-
An ontology of free – or: is there such a thing as freedom of knowledge?
The last couple of days I have started thinking about what the concept of free knowledge exactly entails. I want to dedicate a few future posts to this subject, in order to explore the idea to its fullest and to give it a proper categorization (at least I will try to). This can be…
-
Digitisation and the Trade Book
During last Thursday’s Round Table on ‘Digitisation and the Trade Book’, organized by the department of Book and Digital Media Studies at Leiden University, the focus was on the future role of ‘intermediaries’ (distributors, booksellers and librarians) in the age of the digital book. What kind of value will these ‘old players’ still add to…
-
Text Comparison and Digital Creativity – Day I
Last Thursday and Friday the two day colloquium ‘Text comparison and digital creativity’ was held at the KNAW, as part of its 200th anniversary year. The symposium was a joint initiative from the Virtual Knowledge Studio (VKS) and the Leiden based Turgama project. For more information on both organizers simply follow the links. One of…
-
Edupunk
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNTlescIvW0&feature=related] I found this video by Tony Hirst on the Internet today, and it gives a very ‘hip’, though to my opinion also good overview of the emergence of new ideas about opening up information in the educational sphere. The video is connected to the Edupunk approach to teaching and learning practices. Edupunk is…
-
Frankfurt Book Fair (II): Ebook Platforms
As I mentioned in my previous post, at the Frankfurt Book Fair two weeks ago Ebooks were certainly the buzzword. Interestingly enough, whilst everyone is talking about Ebooks, there are as of yet few (if any) sustainable (let alone profit-making) publishing models for Ebooks. However, experiments are increasingly being conducted. This has led to the…
-
Dodo or Dog Conference
Following the metaphor dodo or dog (an extinct bird versus man’s best friend), the future of the scholarly book in the digital age was examined at the Dodo or Dog conference last week. A handful of prominent Dutch and international speakers shared their thoughts on the development of the monograph in the HSS. One of…
-
Frankfurt Book Fair (I): Free Ebooks, Copyright and Piracy
As I visited the Frankfurt Book Fair last week, Ebooks and Ebook services seemed to be omnipresent. From E-readers to E-publishing experiments and from POD and software services to E-braries, the publishing value chain finally seems to have lost its fear when it comes to the embracing of the Ebook. This has lead to the rise…
-
Open Access and eBooks
One of the most heard objectives against eBooks (let alone against Open Access eBooks) is that nobody is going to read a whole book from a screen. Especially in the Humanities, where long stretched arguments are laid out over hundreds of pages, scholars and students will prefer a solid hard copy over reading from the…
-
Open Access Day
Today (October 14th) is the very first Open Access Day. From the Press Release: “SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), the Public Library of Science (PLoS), and Students for FreeCulture have jointly announced the first international Open Access Day. Building on the worldwide momentum toward Open Access to publicly funded research,…
-
Content is Context, Content is Conversation
Symposium Nederland Kennisland (02-10-08) http://klstudio.wik.is/ Kennisland (Knowledgeland http://www.kennisland.nl/) is an independent Dutch think thank with the overall goal to make Holland smarter. They try to achieve this goal by means of research, advice, projects and networks focused on four main themes: creative economy, open innovation, smart government and smart schools. I attended…