Words’ End

Meant to write a mini-news-update on Denmark and Norway, who’ve had a particularly productive news day today. Behold:

Denmark leads social justice rankings, says a German think tank. *wistful sigh* Color me transplant-wannabe, and that’s just the first link.

Over 7000 Swedes commute to Denmark daily for work, and a new EU directive may relieve the tax burden on Danish employers, who at the moment are technically supposed to pay a sizeable chunk of cash in taxes to the Swedish government in addition to what they already pay to the Danish one. I’m not sure how it is that Sweden wins, here; it’s likely to be a touch-and-go process. But if they do succeed in working something out to everyone’s benefit, great.

Denmark, the brand name. They’re putting forth a serious effort to promote their country, presumably to drum up tourism and improve the country’s image (as if it needs to be improved, much). Go go Denmark gadget; given funds availability, I’d go there again in a heartbeat. Then again, see transplant above.

Compare and contrast to Norway, whose chief profits are still coing from oil. From conversations with Jill a few years ago, Norway at least seems to be going about oil production more responsibly than most other countries that have access to this resource.

“High consumption lands Norway among world’s worst: Norway, which generally prides itself on maintaining high environmental standards, seems to actually be using way more than it should of the world’s natural resources.” Oh yeah, Norway? Well, the good ol’ USA is second in the worst-offenders list, compared to your paltry 11th! We sure showed you!

Oy.

Finally, the young Norwegian who cracked DVD protection a few years ago claims to have done the same with the dread iTunes/iPod combo. “Johansen claims he’s mastered the inner workings of the iPod and its FairPlay encryption technology, allowing him to remove many of the restrictions Apple places on its users. Today, songs purchased from Apple’s iTunes store can’t be played on non-iPod devices, and, if you’ve bought songs from other music stores, the chances are you won’t be able to play them on the iPod either since they use a form of copy protection that Apple doesn’t support. [...] Johansen’s driving force is his belief that users have the right to listen to songs they have bought legally on any device they own. [...] Unlocking the iPod-iTunes ecosystem is seen by many as a good thing for consumers, as it will most likely result in increased competition to the iTunes Store, possibly resulting in lower prices and a higher quality service.” No particular comment here, except that I’m pleased: the iTunes/iPod black box has gotten on my nerves more than once.

Work is getting easier – sitting down and actually working, that is, as opposed to dreading it and feeling guilty about not doing it. I’ve been on the same primary source since last Thursday, but it is big (over 2700 lines), so I have sixteen whole excerpts from it. Only the Song of Roland has more excerpts. Plus, this one (Otuel and Roland) is in Middle English. Instead of translating it – at which I’d do a miserable job – I’ve written a mini-guide on pronunciation that should take the reader pretty far, and am encoding translations for the particularly obscure words using the glossary at the end of the book. This is adding a lot of encoding time, but should be cool if I can figure out how to make the translations appear on mouseover. (If I can’t figure out, there’s always Ethan to beg for help, but if it can be done with XSLT/CSS, I shouldn’t need to.)

Right. To work.

[Psst... Livejournal readers – just a reminder that if you comment on the feed, I don't get notified, and at the rate things are going, am unlikely to go back to past posts and check to see whether there are any comments. Instead of clicking on "leave comment," click the URL for the post, and you'll be magically transported to a comment interface on Words' End.]

Top 10 Pot Studies Government Wished It Had Never Funded.

That’s excellent. Now I can point people to one handy link when they start spouting bullshit about marijuana use, users, function as a Gateway Drug ™, etc. without actually knowing anything about its socio-political history.

Via the inimitable Ms. Bitch comes a link to a Washington Post article (free registration required, I believe): “As Europe Grows Grayer, France Devises a Baby Boom.”

France has woken up to a bit of population crisis going around Europe: all of Europe is below replacement rate, meaning the population count is going down. In addition, they like families. You know, have family values. I remember hearing something about that in the U.S., vaguely and only once or twice.

