73 research outputs found
Contexts and Contributions: Building the Distributed Library
This report updates and expands on A Survey of Digital Library Aggregation Services, originally commissioned by the DLF as an internal report in summer 2003, and released to the public later that year. It highlights major developments affecting the ecosystem of scholarly communications and digital libraries since the last survey and provides an analysis of OAI implementation demographics, based on a comparative review of repository registries and cross-archive search services. Secondly, it reviews the state-of-practice for a cohort of digital library aggregation services, grouping them in the context of the problem space to which they most closely adhere. Based in part on responses collected in fall 2005 from an online survey distributed to the original core services, the report investigates the purpose, function and challenges of next-generation aggregation services. On a case-by-case basis, the advances in each service are of interest in isolation from each other, but the report also attempts to situate these services in a larger context and to understand how they fit into a multi-dimensional and interdependent ecosystem supporting the worldwide community of scholars. Finally, the report summarizes the contributions of these services thus far and identifies obstacles requiring further attention to realize the goal of an open, distributed digital library system
Forgotten as data – remembered through information. Social memory institutions in the digital age: the case of the Europeana Initiative
The study of social memory has emerged as a rich field of research closely linked
to cultural artefacts, communication media and institutions as carriers of a past
that transcends the horizon of the individual’s lifetime. Within this domain of
research, the dissertation focuses on memory institutions (libraries, archives,
museums) and the shifts they are undergoing as the outcome of digitization and
the diffusion of online media. Very little is currently known about the impact that
digitality and computation may have on social memory institutions, specifically,
and social memory, more generally – an area of study that would benefit from
but, so far, has been mostly overlooked by information systems research.
The dissertation finds its point of departure in the conceptualization of
information as an event that occurs through the interaction between an observer
and the observed – an event that cannot be stored as information but merely as
data. In this context, memory is conceived as an operation that filters, thus
forgets, the singular details of an information event by making it comparable to
other events according to abstract classification criteria. Against this backdrop,
memory institutions are institutions of forgetting as they select, order and
preserve a canon of cultural heritage artefacts.
Supported by evidence from a case study on the Europeana initiative (a
digitization project of European libraries, archives and museums), the
dissertation reveals a fundamental shift in the field of memory institutions. The
case study demonstrates the disintegration of 1) the cultural heritage artefact, 2)
its standard modes of description and 3) the catalogue as such into a steadily
accruing assemblage of data and metadata. Dismembered into bits and bytes,
cultural heritage needs to be re-membered through the emulation of recognizable
cultural heritage artefacts and momentary renditions of order. In other words,
memory institutions forget as binary-based data and remember through
computational information
The Object of Platform Studies: Relational Materialities and the Social Platform (the case of the Nintendo Wii)
Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System,by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort, inaugurated thePlatform Studies series at MIT Press in 2009.We’ve coauthored a new book in the series, Codename: Revolution: the Nintendo Wii Video Game Console. Platform studies is a quintessentially Digital Humanities approach, since it’s explicitly focused on the interrelationship of computing and cultural expression. According to the series preface, the goal of platform studies is “to consider the lowest level of computing systems and to understand how these systems relate to culture and creativity.”In practice, this involves paying close attentionto specific hardware and software interactions--to the vertical relationships between a platform’s multilayered materialities (Hayles; Kirschenbaum),from transistors to code to cultural reception. Any given act of platform-studies analysis may focus for example on the relationship between the chipset and the OS, or between the graphics processor and display parameters or game developers’ designs.In computing terms, platform is an abstraction(Bogost and Montfort), a pragmatic frame placed around whatever hardware-and-software configuration is required in order to build or run certain specificapplications (including creative works). The object of platform studies is thus a shifting series of possibility spaces, any number of dynamic thresholds between discrete levels of a system
Typing the Dancing Signifier: Jim Andrews' (Vis)Poetics
This study focuses on the work of Jim Andrews, whose electronic poems take advantage of a variety of media, authoring programs, programming languages, and file formats to create poetic experiences worthy of study. Much can be learned about electronic textuality and poetry by following the trajectory of a poet and programmer whose fascination with language in programmable media leads him to distinctive poetic explorations and collaborations. This study offers a detailed exploration of Andrews' poetry, motivations, inspirations, and poetics, while telling a piece of the story of the rise of electronic poetry from the mid 1980s until the present.
Electronic poetry can be defined as first generation electronic objects that can only be read with a computer--they cannot be printed out nor read aloud without negating that which makes them "native" to the digital environment in which they were created, exist, and are experienced in. If translated to different media, they would lose the extra-textual elements that I describe in this study as behavior. These "behaviors" electronic texts exhibit are programmed instructions that cause the text to be still, move, react to user input, change, act on a schedule, or include a sound component.
The conversation between the growing capabilities of computers and networks and Andrews' poetry is the most extensive part of the study, examining three areas in which he develops his poetry: visual poetry (from static to kinetic), sound poetry (from static to responsive), and code poetry (from objects to applications). In addition to being a literary biography, the close readings of Andrews' poems are media-specific analyses that demonstrate how the software and programming languages used shape the creative and production performances in significant ways.
This study makes available new materials for those interested in the textual materiality of Andrews' videogame poem, Arteroids, by publishing the Arteroids Development Folder--a collection of source files, drafts, and old versions of the poem. This collection is of great value to those who wish to inform readings of the work, study the source code and its programming architecture, and even produce a critical edition of the work
The Making of the Humanities, Volume III. The Modern Humanities
This comprehensive history of the humanities focuses on the modern period (1850-2000). The contributors, including Floris Cohen, Lorraine Daston and Ingrid Rowland, survey the rise of the humanities in interaction with the natural and social sciences, offering new perspectives on the interaction between disciplines in Europe and Asia and new insights generated by digital humanities
- …