Monday, May 05, 2014

MediaWeek (Vol 7, No 18): Metadata Harvesting, Death of the Novel, Ed Innovations Conference + more

This weeks selection on FlipBoard

A presentation on slideshare.net that describes how to take metadata from HathiTrust and Pubmed:
This presentation will describe Cornell University Library efforts to provide an "afterlife" to The Cornell Veterinarian by leveraging a number of disparate initiatives and metadata sources. While attempting to build article level linking to full-text in HathiTrust (functionality currently unavailable), limitations in the metadata captured during the scanning process were uncovered. The speaker will delineate these metadata findings and provide strategies (some scalable, others highly labor intensive) for gathering the necessary metadata for creating direct links to articles found in HathiTrust. 



A dispatch in Inside HigherEd from the Education Innovations Summit where impatience may be brewing:
“At a national level, there is no evidence that educational technology has reduced the cost of education yet or improved the efficacy of education,” said Brandon Busteed, executive director of Gallup Education. “And that’s just as true as it gets. Maybe there will be some day, but that’s the question: How much longer do we think it will take before we can detect movement on the national needle?”
During the summit’s first two days, speakers identified well-known issues such as the rising cost of higher education, stagnant graduation and retention rates, and stubborn levels of unemployment among recent graduates. The proffered solution, in many cases, was a renewed promise of the disruptive powers of technology -- often wrapped in a sales pitch.
“Every one of these companies has -- at least most of them -- some story of a school or a classroom or a student or whatever that they’ve made some kind of impact on, either a qualitative story or some real data on learning improvement,” Busteed said. “You would think that with hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe billions now, that’s been plowed into ed-tech investments ... and all the years and all the efforts of all these companies to really move the needle, we ought to see some national-level movement in those indicators.”

Will Self thinks the novel is dead and it's not coming back to life. (Guardian)
My canary is a perceptive songbird – he immediately ceased his own cheeping, except to chirrup: I see what you mean. The literary novel as an art work and a narrative art form central to our culture is indeed dying before our eyes. Let me refine my terms: I do not mean narrative prose fiction tout court is dying – the kidult boywizardsroman and the soft sadomasochistic porn fantasy are clearly in rude good health. And nor do I mean that serious novels will either cease to be written or read. But what is already no longer the case is the situation that obtained when I was a young man. In the early 1980s, and I would argue throughout the second half of the last century, the literary novel was perceived to be the prince of art forms, the cultural capstone and the apogee of creative endeavour. The capability words have when arranged sequentially to both mimic the free flow of human thought and investigate the physical expressions and interactions of thinking subjects; the way they may be shaped into a believable simulacrum of either the commonsensical world, or any number of invented ones; and the capability of the extended prose form itself, which, unlike any other art form, is able to enact self-analysis, to describe other aesthetic modes and even mimic them. All this led to a general acknowledgment: the novel was the true Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk.
From twitter this week:
News Corp to buy Torstar's romance publisher Harlequin Amazing this deal hadn't been done yrs ago.
With free web courses, Wharton seeks edge in traditional programs
Sad Ending to Ladies’ Home Journal’s Era

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