Anyone looking for a snapshot of the way digital communication is accepted (or not) as a viable part of the traditional scholarly process should hie, forthwith, to Ulises Ali Mejias’s discussion on his Ideant blog: “The Blog as Dissertation Literature Review?” and a followup post. Mejias is a doctoral candidate … Continue reading
If you were to invent del.icio.us for academics, how would it work? It would allow for bookmarking, tagging, and sharing. It would pull metadata from academic resource databases. It would allow me (the layprof) to organize collected essays and citations with a minimum of clickage. And it would do all … Continue reading
Did you find last night’s State of the Union speech unwatchable? Try looking at it another way. Once again, style.org offers a nice way to visualize the spin: the State of the Union Parsing Tool. Enter in a couple of terms and see maps of their occurrence across all of … Continue reading
The latest Pew Internet & American Life study of teenagers and their online habits (“Teen Content Creators and Consumers”) has been out since November, so in our speedy echosphere it qualifies as old news. But I see that this report is getting cited at ALA Midwinter, particularly during the OCLC-sponsored … Continue reading
If the idea of faceless hoards organizing the web’s pro/con/fusion in absolutely uncontrolled fashion gets you hot, or bothered, or both, this article on folksonomy by Marieke Guy and Emma Tonkin in the latest issue of D-Lib is worth a look. It’s a nice rundown of behavior on those 900-pound … Continue reading
When I unwrapped The Complete New Yorker this Christmas, I was so grateful to my sister. Here was a complete, 80-year archive of one of the few magazines I’ve subscribed to and avidly read down through the years. There is something so irrationally satisfying in knowing that you have full … Continue reading
Last summer (yes it was once summer) I wrote a bit about TagCloud — a nifty folksonomy visualization tool. When the MetaMuser mentioned this app recently, I took another look and decided to see how websites I visit might cloud together. Which is a convoluted way of announcing ClayfoxClouds – … Continue reading
Fresh outta Norway, here’s an intriguing marriage of wikis, folksonomy, and metadata harvesting: meet Collib, an experiment launched by a student at the University of Tromsø. The idea here: records are harvested from OAI-PMH-compliant repositories and brought into the wiki. Users – now end-users of these records – then ‘tag’ … Continue reading
Of the several new tools under development discussed at ARL’s lively symposium on Managing Digital Assets in Washington last week, none seemed simpler in concept, or more likely to be popular in practice, than “Firefox Scholar,” an IMLS-funded initiative underway at George Mason University (details here). The idea is to … Continue reading
Electronic paper? Sounds oxymoronic, but this phenomenon a-borning could make the thought of e-books and e-newspapers more bearable. A description of E Ink’s new electronic ink display describes it as “somewhat like a miniaturized Etch-a-Sketch based on electricity, instead of magnetism.” Once the high-contrast, thin, flexible surface is “printed,” it … Continue reading