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November 30, 2005
Google Book Search
On Monday I attended a talk sponsored by the Center for History and New Media and the Visual Knowledge Project on Google's plans to digitize essentially every book in several major university or research libraries (Michigan, Stanford, Oxford, Harvard, New York Public Library). The speakers were Clifford Lynch from the Coalition for Networked Information and Jonathan Band, an IT lawyer specializing in issues of digital copyright. I was pleasantly surprised to see something like 75 people show up for what could be construed as a fairly obscure topic.
Why would so many people show to hear two experts desclaim on digitization, copyright and Google? Despite the speakers' overall positive take on Google's project, I think the size of the audience was, at least in part, a reflection of the unease many people feel at the idea that a small number of corporations (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo in particular) will have such a prominent role in the creation of digital versions of the intellectual product of our society.
Others were there because Google's project poses a particular interesting challenge to existing copyright. Essentially, as Lynch pointed out in his remarks, Google is arguing that it is okay to build an access apparatus without permission of the copyright holder. Thus, when Google scans a book that is currently in copyright and posts snippets from the book in their search database, they have made limited access to copyrighted material available without permission of the copyright holder.
I think this concern of the copyright holders is overblown. My first attempt to use Google Print happened last week when I was trying to locate a copy of the James Thurber story, The Dog That Bit People so that I could read it to my children. Via Google Print I was able to get to page 1 of the story, but that's all we could see--not very satisfying to my children--and so my only option then was to click one of the links on the left of the screen and order the book online. I did, thereby verifying that the new business model works, both for Google and for the copyright holder. I could have waited and gone to the library and picked up a copy of the book, but, sitting there at the computer with my boys, I decided to go ahead and order it up asap. I don't see how the copyright holder was harmed by this transaction, do you?
Still, many in the audience, me included, couldn't shake the worry about what happens when libraries begin deciding that once they have a digital collection, why do they need to use up all that space taken up by the stacks? Why not pitch the books and use that space for income producing classrooms? For those who want to dismiss this as alarmism, I would submit that this is already happening. With the advent of JSTOR, more and more libaries are pitching their journal collections. Sure, sure, various library consortia are keeping sets of these journals in storage, but for how long?
In the end, I suppose we're going to be better off with all this work digitized. For one thing, it takes away my students' excuse for not doing library research. With all those library books online, they won't be able to hide from scholarly monographs any longer.
Posted by mills at 12:02 PM
November 28, 2005
World Digital Library?
In case you didn't see Librarian of Congress James Billington's op ed piece in the Washington Post on November 21, he announces a big initiative to create a World Digital Library in which the great works of print are digitized. Guess who's helping to pay for it? Google did you say? Give the lucky lady a prize!
The column begins:
Digitized, instant communication is the great technological revolution of our time. It has streamlined business and delivered more information more quickly to more people than ever. And it has accelerated basic and applied research. Both the problems and the researchers who work on them are scattered around the world, but they come together in a common focus on the Internet...
Later he argues:
Libraries are inherently islands of freedom and antidotes to fanaticism. They are temples of pluralism where books that contradict one another stand peacefully side by side just as intellectual antagonists work peacefully next to each other in reading rooms. It is legitimate and in our nation's interest that the new technology be used internationally, both by the private sector to promote economic enterprise and by the public sector to promote democratic institutions. But it is also necessary that America have a more inclusive foreign cultural policy -- and not just to blunt charges that we are insensitive cultural imperialists. We have an opportunity and an obligation to form a private-public partnership to use this new technology to celebrate the cultural variety of the world.
Through a World Digital Library, the rich store of the world's culture could be provided in a form more universally accessible than ever before. An American partnership in promoting such a project for UNESCO would show how we are helping other people recover distinctive elements of their cultures through a shared enterprise that may also help them discover more about the experience of our own and other free cultures.
Somehow creating a World Digital Library turned into an instrument of foreign policy. It's an interesting leap but not one I'm sure I follow. Part of the problem for people like Billington is that big initiatives like this one need to be "policy relevant" if they are going to be sold successfully on Capitol Hill. It's a shame that he can't just make the argument on its merits. I suppose the good news is the the digital capabilities of the Big Library will be used now to begin bringing together similar initiatives on a global scale.
Posted by mills at 10:14 AM
November 22, 2005
Off the desktop
What will happen to digital history when it moves off the desktop and into the handheld device? The day of the migration from desktop computer to handheld portable device is closing in on us fast, but will it transform what we do with digital history in the same ways that the migration from CD-Rom to the Internet changed what we do?
What makes me think this change is in the wind? For me the most important indicator is the amount of money corporate America is betting on the shift to the handheld device. Apple Computer has placed a huge bet on the new iPod with video capability and TiVo To Go hit the market shortly thereafter. And the telecoms are all planning on streaming lots and lots of video content to your phone (thereby using up lots and lots of the minutes on your service plan). The complaints I've heard are (a) the screen is too small to see much and there isn't much content available. I suspect there won't be a lot done about screen size, although the resolution is fantastic on the new iPod, but the content will start flowing pretty fast.
What does this mean for historians interested in the digital presentation of information.
