17 Tuesday Nov 2015
Posted in Spotted in the news
Issue 140 of Australia’s Island magazine has a 6,000 word extract from the unfinished/unpublished mid-1970s Marshall McLuhan book on the future of libraries…
[ Hat-tip: Mita Williams ]
15 Sunday Nov 2015
Have you spotted an academic who is supposed to have made their work OA, but who hasn’t done so? Dissemin checks their OA status, and provides a way to upload their papers to the Zenodo repository (CERN’s data repository).
15 Sunday Nov 2015
Posted in Spotted in the news
Oh, how wonderful. Now you can walk the floors of the British Museum, via Google Streetview, and get close-ups of 4,500 artefacts. No more trudging for miles through hordes of tourists, with nowhere to sit down except in the cafes…
Built over 15 months with the help of a Google employee with a camera on wheels [and] completed by the Google Cultural Institute after hours, with special light-bulbs being installed to ensure the lighting remained the same through the galleries. The results can now be used by members of the public, academics who wish to study objects in detail from home, or teachers, who are being encouraged to “bring their lessons to life” through the resources.”
Also very useful for visitors who are only ever going to get one pass at an in-person visit, and who want to learn the layout of the place first in order to maximise their time at the Museum.
13 Friday Nov 2015
Posted in Spotted in the news
It looks like Amazon is about to have a major problem, in terms of the findability of bona fide academic books. Caused by get-rich-quick marketeers setting up bots that shovel millions of individual CC-BY open access journal articles onto Amazon, for sale as $5 “e-books”.
11 Wednesday Nov 2015
Posted in Ooops!, Spotted in the news
The EU’s “right to be forgotten” ruling is now blocking access to historical Holocaust archives, reports the Jerusalem Post…
Researchers across the continent – especially in Sweden, France and Germany – have claimed that archivists have begun restricting access to data, citing the GDPR as their rationale for not complying with requests for documents. Because the legislation does not stipulate how long after a person’s death his or her private information can be revealed, or when access to such information can be granted, some archivists “have begun reading into what they understand the law will be,” and are “barring access to materials, including materials [related to] the history of the Holocaust,” Dr. Robert Williams said.”
07 Saturday Nov 2015
Posted in Spotted in the news
Thomson Reuters on OA in Web of Science…
The Web of Science [has] more than 12% of its core collection database in Open Access journals, many with direct, full-text links to open content (see Figure 1).”
Fig. 1: “Open Access Titles in the Web of Science by Discipline & Geography” (SOURCE: Thomson Reuters Web of Science)
The total of 72 OA titles in arts & humanities (all in English?) is comparable to Scopus. Scopus had 60 OA arts & humanities titles in English at June 2015, a fact discoverable via their new OA tagging. Though, after sorting, that Scopus category also included such tres arty titles as Canadian Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, Journal of Biomedical Discovery and Collaboration and Asian Social Science.
06 Friday Nov 2015
Posted in Spotted in the news
Hansard Corpus: British Parliament, 1803-2005…
“contains nearly every speech given in the British Parliament from 1803-2005, and it allows you to search these speeches (including semantically-based searches) in ways that are not possible with any other resource.”
04 Wednesday Nov 2015
Posted in Spotted in the news
From The New York Times today, a defense of the value to the humanities of the classic hour-long lecture / following discussion format, augmented by concise hand-written note-taking by students. Of course a lot will depend on one’s ability to deliver the lecture without reading verbatim or killing it with Powerpoint, plus the level of one’s physical dynamism, clarity of diction and strength of voice. And one needs students who know how to take good selective paper notes and sketch mini-diagrams, and who are not either hungover/shivering in the morning or exhausted at the end of the day. So it’s not an option for everyone, nor at all times of the day.
03 Tuesday Nov 2015
Posted in Academic search, Spotted in the news
Another month, another search-engine for the well-thumbed corpus of academic articles in Computer Science. Semantic Scholar is a touch different though, as it’s been developed at the Paul Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and it just searches 3 million open access papers. As such I guess that most Computer Science students may come to think of it as just a much more elegantly designed and somewhat faster equivalent of Microsoft Academic, minus the pesky records with no PDF links.
Semantic Scholar reportedly plans to expand to the neurosciences and biomedical by 2016-18. And, of course, one should never underestimate the Microsoft tortoise/hare growth method (Allen is a Microsoft founder) — what looks like a lackluster tortoise at first slowly builds and redefines, and re-builds and expands again over the years, until suddenly it’s out in front of the race. That process stalled with the reported ceasing of further development on Microsoft Academic, but it may be that Semantic Scholar is effectively Microsoft’s arms-length second try at that? Just my guess.
As with most such ventures, it seems to be cloaking the allegedly A.I. / semantics-assisted development of something far more commercial and widely applicable: accurate automatic full-text detection (CORE could only get to around 27% with that on academic repositories, last I heard), then document structure evaluation, extraction, segmentation and re-formatting. Which is nice, if one only has to organise an interface for a very well-behaved corpus of Computer Science papers. Semantic Scholar certainly looks like it can do that, and elegantly too, though I’m not qualified to comment on its relevancy ranking or the alleged semantics aspects. But I suspect we’re still many decades from having an autobot that can tame the messy Wild West of open publishing in that manner.
02 Monday Nov 2015
Posted in Spotted in the news
Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg has placed online images of all items in its collections, flagged as Public Domain. The site’s image server seems to have crashed over the weekend on all but the front page, but a Google Images search suggests that the largest size is 1200px on the longest side. The site search is also unreliable at picking out hyphenated or apostrophed words: for instance, a search for Orme doesn’t bring up the photo-chromolithograph “Llandudno from the Great Orme’s Head” (which, incidentally, is available at 28Mb from the Library of Congress).
