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In the Library, With the Lead Pipe: On Scholarly Communication and the Digital Humanities: An Interview with Kathleen Fitzpatrick
At Temple University Libraries (TUL), librarian Fred Rowland began conducting interviews and sharing them as streaming audio through TUL's website in 2007. The following interview transcript with digital humanities scholar Kathleen Fitzpatrick offers insight into her work and a discussion about the future of scholarly communication. An introduction has been added to the interview, which addresses both the transcription process and the implications of using digital media to make more scholarship available to a wider audience beyond academia.
In 2007, librarian Fred Rowland started recording and sharing his own interviews with students, scholars, and practitioners on the Temple University Libraries website. The interviews are noteworthy not just for the reasons any interview would be, but because they capture some of the creative intellectual energy that circulates through an academic institution on a regular basis. They are furthermore conducted by a librarian, which is not typical. To give a sense of what the interviews accomplish, consider Rowland's discussion with the editors of the journal n+1. When the editors visited Temple University to talk about their experience starting a print journal in the midst of the online transformation of the early 2000s, Rowland made arrangements to sit down and talk with them on record about their work. His n+1 interview offers unique insight into the formation of a significant publication at a particular historical moment. It also serves as a record of what transpired on the occasion of their visit. Indeed, something similar would need to be said for each of the many interviews Rowland has conducted over the course of the last eight years; a growing body of work that merits further consideration.
In 2015, Rowland's interviews continue to offer high quality, original content from the front lines of research and publishing. From the perspective of a fellow librarian, his interviews can be seen as an example of professional and scholarly engagement. He asks smart questions of a diverse cohort of academics whom we might not otherwise encounter. My interest in his work, and the desire to transcribe it, developed alongside the expansion of his outreach. Gradually, my interest took the form of a concern, first about the findability of the interviews via keyword searching online, and later about their longevity as potentially valuable primary documents. How is anyone going to find these interviews? And how long are the audio files going to last? In my opinion, such rich dialogue should be transcribed and published in order to increase access to it, in order to make it easier to cite should anyone wish to reference its contents, and in order to preserve it as part of the historical record.
Though it is tempting to see the transcribed interview as simply another way of accessing the same content, it is important to draw a distinction between the audio recording and the transcription. The meaning of the original interview slips and slides at each stage of editing and through the transformation from one medium to the next. Kathleen Fitzpatrick's participation in the interview transcribed and published below is an example of the engagement she encourages scholars to make outside the peer-review process. She is concerned that the current grip of peer-review on tenure, promotion, and recognition prevents humanities scholars from taking advantage of the innovative and creative possibilities of new technologies.
By participating in informal interviews such as the one that follows, scholars would likely lose some control over their message as it passes from one form and audience to another (although Fitzpatrick's participation as a reviewer in this publication helps ameliorate that effect here). As she explains during her conversation with Rowland, scholars get a little nervous when moving outside traditional venues for just this reason. Reliance on the monograph has always offered humanities scholars the illusion of control as their work is likely to reach but a small coterie of like-minded academics and enthusiasts who share a similar background and orientation.
Digital media and the Internet have the potential to expand the audience of scholarly work beyond the confines of the academy, if only scholars are willing to work towards such developments. This is both an exciting and unsettling prospect. In order to breathe new life into the humanities and reach wider audiences, scholars will need to learn to negotiate these uncertain and ambiguous encounters. Given the longstanding relationships between librarians and scholars, the academic library becomes an important pivot-point in this process of engagement between the world of scholarship and wider communities of interest. Librarians have a long history of building personal and professional relationships that encourage conversations across communities, and the academic library is increasingly becoming a hub of publishing support and expertise. As they make the work of scholarship available to wider audiences, academic libraries can play an essential role in loosening the grip of traditional peer-review on the career choices of scholars.
Around the turn of the century, with two decades of experience in the book trade, and a privileged perspective on the rise of the Internet, Rowland began working as a librarian in classics, philosophy, religion, and economics. His interviews take place in his small, modest office, decorated with books, family photos, a few Buddhas, and a bust of Shakespeare. Though it is understood that recordings of the interviews will be posted to his blog on the Temple University Libraries website, it is important to recognize there is no audience at the time of recording, making each interview a rather intimate scholarly conversation between author and librarian. The two participants respond to physical and verbal queues in order to develop a sense of shared meaning. The author provides greater or lesser details and explanations depending on her intuitions and assumptions of the librarian's knowledge and understanding. In relative terms, this is an impromptu encounter for a scholar, more dance than lecture.
Once the interview is over, the editing begins, as Rowland prepares the conversation for an audience. A preliminary effort is made to remove verbal prompts, hiccups, and pauses. Unnecessary signals of agreement or understanding are truncated and digressions deleted. Though Rowland does not go out of his way to shorten his interviews, the audience's brief attention span must be considered. Once the edited recording is posted online, the encounter has already been stripped of some of its context, and, short of some kind of pre-publication agreement, the scholar's message is increasingly dependent upon the kindness of strangers.
The audio introduction Rowland provides before the interview is an additional opportunity to layer in a meaning over which the author has no control. The text of the blog post adds yet another layer. The move between forms of media – from audio recording to transcript – is one more step, and arguably the longest, away from the original encounter. As with the audio editing, accuracy in transcription involves finding some further balance between recording every utterance in all of its detail and stripping out the more detailed idiosyncrasies of speech that may be considered irrelevant. As more of the context is stripped out in transcription, however, what remains of the conversation that took place in Rowland's office? As Fitzpatrick goes to read the following transcript, one can imagine her thinking at various points that she should have finished this thought, or rephrased that question, or taken the time to explain some important background information.
Scholars, who pride themselves on accuracy, precision, and message control, and whose careers are so dependent on reception by peers, might be anxious and reluctant to enter a wider cultural orbit. The intervention that Kathleen Fitzpatrick advocates is actually much greater than engaging in a few interviews. She and her colleagues are working to influence the scholarly publishing environment in ways that make alternate venues such as blogs and podcasts more respectable as a means of scholarly recognition. In this interview she discusses her experiences with the communities that form around blogs and her experiments in peer-to-peer review. Not only do these forms make scholarly work available to the wider public and encourage its response, but they do something more novel in terms of scholarship. They show the scholar's work in process, as fragments, that precede the finished product in the form of a book or journal article. Instead of the monograph springing fully formed from the mind of the scholar, we begin to see the building blocks, like a painter in her studio.
If this ethos in scholarship takes hold, we will see an increasing emphasis on the processes – the conversations, the blind alleys, the preliminary judgments and analyses – that are currently obscured from view. The scholars who have agreed to interviews with Rowland over the past eight years should be congratulated on their willingness to open up their scholarship to the public. It is one very small but important step in transforming the relationship between the academy and the wider world. Kathleen Fitzpatrick has been particularly gracious and generous through this whole process, a fine example of the engagement she advocates for her peers in academia.
The following interview between Rowland and Fitzpatrick took place on March 7, 2013, at Temple University, before Fitzpatrick gave a lecture at the Center for the Humanities entitled "The Humanities in and for the Digital Age." It provides an introduction to her work, her two books The Anxiety of Obsolescence: the American Novel in the Age of Television and Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, as well as a discussion about the meaning of the digital humanities, the crisis in publishing, the history of peer review, and what's in store for the future of scholarly communication. In discussing these topics, Rowland and Fitzpatrick address an array of philosophical questions pertaining to the Internet's effect on the human brain, the status of attention, what counts as knowledge, our notions of the author and the text, and the history of reading. Rowland's references to recent books, such as Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains and Robert Darnton's The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future, add substantially to the conversation.
Fred Rowland (FR): Kathleen Fitzpatrick is the Director of Scholarly Communication at the Modern Language Association and a visiting faculty member in the English department at New York University. Her graduate work was concentrated in contemporary American fiction and media studies, resulting in her first book, The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television, which analyzed the anxiety and vested interests surrounding the purported demise of literature. She began a blog shortly after completing Anxiety of Obsolescence called Planned Obsolescence, because she was, as she writes in the introduction, "left with the detritus of many smaller ideas that demanded a kind of immediacy, and yet seemed destined to fade into nothingness" (Planned 7).
At the invitation of scholars at the Institute for the Future of the Book, she participated in the founding of the online collaborative called MediaCommons, which, in the words of its website, is a community network for scholars, students, and practitioners in media studies promoting the exploration of new forms of publishing. Her work on her blog and MediaCommons led to her second book, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, a fascinating and incisive look at the future of publishing and scholarship in the academy. Kathleen Fitzpatrick gave a lecture at the Center for the Humanities at Temple on March 7, 2013, entitled "The Humanities in and for the Digital Age." Before her talk she kindly stopped by my office to discuss her work in scholarly communication and the digital humanities. I am Fred Rowland. [1:44]
FR: Kathleen Fitzpatrick, thank you very much for speaking with me.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick (KF): Well thank you for having me.
FR: I was wondering if you would just talk a little bit about your first book, The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television. What is it about, and what were you trying to accomplish? [1:59]
KF: Well I had been hearing for years, as long as I could remember, that the novel was a form under threat, that the novel was this dying form that no one was paying any attention to anymore. And that new forms like television or film or what have you were taking over the cultural brain space. And so what I was interested in was less trying to figure out whether that was true or not. I sort of began from the presupposition that it was not actually true, because there are more novels published every year than there ever have been in history. Instead, I was trying to figure out why we claim that the novel is a dying form and what purposes those claims serve. And what I found the longer I looked into the question was that the claim of the novel's obsolescence serves to protect it in a certain way from the onslaught of these new forms. It sort of creates what I like to refer to as a cultural wildlife preserve. [3:02]
FR: Yes, what do you mean by that exactly?
