From Cathy Davidson at HASTAC:
As part of its $50 million initiative on Digital Media and Learning initiative launched last year (www.digitallearning.macfound.org), the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has just announced support for a $2 million open Digital Media and Learning Competition, with entries due on October 15, 2007. All details about the competition and application requirements can be found at www.dmlcompetition.net. Awards will be made in two categories, Innovation Awards and Knowledge-Networking Awards. Innovation Awards ($100,000 and $250,000) will support learning pioneers, entrepreneurs, and builders of new digital learning environments for formal and informal learning. Knowledge-Networking Awards ($30,000-75,000) will support communicators in connecting, mobilizing, circulating or translating new ideas around digital media and learning. Primary applicants must be U.S. citizens or residents, however other members of a research team need not meet this requirement.
The competition is administered by HASTAC (“haystack”—Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory), an innovative “Web 2.0” virtual institution of more than eighty institutes, centers, and community organizations anchored at the University of California Humanities Research Institute and the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University. Anyone can join the HASTAC network by registering on the website (www.hastac.org) and contributing content and ideas, including podcasts, blogs, or collaborative opportunities.
Author Archives: ben vershbow
google news adds an interesting (and risky) editorial layer
Starting this week, Google News will publish comments alongside linked stories from “a special subset of readers: those people or organizations who were actual participants in the story in question.”
John Murrell and Steve Rubel have good analyses of why moving beyond pure aggregation is a risky move for Google, whose relationship with news content owners is already tense to say the least.
national archives/amazon agreement released
From Rick Prelinger:
In a rapid FOIA response, NARA has released the partnership agreement between them and Amazon’s CustomFlix (now CreateSpace) subsidiary. It’s downloadable here (I’m responsible for the poorly derived PDF). I’ll be reading and analyzing it soon.
cornell joins google book search
…offering up to 500,000 items for digitization. From the Cornell library site:
Cornell is the 27th institution to join the Google Book Search Library Project, which digitizes books from major libraries and makes it possible for Internet users to search their collections online. Over the next six years, Cornell will provide Google with public domain and copyrighted holdings from its collections. If a work has no copyright restrictions, the full text will be available for online viewing. For books protected by copyright, users will just get the basic background (such as the book’s title and the author’s name), at most a few lines of text related to their search and information about where they can buy or borrow a book. Cornell University Library will work with Google to choose materials that complement the contributions of the project’s other partners. In addition to making the materials available through its online search service, Google will also provide Cornell with a digital copy of all the materials scanned, which will eventually be incorporated into the university’s own digital library.
amazon on demand
CustomFlix, Amazon’s on-demand DVD distribution service, has just been rebranded as CreateSpace, and will now serve up self-published media of all types. Getting a title into the system is free and relatively simple. Books must be a minimum of 24 pages and have to be submitted as a PDF. Seven trim sizes are available for color interiors, five for black and white. Each title automatically receives an ISBN and is displayed to shoppers as “in stock,” available for shipping immediately. You set the list price on your media, Amazon sets the selling price. CreateSpace is listed as the publisher of the book unless you provide your own ISBN, in which case you can appear under your own imprint.
CreateSpace titles apparently are eligible for the SearchInside browsing program (I wonder what the threshhold, or price, for entry is). I assume they will also be open for reader reviews, ratings and such. One thing I’d be very curious to know, however, is whether, or to what extent, CreateSpace titles will get factored into the social filtering and recommendation engines that power Amazon’s browsing experience. In some ways, that would be the best indicator of how much this move will blur the lines – ?in the perceptions of readers – ?between traditional publishing and the new, less authoritative POD channels.
Obviously, this presents a major challenge to other on-demand services like iUniverse, Xlibris and Lulu. It will be interesting to observe how the publishing cultures on these sites will differ. Lulu.com seems to hold the most potential for the emergence of a new ecosystem of independent imprints and publishing storefronts, with the Lulu brand receding into a more infrastructural role. iUniverse and Xlibris still feel more like good old-fashioned vanity presses. Amazon theoretically offers good exposure for self-published authors, but again, as I queried above w/r/t social filtering, will CreateSpace titles be ghetto-ized in an Amazon sub-space or fully integrated into the world of books?
commentpress 1.2
commentpress classics fantasy football
Following last week’s discussions on a hypothetical digital Ulysses (1, 2), numerous ideas for electronic dream editions have been coming out of the woodwork, including this proposal from our good friend John Holbo of The Valve. John’s agreed to let us repost it here – ?I think this could be a terrific CommentPress collab.
