Saturday, March 10, 2007

Media Commons Lunchtime

The following was a lunchtime meeting where a few of us who are on the MediaCommons editorial board tried to flesh out some ideas as to what we wanted to do. Because I don't blog when I speak, you will see that I simply note what I say in parentheses.


Avi - Basically this is an incredibly ambitious and open project. Let's get some back ground. Media Commons is emergent from Kathleen's work where she wanted a digital scholarly press. There has to do with what it would mean to value digital media and this produces a meeting at USC and it is intended to think of what it would mean to make this press. And the scholarly press is an aspect of something that we would like to design. So, we need to rethink what the press would be. The digital environment may make community and scholar engagement. More of a press as process. This has to reinvigorate discourse and making it more of something about. Also a social network that may take place in this place.

Avi's questions -- what does media common's mean to you? What did you imagine? How does it gel with what you are seeing so far? What sorts of projects should we be engaging in? How do we deal with a digital press and how would we get something that may pass peer review? What are the criteria involved? How do we socially engineer a community? How do we see ourselves involved?

Tara -- Coming out of the meeting last spring and the desire to focus on media is a good idea. The idea is that a shorter thing where the thing that is happening here and a space needs to be build in. We need to think through with a multiple media environment and tis is more a credit toward tenure of a written piece.

Richard -- A couple of different thoughts... let us work toward the new consensus. Let us think about this since I am placing a tenure file up on things that only deal with electronically. This is hard since I need to do all kinds of justification for things why Podcasting is a scholarly endaevor or could be.

I want to build people together and this means that we need to demonstrate a real world purpose and things that we manufacture. Now, we need to think about how these things can contribute to debate.

I would like to max out things that are circulating popular. Let's make this a MySpace presence. In Media Res could be RSSed and in iTunes. Let us circulate and repurpose this. What is it that can get our best minds turning in the work.

How do we get people throwing their ideas out. What does web 5.0 for us? I think it signifies nothing. I do not want to fall prey to the network were it can produce a laboratory from it. We need to look at what does and doesn't work?

Chuck -- The networking idea is good is the idea of promotional work that happens in between blogs and getting a sense of community awareness.

Tara -- you want to connect and do a lot of edge work.

Radhika -- I was also wondering if you would reach out to Steve Jones. Let us think about the issue of the ideas of several things and we need to be in a number of social nets. We need to be there in strategic places and each of us will bring different communities. Academia tends to be an ivory tower but there is an issue of the community. The reason I see this is that I am at Bowling Green and I have an opportunity for a dissemenation grant and we could

Richard -- what becomes interesting if we flip the script. Think about the rush to online teaching and the idea of the idea of revenue models. It does mess with prestige and that aspect. The peer review process is always about prestige and this narrow gate was well defined and this is a thing that happens.

(I mention this issue of the making it valued as a clearinghouse of information, local communities, etc.)

Radhikia -- This is a service and this could become the place on issues of makingit valuable in communities

(I need to see this place where other institutions find value)

Tara -- Haystack would partner on this. Haystack is a consortium for reclaiming the digital humanities from those who were simply data mining. haystack is doing a conference in April at Duke. Last summer when the supercomputing workshop did work at San Diego, Haystack did this.

Richard -- How about something that opens up the process with the scholarly

Radhika -- Are we putting up another process or just the old process? We need to bring something new in here for value.

Avi --- what about the rights of the author? We cannot place people the box for failure.

(I suggest the guild model)

How do we get people to the site?

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