Arts and Humanities E-Science Support Centre

As we mentioned on the HASTAC blogs last week, you can now download or purchase a copy of the report entitled The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, co-authored by Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg, with assistance from Zoe Marie Jones, our former colleague extraordinaire. Here are the details from MIT Press:

Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg in an abridged version of their book-in-progress, The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, argue that traditional institutions must adapt or risk a growing mismatch between how they teach and how this new generation learns. Forms and models of learning have evolved quickly and in fundamentally new directions. Yet how we teach, where we teach, who teaches, and who administers and serves have changed only around the edges. This report was made possible by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in connection with its grant making initiative on Digital Media and Learning.

Young people today are learning in new ways that are both collective and egalitarian.
They are contributing to Wikipedia, commenting on blogs, teaching themselves programming and figuring out work-arounds to online video games. They follow links embedded in articles to build a deeper understanding. They comment on papers and ideas in an interactive and immediate exchange ofideas. All these acts are collaborative and democratic, and all occur amid a worldwide community of voices.

Universities must recognize this new way of learning and adapt or risk becoming obsolete.
The university model of teaching and learning relies on a hierarchy of expertise, disciplinary divides, restricted admission to those considered worthy, and a focused, solitary area of expertise. However, with participatory learning and digital media, these conventional modes of authority break down.

Self-learning: Today’s learners are self-learners. They browse, scan, follow links in mid-paragraph to related material. They look up information and follow new threads. They create their own paths to understanding.

Horizontal structures: Rather than top-down teaching and standardized curriculum, today’s learning is collaborative; learners multitask and work out solutions together on projects. Learning strategy shifts from a focus on information as such to learning to judge reliable information. It shifts from memorizing information to finding reliable sources. In short, it shifts from learning that to learning how.

From presumed authority to collective credibility: Reliance on the knowledge authorities or certified experts is no longer tenable amid the growing complexities of collaborative and interdisciplinary learning. A key challenge in collaborative environments will be fostering and managing levels of trust.

A de-centered pedagogy: To ban or limit collective knowledge sources such as Wikipedia in classrooms is to miss the importance of collaborative knowledge-making. Learning institutions should instead adopt a more inductive, collective pedagogy based on collective checking, inquisitive skepticism, and group assessment.

Networked learning: Learning has traditionally often assumed a winner-take-all competitive form rather than a cooperative form. One cooperates in a classroom only if it maximizes narrow self-interest. Networked learning, in contrast, is committed to a vision of the social that stresses cooperation, interactivity, mutual benefit, and social engagement. The power of ten working interactively will invariably outstrip the power of one looking to beat out the other nine.

Open source education: Traditional learning environments convey knowledge via overwhelmingly copyright-protected publications. Networked learning, contrastingly, is an “open source” culture that seeks to share openly and freely in both creating and distributing knowledge and products.

Learning as connectivity and interactivity: Challenges in a networked learning environment are not an individual’s alone. Digital tools and software make working in isolation on a project unnecessary. Networking through file-sharing, data sharing, and seamless, instant communication is now possible.

Lifelong learning: The speed of change in this digital world requires individuals to learn anew, face novel conditions, and adapt at a record pace. Learning never ends. How we know has changed radically.

These ten principles, the authors argue, are the first steps in redesigning learning institutions to fit the new digital world. By assessing some of the institutional barriers to change, the authors hope to mobilize institutions to envision formal, higher education as part of a continuum of the networked world that students engage in online today.

The full The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age report is now available for free online from MIT Press. A print version of the report can also be ordered from the Press. For more information please visit the MIT Press website.

To order print copies of this report, visit: http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11841
ISBN: 978-0-262-51359-3 | Price: $14.00

To view the report online, visit: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chapters/Future_of_Learning.pdf

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning are available here: http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/browse/browse.asp?btype=6&serid=178

In one of the best articles I've read in a long time on the possibilities for new technologies to enhance and save scholarly publishing from its crisis, Robert C. Binkley, in the Yale Review, remembers all the elements that are essential if we really are going to make a difference in our Digital Futures. His piece remembers historical examples that did or did not prove revolutionary. Rather than techno-determinism, he understands technology as part of vast social changes and underscores the relationship between economics, opportunity, interest, possibility, and social dynamics. He remembers aesthetics, and the sheer beauty of an object and its reduction when mechanically reproduced or its potential for enhancement through new technologies. And he realizes that culture is continuous and global, not provincial: his examples range across 15th century Chinese Sung Era bookmaking that made Chinese classics as well as Christian and Greco-Roman works available to a wider audience than ever before. He also makes reference to American Indian language specialists and the use of images as well as text to convey information. And he never strays far from the actual details of the technology, what it costs relative to other consumer goods (for text is also that), and how issues of archiving and distribution, production and consumption, individuals and institutions (libraries and presses, writers and readers, universities and IT departments) are all interconnected in scholarly communication.

But what makes this article so brilliant is that, unlike so much blather on electronic publishing, this article talks about the good and importance of scholarship in the world, talks about scholars as if we were also (imagine that!) workers who produced something of value, and then considers the arrangements of professionalization, training, and credentialing that go into the professional scholar and argues that, in this confluence of social conditions and technologies, now is the right time for the rise of the "amateur scholar." "Open access" doesn't matter if there is no one who wants to "access" what is "open." In other words, our demand for information that is free has to be accompanied by a responsibility to teach/support/develop a readership vitally interested in that information. If learning and curiosity are impoverished, who cares if our archives are lock-box or open? Why poor millions and millions into digital projects if there is no public excited to take advantage of such archives? Technology and information cannot be divorced from learning and the imperative to teach far and wide, beyond a handful of specialized scholars. We need "Citizen Scholars." And we need "Citizen Educators" for the new information technologies or why bother?

You don't write to archive. You write to be read. That doesn't mean you always write for the same audience. The point is that with variable modes of accessing scholarship, you can address a widespread but still niche audience. But not if that audience doesn't exist, isn't supported by networks and communities. (That is part of the Creative Commons mantra: we need to place less emphasis on "content" and more on "community." ) Content does not exist in a vacuum any more than does technology. The production of knowledge and the production of readers is a continuous process with technological development; knowledge is not some fly preserved in amber, all of its features in tact and utterly untouchable.

Binkley calls for "local studies" and a kind of distributed model of teaching scholarship, what a scholar does, what a scholar's methods are, why serious study (no matter the object) counts as part of technology's designs for universality, a distribution of teaching that works informally, outside of any professionalized, specialized school or educational or professional school credentialing. A community of readers suitable to the new and revolutionary technologies of communication. He calls this a "pilot of democracy." Where "science and scholarship and the intellectual ideal are not a doctrinaire respect for a participant's interest" but a de-centralized and expansive collaborative model where every home is a "library," every dining room a school room, and every person a "man of letters." [sic]

As he concludes, "Towards this end technology offers new devices and points the way."

Oh, one catch: the new technologies he is talking about in his brave new world of scholarly publishing may not be available to all. His focus is "near print" and micro-photography and photo-off set, mimeography and hectographing. Binkley's article was published in 1935.