KF: It's a protected space within which we can understand that this threatened form deserves some kind of special treatment. It needs to be protected in order to preserve the heritage of our culture as it has been practiced for centuries. As you can hear in that kind of rhetoric, this notion of cultural heritage and preservation, often what we're talking about is a fairly conservative impulse. To protect the old from the encroachment of the new. So what I was really interested in in this volume is attempting to think about what that new was. And what kinds of dangers the novel felt like it was being threatened by. [3:55]
FR: And the authors, who are the authors you were dealing with?
KF: In that book I am primarily dealing with Thomas Pynchon and Don Delillo. But a host of associated authors, who are working in that same postmodern vein, are also thinking about the ways the cultural landscape in the United States is changing in the period of television's onset.
FR: You give one example, and this was a fairly well known example, because it broke into the public space, about a certain conflict that developed on Oprah. I remember that, but I wasn't really paying attention at the time. How does that feed into your book and your argument about these tensions?
KF: This moment of conflict that you're talking about is of course the kerfuffle between Jonathan Franzen and Oprah Winfrey (Fitzpatrick, Anxiety 1-2). When Oprah had extended an invitation to Franzen to appear as part of her book club, she had adopted The Corrections as one of the book club's books. And Franzen said something pretty unfortunate in an interview not really expecting it to get around in the way that it did. And it seemed to indicate that Oprah's audience was not the kind of audience he was hoping that The Corrections would reach, and that he was kind of uncomfortable having the Oprah seal of approval on the cover of his book. And Oprah's response was to disinvite him and to end that period of the book club's conversation with The Corrections.
There was this tremendous brouhaha that came up around this. Everybody felt like they had to take sides. Either Franzen was absolutely right, and we were seeing the encroaching commercialization of literature…
FR: The downfall of literature… [5:48]
KF: Absolutely, and the ways that corporate media was really encroaching on the space of free expression. Or, there were the folks who were defending Oprah by noting that Franzen's approach to understanding literature was a fairly elitist one and that his description of Oprah's audience was dismissive at best.
FR: Especially since she did get a lot of people to read good books. [6:12]
KF: Exactly. So I don't entirely take a side in that debate, although I am clearly in the course of the book more interested in the kinds of opening up of the audience that television is able to perform in the ways that Oprah is able to bring people to the book who wouldn't have been there otherwise. But I think it's a really emblematic moment of exactly this conflict between television and the literary. [6:46]
FR: This got me wondering about a book I read recently called The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. It's a fairly good book, which I really enjoyed, and it was recommended to me by someone else here on campus. The author describes how he was able to get away from his iPhone and his Facebook and his various electronic accounts. He moved with his family to a very pristine environment in Colorado to write this book about the Internet. He presents a lot of scientific information about how the Internet is rewiring our brains. And it is very interesting. But when I read something like this I also think to myself of my mother telling me as a young boy "don't sit too close to the television because it will ruin your eyes," or because it will do this or that to you. And so I wanted your opinion, you know I also think about when the Web first became widely available there were just real Millennial expositions on how the Internet and the Web were going to transform everything. They were going to make democracy break out all over the world, they were going to destabilize all of the powerful forces. So it seems like you've got, on the one hand, the utopian dreaming, and now there's sort of a dystopian feeling creeping in here. Although there's some true stuff to what he writes. [8:29]
KF: It is undoubtedly true that the Internet, that our iPhones, that all of the different forms of technology that we're surrounded by change the ways that we interact with the world. It is unquestioned. But the degree of that change, and whether it's actually rewiring our brains, I think, is really under question. There are other folks who are writing about this same kind of question. I think of Cathy Davidson, for instance, who recently moved from Duke University to CUNY. She suggests that the mode of the Internet's distribution of attention – rather than having the sort of deep focus that long form print has long had, the ability to think in nonlinear, connected, more distributed ways – is highlighting different kinds of skills that students and workers today really need to develop in order to cope with multiple information streams at multiple times.
So all of this suggests that, yes, the Internet is producing different modes of learning and different modes of thinking, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. My sense is that, as you say, these kinds of anxieties about what the Internet is doing to us are very, very familiar. They're very much the same as the concerns about what television was doing to us. Television was turning us all into couch potatoes, television was disconnecting us from one another, etc. All of those kinds of things. And yet, none of that seems to really have borne out. The American public hasn't entirely dissociated itself from reality, it hasn't become any lazier than it used to be. [10:28]
FR: This was particularly a strong feeling for me, because my father actually locked the TV away in the closet during the school week when I was growing up. He would bring out the TV, we would be waiting for him to get home on Friday evening so he could unlock the TV…[laughter]
KF: Literally unlock the TV, that's great…
FR: It's very interesting now with my own kids and their devices that just seem, no matter what you try to do, they seem to proliferate, because there's always at least one or two really good reasons why you should have these things. [11:14]
KF: I got asked a question not too long ago that I thought was really important in this regard about teaching in the age of all of these divergent information streams constantly coming in. I was asked you know in this kind of environment, how do you command student attention? And all I could think was that attention really is not something to be commanded.
FR: Yes, you've never been able to command attention… [11:40]
KF: Exactly, it's something to be channelled. What we're learning from the Internet is the increasing ability to channel attention in multiple ways in different forms at different times.
FR: Yes, so in your book, in both of your books, you treat both anxiety and obsolescence. But they are in relatively different contexts. In the first book, you describe it as literary criticism. By the time you get to your second book it's clearly something else. You're talking about scholarly communication, the digital humanities. How did you get from the first book to the second book? I know that you had a blog called Planned Obsolescence. Could you talk about this transformation? [12:45]
KF: Sure. The Anxiety of Obsolescence, the first book, was published in 2006, but I finished writing the book more or less as we know it now in June 2002. At that point, I thought ridiculously optimistically it was going to be about a year and a half before the book would be read by anybody. And I had all of these ideas that were left over and stirring about from having finished the book. So I thought I am going to start one of these blog things that I've been hearing about. And I'm going to put some of these ideas out there and see if I can get conversations going. And very quickly, at least by academic terms, I really did get those conversations going. I developed an audience, I found other academic bloggers, there was a real community that developed around these blogs. And it became a real source of energy and engagement, and the development of really fun work. [12:43]
At the same time all of that's going on, I'm trying to get this book published. And I had had interest in the manuscript a few years before from some academic presses that I really was excited about the possibility of working with. They had told me as soon as you're done with the manuscript, send it on to us and we'll take a look. And when I did in June 2002 when I finished up the manuscript, all of those presses that had previously been interested came back and said we still love this project, and we'd love to publish it, but we just can't afford to right now.
FR: It was right after the Internet bubble collapsed. [14:18]
KF: Exactly. And I started discovering that it wasn't just those presses. They weren't unusual in the university press landscape at that point. Everybody was in this same kind of circumstance in which they were having to scale back the numbers of titles that they were publishing, they were having to think of things other than sheer quality in order to make publication decisions. And this put a great difficulty in the path of authors of first books, authors who did not already have track records with university presses. So instead of taking a year and a half for people to get their hands on this book, it ended up taking four years. [15:01]
It was in the process of attempting to get that book published, while keeping this blog, that I started thinking about what scholarly communication was becoming, what it could be if it were all online in the form of a blog, and why we still need the book and what the book might become as we go forward. So I started at first writing on my blog about it, then writing some extended articles, and then the next thing you knew I woke up one day and realised that everything I had been doing was developing into the book, Planned Obsolescence. [15:36]
FR: So I guess did this surprise you, the path of your career?
KF: [Laughter] It did. It was not an expected path. Looking back on it, it makes perfect sense.
FR: Right, you were dealing with those issues in Anxiety of Obsolescence. Were you at any point concerned for your career, because you were going from a recognized academic field, literature, into something that is interesting, it's exciting, it's developing, but as far as tenure decisions, that kind of thing? [16:15]
KF: Sure, I had always been a little bit fringey even within literary criticism. I was working on contemporary fiction, which was very popular with the students, I'll put it that way, but it had less purchase within English departments per se. Even more, I was working on this media studies stuff. I mean, what did television have to do with English departments?
FR: And then, you studied television in terms of literature in your first book, but were you studying television outside that, in more general terms?
KF: Television as television? My position at Pomona College was joint between English and Media Studies, and so I was teaching classes that were focused on television in American culture and focused much more directly on the media per se. [17:04]
FR: I spoke with somebody who studies film here [at Temple University]. Since my children watch TV, and I try to limit it, but they certainly do watch it. What I found with my son watching TV was that he would really engage with some of these shows and he really enjoyed some of these shows. And I asked her [this person at Temple University], my question to her was, is there something going on when you watch TV that's more than just passive absorbing of information, because what I saw and what it seemed like I was seeing was a real engagement with the content that was not wholly pernicious. [17:45]
KF: Absolutely!
FR: And so the same questions are going on with the Internet with people spending time and absorbing things from the Internet. The questions do seem to be very similar in many respects.
KF: Absolutely, going back to this whole couch potato idea. We have this idea that the process of watching television is a wholly passive one. We lie back and the story comes at you. But it's never been that passive. Because it's always been about sharing television with someone. Talking with your family, talking with your friends; kids reenacting television shows on the playground. There's always been this kind of activity around it. So I think that similarly we think of the Internet as being populated by bloggers in their pajamas in the basement. And in fact there's real substantive intellectual and communal engagement that takes place in all of these networked spaces. [18:45]
FR: How would you define the digital humanities?
