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One episode closer to the century mark, Amanda, Dan, Mills, and Tom welcome Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Tim Carmody for a debriefing on digital developments at the annual meetings of the MLA and AHA and a discussion of the tragic suicide of programmer and activist Aaron Swartz.

Links mentioned on the podcast:

Dan Cohen, Digital History at the 2013 AHA Meeting
Mark Sample, Digital Humanities at MLA 2013
MLA Commons
Aaron Swartz (Wikipedia)
Tim Carmody, Memory to myth: tracing Aaron Swartz through the 21st century

Running time: 58:04
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We report on a new CLIR / NITLE project to develop a technical infrastructure for publishing new-model digital scholarship, what’s coming in the next version of Mac OS X and other operating systems and what their cloud centrism might mean for universities and their privacy concerns, and canvas the current (and historic) situation with regard to open access. All best wishes for speedy recovery of your voice, Mills.

Editor’s Note 2/27/2012: Soon after we recorded the podcast on 2/24/2012, Elsevier withdrew its support for the Research Works Act, and news subsequently spread that indeed the entire Act would not go forward. See http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/intro.cws_home/newmessagerwa and https://plus.google.com/u/0/107980702132412632948/posts/a4DzVk9n7fG.

Links to stories mentioned on the podcast:

• Plans for new publishing platform “Anvil”: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/02/13/anvil-academic-aims-provide-platform-digital-scholarship
• Looking ahead to Mac OS X Mountain Lion: http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-57378751-248/apple-mac-os-x-mountain-lion-takes-more-bites-out-of-ios/
• Why Mozilla is entering the smartphone war: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/why-mozilla-is-entering-the-smartphone-war/
• Mozilla’s Persona Project: http://www.webmonkey.com/2012/02/mozillas-persona-project-wants-to-help-manage-your-online-identity/
• Apple address book data accessed by many apps: http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/15/applebook/
• Google Chromebooks in schools: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-57365703-264/27000-google-chromebooks-headed-to-u.s-schools/
• Australia mandates open access to biomedical research within 12 months: http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/australia-to-open-publicly-financed-biomedical-research/35505?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
• Elsevier boycott continues: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library-babel-fish/why-are-we-boycotting-elsevier
• Letter from @FakeElsevier: http://fakeelsevier.wordpress.com/2012/02/19/dear-elsevier-employees-with-love-from-fakeelsevier/

Running time: 59:10
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Friend of the podcast Peter Hirtle stands in for Amanda to give Tom, Mills, and Dan some much needed legal education as we take on SOPA, PIPA, the Research Works Act, and the Supreme Court’s decision in Golan v. Holder [PDF]. We also consider Apple’s attempts to shake up the textbook market and the sad fate of two very old University of Nevada at Reno students’ Facebook pages.

Links mentioned on the podcast:

Apple Introduces Tools to (Someday) Supplant Print Textbooks
Apple’s mind-bogglingly greedy and evil license agreement
How Wikipedia Turned Off the Lights
Publishers Applaud Research Works Act
Supreme Court Upholds Law That Pulled Foreign Works Back Under Copyright
Facebook Deletes University’s History Project for Violating Social Network’s Rules

Running time: 1:00:31
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The clock strikes noon, and that sound might just signal the end of the bright morning for closed systems in higher education. On this week’s podcast, we discuss Coursekit, a free (for now) learning management system built by dropouts from the University of Pennsylvania; Commons-in-a-Box, a free (funded by the Sloan Foundation) academic social networking system of blogs and wikis that will be built by non-dropouts from the CUNY Academic Commons; and the Berlin 9 Open Access Conference, which seems to have convinced not only several universities but also the White House that peer-reviewed scholarly publications should be, what else, free. Our honored guest is journalist Audrey Watters of Hack Education.

