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In: Academia, Collection Items, Digital Library, exhibit, materiality, museum, objects

UF’s Digital Library Center has digitized this Grebo Mask. I’m not a mask expert of any sort, but the description tells that the Grebo Mask is possibly Kru (Liberia and Ivory Coast), in the shape of a bird with four eyes, representing a seer (Wood) circa 1960. The Grebo Mask alone is a beautiful artifact, but what’s more interesting is that the Digital Library Center is working on a standard method for putting these images together in a looping clip, where users can click to stop the clip or to zoom in on the object. A number of museum websites offer spinning objects or objectsRead More →

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In: Academia, comics, Digital Library, imagetext

I’ve started working on digitizing photographs of comics creators. Don Ault, a professor at UF and a major comics scholar, is also a friend and he’s loaned me some of his materials. What’s really interesting about these photos is that they aren’t available elsewhere. Don has devoted a great deal of his life to the study of comics and so he’s amassed tons of photographs that span academic interests, comics collector-fan interests, and his personal academic-family chronology. For instance, a number of the photographs have Don in them and/or members of his family and members of the comics creators families. These personal, non-commercial photos areRead More →

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In: Academia, Commons

The Times Select is now free, which is great even if it is a little late. What’s better than this material being free is the reasoning behind it, which recognizes that having the material freely accessible is more valuable than requiring people to pay for the material. As more businesses realized that creating and sharing information openly can be profitable–as with Open Source Software where the software is free, but industries are built on top of them selling optimal support documentation, support services, and more–then hopefully, hopefully, businesses could soon function with more awareness of gift economies and their model for operation. This in turnRead More →

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In: Academia, Library

I won’t be able to attend this, but it looks wonderful and I wish I could! The program for the Second Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science has now been set, and you can see it here. The Colloquium will take place on Sunday and Monday, October 21-22, 2007 at the Hotel Orrington in Evanston, Illinois. This event jointly sponsored by the Illinois Institute for Technology, Northwestern University, and the University of Chicago. Registration is free, and you are cordially invited to attend. Information about logistics is available on the web site. The theme of this year’s colloquium is “Exploring the scholarly queryRead More →

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In: Academia, Digital Library

There’s a new article in First Monday that surveys Google Books by looking at multiple versions of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.* The intent of the article is that the oddities of the book form make it difficult to digitize; however, this good and useful point gets a bit lost in the details. The article argues that many of the books in Google Books have issues with quality control and it argues that “quality assurance on the Web is provided either through innovation or through “inheritance” and that the inheritance for Google Books comes from the quality of the libraries.Read More →

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In: Academia, Collection Items, comics, imagetext

One of my current goals is to get materials online from awesome scholars who have the copyright to their work (often academic books return the copyright to authors after a set period of time). I’m extremely happy that the first book I’ve gotten to do this with is Donald Ault’s Narrative Unbound. Not only is Narrative Unbound important for Blake studies and imagetext/visual rhetoric/comics/textual studies, it’s also an important book because of what it shows about copyright and because it’s by Donald Ault, a great scholar who I’ve been lucky enough to work with. There’s so much more that I could say about Narrative Unbound,Read More →

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In: Academia, Commons, Digital Library

I’m the digital projects librarian in the University of Florida’s Digital Library Center. This blog chronicles my work with the Digital Library Center. In the DLC, I get to digitize various materials including books, paintings, manuscripts, objects (like this biscuit), audio, and more. Digitizing materials is only part of my work, though. I’m largely working on projects to help people better access and use the collections, which includes writing lesson plans, grants, creating learning objects, creating mashups (like adding materials from the digital collections to Google Earth and Maps), and more. Working in the Digital Library Center is fascinating and it’s not what many peopleRead More →