For next week's discussion I think we can concentrate our attention on the social networking of the still and video image on two sites, Flickr and YouTube. For Flickr, the Open Source podcast discussion will be central, so please give it a close listen and spend some time at Flickr (if you have the time and inclination to dig deeper, check out the comments posted on the Photography 2.0 podcast site as well). I’m particularly interested in the social/intellectual networking that develops there around groups. Try joining a few and look at the discussions as well as some of the posted images. For example, I’ve joined and am going to try to monitor the following groups (click on links to access groups):
Hardcore Street Photography
Barcelona Street Art
Graffiti Archaeology
Art & Theory Nobs
Aesthetics of Failure
Vanishing Beauty
Baudrillard's Way
There have been lots of developments at YouTube over the last few weeks. In addition to the assigned articles from the syllabus for this week, you should also take a look at a couple of articles on the recent suit Viacom has filed against YouTube: "Talking Business: Awaiting a Compromise on YouTube" (posted in syllabus material for this week), and "Viacom's Full-Court Press for Online Ads," both at The New York Times. In light of these developments, we'll want to specualte about where YouTube is headed (Is the heyday of video free-for-all over? Is the site going to be commodified and appropriated by traditionally dominant mega-entertainment groups?). See also "News Corp. and NBC in Web Deal" for another dimension of potential changes. You might also take a look at how MTV is contemplating the social-networking of TV shows as described in this article (sound interesting, or a total waste of time?).
Then, of course, there's the appearance of Apple TV, which is linked to iTunes. For an overview of this potentially revolutionary (or not?) device, see David Pogue's overview of how it works and what it might do.
All of this, plus some discussion of the videos we can find on the sites linked to the menu on the right, "Online Video Links," ought to keep us plenty busy.
ALERT ON INTERNET RADIO: On a totally unrelated note I want to sing the praises of Pandora Internet Radio. This site allows you to custom build as many radio stations as you like utilizing the Music Genome Project. You create a station by "seeding it" with some music you like and then it sets about "learning" more music that goes with it. The radio plays in the background on your computer, but if you plug your computer into a speaker system it plays through your stereo. I've been editing my Tex/Mex station while writing this blog entry. Talk about multi-tasking. And you can share your stations with others. Let me know if you want me to send one your way.
Friday, March 30, 2007
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
MLA Report on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion
As a follow-up to last night's discussion about the future role digital and multimedia publication might play in our profession, I want to call your attention to the new MLA Report on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure. The Executive Summary report is troubled by "the state of evaluation for digital scholarship, now an extensively used resource for scholars across the humanities: 40.8% of departments in doctorate-granting institutions report no experience evaluating refereed articles in electronic format, and 65.7% report no experience evaluating monographs in electronic format." The Executive Summary goes on to recommend that "the profession as a whole should develop a more capacious conception of scholarship by rethinking the dominance of the monograph, promoting the scholarly essay, establishing multiple pathways to tenure, and using scholarly portfolios," and, "Departments and institutions should recognize the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media, whether by individuals or in collaboration, and create procedures for evaluating these forms of scholarship." Those writing the report clearly understand that the age of networked scholarship is upon us, and they are troubled by the inattention of most departments to the changes we've been discussing, and the fact that our profession has yet to start sorting out how to "count" digital publication. The full report is available on the MLA website
Networked Publics Book Introduction
Mimi Ito has just posted a draft of the Introduction to the Networked Publics book we read earlier in the semester (i.e. the "Place," "Culture" and "Politics" essays). You can download it in .pdf format at her website.
Monday, March 26, 2007
Networked Scholarship and the Social Life of Books
I don't know about you, but I’ve found the readings for Tuesday night to be particularly exciting. Of all the material we’ve studied so far, this bundle of articles and essays deals most specifically with the impact of networked public culture on the academic world in which we live and work. The transformations in the production, review, distribution and consumption of academic scholarship envisioned in these articles is rather breathtaking, but at the same time they raise a set of vexing issues and sometimes traffic in rather questionable assumptions. Following are a set of questions meant to focus our discussion both on the exciting possibilities conjured up in these essays and some of the key issues they confront us with.
The first few articles I asked you to read provide background reporting on the work being done at the Institute for the Future of the Book. Some of this reading you’ve no doubt found repetitive, but it seems to me each short article contributes something interesting to the overall discussion, and, collectively, the articles provide us with a good sense of what the folks at the Institute are up to. The other articles focus more on a set of specific projects that try to make some of the general concepts concrete. These will be worth some particular attention. Here’s a list of questions or topics from the articles I think are worth our kicking around.
