[Oa-italia] Academic Commons e le discipline umanistiche
Susanna Mornati
mornati a cilea.it
Lun 17 Dic 2007 13:14:40 CET
E' appena uscito il numero di dicembre di
Academic Commons, dedicato alle discipline umanistiche:
http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/announcement/table-of-contents
La cyberinfrastructure e' la risposta a quanti
pensano che la vita sia fatta di metadati e per i
full-text basti avere i soldi per acquistarli dagli editori..
Un po' come comperare servizi di piatti sempre
piu' pretenziosi ma non avere i soldi per
riempirli di cibo... per non parlare di text
mining e altre simpatiche cosette che si
potrebbero organizzare se gli open archives
fossero pieni, un primo passo verso la
"data-driven scholarship" di cui parlano i contributi qui elencati.
Riporto di seguito il sommario.
Saluti a tutti,
Susanna Mornati
-----------------------------------------------------
Cyberinfrastructure and the Liberal Arts
A Special Issue, edited by David L. Green
INTRODUCTION
<http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/cyberinfrastructure-introduction>A
Cyberinfrastructure for Us All
By David L. Green, Knowledge Culture
Made possible by dramatic advances in networking
technologies, cyberinfrastructure promises to
combine new computing capabilities, massive data
resources and distributed human expertise to
enable qualitatively different creative product
from new generations of "knowledge environments."
Introducing this timely collection of
observations on how this will affect liberal arts
disciplines and institutions, David Green reviews
the distance we've come in the last 15 years and
identifies the main themes of the essays, interviews and reviews that follow.
HUMANITIES CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE
<http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/review/the-uncommon-challenge>The
(Uncommon) Challenge of the Cultural Commonwealth
By Gary Wells, Ithaca College
In reviewing Our Cultural Commonwealth, the
report on cyberinfrastructure and the humanities
commissioned by the American Council of Learned
Societies (ACLS), Gary Wells notes "both the
allure and anxiety of radical and disruptive
change," and wonders if the academy and the
broader public will be up to the cultural and financial challenges.
<http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/interview/acls-report-interview-john-unsworth>Beyond
the ACLS Report: An Interview with John Unsworth
By Kevin Guthrie, Ithaka
John Unsworth chaired the ACLS Commission that
authored Our Cultural Commonwealth. In a
conversation with Kevin Guthrie, he offers his
own well-developed definition of
cyberinfrastructure, talks about why and how the
needs of the humanities should be considered
separately, and explains how the report's
framework has been useful already in developing new implementation strategies.
BEYOND THE TWO CULTURES
Will the resources and the power of advanced
networked computing affect the methodologies of
the sciences and the humanities differently?
<http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/michael-lesk>From
Data to Wisdom: Humanities Research and Online Content
By Michael Lesk, Rutgers University
This computer-scientist champion of digital
libraries and humanities computing provides an
overview of paradigm changes in the sciences; a
similar review of humanities achievements show
that they still stop short of developing a new kind of scholarship.
<http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/VO-and-roman-de-la-rose-collaborative-imperative>The
Virtual Observatory and the Roman de la
Rose<http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/VO-and-roman-de-la-rose-collaborative-imperative>:
Unexpected Relationships and the Collaborative Imperative
By Sayeed Choudhury and Timothy Stinson, Johns Hopkins University
Scientists were not always good collaborators. In
pondering the "unprecedented convergence of
interest across C.P. Snow's Two Cultures in the
promise of cyberinfrastructure and of data-driven
research," the computer scientist/digital
librarian Sayeed Choudhury and medieval scholar
Timothy Stinson propose a new relationship
between humanities scholars, their resources and their colleagues.
CYBERSCHOLARSHIP
A review, an essay and a roundtable discussion on
the new kinds of scholarship and teaching that cyberinfrastructure might bring.
<http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/review/gregory-crane>Building
the Infrastructure for Cyberscholarship
By Gregory Crane, Tufts University
Greg Crane shares his insights in a review of an
important report on data-driven scholarship and
the supportive infrastructure it requires.
<http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/cyberinfrastructure-murray>Cyberinfrastructure
as Cognitive Scaffolding: The Role of Genre Creation in Knowledge Making
By Janet Murray, Georgia Institute of Technology
This gripping account describes what the process
and products of a new cyberscholarship might look
like in the age of the Semantic Web, in which
cyberinfrastructure’s potential as a "facilitator
of a vast social process of meaning making" might be further developed.
