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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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 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.

Related Links:

History PhD being Redesigned?

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/03/20/historians-association-and-four-doctoral-programs-start-new-effort-broaden-phd

http://www.historians.org/teaching-and-learning/current-projects/career-diversity-for-historians/the-many-careers-of-history-phds

http://blog.historians.org/2014/03/aha-receives-grant-expand-career-tracks-history-phds/

Duke UP and Social Science History association lawsuit over ownership of journal

http://chronicle.com.mutex.gmu.edu/article/Dispute-Over-Who-Will-Publish/145307/

http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2014/03/18/more-than-meets-the-eye/

http://publichistorycommons.org/update-on-the-journal/

Advances in Wearable Computing

Google Smart Watch
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/18/google-introduces-a-smart-watch/?_php=true&_type=blogs&partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0

Recently published book, Pastplay: Teaching and Learning History with Technology – http://www.press.umich.edu/6025015/pastplay

Bill Turkel’s Humanities Fabrication and Physical Computing: http://williamjturkel.net/

Thingiverse: http://thingiverse.com

Report from the Center

http://pressforward.org/the-pressforward-plugin/

Running time: 52:28
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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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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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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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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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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
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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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