research

[crossposted from MediaCommon... read more »

ABSTRACT

BEYOND PROJECT: An Ethnographic Study in Community Media
by Shawn Naphtali Sobers... read more »

The Library of Congress has just this morning issued its statement of exemptions to the portions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that forbid the circumvention of DRM and other technological measures intended to prevent access to or copying of digital materials. These exemptions are issued every three years; last time out, the exemptions allowed film and media studies professors to crack the content scrambling system (a.k.a. CSS) on DVDs in order to rip short clips to make compilations for classroom use. This seemed at the time like an awfully restricted exemption — literally only film and media studies profs (no profs in other fields, and no students), literally only in order to create compilations of clips for use in the classroom (not for use in critical writing) — but it struck me then that the statement might be the thin end of the wedge.... read more »

A quick note: I’m (at least in theory) participating in today’s ... read more »

I forgot to mention this yesterday, but Jon Reiss has pointed to an incredibly useful resource for people interested in how independent films are financed, while pointing out how how “stars” and film festivals function in the indie film economy. The survey, known as the AKA Report, was compiiled by Jeremy Juuso Consulting, and it is available for free here.

... read more »

It was refreshing to be around so many different people from so many different backgrounds at the Games, Learning, and Society (GLS) conference in June, specifically because they were all incredibly excited about games. The conference had just a slight tinge of fangirl/boyism that was endearing and, in some ways, quite productive. After all, in a field such as game studies it is often glaringly obvious in some research that the scholar had not played the game much.... read more »

I’m a bit off the grid for the next several days, but wanted quickly to draw your attention to an art... read more »

I’m deep in the thick of the chapter I’m writing on issues of preservation for digital scholarship, and am feeling fairly acutely the extent to which these issues have not been on my radar before now, so I need to ask for your help, particularly the digital librarians among you.

While there are a number of extremely important reports that have been published around these issues of late (see, for instance, the Blue Ribbon Task Force interim report, “Sustaining the Digital Investment,” the MITH white paper “Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use”, and the ARL report, “Safeguarding Collections at the Dawn of the 21st Century”, among others), I’m focusing the chapter around a few particular projects of which I could really use a deeper sense.

What I’m looking for is critical accounts of the histories of the histories of projects such as TEI, COinS, DOI, and LOCKSS, accounts that both convey the development and administration of the programs as well as any lingering issues with which the projects need to contend. I’ve found some basic stuff about each project, but if there are particularly good resources out there, I’d love to hear about them!... read more »

Cathy Davidson has an excellent post up at HASTAC thinking about the meaning of tenure and ways of imagining valid tenure standards for an increasingly interdisciplinary future. Along the way, she announces that HASTAC will be working with the MLA on reimagining tenure guidelines, and that they hope to work with other disciplinary organizations as well.

But the key moments of her post come after that announcement, as she ponders what the basis for tenure decisions ought to be:... read more »