As always, feel free to start off the discussion with a posted comment ahead of our meeting.
From “The Future of Books”:
Is the book a “timeless piece of hardware” or a “device in need of regular upgrading” (and how comfortable are we with talking about books as “hardware” and “devices”)?
How attractive are “print-on-demand” machines like the “Espresso Book Machine” or Caravan Books? Are public access Napster or iTunes-like vendors the future of publishing?
What does it mean to talk about “the social life of books?” Is this a new way of thinking about books, or a way to adapt an old concept to new technologies? How socially networked do you want your books in general, and your academic books/articles in particular?
From “The Networked Book”:
This article shifts our attention from the problem of reading on screen to the advantages and pitfalls of “networked reading.” How important is this shift in focus? How interested are you in networked reading? Do you see it as something new, or as an extension of how we already read?
Vershbow (p.2) points out that when books are produced in networked social spaces “one notion that networked writers might have to give up is closure.” What does it mean to think of writing, peer-review, and publication as a single, fluid, open-ended, indeed, possibly never-ending process? Consider the following quote from p. 3 of “Publishing Trends: The Book as Place”: “What a revolutionary idea! A page or some other portion of a book is not complete unless the reader has commented on it. That means the author’s job is not only to write the book, but to engage the reader so completely that he or she joins the discussion. The reader is no longer anonymous and passive, but must step up and be counted, and the author has not successfully fulfilled his or her role unless that happens?” My question: why is this so cool?
From “The Social Life of Books”:
This article envisions the convergence of three technologies transforming the production of the book: scanning, searching, and open source wikis (p.2). Instead of thinking about Wikipedia, as we did last week, as a search tool, these people are thinking about Wikipedia as the model for a networked book. What are the possibilities and the problems here? How much sense does it make to even think about such productions as “books?” On this topic see also p. 3 of “Book 2.0.”
To what extent can the blog stand as an alternative to article and book publication (p.2, and this comes up in other articles as well)?
In the interview, Vershbow continually invokes environmental metaphors (“ecology,” “ecosystem,” “environmental,” etc.) in discussing open-source networked places. How applicable are these metaphors and how do they relate to our earlier discussion of the internet as a “place?”
Vershbow ends the discussion speculating about what kinds of books lend themselves to born-digital, networked status (“I am pretty certain,” he says, that “the main arena of intellectual discourse is moving away from print to networked, digital media”). Where do the humanities seem to fit in this shift? This question of course comes up in a number of the assigned pieces: to what extend does networked scholarship lend itself more to scientific than humanistic work? See, for example, p. 6 in “Book 2.0.”
From “Book 2.0”:
We should consider the questions raised by Ken Wissoker from Duke UP and others quoted on p. 7 who defend the current system. Do they make some good points, or are they just resisting the inevitable?
From “Publishing Trends: The Book as Place”:
A major issue running through many of these articles has to do with the role, shape, and future of peer review in an age of networked scholarship. This gets raised in the section here entitled “Peer Review on Steroids” (5-8) and is picked up in Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s essay, “On the Future of Academic Publishing, Peer Review, and Tenure Requirements,” as well as in “Toward the Creation of a New Scholarly Press” and “Rethinking Scholarly Publication.” How central is peer review to the work we do, and what do you think of the ways in which the authors of these articles try to re-envision and transform the process of peer review?
“On the Importance of the Collective in Electronic Publishing,” “On the Future of Academic Publishing, Peer Review, and Tenure Requirements,” “Toward the Creation of a New Scholarly Press,” and "Rethinking Scholarly Communication":
It seems to me that these three articles are worth particular attention because they’re about concrete projects aimed at transforming academic publication in a networked environment. Three of these are by Kathleen Fitzpatrick (and English Professor), and two of them have to do with the symposium on forming an electronic academic press held in April, 2006. These are worth some detailed discussion. The proposals for networked publishing in the essay "Rethinking Scholarly Communication” seem to pertain mainly to writing and publishing networked scientific scholarship, but we should be able to discuss how this apparatus can be adapted for the humanities.
