Word Games

Lists of commercial word games (board, not computer) based upon the following mechanics:

• Recognition
  
• Simple Word Formation
  
• Complex Word Formation
  
• Guessing
  
• Rearranging

Update: A list of lists on the topic.

Window Washers

It’s not often I look up to see someone outside the window of our tenth floor apartment . . .

News Roundup

Some news items that have found their way into my inbox of late follow. Folks might want to pay particular attention to the ACLS program, a wonderful new resource to have on the scene.

UK Announces National Centre for Text Mining

29th April, 2004. Imagine a future in which databases are populated with accurate, valid, exhaustive, rapidly updated data where users find what they want all the time; where drug discovery costs and development time are slashed and animal experimentation is reduced through early identification of unpromising paths; where new insights are gained through integration and exploitation of experimental results, databases, and scientific knowledge; where product development archives and patents yield new directions for R&D; and where searching yields facts rather than documents to read. This is the potential of text mining.

The JISC, BBSRC AND EPSRC announced today funding of some £1m to establish a National Centre for Text Mining. The remit of the Centre, the first publicly funded centre in the world, is to contribute to the associated national and international research agenda, to establish a service for the wider academic community, and to make connections with industry.

Text mining attempts to discover new, previously unknown information by applying techniques from natural language processing, data mining, and information retrieval:

• To identify and gather relevant textual sources
  * To analyse these to extract facts involving key entities and their properties
  * To combine the extracted facts to form new facts or to gain valuable insights.

Text mining finds applications in many diverse areas of wide interest such as drug discovery and predictive toxicology, protein interaction, competitive intelligence, protection of the citizen, identification of new product possibilities, detection of links between lifestyle and states of health, and many more.

Led by UMIST, the National Centre for Text Mining will be run by an internationally leading consortium. The consortium has four UK partner institutions: UMIST, the Victoria University of Manchester, the University of Liverpool, and the University of Salford. These core partners are extended by international partners: the University of California Berkeley, the University of Geneva, the San Diego Supercomputing Centre, and the University of Tokyo, with the European Bioinformatics Institute having presence on the Technical Directorate. It is anticipated that the Centre will engage as part of the related emerging networks of excellence.

The Centre will be initially focused on biological and biomedical science. This area of science has the largest user community and the fastest growing literature, and the area where most applications research in text mining is being undertaken. At the same time, the tools developed by the Centre will be of interest and relevant to the needs of the wider academic community. A major challenge for the Centre will be to handle efficiently and robustly very large volumes of text and the intermediate data produced while processing.

The Centre will be housed in the under-construction £34M Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre to facilitate interaction between text mining researchers and bio-domain users. As a measure of its commitment to the Centre, the consortium is itself investing some £800K, including the establishment of a new Chair in Text Mining and the full-time secondment of staff. Further, the North-West Development Agency, the National Centre for e-Social Science, the Consortium for Post-Genome Science, and e-Science Northwest have been most supportive of the initiative.

Professor John Garside, Principal and Vice-Chancellor of UMIST, said: “I’m delighted that UMIST and the new University of Manchester have the opportunity with this new centre to make a leading contribution to the critical task of deriving meaning from text. The consortium represents expertise in all the component areas of text mining, with an impressive array of international partners.”

Professor Julian Crampton, University of Liverpool Pro-Vice Chancellor, said: “Our work within the UK Centre for Text Mining builds on current work in developing systems which will let leading researchers in the biosector discover hitherto unknown information. The possibilities for such data mining from large text collections are virtually untapped and we are pleased to play a leading part in developing state of the art tools and techniques which will increase the rate and scope of discovery in biomedical science.”

Professor Ross King, of the University of Wales, and member of the JISC Committee for the Support of Research (JCSR), said: “The setting up of the UK Centre in Text Mining is a very exciting development. The amount of scientific literature is growing so fast that there is an urgent need for novel computer based tools to help scientists keep up. The success of Google has shown how useful text retrieval programs can be. The tools developed will be applicable to academics in all subject areas, including social science and arts and humanities, for example in analysing ancient texts found by archaeologists.”

Professor John Keane (Computation, UMIST; Proposal Coordinator, and Interim Co-Director): “The Centre will play a leading role both nationally and internationally in developing the research agenda in text mining, promulgating associated best practice, and developing service provision. All those involved look forward to the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.”

Dr Sophia Ananiadou (Computing, Science and Engineering, Salford; Interim Co-Director): “The Centre will address the increasing needs of the bioscience community to gather and structure scientific knowledge from texts. The synergy of text mining and bioscience will be beneficial to scientists from both communities.’

For further information:

John Keane, (Co-Director) 0161 200 3347

Sophia Ananiadou (Co-Director): 0161 295-0480

John McNaught (Technical Directorate) as a contact point: 0161 200 3098

ACLS Digital Fellowships

ACLS OPENS COMPETITION FOR DIGITAL INNOVATION FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is pleased to announce
its new Digital Innovation Fellowship program, in support of digitally
based research projects in the humanities and humanistic social
sciences. These fellowships, created with the generous help of The
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, are intended to support an academic year
dedicated to work on a major scholarly project of a digital character
that advances humanistic studies and best exemplifies the integration of
such research with use of computing, networking, and other information
technology-based tools. The online application for the fellowship
program is located at http://ofa.acls.org ;
applications must be completed by November 10, 2005 (decisions to be
announced in late March 2006).

