Planet DHASS

Center for Digital Humanities and Culture: Reading Rebooted - Website online

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 02:58:39 +0000

Announcing the companion website for "Reading Rebooted: Glimpsing the Future of Literature in the Digital Age" which offers the opportunity to preview the works selected from twelve digital writers and artists from the United States, Europe, and Australia. Visit http://readingrebooted.iupdhc.org to learn about future of literature in the digital age.

HASTAC blogs: Carl Skelton, Betaville, and Massively Collaborative Mirror Worlds

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 01:52:49 +0000

"Betaville: a Massively Collaborative Mirror World Editor for Public Art and Urban Planning Applications": In essence, Betaville is designed as a platform for full participation in re-imagining real urban environments, based on open-source software development practices: anyone can put out an idea, and anyone can propose or offer changes, within an informal but effective etiquette...

HASTAC blogs: Carl Skelton, Betaville, and Massively Collaborative Mirror Worlds

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 01:52:19 +0000

Open Access News: 2 OA mandates at Brigham Young U.

noreply@blogger.com (Gavin Baker) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 22:51:07 +0000

David Wiley, Two Units in BYU Adopt Open Access Policies, iterating toward openness , November 23, 2009.

Two units at Brigham Young University have adopted open access policies – both the Harold B. Lee Library faculty and the faculty in my own department, Instructional Psychology and Technology, voted to adopt the policies earlier this month. IP&T’s policy was based on the HBLL policy, which was based on existing OA policies at other universities. ...

For those who are interested, here’s the text of the IP&T policy:

... Each Instructional Psychology and Technology Department faculty member grants to Brigham Young University permission to make scholarly articles to which he or she has made substantial intellectual contributions publicly available as part of the Harold B. Lee Library’s ScholarsArchive system, or its successor ...

The term “scholarly articles” includes articles prepared for presentation or publication, whether in electronic or print media. ...

The IP&T Department Chair or the Chair’s designate shall waive application of the policy to a particular article upon written request by a Faculty member explaining the need. The IP&T Chair, in consultation with the faculty, will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending changes to the faculty. This policy will be formally reviewed two years after implementation, by September 30, 2011.

As of the date of publication, each faculty member will make available an electronic copy of his or her final version of the article at no charge to a designated representative of the University Librarian’s Office in appropriate formats (such as PDF) specified by the University Librarian’s Office.

See also: Peter included BYU in his January newsletter's list of "mandate proposals known to be under discussion".

HASTAC blogs: Questioning the valorization of labor of "low-income" students for Sony

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:32:39 +0000

In our e-mail boxes this morning were no less than three messages announcing the new

HASTAC blogs: HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition to Participate in White House STEM Initiative

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 19:59:10 +0000

HASTAC is playing a major role in the new White House campaign to encourage students to pursue science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

HASTAC blogs: Just another day at the office

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 19:58:58 +0000

Working for HASTAC has it's perks. Today's Presidential announcement about National Lab Day was the culmination of several frantic months of percolating, planning, wondering, worrying, creating, and kvetching. And it was all worthwhile to see the big public launch of this incredible strategic initiative to improve education and address global challenges

HASTAC blogs: Test

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 19:08:04 +0000

testing teaser

HASTAC blogs: President Obama announces major initiative including 3rd DML Competition

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:20:25 +0000

In just a few minutes, the President will be making an announcement about a strategic corporate-philanthropic-government partnership that wil include the 2010 Digital Media and Learning Competition

HASTAC blogs: 3rd DML Competition Opens: Key Component of Pres Obama's Educate to Innovate Initiative

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:46:18 +0000

As President Obama called for new efforts to reimagine and improve education in science and math, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced a $2 million open competition for ideas to transform learning using digital media. The competition seeks designers, inventors, entrepreneurs, researchers, and others to build digital media experiences the learning labs of the 21st Century that help young people interact, share, build, tinker, and explore in new and innovative ways. Administered by HASTAC, the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory ("haystack") through a grant to the University of California at Irvine and Duke University, the competition was planned and announced in partnership with National Lab Day, a movement to revitalize science, technology, engineering and math in schools that was highlighted at a White House event today.

Found History: Benchmarking Open Source: Measuring Success by “Low End” Adoption

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:15:16 +0000

In an article about Kuali adoption, the Chronicle of Higher Education quotes Campus Computing Project director, Kenneth C. Green as saying,

With due respect to the elites that are at the core of Sakai and also Kuali, the real issue is not the deployment of Kuali or Sakai at MIT, at Michigan, at Indiana, or at Stanford. It’s really what happens at other institutions, the non-elites.

Indeed, all government- and charity (read, “foundation”)-funded open source projects should measure their success by adoption at the “low end.” That goes for library and museum technology as well; we could easily replace MIT, Michigan, Indiana, and Stanford in Mr. Green’s quote with Beinecke, Huntington, MoMA, and Getty, Though we still have a long way to go—the launch of Omeka.net will help a lot—Omeka aims at just that target.

Institute for the Future of the Book: two anniversaries

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:12:17 +0000

Just before Thanksgiving 1984, twenty-five years ago this week, The Criterion Collection was launched with the release of laserdisc editions Citizen Kane and King Kong.

In the video below critic Leonard Maltin introduces Criterion to his TV audience. Roger Smith who appears in the tape was one of Criterion's co-founders. Ron Haver, who at the time was the film-curator at the LA County Museum of Art, made the first commentary track; a brilliant real-time introduction to the wonders of King Kong.

Although its since been changed, Criterion's original logo from 1984 was based on the idea of a book turning into a disc. At the time it represented a conscious recognition that as microprocessors made their inevitable progression into all media devices, that the ways humans use and absorb media would change profoundly. The card below was distributed at the American Bookseller's Convention (now the BEA) in June of 1984.

This week in 1988 also marks the publication of Voyager's CD-Companion to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony by Robert Winter -- the title that launched the brief cd-rom era of the early 90s. In honor of that anniversary, beginning tomorrow and continuing through the end of the year, we'll start posting promo pieces for a number of Voyager's cd-roms.

Digital Arts & Humanities, King's College: Dealing with Images by the Millions - Citizen Science and Galaxy Zoo

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:42:06 +0000

Start: 24/11/2009 - 14:00 The OeRC is pleased to welcome Dr Chris Lintott from the Department of Physics, to present a seminar entitled Dealing with Images by the Millions - Citizen Science and Galaxy Zoo on Tuesday 24 November 2009 This seminar is open to all and will start at 2pm in the OeRC Access Grid Room (room 277 - access available via 7 Keble Road). This seminar may be broadcast with permission via video-link to other e-Research South venues. Only the speaker will be visible from other locations. Recording of this seminar is prohibited. abtruct [read more...] e-Science

HASTAC blogs: Proud the DML Competition is Part of Pres Obama's Educational Initiative

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:36:21 +0000

The New York Times has just revealed the outlines of an enormous and visionary educational initiative to improve the sciences and mathematics in the United States, including the third HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition that will be announced by the President today.

Here's the url to "WHITE HOUSE PUSHES SCIENCES AND MATH EDUCATION" by Kenneth Chang in the NY Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/23/education/23educ.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

Digital Arts & Humanities, King's College: Second Open Source GIS UK Conference

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:29:42 +0000

Start: 21/06/2010 End: 22/06/2010 Website: http://cgs.nottingham.ac.uk/~osgis10/os_home.html The Centre for Geospatial Science of University of Nottingham, Open Source Geospatial Foundation (UK Chapter) and ICA Working Group on Open Source Geospatial Technologies are organizing the Second Open Source GIS UK Conference on 21-22nd June , 2010 at the University of Nottingham. [read more...] e-Science

Digital Arts & Humanities, King's College: Managing and sharing research data: focus on consent, confidentiality and disclosure

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:22:10 +0000

Start: 02/12/2009 The UK Data Archive is organising a pre-conference workshop on 2 December 2009, for the 5th International Digital Curation Conference, on: "Managing and sharing research data: focus on consent, confidentiality and disclosure". This workshop will cover key issues on data management and sharing as applied to socio-economic research involving people as participants. It will provide both theoretical information and practical exercises and discussions Cost: £65 [read more...] e-Science

HASTAC blogs: The Digital Humanities, Circa 1965

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 03:31:09 +0000

Thomas Pynchon writes from the "matrices of a great digital computer."

Found History: Briefly Noted for November 22, 2009

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 03:31:06 +0000

What’s Happening? New Twitter Question Makes More Sense for Digital Humanities — Yesterday Twitter changed its update prompt from “What are you doing?” to “What’s happening?” There is a lot of subtle speculation on what the change means for Twitter and how it does or doesn’t reflect changes in user behavior over time. But at least for the digital humanities crowd, which uses Twitter largely as a place to share links, content, and news—rather than simply to provide personal status updates—the new question seems more appropriate.

HASTAC blogs: The Digital Reading Room -- er, Archive

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 03:21:28 +0000

Amidst all the exciting news in the digital humanities world this week, the Shakespeare Quartos Archive was quietly launched. This is big news for early modern book nerds and digital humanists alike. Promising "at least one copy of every edition of William Shakespeare's plays printed in quarto before the theatres closed in 1642," SQA* substantially expands the British Library's Shakespeare in Quarto project and includes an interactive interface that allows for side-by-side image comparison, text overlays, exhibits, tagging and user annotation.

DigitalKoans (Charles Bailey): DigitalKoans Break

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 03:05:41 +0000

DigitalKoans postings will resume on 11/29/09.

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DigitalKoans (Charles Bailey): Web Services Librarian at University of Arkansas at Fort Smith

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 03:04:18 +0000

The University of Arkansas at Fort Smith Library is recruiting a Web Services Librarian.

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

Primary responsibilities of the Web Services Librarian will be to provide vision and direction for all aspects of the library's website; to work collaboratively with library staff in order to provide and maintain quality online services and resources; to create new and/or update the existing web pages; and to provide leadership in developing new web-based applications. Other duties will include exploring how new technologies can be implemented and used to the best advantage on the website; delivering instruction to students and faculty on the use of website and database content; serving as a liaison to a selected discipline; and performing other related duties as required and/or assigned. Candidate chosen must be available to work some evening and weekend hours.

