Note from the Editors: Mr. Puschmann authored four excellent recaps of the Berlin 9 conference which are highlighted below. He also compiled a list of other posts which are listed here as well.
JCDL (Joint Conference on Digital Libraries) 2012 Call For Participation June 10-14, 2012 GWU Washington, DC, USA.
Interesting discussion of how to use IRC channels to show people how much Wikipedia is actively curated, without requiring them to reload the recent changes page, connect to some cryptic IRC channels, or dig around in some (wonderfully) detailed statistics. More importantly, could it be done in a playful way?
Last week I attended the Digital Library Federation (DLF) Forum. I’d like to recap a few of the publishing and digital humanities (DH) talks from DLF & highlight a few interesting things to read.
The ETCL (http://etcl.uvic.ca/) engages in cross-disciplinary study of the past, present, and future of textual communication, and acts as a hub for digital humanities activities across the University of Victoria campus, from coast-to-coast, and around the world.
HASTAC’s fifth international conference, hosted this year by the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, December 1-3, practices what it preaches, experimenting with an array of new forms and formats designed not just to discuss “Digital Scholarly Communication” but to explore how each of those three terms–digital, scholarly, communication–changes the others in ways that presage powerful new possibilities for higher education (both in the academy and for the general public).
I have problems with the idea of infrastructure, particularly that of the e-research variety. It seems like we always end up talking about huge amounts of money and multi-institutional partnerships. It just doesn’t seem like a great model for innovation. As I’ve previously argued, I’d like to see something more like the funding schemes offered by the NEH Office for Digital Humanities. Encourage people with ideas, don’t just reward the good networkers. Build tools and apis, not portals and platforms.
Of course I’d still like to see the digital humanities well represented in the list of Virtual Laboratories and eResearch Tools currently under consideration by NeCTAR. It’s time the digital research needs of the humanities were properly recognised.
How can museums advance beyond the continuation of traditional practices utilizing digital tools to a new mode of interpretations that seeks to understand the meanings of collections and scholarship in a new media culture?
I’ll provide a quick and easy tutorial on using easygui and some usage scenarios.
I want to talk about how the evolution of the forms of delivery and analysis of text inherent in the creation of the online, problematizes and historicises the notion of the book as an object, and as a technology; and in the process problematizes the discipline of history itself as we practise it in the digital present.
First, it has allowed us to begin to escape the intellectual shackles that the book as a form of delivery, imposed upon us. If we can escape the self-delusion that we are reading ‘books’, the development of the infinite archive, and the creation of a new technology of distribution, actually allows us to move beyond the linear and episodic structures the book demands, to something different and more complex.
