TidBITS Publisher Awarded Fellowship

TidBITS Publisher Awarded Fellowship — Cornell University today awarded TidBITS Publisher Adam C. Engst a fellowship in the university’s interdisciplinary Information Science program. Engst’s mission, along with continuing his long-standing work on TidBITS and innovative experiments like PayBITS, will be to explore past and future trends in electronic publishing, looking at the many different ways individuals and organizations publish. He will be giving guest lectures in a number of courses and will be working with graduate and advanced undergraduate students to create a variety of electronic publications throughout the university. “There’s no one ‘right’ way to publish electronically,” Engst said. “For some situations, a moderated mailing list with Web archives or a shared wiki is what’s needed. For others an archived weblog is the perfect snapshot of a point in time, something I’ll be examining in association with Cornell’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, which has amassed numerous student scrapbooks from years past.”

<http://www.cis.cornell.edu/infoscience/>
<http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/>

The move is widely seen as yet another salvo in the rivalry between Cornell and Harvard University. Harvard recently gave software developer Dave Winer a fellowship at the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society to, as CNET’s Paul Festa wrote in an interview with Winer, “instruct Harvard students and faculty in the art of posting daily dispatches to the Web.” Cornell’s Charlie Fay, associate provost for Research Administration, said “This is how universities interact. First we beat Harvard in the ECAC hockey championships in overtime, and now, with Adam Engst, we’ve found someone who has been pushing the boundaries of electronic publishing longer than anyone else – nearly 14 years. Plus, he’s a Cornell alum and did his early work as a student at Cornell in the late 1980s.” Engst’s undergraduate degree was in Hypertextual Fiction, which he developed while in Cornell’s College Scholar program and while majoring in Classics. [GD]

<http://news.com.com/2008-1082-985714.html>
<http://www.ecachockey.org/Page_for_Men/ championship/Cornell_Wins_ECAC_ Championship_with_3-2_Overtime_Victory_ over_Harvard>