Epistemographer

Panelists:

• Daniel Clancy Google
• Bob Stein
• Danielle Tiedt GM, Microsoft

• Elizabeth Lawley Professor, RIT

LL: Concerns ->

• chilling effect of requiring login for viewing of resources, etc.

• rankings are opaque systems

DC:

• Asked group of students how many had been to the library in last year; less than 1/2 had.
• two programs – publisher program and library program
  • publisher program works with currently available materials

• library program works with out-of-copyright materials, etc.

DT:

• Sees Microsoft’s digitization efforts as intended to help them “answer questions better”
• Wishes government would take a larger role in digitization – from Microsoft’s perspective, she’d rather everything was already scanned so that all she had to do was crawl it, index it and create a user interface that makes users want to use it via Microsoft.

• Ultimately, corporations are going to be concerned about the bottom line

DC:

• Asks Bob Stein:
1. Would you rather we cancel the project?

1. Would you really want the U.S. government in charge?

LL: What about decentralization? Can individuals scan individual books?

Kevin Smokler (question): Is there really such a demand for digitization of 19th century lit that justifies a rush forward without concern for the cultural and ethical questions posed?

DC: Yes (particularly for still-in-copyright works)

BS: There’s a certian disingenuousness to the argument that this is all about making the materials available; the purpose of Google’s project is not so much about making the world’s information available as it is about serving ads and gathering information about us.

Once more into the breach! I never really hit my writing stride after getting back from my honeymoon (honestly, one decently thoughtful post in almost two months does not a blog justify), but if there’s one motivation that outweighs all others, it’s the threat of public shaming – since I’m heading off to spend 5 days with all the cool kids at SXSWi, I’m blowing the dust off this here blog and hitting the ground running.

First, a brief catch-up on general life stuff:

• Bought a condo in DC, spent a month or so getting my hands all dusty with some home improvement (June 2005)
• Got married (Oct 8, 2005)
• Spent a month in New Zealand (December 2005 – January 2006)

• Had a small homeowner’s disaster

In more professional news:

• Teaching a class at American University this semester
• Got positive reviews back on my book manuscript from MIT Press, currently writing a response to criticisms
• Working on some cool software projects

• Hatching a few other plans, more about which soon

Non-RSS readers will also notice a snazzy new design, cribbed almost whole-cloth from the talented Jeremy Boggs, with whom I’m lucky to work. My strengths are many, but design ain’t one of ‘em; my interests lie far more in tweaking information design than in graphic design, so standing on Jeremy’s shoulders was exactly the boost that I needed. I’ve also decided to kill the blog.epistemographer.com subdomain, so everything now redirects to www.epistemographer.com – change your bookmarks and RSS feeds accordingly!