We’re both pleased and grateful to announce that Microsoft Research has given $10,000 in support of THATCamp. An early sponsor of THATCamp Pacific Northwest, Microsoft Research has now made funds of up to $500 available for sixteen separate THATCamps. These funds will be administered and distributed by THATCamp Central at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. If you are organizing a THATCamp in the U.S. and are interested in receiving these funds, please write info@thatcamp.org for details.

MS Research has supported the work of Internet ethnographer and privacy scholar danah boyd, has produced such useful open source tools for the humanities as Chronozoom, and has organized an annual Faculty Summit for the express purpose of bringing academic researchers and educators together with Microsoft’s computer scientists and engineers. We’re proud to be associated with them.

For most academics the cycle is well-known. It is obvious. It is the way things are.

If you point it out, you sound naïve, demonstrating your innocence, your youthful ignorance of what "life" is really like.

Yes, it's all about the money. What did I expect?

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For most academics the cycle is well-known. It is obvious. It is the way things are.

If you point it out, you sound naïve, demonstrating your innocence, your youthful ignorance of what "life" is really like.

Yes, it's all about the money. What did I expect?

read more

In this episode of Digital Campus, Tom, Mills, and Amanda (sans Dan) touch briefly on the passing of Steve Jobs and discuss Apple’s announcement of iOS5, the release of the Kindle Fire and other new Kindle products, the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Project Directors meeting, and one university’s brief ban on social media sites. We also agree that “Nickerson” probably isn’t the best name for a razor company.

Links:

• Jobs, Apple co-founder and visionary, is dead, New York Times
• Apple releases iOS5, CNET News
• Amazon unveils $199 Android Kindle Fire tablet, $99 e-ink Kindle Touch, Ars Technica
• The Promise of Digital Humanities, Inside Higher Ed
• Back in Blackout, Inside Higher Ed

Running time: 41:35
Download the .mp3

Running time: 56:39
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Over the next few days, we’ll jot down some of the issues related to each of the three strands that will go to making up the overall call.

First off, Strand B) Large-Scale Digitisation

Issues that applicants will need to address will include the following:

Aggregation and Partnership

How are applicants working with others to help create an aggregated mass of content? How are other partners helping reach audiences or deliver online experiences that univerisites working by themselves could not achieve

Usage and Institutional Support

How will the resource being created develop a user base that will help impact on research and teaching at a national level? Will the institution leading the project show support for the resource in the long term, embedding it in teaching and research practice.

Access, IPR and Business Models

What is the business model that will support the resource in the long term? Are there complex IPR issues that must be addressed early on?

Metadata

Will the metadata from the project be made openly available? Will metadata be easily harvestable, findable and re-usable by other sources? Will innovative methodologies like geo-tagging, natural language processing and APIs be used? Or other forms of innovative metadata creation?

Impact and Evaluation

Will the project have means of evaluating usage and impact embedded from the start of the project? Will they be able to react and respond to the results of such analysis once the initial project has ended?

Subject to confirmation from the appropriate JISC subcommittee, there will be three strands within the JISC Digital Content call.

A) Digitising for Open Educational Resources – digitising primary and other scholarly material for embedding in open access Open Educational Resources. Note there will also be a separate JISC OER Phase 3 programme.

B) Large-Scale Digitisation – Creating or extending high-impact, sustainable digital resources for research and teaching, according to a variety of business models.

C) Clustering Digital Content – Bringing together existing digital content from a variety of sources to create or extend high-impact resources for research and teaching.

Strand B is likely to be open to any UK cultural or educational organisation who has content of note to higher and further education

We are currently writing the Requests for Proposals.

The call is likely to be issued in early June. It may well be joined up with calls from other areas JISC covers. Closing date is likely to be early August.

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Friday 7th January – All marks received from peer reviewers

Wednesday 19th – Panel Meeting for JISC Call 11/10.
Strand A (Enhancing Digital Content) and Strand B (Developing Community Content)
Thursday 20th – Panel Meeting for JISC Call 16/10, Rapid Digitisation

w/b Monday 31st January – Finalise details of successful and unsuccessful projects after any comments from peer reviewers unable to attend panel meetings

w/b Monday 31st January – Email successful and unsuccessful projects

w/b Monday 7th – Send off grant letters

w/b Monday 7th – Announce winners.

March 1st – Projects start

• 11/10 Strand A – Enriching Digital Content – 33 bids (Up to 5 projects likely to be funded)
• 11/10 Strand B – Developing Community Content – 57 bids (Up to 6 projects likely to be funded)
• 16/10 Rapid Digitisation – 45 bids (Up to 7 projects likely to be funded)

Proposals are now being disseminated to markers. The panel meetings to discuss the marks take place in mid January, and so are JISC are aiming to inform winners of the calls in late January / early February.

• MediaHub (currently in development for 2011) will provide access to image, video and audio resources in Higher and Further Education. It evolves from the Vision and Sound Portal at EDINA at the University of Edinburgh.
• Not too differently from MediaHub, Culture Grid is harvesting metadata and then linking back to digitised content in museums, libraries, archives within the UK. Much content is already available for searching, including material uploaded by the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS). The site is run by the Collections Trust,
• Europeana has similar aims to Culture Grid, but works right across Europe. All content from CultureGrid is automatically harvested into Europeana.

I’ve already talked informally with some JISC–funded projects about this, and a few have taken things forward themselves. JISC has small amounts of funding for projects who wish to tailor and export their metadata to such portals. The portals will then incorporate the metadata and provides links back to the original resource.

Collections must be based on discrete digital objects (i.e. a single image, movie or sound file), and have a stable URL to point at. Content for CultureGrid needs to be open access, whilst it can be gated or open for MediaHub.

If you are interested in exposing your content to these sources, then get in touch with me (Alastair Dunning) and we will take things from there. We are primarily interested in content funded by JISC, but are happy to consider other resources.

Running time: 58:10
Download the .mp3

The Undercover Economist, Tim Harford, has a good article in today’s Financial Times about the stages in life when different professions are most productive. For example, I did a quick Google/calculation: the average median age of a Nobel Prize winner in physics or chemistry is 55; in the literature and peace prizes, it’s 64. (Sorry, not going to do the full test for statistical difference today). This distinction makes some sense, as the great discoveries in the two scientific subjects are marked by innovation (something that may become replaced by habit with age) and excellence in literature and statesmanship benefits from vast amounts of experience.

But, in keeping with our recent discussions about reform in academia, perhaps the bigger question is whether or not we should be actively targeting funding to match these periods of productivity? A quote from the FT article:

Two of my favourite writers, Malcolm Gladwell and Jonah Lehrer, are worried about this – but from different perspectives. Gladwell, a Galenson fan, worries that our obsession with youthful genius will cause us to reject future late bloomers.

Lehrer has the opposite concern: that funding goes to scientists past their prime. He says the US’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) has been funding ever-older scientists. Thirty years ago, researchers in their early thirties used to receive 10 per cent of NIH grants; by 2006 the figure had fallen to 1 per cent.

From my experience in the UK, I think both groups have good, but different, funding opportunities. Established researchers are well-versed in applying for traditional call-based research grants, whereas young researchers are catered for by a number of fellowship schemes. I haven’t seen much evidence of disciplinary-based bias and to be honest, I think anti-discrimination laws would make it difficult to explicitly exclude a group of talented researchers just because they’ve reached an arbitrary age barrier. Think of Andrew Wiles, who found a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem but just over the Fields Medal’s age limit of 40.

Ultimately the top performers in these disciplines are so unique that it doesn’t make sense to design generalized development or funding programmes for the rest of us. However we can at least take comfort that our best days may be ahead of us!