KF: For me it has to do with the work that gets done at the crossroads of digital media and traditional humanistic study. And that happens in two different ways. On the one hand, it's bringing the tools and techniques of digital media to bear on traditional humanistic questions. But it's also bringing humanistic modes of inquiry to bear on digital media. It's a sort of moving back and forth across those lines, thinking about what computing is, how it functions in our culture, and then using those computing technologies to think about the more traditional aspects of culture. [19:34]
FR: Okay, good. Your first chapter in Planned Obsolescence is about peer review. When it comes to scholarly communication, peer review is what holds everything together, or prevents real changes in the system. Could you give us a little background on how peer review developed?
KF: Sure. You're absolutely right that peer review is the lynchpin in all of this. When we were in the process of beginning to found new digital scholarly communication networks online, the first question everybody asked is what are you going to do about peer review?
Peer review has a couple of different histories that get told. One of which, the most common that you'll hear, is that at a certain point in its past the Royal Society of London, which had developed the first recognizable academic journal, Philosophical Transactions, made the decision that it was going to send everything that was being considered for publication in Philosophical Transactions out to be reviewed by at least two members of the academy prior to its inclusion. And this is sort of the moment that gets described as being the onset of peer review. [20:47]
There is another history that Mario Biagioli unfolds in his study of peer review, which is to say that peer review doesn't actually begin with the Royal Society of London or with journal publications, that there is an earlier form that takes place around the printing of books in the first place. And that in England in particular in order to receive royal permission to print books the printer of those books had to take responsibility for the content in them. And so the crown passed to the printer this royal imprimatur, this royal approval to print this kind of material under the assumption that the printer would not allow anything that was libelous or heretical to pass through its processes. And so the first form of peer review, Biagioli argues, was in fact a mode of censorship. That controlled the material that was being produced so that it wouldn't anger the crown. [21:51]
But what happens is that when the Royal Society gets founded, that imprimatur passes to the Society and the Society agrees that nothing that it publishes will have any endangering aspects to the crown. And so one of the forms that this form of censorship morphs into is peer review, instead of the sort of external censoring official governmental control over what's being produced; instead it's sort of internal self-policing. And so Biagioli comes to suggest that peer review is a profoundly Foucauldian mode of creating discipline. And literally discipline as we understand it in that Michel Foucault sense, but also discipline in the sense of the academic structuring of knowledge. Knowledge comes to be regulated through the form of peer review. And in this way it comes to seem that peer review is not just about filtering potential material that can be published for quality, but is instead about policing the boundaries of what can be considered knowledge. In that respect, the Internet poses great challenges…[23:19]
FR: Yes…
KF: …to the nature of peer review. And not simply because anybody can publish anything, right, anybody who knows how to produce a little HTML, or who can get their hands on a decent web editor, can post whatever they want to on the Internet provided they've got access somewhere. It's also that there is this potential explosion in thinking about not just knowledge, but also who gets to produce that knowledge and what qualifies as knowledge, and who gets to decide what is knowledge.
So one of the things that I'm thinking about in Planned Obsolescence in that particular chapter on peer review is whether the mode of peer review that has long been established within the academy – pre-publication gate-keeping, that kind of makes sure that everything that gets published is the best material, and sort of selects for quality and makes sure that things have certain kinds of quality control around them – whether that can at all function online, or whether the attempt to reinstate that pre-publication gate-keeping in online spaces, like with online journals, saying that we're going to have rigorous peer review before we release any articles, is in fact working counter to the Internet's best mode. [24:45]
FR: So you've done a lot of writing, but also you've done work online in trying to change the reliance on traditional peer review. Can you talk about your experiences with your book Planned Obsolescence in releasing it for pre-publication peer-to-peer review, and tell us what that is?
KF: I had been working for some years prior to finishing up Planned Obsolescence with an online network called MediaCommons. At the point when I was working with NYU Press planning on publishing Planned Obsolescence, it was clear to the press that I was going to want to do something with the book online. And they were thinking, my editor was thinking, that maybe I would want to have a blog alongside it, or to kind of prepublish little bits of it or something like this. And what I suggested was that since I was making this argument about the way that peer review best functions online, I should actually sort of at least put my metaphorical money where my mouth was, and try it out. [25:53]
So we posted the entire text, the draft of the manuscript, the entire thing with the exception of the conclusion, which had not yet been written, on MediaCommons, in our MediaCommons press area. It's a blog-based structure but it runs with a plug-in called CommentPress that allows for paragraph by paragraph commenting. We posted the entire thing there and opened it up to online commenters, asking explicitly for feedback to help me with the revision process. At the same time that this was going on, the press sent the manuscript out for traditional peer review as well, knowing that the process was going to have to be approved by the editorial board, and that it would have to meet some traditional standards. [26:42]
But I was interested in having both modes of review available because I wanted to do a little bit of comparison between them and see what kinds of differences they produced. The open review online was an extremely exciting process. I got a lot of engagement from a lot of great people. I had a lot of voices participating in that review process who would never have been called upon in a traditional review process, and yet who provided me with absolutely crucial feedback. [27:13]
FR: How many comments did you get?
KF: Oh gosh, it was just shy of 300, I think, from about 45 unique commenters, which I was very pleased with. And among those commenters there were several members of the library community, for instance, who would never have been called upon to serve as peer reviewers and yet there is a crucial chapter in the book that focuses on library issues. And they were able to help me really significantly improve that chapter. [27:42]
At the same time, I got these two traditional peer reviews, which were both fantastic. Really careful, sensitive readings of the book as a whole, that did a lot of really deep thought about the book's structure and about parts that were working better than others and so forth. And what I finally came to discover in this process was that the openness of the online review allowed for many more voices, allowed for discussion amongst those voices, so people argued amongst each other, and not just with me, and it allowed me to contextualize those reviews, because I knew who the reviewers were. I didn't ask them to sign their names, but they did. So I had context for understanding the comments they were making and knew how to interpret and how to connect different ideas. On the other hand, the comments were very, very local. They were focused on specific issues within the text, and there weren't really comments about the overall structure of the text. And then there were places where there were no comments whatsoever. Because people don't tend to comment online to say "I totally agree. This is exactly right." So I had no idea how to interpret silence. Did it mean that everything was fine? Did it mean that everything was so bad that no one was going to embarrass me by saying so? [29:12]
FR: Or did it mean that people just didn't read those parts?
KF: Exactly. Whereas with the two traditional reviews, they did deal with the entirety of the book. And I knew that when they said chapter 3 was fine, that chapter 3 was fine. So what we were able to take from this is the sense that we need to develop a mode of online review that allows for the best aspects of the open review that we did, but that still allows for the development of this holistic picture as well, something that can deal with the entirety of the text at the same time.
FR: Interesting, and are other people doing this? [29:50]
KF: Yes, actually MediaCommons has since engaged in a number of different experiments with folks who are interested in using these open review processes, including we did a couple of different experiments with the journal Shakespeare Quarterly…
FR: And can you tell us what those are? [30:07]
KF: The first was for a special issue on Shakespeare in new media. The special editor for the issue, Kathy Rowe, posted a select number of essays from that special issue for the same kind of open review that we used on mine, but with a few sort of tweaks in the process. They went out to a very specific set of reviewers asking them to come to participate, they had a very defined period during which commenting would be open, and then comments were closed at the end, and so forth.
We have a couple of authors right now who are in the midst of open review experiments on MediaCommons; Jason Mittell with his book Complex TV, and Aram Sinnreich who is working on a book called The Piracy Crusade. And both of them have chosen, rather than as I did, posting the entirety of the book online all at once, they have been releasing the texts chapter by chapter, seeing if an audience can be built over time that can then follow through and will develop some cumulative thoughts as it goes. MediaCommons and NYU Press jointly received a grant from the Mellon Foundation last year to conduct a study of open review practices and develop some sort of best practices for folks who want to conduct experiments like these. We submitted our white paper draft to this kind of open review process as well. And now the final open review paper is available on the MediaCommons website. [31:52]
FR: Okay and just a little bit about MediaCommons and how it developed?
KF: It developed out of a lot of the blogging that I had been doing right around the time that I was trying to get the Anxiety of Obsolescence published. I wrote this one blog post in particular that had me thinking out loud about what a scholarly communication network that looked more like blogging might do for us. And I ended up getting an email message from Bob Stein, who is the director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, saying "we've been thinking about this and we really want you to come talk to us." And I thought, "oh my gosh, really?" And it was amazing. I went and had this series of meetings with the folks at the Institute, and out of the course of those meetings came MediaCommons. The Institute was absolutely fundamental to establish… [32:48]
FR: They're at NYU?
KF: Yes, they're connected with NYU. MediaCommons has since sort of developed its own independent existence. It's still at NYU being housed by the NYU Library's Digital Library Technology Services group. It has a network of scholars, students, activists, practitioners, all working in the area of media studies. We have a number of different projects that our editorial board has developed and it has been extremely exciting. It's been around for about 6 years now. [33:24]
FR: How does moving more scholarship into web-based formats destabilize our notions of the author and the text? When we talk about peer review, it's not just an abstract argument, it's also the bread and butter of academics, right? They get tenure through peer review, they get promotions to full professor through peer review. This is a very unsettling notion when people's lives and livings are in the mix. What does this do to the author and the text?
KF: There are some serious changes that are at least potential for the ways that we understand the author and the text. The changes in the nature of the text seem obvious to us. Texts can become nonlinear online, they can include media objects online, they can be interactive, they can be code, they can be… [34:25]
FR: And there's also this sense that they never end…
KF: That's one of the crucial things for our understanding of the author, because we understand the author to be someone who produces discrete, finished, complete, perfect texts. We only see the end result of a long process.
