behind AotW

A digital history grail, anyway.

Yale Computer Science major Sam Strasser has started blogging about his Senior project at Visualize History.

Visualize History will attack the general problem by presenting that multi-dimensional story in multiple dimensions. For example, many key events are directly linked to a specific geographic location and all are linked to a specific time or time period. The application will therefore provide a way to navigate through both time and space. However, the logical relationships are just as important as the temporal or spatial ones, and the application will also provide a way to navigate from an event to other related events.

I’ll be very interested to see how this goes.  I expect he’ll find the deeper he goes, the bigger it gets!

In an opinion piece today, David Caraviello (nascar.com) uses a battle analogy talking about cars not finishing races in the Chase to the Nextel Cup:

… This isn’t racing. This is an automotive Antietam, a three-week wave of motorsports mayhem that’s turned NASCAR’s premier championship into a simple battle of attrition. Drivers, cars, and hopes — both of race wins and championships — all emerge battered in a cycle of aggression and impatience that’s repeated itself from Dover to Kansas City to Talladega, and shows no sign of slowing down …

(Chris Graythen/Getty - speedtv)

Automotive Antietam. Yup.

This may be the most trivial battle reference I’ve seen, but, on the other hand we do love blood and gore in sport, so maybe it applies. What? No blood? No gore?

Poetic license?

Documenting the upmty-ump trillionth blog–created by Ms. Myrna Hummel (observing on stale pancake mix), noting the blog-prominence of cats, and worrying about an approaching critical-mass-of-blogs crisis, cartoonist Richard Thompson has nailed it.

As a garrulous drone I can personally validate the accuracy of both his analysis and the technically stunning blog map, seen here.

The illustration and accompanying text are in today’s Washington Post in Richard’s Poor Almanack (pg. C3), and will be online soon, I would think, at the WaPo.com comics page.

Unless you’re a certain kind of geek, you may not have heard much about Open Access (OA), but it’s coming on strong. The core idea is to make the products of research more widely available by reducing the barriers of cost and limited access.

I think the case for OA is strongest for ‘peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly research’, particularly that which is publicly funded, but there’s far wider application, of course.

theme/logo: Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain

I bring this up because Ross Scaife points today to an OA manifesto of sorts from AA Adams. It includes this stunningly simple and powerful nugget:

… academics should be confronting the responsibilities that go with their cherished and fought-for freedoms. That responsibility is to disseminate one’s work as widely as possible, to hold it up for criticism and to allow others to build on it. To do so demands that we hold Open Access to our articles as a categorical imperative and not allow the tail of academic publishing to wag the dog of academic communication.

I suspect the likeliest proponents of OA are folks who aren’t expecting to make any real money publishing their work for-profit and/or those who believe in that whole ’standing on the shoulders of giants’ thing.

As someone with a non-commercial interest in History, I’m very fond of the idea. I license my own work (on AotW and this blog) accordingly, feeble though it may be.

Most academic presses, professional journal publishers, and copyright/control freaks are not going for this at all, however. Even as evangelist Peter Suber (blog: OA News) reminds that

OA is a kind of access, not a kind of business model, license, or content.

How do you feel about OA?

Teacher Mike started a new blog Throwing Down the Gauntlet in July. I just picked up on him when Google Blog Search pointed me to his new post about the Antietam anniversary. Laurie already covers him, so I don’t know why I’m so late to the party …

Recent blog illustration (by Mike)

He notes specialization in Evander Law and the 4th Alabama Infantry, with a book in his future. He’s covered a lot of ground in the last couple of months. I’ve got some catching up to do.

Best blogging wishes, Mike.