Some excerpts from the article:

When the municipal day-care center ran out of space because of a local baby boom, the town government gave Maylis Staub and her husband $200 a month to defray the cost of a “maternal assistant” to care for their two children.

When Staub delivered twins last December — her third and fourth children — the nation not only increased their tax deductions and child allowances, the government-owned French train system offered 40 percent discounts off tickets for the parents and the children until they reach their 18th birthdays.[...]

France heavily subsidizes children and families from pregnancy to young adulthood with liberal maternity leaves and part-time work laws for women. The government also covers some child-care costs of toddlers up to 3 years old and offers free child-care centers from age 3 to kindergarten, in addition to tax breaks and discounts on transportation, cultural events and shopping. [...]

A century ago, France was one of the first European countries to face a declining population. Since then, almost every elected French government — regardless of party — has instituted laws that encourage bigger families and make it easier for women to keep their jobs while raising children.

Now that’s family values.

Ethan’s taken geeky anti-vandal measures. Plus, we now have a set of functioning motion-sensor floodlights. Come back, kid. I want you to show your face.

This repeated-senseless-violence thing has been… distracting; I had been unsuccessfully trying to work for two days and instead somehow getting sucked into the WaiterRant archives again and again. But lo, as soon as I sit down to read/annotate some primary sources (instead of writing the second chapter, which is due – oh – at the end of the month), work gets interesting again. Go figure.

Reading and annotating, in this case, is a lot of pattern-searching. All afternoon and evening my peripheral vision has been crazy-sensitive. I wonder if the two are related.

He fucking did it again.

One un-smashed window remains in our car.

He’s some punk kid. I saw him but, of course, not his face.

Some bored soul has busted in the rear windshield and one of the back door windows of our car tonight. Probably with one of those little hammers that come in safety kits: the windshield is broken in the middle and also around the edges, but not in-between – and there are no marks on the metal around the edges, so it probably wasn’t a sledgehammer.

Fucking punks. Completely pointless vandalism. Unless they know us and are trying to make some sort of a statement, which I highly doubt: nobody really knows us around here, except by passing hellos. I hate this sort of shit, this mindless mean-spiritedness. [ETA: They didn't take the ipod that was in the glove compartment, or my passport, or the road atlas. Really pointless.]

Now, instead of angsting about my dissertation tomorrow, I get to call the insurance company and sweep up broken glass, and maybe drive the car over to some repair place or other (or maybe wait until they get the part in, since these cars haven’t been sold in the States for that long). Plus there’ll be a deductible-sized hole in our budget that we just didn’t need. All of it because some idiot broke stuff for ha-has.

Work on the thesis is being done in spurts. Partly of necessity: I’ve managed to schedule myself for five out-of-town events, in four trips, all within the same two months. Plus there’s a possibility of getting to spend time with the Nephew, who is turning into an excellent if willful little person, and while I like having him over, I’ve discovered that zero work gets done when he’s around. I suspect it’d be different if we lived closer together, but so it goes.

Anyway, my mental pattern with regard to thesis work has been repeating – rather predictably so; this pattern has existed since long before Roland. It goes something like this:

Before the work period starts: attitude cavalier, anxiety far at bay. Usually, during this time things are happening that make me feel good – conferences, family time, just-breaks with good books.

First day of work period: attitude of “ok, here I am buckling down.” Permitting myself to spend this one day Organizing, which never takes just a day, so the day almost inevitably ends in a vague state of many things accomplished but not enough, damnit.

Second day: overwhelmed and in denial. Repeat mantras of the “I’m smart enough and diligent enough to do this in time – but it won’t happen if I keep succumbing to the anxiety and denial, for they evilly drain energy, confidence and time” sort. Keep having to remind myself that I love this stuff (and I do, it’s the time pressure that’s a bitch to deal with).

From this second day on, if I manage to get myself to start working sometime before 10, life is good. If I don’t, I lose days to self-loathing, or thought patterns less dramatic but just as draining.

