Turing's Tape

This Thursday in the on-going Humanities Computing Lunch Series, Professor Ronald B. Inden, Emeritus, History and South Asian Languages and Civilizations, will be presenting a digital text created using LaTeX, a document mark up and type-setting language. While TeX and LaTeX has long enjoyed dominance in the Physical and Social Sciences as the preferred method of writing and presenting research, it has a relatively light footprint in the Humanities. That, however, is changing as more scholars in the Humanities are focusing on Open Source alternatives to dominant word processing programs or desiring better implementation of non-Western languages and characters in their documents. LaTeX is a key solution to both of these issues.

Prof. Inden will present Vishnu’s Will, created using LaTeX. He will discuss some of the choices and decisions that informed and his usage of LaTex to create and present his research. After his presentation, we hope to hear from many of the other users of LaTex on campus - and discuss some of the resources Humanities Computing can help provide to spearhead the growth of LaTex in the Humanities. Just recently, we have added LaTex to the Humanities Wiki. Please visit the wiki page for more links and information about LaTeX.

This event is open to all staff, faculty and graduate students. Please circulate.

Where: Rosenwald 405
When: 12 - 1:30
RSVP: manan@uchicago.edu

On Wednesday, April 9, at 1:30 p.m., it will be downtime o’clock. We will briefly take down the wiki for a software upgrade, and the web and file servers will need a quick reboot. FileMaker databases will remain available the whole time, and everything should be back up by 3:30. You will enjoy the new improved software! We promise.

Welcome to lucian.uchicago.edu. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

This Wednesday November 27th from 12-1pm in Rosenwald 405, Humanities Computing is going to offer another of informal, lunchtime “Getting to Know” presentations to staff and faculty on various technical topics and internet buzzwords du jour. The goal of the “Getting to Know” series is to help introduce and explain current technologies in a way that is relevant to your own daily work and research.

Our presentation will be highlighting “visual technology in research projects” – we will focus on visual representation; photographs, paintings, sculptures, but may digress.  We may also  discuss what technologies are available for particular research problems. How collaborations with individuals in other disciplines help in Humanities research. One example demonstration will be of photo visualization project we are working on with Microsoft and how our research may assist in visual software design.

Light sandwiches and refreshments will be provided, or else just bring along your own brown bag lunch.

We’ve added a bunch of new WordPress themes for use by our bloggers. You can see an overview of them on the divisional wiki. Enjoy!

Over the last two years, Humanities Computing has created over 30 projects on the divisional wiki. The most widely used is the Divisional Resources wiki which offers a wide range of practical “how-to” information for staff and faculty.

We know that many people already use this wiki as a reference (with up to 800 page views on a single day..) but did you know that with a login you can add to and amend any of the text on these pages? From the outset, wikis were conceived as easy to use, web-based tools for collaborative writing, editing, note taking, planning. Adding and modifying texts and images offer one perspective for thinking about wikis. But perhaps as importantly, wikis are also databases whose content can be commented, tracked, tagged, sorted, reverted, searched and re-arranged in a wide variety of ways.

At the next Humanities Computing technology brown bag on Tuesday, October 23rd, 12-1pm, in Rosenwald 405 we’ll offer you a beginner’s introduction to wikis along with existing, practical examples of their use by faculty and staff in the Humanities Division.

Light sandwiches and refreshments will be provided, or else just bring along your own brown bag lunch. Please R.S.V.P. on the divisional calendar (using the “Sign-Up” button) if you plan to attend.

For answers to common questions about the Divisional wiki, please see our Blog FAQ. And please feel free to contact me directly with any questions.

On Wednesday, October 10, at 1:30 p.m., the Humanities Division’s blog server will go down for a software upgrade.  No other services will be affected.  We expect to be back up by 3 p.m.

Lec Maj, Assistant Director for Research Computing, working in China on the Xiangtangshan 3-D Digital Caves Project.

This Wednesday, September 12, between 1:30 and 4:30 p.m., the Humanities Division’s servers will experience a maintenance downtime.  This will affect blog, wiki, file-sharing, and web services, but all databases will remain available.

A little bird told me that these multi-hour mid-week maintenance windows will shortly become a thing of the past.  Wednesday-afternoon solitaire games are trading at all-time lows.

The system administrator has been down for routine maintenance since August 1. She has undergone software upgrades and hardware tests, and all services are now back online. This Wednesday, August 15, at 1:30 p.m., the other machines will likewise go offline for system maintenance. Blog, wiki, file-sharing, web, and database services will be unavailable for the duration. We expect to be finished by 3:30 p.m.