and UCSB.

I’m sitting at my workstation in the lab on a drizzly-snowy (half drizzle, half snow…) Sunday afternoon, tuning down after an excellent and convivial brunch (thanks, Emma E!). There is no one here other than Emma herself, working hard in the other room of HUMlab 1, and the lab is unnaturally silent. I spend my time doing the usual writing and reading (a dastardly conference paper due on Tuesday – aaugh!… And, therefore, I blog……), but also contemplating all the technology around me, of which there is no shortage in the lab. These machines are seldom so quiet; they are usually engulfed in a hive of activity – computers humming, screens being pushed across rooms, screens alight with text and images, screens around which students cluster and point to and discuss about. And now they (other than my own workstation) are dark and silent around me, each blank screen tabula rasa – machines that aren’t being functional or fulfilling some purpose, but just there. Just sitting. Just being.

I like this silence, this return to a contemplation of nothingness. Earlier this morning, I came across an article from Internet Evolution about how a “Web-centric tech conference” in downtown New York 2 days ago disallowed at its event laptops, Twitter and WiFi – ie, all the things which define civilisation today. “The ‘audience’ is actually an audience”:

This is the first event I’ve been to in quite a while where the “audience” is actually an audience. No one is Tweeting out the quotes, bit by bit; no one is live-streaming the sessions; there is no Twitter board to which people try desperately to post snarky comments.

Instead, we’ve been forced to just listen, to acknowledge that there is room for both a storyteller and a passive audience, even in the world of technology.

HUMlab has had seminar live-streaming for a while now, and last Tuesday we started (?) a seminar Twitter feed with Charles Ess’s “Trust and Democracy Online” seminar. There are indisputable benefits to these initiatives, which is why we do them: the stream sessions are a treasure archive – I have used and viewed them extensively – and the tweets achieve what tweets achieve – relatively real-time, micro-blogging notes of a live event.

But I think there is also space for silence and time for machines to fall quiet. I have called before for fewer cameras – the more images we record, the less we seem to see. Perhaps sometimes we need to look less, to hear less. Like today. Like now. Like here. Just be.

I recently returned from a symposium in Luxembourg on the topic of Contemporary History in the Digital Age and will report some of my impressions here. First, I should say that attending the event was a remarkable experience for a number of reasons. The symposium, which was hosted by the Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l’Europe (CVCE) and the University of Luxembourg (Master’s in Contemporary European History program), was multi-lingual and this was a technological and human achievement in its own right. Translators worked in the background to make accessible the French language papers for English speakers, and they were highly skilled. Another reason the conference was so interesting is that it looked at digital innovation in the humanities from a European perspective. As an Australian in Sweden, much of this discussion was very new to me and I gained a great deal from it. The field of digital history tends to be dominated, at least in the research published in English, by the work of a handful of scholars in the US and UK. The CVCE in particular has a lot of experience in digital history projects. It coordinates and produces La référence multimédia sur l’histoire de l’Europe, one of the long-running digital resources on European history and integration. One of the main points for discussion at the symposium was the decision to re-design this online resource, and papers compared the earlier verion with the upcoming version from different perspectives (technical, conceptual, philosophical). However, I should say that the focus on practical experiments (in interface design, content management, interrelationship of institutional resources etc) was arguably eclipsed by one main issue: training the next generation of researchers/technicians. Indeed, this need was identified by nearly all the presenters. It seems that the digital humanities are at the start of what is likely to be a rapid rise to a more central place in universities but that what is lacking is the people to facilitate this transition.