Split (1)

train · 21k rows

text stringlengths 5.66k 10.4k
But I just – basically I couldn't take it anymore. And so I decided I would write a series of posts in which I speculated a little bit about this business of counting and what it meant for historians doing digital work. And so – and I tried to be a little more deliberative or thoughtful maybe than I have in some of my other posts in the sense that I actually wanted to talk to some other people, senior people in our field to find out what they thought also. So it wasn't just going to be my reflections on it but also what some people who I really respect and who have been around even longer than I have and seen various iterations of the tenure and promotion mill. And so I talked to Stan Katz up at Princeton and Kathy Davidson down at Haystack and then Peter Stearns, our provost here, George Mason, who's a past vice president of the American Historical Association. And well, I don't know, as of last week, he was the author of 102 books. I think probably by next week, it will be 103. But we all joke because Peter seems to publish a book a month or more. So as a provost, he, of course, knows a lot about this business of counting and tenure and promotion. So I tried to figure out why was it that we're having this problem with digital scholarship counting. And I think what I concluded, and I don't know that I even made it as clear as I might have in my blog post, is that we're trying to fit a square peg into a round hole or vice versa in the sense that we're trying to claim – often we're trying to claim that something that I call digital work as opposed to digital scholarship, we're trying to claim it as scholarship when it isn't because it's an incredible amount of work and it has a big audience and we're really proud of it. But it's not the same thing as scholarship. And so my argument in this series of posts is that for digital work to count as digital scholarship, it has to be scholarship. And scholarship, I think, is pretty easily defined in any discipline you care to name as the product of research, that it's embedded in a conversation among scholars, it's peer-reviewed, and it's made public. And as long as it has those main characteristics, and it has some kind of an argument. So as long as it has those five characteristics, then it would fit as scholarship, whether it's in mathematics or history or physics or English literature or whatever you want to pick. Scholarship has those kinds of characteristics. And so often, digital projects don't have an argument or they're not clearly connected to some sort of larger conversation among scholars. They're fabulous projects, but they're not exactly the same thing as scholarship. So I was trying to – and because they're not the same thing as scholarship, then it makes it really hard to make the case that they ought to count because, okay, they were an incredible amount of work and they're very popular, but they're not in some way roughly equivalent to a book or a series of articles in prestigious journals or whatever might be your accounting system. So that's what I was trying to deal with. And that's really what I heard from all the people that I talked to was that if we're going to claim it as scholarship, it has to actually be scholarship, not just a big database with lots of primary sources that people use a lot. And so, for instance, many of our projects here at CHNM qualify in that second category. They're big archives, like the September 11th Digital Archive is a digital project, but I'm not sure why it's scholarship. At the same time, I don't think that means that it shouldn't count at all for something. And clearly, it does count for something to a lot of people. And I guess what I would say is that if scholars and other people working at universities and libraries and museums are making an argument that the nature of scholarly and academic work has changed with digital technologies. I think that they have to be willing to accept that the models and terms of academic employment may also change with that. So, for instance, I'm not in a tenure-track position, and that has its drawbacks, but it also has its benefits. And, in fact, I don't care that I'm not in a tenure-track position, and that has its drawbacks, but it also has its benefits. And in fact, I don't care that I'm not in a tenure-track position because it allows me to do all of the kinds of things that I really want to do. I can do the digital projects rather than the digital scholarship, which are my primary interests. So I can work on something like 9-11 or the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank or I can build Omeka, a software platform. All of these other things which wouldn't count as historical scholarship, although they relate to history and they are historical work in some sense or another, they don't need for me to count. I am not judged on whether those things are scholarship by the criteria that Mills just laid out. And that's great for me. It has its drawbacks. I suppose I can be fired, but so can my wife, who's a lawyer. So can 99.5% of the U.S. workforce. If you don't perform, you may get fired. If you do perform, you generally are rewarded and promoted and compensated. And one of those consequences may be that they don't have the same exact terms of employment as their colleagues doing more traditional work. And that can be fine, as in my case it is. I've been able to kind of find a third path. I'm lucky in that respect. I don't think everyone else has the benefit of being at a place like CH&M or George Mason, but I think that's also part of it. We need to have a shift in that there are other models of employment other than the traditional promotion and tenure system of academic scholarly departments that's existed over the past, let's say, 100 years. Yeah, I think that's a good point. And I mean, tenure really is a racket and it's unusual compared to other jobs and job security. And I think we should both, I think academia often doesn't think too much about how unique it is and that there might be other models. So Mills, in reading your series, I had kind of two reactions. I think in some sense, I mean, I very much agree with a lot of what you said. And I think what you wrote in terms of, you know, it's got to look like scholarship. It's got to be part of, you know, make reference to existing discussions, et cetera. I think that fits very well with my feeling that, for instance, blogs could be scholarship. Often they're not, but they could be scholarship, that there's nothing necessarily preventing them from being sites where scholars post long-form argument. I guess where I diverge slightly from what you've said is that it does seem to me to privilege a bit the standard narrative format that historians are used to. And so then we get to the question of these other forms. So, you know, when you were talking about making an argument, we've tended to make that in a linear text fashion. And so I think the really tricky part for making things count are these kind of sites. Now, 9-11 is just a pure archive that we host. But there are sites that kind of do make some argument, but it's not maybe as clear as a straight narrative text that you'd see in a journal article, which, after all, could be posted on a blog very easily. And then there are kind of digital tools and some of the things that I've worked on that implicitly make an argument about, let's say, the nature of historiography or research, but that isn't clear from the tool itself. So I'll give you, I think, one pretty clear example. So I wrote a tool that's still used pretty widely, the Syllabus Finder, that is just a search engine for syllabi. And you think, well, this is not something that should count. But what I've tried to do with that tool is then to produce scholarship based on it to show people how the tool enables new kind of scholarship. So the tool itself, yes, you know, it's a technical exercise, but there's some intellectual thought that went into sort of the creation of it and then to figure out what the products of it could be. So, for instance, beyond just, you know, trying to find a particular syllabus or a set of syllabi on a particular topic, I ended up writing an article for the Journal of American History using the Syllabus Finder to show how American history was taught at the basic level, at the textbook, you know, history 101 level. And that the Syllabus Finder helped me to produce scholarly insights about the nature of that teaching.
And so in that way, the tool was a kind of bridge that got me to scholarship that would not have been possible without the tool. So in that case, you know, and I've talked about this with a lot of people, or some of the software projects that we have at the center, that I try to tell scholars who are in the tenure track, look, if you're going to build a digital tool or resource, I would really try, I think at least in this transitionary period, if you want it to count, to try to write some piece of scholarship based upon that tool or research that looks more like standard narrative that then shows how, hey, this isn't just an exercise in HTML and the technical infrastructure, but that it enables something new that we couldn't have done without it. And in that way, I think then you can have recognition for the peer review article based on the resource and the resource itself that's online, that it then becomes more accessible as a piece of scholarship to people who don't maybe understand the intellectual work that goes into a technical resource. Does that make sense, Nils? Yeah, and I think I completely agree with that. And what I would say is that a couple things. First of all, on the example of the syllabus finder, I think we're trying to make it then into a square peg that will fit into a square hole, the system that we're used to. To me, that's sort of like the historian or an equivalent to the historian who comes up with a new methodology for analyzing and presenting an argument about the past. So for instance, Pierre Nora wrote this – I can't even think of the name of the book or the article now – that sort of the first point of thinking about sites of memory and he uses this term, sites of memory. And then this whole sites of memory industry appears in the historical profession. There are books in every national context and articles and conferences and all this sort of stuff. Well, but everybody has to footnote Nora because he's the one who got it started. And so he gets more credit because it was his idea to start talking about sites of memory or who was the first person to start talking about the public sphere. So when the historian comes up with a new methodology that then creates a cottage industry following it, well, you get more credit for that because now you've done something really new and different. Well, that's where the tool fits in is it's like a new methodology. It allows us to think about the past in ways that we hadn't thought about it before or it allows us to understand it in ways that we hadn't understood it before. So the digital tool is sort of like coming up with that new methodological approach and I think the big difference is digital tools, it's easier to come up with digital tools that allow us to do lots of really interesting things because the possibilities are still so wide open. But I think – so that's where I think that fits. In terms of the linear, nonlinear question, I think you're absolutely right. And I think we're just in a period of transition on that because historians are, as I wrote in an earlier post, we're pretty fussy and conservative as a tribe when it comes to what we accept and what we don't accept as scholarship. And what we're used to is linear and nonlinear is hard to figure out. And that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be accepted as scholarship. It just means it takes more explaining to a tenure and promotion committee or just simply a hiring review committee in a non-tenure situation like Tom described. And so you have to be able to explain it a little better as to why this is also scholarship. And so for instance, my next project, I'm calling it a project rather than a book because I don't expect it to ever appear as a book. Instead, I expect it to appear as some kind of a digital project that has many of the same characteristics as a book but will be a web-based thing. I don't even know what it's going to look like yet, but which has primary sources and an argument and is the product of conversations among scholars. And it's all of those things, but it's also an opportunity for you as the user to wander around and maybe decide that your argument is actually better or more interesting than mine. But I'm going to have an argument there that is at least made front and center at the beginning of the project. I guess the only other thing I'd add here is that in some ways we're talking about fitting our digital work into models that already exist for historical or humanities professionals. And I think that's an important thing that we need to do. And we need to take that step and make that effort to make our work understandable to colleagues, our peers in various ways. I think the only thing I'd say is I think they also need to, in some respects, meet us halfway. I think it's very important for us to meet them halfway, but they need to meet us halfway too. And I think there are models for that. For instance, I think, Dan, you can do what you did with Syllabus Finder or HBOT or these other tools you built and write a kind of long-form narrative piece about historiography and the nature of history teaching and learning and that kind of thing that would be very recognizable to any historian. I also think there are other ways to models from the sciences and from especially the applied sciences for writing up the results of technical research for a tool. I can imagine a set of articles coming out of Zotero that really just report the results of the research that explain how you built something and then to suggest some future directions for research that would be not, let's say, 20-page articles but would be four or five-page articles that would look more like something that is in an engineering journal or an applied sciences journal. And in those disciplines, those shorter research reporting kinds of articles count. They count for traditional tenure and promotion. to not try to fashion some narrative journal article out of what really is technical work and rather just treat technical work as technical work with its own value. But that also needs to be peer-reviewed and needs to be reported and needs to be written up in a way that's standard and understandable and reviewable, etc. So I think there's a balance here, and I think that's the balance I think we need to find. We need to do some work, and our colleagues need to do some work to find out where this stuff fits. And I would add, you know, I said that we're a fussy and conservative tribe, but I would also say that all across the United States anyway, and also in the UK, and these are the only two contexts I'm really familiar with, there is an increasing willingness to start moving toward that halfway position in a lot of different departments. And so it's not as though historians are all this way, but still as a group, we as historians have a ways to go to sort of find an acceptance for other forms of scholarship. And I think my last post in the series was about the process of peer review. And that's where we differ from other disciplines the most, is that we insist on this prior peer review process as the coin of the realm. And we're one of the only disciplines, there are a few others, but we're one of the only disciplines that insists on that. When I was talking to Stan Katz, he said he was trying to have a conversation with the chairman of the computer science department at Princeton about peer review. And he said they couldn't actually find a way to talk to each other because their systems are so different that nothing that Stan said made any sense to this computer scientist and vice versa. And yet computer science at Princeton, I'm guessing, is probably a pretty highly developed discipline and department. And so, you know, with really high standards. And so it's just that their method for evaluating is different from ours. And so I don't know that ours is perfect in any way. And so I think we need to, and digital work, as I wrote in this last post, is really undermining that prior peer review process. And that's where I think we're going to have the biggest giving away our software picks, our links, and other things we found online. Tom, why don't we start with you? Sure. I've got something a little different this week. It's the Creative Commons Case Studies Wiki. For people who don't know, Creative Commons, I'm sure most people do, Creative Commons is a set of open licenses for web and other content that you can create. So if you want to license your blog under an open license that allows people to use and reuse the content on your blog, you can release it under a Creative Commons copyright license. And this is a big trend in the world of the web and also in the world of the scholarly web. And sometimes it's a little confusing what – there's a variety of licenses you can choose from, each with their own terms. Sometimes it can be a little confusing which licenses to choose.
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi-weekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Here it's built. This is Digital Campus number 44 for the 29th of September 2009. Unsettled. I'm Dan Cohen. And welcome back to a new edition of the Digital Campus Podcast. I'm Dan Cohen, and here with our regulars, Mills Kelly. Hi, Mills. Hey, Dan. And Tom Sheinfeld. Hey, Tom. Hey, guys. Hey, we're piping in Tom NPR style from an undisclosed location. And so we're glad we could get you on, Tom, even via cell phone. And we're really glad to have a guest Thank you. Podcasts in New Ways, and one of the ways in which we're doing it is simply because Tom Mills and I are just sick of each other's voices, right? Pretty much, yeah. And we agree with each other too much. We need to diversify the podcast, and so we're delighted to add two new podcasters to the Digital Campus team this week, and we'll be adding more in weeks to come and rotating the team. And so the first one that we'd like to introduce is Amanda French, who is in New York City right now. Hi, Amanda. Hi, Dan. Good to talk to you. Good to have you on the podcast. Thanks for being willing to do this. Oh my gosh, willing doesn't even cover it. Try it eager. You're too kind. It's great to have you on. We have a lot to say about Amanda. She's a friend of the show and is a, how should we introduce you, as a research scholar at NYU. My title is always a little dicey, but assistant research scholar. We'll drop the assistant. Okay. Can we call you a senior research scholar at NYU, where she's helping to model a digital curriculum for the MA program in archives and public history. She's actually teaching a class right now on digital history, and we can talk about that. You can check out her program at APHDigital.org, and a project that's sort of coming along to come up with certainly a better digital history curriculum than I probably have at the current moment, which is at digitalhistorycurriculum.org. And Amanda can be found at amandafrench.net and, of course, on the Twitter at Amanda French. Welcome to the podcast, Amanda. Thank you so much. We're also joined from the University of Mary Washington, just south of here, by Jeff McClurkin. Hi, Jeff. Hi, Dan. Hey, welcome to the podcast. Jeff is a associate professor and chair of history and American studies at the University of Mary Washington. And your independent research is really in 19th century America, is that right? That's correct. Okay, as well as digital humanities and some of the things that we tend to talk about on the podcast. And he can be found at Techist, is your kind of digital humanities blog, is that right? That's correct. The easiest way to find me is mcclurkin.org. Okay, great. All my links are from there. And Jay McClurkin on Twitter. That's correct. firestorm of criticism that we discussed on the last podcast, the authors who are on the plaintiff's side of the podcast asked the court, and Google did not object, for an extension, a several-month extension, to, I guess, modify the settlement. Where are we? Has anyone been following this in enough detail to understand? You know, I've seen some posts saying that the settlement is dead, but isn't it more like's part of the question is whether or not they're going to, quote unquote, tweak it or sort of really throw it away. But it's a hard case to follow. I always have the sense that there are a number of very specific legal points that they're really talking about that don't necessarily have, or are not necessarily directly relevant to what I'm concerned about and what a lot of people are concerned about, which is I don't want Google to have an exclusive monopoly over the orphan works. That seems to be one of the big issues, isn't it? That came up is everyone kind of understands the state of the public domain books. And more or less, we understand books where the authors are still around or the publishers who have copyright really know what they're doing and have either opted in or opted out. But there is this key segment of 1.5 or 2 million books, I still haven't gotten a definitive number, that are sort of in limbo and that this settlement would effectively give through this book rights registry to Google for whatever purposes it sees fit, at least as the critics put it. That's right. I think that the crux of all of this and the reason sort of behind the settlement and the money that's being paid as part of the settlement, $125 million, goes to this book rights registry, which deals with this problem of the orphan work. It is complicated, though. There are a lot of other concerns that have been raised, including privacy concerns by the EFF and others. The Department of Justice weighed in this week, saying essentially that this probably should go forward, that the parties have some rough agreement on how they should proceed, but there are enough concerns that the settlement should be revised. And I think Judge Shin took that into account this week and sent the parties back for further negotiations. I'm not at all surprised that that's how it turned out. I think probably the Obama administration and the judge, and I sort of agree with this, that there is a settlement here that can work, that doesn't give Google a monopoly, that doesn't violate privacy rights, that doesn't make sweeping changes to copyright law by judicial fiat, that there is a settlement here that can work, but that maybe the way this one is currently written is not quite there yet. And so I think it's probably just going to go back for a couple months and come back. And my guess would be we're going to see something that we're all going to be a little happier with when that happens. I mean, isn't the likely outcome, right, that they'll have to grant other parties some kind of license to these orphan works or somehow make sure that that piece isn't a monopoly? I mean, the privacy concerns is odd because, you know, well, you're on the web. I mean, you're doing Google searches. Those are also, I mean, if you search for things, those are being stored and those tell you a lot about a person just as much as checking out a book, maybe more so. Yeah, I sort of, this is sort of opportunistic. They're just getting in these concerns about privacy because Google is before a judge. I think people have concerns about privacy and Google just generally, and they happen to be before a judge right now, and so they're kind of flipping those in into this to kind of push Google in a certain direction more broadly. But yeah, as part of this particular issue, it doesn't seem like the crux of the matter. Have they addressed at all the pricing issue? Because that seemed like another sticking point that we discussed last week on the podcast. I think, Mills, you made the great point that however benevolent the current leaders of Google are, one can imagine in 20 years that a more profit-driven company would put the screws on local libraries with this terminal that has still not been really priced out or pricing to libraries like ours here at Mason, how we would get access to the broad collection, since those prices aren't spelled out in the settlement. I don't see anything in the settlement or any of the news stories about it that even brings that up. And this is, I mean, this is in a way similar to Amanda's concern about the orphan works because, you know, I remain worried that it's going to end up being sort of like JSTOR, that the institutions and organizations that can afford the access will have that access and the institutions and organizations that can't won't. And so will public libraries, especially in rural areas where they have no money, will they be able to have this kind of access? And so then do we start creating some sort of privileged information and unprivileged information? It's just potentially a real problem that I think, given the global nature of this, it really needs to be addressed. And if I could add to that, I think for academic libraries in particular, they've been so burned by what happened, what has been happening for the last, I don't know, 20, 30 years with journal subscription prices going way, way, way up.
So I think libraries have learned from that and are saying we desperately don't want to get into that situation with Google, where Google is in a position to dictate the price to us. So I don't know whether, however, that I'm sure that is a concern that they're discussing among themselves. I don't know whether the judge in this particular delay of the agreement cited that as an issue. Well, I mean, what I thought was interesting about this was that the Justice Department weighed in in such a way to say that the settlement itself would have actually changed copyright law, you know, or would have set a precedent for copyright law. And I think that's, you know, it seems to me that they're thinking that this is an important, I mean, it's such a huge case and such a huge number of books involved that this is a real, potentially a real precedent setter for some of the questions that Amanda was just raising about, you know, journal subscriptions and about, you know, all this information that's increasingly behind these subscription walls that makes it harder for lots of, I mean, my university has problems affording to buy all of these journals. And we have to subscribe to Google Books as well. I mean, I think that raises some real questions. In fact, actually, I'll be a little pro-Google for just a moment. On the one hand, you know, they did do the work. They did do the scanning. And they did it when no one, few people in the academic and nonprofit sector was willing to. So I actually do think that most of the people I talk to about Google Book Search do agree that Google has a little bit of a right to profit somewhat from this. And everybody also wants this digital library to exist. I actually gave a paper a little while ago about the enormous benefit that Google Book Search had for my research. I did my dissertation research in 2004 before Google Book Search, revisited it after Google Book Search, and it was phenomenal, like the kinds of things that I could find using this resource that I couldn't have otherwise. But I think that the fact that this has been delayed is a really good thing, and I think, as you say, Dan, we're going to be happier with this unsettled settlement when they renegotiate it. Right. I mean, Amanda, you bring up the great point that, you know, academics are really good at looking a gift horse in the mouth. It's one of the things we specialize in. And, you know, I respect Google for doing this. I mean, Microsoft, after all, had a scanning project and they stopped. And, you know, I know lots of people at Yale, literally, they just one day pulled up and left. And, you know, they were nice enough to leave their scanning equipment there and their files there. But they didn't have the commitment that, you know, Google had to do this and to spend the $300 million. So I think at least we need to keep on the table that, and I'm dreading this because I'm on a panel called Is Google Good for History at the American Historical Association meeting? I think I've been put on it as the patsy. I'm really concerned about going up there. But I'm sort of going to be the guy who sits between the angry person who's opposed to Google and the guy from Google. So that will be fun. But, you know point is I can see some tremendous benefits to this. It seems to me like there will be a settlement. We've come too far. There's been too many books scanned. And I guess the question is, it really boils down to how much we trust Google, right? I mean, isn't there a kind of larger issue here? We've talked about a lot on the podcast, for instance, with email outsourcing. We had this case this past week where some Brown University students were able to read each other's Gmail email because of a mess up with the Brown Google Apps for your domain site. And, you know, and there's just sort of lots of little cases as we go along where people both love Google because it provides free, incredible things and hate them because of potential monopoly power. And it just kind of boils down to that, doesn't it? No, I disagree. I don't think it does boil down to whether we trust Google because the truth is that I do trust Google and I trust Gmail. I mean,'s outages and mix-ups I think are no, no worse than you would get from something that's internal. They just get a lot more news play and potentially affect a lot more people. But with the settlement, even though I trust Google, I don't want it to be inscribed in the law or in case law precedent that Google has all this power. I do really trust them, but I want to make sure that that's not the only recourse I have. Right. I think the issue here is we can trust Google, but I also want a choice not to use Google if that choice presents itself. And I think as the settlement was currently written, effectively these orphan works would be under, the scans of these orphan works would be under Google's control. And if a smaller project even wanted to come along and do a scanning project of some subset of the orphan works in the world, of a particular author or of a particular publisher or whatever, it would make it very difficult for them to negotiate the right to those books. That's, I think, the problem. Yeah, that's a real key part of this is the book rights registry itself, isn't it? That's hard to replicate. Anyone can scan the books. It's getting that piece of it. Well, and we desperately need that. We need to have that registry. That part I always have found a little weird. I mean, Google has the technical chops to build it, so everybody's happy about that. But it seems like a kind of registry that should be something similar, something owned and run by the copyright office. Right, exactly. And I just think we just need to maintain choice in this arena and opportunity. And as long as that's there, I'm happy to use Google as long as Google's the best thing out there. And currently it is. Right. And as long as we're setting precedents that we do think about, you know, life beyond Google, right? You know, if others do want to come along, the potential for creating some better set of these works is there. It should be able to happen. Locking us in is what concerns me most. Yeah, but hasn't, the underlying assumption in all the coverage of this is that no one else is ever going to do this. Am I wrong about that? That Google is the only one who will ever actually make a project to scan tens of millions of books or 20 million books, whatever the final number is. Well, I think that's an assumption, but I think also it's worth remembering what happens to companies in the United States when they develop too much of a stranglehold on a particular market. Standard Oil got broken up. AT&T got broken up. If Google controls all text, then they'll get broken up. I just expect that that will happen eventually if they exert too much of a stranglehold on the information market. And I'm also just not willing, and I said this last time we got together, I'm just not willing to concede that Google is the only entity on the planet that can do this. It's a $300 million project. That's a big project, but companies and governments and even non-governmental organizations undertake $300 million projects all the time. So it's for something this important. It's not all that expensive, and I'm just not willing to concede that Google's the only game in town. Really, since those books are still on the shelves of those libraries, to their credit, Google didn't destroy them in the process of scanning them. Just so long as that very large subset of those books on the shelves, those orphan works, are available to another party if that party decides they want to scan them. So that's, I think, the key. And I think it's sort of unclear in the settlement what if Microsoft or if some other company or the European Union or whoever came along and said, okay, we want to scan all these orphan workers too, whether they would ever be able to come to a similar settlement as the one Google has come to. That, I think, is the crux of this. And I think as long as there's opportunity for someone else to come along and do that, then we're fine. I'd be satisfied. What did others make about the acquisition of reCAPTCHA this past week? It was kind of a sidebar to the main story about the Google Book settlement being postponed. But in some ways, it is a big part of the story, right?
And so you'll see on a lot of sites kind of wavy, squished-up words that come out of books that are being scanned as part of the Google Books project and other projects. Internet Archive actually was part of the reCAPTCHA system as well. And by solving those words, transcribing them by hand, you are effectively digitizing these books. So Google went ahead. I mean, this is a project that many consider to be kind of nonprofit or research project at Carnegie Mellon. And they've acquired it, surely in part, to make their Google Book Search better. I mean, I guess they had already been using this to some extent, as I understood it. I mean, it wasn't completely in-house, but they were already using that technology for some of the Google Books and some of their archival newspaper stuff. So, I mean, in some ways, it's not a big change for them. The question is why they chose to bring it in-house as opposed to, you know, is that about keeping it from others? If you wanted to take a particularly Google is evil perspective on this, that's, you know, this is about making sure that other people won't be able to do other book projects. I mean, I have no information along those lines, but it certainly could be interpreted that way. I mean, why, if they were already using it, did they need to bring it in-house? Well, the other issue I have with this a little bit is this is all very clever. You're killing two birds with one stone. It's a little security thing. And then you're also improving OCR and I suppose improving the text. But what many people want, particularly librarians with regard to Google Books, is a way to correct the, you know, the OCR text of those things and also the metadata about them. They want to be able to send that information directly to Google. And so far, Google Books does not allow that. So this is a very indirect and, you know, maybe overly clever way of improving those texts. Why can't we just improve them directly? You know, at Digital Humanities 2009, the meeting at the University of Maryland, John Orwant of the Google Books Project, that question was posed to him about why they wouldn't take more human input. And I think the difference between reCAPTCHA and a direct, you know, feedback mechanism is, I mean, I'm paraphrasing John here, and hope not doing him disservice, but they sort of distrust crowdsourcing. And I think what's interesting about Recaptcha is it has this engineering view of crowdsourcing where multiple people have to solve the same word before it's considered solved. It doesn't have that direct input as you would have in, let's say, a wiki where anyone could kind of come in. Although, of course, this past week, Google launched this side wiki project where anyone could come in and annotate a website and store that information on Google. So, I don't know, there's a little bit of maybe schizophrenia here. And you can imagine this being applied not just to the text, to the body text of Google Books. You can imagine it being applied to the metadata as well. If they wanted to use it on certain segments of title pages for instance, you could have people transcribing publication dates and publication locations and ISBN numbers and other things. So you could imagine it being something, you know, they'd have to make it a little bit more sophisticated, but something that could be used for metadata as well. I mean, I, you know, have this kind of gut distrust of, you know, this thing. I use ReCAPTCHA on my blog. You know, I thought it was this kind of open source-y kind of independent scholarly side project and, you know, then it gets sold to Google for an undisclosed amount and it just kind of rubs me the wrong way but I don't really have any reason that it should rub me the wrong way. I guess the reason it probably rubs me the wrong way is it just seems like and here we are, you know, halfway through our podcast still talking about Google. And now they're taking over academic software projects. And, you know, if somebody came along and offered us, you know, $50 million for Omeka or Zotero, would we sell out? I mean, we kind of can't, but it's a little disheartening, I guess. So that's where my feeling on it. Okay, we'll try to move beyond Google here, Tom. I hear you. I was going to bring up that on the positive side of Google's chutzpah, they have decided they're going to take over Internet Explorer by inserting Chrome in it, but maybe we'll discuss that next time. Between overlords, I think I would choose Google over Internet Explorer. Agreed. Well, that's the problem. The benevolent dictator is still a dictator. Yeah. Yep. Gosh. All right. We'll bring up Aristotle. He'll be on the next podcast. We'll be reading Aristotle's Politics, book one, next time on Digital Campus. Well, speaking of benevolent dictators, Windows 7, are we excited? Are we having parties? Fired up. Fired up, ready to go? Have they bought a Rolling Stones song yet for it? Is there anything that we can say about Windows 7 for the academic market? I mean, actually, to their credit, $30 upgrade for students in the United States. That's a good thing to publicize if people don't know that, that there are discounted versions of Windows 7, not versions, but installations of Windows 7 for students. Well, I hope it works better than the upgrades to Word, for instance, in the new versions of Microsoft Office. Yeah, I mean, I think the big question will be, I mean, if you sort of delve down a little deeper, they basically are telling people, if you have Vista, this upgrade will work. But if you don't, if you have some earlier version, that you should probably think about getting a new computer. That's pretty much what they say. So it does sound like it's a limited upgrade. It's an upgrade that mostly, that they really intend for Vista-enabled machines. But I do know that there are a number of campuses that are still using XP. They haven't switched over to Vista yet. And so Microsoft is clearly attempting to, you know, by getting students to switch over, I think trying to convince, you know, institutional IT groups to make that switch as well. You know, I think that's... Yes, and then in three or four years when those students graduate, they're going to expect the new version of Windows on their work computer as well. So students are a good place to start to kind of see the market. I totally agree, Joe. Are there any features of Windows 7 that I'm unaware of that I should be excited about that have any kind of impact? Or is this just... Well, I might... You know, I run desktop Linux, but I have been running the Windows 7 release candidate in VirtualBox for a few months now. Occasionally, if I want to, like, use Microsoft Word to make sure the formatting on a document is right or something. I keep a Windows instance available. And I will say, and I will go out on a limb here, I will say that Windows 7 is great. It's not just good. It's great. And it's still Windows. So that is what it is. But it delivers, I would say, as polished an experience as Mac OS X does. It's really great looking. I've experienced almost no crashes, which for Windows is saying something. I think the old software from XP and Visto seems to work just fine. It works very well with my hardware. I think this is a real winner for Microsoft. The question will be whether they can get their reputation back, if they can rebuild their image with this or not. But in terms of just the technology, I think we're looking at definitely the best Windows, certainly since XP, and I would say probably since Windows 98. So I think, I mean, there's no features. It's not going to do your homework for you or anything. I think I just would adopt it really quickly. But it is as slick and nice an operating system as you're going to find, and I would include, you know, the new Snow Leopard in that category. So, I think... So, it keeps Windows alive as something that's important, that would be important to campuses or library terminals or things like that for another, Jen, or whatever, for another few years. Oh, Windows is very much alive, I think.
This seems to say to me, well, you know, a nice, slick, good operating system for Microsoft still matters. Yeah, I think you can't count them out. I just, I think it's too easy. And frankly, historically speaking, this is their pattern, right? I mean, you have 98, and then you had me, and then you had XP, and then you have Vista. And I mean, you sort of, you know, you have a good operating system that everybody uses, and then they try something else, and it doesn't really work. And then they go to a good operating system that everybody uses. So we're back to this is their time. Windows 7 is the good one. Can I just ask Tom a question? How's the search, the hard drive search? Have you tried that? The search, I would say, is much improved. I would say from what I tend not to use the operating search all that much, but I would say from my experience it's as good as the Spotlight search on the Mac. And it's actually more conveniently located than the Spotlight search on the Mac. It's built into the Start menu which is where everything is on Windows. And it's sort of right there when you click on that start button. Really your cursor is placed in the search box. And so the search I think works really pretty well. Things seem quickly indexed. And in terms of the browsing experience, they do some really nice things with stacking icons. So for browsing photo galleries or something where visual materials, they're stacked in interesting ways and you can resort them according to color, or according to date, or according to the device that they were taken on. So there's different ways to kind of browse these stacks of images. So, you know, that kind of information management interface is really good. I have very good things to say at Windows 7. Well, Tom, I'm looking forward to your Windows 7 release party in three weeks. Oh, yeah. You're all invited. Thank you very much. That sounds so fun. I'm not expecting very many. I have three chairs in my office, so I think that'll do it. I'm sure you have several other Windows 7 launch parties to go to that same night, so I won't be able to come. You're too popular for the rest of us, Amanda. Well, yeah, I guess so. We'll watch you at our Windows 7 party. Well, this will be a bad segue, but from the Windows 7 parties, it seems like the parties are over in university libraries, according to a meeting in New York at Baruch College about the libraries of the future, which, according to an article at Inside Higher Ed and some of the Twitter traffic that we saw about the conference. This conference on the sustainability of libraries in a digital age really focused on sparse staffing in the future, highly decentralized libraries where all their information is sort of outsourced to the cloud, and a smaller physical plant just focusing on special collections. Amanda, you kind of followed this conference. Was it as depressing as it sounds in this article, or were there good things to come out of it? I know a lot of librarians were worried about, you know, what this implied about their future. Well, it's interesting. This idea that the library will cease to be primarily a noble building filled with books has certainly been kicking around for quite a while. And there is no reason it needs to be a scenario of doom, actually. If you define library as your sort of information acquisition and dissemination nexus for the library, or in the case of public know, your county or whatnot, your area. If you define a library that way, then I think everybody agrees that libraries are not going away. But it is funny how this particular meeting where Daniel Greenstein said this, he said, you know, we're going to see the physical building of the library house only special collections and study areas where, you know, the actual information dissemination part of the library will, as you say, reside in the cloud. Perhaps not surprising, but it is a little surprising how freaked out people get by that because there's a utopian vision of that same thing, right? If you start from scratch, if you were to design a 21st century library from scratch, many people say, well, this is kind of what it would look like. So I found this meeting really interesting in that in one way, it's a horrible vision. But in another way, it's a very utopian vision. You know, There are real benefits to having all that information in the cloud. In many cases, there's no real reason to have a big noble building filled with books and journals and so on. But I think that actually the physical space of the library is probably not going away anytime soon, if only because I've read elsewhere that that need for study space is actually going up and up and up. As students learn to collaborate more online, they learn to collaborate more in person as well. And so particularly at universities, they find the library invaluable as a place to study with their Wi-Fi enabled laptop open on the table in front of them rather than, you know, with the books from the stacks spread out in front of them. Well, and, you know, along those lines, I spend a fair amount of time in my local public library, and it's full of people using the computers. And I think probably most of those people did not drive up in their BMWs and Mercedes. There, you know, there are an awful lot of people in our communities who really need this kind of information access. And the library is the one place that they can get it, whether it is the only place that they can actually use email or the place where they can go online and look for further information, whether it's about a book or a property tax issue that they're having or something like that. So the library also is this kind of community information space I think is not going to go away anytime soon. I was struck, though, when I read this article on Inside Higher Ed about the meeting that if it turns out the way that Greenstein says, it's time to sell your stock in university presses because the only thing that's keeping university presses open is the library orders. Because if it weren't for those library orders, you know, the number of books that they would sell would drop into the dozens instead of the thousands or hundreds. And so, you know, that would be the final death blow to the university presses. But if they're not dead already, this would for sure kill them off. But, you know, a, I taught at Grinnell College, and the library there is quite a nice library. I mean, Grinnell has tons of money that they can spend on pretty much whatever they want. And the students joked about this addition that was on the library. They called it the Steve Jobs Wing. And the reason it was called the Steve Jobs Wing, according to the local common knowledge, whether it's true or not, I'm not sure. But Jobs had been on the board of Grinnell when they were getting ready to build the new library. And he convinced the board that they shouldn't spend so much money on the structure because books were pretty much over. And so they wouldn't need all of that space for stacks. And so they built a library without enough stack space. And then they believed him because, of course, who doesn't believe Steve Jobs? And so he can be very persuasive, I'm told. So they built this building without sufficient stack space. And then six or seven years later, had to build an addition just to accommodate the books. I think in the case of journal articles and things like that, I think it would be much more plausible. If a library consisted of nothing but journals and journal articles, then I think that this everywhere library would come a lot sooner and with a lot less anxiety. However, e-book as an object is still an extremely rare beast. You don't see it around that much. There's only so many people who have Kindles or e-book readers. We really have not settled how or even if the book is ever going to transition to the digital realm. So as long as there are books, I think there will continue to be good physical spaces for libraries. Yeah, I would also add to that that I think that I would echo Amanda's point about student space, because I do think that that's, if you look at the new libraries that are being designed these days, there is a lot of attention paid to that. Hopkins is, Johns Hopkins has been doing, putting together a new library, and it has, sort of, the books are not front and center. The study spaces are front and center. The collaborative spaces are front and center. But one thing I think is we do see more of that attention to collaborative spaces.
I mean, if the library is sort of a knowledge center for the institution or for a community, librarians continue to have a role in helping people navigate through, even if everything's online, even if everything's searchable through Google or something else, there's still a need for human assistance in directing us towards particular things. Well, there's a really great need for that. And what's often a shame is that neither students nor university administrations really recognize that. I mean, people feel like they can Google everything and find it, and they're not even aware that that's not true. And, you know, even still, too often, you know, the library training that a student gets consists of an hour in your composition class, and hey, you've been trained to use the library now, and it's a lot more complicated than it used to be. So, of course, librarians have this whole information literacy movement, and I'm glad that that has taken place. Yeah, and I think it's going to be important for librarians. I think they're starting to do this and I think people have written about this and studied this question. How to connect to the students and the public in the ways that they are expecting them. How to get to students in ways that feel natural to the students. I think sitting behind a reference desk probably isn't it. Figuring out ways to reach students on Facebook or whatever, however students want to communicate now, we're going to have to figure out a way to communicate with them that way. I was excited to see that the Mason libraries now have a little Mebo widget, an instant message widget where you can ask a librarian on the library, sort of the home page. And so doing those kinds of things, experimenting with those kinds of technologies is going to be an important piece here because I still don't think that the building is even going to be the place where people go to ask a librarian a question. Well, but I also think, you know, I mean, I think that faculty have some responsibility in this as well in ensuring that students don't just search in Google and not just for our own sake, but I mean, I think, you know, you can make real efforts to bring librarians into your classroom and we do, you know, I do a session in our department's methods class where I bring the research librarian in, and so everybody sits there with their laptops, and they're searching on their individual topics, and the research librarian is there giving them advice about how to search different databases. I think there are certainly ways that faculty have some responsibility in ensuring that libraries and librarians don't get left out of this. Well, it's exciting to go to picks for the week on the podcast. There's now even more picks with five of us. And actually, it might mean that a few of them are actually good, statistically speaking, because mine usually aren't. Amanda, maybe we'll start with you, you know, in a hazing kind of way. Start with the new people. And do you have a site or a tool or something you want to point out to the audience that you think they might find useful? I emphatically do. I was fortunate enough to be asked to read a forthcoming work by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, who is a scholar who's been doing work on scholarly publishing from a sort of a media studies point of view. She gave a great paper at Digital Humanities 2009, for instance. And so in conjunction with New York University Press and the Institute for the Future of the book, she has just announced or is just about to announce, in fact, we're recording this on Friday, she's going to announce this on Monday, so by the time you listen to this podcast, it will have been officially announced. Her book, Planned Obsolescence, Publishing Technology and the Future of the Academy. Now, this is published on futureofthebook.org as part of Media Commons Press using Comment Press. So it is a site, really, but it is also a book. And it's just a marvelous book. I can't recommend it enough. I'm so enthusiastic about this book. I thought it was just really wonderful. So I can give you the URL for this, or of course, you can put it in the... Right. We'll go ahead and put it in the show notes. But that sounds terrific. I've been looking for that book to come out. Yeah. Oh, it's wonderful. It's mediacommons.futureofthebook.org slash mookpress slash plannedobsolescent. I won't rave any more about this book. I do recommend that you go and comment on it because, of course, as we know, comment press allows you to comment on each individual paragraph. I will just say that I'll give away the ending. The book recommends that universities take responsibility for scholarly publishing as a matter of infrastructure, that we basically not try to have university presses be these unsustainable cost recovery organizations that they are, that they really, the university itself, take responsibility for publishing the output of its own faculty, which would mean re-envisioning what a university press is in a major way. Great. Thank you for that plug and certainly look forward to reading that. Jeff McClurkin, what do you have for us this week on the podcast? Sure. The site I'm recommending this week is TED.com and that's, for those of you who don't know, the TED conference comes from Technology Entertainment Design. And this is a conference that's been going on for 25 years now. But in the last couple of years, they've begun to publish their TED Talks, as they're called, which are somewhere between 10- and 20-minute talks by leaders in a variety of fields, top thinkers. Al Gore did the slideshow presentation there that became an inconvenient truth. And so I would recommend it's wonderful to see sort of the experts in a field try to take their life's work and condense it to 18 minutes. And, you know, two to sort of get you started are Ken Robinson's talk on how our schools are killing creativity and pretty much anything Hans Rosling does. He's a professor who works with stats, especially statistics involving the comparisons between the third world and the first world and very interesting stuff, fascinating stuff, and I highly recommend you check out TED. You will lose hours and hours of time, but you'll feel like you're doing work. Right, great. Yeah, it's fun to kind of leaf through those, and we'll definitely link to those ones that you found most interesting for our audience. Thanks, Jeff. Sure. Mills, what do you have for us this time? Well, in the sort of reversal of our bashing on Google today, I have a somewhat humorous Google page. Humorous in one way. If you Google study tips for students and Google, you get this particular page which provides sort of links to various Google services for students. And it's lots of librarians and others point their students to these sort of information educators, point their students in the direction of this page because it shows them how to get to Google Books and how to use Google Scholar and things like that. But the part that I find rather humorous is that there's a nice little box in the upper right-hand corner that says a great quote for your cover page or conclusion and then you click generate a quote and from somewhere in the Google database comes up a pithy quotation for the cover of your paper and just as I looked at this today the random quotation that came up on my screen was historical books that contain no lies are extremely tedious and this this is from Anatole France. And so, and you know, you refresh the page and you get another one. And so mine right now is I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. Mark Twain. Yeah. Mine is H.G. Wells. His studies were pursued, but never effectually undertaken. So, so I we'll start seeing, if this gets wide dissemination among students, then we'll start seeing some really great quotations on the front pages of the papers our students give us. Okay, thanks, Mills. Tom, do you have a pick for us this week? What I'm going to recommend here is the Online Database of Social Media Policy. This is a database put together by a guy who is writing a book on social media governance. And essentially, it's a list of links to organizations, private companies, universities, non-governmental organizations, government organizations that are blogging or tweeting or on Facebook or MySpace and it provides a link to those organizations to their social media policies, the guidance that they give their employees and their members for how they should use social media.
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi-weekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Fear itself. This is Digital Campus number 13 for the 21st of September, 2007. Everything in moderation. I'm Dan Cohen. Well, we've done it, Tom and Mills. We are on episode 13 and a half year of podcasting. We can all celebrate at this point. Welcome to the 13th episode, lucky 13, of Digital Campus. We are here with much greater sound fidelity over our high-speed Internet 2 networks here at George Mason University, the Center for History and New Media. I'm Dan Cohen, and I'm here with Tom Scheinfeld of foundhistory.org. Hi, Tom. Hey, Dan. And Mills Kelly of edwire.org. Hey, Mills. Hi, Dan. How are you? Very good. And, of course, I can be found at dancohen.org. And welcome to the podcast. New listeners of the new semester and our faithful listeners who have been with us from the beginning, we'd like to welcome you back. And we're going to kick right off with our regular opening segment, which is the News Roundup. And there were a lot of stories this week around online and free Office applications that compete with Microsoft's near monopoly of their OpenOffice, or excuse me, their Office suite. These are applications that, of course, we use all the time, things like Word and PowerPoint, which I always have to shudder when I say, and email applications as well. In fact, on email, it looks like the founders of the Firefox web browser have spun off Thunderbird, which was sort of really playing a second fiddle as their email application to Firefox. And so Mozilla has now spun that off as a company. I can't remember if it's, I guess it's sort of for-profit, but they're not aggressively for-profit. Is that right? I think it's going to be for, I think it's probably, at least from what I understand, it's along the same model as the Firefox Corporation, which is a for-profit company that's wholly owned by the Mozilla Foundation. So it's actually called the Mozilla Corporation. But I wonder if they're going to change the name to Firefox Corporation and then have Thunderbird Corporation so that they're sort of separate entities so that the profits all get rolled back into the Mozilla Foundation. Got it. That makes a lot of sense. I mean, they're really known as a kind of one-trick pony at this point with Firefox, and I'm sure a lot of the energy goes into Firefox. So this seems like a good move for them to create a separate entity that can really solely focus on Thunderbird, which is a competitor to Apple Mail and the ubiquitous Microsoft Outlook. We noticed that also Google launched their presentation part of their online office suite. And at the same time, IBM released an open source suite called Symphony, a beautiful sounding name for some existing software. Of course, the OpenOffice.org suite of open source tools, very popular, often comes in different flavors sold and distributed by different companies and entities. And Yahoo bought Zimbra, which is a big sort of email and collaborative calendaring system. So they're going to fold that in, I think, to their Yahoo mail system as well. So it seems like a lot of competition for Microsoft this week. In addition, they were sort of received an interesting and painful smackdown by the European courts. And I think this was also an interesting story that kind of brackets all these other stories about, you know, the role for government regulators in Europe, the much more aggressive role that they're taking in terms of, you know, beating down near monopolies in the tech industry. And I think what was interesting is that probably here on digital campus, we'd like to see bad news about Microsoft. And certainly all of the things I just mentioned are bad news in a way for Microsoft, which makes a considerable amount of profit from its office suite. But this ruling in Europe really means that they're going to get very aggressive for not only for Microsoft, but other tech companies that achieve very high sort of near monopoly rates of adoption. You can think already about Microsoft was criticized and ultimately sued in Europe for adding in a media player when real networks had a competing product and was out in front. And then, of course, Microsoft in the same way that they crushed Netscape by including Internet Explorer in every copy of Windows, simply just added Windows Media Player. And that pretty much did in real, although, of course, real is still around. But Europe didn't like it that much. And so you wonder about, you know, Google adding, for instance, new features to the search engine that really take on independent companies. You know, even their productivity suite, their office apps compete with independent companies like Zoho, which has a terrific set of, you know, very similar sorts of online applications. And Apple, of course, with their iPod, you need to wonder what happens there when they've got 85% or 90% of the market, what will happen to them in Europe as they sort of continue to expand iTunes into more areas. So, Tom and Mills, what was your take on all these stories and what is the future for the Microsoft Office suite? It's still really the standard, isn't it? I mean, we ask for, for instance, applications, you know, in Word format or, you know, it's the most common format that's tossed around between collaborators. I think this is the thing that Microsoft has been afraid of for probably five or six years, and it's finally really starting to come to pass largely because big companies like Google are really taking it seriously as a possibility. I mean, for a long time, I can't remember now how long it's been since the first time I saw the prediction that the Internet eventually would go to this sort of model of applications running off of servers of various companies rather than having to buy the software and run it on your computer yourself. It's been so many waves of that, haven't there? Every five years, you think it's there, that thin client model. Well, that was the whole kind of, that was supposed to be the revolution with Java in the kind of early and mid-90s was that we'd all be running thin clients and running these Java apps on our thin clients. But that never happened. So I think the big difference now is that you've got a company with the strength of Google behind it and the technical capability of Google. So Google can actually – they have the resources both fiscal and also technological to make it happen. And so I think that's really what's going to make the difference. The question is will people buy into it or do they feel more comfortable owning a copy of the software themselves? I think the other question is really can they get the software? How long will it take them to get the software up to speed? And are they rolling it out too soon? I know that from what I've seen of the new PowerPoint, the new presentation software that Google's rolled out, it's really not a substitute in any way for PowerPoint. I don't use PowerPoint very much myself. I actually think the Google Docs are actually pretty good, but you need a lot less, it seems to me, a lot less computing power and sophistication to build an online and run an online word processor than you do to run an online graphics and graphing and video audio presentation software. And from what I've seen of the Google presentation software, it's not there yet. And the question then becomes like, okay, well then you roll it out too quickly. A bunch of people try it. They find out it's kind of cheesy and clunky and the presentations come out kind of ugly and amateurish. Do they say, forget this, I'm going back to PowerPoint and never come back? That's one of these things where I think in this online environment with running web services, and I think this applies to digital humanists running web services, you can release too early because, you know, you've really got one shot at people, I think. You know, people will come and try your product. They try it the first time and don't like it. It's really hard to get them back to try revision two. Boy, that's really the case. I mean, people who beta tested Zotero last fall, I've now seen updated blog posts where these people sort of come back to the, you know, to the software and, you know, haven't realized that we've done this enormous amount of development in the past year and realize there are all these new features. But you're right.
I wonder, though, are we talking about apples and oranges here? I mean, isn't, you know, I guess the IBM Symphony story, there is a direct competitor, i mean that's downloaded applications it's really a direct replacement for your um you know for your installation that runs on your computer that you can take on an airplane and uh you know exchange documents with other people across the network um but google docs it strikes me you know and and indeed their whole suite is isn't it for kind of more collaborative space than Microsoft? I mean, isn't it about, you know, you're not going to get the formatting because Google Docs drives me insane with its formatting and, you know, trying to delete, for instance, sometimes the delete key doesn't work. Like you would imagine, you can't delete a line for some reason. But if you're just interested in the content and not the layout and these sorts of things that we're used to, kind of that are leftovers from the print world of, you know, I need that specific font and I want to have lots of fonts and I want to be able to do a three column view really easily and, you know, create a newsletter on it. If you're not concerned with that, if you're more concerned with, okay, I need some text and I'm working on it and Mills, you might have to take a look at it at some point and then Tom, you want to write the second half, Google Docs really excels at that. it actually really does work. I think the presentation software, when you start to get into that, because there you are building a finished product. That's the whole point of the presentation software is to build a presentation that you will, and the layout is everything, and the presentation and the fonts and the colors and the graphics and the charts and the graphs and all that. That is the point of it. And so there, I'm a little more skeptical. But yeah, I agree. I think maybe it's not a direct competitor. Maybe it's a supplement or just a different market, a different kind of client. The other thing I would say is to go back just for a minute to Dan's point about, well, if you don't get it right or Tom's point, when you don't get it right the first time, then people aren't going to come back. I think that's true in the United States. I think it's true in Europe. I don't think it's true in Central America. I don't think it's true in Africa. I don't think it's true in Southeast Asia where – I mean when I was in Cambodia back in the spring, I bet Microsoft has only sold hundreds of copies of its office suite in Cambodia in a country of 30 million people. They're going to use the Google Docs and not worry about the fact that it's a little clunky. So I think there is really a divide on this. They're going to use the pirated version. Yeah. I mean, certainly there are probably thousands. But now they don't need to. There are free versions, right? Right. I'm sure that there are thousands of pirated versions floating around. But the freeware is going to make, I think, a really big difference also in the developing world. I think that's a great point. I think that what's also going to make a difference is when they get Google Gears up, really up and running, which is really just in beta now, but they need to get the airplane market, the offline market, the don't always have Wi-Fi market, and that's going to require them with Gmail, with Google Docs, with the presentation software in particular, because I know when we go to meetings, the American Historical Association, you're not going to have a web connection from your point of presentation. You need it on a USB key, or you need it on your laptop that's not online. And so what Google Gears will do for them is the ability to run Right now, the only thing it really works with is Google Reader. And I get how it works with Google Reader. It's using the Firefox SQLite backend, and so it's saving it in a little table where it's got my 200 items from my feed reader on red items, and it's got the text of the post and the title and the date, and that's a pretty simple table, and it doesn't take up much space and everything. How are they going to do that with Gmail? I've got 50,000 emails with attachments in my Gmail. How are they going to make Google Gears with the Firefox SQLite database? How are they going to make that work? Is it going to be so slow to do the syncing and the upload and the download? I just don't see it happening anytime soon. And that's actually another story that's kind of out and about today is that Google Gears for Gmail is going to be coming out soon. Now, that may be just a rumor, but I'll believe it when I see it. Well, Tom, actually, I'll throw out the first link for our show then. If you want a vision of the future, this is not from Google, but a third-party application that does just this. It's called Mailplane for OS X or OS X. It's just that Mailplane app like M-A-I-L-P-L-A-N-E-A-P-P dot com. And it's a Mac client for Gmail. And it is really strange. It's got the Mac trimming, so menu bars, all this stuff. And inside of it, you actually view what looks exactly like Gmail. And you can take it on the plane, and it works just fine. Really, it's an offline client. Yeah, it does it offline. And you can even drag and drop attachments, like you do in Apple Mail, onto the window, which you can't do in a web browser. And it just will add it as an attachment. Because I heard about it early, early on when it first launched, and I don't think it had that offline capability. That's amazing. Okay, I'm going to have to check that out. But they're not using the backend that Google Gears has, which, you know, we don't need to get too technical, but really is sort of a database backend, which makes a lot of sense for, like, as you said, for a reader, a newsreader, but, and I guess in some ways makes sense for mail, but then you do have this problem of attachments and all the stuff that you need. It'll be interesting to see what they can do to get these things offline, but I'm sure this is where they're going. At that point, then they're in a really competitive space because they have the online-offline thing. That's what's a real killer app, I think. They're clearly way smarter than me do it, they can. Right. Well, it looks like, at the very least, we will not be paying much for these important Office applications in the very near future, one way or another, whether we use Symfony or Google Apps or Zoho or Zimbra or any of these other applications. And also this week, it looks like we're not going to be paying much for premium content anymore either. There's been a lot of buzz about the New York Times basically doing away with Time Select, which was their, really what I guess was an experiment to see if they could charge visitors to newyorktimes.com for some of the quote-unquote premium content. By that, they meant op-eds and certain parts of each section. And I think, you know, they seem to have some success on this front. From what I read, there were about a quarter million paying members of Time Select. I mean, I was a member of Time Select, but I get home delivery of the physical paper. So I think there was another 700,000 or 800,000 Time Select users that were getting home subscriptions and signed up for Time Select for free. So they were making some money, but decided, no, the future is really in free content online. Sort of dovetails, interestingly, with what we discussed last week with the New York Times setting up an online learning company, essentially, and trying to get more paid content that way. And, of course, then immediately there was speculation that Rupert Murdoch would, as part of one of his initial fiats over at the Wall Street Journal would actually make that open up as well. And they actually have many more subscribers at, I think, $100 a year for their online content. What do you think the significance is on this, of these major institutions like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal opening up? I think it's going to feed nicely into our feature segment as well.
In particular, I get this from my students. They just aren't going to pay for content online. They've come through this system for the last five or six years where there is a tremendous amount of free content that is perfectly good. And so since what they found is perfectly good, why would they pay for premium service? I mean, there are businesses where that's true. I'm sure that that is the entire business model of the pornography industry online. But there's so much free, why would you pay for information content that just seems marginally better to the average user? So I think that they've kind of had to recognize that the average person on the Internet just doesn't make the kind of premium, not premium distinction about information. I think there's also a tension with the Internet, and I read this somewhere. Maybe it's like O'Reilly. I should probably source this better. But there's a tension on the Internet with gated content, and I think this goes just as much for gated scholarly resources, educational resources, ProQuest, things like that, as it does for the New York Times. Maybe not quite as much so, but same idea. That when everything is linked to everything else, you can have some things that are behind a wall and some things that aren't. Like I know that the blogosphere got really angry with the Times for gating some of its content because you're a political blogger and you're blogging and you want to comment on Maureen Dowd's piece and you put a link to it up and only 3% of your readership can actually get there. So that's like a real problem with this kind of – if they want to be major players in the kind of blogosphere, in this world of social media and sharing information and all the things that the Internet is, they can't be gating some of their content. Yeah, I mean, you could do a really interesting experiment on this. Go to Technorati or Google Blog Search and get a feed for blog posts that link to NewYorkTimes.com, to articles at NewYorkTimes.com. And your feed reader will instantly fill with hundreds of things a day. I mean, they were getting all these link backs that after two weeks or perhaps not at all, no one could actually view the article. I mean, they're turning away readers. They're turning away advertising eyeballs for just this relatively small number of people. Because nobody finds an old blog post, finds a link to a New York Times article, clicks on that link, finds that it's gated and says,, oh, yeah, I'll pay the, you know, 80 bucks or whatever to subscribe or 20 bucks to subscribe or whatever. They just say, I'll go somewhere else. That's right. And, you know, they're in the business of maintaining a certain kind of premier reputation. And also, you know, I'm sure that they looked at the advertising dollars and that, you know, despite the burst of the dot-com bubble, that's now come way back up. And, you know, I think you can just project that into the future and look at your server logs and how many people you're turning away for viewing, you know, all these link backs and page views that you're missing out on because your stuff is gated. I imagine that there was a lot of agitation even before this happened, especially among the people in the New York Times business unit who really understood what this meant to give away these free eyeballs that were being linked back to their site. And not only that, these articles last for years and years and years. I mean, you Google search some things, you'll get New York Times articles now, and you couldn't before. They have permanent URLs for these articles, and so you're just missing out on all that Google traffic. Someone Googles a particular topic, and if the New York Times had an article about that, they wouldn't get any of that traffic. So I think this makes a lot of sense. And I think it'll be interesting to see if others open up as well. I guess the Wall Street Journal is the biggest, but there are probably others as well, right? Economist. Yeah, Economist is gated. Washington Post is gated. Right, right. Or at least you have to sign up for an account. Well, it's not yet. They don't charge you, but you still have to go through the process of signing up for an account, which an example that Tom gave is the same problem. I mean, if you click on a blog post, you read the link, you see a link to WashingtonPost.com story, you click on the link and you can't get in, are you actually going to go to the trouble of registering for the site just to read it? I think a lot of people won't. Right, right. Well, it sounds like open is king, and that actually leads into our featured story. For our feature segment today, we wanted to spin out some thoughts from a discussion, or really rather a debate that came about because of a blog post from our own Mills Kelly on the podcast. And Mills, you had a post about HNet, which for people who are not in history may not know HNet, but it's very widely used and really has been around for what, I guess about a decade. Is that right, Mills? Yeah, about a decade. Listserv, really, so an email discussion group that's separated into various fields. So there's, for instance, I read H-SciMed Tech, which is about the history of science, technology, and medicine. And I think there's well over 100 of these groups. And, Mills, you had post on the past, present, and future of H-Net, and particularly in relation to blogs. And it really had to do with this issue of making scholarly materials open and available. We should say H-Net is totally free. Anyone can go to H-Net and sign up. But on the other hand, it isn't available in the same way that sort of Washington Post articles aren't really available or visible on the web. Do you want to explain your thinking a little bit about that? And we'll talk from there. Sure, sure. Well, first of all, just to kind of clarify on the availability issue with HNet and a little bit more on the kind of background of the organization. HNET is really, it's more than a list service. It's really a cluster of networked communities of scholars. I guess there are more than 100 different list serves that are under the HNET umbrella and they are really all over the scholarly map in humanities, social sciences, technology, education. And some of them are quite small with a small number of members in the dozens. Others are quite large with, I know for sure, one has at least 13,000 members who are receiving email through the list on a regular basis. So they really range in size and amounts of traffic on the list. The second thing has to do with the availability issue. You can go to the H-Net website and you can search the discussion logs through a kind of clunky search process where you have to search each log by month. But you can do it and search through the posts in any one of the different scholarly communities represented there and read what was posted on the list. So it is open in that sense and accessible, not easily accessible, but accessible. And then the second thing, though, is that they blocked access to all of those posts, those tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of posts in their archive. They blocked the major search engines from them. So an H-Net posting never turns up in Google, for instance, unless it's been reposted somewhere else like on somebody's blog or on a website. So that's one issue about accessibility. The other is not everybody can belong to an H-Net list. They are closed communities, moderated lists. And so, for instance, one of the lists that I've been involved in for a long time, Habsburg, because I'm a Habsburg historian and I actually was the teaching editor of that list for several years, undergraduate students are generally barred from the list. And so it's really grad students and professors and then other interested scholars, I guess is maybe the way that they put it. So that's not really an open community of interest the way that other websites, other kinds of social networking opportunities might be. So they are closed communities by choice. And so that, you know, it's really kind of a restricted conversation that goes on among scholars there. Mills, if I could just interrupt you there. I mean, the defenders of H-Net and indeed the three of us know that that closure or whatever you want to call it, partial closure, had significant advantages for many years.
So posts that were really off topic were kept off the list. It acted as a filter. We have filters all throughout academia and journal editors and peer review. What is the problem there? I mean, what has changed and what are your concerns? Well, I have kind of two concerns about it that I raised in the blog post. One is this question of accessibility. And so if the material, if it's a closed conversation among a small community of scholars, then that really shuts out the sort of general public from the conversation. And so we end up as scholars just kind of talking to ourselves about things that we already know a fair amount about. There's some advantages to those sorts of semi-private conversations and there's some disadvantages in that we don't tend to get a lot of new perspectives. I mean I'm bothered by the lack of accessibility for undergraduate students, for instance, as though somehow they don't have something to contribute. But the bigger issue that I raised in the blog post that kind of set off this discussion was about the future of email as the delivery system for scholarly content because that's what HNET is based on, the email model. All of the material comes as not just email but plain text email. So if you're working in a language that uses diacritical marks in the language, all of those words that require diacritical marks are misspelled because email just won't do that or at least the kind of email server that they're using won't do that. And also, I started my blog post with the question of do you get too much email? Because certainly I do and I think just about everybody listening to this podcast gets too much email. And so I wondered whether email was really the right way to maintain these scholarly communities and suggested that there were now other kinds of platforms like blogs and wikis and other sorts of social networking platforms that would allow scholars to have the same sort of interchange of information and they could do it still in this sort of semi-closed way that H-Net is, only letting in quote-unquote reputable people. I guess grad students and faculty members are by definition reputable, but letting those people, only those people could comment or whatever. So it could be that closed in that way or it could be more open and really give sort of a wider frame for the discussion. So my speculation was that email as a method for delivering content is probably on its way out and so HNET ought to start thinking of other ways to build the same kinds of scholarly communities that it had five years ago, three years ago around some of these new platforms. And I also asked the question, kind of an empirical question, which was what's happening to the traffic on their list? Now, you can go to hnet.org slash stats and get the results of the stats program that they run. And I would say that those stats are pretty much useless because they're cumulative stats from the beginning on a daily basis. And so there are 3 million and some odd messages that have been posted in the last year or something like that. It just doesn't actually tell you anything about the traffic on the individual lists. So I went to the brute force method and went to their logs for four different lists and counted the traffic on those lists. And I didn't just pick them at random. These were lists that I have either subscribed to or know that other people find very useful and they've been fairly active in the past. And three of those four lists have had a decline in traffic over the last three years for the same three-month period of time I looked at, and one of them was flat over that period of time. So that raised the question in my mind of, well, is their model really starting to show signs of strain? And it set off really a fairly interesting discussion from people about whether email was the right way to go or not. Yeah, and we'll post to HNet and also to some of these online discussions about this. Again, just playing it from the side of HNet, I think some of the arguments for are, first of all, probably first and foremost, just the barrier to entry question of everyone has email, we know how to use it to post to H-Net. You simply, you know, put in the address for your particular list and send it off and it goes to the moderator and the moderator accepts it, it gets passed along to the entire list. But, you know, and there are other arguments as well in terms of, you know closure. I say this obviously with some note of skepticism sense. I do think that the technology has moved on. And we should say, in all fairness, it sounded to me, Mills, and you can confirm this, but it sounds to me like these very discussions are going on within HNet, as I assume they're going on within all listserv communities, including old-style forums and these sorts of things that blogs and other technologies have overtaken. That's right, right? Yes. I heard from a number of senior people at HNet after I posted the thing on my blog, and several of them indicated that they were having these kinds of discussions, but that thus far those discussions really haven't gone anywhere. Right. And, you know, now I think the issue is, well, there's several issues. I mean, the barriers to entry for something like a blog are extraordinarily low. I mean, Mills, you and I, we both have all of our students blogging. And, you know, at this point, I have no problem getting anyone online. Literally, if you can sign up for an email account, you can sign up for a blog and start blogging. So that's quite simple. You know, the big issue that you brought up is, you know, searchability and findability. You know, having, for instance, each post on HNet be a distinct URL that has a page would be enormously helpful because then you could refer to it from other places. And, you know, that's what we're kind of getting used to in this quote-unquote Web 2.0 world is, you know, we want to be able to point to fixed, you know, permanent URLs for objects that, you know, that we want to cite. Well, they do have fixed URLs for each one of those posts through their logs, but finding that is hard. And it's not, it's still currently not crawled by Google. In other words, if you search, okay, huh. Yeah, and that's one of the things that blogs do really well is actually on my blog, if I post something, it's available not only in Google Blog Search, but actually the main Google index generally within 24 hours. Sure. And because Google knows that, okay, it's a blog, it's updated more frequently than other kinds of sites, and they ping my site a few times a day. So you get that. You know, There is the question of elitism, which I thought was an interesting one. Tom, your blog is really oriented toward a more popular audience within and outside of academia. What's your take? I assume you'd want HNet to open up a bit more than they currently are. I think I would like HNet to open up a bit more than they are. Although I think where I come down on this is that I would like to – I think that email has some things to recommend it. And one of those things from a community building standpoint is once somebody's signed up to your list, you know that they get that email every time it's sent out. And you know that it goes to their inbox. You know it's delivered to them. So it's this kind of push mechanism whereas with blogs, they still have to pull the content from you to some extent. RSS readers is pushing the content to them to some extent but it's less of a guarantee that they're getting the content. Now, you could argue that people should have the choice whether they want to get the content every day and every time or not. But I think as a moderator for one of these communities, you know that the people are getting the material. I think also if anybody's ever signed up for a listserv and then tried to unregister for the listserv, you know that it's kind of hard. And it's, you know, I'd be interested to see with HNET's lists, just how many people are members of these communities, but only because they just haven't gotten around to unsubscribing. I mean, I think there is this kind of constraint of, you know, you have to go back to the welcome email that's sitting, you know, somewhere at the bottom of your saved message folder and figure out what command you're supposed to send to sign off the list. And so I think, I mean, from a community building point of view, that's in some ways a positive, although it might be a negative to the users. So that's one thing.
I mean, I think whenever any new technology comes along, especially communications technologies, I think the history of technology is rife with these examples. Everybody says, oh, well, you know, TV is going to be the death of radio. Well, we see that radio is still around. It may not be quite as prominent as it was before television came around, but it's still around. And it works very well for certain things. I mean, you know, like, you know, video didn't totally kill the radio star, but to the extent that it did, you know, talk radio replaced that. And radio, in many respects, is the best place if you want political talk. It's just the technology is just very well suited to political talk. And really, if you're going to have a 24-hour political network, radio is probably the best place to do it, not TV. I mean, the talk radio stations are doing much, much better than MSNBC and CNN. So maybe TV isn't the right place for that. Maybe radio is. And I think we're still in the process, you know, as the Internet in general, but also, you know, scholars and educators and public historians and other public cultural professionals, we're still in the process of figuring out, like, what is email good for, what are blogs good for, what is social networking good for, and how do these technologies kind of mix. So I think that's where we are. And so I think it's kind of hard to say whether email is dead or even how far it will die. Yeah, I agree, Tom. I think this is a, this is a process of figuring, yeah, right, figuring out the advantages and disadvantages of each technology. I think where I had kind of a problem with the defenders of H-Net this week were those who were saying there's not serious scholarship going on on blogs. And it's amazing to me that after all these years of, you know, the existence of blogs, that there's still this feeling, and I've blogged about this. In fact, the most popular post on my blog is called Professors Start Your Blogs. And it's all about how there's a sort of legacy of the early years of blogging that for some reason, this myth still sticks around that, you know, blogs are about what you ate for breakfast that morning. or, you know, if you're a teenager, what current lusts you have, you know, and there's now a very serious body of academics blogging. You know, if you look at the library community, there are very great, serious library blogs, lots of them, hundreds, thousands of them. If you look at an area like the law, there are law blogs that have literally tens of thousands of subscribers that are reviewing, really within days, articles that come out in the major law reviews. So they provide a much more extensive feedback section than some of these journals, even if the journals are online. And then you have preprint services like archive.org for the natural sciences that are doing an amazing job sort of taking forward the idea of, you know, putting out serious scholarship in a kind of, you know, quick, online, fully available way. And I think it's really starting to change some of these fields. I mean, certainly it's changed the field of physics and mathematics. I mean, you've had advances come out on archive.org before they're published anywhere else. I mean, major advances show up there. And I think it's only a matter of time. I think the humanities are really far behind that this is going to start happening, that there'll be a blog post that will be really important in some field of, let's say, history. And I think it's more likely to happen on a blog where you have the ability to do images and, you know, a bit longer form than you could do in an email and also have the ability for comments directly on that particular article that you post to your blog, that seems to me to have a lot of advantages. Go ahead, Mel. The other problem with email as a delivery system through the Listserv software is that what you just said, something about images. I mean, on these HNET lists, you can't get any images, you can't get any video files. It's only plain text. Yeah, and I just don't see how, I mean, I don't think that there's tremendous scholarship happening on listservs either. I mean, a lot of the things that are happening on listservs are answers to, people are asking and answering, important to them, but still relatively mundane questions like, does anybody have a source on, you know, such and such a topic? Or can anybody point me in the right direction to somebody to talk to about X, Y, or Z? So it's not like, you know, people are writing, you know, full-blown journal articles on HNet lists either. So. Yeah. Well, I guess we'll have to keep track of this. You know, I think, I think, you know, it remains to be seen. I think certainly Mills, you, you know, you mapped out, I think, some changes that HNET can make. And surely HNET will have to change somewhat. But, you know, of course, I'm sure the debate within HNET is also that any change incurs loss, and there'll be some people who will be quite fussy about losing email or moving into an RSS reader or any of those things. It's hard to know how to move forward from here. Yeah, certainly fussy would be the right word. I got a few fussy responses to the whole thing. But yeah, I think, I mean, there certainly will be a loss for the people who I think who will get lost are the people who only want the push. You know, they just want to have the stuff show up in their email inbox and they don't actually want to transfer this whole process to a feed reader or something like that. And so I think that what we'll see is some sort of a transitional period. And I think that it may be that blogs ultimately end up, instead of having an RSS feed only, they may also have some sort of an email feed where they're sending things regularly to subscribers that way. Who knows? Well, if the audience would like to get fussy with us on this issue, please, of course, join us online at digitalcampus.tv and write in some comments for episode 13. It's time once again for Picks of the Week. Tom, let's start with you this week. All right. I have another podcast here to recommend. It's actually a radio program that is also made available now as a podcast. People in the U.K. will be familiar with this. Maybe people in the U.S. and other places not as much so. It's called In Our Time, and it's a history podcast from the BBC. It's very British. It's a little dry, but it brings together usually three scholars with the host, Melvin Bragg, for an hour. And it comes out about once a week, usually I think during the winter, and I think they take a recess during the summer, to talk about issues mostly in intellectual history. And the discussions are usually very, very rich for a podcast, certainly, very highbrow, and usually very good. And he gets very, very good scholars on the program. So maybe don't listen to it while you're driving if you're worried about falling asleep at the wheel, certainly not late at night because it does get a little long-winded. But it is very, very good, very high quality. And if people want to see, I guess, not a commercial radio broadcast, but a mainstream radio broadcast that is incredibly high quality and very well done, have a listen to In Our Time. Yeah, it's a great podcast. It was one of the first podcasts I ever downloaded was In Our Time on Renaissance Geometry. And it was so good, I could not believe it. So great pick there, Tom. Mills, what do you have for us this week? Mine is a blog called Strange Maps. I don't know if either of you have ever seen this, but it's strangemaps.wordpress.com. And it's a blog about unusual cartography and some of it historical, some of it not. Some of it humorous. I was looking at one the other day, which is a Texans map of the United States where Texas occupies about two-thirds of the land mass of the lower 48. And the state just to the north that Texans don't even like to mention is the state of misery and Illinois is ill noise and things like that. There are various maps. There's a very humorous one from Punch of John Bull sending bumboats toward France and you can perhaps get the idea of what a bumboat is.