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DigitalKoans (Charles Bailey): Digital Video: The Google Books Settlement: Issues and Options

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 03:03:53 +0000

The UCLA Library has made The Google Books Settlement: Issues and Options, a digital video featuring copyright expert Jonathan Band, available on YouTube.

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DigitalKoans (Charles Bailey): Closing the Digital Curation Gap Project

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 03:02:51 +0000

The Institute of Museum and Library Services has awarded $249,623 to the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science for the Closing the Digital Curation Gap project.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Scientists, researchers, and scholars across the world generate vast amounts of digital data, but the scientific record and the documentary heritage created in digital form are at risk—from technology obsolescence, from the fragility of digital media, and from the lack of baseline practices for managing and preserving digital data. The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) School of Information and Library Science, working with the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and partners in the United Kingdom (U.K.), are collaborating on the Closing the Digital Curation Gap (CDCG) project to establish baseline practices for the storage, maintenance, and preservation of digital data to help ensure their enhancement and continuing long-term use. Because digital curation, or the management and preservation of digital data over the full life cycle, is of strategic importance to the library and archives fields, IMLS is funding the project through a cooperative agreement with UNC-CH. U.K. partners include the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), which supports innovation in digital technologies in U.K. colleges and universities, and its funded entities, the Strategic Content Alliance (SCA) and the Digital Curation Centre (DCC).

Well-curated data can be made accessible for a variety of audiences. For example, the data gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (www.sdss.org) at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico is available to professional astronomers worldwide as well as to schoolchildren, teachers, and citizen scientists through its Galaxy Zoo project. Galaxy Zoo, now in its second version, invites citizen scientists to assist in classifying over a million galaxies (www.galaxyzoo.org). With good preservation techniques, this data will be available into the future to provide documentation of the sky as it currently appears.

Data and information science researchers have already developed many viable applications, models, strategies, and standards for the long term care of digital objects. This project will help bridge a significant gap between the progress of digital curation research and development and the professional practices of archivists, librarians, and museum curators. Project partners will develop guidelines for digital curation practices, especially for staff in small to medium-sized cultural heritage institutions where digital assets are most at risk. Larger institutions will also benefit. To develop baseline practices, a working group will establish and support a network of digital curation practitioners, researchers, and educators through face-to-face meetings, web-based communication, and other communication tools. Project staff will also use surveys, interviews, and case studies to develop a plan for ongoing development of digital curation frameworks, guidance, and best practices. The team will also promote roles that various organizations can play and identify future opportunities for collaboration.

As part of this project, the Digital Curation Manual, which is maintained by the DCC, will be updated and expanded www.dcc.ac.uk/resource/curation-manual/chapters and the Digital Curation Exchange web portal will receive support (http://digitalcurationexchange.org). Through these efforts, the CDCG project will lay the foundation that will inform future training, education, and practice. The project's research, publications, practical tool integration, and outreach and training efforts will be of value to organizations charged with maintaining digital assets over the long term.

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DigitalKoans (Charles Bailey): Oberlin College Adopts Open Access Policy

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 03:01:31 +0000

Oberlin College has adopted an open access policy.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Oberlin College General Faculty unanimously endorsed on November 18 a resolution to make their scholarly articles openly accessible on the Internet. As a result of the measure, the rich scholarly output of the Oberlin faculty will become available to a much broader national and international audience. The Oberlin resolution is similar to policies passed at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Kansas, and Trinity University.

"Through this resolution the Oberlin College faculty has expressed a principled commitment to disseminating their scholarship as widely as possible,” said Sebastiaan Faber, Professor of Hispanic Studies and Chair of the General Faculty Library Committee. “The current system of journal publishing, which largely relies on subscriptions and licenses, limits access to research information in significant ways, particularly for students and faculty at smaller and less wealthy institutions, as well as for the general public. Access is also seriously limited around the world in countries with fewer resources."

Under the new policy, Oberlin faculty and professional staff will make their peer-reviewed, scholarly articles openly accessible in a digital archive managed by the Oberlin College Library as part of the OhioLINK Digital Resource Commons. Oberlin authors may opt out of the policy for a specific article if they are not in a position to sign journal publishing agreements that are compatible with the policy, or for other reasons. The resolution also creates an institutional license that gives Oberlin College the legal right to make the articles accessible on the Internet through the digital archive. The resolution further encourages, but does not require, authors to submit publications other than peer-reviewed articles in the same manner. . . .

"I'm delighted that Oberlin's faculty and staff have made this important commitment to open access," said Ray English, Azariah Smith Root Director of Libraries. "The movement for open access to scholarly research information is international in scope and growing rapidly as academic institutions, research-funding agencies, and policy makers see the benefits of unfettered access to scholarly research. The library looks forward to putting in place the support structures that are needed to carry out this important initiative."

Adopted at the recommendation of the General Faculty Library Committee, the policy calls for the committee, in consultation with a faculty council, to establish procedures for carrying out the policy and to monitor its implementation. Policy implementation will be coordinated by a scholarly communications officer, a member of the library staff designated by the director of libraries. The text of the faculty resolution is available online at: http://tinyurl.com/ykyfz2j

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Institute for the Future of the Book: how we read: an investigation

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:23:59 +0000

An extremely interesting new book by Stanislas Dehaene entitled Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention has just been released. Dehaene, a neuroscientist, is curious about exactly what happens in the brain when we read, a subject of much conjecture but previous little evidence until now. My copy's still on its way, but an interview with Scientific American's Gareth Cook makes it sound like Dehaene's book will be essential for anyone thinking about how we read in new environments:

DEHAENE: One of my long-time interests concerns how the human brain is changed by education and culture. Learning to read seems to be one of the more important changes that we impose to our children's brain. The impact that it has on us is tantalizing. It raises very fundamental issues of how the brain and culture interact.

As I started to do experimental research in this domain, using the different tools at my disposal (from behavior to patients, fMRI, event-related potentials, and even intracranial electrodes), I was struck that we always found the same areas involved in the reading process. I began to wonder how it was even possible that our brain could adapt to reading, given it obviously never evolved for that purpose. The search for an answer resulted in this book. And, in the end, reading forces us to propose a very different view of the relationship between culture and the brain.

COOK: What is this "new relationship"?

DEHAENE: A classical, although often implicit, view in social science is that the human brain, unlike that of other animals, is a learning machine which can adapt to essentially any novel cultural task, however complex. We humans would be liberated from our past instincts and free to invent entirely new cultural forms.

What I am proposing is that the human brain is a much more constrained organ than we think, and that it places strong limits on the range of possible cultural forms. Essentially, the brain did not evolve for culture, but culture evolved to be learnable by the brain. Through its cultural inventions, humanity constantly searched for specific niches in the brain, wherever there is a space of plasticity that can be exploited to "recycle" a brain area and put it to a novel use. Reading, mathematics, tool use, music, religious systems – all might be viewed as instances of cortical recycling.

Of course, this view of culture as a constrained "lego" game isn't that novel. It is deeply related to the structuralist view of anthropology, as exemplified by Claude Lévi-Strauss and Dan Sperber. What I am proposing is that the universal structures that recur across cultures are, in fact, ultimately traceable to specific brain systems.

HASTAC blogs: Michael Berube Visit 2: Reflections Reloaded

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 22:06:01 +0000

New and improved reflections on Michael Berube's visit to the engaged humanities scholar as public intellectual research workshop.

HASTAC blogs: Event! The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 19:56:15 +0000

I will be attending this conference February 18-20, 2010. Here's the link to the

HASTAC blogs: Call for Papers: HASTAC 2010 Grand Challenges, Global Innovations

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 21:02:49 +0000

HASTAC is delighted to announce the HASTAC 2010: Grand Challenges and Global Innovations Conference. Held April 15-17, 2010 and hosted by the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science at the University of Illinois, HASTAC 2010: Grand Challenges and Global Innovations will be a free, entirely virtual event held in a multiplicity of digital spaces instigated from sites across the globe.

Key dates:

Abstract submissions due: Dec. 18, 2009

Notification of participants: Jan. 29, 2010

Conference: April 15-17, 2010

HASTAC blogs: Interaction and Change

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 17:34:59 +0000

Cultural theorist, intellectual, and novelist Umberto Eco recently said: "If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you're an idiot." He noted this in an interview in Spiegel On Line, which can be found at http://tiny.cc/bXAcP

HASTAC blogs: Michael Berube @ Northwestern - Reflections

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 08:14:04 +0000

Three kinds of public intellectuals: the heroic book reviewer; the civic engager consultant; the policy wonk. But how to move among these roles, or combine them in new ways?

Found History: Briefly Noted for November 20, 2009

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 03:30:47 +0000

CONTENTdm 5.2 Released — OCLC has released version 5.2 of its popular digital collection management software, CONTENTdm. Among the new features, CONTENTdm 5.2 includes improved PDF print support and reduced indexing times for text collections. Version 5.2 is available at no additional charge to current license holders.

Think ChromeOS is Competing with Linux? Think Again. — It would be easy to see Google’s announcement of Chrome OS—a lightweight, web-focused operating system—as a shot not only at Microsoft and Apple, but also at popular Linux distributions, especially those focused on the netbook experience like Ubuntu Netbook Remix and Mobiln. In fact, Canonoical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu has announced it is “contributing engineering to Google under contract” for Chrome OS and its open source code base, Chromium OS. Noting that “open source development is as much about co-operation as it is about competition,” Canonical says Chrome OS is “a positive development, bringing choice to the consumer.” In this case, Canonical says the choice will be between Ubuntu, which “will continue to be a general purpose OS running both web and native applications such as OpenOffice,” and Chrome OS, which will provide an entirely web-based user experience. We’ll have to wait and see how this goes down with the Linux community at large.

Grand Text Auto: IF Author, Novelist Alan DeNiro

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 03:14:33 +0000

That’s an interview with Alan DeNiro now up at Grinding to Valhalla. DeNiro is author of the just-published Total Oblivion, More or Less, in which Minnesota, and then the rest of the US, is invaded by ancient European tribes. DeNiro also wrote and programmed one of the most unusual interactive fiction pieces of recent vintage, Deadline Enchanter. Or perhaps the word is “bizarre.” The game seem to not completely work, in a few different senses of “work,” but I was intrigued with it and found it to be oddly compelling, a refreshing experiment. Hopefully novel-readers will receive a similar wake-up slap from Total Oblivion, and, hopefully DeNiro won’t abandon interactive fiction now that he’s made it to print.

