Bridging the Gap between Scholarly Editing and Mass Digitization

A hybrid model for online scholarly publishing projects
(This is the edited version of a paper presented at the TEI Conference and Members’ Meeting in Ann Arbor, November 2009. Slides of the original presentation may be found here)

In this essay, I would like to highlight the differences between mass digitization efforts such as Google Books, and small-scale scholarly editing projects, most of which use one of a number of standards developed by the academic text-editing community (for example, the Text Encoding Initiative or TEI).

A new era of plagiarism?

There is a terrific article on the New York Times website on the changed attitudes of today’s students towards plagiarism. It develops a number of points I vaguely hinted at in my earlier post on ‘DIY plagiarism detection.’ The most disquieting observation is that students simply no longer realize that they are plagiarizing another author’s text, or, even more perplexing, that they do not grasp that text is never just nameless ‘copy’ or texte trouvé, but always someone‘s writing. (Even if that someone is an anonymous collective, as in the case of most Wikipedia articles.)

I’m on Day of Digital Humanities 2010!

Today, it’s blogging time for digital humanists all over the globe. I’m happy to participate in “Day of Digital Humanities 2010,” an initiative hosted at the University of Alberta in Canada.