Group items tagged

This article explains the dispute between Google and publishers here in the United States. As we have seen in class, Google Books offers internet users the ability to search through their database of scanned books. Publishers are fighting that Google is violating copyright laws by scanning these books and letting people have free open access. Although the project itself is causing an uproar, publishers as well as authors are being given the opportunity to decide what books are included in this project.

Matthew Ingram discusses the recent ruling on the Author's Guild's copyright infringement lawsuit. The author points out the decisive nature of the ruling, and goes on to explain the reasons that the project clearly falls under the protection of fair use. He argues that this ruling follows the intent of copyright law, to promote research and knowledge.

This article gives a brief overview of the environment surrounding the HathiTrust litigation, and gives some added insight to the cases in which Google has been involved. It specifically notes Google's exclusion from the Orphan Works project, citing Judge Denny Chin's assertion that private parties should not be allowed to "establish a mechanism for exploiting unclaimed books.

This article describes the end to Microsoft's Live Seach Team. This team has indexed the contents of 750,000 books and 80 million scholarly journals. The project scanned books and put them into a database that allowed the contents to come up in a diiferent area online when the content was being searched for. This effort comes as a dissappointment due to its ending of the project.

Fujitsu's food project brings people to volunteer on almost 40 acres of farms around the Boston area, increasing a sustainable system for living and growing food. Part of the Fujitsu food project is to digitize paperwork such as surveys taken from neighborhoods and information about each individual farm site. Part of the problem with digitizing their paperwork is finding a multi-functioning device, especially for Mac users. Fujitsu technology managers and workers are still working to find a more reliable scanning solution for this project and the Fujitsu company as a whole. Rob Sozanski, the Technology Manager for the Food Project also explains how scanning documents allow people to come together to look at their database and save costs.

A professor used her Women's Studies class as a way to test out the use of digital humanities in the undergraduate classroom. The assignment was to create an online archive of every issue of the feminist magazine "Conditions" as well as a presentation over the issue they chose. In doing so, they were required to scan in every page of the magazine and edit them on computer to fit together uniformly. At the end of the assignment period, she submitted the archive into the "Lesbian Poetry Archive" for public viewing and use. Through working on this archive, she became convinced that the PDF format will continue to be the main format for converting physical documents into the digital medium. This is due to the format being almost universal in digital humanities and the likelihood of it continuing to be a relevant file format for many years to come.

Blogger Dan Cohen discusses how Google is good for history. Historians are simply a group of people who dig through information from the past, put it all together as possible facts or theories, and then share. Cohen then teases Google for a bit when bringing attention to the hand scans that can be occasionally found in Google Books. Their is a question of quality and direction.

With the use of digitizing media, NASA and Internet Archive are teaming up to scan films and photographs into an online database where their information can be stored and accessed with easy use. Making this kind of information available online, NASA believes, is important to catagorizing information and storing it for effiecient use. Internet Archive will be using a new system where the media catagorized by historical significance.

In her blog Erin Bell discusses a digital humanities project called the Cuyahoga County Archives, a collection that focuses on sharing the history of Cuyahoga County. It mainly explores the transportation and infrastructure of Cuyahoga county, but also contains police report documents dealing with the Kent State Shootings in 1970. Undergraduate interns collaborated together to scan and search for these items to share, all for free access.

After making millions from his internet inventions, this article from Forbes, discusses how Brewster Kahle and Google are constantly butting heads. Brewster Kahle believes that his open access of books restricts Google from having optimum control over data, such as texts. Most of the scans that are available in Kahle's Archive, are from Google. Although Kahle has been compiling his library since 1996, Google was not incorporated until 1998. Kahle's Archive is now offering a service called Bookserver that allows anyone to upload their literary texts and loan it to others.

This article explains how Google Books is teaming with digital humanities scholars to spread digital sharing for public use. The company announced they will bankroll 12 university based research projects. Google has been scanning books since 2004, accumulating to over 12 million books. One of the projects Google is supporting is called "Reframing the Victorians," which plans to find out if the Victorian era had an optimistic population by crowdsourcing materials. Google has decided to use one million to support digital humanities in the next two years.

arXiv is another open access collection/publication (?) maintained by Cornell University. The publications are based primarily in any field of science and mathematics (such as work on K-Theory and quantitative biology). It does not state if the articles are peer reviewed, but it does say that "Submissions...must conform of Cornell University academic standards." I don't know if this means that all of the work in the collection is by students and teachers, or if the were able to scan in articles from the library.

Google Books is a service that allows searches of full-texts of books and magazines that have been scanned by Google. These texts are stored into a digital database and with the use of "character recognition", a user can locate any textual material. This website discusses the legal aspect to Universities access and use of Google Books. With a proposed agreement between AAP and Google Book Search, the proposal was unfortunately rejected.

This is an online site for the Center for Digital Research in Humanties at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The main goals of this center is to provide tools for research in the field (reference sources), compose creative digital content, and pushing the use of international standards. The center enjoys working with Digital Humanist to ease their projects by providing a venue for discussing, information, and tools. A lists of activities on the site include scanning, round tables, software, and assistance.