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From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi-weekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Fear itself. This is Digital Campus number 20 for the 30th of January 2008. Open for change. I'm Dan Cohen. And we're back for another episode of Digital Campus, our 20th episode. Thank you. Good. Good. And Mills Kelly and also seemingly someone rustling in there in the hay or something over there. Mills, are you with us? Yes, it's me. And I think it may have been me doing the rustling noise. I think I bumped my microphone into my shirt. Right. Right. Are you sanding something or using a belt sander? No, I have not. No tools. Okay. Mills Kelly, of course, from edwire.org. And I'm Dan Cohen from dancohen.org. And, of course, all of us here from George Mason University and the Center for History and New Media. And last podcast, just to catch up a little bit. As usual, we record about 48 hours before we master the audio and send it out over the airwaves. And So, of course, the day after we had our featured story on small, slim laptops that you can carry everywhere, of course, Steve Jobs shows up and does the right thing by confirming this trend for the digital campus team here and releasing the MacBook Air, the three-pound wafer-thin notebook from Apple, lacks a lot of things that the regular laptops have, including such standard things as an optical disk drive for CD-ROMs, DVDs, and an Ethernet port. I think you have to do it through the USB port that's there. Ultralight, Tom Mills, are you getting this? Is this add to our trend or at $1,800, is this something completely different than say the one laptop per child or some of the other notebooks that we mentioned that are dirt cheap and very small? I think it's, I guess, well, I have sort of two responses. One is that I think it's completely different. I mean I think it doesn't have really any of the same hallmarks that those do, low cost, Linux-based. And so I think it's a different thing. And also I guess – I mean, I sit with bated breath for the Macworld announcements. And in this case, you know, I guess we probably should have mentioned the air because everybody kind of knew it was coming out before it came out last time. But I was really pretty underwhelmed by this announcement. I guess my feeling is that, you know, I think there are some kind of interesting things about it, but my feeling basically is that Steve Jobs has gotten used to making all the big headlines in the tech world in the last couple of years with the iPhone and other things, and that they wanted the headline, World's Thinnest Laptop, out of Macworld, and they got it. But just for my money, I think, you know, I just don't see really what this adds to portability. I guess it's a little bit lighter than some other notebooks, although I feel like my MacBook Pro is plenty light. And really, I think portability is not so much about the thinness or the thickness of the laptop. It's really about the case dimensions and the size of the screen. And so I just don't see how a 13-inch notebook, no matter how thin it is, really helps me carry it any more easily. I guess I can fit a little bit more in my bag. I guess maybe it's a little less weight on my shoulder. But I just kind of don't get it. Maybe somebody can explain it to me. Mills, what was your reaction? I mean, my reaction, of course, is that clearly Steve Jobs has been listening to our podcast. But beyond that, I think that this is targeting a whole different audience. This is targeting the business traveler, which I used to be. And as somebody who used to travel four days a week, the fewer ounces you can lug around, the better. Now, the key is how well does it fit on the drop-down tray on an airplane? And I think it's a little big for that. And so I guess if they'd really been targeting the business traveler, they probably would have made the whole thing a little smaller so that it fits nicely on that drop-down tray because that's really going to be the market that's going to plunk down slightly under $2,000 for a nicer gadget. But I think for me, what I thought was really particularly interesting about it was that it doesn't have the optical drive in it, which means that Apple has decided that there's now enough software easily downloadable, there are enough applications like Google Docs or whatever running directly online that you don't need to go through that clunky process of buying a box with some CDs in it and loading them all into your computer and booting up all that software. Right. I think that's probably its significance for the long term. I mean, obviously, this is a very high-end laptop that probably won't be seen a lot on campuses, at least, you know, among students. But I think it points, you know, as often these early Apple releases do, they kind of point to the future. And I think that future is probably precisely what we've been discussing on the podcast, which is one of, you know, I was going to call it the thin client. In this case, quite accurately, physically thin, but then also the idea that, you know, maybe it doesn't necessarily have to have a big hard drive, a wired connection because everything's being done wireless. And it just assumes that you're using Google Docs or Zoho or something online or Gmail as indeed most students are. And so you can just, much like the GOS that Tom, you spoke about that I think comes with the EverX laptop. So it's using a kind of stripped down operating system and very small, I think in that case, only two gigabytes of storage. But it's just assuming that your storage is out there in the cloud on the network. And I assume we'll see more and more laptops like this, and I think just Steve Jobs is ahead of the curve, just a little bit too fancy, too big, as Tom, you pointed out. I think it brought