Ian Bogost has an article at The Atlantic about Google’s new “Classic Papers” section of Google Scholar, where articles from 2006 are selected on the basis of the number of citations since then. Bogost explains the difference between value and popularity and reveals how Google’s monopoly over information discovery has changed how we think about knowledge and information: PageRank and Classic…
future of history
The Library Challenge
For our final class of the semester, George Mason’s History Librarian, Dr. George Oberle, came to present on the topic of libraries and enclosure. As a former employee of Fenwick Library with a continuing interest in the world of academic libraries, I found this especially interesting. After providing some background on the history of scholarly presses and the growing commercialization…
Free Culture Response
Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture makes the case that the expansion of copyright power in the last several decades is hindering creativity and scientific advances. Lessig argues that while copyright law began as an attempt to incentivize creativity by protecting creators’ rights to their work, “The law’s role is less and less to support creativity, and more and more to protect…
“Confronting the Digital” Response
One of the questions we keep returning to throughout the course is whether digital history has actually changed the questions, problems, and opportunities facing historians or whether these are simply the same issues masquerading as novel ones. In “Confronting the Digital,” Tim Hitchcock makes the case for significant change. According to Hitchcock, historians have not responded effectively to the fact…
