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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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Our friend Steve Ramsay rejoins the regulars to pore over the Facebook IPO and its fallout for the markets and the gossip pages. Reluctantly, we turn to more familiar turf with updates on the Google Books and George State e-reserves cases. We then take a moment to lament the closure of the University of Missouri press before ending the show with a discussion of the push toward minimalism and readability in digital humanities web design.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
Facebook (NASDAQ:FB)
Judge Certifies Authors as Class in Google Book-Scanning Lawsuit
GBS: Authors Guild Goes for an Early Knockout
Publishers and Georgia State See Broad Implications in Copyright Ruling
University of Missouri Press to close, after 54 years
Jeffrey Zeldman’s Web Design Manifesto 2012

Running time: 38:03
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Sometimes we wonder to ourselves (and to those of you listening) whether some of the biggest “stories” in the world of digital media really are stories. Maybe it’s just us, but is it really news that Google is combining all of its user data into one big file? Or did Apple really revolutionize the textbook market? Dan, Amanda, and Mills asked these and other really, really big questions during the most recent podcast. Among those other questions were whether the growing boycott of Elsevier publications by scholars was really going to make a difference and why it should (or shouldn’t)? We also speculated on what it would be like to take an online course with 64,999 of your closest friends at a university called U-Da-City? To find out where we ended up on each of these very pressing issues of the day, give a listen and tell us what you think in that comment field below.

Links:

European Union Presses Google to E.U. to Delay Privacy Policy Changes
On (Not) Learning to Code
Elsevier Boycott Gathers Pace

Running Time: 46:40

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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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Is it just us, or does it seem kind of strange to see people walking around campus, the mall, or the local park talking to their phones as if those phones were actually sentient? Even if it is a little strange, Dan, Tom, Amanda, and Mills spent some time speculating about what such “talk to me” apps might mean for museums, historic sites, and other places digital humanists care about. We also had generally nice things to say about the developer build of Windows 8 and about the recent meeting about the Digital Public Library of America. Our discussion of free content then led to a conversation about how much money is being made publishing academic journals by just a few publishing houses and why open access scholarship is so necessary to the circulation of knowledge. Our outrage about journal publishing profits burned itself out when we turned to a brief look at the newly launched (and free) Digital Humanities Now, a CHNM project. We finished with perhaps the world’s shortest conversation about Google+. Why? Give a listen and find out.

Links mentioned in the podcast:

In Public It’s Rude, In Private It’s Creepy
Why Indoor Navigation is so Hard
Building Windows 8
Download Windows 8 Developer Preview
DPLA: First Things First
Copyright Office on Mass Digitization
Economics of Open Access Publishing

Running time: 58:45
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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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Returning from a post-THATCamp hiatus, podcast regulars Dan, Mills, and Tom are joined by original irregulars Amanda French and Jeff McClurken to discuss the new iPhone, a nascent course management offering from Google, and the launch of Microsoft Office Web Apps. The panel applauds the University of California/California Digital Library in its showdown with Nature Publishing Group over subscription costs and weighs in on students buying and selling course spots on Craigslist. Hat tip to our good friend Bethany Nowviskie for this episode’s inspired title.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
ProfHacker
Letter from UC to faculty [.pdf]
Nature Publishing Group responds, via Ars Technica

Running time: 57:41
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