 think it's about that time. So let me welcome you all back to the closing session of our fall 2010 meeting. I hope you'll agree with me it's been intense but interesting day and a half and we still have something very special in store. Before we go there though I do want to just take care of a few housekeeping reminders and other things. First off I want to just take a moment I do believe Herbert is still here. Herbert Vandesampel yes. I want to recognize Herbert and his colleague Mike Nelson from Old Dominion. They just a few days ago won a very hotly contested digital preservation award for the year for their work on the momento system. I know that Herbert and Michael and colleagues showed some of that work in an early stage to us here at a prior CNI meeting and I've been promised that we'll be seeing an update on it but it's really I think quite an achievement and quite an important milestone to see that work recognized there. So join me in congratulating Herbert and Michael. And with that let me let me just remind you of a few upcoming dates in your packet you've got the dates for the spring CNI meeting that will be in San Diego. I know that when we've talked about where should we have the not in Washington meeting a few of you have said over the years San Diego would be a really good place and actually it's worked out that I think in early 2011 San Diego is going to be a really good place. So I hope to see many of you there and then you also have the December dates when we'll be back here. I want to give you one other set of December dates that aren't in the packet and that just got settled a few days ago. Those are for the International Digital Curation Conference which as you know CNI has been co-sponsoring this is the conference that the UK Digital Curation Center puts together every year and that's going to be held in Bristol on December 7 through 9 2011 the week before the CNI fall meeting for those of you who are tracking on that. I'd also like to say a few rounds of thank you's. I'd like to start by saying a thank you to our presenters. Getting around the country in the world isn't as easy as it used to be. The weather seems to be getting weirder every year maybe it's just me but you know travel seems to get complicated and we had some particularly tricky weather this time yet we managed to have all of our sessions all our presenters made it and they've made this a fabulous conference I think. I know that I've seen some wonderful sessions I know many of you have told me how valuable you've found some of the sessions you've heard so I'd like to call for a really big hand for all of our presenters and I'd also like to just say thanks to the CNI team that makes these meetings run smoothly to everyone who helped with registration made the AV happen got the sessions together it's an enormous amount of work and please join me in thanking them as well and with that let me get on to the main matter at hand. I want to introduce Dan Cohen I think many of you know him many more of you I know know of his work in many different areas in digital history his leadership along with the late Roy Rosenswig of the Center for History in New Media at George Mason University his scholarship on the intellectual history of mathematics in the Victorian age his work with sophisticated use of textual databases to inform that scholarship I could go on you know for a long time about Dan he's got amazing range of interests and insights and you know on a very personal note he has been a huge help to the coalition and to me personally over the last few years through his service as an at-large member of the Coalition Steering Committee where he has been just fabulous in terms of keeping us connected with the evolving scholarship around e-research and how it ramifies through scholarly practice and scholarly communications I'm going I'm not going to try and summarize his talk because he's here to give you that talk so let me just turn it over to Dan I'm so glad you're here welcome thanks Cliff for raising expectations sky high there you know I do I do really want to thank Cliff and Joan and everyone involved in CNI really for their hospitality and for inviting me into you know the CNI crowd I you know I feel as a traditionally trained historian really lucky to have fallen into this crowd that really works on all parts of the infrastructure that supports my work and in the future I believe all the work that scholars will do and so I really want to thank everyone here and I appreciate the audience I also think that these the people in this audience really get the web and so in some way this talk is perhaps not to you although in part it perhaps is but but the title the talk and end of the book I'm writing is comes from the sense that you know even 20 years after its inception I think a lot of my colleagues really don't understand the potential of the web I mean it's pretty remarkable to think but if you you know we're just to go to the American Historical Association meeting and just walk around in the halls and indeed there have been many surveys recently that the AHA has done about the use of new media it's remarkably marginalized and I just don't think there's a lot of my colleagues broadly in history or the humanities who see the potential they see the web is really a place for electronic copies of what they produce rather than a kind of locus of creativity and of new ways of thinking they don't really see the web as a place where their scholarship might be helped or their scholarly community might be realized and so I just wanted to pause and at this time in my career and just get some thoughts down on paper and in talks like this about you know what I sort of sees is necessary for the next 20 years and in a sense also to reawakening all of our interest in the web and how really an unusual weird place it is still 20 years after its inception I think that's a very important thing to do is to really continue to understand what an unusual network it is and and what it can do for us you know when I start my graduate course in digital history I like to throw students off balance not by looking at academic work on the web but by venturing out onto what I like to call the vernacular web or just the web that's out there and so I just pick a topic at random and then go to some sites that are out there on the web again avoiding academia so I'm gonna do that right now if you want to just throw out some potential topics web topics that we could look at burritos okay thank you very much let's let's talk about burritos for just a second you know so this is something I would do in class is let's just look at burrito websites right not history websites but let's look at sites about burritos so I want to start here today with on this random website that I've pulled up on burritos it's called the burrito bracket it's a very un ivory tower website as you can tell from the web design you know this is a very typical site of the open web it couldn't exist in a book format or an article format it's live it's interactive it's got a map tell you a bit more about this the creator of the site went to all the cheap Mexican restaurants in Chicago's wicker park neighborhood and with scientific precision analyzed carne asada burritos at each site in a sort of playoff fashion can see here it's got a geolocated mashup of data burrito data overlaid on Google Maps it has a relatively sophisticated grading system that I've thought to adopt in