Men and Women in Shakespeare

There is a great post on how you can use the computer to answer humanities questions. In this case the question How does the portrayal of men and women in Shakespeare’s plays change under different circumstances?

This is a nice example of combining linguistic study with that of literature. It goes some way to explain why in Birmingham we have one single department dealing with both sides of English!

More on SOPA

Here is an article giving some more background on SOPA, in case you're interested.

Useful articles on HTML and XML

Anonymous 'New to XML' http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/newto/ (a brief look at the workings and practical applications of XML)

Anonymous 'HTML5' http://w3c-html.com//html5.html (a brief look at the development of HTML in the near future)

Word processing

There's a brief article on the 30th anniversary of Word. However, it is not the pioneering piece of software it appears to be from the description—there were other word processors before, such as WordStar and WordPerfect. Word was one of many that managed to get ahead, a bit like MS-DOS and Windows. Previous operating systems such as CP/M or DR DOS and graphical interfaces such as Gem are nowadays confined to the museum... The victors write history.

Teaching and Digital Literacy

The full title of 'Hacking the Book' is 'Hacking the Book: Skills for the Digital Age'.  The Government, spurred on by a damning report about ICT teaching by Ofsted, has recently turned its attention to the way ICT (Information Communications Technology) is taught in school.  Did you study ICT at school? How do you think this has helped with your studies at University (if at all)? And in your wider life? Lastly, do you think there is a place for teaching digital skills in humanities programs at Universities?

You can read the Ofsted report here:

Ofsted (2011), 'ICT in School 2008-11' (Manchester: Ofsted) <http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/ict-schools-2008-11>