T-cht-t-totally wired
In December 2004, Google announced an agreement with five major research libraries to digitize 30 million volumes from their collections for access on the internet. "Universal availability," once again, were the key watchwords. In the meantime, broadcasting, cable, computer technology companies enage in a race for competitive market advantage through mergers, strategic alliances, cross-marketing, reaching an unprecedented level of concentration in the consumption and distribution of media content. This means the way you check out a book from Green library could be very different in about three more years. Microsoft IBM Cisco, all those companies in the race for these network convergences, will be perfectly poised to deliver corporate degree programs, much like the University of Phoenix does today, only with access to the country’s top library collections.
Its easy to imagine that the commercial sector will deploy all of the major teaching innovations in over the next decade: for example, lessons and entire classes taught by the most celebrated faculty at wholesale prices on Amazon. Higher education will be viewed as one more source of easy profit, much like health and social services already function today in America.
There is a possibility that this technologic situation will create a new ‘common-sense’ in which "knowledge" becomes so media-dependant, commercial, universalized, and standardized that "the academy" will once and for all loose any sense of integrity as an institution.
Such a future gets those on the left, who already recognize the campus as a corporate environment, stuck in the headlights asking themselves, "is that such a bad thing?" In the 1960s, campuses across the country and globe served as the battlegrounds for civil rights organization and strategy. But today, its quiet on campus; is the university still a site worth fighting for?
The Stanford Humanities Center invites faculty and grad students
TEI WORKSHOP
Julia Flanders and Syd Bauman
Women Writer’s Project, Brown University
The Methods and Issues of Text Encoding for Humanities Scholarship
Friday, March 16, 2007
8:45 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Stanford Humanities Center
424 Santa Teresa Street, Stanford, CA
This full-day workshop will address the following topics:
What is Text Encoding?
What and Why is the TEI?
The Impact of Digital Texts and Encoding as Disciplinary Practice
Innovative Research with TEI Documents
The resources and events in this program are all aimed at faculty and students in the humanities who have little or no technical experience but are interested in digital textuality. In addition to providing support in grappling with the technical topics, these resources also engage with the scholarly issues that surround these technologies.
With nearly two decades of experience and research, the Women Writers Project (WWP) is internationally known as a center of expertise in scholarly text encoding. Led by director Julia Flanders, the project has built an electronic collection of early women’s writings, covering a period from 1450 to 1850. With texts spanning genres from comic drama to midwives’ books, Women Writers Online presents a vivid cross-section of women’s writing and culture. The collection’s several hundred texts can be browsed, searched and analyzed online, thus providing access to rare materials by women that may otherwise go unread and untaught. The WWP is also involved in researching the complex issues involved in representing early printed texts in digital form. This workshop is the first in a series of 12 workshops at institutions across the United States, funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Julia Flanders is the Director of the WWP and serves as vice-chair of the TEI Consortium. Her research focuses on the political and social dimensions of digital humanities scholarship and of text encoding in particular. She is also the editor-in-chief of Digital Humanities Quarterly, a new open-access digital journal.
Syd Bauman is the North American Editor of the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines, and the Senior Programmer/Analyst at the Women Writers Project at Brown University. His work focuses on developing data standards, tools, and digital materials that reflect the real needs and constraints of humanities research.
Comment by kiersten — March 6, 2007 @ 3:42 pm
Does the TEI do for books what blogs do for conversation?
Comment by minger — March 8, 2007 @ 12:44 am