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Announcement: Related Projects & Centers

MediaCommons

A “digital scholarly network,” MediaCommons focuses on bringing academic work into wide circulation for discussion and on refiguring the processes of academic publishing. Projects of MediaCommons include In Media Res and the MediaCommons Press.

“MediaCommons, a project-in-development with support from the Institute for the Future of the Book (part of the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC) and the National Endowment for the Humanities, is a network in which scholars, students, and other interested members of the public can help to shift the focus of scholarship back to the circulation of discourse. This network is community-driven, responding flexibly to the needs and desires of its users. It will also be multi-nodal, providing access to a wide range of intellectual writing and media production, including forms such as blogs, wikis, and journals, as well as digitally networked scholarly monographs. Larger-scale publishing projects are being developed with an editorial board that will also function as stewards of the larger network.”

Starter Links: MediaCommons | In Media Res| MediaCommons Press | Institute for the Future of the Book

Transliteracies Research ReportTransliteracies Research Report By Christopher Hagenagh

ACLS Humanities E-Book

Sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Humanities E-Book (HEB) initiative digitizes scholarly books in the humanities. E-books in a range of subjects, from African History to Women’s Studies, are hosted on the Initiative’s site and available via institutional or individual subscription. The site also hosts a number of XML-based books.

“Humanities E-Book is a digital collection offered by the ACLS in collaboration with ten learned societies, nearly 80 contributing publishers, and librarians at the University of Michigan’s Scholarly Publishing Office. The result is an online, fully searchable collection of high-quality books in the Humanities, recommended and reviewed by scholars and featuring unlimited multi-user access and free, downloadable MARC records. HEB is available 24/7 on- and off-campus through standard web browsers” (HEB web site)

Starter Links: Humanities E-book | American Council of Learned Societies

Electronic Poetry Center

Online resource focusing on electronic poetry.

“The EPC was founed in 1995 and serves as a central gateway to resources in electronic poetry and poetics at the University at Buffalo, the University of Pennsylvania’s PennSound, UBU web, and on the Web at large. Our aim is simple: to make available a wide range of resources centered on digital and contemporary formally innovative poetries, new media writing, and literary programming. The EPC itself makes extensive resources available through its E-Poetry and Author libraries. These libraries provide curated lists of resources on a focused range of authors for personal use, research, and teaching. Additionally, the EPC curates lists of links to similar digital and literary projects, related book publishers, literary magazines, and other resources. In addition the EPC offers substantial sound resources that will not be found elsewhere. These include the vast resources of the PENNsound and UBU archives and the award-winning interview and performances series of LINEbreak.” (From the EPC’s “about” page.)

Starter Links: Electronic Poetry Center | Chronicle of Higher Education article by Zoe Ingalls| Times Literary Supplement article by Paul Quinn

The Digital Cultures Project

University of California sponsored research initiative focused on new media technologies.

“The Digital Cultures Project (DCP) brings together faculty and graduate students from across the UC system who are actively engaged with the history and theory of new digital technologies and the ways in which they are changing humanistic studies and the arts. It also serves as an agency through which faculty and graduate students who have not been actively engaged in these matters can learn about them in order to incorporate them in their future work. The project is based at UC Santa Barbara, where the English Department is the home to Transcriptions, an NEH-supported project concerned with digital technology in research and teaching. The Multi-Campus Research Group (MRG) sponsors five interrelated activities.” (From the Project’s home page.)

Starter Link: The Digital Cultures Project

The Agrippa Files

An online archive devoted to Willilam Gibson’s ephemeral poem and book, Agrippa: (a book of the dead).

“Agrippa (a book of the dead) appeared in 1992 as a collaboration between artist Dennis Ashbaugh, author William Gibson, and publisher Kevin Begos, Jr. The Agrippa Files is a scholarly site that presents selected pages from the original art book; a unique archive of materials dating from the book’s creation and early reception; a simulation of what the book’s intended “fading images” might have looked like; a video of the 1992 “transmission” of the work; a “virtual lightbox” for comparing and studying pages; full-text scholarly essays and interviews; an annotated bibliography of scholarship, press coverage, interviews, and other material; a detailed bibliographic description of the book; and a discussion forum.” (From the project’s home page.)