HASTAC blogs: History Canada Developer Diary 2

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 22:54:22 +0000

History Game Canada

eDream - Emerging Digital Research and Education in Arts Media Institute: Pauline Oliveros: A Floating World

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 20:30:21 +0000

Friday, November 13th, at the end of a long work day, I returned to campus for Pauline Oliveros’s performance at the Krannert Museum of Art. I had heard about her visit for months, had recommended it for sponsorship, and had every reason to be delighted that the night had finally ...

Open Access News: Oberlin adopts an OA mandate

noreply@blogger.com (Gavin Baker) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:33:14 +0000

Oberlin College Faculty Unanimously Endorses Open Access, press release, November 20, 2009.

The Oberlin College General Faculty unanimously endorsed on November 18 a resolution to make their scholarly articles openly accessible on the Internet. As a result of the measure, the rich scholarly output of the Oberlin faculty will become available to a much broader national and international audience. The Oberlin resolution is similar to policies passed at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Kansas, and Trinity University. ...

Under the new policy, Oberlin faculty and professional staff will make their peer-reviewed, scholarly articles openly accessible in a digital archive managed by the Oberlin College Library as part of the OhioLINK Digital Resource Commons. Oberlin authors may opt out of the policy for a specific article if they are not in a position to sign journal publishing agreements that are compatible with the policy, or for other reasons. The resolution also creates an institutional license that gives Oberlin College the legal right to make the articles accessible on the Internet through the digital archive. The resolution further encourages, but does not require, authors to submit publications other than peer-reviewed articles in the same manner. ...

Adopted at the recommendation of the General Faculty Library Committee, the policy calls for the committee, in consultation with a faculty council, to establish procedures for carrying out the policy and to monitor its implementation. Policy implementation will be coordinated by a scholarly communications officer, a member of the library staff designated by the director of libraries. ...

The Oberlin College Student Senate recently endorsed the national “Student Statement on the Right to Research,” which expresses a similar commitment to making scholarly research information openly accessible.

Stefan Sinclair: Digital Humanities Now

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:08:19 +0000

Real-time Voyeur wordcloud of this DH Twitter list

The good folks at the Center for History and New Media have initiated (yet another) fantastic resource in the form of Digital Humanities Now, a real-time, crowdsourced publication. It takes the pulse of the digital humanities community and tries to discern what articles, blog posts, projects, tools, collections, and announcements are worthy of greater attention. I’m especially happy to hear that part of the motivation for DHNow is to explore how, as Dan Cohen puts it “some version of this idea could serve as a rather decent new form of publication that focuses the attention of those in a particular field on important new developments and scholarly products”. Though perhaps not itself a quantifiable object in terms of hiring, tenure and promotion, it can certainly function effectively in that ecology to promote noteworthy content and projects. I see this as akin to participating at conferences: there’s a kind of intangible value ascribed to it by committees wanting to judge the scholarly activity of an individual (that can enhance the perception of other work). We can’t just wait for administrators to “get it”, we need to be more proactive, by providing them with other tools by which to assess the value of digital humanities scholarship. It’s partly for this reason that I think it’s so important to think, as a community, about how we can get DHNow (and similar initiatives) right.

One of my first reactions was to ask how the algorithms could get a good diversity of languages if – as I’d falsely assumed – there was linguistic analysis happening in the filtering and grouping process. It turns out that DHNow uses a much simpler and more elegant mechanism for gathering content: it (via Twittertim.es) analyzes common URLs, which really makes it language and context independent (though still likely very relevant if several DHers mention the same URL).

The URL-centric approach is useful for converging on a unique resource, but there’s a lot of discussion on Twitter that’s not oriented towards URLs (and of course there’s also a lot of DH discussion that’s not on Twitter). One huge advantage of the URL approach is that it usually produces a nice, coherent title to represent a set of tweets – it may be difficult to generate an expressive title from a tweet in the absence of a URL. In any case, what could be some possible (relatively simple) strategies for capturing a broader range of topics and discussions?

identify tweets that exhibit interrelatedness (within DHers) without necessarily containing URLs – replies to and retweets of DHers can suggest something of greater interest
identify tweets that contain common terms that are distinctive from a larger corpus of DH tweets
use trends

Other ideas? Tweet me @sgsinclair (with this URL http://tr.im/FnOI ;-)

I have another motivation for wanting DHNow to work optimally: I’m already overwhelmed by digital information from email, blogs, Twitter, and so on. I’m not especially keen to add yet another source of information, unless I have confidence that it will allow me to drop something else. Any filtering and aggregation obviously means compromise and loss – but if anyone should be up to the challenge of a technical and social problem, it’s the digital humanities community.

HASTAC blogs: Updates on the ARG at UNC

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:55:49 +0000

Just wanted to give you all an update with where we are at with the alternate reality game (ARG) at UNC.

Digital Arts & Humanities, King's College: Call for projects on digital facades: Open Up

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:05:35 +0000

Deadline: December 10, 2009 Dates of the workshop: February 9 through 23, 2010 Venue: Medialab-Prado in Madrid (Spain). Worskhop tutors: Jordi Claramonte, Chandler McWilliams, Casey Reas, and Víctor Viña. Directed and coordinated by Nerea Calvillo. Open Up is a workshop focused on the development of projects for the digital façade in Medialab-Prado's building. This call is meant for project proposals to be collaboratively developed during the workshop-seminar taking place in Madrid from February 9 through 23, 2010. [read more...] Real Time Collaborative Art Making

DigitalKoans (Charles Bailey): Preliminary Approval Granted for Amended Google Book Search Settlement

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:03:42 +0000

US District Court Judge Denny Chin has granted preliminary approval of the amended Google Book Search Settlement.

Here's the order.

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Digital Arts & Humanities, King's College: Help us build the TEI Demonstrator

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:13:33 +0000

The EU-funded DARIAH project is now starting work on a major deliverable, forming a key part of its objective to define the infrastructure needed to support European digital research in the arts and humanities for the next decade. The *TEI demonstrator* will showcase an open hosting service for richly encoded documents following the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative. The service brings together ideas from several DARIAH partners. It will combine case studies and examples of best practice and build a freely [read more...] Text mining

Craig Bellamy: The Digital Future is Now: A Call to Action for the Humanities

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:30:13 +0000

This paper is based upon the Keynote lecture given at Digital Humanities 2009 in Maryland, USA by Professor Christine Borgman (link). ABSTRACT The digital humanities are at a critical moment in the transition from a speciality area to a full-fledged community with a common set of methods, sources of evidence, and infrastructure ...

Grand Text Auto: Piksel09 Kicks Off in Bergen

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:28:45 +0000

Piksel, a festival for free-software-creating and -using artists and developers, has begun in Bergen, Norway. If you can’t drop by, at least visit the festival on the Web and check out the brilliant hackery on display at the main exhibition.

DigitalKoans (Charles Bailey): "Examining Law Journal Publication Agreements for Copyright Transfers and Self-Archiving Rights"

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:06:18 +0000

Benjamin J. Keele has self-archived "Examining Law Journal Publication Agreements for Copyright Transfers and Self-Archiving Rights" in SSRN.

Here's an excerpt:

This study examines 78 law journal publication agreements and finds that a minority of journals ask authors to transfer copyright. Most journals also permit author to self-archive articles with some conditions. The study recommends journals make their agreements publicly available and use licenses instead of copyright transfers.

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DigitalKoans (Charles Bailey): Institutional Repository Manager at University of Essex

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:05:12 +0000

The Research and Enterprise Office of the University of Essex is recruiting an Institutional Repository Manager.

Here's an excerpt from the ad (Ref# SS948):

The postholder will be accountable for delivering an institutional repository (IR) for the University’s research outputs, to schedule and on budget, and for managing the IR once implemented. This will involve working closely with other members of the University, both in academic departments/schools and in professional services, to identify a suitable system, to implement it, and to maintain it in the future so as to provide a quality service for those within and outside the University.

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DigitalKoans (Charles Bailey): Systems Programmer 2 at Yale

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:04:26 +0000

The Yale University Library is recruiting a Systems Programmer 2.

Here's an excerpt from the ad (STARS# 8624BR):

Purpose In a dynamic 24×7x365 production data center environment, working independently and collaboratively as a senior member of an interdepartmental team, provides Unix and Windows system administration, storage and backup administration, and application administration for Yale University Library, consortia, and development partner’s servers and web services. Plays a leadership role in the acquisition and deployment of new hardware.

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DigitalKoans (Charles Bailey): CONTENTdm Version 5.2 Released

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:03:28 +0000

OCLC has released CONTENTdm version 5.2.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

With the new release, the CONTENTdm Project Client now supports auto updates, enabling users to get updates as quickly as they are available. It automatically checks for software updates in the background, so work is not interrupted. If updates are available, they are downloaded but not installed until the organization is ready.

To better support text-based collections, PDF print quality can now be specified in the Project Client, enabling users to select a quality level when generating optional print versions of their compound objects. For users with large, full-text collections, several enhancements improve performance and reduce indexing times. Other enhancements include the addition of a new thesaurus, Canadian Subject Headings (CSH), and configuration options to filter hits in Usage Reports.

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DigitalKoans (Charles Bailey): "Memento: Time Travel for the Web"

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:01:13 +0000

Herbert Van de Sompel, Michael L. Nelson, Robert Sanderson, Lyudmila L. Balakireva, Scott Ainsworth, and Harihar Shankar have self-archived "Memento: Time Travel for the Web" in arXiv.org.