Here’s an idea for you: Ulysses, as I am sure you know, may be a problematic text for copyright reasons (sad to say, but it’s true.)
I have a counter-proposal: Frankenstein. (Really a supplementary proposal. I’m not counter the other thing, by any means.)
Advantage: two editions, 1818, 1831. Substantially different. So there is some notation to be done.
Advantage: I’ve already painstakingly made a clean electronic edition of the 1831 edition by taking the substantially screwed up Project Gutenberg edition (really it’s a mess) and copy editing it up with respect to an old, but respectable public domain edition. Took me a long time to do the cleaning, dozens of hours. I was picking up typos for weeks. I am planning to just let it go free one way or the other. It currently exists as a set of MS-Word files. Maybe someone would like to take it and do up a nice CommentPress edition.
We’re thinking of doing a book event at the Valve, discussing the novel’s debated status as the first SF novel. I thought we could call it: The Structure of Mad Scientific Revolutions. That could create a mass of scholarly matter, albeit in the form of essays rather than stuff that would appropriately be displayed side-by-side with the text.
I have proposed to Parlor Press doing a paper edition, under CC release… Obviously that would be consistent with doing something a bit more ambitious. One thing I thought would be fun: try to encourage artists to contribute illustrations. Collect a whole bunch of illustrations of Frankenstein and have that as a possible display, side by side with the text.
Also, try to get SF authors to contribute in some way. What do they think of the original SF novel? Make it not just academic that way.
The suggestion isn’t to scuttle Ulysses but to do something else in addition. Since I’ve already made a basic text, which I am happy to hand over for free, it wouldn’t be hard to get something up and running. Also, it would be an attractive thing for the Institute to have: the web’s only decent online edition of the 1831 edition of Frankenstein. (Also there must be some nice metaphor to be had about how these collaborative projects are sort of Frankenstein monsters themselves. Call it the Frankenstein Project. Something.)
Cheers,
JH
Sebastian Mary replied with another idea:
…if I were playing Commentpress Classics fantasy football the title I’d like to see networked would be Pope’s Dunciad. Its subject-matter is the step change in volume of printed matter appearing as a result of the early C18 print boom, and the writer’s concern about the onset of an age of ‘dullness’ brought about by the surge in hack writing: pretty much the same anxiety as that articulated by print publishers about digital text.
Formally, it’d work wonderfully, as it’s a very lateral text anyway: the later edition is elaborately footnoted – and because of the very specific references to historical places and people many of these themselves need explicatory footnotes.
There’s a kind-of-hypertext version here: http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/dunciad4.html#8 – I can’t help daydreaming about what it’d be like if you it was in Commentpress so that you could add to each footnote, sprout new arguments, proliferate the text to infinity. Perhaps I just like the ironies in all this, but I think it would be beautiful…
M
The thread is open so please feel encouraged to float your own proposals, not just for CommentPress-based projects but for anything you can imagine being done with digital networked forms.
audiovisual heritage double play
Two major preservation and access initiatives just reported by Peter Brantley over at O’Reilly Radar (1 and 2):
1. Reframe (set to launch in September ’07)
The Reframe project is a new initiative of Renew Media in partnership with Amazon and with major support from the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which promises to offer exciting solutions for the dissemination of important media arts and the preservation and accessibility of our visual heritage.
The Reframe project will help connect audiences of independent media to a robust collection of media arts via an integrated, resourceful website. Reframe will aggregate content from individual filmmakers, broadcasters, distributors, public media resources, archives, libraries and other sources of independent and alternative media. Serving as a both an aggregator of content and a powerful marketing tool, Reframe enables content-holders to digitize, disseminate and make available their content to a vast potential audience via a powerful online resource.
Renew Media will create a specialized Reframe website, which will interact with the Amazon storefront, to assist institutions (universities, libraries or museums) and consumers of niche content in browsing, finding, purchasing or renting Reframe content. Reframe website visitors will find it easy to locate relevant content through a rich menu of search and retrieval tools, including conventional search, recommender systems, social networking tools and curated lists. Reframe will allow individual viewers to rate and discuss the films they have seen and to sort titles according to their popularity among users with similar interests.
2. Library of Congress awards to preserve digitized and born-digital works
The Library of Congress, through its National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), today announced eight partnerships as part of its new Preserving Creative America initiative to address the long-term preservation of creative content in digital form. These partners will target preservation issues across a broad range of creative works, including digital photographs, cartoons, motion pictures, sound recordings and even video games. The work will be conducted by a combination of industry trade associations, private sector companies and nonprofits, as well as cultural heritage institutions.