out a lot of nostalgia for that 12-inch notebook that everyone here used to love so much. Yeah, I can't understand why they just didn't go and do a 12-inch MacBook Pro that weighed the same but maybe was a little bit thicker. Could fit better, as Mills says, on an airplane tray because I know my MacBook Pro, that is one of the pretty annoying things about it when you're traveling a lot. I don't know why they didn't either do that or what I'd really love is a kind of a bigger iPhone, like maybe the size of a paperback book that you could still stick in your jacket pocket and maybe that had Bluetooth so you could connect one of those cool little keyboard stand that you bought to it wirelessly and a wireless mouse and maybe it would have like a picture frame stand on the back so that if you had your keyboard, you had your mouse, you could prop it up, use it in the landscape mode and actually be carrying around a full computer with you in your jacket pocket. That's what I really would like. Maybe I'm just nostalgic for the Newton, but oh well. It will come back, yes. Well, the other thing that just we wanted to follow up on from last time is that I mentioned the publicdomainreprints.org site, which is an experimental non-commercial project to republish public domain works. And the way this work that I mentioned on the last podcast was that they're taking the books that have been scanned in both by Google and then also the Internet Archive and generally something called the Universal Library, basically the Open Content Alliance. So these are full-text books that have been scanned in, and they're often made available as PDFs. And so what this website does, and indeed I received a nice note from Yakov Shafronovich, who is the single person behind this. He's just written some code to basically connect up those giant databases and storehouses of these PDFs and scans, and he pushes them over to Lulu.com, and Lulu.com is a print-on-demand service. And then Lulu actually executes the order, sets up actually a page permanently for that work, and then prints out a book and sends it to you. So I went ahead and tried this out because I thought it was really interesting. |
And I got the book that is the centerpiece of my book, actually, on the history of Victorian math, and that's a book by George Boole called An Investigation of the Laws of Thought. And it's sort of the key text in the history of mathematical or symbolic logic. And it was really at the heart of my book, Equations from God. And I've never actually owned an original first edition, but now I have it in my hands here. It's a paperback. It cost me $14.99. And Tom Mills, it's really interesting actually to look at the book and see what happened in the process because I think there are still some hiccups, and I'm going to write to Yakov about some of these. But it's also pretty fascinating, and I think it's, you know, you can get together an amazing collection of, you know, first editions using this service. So I think it shows a lot of promise, except for the hiccups. So let's quickly get to them. The first thing is, is that when you order it, of course, as I said, it takes the PDF and moves it over to Lulu. And oftentimes, Lulu has no idea what to do with this book. So you get a URL for a book. So on Google, I went to Google Books, searched for Investigation of the Laws of Thought, found the first edition, which is 1854, and you cut and paste the URL on the Google Books page into a form over at the public domain reprints.org site. And it kind of thinks about it for a while, and it says, okay, I've got the text, and then you ask it to process it. And then what happens is you get a screen that says, well, this could take up to 72 hours. We're really busy right now. It actually only took a few hours for them to move it over to Lulu. And then I got a link saying my book was ready. I went to lulu.com. And there's now a page there for George Bull's Investigation of the Laws of Thought. And the problems began here. First of all, Lulu had no idea how to categorize it. So it put it actually in fiction, which is interesting. So clearly there's no way, there's no metadata. And really a lot of the problems have to do with metadata. There's no metadata, I guess, at the Google Books site, you know, saying this is nonfiction fiction or anything. Subject headings, nothing got passed along to Lulu. So Lulu just sort of sticks it, I guess, willy-nilly wherever it can find it. But still, $14.99, considering a first edition, will run you hundreds if not thousands of dollars. And there's not currently a good reprint of this available from, let's say, University Press. Not bad. So I went ahead and ordered this, and it said it could take a couple weeks. I actually got the whole thing in five days, processed, printed out, and sent to me. And the further problems began with the cover. And that is because, again, it's getting just the unprocessed or unexamined metadata from Google. And so the cover, which you guys have to see, it's in my office, it says, an investigation of the laws of thought, colon, on which are founded the dot, dot, dot. So what it's done there is it clearly took what was either the title of the page at Google, or it's got a long subtitle. And so it tried to squeeze the subtitle into the cover, but it didn't fit it, so there's just an ellipse. So that looks really quite strange. It got the author correct, and it actually says originally published in 1854 by Walton and Maberly, which is absolutely correct. On the back, it lists the price. And then I think this is a really nice touch that either Lulu or Yakov has done, which is that it says specifically on the back that this book is in the public domain and that you can download it and read it for free on Google Books, and it gives you the URL to go to for that. So it does do that. And, but