I learned about this essay this morning on Facebook from Rutgers University professor and scholar Meredith McGill. (She says she learned about it from Lisa Gitelman in their American Antiquarian Society Seminar and Lisa received it from Rick Prelinger. I don't know where he first learned of it.) And you can read the article here, because Binkley's works have been lovingly digitized by those who remember him and are available on line:

http://www.wallandbinkley.com/rcb/articles/newtools-output.html

Here's a favorite section: "These three processes, photo-offset, micro-copying, and near-print, each important when considered by itself, offer an imposing prospect when they are considered together. . . . The duty of making reading matter accessible to the scholar may be assumed increasingly by the micro-copying process, and near-print may become the normal channel by which the creative worker, whether in literature or in scholarship, can be guaranteed communication with a limited group that shares his interesets, leaving publication in printed forma s the channel of communication with a larger public."

And then this section, on the "amateur scholar": "The professional scholars cannot indefinitely continue indifference to the prospects of amateur scholarship, for they are facing a crisis themselves. The strain that is appearing in their system of recruiting and maintaining financially a professional personnel will force them to consider the redistribution of scholarly labor and the reorganization of scholarly communications."

Wikipedia, anyone?

(Ah, sigh, too bad: YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, now even Twitter is breaking our useless, frivolous heart.   Another trivial, mindless social networking toy ruined by urgency, another one of the dumbest generation who turns out to be smarter than we are. Stop that now!)

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Please click on the image provided by Flickr community member "faramarz" for the full photostream and complete documentation. Special thanks for posting this for us to share.

In preparation for my West Coast trip, where I will be interviewing many of the most innovative open source thinkers and entrepreneurs, I've been noodling around on websites. This is also useful because HASTAC is in the final stages (I almost wrote "death throes") of migrating our content to our new site . . . and, well, some of our content is hopelessly outdated. When you start in 2002, and innovation and the "future of thinking" are your bywords, you can carret in a lot of new ideas and adjectives but, one day, you have to bite the bullet and rewrite the content. 2002 is not 2009. Wikipedia was barely a glimmer in Jimmy's eye in 2002. Time to start from scratch.

So I'm reading websites and watching web videos. There's a fantastic new video up on Creative Commons, for example. Here's the URL: http://creativecommons.org/videos/a-shared-culture/. Our beloved colleague James Boyle, of Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain and a Creative Commons leader, author most recently of The Public Domain, has a great phrase in the video: "Saving the World from Failed Sharing." [Are you listening, Chris Anderson?] Sharing is not borrowing without attribution. It's not cut-and-paste thinking. It's not plagiarism. It is finding a way to think together creatively while giving credit, and making sure that the law poses the fewest possible impediments to that process.

That leads to another great line in the video: Creative Commons licensing seeks to "enable the creative energy that new technology lets loose--and get the law out of the way."

HASTAC: seeks to enable the creative energy that new technology lets loose--and get educational bureaucracy out of the way. That's pretty close to what we aspire to!

On the Creative Commons website, the keywords are "Share, Remix, Reuse--Legally." On Mozilla the keywords are "Openness, Innovation, Opportunity."

HASTAC's keywords are new technology, collaborative learning, critical thinking . . . creative, critical, open, together. Learn. Share. Remix. Inspire. Create. Critique. Think. Dream. Design. Oh, yes, plus "Always historicize!" (--attribution, Fred Jameson, for anyone who doesn't recognize the reference.)

In the Creative Commons video, one of the very engaging talking heads says, that we need to help build a sharing culture, we need to move from an emphasis on content to an emphasis on community. Isn't that exactly what learning should be about?

Todd Presner, Jeff Schnapp, and the Mellon group meeting this summer at UCLA have done a magnificent job creating a clever, smart, sexy Digital Humanities Manifesto.  We've circulated the url and blogged about it twice before--and tweeted it too.  Here, we reprint the absolutely delightful  "Map of Online Communities" and an excerpt from Todd's blog. Pay attention!  This is a place where much is happening.  And it's fun too.

Todd Presner

Posted by Todd Presner in Uncategorized on June 22nd, 2009

Derived from “raising the hand” (manus), a manifesto is a call to action, a decisive intervention at a critical moment.  It is a genre characterized by pithy statements and suggestive formulations, which are simultaneously playful and deadly serious.

The purpose of the Digital Humanities Manifesto is to arouse debate about what the Humanities can and should be doing in the 21st century, particularly concerning the digital culture wars, which are, by and large, being fought and won by corporate interests.  It is also a call to assert the relevance and necessity of the Humanities in a time of downsizing and persistent requiems of their death.  The Humanities, I believe, are more necessary than ever as our cultural heritage as a species migrates to digital formats.  This is a watershed moment in the history of human civilization, in which our relationship to knowledge and information is changing in profound and unpredictable ways.  Digital Humanities studies the cultural and social impact of new technologies as well as takes an active role in the design, implementation, interrogation, and subversion of these technologies.

To quote from the Manifesto: “Digital Humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent practices that explore a universe in which: a) print is no longer the exclusive or the normative medium in which knowledge is produced and/or disseminated; instead, print finds itself absorbed into new, multimedia configurations; and b) digital tools, techniques, and media have altered the production and dissemination of knowledge in the arts, human and social sciences. The Digital Humanities seeks to play an inaugural role with respect to a world in which universities — no longer the sole producers, stewards, and disseminators of knowledge or culture — are called upon to shape natively digital models of scholarly discourse for the newly emergent public spheres of the present era (the www, the blogosphere, digital libraries, etc.), to model excellence and innovation in these domains, and to facilitate the formation of networks of knowledge production, exchange, and dissemination that are, at once, global and local.”

Authorship: The manifesto has been published in two “Commentpress” blog instantiations.  Version 2.0 is also available as a pdf file.  Parts of the manifesto were written by Jeffrey Schnapp, Peter Lunenfeld, and myself, while other parts were written (and critiqued) by commenters on the Commentpress blog and still other parts of the manifesto were written by authors who participated in the seminars. This document has the hand and words of about 100 people in it.

Daniel Scott Poynter's Digital Democracy Contest is a 2009 HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media & Learning winner, and already he has partnered with the Sunlight Foundation in an effort to crowdsource some new and exciting twists on up-and-coming digital citizens.

From Connor Kenny's blog over at Sunlight:

This fall the Sunlight Foundation is creating a whole new generation of watchdogs by engaging thousands of high school students as both consumers and producers of information in order to build detailed profiles of members of Congress. With their help, well also build and post online a set of detailed profiles on every senator and representative.

But first, we need your input on what to put in those profiles.

The project is modeled on and done in partnership with the Digital Literacy Contest, an online search competition that teaches college students about various online resources. The new version, the Digital Democracy Contest, similarly asks questions answerable by using online resources on Congress, but with a twist: after answering a series of questions with known answers, the students are asked a question for which we dont yet know the answer. (For example, Does a Senator X have a top-ten campaign donor with interests before the committees he/she sits on?)

The students are also asked to fact-check other students responses. Sunlight will then take answers written and verified by the students and add them to our profiles of members of Congress at OpenCongress.org, effectively crowd-sourcing the creation of a massive encyclopedia on our government.

The Internet has given us a wealth of information, but its crucial to be a savvy reader who knows how to check facts. The Digital Democracy Contest will give students these skills while also showing them they dont need to wait for a diploma or the voting age before engaging as participants in our democracy.

The project is funded by the Sunlight Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation through a Young Innovator Award.