Starter Link: The Agrippa Files

English Ballad Archive, 1500-1800

Online archive of ballads from the Samuel Pepys collection.

“Dedicated to mounting online extant ballads published in English from 1500-1800, the English Department’s Early Modern Center at the University of California at Santa Barbara has begun by archiving the 1,857 ballads in the Samuel Pepys collection…The Pepys ballads became the first priority of the EMC’s Ballad Archive because full access to these ballads has until now been extremely limited. Due to their fragility, the Pepys Library has restricted access to the originals. As consolation, it published in 1987 a facsimile edition of the five volumes of Pepys’s ballad collection, which has proved invaluable to scholars. But since most of the ballads are in black-letter or gothic font (a thick print type that bleeds into the poor quality ballad paper), the printed facsimiles are very difficult—at times, impossible—to read. Very few of the ballads, furthermore, have been mounted on the web.” (From the project’s home page.)

Starter Link: The Early Modern Center of UCSB’s English Ballad Archive, 1500-1800.

Canadian Symposium on Text Analysis (CaSTA)

Conference series that brings together computer scientists and humanities computing researchers to share research on “the linguistic, visual, and aural manifestations of text.”

  • “What textual research methodologies can be automated or assisted by computing?
  • How can computing assist us in visualizing electronic texts?
  • What data mining techniques are there for answering interesting questions relevant to humanist enquiry within large bodies of texts?
  • How can text analysis research benefit and learn from applied text systems in such areas as science, law, and digital libraries?
  • What new models are there for navigating and displaying textual information, including multimedia?
  • What is some of the current research in computer science that may have an application in humanist enquiry?
  • What roles do genres (both traditional and digital) play in the development of
  • and use of digital text?
  • How are new interaction devices (from handhelds to tabletops, wall displays and
  • wearable devices) changing the way that we interact with text?
  • How are they changing design models for digital text?
  • How do we evaluate the effectiveness and usefulness of new methodologies and
  • technologies for using and studying text?
  • What open questions in Humanities Computing can be addressed by further computer science research?”
    (from Overview of CaSTA ‘06)

    Starter Links: CaSTA home page | Overview of CaSTA ‘06

Credibility Commons

MacArthur Foundation-funded initiative by the American Library Association’s Office of Information & Technology Policy and the University of Washington to conduct research into the credibility of information on the Internet.

“The credibility of Internet information is a problem. While the credibility of Information in general is an issue, the Internet presents a new set of challenges. Today the public is expected to book their own airline tickets, decide on their own retirement plan, even decide on life and death medical treatments with the tools and information on the web. With a disappearing paper trail in voting, with no one official copy of government documents, with a lack of common criteria in presenting and consuming credible information there is a great need to research and develop real tools to help the citizen. Addressing these issues now, as tools are being developed and more critical information is becoming exclusively Internet information, will prevent larger and more dire consequences in the near and long-term future.” (from About the Commons)

A notable goal of the initiative is to “incorporate new credibility tools and mechanisms into a wide array of information products.” Initial tools include Reference Extract, Digital Reference Face Off, and Credibility Repository.

Starter Links: Credibility Commons home page | About the Commons | Projects

The Ockham Initiative

Organization devoted to increasing online reading materials.

“The OCKHAM Initiative seeks to promote the development of digital libraries via collaboration between librarians and digital library researchers. By promoting simple, open approaches and standards for digital library tools, services, and content, the gap between digital library development and the adoption of digital library systems by the traditional library community will be bridged.

To this end, the OCKHAM Initiative received a $425K grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a network of services that will improve the deployability of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) in traditional libraries. This grant will produce the initial OCKHAM Network – a suite of interoperable digital library services for use by traditional libraries.” (From The Ockham Initiative.)

Starter Links: Information from D-Lib | The Ockham Initiative

next/text

Institute for the Future of the Book’s project to encourage the evolution of the book from printed form to new-media entity.

“In this networked age, the printed textbook has likely reached the end of its useful life cycle, but a robust digital competitor has yet to emerge. The next\text project seeks to encourage the creation of born-digital learning materials that enhance, expand, and ultimately replace the printed textbook. The work presented here offers multiple visions of what might be possible. ”(from next/text.)

