If:book alerts the"scholars in the humanities, film and media studies especially" to check out SciVee - which"moves science beyond the printed word and lecture theater". In essence, a researcher can upload both the paper and a video/annotated presentation of the research. The video, they suggest, should be"as if you were presenting in front of a live audience possibly using PowerPoint slides as a teleprompter to guide you."

Best to go and see Eric Scheeff and Philip Bourne's Structural Evolution of the Protein Kinase–Like Superfamily. On the left menu, you can jump to places in the video, read relevant selection from the paper etc. On the right hand, you can simply read the whole paper. Through the site, a researcher can publish any"publications from the PLoS (Public Library of Science) ... PLoS publications are open access so the full text of the paper is available for free and unrestricted access." SciVee doesn't accept any non-Open Access papers.

While I am enthusiastic about the ability to virtually present one's paper - AHA should really pay attention here - I don't think that the Humanities academy in the US is very receptive to the idea of public presentation/re-presentation of published papers. Not to mention that the commitment to Open Access itself is quite spotty - the various history journals listed at the Directory of Open Access Journals are either based outside of the US or have intermittent publishing history. Please see Linda Hutcheon's What Open Access Could Mean for the Humanities for a good overview of issues involved.

Still, until we decide that open access digital publishing should be an essential part of our scholarly apparatus and assessment, we can use technologies like SciVee to at least expand that staid conference model.

It would be a fairly simple exercise - with the built-in usage of Instant Messaging and comment features -to collaborate, workshop or conference together on a topic and theme with colleagues around the world. Perhaps even a necessary exercise.

Sherman Jay Dorn - 8/20/2007

At least for now, it might be best to thinking of these technologies as supplementing conference sessions or enabling feedback for graduate students and independent scholars in far-flung places, or in fields where meetings only occur every few years. But there are some cool technologies already:

1. Text interactivity at the paragraph level: The Institute for the Future of the Book (http://www.futureofthebook.org/) and the WordPress theme they've developed (http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2007/07/commentpress_10.html); and Jack Slocum's paragraph-level AJAX comment system that was the inspiration for it (http://www.jackslocum.com/blog/2006/10/09/my-wordpress-comments-system-built-with-yahoo-ui-and-yahooext/).

2. In-frame audio and video recording platforms that do not require anything other than Flash and a mic/webcam: Yackpack (http://www.yackpack.com), Vaestro (http://vaestro.com/viewforum-68), and Springdoo (http://www.springdoo.com, this one for video).

3. Video that people can upload and is transformed into easily-played screens (Youtube) and that people can even tag and comment on (Viddler, http://www.viddler.com). Slideshare (http://www.slideshare.net) also has a way to synchronize slides with video (http://www.slideshare.net/jboutelle/slidecasting-101/).

4. While it's had some technical problems this week, Skype still shows promise of a voice-over-IP service that can connect people up in real-time, either audio-only or also with video (with a webcam). While the image I've attached is focused on asynchronous interaction, there are teleconferencing systems (Zoho Meeting and Yugma) that play well with Skype.