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The only thing we have to fear is can do for your country. Fear itself! This is Digital Campus, Episode 61, recorded October 15, 2010. Fantastic Four. Well, welcome to another edition of Digital Campus from the Center for History and New Media. I'm Tom Sheinfeld from foundhistory.org. Coming to you today from a Barnes & Noble cafe somewhere outside of Hartford. I'm doing the commute, the faculty commute this semester. It's pretty miserable. You're reporting from on location. On location, right, from a major book retailer. We're going to talk about the publishing industry. Hartford. So if you hear any coffee grinding in the background or kids running around, that's what it is. But I'm here today with Dan Cohen. That's Dan, I think you just heard, from dancohen.org. Hi, Dan. Hey, Tom. And our other regular, Mills Kelly from edwire.org. Hi, Mills. How are you, Tom? Good. And actually, we have some big news to announce today. We are promoting one of our irregulars to regular status. I don't know how much of a promotion that is. But we're very happy to welcome Amanda French, who you've all heard many times from AmandaFrench.net, to the show as one of our regular hosts. Hi, Amanda. Hi, Tom. I'm looking forward to the increase in salary. Yeah, you should see the benefits package. Aren't we all? You have to go through the hazing first. Okay. We'll do that later on in the show. But let's jump in. A lot to talk about this week, actually. And one of the things we noticed was the press release from Amazon, which is increasingly making waves in the publishing industry. Maybe I shouldn't be saying this from Barnes & Noble, but Amazon is set to launch something called Kindle Singles, which are essentially a pamphlet series. They're going to publish pieces of written works of between 10,000 and 30,000 words under a Kindle Singles brand and then make them available as e-books. I know, Dan, you've been thinking about this idea of pamphlets and how e-books could revive that format that has a very long tradition in the publishing industry but has in the last 50 or 100 years really fallen by the wayside. What do you think of this Kindle Singles announcement? Well, I think, and I'm going to compress all of my normal 50 minutes of ranting into 10 minutes because I'm going to have to leave, unfortunately, a bit early on the podcast today. And so my rant for today is, you know, why is Amazon the innovator? I mean, like, why aren't university presses thinking about maybe doing, you know, $9.99 80-page books or long essays. You know, I just think it's an interesting and sort of sad statement about the state of publishing that there's this, you know, large.com that's, I think, doing more innovative things in e-publishing than really should be going on. I was talking kind of off the record to some people this morning who were interviewing me about the future of publishing and specifically about the future of the book, which in their mind they equated with somehow taking the book as it is right now and just sort of like sticking it online with like a little bit of window dressing around it. And I was really trying to say that there has to be experimentation in form and in economic models. Yeah. from, you know, whatever, Harvard University Press on your Kindle, or at least just making some kind of moves to try out different models, different sizes, shapes, payment schemes. And so, you know, I've just really been depressed by the rate of innovation in this area compared to, say, in journalism, where I think there's just Armageddon going on. And so people have had to try all kinds of different models, many of which will be unsuccessful. And I think we've discussed that on the podcast before. But this seems like a no-brainer for me. I think when this came out, I tweeted that I thought it was a genre that was really well-suited for the Academy because, frankly, there are a lot of dissertations that don't need to be 250-page books or 300-page books. They're probably, they'd be a solid 80-page read or maybe an 80-page read with an online exhibit to go with it, let's say, if it's an art history book. So I think once we're liberated from, you know, the kind of print and purchasing requirements of the monograph of the 200 or 300 page 60 or 80 or a hundred dollar print book. Um, why not try something in that range of the 30,000 word, you know, report? Um, I just think it makes a lot of sense to try to experiment with form, um, and, and with pricing. And, you know, I say kudos to Amazon for beating out, I think, some other potential innovators in this space. You know, I think it's, you said, Dan, that it's very well suited to academic writing, and I think that's absolutely right. I also think it's, to me, my feeling is it's very well suited to electronic writing. I know that a lot of the kind of, if you took what I've written on my blog over the past, I don't know, you know, couple of years, you know, there are some, I think, some themes there, some things that could be stitched together and put into a longer form. But it's probably not 100,000 words. It's probably more like 30,000 words. I think it's the way we kind of, that's the length at which we tend to express ideas online, I think. And so I think Amazon's probably tapping into something there. Mills, Amanda, do you guys think you're going to be publishing a Kindle single anytime soon? Well, I don't know that I'll be publishing a Kindle single, but just because I don't know that Amazon would be interested in the things that I might publish. But, you know, just when you said this about things from your blog, it occurred to me, you know, some of the most read and reread posts from Ed Wired over the last few years was a three-part series I did on making digital scholarship count. And if you took those three plus all of the comments from readers, it probably adds up to about 25,000 words. And, you know, and it was a snapshot of where we were in our thinking about it at that particular moment. And so now it's kind of out of date, but something like that could certainly be published. The other thing I was thinking as Dan was talking about this is something that's kind of disappeared from the scholarly publishing landscape is the working paper series. These used to be common, and they were a place where scholars could try out a rough idea but something that was not so rough that it didn't deserve to be published and disseminated. And so they were often printed between two pieces of heavy construction paper rather than bound, but they were still working papers and they circulated knowledge among scholars. And, you know, that's kind of moved off to the internet in a way, but that's something, those had a, they had a coherence and they had a purpose. And, and so as they're about that same size, that sort of 20,000 to 35,000 word piece. Yeah, I think this is interesting. One of the interesting things I think about it is what Amazon's motivation might be for doing this. And I think that their motivation for doing it is probably to take a little end run around the publishers that it's been having trouble with. Because, Dan, you were saying, well, why don't university presses do this? But book publishers in general, I think, have been conservative when it comes to innovating in this space. And Amazon is just the giant gorilla, you know. And so there was a whole controversy not too long ago, or not controversy, but sort of argument between Amazon and publishers where Amazon wants to offer ebooks for cheap, which, you know, seems logical because there's a lot less overhead. But publishers want to make sure that the prices are high. So, you know, Amazon put this little passive aggressive notice on a lot of its Kindle books saying, this price was set by the publisher. You know, it's not our fault if this e-book is $14.99 instead of, you know, $5.99 or $8.99. So almost all Kindle books have that. So in thinking why Amazon would want to do this, I really think that they want to do this because they want e-books to be cheap.
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I want to buy lots of e-books and to buy them cheaply. And, you know, it's interesting when you're talking about mini e-books, because length doesn't really matter in the digital world. I mean, there's no difference between a 90-page book and a, you know, 290-page book in terms of what it costs to manufacture and distribute in the e-book world. So the only reason I can think of is that this is, you know, Amazon sort of thinks that this is a way to offer cheap e-books, you know, and show traditional publishers, you know, that they're not going to be ruled by what the traditional publishers think is the right price for e-books. Yeah, and in fact, with Kindle books, right, there are no page numbers even. So there really is no difference in the experience in reading a long-form work or a short-form work. And I think you're right, Amanda. I think they're definitely taking a shot at the publishing industry. One of the things that the vice president of Kindle content, Russ Grandinetti, said in the press release was, ideas and the words to deliver them should be crafted to their natural length, not to an artificial marketing length that justifies a particular price. So they definitely are taking a shot at the publishing industry. Great statement. I mean, it's totally true. You're totally right. I don't know if you remember these. In the 90s, was it Penguin that had these? They were 60 pence in the UK, I remember where they started. But then I think they did come to the United States and they were maybe $1 or $1.99. But these little books, do you remember them? They were even smaller than the Octavo size, like half that. I don't know what that would be. Sure. Yeah, no, I know what you're talking about. Yeah, do a decimal. Yeah, right. And it was exactly that. I remember the first one that I bought was an essay by Montaigne. And it was like the perfect size. It was 60 pages. It was a dollar. It had a little bit of an introduction. It was just perfect. And you could slip it in your pocket. Yeah. So I wonder if it's something like, you know, they're doing these short e-books because it's the kind of thing that print publishers don't publish because it's not worth it, you know, financially. Like maybe the scale of publishing, you know, 5,000 90-page books isn't worth it or something. Or they can't charge $25.95 for a 90-page book or something, so they don't publish any of those? I wonder if it's... Yeah, I'd love to learn more about the economics of all this. But I think in terms of the content, I'm willing to trust Montaigne that if 30,000 words is long enough to make a point, then 30,000 words is long enough to make a point. I'm going to... Isn't it also that you go into whatever, your Costco, which is really, has become one of these big locations for purchasing books. And, you know, you see that biography of John Adams and you think, oh man, you know, that has gotta be worth 30 bucks. I mean, it's a doorstop. And, you know, I think size has been this strange signal for price, even though it's theoretically, it shouldn't have anything to do with it. Right. Well, it does to an extent. I was actually really shocked when I was trying to publish my dissertation and was getting advice from various people because, you know, as a graduate student, I was really idealistic and I was trying to make, you know, do the best work I could and make sure it was right. But at the same time, I was writing to a specific page limit, you know, which was in that, you know, 250 to 300 page, you know, recommendation that the College of Arts and Sciences had for graduate students. And yet when I was talking to publishers, you know, on like how to get published by university press, they were like, short, have a short book. Make sure it's short. I'm like, really? Hey folks, I'm sorry. I need to head out, but it's good talking with you. All right, Dan. We'll talk to you next time. Okay, well, that's a good point to move on. We can take a look at what's going on in EDUCAUSE. EDUCAUSE is going on this week, and I think there's been a steady stream of interesting news out of that meeting. Does anybody know where EDUCAUSE is this year? I never go, so I don't know. Yeah, I'm not sure. But it doesn't matter in the digital world. Right. Actually, it totally doesn't matter. And the big news that came out on, I think, the first day of the conference on Monday was that the Gates Foundation announced a $20 million new program for education technology. And they're looking at making education technology reach more students and to improve the learning outcomes from educational technology. Now, they're giving these grants in a couple of different categories, four actually. One is open courseware. Another is blended learning, which I think means kind of mixed classroom, online kinds of experiences. Deeper learning, which is, I think, code for sort of virtual worlds and games. And then learner analytics, which I think is innovations in assessment and in identifying students that can benefit from these technologies and that sort of thing. This is really the first time I think we've seen Gates get into post-secondary educational technology in a big way, in a way that someone like the Center for History and New Media could apply for a grant from them. We haven't seen a kind of open call for proposals from Gates in our world. What do people make of this? Amanda, what are your thoughts on this big Gates announcement? Well, it's only natural to compare it to the story we talked about last time with Mark Zuckerberg donating whatever it was, $100 million directly to the Newark school system. And so actually, when I was thinking about this, I was thinking about, number one, it just, frankly, it makes me mad that our national public education system is some kind of charity that people have to keep giving money to. I mean, isn't this a basic qualification for a citizen? Isn't it a basic requirement in our country? How come we can't fund it out of government money? But, you know, I'm over it. It's okay. So it's fine. It's being supported by, you know, great philanthropists. That's a good thing. But apart from that, you know, I was sort of thinking about different models of, you know, investing in K through 12 public education in this country. And it's like, oh, do you want to give the money directly to the school district or do you want to do this kind of thing, which is a bit more removed? You know, funding grant programs for people to build various kinds of software. And it's, you know, it's interesting that Bill Gates would take the latter approach and Mark Zuckerberg would take the former approach. But, you know, and then the only other thing to be said about it is, you know, sounds cool. I bet some it's also worth mentioning that this is really – the $20 million goes along with like $34 or $35 million grant to community colleges or a program to provide grants to community colleges to improve success rates in community college education. And so I think it's really – if you see it in that context, then it's especially wise giving because these two things I think really go hand in hand is improving the improving success in community college is going to be affected by some of the kinds of things that this 20 million dollar grant is going to fund and if you read the the description of the things that they're expecting to to fund it's it's clear that it's a big part of it is targeting student success so I think that that that's really great because great because some of the more significant grants in higher ed from philanthropists of late have been focused much more or foundations have been focused much more on access. And it's not that I think access isn't a worthy goal. I think it's something really important to be funding. But access is not the same thing as success. And so I think I'm really pleased with this announcement, these sort of two announcements together, because they are focused in a lot of ways on success.
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But I'm actually not one of those people that worries about that. I think the more open our classrooms are to observation by people from outside, the better. I think I've been advocating open teaching since the beginning of my career. So I think it's when classrooms are closed off from observation that all kinds of weird things happen that are not necessarily positive. It makes it too easy to kind of slack your way through the class as an instructor or a student. So I'm not a big believer in surveillance, but at the same time, I am a believer in open classrooms. So I think the whole thing is really exciting, and I'm glad that there is money for post-secondary education, not just primary and secondary ed. And I think some really exciting stuff is going to come out of this. It is going to be something to watch. I mean, I think this really has, you know, I don't know whether the results of the program will be any good or not. I think that remains to be seen. We'll see. But I do think that one thing's for sure, this is going to change the landscape of, you know, our fields, educational technology, digital humanities. All of a sudden, there's this new player. Gates suggested that he might give as much as $80 million over the next four years to this. All of a sudden, Gates is one of the biggest players, just like that, in funding the kinds of things we're involved in. So right up there with MacArthur and Mellon, NEH and the Department of Ed, and those usual suspects, now we've got Gates. And so, you know, I think we're really going to see some changes. That will have effects. And I think it we can learn a lot from the gaming industry in terms of sort of immersive experiences and how that can affect student learning. But the MacArthur funding has always seemed to me a little myopic in that sense. And the Gates announcement mentions some things about that, but on the positive side, I do really think that it's nice to see that the funding is spread across a whole variety of areas and is going to leave a lot of room, I think, for innovation by educators. And so I'm really pleased about that. On the slightly less positive side, I think there may be a kind of underlying assumption in this approach that distance education in some way is the future of higher education. Or they talk about blended learning and a mixture of face-to-face and online. Well, that's fine, and I think that's great. But I've said before in the podcast, you know, a lot of people in higher education think that distance learning is sort of, it's like the cold fusion, you know, it's, it's, as cold fusion is and always will be the energy source of the future. I think distance ed is and always will be the solution to all financial problems in higher education. And it's just not going to happen. And so I think it will be important. I don't think it's going to be the solution that a lot of people think it is. So I would hate to see, you know, when the announcement of who gets the money comes out, that everything's focused on distance ed. That would really disappoint me. Yeah, and I think we have seen that Bill Gates personally, not the Gates Foundation necessarily, but Bill Gates personally, shares that view. I think we saw a couple of weeks ago he made some statements about the future of education and that distance learning would be, you know, distance learning programs could be the new Harvard and Yale of higher ed. And I think, you know, there's definitely a connection between those two, this announcement and those statements. You know, Regarding your first point, Mills, I think that brings us nicely to another story coming out of EDUCAUSE, which is some worry about Second Life. Surprise, surprise, surprise. This is where we gloat a little bit. It seems that there's been a bit of a mass migration from Second Life when Second Life announced the end of their educational discounts. And campuses that have gotten heavily involved in Second Life are worrying about what to do next with their virtual campuses. Mills, I know what your thought about this is. Your thought is, I told you so. That kind of sums it up for me. I hope that when we actually put this together for broadcast, we'll be able to just pipe back in what I said, however long it was. We do have that flashback music that we haven't used in a while. Maybe, okay, maybe we'll, right, we could slot that in right here. You know, Tom, I think it was, it may have been you, it may have been Mills, who I remember really remarking on it when you made the point that data in Second Life is not exportable. You know, I don't know how people are doing this mass migration. It's a great visual image. You know, you picture people trudging along with their knapsacks, you know. Like a wagon train from Second Life. But I remember being kind of, you know, skeptical about Second Life and kind of eye-rolling about it and not really having a good reason for that eye-rolling until you mentioned that. So it's been a stone that I've thrown at Second Life ever since. Well, you can't get your data out of there. It's proprietary. Well, we really should get someone on here who can defend virtual campuses and virtual worlds because I think we're all skeptics. But I do think this announcement, the proprietary nature of Second Life, the difficulty of getting out, the lack of alternatives, does suggest that maybe we were a little bit right in all that name-calling. More news coming out of EDUCAUSE. There's a new recommendation engine for students called Sherpa. Amanda, you brought this up. What do you think about Sherpa? You know, I haven't seen, you know, I didn't see the demo or anything. I just have been reading a little bit about it. So, of course, the proof is going to be in the pudding the pudding about like what this software actually is and what it actually does. But there was a demo of a product called Sherpa, or maybe it wasn't even a demo, just sort of a description that is supposed to, like Netflix, recommend things for students, recommend courses, recommend library resources, all that kind of thing, gathering data from, I think, Blackboard in particular, but other university resources as well. You know, Blackboard, you know, you really, you know, if you have been in college for a while and you've been using Blackboard or some kind of learning management system like that, it does collect a lot of information about what classes you've had and so forth, but it doesn't really do anything with that information. So the system is supposed to do some recommending to students. And I think that can only be a good thing if it does work really well. But when I worked at NC State Libraries, they had developed something that was sort of similar to that. They did a lot of data mining, not so much based on an individual student's profile, but based on a course. They looked at the course catalog and took keywords from course descriptions and built recommendations of library resources and things like that for those courses. So I think we're generating so much data these days. I think it can only be a good thing to try to use that data in productive ways. What I'd like to see, and I haven't taken a close look at any of this, but I hope they're not just using data from Blackboard and the university kind of IT infrastructure about these students because the worry there is that you don't really get an accurate picture of a student's interests from what they've posted on Blackboard and the information that's logged about them in their university systems. I think it would be great to see if they could actually integrate data to the extent that that's possible from Amazon, from Facebook, from Netflix, to get a better view of the student as a rounded person know, it may be if they could take information from those systems, you might actually get a recommendation engine that would point students to educational resources and, you know, primary source documents, books, courses, other things that really did match their interests. I think one of the problems a lot of students had, I know I had as an undergraduate, it's hard to really match what the college has to offer with the things that you are actually interested in. You know, I might have been, I might have been, you know, had chosen a different major had I realized some of the cool things that were going on in, let's say, anthropology or some of the cool things that were going on in some of the science departments. I didn't because I didn't think I was interested in those things. In fact, I was interested in those things.
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But you wouldn't have been able to tell that from the courses I was actually taking. So, you know, I hope that, I think that these kinds of systems do hold out a lot of promise, but I hope that they take the whole student into account in building these profiles and recommendations. Yeah, you know, I was just thinking, first of all, this seems to me like a nice add-on to Zotero. It takes a look at what you've saved in your library and the libraries of the people who you might be following on Zotero and then says to you, have you ever thought about this? And so that could be, you know, that could be quite interesting. And in particular, you know, the thing that we're thing that we're losing rapidly as fewer and fewer people go into the library, the physical library, is that serendipitous experience of just kind of walking down the aisle looking for that book with the call number that you need. And then you pull that book and then you happen to notice the book right next to it, or one shelf below has this title that catches your eye, and it may be in a whole different call number sequence than what you would have looked for. So you never would have turned it up in a Google search, but it happens to be shelved next to the thing that you were pulling, and there's some Library of Congress reason why they're shelved near each other. And so you find something that you never would have encountered otherwise. And so this is, to me, sort of the attractive thing to these recommendation systems is that they do recommend things that wouldn't have occurred to you. And so I can imagine, you know, scanning through the reading list subscribed or assigned by individual faculty members and then doing just what Tom said, recommending a course that, you know, you took courses where you read these books, well, and these articles, well, here's a course that is in some way connected to that. I remember once seeing a presentation by Patrick Murrayjohn at the University of Mary Washington where he's really into linked data, semantic data, and he made this point that I just have remembered ever since then, where he says, you know, the only entity on campus that knows which courses are assigning the same book is the university bookstore. And they don't let, you know, that information is closed down in their little, you know, Oracle database or whatever it is. You know, they don't share that information. Nobody can generally find that out. So if a chemistry class is reading Frankenstein and a literature class is reading Frankenstein, they're never going to know about it. And you lose the opportunity for a lot of great conversations that way. And so I don't know how much I'm into this whole gathering data about the student from various different services they already use, like Amazon and Netflix and whatever. I think there's privacy concerns with that, and it just seems sort of technically difficult in some cases. But definitely, like, things that are all within the university, I think, could be talking to each other a lot better than they do. We could be making connections much better than we do. So if this helps with that, I'm all for it. But it would also be interesting to know what percentage of our students use Rhapsody or Pandora or use the Genius settings on their iTunes account. So to see, you know, are they already opting into these recommendation software systems? And if it was set up as an opt-in, then I think that would probably be a better choice. Certainly there are huge technical difficulties too. I mean, the privacy concerns are real. The technical difficulties are possibly insurmountable. But I guess my point is that I just, how much can you really tell about a student from what he or she says on Blackboard? I mean, it seems to me that that is the time when the when the student is being leased his or her true self. You know, I mean, it's like it's you know, they're they're they're interacting with their professor. That's like that's not the real person. So I just wonder how much real information you can get from that student. You know, maybe some, you know, for some students, it's bound to work better than others. But, you know, the way that, you know, at least in my experience, the way a lot of students interact with even, you know, even a course blog is, you know, in the most, you know, in the most kind of bland way, you know, it assignment. They're doing it because they need to get the grade. And I guess it's just like garbage in, garbage out. I just don't know how much we're going to be able to tell from those interactions. But you know what? I think this is an exciting announcement. I think there's a lot of research to be done in this area, and we'll see. Moving on, we've got a couple more things to get through today. Another big announcement this week, the NHPRC, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the National Archives, essentially, and the University of Virginia announced that they are making the papers of the founding fathers available for free online. UVA has been digitizing and creating edited volumes of the founding fathers' papers for years, and at least for the last 10 or 15 years, putting those online but in a gated subscription way. And this new grant from NHPRC is going to enable UVA to make that stuff available for free to everyone. Mills, you know, this seems like something that we should all be very happy with. Am I wrong about that? No, you're not wrong. And, you know, it is certainly, I think, a good example of why there have to be these public and public-private or public, you know, federal and state partnerships over these kinds of things because we all know that the digitization of all of this material is extraordinarily expensive to do if you're going to do it. First, if you're going to do it, and even more expensive if you're going to do it right. And so it's too much to ask any university or organization to digitize all this material and then make it available for free without some support for that because it's not just getting it digitized. It's then once it's up, keeping it up and keeping the links unbroken and all of that kind of stuff that has to happen to projects once the initial work is done. So I think this is really great. And what could be more important for a democracy than access to crucial papers like these and free and open access because it's bothered me for years that UVA has kept these in a subscription-only system because everybody in the United States needs to have the possibility of access. They don't need to read it, but they need to have the possibility of access to this in the same way that we've screamed and yelled on the podcast about Reed Elsevier locking up federally funded medical research, for instance. It's's really a great, the interface is horrible, but the database of the material that's there is really great. The reason it's one of my favorite whipping boy websites is because it's not possible to learn who is behind the – it's constitution.org. It's not possible to learn who's behind it because let me tell you, I've tried and I'm pretty good at that. But I have learned that that same web hosting service on the other sort of behind the screen is also providing web hosting to various militia organizations around the United States, and so who have a very strong interest in constitutional documents. And so this is why this database exists. And so now once UVA puts all this stuff up, maybe there won't be a need for the constitution.org site anymore. And I'll have to find some other website to whip on. There's always the Hitler, there's always the Hitler historical museum. Yeah, I think, you know, it can, I'm not looking forward to increased ammunition for the endless debates about what the founders meant, but otherwise I'm, I'm, I'm with you, Mills. I think this is a very good thing. But at least the possibility of reference to the actual source will now exist. Right, right. Have you used these papers before through the subscription, Mills or Tom? I haven't. I mean, I've poked around the Rotunda website and looked at the interface for, of other reasons, for interface reasons, and because of our Papers of the War Department project to see how other people are doing it. But I haven't actually used the documents in my work. Because I was just wondering if they're marked up in TEI or what. I bet they are. Yeah, they are, right? Which is a very heavy, you know, that costs a lot of money to do that.
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I'm glad to see that maybe the archives is starting to move in that direction. So I think that's a good thing. That's, you know, the mandate is good and the additional funding so that it's not an unfunded mandate is good. So I think we're seeing the start of something new and something good. From the wider tech world, we saw some news this week, too, some news that I think will have implications for campus life and certainly for museums and cultural heritage institutions. We saw the launch of Windows Phone 7, Microsoft's new mobile operating system, and the announcement of a whole bunch of handsets from a bunch of different handset makers, Samsung and HTC and LG and others, and the announcement that Windows Phone is going to be on several carriers as well. What do people think about, have people had a chance to look at the Windows Phone demos, and what do people think about Microsoft's new entry into the smartphone business? I haven't looked at it too much, but I've heard people talking about it who have looked at it, so, you know, secondhand or thirdhand reporting. We're all about that here. Yeah, right. It's the most unscholarly reportage ever. But, yeah, no, what I've heard was that people were really impressed with the range of phones so that there are some that have physical keyboards. There are some that are touchscreen. There are on all kinds of carriers and that the interface is really good. So it seems like a really strong contender in the mobile space. Mills, you've been in the market for a smartphone. Have you gotten one? I have finally ditched my crappy old clamshell phone, much to the relief of my 13-year-old son, who is no longer embarrassed by my phone because I now have an Android, which I'm very happy with. I held out as long as it was possible to hold out. You'll be glad to know, however, that I have not tweeted once from my new phone. Even though the app is built in, right? It doesn't seem to be built into my. And you're not sure which model you have, are you? Oh, I don't even know that. I just know. I know that I have an Android phone and it has lots of little icons on it. And I can, I can, it took me, you know, I will say though, it took me about five minutes to figure out how to answer it the first time it rang. But, but I am in fact old. I'll be even older on Monday. So, you know, but at least I've made it into the 2000s or the 21st century or whatever century we're in. But on the question of Microsoft, you know, I think, I guess I'm surprised it took so long, but it's, I think it's going to be ultimately important just because Microsoft really has really improved Windows a lot. I mean, my kids' computers are Windows 7 computers, and I will admit to being really impressed by Windows 7. I think it's a very good upgrade for a change. God only knows why Vista ever hit the market in the first place, but Windows 7 is good, and this is a stripped-down phone version of Windows 7. And for people whose platform this is, Windows is their platform, then it's, I think, really important that they have that easy transfer from their laptop to their phone and back. And from what I understand, too, this plays really well with the Zune software. And there are some people who are very, very fond of their Zunes. And it's anything that kind of breaks up a monopoly, I think, is a good thing. And Apple and iTunes seem to have such a lock on the music player. And the iPhone is such a's, it's nice to have a lot of choice. I'm going to bring Dan back in here. Hey, I'm back. You know, I was just thinking, I'm sorry for that little interlude there. But aren't we a featured podcast in the Zune marketplace? I think the campus is. Yeah. I've, I've received like several tweets from people saying that we're a featured podcast in their, like, academic section or something. Maybe that'll really increase our listenership once Windows Phone launches. No, I think, Tom, you, I think, well, we discussed this probably, like, a year ago, and you said it's going to increase our numbers by tens. I think that was the quote. But it actually, I think, with the launch of Windows Phone, which looks like a really nice offering, I think they've done some interesting things with the quote. to see different parts of applications. It looks pretty slick. And I think as the enterprise, including campuses, is going to take a pretty hard look at this. And so maybe now that we'll be a featured podcast on Windows Phone, hopefully that'll stick. We may increase our numbers by hundreds. Well, you know what we should do is launch a campaign to get people to, you know, rate us really high and subscribe, you know, in iTunes and, you know, get us. Oh, yeah. People should really do that. The iTunes store, yeah. Don't we need an iTunes or Android app? Oh, Lord. You know, a digital campus app? Oh, yeah, right. You want to start working on that, Mills? Sure. Okay. Yeah. Just don't make it multi-. Okay. I think that's what I'll do this weekend. I'll knock it out this weekend. But I think, Mills, you make an interesting point about Windows 7. I do think that Windows was on its heels, I think, for a long time. Microsoft was on its heels for an awful long time. It seemed like all the interesting news had been coming out of Google and Apple and Facebook. But I think, you know, with the launch of Windows 7, I get the feeling Microsoft is not as dead as people might have thought. I think Windows Phone looks really good. And I think the other announcement we saw this week was a partnership between Facebook and Bing to make some kind of social search, basically tying search results to your Facebook friends, the things that your Facebook friends have liked, to try to hone the search results that you get from a Bing search to map that onto your social graph and to give you customized search results based on the kinds of things that your friends have been searching for and the kinds of things your friends have liked. It seems to me that that is a, you know, that's an interesting new direction for both Facebook and Bing. And I think it may be a challenge to Google. Do other people have thoughts on this kind of social search announcement? You know, I was thinking about these new Microsoft announcements, and boy, they really are trying hard. But I think where it's different now from what they used to be is that they were always able to leverage Windows, right, to kind of force people to, for instance, use a browser, a new browser from Microsoft. And they've lost that near monopoly power to kind of leverage the OS to get people to use other stuff. And that, I think, is their biggest problem right now is I agree that I think this Windows Phone 7 thing, like, it looks pretty cool. I like the UI quite a a bit but is it that much better than android or iphone you know um that it makes me take a second look probably not is being that much better or even as good as google to make you switch i just think the problem is is that they're coming second um and they used to be able to come second when they had OS power. In other words, I think their Internet Explorer was a second browser, right? But they made it a 90% of the market browser because they put it into Windows. But you can't put a phone into Windows. Maybe they're thinking of ways to do that, but they haven't yet. And, you know, and search is another area where it's just, you know, Google has become a verb and it's just much harder for, even though I think Bing is actually, it's not too bad right now. But it just, you know, things like social search, I don't know. Does your average college student, are they going to switch from Google to Bing because of that? I'm not sure they will. Yeah, I will agree with you there. I mean, I think it is much harder for Microsoft. I think the difference that I've seen, at least, is that I think Microsoft maybe gets that finally. I think they've been operating for the past five, maybe even 10 years, thinking that they were still the monopoly they were in 1997.
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Any further thoughts on Microsoft and these new announcements, Amanda? Just that, honestly, it surprises me that Microsoft tries to innovate as much as it does, given that, I mean, I saw a study recently that Internet Explorer went under 50% worldwide for the first time, you know. That if you look at all browsers worldwide, Internet Explorer for the first time had less than half that market share. But they still do have such a lock on Microsoft Office and on the OS, the Windows OS. And then the other thing that they're really good at is Xbox. That's right. A lot of people are really, really good at Xbox. But I think they're doing fine. I'm not worried about them because they make a lot of money on all those. So you have to innovate or die, I guess, in the tech world. But I think if they can keep up in the browser space, if they can keep up in the mobile space, the tablet space is another thing that they need to kind of compete in, and they are working on that. I think they're going to get people to use Yahoo as its homepage, as their homepage. They've got something like 600 million people worldwide who use Yahoo as their homepage and then use a Google search through their browser. But they like the Yahoo homepage for some reason. So that, I think, it just surprised me that that deal didn't work out. But I do think that the competition has been good for Microsoft. I mean, just as a small example, they just have gotten better in a lot of things. I was just complimenting Windows 7 before Dan got back, but the satellite imagery that you can get through the Bing mapping system is significantly better than what's available through Google. Yeah, totally. Significantly better. Which means that they're paying for better satellite imagery from the big providers, like the gatherers of that imagery, like GOI and people like that. And the interface on it is better. You can actually spin the image on the screen. So I was looking at my house the other day because we were getting ready to have some work done and the architect, we were looking at it together in Bing and he was spinning around the house on the screen and I said, how did you do that? And he said, oh, it's easy. So that's something that Google has not innovated on. And another of the big, in a similar vein, one of the things that Google is often criticized for, and they've tried and tried again to get right, and they haven't been able to yet, is social. That they, Google, doesn't get social. And I think that Microsoft, Amanda, you mentioned the Xbox. You know, the Xbox is a hugely successful social platform through Xbox Live. You know, not one that I spend a lot of time on, but one that a lot of people spend a lot of time on. And if they can transfer some of that expertise to the phone and to their search engine and maybe to Windows 7, they may be able to make some inroads. Certainly, you know, Apple actually hasn't been able to master social either. We saw the launch of Ping, their social network that's based around iTunes, that has been, you know, as far as I can tell, kind of a flop. So, you know, I think Microsoft certainly has some assets. I think they're more than they have been in the last couple of years, certainly since I think we've been on the air. It's worth watching Microsoft. Well, moving along to our last story, I'm sure a lot of you listening today are probably thinking you should be doing something other than listening to us. Unless you're working out at the same time. Right. Well, okay. I actually took that advice. I went off and did something else while the podcast was going on. Exactly. Exactly. So if your attention is divided, Mills, you posted a link for us to talk about. For those of us who's having a hard time focusing their attention on the important things of scholarly life like reading and writing. Something called antisocial? Yeah. I think it would be okay. So if they had the 50-minute version of antisocial, then faculty members who don't want laptops in their classroom could require it to be installed on all their students' laptops, but it cuts you off from the social networking systems. And so I tried it out. I stayed home on Tuesday to get some writing done. I installed it on my computer. And let me tell you, I got a lot more done because I couldn't check any of these other things that distract me. And so, you know, it's really a response. So this is not just an internet off sort of thing. No. No, it didn't kill my internet. It just killed me from the distractions, basically. So you install this thing and it kills, you know, it doesn't let you access Facebook. It doesn't let you access Twitter. Is that? Exactly. I didn't realize you were such a Facebook addict, Mills. I'm not. I'm not, but, you know. What were you turning off? Well, let's see. I was mostly turning off Facebook, and I pretended that it was cutting off my email, too. You see, that's a thing, yeah. But since I pretended that it cut off my email, then it did. Yeah. And, and so, and I didn't have to cut off Twitter cause I'm already cut off. That's the cheapest software development project ever. You know, like instead of actually building the software, you know, you build something and like pretend I actually, that's, that's my strategy for my email. I was doing that just this morning. You know, I mean, I really, I actually, if I owe you an email, I'm sorry. There's a couple that, you know, I know I need to respond to, but I'm like, I have to build this spreadsheet. You know, I know it's not very exciting, but I did. I mean, it is sort of amazing that there's really a, you know, I think this is a free download, but there really is a lot of software out there that's designed to, you know, cut us off from all this new technology. I know we've talked about Rightroom and its clones, which is a piece of software which basically just throws up a black screen with green text. It's a writing environment where there's no menu bars, no icons, no flashing, no paperclip jumping up from the bottom of the screen. It's just designed to give itself a lock switch so that you can't be distracted by it. We've seen more and more of this. It really is a growing trend, and I think it speaks to our divided attention. On that note, I think we've divided your attention long enough, our faithful listeners. We'll be back again. Welcome, Amanda. We'll be back, and maybe we'll have Amanda host next time. We'll see. Maybe we'll give her a couple of weeks to... Yeah, I like this idea. That sounds better and better. Then I can be totally distracted during the podcast. Well, maybe we'll give Amanda a couple of weeks to break herself into her new role. But we're really happy to have her, and we're really happy to have you listening. And we will see you again in a couple of weeks on another Digital Campus. The only thing we have to what you can do for your country. Fear itself. Amanda, could you just say a couple things? Just I want to see what your level's like. Twas brillig and the slidey toes did gyre and jimble in the wave. All mimsy were the bargos and the momeraths outgraved. That's what we're going to do this time on Digital Campus, poetry. It's our all poetry episode. Among my memorized poems are many works by Lewis Carroll. I think I have most of your old father, William the Young Man, said, Your hair has become very white, and yet you incessantly stand on your head do you think at your age that is right I don't know much poetry I wish I had memorized anything near that good seriously I know rock you like a hurricane Bye.