Several of the projects will involve developing standardized approaches to content formats and metadata (the information that makes electronic content discoverable by search engines), which are expected to increase greatly the chances that the digital content of today will survive to become America’s cultural patrimony tomorrow. Although many of the creative content industries have begun to look seriously at what will be needed to sustain digital content over time, the $2.15 million being awarded to the Preserving Creative America projects will provide added impetus for collaborations within and across industries, as well as with libraries and archives.
Partners include the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the American Society of Media Photographers, ARTstor and others. Go here and scroll down part way to see the full list.
One project that caught my and Peter’s eye is an effort by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to address a particularly vexing problem: how to preserve virtual environments and other complex interactive media:
Interactive media are highly complex and at high risk for loss as technologies rapidly become obsolete. The Preserving Virtual Worlds project will explore methods for preserving digital games and interactive fiction. Major activities will include developing basic standards for metadata and content representation and conducting a series of archiving case studies for early video games, electronic literature and Second Life, an interactive multiplayer game. Second Life content participants include Life to the Second Power, Democracy Island and the International Spaceflight Museum. Partners: University of Maryland, Stanford University, Rochester Institute of Technology and Linden Lab.
privatizing public goods (our tax dollars at work)
The National Archives is at it again. After announcing in January its exclusive agreement with Footnote.com to digitize and offer priced access to millions of public domain historical records, NARA (National Archives and Records Administration) has now inked a deal with Amazon to distribute significant parts of its vast archival films collection commercially on DVD and online.
As reported by the Cumberland Times News:
The arrangement allows Amazon – and a subsidiary, CustomFlix Labs Inc. – to copy National Archives films and video onto DVDs, and sell them to the public via the Internet.
The Archives will initially make available its collection of Universal Newsreels, dating from 1920 to 1967. Thousands of other public-domain and government films will be made available later.
Included in the initial offerings are events as diverse as the famous 1959 “Kitchen Debate” between then-Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, and footage of a youthful Fidel Castro after the communist revolution in Cuba. Newsreels that will become available later include coverage of the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the end of World War II, and the royal wedding of Princess Margaret.
National Archives officials said the arrangement will greatly expand the availability of the collection. Previously, such films could only be viewed and recorded at the Archives facility in College Park.
No doubt NARA should doing everything in its power to digitize and increase access to its vaults, but locking materials down through commercial partnerships is no way to run a public trust. In a more commendable move, NARA put up a draft of another digitization/distribution agreement it has in the works, this one with the Genealogical Society of Utah (GSU), and they’ve even opened it up to public comment. They ought to do the same with the Amazon deal, and while they’re at it, offer less antiquated mechanisms for the public to make their voices heard. As it stands, comments on the GSU draft can be submitted in the following ways:
* regulations.gov
* fax
* postal mail
* hand delivery or courier
Hey, why not use CommentPress?
ithaka report on scholarly publishing
From a first skim and browsing of initial responses, the new report from the non-profit scholarly technologies research group Ithaka, “University Publishing in a Digital Age,” seems like a breath of fresh air. The Institute was one of the many stops along the way for the Ithaka team, which included the brilliant Laura Brown, former director of Oxford University Press in the States, and we’re glad to see Gamer Theory is referenced as an important experiment with the monograph form.
A good summary of the report and a roundup of notable reactions (all positive) in the academic community is up on Inside Higher Ed. Recommendations center around better coordination among presses on combining services, tools and infrastructure for digital scholarship. They also advocate closer integration of presses with the infrastructure and scholarly life of their host universities, especially the library systems, who have much to offer in the area of digital communications. This is something we’ve argued for a long time and it’s encouraging to see this put forth in what will no doubt be an influential document in the field.
One area that, from my initial reading, is not siginificatnly dealt with is the evolution of scholarly authority (peer review, institutional warrants etc.) and the emergence of alternative models for its production. Kathleen Fitzpatrick ponders this on the MediaCommons blog:
The report calls universities to task for their failures to recognize the ways that digital modes of communication are reshaping the ways that scholarly communication takes place, resulting in, as they say, “a scholarly publishing industry that many in the university community find to be increasingly out of step with the important values of the academy.”
Perhaps I’ll find this when I read the full report, but it seems to me that the inverse is perversely true as well, that the stated “important values of the academy” -? those that have us clinging to established models of authority as embodied in traditional publishing structures -? are increasingly out of step with the ways scholarly communication actually takes place today, and the new modes of authority that the digital makes possible. This is the gap that MediaCommons hopes to bridge, not just updating the scholarly publishing industry, but updating the ways that academic assessments of authority are conducted.