Announcing the 2008 Digital Humanities Summer Institute

University of Victoria, May 26-30, 2008

http://www.dhsi.org

* Scholarships

We are pleased to announce that funding from the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada, and other partners, makes possible the
offering of a limited number of scholarship-subsidized spots in the 2008 Summer Institute. These will be awarded to scholars in the
digital humanities, both students and professionals. The application deadline is March 15th. Applicants will be informed of their success
before March 30th. The application form is available on line at: http://www.dhsi.org/home/scholarships.
Scholarships will be awarded first to those coming to the institute for the first time, then to returning participants.

* Additional ACH Travel Bursary

The Association for Computers and the Humanities (http://www.ach.org) is offering several bursaries to assist graduate students by defraying travel and lodging costs. You may apply for the this bursary at the same time as for Institute scholarships by indicating on the scholarship application form that you are a graduate student member of the ACH and would like to be considered for the ACH bursary.

In recent years, there have been two trends: Increasing purchases and usage of computers and gadgets, and increasing environmental awareness and action. Apply the latter to the former and you get the rise of green computing.

“Green computing? Is that to imply that my current computing is… not green?” As beneficial as technology is today, it also damages the environment during the three phases of its existence: Manufacturing, usage, and disposal. There are two primary aspects of environmental damage that consumers and businesses are focusing on: The production of greenhouse gases from energy consumption, and toxic air and water pollution from manufacturing and disposal.

How can we help? There are many green decisions we can make beginning from when we’re thinking about getting a new computer until when we’re getting rid of that computer.

Purchasing

When shopping for a new computer, there are a couple signs that basically say “officially green”.

• Look for Energy Star 4.0 compliance
  If equipment has the “Energy Star” label, it means it conforms to energy efficiency specifications set by the US EPA. A description from their website states, “Qualified products must now meet energy use guidelines in three distinct operating modes: standby, sleep mode, and while computers are being used. This approach ensures energy savings when a computer is active and performing a range of tasks, as well as when standing by. Newly qualified computers must also include a more efficient internal power supply.” These specifications were updated in 2007 (version 4.0) to be more stringent than past versions.
• Look for RoHS compliance
  The RoHS Directive bans the sale in the UK of electronic goods that contain more than agreed levels of certain toxic substances. How does that affect consumers outside the UK? Well, if a manufacturer wants to sell to the UK market, instead of making an RoHS-complaint and an RoHS-non-compliant version of their products, they might as well make just the RoHS-compliant version to sell to the UK and outside. Thus, you’ll be finding RoHS-compliant components in the US thanks to the UK.

You can also prevent the creation of e-waste by obtaining a used computer if you feel the environmental benefits outweigh the drawbacks (such as older technology and no warranty).

Usage

An average computer, including monitor, consumes 100-300 watts. While we can encourage manufacturers to produce greener products, we have much more control over the energy consumption of products through the way we use them. The following chart illustrates this concept.

Ideally, we would power off our computers the moment we stop using them, but we can have a balance between low energy consumption and practicality.

• Configure your computer’s power management settings.
  You can set your computer, if it’s not set already, to automatically turn off unused components like the monitor and hard drive after they’ve been idle for a certain time. You can also put the computer on a timer to…
• Suspend, sleep, or hibernate
  We might avoid turning off our computers because they take a while to boot back up or we’re reluctant to close our work and have to reopen everything later. Both these obstacles can be reduced or avoided by using the suspend, sleep, or hibernate function on your computer instead of completely powering off. There are some distinctions between the three modes and they still consume a trickle of power, but the bottom line is they consume much less power than the computer being on.

Outside of the environmental impacts, consumers and businesses gain by spending less money on energy.

Disposal

Since electronics often contain toxic metals and substances, it’s often illegal to toss old electronics away with the rest of your trash, where the substances are in danger of polluting water sources. Luckily, we have many other options that are becoming more convenient.

• Donate the equipment if it’s still usable
  See if a friend or local non-profit organization or school would like your old computer. You can also lookup thrift shops and donation and recycling sites at www.earth911.org.
• Recycle unusable items
  Lookup local recycling centers at www.earth911.org. You can also research if your community organizes e-waste recycling drives/pickup.
• Use manufacturer recycling programs
  An increasing number of computer manufacturers now offer ways for you to send your old computer to them for recycling. For example, Dell’s recycling program will recycle any Dell-brand product for free or recycle other-brand products for free with a Dell purchase.
• Recycle dead batteries
  Most electronics stores, including cell phone retailers, accept depleted batteries for recycling.