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi-weekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Here is the bill. This is Digital Campus number 26 for the 7th of May 2008. Free for all. I'm Dan Cohen. Welcome back to another episode of Digital Campus. We're lucky to have Mills back on the program. Hi, Mills. Kelly, hi, Mills. Hey, how are you? And Tom Scheinfeld, of course. Hi, Tom. Hi, guys. And we've got some interesting news stories from the week, and of course we're wrapping up the semester, and Mills, you're finishing up grading, is that right? No, the grading tsunami has just crashed over my desk, and so now I'm going to spend the next week grading. Oh, goodness. Well, good luck with that. I guess we'll keep the podcast short today. The first story we wanted to talk about was very much a campus story, and one that we haven't talked about in a while, but certainly something that we have covered on prior digital campus podcasts, and that is that the recording Thank you. known in the past to send out tersely worded emails to CIOs and others on campus about the file trading that goes on, music file trading. And evidently, it looks like they've really stepped up their efforts to crack down once again on piracy, music piracy on campuses. We haven't talked about this in a while. Mills, Tom, is it your sense that, I mean, is this just, you know, they've gotten more aggressive because they think there's more piracy? Is this something new? Has the landscape changed in the past year since we started discussing this on the podcast? And do you think file trading is up, down, about the same? I think from what I can tell and sort of from what I, just the sense I get on campus and what little I hear from students, I think it's probably about the same. I think this is possibly the RIAA feeling increasingly desperate. They've exhausted, I think, a lot of their legal challenges and legal means for stopping this. And going after individual students has gotten them a ton of bad press. And so maybe now they're targeting, and it seems like this is true also on the legislative side as well as maybe the more retail side, they're targeting the universities themselves rather than the students at the universities. So here we see the RIA sending more and more notices to university IT departments trying to get IT departments to cooperate in cracking down on file sharing. In the House, we saw RIA lobbyists push through a bill recently that would target universities who allow their students to file share or who don't crack down sufficiently on their students. It would target them with penalties to their student loan funds. And so maybe it just represents a change in tactics for the RIAA. But I don't know if it reflects any kind of increase or decrease in student file sharing. Yeah, I mean, GW, George Washington University, just down the road from us, they usually receive, according to the Chronicle of Higher Ed, five to ten notices per week from the RIAA, and last week alone they received 123 notices. You know, it could be software, you know, that's detecting this better. Mills, what are your thoughts on this? My thoughts are that, I guess, if I were them, I would probably be doing it this way because, as you said, the targeting of individual students has just garnered them a lot of bad press. The targeting of the platforms like Kazaa and I can't even think of what was the original one. I've already forgotten now. Napster. Napster. Napster. See, it's been so long. The targeting of those organizations hasn't really worked. It hasn't prevented anything in terms of file sharing. And so now they're going after what is, I have to say, a weaker link in the chain because universities are so lawsuit-averse that just a threat of a lawsuit is often enough to make universities knuckle under. And I'm not saying that universities should facilitate and allow lots of file sharing, but I do think that, especially universities like ours, which is incredibly lawsuit-averse, in part because we have no endowment to speak of and so can't afford expensive lawyers to defend ourselves. So if I were the RIAA, I would be going after places like George Mason. I probably would give Princeton and Stanford and Harvard a pass because they might actually defend themselves in court. Yeah, I mean, it does seem like, you know, I mean, this has been going on for a while, and, you know, I think it probably had some effect, but I just think this generation is probably lost to the RIAA. I mean, you know, I think people under 25, they just got used to, between the Napster years, Yeah. but a free and easy model. It just, you know, I think, you know, we're buying music, but I think this younger generation has just gotten used to getting music through all these different ways. I mean, I think they're not using something like Napster anymore, but there are just so many ways to trade files on the internet that I could believe that probably after, you know, some decline in file trading after the initial lawsuits went out, I think people just feel like now there are just so many ways to get free music that they're probably doing it again. And I'll bet you the RIA has some numbers backing this up and is getting worried about that sort of generational problem that this whole generation has come up with, the notion that music is something you get for free and they're options for downloading digital music from the Internet. So now we have finally, after years and years, a mature outlet in iTunes, a good competitor in Amazon, and then some worthy subscription services like the new Napster and others, Rhapsody and others. So, I mean, it took them really almost a good decade to provide consumers with what they were wanting, to provide a legal means for giving consumers what they wanted. And so in those intervening years, the students who, the early adopters, went elsewhere, and that was to the black market. And then those early adopters told all their friends about how to do it. And, you know, these are people with time on their hands. They can, you know, now even though it's relatively inexpensive and the Amazon service is really terrific, it's 89 cents a song, it's less than iTunes, and it's DRM free. I mean, you can put it on any device you want and as many devices as you want, but they're still willing to kind of go around that to get free music because they know how, they've learned how to do it really easily from all their friends. And this is why, you know, I think Chris Anderson is completely right in saying that the problem with this particular issue of music sales is that it's an economic model that was created, what, in the 1920s, 1930s, whenever vinyl records started being mass marketed. And so it's worn itself out. The new delivery systems for content are completely at odds with that model that worked so well for, you know, 60, 70, 80 years. And what the RIAA is doing is defending a model that's really over. And they just won't recognize that. And that instead, they should be investing their resources as an association into developing new economic models where they can make a lot of money in this new economy instead of the economy that, you know, was great in the 1960s. Yeah, right. I mean, I still think they've got this deer in the headlights way of looking at things. And I just, you know, I wonder about, you know, like Tom said, it's been 10 years really since Napster took off. It's hard. It's amazing to think about that. But the fact that you have a whole decade to try to think about new models, you know, you've got students coming into colleges now who were, you know, were eight when Napster was launched. And they're just, they've been used to, through their entire teens, you know, they've been used to stealing music. And they haven't experienced something really exciting from the RIAA's membership that's gotten them to look at this a different way. It's rather astonishing to think about. Well, another interesting story that caught our eye this past week was the University of Chicago Law School. I guess the professors there were getting a little sick of students in classes tapping away at their laptops.
But they're now actually cutting off wireless and wired access in their classrooms at the University of Chicago Law School. Good idea? Bad idea? Boy, students, you know, they're bringing their laptops. They're clicking away. I assume they're not taking notes all the time from a professor's perspective. Surely there's other things going on. Is this the wave of the future? You know, I think they're really on to something here, and I think the next innovation that they need is these cerebellum implants that you can install into the human brain that as soon as somebody starts daydreaming in class, it gives them like 40 volts. You know, I think that that's really, that's the answer is no, no, no one in my class is allowed to not pay attention. They must always pay attention at all times. So give me those implants, you know, I've put them right in my students ears and then they'll just get zapped every time they lose the thread of what I'm saying. But, I mean, you don't think there's a distraction going on here, Mills? I mean, this is the box of utmost distraction. Yes, but that's their problem, not my problem. You know, I have exams, and if they want to pass my exams, if they want to do well on the papers that I assign, then maybe they want to pay attention. And, you know, if they want to get in my classes, class participation is 25% of the grade in whichever class I teach. And so, you know, if they want to participate, they better be participating as opposed to doing whatever else they might be doing. And so, you know, over the years, I've gotten pretty good at noticing when somebody's eyes have glazed over in front of their laptop. And so what do I do? I ask them a question. So, Dan, what do you think about that? And if Dan looks up from his laptop and says, uh, what? His class participation grade just went down. And I tell them that on the first day of class, that, you know, I'm happy for them to bring their laptops in, to look things up and use them as a participation device. But if they're not paying attention and I notice it and I call them on it, their grades are going to suffer. And that's, you know, in the Kelly family, we call this paying the stupid tax. Well, I mean, there is a trend that, you know, I just read about this somewhere else about, I don't know if the two of you have heard about this, but they're called topless meetings, which it's a pretty funny name for, you know, no laptops in the meeting. And companies, so companies are doing this too. You know, they just say, you know, we're going to have a topless meeting, no laptops, no BlackBerrys, no iPhones. And, but is that a different situation, the teaching situation? Is it something where business really can require their employees to kind of pay full attention and not be surfing the web or doing email or text messaging? I think the problem here, I guess, is I think there are times in a class when you want to say to your students, okay, shut your laptops. Or even particular classes, courses, you know, a full semester where you say there will be no using laptops in this class. I can see why, you know, in a certain circumstance that a certain professor would want to do that either on a class-by-class basis or for the semester. The problem here seems to be that they're just, it's a blanket policy. They're taking out, they're cutting off access to all classes. And I think that is this kind of reaction. If you read actually the email that the dean of the University of Chicago Law School, Saul Levmore, sent around to his faculty and students explaining the new policy, he actually, I'll quote something here, he says, several observers have reported that one student will visit a gossip site or shop for shoes, and within 20 minutes, an entire row is shoe shopping. That seems like an overreaction to me. I'm sure that shoe shopping is not that contagious, that entire classes at the University of Chicago Law School, which is, after all, one of the best law schools in the country, are spending all of their time shoe shopping in class. And I think that there are times and places for allowing students to use their laptops and disallowing students to use their laptops. So I think it's the blanket nature of this policy that's the problem. What I just don't get here is aren't we moving more and more to applications that live on the web that, you know, note-taking applications and all kinds of services that we use in academia that are, you know, as they say, in the cloud. They're out there on the internet. And so, you know, I just don't get how this works in the long run. I mean, it just... Well, this is, you know, I'm sorry, but this one really frosts me because first of all, so what if they're shoe shopping? Okay, what does that say about the kind of instruction that's happening in that classroom? If, in fact, students at the University of Chicago Law School can do well in their classes and pass the bar and also shoe shop, either that instructor is fabulous because he or she is teaching in such a way that all of those things are possible, or that instructor is so deadly boring that the only way students can make it through an hour and 30 minutes or an hour and 15 minutes is by going shoe shopping or checking out the latest celebrity gossip. So it says something about the pedagogy that's evident in that classroom, and I would have to go and see for myself. But about two weeks ago, maybe three weeks ago now, I was sitting in on one of our adjunct faculty members here classes and observing her teaching and providing feedback. And I was sitting all the way in the back of the room, and there were 10 or 12 laptops open in the room. And most of the students were, in fact, just taking notes. Now, they would get an IM every once in a while, and they would type in two or three words to respond for a second or two, but then they would go back to taking notes. There was one student, however, who was all over the Internet. I could just see she was IMing. She was checking her email. She checked her bank account balance. She did all sorts of stuff, and I was thinking, okay, here's a student who's just not paying attention. And then she raised her hand and asked the best question that any student in the class had asked. She was a very bright young woman and was staying connected to what was happening in the class while doing all these other things. I think what's happening at the University of Chicago Law School is that these professors are feeling wounded in their vanity that students aren't paying attention. Well, get over yourself. If students choose to pay attention or not pay attention, whether there's a laptop there or not. And the question is, how are they performing in class and what does that have to do with the way the class is being taught? Well, that was quite an impassioned speech. I'll not get off my high horse here. I'm sure you made some good points, Mills, but I was actually on the internet shopping for shoes. Yeah, well, I know, but you know, maybe our listeners don't know that your middle name is, in fact, Imelda. It's gotten a lot of press, and he's turning it into a book, and the book is simply entitled Free. And it's just about the way in which so much of what we see on the Internet, by its very nature, will be reduced to a price of zero. And this is just inevitable. It's the nature of the Internet. And, Mills, you know, you've recently written a lot on your blog, edwire.org, about the coming Chris Anderson-type world in academia and what free means for us. I guess maybe I want to toss out a challenge and answer a question about that. And, indeed, this featured segment, we're going to talk about, you know, how we can sustain digital projects, digital education, digital tools in academia. But isn't Chris Anderson, and indeed, you've sort of thrown a wrench in this by saying, well, it is going to go to free. If that's the case, I mean, how do we live in this free world and still have some kind of model towards sustainability?
So it's not like that. Anderson proposes in this article a whole series of different models for a new free economy. So, for instance, the one I think has the most relevance for higher education is what he calls the cross-subsidy model, where essentially what I'm proposing is that we ought to just go ahead and give away the general education curriculum because in many cases we do anyway. We allow students to transfer in from other institutions, especially community colleges, and we give them credit for all of that prior work that they've done that somebody else got the money for and not us, but we still credit them for that. And instead, we should go ahead and give them about a third of their college degree, about 40 credits worth, something like that, as a way of then inducing them to focus on the upper level courses. And at the same time, if they want, if they need other services from us, it's kind of like the Ryanair model where you get the ticket from Dublin to Barcelona for $19. But if you want to bring luggage on, you have to pay an extra $5 per piece of luggage. And if you want a drink, you have to pay for that. And if you want extra legroom, you have to pay for that. Well, in our case, it's if you want instead to use the writing center, that costs money. If you want to use one of the student media labs, there's some charge against your student account. So that if you want to pay for premium services, you can, and those premium services cross-subsidize the free general education. Huh. And so, I mean, the other model I'm thinking about here is the free nacho chips at Mexican restaurants, which makes you thirsty and you want beer. Is the General Ed sort of like, it's a loss leader then? Is that what you're saying in this model? Well, in some ways it can be a loss leader, but it can also really, you know, there are other varieties of this model that can work in higher education. You know, if you think of the Flickr model where you get the basics for free and you can only upload so many photographs a month or you pay $29.95 for the pro account and then you have unlimited uploads. Well, students could have the basic general education for free. They have to test out of these courses. They don't get to just walk in and get check marks next to their name for Western Civ or whatever. They actually have to test out of the courses. But then if they want the pro model, then if they want to participate in some sort of freshman learning seminar or something like that, that costs extra. And so it's not even necessarily a lost leader. You can do the basics. If all you want for general education is just to kind of get through it, which we have to admit many students, that's all they want. But the students who have real intellectual curiosity and want to explore other topics on their own, well, they have to pay a little extra for that. And that's where scholarships come in to help discount it for students who can't afford to pay for that extra. You know, it doesn't make financial aid go away. Yeah, I can see university accountants ripping their hair out right now at the complexity of this model. I mean, I just, you know, isn't the model right now, it's so comprehensible, right? You know, there's certain number of credit hours and, you know, they cost X amount. It just seems like, you know, the only other model that I can see that's similar to this that has had some success is the OpenCourseWare model where MIT has, you know, put out this, all this massive material, but, you know, sort of like, you know, we just discussed the RIAA and you think of the free model there is, you know, what Madonna and some other stars have done, which is, you know, they realize their music's going to be traded for free. And so instead of signing a contract with a record company, you sign a contract with a tour promotion group because you're making all your money on the live performances. And so in that way, for instance, MIT, they're making the money on the attractiveness of actually being able to sit in person with that star professor who's put all their stuff online for free. Is that different than what you're saying? You've got a more complicated model here. No, I think that's in many ways essentially what I'm saying. I think that there are a variety of different models that could be explored. And also, I think there's something kind of wrong in what you said earlier, that it's a pretty straightforward model right now. In fact, every student on our campuses pays a different price. It's actually colleges and universities have an incredibly complex financial modeling system where each student has a different amount of financial aid or scholarship. And some of that's based on needs. Some of that's based on merit. Some of it's based on the fact that we need more students to study Italian or play the trombone in the band. And so they have – we have – in many ways, our model is much like the airline's model. Once the semester starts, if students aren't in the seats in our classrooms, that's money that we've lost and we can never recover. The airlines, it's the same. Once the plane takes off, the empty seats represent lost revenue. And so universities discount aggressively to try to fill all those seats because we're still going to heat the building. We're still going to pay the faculty members to teach the classes. We're still going to have campus security officers and all of those things, which we're stuck with. So we want students there because if they aren't there by September 15th, we've lost that revenue and we can never recover it. So we have this actual discounting model that means that nobody's paying the same price on campus. That's a good point. Let me expand out this conversation about the free and the sustainable to include not only education but also digital tools and services of the kind that we discuss on the podcast quite regularly. Tom, you know, both of us are responsible for major software projects that put out free and open source software used by a lot of people. And, you know, we encounter this problem, right? I mean, we're, you know, we not only do we want to, but we are actually, you know, we have to put out our materials based on our grants under a free and open license. But we're also charged with the need to come up with a sustainability model. What are your thoughts on this matter? How do we deal with not just the education side, but also resources, collections, online archives, online tools to go with education? How do we make those sustainable for the long run if we're not getting paid for them? Yeah, it's a very difficult problem. As you say, we're required to release our tools under open source licenses. And while we're not prohibited from exploring cost recovery models, I think we are encouraged to give at least some version of these things away for free. We're charged with providing free tools to students and scholars and researchers and teachers and others. isn't squandered, that it lasts and that it has a long-term effect and is able to last beyond the life of the grant. And so we're faced with this dilemma. After the grant is over, how do you maintain these tools? When you're building digital tools, they require really constant upgrading and maintenance and user support and other things. And how to do that is problematic. And so with something like Omeka, we're exploring a bunch of different options. One of the things we're exploring is a model like you have with WordPress, where the server downloadable application is free. But if you want a hosted account on WordPress.com, you can get free accounts, but you can also pay for a monthly subscription if you want more features, more services, greater storage capacity, and other things. So we're exploring that with Ameca to have a hosted version where a kind of freemium model where you can get more services, more support, more storage if you're willing to pay for it, but there's always going to be a free version for non-profits or for people running smaller projects or who don't need lots of support or services. So that's one model we've been exploring. There are others. One is an ad model, an ad-supported model. We've thought about that, although it's hard to see how that works in an educational context, a scholarly context, both because the audiences are very small usually and because there's a certain, I don't know, morality, ethics surrounding advertising and education, and you don't want to mix the two. And other things like donation models is another thing we've been exploring.
And if you like it,, you give money and we'll have to have some kind of membership drive. So it is a very difficult problem to solve and I don't think anybody's come up with any real good solutions yet. Yeah, you know, I think there was a great post and I'll link to to this from digitalcampus.tv, a great post on the OpenCourseWare blog by Laura Dewis, who is, she is the sort of online communications person and media relations person for the Open University's OpenLearn website. And she wrote a really eye-opening and sort of helpful blog post called Money Makes the World Go Open, in which she sort of goes over a bunch of the options that, Tom, you just spelled out for funding the free and making it sustainable. And so I'll just real quickly reel off some of the things you mentioned, but, you know, pre-financing from a foundation, sponsorships, subscriptions for extra services or fees for extra services, Mills, that sort of gets into what you were talking about. The freemium model where 1% of the users pay sort of extra and 99% of the users, you know, use a more basic version. So the people who really need kind of a high-end or larger version of something pay more or pay something, whereas most people who need a kind of restricted version get it for free. Private partnerships, donations by the community. And then this one that, Tom, you mentioned, I sort of want to talk about just very briefly, I mean, advertising. You know, do, you know, universities that want to have, let's say, an open courseware site, is it okay to put, you know, advertising on that site to make it sustainable? I think there are, I think in some cases it probably is okay, and I think in other cases it probably isn't, especially since the way that the ads are placed, at least in today's world, is by search algorithms and by keywording and things. I think we, you know, if let's say you're, I'm just thinking of Omeka and online exhibitions in the museum world. If you're running or launching an online exhibition on, let's say, the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado and a battle between the U.S. Army and Native Americans, which is a very sensitive topic, a very controversial topic, something that has a long memory and is very, in which the wounds and the emotions are very raw. For that, I don't know if you want Google deciding what kinds of ads to place next to the content. I think you want to give visitors and your stakeholders an experience that's free from Google ads. So I think in some cases it may be okay. Maybe for a course website it may be okay, but I think for other kinds of websites or tools, it may not be. And I think that's a difficult question. It's certainly not a model I think that you can extend to all tools. And it may be that we need to come up with some hybrid, and it may be that on a case-by-case basis, you have to look at your tool and decide which of these models works best. I suppose that's the way it's going to shake out. But none of them seem like a silver bullet to me. Mills, looking forward, do you think that this, you know, free will indeed gain traction in the university? Is this a way of doing, you know, what you were saying of a sort of price, what do they call it, price differentiation or slicing up the market so that this will be effective? Well, first of all, it's already happened. Isn't Princeton free? Yeah, right. So there's, you know, and I think, but in addition to that, I think that, I think we're going to see it instead of kind of from the top places like Princeton or Harvard that can afford to give away their education. I think we're going to see it from the bottom as well. But I think it's going to take a long time. I mean we've talked about this before. Universities are incredibly conservative institutions and move incredibly slowly in the face of changes in the marketplace. But nevertheless, they do. And so I think it's going to happen. I think it's just going to take a while. And Tom, what do you see in the future for the people building tools and archives and museums and libraries who are putting things online? What do you think about this? I mean, do you think there'll be a common sustainability model or will it just be an amalgam of some of the things that Laura Dewis talks about? I think it's going to be an amalgam of some of those things. I think we, and I'm not sure if we know really any of these models are tested yet. So I think we're going to have to spend some time testing these models. And I imagine each project is going to have to make its own decisions on which models are best for it. The other thing I would add to this is right now, the burden for sustainability, it's sort of assumed that the burden for sustainability falls solely on the grantee. It's almost as if at the end of the grant term, if it's a two-year grant or a three-year grant, that the foundation or the agency that's funding the project just assumes that they are out, that it's over, and that all the burden for sustainability, for long-term maintenance and sustainability, upgrades, et cetera, fall onto the grantee. I think that funding agencies and funding entities are going to have to work more closely with their grantees on sustainability in the future. I think that some of the burden is going to have to fall on the funders as well as the fundees. And I think at least until these questions are sorted out, some of the burden is going to have to fall back on the foundations and the agencies, something which they're not at all comfortable with and that they don't have the mechanisms in place to deal with, but neither do we. And I think if we're going to work this out, it needs to be a collaborative effort. Great point. Well, if our audience has good examples of either free tools and resources that have come up with good sustainable models, or if you know of education projects of the kind that Mills was talking about that also have models for sustainability, let us know, of course, on our website, digitalcampus.tv. Time for Picks of the Week. Mills, why don't we start with you? All right. Well, my Pick of the Week is actually an interesting pair of maps produced at the website WorldMapper. I don't know if either of you have ever been to this website, but they display some geographers who display data proportionally on the globe so that countries get larger or smaller based on their values in the data table. And so these are two maps that they produced recently on Internet users, one from 1990 and then the other from 2002. And it's really quite remarkable how the Internet world has changed in that span of time. And so it really helps us to visualize the changes that have gone on in the digital world, where in 1990, almost all of the Internet users were either in the United States or Western Europe, with just a few scattered around the globe. And now it's a much more evenly distributed phenomenon. And so I think that really has to change our thinking about what we're doing in digital work because we're no longer just talking to ourselves. We're actually talking to people all around the world. Great. Yeah, that's a really interesting site, and those maps are really eye-opening, and they look good. Tom, what do you have for us this week? This week I've got the Harvard College Thesis Repository, which is a project headed mostly by students, which aims to get all of the Harvard College theses up online for free under Creative Commons licenses. And I got an email about this asking me to put my, Harvard's my alma mater, and I got an email asking me to put my college thesis up online in this repository, something which I haven't done yet, and it looks like not many of us have. Right now they've got 25 theses available. And that may change. I'm thinking that may change this spring when Harvard ends a little later than most. And as seniors start to finish their theses, I'm hoping to see more of this. But I think this is a great idea and something that other schools, other undergraduates should consider. There's so much good undergraduate work done and so little of it ever makes it into print or even online. And so I think this is at least one model for getting some of that great work up online and I hope it succeeds succeeds. So I'd like people to check it out, and we'll put the URL in the show notes. That's great. I've been meaning to check that out.
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi-weekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Fear itself! This is Digital Campus 21 for the 13th of February, 2008. To read or not to read. I'm Dan Cohen. Welcome listeners, new and old, back to the Digital Campus Podcast. We're here, as usual, with our regulars around our virtual roundtable, here with Mills Kelly. Mills, hi. Hey, Dan. How are you today? Pretty good. And Tom Scheinfeld. Hi, Tom. Good to talk to you, Dan. Good to talk to you. Well, I guess we're going to jump right into the news roundup, and I suppose we need to maybe say a few words about the possible impact of the Microsoft Yahoo story. Of course, Microsoft offering $44 billion to buy out Yahoo. I mean, obviously, this is a business story. This is a tech story. Is there any angle here or importance for academia or museums and libraries to this union? Should it go through or if it doesn't go through? Tom, what are your initial thoughts after seeing this story come out? Well, I think now, earlier last week, I think I was thinking that it was definitely going to go through. I couldn't see why Yahoo wouldn't. Now it looks like they're looking for more money. I guess I would say that it is probably an important story if it happens for higher ed. Just in that, I think that there needs to be a competitor to Google. I mean, Google is doing amazing things right now, and I am bought into the Google suite of technologies. I'm using Gmail. I'm using Google. I mean, Google's doing amazing things right now. And I am, you know, bought into the Google suite of technologies. I'm using Gmail. I'm using Google Docs. Google's my primary search engine. I use a lot of the Google products. But as, you know, with Microsoft 10 years ago, I think having a viable competitor in the web services realm is important to the internet in general, but to higher education users in particular. As we've said this before, as universities and other institutions start looking at using things, for instance, like Gmail instead of their own homegrown email servers as they start looking into Google Docs as a collaborative environment for their students and for the work of museums and libraries. I think it's important to have a competitor to that, and Microsoft hasn't been able to be a viable competitor. Yahoo has put out some really great products and has actually been able to incorporate some great products like Flickr and Delicious into its stable of technologies. But neither of them have really been able to compete with the onslaught of Google. And I think this is an opportunity for that. These are two giant companies, and we'll see if it works and we'll see if it even happens. But if it does, I think it's a good thing. Mills, what were your initial thoughts on hearing about this alliance? I guess I sort of had the same opinion as Tom in that I guess it's not going to make that big of a difference one way or another for higher education, except that I have one kind of personal concern, and that is I'm a big Flickr user. And I've written a good bit about Flickr in my blog, in particular a recent post about the Flickr Commons alliance with the Library of Congress. And Microsoft is an increasingly bureaucratic organization, at least from the outside looking in. And so I would worry that some of those kind of exciting fringe developments around the edges of Yahoo's core business would get lost in this merger if it happened. But that's, I guess, my really only significant concern. Yeah. I mean, I didn't think it had a lot of applicability to higher ed until, you know, I started thinking more along the lines of, Tom, what you were speculating about web applications and services. And, you know, also knowing that Microsoft has indeed, I think, recently tried to start matching Google on the, you know, sort of Google Apps for Education, at least in terms of their email systems, I think you can now get a similar deal, sort of free deal for some kind of Microsoft Mail for campuses. And, you know, but then spreading that out a little bit, I think John Markoff had a good column on in the New York Times about this. And he actually thought, much like you, Tom, that maybe what this is is while everyone's focusing on Yahoo's search business and the advertising business, which is where much of the money is right now, and certainly it's where Google is making 95% of their money, that in the long term, Microsoft is looking to sort of migrate their Office suite, which is an enormous moneymaker, online. And they, of course, have Microsoft Live applications that live on the web, that are in the trendy term for cloud computing now is what it's called. And that Yahoo has 350 or 400 million users and that they get that user base and kind of convert that user base into Microsoft Live Apps, Office Online rather than Google Apps, that maybe that's the road forward for them, that they kind of keep this Office suite but move it on the web and then get all the Yahoo users and get a dominant position there, which has always been their cash cow. And in that case, then it really does provide a serious competition to what Google is trying to do with Google Apps. And, you know, we all use Google Apps, but, you know, Gmail is still a distant second to Hotmail and MSN and, or what's the, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail. So they have a very, you know, strong position in email. And then,. And then Google Apps, while it certainly made inroads among early adopters, most people are still using Word, and they're using it on their desktop. And I think if Microsoft can provide a seamless sort of migration path, then you've got a real competitor for, especially on campuses, for sort of free apps that are probably going to be ad supported maybe in the long run. But it kind of provides that competitor for that market. And so I think thinking not in terms of search and advertising, but in terms of those all important sort of office suite applications might be, it might indeed have some kind of impact on campus. Well, the other story that we were following this week or that we always like to see every year is the Horizon Report. And the Horizon Report comes out at the beginning of every year. It's a production of, joint production of the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. And what it does is it basically just sort of looks ahead to the coming five years and sort of splits out what they think is going to happen technologically on campuses in the next year, in the next two or three years, and then sort of in the long run, if we can call it that, in a five-year window. And, you know, a lot of these key emerging technologies, as the Horizon Report makes available, by the way, we'll, of course, link to this, as always, on digitalcampus.tv, but you can download the PDF. And a lot of these prospective technologies are things that we've talked a lot about and perhaps confirms our vision of the future. But we will walk through here and see if there's any surprises. First of all, at least in the near term, they're looking at the growth of grassroots online video and it seems like a no-brainer there. And then also one year or less in that category are collaboration webs, which they sort of define as collaborative tools that enable, for instance, groups to edit documents online or hold online meetings. And indeed, that's just what we discussed. Does this make sense to you? Is this just the Horizon report tipping their hat toward these Web 2.0 phenomena like YouTube in the case of video and also Google Apps? Is that what's going on with these first two? I think the whole report is actually that. I read through this when it came out out and I thought, well, this isn't, I guess maybe horizon is the right term for it because it's not all that future looking. It's what's on the near horizon as opposed to the distant horizon. What they're really talking about is things which are already pretty common and so that, but that will, I guess, work their way into higher education to a much greater degree. So there's nothing kind of all that forward-looking here. It's more like, hey, everybody, pay attention. This is already going on, and it's going to affect what's happening on your campus. Right.
Collective intelligence and social operating systems. So here we've got, you know, collective intelligence. They mentioned Wikipedia, community tagging also seems a lot Web 2.0-y, and social operating systems. Maybe I didn't quite get this one, but, you know, it seems like, again, the impact of kind of the social graph, social networking is sort of having an impact here. Tom, did you agree that maybe this is just rather than a horizon, it's sort of maybe what's here and now and that we can already see? Yeah, I do think it's that. I also think it's, and I guess this is defensible because they're trying to predict the future, but it seems incredibly vague to me. And maybe this is partly because they're trying to predict the future and partly because their past predictions maybe have been a little off. But all of these things seem to me to be in some ways kind of the same thing. I mean, maybe mobile broadband is a little bit different, but collective intelligence, social operating systems, data mashups, collaboration webs, they all seem to me to be sort of a piece. And it is this Web 2.0 piece. I think, you know, in the past, last year, one of the things they had on there was virtual worlds, and that's not on there this year. Yeah, interesting to see it drop off. Right, and maybe they were a little too hasty in that judgment, and so this year they're pointing to things that are clearly underway and that are clearly going to have an impact over the next couple of years. Yeah, they actually talk a little bit about virtual worlds a little deeper into the report under their category of meta trends, sort of looking further off into the future. And they actually have a more interesting way of thinking about these virtual worlds, and that's to talk about three-dimensional viewing of information. And as opposed to a virtual world environment. It's more sort of how is that information displayed and now in a virtual world environment. It can be in three dimensions. And they talk about not only Second Life but Open Croquet, this project coming out of Duke and UNC that's trying to do sort of an academic version of Second Life. And so at least, you know, they're still talking about it in this report, but I think they've kind of moved it further off into the future as one of those things we have to keep an eye on as opposed to something that's really going to affect us now. Right. I think that's right. And yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, of course, this report is not necessarily for super geeky people who are all using Flickr and Delicious, etc. It's for administrators as well and people who need to understand the lay of the land. That way, I think it does do a good job. I think it's very important that they've added mobile. Basically, the smartphones thing. I think that's the big new addition with sort of knocking virtual worlds off of maybe the top tier. We've certainly covered that here on the podcast. I agree that this is something that, for instance, if the president of our university was going to ask me, is there something I can read about new trends on the web and higher education? This is useful for that. I would point him to this. So I think it's a very useful thing in that regard. Right. Well, on the next podcast, maybe we'll mention, you know, on social operating systems, certainly we saw some news from Google about their sort of attempt to regenerate the social networking just with what's already on the web. And we can discuss that in greater depth since we don't have a lot of time in this news roundup. So stick with us for Digital Campus 22. Maybe we'll start there along with some of the other things that Google's done. Just one last word in the news roundup. Our favorite bill, and I'm sure the favorite bill of so many people in our audience, COA has passed the U.S. House of Representatives. This is the well-named College Opportunity and Affordability Act. How could anyone be against it? Except for that it has this piece in the bill about copyright infringement and peer-to-peer usage, and it really strongly pushes colleges and universities to basically to buy, you know, replacements for peer-to-peer music sharing, which, I mean, it sort of forces them toward services like the new Napster, which isn't like the old Napster. It's a commercial service. I can't remember the other ones. Ruckus, is that the one from MTV? Or some of these other services that basically provide free music on campuses to try to prevent or to de-incentivize, is that the word? Students from just grabbing it free off of peer-to-peer networks. And it's not clear to me, did anyone in this final passage of the bill, did anyone really get a sense of, will there still be these financial penalties for universities that are caught with high numbers of peer-to-peer traders among the student population? My sense is that it's still in there and that there was, in fact, an attempt to remove those provisions from the bill by a Democrat from Tennessee named Steve Cohen. And unfortunately, unfortunately for many reasons, but unfortunately for higher education, the tornadoes in Tennessee struck last week and Representative Cohen had to go home to Tennessee and wasn't able to present his amendment at the meeting of the Rules Committee. And so it seemed like there was some opposition to it in the House and that the leader of that opposition or one of the leaders of that opposition wasn't able to take that out. So I think it's still there. I think we're still stuck with those. And hopefully when this goes to the Senate, something changes. Yeah, I mean, Ars Technica did a little investigation of this, and they said that the staffers for some of the members of that committee said, oh, well, we're not, there won't really be financial punishments. I mean, I think the original language had them taking away, for instance, funding for student loans on campuses that were caught with a lot of peer-to-peer activity. And so they were sort of saying, well, it's still in the bill, but we're not really going to enforce it. But I don't know, it seemed like a very weak response, at least, that Ars Technica got. And I think there's still a real possibility here that this could go through with strong language. Well, I mean, and it doesn't set my mind terribly at ease for the staffers of a committee to say, well, we're not really going to enforce it when it's not Congress's – certainly not the staffer's job and not Congress's job to enforce the bill in the first place. It's going to be the executive's job to enforce the bill and it's going to be the judiciary's job to interpret that. So if it goes through, that's a very bad thing, I think, whether Congress's intent is more benign or not. Okay. Well, we'll keep track for the Arts. Hi, Sunil. Hi, Dan. How are you? Good. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us. No problem. And Matt Kirschenbaum from the University of Maryland. Hi, Matt. Hi, Dan. Well, welcome. And we also have Tom Sheinfeld on the line, and Mills Kelly has had to go off and teach, but he may join us momentarily. So I'll toss him into the conversation if need be. So we wanted to discuss the report that came out from NEA. And this report was about reading or the lack thereof in modern American society, and particularly among the younger crowd, those in the K-12 group and even beyond. But I thought maybe we'd start with Sunil. Maybe if you, you know, some people in our audience might not have read the report. And maybe for just a couple minutes, do you want to summarize what you feel were the main points of the report for our audience? Thanks. Sure. Sure, I'd be glad to. So this report is called To Read or Not to Read, a Question of National Consequence. And it's really a compilation of data on reading, that is to say voluntary reading, non-required reading, that is to say non-required for work or school reading of virtually any type. It really started from a study we did several years ago on reading of literature and reading of books. And while literature was not attached to a specific format other than, you know, one could, for example, read a poem online or a short story online or in print, we did ask about the number of books read over a period of a year. And we found that there were significant declines in the amount of reading that was going on compared with previous years that we've done this survey.
So in the wake of that, a major concern for our agency and for a lot of our partners and people in the community, in the arts organizations, but of course those in education, has been how is this trend of reading less? Is it seen extensively throughout various other types of studies, as well as what are some of the implications of this, and to what degree is it truly significant? Well, we then, so to answer that pretty formidable question, we looked at a series of federal, non-profit, academic, some industry studies with the criteria that they all had to be large and nationally representative. So having looked through the data, we came up with three central conclusions. The first is that unfortunately Americans are spending less time reading, but that's particularly the case with young adults and with teenagers. We also find that reading comprehension skills are eroding, and this is a very serious finding because the Department of Education has noted this, both of the adult population as well as some of the teenager groups we're talking about. Finally, we found some striking statistical links and correlations between reading frequently and reading well, and also reading well and reading frequently on the one hand, and some very positive individual and social outcomes on the other hand that we could discuss if you'd like. So those are really the three conclusions, which is very hard to generate, as you know, probably, when you have very discordant data sources. But we were, you know, to some degree gratified that we could synthesize the results into this report. Well, just maybe one point of clarification for our audience, since our audience is a sort of digitally savvy one. It was a little unclear to what extent digital reading was in fact covered. What's your sense of just, if you want to summarize for us, sort of how many of these national studies you looked at included some kind of breakout for digital reading and sort of how much you took this into account, for instance, the example you mentioned about reading a poem online, that kind of thing. Sure. So as with any literature review or study, meta-study, you're really bound to the data and the questionnaires that have already been written and that have been provided for the surveys that we were gathering. In other words, we couldn't go back, obviously, and change the information that was collected. However, in the majority of these studies, so to answer your question, really about a couple of dozen, up to 40 or so studies figured in some way in this report. I would say close to a dozen were central to the report, and the majority of those stemmed from the Department of Education, the Kaiser Family Foundation, the Department of Labor, and a couple of other sources, U.S. Census Bureau sources. Now, with the exception of our own study, the one I referred to at the beginning, where we were really, as an arts agency, concerned about literature, we focused on literary reading, and we defined that as reading a poem, a play, or a short story, or a novel. We didn't specify the medium, but when interviewers were asked, does online count, they were told to say yes. But they didn't specify for every single question reading online or in print. Now, that was a limitation there, but with every single other study cited, we are talking about reading of any type whatsoever. So the standard question is, how much did you read for fun this week? Or how much did you read you read for pleasure now it is up to the survey respondent to interpret that question you know when they're asked that ideally if they consider what they do reading if they're reading a book or reading a chapter reading a blog even they should be answering accordingly now we hope to refine our own internal data collection to more, if I could say more specifically, you know, kind of adumbrate what is, you know, what we're talking about with electronic reading. But we also do footnote some studies that have been done with online reading specifically, and there haven't been too many to our knowledge. It seems there's still a murky line between reading in print and reading online. And so, in a sense, the study sort of skirted that problem because the surveys themselves were focused on reading of any type in any genre in any format. I think that murkiness is part of what's significant at our contemporary moment because when we talk about reading a newspaper, often just in casual conversation, we don't even bother to distinguish anymore whether we've read it online or whether we've read the hard copy. The same goes for magazine articles that we might read or all different kinds of media. One thing that I've noticed that was a concern to me in Chapter 3 of the report, where you look at the breakout of how people are spending their leisure time, and you look at the different sources, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Michigan Study, the Kaiser, all of them differentiate explicitly between reading and then something that's usually described as computer use or computer activities. And the implication that follows then from the data is that what we do when we're spending time with a computer online is something other than reading. Reading remains a separate category. And that to me suggests that the way in which we're talking about online reading really hasn't been sufficiently conceived. I know what data you're referring to. That's the way the U.S., the Department of Labor Statistics, for example, just to give you an example, they ask about, and this is what you're referring to, Matt, they ask about leisure reading, how much is being done, and they ask the individual to keep track of that in a time diary. Separately from that, they do ask about games and computer use. Now, in their definition, games can include hopscotch, computer use could include reading, or it can include other activity. But talking with the Department of Labor researchers, they believe that the reading, and this is something that I would agree with you, that we need to revisit how we define some of these computer activities. But they are hoping reading is discreet enough and separate enough to encompass what people consider they're doing on the computer when it is in fact reading. As we know, the computer can be used for multiple things, not just skimming, much less reading. So I think I would tend to agree that that category is insufficient right now. But I just want to point out that what we're seeing is really an aggregate. And I know you understand this, but it's important to kind of explain that various studies, so for example, the Kaiser one, too, their whole concern was multitasking. And all these studies have different intents. Like this one was looking at multitasking in media. And they found that, for example, 20% of the time spent reading anything of any type is done, this is among 7th to 12th graders, done using a computer in addition to reading, which is when the computer is not the primary purpose. In other words, you're not reading on the computer in that case. Or watching TV or instant messaging, texting, or emailing when that's a separate activity from what they were supposed to be reading in their minds. So there's some perception problems here, clearly, and I do think survey methodologists can do a better job in time of refining this. One last thing about this I just want to throw out there because this is frequently asked and it really dovetails with this is there is actually, there are a couple of statistics at least in, I think it's on page 42 of the report, where we talk about online reading exclusively. And that was because of the high school survey of student engagement, which found that, I think it was, yeah, 71% of high school students in 2004 read online for zero to three hours per week. And then a year later, that had climbed to 81% or sorry, 84% of them reading zero to three hours a week. Therefore, you're having less people in that group reading more than that. I agree with you. This is a more complex issue. I just would say there are a lot of indicators showing that reading as a whole, however, if one just defines it as reading in an absolute sense, it seems to be diminishing. And we're talking about it in an absolute sense, or are we talking about leisure reading in particular? Oh, yes. Important distinction, yeah. Because I know, for instance, just in my own career even, I know when I first started out in sort of the mid-s, at work, I spent a lot more time on the phone doing, you know, just conducting business. And now, at work, the way I stay in touch with most of my colleagues is through email. And so I'm doing, I would say, on a daily basis, a lot more reading and writing than I had done probably at the beginning of my career. But it's not necessarily, it's this kind of email activity, which is somewhat different than I think what you're talking about in the study.
And I don't think it's easy or self-evident. This is where I think a historical perspective becomes helpful. Because once you start to delve into the history of the book and the history of reading and you take that long view, in some ways, the conversation that we're having today, it's the kind of conversation that's happened many times before. And the irony is that there have been anxieties, both that people are reading too much or that people haven't been reading enough. And, you know, if you go all the way back to the etymology to read Leggera from the Latin, this is a point that a scholar named Bill Sherman makes in a book on Renaissance reading and how readers in the early modern period read in a very interactive way by marking up their books and essentially talking back to them. But Sherman points out that in the original usage of the verb and the etymology of the word, reading included gathering, it included choosing, it included overhearing, even stealing, wandering, and tracking. It was really, it was a much more inclusive activity than simply consuming text. It was related to observation. And that, to me, sounds more like the kind of reading that we're now doing once again online. So, Matt, is it... Yeah. I mean, to summarize your critique, then, is your concern about the sort of mythologizing of some kind of armchair reading from the 20th century? I think so. And this is, you know, I often think in terms of visual imagery, and this is why the photography that accompanied the report struck a chord in me, where you have pictures of solitary readers. And we know historically that the look of reading has changed over time. In other words, how reading is represented visually, pictorial, that matters. And that tells us something about how we understand the activity of reading. There's actually a book. It's a great coffee table book I recommended. It's by Garrett Stewart. It's called The Look of Reading. And it simply gathers together drawings, paintings, photographs of people reading. And what immediately becomes apparent is just the variety of different social situations, the variety of different environments, postures in which people are reading. And so to me, what we tend to, I think, feel anxious about in our own present moment is the loss, the increasing loss of a certain kind of reading, that deep immersive reading that's typified by the stereotypical image of the reader under a tree. And I think that what we fail to recognize sometimes is the extent to which that is very much an idealistic image. It's a historically constructed, a historically specific image of reading. People did not always read that way. Again, if we come back to the example of the Renaissance reader, very aggressively marking up the text, or even earlier than that, medieval readers who would read out loud and read to groups of people and so the act of reading was very much one of conversation. I completely agree with that. Just philologically as you're saying, there's a great amount of history here to mine in the way that the book is portrayed and not to speak for our art director, but we were just simply looking for pictures that were aesthetically, we didn't have to crop that fit into the pages. But I can tell you what you're Right. I don't have an exclusive right to that salutary effect. And I know you're not necessarily saying that either. In other words, I believe, like you're saying, people still can mark up books. We're not trying to preserve the fetish or the artifact of the book at the expense of everything else. We're just saying that we do have these strong correlations between reading and with, for example, how well people read, how often people read. I would wager all of you are fairly frequent readers, however we might define it, because I think we would have the commonality that you read deeply, you think deeply, and you write about these issues. Now, we can't get everyone there necessarily, but I do think it's helpful to have that as a goal. And certainly reading in the conventional sense has proven, or I should rather say, reading of books is not a hindrance in that way. There's certainly some great opportunities to engage on the internet, to interact as we are doing just now. But that's kind of a slightly different form of interaction, I would argue, than one's writing and reading in a long form and then sharing it with more written critiques added onto it. And I think that's being done on the internet, too. Go ahead, Matt. I was just going to share a quick quotation, if I could. This is from 1859, published in Christian's Penny Magazine, an item that appeared there. And the shape of a romance. This led her to utterly neglect her husband, herself, her eight children. One daughter, in despair, fled the parental home and threw herself into the haunts of vice. The house exhibited the. And lots of different things one could do with that. We could certainly talk about the way that reading has been gendered, for example, certain kinds of reading, the genre of the romance or the novel. But to me, when I hear that, it sounds so much like some of the critiques that we hear about today. For example, digital gaming, where you hear these stories about the mother, it's often the mother, so again, gender does come back into it, or the father who gets caught up in World of Warcraft or Second Life or whatever it is, and the kids don't get their supper and the house goes to ruin. The media loves those kinds of sensational stories. And again, I think when we look historically, we do very much see a certain kind of pattern and a certain set of anxieties that manifest over and over with regard to new media. I'm sorry, go ahead. Well, I agree with you to a point there. I do think that's certainly the case. There's always an anxiety with the new transference to a new medium, what are called disruptive technologies, often misleadingly. But I think at the same time, I think what I'm just trying to draw things back to, and I hope this is not outside the purview of this, but I feel that really a lot of this has to do with reading skills as well. In other words, we're talking about the historical, as I understand it, the historical associations with reading and whether that's in fact been elevated unduly, that is to say book reading or any reading in the conventional sense. But all I'm trying to say is with statistics showing that those who read frequently tend to perform much better on reading tests and they also tend to perform better on writing tests. And really, I don't see how in this case one can really mind necessarily that whether we're delineating that in terms of reading books or reading that online, because reading online, too, is included in that category of reading. If one reads frequently and reads widely online, then they will do presumably much better in these measurable outcomes than those who don't. And in fact, we see that reading online is often a co-occurrence, and it goes hand-in-hand a lot of times with people reading conventional text. That is to say, those who read, say, for example, books or magazines also tend to read more online than those who don't read at all, of course. And so I think some of this is mainly, I agree we need to refine the way we collect a lot of this data, but I think I hear a lot of things in common that I think our study might have been misconstrued in some ways as advocating only one type of reading versus another. Sunil, maybe you could tell us a little bit, I mean, what, you know, Tom and Matt and I all, among other things, actually teach in the classroom and have students. And what do you think the prescriptions are from this report? Is it, you know, I think a lot of people saw it as, you know, as a sort of Jeremiah ad. But are there prescriptions and are there things that we can do considering that, for instance, Matt is a owner of a shiny new Kindle. Should he be giving Kindles to all of his students? Should he be recommending they read the New York Times online? Is it to read offline as well? What is the point of it for teachers, let's say? Sure. What can we do? Right. Maybe I can answer this through a very good piece of an observation that Matt made. I mean, I think there is a misperception that reading is a passive, maybe ivory tower type activity. And we are saying through this report, particularly in the third final section, that no, those who read often engage at higher levels in a variety of social and civic activities.
But when you control for various factors such as those, you see that invariably those who read also engage more intensely in their communities. So what I would do is I think what we would like to say is that it's really, it starts with the parents. It starts with the family to, you know, read in front of your kids, read to the kids, have kids read at a very early age. If they want to start reading online, great, but I would argue that one should still not lose track of the, you know, the conventional methods. And then throughout time, especially when one hits 13 and goes into high school or, you know, enters that environment where there's so many competing pressures and time considerations, that one continues to read and possibly engage in social circles through literature and through reading. And then through college and beyond, if they go to college, you would like to see communities engaged in reading and discussing things. I know that sounds like a utopia, but I feel in some ways it's no less utopic than some things we've been hearing sometimes about the great new media. I mean, I think, in other words, there's so many things we can do with what we have already, and we should bring that into the new media means and take advantage of the unique aspects and benefits of online reading. But I just think that we would just encourage people to make reading a social and civic priority. Matt, how would you respond to that? What do you see for the future in a world where students may be using the internet more than TV and maybe gaming more than the internet? I guess what I would just want to underscore is what a remarkable moment I think it is for reading. And that to me is part of the, really the urgency and the excitement of this conversation. I mean, I look at the NEA report as one contribution to a discussion that also includes, or you mentioned the Kindle, which was actually released on the same day that the report came out. I have a colleague who has vision trouble who reads exclusively via audible.com and they have 40,000 books online. I look at Google, they're digitizing 3,000 books a day. I look at efforts like the Open Content Alliance. So there's a remarkable amount of intensity, of thought, of creativity that's going into really reimagining the act of reading, reimagining our technologies of reading, and not just imagining, but reengineering. That's something that, as we know, the book, although it has not remained a completely stable platform or technology over the years, certainly this is the most fundamental shift. It's really the moment in which we're rethinking what a book is and what reading is in ways that we really haven't for a long time. To me, I spend less time worrying about the end of reading or the decline of reading than I do simply thinking about the opportunities of the present moment. Well, Matt, Sunil, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast to discuss the report and to discuss reading in a digital form and also in those armchairs. Thanks again, both of you. Thank you don't mind, Tom and Mills. And I want to start with a new part of a website for the Newseum. That's Newseum with an N at the beginning. And for those of you who haven't visited Washington, D.C., the Newseum used to be a very popular museum that was actually across the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia. And they had a museum there about the news and about journalism. And it's about to reopen after many years of, it closed in Arlington and they got a great site right off of the National Mall in Washington, D.C. with a very neat new modern building. And they're about to reopen, but they've already sort of relaunched pieces of their website. And I wanted to point to one in particular because I think it's a great example of a terrific interface that uses maps and uses sort of archival materials to, I think, provide viewers with a kind of way of prospecting through the past and sort of through an archive in a really interesting way. So when the museum was over in Virginia, they used to have this wall called Today's Front Pages. And somehow they were able to sort of fly in overnight newspapers from all around the United States, and they'd post them on a giant wall. And so you could kind of compare and contrast all of these big and small newspapers and what they chose to make their most important story or below the fold stories that they wanted to cover, social issue stories and things like that. And it was a nice kind of overview of news in the United States. Well, they've now moved that online. And again, we'll have a link on our digitalcampus.tv website to this. But there's a website, part of the website at the Newseum, which is at newseum.org, where you can look at all the front pages. And they have a map, an interactive map of the United States with little dots where they have the front pages of the physical newspapers. And you kind of roll over the map and it shows you different covers in the right side of the website. And it's just a great way as you kind of move from east to west or around a region to see, you know, the ways in which, for instance, Super Tuesday was covered by different newspapers. I think it's a really interesting, great interface that could be used by a lot of museums and libraries that want to put their archives online. And I think it's a nice way to also do, you know, it shows the principle of what Edward Tufte, the great interface expert, called small multiples, where the use of kind of little graphics next to each other so that it takes advantage of the human brain's capacity to compare and contrast quickly. A nice interface over at the Newseum website. Mills, why don't we go to you next? All right. Mine is a website called Aluka, A-L-U-K-A, aluka.org. And as their website says, they're building a digital library of scholarly resources from and about Africa. And so this is an attempt to leverage lots of information from a variety or leverage the information that a lot of different people have about Africa, both contemporary and historic, and biological as well as textual and images and that sort of thing. But what's interesting to me about this particular project is that it gets at something I've been talking about for a while, which is allowing users to tag various records within the database. And so they've actually, as long as you're a registered user, then you can, any item in their database, you can add your own tags to. And this is something that we've struggled with, with projects like the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank and other projects that we've got about to what degree do we allow users to tag the information on our sites. And the Aluka folks, anyway, have settled on allowing people to tag whatever they want. So I went in the other day and tested out the tagging system, and it works pretty well. Their search process, the search engine within the site could be a little better, I think, than it is. It's not all that user-friendly. But it is nice to see a project that has pretensions of becoming a very large project starting off with allowing users to tag their own information. So it's worth checking out. I guess the only criticism I have is that this is not open to the general public for free. And the only reason I know this is because on my screen it says access provided through George Mason University. So they're somehow keying on the fact that my IP address is a George Mason University IP address. And so I get into the system that way. I suspect that if I were coming at it from home, I might not have that same access. I have to try it from home. I haven't yet. Okay, great. Thanks, Mills. It's a really interesting site and very varied content, as you said. Tom, what do you have for us this podcast? Well, I've got something for Black History Month, actually. It's called Amistad, the Amistad Digital Resource, and it comes out of the Columbia Center for Digital Research and Scholarship. It's a fairly traditional resource. It includes a kind of online exhibition of the history of the Civil Rights era from Brown v versus Board of Education through the March on Washington and Black Power movements and kind of ends with the foundation of the Congressional Black Caucus. But the content is very rich. It's very professional. It's very well done. So it has that kind of online exhibition component. And then alongside that, it has a set of maps and timelines, an image archive, an audio-video archive, a document archive, and then some glossaries of key figures, organizations, and institutions in the civil rights movement.
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, featuring Tom Sheinfeld, Mills Kelly, Amanda French, and Dan Cohen. You ask what you can do for your country. Here it goes. This is Digital Campus number 62, recorded on November the 8th, 2010. PDA in the library? Well, welcome back to another edition of Digital Campus. This is Digital Campus number 62. We were just thinking that perhaps 62 episodes meant that we might be the longest running podcast in history. So some kind of an award for longevity, I'm sure, would be in order. But we're podcasting away from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason. And I'm Mills Kelly from edwire.org. Joining me today is Dan Cohen, director of our Center for History and New Media. Dan, how's it going? All right. How are you doing, Mills? I'm doing quite well. Enjoying the fall weather here in Virginia. Yeah, me too. And also our newest podcast regular, Amanda French It was sleeting this morning, and now it's snowing. Very nice. Very nice. Well, it's your fault for living there. And here, also in the nice weather in the greater Washington area, is one of our irregulars on the podcast, Jennifer Howard from the Chronicle of Higher Education and JenniferHoward.com. Jennifer, how are you? I'm fine, Mills. How are you doing? I'm doing quite well. I'm doing quite well. Well, we have a number of things to talk about today that we are somewhat surprised by and perhaps not surprised by other things. And I'm going to start with the thing that I'm, I guess, not so surprised by. And that is that the Wikimedia Foundation, we haven't talked about Wikipedia much on the podcast in a while. So I thought we needed to bring it back because the Wikimedia Foundation has recently announced a public policy initiative where professors of public policy, including one from George Mason, where the podcast is based, are going to do something really surprising, and that is that they're going to have their students write entries for Wikipedia as a way of teaching them about this vast information resource. I say surprising with a certain degree of sarcasm. That's a little familiar to me. Yeah, I say that with a certain degree of... Sorry, is that like digital campus number one? I think it is, in fact, digital campus number one. And if you're counting, this was 62 and we go all the way back to one. I don't know how many years ago that was now. It's almost four years. Almost four years ago. And I think our title was, in fact, Wikipedia Friend or Foe. And in that podcast, a certain podcaster, who shall remain nameless, talked about assigning Wikipedia to his students and how that worked. And so perhaps what this means is that the folks at the Wikimedia Foundation have begun listening to the podcast at last, and they sort of worked their way all the way back to episode number one. But, you know, I'm, okay, I'm being very sarcastic, but I think... Wait, does this mean you're off of Jimmy Wales's dead-to-me list? Oh, no, I'm quite certain that I'm still on Jimmy Wales's dead-to-me list. And anybody who doesn't know the reference can go back to edwired.org and look for Jimmy Wales's you're dead-to-me comments. Not happy with Mills. Yes. We'll put it that way. Actually, his exact words were, not a fan. So, but, and also, you know, for those who may remember, for a brief period of time, I was actually blocked from Wikipedia editing. I could actually read it, but I couldn't edit either from home or from my office, plus the classroom that I was teaching from that semester. Whoever the instructor was who followed me in that class, that IP address was blocked for a little while, too. But I'm unblocked. I'm allowed to edit again. I've been forgiven by all but Jimmy. But I mean, what do you guys think about this, about assigning Wikipedia to students? Well, I have to say it. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead, Jen. No, I was just going to say, if part of the idea these days is to teach students about information literacy, maybe it's not a bad idea to have them tackle, you know, directly tackle one of the main and often maligned sources of online information. Amanda, what about you? Oh, I mean, I'm all for having students edit Wikipedia. And it's funny because I think we get so much student work and it's always such a shame that that student work isn't read by other people. It's no wonder that students kind of aim their writing only at the professor because they know that no one else is reading it. So I think in general, opening student work up to other people is always a good thing. And, you know, having them contribute to Wikipedia is something they can see immediately and they can watch their changes over the course of the, you know, the semester as you've done or whatever. I did this with a dance class actually down at Emory. They asked me to come in and help them contribute to Wikipedia dance. There's a whole separate project of Wikipedia. And so the students wrote biographical articles about dancers who only had stubs. The only thing that I'll say is that I was surprised that this particular article that we're looking at about professors assigning their students to write for Wikipedia is that the issue of privacy doesn't come up because we get a number of people will maintain, some students among them, that student work is, it is by law private. So really you're supposed to get release forms from the students before you have them do anything like this, unless they're doing it anonymously, I suppose. But even then, you're really supposed to get a release form. But to my mind, usually you ask the students to sign a release form, and they happily do so, and you go along with your work. But that is an issue to be addressed with assignments like this. Dan, you teach a grad seminar. Yeah, we did it this semester. I'll tell you, it's one of the assignments that I like the best. It always works. And it's also, as Amanda hinted at, it's kind of the gift that keeps on giving because they can watch the changes for the rest of the semester. So we did it a month ago or so. I split the class up into four groups and assigned them some, I always like assigning contentious articles. So we looked at four articles. I'm probably going to forget one of them. But I know we looked at Thermopylae, which you wouldn't think was contentious, but the Battle of Thermopylae, Joan of Arc, Hiroshima, and I can't remember the fourth. I knew I was going to forget one. But it was a fascinating, I think, experiment. Just looking through the existing discussions of the sites, you know, this year Hiroshima was particularly interesting because that entry has changed so radically over the past 10 years in the English and in the Japanese language version. And so the students got, I mean, the reason I feel like it has so many facets when you teach this, because they learn about the writing of history in this sort of natural, neutral point of view. They also learn about debates and fact checking and footnoting in the weird way that Wikipedia does that. Edit wars, all these things in the nature of wikis. So there's a lot of different angles to it. What I was going to say before that tangent was just that, you know, Hiroshima, for instance, has changed over the past 10 years from being almost solely about the dropping of the atomic bomb to being about the city itself and the arts of the city in a kind of longer view history, which I think was very instructive for students to see how that changed and how the bomb became just one section in a much broader article about Hiroshima. In the Japanese language version, even though none of us speak Japanese, you could see that change actually. We used Google Translate and went back over the edits over the past eight or so years in the Japanese language version of Wikipedia. And you could see very early on there was enormous resistance to making the article about Hiroshima being solely about the bomb and very quickly moving it into a broader economic, social, and intellectual history of the city. So, you know, I just think it's great to get people involved with Wikipedia. It's much deeper than I think a lot of people imagine when they first see it or just if they use it just superficially. So it's always effective.
Yeah, I will say that the only problem I've had with this assignment that I came up all these years ago is that I used to say to my students, okay, find an entry on the subject that we're working on that either needs to be elaborated on or there is no entry and so you need to write one. And as Wikipedia is getting built out, it's become increasingly difficult for them to find something like that. So increasingly, my assignment turns to editing existing entries rather than creating something new. But it was always a lot of fun to turn the students loose and say, write an entry on a subject that interests you within the general framework of our course. And so when I was teaching Western civilization, that meant sort of all of Western history. And so they had a lot of room to wander around. But I think the student who got the most excited about this was one who, she didn't actually check with me in advance, but she wrote her entry on the only husband and wife serial killers known, the Birneys of Australia. And why she chose that, I really don't want to know. And however, she came into class, she came into class just sort of floating about three inches off the floor, because the day after the, her entry went up, it became the featured entry on the Wikipedia homepage. And so now what is she going to remember about Western civilization, she's going to remember that she wrote a Wikipedia entry that was the featured entry that day. And so if you look up the Bernese, she was the – and you go into the history, the creator's handle was OMG, it's Monica. And so that was one of my students. So great. Yeah. It's pretty rare for students to get a chance to put writing or ideas in a form that has a billion users. I mean, I don't think people really realize the scale of Wikipedia as a top 10 website worldwide. And so it's just incredible. I mean, when would you normally have the chance to do something like that? Yeah, I mean, exactly. When would a freshman in college be able to write something that millions and millions of people read that day? So, so. I'll say too that, I mean, another assignment that I think one could assign and something that I did a little bit in my creating digital history class last year is even if there aren't a great many text additions to be made to Wikipedia, I think lots of articles need references and even updated references. So I could see your assignments, Mills, maybe changing from being write this article to source this article, you know, find sources for it, add new sources as they come out, you know, because Wikipedia always needs that. And I think they're very good about being vigilant at making sure that articles are sourced. And when I was working with archivists last year, we looked at articles that said, look, when you link to primary sources in your archives from Wikipedia articles, because a lot of those are online at the item level, the traffic to those items goes way, way up. So particularly for librarians and archivists who know all these unique special collections materials on these arcane topics and know where they are on the web, I really think it's a public service for them to put that in the references to Wikipedia articles. Yep. Well, I think you're absolutely right. And speaking of libraries and archives, there's been a lot of buzz about libraries the last week or two, in particular about a proposal from Bob Darnton up at Harvard about creating a national digital library. Jan, you had a chance to talk to Darnton about this. Tell us how that conversation went. Sure. Well, Darnton hosted a top-level gathering at Harvard at the very beginning of October. He got about 40, 42 representatives from the library world, the foundation world, some of the top foundations were there, including Sloan and Mellon. It was a very, it's probably wrong to call it top secret, but it was not publicized. Media were not invited, but I called Darnton up afterward just to see how it had gone. And he was really gung-ho about it. He said that everybody was on board with this. Critically, I think he was very pleased with how the foundations felt about it. They all seemed willing to step up and put some cash toward it. So he was actually less worried about the financial outlook for this proposal than he was about the copyright issues, which of course is what Google with its mass digitization project has run afoul of. Darnton seems to think that as far as creating a national digital library, there are various terms one can use for it. It doesn't have to be national per se, but something that would really be overarching, that it's going to be the copyright issues that are the most troublesome, not the financial picture, which surprised me a little bit, but maybe shouldn't have, as I thought about it. Yeah, that surprises me quite a bit. So why isn't the funding a problem? I mean, doesn't it require, I assume, several hundred million dollars to... A year. Probably so. Now, nobody has made public any specific plans about how the financial structure of this thing would work. They do, they are planning to, they have a game plan of some kind, an action plan, which involves, I think, getting more formal commitments from foundations and putting together some kind of governance structure. It's not clear where that would be housed, if that would be housed at a foundation or at Harvard. I mean, somebody has to be in charge of organizing this, you know, octopus of a project. And I haven't seen any specifics yet. So I'm very curious to see, you know, what kind of projections they're looking at and how much they can draw on things that are already in place. You know, would HathiTrust be a big part of this? I'm guessing yes, I think. But, you know, I don't know what kinds of, I don't think there are any formal agreements yet. in DC. And DLF is an organization that's been around for a while, since 1994, and it's been a standard-setting organization, and it's been this essentially consortium is not quite the right word, but association of major research libraries and the kind of digital library part of that. And so there was some discussion of this at the DLF Fall Forum, but it's the kind of thing where all of these major research libraries have, as you said, Jen, they've been doing things kind of piecemeal. Even HathiTrust, which takes files that Google Books has digitized and makes those available through a nice little interface, it's not one of these web scale things. Web scale was a term that kept coming up at the DLF Fall Forum. So I think that there was a lot of willingness to be involved, a lot of the perception was everywhere that, yes, we as libraries need to band together, club together, and provide something that, you know, everybody would know where to go to find digital books, you know, besides Google. I think there's a lot of willingness there, but yeah, what the administrative organization would look like, what the technical infrastructure would look like, that's still to be determined. One thing that I was struck by after my conversation with D'Arnton, I got a note from somebody at a foundation whom I will not name, but he said, D'Arnton is a wonderful guy, great ideas, great champion for this idea, but he's not the only person who has this idea. There are other people involved in this as well. And this is a at i think at the meeting um and that made me wonder how organized this group is internally um if they're not even sure what is you know who can say what now um who speaks for the group does anyone speak for them um i'm sure that that partly is coming out of a sense that this has to be a collaborative and collective enterprise but it's such a big idea somebody has to be a traffic controller of some kind and and they've also gotten tangled up in some of the rhetoric surrounding the project some of you may have seen paul caron's post about darnton's use of the term cultural patrimony to describe what the contents of this digital library would be and that provoked several people were upset or upset or concerned that D'Arnton had used this charged rhetoric. I think D'Arnton used it in a, what was meant as a constructive way, but it's a term that's fraught for a lot of people. So if they're already getting, encountering rhetorical hurdles, I'm wondering how they will handle the more practical and substantive challenges involved. That's a tactful way of putting it, yeah. Well, and for me, I mean, we have such an organization already. It's called the Library of Congress that is charged by Congress with doing this, although in an analog world.
It'll probably be a little bit, but I think it will begin to emerge. But I wonder the degree to which whatever emerges is then direct competition to the mission and purpose of the Library of Congress. And at what point then that's going to be coming up with a national plan for preserving digital infrastructure. It's got all this, you know, this material it has to do things with already. It's got too much to do already. Oh, I completely agree. So Jen, did you get a sense of which path this is likely to go, whether it will be, you know, I think Amanda, you brought up the web scale notion and the technology I think about that's web scale is the web, which already has collections that are at endpoints that could be virtually aggregated. And so one version of this project seems to me to be some kind of virtual aggregation, you know, decentralized, but maybe with a centralized interface or search tool to scan these various books or materials, which kind of already exists in some ways, but maybe not to the extent or the ease of use that, say, Google Books has. The other option is more like HathiTrust, where you're actually depositing an archival digital copy into some center, which I believe the grid for Hathi's at Indiana, I want to say, their main technical infrastructure at IU. I think it's at Michigan, actually. Is it at Michigan? I think so, but I'd be wrong. Or maybe there's a couple of centers. But still, it's a centralized technical infrastructure. Do you get a sense of which way this is going? I did not get that sense from Darnton. I think he's not the nation, to LCE or whatnot. Well, Darnton made it very clear that this was not an anti-Google gathering. Was anyone from Google there? No, I don't believe they were. I don't know if they were invited or not. And why was it secret? I mean, even though it wasn't top secret, but why? I guess this is just my way of expressing sadness that I wasn't being invited. I'm sorry, I wasn't invited too. My impression is that there was some concern that the foundation folks in particular and some of the governmental representatives were there. They didn't want their involvement made too public too early, not because they're embarrassed about it, just because they didn't necessarily want to be committing publicly to anything before they had a chance to hear what was going on. There's kind of a debate about whether it was really a secret meeting or not. Okay. So it was more expectations management than some kind of secret cabal that was... Oh, yeah, definitely, definitely. I don't think it was meant to be, you know, exclusionary in a scary sense, more just, well, this is, you know, there are a lot of people who have, foundation people, you know, notoriously sensitive about what they're going to commit to publicly too early. But is there, honestly, is there any hope that the copyright issues are going to be overcome by this attempt? Boy, that's a great question. I don't know, but I'm hearing more and more urgency when I talk to librarians and others about the need for copyright reform. Although at a recent meeting, not a meeting I was at last week, but a couple weeks ago, somebody was saying, well, but look at everything that Congress has on its plate. Are they really going to get around to copyright reform right now? This is urgent for librarians and scholars, but maybe not for the people who actually make law. Certainly not for the next couple of years anyway. Yeah, yeah. Well, but also who's, you know, which party is the champion of copyright reform? I mean, the Republicans are against it and the Democrats are against it even more. I mean, like they each have constituencies that are, you know, lobbyists who are against it. I mean, there's no point. Well, I think at the very least, it's not immediate, but we're going to get some discussion about copyright reform coming up in six years or so when you get the Sonny Bono Term Extension Act, you know, it's going to run out, right? They reinstated, you know, they lengthened the term of copyright for 20 years back in 1998. So in 2018, Mickey Mouse is going to be in danger of going into public domain again. And I guarantee you that will light a fire under copyright discussions, even if we don't get any before then. We're also about to get a new register of copyrights. Mary Beth Peters is retiring. That's an interesting hidden story. I mean, with Ed Felton going in, into his role at, people don't know this, the Princeton professor, who's really done a lot of work. You know, I would say in this area of, well, you know, computer security, but also in, you know, working for kind of a fair and open environment for computation in the United States. He's now become the chief technologist for the FTC, which is, you know, really unusual and interesting. He's been the person who's been, he's argued against a lot of these, the Diebold machines, voting machines. He's done a lot of work on their security. So, you know, he also was a witness in the United States versus Microsoft antitrust trial. So, you know, I think he's been, by the way, and, you know, saying that he was a critical part of that trial in that he showed that you could uninstall Internet Explorer from Windows, which Microsoft said, no, no, no, it's this will happen, but a Larry Lessig type person as the copyright officer would, I think, change things. And the Google book search settlement, if we ever get one or get a ruling on that, that amended settlement, that may also change the legislative picture some, depending on which way that goes. Right. Do we have any sense of what's going on with that? I mean, it was supposed to be resolved, you know, a year ago and then six months ago, and now we're all waiting around. I have heard nothing. I mean, I, you know, I keep, I've been trying to keep tabs on it since it's something I will need to write about whenever we get some kind of ruling, but I hear, I about it. I hear much more chatter about Google Editions. But as far as when we get a Judge Chin ruling on the amended settlement, I have no idea. It could be today. It could be six months from now. It's funny you mentioned Google Editions because I was just about to bring that up. Because Google Editions, and again for those who don't know, Google Editions is essentially the Google e-bookstore, right? You know, Google selling electronic copies of some of the books that it scanned, the in-copyright books that it has scanned. And it was actually supposed to go live this past summer and is now delayed. I think I read an article that said, oh, maybe fall. I wouldn't be surprised if the delay in that has to do with the Google Books settlement as well. Might well. Well, from the sublime, the National Digital Library, to the mundane, individual libraries. Jen, you were at a conference in, you said, I think, Charleston, where one of the hot topics was patron-driven acquisition. What is patron-driven acquisition? Sounds like print-on-demand to me. Well, it can have that component. The conference I was at was the Charleston Conference, which has been going for about 30 years now. It's not associated with any particular professional association, not the ALA or anything like that. But it's where librarians and publishers and some vendors of materials to libraries, you know, people like Ibrera, Yankee Book Peddler, where they all get together to talk about this very practical as well as larger thematic issues that are affecting all of them. It's an interesting gathering. It's not an unconference, but it's less formally organized than a lot of the scholarly conferences I've been to. But anyway, I think I counted at least nine sessions out of a three-day program on this patron-driven acquisition. It comes in a lot of models, a lot of flavors, if you will. I'll give you an example of one of these. A library, an academic library can get from its vendor a bunch of catalog records for e-books, drop those records into its catalog as if it already owned those books so that users, you know, you or I can go in that catalog and we're clicking through and we'll see those books, those e-books, and be able even to pull them up and read through them as if they were already part of the library collection.
If two or three users select the same book and spend some time browsing it or printing out parts of it, that can be a trigger event. You can set a number of different options for what demonstrates enough interest on the part of your users. But a lot of librarians are trying this and with fairly good results. They can burn through a lot of money quickly doing this, you know, if people, if they don't set the trigger events correctly. But they know that users are interested in these particular books because the users have shown that by using them. Now there's some argument about how much use really constitutes genuine research interest, but it's a much more targeted way of buying materials than just going in and guessing what people are going to want out of a publisher's, you know, catalog or these approval plans a lot of libraries use where they say, I want everything from Oxford University Press and classics, and then 50% of it doesn't get used within five or ten years. 50% is the very general statistic one hears a lot in the library world about how much material just sits on the shelf. You know, I just figured out how to make my next book an academic bestseller. While you were describing that, I formulated my plan, and that is I'm going to hire a group of undergraduate students or maybe even just high school students, and they're going to go to the websites of all the university libraries around the country and request copies of my book. One nice thing is that the user in most cases has no idea that his or her actions might trigger a purchase. As far as you can tell, it's just there in the catalog for you. So there's a little more. I still love this idea of gaming the system. Well, people used to do it with search, right? They would hire companies to do just search requests over and over. All you have to do is assign your own book in your classes. You can't just be old-fashioned about it and do it that way. Which, by the way, I found out just the other day, just as a total aside, that that's not illegal in the state of Virginia. It's illegal in the state. It's not illegal. It's illegal in Texas, where I used to work. I'm just surprised. Now I know how to make more money and write books, which I did. I know. I live off the $13 that I get each semester from my, my royalty check. Um, so Jen, I have a couple of questions. What, what about how do libraries answer the question? First of all, of the, I don't know, the serendipitous, you know, bumping into it on the shelves question, which, you know, I don't know if I've, I've got that question, but maybe at some large research libraries there would be people who would kind of wonder about that question, that if it's not physically present, you know, and that's their method of kind of browsing, that that's an issue. Sure. There's that question. And then what about the overall market for academic books? Yeah. as you said, I think almost very casually, the fact that this might lead to a lot of libraries to just unsubscribe from buying every classics book from OUP. Right. Well, I think librarians are getting much more comfortable with that idea. But going back to your first question about the serendipity of browsing, one thing that struck me as I was interviewing librarians about PDA, sort of a lovely acronym for this concept, is that patrons, both students and faculty members, are getting much more comfortable using e-books and just getting the book on their computers, their laptops, wherever they are, not going to the stacks anymore. Of course, there always will be people who love the browsing of actual books on actual shelves, particularly in fields like art history where e-books have not really caught up yet to what the field expects and needs. So there's not, librarians will also tell you truthfully that they're not doing away with print acquisitions. In fact, they can use some of these models for print acquisitions too. So in most cases, it's not like all the books on the shelves are going away and you'll only be able to get them through your computer. But going back, going then going on to the question of what about this object only exists when it's wanted. One thing that I found fascinating when I was talking to librarians about PDA was that they're keeping statistics on usage of books by publisher, which if I were a publisher, I'd find very scary. And I think that what they're seeing is that the reputation of a publisher does not necessarily guarantee that its books are really going to be used. So I think the librarians are hoping that this will get publishers thinking harder about what they're publishing. Maybe some of these books shouldn't be published or shouldn't be published in this form. There's a lot of waste in this system, arguably, and this may be a way to help publishers think through more carefully what they're doing, which gets us into a lot of the raging debates about tenure and promotion criteria and credentialing and all those good things that we see. Right. Because, okay, when I was in high school, PDA was public display of affection. Too much PDA was kind of gross. And then there was the personal digital assistant. And now there's patron-driven acquisition. Okay. But I like it because it is PDA. It's a public display of affection for a particular book. Exactly. Exactly. It's people expressing their love. Amanda, you had mentioned Amazon's plan to become kind of a limited lending library. Does this sound like a similar development, a connected development? Well, yeah, actually. Yes and no. What I was thinking before you gave us that great explanation, Jen, was that if you have a Kindle or an iPad, there really isn't any way for a library to buy an e-book and then lend that e-book to, you know, 50 patrons. Unless, of course, you buy the device itself, download a book onto that, and then loan the device out. So I've often thought that somebody clever should come up with some way for, I don't know, people to buy an e-book on their Kindle and somehow share that back up to the library so that you could, I don't know, you could borrow a Kindle from the library, buy a book on it, read it once, be done with it, and then give the Kindle back to the library so that other people could then read that book, something like that. But yeah, Mills, I know what you're referring to is the fact that the Kindle now has a very mild and limited form of lending, which is good, but it's so limited as to be useless for libraries. And actually, I think kind of useless for most individuals too. You can, you know, it sort of guts the whole copyability of e-books generally, you know, of digital files. You know, you can loan it for 14 days if the publisher allows it only once and while you've loaned it out, you cannot yourself read it. So, you know, I think it's a sop to people who hate, you really are dependent on their good graces. But it's a good thing. And I have to say that thinking about this a good bit, say that we live in a world in which all books are electronic, which I don't know that we'll ever get to that world, but say that we do. And then, you know, what happens to the library in that world? And I think that it honestly would not bother me a huge amount if, you know, the model of the library as we know it, whether a research library, a university, or a public library, goes away as long as e-books remain cheap enough to where you really can get them when you need them. And that's what I'm worried won't happen. I think that in a world where almost everything is an e-book that is a book at all, there has to be some right to, um, acquire that information without having to pay a whole lot for it. So, um, yeah, I mean, right. I mean, I think that we're going to end up with in the next few years, a lot of what, um, when I try to get a, um, an audio book out of their electronic audio books you know files essentially from my local public library and of course it only works on Windows it's entrapped in some kind of horrific DRM that I can never get to work and so I have to boot my Mac into Windows to try to get this all to work. And it's got all kinds of crazy restrictions that, you know, while I'm listening to it, somebody else can't listen to it, even though it's a digital file.
