Infrastructure

Hacking: WYSIWYG

~ devo3000

Two weeks ago I noted that someone had recently tried to get into my WordPress server. My firewall traced the query back to an IP in China, though I don’t have the ability to figure out where it originated from initially. I linked it to news of escalating activity from abroad; it seems that attempts to get into academic networks are sharply on the rise.

Then a week ago my server collapsed under what seemed to be a DDOS attack. I tried to restart it several times, but everytime I got the server back up it was swamped with traffic. I’ve spent a good eight hours now launching a new server and migrating over content from a backup. Most of my posts are back, but I lost the last year’s worth of images. I’ve only been able to recreate or restore about half.

It’s all kind of creepy. And it may be beyond my capacity to try and stay on top of escalating security problems on a private blog. Apparently there’s a botnet that’s been hacking WordPress servers generally for the last several months. I like having my own site; I like the ability to post whatever content I want and try out different kinds of server technologies; my Omeka-based class last year depended on this capacity. But the bar is getting higher.

Teaching with Omeka: Presenting the Peries Project

~ devo3000

Yesterday the seminar I’ve been teaching at Penn finished their digital project: an online edition of John Leyden’s “Tales of the Peries,” a handwritten manuscript in the archives of the National Library of Scotland. Leyden was a romantic poet as well as close collaborator of Walter Scott’s, before traveling to Southeast Asia as a functionary of the East India Company. Once there, Leyden established himself as an Orientalist and specialist in Asian languages, and the Tales of the Peries is an example from this fruitful period before his early death in 1811.

As part of a larger class on historical fiction, fantasy, and the influence of empire, my students built an Omeka site that includes digital facsimiles of the manuscript, transcriptions using Scripto, a plugin for Omeka, and a “readerly edition” that incorporates their research into editorial practices and critical editions and links to supporting materials and entries in the Omeka collection and on the wiki. In addition, they built a host of supporting materials for the site, from critical evaluations of the Tales, its verse, and the influence of Urdu and Arabic literature, to information about Leyden, his involvement with the EIC, even an animated Flash map that walks the reader through the geography of the tale and details the main transformations of Melech Mahommed, the main character, over the course of the narrative.

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The David Livingstone Spectral Imaging Project, I Presume?

~ devo3000


Yes, groan. But I spent this morning looking through the beautiful online collection produced by the David Livingstone Spectral Imaging Project. Livingstone’s 1871 field diary, from the months leading up to his ‘discovery’ by Morton Stanley, was written in a berry-based natural ink across the pages of newsprint, and has faded to near invisibility. Using spectral imaging (which images at distinct spectra and then recombines them), the team has managed to reveal the journal entries and strip out the original newsprint. The results are simply amazing — it reminds me of looking at Hubble images of distant nebula. Gorgeous, strange, new. In addition the the extensive documentation and supporting bibliographic and historical materials, the snazzy interface, which allows you to coordinate scrolling across the color and spectral facsimiles (as in the above image), is just stunning.

On the one hand, it’s a case of an extraordinary archival find (Adrian Wisnicki and Anne Martin’s recovery and reassembly of the often uncatalogued portions of the journal across several distinct accessions at the David Livingstone Center) combined with an ideal technology (the Archimedes Palimsest team brought their expertise to bear). But when you look at the extensive documentation provided, it’s also a window into the extraordinary challenge of producing collaborative, trans-Atlantic research in the digital humanities.
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ThatCampPenn 2012

~ devo3000

I spent Wednesday on campus at Penn’s inaugural ThatCamp. It was set up by the Penn Library and the Penn Humanities Forum, and showed the promise and possibility of the “unconference” format, particularly when applied to something as tentative and collaborative as the digital humanities.

Amanda French, who came up from house THATCamp at George Mason and the Center for History and New Media. She set precisely the right open, collaborative, free-wheeling tone at the opening session, and it carried through. The thing that struck me most forcefully is that the open formatting creates environments that are extraordinarily friendly to non-specialists. Continue reading →

Amazon “Academic AMIs” find a community

~ devo3000

There’s been some larger interest in using Amazon AMIs to do academic research. I took my work installing the SEASR MEANDRE development infrastructure as an Amazon AMI instance to the folks over at SEASR/NCSI last Spring, in time for their visit to the U. Victoria DHSI (which I had the great pleasure of attending back in 2010). They shared the AMI work there, and my friend Jason Boyd (fellow DHSI class ’10) took it over to THATCamp Victoria the following week. This sparked the intests of James Smithies, who coined the term “Academic AMIs” and launched this site to try and support the use of various academic software packages using the AMI infrastructure. I think it’s a fabulous idea, and hope I can encourage some others to head over to James’ site and lend a hand.

It also brings up an infrastructure problem that I’ve been working with here at U Penn. I’ve been consulting with the excellent IT group here at the University in working on a few different projects, including MEANDRE, archive hosting, and demoing the use of TILE in the classroom. The challenge we’ve kept running in to is that it’s much easier to get a net-based project up and running if it is hosted outside the university, because of various security concerns and issues. For initial development, this isn’t so much of a problem, but when you start talking about longer-term projects (even if small), and University support, it gets more complicated. Continue reading →