Category — Cultural Memory

Digital Archives That Disappear
April 22, 2009
As digital archives have become more important and more popular, there are varying schools of thought among scholars about how best to guarantee that they will be around for good. Some think that the best possibility is for the creators of the archives — people generally with some passion for the topic — to keep control. Others favor acquisition, thinking that larger entities provide more security and resources for the long run.

[From News: Digital Archives That Disappear - Inside Higher Ed ]

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I remember when people were horrified that google bought dejanews and when dejanews started archiving and keeping usenet, which was before fairly ephemeral. Those were horrific days for many people because something would be preserved and controlled by someone else that was never intended to be that way.

We’ve been facing problems with digital archives for ages and private digital archives are a huge problem for researchers, costs aside… The question of copyright, etc. is key and often misplaced, in the new form of the digital material. In any case, the discussion above points to some of the new problems of digital archives.

The Center for Digital Discourse and Culture is pleased to announce our Front Pages Collection, an archive of newspaper coverage of the April 16 tragedy. The hundreds of front pages posted on this site were given to the Center by a thoughtful individual in the aftermath of the shootings. Together, they capture a wide variety of responses to, and representations of, the events and aftermath of April 16 from around the world. The collection is organized by geographic location. It can be accessed at: http://april16archive.org/frontpages/

QueenRania

[From YouTube - QueenRania's Channel]

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this is a brilliant use of youtube!

IBM Presents:
A Workshop on Humanities Applications for
World Community Grid

On October 6, 2008, IBM will be sponsoring a free one-day workshop in Washington, DC on high performance computing for humanities and social science research.

This workshop is aimed at digital humanities scholars, computer scientists working on humanities applications, library information professionals, and others who are involved in humanities and social science research using large digital datasets. The session will be hosted by IBM computer scientists who will conduct a hands-on session describing how high performance computing systems like IBM’s World Community Grid can be used for humanities research.

The workshop is intended to be much more than just a high-level introduction. There will be numerous technical demonstrations and opportunities for participants to discuss potential HPC projects. Topics will include: how to parallelize your code; useful tools and utilities; data storage and access; and a technical overview of World Community Grid architecture.

Brett Bobley and Peter Losin from the Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities have been invited to discuss some of the NEH’s grant opportunities for humanities projects involving high performance computing.

If attendees are already involved in projects that involve heavy computation, they are encouraged to bring sample code, data, and outputs so that they can speak with IBM scientists about potential next steps for taking advantage of high performance computing. While the demonstrations will be using World Community Grid, our hope is that attendees will learn valuable information that could also be applied to other HPC platforms.

The workshop will be held from 10 AM – 3 PM on October 6, 2008 at the IBM Institute for Electronic Government at 1301 K Street, NW, Washington, DC. To register, please contact Sherry Swick, sherry@us.ibm.com. Available spaces will be filled on a first-come, first served basis.

More about the World Community Grid

World Community Grid, a philanthropic initiative developed by the IBM Corporation, offers researchers a unique opportunity to accelerate the pace of their work while also mobilizing people worldwide around critical social issues.

Launched by IBM in November 2004, World Community Grid uses grid technology to harness the plentiful, underutilized resource of PCs and laptops to support humanitarian research. Today, volunteers around the globe have donated the computational power of close to 1 million PCs; World Community Grid is harnessing their power when the computers are on but not in use to help advance promising research. Results on critical health issues have already been achieved, demonstrating World Community Grid’s potential to make significant inroads on a great range of future projects that can benefit the world.

World Community Grid is available free-of-charge only to public and not-for-profit organizations to use in humanitarian research that might otherwise not be completed due to the high cost of the computer infrastructure required in the absence of a public grid. As part of IBM’s commitment to advancing human welfare, all results must be published in the public domain and made public to the global research community. Current research partners include The Scripps Research Institute, The University of Texas Medical Branch, New York University, University of Washingon, French Muscular Dystrophy Association, the University of Cape Town and The Ontario Cancer Institute.

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Looks like Ill be at this:)

Walk of Ideas

[From Walk of Ideas - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

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this is a brilliant idea.

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Brent and I have “Chapter 11: The April 16 Archive: Collecting and Preserving Memories of the Virginia Tech Tragedy” in the above book.

Archival collections, impossible to house centrally at many campuses, are about to get easier to use. Starting today, librarians and archivists can upload digital content into online collections with relative ease, allowing them to effectively curate items with open-source tools instead of relying on third-party consultants to build specialized Web portals.

[From New Tool for Online Collections :: Inside Higher Ed :: Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education]

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this quotes the paper that I wrote with brent at the end.

Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage: A Critical Discourse (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007) provides one clump of essays exploring the use of digitization, mostly from the vantage of museums but considering cultural heritage to span across libraries, galleries, archives, and archaeology as well. [From Preservation and Access Across the Spectrum]

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this looks like an interesting read. i expect we will see more of this material in the next few months.

Report: The future of scholarly communication: building the infastructure for cyberscholarship:
The future of scholarly communication: building the infastructure for cyberscholarship link

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From craigbellamy.net

How to pay for a free press, by André Schiffrin:
How to pay for a free press

In a media world with one eye on the bottom line and the other on the official line, it’s getting harder to publish or broadcast anything that doesn’t promise huge sales and attendant profits, and that doesn’t say or show what is approved. But it’s still possible

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perhaps it is time to start a universal trust to support the free press?