We are excited to announce the latest title from digitalculturebooks, DOOM: SCARYDARKFAST by Dan Pinchbeck. This is the third book in our Landmark Video Games series. It aims not only to be the definitive work on DOOM, but a snapshot of a period of gaming history, a manifesto for a development ethos, and a celebration of game culture at its best.

In December 1993, gaming changed forever. id Software’s seminal shooter DOOM was released and it shook the foundations of the medium. This is a book about what is considered the most important first-person game ever made; about the blueprint that has defined one of the most successful genres of digital gaming. Pinbeck brings together the complete story of DOOM for the first time. It sets the scene with a discussion of the early days of first-person gaming and the video game studio system. It discusses the prototypes and the groundbreaking technology that drove the game forwards, and offers a detailed analysis of gameplay and level design. This is followed by sections on DOOM’s contributions to wider gaming culture: online multiplay and the mod scene, and consideration of the many ports and sequels the game spawned. This close analysis sets the scene for an extensive discussion of the first-person gaming genre, focusing upon DOOM’s status as a foundational title, using this analysis to offer a means of better understanding how the genre has developed since 1993.

Dan Pinchbeck is Senior Lecturer of Creative Technologies at the University of Portsmouth and the Creative Director of thechineseroom, an independent research-led game development studio.

DOOM: SCARYDARKFAST is freely available to read online or may be purchased from the University of Michigan Press.

We are happy to announce a new title from digitalculturebooks, Hacking the Academy: New Approaches to Scholarship and Teaching from Digital Humanities edited by Daniel J. Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt. This is the second book in our Digital Humanities series.

Hacking the Academy both explores and contributes to ongoing efforts to rebuild scholarly infrastructure for a new millennium. This book poses important and timely questions about scholarship in the digital age.

• Can an algorithm edit a journal?
• Can a library exist without books?
• Can students build and manage their own learning management platforms?
• Can a conference be held without a program?
• Can Twitter replace a scholarly society?

As recently as the mid-2000s, questions like these would have been unthinkable. But today serious scholars are asking whether the institutions of the academy as they have existed for decades, even centuries, aren’t becoming obsolete. Every aspect of scholarly infrastructure is being questioned, and even more importantly, being hacked.

Dan Cohen is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Art History and the Director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

Tom Scheinfeldt is Managing Director of the Center for History and New Media and Research Assistant Professor of History in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University.

Hacking the Academy is freely available to read online or may be purchased from the University of Michigan Press.

We are happy to announce the latest title from digitalculturebooks, Teaching History in the Digital Age by T. Mills Kelly. As the first title in the Digital Humanities Series, Teaching History in the Digital Age is intended to serve as a guide for practitioners on how to fruitfully employ the transformative changes of digital media in the research, writing, and teaching of history.

Digital history is an approach to examining and representing the past that takes advantage of new communication technologies such as computers and the Web. It draws on essential features of the digital realm, such as databases, hypertextualization, and networks, to create and share historical knowledge. Digital history complements other forms of history—indeed, it draws its strength and methodological rigor from this age-old form of human understanding while using the latest technology. Although many humanities scholars have been talking and writing about the transition to the digital age for more than a decade, only in the last few years have we seen a convergence of the factors that make this transition possible: the spread of sufficient infrastructure on our campuses, the creation of truly massive databases of humanities content, and a generation of students that has never known a world without easy Internet access. 

T. Mills Kelly is Associate Dean and Director of the Graduate Program in Global Affairs and an associate director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

Teaching History in the Digital Age is freely available to read online or may be purchased from the University of Michigan Press.

We’re proud to announce the latest title from digitalculturebooks, Andrew Herscher’s The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit. The first sustained study of Detroit’s alternative urban cultures, The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit initiates a new focus on Detroit as a site not only of urban crisis but also of urban possibility.

The Guide documents art and curatorial practices, community and guerilla gardens, urban farming and forestry, cultural platforms, living archives, evangelical missions, temporary public spaces, intentional communities, furtive monuments, outsider architecture, and other work made possible by the ready availability of urban space in Detroit. The Guide poses these spaces as “unreal estate”: urban territory that has slipped through the free-market economy and entered other regimes of value, other contexts of meaning, and other systems of use. The appropriation of this territory in Detroit, the Guide suggests, offers new perspectives on what a city is and can be, especially in a time of urban crisis.