Tell us what you want to know about Congress. Use this form to help us create questions for the students.

We need participating classes for the fall and spring! Are you, or do you know, a high school government teacher? The contest will be available, for free, for any high school government class to participate. It has a ready-to-go online interface that takes about 40 minutes to complete in-class. Please email us if you know anyone who might be interested.

Todd Presner launched his new blog today, a worthy addition to any digital humanities RSS feed. Todd focuses on "the development of the geo-spatial web, augmented reality, issues of temporality and GIS, and the technical media that enable visualizations of complex city spaces."

Like a lot of things related to digital humanities, it can take me a few moments to really GET what some of this new media research and work is about, probably because there is often a visual, audio, networked and time-shifting component that text strains to capture. This is part of what makes Todd's work so fascinating, the ability to use different media to explore "layered histories," beyond text. But the learning dimension of Hypercities is equally fascinating, particularly when people actively seek to record digital stories, and embed them in the geo-spatial web.

Last year, members of Historic Filipinotown participated in this kind of digital storytelling. A group of youth did video interviews of neighborhood elders, participated in historic tours of the newly designated area, and captured a non-linear, visual,and oral history of a dynamic and meaningful community space. It inspired me to think more deeply about questions of place: What does it mean to inhabit a community, and how does that community tell its story over time? Who should tell those stories, and how do we understand history when it is collaborative, as opposed to authoritative. Even though I did not participate in the program, I was drawn into the narrative, and not just through the interactive end product. There seemed to be so many important points of contact in the process of gathering and recording stories, not just for the youth and the professors, but for the graduate students, community members, and especially the elders.

Is this what learning looks like in the 21st century?

Todd describes Hypercities as "an interactive, web-based research and teaching environment for authoring and analyzing the cultural, architectural, and urban history of cities." But it is more than that, too, since Hypercities is redefining and reconceptualizing the humanities with technical media, in often brilliant ways.

In his first blog post, Todd writes about the Digital Humanities Manifesto, which he helped compile, along with Jeffrey Schnapp, Peter Lunenfeld and approximately 100 people who contributed through guided workshops and Commentpress.

The Digital Humanities Manifesto, writes Todd,  is intended to "arouse debate about what the Humanities can and should be doing in the 21st century, particularly concerning the digital culture wars...This is a watershed moment in the history of human civilization, in which our relationship to knowledge and information is changing in profound and unpredictable ways. Digital Humanities studies the cultural and social impact of new technologies as well as takes an active role in the design, implementation, interrogation, and subversion of these technologies."

It always helps, during watershed moments in the history of human civilization, to have a good blog to shine a light on things. I'll be following Todd's work and Hypercities, gathering insights and adding them to my own conversation about participatory learning in the 21st century.

Over on Facebook, I'm engaged in a very interesting conversation sparked by Siva Vaidhyanathan's posting of this excellent expose in VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW of all the passages in Chris Anderson's new book FREE that were taken all too freely from other people, mainly Wikipedia, mistakes and all, without fact checking, and without attribution. Bad, bad, bad . . . Inexcusable. Not acceptable. Intellectually lazy. Reprehensible.

And yet . . .

It's a little terrifying for a fellow author to read this, especially one such as myself who is making the transition from my insanely meticulous scholarly way of writing to trade writing. Yesterday, I'm delighted to say, I delivered Part One of THE REWIRED BRAIN: THE DEEP STRUCTURE OF THINKING FOR THE INFORMATION AGE to my editor at Viking Press. Here's the count: 153 pages of text and 20 single-spaced, tightly packed pages of endnotes. In tiny type. The printed book will not look like this.

In academic publishing, every idea is attributed to a scientist or another researcher and that person's affiliation is included in the text which then has an endnote with the relevant research fully cited. When I look through the trade publications on my shelf, there are rarely endnotes. When there are, it's usually something quite scant with "note to page 34" and then maybe one citation. Maybe a bibliography. Maybe a bibliographic essay. Maybe not even. Oi vey.

I'm not being negative about trade publishing. There are conventions specific to different kinds of scholarship and different national settings. These are conventions and like all conventions we develop them over time. But endnotes are not the way to get the message about big, important, meaningful, transformative ideas to a mass audience. Endnotes should "PROFESSOR!" and, well, we profs don't expect thousands, tens of thousdand, hundreds of thousands of readers. By last count, the typical university press monograph had something like 800 readers. I happen to think the research I am doing on a new model of mind adequate to the last twenty years of neuroscientific research and helpful in addressing the complexities of our interactive, global, collaborative Information Age deserves more than 800 readers. I do want to change the world. Yep, that's my goal.

How do you change the world and footnote the work of some new center for cognition and digitality at this or that university? We don't have conventions for that yet. What we do have conventions for is a hugely rushed (this is true in academic publishing too, by the way) final copy edit through a manuscript, where mark after mark changes the order of things, changes content, and realligns the endnotes and the author sees her baby cut up like one of those diagrams of a cow on the way to slaughter (Here Thar Be Flank Steak, Here Thar Be Filet Mignon), and the clock is ticking, and nothing says "attention blindness" like worrying over thousands of small details under a deadline.

Oy vey.   And no doubt after the success of The Long Tail, Anderson's editor was pushing him hard to deliver his new book fast, faster, fastest, to capitalize a fickle audience ready to discard him for the next new flavor of the month.   You write that fast and you cut corners.   That is as much a parable of contemporary publishing as the "crisis in humanities monograph publishing at university presses."  Different end of the spectrum, not necessarily a different crisis.

Do I forgive Chris Anderson for sloppy research, snagging whole passages from Wikipedia without checking or attribution? Even with extenuating circumstances?  No way!

Am I feeling the anxiety of competing versions, visions, goals, and methods of authorship this morning? You betcha.

In our Facebook discussion, Siva notes that he faults Anderson less for dishonesty (which may well be inadvertent--it's easy to do in our "cut and paste" era where information can so easily be extracted for further use and then one can equally easily forget it's an extraction not one's own brilliant idea) than for intellectual laziness. I agree.

Here's the rest of the Anderson story, as a famous old newscaster used to say. There is an excellent moral to this story of "Free" publishing that we can use when we lecture next fall on plagiarism. Even the pros do it. And even the pros get caught. But there's also probably another moral too. It is possible that the Big Scary Plagiarism Accusation will get so much press that his sales will actually be higher than if he had done it the right way. I've read excerpts from FREE and it seems as if it is worth reading, so I don't begrudge him a big audience. But I really wish he'd done it right. And I wish that the Hyperbolic You Been Caught Paparazzi Version of Scholarly Responsibility were not the only measure of what does or does not make honest and serious thinking through of a complex subject.

To enlarge upon Siva's point, Anderson getting caught at pasting in unattributed and unchanged paragraphs from another source may be the least offensive version of "theft" in this too-free appropriation of ideas caught-out in FREE.

What do you think?

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This is from Publisher's Lunch: And here's the url to the expose itself:

Free Indeed; Anderson's New Book Lifts Numerous Passages from Wikipedia
The Virginia Quarterly Review convincingly reproduces a number of incidences in Chris Anderson's new book FREE: The Future of a Radical Price that reproduce nearly verbatim portions of a number of Wikipedia articles.