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From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi-weekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Fear itself! This is Digital Campus number 28 for the 17th of June, 2008. Raising the Bar Camp. I'm Dan Cohen. Welcome back to Digital Campus. We're glad you could join us. And this week we have the regulars on the line, Mills Kelly. Hi, Mills. Hi, Dan. And Tom Scheinfeld, who's joining us from a landline this time. Hi there, Tom. Hi. Hi, guys. Sorry, I apologize to all the listeners for my sound quality. The District of Columbia seems to be in complete chaos with fires in the metro and power outages. So I didn't make it out to campus today and I don't have my headset. So my sound's a little bad, that's why. Yeah, you know, we should explain to our international audience that even though we live in the capital of a superpower, somehow we have a lot of power outages in the Washington, D.C. area. My power was out for a couple of days the other week. We're also in the, a lot of people don't realize that Washington is at the end of the tornado corridor that is in the United States that starts out in the Midwest and is sort of a stripe across the United States. We're actually at the end of that. So we do get strong winds and occasional tornadoes. And so we've had a lot of power outages. And I think almost a tornado came by CHNM or a near tornado came by this CHNM pretty recently, a week ago. So anyway, Tom, we're glad you could join us by phone. And let's kick right in. Well, I guess it's unavoidable to discuss the 3G iPhone. You know, I guess I'm the only one still with an iPhone here. Mills, Tom, does this make you want to bite that there's now a cheaper, faster iPhone with GPS in it? Yeah, I think I'm going to bite. My problem with the iPhone has been all along, and I've said this on the show before, is the lack of a physical keyboard. But I've kind of realized in having my BlackBerry now for a whole year that I don't want the physical keyboard anymore. It drives me too much to my email. And so I'm happy to get rid of the physical keyboard and the speed of the connection and the new features I think are just going to kind of put me over the edge. So I'll probably be going out on July 11th as soon as it's out and waiting in line to get one. Yeah, I think, well, I'm going to wait and see what happens with Father's Day that's coming up. But hint, hint, hint to one listener to the podcast. But I don't know. I'm really bad about stepping on telephones and losing them and things like that. So dropping them in the pool. And so I think still $200 might be above my price point, but we're going is going to be iPhone usage on campus. And indeed, there was a rumor that in addition to this 3G iPhone, they are thinking about letting campus technology stores sell the iPhone, which I think would really change the landscape of this. And I wonder if that would include a more significant discount for students. But the iPhone interface, along with Android, which I think is the open source iPhone-esque operating system for mobile from Google, which I think is going to have a lot of traction. It looks really good and allows for a lot of the feature set that the iPhone has. I think between those two things, we're going to have a lot of smartphone users on campus in 2009. And I've enjoyed having the iPhone and more than that, enjoyed jailbreaking my iPhone, which is the act of sort of doing a little hack on your iPhone to install non-sanctioned applications is I really feel it gives me a window into 2009, 2010, the kinds of things that will be possible on mobile on campus, like location-based access to information, various kinds of messaging systems. You know, it really sort of opens up your imagination when you jailbreak your iPhone, install these applications. Of course, after June 11th, you won't have to do any of that because there'll be an application store and you'll be able to legally download this. But I think it's going to open up a lot of eyes on campuses in museums and libraries, the kinds of new applications that will be available on mobile. In addition to the high-speed connection for the iPhone, I think that the big story here really is the built-in true GPS to this phone. And I think there have been GPS devices around, consumer GPS devices around for a long time, and we've talked about them, and we've bought a few and played with them and stuff. The difference between the iPhone and those earlier devices is I think that the iPhone provides a really nice applications programming platform for a GPS-enabled device. Like the earlier devices, the Garmons and the Dells and all those kinds of handheld GPS devices, you basically use the software that came on them. This device, I think, allows people and educators and museum professionals and others, it will allow them to actually build custom apps for the built-in technology of the built-in GPS. And I think that will push us forward. I think prior to this, you could use it for what you could use it for, but you couldn't really be imaginative. I think that the iPhone and the App Store and the development kit will allow us to really let our imaginations run wild. So I think that's really the biggest story, I think, here. Well, and for me, I think that's exactly right because, I mean, my imaginations already run wild. I'm teaching a course, a field studies course next summer where we're going to spend, a group of students and I are going to spend two weeks actually in the field doing place-based computing. And so when I started reading this story, I mean, I was planning on doing this all with GPS devices and then kind of going through the cranky process of coordinating the data that we're going to get, the historical data that we're going to gather out in the field with other kinds of applications. And so to be able to do it seamlessly in an iPhone, I think it's just going to be great. So I'm already thinking about how I'm going to write that grant application to Apple to say, here's, you know, I'm developing a whole new application for place-based education. And so I need, you know, 20 of these for my students. Yeah, I agree. I think, and, you know, some of this may be able to take place on the iPod Touch, even though it's not going to have the GPS. But, you know, I think you could still have some applications for that, which is, you know, it's obviously going to be a cheaper device because you won't have to have the service contract on it. But I do think this opens up a realm of possibilities. I mean, I know the three of us who've talked about, you know, possible history applications or things that maybe, let's say the National Park Service could do if they knew that a certain segment of the population visiting, you know, sites around the United States had an integrated GPS on their phone, you know, with a very rich interface. The possibilities of that, I think, are pretty astonishing. So, and I would encourage people, you know, at least if they're listening to this in June when it's coming out 2008, you know, over the next month, you can go and look at some of the existing applications for jailbroken phones. There are good lists, for instance, at lifehacker.com. Just do a search on that site for iPhone and jailbreak, and it'll list, you know, the top 10 applications. And you'll see the really wide variety of things that you could do on a phone that has that kind of feature set. And it's really becoming a sort of full-fledged computer that's mobile. And so I think in that way, it's really different than bringing your laptop somewhere and loading up some kind of application. It really enables, I think, new things. And I think we'll just have to think through what is actually possible here and what you could do once you know where, let's say, a phone user is and the kind of information that could be delivered instantly to that device. Is there anything negative from this iPhone announcement that you'd like to see on that kind of a platform?
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So I think there are going to be a lot of angry first-generation iPhone owners out there. But I do think that the platform has really improved, and I think this is mostly good news. The one thing I think I'd say is I'm not sure that I'm entirely happy with the notion that I'm going to have to buy all the applications, or even if they're free, get them through the iTunes Music Store. It seems like a fairly closed universe. And, I mean, Apple is all about the kind of closed universe, always has been. But this seems even more closed than what they've done, for instance, with the Mac. And so I'm a little concerned that Apple is going to be vetting these applications. Apple is going to be deciding which ones get into the store, which ones don't, which ones are highlighted on the homepage, which ones aren't. And so for smaller application developers, for people who are doing experimental projects, I worry that Apple will be exercising a little bit too much control to let a thousand flowers bloom. But other than that, I can't see too many negatives. Yeah, I will say sort of the counter-argument on that is that for this to have any kind of ease of use in the educational environment, it's got to be simply downloaded from the iTunes store or some central place like that because the average faculty and student user just needs that simplicity. Did you notice that in the announcement, they actually mentioned something about being able to distribute up to 100 people in an ad hoc way applications? I kind of wonder about that piece of it. There may be some way for kind of small scale, you know, class size distribution where, you know, you don't need to go through some kind of, you know, sign up to be an official developer, etc. It was a little bit unclear to me. It may be for the enterprise only. And I wonder if universities would qualify in a sense to get some kind of enterprise plan where it seems like would be great for use in the classroom because you could actually, I think, distribute these things and wipe them out or alter them from a central location, which is always what big institutions like universities want to do. And I think as part of that, you can put some of these applications on it directly. So you could say, well, for all History 101 students who want this program that Mills came up with, and we only want it for those people for the next three months, and then sort of wipe it after that and get the phones back. It's a little bit unclear to me what that one line was about being able to distribute up to 100 phones on an ad hoc basis. But I guess we'll have to see. And, you know, we'll have to see about these licensing requirements too, which undoubtedly are going to clash with some of the intellectual property arrangements that universities normally like to have. Because the developers program, it really seems like for individual developers, I'm not sure how a university as a whole would sign up for that. Well, and where it's going to run into trouble is along those lines because I've been, you know, we've been struggling with the whole iTunes U thing here at George Mason for the last year and a half. And one of the big issues has to do with copyright and licensing agreements because not so much for historians but in a variety of other disciplines, faculty members have some arrangement with a publisher to use a variety of graphics in a lecture that came from a textbook or something like that. And so they've said, well, I can't make my podcasts available to, you know, with any of these kinds of images. I can't make that available to the general public. And so because that would violate the terms of these agreements that I've signed. And so my podcasts have to be behind the password and blocked from general access. You students in my class can actually listen to it. And this has just been a real hairball for us to try to deal with. And in fact, I think it's really retarded the rollout of that iTunes U platform at George Mason. And the other problem is an authentication issue, which I have to say Apple has never been able to work out with the people at Mason. And the people at Mason say it's Apple's fault. I'm sure the Apple people say it's Mason's fault. But basically, Right, right. complicated legal landscape for this application store and then you mesh that with a complicated technical infrastructure for that application store and then you mesh that with the complications of a university legal and technical environment, authentication is a really, really good point. It seems like most of these applications are meant to be downloaded to any phone and used by anyone and that's going to be really hard to figure out how to limit those sorts of things. Well, I'm sure we'll talk much more about this. And I suppose we should cover Android when that's officially out. You know, a quarter million people have downloaded the software development kit for the iPhone. It's pretty astonishing. And including some people here at the Center for History and New Media, it'll be interesting to see if we can come up with some initial applications that they're up there. Well, in other news, using technology for another reason, Tom forwarded a pretty interesting article about peer-to-peer loans and how this might work to help out college students. Tom, you want to fill us in on this story? Yeah, there's a new company that's launching, I guess just launched, called GreenNote. And what essentially they do is offer small sort of microfinance loans to students, basically on the model of microfinancing that has gone on in the developing world where companies like Grameen Bank and others have done this where you can give a small $100 or $500 or $1,000 loan directly to, in the case of the developing world, a small business or in the case of GreenNote, a student, you can give them that loan. And the company, the GreenNote or the bank, is sort of the middleman. They do all of the servicing of the loan, the invoicing and the tracking the loan and all of that. And you get the interest from the loan. And so this allows basically for people with resources to provide students without them with college loans. And they're basically modeled on the Stafford loan. So the interest rate is the same as a federal Stafford loan. And the terms are the same as a federal Stafford loan. It's just that you're doing this in small amounts directly with a student who you have an interest with. And what this company allows you to do is pick the student that you want to service, and you can read their profile. And it's in some ways a nice little investment for an investor because they can sort of see the progress of the student. Student loans have very low default rates, so it's a fairly safe investment. And it's at 6% or 7%. It's a better interest rate than you're going to get in a savings account or even in a CD. So it's kind of an interesting model of using technology to put people in contact, people sort of outside of the academy, outside of the world of education, in contact with students who are looking to get into that world. And so, you know, it has worked very well in the developing world with financing, you know, very, very small businesses, tea shops and other kinds of very small businesses. And it could work, I think, for student loans, especially in this economic climate where there's such a credit crunch and we're getting student loans, commercial loans, outside of the $18,000 or whatever the federal government offers you, is so difficult. So this is something of a new model, I think a timely new model that we should keep an eye on. Well, and in fact, it's a new delivery system for an old model because my father went to college on a plan, through a plan just like this. He grew up very poor in Tampa, Florida, and there was a local radio DJ who had no children of his own. And so he would pay for the first semester tuition room and board for, and books for a deserving student from the Tampa area, uh, with the understanding that someday they would pay him back. And, and back in those days, if you went to college and you made straight A's, then the college would find a way to keep you. And so that's how my father stayed in college was by making straight A's pretty much the whole time. But he was probably, it was probably 15 years before he made enough money to pay this man back the $300 or $400 that first semester cost back in the day. So it's the same system. It's just a much better delivery, much more efficient delivery system. I mean, much like the iPhone, I think it's just, it does sort of spur the imagination to think of other things that could use this peering system to assist students.
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I wonder if this will actually take off. I guess we will have to see. The three of us really had a terrific time at a new conference that started this year at the Center for History and New Media. You may have heard about it. It was called VATCAMP, with the VAT acronym being the Humanities and Technology Camp, and the website for it at vatcamp.org. And it was the first really unconference or bar camp, and we'll have to explain what those terms mean, that I've been to. And I think that the rest of us, Mills and Tom, this is the first time you've been to one of these as well, right? That's right. Yeah. So what we want to do is sort of explain what that camp was and the way in which it might fit in pretty well into the world of museums and libraries and universities and colleges, which all have these regular conferences. And I think all three of us felt it might provide a kind of new model for at least part of these conferences that we all go to, these academic conferences. So maybe Tom if you could kick us off by telling us a little bit about that camp, what it was and sort of the unusual way in which we started the weekend at the conference. Sure. Well, we had the idea for that camp several years ago, and we thought about, wouldn't it be nice to just get a whole bunch of people with similar interests together for a kind of working weekend? And this was right about the same time that the bar camp or unconference trend was taking hold in the world of IT more generally and web development and Web 2.0. And a bar camp or an unconference, you get into these definitional battles that people in the world of IT like to get into. But essentially, they're all sort of the same in that they differ from an ordinary conference in a couple of ways. First, that the sessions aren't planned in advance. The sessions are planned mostly on the day of the conference. And the way that happened in the case of that camp was we encouraged people who wanted to come to the conference to email us with a vague idea of what they might want to talk about or what they might want to learn, the kind of reasons that they wanted to come to the conference, and just a little bit about themselves. And we made our decisions on the applications just on kind of who sounded most enthusiastic, who had the best questions, who had the most interesting ideas. And so we made some decisions about who could come. And then we encouraged those people who were accepted into the conference to go to a blog. We set up a blog and to post some of their ideas and to try to start conversations about things we might talk about, try to start those conversations ahead of time, but no kind of formal proposals for panels or papers. Just throw out some ideas, try to start some conversations. And then when we got to the conference, on the first morning of the conference, the first slot was a plenary session where we all got together and we looked at that blog and we tried to pick out some general trends. What are the kinds of things people are interested in? And from there, we put it to the audience. Are you guys still interested in these topics? Someone proposed doing something on GPS. Who's interested in GPS? We saw a show of hands. We said, okay, well, that seems like something we should talk about. Who wants to go to a session on GPS? Another show of hands. And we scheduled the time slots in the rooms based on kind of the interests of the crowd, what people were interested in doing on that morning. So it was really kind of ad hoc program. And sort of the other way it differs from an ordinary conference is that there are no just attendees. Everybody has to be an active participant in the conference. Nobody can just sit there and listen or take notes. And in fact, no one is really standing up at a podium and presenting a paper either. There were no formal papers. There were no red papers. Everyone was there to demo a project or test the technology or discuss a problem or an issue with the audience. And so everybody was required to present or demo or propose something. And so all of the sessions ended up being very collaborative. So those are sort of the two differences, is that the program was a kind of ad hoc program just based on the collective interests of the people there. And the sessions themselves were much more informal, much more discussion-based, much more kind of collaborative than an ordinary paper session you would have at an ordinary conference. Yeah, and just to let our audience know, I mean, some of the things that came up, just to read from the schedule, we had sessions on text mining and digital art, the act of teaching, you know, how you teach a digital humanities course. We had something on virtual worlds, crowdsourcing, questions about civil engagement and research methods, games, street maps, open street maps. We had something on graphics programming and infrastructure and sustainability and various hacking sessions on different programs, including two of our major open source programs here at the center, Omeka and Zotero. And visualization and GIS and mashups had a lot of interest as well. So it was really across the board, these sessions, right, Tom? Yeah, it was. And, you know, depending on the interest of people in the crowd, we had about five different spaces that we used. We had two kind of conference rooms that fit about 25 people each. We had a smaller, our lab space, which maybe fit about 15 people around a widescreen TV. And then we had two sort of smaller breakout areas, just large tables where people could congregate. And those were, you know, eight to 12 people. And so depending on the interest of the session, people just kind of congregated in the space that was right for them. And, you know, if it was a hacking session, people tended to want to sit around a table. If it was more of a project demonstration session, then we did it in a larger conference room. So, you know, sort of depending on the interest, we assigned the rooms that way. So it really was that the spaces also fit the topics, I think, very well. So that was kind of cool, too. Mills, what was your experience as a first-timer to this kind of relatively unstructured event? I was trying to think of a way that I could convert all of my professional conferences to this model. Because, I mean, we've all been to academic conferences, and they all have kind of moderate interest value. Mostly the sessions are an opportunity to sort of find out what somebody is doing that might be interesting, and sometimes it is, sometimes it's not. It's a chance to go and be supportive of a friend or a colleague who's giving a paper. It's a chance for graduate students to present themselves to a wider audience. It's a variety of things like that. But mostly they're, especially at least in history, I don't go to museum conferences or political science conferences, but in history, they tend to be pretty doggone boring. And especially at the late afternoon sessions, it's often really hard to stay awake. And it's not because the information being communicated isn't worthy or interesting it's just being having papers read to you for hours on end is after a while you know the brain recoils and so this this this was just so much more stimulating and engaging and um and it wasn't you know also the other flaw i think in academic conferences is that there's a fair amount of posturing that goes on and there really was none at this unconference that we held. It was really an opportunity for people of like mind and like interest to get together and share ideas and possible projects and talk about what they were up to and really collaborate in the true sense of the word of collaboration. That's I I think, the thing that really impressed me the most was the really high degree of collaboration that went on. So, you know, I was thinking about this and thinking, well, what about the American Historical Association Conference or the My Home Conference, which is a Slavic Studies conference? And I think that there's really going to be a place within those conferences for a kind of sub-conference like this where things like this can happen. I think it's not the case that the American Historical Association annual meeting could switch entirely to an unconference model in part because graduate students do need the opportunity to present themselves to potential department employers by showing off their work a little bit. And this model doesn't really provide that as easily. And also the funding model that we live in is that you get money if you're going to a conference to give a paper. And so as opposed to – I'm trying to imagine how I would make the case to the dean's office of, well, I'm going to a conference to sit around and talk.
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I mean, you know, presenting a paper at the annual conference is a sort of, you know, a kind of quasi-publication. It's part of your, you know, what is expected of you as an active participant in the profession. So, yes, going to sit somewhere and drink coffee and do something really interesting and productive, you know, that doesn't count. And, you know, in a lot of places, I mean, you know, our institution is not as formal about this, but a lot of institutions are extremely formal about, you know, they have counting systems that presenting a paper at a conference counts X points and chairing a session only counts X minus four or something like that. And so, like in the UK, for instance, everything is spelled out in their annual evaluation scheme. So there's no place for collaborative work in these counting schemes. We should mention that the attendees were from all kinds of parts of the university library museum world. I mean, we had programmers, we had librarians, we had professors, you know, tenured and non-tenured. We had project management people. We had foundation project officers. Sort of everyone who's involved in this world of humanities and technology was there. And it really felt, you know, non-hierarchical that, you know, people were really willing to work with, you know, people of different stripes and at different stations in life and in the profession because they felt that those people might have information that was of interest to them and that they could learn from those people. And, you know, I found the academic conferences, beside the sort of careerism that goes on there, is a very hierarchical place. I mean, the AHA, you see kind of glaze-eyed graduate students who've, you know, are just about to finish their dissertation, who are on the job market, and they're sort of walking around between interviews or hoping to schmooze with the right people. And there was really none of that at that camp. Yeah, that was one of the, I wrote a blog post following the camp about this, and I pointed out sort of three differences between that camp, just in terms of atmospherics and process between that camp and other kinds of conferences. And the democratic nature of that camp was one of the things that I pointed to, that there really wasn't a whole lot of concern about status, that graduate students and full professors were able to kind of mix it up in a very open way and share information very, very openly. The other two things that I mentioned were that I thought that that camp was very honest. I thought that people were not there, you know, Dan, you used the word posturing, and I think you do get a lot of posturing at traditional conferences where everyone, at least it's been my experience, everyone is sort of there to prove how smart they are and to kind of outsmart the competition. And there was really none of that at that camp either. I mean, people were very honest. What I thought was very interesting, and I thought the most productive thing, people were really honest about, not about their successes, but about their failures, where they had problems, where things that they were trying to do but couldn't do, where they didn't have the resources, where they didn't have the knowledge. And that allowed for, I think, some really productive exchanges where people were really helping each other to solve their problems rather than trying to sweep those problems under the rug and pretend like they had kind of mastered their field and they were in complete command of the issues. I thought that was really, really very nice. I think the other thing to point out about that camp that I did in my blog post is that it was really inexpensive. We were able to do this on a relative shoestring, and really there was no funding for the conference. We didn't have a grant for it. We got some sponsorships from the GMU Provost's office, a small sponsorship from them, a small sponsorship from Niche, the network in Canadian history and environment, and a small sponsorship from the New York Public Library. Other than that, we asked for $20 donations from the participants. We literally passed around a hat. And between those $20 donations and some small sort of sponsorships for a lunch here and a breakfast there, we were able to put on a very nice conference with T-shirts and breakfast, really nice breakfast and lunch buffets each day, office supplies, and even a couple of travel stipends for students. So, you know, it's another model. You don't need $100,000 to bring people together to actually have a good weekend, a good productive working weekend. Well, and it seems like the fact that it was done on a shoestring changed the expectations game for it. I mean, when you get a very formal conference, something like the AHA or in the library world, the ALA, those kinds of conferences that are at the Marriott, that have the ballroom, you know, there is a certain formality that is just sort of enforced by that kind of environment. And so I think people did feel more open because we weren't sitting in rows of, you know, gilded chairs in a ballroom. I think that really helped out. And people pitched in to, you know, help clean up, do those sorts of things that you wouldn't normally see at a conference. Okay, but before we say that this was the greatest thing since sliced bread, I mean, doesn't the bar camp or unconference idea come out of a different world than that of academia, more technology world where, say, people might be used to collaborating more often like programmers do on a big project? How well does this map onto something like the AHA? And what might actually be the kind of takeaways for conference planners in the world of academia? Well, I think that's a fair point. I think it does map onto digital humanities and digital history better than it does onto traditional scholarship. I think that's a fair point. I think it could be very easily transferred to fields like public history, where the work is very collaborative, to the museum field, and to libraries as well, where work is done in teams. And, you know, the single-authored monograph is not the end-all, be-all of professional success. So I think that in some worlds, it's going to fit better than others, but I do think that there is room, even in the traditional fields, for a frank discussion of issues, for an honest and open discussion of challenges and problems, for real community between graduate students and tenured faculty. So those kinds of things, I think, could be beneficial to traditional fields as well. So while it probably does map on better to fields where the nature of the work is, you know, by necessity collaborative, I think there are things that could be transferred to more traditional fields as well. Yeah, I mean, it would be interesting to see at the AHA if you could have a session that, let's say, graduate students who were not at the end of their dissertation process and thus on the job market and having that scared look on their face, but ones maybe near the beginning of their dissertation process who could go into, you know, micro groups of common interest and, you know, get advice from more senior scholars in the field. I mean, beyond just their, let's say, their dissertation director. I mean, that is a fairly appealing thing. So, you know, I don't know if that's a possibility, but, you know, I'd like to, you know, see that in the future. Okay, so in the spirit of unconference sharing, why don't we have our picks for the week? Mills, what do you have for us this week? Well, mine is one I picked up at that camp, and that is the OpenStreetMap.org. And if you're not familiar with OpenStreetMap, they are creating in a collaborative open source environment a free editable map of the entire world where individuals are uploading all the data. Why I'm particularly excited about this is not the free access to mapping data, but instead to use the same platform to start building historical maps. And so we're going to download some of the patches. It's a Ruby on Rails application, and we're going to download some of the patches that make it possible to use it in historical time instead of in present time and this summer play around with it a little bit and see if we can't create some historical maps this way. So it should be fun. It's really a neat site, so you should check that out. It's at openstreetmap.org. Of course, we'll link to all of the picks and other links from this week at digitalcampus.tv. Tom, why don't we go to you? Okay, thanks. I've got sort of a shameless plug if people will indulge me. My pick of the week is the Gulag Many Days, Many Lives site that CHNM just launched last week.
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And it is CHNM's first online exhibition, sort of a museum exhibition, a museum online exhibition without the physical exhibition. And it is a comprehensive history of the Soviet gulag. And the title, Many Days, Many Lives, comes from, it's kind of a play on Solzhenitsyn's title, A Day in the Life. And the main thesis of the site is that the Gulag didn't exist as a single experience or a single institution. It wasn't just one day or one life. It was many different experiences experienced by hundreds of thousands of people over the course of half a century. And so we take people through the experience of the gulag through the eyes of the people who experienced it. And so in kind of the way as people have been to the Holocaust Museum in D.C., you're given a prisoner at the entrance to the museum and you follow that person's story as you follow the path through the museum. In this exhibition, you're also assigned a prisoner, and you learn about that person's gulag experience through the various stages of a gulag experience, so through their capture, their work, their suffering, their relationships with the guards, their survival, their fate. And you learn their fate at the end of the exhibit. And so it's kind of new territory for CHNM, moving into sites not for scholars or not for teachers, but for general audiences. So we're really excited about that. It's built on the Omeka platform. so if people are interested in using Omeka, it's really a great example of the kind of rich narrative exhibition you can do with Omeka. So we're very proud of it, and I hope people will visit it at gulaghistory.org. Yeah, terrific site, beautifully designed. It has really outstanding content. I mean, I didn't know that much about the Gulag. It really is, I think, a mystery probably to a lot of, you know, non-Russians. And I think this is a terrific place to start. Great for the classroom. Great for, you know, those just interested in history. Terrific. Well, my pick for the week is actually a way that I've discovered that has been around in the Mac operating system for the last year, but I've recently been using it to try to have an environment in which to write. And I know we've thrown out a lot of suggestions for this to kind of reduce the clutter on your screen and get those distractions out of the way so you can focus on a single task. And I know we've all come up with different solutions, but I've been now using Spaces in OS X. And I don't know, do the two of you use Spaces at all? Yeah, totally. Tom, you do? Yeah, I use it pretty heavily. Yeah, it's really terrific. So it's one of these things that it's not on by default, but, you know, if you go into system preferences and click on expose and spaces, you can actually line up multiple screens that sort of virtual screens that exist. And then you can just press a key and switch back and forth between, let's say, two screens and have one screen be your email and your web browser and your Twitter and all those things that pop up and get in your face and want to distract you. And indeed, I was thinking about this as I was reading a really terrific book. Actually, this will be my second pick of the week, which is an actual book called Dave Gorman's Google Whack Adventure. Dave Gorman is a British comedian. He's very hilarious. And he wrote a book just about using Google to essentially distract himself from writing the book that he was supposed to write. So it's very apropos. And he's got this great line about how, you know, whoever thought that the work environment for the 21st century would be a window into the most distracting world that you can imagine. That, you know, you'd have your word processor up next to your web browser, which has access to all this incredible stuff and constantly distracts you. So check out Spaces if you haven't used it. It's really easy to switch back and forth and you can just have one window be, you know, your word processing document or if you're working on a blog post, just your browser. Just have that one app environment with no distractions at all. It's really easy to use and again, that's only for those Mac users and it's in your system preferences under expose and spaces. Just an editor's note, we want to remind people that beside going to digitalcampus.tv to write comments on posts, you can also now call us. So if you're listening to this in the car, you can call us on your cell phone at 703-879-4796. We had a little bit of a technical issue last week, but that should be resolved and the number should be available. And if you call in, we'll add your comment from that line onto our blog at digitalcampus.tv. So, Tom, glad you could join us on the regular phone. We'll talk to you on Skype next time. And Mills, thanks for talking to you on regular Skype. And we'll see all of our audience next time on another episode of Digital Campus. Please visit us online at digitalcampus.tv where you can do for your country. Here it goes.
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From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi-weekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Here it goes. This is Digital Campus number 25 for the 21st of April, 2008. Get with the program. I'm Dan Cohen. And we're here for the 25th anniversary edition of the Digital Campus podcast. Here, as usual, with Tom Scheinfeld. Hi, Tom. Hey, Dan. And unfortunately, Mills Kelly could not make it today, but we are incredibly fortunate to have two really bright and creative individuals working in the digital humanities with us on the podcast. And we were just going to have them on the feature segment to talk about their thoughts on starting programming. But we've decided they're so good, we have to bring them in the new segment as well. So we have with us as well, Steve Ramsey from the University of Nebraska. Hi, Steve. Hello. Hello, everyone. And Steve is an assistant professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and you're also a fellow at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. Do you want to say a word about the center? Yeah, it's a big research center similar to the sort of outfit you guys have, or IATH MYTH or other organizations, centers like that, and has about 40 or so digital projects, including the Whitman Archive, most famously, and some other things. And it's a really wonderfully vibrant research community. It was one of the main reasons I came here, actually, is to be associated with that group. That's great. Yeah, we follow a lot of the work that goes on there. And, Steve, you can be found online at your blog, which is at lens.unl.edu. Yes. And we are also fortunate to have with us, and I think this is the first time we've had a guest back. So, Bill, you've done a good job on, I think it was Digital Campus No. 9, Bill Turkle from the Department of History at the University of Western Ontario. Hi, Bill. Hey, guys. And Bill, of course, is the mind behind digitalhistoryhacks.blogspot.com, one of the great digital humanities blogs out there on the web. And you're also an assistant professor in the Department of History at University of Western Ontario. And anything you would like to plug? No. Okay. Well, I know we have something else to plug from you, a book that you're working on later on in the feature segment. So we'll have ample time for plugging. But as usual, we'd like to dive right in the news. And it's great to have Steve and Bill joining Tom and me on the news roundup. Well, I guess one of the things that the four of us always deal with is our servers, our web servers, which are generally giant panes in the rear. And as our server has been doing a lot this past week, crashes a bit. And so I guess we always look at the attractiveness of maybe hosting off-site and putting our applications in better suited environments. And so I guess we were interested, at least Tom and I were, on the launch of Google Apps Engine, which is a place to put web applications where Google stores it. So, Tom, what was your initial thought on this? I know we host web applications like Omeka, the web exhibit software. Is this something that we would want to port over to Google Apps in the future? Well, I mean, I should say off the bat that my feelings on this are a little bit colored by the week I've had, which has involved a lot of butting up against our administration and bureaucratic red tape in various ways. And so I'm right now – you're catching me at a moment when I'm incredibly eager to move all of our stuff off campus to some more reasonable site. So I do think it's a promising idea. The idea of having someone else host your web application, keep everything up and running, providing storage even is a really attractive one, kind of outsourcing some of those functions and some of that work. We've talked about outsourcing other things on campus, like more and more universities are turning to things like Gmail to outsource their email systems. And to some extent, you could see a similar model for outsourcing web applications that are built by and used by university and library and museum communities. So it sounds good to me. And I've noticed that people have been doing experiments combining some of these services so that Google hosts and runs the web app itself, but Amazon S3 provides the storage and various other things. So I think it's definitely something to consider. Right. So a little bit more info on this, and then we'll get Bill and Steve's input on it. But it seems that, first of all, for those who don't know about sort of outsourcing these sorts of things, generally the way you do it is that you get a server, much like the one you currently have, which is a box connected to the internet 24-7, and you can write in files and create a database there and things like that. This is a sort of different environment. You don't really get access to all the stuff on the server. You don't get access to the operating system. You can't install a database. It's sort of what they call cloud computing. And you kind of have to program to that particular environment. So you have to kind of learn these things. I guess a good competitor is Amazon has some of these services like their EC and S series. So S3 is a storage capacity that you can use for applications and dump files there. And a lot of modern web applications use Amazon services to host this. But it's not like you have access to your own server. And so some of the, I think the worries about this are that you're giving your application away to Google's giant server farm. The other thing is that Google, at least at first, is requiring you to program in Python. And Steve, you are an active Python programmer. Is that correct? Actually, Bill is the... Oh, Bill, I'm sorry. I know Python fairly well, but Bill is the expert. I'm more on the Ruby side. Oh, you've gone to Ruby. Okay, we'll discuss that in a few minutes. Bill, have you looked at Google Apps Engine at all? I mean, is this something you would consider, or do you just like the total control that you get of hosting something on your own server? I'm actually of two minds about this. I think if you're trying to do the kinds of projects that you guys are doing or that they're doing at Nebraska where you're creating tools for other people or for a kind of community of users, then absolutely it's to me to put the stuff on someone else's server and let them do the kind of low-level sysadmin type stuff. In terms of kind of individuals or smaller projects or more kind of hackish projects, I think it is essential to get a setup where you can actually get under the hood and tinker around with stuff. And so I would say, you know, there's kind of benefits to both approaches, definitely. And I think that there could be, and Bill, even what you're describing, I think that there could be a hybrid model where the development of your project, even if it's a larger product or web service, that the development has to maybe happen on your own machine so that you're on your own service so that you really can have the full range of possibilities to experiment with. But once it's up and running, I mean, for dealing with all the issues of load and uptime and patching security patches and things like that, maybe outsourcing is a good option. Yeah, definitely, Tom. And also I find that just having a server is very useful for myself. Like one of the things I've started doing recently is synchronizing my own personal files using a web server across my various Macs and PCs and Linux boxes that I have at home and at work. Well, it does seem that one benefit is certainly if you don't have access to your own server or your university doesn't provide something like that, the capacity on this Google service is pretty high. I mean, they estimate you can have a website with 5 million visitors a month and not go over their limits for the free service. So it's certainly something that I think we want to keep an eye on. And sort of one of these tech trends is this cloud computing environment. And, you know, I think Google entering this market really kind of provides some competition to Amazon as well.
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So anyway, so we'll keep an eye on that story. But another story is over at the Library of Congress, something very different. I've got a lot of friends of the show over at the Library of Congress, and so we were interested to see the launch of My Library of Congress, which is at myloc.gov. Sort of a cute name. Do we need myloc.gov? Well, we're not sure. Let's take a listen to their introductory video. This is the original yellow ribbon that was tied around the old oak tree during the Iran hostage crisis. This is the sneeze that launched a thousand film careers. And you'll find them all here at the Library of Congress. So it's, as Dick Clark used to say, it's got a good beat and you can dance to it. I guess the question here for listeners in the audience is how much a website like a collection like the Library of Congress or an online archive in 2008, do these sorts of sites need services like MyLOC provides? Particularly, they have a sign-in where you then can create your LOC. In other words, you can grab objects or lesson plans or videos from the Library of Congress website and sort of store them in your own personal online book bag. Well, I have pretty strong views about this, but I won't say. Maybe, Steve, what are your thoughts on this? Do you think collections like, let's say, the Whitman Archive, is there a way for users to sign in and have their own My Whitman? I don't know. I don't know whether what the LOC has done is good or bad or whatever, but there is... When I see someone put my before the name of a portal on a website, it's always kind of a red flag because I think that the great virtue of the web or where the web really shines is when it takes advantage or adheres to Jakob Nielsen's observation that you have eight seconds to do something interesting. Get in there quick. It's obvious what needs to be done. Things are very brief, and I can move in a kind of fleet way. And I don't think there's anything teleological about this. I don't think it necessarily goes down this path. But often when websites start to talk about, well, why don't we have a MyLOC, usually they run the risk of putting a whole bunch of new kinds of interface constraints and now you have to learn a new system that is often a system different from the way the web normally works and so there's a big there's always a big usability issue with these kind of moves on web on website portals so i don't know now maybe they've done it brilliantly but i but i you know i i can say that that i think often when we go that way you know there's a there's a there's a, there's a, you know, Edward Tufte has this great thing where he says, he says, you know, it's a bad meeting when someone says we need a metaphor, right? So, you know, you're, you're in a design meeting and someone says we need a metaphor. There's, there's great, there's great wisdom to that. And I think often what, what, what gets, what starts to sort of take over when people start designing portals is, well, you know, we'll have a metaphor. It will be just like walking around the real library and all this kind of stuff. And maybe you'll have a bag and you can put books in a bag and things like that. And as we do this, we run the risk of getting further and further away from sort of the normal web conventions that people know how to use. Yeah. Well, speaking of portals, I mean, Bill, you're one of the prime movers behind Niche, the Networking Canadian History and Environment. And you've got a lot of, you know, environmental data there, et cetera. Do you have meetings with metaphors, or how did you sort of conceptualize that and think about how people will then use that without having this kind of, you know, my book bag metaphor or sort of ability to store this material on your web service? Well, it's actually, it's a good question, and it's one we're kind of, we certainly haven't really solved yet. I mean, one of the things that we have done is we've created a content management system with the idea that our various users and stakeholders would be able to have blogs, contribute to forums, exchange messages, that kind of thing, use tools. But it's really, I mean, I have a bit of sympathy for the people who say, you know what, we need a my whatever, because at least their heart is in the right place. They're trying to reach out to the network society. Yeah, I mean, I guess this is something we always talk about at the center in terms of, you know, I think, Tom, is Omeka going to have some kind of, you know, my Omeka plug-in? It's going to be, yeah, it's going to be an optional plug-in, and we are actively building it. So users of Omeka, institutions that use Omeka to host their collections and their exhibitions, can install this My. We've gone around about names, My Archive, My Stuff, My Backpack, all of these metaphors. Maybe I've fallen into Steve's trap here. But they'll have the option of installing this and allowing their users to do just this, to favorite items, to share items. They'll be able to build their own mini exhibits that they can, especially for students who can build a little exhibit that they can email to their teachers. Yeah, and I suspect that's what the main audience for this LOC site is, the students, and clearly with the emphasis on lesson plans on the site, the ability to build up class galleries and things like that. Sorry. Right, and I think in some ways those kinds of constraints that take you out of the normal conventions of the web and put you in a kind of separate space are kind of useful for the classroom because the classroom is sort of a separate space. It's constrained. It's not the research environment. It's a much more constrained environment. So maybe they're useful for that. At the same time, what we're doing with Omeka is everything in Omeka comes out of the box Zotero compatible. So you could also, if you don't want to organize your stuff on our web service, you could organize your stuff in your Zotero collection. So I think maybe the idea here is to give users options for how they want to maintain this information. There's nothing, you know, I don't think there's anything inherently, it's just sort of a warning flag, like I said, right? It's like, as soon as you get into this, as soon as you start saying, I'm going to sequester a space for my users where they can do certain kinds of things, which, as you say, might be exactly what is needed for something like a classroom, you know, when you're trying to have a classroom environment or something like that. But you immediately increase the number of things you can screw up in terms of usability, right? So that's really what it's about. And so you can do this kind of thing absolutely brilliantly. I hope the LOC has. I haven't looked at it. But it always to me signals like, okay, let's go plug in as we speak and I'm going to take some of this away from the, from some of this from back to that development and think again about this. As I said at the top of the podcast, we're incredibly lucky to have Steve and Bill here because they are really two of the world's experts on humanities programming. And we wanted to have them on the podcast because for quite some time, Tom, I think you could agree, we sort of wanted to have a podcast on, you know, how you get started with the more technical side of the digital realm in museums and libraries and academia. And Bill, maybe if I could start with you, you're actually writing a book called The Programming Historian. So could you tell us a little bit about that book and how you sort of approach this topic of someone who's totally new to the topic, who can't just wade right into algorithms and all this complicated stuff. How do you get them started? Okay, well, I'm working with a colleague, Alan McEachern, and what we're doing is we're kind of writing an in-progress, work-in-progress, open-access book that's a tutorial-style introduction to programming. And our idea is kind of that maybe you're coming into this without knowing very much about, you know, you're comfortable with computers, but maybe you don't know very much about programming.