Here's an excerpt:

The Web is ephemeral. Many resources have representations that change over time, and many of those representations are lost forever. A lucky few manage to reappear as archived resources that carry their own URIs. For example, some content management systems maintain version pages that reflect a frozen prior state of their changing resources. Archives recurrently crawl the web to obtain the actual representation of resources, and subsequently make those available via special-purpose archived resources. In both cases, the archival copies have URIs that are protocol-wise disconnected from the URI of the resource of which they represent a prior state. Indeed, the lack of temporal capabilities in the most common Web protocol, HTTP, prevents getting to an archived resource on the basis of the URI of its original. This turns accessing archived resources into a significant discovery challenge for both human and software agents, which typically involves following a multitude of links from the original to the archival resource, or of searching archives for the original URI. This paper proposes the protocol-based Memento solution to address this problem, and describes a proof-of-concept experiment that includes major servers of archival content, including Wikipedia and the Internet Archive. The Memento solution is based on existing HTTP capabilities applied in a novel way to add the temporal dimension. The result is a framework in which archived resources can seamlessly be reached via the URI of their original: protocol-based time travel for the Web.

Read more about it at "Time-Travelling Browsers Navigate the Web's Past" and the Memento project website.

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HASTAC blogs: Check out Get Schooled.Com

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:51 +0000

DML Competition 2008 judge (and FB friend) Kenny Miller has let us know about Get Schooled.com, a new website at http://www.getschooled.com/.

HASTAC blogs: A Digital Chaperone At the Halfway Home

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:22:52 +0000

The musician/artist Beck offers new modes of digital culture on his website.

Grand Text Auto: Nickm on His IF and E-Lit

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:40:23 +0000

Rachel Miller of Virginia Commonwealth University just interviewed me about my electronic literature work – my digital writing, focusing on my interactive fiction. She asked some very good questions. In return, I asked if she’d let me post the interview here, to which she kindly agreed.

1. Do you have a specific audience you are trying to appeal to with your work? (It may be different audiences depending on the genre.)

Yes, certainly. I even think of specific people who I would like to enjoy particular pieces of work, and that offers very good guidance. I also think of groups of people such as the interactive fiction community, digital poets, and electronic literature authors and scholars.

2. How do you feel about cellphones? Is it me or did I notice a reoccurring theme of cell phones? (Another Hole+Ten Mobile Texts.)

Cell phones are now completely ordinary and ubiquitous, but they’re pretty amazing in terms of being a very recent technology and one that changes the way we speak and experience space. I could say more, but the pieces you mention (along with Book and Volume, which has an anachronistic pager instead of a cell phone but is trying to deal with that technology obliquely) are my more extended attempts to marvel at this communications technology.

3. What advice do you have for people who are new to interactive fiction?

Play it with someone else, whether your IF partner is experienced or not. I don’t think I know anyone who learned the conventions of IF alone – I certainly didn’t. And, solving puzzles together and exploring a world together is great fun.

4. Why do you support IF? What are the benefits of further development and it being considered a genre in literature?

I see IF as a fascinating point of intersection between literary writing, computer gaming, and the power of the computer to simulate. I’ve always loved what language can do and what computing can do, and I see that this comes together in a powerful way in IF. Of course, it’s specific pieces of IF that give me this feeling. While I see great successes in the form, I also see untapped potential, which encourages me as I work on particular games and as I develop my IF system, Curveship.

5. What do you want your “interactors” to walk away with?

More to think about, so that solving puzzles and completing the game has opened up new questions and possibilities instead of wrapping everything up.

6. What potential problems (if any) do you see with IF?

It’s sometimes dismissed for the wrong reasons – I’m not sure that’s a problem with IF, really. I guess if people are expecting it to become mainstream again, they may be disappointed. I think IF is very interesting in its niche and on its margin, so this doesn’t bother me. Beyond that, IF has the same problems many literary and gaming forms do, such as: Most of it is not very good, and some of it in good in some ways but really problematic in others. But, as is the case with other types of literature and gaming, there are also some pieces of IF which are awesome.

7. Implementation is a fascinating idea. I have not read the entire sticker novel but enjoy the process of viewing pictures online or being a *web reader*. Are you simply exposing narratives/dialogues/scenarios in public areas all over the world so that it may inspire all walks of life? What is your goal or hope here? Is there is an overall theme to the sticker novel? If so, doesn’t this affect the interpretation of the place readers? Or,is it more of an experiment to see how publicized you can make the project?

One goal of the project is to extend the idea of sticker art – a really nice concept, I think – into literary practice. We wanted to offer these literary texts, ones that aren’t advertising anything, in public spaces for people to read and enjoy. That by itself, apart from the themes and plot of Implementation (and, yes, there is are themes and a plot), was meant to challenge what we see and read in public. Implementation isn’t mainly an attempt to publicize itself – most of the people on the street who read some of it won’t know that they’re reading a novel called Implementation and there’s nothing to advertise that Scott Rettberg and I wrote the text. Instead, it’s an attempt to introduce literary reading into a different set of spaces.

8. What started your passion/interest for the digital and literary world?

I can’t trace my interest in computing and the literary back to anything in particular, but as I was becoming an avid reader, I was also learning to program, and soon thereafter was playing and (clumsily) writing interactive fiction. So I see these two interests as very kindred with one another.

9. Just curious…how many hours a week do you spend on a computer? If a lot, does it have any negative effects physically or mentally?

I’m not sure I can estimate, but I spend a lot of time in different contexts (home, office, classrooms, coffeehouses, trains, planes) and can’t say that I do feel any strong negative effects. If I sat at the same desk for the same eight hours a day using a computer, I might, but I think I benefit from having a lot of choice in where, when, and how I work. I wish more people had this choice.

HASTAC blogs: Humanities in a Digital World

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:58:28 +0000

What is HASTAC?

What is the future of learning?

Found History: Archiving Social Media

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:39:14 +0000

In an article posted yesterday under the title 5 Ways Social Media Will Change Recorded History, Mashable co-editor Ben Parr writes,

For the first time in human history, the day-to-day interactions between people are being permanently recorded and formatted in easily organizable segments of information.

I don’t disagree that social media is poised to change the way the history of the early 21st century is written. But I’m not at all convinced social media interactions are being “permanently recorded” or “formatted” in ways that will be useful to future historical inquiry. As a session organized by Jeff McClurken at this year’s THATCamp made clear, there are still lots of unanswered questions swirling around the issue of archiving social media. Indeed, I’m not sure we understand the full range of questions involved—standards and interoperability, privacy and copyright, preserving context, mapping personal networks, etc., etc.—let alone the answers.

For nearly a decade now, my colleagues at the Center for History and New Media and I have been investigating the problems and opportunities that internet ephemera presents for scholars and archivists, exploring and implementing best practices for collecting the born-digital record of unfolding events through projects like the September 11 Digital Archive and the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank. New social media and their traces (Tweets, Facebook status updates) present a new set of questions for this ongoing project. If past experience tells us anything, the full range of those questions won’t be readily apparent until we begin the actual work of archiving social media. It also suggests we have to move quickly.

With that in mind, we are already getting down to business, laying the groundwork for a 2010 workshop of collections professionals, scholars, social media experts like Ben Parr, and representatives from the most popular social networking services to start this project and make sure these unprecedented—but as yet still potential—historical riches are in fact “permanently recorded” and properly “formatted” for scholarly access.

Stay tuned.

The Stoa Consortium: Pre-conference workshops at DH2010

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:13:37 +0000

As in previous years, the days 3-6 July, before the DH2010 conference (7-11 July at King’s College London <http://www.cch.kcl.ac.uk/dh2010>) have been set aside for community-run workshops. One can reach a diverse and committed body of participants in the Digital Humanities at DH2010. Do you or your project have a workshop up your sleeve that would interest this Digital Humanities community?

Half- or one-day slots are available for workshops, which need to be self-organized and self-funding. KCL can provide space for the workshop at no or low cost, so it is likely that the costs per participant would be low.

We would like to receive proposals for such workshops.

In your full proposal (total 500-800 words), please include:

(1) a brief description of the workshop programme, the project or community out of which it arises, the trainers who will run the workshop, and its proposed length;

(2) what is the demand for this workshop, and who do you expect the audience to be? What minimum number of attendees would be needed for you to do the workshop?

(3) what funding is available or will you seek to help to support the costs of this workshop (for instance, travel for trainers, lunch or refreshments for participants, as applicable)?

A few groups have already expressed interest in running workshops, and we have been talking informally with them. If you have ideas that is not yet fully formed, we would be delighted to e-speak to you about them before you submit a proposal.

The closing date for full proposals will be 31 December 2009. Please send them via email to both John Bradley (john.bradley@kcl.ac.uk) and Gabriel Bodard (gabriel.bodard@kcl.ac.uk).

Digital Arts & Humanities, King's College: London Churches, Part 2

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:42:30 +0000

"Coffee stall by the front entrance. People drinking coffee in the shade of a tree. More or less everyone in suits. Business coffee-break. Giles, meet me at half-two, outside the church, for a power-espresso. Stockbrokers, financiers, commodity-dealers. I don't do tangibles, I do invisibles, I'm into futures, that's where the big money is. Right in front of the church steps. If Jesus were to pay an unexpected visit, I wonder if he'd knock their tables over?" [read more...]

Digital Arts & Humanities, King's College: Repository Preservation Infrastructure (REPRISE)

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:57:53 +0000

Start: 02/12/2009 - 14:00 End: 02/12/2009 - 17:30 (co-organised by the OGF Repositories Group, OGF-Europe, D-Grid/WissGrid) Register Now - http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/dcc-2009/ (£45.00 for Associates Network members; £60.00 for non-members) Following on from the successful Repository Curation Service Environments (RECURSE) Workshop at IDCC 2008, this workshop discusses digital repositories and their specific requirements for/as preservation infrastructure, as well as their role within a preservation environment. Digital repositories in various shapes and sizes are the basis for [read more...] e-Science

Digital Arts & Humanities, King's College: Critics Floating in the Virtual Sphere

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:48:06 +0000

Start: 09/12/2009 - 14:00 End: 09/12/2009 - 17:00 International Seminar De Balie, Amsterdam www.debalie.nl Wednesday December 9, 2009, 14.00 - 17.00 hrs (CET) Doors open: 13.30 [read more...] e-Science

Melissa Terras: Understanding Image Based Evidence

noreply@blogger.com (Melissa) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 06:14:24 +0000

On Tuesday I participated in an excellent workshop, Understanding Image Based Evidence, as part of the eScience and Ancient Documents project at the University of Oxford. We looked at issues of fidelity of digital images, and how image based evidence is used for reasoning, particularly in papyrology and palaeography.