Links

What Does Coursekit Say About the Future of the LMS?
“Commons in a Box” and the Importance of Open Academic Networks
Beyond the Iron Triangle: Containing the Cost of College and Student Debt
Berlin 9 Open Access Conference
Open Access Policy Adopted at Princeton
Open Access to Knowledge at Wesleyan
Request for Information on Public Access to Digital Data and Scientific Publications (submit your comments by January 2, 2012)
HASTAC Annual Meeting 2011

Running time: 50:35
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A few days before we recorded the latest episode of Digital Campus, Apple visionary and guru of all things cool in digital technology Steve Jobs announced that he would step down as CEO in what we assume will be the end of his adept micromanaging of the business. Tom, Dan, Amanda, and Mills mused on what Jobs’ legacy will be and how the tech world may or may not be different without him. Will we feel like orphans now that the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Sphere can no longer descend upon us at times of severe tech ennui? And what about those other digital orphans — the “orphan books” we hear so much about? Amanda reviewed for us the latest on this subject coming out of the University of Michigan Library and some of us agreed that we will henceforth banish the term “orphan work” from our vocabulary. Why? Listen and learn. And from what we learned about student searching skills, someone should start teaching students more about online quests for information. That someone could be you.

Links to stories covered in the podcast:

Stanford Silicon Valley Archives
Orphan Books Online
Student Searching Skills

Running time: 37:56
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Lisa Spiro and Jeff McClurken join Amanda, Mills, and Tom for a high summer episode of Digital Campus. (Dan Cohen did not join us this time, choosing instead to remain incommunicado in an undisclosed location while he writes some book or something.) There is no avoiding the story of Aaron Swartz, the 24-year-old Harvard researcher arrested for hacking MIT’s JSTOR subscription, which raised for our panel, among other concerns, ongoing questions about open access and the viability for libraries of “big deal,” multiple-journal subscription packages. We also mourn (or celebrate) the demise of the big box bookseller Borders, share thoughts about the next generation of operating systems (including Mac OS 10.7 “Lion” and Windows 8), and hold our collective breath as we await major cuts to humanities funding from Congress.

UPDATE 8/17: There was a stretch of dead air in the recording we first posted that we’ve gotten rid of. The corrected recording is below; in a podcast manager such as iTunes you can delete the old recording and refresh your feed to get the new, corrected one. You might need to unsubscribe and resubscribe to the feed. Also, check out this terrific article on the Swartz affair by Maria Bustillos over at The Awl.

Running time: 56:58
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On Friday, June 3, we live-streamed Digital Campus from the first day of THATCamp CHNM, The Humanities and Technology Camp at the Center for History and New Media. About half the live audience of seventy-five or so people said they had heard the podcast before — it was great to see the listeners in person, not to mention one another.

We discussed at some length the trial of the copyright lawsuit brought against Georgia State University by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Sage Publications, agreeing that if the publishers were to win their suit, teaching faculty would certainly have to become more aware than ever before about the costs of the readings they assign. Also on the table (more briefly) were Google’s cessation of its mass digitization of newspapers, the major search engines’ support for structured data with http://schema.org, the Library of Congress’s plans to transition away from MARC, YouTube’s announcement of Creative Commons licensing, and Amanda’s alternative solution to the Open Researcher and Contributor ID.

Special thanks to Chris Preparato, who managed the audio recording and livestreaming. And, with proof that we’re at least as good-looking as you always imagined, here’s video of the episode 70 of Digital Campus, kindly provided in high definition by George H. Brett (whom you can also hear making a comment about parallels between the GSU case and the early days of Electronic Theses and Dissertations). Thanks so much, George, for capturing this.

Stories or projects mentioned on the podcast:

What’s at Stake in the Georgia State Copyright Case

Google Ditches Newspaper Archive Plan

Google, Bing & Yahoo’s New Schema.org Creates New Standards for Web Content Markup

Open Researcher and Contributor ID

Library of Congress May Begin Transitioning Away from MARC [Machine-Readable Cataloging]

Google Rolls Out YouTube Creative Commons Licenses

Running time: 50:25
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