The Digital Curation program is a two-year graduate certificate, taught online, intended for professionals working in museums, archives, artist studios, government offices, and anywhere that people need to manage digital files. The program walks students through the phases of managing digitized or born-digital artifacts, including acquisition, representation, access, and preservation. Registration opens soon!
Tags: art, class, digital curation, distance education, education, New Media, preservation, University of Maine, variable media
Screengrab of Debra Levine’s DEMONSTRATING ACT UP Scalar projectAre footnotes obsolete? At this month’s Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, Craig Dietrich suggests crediting other scholars is still necessary, but it’s no longer enough.
The Still Water Senior Researcher and USC digital studies professor argues that run-of-the-mill citation methods don’t cut it in today’s connected world, where technologies like RDF can provide a far richer context and encourage reuse of online scholarship.
Tags: education, media, network, presentation, scholarship, sharing, software, Still Water, Thoughtmesh
Photo archivists and Twitter sociologists, guerilla gardeners and best-selling Kindle authors descend on Orono, Maine for the 2011 Digital Humanities Week.
Tags: digital humanities, education, network, New Media, orono, presentation, preservation, sharing, software, Still Water, University of Maine, variable media
Still Water‘s archival tools were featured in a keynote at the Compatible Data conference organized by Micki McGee at Fordham University in New York on 24 September. This conference gathered data mavens from the New York Public Library, Columbia and Brown universities, and other prominent collections with the goal of finding a metadata Esperanto in the current Tower of Babel of competing standards.
Tags: Forging the Future, Metaserver, network, New York City, presentation, Scalar, sharing, software, Still Water, Thoughtmesh, variable media
In recent weeks the ThoughtMesh publishing platform has expanded to include videos of conference proceedings, reports on the 2011 Egyptian revolution, and book-length publications.
Critical Code Studies has launched a Mesh to publish proceedings of their 2010 conference, in conjunction with a HASTAC Scholars Forum on the same topic of software studies. The launch coincides with a major ThoughtMesh upgrade from Still Water Senior Researcher Craig Dietrich that enables videos and articles to coexist side-by-side. The videos include talks by keynote speaker Wendy Chun and a host of prominent scholars.
ThoughtMesh is a free publishing platform created by Still Water with sponsorship from USC’s Vectors journal. Once “meshed” with this software, any document is automatically linked via automatically generated tags to related documents across the Web.
While the CCS Mesh gathers together seventeen presentations from the conference, many authors use ThoughtMesh to publish one document at a time. Just last week Egyptian-American Laila Shereen Sakr published a call to action based on her hash tag analysis engine that mines Twitter to follow anti-government protests in Egypt.
Tags: network, publication, sharing, software, Thoughtmesh
According to Colin Kloecker at the Walker Art Center, ThoughtMesh and The Pool are good tools for a healthy commons. He profiled these two open-source Still Water networks in a post leading up to the kickoff of the Walker’s Open Field initiative last June.
Tags: network, press, publication, sharing, software, Still Water, The Pool, Thoughtmesh
Forging the Future has just launched its own Mesh–a set of documents linked by ThoughtMesh software–on the topic of variable media and preservation. The Mesh includes seventeen essays from the book Permanence Through Change: The Variable Media Approach, making this acclaimed publication accessible to even more readers, and automatically linking it to other texts on preservation published across the Web.
Tags: art, Berkeley, Forging the Future, Franklin Furnace, network, preservation, publication, sharing, Still Water, Thoughtmesh, University of Maine, variable media
“New Criteria for New Media” topped the list of the most downloaded article from MIT’s Leonardo Journal with 798 downloads as of this writing. This article by Joline Blais, Steve Evans, Jon Ippolito, Owen F. Smith, and Nathan Stormer proposes concrete new academic guidelines for evaluating scholarship in the digital age, and has garnered enormous attention from university researchers and administrators alike.
A pdf version can be downloaded from the MIT Press Web site. An interactive version of the article can be found at ThoughtMesh.net.
Tags: education, New Media, publication, research, Still Water, University of Maine
“Think like a Network,” a remote presentation by Jon Ippolito at The Art of With conference, argued for expanding the participatory possibilities of arts institutions to an audience of art enthusiasts and professionals gathered at Cornerhouse in Manchester, UK, on 24 June 2009. “Think like a Network” argued that museums reinforce boundaries for rare experiences discovered by instruction, while networks pierce boundaries for ubiquitous experiences discovered by extraction.
The presentation went further by examining three paradigm-shifting tools to help break the old model and usher in the new: ThoughtMesh, which pierces interdisciplinary boundaries; Forging the Future’s Metaserver, which aims to make artifacts ubiquitous; and The Pool, which encourages discovery of creative projects by collaborative filtering.
You can read a summary of all the presentations in “The Art of With” report.
Tags: art, europe, Forging the Future, network, New Media, presentation, sharing, Still Water, The Pool, Thoughtmesh, variable media
ThoughtMesh developers Craig Dietrich and John Bell have just launched a sophisticated reviewing system internal to the ThoughtMesh open publication platform.
Unlike the relatively uncontrolled comments at a site like YouTube, ThoughtMesh’s reviews are subject to a rigorous trust metric. Each reviewer must claim a level of expertise before rating an article, and the software holds them accountable in a way that even the rigorous method of peer reviewers for academic journals do not achieve.
As might be expected, a review by someone claiming expertise will have more effect on the overall rating of the essay than by someone who claims none. However, those who claim expertise have to live up to it. If an academic makes exaggerated claims and is then trashed by her peers, her credibility will plummet faster than if she claimed no expertise in the first place.
You can see a sample discussion by clicking on the “peer review” tab of Robin Boast’s paper “Open Objects Initiative: A Critique of Openness.”
The release of this peer review feature is good timing, given MIT’s recent publication of the University of Maine’s new criteria for 21st-century academics.
Tags: education, evaluation, network, research, sharing, Still Water
