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Dan Cohen Lecture - February 25, 2011
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The Ivory Tower and the Open Web
Dan Cohen shared insights from his new book The Ivory Tower and the Open Web with a standing-room-only audience and a twitter backchannel. His talk description was:
The Web is now over twenty years old, and there is no doubt that the academy has taken advantage of its tremendous potential for disseminating resources and scholarship. But a full accounting of the academic approach to the Web shows that compared to the innovative vernacular forms that have flourished over the past two decades, we have been relatively meek in our use of the medium, often preferring to impose traditional ivory tower genres on the Web rather than import the open web's most successful models. For instance, we would rather digitize the journal we know than explore how blogs and social media might supplement or change our scholarly research and communication. In this talk, Dan explores what might happen if we reversed that flow and more wholeheartedly embraced the genres of the open Web. Event Flyer  |
Friday, February 25, 2011, 10:30 to 11:30 am
Class of '55 Conference Room, Van Pelt Dietrich Library Center
Dan Cohen is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University and the Director of the Center for History and New Media. His research is in European and American intellectual history, the history of science (particularly mathematics), and the intersection of history and computing.
He is co-author (with the late Dr. Roy Rosenzweig) of Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), author of Equations from God: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Faith (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), and has published articles and book chapters on the history of mathematics and religion, the teaching of history, and the future of history in a digital age in journals such as the Journal of American History, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Rethinking History. Dr. Cohen is an inaugural recipient of the American Council of Learned Societies' Digital Innovation Fellowship.
At the Center for History and New Media he has co-directed, among other projects, the September 11 Digital Archive and Echo, and has developed software for scholars, teachers, and students, including the popular Zotero research tool.
He received his bachelor's degree from Princeton, his masters from Harvard, and doctorate from Yale.
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