Ever since Google demoted Scholar from the products bar, people have become anxious as to whether this is a sign that it will be discontinued. This feeling has only strengthened since the demise of Google Reader, which proved that Google is not afraid to discontinue services with (pretty) large and devoted audiences. Why would Google discontinue Scholar, and what would be the consequences?
Oral History Today demo at SUEDL 2013
As I will be attending Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (September 22-26, Valetta, Malta) to present two posters, I was keen to attend the workshop on Supporting Users Exploration of Digital Libraries (short, SUEDL2013) as well. We (i.e. yours truly, Franciska de Jong, Stef Scagliola and Roeland Ordelman) submitted a demo paper titled Research Environment for Exploring Oral History Collections. In this paper we describe the fundamental principles underlying the Oral History Today interface, which we are developing to improve exploration in oral history collections.
The value of keywords for papers
At the Digital Humanities congress 2013, 159 papers and 52 posters will be presented. All abstracts have been made available online, but fortunately it’s possible to browse the material by several metadata elements conference-related such as room and date, or paper-related such as author and affiliation. I was particularly interested in the browsing by keyword, as I hoped to gain an overview of the papers available, as well as gain quick access to material interesting for my research.
“Just Google It” Abstract
In the summer of 2012, we held a survey amongst scholars, inquiring about their online search practices. The results of this survey were presented in September 2012 at the Digital Humanities Congress Sheffield, titled “Mapping the Use of Digital Sources Amongst Humanities Scholars in the Netherlands“. This August, we hope to publish a (first) paper about the results of this survey in the then launching online journal Studies in the Digital Humanities. This journal will be Open Access, additionally we will make the manuscript available Open Access at the Erasmus University Library RePub, and will publish the survey data Open Access at DANS. I’ll provide the links later on the Publications page.
This paper was co-authored with Martijn Kleppe and Stef Scagliola. Below I provide the abstract we submitted, which undergo some modifications before publication.
eHumanities Workshop Soeterbeeck: More Digital Than Humanities
On 13-14 June the Radboud University Nijmegen and the eHumanities group from KNAW co-organized the eHumanities workshop Soeterbeeck. This very nice mid-sized workshop with under 50 participants staying in the beautiful monastery Soeterbeeck in Ravenstein included very interesting invited-talks as well as a nice postersession where we presented the PoliMedia project. However, the workshop also demonstrated that so far the Digital Humanities is more Digital than Humanities.
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Presenting PoliMedia poster at The Soeterbeeck eHumanities Workshop
This week Martijn Kleppe and I will present the PoliMedia project at the Soeterbeeck eHumanities Workshop (13 & 14 June 2013, Ravenstein, The Netherlands) at the Posters & Demos session. The poster below will be presented, along with a demonstration of the search user interface.
Abstracts for Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries
The following are two abstracts that have been accepted for poster presentations at Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (September 22-26, Valetta, Malta). Both are abstracts for papers of four pages, which will be published in conference proceedings by Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LCNS). We will make the manuscripts available Open Access at the Erasmus University Library RePub, and will publish the eye tracking data Open Access at DANS, I’ll provide the links later on the Publications page.
Update (05-09-2013): papers and data have been published, see below.
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Is sloppy science an institutional issue?
On wednesday June 5th I attended the Erasmus Graduate School of Social Sciences and the Humanities symposium “How to prevent sloppy science? Defining good conduct in science“. This symposium offered much promise with keynotes by prof. Kees Schuyt and dr. Peter Verkoeijen, but eventually did little in defining what this good conduct in science actually is or should be.
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“Dutch Journalism in the Digital Age” Abstract
The following is the abstract for the paper on the role of the internet in the research practices of Dutch journalists, which was accepted yesterday for publication. This paper was co-authored with Martijn Kleppe, Bob Nieman and Henri Beunders. Continue reading ““Dutch Journalism in the Digital Age” Abstract”
Searching in Oral History collections; perspectives and user wishes
In an earlier blogpost, I described a call asking for scholars interested in being part of a focus group in the development of an Oral History (OH) search interface. This call was also sent by email to 113 scholars in our network, after which fifteen people responded to our e-mail (13.2% response-rate, not bad), and one more scholar responded after being tipped by another scholar. In the past two weeks, I’ve interviewed these fifteen scholars via Skype and phone.
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