In Alan Jacobs’s important new book How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds, he locates thought within our social context and all of the complexities that situation involves: our desire to fit into our current group or an aspirational in-group, our repulsion from other groups, our use of a communal (but […]
Category Archives: Books
What’s the Matter with Ebooks: An Update
In an earlier post I speculated about the plateau in ebook adoption. According to recent statistics from publishers we are now actually seeing a decline in ebook sales after a period of growth (and then the leveling off that I discussed before). Here’s my guess about what’s going on—an educated guess, supported by what I’m […]
What’s the Matter with Ebooks?
[As you may have noticed, I haven’t posted to this blog for over a year. I’ve been extraordinarily busy with my new job. But I’m going to make a small effort to reinvigorate this space, adding my thoughts on evolving issues that I’d like to explore without those thoughts being improperly attributed to the Digital Public Library […]
A Conversation with Data: Prospecting Victorian Words and Ideas
[An open access, pre-print version of a paper by Fred Gibbs and myself for the Autumn 2011 volume of Victorian Studies. For the final version, please see Victorian Studies at Project MUSE.] Introduction “Literature is an artificial universe,” author Kathryn Schulz recently declared in the New York Times Book Review, “and the written word, […]
Reading and Believing
Rather than focusing on a new technology or website in our year-end review on the Digital Campus podcast, I chose reading as the big story of 2011. Surely 2011 was the year that digital reading came of age, with iPad and Kindle sales skyrocketing, apps for reading flourishing, and sites for finding high-quality long-form writing proliferating. […]
Some Thoughts on the Hacking the Academy Process and Model
I’m delighted that the edited version of Hacking the Academy is now available on the University of Michigan’s DigitalCultureBooks site. Here are some of my quick thoughts on the process of putting the book together. (For more, please read the preface Tom Scheinfeldt and I wrote.) 1) Be careful what you wish for. Although we […]
Using WordPress as a Book-Writing Platform
I’ve had a few people ask about the writing environment I’m using for The Ivory Tower and the Open Web (introduction posted a couple of days ago). I’m writing the book entirely in WordPress, which really has matured into a terrific authoring platform. Some notes: 1) The addition of the TinyMCE WYSIWYG text-editing tools made […]
The Ivory Tower and the Open Web: Introduction: Burritos, Browsers, and Books [Draft]
[A draft of the introduction to my forthcoming book, The Ivory Tower and the Open Web, which looks at academic resistance to the modes and genres of the web, and how those modes and genres might actually reinvigorate the academy. I’ll be posting drafts of chapters as well for open comment and criticism.] In the […]
Initial Thoughts on the Google Books Ngram Viewer and Datasets
First and foremost, you have to be the most jaded or cynical scholar not to be excited by the release of the Google Books Ngram Viewer and (perhaps even more exciting for the geeks among us) the associated datasets. In the same way that the main Google Books site has introduced many scholars to the […]
New York Times Covers Victorian Books Project
Patricia Cohen of the New York Times has been working on an excellent series on digital humanities, and her second article focuses on our text mining work on Victorian books, which was directly enabled by a grant from Google and more broadly enabled by a previous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to […]
