I’m having a huge amount of fun teaching a class at the Harvard Graduate School of Design with my friend Jeffrey Schnapp on the history, present, and future of libraries, called Bibliotheca. The students are fantastic: twenty or so, mostly studying design and architecture, though there are graduate students in other fields. We’re holding the … Read more
It is our great good fortune at the Berkman Center that Urs Gasser has returned, on a full-time basis, to be our new executive director. I can’t think of anyone better positioned to move us forward in our second decade. Urs has been a longtime fellow of the Center, but most recently has been living … Read more
This morning, at our 10th Anniversary celebration, we are talking about the future of politics and the Net. The notes I’ve prepared with my colleagues in advance of the session are here, on the conference wiki; have at them!) Before we start the real-space conversation, a quick pause to introduce a new project, called Publius. … Read more
I’ve got the great pleasure of co-teaching with David Weinberger this semester. It’s his triumphant return to the classroom after a few decades of taking time off from formal university teaching. The core inquiry of the course is to explore whether or not the web is in fact “different” from that which came before. Then, … Read more
For the past few years, Urs Gasser and I have been working on a book project together about a phenomenon that we have become obsessed with: how some young people, including our kids, use technologies in ways that are different that what we’ve seen before. The book is called Born Digital (Amazon seems not yet … Read more
There’s enormous promise in the Open Library project, which we’re hearing about today at Berkman’s lunch event from Aaron Swartz. The idea is wonderfully simple: to create a single web page per book. That web page can aggregate lots of data and metadata about each book. In turn, the database can be structured to indicate … Read more
During our weekly fellows’ discussion at the Berkman Center, the conversation turned to a series of issues related to information quality. (This turn of events is not surprising, given who was in the room.) Wikipedia, not surprisingly, cropped up as a topic early and often. One of the examples (good, bad, indifferent?) that David Weinberger … Read more