Couldn't be there? Well, my PhD student, Alejandro Giacometti, took some pretty good notes...

Melissa Terras: Twitterverse

noreply@blogger.com (Melissa) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 05:25:29 +0000

If its been quiet around here, its because I've been hanging out elsewhere. In class, lecturing, for one - and as with many other scholars, I've been gradually, and more frequently, becoming immersed in the stream on twitter (@melissaterras).

A couple of things you should know about if you are interested in Digital Humanities. Dan Cohen has put together a fabulous tweet roll of folks in the Digital Humanities, currently numbering 279 active tweeters. James Cummings has another list of 50 digital humanities folks (and although the two lists have some overlap, they dont feature all the same peeps).

Dan Cohen has also gone one stage further - using the new Twitter Times site, he's pulled together a "virtual" journal, that takes all the tweets from his DH list, and produces a changing overview of what people in the DH community are pointing to, and talking about at any one time. Digital Humanities Now is then a "passively edited" DH journal - a fantastic place to dip into daily to see what the community is finding interesting.

Read more about how it works on Dan Cohen's blog.

Finally, the future has arrived. Phew. Twitter is making more and more sense.

(Twitter seems to me like someone leaving some toy money, an old boot, and an iron in a field, and those who found it going on to create Monopoly. Hurrah!)

HASTAC blogs: New model for digital publications?

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:05:32 +0000

A new model for digital scholarly publishing jumped online tonight, created by Dan Cohen, Director of the Center for History and New Media, GMU.

What's amazing is that Dan created this new publication in a few days. I like his approach: he had an idea and implemented it immediately. I think this is one trait that is shared by many digital humanists/scholars--the willingness to experiment and just do. He is assuming there will be adjustments, but wasn't afraid to go forward with an idea. I'm proud to be one of the 274 founding editors, together with some other HASTAC scholars.

Found History: Briefly Noted for November 18, 2009

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 03:31:00 +0000

"How to Write a Zotero Translator" Now in Print — Another great resource from Adam: his comprehensive guide to building a Zotero translator is now available in print from LuLu. As Adam points out, I was the one who asked for this, so I guess I finally have to get off my backside and learn how to write a translator.

Writing Great Documentation — Jacob Kaplan-Moss of Django has some tips for writing software documentation, including thoughts on what to write, style, and the importance of editors.

DigitalKoans (Charles Bailey): "The Practice and Perception of Web Archiving in Academic Libraries and Archives"

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 03:04:27 +0000

Lisa A. Gregory's Master's theses, "The Practice and Perception of Web Archiving in Academic Libraries and Archives," is available from the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Here's an excerpt:

In order to dig deeper into possible reasons behind archivists’ and librarians’ reluctance to archive Web sites, the study described here asks professionals to reveal their Web archiving experiences as well as the information sources they consult regarding archiving Web sites. Specifically, the following two research questions are addressed: Are librarians and archivists at institutions of higher education currently engaged in or considering archiving Web sites? What sources do these professionals consult for information about Web archiving?

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DigitalKoans (Charles Bailey): Head of Library Systems at Johns Hopkins

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 03:03:19 +0000

The Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University are recruiting a Head of Library Systems.

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

Responsibilities include technology analysis and strategic planning; overseeing implementation of central and distributed hardware, software, networking, desktop support, and help desk services; coordinating computing and telecommunication support for various library and university activities; supervising staff; recommending operating budgets required to support, enhance and expand the Libraries’ digital resources.

Works closely with other library departments in developing and maintaining library services; collaborates variously with the Digital Research and Curation Center; coordinates and collaborates with Information Technology @ Johns Hopkins and the other university libraries, as appropriate, to facilitate use and development of the Libraries’ electronic resources, as well as other electronic resources on campus; maintains strong partnerships with IT staff throughout the University in the ongoing assessment of and planning for the robustness of Hopkins’ network infrastructure; coordinates computing and telecommunication support for the shared library management system, the library’s Web site, and other Web-based services; collaborates with Libraries’ Human Resources Manager on technology training.

Manages and implements of special projects, as appropriate. The Libraries’ budget is approximately $27 million with a staff of 150. Library systems manages and supports: staff desktop workstations and application software at six sites; Windows servers; paid printing services; network hardware and infrastructure for six library sites; wired and wireless public access networks; Unix servers running Solaris and Linux; SirsiDynix Horizon integrated library system and HIP; library Web site; and library-specific applications, such as SFX. The Head of Library Systems reports to the Associate Dean for Library Digital Programs and serves as a member of the Libraries’ Management Team.

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DigitalKoans (Charles Bailey): NSF Awards $20 Million to DataONE (Observation Network for Earth) Project

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 03:02:16 +0000

The National Science Foundation has awarded a $20 million grant to the DataONE (Observation Network for Earth) Project, which reports to both the Office of the Vice President of Research and the University Libraries at the University of New Mexico. William Michener, professor and director of e-science initiatives at University Libraries, is directing the project.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Researchers at UNM have partnered with dozens of other universities and agencies to create DataONE, a global data access and preservation network for earth and environmental scientists that will support breakthroughs in environmental research.

DataONE is designed to provide universal access to data about life on Earth and the environment that sustains it. The underlying technologies will provide open, persistent, robust, and secure access to well-described and easily discovered Earth observational data.

Expected users include scientists, educators, librarians, resource managers, and the public. By providing easy and open access to a broad range of science data, as well as tools for managing, analyzing, and visualizing data, DataONE will be transformative in the speed with which researchers will be able to assemble and analyze data sets and in the types of problems they will be able to address. . . .

DataONE is one of two $20 million awards made this year as part of the National Science Foundation's (NSF) DataNet program. The collaboration of universities and government agencies coalesced to address the mounting need for organizing and serving up vast amounts of highly diverse and inter-related but often-incompatible scientific data. Resulting studies will range from research that illuminates fundamental environmental processes to identifying environmental problems and potential solutions. . . .

The DataONE team will study how a vast digital data network can provide secure and permanent access into the future, and also encourage scientists to share their information. The team will help determine data citation standards, as well as create the tools for organizing, managing, and publishing data.

The resulting computing and processing "cyberinfrastructure" will be made permanently available for use by the broader national and international science communities. DataONE is led by the University of New Mexico, and includes additional partner organizations across the United States as well as from Europe, Africa, South America, Asia, and Australia.

This grant is important nationally, and locally especially for our research community. University Libraries Dean Martha Bedard said, "The University Libraries are key partners in UNM research initiatives, and are excited and committed to supporting the emerging area of data curation, which this grant seeks to support in sophisticated ways."

DataONE will build a set of geographically distributed Coordinating Nodes that play an important role in facilitating all of the activities of the global network, as well as a network of Member Nodes that host relevant data and tools. The initial three Coordinating Nodes will be at the University of New Mexico, UC Santa Barbara (housed at the Davidson Library), and at the University of Tennessee/Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Member Nodes will be located in association with universities, libraries, research networks, and agencies worldwide.

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DigitalKoans (Charles Bailey): Brenda Johnson Named as Dean of Indiana University Libraries

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 03:01:19 +0000

Brenda Johnson has been named as the Ruth Lilly Dean of the Indiana University Libraries. Johnson is currently the University Librarian at the University of California, Santa Barbara, a position that she has held since January 1, 2008.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"I am delighted to have been selected to serve as the next Ruth Lilly Dean of University Libraries at IU," Johnson said. "I believe a library is the greatest metaphor for a university. It provides essential resources for academic research, is a repository for scholarly achievement, a source of intellectual inspiration, a stage for public discourse, a center of cultural life, an incubator for new ideas, and is, in and of itself, a 'community'."

"I'm delighted to see the IU Libraries already stand very strong in embodying those values and concepts," Johnson continued. "I look forward to leading a library that is already recognized as one of the top libraries in the country as we engage with faculty, students and staff to achieve even-greater excellence and to create innovative and emergent services for a changing academic environment."

Major initiatives coordinated by Johnson at the University of California, Santa Barbara, include planning for a $62 million library addition and renovation, the UCSB Reads program (a program that engages the campus and community in conversations about a key topic while reading the same book), increased emphasis on outreach to students and faculty, and a rejuvenation of fundraising efforts for the UCSB libraries.

Prior to assuming the role of University Librarian at UCSB, Johnson served as interim co-university librarian of the University of Michigan Libraries. She served the University of Michigan Libraries in various roles for more than 20 years. From 1997-2007, she served as associate university librarian for public services. . . .

"Brenda Johnson's background and experience with the Big Ten and the Committee on Institutional Cooperation have prepared her well for the IU Libraries deanship," said [Debora] Shaw [professor in the School of Library and Information Science]. "We on the search committee were especially impressed with her breadth of understanding and her sense of how to help the libraries continue to build on their strengths and partnerships."

"I am delighted that Brenda Johnson will be joining IU as Dean of Libraries," said [Bobby] Schnabel [dean of the School of Informatics and Computing and interim vice president for research]. "Her vision for the future directions of libraries, enthusiastic personality, and vast experience and proven leadership abilities at both the University of Michigan and at UC, Santa Barbara, make her an outstanding choice." . . .

The dean of University Libraries provides administrative leadership for a system of libraries on eight campuses. On the Bloomington campus, the dean provides strategic planning and policy direction in the areas of collection development, public and technical services, facilities planning and personnel policies.

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Dan Cohen: Introducing Digital Humanities Now

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:12:43 +0000

Do the digital humanities need journals? Although I’m very supportive of the new journals that have launched in the last year, and although I plan to write for them from time to time, there’s something discordant about a nascent field—one so steeped in new technology and new methods of scholarly communication—adopting a format that is struggling in the face of digital media.

I often say to non-digital humanists that every Friday at 5 I know all of the most important books, articles, projects, and news of the week—without the benefit of a journal, a newsletter, or indeed any kind of formal publication by a scholarly society. I pick up this knowledge by osmosis from the people I follow online.

I subscribe to the blogs of everyone working centrally or tangentially to digital humanities. As I have argued from the start, and against the skeptics and traditionalists who thinks blogs can only be narcissistic, half-baked diaries, these outlets are just publishing platforms by another name, and in my area there are an incredible number of substantive ones.

