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The Economist:

HOW much would you pay for an annual subscription to Small Ruminant Research, Queueing Systems or Headache? University librarians pay rather a lot. In Britain, 65% of the money spent on content in academic libraries goes on journals, up from a little more than half ten years ago. With budgets tight, librarians are trying to resist price increases. But Derk Haank, the chief executive of Springer, a big publisher, is firm: “We have to make a living as well.”

And what a living it is. Academic journals generally get their articles for nothing and may pay little to editors and peer reviewers. They sell to the very universities that provide that cheap labour. As other media falter, academic publishers have soared. Elsevier, the biggest publisher of journals with almost 2,000 titles, cruised through the recession. Last year it made £724m ($1.1 billion) on revenues of £2 billion—an operating-profit margin of 36%.

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Mark Sample:

The promise of the digital is not in the way it allows us to ask new questions because of digital tools or because of new methodologies made possible by those tools. The promise is in the way the digital reshapes the representation, sharing, and discussion of knowledge. We are no longer bound by the physical demands of printed books and paper journals, no longer constrained by production costs and distribution friction, no longer hampered by a top-down and unsustainable business model. And we should no longer be content to make our work public achingly slowly along ingrained routes, authors and readers alike delayed by innumerable gateways limiting knowledge production and sharing.

Compare this with Stephen Ramsay’s argument about building in the humanities and William Thomas’ post on cyberargument in digital humanities.

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Marco Arment:

From a personal perspective, I appreciate great writing, but I’ve become frustrated with the quick-consumption nature of many devoted blog readers. Authors are encouraged to cater to drive-by visitors hurrying through their feed readers by producing lightweight content for quick skimming. There’s no time to sit and read anything when you’re going through 500 feed items while responding to email, chatting, and watching bad YouTube videos. As a result, popular blogs are now full of useless “list posts” with no substance or value. Well-written content is out there, and we do have opportunities every day to read it — just not when we’re in information-skimming, speed-overload mode.

Amen.

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Kathleen Fitzpatrick:

The state of things in digital humanities today rests in that creative tension, between those who’ve been in the field for a long time and those who are coming to it today, between disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, between making and interpreting, between the field’s history and its future. Scholarly work across the humanities, as in all academic fields, is increasingly being done digitally. The particular contribution of the digital humanities, however, lies in its exploration of the difference that the digital can make to the kinds of work that we do, as well as to the ways that we communicate with one another. These new modes of scholarship and communication will best flourish if they, like the digital humanities, are allowed to remain plural.

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Don Murray:

Each time I sit down to write I don’t know if I can do it. The flow of writing is always a surprise and a challenge. Click the computer on and I am 17 again, wanting to write and not knowing if I can.

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Frank Chimero:

Writing is chasing a question—an inquiry of the mind. Forward is better than every direction at once. It’s not really writing until you feel something; until you choke up at a thought, until you start fidgeting in your seat in excitement, until you feel the twinge of pain that happens when a thorn is pulled out of your side. Go back. Delete everything before you started fidgeting or crying or deflating like a balloon. Then, write some more. Go write.

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John Houghton:

The costs and benefits associated with alternative scholarly publishing models demonstrate that research and research communication are major activities and the costs involved are substantial. Our preliminary analysis of the potential benefits of more open access to research findings suggests that returns to research are also substantial and that different scholarly publishing models might make a material difference to the returns realised as well as the costs faced. It seems likely from this preliminary analysis that more open access could have substantial net benefits in the longer term and, while net benefits may be lower during a transitional period they would be likely to be positive for both open access journal publishing and self-archiving alternatives.

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Envy Labs has launched an impressive service called Code School designed off their highly useful Rails for Zombies that teaches introductory Ruby on Rails programming. The service combines screencasts, in-browser coding, challenges, and interactive teaching that makes the process of learning code engaging. Paul Stamatiou has a great review of the service.

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Tomorrow, I’ll be blogging here for Day of DH 2011. You can also follow along on Twitter through the hashtag #dayofdh. What is Day of DH, you ask? Well, as Steve Ramsay noted last year, “we do it mainly to demonstrate to other scholarly communities that we have way more fun than they do.”

Some good and timely advice from Seth Godin. Useful as I embark on my new job as a project manager for the William F. Cody Archive, but also applies to life in general.

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