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In the Comments
You have to learn to let go. The idea that books, magazines, databases or any form of information source can and should be kept for perpetuity is laughable. Items in a library need to be weeded and space is the major reason why. I know all of you want to keep your precious books, and I do to. But who’s going to pay for it, you?... — the other me
Library Protesters to Ohio State U.: Digital's OK, but Save Our Books!
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July 2, 2009
Are Scholarly E-Mail Lists Fading in an Era of Blogs and Twitter?
Some professors are unsubscribing from scholarly e-mail lists because they say that discussion has shifted to academic blogs, to social networks like Facebook, and to Twitter. In response, the groups running some of the largest academic e-mail lists are adding Web 2.0 features to their mix of services. Many devoted fans of e-mail lists, meanwhile, say that the form is far from dead, and that discussion on e-mail lists are richer than what’s happening in the blogosphere or other new forms.
The latest installment of The Chronicle’s College 2.0 column argues that e-mail lists may soon occupy a space like radios did in the television age, sticking around but fading to the background. Are e-mail lists still part of your online diet?
Posted on Thursday July 2, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [7]June 23, 2009
'Twitterature': Tweeting Classics on the Web
It isn’t uncommon to find literature rendered in the style of Twitter’s trademarked 140-character blasts. But it’s rare for such tweets to make their way into print.
Yet that’s the concept behind a new book penned by two rising University of Chicago sophomores, titled Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books, Now Presented in Twenty Tweets or Less. The project’s Web site calls it “a humorous retelling of works of great literature in Twitter format.”
Emmet Rensin and Alex Aciman, who both just completed their freshman years at the university, pitched the project to Penguin Publishing. The book is scheduled to be released this fall.
Mr. Rensin and Mr. Aciman say on their site that combining classic literature and young technology “is the perfect remedy and counterbalance to the esoteric texts, which are still so vital to us—and to our GPA.”
Both students plan to work on the project this summer, though no updates have been added to their site. A Chronicle search of Twitter yielded an account for Mr. Rensin, but not one for Mr. Aciman or for the project itself. Neither could be reached for comment.
According to the site, both students have experience in writing and publishing. Mr. Aciman has worked for The Paris Review and the late New York Sun, and has also written essays for The New York Times. Mr. Rensin—whose father, David Rensin, has written five Times bestsellers—has contributed to The Huffington Post and is also an ordained reverend. Both say they hope to be writers. —Erica R. Hendry
Posted on Tuesday June 23, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [14]June 12, 2009
Religion 101, in 140 Characters
Stephen Prothero is helping world religions make their way onto Twitter this summer, one 140-character tweet at a time.
The Boston University professor of religion is treating his account, sprothero, like a microcourse, posting several tweets on each of what he identifies as the eight major world religions: Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Daoism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the Yoruba tradition, which Mr. Prothero calls the “neglected world religion” from West Africa.
“I liked the idea of doing the world religions in 140 characters,” Mr. Prothero said. “I thought, what a fun challenge that would be.”
Mr. Prothero is in the process of writing a book about these religions, in which he said each religion will have about 30 pages. In academe, he said, such a short space for a major religion is “scandalous,” but he’s trying to prove it can be done well, both in print and online in hundreds of characters, too.
“I’m not sure which is harder,” he wrote in a tweet today.
He said he plans to tweet at least once a day, and began yesterday with a post on Islam, which read “Islam 140: Allah told Gabriel told the prophet Muhammad (PBUH): Just 1 God, pray to Him 5x day, give alms, fast, hajj to Mecca. Submit! Ahh!”
Today, Mr. Prothero has tweeted twice on Buddhism. He’s already gained 103 followers, some of whom are his students, in little more than 24 hours. And he’s getting more economical too — his last post was only 128 characters.
“I read it and thought, oh my god, what am I going to do with the other 12 characters?” he said.
Mr. Prothero said he’s not sure if and how he’ll use Twitter in the classroom when he teaches world religion this fall, though he’s considered using the tweets on his lecture notes or handouts. —Erica R. Hendry
Posted on Friday June 12, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [10]June 8, 2009
Facebook Campaign May Have Led UCLA Graduation Speaker to Pull Out
Controversial commencement speakers are hardy spring perennials on American campuses. A college invites a speaker hoping for an inspirational oration or a celebrity presence or something, in short, to make the day memorable for the graduates and their families, and to reflect well on the institution at large.
Inevitably some of those invited speakers bring controversy with them, whether because of something they did or said on a hot-button issue, or just because of who they are. Critics, typically more from off campus than on, then speak out, assailing the choice of speaker, demanding an alternative, and making various threats (refusing to attend, withholding alumni gifts, embarrassing the institution, etc.) if they are ignored.
