Theoreti.ca – Page 153 – Research notes taken on subjects around multimedia, electronic texts, and computer games.

CAUT: Email Outsourcing Threatens Privacy & Academic Freedom

The Canadian Association of University Teachers recent Bulletin has a timely story about Email Outsourcing Threatens Privacy & Academic Freedom. The story is about Lakehead University switching over to Gmail. The switch means that students and faculty now have gigbytes of email space as opposed to the megabytes they had from the campus run service (a situation similar to what we have at McMaster.) The switch also raises privacy concerns because Google’s terms of use includes the following:

As a condition to using the Service, you agree to the terms of the Gmail Privacy Policy as it may be updated from time to time. Google understands that privacy is important to you. You do, however, agree that Google may monitor, edit or disclose your personal information, including the content of your emails, if required to do so in order to comply with any valid legal process or governmental request (such as a search warrant, subpoena, statute, or court order), or as otherwise provided in these Terms of Use and the Gmail Privacy Policy. Personal information collected by Google may be stored and processed in the United States or any other country in which Google Inc. or its agents maintain facilities. By using Gmail, you consent to any such transfer of information outside of your country.

As Google ads functionality so that they can offer more than just email I suspect this problem will be more acute. Soon we might see universities outsourcing calendar, word processing, spreadsheets, and web site functions.

Digital Humanities Trip Report Update

I have updated my trip report on Digital Humanities 2007 with some general thoughts:

There were more graduate students and young scholars attending and giving papers, which is a good thing.

A number of sessions and papers dealt with issues around large scale computing – what to do with large collections of evidence. The sessions that Mark Olsen chaired (and presented in) on text mining with Philomine, for example were looking at thousands of documents. Bethany’s paper on NINES dealt with issues around the management and collation of heterogeneous materials. In short we are shifting from issues around the representation of single works or single author corpora to issues around the study of large collections.

There were a number of sessions around visualization and representation. Visualization and interface design seem to be an accepted part of the discipline now.

It is hard to say when one only attended particular sessions whether this conference represents a general turn to large scale analysis and representation, but that was my impression. Our conferences used to mostly project reports, now we are seeing more mature papers that use a project to introduce larger issues.

Text in the Machine – Flckr Set

I recently was playing around with the pages of old books as matter and uploaded a photo essay to my Flickr account, see Text in the Machine. This started as a project for a JestShrift for a friend, but I thought I would document it after hearing Peter Stoicheff talk about Otto Ege’s “scattered leaves”.

The reactions I get to these images, especially Cutting Pages and Sawing off the spine, is a mixture of horror and nervous laughter. We feel books are sacred and should be cared for, not cut and ripped by saws. The image of sawing off the spine with a power tool teases this unexamined academic taboo.

Richard Rorty Dies at 75 – New York Times

The New York Times has an obituary for Richard Rorty by Patricia Cohen, Richard Rorty, Philosopher, Dies at 75 (June 11, 2007). Rorty, when I was a Haverford, was presented to us as a philosopher looking to the American tradition of James and Dewey to reconcile Continental and Anglo-American philosophy.

Gary Madison has an essay online, Coping with Nietzsche’s Legacy: Rorty, Derrida, Gadamer that nicely positions Rorty in postmodern philosophy.

Digital Humanities 2007, Conference Report

I am now at the Digital Humanities conference in Urbana-Champaign. You can see my conference report as I take notes at talks.

The quality of the papers seems high and the weather is good.

The Walrus ¬ª Driven to Distraction

The Walrus has a story, Driven to Distraction by John Lornic (April 2007) about new research showing how always-on communications technology is distracting us. The article references a research site interruptions.net with links to papers on interruption, which seems to be emerging as a focus for cognitive studies and HCI. See, for example the reports by Daniel McFarlane who defines interruption thus,

Human interruption is the process of coordinating abrupt change in people‚Äôs activities. (Interruption of People in Human-Computer
Interaction: A General Unifying Definition
of Human Interruption and Taxonomy, PDF)

Interruptions are not necessarily bad, and there is evidence (the Zeigarnik Effect) that we are better at remembering incomplete or interrupted tasks better than finished one, but when interruptions become the normal state we lose the ability to finish anything and become addicted to perpetual interruption. Interruption is the fundamental possibility of interactivity, it is the cutting into the continuum that surprises us.

Spam King Arrested

The press is full of the news that Robert Alan Soloway, the “Spam King” has been arrested. See, for example, Spam King and the zombie computers from the Times Online. For more there is a site, solowaysucks.net that has links and an image of the arrest warrant.

I think it interesting that it is business owners that he preyed on and leveraged for his zombie empire.

Prosecutors allege that Mr Soloway preyed on computer-gullible business owners who thought they were hiring a legitimate company to help to increase traffic to their website. He then used their sites to send waves of spam in their names. When they complained, he threatened to charge them extra fees and report them to collection agencies.

Cheddarvision.tv

Watch cheddar age at Cheddarvision.tv. You may not think this would be exciting, but apparently 1,391,872 people have viewed this page (as of today). The success of this webcam focused on a West Country cheddar that is being aged is partly due to stories like this one that appeared in today’s Globe and Mail, Cheesy programming? You bet (Philip Jackman, June 1, 2007). You can also see a time-lapse of the first three months of the aging on YouTube – Cheddarvision.tv. What an interesting example of viral marketing with humour.

Thanks to Alex for this.

Sweden upstaged by Maldives in virtual diplomacy

Sweden is the second country to open an embassy in Second Life according to this story from the Associated Press, Sweden upstaged by Maldives in virtual diplomacy. The Maldives beat them to it by a couple of weeks. What is interesting is that the embassay will feature an exhibit about Wallenberg.

It provides visitors with information about Swedish culture and history, as well as tips about places to visit and visa rules. It will also host exhibits, including a virtual version of the Budapest office of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who helped thousands of Jews escape Nazi-occupied Hungary during World War II.

Thanks to Jean-Claude Guedon, who told me about this yesterday.