Anderson admits fault via e-mail, saying "all those are my screwups after we decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources." He intended to "do a write-through" of "source material without an individual author to credit (as in the case of Wikipedia)," and says that "obviously in my rush at the end I missed a few of that last category, which is bad.... I should have had a better process to make sure the write-through covered all the text that was not directly sourced.

"I think what we'll do is publish those notes after all, online as they should have been to begin with. That way the links are live and we don't have to wrestle with how to freeze them in time, which is what threw me in the first place."

As you can imagine, Hyperion supports Anderson's statement: "We are completely satisfied with Chris Anderson's response. It was an unfortunate mistake, and we are working with the author to correct these errors both in the electronic edition before it posts, and in all future editions of the book."

But Fast Company observes: "What's more disconcerting is that Anderson was relying so heavily on Wikipedia for his information in the first place; even middle-school book-reports shouldn't be crafted with ancillary information from that site. Confoundingly, many of the passages that appear lifted were readily-available definitions of terms that would appear in more credible reference books like the Oxford English Dictionary."

Subsequently, Ed Champion finds and blogs about various other lightly rewritten or borrowed phrasings from other sources (including a passage from a book by Wired colleague Kevin Kelly). "A cursory plunge into the book's contents reveals that Anderson has not only cribbed material from Wikipedia and websites (sometimes without accreditation), but that he has a troubling habit of mentioning a book or an author and using this as an excuse to reproduce the content with very few changes -- in some cases, nearly verbatim."
VQR

There is a sweet sadness in handing over the reins of the HASTAC Scholars Program.  This past year has been such a marvelous experience, getting to know and work with (both virtually and f2f) so many extremely talented, creative, visionary people.  I am sad to leave, but the true beauty of virtual community is that it is only my role that is shifting, not my ability to participate, and my ties with HASTAC will simply evolve along with me.  What else is HASTAC about if not flexibility, change and new horizons?

Perhaps the sweetest part is that I am truly delighted to get to introduce to you the next Director of the HASTAC Scholars Program, Fiona Barnett.  When we conducted the search for this position, Fiona's letter and resume were clear standouts to everyone who read them.  We all thought, "wow, she not only gets HASTAC - she is HASTAC!"  (whatever that means exactly...  We may still be looking for that perfect explanation for HASTAC, but we recognize it when we see it -- someone innovative, creative, savvy, hooked in, open-minded, pushing boundaries -- not to mention that she's also brilliant, charming and funny!)  During the interview, it was obvious just how perfect a fit Fiona was for the job, so much so that at the close of the interview as we told her "we'll let you know within a few days," we all looked around at one another as if to say "Don't we know already?  Can't we just offer it to her?"  And so we did offer her the job on the spot - and she accepted.  Sometimes the fit is just that clear!  Let me share with you a little more about Fiona...

Fiona Barnett is a Ph.D. candidate in the Literature Program and Women's Studies at Duke University. She graduated with a B.A. in Modern Culture & Media from Brown University in 2001, and then spent several years working in a multimedia studio in Vancouver, BC.  Her scholarly work is at the intersection of feminist and queer theory, science studies, critical theory and visual studies. She is currently at work on her dissertation, entitled Turning the Body Inside Out, which is a genealogy of the fantasy that the body requires investigation, and traces the attachment to the kind of knowledges that can be produced by examining the body (both inside and out). It considers the social, scientific, aesthetic and theoretical practices which discursively produce the body as a visible – and thus knowable –  object by repeatedly staging the scene of its dissection. In particular, her project focuses on the historical practices and contemporary situations that reinscribe the desire for an open and legible body, including the autopsy, dissection, lens technologies, museum exhibits, freak shows, serial killers, DNA and especially critical theory itself.  At Duke, Fiona also enjoys organizing the Women's Studies Graduate Scholars Colloquium, a unique program that generates a supportive intellectual community for graduate students.  In her free time, she loves to practice her photography, enjoy the vibrant Durham community and foster dogs through a local rescue organization.

I know that Fiona is thrilled to be joining the HASTAC team - perhaps as thrilled as we are to have her on board!  Please join me in welcoming Fiona to HASTAC!

This Friday, Erin Gentry Lamb, our "Founding Director" (!) of the HASTAC Scholars program, will be moving to her new position as an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Humanities at the Center for Literature, Medicine and the Biomedical Humanities at Hiram College in Ohio.  At her dissertation defense (and it was a brilliant one, I add editorially), we asked her what her dream job was, and this is the one she picked.   We were so happy when Hiram picked her as their new faculty member.  It's a perfect match.

I know I speak for all of us at HASTAC when I say that our new HASTAC Scholars program could not have gotten off to such a phenomenal start without Erin.  It went from an idea we hatched together in the HASTAC offices one afternoon, to an enthusiastic meeting of our Steering Committee, to fifty-five scholars starting out brand new and with no expectations but a lot of energy to being an amazingly successful program that has garnered attention and interest from many quarters.  That's Erin!   Take an idea and make it not just happen but happen better than anyone dreamed possible.   

Our ambition for the HASTAC Scholars was to create a network of the next generation.   They would report on the most exciting activities at their institutions, they would tell us about their own work, they would hosts forums on pressing topics of significance to their work.   HASTAC Scholars was intended to be a network where young scholars, graduate and undergraduates, who may or may not find a large cohort of colleagues, a network for their work and ideas and ambitions, at their home institutions might be part of something national or even international that would then provide a platform upon which they could build toward their own futures.  Talk about a lofty ambition.  And Erin was the galvanizing force behind the fifty-five exceptional scholars.  For a full report, take a look at this:  http://www.hastac.org/node/2226

Now, Erin.  I think I met her when she was a first year graduate student in the University Scholars Program, a highly innovative interdisciplinary program where undergraduates, grad students, and professional school students all merge together, across disciplines, to talk about their own intellectual ambitions and ideas with other smart people from other disciplines.  (If that sounds a bit like HASTAC Scholars, that's not entirely a coincidence since I had a role in being able to create the University Scholars Program a while back.)   Erin was a natural University Scholar, energetic, engaged, full of so many ideas that didn't fit into any conventional niche.  She was also so engaging, a great human being.  I've been fortunate to work with hundreds of wonderful graduate students over the year but few match Erin in all the ways that Erin is in the world.   Hiram College faculty and students are so lucky to have her on their faculty!   They know this, but they don't even begin to really know it.  Not really.

Not the way we in HASTAC have been privileged to see her in action.  Generous, gentle, tough, disciplined, smart, practical, idealistic, realistic----and funny too.  What more could one want in a colleague?   As Director of the HASTAC Scholars, it's your show.  Basically, everything we do at HASTAC grants individuals creative autonomy and then works with the best kind of collaboration.  Each person does his or her thing . . . and then we come together to give feedback, challenges, insights, and other perspectives.  Erin gave as much as she got, always.  Always!   And then some. 

We are going to miss her.  Our one consolation is that, true to form, she made sure her successor is also fabulous.  Fiona Barnett, our new Director of the HASTAC Scholars, will be introduced to all of you shortly, and she is already moving into her role because (of course! that's Erin!) there's been a very smooth passing of the reins.  It will be an exciting year and that will be Erin's legacy.

Hiram College has also agreed to fund a HASTAC Scholar, so, next year, Erin will be able to serve as mentor to one of our incoming HASTAC Scholars in her role as Assistant Professor in the Center for Literature, Medicine, and Biomedical Humanities.

