The Quintessence of Ham

I met up with my French col­league Marin Dacos today while he was in the mid­dle of giv­ing an exam on dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing to his human­i­ties master’s stu­dents. While many U.S. grad­u­ate stu­dents (and pro­fes­sors) would balk at such a “fac­tual” exam, I sus­pect that they would have a very tough time get­ting through it unscathed.¹

How would you or your stu­dents fare with a test like this? I’ve trans­lated the ques­tions into Eng­lish. You have ninety min­utes. Go!

Basic ques­tions and def­i­n­i­tions (13 points)

1. In Wikipedia, what do “Diff” and “Edit war” mean?
2. Name the XML for­mats use­ful for elec­tronic pub­lish­ing and spec­ify their particularities.
3. How does PageR­ank work? What are the advan­tages of this sys­tem? What are its drawbacks?
4. Who is Tim Berners-Lee? What is the W3C?
5. What is meta­data? What is Dublin Core?
6. What is DRM? What are its advan­tages and disadvantages?
7. What is sin­gle source publishing?
8. What is the dif­fer­ence between the PDF and EPUB formats?
9. What is Zotero? What does it do?
10. What is a DOI? What is name resolution?
11. What is inter­op­er­abil­ity? What is OAI-PMH? What are the main verbs of OAI-PMH and what do they do?
12. What is the atten­tion economy?
13. What is the Cre­ative Com­mons License? What is its purpose?

Syn­the­sis (7 points)

1. Elec­tronic pub­lish­ing falls into three cat­e­gories. For each type of elec­tronic pub­lish­ing, pro­vide a def­i­n­i­tion, at least one rep­re­sen­ta­tive exam­ple, its main tech­ni­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics, its prin­ci­pal qual­i­ties, and its major faults.
2. The pub­lish­ing indus­try is search­ing for an eco­nomic model of elec­tronic pub­li­ca­tion. Present the dif­fer­ent strate­gies cur­rently under devel­op­ment (name, basic descrip­tion, exam­ple, advan­tages, disadvantages)

1. Except for #9. Every­one can answer that one. [↩]

Before the excite­ment sur­round­ing last month’s Open Access Week fades com­pletely — too late — I thought it might be appro­pri­ate to describe how and where Zotero inter­sects with OA. When peo­ple talk about Open Access, they typ­i­cally mean free access to pub­lished, usu­ally schol­arly, con­tent. It’s a con­cept that’s ide­o­log­i­cally easy for most researchers to get behind because few of us reap any direct finan­cial ben­e­fit from the major­ity of our pub­li­ca­tions, and we’re all very famil­iar with the annoy­ing fric­tions intro­duced by gat­ing access to con­tent. Cham­pi­oning Open Access is kind of like advo­cat­ing not club­bing baby seals: you’re unlikely to encounter much oppo­si­tion. » Read the rest of this entry «

Today is Vet­er­ans Day in the United States, Remem­brance (or “Poppy”) Day in Com­mon­wealth nations, and le Jour du Sou­venir in France. In Viet­nam, it’s not cel­e­brated at all, but that wasn’t always the case.

Unlike the United States’ vaguely-defined Vet­er­ans’ Day, in the places where the hol­i­day is else­where cel­e­brated it remains rooted in the speci­ficity of the Great War, even as those mem­o­ries to be recalled have vir­tu­ally receded beyond the lim­its of the human lifes­pan. In France and else­where in Europe it’s the dead in par­tic­u­lar that are the focus of the day’s atten­tion, and one need not visit in Novem­ber to wit­ness its sig­nif­i­cance in his­tor­i­cal mem­ory. » Read the rest of this entry «

While I am squarely in the “don’t-go” camp when it comes to grad­u­ate study and the inevitable night­mar­ish job search, I also rec­og­nize that I am the extremely for­tu­nate recip­i­ent of very good pro­fes­sional advice all along that rocky path. Roy Rosen­zweig pro­vided some of the best such wis­dom, and few days go by at CHNM when we don’t try to chan­nel his common-sense prag­ma­tism. Roy drew on decades of expe­ri­ence in the machi­na­tions of depart­ment pol­i­tics and hir­ing, and he knew exactly where job can­di­dates should focus their energy. In the spirit of Roy’s intel­lec­tual gen­eros­ity — and per­haps in the hope that you’ll be inspired to repay it in more tan­gi­ble ways — I’d like to share a bit of it here, at least as it has remained pre­served in mag­netic amber for the past four years. It might not look like much, but it’s pure gold — it worked for me and the only other per­son with whom I’ve ever shared it.

Other than very min­i­mally expand­ing my orig­i­nal tran­script into more read­able prose, what fol­lows is pure Roy, though the foot­notes are mine.

Job Talk
The talk should not be read but should be very well mapped out. It needs to fin­ish on time.¹ It needs to be directed at peo­ple out­side your field (i.e. Amer­i­can­ists, etc.) who have not read any of your work. The talk needs to show rel­e­vance and impor­tance of work out­side of field, i.e. “why should i care about this?” It needs to have enough sub­stance to gen­er­ate ques­tions. How you han­dle ques­tions is the real test.

Class Lec­ture²
The class lec­ture rarely sinks a can­di­date and is never the decid­ing fac­tor in favor of one. The bar will be lower for you if you don’t have much teach­ing expe­ri­ence. You should aim to do some­thing solid that doesn’t require too much work or prepa­ra­tion. It should be at an appro­pri­ate level: maybe just slightly advanced (i.e. include “some­thing for the grown-ups”). It should involve some amount of inter­ac­tion – ask ques­tions, show an image – but do not be dis­ap­pointed if stu­dents don’t get very enthu­si­as­tic. It should be the appro­pri­ate length, not run over or end ter­ri­bly short.