academia with not one not two but three different meat categories which can be from one to five jalapeno peppers it's got a rather rather clever hack actually of Google spreadsheets to create the bracket playoffs for the burrito joints and it has an extensive documentary archive for supplementary evidence on the burritos at hosted at flicker you know not too shabby right for this random website about burritos that shows up here thank you person I never spoke to in the audience beforehand so I think you know most of all what this kind of site shows me out there on the vernacular web it's someone trying to really get the web it's someone living in the web trying to respond to it trying to understand its potential its interactivity amazingly at its prime this site garnered an audience in the tens of thousands it this is the vernacular web and I just love how web savvy it is it sort of cobbles together off the rack tools blogging software mapping tools that don't require fancy training in GIS it uses Google Docs it's got a polling a polling plug-in widget down there in the lower right asking its audience whether a burrito is a sandwich and it's got a makeshift photo archive and a good old-fashioned research methodology it also I think very importantly it creates a community a community arose around this site the burrito bracket because of its interactivity because of the way it operated in a very webby way and it iterated toward complexity from a very basic you know off the rack blogger installation now there's something more unusual about this website which I'm going to leave as a puzzle and a challenge to the audience and to the Twitter back channel I'll come back at the end of this talk to give you the answer for now again let's just use this as a typical website so the web way in the academic way you know I think the academic way is very different in different in attitude and really I think this talk is it's a talk about psychology and attitude more than anything you know in the academy we tend to be deliberative sometimes to a fault you know I think most scholars do not believe as Voltaire did that the perfect is the enemy of the good enough we like to get everything in ship shape we don't like to expose our work our process as the owner of the burrito bracket did we are low to experiment in genre we sort of have the genres we know about we don't want to cobble together any tools we don't want to iterate in any way we want to stick with the modes that we know the modes of pedagogy the modes of research the modes of scholarly communication which has served us well I think that's somewhat understandable however I think it's also rather conservative and I think you know when you see scholars looking at the web if they if their work has to go on the web they want it I in an identical format to the way it exists offline or close to identical if there have to be comments on their work on the web this open web they want them vetted or gated or somehow moderated and so what we've often ended up with is all sort of contemporary instances of the photo play right the classic study of when film was invented and many of the early genres were photo plays where a camera was fixed like this one that's filming me right now at a stage where a play took place because well what's the genre that everyone knew they knew the play and so you just have a fixed camera and you you videotape or film the play and then you can distribute that you use it as a distribution mechanism it wasn't until directors started experimenting with genre experimenting with cutting multiple cameras asynchronous filming all those elements that really we have film as we have today and I think we're kind of at that point where there's still a lot of at least my colleagues perhaps not the people in this room who are still kind of going through that exercise if they do anything online of doing a kind of modern photo play so the question I want to ask is what if we take the burrito brackets seriously what can it tell us about the successful genres of the web and how we might emulate them to further our academic ends you know the web is 20 years old it's about to graduate from college I guess in web years but it's it's still far from mature and I think it's really worth again reawakening our sense of wonder about the web and how strange it is and how different it is from academia and how it's still full of surprises I try to spend part of every day just looking at the vernacular vernacular web and what goes on there new genres unexpected kinds of websites to really understand what can be done is indeed full of the unexpected I want to show some examples today and how it's kind of influenced our work at the Center for History and New Media and then sort of think ahead about what genres are emerging that we might be able to adopt here's a good a really good example layer tennis layer tennis calm a very new kind of genre and what this is is a website that takes two designers every week on Friday and has them have a kind of debate or battle using graphical art so in this case it's a match between Scott Thomas he might know most famously was the design director for Barack Obama's 2008 campaign is the one that came up with that oh with the field in it and you know one of the strongest visual identities of the last decade and on the other side designer illustrator Mark Weaver also a very well-known designer they're both actually rather intellectual and what I find interesting about layer tennis here is what's going to happen in one day is they're going to have a kind of debate through art they have to give each other their Photoshop files as they go back and forth in what's called the volley so one person throws up a work of art the other person gets the files that were used the various layers in Photoshop parlance and gets to edit those and maybe add their own layers in and put something new up that critiques the prior illustrator so here we go I'll go relatively quickly through this so here's the first volley by Thomas he's got a quote from Seneca ideas should be worth sharing there is no delight in owning anything unshared here's Weaver bit more abstract Thomas again it's got a quote from Hume the wise man proportions his belief to the evidence there is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact from Arthur Conan Doyle you can see here how they're playing which with the form here I mean it's really stunning graphical work considering this is all done in one day art is anything you can get away with from McLuhan of course reframed but then again art for art's sake is the philosophy of the well-fed from Frank Lloyd Wright another right quote less is only more when when more is no good beauty is no quality in things themselves it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them David Hume and finally half of art is knowing when to stop really great match weaver with a tremendous final volley he won and actually he made it to the semifinals if you're interested in this genre the finals are this Friday all day on on layer tennis calm so I mean this is just a completely unexpected genre you wouldn't think that in one day you could have this good of a kind of intellectual debate a graphical debate I think this is this qualifies as art it's it's got a lot of really interesting elements to it including a sustainability model which is that it's sponsored by adobe which of course makes creative sweets the creative suite so creative indeed