again, you know, problems with the metadata, and the inside title page, you'd think, well, they could squeeze in the whole subtitle, but indeed, you would get the same thing where you've got the dot, dot, dot. Then there's a bunch of, you know, there's a page from Google that says, you know, this is the Google's digital copy of the book and, you know, you're okay to make non-commercial use of it. So it includes sort of the Google header as well as the Lulu header. From there, actually, it's not bad. They've got the really great coat of arms that is the gift of this book to, it says, bought with the gift of William Gray of Boston, Mass., class of 1829, March 19th, 1860. I assume that this is the Harvard copy of this book, unless I'm wrong. No, it is. It is, in fact, on the next page. They've got the Harvard stamp for Harvard College and then the regular title page from the scan, which does have everything correct. So it's, you know, it's, and then after that, you get what looks like a kind of decent fax quality image of it. Perfectly readable. It's a little bit overwashed. You can see the edges of some of the scan pages, although I assume that's what it was like on Google. But perfectly readable and with nice margins. You can certainly mark it up. It's got a lot of mathematical equations. They're all pretty readable, with a couple of exceptions where it got kind of complicated and all smudged together. And then, of course, there's some underlines, and those make it into the text as well. So all in all, not too bad. In the back cover, it's got a full technical information thing of exactly how this did it. So he talks about getting metadata from extracting it from MySQL and using Linux and all that stuff. So it has a lot of the artifacts that public domain reprints has. So not a bad little piece of work by Yakov. Obviously some things to iron out. I wonder if this will really take off. I mean, is this something that you guys would use, let's say, in a classroom to order cheap books or first editions? I think I might. That's funny. Go ahead, Tom. Well, I don't know if I'd use it in the classroom, but I would definitely use it for research. I mean, it is really nice to have the books on your shelf when you're writing. And, you know, rare books, first editions, especially, I mean, I think it's especially good for people who are doing, let's say, pre-1923 history. To have those books on your shelf is something that we've never had before, really, unless you have a carol in the library or something. And it would be really nice to have those. I think about writing my dissertation, and there are several books that I either had to buy from used bookstores or from, you know, abe.com or other places, or that I just, you know, just kind of did without most of the time that I could really have used. In the classroom, I'm not so sure, possibly with graduate students, but I'd like to hear what Mittle says. Yeah, I mean, I was thinking primarily of grad students, but, or senior, you know, senior level of the key books that I use in my classes, let's say the first edition of Darwin's Origin of Species, you know, there are good $15 paperbacks that are already available. But there are a lot of books, you know, much like this one, where, you know, it's very hard to get a quality reprint for something like 14 bucks. And I think it could be pretty handy in that kind of setting. Well, one other launch from this past week that caught our eye was the launch of Flickr Commons. Clearly, they've been watching the Zotero project since we were launching a Zotero Commons. They beat us to getting this online, but with the Library of Congress, I don't know if the two of you saw this, but the LC has given them, I think, to start 3,000 photographs from their American Memory digitized collection of public domain works. And I guess the idea here is to, it's at flickr.com slash commons. The idea is that I guess you can not only use these photos on your site, but also tag them, which provides the Library of Congress a sort of way of searching through their historic collection. |
I actually wrote about this on my blog just the other day. I think it's really interesting because I went and poked around in the pages and I didn't look at all 3,115 photographs, but a fair amount of the commenting on the individual images is just like, oh, I didn't know they had those kinds of things in 1914 or how did they get the color so good in 1943, those kinds of comments. But people also found errors in the Library of Congress's annotations of the images, a misspelling here or a mischaracterization of a date there. And so the general public improved the quality of the Library of Congress's metadata on these images. And so in that sense, here you have the general public participating in an archival orotero, and the complaint that I have is that it doesn't pick up that whole conversation under the image. Yeah, it would be interesting to do that. I did look at some of the conversations, and, for instance, they've got a nice collection of photographs of baseball players from the 1910s. And this is such a perfect example of how the public can help out because there are all these amateur baseball nuts who knew every stat. And you look through these photographs that people are, you know, the Library of Congress wasn't exactly sure who it was or they knew a little bit about the player's name. And the comments, Mills, that you noted below the photograph say, oh, this guy's nickname was Cocky and he hit 365 in 1911 and then he was traded and, you know, he died in whatever year. I mean, the information that people have just from the photograph is pretty impressive. But it's interesting, isn't it, that the ELC didn't do it on their site, right? They're not opening up loc.gov to this kind of discussion. It's almost like they put it on Flickr and that kind of