Reading

First, scholarship will be freely accessible online. Online scholarship not only is the next logical step for publication but also presents a way to address an expanding audience. The much-discussed crisis in the humanities has at its origin the question of what—if anything—the humanities are good for. It has been difficult to answer that question, in part because our scholarship is frequently inaccessible, published in small journals or contained in subscription-only databases.

Listen to the Presidential Address by Catherine Porter at the 2009 MLA Annual Convention.

Why You Can't Work at Work -- a possible solution..

When I look around at digital humanities centers and such, I read them as being concerned with identifying and moving practices into the early majority phase.  As such, one way of approaching supporting digital humanities is to identify faculty who are innovators and early adopters and support their activities in these areas. What do digital humanities researchers and teachers need that print humanities faculty do not? Two general things, I think. First, they need more technology (duh). Second, because digital projects tend to require a team approach (as opposed to the traditional model of the solitary scholar), they may require support to facilitate collaboration (hiring grad students and tech specialists, travel, meetings, and other management-type costs--even though social media might help to reduce these if properly used).

As you’ll recall from the health reform debate, somewhat paradoxically it’s the current beneficiaries of single-payer government-provided health insurance who evince the most opposition to universal health care. Basically, they’ve got theirs and don’t care about extending the benefits of universal health care to younger people. Ryan and Hensarling are proposing to institutionalize this version of the intergenerational bargain—culturally conservative oldsters still get paid, but the welfare state they enjoy and support will be phased out for Generations X and Y.

The controversy also exposed the impressive capacity of the conservative judicial revolutionaries to live by double standards without apology.

#Top50EG got me remembering everything I love about Egypt. And here I share some of my own favorite #Top50EG tweets (plus a very few retweets…it would have been impossible to include everything I retweeted or everything I liked in the hashtag…there were so many!):

Overlooked in much of the hype about the iPad announcement earlier in the week was a comment by Steve Jobs in the Keynote presentation where he mentioned that the iBooks app for iPad would take advantage of the popular EPUB format for electronic books.

For some, living in a home without heat is the tradeoff for an atmospheric space.