ePublishing in the Scholarly Community, a conference at McGill University looking at e-publishing, e-scholarship, and scholarly communication.
Open Journal Systems “is a journal management and publishing system that has been developed by the Public Knowledge Project through its federally funded efforts [Canadian] to expand and improve access to research.” They’re referring to the refereed publishing process.
Digital Culture Books, University of Michigan–free online; for sale hardcopies.
On Open Access Publishing blog post by Kathleen Fitzpatrick. “The open access movement in contemporary scholarship began in large part with the sciences, as a response to the predatory practices of certain commercial journal publishers. ”
Institute for the Future of the Book investigates the evolution of intellectual discourse as it shifts from printed pages to networked screens. Media Commons is among the projects subsumed under Future of the Book. Looks at networks of scholarship, on interactive, linked communities of discourse.
A few weeks ago, I officially advanced to candidacy in American history at George Mason University, and I took my first trip as an ABD to the Library of Virginia in Richmond, Virginia, for research in the business records of Tredegar Iron Works. Over one hundred years of ledgers, accounts, patents, letters, advertisements—the paper evidence of corporate structure and process—are housed in 1,345 boxes, 490 volumes, seven oversize boxes (containing 93 oversize folders and 1,000 drawings), six oversize map case drawers, and one rolled tube. The records are not digitized, and a visualization of their sequencing would appear as a dense tangle of obfuscated relationships scattered across eight organizational series. These records are the core primary source material for my dissertation on nineteenth century southern industrial development.
I went to the archives equipped: a Canon digital camera with flip-and-twist LCD screen; a table-top tripod for hands-free stability, image consistency, and document management; spare batteries in a charger; two 4GB memory cards; and a laptop. I photographed hundreds of documents, answered questions from five other researchers about the pluses and minuses of the equipment, and became an exemplary object for a middle school library tour.
It’s not hard to point-and-shoot. But how does the researcher begin to sort through it all, to prioritize primary sources, then to branch out to other archives to shape to a coherent narrative? And what is the shape of that narrative? Digital technologies add the question, “What is the format, the medium of the narrative? What is the delivery system?” read more…
In The Visible Hand, Alfred Chandler gives us a model of the rise of the modern business enterprise in the United States—a model constructed on technological determinism, propelled by the market, and creating a new agency: that of middle managers who oversaw production, distribution, communication, and all the various functions of the large corporation. read more…
Every time the gold standard becomes a topic of discussion in a history class, my heart moves into doubletime, I speed read beyond paragraphs on Keynesian economics into socio-political-cultural text, and I hide under the desk to avoid having to speak. It’s crowded under there. I join a rather sizable group of historians and students of history with little or no background in economics, business, or finance. read more…
There’s no dearth of financial news, analysis, and restrospective this week, calendared as the one-year anniversary of the financial crisis.
A little satirical side trip away from this week’s assigned reading, Lords of Finance—real blog post to follow. Of course, it’s not actually Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, but Will Forte doing the opening skit, Bank Stress Test on Saturday Night Live last May.
(Five-and-a-half minute clip, original air date May 2009, posted on Hulu, accessed September 12, 2009).
Opposed by anti-chartists as anti-republican bastions of privilege and exclusion, advocated by supporters as associations that created economic opportunity and equality, the early business corporation in America “faithfully reflected the society that gave it form,” according to Pauline Maier. Ideological conflicts of the American Revolution—decisions about where power would reside, about regulation and control influenced the political and legal evolution of corporate structures. read more…
