2cultures.net(.au)

Expert Contributors Needed

Nigel J Hetherington — Sun, 19 May 2013 11:15:00 +0000

At Past Preservers, we are always seeking to expand our network of experts and specialists who can energetically share their knowledge and enthusiasm for their subjects with the viewing public.

Our expert database contains experts from over twenty countries with a variety of skill sets and specializations. Through our networks, we can connect researchers of the past or present to the people who know it best. We provide consistent and reliable access to the archaeological, scientific, and practical resources that are crucial to our clients’ research, project or business.

“Our experts share a common thread in that their inspiration comes from a fascination with the historical world along with a talent for piecing together the wonderments of the past" says the CEO and founder of Past Preservers Nigel J. Hetherington.

Our experts include archaeologists, scientists, theologians, historians, curators, anthropologists, adventurers and more. They all have great passion for their careers and want to share that enthusiasm with others. If you want to be a part of our expert database, register today

An Introducton

historivist — Sun, 19 May 2013 03:00:39 +0000

Now that the semester has ended and I've woken up from my recovery period, I am actually ready to introduce myself and participate! I'm in my last year of the dual-Master's program in Archives Management and History at Simmons College GSLIS. After I finally graduate, I hope to be able to work in an academic environment and apply the innovative spirit of digital humanities to archives.

Going to soak up all the Drupally goodness

Ruby Sinreich — Sat, 18 May 2013 17:21:05 +0000

I'm going to be attending DrupalCon in Portland this week to gather all the skills, knowledge, and connections that I can bring home to help support the HASTAC community.

Hello! Collaborative Digital Edition Projects

Elisa Beshero-Bondar — Sat, 18 May 2013 17:08:31 +0000

Hello! I've just recently joined HASTAC, and I am fortunate to be posting my first blog entries here just as the Feminist Scholars Digital Workshop is beginning. I'm really glad to see a feminist scholars collaborative well underway!

Caught by the Dragonfly’s Gaze

Elisa Beshero-Bondar — Sat, 18 May 2013 07:52:06 +0000

New Print Release of Hacking the Academy

Elisa Beshero-Bondar — Sat, 18 May 2013 05:45:51 +0000

Greetings, HASTAC community!

Six Degrees of Separation

amcleod — Fri, 17 May 2013 23:56:49 +0000

Introduction

JessieNYC — Fri, 17 May 2013 23:42:13 +0000

Greetings everyone ~ I'm delighted to see this workshop emerge and excited to participate.

Greetings

LaGuare — Fri, 17 May 2013 20:37:56 +0000

Hi! My name is Alma Maria Rinasz. Just to give you an idea of what I do and who I am. I moved to Mexico right after graduating with a BA in International Relations and Spanish with a minor in Women's Studies from a small Jesuit college in Buffalo, NY. In Mexico, I began a career in education which has almost always focused on ESL teaching. I also began my own green business several years ago and became envolved in local farmer markets and urban gardening. With the business I started, my goal was to help local seamstresses become economically empowered.

Graduate Fellows Forum: Lydia Rodríguez

ronda — Fri, 17 May 2013 18:36:28 +0000

Graduate Fellows Forum: Lydia Rodríguez
The Time Has Come: Ethnography, Gesture Research, and Digital Technology

Lydia Rodríguez
PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology
Scholars’ Lab Fellow

Respondent
Dr. Eve Danziger
Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology
University of Virginia

Summary:
In Western societies, time is usually perceived as a linear progression of events, but not all cultures think about and experience time in this particular way. In this presentation I analyze the relationship among linguistic, conceptual, and cultural notions of time through ethnographic observation of spoken interactions in Chol, a Maya language spoken in Chiapas, Mexico. In particular, I describe how the concept of time is depicted in the spontaneous gestures which are produced in conversational exchanges among speakers of Chol Maya. I also discuss the role that digital technology has played in the collection and analysis of gestural data, and how digital tools can be used to complement and enhance traditional ethnographic research about temporal conceptualization.

As always, you can listen to (or subscribe to) our podcasts on the Scholars’ Lab blog, or on iTunesU.

Renee Powers Introduction #FSDW13

reneepowers — Fri, 17 May 2013 16:38:57 +0000

About Me

Introduction

dgloumbia — Fri, 17 May 2013 16:23:47 +0000

I am the author of The Cultural Logic of Computation (Harvard UP, 2009), which applies cultural studies & critical theory methods to core topics in the theory, philosophy, and practice of computation, and develops a variety of arguments to show how computation functions in our society to produce and exacerbate hierarchies of race, class, gender, and power, despite the tremendous amount of rhetoric suggesting that computerization "democratizes," flattens, and decentralizes.

Words & Votes: The Changing Congressional Opinions on Gun Violence

information aesthetics — Fri, 17 May 2013 15:34:30 +0000

The political visualization Words & Votes [sandyhookpromise.org], developed by digital agency R/GA for non-profit organization Sandy Hook Promise, provides a comprehensive look into the opinions of congressional representatives on the issue of gun violence.

More specifically, the visualization tracks each member of congress as being "neutral", on the side of "Gun Safety," or on the side of "Gun Rights". It then maps the evolution of these opinions over time on a vertical timeline.