so I think this it's worth being an anthropologist here with the web and saying you know what what can we find there and what does it do well and how does it do these things this is just a completely new genre but I think it is a genre when I reflect upon it that could be imported into academia you could imagine for instance a scholarly society or journal hosting a debate over a day or over a week between two scholars at the top of their game over a particular topic I think that's a very live and interactive and sort of interesting forum that won't be the static debates that we see in print journal so unexpected new genres there's another aspect of the unexpected web that I've spoken about before in other forums and that's the unexpected use of the content that goes up on the web the example I always like to use is from our September 11 digital archive which we did with the American social history project in New York and here you know this was very rapidly built after 9 11 it ended up it's a website that collected memories photographs emails audio video it went up within three months of 9 11 we wanted to capture the born digital materials before they were lost and to our surprise actually ended up collecting 150,000 digital objects from 30,000 people virtually every state country in the world and so it's a very large kind of raw digital archive in 2003 on the second anniversary of 9 11 we contributed it to the Library of Congress as a digital acquisition and you can see that the way we're thinking about this is the way historians think about how they go through physical archives which is when we made the site we made it browsable as you would sort of flip through the folios that you would get in a box that you've taken off the shelf in special collections that sort of one at a time we'd make our way through but one of the unexpected uses that really woke me up to the potential the web in 2002-2003 when Roy and I was starting to think about our book on digital history we looked at the logs the server logs of how people use the 9 11 collection and what we couldn't believe is that there were actually many linguists who had come through and were doing very extensive text mining and data mining of the collection and then it struck us how much has made sense because we had a very open collection there was there were no gates you could come through and look at everything and so there were linguists who were very very interested in the origins of modern teen slang texting for instance so we have one of the few archives that has a lot of early instances of omg again not something I could have anticipated ahead of time we have a lot of stories where cell phones were used actually in about 25 percent of the stories again this is relatively early in the use of cell phones so so we have sociologists who are looking at the use of cell phones on 9 11 again very different from the kinds of uses that we anticipated but enabled by the open web and I think the web is is full of these kind of unanticipated uses I think that that's part of the DNA of the web is that once it's up there people will make use of it in ways you can't anticipate and I think we haven't leveraged that fact enough so what what I think has to go on is you know you ask yourself this question of how you handle surprises and I think a lot of people on the open web have asked that same question and they've come up with a solution of openness modularity and extensibility you sort of admit which is hard for academics to do you admit that you don't have all the answers this is really hard for someone with a phd you you have to say in some way that you're going to to leave it half built you're going to make something a tool or a collection or some kind of scholarly form that again like the burrito bracket might have to be iterated might have to be changed along the way and so you think in these ways of openness modularity and extensibility and so you know one great example this is WordPress which at the center we're really impressed with WordPress I mean in many ways it runs a lot of our blogs so we like it as our blogging software but I think it's fascinating on many different levels I think from a development standpoint from the open source standpoint I think it's a fascinating model and the way that they've engaged a very large community of developers they also have a very large community of users 30 million blogs they have an interesting sustainability model which I don't have time to get into today but I might hint at later in in the talk and they deal well with unexpected uses I also just as a side note a lot of people at the Center for History and Media have picked up programming from WordPress so they start using WordPress and then it's a kind of gateway drug well they want to tweak the CSS a little bit they learn a little CSS then they start learning about WordPress functions and they go under they read the code at WordPress codex and they figure out how to kind of tweak the way their posts are shown or how many characters of each post are shown and that kind of gets them into a little bit of that then they realize oh well it's that's not so different from PHP and they learn PHP and they they go that way rather than some kind of formal training in computer science they back their way into it I think that's a fascinating model actually for engaging non technical scholars in in development in web development so what WordPress as well is that it's completely modular and it allows all kinds of modifications unexpected uses and it allows for the sharing of those modular uses so here of course there are thousands of themes that people share freely through their WordPress gallery so if you want to make your blog look different you can install it right within WordPress you can tweak it it's really amazing collection of WordPress themes there are plugins of course so that if you want to extend it you can very easily do that and they have very simple ways for all kinds of hooks and apis and ways to modify the code they have thousands of plugins for WordPress so we've thought a lot about WordPress we spent a lot of time looking very carefully I think Matt Mullenweg is a very smart guy about the way that he set WordPress up from the start to take advantage of of its webbiness in our own projects like Zotero and Omeka we really taken the model to heart both from the back end software development practices and also the way we model the functionality if you look at our homepage today there are these five tabs that show kind of main kinds of functionality but we really only started out with the first one the the notion that we could collect from the web the first inside of of Zotero the the basic instance of it was just that we were doing research in the browser as historians and so why should we have this tool kind of over there in some other desktop application should shoehorn the application into the web browser Firefox with its extensibility allowed us to do that and then through some magic we were able to pick up information about scholarly objects on the web and identify those so that icons show up in the address bar and you can save this page not as a web page but as an article about ambivalence in the player speech in Hamlet so we started out here we wanted to get past the cutting and pasting of bibliographic information we found a way to do it we shamelessly clone the iTunes interface and had it slide up from the bottom of the Firefox web browser