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
>>>
>>
>
--
Simon Mahony
Senior Teaching Fellow
Programme Director MA/MSc Digital Humanities[1]
UCL Centre for Digital Humanities[2]
Department of Information Studies
University College London
Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT
Tel: 020 7679 0092
Fax: 020 7383 0557
[log in to unmask]
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dis/people/simonmahony
[1] www.ucl.ac.uk/dh/courses/mamsc
[2] www.ucl.ac.uk/dh/
|