In most cases, of course, the college and the speaker ride out the storm and the commencement goes ahead as planned. Case in point: President Obama’s appearance last month at the University of Notre Dame’s graduation ceremony.
But not every speaker may have the stature to face down the critics, and not all critics are outsiders. The Los Angeles Times reported today that the scheduled speaker at the University of California at Los Angeles’s commencement next Friday — the actor James Franco — had backed out apparently because of a months-long campaign by hundreds of students against his selection that was carried out via the Facebook social-networking site.
Mr. Franco, who has received acclaim for several movie roles and who won a Golden Globe Award, was said by his UCLA critics to be too young (at 31 he would be the youngest commencement speaker in university history). In fact, he was a classmate of some of those who will receive degrees next week: He originally enrolled at UCLA in 1996, but dropped out to pursue his acting career, and only completed his degree last year.
In a written statement issued by UCLA, the actor said preparation for his next film had made it impossible for him to speak as scheduled. He said he regretted not being able to honor his commitment to appear at commencement.
For its part, UCLA had no comment on Mr. Franco’s withdrawal. Officials there were busy lining up a last-minute understudy: Brad Delson, a UCLA alumnus and lead guitarist for the Grammy Award-winning band Linkin Park. Mr. Delson’s age? 31. —Andrew Mytelka
Posted on Monday June 8, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [1]June 4, 2009
Harvard Study Suggests Twitter Users Are Self-Obsessed, Says Harvard's Own Tweet
A study released this week by a Harvard University professor and a graduate student told many who use Twitter what they may already know: The network is dominated by a few tweeters talking about themselves, much more so than other social networks.
The university, as if in a hurry to support this observation, was quick to trumpet the research on its own Twitter feed, @Harvard Research.
The study, published by Harvard Business Publishing, looked at a random sample of 300,000 Twitter users last month and then compared them with users of other social networks. It found that the top 10 percent of the social network’s most active users accounted for about 90 percent of all tweets, and most of those users were men.
On other online social networks, the study says, the top 10 percent of users account for 30 percent of all production. And on Wikipedia, the top 15 percent of the most active editors account for about 90 percent of its content. Researchers say this may indicate that Twitter isn’t as much about communicating back and forth as it is about posting personal ideas or thoughts.
“This implies that Twitter’s resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network,” the study said.
Researchers also concluded that 80 percent of users are followed by or follow at least one other user. Men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, but men have 15 percent more followers than women; and an average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman.
This “follower split” led researchers to conclude that women are not driven as much by followers as men are, or are more selective when they are deciding whether to reciprocate a Twitter friendship.
But not everyone is sold on the research – several bloggers have said researchers were too quick to make conclusions about the new, and often misunderstood, social platform.
On his blog called A Fire Under Embers, Zachary Tumin, a program director at Harvard, said the study would benefit from real-life observation of people using Twitter, which could answer lingering questions about who users they chose to follow, and why.
For example, he writes, some users keep their gender identity ambiguous, which would skew some of the study’s gender conclusions. He also writes that the study doesn’t take other biases into account, such as whether or not a user would follow someone in a different profession or religion, or with different interests than their own. —Erica R. Hendry
Posted on Thursday June 4, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [19]College Students Help Connect the Vatican to Internet 2.0
Samantha Chin helped bring Pope Benedict XVI to YouTube and Facebook — literally.
As an intern for the Vatican’s Internet office, Ms. Chin researched different ways for the Roman Catholic Church to publicize the Pope’s message for annual World Communication Day, in May.
“My main job was to figure out new ways to reach a larger and a younger audience for this message to be delivered,” Ms. Chin said. “I immediately thought of ways to incorporate the Internet. I use it every day. I don’t think I could possibly live my life without it.”
And by January, the Communication Day message was posted on the Vatican’s YouTube site; a Facebook application called Pope2You, which allows users to send virtual postcards and get-well messages in five languages; and an iPhone application that distributes news in the Catholic world.
Ms. Chin, who received a bachelor’s degree in communications last month, was part of a Villanova University internship program that has been working for the past seven years to keep the Catholic Church up to date with multimedia tools and technology.
Over the past year, student interns and their professors have also begun a project creating virtual tours of several sites at the Vatican, the first of which — a tour of the Basilica of St. Paul — made its debut on the Vatican’s Web site last month.
Positive feedback from the first virtual-reality tour and interactions with the Villanova groups paved the way for the students to begin filming other sites, including an after-hours photo shoot of the Sistine Chapel, in March.
Samantha Coveleski, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in communications from Villanova last month, called her experience filming inside the chapel “breathtaking.”
“I had been there before and been inside the Sistine Chapel with the million other people,” Ms. Coveleski said. “But then to go back into the chapel at night knowing that nobody else was going to be there, you were really able to take in the artwork as it was designed to be witnessed.”