You know, I assume we'll get a lot of that. You know, I kind of wonder what will happen to libraries of the size we have here at Mason, you know, the one to two million volume, you know, pretty much recent, you know, past 100 years, you know, doesn't have a deep catalog of rare books. You know, past 100 years, you know, doesn't have a deep catalog of rare books. You know, what happens to that world in Amanda's scenario? What happens to that kind of library? I mean, I still get the Library of Congress, your Harvard's, your University of Michigan's. But it's hard to imagine. I don't know. It's hard to give the rationale for why, you know, Fenwick library here sticks around. It's a lot of heating and it's a lot of physical time and it's a lot of people. And I love libraries, but I'm just saying, you know, aside from that fact of a kind of upstairs, downstairs, well, this is where the poor people go to get their sad old printed books. You know, what happens to you? Because it's not really in which all, there are no free e-books is that there is a lot of free stuff on the internet, right? There's a lot of free information on the internet that isn't a book. Right. Yeah. One thing I'm hearing from librarians a lot as I go to these conferences and do interviews with them is that they're redefining themselves not as a place but as service providers. There was a fascinating presentation at Charleston given by a medical librarian from Johns Hopkins University. They have a medical school library, obviously. And they have been given, I think they've been told to get rid of 80% of their print books by 2012. And they're repurposing the library building. The building itself is going to be something else. It's not going to be a library. What they're doing is embedding the librarians within specific departments of the medical school so that the patrons, they said, just weren't coming to the library anymore. So the library has to go to the patrons. Now, that's probably, given the nature of medical training, a more extreme example than many libraries would be confronted with. But the librarian said that – basically said that we're a set of services now. We're no longer an institution of cultural memory. So we're not that. This was very interesting. Yeah, I find that very interesting because it's so reminiscent of a conversation that Tom and I – and I never mentioned. Tom was not on the podcast today. Tom, unfortunately, couldn't join us, but sends his best wishes to all of our listeners. But Tom and I had this conversation with one of the big telecom providers about doing some mobile apps several years ago. And they told us at the time that they felt like their business model as a telephone company was already over. And that although it was just sort of their legacy business, and that really what they were planning to be was content providers. And this was before the smartphone. And so, you know, clearly they had it called correctly. I mean, the phone companies, although people still do use their phones to make telephone calls, they use it less and less for that purpose. I'd be interested to see what the sort of overall use of a smartphone is in terms of calls versus other kinds of data that pass through the phone. Well, I think it's very clear that libraries are in a tremendous transitional period, and it's completely unclear to me anyway, and I think to most people in the library business as well, how it's all going to turn out. So we'll stay tuned. Briefly, at the end of the show today, I want to ask Dan to tell us a little bit about a new development at the Center for History and New Media, omeka.net. Dan, can you tell us a little bit about that? Sure. Well, this is intended to replace all libraries worldwide. And archives. Don't forget archives. That's right. I think this idea has legs. We're trying to hasten the end time. And I'm just kidding. It's the fifth horseman of the apocalypse. The audience has already labeled Amanda as a library hater. And I'm worried now I'm getting the same thing. All right. No, I'm just joking. People may know Ameca. It's one of our two big open source software projects here at CHNM. And like all the things we do, it's intended to try to sort of make easier a lot of the more difficult digital things that people do at digital humanity centers. One of which is getting digital collections online and making a nice looking website and making collections searchable, scannable, and also extending them to include things like maps or exhibits or contextualization or note taking capabilities. And so Omeka is something that really has developed specifically in the last two years here at SageNM, but really comes out of really a decade's worth of generalized code for making, you know, online collections that are really nice to look at, are easy to look through, but also have really rigorous back ends that adhere to standards, library standards, yes, digital library standards, archival standards, and are really easy to administer, even if you have no technical experience. So Omeka for the past couple of years, it's almost coming up on a couple of years, has been available for free. Everything we do is free and open source, of course, but you had to have your own server or know how to use a host to install Omeka before uploading or scanning your collection and putting it online and putting it into exhibits and putting a theme or a skin on top of that. So what we've done now is the project was always intended to really help out museums, libraries, and archives that maybe didn't have their own IT staff, technical staff. And we've taken that a step further by actually now providing our own hosting for people who don't even want to download it and install it, but just want to get right going with a collection. And we're charging on a cost recovery basis. It's really quite modest. The plans, I think, start at $49 a year, which will, I think, be good enough for a lot of small digital collections to go online. So not much more than a hosting plan would cost, or probably even less in some cases than a hosting plan would cost on a per month basis. But if you go to omeka.net, O-M-E-K-A dot net, you can find out about the Omeka plan. And there's even what I'm really excited about for pedagogical uses. There's a free plan that you can sign up for. So if you've got students, you can have them sign up for the free plan and they can host a small collection and just sort of get used to what it's like to put a digital collection together, what it takes to kind of get things organized online. And then to just begin with playing around with some of the Omeka plugins and geolocation and all the kind of fun things we do in digital humanities. So it's a really good way to get started. And we don't really think there's anything else out there like it. And so if you're interested, try it out. There's also larger institutional plans for universities and large museums and libraries if they want to just buy a blanket plan and roll out as many online exhibits as they want or digital collections as they want, they can go ahead and do that too for modest cost. Hey, Dan, can I ask a question? Sure. On the microblogging service, which shall not be named, I noticed that several people, it looked as though a lot of people were kind of interested in this, you know, bigger than big plan, like interested in getting customized plans. Is that right? Yeah. I was surprised by that. Yes. Sorry. No offense. Pleasantly surprised. Oh, thank you, Amanda, for asking about our extra large super plans. This week only listeners to the Digital Campus podcast get 50% off. No, yes, of course. We in fact, we have gotten already some calls. And actually, this is done through a nonprofit that we spun off from CHM called the Corporation for Digital Scholarship, which also runs the payment systems for Zotero storage. And so all this goes into a 501c3 corporation with a board that actually includes librarians and others to administer the financials and the governance of that. And so there are contact points if you go to Omeka.net for contacting people at CDS, the Corporation for Digital Scholarship, to talk about bigger plans. Because yes, we can pretty much provide unlimited storage.
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, featuring Tom Sheinfth of December, 2010. The Year in Review 2010. And it is time for the fourth annual Big Stories of the Year Roundup here on the Digital Campus Podcast, something we love to do every December. I'm Dan Cohen, broadcasting from the Center for History and New Media, where it is a frosty day outside with a cataclysmic one and a half inches of snow. We're recording a little bit later than we expected, but glad to have here in the hearth of the room, we have, of course, Amanda French, our newest addition as host of Digital Campus. Hey, Amanda. Hi, Dan. I'm wearing a red velvet formal floor-length ball gown. It is very nice. We noticed that on the red carpet, and thank you for dressing up. I am wearing a tux, at least on the top half. I have sweatpants on the bottom. Welcome back. We also have Tom Scheinfeld. Hi, Tom. How's your tux fitting you today? Fitting not quite as well as it was last night at the holiday party. Lots of food and drinks to be had. Also coming off an excellent CHNM holiday party with a lot of food, drink, and mirth and bad gifts. Vuvuzelas were traded. And also Mills Kelly. Hi, Mills. Hey, I'm still smarting about somebody stealing that USB-controlled rocket launcher from me. That was just the best. I know. That traded hands quite a bit. We have a process here at the Center where you can steal other people's gifts, and the USB-driven rocket launcher was highly popular, although there were many excellent gifts. Well, let's dive right in. It's been a great year, 2010, and we decided to mix it up a little bit this year. Normally we've done a countdown from 10 to 1, top stories, but this time we're going to go around the horn and discuss one big flop that we saw this year, one big hit, and one story to watch for 2011. So let's kick right in. Amanda, what's your big flop of 2010? Well, it's a medium-sized flop, but I have to say that the revolution so far has not happened in terms of libraries putting up a whole lot of resistance to insane journal publishing prices. So I got very incensed by and excited about the University of California System's protests against the Nature Publishing Group's attempts to raise their prices 400%. And basically that fizzled just a little bit. You know, apparently, you know, there weren't huge boycotts of nature publications. It wasn't, at least hasn't so far, been the enormous blow for open access that I hoped it would be. Apparently, the University of California and Nature Publishing Group came to some agreement, which is more or less secret, and that's really all we know about it. Yeah, you know, I think I said on Twitter I was hoping this would go nuclear, but I guess that was not to be expected. You know, I assume that the faculty wanted their journals at the end of the day, and it was going to be hard, really, for everyone to go to war over this. It does highlight the continuing secrecy around these agreements with publishers, doesn't it? Yeah, they're always, you know, they're contract negotiations. And, you know, there's a lot of pressure really on both sides, honestly, for to keep the actual prices secret and the actual terms of the deal secret. So, you know, what was interesting about this, at least, was that it did get a lot of actual data out there about what the journal prices are. And, you know, so that's good, at least. Right, right. It's a great site that I saw this week, writetoresearch.org, that's organized by students. And it's the first site I've seen that really does a good job just visualizing the prices of these journals, mostly the scientific journals. But they've got a great video introduction that just shows the graph of journal prices against inflation, you know, up several hundred percent versus general inflation being something like 80% in the last 25 years journals and libraries are kind of in this, you know, in this death struggle, this death struggle. They're in this kind of mutual suicide pact, it seems like, in a way. The journals need the libraries. The libraries need the journals. Everybody keeps raising their prices. Nobody can really back down. And meanwhile, we're starting to see alternatives, open access alternatives that aren't, that, you know, aren't, aren't published through the normal channels and aren't distributed through the normal channels, which, you know, published through the presses and distributed through the libraries. They're, they're published in different ways. They're distributed in different ways. And it seems while the libraries and the big publishers continue to continue to, you know, fight these battles. Some of us, you know, I think many of the listeners of this podcast are, you know, busy getting on with it and coming up with new ways to disseminate scholarly information. Yeah. Amanda, you were going to say something? Well, yeah, I just, I, more and more, I really, I think there's data on this as well about the decrease in individual subscriptions to scholarly journals. And I always wish that somebody would just come right out and say, look, if this is so important to you, maybe you should subscribe to it yourself individually. And hopefully there would be subsidies for those prices through grants, particularly since these are STM publications we're talking about. But again, that didn't happen and doesn't look like it's going to happen. Libraries are going to... I gave a talk recently, actually, which I'm still revising to put up on my blog, but I gave a talk at Metro in New York City. Metro is the Metropolitan New York Library Council. And so I was talking to some librarians and I used a phrase that went something like, this service ethic thing, get over it. You know, stop helping scholars so much because sometimes it becomes a little codependent. You know, I mean, libraries often, you know, there's everybody in libraries knows that a lot of scholars do not know how much these journals cost and do not make the connection between, hey, we provide these journals free labor and then our institution has to buy them back. And so I feel as though if people had to subscribe to them individually, they would learn that a little better. Yeah, the incentives are just all screwing the entire system. Well, I guess that's also maybe something to watch for 2011. Mills, what's your big flop of 2010? My big flop of 2010 is the demise of Delicious. Oh, man. This is like late-breaking news, isn't it? Yeah, just like in the last day or two. Yahoo, the owner of Delicious, pulled the plug as part of their continuing efforts to stay in business. Yahoo's continuing efforts to stay in business. And so Delicious, which was, I don't know what, two years ago, was the coolest thing ever in social bookmarking. And used widely on campuses, right? Oh, yeah. For the purposes of this podcast, it was important, right? Yeah, and I was a big Delicious user, although I didn't use it in the social bookmarking way. So I didn't ever take full advantage of the system, but it was the way that I saved all the web content that I was using for, I don't know, a year and a half or so. And then this thing, I don't know, Dan, maybe you've heard of it. It's called Zotero that came along. It strikes a, it sounds familiar. Yeah. It's this weird kind of name, Zotero, but anyway, it sounds like Albanian or something. It does sound slightly Albanian. Albanish. So when Zotero came along, then I just stopped using Delicious. And so I'm part of the problem, I guess, but Delicious is done. So for all of you out there who have been relying on this, what was a great system for keeping track of all your web content that you were using, best of luck with that because it's over. And it underscores really the problem of scholars depending on services that are owned by profit-making or in the case of Yahoo, I guess, loss-making entities because I'm sympathetic about Yahoo's need to balance their books because they do have stockholders that they have to satisfy. What worries me is not delicious because I had migrated off of it. What worries me is Flickr, which is awesome, by Yahoo.
Oh, man, that's such a good point. Particularly Flickr Commons, which I love so much. And as I was scanning through the stories over the past year that we covered on Digital Campus, I got reminded of a lot of things. One of which was that Flickr Commons a while ago had decided not to accept new partners until 2011. Again, that's another thing to watch. But I just think Flickr Commons is hugely important. I mean, I've been saying since Flickr Commons launched, and I hate to do, there's going to be a few I told you so's in the next couple of minutes. It's okay, we get to do that. It's for sure. Yahoo doesn't have a commitment to cultural heritage. You know, it might be a nice channel for people to do some, you know, some interacting with the public and some kind of Web 2.0-y kinds of things. But as a digital strategy for libraries, archives, and museums, which it has kind of played into a kind of broader digital strategy that has, you know, where there's, you know, sort of preservation language and stuff. It just isn't that. And I don't think we can kid ourselves that these commercial services are really places where we should invest an awful lot of our very precious, very limited resources. So I think this delicious failure and the specter hanging over Yahoo and Flickr should give us all pause that when we dedicate a couple of people at the Library of Congress to putting stuff up on Flickr, are those resources better spent somewhere else? I think we just need to be mindful of that as we move forward with, you know, in this new environment. Yeah, I think what disturbed me the most was how sort of casual this casting off of Delicious was where, you know, it really was important. It made it on a lot of lesson plans for educational technology. And, you know, to hear the CEO of Yahoo effectively say, like, it had become tiresome for them, you know, I can't imagine they had an enormous team working on it. And, you know, it just strikes me as, you know, sometimes the reason these things go away is really rather marginal, you know. Okay, Tom, we need to move on to you. What is your big flop of 2010? Okay, another I told you so. My big flop of 2010 is Second Life. Oh, Second Life. You know, we heard... Oh, Second Life. Yeah, we heard... Oh, yeah. We have been beating this drum for years, haven't we? Vindication in 2010. libraries, archives, and museums, again, poured considerable resources into building up Second Life properties. You know, not necessarily cash, but certainly staff resources. And we heard earlier this fall, I believe, that Second Life is now going to start charging for educational purposes. And there's been an exodus of sorts from Second Life because of that. This is, again, the risk of using commercial services that are free for now and exist for now, but don't have good migration paths. It's not easy to get your stuff out of Second Life or actually, for that matter, it's not terribly easy to get it out of Flickr in a way that would be useful to repurpose in a collections management system or in an archival system or other ways. Companies, as they should, make decisions for the benefit of their shareholders and their bottom line. And when the bottom line for the shareholders doesn't match the bottom line for the cultural heritage professional, that's just too bad for cultural heritage and education. So, you know, that's, again, another example of a flop, and I told you so, for 2010. Well, Tom, let me ask you something, though. I mean, to me, Flickr Commons and Second Life are rather different things because, number one, it is a lot easier to get your data in and out of Flickr than it is Second Life. You know, it's not quite as closed a system. And the other thing is that Flickr just has so many users, whereas Second Life, it never seemed to me as though, you know, a whole bunch of people were going to be using it in a really mainstream way. So, you know, to take the other side for a second, I mean, I think it's really important, actually, for cultural heritage institutions to go where the people are you know which is why i like um some of these efforts to put materials out there in in places where the people already are so what's what's your response i'm not i i first of all i don't think there's a a you know a one-to-one equivalence between Second Life and Flickr. I wouldn't say that. I also, because I do think you're right, I mean, Flickr is a much more open system. Although what I mean when I say it's not all that easy to get your stuff out, what I mean by that is, you know, so all of this interaction that happens on the Flickr site where, you know, and people always kind of point to the examples where a commenter on a particular photo provides some key identification of a person in the photo or provides some information, a date or other information that the institution didn't have previously. The problem with that is, you know, it's not easy. You can get the photo back, but you already have the photo, right? What you can't get out easily is all that comments, like all that interaction happens on their site, and it's kind of locked into their site. There's no easy way to migrate that back to the benefit of the institution, of the institution's main systems. Now, as a place for public engagement and kind of ephemeral public engagement, sure. I think that's a valid point. But I think there is a story here about putting too much time into commercial properties that you just, you know, we should just know what we're doing when we're doing it, I guess is what I would say. Yeah. Yep. Okay. Tom, thank you for that big flop of 2010. You got your rant in. We need to tell our audience that we're getting all the rants in early in the podcast so we can have triumphant, you know. I'm going to be totally upbeat for the rest of the podcast. Okay, that sounds good. I'm going to spread the holiday cheer. I'm going to mix in some happy songs behind your voice. Okay. I guess it's to me, my big flop. My big flop was a service that just a year ago, everyone considered, you know, there were these incredible calls that this was the future of computing and communications on the internet. Of course, I am talking about Google Wave, which also saw its demise just recently, or I shouldn't say demise. It has been moved into the Apache Software Foundation as it has become Apache Wave for people who had totally forgotten about the maelstrom over Google Wave when it launched. This was, of course, Google's attempt to leap ahead several generations ahead of email, IM, social networking, etc., and creating the most complicated interface I have ever used on a computer, I believe, maybe since the TRS-80. I couldn't figure it out. I think everyone else couldn't figure it out. And so late this year in 2010, they sacked it. And everyone was so excited that it has joined the Apache, of course, Apache Software Foundation, which runs the Apache web server, which runs two-thirds of the web. But it is in what's called their incubator. And I sort of checked this out to see, well, how alive is Wave now that it's moving over into the Apache incubator, which is sort of like its startup area. It actually joins 30 other projects, including such exciting projects as Apache Chukwa, Apache Droids, and Apache Wookie. And as you can tell, for instance, Droids is a intelligent standalone robot framework. So this is definitely the home of geeks, as it should be. And maybe that's where Webb should have gone to begin with, I suppose. Yeah, I'm a little sad about Wave. I mean, I never really grokked it, to be honest. Thank you for using that very geeky word there, Tom. Yeah, I thought I'd throw that in. But I certainly never really used it. But I do think there was something to the idea of kind of bringing all your different kinds of communications, instant messages, longer form writing, email, sort of text message type communications, kind of tweets, all that kind of, all those different ways that we sort of message each other and we kind of share thoughts and ideas and written thoughts. bringing that all into one place and having it available for group sharing, for group work, was kind of an interesting idea and a good way to go.
Yeah, they probably did, didn't they, in their new messaging? Right, their new messaging system where they're going to kind of bring all that stuff together. But what they're going to do is they're going to do it in a way that's kind of accessible and that's going to be easy for everybody to grok, not just the Uber geeks. So I do think there's a nugget of an idea there. I just think it was, this is an example where Google tends to leave things up, totally up to the engineers. And sometimes the engineers build things that only an engineer could love. Yeah. I mean, it makes me wonder about things like Chrome OS, which I'm sure will be a big story in 2011, or maybe it won't. Maybe it'll be the big flop of 2011. But they do commit large resources to big ideas, but more than anyone, they're very willing to kill things off. And I guess this is just an echo of what you were just discussing, Tom, with Flickr Commons and other online resources that are hosted by companies. Not trustworthy. Well, Wave will live on, and we will follow it, along with Apache Droids and Apache Wookie, which I don't know what Apache Wookie is, but I'm excited by it. I'm actually hoping I never find out what it is. Right. I'm wondering, you know, CHNM, people that might not know, but one of our big rooms was actually occupied by intelligent standalone robots. So I'm wondering if they were actually running on Apache droids. I'll have to ask them. Now, they've been banished. We took over. They were slow and very not Battlestar Galactica-like. So we were able to evict them at a quarter mile an hour. Okay. Let's move on from depressing stories to uplifting one. Big stories of 2010. Let's start with you, Amanda. Big stories of 2010. Yeah, what's your choice? What do you think is number one? Yeah, I would say e-books and e-readers. Good choice. It's a whole kind of failing sub-stories, but had the launch of the iPad and the iBook store in April, launch of Google e-books just last week. I was actually doing a little, I don't know if you could call it research, but Googling on just the pricing of the Kindle. Back when the Kindle launched back in 2007, it was $399. And you can get it for $139 today. And plus there's competitors, but like the Nook for like $149. So, you know, e-readers have really, I think, gone into the mainstream. And there's still some, you know, interesting, I don't know, competition going on between which e-reader and DRM of e-books and all that. But, and then I guess the other thing I have to say that's kind of interesting to me about the rise of e-books this past year is, so before, before the rise of e-readers, there were such things as e-books, but they were books that you would read on your computer. Libraries would subscribe to things like NetLibrary. They still do that. And those really didn't have, they were not widely adopted. They were not convenient to read, all those sorts of things. So there have been e-books around for a long time. But what I thought was kind of interesting about 2010 was that while we did see the rise of the e-reader and of e-book stores where you can buy books specifically for the e-reader, we also saw a lot – I think we're seeing books on the web as well. I'm not sure that – I almost think that the e-books on e-readers might almost be a little bit of a gateway drug to books on the web. I'm just happy to see that the rise of the e-reader hasn't totally killed the notion of books available in a browser. So that's kind of interesting to me, and that I think is just a huge story. Yeah, I mean, it was pretty remarkable how quickly this transition was made. I mean, even just a huge story. the phone with people that, you know, a lot of people I wouldn't expect are, you know, asking me about, you know, well, should they get a Kindle? Should they get an iPad? What's the difference? What's the, you know, what's better for reading? You know, it's really taken over the, at least the mental space, the mental share of interest. And I think that's going to accelerate in 2011, won't it? I think I read that in 2009, 3% of total book sales were e-books. In 2010, it was 9%. So that's a 300% increase. And in 2011, they think it's going to be 20%, which is actually a conservative estimate. So I mean, talking about it, one-fifth of all books over the course of three years. That's really rapid. I mean, CDs and DVDs didn't have that kind of adoption. I mean, it's astonishing. And you know, a tiny little story that came out in 2010, which I'm not sure we covered on the podcast, but the New York Times really recently started including eBooks in its bestsellers list. They used to kind of track them separately. And now, like if you publish, you know, an e-edition, an e-book edition, that's allowed to be considered for the New York Times bestsellers list, which it didn't used to be. Stuff like that, you know, is fundamentally a changing landscape of the way we read. Yeah, and I guess it's going to have an impact, as we did talk about on the podcast this year, on libraries and their purchasing decisions. Will they end up being just subscribers to giant e-book databases, or will they continue to enhance their physical stacks and book sales? Certainly going to have a huge, huge impact, And I think we can definitely say that 2010 was the year this broke. Absolutely. Mills, what's your top story of 2010? Okay, so my top story for the year is the rise of Android as a really reasonable competitor to the whole Apple app store and all of that. Listeners to the podcast know I fought off the desire for an iPhone for many years and waited and waited. And sure enough, Android came along. And so I got one. And why did I get one? Well, largely because I'm locked into my Verizon account with Fios and everything else. But I have been really happy with the service in the sense that I like having the apps. And it's been nice for me personally, but also I think, Dan, you and I were talking about this at lunch yesterday, it's going to be very interesting to see when other services than AT&T are allowed to sell the iPhone, what that's going to do as well. But the main thing is that there's now competition. And I think competition is good in this marketplace. You know, I don't think it matters which service has more apps available in their app store because there are already too many. And so they're way more apps than anyone could ever possibly think of wanting in their lives. And so I think that competition has been really good. I think it's going to force Apple to continue to get better. I think it forces the folks doing Android things to get better. So all in all, I think it's been a really positive development. Yeah. We didn't actually end up seeing what I think we predicted last year for Android, which was I think we were excited about it because of its openness and the possibility that there could be Android devices that you could use in the classroom because they were unlocked. You didn't have to pay a monthly fee for them. We didn't get the Android equivalent of the iPod Touch this year, did we? No. I guess we started to get Android tablets. The big one of those is the Galaxy Tab, which is still tied to a T-Mobile contract. But I think there's – And it's expensive. I mean in terms of what we were talking about is a cheap kind of touch device for the classroom. Yeah. At CES in January, the Consumer Electronics Show, I think we're going to see a ton of new Android tablets and smaller devices drop. And I think 2011 is going to be the year of the Android tablet. I think we're just going to see... Oh, now you're getting into predictions now. Yeah, okay, sorry. There's going to be tons of them. Can I just mention something about that too, though, is coming back to my story, my big story.
And that's actually been really interesting to me too, particularly because Kindle, I think, did it exactly right where they had a Kindle app, which you can get, I think, for Android as well as for iPhone. And it's kind of amazing that those don't compete, right? You can use your phone as an e-reader and or still get an e-reader. So that's one of the important applications that you can get. Well, there's actually, you know, there's even more convergence. One of the interesting things about e-readers is one of the new developments is the launch of the Nook, the color Nook, which is, in fact, an Android tablet. It's a full-color touchscreen. It doesn't have a keyboard or anything. It's running on Android. And the word is that it's going to get Android 2.2 Froyo updated, the full OS, in January. So the Nook is now kind of pushing into the tablet space. And it's a nice little device. I know my sister-in-law has one. And so I think we're going to start, and I think we saw that with the iPad too, it's kind of pushing into the Kindle's territory. And I think it's going to force the Kindle to kind of converge too. So I think we're seeing a lot of convergence. And I think it's because of all this competition and because of the rise of Android, which is now outselling. Android phones are outselling iPhones. And so, you know, as Mills said, I think that's just good for innovation. That's just good for consumers. That's just good for everybody. Okay. Well, Tom, why don't we stick with you? What was your big story of 2010? My big story is something that is probably of more narrow interest, but certainly of tremendous interest, I think, to this community, our audience, is the Library of Congress's acquisition of Twitter this summer. If you can remember back to, I guess, June it was, June or July. If only it were interesting to all the members of the podcast. It's interesting to me. I keep really wanting to do all kinds of research with Twitter, which I can't because I can't get access to the archive. have taken. And so I think the Library of Congress made a big splash with the announcement, but I think it reflects a broader commitment that I think is that the Library of Congress has had to preserving internet, web, and digital content through their end-it program. And I think it's just a further recognition of the importance of electronic communications and the electronic life. So I think it's going to be an even bigger story when we have access to it and humanists are able to start and social scientists are able to start doing some research on the corpus, whatever that looks like. We talked a little bit last time about how WikiLeaks might change the face of scholarship by emboring diplomatic communications, making diplomats less likely to communicate that way. I like that coinage. It's really difficult to say. I actually don't recommend it. But yeah, but we have such, you know, the rise of archives like this Twitter archive. I mean, just think about how that's going to change historical research in the future. I mean, that's just insane to think about. Yep. Okay. Yeah. And I wonder if now they could step in and grab those delicious links before those go away. Probably not. But it seems like there's a bunch of these services. I mean, Facebook probably being the number one thing that will lose quite a bit of history if that goes offline. Yet again, thinking about the downsides of the cloud. Well, my number one choice is the obvious choice, which is it's the iPad, people. It has to be the number one story of 2010. And I think maybe the iPad as a symbol of, I guess, a lot of what we were just discussing. You know, it was the Swiss army knife of touch computing. It did e-reading, it did apps. And I think the rise of app stores is probably a part B of this, that the importance of apps and what this might mean for higher ed and applications for higher ed. All of this was implied in the magical box that Steve Jobs dropped on us in January, although we didn't get our hands on it until April. But I think it was, you know, surely we'll look back and see that this was a really major time. I think really what happens with Apple devices like this, as it happened with the iPod, is somehow they kind of magically bring together a lot of things that are in the air and they put it into an attractive packaging that's a consumer packaging. And I think that's why it had this effect as a kind of catalyst for touch computing, app computing, e-reading, lots of things. I think there's probably a lot of people who see an iPad ad and then go buy a Kindle because they see the iBooks ad on it. So I think it just had this sort of effect of increasing the activity in all these areas. And I think it really was the device that changed so many or implied future change in so many areas in academia, libraries, and museums. I'm sure that there are lots of museum iPad apps out there now, and there'll be more in the future. I can see them being used in a lot of different ways. So I think just the imagination that one has when one sees the blank canvas of the tablet was really crystallized in the iPad. And for me, I think that's got to be the top story of 2010. Yeah, and I don't mind saying that I was about 80% sure that the iPad would tank a little bit. And so I, um, if I ever, uh, opined such in public, but, um, yeah, so I, I was very wrong on that. And I've been surprised, I guess one of the things that has surprised me about the popularity of the iPad and all the Me Too tablets that are coming along, because I think it's not too much to say that we wouldn't have things like the Galaxy Tab if we didn't have the iPad. One of the things that has surprised me about that has been that, to me, they're such consumer devices in the literal way, not just that they're for the consumer market, but that, to me, they're really not very good input devices. And in fact, you know, calling the iPad a tablet to begin with, before we heard what the iPad really was, people were imagining it would be a thing with a stylus, you know, where you get to write on it and have handwriting recognition or something like that, you know, which there had been versions of that before. And it's not that at all. It's a reading device. It's a, you know, yes, you can do a little bit of email on it and so on. So I may even, as I say, I'm not wanting to buy an iPad for that reason, but I have a feeling that I may not have played with it enough and that once I go and play with it some more, I may be converted to that. Right. I mean, for me, it just became my kind of evening couch device and most significantly for reading. And I think where it excelled over something like a Kindle, which I admit is a very good reading device and is considerably lighter. And I do have like carpal tunnels now from holding my iPad all evening. But it is it had enough of the apps like newspaper apps, The Guardian, BBC, NPR, very solid New York Times app, although it crashes all the time, which is rather annoying. But then apps like Instapaper, which I think are the really revolutionary part of the iPad, where you can send any bit of text, whether it's an academic article or a blog post or a newspaper piece or a magazine piece, you can send them all to your Instapaper queue and it really formats them in this sort of really beautiful, almost invisible design, but that your eye reads as a piece of paper with a slight curl to it. And it really just gets reading right on this kind of a device. And so for me, it kind of automatically assembled a nice chunk of reading for the evening and allowed me to kind of phase out some, but not all, as my Twitter account will attest, some of the kind of background noise, particularly email. And I think the fact that it wasn't a windowing system, I think everyone was thinking, and I think certainly in the Android community, people were thinking in terms of devices with windows on it. And I think the real breakthrough was that the iOS team decided to maximize everything, just like on the iPhone, so that you can't see the edges of other windows like your Gmail window when you're reading.
So I think there's a lot going on with the device that was pretty important. And I think the price was important, too, to really mainstream it. Yeah, well, I think its effect on libraries, archives, museums, and universities is yet to be determined. There's a couple of pilot programs with the iPad at a couple of universities. But I still don't think it's – it's a much more mainstream device than I would have thought, especially given the price. But I don't think we're seeing wide student adoption of it yet. But I think that two trends that the iPad represents that will definitely have a big impact on higher education are that touchscreen computing and then also that I suppose you could call it just the tablet slash mobile revolution, you know, where you have these devices that are bigger than your phone, but not as big as your laptop. And there seems to be a real, real market for that. And so that I think is going to continue to be big. Right. Okay. The big stories of 2010 from the digital campus team. Let's move on to predictions. Always my favorite part of the yearly year-end wrap-up. Amanda, what is your big prediction for 2011? Drumroll, please. My prediction for 2011 is that the Berkman Center's planning initiative for the National Public Library of America will continue to plan all through 2011. You're planning on planning. Oh, I'm so in agreement with that. Yeah, I think it's marvelous. don't get me wrong. But it's a slightly snarky way of saying I don't think that much is going to come out of it in 2011, maybe later. But I think that there are such big thorny issues to be addressed with regard to building this National Public Library of America in copyright works. Yes or no? If yes, how? You know, some kind of technical infrastructure for delivering this, right? That's a huge decision and huge implementation. You know what? I think another big issue that the planners are going to be planning to discuss is whether or not the National Public Library of America will include only books. Right. Key question. you is that, you know, when I have asked what is a digital library, you get a lot of different responses as to whether that includes things like archival collections, you know, or is it only books? You know, so what this library will include, what its scope will be in terms of digital content is going to be a really huge decision. So yeah, and I don't know if anybody would like to join me in attempting to predict what the URL of the National Public Library of America will be. I did some Googling to try to find out, you know, some likely ones. I did some domain lookups and some who-is's. So digitallibrary.org is already owned by the New York Public Library. It's not being used. Nationalpubliclibrary.org is owned by a grad student in human-computer interaction at Purdue, if it's the same guy. My favorite URL, the one that I hope it has, is library.gov. Ah, nice. It doesn't go anywhere. It's just parked. It's some Time Warner parked thing. Yeah, but this is, would this be a government entity? Right, that's what I mean. Well, the National Archives and LC are, you know, on the planning committee. They're heavily involved in the planning committee. And I will say, too, that, you know, some of the critique of this has been that, despite its name, the National Public Library of America, they're not really including public libraries per se. I mean, New York Public Library and Boston Library, that's one thing. I mean, they've both got members who are involved at least in the project. They're not public libraries in the way that some other libraries are. Exactly, right. They're private public libraries. They're big research libraries. And they're not government funded. They're private libraries. Are they both? Well, yeah. I think they're two of maybe the only, but they're not run by the city of Boston and the city of New York. They're private public foundations, but they're not government organizations. Well, I would love for there to be something that is government organized and promoted. And actually, if it were me, if I were on the planning committee, I would say do only books, do only public domain for now. You know, deal with copyright later. Just, you know, set up library.gov and put up a bunch, you know, and there's plenty, you know, gutenberg.org and the Internet Archive, all those places. There's plenty of places where you can get free public domain e-books now, Google e-books. But, you know, I think it's important for us as a country to commit to this ideal that Robert Darden has been publicizing so well that, you know, we need to commit to the principle that our citizens deserve access to free information. Okay. We will, this is certainly something we're going to be talking about, I can tell, in 2011. And we'll see where it goes. I'm having trouble imagining in the age of the Tea Party getting government funding for this. Maybe in the second Palin administration. It's anti-American, Dan. Don't you know that? It's socialist. You didn't even catch my second Palin administration. I caught it. I'm trying my best here as host. Mills, what is your prediction for 2011? My prediction for 2011 is that seven university presses will close. Oh, wow. Thank you for the very specific seven university presses. Will you enumerate them? No, I do not have a list, but I predict that seven will close. There are far too many in the marketplace as it is. All or almost all of them are losing money. The financial situation of colleges and universities has not improved in 2010 and is probably not going to improve in 2011. And most importantly, Rice University did not close down when Rice University Press closed in the fall of 2010. And so if I'm, you know, on the fiscal side of a university and I'm trying to figure out how we're going to make payroll for the rest of the year, one of the things that I'm looking at is the university press, because although they're not extraordinarily expensive, they're an auxiliary operation to the function of the university. It is not necessary for a university to have a press. And so why can't those other universities absorb the cost of doing this? And we're going to save money. And of course, maybe you heard earlier in the podcast, a little discussion of e-books and e-readers and open source materials and all those other things. There never was a strong cost recovery model for university presses, and it's getting worse by the minute instead of better. And so I think the university press, by and large, is toast. And so I think seven is the number that we're going to see close their doors in the next 365 days. Seven is the over-under. Let the wagering begin. And I'm thinking of putting a death pool on my blog. Good idea. I wonder if that domain name is available. I assume you remember the fcompany.com fcompany.com I will not say the whole word since it's a family podcast. We need updeathwatch.org. Yeah. Okay. That's a better. Or maybe, maybe.com. I think we can get some good. I like this domain speculation here on the podcast. We should start buying up domains that will be, that people will need in the future. Well, my, just to say my all time favorite, many listeners to the podcast know that the Open Society Institute in New York is one of the largest philanthropic organizations in North America, financed largely by the market winnings of George Soros. And if you go to osi.org, you can learn all about swine improvement in Ontario. And in particular, if you go there today, you can register for the Banff Swine Conference in January of 2011. Gosh, I'm surprised Soros didn't try to buy that with currency trading shares or something like that. Banff in January is a pretty nice place, though. All right. Okay, Tom, on that note, Tom, what's your prediction for 2011? So I'm not sure it's a prediction, but it's definitely something I'm going to be watching in 2011. And that's the Gates Foundation and their investment of $20 million in educational technology, particularly technology for higher education.
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi-weekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Here it goes. This is Digital Campus number 12 for the 10th of September, 2007. Productivity and connectivity. I'm Dan Cohen. Welcome back once again to Digital Campus, our 12th episode of the podcast. And we're sitting around the virtual roundtable this week with much better Skype, thankfully, after last episode's debacle on Skype with all the problems that they had. But we're here with the regulars, Tom Scheinfeld of foundhistory.org. Hi, Tom. Hi, Dan. And Mills Kelly of edwired.org. Hi, Mills. Hi, Dan. And since I rarely mention my blog on the podcast, of course, I'm Dan Cohen, and I'm at the eponymous dancohen.org. Well, it is, I guess, our back-to-school edition. The three of us have begun the school year, and so we have lots to talk about, both in the news roundup and then later on in the future story, we're going to talk about one of the main things that we often encounter at the beginning of the semester, and actually at this point, with the way that the electronic world is going sort of all through the semester, and that is the issue of information overload and dealing with all the email we get from students. And if you're a student, all the email you get from professors and also all the things we have to digest from libraries and online and news feeds and so forth. So we're going to look forward to that discussion coming up after the break. But first we wanted to begin with the news roundup, as we do every week. And before we dig into the major news stories, I have to actually give some embarrassing news, actually, from the Dan Cohen household. I have to say, I haven't told the two of you guys, but I am now an iPhone owner. You are? Yes. But did you pay $600 or $400? No, $400. I got the late adopter discount from Steve Jobs there. That was nice of him, really. I have to say, I buckled under from various pressures, but the main thing was just seeing one of our Zotero developers who has an iPhone that he has, how should we put this gracefully? He has extended through various unsanctioned means. And it really shows the power of the iPhone when you see these additional applications that you can put on there that are coming out. I mean, there's probably several dozen packages. And for instance, there's a really good book reader now for the iPhone. Again, this is sort of unofficial gray market area, but the book reader is just astonishing. I mean, the quality of the text on the iPhone is really great, and I could really see some good applications. There's all kinds of amazing stuff that's coming out, and I just wonder with all this development going on by third parties, whether this will sort of push Apple to come out with their own solution. But anyway, since we've been talking about the iPhone, I suppose I had to embarrassingly admit it after saying, I believe on episode number 10 or 9, that I was going to wait at least a year. So here I am. So Tom, who won the off-the-kool when he was actually going to buckle under? We'll have to check and see. Who do I owe dinner to? Probably several people. Yeah. Yeah. wife. Yeah, yeah. Okay, well, okay, in actual news, you know, it is back to school season, and a couple of stories caught our eye here at Digital Campus for players outside of the academy getting into the online learning business, two major players, actually, Yahoo and the New York Times. Maybe we'll start with the New York Times. So, Tom, do you have a good sense of what The New York Times is trying to do with this online endeavor that they just launched? Well, I don't think anybody really has maybe a good sense, except maybe the players involved. And I think The New York Times has partnered with Mount Holyoke College, Stanford University, NYU, a few other universities to essentially provide online courses, non-credit courses, but paid courses in various subjects taught by faculty members at those institutions. And I guess what they're going to do is they're going to use some of the New York Times technologies, some of the technologies that they've developed for publishing, sharing, exchanging information, along with some New York Times content as well, I guess, maybe course packs with New York Times, bundled New York Times articles or maybe possibly, I don't know if this is the case, I haven't seen anything about this, but possibly specially produced content by New York Times correspondents to create these online courses. It's hard to say, I think, where it's going to go. Part of me thinks it's just kind of a marketing partnership where these institutions are using kind of the marketing reach and power of a brand like the New York Times to bring some money in these non-credit courses. But who knows? Maybe it will actually be a more substantive partnership than that. And, I mean, isn't this something that's been done before? You know, I think the article on Inside Higher Ed mentioned Fathom, the initiative company actually set up by Columbia University, I believe, and several other partners that tried to do this in the early part of the decade. You know, I suppose that things have changed online. You know, that article pointed out, I think they spoke with the former CEO of Fathom, and she had mentioned that, you know, with podcasts sort of coming online and widespread availability of blogs and high readership of blogs that people are now used to sort of going online to learn. But I still wonder about some of the environment for, you know, paid online learning, a kind of non-credit online learning, you know, versus, you know, what's already out there on the web. There's a lot of good podcasts. I hope one of ours, sometimes we put out decent free educational content on this podcast. Why would someone pay for a non-credit course? Maybe I guess we'll have to look at how it's exactly put together. Maybe it works for certain topics and not, let's say, history. Yeah, my take on it is that colleges and universities have been offering non-credit educational experiences to their alumni for years as a way of bonding those alumni to the institution. You know, you can take summer courses, you can do study tours, you know, sort of academic tourism. They have all sorts of different things for their alumni. And so I think the interest for the institutions is to kind of continue that process but have somebody else produce the media part of it for them because they don't have the capacity to produce multimedia extended learning opportunities like this. Instead, they always invite you to campus or they send one of their professors to a place where there are big clusters of alumni. So for them, I think the advantage is really going to be to extend that process that they've been engaged in for a while into the online environment and to get the New York Times as a media company both to help with the branding of it and also to pay really for a lot of the production expense. For the Times, it seems to me that the real advantage is that this is just another part of their transformation into a media company instead of just a newspaper company. And so they get the kind of reverse advantage of the brands of the educational institutions to lend some credence to the endeavor that they're engaged in, that they're not just repackaging educational content out of their own experiences, but they're really providing you access to well-known and excellent teaching professors. So I think it's kind of a mutual advantage in that sense, but I think it's really all about the media capacity of the times and the brands. Yeah, I mean, they've got really all their stuff online now, and they're clearly poking out in a bunch of different directions with trying to find subscription-based, you know, they tried this, what was it, the Times Plus, or what did they call it for a while, where they had Select, of course, right, you know, where they tried to have some subscriptions for a while, and yeah, I mean, they're sitting on giant servers full of really high quality content. I guess it makes sense for them to do this. I'm still a little unclear about the market, but I guess we will see if 2007 is a better year for it than at the height of the dot-com boom with fathom.com. Yahoo, at the same time, seems to have taken a different approach with Yahoo teachers.
I mean, it looks more like a peer-to-peer network. Am I right about that? Some way for teachers to sort of share, let's say, lesson plans or curricula. It's a little unclear, but it's at teachers.yahoo.com. Has anyone taken a look at this? Yeah, I looked at this because as soon as I heard about it, because this is actually an idea that I had a couple of years ago. I felt so bad for you when I saw it. And I thought, oh God, somebody beat me to it. Somebody with money beat me to it. Tom and I had, I guess, the first conversations about this probably close to three years ago now. We talked to a variety of vendors who might provide the platform for it. Basically, we just couldn't find a way of financing it. I think this has legs. I think this is a project that really is going to go somewhere because there's such a tremendous need for teachers, especially young teachers, to be able to network with each other and share lesson plans and share PowerPoint presentations and all those kinds of things that they use every day because there's such a generational transition going on in K-12 education right now. And all these young teachers who end up in communities where they don't know anybody, and they're all wired together through Facebook and whatever. And so to have something like this is going to be a natural for them. And I expect that this is going to be a real winner. Yeah, you know, looking at it, it seems to me that the key here, again, thinking about what has changed in the last five years, I think it is No Child Left Behind. You know, one of the things they mention on their homepage is to share standards-based curriculum. And so you could see, you know, the High Tension Wire Act that is, you know, being a third third grade teacher, having to prepare your students for the exam. Um, uh, and suddenly you can go online, get, you know, good lesson plans for a particular, you know, uh, aspect of, of mathematics or, uh, vocabulary or something like that, rather than coming up with it yourself. I mean, what all these students, these teachers are complaining in elementary school is about the preparation time and the amount of time it takes to, to, um time it takes to come up with good lesson plans that will help students learn to ace the test. And I think this is probably coming at just the right time. Although, Mills, I think you should reserve the right to sue like several other Harvard former undergrads are thinking or are suing Facebook for the idea. Well, no, I was there. I remember you guys having this conversation. Were you bunking by any chance with anyone at Yahoo when you came up with this idea? Yeah, I'm going to have to go back through all my notes and see who was in the meetings where I talked about this and do any of them now work for the Yahoo Teachers Project. Could be my meal ticket for the next few years. Absolutely. Remember us when you're big, Mills. Well, another area that we've talked more about is Google Books, which seems to have had a very busy summer, actually. And there were a bunch of stories that came out over the last week of things that they've added to Google Books. By the way, I don't know if the two of you have seen Rob Townsend's very good article in the American Historical Association's Perspectives for the month of September. It's not online yet, but I'll link to it from my blog and from the Digital Campus blog when it comes online. But he put together a sort of critique of Google Books in the spring, and he expanded that out based on some critiques that people made of it. And I think it's, as it stands right now, it's probably the best critique of Google Books in terms of, you know, problems with quality, problems with sharing, and those sorts of things. What's interesting is that what came out in the last week, I think, begins to address some of the criticisms against Google Books in terms of it being more closed than we'd like. And I've been one of the critics about this and have blogged most recently about them needing to open up better with an API. But now, just to go through the list here, I mean, the things that you can do with Google Books that really is not available anywhere else. First of all, the clipping story. I mean, this is something very simple, but I think will really extend the reach of Google Books and make it much more usable. You can now go into Google Books and drag your mouse over a certain section of text, as long as it's in the public domain. So full text. Remember that most books after 1923 will not be available in this fashion, although there are many books that evidently authors and publishers have allowed Google to add this feature to. But as long as it's available for full view, that is, you can see every page of the book rather than getting those little text snippets when you do a search. You just drag your cursor over a section, and a little sort of clipping icon appears. And you can clip that and then take that section and embed it in your blog, embed it in a paper with a link to that section in the book. You really begin to get that feel for the way in which they really could connect up this giant database of text with other, you know, other texts, other writing, secondary sources, et cetera. Have either of you tried this out? It doesn't work every time, but it is really pretty astonishing when it does work right and what you get. It looks like a sort of teared piece of the book. I mean, what I find really interesting about this is kind of the way that, you know, kind of the Google parent company has taken a lesson sort of from their relatively recent acquisition, YouTube, in that it's not just providing the access to the books that's interesting about Google Books and having this vast database of scanned books. It's providing the ability to share that. What makes YouTube interesting is not so much that they've got lots of movies online. It's that you can take those movies and share them very easily on your own blog, on your Facebook page, wherever you want to kind of add that little embed text, you can add a movie. They're doing really pretty much the same thing now with their book text. And their maps recently. A couple of weeks ago, they added the ability to embed a map as well. So you can really begin to think about, you know, for let's say student assignments where students would do a paper online, embed a map, you know, and you can embed a map with items embedded in that, you know, like little flags that say, you know, here's what happened in my history at these locations. You can footnote it. You could point back to the book that you got a footnote from. Yeah, I think you're right. That's a really interesting point, Tom, about, you know, learning from YouTube, which really pioneered that. And I think that's what really made YouTube take off is the ability to sort of cut and paste this stuff into different web environments. They also added a feature to save books into what they call My Library. So you can set up a sort of personal library of Google Books. And this can include both full-text, in other words, public domain and full-text available books, as well as books that are not full-text. And so this competes directly with services like probably most prominently LibraryThing, which is really a kind of small independent operate, well, not independent anymore, but a small operation run by Tim Spaulding and a few others that has allowed people to sort of create virtual bookshelves and then to share those bookshelves with other people and to sort of expose your library to the world. Now you can go into Google Books, and if you see something you like, you can save it into your library. You can categorize it, essentially giving it tags. And then I think most interestingly, since there are other services like this, not only LibraryThing but also Shelfari, which is an Amazon.com company. But really, the amazing feature of this is you can put together a bunch of books in your library and then do full-text searches of those books. And that, I think, is really interesting. I mean, there you can see a lot of great applications, both for the classroom, but then I'm also thinking for scholarship. I mean, you could put together a set of, let's say, Victorian novels, let's say 1,000 Victorian novels, and then search through all those novels at one time. That is something we couldn't do before last week. So I think that this is a really interesting development over at Google Books.
I think that's going to be a real challenge. Oh, it's going to be a tremendous challenge. It speaks to the issue we're about to discuss after the break of information overload. I mean, just the example I gave, you know, what do you do to a student, or what do you tell a student that's, you know, looking at a thousand Victorian novels, whereas they might have just looked at ten, let's say, for a literature class or a history class. It really gets into all kinds of questions about what scholarship and learning should look like. Just another small feature that they added that was sort of related to this, they're clearly doing their own pre-processing of the text and particularly finding passages that are what they call popular. So they have this new feature. If you go and look at the About page for a book in Google Books, it will tell you the 10 passages from the book that are most quoted in other books. This is just a really interesting application of the database. It's imperfect now. If you try it out, it will get things wrong. For instance, if a book talks about Shakespeare a lot and quotes Shakespeare a lot, then it will say that the most popular passages in those books are actually ones that come from Shakespeare and not the author. In other words, they come from the primary text. So they obviously haven't figured out a way to disambiguate the primary and the secondary text. But still, I think it you know, it opens up some really interesting applications for, again, for scholars and students. One final aspect of Google Books is they're really starting to work more on combining it with their mapping system. And there was a great post on Inside Google Book Search. It's a blog that you can subscribe to from the Google Book Search team about integration with Google Earth, where they're now able to extract all the locations in a book, the text of a book, and put it right on to Google Earth. And so you open up that file into Google Earth. Again, your mind starts spinning, thinking of ways to use this, although maybe it's a distraction. I guess that remains to be seen. Okay, well, lots of things to discuss on this very topic of what do you do with everything that you can now extract from Google Books, as well as many other things, as we'll discussed, with Google Books, you're now getting millions of books, and you can now search through the giant amounts of text. And if that's not enough, we're already overwhelmed by email and by some of us, by our RSS newsreaders and mills. I've heard that this semester you have 100 students who are blogging, and so you have to read all their blogs. That is correct. Oh, goodness. I only have 20 blogs to read this semester, but I'm going to do the same thing next semester. So, you know, I think we're all dealing with this. And, you know, whether you're a student or teacher or scholar, researcher, we really are dealing with an age where we're just swamped by information. And I think that, you know, there's a couple of things that we wanted to discuss on the podcast. We wanted to sort of go over, of us handle it. I don't think we're perfect by any stretch of the imagination. Tom and Mills, I think you'd probably agree with me there. We're often overwhelmed. But we try to do our best, and maybe we have some pointers that will be helpful for the audience. And then to think through, well, does this information overload, you know, hurt other aspects of, you know, of our lives? And, you know, I'm thinking about, you know, how do you start a major project like a book, let's say, or an exhibit at a museum or to conceptualize a new project at work or start a research paper as a student when, you know, you're dealing with an information stream that is filled with hundreds of little interruptions every day? I think these are really big questions. But let's start really with these first questions of just how do you actually handle the information flow? Mills, what do you do? What are your tricks? What secrets do you have for us and the audience? I never communicate with students. That's a good one. You know, you hold yourself up. That's right. I just never respond to email. I never answer phone messages. It works really well. That does work very well. Yes, off the grid. Okay, that's probably the first one. After about three weeks, they just give up. When I switched from other forms of communication with students to blogs, my life got so much easier because what I did then was instead of them emailing me constantly with questions, they blogged about their questions. Other students in the class answered their questions for them. So that cut way down on the amount of email that I was getting. But the other thing I do is I tell them, as you mentioned at the outset there, I have 102 students at last count this semester, each of whom is writing something every week in one of the class blogs. And that's just way too much content for me to manage. I mean, I use the Google Reader to manage the RSS feeds and that kind of helps organize it on my screen but it's still way too much content. I just don't have that much time. So what I do is I tell my students that I will be reading what they wrote during the semester but that I'm not going to be reading everything that they write And I have a cheat sheet and in the first half of the semester, I make sure that I comment on everybody once. And in the second half of the semester, I make sure that I comment on everybody once. Sometimes I get involved in a conversation on the blog with a group of students who are interested in a particular topic but I make sure that everybody has at least comment from me, which gives them the sense that I'm reading more than I probably actually am. But I really depend on the other students in the class to carry on some of that for me because they have to comment on each other's postings and that sort of thing. And they certainly alert me if there's ever anything untoward or unpleasant going on in the blog. But then at the end of the semester, the blog management, the blog interface really makes it easy to manage going back through the students' writing. And so as I'm trying to figure out a grade for their blog during the semester, I tell them that they have to tell me what they think their best blog posting of the semester is and that I'm going to pick one or two more at random beyond that and I'll probably base their grade on those rather than the entire corpus of what they wrote because they might write something about some article they saw in the Washington Post about Wikipedia or they might post something about a student organization project that they want to alert everybody in the class to. So that's noise. I'm not going to read that kind of thing. So this system works pretty well for me. It's still hard with 102 students, but it does work a lot better. That seems like great advice and something I'll have to think about just reading the 20 blocks in preparation for next semester. Tom, how do you handle all of your email and reading that you do online? Yeah, I have a slightly different problem because most of what I do is manage a set of some large, some small digital history, public history projects. And I have just a huge load of email that I have to manage. And, you know, sometimes I do that more effectively. Sometimes I do it less effectively. I tend to switch technologies a lot, which probably wastes a lot of time. But what I'm doing right now, actually, I'm pretty much using Google's suite of productivity tools almost exclusively. Which ones do you use in particular? Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Google Docs, and actually Google Notebook. So I'm using those pretty heavily to manage email, RSS feeds, calendar, and to take notes. And I find especially Gmail to be very good. I know this is something a lot of people use, but I've actually moved all my old email into Gmail, which took me forever, but has been really worth it. And I've almost entirely eliminated any folders or tags for my email because the search for Gmail, and I've got 50,000 email messages dating back to the late 90s, and the search is so good that I really don't need to spend a lot of time now filing and sorting email. So that's been one thing that's been really good. At the same time, I think one of the problems we all have now is kind of the tyranny of email. And I think we tend to get really stuck in our email and stuck in our inboxes to the point where we really don't do anything else but email.
Our jobs are to do whatever it is we're doing, teaching or researching or writing or managing humanities projects. And so I do find it really useful. I've developed some tricks to kind of stay away from my email at times. I mean, one of the good things is to just say to yourself when you wake up in the morning, I'm not going to open my browser until noon or I'm not going to open my email client until noon because it allows you to do those other things that are off email. Because I think as soon as you dive into your email box, it's sometimes really hard to extricate yourself. So that's one thing I have. Another thing that I've done actually is to set up another profile on my computer. So there's my main profile with all my documents and all my email and all my bookmarks and everything. But I've got another one, another login that I can log into, which is kind of just a clean and empty user account on my personal machine that doesn't have all those distractions of my RSS reader and my email client. It's free. It's called Write Room and we'll put a link to it in the show notes. And what it does is it essentially just kind of, you launch it, it takes over your computer, not in a bad way though, and it just creates a black screen with a blinking green cursor. And it's just a hugely simple word processor with just green text on black screen. It hides your toolbar. It hides your start menu and all that. And it's just like a blank canvas and just hides all those distractions and really can help you write. So those are just kind of the things that I do to try to keep me focused and even if there is this information overload, to keep it from drowning me. Yeah. Wow, this is a bunch of great tips from both of you. You know that Write Room, I tried that for a while, and there was actually another program that would just white out or black out all the other windows on your Mac other than the one you're looking at. And the problem that I found is that I think a lot of the writing that I do, I need stuff from somewhere else, you know, from the web or from an email. And so I found I had to keep leaving the program to do that. It's one of the reasons I'm really looking forward to, there's a new feature in Leopard, which is the upcoming version of the Mac operating system, that will actually darken the other windows, sort of, almost looks like night, but you can still see them vaguely. So they kind of de-emphasize the other windows because most computer environments, everything is this bright white behind the window you're looking at, and so you're seeing other stuff, and it's really foreground. Everything's in the foreground for you. So I think that kind of a feature is really something that people look forward to. You know, from what I've read that, you know, the key is, you know, everybody has their own system. But I think the people who are successful, as both of you clearly are better than I am, is that they limit their, they sort of funnel everything into a specific environment. You know, and so for some people, that so for some people, that's just a specific program. Some people have amazing to-do lists, and everything goes into the to-do list that they have to do. It sounds like Mills, for instance, you're bringing everything into WordPress, and having everything there, you just go to your dashboard, and you can see sort of panoramically your entire class. And you can sort of from that one point, you're at the mountaintop and you can kind of look down and look at a specific student or look at what's going on in the class in general. That's, you know, again, that sort of single point. You know, Tom, it seems like for you, the Google Apps have been really a consolidated environment where you can get a lot done. And particularly, it sounds like Gmail is something for you. You know, I'm still operating in several different environments. I use, and I've been using it since it launched. I think it's a great web application called Backpack. And I think, Tom, you use that as well sometimes. Yeah, yeah. I have had a kind of love-hate relationship with Backpack. I've gone to it and gone away from it. We've had a kind of rocky love affair, Backpack and I. But yeah, yeah, it is a great thing. It's sort of like a personal wiki or a place that you can really quickly set up lists for different projects. And it's like you know maybe a single user project management for your for your life but it i could see how it you know i've also kind of gone in and out of using it well but that is where i keep my to-do lists and i actually have a bunch of different lists and i try to keep all my work stuff separate from my you know home stuff separate from you know class to- and things like that, so I can try to knock them out. Yeah, there are some pretty good online kind of personal project management, personal task management packages out there. The Backpack is definitely one. The same company that builds it, 37signals, has kind of a more enterprise or professional version of or similar software called Basecamp for real kind of web project management. And we should mention that that's what we use at the Center for History and New Media now for all of our project management. Yeah, and it really is a nice system. There's another thing that's fairly similar to Backpack, but I think it has a little bit more functionality, although the tradeoff is that the interface isn't quite as clean and svelte, is something called Remember the Milk, which is kind of a stupid name, but it's a good product. And there are others out there that can help with, I think you're absolutely right, Dan, this consolidating function is very important, I think, if you're going to manage so that you have a kind of single intake point for all of your information where you can separate the wheat from the chaff and then focus entirely on what's important. Yeah, I've tried, I think now finally with some success on email prioritization too. Because I get just a ton of email from a number of different angles and, you know, projects at the Center for History and New Media, things from students, things from friends and family, things from colleagues, you know, just all kinds of different areas. And, you know, I've, I think I've now come in, you know, into a system of, you know, most email programs will allow you to, for instance, flag an email as being important or that you can rank it. And I would, you know, encourage our audience to check out the various ways of sort of ranking your email. And then you can sort of quickly switch views and see, okay, which ones do I really need to respond to today and which ones can wait a week or a month. And actually, Tom, I took your advice and looked into a little bit on the getting things done system. And I'm not good about systems, as you've probably already figured out. But one aspect of that really helped me, which is to, you know, I just have three folders now. And I use the Mac mail program, not Gmail. But, you know, one folder of just, you know, an action folder of things that I really need to respond to. One, which is sort of for reference. So, you know, for instance, in preparation for this week's podcast, I could store some email in that folder that I knew I'd have to look back on, but that shouldn't be in some kind of folder that's really about replying to the email. And then another folder that I call waiting, which is just, you know, email that I am going to have to respond to, but it has to wait for some other thing to happen. And I think just with those three, I finally managed to get some system. But, you know, before that, I had a kind of one, two, three prioritization ranking scheme. But, you know, it's hard. Even with these systems, inevitably, you know, we get caught behind. And, you know, is that maybe the issue here is that it's one of expectations, Mills? I mean, I kind of felt like that's something that you were trying to get across is that, you know, part of what we have to do is sort of manage expectations. And I know you were sort of kidding about the email, but, you know, is it time where, you time where everyone realizes, wow, everyone's swamped by a lot of email and it's okay if you don't get back to someone for a long time?
I'm not ready to declare email bankruptcy yet, and I think I've kind of gotten it under control because one of the things I've done is just every email that I read now, I ask myself, do I really have to respond to this? I mean are they really looking for a response? And I never send email anymore that says thanks for the something that somebody else sent me because when you aggregate all those thanks emails over the course of a year, it probably takes two days' worth of time that you could better use somewhere else. The other thing is I don't respond to work emails on the weekend. I will occasionally respond to friends and family over the weekend, but I do not respond to people from work. I don't respond to my students. And this is just kind of behavior modification for everybody who's in my email circle is that when I'm at home on the weekend, I'm either working on stuff that I really need to get done for work and so therefore I'm not going to respond to emails or I'm with my family. And so I work very hard Monday through Friday and sometimes I work on Saturdays, but on Saturdays I don't respond to work emails. And that really helps a lot too. Well, what about that Mills? I mean, that does raise the sort of final question that we wanted to cover about, you know, how do you do something big? I mean, in this age of lots of little annoyances, like millions of blog posts and emails, how do you, how do you start a big project? How did you, you know, you're, you've started to work on a new book project. How do you carve out the time for that? Tom, I think you had the good advice of just not opening your browser and not opening your email, let's say, until noon. What other techniques can we do to do something that really requires a concerted effort and new kinds of thinking rather than little email responses or blog posts. I sit down at the computer and I work for an hour and a half or so, maybe two hours depending on when everybody else gets up. And so I get work done then and that's just really the only time of the day when I can carve that out because by the end, if I tried to add an hour or two at the end of the day, I wouldn't be able to think straight. So that's really the only way I can do it. And when I'm at my desk at home doing that, I do not connect to the Internet. So it seems like we've come full circle. Going off-grid does seem to be actually a viable strategy, I suppose, right? Just unplug, turn off the Wi-Fi. I think so. I mean, I think one of the things a lot – a lot of us have forgotten too is the telephone. I think we send emails, like Mills said, for all these little thank yous. And we send – we respond to – we take 20 minutes to craft an email that would take 30 seconds to take care of over the phone. So I think some of the solution is to disconnect. Right, right. And to use phones, which is precisely the reason that I bought the iPhone this week. As we do every week, we like to end the show with going around the horn and throwing out some links or resources or tools that we found over the past couple of weeks. And maybe we'll start with you this week, Tom. Yeah, I've got a tool. I was talking about Gmail and the Google Apps suite that I've been using so much in the last segment. And one of the things that makes it actually usable for me is this little Firefox add-on called Customize Google that I use. Basically, what it does is it allows you to make some minor tweaks to the Google Apps and actually the Google Web Search interfaces so that, for instance, you can get rid of all the ads so that your Gmail doesn't have ads. Because I think one of the things that really annoys people about using Webmail clients are the contextual ads that the program puts into all your emails. This can get rid of those. It allows you to hide certain of the menu items if they're not things that you use. And it allows you to set security settings differently than the default settings that Google provides. So it does a lot of little tweaks to the user experience of the Google apps that just makes it a little more usable for kind of everyday and power users. So it's customized Google. Great. Mills, what do you have for this week? My site this week is actually a very useful teaching site for people teaching history and sociology or administration of justice, anything like that. It's the famous trials by Douglas O. Linder, University of Missouri, Kansas City Law School. And he's collected, I don't know, it looks like about 35 famous trials, mostly from American history but not entirely. There's the, for instance, the Dingo trial from Australia in 1982 and the trial of Socrates. But mostly it's American history, the Amistad trial, the trial, the O.K. Corral trial of the Earp brothers, the Mississippi burning trial, the Oklahoma City bombing or O.J. Simpson. And it's a really, really nice teaching resource because he's combined kind of the crucial documents. So, for instance, in the Clinton impeachment trial, there's the Starr report and Clinton Senate testimony and a deposition from Monica Lewinsky. And all of those kind of crucial documents are there, but it's not information overload. It's not the full record of any of these trials. It's just enough to teach them. And so it makes a really nice teaching resource. So I use it a lot. I like the site. Yeah, it's a great site. Very appreciative of Linder for putting it up. Yeah. It doesn't have the world's best web design, but it's got fantastic content. And it's one of the sites that Roy and I highlighted in Digital History. Well, for this week, I wanted to point to one to-do list. If you're around for a to-do list. And it is from the folks at 37signals, which produces Backpack and Basecamp and all these other tools we use. But this is just their stripped-down to-do list, and it's just called Tadalist, T-A-D-A-List.com. And it's just the simplest way to really get a to-do list on the web. And, you know, one advantage of it being on the web is it's really great for multiple users. So if you, you know, have to coordinate something with your partner, you can go ahead and, or a group, you can put it up on the web, check things off. It's got all the real usability and beautiful design that all the products from 37signals has. And what's really nice is you can also subscribe to the to-do list via RSS. So, again, thinking of our theme of trying to aggregate all of your stuff that you're doing in one place, I really use Google Reader very aggressively for a lot of different reasons. I subscribe not only to blogs, but a lot of different kinds of feeds. And so you can actually subscribe to a to-do list right in your reader. And so see as things get checked off right in your reader, which is a really nice way of, again, sort of just getting one web page that gives you an overview of your world. Well, one final site that the three of us actually wanted to highlight, since this podcast will be coming out on September 10th, is that September 11th will, of course, be the sixth anniversary of the terror attacks of 9-11-2001. And, of course, the Center for History and New Media, along with the American Social History Project, has put together a site called the September 11th Digital Archive at 911digitalarchive.org. It's one of the best-known sites for remembering 9-11 and contains over 150,000 digital objects contributed by tens of thousands of people from around the world. Email and artwork and photographs and stories, video, audio, BlackBerry communications, PDFs, all kinds of things from that day. It's a really comprehensive archive that was put together not only by us, but also by all of the many contributors. And it's a great way to sort of, if you want to wake up on 9-11 and just browse the collection a little bit, get a sense of what other people were doing that day and what they thought about that day. And I think it's a good way to remember the day. Again, the September 11th Digital Archive at 911digitalarchive.org. Well, we'll be back again in two weeks for another episode of Digital Campus. Fear itself. Fear itself. Fear itself.
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi biweekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Here it goes. This is Digital Campus number three for the 4th of April, 2007, CI, Cyber Infrastructure. I'm Dan Cohen, this week's host. Well, we're back once again for Lucky Podcast number three. And I'm Dan Cohen, as you just heard in the introduction. And I'm here once again with the regulars, Tom Scheinfeld. Hey, Tom. Hey, Dan. And Mills Kelly. Hey, Mills. Hi, Dan. How are you today? And I should say, as you can hear from Mills and Tom's crisp voice on the podcast this week, that we think we've finally resolved all of our sound issues. We all have high-quality mics and high-speed networks, and so this podcast, I think, is going to sound considerably better than our first two. And as we said, I think in last week's podcast, we're learning each week, and we hope that you're learning along with us. And we've certainly learned a lot about sound and how to make it better. And so hopefully this will sound good when it receives, when it gets to your downloads. We wanted to start, since yesterday was April Fool's, we are not going to do an April Fool's podcast, although some of what we say may sound ridiculous. But we did want to discuss a little bit. Tom Mills, did you hear any good April Fool's jokes in the area of digital humanities? Well, I did notice that Google bought OCLC. That was kind of an interesting purchase for them. Yeah, I saw this one online, and it had all the merits of a good April Fool's joke because it was based in something that was believable. It could happen that Google might do that, and the people purveying the joke certainly made it seem a little believable. And so for a few minutes, I thought, wow, maybe they really did do that. It's interesting this year, I don't know if the two of you noticed this, but so many of the jokes, the sort of tech and academic jokes from prior years that used to be about Microsoft and their world domination have now all become about Google buying people or merging with people or coming out with products. And I think it's just very telling that now Google is the kind of center of most of these April Fool's jokes. So does that mean we should sell our Microsoft stock now? I think we should have done that a long time ago, but it's probably a little too late for that. You know, and I think Google has done a good job, actually, with their own. Every year they always have pretty good April Fool's jokes, beginning with the pigeon rank scheme. I don't know if you remember that. You know, and I think Google has done a good job actually with their own. Every year they always have pretty good April Fool's jokes beginning with the pigeon rank scheme. I don't know if you remember that from a couple of years ago, were they? I sort of remember that. They said that they had an army of pigeons sitting in a lab ranking web pages by pecking at keyboards. And then they of course had the famous Google moon unit where they were going to have a base the moon, or was it Saturn or some other planet? But they actually had a pretty good one this year that was exactly the joke that we were going to have on the Zotero site, which was they had on their Google Labs website something about how Google's coming up with a technology that writes your papers for you. And so it totally stole our joke. So we didn't end up posting it on the Zotero blog. I mean, it is interesting, though. I think this OCLC story originated on an official American Library Association blog. And it made the rounds of the web pretty quickly to the point where I think some people who maintain blogs, respectable blogs in history, the humanities, library science, and other disciplines, picked up the story and ran with it without really reading the article to the end to the point where they they gave away the joke and i think a lot of people really believe this and it says something about the power of blogs and the kind of casualness of the medium uh... and how it how it affects the way uh... professional and disciplinary disciplinary news travels around but i think i think you're right tom and and it also shows how much easier it is to purvey hoaxes in the digital age than it used to be. I mean, there are a number of excellent hoax websites. The best one maybe is the Boilerplate site, which is the history of a Victorian-era robot, which the website has the advantage of everything in the website is true except for the central premise, which is a lie. And it's very convincing in its design. It looks like a good history website. And if you're not careful, you could be taken in, as one of Jerry Seinfeld's writers was, who discussed it in a book of his about comedy. And he thought it was a spoof of a Victorian-era robot. He didn't know that the whole thing was a spoof. Yeah. And I also think just the velocity of the blogosphere. I mean, the problem I have now is if you really participate in this, you know, in the blogosphere and you're reading all these things, they're found out so much faster too. I mean, you really have to try to get to sort of pull something over on other people just with a number of eyes that are looking at these things. You know, I remember there used to be pretty good April Fool's jokes that would really catch a lot of people, including ones about Microsoft, you know, buying Apple and that sort of thing that sounded legitimate. And now I think people are more, you know, they're trying too hard in a sense to make this stuff up. But anyway, we wanted to also mention just as a follow-up to last week's or two weeks ago, we discussed YouTube. And in the interim, we've of course seen that News Corp and NBC and some of these big groups that see a lot of their content on YouTube are now banding together. I think the snickering comment of the week about this was that it was a Me Too Tube rather than YouTube, but these big media organizations trying to come up with their own structure. And I suspect it's just not going to work because they won't be able to build the kind of community that YouTube already has. But it'll be interesting to see what, you know, is NBC News going to put up free content or is this just entertainment content that'll go up on these sites, the SNLs, clips from SNL or something like that. I mean, to some extent, these big media companies are already doing this. I mean, there is video content available on NBC's site. That's true. Fox News' site. I mean, CNN has tons of video content up there. It's streaming content. It's not in the cool Flash player that you can share and pass around. But it's already up there. I just don't see what they're doing that's all that different. But, you know, who knows? Well, I think there may also be a necessary step in future lawsuits as well because if they've got a site where they're purveying their own content and then that same content shows up on YouTube, then they can show some sort of commercial harm being caused by YouTube. That's a great point. Plus, they can also show that they can filter out their site, which I assume is what the argument will hinge on, is that Google is going to argue there's no way that they can, you know, that's not humanly possible to vet everything that comes in through YouTube. And so if NBC and News Corp have a site where they are vetting everything, they can say, hey, look, we did it. Why can't you do it? You have all these math PhDs on your staff. So I think you're right. It is a good bargaining chip for them. And isn't that what happened in the end with Napster? The judge didn't say that Napster had to close its doors. The judge said Napster had to come up with a way to filter its content of copyright material, and they couldn't come up with a way to do that. Right, exactly. And that's what killed them. Yep. Well, I guess we'll see what happens there. But I think that the kind of content there is probably not likely to have, you know, the historical content that Mills mentioned.
