The first generation of the digital humanities was all about data....
Second-generation digital humanities are the scholarly equivalent of what Tim O’Reilly has dubbed “Web 2.0.” ...
The transformation of archives into interoperable and professionally-constructed digital databases has changed the research and pedagogical questions of our age, by providing the individual researcher almost instantaneous access to far more data than any one person could gather in a lifetime and by allowing more people access to these materials than ever before. Let me give an example of how transformative this has been for teaching and education in the human sciences. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, when I taught courses on mass education, reading, and writing during the highly contentious political period following the American Revolution, I used to have graduate students do archival research in early American newspapers and magazines, some of which were available on microfilm or microfiche, unindexed. A student might have spent a hundred hours rolling the films in the dizzying light of those unwieldy machines....If the student found one good example, it was a successful project. Two examples constituted a triumph. In many cases, the search was so frustrating that the student might well have applied for a scholarship to travel to an archive in New England, such as the American Antiquarian Society, where the resources were far richer.
If I teach that course now, my students can go to searchable data bases of early American imprints, of eighteenth-century European imprints, of South American and (growing) African archives, and of archives in Asia as well. A contemporary student could, in far less time, not only use digitized and indexed archives to search U.S. data bases but could make comparisons across and among popular political movements world-wide....
[C]yberinfrastructure does not simply change the quantity of information. It allows for the conceptualization of more complex, intertwined, and interconnected problems that are as vast as the data bases themselves. However, the immense intellectual ambition of projects enabled by new access to massive data sets is precisely what has spurred the evolution to what I’m calling second-generation digital humanities....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/29/2007 02:20:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
