Here’s the video of my plenary talk “The Ivory Tower and the Open Web,” given at the Coalition for Networked Information meeting in Washington in December, 2010. A general description of the talk: The web is now over twenty years old, and there is no doubt that the academy has taken advantage of its tremendous […]
Category Archives: Audience
The Social Contract of Scholarly Publishing
When Roy Rosenzweig and I finished writing a full draft of our book Digital History, we sat down at a table and looked at the stack of printouts. “So, what now?” I said to Roy naively. “Couldn’t we just publish what we have on the web with the click of a button? What value does […]
The Pirate Problem
Last summer, a few blocks from my house, a new pub opened. Normally this would not be worth noting, except for the fact that this bar is staffed completely by pirates, with eye patches, swords, and even the occasional bird on the shoulder. These are not real pirates, of course, but modern men and women […]
Measuring the Audience of a Digital Humanities Project
Karen Motylewski of the Institute of Museum and Library Services recently pressed an audience of recent IMLS grantees to think about how they might measure the success of their digital projects. As she was well aware, academics often bristle at the quantitative measurement of the audience for their websites because it smacks of commercialism. Also, […]
The Final Four’s Impact on Websites
I work at George Mason University. Unless you live off the grid (and if so, how are you reading this?), you’ve probably heard that our basketball team is in the Final Four this weekend. There has been a great deal of talk around campus about the impact this astonishing feat will have on the university’s […]
Search Engine Optimization for Smarties
A Google search for “Sputnik” gives you an authoritative site from NASA in the top ten search results, but also a web page from the skydiver and ballroom-dancing enthusiast Michael Wright. This wildly democratic mix of sources perennially leads some educators to wring their hands about the state of knowledge, as yet another op-ed piece […]
First Impressions of Amazon Connect
Having already succumbed to the siren’s song that prodded me narcissistically to create a blog, I had very little resistance left when Amazon.com emailed me to ask if I might like to join the beta of program that allows authors to reach potential buyers and existing owners of their books by writing blog-like posts. Called […]