FR: It's a product, it's a thing… [34:45]
KF: It is a product, right. I believe that the longer we work in these online spaces the more we are going to start understanding the act of authorship as being a process, rather than as the production of products. It's going to be something that's more ongoing, more fluid, more collaborative. And we're going to understand our relationship to the texts that we're producing as being something that is more ongoing and that doesn't have quite the beginning and end that we come to expect. [35:20]
FR: This is interesting from the standpoint of teaching at the university and dealing with students who are writing papers, because the interactive part of scholarship is really something students have trouble grasping. They never see it, although professors will – and they should do this – get up and talk about who is this person responding to in this work? And I think the difficulty for a young student is that they see a book written out by a single author and it really takes some work and some experience to realize that every argument the author is making, he or she is responding to what somebody else has said, or these ideas that are out there. This would be really useful for students who would be able to engage and see by example that these conversations are going on. [36:26]
KF: And I think that seeing by example is absolutely crucial, not just to understanding how conversations develop across authorial lines, right, that everyone is always responding to someone else. And therefore any single author text is always collaborative in ways that are sort of belied by the single author's name on the cover. But also that, you know, I have taught writing for a long time, and have many colleagues who of course do a lot of teaching of writing. And I often hear colleagues frustrated with students' difficulties in understanding the process of revision as deeply as they would like. They get frustrated that students come in and they just sort of did surface corrections, rather than really rethinking the ideas and the format and presentation of the ideas in the text. And I think, in no small part, that's because we never model the process for them, right, we never show them that we start out in a totally different place from where we end up in working on an essay ourselves. If we were to show them some of that process, show them the bad first draft, and then all of the work that happened in conversation leading to the next draft, and then the polishing that happened in order to get to the final thing, students might have less of a sense of these ideas just sort of springing forth in full essay format with proper citations. [37:56]
FR: You have sort of the romantic notion of the author, the genius that just has this inspiration….
The scholarly monograph seems to have been in crisis for decades. Given the pressure that scholarly publishing, and I'm thinking here mainly in terms of the humanities, the pressure that scholarly publishing is under, are you surprised that the monograph, as it's currently understood in humanities publishing and scholarly publishing, hasn't changed more than it has?
KF: I'm not entirely surprised. I mean, you are absolutely right that university press publishing has been existing in a constant state of crisis certainly since the '70s if not before. The monograph hasn't changed for a couple of different reasons. There are profound forces keeping it looking exactly like it is. One of them is university presses and their extremely constrained budgets. In order to do something different there has to be a lot of research and development. There has to be a lot of exploration. There has to be a lot of experimentation. And that kind of experimentation really requires the folks doing the experimenting to at least admit the possibility of failure. But I think the other part of this, the university presses are only one player in this entire chain of producing the scholarly monograph and keeping it looking exactly like it is.
A far more important player in that process is the faculty. Right, the folks who are writing these things. And it's in no small part the tenure review process, which persuades even faculty who want to experiment, who want to do something unusual, who want to produce a digital archive, or want to produce something interactive online, to kind of reign those experimental ideas in and force them between covers in print, because that's the only thing that anybody believes will get them tenure. And it's really going to require a serious change in the ways that individual faculty and departments and colleges and universities on the whole approach their understanding of what counts as the large-scale work of scholarship in the humanities in order for the humanities monograph to become something other than what it is. Presses feel utterly constrained by faculty desires. Faculty desires are utterly constrained by the tenure process. And we end up just not changing anything. [40:46]
FR: Can you imagine alternatives to the scholarly monograph? What would you…?
KF: Yes, I think there are lots of alternatives already out there. There are some really amazing projects that are being done out of digital humanities centers, like the Scholars' Lab at University of Virginia, like the Center for History and New Media at George Mason, like the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland. I could go on and continue naming digital humanities centers that are all over the place. But you see projects that are bringing together digitized corpora of particular authors and texts, or that are doing certain kinds of scholarly editing work around particular authors, or that are doing deep text mining and visualization projects around the incredible quantity of digitized material that exists out there now. [41:45]
There are projects that are being built in new platforms like Scalar which allows for multi-modal argumentation that can move fluidly across text and video and audio and image and other kinds of media forms that are being published openly online. All of these are really phenomenal alternatives, and I think more and more of them are developing everyday. One of the challenges is getting the folks who are reviewing these projects to recognize that they are works of scholarship, that they are being produced in different ways, that they may be being produced collaboratively, they may not have beginning and end dates, they don't have covers that sort of demarcate the borders of the text, but they are a similar kind of work, they are the act of scholarship. [42:37]
FR: In some of your recent talks and articles you make interesting arguments for opening up humanities scholarship to the wider world beyond academia. Can you talk about that?
KF: Public intellectual work, I think, is something that a lot of scholars in the humanities feel deeply ambivalent about. On the one hand, we all sort of want to do that kind of work, to reach out to the public, to have a greater public engagement for the kinds of work that we're doing. But on the other hand, it feels like this very scary endeavor, in no small part because a lot of the criticism that the humanities have come in for, since the 1980s in particular…
FR: The culture wars? [43:20]
KF: The culture wars, exactly. On the one hand, there's this common sense that the public doesn't understand or appreciate why it is we do the work we do. I mean, you're just reading books, how can you take all this too seriously. You're reading too much into things, as people will say. And there are the political conflicts that come up around a lot of humanities work as well. So it feels like there's this great danger in putting work out to the world where it can be openly criticized and misunderstood.
So we hold it back and kind of keep it to ourselves and communicate only with other experts. But in so doing, we end up convincing the public that there's nothing serious going on in the humanities, that in fact if you want to think about what's going on seriously in higher education today, it's all STEM research. It's wonderful that we have a president right now who is really invested in increasing higher education opportunities across the United States, but if you listen to what's coming out of the White House it's all STEM, STEM, STEM.
FR: Science, technology… [44:27]
KF: The humanities simply don't exist. To some extent, I really believe that opening work in the humanities up to the public can help break down that wall, can help remind everyone what the humanities is doing, why it matters, what we have to share with the world in teaching about our culture, and the ways that individuals engage with it. So I do believe that it's absolutely crucial that we start doing a better job communicating with the public in order to get that work out there. [45:00]
FR: Robert Darnton wrote an essay in his book, The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future, it's a collection of his essays, and I can't put my hands on the individual essay or the quote that I'm thinking of, but when I read this I was fascinated. It was a description of a person, I think it was a women, and this person was in early modern Europe, maybe around 1600, and he described her as really using books as sources that she could just sort of dip into for little bits and pieces of information. There was no sense in the way he was describing it that this person saw the book as a complete entity, as we've just been discussing it. And so I was wondering, could you talk a little bit about the history of reading and how our assumptions about that history might prevent us from thinking clearly about reading on the Internet? [46:08]
KF: I am far from an expert on the history of reading. I would really want to direct people who are listening to this to Robert Darnton, to other people like Leah Price, who are much more fully engaged with that universe of research than I am. But I will say that there are moments in the history of reading at which we can see very clearly that our ideas or idealized notions about what it is to read a book, to sit down as an individual by yourself and engage in a long sustained fashion with a text, starting at the beginning and working through to the end, have not in fact always been the same. There have been other modes of thinking about what it is to read; reading out loud, reading in public spaces, reading in groups, reading bits and pieces of things, picking things up and putting them down…
FR: For a quote…
KF: Absolutely, and there is a wonderful bit of work by Roland Barthes, and now I can't remember which book it comes out of, but he makes the argument about what had been seen as the practices of the bad reader, the reader who skips and jumps around in the text, as being, in fact, the empowered reader. This is the reader who is engaging in what he refers to as the process of tmesis, right, who is picking up various ideas from the text, who is doing what she wants with them, who is skipping around at will, and who is really on some level writing the text herself.
FR: By active synthesis… [47:45]
KF: Exactly, and so the description that Barthes presents of this reader is very much like the description of the user of the Internet, who is following links and moving around and not really behaving in a disciplined fashion, starting at the beginning of something and working her way through to the end. But is instead following paths of association that are about the branches of knowledge that she is trying to produce. So I think this mode of reading that feels so undisciplined and dangerous to us is not about a loss of the powers of concentration, right, it's not about something that's been done to us by television or the Internet. It's not that we no longer know how to sustain our concentration, it's instead that we now have a technology that actually works with our powers of association, with the way that thought works, in a much more fluid fashion.
FR: Yeah…
KF: And I think it is a crucial moment of liberation to realize that we can let ourselves follow these associative paths. And in fact, one of the sort of negative stories that gets told about readers on the Internet, following a chain of links and then not knowing how they got where they were going, and never having really found the thing that they were looking for. In fact, we're developing better and better technologies that allow us to gather the material that we need to pull the ideas together in ways that allow us to do better synthesis, that keeps track of those pathways that we followed to get where we're going. [49:26]
FR: You have a recent article called "Reading (and Writing) Online, Rather Than on the Decline" (available from Profession 2012) and it deals with some of the things we're talking about right now. But I just spliced or grabbed some quotes from that and I thought I would read them out to you and let you comment on them, okay? So here we go. [49:47]
"Reading has never been a straightforward means of downloading meaning constructed by an author in a reader's brain. Digital platforms call attention to the degree to which reading is a communal process rather than an individual activity. The relationship between writers and readers online has become less focused on the one-way broadcast of information and more productive of a multi-dimensional conversation that takes place within a community" (45).
So…? [50:19]
KF: This is exactly the thing that we've been talking about across this conversation. That we have this romantic notion that the author produces an idea and conveys that idea perfectly into the brain of the person who is reading the text. That the reader perfectly obtains that idea and processes it in exactly the way that the author intended, should the author have done his job perfectly. And, in fact, it's never been that straightforward. The possibility of misreading has in fact been the norm. And the reader has always been free to do with the bits and pieces of the text what he or she will.