Below is a "Welcome" to Erin from that new Center.   We envy you, Hiram College!   And we thank you, Erin, for a great year getting this fantastic HASTAC Scholars program rolling.   It will flourish because of all you've given to it, you will flourish at Hiram College.   And, yes, we're going to miss you, Erin.  All the best of luck in your new life.  Blog about it occasionally and let us know about life in Ohio and at Hiram.  We will take great pride in your future.    

------------------------- 

Center Welcomes New Assistant Professor, Erin Gentry Lamb  [http://www.hiram.edu/excellence/litmed/lamb.html]

The Center for Literature, Medicine, and Biomedical Humanities is delighted to announce our newest faculty member, Erin Gentry Lamb.  Dr. Lamb comes to us from Duke University, where she recently completed her PhD.  Her dissertation, The Age of Obsolescence: Senescence and Scientific Rejuvenation in Twentieth Century America, masterfully uses science, literature, and archival research to re-think how we as culture view the process of growing “old.”  Her interests in science and science fiction inform her scholarship and, most exciting for us, the classes she will teach at Hiram.  Dr. Lamb’s teaching and research have earned the recognition and support of numerous institutions, including the prestigious Mellon Foundation.  Her publications demonstrate a commitment to the kind interdisciplinary study we value most at the Center.  In 2007, her moving essay, “My Gift to Mon on Her Second Birthday: An Adult Daughter’s Perspective,” appeared in Caregiver’s Guide for Bone Marrow/Stem Cell Transplant (Eds. Myra Jacobs and Jean Jones. National Bone Marrow Transplant LINK).  Her review of Jack Morgan’s The Biology of Horror and Justin D. Edward’s Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic appeared recently in American Literature.  Dr. Lamb arrives this August.  The courses she plans to teach for us promise to widen the Center’s intellectual scope and challenge our students’ imaginations.

The rest is silence. - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act V, Scene 2

In music composition the rest is used as punctuation, as a reset for the volume creep of dynamics. Silence is golden and like gold the price of silence keeps going up as its rarity increases. In modern pop and rock music the constant use of compression to make the quiet parts louder and increase the overall loudness of the music has over time been labeled the loudness war. (Also see Over The Limit.)

Turning up the gain on any signal, however interesting and informative, degenerates into noise either by the incapacity of the output media to reproduce only and exactly as closely as reasonably possible what it is given, or through repetition decreasing the information content of the signal averaged out over time. After a certain point you can't hear it or tune it out or run away or get earplugs and whatever information was there is lost in the distortion or thrown away. Noise pollution will grow as human population density grows and industry grows further. Recent studies have shown that birds are leaving urban areas or singing louder or singing at night because their dawn chorus cannot be heard over the cacophony of humanity's rush hour.

We will pay for silence. For better soundproofing in walls, or lacking it we will rest less when we sleep. For more distance from high-density zones, creating longer commutes and increasing fuel consumption, and reducing the time we have by sacrificing it to the extended travel. For active noise canceling cellphones to talk with and headphones to listen to our overly compressed and distorted music on our portable music players and *still* have to pump up the volume until we reach the limits of our ear fatigue before we want to stop listening. For white noise and for nature sounds that become rarer and more exotic over time. For recordings of silence at the bottom of a well, in a cathedral, in the soon-to-become-misnamed Rub' al Khali, the Empty Quarter of Arabia.

More rest.  Less noise. Listen more. Use negative space. Think of loudness as a criterion to select against when choosing equipment of any kind. Then when you choose to make sound or listen to people or music or just live, you don't have to waste as much energy struggling against the ocean of sound.

This transcript from an NPR piece on Social Networks and how they are growing by the millions but still can't pay for themselves.   One person they interviewed on this subject was Fred Stutzman, of the University of North Carolina, and who was the first Director of Social Networking for the HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition.   As readers of my Cat in the Stack blog know, I worry a lot about all the way that "information wants to be free"----but is costing someone a lot.   How it eventually pays for itself is the issue, and there are good thoughts in this essay.  Here's the url and an excerpt of Fred's smart comments.

by Laura Sydell

 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105493600

Fred Stutzman, who studies social networks at the University of North Carolina, thinks charging for services will turn out to be the best way for social networks to get profitable.

"People will pay for good technology," he says. "People will pay for a responsive company."

He points to the professional networking site LinkedIn. It offers some free services, but users pay for a premium level with more features. With only 40 million users, LinkedIn is significantly smaller than Facebook or MySpace, but it's making a profit.

Facebook, though, may face a bit of a conundrum. There are two groups on the site called "We Will Not Pay To Use Facebook. If This Happens We Are Gone." Their combined membership? Nearly 8 million.

Stutzman thinks that ultimately Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are going to be around for a long time. They just might not be the big cash cows that some people expect."

Dear HASTAC Members,

I am nearing the end of my tenure as Director of the HASTAC Scholars Program (and will soon be replaced by the amazing Fiona Barnett, whom I will properly introduce in a later post). It has been an honor and a pleasure to be part of the HASTAC team and to get to work with such an amazing group of scholars.

I want to share with you the performance report we sent to the Mentors who nominated HASTAC Scholars for the 2008-2009 pilot year (in the hopes that this might help them to convince their administration to offer up money again to sponsor another Scholar this next year, even in hard financial times). For those of you who are regular HASTAC readers/bloggers/etc., the activities recorded here may all seem quite familiar, but to see it all gathered together at least reminds me what an amazing year it was for this pilot program.

We had a group of 55 impressively diverse, creative and accomplished Scholars. Between September 2009 and May 2010 over 12,650 absolutely unique visitors from across the United States and internationally tuned in (with more than 55,500 views) to one of the 13 HASTAC Scholars Discussion Forums hosted on the HASTAC website. These forums were facilitated by different HASTAC Scholars, featured an array of distinguished guests, and were all addressed to HASTAC's three missions: new media, critical thinking, and participatory learning, in any and all possible configurations. The forums focused on such vital and timely topics as “Academic Publishing in the Digital Age,” “Fair Use and the Future of the Commons,” “Blogging and Tweeting Academia” and “The Future of the Digital Humanities,” and featured such distinguished participants as Brett Bobley (Director of the Office of Digital Humanities for the National Endowment for the Humanities) and Howard Rheingold (pioneer of social networking and author of Smart Mobs). See the report below for a complete list of these discussion forums.

The HASTAC Scholars also blogged regularly on a diverse array of topics, participated in many national and international conferences, tweeted and spread the word about their activities, events at their universities and HASTAC happenings. They not only contributed to, but in fact inspired a vibrant conversation about the future of higher education and the humanities, arts, and interpretive social sciences in a technological age. The report that follows includes many numbers and details about the Scholars’ performance this past year, but the bottom line is that the program was so successful that we decided to expand it in 2009-2010 and open it to the public, inviting nominations in an open call on the HASTAC site.

If you would like to nominate a HASTAC Scholar for the 2009-2010 program there’s still time! Nominations will run until July 31. We’ve already received several, including our first international HASTAC Scholar from Spain, and I hope we’ll see many more flowing in soon!

