Open Peer Review Process, from Palgrave Macmillan

Palgrave Macmillan is trialling an open peer review process until 7 March. They have a few books available (4 under “Culture and Media”), and where it seems particularly interesting to me is that this is less peer review as “inviting feedback” and thus allowing for works in progress to be further developed. Jason Mittell tried a similar experiment in 2012 for the publication of his book Complex TV, and MediaCommons has of course lots of other texts opened for scholarly review and feedback (including the White Paper on their study of Open Review practices, together with NYU Press) — but still, it’s nice to see an established publisher get on board.

Mapping the correlation of cinema shows with magic shows

Early days (started June ’13) of a mapping project to track the criss-crossing and potential correlation of magic shows with movie shows in 1920s Colorado. Yes, only two entries so far, and just barely learning to use the GIS software… Watch me grow!

–> ArcGIS explorer

Why Colorado, you ask? I do like the mountains, but even more, I like the open-access digitized archive of local historic newspapers, the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection, that has extensive coverage of newspapers up and until 1923 (copyright restrictions for later date, ach!), and which I can access from my home :-).

Digitial Humanities: 2 recent projects

Following on the heels of an engrossing conversation about Digital Humanities at the last HoMer group meeting, in parallel to the last NECS conference in Prague last June — not just the fabulous projects already up and running, such as Richard C. Allen’s Going to the Show (University of North Carolina), but also the promises of Big Data in the field of movie reception (from Jeffrey Klenotic‘s mapping of places of amusement, from the 19th century onwards, to illustrate the conflicts and cooperations between movie houses and vaudeville houses, to the great visualisations proposed by Deb Verhoeven from Deakin University and her team in Australia to track recent changes to global exhibition of films)…

[sorry long sentence]

…come two truly exciting developments for film scholars around the world. Digital humanities at their best.

–> Lantern: from the Media History Digital Library, now a search engine to explore their vast and growing collection of film magazines. Free, easily available, a must for film scholars engaged in understanding reception.

–> PictureGoing: the latest brainchild of web-prolific Luke McKernan (of Bioscope fame), this aims to provide curiosity-seekers and reception scholars alike with “an ongoing survey reproducing testimony of watching films, from the 1890s to the present day”, no less ! Sources added, what, every day since the site went live in early september. You’d be a fool not to subscribe, frankly.

Open-Access research, a promise not yet realized

I find the conclusions of this study rather sad. It doesn’t quite come as a shock, true, but it’s depressing nonetheless to read that

 23% of all the students have made passive use of online forums, but only 13% have taken an active part in any discussions: 23% followed blogs, but only 9% maintained a blog themselves.

What I find particularly damning is what the report calls “a continuing lack of understanding about the nature of open access”:

Generation Y students felt that putting their own work out openly will bring them no positive benefits, and may even have a negative impact. Equally, doctoral students’ understanding of the intellectual property and copyright environment appears to be a source of confusion, rather than an enabler of innovation.

If GenY researchers have not yet embraced web 2.0 and open-content, how long are we going to have to wait for the promise of the free exchange of scholarly thoughts to be realized on a large scale ? The stranglehold of proprietary information goes beyond copyright law — it’s a culture that we, pre-genY teachers, have so far failed to expose, denounce, and obliterate. Young researchers are learning to protect their work for career purposes — whereas they should be learning about the fun of collaborative research. Our fault, really.

a new online film journal

Frames is a new open access online film journal published by the University of St Andrews, with a rich first issue that cuts straight to the core and exemplifies the promise to deal with cutting-edge, unexplored areas of film studies, and explores the impact of new media on film studies. Welcome to the world, Frames !

(h/t Film Studies for Free)