Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Mar 19, 2010, 10:44 AM

Relentless optimism has served me well as practice and as a politics.  I'm reminded of this, yet again, by this nice comment by Kevin Smith in his blog on our new Open Access policy at Duke:  "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." 

Submitted by pjherron on Mar 17, 2010, 04:55 PM

 Duke University has started the Online Discourse Project (http://dukediscource.ning.com) in order to ask you to contribute to our understanding of the world of internet communication. In the spirit of the internet era, we'd like to proceed collaboratively. We are offering to aide you in assisting us to develop a fuller understanding of internet discourse. The Duke Online Discourse Project has made grants available and is now asking for your best proposals.

Submitted by juneahn on Oct 27, 2009, 12:24 PM

There is a lot of attention today on educational video games. But what should scholars think about when trying to examine the learning effects of games? I offer a few simple guidelines.

Submitted by Michael J Kramer on Aug 05, 2009, 11:27 AM

A 2009-2010 Alice Kaplan Humanities Institute/Center for Civic Engagement Research Workshop, Northwestern University

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jul 22, 2009, 11:19 AM

I've said before that we need to rethink everything about how we teach and how we learn, about the basic structures of all of our professions. Next Spring, I'm teaching our graduate "Research and Methods" course, typically the place where the most conventional, traditional "standards" of a profession are inculcated and reinforced. I believe that, given our declining numbers, this is the slow death of our profession and doom for our graduate students. So I volunteered to teach "Research and Methods" for a digital Age. Here's my first stab at a syllabus. I'm happy for comments.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Apr 20, 2009, 07:08 AM
At the panel on Participatory Learning at the HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition Showcase, Mimi Ito talked about the way peers will beat up on one another, policing one another's behavior, coming up with rigid hierarchies of what counts and doesn't and then publicly humiliating and abusing those deemed, by the narrowest of standards, to be dweebs, dorks, nerds, or other outcasts, a practice now made even more public and vicious by the Internet.  We knew she must be talking about the horrors of cyberbullying . . . but then she delivered the punchline:   "I'm talking about academic peer review," she deadpanned.

Submitted by jonippolito on Apr 09, 2009, 12:24 PM
Academia's goal may be the free exchange of ideas, but up to now many universities have been wary--if not downright dismissive--of their professors using the Internet and other digital media to supercharge that exchange. Yet in a signal that digital scholarship is the future, the latest issue of MIT's Leonardo magazine showcases the recently approved academic guidelines of the University of Maine's New Media Department as a model for other universities to consider.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Feb 03, 2009, 07:34 AM
In his interview for the current HASTAC Scholars Forum on Digital Humanities, NEH's Director of Digital Humanities Programs, Brett Bobley, mentioned the excellent list of digital tools that Professor Lisa Spiro and her team has prepared. It's been on my to-do list to blog about this remarkable list for a long time and this is the nudge I needed. What I love about the list is that she gives a function or a desire and then you link to the tools that can make that goal a reality. Here's her list, but mostly you need to go to her website to check out this tools wiki and all of the other goodies available there. The URL to her DiRT WIki (Plant seeds. Grow ideas): http://digitalresearchtools.pbwiki.com/Thank you, Lisa, for this wonderful service to scholarship! Now, my next stop is to go to the HASTAC Scholars and contribute there. C'mon everybody. Join this important and useful discussion that could make a difference to your future.

Submitted by mwriceny on Jan 19, 2009, 09:19 AM
"Ranking America" has been named a "best of the web" research and education website by Intute.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jan 16, 2009, 09:49 AM
Today, a new, international competition called the Digging into Data Challenge was announced by four leading research agencies: the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) from the United Kingdom, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) from the United States, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) from Canada.  The Digging into Data Challenge encourages humanities and social science research using large-scale data analysis, challenging scholars to develop international partnerships and explore vast digital resources, including electronic repositories of books, newspapers, and photographs to identify new opportunities for scholarship.