So digital platforms really sort of call attention to this. To the act of bringing together ideas, to the act of interpretation, and particularly to the act of the creation of community between author and reader, and among readers in the act of engaging around a text. One of the things that the Internet adds most explicitly to this development of reading across its history is that it's become profoundly a read-write medium. Readers online expect, on some level, that there will be comments available, and that they will be able to respond if they want to. If they don't want to respond in the comments on the text that they're reading, they can go to their own blogs and grab quotes and respond to them and have a conversation within their own communities about the things that they're reading. [52:01]
And it's that process of the seamless movement from reading to writing, and then back again, that I think has really distinguished the Internet in a whole lot of ways. Now there are precursors for this, of course. In earlier eras the development of the commonplace book, the commentary, and so forth.
FR: Which is oral culture, right? [52:24]
KF: Exactly, the seminar. All of this has been about the process of creating new texts around existing texts. [52:33]
FR: How do you think university presses will change in the next ten years? And do you think they should survive, or what are your thoughts? You've dealt with a bunch of them…
KF: I think university presses serve an absolutely crucial role for scholars in the production and dissemination of certain kinds of work. The reason university presses came into being had to do with the fact that scholars in the humanities were producing these monograph books and commercial presses didn't want to publish them because there wasn't a sufficient market. The university saw its responsibility as being facilitating the communication of the work that was going on within its faculty to the outside world. And so universities formed presses and they started distributing the work that was being done originally by their own faculty on their campuses to other campuses. And so the university press was born. [53:37]
But the university press over the course of the first half of the twentieth century morphs into this odd relationship to its campus, in which many university presses are now understood to be revenue centers on their campuses. They're required at minimum to break even. There are even presses that are required to actually contribute back to their universities. There are university presses that are seen as being fully businesses that just happen to function with the university name. And I believe that those university presses serve an absolutely crucial role in the dissemination of scholarship, because they are this locus of not-for-profit communication of the work that is being done by scholars in the humanities.
But I think that those presses need to develop, and this is not something that the presses haven't been trying to do, trust me, and I understand how difficult this is. But they need to develop a different relationship to the universities that house them. The universities really need to understand their responsibility, once again, with respect to the dissemination of scholarship. I also think that university presses need to develop a much more symbiotic relationship with, for instance, libraries, with information technology centers on campus, with academic departments, with the other aspects of what's going on on campus, that might help fully integrate them into the life of the institution in a way that makes them see very clearly at the heart of what it is the institution does. But that would also sort of alleviate some of the wheel reinvention that has to happen with university presses now because they are adjunct to the campus, rather than being a part of the campus. [55:26]
FR: And what role do you see academic libraries playing in this whole publishing ecosystem?
KF: Well it's clear that libraries have a crucial role to play. There are increasing numbers of library publishing ventures that are springing up on campuses across the country. There are many libraries that are in fact developing really intimate relationships with their university presses. In some institutions, the press has been brought in fully under the library. In some, there's just a deep partnership between them. I think that libraries have a certain amount of room for experimentation with new forms of scholarly production and dissemination, because many libraries have technology centers where that kind of research and development work gets done.
Many libraries have been working on institutional repositories that have allowed them to sort of gather and disseminate the work that's being done by the faculty on their campuses, just like those original university presses were intended to do. So I believe that rather than doubling efforts across the library and the press, increasingly we're finding libraries and presses working in a kind of symbiosis, really thinking about how together they're producing a range of forms of communication for faculty who really need it. [56:51]
FR: Finally, in your introduction to your book Anxiety of Obsolescence, you mention that you grew up reading literature and watching TV and you never saw these as incompatible. So, to end our interview, I was just wondering, what were some of your favorite TV shows growing up?
KF: Oh boy, you know, if I think back on childhood television watching experiences, and you may remember this one, having had your television unlocked on the weekends, I will inevitably think back to what seems to me the iconic Saturday evening lineup of Archie Bunker, Mash, Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart, Carol Burnett.
FR: Oh, I remember all of them, yes. [57:40]
KF: I grew up in the central time zone, so it started at 7 and it ended at 10. It was the only time I was allowed to stay up and watch television until ten o'clock was those Saturday nights. And I don't think that lineup could ever be reproduced today, but I think back on those Saturday nights in front of the television with great fondness.
Fred Rowland's interview with Kathleen Fitzpatrick was transcribed from audio and edited by Andrew Lopez.
Thanks are due to Fred Rowland and Kathleen Fitzpatrick for undertaking this interview, for agreeing to let me transcribe it, and for participating as peer reviewers in the preparation of the transcript for publication online.
An additional thanks is due to Fred Rowland for collaborating on the introduction with his input on the interview process and his thoughts on scholarly communication. Thanks also to Dean of University Libraries at Temple University, Joe Lucia, for sharing his insights on interview transcription with Fred Rowland.
Emily Ford at Lead Pipe has been patient and dedicated throughout the transcription process, which may not have been completed without her support. Thanks also to Carrie Kent and my colleagues at Connecticut College for keeping this conversation alive.
Audio Recording of Interview
An audio recording of this interview is available for streaming or download from the Temple University Libraries website:
References & Further Reading
Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. Print.
Biagioli, Mario. "From Book Censorship to Academic Peer Review." Emergences: Journal for the Study of Media & Composite Cultures 12.1 (2002): 11-45. Print.
Carr, Nicholas G. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York: W.W.Norton, 2010. Print.
CommentPress: A WordPress Plugin for Social Texts in Social Contexts. Institute for the Future of the Book. Web. 3 Dec. 2014.
Darnton, Robert. The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future. New York: PublicAffairs, 2009. Print.
Davidson, Cathy N. Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn. New York: Viking, 2011. Print.
—–, and David Theo Goldberg. The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010. Print.
Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006. Print.
—–. "The Humanities, Done Digitally." Debates in the Digital Humanities. Ed. Matthew K. Gold. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 12-15. Print.
—–. Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy. New York: NYU Press, 2011. Print.
—–. "Reading (and Writing) Online, Rather Than on the Decline." Profession (2012): 41-52. Print.
—–. "We Never Do Anything Alone: An Interview on Academic Authorship with Kathleen Fitzpatrick." A Companion to Media Authorship. By Jonathan Gray and Derek Johnson. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2013. 544-550. Print.
Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. University of Maryland. Web. 3 Dec. 2014.
MediaCommons: A Digital Scholarly Network. Institute for the Future of the Book. Web. 3 Dec. 2014.
Mittel, Jason. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: NYU Press, [forthcoming].
Price, Leah, ed. The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature. Spec. issue of PMLA 121.1 (2006). JSTOR [database]. Web. 3 Dec. 2014.
Rowe, Katherine, ed. Shakespeare and New Media. Spec. issue of Shakespeare Quarterly 61.3 (2010). Project Muse [database]. Web. 3 Dec. 2014.
Rowland, Fred. "Interviews with Authors." Fred Rowland – Librarian. Temple University Libraries. Web. 3 Dec. 2014.
Rowland, Fred, et al. "n+1: The Temple University Libraries Interview." Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication 2.1 (2013). Web. 3 Dec. 2014.
Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. George Mason University. Web. 3 Dec. 2014.
Scalar. The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture. Web. 3 Dec. 2014.
Scholars' Lab. University of Virginia. Web. 3 Dec. 2014.
Sinnreich, Aram. The Piracy Crusade: How the Music Industry's War on Sharing Destroys Markets and Erodes Civil Liberties. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013. Print.
District Dispatch: Experts to discuss library policy at ALA Midwinter Meeting in Chicago
Library and policy leaders will discuss Policy Revolution!, an initiative to advance national policy for libraries and our communities, during the 2015 American Library Association's (ALA) Midwinter Meeting in Chicago. The session, titled "What is a Policy Revolution! anyway?," takes place from 1:00 to 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, February 1, 2015, in the McCormick Convention Center, room W196A.
In a time of dramatic technological advances and increasing competition for federal resources, the ALA Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP) launched the Policy Revolution!, a grant-funded effort that focuses on establishing proactive policy priorities, engaging decision makers and influencers and upgrading the organization's policy capacity. Come to learn more about the initiative, discuss a preliminary policy agenda and how it all relates to the ALA's overall strategy.
Speakers include Alan G. Fishel, Partner, Arent Fox and senior counsel to ALA OITP; Alan S. Inouye, ALA OITP director; Chris Jowaisas, senior program officer for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Dan Lee, director of the University of Arizona's Office of Copyright Management & Scholarly Communication and chair of the ALA OITP Advisory Committee; James Neal, university librarian at Columbia University and member of ALA's Executive Board; and Vailey Oehlke, director of the Multnomah County Library, executive board member of the Urban Libraries Council and president-elect, Public Library Association.
View other ALA Washington Office Midwinter Meeting conference sessions
The post Experts to discuss library policy at ALA Midwinter Meeting in Chicago appeared first on District Dispatch.
John Miedema: What happened to 'Whatson'?
Question. What happened to Whatson/Wilson/Whatever you called it?
Answer. 'Whatson' was my first go at building a cognitive system in my basement, a Q&A system for literature, using open source code, open access articles, open web knowledge, and public domain content. It went through two iterations, sketching out architecture in broad strokes, and documenting deep dives into key code pieces. My third 'Wilson' iteration was already in progress when I took a strategic turn this January. You see, the main point of Whatson was personal research into the depths of cognitive computing. Having covered some of those bases, my next iteration became clear. I had to pick a smaller project with a sharper focus. Lila is that project. Lila is a cognitive computing project, designed to extend reading, thinking and writing capabilities. I will be proceeding with Lila much like I did with Whatson, only the focus will be sharper, and, I believe, more interesting. Lots of cognitive stuff coming down the pipe. I hope you join me.