Gen­eral Advice
You need to give peo­ple a nar­ra­tive about your­self. You need to show your desire to be at the hir­ing institution.

That’s it. After you’re hired, please con­tribute gen­er­ously.

1. This could scarcely sound sim­pler but is almost never fol­lowed. If the com­mit­tee asks for a thirty-minute talk fol­lowed by an hour of ques­tions, you not only win zero points by run­ning over the thirty, you antag­o­nize the few peo­ple who might have been lis­ten­ing and who would now like to pose a ques­tion. [↩]
2. Refer­ring here to the odi­ous prac­tice of ask­ing job can­di­dates to teach a sam­ple class while on cam­pus, cold. What a great idea! [↩]

Rob Townsend recently pub­lished some fas­ci­nat­ing analy­sis of his­to­ri­ans’ usage of dig­i­tal con­tent and tools. I think the over­all take­away mes­sage has to be unequiv­o­cally grim: his­to­ri­ans are not, by any stretch of the imag­i­na­tion, actively engag­ing with new mate­ri­als and meth­ods. Before I dig into the study, let me say that any crit­i­cism which emerges is in no way directed at Townsend, who teases out a remark­able amount of valu­able data from a group that comes across as not only reluc­tant to adopt tech­nol­ogy but often deeply sus­pi­cious of it.

Townsend’s analy­sis is divided into three key areas: user type, tool usage, and online pub­lish­ing. I’m just going to look at tool usage here since those results inter­sect most closely with my own research inter­ests. That said, I’m going to do away with the orig­i­nal analysis’s cat­e­go­riza­tion accord­ing to user type, which when rep­re­sented graph­i­cally tends to paint a rosier pic­ture of tech­nol­ogy usage than is in fact the case. » Read the rest of this entry «

My col­league Mike O’Malley recently wrote an excel­lent blog post on rethink­ing his­to­ri­ans’ use of evi­dence in the dig­i­tal age. In an era where dig­i­ti­za­tion and search tools have largely erased the evi­den­tiary con­straints that defined ear­lier schol­ar­ship, how should his­tor­i­cal prac­tices change?

Mike argues that dig­i­tal abun­dance has ren­dered obso­lete the litany of super­flu­ous evi­dence that his­to­ri­ans often deploy to bol­ster their argu­ments. Just a few years ago, lim­i­ta­tions of of time, evi­dence, and access drove his­to­ri­ans to lard their work with as many exam­ples as pos­si­ble, a “parade” that “demon­strated the historian’s tri­umph over scarcity.” Mike sug­gests that in the future, a his­to­rian might spend more time describ­ing her “infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture” than stack­ing up evi­dence like so much cordwood.

Although I am entirely guilty of the crimes Mike describes, I’ll plead for leniency by fully agree­ing that more does not nec­es­sar­ily mean bet­ter. More­over, I’ll add my worry that the new envi­ron­ment of abun­dance might actu­ally com­pound the prob­lem that Mike describes, rather than relieve it.
» Read the rest of this entry «

The fol­low­ing piece is loosely based on a talk I gave at the 2010 meet­ing of the Amer­i­can Soci­ety of Eighteenth-Century Stud­ies in Albu­querque, NM.

Although the research and ref­er­ence man­age­ment soft­ware Zotero has gar­nered plenty of atten­tion for its pithy taglines and mil­lions of delighted users, less well-known is the mis­sion state­ment that guides every last detail of the project’s development:

To col­lect knowl­edge dis­sem­i­nated around the globe; to set forth its gen­eral sys­tem to those with whom we live, and trans­mit it to those who will come after us, so that the work of pre­ced­ing cen­turies will not become use­less to the cen­turies to come; and so that our off­spring, becom­ing bet­ter instructed, will at the same time become more vir­tu­ous and happy, and that we should not die with­out hav­ing ren­dered a ser­vice to the human race.

» Read the rest of this entry «

This fall I, along with many oth­ers, will use Zotero groups in the class­room for the first time. With their unprece­dented col­lab­o­ra­tive func­tion­al­ity, Zotero groups promise to trans­form the way that instruc­tors and stu­dents inter­act with sources, par­tic­u­larly in research-intensive classes. Although the Zotero groups func­tion­al­ity is already well-established – there are cur­rently over 3200 pub­lic and pri­vate groups active at zotero.org – over the course of the semes­ter I fully expect to dis­cover areas where we could add or improve fea­tures, and I also look for­ward to refin­ing how best to inte­grate Zotero into what passes for my ped­a­gogy. » Read the rest of this entry «

We’re still wait­ing for the court reporter’s tran­script from last week’s dis­missal of the law­suit filed by Thom­son Reuters tar­get­ing Zotero, but a few more details have sur­faced regard­ing the nature of the ruling.

Judge Gay­lord L. Finch, Jr. dis­missed the Thom­son Reuters com­plaint due to a lack of juris­dic­tion. The dis­missal was with­out prej­u­dice, which means that the judge did not bar Thom­son Reuters from refil­ing its law­suit. Whether the cor­po­ra­tion can or will refile is unknown (to me) at this point. » Read the rest of this entry «

I’m delighted to announce that this morn­ing the Fair­fax Cir­cuit Court dis­missed the law­suit filed against Zotero by Thom­son Reuters. The law­suit had claimed that the Cen­ter for His­tory and New Media “reverse-engineered” Thom­son Reuters’s End­Note soft­ware to pro­vide data inter­op­er­abil­ity between Zotero and End­Note. » Read the rest of this entry «