It is hard to believe that another summer has come and gone. Yesterday was the 4th of July and then it was the 3rd of September. So it goes. Should be a fun semester. Volunteered to teach an extra course this fall in exchange for a break in the spring.

I will be teaching for the second time the WRA 453, and upper division course in Grant Writing. This has been a great experience since it has force me to articulate a process we have been doing for a number of years. The other course is one of my favorites, as is often the case with history, AL 805, a graduate course that covers the History of Rhetoric, from the Sophists to the Postmodernists.

The iPad is a nice tool for blogging. The word press app makes it easy to draft and publish posts.

Attending the Great Lake That Camp at Michigan State University, March 20 & 21, 2010;  (http://www.greatlakesthatcamp.org/).

Attended the board meeting for the Alliance for American Quilts, March 5, 2010, in Washington DC.  Congenial and fruitful meeting that was very productive.

At Michigan State University, the College of Arts & Letters is creating an undergraduate specialization in the digital humanities.

“The Digital Humanities specialization provides a space for students to study, research, explore, and create in relation to digital tools, technologies, and spaces. The specialization provides a space for students to explore the ways in which digital technologies have changed our current intellectual, professional, and personal landscapes. In the specialization, students read about, explore, research, analyze, argue about, and critique the ways in which digital tools, technologies, and spaces have transformed (and are continually transforming) the work in the humanities.” <http://dh.cal.msu.edu/>

The Digging into Data Challenge is an international grant competition launched in January 2009 by four leading research agencies: the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) from the United Kingdom, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) from the United States, the National Science Foundation (NSF) from the United States, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) from Canada.

What is the “challenge” we speak of?  The idea behind the Digging into Data Challenge is to answer the question “what do you do with a million books?”  Or a million pages of newspapesr? Or a million photographs of artworks?  That is, how does the notion of scale affect humanities and social science research? Now that scholars have access to huge repositories of digitised data — far more than they could read in a lifetime — what does that mean for research?

Digging into Image Data to Answer Authorship Related Questions (Dean Rehberger and Wayne Dyksen, Michigan State University, NEH; Peter Bajcsy, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, NSF; Peter Ainsworth, University of Sheffield, JISC). This project will take three specific resources (manuscripts, maps and quilts) and develop tools to analyse and identify authorship of visual images.

http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Social-Sciences-And-Humanities-Research-Council-Of-Canada-1085655.html

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/digitisation/diggingintodata.aspx

Attended the Nebraska Digital Workshop.  Excellent work by the CDHR (and Kay Walter and the gang) to show off new work by emerging scholars in digital humanities (http://cdrh.unl.edu/opportunities/neb_digital_workshop/index.php).Nebraska Digital Workshop

Participated in Teagle Workshop at Union College, NY.  The goal of the “High Performance Computing at Liberal Arts Colleges” planning grant is to develop a proposal for the best way to utilize HPC in the liberal arts setting. We plan to hold four workshops: 1) what do we mean by HPC?; 2) applications of HPC in the humanities and social sciences; 3) applications of HCP in the sciences and engineering; 4) what should we do in our liberal arts settings? This project involves Bard, Colgate, Hamilton, Skidmore, Union, and Vassar Colleges.  With Geraldine Heng, University of Texas, Austin; Doug Reside, University of Maryland; Orville Vernon Burton, Coastal Carolina University.  September 29, 2009.

Project Title: ” ”
New technologies offer great potential for advancing the practice of oral history. However, they also introduce new questions and issues. Michigan State University, through the MATRIX Center and the Michigan State University Museum, will partner with the Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, the Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center, the American Folklore Society, and the Oral History Association to recommend standards and best practices for digital oral history. Seven multidisciplinary working groups recruited from experts and practitioners from museums, libraries, and scholarly societies will work online, at meetings such as national conferences, and in a symposium at the Library of Congress to produce recommendations around core topics including intellectual property, transcriptions, digital video, technology, scholarship, preservation, and access. Final recommendations from all groups will be published as a guide to conducting digital oral history.  http://www.imls.gov/news/2009/092409b_list.shtm#MI

This semester I will be teaching a new course in of all things, grant writing. It will be a work of ongoing development and will focus a good deal on the process and project management needed for completing a proposal. Information on the course will be kept at http://resources.matrix.msu.edu.