I have received inquires about the disappearance of Whatson. If you would like a copy of that material, here is a PDF of my Physika blog — the Whatson posts are in the 2014 entries toward the end. The code samples are also still online at Github Gist. I'm happy to answer any questions you have about Whatson or Lila.
Best to you.
Ed Summers: When Google Met WikiLeaks
When Google Met Wikileaks by Julian Assange
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book is primarily the transcript of a conversation between Julian Assange and Eric Schmidt (then CEO of Google) and Jared Cohen for their book The New Digital Age. The transcript is also available in its entirety (fittingly) on the WikiLeaks website along with the actual audio of the conversation. The transcript is book-ended by several essays: Beyond Good and "Don't Be Evil", the Banality of "Don't Be Evil" (also published in New York Times) and Deliver us from "Don't Be Evil".
Assange read The New Digital Age and wasn't happy with the framing of the conversation, or the degree to which his interview wasn't included. When Google Met WikiLeaks is Assange's attempt to reframe the discussion in terms of the future of publishing, information and the Internet. In particular Assange takes issue with Schmidt and Cohen's assertion that:
The information released on WikiLeaks put lives at risk and inflicted serious diplomatic damage.
Schmidt and Cohen offer no source for this bold assertion, and in a note they equate WikiLeaks with minimally enabling espionage, again with no citation. Assange makes the case that WikiLeaks is actually in the business of publishing and journalism, not secretly selling information for private gain. I think Assange does this, but more importantly, he presents a view of the near future of the Internet, that is presaged by WikiLeaks, which is actually interesting and compelling. The transcript itself is heavily annotated with footnotes, many of which have URLs, that are archived at archive.today.
For me the most interesting parts of the book center on what Assange calls the Naming of Things:
The naming of human intellectual work and our entire intellectual record is possibly the most important thing. So we all have words for different objects, like "tomato." But we use a simple word, "tomato," instead of actually describing every little aspect of this god damn tomato…because it takes too long. And because it takes too long to describe this tomato precisely we use an abstraction so we can think about it so we can talk about it. And we do that also when we use URLs. Those are frequently used as a short name for some human intellectual content. And we build all of our civilization, other than on bricks, on human intellectual content. And so we currently have system with URLs where the structure we are building our civilization out of is the worst kind of melting plasticine imaginable. And that is a big problem.
Transcript of secret meeting between Julian Assange and Google CEO Eric Schmidt
This particular section goes on to talk about some really interesting topics: such as the effects of right to be forgotten laws, DNS, Bittorrent magnet URIs, how not to pick ISPs, hashing algorithms, digital signatures, public key cryptography, Bitcoin, NameCoin, flood networks, and distributed hash tables. The fascinating thing is that Schmidt is asking Assange for these details to understand how WikiLeaks operates; but Assange's response is to discuss some general technologies that may influence a new kind of Web of documents. A Web where identity matters, where documents are signed and mirrored, republished and resilient.
Assange has been largely demonized by the mainstream press, and this book humanizes him quite a bit. It's hard not to think of him in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London (where he will have been for 1500 days tomorrow) quietly adding footnotes to the transcript, and archiving web content.
OR Books role in printing this content on paper, for bookshelves everywhere is another aspect to this process of replication. Hats off to them for putting this project together.
Here's some musical accompaniment to go along with this post:
FOSS4Lib Recent Releases: BitCurator - 1.2.0
Last updated January 13, 2015. Created by Peter Murray on January 13, 2015.
Log in to edit this page.
The 1.2.0 release includes some forensic hardening updates, along with bugfixes and software additions:
District Dispatch: A big fat index term
Curious, I looked at the program for the AIPLA conference. AIPLA's motto is "Serving America's Legal and Creative Community." They are a membership organization of practicing lawyers, most who seem to be affiliated with law firms that specialize in intellectual property. Not my normal crowd, but I'm always eager to learn more about copyright, so I looked at the "Conference at a Glance" page for copyright programs. It read:
"Copyright – See Anti-counterfeiting and Anti-piracy"
Copyright was subsumed into what appeared to be an already engorged anti-piracy category. (There was only one copyright program – an update from the US Copyright Office.)
After the initial eye-rolling, I wasn't surprised. After all, these are lawyers who come to their professional conferences to learn more about representing the interests of the "creative community" and that community is on an anti-piracy bandwagon like none ever seen before. As earlier reported in the New York Times and here, the Sony security breach revealed that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) was pursuing other legal means to enact the failed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) legislation of 2011.
"Piracy" (rather than infringement) is a strategic term to use. It resonates. It sounds scary and dramatic, and people like "drama" – especially Congress. The meaning of the word "piracy" is clear in all of its evilness. Piracy is coupled with counterfeiting, which evokes consumer fraud, bad prescription drugs, and bootleg DVDs. No one likes piracy except pirates.
With so much attention directed to the piracy meme, the other side of copyright—the part about the importance of user rights to information and the public interest—is like some old and tired episode of The Andy Griffith Show. And after all, what is the public interest anyway? It is a term thrown around to mean all kinds of things (whatever you like actually). Why would copyright have anything to do with the public interest? You have to understand the history of U.S. copyright law to know its importance.
Copyright is meant to be a policy for all people. People will benefit if information, knowledge and creativity are widely distributed through incentives that (hopefully) go directly creators and authors. I like to say the copyright is about the advancement of knowledge and learning and the explosion of creativity and innovation that it enables. But then again, what do I know? I still think those old TV shows are much better than reality TV.
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DPLA: Registration now open for DPLAfest 2015!
We're excited to invite you to join us at DPLAfest 2015, taking place on April 17-18, 2015 in Indianapolis, Indiana. Our hosts include the Indianapolis Public Library (Central), the Indiana State Library, the IUPUI University Library, and the Indiana Historical Society.About
DPLAfest brings together the full range of the cultural heritage sector to discuss everything from technology and development, to content, law, and education. DPLAfest will appeal to librarians, archivists, museum professionals, developers and technologists, publishers and authors, teachers and students, and members of the public alike who are interested in an engaging mix of interactive workshops, hackathons, engaging discussions with community leaders and practitioners, fun events, and so much more.Registration
Registration for DPLAfest 2015 is now open. We invite all those interested from the general public, the educational community, public and research libraries, cultural organizations, state and local government, the creative community, publishers, and private industry to join us for conversation and community building as we celebrate our second year of success.Agenda
We will be posting a full set of activities and programing for DPLAfest 2015 soon. Participants can expect to discover an array of sessions that align with a handful of general themes ranging from technology and content partnerships, to end-user engagement, education, and lots more. For additional information about the agenda, click here.Logistics
For logistical information about DPLAfest, including event locations and recommended hotels in the Indianapolis area, click here.Share
Please feel free to share this announcement widely with your friends and networks. To share this event on Facebook, click here.Questions
Should you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to us at firstname.lastname@example.com. We look forward to seeing you in Indy!
David Rosenthal: The Miner's Dilemma
The dismantling of overly large pools is one of the most important and difficult tasks facing the Bitcoin community.Pools are needed to generate consistent income but:
[Miners] can get steady income from pools well below 10%, and they have only little incentive to use very large pools; it's mostly convenience and a feeling of trust in large entities.Source: blockchain.infoAs I write, the three largest pools (F2Pool, AntPool and GHash.IO) controlled 50% of the mining power for the past 24 hours, so Eyal is right to say:
Gavin Andresen, chief scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation, has repeatedly urged miners to use smaller pools, and researchers, including ourselves, have suggested technical fixes to reduce pool size (here, and here). But alas, community pressure has only had limited success, and technical solutions are still under development and far from production.Eyal's post, and the detailed analysis in arXiv.org, are important because they show how the block withholding attack on mining pools that has been known since 2011, and has been used at least once in practice, can create a countervailing pressure that would limit the size of mining pools. Below the fold I discuss the details and the implications for my analysis.
The block withholding attack does not appear to be prevalent:
Long term block withholding attacks are difficult to hide, since miners using an attacked pool would notice the reduced revenue density. Nevertheless, such attacks are rarely reported, and we can therefore conclude that they are indeed rare.However, a pool that mounts such an attack can increase its revenue:
This attack affects the revenues of the pools in several ways. The victim pool's effective mining rate is unchanged, but its total revenue is divided among more miners. The attacker's mining power is reduced, since some of its miners are used for block withholding, but it earns additional revenue through its infiltration of the other pool. And finally, the total effective mining power in the system is reduced, causing the Bitcoin protocol to reduce the difficulty.
Taking all these factors into account, we observe that a pool might be able to increase its revenue by attacking other pools.Eyal shows the decision process for each pool:
Since pools can decide to start or stop attacking at any point, this can be modeled as the miner's dilemma — an instance of the iterative prisoner's dilemma. Attacking is the dominant strategy in each iteration, but if the pools can agree not to attack, both benefit in the long run.Apparently the pools have such an agreement:
The fact that such attacks do not persist may indicate that the active pools have reached an implicit or explicit agreement not to attack one another.But Eyal shows that this is an unstable equilibrium:
Our results imply that block withholding by pools leads to an unfavorable equilibrium. Nevertheless, due to the anonymity of miners, a single pool might be tempted to attack, leading the other pools to attack as well. The implications might be devastating for open pools: If their revenues are reduced, miners will prefer to form closed pools that cannot be attacked in this manner. Though this may be conceived as bad news for public mining pools, on the whole it may be good news to the Bitcoin system, which prefers small pools.Open public pools are those whose miners are anonymous, and therefore untrusted. Pools whose miners are trusted are closed; they behave as a single miner. The assumption here is that only open public pools can grow large enough to threaten the network, which appears to be the case at present.