Professor Bryan Crable, director of Villanova’s communication department, said cardinals at the Vatican were hesitant at first to let the teams from Villanova have more access to the sites.
“They wanted to make sure that what we were able to present would accurately capture Michelangelo without distortion,” Mr. Crable said, adding that the virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel will most likely offer a feature that allows viewers to click on different historically significant items and get background information on them.
“It’s just been a phenomenal experience for our students to be not only engaged in an internship that’s teaching them about multimedia, video production, and editing, but also to do it in such significant cultural, historical, religious spaces, and aesthetic spaces,” he said. —Marc Beja
Posted on Thursday June 4, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [1]May 26, 2009
Paper Highlights Pros and Cons of Twittering at Academic Conferences
Professors are beginning to use Twitter at academic conferences to share proceedings with absent colleagues and to create an online “backchannel” for attendees, but the tool can also be distracting and detract from face-to-face communication at events.
Those were the basic findings of a survey of academics at five recent conferences, in research presented this month at the annual EduMedia Conference in Salzburg, Austria. The paper is titled “How People Are Using Twitter During Conferences.”
Though the findings may not surprise anyone who’s seen Twitter in action at recent scholarly events, the paper does provide a good overview and looks at the implications of microblogging for scholarly communication. Though the study’s sample size was small — just 41 people — one of them raised a word of caution not seen in many excited blog posts about the promise of Twitter. “Twitter can be distracting,” the respondent wrote. “For people actually there, they maybe spend more time with their computer or phone than talking to people.” —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Tuesday May 26, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [5]May 21, 2009
UT Austin Humor Magazine Writers Impersonate Institution's President on Twitter
A Twitter account claiming to be written by the president of the University of Texas at Austin, William C. Powers Jr., is actually the work of writers of Texas Travesty, a student-run humor magazine at the university.
Ross Luippold, editor in chief of Texas Travesty, claimed authorship of the parody Twitter account in an e-mail message to The Chronicle today. “When we first started, a lot of people thought it was real, and many of his followers still do (somehow),” wrote Mr. Luippold. “I really hope we don’t get shut down. Running the Powers account is way too fun.”
“More than anything else, we thought it’d be funny to create a fictional campus character, and this fictional character happened to share a name, likeness, and profession with William Powers, the president of the University,” the student wrote, adding that they have been dropping issues of their publication featuring the parody at his office hoping for a response. “When we never got a response from his office, we decided that if he didn’t care about the stuff we wrote about him in a joke paper going out to 30,000 people, he wouldn’t mind if we made a Twitter in his name.”
A Chronicle article online today noted that another university president has a false double on Twitter as well: Georgetown University’s John J. DeGioia. That Twitter parody is the work of a writer for Georgetown’s student humor magazine, The Georgetown Heckler. —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Thursday May 21, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [9]May 15, 2009
New England Journal of Medicine Now on Facebook
Some of the oldest scholarly journals are setting up pages on social-networking sites like Facebook. The latest is The New England Journal of Medicine, The Boston Globe reports.
The journal, which was founded in Boston in 1812, has created a Facebook
site where readers can link to articles and a weekly podcast summary. “If our users are going to be there, we should be there,” says Kent Anderson, the journal’s executive director of international business and product development.
The move is the journal’s latest attempt to find new ways to connect with readers. The medical journal has offered an online edition for 13 years.
Other long-established journals that have set up Facebook sites include Science and The Journal of the American Medical Association. —Katherine Mangan
Posted on Friday May 15, 2009 | Permalink | CommentMay 13, 2009
Stanford U. Experiments With Open Office Hours on Facebook
Some feel the Internet may be undermining office hours, as students opt to e-mail professors rather than visit them. Now one university is bringing office hours to the Internet.
Stanford University bills its new Open Office Hours experiment as a public version of the old weekly tradition. Only in this forum you don’t need perfect SAT’s and a 4.0 GPA for the privilege of interacting with the California university’s professors.
It’s free. It’s open to anyone on Facebook. And it’s sort of like video blogging. Faculty members share their thoughts in introductory clips. They respond to questions in follow-up videos.
The most recent to open his office is Philip G. Zimbardo. The professor emeritus of psychology gained fame with the Stanford Prison Experiment, a study that showed disturbing levels of violence among men in a simulated prison.
“Yo! It’s Phil Zimbardo,” is how the professor opens his video, which drew more than 70 comments. Mr. Zimbardo tells the audience that he is “especially concerned” about all those former students “who never came to my office hours, and I was sitting there wasting my time.”
Ian Hsu, Stanford’s director of Internet media outreach, calls the new project “a natural evolution of the university’s existing efforts to make its discoveries and knowledge easily and widely accessible online via Stanford on YouTube, Stanford on iTunes U, and Stanford Engineering Everywhere.“ —Marc Parry
Posted on Wednesday May 13, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [9]