Stanford has put up a video of a talk on why you should Quit Your Technology Job and Get a Humanities Ph.D.. The talk is by Dr. Damon Horowitz who did just that. He quit doing AI and got a Ph.D. in philosophy. He argues that it has given him perspective on what AI can and can’t do, in addition to helping him think about his life and some of the things that make him uncomfortable about the tech world. It isn’t a ground breaking talk, but it is delivered with humour and addresses technology folk where it matters. Are you really that happy with your job and the hype around what you do?
In response to the US president, Wolfenstein’s marketing used his own words to market the game: “Make America Nazi Free Again”, “There is only one side”, “These are not ‘fine people’”, and so on. Many of his supporters have taken exception to this, decrying the notion that Nazis support the current occupant of the Oval Office. Unfortunately, the fact that white supremacists and actual Nazis support Trump and march openly in America doesn’t help their claims.
The Guardian and others have stories about how the marketing of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus has angered Trump supporters: Nazis as the bad guys in videogames? How is that controversial? The issue is partly how Wolfenstein adapted Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again.” Alt-Right gamers would like games to not be political, but they always have been; it’s just that certain demographics weren’t bothered by the politics before.
It is also worth noting the reference in the game title to the poem by Emma Lazarus at the base of the Statue of Liberty titled The New Colossus. I knew the famous line about “Give me your tired, your poor …”, but not the whole poem that starts:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. …
The larger story is how the gamergate community began to affiliate with the alt-right. Motherboard has a story about the shift in the r/KotakuInAction (KiA) subreddit.
So where does that leave Gamergate? Some people within the community are embracing the alt-right, others are peeling off in disgust, and most, it seems, continue to deny the link vehemently while paradoxically allowing that ideology to supplant Gamergate’s identity.
Cross, who even some Gamergaters would now agree was right about the nature of the movement from the very beginning, thinks that it’s going to be completely absorbed by the greater alt-right, and that this process has already begun with KiA essentially becoming a sub forum of r/The_Donald. The standard around which Gamergate organized—fighting for video games—is no longer the driving force behind KiA.
The Atlantic has a good article on What Facebook Did to American Democracy by Alexis C. Madrigal (Oct. 12, 2017). What is interesting is how we assumed that the net and social media could affect things and that is would naturally benefit the left.
The research showed that a small design change by Facebook could have electoral repercussions, especially with America’s electoral-college format in which a few hotly contested states have a disproportionate impact on the national outcome. And the pro-liberal effect it implied became enshrined as an axiom of how campaign staffers, reporters, and academics viewed social media.
The story of networked politics seems to be that of tactics being developed by the left and promoted as democratizing and inclusive that are then reused by the right. It is also the story of how Facebook decided to own news and fake news. They created filter bubbles so that none of knew what the other was thinking.
From this motley chorus of suburban parents, journalists, tech leaders, and conservative intellectuals, Yiannopoulos’s function within Breitbart and his value to Bannon becomes clear. He was a powerful magnet, able to attract the cultural resentment of an enormously diverse coalition and process it into an urgent narrative about the way liberals imperiled America. It was no wonder Bannon wanted to groom Yiannopoulos for media infamy: The bigger the magnet got, the more ammunition it attracted.
Many of those who wrote Milo seem to be disgruntled people who feel oppressed by the “political correctness” of their situation, whether in a tech company or entertainment business. They email Milo to vent or pass tips or just get sympathy.
The Canadian Social Knowledge Institute (C-SKI) actively engages issues related to networked open social scholarship: creating and disseminating research and research technologies in ways that are accessible and significant to a broad audience that includes specialists and active non-specialists. Representing, coordinating, and supporting the work of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership, C-SKI activities include awareness raising, knowledge mobilization, training, public engagement, scholarly communication, and pertinent research and development on local, national, and international levels. Originated in 2015, C-SKI is located in the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab in the Digital Scholarship Centre at UVic.
From Teaching in a Digital Age by A. W. Bates I came across this 1954 video of Skinner explaining his Teaching Machine inspired by behaviourism. The machine runs a paper script, but it isn’t that different from the computer based drill training today. You get a question, you write your answer, and you get feedback.
Wired Magazine has a nice essay on Hey, Computer Scientists! Stop Hating on the Humanities. The essay by a computer scientist argues that CS students need to study the ethical and social implications of what they build. It can’t be left to others because then it will be too late. Further, CS students should be scared a little:
Professors need to scare their students, to make them feel they’ve been given the skills not just to get rich but to wreck lives; they need to humble them, to make them realize that however good they might be at math, there’s still so much they don’t know.
This year I kept notes about the Digital Humanities 2017 conference at McGill. See DH 2017 Conference Report. My conference report also covers the New Scholars Symposium that took place before.
The NSS is supported by CHCI and centerNet. KIAS provided administrative support and the ACH provided coffee and snacks on the day of. We were lucky to have so many groups supporting the NSS which in turn supports new scholars to come to the conference and to articulate their issues in an unconference format.
DH 2017 itself was a rich feast of ideas. There was too much going on to summarize in a paragraph, but here are two highlights:
We had an opening keynote in French from Marin Dacos. He talked about the “Unexpected Reader” that one gets when publications are open.
We had a great closing keynote by Elizabeth Guffey on “The Upside-Down Politics of Access in the Digital Age” that asked about access for disabled people in the digital realm.
The participants of the New Scholars Symposium identified the following as topics to watch and think about:
