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In: Academia, conference, MLA

The Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention of 2012 is now over. MLA 2012 greatly exceeded my expectations. In this post, I’d like to note my appreciation to the MLA and all attendees for making MLA 2012 such a vibrant and wonderful experience.  As Roger Whitson noted, he and I had a number of discussions on how and why this MLA was a great conference. We both attributed a great deal of the energy and dynamism to the digital humanities (DH). In his blog post, Roger goes on to consider calls for transformation to DH, finding DH useful and supportive as it is without transformation. I stronglyRead More →

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In: Academia, exhibit, PeerReview

Dene Grigar (Electronic Literature Organization, ELO, Board Member), Lori Emerson, and Kathi Inman Berens are the curators for the E-Lit Exhibit and Performance (installed, with an online component and an additional exhibit of mobile e-lit) as part of the MLA Convention.* This exhibit is the first of its kind for MLA. The E-Lit Exhibit is extremely important as an exhibit/event in itself. It’s also extremely important as an example/model for future exhibits with MLA and for all who are interested in how changes in scholarly communication are affecting the humanities, how to support scholarly work outside of silos (field-specific and over-separation of research, teaching, and service), and what countsRead More →

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In: Academia, digitalhumanities, DigitalScholarship, evaluation, open access, Research & Projects

MLA’s Profession 2011 is out and it includes six articles within the section on “Evaluating Digital Scholarship.” All of the articles within “Evaluating Digital Scholarship” are openly available (no library subscription needed), excellent, timely, and needed. It is critically important for academia to engage and grapple with concerns over the evaluation of digital scholarship. This work is specifically needed to develop the necessary supports for evaluating digital scholarship as scholarship that “counts” for promotion and tenure. The official evaluation is difficult because traditional reporting separates work into three categories: research, teaching (or core job duties in some instances, as it is for me as a tenure-trackRead More →

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In: Academia, digitalhumanities, education, eliterature, games, innovation, materiality, play, presentations, Research & Projects, serendipity

University of Florida Event on October 4, 2011, 6pm: Jane McGonigal: Author and world-renowned gaming expert Jane McGonigal, PhD, is an expert on alternate reality games and a renowned game developer. She is the New York Times bestselling author of Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. She has appeared at TED, the New Yorker, and the Web 2.0 summit, among others. Business Week has named her “one of the top 10 innovators to watch.” Watch Jane McGonigal on the Colbert Report. Text above from the Bob Graham Center for Public Service and available directly from theRead More →

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In: Academia

The Center for the Study for Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley, has published a new report  on the role of peer review in academic tenure and review and in scholarly publishing. Report citation and link: Harley, Diane, & Krzys Acord, Sophia. (2011). Peer Review in Academic Promotion and Publishing: Its Meaning, Locus, and Future. UC Berkeley: Center for Studies in Higher Education. Retrieved from: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/1xv148c8 Announcement: Since 2005, and with generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE) has been conducting research to explore how academic values – including those related to peer review,Read More →

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In: Academia, imagetext, innovation, technologies, tools

The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture: seeks to enrich the intellectual potential of our fields to inform understandings of an expanding array of visual practices as they are reshaped within digital culture, while also creating scholarly contexts for the use of digital media in film, media and visual studies.  By working with humanities centers, scholarly societies, and key library, archive, and university press partners, we are investigating and developing sustainable platforms for publishing interactive and rich media scholarship. The Alliance has strategic partnerships with four archives (the Shoah Foundation, Critical Commons, the Hemispheric Institute’s Digital Video Library, and the Internet Archive) and three university pressesRead More →

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In: Academia, digitalhumanities

Tanner Higgin has written an excellent essay on his ambivalence towards the digital humanities. His post is particularly interesting to me in light of my recent reading of Jaron Launier’s You Are Not a Gadget and Johanna Drucker’s SpecLab, both of which deal with the same problems of techno-romanticism/fetishism, albeit in different contexts. The digital humanities is still a relatively new field, with roots in humanities computing, texts and technology, and many other names. In 2008, NEH institutionalized what had been their digital initiatives into the “Office of Digital Humanities.” The Office of Digital Humanities offers a brief explanation of the digital humanities, highlighting theRead More →

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In: Academia

Peter Suber has written an excellent summary of the current situation the University of California System is facing with the Nature Publishing Group (NPG). If a reasonable proposal doesn’t come about, UC will be forced to boycott. While there hasn’t been recent news, the eventual resolution – whatever it may be – will be repercussions for academic libraries.Read More →

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In: Academia, digital collections, dloc, tools, UFDC

The UF Digital Collections (UFDC) now have fully functioning online metadata editing! It’s only been a few weeks since the UFDC self-submittal tool for  faculty to use to load materials to the Institutional Repository and for UFDC partners to use to load materials to their collections went live and now we’ve already added  full online metadata editing.  Mark Sullivan, the programmer who created the internal metadata editor originally as a desktop tool and who has now made the online tool with the same and even enhanced functionality over the desktop tool, released the online metadata editing earlier this week. We’ve been keeping the release quietRead More →

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In: Academia, access, copyright, ifla, open access

International Publishers and Librarians Agree to Enhance The Debate on Open Access Geneva/The Hague 20 May 2009 – For immediate release A joint statement released today by the International Publishers Association, the International Association of Scientific Technical and Medical (STM) Publishers, and the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) calls for a more rational, evidence based debate on open access. It encourages experimentation and piloting of new concepts and ideas, whilst acknowledging that the differences in the different academic disciplines and publishing traditions may lead to differentiated approaches and business models in support of authors. The joint statement is intended to move theRead More →