This work will be of interest to readers in history, public art, architecture, urban planning, American studies, and anyone with a desire to see Detroit as much more than a textbook example of urban decline. As Herscher’s Guide suggests, Detroit is a site for creation (either by choice or necessity) and change, not just shrinkage and decay. While the trope of “ruin porn” might represent Detroit as an empty landscape of infrastructure being reclaimed by nature, the city is active, alive, and far from abandoned.

Andrew Herscher is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning. He also co-founded the Detroit Unreal Estate Agency, an open-access platform for research on urban crisis using Detroit as a focal point.

The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit is available to read online or can be purchased from the University of Michigan Press.

Digital Preservation in Higher Education
Zach Coble

I was particularly interested in a paper mentioned in Roger’s post last week on Archiving Twitter. The paper, recently published by Hany M. SalahEldeen and Michael L. Nelson of Dominican University, found that 11% of resources shared on Twitter are lost after one year (and 20% archived after a year) and after one year we lose .02% per day (for those interested, there are more details on the methods used in the study in an earlier blog post written by the authors). The tweets themselves are not lost but rather the resources linked to in the tweets are lost, such as photos, videos, and websites. It is not news that information on the web disappears, especially in the ephemeral world of social media, but the study affixes a number to the atrophy and places it within the context of significant social and cultural events.

Why is this important? Without the resources shared via social media, we lose not only the context but also important pieces of the conversation. Attached pictures are as much a part of the first draft of history as the 140 characters that describe or comment on the picture. Similarly, Tom Chatfield notes that what is vulnerable is “the network of living connections into which social media is a window: the nexus of sources, resources, sounds, images and updates that together constitute the stuff of many millions of people’s daily experience.”

What are the implications for higher education? This decay of information presents a problem not just to historians in some distant future but to current scholars studying an array of contemporary subjects. However, does higher education have a responsibility to preserve this content? It is impractical on many levels to expect any organization to preserve the entire social media output along with the resources shared on these platforms. But it would be feasible for universities to capture content that hits close to home or fits its curricular or research needs, such as the University of Virginia Library has done with collecting content and allowing the public to upload content regarding the President Sullivan controversy or the Tweeting #OWS project at Emory University’s Digital Scholarship Commons (DiSC).

Many libraries and digital humanities centers are already engaging in preservation of born-digital objects and would be logical partners for such projects. More broadly, it is an opportunity for higher education to examine the issues involved in digital preservation, which is still very much an emerging field, and understand how participation can support institutional, curricular, and research needs.

Reporting Out: Anvil Full Disclosure
Korey Jackson

(Cross-posted at http://anvilacademic.org/reporting-out-anvil-full-disclosure/)
It’s launch day. And with Anvil’s new public face comes the pressing need to dig into and detail what we’re up to, what we hope to be up to shortly, and some of our longer-term goals. And how better to take account of goals that include increased scholarly openness and publicness than to do so openly and publicly? As we move forward, this “Reporting Out” feature will be a space for the Anvil team to talk candidly with the scholarly community–to be as transparent about our internal operations as possible.

So, full disclosure. Anvil has some grand ambitions: nothing short of the total realignment of scholarly publishing with the social, cultural, and professional needs of the wider digital humanities community. It’s a tall order, and one we fully recognize as still existing within the realm of the aspirational—especially for what is, at least for now, a compact operation.

We’ve already had some fruitful public conversations about the larger changes we’d like to see in the culture of the academic press. Chief among these is promoting the uptake of web-born DH projects as legitimate scholarship within traditional humanities departments. And I’d point out here that despite the occasional appearance of a sneer at the printed monograph, what we’re really hoping for is the chance to merge the narrative and interpretive capacity of good books with the interactive potential of equally good born-digital scholarship. In other words, it’s a relationship that is not about one-upmanship but productive hybridity, in terms of content, form, and, ultimately, professional and cultural cachet.

