Hello Group E, I have registered http://groupeblog.wordpress.com for us to blog important research material and discussion. The flickr and de.licio.us tags are groupeblog.
Hello Group E, I have registered http://groupeblog.wordpress.com for us to blog important research material and discussion. The flickr and de.licio.us tags are groupeblog.
February 24, 2008 at 4:41 pm |
Well this is good timing, I’m in a big discussion this week about WordPress here locally in my department, and thus far I have been nothing but critical. Here are a few of the issues:
1. Knowledge Sharing: Why should I put my stuff into WordPress, or into ANYTHING for that matter other than a non-propretary, univerally accessible database, knowledge should be independent of any platform, so we’re trying to figure out how to access information in WordPress independently of the WordPress environment. Looking for some sort of XML/Web Service as an interface to the data. I would probably need to use the RSS feature to pipe data into my own database and maintain a seperate copy that way.
2. Knowledge structuring. I need much more than a simple text editor for posting coments, or uploading an associated image. Not only do we need to model many other forms of knowledge, but the interrelationships among knowledge objects must be more than blog lists.
3. Semantic retrieval. I was first excited about the WordPress claims about semantic topic indexing and “term spaces”, but on closer look, I don’t think there is anything behind it, simple arbitrary term lists created by users, with no representation of semantics beyond statistical analysis.
Am I missing the point?
OK, yea, it’s convenient, looks great, lots of fun, but we can do better!
February 24, 2008 at 10:49 pm |
I agree that this is not an end all, and really no place for substantive intellectual property. Just a place for some collaborative brainstorming. It has a gentle learning curve and should do until we can work something better worked out. At that point we should be working on the “thing” itself, rather than documenting the process. You guys should decide wether it is useful for now or not. Let me know. I appreciate the comment. btw, can’t we just export to XML when we have a non-proprietary option?
February 27, 2008 at 2:46 am |
John: Sorry, I do appreciate your setting this up. I’ve been preoccupied with WordPress all week, cluminating in a meeting today, where I’ve been arguing on the side of the prosecution. I’ve taken the position that we can do much better, this however does not reflect on your efforts to get a discussion started for our group.
So what next? We need some focus, and some funding, and some further discussion.
February 28, 2008 at 12:08 am |
Thanks Howard, No problem. Let’s start by encouraging the rest of the group to sign-up as authors and post a little something to get started. Nothing elaborate. Just get them to stand up and be counted, see if we can get the groupeblog tag working for us with flickr and de.licio.us. Do you have similar reservations with them? I know I do, but again it is a place to start, not the thing itself. From my perspective, if I don’t press the use of the internet tools, I don’t exist as a group member. I appreciate the initiative.
I recommend the NEH Digital Start Up program to get the funding thing under way. http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/digitalhumanitiesstartup.html
Best
February 28, 2008 at 7:43 am |
Warning, I have reservations with just about everything. Man, ya gotta try to make the world a better place!
I hope we can get the rest of the group involved too, bit it occurs to me that you and I havn’t really had a good chat either. Where can we begin? I think we have a mutual interest in somehow using databases to drive 3D/VR sites? And maybe tools?
That link to the neh grant guidelines isn’t working, can you post the correct one?
February 28, 2008 at 10:26 pm |
Okay the link will work now. Damned WordPress, included the period at the end of the sentence in the link. Who’s idea was it to use word press?
We do indeed have mutual interest using databases to drive 3D/VR sites. Lets start by moving the discussion up top to blog entries. This might better facilitate the others getting involved. Tell me a bit about your background and interest in data VR.