September 2011
19 posts
On the future of collaboration and the essential...
I read with great interest Bryan Alexander’s latest Educause piece on the unfolding future of collaboration. The vision he projects is inspired by the obvious proliferation of collaborative platforms and, in the context of education, the ability of people to work together over far distances, discussing complex projects and ideas in real time from the comfort of a dorm room. As with all of...
A call to action on academics publishing in open... →
“The status quo is not merely unfortunate, it’s exploitative and immoral. By giving those corporations our time and effort, we are helping to perpetuate it.”
DPLA Beta Sprint Results →
Well someone thinks the Google Books settlement is... →
Former director of Google’s Book Rights Registry joins the Copyright Clearance Center.
“Most histories of technology, like most histories of scientific discovery, are...”
– Raymond Williams, Television, Technology, and Cultural Form, p. 6
6 tags
Disrupted by a lack of innovation: trapsing to the...
After writing my post on the political economy of innovation, my scholarly conscious was twitching. I was sloppy in not reading Christensen’s book, instead relying on sketchy (in both senses) versions online. But in some ways this was brought about by the very situation I mean to write about in relation to libraries. As David Lewis’ forthcoming piece on Open Access journals...
4 tags
On the innovation of not listening to your...
As I said above, I’ve now had a chance to read Christensen’s book on the Innovator’s Dilemma in order to correct some of my understandings of it in a previous post. In that post, I had said there were four things fishy about the theory he espoused, but really only addressed the first one. Not being a master of pith, I went on a little too long about what might be wrong with his...
4 tags
Value Networks and Economic Power
As I said earlier, Clayton Christensen set out to understand why very successful incumbent firms were unable to modify their existing model of production to take into advantage of what he calls disruptive innovation. In contrast to sustaining innovation, at which these successful firms excelled, disruptive innovation called forth markets that had thinner margins, lower tech demands, and lower...
“If valid science is all behind subscription barriers, we have no cause to...”
– Kevin Smith, JD, Getting Light Right
#occupywallst take 3 →
Doug Henwood walks the streets
#occupywallst take 2 →
Liza Featherstone diagnoses the populist ethos
#occupywallst take 1 →
Jacobin’s insightful critique of the lack of tactics
“So who needs the humanities — even the so-called “digital humanities” — when...”
– Ted Striphas, on what he’s calling algorithmic culture
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The political economy of innovation
“Disruptive innovation” is the pet concept of a business professor Clayton Christensen. It originated in his book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, written originally in 1997 but due for it’s latest edition in October. The concept outlines the distinction between sustaining and one that is disruptive. In his thumbnail sketch of it, available at his website above, he says,...
5 tags
Uncreative Writing →
interesting take on “uncreative writing.” “most writing proceeds as if the Internet had never happened.”
By this the author means that, despite the internet being the greatest copy machine ever invented, we still insist that good writing is that which is wholly original. This is especially the case with most college writing assignments, which punish students for...
maps of citations, new visualizations of knowledge... →
This sounds like an amazing project, and from the comments at the bottom, it is only one of several such projects. Aside from the incredible work of the researchers and programmers themselves, the key to this endeavor was the open access they received to JSTOR and other data. Had they been forced to pay for this, or even enter it by hand themselves, there is no possible way for them to have done...
“Most political battles are fought about the direction of the next five to ten...”
– Alan O’ Connor, Raymond Williams
Libraries, today and tomorrow
I just started work with NITLE (the National Institute for Technology in the Liberal Arts) and have been charged (among other things) with thinking about how libraries work—or could work—in the future.)
