Category: Markup and Text Representation

From Metadata to Linked Data Summer School | Digital Humanities Observatory

 

This week (July 4th, 2011) I’m instructing at the From Metadata to Linked Data Summer School at Trinity College, Dublin. I’m teaching a half-day hands-on workshop on Voyeur. You can see my workshop script here. I am trying a new version of our workshop script which will include worksheets.

I’m writing my notes at http://www.philosophi.ca/pmwiki.php/Main/FromMetadataToLinkedData – these are not a conference report so much as reflections on stuff I’m learning.

Distractions in the Shallows

I’ve was slowly reading Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows when I came across this passage,

By combining many different kinds of information on a single screen, the multimedia Net further fragments content an disrupts our concentration. (p. 91)

As often happens when reading, questions disrupted my concentration. I couldn’t help thinking that Carr’s gaze was limited by the screen. How many distractions are there beyond the book and screen. I grabbed my iPhone and took a panoramic shot of the visual space from where I sat on the living room couch. Rooms are the problem – they are filled with multimedia and interactive distractions starting with the couch (which invites me to put down the book and snooze.) Here is my annotated “multimedia” space (click to enlarge):

Amazon and Waterstones report downloads eclipsing printed book sales

So, ebooks are finally taking off! The Guardian reports that Amazon and Waterstones report downloads eclipsing printed book sales . This doesn’t mean that the value of print sales has been surpassed, but it is still indicative that ebooks are here to stay.

Now, can we redesign the book for the ereader? The current crop of ebook readers are page turners that don’t use the medium. Instead the medium has been made to work like the book and perhaps that is right, but I would still like to see something more interesting. Here are some ideas:

  • e-audio-books – ebooks that come with either voice synthesis or synchronized audio so that you can listen or read them.
  • An API for reading apps so that you could buy apps that work with all your ebooks. The apps might allow you to search across books or visualize books. There might be apps that quiz you with random quotes or help you pull linked data out of a book.
  • A standardized way of citing passages in an ebook.

Issuu – You Publish

Thanks to Sharla I came across Issuu a site for publishing online magazine like documents. You get an account, you upload documents, and they create an interactive page-flipping e-publication out of it. When you “Click to read” a publication an application takes over your screen to give you a reading environment. They seem to have a lot of publications made available this way.

Making Books : Encyclopaedia Britannica Films : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive

On Boing Boing I cam across a reference to this Encyclopedia Britannica short video on Making Books (Encyclopaedia Britannica Films, 1947). It is remarkable how many specialized machines there were for printing books. Nicely reminds us of a moment in the history of information technology.

Digitization Day Conference Report

On Thursday we held the first University of Alberta Digitization Day. The idea was to bring projects on campus that are digitizing research evidence from texts to 3D objects. We also invited a number of units on campus that provide research computing services like Library that runs an Education and Research Archive (ERA).

See my Digitization Day Conference Report. At the end is a list of issues that came from the final Lightning Round. Also, I have put up a list of useful links in the Histories and Archives area of the CIRCA wiki.

Digitization Day

The CIRCA Histories and Archives group I am part of is organizing the University of Alberta’s first Digitization Day.

This one-day event is a chance for research projects that are digitizing evidence to meet up with each other and with units on campus that provide relevant research services. Projects that are creating digital archives of different sorts will give short presentations as will units on campus that support research.

The idea is to bring a lot of digitization projects together to learn about each other and what is happening on campus. My sense is that we have hit a critical mass on campus and now that we have a trusted digital repository ERA (Education and Research Archive) it is time to start talking and sharing knowledge. Each project should not have to reinvent itself.