Jennifer Howard

My latest story for the Chronicle looks at lessons learned from Gutenberg-e, the high-profile digital-history monograph series created by Columbia University Press and the Columbia Libraries in collaboration with the American Historical Association. It has quietly added an open-access option. It has also switched its subscription model from in-house to the Humanities E-Book project run by the American Council of Learned Societies. The bottom line? Well—surprise—digital publishing isn’t necessarily cheaper than the old-fashioned kind. What you save in printing and binding and warehousing, at least with a project as sophisticated as Gutenberg-e, you may lose in extra labor-and-tech costs. “We… Read more...

I’ve been getting questions about the new, reading-heavy recommendations for undergraduate creative-writing instruction that I wrote about not long ago for the Chronicle (subscription required). The guidelines, put together by the AWP (The Association of Writers and Writing Programs), have now been posted on the group’s website as part of the 2008 AWP Director’s Handbook. More thoughts on this later…. Read more...

I have been accused, from time to time, of being a mixer. My husband likes to remind me of the time that I posted a perfectly innocent question—about the pros and cons of circumcision—to a parenting listserv. Before long, the pro- and anti- camps were hurling accusations of genital mutilation and cultural imperialism at each other. Let’s just say it was an eye-opener. Another question of mine, this one about what “post-avant” really means, had a similar match-meets-powder-keg effect not long ago. You can read the question here (scroll to the bottom) on the Chronicle’s Footnoted blog, the answer here… Read more...

Librarians get their own web series, “Erik the Librarian,” courtesy of “The Office” scribe Brent Forrester. Speak Quietly has the skinny and a clip. Worth the three minutes and 25 seconds of your life that you will spend watching it. (Link via LIS News.)… Read more...

Over at Print Is Dead, Jeffrey Gomez has posted a report from this week’s O’Reilly Tools of Change confab NYC. Depending on how devoted you are to the idea of the solitary writer/reader, you will find it either bracing or alarming. According to Gomez, one panelist, Stephen Abram, talked about how Wiki-style creation (context, in other words) has displaced the idea of content. Another, Douglas Rushkoff, took it a step further: Rushkoff’s idea is that the main point of content is to offer people the opportunity to socialize. And it’s that socializing, or socialization, that’s the real point; it’s the… Read more...

If you’re reading one of the Bard’s plays, you can now join the global crowd—online—via Shakespeare’s Global Globe, the brainchild of an English professor at Carnegie Mellon. (Love the orbis-mundi URL.) The Chronicle’s Wired Campus blog has some background. As of 12:59 p.m. EST, 108 people are reading Shakespeare. Well, 108 people have logged on to report that they’re reading Shakespeare…. Read more...