While our hopes for humanities publishing are admittedly big, we’re still very much committed to procedural and incremental thinking about scholarly communication reform within the humanities.

A legitimate synthesis of the traditional and the cutting-edge begins by borrowing a page from the tried and true practice of peer review. The gestalt takeaway at our recent board of directors meeting (which convened September 24th at Washington University in St. Louis) was this: right now, in the beginning stages of the Anvil Academic experiment, what we offer the DH community, and the institutions that house its members, is an editorial board that has the pan-academic clout to achieve crossover status for digital scholarship. We will begin marshaling the board to bring needed attention and authority to DH projects that still exist on the periphery of promotion and tenure requirements.

All well and good. The questions that remain–and that we’ll continue to tackle openly on this site–are what exactly “attention” and “authority” will mean and what projects will ultimately constitute Anvil’s core products. A compendium of DH reviews? A more refined series of evaluative guidelines for digital scholarship? Public conversations with scholarly societies, deans and provosts, and other administrative bodies within humanities higher-ed? Fully-realized and fully-vetted web-based projects sponsored in partnership with other institutional presses? The answer, of course, is yes to all of the above. But how we get there in the next six months, in the next year, in the next two years is still being mapped out.

Next week, I will outline our first goals in more detail: specifically, our plans to produce a series of digital scholarship reviews and our procedures for evaluation.

So, full disclosure to be continued….

Archiving Twitter
Roger Whitson

This week the Digital Scholarship Commons (DiSC) at Emory University released “Tweeting #OWS,” a project that archives and maps over 10,000,000 tweets associated with the Occupy Wall Street Movement. The project is particularly important in showing how the archiving and mapping of tweets can help preserve history. Natasha Lennard of Salon.com recently reported that a massive amount of data associated with the Arab Spring has already disappeared from the web. Lennard, citing a new report by two researchers working at the Dominican University, found that over 27% of linked content has already disappeared. This is due to a number of reasons, as Lennard recounts in the article: content providers might shift the servers that host the information, access paywalls may restrict information exchange, or Twitter’s own practice of making it difficult to find tweets that are over a week old might limit access.

ProfHacker covered the demise of apps like TwapperKeeper a couple of years ago, and reported that Twitter’s API policies make it difficult to keep track of Tweets for extended periods of time. Scott Turnbull, head developer at Emory Library, designed a new program he calls “Twap” to help harvest the tweets used in the DiSC #ows project. As explained on Turnbull’s GitHub site, Twap “uses the tweetstream library and django to query the twitter streaming api for tweets filtered by terms in a searchlist.” Tweets are archived using JSON data that includes information like geolocation and the time the tweet was published. Scott began his harvesting of the Tweets last October, after having conversations with Andy Famiglietti of UT-Dallas, myself, and the rest of the DiSC team. More recently, graduate fellows Sarita Alami, Moya Bailey, and Katie Rawson worked with Brian Croxall, Stewart Varner, and the Digital Scholarship Solutions Analyst Jay Varner  to create heatmaps, graphs, and a web interface that can help users navigate the data. Topic modeling and distant reading methods were also used to determine the frequencies of specific words associated with certain topics. The project even envisions future applications for a wider sample of data: “Do people who have decided to locate themselves have different discourse strategies or topics than people who don’t? What would happen if we added in other locating factors (origin of user, names of places)? What would this map look like if we charted different places over time?”

Twitter has become an indispensable part of our contemporary historical archive, especially when communication about historical events happens largely through social media outlets. In a very real way, Twitter is shirking its duty to the public by limiting access to its archive. But “Tweeting #OWS” also shows us a new way to engage in public history: by harvesting, archiving, and distant reading millions of Tweets, we can get large-scale maps of how historical events develop. The project also shows quite powerfully how the digital humanities points the way forward for historical research. If archives are not openly available for research, sometimes it’s important to program your way to the required resources.

