Take a look at this list of free and open textbooks. (Found this page a couple of clicks away from a helpful post at Peter Suber’s Open Access News.) Now note the stark imbalance between the number of science textbooks listed here and the number of humanities textbooks. Why is this?

It seems to me like there is a great opportunity here for funders, with potentially an incredible return on investment. Texas alone spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on textbooks like the U.S. History survey. For less than a million dollars a high-quality free and open textbook could be produced, with print on demand producing paper copies where needed and with a slight markup on those printed versions possibly covering ongoing expenses for updating the work.

[More on open source textbooks from Inside Higher Ed today.]

[Creative Commons image credit.]

Every year George Mason University has a 5K race/walk, and the Center for History and New Media always has a good showing. We had 21 participants this year (4 runners, 17 iPhone-and-coffee-wielding walkers), but were edged out by the athletics department for the highest participation rate (no surprise there).

We also like to design t-shirts for the event each year. Generally the designs are Photoshopped movie posters with CHNMers inserted, but this year race chair James Halabuk and designer Jeremy Boggs came up with a nice, simple M*A*S*H substitution.

Beautiful day for a 5K, and great fun to get away from the monitors for an hour.

On the first podcast of our second year of the Digital Campus podcast, we discuss some of the legal constraints and threats that academic content providers and digital tool builders face—namely, an increasingly confusing and nightmarish patchwork of regulations from copyright to patents. We talk about the ways in which we have tried to pursue fair use and new technology without getting sued. In the news roundup we cover the launch of offline Google Docs and Internet safety classes for kids. [Subscribe to this podcast.]

It’s time to subscribe to the blog of CHNM’s Creative Lead, Jeremy Boggs, if you haven’t done so already. Jeremy is ramping up for what promises to be a very important blog series on how to create and execute a digital humanities project, from conception to design to coding to maintenance.

An incredible new piece of art is enlivening the main lab at the Center for History and New Media—a mammoth (5 feet by 7 feet) scrap metal sculpture of the United States. Many thanks to CHNM Project Manager Sheila Brennan’s husband, Ian, for this stunning work of art! (With some witty touches if you look carefully.)

[Yes, we're hiring again. Come join us if this sounds like you!]

The Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University is seeking a postdoctoral fellow to work on a new text-mining initiative supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. ABD candidates are also strongly encouraged to apply. This is a grant-funded, two-year position that is particularly appropriate for someone with interests in computational linguistics, machine learning, or technology and the humanities and social sciences. Specific background and experience is less important than the ability to learn new technical skills quickly. Knowledge of some combination of the following would be particularly helpful: Java, JavaScript, MySQL, PHP, or object-oriented programming. Ability to work in a team is very important. CHNM (http://chnm.gmu.edu), known for innovative work in digital media, is located in Fairfax, Virginia, 15 miles from Washington, DC, and is accessible by public transportation. Please send a cover letter and resume, including relevant programming projects and experience, to chnm@gmu.edu with subject line “Text Mining.” We will begin considering applications on 5/1/2008 and continue until the position is filled. Applications without a cover letter will not be considered.

Andy Guess of Inside Higher Ed uses the announcement of the National Endowment of the Humanities’ new Office of Digital Humanities to explore the rise of digital humanities in general—the challenges it faces but also the possibilities it brings to academia. A great summary of the state of our field.

The Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the
University of Maryland in College Park is seeking a full time
programmer for at least a year to work on the NEH/JISC funded
Shakespeare’s Quartos project. This exciting digital humanities
initiative, an international collaboration among MITH, the Folger
Shakespeare Library, Oxford University, the British Library, the
Huntington Library, and the Scottish National Library, aims to create
a digital archive of all the extant quartos of Shakespeare’s plays
beginning with Hamlet. The successful candidate will at the minimum
have a bachelor’s degree and be an experienced web programmer familiar
with PHP, JavaScript, MySQL, XML, and XSLT to develop both the user
interface and the database back-end for this interactive archive.
Ideally, the candidate will also have a background in textual
criticism and/or Shakespearean scholarship.

Located in McKeldin Library at the heart of the campus, MITH is the
University of Maryland’s primary intellectual hub for scholars and
practitioners of digital humanities, new media, and cyberculture, as
well as the home of the Electronic Literature Organization, the most
prominent international group devoted to the writing, publishing and
reading of electronic literature. MITH’s house research includes
projects in text mining, tool building, visualization, digital
libraries, electronic publishing, and digital preservation. We
collaborate actively with allied campus units, including the
University Libraries, the College of Information Science, and the
Human Computer Interaction Lab. Situated just outside of Washington
DC, MITH also offers all of the opportunities that come from the
libraries, museums, and cultural institutions of the area.

Salary range, $50,000 - $55,000. To apply, please send a letter of
application, CV, and contact information for three references. Best
consideration by April 9, 2008. Application materials may be sent
electronically to mith@umd.edu or to Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH,
McKeldin Library, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742.
Consideration of applications to begin immediately. Applications from
women and minorities are encouraged.

[thanks, Kari!]

For years on this blog, at conferences, and even in direct conversations with Google employees I have been agitating for an API (application programming interface) for Google Book Search. (For a summary of my thoughts on the matter, see my imaginatively titled post, “Why Google Books Should Have an API.”) With the world’s largest collection of scanned books, I thought such an API would have major implications for doing research in the humanities. And I looked forward to building applications on top of the API, as I had done with my Syllabus Finder.

So why was I disappointed when Google finally released an API for their book scanning project a couple of weeks ago?

My suspicion began with the name of the API itself. Even though the URL for the API is http://code.google.com/apis/books/, suggesting that this is the long-awaited API for the kind of access to Google Books that I’ve been waiting for, the rather prosaic and awkward title of the API suggests otherwise: The Google Book Search Book Viewability API. From the API’s home page:

The Google Book Search Book Viewability API enables developers to:

• Link to Books in Google Book Search using ISBNs, LCCNs, and OCLC numbers
• Know whether Google Book Search has a specific title and what the viewability of that title is
• Generate links to a thumbnail of the cover of a book
• Generate links to an informational page about a book
• Generate links to a preview of a book

These are remarkably modest goals. Certainly the API will be helpful for online library catalogs and other book services (such as LibraryThing) that wish to embed links to Google’s landing pages for books and (when copyright law allows) links to the full texts. The thumbnails of book covers will make OPACs look prettier.

But this API does nothing to advance the kind of digital scholarship I have advocated for in this space. To do that the API would have to provide direct access to the full OCRed text of the books, to provide the ability to mine these texts for patterns and to combine them with other digital tools and corpora. Undoubtedly copyright concerns are part of the story here, hobbling what Google can do. But why not give full access to pre-1923 books through the API?

I’m not hopeful that there are additional Google Book Search APIs coming. If that were the case the URL for the viewability API would be http://code.google.com/apis/books/viewability/. The result is that this API simply seems like a way to drive traffic to Google Books, rather than to help academia or to foster a external community of developers, as other Google APIs have done.