gives them permission to run this experiment or to open it up. One of the things I guess I'm a little maybe concerned about is how does this metadata, how does this discussion get back onto the Library of Congress' website? I mean, is this going to be just kind of an island in Flickr where they have some images, or does all of this get back into the main Library of Congress catalog and integrated into the into the Library of Congress website. So that's one one question I have. And then another thing I thought about this was what a contrast to the Smithsonian, where the only way that they ended up on Flickr was for this public resource dot.org. Do you guys remember we talked about this a few months ago? Where publicresource.org basically took photos off the Smithsonian site that the Smithsonian was actually charging for, charging for access to, and put them onto Flickr without the Smithsonian's permission because they are public domain works. And there was kind of a mini tempest in a teapot over that a few months ago. So I think it's interesting the different attitudes that these public resources, these public institutions just down the mall from one another are taking towards Flickr and open access and those kinds of issues. Yeah, that's a great point and one that we're going to pick up in our featured segment, which is indeed about open access. And open access is indeed the topic for today's feature segment. For those of you new to the podcast, we like to spend the middle portion of the podcast talking about one issue in depth. And this is one issue that we've actually covered on prior podcasts. And that is, you know, looking at the potential for things like this very podcast, podcasts of lectures, YouTube videos of lectures, open access blogs that are written by professors, and other open access materials from the Academy making their way out using the web to all corners of the globe and into the minds of the general public as well as students. And, you know, this theme is something that came up particularly over the last month as we saw the launch, the glossy launch of BigThink.com, which is a new site with short two-minute videos covering big topics that's hoping to make a big splash. And for those of you who haven't heard about BigThink, it's underwritten by luminaries like Larry Summers, the ex-president of Harvard University, and course, from the Clinton administration as well, the economist. Why don't we take a listen to, since we're historians, to Neil Ferguson, speaking of Harvard, the Harvard professor and best-selling author. Neil Ferguson on, is history driven by individuals or larger forces? From BigThink.com. Well, the larger forces are, in some measure, the product of individual action, too. Naturally, there are natural phenomena over which we have limited control. Most of history was shaped by the weather, because most of history consists of agricultural societies trying to eke out a living with pretty poor technology. Now, I don't tend to study that period. I'm a modernist concerned with the post-industrial world. And in that world, the role of the weather diminishes, though it still remains an important factor. And who knows, it may become more important as time goes on. But allowing for those natural constraints under which all historical processes operate. The individual's decisions never stop being taken. Everybody is making a decision every day, even if it's a very humble decision. Do I plant tomorrow or wait a week? But the great forces that historians used to talk about when they tried to make deterministic arguments are just the net result of all the individual decisions collected together. Well, Tom and Mills, weather, individuals, wars, what do you make of this? I think it's hard to be interviewed about things that aren't actually your area of expertise. I mean, you know, Ferguson had to say, well, but I don't actually study that period of time. But, you know, I think in the bigger context, I mean, Ferguson had to say, well, but I don't actually study that period of time. But I think in the bigger context, I mean, this site got a lot of buzz when it first came out. And I have to say, I spent some time surfing through the site, and there's just kind of not much there. And in particular, where there's not much there is participation from the general public. I mean, if you look at – I don't know how long the site's been up now, but it's been weeks. And there's virtually no discussion going on. Hardly anybody has, you know, participated in ways that were anticipated. They say that there are 5,900 and some odd ideas on the site, but each one just doesn't seem to have much going on. And I don't know what the sort of higher intellectual plane is of this site. Yeah, I mean, weren't they looking at, you know, over this last summer on the podcast, we played the Berkeley YouTube channel, which had some very in-depth and still does indeed have a lot of lecture, you know, in-depth lectures about topics in history and physics and computer science. I mean, isn't this a site that looked at that open access model and said, wait a minute, there's a market here? Although their response is these two-minute things. Is this just attention span, attention deficit disorder version of that? Is this the same market? Is there a market for this kind of intellectual content? And should professors be pursuing that? I just think, I think, you know, from the, we can see from the Neil Ferguson clip that it's sort of like, you know, ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer. I mean, it, I don't, I mean, here's a really smart guy. I mean, you know, I've read some of his work and's good. And it's not necessarily the kind of history that I would like to do or the kind of political leanings that I have, but he's good. And he's given two minutes to say something about this very big, I mean, one of the sort of central questions of history. And he doesn't do a very good job at it, and I don't think any of us would. I think the site sort of assumes that the sum of knowledge is the sum of the answers to these two-minute questions or to these small questions. And I think it's kind of a simplistic way to go about thinking about what knowledge really is. And so I just think it's just – and I think I would bet – and this isn't just, I think, scholars thinking this. I would imagine that the general public comes to the site and understands that these are questions that can't be answered in two minutes and that we're not going to buy into this, which is, I think, probably why it hasn't gotten the traction. I don't think it's just coincidence. I think it's probably that the idea is somehow bankrupt and that the public kind of gets that. |
