DCW Volume 1 Issue 7 – Maps, Open Access Textbooks, & Less Than a Million Books

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-07-07

Summary:

Use the link to access the recently launched weekly review from M DigitalCultureBooks. Housed at the University of Michigan, DigitalCultureBooks is “an imprint of the University of Michigan Press dedicated to publishing innovative work in new media studies and digital humanities. We began in 2006 as a partnership between MLibrary and the Press, taking advantage of the skills and expertise of staff throughout MPublishing. Our primary goal is to be an incubator for new publishing models in the humanities and social sciences. This means: [1] developing open platforms that make openness part of the scholarly peer review process [2] establishing a model for press-library collaboration at Michigan and elsewhere [3] showcasing and extending Michigan’s leading role in the development of digital resources [4] encouraging and participating in a national dialogue about the future of scholarly communication...” The weekly review, DigitalCultureWeek “provides[s] a forum for amplifying, (re)absorbing, and asking questions about each week’s digital humanities and new media news.” Articles in the current issue include: [1] Mapping Uncertainty at UCLA ... “For the last few weeks, we’ve been pretty busy here at UCLA, hosting a National Endowment for the Humanities-sponsored institute for digital cultural mapping. We’re using the term ‘digital cultural mapping’ to describe the process of using (or reinventing) maps so that they make humanistic arguments... [2] Data big and small, digital and analog ... “It’s been almost two years now since the New York Times proclaimed that “The next big idea in language, history and the arts [is] data.” This lofty declaration came in the context of a discussion about the rise of digital scholarship in the humanities, implying that “data” and “digital” are necessarily yoked concept. And for many of us who work in the digital humanities, they are. One of the commonplaces of digital humanities scholarship is that we need computation methods to help us deal with the vast amounts of data that no individual researcher could possibly comb through on her own.  Scholars such as Tanya Clement, Sara Steger, John Unsworth, and Kristen Uskalo have warned us, pointedly, not to try to ‘read a million books,’ offering instead that we use digital tools to process large data sets. But do we always have to use digital tools to work with data? And does data always have to be large (i.e., of the ‘million books’ variety) to be worth our attention as scholars?...[3] Why open Textbooks Matter ... I firmly believe that the first duty of anyone involved in graduate education these days is figuring out how to lower costs for graduate students, especially since the US government has decided to abandon subsidizing loans for students while they work to achieve their degree. One possibility is the creation of a cross-institutional open access repository of texts and other resources that can be adopted to help offset expensive textbooks. Before we get to the point where such a repository is available for everyone, I’m going to look at one group who is leading the way for adopting open textbooks...”

Link:

http://www.digitalculture.org/2012/07/06/dcw-volume-1-issue-7-maps-open-access-textbooks-less-than-a-million-books/

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.data oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.licensing oa.green oa.universities oa.copyright oa.libraries oa.cc oa.events oa.peer_review oa.preservation oa.students oa.presentations oa.tools oa.sustainability oa.librarians oa.prices oa.funders oa.media_studies oa.colleges oa.publishing oa.digital_humanities oa.neh oa.ucla oa.neatline oa.digital_cultural_mapping oa.fipse oa.textbooks oa.books oa.repositories oa.hei oa.libre oa.economics_of oa.humanities oa.ssh oa.u.michigan

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

07/07/2012, 17:35

Date published:

07/09/2012, 14:01