After a long break, our podcast regulars, Stephen Robertson and Mills Kelly, were led by Amanda French in our first 2015 podcast. After a quick check-in on their current projects, the group kicked it off with a review of the winter academic conferences. Next, they discussed the announcement that Stanford University Press was awarded funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the publishing of interactive scholarly works. On the subject of digital scholarship, Amanda mentioned the Humanities Open Book project which was recently funded by both the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Mellon Foundation. Shifting the discussion to pedagogy, Mills addressed the way in which students may engage with the humanities differently through wearable computing. This podcast was produced by Digital History Fellows Jordan Bratt and Jannelle Legg.

Links:

Stanford University Press

Humanities Open Book

Gluejar

Wearable Computing

Internet of Things

Running time: 45:27

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In this year-end roundup/predictions episode of our Digital Campus podcast, Stephen and special guest Sharon Leon jumped in on this year’s cheers and jeers, listing the best and worst stories and events of 2013, including praise for expansion of DH centers and digital collections, as well as critiques of Elsevier‘s recent actions and the impact of the government shutdown on educational institutions. Tom, Mills, Amanda, and Dan then reviewed the successes (there were a few!) and failures (oh, MOOCs…) of their respective predictions for 2013.

Once they’d finished assigning grades and debating near-misses, the group invited Sharon and Digital History Fellow Amanda Regan to join in on putting together a set of alternately optimistic and depressing predictions for 2014. Judging from these predictions, this coming year looks good for grad students working on digital dissertations and for those interested in expanding open access, but Amazon’s drones might want to look into bulletproof casings.

Special thanks to multimedia whiz Chris Preperato for the plethora of pertinent sound effects in this episode, as well as for ongoing work on the podcast.

Links:

Cheers:

• Google Books decision: https://chronicle.com/article/Judge-Hands-Google-a-Big/143059/
• JSTOR Swartz documents: http://docs.jstor.org
• Smithsonian 3D: http://3d.si.edu/

Jeers:

• Shutdown affects research: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/10/03/government-shutdown-curbs-academic-research-many-levels
• Elsevier takedowns: http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/posting-your-latest-article-you-might-have-to-take-it-down/48865
• Udacity moves to executive education: http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/academics-to-udacity-founder-told-ya

Predictions for 2013:

• EBook Sales in 2013: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/retailing/article/59194-signs-of-stability.html

Predictions for 2014:

• Affordable College Textbook Act: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/s1704

Running time: 50:48
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In this, the first episode of the new Digital Campus century, Mills, Stephen, and Amanda were joined by two new Digital History Fellows, Spencer Roberts and Anne Ladyem McDivitt. Our first story is possibly the most important in Digital Campus history: the Google Books lawsuit has ended (until the appeals). At long last, the court decided that Google’s digitizing project was within fair use law and practice, clearing the way for the digitization work to continue. In addition to the legal significance, it means we can STOP TALKING ABOUT THE GOOGLE BOOKS LAWSUIT. It’s such a shame Dan wasn’t with us to chip in his four cents on the subject. Probably because we needed a new legal topic, we then discussed policies on digital first sale, which will determine how digital content is purchased, distributed, and shared, and speculated about how the first sale policy will affect the practice of buying and reselling textbooks, especially considering recent proposals for open, online textbooks. And in case no one noticed, we reminded listeners that the recent US government shut down did, in fact, make a number of government websites that scholars depend on go dark. One government agency doing some pretty cool stuff these days is the Smithsonian, which has launched a project to digitize and then facilitate the 3D printing of artifacts in their collections. And finally, we expressed our shock and outrage that 90% of students use their mobile devices in class for non-class activities. Can you imagine?

Related Links:

Google Books court decision

Digital first sale policy discussion

Open, online textbooks

Government websites shutdown

Smithsonian digitizing and printing 3D artifacts

Digitizing heritage sites

Newsflash: Students Use Mobiles in Class

Running time: 48:30
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For our hundredth anniversary episode, the digital history fellows divided up the 2007 episodes of Digital Campus and picked their favorite bits — listen to the result if you dare, and be transported back to the days when the iPhone was brand new, when Second Life was the Next Big Thing, and when you had to have an email address with a .edu TLD in order to use Facebook. Good times.

Many thanks to digital history fellows Ben Hurwitz, Jannelle Legg, Anne McDivitt, Amanda Morgan, Amanda Regan, and Spencer Roberts for choosing the clips, and many many thanks to audiovisual guru Chris Preperato for stitching them together.

Running time: 58:13
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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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In this episode of Digital Campus, Tom, Mills, and Amanda (sans Dan) touch briefly on the passing of Steve Jobs and discuss Apple’s announcement of iOS5, the release of the Kindle Fire and other new Kindle products, the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Project Directors meeting, and one university’s brief ban on social media sites. We also agree that “Nickerson” probably isn’t the best name for a razor company.

Links:

• Jobs, Apple co-founder and visionary, is dead, New York Times
• Apple releases iOS5, CNET News
• Amazon unveils $199 Android Kindle Fire tablet, $99 e-ink Kindle Touch, Ars Technica
• The Promise of Digital Humanities, Inside Higher Ed
• Back in Blackout, Inside Higher Ed

Running time: 41:35
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The regulars are joined this week by the great Tom Merritt of Tech News Today and TWiT fame. We discuss in depth the surprising lawsuit by the Authors Guild against five universities and HathiTrust, related to the ongoing Google Book Search legal saga. We also look at whether a “Netflix for books” is possible or desirable. And Dan gets a little too badge-happy. You’ll get a badge for listening to this week’s freewheeling podcast.

Be sure to check out Tom Merritt’s new book, United Moon Colonies, available in multiple formats for your reading (and listening) pleasure.

CORRECTION FROM AMANDA: I mistakenly said on the podcast that public domain works in Hathi Trust are not publicly available: in fact, public domain works in Hathi Trust can be *read* by the public, although not *downloaded.* Moreover, works in Hathi Trust published between 1870 and 1923 that are in the public domain in the U.S. are not available to be read outside the U.S. See Hathi Trust’s copyright FAQ for more precise information. — Amanda

Other links mentioned on the podcast:
Digital Media and Learning Competition 4
Think You’re An Auditory Or Visual Learner? Scientists Say It’s Unlikely
Sigil, A WYSIWYG ebook editor

Running time: 1:02:50
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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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Two big stories dominate this edition of the podcast: the rejection of the Google Books settlement and the request for a professor’s personal email. Tom, Mills, Amanda, and Dan discuss why the settlement between Google and the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers didn’t pass muster, and what the ramifications of the ruling are. We also look in-depth at what it means to have an university-provided email address given the Wisconsin GOP’s request to gain access to William Cronon’s email messages. On a lighter note, the Digital Campus team tries to decide if the addition of OMG and LOL to the OED spells the end of civilization.

[Editor’s Note: We recorded this podcast on 3/31/11, before the resolution of the Cronon affair.]

Additional links mentioned on the podcast:
‘Academic Freedom’ Offers Little Protection Against New Efforts to Obtain Professors’ E-Mails
Tyler Cowen’s Ethnic Dining Guide

Running time: 50:05
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