Category Archives: General

Dr. Saul Fisher, who is Associate Program Officer for the Mellon Foundation’s program in Teaching and Technology, made a presentation at the recent MLA in Philadelphia entitled “The Open Source Movement and Higher Education: Consequences for the Humanities.” I found … Continue reading →

Culture-hero Lawrence Lessig comments amusingly on the neo-red-baiting practiced by Bill Gates. The episode is giving rise to some terrific new graphics from the Copy Left crowd!

Richard K. Johnson, The Future of Scholarly Communication in the Humanities: Adaptation or Transformation? A presentation at the meeting of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, December 30, 2004. Excerpt: The most compelling motivation for Congress and NIH to … Continue reading →

Today’s trivia quiz: what is the search term in Google’s example of public-access texts in their $150M library scanning project? Answer available here. Not such a bad thing if Google thinks this is what digital libraries are all about… (Thanks … Continue reading →

The January issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter contains the best summary I’ve seen yet concerning Google’s gigantic library project, with a useful comparative postscript on the one million book digitization effort by Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive.

“We celebrate the Promethean power of our labour and imagination to shape the virtual world.”

Publish or Be Damned is a recent BBC discussion of academic publishing issues, including the Open Access controversy.

Odyssey, a magazine about research at the University of Kentucky, has just published an article about the efforts of CS professor Brent Seales and his team to develop non-destructive methods for extracting information from delicate cultural artefacts. The project is … Continue reading →

From one of the Wordherders, extremely unwelcome news: The Education Department has canceled its annual grant competition for the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education because Congress has earmarked the bulk of the program’s $163.6-million budget for pork-barrel projects. … Continue reading →

Janice Siegel has begun to create several albums of her photographs from various places of interest. So far there’s a collection from the British Museum, starting with a nice series of the Caryatid from the Erechtheion, and also lots from … Continue reading →

Lots of sources today on Google’s plan to digitize hundreds of terabytes of scholarship in several of the world’s largest research libraries over the next decade: Search Engine Watch Boston Globe, New York Times, BBC Chronicle of Higher Education Harvard … Continue reading →

From TEI-L, a mention of the new Wikipedia entry on the TEI.

Classic end-of-term displacement activity: I’ve created a bunch of Firefox search plugins for open content sites (Perseus, the Stoa, the Suda on Line, and the Latin Library), to accompany one for Perseus I found ready-made at the Firefox site. Just … Continue reading →

An earlier post to this blog summarizes new NEH-funded work on the problems of digitizing Latin incunabula. The project will disseminate its results very broadly, through publication of data on freely accessible sites like Perseus and in other university digital … Continue reading →

The Center for Hellenic Studies invites applications to two upcoming summer seminars on Greek scholarship and electronic publication. The first seminar (led by professors Casey Dué and Mary Ebbott) will be on “Homer: Research on Homeric Poetry, Emphasizing Textual Criticism” … Continue reading →