I am just reading Professor Robert Darnton’s new book titled ‘The Case for Books’. Darnton is a well know book historian, especially of the French Enlightenment, and made the bold career move to become Harvard’s Librarian. Admittedly ‘the Case for Books’ is not that good, especially for those who have been involved in academic publishing debates for quite some time. In the quest to reach larger audiences, the book appears to have lost some rigour and Darnton’s first-person monologue is a little too personal at times (he should keep a blog). Still, there is a lot of information on the Google Book project, especially as it relates to the looming legal decision in which I am admittedly not on top of.

Here is a initiative from the UK’s JISC (The Joint Information Services Committee) who have attempted to create a ‘social software’ solution for broader public consultation. Almost always these social software solutions do not work (as it the case here) as the sites lack of community feedback. Still there there is an excellent summary of the case and key issues (link to JISC’s site).

The book that I worked on in 2006 as a Research Assistant with Professor Jim Falk is to be launched this Friday at the University of Technology; Sydney. The book is about the rise of ‘global governance’; driven by crisis such as climate and technological changes (I worked on the technology chapter).

The argument, and supporting studies, are built around a simple concept – that over the sweep of human history, ever more potent flows generated and shaped by ever more complex and sophisticated human activity, have increasingly developed across the boundaries around which prior governance institutions and processes have been erected. In this context the authors consider the growth of flows of finance, atmospheric pollutants, information, pathogens, and security threats, the challenges they pose, and the transformations to governance at all levels under way (link).

The book is to be launched by Helen Clark; the ex-Prime Minister of New Zealand. Well done Profs Jim Falk and Joseph Camilleri.

The book has its own web site (here).

Our City of Literature status is not about Dickens on the tram, Nabokov in the Great Southern Stand or a Bronte or two over breakfast. It’s a recognition and celebration of Melbourne’s passionate readers.

We’re home to many of Australia’s best and best-loved writers, past and present. We host an extraordinary network of booksellers, a diverse publishing culture and a vibrant community of thinkers.

Being a City of Literature is about engagement locally and globally. Because there’s a public conversation going on: in our papers and online, on our TVs and radios, in our workplaces and homes. Books, writing and ideas flow through Melbourne and there is something for everyone (link).

In the mean time, here is a new book from the cultural historian, Robert Darnton who has recently taken up the post as Librarian at Harvard University.

“In The Case for Books, Robert Darnton offers an in-depth examination of the book from its earliest beginnings to its shifting role today in popular culture, commerce, and the academy. In a lasting collection drawn from previously published and new work alike, Robert Darnton lends unique authority to the life and role of the book in society. The resulting book is a wise work of scholarship – one that requires readers to carefully consider how the digital revolution will broadly affect the marketplace of ideas.”–BOOK JACKET.
Full contents Google and the future of books — The information landscape — The future of libraries — Lost and found in cyberspace — E-books and old books — Gutenberg-e — Open access — A paean to paper — The importance of being bibliographical — The mysteries of reading — The history of book (link to library catalogue)

‘Presenting the first broad look at the rapidly emerging field of data-intensive science’

(A fantastic book for e-Science buffs!)

Modern science is increasingly collaborative, as signaled by rising numbers of coauthored papers, papers with international coauthors, and multi-investigator grants. Historically, scientific collaborations were carried out by scientists in the same physical location—the Manhattan Project of the 1940s, for example, involved thousands of scientists gathered on a remote plateau in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Today, information and communication technologies allow cooperation among scientists from far-flung institutions and different disciplines. Scientific Collaboration on the Internet provides both broad and in-depth views of how new technology is enabling novel kinds of science and engineering collaboration. The book offers commentary from notable experts in the field along with case studies of large-scale collaborative projects, past and ongoing (link)

(as researchers, perhaps we are spiders stuck in a web)

A interesting new book on Digital Scholarship was released in December called ‘Digital Scholarship’; edited by Marta Mestrovic Deyrup. I haven’t ordered, read, and reviewed  this book as yet (it doesn’t come cheap at 57 pounds).

What I see as one of the grand challenges of digital resources and scholarship is developing an explicit understanding of how they are actually incorporated into humanities research practices (and please, not through counting things!).  This requires an empathy towards humanities researchers so as to understand how they establish meaning from these resources.   Also, the concept of interdisciplinarity really needs to be interrogated socially and politically in the digital scholarship field, as at times, it is applied as a utopian buzz word lacking context and thus meaning and reeks of new-right anti-intellectualism. Here is a blurb from the dust-cover.

Collecting important original essays by librarians and archivists – all of whom are actively engaged in building digital collections – Digital Scholarship details both challenges and proven solutions in establishing, maintaining, and servicing digital scholarship in the humanities. This volume further explores the ways in which the humanities have benefited from the ability to digitize text and page images of historic documents, mine large corpuses of texts and other forms of records, and assemble widely dispersed cultural objects into common repositories for comparison and analysis–making new research questions and methods possible for the first time.

The ten notable scholars included in Digital Scholarship offer a balanced view of the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches to digitization, reporting both progress and problems, examining new business models, new forms of partnerships, and the new technologies and resources that make many more library and archival services available. Librarians and library staff everywhere will find Digital Scholarship an essential text for the modern library and an illuminating resource for anyone looking to understand the changing face of research in the electronic age.

A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You’ve probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from “bots,” or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.

To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then, to make them searchable, transformed into text using “Optical Character Recognition” (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect (link).

This collection draws together contemporary research into queer theory and practices, as they intersect with new media and communication technologies. It provides a synthesis of critical debates in these fields followed by empirical analyses of current and historical internet activities. These include, among others, a study of changing leathersex identities as meeting spaces moved from bars to online chat rooms, an investigation of the dynamics of racial identity as social sites moved from text-based to visually-based media and the tensions between community and audience identities inherent in commercial affinity portals.
The chapters investigate the relations between the technical, legal and industrial organization of online media and the queer practices that they facilitate. While scholarly and theoretically rigorous, its rich empirical detail makes Queer Online vital reading for activists and members of queer communities, in the academy and beyond.

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