18 Tuesday Jan 2011
Posted in My general observations
I wonder if there’s a readership for an open journal on that which is “not yet studied in the humanities”? Short articles concisely outlining notable topics, topics not yet investigated by scholars? Just a thought.
14 Friday Jan 2011
Posted in My general observations, Spotted in the news
The new Ion Book Saver, a $150 non-destructive book scanner for the home or office. You have to flip the pages manually, although it seems it’s far faster than a traditional flatbed scanner. Sadly the device only seems to be available from big retail stores in the USA, and not via Amazon or in the UK. It’ll be interesting to see if these become available to the UK privately, via eBay sellers, and at a reasonable premium.
I’d also like to see a video of how it copes with a fat hardback and a tight spine. The device lifts up via the handle, but doesn’t appear to have the weight or clips needed to keep pages flat in such circumstances. Still, it looks useful for quickly digitising a lot of old ephemera such as newsletters and magazines. Paper journals, too. The device saves to .jpg or .pdf on the slot-in SD card.
Ion — if you can send me a review device I’ll happily give it a detailed review here at the JURN blog 🙂
13 Thursday Jan 2011
Posted in JURN blogged, My general observations
A few reciprocal backlinks, for those linking to JURN recently:—
Princeton University library links JURN on its Online Reference Shelf.
The Royal Library of Denmark links JURN on its main Humanities page.
The Library of the Universite Paris-Sorbonne links JURN.
Linked on the Journals page at Southern Cross University, Australia.
Linked on the Journals page at Lulea university, Sweden.
Linked on the Journals page at Singapore Management University.
Postcolonial Space journal has added the JURN search box to its courses website.
12 Wednesday Jan 2011
JURN’s search-engine is now 3,001 ejournals ‘up’ from its starting position of 951. Just 951 titles were indexed by the alpha version at launch on 3rd February 2009.
12 Wednesday Jan 2011
Posted in My general observations
Leading videogame guru David Braben (Elite, Lost Winds, leading light of UK trade body TIGA) confirms that ICT teaching in UK schools is dire…
“every kid I talk to says ICT is dull. They hate it. The majority is learning how to use certain MS [Microsoft] tools and how to find the on and off switch.” … “That is such a far distance from what I’m talking about, where self-driven learning happens. I think it was very well meaning to try and make ICT universal but I think it’s backfired.” He called for computer science teaching that “actually taught programming and all the things which are exciting about it.” The problem was particular acute, he felt, for those children who could not use PCs at home. “For those who didn’t have access to computers it just confirmed the fact that they weren’t interested.”
His comments follow reports that the Royal Society are setting up an investigation into why ICT teaching is so poor…
“Since 2006 there has been a 33 per cent fall in pupils taking ICT GCSEs, and numbers taking A-levels in ICT have fallen by a third in six years. The number of candidates taking A-level Computing has fallen 57 per cent in eight years. … “ICT and Computer Science in school seem to turn these young people off. We need school curricula to engage them better if the next generation are to engineer technology and not just consume it.”
Part of the problem apparently lies in the failure to recruit quality teachers, which has led to a dumbed-down curriculum that any 2:2 can teach by rote. A mildly-obsessive techie nerd — someone with the drive to keep pace with the ever-evolving world of ICT, and just the sort of person you want in front of a class of bright kids — would rightly run a mile from teaching ICT in British schools. A deeper part of the problem seems to be that our secondary education system and its follow-on ‘youth training’ & unemployment-handling routes are still deeply stuck in a ‘mass industrial’ / ‘mass retail’ / ‘mass secretarial’ mindset about the world of work.
15 years of hand-wringing reports, committees, and failed initiatives have failed to make a dent in the national picture. But if there is to be real reform, perhaps via ‘serious games’, then let’s hope that intensive search literacy is put at the heart of it.
10 Monday Jan 2011
Can ‘taste engines’ and ‘recommendation engines’ cut through the clutter of the web? Or just serve us up an awkward hit-and-miss selection, based on the likes of our tasteless friends and the sort of clumsy clumping of artists/genres that can’t distinguish between Ziggy Bowie and Tin Machine Bowie? People often point to the system at Last.fm, but what does the research say? Some interesting quotes from the article “User Acceptance Issues in Music Recommender Systems” (2009) by Jones & Pu…
“Users perceived Last.fm’s recommendation technology as being less accurate … this is supported by post-study interviews where Last.fm users often reflected negatively on the accuracy during the post-study interviews” … “People only half agreed than ‘if similar technology existed for recommending other items (books, movies) then they would use it’.”
