Collaboration tools of mathematicians

Kristine Fowler from the U. of Minnesota wrote “Mathematicians’ Views on Current Publishing Issues: A Survey of Researchers” for the journal, Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship.  Within the article, she noted:

Research Collaboration Tools and Methods

E-mail and face-to-face meetings are by far the most popular communication mechanisms for research collaborations, used usually/always by 89% and 68% of respondents, respectively. Use of telephone/Internet phone is the most variable, with roughly a third using it usually/always and a third using it rarely/never. None of the other collaboration methods given, ranging from posted letters to wikis, are frequently used by more than a few; in fact, 68-77% use them rarely or never.

Humanities High Performance Computing Collaboratory Summer Institute

The Humanities High Performance Computing Collaboratory (HpC) is a summer institute Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Humanities High Performance Computing for graduate students and faculty who are conducting scholarship in the digital humanities. HpC offers two five-day workshops, one with the University of Illinois’ Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (I-CHASS), and the other at the University of South Carolina’s Center for Digital Humanities (CDH). Attendees will 1) receive a comprehensive education in four computational concentrations: computer vision, augmented reality, game design, and mobile app development; 2) receive instruction in digital humanities project design and management; 3) obtain hands on experience with a variety of technical platforms; 4) work with technical staff to outline pilot explorations in at least one area of computational concentrations; and 5) join a year long virtual community where scholars will support their peers in authoring digital humanities projects.

The first workshop will take place in Champaign, IL on June 10-14. The second will take place in Columbia, SC on August 5-9. There will be a two-day concluding conference to be hosted by CDH August 25-26. From June 10 2011 to June 10 2012, participants will be linked by an online collaboratory where they can discuss, plan, and develop new projects in the digital humanities.

Because the goal of HpC is to familiarize scholars in the humanities with the crucial technologies and methods of advanced computing, applicants need not have any technical background or expertise.

Please send a letter of interest that outlines your current technical and intellectual investment in digital humanities and C.V. to Michael Simeone, mpsimeon@illinois.edu. Please submit your application before January 15^th, 2012. HpC will select a total of 25 applicants for participation in the institute.

World scientific collaboration

Ali Gazni, Cassidy R. Sugimoto, and Fereshteh Didegah wrote “Mapping world scientific collaboration: Authors, institutions, and countries” for JASIS&T. (Subscription required to download the full text.)

Abstract – International collaboration is being heralded as the hallmark of contemporary scientific production. Yet little quantitative evidence has portrayed the landscape and trends of such collaboration. To this end, 14,000,000 documents indexed in Thomson Reuters’s Web of Science (WoS) were studied to provide a state-of-the-art description of scientific collaborations across the world. The results indicate that the number of authors in the largest research teams have not significantly grown during the past decade; however, the number of smaller research teams has seen significant increases in growth. In terms of composition, the largest teams have become more diverse than the latter teams and tend more toward interinstitutional and international collaboration. Investigating the size of teams showed large variation between fields. Mapping scientific cooperation at the country level reveals that Western countries situated at the core of the map are extensively cooperating with each other. High-impact institutions are significantly more collaborative than others. This work should inform policy makers, administrators, and those interested in the progression of scientific collaboration.

New collaboration tool developed at Rutgers University

Rutgers LIS Prof. receives a Yahoo! Award which supports the development of an online collaboration tool. This project seeks to understand the motivations and methods that collaborative workers employ while seeking information.

Chirag Shah, assistant professor of Library and Information Science at SC&I, has been awarded a Yahoo! Campus Innovation Award of $20,000 to further develop “Coagmento,” an online tool that promises to enhance collaboration by focusing on not only the results of shared work, but also the processes.

Collaborative marketing for electronic resources

Marie Kennedy noted that “100 institutions have signed on to be part of a research/training project on marketing electronic resources! The project is designed to test whether a collaborative model of benchmarking the marketing of e-resources is feasible.”

For more information, head on over to:

http://benchmarketing.wetpaint.com.

The project is summarized at Marie R. Kennedy. 2011. “Collaborative Marketing for Electronic Resources.” Library Hi Tech News 28(6): 22-24. if you don’t subscribe to that journal you can read the pre-print at http://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/librarian_pubs/4/.

