Day of Digital Humanities, 18 March 2010

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[17 March 2010]

Tomorrow I’ll be participating in a mass experiment with self-consciousness, the 2010 edition of the Day of Digital Humanities. The organizers have persuaded close to 150 people who self-identify with the description “digital humanist” (list) to blog, during the course of 18 March, about what it is they actually spend their time doing. “The goal of the project” (say the organizers) “is to create a web site that weaves together the journals of the participants into a picture that answers the question, ‘Just what do computing humanists really do?’”

For the day, I’ll be using the special Day of Digital Humanities blog set up for me by the organizers; the blogs of all participants are aggregated on the project site; there is also an RSS feed.

XML Prague is over

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[14 March 2010]

XML Prague took place yesterday and today, and I’m still coming down from the adrenaline high. Lots of good talks, in a single-tracked conference; I had the task of trying to knit them all together in the closing.

I’ll do a fuller trip report later, if working on my taxes doesn’t prevent it. But Norm Walsh has already asked that I post at least the last bit of my remarks.

[Readers who did not attend the conference or follow the streaming video need to know that in the opening sessions of the two conference days, Tony Graham and Sharon Adler had each referred at critical moments to the book of Genesis. One of Sharon’s slides bore the title “In the beginning was SGML,”, and Tony began his talk on Saturday with an extended reference to the book of Genesis: “In the beginning was the page. And the page was without form and void, …” Sharon wondered aloud whether people involved with descriptive markup all have God complexes; she may have something there. The text below also has some other references to things said at the conference, but I think for now I’ll spare readers the detailed annotation necessary to explain them all. Apologies in advance to any readers made uncomfortable by parodies of scripture.]

At the end of my talk, I described wandering through the streets of Prague, trying to find my way from the Strahov Monastery, where the conference dinner was held, back to my hotel, when suddenly I had a vision — one might almost say, a revelation.

And I saw in the right hand of him that sat on the throne an XML document canonicalized and serialized with EXI, containing seven pi-trees encrypted with seven public-key encryption key pairs.

And I saw a strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice, Who is worthy to parse the XML document, and to decrypt the encryption thereof?

And no one in heaven, nor in earth, neither under the earth, was able to parse the XML document, neither by buffering it in memory nor by processing it in streaming mode.

And I wept much, because no man was found worthy to parse and to process the XML document, neither to exploit its vocabulary-specific semantics nor to perform vocabulary-independent pretty-printing thereon.

And one of the elders saith unto me, Weep not: behold, the standards-compliant XML application, with support for C14n and EXI, for XML encryption and schema validation, and for interoperable stylesheet technologies like XSLT 17.2 and XSL FO 42.0, hath prevailed to open the XML document, and to decrypt the seven encryptions thereof, and to display it coherently, yea even for those who abhor the sight of angle brackets and prefer beautiful well-formatted text with tasteful images.

And every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying, Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto those that preserve data, and provide access to information, if not for ever and ever, then at least for the foreseeable future.

And the presentations, and the coffee breaks, were the second day.

And the nine conference organizers said, Amen. And the representatives of the two gold sponsors, and the four silver sponsors, and the four bronze sponsors, and the five media partners, and the three sister events, stood up and said Amen. And the one hundred and forty-four conference particpants clapped their hands and thanked the conference organizers for a great conference focusing on information that shall outlive the applications which create and process it.

XML for the Long Haul

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[23 February 2010]

The organizing committee for Balisage 2010 have announced the topic of this year’s one-day pre-conference symposium: “XML for the Long Haul: Issues in the Long-term preservation of XML,” and have issued a call for participation. The basic question is roughly this: what do we need to do to make sure that XML-encoded data is usable for long periods? Descriptive markup was invented by people who needed and desired longevity, application independence, and device independence for their data, so longevity is often used as a selling point for the use of SGML and XML. And as sometimes happens with selling points, the precise nature of the relation between XML and long-lived data is sometimes obscured, to the point where some potential customers may believe they have been told that the use of XML in itself guarantees data longevity. And maybe they have, but not (I should think) by anyone who knows what they are talking about. The use of XML, or more generally descriptive markup, may be a necessary condition of data longevity, but it’s unlikely to be sufficient, just as a hammer may be necessary (or extremely helpful) in getting a nail driven, but buying a hammer does not by itself get the nail into the wall.

There’s a lot to be said about the facets and ramifications of the topic, but I think I’ll save those for later posts. For now, I’ll just say that I’ll be chairing the symposium this year, and I hope to see readers of this blog in Montréal in August.

[My evil twin Enrique had been tugging my elbow for some time, and now asked “So why is the logo a moving truck? Will non-native speakers of English understand the reference?” I don’t know (but if you do, I’m interested to learn: native speakers of other languages, please speak up! Does the logo make sense outside of English?), but I can at least explain. The English phrase “long haul” refers most literally to long distances, especially for the transport of freight or people (as in “long-haul flights” and “long-haul trucking”). In an extended sense (originally metaphorical, I guess) it denotes a protracted or difficult task (“we’re in it for the long haul”) or an extended period of time. Long-term preservation of data and meaning involves a long haul both in the sense of being a difficult task and of involving long period of time. “Oh,” said Enrique. “I get it! The logo is a truck used for long-haul freight transport, the way XML may be used for long-haul preservation of information. Don’t you think you should explain that somewhere?” “Maybe,” I said. Maybe I should.

ACH and ALLC co-sponsoring Balisage

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[12 February 2010]

The Association for Computers and the Humanities and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing have now signed on as co-sponsors of the Balisage conference held each year in August in Montréal. They join a number of other co-sponsors who also deserve praise and thanks, but I’m particularly happy about ACH and ALLC because they have provided such an important part of my intellectual home over the years.

Balisage will take place Tuesday through Friday, 3-6 August, this year; on Monday 2 August there will be a one-day pre-conference symposium on a topic to be announced real soon now. It’s a conference for anyone interested in descriptive markup, information preservation, access to and management of information, accessibility, device independence, data reuse — any of the things that descriptive markup helps enable. The deadline for peer review applications is 19 March; the deadline for papers is 16 April. Time to start thinking about what you’re going to write up; you don’t want to be caught up short at the last minute, without time to work out your idea properly.

Mark your calendars!

XML Prague 2010

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[10 February 2010]

Friends and colleagues who have attended XML Prague in previous years have come back with such enthusiastic tales that I have always wished I could attend. Smart people, good discussions, and of course Prague is Prague, one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. This year, it seems, my luck is in. My tickets are booked, my passport has been renewed, and my Czech phrasebook has been dusted off. (Pivo, prosim. Velký.)

There’s still time to decide to go. See you there, perhaps?