The first few articles I asked you to read provide background reporting on the work being done at the Institute for the Future of the Book. Some of this reading you’ve no doubt found repetitive, but it seems to me each short article contributes something interesting to the overall discussion, and, collectively, the articles provide us with a good sense of what the folks at the Institute are up to. The other articles focus more on a set of specific projects that try to make some of the general concepts concrete. These will be worth some particular attention. Here’s a list of questions or topics from the articles I think are worth our kicking around.
As always, feel free to start off the discussion with a posted comment ahead of our meeting.
From “The Future of Books”:
Is the book a “timeless piece of hardware” or a “device in need of regular upgrading” (and how comfortable are we with talking about books as “hardware” and “devices”)?
How attractive are “print-on-demand” machines like the “Espresso Book Machine” or Caravan Books? Are public access Napster or iTunes-like vendors the future of publishing?
What does it mean to talk about “the social life of books?” Is this a new way of thinking about books, or a way to adapt an old concept to new technologies? How socially networked do you want your books in general, and your academic books/articles in particular?
From “The Networked Book”:
This article shifts our attention from the problem of reading on screen to the advantages and pitfalls of “networked reading.” How important is this shift in focus? How interested are you in networked reading? Do you see it as something new, or as an extension of how we already read?
Vershbow (p.2) points out that when books are produced in networked social spaces “one notion that networked writers might have to give up is closure.” What does it mean to think of writing, peer-review, and publication as a single, fluid, open-ended, indeed, possibly never-ending process? Consider the following quote from p. 3 of “Publishing Trends: The Book as Place”: “What a revolutionary idea! A page or some other portion of a book is not complete unless the reader has commented on it. That means the author’s job is not only to write the book, but to engage the reader so completely that he or she joins the discussion. The reader is no longer anonymous and passive, but must step up and be counted, and the author has not successfully fulfilled his or her role unless that happens?” My question: why is this so cool?
From “The Social Life of Books”:
This article envisions the convergence of three technologies transforming the production of the book: scanning, searching, and open source wikis (p.2). Instead of thinking about Wikipedia, as we did last week, as a search tool, these people are thinking about Wikipedia as the model for a networked book. What are the possibilities and the problems here? How much sense does it make to even think about such productions as “books?” On this topic see also p. 3 of “Book 2.0.”
To what extent can the blog stand as an alternative to article and book publication (p.2, and this comes up in other articles as well)?
In the interview, Vershbow continually invokes environmental metaphors (“ecology,” “ecosystem,” “environmental,” etc.) in discussing open-source networked places. How applicable are these metaphors and how do they relate to our earlier discussion of the internet as a “place?”
Vershbow ends the discussion speculating about what kinds of books lend themselves to born-digital, networked status (“I am pretty certain,” he says, that “the main arena of intellectual discourse is moving away from print to networked, digital media”). Where do the humanities seem to fit in this shift? This question of course comes up in a number of the assigned pieces: to what extend does networked scholarship lend itself more to scientific than humanistic work? See, for example, p. 6 in “Book 2.0.”
From “Book 2.0”:
We should consider the questions raised by Ken Wissoker from Duke UP and others quoted on p. 7 who defend the current system. Do they make some good points, or are they just resisting the inevitable?
From “Publishing Trends: The Book as Place”:
A major issue running through many of these articles has to do with the role, shape, and future of peer review in an age of networked scholarship. This gets raised in the section here entitled “Peer Review on Steroids” (5-8) and is picked up in Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s essay, “On the Future of Academic Publishing, Peer Review, and Tenure Requirements,” as well as in “Toward the Creation of a New Scholarly Press” and “Rethinking Scholarly Publication.” How central is peer review to the work we do, and what do you think of the ways in which the authors of these articles try to re-envision and transform the process of peer review?
