Horizon Report 2010

The Horizon Report: 2010 edition. A collaboration between the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative.
http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2010/

Open Content. 1 yr or less to adoption. The report discusses large-scale initiatives. What about the vast number of smaller digital imaging projects? While having online visual access preserves this material and helps researchers decide whether to make a special trip to a distant collection, the multitude of metadata schema, and our current inability to easily search across the various schema and platforms (not to mention all the copyright issues) make discovery and use somewhat serendipitous in our massively diffuse content environment. It seems that many of us who are metadata specialists become familiar with one, or maybe a couple of metadata schema at any given time. Should more of us learn about a wider range of schema types and their application?

Visual Data Analysis. 4-5 yr horizon to adoption. These tools blend statistics, data mining and visualization, allowing us to better understand complex relationships and social processes. The report discusses how these tools have been used nearly exclusively in the hard sciences, but are now being applied to the social sciences and humanities. Fascinating examples: http://www.gapminder.org/