“WW1 Discovery: Content prioritisation” – Winning project
JISC is delighted to announce that King’s College London has been awarded funding for a project on “WW1 Discovery: Content Prioritisation”
This work will undertake essential primary research that will guide and underpin the wider JISC WW1 Discovery programme which aims to aggregate and deliver WW1 content by building an aggregation, API and discovery layer so that related material can be discovered more easily by educators and researchers.
The ‘war to end all wars’ to this day remains the most widely covered in teaching in further and higher education and is a huge focus for research across disciplines but despite the growth of exciting multidisciplinary approaches to its study, little centralised information exists on what aspects of the war are being taught or the key research questions in development.
Due to this breadth and depth of content available around WW1, it is necessary to prioritise the potential content that could or should be included in an initial aggregation of material and which will, ideally, act as a foundation for future work in this area.
KCL will be conducting desk research and telephone interviews as necessary on what is actually taught in HE, compiling targeted surveys of resources available and their use and seeking input of academic and information professionals through focus groups, lists and invitations to blog/Twitter.
If you are able to input into any of this ongoing research, please contact patricia.methven@kcl.ac.uk or geoffrey.browell@kcl.ac.uk
More information is available on JISC WW1 commemoration blog
Digital Copyright Exchange – Call for Evidence
The excerpt below is from the Intellectual Property Office website. The planned Exchange will be of great interest to those digitising orphan or in copyright works, hopefully leading to a acceleration of the process of rights clearance.
On 22 November Business Secretary Vince Cable announced the appointment of Richard Hooper to lead a feasibility study on developing a Digital Copyright Exchange (DCE) in the UK.
The DCE feasibility study will consider options for developing a functional digital market in rights clearance and a source of information about rights ownership, as recommended by the Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property and Growth and accepted by the Government.
Richard Hooper has invited stakeholders to respond to a call for evidence which asks two questions:
First, whether they agree with the ‘Hargreaves Hypothesis’ – that the current copyright licensing system is not fit for purpose; Secondly whether they agree with his proposed definitions, including the market definition. Richard Hooper said:
“This is a controversial issue with strongly held opinions across the spectrum – we are seeking hard data and evidence for or against the main, or parts of the, hypothesis. The responses I receive will help to inform my thinking as I move to develop a concept for a workable licensing solution.”
To submit a response to the Call for Evidence (142Kb), send your evidence with a completed response sheet via e-mail by no later than Friday 10 February 2012.
The Digital Humanities surrounds you
Stanley Fish recently published a blog post in the NY Times with the grandiose title, The Digital Humanities and the Transcending of Mortality. The article is engaging; it seems to sharpen the knife for the Digital Humanities but then decides not to stick it in (although that might be to follow)
What strikes me about the post is that is latches on to some recent synthesis work on digital humanities, extracting some of its findings and treating them as an ideology to be critiqued.
This implies there is a coherent philosophy to the digital humanities. A set of founding ideas, an essential ideology, that will either determine its success or failure.
The trouble is that the Digital Humanities is not reducible to a manifesto. Rather it is the evolving set of humanistic traditions and practices about investigation, analysis, critique, communication and publication that are coming under pressure in the Internet age. The whole practice of scholarship is evolving / being revolutionised (delete to taste) because of the digital realm.
All scholars are affected by this. Are there really any scholars who don’t use emails, mailing lists, JSTOR, digitised resources, Google Search, electronic journals, Wikipedia? Are there really any scholars who’ve not worried about peer review, or taken advantage of open access?
No, of course not. Although they might pretend that this is all mere convenience and doesn’t help come them closer to the the ‘explanation of aesthetic works’?
But the ‘convenience’ of the digital can drive their work in different directions; a radical reduction in the hours spent travelling to libraries and browsing through print archives changes the research process.
And as the tools created by digital humanities projects grow in their scope and functionality – projects in 3D scanning, data mining, textual analysis, crowdsourcing – these too will change research practices.
I don’t disagree with Fish that we need to measure the contribution of digital tools to scholarship, but this should be with the aim of refining these tools, not just throwing them all away.
