The National Digital Public Library Is Launched! by Robert Darnton

Robert Darnton has written an essay about the launch of the Digital Public Library of America that everyone should read. A great writer and a historian he provides a historical context and a contemporary context. He quotes from the original mission statement to show the ambition,

“an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that would draw on the nation’s living heritage from libraries, universities, archives, and museums in order to educate, inform, and empower everyone in the current and future generations.”

The essay, The National Digital Public Library Is Launched! by Robert Darnton is in the New York Review of Books. A lot of it talks about what Harvard is contributing (Darnton is the University Librarian there), which is OK as it is good to see leadership.

He also mentions that Daniel Cohen is the new executive director. Bravo! Great choice!

Cupid Computers – Student Dating service 1966

Victoria led me to this 1966 form for a student computerized dating service called “Cupid Computer.” You can see the form in context in the University of Waterloo student newspaper, Coryphaeus. See 1966-67_v7,n09_Coryphaeus. Click to read and page forward and you will see the two page insert with the questions you have to answer and send in. Here are some examples.

The Cupid Computer service was apparently “run by students” and would, for $3 give you a list of 3 scientifically compatible dates. They mention using an IBM computer and that the Computronics Company is “The Leader by far in Canadian Computer Dating Systems”. The PDF of the insert (and cover page) is here, 1966-67_v7no9_Coryphaeus.

It is worth noting that this was a student developed service. While serious university computer centers were doing other things, students were developing their own social uses of computers … and long before the web.

The Expression of Emotions in 20th Century Books

Emilie pointed me to an NPR strory on mining mood in 20th century books, Mining Books To Map Emotions Through A Century. This story draws on a very readable article The Expression of Emotions in 20th Century Books in PLOS One. The article reports on a study of “mood” or sentiment over time in literature. The used the Google Ngram data. I like how they report first and then discuss methodology at the end.

They mention support from an interesting EU funded project TrendMiner. TrendMiner is developing real-time multi-lingual analysis tools.

Continue reading The Expression of Emotions in 20th Century Books

The Cube at QUT – world’s biggest multitouch installation

Luciano sent me this link to a stunning multipoint touch installation at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, The Cube at QUT – world’s biggest multitouch installation. I like how they have the touch at ground level, but the screen extends up.

I note that the Cube folk also have a Lego Education Learning Centre. I’m doubly envious.

Culture Clash: A Truly Bizarre Domino’s Pizza Commercial

From Culture Smash an interesting example of West meets Japan, A Truly Bizarre Domino’s Pizza Commercial. This video nicely captures all sorts of phenomena like:

  • The dangers of cross-cultural interactions. Sometimes it is just weird.
  • The dangers of older men (like me) trying on cool Japan.
  • Vocaloids as a phenomena.
  • Augmented reality (and pizza).

You can download the free Domino’s App here. I plan to try it soon.

Hacker Measures the Internet Illegally with Carna Botnet

Speigel Online has an interesting story about how a Hacker Measures the Internet Illegally with Carna Botnet. The anonymous hacker(s) exploited unprotected devices online to create a botnet with which they then used to take a census of those online.

So what were the actual results of the Internet census? How many IP addresses were there in 2012? “That depends on how you count,” the hacker writes. Some 450 million were “in use and reachable” during his scans. Then there were the firewalled IPs and those with reverse DNS records (which means there are domain names associated with them). In total, this equalled some 1.3 billion IP addresses in use.

Future Hype: Near Futures

I gave a lecture at Kim Solez’s course on the future of medicine and he taped it and put it up on YouTube here:

Geoffrey Rockwell FutureHype LABMP 590 2013 March 7 – YouTube.

This talk came out of a conversation we had at a pub about Ray Kurzweil where I disagreed with Kim about Kurzweil’s predictions. Thinking about Kurzweil I realized how fundamental prediction is. We call it hope. It is easy to make fun of the futurists, but we need to recognize how we always look forward to the near future.

Tool Discourse

Character Density by Year in Tool DiscourseWe are finally getting results in a long slow process of trying to study tool discourse in the digital humanities. Amy Dyrbe and Ryan Chartier are building a corpus of discourse around tools that includes tool reviews, articles about what people are doing with tools, web pages about tools and so on. We took the first coherent chunk and Ryan has been analyzing it with R. The graph above shows which years have the most characters. My hypothesis was that tool reviews and discourse dropped off in the 1990s as the web became more important. This seems to be wrong.

Here are the high-frequency words (with stop words removed). Note the modal verbs “can”, “will”, and “may.” They indicate the potentiality of tools.

“can” 2305
“one” 1996
“text” 1940
“word” 1931
“words” 1859
“program” 1606
“ii” 1514 (Not sure why)
“will” 1361
“language” 1307
“data” 1285
“two” 1188
“system” 1183
“computer” 1116
“used” 1115
“use” 942
“user” 939
“file” 890
“first” 870
“may” 853
“also” 837