In our second podcast, we revisit the debate over Wikipedia, including hearing from Mills about how Cambodians are using it (and how to find a WiFi signal in the Cambodian jungle). Our feature story explores whether and how YouTube is useful in the classroom.
2007 Vectors Summer Fellowships
Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular has announced its fourth annual summer fellowship program to take place in June 2007 at USC. They are seeking proposals for projects related to “reading” and “noise.” About Vectors: “Vectors publishes work which need necessarily exist online, ranging from archival to experimental projects.”
2007 Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has launched the nominating process for the second annual Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC). The awards, given by tech luminaries such as Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf, honor not-for-profit organizations for leadership in the collaborative development of open source software tools with particular application to higher education and not-for-profit activities.
Digital Campus Podcast Launches
I’m excited to announce the launch of Digital Campus, a new podcast that explores how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. In the inaugural podcast our feature story covers the controversy over whether Wikipedia is a useful or problematic resource for students. In the news roundup, we wonder if the launch of Windows Vista has any significance, ponder the rise of Google Docs as an alternative to Word, and cover recent stories about Blackboard‘s patents and their social bookmarking site, Scholar.com. And at the end of the podcast, we share links to the best wiki software and sites on digital maps and books.
I share the virtual roundtable with Mills Kelly and Tom Scheinfeldt, and we’ll be sure to draw from the vast talent at the Center for History and New Media and other digitally savvy domains in subsequent episodes.
Interested? Take a quick listen, or go ahead and subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or your favorite podcatcher.
It’s About Russia
One of my favorite Woody Allen quips from his tragically short period as a stand-up comic is the punch line to his hyperbolic story about taking a speed-reading course and then digesting all of War and Peace in twenty minutes. The audience begins to giggle at the silliness of reading Tolstoy’s massive tome in a brief sitting. Allen then kills them with his summary of the book: “It’s about Russia.” The joke came to mind recently as I read the self-congratulatory blog post by IBM’s Many Eyes visualization project, applauding their first month on the web. (And I’m feeling a little embarrassed by my post on the one-year anniversary of this blog.) The Many Eyes researchers point to successes such as this groundbreaking visualization of the New Testament:
News flash: Jesus is a big deal in the New Testament. Even exploring the “network” of figures who are “mentioned together” (ostensibly the point of this visualization) doesn’t provide the kind of insight that even a first-year student in theology could provide over coffee. I have been slow to appreciate the power of textual visualization—in large part because I’ve seen far too many visualizations like this one, that merely use computational methods to reveal the obvious in fancy ways.
I’ve been doing some research on visualizations of texts recently for my next book (on digital scholarship), and trying to get over this aversion to visualizations. But when I see visualizations like this one, the lesson is clear: Make sure your visualizations expose something new, hidden, non-obvious.
Because War and Peace isn’t about Russia.
Digital Humanities Initiative Email Updates
Now you can receive email updates from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Digital Humanities Initiative, including information about grants, programs, issues, and events.
NINES Officially Launches
As someone keenly interested in the possibilities of digital scholarship as well as nineteenth-century British and American intellectual history, I’m delighted to hear of the official launch of NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship), which allows researchers to search, organize, and annotate over 60,000 texts and images. A screencast of how to use Collex, their powerful web application, would be helpful for new users.
Promotion and Tenure Guidelines for New Media
The University of Maine’s New Media Department summarizes several recent reports on how to assess new media projects as part of promotion and tenure in academia. The summary identifies nine “recognition measures” as alternatives to the standard peer-review process, which is often not possible for new media projects.
Job Openings at CHNM
Once again we’re hiring at the Center for History and New Media. We are particularly interested in people with energy and creativity who would enjoy spending a year or more working with the team at CHNM. Experience with digital media is a plus but not a requirement. In the past, these positions have been excellent springboards to tenure-track teaching jobs, graduate work in the humanities, and other exciting opportunities within and outside of academia.
“The Object of History” Site Launches
Thanks to the hard work of my colleagues at the Center for History and New Media, led by Sharon Leon, you can now go behind the scenes with the curators of the National Museum of American History. This month the discussion begins with the famous Greensboro Woolworth’s lunch counter and the origins of the Civil Rights movement. Each month will highlight a new object and its corresponding context, delivered in rich multimedia and with the opportunity to chat with the curators themselves.