Arguing against the Digital Humanities is a little like arguing the Internet itself. It’s there, and it surrounds you. It won’t go away.
Moving on …
After over four very happy years, I’m moving on from JISC to a new role in the Netherlands.
It’s been a privilege to work with colleagues in one of the most innovative educational funding bodies in the world, and also with a broader community of researchers, librarians, teachers, archivists, policy wonks and web geeks. While I’ve been here at JISC such people have been responsible for some brilliant ideas and projects in large-scale digitisation, crowdsourcing, text and data mining as well as fighting battles with a flotilla of difficult issues – copyright, business models, metadata and users, users, users.
My new job is in The Hague, working for The European Library (TEL). TEL currently acts as the joint catalogue for just under 50 national libraries in Europe. It has ambitious plans to include research libraries, to increase the quantity of digitised cotnent and to devise the tools to exploit such content. It also aims to work more closely with Europeana and eventually morph into ‘Europeana Research’, ie become part of the Europeana service that is focussed on the needs of Higher Education users.
This also means that there will be a new post opening up at JISC for a Programme Manager dealing with Content and Digitisation. Full details are not available yet, but Catherine Grout (c.grout@jisc.ac.uk) is available for informal discussion for anyone interested in applying. I’m in the UK until the end of January should anyone want to know about my experience in the role. Or indeed buy me a drink.
Alastair Dunning, JISC Programme Manager
“Collaborate to Compete”: where does this leave content?
The OER projects in the JISC Content programme 2011-13 recently attended a workshop on “Introduction to Open Educational Resources (OER)”, organised by the Open Unviersity’s SCORE team.
All projects focus on the digitization of primary material from special collections covering a variety of subjects, from fashion design to architectural drawings and microscopic rock slides. Each project also produces a number of OERs by packaging, or “cooking up”, the “raw” digital assets for embedding in HE courses as well as for wider use and re-use.
Paraphrasing the HEFCE report on online learning, the first speaker, Andy Lane, got the audience thinking about what “Collaborate to Compete” meant to them within the context of creating and making available Open Educational Resources for students and teachers.
A stimulating discussion followed; here are some of the highlights:
• all of the projects recognised the benefits of working in partnership, in particular for the opportunity it offers to bring together content from different HE institutions as well as from other domains, such as the private or heritage sector
• individual academics are on the whole happy to collaborate with colleagues from other institutions, even if their own institutions might be seen as competing with each other within a particular subject discipline
• following from the above, it was noted that competition among universities belonged more to the institutional level or the “marketing” department, and individual teachers perhaps felt that pressure less
• sometimes, however, people felt they had to collaborate because they “were told” to do so – not least by funders
• competition is felt more strongly within the research community than the teaching community, but there were different views on this
• collaboration had to allow for institutions to retain their own identity, especially when creating joint outputs such as OERs and making content available more broadly
• although making open content available reflected positively on an institution’s status and sense of identity, it was recognised that from a student’s point of view open content in itself wouldn’t necessarily constitute a reason for selecting the institution where to study, especially as “open content” would be available to them anyway
• recognition that there is a range of “openess” when we speak about content, and while institutions are willing to make some of their content openly available they will also jealously protect other content – the decision often based on potential revenue generating models, such as selling courses outside of the formal HE sector
• “content” was likened to the music industry: what is valuable (=attracts students = makes money) is not the content itself (= music), after all students will find some content or other somewhere, through more or less legal means, that they will be able to use, but the way content is experienced by students.
So, is content king, on its own? It seems not.
The way content/OER is used within an institution – what teachers and students do with it, how it is integrated within the curriculum to engage students, promote active participation, encourage peer working and interaction, enhance learning opportunities and ultimately the student experience as part of a community within a particular institution – is what makes the difference.
And this difference has quite a bit to do with where institutions will compete.
Scanning Fossils in 3D at the British Geological Survey
One of the largest and strangest archives in the UK is the collection of the British Geological Survey. Its mammoth collection store, just outside Nottingham, holds thousands of fossils but also pallets and pallets of rocks samples, often taken as samples prior to oil drilling.
