Gideon Burton's Blog

Creativity and New Media Mormonism

I presented a speech, "Creativity and New Media Mormonism" at the annual meeting of the Association for Mormon Letters on February 28, 2009 at Utah Valley University. Below find links both to the PDF version of the written speech and to a recording of it. In the audio version I excerpt a symphony composed by my father, Rulon T. Burton. The complete symphony is included as the last 9 minutes of the 30 minute recording. If you like the music, send a compliment to the composer (rulonburton AT gmail.com) or to the sound engineer, Perry (introspectiveafrika AT gmail.com).

Download Burton-AML2009 (PDF)

Download Creativity and New Media Mormonism (audio, 40mb)

Mormon Blogs - Sampling an Emerging Literary Genre

An emerging (and exciting) mode of Mormon literary expression is blog writing. I'm sure this is true of many other cultures, and I'm also sure that the digital divide has restricted many Latter-day Saints from engaging in this new mode of personal expression, but a definite flowering has taken place. Mormon lives are opening up as never before, revealing breadths and depths.

The Coming Change in Humanities Publishing (1): Introducing the Issues

I offer a series of posts in which I will lay out my understanding of the radical changes that academic publishing is undergoing in general and within the Humanities in particular. This both continues and expands my prior posts and presentations on the Open Access movement. I'll take up each of the following in separate posts--inviting comments from any interested:

1. Introducing the Issues
2. Problems with Conventional Publishing in the Humanities
3. Opportunities with Electronic Publishing
4. Defining Electronic Publishing
5. Type 1: Electronic Publication of Conventional Scholarship
6. Type 2: Open Access Publishing
7. Type 3: The Online Archive
8. Type 4: "Born Digital" Publications
9. Evaluation of Electronic Publications: Peer Review
10. Evaluation of Electronic Publications: Promotion and Tenure

Open Access meets Open Teaching in the Institutional Repository

At a presentation on Open Access to the Academic Vice President's Council at BYU last week we discussed changes in academic publishing and proposed moving toward a Open Access policy for this university comparable to Harvard's.

A key component of the Open Access movement is the rise of institutional and disciplinary repositories. While these are archives, their role will not be purely archival. A repository becomes a de facto publishing platform, and the publishing it will do will not be limited to republishing copies of scholarly articles that have first appeared elsewhere. An institutional repository will be a place where faculty can deposit their teaching materials. Open Access meets Open Teaching.