Libraries as Platforms
Zach Coble

In a recent article on libraries as platforms, David Weinberger envisions that, similar to Facebook opening its API to developers in 2007, libraries would provide access to everything they have–books and online content, metadata, and conversations about that content–in an effort to develop knowledge and community. Such an idea is not radical and is essentially at the core of libraries: any citizen can check out Huck Finn to read for fun, for a research article on Mark Twain, or to use as a text for a discussion group. In fact, many are currently working on technical solutions to the ideas Weinberger outlines, such as linked open data and the University of Rochester’s eXtensible Catalog. Of course, part of the reason we’re not yet there is that libraries don’t own (in the sense of copyright) all of their content and thus can’t do as they please with it, and most libraries don’t have the resources for a for a research and development unit (a library lab or a skunkworks team) dedicated to finding innovative solutions.

The idea of a library platform with individual libraries as nodes within a larger network is similar to the DPLA’s move toward hubs. Each DPLA hub will contribute metadata under a CC0 license (i.e. no restrictions whatsoever) and preferably for “Green Light” content that resolves to already accessible digital content. After all, there’s no need to duplicate what the Web as a platform has already accomplished. Similarly, one idea recently put forth is for the DPLA to work with institutional repositories to aggregate and spotlight existing collections. As libraries move toward a more networked platform model and leverage the wealth of existing collections, using the DIKW hierarchy, it seems that the library becomes less preoccupied with collecting data and information and more interested in mechanisms that facilitate the creation of knowledge and wisdom.

A Day and a Half of “Data to Insight”: The HathiTrust Digital Research Center Uncamp.
Aaron McCollough

This week the world (or 80 or so academics, at least) witnessed the first HathiTrust Digital Research Center Uncamp. I went. I’m tempted to conduct the rest of this entry in the gonzo journalistic style of Hunter S. Thompson, but I won’t. Really, the only resemblance between this trip and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is that there’s a trip in that novel, too.

I cruised down to Bloomington on Sunday with Justin Joque, the University of Michigan Library’s resident spatial and numeric data librarian. We took his Saturn VUE. We had some iffy Thai food in Fort Wayne on the way. On Monday, we settled in to IU’s brand new CyberInfrastructure Building, which is terrifically fancy. By Tuesday evening, we were back on our way to Ann Arbor in the VUE. We got burritos in Fort Wayne.

So, what (you may be asking yourself) is the HathiTrust Digital Research Center? “I know HathiTrust is the world’s largest digital library, with over 10 million volumes digitized, Aaron,” you might be saying. “And,” you might also be saying, “I know the HathiTrust gathers volumes digitized by Google, the Internet Archive, and many of the partner libraries, but… Aaron… what is the Digital Research Center?”

Well, friend, I’m here to tell you about it, because I just saw the light. Er, I just saw the Digital Research Center anyway…

Here’s how the Center describes itself: “The HTRC is a collaborative research center launched jointly by Indiana University and the University of Illinois, along with the HathiTrust Digital Library, to help meet the technical challenges of dealing with massive amounts of digital text that researchers face by developing cutting-edge software tools and cyberinfrastructure to enable advanced computational access to the growing digital record of human knowledge.” (http://www.hathitrust.org/htrc).

The HTRC Uncamp was an opportunity for scholars, librarians, programmers, and their ilk to learn more about the current state of the Research Center’s mission and to get a crack at some hands-on demos with the corpus. This was also an opportunity to offer feedback and to discuss possible new directions for working with the corpus.

To my mind, the two primary themes of the UnCamp were sounded in the first 15 minutes by Brad Wheeler and Beth Plale. Wheeler recalled the research center’s founding priority to make connections between the HathiTrust repository and the researchers who would benefit from the new potential such a large digital corpus affords. He stressed the importance of the “Technology Acceptance Model” (http://www.istheory.yorku.ca/Technologyacceptancemodel.htm) to enticing researchers. Plale stressed the importance of computation moving TO the data rather than the other way around. In other words, the HTRC is designed to be flexible and to accept algorithms and analysis routines users bring to the corpus (rather than imposing algorithms and routines on users). The implicit message was that the research center has learned a great deal from STM computing, but that it isn’t interested in shoehorning humanities research into STM routines.