<http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/roundtable_future_of_art_hist>Cyberinfrastructure
and the Future of Art History
A Roundtable Discussion
By Amelia Carr, Allegheny College; Guy Hedreen,
Williams College; and Dana Leibsohn, Smith College
Three art historians discuss how their most
urgent needs might be addressed by
cyberinfrastructure. While they hold themselves
responsible for fostering new forms of
scholarship as they appear, the bottom line, they
agree, is that CI will be useless if it can not
revolutionize image access and metadata
management, and cannot help us think differently
about vision and objects: "what kind of image
work is the work that matters most?"
INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE: Colleges and Museums
Interviews with two key figures who hold out for
radical change in university and museum
settings--while grappling with institutional
complexity and inertia--are followed by a
proposal to extend the function of the college
museum into the curriculum, locally and globally.
<http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/interview/james-odonnell>Leveraging
Institutional Change: An Interview with James J.
O'Donnell, Georgetown University
By David Green
Provost O'Donnell, author of Avatars of the Word,
is fascinated by how "institutions full of
creative, innovative, iconoclastic people" are
paradoxically "bastions of conservatism." Guiding
us through the texture of change since the
Internet hit 15 years ago, O"Donnell posits that
incremental change is perhaps the best we can do
until the fundamental instruments of scholarly
communication and the academic reward structure
change: "until the problem we have to solve is
defined persuasively enough that we get enough
people interested in solving it."
<http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/interview/ken-hamma>Museums,
Cataloging & Content Infrastructure: An Interview
with Kenneth Hamma, The Getty Trust
By David Green, Knowledge Culture
The architect of digital policy at the Getty
Trust shares his conviction that building the
digital "content infrastructure" depends on the
contributions of thousands of smaller
institutions that individually lack human and
technological resources necessary for the task.
Cyberinfrastructure could facilitate distributed
cataloging and much wider distribution of museum
holdings that would have a major impact on
scholarship and teaching. However, a significant
challenge remains that of the muddying of
museums’ educational mission with notions of
gatekeeping and income generation from the objects in their care.
<http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/college-museums-weber>College
Museums in a Networked Era--Two Propositions
By John Weber, Skidmore College
The director of Skidmore College's Tang Museum
proposes a dynamic new relevance for the college
museum, whose tasks of addressing students'
visual literacy and in more effectively deploying
the multisensory exhibition in global curricula
could be dramatically facilitated through cyberinfrastructure.
INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE: Where the Rubber Hits the Road
Three essays that examine the details of building
cyberinfrastructure at the campus level.
<http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/francis-starr>Deploying
Cyberinfrastructure for the Sciences at Liberal Arts Colleges
By Francis Starr, Wesleyan University
Access to cyberinfrastructure will be provided
through your campus computer infrastructure:
working out from department to cross-department
to campus-wide. Physics professor Francis Starr,
experienced in deploying the latest "Beowulf
clusters" in Wesleyan University's
infrastructure, discusses the necessary balance
between technical prowess and effective
educational outreach to ensure best deployment of
a college’s computing assets.
<http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/managed-cyber-services>Managed
Cyber Services as a Cyberinfrastructure Strategy
for Smaller Institutions of Higher Education
By Todd Kelley, NITLE
Todd Kelley takes Francis Starr's recommendations
for pooling computing resources across campuses
one step further by discussing the advantages of
outsourcing managed cyber services: "Bringing
institutions with common needs together in a
shared organizational network and aggregating
many of their common technology needs through
cyber services [is] a powerful idea."
<http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/bates-imaging-center>The
Sciences, Cyberinfrastructure and the Liberal
Arts: The Case of the Bates College Imaging Center
By Matthew Coté, Bates College
Many themes of this collection are encapsulated
within this new facility in an old library at
Bates College. Blending a 21st-century
codification of Liberal Arts Education, with
cyberinfrastructure-ready facilities, the Bates
Imaging Center, in Professor Coté’s words,
"presents the campus hub for collaborative and
interdisciplinary projects, especially those that
are computationally intensive, apply
visualization techniques, or include graphical or image-based components."
<http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/announcement/profiles-of-CI-Organizations>PROFILES
Descriptions of some key organizations and
networks whose missions include leveraging cyberinfrastructure.
Susanna Mornati, CILEA
Project Leader AEPIC, www.aepic.it
+39 02 2699 5322, +39 348 7090 226,
mailto:mornati a cilea.it, skype: susanna.mornati
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