EighteenthCentury.org

From Cathy Davidson’s HASTAC-hosted blog comes the news that “the Academic Council at Duke University unanimously adopted an Open Access policy for scholarly articles written by the Duke faculty.” In a post at Scholarly Communications @ Duke, Kevin Smith writes

One thing that librarians often believe is that faculty will only be motivated for open access by their own self-interest — impact, citation and the like. But yesterday Cathy Davidson made an eloquent plea for greater access for people around the world who are blocked by high subscriptions costs and other “toll-access” policies. All round the room, heads were nodding as she spoke. I was reminded that most faculty members genuinely do care about the overall welfare of scholarship and learning.

Smith, in turn, links to Joseph Esposito’s “Let’s Make Open Access Work,” published at The Scholarly Kitchen, a blog of the Society for Scholarly Publishing Esposito’s post opens with

This is a blog post that will please no one. That is not the intention; I am not writing it to pick fights. But the topic is open access (OA), and on this topic, fights inevitably erupt; it is scholarly communications’ equivalent of the Culture Wars. For my part, I stand with Voltaire: The perfect is the enemy of the good. Already in the background I can hear advocates of perfection beginning to sharpen their swords. So, without reference to the many arguments on all sides of the matter, How can we make OA work?…

Yesterday, during the first of our 2 “Digital Eighteenth Century 2.0″ roundtable discussions, the issue of access to and cost of digital scholarly materials came up with regard to Gale/Cengage’s commercial, full-text database of primary materials Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO). (See “18th connect and the sustainability of scholarly collaboration,” by David Mazella at The Long 18th, 6 July 2009) This is not the same kind of resource as, say, peer-reviewed scholarly articles, but many of the issues at stake are the same. A full summary of the back-and-forth that took place is beyond the scope of this quick blog post, but an extremely brief précis would note that on the one hand is awareness of the cost associated with creating and maintaining such a resource, while on the other hand is a desire to see as wide an audience as possible of scholars and teachers and students gain access.

More conversation to continue this morning at the second “Digital Eighteenth Century 2.0″ roundtable…

“The Digital Eighteenth-Century 2.0″

Below are a few details (and a few ideas) about the 2 ASECS 2010 roundtables we’re organizing under the above title.

2 different sessions, but 1 big conversation: We see these two sessions as one roundtable, and we strongly hope to see all participants at both sessions.

Availability of digital tools: The conference organizers have assured us that each session will have a live Internet connection, an LCD projector, and an audio system. However, it’s always a good idea to have a backup plan, just in case.

Online supplements: Posting presentation-related material on this site before, during, and after the conference is strongly encouraged. You might provide screenshots, screencasts, PDFs or other documents.

Length and format of presentations: Each presentation should be no more than 10 minutes. The “Pecha Kucha” format (20 slides X 20 seconds each) is encouraged but not required. (For background on this format and instructions for how to set up your slides, click here.)

Time for questions, discussions, more elaborate demonstrations: After the short roundtable presentations, there will be plenty of time for audience members to ask further questions, to request more detailed demonstrations of certain things, or (perhaps) to talk 1-on-1 with individual roundtable participants if it seems that format would work best.

Post-roundtable gathering: Roundtable participants and audience members are encouraged to arrange to meet afterwards for further discussion, demonstration, and brainstorming. If history is any indication, the conversations will expand to a size larger than the time constraints of each session.

Details of Sessions

We wish to remind you that both of the Digital Eighteenth-Century 2.0 panels (which we consider one project spread across two sessions) are roundtables. In other words, we expect that presentations will be kept short, leaving most of our time available for questions & answers, discussion, and audience participation. We encourage you to use EighteenthCentury.org to post materials that can be accessed both before and after our sessions (we will announce its availability beforehand). The site runs on WordPress, which is a blogging platform you may already be familiar with. If you’d like your own account on EighteenthCentury.or, please let us know. We would like to have your materials posted online by March 4, two weeks before the start of this year’s meeting.

That said, you should consider this an invitation to brainstorm with us about how more specifically to set up the panel and the accompanying online material.

• Would you like to do this pecha kucha style or leave it more open?
• Should we videotape or audiotape the panels?
• What should we post on EighteenthCentury.org, what should be covered by you, the presenters, and how much should we keep open to what the audience wants?
• How can we ensure continuity and conversation across the two sessions? (We’re assuming, of course, that presenters will attend both.)

Finally, at the end of our second session on Friday, we also hope to specifically discuss the formation of an ASECS Digital Humanities caucus.

Thanks for your participation in planning what we hope will be two very interactive roundtables!