More recently, social media such as Twitter has provided a surprisingly good set of pointers toward worthy materials I should be reading or exploring. (And as happened with blogs five years ago, the critics are now dismissing Twitter as unscholarly, missing the filtering function it somehow generates among so many unfiltered tweets.) I follow as many digital humanists as I can on Twitter, and created a comprehensive list of people in digital humanities. (You can follow me @dancohen.)

For a while I’ve been trying to figure out a way to show this distilled “Friday at 5″ view of digital humanities to those new to the field, or those who don’t have time to read many blogs or tweets. This week I saw a tweet from Tom Scheinfeldt (blog|Twitter) (who in turn saw a tweet from James Neal) about a new service called Twittertim.es, which creates a real-time publication consisting of articles highlighted by people you follow on Twitter. I had a thought: what if I combined the activities of several hundred digital humanities scholars with Twittertim.es?

Digital Humanities Now is a new web publication that is the experimental result of this thought. It aggregates thousands of tweets and the hundreds of articles and projects those tweets point to, and boils everything down to the most-discussed items, with commentary from Twitter. A slightly longer discussion of how the publication was created can be found on the DHN “About” page.

Does the process behind DHN work? From the early returns, the algorithms have done fairly well, putting on the front page articles on grading in a digital age, bringing high-speed networking to liberal arts colleges, Google’s law archive search, and (appropriately enough) a talk on how to deal with streams of content given limited attention. Perhaps Digital Humanities Now will show a need for the light touch of a discerning editor. This could certainly be added on top of the raw feed of all interest items (about 50 a day, out of which only 2 or 3 make it into DHN), but I like the automated simplicity of DHN 1.0.

Despite what I’m sure will be some early hiccups, my gut is that some version of this idea could serve as a rather decent new form of publication that focuses the attention of those in a particular field on important new developments and scholarly products. I’m not holding my breath that someday scholars will put an appearance in DHN on their CVs. But as I recently told an audience of executive directors of scholarly societies at an American Council of Learned Societies meeting, if you don’t do something like this, someone else will.

I suppose DHN is a prod to them and others to think about new forms of scholarly validation and attention, beyond the journal. Ultimately, journals will need the digital humanities more than we need them.

MITH: Shakespeare Quartos Archive Launched

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:08:01 +0000

MITH is pleased to report the launching of the Shakespeare Quartos Archive by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC and the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford. Funded by a JISC/ NEH Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration Grant, The Shakespeare Quartos Archive provides access to the early rare quarto editions of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a collection that in its physical form is distributed among six geographically distant institutions. In addition to providing unprecedented access, the archive promotes scholarship by enabling users to perform side-by-side text comparisons and full text searches as well as create and affix annotations and tags to content that can be stored for future reference and shared with other users. The Shakespeare Quartos Archive is the result of a cross-Atlantic collaboration between the Maryland Institute of Technology and the six institutions housing these rare holdings. Read the press release for more information.

Grand Text Auto: Lots Has Happened and Is Happening

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:57:20 +0000

Andrew Stern’s company Stumptown Game Machine released their Touch Pets Dogs, published by ngmoco for the iPhone. On this social network, everyone knows that you’re a virtual dog. Versions of it are in the top 10 free apps on the iPhone App Store now, and in the top 100 of pay apps.

Rover’s Day Out is the winner of the IF Comp. (Dogs everywhere!) The game is by Jack Welch and Ben Collins-Sussman. Broken Legs by Sarah Morayati took second, Snowquest by Eric Eve third. Congratulations to all authors! If you haven’t played the games yet, they’re still there waiting for you.

CYOA visualizations are the talk of the town: Mainly this extensive site that considers many books in the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure series, but also this PDF mapping Journey under the Sea.

People on the Interweb donated $25,000 to Jason Scott, the textfiles.com, BBS Documentary, and Get Lamp guy. Man, it’s so easy to get money on the Web. Maybe you could do it too, if you first spend years, in your spare time and without pay, saving BBS files, saving Geocities, documenting computer history, and generally amassing a larger archive of digital media history than almost every university in the world put together.

Truly “indie” artgames made the New York Times Magazine. Jason Roherer leads the charge, but many of the usual suspects are quoted in this look at how non-industrial gaming is augmenting and challenging games of the commercial sphere.

A new issue of Game Studies is out, with these articles: “The Character of Difference: Procedurality, Rhetoric, and Roleplaying Games,” “Moral Decision Making in Fallout,” “Cheesers, Pullers, and Glitchers: The Rhetoric of Sportsmanship and the Discourse of Online Sports Gamers,” and “World of Warcraft: Service or Space?” Game Studies is free to everyone! No page fees for authors! Peer reviewed! The future of academic publishing, already here, and about games!

JayIsGames hosts and IF contest and calls for interactive fiction authors to create escape-the-room games. The deadline for this Casual Gameplay Design Competition #7 is January 31. Z-code only, unfortunately for those of us wedded to Curveship, but that lets you use Inform 6 or 7.

HASTAC blogs: Just Seeds-Art, Activism, and Functional Group Blogging

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:55:20 +0000

The past year on the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign campus has been full of art activist projects. As an MFA candidate in New Media who is interested in work that exists in the world of art and the world of social change ,simultaneously, I have been particularly excited about this. I intend to use my HASTAC blog platform to highlight both past and current art and activist projects that have touched the UIUC campus in one way or another. First up, Oakland based artist Favianna Rodriguez and the artist collective she belongs to, Just Seeds.

Grand Text Auto: Call of Duty: Secret Spielberg Level Unlocked

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:52:06 +0000

Call of Duty: Secret Spielberg Level Unlocked

Only with the absurdity of this video can you accurately capture the almost-entirely failed message of Call of Duty.

Choice quote: “My girlfriend has walked in front of the telly again.”

DigitalKoans (Charles Bailey): Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (11/18/09)

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:48:16 +0000

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available. It provides information about new works related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, e-prints, journal articles, magazine articles, technical reports, and white papers.

Especially interesting are: "The 'Big Deal': A Survey of How Libraries Are Responding and What the Alternatives Are"; "Digital Library of the Caribbean: A User-Centric Model for Technology Development in Collaborative Digitization Projects"; "The 'DOD' and 'POD' Project in Context at McGill: Part of Digitizing Collections to Preserve Content, Provide Access and Enrich Research"; "Economists Online: User Requirements for a Subject Repository"; Income Models for Open Access: An Overview of Current Practice; "Knowledge as a Public Good"; "Open Access Repositories in Computer Science and Information Technology: An Evaluation"; "Research Online: Digital Commons as a Publishing Platform at the University of Wollongong, Australia"; and "The Scholarly Communication Process within the University Research Corridor (Michigan State University, the University of Michigan, and Wayne State University): A Case Study in Cooperation."

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NEH Office of Digital Humanities: Digging into Data Challenge Awards to Be Announced December 3rd

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:36:00 +0000

I'm very pleased to tell you that on the evening of December 3, 2009, at a special ceremony in Ottawa, Canada, NEH, SSHRC, JISC, and NSF will be announcing the awardees for the Digging into Data Challenge. The ceremony will be hosted by SSHRC President Chad Gaffield and will also feature remarks by NEH Chairman Jim Leach. Please look for our press release on December 3 to learn about each winning team.

TAPoR: Dictionary of Words in the Wild Passes 5000

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:09:11 +0000

The Dictionary of Words in the Wild has passed 5000 images contributed by participants! Join up and add your own.

Scholarly Community for the Globalization of the Middle Ages: Call for Papers: Essays on Welsh Mythology in Popular Culture

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:37:06 +0000

Essays On Welsh Mythology in Popular Culture Kristin Noone (UC Riverside) and Audrey Becker (Marygrove College), eds. In recent years, interest in Welsh mythology and legendary figures has grown exponentially in popular culture, with appearances in diverse arenas ranging from fantasy fiction to role-playing games, from children’s literature to tourist sites and even Celtic-inspired rock music and [...]

Grand Text Auto: tiltfactor 2009-11-18 07:14:31

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:14:31 +0000

This just in from Tiltfactor at Sea correspondent E McNeill via games(TM) magazine.

Craig Bellamy: Ordnance Survey maps to go free online

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:00:13 +0000

The government is to explore ways of making all Ordnance Survey maps freely available online from April, in a victory for the Guardian's three-year Free Our Data campaign. The move will bring the UK into line with the free publication of maps that exists in the US. Gordon Brown announced the ...

Digital Arts & Humanities, King's College: TEXTvre

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:07:19 +0000

Digital Arts & Humanities, King's College: Linking and Querying Ancient Texts (LaQuAT)

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:41:12 +0000

Digital Arts & Humanities, King's College: Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland (CRSBI )

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:09:45 +0000

DigitalKoans (Charles Bailey): Shakespeare Quartos Archive Launched

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 03:06:20 +0000

The Folger Shakespeare Library has announced the launch of the Shakespeare Quartos Archive.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

For the first time, digitized copies of rare early editions of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet have been compiled into a single online collection. The Shakespeare Quartos Archive (www.quartos.org) makes digitized versions of the play drawn from libraries in the US and the UK freely available to researchers worldwide.

"The Shakespeare Quartos Archive presents new and innovative opportunities that were simply not possible before for scholars, teachers, and students to explore Hamlet," said Folger Director Gail Kern Paster.

"We are confident that the Shakespeare Quartos Archive will become an indispensable online resource for the worldwide community of scholars, teachers, and students with an interest in Shakespeare, enabling them to access and compare these important texts," said Richard Ovenden, Associate Director of the Bodleian Library.

In the absence of surviving manuscripts, the quartos—Shakespeare's earliest printed editions—offer the closest known evidence to what Shakespeare might actually have written, and what appeared on the early modern English stage. Print copies of the Hamlet quartos are of immense interest to scholars, editors, educators, and theater directors, yet due to their rarity and fragility, are not readily available for study. The Shakespeare Quartos Archive offers freely-accessible, high-resolution digital editions of quarto editions of Hamlet, enabling users to compare texts side-by-side, search full-text transcriptions of each quarto, and annotate and tag passages for future reference. Users can also create personal collections of page images and annotations and share these collections with other researchers. . . .

