Here’s what happened when investors using apps like Robinhood began wagering on a pool of unremarkable stocks.
We’ve all been following the story about GameStop, AMC and the Stock Market’s Wild Ride This Week. The story has a nice David and Goliath side where amateur traders stick it to the big Wall Street bullies, but it is also about the random power of internet-enabled crowds.
Gamergate should have armed us against bad actors and bad-faith arguments. It didn’t.
Vox has an important article connecting the storming of the US Capitol with Gamergate, What was Gamergate? The lessons we still haven’t learned. The point is that Gamergate and the storming are the visible symptoms of something deeper. I would go further and connect these with activities that progressives approve of like some of the Anonymous initiatives. For that matter, the recent populist retail investor campaign around stocks like GameStop has similar roots in new forms of organizing and new ironic ideologies.
With millions of fans on social media, gamers have stepped up their game, incorporating luxury, streetwear and even cosplay into their looks.
The New York Times has a nice piece on What Do Gamers Wear? I don’t think I’ve thought much about gamer clothing, but now that we are all in our homes in front of computers for long stretches of time the professional gamer furniture, desk setup, and yes, clothing is something we can learn from. Those of us who teach are all having to learn about how to light up your workspace and record yourself too. Personally, my best purchase has been a pair of Asportuguesas mules that are comfortable and keep my feet warm around the house. They were probably meant to be outdoor shoes in Portugal, but here they work as house slippers. My point, anyway, is that we can learn from professional gamers about comfortable clothing and setups.
How is computerization affecting work and how might AI accelerate change? Erin pointed me to Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell a series of videos that explain things “in a nutshell” produced by Kurzgesagt, a German information design firm. They have a video (see above) on The Rise of Machines that nicely explains why automation is improving productivity while not increasing the number of jobs. If anything, automation driven by AI seems to be polarizing the market for human work into high-end cognitive jobs and low-end service jobs.
But despite data science’s exciting possibilities, plenty of other academics object to it
The Economist has a nice Christmas Special on the Digital humanities – How data analysis can enrich the liberal arts. The article tells a bit of our history (starting with Busa, of course) and gives examples of new work like that of Ted Underwood. The note criticism about how DH may be sucking up all the money or corrupting the humanities, but they also point out how little DH gets from the NEH pot (some $60m out of $16bn) which is hardly evidence of a take over. The truth is, as they note, that the humanities are under attack again and the digital humanities don’t make much of a difference either way. The neighboring fields that I see students moving to are media arts, communication studies and specializations like criminology. Those are the threats, but also sanctuaries for the humanities.
SHAPE is a new collective name for those subjects that help us understand ourselves, others and the human world around us. They provide us with the methods and forms of expression we need to build better, deeper, more colourful and more valuable lives for all.
From an Australian speaker at the INKE conference I learned about SHAPE or Social Sciences, Humanities & The Arts For People & The Economy. This is an initiative of the London School of Economics, the British Academy and the Arts Council of England. It is trying to complement the attention given to STEM fields. I like how they use the word shape in various assets as in:
Gather is a video-calling space that lets multiple people hold separate conversations in parallel, walking in and out of those conversations just as easily as they would in real life.
Kisha introduced me to Gather, a cross between Second Life and Zoom. If you have a Gather account you can create a space – your own little classroom with different gathering spots. People then move around these 8-bit animated spaces and when they are in hearing distance they can video conference. Users can also read posters put up, or documents left around, or watch videos created for a space. It actually looks like a nice type of space for a class to use as an alternative to Zoom.
A peer-reviewed, open resource filling the gap between platform-specific tutorials and disciplinary discourse in digital humanities.
From a list I am on I learned about Visualizing Objects, Places, and Spaces: A Digital Project Handbook. This is a highly modular text book that covers a lot of the basics about project management in the digital humanities. They have a call now for “case studies (research projects) and assignments that showcase archival, spatial, narrative, dimensional, and/or temporal approaches to digital pedagogy and scholarship.” The handbook is edited by Beth Fischer (Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the Williams College Museum of Art) and Hannah Jacobs (Digital Humanities Specialist, Wired! Lab, Duke University), but parts are authored by all sorts of people.
What I like about it is the way they have split up the modules and organized things by the type of project. They also have deadlines which seem to be for new iterations of materials and for completion of different parts. This could prove to be a great resource for teaching project management.
This paper focuses on the fact that AI is predominantly portrayed as white—in colour, ethnicity, or both. We first illustrate the prevalent Whiteness
“The Whiteness of AI” was mentioned in an online panel following The State of AI Ethics report (October 2020) from the Montreal AI Ethics Institute. This article starts from the observation that if you search Google images for “robot” or “AI” you get predominately images of white (or blue) entities. (Go ahead and try it.) From there it moves to the tendency of “White people; and the persistent tendency of members of that group, who dominate the academy in the US and Europe, to refuse to see themselves as racialised or race as a matter of concern at all.” (p. 686)
The paper then proposes three theories about the whiteness of AI to make it strange and to challenge the myth of colour-blindness that many of us in technology related fields live in. Important reading!
Curious about research blogging, but not sure where to start?
Alice Fleerackersand Lupin Battersby of the ScholCommLab have put together a good post on Blogging your research: Tips for getting started. Despite being committed to blogging (this blog has been going since 2003) I must admit that I’m not sure blogging has the impact it once had. Twitter seems to have replaced blogging as a way to quickly share and follow research. Blog platforms, like WordPress have become project news and promotion systems.
What few talk about is how blogging can be a way of journaling for oneself. My blog certainly serves as a form of memory by and for myself. If only I search it (which I often do when I’m looking for information about something I knew but forgot) then it is still useful. Does everything in academia have to be about promotion and public impact?
In this age of fake news we seem to be back in the situation that Socrates and Gorgias sparred about in Plato’s Gorgias. Gorgias makes the point that the orator or, in today’s terms the communications specialist, can be more convincing than the scholar because they know how to “communicate”.
Socrates: Then the case is the same in all the other arts for the orator and his rhetoric: there is no need to know [459c] the truth of the actual matters, but one merely needs to have discovered some device of persuasion which will make one appear to those who do not know to know better than those who know.
Gorgias: Well, and is it not a great convenience, Socrates, to make oneself a match for the professionals by learning just this single art and omitting all the others? (Gorgias 459a)
It certainly feels like today there is a positive distrust of expertise such that the blatant lie, if repeated often enough, can convince those who want to hear the lie. Does communicating about our research have the beneficial effect we hope it does? Or, does it inflate our bubble without touching that of others?
