forum: e-Science projects meeting (Arts and Humanities)
Submitted by Torsten Reimer on Wed, 07/05/2008 - 09:55.
We are currently at the e-Science Institute for a meeting of the arts and humanities e-Science projects that are funded by AHRC, EPSRC and JISC. We have opened this thread to capture some thoughts during and especially after todays discussion.
Re: e-Science projects meeting (Arts and Humanities)
Actually, if those of you who cannot be here today have some questions relating to e-Science - feel free to join us in this. One of the issues we will be discussing today will probably be what kind of support arts and humanities e-science researchers need.
Re: e-Science projects meeting (Arts and Humanities)
Hi.
Stuart and I are also at the workshop and gave a summary presentation yesterday which I attached.
Tobias
Re: e-Science projects meeting (Arts and Humanities)
Thanks! Please can you and Stuart also link your slides from today's presentations?
Re: e-Science projects meeting (Arts and Humanities)
Here are my slides
Re: e-Science projects meeting (Arts and Humanities)
Here is mine.
Re: e-Science projects meeting (Arts and Humanities)
and my slides.
Tobias
future plans
I think it would be really good if we could get some views on how the things that have come up today and yesterday should be taken forward. This forum is one way - what would be most useful ways for the projects to take these discussions forward?
Discussion: 'My use of e-infrastructure'
Some of the aspects of e-infrastructure that the project teams had experience of included:
- Traditional tools including email and messenger.
- Online tools - wikis for collaborative work - sharing presentations and notes, Google documents for writing articles, Zotero for referencing
- Adoption of the Access Grid
Setting up access grid network difficult and time consuming
with variable performance
Bad experiences of the AG puts people off for the future
Problem of introducing tools too early or too late
- Alternatives to the AG
Freely available, simple tools such Flash based video conferencing on the web, EVO, WebEx
Tools for desktop sharing
- e-infrastructure for teaching and learning
Virtual Learning environments
Problems with design VLE environments that don't compete with experiences of other web based applications.
Questions of access to information - access with and without lecturers present.
- Using the computational grid
Difficult to know whether during development whether applications will work better on the computational grid - no opportunity to experiment
Re: Discussion: 'My use of e-infrastructure'
This sounds like a useful discussion (wish I'd been able to be there).
My experience of using conferencing tools is largely restricted to teleconferencing using an interface like Skype, iChat, vel sim. Apart from occasional dips in bandwidth (expected when using free connections--premium services do away with even these little gliches) and the need to restart occasionally, these have worked well, and people whose experience with teleconferencing is a few years old are very impressed. Skype has, again in my experience, been good enough for the delivery of a lecture across the Atlantic fairly reliably.
Given this reasonably good baseline to set expectations, the Access Grid is probably in most people's view a small--if ver useful--step up from this, and a large amount of investment both of time and resources (and travelling to your nearest AG-enabled venue) may seem disproportionate. As the overhead comes down, and bandwidth improves, I guess adoption will pick up (unless the standard tools overtake AG in terms of functionality, which at this rate I suppose is not impossible). Obviously there is a price to pay as an individual or institution for being an early adopter of any technology, but I'm not sure I'd agree this necessarily translates to a disadvantage for a technology being released too soon. (Of course in theory it could, but I wouldn't see that being the case with AG, at this point.)
Thanks for blogging the event! Keep us posted.
==
GB
Re: e-Science projects meeting (Arts and Humanities)
sigh, none of the slide additions work for me when I click on them :(
John Lindsay
Reader in Information Systems Design
Kingston University
Kingston Upon Thames