Jennifer Howard

What does our email say about how we spend our days? Last December, the Cambridge classicist Mary Beard, who blogs for TLS, posted a recap of a day’s worth of email from her inbox. The summary gives you a sense of what Beard called “a Don’s (real) life” and what she’s asked to think about over the course of a more or less regular day. Now it may or may not be interesting to read somebody else’s email. Doubtless you have plenty of your own to get through. But as Dan Cohen said when we were discussing it on Twitter,… Read more...

An iPad recently came to live in my house. I was given it for my birthday, and I’ve enjoyed playing with it. So have my children, who are 7 and 9 and drawn to anything with a screen. By luck or habit or genetic inheritance, they’re also great readers, so I downloaded a couple of interactive ebooks for us to try out: The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore and Alice for the iPad Lite, a free, shortened version of Alice in Wonderland with the original drawings souped up and made interactive. They’re a lot of fun, truly, and… Read more...

Not long ago, I had a chance to interview the cyberpunk Bruce Sterling, who’s in the process of giving his archive to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. It was a neat, all-over-the-place conversation—one that’s given me some ideas for future stories—but one thread I can’t let go of is Sterling’s doubt about the wisdom of trusting electronic archives: He’s also fascinated by dead media—a subject he has written a lot about—and is robustly skeptical about the idea that digital media are durable. “It’s like thinking you’re going to run your Ford Edsel for the… Read more...

Counting this entry, I have managed to turn up on four blogs this week. I’ve been guest-blogging at Bookslut, which I always get a kick out of. Bookslut ought to be part of your regular lit-net rounds if it’s not already. For the Chronicle’s Wired Campus blog, I wrote about “Collector in Chief,” a new blog launched by AOTUS, a k a David S. Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States. His call for “citizen archivists” to get involved in helping the Archives do its work provoked some interesting reax over at ArchivesNext, a site that’s well worth keeping an… Read more...

My adventures in podcasting continue. First, I joined Dan Cohen, Mills Kelly, and Tom Scheinfeldt on their “Digital Campus” podcast (Episode 51, “The Inevitable iPad,” Jan. 28, 2010). We recorded the podcast the day after Apple’s big iPad announcement, so we talked a lot about what the iPad might or might not do for teaching and publishing. We also dug into Cornell’s decision to ask other institutions to help pay for arXiv, the repository where physicists, computer scientists, and others in related disciplines share pre-print copies of articles about the latest research in their fields. Side note: If you care… Read more...

I’m a guest on this week’s installment of Digital Campus, a podcast hosted by Dan Cohen, Mills Kelly, and Tom Scheinfeldt of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. The episode’s theme is “Publishers Bleakly”, and Dan, Mills, Tom, Josh Greenberg of the NYPL and I talk about some of the changes besetting (or reshaping) scholarly publishers and libraries. If you listen, I hope you find it useful. And if I said anything I’ll regret, don’t tell me…. Read more...