I want to thank all of you who participated in our HASTAC Scholar discussions and who make HASTAC such a vibrant, worthwhile community. It is largely thanks to your support that we will get to continue this program that allows the future leaders of the digital humanities to set the agenda and the conversation now, as part of their own professionalization and as a way of revitalizing the work we all do.

Sincerely,
Erin Gentry Lamb
Director, HASTAC Scholars Program

Goals: The HASTAC Scholars Program was created 1) to recognize and offer visibility to students working in the digital humanities, broadly conceived, and 2) to use these students’ expertise and collaborative energy to help make HASTAC a more dynamic and interactive virtual institution. The Program’s stated primary goal was “to bring the innovative work and events happening in the Scholars’ home institutions, communities and regions to the attention of the HASTAC network, while at the same time broadening HASTAC’s reach and bringing more affiliates into the HASTAC network.” In return for regularly posting to the HASTAC site, Scholars received a $300 fellowship funded by their nominating institution and a formal letter for their files.

Nominations Process: Given HASTAC’s lack of centralized funding, the Scholars for this pilot year were nominated and funded by HASTAC Steering Committee members and their institutions. Throughout the nomination process, a few other key HASTAC participants were invited to nominate Scholars from their institutions, and in one case, an eager Scholar sought out a nominator from his home institution.

Expectations: The primary expectation laid upon HASTAC Scholars was to be a regular participant in the online HASTAC community. Scholars were expected to “regularly contribute to the HASTAC blog, to Needle (HASTAC’s information commons), and to a Scholars-hosted discussion forum.” Many Scholars participated offline as well, meeting up at national conferences, organizing groups and events on their home campuses, and in other ways representing their institutions and HASTAC to a variety of different communities.

From the Program’s launch in late August 2008 to the beginning of April 2009, the HASTAC Scholars have added over 300 posts to www.hastac.org. These posts have been blogs, comments in response to others’ blogs, comments in forum discussions, announcement postings, etc.

21 Scholars facilitated or co-facilitated the 13 HASTAC Scholars Discussion Forums held throughout the year. During the week of their launch, these discussions are the most visited part of the HASTAC site, drawing in thousands of views, and continuing to draw new views long past the point where people have stopped adding new comments. These discussions are incredibly rich and thoughtful, and are consistently drawing more viewers and comments than many humanities sites.

In 2008-2009, the HASTAC Scholars hosted the following discussions:

“Participatory Learning”
Featuring: Howard Rheingold (pioneer of social networking, author of Smart Mobs)
Host: Joshua McVeigh-Schultz (UCSC)
http://www.hastac.org/scholars/forum/8-25-08Rheingold-participatory-learning

“Metaverses & Scholarly Collaboration”
Host: Ana Boa-Ventura (UTA)
http://www.hastac.org/scholars/forum/09-22-08Metaverses-and-Scholarly-Collaboration

“Doing Media History”
Host: Whitney Trettien (MIT)
http://www.hastac.org/scholars/forum/10-06-08Doing-Media-History

“Fair Use and the Future of the Commons”
Featuring: Critical Commons (www.criticalcommons.org) and Steve Anderson)
Host: Veronica Paredes (USC)
http://www.hastac.org/scholars/forum/10-22-08Fair-Use-and-the-Future-of-the-Commons

“Academic Publishing in the Digital Age”
Featuring: Staff from 2 online-only peer-reviewed academic journals: Transformative Works & Cultures (http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc, Kristina Busse, Karen Hellekson) & Vectors (http://vectorsjournal.org/, Tara McPherson, Steve Anderson, Erik Loyer)
Hosts: Christopher Hanson (USC) and Julie Levin Russo (Brown)
http://www.hastac.org/scholars/forum/11-02-08Academic-Publishing-in-the-Digital-Age

“Participatory Play: Digital Games from Spacewar! to Virtual Peace”
Featuring: The Virtual Peace Humanitarian Assistance Training Simulator (http://www.virtualpeace.org/)
Hosts: Lindsey Andrews (Duke) & Patrick Jagoda (Duke)
http://www.hastac.org/scholars/forum/11-18-08Digital-Games

“Collaboration 2.0”
Featuring: Winners of the 2007-08 Digital Media & Learning Competition
Host: Jim Brown (UTA)
http://www.hastac.org/scholars/forum/1-14-09Collaboration-2-0

“The Future of the Digital Humanities”
Featuring: Brett Bobley (Director of the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities)
Hosts: Michael Gavin (Rutgers) & Kathleen Smith (UIUC)
http://www.hastac.org/scholars/forum/02-02-09The-Future-of-the-Digital-Humanities

“What’s Going On in Digital Humanities?”
Hosts: Staci Shultz (UM) & Isabel Millan (UM)
http://www.hastac.org/scholars/forum/02-16-09Whats-Going-On-in-Digital-Humanities

“Digital Textuality and Tools”
Featuring: Geraldine Heng & the Global Middle Ages Project (http://www.laits.utexas.edu/gma/portal/)
Hosts: Angela Kinney (UIUC) & Michael Widner (UTA)
http://www.hastac.org/scholars/forum/03-09-09Digital-Textuality-and-Tools

“Making Invisible Learning Visible”
Featuring: Randy Bass, Bret Eynon & the Visible Knowledge Project (https://digitalcommons.georgetown.edu/blogs/vkp/)
Hosts: Daniel Chamberlain (UM, USC) & Chalet Seidel (Case Western)
http://www.hastac.org/scholars/forum/03-23-09Making-Invisible-Learning-Visible

“Mapping the Digital Humanities”
Hosts: Jentery Sayers (UW) & Matthew Wilson (UW)
http://www.hastac.org/scholars/forums/04-06-09Mapping-the-Digital-Humanities

“Blogging and Tweeting Academia”
Hosts: John Jones (UTA) & Ramsey Tesdell (UW)
http://www.hastac.org/scholars/forums/04-16-09Blogging-Academia

These forum discussions, and the HASTAC Scholars’ regular contributions to the HASTAC site, have significantly increased both the membership of HASTAC as well as the number of visitors to the HASTAC site:

At the same time that the HASTAC Scholars Program has been a boon for the HASTAC community, it has also led to opportunities for the Scholars themselves and exposure for the institutions they represent. Examples of some of these benefits to both self and institution that HASTAC Scholars have identified as arising from their participation in the program include:

• Networking and Collaborative Communities. Scholars report making connections with practitioners both in their own field of study and across disciplines, in their home institutions and in universities and organizations in the U.S. and abroad. In particular, Scholars note that HASTAC exposed them to new approaches and possibilities for collaborative projects. Many of the projects Scholars undertook fed back to enrich their home institutions. For example, this past year two Scholars initiated an interdisciplinary Digital Media Studies Group at their university that will host speakers, workshops, etc. At another institution, two Scholars from different disciplines collaboratively developed an undergraduate course that they taught, gave several talks about, and presented to HASTAC both at the HASTAC III conference and through a HASTAC Scholars Discussion Forum. In still other universities, Scholars collaborated on a grant proposal, and helped to put on a new media symposium.
  
