The Digging Into Data Challenge and List of Online Data Repositories for Humanities and Social Sciences

I came across the Digging Into Data Challenge website today and thought it might be of interest to IMT readers.  Below is a description of the project, a few related links, and an abbreviated list of links to a wide range of data repositories on the web.  

 ABOUT 

"Welcome to the second round of the Digging into Data Challenge. During the first round, in 2009, nearly 90 international research teams competed in the challenge. Ultimately, eight remarkable projects were awarded grants."

"In 2011, the Digging into Data Challenge has returned for a second round, this time much larger, with sponsorship from eight international research funders, representing Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States."

"What is the "challenge" we speak of?  The idea behind the Digging into Data Challenge is to address how "big data" changes the research landscape for the humanities and social sciences. Now that we have massive databases of materials used by scholars in the humanities and social sciences -- ranging from digitized books, newspapers, and music to transactional data like web searches, sensor data or cell phone records -- what new, computationally-based research methods might we apply? As the world becomes increasingly digital, new techniques will be needed to search, analyze, and understand these everyday materials. Digging into Data challenges the research community to help create the new research infrastructure for 21st century scholarship." 

"Applicants will form international teams from at least two of the participating countries.  Winning teams will receive grants from two or more of the funding agencies and, two years later, will be invited to show off their work at a special conference sponsored by the eight funders."

"Let's get digging."

RELATED
Digging into Data Challenge Second Year Request for Proposals
Press Release    Round Two: Digging Into Data Challenge: Social and computational scientist asked to design methods and tools for analyzing large data sets (National Science Foundation)

Times Higher Education, April 28, 2011, "Research intelligence - Let's dig a little deeper"
The New York Times, November 16, 2010, "Digital Keys for Unlocking the Humanities’ Riches"
The Globe and Mail, June 18, 2010, "Supercomputers seek to ‘model humanity’"

Be sure to visit the Digging Into Data Challenge data repository page.  Each repository is annotated in detail and includes links and in some cases, APIs. The page is updated regularly, and at the time of this post, was updated on May 26, 2011. For your convenience, here's the abbreviated version of the Digging Into Data Challenge list of repositories: 

The Archaeology Data Services (ADS)
http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/


ARTStor.org
http://www.artstor.org


Biodiversity Heritage Library
http://biodiversitylibrary.org


The Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art Canadian Art Database Project
http://ccca.ca


Chronicling America, Library of Congress, National Digital Newspaper Program
http://loc.gov/chroniclingamerica


Data-PASS
http://www.icpsr.umish.edu/DATAPASS/


Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE)
http://www.dlese.org


Early Canadiana Online
http://canadiana.ca


English Broadside Ballad Archive
http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu


Great War Primary Documents Archive
http://www.gwpda.org


Harvard Time Series Center (TSC)
http://timemachine.iic.harvard.edu/search/


HathiTrusthttp://www.hathitrust.org


The History Data Service (HDS)
http://hds.essex.ac.uk


Infochimps.org
http://www.infochimps.com/


Internet Archive
http://www.archive.org


Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
http://icpsr.umich.edu


JISC MediaHub
http://jiscmediahub.ac.uk


JSTOR
http://jstor.org

Marriott LibraryUniversity of Utah
http://ww.lib.utah.edu/portal/site/marriottlibrary/

NASA ADS: Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/index.html

National Archives, London
http://nationalarchives.gov.uk

The National Library of Wales
http://www.llgc.org.uk


National Science Digital Library (NSDL)
http://www.nsdl.org

National Technical Information Service (NTIS)
http://www.ntis.gov/

Nebraska Digital Newspaper Project
http://cdrh.unl.edu/nebnewspapers/

New York Public Library
http://NYPL.org

The New York Times Article Search API
http://developer.nytimes.com/


Opening History
http://imlsdcc.grainger.uiuc.edu/history/

PhilPapers (philosophy)
http://philpapers.org

Project MUSE
http://muse.jhu.edu/

PSLC DataShop (Pittsburg Science of Learning Center)
http://pslcdatashop.web.cmu.edu/

Scholarly Database at the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center, Indiana University
http://sdb.slis.indiana.edu

ScholarSpace at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa
http://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/community-list

Statistical Accounts of Scotland
http://edina.ac.uk/stat-acc-scot/

University of Florida Digital Library Center
http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/ufdc

University of North Texas
http://digital.library.unt.edu/browse/?browseby=collection

Just a thought....
I'd be interested in learning if any of the researchers involved in the Digging Into Data Challenge plan to work on an interactive, multidimensional, multimedia timeline to support collaborative data sharing and analysis.  