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And so right in the kind of introductory lessons, we have things on, you know, installing the language and some simple programming tools. We have things on automatically opening and downloading and scraping material from web pages and computing word frequency, Google searches and things like that. And really the goal is to try and create not just a useful tutorial, but to try and create a small community of people who think of themselves as humanists or as historians who know how to program, basically, and for whom that's part of their way of looking at the world. So, Bill, your method then is actually to sort of start with something that all these historians know, which is the web. I mean, a sort of experience that they're used to. And then to kind of build off of that, is that right, by doing things like web scraping? Yeah, absolutely. And not just their experience with the web, but their experience with the kind of useful tools like Zotero, VIT, and RSS feeds, the kinds of things that they probably, if they're not already using, they want to start using right away. And so we're trying to, and one of the things that's really interesting about this project so far is my co-author actually doesn't know anything about programming. I mean, he's starting to learn about programming. And so this is really a conversation between the two of us and between the people who have started reviewing the material that we have online about, you know, what do you need to know? How much do you need to know? How do you get started? What's clear? What's not clear? Right, right. Well, Steve, you know, normally the way that, you know, beginning computer or programming classes begin is, you know, you start with a language and you start with some basic symbols and constructs and kind of get more complicated from there. Should things be different for humanities scholars? Is there a different approach that you take, for instance, when you've taught it in the class? I don't know that there's a different... I guess, I mean, I spend a lot of time getting people over their fear of computing and their fear of that this is all going to be, you know, way over their you'd be doing is, you know, using the whatever programming language they're teaching to, you know, generate the Fibonacci sequence or something like that. I start with things like Mad Libs programs, right? So, you know, I do a lot of stuff with text and a lot of stuff with, now, you know, this is ironic because actually text or strings, as we say in programming, are, I think, on balance actually harder to deal with than numbers in many ways. But I think that the students, you know, it helps them to feel more comfortable with the material right away. You know, they know text. They feel comfortable in that land, and so it's easier for them to get into it. But, you know, at some level, the way I teach programming, you know, from, as you say, from first principles, really isn't all that different from the way it's taught in an ordinary computer science program, I think. Steve, do you have a particular language that you stick with or that you force on students? Well, it's funny. I get asked, you know, I remember when I started in programming, I was obsessed with the question of what language should I learn? You know, where should I start? What language should I learn? I remember I went and asked a friend of mine who was at the time doing a PhD in computer science and who was also, I knew, a kind of, you know of good old-fashioned hacker. And I said, so what language should I learn? And he said, oh, it doesn't matter. Just pick one. You know, whatever. He said, oh, you know what? There's some great pseudo-languages out there, like pseudocode. You go get a book on a language that doesn't actually exist, but will teach you programming will teach you programming. I thought he was, you know, 100% out of his mind. I mean, I thought this was, this guy had finally, he was now, he was now on the 131st floor of the ivory tower. This was so divorced from reality. You know, now it's been, you know, 12 years or so since that conversation. And I now see that he was 100% right. And he was right in the sense that what's important about programming and what needs to be learned is this set of fundamental concepts. And that set of fundamental concepts really doesn't change from language to language, which is why I probably know 10 different programming languages, and I think Bill probably does as well, mostly because, you know, since the concepts don't change. What I tell my students is that the first language is hard because programming is hard. The second language is hard because it's not like the first language. And after that, you know, you pick them up in a weekend. Now, having said all that, that, you know, it's the concepts that matter. If you're starting out today, you have great choices because you have languages like Python, which Bill is an expert on Python. You have languages like Ruby, which is a language that I teach. And, you know, the great advantages of these languages, I think, is that they take you away from some of the sort of low-level concerns of languages like, you know, systems programming languages like C and C++ and things like that, and allow you to get right in and write useful programs fairly early in the process. And so I think, you know, for anyone who's starting out today, you know, that's the way you want to go is towards those languages like Ruby or Python or even Perl or PHP, languages like these. And I would say that, you know, I write pretty with Ruby for a number of years precisely because it's so easy to get into it so quickly and to learn those fundamental concepts that, again, are going to be portable when you go try to learn some other language. Bill, do you have a real preference for Python, or is there a reason? Do you generally agree with what Steve just said about not really having to choose a language? I think, yeah, I do generally agree with Steve. I mean, I think the thing is that at the beginning, it does make sense to start with a high-level scripting language like Python or Ruby or one of those languages just because it makes a lot of tasks easier, and there are a lot less kind of hardware issues that you have to be concerned with. But over time, I think that you kind of, especially if you do work on the web, you kind of have to take what Manan Ahmed called the polyglot approach. You have to be comfortable moving between PHP and Python and JavaScript and HTML and XML and whatever else you're using just because other people are programming in all of these different languages or scripting in all of these different languages. But it definitely doesn't hurt to kind of start with one of the high-level ones. I mean, I think, you know, speaking to, you know, Bill mentioned, and he and I, I think, are in agreement about this as a teaching modality, is that we both try to connect things right away to, like, you know, what would a historian want to do with the web or with this data set or whatever? What would a literary critic want to do with this text collection? And we try to sort of get into that as quickly as we can. And these languages, they're sometimes called scripting languages, are very good at letting you get right in there. The problem with some languages, the first language I learned was C, which was an extraordinarily bad language to start with, in part because C makes you worry about things like memory management and all this kind of stuff. Now, one should probably eventually go back and learn all of that kind of stuff, but in the beginning, with these dynamic languages, we have the great advantage of being able to build useful programs right away. I think that's actually another pedagogical issue, is that the only way to learn programming is to write programs. And the more real those programs are, the better. The ideal situation is you have something you need, something you want, some tool that would make your life easier, and you're locked in a room and you have to figure out how to build that tool. That's maybe the absolute best way to learn how to program. And in fact, all of the exercises that I do in my class are in a sense an attempt to recreate that, you know, artificially create that, those conditions, right, so that students get into it. But again, these high-level languages, you know, you can fairly quickly get into writing, you know, real useful programs. And that's just.
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One question I have for you guys is who do you think needs to know this? Like, you know, we're teaching students how to program. We're writing books to help historians learn how to program. I mean, who needs to know this? Presumably, or maybe this is wrong, presumably not the whole community of historians and humanists needs to know how to program. But who does? I was at a meeting a couple weeks ago with a group of librarians, archivists, and museum professionals all discussing the future of training for their professions and issues of mutual concern thereof. And one of the questions that came up was, do we need to be training our, you know, MLS students how to program? And do they need to know any computer languages? And that was, a lot of people were saying, oh, no, they don't need to know this. They just need to be technically literate, whatever that means. And then. And I think I was sort of in the second camp, there were a bunch of people saying, well, they probably need to know a little. If we do want to train leaders for this new information and digital information age, they maybe need to know a little bit of programming. And the exercise that I wanted to go through was to have everyone in the room raise their hand if they knew a little bit of programming. And pretty much, I think, everybody in the room would have raised their hand. And if those are leaders in the field and they all know a little programming, why don't our students need to know as well? But what's your take on that? I mean, is this something that we all need to know or is, you know, maybe the few people who work in a center like yours, Steve, or a center like ours, Dan, is this something that just we need to know? Tom, my feeling is that the network really lies in diversity. And so the key point for me really is that some people have to know how to do this, and some of them have to know how to do it really well. And there's not a sense in which kind of the whole historical profession can say, we're never going to need to know this and our students are never going to need to know this. But on the other hand, I guess I don't feel strongly about kind of any imperial projects. And so I think it's probably okay for some people not to know it as long as they know that they don't know it, if you know what I mean. I think I would, you know, I would put, I mean, I would agree, first of all, that, I mean, you know, Bill and I are specialists, and I wouldn't suggest that everyone become a specialist any more than I would say, you know, everyone should become an American historian or a specialist in 18th century literature or something like that. But I would, you know, I can put this in positive terms by saying that I think that, or the experience that I had learning to program was really quite profound for me because it was, what it represented for me was for the first time in my life, I suddenly had control over this machinery on my desk. You know, I see this thing happen all the time where people, they're working away in Microsoft Word or something, and the machine freezes and they hit the reset button and restart the system. And I think to myself, if your dishwasher did that, you'd throw a fit, right? You'd be just, you'd throw it out the window. You'd be furious. You know, you'd be, you would immediately say, what's wrong with this machine? Why isn't it, you know, why isn't it working? And yet I see people with computers sort of feel like, well, it's a computer and it's a very complex thing. And who knows why it crashed, but I'll just, you know, I'll just sort of go along with it. It's hard to think that way after you learn to program. I think after you learn to program, you say, no, wait a minute, this is not, I'm not at the mercy of this bloody thing. Because what programming really gives you is the ability to change your environment, change your digital environment, build it, hack it, break the warranty, et right? And I know for my students, certainly for me, that was a huge epiphany. And I think it is for my students, too. You can tell that they take a different attitude. Like, the digital world, if we can make a grand gesture like that, suddenly seems less intimidating and less deterministic than it might have before because they suddenly realize that, well, no, I can have a role in how these things work and I can change the way they work if they don't work the way I want. And so to that extent, I feel like everyone should learn how to program at least enough to have that sense, right? To have a glimpse of that sense of control over the environment and to feel like, or enough to help them to understand how these things work and so forth. Because I do think it's empowering. I think that's a great point. Bill, I'm often asked what the difference is between learning a programming language, or learning programming in general, and learning a foreign language. So for instance, and I think this relates to what we were just discussing, that do you have to know ancient Greek to be a classicist, for instance, and I think this relates to what we were just discussing, that, you know, do you have to know ancient Greek to be a classicist, for instance? It gets back to this question. How are you in the programming historian, your book, how are you sort of answering that question about, you know, the differences, if there are any, between sort of learning a programming language and learning a foreign language? Is it in approach? Is it in results? How would you kind of address that question? I think I would say that learning to program is a lot like learning a foreign language in a variety of ways. I mean, one of the ways is that you're kind of, a beginning programmer is kind of dropped into a culture where most of the conversation is something that they can't understand. They need to gain mastery. They have a sense that when they can read code, they've really arrived. But actually, it's much more difficult to kind of fluently speak code than it is to understand something someone else has written. And so there's this kind of long process of basically learning to speak like a native speaker. And that's exactly sort of what beginning programmers are faced with. Right. Steve, how would you answer that question? Someone came to you and, like you said, you know, maybe they don't want to be an Americanist, maybe they want to study French literature. Is it like learning French extremely well, and that becoming fluid in another culture as well as language? Yeah, I think there's actually some... I mean, I find programming languages personally to be quite a bit easier than learning foreign languages, mostly because programming languages are rigidly consistent and predictable in a way that Attic Greek is not. But there are other, you know, one of the big points of comparison, you know, shows up in the learning process, and that is that I know every language I've ever, every foreign language I've ever studied has made me feel very stupid for a very long time. You know, I've had to, you know, I remember sitting in classes on Greek and Latin and French, and you sort of, you have to get comfortable with your own, you know, your own daftness, you know, as you struggle into this language. And, you know, learning programming is similar, because you know, it can be a little frustrating and it's a very foreign way of thinking and it requires certain habits of mind that you don't necessarily have. And, you know, I always have this experience with my students. You know, about three weeks into the class, you know, I can see that morale is starting to dip, you know, because the stuff is getting hard and it's frustrating and so forth. And what I usually tell them is that, you know, well, you know, I've been doing this for 10 or 12 years and I can tell you that that feeling will never really go away. And it will never go away in part because you're always sort of trying to pitch yourself slightly higher than what you're qualified to really suddenly become very comfortable with this mode of sort of, of, of instead of seeing it as, as frustrating, they've started to see it as, as a kind of, you know, fun journey of exploration and so forth.
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And we'll look forward to reading The Programming Historian. And also, Steve, you said you have a book coming out on mathematics and the humanities. Do you want to mention that? I do, yeah. Sometime, I guess, next year from Oxford, I'm co-authoring a book with Patrick Yola at Duquesne University on mathematics for the humanist scholar. And yeah, so this is a book that's really about when you, you know, certain kinds of digital, certain kinds of activities in digital humanities, in particular text analysis, the sort of stuff that I do, you know, requires some fairly heavy dutyduty mathematics, and so this is an attempt to explain that world to humanist scholars. Sounds great. Well, you know that I'm very interested in mathematics, and I'm looking forward to that book. And Bill, if it's okay with you, we'll go ahead and link to your book in progress from the Digital Campus website. Absolutely. Terrific. A book, which is dynamite, let me say, as a fellow programming teacher, is really excellent. Thank you. It's time for Picks of the Week, and Tom, why don't we start with you? All right. I've got a kind of a cool little tool, actually an extension to the Mozilla Thunderbird email client. Mozilla, for people who don't know, is the foundation corporation that makes the Firefox web browser. They also have a great email client replacement for your Outlook or for your Apple Mail called Thunderbird. And the Simile Project at MIT has come out with a new tool called Seek. And what Seek does is it's a little plug-in, a little extension for the Mozilla Thunderbird client that adds a faceted browsing pane to your email display. And for people who don't know what faceted browsing is, it's kind of like when you go to Amazon and it allows you to, you know, you do a search and then you can, you know, you do a search for something and then it shows you, okay, well, there are books, home and garden items, music, various things. And it kind of limits that search so then you can click on music and it just gives you the things that hit on your search that are in the music category. And from there you can click on rock and pop and classical. So you can kind of limit your search down that way. iTunes has a faceted browsing panel as well. It's a really nice way to search. It's kind of a very intuitive way to sort through your email. And the implementation that Simile has come up with in the Seek extension is really great. Actually, our producer here, Ken Albers, had it installed on his machine, and he showed me it. I haven't used it myself yet, but it looks very cool, and I encourage people to take a look and try it out and let us know what you think. Sounds great. Bill, maybe could I go with you next? Sure, yeah. Actually, I guess my pick would be a book that O'Reilly published last year, an edited collection called Beautiful Code. It's a number of programmers discuss unusual problems that they faced and kind of how they solved them. And it ranges from some of the kind of programming giants, people like Brian Kernighan or John Bentley to people who are really active now. And I think one of the things that's really interesting about this book is that it kind of goes beyond what we've said today in that it shows you that sometimes thinking in different languages is a part of the approach to particular problems. And so I think it's good for people who want to go a bit further. Sounds great. Thanks very much. I'll have to pick a copy of that up. I haven't read it yet. Steve, why don't we go over to you? What do you have for us? Well, I recently became aware that many of my colleagues in digital humanities, many of which are managing software or web development projects of one kind or another, are not familiar with maybe the most famous book ever written about software project management, and that's a book called The Mythical Man Month by Frederick Brooks. This book is now, I think, 25, 30 years old. It was written by this guy, Frederick Brooks, who was responsible for developing the OS 360 from IBM. So this is going back quite a few years. And The Mythical Man Month is about the failure of that project and why it was such a disaster. It's been said many times that the many, many books that have been written on software project management are really just footnotes to the Mythical Man Month in the same way that all philosophy is footnotes to Plato. And it's not a technical book at all. It's a book about the sort of sociology of developing projects that I think is still relevant today. So I feel compelled to make sure that people know about this book. And I'll also just mention its most famous quote, which is about the title, Mythical Man Month, comes from this sort of Tayloristic notion that you can define productivity in terms of man months. And he has a quote in there that says, you can't get a baby in one month from nine women. Adding more people to a project doesn't necessarily make it go faster and things like that. It's a very bracing read for anybody who's tried to develop software. Yeah, it's a really important read, and I would encourage our audience to take a look at it. And we didn't really discuss this in the feature segment, but programming is often, unlike humanities scholarship, it's often collaborative. And maybe we'll have to have both of you back on the podcast to discuss issues with collaboration and code. There are certainly a lot of issues there. Well, my quick pick for the week is a site called Social Explorer. It's at socialexplorer.com. And of course, this and all the other links we just mentioned will be available on digitalcampus.tv for this episode, episode 25. And what's neat about Social Explorer is that they just added, this is a application that shows you a map of the United States and you can overlay various demographic information. It does a really good job. I think it's a nice application for high school and college teachers and students to take a good sort of data mining approach to looking at American history. The reason I'm highlighting it today is that they recently just added some new information. They've got now census reports going all the way back to, I think, 1790. And the data is a little bit sketchy here and there, but it used to be only modern 20th century data, but they now have historical information as well. And they've also got some interesting kind of breakouts about religion and race and all kinds of things. So over 3,000 different kinds of maps that you can overlay, and I think it's kind of an interesting way of getting your students into thinking about demographics and U.S. history. So that's, again, Social Explorer. Well, I think I can speak for Tom in thanking our guest today, Steve Ramsey from the University of Nebraska. Thanks so much, Steve. It was a great pleasure. Thank you. Hope we can have you back on again. And Bill Turkle from the University of Western Ontario. Thanks so much, Bill. Yep, no problem. Always a pleasure. We'll be sending you the trophy for the second appearance on Digital Campus. Thank you so much for coming back. Poor Bill. I think the first time you were on, you had a terrible cold, and we forced you to do it live in our office. We dragged you in. So I really appreciate you joining us. And, again, we're looking forward to your book, The Programming Historian. We'll, again, link to that from digitalcampcampus.tv and we, as always, encourage our audience to know about stories and issues you would do for your country. Fear itself!
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From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi-weekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Here it's built. This is Digital Campus number 43 for the 15th of September, 2009. Summer Wrap-Up. I'm Dan Cohen. Live from the Center for History and New Media, we are back, the Digital Campus Podcast. I'm Dan Cohen. We have taken an impromptu summer hiatus, which we are glad to be back from. It's just been a busy summer for all of us, and we are glad that you are listening to us once again, and we are glad to be podcasting once again. I'm here, of course, with our regulars, Tom Scheinfeld and Mills Kelly. Hi, Tom. Hello. And Mills. Hi, Mills. How are you, Dan? Good. Great to be back on the podcast with the two of you. Well, usually we only have two weeks of tech and academic and university, library and museum issues and news to catch up on. This time it looks like we've got a whole summer, a lot to cover. I think what we'd like to do is start out with maybe some updates on stories we've covered a lot here on the podcast, and then maybe move on to some new things that cropped up over the summer that we think are going to be influential in this coming 2009 to 2010 school year. We also want to say that we are committed to keeping the podcast going despite our impromptu summer break. And to do that, we're going to introduce some changes to the podcast. We hope on the next podcast, Digital Campus number 44, lucky 44, we may introduce some changes that we will talk about as they come up. But thanks again for following us here via iTunes or live on the web at digitalcampus.tv. And also thanks to the over 600 people now who are following us on Twitter at digitalcampus, where you can suggest stories that you'd like us to cover and also respond to us as we're podcasting. So it looks like a bunch of issues we've covered on the podcast are really coming to a head this fall and even perhaps in the next week or two. One of which I guess is getting a lot of press in the news is Google Books and this settlement that they have, class action settlement with authors and publishers, or at least some authors and publishers, that boy, really created a firestorm over the summer and really in the last couple weeks as the judge set a deadline for filing amicus briefings, you know, sort of suggestions to the court about what should go on. Again, for those new to the podcast and new to this issue, Google sort of just went right ahead and started scanning whole shelves of libraries about four and a half years ago, and including books that were in copyright. And this led to a lawsuit and then a settlement between the American Association of Publishers, I hope I'm getting this right, and the Authors Guild, representing authors, or at least putatively representing all authors and publishers that might have a stake in this Google project. And of course, what Google wanted to do was to be able to show snippets or sections of books that even were in copyright. The authors and publishers considered even the act of scanning it, even for search purposes, to be an illegal act. And we've now reached the point where we're really closing in on sort of final arguments and ultimately a settlement, sort of thumbs up, thumbs down from the judge, although I guess another option would be some kind of tweak to the settlement. We could talk about some of the things that have gone on recently. But boy, the heat on this issue has really grown, hasn't it, Mills and Tom? You know, just this week, Mary Beth Peters, who's the head of the Copyright Office in Washington, D.C. for the federal government, really whacked Google over the head with a statement in front of the House committee looking into this issue. I think a lot of people were taken aback by her fairly aggressive statements about how she thought that parts of the settlement were completely improper and usurped copyright law. What are the two of you think is sort of happening at this point? Where are we as of this recording, which we're recording on September 11th, 2009? Well, I think, I mean, I think that the fact that it's gained the notice of Washington and politicians is important because it had really, I don't think it had gotten that kind of notice previously. And I think really, to be honest, what prompted that, what made lawmakers sort of wake up to what was going on is something that happened in August, which was Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo, and a bunch of other very large, very important companies in the business, joining with the Internet Archive and something called the Open Book Alliance to challenge the settlement. And so once those really high-profile entities were on board, and it wasn't just the, you know, us kind of academics howling in the wilderness. Once it was these big money industries and big money interests complaining about this, then I think people, then I think Washington has woken up to it. And I think, you know, putting some political pressure on the courts is, you know, it will make a difference. And I think it probably will affect the outcome. I don't know, Dan, as you said, if we're going to get an up or a down outcome from the judge. I think there's kind of a middle ground that we might get, which is a sort of sending them back to make some changes to the agreement. And if I had to guess, that would be my guess, that the judge is probably going to send them back to come up with a new draft, essentially. Yeah, right. So this new organization for listeners is at openbookalliance.org. And obviously, this is, you know, a coalition, as Tom said, of those who are against the settlement. But there's a lot of good resources. And I think they're tracking the news pretty well about what's going on in the settlement. You know, I suppose we should say the crux of the issue is really this segment of books, well, one of the issues, one of the main complaints is about orphan books, right, which are these books that are in copyright, that is most books in the United States that were published after 1923, but whose authors, you know, kind of no one can find. And that's actually, it's quite a few books. It's over a million books. I've heard different numbers thrown out, but it's certainly seven figures. So quite a few books. And Google is sort of just saying, well, you know, these books, you know, they're neither here nor there. We kind of, you know, should have the rights to do something with them under the settlement. And a lot of people are saying that, you know, basically gives them a monopoly over this segment of books. And also books where, you know, the authors, and surely there will be many of them, just sort of haven't really acted to opt out of this settlement. We should also say that, you know, this is a global issue. The settlement is applicable in the United States, but the, you know, lots of countries in the European Union are expressing serious misgivings about this, including the federal government of Germany, I believe, and others in Europe, libraries and organizations. Well, I think that, you know, we're getting close to the end game on this, at least this round of it. I think it'll probably go on beyond this particular court action because either Google will appeal or the other parties are going to appeal. But I think that, you know, they've kind of, that everybody involved is sort of focused in on just a couple of key issues now. And one of them is the one that Mary Beth Peters raised from the chief copyright officer of the United States raised about what amounts to sort of a compulsory opt-out license for copyright holders. So, okay, I wrote a book. Google, under this settlement, has the right to scan that book and create commercial products from that unless I opt out. So it's now incumbent on me to contact Google and say, I don't want you to do that. And so I think that that creates one set of issues. And then the second is it's still unclear what kinds of secondary commercial products Google can create under the terms of this settlement. And until that's defined by Google and by the other people involved, I think they're going to have a hard time pushing this through. Right. There is this larger issue about commercialization, isn't there?
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You know, there's a lot of people saying, well, we sort of have to trust Google that, for instance, pricing for libraries for access to this set of books will be reasonable and will remain reasonable even in the future as, you know, let's say they have profit pressures or things like that. And then what else are they going to do with these books? Or other people running the company. Right. That's right. Okay. So let's imagine a circumstance in which Google does find itself in a slightly more competitive environment than it is now and their pressure is on their business and their stock value has gone down and a consortium of Chinese investors comes along and buys up all their stock or enough to get a controlling interest to the corporation. But at that point, the horse has left the barn. Now you can imagine all the sort of the fulminating that will go on in Congress and the public about, oh, my God, we just sold our entire copyright legacy to some group of Chinese investors. And now this sort of economic nationalism will surface. But then it will be too late because Google is a corporation which is publicly traded and so therefore belongs to its stockholders. We'll be able to do And so, you know, it would be a hard one to then file a suit about. Right. I mean, that's the, with all of these kinds of private ownership of knowledge resources, I mean, this is the problem is these companies are and should be responsible in the end to their shareholders. And so, I mean, that's, and they should be. Google should be doing what's right for its shareholders, not what's right for copyright holders. I mean, that's not really their obligation. It's their shareholders. And I don't think we can fault them if they decide to make a business decision that is good for their shareholders, but bad for education and the diffusion of knowledge and all of those good things. So we should think about that when we do these kinds of deals at the outset. We can't just trust them not to be evil. Isn't this a larger problem that we're going to encounter with Google in the coming years or that we've already encountered in that the start, and even today when you look at the way Google is run, it's a company but it's also kind of a university. It's kind of academic in a way, right? They hire smart people. Everyone knows they're kind of the Harvard of tech companies. They take the best PhDs. They have a kind of academic environment where people are allowed to do 20% research in the same way that sort of professors are allowed to kind of do their own thing 20% of the time. And haven't we said, haven't they and also we set up unrealistic expectations about Google as they do things like, you know, they launch a site, for instance, on Google Apps for Education, which they're pushing really hard. And we'll link to this from digitalcampus.tv. But they have a kind of evangelism website for Google Apps for Education in which they say that more than 5 million students are already using Google. And they're using it for free. And that means that these universities are saving a ton of money in terms of servers and IT staff. And I mean, doesn't Google have a kind of frenemy problem at this point? They're sort of frenemies of the universities, if I can use that word. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I mean, I think we all love Google. You know, if you wanted to be a bit of a conspiracy theorist, you could say that they've, you know, lured us all in with this, you know, with this nice line about and this kind of ethos of openness and collegiality and cooperation and collaboration and goodness, essentially. And, you know, once they've, you know, reeled us in, they could turn on a dime and start, you know, they could start charging for those email systems. I mean, once all these universities have moved to them, they could, you know, raise the price. Oh, my God, then they would be Microsoft. Well, right. They would right. In a way, isn't this sort of our objection 10 years ago about Microsoft is that they kind of controlled word processing and internet browsing and all of those things, and this is what we hated about them, especially because then Microsoft Office costs a lot. And so Microsoft at least came in through the front door. Right, at least they were up front about it. Yeah, that's a great point. But, I mean, on the flip side of this, you know, maybe just to take Google's perspective for just a second, I mean, isn't there a lot of kind of sour grapes complaining here also in academia about Google? I mean, just to look at the Google book search, which I have qualms about as well. But I mean, this is a company. I mean, after all, Microsoft dropped out of this business of scanning books and losing money scanning books. And here's a company, Google, that has committed hundreds of millions of dollars to scan, you know, 15 million books and make a lot of them available for free online. And aren't we, you know, I mean, academics are critical, of course, but, you know, you can imagine, like, if Google built Widener Library at Harvard, you know, we'd complain about the number of steps it would take to get up to the reading room. I do what I don't, but the difference is, I mean, the difference is, like, why isn't Harvard doing this? Why aren't universities doing this? Why isn't a consortium of universities with a combination of foundation and government funding doing the open version of Google Books? Why can't we get that funded? Yes, it's $100 million or $200 million or $300 million. But in the big picture, that's not that much money. That's not that much money. Even NSF, what is their budget? Several billion dollars. NIH, their budget is a couple tens of billions of dollars. So to put all of the books in the United States online for free and in a publicly held repository for $300 million, we're really not talking about all that much money. It seems like it's just a little lazy. Google saw an opportunity for what they saw as a fairly minimal investment to control all of this knowledge. And that's worrying. I guess my problem with it is that it seems like we've just been lazy, that it's easier to let Google pay for it and not worry about the consequences than to try to actually raise the money ourselves. Yeah, that's a great point. You think about universities, just to go back to Harvard for a second, although now with their financial arm again, they're not doing this. But they were in the business of building $100 million science labs not so long ago for things like genomics that are incredibly expensive. And you could think that evidently at scale, you could do a book at $10 a book. So $100 million gets you a lot of books, Kent, and even at $30 a book. I'd be interested to see how much Widener Library cost when it was built. Right. Or how much the... In 1909 or 1915 or whenever it was. Or the aggregate acquisition costs are surely billions of dollars to build up. So, I mean, if you're talking about $300 million, what, $10 million for 30 years, we'd have this. Or $30 million over 10 years, we'd have this and it would be public. It doesn't seem undoable to me with the amount of money that's funding. And we're not just talking about the humanities in here. I mean, we're not talking about IMLS funding this or NEH funding this. We're talking about, like, let's get NSF involved. Let's get NIH involved. They have big budgets. This is doable. That would take two years, if not longer. And then the negotiating of the boundaries of the agreements would take another year. And so by the time academia was actually ready to do it, Google would have finished. Right. I mean, that's where they have the real advantage is that they only have to marshal their own troops and then they go. Right. Mills, could I ask you just to speak up a little bit? Sure. We can hear you, but I'm worried that all of the million-dollar grants that are given out by all of the funding agencies and all of the foundations, if you pooled some of those, you'd get there relatively quickly. Anyway. Right. Okay.
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And maybe we'll ask maybe someone from Open Book Alliance and Google to come on the podcast at a later date. Hopefully not to have a John McLaughlin-style yelling match, but to have some kind of cogent or calm discussion about where we are and where we're headed in terms of these digitized books. Well, I guess a related update would be on the e-book front. Boy, this summer saw a lot of these e-book readers come out. Sony issued a few new models, some of them relatively inexpensive. I think they're now under $200. And I think there's Plastic Logic has something coming out. There was another UK brand. Now we're starting to get these off-market brands that no one's ever heard of. Yeah, IREX. Oh, IREX and then something Reader. It has just a really simple name. Well, and I'm starting to see students on campus with them. Are you really? Yeah, not a lot of students, but some, you know, sitting in our student union building or sitting in a classroom building, you know, looking at their e-book reader rather than at a book. And when I say some, I mean, you know, fewer than 10 so far this semester. But they're out there. They're starting to show up. Yeah. I mean here's the thing. I think like Amazon with the Kindle tried to make the play that Apple made with the iPod. They tried to get in. They saw that there were these e-book readers out there and some people were using them. But they weren't very successful in the way that in 2001 and 2002, Apple saw MP3 players. But they knew the future of music was digital and Amazon knows that the future of reading is digital. And so they basically came in with this Kindle. It was closed. You had to use Amazon's. You had to buy your books from Amazon. It was this kind of closed hardware software platform, and you had to use the Amazon hardware and the Amazon software to make it all work together in the way that you have to use the iPod with iTunes. It's all one piece. And I think they tried to get in early and corner the market that way. The question is whether with these new entries from Sony and from Barnes & Noble, whether they'll be able to add some competition and make the e-book reader space a competitive space in a way that the MP3 player space is not competitive anymore. I mean, Apple's got 80-something percent of the market. Right. I'm sorry. That UK brand is called Cooler with, for some reason, with a dash between the L and the E. I'm not sure quite why, but Cooler Reader, which looks like a, it's kind of neat. It's got a little click wheel that looks exactly like the Nano, the iPod Nano click wheel on the bottom right. And then it uses, everybody's using the same E-ink, you know, shades of gray, five or seven inch screen. So the screens are almost identical on all these. And then Asus is coming out with one. And Asus is, of course, the manufacturer that basically created the netbook, the cheap notebook market. So they're coming out with one that's going to be dual screen. So you open it up like a book and you actually read something on each side. So if they're getting into this market and then one assumes they're going to produce something cheap, just like they did in the notebook market, something's happening here. And if Apple, I think Apple is thinking that if all the speculation about Apple coming out with a tablet is correct, a touchscreen tablet PC. If Apple comes out with that, that essentially is going to function as an e-book reader as well, I imagine. So there is an awful lot going on here. I guess a related update is just on, you know, from an academic perspective, really a push toward textbooks on these devices as well. Mills, you've talked to Stan Katz recently. We had him on the podcast in the spring, and he was planning on using e-readers in his fall class. Is that right? Stan Katz of Princeton. I don't know which class he's actually using it for, but he is using a Kindle in one of his courses, and I'd actually hope to be able to go up and watch and see what was happening. Unfortunately, it happens to be the same night of the week that my class is, so I couldn't do it. But I'll be real interested to hear from Stan how it goes. And he's promised to be available to give us a report sort of midway through the semester. Right. So a lot of these new readers, he's using the Kindle DX, which is that large form factor reader from Amazon. Almost all of the rest of them are now using, the Kindle DX, I'm sorry, just to back up a sec, reads PDFs, which is I think one of the main innovations and I think one of the reasons it became very attractive for academia because so many articles are in PDF. But a lot of these new readers are using the EPUB format, which is an open format. It's not the Kindle format. It's not a closed format. And there seems to be a big push toward EPUB here that I wonder if that's the underlying story or perhaps in the long term a more important story that's going on here is the rise of a kind of standardized electronic book format or electronic article format that formats really well on these different devices and is open. And so for instance, just at the end of the summer, Google announced that they were going to reissue, I think, a million of their public domain books in the EPUB format. Right now you can download them as PDF, but they were going to rework them as an EPUB book, which means that, for instance, the Cooler device is going to offer 500,000 public domain books. The new Sony ebook reader that came out this summer is offering, I think, a million of these free public domain books. So you sort of get a big chunk of books on them if you use the EPUB format. Yeah, I think that is hugely important. I think that's the difference is with these new readers using this EPUB format, this open format, are they going to be able to compete with Amazon's more kind of closed, more, you know, it's like the Apple experience. It's seamless. It's beautiful. It feels unified and holistic, but it's closed. You know, I think this, on the other side, there's like the PC world. And I think this other world of these eBooks where, you know, there's a lot of different kinds of hardware, but all that different hardware runs the same software. In this case, it's that EPUB format. And so there's kind of two models there, one which is closed and controlled but offers a kind of unity of experience and one which is open and a little more chaotic but which holds out the hope of interoperability and some openness, sharing of these books and other things. And it'll be interesting to see how this plays out. I think we're seeing in some ways a repeat of what we saw with the personal computer and then the MP3 player and now here with these e-books. I think one of the things that Amazon is going to find difficult right away is the Kindle is just so ugly and these other readers, if you take a look at them, you can get them in eight different colors or 12 different colors. People will be able to express themselves a little more than just something putty-colored, like the good old-fashioned IBM PC. Right. Well, I guess we'll have to see what happens. I mean, I suppose, just Tom looking at that history, I mean, we know what happened in the PC world, that Apple's closed platform, at least for much of the history of computing, lost out to the, you know, make any hardware you want and it'll run Windows world. But then in the iPod world, it ended up being the opposite, that these closed systems ended up being the monopoly. E-book readers, jury's still out, huh? Yeah, I think we'll see. And I think we're going to actually probably begin to see by the end of this year, we're going to have an idea of which direction this is going. Yep. Okay. Well, again, to be continued. Well, let's move on to, from the news from the summer, things to watch. Things that came up this summer that we here on the podcast think are going to be important elements of the next year or indicative of important trends in technology and academia, museums, and libraries. Well, I guess, you know, probably the one that got the most hype was this Google Wave introduction over the summer. What are we thinking of Wave?
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This is a kind of skunkworks project that their team, I think mainly in Australia, tried to reconceptualize, you know, if you were starting now, what would email look like? And what they came up with, I suppose, could be described as a hybrid of a messaging system, that is, a system that passes messages back, like email or IM between various people or groups, and also newer elements of the web, like wikis and mashups, embeddable content like maps, etc. And they kind of threw this in a blender and came up with Wave. I guess that the name Wave is meant to imply that rather than getting an email or a thread of email, you get a single wave that kind of persists and sort of bobs up and down as everyone who's reading it edits it, makes additions to it, et cetera. And what you get then is the ability to, let's say if you're going out to dinner and you've got a group of people, you wave them, I suppose. I don't know what the term is going to be. And then everyone can kind of write in the email live, and these additions or edits get propagated out to everyone looking at this wave and everyone can say what times they're available and what restaurants are good and someone can throw on a map and see me there. Is this important? Is this just a lot of bells and whistles but isn't really important, especially for those of us in our line of work? I think people are going to have a hard time finding where it fits into their – where this new model of – it's like collaborative email almost or collaborative messaging. Where this fits into their current workflow. I think email worked and remains the killer app because there was like a clear metaphor to what came before. There was a clear analogy like this is email. This is like mail. It's just on your computer. And so you could say, ah, so how do I use this? I use this instead of writing a letter. Okay, so like that makes sense. So I used to write a letter. Now I write an email. that sort of makes sense. I know where that fits into my into my everyday kind of workflow. You know, other things, I think, you know, are have been have been like this, you know, instead of, you know, like a wiki, like, okay, okay, I use a wiki, I use that instead of using a notepad, or, you know, so so like, you can kind of make a make an analogy to what you did before. I don't see really where that analogy is with Wave. Like, what is it replacing? What am I doing now that this is going to help me do better or just a little bit differently, but, you know, in a quicker, more efficient way? I don't know if there's really that analogy. And to have kind of widespread adoption, I sort of think you need that very quick statement of what it is and what it does to say, ah, you use this instead of writing a letter. And somebody says, ah, oh, I see. Okay, I'll do that. That's what I don't see with this. But I haven't used it, so I guess I'll have to see. But that's my early sense of it. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I'm always thinking about these things in terms of how they might be used in teaching. And one of the things I'm especially interested in is getting students out of the classroom and sort of moving around in the public at large rather than just sitting in a classroom tied to a desk. And so I can imagine possibly, I mean, again, none of us have actually used this thing, but I can imagine that for some kind of group place-based computing effort, it could actually be kind of interesting in a classroom context or a non-classroom context. But I'm just going to have to wait and see. And I would want to know how easily usable is it on various portable devices like iPhones, etc. Yeah, that's a good point, Mills, on the various devices. What struck me, really, I mean, if you look at the demo, is how web-centric it is. And isn't the innovation here going to be related to mobile? I mean, how are you going to edit wiki-type objects on a 3-inch screen? Their whole demo really focuses on having a large monitor. But I also like your other point about maybe there's some version of this that's great for classroom use where students can collaborate on a project, let's say, quickly put together a chart or an article on some topic and using that. And obviously the Wave is private, so they don't have to put it up on Wikipedia or some other place. Or you could use it in place of the clicker in the classroom if you wanted to do a quick poll or something like that. I mean, they're trying to really create a platform and that's always tricky, right? It isn't just a simple technology. If you watch the whole video, I mean, they talk about things like you could create bots, you know, these automated software agents that change the wave as things happen. So, you know, you could embed a traffic map of, you know, getting to the restaurant and then there'd be a bot that would update the traffic so people could check in. It just seems like it's a little bit too much right now, at least from this video of a solution in search of a problem. I mean, people have kind of ad hoc ways of doing a lot of this. If you want to arrange a meeting time with your colleagues, you can use, what is this service? Doodle, where it just gives you a chart and you just click on the hours you're available and then it spits out a result at the end. So people have kind of made their way around a lot of these issues. And I think, Tom, your point about the metaphor becomes really difficult. I mean, I guess the larger problem here is just that people who are so immersed in the technology, it's hard to see what the 90% of people who are not on Twitter or not using wikis would want out of the technology and how to, you know, you can't just push this stuff on them, can you? What percent of people are not using Twitter? Okay, 99% Mel's. Oh, I feel so much better. Yeah, I mean, I think there's probably uses for it, and I'm sure there'll be creative uses for it. But I think Google's problem was when the announcement came out, I think the initial announcement was like, this is the future of email. And it's sort of hard to see just yet how this replaces email. I don't see that happening. But I think it's totally possible that some of the interesting uses that Mills was talking about and Dan, you were, I think that's possible that those will come to pass. Well, I guess a related kind of summer wave, another kind of wave of technology that's coming that might be be important over the next year. And certainly wave is trying to capitalize on is real time, right? It isn't the point of wave that as various people edit it, you can have eight people edit the same document at the same time. The updates are propagated out. And we saw a lot of movement this summer toward these kinds of real time interactions. I mean, Twitter is, I suppose, one symptom of this, and it's clearly instigated a lot of thinking about this kind of real-time social media. There were a bunch of technologies, some with better names than others. Dave Weiner, who created the original RSS spec that runs blogs and podcasts that pushes out new content, came up with something called RSS Cloud, where he's trying to create a kind of system of technologies whereby RSS goes more real-time. I mean, if you subscribe to a blog, you might not get a new post from that blog for anywhere from 15 minutes to a few hours, depending on your blog reader, your news reader. He's trying to get that down to a fraction of a second. And when that happens, you can start thinking about new forms of real-time interaction. There was another spec with the horrible name of PubSubHubbub. Someone should be shot for coming up with that name. That does a similar sort of thing that also kind of deals with real-time communications. And toward the end of the summer, we saw, I think it was WordPress.com, the makers of the great open-source WordPress blogging platform, and this is their commercial hosted version. I think they adopted RSS Cloud, if I'm not mistaken. And I believe Google Reader adopted PubSub HubBubs so that they can also do real-time updates.