• Communicating their Work. Scholars report learning to communicate their work more succinctly, and in particular, growing more comfortable sharing their ideas with a wide, public audience. Some Scholars used HASTAC as a research tool, posing questions to the HASTAC network and receiving thoughtful feedback from people they had never met. Other Scholars reported that the ideas they began to develop via forum and blog posts on HASTAC have now turned into fully realized projects. Additionally, Scholars were offered opportunities to participate in various national conferences. Thirteen of our Scholars presented papers, posters or acted as official bloggers at the HASTAC III conference in April 2009 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Four more Scholars will be collaborating on a panel presentation for the Association for Integrative Studies conference in October, 2009. As the “HASTAC@” programming develops this next year—embedding HASTAC components within already established conferences—we expect these opportunities for students to present their work in officially recognized capacities to grow.
  
• Developing Pedagogy. Scholars report that HASTAC forum discussions and blogs provide useful ideas for implementing new techniques and introducing new technologies into the classroom. These ideas benefit not just HASTAC members, but the wider university community as well. For example, one student who contributed to a discussion about assigned blogging in the classroom was asked to share her perspective via a faculty showcase. Advanced graduate Scholars reported that the discussions held on HASTAC about participatory learning and using blogs, wikis, social media, digital storytelling and electronic portfolios in the classroom helped them to develop their teaching statements and sample syllabi for the job market.
  
• Increased Marketability. Scholars report that their HASTAC experience was beneficial to their experience on the job/post-doc market in several ways. In addition to helping develop their teaching materials and providing an honor on their CV, Scholars report talking about their HASTAC experience during job interviews as a way of demonstrating their engagement with the digital humanities and featuring their networking skills. HASTAC discussions throughout the year exposed Scholars to work both in and outside of their disciplines, and to some of the essential debates currently happening within academia about proposed changes in publishing and the tenure system. Several Scholars who graduated and are moving on to faculty positions next year plan to Mentor their own HASTAC Scholars next year.

Because of this incredibly successful 2008-2009 pilot year for the HASTAC Scholars Program, the HASTAC Steering Committee has voted to expand the program for 2009-2010, and will invite any HASTAC member who is faculty or staff at an institution of higher education to nominate a HASTAC Scholar. The new HASTAC website, which will launch over the summer of 2009, will feature all the nominating Mentors and their sponsoring institutions or centers.

We look forward to seeing what new opportunities this expansion of the program will create, and we thank all of you who participate in the HASTAC community for making this possible!

HASTAC needs a motto. Or mottos. We hope you'll use the comment section below so together we can come up with one--or many.

Here's why: We're still beta-testing our new website, but what a site it will be when it will be. Richly interactive, the new www.hastac.org will allow individuals and institutions to show their work, their events, to allow for invitations the way Facebook does, and in other ways is the online embodiment of what HASTAC's network of networks aspires to be (at least as much as a voluntary network that doesn't collect dues can afford to do). Mandy and Mark did an amazing job working with the developers (and very, very little cash: remember, no dues, no advertising, lots of volunteerism and elbow grease and generous institutions behind us), and now Ruby has taken up the leadership role. Soon we'll be public to more than just the HASTAC Scholars and the Digital Media and Learning Competition winners (who are helping us with the beta version now). We're hoping for the big (still beta) release after the Fourth of July, and we will be inviting all of you to explore the new site, give us constructive feedback, and, most important, populate it with your projects and activities. We'll be rolling out more features over the next year. We're excited!

But, we are also amused and bemused. There's all this text about what HASTAC is and it just isn't that anymore! It now seems hopelessly outdated. (That's why you redo a website if you redo it right, not just to make it up to date in tech and design but in content, in the deep structure of thinking that should structure every website.) Ours goes back to 2005 . . . and that's eons ago in Internet Time. We were also amused to see archives of previous statements, going back to 2002, about what HASTAC is. Or was.

The basics are the same, but all the details vary, with so many differences in pitch and purpose. That's a good thing. HASTAC is about change. But there are so many shifts and turns in our purpose statements over the years that Mandy quipped we should use as our motto, "We Are What You Make Us." Or "We Are What You Want Us to Be." Or "We Are What We Want to Be." Or "We Are What We Make." Or "We Are What We Want Us To Be." (Down with pronouns!) Or all of the above. A DIY network of networks should have a constantly self-customizing motto.

Here are some HASTAC principles; A passionate interest in some kind of learning that is not restricted to schools or to books but all the ways we learn our world and each other. Some kind of ever-new, ever-changing media whose impact is social and intellectual and deeply global. Some kind of critical thinking, informed by history and deep interdisciplinary appreciation across all boundaries. Some kind of recognition that learning never stops, that it is about all the ways we interact. Some deep conviction that universities need to be un-walled. Some sense that, whether or not we work within institutions, we can mobilize our efforts and use whatever skills and research and thinking we have and do to make a difference in the world. Some keen awareness that everything is changing fast--a revolution can be waged in Iran on Twitter, the world's largest encyclopedia can be created by volunteers worldwide in hundreds of languages with new stores of knowledge by contributors who never meet one another.

Everything is changing fast, that is, except universities, which are changing only around the edges, and K-12 which barely budges at all. Is school the opposite of learning? What a waste, on every level if schools are for taking and passing tests and learning happens organically and elsewhere. What is the future of thinking in this digital age? These are deeply humanistic questions but the humanities are just beginning to claim this responsibility and take this opportunity and run with it.

There was once upon a time (and now) so much dedication to condemning science and technology that there was no time left to think about what the humanities should be doing. How ignorant is that? Science and technology need the humanities in this era when ever major question is about the meaning of life, the meaning of our planet. The humanities need the social sciences, science, and technology when we want to ponder the big questions and need still other tools. But who is thinking in these ways except HASTAC? It's frustrating. In this incredible time, we need incredible new ways to think and act and organize together. The walls remain. But HASTAC has no walls. And the Revolution will be tweeted.

We began with some core principles in 2002 (same year Wikipedia began, to put our history in perspective) but all the details keep changing because our landscape does and the whole point of HASTAC is change.

So our motto? We invite you to use the comment section below to come up with mottos (plural) for HASTAC. HASTAC R Us. How do you HASTAC? How (in five words or ten) do you describe why you are interested in HASTAC? What is HASTAC to you? We Are What We Make Us. Mottos, please!

June 2009
5 3/8 x 8, 81 pp., 11 illus.
$14.00/£10.95 (PAPER)
Short

ISBN-10:
0-262-51359-5
ISBN-13:
978-0-262-51359-3

 Scott McLemee has an excellent piece in the current INSIDE HIGHER EDUCATION about tweeting and university presses.  His lead, below, references the San Francisco MLA where, of course, some HASTAC Scholars held a whole, excellent, and well-attended session on Tweeting Academia.   He also notes the exemplary use of Twitter by our own Laura Sell at Duke University Press who not only tweets new publications but many other events and links and stories of interest to a university press community.  And yes, our own Jonathan Tarr,HASTAC Program Coordinator and HASTAC's own Tweeter-in-Chief, has already tweeted this on @HASTAC

 Here's the link to Scott's excellent article:    http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee246

Only during the final week of 2008 did it become clear to me that Twitter is now a full-fledged widget within the discursive apparatus of academe. I had opened a Twitter account a few months earlier. (Everyman his own panopticon administrator.) But it was the Modern Language Association convention in San Francisco that made me conscious, for the first time, that microblogging was something more than just another way for the Internet to get me to write things for free.