and we started there but then only later did we then layer on social functionality all kinds of new web 2.0 elements sharing groups these sorts of things that happen in 2.0 we beefed up our documentation so that we made it a lot easier for people to extend the functionality of Zotero we started to have a plugins shop so that people could list their plugins and make them available to others simply from our homepage Tufts with their view project took advantage of this to add their kind of mind mapping and topical mapping system and hook that up to Zotero Caesar the text mining platform did the same thing we have mapping tools and open layers map tool that plugs into Zotero and extract place names and text within Zotero and then maps it and I was delighted to hear about the advances in simile and what's going to happen in simile 2.0 but we've got their timeline tool shoehorned in here there's a plugin for audio and video annotation all that happened in a sense with our knowledge but because of the kind of modularity of the software but beyond developers we've also made a lot of choices to allow I guess regular users to extend and change Zotero so one of the most basic which I think a lot of projects forget about is language localizations that they don't start by cutting out the English language strings in their software interface and putting those in a separate file the power of this is really remarkable not just because you get crowdsourced translations of the interface and I'm delighted to report that we have almost 50 of these everything from Arabic to Vietnamese we have Mongolian interface that's been written by the Mongolian Academy of Sciences and in fact we recently got a whole video introducing Zotero and Arabic that was sent to us but not only this not only does it get this kind of pragmatic language localizations but it gets people involved the people who maintain these language localizations are really invested in the project they take pride in if we add a new menu element it's very instantly translated via the babelzilla website they get involved in the project they feel like in some ways they are developers of the project as well people can create citation styles so we adopted an open xml format called csl citation style language and journals or individuals can write csls to format your bibliography from Zotero in a very specific format we have over a thousand of these that people have contributed shared back and forth if you understand xml it's relatively easy to write one of these again so there's a low hurdle to get over to become involved with development on the project we have a way to create site translators which is our nickname for making a site Zotero compatible so when someone who's surfing around the web with Zotero comes to a site and wants to extract archival material or scholarly objects those little icons show up uses javascript and xml and we have at this point over 350 people with commit level access who've many of whom are contributing these translators so every night new ones come in they get shipped out to everyone in the Zotero community and more and more of those icons show up as you surf around the web so think about all the different ways that people can get involved here from from very technically unsophisticated just giving us you know what's the French word for that menu item all the way up to core commits to the code in addition we've encouraged interoperability by adopting standards so in this case you've got world cat has a feature called lists where you can create your own bibliographies online on the WordPress site by getting an account and they adopted a standard that we use in Zotero which means we didn't even have to create a translator you just surf over to a world cat list and the folder icon shows up and you can grab and import references from world cat so we end up with a kind of virtuous circle here of semantic information I also don't want to belittle this although it's kind of amusing but we get translators on very non-academic sites sites outside the ivory tower so Epicurious there is it there is a Zotero translator for Epicurious that allows you to grab recipes using Zotero you could use Zotero entirely as a recipe management system and it actually dumps the ingredients into a Dublin core metadata field you can print out a shopping list and go make these delicious Christmas cookies here so why is this important again I think it strengthens the the development of the project I think having this many stakeholders the fact that there's a recipe community using Zotero which I think you know maybe in again the other psychological mode that's common in academia you'd say well you know we want to do highbrow stuff we don't want to do this but I think in this case it strengthens the project that there are people out there thinking about writing translators for sites like Epicurious and we have swag this is Christmas 2010 door buster available on our Zotero store nice jacket great if you're going through the airport you can wear your colors okay Omeca just very briefly again adopts the WordPress model even more specifically it's a platform for collections an open-source content management system and again here we thought about theming so we use Omeca in-house for projects like our history of the soviet gulag or our history of the the mexican guest worker program after world war two many other institutions use it to host exhibits and digital collections and all these themes are shareable they're all done in a way that's completely modular we have set up from the beginning Omeca has a site where you can get involved again multiple levels you can do documentation you can do development you can do design work like themes we have a plugin gallery I think we've got 20 or 25 plugins now for Omeca everything from very geeky stuff like oai-pmh to things that are oriented toward pedagogy like the ability to set up student archives or student accounts on on a website again we have themes that are easily shared and like WordPress and I was talking about that elusive sustainability model we've recently launched omeca.net which like wordpress.com takes an open-source package and provides hosting services for institutions and individuals that don't want to go through the hassle of installing an open-source package and running it themselves or to run a server so we do that for them at omeca.net as opposed to omeca.org where you get the software for free so let me move now from platforms for research and digital collections to the scholarship that can be done on the web what can we learn here from vernacular forms you know we're still 20 years in the web we're still mostly writing articles and books and so i think that this is one area that a lot more work needs to be done in you know can blogs be scholarship can twitter be a process of peer review that is an open question but i think it's worth asking you know i i was sort of depressed by this survey that the association of american university publishers did last winter where they asked their membership you know what their digital strategies were and i'm sure the questions were formulated this way but they were almost all about books so the a up members and you can see the top answers and i'm sorry it's fairly small here but they're all about you know print on demand ebooks ebook sales um open access to books right books books books ebook collections and then much like the asterisk next to um roger maris's 61st