JISC has recently funded the Survey to lead a nationwide project to begin a UK fossil collection, including the 3D digitisation of some of the most relevant pieces.
The fossil is placed on the turntable, and the same piece of hardware takes a 2D image (via a digital lens) and 3D image (via a laser). The 2D image has captured colour whilst the 3D image have captured texture and shape, but only from a single viewpoint.
So the turntable then turns a set number of degrees, and more 2D and 3D images are taken until 360
degrees are completed.
The digitisation operator then has a suite of images to merge together.
There is some manual cleaning up (e.g. removing the turntable from the image) and then the operator clicks at similar points on related images.
From this, the software can merge the images together to form a single 3D digital object.
The project aims to digitise 4,000 fossils as part of its JISC funding. They will be made openly available via a variety of formats, allowing users to inspect them online (via Adobe 3D PDFs), download them for use in their own software (such as the open source MeshWeb) or even recreate the fossils using 3D printers.
Good interfaces – Isaac Newton and Criminal Data
A couple of JISC funded content projects have recently gone live, and they are worth having a look through as they provide excellent examples of good interfaces for digital content
One is the papers of Isaac Newton, a joint project between Cambridge and Sussex, whilst the other is Locating London’s Past, which involves Sheffield, Hertfordshire, the Institute of Historical Research and the Museum of London.
The Newton Papers are digitised to a beautifully high resolution, and have viewing facilities that allow users to view individual pages but also to get the sense of a collection of papers through which one can turn pages. Cambridge are also using a Creative Commons licence. Clicking on teh download link brings up a pop-up box that allows.
http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/newton
Locating London’s Past exploits a range of data related to early modern London. It’s a more complex tool than the Newton papers, but they’ve handled the ability to integrate and mash up different data soruces (e.g. trial reports, tax reports, and archaeological finds) via Google Maps.
http://www.locatinglondon.org/
New British Library newspaper archive
As part of its initial work in digitising its huge collection of historic newspapers, the British Library received two tranches of funding from JISC to digitise 3m pages from its Colindale repository.
As part of a three-way project involving the BL, JISC and the publishers Gale-Cengage, these newspapers have been made available in two different ways. One interface is the newspapers.bl.uk interface, open to the general public, who can pay for access to the newspapers. The other interface allows for direct access via your university, public library or other institution
Since the JISC-funded projects ended, all universities and colleges in the UK have been able to sign up for free access and search the newspapers via this second interface.
More recently, the British Library has signed a contract with the firm brightsolid that commits the latter to digitising around 40m pages of the BL’s newspaper collection, and distributing them via different channels
Today marks the launch, by the British Library and brightsolid, of The British Newspaper Archive. At the moment, this includes some of the JISC funded content plus other newspapers digitised by brightsolid.
With time it will grow to include all the JISC content but also millions of pages digitised by brightsolid and also acquired from other newspapers that have microfilms of their contents
Access to the new site is currently via subscription (e.g., £79.95 per year) or micropayment
JISC will be in negotiation with the British Library about gaining access to the new content.
For all UK universities and colleges free access to the 3m pages funded under the JISC project remains via the Gale Cengage interface.
Using archives on Vietnam war
The NAM project at the University of the Arts, London is bringing together the photographic archives of Phillip Jones Griffiths, aspect of the film archive of Stanley Kubrick, and the journalistic archive of Phillip Knightley in an interactive multimedia resource that looks at the resonances of the conflict in Vietnam today. It then gets students working with the archives, developing their own commentaries based on the primary sources.
This video piece was created by Alex Milan Tracy as part of his research into Agent Orange for his MA in Photojournalism & Documentary photography.
The project will be completed early next year, with more content from the archives and students made available under a number of licences.
Boutiques, Shopping Malls and Specialist Shops
Boutiques, Shopping Malls and Specialist Shops
(or put your content where the users are, not where you are)
This presentation looks at why content owners such as universities, museums, archives etc need to deposit their digitised matieral not just on their own bespoke websites, but also the popular websites such as Google, Flickr, Wikipedia and others.