Imagine this first scenario: A visitor to the Manassas Battlefield National Park stops in the park's visitor center, plugs his or her iPod into a download station pops in the ear buds and sets off on a walking tour of Chinn Ridge, the Old Stone Bridge and other landmarks of the two Civil War battles there. Along the way, our visitor gets not only an audio tour, but is able to see historical images from the various stops on the tour, can access texts such as letters home from soldiers who fought there, or can download entire documents to read later at home.
Scenario number two: A visitor to the National Gallery of Art stands before Renoir's Odalisque. In addition to listening to an audio tour, our visitor sees on the handheld screen smaller pieces of the larger work to focus on, can click over to a different work in the same orientalist style for comparison, can read something Renoir wrote about the work, can trace its provenance over time, and can download more information for later perusal.
Scenario number three: A student visits the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum for class. Standing in front of a 1930s photograph of a German woman wearing a sign that brands her as a race traitor because she slept with a Jewish man, our student can then access the Museum's digital library of other such images, can read accounts of women humiliated in this way, can download documents for later research and can read postings in a discussion forum of other students who have stood in that same spot in the Museum.
These are just three scenarios that occur to me off the top of my head as I ponder what we might do when we take history off the desktop and out into the world. The possibilities are nothing less than exciting.
Posted by mills at 09:22 AM | Comments (2)
November 18, 2005
Digital Classrooms
My graduate students have weighed in on the topic of "digital classrooms" in their class blog. Their postings are very instructive because they offer the view of the next generation of historians on where digital media will (and won't) take us in the teaching and learning of history. As I read their contributions to the blog I was struck by the sense of comfort that they had with digital media, but also with the continuing unease many felt for the shift away from the more traditional methods of history teaching.
I share some of that unease, raised as I was in the Joe Friday school of history ("Just the facts, sir"). Every week I worry that my students will emerge from my course without the facts they need to qualify as educated in the subjects I am teaching. But then I kick myself in the rear (no mean feat given my lack of flexibility these days) and remind myself that facts can be looked up--it is the ability to work with those facts that is most important.
Posted by mills at 03:28 PM
November 14, 2005
Changing attitudes
This past weekend I attended the national conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in Salt Lake City. In addition to the usual conference activities of presenting a paper, serving as the discussant on a panel, and doing a lot of schmoozing with colleagues, I attended my first meeting of the Education Committee of the Association. This was a duty I volunteered for because it seemed to me that the AAASS could be doing a good bit more to promote our field through the ways that our varied subjects are taught.
AAASS is an ecumenical scholarly society in that anyone in any discipline that is in any way associated with Slavic, Soviet, or East Bloc society can feel at home. Thus, we have historians, political scientists, anthropologists, economists, linguists and literary scholars all mingling together. During the Cold War, AAASS was where it was happening. Although I didn�t join the association until after the collapse of Communism in Europe and Eurasia, I sure heard enough stories about how much bigger the Association used to be. In any given year, more than 3,000 scholars and others would attend the annual meeting. Last weekend somewhere around 1,000 people showed up in Salt Lake City and I�m willing to bet that membership in the Association is down by a similar percentage.
So, given that our field is now going to be smaller than it was when understanding those East Bloc types was vital to our very existence, why not reinvigorate what we�re doing by focusing more on our students? One way to accomplish this would be to get the Association�s membership thinking more about the scholarship of teaching and learning. We�ll see what�s possible to achieve in the months to come.
Posted by mills at 05:07 PM
November 02, 2005
Historical Hoaxes Online
Of late the Internet has spawned some very interesting historical hoaxes. My current favorite is Boilerplate. Mechanical Marvel of the Nineteenth Century. Another recent example is the Old Negro Space Program documentary about America's now forgotten Blackstronauts.
I think it's easy to imagine a student finding his or her way to one of these websites and then writing a paper that draws heavily on what he or she found there. After all, the Boilerplate spoof took in comedian Chris Elliot. So if a sophisticated writer for television shows such as David Letterman can be fooled, why not our typical 18 year old freshman?
Posted by mills at 01:50 PM
November 01, 2005
Rewriting a mission
Here at George Mason University we are in the process of splitting our College of Arts and Sciences in two, thereby creating a College of Mathematics and Science and a College of Liberal Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CLAHS). The reasons for this are long and not so interesting. What is interesting is that for each of these colleges the faculty have been charged with developing a new set of academic goals for their college. I sit on the CLAHS academic goals committee.
At a moment like this when all bets are off and everything is on the table, I'm hoping it is the moment to get my colleagues to take seriously the idea that the scholarship of teaching and learning has a place at the core of the new college's mission.
As the meetings of our committee unfold, it will be interesting to see how they respond to the idea that this domain of scholarship should be valued alongside the scholarship of discovery and the scholarship of integration. No one, I think, will disagree with the fact that our colleagues take their teaching responsibilities very seriously--most of the departments in the new college are known for excellent teaching and the rest must be considered very good. So, if we take teaching seriously, why not take the scholarship of teaching seriously?
Several units within the new college already are deeply immersed in SoTL work. Our Higher Education program places the SoTL at the center of their graduate course sequences and the entire approach of New Century College (a college within the college) is grounded in the SoTL. Many of the projects of the Center for History and New Media also grow from the results of SoTL research.
The direction this discussion takes will say a lot about the future of the scholarship of teaching and learning here. Stay tuned...
Posted by mills at 01:34 PM