This is the first national fellowship program to recognize and reward
humanistic scholarship in the digital sphere, and to help establish
standards for judging the quality, innovation, and utility of such
research. Many scholars have been working in the humanities for years
with such tools as digital research archives, new media representations
of extant data, and innovative databases-and now the ACLS sees an
important opportunity to start identifying and providing incentive for
distinctive work, on a national basis. “Information technology can be
the means for scholars to answer new and old questions that have so far
resisted our curiosity and our effort. This program will support a
rising generation of scholars in making exactly that kind of progress,”
says James O’Donnell, provost of Georgetown University, Chair of the
ACLS Executive Committee of Delegates, and author of Avatars of the
Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace (1998).

Up to five Digital Innovation Fellowships will be awarded in this
competition year, for tenure beginning in 2006-2007. As this program
aims to provide the means for pursuing digitally-based scholarly
projects, the fellowship includes a stipend of up to $55,000 to allow an
academic year’s leave from teaching, as well as project funds of up to
$25,000 for purposes such as access to tools and personnel for digital
production, collaborative work with other scholars and with humanities
or computing research centers, and the dissemination and preservation of
projects.

The ACLS criteria for judging applications include the project’s
intellectual ambitions and technological underpinnings, likely
contribution as a digital scholarly work to humanistic study,
satisfaction of technical requirements for a successful research
project, degree and significance of preliminary work; potential for
promoting teamwork and collaboration (where appropriate), and
articulation with local infrastructure at the applicant’s home
institution.

Applicants must be citizens or permanent residents of the United States
as of the application deadline date and must hold a Ph.D. degree
conferred prior to the application deadline. However, established
scholars who can demonstrate the equivalent of the Ph.D. in publications
and professional experience may also qualify.

Applications for the 2005-06 ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship Program

Deadline: November 10, 2005
Contact: American Council of Learned Societies, 633 Third Avenue, New
York, NY 10017
Phone: (212) 697-1505
E-mail: sfisher@acls.org
Web: www.acls.org/difguide.htm

Mellon Foundation Announces New President

July 26, 2005

Don Michael Randel has been chosen by the Board of Trustees to serve as the President of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, effective July 1, 2006. Randel has served as President of the University of Chicago since 2000. The election of Randel is the result of an extensive search carried out by the Trustees over the last year.

Randel will succeed William G. Bowen, who has served as President since 1988. Bowen will serve a final year before continuing his research and writing, as well as providing support to Ithaka Harbors, Inc., a non-profit organization chaired by Bowen whose mission is to accelerate the productive uses of information technologies for the benefit of higher education around the world.

“The Mellon Foundation is unique among the major foundations in its commitment to the humanities and the arts and in bringing new technologies to their support,” Randel said. “These are matters to which I have devoted all of my professional life, and it is therefore extraordinarily exciting to be offered the opportunity to aid in continuing the Foundation’s great tradition. I look forward to furthering the Foundation’s collaborations with grantee institutions to strengthen them within all of the Foundation’s areas of focus both in this country and abroad.”

Anne M. Tatlock, Chairman of the Mellon Board and Chairman and CEO of Fiduciary Trust Company International, said she spoke for all Board members in expressing their great pleasure that Randel had agreed to head the foundation. “Under Don’s leadership we are confident that Mellon will continue to provide strong support for some of our nation’s most important institutions and for our unique international programs. His deep knowledge of the arts and the humanities is a marvelous fit for the Foundation as is his experience leading one of the country’s great research universities.”

Don Randel is a musicologist who attended Princeton University, where he received bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees in music. His scholarly specialty is the music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance in Spain and France. As a music historian, Randel is widely published, particularly on medieval liturgical chant, and he has also written on such varied topics as Arabic music theory, Latin American popular music, and 15th century French music and poetry.

In 1968, Randel joined the Cornell University faculty in the department of music. He served for 32 years as a member of Cornell’s faculty, where he was also department chair, vice-provost, and associate dean and then dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. He became provost of Cornell University in 1995.

In July 2000 Randel assumed the position of President of the University of Chicago. There he has led efforts to strengthen the humanities and the arts on campus as well as a broad range of interactions with the City of Chicago and a further strengthening of the University’s programs in the physical and biomedical sciences and its relationship with the Argonne National Laboratory. He has also led an ongoing campaign for $2 billion, the largest in the University’s history.

Randel served as the editor of the Journal of the American Musicology Society. He is also editor of the Harvard Dictionary of Music 4th ed., published in 2003, the Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music, published in 1996, and the Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music and Musicians, published in 1999.

“I am delighted that Don Randel has accepted this position,” said Bowen. “He is the ideal choice to lead the Foundation’s efforts in its core areas of activity, and I am confident that he and the staff will work very well together. I look forward to handing my baton to such a strong runner.”