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Isn't that right? I think, you know, I certainly think that people are, I think the real issue is trying to aggregate the massive flow of information that's coming at us. And I think all of these things are an attempt to do that. And I still haven't seen one that's going to solve that problem for me. I mean, for me, the problem is solved largely by removing myself from a lot of that flow of information. But until somebody comes up with something, you know, I mean, RSS is a cloud I've looked at. It didn't really look like it was going to solve my problem, so I didn't actually use it. But the flow of information is vastly exceeding our ability to cope with it. Yeah, I think if these kinds of things are going to be successful, and I do think that's where we're headed, and I think Twitter sort of points in that direction. I think we're going to all have to get used to not reading everything and feeling comfortable with that and feeling comfortable with other people not reading everything you send them. I've gotten used to, when I first started on Twitter, I used to like, Yeah, no, no, but right. Well, right. And, but I've gotten really comfortable with like, you know, like I check in with Twitter when I check in with Twitter and if I miss something, like I miss something. Um, and I think we're going to have to get more comfortable with that with, in terms of reading blog posts and maybe even in terms of reading emails and stuff where like you kind of dip into it. I've heard a lot of different metaphors for this. Like one is, you know, you kind of wade Yeah. Now I've heard another metaphor, which is the cocktail party. If you show up 20 minutes late to a cocktail party, you don't go around asking everyone at the cocktail party what transpired in the previous 20 minutes. You just sort of accept that you're coming in midstream and you kind of catch up and then you leave and maybe you rejoin later. And that's kind of fine. In that way, it's more like a conversation and it's fine to just sort of come in and out of it. You don't have to read everything. And I think we're going to have to get comfortable with that if these things, if this is the future. We're all going to have to get comfortable with it, and we're going to have to get comfortable with our colleagues and friends maybe not keeping up with every single thing we say. That's just sort of an observation, not really a comment on whether this is going to happen or not. But I do think we all have to a pretty harsh criticism from those. In the same way there's been the slow food movement to attack the rise of fast food. I think we're probably going to see some kind of attack on this real-time. Okay, any other new news from the summer? We saw Steve Jobs this week up on stage. Anything, you know, he's always got his finger on the pulse of new technologies that are going to influence the way we do lots of things, not just in academia. Every student's going to have a camera, I suppose, now with a camera on the iPod Nano, which is their most successful model. Is that going to have any impact? A video camera, I should say. I think it's possible. I actually thought the big story out of Apple this summer was that there was no story. I feel like Apple's in the sorry situation of having to announce something big every time they announce something. That's a hard expectation meet. And I guess I didn't see a whole lot there. But I do think, yeah, I do think the increasing ubiquity of cameras, especially video cameras on campus, is going to change things. I think it's also going to change things in museums and libraries. We're going to see a lot more audience-produ visitor produced video and audio and imagery coming out of museums and libraries. So I do think that's a continuing story. Yeah, I think the other thing that's going to happen is we're going to see more faculty members on YouTube. Right. Students in class and videotape and put up, you know, here's my really interesting or really boring professor. Well, right. I think what's really interesting now, there was a new update to iTunes this week, and some of the functionality had to do with better organization for iTunes U. And if you look at these updates, I mean, you can really set up a whole core system now in iTunes U. I mean, you can arrange a whole set of classes in it and put podcasts together, and it's going to put a lot of pressure on professors if we're still going to go by this lecture model, and they're all going to get videotaped to, well, be a bit more entertaining, I suppose. Okay, well, I suppose that's our wrap-up from the summer for now. We've probably missed some things. If you can think of anything that we missed, feel free to send us feedback at feedback at digitalcampus.tv, or you can send us a reply on Twitter at Digital Campus. Let's move on to picks for the podcast. Okay, for those who are new to the podcast for the 2009-2000 school year, we end the podcast with some picks of interesting things you might find online, interesting devices, anything that might be useful to your life that we found useful to our life. Tom, why don't we start with you? All right. I've got sort of two things, two Linux or Unix resources that people can take a look at if they're interested in Linux. The first one is something called Sugar on a Stick. Sugar is the flavor of Linux that runs on the one laptop per child. It's sort of an education-focused flavor of Linux with an interface, with a user interface that is geared towards, really towards kids and the way they might want to use a computer in class and outside of class. And Sugar on a Stick is a version of Sugar which it loads onto a USB memory stick. And you can boot from the memory stick. So if you stick this memory stick in any PC, into the USB port of any PC, and start up, it will boot Linux from that USB stick without affecting the rest of your computer. So let's say you've got Windows running on your main machine in your office or at home. You can put this USB stick into the USB drive and boot up in Linux, and it won't affect anything on your hard drive. It'll just run directly from the flash drive. And there's enough space there to save some documents and certainly to surf the web and to install a little bit of software. But it's a good way to try out Linux and to get a look at one laptop per child and what that environment looks like if you haven't had a chance to do so on the OLPC and the XO itself. So that's kind of a nice little resource. And then another thing is a blog post from actually a former intern of ours at the Center for History and New Media, Adam Krimble, who is a graduate student of Bill Turkel's up at the University of Western Ontario. His blog, Thoughts on Public and Digital History, he had a great post over the summer called Learning Unix. And it gives some links to some resources for learning some pretty basic Unix commands, especially if you're running Mac OS. If you open up a terminal window, that is a Unix command prompt that you've got there. And if you want to learn how to use that command prompt a little more effectively, Adam provides some resources and also a kind of a tutorial, a few simple tasks that you can perform to kind of get your skills up to speed and to hone those skills if you've got some already. How to copy a file, how to make a new directory, how to move between directories. He's got a nice little tutorial written up there. So just a plug for a former intern of ours and a student of a friend. And in general, the blog is a great little blog. And not actually a little blog. His blog is certainly, he's posting a lot and a lot more than I am, for sure. And it's a great, great, great resource for a lot of different things to do with public history and digital history. So Adam's blog is something to check out, too. Great. Again, we'll link to all these resources from digitalcampus.tv. Mills, what do you have for us this time? Well, mine is also a somewhat connected to us blog post, and this is one by Rob Townsend at the American Historical Association. Many of you know Rob got his Ph.D. recently from our program, and we're very proud of him.
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And it's really a nice summary of a much more extended report from the National Humanities Alliance called, The Future of Scholarly Journal Publishing Among Social Science and Humanities Associations. And so, I mean, this is an issue we've talked a lot about on the podcast, the future of journal publishing and, you know, what does it mean when they stop publishing print versions. And so this report from the National Humanities Alliance takes that on. But if you don't want to read the whole report, I would suggest reading Rob's AHA Today blog post because it summarizes the issues very clearly. Okay, great. Just checking it out right now. Again, we'll link to that. Is there a future for journals in the humanities by Rob Townsend of the American Historical Association? I have a general blog to recommend that just launched, just stealth launch over the summer, but is now live and includes many friends of the podcast as bloggers on the site. It's called profhacker.com, P-R-O-F-H-A-C-K-E-R.com. And it's a group blog of a lot of very savvy technologists, some professors, some people in academic technology, some in the library world. And it's just got a terrific series. I mean, Thank you. to pedagogy to using tools, Firefox recommendations, Google recommendations, Microsoft recommendations. They have weekend reviews of what's gone on. They're just doing a real terrific job, and I want to give them a major plug from the podcast. Again, that's profhacker.com. Subscribe to it from your favorite blog reader. Well, Mills and Tom, thank you very much for rejoining the podcast with me. I think the three of us are glad to be back on our horses and ready to ride on on the podcast. And again, we'll let you, the audience, know about changes that are upcoming to the podcast. Tom, I want to thank you especially for stopping on a trip to New York in a Panera in Delaware to log on. It's great to have you on via Panera Wi-Fi, which worked remarkably well. Thank you very much to Panera for the coffee and for the Wi-Fi. This podcast is sponsored by Panera. Panera. For all your Wi-Fi and bread needs. Okay. I wish we had product placement, but we are a free podcast available at digitalcampus.tv and, of course, also on iTunes. We want to thank everyone for listening in, and we hope you rejoin us in two weeks on another edition of Digital Campus. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Fear itself. Fear itself. Please visit us online at digitalcampus.tv where you can join in the country. Fear itself!
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From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. This is Digital Campus, featuring Tom May 7, 2010. Past play. Welcome, everyone, to Digital Campus number 56. I'm Mills Kelly from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, joined by our regular podcast crew, Dan Cohen from dancohen.org. Hey, Dan, how are you? Hey, Mills, how are you doing? I'm doing quite well, quite well. It's a beautiful day here in Fairfax, Virginia. It is. And I hope my mic sounds okay. I'm on a new headset because I was podcasting so hard last time that I literally broke the microphone off of my old headset. Yeah, I remember that. I remember that. It just snapped right off. That's how hard I work on Digital Campus. That's our podcast. My commitment. My commitment. And then also Tom Scheinfeld from foundhistory.org. Tom, how's it going? Hey, guys. All right. Good. Good. And we have two special guests today as part of our Digital Campus Irregular crew. They are from north of the border. We have Kevin Key, who is the Canada Research Chair at Brock University in beautiful Niagara, New York. Kevin, welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Bill. And I should say Canada Research Chair of Humanities Computing, which makes him especially relevant to the topics we like to talk about. And then we also have Bill Turkel, who's an Associate Professor of History at Western Ontario University. Bill, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks, Bill. It's good to be here. Great. Great. Well, we're really glad to have you guys. The reason we have Kevin and Bill with us today is because they have just finished the coordination of a fantastic digital history and digital humanities conference at beautiful Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, which I was lucky enough to attend last week. And the title of the conference is Playing with Technology in History. And this is really, it was a really very, very interesting conference focused on what happens when people start playing around with technology or inducing their students to play around with technology in history. And so we've invited Bill and Kevin to join us today to talk a little bit about the conference and the idea behind it, what they think came out of it. So Kevin, let me throw this to you first and say just what induced you to do this in the first place? I like organizing conferences. So, you know, that's part of it. It was just the opportunity to get people together. I think Bill and I and certainly you guys and a bunch of people have been feeling for a while like we needed to be more playful with history. And I remember talking with you about this, Mills. You know, we thought the best way to do that was to gather a bunch of people who struck us as being quite playful and see what came out of it. The impetus originally started with the History Education Network. And what I mean is that they were the ones who were funding the conference, and so they got the ball rolling. And the History Education Network, or DENIER, because it's Histoire, Education, histoire education réseau in French is an organization that was formed to promote the improvement of or the bettering of teaching and learning history in Canada and it's funded by the social sciences and humanities Research Council and specifically a research cluster grant and so what SSHRC larger funding body, is trying to do through these grants is create organizations that can create links with other organizations. So what we're doing at Denny Ayres, we're bringing together museums and researchers and universities and you name it, everybody interested in teaching and learning of history. And we're holding different events and finding different means to bring people together and we had a symposium last year and then they turned to me and said can you organize the second symposium on technology and I said that's fine but we've got to do better than that and so Bill and I started to talk and what came out of our conversations was that we should really focus on how we can play with technology, what's special about technology in terms of how we can interact with it. And I think ultimately what we really wanted to get at was engagement. So we put this together, and we brought together a bunch of wonderful people who came from very different perspectives and had a great couple of days. Well, yeah, it was certainly one of the more productive, it seemed like one of the more productive conferences I've been to in a long time in the sense that people really remained engaged. You know, it was a small group. How many people were there all together? About 20 all together. Yeah, about 20 people, and so we were able to all be in the same room together for a couple of days. But the first part of the conference was actually the first day was an unconference. And Bill, you kind of wrangled the unconference. Why did you guys decide to do it that way first? Well, one of the things that I've been quite interested in lately and one of the things I think that informed the idea of doing something with play was that much of what we know how to do and would like to communicate with one another is tacit. And I feel like if somebody stands up and gives a talk, that doesn't necessarily come across. But that if you get people in a room where they can do things with their hands and minds at the same time and it's kind of less formal, that some of that kind of tacit knowledge and tacit understanding can be communicated. And Dan, Tom, you know, we've had some of these unconferences here at the center as well. Tom, from your perspective, what's the real advantage of the unconference model? Well, I think Bill's getting at it. I think also part of it is that it is kind of democratizing in the sense that it breaks down some of the barriers between, you know, the person on the stage and the people in the audience. It breaks down barriers between people at different stages of their careers, people who perform different roles in their jobs, whether they're librarians or teaching faculty or whatever they are. So I think, you know, between, you know, different kinds of communication, different kinds of knowledge dissemination and a more democratic interaction. I think that those are the things, to my mind, that make it a productive alternative to kind of a more traditional format. And it sounds like you guys had some of those same kinds of interactions up in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Yeah, but, you know, I have to say, I really missed sitting in the audience and listening to three 20-minute papers being read plus a 20-minute discussant paper being read, you know, because I had to pay attention in the unconference the whole time as opposed to letting my mind just kind of wander off to wherever it wanted to go as I normally do at academic conferences. We could arrange this for you, Mills. I mean, we can. I'd be happy to just give a lecture to you for an hour, maybe. You know, I would get so much more intellectual work done if you would do that, Dan. Maybe you could just stop by my office once a day. I'd get so much more email done. Yeah, I was going to say, you can get your email done in a regular conference. I know. As long as you have a Wi-Fi connection while you're listening. You know, what I found about that, I totally agree with Tom, and it really sounds like this conference is a case of this, but I also have come to see the unconference format as a way to begin things, to sort of be playful, play around at something, but also to kind of start new projects, to germinate new ideas. I kind of feel like the standard academic conference is a way to disseminate, well, sometimes, you know, what you've learned. Like, here's a chapter from my book. Here's my essay. Finished work as opposed to. Yeah, finished work. Right. And I think it turns out that I think most academic work is in other stages than that. And, you know, I think also by the time you get to an academic conference where there are talks, you kind of already know, like so-and-so is doing a dissertation on X or Y or, oh, yeah, that professor just wrote a book on this thing and now he's going to give a talk on a book, on that book.
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And then once you communicate that kind of knowledge and are open to collaboration, and that's, I think, another big part of it, rather than everyone showing how smart they are, you're thinking about potential collaborations and things you can work on um either you know centrally or in a decentralized way um and you know i think that's why we've been able to launch things out of that camp and i've seen other on conferences where um you know for instance the the crisis camps that have gone on over the past couple of years where um you know new software has emerged that's really helped out in Haiti or other disasters. There's some software that came out of one of these unconferences that's being used actually in the Gulf region right now for this oil spill where people can tweet in sightings of slicks and it auto-generates a map for rescuers and others to use. So I think if that's your goal, if you want to try to start something, the unconference is a great place to do it. So that raises then the question for Kevin and Bill is, what do you think got started? Wow. Certainly there was the creation of a lot of relationships. And so, you know, what really jumps out for me with these unconferences, and this was the first one I've really been a part of. I was a part of a workshop that Bill had organized that felt very unconference-like, but I think doesn't follow the model that you guys have at that camp and other places. So, you know, I went into this thinking, yeah, I really want to do an unconference, but I'm not really sure how they work. And what struck me was that there was the opportunity to build relationships that people, I think, had wanted to form but just didn't have the chance to. And I'm at a smaller institution. I'm not in a major urban center. And so one of the things that I feel as an academic is that I'm a bit isolated. I can't get together with a group of 10 like-minded people in my field. Maybe nobody can, say, for two or three places on the continent, but that's certainly the impression that I have. And so I go to conferences really wanting to build relationships so that we can do something together in the future. And that came out because we had the opportunity on that first day to just hang out and to make things and to discuss ideas in a more unstructured fashion. But there was a tangible output too. And that's where this conference was perhaps a little bit different from other unconferences because what we did is we merged not really a traditional format with this new format because what we did on day two was still a little bit unusual. But in the same way that a lot of conferences have as their purpose, the assembly and presentation of papers so that they can be published in a larger set of papers later on, each person that came to the symposium had written a paper. And so, Bill, maybe we can talk in a second about what happened on the first day, but just for a moment, sticking on the second day, what we did is we took those papers and we didn't present them, but everyone else commented on what the writer had said and then talked about opportunities for how the paper might be changed or adjusted in light of the other papers that we were discussing on the second day and in light of what happened on day one. So we're going to be coming out with a book that will probably be called Pass Play. And right now we're exploring the different opportunities and options for how it might be published and what the web presence and everything else will be. But that will be a real tangible result because you've got a bunch of people who really focused on putting down on paper and creating digital artifacts that can express some of their ideas. So that was one output. And Bill, what do you think about outputs from day one? Well, I think that, just to explain briefly, on day one what we did was we had a room that we called the toy room, and we had people have a chance to experiment with a number of different kinds of technologies, everything from Lego Mindstorms and RFID, radio frequency ID tags, to Arduinos, to 3D printing in the form of MakerBot, to a little computer-controlled machine that can cut pictures and patterns out of paper, out of sticky back vinyl, that kind of thing. In the other room, while the toy room was open, people could go from station to station and learn how to use these various fabricating technologies. In the other room, people like Rob McDougall were leading sessions on kind of game design, leading people through a series of what Rob called barely games, these kind of things that almost don't even deserve such a grand title as game, but they're certainly a kind of a form of reflective play. And I think that in addition to the kind of obvious book outcome, the relationships that were forged there, I think that things like kind of techniques, toys, and games also came out of day one and can be used in our further research. And I think what also came out were just new ideas about how we do conferences generally. So certainly the unconference is an established form in large part because of what you guys are doing at George Mason. But what we were trying to do more broadly was play with beyond just the notion of conference, play with the notion of book, play with the expression of our research in the creation of items, just generally play with the forms in which we're operating and the methodologies that you were talking about, Dan. Yeah, and I think from my perspective as one of the participants, Kevin, you asked the question about sort of what happened from day one to day two. And I noticed as day two went on and we were talking about various papers, all throughout the day people were bringing in examples of things that had happened on day one. And that was these examples of somehow informing their thinking about what they were doing then on, what they were talking about on day two. So I certainly saw a lot of that connection. And I think that is one of the things that I personally liked about the conference is that, you know, day one was really the unconference, and we got to kind of do what we wanted and focus on the things that we were interested in and play around with various things. But on day two, we had to, to a degree, put our nose to the grindstone and get some work done also that was going to have some sort of a tangible outcome because, well, as a participant UN conferences, I've had some wonderful ideas and I've built some great relationships with other scholars. I will say that I'm not sure sort of what the tangible thing was that I walked away with. And in this case, at a minimum, I walked away with some great comments on my paper and some great ideas from other people's papers. And I think the book is going to be really interesting when it's done. I'm going to be at VAT Camp London, which I'll advertise right now, which is in early July and just before Digital Humanities 2010. And one thing that's neat for that conference that I think speaks to this point about outcomes and maybe making them a little clearer is that JISC, which is the sort of, well, I don't know, I wouldn't say the equivalent of SSHRC or NEH, but it's a major funding body for the digital humanities in the UK. And they're putting up some money, not a lottery ticket's worth of money, but an iPad's worth of money for a kind of challenge as part of that Camp London, where developers and others can kind of come in and build a tool, and it will be judged during DH 2010. And I think a prize awarded for the sort of, you know, best outcome and groups can form and things like that. But kind of a neat idea just to spin on this to have something tangible come out of it that can get recognition as well. Because, you know, the comment I often hear about the young conferences is, you know, how do you get the travel budget to go to it? Because, you know, well, I'm not really presenting a paper. I'll just be talking to other people and something might come out of it. Now, it seems like on playing with history, you guys actually had paper, so that was a good justification. Yeah, that always helps. What do others think about the extensibility of this model to, let's say, I don't know, medieval history or other fields in the humanities that might not have any physical computing pieces or don't, you know, don't really circulate a lot of their members in digital humanities circles. Is this something, I mean, we've clearly borrowed the unconference model from Bar Camp and these sorts of kind of techie areas, but do you think it can expand out to other areas of academia? teaches them how to cook various kinds of medieval recipes. And then they, you know, sit around and eat the recipes and think about cuisine and stuff like that.
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Oh, it's terrible. Yeah. And, and ancient Roman food is even worse. It's almost inedible. It wasn't delivery pizza. No, it definitely wasn't. So, okay. So one, so like, you know, our audience will know that I am all about the unconference and new models of scholarly communication. And so this is kind of a devil's advocate question, but I think one question that a skeptic might ask is, so where's the history, right? So, you know, playing with Legos sounds great. I love it. Actually, I wrote my college admissions entrance essay on playing with Legos, but another story. But, you know, where's the humanities content in all of this? What can we actually, you know, learn? What could you use in a classroom to teach history to students? What can you use to grow scholarly knowledge, grow historical knowledge in all of this? And, you know, I think that's a criticism we get about a lot of what we do. And, you know, it's probably, it's maybe, it maybe is more focused when we start thinking about play and, you know, I think we get to the heart of that question in situations like that. So where is the beef, I guess, is to borrow something from the 1980s? Well, it's a great question because the real answer is we don't know until we get in there and you know that's precisely the point from my perspective my focus tends to be on simulations and serious games in history and so you know the the first line in my explanation when i'm talking about this is that we've gotten used to expressing history as text and that's part of the problem we need to move beyond so what are the other forms that we can explore and as you guys well know Rory Rosenzweig and others were saying and have been saying for a while that people love history they don't just miss they don't necessarily like it in the way that we as academics express it so you know partly what's happened or what happened over the course of the 20th century was that history went from being something very general to being something in the academy we thought we owned and we made it fit into tight little boxes. And so now we need to break out and we don't necessarily know when we start what they're going to look like because we can at times be stuck in the forms that we've got. So Bill will have, I think, a much more cogent answer to this. But the reason that I started to go down this path was just so I could sit down with people like you, Mills, and find out about how to organize a course in a way that I never would have imagined before. Okay, Bill, the more cogent answer? The pressure's on, Bill. around us as some kind of time traveler from the past. And yet, for some reason, we choose to convey our consciousness of the past or understanding of the past often in text, you know, more rarely in picture or video or sound, and sort of least, at least for professional historians, least frequently of all as actual physical objects. But we have the capacity now to make an amazing range of different objects and materials and so forth, and to make objects actually interact with people by embedding various kinds of small computers and sensors and stuff in them. It seems to me that the possibility of remaking environments and artifacts and so forth so that they can actually communicate theses about the past or convey a kind of sense of historical consciousness is really one of the great opportunities that we have available to us right now. And, you know, go ahead. Sorry. Well, I'm sort of reminded in Kevin and what you were saying about, you know, we don't really know until we start, you know, doing this work until we until we get get some hands on time with these with these new technologies, technologies, these new modes of working. I'm sort of reminded of the early 18th century electrical machine. So I'm putting on an old historian of science hat here. But at the time that it was built, that, you know, Hawksby's electrical machine, it was really used as a toy. I mean, it was something that they kind of rolled out at the Royal Society. They would, you know, fire it up and turn a crank and the evacuated globe would glow and they would show it off to wealthy patrons. And it was sort of a parlor trick. You know, there was sort of a glowing globe of static electricity, and that was something that was fun and interesting and cool. But there was really not a whole lot of scientific purpose to it. It didn't really for a very long time go anywhere. Static electricity was essentially a game, a parlor trick for most of the 18th century until it wasn't anymore, until in the later 18th century, it inspired and evolved into a whole new sort of a more scientific view of electricity and kind of the basis for electrical physics as we know it today. And so I'm sort of struck by that and that this criticism that I, with my devil's advocate um pat levied is is is that's exactly right that's the that's the response to it is that like well we don't know and i think one of the things that's hard i think for academics to get their heads around is is that i don't know answer um and we tend to use that a lot in the digital humanities and it's and i think it's's a hard thing for people to, to accept that, you know, we're real, we are really experimenting and, and we don't know where it's going to take us all the time. And that's, that I think is not something we're very accustomed to in the humanities. Well, and, and yeah, but although our colleagues in other buildings on campus in the sciences are very accustomed to that, they, they often have no idea what the result of an experiment is going to be. They have some clues, but then also they run a different experiment and they end up with the glue on the post-it note that we all love so much, which was a complete accident. So yeah, I think you're right, Tom, that we often don't know what's going to happen with these. But I went into this conference with that question in front of me and kind of worried about it because I wanted to know, like, if I'm going to spend, if I'm going to come back and try to convince somebody to buy me a craft robo, then, you know, and spend $300 of our department technology budget on that, I need to be able to say. I can't say, well, I don't know what I'm going to, what the tangible outcome is going to be. So, you know So the example that Bill and I played around with at the conference was one of the things that I'm very interested in is the kind of ephemeral street art of graffiti, which is something I guess, you know, the first cave drawings were some form of graffiti. But, you know, something that's been with us in human society for a very long time, and it's a global phenomenon. It happens in all sorts of different ways. And it's there today, and it's gone tomorrow. Or at least gone as soon as Thank you. of them. And our students see that. I can show them pictures of tags that I've taken pictures of, stencil tags and that sort of thing. And they see it and they see it in downtown Washington. They see it here in the city of Fairfax. It happens everywhere. But they don't really think about it much unless they themselves are art students or perhaps taggers in their own right, which hopefully not too many of them are. So what Bill and I did was we took one of those tags, which I dubbed the angry worm because that was about the closest title I could put on it. And it was on, you know, in the city of Vienna, Austria, a couple of years ago when I was there with some students. And so Bill and I were able to take that image that I took, port it over into Illustrator, Adobe Illustrator, and then from there create a stencil from it and then go around Niagara-on-the-Lake and tag buildings for the rest of the day. Fortunately, that's the last thing. That was Bill's. It was Bill that did that, not me. So although they have been asking for Kevin's phone number, I think, ever since. But the reason I cite that is you can still say, well, where's the history there? Well, now I could give that to my students and say, okay, now tag your notebook with that. And not a building on campus, but just try to do that. It's not easy to do or try to create something like that. That's not easy to do. So there's an artistic process that went on here that we're just replicating through digital means.
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And how complicated would that, you know, the decorations on monasteries, how difficult would that be to do? And so, as Bill said, you know, when they start grappling with evidence as a tangible thing as opposed to an image on the screen in the classroom or a picture in a book, but it becomes an actual tangible thing that they try to do something with, then my hope is that they're going to start thinking about it in some slightly different ways and maybe come up with some new insights. I mean, it's one of the participants in the conference, Stephan Levesque, Stephan Levesque said that, you know, he has in his book on thinking, historical thinking, that, you know, if you tried to coach a sports team the way we teach history students, the sports would have died out a long time ago because we stand up in the class and we tell the students all about the past, and that's the standard mode of teaching. And even if we have interactive exercises and that kind of thing, but only rarely do we actually take our students into an archive and have them produce real historical knowledge, where if you're coaching a sports team, you can tell the kids what to do, but that doesn't work. You have to get them on the rink, or since we're talking about Canada, or out in a field somewhere and give them a ball or a hockey puck or whatever and have them start to play. So that's where I think this is actually a little different. And the unconference format made it possible for us as participants to also have that experience of play that we wouldn't normally have in a standard conference environment. See, now this is where I think what seems like very out in left field, I guess, to traditional scholars in history actually I think wraps around and becomes very comprehensible to those who do, let's say, the history of the book, who learn about printmaking and really understand how a book is put together physically. Then they can go to an archive and really understand, you know, what it means when you see pages that aren't cut or look very carefully at the kind of binding. These sorts of things become historical clues. And I think that there's probably some evangelism we could do to talk about the way in which this is actually ultimately less radical than I think people think, that the kinds of things that Bill and Kevin are doing are really to just recapture more of, you know, of material culture history beyond textual history, which we have been too focused on, I think, as professional historians. And, you know, I think it's sort of an open secret that this is something that would help you out if you understood how things are made, put together. And then I also think, you know, like you said, Mills, just the fact that you went to this conference or this unconference, it may not be actually, you might have some immediate result, but you could think two or three years down the road of some kind of classroom scenario where it might be really handy to have an exercise similar to what you've done there. And I think that's really important that there might be delayed outcomes or something that you think back upon in the same way that when we read a book, we might not have immediate thoughts of how it could impact our own research, but then you might think about it years later. Well, let me then take that and turn to one other thing that I noticed just both as a participant in the conference, but as an observer of the conference as it was happening. And that is, it seemed to me that there were kind of two groups of people out of the 20 there. And those that were there because of their strong interest in games and gaming, and those that were there because of their interest in not games or gaming. They were people like, you know, that's not why I was there because I'm not a gamer. And sometimes, I was a little worried that sometimes we were going to be sort of talking on different planes and not really understanding one another, but it seemed to me that that wasn't the case. I don't know, Kevin, Bill, what was your perspective on that? Were the gamers and the non-gamers able to really have a conversation where they all made sense to each other? I think absolutely. We did not want this to be a conference about gaming. And so because that's my focus, or serious gaming at least is my focus, I know a lot of people in the community who could have been a part of that. And so that was one of the challenges for me was I wanted to invite them, but I realized pretty quickly that if I did, then we would have 20 people talking about history games in the room and it would be over. And I think a lot of us who've been doing this, I know I've certainly felt this way in the past year or so, Rog McDougall as well was talking along a similar line at the conference, are having some doubts about some of the claims that were made, let's say five years ago, about what gaming could do in history or serious gaming might do in history. And so in a way, some of our research has moved forward and we can stand back and be a little bit more critical. But, you know, more broadly, I think what we wanted it to be about was obviously play. And so you can play in games, but there are lots of other places that you can play. And sometimes, as Rob pointed out, getting out of games is actually a much better idea. In some of the foundational literature in gaming, two concepts arise, and they're on a spectrum. So at one end is Ludus, which is a very focused kind of gaming situation in which you have clear rules and a goal that you're trying to achieve. And at the other end is Paideia, and Paideia is open and free play. So Paideia would be bouncing a ball in your driveway, and Lutis is playing basketball at high school on a team against another high school's team. And so I think what we wanted to do was get away from that Lutis side towards the Paideia side't recognize that this is a spectrum, but the games are not the only place where play can happen. And I think the gamers came in knowing that, but it was helpful to hear it again. And I think the non-gamers came in and maybe heard the gamers speaking a little more comprehensively than maybe we had in the past. Perhaps I'm just speaking for myself, but I certainly think, as I say, that we're able to be, well, I guess have a little bit more of a context and a good view of things now that some of the initial enthusiasm around serious gaming has passed. Bill, what do you think? The gamers and the non-gamers talking to or past each other? No, I think I kind of, I really agree with what Kevin said that the kind of emphasis was really shifting toward the play end of the spectrum. I mean, just speaking for myself, I don't have anything against games. I'm a lot more interested in play and being playful and playing as a kind of a way of learning new things. And I think that, I mean, one of the things that I found interesting that was in our discussions on the second day when we talked about playful, play tended to slide toward the games end of things rather than the toys end of things, even though many of the participants later sort of said, well, yeah, I had some toy-like examples, but it just didn't occur to me to mention them in context. One of the things that I think has happened is that those of us who were really focusing on serious gaming and what it might do in the humanities and might do in history were going in that direction because we were frustrated by the reification of text. So this notion that history was text. And I think for two or three years what happened was in this small community that history became games. So we went from reifying one thing and reacting to that reification to reifying another thing. And as I say, what I think is happening now is that we're recognizing that there is that spectrum and we need to move away from that and have a more comprehensive view. And that was certainly there. I think the default is sometimes to start talking about play and then go to the conventional form in the same way that we talked about history and went to the conventional form of text. So it's a journey. And as I say, I was really pleased that we're becoming more comprehensive. And, you know, the stuff that you're doing, Bill, is newer and or at least newer to those people who haven't heard of it before. And I think as time goes on, I'm really excited about what's going to happen in the next two to three years. I think the notion of toy is going to become much more part of our discourse and conversation. Yeah, and before too much longer, maybe Bill and I will actually get together and build the magic wand idea that we came up with.
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I mean, that's kind of a segue into some of the work you're doing at the Simulating History project that you're working on. Can you talk just a little bit about some of the mobile apps that you're working on? Because this is something we've talked about a lot on the podcast is the future of mobile history computing. Yeah, so just to stick with the journey, initially my focus was on 3D environments. And the arguments have been made that what we've seen in the last 10 years is a shift from entering into the box of the computer and into virtual reality to pulling computing out and taking it into the real world. So I've built 3D environments and on the spectrum, sticking with the notion of spectrum for a second, although a different one now, I've kind of done that journey from the box out. So 2005, 2006 was a very big, expensive, and wonderful virtual environment that took a tremendous amount of time to building an isometric environment. And for those people who aren't familiar with it, an isometric environment is one in which you take a God's eye view. And so you're looking down on a map or a game board or whatever metaphor you want to use. And so that's a simulation that's out now that deals with epidemics. And then continuing along the spectrum, I move further away and now I'm building an application that's really a tour of Niagara-on-the-Lake where the conference was. And the idea is that you will download this little application onto your iPhone and you can walk around Niagara-on-the-Lake and you can take a conventional kind of tour in which you roam. We're calling it roam mode. You can just roam around town and as you come to different buildings, GPS knows where you are and so will tell you about the building that you happen to be standing beside. And will also tell you where to find the washrooms and everything else in town that a tourist might need. And then what we also have as part of the same application is more of a quest mode, opportunity for you to go on a quest and try and solve a mystery that we created in the town. And in the course of doing that quest and moving around town to different places and different sites, you learn about the early 19th century and specifically the War of 1812 in Niagara, what it meant to people and what people have thought about it in retrospect. So I started off by saying that the virtual environment was a lot of work. Everything's a lot of work, as we all know now. But it was a lot of fun to literally be out and to also be out in the sense of away from the academy and thinking about public history. And we're expecting a tremendous influx of visitors into Niagara for the bicentennial of the War of 1812. So I'm not sure what's going to happen in the United States, but it's going to be a big deal for us. So with all these visitors, we thought this was a wonderful opportunity to get people to think about what happened a couple of hundred years ago in this specific location and what it's meant for us since. Given what happened in Washington during the War of 1812, I think there might not be a lot of commemoration here. Extra guards around the White House. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I took that tour and it was really, really interesting. Tom, you know, you would have chuckled along with me because it was very, very similar to something that Tom and I and Josh Greenberg, who was formerly at the Center for History and New Media and now at the New York Public Library and at the conference as well. The three of us had thought a number of years ago it would be fun to do something like this, and we talked to one of the cell phone providers, Sprint Nextel, I think it was, and they were kind of interested in it, but the technology was nowhere near what it is today. Pre-iPhone, pre-apps. Yeah, people didn't talk about apps then. And we weren't even sure how it would be possible to make it. We knew it could be done. Our idea was something similar to what, Kevin, you developed, but it was to stop Booth from assassinating Lincoln and so send you off on a quest through D.C. And it was just not possible several years ago. I mean, it was technically possible, but it would have required such an expenditure of time and effort that we pretty quickly gave up on it. And now, you know, the technological environment has changed so much that I got to walk around Niagara-on-the-Lake with an iPhone in my hand and learn about the War of 1812. It was really, in particular, as somebody who's spent a lot of time thinking about K-12 teaching recently, you know, I can't wait to see kids wandering around D.C. and cities wherever doing similar kinds of things because I think that's going to be really, really popular. So let's see. Now, Bill, one thing you work at, one of your projects is the Lab for Humanistic Fabrication. We've talked a lot about this during the podcast today, but can you sum up humanistic fabrication in just a few sentences? Sure. I guess if you kind of ask the person on the street what their idea of a great humanist would be, they might come up with somebody like Da Vinci or Cellini or somebody like that. It wasn't until relatively recently, if you take the long view, that humanists stopped working with their hands and stopped making things as well as, you know, writing things or stopped painting, stopped photographing, doing all of those things to focus on text. And so what I've been trying to do over the past few years is start to bring these kind of practices of making back into my own work, into the work of my students, into the graduate teaching, to see what happens if you take the perspective that humanists can make more than texts as ways of communicating their understanding about, you know, in the big view about what it means to be a human. Okay, so you're not manufacturing humans. That was the concern of my 13-year-old. He said he's fabricating humans? Well, I'm fabricating humanists. Yeah, yeah. I explained that he had to read the whole word, not just humans. So, well, for those of you listening to the podcast today who haven't seen either Kevin's work or Bill's work, we'll link this up in the notes, the liner notes for the podcast, so you can visit both of their websites because they're doing some really fascinating and interesting things and kind of even further out on the cutting edge than I had realized until I got a chance to spend some time with them. So it was really, for me, it was really stimulating and exciting to just have these kinds of conversations in depth. And again, that's what I think is one of the great advantages of the much more informal conference environment is that not only did we have the unconference day and the day of more serious work, but we had, since we were a small group, we could spend a lot of time together just in the more informal, around-the-edges conversations where things like what we've been talking about can get explained in detail, and it generates so many new ideas. Isn't that when all the good things happen? Yeah. It's all on the fringes of the conference. I mean, even at a button-down academic conference, it's always the hallways, the lobby, the coffee shop. Or when your mind is wandering during that 20 minute paper, that's really a 30 minute paper. We really have to change that, don't we? We do. We do. It's, I think, you know, I don't know anybody who loves that format. Certainly not the poor graduate students who have to get up and present for the first time in those environments when you can see the sweat running down their temples. One thing that strikes me is that the advantage of those kinds of conferences is that, and I don't think we want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, is that there are established conventions. You can feel quite comfortable about what's going to happen because the person who wrote the paper owns the mic and they're now in control. And what we did on day two, and this followed something that Bill has done, was that the writer of the paper wasn't allowed to speak. And so that person could ask clarifying questions of the others, but there was an appointed first reader for the paper who would talk about what he or she thought of the paper. And then the rest of the group commented. And as I say, the writer could only ask for clarification. But that requires a high degree of trust. And I think we were able to do that. And you're able to do that in small groups.