We were treated to the philosophical view behind Hathi as articulated by John Wilkin (Executive Director of HathiTrust), an overview of the collection and data currently accessible with research center tools by Jeremy York and Stacy Kowalczyk, and an overview of the architecture designed to enable “non-consumptive reading.”

The notion of “non-consumptive reading” will be familiar to most DH-interested readers due, in part to its perversity as an English phrase. The point, as an HTRC poster succinctly put it, is this: “The ‘non-consumptive research’ model has been developed to provide secure analytic access to large corpora of copyrighted materials that otherwise would be off limits to researchers when rights holders do not want to expose their collections to the public.” Put another (somewhat tortured) way by Plale, “your eyes are not human-consuming the materials.” Instead, you are using a variety of workflows to query the repository’s index, to access volumes and build collections using the metadata retrieved from the index, and to process those collections against an array of analytic tools.

Concrete research examples were offered by Colin Allen and Ted Underwood. The former stressed the need for significant computing power to run, store, and make replicable all of the experiments his research into homologies between academic argumentation across humanistic and scientific discourses. The HathiTrust Research Center promises this kind of scale. Underwood focused his remarks on the potential for cleaning HathiTrust data within the Research Center’s architecture.

During the hands-on sessions with SEASR analytics, we also got an immediate glimpse of the potential Allen and Underwood had described. Although the system is still in its infancy, it’s easy to imagine it bringing DH to the doorstep of many scholars who presently regard the field as obscure. Those who are proficient in Java and/or PYTHON, or (more likely) those who have proficient students/assistants/librarians at their disposal will be able to customize routines, iterate those routines extensively, preserve the routines along with their results, and then leave the routines behind for others to use in turn.

Overall, the HTRC Uncamp was a success, and the prevailing attitude was one of powerful potential just around the corner. As the HathiTrust partnership continues to grow, it is encouraging to see institutions developing their own brands of expertise (i.e., Indiana and Illinois tackling the Research Center). It bodes well for further developments at other schools. I look forward to future HTRC events as they emerge, and I hope this one will inspire other Hathi communities to flourish.

Transatlantic Reflections on the Digital Humanities
Edward Whitley

There’s a new collection of essays on the digital humanities floating around the Internet this week. The Digital Academy at University College Cork has put together a collection of short essays by doctoral candidates titled Digital Arts & Humanities: Scholarly Reflections. It’s worth a look.

In a foreword to the collection, Professor Andrew Prescott of King’s College London presents the essays as a complement (or, perhaps, an antidote) to what he calls “the goldfish bowl of American scholarship” and the “American academic parochialism” that has come to dominate discussions of digital humanities scholarship. Despite this initial waving of the Union Jack, what stood out most for me in this insightful collection was not an effort to challenge the work of digital humanists in the United States (on the contrary, projects by scholars at the University of Virginia and Stanford University figure prominently in the collection), but rather to argue that digital scholarship is better seen as a continuation of traditional modes of scholarly production than it is a radical departure from them.

For example, in an essay on digital history Rachel Murphy writes that “Traditional analytic skills remain at the core of what all historians do, whether digital or otherwise.” Similarly, James O’Sullivan writes that electronic textual analysis “is not an approach designed to replace traditional literary criticism, but rather, supplement it,” and Sara Goek reminds us in her essay on oral history that “Long before the concept of a digital archive accessible via an internet connection anywhere in the world, [we recognized] the importance of access as well as preservation.”

This measured, balanced approach really appeals to me: digital scholarship is new and exciting, but it isn’t necessarily a radical departure from the scholarly practices that have preceded it. And maybe that’s where the transatlantic critique from Prescott’s foreword comes into play. Are U.S.-based scholars guilty of over-the-top rhetoric that presents digital scholarship as more than what it actually is? Are we so eager for “the next big thing” that we resort to the kind of hyperbole that ends up distorting the true scope of our accomplishments? I’ve appreciated William Pannapacker’s thoughtful reflections on the rise of the digital humanities as “the next big thing” over the last three years (here, here, and here), and given that Pannapacker is a Whitman scholar living in the Midwest–can you get more American than that?–it’s probably not fair to indict all U.S.-based scholars of rhetorical excess. Nevertheless, Prescott’s critique is worth considering as digital humanists in the U.S. continue to work in a culture that values novelty and change more than tradition and continuity.

