text stringlengths 3 10.4k |
|---|
The only thing we have to fear is can do for your country. Fear itself! This is Digital Campus, Episode 61, recorded October 15, 2010. Fantastic Four. Well, welcome to another edition of Digital Campus from the Center for History and New Media. I'm Tom Sheinfeld from foundhistory.org. Coming to you today from a Barnes ... |
I want to buy lots of e-books and to buy them cheaply. And, you know, it's interesting when you're talking about mini e-books, because length doesn't really matter in the digital world. I mean, there's no difference between a 90-page book and a, you know, 290-page book in terms of what it costs to manufacture and distr... |
But I'm actually not one of those people that worries about that. I think the more open our classrooms are to observation by people from outside, the better. I think I've been advocating open teaching since the beginning of my career. So I think it's when classrooms are closed off from observation that all kinds of wei... |
But you wouldn't have been able to tell that from the courses I was actually taking. So, you know, I hope that, I think that these kinds of systems do hold out a lot of promise, but I hope that they take the whole student into account in building these profiles and recommendations. Yeah, you know, I was just thinking, ... |
I'm glad to see that maybe the archives is starting to move in that direction. So I think that's a good thing. That's, you know, the mandate is good and the additional funding so that it's not an unfunded mandate is good. So I think we're seeing the start of something new and something good. From the wider tech world, ... |
Any further thoughts on Microsoft and these new announcements, Amanda? Just that, honestly, it surprises me that Microsoft tries to innovate as much as it does, given that, I mean, I saw a study recently that Internet Explorer went under 50% worldwide for the first time, you know. That if you look at all browsers world... |
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 ... |
So I think there are going to be a lot of angry first-generation iPhone owners out there. But I do think that the platform has really improved, and I think this is mostly good news. The one thing I think I'd say is I'm not sure that I'm entirely happy with the notion that I'm going to have to buy all the applications, ... |
I wonder if this will actually take off. I guess we will have to see. The three of us really had a terrific time at a new conference that started this year at the Center for History and New Media. You may have heard about it. It was called VATCAMP, with the VAT acronym being the Humanities and Technology Camp, and the ... |
I mean, you know, presenting a paper at the annual conference is a sort of, you know, a kind of quasi-publication. It's part of your, you know, what is expected of you as an active participant in the profession. So, yes, going to sit somewhere and drink coffee and do something really interesting and productive, you kno... |
And it is CHNM's first online exhibition, sort of a museum exhibition, a museum online exhibition without the physical exhibition. And it is a comprehensive history of the Soviet gulag. And the title, Many Days, Many Lives, comes from, it's kind of a play on Solzhenitsyn's title, A Day in the Life. And the main thesis ... |
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 ... |
So anyway, so we'll keep an eye on that story. But another story is over at the Library of Congress, something very different. I've got a lot of friends of the show over at the Library of Congress, and so we were interested to see the launch of My Library of Congress, which is at myloc.gov. Sort of a cute name. Do we n... |
And so right in the kind of introductory lessons, we have things on, you know, installing the language and some simple programming tools. We have things on automatically opening and downloading and scraping material from web pages and computing word frequency, Google searches and things like that. And really the goal i... |
One question I have for you guys is who do you think needs to know this? Like, you know, we're teaching students how to program. We're writing books to help historians learn how to program. I mean, who needs to know this? Presumably, or maybe this is wrong, presumably not the whole community of historians and humanists... |
And we'll look forward to reading The Programming Historian. And also, Steve, you said you have a book coming out on mathematics and the humanities. Do you want to mention that? I do, yeah. Sometime, I guess, next year from Oxford, I'm co-authoring a book with Patrick Yola at Duquesne University on mathematics for the ... |
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 ... |
You know, there's a lot of people saying, well, we sort of have to trust Google that, for instance, pricing for libraries for access to this set of books will be reasonable and will remain reasonable even in the future as, you know, let's say they have profit pressures or things like that. And then what else are they g... |
And maybe we'll ask maybe someone from Open Book Alliance and Google to come on the podcast at a later date. Hopefully not to have a John McLaughlin-style yelling match, but to have some kind of cogent or calm discussion about where we are and where we're headed in terms of these digitized books. Well, I guess a relate... |
This is a kind of skunkworks project that their team, I think mainly in Australia, tried to reconceptualize, you know, if you were starting now, what would email look like? And what they came up with, I suppose, could be described as a hybrid of a messaging system, that is, a system that passes messages back, like emai... |
Isn't that right? I think, you know, I certainly think that people are, I think the real issue is trying to aggregate the massive flow of information that's coming at us. And I think all of these things are an attempt to do that. And I still haven't seen one that's going to solve that problem for me. I mean, for me, th... |
And it's really a nice summary of a much more extended report from the National Humanities Alliance called, The Future of Scholarly Journal Publishing Among Social Science and Humanities Associations. And so, I mean, this is an issue we've talked a lot about on the podcast, the future of journal publishing and, you kno... |
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. This is Digital Campus, featuring Tom May 7, 2010. Past play. Welcome, everyone, to Digital Campus number 56. I'm Mills Kelly from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, joined by our regular podcast crew, Dan Cohen from dan... |
And then once you communicate that kind of knowledge and are open to collaboration, and that's, I think, another big part of it, rather than everyone showing how smart they are, you're thinking about potential collaborations and things you can work on um either you know centrally or in a decentralized way um and you kn... |
Oh, it's terrible. Yeah. And, and ancient Roman food is even worse. It's almost inedible. It wasn't delivery pizza. No, it definitely wasn't. So, okay. So one, so like, you know, our audience will know that I am all about the unconference and new models of scholarly communication. And so this is kind of a devil's advoc... |
And how complicated would that, you know, the decorations on monasteries, how difficult would that be to do? And so, as Bill said, you know, when they start grappling with evidence as a tangible thing as opposed to an image on the screen in the classroom or a picture in a book, but it becomes an actual tangible thing t... |