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And sometimes that can be great, but that can also make people feel uncomfortable. Yeah, I think that in the large conference environment, I was thinking about that, and Kevin was, I have to say, very strict about the no talking rule. People would start to say something and he would raise his hand, no talking. But that just, obviously all of us who've been to large academic conferences, that's not going to work because people are there so they can talk, not so that they can be told not to talk. But I think you're right that the trust issue is a really important one. And my own feeling is that the large conference is dead, but the corpse has just not wandered off yet because people don't like them. The only people who like them are the associations who depend on them for their income, but they've become sort of like the survey course, the large lecture course that we know generates no actual learning among students, but it's necessary to build our enrollment budget on. These large conferences don't generate much in the way of real intellectual activity, but they are necessary for the associations to build their budgets on. And so until we come up with some other way of funding our associations, we are probably stuck with these conferences. Do you think people used to like them? Yeah, because I think they used to be a lot smaller. And I think they used to be a lot more informal. You talk to members of the AHA or OAH who went to these meetings, and even the full professors would go, and they would hobnob, and there were cocktail hours. And I think people felt like it had a social function that was a little bit closer to the unconference than people might imagine. And it was largely a good old boy network at the time, probably 80%, 90%, something like that. But our colleague, Roy, the founder of the Center for History and New Media, he actually wrote something a number of years ago about the reform of the American Historical Association's annual meeting and about how back in the, it was in the interwar period, I can't remember now if it was the 20s or the 30s, people were having these same kinds of complaints that we're airing today. And so the reform was to add the discussant to the panel, thereby adding a fourth paper to go along with the other three. A huge leap forward, I believe that was called. Yes, I think so. A great leap forward, yes. Well, you know, this has been, it's been really great, Kevin and Bill, having you on the podcast today. It's, you know, as I say, I think it was one of the best conferences I've ever attended and that, you know, I came back really, really inspired and actually very uncommon for me, I sat down right after I got back and started trying to finish my paper because I didn't want to lose the thinking and the enthusiasm that had been generated there. And so I'm actually almost done. Whether I finish is a whole other story, but I am almost done, which is very unusual for me. Usually I leave a conference and don't want to think about it. So, you know, thanks for putting this all together. And here on the podcast, we're going to check back in when the book is done and see what's been happening and what other kinds of things have been generated by the conference. So we really appreciate you being on the podcast today, and we'll look forward to talking to you again soon. Okay, thanks for having us. Please visit us online at digitalcampus.tv what you can do for your country fear itself
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From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi-weekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Here it goes. This is Digital Campus number 19 for the 16th of January, 2008. Big things in small packages. I'm Dan Cohen. Well, welcome to our first podcast of 2008. We're looking forward to another year of podcasting at Digital Campus. And of course, as always, we are podcasting here live from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in scenic Fairfax, Virginia, right outside the nation's capital. And Tom Scheinfeld is here with me at the Center for History and New Media. Hey, Tom. Hey, Dan. And we have an overseas visitor, but someone who's well-known to the digital campus groupies out there. Hi, Mills. Where are you calling from today? I'm calling in from Vienna, Austria today. Ah, and how are things in Vienna, Austria? Cold and foggy today, but otherwise good. Great. And what are you doing over there? I'm leading a student study tour to Prague, Vienna, and Budapest, and so we're kind of at the halfway point. Great. Terrific. Well, the Skype, again, sounds terrific. Probably should have been on our top 10 list from a couple of weeks ago, but I think Skype is still one of those big sort of silent stories. I mean, just the quality of this is terrific, and the ability to do it overseas like this is fantastic. Well, let's dig right into our news stories from the past couple of weeks and how we always begin the podcast. But first, just a little note from the Center for History and New Media. I think there's a couple of initiatives that Tom wanted to mention that I think will be of interest to our audience. Tom, we have two new, we have a new podcast and a new sort of summer camp, I guess you could call it. Do you want to talk about those briefly? Yeah, sure. Yeah, we're very pleased to announce another addition to the CHNM podcast, podcasting stable, CHNM podcasting network. We've got a new podcast coming online either the end of next week or the end of this week or early next. And it's called That Podcast. And that stands for the humanities and technology podcast. So we've got that podcast and that stands for the humanities and technology podcast so we've got that podcast coming online that's a production by CHNM's creative lead Jeremy Boggs and one of our crack web developers here and actually a great student of digital humanities Dave Lester're launching that podcast, really showing us up here at Digital Campus with an interview with Matt Mullenweg, the founder and head of WordPress, the popular blogging platform. So that's going to be a video podcast, actually, and the format's going to be a short interview with someone of interest to the digital humanities community, and then followed by a short sort of hands-on, very practical tutorial in how to do something. So how to build a WordPress theme or something like that. And so it's going to mix an interview with something very practical. And I think it's going to be a fantastic new podcast. And I encourage everybody to go to that podcast, T-H-A-T-P-O-D-C-A-S-T dot org. That should be great. And what else did you want to mention? Right. And so then there's another initiative kind of riffing on the VAT theme. It's called VAT Camp, the Humanities and Technology Camp. And what we're going to do is, together with Dave and Jeremy, is we're going to have a brief weekend-long summer bar camp-style unconference on digital humanities here at the Center for History and New Media. And that's going to happen on May 31st and June 1st. And the idea basically is just to bring together a bunch of people, digital campus listeners, hopefully among them, a bunch of people together here at the Center for History and New Media and very informally present ideas we're working on, software demos, have informal training sessions, discussions of research findings, various other things in a very kind of informal way. If people are familiar with BarCamp, it's going to be that kind of thing where people kind of turn up. We're not presenting formal papers or anything. It's not a conference like that. It's more of a meetup where people can share ideas and form new collaborations. And instead of people just listening to papers, everyone who attends is expected to participate in some way, make some tangible contribution to the conference. And so that's called That Camp. And you can find the announcement for it and send us an application, which really is just an email letting us know that you're interested. You can find information about that at thatcamp.org, T-H-A-T-C-A-M-P.org. So we're really excited about these two new initiatives and hope people will take a look. Sounds great. All right. Well, I will certainly be there. I'm looking forward to that. And for those who haven't been to an unconference, I mean, I think this is a new trend. I think it's a great trend having just come from the AHA where things tend to be very formal. There's a panel that's up on a stage and giving presentations and everyone sort of listens dutifully. This is going to be something much more interactive where I think communities of interest will sort of get together around a table with some laptops and hash out some things, learn some things. So looking forward to that for the summer. Thanks, Tom. Well, it's a new year, and I suppose we're always supposed to be optimistic at the beginning of the year, but we noticed a lot of pessimistic, melancholy stories full of sorrow and things going south. Three in particular that we wanted to mention in our news roundup. The first one, which I think probably didn't get as much coverage as it should have considering how prominent this browser and company used to be, but Netscape is going away after all these years. I mean, I think it's been 13 or 14 years since Netscape, which those of us who remember the early rise of the web and the excitement around it, I mean, Netscape was really the Google of the mid-1990s. It was the first stock that really took off and made people millionaires and billionaires. And, you know, it just sort of has this quiet death here. It had been acquired, the Netscape browser, by AOL. They actually acquired Netscape Communications Corporation in 1999. And, you know, they converted it to open source software. And lots of things happened from there. Of course, Mozilla also came out of this rocky period for Netscape. And that, of course, led to Firefox. And it I saw the news story, I had this brief pang of sort of sadness about it because I can still remember creating my first web page with Netscape Composer, which that disappeared a long time ago. But that was really the first easy tool for creating web pages for people who knew nothing about it. Yeah, I think it is kind of the end of an era. I think Netscape, even though really you know, really, it was only a few years there where it was a major player in the browser space. It was fairly quickly with the launch of Windows 95, which bundled Internet Explorer with it, and the browser wars that ensued. It was really by, oh, probably, I don't know, probably by 1999 when AOL acquired Netscape, the browser wars had kind of been decided. But the core of Netscape, which was released as Mozilla, kind of kept an alternative alive. And Netscape really does live on in Firefox. And in many ways, the browser wars are alive and well. And Firefox, the descendant of Netscape, is actually doing quite well. And I don't think anybody in 1999 when Netscape went to AOL and then later when the Mozilla Corporation and Foundation were spun off from that, anybody would have predicted the success of this successor to Netscape. And so it's really a great story. And so while I mourn Netscape with some sadness, I think that we can all be hopeful that much of it lives on today. And in fact, the code base really does live on very much so in Firefox and all the products that have been built on Netscape technologies, on the Gecko rendering engine, on the Thunderbird email client, which was the email client that was built into Netscape. There's actually even Mills, the composer, lives on. I guess Mozilla has a product called Enview.
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So it does. It really lives on in the Mozilla foundation. And so hopefully it will continue to do well. Right. And I guess the important point here is that Netscape was, I think, you know, hopefully it will continue to do well. I think that's what really excited people. And a platform that was network-based, that was web-based, that's why the early browsers had web composition built into them and not just browsing built in. They also had email and all these other things. And their whole point was Microsoft's there, they're a monopoly, but there's this new thing, the Internet, that's taking off and this new web technology that makes the Internet very easy for people, for instance, in academia, non-technical users, to kind of participate in the Internet, to post things on the Internet, to read things off the Internet in a rich environment. And they sort of saw that as, in a sense, a kind of new operating system or a new platform. And I think that's really their legacy is that it was a sort of alternative to the desktop model. Now, you know, in some sense, it's ended up being more of a browser ultimately, and they never really got there. But I think the web in general has obviously taken off so much. And I think they were the first company to really have that vision of what the web could be. Yeah. And I think they were just maybe a little too far ahead of their time. I mean, and in fact, now the remnants of the Netscape code base that live on in Mozilla are really being used as a platform. I mean, look at Zotero. Zotero is built directly on what the descendants of the Netscape platform. Yeah, you know, if you're a programmer and you actually look under the hood at Firefox, as we do for the Zotero project, there are so many system calls and various pieces of code in Firefox that begin with NS, which was the Netscape insignia sort of in the code. So it'll be NS underline and then some other function. And those are all, you know, the original Netscape code is kind of there. It's really interesting sort of, you know, as a historian of science, to look under the hood and see those kind of legacies of the earlier iterations of the software. So it's there. Maybe someday there'll be like software archaeologists who actually look through the code base of something like Zotero and find these legacies of older programs. Yeah, yeah. Well, goodbye Netscape. And of course, Firefox still is coming on strong and building market share worldwide very quickly, actually. So, you know, I think it does. It's a continuing story. Well, two other more minor stories, perhaps. I think that builds on what we were talking about last week in our year-end wrap-up. I think the first one, Mills, you had speculated about, about the problems with adult-type material in educational environments. And I think you were talking about Second Life and the problems there, and I'll talk about Second Life in just a second. But we did notice that one of the big alternatives to Facebook, which is called Ning, N-I-N-G. A lot of people might not have heard of Ning, but interestingly, there's a Netscape connection because Ning was founded and funded by Mark Andresen, who was the young programmer who started what became the Netscape Communications Corporation. And Mark's been doing a lot of things. He's done some cloud computing companies, but he started this social networking company called Ning, where you can kind of set up your own social networks for different places and corporations. And it's kind of like a, you know, they call it a white label service where you can kind of, it's a blank slate that has all the networking components and then you put on top of it what your community wants. Well, it turns out that what the Ning community wants is porn, because evidently quite a bit of what goes on in Ning is sort of porn-related social networking. I think, I guess, Mills, this speaks to the problems that you were saying about sort of bringing some of these new tools like social networking or virtual worlds into the educational space. Yeah, I mean, it's really, it's the problem of the open environment in what for education is difficult to deal with because, you know, we, especially for K-12 education, it can't be an open environment like that because you do have users in this open environment who use it for the things that they happen to be interested in. And in case they happen to be interested in porn and lots of them. And so that really kind of means that school systems that have no time to sort of investigate the merits of the situation are just going to say, no, we're not going to allow that to be used. And, you know, I was talking really about Second Life when we discussed this earlier. Right, right. to squeeze in another story on this sort of March South, the pessimistic news roundup that we've got here, is that Second Life, and perhaps for these very reasons, because of the creepiness of it, especially for new users, seems to be stalling out. We noted a very good sort of summation from Brian Alexander over at Liberal Education Today, who noted several sort of symptoms of, I think, what we speculated at. We've been second-life pessimists for a year now on the podcast. But we did note that, you know, Brian noted several things, that the active participants seems to have leveled off at about a half a million. You know, plateauing for any new web company is very unusual, just considering the way these things tend to grow exponentially. They've had a lot of service outages, he notes. They've lost their chief technology officer. The number of dollars spent in Second Life, remember, you can kind of create these virtual dollars, but you have to create them out of real dollars. And that's not only leveled off, but it's actually started to decline toward the end of the year. And of course, they're losing sponsors like Pontiac. And I think all that speaks to this question of these sort of amorphous, open environments. Are they really going to work considering all the bad things that can happen there versus a structured environment? Well, I think all of these bits of information from that article you cite, I think it's a pretty good indication that Second Life is pretty much done. Because, I mean, we all know these companies come and go so fast in the Internet space that to be plateauing out this early and to have sponsors bailing out this early in their life means that people are just moving on to something else. So it makes me really wonder about all the hype about investing in Second Life as an educational platform. I think that that's probably money badly spent. Yeah, I mean I think it's truly amazing with all the amazing amount of publicity that Second Life has garnered that they're actually starting to turn down. So I mean I think it is one of these things where the technology is just not quite there yet. I think you go there and you kind of look around and you say, wow, this is cool. Then you go for your second time and you say, okay, well, wait, what else am I supposed to do here? And, oh, by the way, this is a little creepy. And then, you know, and ultimately you kind of fall off. It doesn't surprise me really, really at all. But I do think it's, at the same time, I think it's important for people to be pushing these boundaries. I think even if Second Life only turns out to be an experiment and a failed experiment, I think we will have learned a lot of things from it about virtual worlds and the potentials of them and also the problems with them. So I think we will see in 2008. Well, Tom and Mills, I think one story we may have missed in our year-end wrap-up in Digital Campus number 18 was really just a big story on the micro-laptop front. And there's a lot of news on this over the last couple of weeks that we wanted to kind of bundle together and talk about maybe the role for these super-small, super- super cheap laptops in academia, museums, and libraries. And, you know, that is, of course, the rise of the One Laptop per Child program in 2007. Obviously, this is directed at less at a college crowd and more at a perhaps elementary or middle school and perhaps up to the high school level. And also, of course, it was intended to be for the international community and particularly developing countries. Although in the last week, they've now said that they're going to try to push ahead and sell OLPCs, as they're known, or the XO, as the particular laptop that they're selling is called. The XO, which is a cheap $188 laptop.
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And actually, you could buy it. They had a program in the Christmas season called, I think it was called Give One, Get One, where if you paid $400, you could give one of these $200 laptops to a kid in the developing world, and you got one for yourself. And actually, I saw one of these live from someone who did that in downtown Silver Spring, where I live, right outside of Washington. There was a guy who had one of these XOs. And so I, of course, accosted him in a coffee shop and took a good look at it. And it's really an impressive piece of machinery for $188. I mean, the screen, as I think a lot of people have commented on, is pretty impressive, and it's got a really interesting new user interface, very, you know, unlike the kind of standard laptop, you know, Windows mouse environment that we're used to. Big, chunky icons. It has a kind of very Web 2.0 feel to it. And this guy was actually lamenting that there was no other, no one else around with a OLPC because he wanted to do one of these mesh networks that they're known for where you can share an internet connection and they sort of automatically create these networks. And so we talked about that a little bit, but he did this. And I think they're still available under these buy one, get one, or give one, get one programs. So it'd be nice to get one to play around with. And at the same time, there's been this rise. I mean, it's actually number two on Amazon.com. I just checked it out. Is this Asus EPC, which is a laptop that's selling for $399. It's very small, but it packs a lot in there. And it only has a seven-inch screen. I actually saw one of these also in a Panera. But If you want to go to Panera, if you want to see new laptop technology, I guess is the takeaway point here. Free Wi-Fi. Yeah. Every time. Right. The screen's too small, but Tom, you had said that they're probably coming out with a larger screen on this, on the Asus. Yeah, I think they are. I mean, I think one of the things, and I think this is one of the innovations that OLPC has really made, as you said, is the screen is really one of the things that I think has kept laptop prices high. And I think OLPC is really innovated in building a screen that not only does more things than your normal screen, but also is quite a bit cheaper to produce than other screens. I think Asus, again, limited, they wanted to keep it under $400, and so they, with screen costs being what they were, they had to keep it at kind of a 7-inch screen. I think now they've found a way to reduce costs again, and they're releasing a new model that is, I think has the same physical dimensions, case dimensions as the old one, but it actually is going to just extend the screen further out towards the edges of the box, and I think it's going to be an 8-inch screen. Yeah, they'll really need to do that. I mean, there's this giant black border, about a 2-inch wide black border around the screen, and that's the only drawback to it. Just to pause for a second and just flesh this out a little bit more, I mean, these are both laptops, the OLPCs XO and the ASUS. And indeed, Tom, you noted before we got on the podcast that there's a third $399 PC coming out or a third cheap ultra-mobile from EverX called the CloudBook that's going to be sold at Walmart, of all places, for $399. Similar kind of dimensions, also 7-inch screen to the Asus. It seems like there's a kind of budding market here. At the same time, we should note that a couple of the other stories from the past couple of weeks from OLPC is that Intel, one of the major corporate sponsors of the program, backed out. And that's, of course, because, again, this is an open source project. And Intel's also in the business of selling their own cheap PCs. And I think that got in the way. They're trying to sell some cheap PCs that run Windows to governments. These are often government sales that drive the market. And also at the same time, I think as sort of matching this Intel leaving the project is that OLPC, I think in part because they need a bigger market for things like their screen, which the screen really is remarkable and I think a breakthrough. But since they've only sold I think about000 or 200,000 of these OLPCs, they're trying to commercialize some of the technologies that make up the XO for other markets so that they bring the cost down through economies of scale. So the chief financial officer of OLPC left to actually create a new company, Mary Lou Jepson. I'm sorry, she was the chief technology officer. And interestingly enough, in this sort of Wagnerian opera between OLPC and Intel, she was actually a manager at Intel before she came to OLPC. But anyway, but she left to start a company called Pixel Qi. The Qi is actually the Chinese character QI is often how it's transliterated. And Qi, of course, being life energy, very much part of the Kumbaya, part of this OLPC project. But this is a for-profit company that's trying to, you know, get, for instance, the screen in other laptops or other cell phone-based platforms so that, you know, the manufacturers can produce enough of them. I mean, if they're producing them 100,000 at a time, the cost for the XO is going to stay at $200. And they had always wanted it to cost $100 or less. And the goal of Pixel Qi is to get the cost down even to maybe $75. And there, I think, things get really interesting as they're already getting interesting with these laptops, right? I mean, Mills, what are your thoughts about, you know, a laptop that goes down towards a kind of zero cost for, let's say, the K to 12, but also the college market? I mean, are there new applications that happen there? Is it just that more and more people will be carrying around the laptop? Well, I think one of the things in the college market that we'll see is that, I mean, if this really happens, then instead of four or five students in a class of 50 having laptops, more like 47 or 48 of the students will be carrying laptops. And then it's also possible to require it so that you're requiring students to be able to do things in class with the laptops. And so I think that opens up the possibility of all sorts of different teaching methods. And that's, I think, pretty exciting. I'm less sanguine about how it's going to go in the developing world, having spent time there. I don't think these machines are rugged enough for the environment that they're designing them for. I mean, I spent time in rural Cambodia this past spring, and these machines aren't going to survive physically in that kind of an environment. Yeah, I mean, you know, it looks rugged when you look at it, or at least let's say more rugged than a Mac laptop or most PC laptops. You know, the keyboard is sealed off. You know, The screen looks a little bit less finicky. But there are things like, for instance, the networking antenna. There are two of them that are sort of plastic and they kind of stick up or you should stick them up to get the maximum reception. You can see those kind of breaking off. You know, I know that Negroponte, the head of the OLPC project, has talked about, well, these are going to be able to be repaired by the kids themselves. But it is, you know, it's a tough thing to do, to try to do at this cost level. Yeah, yeah. But I got to say, I mean, I visited an elementary school in Cambodia. I mean, I think this is a wonderful project. I'm not slamming OLPC. I think it's a great thing, but I'm just not as enthusiastic. I'm enthusiastic in the long term, but this elementary school I visited had 4,000 students. It was the best school in its city. It was 4,000 students in a facility that holds 1,800. And so the kids can only go half a day. So that takes it down to 2,000 in a facility that holds 1,800, which meant that 200 of the kids had to be at recess at all times.
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I think actually OLPC's announcement just this weekend that they're moving into the American and especially urban inner city market is maybe a recognition of that. I think it's also a recognition of the fact that they've had a very hard time working and cutting the deals with foreign governments. I think their marketing strategy for the OLPC was always to cut deals, large deals, like to sell a million units to the government, to the education department of the government of Nigeria, for instance. And I think they've had a hard time cutting those deals in part because of competition from Intel and other makers of low-cost laptops and computers. But I think there is some recognition that maybe they were maybe a little ahead of their time. Maybe it's a little too early to go after the developing world, maybe the technology has to be refined, but that it's not too early to go after the developed world. And I think there's actually another kind of middle tier of countries which maybe aren't as, the needs and the challenges aren't as hard as somewhere like Cambodia but that OLPC could target. Let's say a place like Iran where there's high level of literacy. There's relative stability politically. There's problems like hunger, and those kinds of problems aren't as severe, but maybe they haven't quite had a chance to develop technologically as much as they could. So I think there are some opportunities here. I think there's also an opportunity in terms of administration on college campuses and libraries and museums in the U.S. and in developed countries. I think one of the big things about this story is kind of the rise of Linux. All of these machines are running on Linux. And if they become popular, we could be seeing a real open source challenge finally after years of it being predicted to the commercial operating systems. Yeah, that's a great point, Tom. I mean, this really could be a beachhead for Linux in the environments that we circulate in, in higher ed and libraries and museums, simply because when you get down to this cost level, at $400 or really when you get down even lower at $100 or $75 for a laptop, Microsoft charges anywhere between $50 and $100 per Windows installation to OEMs, to the manufacturers that they pass along. And so it becomes a huge chunk of the cost of a laptop. And so all these cheap laptops are going with Linux. The OLPC uses Linux that was created by Red Hat, which is one of the big Linux companies, a version of Linux that they created specifically for the OLPC. And the Ever, what is it, EverX? EverX CloudBook. CloudBook, yes. And then the Asus, which is this hot seller on Amazon. They've sold over 300,000 of these on Amazon in the last few months. They're using, well, let's see, one is GOS, which sounds like it's Google's operating system, and I think that's probably an intentional misdirection by the company. But it's actually just a version of Ubuntu, which is already gaining popularity as a kind of very approachable, non-techie interface. It has a nice, pretty user interface that's put on top of Linux. And I think also this EverX machine, yeah, so that's the GOS and the Asus is just a straight Ubuntu, right? Asus? I don't know. Yeah, I can't remember. But yeah, I think in... Yeah, I'm sorry. Right, so you could see if a lot of students, and particularly Mills, as you said, it's like that sort of final third that aren't bringing their laptops to class. If they can get a laptop for $199 at the sort of iPod level of purchase, and they're going to all be using Linux. They might not even know it, but that sort of represents a beachhead there. Right. That's the thing. I think it's like Linux has almost been – I think one of the big problems Linux has always had was that it was so geeky. And I think it just had this reputation. And as like the geeks operating system and something like, well, I can't touch Linux. Linux is something that only those people can use. I need something more user-friendly like Windows. I think they almost don't even know it. And the popularity of the Asus, of the EPC, shows that. I mean, this actually I think is the first time that Linux is really getting into ordinary consumers' hands on a large scale. And I know it's interesting that this EverX cloud book Right. didn't work. But here for the first time, it seems to be really taking off among ordinary consumers. And that's, I think, the moment when it really stands a chance. It's been a good operating system for a long time, but it just wasn't in the hands of ordinary people. And I think that's just so necessary for it to actually take hold. If it does take hold, there are huge implications for institutional users. I mean, the licensing being the biggest one, the licensing costs of operating systems being the biggest one. So that could be a huge story in the coming year or two. Right. I mean, a lot of this is predicated on a story that did make our top ten for 2007, and that is so many of the applications moving onto the web. I mean, people using Gmail and using Google Docs and Zoho and Yahoo applications and all this stuff happening online rather than on your desktop. And indeed, actually, this is more echoes of Netscape. I mean, isn't it, haven't we reached the point that Netscape thought we were going to be at in 1995, which is that so much is going out there on the web, on the network, and really, Ubuntu is fine. You've got Firefox with it. You open up Firefox. You look at your Gmail on it. You browse the web on it. You don't need those applications anymore. And I would think that this is an interesting development in terms of, as you said, licensing, let's say, Microsoft site licenses for Office, Microsoft Office, and the Microsoft operating system. And I think if you look at the interface of this EverX Cloudbook with this GOS, this flavor of Ubuntu, it actually has a little dock at the bottom like you have on the Mac OS, OS X. Right, I see that. And it has links to Firefox and Gmail and Skype and Google Docs and Google Calendar and Wikipedia. But they don't look like internet links. They look like programs. Application links, yeah. Yeah, because they don't care. They just don't care. They just want it to do what they need it to do. And I think there's kind of a little conceit in this interface, but I think it really works, and I think that could mean something very important for these web services as well. Yeah. Mills, do you think that this also plays into what you've been pushing, which is on the cell phone front, it's the ubiquity of some kind of digital device that people are carrying with them and the impact that that has on the educational environment. You know, maybe it's everyone will have a cell phone interface and a super cheap one pound, you know, or two pound laptop with a small screen, but it's good enough to, you know, carry out to, you know, the battlefields that we have near campus, the Civil War battlefields for a history project. It's a more portable format than, you know, the 15-inch laptop. Let me tell you, I wish I had one right now instead of lugging through Central Europe, the one that I'm lugging around that I'm calling on today. You know, I spent a lot of time on this trip out of various historic sites. And to be able to have either some sort of ubiquitous device like that, boy, that would make this trip a lot easier for me. So I think that we're going to see a lot more of that. And I think from an educational standpoint, it makes it possible to demand that students do assignments, you know, out at the space. And so that will help take them out of the classroom in ways that we haven't really been able to do yet. Right, right. And you could see that, for instance, in a museum environment as well. Sure. Yeah, yeah. Okay. I was just going to say, I was at the Museum of Applied Arts here in Vienna yesterday, and they actually have little mini handheld computers now that you walk through the museum exhibits with. They're basically locked to the network within the building, but they're those little Dell handhelds that look sort of like the old Palm Pilots. And so you can get all sorts of information about whatever you're looking at. Wow, it sounds like a great application.
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What do you have for us from Europe? Well, actually, it's a website from Sweden from the Swedish National Library, and the reason I picked it is because it's the antithesis of what we were just talking about with the micro laptops and it's a website on the world's largest book, the Codex Gigas, which I happened to see in Prague because it was in the Czech National Library this past week. It is a mammoth volume and it is a Bible, not surprisingly, and it was produced in the 13th century in Bohemia. They had a whole display at the Czech National Library, and it was really fun to go through. But the website at the Swedish National Library has images of every single page. And what's remarkable about this book is it was produced over 30 years by one monk. And so it's his handwriting all the way through, which is just really incredible. But what's nice about the website is that you can zoom in on every single page. And he did all the illustrations and everything, and it's really an incredible thing. As a side note, it's in the Swedish National Library because when the Swedes invaded Bohemia in the Thirty Years' War, they stole it. But it's really a fun – the Czechs are still sore about that. But it's a fun website to go through and look at the world's largest book. Sounds great. Tom, what do you have for us this week? I've actually got a piece of productivity software that I'd like to recommend. It's – after talking about all these Linux laptops, it's kind of strange. I'm going to push a Mac-only product, but it's called Scrivener. And you can get it at literatureandlatte.com slash scrivener.html. It's not the best URL in the world, but we'll put it in the show notes. And essentially, it is a tool for writing. It does some of the things that I like about some other things I've recommended in the past. I recommended at one point, I know, something called Write Room, which basically blacks out the rest of your screen and only gives you the document you're working on. It does that, but it also does a whole bunch of other things. Essentially, it allows you to break up the paper you're working on, the document, the book chapter, whatever it is, into little bits of text. And then it makes it very easy to edit those blocks of text by moving them around. It has a corkboard interface where it displays all the little snippets of text as little index cards that you can then drag and drop to change the order in which they appear. It'll allow you to split the screen so you can be looking at one bit of text alongside another bit of text that may be further down in the document and then move things between them. It allows you to tag and label these bits of text with different keywords so that you can go and find them very easily. It's really good for, for instance, if you're, let's say you're trying to expand a conference paper that you gave into a longer journal article. And you are kind of taking the outline that you produced for the conference and building it out. It allows you very easily to kind of take those bits, the existing text, and fill it in with additional text. It's also great if you're trying to combine two different pieces of two different drafts that you've written or if, for instance, you're trying to reorganize a draft that you have. Let's say you've organized your chapter for a historian. You've organized it chronologically. So you have a chronological narrative and you decide, you know, this doesn't really work. I want to organize it biographically. It has a really good search. So you can search for people's names and then kind of pull every bit of text that has their name out and put that into a new document so that then you all of a sudden just have just the stuff about that one person and you've now been able to organize your work biographically. It's a little hard to explain. You've really got to check it out. And I think everybody, and I don't normally like to do this. I normally like to jump into software. But if you're going to try it out, I would really recommend doing the tutorial when you start because there's a lot of features in there that you probably won't understand or see if you don't do the tutorial. But I really recommend it to everybody. It's Scrivener. It's at literatureandlatte.com. Sounds great. Yeah. And we should mention this is, I'm not sure if you did, but it's Mac only. Yeah, it is Mac only. That, unfortunately. Right, right. Okay. Sounds good. Well, one thing that I noticed over the past couple of weeks that I'm actually going to try, so I'm going to go ahead and purchase one of these and we can discuss it on the next podcast. But this is a really interesting experiment, a non-commercial project to connect up all the digitization that's going on of public domain books. So we're thinking here of things like the work of the Open Content Alliance and the Google Book Search Program. And it's connecting that up with a print-on-demand service called Lulu.com to allow you to order any of 1.7 million books online. And they'll go ahead and print it out, put a cover on it, and send it to you. So these are books that are public domain, generally meaning before 1923. And you can order any of these. They'll send it right to you. And so I'm going to go ahead and print one of these out and see what it looks like. But I think it's a really interesting experiment. And what's really neat is, you know, it's like a giant back catalog of so many books. And, of course, as a Victorianist, I'm really excited about this. These are books that haven't been in print for 100 or 150 years, and you can now get some of these first editions of books and have it printed out on real paper. So take that Amazon with your Kindle. And we'll see what that looks like and talk about it first thing in two weeks on Digital Campus number 20. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Fear itself. Fear itself! Fear itself! Please visit us online at digitalcampus.tv where you can join in the discussion and let us know about stories and issues you would like us to cover on future episodes. Mike O'Malley wrote our theme music.
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From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi-weekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Fear itself! This is Digital Campus number 16 for the 4th of December, 2007. Steal this book. I'm Dan Cohen. We're back from our Thanksgiving hiatus. Hope all of our listeners had a good Thanksgiving. And, of course, we're back with the regulars, Tom Scheinfeld from foundhistory.org. Hi, Tom. Hey, Dan. And Mills Kelly from edwired.org. Hey, Mills. Hey, how are you? Good. Both of you had a good Thanksgiving? Yeah, really nice. Yeah, mine was excellent. Oh, great. Well, we came back to the same firestorm that we had going into Thanksgiving, which we talked about on our last episode, Digital Campus Episode 15, where Facebook continues to, let's see, to put it charitably, push the edge of, or the boundaries of propriety and privacy. In particular, really this past week has been a real flare-up over Facebook Beacon. Well, we're all on Facebook. Have any of you seen these Be beacon advertisements? So just for people in our audience who are not heavy Facebook users or who haven't been following this story, part of their new advertising platform is it allows commercial partners like overstock.com to, or Fandango for movie tickets, to place a little news link into your Facebook news feed saying, you know, I bought a ticket to go see Pirates of the Caribbean or something like that, or I bought gloves for my daughter, something like that, into your news feed, and it inserts you. And like all things Facebook, and I think this initially happened with the newsfeed as well, there was a flare up when the newsfeed itself started where Facebook just goes and does this and then I guess waits around to see how much people care about the invasion of their privacy and then scales it back to the level that matches up. But I haven't actually gotten one of these advertisements or whatever they're, I guess they're called recommendations into your newsfeed. Have either of you seen one of these yet? I haven't seen one yet, but I have to say, you know, I'm pretty amazed by this because this is kind of commercial stalking in a way and kind of take it to the next level. I mean, for years, websites have been tracking with cookies your click-through behavior. And so, you know, there's been a lot of data mining of that. But it's really different to take that information and then, without your permission, display it potentially to the world. And for me, it raises really serious questions about how many more hours I'm going to have a Facebook account. Yeah, I was wondering the same thing. I've gotten these in the past. I've gotten these recommendations where it said, you know, you might like to buy something in my feed or maybe not in my feed, somewhere on my page, and not an ad. It was, I guess, in the feed. Basically an advertisement, which didn't bother me too much. I mean, every website I go to asks me to buy something, and that's expected. This seems like something else, where it's advertising to other people what I've already bought. And that seems like a totally different thing. And I agree with Mills. And I'm a pretty heavy Facebook user. I really like it. I'm on there changing my status three or four times a day. And I think it's fun and I use it to keep up with friends and stuff. But I'm really – this now scares me. And it's weird because last time we talked about this, I wasn't scared. I was kind of like nonchalant about it. I was kind of gung-ho. But this finally, I think, put me over the edge. And I think I'm with Mills. I might go cancel my Facebook page. Well, here's the scary part. So they did back off. I mean, sort of very oddly, moveon.org, which is really known as a lefty net roots group, really went after them. And usually they just go after, say, George Bush and Don Rumsfeld. But they took up this cause. I actually do think it made an impact. I mean, it really gave it a kind of national story. I mean, AP picked it up, CNET, the tech news sites picked it up because of moveon.org's activity. And of course, there's a Facebook group called Facebook Users Against Facebook Beacon. And that started to take off as well. And so they backed off, actually, we're recording this on Friday, November 30 November 30th, probably come out in a few days, but they backed off late last night on the 29th to have it so that it doesn't automatically go into your feed. You have to say, you have to press an okay button to have it go there. But there's still no opt-out of the program. And if you want to not have purchases, let's say at Fandango to go on your thing, you have to actually go into your preference, your privacy preferences, and actually opt out of each individual vendor. So you can imagine there'll be hundreds of these vendors you have to go in and click. I don't want this, you know, the purchases from this place to go on my feed. But even after you've done that, all that's about is what gets shown publicly. It still means that Facebook and the vendors are going to have information about your purchasing habits. And that's a really scary thing in terms of privacy. So, I mean, there's still value there for both the vendors and for Facebook, that they're kind of getting a lot of profiling on you. And, you know, I still think this is what makes, you know, people are worried about Google, as we said last time, and, you know, what they're able to aggregate. But this is far more pernicious, I think. And I'm also considering canceling my Facebook account. Yeah, I mean, the thing for me that's really the troubling part is, I guess, not so much that information is getting collected because every time you log onto the computer, lots of information about you is being collected and used in a whole variety of different ways that we don't know about. What is, I think, more troubling about it is that Facebook started posting this information for public dissemination right away without even saying to somebody or saying to the members, here's what we're going to do. What do you think? And it came out initially in the news story as just sort of a funny thing like Facebook spoiling Christmas surprises by posting people's purchases. And then their boyfriends or girlfriends or husbands or wives saw what they just bought and said, oh, that's what I'm getting for Christmas. Well, you know, it's clearly a lot more than that. There are all sorts of privacy issues here that are really troubling. Yeah, there sure are. Well, we'll see what happens on this in the next few weeks. I mean, I think it is interesting that it's in the Christmas season. I mean, you know, there are kind of funny stories and some of the initial stories emphasize that. I guess it was someone found out that they were getting gloves for Christmas from their boyfriend. You wouldn't think this is major, you know, national news. But I think there are going to be more stories like this that people won't realize what's happened and, you know, they'll have one of these beacon flares go up on their news feed and be really upset about it. Well, more things to worry about on campus. This will be our worry news segment for the podcast, but quite incredibly, I mean, almost as audaciously as the Facebook beacon is, is a new House of Representatives bill that seems to be, it was introduced by the top Democrats in, let's see, on a couple of weeks ago. And this federal legislation says that universities must agree to provide not just deterrence, but also alternatives to peer-to-peer piracy, such as paying monthly subscription fees to the music industry, paying for Ruckus, which is a sort of advertising-supported music-sharing service, or the new Napster, which charges a monthly fee per service. Really unbelievable. Now, of course, the penalty here, and this is what's really putting the pressure on universities, is if they refuse to do this, they can lose all their federal financial aid for their students, for all their students, not just the ones who are pirating the latest Britney Spears song.
