That last item was the longest in a long time. This will be the shortest:

Careful punctuation is worth more than you think

Thanks to JMcNair and Mark Hamilton for pointers to the story.

11:27:35 PM  #  

and from disappearing footnotes to "read-write" scholarship

[Original essay-length version here]

On the closing day of last week's Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication convention, I was part of a panel discussion of digital archives -- a discussion that combined a "glass half-empty" and "glass half-full" approach. The official title was quite a mouthful itself: "The Ethereal Electronic Archive: The Life and Death of Information in the Electronic Age."

On the "half-full"--or at least "being filled"-- side, I expressed some optimism about the National Digital Newspaper Program, an effort to get a huge number of historic newspapers scanned and made available on the Web at no charge through the Library of Congress and state libraries. The digital challenges to traditional scholarship were the topic of a report on ongoing research by University of Iowa professors Daniela Dimitrova and Michael Bugeja.

As noted above, the first version of this item was very long for a blog post, so I've moved it to what my blogging software calls a "stories" item, with many more links, and I may update it further someday: http://www.stepno.com/oldblog/stories/2006/08/09/digitalArchives.html

(And, yes, moving it like this is yet another example of the hazards of footnoting Web documents.)

8:59:26 PM  #