home run down here at the bottom where i have this little red arrow it says oh you know a couple of us were also maybe thinking about blogs you know and i think it's worth asking you know what business we're in and i think university presses should be in the scholarly communication business right i think that they should be expansive in their thinking about digital publishing um and um so i think this is one area that again begs the question of are we going to do it the academic way or are we going to think about importing or making better use of vernacular forms meanwhile there are blogs proliferating um becoming increasingly prevalent in academic writing um actually blogs i think have become more erudite on average because students recently abandon blogs for social networks which is great you know leave it leave it to the professoria um uh you know there are wonderful blogs i don't have enough time here to to go over the great academic blogs i subscribe to um here's one by professor of architecture jeff manaw some of you might read building blog um really takes advantage of the web has a huge audience it's probably the best architecture blog on the web and maybe some of the best architectural writing anywhere um and this post that that i've taken a screen capture here is a meditation on the ways in which careful reading of zoning laws zoning regulations actually allows some creative architects to make structures that in a sense um you know one wouldn't expect um here there was they they found a loophole which allowed them to get more square footage by cantilevering the buildings out over the road and i think in some sense it's a nice metaphor for what jeff's been doing for many years um as a scholar on his blog he just he doesn't need the permission of anyone of a journal to do what he's doing he just creates good content and and from that he's developed a very large audience of architects architectural historians and scholars interested in architecture um there are terrific group blogs frog in a well the collaborative weblog dedicated to east asian history um is a very good site um i i this is not an area of my specialty but i'm a subscriber to the blog because i think there's very interesting work being done on this blog reviews of literature but also original pieces and comments on contemporary events from the perspective of asian historians many of you probably know cricket timber site for intellectual discourse a lot here also on history in history writing it's got some of the best writers on the web and they've and it's very highbrow stuff um and law of course is a very big of the lc has an archive of law blogs i think it's actually blogs if i can get that word correct bl a w gs um the vola conspiracy is the biggest law blog in the united states um it's mostly law professors and uh it has a lot of readers in fact i took a screen screen capture of quant cast yesterday it's got 137 000 average visitors a month um worldwide uh so you know that's a bigger much bigger audience by the way than law journals probably it's bigger audience than all law journals combined um and you start looking at these numbers and you start thinking you know if you're Eugene volak you know where would you want to publish your work right what what is the point of your scholarly work um do you want to publish it to a very small audience that might leaf by it in a paper journal or do you want something with 137 000 readers in multiple disciplines so i think you know blogs are continue to be disparaged um for being shorter form than the you know average 8 000 word article but and surely there are cases where longer forms are necessary but blogs have the advantage of the web way and the open way where the unexpected can happen let me give a quick example of that for my own work on my blog um you know i wrote this post over the summer on open access publishing and scholarly values and i talked about a lot of what i've i've just spoken about here and the importance of openness from a kind of ethical standpoint but a curious thing happened as this post went out um Steve Ramsey um a lit professor at Nebraska wrote a very long response in which he called it part two of my response Kathleen Fitzpatrick a media studies scholar then wrote part three of this article that i wasn't expecting to have more than part one and then Richard um Lavin who i've never met um wrote a very long piece on all of our pieces which he put up on his blog with the comment comment press plugins that other people could comment on his comments um it went on and on um here's paul fife's uh piece and um another long you know thousand two thousand word blog post um in addition on all these blog posts there were 60 comments many of which were very long now to me that looks a lot like scholarship right well i mean you can disparage it as blogs but it looks a lot like scholarship it is open debate it is um it's not the static heavily footnoted scholarship of the academic journal but it should be recognizable to intellectuals in any age as scholarship and as the open discussion and debate that scholars do um so you know i don't buy the critique that blogs are vanity publishing at this point i think there's a lot going on in the blog sphere that um more fields in academia beyond digital humanities where there's been a very active blog sphere for a long time um i think this could could happen in in much greater ways um you know obviously at this point the critique is well you know how about real peer review blind peer review and we could get into debate which i don't have time for right now about post peer review versus pre peer review and blind versus open but clearly the openness of the form allows all comers to to sort of weigh in and it requires the author i had to respond to comments on my blog and to these other comments on other blogs in this decentralized fashion you know in a way that's much more uh uh labor intensive than a regular peer review uh process um i'd also note here that i'm a historian if i had published something like this let's say i published it in the journal of american history i would have heard from historians but you note here i heard from a literature professor and a media studies person i don't even know who those last two people were but i can tell you that this is a much more interdisciplinary way of producing scholarship and it brings me into um discussions with people i never thought i would have discussions with and i think that is also extremely healthy um from the the point of view of scholarship also on the question of peer review i mean if you look at academic publishing reviews in american history um you know there's no way to respond the web way of review is recursive and it's really critical to note that the web involves recursive review so you can have reviews of the original object and then reviews of the reviews right and this can go on and on if you look at the history of peer review on the web which in many ways begins with slash dot the tech discussion sites pioneering commenting system which voted up and down comments and in some sense separated the wheat from the chaff it's nothing like the stereotypical view of comments on the web from within academia where people say oh well it's just the riff raff and it's a free-for-all it doesn't have to be that way there are very sophisticated uh recursive peer review systems on the web that we could experiment with i also think just the openness of it the fact that