The Emerging Field of Software Studies: Anne Helmond's Presentation: "Blogging and the blogosphere through the eyes of software and search engines"; UCSD's Software Studies Initiative

The slideshare presentation is by Anne Helmond, a New Media PhD candidate with the Digital Methods Initiative at the Mediastudies department at the University of Amsterdam where she studied New Media from 2004-2008. She is focusing her work "on the emerging field of Software Studies, which addresses the role that software plays in our society."

The presentation caught my eye because I've been using my blogs as on-line file cabinets, and discovered that my my careful tagging, designed to help me search my own posts, has been something highly favored by search engines. Anne has given this topic some deep thoughts, as you can see from the presentation.
Blogging and the blogosphere through the eyes of software and search engines

The Software Studies Initiative at UCSD  The description below was taken from the UCSD Software Studies Initiative website:

"Google searches and Amazon recommendations, airline flight paths and traffic lights, email and your phone: our culture runs on software. How does software shape the world?



"Software Studies is a new research field for intellectual inquiry that is now just beginning to emerge. The very first book that has this term in its title was published by The MIT Press in June 2008 (Matthew Fuller, ed., Software Studies: A Lexicon). In August 2008 The MIT Press approved Software Studies book series, with Matthew Fuller, Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Lev Manovich as editors."

"The Software Studies Initiative intends to play the key role in establishing this new field. The competed projects will become the models of how to effectively study “software society.” Through workshops, publications, and lectures conducted at UCSD and disseminated via the web and in hard copy publications, we will disseminate the broad vision of software studies. That is, we think of software as a layer that permeates all areas of contemporary societies. Therefore, if we want to understand contemporary techniques of control, communication, representation, simulation, analysis, decision-making, memory, vision, writing, and interaction, our analysis can't be complete until we consider this software layer. By being the very first center of its kind, The UCSD Software Studies Initiative has the unique opportunity to shape how this software layer will be understood and studied by other universities, programs, and centers in years to come."

"Social scientists, philosophers, cultural critics, and media and new media theorists now seem to cover all aspects of the IT revolution, creating a number of new disciplines such as cyber culture, Internet studies, new media theory, and digital culture. Yet the underlying engine that drives most of these subjects – software – has received little or no direct attention. Software is still invisible to most academics, artists, and cultural professionals interested in IT and its cultural and social effects. But if we continue to limit critical discussions to the notions of “cyber,” “digital,” “new media,” or “Internet,” we are in danger of always dealing only with effects rather than causes; the output that appears on a computer screen rather than the programs and social cultures that produce these outputs. This is why we are convinced that “software studies” is necessary and we welcome you to join us in our projects and activities....“software studies” translates into two complementary research paradigms. On the one hand, we want to study software and cyberinfrastructure using approaches from humanities, cultural criticism, and social sciences. On the other hand, we want to bring software-based research methods and cutting-edge cyberinfrastructrure tools and resources or the study of the new domain where they have not being applied so far – large sets of cultural data."

Pictures from the Software Studies Initiative website & culturevis' Flickr photostream:


Cultural Analytics Research Environment + HiPerWall



Interactive exploration of an image collection on a HIPerSpace tiled display



Legend of Zelda Map Visualization



Data Exploration on the HiPerWall

Anne Helmond's Presentation

This post was updated and moved:


http://interactivemultimediatechnology.blogspot.com/2009/11/emerging-field-of-software-studies-anne.html