Surfacing: 2nd Biannual Digital Humanities Week

Featured Speakers: Professor Nicole Starosielski (New York University), EricaZimmer (Boston University), Ari Epstein (Massachusetts lnstitute of Technology), and Anne Goodyear (Bowdoin Art Museum). The second biannual Digital Humanities Week takes place across the UMaine campus the second week of October. Entitled Surfacíng, this year\u27s program calls for the arts and letters to step up their influence in a world convulsed by rapid change. An MIT oceanographer, a Smithsonian curator, and distinguished scholars from NYU and the University of Virginia will examine a variety of methods for bringing to the surface what was previously hidden, from word correlations in Emily Dickinson to the geopolitics of transatlantic Internet cables. Consistent with the theme of emergence, the conference follows a bottom-up dynamic as Maine\u27s first THATCamp (The Humanities And Technology Camp). A1l visitors are invited to register their interests online or in person at the numerous workshops spread throughout the week. During each workshop, the participants break into self-determined groups to learn more about the topic of their choice, be it how to curate a digital exhibition, fight global warming, or code a mobile app. Many of the workshops take place at IMÅC, the just-opened Innovative Media Research and Commercialization center, where participants can take advantage of cutting-edge tools like 3d printers

Recent Trends in Funding for the Academic Humanities and Their Implications

[Excerpt] Never abundant, financial support for the “academic humanities” is now scarce. How scarce it is, both in absolute and relative terms, and whether the humanities now confront particularly hard times, are the pressing questions. To piece together an answer, we ask first how much the government, foundations, and private donors provide for the humanities now compared to estimates John D’Arms made in 1995, when he completed his important review of “funding trends.” Then we probe expenditures universities and colleges make on the humanities. Is there evidence, for example, in institutional budget allocations that the humanities are holding their own, or have rising costs of other academic activities, such as scientific research, been accompanied by reduced support for the humanities? And last, because public universities are so large and numerous, and because many operate on conspicuously tight budgets, we ask how well the humanities in this class of institutions have fared in comparison with their counterparts at private universities. The answers to such questions are not mere matters of financial accounting. Although much can be achieved in the humanities with quite small investments, the pursuit of excellence in scholarship and teaching in these fields is not cost-free. For relevant evidence, we draw on the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’s useful Humanities Indicators Prototype, as well as a variety of other available (but often imperfect) data sources

Book Review: Fireship: The Terror Weapon of the Age of Sail

This document is Dr. Oxley\u27s review of Fireship: The Terror Weapon of the Age of Sail by Peter Kirsch, translated from the German by John Harland. Naval Institute Press, 2009. 256 pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9781591142706 $74.9

Disciplined: Using educational studies to analyse 'Humanities Computing'

Humanities Computing is an emergent field. The activities described as 'Humanities Computing' continue to expand in number and sophistication, yet no concrete definition of the field exists, and there are few academic departments that specialize in this area. Most introspection regarding the role, meaning, and focus of "Humanities Computing" has come from a practical and pragmatic perspective from scholars and educators within the field itself. This article provides an alternative, externalized, viewpoint of the focus of Humanities Computing, by analysing the discipline through its community, research, curriculum, teaching programmes, and the message they deliver, either consciously or unconsciously, about the scope of the discipline. It engages with Educational Theory to provide a means to analyse, measure, and define the field, and focuses specifically on the ACH/ALLC 2005 Conference to identify and analyse those who are involved with the humanities computing community. © 2006 Oxford University Press

Kotarbiński’s Ontology of Humanities

What is left of this initial project once Kotarbiński’s textbook became obsolete – as Kotarbiński himself claims, perhaps too modestly, in the preface of its second edition, in 1959 – and also given the strong criticism of reism, particularly by Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz [1966]? My answer is that the philosophical project of reism then became a methodological framework for intellectual work in general, and in particular for humanistic studies, or what we today call the Human and Social Sciences