Copyright and preserving computer games

This article looks at the tension between preserving computer games (especially those based on consoles). You will find that this article is written from the technology perspective, but it should be of broader interest to the school.

Vanishing Act

Michael Bugeja and Daniela V. Dimitrova, Vanishing Act: The Erosion of Online Footnotes and Implications for Scholarship in the Digital Age (Duluth, MN: Litwin Books, LLC, 2010), give us an interesting and compelling research study about one aspect of the implications of the growth of the Internet. The report offered here was started in 2003 when one of the authors noticed his Web citations disappearing. Examining in-depth nine leading journals in journalism and communication in order the determine what is the half-life of a Web citation, the authors sound this warning: “Vanishing online footnotes undermine the building blocks of research, and their disappearance raises concerns about the reliability and replicability of scholarship” (p. 8). They conveniently cite and summarize the research of others who have also examined this issue, lamenting that we seem to have lost the notion of the archive (in other words, the function that traditional libraries served for a very long time but which is now being displaced by virtual journals and other repositories lacking a sense of a long-term commitment to maintaining documents). “Simply by changing and renaming servers," they write, "computer technicians routinely destroy for citation purposes entire archives on a scale as disastrous as the legendary but mysterious fire at the ancient Library of Alexandria” (p. 17). Personally, I wish they had devoted a few pages to the emerging efforts in digital curation and those of some leading academic libraries to create digital repositories; I thinks this would have provided a more hopeful picture, but this is an important study and one that can be readily replicated in other fields.

Slow Reading

John Miedema, Slow Reading (Duluth, MN: Litwin Books, LLC, 2009) is an interesting, brief reflection on the nature of reading slowly for reflection rather than just locating information. “Unlike our modern consumption of information,” Miedema writes, “slow reading is a journey that fundamentally changes us” (p. 8). He also argues that “Print persists because it is a superior technology for integrating information of any length, complexity or richness; it is better suited to slow reading” (p. 16) and that “libraries are more than just data, they provide a context to information and a house to the people who use it” (p. 49). He is convinced that digital and print books will co-exist for a long-time into the future.

Rethinking the photograph

The photograph remains one of the most prevalent documentary forms going, and the scholarship trying to grapple with it broad and varied. Anna Pegler Gordon, In Sight of America: Photography and the Development of U.S. Immigration Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009) argues that photography influenced US immigration policy and how the objeCts of the photos also exercised control over how they would be depicted. John Tagg, The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009) wrestles with the nature of evidence in such images and the means by which the evidence is shaped ANC reshaped. Both are important books for understanding photography and how it is changing.

An Amazing Body of Scholarship about Maps

Mark Monmonier, geography professor at Syracuse, has perhaps created one of the most amazing bodies of scholarship on one document form, in this case the map. I have about a dozen books by him on the subject. I just read his most recent one, No Dig, No Fly, No Go: How Maps Restrict and Control (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), concerning restrictive maps, such as concerning zoning, flight paths, nautical passages, and political subdivisions. Monmonier's books are also a model of serious scholarship written in a way that can be read by a broader public.