These individual opinions have been based on two separate types of information: the analysis of the tweets sent by members of Congress and their voting record on Capitol Hill on laws and bills that relate to gun violence.

Individual members of congress can be explored in terms of being influential or vocal, or filtered by address, zip code or home town.

The House of Savoy

peacay — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:32:00 +0000

Superb illuminated paintings distinguish this visual regional history as an album of outstanding quality, to my eye. Please do yourself a favour by clicking through directly to the very large versions of these parchment page images so you can better inspect the manuscript illustrator's exquisite and detailed work. Produced in ~1580, this is quite a late example of such high calibre illumination work, and it was likely a special commission by a member of the royal household in the variable Italian-French-Swiss territory of Savoy.

"The House of Savoy was formed in the early 11th century in the historical Savoy region. Through gradual expansion, it grew from ruling a small county in that region to eventually rule—through its branch Savoy-Carignano—the Kingdom of Italy from 1861 until the end of World War II. The House of Savoy ruled unified Italy for 85 years with Victor Emmanuel II [..&c..] as monarchs. The last monarch ruled for a few weeks before being overthrown by a Constitutional Referendum, and a new republic was then proclaimed. [..]

The House of Savoy emerged, along with the free communes of Switzerland, in what is now called Switzerland. The name derives from the historical region Savoy in what is now France and Italy. Over time the house expanded from that region to rule almost all of the Italian Peninsula. Yet their growth and survival over the centuries was not based on spectacular conquests, but on gradual territorial expansion through marriage and methodical and highly manipulative political acquisitions." [source]

The manuscript features the armorial bearings^ of (at least) the House of Savoy and the Habsburg Empire, assorted Dukes, Counts, Marchionesses and Countesses at their investitures, battles and in funereal or marriage portraits; and formal Roman and Greek architectural decoration is mixed in with the stylised grotesques, trophies, arms and strapwork motifs favoured during the Renaissance. The colouring is just gorgeous and adds enormously to the ink and ink-wash foundation. The only written text is in the name plates and scene descriptions (+/- mottoes) in Latin accompanying nearly all the illustrations.

'The Album of the House of Savoy (W. 464)' is owned and hosted by the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore within 'The Digital Walters' assemblage of manuscripts: one of the best sites of its kind on the internet.

The images above were slightly cropped (the illustrations take up nearly the whole of every page) and I don't recall adjusting any of the colour/balance qualities at all. I uploaded very large jpeg images, but the reason The Digital Walters deserves praise is, in addition to sharing all the manuscript images under an attribution share-alike 3.0 CC license, they also supply a range of .jpg and .tiff file sizes, unlike most repositories. So an even LARGER and very high resolution version of each page image can be found on their website.

Re: House of Savoy - I'm not a fan of any of the sites I looked at, in terms of an historical overview, but in addition to Wikipedia, there are: Chivalric Orders, New Advent & Regalis that you may find useful.

Previously: Illuminated.

Testing asynchronous background processes in Omeka

dm4fn — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:16:22 +0000

[Cross-posted from dclure.org]

I ran into an interesting testing challenge yesterday. In Neatline, there are a couple of controller actions that need to spawn off asynchronous background processes to handle operations that are too long-running to cram inside of a regular request. For example, when the user imports Omeka items into an exhibit, Neatline needs to query a (potentially quite large) collection of Omeka items and insert a corresponding Neatline record for each of them.

Jobs extend Omeka_Job_AbstractJob and define a public perform method:

And can be dispatched asynchronously by getting the job_dispatcher out of the registry and passing the job name and parameters to sendLongRunning:

It’s easy enough to directly unit test the perform method on the job, but, since actual execution of the process is non-blocking, the jobs can’t be tested at the integration level in the ordinary manner. For example, I’d like to just dispatch a request with a mock item query, and check that the correct Neatline records were created. This can’t be asserted reliably, though, since there’s no guarantee that the job will have completed before the testing assertions are executed.

The job itself is non-blocking, but the job invocation in the controller code is blocking, and can be tested pretty easily by replacing the job_dispatcher with a testing double and spying on the sendLongRunning method. Since this is a pattern that needs to be implemented in more than one test, I started by adding a mockJobDispatcher method to the abstract test-case class that mocks the job dispatcher and injects it into the registry:

Then, in the test, we can just call this method to mock the dispatcher, assert that the dispatcher is expecting a call to sendLongRunning with the correct job and parameters, and then fire off a mock request to the controller action under test:

This is a pretty good solution, but not perfect: The integration test is really asserting an intermediate step in the implementation of the controller action, not the end result – it tests that the job was called with certain parameters, not the final effect of the request. This opens up the door to false positives. For example, in the future, I might make a breaking change to the public API of the Neatline_ImportItems. Assuming I’ve changed the job’s unit tests to assert against the new API, the test suite would pass even if I completely forget to update any of the job invocations, since the integration tests are just asserting the structure of the invocation, not the final effects.

I’ve encountered a version of this problem more than once, and I’ve never really found a good solution to it. Short of moving up to something like in-browser Selenium tests, or resorting to hacky execution pauses in the integration tests, has anyone ever come across a better way to do this?