...Although arts and humanities data may not ever be automatically produced on the scale of “gigabytes per hour,” a lot of data already exists that is of genuine interest to arts and humanities researchers....
Just one example is the Shoa Multimedia Archive of Holocaust survivors’ testimonials in the United States, consisting of 200 terabytes of compressed data and several petabytes of uncompressed data....
These are small volumes of data when compared to applications in the sciences, but they are still difficult to handle on a single computer....
Automatic processing is relatively easily when you’re dealing with numbers and sensor measurements, but with unstructured information such as that in texts or multimedia formats, complicated statistical calculations are required before knowledge can be extracted. This brings exactly the kind of challenges that grid computing and e-science can address.
And yet, in the opinion of the Arts and Humanities e-Science Initiative in the UK, grids are not just about processing power and incredible data scales. Grids stand for the development and deployment of a networked infrastructure and culture through which resources can be shared in a secure environment....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/09/2007 08:13:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
