Great timing for us, as we record the podcast on the very day the US Appeals Court rules that yes, scanning in-copyright books for the purpose of creating an online index of them is indeed a transformative and therefore fair use. Huzzah! The way is clear for all kinds of things now. We also talk about a new digital humanities / libraries tool called BigDIVA that launched today, discussing mainly its plan to become a subscription-based paid service. That leads into a brief digression on the recent patent win by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation against Apple, which could potentially raise almost half a billion dollars for the University of Wisconsin system (just enough to make up for proposed budget cuts). We refrain from comment. Finally, Stephen Robertson reports on RRCHNM’s plan to build a new tool called Tropy, which would help researchers organize the pictures they take in archives.

Related Links

• “Google Books Scanning Legal,” Infodocket, http://www.infodocket.com/2015/10/16/ruling-just-in-google-book-scanning-project-legal-says-u-s-appeals-court/
• “Google Books Litigation Family Tree,” Library Copyright Alliance, http://www.librarycopyrightalliance.org/storage/documents/google-books-litigation-tree-16oct2015.pdf
• “Online Tool [BigDIVA] Aims to Help Researchers Sift Through 15 Centuries of Data,” NCSU press release, https://news.ncsu.edu/2015/10/big-diva-2015/
• “Apple’s Newest Courtroom Foe is a Patent-Savvy University,” Reuters, http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/16/us-apple-patent-wisconsin-idUSKCN0SA09G20151016
• “RRCHNM to Build Software [Tropy] to Help Researchers Organize Digital Photographs,” RRCHNM blog, http://chnm.gmu.edu/news/rrchnm-to-build-software-to-help-researchers-organize-digital-photographs/
• Stephen Robertson on Tropy, http://drstephenrobertson.com/news/tropy-a-tool-to-organize-describe-share-digital-images-taken-in-research/
• Sean Takats on Tropy, http://quintessenceofham.org/2015/10/02/hello-tropy-soon/

Running time: 44:54

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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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This Digital Campus episode was recorded live by Chris Preperato during Friday’s second afternoon session of the RRCHNM’s 20th Anniversary Conference and was produced by Anne Ladyem McDivitt and Alyssa Toby Fahringer. Mills Kelly, Stephen Robertson, and Tom Scheinfeldt joined host Dan Cohen to recap the earlier sessions of the day, including discussions on failure, ECHO, History Makers, pedagogy, and digital humanities centers’ websites. The floor was opened for a question and answer session, and audience participants and those on Twitter asked about Tom’s laptop’s dearth of stickers, how to convey scholarship to a broad audience, and gender and digital history centers.

Links:
Gender and Digital History Centers Google Doc

RRCHNM20 Friday schedule

#RRCHNM20 Twitter stream

RRCHNM20 site

RRCHNM20 Omeka

Running time: 48:10

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In this episode, regulars Mills Kelly, Dan Cohen, and Stephen Robertson were joined by special guest Sharon Leon, the Director of Public Projects at RRCHNM, along with the digital history fellows, Amanda Reagan and Stephanie Seal.  We picked up where we left off last week with a discussion about Twitter and academic freedom after the dismissal of tenured professor Steven Salaita from the University of Illinois. Then we moved to a discussion on the future of Learning Management Systems and their role in academic institutions, as well as praise for the new online journal JSTOR Daily. Our last topic of discussion surrounded the ever ongoing question of whether or not those in the digital humanities should to learn how to code.  This conversation was spurred by the new platform Exercism that teaches users to code by encouraging more experienced programmers to provide feedback on a user’s code.   We wrapped up the discussion with news from Sharon Leon about upcoming Omeka enhancements, upgrades, and features.

Links:

Academic Freedom and Twitter

• Denial of Job to Harsh Critic of Israel Divides Advocates of Academic Freedom — Chronicle of Higher Education

Educause Learning Management Systems Report

• LMSs by the Numbers – Spring 2014 Updates
• The Current Ecosystem of Learning Management Systems in Higher Education: Student, Faculty, and IT Perspectives
• Where Does the LMS Go From Here?

JSTOR Daily 

• JSTOR Daily
• New Online Journal Offers Daily Dips Into JSTOR’s Deep Archive

Exercism.io

• Out in the Open: The Site That Teaches You to Code Well Enough to Get a Job

Omeka Enhancements, Upgrades, and New Features

• IMLS Funds Opening Omeka for Close and Distant Reading
• IMLS Funds Omeka Everywhere

Running time: 55:25
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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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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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In this edition of Digital Campus, Tom, Dan, and Mills (Amanda was on a beach somewhere when we were recording) ventured into strange and wild paths of the Internet previously unknown to us, thereby proving that we are, indeed, old in Internet years. After years of talking about Google, Apple, Facebook, and Wikipedia, we set aside those old school web platforms to examine Pinterest and Tumblr. How might humanists, archivists, librarians, and museum professionals make good use of these sites that had (largely) been off our radar all this time? And we wondered whether the fact that traffic on Pinterest now rivals that on Twitter and the growing evidence that young people are moving away from Facebook to services like Tumblr might mean that those of us in the digital humanities ought to be taking a much closer look at how to best utilize these platforms. We also took a look at the 2012 Digital Humanities Award winners and offered up a few favorites from among the many worthy winners and runners up for those awards.

Links:
Maine Historical Society’s Pinterest site
Alan Jacob’s Tumblr blog
2012 Digital Humanities Awards

Running time: 37:02
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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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Sure, there are a few talented people who have gotten EGOTs (an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony), but has anyone gotten a CEGOT? Find out who the lucky recipients of Campies are this year, awarded to the best and the worst in the world of technology and academia. Tom, Mills, Amanda, and Dan make their selections, as well as their predictions for 2013. The Digital Campus crew has often been right in the past, so be sure to tune in and know the future. (Past performance is no guarantee of future results.)

Links mentioned on the podcast:
Tumblr growth
Peter Brantley, “You Have Two, Maybe Three, Years”
Lorcan Dempsey, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Libraries, Discovery, and the Catalog: Scale, Workflow, Attention”
Calling a Quorum — for Real
Buffeted by the Web, but Now Riding It
Amazon Is a Great Company Because It Has the Most Generous Shareholders in the World

Running time: 56:50
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We’re joined this week in our last episode before our traditional summer hiatus by Bethany Nowviskie, Director of Digital Research and Scholarship at University of Virginia Libraries and president of the Association for Computers in the Humanities. We mainly discuss what’s going on at UVA, agreeing that it’s a good thing we’re having nationwide discussions now about what universities are doing, have done, and should be doing in the digital age with regard to scholarship and learning, and wondering whether the farmer and the cowman should be friends academics and businesspeople can find a common language. Back by popular demand is our old “pick of the week” segment, featuring UVA’s own ongoing archive of events taking place there.

Links mentioned on the podcast:

• Sullivan Resigns from UVa: Complete Coverage – The Chronicle of Higher Education
• reality bytes – Bethany Nowviskie
• Syllabus Journal
• ReadLists.com
• Encyclopedia of Connecticut History
• Archive of Materials Relating to the Resignation of President Teresa Sullivan

Running time: 54:36
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