“Last.fm is clearly a successful website with more than ten million users. However, based on our results we believe that this does not primarily come from the recommender system which clearly poses some problems,” (Jones & Pu, 2009).
06 Thursday Jan 2011
Posted in JURN's Google watch, My general observations
A big dollop of lazy journo-bluster has landed at The Guardian, over the amount of outright spam that’s been inveigling itself into the Google search-results.
This growing so-called backlash is largely down to some users thinking they can still type in dishwasher review and get good results. Those “two keywords is enough” days are over — just spend 50 minutes learning how to search properly, guys. Yet some people are going to find learning this more difficult than others — more and more people who not fully literate are now trying to use the web. They can’t skim-read the results very well, or remember how to do complex strings of search modifiers. The ‘advanced search’ forms scare them. All the more reason why we need to be teaching search literacy from infant school onward.
Perhaps the Googleplexers who do nothing else but weed for spam are being temporarily overwhelmed? There’s an obvious tidal wave of robot-registered domains being populated by robots with robot-made pages. 99% of this Web spam has never seen a human hand, other than in the plagiarised material that gets pirated, semi-garbled, and pasted into the page. So, hire as many people as it takes to rip out the spam. It’s not as though Google doesn’t have the cash to throw another 500 eyeballs at the problem.
The other problem that people seem to be raising in the Guardian comments is that we don’t really have a reliable hand-made search-engine for product reviews, one that is devoted to serving only reliable reviews from reliable sources — and nothing else. Certainly, I’ve never found one I like and feel I can trust, and which is comprehensive in its sources and relevant to the UK.
03 Monday Jan 2011
Posted in JURN metrics, My general observations
How is JURN’s total number of ejournals calculated? Well, it’s a number that’s been built up incrementally since the beta. But a rough checking calculation at Jan 2011 would go something like this:—
* 2,580 non-duplicate English-language titles, as listed in the 2,700-link JURN Directory.
* Around 620 marginal ‘partly in English’ titles that I didn’t enter in the English-language JURN Directory, and yet which are not on Revues / Persee / Dialnet / Cairn since they’re not in Spanish/French.
* 2,792 Spanish titles in the arts and humanities and ‘philologies’, as currently indexed via Dialnet. 1,367 titles on Dialnet currently have full-text, and perhaps 600 of these offer articles relevant to the arts and humanities. *
* 105 older French titles on Persee.
* 274 titles on Revues, perhaps 260 if a handful of geography titles and ‘collections’ are discounted.
* Around 250 relevant titles via the Hungarian central index.
* Around 180 relevant French titles via Cairn.
* Around 250 humanities titles from the Central America region via Redalyc.
* Around 170 arts and humanities titles in Portuguese, via Livre.
* Perhaps another 200 (perhaps more) non-English titles from various national amalgamation services such as those in Serbia, Taiwan, Singapore, Mexico, Catalonia, etc.
That would give a grand total of about 5,200 titles indexed.
However, if only those titles that carry at least some English articles are to be counted, then the calculation is more like: 2,580 English titles + 620 known partly-English + another 700 unknown partly-English titles hidden among the total at Dialnet / Redalyc, et al = 3,900.
* Indexing Dialnet does bring in some article record pages that don’t contain links to full-text. JURN indexes Dialnet via three URLs that bring in: i) just the main index pages for journals (not the TOC pages), ii) full-text PDF articles hosted on Dialnet, and iii) article record pages. The latter may or may not contain links to full-text (I estimate about a one-in-six chance of full-text from a Dialnet record, in arts and humanities searches). However, for those searching for English search-terms, this is unlikely to flood the search results with masses of records that only contain citations / abstracts. I think it’s a price worth paying, when weighed against the wealth of full-text material that it can bring in for a searcher.
03 Monday Jan 2011
JURN’s main index has ticked over 3,900 titles indexed, and now stands at 3,902. Onward to 4,000!
02 Sunday Jan 2011
A new January 2011 issue of the Open Access Newsletter, providing a useful round-up of what has been a boom year for open access. The DOAJ added 1,401 new ‘pure’ OA titles in 2010, and as a regular tracker of these I’d guesstimate that perhaps 8 to 10 percent of these were arts and humanities titles (about 120 to 140 titles?). Not all of these were newly launched, since the DOAJ also sometimes retrospectively indexes established titles from previous years. In the arts and humanities the DOAJ currently lists 944 titles. So combining these figures might very roughly suggest a 14% increase in DOAJ arts and humanities titles during 2010?