The regulars (Stephen, Tom, Amanda, and Dan) are back for a new semester and a new season of Digital Campus in which we wave to Mills as he jaunts about Europe. We also talk about some of the summer and early autumn’s big news, including the NEH ODH’s project directors meeting, the 50th anniversary of the NEH, Librarian of Congress James Billington’s retirement, and the George Mason University History Department’s new digital dissertation guidelines. Other mentions include:

– UConn historical musical instruments project
– John Donne’s 1622 sermon for Gunpowder Day: Virtual Paul’s Cross Project
– NEH Anniversary Message from President Obama
– NEH Funding Levels, American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Check back in two weeks for more from the world of digital humanities, libraries, and museums and to see where Mills lands on another episode of Digital Campus.

Running time: 47:32

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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?

Related Links:

Open e-books initiative (or Dan goes to the White House) 

White House Fact Sheet

DPLA Blog Post

MLA CORE

MLA Commons Open Repository Exchange

Humanities CORE NEH-ODH Start-up Grant

AHA Guides on Assessing Digital Scholarship

AHA Blog Post

Guidelines for the Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship in History (PDF)

YouTube’s Tenth Anniversary

The very first YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw

Matt Schiavenza, “How YouTube Changed Journalism,” The Atlantic (February 14, 2015)

Running time: 52:24

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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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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

Related links:

• Inside Higher Ed, “After Weeks of Delays, San Jose State U Releases Research Report”
• “Power Searching with Google”
• Inside Higher Ed, “Feminist Professors Create Alternative MOOCs”

Running time: 45:49
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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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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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The regulars welcome the new month with a discussion of last month’s emphatic district court ruling in favor of HathiTrust in the Authors Guild’s copyright infringement case against the digital library project. We also discuss the potential and potential pitfalls of the ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) project and the official launch of Windows 8. We close with a discussion of (what else?) Star Wars.

Links mentioned on the podcast:

‘U’ wins copyright lawsuit against Hathitrust digitalization project, The Michigan Daily
A Legal Sweep, Inside Higher Ed
ORCID Launches Registry
What’s In A Name, Melissa Terras’s Blog
How to Make Windows 8 Look Like Windows 7, CNET UK
Why Is Dad So Mad
Weird Al, The Saga Begins [YouTube]

Running time: 38:27
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With very best wishes to our listeners and friends affected by Sandy — Tom, Amanda, Dan, and Mills

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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