your scholarships on the web is a sort of check against error um you know the example i like to use recently is this blog by ken levine who is a um a writer in hollywood and he's got a blog on tv um but he took a diversion to make a criticism and actually some people weighed in about the social network um the movie the social network this fall open out there on the web easily found via google and news readers and those sorts of things so you know what happened erin sorkin wrote a long response actually the most critical response that sorkin has written more than anything he's written to um you know the new york review of books or the new yorkers review of his movie he went on this blog and took apart these criticisms of his movie and said you know here's what i was trying to do right so you know i think about let's say book reviews in history um you know you open those up the the author can come back and say you know here's why you the reviewer is wrong or others can come in and say hey this is just a bunch of log rolling by a friend of this author because it's an inert form in the print journal it just doesn't have this capacity that the web has to be recursive i think that's accountability i actually just a side story here i once wrote something that um was slightly inaccurate about vent serve um you probably know one of the fathers of the internet now at the chief um internet evangelistic google i wrote it that morning by that afternoon i had an email from vent asking for a correction on my blog which i then did um but you know clearly he's out there and again um you have to get things right i don't think it is just a free for all of writing but comments in the blogs i think are only the beginning of more sophisticated systems separating the good from the bad um and i think there's ways that the web can actually make it easier just as a journal does today and in the past to read a manageable number of works in one's field i think this is another common and still long lasting criticism of the web is oh my gosh there's just so much out there there's so many blogs you know at least the journal i get it every quarter in my field and i only have to read those things let's forget it i'm forget about how myopic that is but but still i think um there are systems out there on the web and this is what i'm currently tracking on just as a final point for this talk of the ways in which the web is now trying out genres to aggregate and curate to separate the good from the bad and to show the power of centralized attention when placed on top of a system that allows for decentralized publishing this actually happened early on if you look at the history of blogging very early on when blogs started to grow exponentially you started seeing a genre emerge called the carnival where um individual bloggers would host a carnival where they would point to what they thought were the best blog posts from the past month or quarter in their field um here's just a recent one history carnival that is now doing this um same idea they might pick out 10 or 15 blog posts say why they thought they were good in a sense again aggregation and curation on a personal format um out there in the tech press this has become much more sophisticated so um a great example is tech meme um which some of you may read but um tech meme aggregates all the tech news during the day and distills it down to the eight or ten stories you really need to know for that day so if you can't read the thousand and one tech blogs on your topic you could go to tech meme speak uh pick out a specific area or just look at the general feed and you'll get just sort of at a glance what you need to know right this is aggregation and curation in action it's also tech meme is much more complex and it seems at first site when the creators made tech meme it was at first initially 100 algorithmic so look at links from blogs and tweets and just pick the greatest aggregate from that to put on the homepage now actually they've measured in some human editorial latitude into the site to be able to surface websites that might not be the big websites in technology so they will try to point to for instance an individual blog that people haven't heard about as much as they will to a big site like from apple or google um tech meme has spawned all kinds of clones like twitter times and paperly um which create a tech meme like site based on links mentioned by people you follow on twitter um and people are now using these sites and then in fact there are applications apps for the um for the ipad like flipboard that do the same thing as these websites that again distill down what people are talking about in your social circle to the few things you need to know so that you can check in just once a day and read those articles really fascinated by the recent launch a couple weeks ago of food press um which besides making me salivate is um is an aggregator for food blogs from wordpress.com and um so again it's taking there's a lot of food bloggers and it surfaces the best recipes the best stories out of the 30 million wordpress.com blogs and indeed goes on to curate them into various things like if you're just interested in vegetarian food you can subscribe to a curated feed of vegetarian recipes or stories from the blogosphere they also have a breakout box highlighting specific authors that they think are good so again it surfaces quality work um in the wordpress world so okay this is about food i understand that but what i'm saying is again if we just think about the vernacular web i think this is really fascinating to think about you know importing this model if you are a historical society and every um scholar in your society had a blog right and you hosted a centralized site that aggregated attention that people could come to you to read the best from the membership that strikes me as a very powerful value added process there are sites that do this um there's of course the venerable arts and letters daily which has been doing this for over a decade more recently in the uk there's this terrific site the browser which pulls up sites um uh excuse me stories from across the web that um are often you know academic in nature so i think there's a lot we can learn from these sites that again distill down the web into a manageable number of articles or things to read or pointers to projects that you might want to look at um people are starting to figure this out and i think it's starting as usual in the sciences there's been a proliferation the past few years of science blogs multi-user blogs like science blogs that again host a kind of multi-user installation of blogging software but then aggregates into a surface on the homepage the best of science blogging from that day or week um there are some pioneering universities like the university of mary washington and um cuny that have created wordpress mu websites that aggregate scholarship and work from across their universities and bring it together um onto a single page or a customized feed i think these are very powerful models um just a little plug for one of my little side projects here but um for the past year i've been doing a uh i guess a quote unquote journal called digital humanities now that aggregates um what digital humanities scholars are looking at across the web and tries to surface again the most important stories um i've recently revamped this site and uh to point to more substantial work by the quote unquote members of