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I mean, the possible penalties on this seem extraordinarily high. I mean, it's just outrageous. And it's just one industry, the entertainment industry, which continues to just break new barriers for outrage. I find this amazing. And I think especially the fact that they would punish all students and an entire institution for the actions of even just one of its students. It just seems, and in such a draconian way, it's completely outrageous. 's completely outrageous. And again, this is like the Facebook thing. It's kind of like I feel like I've gotten to the point where this is like I've had – it's like my last straw with all of this stuff. It's really amazing. Yeah, it's – I mean it's – this one is not going to stand up because the first time – I mean members of Congress are going to find out that the first time this actually gets, if it goes through, the first time it actually gets applied, thousands of constituents in their districts where the first college loses all its financial aid, thousands of constituents in their districts are going to flood their offices with hate mail and anger and they're going to realize, oh, gee, the people who actually vote for me as opposed to the entertainment industry are really mad at me personally. And so then they're going to say, how could we have passed this law? It certainly wasn't my idea. And then it'll be, you know, retracted in some way. But it's just, like Tom says, it's one industry that's just gone crazy on this. Yeah, I mean, I can't imagine a more appreciated program than, let's say, Pell Grants. I mean, I don't know. I mean, to take away the Pell Grant program, you know, one of the most successful and important higher education bills of, you know, in American history, for this kind of a violation. I mean, you know, you'd think you'd have to, something unbelievably outrageous to have that kind of penalty imposed upon you. For one industry to target in this way another industry through federal legislation, I mean, you know, and an unrelated industry. I mean, it's the entertainment industry targeting the education industry through federal legislation. I mean, they're not, you know, there are other people who are file sharing from their workplace or wherever. And I mean, for instance, they're not going after, you know, and other industries that receive federal subsidies, they're not going after, for instance, let's say, like the agricultural industry, which receives tons of federal subsidies. And I'm sure who engage in practices, their employees at times, that the record industry would not like. And it's just an outrage that it hits, as Mills said. And I think constituents will be outraged. Although what's amazing to me, as Dan said, is that this hasn't gotten any play. I mean, this isn't at all front-page news. Yeah, well, when I heard about this, I actually went to the House of Reps, you know, house.gov, and looked up the bill. And when I used their search engine, so I found the committee that passed this legislation. So this is at the initial stage. It hasn't been voted on by the entire House yet. But it's the Committee on Education and Labor in the House of Representatives. And so they have the press release from the chairman of that committee. And, okay, first of all, I mean, this is classic legislator speak. The bill is called the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007. Good luck voting against that. And then, so it's, so then they have a bullet point list of, you know, sort of a summary because if you actually read the bill and they provide a PDF of the bill and it's, you know, so it's, so then they have a bullet point list of, you know, sort of a summary, because if you actually read the bill, and they provide a PDF of the bill, and it's, you know, obviously it's very long, and I'm not a lawyer, and I can't get through it, but they give the bullet points. So here's the bullet points of what the COAA would do. Streamline the federal student financial aid application. Make textbook costs more manageable, expand college access for low-income and minority students, increase college aid and support programs for veterans and military families, create safer college campuses for students and faculty, ensure equal college opportunities and fair learning environments for students with disabilities, and help strengthen our nation's workforce and economic competitiveness. Oh, there you go, competitiveness. So somewhere in there, I actually think it's under bullet point creating safer college campuses that this P2P stuff is shoehorned in. But nowhere in there does it say anything about this. And, I mean, I would assume this has a really good chance of passing. Can you imagine trying to go up against, let's say you're trying to unseat one of these House members, and they voted against this a... It's made for an attack ad. I mean, you can just imagine the TV ad, you know, Congressman so-and-so voted against the education perfection bill. You know, I mean, it just... Right. He wants unsafe college campuses and doesn't want our veterans coming back from Iraq to have college aid. He wants them to be homeless. Yes, so, boy, if we all had the clout of the RIAA and the MPAA, it seems like we'd all be in good shape. Well, one final note in the news roundup. I think that's a more positive note if we can end there. Berkeley has, which has always been in the forefront, and I think we actually played their YouTube channel once on the podcast, but they're now, I think, trying to help others get, move educational content online, multimedia education in particular. They started an initiative that's been signed on to by a number of universities, actually a few dozen universities called Opencast. We'll link to it from digitalcampus.tv on our episode links. But it looks like an interesting initiative. I mean, basically they're trying to help out, you know, make the process, and we know this very well, getting a podcast online is pretty difficult. I think particularly in a live setting for lectures, Mills, you know this pretty well, it's not that easy, right, Mills? Right. Well, I mean, it's not that easy if you actually want to edit what you're going to post. I mean, it's actually now pretty simple through iTunes U for me to just record my class and dump it straight into iTunes U. That's then a really big file. My classes last an hour and 15 minutes. I don't really want to podcast the entire class. If I were just going to podcast the whole class, it would really be pretty simple. but I end up going back and editing just sort of highlights of the class and posting that instead, and so that's what takes the time. But the interface is not bad. There's a problem, though, with the iTunes U interface at the moment, which is that anybody with administrative access to the account can edit anything in our GMU site. So one of my colleagues accidentally deleted my picture and sent me an email saying, oh, sorry, you might want to put it back. So they're still working out some of the kinks on that, but in terms of just recording the class and dumping it straight into the iTunes U account and then having it appear online, that's pretty easy now. Right. I guess what Opencast is trying to do is really to provide that full authoring environment. Right, right. You know, where you've got, you might have multiple mics, you might have to mix and edit. So, you know, just to streamline the entire process, especially for non-technically savvy people. So, yeah, it'll be interesting to see where this goes. I mean, I think, you know, just in general, I think we're on the cusp of a lot more of this material going online. Mills, you're at the bleeding edge of it. But, you know, it could make for an interesting, you know, I think not only, we were joking about Berkeley using it as a promotional tool, which I absolutely think it is, but I think it's just a sort of public good that professors put stuff online. It's why the three of us have blogs and podcasts are part of that too. And I think this is, providing the editing tools is really key because I think, you know, it's great to put lectures online, but an unedited lecture online, I really, I just don't think, I don't think it suits the medium very well. I don't think it's that interesting to students or anyone.
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And I think a small amount of editing and a small amount of, for instance, like lead-in music and those kinds of things, multiple mics, conversational style, very simple things that you can do that we've tried to do on digital campus can make the medium a lot more friendly and will make it a lot more usable and used. So I think any of these tools that are free and easy to use, that can allow for really what are kind of simple manipulations, but maybe not immediately apparent to someone who's new to audio and video production, any of those tools are really welcome. Well, we're all technophiles on the Digital Campus podcast. And so we love checking out new gadgets and things that come out. And of course, as people who are also into books, we're interested to see the launch of Amazon.com's new e-book reader, the Kindle, which was launched just before Thanksgiving, sold out in five and a half hours, which, of course, you never know what that means. They probably had three on hand and immediately sold those to the Uber geeks who ordered it. But, you know, another attempt at creating some kind of dedicated device for reading, reading books. In this case, actually, the Kindle does newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, some magazines and blogs as well, which is sort of interesting, taking a medium that really began on a general-purpose device, the computer, and taking it onto a dedicated device for reading. And I think all three of us probably have pretty strong views on, I think not only on the Kindle, but also just the e-book in general. I mean, this is something that we've seen time and again. You know, sort of every couple of years, a new e-book reader is launched, and none of them them have taken off. It's sort of curious as to why that is. We thought we'd just discuss the possibilities of this for campus. Obviously, if you had a device that you could put our entire library onto and read any book off of it, there's something certainly special about that. But why haven't they taken off? And what are the possibilities of an e-book reader, and what are its drawbacks? So Mills, you know, what did you, I wrote a blog post about this this week, and I can mention that in a second, but maybe we can start with you. What are your thoughts about, you know, the Kindle and then also the e-book more generally? What are its possibilities, and what do you think its negatives are? Well, I'm like everybody, I guess, from the book generation. On the one hand, I'm kind of excited about the possibility of what an e-book reader would provide in terms of access to lots of books and just that much less that I have to carry around. I just happen to like the tactile aspect of books, but that's because I'm 48 years old and so I grew up with books. For me, it's hard to let go of that kind of tactile interface. I do think that thinking about it rationally, that this is the way that the book publishing market is going to ultimately go because it is so easy to have access to so much information in an e-book reader form. The question I have, though, is whether the dedicated e-book reader is really going to be the thing that makes the difference, the thing like the Kindle or the Sony's version, or is it going to be just a different computer platform like a slightly bigger cell phone or a slightly smaller laptop that ultimately becomes the primary reading platform for people? Right now what they're trying to do is take a book and make it digital. Right. be digital. And so it's taking one technology and trying to force it onto another technology. And so I think maybe they're going about it the wrong way. Instead, what I think is really good about the Kindle, I haven't actually held one in my hand, but I've just looked at the videos online, and it seems like the screen is really, really book-like in the sense that it's extremely readable. I mean, for me, this is a real issue just because my vision isn't all that great anymore. And so, you know, I have to boost my text size up now to read comfortably, and either I have to get new bifocals. And so, you know, it seems like it has the look of a book page, which is, so that's really to the good. Yeah, this is this new e-ink technology that came out of MIT and is not really a screen in that it's a surface where the print actually appears. It is very book-like. If you've seen the Sony Reader, it has the same technology. The Sony Reader's been out now for a year. And it's basically these little balls filled with black dye that spin. And so it has the advantage of looking more book-esque, although to me the contrast, if you've seen the Sony, I haven't seen the Kindle yet, but on the Sony the contrast isn't exactly book-like. It's still a little bit sort of dark gray on light gray rather than black on white, but it's better. It's certainly more readable. Yeah, it's definitely more readable. It looks more readable than my laptop screen, which is pretty readable. Right. And it has the advantage of being quite thin and lighter than a paperback and containing all kinds of information, But I think that there are a couple of big problems with it other than the fact that it's like trying to make a bike fly. One of them is it's never going to catch on for the beach because you can't take it to the beach because it will get sand in it and then you've got $400 that you just flushed down the toilet. And the beach is that or wherever people like to read where it's dangerous for electronic devices. Near coffee. Right, near coffee. And then the second problem is just that it's just ugly. And when I first saw it, I thought, God, they should have hired a designer from Apple or someplace where they do actually good industrial design because there is absolutely nothing that's appealing about this. It's just blah. I mean, they could have made it putty colored and it would have been worse, but it's just really blah. And if what they're trying to do is target the younger generation that doesn't read books nearly as much as we do, this isn't going to work because they're not going to want just something blah and white looking like that. Well, I think that's my initial reaction to this is that, I mean, what an amazing marketing job Amazon and Jeff Bezos have done with this thing. I mean, as Dan said, the Sony reader, which by many accounts is a better reader, has been out for a year. And this thing, it just doesn't strike me as this wonderfully game-changing device. E-book readers have been out since at least the late nineties. Right. And, and I just think it's, I think it's like holiday season desperation among the tech press for something to write about. That's comparable to let's say the iPhone or last year at this time to the Wii. I just think it's like Amazon did an amazing marketing blitz. The tech press picked it up, and it's good for Newsweek magazine to put it on the cover and say, is this the end of books? So in some respects, I think it's, and maybe this isn't the best thing to say for marketing our own podcast, but this is kind of a non-story in some ways. I think it brings up some interesting questions, though, and maybe that's what will save our podcast and maybe even save the Kindle. Yeah. Mills, I looked up the designer of Amazon Kindle while you were talking. So it's Robert Bruner who was the, get this, this is rather unbelievable. He's the designer of Apple's original PowerBook. The original PowerBook. Which just goes to show you genius can fail sometimes. Yeah, on my blog I said it looks like the, many people in our audience may not remember this, but the Sinclair ZX80. Right, right. Which was a very early computer that, go Google it and you'll see a picture of the ZX80. And I swear, it looks uncannily like the Kindle, which is not a good sign when a device in 2007 looks like it's from 1984. But, you know, my question about this that I posted on the blog, and I think, Tom, you were starting to get at this too, is sort of like a more general question. I mean, you know, okay, so the design is pretty lousy, and the e-ink is pretty good. We could talk about the technical aspects of this. And actually, I think some of the business model aspects of this are pretty interesting.
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They're $9.99 for most books. So it's less expensive. And you can imagine a business model where this would make sense for the publishers. But I still think, you know, why have all these e-books failed? And I think the problem isn't on the business model or from the publisher's side. It's the fact that, first of all, there's, you know, many generations like, you know, all of us, we like the feel of a book. And, you. And if I'm going to read in a long format, I really like books a lot. And I just think the e-book reader is sort of neither here nor there. And the way I put it on my blog is I compared it to the photo play, which was, if you look back at the history of film, there was this moment in the very early 20th century after the invention of film where everyone thought, oh, well, a film will be a fixed camera on a theater performance. And so it was literally photographing a play because everyone was used to going to see plays. And, okay, here's a film. And what you do is you go ahead and film a play. And that's what film will be. Well, and so people just assume that, okay, a book, well, okay, now we've got the digital medium. And so a book will be some kind of device that looks bookish. And I think it just misses the entire point that we gain something in going online. And we gain something in the general purpose device of either the laptop or, Mills, as you noticed, the cell phone. And I think the iPhone is really the competitor to the Kindle because I've read stuff on that, and the font is really crisp, and it's easier to hold, and it looks a lot better. But, you know, if I'm going to read something in a digital format, I want to be able to do stuff to it that I can do to digital stuff. I want to be able to cut and paste from it. I want to be able to put it into folders, relate it to other stuff, link to it for my blog, email it. There's just all these other things that we're used to doing now in a networked computer environment that, okay, so the Kindle has a little keyboard and you can take notes on your books. But, well, how do I get that into Word? How do I aggregate that? How do I use it in Zotero? It's just impossible to think about how this integrates well into the modern research environment. So I don't see the real advantages over a book where, you know, okay, if I'm going to curl up with a book and really, you know, invest time in thinking about the ideas in it, then I'll just use a book and I'll, you know, take notes on my laptop on the side. But I just think, again, it's sort of neither here nor there. And it doesn't surprise me that none of these book readers, no matter how good the design, and actually, I think if you've seen the Sony Reader, it's quite beautifully designed. Yeah, it looks great. So, but, you know, again, hasn't taken off. Yeah, I think you're right. It's like a solution in search of a problem. I mean, it hasn't substitute for the book. It's a different act and you get something different. You have different expectations going in and you get something different coming out. This again, I'm not quite sure this is a huge story. But I do think there's one possible application of this from a business and educational standpoint that could actually really work. And that is if, just imagine, for instance, that George Mason gave every student one of these devices, and then the students could just register for their classes and put a little check next to all the books that they wanted to purchase for their classes, and all of those books would be downloaded to their device immediately and their account charged automatically, so they wouldn't have to go stand in line in the bookstore. That would be a number one advantage for them. And second then, as an instructor, you can instruct your students to all bring their device, whatever it is, to class, and they've got all of their materials, all of their assigned materials. They can't say, oh, I mean, they could say I forgot my Kindle, but they can't say I forgot my article that we're going to talk about today. But also, if they can take notes on it, it becomes a point of contact with all of that material. Thank you. And the reason is because if the students are going to do that, they're going to want what we've just been talking about, which is a computer where they can check their email and do all of the other things that they want to do while they're using it. So they're not going to want just a book device. Right, right. So it has really great advantages from a teaching standpoint, but it has a basic practical problem of how the students would use it. Yeah. I hadn't thought about that, Mills, but, you know, textbooks would be an interesting case of this. I mean, obviously the price would have to come way down from $400 a pop. But one assumes that that $400 is sort of a subsidized price in the same way that in the United States cell phones are subsidized because they know, well, you're going to have to pay, you know, $60 a month for service. So, you know, they can subsidize the cost quite a bit. But yeah, I mean, the textbook thing is interesting. I remember a test when I was at Yale that they did at the Yale Medical School. They gave all the students a CD-ROM at the beginning of the semester with all of their textbooks on it or all their readings for their courses. And the problem about it, and so of course they could load it into their laptop, so they do have it on their general purpose device. But the real problem was it was DRM'd, just like the Kindle. So it had, at the end of the year, you lost all these textbooks, which is incredibly frustrating and actually sort of problematic as a med student. If you need your anatomy book after the semester's over, shouldn't you have the right to that? Yeah, was it one liver and two kidneys or two livers and one kidney? I can't remember. Right, right. Yeah, well, I think the answer to this, I mean, in some respects, in terms of education and kind of a low-cost device would be the one laptop per child machine where, you know, you're talking about a $200 laptop which is fully functional. It's a fully functional word processor, fully functional Wi-Fi and Internet browser and everything else. You could almost load all of that stuff onto that device and for half the price give it to students. So I don't think it's going to replace the book, and I don't think it's going to replace the laptop. And the question is, is there some space in between those two? And I guess we'll see over this holiday season. That's a great point. Okay, well, we'll leave it there and come back and see how we do after Christmas. Time for Picks of the Week. Let's start with you, Tom. their, I think all, of their years and years of comics. And they're actually, for a limited time, giving away 250 of them for free. So if you go to marvel.com slash digital comics, you can find 250 free samples of comics. Most of the free ones are relatively recent comics, but there are, in the larger archive, for an annual subscription of $59, you can get comics dating all the way back to the beginning of the founding of Marvel. And they've got a nice reader for them for cultural historians and people doing history of popular art and things. It could be an interesting resource, and I hope it's something that colleges, college libraries pick up on and subscribe to. Do they have an institutional subscription for it? I don't see anything yet on the website, but I'd like to search around a little bit and maybe talk to our library and see if they would get it. For people who are interested in things like history of science fiction and those kinds of things, things which I'm interested in, this could be a real great resource. Wow, I didn't realize that. There must be squeals of delight from nerds all across the planet right now. Okay, Mills, what did you have for this week? Sorry, I was just squealing. Mine is vixy.net. That's V-I-X-Y dot net.
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So for me, this has been really important because I use a lot of video, historical video from YouTube. And so now I have those things saved locally on my computer. And so that if they go down from YouTube, I've still got them. But also where this is going to be really important is for school teachers, many of whom are blocked from accessing YouTube by their school districts. This is something we talked about before. They can now, at their home computers, download the files, the historical video that they want, burn that to a CD, and then take it to school and show the video file that they saved in that way. So it's going to be a really great tool. Sounds great. Yeah, I think there are more and more kinds of tools like that for exporting YouTube to other environments. So that sounds terrific, particularly for classroom use and also places where you might not have an Internet connection where you'd want to show one of these videos. Terrific. Well, for this week, I'm always interested in historical sites and museums and libraries that are experimenting with new media and ways that they can integrate it into their collections. And I was particularly excited by a link that I saw on the O'Reilly radar that Peter Brantley of the Digital Library Federation noted. And this is phillyhistory.org. It's the history of Philadelphia. A lot of great photographs and artworks. And what's really interesting is that they've done a map mashup with this where you can find historical photographs of, for instance, streets. So when I tried it out, I looked at North Broad Street. So this is where City Hall is in Philadelphia. And you can get various views of this from throughout the century. And then you can actually click on a link and see nearby photos. So you can browse it by clustering. And it will actually place them on a map for you. And it's really fascinating. So you can sort of see, you know, if you think about the modern Philadelphia, you can go to a location and then actually see photographs of, and they range all the way back to, I think the earliest one I saw was from 1871. So, you know, it's a really remarkable resource if you, you know, are doing a walking tour or something like that. You can look at what things looked at, you know, through the decades. And I think a really nice example, the design is also superb, very clean design. And so I'd encourage people to check it out. It's a little bit hard to find the maps. You just need to go into the search and then click on some of the little icons below each photograph that say, you know, see more information or find others in the recent, in the nearby, and it'll switch you into this map mode. So it's really terrific. I think City of Philadelphia, which sponsors this site, has done a terrific job, and I'd like to see more sites try out things like this. I think it really engages the viewer in a way that your standard archive doesn't. Okay, well, we'll be back in two weeks. In the meantime, we'll do lots of reading on our Kindles, right, Tom and Mills? Yeah. And I look forward to talking more in a couple weeks on another episode of Digital Campus. Fear itself! Fear itself! Team music.
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The only thing we have to fear is fear itself, fear itself, fear itself. From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi biweekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Here it goes. This is Digital Campus number 9 for the 4th of July, 2007. Too much information. I'm Dan Cohen. Well, welcome to another edition of Digital Campus. We're glad to have you back. And we're here today with the regular roundtable, Mills Kelly. Hi, Mills. Hi, Dan. And Tom Scheinfeld. Hi, Tom. Hey, Dan. Hey, good to talk to you guys. And we'll kick right in with the most obvious question that's at the top of everyone's minds, and I'll ask the question of the two of you. Are you now or will you ever be an iPhone user? Mills? I think it's unlikely that I'm going to be only because I have this really bad habit of losing phones or dropping them in bodies of water and things like that. And so I tend to get the cheapest possible cell phone I can buy just because then when I do drop it in a lake, I just don't feel so bad. But that's not to say I don't want an iPhone. It's just that I know better than to actually go and buy an iPhone. Okay. Tom? Yeah, and I mean at $600 a pop, I think definitely not something you want to drop in the lake. I am not the owner of an iPhone, but I may someday be the owner of an iPhone. I actually just bought a – like three weeks ago, knowing that the iPhone was going to come out. So, you know, I wasn't caught by surprise or anything, but I bought a BlackBerry Curve and I made a very considered decision as to whether to buy the BlackBerry or the iPhone. And we can talk about the reasons that I did that. But I I I'm keeping my options open. I think, you know, in a year or something, maybe I'll, maybe I'll spring and get the iPhone. I'm kind of a, uh, a, a gadget hound. So, um, so it wouldn't surprise me if I ended up with one, um, and it would definitely surprise my wife. Well, you know, I mean, you guys know that I'm a gadget hound, too, especially with regards to Apple products. And so I imposed a restraining order and we went inside, and I said, Daddy has to look at a phone. And I actually played around with it for a while. Have the two of you had a chance to actually try one? I'm like you. I have to keep it out of my hands, and that way I can't actually buy one. Right. Well, let me say, actually, I have to say, you know, people are saying what a great job Apple did with, like, the hype factor and publicity and the ramping up and things like that. But I have to say it was a slight letdown actually when I used it just because I had already seen all the functionality in the videos and the blogs and things like that. And so in an odd way, like if they had just announced it and said it's available now in the stores, I think I would have been more impressed than I actually was. And I think actually the biggest problem was, and I intentionally did this to make sure I wouldn't walk out of the store with one. Of course, they have them all set to use the Wi-Fi connection in the AT&T stores. Yes. And so I just fidgeted with it and turned it off so it would go onto the cellular network. And it really was slow. And so I have to say that I think I need to wait for the next generation version. And people say, well, it'll be Wi-Fi. And of course, this is a good segue because on campus, you could think, well, you'd have this sort of ubiquitous Wi-Fi connection. But, you know, actually in our building, we have ubiquitous Wi-Fi, but you have to log on through the browser. It's not a seamless experience. And I think that unless this is on Wi-Fi, it is painful when you're using Google Maps or the Safari web browser. And so I think I'm just going to wait on it. And I feel like a storm has passed, and I'm not going to whip out my credit card and buy one of these things right away. Yeah, I mean, I think that the slowness of the connection is a problem. And I don't think Wi-Fi is really a real alternative to a cell phone or a real wireless connection. Because if I'm somewhere where they have Wi-Fi, chances are I also have my laptop in my bag. It's when I don't have my laptop in my bag or I can't access my laptop if I'm in the car or if I'm out on the weekend or something that I want this connectivity. I think the decision I made to get the BlackBerry instead of the iPhone, I really made it on the basis of the keyboard. And I realized that for me, the thing I needed most was a good email terminal, a mobile email terminal. I live in email. Email is my killer app. And the lack of a keyboard, a real touch keyboard, a tactile keyboard on the iPhone just did it for me. I thought, you know, 90% of what I'm going to use this for, other than making phone calls, is email. I'm not really going to listen to music on it. I'm not going to watch YouTube, even if that was possible with the connection. I'm going to write email. So I bought the product that has, doing email and doing it well for years. So that was my decision. Right. Well, I'll, you know, on the keyboard factor, you know, I have a Sidekick. I've had one for a few years. I love it. It's got a great keyboard. The screen flips up and you get a full profile keyboard. So it's a pretty wide keyboard. And I tried typing on this thing, and I don't think I got 20% of the letters right. And I know that even with training, you know, I mean, with training, it should get better, but I really worry about that in terms of input. That seems like a huge hurdle for me, because I also use the phone for email sometimes, and not having a really fast keyboard is a problem. Which just goes to show that you're showing your age because my nephew, who sends approximately 3,000 text messages a month with his phone, can actually text with the phone in his pocket. So that that way the teacher in his class cannot see that he's doing this. And so, you know, it's because we grew up with the QWERTY keyboards, and so we want to type that way, where in his case he just, you know, punches all the buttons with one thumb and away he goes. And then are the SMS messages kind of piped directly into his brain because he can't take the phone out of his pocket to see the screen and see the response? You know, if he could have a microchip embedded, he would certainly do it. Because I asked him that question one day. I said, well, if you could have a chip embedded in your brain that would just send the messages directly, he said, oh, yeah, I'd be first in line. And I think he's not all that atypical of America's teenagers. You know, I was thinking about the iPhone stuff the other day. I don't know if you guys have ever seen Gartner's Hype Cycle. Oh, yes. It has the five phases of the Hype Cycle. So the technology trigger, then the peak of inflated expectations, then the trough of disillusionment, the slope of enlightenment, and the plateau of productivity. So it'll be very interesting to see how long it takes the iPhone to dip into the trough of disillusionment. There was certainly a brief dip over the weekend due to getting people's service started on time. But I think that Apple is probably going to be sorry that they hitched their wagon to AT&T's network on this because I'm a recovering AT&T wireless user and their network is just substandard, at least around here in the Washington area. And we moved to a house, you know, new house in a different part of the same service area and all of a sudden couldn't get a signal.
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So it's a slow network compared to the others, and I think that Apple may end up being sorry that with this phone that creates all these expectations of, you know, moving around large amounts of data, AT&T's network may not have been the right choice. Right. Well, I just think that when you play with it, I mean, the user interface is spectacular. It really lives up to the hype. But it makes you want to do all these things, at least me, that are non-phone functions. I mean, I want to use the web. I want to use the Google Maps stuff. I could see a lot of interesting applications, and people in the education world have been talking about this, you know, interesting in-the-field applications and, you know, classroom activities and things like that. But if you're using such a slow network, just the experience basically crashes on you. And at least for now, it's kind of closed to third-party development. I mean, you can, I mean, essentially they're saying to third-party developers, they're saying, well, you know, go build a web page that works on the mobile Safari, which, you know, seems like kind of a letdown. Right, but that's, again, exactly where the speed issue. I think what they need to do, um, at least for me, or if I wanted to write an application for this thing, or if someone in academia or museums or libraries and museums, boy, there's, there could be amazing applications for this, or that you could put up web pages that people could surf to. But if the surfing experience is so slow and you're standing in front of a painting and you want to get a webpage and and it's taking a minute to load, that experience isn't very great. You might as well preload a device as they do with audio tours already with some information. But I think the way around this, at least with this network, is to really enable developers to create the little widgets like the YouTube widget. It seems to me they have to absolutely do that because then what you have is all the UI functions and all the drawing functions that take a lot of time as you're downloading, for instance, images from a web page. A lot of that stuff can be preloaded into the phone and then you're just doing HTTP calls, basically like an AJAX application where you're just grabbing text or maybe some images from the web and putting it into an environment that's already on the phone. And I think that'll make it feel a lot snappier. And I'm surprised they haven't done that already on the phone. You could have some really great third-party apps that basically look like those little widgets on a Mac right now. Well, I mean, I think the big thing with the iPhone is it seems to me that, you know, if you take any one of these pieces, you know, let's say the Google Maps functionality, there are mobile devices out there that do a better job of mapping. You know, or you take the email functionality. Well, there are like my BlackBerry, I think. There are devices that do a better job of email. But what I think the Apple phone does is, and what I think the important thing about the Apple phone is, is the interface and is the user experience. And I think this is what people are saying is Apple's the first company that's really thought about and thought hard about what do people want to see in a phone? How do they want it to feel? How do they want it to look? And that's really where I think the iPhone, it seems to me from all I've seen, is really pushing forward. This is going to be a device, maybe the first handheld device that people want to use. And, Dan, you said it yourself. It makes you want to use it. The interface is exciting. I think that's critical. Design is important here. Yeah. Very important. And I think it's especially important if we're going to engage audiences for educational content, if we're going to engage student audiences. It has to be something they want to do. It can't just be something that, you know, is there but not that interesting. So I think that's where the iPhone really pushes forward. Yep, I agree. Well, in other non-iPhone news, was there any non-iPhone news this past couple of weeks? No, I think there was. And actually, you know, this is sort of a related item that we have from prior episodes of Digital Campus, and it also relates to the iPhone, is Gmail. You know, we had been talking about, you know, maybe universities should throw overboard their ITU departments and, you know, just adopt Google applications like Gmail where they don't need a lot of servers. They just sort of outsource the whole thing. And indeed, we were so prescient right after we said that on the podcast, we discovered that indeed Trinity College Dublin, a beautiful university, if you can get to Dublin, right in the city center, has done that. They're using Gmail now. There are other universities around the globe. And I think one of the Arizona universities was also open. Arizona State. Arizona State. I think it's going to be a big trend. And it seems to me that a lot of students are coming to universities already with Gmail. But it did seem like this is a great way to provide applications, et cetera, without the extreme cost to universities of sort of server support and hardware. Yeah. One of the, I mean, one of the, oh, sorry, Mills, you go ahead. I was just going to say, I think that this just goes to show that more and more universities are going to jump on this bandwagon because it is so much less expensive in the long run. And the reason it's less expensive is the staffing dimension of it more than anything else. And as we all know, benefits like health care and retirement and these kinds of things are hugely expensive for large organizations. And so to be able to outsource a technology like email is going to be immensely attractive to the business side of the university, to the vice president for fiscal affairs or whoever that person is going to start putting a lot of pressure on the technology side of the house and just keep asking, well, why are we paying people to do this when we can outsource it for a fraction of the cost? Yeah, I mean, one of the things that the story that I read in the BBC website pointed out was that Google's saying that many of the universities who are leading the way in this area, who are signing on to their service or have signed on to their service first are universities in the third world. And they point out universities in Egypt and Rwanda and Kenya who are ditching whatever servers that they had for Gmail servers that Gmail or Google can provide these services, can provide sophisticated services that they can't provide for themselves. Yeah. With very few exceptions. And it just seems to me that the cost savings there, of course, there is, I do think universities feel that they need to sort of have all their stuff in a way, you know, they should have possession of students' email and these sorts of things. And obviously, you know, we're not, you know, we like Google, but they're not perfect. And we have privacy concerns. And I'm sure people in the audience can think of many concerns that you would have in doing this kind of outsourcing. But, you know, I do think that it frees up costs to do other things. And I think there are a variety of technologies around, like web applications, open ID for identity management, and single sign-on services. These sorts of things allow a university to have a kind of distributed data cloud or application cloud for students. And I think students, frankly, are used to that. They're coming in with their Facebook accounts and their Gmail accounts or Hotmail or what have you. They're used to stuff being in multiple places. And, you know, when we went to college, the university provided all this stuff. You had your university email and that was it. And then eventually we got our own little web space, which was just like Unix file system space to put up some web documents. But people are used to now, you know, they've got their own blog, they've got their own this and that. I think this is absolutely the future. Yeah, and I think that the security concerns, and I think those are probably security, privacy, those are probably the big concerns with this kind of thing. Or at least that's the, if there's a knee-jerk reaction against these things, that's where the knee-jerk comes in. I actually think those aren't really very good concerns. I mean, it seems to me that Google can provide probably better security if they want to provide those services. They can provide better security and privacy services than a university can.
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Especially when you're talking about the economies of scale that they generate. If they're doing this for universities all over the world, they can provide a host of kind of a menu of security options for universities that a small shop on a small campus, or even a relatively large shop on a large campus, isn't going to be able to provide themselves. Right. Well, finally, we saw the release of a much-anticipated real world. Well, I guess this is an object that marries the real world with the digital realm. And since we're all book lovers, I think we all found this very interesting, of these espresso machines and print-on-demand machines and news stories over the past few weeks. Looks like our good friend Josh Greenberg, who is at the New York Public Library, actually took possession of the first one of these books. This is called the Espresso Book Machine, or maybe that's its nickname. But it's basically a refrigerator-sized machine that you press a button and choose a book from many digital offerings, and it prints out a paperback book, I think, in about five minutes. And what's amazing is then you look at what else is going on. I mean, Google digitizing all these books and other, you know, Open Content Alliance and all these places digitizing these books and having effectively page images of these that are pretty high quality, although Google's might be a little bit less so. And then the ability to just sort of print this out if you actually want a physical copy. Do you think this is important, or have we moved so much online that people will no longer actually want the physical book? Mills, what were your thoughts reading these stories? You know, I think that we're still a long way away from people not wanting the physical book. And I think what we're going to see is that increasingly the reference market is going to die because you don't need to own all the reference books. Those sorts of books, you go and look up something. But that's different from the reading experience that, you know, certainly the generation of people who are, you know, I don't know, 30 and over still really wants. And so I think that that's going to, I think that books in their analog form will continue. You know, even if your book is on your iPhone, you don't want to really take it to the beach. And so, and it hard to snuggle up in bed with your laptop. So I think we're still a little ways away from the end of the book. You guys probably don't even know this, but I've been on the editorial board of a print-on-demand press for the last couple of years. And I think this is really the future of academic publishing because so often now, in the history business anyway, the question is, well, what's the market for that book? And the answer is, well, almost none. If we're talking about a real market in the sense of selling 5,000 or 8,000 copies of some hardback book, the press that I work on has this new academia press, has the same exact process of scholarly review. It's all double-blind and has an excellent editorial board and all of those things that you would expect from a major university press. However, they print five copies of the book when it's done and send those to the author, and then the rest of them are ordered directly through Amazon. And there's a press down in Nashville that big, I think it's called Lightning Press, and you order the book from Amazon and the order goes directly to the folks in Nashville and the next book that comes out of the end of their press is the book that you just ordered. So it's like a warehouse-sized version of this espresso machine publishing system And the book drops into an Amazon box and goes out in the next morning's mail. Yeah, and it seems like Amazon is – I mean, that's an amazing process and gets beyond publishers usually for now for academic monographs. I don't even know what the smallest print run is, but they probably only print out a few hundred copies of a lot of these hardback books. Sure. Just a few. 500 is about the bottom end, I think. Right, right. And then you think about all these public domain books that are out there, it looks like, both Amazon and then also a very interesting report, although I think it was a little bit of PR just for this research company called Outsell Incorporated, which speculated about Google possibly jumping into the print-on-demand world by just printing out all these books that they've digitized, over a million books that they've already digitized. It really could open up the market for these sort of single-print runs. I was just going to say one other piece of this from an academic standpoint is that there are all these works of scholarship that are – Yeah. amount through a used book dealer. And so one of the things that the press that I work with has done is encouraged authors to reclaim their copyright on a book that's no longer being printed and then submit it to us. And then we simply set it up as print on demand. And so we're reintroducing books into the stream. Now, we're doing it at this tiny little level, you know, dozens of books a year happening this way. Google is, as you say, scanning millions of books a year. And so I think it's quite likely that Google's going to do that. They'd be crazy not to. You know, it seems to me that, though, this is actually a bigger story. A lot of the talk about this print-on-demand has focused on, well, this is going to put bookstores out of business. And, in fact, I don't think that's true. I actually think this is a much bigger story for the kind of scholarly, academic, educational community and educational market than it is for the kind of general book publishing market. I can't imagine that these machines, these Coke machine-sized machines, are going to be – they're not really a substitute for the bookstore in the airport where you want to get a bestseller, you want to get it quickly, you're going to pull it off the shelf. They need lots of them. They can't have people, each person waiting five minutes for a book to print. But it does seem like just the right thing for, as we were saying, out-of-print books, textbooks where they're only doing a limited run for a course at this university or that university. It seems like that's really the model. And for that market, it seems like the model that Mills is talking about with the warehouse-sized machine where it maybe takes a day or two to get you the book is the model that's going to work rather than this kind of Coke machine model where you're actually standing in the library getting your book. It seems like for the kinds of books students, teachers, scholars need, they're the kinds of books that you can wait a day for. So I wonder, you know, this print-on-demand, it's definitely coming. It's definitely important. It's just going to be interesting to see what sort of shape it takes. Is it going to be the Coke machine or is it going to be the warehouse? Well, I think we'll definitely keep track of this story as it develops and actually try to get a book from Josh and see what these things look like as they come out the other side. So we'll keep on top of this on the podcast. As we just discussed with the new Espresso book machine, part of its power is that it's leveraging all the digitization that's gone on. And we've really noticed that the amount of material available for researchers, digitized books and articles and images, has just exploded in the past few years. I mean, you look at JSTOR with more than 2 million scholarly articles from the past century, or ProQuest's historical newspaper collection, 14 million pages of newspapers. Library of Congress, with their online memory project, has 9 million items now available online. And then, of course, Google Book Search, the big 800-pound gorilla with a projected 15 million volumes minimum in their catalog. And it seemed to us that it was important to discuss, as part of a feature for Digital Campus, just the opportunities and also the challenges that this poses to scholars and students and teachers. It's the size of this digitized collection of materials that we can study is really quite daunting. And, you know, Mills and Tom, the example I always like to use is the Clinton White House and the poor presidential historian who faces the task of looking through email messages produced by the administration. Well, it turns out that on their main server, there are 40 million email messages. And you sort of compare this number to, let's say, the number of letters that came in and out of, let's say, the Johnson administration, or even earlier, you know, Woodrow Wilson.
