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The Digital Future



A series of eight discussions hosted by the Library of Congress' John W. Kluge Center, which examine how the digital age is changing the most basic ways information is organized and classified. See the series schedule and archived video segments below.

SERIES SCHEDULE

2004

  • Monday, November 15
    David Weinberger, one of North America's best known experts on "blogging" and coauthor of the bestselling book, "The Cluetrain Manifesto" (2000). Weinberger is also author of "Small pieces, loosely joined: a unified theory of the web" (2002), a frequent commentator on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" and "Here and Now," and has been published in many magazines including Wired and the Harvard Business Review.

  • Monday, December 13
    Brewster Kahle, Digital Librarian, Director and Co-founder of the Internet Archive. Kahle is the person who first developed the idea and tools to archive the Web. He will explain how he did that, and why it's important to our everyday use of the internet. The title of his talk is "Universal Access to Knowledge."

2005

  • Monday, January 24
    Juan Pablo Paz, a quantum physicist from Buenos Aires, currently working at Los Alamos. He will discuss how quantum computing, now in its development stages, will eventually change again the way we collect, store and distribute information.

  • Monday, January 31
    Brian Cantwell Smith, dean of the Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Toronto Smith, the author of "On the Origin of Objects," combines degrees in computer science and philosophy and is an expert on the interdisciplinary convergence brought about by digitization. His talk is titled, "And Is All This Stuff Really Digital After All?"

  • Monday, February 14
    David M. Levy, professor at the Information School of the University of Washington Levy is the author of "Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age," and he will discuss the shift of the experience of reading from the fixed page to movable electrons and the effect that has had on language.

  • Thursday, March 3
    Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society Lessig is the author of "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace" and an expert on the issues of copyright and "copyleft." He is the inventor of the revolutionary concept and application Creative Commons, which invites the right to use material under specific conditions.

  • Monday, March 14
    Edward L. Ayers, dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia Ayers is the author (with Anne S. Rubin) of "The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War" on CD-ROM. Among the questions Ayers will address are the implications for the creation and distribution of knowledge in today's digital environment.

  • Monday, March 28
    Neil Gershenfeld, director of the Center for Bits and Atoms at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Gershenfeld is the author of "When Things Start to Think." His new concept Internet Zero (0) proposes a new infrastructure for the existing Internet that would give an IP address to all electronic devices - from light bulbs to Internet addresses and URLs - and interconnect them directly, thereby eliminating much intermediating code and server technology. His topic is "From the Library of Information to the Library of Things."

Web Resources

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