TAPoR News Channel: Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations Title Digital Humanities Initiatives (via Neil Fraistat) Description SUMMARY OF GOOGLE MEETING On Thursday, June 14, representatives from the start up committee of the centers network met for three hours at Google with Vint Cerf, Dan Clancy, and members of the Google Book Search team. Representing the U.S. centers were Matt Kirschenbaum, John Unsworth, and me. Geoffrey Rockwell represented the Canadian centers. Our purpose was to initiate a dialogue about how the centers and Google might best work together. The conversations were wide-ranging and very encouraging. We began with a brief presentation about the history of digital humanities as a field and a demonstration of some recent projects and tools. Among the ensuing topics discussed were (1) the possibility of Google providing digital humanities centers with specially focused subsets of Google Books (e.g., British novels from 1830-1870) for scholarly research and annotation; (2) the possibility of Google making available a layer of special services for scholarly analysis, perhaps to be accessed through the new international digital humanities portal that we hope will be emerging within the next year or so; (3) the possibility of Google running broad-based workshops for digital humanities scholars, or perhaps developing some larger research facility for scholars in the field; (4) the participation of Google at digital humanities conferences. Google is thinking seriously about all of these possibilities and has committed to participating in the center-related sessions at CNI next December, which are being organized by Mark Kornbluh and Kay Walter, and to similarly participate at DH 2008 in Finland. We will keep you posted as things develop. INTERNET ARCHIVE/OPEN CONTENT ALLIANCE On Friday, June 15, Matt Kirschenbaum and I met with Brewster Kahle to begin a dialogue about how the centers network might best work together with the Internet Archive and Open Content Alliance. The conversation centered on the possibility of OCA creating special subsets of its scanned books on demand. That is, if a scholarly team of researchers were to put in a request through the centers network for, say, British novels from 1820-1870, the OCA might be willing to create and share the subset. In return, scholars would help to clean the scans and share with OCA the metadata they create. Currently the OCA scans about 12,000 books each month. Talks of possible joint grants between the Internet Archive and the network of centers were begun and will continue over the summer. Date Wed, 27 Jun 2007 13:46:51 EDT Full Story   SUMMARY OF GOOGLE MEETING On Thursday, June 14, representatives from the start up committee of the centers network met for three hours at Google with Vint Cerf, Dan Clancy, and members of the Google Book Search team. Representing the U.S. centers were Matt Kirschenbaum, John Unsworth, and me. Geoffrey Rockwell represented the Canadian centers. Our purpose was to initiate a dialogue about how the centers and Google might best work together. The conversations were wide-ranging and very encouraging. We began with a brief presentation about the history of digital humanities as a field and a demonstration of some recent projects and tools. Among the ensuing topics discussed were (1) the possibility of Google providing digital humanities centers with specially focused subsets of Google Books (e.g., British novels from 1830-1870) for scholarly research and annotation; (2) the possibility of Google making available a layer of special services for scholarly analysis, perhaps to be accessed through the new international digital humanities portal that we hope will be emerging within the next year or so; (3) the possibility of Google running broad-based workshops for digital humanities scholars, or perhaps developing some larger research facility for scholars in the field; (4) the participation of Google at digital humanities conferences. Google is thinking seriously about all of these possibilities and has committed to participating in the center-related sessions at CNI next December, which are being organized by Mark Kornbluh and Kay Walter, and to similarly participate at DH 2008 in Finland. We will keep you posted as things develop. INTERNET ARCHIVE/OPEN CONTENT ALLIANCE On Friday, June 15, Matt Kirschenbaum and I met with Brewster Kahle to begin a dialogue about how the centers network might best work together with the Internet Archive and Open Content Alliance. The conversation centered on the possibility of OCA creating special subsets of its scanned books on demand. That is, if a scholarly team of researchers were to put in a request through the centers network for, say, British novels from 1820-1870, the OCA might be willing to create and share the subset. In return, scholars would help to clean the scans and share with OCA the metadata they create. Currently the OCA scans about 12,000 books each month. Talks of possible joint grants between the Internet Archive and the network of centers were begun and will continue over the summer.