Category: Lectures and Conferences

  • The Public Domain and Digital Natives

    Two weeks ago I visited the wonderful city of Turin to attend the International Conference University and Cyberspace. Reshaping Knowledge Institutions for the Networked Age, the closing conference of The COMMUNIA Thematic Network. As they state on their website, COMMUNIA aims at becoming a European point of reference for theoretical analysis and strategic policy discussion…

  • Who Owns Research?

    Or better yet, who should own research? Last Thursday CRASSH―the Cambridge based institute for Cultural Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities―assembled an expert panel from the publishing and library community to tackle this question.  Linda Bree (Cambridge University Press), Rupert Gatti (Open Book publishers), Gary Hall (Open Humanities Press) and Elin Stangeland (DSpace…

  • Governance in Times of Change

    Last week I attended the International Conference – Digital publishing and its governance: between knowledge and power, which was held from April 28th-30th in Paris. The conference was organized by Sens Public with support from INHA-Invisu, tge-ADONIS, CNRS and DARIAH. The conference focused on how digitally induced practices in the Humanities and Social Sciences are…

  • APE 2010: The Semantic Desktop and the Article of the Future

    During the second and third day of the APE conference three presentations were given which focused on services that would aid the information worker through the information overload. They were all based on filtering out the essential information through web based services and interfaces centered on the (scholarly) user of these information resources. Andreas Dengel…

  • APE 2010: Open Access and Thinking Beyond the Document

    Last week I was in Berlin where I listened to some amazing talks on the future of publishing and scholarly communication delivered at the APE conference 2010. Underneath you will find a selection of what I felt to be the most interesting bits. One of the key speakers during this year’s event was Stefan Gradmann…

  • Historical Sensationalism. On the Morality of History

    Yesterday evening, Marita Mathijsen, one of the leading Dutch literary historians, gave the 38th Huizinga-lecture at the St. Pieterskerk in Leiden. An elaborate version of this lecture has been published in a print edition, and a summary of the lecture is available at NRC Handelsblad (both in Dutch). Underneath my rendering and translation of her…

  • Society of the Query – Part 2: Gugerli, Fuller, Manovich, Ludovico, Bruno and Van ’t Hof

    Part 1 of my notes on the Society of the Query conference can be found here. David Gugerli a historian specialized in the philosophy of science gave a lecture on the history of databases and of data management as a signifying practice. In a Deleuzian fashion, he states, knowledge operates in distributed networks. The world…

  • Society of the Query – Part 1: Lovink, Boutang, Pasquinelli and Numerico

    Last month the Institute of Network Cultures organized a two day conference entitled Society of the Query. Below you can find a wrap-up of the notes I took during the conference. More elaborate blog entries focusing on each of the lectures separately can be found here and you can also take a look at the…

  • Publishing, Peer Review and Quality Certification in the Digital Age

    Every month the Special Collections department of the University of Amsterdam hosts a book salon, each focusing on a special theme. Last Thursday’s gathering focused on ‘the scientific publisher in the digital age’ and brought together a panel of three experts on the subject. Cees Andriesse, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Utrecht…

  • Digital Scholarship

    Christine Borgman is one of my scholarly heroines; when it comes to her fine nose for current developments in e-scholarship and digital information retrieval and her thorough and concise way of communicating (alas, she is a specialist in scholarly communication) these issues via monographs, articles and lectures, she definitely belongs to my scholarly all-star gallery.…

  • Adieu Copyright – A debate

    Last Wednesday one of Holland’s most famous and disputed anti-copyright defendants, Joost Smiers, presented his new book (or essay) co-written with partner-in-crime Marieke van Schijndel, at cultural hot-spot De Balie (a former courthouse in Amsterdam). Surrounding the presentation a debate evening was organized based on the utopian notion of ‘imagining a world without copyright’. The…

  • Culture is Data

    Paradiso was enlightened last Sunday by the presence of a true Digital Media apostle: Lev Manovich, the renowned professor of Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego, came to give a lecture on Cultural Analytics. His lecture was part of a one day conference, Archive 2020, organized by the Dutch expertise centre for…