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And the calculation I always like to throw out is that even if you could read one email message a minute without sleeping, drinking a lot of coffee, it would take you 76 years to actually read all of those Clinton White House emails. And so we're really faced with, I think, what Roy Rosenzweig, our colleague and friend, wrote a great article for the American Historical Review a few years ago called Scarcity or Abundance. And he postulated that there are sort of two possible futures in a digital realm. One is a world of scarcity where because digital things are very fragile and a lot of things aren't digitized and we have all these born digital materials like email that are deleted and lost that we might end up with a kind of digital dark age or scarcity, a world of scarcity where we don't have a lot of materials to look at. And the other possible world that we face is one of abundance, where we do have all this stuff and it overwhelms us with its size. And I think it's pretty clear to us now that we've ended up in that latter world. And it seems to us that in the next five, ten years, really what we're going to be dealing with is how do you deal as a student, as a scholar, as a researcher, how do you deal with just the sheer abundance of this material? Mills, what sort of experiences have you had with maybe a collection that was really large and how you get through it and what do you do as a scholar when you bump into this world of abundance? Well, it's something actually we've just started working on with the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank project here at CHNM. We've, over the last year and a half now, have been collecting almost two years, collecting the stories of Hurricane Katrina and Rita and collecting images that people submit. But now we've moved into a different phase, which is we're trying to collect other material that people have posted online. And our first target is the Flickr database of, you know, I don't know how many gazillion photographs at this point. And so we've developed a program that will essentially mine the Flickr database for everything with certain tags, and in this case the tags Hurricane Katrina, and at the same time have a Creative Commons license on them so that we can suck them into our database without having to ask permission. And just the first pass at the database gave us over 68,000 images tagged Hurricane Katrina with a Creative Commons tag on them. Right, and that's a small subset of the total number that are tagged Hurricane. Right, it's a small subset of the total. Actually, I'm sorry, it was 68,000 without the Creative Commons, and then when we went to Creative Commons, it took it down to 14,000. But the two of us who work on this project on a daily basis, we don't have time to go through 14,000 photographs and see whether they're actually of Hurricane Katrina or of someone's cat named Hurricane Katrina or, you know, who knows why they tagged it in that way. So we do, you know, we've got 14,000 photographs, but now we've got to figure out a way in some sort of an efficient way to go through them and decide which ones ought to be in our archive and which ones shouldn't be. And at this moment, we haven't arrived at a solution to that problem. Right. Tom, what have you experienced in this realm of abundance? I think the interesting thing for me is that, you know, sort of a, let's say, a hundred years of historical training and methodology has really – and this is another kind of take on Roy's scarcity and abundance – is that 100 years or more of historical training and historical methodology has really taught us to deal with problems of scarcity. When you're researching a topic in history, at least up until very recently, you're posed with the problem of not having enough sources, not having really enough sources to tell the story you would really like to tell. And searching and searching and searching and finding, you know, that great crucial source that can help you tell your story. You know, now we have the opposite problem, this problem of abundance. And I think there's – we need to start thinking, doing sort of a fundamental rethink in terms of training students to deal with that problem and creating tools for dealing with this. Because as Mills says, you can't just do it by flipping through these things yourself. You can't get your hands around it in that manual way. We're going to have to come up with automated ways to do this. Yeah, and I think for all of us use Google every day and we appreciate its power. But I think in, you know, the realm of academia and museums and libraries, I think a lot of the searches we're doing are more complicated. I mean, trying to locate items of interest that you, you know, would like to study further. It's a more complicated process. So you're not, let's say, oftentimes a keyword might not be really helpful, right? Let's say you were, again, that presidential historian and you wanted to do the history of the Clinton White House dealing with Al Qaeda. Well, you could certainly Google, I guess, for Al Qaeda if you had the Google index, this entire collection. But of course, it's broader than that, right? As historians, you want to know, well, the context of, let's say, fighting terrorism. What about, you know, other angles to the story, financial transactions that the administration was trying to cut off that might not have the keyword Al-Qaeda in it? And all the different spellings of Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda would be very tricky to deal with. And so we have a question of synonyms and changing terms over time and all these issues to try to find documents of interest. So location is extremely difficult, I think, in a scholarly setting with a lot of materials, much harder than it is, I believe, on the web. And so I think that's really kind of one main phase that we need to tackle first, Tom, I think is exactly what you said. Well, and our friend Bill Turkle, who we had on digital campus not too long ago, has been writing about this exact issue in his blog, Digital History Hacks, fairly recently, just over the last week and a half or so. And he's actually got a very interesting post on June the 27th about doing just what we've been talking about. In his case, he's got a data set of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, and he wrote a program to essentially find the relationships between entries based on some criteria that he set. And, you know, the program, this Python program, which is only about, I just looked at it, it's about 30 lines of code, so it's pretty simple, came up with some very interesting clusters of entries based on, simple parameters that he set. And the parameters aren't about looking for locational clusters or that kind of thing. He was looking for things that just basic distance between the entries. And it worked pretty well. And he says that in his post that to run this on the 80,000 entry dictionary of Canadian biography took just a small amount of time, just a little over an hour on his PC. And so that worked pretty fast. Yeah, I think that's a great example. A similar example is some work that David Mimno, who's a PhD student in computer science, has done at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. And he's been working on creating what he calls virtual shells, which I think is just a terrific term for it, and it's a great idea. And basically what he's done is he's taken the books, the freely available books from the Open Content Alliance. So these are digitized books. They've been digitized by the Internet Archive and some libraries and Microsoft and Yahoo. They're all public domain works. And unlike Google, the Open Content Alliance makes these books fully available. So you can actually get the OCR text or the entire text of about 45,000 books through a process that essentially clustered them by topics rather than keywords. And so it really provided a sort of powerful insight into how you could sort of redo the library or redo the process of locating things. I mean, you know, you experience in a physical library as you go to a bookshelf, let's say you're looking for the history of canals. You'd go to a bookshelf and you try to look around near a book if you saw something of interest. What Mimno's project does is it sort of creates virtual shelves and it does an incredibly good job of clustering books that wouldn't normally sit together on the bookshelves, that you might want to look at, but you'd never find in a physical library, and you wouldn't find by keyword search.
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And I think those are the kinds of tools that we're going to need to explore to see how they can facilitate scholarship when you have such masses of information available to you. I think tools are key because what I don't think we can expect of our students is them all to learn the kind of Python skills that Bill Turkle has. I think we need to, the people who do have those kinds of skills, need to start thinking in terms of tools that can be Right, right. ordinary humanists. That's where, and I think we need to be thinking more about that, and I think, frankly, there needs to be a lot more funding provided for that kind of thing. Yeah, that was my question as well, is where are these tools going to come from? Who's going to create them? Who's going to fund the process of creating them? And I think it's really a next step for those funding the digital humanities to really think seriously about because, you know, a lot of money has been put into digitizing humanities collections, but now we have the abundance problem. Right. And I think that, you know, as a sort of second part of this question and something that makes this world different than, you know, printed works and where I think the espresso book machine might not help out as much as it possibly could in the future is there is something special about having these things in digital form that is lost when you actually end up printing it out. There's some things gained, you can take it to the beach, etc. But I think a lot of what people are going to want to do, and people have already started discussing this, is you want to extract information from these books. You want to mash them up with maps or other applications. You want to contribute to sort of social bookmarking tools. So you want to be able to, you know, share them on different, you know, Conatea or Zotero project or, you know, network them together. I think that those kinds of applications of being able to kind of pull important information out of it, aggregate it across different sources, that's really enabled by Abundance as well. So we don't want to, you know, simply locate the books with, you know, virtual shelves is great for doing that and then print them out and read them. We also want to go a next step right beyond that, which is locating them using computational methods to analyze them, extract information from them, summarize them, perhaps translate portions that are, you know, if you don't speak the language that they're written in, if you want to, you know, quickly scan the table of contents in a German book and you don't speak German, you want to just get a quick sense of what's in the volume. These sorts of things, sort of acting on the text as well, is really enabled, and that's a very exciting possibility. Well, I think that sort of third area that I think we're going to look at in this area is also sort of, you know, the digitization process itself and what happens there. I mean, we talked about Open Content Alliance making their text available, but I think really for this to take off, you know, right now what saddens us is that, you know, Google with all these books has not made their stuff available. And in fact, I just saw today this sort of third leg of the stool, as it were, is that Clear, the Council on Library Information Resources, is actually now doing a study of Open Content Alliance, Google's project, and some of these other big digitization projects to see how they can be done in a way to encourage and enable scholarship. And I think that's really exciting. There was a piece by Peter Brantley on the O'Reilly radar on this. And I think the outcome of that study will be, I think, a very important one to see, you know, for other people who wanted to do, you know, who want to do digitization projects, you know, how can you do it in a way so that the text is scanned and made available in a way that really enables all of what we've discussed. Because after all, if you're just Google and you just make page images available, you're not helping out at all. Right. And even just providing full text may not be enough. It may be that these large digitization projects that are putting all of this text into, well, XML documents or into a database, they need to be providing the kinds of hooks into that database, into that data that digital humanists can use to pose their own research questions. As we said, the kind of brute force of a Google search is great and incredibly powerful. But even more powerful are the APIs that Google is now starting to provide. And if they could provide those same kinds of APIs for their large-scale book digitization and article digitization projects, that would be even better. Right. I think that we can't rely on the collection owner's own interfaces into the materials. I think at the very least there need to be APIs or application programming interfaces so that we can interact with those techs in a variety of ways. So new tools that we build can come along and scan them, can extract information, can combine it. If these things are just locked up, you know, Google Books isn't gated in that you can access it on the web. But in another sense, it is kind of gated, a sort of soft gating in that, you know, they've got all the text index and we can't really access it, but we can look at the page images. So they're providing access at three in the morning. If we want to take a look at a book, we can look at the book, but we can't do the kinds of computational analysis, extraction, location algorithms that we create like Mimno's virtual shells. We can't do that right now on Google Books. And I think that's something that we're really going to have to track. And I'm really looking forward to this report from Clear. So we'll see where this all goes. But I think abundance is certainly a theme that we're going to be tracing over the next few years on the podcast. And we'll see where it heads. Well, we've come to the end of the show. And as we like to do each episode, we like to just go around the horn and discuss any links or resources or software that we found that might be helpful for the audience. Tom, what do you have for the week? I've got sort of I always have two things. I've got two things. The first one is something called Learning 2.0 that was first put out by the Public Library of Charlotte Mecklenburg. And it's called Learning 2.0, but it's kind of confusing. It's also called 23 Things. And what it provides are 23 small exercises that you can do on the web to expand your knowledge of Web 2.0. And this isn't going to be really that interesting for digital campus listeners, I don't think, but it'll be kind of elementary. It's kind of 23 things that you can do on the Web to help you understand the latest in Web 2.0 technology. I imagine that the listeners already know most of this, but it could be something that they could give their students or their staff members to kind of a new staff member or something to bring them up to speed on what's kind of going on in Web 2.0 and give them a kind of lay of the landscape and help them learn some of the lingo that we all kind of throw around. It's got a horrible URL, as all these things do, and so I'll put it in the show notes. But it's 23 Things Learning 2.0 from the Public Library of Charlotte Mecklenburg. The other thing I had was a, and I can just do this really quickly, I noticed yesterday was a little hack on Lifehacker. It's actually a little JavaScript that you can add to Google Docs to enable... There's actually some hidden JavaScript in Google Docs, and if you cut and paste this code into your address bar when you're using a Google document, it actually adds dictionary and thesaurus functionality into Google Docs. It's kind of hidden in Google Docs. They haven't put the menu on the page yet, but it's actually hidden in there. And it seems to me that a dictionary and a thesaurus are kind of essentials to make Google Docs useful for scholars. And it's actually in there. It's just hidden. And this gives you a way to unlock that. So it sounds like that will come eventually and you won't need to hack at some point. Right. It looks like something that they're testing. But you can have it now if you just, I'll put the URL in the show notes. Okay. Great. Mills, what do you have for this episode?
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He's done a lot of work. The author's done an awful lot of work on mashups and ways that this can really transform the museum experience. And so it's a lot of really critical thinking by this author, Mike Ellis, on how the museum is going to evolve over time. And of particular relevance to the discussions we've been having on digital campus, his most recent post is about a discussion among museum tech people about the sudden rush to set up Facebook accounts for their museums and whether this is even a good idea or not. It looks like a great blog. I just dialed it up. So it's a terrific recommendation. Well, for this week, actually, it sort of relates to our question of abundance. I think this is a great site to get a sense of both abundance and also ways of sort of searching through it and also extracting information and learning from a large corpus. And this is a very large corpus of American English. It's actually more than 275,000 articles from Time magazine from 1923 to the present. And it's on a Brigham Young University website. I'll include the URL again in the show notes. And you can look through it, and for keywords, you can, in fact, create a sort of frequency analysis by the decade of when terms show up. So you can look at the rise of terms like political correctness in it. And it's really, you know, fun to play around with. And I think it also could be used in the classroom pretty well if you're doing 20th century, you know, American culture or history. It's a terrific corpus to sort of try things out on. So again again, it's available online, and I'll put the link in the show notes. Well, again, we want to thank everyone for joining us and want to wish everyone a happy Fourth of July. And we'll be back again in two weeks for another edition of Digital Campus. Please visit us online at digitalcampus.tv, where you can join in the discussion and let us know about stories and issues you would like us to cover on future episodes. Mike O'Malley wrote our theme music. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Fear itself. Here it goes.
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The only thing we have to fear is fear itself, fear itself, fear itself. From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi-weekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Fear itself! This is Digital Campus number 42 for. It's 42, episode 42 of our podcast. I'm Dan Cohen. Welcome to our audience, new and old. And welcome back to the panel. Of course, our regulars and co-hosts here, Tom Scheinfeld from foundhistory.org and at foundhistory on Twitter. Hey, Tom. Hi, guys. Great to be back. Yeah, good to be back. We'll have to hear about your baby in just a second. And of course, Mills Kelly. Hey, Mills, from edwired.org and fake at edwired on Twitter, of course. Hey Mills. How are you? It's good to be back. Good. Good to have you. So we're welcoming Tom back to the podcast after a paternal leave. How was paternity there? Paternity is interesting. It's sleepless. It's a lot of fun, though, and we're having a really good time with Luke. And, you know, I was so thrilled that you guys got Stan Katz on in my stead last time, and I'm sort of thinking he did such a great job that maybe I should bow out permanently. But, well, put it this way. I'm glad that you had me back after Stan. I'm glad that you still wanted me back. You'll be getting your pink slip from the podcast soon, Tom. Stan was really, really excellent. There was a recession after all. Yeah, it is quite a downturn, and our podcast with no budget is increasingly tight these days. Okay, so we need to ask the Digital Campus New Parent Quiz. Question number one, have you bought a domain name for Luke Sheinfeld? No, I have not, but I have thought about it. I just haven't gotten around to it. Okay. Changing diapers, but as soon as I get a minute, I'm going to. Okay, question number two, have you reserved his Twitter name? Have not. Again, again, delete. Okay. We'll leave it at that. I'll take it no further. Getting this parenting thing down. I know. Focus on the diapers first and then the domain name next. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's my plan. Okay. Sounds very good. Well, welcome back to everyone. We're delighted to have you here. And well, I was joking at the beginning about this Wolfram Alpha, which I did type in. Boy, it's a mouthful, isn't it? Wolfram Alpha. What is the meaning of life? Of course, it answers from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 42. And I actually typed in just before the podcast, what is digital campus? And Wolfram Alpha says, I'm not sure what to do with your input, Dave. Would you like to explore sports and games instead? Your initial reactions to this computational knowledge engine that everyone is chatting about as maybe the answer to homework? I think it's going to sink like a stone. I do. You can't get the answer to much of anything from it. I played with it for 15 minutes at lunch today, and I asked it many questions, and I would say probably 95% of those questions came back with, well, from Alfred, it doesn't know what to do with your question. It's like if you turn on a radio station and there's no sound coming out, you assume that they're off the air. Well, it seems to me that Wolfram Alpha is kind of off the air in terms of providing information. Yeah. My problem with it is that I think it has a few problems. I think the biggest problem right now is possibly a design problem. When you go to the Wolfram Alpha homepage, you're given what looks a lot like a Google search box. It's kind of right on the top of the page, a single, long, 600-pixel-wide search box. And so from a user interface perspective, it says to me that I should just type in a free-form question. And when I do that, I get back a bunch of nonsense. It doesn't have the answer to my question. Whatever it spits back is usually not the answer to what I'm looking for. And the problem with that is that's not really how you're supposed to use Wolfram Alpha. And if you read further down the page, it gives you all these hints for how to structure your query. So it's basically a knowledge engine, a computational engine that uses structured data to answer structured queries. If that's the case, then the user interface should reflect that. If I'm supposed to be giving it a structured query, then the user interface needs to help me do that. I can't just be led to believe that I can type in something the way I would type in something to Google and be given a set of results. That should be explicit in the interface. So I think that at least, I'm hoping that's the big problem with this new computational engine and that once they kind of fix the UI problems, it will have some potential for answering kind of queries about structured data, not natural language queries, but things about statistics and other kinds of more, let's say, scientific or more numerical queries. Yeah, it doesn't really make much sense as a kind of general engine. I could see this being laid on top of, let's say, a particular archive or set of data that you might want to mine and that you would have a kind of restricted domain or set of queries to act against it in the same way that structured query language, SQL, which is used on most databases, kind of knows already what the columns are and kind of allows you to, in sort of a quasi-English, to say exactly you know, exactly what you want to get out of it. You know, it's interesting because, you know, I experimented with this idea of a kind of homework search engine a few years back with Simon Kornblith, a really talented programmer who's at Caltech now. And, you know, we tried pulling a lot of information like this, like figuring out when someone was born and grabbing web information and kind of distilling it down. And it's, you know, I think they've ended up in exactly the same place, which is you end up using Wikipedia a lot because you can get a lot of data out of that. And the general web, you can't just rely on what's there. You have to do some statistical processing on it to kind of distill down what the facts are, to grab it from many pages and to kind of figure out the validity of pages. And it ends up being really tricky. And so the process, I think, of just the general Google search engine where you end up with a set of results and you kind of scan with your eye for a page that provides what you would consider a reliable source is actually not a bad way for answering most things. I suppose they're going to add a lot of visualizations and things like that that you can't get out of Google. But I did find it interesting that Google, I think, feels some pressure from this in that they had this presentation of exciting things going on in Google Search Labs where they had something called Google Squared. Did you two see this? The release of Google Squared where it was, yeah, where again, it was a kind of database thing and they categorized types of dogs and, you know, had little structured bits of data about that, that, you know, dachshunds are prevalent in New York City and things like that. And I think it's because they feel like, you know, there's all these math PhDs at Google and they need to feel like they're on the absolute cutting edge. And so, you know, clearly this really smart guy comes along with, you know, with his company and Wolfram, who if you don't know about him, but he's done a lot of work also in basically the theory of science and his emphasis on algorithms as a kind of key part of science and developing scientific theory. And so, you know, they want to feel that they're out in front and that they're not just the domain of the 10 blue links as Yahoo recently disparaged them as. I actually think that another question that I think Wolfram Alpha raises is whether it's really the algorithm anymore that sort of determines a search engine's dominance, that determines Google's market dominance and its superiority.
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And there, after restructuring my query a couple times, it did give me the answer. I did the same thing for the United States, and the closest it could get was 1933. It couldn't get me the answer for 1900. And that, essentially, it's not that it didn't understand the query. It's that it didn't have the data on hand. And so the question then becomes, well, so you've got this super sophisticated algorithm that can, you know, take my query and run it on a set of data and come back with an answer. Well, if you don't have the data, then you're not going to, no matter how good the algorithm is, you're not going to give me the answer. And I wonder if Google now is just so far out ahead in terms of amassing and aggregating loads and loads and loads of data, whether anybody's really ever going to be able to catch up in that respect. They've now got so much data to run their queries on that even if their algorithm is slightly less sophisticated or it doesn't deal quite as well with more statistical data or structured data, whether that even matters anymore because they've just got that mass of raw data at hand. Yeah, you know, this is a point that I kind of picked up. Murr Rosenzweig and I wrote a piece on data on the web or it was called, it was a piece called, an article called Web of Lies, Historical Knowledge on the Internet. And one of the points that we made in that article, we'll post a link to this from the digitalcampus.tv website, was that, you know, historical facts actually change more than you'd imagine. And the one that we brought up was the year that Alexander Hamilton was born, which you'd think would be an established date. But it's actually changed recently. The most common year that used to be mentioned was 1755, but now most historians believe, at least in the last five to 10 years, most historians now think he was actually born in 1757. You'd think you'd have a founder of the United States' birth year pinned down by this point. But what's interesting about this is that Google actually has the means of picking up the fact that that date changed, because if you look at an index of pages that mention Alexander Hamilton's birth, they're slowly evolving from listing 1755 to 1757. And you can kind of do a statistical analysis on that and realize that something's up because of the spikes on these dates. And so I think Google has always been based upon the fact that quantity beats quality. They'd rather have the kind of messiness, the kind of web as it is, in its aggregate, in its enormity, and that they could mine a lot of data straight out of that rather than having, let's say, the specific census records, which is I'm sure what the structured data is that Wolfram Alpha uses for these life expectancy queries. So they'd rather have that kind of scale versus quote unquote kind of vetted sources, pinned down sources, because of the fact that things do change. And I think this model where, you know, Google does 99% of the work for you, and then it expects you to do the last 1% on your own. Like it gives you the top 10 results. And from those, you know, you can find something that's going to be useful to you, or you can at least follow one of those links to another link that's going to be. And I think, you know, the question of do we really need with the gray areas, not necessarily the hard, cold numbers, I wonder if something like Google isn't good enough for us. Yeah, I mean, I tried a couple of – I tried sort of a natural language search and got all answers, you know, from Wolfram Alpha because it's just clearly not designed to do that. So then I thought, okay, I'll be a little more fair. You know, I'll try to play in the sandbox that it's designed to play in. And so my search term was, since I do Habsburg kinds of history, Austrian, Czech, Slovak, Hungary population. All right. Well, so I got a reasonable outcome from that that you wouldn't have gotten from Google. So, you know, it gives you the population of these four countries, which one has the highest, which one has the lowest, what the ratios are in comparison to each other, what's their growth rate, life expectancies, comparisons. You know, so it's a little more useful. So if you needed something for a paper about population in that part of Central Europe, you know, you could get something pretty useful. But if you go to the source information, this is where I think they've got all kinds of problems is that they, you know, it says primary source, they're curated data. Okay, that's a very expensive proposition to curate this kind of data. And so then you look at the list of background sources and references. Okay, they've got a nice long source list and at the bottom is the Wikimedia Foundation. And so you immediately wonder, well, did they get it from there or the World Tourism Organization or the United States Department of State background notes or where did it come from? You can't say. It's just some conglomeration of those things. And so on the one hand, on the surface, it's kind of useful, but I would never cite that result that I just got on population in this area. I would never cite it in something that I was writing, ever. Yeah, it's an interesting point. I mean, you have, much like an academic resource, it at least says, you know, here are my sources. But in a sense, I mean, a lot of people aren't going to click on that link at the bottom of the page of the search results. And so it has the kind of patina of an academic publication, but it does have a lot of Wikipedia stuff in there. And I wonder if it's just better to tell a student, well, you know, okay, at least you know you're getting it from Wikipedia and you know the problems that that might have. Wolfram Alpha, you're getting it from a scientist with his big computers, and so it's got to be right. And I wonder if that's a kind of worse proposition. Well, speaking of possibly fake results, have you guys been following this Elsevier scandal with this bogus journal that they created for Merck, the giant pharmaceutical company. They had this Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine. And now it seems like they're uncovering at least six other fake journals that they've turned out. So I think it wasn't just Merck, but I'll link to this article. There's several journals that are now kind of being looked at, which basically publish, you know, drug articles. And so they can be used to kind of bolster advertising claims by big pharmaceutical companies. And it looks like, well, let me find this, but while I'm getting your reactions, here's another case where you'd think anything you'd find on an Elsevier search engine would be fact. What are we to make of this? Is this just an outlier? It's really hard to say. I mean, at first when I saw it, when I saw the story, I thought, okay, there's just this one instance. And so some editor within their organization kind of went rogue on them. And it's a big, sprawling operation at Read Else elsevier and so there wasn't proper editorial control and this thing happened but now as it appears that more and more of these journals are under their imprint then it starts to look like an actual policy yeah there was there was kind of a drip drip drip uh to this story where you know one came out and then a couple more came out and and i think um if any more come out i think out, I think this is going to turn into something really big. And if I was a publisher of scientific journals, I would be scouring my titles and my editorial boards to make sure to double check that there weren't any conflicts in funding and in editorial control and things. Because I think this is the kind of thing that could really discredit a label. I think it could be a big problem and I imagine these journals are not easily going to come back from this hit. Well, and the scientist who then cited work published in a reputable journal in their own work, okay, they have to go back now and republish what they did and say, okay, I assumed that this was reasonable research because I found it in a Reed Elsevier journal, and it turns out it was just baloney. Well, in their defense, I will say that it hasn't been determined that the research itself is baloney. It's just that it's tainted. It may be baloney. Yes, tainted is a better word than baloney.
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It's just that it's sponsored by companies that have a special interest in that particular research result. Whether the research result itself is bogus or not is another question. Right. It looks like a lot of these, so I found the article, it's in The Guardian, the UK newspaper, The Guardian. And it looks like they did actually have a set of these journals that were basically just sort of reprints of other articles that they sort of published together with maybe some glosses on it and a new cover and things like that. But clearly it's the kind of thing that it's sort of a marketing-shaped journal rather than a science-based journal, which really is pretty damaging, it seems to me. Well, let's continue. This is the fake versus real, I guess, episode of Digital Campus. The MPAA going up and saying that teachers should videotape monitors rather than break the DVD encryption to get videos into the classroom. Does this make any sense here? I guess the reason for this is that there's this, I don't know, I can't remember if it's annual or biannual, set of hearings to look for exemptions in the DMCA, the copyright law that we have here in the United States. That's relatively harsh in terms of what you can do with materials that are encrypted for digital rights management, like DVDs. And I guess some people are trying to get an exemption or continue an exemption to allow teachers to rip DVDs or get clips of movies off to show to their students for educational purposes. MPA says, take your camera, set it up in front of a TV and shoot away. Thoughts? Yeah, seems like a silly thing to recommend. I mean, there is this kind of accepted exemption, this kind of analog hole, they call it, which would allow you to do something like tape a CD. You could move a CD to a tape and then pass that to your friend. That's an old exemption in the copyright law, which still exists. And so what the MPAA is saying is if you're a teacher and you want to post a video online, a clip of a video online, let's say to your blog for your students, instead of just ripping the DVD and posting that clip to your blog, even if it's access to that blog is controlled, if it's a password-protected blog, then instead of doing that, you should set up your camcorder in front of a TV and basically make an analog recording of the screen and then post that to your class website. Seems silly. I mean, it seems like they should just either just one or the other, like just say, we don't approve of this practice at all, or say, you know, go ahead and do this for educational purposes. This middle ground where they're trying to appeal to teachers and Yeah. So apparently it is okay as long as you do it in this really low-tech and poor resolution mode. It's like saying that it's okay to go to a concert and record the band or the symphony with the recording device in your cell phone camera and get this really scratchy kind of low-tech recording. But that's okay. And it just seems crazy to me. And further, almost nobody's going to do it that way. If teachers are going to reuse content, they're going to reuse the content. And if they're not, if they've been told to go through this whole series of steps just to reuse the content, they won't. It's just too much trouble. Isn't this, so it's not biannual, it's actually triennial. So every three years, the Copyright Office sort of hosts this forum for rulemaking about DMCA. This is just a crazy system, isn't it? That every three years, film historians or teachers who want to use films are going to have to re-justify this. I just don't understand why. I mean, clearly it's part of the law, but this seems like a convoluted process itself to have to justify all these things every three years. And undoubtedly there will be new forms of digital rights management and encryption, et cetera. So this will just be a kind of academic version of the cat and mouse game that goes on in the world of piracy, won't it? Well, I think it's a function of the DMCA being such a restrictive law where if you're going to have really restrictive laws on a technology that is constantly changing, you need to look at it every three years and say, okay, what are the new holes that have opened up? What are the new practices, the new piracy practices, the new technologies that allow piracy that have developed during the past three years that allow people to get around or to exploit loopholes in the law? If the copyright regime weren't so restrictive, you wouldn't need a review of these things because these things would be, many of them, permitted and it would be clear. So I think it's just this, as you say, a cat and mouse game where publishers are just constantly trying to keep up with this changing technology, which if it ever changes, it always changes in the direction of increasing access, of increasing portability, of increasing openness. And so it has to be this way. And it's just ridiculous. And it's inherently ridiculous, I think. Well, I think you're right, Tom. I mean, isn't this exactly what's happened? We haven't had a chance to discuss it yet on the podcast, but with the new Amazon Kindle DX, really the big news is not just the form factor that it's larger and might be better for things like textbooks. And of course, they did announce that they would have textbook publishers as sort of buy-in to the system, but also that it supports PDFs, right? So I assume we are headed down the road where there will be probably textbooks that are photocopied and stuck up on PDFs on the web. They're probably there already if we looked around. And if you had a Amazon Kindle DX, which granted right now is out of the price range for most students, but one would assume it will come down. Are we going to get to the point that the publishers of textbook are going to have to go in front of the copyright office and argue that students will have to get a Kindle DX, get the PDF, take a photograph of the Kindle DX on each page, and then use those for readings? Are we going to end up with more and more Rube Goldberg contraptions to go forward with education? years because teachers aren't going to do what you just described. Students aren't going to do what you just described. Instead, for educational purposes, they're still going to take that textbook or that book of sources or whatever it is down to the office and copy off, you know, 20 copies of that one primary source that's not online and is in a book, and they're going to hand it out to their students because that's what they have to do because they don't have other kinds of workarounds and they can't do it other ways. It just strikes me that this PDF reading, it's really, you can imagine a lot of copiers actually right now, they'll take a scan too and they'll email it to you. So it's just not that complicated to get a lot of this stuff up for free. I'm sure these publishers must be a little freaked out by this. But, you know, I guess this could happen right now. I mean, on any netbook, on any notebook, desktop machine, you can find a PDF and read it on that device. I guess it just makes it a little bit more visible, right? That all of a sudden now there's really a kind of market for, you know, pirated book materials. And I think the Kindle, because it's a, from all I've heard, and I've played with them a little bit, but from all I've heard, it is really a much more comfortable, much more kind of lean back reading experience, whereas I think the computer is kind of a lean forward reading experience. This is a distinction they make between TV and the computer where you kind of lean back and watch TV and you lean forward and look at video on your computer. The Kindle is sort of the same way where you kind of lean back in bed and read something on your Kindle. I think that publishers were a little insulated from it because they knew people weren't going to really do a ton of reading on their computers or on their netbook. I mean, you'd have to kind of turn the netbook on its side even to make it feel a little like a book. With the Kindle, all of a sudden, like, this really does replace in many ways the print copy. And I expect to be hearing a lot more from publishers about this PDF feature as Kindles make their way onto campus next semester. Seems like a pretty easy way now to set up your own press, isn't there?
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Oh, yeah. Pretty easy to distribute them. You know, you could use some, I learned a great term from Peter Brantley, you could use some social DRM. So you could let people download PDFs that have their, you know, purchased by Dan Cohen scrolled along the bottom. So if they in turn circulated around, you know, you'd know that they, you know, that they were distributing it illegally. And, you know, you could charge a lot less, right, than the current textbook. Absolutely. I think it's just going to get easier and easier to do this kind of thing. And then people are going to find the, you know, instructors are going to find the books that they like or the pieces of books that they like, and they're going to put them together into something simple and easy to use and pretty inexpensive. Yeah, I remember the source books that, you know, we were forced to buy as an undergraduate, the compilations of photocopies that were bound together and sold in the basement of the science building on campus. Why not do that now and put it on a Kindle and the instructors can do it? And they're going to because it's just a lot easier than going through the university administration, which I'm sure offices on campuses will be set up to do this for faculty members. But, you know, and that was convenient in years past when actually these things had to be copied and bound and expensive. Now it's simple. And, you know, I mean, I could, you know, just compile a PDF source pack and give it to my students. And that would be that. I think, you know, it'll be very interesting to see towards the end of the fall semester where this has gone. You know, Cliff Lynch of the Coalition for Network Information, I was in a meeting with him. He made this really striking point, which wasn't directly related to the new Kindle, but you could see its impact on an environment where you had a lot of Kindle-like devices. He was making this point that when you look at the textbook market, there's really only about 50 courses in the, at least in American universities, but I assume this applies globally as well, but there's about 50 courses that are really kind of profitable textbook areas. So there are things like, you know, American History 101, Econ 101, these sorts of courses. And there's only about 50 of them in the entire university structure. And he was saying that, you know, a lot of foundations and other groups have kind of studied this problem, that if you came up with an open source textbook, let's say in PDF, for the sake of the Kindle DX, if you somehow were able to fund 50 decent quality textbooks in those fields, you could save the entire education system literally billions of dollars over a decade or more because you'd effectively have those things available, easily distributed, et cetera. It just hasn't happened yet, but you can imagine the power of that idea that you could basically short circuit the entire textbook market and save the educational system enormous amounts of money with just a kind of surgical strike on open access, let's say PDF versions of 2009. I think that's fairly ambitious. But the idea would be that these things would save the state of California tons and tons of money in the cost of buying books. And sort of your standard algebra textbook is not something that the information is the same across all of these textbooks. It's fairly standardized. The way it's taught is fairly standardized, and there doesn't seem like it needs to be proprietary. It could be open source. I think, at least according to this article, that they're running into problems with state standards and how do you evaluate this open source textbook which presumably will change over time. How do you make sure it is that this changing, growing thing is always current with state standards? What's the evaluation? Who do you go to if changes need to be made, if the curriculum changes, those kinds of things. Right. Those are good questions. But it is something I think that's being tried. And I think if the California public schools manage to replace their math and science textbooks with something open source, wow, watch out. That's when things will really change. Yeah. You mean, this whole landscape is changing really rapidly. I don't know if the two of you saw that Scribd now has a store for PDFs. So if you're an author, you can post a PDF to Scribd, S-C-R-I-B-D, leave out the E, .com. And they've got now a section that's basically just a store that you can imagine hooking up to pretty much any device, mobile, netbook, Kindle type device. And you can sell it for anything you want and keep 80% of the profit. So there's also a market developing here again for kind of, you know, easy to distribute, open, you know, quasi open access, maybe with social DR-type material. I think it points in interesting directions for academic presses and other kinds of publications on that side as well. Well, let's see. Lots of other stories to get to. More on the Google Books. We just actually had an announcement just today. We're recording on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009. And University of Michigan actually has announced a kind of revised settlement or, excuse me, digitization agreement with Google. And we're just getting the details in this right now via Twitter and other means. So we haven't completely processed it. But what does seem like what's happening, and again, we'll post the agreement here on our website, is that effectively the University of Michigan has gotten Google to sort of explicitly agree to considerable more, and I think, you know, obviously allowable kinds of public domain uses of the books that are being scanned as part of the collaboration between Google and University of Michigan, and that in the most obvious case are showing up at Google Books, but also that University of Michigan is now putting into HathiTrust, which I believe we've discussed before on the podcast, a kind of digital library storehouse that a bunch of about a dozen large-scale research universities in the Midwest, as well as I think Berkeley, have joined together to kind of have a digital book repository. And so they're now allowing for kind of expanded opportunities to provide users with access to these books. They secured some rights to, it sounds to me like, for instance, create audio versions for people who are blind to access these books that have been scanned, to provide greater access for scholars who want to do kind of computational studies of the entire corpus of, I guess what's now approaching 8 million digitized books. And so it seems to me, I guess now as a settlement is going on that the settlement between Google and the American Association of Publishers, as that's going on, I guess now these libraries are getting into the business of kind of fine-tuning the agreements that probably they launched without maybe fully thinking through or fully foreseeing what would happen with this digitization project with Google. Is that how the two of you read this? I mean, I think this is a good example of why it wasn't a bad idea to wait a little bit, because I think the University of Michigan has created a much better arrangement for the use and reuse of this material than was the case in the original scanning process. Yeah, I wonder if it has something to do with the way if Google is sort of sensing some public backlash to the settlement and that maybe some of the public backlash is going to influence the judge's decision and they're trying to show that there's, you know, even with the settlement coming out, that there'll be some flexibility and there'll still be some ways to improve access for various audiences. And I just wonder if some of this isn't, you know, sort of PR. It's hard to say. That's an impossible claim to prove. But it just seems like the timing is all, there's been a lot of, I saw Brewster Kahle had an op-ed in the Washington Post, I guess yesterday, decrying the Google Books settlement. And I'm just wondering, and urging the judge to reject it. I'm just wondering if some of this, the timing seems like a little suspicious, but, you know, who knows? Yeah, I mean, if you read through here, it says that the agreement expands the scope of the partnership to broaden public access, support shared services with other libraries, provide greater access to students and faculty so that, you know, people at the University of Michigan can get a digital copy of every book in the collection, whether it's scanned at Michigan or another library, and that you can share public domain books.