Collaborative CS infrastructure in the humanities

This First Monday article looks pretty good.

“Digging into data using new collaborative infrastructures supporting humanities-based computer science research” by Michael Simeone, Jennifer Guiliano, Rob Kooper, and Peter Bajcsy

This paper explores infrastructure supporting humanities–computer science research in large–scale image data by asking: Why is collaboration a requirement for work within digital humanities projects? What is required for fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration? What are the technical and intellectual approaches to constructing such an infrastructure? What are the challenges associated with digital humanities collaborative work? We reveal that digital humanities collaboration requires the creation and deployment of tools for sharing that function to improve collaboration involving large–scale data repository analysis among multiple sites, academic disciplines, and participants through data sharing, software sharing, and knowledge sharing practices.

Collaboration can be found in those puffy white things in the sky

Here is another good article from C&RL News.

“Collaboration in the cloud: Untethered technologies for scholarly pursuits” by Courtney Greene and Elizabeth Ruane.

April 2011 was an especially tough month for cloud computing—Amazon’s cloud went down, the Sony PlayStation network was hacked, and Verizon’s LTE network was unavailable for more than a day. However, if loving the cloud is wrong, we don’t want to be right. Our story of life in the cloud begins in the fall of 2009, when we produced a book manuscript relying almost exclusively on Web-based applications and services. Although using these mobile-friendly tools while writing a book about building mobile-optimized Web sites wasn’t a conscious or purposeful decision, integrating a suite of portable technologies, like Google Docs and Dropbox, transformed our workflow, sparked our creativity, and improved our eventual product.

Chapter–New Paradigm of Library Collaboration

This chapter by Adam Sofronijevic appears in a new book from Springer.

 

Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2011, Volume 6966/2011, 519-522, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-24469-8_63 (Subscription required for the full text.)

The thesis entitled ”New Paradigm of Library Collaboration” presents the case for the holistic approach to the issue of collaboration in a contemporary library. Patron needs and expectations in regards to collaboration, interactivity and ultimately participation are investigated in the specific area of changes in reading process. Collaboration between librarians and patrons and among librarians is discussed in regards to Library 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 concepts. Based on the research results gathered in European libraries a new paradigm of library collaboration is presented as a must for an efficient library providing up-to-date services.

I-CHASS receives a major NEH grant

Congratulations to the UIUC and the University of South Carolina.

The Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts and Social Science (I-CHASS) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the Center for Digital Humanities (CDH) at the University of South Carolina have collaborated to win a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Institutes for Advanced Topics in Digital Humanities (IATDH) grant award in the amount of $259,588.00 to support a project called the Humanities High Performance Computing Collaboratory (HpC).

HpC will engage humanities scholars in a year-long collaboration with computing specialists in order to: 1) receive a comprehensive education in four computational concentrations; 2) receive instruction in digital humanities project design and management; 3) obtain hands-on experience with a variety of technical platforms; 4) work with experts to outline pilot explorations in at least one area of computational concentration; and 5) join a year-long virtual community where scholars will support their peers in authoring digital humanities projects.

Presentation on the Brain Science of Attention

If you are in the Boston area and are free on the evening of September 20th, then this looks like an interesting presentation at Harvard.  If not, they will tape the talk, and probably post it to the Berkman Center for Internet & Society YouTube channel once it is ready for public consumption.

“NOW YOU SEE IT: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn” by Cathy Davidson, Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English and John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Duke University and co-founder of HASTAC

Tuesday, September 20, 6:00 pm
Location TBA
Free and Open to the Public; RSVP required for those attending in person

When Duke University gave free iPods to the freshman class in 2003, critics called it a waste of money. Yet when students found academic uses for the brand new music devices in virtually every discipline, the iPod experiment proved to be a classic example of the power of disruption – a way of refocusing attention to illuminate unseen possibilities. Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at the time of the iPod experiment, Cathy N. Davidson sees this kind of innovation as the heart of a new way of collaborative, interactive learning ideal for students facing a changing, global future. Using cutting-edge research on the brain and learning, she shows how the phenomenon of “attention blindness” shapes our lives, and how it has led to one of the greatest problems of our historical moment: Although we email, blog, tweet, and text as if by instinct, too many of us toil in schools and workplaces designed for the last century, not the one in which we live.