The hardest thing is not knowing how long this thesis will take, or how much work it will be. I’ve set myself a hard limit – graduate next spring – but what if I don’t get the work done? If I could see the steps clearly, it would be easier to work. As it stands, it’s hard to even know which large swathes of work will turn out to be useless for the current purposes. There’s no way I can do justice to the Roland corpus in the course of this dissertation; defining its limits in a field of material that I don’t know that well (there’s SO MUCH of it!) seems like a futile exercise.

Outlines don’t help, either. They take so much time to make, and then I have to change them a million times over. My working outline helps me organize whatever it is I want to do next, I guess. But since it isn’t representative of the final thesis structure (as I discovered rewriting chapter the first), it’s not an indicator of how far along I am.

These are some of the things that make thesis writing hard – I’ve read and heard this from many sources. The resultant anxiety is a pest, and I resent it for that. Go. Shoo!

Whew, that was grand. Just one thing about the closing panel discussion, while it’s fresh in my mind.

This year’s CaSTA was billed as “a joint computer science and humanities computing conference.” And it was! And [we saw that] it was good. Of the five keynote speakers, three were humanists and two – computer scientists. The final discussion was called “Humanities Computing Science??”.

William Arms, in his remarks during the panel, said that during the conference a word was frequently used that isn’t generally used in his usual [computer-science] circles. That word – knowledge. He, and just about everyone at the panel, said that what they primarily want from the “other side” is dialogue.

In light of that, what I’d like to see in this continuing dialogue is a bit of discussion of the word science. As it’s been used lately (in the last, what, 200 years?), it implies “HARD.” Humanities implies “soft.” That’s a major point of contention.

But given that “science” pretty much means “knowledge,” should we revisit our use of the word?

Ray Siemens is a computing humanist and Renaissance scholar working at the University of Victoria. The full title of his paper is “Knowledge management and textual cultures? Work toward the Renaissance English Knowledgebase (REKn, pron. “reckon”) and its professional reading environment (PReE).”

REKn seems to be aiming to amalgamate and integrate knowledge in its area. Its implementation is based in the study of disciplinary activity of, and professional interaction among, those in the humanities. It’s founded in concepts of knowledge representation and modeling. A short description of the project can be found here.

Knowledge representation: draws on the field of AI and seeks to produce models of human understanding that are tractable to computation. Modeling: REKn/PReE model data, intellectual processes, and beyond.

Key elements of REKn’s model:

- representation of archival materials

- analysis/critical inquiry originating in those materials

- the communication of the results of these tasks (the dissemination of primary and secondary materials)

REKn’s assumptions: all of the above are interrelated and inseparable, and electronically representable.

They’ve collected primary and secondary sources, and have built tools for working with them (the tool-building process seems to have been multi-stage: many tools built and discarded as inadequate). They’re looking to long-term partnerships with Renaissance materials providers in the future. Right now REKn has about 13,000 primary sources and over 80,000 secondary sources. About 1500 of these resources are currently available for public use, but the majority are not open-access.

So that’s REKn, the text base. What about PReE, the reading environment? It’s a rudimentary document viewer, and analysis and communication facilitator. Currently the UI is a “down-and-dirty prototype,” as they’ve been concentrating on making things work in the back end. [vz: he's showing PReE in Windows; I wonder what it's written in.] They’ve made several analytical tools for the encoded texts. Primarily, though, analysis will be carried out using TAPoR tools.

Communication facilitated electronically: they’re attempting to provide a system by which people can manage their professional interaction.

Short-term goals:

- integrate better with TAPoR and the Public Knowledge Project reading tools

- conduct usability studies

- consult with “contextual” stakeholders, including acad. publishers

- move prototype to a web environment

- scale up!

And that’s Ray’s talk, the last talk of this conference. Next is the panel discussion, titled “Humanities computing science?”. The panel will consist of the five keynote speakers. I’m not sure whether I’ll be taking notes on this; it’ll be video recorded, and there’s little probability that I’d do it justice. Again, I’ll update when the webcasts are up.