Technology is transforming scholarship, and while technology’s impact has been less extensive in the humanities than in the social or natural sciences, recent years have seen a blossoming of innovation by digital humanists. In a forthcoming report from CLIR and DLF titled A Kaleidoscope of Digital American Literature, author Martha Brogan describes achievements in digital American literature and explores priorities and concerns of digital practitioners in the field....Brogan interviewed more than 40 scholars, librarians, and practitioners to learn how well digital resources serve scholars of American literature and what is most needed to advance digital scholarship. She also conducted a review of digital resources and projects in American literature, a sampling of which comprises the bulk of the report....Because digital scholarship is still so new to them, most humanists find it hard to articulate what tools they need beyond information filtering and navigational devices. A variety of notable projects are, however, available or under development. Among them are the NINES tools, which will support six basic scholarly tasks (arranging, comparing, transforming, discussing, commenting on, and collecting texts and images); the Nora project, which is developing software for discovering, visualizing, and exploring significant patterns across large collections of full-text humanities resources in existing digital libraries; the NITLE Semantic Engine, designed to facilitate accessing and organizing large amounts of unstructured digital text; and DLF Aquifer, a suite of services and tools to support a distributed, open digital library....Several interviewees identified copyright as the biggest obstacle to advancing digital scholarship in American literature....A Kaleidoscope of Digital American Literature will be available in print and on the Web in August.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/13/2005 08:47:00 AM.
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.