First Year Seminar: Prospective
Kathryn Tomasek

For the first time in a long time this fall, I’m teaching a first year seminar, and I’ve taken the opportunity to try out the transcription and markup module I’ve been using for the past couple of years with a group of entering students. The module is one I developed in collaboration with Patrick Rashleigh, a Humanities Technology Liaison in our Library and Information Services and with Zephorene L. Stickney, Wheaton College Archivist and Special Collections Curator.

We have used the module several times over the past few years, first with small classes of students in the History department’s methods course for majors, and once last year with a larger group of students in the course on U.S. Women, 1790-1890. The module is meant to give students an opportunity to decipher nineteenth-century script through transcription, learn a bit about daily life in a town with a mixed rural/industrial economy by spending some time with a storekeeper’s day book, and practice XML markup with a constrained tag-set. A pdf of the original assignment can be downloaded here.

This semester, the FYS students will be working on the module in the context of a course focused on the topic “History and Culture in the Digital Age.” A pdf of the syllabus is linked here. My goal for the course is to encourage students to think about how their digital experiences might change if they were to learn markup and/or programming. I’m considering offering them the option of creating an iOS app as part of their semester research projects.

Are others doing this kind of work with first-year undergraduates? I’d welcome discussion of your experiences and observations. I hope to report back about this course once or twice as the semester develops.

On Hallowed Halls and Anvils
Korey Jackson

I recently transitioned from the University of Michigan’s MPublishing team to Anvil Academic, a digital humanities publishing accelerator sponsored by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE). It’s an exciting move for a lot of reasons. The organization is brand spanking new and has all the start-up vigor of the grand experiment on a small (but galvanized) scale. At the same time, it’s also public sector, public-minded, and non-profit, so it lacks some of the slicked-back marketeering of its private sector cousins, while still maintaining the same coltish spirit.

And, quite honestly, it’s fun. We’re right now in the process of crafting and refining our vision statement—an exercise that’s part prophesying and part organizational self-analysis (and, despite seeming like so much corporate mumbo-jumbo, it’s one I’d highly recommend to anyone embarking on a new venture or project).  Getting to do this kind of forecasting and future-hoping is energizing on a level I hadn’t anticipated. A part of me I didn’t know existed really digs the entrepreneurial chutzpah that it takes to conceive of (and conceive of executing) an organizational future.

That said, some of this professional excitement is alloyed by just the slightest bit of personal angst. Not because I’m worried about the future of Anvil, which has all the signs of becoming a core function within DH and new-model scholarly communication. No, it’s a feeling that has more to do with institutionality…or lack thereof. Because today is the first day-after-Labor-Day in over a decade that I’ve been unaffiliated with the comforting brick-and-mortar of higher-ed. It’s the first time I’ve ever looked at my university ID as scrapbook fodder and not a crucial piece of wallet matter.

And, frankly, that’s left me feeling a little unmoored.

There’s a sense of safety one gets from institutional allegiances—the kind of “we’re-all-in-this-together-and-there-are-a-lot-of-us” security that lies behind even the crassest school spirit. There’s also a sense of safety that comes with the storyline academic departments and divisions offer: the path-to-goal paradigm that exists as an entrenched part of most institutional cultures. Put more simply: one knows what one needs to do to get where one wants to get (at least hypothetically). There are set accomplishments and set tasks that, one by one, get checked off on the way to those accomplishments. This is reductive, of course: service requirements, teaching requirements, tenure requirements, and especially the more abstract “productivity” requirements of the successful academician are never as simple as checking boxes on a bucket list. But the requirements are, at the very least, a known quantity.

With Anvil, we’re just now in the process of list making and goal setting. There’s no preset recipe for success, especially not within the ever-dynamic double boiler of digital humanities and academic publishing. Like I said, a big part of me finds this energizing. But it’s an energy that’s closer to inchoate ball lightning than well-mannered circuit board. And that lack of walls, channels, and known checkpoints is going to take some getting used to.