the digital humanities community um while also allowing if you scroll down to the bottom of the site if you're looking at it live just the raw stream of what digital humanities scholars are looking at a lot of which is stuff from across the vernacular web um but uh it gives a good sense of what at least this scholarly community is looking at so i think there are models here that can again be emulated i think this model here could be emulated in many fields um even ones that don't have an extensive blogosphere like digital humanities does i think twitter is also a really interesting example of aggregation and curation um there are there are scholars like j rosen the journalism professor at nyu who has let's see he's approaching 50 000 followers on twitter i think pretty much every journalist journal student of journalism um professional journalists subscribe to his his twitter feed and um he uses it rather bluntly as a platform for taste-making and vetting he calls people out he points to good substantial work in new media and journalism um he understands the web with uh dav weiner often called the father of rss um he has his website where he aggregates the links that he's pointed to and then notes how many people actually click through on those links you can just go to this page if if his twitter stream is too much for you then you can just go to this page and see you know the 40 most recent links and sort of what he has to say about that how he's curating those links across the web and how many people click through them so you can get a sense of what the community thought was important as well i've done some stunt uses of twitter from a scholarly perspective um cliff knows that uh a year ago i was up in new york um at the digital dilemmas symposium and um i i just posted this image from the victorian age from 1882 an image of a um a an object that was found in saint claire county illinois by a young anthropologist from the smithsonian and um i sort of replicated how you might be able to use twitter to do what this guy did which is he brought this back from illinois and asked in a salon the the other anthropologist you know what is this how can i figure out what this is so i posted this object on twitter um we used a hashtag to aggregate the comments about what the object was and i challenged the audience out there beyond the talk to try to figure out what this thing was um you know i'm lucky to have a lot of twitter followers so perhaps this wouldn't wouldn't work for everybody but i could see it working if a scholarly society had aggregated their membership on twitter um and so i gave everyone an hour to figure out what it was um in that very web way there were scholars in many different fields religious studies anthropology um information sciences all kind of took stabs at it started talking to each other adding each other back and forth and um it took 29 minutes for them to come up with a fairly rich description that this was an ornamental gorget from the co coca tribe um it's made out of shell it has two holes in the top because it was used as a necklace um and um again unlike the sort of siloed inert discussions in the scholarly journal that sort of showed what the live web can do and i don't think the creators of twitter ever anticipated that you know it would be used in this way but it is again the unanticipated uses the permissionless innovation that can happen on the web that enables these kinds of uses now people who know me know that i'm really a pragmatist about these things and i don't pretend that we're going to move on to twitter and blogs in 2011 although that would be nice but um you know there is a lot of inherently conservative aspects of academy and perhaps that's good right it is the storehouse of knowledge and the advancement of knowledge um and we're raised as scholars with really acute attention to what economists would call signals of quality the book has many signals of quality to it um i think those signals of quality and if you look at what's going on in journalism right now and how journalism is changing it's because the signals of quality associated with the newspaper is eroding j rosen talks a lot about that on his twitter feed and on his blog um you know obviously there are things like the ipad and the the surprisingly rapid adoption of e-readers that's kind of eating away at some of the these signals the signals of the physical book that the physical book is is worthy of reading and something else is not worthy of reading what happens when we start reading everything on an e-reader the sort of behavioral aspects of reading i think are changing i think apps like insta paper my favorite ipad app by a 28 year old developer marco arman um who also i think is intellectual i think this is an app that makes an argument about reading excuse me um makes an argument about reading in that it takes any text a blog post a newspaper article an academic article and it formats them in exactly the same way and gives you a nice little journal to read in the evening so it's already eroding those signals of quality and saying to you hey here's just writing it's writing read it in the same way you can flip through it um as uh as you would any beautifully formatted work the neh funded a one week one tool crash course charrette at george mason university this summer to create a digital humanities tool um i can take no credit for this whatsoever but they came up with this tool called anthologize which is a wordpress plugin which takes wordpress content either aggregated from around the web or within a specific wordpress installation uh orders it formats it spits it out into a variety of formats including e-pub which you can then pop onto your ipad it looks as good as a book um they did that in one week it's rather impressive it's now being updated um but you can imagine projects like this and like insta paper forcing us to reconsider cues for quality the the form of writing itself without the fancy trappings that come with the journal or the book i always like to bring up the unpretentious wine writer alexis the sheen's um shrewd comment about um deciding whether wine is good or bad um you know he said there's no substitute for pulling corks right just he would constantly meet people who would say oh he's just you know it's beautiful first growth from you know and he'd say no just open it up drink it do you like it is it good you have to open the bottle to understand whether it's good so i think there will be a process that occurs over the next decade that erodes traditional signals of quality and makes us more expansively interested in all kinds of writing and all kinds of genres and new modes of work that happens across the web so burrito bracket did anyone figure it out yes nate silver um was the creator of the burrito bracket before this point he was best known as a baseball statistician and um he sort of grew sick of burritos and so in 2008 he shut down the burrito bracket site and set up another blog called 538.com which he used to begin to analyze the horse race between obama and mccain and what was going on in the 2008 election in general um you know can a burrito statistician uh you know brazenly decide to analyze elections and the economy better than most newspapers on the web yes on the open web he can um and you know i became a huge fan as many did of of nate silver's work i mean it was just high quality writing and you could compare it um to what was going on in the new