Jeffrey T. Schnapp

February 4, 2015.

Harvard cultural historian and media theorist Jeffrey T. Schnapp (VC'75), Co-director of the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society and founding Faculty Director of the Harvard Graduate School of Design's knowledge design studio metaLAB, talks about his new book, co-authored with Matthew Battles, entitled The Library Beyond the Book (Harvard, 2014), as well as about the Library Test Kitchen and experiments in library interfaces for the digital age.  

"With textbook readers and digital downloads proliferating, it is easy to imagine a time when printed books will vanish. Such forecasts miss the mark, argue Jeffrey Schnapp and Matthew Battles. Future bookshelves will not be wholly virtual, and libraries will thrive, although in a variety of new social, cultural, and architectural forms. Schnapp and Battles combine deep study of the library's history with a record of institutional and technical innovation at metaLAB, a research group at the forefront of the digital humanities. They gather these currents in The Library Beyond the Book, exploring what libraries have been in the past to speculate on what they will become: hybrid places that intermingle books and ebooks, analog and digital formats, paper and pixels."

56.34 minutes.

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Thomas Warger

December 5, 2012.

Thomas A. Warger, lead author of the Edutech Report, former CIO (Bryn Mawr), and a leading consultant in academic information systems, talks about the changing landscape of technology-enhanced learning at American liberal arts colleges, and the path toward developing more innovative and effective learning and research environments. 

52:12 min.

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John Long

November 28, 2012.

John Long, Professor of Biology and Cognitive Science at Vassar College, discusses his book Darwin's Devices: What Evolving Robots Can Teach Us About the History of Life and the Future of Technology, chosen by the New Scientist as one of the top five books published in the spring of 2012.

“Though [Long] is a gifted storyteller, this is no simple fish tale. The engineering draw of robots is clear, but Long also emphasises the value for science, showing how robots can serve as physical models of biological organisms; evolving biorobots can shed light on why organisms evolved as they did; and robot interaction can illustrate coevolutionary dynamics, as between predators and prey…. With Darwin’s Devices, Long reminds us that science is always an adventure, and that new technology only drives us faster and further into the unknown.” -- Josh Bongard in the New Scientist.

61:59 min.

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