News about projects of the Still Water lab at the University of Maine
Demand for professionals who can manage collections of digital heritage and data continues to climb rapidly as related job postings rose by 130% in 2022, according to an analysis by UMaine’s Digital Curation program. This is a dramatic surge compared to the 61% increase over the pandemic years between 2019 and 2021.
Tags: digital curation, economics, study
NFTs and TikTok, two of the biggest digital trends in recent years, came under fire in 2022. Research by Still Water researchers helped to explain their advantages and vulnerabilities in over a dozen venues, including publications from Wired to Forbes and presentations from London to Shanghai. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: blockchain, network, New Media, presentation, preservation, press, publication, social media, Still Water, variable media
Disinformation. Tech monopolies. Surveillance capitalism. For all its benefits, our current Internet is rife with vulnerabilities that can be exploited by the powerful and lead to an erosion of trust among the rest of us. The latest of UMaine’s Digital Curation teleconferences asks whether changes to the fundamental dynamic of the web might help us engineer a more healthy and equitable digital society.
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Tags: blockchain, data, digital curation, network, presentation, privacy, sharing
A three-year analysis of jobs advertised on Twitter suggests that the pandemic increased demand for digital curation professionals, which has grown by almost two-thirds since 2019. Despite the maturity of the field–UMaine’s Digital Curation graduate program was launched in 2021–there still appears to be no consensus on what to call these positions, whose titles have ranged from the prosaic (Digital Archivist) to the esoteric (Emerging Data Practices Librarian).
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Tags: digital curation, economics, study
NFTs hold out the promise of democratizing art by letting digital creators sell their works directly to collectors. But does the reality hold up to the hype?
Tags: art, economics, network, New Media, presentation, press
Thursday August 12th a New Media teaching assistant and professor present Inclusive Techniques for Teaching Code to make programming more attractive to women, minorities, and others who have been underrepresented in the field. The presentation is part of the CS Summer of Fun organized by Project Login and Code.org’s CS Summer Institute for high school teachers in the US northeast.
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Tags: code, diversity, education, gender, inclusion, intermedia, New Media, presentation, race, University of Maine
UMaine’s Digital Curation program is thrilled to host a free public webinar with “free-range archivist” Jason Scott on Wednesday 5 May at 2pm EDT as part of its regular teleconference series. Anyone interested in attending can register for free. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: class, digital curation, presentation, preservation, variable media
News stories in the Bangor Daily News and the Portland CBS station profiled New Media seniors and their creative applications designed to help people cope with COVID-19.
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Tags: Android, app, arduino, Augmented Reality, award, capstone, class, COVID19, education, hardware, iPad, New Media, presentation, press, software, student, undergraduate, University of Maine
Curators hoping to augment their collections with interactive exhibits often forget that today’s visitors walk in the door with powerful digital interfaces already sitting in their pockets. For the 2020 Maine Archives and Museums conference on October 8th, Still Water Co-director Jon Ippolito offers a workshop that walks participants through the creation of a cross-platform smartphone app to connect visitors in person or over the Internet.
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Tags: 3D, Android, app, Augmented Reality, digital curation, education, iPad, iPhone, mobility, museum, New Media, presentation, software, Still Water, virtual reality
Is the US government right to outlaw TikTok because it might share data with a foreign power, or is the security threat overstated? News outlets interviewed Still Water faculty to get a different take on a proposed ban on the popular social media app.
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Tags: Android, app, Asia, defect, iPhone, New Media, politics, press, sharing, social media, software, Still Water