Queensland Judge Appointed to High Court

Queensland citizens and advocates today celebrate the appointment of Justice Susan Keifel to the High Court of Australia. Justice Keifel is the third female to be appointed to this position, and will share the bench with Justice Susan Crennan, appointed in 2005. Her Honour replaces Queenslander Justice Ian Callinan, who is retiring on 31st August, one day short of his 70th birthday.

In an interview conducted with ABC television news, the Honourable Paul de Jersey AC Chief Justice of Queensland commented that it was important for Queensland to maintain its position on the High Court, to illustrate the on-going role to be played by the State in federal affairs.

Moreover, this appointment, albeit widely considered to fit with the Howard Government’s conservative agenda, illustrates the importance of female presence on the bench.

Justice Keifel famously left school when 15, going to work as a legal clerk at a ‘prominent law firm’ Messrs Fitzgerald, Moynihan and Mack. Keifel gained no ordinary legal training: in 1984 she was awarded a Master of Laws from Wolfson College, Cambridge, with the CJ Hamson prize in Comparative Law. Excelling at her bar exams, she was the youngest female to make silk in Queensland in 1987, whereupon she was appointed to the Supreme Court of Queensland in 1993, and to the Australian Federal Court in 1994.

At a recent lunch-time address to the Australian Academy of Law, of which she is a foundation fellow, reported by The Australian, Keifel J stated:

"Perhaps the time has come for judges to give detailed consideration to their concerns and articulate them. I am not sure solutions will be obvious but clear statements about what is unacceptable in presentation must be a starting point. Case management is not itself the solution."

We wish her all the best for her appointment.

Tools for Humanities Researchers

Yesterday several heads of research gathered at QUT Creative Industries to discuss tools for humanities researchers. This discussion follows an ARC-funded national survey administered by the Australian Academy of the Humanities to acquire detailed knowledge of the current practices and future requirements of researchers in Australia. Questions asked encompass:

‘What kinds of technologies do you use in your research? How do you use them? What is the impact on your research? Does technology change the kinds of questions you can ask? Why don’t you use more?'

As a corollary to this Learned Academies Special Projects linkage program, the Academy is about to conduct a digitisation scoping study to identity materials most useful to have digitised for researchers in the humanities. The aim of both projects is to compile a substantial evidence base to identity resources and tools to guide investment in these areas.

My contribution to the discussion is as a recent participant in the Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Programme, held at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. Being involved in Internet studies, researchers often confront the problem that there aren’t established ways of undertaking qualitative or quantitative analysis. We are always already bricoleurs, mashing previous methods and modes of study to innovate when and where required. (On ethnography, Bryman (2004) comments that it is ‘generally recognized that the method entails a wide range of methods of data collection and sources’ (p. 292).) Do we still need a composite suite of tools to facilitate easier data collection and analysis? Those who are tracking the blogosphere appear to be saying so – colleagues have variously used IssueCrawler teamed with Technorati rankings, but feel that further tools could facilitate analysis. Some have been inspired to work on their own tools, such as OII SDP guest John Kelly, who presented interesting visualised slices of the blogosphere at Harvard.

A much–referenced portal is visualcomplexity.org, which lists over 500 projects, filtered into ‘pattern recognition’ and ‘social networks’, amongst others.

Here is a selection of other tools currently being employed by OII SDPers:

* A useful blogging bibliography tool from Ismael Peña-López, as a database employing two main classes, ‘Contacts’ and ‘Works’, to which five attributes are attached, ‘categories’, ‘types of authors’, ‘types of projects’, ‘languages’ and ‘countries’.

* In the Psych domain, Ralph Lengler of visual-literacy.org (recently rated highly with TED) introduced Tools for Internet-based data collection, and the Web-Experiment-List.

* Daithí Mac Síthigh employs YEP as a Mac-based (and unfortunately not-yet FLOSS) file management tool for pdfs, in which documents can be tagged and annotated. Note the subsequent alert to Skim! which appears to have improved annotation capability, to appease my concerns.

* Peter Ryan introduced TAPoR, a text analysis portal for research based at McMaster University, from a project contributed to by six of the leading Humanities computing centres in Canada. In particular, Peter spoke of HyperPo, a text analysis tool to examine the frequency and senses of words. I believe it outputs nice graphic distributions as a visual model of authors’ arguments.

* One way to track information online is through dapper.net, started with the vision of allowing users to extract and reuse data from nominated sites. Two services employing dapper are blotter, which graphs a blog’s popularity over time, and snag, a social network application which aggregates a user’s presence across the net.

* Marcus Foth mentioned two tools which have been of great use to him recently: dopplr, which displays colleagues’ travel plans, recently reviewed by the Guardian as a British dotcom to watch, and LinkedIn’s capacity to request connections.

* Alla Zollers, given her interest in tagging, commented about ma.gnolia, opining that it has a better interface than del.icio.us and emphasises the power of social networks. That said, there are probably more people using del.icio.us, and for that, the wisdom of the crowds may be… wiser? over there?!

IceTV Baby

In a decision handed down by Bennett J of the Australian Federal Court, Sydney’s IceTV has succeeded in proving that its electronic program guide (EPG) ‘does not reproduce a substantial part’ of the Nine Network’s program guide. The decision supported Nine’s claim to ownership of the copyright, but upheld that IceTV’s guide was compiled independently. From the instigation of proceedings in 2006, IceTV had asserted that ‘IceGuide is independently compiled by the company from a suite of sources in the public domain.’

This decision allows users to continue to schedule television recordings on a number of devices, including PCs, video recorders, and mobile phones. The IceTV service currently has 6500 fee-paying subscribers and an additional several thousand on a trial basis. The service is pitching itself as a viable alternative to TiVo, whose official introduction into Australia still remains unclear.

The Sydney Morning Herald observed that many viewed these actions as a traditional media vs. new media battle. Undoubtedly, the service will see increased success in the wake of this decision.