The kind folks at the Long Room Hub at Trinity College Dublin have put up the video of the “conversation” I participated in on the 6th of March. The event was called Narrative and Technology: Curtis Wong and Geoffrey Rockwell in Conversation. Curtin Wong is now at Microsoft Research, but worked for some time at the Voyager Company back in the days when they were developing some of the most interesting multimedia works.
Category: Media and News
The Digital Humanities and the Revenge of Authority
That has always been my aim, and the content of that aim — a desire for pre-eminence, authority and disciplinary power — is what blogs and the digital humanities stand against.
Stanley Fish in his blog post on The Digital Humanities and the Transcending of Mortality starts by setting himself up as an example of what the digital humanities stands against. We know that his tongue is in his cheek because he prefaces this aim for authority by mentioning David Lodge’s character Morris Zapp “whose ambition, as his last name suggests, is to write about a topic with such force and completeness that no other critic will be able to say a word about it.” It is a lovely move that he returns to at the very end when he reminds us that we are reading a “column, oops, I mean blog.” He can disarm his critics by mocking the authority he really has while using it. That authority comes from, among other things, writing a column/blog in the New York Times. Fish is a slippery Zapp, and he knows it.
Continue reading The Digital Humanities and the Revenge of Authority
What is the purpose of higher education? Live chat, 16 December
I have been invited to join a live chat on What is the purpose of higher education?. This is being organized by the Guardian Higher Education Network. I’ve never done a live chat like this, so it will be interesting to see how it works. The question we will be addressing is one posed by Aidan Byrne in his live blogging of “The Politics of the Univesity”:
Since the 2000s, academic managers and leaders have adopted the discourse of neoliberalism, presented as neutral truth, ‘common sense’ or realism. ‘Choice’ trumps all other ideas. Universities form businesses, conduct marketing, undertake ‘esteem indications’ and surveys. Private income is lionised. Students are encouraged to pursue self-interest: public service is derided. What of the future?
MLA Profession 2011: On the Evaluation of Digital Media as Scholarship
My paper “On the Evaluation of Digital Media as Scholarship” has just been published online in MLA: Profession 2011 (pp. 152-168). The PDF is freely available. The abstract reads,
As more and more scholarship is digital, we need to develop a culture of conversation around the evaluation of digital academic work. We have to be able to evaluate new types of research, like analytic tools and hypermedia fiction, that are difficult to review. The essay surveys common types of digital scholarly work, discusses what evaluators should ask, discusses how digital researchers can document their scholarship, and then discusses the types of conversations hires and evaluators (like chairs) should have and when they should have them. Where there is a conversation around evaluation in a department, both hires and evaluators are more likely to come to consensus as to what is appropriate digital research and how it should be documented.
This is part of a collection put together by Susan Schreibman, Laura Mandell and Stephen Olsen about Evaluating Digital Scholarship. McGann and Bethany Nowviskie, among others, also have papers in this issue of Profession.
Analysis of 250,000 hacker conversations
From Slashdot a story about the text Analysis of 250,000 hacker conversations. A security company Imperva has been analyzing hacker forums to understand trends, how people learn about hacking, and what are popular strategies.
In the Imperva report, Hacker Intelligence Initiative, Monthly Trends Report #5 (PDF) they describe their methodology as “content analysis” (their quotations) but it mostly involves searching for threads and reading. The report has great examples of the types of discussions.
A good example of how simple text analysis can help industry understanding.
Compute/Calcul Canada Works with Humanities
Compute/Calcul Canada has partnered with Super Micro to offer a High-Performance Computing platform for humanities researchers. Super Micro has kindly donated a HPC system that Compute Canada will make available with support to humanists. To get access you have to apply through the National Resource Allocation process. It isn’t clear what you do as a humanist.
Continue reading Compute/Calcul Canada Works with Humanities
Gamers’ discovery could generate anti-HIV drugs – Health – CBC News
CBC has a story about how Gamers’ discovery could generate anti-HIV drugs (Sept. 19, 2011). The story is about how players of Fold.It have solved a protein folding problem related to AIDS which has been recently published. (The paper is here.)
What is neat about this project is that it is an example of “citizen science” or crowdsourcing for research. Rather than use the computer to analyze the data, the computer/network was used to make it easier for humans to solve the problems. They turned protein folding into a game that enticed volunteers to play for science.