 -------------------------------

"At Duke University Press, where Laura Sell is publicist and tweeter-in-chief, the following of some 1,600 people built up since November reflects both the quantity and quality of the links posted. The range and the interest of Duke's tweets make its presence exemplary, in my opinion. Between drafting and rewriting this column, for example, I followed Duke's tweets to a newspaper article about whether or not English was approaching one million words, a blog post about rock songs cued to Joyce's Ulysses, and the Twitter feed of Duke author Negar Mottahedeh, who has been posting about events in Iran.

With a colleague from the press’s journal division, Sell tweets “about 6 times a day, more if we find a lot of interesting links, less if one of us is out or very busy.” She says the readership appears to range “from other publishers to librarians to news media to interested individuals.”

Variety as well as regularity seems to help. “We tweet about Press news and reviews,” she says, “but also about non-Press-related things like higher ed news, literary culture, and publishing. We do not use the DUKEPress twitter account to post anything personal and try to be attentive to our voice and tone. We must be picking out interesting links, because a large percentage of our tweets are re-tweeted.”

Microblogging has also been an unusually efficient way to get out the word on a breaking development. “We have used it twice to spread news virally now,” says Sell, “once when Eve Sedgwick died and once when we put out the press release about Obama's mother's book. We were first out there with news of Sedgwick's death and I found it very interesting to watch my initial tweet get re-tweeted over a variety of networks. It worked similarly in Facebook.”

Reblogged from Duke Today 

Treasures Move From Library Shelves to the iPhone With New DukeMobile Applications

New applications offer a range of university materials, services

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

print | email | ShareThis

Durham, NC -- Scholars and students who once had to travel to museums or libraries to view collections of historic images can now do so by clicking on their mobile device instead.

With the launch of DukeMobile 1.1, the Duke University Libraries now offers the most comprehensive university digital image collection specifically formatted for an iPhone or iTouch device. It includes thousands of photos and other artifacts that range from early beer advertisements to materials on San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury scene in the 1960s. Although a growing number of scholarly institutions offer images and other material online, Duke is the first to offer collections that take advantage of the iPhone’s design, navigation and other features.

A brief video describing the new gateway to the collections is available here.

The collections are the latest addition to the DukeMobile suite of applications, which has also expanded to include several feeds of university news, along with emergency notifications and IT service alerts.

Duke University Libraries offers mobile users digital materials from 20 collections -- about 32,000 images overall -- covering women’s history, early American sheet music, Duke history and other topics. The libraries will add new collections regularly as they become available.

“Making these collections available for the iPhone and similar devices is important not only to extend access to Duke’s collections, but also as a milestone in the evolution of academic libraries from traditional print repositories to institutions that embrace new technology for sharing their rich resources with broader audiences,” said university librarian Deborah Jakubs. “Duke believes in putting its knowledge in service to society, and we are making a major commitment to reach well beyond our campus by placing our collections literally into people’s hands.”

In addition to the library collections, DukeMobile’s offerings for the iPhone and other mobile devices now include campus news feeds about business, the environment, law, research and other categories, as well as the latest stories from Duke Today and other campus sources. The news section appears under an icon that will turn red to notify users about campus emergencies or IT alerts.

“This new application consolidates our news and alerts to be more useful for students, alumni, parents or anyone else with an interest in Duke,” said Michael J. Schoenfeld, the university’s vice president for public affairs and government relations. “We want to make it as easy as possible to find the latest information about Duke, and to make the most of the iPhone’s rich interactive capabilities.”

The DukeMobile Version 1.1 suite of apps also includes an expanded schedule of courses and improvements to the campus map.

Duke’s Office of Information Technology and Office of Public Affairs and Government Relations have developed DukeMobile in partnership with TerriblyClever Design, a California-based web services company. Users of iPhones and iPod Touch devices can install DukeMobile by visiting the DukeMobile page in the iTunes App Store. Users of other wireless devices with browsers compatible with WAP 1.0 and 2.0 protocols should point their browsers to http://m.duke.edu.

Ilene Nelson

Director of Communications

T: (919) 660-5816

Email: ilene.nelson@duke.edu

Enduring a Troubled Economy

Remembering John Hope Franklin

This Month at Duke

Do digital games foster real-life civic engagement?

Joseph Kahne, a MacArthur Foundation fellow, is doing a study on this question, building on his earlier research about "the future of digital media and learning...[and] its potential to meaningfully support (and in some cases undermine) the development of a more informed, engaged, and reflective democracy." Joseph was not at the Stimulating Transparency & Accountability conference I attended in Montana, but his research questions and scholarly interests were in the air. If digital games can foster real-life civic engagement, it could have a game-changing effect (!) on our democracy. Anything that raises the bar of youth civic engagement --or any civic engagement for that matter--deserves a close look.

The National Institute of Money in State Politics hosted the conference, and Project Vote Smart, Center for Responsive Politics,  and the Sunlight Foundation (among others) were there to discuss campaign reform, transparency, and accountability. Many of the presenters mentioned the "transparency cycle" and the different points of contact neccesary to create a truly open and accountable government. Technology is an important part of this transparency, which means it's an important part of democracy. FollowTheMoney.org, VoteSmart.org, OpenSecrets.org, all of these sites help us understand civics we don't tend to learn in social studies class, even though campaign donations and lobbying are arguably the most influential aspect of our election process. How can we get these conversations into the minds and hearts of students?

President Obama has issued a Memorandum on Transparency, an unprecedented move during a time of unprecedented technological tools. This could be the Golden Era of Transparency, not only because of the technology, the tools and the commitment of people at this conference, but because we develop ways to engage all ages of learners in the conversation. If it takes games like Sandra Day O'Connor's OurCourts.org, or innovative but wonderfully simple movements like the DigitalDemocracyContest.org, maybe we will see a bump in civic engagement or voter participation in years to come. 

It was an eye-opening and deeply rewarding conference; I became an American citizen last December, a month after the 2008 elections. Not once during my citizenship studies did I read about campaign finance and the influence of money on elections and issues. There is a disconnect between the way U.S. history and social studies prepare us for deep engagement in civics. What usually motivates us to learn are the compelling, controversial, personal and sometimes intimidating issues that affect us individually. Technology can, and has, made those issues become "aha!" moments, making complex issues accessible and real. To bring those learning moments to the youngest members of our democracy is an important part of the "transparency cycle," the part that touches motivation and action.

Thanks to the staff at Flathead Lake Lodge for a great time, and arranging that spectacular weather! Our hikers also appreciated the trip up Lake MacDonald Valley Trail without bumping into the local grizzly bear. And thanks, too, to the National Institute for Money in State Politics for hosting an exciting conference.

This article (http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Jun-09/JunJul09_Uzwyshyn.pdf) describes a new opportunity for image search and retrieval by leveraging emergent image retrieval paradigm methodologies (Google Image Labeler/Human Computation) with new interface search possibilities (CoolIris) for the next stage of image search.  I'm also including a link to an earlier unpublished draft below that includes more images that didn't make it into the final version for those more visually oriented folks here.   http://www.uwf.edu/ruzwyshyn/2009PDF/ImageSearchDirections.pdf  Also, this was recently published in the June/July 2009 Bulletin of the American Society of Information Science and Technology devoted almost entirely to Visual Representation, Image Search and Retrieval and containing a wider range of interesting articles regarding images, digital video and current challenges and topics in information visualization.