The block withholding attack provides an incentive for miners to join closed pools, which are assumed to be smaller. But it isn't a very powerful incentive. It depends on the breakdown of an agreement not to use an attack which has to be sustained over a significant period, which is "difficult to hide", and which does not seem likely to have a large impact on miner's income compared, for example, to market forces. Eyal points out that:
[Miners] have only little incentive to use very large pools; it's mostly convenience and a feeling of trust in large entities.Nevertheless, these weak incentives have concentrated 50% of the mining power in only three pools. So there must be some doubt that the not-very-powerful incentive provided by the possibility of the breakdown of the agreement not to use the block withholding attack would overcome "convenience and a feeling of trust in large entities".
Note that of the three pools controlling 50% of the mining power, two (F2Pool and GHash.IO) are secretive. The third is AntPool, which as I understand it is based on p2pool, a P2P pool protocol. A goal of p2pool is to ensure that an attack by a pool using it can only be performed by modifying the code running at the pool's miners, not by code running at a pool manager. Thus an attack by a p2pool-based pool would be visible to the pool's miners, as a conventional pool's attack would not be. This mitigates the bad effects of a large public pool. But does it leave a p2pool unable to respond to a block withholding attack by attacking back? I need to study p2pool more, so apologies if I misrepresent it.
Neither the withholding attack nor p2pool mitigates the bad effects of a large closed pool, or a large single miner.
Although I'm skeptical of the practical impact of Eyal's analysis, it led me to think that my economies of scale argument needs to be refined. Eyal shows that the incentives for open and closed pools (or single miners) are different, and I think that is true for the effects of economies of scale too.
The costs of mining, and thus the benefits of economies of scale, apply to the individual miner (and thus to closed pools). There are thus powerful incentives causing the majority of mining power to be generated by large miners. But a pool bears none of the costs of actual mining, only the costs of running the pool. A miner increases scale by investing in hardware, which costs a lot. A public pool grows by attracting miners, which costs very little. Even though Eyal points out that miners have "little incentive to use very large pools" it is clear that large miners prefer very large pools. I need to think more about the forces that are operating to drive the domination by very large pools, but clearly the advantages to very large miners must be a major factor. Are they more sensitive to small changes in reward variance?
Nick Ruest: Preliminary stats of #JeSuisCharlie, #JeSuisAhmed, #JeSuisJuif, #CharlieHebdo
Preliminary and non-depuped, we're looking at roughly 74.4G of data, and 13,188,809 tweets after 5.5 days of capturing the 4 hash tags.tags: twarc#JeSuisCharlie#JeSuisAhmed#JeSuisJuif#CharlieHebdo
Hydra Project: Duoc UC, Chile, becomes a Hydra Partner
[English version below]
Estamos encantados de anunciar que Duoc UC (http://www.duoc.cl), en Santiago de Chile, se ha convertido en el más reciente Hydra Socio formales, y nuestro primer socio en América Latina. Duoc ha estado trabajando con Hydra para construir la "Biblioteca Digital Patrimonial" (http://loncofilu.cl), un repositorio digital de planos arquitectónicos, fotografías, planes de restauración y documentos históricos relacionados con los edificios históricos más preciados de Chile, y que representa el trabajo producido por los estudiantes de la Escuela de Construcción Duoc UC. Para el 2015 están planeando el desarrollo de dos repositorios adicionales basados Hydra que se centrarán en la recogida de proyectos de títulos de estudiantes y de audio y producciones visuales de la Escuela de Comunicación.
En su carta de intención, Duoc dice que se han comprometido no sólo a la construcción de más proyectos con Hydra, sino también para la construcción de una comunidad de Hydra en América Latina mediante la traducción de la documentación en talleres españoles y explicaciones por otras instituciones de América Latina interesados en la construcción de repositorios de Hydra.
Bienvenidos, Duoc UC!
We are delighted to announce that Duoc UC (http://www.duoc.cl), in Santiago, Chile, has become the latest formal Hydra partner, and our first partner institution in Latin America. Duoc has been working with Hydra to build the "Heritage Digital Library" (http://loncofilu.cl), a digital repository of architectural drawings, photographs, restoration plans and historical documents related to the most precious historic buildings in Chile, and representing work produced by the students of Duoc's Faculty of Construction. In 2015 they are planning to develop two additional repositories based on Hydra that will focus on the collection of student thesis projects and audio and visual productions from their Faculty of Communication.
In their letter of intent, Duoc says they are committed not only to building more projects with Hydra, but also to building a Hydra community in Latin America through the translation of documentation into Spanish and offering workshops to other Latin American institutions interested in building Hydra repositories.
Welcome, Duoc UC!
Ed Summers: Bowie
Bowie by Simon Critchley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
If you are a Bowie fan, you will definitely enjoy this. If you are curious why other people are so into Bowie you will enjoy this. If you've never read any Critchley and are interested in something quick and accessible by him you will enjoy this. I fell into the first and third categories so I guess I'm guessing about the second. But I suspect it's true.
I finished the book feeling like I understand the why and how of my own fascination with Bowie's work much better. I also want to revisit some of his albums like Diamond Dogs, Heathen and Outside which I didn't quite connect with at first. I would've enjoyed a continued discussion of Bowie's use of the cutup technique, but I guess that fell out of the scope of the book.
I also want to read some more Critchley too — so if you have any recommendations please let me know. The sketches at the beginning of each chapter are wonderful. OR Books continues to impress.
William Denton: Clapping Music on Sonic Pi
A while ago I bought a Raspberry Pi, a very small and cheap computer, and I never did much with it. Then a few days ago I installed Sonic Pi on it and I've been having a lot of fun. (You don't need to run it on a Pi, you can run it on Linux, Mac OS X or Windows, but I'm running it on my Pi and displaying it on my Ubuntu laptop.)My Raspberry Pi.
Sonic Pi is a friendly and easy-to-use GUI front end that puts Ruby on top of SuperCollider, "a programming language for real time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition." SuperCollider is a bit daunting, but Sonic Pi makes it pretty easy to write programs that make music.
I've written before about "Clapping Music" by Steve Reich, who I count as one of my favourite composers: I enjoy his music enormously and listen to it every week. "Clapping Music" is written for two performers who begin by clapping out the same 12-beat rhythm eight times, then go out of phase: the first performer keeps clapping the same rhythm, but the second one claps a variation where the first beat is moved to the end of the 12 beats, so the second becomes first. That phasing keeps on until it wraps around on the 13 repetition and they are back in phase.
Here's one animated version showing how the patterns shift:
And here's another:
Here's the code to have your Pi perform a rather mechanical version of the piece. The clapping array defines when a clap should be made. There are 13 cycles that run through the clapping array 4 times each. The first time through cycle is 0, and the two tom sounds are the same. The second time through cycle is 1, so the second tom is playing one beat ahead. Third time through cycle is 2, so the second tom is two beats ahead. It's modulo 12 so it can wrap around: if the second tom is on the fifth cycle and ten beats in, there's no 15th beat, so it needs to play the third beat.use_bpm 300 load_sample :drum_tom_lo_soft load_sample :drum_tom_mid_soft clapping = [1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0] 13.times do |cycle| puts "Cycle: #{cycle}" 4.times do |reps| 12.times do |beat| sample :drum_tom_lo_soft, pan: -0.5 if clapping[beat] == 1 sample :drum_tom_mid_soft, attack: 0.05, pan: 0.5 if clapping[(cycle + beat) % 12] == 1 sleep 1 end end end
If you're running Sonic Pi, just paste that in and it will work. It sounds like this (Ogg format):
It only does four repetitions of each cycle because my Pi is old and not very powerful and for some reason eight made it go wonky. It's not perfect even now, but the mistakes are minimal. I think a more recent and more powerful Pi would be all right, as would running Sonic Pi on a laptop or desktop.
It's lacking all the excitement of a performance by real humans (some of which could be faked with a bit of randomization and effects), but it's very cool to be able to do this. Algorithmic music turned into code!
DuraSpace News: Get the Scoop on How Institutions Research and Select Hosted Repository Solutions
Winchester, MA Find out first-hand how institutions research and select hosted repository solutions at the January 22 Hot Topics webinar "Doing It: How Non-ARL Institutions are Managing Digital Collections".
DuraSpace News: CALL DSpace Interest Group Proposals for OR2015
From Maureen Walsh, Institutional Repository Services Librarian, The Ohio State University Libraries
Conference Theme: LOOKING BACK, MOVING FORWARD: OPEN REPOSITORIES AT THE CROSSROADS
Conference Dates: June 8-11, 2015
Conference Location: Indianapolis, Indiana
Conference Website: http://www.or2015.net/
Important dates
DuraSpace News: CALL Fedora Interest Group Proposals for OR2015
From David Wilcox, Fedora Product Manager, DuraSpace; Co-chair, OR2015 Fedora Interest Group
Evergreen ILS: 2015 conference registration open
Registration now is open for the 2015 Evergreen International Conference, to be held on May 13-16 in Hood River, Oregon, USA.
The conference venue is the Best Western Plus Hood River Inn. Booking details is available on the venue page of the conference website. The website will be updated as information comes available.
Stay tuned for information about submitting proposals, sponsoring the conference, and exhibiting.
Questions? Contact conference chair Buzzy Nielsen, email@example.com, 541-387-7062.
Nick Ruest: Preliminary look at 3,893,553 #JeSuisCharlie tweets
Last Friday (January 9, 2015) I started capturing #JeSuisAhmed, #JeSuisCharlie, #JeSuisJuif, and #CharlieHebdo with Ed Summers' twarc. I have about 12 million tweets at the time of writing this, and plan on writing up something a little bit more in-depth in the coming weeks. But for now, some preliminary analysis of #JeSuisCharlie, and if you haven't seen these two posts ("A Ferguson Twitter Archive", "On Forgetting and hydration") by Ed Summers, please do check them out.