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which is headquartered in New York City, makes grants principally in five core program areas: higher education and scholarship, libraries and scholarly communications, conservation and the environment, museums and art conservation, and performing arts. Additionally, Mellon has been instrumental in the development of ARTstor, JSTOR, and Ithaka, non-profit organizations engaged in various activities to further the use of information technology to benefit higher education around the world.

The Foundation was established in 1969 as a result of the consolidation of the Old Dominion Foundation and The Avalon Foundation, founded respectively by Andrew Mellon’s son, Paul Mellon, in 1941, and daughter, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, in 1940. It has $4.5 billion in assets and provided $186 million in grants in 2004.

Opinionated

Spotted on an internet forum where I hang out:

Keep in mind, I don’t care if your opinions are informed or not, mine are mine, and yours are yours. And I think as much of yours, informed or otherwise, as you do of mine.

Funny, when English professors or other humanities types start talking like that we’re accused of being postmodern radicals fueling the decline of Western Civilization with our relativist ways.

Comments Up

Back working now.

I sent the URL for comments and trackbacks on the “Why I Blog Under My Own Name” entry to the Chronicle. Thanks to everyone who weighed in there.

Comments Down

Comments are temporarily down here due to some backend switching on my server. Hopefully to be fixed tomorrow. (I’m not sure if trackbacks are likewise affected . . . )

Why I Blog Under My Own Name (and a Modest Proposal)

Gotta weigh in on this recent piece of tosh in the Chronicle. The mix of paranoia, conservatism, and raw ignorance on display is downright creepy.

First off, this is the kind of thing I cancel subscriptions over. The real issue is not Ivan Tribble’s ruminations, but the Chronicle’s motivations in publishing them. To what end? To be edgy and controversial, to stir up just this kind of buzz in the blogosphere? That’s not why I have a Chronicle subscription. That’s why I have cable TV. I don’t need both.

Being edgy and controversial is also not why I have a blog. As readers here will know, I generally eschew politics and current events (my blog resides on a publicly funded university server and I respect that) and I also spare visitors my midnight anxieties. As I’ve mentioned before, this blog functions first and foremost as a kind of public academic workbench for me. Why public? “What is the purpose of broadcasting one’s unfiltered thoughts to the whole wired world” in the memorable prose of Mr. “Tribble”?

The science fiction writer Harlen Ellison once described a stunt in which he sat in the window of a bookshop all day writing a story. He was curious about what would happen if writing became a public spectacle rather than the mysterious, solitary endeavor it usually is. That scene piqued my imagination and stuck with me, enough so that when I explored the idea of writing an electronic dissertation in the mid-1990s (at the same time the Web was emerging as a popular medium) I immediately decided do it it “live,” in “real time” on the network. That is, I would simply publish drafts of my work, and revise them, and the whole would take shape as a massive, interlaced hypertext.

The idea was to keep myself motivated. By writing in a fishbowl, I reasoned, I would have some real, external pressure to keep at it. I would never know who was reading (watching). Yes, the fishbowl was also a panopticon.

What I really wanted, of course, was a blog. They didn’t exist then, at least not as such, though if anyone wants to see a proto-blogger in action my fellow Charlottesvillian The Gus deserves to be up there with Justin Hall. A whole virtual world he made with his musings and ethnography of Big Fun.

But I digress. Was I worried about plagiarism when I published drafts of my dissertation online? Nope, red herring. I was branding my ideas, imprinting them with my name, putting them into public circulation. Sure enough, there followed conference invitations, citations of my work in other scholars’ work, and contacts and connections that to this day form the basis of my professional community.

If anyone needs an answer as to “why blog,” an utterly crass, careerist answer (as befits the Chronicle), here’s one: networking. First, go read Phil Agre’s “Networking on the Network.” Then ask a blogger how their blog has paid off in terms of networking dividends. Bet they’ll have some stories to tell. In fact, why don’t we do just that? Would all academic bloggers reading this consider posting a comment or a trackback entry about some specific professional dividend that their online presence in the blogosphere has garnered for them?

If there’s sufficient response I’ll send the URL to the Chronicle.

(Thanks to GZombie, KF, Bitch.Ph.D., and the Little Professor for the initial tip-off here.)

Update: I regret that I have had to close comments and trackbacks on this entry due to spam. Personal comments to me can be sent to the address at the top of the page. I have also opened a new thread here for discussion of “Ivan Tribble’s” second piece, “They Shoot Messengers, Don’t They,” in which this entry figures prominently.

A Good Charity

Next time we have a few spare dollars they’ll be going to Service Dogs of Virginia:

Service dogs are companions that can perform a variety of tasks for their handlers, including retrieving dropped items such as cell phones, pencils, and change; opening and closing doors; and “fetching” a cordless telephone to name a few. A service dog not only makes life easier and safer, additionally, the dog serves as a vital bridge to the able bodied community. A canine companion is an appealing warm magnet that draws people to an individual in a wheelchair, an individual who is characteristically ignored and rendered invisible. Once the dog performs this little bit of magic, disabled individuals can be seen for the people they are.