york time say at that at that point and it was just as good if not better now you might know where this all ended up new york times bought 538.com this year they recognize quality yes it came from this burrito bracket guy who brazenly set this site up but they realized good is good right writing is writing he set out he created his own blog he didn't publish in a journal he didn't go through any vetting systems but they understood that good is good and they've now aggregated this up they've pulled it up the chain of value onto the new york time site itself he is now effectively eight times columnist and that's how the web scrambles signals and i think that is an incredible important lesson from the first 20 years of the web and something that we need to think more about in the academy still the web is a place it's a it's a wondrous place i think still after 20 years it has permissionless innovation it has a spirit of do-it-yourself it's interdisciplinary it allows for community and collaboration in a way that inert academic forms don't and so 20 years into the age of the web i think we still have much more work to do on incorporating this open webs potential into the ivory tower thank you very much so before i give the traffic report on i-95 north and south i've been told there's time for a few questions if anyone has has them right that's a the question is about the advantages i think of current publishing current current academic environment where an editor can receive articles from anyone and so is sort of forced to see potential good new work that's out there and the response i have on that is just a quick example i have various google alerts for topics like digital humanities and digital history and i always am on the lookout for good new scholars on the web and recently i found through this this method this graduate student at Princeton he's working on a digital history of the 19th century and working on text mining and i think he's years away from publishing anything in the field he's still early in his academic career but because he set up a blog um and i could find pointers to that blog i was able to find him and start collaborating with him we started trading back graphs of of keywords in the 19th century and these sorts of things in a way that in some ways is a a flip side of what you just mentioned so i i completely agree and i think there are ways to probably slot in still submissions on something like let's say digital humanities now where you could have a form that would submit articles into that but also to find out through these kind of tendrils of the social networks and the blogs here to find new work sort of where it is right um it also allows for new forms you know he's doing work that probably won't show up well in a print you know eight thousand word article he's got graphs he's got um text mining work to do and so in some ways i think we can have our cake and eat it too i think we can continue to have a kind of submission process but also match that up with some of what the web does well yes mark there's a saying that science advances most quickly through the death of old scientists which is sort of a preface to um what about promotion and tenure and until promotion and tenure in academia can recognize new media what's the rewards right um this is a question that comes up frequently and is as much discussed um i this is where i think that there needs to be a combination of efforts between institutions like university presses scholarly societies and scholars themselves and people working on infrastructure i think there are ways still to validate this material but i do not doubt that for a long time right the inertia of things like for instance the book in my field is very tough to get over right i mean think about how much would have to change uh in history um with respect to different forms of publication i mean people still getting phds they effectively are writing a proto book called a dissertation then they graduate then they have to turn that book into something publishable to get tenure and then they have to write another book for full professorship there's just a gamesmanship there i mean it's a it's just a vertically integrated industry here of bookmaking and so it's very hard that's a lot of inertia in the system for those sorts of things so i you know i think in the pragmatist way what i would say is it's just it's going to be hard to swap these things out it's going to be hard to swap out the blog for the book but i think a good place to start is to expand the footprint of scholarly communication to say you can do the book but you might also want to have a blog about your process of the book or some things that didn't make its way into the book or some other thoughts you're having on a new project and to begin to have those things aggregated in a way that once the attention is aggregated on those formats you can begin to get validity and signals of quality that would count in the promotion and tenure process so my game plan for instance for digital humanities now is okay right now it's pulling all these things together but i want to get an editorial board on it i want to have a best of digital humanities now for 2010 that gets the best of the best the best of the things that made the homepage which happened generally algorithmically but you could have people then stretch out right so now we're we're moving up the scholarly communications pyramid to just the very top one percent let's say of all work that's new projects that were launched that were cited on on digital humanities now great blog posts or new tools that have been submitted that could go into some format we could say this is an item that could go on your cv this has been vetted even to a higher level and so i think there are ways to again iterate toward validation in that way okay uh wait looks like one more question i think so you mentioned the vernacular web several times just wondering what the non vernacular web is what the i'm sorry what the what the non vernacular web is um well again i think it is i'm using it really as a shorthand for uh let's say google maps versus gis right i think there's a lot that scholars can do with google maps faster and in many cases just as well as they could with extensive training in gis i mean if you look at that nate silver blog um he's making use of these technologies that are just kind of out there that you don't need substantial scholarly training to understand and use so um you know perhaps it's not a great word and that's why i've substituted open web in here the web beyond the academy you can choose your favorite modifier okay thank you very much appreciate it thank you that was in that was an incredibly rich talk and i suspect that uh i know i'm going to be digesting that for some time to come um it it just for me connected off in so many different directions peer review engagement with the public dealing with overwhelming information flows crossing disciplinary boundaries i think there's there's just a tremendous amount in there and i'm very happy to say that um we've got video of this that will make available probably early in the new year on the web and uh that will have an opportunity through that to revisit some of these ideas that dan has shared with us um dan thank you for an incredible conclusion to our fall meeting i tremendous thanks and with that let me wish you safe travels happy holidays and i will see you all in the new year thanks again