ebooks – Digital Campus

Episode #114 – What to do with your (digital) scholarship

chnmadmin — Mon, 11 May 2015 19:58:34 +0000

On this episode — #114, not #115 as Stephen mistakenly claims in the introduction — the full crew of regulars, Dan Cohen, Amanda French, Stephen Robertson and Tom Scheinfeldt discuss the MLA’s new repository, the AHA’s draft guidelines for assessing digital scholarship, and the tenth anniversary of YouTube. But first Dan talked about his visit to the White House, and Amanda described her new job as Director of Research and Informatics for the Virginia Tech Libraries. And Mills needed to know, did Dan wear an Apple watch to meet the President?

Episode #102 – Digital Campus on 2013 and the Uncertain Future of Amazon’s Drones

Amanda Morton — Wed, 18 Dec 2013 20:52:16 +0000

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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Episode #101: Fair Use and Access (Shutdown Edition)

Spencer Roberts — Thu, 21 Nov 2013 19:05:13 +0000

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?

Episode #100 — The Best and Worst of 2007

Amanda French — Fri, 08 Nov 2013 15:37:18 +0000

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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Episode #98 — 500 in Podcast Years

Amanda Regan — Mon, 16 Sep 2013 18:14:49 +0000

Digital Campus is back! In the inaugural episode of the 2013-2014 school year, Tom, Dan, Mills, and Amanda welcomed RRCHNM’s new director Stephen Robertson and two of the Digital History Fellows, Amanda Morton and Amanda Regan. We began with the union between Google and edX, and the potential for change in the way that MOOC platforms are chosen, a discussion that included brief thoughts on Google Apps for Education and the collection of data on education. Moving on, we looked at the launch of a new platform for iPhone called Oyster, which offers a Netflix-like service for ebooks. The discussion revolved around what this new service might mean for the current state of textbook rental, deals with publishers, and efforts to combat the rising costs of textbooks. Mills suggested the possibility of a flat fee for a subscription to a semester worth of textbooks instead of students paying individually for ebooks. We dug deeper into this topic with a discussion of the current state of ebook purchase and rental, citing the Kindle borrowing program as well as libraries’ offering ebooks through the Overdrive platform, and we wondered whether ebook subscriptions could be compared to movie and television streaming through services like Netflix and Amazon Instant Video.

Finally, we took a quick look at Topsy, an analytical service that allows users to search tweets from the earliest days of Twitter, an option that brings up interesting questions about how historians (and educators!) can use Twitter as a historical source. There was some suggestion that the release of this tool might be connected to Twitter’s IPO offering.

This episode concluded with a briefing on the state of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media by the new director Stephen Robertson, which marks the introduction of a new segment narcissistically titled “Reports from the Center.” Tune in two weeks from now (we promise) for more.
Links:

Google and EdX Press Release
Inside Higher Ed, “EdX and Google Develop Open Source MOOC Platform”
Chronicle of Higher Education, “Google and EdX Create a MOOC Site for the Rest of Us”
InfoDocket, “Oyster, a Netflix-Like Service for Ebooks, Launches
ZDNet, “Oyster Review”
The Verge, “Topsy Lets You Search Every Tweet Sent”
Google Apps for Education
Oyster
Topsy
Twitter’s IPO offering

Episode 97 — Digital Potato Library of America

Amanda French — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 15:41:00 +0000

In another single-topic Digital Campus, we react to the news that Dan is headed to the Digital Public Library of America as its Executive Director (no tears, no tears) by forcing him to tell us all about it. Special guests on the podcast include Berkman Center and DPLA Technical Workstream member David Weinberger, author of Too Big to Know and Everything is Miscellaneous as well as Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows and The Big Switch. Issues raised include Internet centralization, the future of public libraries, and Mr. Potato Head.

Links
Nicholas Carr, “The Library of Utopia,” MIT Technology Review, April 25, 2012. Available at http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/427628/the-library-of-utopia/

Running time: 49:45
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Episode 94 – The 2012 Campies

chnmadmin — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 16:28:10 +0000

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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Episode 85 — Book ’em, Bezos

Mills Kelly — Tue, 01 May 2012 19:49:39 +0000

In this edition of the podcast, Dan, Amanda, Tom, and Mills are joined by Tim Carmody, senior writer for Wired, and it was very refreshing to record what we called a “fact-based” podcast for a change. At the top of the show, we got Tim’s take on the lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice against Apple and several of the major book publishers. Sharp-eared listeners will remember that we discussed this topic in the previous podcast–when it had first arisen. This time around, we were able to take advantage of Tim’s deep knowledge of this complex topic. In particular, we discussed why the average ebook consumer should care and whether the end result would be Amazon.com taking over the world. In addition, we discussed rental fees being recommended to Canadian universities for the use of digital journals, and whether Google Drive (yes, we said “Google” this time) would become part of our lives, or would it end up in the dustbin of history along with Google Wave and other such fails by the search giant.

Links:

DOJ Announces Terms of Settlement With 3 Publishers in E-Book Lawsuit
The most expensive copyright insurance policy in Canadian history
Introducing Google Drive…yes, really
Google Drive: A step closer to no-fuss cloud storage?

Running time: 1:12:35
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Episode 84 – The One Where We Didn’t Say G****e

Tom Scheinfeldt — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 15:19:58 +0000

This week we consider the question of whether Apple and five major publishers colluded to fix e-book prices and the prospect of a Department of Justice Anti-trust suit against them. We also argue the question of whether buy-in from Blackboard will be good or bad for open source learning management projects Moodle and Sakai and join the chorus of praise lauding the online release of the 1940 U.S. Census. On the lighter side, we check in on the ongoing saga of @FakeElsevier. Finally, we celebrate our unintentional, but surely very welcome, neglect of a certain not-evil web search and services company.

Late update: Since we recorded this episode on April 4, 2012, the DOJ showed its hand and officially filed suit against Apple and its partners in the publishing industry, announcing terms of a possible settlement with at least three publishers.

Other links mentioned on the podcast:
Bigger Than Agency, Bigger Than E-Books: The Case Against Apple and Publishers
Blackboard Buys 2 Leading Supporters of Open-Source Competitor Moodle
Fake Elsevier’s complaints about academic publishing leads to fake takedown notice
Big Day for Family History Hunters: 1940 U.S. Census Is Online

Running time: 45:38
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Episode 81 — Is There a Story Here?

Mills Kelly — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 21:31:01 +0000

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.