Overview of content related to 'university of chicago'

Kultivating Kultur: Increasing Arts Research Deposit

lisrw — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 14:06:59 +0000

Marie-Therese Gramstadt discusses how the JISC-funded Kultivate Project is encouraging arts research deposit in UK institutional repositories.

Funded by the Deposit strand [1] JISC Information Environment programme and led by the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS), a Research Centre of the University for the Creative Arts, Kultivate will increase arts research deposit in UK institutional repositories.

International Digital Curation Conference 2010

editor — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Alex Ball reports on the 6th International Digital Curation Conference, held on 7-8 December 2010 in Chicago.

The International Digital Curation Conference has been held annually by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) [1] since 2005, quickly establishing a reputation for high-quality presentations and papers. So much so that, as co-chair Allen Renear explained in his opening remarks, after attending the 2006 Conference in Glasgow [2] delegates from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) offered to bring the event to Chicago.

eBooks: Tipping or Vanishing Point?

editor — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Emma Tonkin investigates ebooks and takes a look at recent technological and business developments in this area.

Due in large part to the appearance since mid-2006 of increasingly affordable devices making use of e-Ink technology (a monochrome display supporting a high-resolution image despite low battery use, since the screen consumes power only during page refreshes, which in the case of ebooks generally represent page turns), the ebook has gone from a somewhat limited market into a real, although presently still niche, contender. Amazon sold 500,000 Kindles in 2008 [1]; Sony sold 300,000 of its Reader Digital Book model between October 2006 and October 2009. In September 2009, ebooks represented between 1% and 3% of the total US publishing market [2].

Following the JISC National eBooks Observatory Study [3] in the UK, one participant, David Nicolas, was quoted as stating that ebooks have 'reached the tipping point' [4]. Keeping in mind Bohr's statement that, 'prediction is very difficult, especially about the future', it's nonetheless safe to say that publicity about these devices is currently at a high point. But for ebook readers, as Figure 1 shows, this is not their first time in the spotlight.

"A good book has no ending. ~R.D. Cumming"

This article marks the third time that Ariadne has discussed the subject of ebooks, namely "Ebooks in UK Libraries: Where are we now?" [5] and "e-Books for the Future: Here But Hiding?" [6]. There is something very beguiling about the idea of a book that has 'the marvelous chameleon-like quality that it can very quickly be made to substitute for a different printed work by simply loading different content' [7] - a book that can play the role of a library.

As Striphas [8] points out, the concept of the electronic book, and the exploration of the interaction between the size of a container and the quantity of knowledge held, has an extraordinarily long history. He traces the idea back to the creation of miniature manuscript books, composed of 'tiny handwriting, or micrographia', in the late 15th century, which were functional objects and could be read by means of a magnifying glass.

Striphas notes the development of microphotography techniques in the 19th century. This was initially pioneered by John Benjamin Dancer, an optical instrument-maker who combined microscope and camera in order to create the earliest example of microphotography on record [9]. Luther reports that 'the 21 May 1853 issue of Notes and Queries carried a letter from a Dublin scholar asking "May not photography be usefully applied to the making of catalogues of large libraries?' Microphotography led to the report in the British Photographic Journal of, 'A page of printing, from Quekett's "Treatise on the Microscope", reduced to such size that the whole of the volume of 560 pages could be contained in a space one inch long and half-an-inch broad ' [8].

News and Events

editor — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.

JISC Digital Media (formerly TASI) Training Schedule

Four brand new courses are on offer for the 2009 season dealing with:

Finding free images online
Editing and managing images using Photoshop Lightroom 2
Audio Production (recording lectures, seminars, interviews and podcasts)
Digitising analogue video recordings.

Courses are already filling up fast and several courses now have multiple dates to accommodate demand.

Capacity Building: Spoken Word at Glasgow Caledonian University

editor — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 23:00:00 +0000

Iain Wallace, Graeme West and David Donald give an account of the origins, nature and establishment of Spoken Word Services at Glasgow Caledonian University.

At Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU) the Spoken Word [1], a project in the JISC / NSF Digital Libraries in the Classroom (DLiC) programme [2], was conceived in 2001-2002 in response to a set of pedagogical and institutional imperatives. A small group of social scientists had, since the 1990s, been promoting the idea of using 'an information technology-intensive learning environment' to recapture some of the traditional aspirations of Scottish Higher Education, in particular independent, critical and co-operative learning [3].

2nd International DCC Conference 2006: Digital Data Curation in Practice

editor — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Alexander Ball and Manjula Patel provide an overview of the second annual conference of the Digital Curation Centre.