Yeah, I mean, if you look at some of the iTunes subscriptions and then some of the YouTube page views just for some of these, you know, what I think the people behind BigThink.com would consider rather boring talking head lectures, although actually all their videos are talking head lectures, but of more well-buffed people than on some of these college videos. Yeah, that, I don't know, there's a lot of people out there. There's an interest out there, isn't there, in this kind of broader learning that open access enables? Isn't there, Mills? I mean, you've advocated this very strongly on your blog and on this podcast. Yeah, I mean, I think that there's a lot more interest in open access to education than, I mean, and I think the Berkeley YouTube is a perfect example of that or, you know, various things that have been written recently in the popular media about college professors whose – their video podcasts or just their regular podcasts have become very popular. And they're not really creating those to be popular. They're creating those – that's how they teach their classes and people other than their students start watching them and get – or listening to them and get excited about it and subscribe to the whole thing. And I mean I just put up my lectures for my East European history class last semester and I've had two or three emails from people who picked them up off of iTunes and listened to them and wrote me questions. Now, I mean this is a total shock to me because who knew that anybody would listen other than the students who have to because they're in my class. But, you know, it's a pretty obscure topic. So, you know, if I were teaching a class about Darwin and evolution, I bet I would have a bigger audience. And so, you know, I think that there really is a much bigger audience for it out there. And I think as educators, especially those of us who work for public universities, we have a real obligation to try as much confluence of several factors that push toward open access, right? I mean, Mills, you've talked a broader community, one that might not be paying, but that is very interested in topics like Eastern European history. And then there's, you know, there's more narcissistic things about reputation, that you're getting your reputation out there, the things behind gates, you know, that are closed off, that are not on the web, are going to get fewer views than something that's out there on open access. So open access really encompasses a lot of incentives and tensions in it, doesn't it? I mean, it's hard to say why you should do it or what the reasons are behind it without getting into all these different areas. Tom, I'm sorry I cut you off. Byzantine Rulers, which, I mean, what could be more obscure in Byzantine than 12 Byzantine Rulers, this podcast that is done by a teacher at a high school on Long Island, and it really is, they're all probably 20 minutes to 45 minutes long, and there are 13 episodes, including the introduction, And it's one of the most popular podcasts on the web. Still, after a couple years of being available, it's still one of the most popular podcasts on the web. And so I think there, I mean, in terms of markets, I think there really is a market for this stuff. Yeah, I mean, is it that in that case, and also I think we've mentioned the BBC In Our Time podcast or radio show, which is now also a podcast that gets into things like Renaissance geometry in depth, which you would never imagine would have a large radio audience, but it does work extremely well. Is this a, I mean, is the iPod kind of enabling a lot of this or the long commutes that people have that you want to listen to something more than just talk radio, you know, banal talk radio in the car that it gives you something more intellectual to listen to? I mean, who's actually listening to this stuff? I think that's what we don't know. I'm not sure we know who's listening to it. And it would be great to find out. Sorry class period in a semester. And so having the ability to listen to a class that they missed or watch a class that they missed is really important to them being able to complete the work, especially in classes or in majors where there's a licensing exam at the end and there's certain critical knowledge they absolutely have to have, like mechanical engineering or nursing or something like that. They have to have that information. There's no single fact in history that they have to have, you know, like mechanical engineering or nursing or something like that. You know, they have to have that information. There's no single fact in history that they have to have. But, you know, in other fields, they really have to have that information. And so these students, you know, who work so much, to have access to, easy access to that kind of information, I think is really, really important. Right. So that's another point for open access that I hadn't thought about, which is just time shifting of the materials standpoint, a little bit of the