Hope's Centre-Table

Powerset has been working on a search engine that incorporates natural language and semantic web technologies. They’ve just released their first product which is used to search Wikipedia. According to their blog:
“Instead of being limited to keywords, Powerset allows you to enter keywords, phrases, or questions. Instead of just showing you a list of blue links, Powerset gives you more accurate search results, often answering questions directly, and aggregates information from across multiple articles. Finally, instead of leaving you at the search page, Powerset’s technology follows you into enhanced Wikipedia articles, giving you a better way to digest and navigate content quickly. This post serves as a jumping-off point for all of the key information about the launch.”
So, if you often search Wikipedia. or if you often use Google to search but end up at Wikipedia, you might want to try Powerset instead. Rumors are that Google will be trying to catch up soon…
http://www.powerset.com/

Students at Harvard have decided not to wait for an ‘official’ open repository for undergraduate theses. A group of students calling themselves the Harvard College Free Culture have set up a repository for undergraduate honors and senior theses. The site let’s student upload their own work, and search or browse the collection.

Welcome to the Harvard College Thesis Repository – Harvard College Thesis Repository

Tech info: This site is running EPrints 3.0 (Beetroot) [Born on 2007-01-23].EPrints is free software developed at the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, England.

The Internet Archive has been building a library since 1996. Many know it as the home of the “wayback machine” a tool that lets you search for older versions of web pages, including those that may no longer exist. For example, if you search on http;//www.uvm.edu you can find samples of UVM’s home page going back to 1996.
More recently I revisited the site to look at their text collections. These have grown extensively. They now include text from American Libraries, Canadian Libraries, the Gutenberg Collection, the Biodiversity Library, and a Children’s Library, along with many others, some 383,875 texts and growing.
The texts themselves come in a variety of formats, all searchable. You can view them as PDFs, HTML, plain TXT, and even as flip books, i.e. versions that show you an image of the books pages. When you click it “turns” the page so you can proceed as you would in a paper-based book. The site also includes video and audio collections, as well as educational materials.
Check it out the text collections at:
http://www.archive.org/details/texts

Google had promised to release its Viewability API to give access to Google Books. The buzz around digital humanists was that this wold be a wonderful tool allowing access to the content of the books. Think of the fun! Instead, here’s the scoop from their site. Looks like Google is defining “universally accessible and useful” in terms of books as objects, not books as textual content. How boring, how sad, what a lost opportunity.
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http://code.google.com/apis/books/
What are the Google Book Search APIs?
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. To help make the information we’ve organized in Google Book Search more useful, we provide several different ways to learn about Google’s books and link to them.
Viewability API – Dynamic Links
The Google Book Search Book Viewability API enables developers to:
* Link to Books in Google Book Search using ISBNs, LCCNs, and OCLC numbers
* Know whether Google Book Search has a specific title and what the viewability of that title is
* Generate links to a thumbnail of the cover of a book
* Generate links to an informational page about a book
* Generate links to a preview of a book
Static Links to Google Book Search
Google Book Search provides a standard linking format that allows developers to link to books using ISBNs, LCCNs, and OCLC numbers.

UVM’s annual staff conference.
Here’s the ppt for the session “

”
Here are some of the sites we may have visited:
Google Docs

This year’s HASTAC conference adds a new twist: video.
HASTAC is “the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory. A consortium of over 70 public and private research institutes across the human and computer sciences.” This year’s conference has an interesting addition to their Call for Proposals:

“In addition to filling out an application, participants will be required to provide a URL for their project and/or make a two minute video of their proposal, upload it to YouTube and tag the YouTube video with “HASTAC2008.”

They’re not the only ones thinking about YouTube as a scholarly tool. The Chronicle of Higher Education’s article “Thanks to YouTube, Professors Are Finding New Audiences,” reports that “public intellectualism” is alive and well. Apparently over 100,000 people have viewed some scholars’ lectures there.

As might be expected, the blogoshpere is abuzz with responses to the NEA report on reading. Among those who have made sensible comments are (of course!) Matt Kirschenbaum writing to the Chronicle, with also-to-be-expected knee-jerk reactions to same.
Gross oversimplification:
NEA: reading is in decline because people are buying/reading fewer books, or in the idealized image: people, especially younger people, are not curling up with an absorbing book. One of the major problems is that they are going online.
Response: there are and have been many forms of reading. “Going online” can mean anything, including reading absorbingly or immersively. The report is flawed because it 1) does not differentiate between the media (book/screen) and 2) does not define reading as anything more than a single experience: linear absorption reading versus scanning, searching, skimming, rereading, etc.
Update: good discussion on the topic at if:book (A Project for the Institute of the Future of the Book).