How about other “alt-ac” or “alt-track” readers? What have been your experiences in making the shift from higher-ed to outer-ed, or from your home department to a separate division within the college or university? Let us know in the comments below!

Digital Humanities Syllabi – Fall 2012 Edition
Roger Whitson

As we get into the start of the Fall 2012 school year, I wanted to highlight a few interesting syllabi that are freely available online and that do some interesting things for digital media and the digital humanities.

Kristin Arola, English 591: Teaching with Technology – Kristin is one of my new colleagues at Washington State University and currently serves as the head of WSU’s Digital Technology and Culture program. Her course investigates “why (and sometimes why not) to interrogate computer technology into writing-intensive classrooms while interrogating the material and cultural components of a digital pedagogy.” One of the strengths of Kristin’s syllabus is that it incorporates both more traditional readings in digital media (Bolter and Grusin’s Remediation) with recent interventions into composition theory using digital media and multimodality (Shipka’s Toward a Composition Made Whole).

Alexis Lothian,  English 121: Literature, Technology, and Society – Lothian is a new member of the faculty at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and works on the intersection between fan culture and digital media. Her section of 121 is provocatively entitled “Rage Against the Machine,” which focuses on how culture depicts our connection to (and separation from) machines. “Do we use our machines,” Lothian asks her students, “or do our machines use us?” Readings focus specifically on science fiction classics like Mary Shelley Frankenstein and more recent speculative fiction like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

Andrew Famiglietti, Emerging Media and Communication 6381: The Hacker in History, Theory, and Practice – Andy works in the EMAC program at the UT Dallas and writes frequently about the politics of Wikipedia. His course on the Hacker not only investigates cultural representations of the figure in films like Sneakers and War Games, but Andy also encourages his students to use Arduino: a platform that teaches people how to build a rudimentary form of artificial intelligence. Andy’s course thus combines some of the best critical reflection on technology with hands-on training that is becoming the hallmark of work emerging in the digital humanities.

Shannon Mattern, New Media and Digital Studies 5278: Archives, Libraries and Databases - Mattern focuses on the intersections between architecture and digital culture, and her course on the history of the “logics, priorities, politics, audiences, contexts, aesthetics, physical forms, etc” of the collection and organization of information emphasizes a connection between theoretical reflection and creative production. From Clay Shirky’s provocative claim that “it isn’t information overload, it’s filter failure” to David Bell’s reflections on “The Bookless Library,” Mattern gives her students plenty of opportunities to explore how libraries are enmeshed in a larger conversation regarding the circulation of knowledge.

Funding Gold OA
Zach Coble

I’ve been thinking a lot about Open Access (OA) lately, specifically how the OA movement can find sustainable models for moving forward. Gold OA has been receiving a lot of attention as research funders answer calls make publicly funded research freely available to end users. However, transitioning to Gold OA creates a barrier for researchers without public or any funding.

Some universities, such as the COPE signatories, have created funds to help authors pay fees associated with publishing in OA journals. However, many of these are funded through special initiatives and wouldn’t be cost efficient if Gold OA does in fact see a significant uptake. Since one assumption of the Gold OA model is that library subscription costs will decrease proportionally as uptake of Gold increases, one option for institutional funding is to gradually transfer funds from library subscription budgets to some sort of institutional publication fund.

I’m surprised that I have not yet come across any articles or reports that take up the idea. Although risky because it would paradoxically result in a temporary period of reduced access as some resources are cut, it seems like an (almost painfully) efficient way to transition from a reader pays (i.e. library) to author pays model. Because the transition to OA has moved at a slow pace, it would make sense to incrementally shift funds as necessary to prevent unneeded disruptions in access.

Do you know of any resources that discuss shifting library subscription budgets to fund OA publishing costs? Is this idea completely crazy or just crazy enough to work?

Challenges to DH in the Library
Zach Coble

Libraries have long been central to digital humanities (DH), but providing support for DH has not been a central issue for many libraries. Of course, there are many exceptions as numerous DH centers are located within libraries (see centerNet’s listing of DH centers), but on the whole, DH and libraries have had developed piecemeal and without much collaboration between library or DH organizations.

