Laurie N. Taylor September 28th, 2007
The Alice and Wonderland Special Collections exhibit is coming along nicely. We have almost all of the images ready for the posters and most of the text ready for the exhibit cases. I’ve loaded small versions of the images into Picasa for easy reference and the image above is a screenshot of the thumbnails in Picasa. All of the images are online here.
The exhibit will be up October 15 - December 15, but the most fun part, the tea party, is November 7. We should soon have a white rabbit running about, leading to the exhibit.
Laurie N. Taylor September 28th, 2007
UF’s Special Collections Library includes a popular culture collection with loads of comics. I’m currently working on a small grant to fund the digitization of some of these rich materials. In order to help support the grant, I made the collection page and digitized one sample issue of Will Eisner’s PS* Preventive Maintenance.
Hopefully I’ll be adding a great deal more in the near future, and I’ll hopefully be doing it with support for a much larger project later on. In the meantime, UF’s Libraries will be presenting at the Jewish Museum in Miami, Florida on October 21, and I’ll post details on it as they become available.
Laurie N. Taylor September 19th, 2007
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 turn could be helpful for academia because the current, and very poorly applied, business-capitalism-market model fails when applied to academia. If more businesses realize the profit involved in gift economies, then perhaps the market metaphor could adapt as well and academia could again be viewed under the larger lens of building the information commons through a gift economy.
The only problem is that academia, like the New York Times’ Times Select, still requires money invested up front. After that, businesses can create a self-sustaining system. However, academia returns on investments to society, creating a structure that requires constant investments, albeit investments that have excellent returns. While the market metaphor will likely continue to be mis-applied to academia–in part because academia’s larger returns can be more difficult to trace–hopefully a modified market metaphor that at least includes the concept of a gift economy could aid academia as a whole.
Laurie N. Taylor September 11th, 2007
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 query potential of high quality text and image archives in a collaborative environment.” The presentations range widely across cultures and technologies, with topics including:
- Digital surrogates of Mesopotamian cylinder seals and of 3,000 clay statuettes from a Chinese Buddhist temple that make you see things you could not easily see “in the flesh.”
- How to find readable and manipulable representations of the symbols that appear in Isaac Newton’s alchemical writings.
- How to explore the “countless links” that are at the heart of the Orlando Project about Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the
Beginnings to the Present.
- How to make the history of North Carolina speak in different ways when the print records (a massive work of late nineteenth century scholarship) are translated into a digital medium.
A special session on Monday will explore the different ways in which quite similar technologies of text mining support different goals in legal, literary, and business analysis, and it will ask what these different approaches can learn from each other.
The keynote speakers, Matt Kirschenbaum (The Remaking of Reading) and Lew Lancaster (Beyond 2-D Text/Plan: The Chinese Buddhist in 3-D) nicely define the range of topics. Ray Siemens will sum it all up.
Laurie N. Taylor September 10th, 2007
The Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature (which is within UF’s Special Collections Department) is preparing an Alice in Wonderland exhibit based on the many versions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and their cultural influence and afterlife. I’m helping with the digitization of materials for the collection and they’ll be housed here.
This collection and exhibit will be really exciting for the beautiful illustrations and the textual variety among the many versions (we have well over 150, but many are still in copyright).
Laurie N. Taylor September 6th, 2007
LibraryThing just announced that they’ve teamed with publishers to provide advance copies of books in exchange for reviews. After so many publications cut back or cut book reviews, it’s nice to see that some publishers are making sure their books are reviewed and that those reviews are shared. This is also part of what we may see more of as companies and mental models move from print-oriented thinking to web-thinking. Book reviews are great, but it makes more sense from a distributor point of view to include them online where they can be slurped into other systems, shared, and distributed. Since book reviews imply literacy and access to books, the audience isn’t reduced by the switch to the online model. It makes sense, and hopefully LibraryThing and its reviewers will help foster more things that make sense by sharing those reviews with library catalogs and other public-commons systems for even greater effect.