The ability to re-read long novels might not seem directly relevant to our current political dysfunction, but neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf makes a strong case that it is in her new book, Reader, Come Home. I reviewed the book for The Washington Post. Read More at The Washington Post »
Journalism
“Copy Machines in Libraries Are Going the Way of the Dodo–Slowly”
I'm always interested in how familiar tools--like the copy machine--change over time or give way to other tools and what that says about how we live, so this story was fun to do. Read More at EdSurge »
“Content Providers?”
A review of The Digital Critic, a collection of essays on living the literary life online, for the TLS. Read More at The Times Literary Supplement »
“What Next-Gen Digital Humanities Looks Like”
Has it really been 10 years? The Office of Digital Humanities at the NEH celebrated a decade of supporting seminal digital scholarship recently, and I was there to mark the occasion. Read More at EdSurge »
“Pop Up Archive Filled a Need for Audio Archiving, and Apple Noticed”
"Whatever lies ahead, during its five-year existence Pop Up Archive helped accelerate a collective and rapidly evolving effort to get a handle on audio archives, accidental or otherwise. That Pop Up Archive won the intense support it did in a short time span speaks to the pressing need felt not just by radio producers and broadcasters but by galleries, libraries, archives, and museums, too." Read More at Humanities »
“The Character of Its Content”
My alma mater's alumni magazine asked me to profile Peter Dougherty, the outgoing director of Princeton University Press, and I was happy to oblige. Read More at Princeton Alumni Weekly »
“The Copyright Mavericks”
Is there a workaround that allows libraries to make digitized copies of some copyrighted material publicly accessible? Looks that way. The Internet Archive (the geniuses behind the Wayback Machine) and a crack copyright scholar are testing the limits of a little-known section of the copyright code.
(N.B. I hadn't written for Slate for a while, and I'm thrilled to be contributing now to Slate's Future Tense.) Read More at Slate »“Old Ways Meet New Tech (and New Students) at Meeting of Library and Academic Leaders”
Sometimes the old ways (copy machines, general-purpose digital tools) really are best. My report from the Ithaka Next Wave conference. Read More at EdSurge »
“Campus Libraries Are Centers of Information, But Not of Diversity (At Least Among Librarians)
My writeup of a new report from Ithaka S&R, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, about diversity (or the persistent lack thereof) among librarians at research universities, in spite of a number of attempts to improve the situation. Read More at EdSurge »
“What Happened to Google’s Effort to Scan Millions of Library Books?
Among other things, it gave us (or at least expedited) the HathTrust Digital Library, and it made possible scholarship like this. Read More at EdSurge »
