The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.
The principal objectives of the WDL are to:
Promote international and intercultural understanding;
Expand the volume and variety of cultural content on the Internet;
Provide resources for educators, scholars, and general audiences;
Build capacity in partner institutions to narrow the digital divide within and between countries.
Items on the WDL may easily be browsed by place, time, topic, type of item, and contributing institution, or can be located by an open-ended search, in several languages. Special features include interactive geographic clusters, a timeline, advanced image-viewing and interpretive capabilities. Item-level descriptions and interviews with curators about featured items provide additional information.
Navigation tools and content descriptions are provided in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Many more languages are represented in the actual books, manuscripts, maps, photographs, and other primary materials, which are provided in their original languages.
The WDL was developed by a team at the U.S. Library of Congress, with contributions by partner institutions in many countries; the support of the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO); and the financial support of a number of companies and private foundations.
I'm working on a couple of presentations I'll be doing on Saturday as part of Dr Astrid Ensslin's AHRC-funded Ph.d training sessions. This will be the third session of six. I'll be giving a talk on academic blogging and then on digital literacy and creativity (I'll be showing a bit of Sue Thomas' talk on transliteracy too).
I'm often asked why I blog and aren't I worried about giving away too much of my research. Good questions but simply, no. I'm not worried. Blogging here is like my online business card. It always makes me wonder when people (especially academics) don't appear on google...why not? It's also about participating. A great example for me is a year ago I blogged about new media literacy and my feeling that the terminology "digital natives" and "digital immigrants" wasn't quite right...resulted in some greatconversations almost exactly a year later.
[digital citizenship: the internet, society & participation]
Today I attended a presentation given by Karen Mossberger (Associate Professor, University of Illinois at Chicago) on Digital Citizenship: The Internet, Society and Participation. Overall the presentation was interesting however I don't think the data told us anything really new...but it certainly backs up what we already surmise. Poor people and African-Americans and Latinas/Latinos has less access to computers and the internet and this filters through to less participation in public life (voting was one of the examples).The definition of citizenship put forth was that by T. H. Marshall, basically you need to participate to be a full member of a community. Citizenship is also a "developing institution" according to Marshall.So how to develop citizenship through digital means...well, Mossberger didn't really talk much about this. She concentrated on providing statistics which empirically show the digital divide. It was pretty apalling. In this day and age (here I am, using a computer, on the 'net, blogging) there are people who are too poor, or without sufficient education which in the States seems to mean you're not white...the statistics were incredible. Of course there are poor white people but apparently they are not on the 'net because they're not interested in it. From Mossberger's research, African-Americans connected internet/computer literacy with better jobs etc....and the statistics back this up.The issue of broadband access also came up. Sure people can use computers (for a bit) at a local library etc...but interestingly enough there are certain neighbourhoods where there is no DSL access (i.e. no affordable access) to the internet...only cable. That's another deterrent. I would have been interested to know what the statistics *really* meant in terms of "going online." Was it for checking bus times? What about banking online and using SNS? Mossberger at the end suggested it was more for *entertainment* purposes....but I guess what we're looking at here is not just issues of access (of course) but issues of literacy. *How* to properly navigate that content/information.Mossberger's latest project, results to be publishes as we speak, looks at Chicago neighbourhoods and notes the use of internet. I wonder what that will show.Two things aside from the presentation that I would like to share here.
There were 18 people at the presentation today. 16 in the audience (then the speaker and the introducer). Out of the 18 people 7 were women. All were white.
Mossberger made this comment at the end re: twitter: "I don't care what movie you saw lastnight. I don't have time for this." Actually, I think twitter (like mobile 'phones, especially if we're talking about financial cost) has it's uses. Just look at how the knowledge of swine flu is spreading/trending via twitter....
The following useful post explains how to find the *original* date something was posted to a web site. Very useful for those referencing online content:
"There are basically three different dates associated with any "public" web page that’s available on the Internet:
1. The publication date - this is the date when a web page or a website is first uploaded on to a public web server so that human beings and search spiders can find and read that page.
2. The discovery date - this is the date when search engine spiders first discover a web page on the Internet. Given the fact that Google has become so good at crawling fresh content, the date of first-crawl can be the same as the actual publication date (#1).
3. The cache date - this is the date when a web page was last crawled by the search bot. While webmasters can use XML sitemaps to hint search engines that a page on the site has changed, search bots are free to ignore that advice and therefore the cache date may or may not be the same as the last modified date.
To give you an example, the publication date of this article is February 25, 2008 (it’s mentioned on the web-page), the discovery date (when Google first crawled that page) is also Feb 25, 2008 but the cache date, or the day when Googlebot last crawled that page, is April 20, 3009.
Know The Publishing Date of Web Pages
Now in the above case, the author has himself indicated the publishing date of the web page but in situations where the date is not specified (or you think the mentioned date in incorrect), here’s a simple hack to help you know when a web page or web domain was last published on the Internet.
Step 1. Go to google.com and copy-paste the full URL of the web page in the search box along with the inurl: operator (e.g. inurl:www.example.com). Hit enter.