An upcoming issue of the Journal of Library Administration (due out in January) plans to address some of these challenges. Miram Posner (@miriamkp) is contributing an article and recently wrote a post to begin identifying these barriers, such as insufficient training in library schools, lack of administrative support, and difficulty in wrangling the resources (personnel, technology, etc.) required to do a DH project. Mike Furlough (@surleyF) wrote a response that sheds light on many of the realistic, day-to-day obstacles facing all academic departments, including a very intriguing question: “Is research antithetical to the University’s core business?” If you have thoughts or challenges you’d like to contribute, post a comment to either one!

Coming from the library side of things, I can attest that there are many levels of barriers. Last fall, my library formed a digital humanities working group to gauge interest among faculty on campus for DH and how the library might support DH projects. Our group fizzled out after a while because there was not a strong enough need for DH support among faculty and the library realized it was not prepared to dedicate and fight for the amount of resources required to do it right. However, it’s promising to note that other librarians in similar positions are congregating around the recently formed ACRL Digital Humanities Discussion Group (already 600 subscribers to the listserv). The group’s first meeting at ALA in June was full of librarians interested in supporting DH although many were unsure exactly how to do so. It’s reassuring to see so many librarians interested in DH collaboration because such an asset will help all of us to overcome the current challenges as we move forward.

On MOOCs We Want and MOOCs We Don’t
Roger Whitson

As a member of the Hybrid Pedagogy editorial board, I’ve been knee-deep in their MOOC MOOC event this past week. Advertised as a MOOC about MOOCs, it promises to be a “lively, playful scrutiny and consideration of the Massive Open Online Course.” Examples of MOOCs include Coursera, which made headlines recently when several Universities signed deals with them publish video content; Udacity, which also made headlines when its founder split from Stanford University to run MOOCs full time; and MITx, which was an earlier adopter and inspired people from Forbes magazine to argue that MOOCs will democratize education.

Of course, MOOCs have also had their fare share of critics: for their high drop out rate, for their inability to engage students adequately, and for their status as being essentially a marketing ploy. Jesse Stommel, one of the organizers of MOOC MOOC, calls them “monsterous” and “incessant” and argues that “there is something wild and playful about the form” that can “disrupt assumptions about what online learning can be.” Perhaps, but it is even more interesting to see the wild and playful attitude amongst MOOC MOOC participants. As a seven day participatory event, MOOC MOOC has produced (appropriately enough) a massive amount of content. Blog posts, Storified Twitter chats, a collaboratively authored statement about MOOCs, several videos, and even personally designed MOOCs.

I had remarked playfully in a post on Monday “‘il n’y a pas de hors-MOOC.’ There is no outside-MOOC, or there is nothing outside the MOOC.” There is, however, something truly compelling about the sheer amount of stuff this event has produced. Perhaps even more compelling is the way that Jesse’s project brought together very different thinkers and professionals. Participants and lurkers in the event include graduate students, professors, educational technology professionals, #altac scholars, adjuncts, and other interested parties. And I also learned quite a bit from the posts and activities sprinkled throughout the week. One post charted the MOC (Massively Online Course) piloted by Michel Foucault in the 1970s and 1980s. Apparently Foucault was required by the French government to teach a course open to the public for the last fifteen years of his life, and all of these courses were recorded. Foucault repeated many of the critiques that are leveled at modern day MOOCs. “It is often rather difficult,” Foucault remarks to an interviewer in 1983, “giving a series of lectures like this without the possibility of comebacks or discussion, and not knowing whether what one is saying finds an echo in those who are working on a thesis or a master’s degree, whether it provides them with possibilities for reflection and work” (1).

MOOC MOOC ends on Saturday. After all of the conversations, I still question the usefulness and the openness of the MOOC form. I also think that learner-centered pedagogy and teacherless classrooms are powerful ways that MOOCs can engage with a culture that is becoming increasingly networked and digital. If anything, MOOC MOOC has illustrated how creative and wild MOOCs can potentially be, even if — in their current form — they rarely live up to that potential.