Worth Reading Recently

ThatCamp Philadelphia 2014: How Can The Digital Humanities Inform The Work Of Scholarly Communication?

Janine Utell had proposed this session, but she was unable to attend so I served as moderator in her place.

  • DHNow http://digitalhumanitiesnow.org/

  • Faculty need to publish in peer reviewed journals for tenure

    • This is weird to say because it implies that open access journals are not peer reviewed. This is propaganda coming from somewhere and I am troubled every time I hear it.

  • Copyright hurdles on campus

  • Do you have a data management plan?

  • Differences between teaching schools and research schools

  • Haystack is helpful source for DH stuff

  • Funding opportunities can be opened up via the digital humanities and open access

  • The R1/University experience generally feels like a different universe from the one I live in that I want nothing to do with.

    • The idea of paying $1,000 to make an article open access is one of the most offensive ideas I have ever encountered.

    • What about class issues and working with various populations if there is a need for cash to access information?

    • That is elitist universities and publishers declaring war on the lower classes access to information.

ThatCamp Philadelphia: Small Scale Publications & Digital Editions

The Stockton family ran a number of sessions at ThatCamp Philadelphia, including Deb Gussman’s session on small scale publications and digital editions.

  • Gussman is doing a digital edition of the works of Catharine Maria Sedgwick.
  • Deb’s steps of a digital project: Strategy and Approach, Scope, Content, Design, Development, Testing, Support.
  • Collaboration is very important. Need to find others who have skills you don’t have.
  • There are no guarantees that apps, websites, etc will work in a year.
  • I suggested the use of emulators ala what is done in modern times with classic interactive fiction.
  • Deciding on what app/website/cms to use can often come from other colleagues/friends.
  • I brought up the work of Cory Doctorow and how, by releasing his work under a Creative Commons license, readers can create versions of his works for different platforms.
  • It is helpful to be familiar with remix culture in general.
  • A great idea from John Theibault: in grant applications, include money for development of emulators for later editions when platforms become obsolete.
  • Creative Commons licensing allows others to care more about the preservation of your work than you do.
  • A lot of Gussman’s work with Sedgwick is coming from Google Books.
  • Theibault’s students digitized Philadelphia’s directories.
  • Back in 2003, I worked on the digitization of the American Weekly Mercury in one of Tom Kinsella’s classes.

Deb leading the discussion.

Adeline Koh, John Thebault, and Rebecca Goldman listen to the discussion.

Under Construction

I spent some time tonight moving things around.  I think things look a lot better now. I got a new, nicer looking, Creative Commons license and also added a tag cloud. I seem to have broken my Flickr link however; I will take a look again tomorrow and see if I can fix it.

Second Life Open Source

I am really excited about Second Life becoming open source.  Boing Boing puts it best:

Second Life is distinct because it allows in-game creators of objects to “own” them, sell copies of them, give them away, and license them under Creative Commons. Most other worlds require that you assign all your copyright to the game’s corporate owners — and prevent you from doing some kinds of creative stuff to avoid copyright hassles (musicians in Star Wars Galaxies could only perform compositions provided by Sony, for example).

But there’s a fly in the ointment — it’s not very meaningful to amass in-game wealth if your ability to use it is contingent on your ongoing good relations with a single company. What good is your wonderful Second Life real-estate, architecture, gadgets and wardrobe if Linden Labs can throw you out at any time? It’s like amassing Soviet-era rubles — you could only spend them in Russia.

But by opening up the source code for Second Life, Linden is inviting a competitive marketplace for Second Life hosters. Indeed, they describe a “Second Life grid” of multiple Second Life hosters who interconnect — the way that today’s Web consists of a single Web with millions of servers that are all linked together by their users.

O’Reilly Radar has more information about the actual source code.