I have a recurring TODO note in my org-mode which reminds me to write a blog post every week. This reminder also offers me the possibility of make a small note each time I mark it as DONE. Since 11 August 2009 I've CANCELLED every single one of those reminders, but I've always left myself a note. So here is the unaltered log of all my failed blogging attempts since 11 August 2009. Consider it a kind of sub-blog.

• State "CANCELLED" from "TODO" [2010-03-15 Mon 21:45] \\

Purcell Plus meeting. Very good Evensong (Rach Bog, Sumsion in A,

Copi pieces). Saw Ali.

• State "CANCELLED" from "TODO" [2010-03-08 Mon 11:27] \\

Parents visiting. Horniman museum.

• State "CANCELLED" from "TODO" [2010-02-28 Sun 12:21] \\

Can't think of anything in particular. Luc Steels talk was good.

• State "CANCELLED" from "TODO" [2010-02-21 Sun 22:06] \\

Went to Bromley. Mozart Requiem. Meeting with Alex about Beyond

Text. MLI conference. Discovered importance of relating computer

science as science of procedure with procedure in scholarship.

• State "CANCELLED" from "TODO" [2010-02-12 Fri 18:46] \\

No blogging today

• State "CANCELLED" from "TODO" [2010-02-12 Fri 11:59] \\

No blog this week

• State "CANCELLED" from "TODO" [2010-02-02 Tue 11:21] \\

Zoe went to see the new baby.

• State "CANCELLED" from "TODO" [2010-01-24 Sun 14:07] \\

Choral evensong with Leighton! Birthday. V&A Decode exhibition.

• State "CANCELLED" from "TODO" [2010-01-18 Mon 17:18] \\

Live coding event at KCL

• State "CANCELLED" from "TODO" [2010-01-11 Mon 17:54] \\

I did blog, just not about my week

• State "CANCELLED" from "TODO" [2010-01-02 Sat 12:26]

• State "CANCELLED" from "TODO" [2010-01-02 Sat 12:25] \\

Christmas at mum and dad's (lots of snow and ice). New year at home.

• State "CANCELLED" from "TODO" [2009-12-21 Mon 11:14] \\

SBCL 10. Carol service. Where the Whild Things Are

• State "CANCELLED" from "TODO" [2009-12-17 Thu 11:13] \\

RCUK e-Science review. All Hands Meeting.

• State "CANCELLED" from "TODO" [2009-12-07 Mon 09:04] \\

Crib service. Mum and dad visiting. Doing RCUK poster.

• State "CANCELLED" from "TODO" [2009-11-29 Sun 22:03] \\

Advent carol service. Real-time. I did actually blog about CLSQL

and MySQL table name case sensitivity

• State "CANCELLED" from "TODO" [2009-11-23 Mon 09:37]

• State "CANCELLED" from "TODO" [2009-11-17 Tue 17:59] \\

It was very windy on Saturday. Zoe is away in Ghent. I had a bit

of a fail with marking the relations tests (but did quite well

on learning about them).

• State "CANCELLED" from "TODO" [2009-11-03 Tue 09:26] \\

Mum and Emma visited to see Breakfast at Tiffany's. Durufle

reqiuem. Zoe away.

• State "CANCELLED" from "TODO" [2009-10-26 Mon 17:16] \\

UEA seminar. SMITF broadcast.

• State "CANCELLED" from "TODO" [2009-10-17 Sat 12:39] \\

Trying to write UEA paper. Got caught by libpthreads bug which

disabled X server. Set up kernel mode switching. Seems that

this causes xrandr not to work, and DisplaySize not to work,

DPI to be broken, etc. etc.

• State "CANCELLED" from "TODO" [2009-10-12 Mon 09:10] \\

Went to Thomas Dixon lecture. Was ill most of the week.

• State "CANCELLED" from "TODO" [2009-10-05 Mon 12:56] \\

Sang your first solo. Zoe got an AAO.

• State "CANCELLED" from "TODO" [2009-09-27 Sun 22:22] \\

We went to Ham Hall. Sang first evensong at SMITF. Got some

teaching jobs. Learned to use ssh-agent.

• State "CANCELLED" from "TODO" [2009-09-21 Mon 09:44]

• State "CANCELLED" from "TODO" [2009-09-15 Tue 15:03] \\

You went to see Dido and Aeneas and it was great! You also

still need to blog about DRHA.

• State "CANCELLED" from "TODO" [2009-09-05 Sat 18:23] \\

I'll blog after DRHA

• State "CANCELLED" from "TODO" [2009-09-01 Tue 09:15] \\

Must get back in to blogging

• State "CANCELLED" from "TODO" [2009-08-24 Mon 09:47] \\

Did a review, but no blog

• State "CANCELLED" from "TODO" [2009-08-17 Mon 10:19] \\

See weekly report excuse.

• State "CANCELLED" from "TODO" [2009-08-11 Tue 11:13] \\

Was away in Ross for Three Choirs

I went to what amounts to a digital humanities pub meeting on Tuesday. It was called Decoding Digital Humanities, held at a pub near UCL, and organised by the new Centre for Digital Humanities at UCL. There must have been about 30 participants, though mainly from UCL.

They set some reading: Walter Benjamin Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and the Wikipedia article on Digital Humanities. The Benjamin evoked discussions on aspects of digital humanities which I've never really considered seriously; the whole area of new media art, digital literature, interactive narrative. It seems I've always considered digital humanities (like its non-digital parent) an analytic discipline rather than a synthetic one.