How fast were the tweets coming in? Just to try and get a sense of this, I did a quick recording of tailing the twarc log for #JeSuisCharlie capture.Hydration
If you checked out both of Ed's post, you'll have noticed that the Twitter ToS forbid the distribution of tweets, but we can distribute the tweet ids, and based on that we can "rehydrate" the data set locally. The tweet ids for each hashtag will be/are available here. I'll update and release the tweet ids files as I can.
We're looking at just around 12 million tweets (un-deduped) at the time of writing, so the hydration process will take some time. I'd highly suggest using GNU Screen or tmux
- #JeSuisCharlie: % twarc.py --hydrate %23JeSuisCharlie-ids-20150112.txt > %23JeSuisCharlie-tweets-20150112.json
- #JeSuisAhmed: % twarc.py --hydrate %23JeSuisAhmed-ids-20150112.txt > %23JeSuisAhmed-tweets-20150112.json
- #JeSuisJuif: % twarc.py --hydrate %23JeSuisJuif-ids-20150112.txt > %23JeSuisJuif-tweets-20150112.json
- #CharlieHebdo: % twarc.py --hydrate %23CharlieHebdo-ids-20150112.txt > %23CharlieHebdo-tweets-20150112.json
#JeSuisCharlie tweets with geo coordinates.
In this data set, we have 51,942 tweets with geo coordinates availble. This represents about 1.33% of the entire data set (3,893,553 tweets).©
How do you make this?
Create the geojson % ~/git/twarc/utils/geojson.py %23JeSuisCharlie-cat-20150115-tweets-deduped.json > %23JeSuisCharlie-cat-20150115-tweets-deduped.geojson
Give the geojson a variable name.
Use Leaflet.js to put all the tweets with geo coordinates on a map like this.
Top 10 URLs tweeted from #JeSuisCharlie.
- (11220) http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/cover-story-2015-01-19?mbid=social_twitter
- (2278) http://www.europe1.fr/direct-video
- (1615) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KBdnOrTdMI&feature=youtu.be
- (1347) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bjbUg9d64g&feature=youtu.be
- (1333) http://www.amazon.com/Charlie-Hebdo/dp/B00007LMFU/
- (977) http://www.clubic.com/internet/actualite-748637-opcharliehebdo-anonymous-vengeance.html
- (934) http://www.maryam-rajavi.com/en/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1735&catid=159&Itemid=506
- (810) http://www.lequipe.fr/eStore/Offres/Achat/271918
- (771) http://srogers.cartodb.com/viz/123be814-96bb-11e4-aec1-0e9d821ea90d/embed_map
- (605) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=et4fYWKjP_o
Full list of urls can be found here.
How do you get the list?
- % cat %23JeSuisCharlie-cat-20150115-tweets-deduped.json | ~/git/twarc/utils/unshorten.py > %23JeSuisCharlie-cat-20150115-tweets-deduped-unshortened.json
- % cat %23JeSuisCharlie-cat-20150115-tweets-deduped-unshortened.json | ~/git/twarc/utils/urls.py| sort | uniq -c | sort -n > %23JeSuisCharlie-cat-20150115-urls.txt
Top 10 Twitter clients used from #JeSuisCharlie.
- (1283521) Twitter for iPhone
- (951925) Twitter Web Client
- (847308) Twitter for Android
- (231713) Twitter for iPad
- (86209)TweetDeck
- (82616) Twitter for Windows Phone
- (70286) Twitter for Android Tablets
- (44189) Twitter for Websites
- (39174) Instagram
- (21424) Mobile Web (M5)
Full list of clients can be found here.
How do you get this?
- % ~/git/twarc/utils/source.py %23JeSuisCharlie-cat-20150115-tweets-deduped.json > %23JeSuisCharlie-cat-20150115-tweets-deduped-source.html
Word cloud from #JeSuisCharlie tweets.
I couldn't get the word cloud to embed nice, so you'll have to check it out here.
How do you create the word cloud?
- % git/twarc/utils/wordcloud.py %23JeSuisCharlie-cat-20150115-tweets.json > %23JeSuisCharlie-wordcloud.html
FOSS4Lib Recent Releases: Avalon Media System - 3.2
Last updated January 12, 2015. Created by Peter Murray on January 12, 2015.
Log in to edit this page.
Indiana University and Northwestern University are delighted to announce Avalon Media System 3.2, completed and released on December 19, 2014. As part of a series of minor 3.x releases, Avalon 3.2 provides support for important content management efficiencies and other improvements.
Release 3.2 adds the following capabilities:
District Dispatch: Afterschool funding available through states
As discussed in previous District Dispatch entries, Congress passed in late December its massive $1.01 trillion CROmnibus bill providing FY15 funding for much of the Federal government. With the return of the new Congress on January 6, the discussion on the FY16 budget begins anew and ALA will be fighting for library funding.
For FY15 programs of interest to the library community, the CROmnibus package provided level funding for most programs while a small number of programs received slight increases or decreases. It is safe to say that the appropriations package presents no major new library or educational initiatives.
One example of a library program receiving a slight increase is the 21st Century Community Learning Centers, which received an increase of $2.3 million (0.2% of its budget). As with many Federal education programs, funding for 21STCCLC is awarded directly to state educational agencies that control how the grants are apportioned. Libraries have opportunities to apply for many of the grants.
The way this program works is that funds are sent to states who then make competitive grants to "local educational agencies (LEAs), community-based organizations, faith-based organizations, or other public or private entities that can demonstrate experience, or the promise of success, in providing educational and related activities. In making awards, States give priority to applications that: (1) propose to target services to students who attend schools identified as in need of improvement under Title I; and (2) are submitted jointly by at least one LEA that receives funds under Part A of Title I and at least one community-based organization or other public or private entity. States must make awards of at least $50,000 per year for a period of 3 to 5 years."
Background on 21STCCLC can be viewed here. The Department of Education Guidance answers everything libraries need to know about the program with a helpful table of contents.
A good resource for libraries to be aware of for participating in these grant programs is the Afterschool Alliance, which provides good information and knowledge of all things related to 21STCCLC. The Afterschool Alliance is the main national organization advocating for after school programs.
State Education Agency offices are also a good resource of grants, since they are awarded from the state level. A list of contacts for 21STCCLC in each state is available here and State Educational Agencies here.
The post Afterschool funding available through states appeared first on District Dispatch.
Open Knowledge Foundation: Open Data Handbook 2015 comeback – and you want to be a part of it!
There is famous saying that says that outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. We at Open Knowledge tend to agree. This is why we decided to take one of Open Knowledge key resources, the Open Data Handbook, and give it a bit of a face lift in this upcoming year.
The open data handbook has been an important resource for the open knowledge community for years. The handbook introduces and discusses legal, social and technical aspects of open data. It has been used by a wide range of stakeholders from open data beginners to data wizards, from government officials to journalists and civil society activists. It examines the following questions which are relevant to all: what is "open", why to open up data, and the how to 'open' data?
Since it was first written, the handbook is read by thousands of users each month and has been translated into 18 languages (making the most widely translated Open Data resource out there) . However, open data is both a fast moving and a relatively field. As such, it is not surprising that open data initiatives have been launched and open data policies approved, we, as a community, have learned a lot about the opportunities and the pitfalls of open data. The last version of the book is from 2011 and at the time, government open data portals were few and far between and the open government partnership had only just launched. The book represents what we new/thought then but as the open data movement expanded both in terms of numbers and in geographical spread, we have decided that it is high time that we incorporate our learnings into a new version. This version of the Open Data handbook will focus mainly on one main type of open data: open government data, but a number of the sections can be applied to other types of open data. This project is supported by Partnership for Open Data – a collaboration between Open Knowledge, Open Data Institute and the World Bank.
So much of this knowledge, these stories and the brilliant ideas about what works and what doesn't work is in this community. Therefore, we believe that the process of creating the updated version of handbook should be, as its always been, a community project. This process can not only strengthen the community through a joint project, but also to help us to learn from peers, listen to members who usually do not participate in daily channels and to create a handbook, rich in content, experience and a wide spectrum of knowledge.
There are a number of ways you can get involved! You can submit your stories or comment on the "alpha" version we are planning to launch in February. The handbook will be part of a larger community owned resource platform and we have
How can you help?
Contribute a short open data story – We are looking to different stories about open government data stories in various fields. It can be a success story or even a failure that you think we should all learn about. If you want to contribute a story please fill this form and we will get back in touch with you.
Revise the first draft of the book – The current chapters in the open data handbook are being review by Open Knowledge staff – we are updating and producing new . Our goal is to release an 'alpha' version of the book the week before open data day, so it can be revised, commented on and added to by the community.
Propose a resource – We are putting together a list of open data resources – If you know of other resources about open data, in any language, please give us a shout. At the end of each section, we will have a "further reading" section and we'd love to share as many resources as possible.
Send us a short video about open data – In the internet world, a handbook doesn't have to be text only. Send us a video of you / your organization and answer the following questions:
Tell us an example of open data having an social and/or economic impact in your city/country/region
What is your main obstacle dealing with Open Data?
How do you / your community engage with open data?
What do you think is the next big thing for Open Data in 2015?
The videos will be embedded in the handbook and on our YouTube channel!
Who can write to the book? Everyone! While we are editing the book are editing the book, we want your input. Unfortunately, we can't promise that every story / idea will ultimately be part of the book. If you think that we are missing something, please let us know! We will try to include as much as possible!
If you have any comments or suggestions, please email us at handbook [at] okfn [dot] org
2015 is going to be great for open data, let's write about it together.