citation
Group Leader/Consultant, Humanistic Algorithms Project. (2008–2009). Humanities High Performance Computing Collaboratory (HpC). Principle Investigator: Kevin Franklin (UIUC); Project Leader: Virginia Kuhn (USC). National Endowment for the Humanities Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities Grant. $250,000 [External; ~$5,000 for travel/honoraria].
grant project description (from accompanying materials letter)
As one of the group leaders of the Humanistic Algorithms project—one of three humanities groups selected for the 2008–2009 HpC mini-residencies—you will collaborate with high performance computing specialists in order to identify, create, and adapt computational tools and methods. Your participation in this grant includes travel to three supercomputing centers for three different workshops tailored to address the specific challenges of your individual projects and research goals. The Humanistic Algorithms project is a collaboration between SEASR, I-CHASS, and the University of Southern California’s Institute for Multimedia Literary that focuses on building metadata algorithms for digital media content and creating a digital archive system in support of an open-access digital portfolio application for faculty and students at higher education institutions. Supercomputing workshops for the Humanistic Algorithms group include visits to the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center on February 26-27, the San Diego Supercomputing Center on March 19-20, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications from April 19-23 to participate in the third workshop and to attend the third annual HASTAC conference, Traversing Digital Boundaries. The year-long program will culminate in a final two-day conference in August 2009.
group/project abstract
Humanistic Algorithms: The University of Southern California’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy (IML) has faced a material challenge for the past eight years in realizing one of its primary goals: creating a digital archive system in support of the creation of digital portfolio application. The lack of sufficient computational resources for holding large collections of multimedia resources, most notably its robust digital portfolio of media-rich student projects and faculty teaching resources, has hindered IML’s creation of a pedagogical tool for faculty and students. The Humanistic Algorithms project is a collaboration between SEASR, ICHASS, and IML to address this challenge. The project is being imagined in phases, with the first stage to serve as a prototype to be completed by early June. SEASR will use data analytics to extract information from unstructured texts (i.e., raw textual data like websites, etc.) to produce semantic information that can be used to create meta-analyses of scholarly multimedia. From these meta-analyses, Humanistic Algorithms would like to contemplate: What are the components of scholarly multimedia? What is pedagogy in a networked world? How do we collaborate, train faculty, and teach students how to read and compose scholarly multimedia?
Note: Kairos (see under Edited Journals) is part of the corpus for the prototype algorithm, along with the IML student projects and two other scholarly, multimedia collections.
accompanying materials
- letter of participation (from Kevin Franklin, ICHASS)