I’ve finally posted the first draft of the Dickens website here: https://austgate.co.uk/dickens/index.php?author=Dickens. The idea is that it will allow users to derive networks across the a variety of Victorian authors as and when I can develop the datasets. I’ve also been developing a small text ontology to add to the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) […]
As an aside I’ve started a small project to begin visualising ways of searching the letters of Charles Dickens and exploring the Simile library which MIT have produced. Its originally an extension to the D-Space repository tool but Rufus Pollock used in the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Weaving History project – to which I contributed the […]
The slowness or lack of real time on RSS feeds has reared its head again in terms of getting news out quickly and in “real-time”. Erick Schonfeld on Techcrunch wants to speed them up and John Biggs has decided that RSS needs to RIP. I’ve been working on Twittering RSS feeds for the JISCMail service […]
The New York Times had a piece on digital piracy of books and the contrasting views which was picked up by Slashdot. Starting out from the anti-piracy view, it does note that bestsellers are often the most pirated books which backs up Cory Doctorow‘s assertion: “I really feel like my problem isn’t piracy,…It’s obscurity.” His […]
As part of the Open Milton project, I’ve been thinking about the place of XML in it. Over Christmas, I wrote a small XSL transform using the Bosak XML Shakespeare files. Rufus took Anthony and Cleopatra and, using Latex (I gather), created the Open Shakespeare Anthony and Cleopatra pdf. At one level, this is yet […]
I’ve recently been working on a plugin for WordPress to set up each post as RDF enabled using OAI_ORE and SWORD which I presented to the Oxon SWIG on Tuesday. The Berlin Declaration of Open Access states the work should be free and also that it should be deposited in a repository. This seems to […]
I’m going to talk to you today about opening science and some of the ways that are being used to create platforms and tools and underlying responsibilities and actions that the commons needs to take if it is to develop a truly open way of working. Technology really is a means to an end; not […]
Wikinomics author Don Tapscott has an intriguing argument, reported in the Times this morning, that “Teachers are no longer the fountain of knowledge; the internet is … Kids should learn about history to understand the world and why things are the way they are. But they don’t need to know all the dates. It is […]
I’ve been putting together a chart of placenames and adding in sources. I need to check some of the sources to set up the correct licence but I’ve derived the base data from Wikipedia which is GFDL and now (hoorah) Creative Commons Share Alike (as I understand it but I’ll check when a few more […]