I mean, that's kind of a segue into some of the work you're doing at the Simulating History project that you're working on. Can you talk just a little bit about some of the mobile apps that you're working on? Because this is something we've talked about a lot on the podcast is the future of mobile history computing. Ye... |
And sometimes that can be great, but that can also make people feel uncomfortable. Yeah, I think that in the large conference environment, I was thinking about that, and Kevin was, I have to say, very strict about the no talking rule. People would start to say something and he would raise his hand, no talking. But that... |
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 ... |
So it does. It really lives on in the Mozilla foundation. And so hopefully it will continue to do well. Right. And I guess the important point here is that Netscape was, I think, you know, hopefully it will continue to do well. I think that's what really excited people. And a platform that was network-based, that was w... |
And actually, you could buy it. They had a program in the Christmas season called, I think it was called Give One, Get One, where if you paid $400, you could give one of these $200 laptops to a kid in the developing world, and you got one for yourself. And actually, I saw one of these live from someone who did that in ... |
I think actually OLPC's announcement just this weekend that they're moving into the American and especially urban inner city market is maybe a recognition of that. I think it's also a recognition of the fact that they've had a very hard time working and cutting the deals with foreign governments. I think their marketin... |
What do you have for us from Europe? Well, actually, it's a website from Sweden from the Swedish National Library, and the reason I picked it is because it's the antithesis of what we were just talking about with the micro laptops and it's a website on the world's largest book, the Codex Gigas, which I happened to see ... |
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 ... |
I mean, the possible penalties on this seem extraordinarily high. I mean, it's just outrageous. And it's just one industry, the entertainment industry, which continues to just break new barriers for outrage. I find this amazing. And I think especially the fact that they would punish all students and an entire instituti... |
And I think a small amount of editing and a small amount of, for instance, like lead-in music and those kinds of things, multiple mics, conversational style, very simple things that you can do that we've tried to do on digital campus can make the medium a lot more friendly and will make it a lot more usable and used. S... |
They're $9.99 for most books. So it's less expensive. And you can imagine a business model where this would make sense for the publishers. But I still think, you know, why have all these e-books failed? And I think the problem isn't on the business model or from the publisher's side. It's the fact that, first of all, t... |
So for me, this has been really important because I use a lot of video, historical video from YouTube. And so now I have those things saved locally on my computer. And so that if they go down from YouTube, I've still got them. But also where this is going to be really important is for school teachers, many of whom are ... |
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself, fear itself, fear itself. From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi biweekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and ... |
So it's a slow network compared to the others, and I think that Apple may end up being sorry that with this phone that creates all these expectations of, you know, moving around large amounts of data, AT&T's network may not have been the right choice. Right. Well, I just think that when you play with it, I mean, the us... |
Especially when you're talking about the economies of scale that they generate. If they're doing this for universities all over the world, they can provide a host of kind of a menu of security options for universities that a small shop on a small campus, or even a relatively large shop on a large campus, isn't going to... |
And the calculation I always like to throw out is that even if you could read one email message a minute without sleeping, drinking a lot of coffee, it would take you 76 years to actually read all of those Clinton White House emails. And so we're really faced with, I think, what Roy Rosenzweig, our colleague and friend... |
And I think those are the kinds of tools that we're going to need to explore to see how they can facilitate scholarship when you have such masses of information available to you. I think tools are key because what I don't think we can expect of our students is them all to learn the kind of Python skills that Bill Turkl... |
He's done a lot of work. The author's done an awful lot of work on mashups and ways that this can really transform the museum experience. And so it's a lot of really critical thinking by this author, Mike Ellis, on how the museum is going to evolve over time. And of particular relevance to the discussions we've been ha... |
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself, fear itself, fear itself. 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 mu... |
And there, after restructuring my query a couple times, it did give me the answer. I did the same thing for the United States, and the closest it could get was 1933. It couldn't get me the answer for 1900. And that, essentially, it's not that it didn't understand the query. It's that it didn't have the data on hand. An... |
It's just that it's sponsored by companies that have a special interest in that particular research result. Whether the research result itself is bogus or not is another question. Right. It looks like a lot of these, so I found the article, it's in The Guardian, the UK newspaper, The Guardian. And it looks like they di... |
Oh, yeah. Pretty easy to distribute them. You know, you could use some, I learned a great term from Peter Brantley, you could use some social DRM. So you could let people download PDFs that have their, you know, purchased by Dan Cohen scrolled along the bottom. So if they in turn circulated around, you know, you'd know... |
You know, they're ensuring these things that probably should have been surfaced maybe earlier on. Again, we're talking a little bit ahead of ourselves here since we haven't seen the full amendment, and we will get that posted to the site when we have it. Actually, I'm now just getting it across Twitter. Ah, the wonders... |
And so I'm really excited about the ways that Zotero is going to really facilitate teaching with digital materials. Yeah, I'm going to do the same thing. And so for those who haven't used Zotero before or are new to the podcast, it's at zotero.org. And on a basic level, it's a way to manage your research and keep track... |
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 ... |
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 G... |
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 d... |
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 pe... |
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.... |
So actually, Mills and Tom, I was thinking about this, that we could share some items together and sort of see what stories we wanted to look at for the next podcast rather than our current method of talking about it via email or just before we start the podcast. But you can click on shared items. It will share it with... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.