Point them at papyri.info if you like. We would love to have the feedback.
josh
On 8/5/15 12:38 PM, Simon Mahony wrote:
We're always looking for websites to review for the exam (in December). Any volunteers? We would have to get permission from the students to share their reports.
Simon
On 05/08/2015 17:31, Joshua D. Sosin wrote:
Gabby writes:
"But I wonder if the difference noted below is rather, or at least in part, that people are uncomfortable with how to go about writing a review of a sophisticated web resource? Do they feel they would need to be an expert in digital publishing, and comment
on issues like software, APIs, accessibility and so forth, as well as only the ancient history content?"
I think this is a great point and wonder the same.
I wonder also what a review venue for such resources would look like. Each resource might have its own bit of real estate, on which could be arrayed a variety of reviews, written from a variety of perspectives (as Gabby says: domain content, performance, UI,
interoperability, documentation, etc.). Co-location of multiple reviews, from multiple perspectives, could be highly useful to users but also to leaders and developers who are responsible for the resources under review.
To a certain extent the creation of such a review venue, outside the control of any given project, asserts a wider disciplinary interest in 'issue tracking' which is sometimes open, often black-boxed. And with a little care and creativity developers might even
include in their own public tracking mechanisms references to the users who suggested the change (even feed that back to the review venue). This would give us a way not only to capture who observed what, but also which observations were operationalized. Credit
given for helping to make things better. That'd be nice.
josh
On 8/5/15 12:03 PM, Gabriel Bodard wrote:
Interesting point. By the same token, I have for a while done some work with a review publication (outside the classics) and at first I expected to see exactly the pattern Jim describes below, vis à vis print books vs Kindle/Epub
or PDF e-books, but in the last couple of years the difference in uptake between books available on paper and (otherwise traditionally formatted) books available only in e-formats is pretty close to zero.
Obviously an e-book isn't necessarily an open access publication, so some of the social transaction that Jim notes is still present in this anecdotal example. But I wonder if the difference noted below is rather, or at least in part, that people are uncomfortable
with how to go about writing a review of a sophisticated web resource? Do they feel they would need to be an expert in digital publishing, and comment on issues like software, APIs, accessibility and so forth, as well as only the ancient history content? If
academics were (and I suspect they increasingly, if slowly, are becoming) in the habit of reading scholarly works on a Kindle or iPad, would the uptake of print vs e-book titles at BMCR be as radically different as we're seeing now?
Best,
Gabby
On 2015-08-05 16:11, Jim O'Donnell wrote:
All of us.
By this I mean a distinct thing: the economics of pre-OA publishing
make books $$-valuable. So if the publisher generously spreads a few
free copies around to journals and we in turn offer them to reviewers,
reviewers are glad to get the books and happy to write the review in
return. We get the review quid for the publisher's quo. That's an
economic transaction deeply embedded in the "commercial" model of
things. We *all* benefit from that because we all get to read the
book reviews, and a certain number of us get nice free books.
At BMCR, we have repeatedly experimented with getting reviews for
"non-commercial" resources, chiefly sophisticated web resources
available for free on the open net. The take-up by would-be reviewers
is statistically indistinguishable from zero. So nobody gets a "free
book" and nobody at all gets to read a review of that resource.
My point is only that the social embeddedness of the current system is
intricate and has many benefits as well as many costs.
jo'd
--
Associate Professor, Classical Studies, Duke University
Duke Collaboratory for Classics Computing
Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies
Duke Data Bank of Documentary Papyri
www.duke.edu/~jds15