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You know, they're ensuring these things that probably should have been surfaced maybe earlier on. Again, we're talking a little bit ahead of ourselves here since we haven't seen the full amendment, and we will get that posted to the site when we have it. Actually, I'm now just getting it across Twitter. Ah, the wonders of Twitter. Okay, so there's now an amendment that they've released, and again, I'll post directly this PDF. And it looks like, wow, this is the amendment. Are you ready for this? It's 36 pages of legalese that's been released just now. Well, that reassures me. Yeah, I feel much better. Now I know exactly how I'm permitted to use these. Okay, so here I am live scanning this on, thank you, I can't remember who that was, it just direct messaged me the actual PDF on Twitter. But it looks like now they're just sort of clarifying how, for instance, they'll review what pricing gets done for access to things that aren't in the public domain. It makes it a little clearer how they're going to provide access to these works for people with disabilities, which I guess maybe wasn't as clear. I guess maybe that's something that kind of came up when or that maybe Amazon was blindsided by when they had to turn off the audio for books because the publishers were sort of crying out about when Amazon allowed the Kindle to kind of read books for you without buying the audio copy. It's not a little bit clear here, but it does say that it'll make collections accessible to users with print disabilities in the same way as other books covered under the settlement agreement. So clearly there's some things in there as well. It looks like there's going to be a mechanism to review prices. So, remember there was kind of a shady, vague language about there being institutional subscriptions to the entire digitized corpus. So, now they're going to have a kind of very specific mechanism here for establishing prices. And, oh my goodness, there's a very price paragraph here about how they're going to adjust prices so how you know for instance if Google wants to raise the price for access to the entire in copyright and public domain corpus how that will go about so clearly there have been a lot of lawyers working overtime there's a whole bunch of things in here for price caps and pricing reviews, user experience, etc. So, wow. Okay, so we will post this so everyone can read through it. We'll maybe review it, I guess, in more depth later on. But Tom, as you pointed out, and we'll link to this as well, I mean, Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive had a very tough op-ed piece in the Washington Post yesterday, really sort of calling out both people in Congress and also those who are cooperating to Google to say, you know, this is really a troubling settlement and agreement and that, you know, we really should push towards something that's truly public. And, you know, at the same time, we saw over the last couple of weeks that Microsoft is contributing $50,000 to the opposition to the Google Books settlement. So this is all really heating up this summer. Well, I think the summer is not a bad time to have it heat up when people just aren't paying that much attention. And I think Microsoft contributing money to that is probably just needling Google because $50,000 would be one day of lawyer's fees and all of this. Right. That's right. Okay. Well, we'll report back in a couple of weeks. And as we read through, we'll have to get our legal division to read through all 36 pages of this. It's rather incredible and has all kinds of definitions of what books mean and things like that. So that'll be our exciting, well, it's a PDF, so you can put it on your Amazon Kindle DX and read it on a hot summer night. The question is whether the legal document itself is covered under the definition of book. Is it covered by the settlement itself? Right. Yeah. And I'm also concerned that if I have the PDF and I might pass it on to a friend, would I be violating somebody's copyright? Not if you take a Polaroid picture of it. I'm under the analog loophole. Well, Tom, since you've been away for a month or so, we'll give you the first pick of the episode. What did you find over the last month that you think our audience would be interested in? I'll link a piece of software website. Yep, it's actually a piece of software. It's called VirtualBox at virtualbox.org. And it's basically just a virtualization, an operating OS virtualization software. Something like if people have used VMware on the Mac, VMware Fusion, so that you can run – what it allows you to do is run another operating system on your box at the same time you're running your primary operating system. So I run Ubuntu as my primary operating system, and I've installed VirtualBox, and I can run – actually, I'm running the new Windows 7 in a virtualized window on my computer. And it's actually – from what I've experienced, I've tried VMware Fusion. I tried another product for the Mac. But I've tried a couple of these packages that allow you to do this. And this is the best one I've tried. It works. It's seamless. And it's free. And the other ones cost quite a bit of money. It was developed by Sun Microsystems. It runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and Solaris. And it's an easy download, a quick download, quick installation. And you just kind of like boot it up and install Windows or whatever as your secondary operating system you want, Ubuntu or another flavor of Linux. You just load it up there. It's super simple and really, really good, really snappy. I totally recommend it. Please save your money if you're looking to buy some virtualization software. Try VirtualBox first. Well, this looks great. I've been meaning to try it. So it really works well then. Yeah, I mean, it did for me on Ubuntu, and I'm guessing it probably does on Windows. I'd like to, you know, anybody in the audience who wants to try it on Mac, I'd love to hear how it goes for you. But yeah, it was really, really good. Yeah, you know, at the Center for History and New Media here at Digital Campus headquarters, you know, we do a lot of testing on multiple operating systems of either websites and what they look like in different browsers on different operating systems and also software, like a certain piece of software we'll talk about in a second, on multiple platforms. And so we've generally used Parallels, although some of us have been using VMware now more recently. Parallels was the other product. Right, yeah, yeah. And, you know, these cost money and, you know, but they seem to work pretty fine. But if this works well, it'd be a great way if you want to try out, for instance, look at what your website looks like in IE8. You can't do that on a Mac without Windows. So you could download this, install Windows on the virtual box, and take a peek at what your site will look like on IE8. Thanks, Tom. Well, Mel, should we announce what we have a joint pick? We do. We do. It is a piece of software that we've talked about before, of course, and is headquarters here at CHNM. Zotero 2.0 has been released to the public. Yay! Well, I'll add myself to that pick. I'll pick it, too. Okay, thank you. All right, we have a joint pick for the week. But you've heard us blab on about Zotero, but this is a very big release. It includes really the full social online element. So not only can you back up your collection online, but you can share it with other people. You can join groups. And Mills, I suspect you have some ways that you might be using this in courses coming up. Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm most excited about Zotero's teaching potentialities in this new version because already, you know, I was just thinking this morning about the class I'm going to do, the grad course I'm going to be teaching this fall on teaching history in the digital age, and I've got almost all of my readings are in some sort of digital format. So now I'm just going to park them all in my Zotero folder for that course, and my students will all have easy access to them, and it's just going to be great.
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And so I'm really excited about the ways that Zotero is going to really facilitate teaching with digital materials. Yeah, I'm going to do the same thing. And so for those who haven't used Zotero before or are new to the podcast, it's at zotero.org. And on a basic level, it's a way to manage your research and keep track of citations. It's a little slide-up window that looks like iTunes and appears in your Firefox or Firefox-based browser. Tom, by the way, you'll be glad to know that it works on, what is it, Ice? It's not Ice Weasel anymore. What did it change to? There's a Linux version of Firefox now that's supported by the GNU group. Anyway, any Firefox-based browser. And it gives you a place to store things from the web browser. And, of course, it's able to pick up academic articles and books straight out of your web browser. And so now what's exciting about this is if you have a group for your class, you can, as Mills said, you can just drag and drop materials from your own Zotero interface into a group folder that will then propagate out to the rest of your class. You can take notes on it together. You can tag things together. So it really opens up, I think, an exciting world now of a kind of collaborative education and also scholarship, which is the part I want to emphasize here that I think now we're seeing. I mean, this is pretty incredible. I don't know if I told you about this, Tom and Mills, but just in the first three days, we had over 500 scholarly groups formed on Zotero.org since the launch of 2.0. I haven't. I should check on it now. It's probably even more, but I mean, this is everything from forestry to, you know, gender studies to all the natural sciences. And of course, everything in history. We're now up to 780 groups, six days into the launch of 2.0. Some of the recent groups, there's now a science and technology studies that has been launched. And some of these groups are open, so anyone can join them. You can also set up private groups, for instance, for your department or a science lab. And you can do kind of quasi-public-private, where you might have a group of scholars that works together to put a really good bibliography together, and then they share that with the world, so you don't have to let in anyone, but you can share your results with anyone. Well, we're actually getting ready to do that. There are a group of us that are, it's the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning's history affiliate, and we have such a bibliography, but it's right now just sitting on a blog platform somewhere, and so somebody's going to migrate it over into a Zotero space right away, and that's going to be really great. Great. So, again, the best way to learn about this is to watch the video on the homepage of Zotero.org. And maybe we'll have to set up a digital campus group here for links. I'm meaning to do that. We will do that right after we get off the podcast so people can drag and drop links and join that group. Things that they want to see us discuss, you can just drag it into our folder and we'll see it. It will show up in our interfaces. And so we will see you at sotero.org in the Digital Campus group and on Twitter at Digital Campus and of course at our home base on the web, digitalcampus.tv where every two weeks or sometimes three or four weeks depending on how we get around to it, fear itself. Fear itself. Fear itself. Please visit us online at digitalcampus.tv where you can join in the discussion and let us know about stories and issues you would like us to cover on future episodes. Mike O'Malley wrote our theme music. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Fear itself! Here it comes.
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From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi-weekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Fear itself. This is Digital Campus number 20 for the 30th of January 2008. Open for change. I'm Dan Cohen. And we're back for another episode of Digital Campus, our 20th episode. Thank you. Good. Good. And Mills Kelly and also seemingly someone rustling in there in the hay or something over there. Mills, are you with us? Yes, it's me. And I think it may have been me doing the rustling noise. I think I bumped my microphone into my shirt. Right. Right. Are you sanding something or using a belt sander? No, I have not. No tools. Okay. Mills Kelly, of course, from edwire.org. And I'm Dan Cohen from dancohen.org. And, of course, all of us here from George Mason University and the Center for History and New Media. And last podcast, just to catch up a little bit. As usual, we record about 48 hours before we master the audio and send it out over the airwaves. And So, of course, the day after we had our featured story on small, slim laptops that you can carry everywhere, of course, Steve Jobs shows up and does the right thing by confirming this trend for the digital campus team here and releasing the MacBook Air, the three-pound wafer-thin notebook from Apple, lacks a lot of things that the regular laptops have, including such standard things as an optical disk drive for CD-ROMs, DVDs, and an Ethernet port. I think you have to do it through the USB port that's there. Ultralight, Tom Mills, are you getting this? Is this add to our trend or at $1,800, is this something completely different than say the one laptop per child or some of the other notebooks that we mentioned that are dirt cheap and very small? I think it's, I guess, well, I have sort of two responses. One is that I think it's completely different. I mean I think it doesn't have really any of the same hallmarks that those do, low cost, Linux-based. And so I think it's a different thing. And also I guess – I mean, I sit with bated breath for the Macworld announcements. And in this case, you know, I guess we probably should have mentioned the air because everybody kind of knew it was coming out before it came out last time. But I was really pretty underwhelmed by this announcement. I guess my feeling is that, you know, I think there are some kind of interesting things about it, but my feeling basically is that Steve Jobs has gotten used to making all the big headlines in the tech world in the last couple of years with the iPhone and other things, and that they wanted the headline, World's Thinnest Laptop, out of Macworld, and they got it. But just for my money, I think, you know, I just don't see really what this adds to portability. I guess it's a little bit lighter than some other notebooks, although I feel like my MacBook Pro is plenty light. And really, I think portability is not so much about the thinness or the thickness of the laptop. It's really about the case dimensions and the size of the screen. And so I just don't see how a 13-inch notebook, no matter how thin it is, really helps me carry it any more easily. I guess I can fit a little bit more in my bag. I guess maybe it's a little less weight on my shoulder. But I just kind of don't get it. Maybe somebody can explain it to me. Mills, what was your reaction? I mean, my reaction, of course, is that clearly Steve Jobs has been listening to our podcast. But beyond that, I think that this is targeting a whole different audience. This is targeting the business traveler, which I used to be. And as somebody who used to travel four days a week, the fewer ounces you can lug around, the better. Now, the key is how well does it fit on the drop-down tray on an airplane? And I think it's a little big for that. And so I guess if they'd really been targeting the business traveler, they probably would have made the whole thing a little smaller so that it fits nicely on that drop-down tray because that's really going to be the market that's going to plunk down slightly under $2,000 for a nicer gadget. But I think for me, what I thought was really particularly interesting about it was that it doesn't have the optical drive in it, which means that Apple has decided that there's now enough software easily downloadable, there are enough applications like Google Docs or whatever running directly online that you don't need to go through that clunky process of buying a box with some CDs in it and loading them all into your computer and booting up all that software. Right. I think that's probably its significance for the long term. I mean, obviously, this is a very high-end laptop that probably won't be seen a lot on campuses, at least, you know, among students. But I think it points, you know, as often these early Apple releases do, they kind of point to the future. And I think that future is probably precisely what we've been discussing on the podcast, which is one of, you know, I was going to call it the thin client. In this case, quite accurately, physically thin, but then also the idea that, you know, maybe it doesn't necessarily have to have a big hard drive, a wired connection because everything's being done wireless. And it just assumes that you're using Google Docs or Zoho or something online or Gmail as indeed most students are. And so you can just, much like the GOS that Tom, you spoke about that I think comes with the EverX laptop. So it's using a kind of stripped down operating system and very small, I think in that case, only two gigabytes of storage. But it's just assuming that your storage is out there in the cloud on the network. And I assume we'll see more and more laptops like this, and I think just Steve Jobs is ahead of the curve, just a little bit too fancy, too big, as Tom, you pointed out. I think it brought out a lot of nostalgia for that 12-inch notebook that everyone here used to love so much. Yeah, I can't understand why they just didn't go and do a 12-inch MacBook Pro that weighed the same but maybe was a little bit thicker. Could fit better, as Mills says, on an airplane tray because I know my MacBook Pro, that is one of the pretty annoying things about it when you're traveling a lot. I don't know why they didn't either do that or what I'd really love is a kind of a bigger iPhone, like maybe the size of a paperback book that you could still stick in your jacket pocket and maybe that had Bluetooth so you could connect one of those cool little keyboard stand that you bought to it wirelessly and a wireless mouse and maybe it would have like a picture frame stand on the back so that if you had your keyboard, you had your mouse, you could prop it up, use it in the landscape mode and actually be carrying around a full computer with you in your jacket pocket. That's what I really would like. Maybe I'm just nostalgic for the Newton, but oh well. It will come back, yes. Well, the other thing that just we wanted to follow up on from last time is that I mentioned the publicdomainreprints.org site, which is an experimental non-commercial project to republish public domain works. And the way this work that I mentioned on the last podcast was that they're taking the books that have been scanned in both by Google and then also the Internet Archive and generally something called the Universal Library, basically the Open Content Alliance. So these are full-text books that have been scanned in, and they're often made available as PDFs. And so what this website does, and indeed I received a nice note from Yakov Shafronovich, who is the single person behind this. He's just written some code to basically connect up those giant databases and storehouses of these PDFs and scans, and he pushes them over to Lulu.com, and Lulu.com is a print-on-demand service. And then Lulu actually executes the order, sets up actually a page permanently for that work, and then prints out a book and sends it to you. So I went ahead and tried this out because I thought it was really interesting.
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And I got the book that is the centerpiece of my book, actually, on the history of Victorian math, and that's a book by George Boole called An Investigation of the Laws of Thought. And it's sort of the key text in the history of mathematical or symbolic logic. And it was really at the heart of my book, Equations from God. And I've never actually owned an original first edition, but now I have it in my hands here. It's a paperback. It cost me $14.99. And Tom Mills, it's really interesting actually to look at the book and see what happened in the process because I think there are still some hiccups, and I'm going to write to Yakov about some of these. But it's also pretty fascinating, and I think it's, you know, you can get together an amazing collection of, you know, first editions using this service. So I think it shows a lot of promise, except for the hiccups. So let's quickly get to them. The first thing is, is that when you order it, of course, as I said, it takes the PDF and moves it over to Lulu. And oftentimes, Lulu has no idea what to do with this book. So you get a URL for a book. So on Google, I went to Google Books, searched for Investigation of the Laws of Thought, found the first edition, which is 1854, and you cut and paste the URL on the Google Books page into a form over at the public domain reprints.org site. And it kind of thinks about it for a while, and it says, okay, I've got the text, and then you ask it to process it. And then what happens is you get a screen that says, well, this could take up to 72 hours. We're really busy right now. It actually only took a few hours for them to move it over to Lulu. And then I got a link saying my book was ready. I went to lulu.com. And there's now a page there for George Bull's Investigation of the Laws of Thought. And the problems began here. First of all, Lulu had no idea how to categorize it. So it put it actually in fiction, which is interesting. So clearly there's no way, there's no metadata. And really a lot of the problems have to do with metadata. There's no metadata, I guess, at the Google Books site, you know, saying this is nonfiction fiction or anything. Subject headings, nothing got passed along to Lulu. So Lulu just sort of sticks it, I guess, willy-nilly wherever it can find it. But still, $14.99, considering a first edition, will run you hundreds if not thousands of dollars. And there's not currently a good reprint of this available from, let's say, University Press. Not bad. So I went ahead and ordered this, and it said it could take a couple weeks. I actually got the whole thing in five days, processed, printed out, and sent to me. And the further problems began with the cover. And that is because, again, it's getting just the unprocessed or unexamined metadata from Google. And so the cover, which you guys have to see, it's in my office, it says, an investigation of the laws of thought, colon, on which are founded the dot, dot, dot. So what it's done there is it clearly took what was either the title of the page at Google, or it's got a long subtitle. And so it tried to squeeze the subtitle into the cover, but it didn't fit it, so there's just an ellipse. So that looks really quite strange. It got the author correct, and it actually says originally published in 1854 by Walton and Maberly, which is absolutely correct. On the back, it lists the price. And then I think this is a really nice touch that either Lulu or Yakov has done, which is that it says specifically on the back that this book is in the public domain and that you can download it and read it for free on Google Books, and it gives you the URL to go to for that. So it does do that. And, but again, you know, problems with the metadata, and the inside title page, you'd think, well, they could squeeze in the whole subtitle, but indeed, you would get the same thing where you've got the dot, dot, dot. Then there's a bunch of, you know, there's a page from Google that says, you know, this is the Google's digital copy of the book and, you know, you're okay to make non-commercial use of it. So it includes sort of the Google header as well as the Lulu header. From there, actually, it's not bad. They've got the really great coat of arms that is the gift of this book to, it says, bought with the gift of William Gray of Boston, Mass., class of 1829, March 19th, 1860. I assume that this is the Harvard copy of this book, unless I'm wrong. No, it is. It is, in fact, on the next page. They've got the Harvard stamp for Harvard College and then the regular title page from the scan, which does have everything correct. So it's, you know, it's, and then after that, you get what looks like a kind of decent fax quality image of it. Perfectly readable. It's a little bit overwashed. You can see the edges of some of the scan pages, although I assume that's what it was like on Google. But perfectly readable and with nice margins. You can certainly mark it up. It's got a lot of mathematical equations. They're all pretty readable, with a couple of exceptions where it got kind of complicated and all smudged together. And then, of course, there's some underlines, and those make it into the text as well. So all in all, not too bad. In the back cover, it's got a full technical information thing of exactly how this did it. So he talks about getting metadata from extracting it from MySQL and using Linux and all that stuff. So it has a lot of the artifacts that public domain reprints has. So not a bad little piece of work by Yakov. Obviously some things to iron out. I wonder if this will really take off. I mean, is this something that you guys would use, let's say, in a classroom to order cheap books or first editions? I think I might. That's funny. Go ahead, Tom. Well, I don't know if I'd use it in the classroom, but I would definitely use it for research. I mean, it is really nice to have the books on your shelf when you're writing. And, you know, rare books, first editions, especially, I mean, I think it's especially good for people who are doing, let's say, pre-1923 history. To have those books on your shelf is something that we've never had before, really, unless you have a carol in the library or something. And it would be really nice to have those. I think about writing my dissertation, and there are several books that I either had to buy from used bookstores or from, you know, abe.com or other places, or that I just, you know, just kind of did without most of the time that I could really have used. In the classroom, I'm not so sure, possibly with graduate students, but I'd like to hear what Mittle says. Yeah, I mean, I was thinking primarily of grad students, but, or senior, you know, senior level of the key books that I use in my classes, let's say the first edition of Darwin's Origin of Species, you know, there are good $15 paperbacks that are already available. But there are a lot of books, you know, much like this one, where, you know, it's very hard to get a quality reprint for something like 14 bucks. And I think it could be pretty handy in that kind of setting. Well, one other launch from this past week that caught our eye was the launch of Flickr Commons. Clearly, they've been watching the Zotero project since we were launching a Zotero Commons. They beat us to getting this online, but with the Library of Congress, I don't know if the two of you saw this, but the LC has given them, I think, to start 3,000 photographs from their American Memory digitized collection of public domain works. And I guess the idea here is to, it's at flickr.com slash commons. The idea is that I guess you can not only use these photos on your site, but also tag them, which provides the Library of Congress a sort of way of searching through their historic collection.
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I actually wrote about this on my blog just the other day. I think it's really interesting because I went and poked around in the pages and I didn't look at all 3,115 photographs, but a fair amount of the commenting on the individual images is just like, oh, I didn't know they had those kinds of things in 1914 or how did they get the color so good in 1943, those kinds of comments. But people also found errors in the Library of Congress's annotations of the images, a misspelling here or a mischaracterization of a date there. And so the general public improved the quality of the Library of Congress's metadata on these images. And so in that sense, here you have the general public participating in an archival orotero, and the complaint that I have is that it doesn't pick up that whole conversation under the image. Yeah, it would be interesting to do that. I did look at some of the conversations, and, for instance, they've got a nice collection of photographs of baseball players from the 1910s. And this is such a perfect example of how the public can help out because there are all these amateur baseball nuts who knew every stat. And you look through these photographs that people are, you know, the Library of Congress wasn't exactly sure who it was or they knew a little bit about the player's name. And the comments, Mills, that you noted below the photograph say, oh, this guy's nickname was Cocky and he hit 365 in 1911 and then he was traded and, you know, he died in whatever year. I mean, the information that people have just from the photograph is pretty impressive. But it's interesting, isn't it, that the ELC didn't do it on their site, right? They're not opening up loc.gov to this kind of discussion. It's almost like they put it on Flickr and that kind of gives them permission to run this experiment or to open it up. One of the things I guess I'm a little maybe concerned about is how does this metadata, how does this discussion get back onto the Library of Congress' website? I mean, is this going to be just kind of an island in Flickr where they have some images, or does all of this get back into the main Library of Congress catalog and integrated into the into the Library of Congress website. So that's one one question I have. And then another thing I thought about this was what a contrast to the Smithsonian, where the only way that they ended up on Flickr was for this public resource dot.org. Do you guys remember we talked about this a few months ago? Where publicresource.org basically took photos off the Smithsonian site that the Smithsonian was actually charging for, charging for access to, and put them onto Flickr without the Smithsonian's permission because they are public domain works. And there was kind of a mini tempest in a teapot over that a few months ago. So I think it's interesting the different attitudes that these public resources, these public institutions just down the mall from one another are taking towards Flickr and open access and those kinds of issues. Yeah, that's a great point and one that we're going to pick up in our featured segment, which is indeed about open access. And open access is indeed the topic for today's feature segment. For those of you new to the podcast, we like to spend the middle portion of the podcast talking about one issue in depth. And this is one issue that we've actually covered on prior podcasts. And that is, you know, looking at the potential for things like this very podcast, podcasts of lectures, YouTube videos of lectures, open access blogs that are written by professors, and other open access materials from the Academy making their way out using the web to all corners of the globe and into the minds of the general public as well as students. And, you know, this theme is something that came up particularly over the last month as we saw the launch, the glossy launch of BigThink.com, which is a new site with short two-minute videos covering big topics that's hoping to make a big splash. And for those of you who haven't heard about BigThink, it's underwritten by luminaries like Larry Summers, the ex-president of Harvard University, and course, from the Clinton administration as well, the economist. Why don't we take a listen to, since we're historians, to Neil Ferguson, speaking of Harvard, the Harvard professor and best-selling author. Neil Ferguson on, is history driven by individuals or larger forces? From BigThink.com. Well, the larger forces are, in some measure, the product of individual action, too. Naturally, there are natural phenomena over which we have limited control. Most of history was shaped by the weather, because most of history consists of agricultural societies trying to eke out a living with pretty poor technology. Now, I don't tend to study that period. I'm a modernist concerned with the post-industrial world. And in that world, the role of the weather diminishes, though it still remains an important factor. And who knows, it may become more important as time goes on. But allowing for those natural constraints under which all historical processes operate. The individual's decisions never stop being taken. Everybody is making a decision every day, even if it's a very humble decision. Do I plant tomorrow or wait a week? But the great forces that historians used to talk about when they tried to make deterministic arguments are just the net result of all the individual decisions collected together. Well, Tom and Mills, weather, individuals, wars, what do you make of this? I think it's hard to be interviewed about things that aren't actually your area of expertise. I mean, you know, Ferguson had to say, well, but I don't actually study that period of time. But, you know, I think in the bigger context, I mean, Ferguson had to say, well, but I don't actually study that period of time. But I think in the bigger context, I mean, this site got a lot of buzz when it first came out. And I have to say, I spent some time surfing through the site, and there's just kind of not much there. And in particular, where there's not much there is participation from the general public. I mean, if you look at – I don't know how long the site's been up now, but it's been weeks. And there's virtually no discussion going on. Hardly anybody has, you know, participated in ways that were anticipated. They say that there are 5,900 and some odd ideas on the site, but each one just doesn't seem to have much going on. And I don't know what the sort of higher intellectual plane is of this site. Yeah, I mean, weren't they looking at, you know, over this last summer on the podcast, we played the Berkeley YouTube channel, which had some very in-depth and still does indeed have a lot of lecture, you know, in-depth lectures about topics in history and physics and computer science. I mean, isn't this a site that looked at that open access model and said, wait a minute, there's a market here? Although their response is these two-minute things. Is this just attention span, attention deficit disorder version of that? Is this the same market? Is there a market for this kind of intellectual content? And should professors be pursuing that? I just think, I think, you know, from the, we can see from the Neil Ferguson clip that it's sort of like, you know, ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer. I mean, it, I don't, I mean, here's a really smart guy. I mean, you know, I've read some of his work and's good. And it's not necessarily the kind of history that I would like to do or the kind of political leanings that I have, but he's good. And he's given two minutes to say something about this very big, I mean, one of the sort of central questions of history. And he doesn't do a very good job at it, and I don't think any of us would. I think the site sort of assumes that the sum of knowledge is the sum of the answers to these two-minute questions or to these small questions. And I think it's kind of a simplistic way to go about thinking about what knowledge really is. And so I just think it's just – and I think I would bet – and this isn't just, I think, scholars thinking this. I would imagine that the general public comes to the site and understands that these are questions that can't be answered in two minutes and that we're not going to buy into this, which is, I think, probably why it hasn't gotten the traction. I don't think it's just coincidence. I think it's probably that the idea is somehow bankrupt and that the public kind of gets that.
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Yeah, I mean, if you look at some of the iTunes subscriptions and then some of the YouTube page views just for some of these, you know, what I think the people behind BigThink.com would consider rather boring talking head lectures, although actually all their videos are talking head lectures, but of more well-buffed people than on some of these college videos. Yeah, that, I don't know, there's a lot of people out there. There's an interest out there, isn't there, in this kind of broader learning that open access enables? Isn't there, Mills? I mean, you've advocated this very strongly on your blog and on this podcast. Yeah, I mean, I think that there's a lot more interest in open access to education than, I mean, and I think the Berkeley YouTube is a perfect example of that or, you know, various things that have been written recently in the popular media about college professors whose – their video podcasts or just their regular podcasts have become very popular. And they're not really creating those to be popular. They're creating those – that's how they teach their classes and people other than their students start watching them and get – or listening to them and get excited about it and subscribe to the whole thing. And I mean I just put up my lectures for my East European history class last semester and I've had two or three emails from people who picked them up off of iTunes and listened to them and wrote me questions. Now, I mean this is a total shock to me because who knew that anybody would listen other than the students who have to because they're in my class. But, you know, it's a pretty obscure topic. So, you know, if I were teaching a class about Darwin and evolution, I bet I would have a bigger audience. And so, you know, I think that there really is a much bigger audience for it out there. And I think as educators, especially those of us who work for public universities, we have a real obligation to try as much confluence of several factors that push toward open access, right? I mean, Mills, you've talked a broader community, one that might not be paying, but that is very interested in topics like Eastern European history. And then there's, you know, there's more narcissistic things about reputation, that you're getting your reputation out there, the things behind gates, you know, that are closed off, that are not on the web, are going to get fewer views than something that's out there on open access. So open access really encompasses a lot of incentives and tensions in it, doesn't it? I mean, it's hard to say why you should do it or what the reasons are behind it without getting into all these different areas. Tom, I'm sorry I cut you off. Byzantine Rulers, which, I mean, what could be more obscure in Byzantine than 12 Byzantine Rulers, this podcast that is done by a teacher at a high school on Long Island, and it really is, they're all probably 20 minutes to 45 minutes long, and there are 13 episodes, including the introduction, And it's one of the most popular podcasts on the web. Still, after a couple years of being available, it's still one of the most popular podcasts on the web. And so I think there, I mean, in terms of markets, I think there really is a market for this stuff. Yeah, I mean, is it that in that case, and also I think we've mentioned the BBC In Our Time podcast or radio show, which is now also a podcast that gets into things like Renaissance geometry in depth, which you would never imagine would have a large radio audience, but it does work extremely well. Is this a, I mean, is the iPod kind of enabling a lot of this or the long commutes that people have that you want to listen to something more than just talk radio, you know, banal talk radio in the car that it gives you something more intellectual to listen to? I mean, who's actually listening to this stuff? I think that's what we don't know. I'm not sure we know who's listening to it. And it would be great to find out. Sorry class period in a semester. And so having the ability to listen to a class that they missed or watch a class that they missed is really important to them being able to complete the work, especially in classes or in majors where there's a licensing exam at the end and there's certain critical knowledge they absolutely have to have, like mechanical engineering or nursing or something like that. They have to have that information. There's no single fact in history that they have to have, you know, like mechanical engineering or nursing or something like that. You know, they have to have that information. There's no single fact in history that they have to have. But, you know, in other fields, they really have to have that information. And so these students, you know, who work so much, to have access to, easy access to that kind of information, I think is really, really important. Right. So that's another point for open access that I hadn't thought about, which is just time shifting of the materials standpoint, a little bit of the pragmatic aspect to it. But also he felt that, you know, his salary was paid for by the state of Virginia, by the taxpayer. He thought universities in getting their giant tax breaks sort of had a responsibility to make things available under open access terms, and that he thought it really was a kind of a shame that so much of what is produced in academia is gated in some way. How do we deal with these sort of sets of expectations? I mean, for instance, the expectations of publishers that things will be available under copyright and that we can't make that material available open access. Well, I think, I mean, I think one of the things that the technology does is it allows us to kind of allows us, we're doing it and other people are making this choice. And if you want to make this choice, it allows you to bypass some of those interests that have prohibited this in the future. I think we're seeing more and more of this because it's gotten to be so easy to put this stuff up. So I think in the past, if you wanted to distribute your production, you had to go through one of these entities that was interested. And rightly so. They're trying to make money. And they tell you that at the outset. No one's trying to scam anybody here. They're trying to make money and you had to go through one of them. And so you played by their rules. You signed a contract and those were the terms you signed. Now with iTunes U, podcasting, and services like Lulu that we talked about in the last segment where you can publish your own book and other things, I think you don't have to choose to go through those kinds of interests anymore. And so maybe it was just a matter of the kind of the means that's been really debated the most is whether historians and others in the humanities can move to an open access model that takes away these mediaries of the publishers or the professional associations and the roles that they've traditionally played as a kind of vetting body for materials. You know, with the power of publishing straight to the web, it raises these questions. And, you know, obviously there's a lot of skepticism, we've encountered it, about open access that it, you know, things that are available via open access are not as good because they haven't been vetted, you know, that there's, you know, they haven't been copy edited well enough, they haven't been, this podcast may be a good example. But, you know, we don't spend a lot of time editing the audio on this. And in some way they're sort of worth less. You're paying nothing for it. It's open access, so it's worth less than the for-pay gated things. You know, and one of the comments I made on that forum was that, boy, you look around at what's going on in fields other than history and the humanities, the sciences, law, economics, and there's been this rush toward open access models. I mean, there's, you know, from the famous to the less famous. I mean, famous being, let's say, the public library of science move where a bunch of famous scientists got together and said, you know, we're going to solve this problem about people being worried about publishing an open access model that somehow it's less worthy of getting tenure or it's somehow not vetted enough and shouldn't have as much credit associated with it. You know, so they put their names on this institution and have a rigorous, you know, acceptance and editing process. And, you know, it's considered very valuable to publish on the PLOS website, P-L-O-S website.
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They can get their ideas out faster. They can have conversations with their audience. Is it just going to be harder for history and the humanities to do this because of our emphasis on the published monograph with a university press? Mills, what are your thoughts on that? You've gone through this process of publishing. Yeah, I mean, I think it's going to be harder because historians are such a cranky tribe. I mean, we're just so hidebound when it comes to our thinking as a group. We're so hidebound when it comes to our thinking about how to do things differently. I mean, you know, you mentioned Roy earlier. Roy actually Roy actually years ago did a study of the American Historical Association's annual meeting. And from the beginning, people complained that the panels were really boring. And so the innovation, I think it was in the 1920s or maybe the 1930s, was to add a discussant. And so just in other words, put another boring person on stage and let them talk for another 20 minutes. And the annual meetings are largely unchanged since the beginning. And so historians for many of them are I think probably liberal or progressive or whatever you want to call them. But boy, when it comes to historians, and I think it is especially historians, but it's other scholars as well, don't really take the long view in that there's this assumption that kind of modes of scholarship have remained unchanged over millennia. And that's absolutely not true. I mean, these mechanisms of publication and peer review were not in place in, let's say, the 17th century. And the book was a different thing in the 17th century and the way it was produced was different or the 15th century or the 9th century or whatever it is. And I don't think we would say that scholarship was inferior during the Renaissance than it is today because of that. I think it assumes that there's some this kind of unchanging standard of scholarship and way of vetting scholarship, which is just, it's just amazing to me that historians don't kind of recognize that kind of change over time and that we may be in a time when things are changing again. And, you know, Dan, it's really interesting to me. I saw that you were going to be doing this discussion for the Journal of American History. You mentioned it on your blog. And my first instinct was, before I kind of read to the end of your blog post, my first instinct was to email you and say, oh, that's great. Where is it going to be posted online? Where can I watch the live discussion? Because I thought there'd be some kind of an IRC channel or a chat room or something. And then I read down to the end of your post and it said, well, it's not going to appear until September or December or whenever. And I just found that so funny that just the difference in sort of my thinking and being in digital humanities and maybe the thinking of the editors of the Journal of American History, sort of how far apart we are on this. Right. Well, I think what it came down to, and I mean, I don't want to disparage the JAH. I think they're doing a great job, and I think it's going to be an interesting discussion. But I think it gets back to something that Mills talked about when we first started talking about open access models on this podcast. And I think, Mills, the way you put it was we just have to get over ourselves. Exactly. I was just going to say that. It's time for historians to get over ourselves. Right. So when I emailed the editor of the JAH, I just said, you know, this is just something to think about. You can make this discussion live. And, you know, he emailed back and said, well, you know, I think people would be worried that there were, you know, this is an open-ended discussion and people are just kind of throwing ideas out there. And we want to give everyone a chance to edit what they said. So we have a, you know, a straight, you know, well, you know, flowing discussion that's abridged and all that. And I think it just goes, but I fully understand that. I mean, I think, but it's just, we worry about this too much. I mean, I think that's part of all of us have had a blog. I think a blog is very instructive on this point that you make mistakes. I mean, horrible mistakes of spelling and grammar, mistakes of content, et cetera, things that you wouldn't, that normally wouldn't happen in, let's say, a published book or article. But there's all these other advantages to it. And you just sort of have to go with the flow and realize you're going to make mistakes, but that the open access-ness of it has a value that trumps those other values of 100% perfection on spelling, for instance. Well, I think the three of us have a pitch battle on our hands because I just think that the tradition, Tom, as you said, it's just, it's really out there and it's a very strong undercurrent in our field. And whether this ends up online, and actually, I think JH actually may end up publishing the entire transcript when it's all done as some kind of open access body, but I'm going to continue to push for that. We'll see how that goes, and I will report back, I guess, in September. We've got a few minutes left, as always, for our Picks of the Week. Why don't we start with Mills this week. Mills, what did you find for us online or off? Mine is Yahoo Pipes, which is a website that allows total novices when it comes to coding like me to create their own information pipe on the Internet. So if you go to this website, it takes about two minutes to register, especially if you have a Yahoo account already. And so I created one in under five minutes, which trolls the Flickr.com database and pulls out photographs of Hurricane Katrina and plots them out on a map of the city of New Orleans, which is something I'm interested in because of my work on the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank. And it worked, and it worked fine. And so it's really a pretty neat way of creating information feeds online, especially if you don't actually know anything about coding. It's all object-oriented, drag the objects around, and it works really easy. Makes me look smart. Yeah, Yahoo Pipes is really quite amazing. And if you get into it, you can do even more complicated things like extract names from it and use those for various purposes. So it'll just take any feed and sort of twist and mash it up. Great pick for the week, Mills. Tom, what do you have for us this week? I've got something called Feed Journal. It's at feedjournal.com. And their marketing slogan is the newspaper you always wanted. And it really is something either for readers of blogs or writers of blogs. Thank you. your RSS feed for a certain time span and dumps it into a PDF that's laid out like a newspaper that you can then print. So I think probably a lot of our listeners here on Digital Campus are bloggers themselves. And I know like my mom never reads my blog, but I bet she would if I printed it out for her. I can send her this. She can print it out and read the articles that I post on my blog in a kind of newspaper format. The other thing you can do as a reader of blogs is to essentially print out all your feeds for the week. This is the newspaper you always wanted aspect of it. It'll aggregate your feeds. It'll lay them out into a five-column or a four-column newspaper-type design layout. And you can print them out and kind of read them in your armchair rather than having to scan them on your computer. So it's kind of a print feed reader for RSS feeds at feedjournal.com. Sounds great. I'll have to check that out. Well, I'll make it a trifecta on the feed RSS side of things for this Picks of the Week and talk about the advanced features in Google Reader, which I can tell is a big, very popular reader among certainly the readers of my blog and also for Digital Campus subscribers. And I think there's, the feature I want to point out is called shared items, which a lot of people don't use. But if you're using Google Reader or if you're not using a newsreader or RSS reader, I'd encourage you to try Google Reader out. And one of the features it has is you can place a star on an item or you can share that item by clicking little icons as you read each item.
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So actually, Mills and Tom, I was thinking about this, that we could share some items together and sort of see what stories we wanted to look at for the next podcast rather than our current method of talking about it via email or just before we start the podcast. But you can click on shared items. It will share it with just your friends if you want. Well, actually, that's not true. If you share it, it's shared with the world, but you have to kind of know a URL of where to go to get someone's shared feeds. But if everyone's using Google Reader, you can just look at a pane in the window called Friends Shared Items and sort of keep track of what they're finding interesting. And this has been shown on an even larger level with a site called ReadBurner. I'm not sure if either of you have seen this yet, but read as in reading a book, burner.com. And what that does is it takes everyone who's using the shared feature on Google Reader and aggregates it all together and sort of creates a dig.com sort of site just based on Google Reader users. And what I'd like to see, speaking of open access, is this is a tremendous model, I think, for sort of vetting open access content in the humanities. You can subscribe to humanities content, you know, including latest articles from journals in RSS or blogs in RSS, and then click on the star or share button in Google Reader and aggregate that. And so I think looking at ReadBurner will give you a good idea of what's possible in RSS, just as it is in Yahoo Pipes or in, what was it again, Tom? Feed? Feed Journal. Feed Journal. Three great ways to flex your RSS muscles this time on the Digital Campus Podcast. And we'll see you again in two weeks for another episode. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Fear itself. Fear itself. Please visit us online at digitalcampus.tv where you can join in the discussion and let us know about stories and issues you would like us to cover on future episodes. Mike O'Malley wrote our theme music. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Fear itself!
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