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. [↩]