So I think probably a lot of that content will remain on YouTube. Well, we also saw in the past couple of weeks, speaking of lawsuits, and we'll try not to turn this podcast into all the all lawsuit edition, although inevitably some of these things come up. I think there's actually a very interesting lawsuit going on right now with the plagiarism company Turnitin. For those of you who don't know Turnitin, it's used by a lot of colleges and universities as well as I think some K-12 school systems to find plagiarism. Yeah, and I think the suit is a K-12. Right, that's right. That's right. The lawsuit, I think including some students from our area, right? McLean. That's right. Virginia. And they have sued turn it in because the way turn it in works is that they take papers that have been submitted to teachers and professors and add them to their database. So they, you know, take a text dump and stick it in their database. So their database continues to grow based on the work of all these hundreds of thousands or millions of students who are writing these, you know, term papers and so forth. So they're not only scanning content on the web to see if a paper matches any of that, they're also scanning existing papers in their database. And it really, you know, I thought about this early on. It just, you know, what about all these students who are essentially contributing to the value of this company through their papers? I mean, I understand why you'd want to do this, but I'm really surprised that there hasn't been a lawsuit up till this point. Yeah, and, you know, speaking as somebody who actually uses this site with my own students, I completely agree with you. I think there's a real legal issue to be defined here. At the same time, whether it's the Turnitin model or some other model, there has to be some way for teachers to combat this sort of rampant plagiarism that's going on made so easy by digital media. Since I started using Turnitin this semester for the first time, where my students actually turn their work in through the project, and I have to say I've spent virtually no time wondering about the work that my students have turned in. It's so obviously their work and not work that they've copied from somewhere else. And so probably for the first semester in five or six years, I'm going to have no honor cases to submit at the end of the term. At least I hope that's the case. And have you ever had matches from the database that are copies from materials from students? In other words, it's not? Sure, sure. Last semester, I had two cases that I turned in. One was a match from a website, which Turnitin identified. I was taking the student papers individually and submitting them through the system if I had some reason to suspect the paper, instead of having all of the students turn in their papers this way. And then I had one student paper which came from a database of papers for sale on the Internet. And so, you know, both of those cases are in front of our honor committee right now. You know, it's interesting. I mean, in some respects, this is the same issue that Google has to deal with. Definitely. You know, I mean, and really any project that's based on this kind of wisdom of crowds model has to deal with these kinds of copyright issues. I wonder if a possible solution to it is for students to have some kind of, you know, like no bots header on their paper so that, you know, like you can make your students hand in their paper through Turnitin and Turnitin will check their paper to see if they're plagiarizing. But if they say to Turnitin, I don't want you to save my paper, Turnitin won't actually add it to the ongoing database. Right. But then, you know, then their whole model is challenged because then, you know, if a lot of students opt out of adding their paper to the database, which I assume a lot would, just if only to snicker at these adults who are trying to catch them, then, you know, you've got these papers that are sort of offline and out of the database, and they can be copied without an infraction being noticed. So I think there's a real serious issue here about it. And I'm surprised that they've kind of had a free pass on this. I do think you're right, Tom, that a lot of it has to do with the kind of copy first, ask questions later culture that Google really has to operate in. And it'll be interesting to see how this lawsuit plays out, especially with the Mirror lawsuit about Google Books, where they're saying, well, you know, we got to sort of copy the stuff first so we can find books better and, you know, do all these things and just provide snippets. You know, it's a lot of the same logic is there. Except that, you know, I think in this case, probably the students have an even better case than people who just have web pages out there or, you know, where they have the expectation that search engines are going to come along and sort of copy their stuff. In fact, a lot of people want that, so they're visible. But students, you know, these papers are sort of personal things. They might not be particularly happy with, you know, how their term paper came out, and all of a sudden it's going to go sit in some database in perpetuity. I think they've got a great case. I think they're going to win. Yeah, I think they might. Do either of you guys know how this thing actually performs and how it deals with things like quotations? How does it distinguish between legitimate copying, because there is a difference between copying and plagiarism, and Joseph Riegel, who has a blog which we'll put in the show notes he had an article a blog post about this this week that there's a difference between legitimate copying for instance in a quotation and plagiarism and how does I mean does the algorithm deal pretty effectively with that? It does I just this morning since we were going to talk about this I looked at some papers my students turned in over the weekend. And when you look in your inbox, it gives you a list of all the papers turned in, ranked either according to the student's last name or according to the suspiciousness of the paper. And so the paper that was at the top of the questionable list said, the report says 36% of the content of the paper is questionable in some way. So you pull the paper up and then it gives you two choices, two buttons to click on. One is exclude quotations and the other is exclude bibliography. And if you exclude those two, I did on this particular paper, I excluded those two things and then there were two sentences in the whole paper that looked questionable. And those, you know, I looked at those and those are kind of normal random sentences that probably show up in a bunch of papers because anybody would have written those sentences. So therefore then the paper is fine. So you can set your preferences to exclude everything that's quoted. And then, you know, so then it tells you right away whether the paper seems fully suspicious, one you need to spend some more time on or not. And do they provide links to websites or things like that where they know it's been copied from? Everything that is identified is questionable. There is a direct link to the website that it came from or to a paper in their database. And if you ask for the paper that's in their database, you have to write, it sends an email message to the instructor who that paper was submitted to. And then that instructor decides whether to send you a copy or not. So Turnitin does not send you the paper. The instructor to whom that paper was submitted sends the paper. Right, but isn't the holder of the copyright is the student, right? I think this is what's going to be decided in court, whether the student writing the paper is the copyright holder or the institution to whom the school or the college to whom the paper was submitted is the copyright holder. And, I mean, I guess this is an older issue with PhD students and other students having to submit their dissertations to UMI and things. I mean, it's a requirement for PhD candidates at most universities to submit their dissertations to these republication services. It's required by the university. But, you know, in fact, the copyright is held by the student. But at least in those cases, yeah, I mean, but we all had to sign, you know, I remember signing the legal document of the rights way. I wasn't happy with it. And it's often sprung on you, you know, right when you're submitting your dissertation, and what are you going to do?
No, and can't legally sign a legal document. Exactly. They're minors. So it seems really bizarre. And my understanding of the copyright law is anything they produce, it's theirs. I mean, they don't even have to put a copyright notice on it. So I think they've got a very, very good case. Although I assume that, you know, they've got lawyers who are quite greedy about this. And it's probably going to be a fairly ugly process. But, you know, there you have it. We also saw this week, speaking of more interesting things going on or less legal things going on, another round of the Digital Humanities Startup Grants came out. I think there were about 15 or so that were funded. And we'll also link to those from our show notes. But do the two of you see any trends or interesting projects that you look forward to seeing that came out of these grants? Well, I was one of the panelists for a portion of the decision-making process on this, so I know a few of these projects, but there were several panels because there were so many submissions. I think that there are some interesting things in here in the list of the stuff that's been funded. And it's very interesting to me having read some subset of the total submitted to see which ones were funded and which ones weren't. I think maybe one of the most interesting ones is, from my perspective, is coming from the University of Virginia, from the folks at the Institute for Advanced Technology and the Humanities. Is this the one that's led by Joanna Drucker or another? No, this is the one by Worthy Martin. Oh, by Worthy, okay. And the brief statement says, to support development of a tool to present the progression of interrelated items held in an electronic thematic humanities repository. And it's really a sort of data mining project to begin looking at some of these massive humanities databases and figure out ways to make sense of the information that's there. And I remember from looking at the proposal in the first place that it's really a startup grant in the sense that they're trying to think about the ways that they would go about this and then hopefully use this money to do that sort of startup work and then from there apply for the sort of serious money that it would take to do this in the right way. Right. It seems like knowing where these work, he's the right person to start thinking about this or one of the right people to start thinking about this. Yeah, I mean, I'm really glad that there are these new grants, and I think one of the challenges about these grants for those that have gotten them is it's that process, as we know very well here at the Center from having done a lot of grant-funded work, it takes a considerable amount of, well, there's all this process of getting your project from a kind of startup phase really into the next phase. So moving from this startup area up through a very major digital project, there's a lot of things that need to get learned. And everything from legal questions to marketing, to to programming to hiring people. I mean, the list goes on and on. It's very challenging to fire on all cylinders for all these different skills. And I think one of the things that probably would be helpful to happen is for projects that come out of this digital humanities initiatives that are in the startup grant pool. It'd be helpful for those of them that do, you know, have some success to kind of roll up into a larger format to transition out of that kind of startup phase where, you know, you're not hiring a full-time programmer for a year, which would, you know, easily top the $30,000 that's available. But for them to have some process that you can kind of move from a startup grant up through the ranks of these larger grant cycles, I think would be incredibly helpful, even if it's only just advice on, you know, these are the kinds of things you would need. Because, you know, I'd like to see a very wide array of scholars get these grants. And I assume a lot of them won't be in, you know, great places like where Worthy works and Joanna Drucker, where they have the real expertise and a kind of standing crew of programmers, database administrators, et cetera, tech savvy people at the Institute for Advanced Technology and the Humanities. You know, a lot of people aren't going to be at that kind of a place.. I noticed that there were some independent scholars here, there were people at universities where I know there isn't a digital humanities center. So they're really building these things from scratch. And I think really a nice next phase would be, you know, how do you transition, you know, build up from one of these starter grants into something more major? You know, how do you do that? How do you get the infrastructure in place? How do you deal with all those questions? Because there are just so many that come up for these Right. ever done the calculations, but I mean, it wouldn't surprise me if some of the grant proposals, you know, that are put together cost $30,000 and, you know, putting together mock-ups and in staff time and in research and, I mean, it can cost, especially for digital projects, it can cost a lot of money just to get a good fundable grant proposal together. And that was really the elephant in the room the day that we were reviewing the projects for the panel that I was on was, okay, so we fund these and we're really happy that the NEH is providing this money and we think it's a really laudable program, but then where's the rest of the money going to come from? And for some of these projects anticipate some very substantial work down the line and who's going to provide the $300,000, the $500,000, the $800,000 necessary to realize the potential of these projects. And that was our unanswered question that day. Did the guidelines in any way have applicants estimate what the ultimate project costs would be, or was that left out? No, that was left out, but the applicants did have to at least lay out some kind of a plan for future funding. I mean, they couldn't just say, and after we've spent this $30,000, we anticipate applying for other grants. I mean, they had to have an actual plan of some sort for how they were going to go forward. But as to exactly who those people were, often it was left unknown because it is unknown where that kind of money might come from. Sure. Well, I think we'll have to keep track on some of these projects. I'd love to hear also where the projects that were funded in the fall, right? Mills, there was another set, the first set that was funded in the fall. It would be great to kind of see where they've gone and what they've produced. Maybe we'll try to delve into that and maybe even bring on some of the project directors on a future podcast. Yeah, that'd be great. Okay, well, we'll have to leave it there for the news round the report is called Our Cultural Commonwealth. But the subtitle is The Report of the ACLS Commission on Cyber Infrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences. And I think it's really a big topic right now of organizations like the ACLS, big private foundations like the Mellon Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation and other foundations are really looking into how to build up this cyber infrastructure. And actually, if you really want to be in the know, which I think listeners of this podcast, of course, being part of the in crowd, you can now call it CI. I just went to a meeting up in Princeton of Mellon grantees, and that's what people were calling it, CI, or cyber infrastructure. Yeah, it's kind of a mouthful. But I think, first of all, let me just read what cyber infrastructure is from the ACLS report. It says that the term cyber infrastructure is meant to denote the layer of information, expertise, standards, policies, tools, and services that are shared broadly across communities of inquiry, but developed for specific scholarly purposes. Cyber infrastructure is something more specific than the network itself, but is something more general than a tool or resource developed for a particular project, range of projects, or even more broadly for a particular discipline. So for example, digital history collections and the collaborative environments in which to explore and analyze them from multiple disciplinary perspectives might be considered cyber infrastructure, whereas fiber optic cables and storage area networks or basic communications protocols would fall below the line for cyber infrastructure. So I think what people are trying to get at here, and it's something that we discussed at this meeting last week, is really how to enable the scholarly process, the process of doing scholarship in an age where we have very sophisticated networks, databases, collections, tools, standards.
So I think the way you can think about it is, I think it's much like the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web, the protocols, the servers, the web browser itself, all these tools gel together to create, I think, something larger than all of its individual pieces. And of course, the individual pieces were around before the web. I mean, you had the internet and you had mainframes and all these things. But, you know, there weren't these kind of specific tools that really brought it together and made it so useful for millions or hundreds of millions of people. And I think what they're trying to get at is, you know, what are the tools, what are the resources, many of which will come out of specific scholarly practices. So I think of, in our case, we have our Zotero project at the Center for History and New Media, which is a end user tool. It's a tool used by scholars to collect, gather and collect and analyze and cite resources that they find on the web or even off the web. That's a specific tool that we really desired as historians, that we thought we needed. And we built that. But you can see already in our work on Zotero how it integrates in with the web, how it integrates with scholarly databases. And it sort of creates a cyber infrastructure or CI that really helps scholars do their work. And so I think we're really here at the beginning of this wave of trying to build a scholarly cyber infrastructure that is one that has certain aspects, certain kinds of information being traded, certain kinds of standards, and certain kinds of tools that are really oriented specifically toward academia. And I think what we wanted to discuss today for our featured story is, you know, where are we, where we can go with this, and sort of what's missing. And I can tell you without getting into the specifics of the meeting, you know, as we were joking up in Princeton, you know, what goes on in Princeton stays in Princeton. I'm not sure if that's actually true. But, you know, I think that a lot of the projects up there are at all ends of the spectrum. So it was really a fascinating series of projects that were presented. And they range from everything all the way down to these really low layers of the academic networks of, you know, data that's floating around and services that are floating around at a low level at the university. Things like student services of, you know, databases that hold information about students or professors, courseware, all these things bubbling all the way up to the actual end user and tools like Zotero. And there's just all these kinds of interaction that are happening between these various layers. And I think we have a tremendous amount of work to do to kind of link these things together. And I thought really what came out of the meeting that, you know, my takeaway for at least the production of this cyber infrastructure for scholarly work is that I think, first of all, there needs to be a lot of work done in terms of interoperability. And I think, you know, I think we're used to using tools like an EndNote, which is, you know, what Zotero is trying to be a lot better than. But, you know, you think about EndNote is a kind of silo or dead end for your research. You kind of grab stuff and put it in there. It runs on your desktop. It's a kind of, it's an application that is for you alone, but it doesn't link well into a lot of this burgeoning cyber infrastructure. There is some stuff on the web where little buttons appear that say, you know, import this item into your EndNote collection. But if you think about that in the reverse, it's not very easy to then export out of your EndNote into different formats that would be available to other users on the web to share your collection, to integrate it into courseware like Blackboard or Sakai, to automatically produce RSS feeds of bibliographies, all these other things that's sort of happening around the web in different, you know, these new Web 2.0 sites that we've talked about a little bit here on the podcast. They're not happening as much or yet in the scholarly realm. And so I think there's going to be a lot of work on interoperability. I also think things like policies and services that we share, these also need a lot of fine tuning. I mean, things like open access to collections are really kind of up in the air. And so I think there's a tremendous amount of work to be done in this area. And indeed, the ACLS report, which we'll link to from our show notes, has, I think, some really terrific suggestions. And I think it's something that Mills and Tom, we can discuss right now. I think, you know, the first one is to, you know, show what the value of this is, because it is such a, you know, daunting thing. And I don't know, I mean, have the two of you heard of this before or the term cyber infrastructure? And would you know how to describe it in 25 words or less if someone asked you on the street? Well, I've heard the term and I've heard it used and know some of the people who served on the commission. But I think that describing it in 25 words or less is difficult. And I think we can tell just from the term cyber infrastructure that the Cyber Infrastructure Commission was thinking about this for a long time and had their own struggles in defining it. I mean, cyber is not a word we use so much anymore, probably haven't used since the late 90s so much. And I think it is a kind of difficult thing to get, even for somebody working in the field, a difficult thing to get your head around. Right. In a way, I like what you were saying. Second, Dan, talking about things like interoperability, I think that's an easier thing for me to get my head around. How can we make things interoperable? That seems to be more of a mission statement to me than building cyber infrastructure. Although I guess some people need to be thinking about the bigger picture. But for me, if I can contribute to tools and to resources that promote and extend interoperability, that seems to me to be something that I can more easily get my head around. Yeah, I mean, the interoperability, it relates, I mean, they're all interconnected, but I think the policies in the state of what's currently out there in terms of infrastructure, you know, it's really hard to get these pieces to work together. I mean, there's scholarly tools and websites and so forth that are in public databases, and there's a lot that is going on in sort of the private sector. And in fact, the ACLS report, you know, the first two or three objects say, you know, making the cyber infrastructure a strategic priority, developing institutional policies that foster openness and access, and promote cooperation between the public and private sectors. That seems like, you know, a tall order right there. I mean, what we have to do is to show the way in which these things, you know, can really make a difference to even to the kind of commercial stakeholders here. So, you know, I think there's a lot to be done there in terms of just policy and working together. Yeah, I want to pick up on another piece in addition to the interoperability, which I think is really central, is early on in that ACLS definition was the question of expertise. And, you know, this is in some ways the softest piece of the whole thing because we don't know exactly what that means yet. But something that's been troubling me for a long, I guess, three, four years now is how little money is being spent in the humanities to develop that kind of expertise. I mean, you know, if you look at our center, all of us developed our expertise kind of on the fly because we wanted to, not because it was part of some degree program somewhere. And still, in history, George Mason is the only place where doctoral students are required to have some sort of expertise in digital media before they graduate. And there are, you know, around the country now a few graduate courses in digital media for historians, but nothing else comprehensive. I mean, Indiana is starting to try to put something together, and I suspect Nebraska probably will before too long with Will Thomas there. But there's still just not much investment in the development of this kind of expertise, so we're reliant on the entrepreneurs, the people who, the historians who learn PHP and MySQL or, you know, the poet who learns Python or something like that. And that's not an effective way to build a cyber infrastructure, if that's what you call it. Right. Well, I think this is definitely, at this stage, I think that's a great point, Mills.
You know, the ACLS report points out, you know, one of their eight points is to encourage digital scholarship. And, you know, I think part of the big problem right now is there's not a lot of professors out there who kind of know about cyber infrastructure, care about cyber infrastructure, know what it would do for them, and have the kind of scholarly methods that would enable them to kind of take advantage of this stuff. And so there's no, there's not, you know, graduate students and professors, you know, staging a sit-in at the president's office at their university for cyber infrastructure. And so, again, I think it's going to take a real effort to kind of build up some of this stuff from a kind of supply side so that when it gets completely built out, scholars will instantly recognize, oh yeah, this has tremendous advantage to me. And I think, you know, there are little pieces here that really do help. You know, our friends who listen to this podcast who are in the library world, you know, they're working on all kinds of interesting things to enable auto-discovery of materials in digital collections and to make that online library catalog work better with other systems both within the university and outside. So there are great projects going on to sort of integrate Google Scholar or other commercial sites in with your standard library lookup sites so you can kind of get a full view of what's out there on your research topic. And so there's little efforts here and there to expose what could really happen if cyber infrastructure all clicks together. But right now, you know, there's not a kind of coordinated effort. And I think it really needs to be, you know, I think a lot more money and kind of visibility has to happen here for there to be, you know, more in the way of demand for it also from, you know, from the faculty. And I think, go ahead, Tom. The other, I think the other part of this is, and I think Dan's right, you're right to say that the library world has to some extent done a lot more than the scholarly world, than the university community. A big part of this is that that kind of cyber infrastructure work contributing to the cyber infrastructure, building it, is valued more highly, I think, in the library community. I think until things like guidelines for promotion and tenure change in the university, there are going to be a limited number of people working on cyber infrastructure projects contributing to the infrastructure. I just think if it's not valued by your peer community, it's going to be hard to get people to do the work. I mean, that feeds right into what I was going to say, which is until such time as the leading scholars at leading graduate programs start demanding from their PhD students that these students have some level of digital expertise and start demanding from their deans and provosts that there be money to teach their students that kind of expertise. It's all, all of this work in cyber infrastructure is going to be dependent on individuals deciding, wow, I should do this. Right. Yeah, you know, I think, I think just a little bit of marketing here would kind of help out because there are cases right now, I mean, you just, I mean, just thinking of, say, something like Google Books or the Open Content Alliance where scholars can see, I mean, when I was doing final revisions on my book, I was able to look up books that I normally would have had to have gone to one of just a very few libraries that would have a copy of this. And it just happened to be that Google Books had digitized it. And I said, oh, this is great. You know, it saved me a whole trip to go check some reference in some obscure Victorian book. And then, you know, there are cases of search or federated search of being able to, for instance, in another database that I used for my research, but Cornell houses a distributed, I think along with University of Michigan and a couple of other libraries, a federated search of mathematics books that have been digitized. So I work in the history of mathematics. This is great. I'm able to all of a sudden search across sites and find things that I might not have found otherwise. So I think there needs to be some use cases, I think, foregrounded that someone could say, ah, you know, that's really what it's about. If we have those, you know, these technologies, they don't need to hear about the specific, you know, acronyms like OAI, PMH, which is what, you know, Cornell uses. So, you know, this federated search technology, they don't need to know about that, but they need to know, oh, this is helping my research in this specific way. I think really you'd start to see some light bulbs go on over people's heads. The other thing I wanted to ask you about, Dan, is without asking you to reveal the secrets of Princeton, was there much discussion about the nature of this project as being scholarly, meaning therefore exclusive of the public? Because, you know, a lot of what we've been talking about lately is in this Web 2.0 world that there's this melding of expertise and the crowd and to produce some kind of new information. I mean, was there much discussion of that? Yeah, I think there was. And I think, you know, the agreement that a lot of people came to on this is that I think a lot of what's been missing in Web 2.0 tools is a lack of kind of coming at it from a scholarly perspective. I think inevitably, you know, when we talk about open standards and tools that interoperate, we are talking about, you know, tools that inevitably will be picked up by, you know, those unwashed masses outside of the ivory tower. But I think what people were talking about was the way in which we think about these sort of infrastructural tools and standards as scholars is a little bit different than what's going on outside of academia. Let me just give you one quick example that I was sort of promoting. You think about the difference between Delicious, which I'm sure a lot of our users use, which is the, or a lot of our listeners use, which is the social bookmarking tool. And Delicious, right, allows you to bookmark these web pages. And what is it concerned with? It's concerned with the URL. That's the basic currency of a tool like Delicious. But for the Zotero project, here at the center, we focused on, you know, what is our unit? It's the actual semantic object of the book or the article that's mentioned on the web page. So we've really focused on that. And when you focus on that, you know, because that's what we care about as scholars, right? We don't care about some long string of, you know, that you would see in the URL. But we care about, you know, okay, this page on that library is about this letter or this article. And if I find it in my library and you find it in your library, we want to be able to talk about that same article. It's the article we care about, not the web page. And so that emphasis ends a scholarly tool on objects like a book or an article rather than on the URL, which is the currency of the web and a lot of Web 2.0 tools, that really changes the way the tool works. And so when we launch the Zotero server, we're going to be having, you know, people are going to be exchanging information about these objects rather than web pages. And I think that opens up a whole range of possibilities, which absolutely will be, I think, of interest to people outside of the academy, but is very different than, say, what's going on right now with Delicious. I think there's a, you know, one of the interesting things, I think, when you have these conversations, a term that comes up a lot is something like open standards. And I think there's almost an inherent conflict or an inherent difficulty in that phrase, open standards. Things like all the Web 2.0 technologies like YouTube and Delicious and all of these things, they're very open, but they're not at all standardized. And oftentimes the things that are very standardized are very closed and underused because they require a certain amount of rigor. I mean, the reason people use delicious is it's so easy to use. You know, you can tag something in a second, whereas even with something like Zotero, it takes a little more work. And I think scholars are willing to do that kind of work, but you're always then limiting yourself to kind of a smaller community. So there's kind of this tension between openness and standardization. And for interoperability, you really need both of those things, but it's hard to get both. Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi biweekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Here it goes. This is Digital Campus number two for March 21st, 2007. The old and the YouTube. I'm Dan Cohen, this week's host. Well, it's great to be back once again for our second podcast. We made it to podcast number two. I guess that's a sign of modest success here in the podcast world. And I think one of the things that's been great about it is, you know, Mills and Tom are here with me again. Actually, maybe we should do introductions again. I'm Dan Cohen. And with me are the regulars, Tom Scheinfeld from foundhistory.org. Hey, Tom. Hey, Dan. And Mills Kelly from edwired.org. Hey, Mills. Hey, Dan. How are you today? Pretty good. You just got back from Cambodia. That's right. Yeah, quite a week in Cambodia. Wow. We'll have to maybe hear a little bit about that and whether you encountered any technology other than very basic ones there. As I was saying, I think one of the things we've learned here on the podcast is, and one of the things I guess we like to do at the Center for History and New Media is learn by doing. We do some theorizing, but I think doing and just trying out this podcast has been a good learning experience for us. So hopefully we'll get even more proficient at it. And I think we're learning a little bit about the genre as well. And hopefully through some more feedback from our listeners, we can buff up this podcast to a nice shine. Where we wanted to start today was to actually look back at last week a little bit. Usually we start with our news roundup, and we had so much news actually about our featured story from last week on Wikipedia. And actually, speaking of lessons from doing, I guess one of the things we learned from last week is we probably shouldn't talk about Windows Vista anytime soon again. Don't you think, Tom and Mosk? I think definitely. We got some fairly serious criticism about our long talk about Vista. I think personally it was necessary to get that over with, and I'm glad we did in the first show, but we promised no more Vista for at least a couple of weeks. Must have a lot of Mac users out there. But yes, Vista hiatus. No more Vista for a little while on this podcast. So really the story that took off, it was already taking off when we discussed it a couple of weeks ago, but the Wikipedia story, boy, has there been a lot of news over the last couple of weeks. And actually, I think a lot of it feeds right into our discussion, particularly what I think Mills was saying about learning from Wikipedia. Mills, did you see the op-ed in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Kathy Davidson? I think she made a lot of the same points that you did. I did. I looked at that and I think she and I are basically in agreement on this issue and that how important it is that we teach our students how to use this resource appropriately. I was reminded of it again when I was in Cambodia because I was working at the National Teachers Training College and showing these folks there who were high school teachers in training, showing them how Wikipedia works. And they all were using Wikipedia as a source for information, both in English and in Khmer, but they had no idea that anyone could edit the entries and were, I have to say, quite surprised to find out that things could be changed so simply. So it just reinforced for me, yet again, why it's so important to teach people how to use this resource that they're using anyway. I hadn't thought about that, but as radical as Wikipedia is for Americans or American students, it must be even odder, I suppose, in countries that have had autocratic forms of government and information ministries and things like that to democratically be able to edit a source must seem very bizarre. What did the students make of it? It did seem really bizarre to them, both for the reasons that you cited, but also because they're in some ways so new to thinking critically about technology resources at all. I mean, they're still in the adoption stage and the very rapid adoption stage. And so anything that they could find online was great. And they're so starved for information resources generally that anything they could find was a wonderful resource for them to use. And so then to find out that it was a malleable resource was really a shocker. How many entries are in Chimera? It was only about 215. There's a real problem for Chimera usage on the Internet, and that is that they have this really funky character set in their really funky script which is hard to render on screen and so that's one problem the other problem was that they didn't know that that there actually was a Khmer option in Wikipedia because the choice is instead of en.wikipedia.org for English it's KM which they never thought so they never thought to look under because they're dumb the Cambodian domains are KH. So for some strange reason, Wikipedia has picked KM as its Cambodian language domain. And so it didn't even occur to them to look under that. That's fascinating. So they were using the English language version only. And did you have them edit some of the entries? I did. I had them edit one of the entries on Cambodian history, and they were nervous about it. They felt a little strange changing information on the Internet, but at the same time they got fairly excited about it and could see the possibilities of assigning something like this to their students. There are real issues of connectivity in Cambodia because an hour online in an internet cafe, I mean almost nobody has connection at home, but an hour online in an internet cafe works out to about 50 cents, which to us doesn't seem like a lot, but the average wage in Cambodia is about a dollar a day, so it's a pretty significant connection charge for the average person. Right. Wow. Sounds like a fascinating trip. And you went out into the countryside as well, and I assume there was not ubiquitous Wi-Fi in your Angkor Wat or anything like that. No, no. They don't have a hotspot on top of Angkor Wat? Not yet. Not yet. However, the tourist concession in Angkor Wat has been sold to, it's either a Japanese or a Korean company. I can't remember which now. And so before long, they probably will, given that 2 million tourists a year are now coming to Angkor Wat. And there are five-star resorts on the road to get there. So it's undergoing quite a transformation. Wow. You know, it's interesting. I think this Wikipedia story has really come out of the, you know, sort of scholarly blog community and really hit the mainstream press. It's sort of taken off. Just in the past couple of weeks, I think, we at CHNM have been contacted by several mainstream media outlets and documentary filmmakers and other kinds of people interested in this Wikipedia controversy. And I'm starting to see more and more in the circuits in the New York Times and other sort outlets. Something about the Middlebury story seems to have caught fire in the mainstream press. I think that's right. I think the mainstream press also, which by the way I happen to like quite a bit, the angle of the story that they like and the reason they like calling academics like us is they want to play up some kind of tension between those who are credentialed and have PhDs and the riffraff of this democracy of people that are contributing to Wikipedia. And I thought it really, you know, another interesting story that played into this over the last week or two since our last podcast was this very prominent contributor to Wikipedia, S.J., who claimed to be a tenured professor of theology, I believe. And some people did some snooping into his life. And, of course, he was using this credentialing of being a professor to gain reputation within the Wikipedia community. And a lot of people deferred to him. And then it turned out, of course, that he's a 24-year-old non-tenured, non-professor. And initially, Jimbo Wales, the head of Wikipedia, sort of defended SJ and the idea of online identities and pointed out how much he had done to build Wikipedia. But then he sort of, after a bunch of criticism in the press, backed away from that position and didn't like what SJ had done, publicly declared that. And SJ actually ended up resigning from the project.
We try not to be snooty about it. On the other hand, we know that there are situations where it can come in handy just from a reputational point of view even though we might not know as much as, let's say, a very committed amateur. Tom, you've written about this on your blog, but there are professors who study the Civil War who don't know, say, as much about a specific Civil War battle as a number of amateurs in our state of Virginia. Yeah, sure. I think it raises the issue of authority and how authority differs online than what authority is in the academic context. This guy, S.J., he carried with him all the authority of a tenured professor on Wikipedia, in part because he was calling himself a tenured professor, but mostly because he had contributed so much to the project, which led Jimmy Wales to defend him initially. And I think this is a tension that, you know, when we got into this last week, that our students deal with. Our students come to sources and they see, I think they do recognize authority when they see it. It's just that the authority in these different contexts can differ. And I think it's our job just to teach them how it differs and what authority means. Right. I certainly wouldn't disparage authority. It's something we trade in every day. And I wouldn't want to get in front of a class and just have it be complete anarchy. But it does, I think, raise a lot of interesting questions about what it means to be credentialed and what role that might play. And I think we mentioned this Citizendium project that Larry Sanger is doing, one of the original Wikipedia founders, who is putting in the foreground people's credentials and checking on them. It'll be interesting to see if that makes any difference to the way it's constructed and then also the way it's used as well. There was some lighter news, of course, about Wikipedia. Sinbad was declared dead over the weekend. He was dead for a whole week, wasn't he? Was it a whole week? I guess his daughter called him and said, just check down Wikipedia, it says you're dead. And he said on the phone to her that that wasn't actually the case. I suppose it's not entirely false. I mean, his career has been dead since the early 90s, I think. That's right. Maybe it was some kind of metaphorical entry. It does remind me of the very hilarious Onion headline from last year where Onion had a bold face on the front page. Onion, of course, being the satirical newspaper that comes out of Wisconsin. And they had across the front page, Wikipedia celebrates 750 years of American independence. I think that was their July 4th headline. And as historians, it gives you a good chuckle here and there. But I think those are stories, again, that mainstream press loves to pick up on. And of course, Wikipedia is littered with errors. But I think what we were discussing last week is the process of it. And I think, Mills, that's what you pointed out and what Kathy Davidson pointed out in the Chronicle. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And I wish we could say that the books in our library written by reputable scholars with PhDs weren't also littered with errors. But as we know, people make mistakes now. But I think I'd like to point out that the real issue here in many ways in the public discussion is about this tension between those with authority and those who don't have it kind of credentialed yet. Right, right. Well, it certainly feeds into another story that we saw from the last week. South by Southwest was over the weekend, and I think it ended on Monday. And several of the people from the Center for History and New Media actually went, and we were alerted to what looks like one of these bear-baiting panels called Out of Control, Does Education Matter Anymore? Boy, I wish they had a podcast of this panel at South by Southwest, but the description says, do social networking tools eliminate the role of faculty and other authoritative sources? Are courses dead? Have they been replaced by referential webs and empowering wikis? Or do tools threaten the chaotic yellow learning environment where the most connected claim is given the most credence. Wow. That featured some people from UT, Adobe, and Monterey Institute for Technology and Education. Has anyone heard of, did anyone report back about this? Well, from the center, one of the people who went was Jeremy Boggs over at cleoweb.org. And, you know, Jeremy thought it was an interesting discussion, but I think it was more smoke than fire. I think there was a lot of talk, I understand, about the industrial model of education represented by the university versus the new Web 2.0 model of education represented by social networking sites and Wikipedia and social recommendation systems like Delicious. And the idea was that instead of having a set curriculum, a college major with required courses, wouldn't it be better to have students recommend to each other courses, books, materials, learning modules, and kind of fashion their own curricula out of those pieces? And it does. It raises this authority and one of the one of the comments Jeremy Boggs had was if students are allowed just purely to choose their their own their own courses if they're allowed totally to go in their own directions and and and just choose courses and choose choose learning learning tracks based on based on the recommendations of their peers, they'd never learn anything about history. No one would ever choose a history course. Most students in our university and elsewhere are required to take certain humanities courses and some of them, few of them, but some of them, their interest is sparked enough to continue onto a major and possibly a graduate degree. The question with education is whether you can have a completely unmediated curriculum, and it's unclear whether that's possible. And I think they raise a really interesting point, which is about the tension between our desire to control what our students learn and our students' right or need to control their own choice of learning. And as long as we've decided that we have this model of the three-credit course and you need 120 credits to graduate with a bachelor's degree, and I'm still not sure who decided it had to be 120 credits, but that's a pretty standard model. As long as we have that kind of model, then students are really boxed into what constitutes a three-credit course, and faculty members are boxed into what could be a three credit course worth of material. My own take on this is that I think that we're going to end up in a place of compromise between these two poles, one where the faculty are entirely in charge of what students can and can't learn and one where the students are totally in charge, where I think we'll have sort of a mixed curriculum of a set series of courses that you have to have if you plan on going into a career in X. If you're going to be a civil engineer, you have to know certain things about structural tolerances and that sort of thing. If you're going to be a nurse, you have to know that human beings have two kidneys and one liver and not the reverse. Because in these fields, there are licensing exams, and we know what students have to know in order to pass those licensing exams. If you're going to be a poet or a historian, there is no licensing exam, and so it matters a lot less what the student has to know or doesn't have to know. I mean, there's no harm in a way if a student chooses to focus her work almost entirely on American history or almost entirely on African history because, you know, that's a choice and nobody's going to die as a result of that choice. So I think ultimately where we're going to end up is something where there's some kind of maybe 60 to 70 credits worth of fairly stipulated or expected work done by students and then a lot of free-form education after that. I kind of think that's where we're going to end up in 15 years or so. I think some of these questions are kind of false questions in that a lot of these things were decided by the American educational system centuries ago or certainly decades ago. If you look at the standard college curriculum for an American college student, there's a lot of choice in it. I mean, compared to European systems where you're on a set, if you're a history major, you're on a set course, you take, you read a set of books, you don't have much choice in what those are. You take standard exams, everybody takes the same exam no matter what courses or lectures they've attended. Whereas in the American system, for an undergraduate, you know, maybe half of your credits are required, but the rest are, you know, sort of liberally dispersed throughout the disciplines, and there actually is a lot of choice in the American system.
Well, I think choice of materials and courses is, in fact, part of our featured story that's coming up. So why don't we move to that right now? Well, one of the resources that is making its way into the classroom, I suppose whether faculty like it or not, is YouTube. And I think there's been a lot of news recently that we've been discussing about YouTube. Obviously the biggest news, I suppose, in the newspapers is Viacom suing YouTube for a billion dollars. But in a sort of lesser story, but I think one that we found very interesting is BBC's big deal with YouTube to provide a lot of content. And I think BBC has really been in the forefront of doing a lot of these online deals. And what's really interesting is just they have this incredible back catalog, which as historians and humanists, we find really interesting. I mean, there's so many clips from the 50s and 60s and 70s that, from BBC's back catalog, that actually they're already making available in other forms, streaming formats, but evidently they are going to put some material on YouTube, although I believe initially it's going to be more of a promotional, more promotional content. And Mills, you've spoken a little bit about this. In fact, you've used YouTube quite a bit in your classes. And I thought for our featured story, the three of us wanted to discuss a little bit about how you use video on the internet for teaching and what something like YouTube, what kind of impact does YouTube have in a teaching environment? So Mills, how did you find YouTube and why did you start using it and what are you doing now with it? Well, it's very interesting how I ended up using it in my class because about a year ago we got a grant here at the Center to start creating a website on the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 and this was right around the same time that YouTube was becoming really hot and trendy. Have you met them? Or knew them? and they had a lot of music videos. Heavy metal or new music? You know, I have to say I skimmed over it, so I can't tell you what their style is because I was looking for other things. I should probably go back and find out. But right away then I started seeing video clips from the Berlin Wall being torn down and a variety of other things. But what really got me excited as a historian was a particular historical video which I had taught about the events many times in my classes, but I'd never actually seen it live on video. And this is Nicolae Ceausescu's last speech in front of the Romanian people in December of 1989 when everything's coming apart for the communists in Eastern Europe and Ceausescu returns from a foreign trip. If you're a dictator, you should never go out of the country right when things are coming apart, but he made this mistake and then came back. And he gives this speech where he assembles the people of Bucharest in the main square and they know how to do this because they've been doing it for 30 years. They know where they're supposed to stand and they know when they're supposed to applaud and when to wave their flags and their banners and it's very ritualized. And he's up on a balcony above the crowd and he starts speaking and he gets just about a minute and a half into the speech and instead of the crowd cheering, you hear the catcalls coming from below and you see him him falter and look out at the crowd, and he's not sure what to do, because in his whole career as the head of the Communist Party in Romania, this has never happened to him before. And you see this indecision on his face, and then you see the Securitate agent, who looks like he's right out of central casting, come up behind Ceausescucu and whisper something in his ear and then leave through the doors behind the communist leader. And then all of a sudden the camera moves away and then you hear chaos from below and you hear Ceausescu shouting at the people to listen up. And it's right there. That's the moment when the Romanian regime starts to collapse. Well, I've read about this and I've taught about and all of a sudden, there it was on my computer screen, and I was watching it. It was a clip from Romanian state television. So for me, it was a really exciting moment to actually see this footage. So based on that, then I started scrolling around in YouTube and found all kinds of historical video that we can use in our classes. Just to give you an idea, I did a quick count yesterday on Tiananmen Square, also from 1989, there are 321 individual videos. Many of these are duplicates of the same thing, but still there are more than several hundred. On the collapse of the Berlin Wall, 371. Malcolm X speaking, 177. Martin Luther King speaking, 1,060. So, you know, there's an incredible wealth of historical resources in the YouTube database. And interestingly, I checked Metacafe, the big competitor for YouTube now, and there's nothing. Using these same searches, I found nothing. Mills, how much of this stuff is copyright? I mean, it's hard to tell sometimes on YouTube, but sometimes it's easy. I mean, how much, like, what's the proportion of the 1989 stuff that is, that's probably, should be restricted? I'd say a fairly small amount because the 1989 stuff a lot of it is either from East European state television broadcasts and so since it's state television then it's a public document or it's amateur video and especially a lot of the Berlin Wall stuff is people's video shot with their old VHS cameras and then converted to digital video and put into YouTube. The Malcolm X, Martin Luther King stuff that I cited is, a lot of that is probably copyrighted in the sense that it comes from news broadcasts from the major networks, that kind of thing. There's always been a problem with Martin Luther King video, especially the Eye of a Dream speech. So it seems like there's, you know, probably some problems with other. Yeah, probably in a gray area just because this estate owns a lot of these speeches, Martin Luther King's estate. But it does raise the question of how students today are very, they're very visual and they're used to video in a way that I suppose we aren't and I think it does have this visceral impact. Unfortunately I teach the 19th century mostly and so there's not a lot of video from the 19th century up on YouTube that I can find. But I think people tend to think of YouTube as just, you know, pranks and cats falling off of TVs and things like that. But there is this just hidden treasure trove of historical material that I had no idea, Mills, before you said that, that there was that much up there. Yeah, and, you know, there are some problems with finding it because YouTube catalogs things according to the date that they were uploaded, not according to the date they were created. And so it's often very difficult to know when a particular video clip was created unless the person who uploads it includes that kind of meta information. The other thing I would say is... Do people tag them with that information? Only a few. Only a few. It's pretty rare for that to happen. But the other thing that I think is very useful as a teaching tool is that when you show your students these... When I show them in class, I'll show them a clip from something, and then I'll point out that I'm taking this from YouTube, and underneath the video there is a discussion from the general public about this video. And so this is a way of thinking about how people in the general public respond to historical artifacts. And so it's not just here's the video, but also here's how the public or some tiny percentage of the public perceives that artifact. So that's also, I think, a useful teaching tool. You know, I think it's... Sorry, go ahead. No, no, you go. The other thing I was going to say is that I had a really interesting experience showing a clip from the Nuremberg Tribunal back last semester. And this is, it was from a newsreel done by the American government. And it's kind of classic newsreel footage of something like Nuremberg, you know, the, the, the voiceover sounding like the voice of God and, you know, the Nazi war criminals brought to justice before the world and, and all that sort of thing. And there's this moment in the, in the clip that I showed where the, the accused Nazis march from the entrance into the dock, and there is this kind of lame 1940s filler music that's used during that procession into the dock by the Nazis.
So I stopped the video and said, well, let's talk about that for a minute. Why do you think that's funny? And one of them said, well, that's just ridiculous music to put in something so serious. You should change that. And I said, what do you mean? And he said, you should strip out that sound and put in something more appropriate, like Mozart's Requiem. And then one of the other students piped up and said, or the Jaws music. And so we had kind of a laugh about what this would be like, and I said, but then it wouldn't be the historical artifact anymore. And the student who raised his hand originally said, yes, but it would be better. And I said, yes, but it wouldn't be the same. And he said, I know. It would be better. And so we had this, I think, very entertaining discussion about what does it mean to change a historical artifact? And I couldn't get them off the point that it would be better. It was like we were talking about two different things. There was a real disconnect there. I mean, this is a case where, from our discussion from last week about Wikipedia, I mean, you know, you've been advocating the students get in there and sort of correct things. And, you know, that's what they're used to is this, you know, culture of the mashup and remixing. And so that's, I suppose, you know, one of their initial reactions is let's make this better, let's mix it up with something else and in this case, that's something that clearly degrades the actual content. I mean, it also makes me wonder, maybe they're visually literate but maybe using visual resources that don't have the kind of finish or polish that MTV has, that it, in a sense, will turn them off more than a document, than a text, because it doesn't seem valid to them. Is that a possibility? I think it depends on, I think it's possible. I think it also depends on the class. Now, I was showing this Nuremberg clip in a general education Western Civ course, and so none of these students were planning to be history majors. I think I might have had a very different discussion with a room full of history majors. So, I think so I think it's interesting that all of us have been at various points surprised to find so much historical material on YouTube because it seems from my surfing of the amateur history web, amateurs have been using YouTube really since its inception as a source for historical material and they've been participating in that visual remix culture by creating historical documents, by producing historical pieces on their blogs, by embedding feeds from YouTube, doing things like presenting their top ten favorite moments in TV news with clips of Huntley and Brinkley and Walter Cronkite and various other famous moments in TV news, or they've been producing the top 500 music videos of all time, doing those kinds of things. Almost, you know, really doing some historical research, going out, finding primary sources, what for them are primary sources on YouTube, providing commentary, contextualization, doing comparisons and contrasts, really doing the kinds of things that professional historians do, but doing it with these amateur resources, things that were uploaded by amateurs, tend to be very, you know, kind of pop culture resources, the things they find on YouTube, but doing some fairly interesting work. And I think it's just kind of interesting that we in the professional context have been sort of slow to take up YouTube as a resource for teaching and learning and doing history when the amateur community really latched onto it very, very quickly. Well, I wonder if we have some legacy from our own education. I mean, I remember in high school the social studies hour that we had a film was, you know was time to take a small nap or do something else. I never remember it being exciting or visually interesting. Probably the most interesting films were in physics classes where they had those fantastic 1950s and 60s films that were very, in ways to teach physics, but the history films were utterly boring. And I think some of this stuff is much more exciting and has the potential to bring video back into the classroom in, you know, K-12 and also college in ways that, you know, we didn't have before. I also think that the length is important, you know, the ability to show a number of smaller clips rather than making a class watch an hour and a half documentary where they're inevitably going to sort of phase out at some point. I think that's very interesting. You can almost use a YouTube video clip, it sounds to me, and I actually haven't done it yet, but it sounds like you can use it in the same way you'd use a short reading or some kind of smaller assignment as part of a syllabus well I think the big difference is that is that you know YouTube video versus a film strip that you we would have seen in high school or or or a videotape that we would have seen in high school I mean YouTube is really a kind of lean forward video experience whereas the film strip or the or the or the or the or the movie that we would have seen in high school. I mean, YouTube is really a kind of lean forward video experience, whereas the film strip or the movie that we would have seen was a kind of lean back experience. It's an active video experience in the way that Mills was talking about. You know, students know that they can rip out the video from the flash player on YouTube and change the music. They know that they can take the embed code and dump it onto their blog and mash it up with different videos to create a kind of historical document. You know, it's active versus passive video, and I think that's the real big difference. And I think it's also worth remembering that the mashup culture that Dan was talking about before is not really all that new. We like to talk about it as though it's new, but, you know, Matthew Brady mashed up all those photographs of the Civil War. And, you know, he moved the bodies all around and moved the rifles and that to get just the shot that he wanted. So, you know, those are, and the National Archives has done a pretty good piece on their website, or the Library of Congress has done a pretty good piece on their website about this, that those aren't accurate photographs in the sense that we like to claim material is accurate. They're mashups. Well, I suppose one of the reasons your students wanted to put the Jaws theme on that video is it's ominous to them. This is the music that they associate with something bad about to happen, like a hanging, for instance. And so they can't understand why there's sort of light, you know, coffee or tea time music twittering across this, you know, fairly serious newsreel. And so I think they're questing for some kind of, you know, greater authenticity to it in the same way that Brady was. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Yeah, and I think Mills is right too, that this is part of a longer tradition of scrapbooking and those kinds of activities, historical activities. And something like YouTube just makes it possible to do with digital video and makes it in some ways just a richer and more interesting experience. Well, I have a feeling we're going to be talking about YouTube quite a bit on this podcast. We'll leave it there for now, and I week. The way we like to end the podcast each week is by throwing out some links, some sites, some resources online that we found that we hope our audience will find interesting as well. Mills, what do you have this week? This week I want to talk about the Document Center of Cambodia. This comes out of my experience this week traveling there. The Documentation Center of Cambodia, which is dccam.org, is a joint project between the Yale University and the group of Cambodian scholars. And it's an online archive from the Khmer Rouge period, the Killing Fields period in Cambodian history. And not only is it thousands of primary sources, but increasingly they're geolocating all those sources. The maps are not available yet, but they're supposed to be sometime later this year. And so at that point, it's going to be a really fabulous GIS application as well. It's really a great online archive. Wow. Sounds very powerful too, especially as they start plotting these things and just, again, speaking of visceral reactions, just seeing all those people and data about it sounds very powerful. Yes. Tom, what do you have this week? I've actually got another podcast I'd like to recommend to people. It's called 12 Byzantine Rulers, and you can find it, it has a horrible URL, at www.anders.com slash lectures slash Lars Bronworth slash 12 Byzantine Rulers.
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi-weekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Fear itself! This is Digital Campus number 23 for the for History and New Media at George Mason University. I'm Dan Cohen, always found at dancohen.org and elsewhere. And as usual, with me are the other two hosts of the show, Tom Scheinfeld from foundhistory.org. Hi, Tom. Hi, Dan. And Mills Kelly from edwired.org. Hi, Mills. Hi, Dan. Hey, congratulations, guys. We've made it a year in podcasting. And yeah, amazing to think. And we're going to have for our feature coming up, our feature segment in the middle of the program. We'll be discussing what we've learned over the past year and some of the things that we've, I think, done right and done wrong and could improve on and maybe ask for some help from our audience to fine-tune the show into our second year. So that'll be coming up in about 15 to 20 minutes. But as usual, we like to start with the news roundup. And it was a juicy week or a few weeks of news. We're a week late on this podcast because we had spring break last week. I guess an appropriate topic then since what was on the minds of everyone on campus was the launch of JuicyCampus.com, a new wiki site where students, faculty, and others can post anonymous things about other people. Tom, you've been tracking this story for us from the CHNM newsroom. Can you tell us a little bit more about this site and sort of what's going on there and your initial thoughts about it? Well, I should say to begin that I haven't been tracking it too closely because I think... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, if you go to this site, you will probably be almost immediately offended. Essentially, it's a place to post campus gossip. And it is, as the header says, totally 100% anonymous. So essentially, it's a place where I think it's mostly students. I don't know how many professors are actually using this, but mostly students can go and post rumors about their classmates. And it turns out to be an incredibly offensive thing. There's a lot of rumors about, you know, different students' sexual behaviors. There's a lot of stuff about, you know, who's the richest kid on campus, those kinds of things. And then there's some fairly, well, fairly sinister stuff, calling people out for various things that they've done and actually posting things like who are all the Jews on campus and trying to compile lists of certain ethnic and racial minorities on campus. So right now it's only open to a select few campuses. I guess, gratefully, George Mason, I don't think is one of them yet. But it's rolling out, and it seems really popular. I mean, I just logged onto the site in preparation for the podcast, and it took forever to load. So it must be getting lots of use. But really pretty scary. Yeah, I'm having trouble loading it too. Mills, what are your thoughts about the impact of this site if it really catches on on campus? I have to say, I don't think it's going to catch on for long. I think it'll be sort of one of those hype bubbles where lots of people will go and check it out. But it has no other use value other than just spreading gossip around where something like – it's not a social network. There's no secondary potential for it other than just being sort of titillating briefly. And plus, it's so hard for me to keep up with Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan that I have no time for this. Right. Yeah. Well, you know, it's interesting. I guess if we were to make this part of a trend, which is always dangerous to do, but, you know, it's coming along at the same time that Wikileaks.org has gotten a lot of press of, again, a kind of open, anonymous wiki like this. I guess this is more, now that I'm looking at it, it took forever to load, Tom. You're totally right. But this seems more like a message board. WikiLeaks is a place, for instance, that people have posted Scientology papers and some of those bank statements that got WikiLeaks in trouble a few weeks ago, all kinds of stuff that's posted there. It's purporting to be sort of under kind of a First Amendment, you know, airing of the dirty laundry from the corporate world or political world sort of thing. This is obviously a little bit more pernicious, and I think quite directly so. But, yeah, it seems hard to see how this doesn't have significant problems. But Mills, you brought up the social networking part. I mean, hasn't this been sort of going on just behind the scenes on Facebook in a kind of closed sort of way? I would guess. I mean, gossip has been popular since there has been print. So this is just digital print. And so, you know, I mean, I think it's just kind of a gossipy thing. And I think people will be titillated by it because they'll go and look at it and say, oh, my God, I can't believe somebody actually did that. But I also think certain students will cross the line and they'll find that their anonymity online is not what they think that it is. Just because they are able to post things quote-unquote anonymously does not mean that a search warrant won't track back to them. And so if they post something that is threatening to someone else or could lead to physical harm to someone else, they're going to find a police officer showing up at their door one day with a warrant. And in fact, that happened. I think there was just this week, a student was arrested based on something he had posted on, I can't remember which campus he was on, but arrested based on something he had posted at Juicy Campus, something threatening. And they were found by IP address or something like that? I assume so. There wasn't much information in the story I read. I mean, unless people are using high-end encryption techniques and routing their messages through various anonymous hacker servers, they're awfully easy to track back. Right, right. Well, I guess we'll keep tracking this site, but it certainly has gotten a lot of free press, including, alas, on our podcast. Well, we'll continue on the legal news roundup here. Speaking of, a student expelled for participating in a Facebook study group. I actually had a post on my blog a few months ago saying that study groups might be actually a good way to use Facebook. Mills, you were tracking this story for us. What happened here, and why was this student expelled? Well, you know, he read your blog. He thought, wow, what a great idea. I'll do it, and now I got kicked out of school, so my lawyers are going to be calling you soon. Right, right. Shouldn't have given my web address at the start of this podcast. Yeah. The case here, he was a freshman computer science student at the University of Toronto, and he created online study groups through Facebook for students in the class that they were taking. And so did essentially, as far as I can tell, did essentially what you were proposing in your blog post. And the university decided that this was aiding and abetting cheating and plagiarism and kicked him out. He subsequently had a hearing with an academic panel, you know, a faculty panel. And the most recent news, he came out of that meeting with his family saying, you know, I'm confident that that went well and I think things are all going to work out. So we'll see. But for me, from my perspective, what's more interesting is a sort of a bigger picture is here you have sort of two cultures clashing. One, the, I mean, faculty members constantly encourage students to form study groups. It's one of the best things you can do for your students, especially in a really hard class, is to get them together, working collaboratively to try to figure out difficult material. That sort of thing is encouraged. Plagiarism and cheating, obviously, are not. And so here a student comes along and takes something that we in the academy have been encouraging for a very long time, which is the creation of study groups and says, ah, here's a perfect platform for doing this. And so they form study groups and he was the one who facilitated all of this.
I mean, I don't know all of the details, so I can't pronounce whether he was guilty or innocent on this, but it's a case of, I think, a younger generation of students taking the platform, which they're very confident with and very comfortable with, and using it to do something that we want them to do, which is work collaboratively. And so the university is now trying to figure out how to match their academic standards up with this platform. Right. I mean, I did cover, there is a Facebook application called Study Groups, yes. copies as, you know, in the time-honored way of our generation and then hand out those copies. Or, you know, in the good old days, you could actually hire a transcriptionist to do it for you. But this is just – so if, in fact, he was using Facebook to facilitate cheating, well, that's one thing. If he was using Facebook to create study groups to facilitate collaborative work, well, that's a whole different thing. Right, right. Right. I think it's all about the intent. People can get together in a group and they can get together in a group for the purpose of cheating or they can get together in a group for the purpose of learning. And I think depending on their intent, I think that's what you need to look at when you're litigating or investigating these kinds of things. Well, it seems to be the intent of Apple to put iPhones in every student's pocket by the fall. And we've been looking here at the first campus, actually, to announce that they're going to deploy, I guess you have a choice of either the iPhone or the iPod Touch, which, course is the sort of iPod relative of the iPhone. It's got the same interface with those little icons, and it's got the multi-touch interface. So the first university to deploy these is Abilene Christian University, not probably the university you might think would be the first up, but Apple also seems to be talking to Stanford and MIT, Yale and Harvard about joining ACU in being a kind of iPod campus. And this also seems to be related to the launch of the iPhone SDK or Software Developers Kit, that clearly there's going to be educational applications on the iPhone and for the iPod touch as well that we'll see out by the fall. And I guess this is precisely what we were predicting at the end of last year, Tom and Mills, right? That mobile will be big. And this seems to be part of the story. What do you think the potential here is for this? And Mills, does this fulfill your vision of having a device in everyone's pocket on campus that can do all kinds of things based on location and in the classroom as well? I think it does. I mean, I think it creates the possibility of faculty members designing all sorts of interesting interactive activities where if there's a level playing field, all the students having the same technology access, then Thank you. is maybe they'll listen to the podcast and call me up. But I've already come up with a couple of really good ways of porting this sort of thing over into a history class. So much of the sort of classroom response technology work that's done right now is more in the sciences and mathematics where kind of limited response questioning is more available, multiple choice tests, that sort of thing. But, you know, I've come up with ways of doing it in the history class too. And so if everybody did have something really exciting development. And I have to say I'm really pleased that it started with a really resource-poor institution rather than Stanford or Harvard or someplace that can afford to pay for this themselves. Much better that it's starting in a place that doesn't have that kind of money to throw around. That's a great point. Tom, what's your thoughts on this program? I think it's a great program, and I'm happy that Apple has opened up the iPhone SDK. I should say that straight out. I think it is going to be a great platform, and I think we are in for a year or a couple years of some really fantastic experiments. At the same time, I think I should say that there are some problems with the way that Apple has opened up the iPhone to developers. It seems that all of the applications that you're going to be able to download for the iPhone are going to have to be downloaded through the iTunes Music Store, which sort of begs the question, does that mean you have to pay for everything? Now, you can get podcasts like ours through the iTunes Music Store, and you don't have to pay for them. The question is, is Apple going to allow free applications to be downloaded through the Music Store? And that's, I don't think, clear. Yeah, no, I think they are going to allow free applications. I mean, the applications developers will have to pay a fee to become a registered developer. And I think at the low end, that fee is $99. They will allow for the free applications. I think they do have to go through a vetting process. Right, right. They want to make sure that you're not going to run malicious code. So, yeah, the details on the SDK are pretty interesting. And I think in an odd way, Tom, I also was worried about some of the conditions there as well. I mean, you know, it would be nice to, for instance, give my students an application directly rather than have to upload it to the entire world. Right. On the other hand, I think there are some things that commercial developers are annoyed with with the SDK that actually might be great for education. And the number one thing that I saw, which was interesting, is that iPhone applications can't run in the background. That is, you have to sort of go into an application. So if you're on a phone call or something like that, you're leaving that to go into the application. The application runs, and to take a phone call or to text message, you actually have to leave the application completely. And in that way, it may be a way to sort of keep the attention of the students who won't be text messaging. I mean, if you, Mills, for instance, some of the applications that you've spelled out on your blog and in other places of, you know, for instance, the clicker kind of application. That means that in an iPhone or iPod Touch application, a student would have to go into, let's say, the History 101 application and kind of stay in there for the class if you have an exercise in that environment where, let's say, they were looking at historic photographs and had to vote on the authenticity of one of those photographs on the specific one that's coming to their phone, they won't be able to so easily quit that application and do other things on the iPod Touch at the same time. So maybe there's a silver lining here in the kind of restrictions that Apple set up. Well, I think that's something that cuts both ways on the one hand, as you were describing it, I was thinking, I'm okay with that because then they can't also be playing solitaire or text messaging their friends or whatever. On the other hand, it means that they may have difficulty then flipping over to the Library of Congress website and doing some quick research to answer questions. I'm just going to say, I just have to see how it's going to play out. Yeah, and I think the other thing to mention is that the way I understand it is that the phone trumps everything. So that if you get a phone call, the phone rings and it closes your application. Because it's a phone. Because it's a phone. And that's what Apple's trying to do with only allowing you to run really one application at a time is to preserve the user experience, right? They want it to be seamless. They don't want you to have five or six or 10 or 20 applications open at the same time and crash your phone. They want it to look and feel and work seamlessly. And the way they're doing that is to say, okay, you can only run one thing at a time. And as I understand it, the phone comes first. And so if students get a phone call during class and they've got their phone out, whatever application you're having them run will quit. And that could be a problem. But I think as Mill says, I think we're going to have to see how all this really plays out. Right. Well, this will definitely be the year of the mobile application along with that Apple iPhone SDK. There'll be the Android, the Google's effort to colonize the cell phone with applications as well. And we'll be on this for the entirety of 2008. As I said at the beginning of the podcast, this is our first anniversary of the podcast itself. Our 23rd podcast.
But not bad considering all the vacations and intercessions and spring break, so to only miss a few is not too bad. And we wanted to sort of take this first year anniversary podcast as a time to kind of do a little self-assessment, self-criticism, and also to encourage our audience to help us out and think about ways that we can improve the podcast by joining us online at digitalcampus.tv, where you'll be able to comment on some of the things we're going to talk about and make suggestions on this episode, episode 23. So let's dive right in. I guess, Tom and Mills, first of all, I guess we should discuss how we actually produce this podcast and whether it's adequate or not, something we question every week as Skype treats us well or treats us poorly. I guess that's where we should start is that we do use Skype exclusively. We tried, I think, on one of our early podcasts when we had Bill Turkle on to do this around a microphone at a table, and actually the sound quality was worse than doing it over the network, whether I'm at home or in my office. We seem to get pretty good sound out of Skype. We all have inexpensive headsets. I mean, the headset I'm using is a Plantronics USB headset that I bought for $40. And I guess the two of you, you're not using much more expensive mics. Is that right? No, I think I might even be using a cheaper one. I'm using a Logitech. And I think it was, you know, yeah, maybe $40, $39.95. Mills you as well. Yeah, I have the same one Tom has. And then we use a $10 program for recording calls in Skype, unsurprisingly named Call Recorder. And that's from ECAM, E-C-A-M-M. And you can get that program, and it just gives you a little record button. And we found actually, we looked at a bunch of different technologies for doing this, but we found this to be really a simple way of recording our calls and also adding in other guests because with Skype, we can do Skype out to a regular telephone and include people that way if they're not used to Skype. Or as was the case a couple of weeks ago in the To Read or Not to Read podcast number 21, we actually had our guests join us by Skype as well. So if people are technically literate, it's very easy to add in others. And, you know, we've gone up to a half dozen people with no problem at all or no degradation in Skype. So we record the three different segments. And then we actually then blend in the music, and Ken Albers, our manager and podcast technician, takes the raw audio that we record and masters it in Audacity and sort of lines up all the sound files and adds in the intro music, which was done, the intro and outro music, by our colleague in the history department, Mike O'Malley, who did it all in GarageBand with public domain sound files and some of his own bass lines that he's thrown in. And we should say these are all Mac programs. Right. Call Recorder and Audacity. Good point. Audacity might have a PC version, but we're working almost exclusively on Macs. That's right. I think Audacity is available on all three platforms. Linux as well. I think it is. It's an open source program. Yeah, that makes sense. So really, this is a very low-cost setup. I mean, it's a $100 setup, I guess, for everything all told. And then it just goes out. To publish these things is very easy now. We just have a WordPress blog that we host the site on, and you just attach the sound file to it and write a description, and it goes up to iTunes and to the rest of the universe over regular RSS. And we use FeedBurner to handle the podcast enclosures, which makes it very easy to not only to handle the podcast enclosure, the enclosure of the audio file, but also to track subscribers and let us know who's listening and who's having trouble and whatnot. Right. And I guess we should talk about our audience size a little bit. I think it's sort of helpful for our audience to know. We now have over 400 subscribers through our FeedBurner subscription rates. We've suspected that the subscription numbers are actually a bit higher simply because people don't have, for instance, iTunes open all the time. So we don't get a ping from everybody every day. It's probably 500, 550, something in that range. And then we have about 1,000 people listen to the podcast overall. So there's another set of audience, people who just, you know, come to the website, maybe sample one podcast or another and are not subscribers, at least at the current time. So we've been very happy with the growth of the audience. Thank you. And again, we're going to encourage everyone to criticize us this week on digitalcampus.tv and help us out. Well, I think that the main thing, you know, I was making some notes about this last night, and the thing that I think really makes a good podcast is one that stays on topic. And I think at the beginning of our year last year, we were not very good about that. We tended to wander all over the place. And as the years gone on, we've gotten a lot better about it. But I think that because we know each other very well, and for us, this is in some ways a conversation that we have in the office when we don't have our headsets on, we tend to wander around a little like we would in a normal conversation. And so the more disciplined podcasters can be about staying on topic, the better because people download a particular podcast. Those people who aren't subscribers, they download a podcast because they want to hear about that thing that the podcast cut line says it's about. And so then to have people wander off and go talk about something else can be intensely frustrating and you wonder why you did that. So I think one of the things we have to probably have gotten a little bit better at that. Tom, what would you say is the a little better in terms of staying on topic. I think we could all get a little better on one thing. One thing I know we tend to do is this. It tends to come up really quickly. Every two weeks, the podcast sort of sneaks up on me. Yeah. And I think probably we it would probably behoove us to do some more planning in advance. Maybe talk about what stories we're going to cover a couple days ahead of time, and actually really do some hard thinking on them, and maybe have a conversation amongst ourselves beforehand so we really sort of understand where we're all coming from beforehand. So maybe a little bit more preparation. In terms of the technical setup... Tom, if I could just interrupt you there for just a second. I guess we should also tell our audience that we've tried various methods of sort of sharing news stories with each other in advance of the podcast. And I guess we've now settled on using the share feature in Google Reader. Although Mills, I haven't gotten this set up with you, but you can click on a little share for items that look interesting and worthy of discussion in the news roundup, and they'll show up in the other host feeds as well. So that's something we've been using. Anyway, Tom, go ahead. Sorry about that. Yeah, yeah. And then in terms of the kind of technical setup, I do think there's more we could do with the sound. I've noticed occasionally that one thing that kind of bugs me, and we're going to see if we can fix it in Audacity, is our podcast seems a little quiet. When I'm listening to it in the car, I have to kind of jack my volume up all the way. And then I get interference, just kind of speaker hiss when I listen to it. So it's maybe quieter than other podcasts I listen to. And so I'd like to fix that. And then I do think that we could maybe, while I think our $100 setup has served us very, very well, I think we could maybe spend some time and investigate maybe a $200 setup that would give us a little bit richer, fuller sound and give our audience members maybe more enjoyable listening experience. So there are some things I think we can definitely improve. And as you said, Dan, I think I'd love to hear from audience members, even nitpicky things that we could do better because it is important to refine this. We're not professional broadcasters by any means. None of us have a background in radio or anything like that. And so there's tons we can learn.
Yeah, the sound is an interesting question because I think what we realized early on is that sound quality in a podcast is like design on a website. And there's this sort of unconscious aspect to it where people say, oh, this is something professional. You know, in the first split second, when you look at a website, you say, this is professional or this is amateur. And I think the same thing happens with sound. I mean, when you've got feedback, when you've got, you know, lower volume, when you're missing some bass levels in a podcast, the ear picks up on that really quickly and says, oh, this is really amateur-y. And so I think we probably could get better mics. What I sort of have trouble thinking about is, you know, would we want to move up to the full studio setup? I know we've got one, a media lab here at George Mason that's got, you know, soundproof booths and things like that. I think the problem is we've wanted this to be a somewhat casual podcast and that, you know, not scheduling it for an exact time. And also, we've generally done it where we're not looking right at each other. We're all in different places. And so it's hard. Yeah, exactly. Right. Um, and I've actually, oddly enough in the podcast where we have been looking at each other, I found it harder than, than when we're, um, maybe, maybe it's that I'm getting used to this setup, but I actually find a little bit easier, almost like talking on the phone, uh, when I'm not looking at someone. So, um, you you know, picking up those cues has been something that I think we've really had to learn the kind of, you know, when is a segment going to end? What's a wrap up? These sorts of things. And I've certainly struggled with trying to get transitions, you know, down as well. Well, the other question that comes up is, for me, along those lines is, increasingly, people are doing video podcasts, and whether we might want to consider that or not. I have to say, I don't watch a lot of video podcasts. Now, they do a video podcast, but in their case, there's really a purpose for video. They're doing hands-on tutorials of different web applications and other things. And so they're actually showing you something. They're moving around the screen with a cursor and doing work on the screen that needs to be seen, not heard. I don't know what my, you know, face, my ugly mug would add to our discussion, but maybe it would, and maybe people want to see that, and I think, you know, we'd be open to trying if people do. Well, for instance, I don't know if either of you have seen the website bloggingheads.com, but they get two bloggers who are then talking about a particular issue of the day that's come up in their blogs. And it's just done with whatever the webcam in their computer is. But you actually see the two people talking to each other, having their conversation. And so it can be a little more engaging as a result, but, doesn't do me any good when I'm driving. Right. That's right. Well, we could indeed have a video, which I think we could record out of Skype, as well as the sound files. And we could have people subscribe to either one. So we're going to ask again our audience to weigh in on this question. Do you actually want to see us, or can you get enough of the podcast just from the audio? Or would you really rather not? Right, exactly. So what are some of the things that we've done right? What do you think are some lessons that we've learned over the past year talk about. You know, we've tried not to just talk about the same issues over and over again. And so, I mean, we have some recurring things that we come back to, but we really have tried to have a diverse base of things to talk about. You know, we've tried not to just talk about the same issues over and over again. And so, I mean, we have some recurring things that we come back to, but we really have tried to think through having a kind of a list of, for our main feature segment, have, you know, a list of different things from podcast to podcast so that we are, you know, sometimes it's about what's happening in digital humanities. Sometimes it's about what's happening in the classroom. Sometimes it's what's happening with new technologies. We've tried to mix it up that way. And some podcasts I end up unsubscribing from. It's because they just beat the same horse over and over. Right. Yeah, I think one thing that we did right was, and I don't think we thought this out, but it turned out to be a good decision, is the format of the podcast. I think we have kind of a diverse format with the news roundup, then 20 minutes or so of the feature story, and then some picks of the week. I think that kind of breaks up the podcast and makes it seem a little, you know, it's still an hour, but it maybe goes by a little faster because there's some diversity there. So I think that was probably a good decision. Makes it easier, I think, for us as well. It kind of gives some pace and timing to the podcast. So that was a good decision. It'd be great to hear from our audience on that as well, and also about just the length in general. We generally end up around 50 minutes. Is that too long, too short? Do people want to hear more news, fewer news items? It would be good to know. But I agree with that, Tom, about the segmentation. Yeah, the other thing I guess I would like to hear from audience members, I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, really, is the introduction of guests. I think over the past six or so episodes, we've been having more and more guests on, and that's been fun for us. And I think we've had some great guests, and I think we can continue to bring on guests. I know we've had various requests from people to appear on the show, and we'd be happy to oblige if that's what our audience wants. What I don't know is whether people like – maybe people like to hear just us. Maybe it's comforting or something just to come back and tune in and hear Tom Mills and Dan. Or maybe the introduction of guests is a good thing. But we don't want to overdo the number of guests either. So what is the proper balance between having guests for the feature segment and just having the three of us? That's something I'd really like to know. Yeah, that's a great question to ask our audience. And, you know, from our end, it is a little bit difficult when we have guests, just in terms of the setup. The three of us now can all get on Skype and within five or ten minutes have all of our, we have to level up our sound so that we're, you know, not one person's too loud and no one's too weak and we try to get that all set up. But we now have that down to a science. When we add in other people, it gets very tricky as we try to figure out what the sound levels could be. I wonder also if from, you know, to ask our audience, are there topics that we've missed? I think one thing that I'm feeling, you know, that we're maybe not getting is enough feedback, I guess, from our audience in general. I thought we would be getting, you know, more responses. And I wonder if this is just a podcast thing, that when you read a blog post, you're right there, you can add a comment in. But a podcast, you're listening to it in the car or while jogging or in some other place, and you sort of have to remember to go to the website and comment. I'm sort of interested, or is it just not something that people want to comment on? I can never get a sense of why that is. I mean, I've had blog posts that have had, you know, 30 or 40 responses. And we've really only had maybe up to five or six responses on a maximum on our podcasts. So I'm wondering if, you know, our audience would like more interactive features. I mean, should we have, you know, easier ways for people to get in touch with us? Would people like to see our newsfeed as it's developing?
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi biweekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Here it goes. This is Digital Campus number four for April 18th, 2007. Welcome to The Social. I'm Dan Cohen, this week's host. Well, welcome to another episode of Digital Campus. We are here once again with the regulars. I'm Dan Cohen, as you just heard in the introduction. I can be found at dancohen.org. And we also have with us today Mills Kelly from edwired.org. Hey, Mills. Hey, Dan. How are you today? Good. How are you doing? I'm doing pretty well. A little cold, but pretty well. Yeah. We have a vicious April storm outside. And we also have with us Tom Scheinfeld from foundhistory.org. Hey, Tom. Hey, guys. How's it going? It's all right. It's all right. Good. Well, we have a lot to discuss today, so I'm going to jump right in and actually just lead off with a little bit of what happened last week, and Tom's going to talk a little bit about what he's experienced in terms of two different conferences. This has been a lot going on with things digital and academic and museum related, and I went to the meeting at the National Endowment for the Humanities, which brought together the Digital Humanities Centers. So these are centers like the Center for History and New Media at George Mason, where we work, centers at UVA, UCLA, USC, Brown, UIUC, and other places. I think there were about 17 centers that came together. It wasn't a comprehensive list of groups, and I think there'll be a larger meeting later on that brings together even more people who are working on the digital humanities, particularly those in centers like our own. But it was really nice to see everyone come together. I think it's the first time, really, that I've seen a lot of these different groups work together and come together to discuss challenges that we all face and what we do and talk to each other about specifically the ways that we go about doing our projects. So it was a really interesting meeting. And I just wanted to raise a few things with the panel today. First of all, I think it was a really interesting introduction from Bruce Cole, who's the chairman of the NEH. And he was talking about how technically illiterate he was, actually, when he began his tenure as the chairman of the NEH. And that really during his tenure, he's just seen this tremendous surge in interest in digital tools, digital collections. He mentioned that they've just digitized 30 million pages of historical newspapers and talked really about how there's this sort of whole new era of digital technology that's going to have a profound impact on the humanities. And so the first thing to say is just that this is really now, I think, on the map. And I think Tom and Mills, you're probably aware of this is, you know, we've known each other for many years and you can see really the difference between, say, five years ago in 2002 and where we are now in terms of just the visibility of this. And part of the visibility was that, in fact, the vice president of and chief Internet evangelist from Google was there, Vint Cerf. And actually, Dan Clancy, who's the head of the technical head of the Google Book Scanning Project or Google Book Search Project was there as well. So it really shows you really where things are and sort of reminded people that everything of value is not found through a Google search, which everyone giggled about. And of course, they're trying to change that by digitizing everything that they can get their hands on. And he actually came to sort of talk about a thousand year view, which I thought was pretty interesting. I mean, I don't really see, for instance, how the Google scans, which are not really that high quality, are going to really last for a thousand years. So I'm not quite sure where he was going with that. And actually, after his talk, he received a little bit of flack from certain parties in the audience who were saying that, you know, Google has its own best interests at heart and not those of libraries or universities. But anyway, and of course, Vint Cerf responded very comically to that by telling those people that he'd meet them in the alley with a pistol after the meeting. Well, I think to any historian who's going to see a sort of thousand-year view as kind of problematic. I mean, it's very difficult to see what's going to happen in 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 years, never mind a thousand. But it is good, I think, that they're at least talking that way and thinking that way, whether they're actually making any progress in that direction. That's another question. But, you know, it sounds good. Right. You know, Vint was saying, well, it might be that we have to convert everything to 8-bit ASCII, which is, you know, a very basic plain text, and sort of lose all these books that have artwork or layouts with them to ensure their longevity. And I think he brought a real insider's perspective on just the technological challenges of scanning entire libraries. You know, he was talking about, for instance, images and how they've already encountered problems just with JPEGs, which, you know, is probably the single most popular image type. And yet there's actually been a lot of different implementations of JPEG, and some of them are already unviewable, and so you really start worrying about, you know, how you scan things, what the page images are in, and, you know, it was a real sort of reality check, even for a big corporation like Google. Yeah, and, you know, for me, the really, I think, exciting part about that movie was, exciting part about that movie, you can edit that out. For me, the really exciting part about that meeting was that it brought together not only people like us working in these various centers at the various universities around the country, but also some really important institutional players, people with real money to spend on this. And I think that's what's really going to make the difference over the next few years is the recognition that doing significant work in digital humanities requires money. That's right. That's right. I should have mentioned that right off the start, that it wasn't just the people from the digital humanities centers, but there were, excuse me, I think there were at least a dozen funders there, including government agencies as well as private foundations. And, you know, they talked about some of their challenges as well. And these are challenges that we've encountered too. And I thought John Unsworth gave a very good plenary address where he discussed how important it is to talk about failure, which is not something that we normally like to talk about, but happens all the time with digital projects. I mean, so many things have to go right for a digital project like a software or a major website to really be completed, to work as advertised, that I think the funders are a little gun shy about funding them. And they worry about sustainability and longevity. And the centers worry about, you know, attracting and retaining talented technical staff. So, you know, this is very difficult. And I think John had a really good suggestion, which was, you know, reporting about failures could actually be a big help for all of us, simply because it'll sort of tell you things that have gone wrong and give a sort of clue to new people working in the digital humanities, all the things that they kind of have to worry about and, you know, to ensure their project goes right. And that even in failures, there are, you know, important things to learn about methodology and technologies and management of these projects. And so I thought that was a really meeting point to the fact that we really haven't figured this thing out yet. You know, I think there are lots of different models for doing digital humanities work. And even institutionally, they function very, very differently. You know, our shop here at George Mason is very different from another very successful shop, you know, just down the road at UVA. And just in the way it's funded, in the way it's organized, in the way the kinds of people working here, the kinds of interests we have. And so there's a lot of room for failure. There's a lot of room for success.
