Commuting in Ottawa is an interesting experience. It seems the entire city disappears in the summer, beguiling one into thinking that a commute that takes 30 – 40 minutes in August will continue to be 30 – 40 minutes in September.

This morning, I was pushing 1 hr and 40 minutes. On the plus side, this gives me the opportunity to listen to the podcasts from Scholars’ Lab, from the University of Virginia (available via iTunes U).  As I listen to this excellent series of talks (one talk per commute…) I realize just how profoundly shallow my knowledge is of the latest happenings in Digital Humanities – and that’s a good thing! For instance, I learned about Intrasis, a system from Sweden for recording archaeological sites (or indeed, any kind of knowledge) that focuses on generating relationships from the data, rather than specifying beforehand a relationships table (and it melds very well with GIS). This is cool. I learned also about Heurist, a tool for managing research.  Also ‘Heml’ – the Historical Event Markup and Linking Project, lead by Bruce Robertson. As I listened to this last talk, as Bruce described the problems of marking up events/places/persons using non-Gregorian calendars and so on, it struck me that this problem was rather similar to the one of defining sites in a GIS – what do you do when the boundaries are fuzzy? How do you avoid the in-built precision of dots-on-a-map, or URLS that lead to one specific location? Time is Space, as Einstein taught us….

The upshot is, I feel very humbled when I listen to these in-depth and fascinating talks – I feel rather out of my depth. At the same time, I am excited to be able to participate in such a fast moving field.  Hopefully, my small contributions to agent modeling for history generate the same kind of excitement for others!