Yours,
George and Lisa

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Vickie Cutting
Date: Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 8:01 AM
Subject: [Asecs] Weekly Announcements
To: asecs@jhupress.jhu.edu

The program for the 2010 ASECS Annual Meeting, March 18-21 and
the Registration Form are
now available at: http://asecs.press.jhu.edu/2010%20Annual%20Meeting-1.html

All participants must be members in good standing of ASECS or a
constituent society of ISECS and must pay the registration fee for the
meeting.Those members of constituent societies of ISECS MUST furnish a
snail mail address to asecs@wfu.edu in order to receive pre-registration
materials.

____________________________________________________________________________________
We will soon be sending details concerning voting for the 2010-11 Executive Board. In order to cast a vote, your ASECS membership will need to be current, you will need to have your membership number as well as the e-mail address of record with Johns Hopkins University Press.

How To Find Your ASECS Membership Number

Your ASECS membership number appears on various pieces of correspondence:

• On your membership/subscription acknowledgement letter (for new members)· Above your name and address on your annual renewal notice
• On the mailing label for the journal Eighteenth-Century Studies
• The online order form has a link to have your member number sent to you
  by email: https://associations.press.jhu.edu/cgi-bin/asecs/asecs_membership.cgi

(If you have lost or forgotten your membership number, request a
reminder here.)

You can request your member number by entering the email address of
record at the following: http://asecs.press.jhu.edu/cgi-bin/member_number_lookup.cgi

Your member number will be emailed to you within seconds.

You can call the Johns Hopkins University Press at 1-800-548-1784 for
your membership number, or email JHUP Customer Service at jrnlcirc@press.jhu.edu

Your member number will be emailed to you within seconds.

The following information is drawn from the tentative schedule circulated in October 2009.

ECCO, EEBO, and the Burney Collection: Some ‘Noisy Feedback’

The Digital Eighteenth Century 2.0 — I

The Digital Eighteenth Century 2.0 — II

Digital Humanities and the Eighteenth Century: Pros and Cons

“Texting, Tweeting, Tagging: The Digital Eighteenth Century 2.0” (Roundtable)

George H. Williams, English, U.of South Carolina Upstate, Spartanburg, SC 29303 AND  

Lisa Maruca, English, Wayne State U., Detroit, MI 48202;

E-mail: gwilliams@uscupstate.edu AND lisa.maruca@wayne.edu  (Please email both organizers)

Since the early 1990s, eighteenth-century studies scholars have used Internet-based resources for research and scholarly communication via dedicated websites, list-servs, and static presentations of both primary and secondary sources.  In addition to these open and freely accessible online scholarly resources, commercial ventures such as the Gale Group’s Eighteenth-Century Collections Online offer vast databases of digitized works previously available only in a limited number of physical archives.

However, as groundbreaking as these tools or services have been in establishing a web presence for eighteenth-century research, they also have their limitations.   Dubbed retrospectively “Web 1.0,” they draw both their strengths and weaknesses from their ties to print culture, with its view of text as stable and communication as a one-to-many enterprise. Furthermore, online archives such as ECCO often come at a steep price, excluding many working outside large research institutions.

While not denying the importance of previous work, this roundtable will consider how the next generation of digital tools is shaping our field.  In contrast to the first iteration of online resources, “Web 2.0” is characterized by a view of text-making as dynamic and participatory and communication as a many-to-many undertaking.  It privileges a construction of knowledge that is transparent, socially mediated and always in-process.  It is open-access, often open-source, with few if any overhead expenses transferred to users.  This new media environment is already transforming the academy in fundamental ways, as evidenced by scores of digital humanities centers, online classrooms, interactive digital archives, and social networking sites for scholars.

This panel will investigate the changes it has made in the study of the eighteenth-century. Prospective panelists are thus encouraged to provide overviews of eighteenth-century projects (both current and imagined) and new pedagogies made possible by Web 2.0 technologies.  They can comment as well on future directions in teaching and research enabled by the plethora of free, digital tools and services now available.

Through both brief audiovisual presentations and audience participation, we hope to address questions such as these:

• How are tools such as wikis, blogs, digital cameras, and smart phones, and sites such as YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Second Life, and Google Apps currently being used in research or pedagogy?  

• How can we better encourage, evaluate, and share student and/or faculty projects in new media?

• What sorts of new research models do these media encourage?  

• Do these tools have the power to engage Gen Y students’ attention and curiosity about Enlightenment thinking?  

• How can we use Web 2.0 analogies to help students better understand eighteenth-century social networking and media forms?

• What lessons might we learn for our use of twenty-first-century technologies from eighteenth-century observations about print technology’s influence upon learning, knowledge, and communication?

• What drawbacks should scholars and teachers be wary of as we work with these new tools and services?

Lisa Maruca
“Eighteenth-Century Cyborg Writing: An Unnatural History of Literacy”
Computer Writing and Research Lab, University of Texas at Austin (February 2009).

EighteenthCentury.org was launched by George H Williams on December 14, 2008.