In addition, the decisions of businesses and organizations have a greatly magnified environmental impact because of the sheer number of computers they use. These organizations can help the environment by adopting greener purchasing and disposal procedures and computer use policies, and by educating users.

To sum it up without getting too technical, the answer to my initial question is “nothing”.

Monday Dec 17, 2005

Academic Commons today released its December 2007 special issue
devoted to CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE & THE LIBERAL ARTS
(www.academiccommons.org/).
Edited by David L. Green (Principal at Knowledge Culture), the issue
is dedicated to the memory of Roy Rosenzweig (1950-2007), an
extraordinary historian who inspired a generation of fellow
historians and others working at the intersection of the humanities
and new technologies (http://thanksroy.org/).

Table of Contents: http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/announcement/table-of-contents

*Introduction*
- David L. Green, “A Cyberinfrastructure for Us All.”

*Humanities Cyberinfrastructure*
- Gary Wells, “The (Uncommon) Challenge of the Cultural
Commonwealth” (Review)
- Kevin Guthrie, “Beyond the ACLS Report: An Interview with John
Unsworth.”

For quite some time, Nancy Ezer (Lecturer, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures) has been working with Ted Liu (CDH’s foreign languages instructional technology coordinator) to develop an online tool to teach Hebrew grammar. Nancy had been using a workbook for quite some time, and even had an electronic version of it, but it was trapped on old disks in a format that we could no longer use (beware the passing of technology!).

She submitted a project proposal to CDH in 2005, which included the possibility of outsourcing some of the work to a company. We decided to take advantage of the functionality available in Course Management systems in order to build the grammar tool. At the time, we were reviewing Sakai, but when it became clear that the CCLE would be based on Moodle, we decided to use it instead.

Nancy and Ted collaborated very closely, and Ted found ways to get the quiz tool to work with the many challenges that the Hebrew Workbook presented.

On December 5, Nancy and Ted talked about and demonstrated the quiz tool at a presentation in the CDH PC Lab. Shortly afterwards, our colleagues in OID picked up the item for their “tools for teaching” series. See http://tinyurl.com/3xao8x

The DHO is a new entity, created to coordinate Digital Humanities initiatives throughout Ireland.

See http://www.dho.ie/index.html

The Library will host a presentation on ArtStor next week (Friday Oct 19, 1pm). ArtStor is a collection of digital images, licensed by the UCLA library. It now has over 1/2 million images which can be accessed by faculty, students and staff.

The collections continue to grow. The most recent additions include Classical Antiquity lantern slides from Bryn Mawr College and Community Murals from Timothy Drescher.

To learn more about next week’s presentation, please take a look at the attached invitation ->>>artstor.pdf

The ARTstor website is www.artstor.org

From: Farb,Sharon

Sent: Sunday, September 30, 2007, 12:13pm

The UCLA library is interested in gathering input from UCLA faculty and graduate students working with undergraduates regarding two databases aimed at interdisciplinary undergraduate uses. Please share this announcement with any faculty or graduate students you think may be interested. All comments welcome. Deadline is October 31, 2007.

————————

The databases are:

Academic Search Premier
Indexes and abstracts articles in more than eight thousand arts and humanities, social sciences, and life and physical sciences journals; offers access to full-text articles in more than 4,400 journals

Academic Search Complete

Indexes and abstracts articles in more than 10,900 journals and other publications in English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, and Portuguese; full-text available for more than 5,300 journals; coverage spans all disciplines and area studies

Academic OneFile
Indexes and abstracts articles in more than eight thousand journals in the physical sciences, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts, theology, and literature; includes NPR, CNN, and CBC transcripts and podcasts and the full text of The New York Times from 1995 to the present

Learn more at http://www2.library.ucla.edu/electronicresources.html

This event was designed to highlight the innovative research that is being done here at UCLA utilizing digital technology. It also served as a catalyst for strengthening the UCLA community by encouraging collaboration between faculty from different departments and disciplines, who are engaged in research utilizing digital technology. It provided a great opportunity for 350 attendees to view and experience many of UCLA’s groundbreaking digital research projects, and meet the faculty and graduate students involved in the creation.

The Keynote Speaker was:
2006 Lyman Award winner Willard McCarty, King’s College London and his Plenary address was: