Google’s eBookstore and Humanities 2.0
Google, the elephant in every room right now, is starting to see the rewards of its large-scale digitization project. First, the Google bookstore has opened up, fostering a potential rivalry with Amazon. From the minimal spot checking I’ve done of titles and price comparisons, Google and Amazon seem about evenly matched at about $9.99 a digital book. The main differences are the method of reading and accessing your works and what devices will or will not work with your new eBook. Amazon likes to have you download your work with the option of syncing information back to its cloud; Google wants you to read in the cloud and download only if necessary. Either way, both are designed for multi-platform reading so you can start your book on your iPad but then continue right where you left off in the book on your iPhone when stuck waiting at a doctor’s appointment, for example. In short, no more clunky carrying. However, the differences between the two remain in the platform accessibility. Google works with a lot of resources, but not some of the major players like Blackberries (WTF?!) and Amazon’s Kindle (less of shock here). Amazon’s establishment in the market and Google’s non-development of a hardware device still make Amazon the ubiquitous eBookstore. Further research TBDAG (To be done after grading).
The other, less flashy Google news is the growing use of the scanned Google books to develop what the New York Times calls Humanities 2.0 or the statistical analysis of work usage over time within works. Below is a sample of what you can do with such statistical analysis:
Having been a literature person, this trend actually isn’t that new. Pawing through concordances of Dante’s Commedia, such as Terrill Shepard’s, are still common in literary analysis these days. Through these methods, scholars have identified trends in word usage, such as having Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso all end with the word stelle (the Italian plural for stars). What a lovely way to end a poem about a religious epic? (And what a lovely name for a girl…). However, for works that have not be read millions of times after seven centuries, Google’s ability to digitize both major and minor works from the Victorian age and allow similar linguistic analysis has a vast potential with revolutionizing the world of literary research. However, I think the “Handle with Care” concept is also useful to make sure we don’t lose the art of literary analysis and criticism since statistics are only part of accessing a culture, a time, and a psyche of a character and author. I’m intrigued to see how this vast plethora of information will continue to transform literature and what we think of as research today. What are your thoughts? Is all of this a boon or a bust?
Confessions of a term paper mill and Wikipedia becoming credible
The most exciting, intriguing read this week has undoubtably been the confession piece “The Shadow Scholar” from the Chronicle of Higher Education. The article is a tell-all confessional from the point of view of a writer for these term paper mills and the details are eerily familiar. Poor writing skills, pressure, and easy access to funds all appear as trademark components for keeping this industry quite alive, including a better than average salary for this individual. For anyone working with writing students, I recommend this article as a Must Read.
For those who don’t despise Wikipedia, you’ll be gaining more ground in the credibility department as UC Berkeley has started gearing assignments, students, and professors to improving the accuracy of the site’s contents, at least in regards to public policy. You can read more about this collaboration and the lasting impact on students from the UC Berkeley PR article, “UC Berkeley students help improve Wikipedia’s credibility.”
Given some other fun events going on in my life (yeah for upcoming holidays!), I have a few more backlogged items I’ll have to get to later, such as McKinsey Consulting’s report “Winning by Degrees: The Strategies of Highly-Productive Higher-Education Institutions.”
Twitter-riffic
Although I started using Twitter almost a year ago now (wow, has time flown by), this week seems the universe seems to want me to move beyond my current, occasional playing with the social media resource to learn more about the power that has led this VC-run idea to become the phenomenon that it is. As part of a new routine, I’m making more time to walk, and hence, I need more audiobooks to consume as part of the needed distraction away from such said exercise. In Joel Comm’s Twitter Power, I’ve been able to have a well-crafted review of the various other social media sites, hear how they compare and contrast with Twitter, and look forward to hearing more about his advice and techniques for making Twitter work for me. While the some of the advice thus far (I’m about 1.5 hours out of an almost 6.5 hour audiobook) is a bit of the tediously obvious (make sure you choose the right username so people can find you; make sure to link your website to your Twitter profile, etc.), his additional advice as to how to add multiple websites to your profile gives me hope that I’ll actually learn something from the book. The book does have a sales/advertising bent, but I figure the methods will still apply to the general outreach my library may need to promote programs, events, and new resources.
On another note, my ProjectMuse Twitter feed helped me stumble upon a Society for Scholarly Publishing blog entry regarding the relationship between Twitter and scholarly communication. For the academics among us, Clarke’s concise discussion does an excellent job providing the short hand notes to the Twitter discussion as well as indicating Twitter’s value as a general social media tool apart from others like Facebook. Furthermore, he ties the topic back into the idea of scholarly communication today. To say the least, I highly recommend perusing this entry for even the avid librarian Twitter user.
Now, in relation to all of these, what have you, in the nebulous fog of the blogosphere, discovered in your Twitter-riffic adventures?