The International Digital Curation Conference is held annually by the Digital Curation Centre [1] to bring together researchers in the field and promote discussion of policy and strategy. The second conference in this series [2], with the theme 'digital data curation in practice', was held between 21-22 November 2006 in Glasgow.

Preserving Electronic Scholarly Journals: Portico

editor — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 23:00:00 +0000

Eileen Fenton outlines issues relating to the long-term preservation of digital resources and the characteristics of an archival entity responding to this need.

The work of academics - in teaching and research - is not possible without reliable access to the accumulated scholarship of the past. As scholars have become more dependent upon the convenience and enhanced accessibility of electronic scholarly resources, concern about the long-term preservation and future accessibility of the electronic portion of the scholarly record has grown. One recent survey found that 83% of academic staff surveyed believe it is 'very important' to preserve electronic scholarly resources for future use [1].

Book Review: Memory Bytes - History, Technology, and Digital Culture

editor — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Ingrid Mason takes a look at this collection of essays and analyses how these authors contribute to our understanding of digital culture by placing digital technology in an historical context.

It seemed a good idea to look at the definition of 'digital culture' offered in Wikipedia [1] and consider this alongside the ideas presented in this text. The definition was marked for possible deletion, then, a few days later the definition had changed, and the matter seems settled (for the moment) [2].

Unicode and Historic Scripts

editor — Thu, 30 Oct 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Deborah Anderson provides us an overview of the progress made in bringing historic scripts to the Unicode Standard.

Many digital versions of texts--whether they be the plays of Aeschylus, or stories from this week's Times--can now be accessed by a worldwide audience, thanks to the Internet and developments in international standards and the computer industry. But while modern newspapers in English and even the Greek plays of Aeschylus can be viewed on the Internet in their original script, reading articles that cite a line of original text in Egyptian hieroglyphs is more problematic, for this script has not yet been included in the international character encoding standard Unicode.

Electronic Homer

editor — Sat, 23 Sep 2000 23:00:00 +0000

Martin Mueller reads Homer electronically with the TLG, Perseus, and the Chicago Homer.

Introduction and summary

In the following pages I look at reading Homer in Greek as a paradigm of "reading with a dictionary" and other forms of "look-up" reading for which a digital environment offers distinct advantages. I take as my point of departure the activity of reading Homer in a print environment with a text, dictionary, and commentary, and then consider the added value of three electronic tools:

Electronic Publication of Ancient Near Eastern Texts

editor — Tue, 21 Dec 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Charles E. Jones and David Schloen report on a Chicago conference which explored XML tagging for Ancient Near Eastern Texts on the Web.

The civilizations of the ancient Near East produced the world's first written texts.

Editorial Introduction to Issue 21: Ariadne's Thread

editor — Wed, 22 Sep 1999 23:00:00 +0000

Introduction to Ariadne issue 21 by Philip Hunter.

This is the twenty first issue of Ariadne. Our first issue was published in January 1996, under the editorship of John Kirriemuir. Twenty one issues is not exactly a birthday, but nevertheless a significant milestone: I'm reasonably sure that when the idea of a web magazine was first floated in 1995, it was not imagined that it would still be around five years later.

The Web Editor: 'Abzu and Beyond'

editor — Wed, 22 Sep 1999 23:00:00 +0000

Charles Jones muses on the history of the Internet presence of the University of Chicago Oriental Institute.

I work in a discipline where scholars are as likely to be interested in a three-quarter-century-old article written in an obscure journal with a circulation of a thousand copies as they are in a lavish and masterly new publication of an international exhibition of never-before-seen artifacts. The archaeologies of scholarship on the ancient Near East are complex and arcane. The skills required to interpret them are taken for granted on the assumption that university students should already know how to use a library (as any schoolboy knows...).

Metadata: Image Retrieval

editor — Fri, 19 Mar 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Michael Day reports on combining content-based and metadata-based approaches.

Introduction

Image-based information is a key component of human progress in a number of distinct subject domains and digital image retrieval is a fast-growing research area with regard to both still and moving images. In order to address some relevant issues the Second UK Conference on Image Retrieval - the Challenge of Image Retrieval (CIR 99) was held in Newcastle upon Tyne on the 25 and 26 February 1999 [1]. Participants included both researchers and practitioners in the area of image retrieval.

Formats for the Electronic Library

editor — Wed, 19 Mar 1997 00:00:00 +0000

Judith Wusteman describes the document formats used in electronic serials.

Every day, subscribers to the the NewJour mailing list [1] receive notification of new Internet-available electronic serials. The NewJour definition of a serial covers everything from journals to magazines and newsletters; from the British Accounting Review to Ariadne, to The (virtual) Baguette and I Love My Nanny. Some days, a dozen or more publications are announced. As of 13th February 1997, the NewJour archive contained 3,240 items.