Starter Links: next/text | Academic Commons article about next/text | Institute for the Future of the Book

Academic Commons

Web site devoted to discussion about information, literacy, and new media. Publishes essays, reviews, and interviews, and showcases educational tools.

“Academic Commons publishes essays, editorials, thought pieces, screeds, and musings about digital tools and innovative practices for teaching, learning, and publishing with technology.” (from Academic Commons.)

Starter Links: Academic Commons | LoLa (learning objects-learning activities) Exchange

Institute for the Future of the Book

Group devoted to studying, understanding, and enabling the evolution of the book in new and multi-media formats.

“Over the next several decades, electronic, screen-based technologies will emerge which preserve all that is good and wonderful about printed books but which add profoundly powerful new capabilities. For example, future books will: – allow authors to express ideas using audio, video and simulations in addition to text and graphics. – contain significant and direct links to materials stored elsewhere on the internet. – create a community of readers and authors by enabling people reading the same document or exploring the same subject area to connect to each other directly over the internet.

While it may be argued that the form of printed books (pages bound together by a spine) was inevitable, screen-based books have no inevitable, physically-imposed form. The challenge confronting us is to develop new forms that empower both authors and readers and enhance intellectual and social discourse throughout society.” (from the Institute of the Future of the Book web site.)

Starter Links: Institute of the Future of the Book Home Page

Electronic Literature Organization (ELO)

Non-profit organization that promotes the writing, reading, publishing, teaching, and preservation of creative “born-digital” works of literature:

“What is Electronic Literature?
The term refers to works with important literary aspects that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer. Within the broad category of electronic literature are several forms and threads of practice, some of which are:

  • Hypertext fiction and poetry, on and off the Web
  • Kinetic poetry presented in Flash and using other platforms
  • Computer art installations which ask viewers to read them or otherwise have literary aspects
  • Conversational characters, also known as chatterbots
  • Interactive fiction
  • Novels that take the form of emails, SMS messages, or blogs
  • Poems and stories that are generated by computers, either interactively or based on parameters given at the beginning
  • Collaborative writing projects that allow readers to contribute to the text of a work

Annenberg Center for Multimedia Literacy

Center focusing on networked, multimedia “literacyâ€?:

“As a project of the Annenberg Center for Communication, the University of Southern California’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy develops educational programs and conducts research on the changing nature of literacy in a networked culture. The IML’s educational programs address students, teachers, and faculty across the educational spectrum: including K-12 teachers, student teachers, and higher education faculty. The IML supports faculty-directed research that seeks to transform the nature of scholarship within the disciplines.” (from Center site)

Starter Links: Annenberg Center home

NINES (Networked Interface for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship

Project for publishing scholarship on 19th-century literature and create scholarly or pedagogical online reading tools:

“NINES will liaison with interested publishing venues on behalf and in the interests of scholars and educators and the work we produce. NINES will include various kinds of content: traditional texts and documents – editions, critical works of all kinds – as well as “born-digital” materials relating to all aspects of nineteenth-century culture. NINES will be a model and working example for scholarship that takes advantage of digital resources and internet connectivity, while allowing scholars to integrate their contributions fully into their local IT environments. It will provide scholars with access to a federated digital environment and a suite of computerized analytic and interpretive tools. A key goal of NINES is to go beyond presenting static images or transcriptions of manuscripts on-screen. Software tools that aid collation, comparative analysis, and enable pedagogical application of scholarly electronic resources expose the richness of the electronic medium.” (from NINEs site)

Starter Links: NINES home | Tools & Interfaces

Public Knowledge Project

Project to develop open-access systems and technologies for scholarly publication:

“The Public Knowledge Project is dedicated to exploring whether and how new technologies can be used to improve the professional and public value of scholarly research. Bringing together scholars, in a number of fields, as well as research librarians, it is investigating the social, economic, and technical issues entailed in the use of online infrastructure and knowledge management strategies to improve both the scholarly quality and public accessibility and coherence of this body of knowledge in a sustainable and globally accessible form. The project seeks to integrate emerging standards for digital library access and document preservation, such as Open Archives and InterPARES, as well as for such areas as topic maps and doctoral dissertations.” (from project website)

Starter Links: Public Knowledge home page | Open Journal Systems (OJS)