Google – Digital Campus

Episode #116 — The Last Episode Ever About that Google Books Case (or is it?)

Amanda French — Tue, 20 Oct 2015 15:45:21 +0000

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.

Episode #104 – Social Science History 2: Electric Boogaloo

Anne McDivitt — Wed, 26 Mar 2014 15:45:00 +0000

In this episode, Amanda, Stephen, Mills, and guest Joan Troyano were joined by Digital History Fellows Spencer Roberts and Anne Ladyem McDivitt. The first topic of discussion was the announcement of the American Historical Association’s $1.6 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, through which four history departments will restructure their doctoral programs to promote diverse career options for history PhDs. The conversation then moved to the lawsuit between Duke University Press and the Social Science History Association regarding ownership of the Social Science History journal. Finally, on a completely different note, we discussed wearable computing and the implications for digital humanities, which raised lots of questions, excitement, and confusion amongst the participants.

To conclude the episode, Joan provided an update from the PressForward project at CHNM, including the upcoming release of their new WordPress plugin.

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 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 91 — The Black Helicopter Edition

Mills Kelly — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 17:47:48 +0000

While President Obama spoke on the other side of campus and the security helicopters buzzed the Digital Campus studio, Tom, Dan, and Mills (Amanda was at a secure and undisclosed location–so undisclosed we couldn’t get her on the show) discussed Dan’s iPhone fetish–yes, he has an iPhone 5–and what the constantly changing landscape of new devices like the iPhone 5 might mean for the humanities. We also breathed a huge sigh of relief that one part of the never ending litigation over Google’s book scanning project has come to an end. If only it were the last chapter in that saga! Is it news that Facebook now has more than 1 billion users? Or that they are using your tagging of family and friends to improve their facial recognition algorithms? Give the podcast a listen to find out what we thought about these topics and more.

Links mentioned in the podcast:

Google’s book settlement website
Google buying Viewdle
A newly discovered photograph of Emily Dickinson
Facebook tops 1 billion
A humorous analysis of the Facebook Billion

Running time: 44:54
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Episode 88 – Live from THATCamp Prime 2012

chnmadmin — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 20:31:41 +0000

Our second annual live podcast from THATCamp Prime was as fun as the first, full of audience questions and comments in addition to our normal discussion of the news from the prior two weeks. We talked about new models of science publishing and contrasted those models with what’s going on in the humanities, mentioned the French settlement with the Google Books project, and detailed the first five digital things we look at in the morning. Mills also debriefed us on the blowback from his historical hoax class. There’s also a recorded video of the podcast over at Ustream, although viewers should be forewarned that 1) in the first few minutes you can’t hear any audio and 2) you get to see our bare legs.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
First 5
PeerJ
French Publisher Group Strikes Deal With Google Over E-Books

Running time: 51:11
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Episode 87 – You Guys Sound Fantastic

Tom Scheinfeldt — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 18:05:34 +0000

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
Download the .mp3