pragmatic aspect to it. But also he felt that, you know, his salary was paid for by the state of Virginia, by the taxpayer. He thought universities in getting their giant tax breaks sort of had a responsibility to make things available under open access terms, and that he thought it really was a kind of a shame that so much of what is produced in academia is gated in some way. How do we deal with these sort of sets of expectations? I mean, for instance, the expectations of publishers that things will be available under copyright and that we can't make that material available open access. Well, I think, I mean, I think one of the things that the technology does is it allows us to kind of allows us, we're doing it and other people are making this choice. And if you want to make this choice, it allows you to bypass some of those interests that have prohibited this in the future. I think we're seeing more and more of this because it's gotten to be so easy to put this stuff up. So I think in the past, if you wanted to distribute your production, you had to go through one of these entities that was interested. And rightly so. They're trying to make money. And they tell you that at the outset. No one's trying to scam anybody here. They're trying to make money and you had to go through one of them. And so you played by their rules. You signed a contract and those were the terms you signed. Now with iTunes U, podcasting, and services like Lulu that we talked about in the last segment where you can publish your own book and other things, I think you don't have to choose to go through those kinds of interests anymore. And so maybe it was just a matter of the kind of the means that's been really debated the most is whether historians and others in the humanities can move to an open access model that takes away these mediaries of the publishers or the professional associations and the roles that they've traditionally played as a kind of vetting body for materials. You know, with the power of publishing straight to the web, it raises these questions. And, you know, obviously there's a lot of skepticism, we've encountered it, about open access that it, you know, things that are available via open access are not as good because they haven't been vetted, you know, that there's, you know, they haven't been copy edited well enough, they haven't been, this podcast may be a good example. But, you know, we don't spend a lot of time editing the audio on this. And in some way they're sort of worth less. You're paying nothing for it. It's open access, so it's worth less than the for-pay gated things. You know, and one of the comments I made on that forum was that, boy, you look around at what's going on in fields other than history and the humanities, the sciences, law, economics, and there's been this rush toward open access models. I mean, there's, you know, from the famous to the less famous. I mean, famous being, let's say, the public library of science move where a bunch of famous scientists got together and said, you know, we're going to solve this problem about people being worried about publishing an open access model that somehow it's less worthy of getting tenure or it's somehow not vetted enough and shouldn't have as much credit associated with it. You know, so they put their names on this institution and have a rigorous, you know, acceptance and editing process. And, you know, it's considered very valuable to publish on the PLOS website, P-L-O-S website. |
They can get their ideas out faster. They can have conversations with their audience. Is it just going to be harder for history and the humanities to do this because of our emphasis on the published monograph with a university press? Mills, what are your thoughts on that? You've gone through this process of publishing. Yeah, I mean, I think it's going to be harder because historians are such a cranky tribe. I mean, we're just so hidebound when it comes to our thinking as a group. We're so hidebound when it comes to our thinking about how to do things differently. I mean, you know, you mentioned Roy earlier. Roy actually Roy actually years ago did a study of the American Historical Association's annual meeting. And from the beginning, people complained that the panels were really boring. And so the innovation, I think it was in the 1920s or maybe the 1930s, was to add a discussant. And so just in other words, put another boring person on stage and let them talk for another 20 minutes. And the annual meetings are largely unchanged since the beginning. And so historians for many of them are I think probably liberal or progressive or whatever you want to call them. But boy, when it comes to historians, and I think it is especially historians, but it's other scholars as well, don't really take the long view in that there's this assumption that kind of modes of scholarship have remained unchanged over millennia. And that's absolutely not true. I mean, these mechanisms of publication and peer review were not in place in, let's say, the 17th century. And the book was a different thing in the 17th century and the way it was produced was different or the 15th century or the 9th century or whatever it is. And I don't think we would say that scholarship was inferior during the Renaissance than it is today because of that. I think it assumes that there's some this kind of unchanging standard of scholarship and way of vetting scholarship, which is just, it's just amazing to me that historians don't kind of recognize that kind of change over time and that we may be in a time when things are changing again. And, you know, Dan, it's really interesting to me. I saw that you were going to be doing this discussion for the Journal of American History. You mentioned it on your blog. And my first instinct was, before I kind of read to the end of your blog post, my first