Long Road

Google Digital Humanities Research Awards

Google has so far digitized over 12 million books in over 300 languages – a significant fraction of all books ever published. This collection, much of which was previously available only in university libraries, has helped many disciplines in the humanities. Because of this vast increase in digitized information, new avenues of literary research are now possible. We also know more could be done to facilitate this research. Sometimes humanities research consists of amassing and curating a private data set, and writing or customizing tools specifically for that data set. While that might be the quickest way to answer a particular research question, it does little to help other researchers with similar questions. We want to make it easy for people to share not just results, but the tools and intermediate data upon which future research can build. Toward these ends, Google is creating a collaborative research program to explore the digital humanities using the Google Books corpus. Disciplines of interest include (but are not limited to):

• Linguistics
• History
• Classics
• Literature
• Philosophy
• Sociology
• Archaeology
• Anthropology

Some example projects to give you an idea of what we’re thinking about:

• Building software for tracking changes in language over time
• Building software for tagging and identifying concepts, structure, or entities in text (possibly tailored to a specific domain or language)
• Creating utilities to discover books and passages of interest to a particular discipline, with support for annotations and collaborative research
• Developing systems for crowdsourced corrections to book data (e.g., OCR text) and metadata
• Generating marked up freely usable datasets (e.g., part-of-speech tagging for little-known languages)
• The testing of a literary or historical hypothesis through innovative analysis of a book corpus
• Analysis of the generative or creative processes revealed in texts

These are one-time awards for up to US $50,000. Google may choose to renew the award for another year following review of the research at the conclusion of the first year. Where appropriate, we expect award recipients to make their software, utilities, datasets, or similar results freely available to others to use. We are requesting proposals in this area from select researchers and faculty members, and we would be delighted with your participation. We expect to make several awards under this program, and welcome proposals that include investigators from multiple organizations. Proposals that share resources or funding with other efforts are also welcome. Google may offer help in some instances by providing relevant subsets of the Google Books corpus (subject to copyright and metadata licensing) or by hosting data for researchers. For instance, we anticipate being able to provide frequency lists of words categorized by language, publication date, country, and subject; and a limited number of scans and plain text from books in the public domain. If your research requires a specific data set, feel free to contact Jon Orwant (orwant@google.com) about availability.

*interesting that two of the examples pertain to language documentation–linguists are you looking!

According to this article in the SF Gate and this follow up article Google has teamed up with Surui people of Brazil. The project itself sounds like it could be very helpful in bringing information about rain forest destruction out through the people it’s effecting locally. According to the article one of the “chiefs” of the tribe found his way to Google Earth at an Internet cafe and…

like most people, began by zooming in for a bird’s-eye view of his own home. He saw a green peninsula dangling into a sea of clear-cutting, a striking juxtaposition that he believed could awaken the world to the Surui’s plight.

Great. Google Earth can help visualize the destruction of the earth and link up people who are on the ground to narrate the destruction. Certainly. So does that mean Google is “saving” an Amazon tribe and or the rainforest. No, and Google doesn’t seem to be making any claims to being doing so…the SF Gate, however, is another story….

So the Google Outreach team got involved through a US group called the Amazon Conservation Team who hooked up Almir with the Google team. He “pleaded his case” and Google came to the rescue with technical training and support using Google Earth, Google Maps, Blogger, and YouTube. All of this lead to a two years of work by many Surui people to document the devastation of the lands. This work has been documented in a YouTube video called…wait for it…”trading bows and arrows for laptops.” Excuse me while I vomit.

Why Denise Zmekhol, the Berkeley filmmaker, decided to trod out the same ol stereotypes of backwards natives entering the modern world through technology is beyond me. Well it’s not, but it’s not worth re-hashing either, is it?

It is clear that this technology has aided the Surui get out their message. No one is being saved. Technology is not the answer or savior, it’s a tool.

Here are Chief Almir’s words:

Today we are 1,300 Surui. Before first contact, we were 5,000 and that really woke us up, because we knew if we didn’t do anything our way of life could end. We became even more worried, when we saw that our forest would go with us. And so we had to find a way to create dialogue with the rest of the world, to find a way for our future. One of the ways we found we could communicate was through the Internet and through technology. …So my people don’t know technology, but we know traditional knowledge, we know of the future and we can communicate with the spirits. But seeing that this technology was very important to create this dialogue with the outside world, to bring our message to the world that if we don’t think about what we do, we bring a great threat to our future. And here I’m not saying we the Surui people, I’m saying we as all of humanity. And that’s when we decided to make our experience in our 600,000 acres of rainforest, to make it a model and build a 50-year plan for our future. And here I’m not saying the forest is untouchable, we need to develop economically, socially, environmentally, justly. …

We as humans need to recognize and respect the contribution of the forest, spiritually and the resources it offers such as our water. And so our people are using this experience in sustainability with the forest and bringing it to the world through technology and the Internet, so we can build our future…My people have hope that we can build a better future together, to build a sustainable world, to build a world with respect, where everyone respects each other’s space and jointly build a better world. …We want to bring this model to other indigenous people, not just in the Amazon, but throughout the world, of how to use your resources sustainably. But we as indigenous people alone cannot ensure our future, every person must do their bit and believe that we can all work together to make this happen. And to believe in your own potential and believe in the love we have for the right to live. …The forest is not asking here as a favor to exist, it is just asking to be able to contribute and have recognized (its contributions) to every one of us. And that’s what we ask you to do as an audience, to take this message to those who don’t already realize this. … Some people ask, “isn’t this technology dangerous?” My answer is, well, what isn’t. It’s up to us whether we use these things for good or for bad.

Did the authors of the SF Gate articles read his words…?