Step 2. Now go to browser address bar (Ctrl+L in Firefox or Alt+D in Internet Explorer) and copy-paste "&as_qdr=y15" at the end of the Google search URL. Hint enter again.
Step 3. Google will load the results again and this time, you’ll see the actual publication date of the web page next to the title in Google search results as in this screenshot.
Video Screencast: Know when a web page was published
Using the same trick, Google tells us that the MySpace.com domain appeared in Google around 31 March 2002, Orkut on 12 Jan 2004 while Barack Obama created his Twitter account on 05 March 2007. The first publication date for Yahoo.com, Whitehouse.gov, CNN.com, Microsoft and other very old domains is mentioned as 31 Jan 2001 which is incorrect but that probably is a bug because Google’s crawler database does include pages prior to that date like this one.
These site publication dates may not be 100% accurate in all cases but they should be very close especially for new web pages and domains.
AHRC-funded doctoral training scheme, CEDAR (Collaborative Digital Research in the Humanities), organised by the Universities of Bangor (Dr Astrid Ensslin) and Aberystwyth (Dr Will Slocombe).
I'll be running the third session in May at the IOCT at DMU - transliteracy, multimodal writing/reading and (hopefully) the creativity assistant. Attendance is free, and a limited number of travel bursaries are available (see details in attachments). BUT priority is given to Ph.D students who are funded by the AHRC.
The share of adult internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years -- from 8% in 2005 to 35% now, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project's December 2008 tracking survey.
While media coverage and policy attention focus heavily on how children and young adults use social network sites, adults still make up the bulk of the users of these websites. Adults make up a larger portion of the US population than teens, which is why the 35% number represents a larger number of users than the 65% of online teens who also use online social networks.
Still, younger online adults are much more likely than their older counterparts to use social networks, with 75% of adults 18-24 using these networks, compared to just 7% of adults 65 and older. At its core, use of online social networks is still a phenomenon of the young.
Overall, personal use of social networks seems to be more prevalent than professional use of networks, both in the orientation of the networks that adults choose to use as well as the reasons they give for using the applications. Most adults, like teens, are using online social networks to connect with people they already know.
When users do use social networks for professional and personal reasons, they will often maintain multiple profiles, generally on different sites.
Most, but not all adult social network users are privacy conscious; 60% of adult social network users restrict access to their profiles so that only their friends can see it, and 58% of adult social network users restrict access to certain content within their profile.
A little while ago I tweeted that I was working on a transdisciplinarity check list (things to read, watch and listen to) as a way of mapping the field and setting the scene for a conference I'm going to run and a journal I'm going to start (no prob!). Christy Dena, transmodiologistextraordinaire, saw my tweet for help, tweeted back and wrote a blog entry with loads of links and information on transdisciplinarity. Interestingly:
"there are (at least) two very different implementations of transdisciplinarity in the methodological realm: one that argues it should be about collaboration between academia & non-academia to address world-scale problems, and another that argues it is a conceptual approach that can be applied to anything, by an individual or group."
I prefer the idea that connections can be made between any kind of group rather than making an initial separation between "academic" and "non-academic." I'll be following the Nicolescu and Dena school of thought.
"The four qualities of Social Capital The similarity to economic capital only goes so far. SC has the following four qualities: Utility through Accumulation: Like economic capital, the more SC an individual accumulates, the more easily that individual is able to affect their environment. Inequality of Distribution: Like economic capital, SC is differently available. Some individuals have a lot,others less. Expiration through Under-Use: Unlike economic capital, which expires through over-use, SC expires through under-use. 'Use it or lose it'. Based Upon Trust: Regular capital is merely the exchange of agreed values as guaranteed by a central authority. SC, however, is a stockpile of trust, which is guaranteed only by the exercise of reciprocal actions between diffuse individuals within a social network."
"Measuring Social Capital Any planned social media activity by a brand within an OSN must be measurable by the way in which it increases or depletes the brand's SC. Measuring a brand's SC, particularly in reference to their online SC, can be achieved through analysis of online sentiment and influence.This in effect is a measure of the 'tone of voice' that online conversations about a brand have. Sentiment metrics describe the level of the 'stockpile' of trust which constitutes SC: how trustworthy is the brand understood to be, and how useful or desirable is its content or activity?
Influence metrics describe the efficacy with which a brand is able to make use of that trust in order to (positively) affect their environment: how easily is a brand able to share its knowledge around its social networks?"
[a million penguins: change and order in a wiki novel]
This afternoon Dr. Bruce Mason shared with us some of his indepth research on the joint Penguin/DMU creation (some call it a wikinovel) A Million Penguins...there are some notes I jotted down by pen (imagine...a pen and paper...)
guiding research questions:
what was the role of the discussion around the wiki?
what patterns of social behaviour occured among the contributors?
There is loads of commentary (on and offline) about A Million Penguins and most of it is negative...I wonder if most of this has to do with the way A Million Penguins was described...a mean, equating it with a "novel" is bound to cause reactionary behaviour. A collaboratively created multiple wiki cannot be a novel...perhaps it can have narrative aspects but a novel...maybe if it was initially described as a wiki experiment rather than a novelistic one the initial feedback/response would have been more positive?