Yeah, and I think the overall conclusion of the meeting was that the important thing about these centers is that they do have a kind of expertise that's been cultivated over the years that I think other faculty and students and others in the humanities can really benefit from, and they're not benefiting from right now. So there was a lot of discussion about internships, of faculty fellowships, of faculty members that might be at, let's say, a small liberal arts college that doesn't have a digital humanities center could spend a semester or a year at one of these centers to really learn the ropes and then sort of bring back the skills that they learned to that institution. So using them as a, you know, as John called it, they are part of the cyber infrastructure, what we discussed last week. And he saw them as a kind of critical human infrastructure to, I think, this whole practice, which is so new that we couldn't even define what it was. And I think there was a lot of discussion there as well. The funders were, a couple of funders came back to the main session after we had breakout groups and said, well, we're actually confused as to what a digital humanities center is. Is it just something focused on digital techniques or computational methods or a specific discipline? And can it be a virtual organization? So I think there were a lot of great questions that were raised. And actually, at the end of the podcast sale, I'll mention a site that we're setting up as an outcome of this meeting where people interested in the digital humanities can come and contribute to fleshing out a wiki that discusses those people working in the digital humanities, where it's being done, tools, standards, all the things that I think people want to learn about if they're new to the field. You know, it's interesting. I think that there's, and here I'll maybe segue into our discussion, short discussion about museums and the web. You know, there doesn't seem to be a kind of professional locus for digital humanities in the university community in the way that there is for, for instance, museums. You know, museums and the web is, you know, there's a couple of different conferences that people go to in the museum world. But museums and the web, if you're doing technology in museums, like, that's where you go. And everybody goes. It's incredibly expensive, so I've never been. But it doesn't seem like for digital humanities in the university that there's that kind of single locus for discussion. And it seems like that's what the NEH was trying to do with this meeting, that it seems like there should be more of one conference, the way there is the AHA conference or the MLA conference. Right. Well, there is this digital humanities meeting every year, and it's at UIUC this year in Illinois. And, you know, I think what's interesting is that of all of us at the Center for History and New Media, I don't think one of us has gone to this. And I sort of feel bad about it, but I think it's because it is a little bit off the radar. And indeed, I didn't know that there was something called ADHO, which is the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, which John Unsworth and others are working to build. And I think there needs to be some publicity. I think, you know, more activity in this area of bringing together people either under that umbrella or under some other umbrella. Yeah, it seems like there's a few places where these conversations occur, but it doesn't seem like there's one that has all the buzz that attracts all the different people, both from the kind of inside crew, the few centers that were invited to the NEH meeting, but also from, you know, that attracts membership and interest from individual scholars working at smaller institutions that don't have digital humanities centers. It just doesn't seem like there is a real professional locus for this work yet, and I think that's going to be an important part. So, Tom, at the museum's meeting, what structures are in place, technological or organizationally, that help with this community building. The first is there's a group of, it's a contractor, a vendor of design services for museums, has set up a museum blog site, which is an aggregator of all the museum blogs that are out there on the web. And, you know, there's hundreds at this point. But it's a good place, a good single place to go to to look for people thinking about technology and museums. The other thing is that this Museums and the Web Conference, which has been going on for several years now, they've just started, it seems, this year. And as I said, I wasn't able to go, but they started a social networking portal for people at the conference. And it had facilities for people to engage in discussion forums, to aggregate people, blogs of people who were blogging the conference live. It had polls. It had a place to share references for articles that were cited and papers that were being given. It had a section that said, you know, who's online now so you could engage in live chats with people at the conference. It just seemed like people had put a lot more thought into how to organize a conference with the tools that digital museums people would want to use and to put those tools into place to make the conference hold together a little better. I know from some of the blogs I've read, though, that the one problem, and this is really a problem at all these kinds of big conferences, is that they had horrible web connectivity in the ballroom in which it was being held. And these hotels charge outrageous amounts of money for really crummy web connectivity, and I think they had that problem. But at least the structures were in place to make this work. And I think we would really benefit in the university community from a similar kind of conference with that kind of thought put into how to share and exchange information. Yeah, I think the crowd at my meeting at the NEH, it wasn't a big blogger crowd. And obviously it was a sort of limited crowd as a first meeting. But I think I was only one of maybe three or four people there with, you know, who were actually writing notes down for a blog post, which I'm going to get to this week and post some more detailed notes. So unlike, let's say, the museum or library community where there's lots of people blogging and very active discussions that happen almost in real time via blogs and other methods, I don't think it was really that kind of a crowd. I think a little bit more on the kind of managerial level. But I think that those structures sound really great and I think could have contributed quite a bit to the meeting. We did begin to set up a couple of wikis and I'll mention one of those later on. Let's see, are there other news items from this week? We heard that the Creative Commons initiative is creating a new unit called CC Learn, and it seems like it has a lot of potential. I think one of the first issues that they're tackling, other than just staffing it, they have an opening for an executive director, but they're trying to put together actually a license for higher education that you can use, just a single Creative Commons license for teaching materials and educational materials. And I think that's just a great idea. I think we've wondered which one of the many different Creative Commons licenses to use on different projects here at the Center. It would be terrific to have one for higher ed to sort of free up all of these things like syllabi and teaching materials that could be put on the web. Is that going to apply to student materials? I know like last week or the week before we talked about the problems of copyright of student materials. Would students be able to release their stuff under this license? I think it's an opt-in kind of a license where any course materials that you want, I suppose, sure, it could be student papers or blogs or anything like that could be put up under the CC Learn license. I do think it has to be educationally related. And so I'm not quite sure where it fits in with their existing licenses. But it's clear that they're trying to, I think, enable a little bit more in terms of open education and probably work with, I assume, OpenCourseWare and other projects that are trying to sort of expose internal university materials to a wider audience and, I think, get away from some of the silos of stuff that are behind gates at universities. Which will certainly be a great change if we can pull it off because so much good material is stuck behind those passwords and not necessarily because faculty members choose to put it behind the password, but because that's the default setting at the university. Right, and so I suppose this would be something that could be adopted university-wide.
I suppose that's the use case for it. Also this week, we saw the launch of Google My Maps, and we've been doing a lot of these Google Maps mashups, and we've discussed it, I believe, on an earlier podcast. But I think what's exciting here is, for those who haven't seen it yet, it's become suddenly much easier for people, in our case, you know, students and faculty and staff at universities or museums and libraries to sort of place little indicators of different items onto a Google map. And I think that really presents, you know, up to this point, you had to have a little bit more technical sophistication or knowledge to actually do these kinds of map mashups. But I think with the launch of MyMaps, I think we're going to see a lot more sort of bubbling up from below. I certainly plan to use it in my Western Civ class because it just makes it much easier for students to put things onto a map and to collaborate on a map and so forth. Yeah, I actually, after I read about this coming online, I sat down at the computer and did a map of all the places I've lived in the last 10 years, which are, there are a lot of placemarks, and it took me 20 minutes to do. It was very simple. That's great. Yeah, I mean, it seems pretty interesting to me. I was actually a little disappointed with the announcement. I mean, I first saw the post on the O'Reilly radar, and, you know, it said, it billed it as, you know, it adds the ability to create and share maps directly from Google site. And I was thinking of something kind of and maybe this is just because I've come to expect way too much from technology because there's just been so much cool stuff happening lately. But I was thinking I'd be able to, like, create my own maps, like actually create my own maps. And really what it is, is you can kind of share your annotations of Google's maps. So, I don't know. It's a pushpin sharer, I guess. Yeah, yeah. Which makes it sound a little less interesting. But I do think that the uses, you know, you were talking about, Dan and Mills, I think there are a lot of real uses for it. Right. Well, it'll be interesting to see how it develops and whether people collaborate on maps together and to see, you know, how it looks in the classroom. You know, whether it's simple enough that students, you know, no longer have to use the API or if they want to use Google Earth, write a KML file and these sorts of things. I think anything that sort of makes it easier for us to experiment with this is great. But I agree that, you know, if they could really release something where we could overlay a 19th century map on the current maps that they have, boy, that would be terrific. Right, and that's kind of what I was expecting. Yeah, you have to do a lot of manipulation and stretching and all this stuff. So I think for historians, yes, that would be a terrific next step. But, you know, I think this is a good first step. And, you know, of course, it at the same time puts out of business a lot of these smaller startups that were doing the same thing. But whatever. I think it's a great start for people who want to start using maps in the classroom. This week we wanted to focus on the use and perhaps the abuse of social networking in the humanities. And as I like to often joke, professors often have their own or see an axis of evil of their own, which is, of course, MySpace, Facebook, and Wikipedia. And I think that, you know, initially we were a little bit scared of certainly of MySpace and Facebook as well. They seem like drains of time and places just where students, you know, networked with themselves, but not us. And so I think it's taken a little while for us to sort of think about the ways in which you can integrate social networking and social networking sites like Facebook into the classroom. And our thoughts about this were sort of peaked a little bit this week with a couple of things that happened. First of all, University of Michigan launched a, I believe it's a master's degree in social computing. So there's actually, I think, a first in the country degree where you can actually study the use of social networking in, I believe it's in their library and information sciences school. But interesting nonetheless, and, or not nonetheless, but interesting that Michigan, which is I think a good bellwether for the use of technology in the humanities and libraries and museums, has actually gone to this point of actually creating a sort of specialized degree in the use of these tools. And then from a more technological side, at the Center for History and New Media, we're always keeping track of what's going on with Firefox development because of our Zotero project. And just in general, we all use Firefox pretty regularly. And they had an alpha launch of Firefox Co-op, which sort of integrates social networking technologies right into their browser. And I believe this will eventually come out in version 3.0 of the Firefox browser. And it reminded us quite a bit of Flock, which is a Firefox-based alternative browser. So Flock, for instance, integrates the ability to very quickly blog on a site that you found, to connect with other people who are online, all this done right through the browser. So Flock's really been a kind of early adopter browser for a lot of people. And Firefox is now moving strongly ahead with, I think, implementing a lot of these features. Now, I have to admit a great deal of ignorance on this front, considering I do not have a MySpace page or a Facebook page. And so I'm going to turn it over to my colleagues here, Tom and Mills. You actually have these pages and actually use them. Yeah, I've been on Facebook now for about a year and a half. I did it originally. I set up my Facebook page originally because one of our former graduate students was telling me a nightmare story about someone they had been planning to hire in her company, and then they saw the person's photographs, personal photographs in her Facebook page, and after they saw those photographs, there was no way they were hiring that person. And subsequently, I had a conversation with our dean of students about it, so I thought I would just set up a Facebook page in part to show students that grown-ups also can have Facebook accounts and see what's going on there. And so I set up the page and then invited all the students in my Western Civ class that semester to add me as a friend, and I came into class the next day, and they were all freaked out, like, how did you get a Facebook account? And I said, well, I have a .edu email address and that's all that's required. Yeah, but you're a professor. And so we had a conversation about making sure that they were a little more discreet with some of the things that they were doing. So that's how I got started. But then I noticed that my students started immediately sending me messages and that rather than email, I was getting a bounce to my email account that I had a new message in Facebook. So I have now tell my students that there are multiple ways to get in touch with me. And one of them is email. Another is they can actually come to my office hours. They could send me a message through Facebook. There's just a variety of ways. But where I really saw the big change or the big sort of utility for me was when I led a study tour in Europe in January, and I had 37 students kind of spread all around various cities in Europe at any particular moment. And they were going into Internet cafes and logging into Facebook and posting messages to the group that we had created about some museum they had just been in and that everybody else needed to go check this out right away before we moved on to the next city. And I found that they were, many of them were getting, I guess, notifications in their telephone that they've gotten an email from their Facebook account, and so then they would check it out on their phone, and then they would go and show up at the museum. So it was a really, it's the way that they were getting in touch with each other. And so to be part of that communications loop was really advantageous for me, but also made it very easy for me to get a message to all of them. I mean, I could have sent a group email out, but I found that they respond to Facebook messages a lot faster than they respond to email messages. Tom, have you used it, Tom? Yeah, I have. Some of the same experiences as Mills' have.
I get the sense that email is something that they use with grown-ups, and Facebook is something that they use with their peers. And so being in that space I think really helps put you more – tie you more closely to the rest of their lives, which I think is always a good thing for education. Another thing I've noticed is Facebook has the ability to – it can pull a feed of your blog. And I've noticed that students who would never, ever read my blog or go to the website, because on my Facebook page there is a feed of my blog, I've had a couple of students come up to me and say, oh, I read your blog post the other day, and maybe they were just trying to score brownie points or something, but it worked. And, you know, and they actually, you know, like took a look at what I was writing in sort of the rest of my professional life. And so I do think this is sort of where the students live. And I think if we're going to be all that we can be as educators, I think we need to be where they are. The two of you found any disadvantages? It sounds to me like what you're both saying is this is the kind of locus or the aggregation of everything that's going on in their life. It's where they say where they are, what they're doing, kind of post reviews and news, things like that, which I understand. And actually, I sort of fear how this is increasingly becoming real time with the launch of Twitter and this new technology that allows you to very specifically say what you're doing in any moment of the day. But is that, is it sort of the aggregation of attention into these places, that it's a sort of central place for them, even if they have, let's say, a blog or something else? I think that it is. I think because they have so many different kinds of input, whether it's coming from their phone or from their email or from their IM accounts or wherever it is, at some point they have to have some kind of a nexus, one place to go to focus on and have all their other communications sort of funneled in that way. Otherwise, they have to check 14 different devices during the course of the day to find out what their friends are up to. So I think it does, whether it's Facebook or whatever site, I think it does provide that kind of easy shorthand or easy system for keeping track of all their various kinds of communications. And I actually think that's where the Firefox co-op is important. That's because it's in the aggregation of attention. Because, in fact, you know, MySpace, which was all the talk of the press when Rupert Murdoch bought it and was the place to be for kids, MySpace isn't that cool anymore. People, kids have moved off MySpace and have moved on to Facebook. And, in fact, Facebook isn't that cool anymore, and I suspect it's in part because people like Mills and I are there now. Facebook's not that cool anymore, and more and more young people are moving to new services like, I know one of the hot new ones is called Verb. Yeah, I've heard of that too. So these services are actually kind of trendy and you... Isn't that a problem though? I mean, you know, as these populations sort of migrate from one thing to the next and also lose their stuff. I mean, this is part of the problem with, you know, I'm one of these old fogies that likes email, but email is, you know, is my life and I can go back and search it and find important information and kind of remember where I was. And a lot of these other services, they're so ephemeral, both in your use of it. You might use it for a year or two, and then it becomes passe, and you move on to something else. But also the way the messages are stored and sent, et cetera, it just seems like it just goes away, and you don't have no record of where you've been or what you've said. Well, I think that's where, like, and that's where Firefox Co-op, I'm not exactly, I haven't tried it out yet, so I'm not exactly sure how it works, but if it's using the MySQLite, the SQLite backend of Firefox to retain some of this information, and so basically what Firefox Co-op will allow you to do is it will provide a sidebar with your friends from Twitter, your friends from Facebook, your friends from Verve, your friends from MySpace, all of their profiles, and will aggregate all that material in the sidebar of your browser so you won't have to go to each one of these sites. If it then saves that information, it could solve that problem. I'm not sure if that's what it'll do, but that would be a nice use of the SQLite backend. Yeah. I mean, although I worry about formats and things like that. I mean, email's a known quantity. We've had it for decades, literally. And I've got a lot of stuff. I mean, we instant message a lot here at the center. And sometimes, you know, I fail to save really important instant messages where, you know, actually decisions have been made or we really discuss some topic. And those, you know, those conversations are sort of gone. And even the ones I have, you know, I have no idea what the actual IM format is and how to search it well and things like that. I mean, maybe these things are just, you know, young person's toys for that reason. You know, there are some adult social networking services out there like LinkedIn, and none of them have really ever kind of caught on. And I think it's because, at least in part, it's probably because they just seem fleeting. Right. Well, I also wonder about, you know, I think that is a good point about, I'm not sure it's even generational. You know, I wonder about these digital natives when they're 35 or 40 or 45 and, you know, having professional careers where, you know, you can't be online all the time and, you know, you may have kids or other things going on in life that it's hard to have that full attention that I think a lot of these services require. Did you see that one guy who got fired from Goldman Sachs because he was on his Facebook account like 40 hours a week? He was working like two hours a week, and he was just spending all his time on Facebook instead of working at this very well-paid job. Right, right. Well, I think that's why I was bringing up at the very beginning of sort of this idea of Facebook being part of the axis of evil. I think it's, you know, it's that time sync aspect to it of requiring that intense participation and the peer pressure of it as well, right? I mean, you're connected up in a way that you aren't, let's say, with a blog. You know, you can post irregularly or what have you, but people feel like almost a physical presence when they're really tied into these networks. And, you know, I get LinkedIn messages, like, add me to your, you know, friends never do it. that I do think that Tom is right that each of these is a fairly ephemeral thing. I mean, Facebook has had its, I think it's already had its moment and before too much longer it will be something else and whoever invested a lot of money in Facebook will find that their investment's not worth quite as much because the trend will have moved somewhere else. But from an educational standpoint, for me, I don't know how many different technologies I've been through now. I think I started in what we might call social networking in its very beginning form with whatever Microsoft's discussion forum system was. I can't even remember what that's called now. And then on to WebCT and then eventually blogs. And I now use some social networking things and I let my students IM me. For me, it's all about finding the way that the students are communicating with one another at this particular moment and utilizing that medium to meet them where they are, as Tom said earlier, and facilitate conversations among them about the work that we're doing in class in that particular medium, and then whatever the next thing is, then we'll move on to there. I do not give them my cell phone number because I don't want them running up my minutes, but beyond that, you know, I think as educators, it really makes our job easier if we try to meet our students where they are. Mills, did you notice that, and Tom too, did you notice that the way they use their accounts changed?
I think they ignore me entirely. Oh, really? Okay, well, that's pretty interesting. Yeah, I don't think that my presence changes their behavior at all. Because I think that behavior is so firmly ingrained, I think they just pretend that I'm not there. Yeah, me too. And I just, well, I hope they haven't changed their behavior because I can't imagine what it was before. If they have, well, watch out. And where do you see this? I mean, going forward, if they do all move over to Verb or these other services, do we need to keep moving on to these things? What if they move on to Twitter or some of these even more caffeinated services? just to cell phones? I mean, is it possible we completely lose track or we just have to keep up with whatever the latest and fastest form of communication is? Go ahead, Tom. I actually saw in the history of this social networking thing, I actually saw the move from MySpace to Facebook as a good thing because I thought, I think... It's certainly better designed. Yeah, Facebook is... I can't look at Facebook. It hurts my eyes. You mean MySpace? I'm sorry. Yes, MySpace. Facebook I can look at. Yeah, MySpace... Yeah, Facebook has some structure. It has some nice tools. It's like coherent. You know, you can really... Right, right. It's organized. And so I saw that as a real positive development. If things move on to Twitter, I think we're really in trouble. I mean, I know I tried out Twitter while a bunch of our colleagues were down at South by Southwest because it was all the rage at South by Southwest. And so I was subscribing to their Twitter messages, to their Twitter streams. And I had to turn it off after about a day because you were just getting text messages like every three minutes with 140 characters of basically nothing because what can you say in 140 characters? If it moves in that direction, I think we're in trouble. But if it moves, if it continues to move in the Facebook direction, which allows for more structure, I think, you know, maybe we could be okay. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead, Mills. But I think we also have to keep in mind that, you know, there are a lot of other social networking applications aside from these two big networks of MySpace and Facebook. And I think Flickr is probably one of the biggest of the other ones. And there are all kinds of social networks emerging on Flickr. I just posted a bunch of photographs that I took when I was in Cambodia a couple of weeks ago, pictures I took at the Genocide Center there. And there's some group that is sort of an NGO, an emergent NGO group focusing on justice issues around the world. And they want permission to use a bunch of my photographs, and they want me to join their group, which I'm probably not going to do because I have not enough time as it is. But these kinds of networks are emerging around images, and we've already seen a number of good examples. I've written about some of these in my blog of people using Flickr as a teaching tool, and of it is just being found. And, you know, they found your pictures and you become part of the online conversation, which I think is pretty critical. I suppose, well, I'll definitely have to get a Facebook page, but for the fall, unless it's passe by that point. But it seems like from there, I think we also probably have a duty to sort of push on our students to adopt, let's say, if there is a variety of these sites, you know, move them away from Twitter, if that's exclusively what they want to use, if they have technological limits, like this 140 character limit, where we can't really have real conversations, or it seems to me like at least Facebook, you can write a pretty long post, let's say on a reading or, you know, what you did at a museum or what you like best. And, you know, I think as long as they're using technologies that allow for that kind of longer form and more in-depth conversation, then it seems like it's fine with me. Yep, I would agree. I'm not going to Twitter. Sounds good. All right, well, I guess we all pledge not to get on Twitter unless something changes. I guess I got to pledge to get off. Yes. Get off now, Tom. When I first saw Twitter, it reminded me of Ross Perot's description of NAFTA, the giant sucking sound. I could just see it sucking people's time right down the drain. Absolutely. Right after this call, it was going to be an intervention in Tom's office. Well, as regular listeners know, we like to end each podcast with a brief discussion of some of the links or resources that we found online. And hopefully we'll find that our audience find these helpful too. Tom, what did you have for this week? I actually, I have something that's not a site and it's actually not directly related to digital humanities. But I think it's something that people might find useful. I don't know how many people out there are devotees of David Allen's Getting Things Done. But a number of people I know here at Center for History and New Media are, and a lot of people kind of out there in the tech blogging community are. Essentially, it's an organizational system. It's sort of a business self-help book, which normally I shy away from. But this one particular book, Getting Things Done, is a really helpful way for managing your time and all of the things that you have to do. And I know people working with computers tend to be, you know, go through organizational systems. Sometimes it seems like one a week. And this is, and Getting Things Done is something that has really helped me and helped a lot of people I know. So I would point people to the book, but I would also point people to a new product, and unfortunately it's for Mac only, but it's called iGTD, iGettingThingsDone. And it's a Mac-only product, but it's kind of right built into the technology is this getting things done system. And it's really been a great thing for me for helping me to organize all the many things I have going on. So Thomas includes to-do lists and things like that. Right. It includes to-do lists. It includes, you know, sort of project management tools. And it logs all that activity and saves it all. As you check things off, they don't disappear. They're saved in case you have to go back to them. And it's got very good integration with Apple Mail and other email clients. So it's a really useful thing. I mean, it's not specifically digital humanities, but digital humanities people are working very hard, I know, and so it could be something that helps out. Yeah, these tools are really, I think, important. I've had a kind of love-hate relationship with getting things done. I always wanted to implement some system like that, but I somehow never seemed to get around to it, so it sounds like this software is really worth a try. Yeah, definitely. Thanks. That sounds great. Mills, what do you have for this week? My site this week is scenemaker.net. And scenemaker.net is a fairly new site that allows you to pull any video that's posted online into their system. So from YouTube or Google Video or wherever it might live, it pulls it into their system and then you can cut it into individual clips, mark up those clips with tags or text and then save them in your account and point people to your individual bits of it. So we were talking about YouTube I guess about a month ago now and I mentioned the Nuremberg Tribunal video. Well this morning I tried out SceneMaker and pulled one of those Nuremberg tribunal videos in, cut it into several pieces that I might use in a lecture where I only want to show one little 30-second clip out of the four and a half minutes, but I also have it then tagged and have some explanatory text to go with it. It's incredibly simple to use and I think could really expand the possibilities for educational uses of online video. Well, it sounds really terrific. I know we've been experimenting with various annotation systems and video clip systems, but this seems like it brings it all together and also has the virtue of being easy to use, which some of these systems don't have. Sounds great. Well, as I promised at the beginning of the podcast in our news roundup, Right.
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi-weekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Fear itself. This is Digital Campus number 32 for the 22nd of September, 2008. Going Native. I'm Dan Cohen. And we're back for yet another episode of Digital Campus. And this week we don't have guests, but it was great to have Brian Alexander from Knightly on last time. But I am here with Tom Scheinfeld. Hi, Tom. Hi, Dan. And Mills Kelly, of course. Hey, Mills. Hey, Dan. Hope your semesters are starting off well. And it was a good discussion last time about Chrome. Has anyone tried Chrome? Yeah, I have. I downloaded it onto my wife's PC, and it is very nice. It's very, very fast. And there's some new features, and the user interface is somewhat different than the conventional browser, but it's actually very, very intuitive and really, really slick. I like it. I'm really eager for it to come out on Mac and Linux so I can maybe give it a little more of a banging on, but it's so far so good. Mills, have you tried it out too? I haven't tried it yet just because our home computer, although it's a PC, is so ancient that downloading anything else onto it would kill it, and so then I use a Mac at work. Right, right. Well, not to get too obsessive about Google, but we have This Week in Google. Should we rename the podcast This Week in Google? It seems like there were some interesting Google news, but lots of other news, too. So a lot to get into. Let's dig into the news roundup, as we always do at the beginning of the podcast. Well, in addition to coming out with their new browser, Chrome, it looks like they're also expanding their digitization efforts into newspapers. Mills, you've been covering this, and you think it's a pretty interesting development for historians. I think it's a really exciting development for historians because, first of all, their plans are very ambitious, as they always are at Google, and there are just so many tens of thousands of small newspapers out there that otherwise wouldn't get digitized. So, for instance, when I had ambitions of being a news reporter back in college, I covered the Democratic National Convention for the La Crosse Wisconsin Tribune. Wow. And I'm sure you both read that on a regular basis. But the only way to – you can't actually get copies of it at the Library of Congress. The only way you can – I had to get a – I wanted to get a copy of the stories that I wrote back in 1980. And so the only way to get it was to call the newspaper in Wisconsin and ask them to be, you know, very nicely go into their morgue and dig the stories out and copy them and send them to me. So that's the kind of newspaper that's going to get scanned. And for students and for historians, access to this vast corpus of local newspapers is just going to really, really change things, I think. Oh, I see. So this isn't for the New York Times of the world. This is for something else. That's my understanding. I mean, the New York Times is already available through ProQuest and or the New York Times. And so, you know, ProQuest has all the major newspapers already locked up, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times. So my understanding is that Google's plan is to just scan as many newspapers as they can get their hands on. And with the standard sort of Google quid pro quo that they have of, you know, yeah, we'll do this for free for you. All you have to do is give us your stuff. Is there something ominous here that at least some people might pick up on, or is this just a net gain in your view? I think it's a complete net gain. Have you ever tried to work with a newspaper from 1890, let's say? Right, right. They're crumbling. Right, right. And the La Crosse Wisconsin Tribune has no resources to maintain those crumbling pages, and so all those newspapers are going to vanish pretty soon if somebody doesn't scan them. And ProQuest isn't going to do it because there's no cost recovery model in their business model for scanning small town newspapers. But Google has a whole different system. I mean, I agree that it's a net gain. It's better than what we have now. That's for certain. What I don't know about is Google has this sort of ethos of providing open access to knowledge. And while they do that and while this newspaper project will do that, it doesn't provide complete open access to that knowledge. I mean they will have some link buried in the pull-down menu of the homepage that is something like Google Newspapers. You'll go there. There'll be a search box. You'll be able to type in a simple search, and you'll get back a list of search results with links to page images of these newspapers. But what you won't get are, and Dan, you've written about this, you won't be able to get a full text dump of the content to do any kind of more sophisticated data mining on. You won't get any kinds of APIs so that you can mash this content up with other kinds of services. You won't get any rights to use these materials in other kinds of websites and to do more sophisticated interpretive things with. So they give you kind of a basic level of open access, but they don't provide any real services on top of that. And my problem with that is if the library sign up for this, it's not that they, it's not an exclusive contract. So it's not that they couldn't do something more. It's that they won't do something more. They'll think that by signing this deal with Google, they'll have done their duty. And I'm not sure that that's the case. Just providing a search box with, um, and then a list of, of hits, uh, is of hits is really the full job of these institutions and what we should be doing as cultural heritage professionals. So that's my problem with all of these Google initiatives, Google Books, Google Scholar, all of them. Well, yeah, you know, I have been writing about this. In fact, I think the very first post to my blog in 2005 was about the need for better means of access into these digitized collections, namely in the case that I did on my blog about application programming interfaces or APIs. And strangely enough, Tom, that you mentioned that, I actually just got an email this morning from someone at Rutgers University sort of asking about, well, has anything happened on this front with Google? And I said, no. You know, it's incredible. The interface to Google Books hasn't changed in years. I mean, there's a new homepage where you can kind of browse through the stacks, as it were. But there's no sophisticated interface to the collection. And one anticipates they're going to keep that stripped down, you know, and Google only interface their collection. And indeed, that is the big problem, at least for doing sophisticated kinds of research and analysis of this collection, which definitely will be incredible. So you're left with just the sort of finding the needle in the haystack use case. That is taken care of. But more sophisticated things, much harder to see how that's going to happen. Right. And what's sinister here is that the fact of the matter is that Google does have that more sophisticated access. They do have that increased access, but they're the only ones that have it. That's my problem. And these are public resources, and that's my problem with it. You know, it's interesting. I think they're a little bit, um, you know, schizophrenic about this, uh, aren't they? I mean, at the same time in this very same week, um, you know, one of the stories that came out was that they're now, uh, over at Google scholar, they're adding these green arrows next to open access, uh, articles. So when you do a search and you'll get a string of search results, all of a sudden you'll notice that there are these green arrows next to things that are open, I mean fully open, that you can go and grab and download. And so is Google just sort of schizophrenic in this way?
You know, they actually have Chris DeBono, sort of a very famous open source developer who kind of leads their efforts toward openness. And at the same time, they're sort of closed-fisted with some of their materials, particularly the kinds of materials that we're talking about right now. You know, before we get on to that, I just wanted to say one other thing about the newspapers, and then I'll let Tom answer that question. You know, yes, I think the quid pro quo issue is one that we need to think about. But I do think that eventually third-party vendors are going to start creating some of these products that we really need. But also I think it's worth noting that when it comes to newspapers, we're talking about billions of pages of information. And, you know, the National Endowment for the Humanities Division of Preservation and Access has been pumping millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars over the last 20 years into preserving newspapers. Please let us know. year to microfilm newspapers. Okay. So that's what the, you know, that's the, that's the landscape for preserving newspapers right now is that the, you know, big cultural agencies are paying for microfilm and that's just insane. And so, yes, I'm, you know, I'm a little concerned about some of the things that Tom mentioned, but if it doesn't happen soon, these, these newspapers are just going to turn to dust. Yeah, no, I mean, I think Mills Mills, you're absolutely right. I mean, I would certainly say it's better than nothing. But when we're talking about public resources, I don't know if better than nothing should be the standard. And it's the same idea with these open access journals. You know, they put this little green arrow next to open access, which is, I suppose, promoting open access materials. And that's good for the community of scholars. Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: But not necessarily so that the public, you know, for the greater good of the public. They want these other resources, the work that other institutions have done to digitize resources to be open access because they want to index them and they want to have them in their databases. And not necessarily to provide more than just the simple access that they provide now. They want to maintain the more sophisticated access for themselves and provide the public with this kind of simpler stripped-down access. And I just don't want to end up in a situation – right now we're in a situation with closed access publications where wealthy universities that have the money to subscribe to these journals, they have complete access and the rest of the public has no access. I don't want to end up in a somewhat similar situation where Google has great access to knowledge and the rest of us have kind of second class access to knowledge. It would be bad if there was one company that gave us kind of limited access but they had complete access. That I think is kind of problematic. push back against this NIH policy, the National Institutes of Health in the United States, which started requiring this year that authors place all of their text and indeed images as well from publications in an NIH database, which is hosted at PubMed Central. You know, and this was a big deal in the open access community to get these things open access, but now they're really fighting back and they've done lobbying. And indeed, there's now an introduction of legislation. I think it's the U.S. House of Representatives Bill 6845 that actually might end up really essentially eliminating this open access policy through PubMed. I mean, is that where we should be looking if we're looking for evil at, you know, really closing off access to these materials? And this was really, I think, that NIH policy, when that passed, it really filtered down. I mean, we saw after that the Harvard policy toward open access and things happening at other universities. That was a real watershed, wasn't it? Now it seems that that policy might be eroded. Well, I've got absolutely zero sympathy for the publishers on this one, and I think it would just be criminal to change the existing policy because, first of all, all three of us paid for those articles. That NIH money didn't come from the companies. It came from you and me. And so the taxpayers of the United States have a right to the access to information Yeah. It's simple and straightforward to me. But then there's another aspect to it, which is this is really a rich country problem that medical schools all around the world in third world countries depend on access to – free access to medical information like this. And they have no money to spend on read Elsevier journals. And so it's also from the standpoint of just the United States is a citizen of the world. It's a really bad idea to close access to medical information generated by scholars using money from the National Institute of Health. It's just bad. Yeah, I have to point out that I think the height of hilarity at this subcommittee meeting on this bill, again, House Bill 6845, was when Howard Berman, who I think was chairing the committee, said that, basically compared the NIH with Napster. He said that the N in NIH shouldn't stand for Napster because they were, basically, the U.S. government was running some kind of free trade site. I mean, this is medical information here that benefits the world and is paid for by the American taxpayer. Right. I think that's the key. That's the key point, that it is paid for by the taxpayer. And I think if these publishers want to control the knowledge, then they should be paying for the research, which obviously they can and don't have the money to do. But if we are paying for the research, we as taxpayers and citizens should have access to the products of that research. And these publications are products of that research. So I think this is really evil. I think the difference here, I think you're right, Dan, that probably Google is somewhere in the middle. I mean, Google's, what is their motto? Don't be evil. Maybe it should be more like don't be as evil as the publishers. But they're probably, don't be evil doesn't mean that they're necessarily good. Right, right. I think that's probably where I come down on this. Yeah. Well, finally, just to wrap up the news from this week, we saw the founding of a couple of institutions that may be important for listeners of this podcast. One actually does come out of the federal government, and this is the passage of this digital promise. This actually happened, I think, a few weeks ago, but I think we haven't had a chance to discuss it on the podcast. But there was a, I guess this is over the summer really, but we're just getting to it now. In the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, there was an establishment of a new program, which was sort of vaguely entitled the National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies. And I think they're actually now in the process of trying to find funding for fiscal year 2009. So it's a little unclear what it is. They're asking for $50 million, though, so this is not small. And it will be a congressionally originated nonprofit corporation that will be located in the Department of Ed. Does anyone get a sense of, maybe we'll have to get someone on the podcast to explain this a little bit better to us, what Digital Promise is going to do? I met with some of the people from Digital Promise, I don't know, three years ago when they were just starting to try to lobby for the approval of this idea. And I think the basic premise that they have is a good one, which is that digital technology is transforming education from K to graduate school in ways that we don't fully understand and that the federal government needs to actually put some resources behind figuring out best practices in a new educational environment. And so I think that's really their basic operating premise is that existing programs through the Department of Ed or the NEH or whatever aren't really doing that. And so there needs to be this nexus within the federal government to provide funding to researchers who are looking at how education is being transformed by digital technology, whether it's second grade education or PhD education. And so I think that's a really good idea. I think that's something that needs to be studied. And those studies are going on. They're just not being funded right now, and so it would be nice to have some money, serious money, behind looking at that. How it's all going to play out, I have no idea whether it's going to turn out that way. My only concern with this is that the $50 million that goes to this will be somehow subtracted from the money that's currently going to NEH and NEA and other federal funding agencies for the work so a worry.
We're recording this, our audience should know, as the stock market tank. So, yes, everything you have will be worth the paper it's printed on, but we'll know a lot more about the digital world, won't we, when this is over. Fortunately, the stock of Digital Campus hasn't budged. Right, yeah. We haven't gone IPO yet, so I guess we're all set. Yeah, we haven't broken the buck. Right. And another institution that I guess we'll have to keep an eye on, since it seems like this Digital Promise new nonprofit corporation is just getting started and really needs funding. Well, one institution that has gotten funding, a $5 million grant from the Knight Foundation, is Tim Berners-Lee's new World Wide Web Foundation. You know, there's the WC3, or W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium. He decided to set up something new. It's at webfoundation.org. Does anyone have a sense of why there needs to be a new institution that focuses on the web and what Tim is trying to do. Of course, our audience probably knows that Tim Berners-Lee was really the creator of the web and really invented it in the late 80s, early 90s. Stole the idea from Al Gore. Yes. Gosh. Clearly intercepted his BlackBerry communications. It says on their page that they're seeking to advance a one web that is free and open, to expand the web's capability and robustness, and to extend the web's benefits to all people on the planet. I'm not exactly sure. Again, this is sort of amorphous. Any thoughts? Yeah, it is definitely sort of amorphous. As you said, I don't really see how this differs all that much from the W3C. I don't know where the differences are. I just brought up the W3C's website, and Dan, you just read the Web Foundation's mission statement. The W3C's mission statement is to develop interoperable technologies, specifications, guidelines, software tools to lead the web to its full potential. It's a forum for information, commerce, communication, and collective understanding. It sounds very similar. Yeah, I mean, I've always seen, right, and you know, Steve Bratt, who's the CEO of the new World Wide Web Foundation, is also the CEO of the World Wide Web Consortium, the W3C. I've got this feeling that this new entity has something more to do with kind of cultural and political issues, you know, cross-border issues. I mean, I've always seen that, you know, when I go to the W3C site, you know, I'm often looking for, like, the publication of new web standards or those kinds of things, calls for proposals for web standards. So it kind of, it's a bit more technical. I have a feeling this is more of a cultural institution to advance the web, to keep it open, in a sense, a lobbying foundation. Am I wrong about that? In fact, the W3C has a big announcement about the creation of the web foundation. Maybe it really is the advocacy arm of the W3C. It sort of seems that way. But again, I don't think we quite know yet. Well, probably something to watch. And watch we will. So we'll keep an eye on those two foundations as they hopefully get established. Well, I suppose that one of the purposes of this new Digital Promise Act and the institution that it will give birth to is to really study the way in which digital media and technology is affecting up-and-coming generations. And indeed, there's been a lot of interest in studying these so-called digital natives, Thank you. I think that in addition, there have been some efforts here to understand this group. And probably most famously in our corner of the world, the MacArthur Foundation has put a lot of money into studying digital natives and the way they interact with, for instance, video games or the web or mobile technology. And indeed, there's another round of the digital media and learning contest for a grant competition that's coming up in the next few weeks. So we thought we'd spend some time on the feature segment on this episode of Digital Campus, talking a little bit about digital natives. And really, I think our curiosity about them was piqued a little bit more when we read Siva Vadianathan's really interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, the Chronicle Review, when he talks about this really as a myth, that maybe John Palfrey is not correct, that there isn't something called a digital native, and that the students he's encountered are all over the map technology-wise. They're not completely fluent in digital technology. They don't necessarily jump right in. And also, Palfrey himself sort of came out with a new study this week of young people aged 13 to 22, in which he sort of looked at the way in which they participated in digital technology. And he was thinking, well, maybe if we got them more interested in interacting with the web, in creating content for the web on a blog or YouTube, that they would start using this technology in a kind of better way rather than, you know, perhaps the more less learned ways that they're using the web and other digital technology right now. So I guess we wanted to start off the conversation with just sort of going around the horn. Maybe, Mills, we can start with you about what's your experience of students in the classroom? How digitally savvy are they? And is there really, let's say, a difference between your undergrad classes and your graduate classes? Well, you know, I think overall they're just not that savvy. So you would agree with Vadianathan that this is a myth? I would completely agree. I mean, I think that the students who I know, and I spend a lot of time studying undergraduate students and their interactions with technology, and, you know, in every class I teach has some kind of a technology component to it. And they struggle with the simplest things like posting a message to a blog or just simply logging in the first time to a blog. I mean, how hard is that? But for more than half of the students in any one of my classes, just setting up an account on a WordPress blog, which is about as easy as it gets, is just insurmountable. They really need me to hold their hands all the way through it. And it's sort of like 10 years ago when I was teaching elsewhere, maybe 15 years ago, and students would come to me and say, okay, I don't have an email address. Can you show me how to set one up? All the students have access to email now because our university requires it, but I think they're just not that savvy. And I think the mistake that we make as educators and as older people looking at younger people is that we see them using technology all the time. They're staring at the little tiny screen of their phone as they're text messaging somebody. They're IMing people on their computers. They're doing things in their Facebook accounts. So they're very facile users of technology to do the things that they want the technology to do, like grab a movie off of BitTorrent or establish six new friends on Facebook today or whatever it is. But that is completely different from actually being able to do anything with the technology. They can't create web pages. They don't know how to upload a video to YouTube. They certainly don't know how to edit the video if you've ever watched any of the videos they produce. They just can't do a lot of things. They can't write any HTML code. They don't learn how to program. And so in the same way that – I mean it's a little bit like me with automobiles. I'm a very good driver, I like to think. And I can change the oil in my car, and I can fix a flat tire. And that's about as far as it goes. Anything else, I have to take it to the mechanic. And our students are kind of like that. They're very good drivers of their web browsers, but when it comes to actually being able to do anything more than that, they start to struggle. And so I think it's really been overhyped. I have the same experience, Mills, and I was actually going to make the same analogy that you did about the automobile. Most people, and let's say the generation that was born immediately after the release of the Model T, I mean, those people could drive a car. They may have been able to do things like change the oil, as you said, or fix a flat tire or change some spark plugs or whatever it was. But for any major repairs, they had to bring it to a mechanic. And going even further, they certainly couldn't design a car.
And in fact, there are even specialist users, race car drivers and truck drivers, who are even better just plain users of the technology than your average driver. And so I think in many ways, it's a little much for us to expect that this technology would be any different from an earlier technology. I think probably we're in the situation where there are always going to be users and power users and then builders, and that those groups, there might not be a lot of overlap between them. Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm in general agreement. I might vary a little bit in that. I mean, I do think the way in which I agree is that I think, and it sounds like this is what the two of you are saying as well, that these young people have a kind of functional view of the technology. Like if they need to do something like text message, then they'll figure that out and they'll do a lot of it. So it's sort of like their experience is a mile wide, but an inch deep. I mean, they don't understand the technology itself, but kind of they get situated in things that they need to do, communicate with their friends or, you know, do social networking sort of things, or they'll figure out how to play videos because that's something that they like to do a lot. But they're not sort of curious about what's behind it to figure out, let's say, you know, in Flash video, what the action script is behind it, or in a blog, they're not interested in the HTML. It sort of has to be put upon them to actually do a task where it would excite them. And I guess in that way, that's sort of what Palfrey is saying, is that you need to get them interested in the act of creation. That's the only way they're going to learn what's underneath the hood. You know, on the other hand, you know, I still feel a little bit, particularly between my grad classes and, you know, at George Mason, we have graduate students who range from, you know, 24 years old to 74 years old. And I still feel that there is a difference. I mean, if you look across that spectrum, the younger students, you know, there's a higher probability that they will know HTML. There's a higher chance that they've created content on the web. And so I think just in general, the numbers are going up. And, you know, I just, you know, I look at my own kids and, you know, they picked up the mouse right away. They understood how they were going to use it. And, you know, there is something I think about growing up with the technology that has an effect. Now, maybe that is fairly limited. And it kind of makes me wonder about what we should do about that, of how you get students beyond that functional stage so they're not just learning the one thing you need to start with first principles when you use technology with this group of digital natives? I don't know that we have to start with first principles, but probably at least with second ones. I'll give you an example. When I went off to college many, many decades ago, in one of my freshman classes, one of the professors said, okay, you guys are all freshmen. You actually don't know what a university research library is because you've only had high school and public library. So we're heading over to the Alderman Library, and we're going to spend an hour learning what a research library is and how it works and how you can get things out of it. And I can't tell you how many times I've blessed that professor because nobody, no other course that I took at the university offered me that sort of introduction to the library, not even my historical methods class. And so I learned the difference between a research library and my local public or high school library. And, you know, and that was fabulous. Well, I think that we have to assume that our students know that there is a thing called the Internet. And I think we have to assume that they know that you can get information off of it. But I think we owe it to them to then begin teaching them the skills to do the things that they need to do to be successful in college with that tool called the Internet and all of its various resources. And so they don't have to be able to write HTML code to be good, successful history majors, but they do have to know how to work with these increasingly massive databases of information like Google Books or the ProQuest Historical Newspapers database or things like that. So I think we can't just say, oh, go to Google Books and find what you need. I think we have to show them how that works. We have to develop exercises to teach them how to do some of these basic things. Yeah, and I would say that it is the other difference with the Internet and the Web versus other technologies like, let's say, the car. I mean, the technology is different in that it is easier to teach those kinds of things, and it is easier to get students to a point where they actually are building. I mean, you know, it would take a lot of training to teach me how to, you know, rebuild an engine block or something. But, like, you know, building a web page in HTML, you know, it's not that difficult a thing to teach. And so I think the barriers, the difference that the Internet presents is that the barriers to entry, to move from the just using stage to the actual building stage, the barriers there are much lower. And so I think if we provide help, the kind of help that Mills is suggesting, it is possible to get them to a place where maybe the place that we think they ought to be already. But isn't part of the problem here and why perhaps digital natives don't have that much technological know-how is that the progress of the technology itself continues to cover up what's underneath. I mean, you know, when we learned how to make web pages, you sort of had to know HTML, and now you can make a pretty good website using, let's say, WordPress. You don't need to know a thing about HTML. And one expects that that will continue to progress in that way. I mean, all these content creation sites, for instance, online video editing sites, you don't have to learn a complicated program like Final Cut Pro. There's some kind of simple flash-based ways of doing it. So it continues as the technology marches forward to kind of mask what's going on. And, you know, you don't need to know programming. You don't need to know these things. I would expect that would continue and that will, you know, as students grow up with the technology, the technology gets smarter and smarter and so they can remain as dumb as they'd like to be. It's interesting. I mean, I think that's a fair point. And I think that probably is true that the technology will continue to cover things up. I think, you know, somebody who might be a little older than us might say the same thing about our abilities in that I can use a text editor to write HTML or PHP or some other simple scripting languages, but I can't program the text editor itself. I couldn't build a text editor in C or whatever language it's using to do that. So, you know, maybe it is a process of covering up and covering up, but I think if we can get students in on whatever floor we're at now, they can advance to higher floors. They may not be getting in on the ground floor at the level of the kernel, but they may be able to get in at a slightly higher floor and then at least advance and keep up as things change. Well, I'm smiling as we talk about this because I'm reminded of my wife's experience with her father, a theoretical physicist and engineer at Kodak his whole career. And every time she needed help with a math problem in calculus, he would always start with, well, I think first we have to talk about integers. What is an integer? And she would just say, okay, thanks, Dad, and walk away. And so I think, and of course he programs still in machine language because, of course, that's very powerful if you can actually do those ones and zeros. But I don't need to know how to do that because, as Tom said, the technology has made it incredibly easy for me. But I think the bigger problem is that there are an incredible number of resources out there right now for students to use that they have no idea how to use. I mean, you know, my example about Google Books is one. You know, as the number of resources, historical primary sources, begins to approach a billion, what are they going to do? How are they going to figure out how to work with that?
Well, and it really suggests for, I mean, beyond, you know, us professors, I mean, I think think really suggests a role for librarians and information specialists to have the kinds of training opportunities. And I know these are out there, but, you know, I realize I don't spend a week at the library with an information specialist or librarian who really knows the ins and outs of, you know, how to do a really good Boolean search on Google or how to mine some of these databases that we've got hundreds and hundreds of databases. And, you know, undoubtedly my students are going to flounder if they just go to one of those databases and just try to plug in keywords. So it seems to me like we have almost a greater onus as educators and then also as the librarians in our audience, I'm sure, are nodding along that there's a real role there in contemporary education there in those kinds of specialties. Yeah, I think that the difficult thing here is finding that right floor, that right place of entry where we need the kind of level of sophistication that we need to get students to. Figuring out like for the gen ed curriculum, let's say, what do students really need to know about the technology and need to know how to do with the technology? I mean, do they need to know HTML? Maybe not. Do they need to know how to use something like a blog to create a website? Well, maybe. Do they need to know how to scan archival documents? Well, I don't know. But do they need to know how to use archival databases? Well, probably. I mean, finding that sweet spot is, I think, a very difficult thing. And I think if we can find, you know, come to some agreement, and maybe we never will because the technology is advancing so quickly, but to come to some agreement about what the average college student or high school senior or whatever needs to know about technology, I think that will help us assess, really, to what extent, you know, are these students digital natives or not. Well, and, you know, we actually at George Mason have, I think, a pretty good set of technology competencies that we expect all of our undergraduates to have when they graduate from college. And it's not that they, you know, and some of the, and they're at different levels, you know, most basic, like be able to send and receive an email message or be able to create and print a word process document. And they sort of progress up the hierarchy, and the expectation is that those simplest things you'll be able to do either when you arrive on campus or by the end of your first semester. And by the time you graduate, then you've progressed into the sophisticated level. And I think an awful lot of campuses around the country have some kind of set of technology competencies, but I would be surprised if more than half of the people in our department here at Mason have actually read those competency expectations. Right, right. You know, even just beyond the basic competencies, though, you know, I guess the final point I would make on this topic is that, you know, we also need to be training for exceptional use of digital technology. And there, you know, when I look around at so-called digital natives, the people we've encountered, for instance, at the Center for History and New Media, who've been doing very, very creative things, is that, you know, you'd want to have beyond just the simple stuff. You want some of these digital natives to really be exploring the boundaries because, you know, we're too old and, you know, uncreative at this point in our lives. And we need new people to come in to think about the ways in which this incredibly flexible technology can be used to advance education and learning and understanding. And so, you know, it'd be great to have more kind of advanced training or more opportunities for these students to kind of get involved, get enthusiastic about the technology. Yeah, and ways to identify them and sort of shepherd them through the training that they would need to do these more advanced things would be great if it existed. I don't think, and I know at least at George Mason, that it really doesn't. And we're identifying people kind of haphazardly. And there isn't something systematic that allows for that kind of creativity and that kind of interest to blossom. Yeah, and I'm doing an interesting experiment right now in one of my classes where the students are going to, in the second half of the semester, create a pretty good-sized Internet project. And there are 17 students in the class, and I asked them on Wednesday to – so yesterday I asked them to come to class tomorrow with a list of what they thought they could contribute to this project. Were they good researchers? Were they good editors? Did they know video editing? Could they write HTML? And so this is just a kind of random subset of 17 history majors, either juniors or seniors, and it'll be really interesting to see what they come up with. Time once again, as we do in every podcast, at the end of the podcast, for some exciting picks from our roundtable, things that you might want to take a look at online and maybe even sometimes offline. Mills, what do you have for us this time? Well, given what we've just been talking about on the need for developing new ways of teaching digital technology to today's students, I'd like to recommend everybody take a look at the National Endowment for the Humanities Teaching Development Fellowships. The first round is the deadline is actually coming up shortly, October 1, but the application is not that arduous. And this is, in my memory, the first time that the NEH has offered money explicitly for the development of teaching rather than kind of educational projects more generally. And these grants sort of focus on one particular course. They don't have to be something to do with digital, but that's our topic here on digital campus. So it is a way to improve a particular course. The one hitch is that you have to have taught the course three times already. So it's not to develop a brand-new course, but to change an existing course. I didn't realize that. So, for instance, if you wanted to digitalize some aspect of a course that you were already teaching and you taught a number of times, then this would be a great grant to apply for. And it's real money. It's enough to buy you out of a class and have a little money left over. And so it's definitely worth taking a look at. Great. We'll take a look. Tom, what do you have for us this time? Well, in the last segment, I was mentioning that it is difficult to identify those exceptional kind of creative students who really want to engage the technology and do something more with it. And this week I've got an episode of a podcast of the Chronicle of Higher Education's Tech Therapy podcast, episode 31, called What to Look For in Tech Staff. And it's just a discussion of the kinds of things if you're running a digital humanities center or you've just gotten a grant to do a digital humanities project and you need to hire some tech staff. Hiring technical staff can be a really difficult thing because it's hard to tell what people's skills really are. A lot of times you'll get a stack of resumes and they all have the same sort of alphabet soup on them. I know XML and PHP and JavaScript and C and C++ and all of those things. And it's hard to identify the people who really know from the people who don't and from the people who are going to be enthusiastic and creative from the people who are just going to be kind of what sometimes we call code monkeys. And so this podcast just gives some tips for navigating those waters and identifying the kinds of people who you really want to have on board for your digital humanities project or center or educational technology project. Sounds great. Thanks very much. We will take a look. Well, I'm actually going to recommend a book. Although, since this is Digital Campus, the book is freely available online. And it is the Companion to Digital Literary Studies, edited by Susan Shribman and Ray Siemens. And kudos to them and also to Blackwell Publishing for allowing them to put it online for free. As with all of these, we'll link to this from digitalcampus.tv. It's got a rather long URL. Thank you. volume. They're all available now online, and they range from things like, you know, an analysis of what reading online is and what it means to read online versus offline, to digital poetry, to digital games, to blogging. There's an interesting chapter on the nature of blogging, to things like digital libraries and collections and electronic scholarly editions. So it's really a comprehensive volume that I think moves even beyond just literary studies and might be useful to a lot of people in our audience.
The only thing we have to fear is can do for your country. Fear itself! This is Digital Campus, Episode 61, recorded October 15, 2010. Fantastic Four. Well, welcome to another edition of Digital Campus from the Center for History and New Media. I'm Tom Sheinfeld from foundhistory.org. Coming to you today from a Barnes & Noble cafe somewhere outside of Hartford. I'm doing the commute, the faculty commute this semester. It's pretty miserable. You're reporting from on location. On location, right, from a major book retailer. We're going to talk about the publishing industry. Hartford. So if you hear any coffee grinding in the background or kids running around, that's what it is. But I'm here today with Dan Cohen. That's Dan, I think you just heard, from dancohen.org. Hi, Dan. Hey, Tom. And our other regular, Mills Kelly from edwire.org. Hi, Mills. How are you, Tom? Good. And actually, we have some big news to announce today. We are promoting one of our irregulars to regular status. I don't know how much of a promotion that is. But we're very happy to welcome Amanda French, who you've all heard many times from AmandaFrench.net, to the show as one of our regular hosts. Hi, Amanda. Hi, Tom. I'm looking forward to the increase in salary. Yeah, you should see the benefits package. Aren't we all? You have to go through the hazing first. Okay. We'll do that later on in the show. But let's jump in. A lot to talk about this week, actually. And one of the things we noticed was the press release from Amazon, which is increasingly making waves in the publishing industry. Maybe I shouldn't be saying this from Barnes & Noble, but Amazon is set to launch something called Kindle Singles, which are essentially a pamphlet series. They're going to publish pieces of written works of between 10,000 and 30,000 words under a Kindle Singles brand and then make them available as e-books. I know, Dan, you've been thinking about this idea of pamphlets and how e-books could revive that format that has a very long tradition in the publishing industry but has in the last 50 or 100 years really fallen by the wayside. What do you think of this Kindle Singles announcement? Well, I think, and I'm going to compress all of my normal 50 minutes of ranting into 10 minutes because I'm going to have to leave, unfortunately, a bit early on the podcast today. And so my rant for today is, you know, why is Amazon the innovator? I mean, like, why aren't university presses thinking about maybe doing, you know, $9.99 80-page books or long essays. You know, I just think it's an interesting and sort of sad statement about the state of publishing that there's this, you know, large.com that's, I think, doing more innovative things in e-publishing than really should be going on. I was talking kind of off the record to some people this morning who were interviewing me about the future of publishing and specifically about the future of the book, which in their mind they equated with somehow taking the book as it is right now and just sort of like sticking it online with like a little bit of window dressing around it. And I was really trying to say that there has to be experimentation in form and in economic models. Yeah. from, you know, whatever, Harvard University Press on your Kindle, or at least just making some kind of moves to try out different models, different sizes, shapes, payment schemes. And so, you know, I've just really been depressed by the rate of innovation in this area compared to, say, in journalism, where I think there's just Armageddon going on. And so people have had to try all kinds of different models, many of which will be unsuccessful. And I think we've discussed that on the podcast before. But this seems like a no-brainer for me. I think when this came out, I tweeted that I thought it was a genre that was really well-suited for the Academy because, frankly, there are a lot of dissertations that don't need to be 250-page books or 300-page books. They're probably, they'd be a solid 80-page read or maybe an 80-page read with an online exhibit to go with it, let's say, if it's an art history book. So I think once we're liberated from, you know, the kind of print and purchasing requirements of the monograph of the 200 or 300 page 60 or 80 or a hundred dollar print book. Um, why not try something in that range of the 30,000 word, you know, report? Um, I just think it makes a lot of sense to try to experiment with form, um, and, and with pricing. And, you know, I say kudos to Amazon for beating out, I think, some other potential innovators in this space. You know, I think it's, you said, Dan, that it's very well suited to academic writing, and I think that's absolutely right. I also think it's, to me, my feeling is it's very well suited to electronic writing. I know that a lot of the kind of, if you took what I've written on my blog over the past, I don't know, you know, couple of years, you know, there are some, I think, some themes there, some things that could be stitched together and put into a longer form. But it's probably not 100,000 words. It's probably more like 30,000 words. I think it's the way we kind of, that's the length at which we tend to express ideas online, I think. And so I think Amazon's probably tapping into something there. Mills, Amanda, do you guys think you're going to be publishing a Kindle single anytime soon? Well, I don't know that I'll be publishing a Kindle single, but just because I don't know that Amazon would be interested in the things that I might publish. But, you know, just when you said this about things from your blog, it occurred to me, you know, some of the most read and reread posts from Ed Wired over the last few years was a three-part series I did on making digital scholarship count. And if you took those three plus all of the comments from readers, it probably adds up to about 25,000 words. And, you know, and it was a snapshot of where we were in our thinking about it at that particular moment. And so now it's kind of out of date, but something like that could certainly be published. The other thing I was thinking as Dan was talking about this is something that's kind of disappeared from the scholarly publishing landscape is the working paper series. These used to be common, and they were a place where scholars could try out a rough idea but something that was not so rough that it didn't deserve to be published and disseminated. And so they were often printed between two pieces of heavy construction paper rather than bound, but they were still working papers and they circulated knowledge among scholars. And, you know, that's kind of moved off to the internet in a way, but that's something, those had a, they had a coherence and they had a purpose. And, and so as they're about that same size, that sort of 20,000 to 35,000 word piece. Yeah, I think this is interesting. One of the interesting things I think about it is what Amazon's motivation might be for doing this. And I think that their motivation for doing it is probably to take a little end run around the publishers that it's been having trouble with. Because, Dan, you were saying, well, why don't university presses do this? But book publishers in general, I think, have been conservative when it comes to innovating in this space. And Amazon is just the giant gorilla, you know. And so there was a whole controversy not too long ago, or not controversy, but sort of argument between Amazon and publishers where Amazon wants to offer ebooks for cheap, which, you know, seems logical because there's a lot less overhead. But publishers want to make sure that the prices are high. So, you know, Amazon put this little passive aggressive notice on a lot of its Kindle books saying, this price was set by the publisher. You know, it's not our fault if this e-book is $14.99 instead of, you know, $5.99 or $8.99. So almost all Kindle books have that. So in thinking why Amazon would want to do this, I really think that they want to do this because they want e-books to be cheap.
I want to buy lots of e-books and to buy them cheaply. And, you know, it's interesting when you're talking about mini e-books, because length doesn't really matter in the digital world. I mean, there's no difference between a 90-page book and a, you know, 290-page book in terms of what it costs to manufacture and distribute in the e-book world. So the only reason I can think of is that this is, you know, Amazon sort of thinks that this is a way to offer cheap e-books, you know, and show traditional publishers, you know, that they're not going to be ruled by what the traditional publishers think is the right price for e-books. Yeah, and in fact, with Kindle books, right, there are no page numbers even. So there really is no difference in the experience in reading a long-form work or a short-form work. And I think you're right, Amanda. I think they're definitely taking a shot at the publishing industry. One of the things that the vice president of Kindle content, Russ Grandinetti, said in the press release was, ideas and the words to deliver them should be crafted to their natural length, not to an artificial marketing length that justifies a particular price. So they definitely are taking a shot at the publishing industry. Great statement. I mean, it's totally true. You're totally right. I don't know if you remember these. In the 90s, was it Penguin that had these? They were 60 pence in the UK, I remember where they started. But then I think they did come to the United States and they were maybe $1 or $1.99. But these little books, do you remember them? They were even smaller than the Octavo size, like half that. I don't know what that would be. Sure. Yeah, no, I know what you're talking about. Yeah, do a decimal. Yeah, right. And it was exactly that. I remember the first one that I bought was an essay by Montaigne. And it was like the perfect size. It was 60 pages. It was a dollar. It had a little bit of an introduction. It was just perfect. And you could slip it in your pocket. Yeah. So I wonder if it's something like, you know, they're doing these short e-books because it's the kind of thing that print publishers don't publish because it's not worth it, you know, financially. Like maybe the scale of publishing, you know, 5,000 90-page books isn't worth it or something. Or they can't charge $25.95 for a 90-page book or something, so they don't publish any of those? I wonder if it's... Yeah, I'd love to learn more about the economics of all this. But I think in terms of the content, I'm willing to trust Montaigne that if 30,000 words is long enough to make a point, then 30,000 words is long enough to make a point. I'm going to... Isn't it also that you go into whatever, your Costco, which is really, has become one of these big locations for purchasing books. And, you know, you see that biography of John Adams and you think, oh man, you know, that has gotta be worth 30 bucks. I mean, it's a doorstop. And, you know, I think size has been this strange signal for price, even though it's theoretically, it shouldn't have anything to do with it. Right. Well, it does to an extent. I was actually really shocked when I was trying to publish my dissertation and was getting advice from various people because, you know, as a graduate student, I was really idealistic and I was trying to make, you know, do the best work I could and make sure it was right. But at the same time, I was writing to a specific page limit, you know, which was in that, you know, 250 to 300 page, you know, recommendation that the College of Arts and Sciences had for graduate students. And yet when I was talking to publishers, you know, on like how to get published by university press, they were like, short, have a short book. Make sure it's short. I'm like, really? Hey folks, I'm sorry. I need to head out, but it's good talking with you. All right, Dan. We'll talk to you next time. Okay, well, that's a good point to move on. We can take a look at what's going on in EDUCAUSE. EDUCAUSE is going on this week, and I think there's been a steady stream of interesting news out of that meeting. Does anybody know where EDUCAUSE is this year? I never go, so I don't know. Yeah, I'm not sure. But it doesn't matter in the digital world. Right. Actually, it totally doesn't matter. And the big news that came out on, I think, the first day of the conference on Monday was that the Gates Foundation announced a $20 million new program for education technology. And they're looking at making education technology reach more students and to improve the learning outcomes from educational technology. Now, they're giving these grants in a couple of different categories, four actually. One is open courseware. Another is blended learning, which I think means kind of mixed classroom, online kinds of experiences. Deeper learning, which is, I think, code for sort of virtual worlds and games. And then learner analytics, which I think is innovations in assessment and in identifying students that can benefit from these technologies and that sort of thing. This is really the first time I think we've seen Gates get into post-secondary educational technology in a big way, in a way that someone like the Center for History and New Media could apply for a grant from them. We haven't seen a kind of open call for proposals from Gates in our world. What do people make of this? Amanda, what are your thoughts on this big Gates announcement? Well, it's only natural to compare it to the story we talked about last time with Mark Zuckerberg donating whatever it was, $100 million directly to the Newark school system. And so actually, when I was thinking about this, I was thinking about, number one, it just, frankly, it makes me mad that our national public education system is some kind of charity that people have to keep giving money to. I mean, isn't this a basic qualification for a citizen? Isn't it a basic requirement in our country? How come we can't fund it out of government money? But, you know, I'm over it. It's okay. So it's fine. It's being supported by, you know, great philanthropists. That's a good thing. But apart from that, you know, I was sort of thinking about different models of, you know, investing in K through 12 public education in this country. And it's like, oh, do you want to give the money directly to the school district or do you want to do this kind of thing, which is a bit more removed? You know, funding grant programs for people to build various kinds of software. And it's, you know, it's interesting that Bill Gates would take the latter approach and Mark Zuckerberg would take the former approach. But, you know, and then the only other thing to be said about it is, you know, sounds cool. I bet some it's also worth mentioning that this is really – the $20 million goes along with like $34 or $35 million grant to community colleges or a program to provide grants to community colleges to improve success rates in community college education. And so I think it's really – if you see it in that context, then it's especially wise giving because these two things I think really go hand in hand is improving the improving success in community college is going to be affected by some of the kinds of things that this 20 million dollar grant is going to fund and if you read the the description of the things that they're expecting to to fund it's it's clear that it's a big part of it is targeting student success so I think that that that's really great because great because some of the more significant grants in higher ed from philanthropists of late have been focused much more or foundations have been focused much more on access. And it's not that I think access isn't a worthy goal. I think it's something really important to be funding. But access is not the same thing as success. And so I think I'm really pleased with this announcement, these sort of two announcements together, because they are focused in a lot of ways on success.
But I'm actually not one of those people that worries about that. I think the more open our classrooms are to observation by people from outside, the better. I think I've been advocating open teaching since the beginning of my career. So I think it's when classrooms are closed off from observation that all kinds of weird things happen that are not necessarily positive. It makes it too easy to kind of slack your way through the class as an instructor or a student. So I'm not a big believer in surveillance, but at the same time, I am a believer in open classrooms. So I think the whole thing is really exciting, and I'm glad that there is money for post-secondary education, not just primary and secondary ed. And I think some really exciting stuff is going to come out of this. It is going to be something to watch. I mean, I think this really has, you know, I don't know whether the results of the program will be any good or not. I think that remains to be seen. We'll see. But I do think that one thing's for sure, this is going to change the landscape of, you know, our fields, educational technology, digital humanities. All of a sudden, there's this new player. Gates suggested that he might give as much as $80 million over the next four years to this. All of a sudden, Gates is one of the biggest players, just like that, in funding the kinds of things we're involved in. So right up there with MacArthur and Mellon, NEH and the Department of Ed, and those usual suspects, now we've got Gates. And so, you know, I think we're really going to see some changes. That will have effects. And I think it we can learn a lot from the gaming industry in terms of sort of immersive experiences and how that can affect student learning. But the MacArthur funding has always seemed to me a little myopic in that sense. And the Gates announcement mentions some things about that, but on the positive side, I do really think that it's nice to see that the funding is spread across a whole variety of areas and is going to leave a lot of room, I think, for innovation by educators. And so I'm really pleased about that. On the slightly less positive side, I think there may be a kind of underlying assumption in this approach that distance education in some way is the future of higher education. Or they talk about blended learning and a mixture of face-to-face and online. Well, that's fine, and I think that's great. But I've said before in the podcast, you know, a lot of people in higher education think that distance learning is sort of, it's like the cold fusion, you know, it's, it's, as cold fusion is and always will be the energy source of the future. I think distance ed is and always will be the solution to all financial problems in higher education. And it's just not going to happen. And so I think it will be important. I don't think it's going to be the solution that a lot of people think it is. So I would hate to see, you know, when the announcement of who gets the money comes out, that everything's focused on distance ed. That would really disappoint me. Yeah, and I think we have seen that Bill Gates personally, not the Gates Foundation necessarily, but Bill Gates personally, shares that view. I think we saw a couple of weeks ago he made some statements about the future of education and that distance learning would be, you know, distance learning programs could be the new Harvard and Yale of higher ed. And I think, you know, there's definitely a connection between those two, this announcement and those statements. You know, Regarding your first point, Mills, I think that brings us nicely to another story coming out of EDUCAUSE, which is some worry about Second Life. Surprise, surprise, surprise. This is where we gloat a little bit. It seems that there's been a bit of a mass migration from Second Life when Second Life announced the end of their educational discounts. And campuses that have gotten heavily involved in Second Life are worrying about what to do next with their virtual campuses. Mills, I know what your thought about this is. Your thought is, I told you so. That kind of sums it up for me. I hope that when we actually put this together for broadcast, we'll be able to just pipe back in what I said, however long it was. We do have that flashback music that we haven't used in a while. Maybe, okay, maybe we'll, right, we could slot that in right here. You know, Tom, I think it was, it may have been you, it may have been Mills, who I remember really remarking on it when you made the point that data in Second Life is not exportable. You know, I don't know how people are doing this mass migration. It's a great visual image. You know, you picture people trudging along with their knapsacks, you know. Like a wagon train from Second Life. But I remember being kind of, you know, skeptical about Second Life and kind of eye-rolling about it and not really having a good reason for that eye-rolling until you mentioned that. So it's been a stone that I've thrown at Second Life ever since. Well, you can't get your data out of there. It's proprietary. Well, we really should get someone on here who can defend virtual campuses and virtual worlds because I think we're all skeptics. But I do think this announcement, the proprietary nature of Second Life, the difficulty of getting out, the lack of alternatives, does suggest that maybe we were a little bit right in all that name-calling. More news coming out of EDUCAUSE. There's a new recommendation engine for students called Sherpa. Amanda, you brought this up. What do you think about Sherpa? You know, I haven't seen, you know, I didn't see the demo or anything. I just have been reading a little bit about it. So, of course, the proof is going to be in the pudding the pudding about like what this software actually is and what it actually does. But there was a demo of a product called Sherpa, or maybe it wasn't even a demo, just sort of a description that is supposed to, like Netflix, recommend things for students, recommend courses, recommend library resources, all that kind of thing, gathering data from, I think, Blackboard in particular, but other university resources as well. You know, Blackboard, you know, you really, you know, if you have been in college for a while and you've been using Blackboard or some kind of learning management system like that, it does collect a lot of information about what classes you've had and so forth, but it doesn't really do anything with that information. So the system is supposed to do some recommending to students. And I think that can only be a good thing if it does work really well. But when I worked at NC State Libraries, they had developed something that was sort of similar to that. They did a lot of data mining, not so much based on an individual student's profile, but based on a course. They looked at the course catalog and took keywords from course descriptions and built recommendations of library resources and things like that for those courses. So I think we're generating so much data these days. I think it can only be a good thing to try to use that data in productive ways. What I'd like to see, and I haven't taken a close look at any of this, but I hope they're not just using data from Blackboard and the university kind of IT infrastructure about these students because the worry there is that you don't really get an accurate picture of a student's interests from what they've posted on Blackboard and the information that's logged about them in their university systems. I think it would be great to see if they could actually integrate data to the extent that that's possible from Amazon, from Facebook, from Netflix, to get a better view of the student as a rounded person know, it may be if they could take information from those systems, you might actually get a recommendation engine that would point students to educational resources and, you know, primary source documents, books, courses, other things that really did match their interests. I think one of the problems a lot of students had, I know I had as an undergraduate, it's hard to really match what the college has to offer with the things that you are actually interested in. You know, I might have been, I might have been, you know, had chosen a different major had I realized some of the cool things that were going on in, let's say, anthropology or some of the cool things that were going on in some of the science departments. I didn't because I didn't think I was interested in those things. In fact, I was interested in those things.