The Wikipedia article, owing to its broadly expository nature, seeded a discussion on the definition of digital humanities. Like many of these discussions, I was left with the impression that DH has more to do with creating digitised versions of the kinds of artifacts that are of interest to humanist scholars, although there was also discussion of the changes that digital humanities may bring about not only to the traditional humanities, but also to computer science. It was suggested that computer scientists find working with humanist data sets interesting and challenging because of their fuzziness. This point also lead to an interesting question: what is the correct/a good technical term for describing this kind of qualitative data?

But the discussion never quite got to considering what the valid questions of digital humanities might be. What are the techniques that make digital humanities digital? Is digital humanities just computer-assisted humanities, easy and interactive access to publications, manuscripts and other artifacts? Or is there a new programme of scholarship which computational methods may make possible?

Some time ago (probably mid-November 2009) I read a short article (Joseph Raben, Introducing Issues in Humanities Computing, DHQ 1:1 Spring 2007) in the first issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly which ends with a series of questions to be asked about humanities computing, its nature, outcomes, effects. I made a note to myself to answer these questions and have finally got round to having a go. Some I have no idea how to answer, some I can give a few opinions on, and some I know I need to say a lot more about.

Can software development, rather than conventional research, serve as a step up the promotion ladder?

So does software development count as a valid research output? This problem can be generalised to the concerns of practice-led research. Does the scholarly community accept work such as musical compositions, painting and sculpture, biographies, digital art, and fiction as valid research outputs? There are certainly structures in place which allow scholars up to and including doctoral level in arts and humanities areas to have evidence of their practice considered as part of their research. And disciplines which include engineering components such as computer science often produce doctoral theses which include substantial practical components. But beyond doctoral level the accepted product of research, in the arts and humanities at least, becomes homogeneous with the mode of its communication: journal articles, conference papers, book chapters, monographs. However, humanities computing stands at an interesting intersection between a humanist discipline and an engineering/science discipline. It's broad questions are likely humanistic (to make observations about the human condition based on evidence of human activity), but its methods may be more related to computer science (development and use of software). Which of these two components of the research (findings and methods) are the most publication worthy? My own opinion is increasingly that software is a means to capture and express procedure and that procedure in scholarship (as well as other areas) should be considered a valid object of study.

Are there better ways to organize our information than the current search programs provide?

How far should we trust simple information retrieval methods to tell us what is relevant and interesting? The idea of automatic relevance ranking based on keyword matching does seem a bit dry and inhuman, but it has certainly become commonplace. Computers are now relied upon to make judgements of similarity, and not just with text; there's a whole field of study which attempts to get computers to make judgements of musical similarity.

How do we confront the trend toward English as a universal scholarly language in the face of objections, such as those from France? How far need we go in accommodating other world languages---Spanish, Russian, Chinese?

[...]

How concerned should we be about the consequence of Web accessibility undermining the status of major research centers in or near metropolitan cities?

I've used access grid, I regularly talk with colleagues in IRC channels, I use Skype and instant messaging tools and, of course, make regular use of email. I've also watched/listened to recorded lectures. But I'm not convinced that any of these things really replace the nuances of human communication which may be vital for serious discussion and networking.

Has the availability of the Internet as a scholarly medium enhanced the academic status of women and

minorities?

[...]

Will humanists' dependence on computer-generated data lead to a scientistic search for objective and reproducible results?

This, of course, assumes that humanists will become dependent on computer-generated data, and that they will interact with that data via computational means. I oppose this to mere digitisation, in which artifacts of scholarly interest (such as manuscripts, printed texts, paintings) are merely transcribed onto a digital medium and made more easily accessible; the mode of interaction with such digitised artifacts is often non-computational, it's just a more convenient way of looking at them. Genuine computational interaction with artifacts, on the other hand, may well call for new understandings amongst humanist scholars, and lead to new priorities and concerns in their research. I see two such potential major changes. Computational techniques may require that the tacit knowledge and implicit procedures that humanist scholars use become explicit and reproducible by being encoded and published in software, somewhat reminiscent of the necessarily pedantic detail used in "methods" sections of scientists' papers. The other change relates to humanists embracing the opposite of their typical close reading paradigm, adopting "distant reading" techniques. The question of what you can do with a million books requires that a scholar knows how to deal with the quantity of information contained in such a corpus. This includes learning to generate valid statistics and to draw legitimate conclusions from them. Whether or not any of this counts as objective is another matter.

Can we learn anything about today's resistance to new technologies from studying the reactions in the Renaissance to the introduction of printing?

[...]

Will digital libraries make today's libraries obsolete?

I can't imagine using a card index over an OPAC (online public access catalogue), and having online access to journal literature is infinitely more convenient than browsing through dusty old archives in library basements. I'm also very keen on digitisation projects as a way of opening up access to important (and maybe also seemingly not to important) artifacts to scholars. Access to information and resources from your desktop is certainly a major advantage. But we will still require institutions which foster and make use of information expertise. Catalogues are only as good as the people who design and maintain them. These are certainly the domains of expertise of libraries and, I imagine, will continue to be so. There is also the question of serendipity in library browsing; simply scanning the shelves can sometimes turn up items which would probably never have been the subject of a "relevant" keyword search.

Are the concepts and development of artificial intelligence relevant to humanistic scholarship?

Why ask this question? Is it because artificial intelligences may take on the status of human agents whose thoughts and actions could be argued to be in the domain of interest of humanist scholars? Is it because artificial intelligences may be able to perform the same functions, make the same judgements and arguments as human humanists? Or even that the whole artificial intelligence project (and its wider context of enquiry into the nature of human cognition and intelligence) could be the subject of a humanities study?