Episode #118 – Predicting the Past – 2015 Year in Review

Digital Campus

In the 2015 installment of the Digital Campus Year in Review podcast, regulars Dan Cohen, Amanda French, Tom Scheinfeldt, and Stephen Robertson look back at 2015 and predict the big news of 2016. Cheers went out to the NEH/Mellon Humanities Open Book Program, Congress (c.1965), the retirement of James Billington as Librarian of Congress, and the US Court of Appeals decision in favor of Google Books. Eliciting jeers were the Ad-blocker controversy, the behavior of Proquest (with Amanda dissenting), and the news that Jennifer Howard has left the higher education beat.

Much of what the group predicted for 2015 came to pass, to some extent: universities were hacked; SHARE developed; the push to learn to code continued; and Proquest and Gale moved to provide data mining access to their collections (at considerable additional cost to libraries). And, with the FAA moving to require that drones be registered, Mills’s prediction from 2013 that an Amazon drone will be shot down over Texas looks ever more likely. If you are impressed by those predictions, then in 2016 you should expect the Wu Tang Clan album to leak, Virtual Reality MOOCs to be launched, a digital humanist to win a Macarthur Fellowship, hypothes.is not to take off (or to enjoy the same success as DPLA), and emojis to replace text as our primary form of communication.

Related Links:

• NEH/Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program Grants: http://www.neh.gov/news/press-release/2015-12-17
• The work of the 1965 Congress:
  • The National Historic Preservation Act: http://preservation50.org/about/nhpa-history/
  • The National Endowment for the Arts: https://www.arts.gov/50th
  • The National Endowment for the Humanities: http://50.neh.gov
• The ad blocking controversy explained: http://www.vox.com/2015/9/18/9351759/ad-blocking-controversy
• In defense of Proquest: http://src-online.ca/index.php/src/article/view/226/448
• Why Are Universities Hacked? https://www.lawfareblog.com/why-are-universities-hacked
• SHARE: http://www.share-research.org
• Register Your Drone: https://www.faa.gov/uas/registration/
• Annotating All Knowledge [hypothes.is]: https://hypothes.is/annotating-all-knowledge/

Running time: 59:23

Download the .mp3