But you wouldn't have been able to tell that from the courses I was actually taking. So, you know, I hope that, I think that these kinds of systems do hold out a lot of promise, but I hope that they take the whole student into account in building these profiles and recommendations. Yeah, you know, I was just thinking, first of all, this seems to me like a nice add-on to Zotero. It takes a look at what you've saved in your library and the libraries of the people who you might be following on Zotero and then says to you, have you ever thought about this? And so that could be, you know, that could be quite interesting. And in particular, you know, the thing that we're thing that we're losing rapidly as fewer and fewer people go into the library, the physical library, is that serendipitous experience of just kind of walking down the aisle looking for that book with the call number that you need. And then you pull that book and then you happen to notice the book right next to it, or one shelf below has this title that catches your eye, and it may be in a whole different call number sequence than what you would have looked for. So you never would have turned it up in a Google search, but it happens to be shelved next to the thing that you were pulling, and there's some Library of Congress reason why they're shelved near each other. And so you find something that you never would have encountered otherwise. And so this is, to me, sort of the attractive thing to these recommendation systems is that they do recommend things that wouldn't have occurred to you. And so I can imagine, you know, scanning through the reading list subscribed or assigned by individual faculty members and then doing just what Tom said, recommending a course that, you know, you took courses where you read these books, well, and these articles, well, here's a course that is in some way connected to that. I remember once seeing a presentation by Patrick Murrayjohn at the University of Mary Washington where he's really into linked data, semantic data, and he made this point that I just have remembered ever since then, where he says, you know, the only entity on campus that knows which courses are assigning the same book is the university bookstore. And they don't let, you know, that information is closed down in their little, you know, Oracle database or whatever it is. You know, they don't share that information. Nobody can generally find that out. So if a chemistry class is reading Frankenstein and a literature class is reading Frankenstein, they're never going to know about it. And you lose the opportunity for a lot of great conversations that way. And so I don't know how much I'm into this whole gathering data about the student from various different services they already use, like Amazon and Netflix and whatever. I think there's privacy concerns with that, and it just seems sort of technically difficult in some cases. But definitely, like, things that are all within the university, I think, could be talking to each other a lot better than they do. We could be making connections much better than we do. So if this helps with that, I'm all for it. But it would also be interesting to know what percentage of our students use Rhapsody or Pandora or use the Genius settings on their iTunes account. So to see, you know, are they already opting into these recommendation software systems? And if it was set up as an opt-in, then I think that would probably be a better choice. Certainly there are huge technical difficulties too. I mean, the privacy concerns are real. The technical difficulties are possibly insurmountable. But I guess my point is that I just, how much can you really tell about a student from what he or she says on Blackboard? I mean, it seems to me that that is the time when the when the student is being leased his or her true self. You know, I mean, it's like it's you know, they're they're they're interacting with their professor. That's like that's not the real person. So I just wonder how much real information you can get from that student. You know, maybe some, you know, for some students, it's bound to work better than others. But, you know, the way that, you know, at least in my experience, the way a lot of students interact with even, you know, even a course blog is, you know, in the most, you know, in the most kind of bland way, you know, it assignment. They're doing it because they need to get the grade. And I guess it's just like garbage in, garbage out. I just don't know how much we're going to be able to tell from those interactions. But you know what? I think this is an exciting announcement. I think there's a lot of research to be done in this area, and we'll see. Moving on, we've got a couple more things to get through today. Another big announcement this week, the NHPRC, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the National Archives, essentially, and the University of Virginia announced that they are making the papers of the founding fathers available for free online. UVA has been digitizing and creating edited volumes of the founding fathers' papers for years, and at least for the last 10 or 15 years, putting those online but in a gated subscription way. And this new grant from NHPRC is going to enable UVA to make that stuff available for free to everyone. Mills, you know, this seems like something that we should all be very happy with. Am I wrong about that? No, you're not wrong. And, you know, it is certainly, I think, a good example of why there have to be these public and public-private or public, you know, federal and state partnerships over these kinds of things because we all know that the digitization of all of this material is extraordinarily expensive to do if you're going to do it. First, if you're going to do it, and even more expensive if you're going to do it right. And so it's too much to ask any university or organization to digitize all this material and then make it available for free without some support for that because it's not just getting it digitized. It's then once it's up, keeping it up and keeping the links unbroken and all of that kind of stuff that has to happen to projects once the initial work is done. So I think this is really great. And what could be more important for a democracy than access to crucial papers like these and free and open access because it's bothered me for years that UVA has kept these in a subscription-only system because everybody in the United States needs to have the possibility of access. They don't need to read it, but they need to have the possibility of access to this in the same way that we've screamed and yelled on the podcast about Reed Elsevier locking up federally funded medical research, for instance. It's's really a great, the interface is horrible, but the database of the material that's there is really great. The reason it's one of my favorite whipping boy websites is because it's not possible to learn who is behind the – it's constitution.org. It's not possible to learn who's behind it because let me tell you, I've tried and I'm pretty good at that. But I have learned that that same web hosting service on the other sort of behind the screen is also providing web hosting to various militia organizations around the United States, and so who have a very strong interest in constitutional documents. And so this is why this database exists. And so now once UVA puts all this stuff up, maybe there won't be a need for the constitution.org site anymore. And I'll have to find some other website to whip on. There's always the Hitler, there's always the Hitler historical museum. Yeah, I think, you know, it can, I'm not looking forward to increased ammunition for the endless debates about what the founders meant, but otherwise I'm, I'm, I'm with you, Mills. I think this is a very good thing. But at least the possibility of reference to the actual source will now exist. Right, right. Have you used these papers before through the subscription, Mills or Tom? I haven't. I mean, I've poked around the Rotunda website and looked at the interface for, of other reasons, for interface reasons, and because of our Papers of the War Department project to see how other people are doing it. But I haven't actually used the documents in my work. Because I was just wondering if they're marked up in TEI or what. I bet they are. Yeah, they are, right? Which is a very heavy, you know, that costs a lot of money to do that.
I'm glad to see that maybe the archives is starting to move in that direction. So I think that's a good thing. That's, you know, the mandate is good and the additional funding so that it's not an unfunded mandate is good. So I think we're seeing the start of something new and something good. From the wider tech world, we saw some news this week, too, some news that I think will have implications for campus life and certainly for museums and cultural heritage institutions. We saw the launch of Windows Phone 7, Microsoft's new mobile operating system, and the announcement of a whole bunch of handsets from a bunch of different handset makers, Samsung and HTC and LG and others, and the announcement that Windows Phone is going to be on several carriers as well. What do people think about, have people had a chance to look at the Windows Phone demos, and what do people think about Microsoft's new entry into the smartphone business? I haven't looked at it too much, but I've heard people talking about it who have looked at it, so, you know, secondhand or thirdhand reporting. We're all about that here. Yeah, right. It's the most unscholarly reportage ever. But, yeah, no, what I've heard was that people were really impressed with the range of phones so that there are some that have physical keyboards. There are some that are touchscreen. There are on all kinds of carriers and that the interface is really good. So it seems like a really strong contender in the mobile space. Mills, you've been in the market for a smartphone. Have you gotten one? I have finally ditched my crappy old clamshell phone, much to the relief of my 13-year-old son, who is no longer embarrassed by my phone because I now have an Android, which I'm very happy with. I held out as long as it was possible to hold out. You'll be glad to know, however, that I have not tweeted once from my new phone. Even though the app is built in, right? It doesn't seem to be built into my. And you're not sure which model you have, are you? Oh, I don't even know that. I just know. I know that I have an Android phone and it has lots of little icons on it. And I can, I can, it took me, you know, I will say though, it took me about five minutes to figure out how to answer it the first time it rang. But, but I am in fact old. I'll be even older on Monday. So, you know, but at least I've made it into the 2000s or the 21st century or whatever century we're in. But on the question of Microsoft, you know, I think, I guess I'm surprised it took so long, but it's, I think it's going to be ultimately important just because Microsoft really has really improved Windows a lot. I mean, my kids' computers are Windows 7 computers, and I will admit to being really impressed by Windows 7. I think it's a very good upgrade for a change. God only knows why Vista ever hit the market in the first place, but Windows 7 is good, and this is a stripped-down phone version of Windows 7. And for people whose platform this is, Windows is their platform, then it's, I think, really important that they have that easy transfer from their laptop to their phone and back. And from what I understand, too, this plays really well with the Zune software. And there are some people who are very, very fond of their Zunes. And it's anything that kind of breaks up a monopoly, I think, is a good thing. And Apple and iTunes seem to have such a lock on the music player. And the iPhone is such a's, it's nice to have a lot of choice. I'm going to bring Dan back in here. Hey, I'm back. You know, I was just thinking, I'm sorry for that little interlude there. But aren't we a featured podcast in the Zune marketplace? I think the campus is. Yeah. I've, I've received like several tweets from people saying that we're a featured podcast in their, like, academic section or something. Maybe that'll really increase our listenership once Windows Phone launches. No, I think, Tom, you, I think, well, we discussed this probably, like, a year ago, and you said it's going to increase our numbers by tens. I think that was the quote. But it actually, I think, with the launch of Windows Phone, which looks like a really nice offering, I think they've done some interesting things with the quote. to see different parts of applications. It looks pretty slick. And I think as the enterprise, including campuses, is going to take a pretty hard look at this. And so maybe now that we'll be a featured podcast on Windows Phone, hopefully that'll stick. We may increase our numbers by hundreds. Well, you know what we should do is launch a campaign to get people to, you know, rate us really high and subscribe, you know, in iTunes and, you know, get us. Oh, yeah. People should really do that. The iTunes store, yeah. Don't we need an iTunes or Android app? Oh, Lord. You know, a digital campus app? Oh, yeah, right. You want to start working on that, Mills? Sure. Okay. Yeah. Just don't make it multi-. Okay. I think that's what I'll do this weekend. I'll knock it out this weekend. But I think, Mills, you make an interesting point about Windows 7. I do think that Windows was on its heels, I think, for a long time. Microsoft was on its heels for an awful long time. It seemed like all the interesting news had been coming out of Google and Apple and Facebook. But I think, you know, with the launch of Windows 7, I get the feeling Microsoft is not as dead as people might have thought. I think Windows Phone looks really good. And I think the other announcement we saw this week was a partnership between Facebook and Bing to make some kind of social search, basically tying search results to your Facebook friends, the things that your Facebook friends have liked, to try to hone the search results that you get from a Bing search to map that onto your social graph and to give you customized search results based on the kinds of things that your friends have been searching for and the kinds of things your friends have liked. It seems to me that that is a, you know, that's an interesting new direction for both Facebook and Bing. And I think it may be a challenge to Google. Do other people have thoughts on this kind of social search announcement? You know, I was thinking about these new Microsoft announcements, and boy, they really are trying hard. But I think where it's different now from what they used to be is that they were always able to leverage Windows, right, to kind of force people to, for instance, use a browser, a new browser from Microsoft. And they've lost that near monopoly power to kind of leverage the OS to get people to use other stuff. And that, I think, is their biggest problem right now is I agree that I think this Windows Phone 7 thing, like, it looks pretty cool. I like the UI quite a a bit but is it that much better than android or iphone you know um that it makes me take a second look probably not is being that much better or even as good as google to make you switch i just think the problem is is that they're coming second um and they used to be able to come second when they had OS power. In other words, I think their Internet Explorer was a second browser, right? But they made it a 90% of the market browser because they put it into Windows. But you can't put a phone into Windows. Maybe they're thinking of ways to do that, but they haven't yet. And, you know, and search is another area where it's just, you know, Google has become a verb and it's just much harder for, even though I think Bing is actually, it's not too bad right now. But it just, you know, things like social search, I don't know. Does your average college student, are they going to switch from Google to Bing because of that? I'm not sure they will. Yeah, I will agree with you there. I mean, I think it is much harder for Microsoft. I think the difference that I've seen, at least, is that I think Microsoft maybe gets that finally. I think they've been operating for the past five, maybe even 10 years, thinking that they were still the monopoly they were in 1997.
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi-weekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Fear itself! This is Digital Campus number 28 for the 17th of June, 2008. Raising the Bar Camp. I'm Dan Cohen. Welcome back to Digital Campus. We're glad you could join us. And this week we have the regulars on the line, Mills Kelly. Hi, Mills. Hi, Dan. And Tom Scheinfeld, who's joining us from a landline this time. Hi there, Tom. Hi. Hi, guys. Sorry, I apologize to all the listeners for my sound quality. The District of Columbia seems to be in complete chaos with fires in the metro and power outages. So I didn't make it out to campus today and I don't have my headset. So my sound's a little bad, that's why. Yeah, you know, we should explain to our international audience that even though we live in the capital of a superpower, somehow we have a lot of power outages in the Washington, D.C. area. My power was out for a couple of days the other week. We're also in the, a lot of people don't realize that Washington is at the end of the tornado corridor that is in the United States that starts out in the Midwest and is sort of a stripe across the United States. We're actually at the end of that. So we do get strong winds and occasional tornadoes. And so we've had a lot of power outages. And I think almost a tornado came by CHNM or a near tornado came by this CHNM pretty recently, a week ago. So anyway, Tom, we're glad you could join us by phone. And let's kick right in. Well, I guess it's unavoidable to discuss the 3G iPhone. You know, I guess I'm the only one still with an iPhone here. Mills, Tom, does this make you want to bite that there's now a cheaper, faster iPhone with GPS in it? Yeah, I think I'm going to bite. My problem with the iPhone has been all along, and I've said this on the show before, is the lack of a physical keyboard. But I've kind of realized in having my BlackBerry now for a whole year that I don't want the physical keyboard anymore. It drives me too much to my email. And so I'm happy to get rid of the physical keyboard and the speed of the connection and the new features I think are just going to kind of put me over the edge. So I'll probably be going out on July 11th as soon as it's out and waiting in line to get one. Yeah, I think, well, I'm going to wait and see what happens with Father's Day that's coming up. But hint, hint, hint to one listener to the podcast. But I don't know. I'm really bad about stepping on telephones and losing them and things like that. So dropping them in the pool. And so I think still $200 might be above my price point, but we're going is going to be iPhone usage on campus. And indeed, there was a rumor that in addition to this 3G iPhone, they are thinking about letting campus technology stores sell the iPhone, which I think would really change the landscape of this. And I wonder if that would include a more significant discount for students. But the iPhone interface, along with Android, which I think is the open source iPhone-esque operating system for mobile from Google, which I think is going to have a lot of traction. It looks really good and allows for a lot of the feature set that the iPhone has. I think between those two things, we're going to have a lot of smartphone users on campus in 2009. And I've enjoyed having the iPhone and more than that, enjoyed jailbreaking my iPhone, which is the act of sort of doing a little hack on your iPhone to install non-sanctioned applications is I really feel it gives me a window into 2009, 2010, the kinds of things that will be possible on mobile on campus, like location-based access to information, various kinds of messaging systems. You know, it really sort of opens up your imagination when you jailbreak your iPhone, install these applications. Of course, after June 11th, you won't have to do any of that because there'll be an application store and you'll be able to legally download this. But I think it's going to open up a lot of eyes on campuses in museums and libraries, the kinds of new applications that will be available on mobile. In addition to the high-speed connection for the iPhone, I think that the big story here really is the built-in true GPS to this phone. And I think there have been GPS devices around, consumer GPS devices around for a long time, and we've talked about them, and we've bought a few and played with them and stuff. The difference between the iPhone and those earlier devices is I think that the iPhone provides a really nice applications programming platform for a GPS-enabled device. Like the earlier devices, the Garmons and the Dells and all those kinds of handheld GPS devices, you basically use the software that came on them. This device, I think, allows people and educators and museum professionals and others, it will allow them to actually build custom apps for the built-in technology of the built-in GPS. And I think that will push us forward. I think prior to this, you could use it for what you could use it for, but you couldn't really be imaginative. I think that the iPhone and the App Store and the development kit will allow us to really let our imaginations run wild. So I think that's really the biggest story, I think, here. Well, and for me, I think that's exactly right because, I mean, my imaginations already run wild. I'm teaching a course, a field studies course next summer where we're going to spend, a group of students and I are going to spend two weeks actually in the field doing place-based computing. And so when I started reading this story, I mean, I was planning on doing this all with GPS devices and then kind of going through the cranky process of coordinating the data that we're going to get, the historical data that we're going to gather out in the field with other kinds of applications. And so to be able to do it seamlessly in an iPhone, I think it's just going to be great. So I'm already thinking about how I'm going to write that grant application to Apple to say, here's, you know, I'm developing a whole new application for place-based education. And so I need, you know, 20 of these for my students. Yeah, I agree. I think, and, you know, some of this may be able to take place on the iPod Touch, even though it's not going to have the GPS. But, you know, I think you could still have some applications for that, which is, you know, it's obviously going to be a cheaper device because you won't have to have the service contract on it. But I do think this opens up a realm of possibilities. I mean, I know the three of us who've talked about, you know, possible history applications or things that maybe, let's say the National Park Service could do if they knew that a certain segment of the population visiting, you know, sites around the United States had an integrated GPS on their phone, you know, with a very rich interface. The possibilities of that, I think, are pretty astonishing. So, and I would encourage people, you know, at least if they're listening to this in June when it's coming out 2008, you know, over the next month, you can go and look at some of the existing applications for jailbroken phones. There are good lists, for instance, at lifehacker.com. Just do a search on that site for iPhone and jailbreak, and it'll list, you know, the top 10 applications. And you'll see the really wide variety of things that you could do on a phone that has that kind of feature set. And it's really becoming a sort of full-fledged computer that's mobile. And so I think in that way, it's really different than bringing your laptop somewhere and loading up some kind of application. It really enables, I think, new things. And I think we'll just have to think through what is actually possible here and what you could do once you know where, let's say, a phone user is and the kind of information that could be delivered instantly to that device. Is there anything negative from this iPhone announcement that you'd like to see on that kind of a platform?
So I think there are going to be a lot of angry first-generation iPhone owners out there. But I do think that the platform has really improved, and I think this is mostly good news. The one thing I think I'd say is I'm not sure that I'm entirely happy with the notion that I'm going to have to buy all the applications, or even if they're free, get them through the iTunes Music Store. It seems like a fairly closed universe. And, I mean, Apple is all about the kind of closed universe, always has been. But this seems even more closed than what they've done, for instance, with the Mac. And so I'm a little concerned that Apple is going to be vetting these applications. Apple is going to be deciding which ones get into the store, which ones don't, which ones are highlighted on the homepage, which ones aren't. And so for smaller application developers, for people who are doing experimental projects, I worry that Apple will be exercising a little bit too much control to let a thousand flowers bloom. But other than that, I can't see too many negatives. Yeah, I will say sort of the counter-argument on that is that for this to have any kind of ease of use in the educational environment, it's got to be simply downloaded from the iTunes store or some central place like that because the average faculty and student user just needs that simplicity. Did you notice that in the announcement, they actually mentioned something about being able to distribute up to 100 people in an ad hoc way applications? I kind of wonder about that piece of it. There may be some way for kind of small scale, you know, class size distribution where, you know, you don't need to go through some kind of, you know, sign up to be an official developer, etc. It was a little bit unclear to me. It may be for the enterprise only. And I wonder if universities would qualify in a sense to get some kind of enterprise plan where it seems like would be great for use in the classroom because you could actually, I think, distribute these things and wipe them out or alter them from a central location, which is always what big institutions like universities want to do. And I think as part of that, you can put some of these applications on it directly. So you could say, well, for all History 101 students who want this program that Mills came up with, and we only want it for those people for the next three months, and then sort of wipe it after that and get the phones back. It's a little bit unclear to me what that one line was about being able to distribute up to 100 phones on an ad hoc basis. But I guess we'll have to see. And, you know, we'll have to see about these licensing requirements too, which undoubtedly are going to clash with some of the intellectual property arrangements that universities normally like to have. Because the developers program, it really seems like for individual developers, I'm not sure how a university as a whole would sign up for that. Well, and where it's going to run into trouble is along those lines because I've been, you know, we've been struggling with the whole iTunes U thing here at George Mason for the last year and a half. And one of the big issues has to do with copyright and licensing agreements because not so much for historians but in a variety of other disciplines, faculty members have some arrangement with a publisher to use a variety of graphics in a lecture that came from a textbook or something like that. And so they've said, well, I can't make my podcasts available to, you know, with any of these kinds of images. I can't make that available to the general public. And so because that would violate the terms of these agreements that I've signed. And so my podcasts have to be behind the password and blocked from general access. You students in my class can actually listen to it. And this has just been a real hairball for us to try to deal with. And in fact, I think it's really retarded the rollout of that iTunes U platform at George Mason. And the other problem is an authentication issue, which I have to say Apple has never been able to work out with the people at Mason. And the people at Mason say it's Apple's fault. I'm sure the Apple people say it's Mason's fault. But basically, Right, right. complicated legal landscape for this application store and then you mesh that with a complicated technical infrastructure for that application store and then you mesh that with the complications of a university legal and technical environment, authentication is a really, really good point. It seems like most of these applications are meant to be downloaded to any phone and used by anyone and that's going to be really hard to figure out how to limit those sorts of things. Well, I'm sure we'll talk much more about this. And I suppose we should cover Android when that's officially out. You know, a quarter million people have downloaded the software development kit for the iPhone. It's pretty astonishing. And including some people here at the Center for History and New Media, it'll be interesting to see if we can come up with some initial applications that they're up there. Well, in other news, using technology for another reason, Tom forwarded a pretty interesting article about peer-to-peer loans and how this might work to help out college students. Tom, you want to fill us in on this story? Yeah, there's a new company that's launching, I guess just launched, called GreenNote. And what essentially they do is offer small sort of microfinance loans to students, basically on the model of microfinancing that has gone on in the developing world where companies like Grameen Bank and others have done this where you can give a small $100 or $500 or $1,000 loan directly to, in the case of the developing world, a small business or in the case of GreenNote, a student, you can give them that loan. And the company, the GreenNote or the bank, is sort of the middleman. They do all of the servicing of the loan, the invoicing and the tracking the loan and all of that. And you get the interest from the loan. And so this allows basically for people with resources to provide students without them with college loans. And they're basically modeled on the Stafford loan. So the interest rate is the same as a federal Stafford loan. And the terms are the same as a federal Stafford loan. It's just that you're doing this in small amounts directly with a student who you have an interest with. And what this company allows you to do is pick the student that you want to service, and you can read their profile. And it's in some ways a nice little investment for an investor because they can sort of see the progress of the student. Student loans have very low default rates, so it's a fairly safe investment. And it's at 6% or 7%. It's a better interest rate than you're going to get in a savings account or even in a CD. So it's kind of an interesting model of using technology to put people in contact, people sort of outside of the academy, outside of the world of education, in contact with students who are looking to get into that world. And so, you know, it has worked very well in the developing world with financing, you know, very, very small businesses, tea shops and other kinds of very small businesses. And it could work, I think, for student loans, especially in this economic climate where there's such a credit crunch and we're getting student loans, commercial loans, outside of the $18,000 or whatever the federal government offers you, is so difficult. So this is something of a new model, I think a timely new model that we should keep an eye on. Well, and in fact, it's a new delivery system for an old model because my father went to college on a plan, through a plan just like this. He grew up very poor in Tampa, Florida, and there was a local radio DJ who had no children of his own. And so he would pay for the first semester tuition room and board for, and books for a deserving student from the Tampa area, uh, with the understanding that someday they would pay him back. And, and back in those days, if you went to college and you made straight A's, then the college would find a way to keep you. And so that's how my father stayed in college was by making straight A's pretty much the whole time. But he was probably, it was probably 15 years before he made enough money to pay this man back the $300 or $400 that first semester cost back in the day. So it's the same system. It's just a much better delivery, much more efficient delivery system. I mean, much like the iPhone, I think it's just, it does sort of spur the imagination to think of other things that could use this peering system to assist students.
I wonder if this will actually take off. I guess we will have to see. The three of us really had a terrific time at a new conference that started this year at the Center for History and New Media. You may have heard about it. It was called VATCAMP, with the VAT acronym being the Humanities and Technology Camp, and the website for it at vatcamp.org. And it was the first really unconference or bar camp, and we'll have to explain what those terms mean, that I've been to. And I think that the rest of us, Mills and Tom, this is the first time you've been to one of these as well, right? That's right. Yeah. So what we want to do is sort of explain what that camp was and the way in which it might fit in pretty well into the world of museums and libraries and universities and colleges, which all have these regular conferences. And I think all three of us felt it might provide a kind of new model for at least part of these conferences that we all go to, these academic conferences. So maybe Tom if you could kick us off by telling us a little bit about that camp, what it was and sort of the unusual way in which we started the weekend at the conference. Sure. Well, we had the idea for that camp several years ago, and we thought about, wouldn't it be nice to just get a whole bunch of people with similar interests together for a kind of working weekend? And this was right about the same time that the bar camp or unconference trend was taking hold in the world of IT more generally and web development and Web 2.0. And a bar camp or an unconference, you get into these definitional battles that people in the world of IT like to get into. But essentially, they're all sort of the same in that they differ from an ordinary conference in a couple of ways. First, that the sessions aren't planned in advance. The sessions are planned mostly on the day of the conference. And the way that happened in the case of that camp was we encouraged people who wanted to come to the conference to email us with a vague idea of what they might want to talk about or what they might want to learn, the kind of reasons that they wanted to come to the conference, and just a little bit about themselves. And we made our decisions on the applications just on kind of who sounded most enthusiastic, who had the best questions, who had the most interesting ideas. And so we made some decisions about who could come. And then we encouraged those people who were accepted into the conference to go to a blog. We set up a blog and to post some of their ideas and to try to start conversations about things we might talk about, try to start those conversations ahead of time, but no kind of formal proposals for panels or papers. Just throw out some ideas, try to start some conversations. And then when we got to the conference, on the first morning of the conference, the first slot was a plenary session where we all got together and we looked at that blog and we tried to pick out some general trends. What are the kinds of things people are interested in? And from there, we put it to the audience. Are you guys still interested in these topics? Someone proposed doing something on GPS. Who's interested in GPS? We saw a show of hands. We said, okay, well, that seems like something we should talk about. Who wants to go to a session on GPS? Another show of hands. And we scheduled the time slots in the rooms based on kind of the interests of the crowd, what people were interested in doing on that morning. So it was really kind of ad hoc program. And sort of the other way it differs from an ordinary conference is that there are no just attendees. Everybody has to be an active participant in the conference. Nobody can just sit there and listen or take notes. And in fact, no one is really standing up at a podium and presenting a paper either. There were no formal papers. There were no red papers. Everyone was there to demo a project or test the technology or discuss a problem or an issue with the audience. And so everybody was required to present or demo or propose something. And so all of the sessions ended up being very collaborative. So those are sort of the two differences, is that the program was a kind of ad hoc program just based on the collective interests of the people there. And the sessions themselves were much more informal, much more discussion-based, much more kind of collaborative than an ordinary paper session you would have at an ordinary conference. Yeah, and just to let our audience know, I mean, some of the things that came up, just to read from the schedule, we had sessions on text mining and digital art, the act of teaching, you know, how you teach a digital humanities course. We had something on virtual worlds, crowdsourcing, questions about civil engagement and research methods, games, street maps, open street maps. We had something on graphics programming and infrastructure and sustainability and various hacking sessions on different programs, including two of our major open source programs here at the center, Omeka and Zotero. And visualization and GIS and mashups had a lot of interest as well. So it was really across the board, these sessions, right, Tom? Yeah, it was. And, you know, depending on the interest of people in the crowd, we had about five different spaces that we used. We had two kind of conference rooms that fit about 25 people each. We had a smaller, our lab space, which maybe fit about 15 people around a widescreen TV. And then we had two sort of smaller breakout areas, just large tables where people could congregate. And those were, you know, eight to 12 people. And so depending on the interest of the session, people just kind of congregated in the space that was right for them. And, you know, if it was a hacking session, people tended to want to sit around a table. If it was more of a project demonstration session, then we did it in a larger conference room. So, you know, sort of depending on the interest, we assigned the rooms that way. So it really was that the spaces also fit the topics, I think, very well. So that was kind of cool, too. Mills, what was your experience as a first-timer to this kind of relatively unstructured event? I was trying to think of a way that I could convert all of my professional conferences to this model. Because, I mean, we've all been to academic conferences, and they all have kind of moderate interest value. Mostly the sessions are an opportunity to sort of find out what somebody is doing that might be interesting, and sometimes it is, sometimes it's not. It's a chance to go and be supportive of a friend or a colleague who's giving a paper. It's a chance for graduate students to present themselves to a wider audience. It's a variety of things like that. But mostly they're, especially at least in history, I don't go to museum conferences or political science conferences, but in history, they tend to be pretty doggone boring. And especially at the late afternoon sessions, it's often really hard to stay awake. And it's not because the information being communicated isn't worthy or interesting it's just being having papers read to you for hours on end is after a while you know the brain recoils and so this this this was just so much more stimulating and engaging and um and it wasn't you know also the other flaw i think in academic conferences is that there's a fair amount of posturing that goes on and there really was none at this unconference that we held. It was really an opportunity for people of like mind and like interest to get together and share ideas and possible projects and talk about what they were up to and really collaborate in the true sense of the word of collaboration. That's I I think, the thing that really impressed me the most was the really high degree of collaboration that went on. So, you know, I was thinking about this and thinking, well, what about the American Historical Association Conference or the My Home Conference, which is a Slavic Studies conference? And I think that there's really going to be a place within those conferences for a kind of sub-conference like this where things like this can happen. I think it's not the case that the American Historical Association annual meeting could switch entirely to an unconference model in part because graduate students do need the opportunity to present themselves to potential department employers by showing off their work a little bit. And this model doesn't really provide that as easily. And also the funding model that we live in is that you get money if you're going to a conference to give a paper. And so as opposed to – I'm trying to imagine how I would make the case to the dean's office of, well, I'm going to a conference to sit around and talk.
I mean, you know, presenting a paper at the annual conference is a sort of, you know, a kind of quasi-publication. It's part of your, you know, what is expected of you as an active participant in the profession. So, yes, going to sit somewhere and drink coffee and do something really interesting and productive, you know, that doesn't count. And, you know, in a lot of places, I mean, you know, our institution is not as formal about this, but a lot of institutions are extremely formal about, you know, they have counting systems that presenting a paper at a conference counts X points and chairing a session only counts X minus four or something like that. And so, like in the UK, for instance, everything is spelled out in their annual evaluation scheme. So there's no place for collaborative work in these counting schemes. We should mention that the attendees were from all kinds of parts of the university library museum world. I mean, we had programmers, we had librarians, we had professors, you know, tenured and non-tenured. We had project management people. We had foundation project officers. Sort of everyone who's involved in this world of humanities and technology was there. And it really felt, you know, non-hierarchical that, you know, people were really willing to work with, you know, people of different stripes and at different stations in life and in the profession because they felt that those people might have information that was of interest to them and that they could learn from those people. And, you know, I found the academic conferences, beside the sort of careerism that goes on there, is a very hierarchical place. I mean, the AHA, you see kind of glaze-eyed graduate students who've, you know, are just about to finish their dissertation, who are on the job market, and they're sort of walking around between interviews or hoping to schmooze with the right people. And there was really none of that at that camp. Yeah, that was one of the, I wrote a blog post following the camp about this, and I pointed out sort of three differences between that camp, just in terms of atmospherics and process between that camp and other kinds of conferences. And the democratic nature of that camp was one of the things that I pointed to, that there really wasn't a whole lot of concern about status, that graduate students and full professors were able to kind of mix it up in a very open way and share information very, very openly. The other two things that I mentioned were that I thought that that camp was very honest. I thought that people were not there, you know, Dan, you used the word posturing, and I think you do get a lot of posturing at traditional conferences where everyone, at least it's been my experience, everyone is sort of there to prove how smart they are and to kind of outsmart the competition. And there was really none of that at that camp either. I mean, people were very honest. What I thought was very interesting, and I thought the most productive thing, people were really honest about, not about their successes, but about their failures, where they had problems, where things that they were trying to do but couldn't do, where they didn't have the resources, where they didn't have the knowledge. And that allowed for, I think, some really productive exchanges where people were really helping each other to solve their problems rather than trying to sweep those problems under the rug and pretend like they had kind of mastered their field and they were in complete command of the issues. I thought that was really, really very nice. I think the other thing to point out about that camp that I did in my blog post is that it was really inexpensive. We were able to do this on a relative shoestring, and really there was no funding for the conference. We didn't have a grant for it. We got some sponsorships from the GMU Provost's office, a small sponsorship from them, a small sponsorship from Niche, the network in Canadian history and environment, and a small sponsorship from the New York Public Library. Other than that, we asked for $20 donations from the participants. We literally passed around a hat. And between those $20 donations and some small sort of sponsorships for a lunch here and a breakfast there, we were able to put on a very nice conference with T-shirts and breakfast, really nice breakfast and lunch buffets each day, office supplies, and even a couple of travel stipends for students. So, you know, it's another model. You don't need $100,000 to bring people together to actually have a good weekend, a good productive working weekend. Well, and it seems like the fact that it was done on a shoestring changed the expectations game for it. I mean, when you get a very formal conference, something like the AHA or in the library world, the ALA, those kinds of conferences that are at the Marriott, that have the ballroom, you know, there is a certain formality that is just sort of enforced by that kind of environment. And so I think people did feel more open because we weren't sitting in rows of, you know, gilded chairs in a ballroom. I think that really helped out. And people pitched in to, you know, help clean up, do those sorts of things that you wouldn't normally see at a conference. Okay, but before we say that this was the greatest thing since sliced bread, I mean, doesn't the bar camp or unconference idea come out of a different world than that of academia, more technology world where, say, people might be used to collaborating more often like programmers do on a big project? How well does this map onto something like the AHA? And what might actually be the kind of takeaways for conference planners in the world of academia? Well, I think that's a fair point. I think it does map onto digital humanities and digital history better than it does onto traditional scholarship. I think that's a fair point. I think it could be very easily transferred to fields like public history, where the work is very collaborative, to the museum field, and to libraries as well, where work is done in teams. And, you know, the single-authored monograph is not the end-all, be-all of professional success. So I think that in some worlds, it's going to fit better than others, but I do think that there is room, even in the traditional fields, for a frank discussion of issues, for an honest and open discussion of challenges and problems, for real community between graduate students and tenured faculty. So those kinds of things, I think, could be beneficial to traditional fields as well. So while it probably does map on better to fields where the nature of the work is, you know, by necessity collaborative, I think there are things that could be transferred to more traditional fields as well. Yeah, I mean, it would be interesting to see at the AHA if you could have a session that, let's say, graduate students who were not at the end of their dissertation process and thus on the job market and having that scared look on their face, but ones maybe near the beginning of their dissertation process who could go into, you know, micro groups of common interest and, you know, get advice from more senior scholars in the field. I mean, beyond just their, let's say, their dissertation director. I mean, that is a fairly appealing thing. So, you know, I don't know if that's a possibility, but, you know, I'd like to, you know, see that in the future. Okay, so in the spirit of unconference sharing, why don't we have our picks for the week? Mills, what do you have for us this week? Well, mine is one I picked up at that camp, and that is the OpenStreetMap.org. And if you're not familiar with OpenStreetMap, they are creating in a collaborative open source environment a free editable map of the entire world where individuals are uploading all the data. Why I'm particularly excited about this is not the free access to mapping data, but instead to use the same platform to start building historical maps. And so we're going to download some of the patches. It's a Ruby on Rails application, and we're going to download some of the patches that make it possible to use it in historical time instead of in present time and this summer play around with it a little bit and see if we can't create some historical maps this way. So it should be fun. It's really a neat site, so you should check that out. It's at openstreetmap.org. Of course, we'll link to all of the picks and other links from this week at digitalcampus.tv. Tom, why don't we go to you? Okay, thanks. I've got sort of a shameless plug if people will indulge me. My pick of the week is the Gulag Many Days, Many Lives site that CHNM just launched last week.
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi-weekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Here it goes. This is Digital Campus number 25 for the 21st of April, 2008. Get with the program. I'm Dan Cohen. And we're here for the 25th anniversary edition of the Digital Campus podcast. Here, as usual, with Tom Scheinfeld. Hi, Tom. Hey, Dan. And unfortunately, Mills Kelly could not make it today, but we are incredibly fortunate to have two really bright and creative individuals working in the digital humanities with us on the podcast. And we were just going to have them on the feature segment to talk about their thoughts on starting programming. But we've decided they're so good, we have to bring them in the new segment as well. So we have with us as well, Steve Ramsey from the University of Nebraska. Hi, Steve. Hello. Hello, everyone. And Steve is an assistant professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and you're also a fellow at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. Do you want to say a word about the center? Yeah, it's a big research center similar to the sort of outfit you guys have, or IATH MYTH or other organizations, centers like that, and has about 40 or so digital projects, including the Whitman Archive, most famously, and some other things. And it's a really wonderfully vibrant research community. It was one of the main reasons I came here, actually, is to be associated with that group. That's great. Yeah, we follow a lot of the work that goes on there. And, Steve, you can be found online at your blog, which is at lens.unl.edu. Yes. And we are also fortunate to have with us, and I think this is the first time we've had a guest back. So, Bill, you've done a good job on, I think it was Digital Campus No. 9, Bill Turkle from the Department of History at the University of Western Ontario. Hi, Bill. Hey, guys. And Bill, of course, is the mind behind digitalhistoryhacks.blogspot.com, one of the great digital humanities blogs out there on the web. And you're also an assistant professor in the Department of History at University of Western Ontario. And anything you would like to plug? No. Okay. Well, I know we have something else to plug from you, a book that you're working on later on in the feature segment. So we'll have ample time for plugging. But as usual, we'd like to dive right in the news. And it's great to have Steve and Bill joining Tom and me on the news roundup. Well, I guess one of the things that the four of us always deal with is our servers, our web servers, which are generally giant panes in the rear. And as our server has been doing a lot this past week, crashes a bit. And so I guess we always look at the attractiveness of maybe hosting off-site and putting our applications in better suited environments. And so I guess we were interested, at least Tom and I were, on the launch of Google Apps Engine, which is a place to put web applications where Google stores it. So, Tom, what was your initial thought on this? I know we host web applications like Omeka, the web exhibit software. Is this something that we would want to port over to Google Apps in the future? Well, I mean, I should say off the bat that my feelings on this are a little bit colored by the week I've had, which has involved a lot of butting up against our administration and bureaucratic red tape in various ways. And so I'm right now – you're catching me at a moment when I'm incredibly eager to move all of our stuff off campus to some more reasonable site. So I do think it's a promising idea. The idea of having someone else host your web application, keep everything up and running, providing storage even is a really attractive one, kind of outsourcing some of those functions and some of that work. We've talked about outsourcing other things on campus, like more and more universities are turning to things like Gmail to outsource their email systems. And to some extent, you could see a similar model for outsourcing web applications that are built by and used by university and library and museum communities. So it sounds good to me. And I've noticed that people have been doing experiments combining some of these services so that Google hosts and runs the web app itself, but Amazon S3 provides the storage and various other things. So I think it's definitely something to consider. Right. So a little bit more info on this, and then we'll get Bill and Steve's input on it. But it seems that, first of all, for those who don't know about sort of outsourcing these sorts of things, generally the way you do it is that you get a server, much like the one you currently have, which is a box connected to the internet 24-7, and you can write in files and create a database there and things like that. This is a sort of different environment. You don't really get access to all the stuff on the server. You don't get access to the operating system. You can't install a database. It's sort of what they call cloud computing. And you kind of have to program to that particular environment. So you have to kind of learn these things. I guess a good competitor is Amazon has some of these services like their EC and S series. So S3 is a storage capacity that you can use for applications and dump files there. And a lot of modern web applications use Amazon services to host this. But it's not like you have access to your own server. And so some of the, I think the worries about this are that you're giving your application away to Google's giant server farm. The other thing is that Google, at least at first, is requiring you to program in Python. And Steve, you are an active Python programmer. Is that correct? Actually, Bill is the... Oh, Bill, I'm sorry. I know Python fairly well, but Bill is the expert. I'm more on the Ruby side. Oh, you've gone to Ruby. Okay, we'll discuss that in a few minutes. Bill, have you looked at Google Apps Engine at all? I mean, is this something you would consider, or do you just like the total control that you get of hosting something on your own server? I'm actually of two minds about this. I think if you're trying to do the kinds of projects that you guys are doing or that they're doing at Nebraska where you're creating tools for other people or for a kind of community of users, then absolutely it's to me to put the stuff on someone else's server and let them do the kind of low-level sysadmin type stuff. In terms of kind of individuals or smaller projects or more kind of hackish projects, I think it is essential to get a setup where you can actually get under the hood and tinker around with stuff. And so I would say, you know, there's kind of benefits to both approaches, definitely. And I think that there could be, and Bill, even what you're describing, I think that there could be a hybrid model where the development of your project, even if it's a larger product or web service, that the development has to maybe happen on your own machine so that you're on your own service so that you really can have the full range of possibilities to experiment with. But once it's up and running, I mean, for dealing with all the issues of load and uptime and patching security patches and things like that, maybe outsourcing is a good option. Yeah, definitely, Tom. And also I find that just having a server is very useful for myself. Like one of the things I've started doing recently is synchronizing my own personal files using a web server across my various Macs and PCs and Linux boxes that I have at home and at work. Well, it does seem that one benefit is certainly if you don't have access to your own server or your university doesn't provide something like that, the capacity on this Google service is pretty high. I mean, they estimate you can have a website with 5 million visitors a month and not go over their limits for the free service. So it's certainly something that I think we want to keep an eye on. And sort of one of these tech trends is this cloud computing environment. And, you know, I think Google entering this market really kind of provides some competition to Amazon as well.
So anyway, so we'll keep an eye on that story. But another story is over at the Library of Congress, something very different. I've got a lot of friends of the show over at the Library of Congress, and so we were interested to see the launch of My Library of Congress, which is at myloc.gov. Sort of a cute name. Do we need myloc.gov? Well, we're not sure. Let's take a listen to their introductory video. This is the original yellow ribbon that was tied around the old oak tree during the Iran hostage crisis. This is the sneeze that launched a thousand film careers. And you'll find them all here at the Library of Congress. So it's, as Dick Clark used to say, it's got a good beat and you can dance to it. I guess the question here for listeners in the audience is how much a website like a collection like the Library of Congress or an online archive in 2008, do these sorts of sites need services like MyLOC provides? Particularly, they have a sign-in where you then can create your LOC. In other words, you can grab objects or lesson plans or videos from the Library of Congress website and sort of store them in your own personal online book bag. Well, I have pretty strong views about this, but I won't say. Maybe, Steve, what are your thoughts on this? Do you think collections like, let's say, the Whitman Archive, is there a way for users to sign in and have their own My Whitman? I don't know. I don't know whether what the LOC has done is good or bad or whatever, but there is... When I see someone put my before the name of a portal on a website, it's always kind of a red flag because I think that the great virtue of the web or where the web really shines is when it takes advantage or adheres to Jakob Nielsen's observation that you have eight seconds to do something interesting. Get in there quick. It's obvious what needs to be done. Things are very brief, and I can move in a kind of fleet way. And I don't think there's anything teleological about this. I don't think it necessarily goes down this path. But often when websites start to talk about, well, why don't we have a MyLOC, usually they run the risk of putting a whole bunch of new kinds of interface constraints and now you have to learn a new system that is often a system different from the way the web normally works and so there's a big there's always a big usability issue with these kind of moves on web on website portals so i don't know now maybe they've done it brilliantly but i but i you know i i can say that that i think often when we go that way you know there's a there's a there's a, there's a, you know, Edward Tufte has this great thing where he says, he says, you know, it's a bad meeting when someone says we need a metaphor, right? So, you know, you're, you're in a design meeting and someone says we need a metaphor. There's, there's great, there's great wisdom to that. And I think often what, what, what gets, what starts to sort of take over when people start designing portals is, well, you know, we'll have a metaphor. It will be just like walking around the real library and all this kind of stuff. And maybe you'll have a bag and you can put books in a bag and things like that. And as we do this, we run the risk of getting further and further away from sort of the normal web conventions that people know how to use. Yeah. Well, speaking of portals, I mean, Bill, you're one of the prime movers behind Niche, the Networking Canadian History and Environment. And you've got a lot of, you know, environmental data there, et cetera. Do you have meetings with metaphors, or how did you sort of conceptualize that and think about how people will then use that without having this kind of, you know, my book bag metaphor or sort of ability to store this material on your web service? Well, it's actually, it's a good question, and it's one we're kind of, we certainly haven't really solved yet. I mean, one of the things that we have done is we've created a content management system with the idea that our various users and stakeholders would be able to have blogs, contribute to forums, exchange messages, that kind of thing, use tools. But it's really, I mean, I have a bit of sympathy for the people who say, you know what, we need a my whatever, because at least their heart is in the right place. They're trying to reach out to the network society. Yeah, I mean, I guess this is something we always talk about at the center in terms of, you know, I think, Tom, is Omeka going to have some kind of, you know, my Omeka plug-in? It's going to be, yeah, it's going to be an optional plug-in, and we are actively building it. So users of Omeka, institutions that use Omeka to host their collections and their exhibitions, can install this My. We've gone around about names, My Archive, My Stuff, My Backpack, all of these metaphors. Maybe I've fallen into Steve's trap here. But they'll have the option of installing this and allowing their users to do just this, to favorite items, to share items. They'll be able to build their own mini exhibits that they can, especially for students who can build a little exhibit that they can email to their teachers. Yeah, and I suspect that's what the main audience for this LOC site is, the students, and clearly with the emphasis on lesson plans on the site, the ability to build up class galleries and things like that. Sorry. Right, and I think in some ways those kinds of constraints that take you out of the normal conventions of the web and put you in a kind of separate space are kind of useful for the classroom because the classroom is sort of a separate space. It's constrained. It's not the research environment. It's a much more constrained environment. So maybe they're useful for that. At the same time, what we're doing with Omeka is everything in Omeka comes out of the box Zotero compatible. So you could also, if you don't want to organize your stuff on our web service, you could organize your stuff in your Zotero collection. So I think maybe the idea here is to give users options for how they want to maintain this information. There's nothing, you know, I don't think there's anything inherently, it's just sort of a warning flag, like I said, right? It's like, as soon as you get into this, as soon as you start saying, I'm going to sequester a space for my users where they can do certain kinds of things, which, as you say, might be exactly what is needed for something like a classroom, you know, when you're trying to have a classroom environment or something like that. But you immediately increase the number of things you can screw up in terms of usability, right? So that's really what it's about. And so you can do this kind of thing absolutely brilliantly. I hope the LOC has. I haven't looked at it. But it always to me signals like, okay, let's go plug in as we speak and I'm going to take some of this away from the, from some of this from back to that development and think again about this. As I said at the top of the podcast, we're incredibly lucky to have Steve and Bill here because they are really two of the world's experts on humanities programming. And we wanted to have them on the podcast because for quite some time, Tom, I think you could agree, we sort of wanted to have a podcast on, you know, how you get started with the more technical side of the digital realm in museums and libraries and academia. And Bill, maybe if I could start with you, you're actually writing a book called The Programming Historian. So could you tell us a little bit about that book and how you sort of approach this topic of someone who's totally new to the topic, who can't just wade right into algorithms and all this complicated stuff. How do you get them started? Okay, well, I'm working with a colleague, Alan McEachern, and what we're doing is we're kind of writing an in-progress, work-in-progress, open-access book that's a tutorial-style introduction to programming. And our idea is kind of that maybe you're coming into this without knowing very much about, you know, you're comfortable with computers, but maybe you don't know very much about programming.
And so right in the kind of introductory lessons, we have things on, you know, installing the language and some simple programming tools. We have things on automatically opening and downloading and scraping material from web pages and computing word frequency, Google searches and things like that. And really the goal is to try and create not just a useful tutorial, but to try and create a small community of people who think of themselves as humanists or as historians who know how to program, basically, and for whom that's part of their way of looking at the world. So, Bill, your method then is actually to sort of start with something that all these historians know, which is the web. I mean, a sort of experience that they're used to. And then to kind of build off of that, is that right, by doing things like web scraping? Yeah, absolutely. And not just their experience with the web, but their experience with the kind of useful tools like Zotero, VIT, and RSS feeds, the kinds of things that they probably, if they're not already using, they want to start using right away. And so we're trying to, and one of the things that's really interesting about this project so far is my co-author actually doesn't know anything about programming. I mean, he's starting to learn about programming. And so this is really a conversation between the two of us and between the people who have started reviewing the material that we have online about, you know, what do you need to know? How much do you need to know? How do you get started? What's clear? What's not clear? Right, right. Well, Steve, you know, normally the way that, you know, beginning computer or programming classes begin is, you know, you start with a language and you start with some basic symbols and constructs and kind of get more complicated from there. Should things be different for humanities scholars? Is there a different approach that you take, for instance, when you've taught it in the class? I don't know that there's a different... I guess, I mean, I spend a lot of time getting people over their fear of computing and their fear of that this is all going to be, you know, way over their you'd be doing is, you know, using the whatever programming language they're teaching to, you know, generate the Fibonacci sequence or something like that. I start with things like Mad Libs programs, right? So, you know, I do a lot of stuff with text and a lot of stuff with, now, you know, this is ironic because actually text or strings, as we say in programming, are, I think, on balance actually harder to deal with than numbers in many ways. But I think that the students, you know, it helps them to feel more comfortable with the material right away. You know, they know text. They feel comfortable in that land, and so it's easier for them to get into it. But, you know, at some level, the way I teach programming, you know, from, as you say, from first principles, really isn't all that different from the way it's taught in an ordinary computer science program, I think. Steve, do you have a particular language that you stick with or that you force on students? Well, it's funny. I get asked, you know, I remember when I started in programming, I was obsessed with the question of what language should I learn? You know, where should I start? What language should I learn? I remember I went and asked a friend of mine who was at the time doing a PhD in computer science and who was also, I knew, a kind of, you know of good old-fashioned hacker. And I said, so what language should I learn? And he said, oh, it doesn't matter. Just pick one. You know, whatever. He said, oh, you know what? There's some great pseudo-languages out there, like pseudocode. You go get a book on a language that doesn't actually exist, but will teach you programming will teach you programming. I thought he was, you know, 100% out of his mind. I mean, I thought this was, this guy had finally, he was now, he was now on the 131st floor of the ivory tower. This was so divorced from reality. You know, now it's been, you know, 12 years or so since that conversation. And I now see that he was 100% right. And he was right in the sense that what's important about programming and what needs to be learned is this set of fundamental concepts. And that set of fundamental concepts really doesn't change from language to language, which is why I probably know 10 different programming languages, and I think Bill probably does as well, mostly because, you know, since the concepts don't change. What I tell my students is that the first language is hard because programming is hard. The second language is hard because it's not like the first language. And after that, you know, you pick them up in a weekend. Now, having said all that, that, you know, it's the concepts that matter. If you're starting out today, you have great choices because you have languages like Python, which Bill is an expert on Python. You have languages like Ruby, which is a language that I teach. And, you know, the great advantages of these languages, I think, is that they take you away from some of the sort of low-level concerns of languages like, you know, systems programming languages like C and C++ and things like that, and allow you to get right in and write useful programs fairly early in the process. And so I think, you know, for anyone who's starting out today, you know, that's the way you want to go is towards those languages like Ruby or Python or even Perl or PHP, languages like these. And I would say that, you know, I write pretty with Ruby for a number of years precisely because it's so easy to get into it so quickly and to learn those fundamental concepts that, again, are going to be portable when you go try to learn some other language. Bill, do you have a real preference for Python, or is there a reason? Do you generally agree with what Steve just said about not really having to choose a language? I think, yeah, I do generally agree with Steve. I mean, I think the thing is that at the beginning, it does make sense to start with a high-level scripting language like Python or Ruby or one of those languages just because it makes a lot of tasks easier, and there are a lot less kind of hardware issues that you have to be concerned with. But over time, I think that you kind of, especially if you do work on the web, you kind of have to take what Manan Ahmed called the polyglot approach. You have to be comfortable moving between PHP and Python and JavaScript and HTML and XML and whatever else you're using just because other people are programming in all of these different languages or scripting in all of these different languages. But it definitely doesn't hurt to kind of start with one of the high-level ones. I mean, I think, you know, speaking to, you know, Bill mentioned, and he and I, I think, are in agreement about this as a teaching modality, is that we both try to connect things right away to, like, you know, what would a historian want to do with the web or with this data set or whatever? What would a literary critic want to do with this text collection? And we try to sort of get into that as quickly as we can. And these languages, they're sometimes called scripting languages, are very good at letting you get right in there. The problem with some languages, the first language I learned was C, which was an extraordinarily bad language to start with, in part because C makes you worry about things like memory management and all this kind of stuff. Now, one should probably eventually go back and learn all of that kind of stuff, but in the beginning, with these dynamic languages, we have the great advantage of being able to build useful programs right away. I think that's actually another pedagogical issue, is that the only way to learn programming is to write programs. And the more real those programs are, the better. The ideal situation is you have something you need, something you want, some tool that would make your life easier, and you're locked in a room and you have to figure out how to build that tool. That's maybe the absolute best way to learn how to program. And in fact, all of the exercises that I do in my class are in a sense an attempt to recreate that, you know, artificially create that, those conditions, right, so that students get into it. But again, these high-level languages, you know, you can fairly quickly get into writing, you know, real useful programs. And that's just.
One question I have for you guys is who do you think needs to know this? Like, you know, we're teaching students how to program. We're writing books to help historians learn how to program. I mean, who needs to know this? Presumably, or maybe this is wrong, presumably not the whole community of historians and humanists needs to know how to program. But who does? I was at a meeting a couple weeks ago with a group of librarians, archivists, and museum professionals all discussing the future of training for their professions and issues of mutual concern thereof. And one of the questions that came up was, do we need to be training our, you know, MLS students how to program? And do they need to know any computer languages? And that was, a lot of people were saying, oh, no, they don't need to know this. They just need to be technically literate, whatever that means. And then. And I think I was sort of in the second camp, there were a bunch of people saying, well, they probably need to know a little. If we do want to train leaders for this new information and digital information age, they maybe need to know a little bit of programming. And the exercise that I wanted to go through was to have everyone in the room raise their hand if they knew a little bit of programming. And pretty much, I think, everybody in the room would have raised their hand. And if those are leaders in the field and they all know a little programming, why don't our students need to know as well? But what's your take on that? I mean, is this something that we all need to know or is, you know, maybe the few people who work in a center like yours, Steve, or a center like ours, Dan, is this something that just we need to know? Tom, my feeling is that the network really lies in diversity. And so the key point for me really is that some people have to know how to do this, and some of them have to know how to do it really well. And there's not a sense in which kind of the whole historical profession can say, we're never going to need to know this and our students are never going to need to know this. But on the other hand, I guess I don't feel strongly about kind of any imperial projects. And so I think it's probably okay for some people not to know it as long as they know that they don't know it, if you know what I mean. I think I would, you know, I would put, I mean, I would agree, first of all, that, I mean, you know, Bill and I are specialists, and I wouldn't suggest that everyone become a specialist any more than I would say, you know, everyone should become an American historian or a specialist in 18th century literature or something like that. But I would, you know, I can put this in positive terms by saying that I think that, or the experience that I had learning to program was really quite profound for me because it was, what it represented for me was for the first time in my life, I suddenly had control over this machinery on my desk. You know, I see this thing happen all the time where people, they're working away in Microsoft Word or something, and the machine freezes and they hit the reset button and restart the system. And I think to myself, if your dishwasher did that, you'd throw a fit, right? You'd be just, you'd throw it out the window. You'd be furious. You know, you'd be, you would immediately say, what's wrong with this machine? Why isn't it, you know, why isn't it working? And yet I see people with computers sort of feel like, well, it's a computer and it's a very complex thing. And who knows why it crashed, but I'll just, you know, I'll just sort of go along with it. It's hard to think that way after you learn to program. I think after you learn to program, you say, no, wait a minute, this is not, I'm not at the mercy of this bloody thing. Because what programming really gives you is the ability to change your environment, change your digital environment, build it, hack it, break the warranty, et right? And I know for my students, certainly for me, that was a huge epiphany. And I think it is for my students, too. You can tell that they take a different attitude. Like, the digital world, if we can make a grand gesture like that, suddenly seems less intimidating and less deterministic than it might have before because they suddenly realize that, well, no, I can have a role in how these things work and I can change the way they work if they don't work the way I want. And so to that extent, I feel like everyone should learn how to program at least enough to have that sense, right? To have a glimpse of that sense of control over the environment and to feel like, or enough to help them to understand how these things work and so forth. Because I do think it's empowering. I think that's a great point. Bill, I'm often asked what the difference is between learning a programming language, or learning programming in general, and learning a foreign language. So for instance, and I think this relates to what we were just discussing, that do you have to know ancient Greek to be a classicist, for instance, and I think this relates to what we were just discussing, that, you know, do you have to know ancient Greek to be a classicist, for instance? It gets back to this question. How are you in the programming historian, your book, how are you sort of answering that question about, you know, the differences, if there are any, between sort of learning a programming language and learning a foreign language? Is it in approach? Is it in results? How would you kind of address that question? I think I would say that learning to program is a lot like learning a foreign language in a variety of ways. I mean, one of the ways is that you're kind of, a beginning programmer is kind of dropped into a culture where most of the conversation is something that they can't understand. They need to gain mastery. They have a sense that when they can read code, they've really arrived. But actually, it's much more difficult to kind of fluently speak code than it is to understand something someone else has written. And so there's this kind of long process of basically learning to speak like a native speaker. And that's exactly sort of what beginning programmers are faced with. Right. Steve, how would you answer that question? Someone came to you and, like you said, you know, maybe they don't want to be an Americanist, maybe they want to study French literature. Is it like learning French extremely well, and that becoming fluid in another culture as well as language? Yeah, I think there's actually some... I mean, I find programming languages personally to be quite a bit easier than learning foreign languages, mostly because programming languages are rigidly consistent and predictable in a way that Attic Greek is not. But there are other, you know, one of the big points of comparison, you know, shows up in the learning process, and that is that I know every language I've ever, every foreign language I've ever studied has made me feel very stupid for a very long time. You know, I've had to, you know, I remember sitting in classes on Greek and Latin and French, and you sort of, you have to get comfortable with your own, you know, your own daftness, you know, as you struggle into this language. And, you know, learning programming is similar, because you know, it can be a little frustrating and it's a very foreign way of thinking and it requires certain habits of mind that you don't necessarily have. And, you know, I always have this experience with my students. You know, about three weeks into the class, you know, I can see that morale is starting to dip, you know, because the stuff is getting hard and it's frustrating and so forth. And what I usually tell them is that, you know, well, you know, I've been doing this for 10 or 12 years and I can tell you that that feeling will never really go away. And it will never go away in part because you're always sort of trying to pitch yourself slightly higher than what you're qualified to really suddenly become very comfortable with this mode of sort of, of, of instead of seeing it as, as frustrating, they've started to see it as, as a kind of, you know, fun journey of exploration and so forth.
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi-weekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Here it's built. This is Digital Campus number 43 for the 15th of September, 2009. Summer Wrap-Up. I'm Dan Cohen. Live from the Center for History and New Media, we are back, the Digital Campus Podcast. I'm Dan Cohen. We have taken an impromptu summer hiatus, which we are glad to be back from. It's just been a busy summer for all of us, and we are glad that you are listening to us once again, and we are glad to be podcasting once again. I'm here, of course, with our regulars, Tom Scheinfeld and Mills Kelly. Hi, Tom. Hello. And Mills. Hi, Mills. How are you, Dan? Good. Great to be back on the podcast with the two of you. Well, usually we only have two weeks of tech and academic and university, library and museum issues and news to catch up on. This time it looks like we've got a whole summer, a lot to cover. I think what we'd like to do is start out with maybe some updates on stories we've covered a lot here on the podcast, and then maybe move on to some new things that cropped up over the summer that we think are going to be influential in this coming 2009 to 2010 school year. We also want to say that we are committed to keeping the podcast going despite our impromptu summer break. And to do that, we're going to introduce some changes to the podcast. We hope on the next podcast, Digital Campus number 44, lucky 44, we may introduce some changes that we will talk about as they come up. But thanks again for following us here via iTunes or live on the web at digitalcampus.tv. And also thanks to the over 600 people now who are following us on Twitter at digitalcampus, where you can suggest stories that you'd like us to cover and also respond to us as we're podcasting. So it looks like a bunch of issues we've covered on the podcast are really coming to a head this fall and even perhaps in the next week or two. One of which I guess is getting a lot of press in the news is Google Books and this settlement that they have, class action settlement with authors and publishers, or at least some authors and publishers, that boy, really created a firestorm over the summer and really in the last couple weeks as the judge set a deadline for filing amicus briefings, you know, sort of suggestions to the court about what should go on. Again, for those new to the podcast and new to this issue, Google sort of just went right ahead and started scanning whole shelves of libraries about four and a half years ago, and including books that were in copyright. And this led to a lawsuit and then a settlement between the American Association of Publishers, I hope I'm getting this right, and the Authors Guild, representing authors, or at least putatively representing all authors and publishers that might have a stake in this Google project. And of course, what Google wanted to do was to be able to show snippets or sections of books that even were in copyright. The authors and publishers considered even the act of scanning it, even for search purposes, to be an illegal act. And we've now reached the point where we're really closing in on sort of final arguments and ultimately a settlement, sort of thumbs up, thumbs down from the judge, although I guess another option would be some kind of tweak to the settlement. We could talk about some of the things that have gone on recently. But boy, the heat on this issue has really grown, hasn't it, Mills and Tom? You know, just this week, Mary Beth Peters, who's the head of the Copyright Office in Washington, D.C. for the federal government, really whacked Google over the head with a statement in front of the House committee looking into this issue. I think a lot of people were taken aback by her fairly aggressive statements about how she thought that parts of the settlement were completely improper and usurped copyright law. What are the two of you think is sort of happening at this point? Where are we as of this recording, which we're recording on September 11th, 2009? Well, I think, I mean, I think that the fact that it's gained the notice of Washington and politicians is important because it had really, I don't think it had gotten that kind of notice previously. And I think really, to be honest, what prompted that, what made lawmakers sort of wake up to what was going on is something that happened in August, which was Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo, and a bunch of other very large, very important companies in the business, joining with the Internet Archive and something called the Open Book Alliance to challenge the settlement. And so once those really high-profile entities were on board, and it wasn't just the, you know, us kind of academics howling in the wilderness. Once it was these big money industries and big money interests complaining about this, then I think people, then I think Washington has woken up to it. And I think, you know, putting some political pressure on the courts is, you know, it will make a difference. And I think it probably will affect the outcome. I don't know, Dan, as you said, if we're going to get an up or a down outcome from the judge. I think there's kind of a middle ground that we might get, which is a sort of sending them back to make some changes to the agreement. And if I had to guess, that would be my guess, that the judge is probably going to send them back to come up with a new draft, essentially. Yeah, right. So this new organization for listeners is at openbookalliance.org. And obviously, this is, you know, a coalition, as Tom said, of those who are against the settlement. But there's a lot of good resources. And I think they're tracking the news pretty well about what's going on in the settlement. You know, I suppose we should say the crux of the issue is really this segment of books, well, one of the issues, one of the main complaints is about orphan books, right, which are these books that are in copyright, that is most books in the United States that were published after 1923, but whose authors, you know, kind of no one can find. And that's actually, it's quite a few books. It's over a million books. I've heard different numbers thrown out, but it's certainly seven figures. So quite a few books. And Google is sort of just saying, well, you know, these books, you know, they're neither here nor there. We kind of, you know, should have the rights to do something with them under the settlement. And a lot of people are saying that, you know, basically gives them a monopoly over this segment of books. And also books where, you know, the authors, and surely there will be many of them, just sort of haven't really acted to opt out of this settlement. We should also say that, you know, this is a global issue. The settlement is applicable in the United States, but the, you know, lots of countries in the European Union are expressing serious misgivings about this, including the federal government of Germany, I believe, and others in Europe, libraries and organizations. Well, I think that, you know, we're getting close to the end game on this, at least this round of it. I think it'll probably go on beyond this particular court action because either Google will appeal or the other parties are going to appeal. But I think that, you know, they've kind of, that everybody involved is sort of focused in on just a couple of key issues now. And one of them is the one that Mary Beth Peters raised from the chief copyright officer of the United States raised about what amounts to sort of a compulsory opt-out license for copyright holders. So, okay, I wrote a book. Google, under this settlement, has the right to scan that book and create commercial products from that unless I opt out. So it's now incumbent on me to contact Google and say, I don't want you to do that. And so I think that that creates one set of issues. And then the second is it's still unclear what kinds of secondary commercial products Google can create under the terms of this settlement. And until that's defined by Google and by the other people involved, I think they're going to have a hard time pushing this through. Right. There is this larger issue about commercialization, isn't there?
You know, there's a lot of people saying, well, we sort of have to trust Google that, for instance, pricing for libraries for access to this set of books will be reasonable and will remain reasonable even in the future as, you know, let's say they have profit pressures or things like that. And then what else are they going to do with these books? Or other people running the company. Right. That's right. Okay. So let's imagine a circumstance in which Google does find itself in a slightly more competitive environment than it is now and their pressure is on their business and their stock value has gone down and a consortium of Chinese investors comes along and buys up all their stock or enough to get a controlling interest to the corporation. But at that point, the horse has left the barn. Now you can imagine all the sort of the fulminating that will go on in Congress and the public about, oh, my God, we just sold our entire copyright legacy to some group of Chinese investors. And now this sort of economic nationalism will surface. But then it will be too late because Google is a corporation which is publicly traded and so therefore belongs to its stockholders. We'll be able to do And so, you know, it would be a hard one to then file a suit about. Right. I mean, that's the, with all of these kinds of private ownership of knowledge resources, I mean, this is the problem is these companies are and should be responsible in the end to their shareholders. And so, I mean, that's, and they should be. Google should be doing what's right for its shareholders, not what's right for copyright holders. I mean, that's not really their obligation. It's their shareholders. And I don't think we can fault them if they decide to make a business decision that is good for their shareholders, but bad for education and the diffusion of knowledge and all of those good things. So we should think about that when we do these kinds of deals at the outset. We can't just trust them not to be evil. Isn't this a larger problem that we're going to encounter with Google in the coming years or that we've already encountered in that the start, and even today when you look at the way Google is run, it's a company but it's also kind of a university. It's kind of academic in a way, right? They hire smart people. Everyone knows they're kind of the Harvard of tech companies. They take the best PhDs. They have a kind of academic environment where people are allowed to do 20% research in the same way that sort of professors are allowed to kind of do their own thing 20% of the time. And haven't we said, haven't they and also we set up unrealistic expectations about Google as they do things like, you know, they launch a site, for instance, on Google Apps for Education, which they're pushing really hard. And we'll link to this from digitalcampus.tv. But they have a kind of evangelism website for Google Apps for Education in which they say that more than 5 million students are already using Google. And they're using it for free. And that means that these universities are saving a ton of money in terms of servers and IT staff. And I mean, doesn't Google have a kind of frenemy problem at this point? They're sort of frenemies of the universities, if I can use that word. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I mean, I think we all love Google. You know, if you wanted to be a bit of a conspiracy theorist, you could say that they've, you know, lured us all in with this, you know, with this nice line about and this kind of ethos of openness and collegiality and cooperation and collaboration and goodness, essentially. And, you know, once they've, you know, reeled us in, they could turn on a dime and start, you know, they could start charging for those email systems. I mean, once all these universities have moved to them, they could, you know, raise the price. Oh, my God, then they would be Microsoft. Well, right. They would right. In a way, isn't this sort of our objection 10 years ago about Microsoft is that they kind of controlled word processing and internet browsing and all of those things, and this is what we hated about them, especially because then Microsoft Office costs a lot. And so Microsoft at least came in through the front door. Right, at least they were up front about it. Yeah, that's a great point. But, I mean, on the flip side of this, you know, maybe just to take Google's perspective for just a second, I mean, isn't there a lot of kind of sour grapes complaining here also in academia about Google? I mean, just to look at the Google book search, which I have qualms about as well. But I mean, this is a company. I mean, after all, Microsoft dropped out of this business of scanning books and losing money scanning books. And here's a company, Google, that has committed hundreds of millions of dollars to scan, you know, 15 million books and make a lot of them available for free online. And aren't we, you know, I mean, academics are critical, of course, but, you know, you can imagine, like, if Google built Widener Library at Harvard, you know, we'd complain about the number of steps it would take to get up to the reading room. I do what I don't, but the difference is, I mean, the difference is, like, why isn't Harvard doing this? Why aren't universities doing this? Why isn't a consortium of universities with a combination of foundation and government funding doing the open version of Google Books? Why can't we get that funded? Yes, it's $100 million or $200 million or $300 million. But in the big picture, that's not that much money. That's not that much money. Even NSF, what is their budget? Several billion dollars. NIH, their budget is a couple tens of billions of dollars. So to put all of the books in the United States online for free and in a publicly held repository for $300 million, we're really not talking about all that much money. It seems like it's just a little lazy. Google saw an opportunity for what they saw as a fairly minimal investment to control all of this knowledge. And that's worrying. I guess my problem with it is that it seems like we've just been lazy, that it's easier to let Google pay for it and not worry about the consequences than to try to actually raise the money ourselves. Yeah, that's a great point. You think about universities, just to go back to Harvard for a second, although now with their financial arm again, they're not doing this. But they were in the business of building $100 million science labs not so long ago for things like genomics that are incredibly expensive. And you could think that evidently at scale, you could do a book at $10 a book. So $100 million gets you a lot of books, Kent, and even at $30 a book. I'd be interested to see how much Widener Library cost when it was built. Right. Or how much the... In 1909 or 1915 or whenever it was. Or the aggregate acquisition costs are surely billions of dollars to build up. So, I mean, if you're talking about $300 million, what, $10 million for 30 years, we'd have this. Or $30 million over 10 years, we'd have this and it would be public. It doesn't seem undoable to me with the amount of money that's funding. And we're not just talking about the humanities in here. I mean, we're not talking about IMLS funding this or NEH funding this. We're talking about, like, let's get NSF involved. Let's get NIH involved. They have big budgets. This is doable. That would take two years, if not longer. And then the negotiating of the boundaries of the agreements would take another year. And so by the time academia was actually ready to do it, Google would have finished. Right. I mean, that's where they have the real advantage is that they only have to marshal their own troops and then they go. Right. Mills, could I ask you just to speak up a little bit? Sure. We can hear you, but I'm worried that all of the million-dollar grants that are given out by all of the funding agencies and all of the foundations, if you pooled some of those, you'd get there relatively quickly. Anyway. Right. Okay.
And maybe we'll ask maybe someone from Open Book Alliance and Google to come on the podcast at a later date. Hopefully not to have a John McLaughlin-style yelling match, but to have some kind of cogent or calm discussion about where we are and where we're headed in terms of these digitized books. Well, I guess a related update would be on the e-book front. Boy, this summer saw a lot of these e-book readers come out. Sony issued a few new models, some of them relatively inexpensive. I think they're now under $200. And I think there's Plastic Logic has something coming out. There was another UK brand. Now we're starting to get these off-market brands that no one's ever heard of. Yeah, IREX. Oh, IREX and then something Reader. It has just a really simple name. Well, and I'm starting to see students on campus with them. Are you really? Yeah, not a lot of students, but some, you know, sitting in our student union building or sitting in a classroom building, you know, looking at their e-book reader rather than at a book. And when I say some, I mean, you know, fewer than 10 so far this semester. But they're out there. They're starting to show up. Yeah. I mean here's the thing. I think like Amazon with the Kindle tried to make the play that Apple made with the iPod. They tried to get in. They saw that there were these e-book readers out there and some people were using them. But they weren't very successful in the way that in 2001 and 2002, Apple saw MP3 players. But they knew the future of music was digital and Amazon knows that the future of reading is digital. And so they basically came in with this Kindle. It was closed. You had to use Amazon's. You had to buy your books from Amazon. It was this kind of closed hardware software platform, and you had to use the Amazon hardware and the Amazon software to make it all work together in the way that you have to use the iPod with iTunes. It's all one piece. And I think they tried to get in early and corner the market that way. The question is whether with these new entries from Sony and from Barnes & Noble, whether they'll be able to add some competition and make the e-book reader space a competitive space in a way that the MP3 player space is not competitive anymore. I mean, Apple's got 80-something percent of the market. Right. I'm sorry. That UK brand is called Cooler with, for some reason, with a dash between the L and the E. I'm not sure quite why, but Cooler Reader, which looks like a, it's kind of neat. It's got a little click wheel that looks exactly like the Nano, the iPod Nano click wheel on the bottom right. And then it uses, everybody's using the same E-ink, you know, shades of gray, five or seven inch screen. So the screens are almost identical on all these. And then Asus is coming out with one. And Asus is, of course, the manufacturer that basically created the netbook, the cheap notebook market. So they're coming out with one that's going to be dual screen. So you open it up like a book and you actually read something on each side. So if they're getting into this market and then one assumes they're going to produce something cheap, just like they did in the notebook market, something's happening here. And if Apple, I think Apple is thinking that if all the speculation about Apple coming out with a tablet is correct, a touchscreen tablet PC. If Apple comes out with that, that essentially is going to function as an e-book reader as well, I imagine. So there is an awful lot going on here. I guess a related update is just on, you know, from an academic perspective, really a push toward textbooks on these devices as well. Mills, you've talked to Stan Katz recently. We had him on the podcast in the spring, and he was planning on using e-readers in his fall class. Is that right? Stan Katz of Princeton. I don't know which class he's actually using it for, but he is using a Kindle in one of his courses, and I'd actually hope to be able to go up and watch and see what was happening. Unfortunately, it happens to be the same night of the week that my class is, so I couldn't do it. But I'll be real interested to hear from Stan how it goes. And he's promised to be available to give us a report sort of midway through the semester. Right. So a lot of these new readers, he's using the Kindle DX, which is that large form factor reader from Amazon. Almost all of the rest of them are now using, the Kindle DX, I'm sorry, just to back up a sec, reads PDFs, which is I think one of the main innovations and I think one of the reasons it became very attractive for academia because so many articles are in PDF. But a lot of these new readers are using the EPUB format, which is an open format. It's not the Kindle format. It's not a closed format. And there seems to be a big push toward EPUB here that I wonder if that's the underlying story or perhaps in the long term a more important story that's going on here is the rise of a kind of standardized electronic book format or electronic article format that formats really well on these different devices and is open. And so for instance, just at the end of the summer, Google announced that they were going to reissue, I think, a million of their public domain books in the EPUB format. Right now you can download them as PDF, but they were going to rework them as an EPUB book, which means that, for instance, the Cooler device is going to offer 500,000 public domain books. The new Sony ebook reader that came out this summer is offering, I think, a million of these free public domain books. So you sort of get a big chunk of books on them if you use the EPUB format. Yeah, I think that is hugely important. I think that's the difference is with these new readers using this EPUB format, this open format, are they going to be able to compete with Amazon's more kind of closed, more, you know, it's like the Apple experience. It's seamless. It's beautiful. It feels unified and holistic, but it's closed. You know, I think this, on the other side, there's like the PC world. And I think this other world of these eBooks where, you know, there's a lot of different kinds of hardware, but all that different hardware runs the same software. In this case, it's that EPUB format. And so there's kind of two models there, one which is closed and controlled but offers a kind of unity of experience and one which is open and a little more chaotic but which holds out the hope of interoperability and some openness, sharing of these books and other things. And it'll be interesting to see how this plays out. I think we're seeing in some ways a repeat of what we saw with the personal computer and then the MP3 player and now here with these e-books. I think one of the things that Amazon is going to find difficult right away is the Kindle is just so ugly and these other readers, if you take a look at them, you can get them in eight different colors or 12 different colors. People will be able to express themselves a little more than just something putty-colored, like the good old-fashioned IBM PC. Right. Well, I guess we'll have to see what happens. I mean, I suppose, just Tom looking at that history, I mean, we know what happened in the PC world, that Apple's closed platform, at least for much of the history of computing, lost out to the, you know, make any hardware you want and it'll run Windows world. But then in the iPod world, it ended up being the opposite, that these closed systems ended up being the monopoly. E-book readers, jury's still out, huh? Yeah, I think we'll see. And I think we're going to actually probably begin to see by the end of this year, we're going to have an idea of which direction this is going. Yep. Okay. Well, again, to be continued. Well, let's move on to, from the news from the summer, things to watch. Things that came up this summer that we here on the podcast think are going to be important elements of the next year or indicative of important trends in technology and academia, museums, and libraries. Well, I guess, you know, probably the one that got the most hype was this Google Wave introduction over the summer. What are we thinking of Wave?