“On the Importance of the Collective in Electronic Publishing,” “On the Future of Academic Publishing, Peer Review, and Tenure Requirements,” “Toward the Creation of a New Scholarly Press,” and "Rethinking Scholarly Communication":
It seems to me that these three articles are worth particular attention because they’re about concrete projects aimed at transforming academic publication in a networked environment. Three of these are by Kathleen Fitzpatrick (and English Professor), and two of them have to do with the symposium on forming an electronic academic press held in April, 2006. These are worth some detailed discussion. The proposals for networked publishing in the essay "Rethinking Scholarly Communication” seem to pertain mainly to writing and publishing networked scientific scholarship, but we should be able to discuss how this apparatus can be adapted for the humanities.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Cathy Davidson on Wikipedia
As a follow-up to last night's discussion of Wikipedia you might want to take a look at Cathy Davidson's short and positive piece about Wikipedia published recently in The Chronicle of Higher Education. It's called "We Can't Ignore the Influence of Digital Technologies" (Volume 53, Issue 29, Page B20). She compares the accuracy level of Wikipedia favorably to other encyclopedias (and even scholarly books and articles), and points out that unlike print media, Wikipedia articles can be very quickly corrected. But beyond this, she insists we not think of Wikipedia as an "encyclopedia" at all: "Wikipedia is not just an encyclopedia. It is a knowledge community, uniting anonymous readers all over the world who edit and correct grammar, style, interpretations, and facts. It is a community devoted to a common good — the life of the intellect. Isn't that what we educators want to model for our students?" She goes on to insist that rather than ban Wikipedia from college campuses (as was recently done at Middlebury College) we ought to "make studying what it does and does not do part of the research-and-methods portion of our courses." She argues that "instead of resorting to the 'Delete' button for new forms of collaborative knowledge made possible by the Internet" we ought to "make the practice of research in the digital age the object of study." Provocative stuff from an important American Studies critic at Duke University.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Hillary '1984'
In case you haven't seen it, here's the Apple/Hillary mashup video that's the YouTube scandal du jour. It ends with an obama.com reference, but his campaign has denied producing it.
Monday, March 19, 2007
Tomorrow Night on "Digital Textuality"
For the next couple of weeks we’ll be discussing digital textuality. This week’s readings are pretty general, focusing on some key projects of public interest involving the Google Print Project, online encyclopedias like Wikipedia and the newer Scholarpedia and Citizendium, and the digitalization of the OED. Next week we’ll be focusing more specifically on the impact of digital textuality on academic writing and publishing, exploring the future of the book and of the academic journal. I’ve added a bundle of links to key sites we’ll be discussing (see “Digital Textuality” in the right-hand menu). I’m trying to get a guest to join us for part of the evening, a good friend who is the editor of a major academic journal who can share with us some of her concerns about their digitalization.
Tomorrow night I’d like us to think about the future of online research in light of the developments discussed in the articles we’ve read. What does the Google Print project as discussed by Kevin Kelly suggest about the future of reading, research, and studies in the humanities? What are the possibilities—and the drawbacks—you see in the world of scanned and connected texts he conjures up? Let’s assume those guys in China succeed in scanning every printed text. Can literary studies then proceed without books? Will the “democratic” accessibility of every text outweigh the loss of the printed book? What are the practical, legal, and economic issues that have to be dealt with here? And what about what Kelly calls “the real magic” that will occur when “each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before” (pp. 3-4)? In what ways can you imagine this will transform the kind of research we do? How will that research adjust to the world of links and tags Kelly discusses (4-5)? If he’s right that someday books, and the words in them, will be deeply linked, so you can click on titles in bibliographies or footnotes to access the actual book or article that’s cited, where will the primary text leave off and the secondary text begin? Are we looking at another form of convergence in which the text and its criticism become a single, fluid, ever expanding entity? If books become “liquid” (p.5) in the way Kelly envisions what are the various academic applications you can imagine? And finally, what are the implications for academic work of the shift from the “hegemony of the copy” (p.6) which we might link to Benjamin’s age of mechanical reproduction, to the “value” of recall, annotation, personalization, editing, authenticating, display, marking, transferring, etc. Kelly associates with the post-copy age of links and tags (p.11, bottom)? Will search “change everything,” as he suggests in the final section, and if so, how?
Perhaps the scanning and linking of all books will create a virtual world that replaces the library, but for now we also need to think about the impact of wikis on research, so we’ll want to discuss a range of issues that come up in the articles on Wikipedia, Scholarpedia, and Citizendium (again, see the links to these sites on the blog). As teachers and researchers, how do we deal with Wikipedia? Are the more “scholarly,” “refereed” sites like Scholarpedia and Citizendium promising, or do you agree with the argument that they buy into elitism and spoil the “democratic” open-source nature of wikis? How can sites like Wikipedia sustain their open-source orientation and still be “reliable,” or is reliability here freighted with assumptions we ought to interrogate? You might check out this blog entry by Danah Boyd about Wikipedia. She’s always provocative. And finally, what’s to stop groups of scholars from creating their own, specialized wikis run by sets of scholar-constables?
