nines and collex

Of chief importance in understanding the current technological direction of NINES is a 2005 NINES white paper by Bethany Nowviskie and Jerome McGann and a description of the Collex tool by Nowviskie.

More information about Collex may be found on its web page. Reviews of Collex by the Transliteracies Project at UCSB and by l'Observatoire Critique are also available.

 

For context, we recommend these readings in humanities publishing and online scholarship:

tenure issues and why publishers should not decide a scholar's fate

Carlos Alonso, et al. "Crises and Opportunities: the Futures of Scholarly Publishing." ACLS Occasional Paper, No. 57: 2003.

why scholars should build their own digital projects

Jerome McGann, "Culture and Technology: The Way We Live Now, What is to Be Done?" (presented at the University of Chicago, 23 April 2004) (PDF format)

the necessity of peer-reviewed online scholarship

John Unsworth, "Not-so-Modest Proposals: What do we want our system of scholarly communication to look like in 2010?" (CIC Summit on Scholarly Communication: 2 December 2003).

Modern Language Association of America, "Tenure Summary Report" (2004 MLA Executive Council tenure and promotion task force).

why the traditional publication model is less valid than ever

Fabio Casati et al. "Publish and perish: why the current publication and review model is killing research and wasting your money," Ubiquity Vol. 8, no. 3 (January 2007)

further reading

• Blackwell Companion to Digital Humanities Eds. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. Blackwell Pub, 2004.
• Martha L. Brogan "Contexts and Contributions: Building the Digital Library" Digital Library Federation, 2006
• Blaise Cronin, "Scholarly Communication and Epistemic Cultures." The New Review of Academic Librarianship 9 (2003): 1-24.
Blaise Cronin and Kathryn La Barre, "Mickey Mouse and Milton: Book Publishing In the Humanities." Learned Publishing 17.2 (April 2004): 85-98.
• Cathy Davidson, "Understanding the Economic Burden of Scholarly Publishing." Chronicle of Higher Education, 3 October 2003.
• Stephen Greenblatt, special letter to MLA members on problems in scholarly publishing (28 May 2002)
• Lawrence Lessig, "Free Culture" (available online through a Creative Commons license)
• Jerome McGann, "Textonics: Literary and Cultural Studies in a Quantum World." Richard W. Lyman Award Lecture, National Humanities Center: 3 October 2002.
• Geoffrey Rockwell, et al., Special Issue of Text Technology on the Ivanhoe Game, vol.12, n.2, 2003. (includes essays by Johanna Drucker, Jerome McGann, Bethany Nowviskie, Geoffrey Rockwell, and Chandler Sansing)
• The Future of Scholarly Publishing: report of the MLA Ad Hoc Committee on the Future of Scholarly Publishing, originially published in Profession 2002, (New York: MLA, 2002) 172-86.
• Guidelines for Evaluating Work with Digital Media in the Modern Languages (from the MLA Committee on Information Technology)
• Report of the CIC Summit on Scholarly Communication in the Humanities and Social Sciences. (Committee on Institutional Cooperation), 2 December 2003.
• H. Van de Sompel et al, Rethinking Scholarly Communication: Building the System that Scholars Deserve, D-Lib Magazine, September 2004
• Access to the Literature: The Debate Continues (a 2004 Nature web focus, including 35 essays of opinion and analysis)
• Clifford A. Lynch, Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age, ARL Bimonthly Report 226 (Feb 2003)

terms to know

Semantic Web: "An evolution of the World Wide Web in which information is machine processable (rather than being only human oriented), thus permitting browsers or other software agents to find, share, and combine information for us more easily." (Wikipedia)

Folksonomy: "An Internet-based information retrieval methodology consisting of collaboratively generated, open-ended labels that categorize content such as Web pages, online photographs, and Web links. A folksonomy is most notably contrasted from a taxonomy in that the authors of the labeling system are often the main users (and sometimes originators) of the content to which the labels are applied. The labels are commonly known as tags and the labeling process is called tagging." (Wikipedia)

Patacriticism: Alfred Jarry called 'pataphysics "the science of exceptions" and "the science of imaginary solutions." 'Patacriticsm is a scholarly and pedagogical derivative of Jarry's late nineteenth-century initiative.

RDF (Resource Description Framework): A family of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications originally designed as a metadata model using XML, but which has come to be used as a general method of modeling knowledge through a variety of syntax formats (XML and non-XML). RDF puts information in a formal way that a machine can understand. The purpose of RDF is to provide an encoding and interpretation mechanism so that resources can be described in a way that particular software can understand it; in other words, so that software can access and use data that it otherwise couldn't. (Wikipedia)

Faceted Classification/Browsing: A non-hierarchical means of expressing ontological relationships, providing multiple navigational paths to any one item of information. For instance, a restaurant guide can classify a restaurant by location, price, ratings, awards, ambience, and amenities. A user can navigate through any of these facets, combining them in any way to reach exactly the desired restaurant. In contrast to a folksonomy, the information in each of the facets can be organized into a hierarchy (for instance, the location facet could be divided by state, then cities, then neighborhoods). (Wikipedia)

Please contact NINES with suggested additions to this list.

a networked infrastructure for nineteenth-century electronic scholarship