instinct was to email you and say, oh, that's great. Where is it going to be posted online? Where can I watch the live discussion? Because I thought there'd be some kind of an IRC channel or a chat room or something. And then I read down to the end of your post and it said, well, it's not going to appear until September or December or whenever. And I just found that so funny that just the difference in sort of my thinking and being in digital humanities and maybe the thinking of the editors of the Journal of American History, sort of how far apart we are on this. Right. Well, I think what it came down to, and I mean, I don't want to disparage the JAH. I think they're doing a great job, and I think it's going to be an interesting discussion. But I think it gets back to something that Mills talked about when we first started talking about open access models on this podcast. And I think, Mills, the way you put it was we just have to get over ourselves. Exactly. I was just going to say that. It's time for historians to get over ourselves. Right. So when I emailed the editor of the JAH, I just said, you know, this is just something to think about. You can make this discussion live. And, you know, he emailed back and said, well, you know, I think people would be worried that there were, you know, this is an open-ended discussion and people are just kind of throwing ideas out there. And we want to give everyone a chance to edit what they said. So we have a, you know, a straight, you know, well, you know, flowing discussion that's abridged and all that. And I think it just goes, but I fully understand that. I mean, I think, but it's just, we worry about this too much. I mean, I think that's part of all of us have had a blog. I think a blog is very instructive on this point that you make mistakes. I mean, horrible mistakes of spelling and grammar, mistakes of content, et cetera, things that you wouldn't, that normally wouldn't happen in, let's say, a published book or article. But there's all these other advantages to it. And you just sort of have to go with the flow and realize you're going to make mistakes, but that the open access-ness of it has a value that trumps those other values of 100% perfection on spelling, for instance. Well, I think the three of us have a pitch battle on our hands because I just think that the tradition, Tom, as you said, it's just, it's really out there and it's a very strong undercurrent in our field. And whether this ends up online, and actually, I think JH actually may end up publishing the entire transcript when it's all done as some kind of open access body, but I'm going to continue to push for that. We'll see how that goes, and I will report back, I guess, in September. We've got a few minutes left, as always, for our Picks of the Week. Why don't we start with Mills this week. Mills, what did you find for us online or off? Mine is Yahoo Pipes, which is a website that allows total novices when it comes to coding like me to create their own information pipe on the Internet. So if you go to this website, it takes about two minutes to register, especially if you have a Yahoo account already. And so I created one in under five minutes, which trolls the Flickr.com database and pulls out photographs of Hurricane Katrina and plots them out on a map of the city of New Orleans, which is something I'm interested in because of my work on the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank. And it worked, and it worked fine. And so it's really a pretty neat way of creating information feeds online, especially if you don't actually know anything about coding. It's all object-oriented, drag the objects around, and it works really easy. Makes me look smart. Yeah, Yahoo Pipes is really quite amazing. And if you get into it, you can do even more complicated things like extract names from it and use those for various purposes. So it'll just take any feed and sort of twist and mash it up. Great pick for the week, Mills. Tom, what do you have for us this week? I've got something called Feed Journal. It's at feedjournal.com. And their marketing slogan is the newspaper you always wanted. And it really is something either for readers of blogs or writers of blogs. Thank you. your RSS feed for a certain time span and dumps it into a PDF that's laid out like a newspaper that you can then print. So I think probably a lot of our listeners here on Digital Campus are bloggers themselves. And I know like my mom never reads my blog, but I bet she would if I printed it out for her. I can send her this. She can print it out and read the articles that I post on my blog in a kind of newspaper format. The other thing you can do as a reader of blogs is to essentially print out all your feeds for the week. This is the newspaper you always wanted aspect of it. It'll aggregate your feeds. It'll lay them out into a five-column or a four-column newspaper-type design layout. And you can print them out and kind of read them in your armchair rather than having to scan them on your computer. So it's kind of a print feed reader for RSS feeds at feedjournal.com. Sounds great. I'll have to check that out. Well, I'll make it a trifecta on the feed RSS side of things for this Picks of the Week and talk about the advanced features in Google Reader, which I can tell is a big, very popular reader among certainly the readers of my blog and also for Digital Campus subscribers. And I think there's, the feature I want to point out is called shared items, which a lot of people don't use. But if you're using Google Reader or if you're not using a newsreader or RSS reader, I'd encourage you to try Google Reader out. And one of the features it has is you can place a star on an item or you can share that item by clicking little icons as you read each item. |
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