The Shakespeare Quartos Archive contains texts drawn from holdings at the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the University of Edinburgh Library, the Huntington Library, and the National Library of Scotland, in addition to the Folger. These six institutions worked in conjunction with the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland and the Shakespeare Institute at Birmingham University to digitize and transcribe 32 copies of Hamlet. The British Library's companion project, "Shakespeare in Quarto," is the first online collection to provide access to at least one copy of every pre-1642 Shakespeare play that was printed in a quarto edition and can be accessed at www.bl.uk.

The Shakespeare Quartos Archive was one of the first projects awarded funding through JISC/NEH Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration Grants in 2008. The grants support the innovative use of digitization technology to advance the humanities and are administered through joint collaboration between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in the United States and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the United Kingdom.

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DigitalKoans (Charles Bailey): Proceedings of the 155th ARL Membership Meeting

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 03:05:26 +0000

ARL has released the Proceedings of the 155th ARL Membership Meeting. Presentations are in digital audio, PowerPoint, and/or PDF formats.

Here's a selection:

"A Scientist’s View of Open Access," Bernard Schutz (PowerPoint, audio available)
"A River Runs Through It," Sayeed Choudhury (PowerPoint, audio available)
"Leading from the Middle: Open Access at KU," Lorraine J. Haricombe (PowerPoint, audio available)
"The Changing Role of Special Collections in Scholarly Communications," Donald J. Waters (PDF)
"Library Options for Publishing Support," October Ivins and Judy Luther (PowerPoint, audio available)

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DigitalKoans (Charles Bailey): OAI-PMH: MOAI 1.0.7 Released

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 03:03:42 +0000

Infrae has released MOAI 1.0.7, a standalone OAI-PMH server that can “can be used in combination with any repository software that comes with an OAI feed.”

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

MOAI is a platform for aggregating content from different sources, and publishing it through the Open Archive Initiatives protocol for metadata harvesting. It's been built for academic institutional repositories dealing with relational metadata and asset files. . . .

More specifically MOAI has the ability to:

Harvest data from different kinds of sources

Serve many OAI feeds from one MOAI server, each with their own configuration

Turn metadata values into OAI sets on the fly, creating new collections

Use OAI sets to filter records shown in a feed, configurable for each feed

Work easily with relational data (e.g. if an author changes, the publication should also change)

Simple and robust authentication through integration with the Apache webserver

Serve assets via Apache while still using configurable authentication rules

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DigitalKoans (Charles Bailey): Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research Will Commit 5 Million Euros to Open Access Publication

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 03:02:47 +0000

According to a news article by the SURFfoundation, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, which "funds thousands of top researchers at universities and institutes and steers the course of Dutch science by means of subsidies and research programmes," will commit five million Euros to support the open access publication of its funded research results.

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DigitalKoans (Charles Bailey): ARL Releases E-Science Survey Preliminary Results and Resources

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 03:01:38 +0000

The Association of Research Libraries has released preliminary results and resources from an e-science survey of its members.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) E-Science Working Group surveyed ARL member libraries in the fall of 2009 to gather data on the state of engagement with e-science issues. An overview of initial survey findings was presented by E-Science Working Group Chair Wendy Lougee, University Librarian, McKnight Presidential Professor, University of Minnesota Libraries, at the October ARL Membership Meeting. Lougee's briefing explored contrasting approaches among research institutions, particularly in regard to data management. The briefing also summarized survey findings on topics such as library services, organizational structures, staffing patterns and staff development, and involvement in research grants, along with perspectives on pressure points for service development. To better explicate the findings, Lougee reviewed specific cases of activities at six research institutions. . . .

A full report of the survey findings is being prepared and will be published in 2010 by ARL through its Occasional Papers series.

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The Humlab: UCx3 , Stanford and new book acquisitions

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:47:39 +0000

I am currently in Palo Alto and have spent a couple of days at Stanford meeting with people and engaging in different kinds of conversations. Really exciting. I have had several meetings with people from the Communication Studies department, where there is a range of really good people. I had a great conversation with Fred Turner yesterday – there is quite a bit of overlap between our current projects. Also I visited the School of Education yesterday and talked with Sam Wineburg, whose work and person I find quite interesting.

Last week I spent a day at University of California at Los Angeles and did a talk on cyberinfrastructure for the humanities. Johanna Drucker, whose work is truly excellent and thought-provoking, was my host. There was quite a good turnout for the talk and good discussion. It was also quite useful for me to talk to Christine Borgman about cyberinfrastructural matters, and I have realized I need to frame my argument stronger in the paper in the sense of presenting a call for humanities cyberinfrastructure with a different set of epistemic scope (than the discourse of science and engineering based cyberinfrastructure). It would be quite interesting with critical work on the notion of ditributedness in relation to cyberinfrastructure, and also a typology of different kinds of distributed work (ranging from twitter to optocomputers). I was delighted to meet Peter Lunenfeld – we have been in touch before, but I have never met him in person – and some of his students in the Design | Media Arts program.

The UC Santa Barbara talk went well. Here the topic was the Landscape of the Digital Humanities, and it was quite useful to get to talk about this work and to engage in discussion with faculty and students. I had been invited by Alan Liu and Rita Raley, and it was great see them again and to talk about the digital humanities. I also quite enjoyed talking to a number of Ph.D. students who attended the talk. There was quite a bit of energy and I was quite impressed with the community and dialogue. Among other things, t reminded me of making sure to include a “young researcher” perspective in my work. We are also really happy that we will have a postdoctoral fellow from UCSB from January 2010.

I also got the catch up with the good work going on at the University of California Humanities Research Institute in Irvine.

And today I bought two new books: delete. The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger (Second Life interview with the author here) and Notes on the Undergound: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination by Rosalind Williams (new edition, Cabinet interview here).

Geoffrey Rockwell: The Onion: Ultra-Realistic Modern Warfare Game Features Awaiting Orders, Repairing Trucks

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:38:31 +0000

Ultra-Realistic Modern Warfare Game Features Awaiting Orders, Repairing Trucks

The Onion has posted a story about a Ultra-Realistic Modern Warfare Game Features Awaiting Orders, Repairing Trucks. Now that’s realism.

HASTAC blogs: History Canada Developer Diary 1

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 22:10:51 +0000

Welcome to the first in a series of our development blog.

History Game Canada

Geoffrey Rockwell: glia neuronal jelly with network sauce 2009.

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:45:22 +0000

Thanks to Jason I discovered an interesting collection of animated poetry that plays with type by David Jhave Johnston. See glia — neuronal jelly with network sauce — 2009.. In theory you can embed the animated poems in things, but it didn’t work in this blog. Perhaps they are best seen in glia.

One feature of Johnston’s work is how he plays with type using, among other technologies, Mr. Softie from Obx Labs.

HASTAC blogs: Student privacy

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:42:54 +0000

This is reblogged from Student Journalism 2.0, a project of ccLearn at Creative Commons:

eDream - Emerging Digital Research and Education in Arts Media Institute: Freshman Arts Discovery Courses Cross Disciplines

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:30:23 +0000

With Associate Dean of the Fine and Applied Arts Mike Ross's leadership and the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's initiative on Cultural Understanding and the Creative Process, UIUC's Discovery Program in the Arts is now in its second year. Freshman are invited each term to enroll in ...

Geoffrey Rockwell: Collaboration: Digital Humanities And Computer Science

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:22:36 +0000

I have now wrapped up my conference report on the Digital Humanities And Computer Science symposium. At the end I was on a panel on collaboration between the digital humanities and computer science. In many ways the DHCS symposium is an example of collaboration and how to build it. Below are the quotes and theses on collaboration that I spoke to.

Artists see science; they don’t understand it; they think it is brilliant. Scientists see art; they don’t understand it; they think it is dumb. (Beyond Productivity, p. 52)

Collaboration has to be built on respect, which is not politeness. Respect can come from dialogue, which involves listening to the other as they chose to present themselves.

The marked contrast between compensation levels for computer scientists and for artists, other things being equal, is significant for the intersection between IT and the arts inasmuch as it affects collaboration and education. Across organizations, and even departments in a university, compensation levels affect patterns of time use, expectations for research and for infrastructure, and so on. (Beyond Productivity, p. 53)

Collaboration is political. It is no easier than any other gathering and it is rarely between equals.
Collaboration is easier when supported externally. What entities on campus support interdisciplinary ventures? In my experience it is administrators above chairs. Chairs try to defend the disciplines, deans try to encourage interdisciplinary activities.

the arts establishment sometimes regards technology suspiciously, as if it lacks a worthy lineage or is too practical to be creative. This attitude was evident in early committee discussions, coming out most strongly in contrasting perspectives on the potential for creative practices within industry. (Beyond Productivity, p. 53)

In the humanities we are tempted to believe in a hierarchy of value to the disciplines where pure scholarship is set over applied and applied research is set over the corruption of industry. Our fear of corruption and belief in the purity of our critique are a hindrance to collaboration with disciplines that believe they are enriched by applied research and interaction with industry.
Collaboration takes time. What are you not going to do? How important is it to collaborate? Pick carefully and be prepared to invest over time.

How should the pursuit of knowledge be organized, given that under normal circumstances knowledge is pursued by many human beings, each working on a more or less well defined body of knowledge and each equipped with roughly the same imperfect cognitive capacities, albeit with varying degrees of access to one another’s activities? (Fuller, “On Regulating What Is Known”, p. 145).

Collabortation is easier where the stakeholders share interests and goals. Two areas that seem to me to have promise are visualization and game design.
Collaboration is the norm. The question is how to manage it?

Digital Arts & Humanities, King's College: Stanford launches virtual 'salon' for humanities scholars

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:19:20 +0000

Taking a cue from the social media trend, "Arcade" is a new website designed to serve as a social and scholarly community for those with an interest in humanities research. The interactive and multimedia site is sponsored by Stanford's Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages (DLCL), but is open for use by visitors from around the globe. The site abounds with interactive elements including blogs by 25 different contributors, virtual seminars and online forums, making Arcade the first widely accessible and interactive platform for intellectual networking in the humanities. [read more...]

Craig Bellamy: On being critical…

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:30:12 +0000

A recent post I placed on Humanist; one of the most important academic initiatives in the Digital Humanities run by Professor Willard McCarty of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College London. In this post, I sort of hijacked the subject somewhat but this needed to be ...