This is a kind of skunkworks project that their team, I think mainly in Australia, tried to reconceptualize, you know, if you were starting now, what would email look like? And what they came up with, I suppose, could be described as a hybrid of a messaging system, that is, a system that passes messages back, like email or IM between various people or groups, and also newer elements of the web, like wikis and mashups, embeddable content like maps, etc. And they kind of threw this in a blender and came up with Wave. I guess that the name Wave is meant to imply that rather than getting an email or a thread of email, you get a single wave that kind of persists and sort of bobs up and down as everyone who's reading it edits it, makes additions to it, et cetera. And what you get then is the ability to, let's say if you're going out to dinner and you've got a group of people, you wave them, I suppose. I don't know what the term is going to be. And then everyone can kind of write in the email live, and these additions or edits get propagated out to everyone looking at this wave and everyone can say what times they're available and what restaurants are good and someone can throw on a map and see me there. Is this important? Is this just a lot of bells and whistles but isn't really important, especially for those of us in our line of work? I think people are going to have a hard time finding where it fits into their – where this new model of – it's like collaborative email almost or collaborative messaging. Where this fits into their current workflow. I think email worked and remains the killer app because there was like a clear metaphor to what came before. There was a clear analogy like this is email. This is like mail. It's just on your computer. And so you could say, ah, so how do I use this? I use this instead of writing a letter. Okay, so like that makes sense. So I used to write a letter. Now I write an email. that sort of makes sense. I know where that fits into my into my everyday kind of workflow. You know, other things, I think, you know, are have been have been like this, you know, instead of, you know, like a wiki, like, okay, okay, I use a wiki, I use that instead of using a notepad, or, you know, so so like, you can kind of make a make an analogy to what you did before. I don't see really where that analogy is with Wave. Like, what is it replacing? What am I doing now that this is going to help me do better or just a little bit differently, but, you know, in a quicker, more efficient way? I don't know if there's really that analogy. And to have kind of widespread adoption, I sort of think you need that very quick statement of what it is and what it does to say, ah, you use this instead of writing a letter. And somebody says, ah, oh, I see. Okay, I'll do that. That's what I don't see with this. But I haven't used it, so I guess I'll have to see. But that's my early sense of it. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I'm always thinking about these things in terms of how they might be used in teaching. And one of the things I'm especially interested in is getting students out of the classroom and sort of moving around in the public at large rather than just sitting in a classroom tied to a desk. And so I can imagine possibly, I mean, again, none of us have actually used this thing, but I can imagine that for some kind of group place-based computing effort, it could actually be kind of interesting in a classroom context or a non-classroom context. But I'm just going to have to wait and see. And I would want to know how easily usable is it on various portable devices like iPhones, etc. Yeah, that's a good point, Mills, on the various devices. What struck me, really, I mean, if you look at the demo, is how web-centric it is. And isn't the innovation here going to be related to mobile? I mean, how are you going to edit wiki-type objects on a 3-inch screen? Their whole demo really focuses on having a large monitor. But I also like your other point about maybe there's some version of this that's great for classroom use where students can collaborate on a project, let's say, quickly put together a chart or an article on some topic and using that. And obviously the Wave is private, so they don't have to put it up on Wikipedia or some other place. Or you could use it in place of the clicker in the classroom if you wanted to do a quick poll or something like that. I mean, they're trying to really create a platform and that's always tricky, right? It isn't just a simple technology. If you watch the whole video, I mean, they talk about things like you could create bots, you know, these automated software agents that change the wave as things happen. So, you know, you could embed a traffic map of, you know, getting to the restaurant and then there'd be a bot that would update the traffic so people could check in. It just seems like it's a little bit too much right now, at least from this video of a solution in search of a problem. I mean, people have kind of ad hoc ways of doing a lot of this. If you want to arrange a meeting time with your colleagues, you can use, what is this service? Doodle, where it just gives you a chart and you just click on the hours you're available and then it spits out a result at the end. So people have kind of made their way around a lot of these issues. And I think, Tom, your point about the metaphor becomes really difficult. I mean, I guess the larger problem here is just that people who are so immersed in the technology, it's hard to see what the 90% of people who are not on Twitter or not using wikis would want out of the technology and how to, you know, you can't just push this stuff on them, can you? What percent of people are not using Twitter? Okay, 99% Mel's. Oh, I feel so much better. Yeah, I mean, I think there's probably uses for it, and I'm sure there'll be creative uses for it. But I think Google's problem was when the announcement came out, I think the initial announcement was like, this is the future of email. And it's sort of hard to see just yet how this replaces email. I don't see that happening. But I think it's totally possible that some of the interesting uses that Mills was talking about and Dan, you were, I think that's possible that those will come to pass. Well, I guess a related kind of summer wave, another kind of wave of technology that's coming that might be be important over the next year. And certainly wave is trying to capitalize on is real time, right? It isn't the point of wave that as various people edit it, you can have eight people edit the same document at the same time. The updates are propagated out. And we saw a lot of movement this summer toward these kinds of real time interactions. I mean, Twitter is, I suppose, one symptom of this, and it's clearly instigated a lot of thinking about this kind of real-time social media. There were a bunch of technologies, some with better names than others. Dave Weiner, who created the original RSS spec that runs blogs and podcasts that pushes out new content, came up with something called RSS Cloud, where he's trying to create a kind of system of technologies whereby RSS goes more real-time. I mean, if you subscribe to a blog, you might not get a new post from that blog for anywhere from 15 minutes to a few hours, depending on your blog reader, your news reader. He's trying to get that down to a fraction of a second. And when that happens, you can start thinking about new forms of real-time interaction. There was another spec with the horrible name of PubSubHubbub. Someone should be shot for coming up with that name. That does a similar sort of thing that also kind of deals with real-time communications. And toward the end of the summer, we saw, I think it was WordPress.com, the makers of the great open-source WordPress blogging platform, and this is their commercial hosted version. I think they adopted RSS Cloud, if I'm not mistaken. And I believe Google Reader adopted PubSub HubBubs so that they can also do real-time updates.
Isn't that right? I think, you know, I certainly think that people are, I think the real issue is trying to aggregate the massive flow of information that's coming at us. And I think all of these things are an attempt to do that. And I still haven't seen one that's going to solve that problem for me. I mean, for me, the problem is solved largely by removing myself from a lot of that flow of information. But until somebody comes up with something, you know, I mean, RSS is a cloud I've looked at. It didn't really look like it was going to solve my problem, so I didn't actually use it. But the flow of information is vastly exceeding our ability to cope with it. Yeah, I think if these kinds of things are going to be successful, and I do think that's where we're headed, and I think Twitter sort of points in that direction. I think we're going to all have to get used to not reading everything and feeling comfortable with that and feeling comfortable with other people not reading everything you send them. I've gotten used to, when I first started on Twitter, I used to like, Yeah, no, no, but right. Well, right. And, but I've gotten really comfortable with like, you know, like I check in with Twitter when I check in with Twitter and if I miss something, like I miss something. Um, and I think we're going to have to get more comfortable with that with, in terms of reading blog posts and maybe even in terms of reading emails and stuff where like you kind of dip into it. I've heard a lot of different metaphors for this. Like one is, you know, you kind of wade Yeah. Now I've heard another metaphor, which is the cocktail party. If you show up 20 minutes late to a cocktail party, you don't go around asking everyone at the cocktail party what transpired in the previous 20 minutes. You just sort of accept that you're coming in midstream and you kind of catch up and then you leave and maybe you rejoin later. And that's kind of fine. In that way, it's more like a conversation and it's fine to just sort of come in and out of it. You don't have to read everything. And I think we're going to have to get comfortable with that if these things, if this is the future. We're all going to have to get comfortable with it, and we're going to have to get comfortable with our colleagues and friends maybe not keeping up with every single thing we say. That's just sort of an observation, not really a comment on whether this is going to happen or not. But I do think we all have to a pretty harsh criticism from those. In the same way there's been the slow food movement to attack the rise of fast food. I think we're probably going to see some kind of attack on this real-time. Okay, any other new news from the summer? We saw Steve Jobs this week up on stage. Anything, you know, he's always got his finger on the pulse of new technologies that are going to influence the way we do lots of things, not just in academia. Every student's going to have a camera, I suppose, now with a camera on the iPod Nano, which is their most successful model. Is that going to have any impact? A video camera, I should say. I think it's possible. I actually thought the big story out of Apple this summer was that there was no story. I feel like Apple's in the sorry situation of having to announce something big every time they announce something. That's a hard expectation meet. And I guess I didn't see a whole lot there. But I do think, yeah, I do think the increasing ubiquity of cameras, especially video cameras on campus, is going to change things. I think it's also going to change things in museums and libraries. We're going to see a lot more audience-produ visitor produced video and audio and imagery coming out of museums and libraries. So I do think that's a continuing story. Yeah, I think the other thing that's going to happen is we're going to see more faculty members on YouTube. Right. Students in class and videotape and put up, you know, here's my really interesting or really boring professor. Well, right. I think what's really interesting now, there was a new update to iTunes this week, and some of the functionality had to do with better organization for iTunes U. And if you look at these updates, I mean, you can really set up a whole core system now in iTunes U. I mean, you can arrange a whole set of classes in it and put podcasts together, and it's going to put a lot of pressure on professors if we're still going to go by this lecture model, and they're all going to get videotaped to, well, be a bit more entertaining, I suppose. Okay, well, I suppose that's our wrap-up from the summer for now. We've probably missed some things. If you can think of anything that we missed, feel free to send us feedback at feedback at digitalcampus.tv, or you can send us a reply on Twitter at Digital Campus. Let's move on to picks for the podcast. Okay, for those who are new to the podcast for the 2009-2000 school year, we end the podcast with some picks of interesting things you might find online, interesting devices, anything that might be useful to your life that we found useful to our life. Tom, why don't we start with you? All right. I've got sort of two things, two Linux or Unix resources that people can take a look at if they're interested in Linux. The first one is something called Sugar on a Stick. Sugar is the flavor of Linux that runs on the one laptop per child. It's sort of an education-focused flavor of Linux with an interface, with a user interface that is geared towards, really towards kids and the way they might want to use a computer in class and outside of class. And Sugar on a Stick is a version of Sugar which it loads onto a USB memory stick. And you can boot from the memory stick. So if you stick this memory stick in any PC, into the USB port of any PC, and start up, it will boot Linux from that USB stick without affecting the rest of your computer. So let's say you've got Windows running on your main machine in your office or at home. You can put this USB stick into the USB drive and boot up in Linux, and it won't affect anything on your hard drive. It'll just run directly from the flash drive. And there's enough space there to save some documents and certainly to surf the web and to install a little bit of software. But it's a good way to try out Linux and to get a look at one laptop per child and what that environment looks like if you haven't had a chance to do so on the OLPC and the XO itself. So that's kind of a nice little resource. And then another thing is a blog post from actually a former intern of ours at the Center for History and New Media, Adam Krimble, who is a graduate student of Bill Turkel's up at the University of Western Ontario. His blog, Thoughts on Public and Digital History, he had a great post over the summer called Learning Unix. And it gives some links to some resources for learning some pretty basic Unix commands, especially if you're running Mac OS. If you open up a terminal window, that is a Unix command prompt that you've got there. And if you want to learn how to use that command prompt a little more effectively, Adam provides some resources and also a kind of a tutorial, a few simple tasks that you can perform to kind of get your skills up to speed and to hone those skills if you've got some already. How to copy a file, how to make a new directory, how to move between directories. He's got a nice little tutorial written up there. So just a plug for a former intern of ours and a student of a friend. And in general, the blog is a great little blog. And not actually a little blog. His blog is certainly, he's posting a lot and a lot more than I am, for sure. And it's a great, great, great resource for a lot of different things to do with public history and digital history. So Adam's blog is something to check out, too. Great. Again, we'll link to all these resources from digitalcampus.tv. Mills, what do you have for us this time? Well, mine is also a somewhat connected to us blog post, and this is one by Rob Townsend at the American Historical Association. Many of you know Rob got his Ph.D. recently from our program, and we're very proud of him.
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. This is Digital Campus, featuring Tom May 7, 2010. Past play. Welcome, everyone, to Digital Campus number 56. I'm Mills Kelly from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, joined by our regular podcast crew, Dan Cohen from dancohen.org. Hey, Dan, how are you? Hey, Mills, how are you doing? I'm doing quite well, quite well. It's a beautiful day here in Fairfax, Virginia. It is. And I hope my mic sounds okay. I'm on a new headset because I was podcasting so hard last time that I literally broke the microphone off of my old headset. Yeah, I remember that. I remember that. It just snapped right off. That's how hard I work on Digital Campus. That's our podcast. My commitment. My commitment. And then also Tom Scheinfeld from foundhistory.org. Tom, how's it going? Hey, guys. All right. Good. Good. And we have two special guests today as part of our Digital Campus Irregular crew. They are from north of the border. We have Kevin Key, who is the Canada Research Chair at Brock University in beautiful Niagara, New York. Kevin, welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Bill. And I should say Canada Research Chair of Humanities Computing, which makes him especially relevant to the topics we like to talk about. And then we also have Bill Turkel, who's an Associate Professor of History at Western Ontario University. Bill, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks, Bill. It's good to be here. Great. Great. Well, we're really glad to have you guys. The reason we have Kevin and Bill with us today is because they have just finished the coordination of a fantastic digital history and digital humanities conference at beautiful Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, which I was lucky enough to attend last week. And the title of the conference is Playing with Technology in History. And this is really, it was a really very, very interesting conference focused on what happens when people start playing around with technology or inducing their students to play around with technology in history. And so we've invited Bill and Kevin to join us today to talk a little bit about the conference and the idea behind it, what they think came out of it. So Kevin, let me throw this to you first and say just what induced you to do this in the first place? I like organizing conferences. So, you know, that's part of it. It was just the opportunity to get people together. I think Bill and I and certainly you guys and a bunch of people have been feeling for a while like we needed to be more playful with history. And I remember talking with you about this, Mills. You know, we thought the best way to do that was to gather a bunch of people who struck us as being quite playful and see what came out of it. The impetus originally started with the History Education Network. And what I mean is that they were the ones who were funding the conference, and so they got the ball rolling. And the History Education Network, or DENIER, because it's Histoire, Education, histoire education réseau in French is an organization that was formed to promote the improvement of or the bettering of teaching and learning history in Canada and it's funded by the social sciences and humanities Research Council and specifically a research cluster grant and so what SSHRC larger funding body, is trying to do through these grants is create organizations that can create links with other organizations. So what we're doing at Denny Ayres, we're bringing together museums and researchers and universities and you name it, everybody interested in teaching and learning of history. And we're holding different events and finding different means to bring people together and we had a symposium last year and then they turned to me and said can you organize the second symposium on technology and I said that's fine but we've got to do better than that and so Bill and I started to talk and what came out of our conversations was that we should really focus on how we can play with technology, what's special about technology in terms of how we can interact with it. And I think ultimately what we really wanted to get at was engagement. So we put this together, and we brought together a bunch of wonderful people who came from very different perspectives and had a great couple of days. Well, yeah, it was certainly one of the more productive, it seemed like one of the more productive conferences I've been to in a long time in the sense that people really remained engaged. You know, it was a small group. How many people were there all together? About 20 all together. Yeah, about 20 people, and so we were able to all be in the same room together for a couple of days. But the first part of the conference was actually the first day was an unconference. And Bill, you kind of wrangled the unconference. Why did you guys decide to do it that way first? Well, one of the things that I've been quite interested in lately and one of the things I think that informed the idea of doing something with play was that much of what we know how to do and would like to communicate with one another is tacit. And I feel like if somebody stands up and gives a talk, that doesn't necessarily come across. But that if you get people in a room where they can do things with their hands and minds at the same time and it's kind of less formal, that some of that kind of tacit knowledge and tacit understanding can be communicated. And Dan, Tom, you know, we've had some of these unconferences here at the center as well. Tom, from your perspective, what's the real advantage of the unconference model? Well, I think Bill's getting at it. I think also part of it is that it is kind of democratizing in the sense that it breaks down some of the barriers between, you know, the person on the stage and the people in the audience. It breaks down barriers between people at different stages of their careers, people who perform different roles in their jobs, whether they're librarians or teaching faculty or whatever they are. So I think, you know, between, you know, different kinds of communication, different kinds of knowledge dissemination and a more democratic interaction. I think that those are the things, to my mind, that make it a productive alternative to kind of a more traditional format. And it sounds like you guys had some of those same kinds of interactions up in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Yeah, but, you know, I have to say, I really missed sitting in the audience and listening to three 20-minute papers being read plus a 20-minute discussant paper being read, you know, because I had to pay attention in the unconference the whole time as opposed to letting my mind just kind of wander off to wherever it wanted to go as I normally do at academic conferences. We could arrange this for you, Mills. I mean, we can. I'd be happy to just give a lecture to you for an hour, maybe. You know, I would get so much more intellectual work done if you would do that, Dan. Maybe you could just stop by my office once a day. I'd get so much more email done. Yeah, I was going to say, you can get your email done in a regular conference. I know. As long as you have a Wi-Fi connection while you're listening. You know, what I found about that, I totally agree with Tom, and it really sounds like this conference is a case of this, but I also have come to see the unconference format as a way to begin things, to sort of be playful, play around at something, but also to kind of start new projects, to germinate new ideas. I kind of feel like the standard academic conference is a way to disseminate, well, sometimes, you know, what you've learned. Like, here's a chapter from my book. Here's my essay. Finished work as opposed to. Yeah, finished work. Right. And I think it turns out that I think most academic work is in other stages than that. And, you know, I think also by the time you get to an academic conference where there are talks, you kind of already know, like so-and-so is doing a dissertation on X or Y or, oh, yeah, that professor just wrote a book on this thing and now he's going to give a talk on a book, on that book.
And then once you communicate that kind of knowledge and are open to collaboration, and that's, I think, another big part of it, rather than everyone showing how smart they are, you're thinking about potential collaborations and things you can work on um either you know centrally or in a decentralized way um and you know i think that's why we've been able to launch things out of that camp and i've seen other on conferences where um you know for instance the the crisis camps that have gone on over the past couple of years where um you know new software has emerged that's really helped out in Haiti or other disasters. There's some software that came out of one of these unconferences that's being used actually in the Gulf region right now for this oil spill where people can tweet in sightings of slicks and it auto-generates a map for rescuers and others to use. So I think if that's your goal, if you want to try to start something, the unconference is a great place to do it. So that raises then the question for Kevin and Bill is, what do you think got started? Wow. Certainly there was the creation of a lot of relationships. And so, you know, what really jumps out for me with these unconferences, and this was the first one I've really been a part of. I was a part of a workshop that Bill had organized that felt very unconference-like, but I think doesn't follow the model that you guys have at that camp and other places. So, you know, I went into this thinking, yeah, I really want to do an unconference, but I'm not really sure how they work. And what struck me was that there was the opportunity to build relationships that people, I think, had wanted to form but just didn't have the chance to. And I'm at a smaller institution. I'm not in a major urban center. And so one of the things that I feel as an academic is that I'm a bit isolated. I can't get together with a group of 10 like-minded people in my field. Maybe nobody can, say, for two or three places on the continent, but that's certainly the impression that I have. And so I go to conferences really wanting to build relationships so that we can do something together in the future. And that came out because we had the opportunity on that first day to just hang out and to make things and to discuss ideas in a more unstructured fashion. But there was a tangible output too. And that's where this conference was perhaps a little bit different from other unconferences because what we did is we merged not really a traditional format with this new format because what we did on day two was still a little bit unusual. But in the same way that a lot of conferences have as their purpose, the assembly and presentation of papers so that they can be published in a larger set of papers later on, each person that came to the symposium had written a paper. And so, Bill, maybe we can talk in a second about what happened on the first day, but just for a moment, sticking on the second day, what we did is we took those papers and we didn't present them, but everyone else commented on what the writer had said and then talked about opportunities for how the paper might be changed or adjusted in light of the other papers that we were discussing on the second day and in light of what happened on day one. So we're going to be coming out with a book that will probably be called Pass Play. And right now we're exploring the different opportunities and options for how it might be published and what the web presence and everything else will be. But that will be a real tangible result because you've got a bunch of people who really focused on putting down on paper and creating digital artifacts that can express some of their ideas. So that was one output. And Bill, what do you think about outputs from day one? Well, I think that, just to explain briefly, on day one what we did was we had a room that we called the toy room, and we had people have a chance to experiment with a number of different kinds of technologies, everything from Lego Mindstorms and RFID, radio frequency ID tags, to Arduinos, to 3D printing in the form of MakerBot, to a little computer-controlled machine that can cut pictures and patterns out of paper, out of sticky back vinyl, that kind of thing. In the other room, while the toy room was open, people could go from station to station and learn how to use these various fabricating technologies. In the other room, people like Rob McDougall were leading sessions on kind of game design, leading people through a series of what Rob called barely games, these kind of things that almost don't even deserve such a grand title as game, but they're certainly a kind of a form of reflective play. And I think that in addition to the kind of obvious book outcome, the relationships that were forged there, I think that things like kind of techniques, toys, and games also came out of day one and can be used in our further research. And I think what also came out were just new ideas about how we do conferences generally. So certainly the unconference is an established form in large part because of what you guys are doing at George Mason. But what we were trying to do more broadly was play with beyond just the notion of conference, play with the notion of book, play with the expression of our research in the creation of items, just generally play with the forms in which we're operating and the methodologies that you were talking about, Dan. Yeah, and I think from my perspective as one of the participants, Kevin, you asked the question about sort of what happened from day one to day two. And I noticed as day two went on and we were talking about various papers, all throughout the day people were bringing in examples of things that had happened on day one. And that was these examples of somehow informing their thinking about what they were doing then on, what they were talking about on day two. So I certainly saw a lot of that connection. And I think that is one of the things that I personally liked about the conference is that, you know, day one was really the unconference, and we got to kind of do what we wanted and focus on the things that we were interested in and play around with various things. But on day two, we had to, to a degree, put our nose to the grindstone and get some work done also that was going to have some sort of a tangible outcome because, well, as a participant UN conferences, I've had some wonderful ideas and I've built some great relationships with other scholars. I will say that I'm not sure sort of what the tangible thing was that I walked away with. And in this case, at a minimum, I walked away with some great comments on my paper and some great ideas from other people's papers. And I think the book is going to be really interesting when it's done. I'm going to be at VAT Camp London, which I'll advertise right now, which is in early July and just before Digital Humanities 2010. And one thing that's neat for that conference that I think speaks to this point about outcomes and maybe making them a little clearer is that JISC, which is the sort of, well, I don't know, I wouldn't say the equivalent of SSHRC or NEH, but it's a major funding body for the digital humanities in the UK. And they're putting up some money, not a lottery ticket's worth of money, but an iPad's worth of money for a kind of challenge as part of that Camp London, where developers and others can kind of come in and build a tool, and it will be judged during DH 2010. And I think a prize awarded for the sort of, you know, best outcome and groups can form and things like that. But kind of a neat idea just to spin on this to have something tangible come out of it that can get recognition as well. Because, you know, the comment I often hear about the young conferences is, you know, how do you get the travel budget to go to it? Because, you know, well, I'm not really presenting a paper. I'll just be talking to other people and something might come out of it. Now, it seems like on playing with history, you guys actually had paper, so that was a good justification. Yeah, that always helps. What do others think about the extensibility of this model to, let's say, I don't know, medieval history or other fields in the humanities that might not have any physical computing pieces or don't, you know, don't really circulate a lot of their members in digital humanities circles. Is this something, I mean, we've clearly borrowed the unconference model from Bar Camp and these sorts of kind of techie areas, but do you think it can expand out to other areas of academia? teaches them how to cook various kinds of medieval recipes. And then they, you know, sit around and eat the recipes and think about cuisine and stuff like that.
Oh, it's terrible. Yeah. And, and ancient Roman food is even worse. It's almost inedible. It wasn't delivery pizza. No, it definitely wasn't. So, okay. So one, so like, you know, our audience will know that I am all about the unconference and new models of scholarly communication. And so this is kind of a devil's advocate question, but I think one question that a skeptic might ask is, so where's the history, right? So, you know, playing with Legos sounds great. I love it. Actually, I wrote my college admissions entrance essay on playing with Legos, but another story. But, you know, where's the humanities content in all of this? What can we actually, you know, learn? What could you use in a classroom to teach history to students? What can you use to grow scholarly knowledge, grow historical knowledge in all of this? And, you know, I think that's a criticism we get about a lot of what we do. And, you know, it's probably, it's maybe, it maybe is more focused when we start thinking about play and, you know, I think we get to the heart of that question in situations like that. So where is the beef, I guess, is to borrow something from the 1980s? Well, it's a great question because the real answer is we don't know until we get in there and you know that's precisely the point from my perspective my focus tends to be on simulations and serious games in history and so you know the the first line in my explanation when i'm talking about this is that we've gotten used to expressing history as text and that's part of the problem we need to move beyond so what are the other forms that we can explore and as you guys well know Rory Rosenzweig and others were saying and have been saying for a while that people love history they don't just miss they don't necessarily like it in the way that we as academics express it so you know partly what's happened or what happened over the course of the 20th century was that history went from being something very general to being something in the academy we thought we owned and we made it fit into tight little boxes. And so now we need to break out and we don't necessarily know when we start what they're going to look like because we can at times be stuck in the forms that we've got. So Bill will have, I think, a much more cogent answer to this. But the reason that I started to go down this path was just so I could sit down with people like you, Mills, and find out about how to organize a course in a way that I never would have imagined before. Okay, Bill, the more cogent answer? The pressure's on, Bill. around us as some kind of time traveler from the past. And yet, for some reason, we choose to convey our consciousness of the past or understanding of the past often in text, you know, more rarely in picture or video or sound, and sort of least, at least for professional historians, least frequently of all as actual physical objects. But we have the capacity now to make an amazing range of different objects and materials and so forth, and to make objects actually interact with people by embedding various kinds of small computers and sensors and stuff in them. It seems to me that the possibility of remaking environments and artifacts and so forth so that they can actually communicate theses about the past or convey a kind of sense of historical consciousness is really one of the great opportunities that we have available to us right now. And, you know, go ahead. Sorry. Well, I'm sort of reminded in Kevin and what you were saying about, you know, we don't really know until we start, you know, doing this work until we until we get get some hands on time with these with these new technologies, technologies, these new modes of working. I'm sort of reminded of the early 18th century electrical machine. So I'm putting on an old historian of science hat here. But at the time that it was built, that, you know, Hawksby's electrical machine, it was really used as a toy. I mean, it was something that they kind of rolled out at the Royal Society. They would, you know, fire it up and turn a crank and the evacuated globe would glow and they would show it off to wealthy patrons. And it was sort of a parlor trick. You know, there was sort of a glowing globe of static electricity, and that was something that was fun and interesting and cool. But there was really not a whole lot of scientific purpose to it. It didn't really for a very long time go anywhere. Static electricity was essentially a game, a parlor trick for most of the 18th century until it wasn't anymore, until in the later 18th century, it inspired and evolved into a whole new sort of a more scientific view of electricity and kind of the basis for electrical physics as we know it today. And so I'm sort of struck by that and that this criticism that I, with my devil's advocate um pat levied is is is that's exactly right that's the that's the response to it is that like well we don't know and i think one of the things that's hard i think for academics to get their heads around is is that i don't know answer um and we tend to use that a lot in the digital humanities and it's and i think it's's a hard thing for people to, to accept that, you know, we're real, we are really experimenting and, and we don't know where it's going to take us all the time. And that's, that I think is not something we're very accustomed to in the humanities. Well, and, and yeah, but although our colleagues in other buildings on campus in the sciences are very accustomed to that, they, they often have no idea what the result of an experiment is going to be. They have some clues, but then also they run a different experiment and they end up with the glue on the post-it note that we all love so much, which was a complete accident. So yeah, I think you're right, Tom, that we often don't know what's going to happen with these. But I went into this conference with that question in front of me and kind of worried about it because I wanted to know, like, if I'm going to spend, if I'm going to come back and try to convince somebody to buy me a craft robo, then, you know, and spend $300 of our department technology budget on that, I need to be able to say. I can't say, well, I don't know what I'm going to, what the tangible outcome is going to be. So, you know So the example that Bill and I played around with at the conference was one of the things that I'm very interested in is the kind of ephemeral street art of graffiti, which is something I guess, you know, the first cave drawings were some form of graffiti. But, you know, something that's been with us in human society for a very long time, and it's a global phenomenon. It happens in all sorts of different ways. And it's there today, and it's gone tomorrow. Or at least gone as soon as Thank you. of them. And our students see that. I can show them pictures of tags that I've taken pictures of, stencil tags and that sort of thing. And they see it and they see it in downtown Washington. They see it here in the city of Fairfax. It happens everywhere. But they don't really think about it much unless they themselves are art students or perhaps taggers in their own right, which hopefully not too many of them are. So what Bill and I did was we took one of those tags, which I dubbed the angry worm because that was about the closest title I could put on it. And it was on, you know, in the city of Vienna, Austria, a couple of years ago when I was there with some students. And so Bill and I were able to take that image that I took, port it over into Illustrator, Adobe Illustrator, and then from there create a stencil from it and then go around Niagara-on-the-Lake and tag buildings for the rest of the day. Fortunately, that's the last thing. That was Bill's. It was Bill that did that, not me. So although they have been asking for Kevin's phone number, I think, ever since. But the reason I cite that is you can still say, well, where's the history there? Well, now I could give that to my students and say, okay, now tag your notebook with that. And not a building on campus, but just try to do that. It's not easy to do or try to create something like that. That's not easy to do. So there's an artistic process that went on here that we're just replicating through digital means.
And how complicated would that, you know, the decorations on monasteries, how difficult would that be to do? And so, as Bill said, you know, when they start grappling with evidence as a tangible thing as opposed to an image on the screen in the classroom or a picture in a book, but it becomes an actual tangible thing that they try to do something with, then my hope is that they're going to start thinking about it in some slightly different ways and maybe come up with some new insights. I mean, it's one of the participants in the conference, Stephan Levesque, Stephan Levesque said that, you know, he has in his book on thinking, historical thinking, that, you know, if you tried to coach a sports team the way we teach history students, the sports would have died out a long time ago because we stand up in the class and we tell the students all about the past, and that's the standard mode of teaching. And even if we have interactive exercises and that kind of thing, but only rarely do we actually take our students into an archive and have them produce real historical knowledge, where if you're coaching a sports team, you can tell the kids what to do, but that doesn't work. You have to get them on the rink, or since we're talking about Canada, or out in a field somewhere and give them a ball or a hockey puck or whatever and have them start to play. So that's where I think this is actually a little different. And the unconference format made it possible for us as participants to also have that experience of play that we wouldn't normally have in a standard conference environment. See, now this is where I think what seems like very out in left field, I guess, to traditional scholars in history actually I think wraps around and becomes very comprehensible to those who do, let's say, the history of the book, who learn about printmaking and really understand how a book is put together physically. Then they can go to an archive and really understand, you know, what it means when you see pages that aren't cut or look very carefully at the kind of binding. These sorts of things become historical clues. And I think that there's probably some evangelism we could do to talk about the way in which this is actually ultimately less radical than I think people think, that the kinds of things that Bill and Kevin are doing are really to just recapture more of, you know, of material culture history beyond textual history, which we have been too focused on, I think, as professional historians. And, you know, I think it's sort of an open secret that this is something that would help you out if you understood how things are made, put together. And then I also think, you know, like you said, Mills, just the fact that you went to this conference or this unconference, it may not be actually, you might have some immediate result, but you could think two or three years down the road of some kind of classroom scenario where it might be really handy to have an exercise similar to what you've done there. And I think that's really important that there might be delayed outcomes or something that you think back upon in the same way that when we read a book, we might not have immediate thoughts of how it could impact our own research, but then you might think about it years later. Well, let me then take that and turn to one other thing that I noticed just both as a participant in the conference, but as an observer of the conference as it was happening. And that is, it seemed to me that there were kind of two groups of people out of the 20 there. And those that were there because of their strong interest in games and gaming, and those that were there because of their interest in not games or gaming. They were people like, you know, that's not why I was there because I'm not a gamer. And sometimes, I was a little worried that sometimes we were going to be sort of talking on different planes and not really understanding one another, but it seemed to me that that wasn't the case. I don't know, Kevin, Bill, what was your perspective on that? Were the gamers and the non-gamers able to really have a conversation where they all made sense to each other? I think absolutely. We did not want this to be a conference about gaming. And so because that's my focus, or serious gaming at least is my focus, I know a lot of people in the community who could have been a part of that. And so that was one of the challenges for me was I wanted to invite them, but I realized pretty quickly that if I did, then we would have 20 people talking about history games in the room and it would be over. And I think a lot of us who've been doing this, I know I've certainly felt this way in the past year or so, Rog McDougall as well was talking along a similar line at the conference, are having some doubts about some of the claims that were made, let's say five years ago, about what gaming could do in history or serious gaming might do in history. And so in a way, some of our research has moved forward and we can stand back and be a little bit more critical. But, you know, more broadly, I think what we wanted it to be about was obviously play. And so you can play in games, but there are lots of other places that you can play. And sometimes, as Rob pointed out, getting out of games is actually a much better idea. In some of the foundational literature in gaming, two concepts arise, and they're on a spectrum. So at one end is Ludus, which is a very focused kind of gaming situation in which you have clear rules and a goal that you're trying to achieve. And at the other end is Paideia, and Paideia is open and free play. So Paideia would be bouncing a ball in your driveway, and Lutis is playing basketball at high school on a team against another high school's team. And so I think what we wanted to do was get away from that Lutis side towards the Paideia side't recognize that this is a spectrum, but the games are not the only place where play can happen. And I think the gamers came in knowing that, but it was helpful to hear it again. And I think the non-gamers came in and maybe heard the gamers speaking a little more comprehensively than maybe we had in the past. Perhaps I'm just speaking for myself, but I certainly think, as I say, that we're able to be, well, I guess have a little bit more of a context and a good view of things now that some of the initial enthusiasm around serious gaming has passed. Bill, what do you think? The gamers and the non-gamers talking to or past each other? No, I think I kind of, I really agree with what Kevin said that the kind of emphasis was really shifting toward the play end of the spectrum. I mean, just speaking for myself, I don't have anything against games. I'm a lot more interested in play and being playful and playing as a kind of a way of learning new things. And I think that, I mean, one of the things that I found interesting that was in our discussions on the second day when we talked about playful, play tended to slide toward the games end of things rather than the toys end of things, even though many of the participants later sort of said, well, yeah, I had some toy-like examples, but it just didn't occur to me to mention them in context. One of the things that I think has happened is that those of us who were really focusing on serious gaming and what it might do in the humanities and might do in history were going in that direction because we were frustrated by the reification of text. So this notion that history was text. And I think for two or three years what happened was in this small community that history became games. So we went from reifying one thing and reacting to that reification to reifying another thing. And as I say, what I think is happening now is that we're recognizing that there is that spectrum and we need to move away from that and have a more comprehensive view. And that was certainly there. I think the default is sometimes to start talking about play and then go to the conventional form in the same way that we talked about history and went to the conventional form of text. So it's a journey. And as I say, I was really pleased that we're becoming more comprehensive. And, you know, the stuff that you're doing, Bill, is newer and or at least newer to those people who haven't heard of it before. And I think as time goes on, I'm really excited about what's going to happen in the next two to three years. I think the notion of toy is going to become much more part of our discourse and conversation. Yeah, and before too much longer, maybe Bill and I will actually get together and build the magic wand idea that we came up with.
I mean, that's kind of a segue into some of the work you're doing at the Simulating History project that you're working on. Can you talk just a little bit about some of the mobile apps that you're working on? Because this is something we've talked about a lot on the podcast is the future of mobile history computing. Yeah, so just to stick with the journey, initially my focus was on 3D environments. And the arguments have been made that what we've seen in the last 10 years is a shift from entering into the box of the computer and into virtual reality to pulling computing out and taking it into the real world. So I've built 3D environments and on the spectrum, sticking with the notion of spectrum for a second, although a different one now, I've kind of done that journey from the box out. So 2005, 2006 was a very big, expensive, and wonderful virtual environment that took a tremendous amount of time to building an isometric environment. And for those people who aren't familiar with it, an isometric environment is one in which you take a God's eye view. And so you're looking down on a map or a game board or whatever metaphor you want to use. And so that's a simulation that's out now that deals with epidemics. And then continuing along the spectrum, I move further away and now I'm building an application that's really a tour of Niagara-on-the-Lake where the conference was. And the idea is that you will download this little application onto your iPhone and you can walk around Niagara-on-the-Lake and you can take a conventional kind of tour in which you roam. We're calling it roam mode. You can just roam around town and as you come to different buildings, GPS knows where you are and so will tell you about the building that you happen to be standing beside. And will also tell you where to find the washrooms and everything else in town that a tourist might need. And then what we also have as part of the same application is more of a quest mode, opportunity for you to go on a quest and try and solve a mystery that we created in the town. And in the course of doing that quest and moving around town to different places and different sites, you learn about the early 19th century and specifically the War of 1812 in Niagara, what it meant to people and what people have thought about it in retrospect. So I started off by saying that the virtual environment was a lot of work. Everything's a lot of work, as we all know now. But it was a lot of fun to literally be out and to also be out in the sense of away from the academy and thinking about public history. And we're expecting a tremendous influx of visitors into Niagara for the bicentennial of the War of 1812. So I'm not sure what's going to happen in the United States, but it's going to be a big deal for us. So with all these visitors, we thought this was a wonderful opportunity to get people to think about what happened a couple of hundred years ago in this specific location and what it's meant for us since. Given what happened in Washington during the War of 1812, I think there might not be a lot of commemoration here. Extra guards around the White House. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I took that tour and it was really, really interesting. Tom, you know, you would have chuckled along with me because it was very, very similar to something that Tom and I and Josh Greenberg, who was formerly at the Center for History and New Media and now at the New York Public Library and at the conference as well. The three of us had thought a number of years ago it would be fun to do something like this, and we talked to one of the cell phone providers, Sprint Nextel, I think it was, and they were kind of interested in it, but the technology was nowhere near what it is today. Pre-iPhone, pre-apps. Yeah, people didn't talk about apps then. And we weren't even sure how it would be possible to make it. We knew it could be done. Our idea was something similar to what, Kevin, you developed, but it was to stop Booth from assassinating Lincoln and so send you off on a quest through D.C. And it was just not possible several years ago. I mean, it was technically possible, but it would have required such an expenditure of time and effort that we pretty quickly gave up on it. And now, you know, the technological environment has changed so much that I got to walk around Niagara-on-the-Lake with an iPhone in my hand and learn about the War of 1812. It was really, in particular, as somebody who's spent a lot of time thinking about K-12 teaching recently, you know, I can't wait to see kids wandering around D.C. and cities wherever doing similar kinds of things because I think that's going to be really, really popular. So let's see. Now, Bill, one thing you work at, one of your projects is the Lab for Humanistic Fabrication. We've talked a lot about this during the podcast today, but can you sum up humanistic fabrication in just a few sentences? Sure. I guess if you kind of ask the person on the street what their idea of a great humanist would be, they might come up with somebody like Da Vinci or Cellini or somebody like that. It wasn't until relatively recently, if you take the long view, that humanists stopped working with their hands and stopped making things as well as, you know, writing things or stopped painting, stopped photographing, doing all of those things to focus on text. And so what I've been trying to do over the past few years is start to bring these kind of practices of making back into my own work, into the work of my students, into the graduate teaching, to see what happens if you take the perspective that humanists can make more than texts as ways of communicating their understanding about, you know, in the big view about what it means to be a human. Okay, so you're not manufacturing humans. That was the concern of my 13-year-old. He said he's fabricating humans? Well, I'm fabricating humanists. Yeah, yeah. I explained that he had to read the whole word, not just humans. So, well, for those of you listening to the podcast today who haven't seen either Kevin's work or Bill's work, we'll link this up in the notes, the liner notes for the podcast, so you can visit both of their websites because they're doing some really fascinating and interesting things and kind of even further out on the cutting edge than I had realized until I got a chance to spend some time with them. So it was really, for me, it was really stimulating and exciting to just have these kinds of conversations in depth. And again, that's what I think is one of the great advantages of the much more informal conference environment is that not only did we have the unconference day and the day of more serious work, but we had, since we were a small group, we could spend a lot of time together just in the more informal, around-the-edges conversations where things like what we've been talking about can get explained in detail, and it generates so many new ideas. Isn't that when all the good things happen? Yeah. It's all on the fringes of the conference. I mean, even at a button-down academic conference, it's always the hallways, the lobby, the coffee shop. Or when your mind is wandering during that 20 minute paper, that's really a 30 minute paper. We really have to change that, don't we? We do. We do. It's, I think, you know, I don't know anybody who loves that format. Certainly not the poor graduate students who have to get up and present for the first time in those environments when you can see the sweat running down their temples. One thing that strikes me is that the advantage of those kinds of conferences is that, and I don't think we want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, is that there are established conventions. You can feel quite comfortable about what's going to happen because the person who wrote the paper owns the mic and they're now in control. And what we did on day two, and this followed something that Bill has done, was that the writer of the paper wasn't allowed to speak. And so that person could ask clarifying questions of the others, but there was an appointed first reader for the paper who would talk about what he or she thought of the paper. And then the rest of the group commented. And as I say, the writer could only ask for clarification. But that requires a high degree of trust. And I think we were able to do that. And you're able to do that in small groups.
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi-weekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Here it goes. This is Digital Campus number 19 for the 16th of January, 2008. Big things in small packages. I'm Dan Cohen. Well, welcome to our first podcast of 2008. We're looking forward to another year of podcasting at Digital Campus. And of course, as always, we are podcasting here live from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in scenic Fairfax, Virginia, right outside the nation's capital. And Tom Scheinfeld is here with me at the Center for History and New Media. Hey, Tom. Hey, Dan. And we have an overseas visitor, but someone who's well-known to the digital campus groupies out there. Hi, Mills. Where are you calling from today? I'm calling in from Vienna, Austria today. Ah, and how are things in Vienna, Austria? Cold and foggy today, but otherwise good. Great. And what are you doing over there? I'm leading a student study tour to Prague, Vienna, and Budapest, and so we're kind of at the halfway point. Great. Terrific. Well, the Skype, again, sounds terrific. Probably should have been on our top 10 list from a couple of weeks ago, but I think Skype is still one of those big sort of silent stories. I mean, just the quality of this is terrific, and the ability to do it overseas like this is fantastic. Well, let's dig right into our news stories from the past couple of weeks and how we always begin the podcast. But first, just a little note from the Center for History and New Media. I think there's a couple of initiatives that Tom wanted to mention that I think will be of interest to our audience. Tom, we have two new, we have a new podcast and a new sort of summer camp, I guess you could call it. Do you want to talk about those briefly? Yeah, sure. Yeah, we're very pleased to announce another addition to the CHNM podcast, podcasting stable, CHNM podcasting network. We've got a new podcast coming online either the end of next week or the end of this week or early next. And it's called That Podcast. And that stands for the humanities and technology podcast. So we've got that podcast and that stands for the humanities and technology podcast so we've got that podcast coming online that's a production by CHNM's creative lead Jeremy Boggs and one of our crack web developers here and actually a great student of digital humanities Dave Lester're launching that podcast, really showing us up here at Digital Campus with an interview with Matt Mullenweg, the founder and head of WordPress, the popular blogging platform. So that's going to be a video podcast, actually, and the format's going to be a short interview with someone of interest to the digital humanities community, and then followed by a short sort of hands-on, very practical tutorial in how to do something. So how to build a WordPress theme or something like that. And so it's going to mix an interview with something very practical. And I think it's going to be a fantastic new podcast. And I encourage everybody to go to that podcast, T-H-A-T-P-O-D-C-A-S-T dot org. That should be great. And what else did you want to mention? Right. And so then there's another initiative kind of riffing on the VAT theme. It's called VAT Camp, the Humanities and Technology Camp. And what we're going to do is, together with Dave and Jeremy, is we're going to have a brief weekend-long summer bar camp-style unconference on digital humanities here at the Center for History and New Media. And that's going to happen on May 31st and June 1st. And the idea basically is just to bring together a bunch of people, digital campus listeners, hopefully among them, a bunch of people together here at the Center for History and New Media and very informally present ideas we're working on, software demos, have informal training sessions, discussions of research findings, various other things in a very kind of informal way. If people are familiar with BarCamp, it's going to be that kind of thing where people kind of turn up. We're not presenting formal papers or anything. It's not a conference like that. It's more of a meetup where people can share ideas and form new collaborations. And instead of people just listening to papers, everyone who attends is expected to participate in some way, make some tangible contribution to the conference. And so that's called That Camp. And you can find the announcement for it and send us an application, which really is just an email letting us know that you're interested. You can find information about that at thatcamp.org, T-H-A-T-C-A-M-P.org. So we're really excited about these two new initiatives and hope people will take a look. Sounds great. All right. Well, I will certainly be there. I'm looking forward to that. And for those who haven't been to an unconference, I mean, I think this is a new trend. I think it's a great trend having just come from the AHA where things tend to be very formal. There's a panel that's up on a stage and giving presentations and everyone sort of listens dutifully. This is going to be something much more interactive where I think communities of interest will sort of get together around a table with some laptops and hash out some things, learn some things. So looking forward to that for the summer. Thanks, Tom. Well, it's a new year, and I suppose we're always supposed to be optimistic at the beginning of the year, but we noticed a lot of pessimistic, melancholy stories full of sorrow and things going south. Three in particular that we wanted to mention in our news roundup. The first one, which I think probably didn't get as much coverage as it should have considering how prominent this browser and company used to be, but Netscape is going away after all these years. I mean, I think it's been 13 or 14 years since Netscape, which those of us who remember the early rise of the web and the excitement around it, I mean, Netscape was really the Google of the mid-1990s. It was the first stock that really took off and made people millionaires and billionaires. And, you know, it just sort of has this quiet death here. It had been acquired, the Netscape browser, by AOL. They actually acquired Netscape Communications Corporation in 1999. And, you know, they converted it to open source software. And lots of things happened from there. Of course, Mozilla also came out of this rocky period for Netscape. And that, of course, led to Firefox. And it I saw the news story, I had this brief pang of sort of sadness about it because I can still remember creating my first web page with Netscape Composer, which that disappeared a long time ago. But that was really the first easy tool for creating web pages for people who knew nothing about it. Yeah, I think it is kind of the end of an era. I think Netscape, even though really you know, really, it was only a few years there where it was a major player in the browser space. It was fairly quickly with the launch of Windows 95, which bundled Internet Explorer with it, and the browser wars that ensued. It was really by, oh, probably, I don't know, probably by 1999 when AOL acquired Netscape, the browser wars had kind of been decided. But the core of Netscape, which was released as Mozilla, kind of kept an alternative alive. And Netscape really does live on in Firefox. And in many ways, the browser wars are alive and well. And Firefox, the descendant of Netscape, is actually doing quite well. And I don't think anybody in 1999 when Netscape went to AOL and then later when the Mozilla Corporation and Foundation were spun off from that, anybody would have predicted the success of this successor to Netscape. And so it's really a great story. And so while I mourn Netscape with some sadness, I think that we can all be hopeful that much of it lives on today. And in fact, the code base really does live on very much so in Firefox and all the products that have been built on Netscape technologies, on the Gecko rendering engine, on the Thunderbird email client, which was the email client that was built into Netscape. There's actually even Mills, the composer, lives on. I guess Mozilla has a product called Enview.
So it does. It really lives on in the Mozilla foundation. And so hopefully it will continue to do well. Right. And I guess the important point here is that Netscape was, I think, you know, hopefully it will continue to do well. I think that's what really excited people. And a platform that was network-based, that was web-based, that's why the early browsers had web composition built into them and not just browsing built in. They also had email and all these other things. And their whole point was Microsoft's there, they're a monopoly, but there's this new thing, the Internet, that's taking off and this new web technology that makes the Internet very easy for people, for instance, in academia, non-technical users, to kind of participate in the Internet, to post things on the Internet, to read things off the Internet in a rich environment. And they sort of saw that as, in a sense, a kind of new operating system or a new platform. And I think that's really their legacy is that it was a sort of alternative to the desktop model. Now, you know, in some sense, it's ended up being more of a browser ultimately, and they never really got there. But I think the web in general has obviously taken off so much. And I think they were the first company to really have that vision of what the web could be. Yeah. And I think they were just maybe a little too far ahead of their time. I mean, and in fact, now the remnants of the Netscape code base that live on in Mozilla are really being used as a platform. I mean, look at Zotero. Zotero is built directly on what the descendants of the Netscape platform. Yeah, you know, if you're a programmer and you actually look under the hood at Firefox, as we do for the Zotero project, there are so many system calls and various pieces of code in Firefox that begin with NS, which was the Netscape insignia sort of in the code. So it'll be NS underline and then some other function. And those are all, you know, the original Netscape code is kind of there. It's really interesting sort of, you know, as a historian of science, to look under the hood and see those kind of legacies of the earlier iterations of the software. So it's there. Maybe someday there'll be like software archaeologists who actually look through the code base of something like Zotero and find these legacies of older programs. Yeah, yeah. Well, goodbye Netscape. And of course, Firefox still is coming on strong and building market share worldwide very quickly, actually. So, you know, I think it does. It's a continuing story. Well, two other more minor stories, perhaps. I think that builds on what we were talking about last week in our year-end wrap-up. I think the first one, Mills, you had speculated about, about the problems with adult-type material in educational environments. And I think you were talking about Second Life and the problems there, and I'll talk about Second Life in just a second. But we did notice that one of the big alternatives to Facebook, which is called Ning, N-I-N-G. A lot of people might not have heard of Ning, but interestingly, there's a Netscape connection because Ning was founded and funded by Mark Andresen, who was the young programmer who started what became the Netscape Communications Corporation. And Mark's been doing a lot of things. He's done some cloud computing companies, but he started this social networking company called Ning, where you can kind of set up your own social networks for different places and corporations. And it's kind of like a, you know, they call it a white label service where you can kind of, it's a blank slate that has all the networking components and then you put on top of it what your community wants. Well, it turns out that what the Ning community wants is porn, because evidently quite a bit of what goes on in Ning is sort of porn-related social networking. I think, I guess, Mills, this speaks to the problems that you were saying about sort of bringing some of these new tools like social networking or virtual worlds into the educational space. Yeah, I mean, it's really, it's the problem of the open environment in what for education is difficult to deal with because, you know, we, especially for K-12 education, it can't be an open environment like that because you do have users in this open environment who use it for the things that they happen to be interested in. And in case they happen to be interested in porn and lots of them. And so that really kind of means that school systems that have no time to sort of investigate the merits of the situation are just going to say, no, we're not going to allow that to be used. And, you know, I was talking really about Second Life when we discussed this earlier. Right, right. to squeeze in another story on this sort of March South, the pessimistic news roundup that we've got here, is that Second Life, and perhaps for these very reasons, because of the creepiness of it, especially for new users, seems to be stalling out. We noted a very good sort of summation from Brian Alexander over at Liberal Education Today, who noted several sort of symptoms of, I think, what we speculated at. We've been second-life pessimists for a year now on the podcast. But we did note that, you know, Brian noted several things, that the active participants seems to have leveled off at about a half a million. You know, plateauing for any new web company is very unusual, just considering the way these things tend to grow exponentially. They've had a lot of service outages, he notes. They've lost their chief technology officer. The number of dollars spent in Second Life, remember, you can kind of create these virtual dollars, but you have to create them out of real dollars. And that's not only leveled off, but it's actually started to decline toward the end of the year. And of course, they're losing sponsors like Pontiac. And I think all that speaks to this question of these sort of amorphous, open environments. Are they really going to work considering all the bad things that can happen there versus a structured environment? Well, I think all of these bits of information from that article you cite, I think it's a pretty good indication that Second Life is pretty much done. Because, I mean, we all know these companies come and go so fast in the Internet space that to be plateauing out this early and to have sponsors bailing out this early in their life means that people are just moving on to something else. So it makes me really wonder about all the hype about investing in Second Life as an educational platform. I think that that's probably money badly spent. Yeah, I mean I think it's truly amazing with all the amazing amount of publicity that Second Life has garnered that they're actually starting to turn down. So I mean I think it is one of these things where the technology is just not quite there yet. I think you go there and you kind of look around and you say, wow, this is cool. Then you go for your second time and you say, okay, well, wait, what else am I supposed to do here? And, oh, by the way, this is a little creepy. And then, you know, and ultimately you kind of fall off. It doesn't surprise me really, really at all. But I do think it's, at the same time, I think it's important for people to be pushing these boundaries. I think even if Second Life only turns out to be an experiment and a failed experiment, I think we will have learned a lot of things from it about virtual worlds and the potentials of them and also the problems with them. So I think we will see in 2008. Well, Tom and Mills, I think one story we may have missed in our year-end wrap-up in Digital Campus number 18 was really just a big story on the micro-laptop front. And there's a lot of news on this over the last couple of weeks that we wanted to kind of bundle together and talk about maybe the role for these super-small, super- super cheap laptops in academia, museums, and libraries. And, you know, that is, of course, the rise of the One Laptop per Child program in 2007. Obviously, this is directed at less at a college crowd and more at a perhaps elementary or middle school and perhaps up to the high school level. And also, of course, it was intended to be for the international community and particularly developing countries. Although in the last week, they've now said that they're going to try to push ahead and sell OLPCs, as they're known, or the XO, as the particular laptop that they're selling is called. The XO, which is a cheap $188 laptop.
And actually, you could buy it. They had a program in the Christmas season called, I think it was called Give One, Get One, where if you paid $400, you could give one of these $200 laptops to a kid in the developing world, and you got one for yourself. And actually, I saw one of these live from someone who did that in downtown Silver Spring, where I live, right outside of Washington. There was a guy who had one of these XOs. And so I, of course, accosted him in a coffee shop and took a good look at it. And it's really an impressive piece of machinery for $188. I mean, the screen, as I think a lot of people have commented on, is pretty impressive, and it's got a really interesting new user interface, very, you know, unlike the kind of standard laptop, you know, Windows mouse environment that we're used to. Big, chunky icons. It has a kind of very Web 2.0 feel to it. And this guy was actually lamenting that there was no other, no one else around with a OLPC because he wanted to do one of these mesh networks that they're known for where you can share an internet connection and they sort of automatically create these networks. And so we talked about that a little bit, but he did this. And I think they're still available under these buy one, get one, or give one, get one programs. So it'd be nice to get one to play around with. And at the same time, there's been this rise. I mean, it's actually number two on Amazon.com. I just checked it out. Is this Asus EPC, which is a laptop that's selling for $399. It's very small, but it packs a lot in there. And it only has a seven-inch screen. I actually saw one of these also in a Panera. But If you want to go to Panera, if you want to see new laptop technology, I guess is the takeaway point here. Free Wi-Fi. Yeah. Every time. Right. The screen's too small, but Tom, you had said that they're probably coming out with a larger screen on this, on the Asus. Yeah, I think they are. I mean, I think one of the things, and I think this is one of the innovations that OLPC has really made, as you said, is the screen is really one of the things that I think has kept laptop prices high. And I think OLPC is really innovated in building a screen that not only does more things than your normal screen, but also is quite a bit cheaper to produce than other screens. I think Asus, again, limited, they wanted to keep it under $400, and so they, with screen costs being what they were, they had to keep it at kind of a 7-inch screen. I think now they've found a way to reduce costs again, and they're releasing a new model that is, I think has the same physical dimensions, case dimensions as the old one, but it actually is going to just extend the screen further out towards the edges of the box, and I think it's going to be an 8-inch screen. Yeah, they'll really need to do that. I mean, there's this giant black border, about a 2-inch wide black border around the screen, and that's the only drawback to it. Just to pause for a second and just flesh this out a little bit more, I mean, these are both laptops, the OLPCs XO and the ASUS. And indeed, Tom, you noted before we got on the podcast that there's a third $399 PC coming out or a third cheap ultra-mobile from EverX called the CloudBook that's going to be sold at Walmart, of all places, for $399. Similar kind of dimensions, also 7-inch screen to the Asus. It seems like there's a kind of budding market here. At the same time, we should note that a couple of the other stories from the past couple of weeks from OLPC is that Intel, one of the major corporate sponsors of the program, backed out. And that's, of course, because, again, this is an open source project. And Intel's also in the business of selling their own cheap PCs. And I think that got in the way. They're trying to sell some cheap PCs that run Windows to governments. These are often government sales that drive the market. And also at the same time, I think as sort of matching this Intel leaving the project is that OLPC, I think in part because they need a bigger market for things like their screen, which the screen really is remarkable and I think a breakthrough. But since they've only sold I think about000 or 200,000 of these OLPCs, they're trying to commercialize some of the technologies that make up the XO for other markets so that they bring the cost down through economies of scale. So the chief financial officer of OLPC left to actually create a new company, Mary Lou Jepson. I'm sorry, she was the chief technology officer. And interestingly enough, in this sort of Wagnerian opera between OLPC and Intel, she was actually a manager at Intel before she came to OLPC. But anyway, but she left to start a company called Pixel Qi. The Qi is actually the Chinese character QI is often how it's transliterated. And Qi, of course, being life energy, very much part of the Kumbaya, part of this OLPC project. But this is a for-profit company that's trying to, you know, get, for instance, the screen in other laptops or other cell phone-based platforms so that, you know, the manufacturers can produce enough of them. I mean, if they're producing them 100,000 at a time, the cost for the XO is going to stay at $200. And they had always wanted it to cost $100 or less. And the goal of Pixel Qi is to get the cost down even to maybe $75. And there, I think, things get really interesting as they're already getting interesting with these laptops, right? I mean, Mills, what are your thoughts about, you know, a laptop that goes down towards a kind of zero cost for, let's say, the K to 12, but also the college market? I mean, are there new applications that happen there? Is it just that more and more people will be carrying around the laptop? Well, I think one of the things in the college market that we'll see is that, I mean, if this really happens, then instead of four or five students in a class of 50 having laptops, more like 47 or 48 of the students will be carrying laptops. And then it's also possible to require it so that you're requiring students to be able to do things in class with the laptops. And so I think that opens up the possibility of all sorts of different teaching methods. And that's, I think, pretty exciting. I'm less sanguine about how it's going to go in the developing world, having spent time there. I don't think these machines are rugged enough for the environment that they're designing them for. I mean, I spent time in rural Cambodia this past spring, and these machines aren't going to survive physically in that kind of an environment. Yeah, I mean, you know, it looks rugged when you look at it, or at least let's say more rugged than a Mac laptop or most PC laptops. You know, the keyboard is sealed off. You know, The screen looks a little bit less finicky. But there are things like, for instance, the networking antenna. There are two of them that are sort of plastic and they kind of stick up or you should stick them up to get the maximum reception. You can see those kind of breaking off. You know, I know that Negroponte, the head of the OLPC project, has talked about, well, these are going to be able to be repaired by the kids themselves. But it is, you know, it's a tough thing to do, to try to do at this cost level. Yeah, yeah. But I got to say, I mean, I visited an elementary school in Cambodia. I mean, I think this is a wonderful project. I'm not slamming OLPC. I think it's a great thing, but I'm just not as enthusiastic. I'm enthusiastic in the long term, but this elementary school I visited had 4,000 students. It was the best school in its city. It was 4,000 students in a facility that holds 1,800. And so the kids can only go half a day. So that takes it down to 2,000 in a facility that holds 1,800, which meant that 200 of the kids had to be at recess at all times.
I think actually OLPC's announcement just this weekend that they're moving into the American and especially urban inner city market is maybe a recognition of that. I think it's also a recognition of the fact that they've had a very hard time working and cutting the deals with foreign governments. I think their marketing strategy for the OLPC was always to cut deals, large deals, like to sell a million units to the government, to the education department of the government of Nigeria, for instance. And I think they've had a hard time cutting those deals in part because of competition from Intel and other makers of low-cost laptops and computers. But I think there is some recognition that maybe they were maybe a little ahead of their time. Maybe it's a little too early to go after the developing world, maybe the technology has to be refined, but that it's not too early to go after the developed world. And I think there's actually another kind of middle tier of countries which maybe aren't as, the needs and the challenges aren't as hard as somewhere like Cambodia but that OLPC could target. Let's say a place like Iran where there's high level of literacy. There's relative stability politically. There's problems like hunger, and those kinds of problems aren't as severe, but maybe they haven't quite had a chance to develop technologically as much as they could. So I think there are some opportunities here. I think there's also an opportunity in terms of administration on college campuses and libraries and museums in the U.S. and in developed countries. I think one of the big things about this story is kind of the rise of Linux. All of these machines are running on Linux. And if they become popular, we could be seeing a real open source challenge finally after years of it being predicted to the commercial operating systems. Yeah, that's a great point, Tom. I mean, this really could be a beachhead for Linux in the environments that we circulate in, in higher ed and libraries and museums, simply because when you get down to this cost level, at $400 or really when you get down even lower at $100 or $75 for a laptop, Microsoft charges anywhere between $50 and $100 per Windows installation to OEMs, to the manufacturers that they pass along. And so it becomes a huge chunk of the cost of a laptop. And so all these cheap laptops are going with Linux. The OLPC uses Linux that was created by Red Hat, which is one of the big Linux companies, a version of Linux that they created specifically for the OLPC. And the Ever, what is it, EverX? EverX CloudBook. CloudBook, yes. And then the Asus, which is this hot seller on Amazon. They've sold over 300,000 of these on Amazon in the last few months. They're using, well, let's see, one is GOS, which sounds like it's Google's operating system, and I think that's probably an intentional misdirection by the company. But it's actually just a version of Ubuntu, which is already gaining popularity as a kind of very approachable, non-techie interface. It has a nice, pretty user interface that's put on top of Linux. And I think also this EverX machine, yeah, so that's the GOS and the Asus is just a straight Ubuntu, right? Asus? I don't know. Yeah, I can't remember. But yeah, I think in... Yeah, I'm sorry. Right, so you could see if a lot of students, and particularly Mills, as you said, it's like that sort of final third that aren't bringing their laptops to class. If they can get a laptop for $199 at the sort of iPod level of purchase, and they're going to all be using Linux. They might not even know it, but that sort of represents a beachhead there. Right. That's the thing. I think it's like Linux has almost been – I think one of the big problems Linux has always had was that it was so geeky. And I think it just had this reputation. And as like the geeks operating system and something like, well, I can't touch Linux. Linux is something that only those people can use. I need something more user-friendly like Windows. I think they almost don't even know it. And the popularity of the Asus, of the EPC, shows that. I mean, this actually I think is the first time that Linux is really getting into ordinary consumers' hands on a large scale. And I know it's interesting that this EverX cloud book Right. didn't work. But here for the first time, it seems to be really taking off among ordinary consumers. And that's, I think, the moment when it really stands a chance. It's been a good operating system for a long time, but it just wasn't in the hands of ordinary people. And I think that's just so necessary for it to actually take hold. If it does take hold, there are huge implications for institutional users. I mean, the licensing being the biggest one, the licensing costs of operating systems being the biggest one. So that could be a huge story in the coming year or two. Right. I mean, a lot of this is predicated on a story that did make our top ten for 2007, and that is so many of the applications moving onto the web. I mean, people using Gmail and using Google Docs and Zoho and Yahoo applications and all this stuff happening online rather than on your desktop. And indeed, actually, this is more echoes of Netscape. I mean, isn't it, haven't we reached the point that Netscape thought we were going to be at in 1995, which is that so much is going out there on the web, on the network, and really, Ubuntu is fine. You've got Firefox with it. You open up Firefox. You look at your Gmail on it. You browse the web on it. You don't need those applications anymore. And I would think that this is an interesting development in terms of, as you said, licensing, let's say, Microsoft site licenses for Office, Microsoft Office, and the Microsoft operating system. And I think if you look at the interface of this EverX Cloudbook with this GOS, this flavor of Ubuntu, it actually has a little dock at the bottom like you have on the Mac OS, OS X. Right, I see that. And it has links to Firefox and Gmail and Skype and Google Docs and Google Calendar and Wikipedia. But they don't look like internet links. They look like programs. Application links, yeah. Yeah, because they don't care. They just don't care. They just want it to do what they need it to do. And I think there's kind of a little conceit in this interface, but I think it really works, and I think that could mean something very important for these web services as well. Yeah. Mills, do you think that this also plays into what you've been pushing, which is on the cell phone front, it's the ubiquity of some kind of digital device that people are carrying with them and the impact that that has on the educational environment. You know, maybe it's everyone will have a cell phone interface and a super cheap one pound, you know, or two pound laptop with a small screen, but it's good enough to, you know, carry out to, you know, the battlefields that we have near campus, the Civil War battlefields for a history project. It's a more portable format than, you know, the 15-inch laptop. Let me tell you, I wish I had one right now instead of lugging through Central Europe, the one that I'm lugging around that I'm calling on today. You know, I spent a lot of time on this trip out of various historic sites. And to be able to have either some sort of ubiquitous device like that, boy, that would make this trip a lot easier for me. So I think that we're going to see a lot more of that. And I think from an educational standpoint, it makes it possible to demand that students do assignments, you know, out at the space. And so that will help take them out of the classroom in ways that we haven't really been able to do yet. Right, right. And you could see that, for instance, in a museum environment as well. Sure. Yeah, yeah. Okay. I was just going to say, I was at the Museum of Applied Arts here in Vienna yesterday, and they actually have little mini handheld computers now that you walk through the museum exhibits with. They're basically locked to the network within the building, but they're those little Dell handhelds that look sort of like the old Palm Pilots. And so you can get all sorts of information about whatever you're looking at. Wow, it sounds like a great application.
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi-weekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Fear itself! This is Digital Campus number 16 for the 4th of December, 2007. Steal this book. I'm Dan Cohen. We're back from our Thanksgiving hiatus. Hope all of our listeners had a good Thanksgiving. And, of course, we're back with the regulars, Tom Scheinfeld from foundhistory.org. Hi, Tom. Hey, Dan. And Mills Kelly from edwired.org. Hey, Mills. Hey, how are you? Good. Both of you had a good Thanksgiving? Yeah, really nice. Yeah, mine was excellent. Oh, great. Well, we came back to the same firestorm that we had going into Thanksgiving, which we talked about on our last episode, Digital Campus Episode 15, where Facebook continues to, let's see, to put it charitably, push the edge of, or the boundaries of propriety and privacy. In particular, really this past week has been a real flare-up over Facebook Beacon. Well, we're all on Facebook. Have any of you seen these Be beacon advertisements? So just for people in our audience who are not heavy Facebook users or who haven't been following this story, part of their new advertising platform is it allows commercial partners like overstock.com to, or Fandango for movie tickets, to place a little news link into your Facebook news feed saying, you know, I bought a ticket to go see Pirates of the Caribbean or something like that, or I bought gloves for my daughter, something like that, into your news feed, and it inserts you. And like all things Facebook, and I think this initially happened with the newsfeed as well, there was a flare up when the newsfeed itself started where Facebook just goes and does this and then I guess waits around to see how much people care about the invasion of their privacy and then scales it back to the level that matches up. But I haven't actually gotten one of these advertisements or whatever they're, I guess they're called recommendations into your newsfeed. Have either of you seen one of these yet? I haven't seen one yet, but I have to say, you know, I'm pretty amazed by this because this is kind of commercial stalking in a way and kind of take it to the next level. I mean, for years, websites have been tracking with cookies your click-through behavior. And so, you know, there's been a lot of data mining of that. But it's really different to take that information and then, without your permission, display it potentially to the world. And for me, it raises really serious questions about how many more hours I'm going to have a Facebook account. Yeah, I was wondering the same thing. I've gotten these in the past. I've gotten these recommendations where it said, you know, you might like to buy something in my feed or maybe not in my feed, somewhere on my page, and not an ad. It was, I guess, in the feed. Basically an advertisement, which didn't bother me too much. I mean, every website I go to asks me to buy something, and that's expected. This seems like something else, where it's advertising to other people what I've already bought. And that seems like a totally different thing. And I agree with Mills. And I'm a pretty heavy Facebook user. I really like it. I'm on there changing my status three or four times a day. And I think it's fun and I use it to keep up with friends and stuff. But I'm really – this now scares me. And it's weird because last time we talked about this, I wasn't scared. I was kind of like nonchalant about it. I was kind of gung-ho. But this finally, I think, put me over the edge. And I think I'm with Mills. I might go cancel my Facebook page. Well, here's the scary part. So they did back off. I mean, sort of very oddly, moveon.org, which is really known as a lefty net roots group, really went after them. And usually they just go after, say, George Bush and Don Rumsfeld. But they took up this cause. I actually do think it made an impact. I mean, it really gave it a kind of national story. I mean, AP picked it up, CNET, the tech news sites picked it up because of moveon.org's activity. And of course, there's a Facebook group called Facebook Users Against Facebook Beacon. And that started to take off as well. And so they backed off, actually, we're recording this on Friday, November 30 November 30th, probably come out in a few days, but they backed off late last night on the 29th to have it so that it doesn't automatically go into your feed. You have to say, you have to press an okay button to have it go there. But there's still no opt-out of the program. And if you want to not have purchases, let's say at Fandango to go on your thing, you have to actually go into your preference, your privacy preferences, and actually opt out of each individual vendor. So you can imagine there'll be hundreds of these vendors you have to go in and click. I don't want this, you know, the purchases from this place to go on my feed. But even after you've done that, all that's about is what gets shown publicly. It still means that Facebook and the vendors are going to have information about your purchasing habits. And that's a really scary thing in terms of privacy. So, I mean, there's still value there for both the vendors and for Facebook, that they're kind of getting a lot of profiling on you. And, you know, I still think this is what makes, you know, people are worried about Google, as we said last time, and, you know, what they're able to aggregate. But this is far more pernicious, I think. And I'm also considering canceling my Facebook account. Yeah, I mean, the thing for me that's really the troubling part is, I guess, not so much that information is getting collected because every time you log onto the computer, lots of information about you is being collected and used in a whole variety of different ways that we don't know about. What is, I think, more troubling about it is that Facebook started posting this information for public dissemination right away without even saying to somebody or saying to the members, here's what we're going to do. What do you think? And it came out initially in the news story as just sort of a funny thing like Facebook spoiling Christmas surprises by posting people's purchases. And then their boyfriends or girlfriends or husbands or wives saw what they just bought and said, oh, that's what I'm getting for Christmas. Well, you know, it's clearly a lot more than that. There are all sorts of privacy issues here that are really troubling. Yeah, there sure are. Well, we'll see what happens on this in the next few weeks. I mean, I think it is interesting that it's in the Christmas season. I mean, you know, there are kind of funny stories and some of the initial stories emphasize that. I guess it was someone found out that they were getting gloves for Christmas from their boyfriend. You wouldn't think this is major, you know, national news. But I think there are going to be more stories like this that people won't realize what's happened and, you know, they'll have one of these beacon flares go up on their news feed and be really upset about it. Well, more things to worry about on campus. This will be our worry news segment for the podcast, but quite incredibly, I mean, almost as audaciously as the Facebook beacon is, is a new House of Representatives bill that seems to be, it was introduced by the top Democrats in, let's see, on a couple of weeks ago. And this federal legislation says that universities must agree to provide not just deterrence, but also alternatives to peer-to-peer piracy, such as paying monthly subscription fees to the music industry, paying for Ruckus, which is a sort of advertising-supported music-sharing service, or the new Napster, which charges a monthly fee per service. Really unbelievable. Now, of course, the penalty here, and this is what's really putting the pressure on universities, is if they refuse to do this, they can lose all their federal financial aid for their students, for all their students, not just the ones who are pirating the latest Britney Spears song.