Bruce mentions in wiki lore there is the garden metaphor however Penguins isn't really about order/organisation. In 5 weeks of the wiki-story: 1500 registered users over 11000 edits 75000 visitors 280000 page views (!!! good marketing!)
since it was closed down (no more edits/additions allowed) there have been a further half a million page views.
Different types of users: Performer Vandal Gardener
the performer made 1780 edits in 4 weeks (he didn't register in the first week)
focused on adding content and linking together - bringing himself to the front
edits frequently viewed pages (so others can always see him)
the vandal was about destruction through changing text - a type of performer who also foregrounds him (or her) self
the edits were all about her/him
166 edits so one of the least frequent however the most frequently talked about and instigated the most contributions and began patterns of behaviour (inspired similar kinds of vandalisation)
the gardener focuses on organizing
made 1144 edits, the 2nd most frequent
made person-to-person edits (more private)
More stats:
650 pages with significant content
366 don't contain any links 9dead ends)
150 pages don't have any incoming links (orphans)
Thus - a lack of "wikification" because pages are not linked, walled gardens which only link to themselves (like a high-school clique?)
Bruce suggests that the kind of negative behaviour (vandalism etc...) might be explained if we think of the wiki as a Bakhtinian "carnival":
"gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies,it buries and revives"
there is a kind of social sanctioning for bad behaviour and two normes are reversed:
the reversal of normal rules of wiki the reversal of normal rules of wiring/publishing
In February 2007, DMU and Penguin Publishing collaborated to host the world’s first wiki novel - “A Million Penguins” - using the same software that runs Wikipedia. Over a five week period nearly 1,500 people signed up to edit the novel, over 11,000 edits were made and it was viewed over 500,000 times leading the CEO over Penguin Publishing to muse that it was maybe the “most written novel in history.”
In this seminar, Bruce Mason will outline the results of a research project held at the Institute Of Creative Technologies (IOCT) which investigated the social behaviour that unfolded during the writing of “A Million Penguins.” What kinds of collaboration, conflict and compromise occurred and what did it tell us about future online writing possibilities? Did a sense of community arise or did we see nothing but chaos and vandalism?
The seminar will not require any particular knowledge of wikis or online writing.
About the presenter Bruce Mason is an IOCT Post-Doctoral Research Fellow specialising in social research and web2.0 activities. He previously worked at DMU with Professor Sue Thomas on an Arts and Humanities Research Council Funded Project (http://www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk/tnn/) that investigated the potential for folksonomy in academic research.
About A Million Penguins A Million Penguins is a collaborative online novel, a wiki which was open to anyone in the world to write and edit. The project ran from 1st Feb to 7th March 2007, was organised by Kate Pullinger (http://www.katepullinger.com) of De Montfort University and Jeremy Ettinghausen of Penguin, with Sue Thomas, Professor of New Media at De Montfort and an editorial team of students enrolled on De Montfort’s Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media.
"The potential integration of texts, images and sounds in the same system, interacting from multiple points, in chosen time [real or delayed] along a global network, in conditions of open and affordable access, does fundamentally change the character of communication."
"Strategy guides support students during reading, helping them attend to significant information, process and think about content, and engage in meaningful discussions throughout the reading experience. Reflecting what is considered “text” in today’s multimedia world, these guides take students beyond traditional textbooks and into multiple sources of information, bridging print and digital literacies. The book’s question sets, statements, engaging activities, and experiences will build and deepen students’ understanding of topics across all subject areas.
In each chapter, the authors provide procedural descriptions and examples of each guide, as well as “Tips for Diverse Learners.” An appendix of reproducible strategy guides is also included."
Check out the Table of Contents:
About the Authors
Foreword
Preface
Part I: Using Strategy Guides in K–12 Classrooms
Chapter 1 Introduction: From Study Guides of the Past to Strategy Guides of the Present and Future
Update: Winter Term:
***
Lecturing at Grant MacEwan University on several topics including journalism, professional writing, e-learning, critical theory, analysis & argument and communications. As always, still interested in the role of new media in education.
still thinking about online narratives. Well, I've spent the past few years thinking about it but now I'm going in a slightly different direction. I'm thinking about wiki fictions, blog stories, youtube stories and facebook storytelling. I guess it's narratives 2.0? But I'm also researching transdisciplinarity in an academic context and editing two issues of the IOCT journal before steering the emergence of a fully-peer-reviewed journal (tentatively) titled: Transdisciplinary Studies in Creative Technologies.
I'm running the Digital Cultures module for the IOCT Master's, giving guest lectures for the Creative Writing and New Media Master's as well as part-time lecturing on new media and digital lit. I'm involved with the Narrative Laboratory project and this year's focus in on mapping social networking. I also contribute as an author to Transliteracy.com, a collaboratively written blog. I'm very interested in how the online environment and its particular affordances are affecting education. To that end I'm involved in a project linking the Inanimate Alice stories to digital literacy. Want to be involved? Check this out.
items provide additional information. 
jess @ jesslaccetti.co.uk