Tomorrow night I’d like us to think about the future of online research in light of the developments discussed in the articles we’ve read. What does the Google Print project as discussed by Kevin Kelly suggest about the future of reading, research, and studies in the humanities? What are the possibilities—and the drawbacks—you see in the world of scanned and connected texts he conjures up? Let’s assume those guys in China succeed in scanning every printed text. Can literary studies then proceed without books? Will the “democratic” accessibility of every text outweigh the loss of the printed book? What are the practical, legal, and economic issues that have to be dealt with here? And what about what Kelly calls “the real magic” that will occur when “each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before” (pp. 3-4)? In what ways can you imagine this will transform the kind of research we do? How will that research adjust to the world of links and tags Kelly discusses (4-5)? If he’s right that someday books, and the words in them, will be deeply linked, so you can click on titles in bibliographies or footnotes to access the actual book or article that’s cited, where will the primary text leave off and the secondary text begin? Are we looking at another form of convergence in which the text and its criticism become a single, fluid, ever expanding entity? If books become “liquid” (p.5) in the way Kelly envisions what are the various academic applications you can imagine? And finally, what are the implications for academic work of the shift from the “hegemony of the copy” (p.6) which we might link to Benjamin’s age of mechanical reproduction, to the “value” of recall, annotation, personalization, editing, authenticating, display, marking, transferring, etc. Kelly associates with the post-copy age of links and tags (p.11, bottom)? Will search “change everything,” as he suggests in the final section, and if so, how?
Perhaps the scanning and linking of all books will create a virtual world that replaces the library, but for now we also need to think about the impact of wikis on research, so we’ll want to discuss a range of issues that come up in the articles on Wikipedia, Scholarpedia, and Citizendium (again, see the links to these sites on the blog). As teachers and researchers, how do we deal with Wikipedia? Are the more “scholarly,” “refereed” sites like Scholarpedia and Citizendium promising, or do you agree with the argument that they buy into elitism and spoil the “democratic” open-source nature of wikis? How can sites like Wikipedia sustain their open-source orientation and still be “reliable,” or is reliability here freighted with assumptions we ought to interrogate? You might check out this blog entry by Danah Boyd about Wikipedia. She’s always provocative. And finally, what’s to stop groups of scholars from creating their own, specialized wikis run by sets of scholar-constables?
Digital Video: "www.movies.now"
Just back from Barcelona and playing radical catch-up, but I see that Sunday's New York Times has a set of timely articles on the digital reproduction and distribution of films we'll certainly want to incorporate down the road in our unit on digital video. Reading them over quickly, I see that what's going on here in the world of video parallels a number of developments discussed in the digital textuality material we'll be discussing tomorrow night. A.O. Scott's article, "The Shape of Cinema, Transformed at the Click of a Mouse," for example, envisions a world in which every film, like every text, is always available 24/7 for viewing, distribution, mashing-up, etc. What he envisions is something like the Google print project applied to film, but he also discusses how the online distribution of film is going to make a lot more so-called "obscure" films available for viewing.
Manohla Dargis, in "The Revolution Will Be Downloaded (If You're Patient)", also discusses the emerging possibilities for the online distribution of independent films (once hardware and bandwith problems are solved). She talks about her experiences downloading some films and provides links to a number of emerging cinema sites (as does a third, companion article, "Little Films on Little Screens (But Both Seem Set to Grow"). She celebrates the portability digital technology provides (you can watch downloaded films on your laptop, desktop, phone, i-pod, etc.) and doesn't waste much time on nostalgia for the "big screen." There's a parallel here with the articles about digital textuality, of course, where die-hards worry about the fate of the book. Will people really read texts that aren't in book form? Will people really watch films that aren't on a big screen at the multiplex? How much pull will the old delivery systems have, or will portability trump our ingrained viewing/reading habits?
Manohla Dargis, in "The Revolution Will Be Downloaded (If You're Patient)", also discusses the emerging possibilities for the online distribution of independent films (once hardware and bandwith problems are solved). She talks about her experiences downloading some films and provides links to a number of emerging cinema sites (as does a third, companion article, "Little Films on Little Screens (But Both Seem Set to Grow"). She celebrates the portability digital technology provides (you can watch downloaded films on your laptop, desktop, phone, i-pod, etc.) and doesn't waste much time on nostalgia for the "big screen." There's a parallel here with the articles about digital textuality, of course, where die-hards worry about the fate of the book. Will people really read texts that aren't in book form? Will people really watch films that aren't on a big screen at the multiplex? How much pull will the old delivery systems have, or will portability trump our ingrained viewing/reading habits?
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