I mean, the possible penalties on this seem extraordinarily high. I mean, it's just outrageous. And it's just one industry, the entertainment industry, which continues to just break new barriers for outrage. I find this amazing. And I think especially the fact that they would punish all students and an entire institution for the actions of even just one of its students. It just seems, and in such a draconian way, it's completely outrageous. 's completely outrageous. And again, this is like the Facebook thing. It's kind of like I feel like I've gotten to the point where this is like I've had – it's like my last straw with all of this stuff. It's really amazing. Yeah, it's – I mean it's – this one is not going to stand up because the first time – I mean members of Congress are going to find out that the first time this actually gets, if it goes through, the first time it actually gets applied, thousands of constituents in their districts where the first college loses all its financial aid, thousands of constituents in their districts are going to flood their offices with hate mail and anger and they're going to realize, oh, gee, the people who actually vote for me as opposed to the entertainment industry are really mad at me personally. And so then they're going to say, how could we have passed this law? It certainly wasn't my idea. And then it'll be, you know, retracted in some way. But it's just, like Tom says, it's one industry that's just gone crazy on this. Yeah, I mean, I can't imagine a more appreciated program than, let's say, Pell Grants. I mean, I don't know. I mean, to take away the Pell Grant program, you know, one of the most successful and important higher education bills of, you know, in American history, for this kind of a violation. I mean, you know, you'd think you'd have to, something unbelievably outrageous to have that kind of penalty imposed upon you. For one industry to target in this way another industry through federal legislation, I mean, you know, and an unrelated industry. I mean, it's the entertainment industry targeting the education industry through federal legislation. I mean, they're not, you know, there are other people who are file sharing from their workplace or wherever. And I mean, for instance, they're not going after, you know, and other industries that receive federal subsidies, they're not going after, for instance, let's say, like the agricultural industry, which receives tons of federal subsidies. And I'm sure who engage in practices, their employees at times, that the record industry would not like. And it's just an outrage that it hits, as Mills said. And I think constituents will be outraged. Although what's amazing to me, as Dan said, is that this hasn't gotten any play. I mean, this isn't at all front-page news. Yeah, well, when I heard about this, I actually went to the House of Reps, you know, house.gov, and looked up the bill. And when I used their search engine, so I found the committee that passed this legislation. So this is at the initial stage. It hasn't been voted on by the entire House yet. But it's the Committee on Education and Labor in the House of Representatives. And so they have the press release from the chairman of that committee. And, okay, first of all, I mean, this is classic legislator speak. The bill is called the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007. Good luck voting against that. And then, so it's, so then they have a bullet point list of, you know, sort of a summary because if you actually read the bill and they provide a PDF of the bill and it's, you know, so it's, so then they have a bullet point list of, you know, sort of a summary, because if you actually read the bill, and they provide a PDF of the bill, and it's, you know, obviously it's very long, and I'm not a lawyer, and I can't get through it, but they give the bullet points. So here's the bullet points of what the COAA would do. Streamline the federal student financial aid application. Make textbook costs more manageable, expand college access for low-income and minority students, increase college aid and support programs for veterans and military families, create safer college campuses for students and faculty, ensure equal college opportunities and fair learning environments for students with disabilities, and help strengthen our nation's workforce and economic competitiveness. Oh, there you go, competitiveness. So somewhere in there, I actually think it's under bullet point creating safer college campuses that this P2P stuff is shoehorned in. But nowhere in there does it say anything about this. And, I mean, I would assume this has a really good chance of passing. Can you imagine trying to go up against, let's say you're trying to unseat one of these House members, and they voted against this a... It's made for an attack ad. I mean, you can just imagine the TV ad, you know, Congressman so-and-so voted against the education perfection bill. You know, I mean, it just... Right. He wants unsafe college campuses and doesn't want our veterans coming back from Iraq to have college aid. He wants them to be homeless. Yes, so, boy, if we all had the clout of the RIAA and the MPAA, it seems like we'd all be in good shape. Well, one final note in the news roundup. I think that's a more positive note if we can end there. Berkeley has, which has always been in the forefront, and I think we actually played their YouTube channel once on the podcast, but they're now, I think, trying to help others get, move educational content online, multimedia education in particular. They started an initiative that's been signed on to by a number of universities, actually a few dozen universities called Opencast. We'll link to it from digitalcampus.tv on our episode links. But it looks like an interesting initiative. I mean, basically they're trying to help out, you know, make the process, and we know this very well, getting a podcast online is pretty difficult. I think particularly in a live setting for lectures, Mills, you know this pretty well, it's not that easy, right, Mills? Right. Well, I mean, it's not that easy if you actually want to edit what you're going to post. I mean, it's actually now pretty simple through iTunes U for me to just record my class and dump it straight into iTunes U. That's then a really big file. My classes last an hour and 15 minutes. I don't really want to podcast the entire class. If I were just going to podcast the whole class, it would really be pretty simple. but I end up going back and editing just sort of highlights of the class and posting that instead, and so that's what takes the time. But the interface is not bad. There's a problem, though, with the iTunes U interface at the moment, which is that anybody with administrative access to the account can edit anything in our GMU site. So one of my colleagues accidentally deleted my picture and sent me an email saying, oh, sorry, you might want to put it back. So they're still working out some of the kinks on that, but in terms of just recording the class and dumping it straight into the iTunes U account and then having it appear online, that's pretty easy now. Right. I guess what Opencast is trying to do is really to provide that full authoring environment. Right, right. You know, where you've got, you might have multiple mics, you might have to mix and edit. So, you know, just to streamline the entire process, especially for non-technically savvy people. So, yeah, it'll be interesting to see where this goes. I mean, I think, you know, just in general, I think we're on the cusp of a lot more of this material going online. Mills, you're at the bleeding edge of it. But, you know, it could make for an interesting, you know, I think not only, we were joking about Berkeley using it as a promotional tool, which I absolutely think it is, but I think it's just a sort of public good that professors put stuff online. It's why the three of us have blogs and podcasts are part of that too. And I think this is, providing the editing tools is really key because I think, you know, it's great to put lectures online, but an unedited lecture online, I really, I just don't think, I don't think it suits the medium very well. I don't think it's that interesting to students or anyone.
And I think a small amount of editing and a small amount of, for instance, like lead-in music and those kinds of things, multiple mics, conversational style, very simple things that you can do that we've tried to do on digital campus can make the medium a lot more friendly and will make it a lot more usable and used. So I think any of these tools that are free and easy to use, that can allow for really what are kind of simple manipulations, but maybe not immediately apparent to someone who's new to audio and video production, any of those tools are really welcome. Well, we're all technophiles on the Digital Campus podcast. And so we love checking out new gadgets and things that come out. And of course, as people who are also into books, we're interested to see the launch of Amazon.com's new e-book reader, the Kindle, which was launched just before Thanksgiving, sold out in five and a half hours, which, of course, you never know what that means. They probably had three on hand and immediately sold those to the Uber geeks who ordered it. But, you know, another attempt at creating some kind of dedicated device for reading, reading books. In this case, actually, the Kindle does newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, some magazines and blogs as well, which is sort of interesting, taking a medium that really began on a general-purpose device, the computer, and taking it onto a dedicated device for reading. And I think all three of us probably have pretty strong views on, I think not only on the Kindle, but also just the e-book in general. I mean, this is something that we've seen time and again. You know, sort of every couple of years, a new e-book reader is launched, and none of them them have taken off. It's sort of curious as to why that is. We thought we'd just discuss the possibilities of this for campus. Obviously, if you had a device that you could put our entire library onto and read any book off of it, there's something certainly special about that. But why haven't they taken off? And what are the possibilities of an e-book reader, and what are its drawbacks? So Mills, you know, what did you, I wrote a blog post about this this week, and I can mention that in a second, but maybe we can start with you. What are your thoughts about, you know, the Kindle and then also the e-book more generally? What are its possibilities, and what do you think its negatives are? Well, I'm like everybody, I guess, from the book generation. On the one hand, I'm kind of excited about the possibility of what an e-book reader would provide in terms of access to lots of books and just that much less that I have to carry around. I just happen to like the tactile aspect of books, but that's because I'm 48 years old and so I grew up with books. For me, it's hard to let go of that kind of tactile interface. I do think that thinking about it rationally, that this is the way that the book publishing market is going to ultimately go because it is so easy to have access to so much information in an e-book reader form. The question I have, though, is whether the dedicated e-book reader is really going to be the thing that makes the difference, the thing like the Kindle or the Sony's version, or is it going to be just a different computer platform like a slightly bigger cell phone or a slightly smaller laptop that ultimately becomes the primary reading platform for people? Right now what they're trying to do is take a book and make it digital. Right. be digital. And so it's taking one technology and trying to force it onto another technology. And so I think maybe they're going about it the wrong way. Instead, what I think is really good about the Kindle, I haven't actually held one in my hand, but I've just looked at the videos online, and it seems like the screen is really, really book-like in the sense that it's extremely readable. I mean, for me, this is a real issue just because my vision isn't all that great anymore. And so, you know, I have to boost my text size up now to read comfortably, and either I have to get new bifocals. And so, you know, it seems like it has the look of a book page, which is, so that's really to the good. Yeah, this is this new e-ink technology that came out of MIT and is not really a screen in that it's a surface where the print actually appears. It is very book-like. If you've seen the Sony Reader, it has the same technology. The Sony Reader's been out now for a year. And it's basically these little balls filled with black dye that spin. And so it has the advantage of looking more book-esque, although to me the contrast, if you've seen the Sony, I haven't seen the Kindle yet, but on the Sony the contrast isn't exactly book-like. It's still a little bit sort of dark gray on light gray rather than black on white, but it's better. It's certainly more readable. Yeah, it's definitely more readable. It looks more readable than my laptop screen, which is pretty readable. Right. And it has the advantage of being quite thin and lighter than a paperback and containing all kinds of information, But I think that there are a couple of big problems with it other than the fact that it's like trying to make a bike fly. One of them is it's never going to catch on for the beach because you can't take it to the beach because it will get sand in it and then you've got $400 that you just flushed down the toilet. And the beach is that or wherever people like to read where it's dangerous for electronic devices. Near coffee. Right, near coffee. And then the second problem is just that it's just ugly. And when I first saw it, I thought, God, they should have hired a designer from Apple or someplace where they do actually good industrial design because there is absolutely nothing that's appealing about this. It's just blah. I mean, they could have made it putty colored and it would have been worse, but it's just really blah. And if what they're trying to do is target the younger generation that doesn't read books nearly as much as we do, this isn't going to work because they're not going to want just something blah and white looking like that. Well, I think that's my initial reaction to this is that, I mean, what an amazing marketing job Amazon and Jeff Bezos have done with this thing. I mean, as Dan said, the Sony reader, which by many accounts is a better reader, has been out for a year. And this thing, it just doesn't strike me as this wonderfully game-changing device. E-book readers have been out since at least the late nineties. Right. And, and I just think it's, I think it's like holiday season desperation among the tech press for something to write about. That's comparable to let's say the iPhone or last year at this time to the Wii. I just think it's like Amazon did an amazing marketing blitz. The tech press picked it up, and it's good for Newsweek magazine to put it on the cover and say, is this the end of books? So in some respects, I think it's, and maybe this isn't the best thing to say for marketing our own podcast, but this is kind of a non-story in some ways. I think it brings up some interesting questions, though, and maybe that's what will save our podcast and maybe even save the Kindle. Yeah. Mills, I looked up the designer of Amazon Kindle while you were talking. So it's Robert Bruner who was the, get this, this is rather unbelievable. He's the designer of Apple's original PowerBook. The original PowerBook. Which just goes to show you genius can fail sometimes. Yeah, on my blog I said it looks like the, many people in our audience may not remember this, but the Sinclair ZX80. Right, right. Which was a very early computer that, go Google it and you'll see a picture of the ZX80. And I swear, it looks uncannily like the Kindle, which is not a good sign when a device in 2007 looks like it's from 1984. But, you know, my question about this that I posted on the blog, and I think, Tom, you were starting to get at this too, is sort of like a more general question. I mean, you know, okay, so the design is pretty lousy, and the e-ink is pretty good. We could talk about the technical aspects of this. And actually, I think some of the business model aspects of this are pretty interesting.
They're $9.99 for most books. So it's less expensive. And you can imagine a business model where this would make sense for the publishers. But I still think, you know, why have all these e-books failed? And I think the problem isn't on the business model or from the publisher's side. It's the fact that, first of all, there's, you know, many generations like, you know, all of us, we like the feel of a book. And, you. And if I'm going to read in a long format, I really like books a lot. And I just think the e-book reader is sort of neither here nor there. And the way I put it on my blog is I compared it to the photo play, which was, if you look back at the history of film, there was this moment in the very early 20th century after the invention of film where everyone thought, oh, well, a film will be a fixed camera on a theater performance. And so it was literally photographing a play because everyone was used to going to see plays. And, okay, here's a film. And what you do is you go ahead and film a play. And that's what film will be. Well, and so people just assume that, okay, a book, well, okay, now we've got the digital medium. And so a book will be some kind of device that looks bookish. And I think it just misses the entire point that we gain something in going online. And we gain something in the general purpose device of either the laptop or, Mills, as you noticed, the cell phone. And I think the iPhone is really the competitor to the Kindle because I've read stuff on that, and the font is really crisp, and it's easier to hold, and it looks a lot better. But, you know, if I'm going to read something in a digital format, I want to be able to do stuff to it that I can do to digital stuff. I want to be able to cut and paste from it. I want to be able to put it into folders, relate it to other stuff, link to it for my blog, email it. There's just all these other things that we're used to doing now in a networked computer environment that, okay, so the Kindle has a little keyboard and you can take notes on your books. But, well, how do I get that into Word? How do I aggregate that? How do I use it in Zotero? It's just impossible to think about how this integrates well into the modern research environment. So I don't see the real advantages over a book where, you know, okay, if I'm going to curl up with a book and really, you know, invest time in thinking about the ideas in it, then I'll just use a book and I'll, you know, take notes on my laptop on the side. But I just think, again, it's sort of neither here nor there. And it doesn't surprise me that none of these book readers, no matter how good the design, and actually, I think if you've seen the Sony Reader, it's quite beautifully designed. Yeah, it looks great. So, but, you know, again, hasn't taken off. Yeah, I think you're right. It's like a solution in search of a problem. I mean, it hasn't substitute for the book. It's a different act and you get something different. You have different expectations going in and you get something different coming out. This again, I'm not quite sure this is a huge story. But I do think there's one possible application of this from a business and educational standpoint that could actually really work. And that is if, just imagine, for instance, that George Mason gave every student one of these devices, and then the students could just register for their classes and put a little check next to all the books that they wanted to purchase for their classes, and all of those books would be downloaded to their device immediately and their account charged automatically, so they wouldn't have to go stand in line in the bookstore. That would be a number one advantage for them. And second then, as an instructor, you can instruct your students to all bring their device, whatever it is, to class, and they've got all of their materials, all of their assigned materials. They can't say, oh, I mean, they could say I forgot my Kindle, but they can't say I forgot my article that we're going to talk about today. But also, if they can take notes on it, it becomes a point of contact with all of that material. Thank you. And the reason is because if the students are going to do that, they're going to want what we've just been talking about, which is a computer where they can check their email and do all of the other things that they want to do while they're using it. So they're not going to want just a book device. Right, right. So it has really great advantages from a teaching standpoint, but it has a basic practical problem of how the students would use it. Yeah. I hadn't thought about that, Mills, but, you know, textbooks would be an interesting case of this. I mean, obviously the price would have to come way down from $400 a pop. But one assumes that that $400 is sort of a subsidized price in the same way that in the United States cell phones are subsidized because they know, well, you're going to have to pay, you know, $60 a month for service. So, you know, they can subsidize the cost quite a bit. But yeah, I mean, the textbook thing is interesting. I remember a test when I was at Yale that they did at the Yale Medical School. They gave all the students a CD-ROM at the beginning of the semester with all of their textbooks on it or all their readings for their courses. And the problem about it, and so of course they could load it into their laptop, so they do have it on their general purpose device. But the real problem was it was DRM'd, just like the Kindle. So it had, at the end of the year, you lost all these textbooks, which is incredibly frustrating and actually sort of problematic as a med student. If you need your anatomy book after the semester's over, shouldn't you have the right to that? Yeah, was it one liver and two kidneys or two livers and one kidney? I can't remember. Right, right. Yeah, well, I think the answer to this, I mean, in some respects, in terms of education and kind of a low-cost device would be the one laptop per child machine where, you know, you're talking about a $200 laptop which is fully functional. It's a fully functional word processor, fully functional Wi-Fi and Internet browser and everything else. You could almost load all of that stuff onto that device and for half the price give it to students. So I don't think it's going to replace the book, and I don't think it's going to replace the laptop. And the question is, is there some space in between those two? And I guess we'll see over this holiday season. That's a great point. Okay, well, we'll leave it there and come back and see how we do after Christmas. Time for Picks of the Week. Let's start with you, Tom. their, I think all, of their years and years of comics. And they're actually, for a limited time, giving away 250 of them for free. So if you go to marvel.com slash digital comics, you can find 250 free samples of comics. Most of the free ones are relatively recent comics, but there are, in the larger archive, for an annual subscription of $59, you can get comics dating all the way back to the beginning of the founding of Marvel. And they've got a nice reader for them for cultural historians and people doing history of popular art and things. It could be an interesting resource, and I hope it's something that colleges, college libraries pick up on and subscribe to. Do they have an institutional subscription for it? I don't see anything yet on the website, but I'd like to search around a little bit and maybe talk to our library and see if they would get it. For people who are interested in things like history of science fiction and those kinds of things, things which I'm interested in, this could be a real great resource. Wow, I didn't realize that. There must be squeals of delight from nerds all across the planet right now. Okay, Mills, what did you have for this week? Sorry, I was just squealing. Mine is vixy.net. That's V-I-X-Y dot net.
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself, fear itself, fear itself. From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi biweekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Here it goes. This is Digital Campus number 9 for the 4th of July, 2007. Too much information. I'm Dan Cohen. Well, welcome to another edition of Digital Campus. We're glad to have you back. And we're here today with the regular roundtable, Mills Kelly. Hi, Mills. Hi, Dan. And Tom Scheinfeld. Hi, Tom. Hey, Dan. Hey, good to talk to you guys. And we'll kick right in with the most obvious question that's at the top of everyone's minds, and I'll ask the question of the two of you. Are you now or will you ever be an iPhone user? Mills? I think it's unlikely that I'm going to be only because I have this really bad habit of losing phones or dropping them in bodies of water and things like that. And so I tend to get the cheapest possible cell phone I can buy just because then when I do drop it in a lake, I just don't feel so bad. But that's not to say I don't want an iPhone. It's just that I know better than to actually go and buy an iPhone. Okay. Tom? Yeah, and I mean at $600 a pop, I think definitely not something you want to drop in the lake. I am not the owner of an iPhone, but I may someday be the owner of an iPhone. I actually just bought a – like three weeks ago, knowing that the iPhone was going to come out. So, you know, I wasn't caught by surprise or anything, but I bought a BlackBerry Curve and I made a very considered decision as to whether to buy the BlackBerry or the iPhone. And we can talk about the reasons that I did that. But I I I'm keeping my options open. I think, you know, in a year or something, maybe I'll, maybe I'll spring and get the iPhone. I'm kind of a, uh, a, a gadget hound. So, um, so it wouldn't surprise me if I ended up with one, um, and it would definitely surprise my wife. Well, you know, I mean, you guys know that I'm a gadget hound, too, especially with regards to Apple products. And so I imposed a restraining order and we went inside, and I said, Daddy has to look at a phone. And I actually played around with it for a while. Have the two of you had a chance to actually try one? I'm like you. I have to keep it out of my hands, and that way I can't actually buy one. Right. Well, let me say, actually, I have to say, you know, people are saying what a great job Apple did with, like, the hype factor and publicity and the ramping up and things like that. But I have to say it was a slight letdown actually when I used it just because I had already seen all the functionality in the videos and the blogs and things like that. And so in an odd way, like if they had just announced it and said it's available now in the stores, I think I would have been more impressed than I actually was. And I think actually the biggest problem was, and I intentionally did this to make sure I wouldn't walk out of the store with one. Of course, they have them all set to use the Wi-Fi connection in the AT&T stores. Yes. And so I just fidgeted with it and turned it off so it would go onto the cellular network. And it really was slow. And so I have to say that I think I need to wait for the next generation version. And people say, well, it'll be Wi-Fi. And of course, this is a good segue because on campus, you could think, well, you'd have this sort of ubiquitous Wi-Fi connection. But, you know, actually in our building, we have ubiquitous Wi-Fi, but you have to log on through the browser. It's not a seamless experience. And I think that unless this is on Wi-Fi, it is painful when you're using Google Maps or the Safari web browser. And so I think I'm just going to wait on it. And I feel like a storm has passed, and I'm not going to whip out my credit card and buy one of these things right away. Yeah, I mean, I think that the slowness of the connection is a problem. And I don't think Wi-Fi is really a real alternative to a cell phone or a real wireless connection. Because if I'm somewhere where they have Wi-Fi, chances are I also have my laptop in my bag. It's when I don't have my laptop in my bag or I can't access my laptop if I'm in the car or if I'm out on the weekend or something that I want this connectivity. I think the decision I made to get the BlackBerry instead of the iPhone, I really made it on the basis of the keyboard. And I realized that for me, the thing I needed most was a good email terminal, a mobile email terminal. I live in email. Email is my killer app. And the lack of a keyboard, a real touch keyboard, a tactile keyboard on the iPhone just did it for me. I thought, you know, 90% of what I'm going to use this for, other than making phone calls, is email. I'm not really going to listen to music on it. I'm not going to watch YouTube, even if that was possible with the connection. I'm going to write email. So I bought the product that has, doing email and doing it well for years. So that was my decision. Right. Well, I'll, you know, on the keyboard factor, you know, I have a Sidekick. I've had one for a few years. I love it. It's got a great keyboard. The screen flips up and you get a full profile keyboard. So it's a pretty wide keyboard. And I tried typing on this thing, and I don't think I got 20% of the letters right. And I know that even with training, you know, I mean, with training, it should get better, but I really worry about that in terms of input. That seems like a huge hurdle for me, because I also use the phone for email sometimes, and not having a really fast keyboard is a problem. Which just goes to show that you're showing your age because my nephew, who sends approximately 3,000 text messages a month with his phone, can actually text with the phone in his pocket. So that that way the teacher in his class cannot see that he's doing this. And so, you know, it's because we grew up with the QWERTY keyboards, and so we want to type that way, where in his case he just, you know, punches all the buttons with one thumb and away he goes. And then are the SMS messages kind of piped directly into his brain because he can't take the phone out of his pocket to see the screen and see the response? You know, if he could have a microchip embedded, he would certainly do it. Because I asked him that question one day. I said, well, if you could have a chip embedded in your brain that would just send the messages directly, he said, oh, yeah, I'd be first in line. And I think he's not all that atypical of America's teenagers. You know, I was thinking about the iPhone stuff the other day. I don't know if you guys have ever seen Gartner's Hype Cycle. Oh, yes. It has the five phases of the Hype Cycle. So the technology trigger, then the peak of inflated expectations, then the trough of disillusionment, the slope of enlightenment, and the plateau of productivity. So it'll be very interesting to see how long it takes the iPhone to dip into the trough of disillusionment. There was certainly a brief dip over the weekend due to getting people's service started on time. But I think that Apple is probably going to be sorry that they hitched their wagon to AT&T's network on this because I'm a recovering AT&T wireless user and their network is just substandard, at least around here in the Washington area. And we moved to a house, you know, new house in a different part of the same service area and all of a sudden couldn't get a signal.
So it's a slow network compared to the others, and I think that Apple may end up being sorry that with this phone that creates all these expectations of, you know, moving around large amounts of data, AT&T's network may not have been the right choice. Right. Well, I just think that when you play with it, I mean, the user interface is spectacular. It really lives up to the hype. But it makes you want to do all these things, at least me, that are non-phone functions. I mean, I want to use the web. I want to use the Google Maps stuff. I could see a lot of interesting applications, and people in the education world have been talking about this, you know, interesting in-the-field applications and, you know, classroom activities and things like that. But if you're using such a slow network, just the experience basically crashes on you. And at least for now, it's kind of closed to third-party development. I mean, you can, I mean, essentially they're saying to third-party developers, they're saying, well, you know, go build a web page that works on the mobile Safari, which, you know, seems like kind of a letdown. Right, but that's, again, exactly where the speed issue. I think what they need to do, um, at least for me, or if I wanted to write an application for this thing, or if someone in academia or museums or libraries and museums, boy, there's, there could be amazing applications for this, or that you could put up web pages that people could surf to. But if the surfing experience is so slow and you're standing in front of a painting and you want to get a webpage and and it's taking a minute to load, that experience isn't very great. You might as well preload a device as they do with audio tours already with some information. But I think the way around this, at least with this network, is to really enable developers to create the little widgets like the YouTube widget. It seems to me they have to absolutely do that because then what you have is all the UI functions and all the drawing functions that take a lot of time as you're downloading, for instance, images from a web page. A lot of that stuff can be preloaded into the phone and then you're just doing HTTP calls, basically like an AJAX application where you're just grabbing text or maybe some images from the web and putting it into an environment that's already on the phone. And I think that'll make it feel a lot snappier. And I'm surprised they haven't done that already on the phone. You could have some really great third-party apps that basically look like those little widgets on a Mac right now. Well, I mean, I think the big thing with the iPhone is it seems to me that, you know, if you take any one of these pieces, you know, let's say the Google Maps functionality, there are mobile devices out there that do a better job of mapping. You know, or you take the email functionality. Well, there are like my BlackBerry, I think. There are devices that do a better job of email. But what I think the Apple phone does is, and what I think the important thing about the Apple phone is, is the interface and is the user experience. And I think this is what people are saying is Apple's the first company that's really thought about and thought hard about what do people want to see in a phone? How do they want it to feel? How do they want it to look? And that's really where I think the iPhone, it seems to me from all I've seen, is really pushing forward. This is going to be a device, maybe the first handheld device that people want to use. And, Dan, you said it yourself. It makes you want to use it. The interface is exciting. I think that's critical. Design is important here. Yeah. Very important. And I think it's especially important if we're going to engage audiences for educational content, if we're going to engage student audiences. It has to be something they want to do. It can't just be something that, you know, is there but not that interesting. So I think that's where the iPhone really pushes forward. Yep, I agree. Well, in other non-iPhone news, was there any non-iPhone news this past couple of weeks? No, I think there was. And actually, you know, this is sort of a related item that we have from prior episodes of Digital Campus, and it also relates to the iPhone, is Gmail. You know, we had been talking about, you know, maybe universities should throw overboard their ITU departments and, you know, just adopt Google applications like Gmail where they don't need a lot of servers. They just sort of outsource the whole thing. And indeed, we were so prescient right after we said that on the podcast, we discovered that indeed Trinity College Dublin, a beautiful university, if you can get to Dublin, right in the city center, has done that. They're using Gmail now. There are other universities around the globe. And I think one of the Arizona universities was also open. Arizona State. Arizona State. I think it's going to be a big trend. And it seems to me that a lot of students are coming to universities already with Gmail. But it did seem like this is a great way to provide applications, et cetera, without the extreme cost to universities of sort of server support and hardware. Yeah. One of the, I mean, one of the, oh, sorry, Mills, you go ahead. I was just going to say, I think that this just goes to show that more and more universities are going to jump on this bandwagon because it is so much less expensive in the long run. And the reason it's less expensive is the staffing dimension of it more than anything else. And as we all know, benefits like health care and retirement and these kinds of things are hugely expensive for large organizations. And so to be able to outsource a technology like email is going to be immensely attractive to the business side of the university, to the vice president for fiscal affairs or whoever that person is going to start putting a lot of pressure on the technology side of the house and just keep asking, well, why are we paying people to do this when we can outsource it for a fraction of the cost? Yeah, I mean, one of the things that the story that I read in the BBC website pointed out was that Google's saying that many of the universities who are leading the way in this area, who are signing on to their service or have signed on to their service first are universities in the third world. And they point out universities in Egypt and Rwanda and Kenya who are ditching whatever servers that they had for Gmail servers that Gmail or Google can provide these services, can provide sophisticated services that they can't provide for themselves. Yeah. With very few exceptions. And it just seems to me that the cost savings there, of course, there is, I do think universities feel that they need to sort of have all their stuff in a way, you know, they should have possession of students' email and these sorts of things. And obviously, you know, we're not, you know, we like Google, but they're not perfect. And we have privacy concerns. And I'm sure people in the audience can think of many concerns that you would have in doing this kind of outsourcing. But, you know, I do think that it frees up costs to do other things. And I think there are a variety of technologies around, like web applications, open ID for identity management, and single sign-on services. These sorts of things allow a university to have a kind of distributed data cloud or application cloud for students. And I think students, frankly, are used to that. They're coming in with their Facebook accounts and their Gmail accounts or Hotmail or what have you. They're used to stuff being in multiple places. And, you know, when we went to college, the university provided all this stuff. You had your university email and that was it. And then eventually we got our own little web space, which was just like Unix file system space to put up some web documents. But people are used to now, you know, they've got their own blog, they've got their own this and that. I think this is absolutely the future. Yeah, and I think that the security concerns, and I think those are probably security, privacy, those are probably the big concerns with this kind of thing. Or at least that's the, if there's a knee-jerk reaction against these things, that's where the knee-jerk comes in. I actually think those aren't really very good concerns. I mean, it seems to me that Google can provide probably better security if they want to provide those services. They can provide better security and privacy services than a university can.
Especially when you're talking about the economies of scale that they generate. If they're doing this for universities all over the world, they can provide a host of kind of a menu of security options for universities that a small shop on a small campus, or even a relatively large shop on a large campus, isn't going to be able to provide themselves. Right. Well, finally, we saw the release of a much-anticipated real world. Well, I guess this is an object that marries the real world with the digital realm. And since we're all book lovers, I think we all found this very interesting, of these espresso machines and print-on-demand machines and news stories over the past few weeks. Looks like our good friend Josh Greenberg, who is at the New York Public Library, actually took possession of the first one of these books. This is called the Espresso Book Machine, or maybe that's its nickname. But it's basically a refrigerator-sized machine that you press a button and choose a book from many digital offerings, and it prints out a paperback book, I think, in about five minutes. And what's amazing is then you look at what else is going on. I mean, Google digitizing all these books and other, you know, Open Content Alliance and all these places digitizing these books and having effectively page images of these that are pretty high quality, although Google's might be a little bit less so. And then the ability to just sort of print this out if you actually want a physical copy. Do you think this is important, or have we moved so much online that people will no longer actually want the physical book? Mills, what were your thoughts reading these stories? You know, I think that we're still a long way away from people not wanting the physical book. And I think what we're going to see is that increasingly the reference market is going to die because you don't need to own all the reference books. Those sorts of books, you go and look up something. But that's different from the reading experience that, you know, certainly the generation of people who are, you know, I don't know, 30 and over still really wants. And so I think that that's going to, I think that books in their analog form will continue. You know, even if your book is on your iPhone, you don't want to really take it to the beach. And so, and it hard to snuggle up in bed with your laptop. So I think we're still a little ways away from the end of the book. You guys probably don't even know this, but I've been on the editorial board of a print-on-demand press for the last couple of years. And I think this is really the future of academic publishing because so often now, in the history business anyway, the question is, well, what's the market for that book? And the answer is, well, almost none. If we're talking about a real market in the sense of selling 5,000 or 8,000 copies of some hardback book, the press that I work on has this new academia press, has the same exact process of scholarly review. It's all double-blind and has an excellent editorial board and all of those things that you would expect from a major university press. However, they print five copies of the book when it's done and send those to the author, and then the rest of them are ordered directly through Amazon. And there's a press down in Nashville that big, I think it's called Lightning Press, and you order the book from Amazon and the order goes directly to the folks in Nashville and the next book that comes out of the end of their press is the book that you just ordered. So it's like a warehouse-sized version of this espresso machine publishing system And the book drops into an Amazon box and goes out in the next morning's mail. Yeah, and it seems like Amazon is – I mean, that's an amazing process and gets beyond publishers usually for now for academic monographs. I don't even know what the smallest print run is, but they probably only print out a few hundred copies of a lot of these hardback books. Sure. Just a few. 500 is about the bottom end, I think. Right, right. And then you think about all these public domain books that are out there, it looks like, both Amazon and then also a very interesting report, although I think it was a little bit of PR just for this research company called Outsell Incorporated, which speculated about Google possibly jumping into the print-on-demand world by just printing out all these books that they've digitized, over a million books that they've already digitized. It really could open up the market for these sort of single-print runs. I was just going to say one other piece of this from an academic standpoint is that there are all these works of scholarship that are – Yeah. amount through a used book dealer. And so one of the things that the press that I work with has done is encouraged authors to reclaim their copyright on a book that's no longer being printed and then submit it to us. And then we simply set it up as print on demand. And so we're reintroducing books into the stream. Now, we're doing it at this tiny little level, you know, dozens of books a year happening this way. Google is, as you say, scanning millions of books a year. And so I think it's quite likely that Google's going to do that. They'd be crazy not to. You know, it seems to me that, though, this is actually a bigger story. A lot of the talk about this print-on-demand has focused on, well, this is going to put bookstores out of business. And, in fact, I don't think that's true. I actually think this is a much bigger story for the kind of scholarly, academic, educational community and educational market than it is for the kind of general book publishing market. I can't imagine that these machines, these Coke machine-sized machines, are going to be – they're not really a substitute for the bookstore in the airport where you want to get a bestseller, you want to get it quickly, you're going to pull it off the shelf. They need lots of them. They can't have people, each person waiting five minutes for a book to print. But it does seem like just the right thing for, as we were saying, out-of-print books, textbooks where they're only doing a limited run for a course at this university or that university. It seems like that's really the model. And for that market, it seems like the model that Mills is talking about with the warehouse-sized machine where it maybe takes a day or two to get you the book is the model that's going to work rather than this kind of Coke machine model where you're actually standing in the library getting your book. It seems like for the kinds of books students, teachers, scholars need, they're the kinds of books that you can wait a day for. So I wonder, you know, this print-on-demand, it's definitely coming. It's definitely important. It's just going to be interesting to see what sort of shape it takes. Is it going to be the Coke machine or is it going to be the warehouse? Well, I think we'll definitely keep track of this story as it develops and actually try to get a book from Josh and see what these things look like as they come out the other side. So we'll keep on top of this on the podcast. As we just discussed with the new Espresso book machine, part of its power is that it's leveraging all the digitization that's gone on. And we've really noticed that the amount of material available for researchers, digitized books and articles and images, has just exploded in the past few years. I mean, you look at JSTOR with more than 2 million scholarly articles from the past century, or ProQuest's historical newspaper collection, 14 million pages of newspapers. Library of Congress, with their online memory project, has 9 million items now available online. And then, of course, Google Book Search, the big 800-pound gorilla with a projected 15 million volumes minimum in their catalog. And it seemed to us that it was important to discuss, as part of a feature for Digital Campus, just the opportunities and also the challenges that this poses to scholars and students and teachers. It's the size of this digitized collection of materials that we can study is really quite daunting. And, you know, Mills and Tom, the example I always like to use is the Clinton White House and the poor presidential historian who faces the task of looking through email messages produced by the administration. Well, it turns out that on their main server, there are 40 million email messages. And you sort of compare this number to, let's say, the number of letters that came in and out of, let's say, the Johnson administration, or even earlier, you know, Woodrow Wilson.
And the calculation I always like to throw out is that even if you could read one email message a minute without sleeping, drinking a lot of coffee, it would take you 76 years to actually read all of those Clinton White House emails. And so we're really faced with, I think, what Roy Rosenzweig, our colleague and friend, wrote a great article for the American Historical Review a few years ago called Scarcity or Abundance. And he postulated that there are sort of two possible futures in a digital realm. One is a world of scarcity where because digital things are very fragile and a lot of things aren't digitized and we have all these born digital materials like email that are deleted and lost that we might end up with a kind of digital dark age or scarcity, a world of scarcity where we don't have a lot of materials to look at. And the other possible world that we face is one of abundance, where we do have all this stuff and it overwhelms us with its size. And I think it's pretty clear to us now that we've ended up in that latter world. And it seems to us that in the next five, ten years, really what we're going to be dealing with is how do you deal as a student, as a scholar, as a researcher, how do you deal with just the sheer abundance of this material? Mills, what sort of experiences have you had with maybe a collection that was really large and how you get through it and what do you do as a scholar when you bump into this world of abundance? Well, it's something actually we've just started working on with the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank project here at CHNM. We've, over the last year and a half now, have been collecting almost two years, collecting the stories of Hurricane Katrina and Rita and collecting images that people submit. But now we've moved into a different phase, which is we're trying to collect other material that people have posted online. And our first target is the Flickr database of, you know, I don't know how many gazillion photographs at this point. And so we've developed a program that will essentially mine the Flickr database for everything with certain tags, and in this case the tags Hurricane Katrina, and at the same time have a Creative Commons license on them so that we can suck them into our database without having to ask permission. And just the first pass at the database gave us over 68,000 images tagged Hurricane Katrina with a Creative Commons tag on them. Right, and that's a small subset of the total number that are tagged Hurricane. Right, it's a small subset of the total. Actually, I'm sorry, it was 68,000 without the Creative Commons, and then when we went to Creative Commons, it took it down to 14,000. But the two of us who work on this project on a daily basis, we don't have time to go through 14,000 photographs and see whether they're actually of Hurricane Katrina or of someone's cat named Hurricane Katrina or, you know, who knows why they tagged it in that way. So we do, you know, we've got 14,000 photographs, but now we've got to figure out a way in some sort of an efficient way to go through them and decide which ones ought to be in our archive and which ones shouldn't be. And at this moment, we haven't arrived at a solution to that problem. Right. Tom, what have you experienced in this realm of abundance? I think the interesting thing for me is that, you know, sort of a, let's say, a hundred years of historical training and methodology has really – and this is another kind of take on Roy's scarcity and abundance – is that 100 years or more of historical training and historical methodology has really taught us to deal with problems of scarcity. When you're researching a topic in history, at least up until very recently, you're posed with the problem of not having enough sources, not having really enough sources to tell the story you would really like to tell. And searching and searching and searching and finding, you know, that great crucial source that can help you tell your story. You know, now we have the opposite problem, this problem of abundance. And I think there's – we need to start thinking, doing sort of a fundamental rethink in terms of training students to deal with that problem and creating tools for dealing with this. Because as Mills says, you can't just do it by flipping through these things yourself. You can't get your hands around it in that manual way. We're going to have to come up with automated ways to do this. Yeah, and I think for all of us use Google every day and we appreciate its power. But I think in, you know, the realm of academia and museums and libraries, I think a lot of the searches we're doing are more complicated. I mean, trying to locate items of interest that you, you know, would like to study further. It's a more complicated process. So you're not, let's say, oftentimes a keyword might not be really helpful, right? Let's say you were, again, that presidential historian and you wanted to do the history of the Clinton White House dealing with Al Qaeda. Well, you could certainly Google, I guess, for Al Qaeda if you had the Google index, this entire collection. But of course, it's broader than that, right? As historians, you want to know, well, the context of, let's say, fighting terrorism. What about, you know, other angles to the story, financial transactions that the administration was trying to cut off that might not have the keyword Al-Qaeda in it? And all the different spellings of Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda would be very tricky to deal with. And so we have a question of synonyms and changing terms over time and all these issues to try to find documents of interest. So location is extremely difficult, I think, in a scholarly setting with a lot of materials, much harder than it is, I believe, on the web. And so I think that's really kind of one main phase that we need to tackle first, Tom, I think is exactly what you said. Well, and our friend Bill Turkle, who we had on digital campus not too long ago, has been writing about this exact issue in his blog, Digital History Hacks, fairly recently, just over the last week and a half or so. And he's actually got a very interesting post on June the 27th about doing just what we've been talking about. In his case, he's got a data set of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, and he wrote a program to essentially find the relationships between entries based on some criteria that he set. And, you know, the program, this Python program, which is only about, I just looked at it, it's about 30 lines of code, so it's pretty simple, came up with some very interesting clusters of entries based on, simple parameters that he set. And the parameters aren't about looking for locational clusters or that kind of thing. He was looking for things that just basic distance between the entries. And it worked pretty well. And he says that in his post that to run this on the 80,000 entry dictionary of Canadian biography took just a small amount of time, just a little over an hour on his PC. And so that worked pretty fast. Yeah, I think that's a great example. A similar example is some work that David Mimno, who's a PhD student in computer science, has done at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. And he's been working on creating what he calls virtual shells, which I think is just a terrific term for it, and it's a great idea. And basically what he's done is he's taken the books, the freely available books from the Open Content Alliance. So these are digitized books. They've been digitized by the Internet Archive and some libraries and Microsoft and Yahoo. They're all public domain works. And unlike Google, the Open Content Alliance makes these books fully available. So you can actually get the OCR text or the entire text of about 45,000 books through a process that essentially clustered them by topics rather than keywords. And so it really provided a sort of powerful insight into how you could sort of redo the library or redo the process of locating things. I mean, you know, you experience in a physical library as you go to a bookshelf, let's say you're looking for the history of canals. You'd go to a bookshelf and you try to look around near a book if you saw something of interest. What Mimno's project does is it sort of creates virtual shelves and it does an incredibly good job of clustering books that wouldn't normally sit together on the bookshelves, that you might want to look at, but you'd never find in a physical library, and you wouldn't find by keyword search.
And I think those are the kinds of tools that we're going to need to explore to see how they can facilitate scholarship when you have such masses of information available to you. I think tools are key because what I don't think we can expect of our students is them all to learn the kind of Python skills that Bill Turkle has. I think we need to, the people who do have those kinds of skills, need to start thinking in terms of tools that can be Right, right. ordinary humanists. That's where, and I think we need to be thinking more about that, and I think, frankly, there needs to be a lot more funding provided for that kind of thing. Yeah, that was my question as well, is where are these tools going to come from? Who's going to create them? Who's going to fund the process of creating them? And I think it's really a next step for those funding the digital humanities to really think seriously about because, you know, a lot of money has been put into digitizing humanities collections, but now we have the abundance problem. Right. And I think that, you know, as a sort of second part of this question and something that makes this world different than, you know, printed works and where I think the espresso book machine might not help out as much as it possibly could in the future is there is something special about having these things in digital form that is lost when you actually end up printing it out. There's some things gained, you can take it to the beach, etc. But I think a lot of what people are going to want to do, and people have already started discussing this, is you want to extract information from these books. You want to mash them up with maps or other applications. You want to contribute to sort of social bookmarking tools. So you want to be able to, you know, share them on different, you know, Conatea or Zotero project or, you know, network them together. I think that those kinds of applications of being able to kind of pull important information out of it, aggregate it across different sources, that's really enabled by Abundance as well. So we don't want to, you know, simply locate the books with, you know, virtual shelves is great for doing that and then print them out and read them. We also want to go a next step right beyond that, which is locating them using computational methods to analyze them, extract information from them, summarize them, perhaps translate portions that are, you know, if you don't speak the language that they're written in, if you want to, you know, quickly scan the table of contents in a German book and you don't speak German, you want to just get a quick sense of what's in the volume. These sorts of things, sort of acting on the text as well, is really enabled, and that's a very exciting possibility. Well, I think that sort of third area that I think we're going to look at in this area is also sort of, you know, the digitization process itself and what happens there. I mean, we talked about Open Content Alliance making their text available, but I think really for this to take off, you know, right now what saddens us is that, you know, Google with all these books has not made their stuff available. And in fact, I just saw today this sort of third leg of the stool, as it were, is that Clear, the Council on Library Information Resources, is actually now doing a study of Open Content Alliance, Google's project, and some of these other big digitization projects to see how they can be done in a way to encourage and enable scholarship. And I think that's really exciting. There was a piece by Peter Brantley on the O'Reilly radar on this. And I think the outcome of that study will be, I think, a very important one to see, you know, for other people who wanted to do, you know, who want to do digitization projects, you know, how can you do it in a way so that the text is scanned and made available in a way that really enables all of what we've discussed. Because after all, if you're just Google and you just make page images available, you're not helping out at all. Right. And even just providing full text may not be enough. It may be that these large digitization projects that are putting all of this text into, well, XML documents or into a database, they need to be providing the kinds of hooks into that database, into that data that digital humanists can use to pose their own research questions. As we said, the kind of brute force of a Google search is great and incredibly powerful. But even more powerful are the APIs that Google is now starting to provide. And if they could provide those same kinds of APIs for their large-scale book digitization and article digitization projects, that would be even better. Right. I think that we can't rely on the collection owner's own interfaces into the materials. I think at the very least there need to be APIs or application programming interfaces so that we can interact with those techs in a variety of ways. So new tools that we build can come along and scan them, can extract information, can combine it. If these things are just locked up, you know, Google Books isn't gated in that you can access it on the web. But in another sense, it is kind of gated, a sort of soft gating in that, you know, they've got all the text index and we can't really access it, but we can look at the page images. So they're providing access at three in the morning. If we want to take a look at a book, we can look at the book, but we can't do the kinds of computational analysis, extraction, location algorithms that we create like Mimno's virtual shells. We can't do that right now on Google Books. And I think that's something that we're really going to have to track. And I'm really looking forward to this report from Clear. So we'll see where this all goes. But I think abundance is certainly a theme that we're going to be tracing over the next few years on the podcast. And we'll see where it heads. Well, we've come to the end of the show. And as we like to do each episode, we like to just go around the horn and discuss any links or resources or software that we found that might be helpful for the audience. Tom, what do you have for the week? I've got sort of I always have two things. I've got two things. The first one is something called Learning 2.0 that was first put out by the Public Library of Charlotte Mecklenburg. And it's called Learning 2.0, but it's kind of confusing. It's also called 23 Things. And what it provides are 23 small exercises that you can do on the web to expand your knowledge of Web 2.0. And this isn't going to be really that interesting for digital campus listeners, I don't think, but it'll be kind of elementary. It's kind of 23 things that you can do on the Web to help you understand the latest in Web 2.0 technology. I imagine that the listeners already know most of this, but it could be something that they could give their students or their staff members to kind of a new staff member or something to bring them up to speed on what's kind of going on in Web 2.0 and give them a kind of lay of the landscape and help them learn some of the lingo that we all kind of throw around. It's got a horrible URL, as all these things do, and so I'll put it in the show notes. But it's 23 Things Learning 2.0 from the Public Library of Charlotte Mecklenburg. The other thing I had was a, and I can just do this really quickly, I noticed yesterday was a little hack on Lifehacker. It's actually a little JavaScript that you can add to Google Docs to enable... There's actually some hidden JavaScript in Google Docs, and if you cut and paste this code into your address bar when you're using a Google document, it actually adds dictionary and thesaurus functionality into Google Docs. It's kind of hidden in Google Docs. They haven't put the menu on the page yet, but it's actually hidden in there. And it seems to me that a dictionary and a thesaurus are kind of essentials to make Google Docs useful for scholars. And it's actually in there. It's just hidden. And this gives you a way to unlock that. So it sounds like that will come eventually and you won't need to hack at some point. Right. It looks like something that they're testing. But you can have it now if you just, I'll put the URL in the show notes. Okay. Great. Mills, what do you have for this episode?
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself, fear itself, fear itself. From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi-weekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Fear itself! This is Digital Campus number 42 for. It's 42, episode 42 of our podcast. I'm Dan Cohen. Welcome to our audience, new and old. And welcome back to the panel. Of course, our regulars and co-hosts here, Tom Scheinfeld from foundhistory.org and at foundhistory on Twitter. Hey, Tom. Hi, guys. Great to be back. Yeah, good to be back. We'll have to hear about your baby in just a second. And of course, Mills Kelly. Hey, Mills, from edwired.org and fake at edwired on Twitter, of course. Hey Mills. How are you? It's good to be back. Good. Good to have you. So we're welcoming Tom back to the podcast after a paternal leave. How was paternity there? Paternity is interesting. It's sleepless. It's a lot of fun, though, and we're having a really good time with Luke. And, you know, I was so thrilled that you guys got Stan Katz on in my stead last time, and I'm sort of thinking he did such a great job that maybe I should bow out permanently. But, well, put it this way. I'm glad that you had me back after Stan. I'm glad that you still wanted me back. You'll be getting your pink slip from the podcast soon, Tom. Stan was really, really excellent. There was a recession after all. Yeah, it is quite a downturn, and our podcast with no budget is increasingly tight these days. Okay, so we need to ask the Digital Campus New Parent Quiz. Question number one, have you bought a domain name for Luke Sheinfeld? No, I have not, but I have thought about it. I just haven't gotten around to it. Okay. Changing diapers, but as soon as I get a minute, I'm going to. Okay, question number two, have you reserved his Twitter name? Have not. Again, again, delete. Okay. We'll leave it at that. I'll take it no further. Getting this parenting thing down. I know. Focus on the diapers first and then the domain name next. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's my plan. Okay. Sounds very good. Well, welcome back to everyone. We're delighted to have you here. And well, I was joking at the beginning about this Wolfram Alpha, which I did type in. Boy, it's a mouthful, isn't it? Wolfram Alpha. What is the meaning of life? Of course, it answers from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 42. And I actually typed in just before the podcast, what is digital campus? And Wolfram Alpha says, I'm not sure what to do with your input, Dave. Would you like to explore sports and games instead? Your initial reactions to this computational knowledge engine that everyone is chatting about as maybe the answer to homework? I think it's going to sink like a stone. I do. You can't get the answer to much of anything from it. I played with it for 15 minutes at lunch today, and I asked it many questions, and I would say probably 95% of those questions came back with, well, from Alfred, it doesn't know what to do with your question. It's like if you turn on a radio station and there's no sound coming out, you assume that they're off the air. Well, it seems to me that Wolfram Alpha is kind of off the air in terms of providing information. Yeah. My problem with it is that I think it has a few problems. I think the biggest problem right now is possibly a design problem. When you go to the Wolfram Alpha homepage, you're given what looks a lot like a Google search box. It's kind of right on the top of the page, a single, long, 600-pixel-wide search box. And so from a user interface perspective, it says to me that I should just type in a free-form question. And when I do that, I get back a bunch of nonsense. It doesn't have the answer to my question. Whatever it spits back is usually not the answer to what I'm looking for. And the problem with that is that's not really how you're supposed to use Wolfram Alpha. And if you read further down the page, it gives you all these hints for how to structure your query. So it's basically a knowledge engine, a computational engine that uses structured data to answer structured queries. If that's the case, then the user interface should reflect that. If I'm supposed to be giving it a structured query, then the user interface needs to help me do that. I can't just be led to believe that I can type in something the way I would type in something to Google and be given a set of results. That should be explicit in the interface. So I think that at least, I'm hoping that's the big problem with this new computational engine and that once they kind of fix the UI problems, it will have some potential for answering kind of queries about structured data, not natural language queries, but things about statistics and other kinds of more, let's say, scientific or more numerical queries. Yeah, it doesn't really make much sense as a kind of general engine. I could see this being laid on top of, let's say, a particular archive or set of data that you might want to mine and that you would have a kind of restricted domain or set of queries to act against it in the same way that structured query language, SQL, which is used on most databases, kind of knows already what the columns are and kind of allows you to, in sort of a quasi-English, to say exactly you know, exactly what you want to get out of it. You know, it's interesting because, you know, I experimented with this idea of a kind of homework search engine a few years back with Simon Kornblith, a really talented programmer who's at Caltech now. And, you know, we tried pulling a lot of information like this, like figuring out when someone was born and grabbing web information and kind of distilling it down. And it's, you know, I think they've ended up in exactly the same place, which is you end up using Wikipedia a lot because you can get a lot of data out of that. And the general web, you can't just rely on what's there. You have to do some statistical processing on it to kind of distill down what the facts are, to grab it from many pages and to kind of figure out the validity of pages. And it ends up being really tricky. And so the process, I think, of just the general Google search engine where you end up with a set of results and you kind of scan with your eye for a page that provides what you would consider a reliable source is actually not a bad way for answering most things. I suppose they're going to add a lot of visualizations and things like that that you can't get out of Google. But I did find it interesting that Google, I think, feels some pressure from this in that they had this presentation of exciting things going on in Google Search Labs where they had something called Google Squared. Did you two see this? The release of Google Squared where it was, yeah, where again, it was a kind of database thing and they categorized types of dogs and, you know, had little structured bits of data about that, that, you know, dachshunds are prevalent in New York City and things like that. And I think it's because they feel like, you know, there's all these math PhDs at Google and they need to feel like they're on the absolute cutting edge. And so, you know, clearly this really smart guy comes along with, you know, with his company and Wolfram, who if you don't know about him, but he's done a lot of work also in basically the theory of science and his emphasis on algorithms as a kind of key part of science and developing scientific theory. And so, you know, they want to feel that they're out in front and that they're not just the domain of the 10 blue links as Yahoo recently disparaged them as. I actually think that another question that I think Wolfram Alpha raises is whether it's really the algorithm anymore that sort of determines a search engine's dominance, that determines Google's market dominance and its superiority.
And there, after restructuring my query a couple times, it did give me the answer. I did the same thing for the United States, and the closest it could get was 1933. It couldn't get me the answer for 1900. And that, essentially, it's not that it didn't understand the query. It's that it didn't have the data on hand. And so the question then becomes, well, so you've got this super sophisticated algorithm that can, you know, take my query and run it on a set of data and come back with an answer. Well, if you don't have the data, then you're not going to, no matter how good the algorithm is, you're not going to give me the answer. And I wonder if Google now is just so far out ahead in terms of amassing and aggregating loads and loads and loads of data, whether anybody's really ever going to be able to catch up in that respect. They've now got so much data to run their queries on that even if their algorithm is slightly less sophisticated or it doesn't deal quite as well with more statistical data or structured data, whether that even matters anymore because they've just got that mass of raw data at hand. Yeah, you know, this is a point that I kind of picked up. Murr Rosenzweig and I wrote a piece on data on the web or it was called, it was a piece called, an article called Web of Lies, Historical Knowledge on the Internet. And one of the points that we made in that article, we'll post a link to this from the digitalcampus.tv website, was that, you know, historical facts actually change more than you'd imagine. And the one that we brought up was the year that Alexander Hamilton was born, which you'd think would be an established date. But it's actually changed recently. The most common year that used to be mentioned was 1755, but now most historians believe, at least in the last five to 10 years, most historians now think he was actually born in 1757. You'd think you'd have a founder of the United States' birth year pinned down by this point. But what's interesting about this is that Google actually has the means of picking up the fact that that date changed, because if you look at an index of pages that mention Alexander Hamilton's birth, they're slowly evolving from listing 1755 to 1757. And you can kind of do a statistical analysis on that and realize that something's up because of the spikes on these dates. And so I think Google has always been based upon the fact that quantity beats quality. They'd rather have the kind of messiness, the kind of web as it is, in its aggregate, in its enormity, and that they could mine a lot of data straight out of that rather than having, let's say, the specific census records, which is I'm sure what the structured data is that Wolfram Alpha uses for these life expectancy queries. So they'd rather have that kind of scale versus quote unquote kind of vetted sources, pinned down sources, because of the fact that things do change. And I think this model where, you know, Google does 99% of the work for you, and then it expects you to do the last 1% on your own. Like it gives you the top 10 results. And from those, you know, you can find something that's going to be useful to you, or you can at least follow one of those links to another link that's going to be. And I think, you know, the question of do we really need with the gray areas, not necessarily the hard, cold numbers, I wonder if something like Google isn't good enough for us. Yeah, I mean, I tried a couple of – I tried sort of a natural language search and got all answers, you know, from Wolfram Alpha because it's just clearly not designed to do that. So then I thought, okay, I'll be a little more fair. You know, I'll try to play in the sandbox that it's designed to play in. And so my search term was, since I do Habsburg kinds of history, Austrian, Czech, Slovak, Hungary population. All right. Well, so I got a reasonable outcome from that that you wouldn't have gotten from Google. So, you know, it gives you the population of these four countries, which one has the highest, which one has the lowest, what the ratios are in comparison to each other, what's their growth rate, life expectancies, comparisons. You know, so it's a little more useful. So if you needed something for a paper about population in that part of Central Europe, you know, you could get something pretty useful. But if you go to the source information, this is where I think they've got all kinds of problems is that they, you know, it says primary source, they're curated data. Okay, that's a very expensive proposition to curate this kind of data. And so then you look at the list of background sources and references. Okay, they've got a nice long source list and at the bottom is the Wikimedia Foundation. And so you immediately wonder, well, did they get it from there or the World Tourism Organization or the United States Department of State background notes or where did it come from? You can't say. It's just some conglomeration of those things. And so on the one hand, on the surface, it's kind of useful, but I would never cite that result that I just got on population in this area. I would never cite it in something that I was writing, ever. Yeah, it's an interesting point. I mean, you have, much like an academic resource, it at least says, you know, here are my sources. But in a sense, I mean, a lot of people aren't going to click on that link at the bottom of the page of the search results. And so it has the kind of patina of an academic publication, but it does have a lot of Wikipedia stuff in there. And I wonder if it's just better to tell a student, well, you know, okay, at least you know you're getting it from Wikipedia and you know the problems that that might have. Wolfram Alpha, you're getting it from a scientist with his big computers, and so it's got to be right. And I wonder if that's a kind of worse proposition. Well, speaking of possibly fake results, have you guys been following this Elsevier scandal with this bogus journal that they created for Merck, the giant pharmaceutical company. They had this Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine. And now it seems like they're uncovering at least six other fake journals that they've turned out. So I think it wasn't just Merck, but I'll link to this article. There's several journals that are now kind of being looked at, which basically publish, you know, drug articles. And so they can be used to kind of bolster advertising claims by big pharmaceutical companies. And it looks like, well, let me find this, but while I'm getting your reactions, here's another case where you'd think anything you'd find on an Elsevier search engine would be fact. What are we to make of this? Is this just an outlier? It's really hard to say. I mean, at first when I saw it, when I saw the story, I thought, okay, there's just this one instance. And so some editor within their organization kind of went rogue on them. And it's a big, sprawling operation at Read Else elsevier and so there wasn't proper editorial control and this thing happened but now as it appears that more and more of these journals are under their imprint then it starts to look like an actual policy yeah there was there was kind of a drip drip drip uh to this story where you know one came out and then a couple more came out and and i think um if any more come out i think out, I think this is going to turn into something really big. And if I was a publisher of scientific journals, I would be scouring my titles and my editorial boards to make sure to double check that there weren't any conflicts in funding and in editorial control and things. Because I think this is the kind of thing that could really discredit a label. I think it could be a big problem and I imagine these journals are not easily going to come back from this hit. Well, and the scientist who then cited work published in a reputable journal in their own work, okay, they have to go back now and republish what they did and say, okay, I assumed that this was reasonable research because I found it in a Reed Elsevier journal, and it turns out it was just baloney. Well, in their defense, I will say that it hasn't been determined that the research itself is baloney. It's just that it's tainted. It may be baloney. Yes, tainted is a better word than baloney.
It's just that it's sponsored by companies that have a special interest in that particular research result. Whether the research result itself is bogus or not is another question. Right. It looks like a lot of these, so I found the article, it's in The Guardian, the UK newspaper, The Guardian. And it looks like they did actually have a set of these journals that were basically just sort of reprints of other articles that they sort of published together with maybe some glosses on it and a new cover and things like that. But clearly it's the kind of thing that it's sort of a marketing-shaped journal rather than a science-based journal, which really is pretty damaging, it seems to me. Well, let's continue. This is the fake versus real, I guess, episode of Digital Campus. The MPAA going up and saying that teachers should videotape monitors rather than break the DVD encryption to get videos into the classroom. Does this make any sense here? I guess the reason for this is that there's this, I don't know, I can't remember if it's annual or biannual, set of hearings to look for exemptions in the DMCA, the copyright law that we have here in the United States. That's relatively harsh in terms of what you can do with materials that are encrypted for digital rights management, like DVDs. And I guess some people are trying to get an exemption or continue an exemption to allow teachers to rip DVDs or get clips of movies off to show to their students for educational purposes. MPA says, take your camera, set it up in front of a TV and shoot away. Thoughts? Yeah, seems like a silly thing to recommend. I mean, there is this kind of accepted exemption, this kind of analog hole, they call it, which would allow you to do something like tape a CD. You could move a CD to a tape and then pass that to your friend. That's an old exemption in the copyright law, which still exists. And so what the MPAA is saying is if you're a teacher and you want to post a video online, a clip of a video online, let's say to your blog for your students, instead of just ripping the DVD and posting that clip to your blog, even if it's access to that blog is controlled, if it's a password-protected blog, then instead of doing that, you should set up your camcorder in front of a TV and basically make an analog recording of the screen and then post that to your class website. Seems silly. I mean, it seems like they should just either just one or the other, like just say, we don't approve of this practice at all, or say, you know, go ahead and do this for educational purposes. This middle ground where they're trying to appeal to teachers and Yeah. So apparently it is okay as long as you do it in this really low-tech and poor resolution mode. It's like saying that it's okay to go to a concert and record the band or the symphony with the recording device in your cell phone camera and get this really scratchy kind of low-tech recording. But that's okay. And it just seems crazy to me. And further, almost nobody's going to do it that way. If teachers are going to reuse content, they're going to reuse the content. And if they're not, if they've been told to go through this whole series of steps just to reuse the content, they won't. It's just too much trouble. Isn't this, so it's not biannual, it's actually triennial. So every three years, the Copyright Office sort of hosts this forum for rulemaking about DMCA. This is just a crazy system, isn't it? That every three years, film historians or teachers who want to use films are going to have to re-justify this. I just don't understand why. I mean, clearly it's part of the law, but this seems like a convoluted process itself to have to justify all these things every three years. And undoubtedly there will be new forms of digital rights management and encryption, et cetera. So this will just be a kind of academic version of the cat and mouse game that goes on in the world of piracy, won't it? Well, I think it's a function of the DMCA being such a restrictive law where if you're going to have really restrictive laws on a technology that is constantly changing, you need to look at it every three years and say, okay, what are the new holes that have opened up? What are the new practices, the new piracy practices, the new technologies that allow piracy that have developed during the past three years that allow people to get around or to exploit loopholes in the law? If the copyright regime weren't so restrictive, you wouldn't need a review of these things because these things would be, many of them, permitted and it would be clear. So I think it's just this, as you say, a cat and mouse game where publishers are just constantly trying to keep up with this changing technology, which if it ever changes, it always changes in the direction of increasing access, of increasing portability, of increasing openness. And so it has to be this way. And it's just ridiculous. And it's inherently ridiculous, I think. Well, I think you're right, Tom. I mean, isn't this exactly what's happened? We haven't had a chance to discuss it yet on the podcast, but with the new Amazon Kindle DX, really the big news is not just the form factor that it's larger and might be better for things like textbooks. And of course, they did announce that they would have textbook publishers as sort of buy-in to the system, but also that it supports PDFs, right? So I assume we are headed down the road where there will be probably textbooks that are photocopied and stuck up on PDFs on the web. They're probably there already if we looked around. And if you had a Amazon Kindle DX, which granted right now is out of the price range for most students, but one would assume it will come down. Are we going to get to the point that the publishers of textbook are going to have to go in front of the copyright office and argue that students will have to get a Kindle DX, get the PDF, take a photograph of the Kindle DX on each page, and then use those for readings? Are we going to end up with more and more Rube Goldberg contraptions to go forward with education? years because teachers aren't going to do what you just described. Students aren't going to do what you just described. Instead, for educational purposes, they're still going to take that textbook or that book of sources or whatever it is down to the office and copy off, you know, 20 copies of that one primary source that's not online and is in a book, and they're going to hand it out to their students because that's what they have to do because they don't have other kinds of workarounds and they can't do it other ways. It just strikes me that this PDF reading, it's really, you can imagine a lot of copiers actually right now, they'll take a scan too and they'll email it to you. So it's just not that complicated to get a lot of this stuff up for free. I'm sure these publishers must be a little freaked out by this. But, you know, I guess this could happen right now. I mean, on any netbook, on any notebook, desktop machine, you can find a PDF and read it on that device. I guess it just makes it a little bit more visible, right? That all of a sudden now there's really a kind of market for, you know, pirated book materials. And I think the Kindle, because it's a, from all I've heard, and I've played with them a little bit, but from all I've heard, it is really a much more comfortable, much more kind of lean back reading experience, whereas I think the computer is kind of a lean forward reading experience. This is a distinction they make between TV and the computer where you kind of lean back and watch TV and you lean forward and look at video on your computer. The Kindle is sort of the same way where you kind of lean back in bed and read something on your Kindle. I think that publishers were a little insulated from it because they knew people weren't going to really do a ton of reading on their computers or on their netbook. I mean, you'd have to kind of turn the netbook on its side even to make it feel a little like a book. With the Kindle, all of a sudden, like, this really does replace in many ways the print copy. And I expect to be hearing a lot more from publishers about this PDF feature as Kindles make their way onto campus next semester. Seems like a pretty easy way now to set up your own press, isn't there?
Oh, yeah. Pretty easy to distribute them. You know, you could use some, I learned a great term from Peter Brantley, you could use some social DRM. So you could let people download PDFs that have their, you know, purchased by Dan Cohen scrolled along the bottom. So if they in turn circulated around, you know, you'd know that they, you know, that they were distributing it illegally. And, you know, you could charge a lot less, right, than the current textbook. Absolutely. I think it's just going to get easier and easier to do this kind of thing. And then people are going to find the, you know, instructors are going to find the books that they like or the pieces of books that they like, and they're going to put them together into something simple and easy to use and pretty inexpensive. Yeah, I remember the source books that, you know, we were forced to buy as an undergraduate, the compilations of photocopies that were bound together and sold in the basement of the science building on campus. Why not do that now and put it on a Kindle and the instructors can do it? And they're going to because it's just a lot easier than going through the university administration, which I'm sure offices on campuses will be set up to do this for faculty members. But, you know, and that was convenient in years past when actually these things had to be copied and bound and expensive. Now it's simple. And, you know, I mean, I could, you know, just compile a PDF source pack and give it to my students. And that would be that. I think, you know, it'll be very interesting to see towards the end of the fall semester where this has gone. You know, Cliff Lynch of the Coalition for Network Information, I was in a meeting with him. He made this really striking point, which wasn't directly related to the new Kindle, but you could see its impact on an environment where you had a lot of Kindle-like devices. He was making this point that when you look at the textbook market, there's really only about 50 courses in the, at least in American universities, but I assume this applies globally as well, but there's about 50 courses that are really kind of profitable textbook areas. So there are things like, you know, American History 101, Econ 101, these sorts of courses. And there's only about 50 of them in the entire university structure. And he was saying that, you know, a lot of foundations and other groups have kind of studied this problem, that if you came up with an open source textbook, let's say in PDF, for the sake of the Kindle DX, if you somehow were able to fund 50 decent quality textbooks in those fields, you could save the entire education system literally billions of dollars over a decade or more because you'd effectively have those things available, easily distributed, et cetera. It just hasn't happened yet, but you can imagine the power of that idea that you could basically short circuit the entire textbook market and save the educational system enormous amounts of money with just a kind of surgical strike on open access, let's say PDF versions of 2009. I think that's fairly ambitious. But the idea would be that these things would save the state of California tons and tons of money in the cost of buying books. And sort of your standard algebra textbook is not something that the information is the same across all of these textbooks. It's fairly standardized. The way it's taught is fairly standardized, and there doesn't seem like it needs to be proprietary. It could be open source. I think, at least according to this article, that they're running into problems with state standards and how do you evaluate this open source textbook which presumably will change over time. How do you make sure it is that this changing, growing thing is always current with state standards? What's the evaluation? Who do you go to if changes need to be made, if the curriculum changes, those kinds of things. Right. Those are good questions. But it is something I think that's being tried. And I think if the California public schools manage to replace their math and science textbooks with something open source, wow, watch out. That's when things will really change. Yeah. You mean, this whole landscape is changing really rapidly. I don't know if the two of you saw that Scribd now has a store for PDFs. So if you're an author, you can post a PDF to Scribd, S-C-R-I-B-D, leave out the E, .com. And they've got now a section that's basically just a store that you can imagine hooking up to pretty much any device, mobile, netbook, Kindle type device. And you can sell it for anything you want and keep 80% of the profit. So there's also a market developing here again for kind of, you know, easy to distribute, open, you know, quasi open access, maybe with social DR-type material. I think it points in interesting directions for academic presses and other kinds of publications on that side as well. Well, let's see. Lots of other stories to get to. More on the Google Books. We just actually had an announcement just today. We're recording on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009. And University of Michigan actually has announced a kind of revised settlement or, excuse me, digitization agreement with Google. And we're just getting the details in this right now via Twitter and other means. So we haven't completely processed it. But what does seem like what's happening, and again, we'll post the agreement here on our website, is that effectively the University of Michigan has gotten Google to sort of explicitly agree to considerable more, and I think, you know, obviously allowable kinds of public domain uses of the books that are being scanned as part of the collaboration between Google and University of Michigan, and that in the most obvious case are showing up at Google Books, but also that University of Michigan is now putting into HathiTrust, which I believe we've discussed before on the podcast, a kind of digital library storehouse that a bunch of about a dozen large-scale research universities in the Midwest, as well as I think Berkeley, have joined together to kind of have a digital book repository. And so they're now allowing for kind of expanded opportunities to provide users with access to these books. They secured some rights to, it sounds to me like, for instance, create audio versions for people who are blind to access these books that have been scanned, to provide greater access for scholars who want to do kind of computational studies of the entire corpus of, I guess what's now approaching 8 million digitized books. And so it seems to me, I guess now as a settlement is going on that the settlement between Google and the American Association of Publishers, as that's going on, I guess now these libraries are getting into the business of kind of fine-tuning the agreements that probably they launched without maybe fully thinking through or fully foreseeing what would happen with this digitization project with Google. Is that how the two of you read this? I mean, I think this is a good example of why it wasn't a bad idea to wait a little bit, because I think the University of Michigan has created a much better arrangement for the use and reuse of this material than was the case in the original scanning process. Yeah, I wonder if it has something to do with the way if Google is sort of sensing some public backlash to the settlement and that maybe some of the public backlash is going to influence the judge's decision and they're trying to show that there's, you know, even with the settlement coming out, that there'll be some flexibility and there'll still be some ways to improve access for various audiences. And I just wonder if some of this isn't, you know, sort of PR. It's hard to say. That's an impossible claim to prove. But it just seems like the timing is all, there's been a lot of, I saw Brewster Kahle had an op-ed in the Washington Post, I guess yesterday, decrying the Google Books settlement. And I'm just wondering, and urging the judge to reject it. I'm just wondering if some of this, the timing seems like a little suspicious, but, you know, who knows? Yeah, I mean, if you read through here, it says that the agreement expands the scope of the partnership to broaden public access, support shared services with other libraries, provide greater access to students and faculty so that, you know, people at the University of Michigan can get a digital copy of every book in the collection, whether it's scanned at Michigan or another library, and that you can share public domain books.
You know, they're ensuring these things that probably should have been surfaced maybe earlier on. Again, we're talking a little bit ahead of ourselves here since we haven't seen the full amendment, and we will get that posted to the site when we have it. Actually, I'm now just getting it across Twitter. Ah, the wonders of Twitter. Okay, so there's now an amendment that they've released, and again, I'll post directly this PDF. And it looks like, wow, this is the amendment. Are you ready for this? It's 36 pages of legalese that's been released just now. Well, that reassures me. Yeah, I feel much better. Now I know exactly how I'm permitted to use these. Okay, so here I am live scanning this on, thank you, I can't remember who that was, it just direct messaged me the actual PDF on Twitter. But it looks like now they're just sort of clarifying how, for instance, they'll review what pricing gets done for access to things that aren't in the public domain. It makes it a little clearer how they're going to provide access to these works for people with disabilities, which I guess maybe wasn't as clear. I guess maybe that's something that kind of came up when or that maybe Amazon was blindsided by when they had to turn off the audio for books because the publishers were sort of crying out about when Amazon allowed the Kindle to kind of read books for you without buying the audio copy. It's not a little bit clear here, but it does say that it'll make collections accessible to users with print disabilities in the same way as other books covered under the settlement agreement. So clearly there's some things in there as well. It looks like there's going to be a mechanism to review prices. So, remember there was kind of a shady, vague language about there being institutional subscriptions to the entire digitized corpus. So, now they're going to have a kind of very specific mechanism here for establishing prices. And, oh my goodness, there's a very price paragraph here about how they're going to adjust prices so how you know for instance if Google wants to raise the price for access to the entire in copyright and public domain corpus how that will go about so clearly there have been a lot of lawyers working overtime there's a whole bunch of things in here for price caps and pricing reviews, user experience, etc. So, wow. Okay, so we will post this so everyone can read through it. We'll maybe review it, I guess, in more depth later on. But Tom, as you pointed out, and we'll link to this as well, I mean, Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive had a very tough op-ed piece in the Washington Post yesterday, really sort of calling out both people in Congress and also those who are cooperating to Google to say, you know, this is really a troubling settlement and agreement and that, you know, we really should push towards something that's truly public. And, you know, at the same time, we saw over the last couple of weeks that Microsoft is contributing $50,000 to the opposition to the Google Books settlement. So this is all really heating up this summer. Well, I think the summer is not a bad time to have it heat up when people just aren't paying that much attention. And I think Microsoft contributing money to that is probably just needling Google because $50,000 would be one day of lawyer's fees and all of this. Right. That's right. Okay. Well, we'll report back in a couple of weeks. And as we read through, we'll have to get our legal division to read through all 36 pages of this. It's rather incredible and has all kinds of definitions of what books mean and things like that. So that'll be our exciting, well, it's a PDF, so you can put it on your Amazon Kindle DX and read it on a hot summer night. The question is whether the legal document itself is covered under the definition of book. Is it covered by the settlement itself? Right. Yeah. And I'm also concerned that if I have the PDF and I might pass it on to a friend, would I be violating somebody's copyright? Not if you take a Polaroid picture of it. I'm under the analog loophole. Well, Tom, since you've been away for a month or so, we'll give you the first pick of the episode. What did you find over the last month that you think our audience would be interested in? I'll link a piece of software website. Yep, it's actually a piece of software. It's called VirtualBox at virtualbox.org. And it's basically just a virtualization, an operating OS virtualization software. Something like if people have used VMware on the Mac, VMware Fusion, so that you can run – what it allows you to do is run another operating system on your box at the same time you're running your primary operating system. So I run Ubuntu as my primary operating system, and I've installed VirtualBox, and I can run – actually, I'm running the new Windows 7 in a virtualized window on my computer. And it's actually – from what I've experienced, I've tried VMware Fusion. I tried another product for the Mac. But I've tried a couple of these packages that allow you to do this. And this is the best one I've tried. It works. It's seamless. And it's free. And the other ones cost quite a bit of money. It was developed by Sun Microsystems. It runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and Solaris. And it's an easy download, a quick download, quick installation. And you just kind of like boot it up and install Windows or whatever as your secondary operating system you want, Ubuntu or another flavor of Linux. You just load it up there. It's super simple and really, really good, really snappy. I totally recommend it. Please save your money if you're looking to buy some virtualization software. Try VirtualBox first. Well, this looks great. I've been meaning to try it. So it really works well then. Yeah, I mean, it did for me on Ubuntu, and I'm guessing it probably does on Windows. I'd like to, you know, anybody in the audience who wants to try it on Mac, I'd love to hear how it goes for you. But yeah, it was really, really good. Yeah, you know, at the Center for History and New Media here at Digital Campus headquarters, you know, we do a lot of testing on multiple operating systems of either websites and what they look like in different browsers on different operating systems and also software, like a certain piece of software we'll talk about in a second, on multiple platforms. And so we've generally used Parallels, although some of us have been using VMware now more recently. Parallels was the other product. Right, yeah, yeah. And, you know, these cost money and, you know, but they seem to work pretty fine. But if this works well, it'd be a great way if you want to try out, for instance, look at what your website looks like in IE8. You can't do that on a Mac without Windows. So you could download this, install Windows on the virtual box, and take a peek at what your site will look like on IE8. Thanks, Tom. Well, Mel, should we announce what we have a joint pick? We do. We do. It is a piece of software that we've talked about before, of course, and is headquarters here at CHNM. Zotero 2.0 has been released to the public. Yay! Well, I'll add myself to that pick. I'll pick it, too. Okay, thank you. All right, we have a joint pick for the week. But you've heard us blab on about Zotero, but this is a very big release. It includes really the full social online element. So not only can you back up your collection online, but you can share it with other people. You can join groups. And Mills, I suspect you have some ways that you might be using this in courses coming up. Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm most excited about Zotero's teaching potentialities in this new version because already, you know, I was just thinking this morning about the class I'm going to do, the grad course I'm going to be teaching this fall on teaching history in the digital age, and I've got almost all of my readings are in some sort of digital format. So now I'm just going to park them all in my Zotero folder for that course, and my students will all have easy access to them, and it's just going to be great.

Subsets and Splits

No community queries yet

The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.