Guardian visualization: Anders Breivik’s spider web of hate
The Guardian has an interesting visualization of Anders Breivik’s manifesto mapped by linkfluence. Andrew Brown explains what they learned from the visualization in an article Anders Breivik’s spider web of hate (Sept. 7, 2011). The visualization shows the network of links from Breivik’s manifesto to other types of sites. There are a large number of links to mainstream media and to the Wikipedia, but also a number to other right wing sites. As Brown puts it,
The Guardian has analysed the webpages he links to, and the pages that these in turn link to, in order to expose a spider web of hatred based around three “counter-jihad” sites, two run by American rightwingers, and one by an eccentric Norwegian. All of these draw some of their inspiration from the Egyptian Jewish exile Gisele Littman, who writes under the name of Bat Ye’or, and who believes that the European elites have conspired against their people to hand the continent over to Muslims.
Webs and whirligigs: Marshall McLuhan in his time and ours
McLuhan and Woody Allen from Annie Hall
Today is the 100th anniversary of Marshall McLuhan’s birth so there are a bunch of articles about his work including this one from the Nieman Journalism Lab by Megan Garber, Webs and whirligigs: Marshall McLuhan in his time and ours. I also found an article by Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky on Dead Simple: Marshall Mcluhan and the Art of the Record which is partly about the Medium is the Massage record that McLuhan worked on with others. Right at the top you can listen to a DJ Spooky remix of McLuhan from the record.
Some students here at U of A and I have been working our way through the archives of the Globe and Mail studying how computing was presented to Canadians starting with the first articles in the 1950s. McLuhan features in a number of articles as he was eminently quotable and he was getting research funding. The best article is from May 7, 1964 (page 7) by Hugh Munro titled “Research Project with Awesome Implications.” Here are some quotes:
If successful, they said, it (the project) could produce a foolproof system for analyzing humans and manipulating their behavior, or it could give mankind a surefire method of planning the future and making a world free from large-scale social mistakes. …
They (the team of nine scientists) have undertaken to discover the impacts of culture and technology on each other, or, as Dr McLuhan put it, to discover “how the things we make change the way we live and how the way we live changes the things we make.” …
The next stage in the technological revolution that will change man’s perceptions is the computer. But it may hold the secret to the communications problem. With these electronic devices, it is possible to test all manner of things from ads to cities.
The article describes a grant (probably Canada Council but perhaps a foundation grant) that an interdisciplinary team of nine “scientists” from medicine, architecture, engineering, political science, psychiatry, museology, anthropology and English. They were going to use computers and head cameras (that track what people look at) to understand what people sense, how they are stimulated and how what they sense is conditioned by their background. “The scientists at the Centre (of Culture and Technology at U of T) believe they can define and catalogue the sensory characteristics …”
The idea is that if they can figure out how people are stimulated then they can figure out how to manipulate them either for good or bad. “Foolproof ads could be designed. ‘Madison Avenue could rule the world.’ Dr. McLuhan said. ‘The IQs of illiterate people could be raised dramatically by new educational methods.'”
Oh to be so confident about research outcomes!
Inside Facebook: Available Data Shows Facebook User Numbers Growing Quickly, or Slowly, or Falling
According to Inside Facebook available data shows Facebook user numbers possibly flattening in early-adopter countries like the Canada, UK and the US. This article follows on an article Facebook Sees Big Traffic Drops in US and Canada as It Nears 700 Million Users Worldwide that got a fair amount of press attention. What is going on? In the article about available data they say,
there do appear to be some overriding trends here. Canada, the United Kingdom and a few other early adopting countries have alternately shown gains and losses starting in 2010. Up until then, growth had generally been much steadier.
I doubt this means that Facebook is about disappear. It is still growing world wide. They may just be hitting a saturation point – something you would expect. We might ask if or how Facebook will change once its user base is not expanding. Are they dependent on a perception of growth and will they suffer once Facebook is no longer the hot growing thing? Will users migrate their social networking to the next big thing?
I would add a general reflection which is that there are now more social media sites than I can keep up with. There isn’t enough time to blog, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and so on. We now have choose that social media that suit our changing lives and where our friends are. My academic friends have migrated to Twitter (while I’m still stuck blogging.) Facebook is what my mother likes. The trick is to not feel one has to keep up with it all.