HASTAC blogs: Digital Humanities and DH Centers

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:04:29 +0000

To continue the ongoing discussion about what "digital humanities" means, I wanted to share this CLIR Survey of Digital Humanities Centers http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub143abst.html report with everyone.

In the process of identifying and surveying DHC's, author Diane Zorich had to create some working definitions of "digital humanities" and the work done at "digital humanities centers." I think her framework is a good place to start and adds to this discussion, especially in thinking that digital humanities can be both "prosaic" and "transformative." This work needn't be both, although it certainly can be.

Craig Bellamy: Online Communication and Promotion of Research Expertise

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:00:12 +0000

I encourage people to apply for this call from JISC. JISC put out some good calls, although at times I worry that they they do not understand the difference between 'skilled work' and 'research work'. There is a big difference. Research is not necessarily 'promoted'; it is cited within the ...

Digital Arts & Humanities, King's College: Tenure-track Digital Humanities positions at Maryland

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:40:13 +0000

The College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Maryland, College Park, invites applications for two tenure-track positions in Digital Humanities, Media and Cultures at the rank of Assistant Professor or beginning Associate Professor to start August 15, 2010. Successful applicants will have their tenure homes in one or more of the following departments: American Studies, Art Studio, Communication, or Women's Studies. See below for preferred areas of expertise in each field. [read more...] The London Digital Humanities Group

Found History: Briefly Noted for November 16, 2009

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 03:32:53 +0000

Aggregate Your Friends’ Links with Twitter Tim.es — Via @james3neal another great link: The Twitter Tim.es scours your Twitter stream for links posted by your friends, grabs the content of those links, and assembles that content daily in a newspaper-style layout for your reading convenience. Stories are ordered according to how many of your friends have tweeted the link in question, and an RSS feed is provided if you’d rather get the content in your reader. It’s a nice way to keep up with what’s hot on Twitter without constantly watching the stream. For instance, yesterday I hardly checked Twitter at all, yet with Twitter Tim.es I know that six of the people I follow tweeted a link to Mark Sample’s recent post, Digital Humanities Sessions at the 2009 MLA. Now, I already subscribe to Mark’s blog, so I eventually I would have read the post anyway. But not knowing how helpful my friends found it, and not being a lit guy myself, I may not have paid the post much attention. And, of course, if I didn’t subscribe to Mark’s blog, I wouldn’t have caught the link at all.

DigitalKoans (Charles Bailey): Open Science at Web-Scale: Optimising Participation and Predictive Potential

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 03:05:48 +0000

JISC has released Open Science at Web-Scale: Optimising Participation and Predictive Potential.

Here's an excerpt:

This Report has attempted to draw together and synthesise evidence and opinion from a wide range of sources. Examples of data intensive science at extremes of scale and complexity which enable forecasting and predictive assertions, have been described together with compelling exemplars where an open and participative culture is transforming science practice. It is perhaps worth noting that the pace of change in this area is such, that it has been a challenging piece to compose and at best, it can only serve as a subjective snapshot of a very dynamic data space. . . .

The perspective of openness as a continuum is helpful in positioning the range of behaviours and practices observed in different disciplines and contexts. By separating the twin aspects of openness (access and participation), we can begin to understand the full scope and potential of the open science vision. Whilst a listing of the perceived values and benefits of open science is given, further work is required to provide substantive and tangible evidence to justify and support these assertions. Available evidence suggests that transparent data sharing and data re-use are far from commonplace. The peer production approaches to data curation which have been described, are really in their infancy but offer considerable promise as scaleable models which could be migrated to other disciplines. The more radical open notebook science methodologies are currently on the "fringe" and it is not clear whether uptake and adoption will grow in other disciplines and contexts.

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DigitalKoans (Charles Bailey): International Copyright: Why It Matters to Libraries

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 03:04:46 +0000

The Library Copyright Alliance has released International Copyright: Why It Matters to Libraries.

Here's an excerpt:

One of the most important issues for libraries at the present time is the need to reinforce copyright limitations and exceptions. Limitations and exceptions that enable uses of works without prior consent of or payment to the copyright holder or payment, for purposes such as research, scholarship and teaching, library preservation, and interlibrary loan, are a fundamental part of the copyright system, but they have not expanded at an equal pace with enhanced rights and protections in recent years. Internationally higher standards of protection and enforcement have been mandated by TRIPS, the WIPO Copyright Treaty, and the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty. In many nations including the U.S., extension of copyright terms, anticircumvention legislation, and a steadily increasing culture of enforcement have created additional restrictions to use of information. There has been no expansion of limitations and exceptions.

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DigitalKoans (Charles Bailey): Associate Dean for Scholarly Resources at Northeastern University Libraries

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 03:03:37 +0000

The Northeastern University Libraries are recruiting an Associate Dean for Scholarly Resources.

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

Responsibilities include the direction, co-ordination, and development of the University Libraries collections and information resources, including digital initiatives, and of the Libraries' technical services activities, in order to ensure their overall operational effectiveness. In these areas the Associate Dean takes the leading role in planning, policy, and budget development and administration, fiscal management, the recruitment and supervision of staff, and consortial activity. She or he also has key leadership responsibility for development of the Libraries' scholarly communications and publishing initiatives. The Associate Dean works in a collaborative mode with a team-centered approach to problem-solving. As a member of the senior Administrative Group, the Associate Dean shares responsibility for developing and implementing the mission, goals, and broad policy directions of the University Libraries and coordinating initiatives with other University and Library senior administrators and managers. The Associate Dean also participates in leading the dynamic process of change in the transition to the hybrid print/digital library in a rapidly evolving research environment.

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DigitalKoans (Charles Bailey): Digitization Activities: Project Planning and Management Outline

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 03:02:40 +0000

The Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative has released Digitization Activities: Project Planning and Management Outline.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The aim of this document is to define activities relating to the digitization of original cultural materials, and to outline general steps for planning and management of this process. The activities described in this document address library/archival issues, imaging and conversion work, and IT infrastructure issues in particular, and were identified using project management outlines from several organizations with significant experience working with cultural materials. This document defines "digitization" as a complete process, and covers all project components from content selection through delivery of digitized objects into a repository environment.

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DigitalKoans (Charles Bailey): Open Library Environment (OLE) Becomes Kuali Foundation Project

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 03:01:30 +0000

The Open Library Environment (OLE) project has become a Kuali Foundation project.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Kuali Foundation, Inc., is pleased to announce that a group of leading academic research libraries is partnering in the Kuali Open Library Environment (OLE) (pronounced Oh-LAY) project to develop software created specifically for the complex business management and workflow operations of academic and research libraries. . . .

More than 300 libraries, educational institutions, professional organizations, and businesses participated in some phase of planning for the OLE project, which was supported by a planning grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and led by Duke University. Based on that broad insight, OLE will create a next-generation library system that breaks away from print-based workflows and reflects the changing nature of library materials and new approaches to scholarly work. The project is designed to work well with other enterprise systems and to be easily modified to suit the needs of different institutions.

Consistent with the values of the Kuali Foundation, the resulting software will be made freely available to libraries around the world, which will then also contribute their expertise and enhancements through community processes that work for the library community. The project will build on the far-reaching expertise of its current and future partners. . . .

Integrated library systems, composed of relational databases and the application software to support them, are used to track materials within library collections, from ordering and paying for them to loaning them to library patrons. Because large academic research libraries are responsible for managing and providing access to millions of items, the need to be more proactive in software development is especially acute in light of the workflow needed to manage and curate a varied digital collection that includes leased electronic journal content and owned special collections. . . .

Kuali OLE partners include Indiana University (lead); Florida Consortium (University of Florida representing Florida International University, Florida State University, New College of Florida, Rollins College, University of Central Florida, University of Miami, University of South Florida, the Florida Center for Library Automation); Lehigh University; Triangle Research Libraries Network, represented by Duke University and North Carolina State University; University of Chicago; University of Maryland; University of Michigan; and the University of Pennsylvania.

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Open Access News: Revised Google Book settlement: what it means for OA

noreply@blogger.com (Gavin Baker) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:21:48 +0000

Google and the plaintiffs in the Google Book settlement released their revised settlement on November 13; see the proposed Supplemental Notice. The change most directly related to OA is this:

... The Amended Settlement provides that the Registry will facilitate Rightsholders’ wishes to allow their works to be made available through alternative licenses for Consumer Purchase, including through a Creative Commons license. ... The Amended Settlement also clarifies that Rightsholders are free to set the Consumer Purchase price of their Books at zero. ...

Some other changes also may be of interest:

Rightsholders can negotiate with Google to change the restrictions on their included works (e.g. to remove the DRM).
The Book Rights Registry can allow more than one free terminal per public library building.

Also of note is that many international books will be excluded. Whereas the original settlement included any books under copyright in the U.S. (effectively, any book published anywhere in the world), the amended settlement only includes books published in the U.S., UK, Canada or Australia, or registered with the U.S. Copyright Office.

The revised settlement also establishes an independent fiduciary agent to manage unclaimed works (where no rightsholder has stepped forward to manage the options under the settlement and claim payments). The Unclaimed Works Fiduciary is meant to act as a proxy for absentee rightsholders, but it doesn't have all the abilities of an actual rightsholder. Instead, the revised settlement enumerates some specific abilities for the Unclaimed Works Fiduciary, and provides that the fiduciary also can act "otherwise as the Board of Directors of the Registry deems appropriate".

The abilities enumerated seem to not include the options to set the price at zero, apply a CC license, or remove DRM restrictions. In other words, the Unclaimed Works Fiduciary apparently does not have the ability to make orphan works OA without the agreement of the Registry board (which is composed of publisher and author representatives). I've put in a question to the parties' press contacts to confirm or clarify this.

The plaintiffs' memo proposes a 45-day period for class members to respond, with an extra week for the U.S. Department of Justice, and the final fairness hearing two weeks subsequent. (That schedule would start after the judge grants preliminary approval to the revised settlement, which hasn't happened yet.)

See also: For more information, including the many aspects to the amended settlement which aren't discussed here, see the oa.google.settlement tag on the Open Access Tracking Project.

D-Lib Magazine: Service-Oriented Models for Educational Resource Federations