Category: Internet Culture and Technology

Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come

I’m at a conference organized by Jerome McGann, Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come: Schedule at the University of Virginia. The focus is on sustainability and Mellon is supporting the conference. My conference report is at http://www.philosophi.ca/pmwiki.php/Main/ShapeOfThings.

Publishing scholarly projects using Google Sites

Thomas Crombez on his Doing Digital History site has a post on Publishing scholarly projects using Google Sites « Doing Digital History. His argument and instructions make a lot of sense. The idea is that you use something like TEI to encode your scholarly data and then you publish it on Google Sites instead of setting up something fancy at your university or lobbying for research infrastructure that doesn’t exist. Google provides stable infrastructure that you don’t have to maintain at an unbeatable price that is “off-campus” (which can have advantages) and which is as likely to survive as a university service.

Either way — running your website on a university server, a private hosting solution, or your own server — you are basically into self-publishing. Will you use an established platform aka CMS (Content Management System, e.g., WordPress or Drupal) or do you prefer to grow your own HTML/CSS? What is the most advantageous and flexible place to host it? If you run your own server, when does it need to be updated? Do you really need that latest Apache update? If you are doing a dynamic website, will the database continue to behave as it does today? When to update your database software? Is it possible that your website will one day attract a lot of traffic, necessitating more than one server? What search engine do you use for your collection of texts? Do you simply plug in a Google search box, or do you want some more searching power for your users? If so, what software do you choose?

I see more and more people moving to Google (and other commercial solutions) as a way of doing projects quickly and with modest resources. I call it Computing With The Infrastructure At Hand.

Kids consume media as a full-time job—many getting overtime

ars technica has a good summary of the Kaiser Family Foundation Report: Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8-18-Year-Olds. Their story, Kids consume media as a full-time job—many getting overtime (Chris Foresman, Jan. 21, 2010) ends with some good news,

The report notes that kids spend less time reading magazines or newspapers, though online reading has supplanted that to some degree. However, the average time spent reading books has stayed relatively steady, at about an hour per day. Only the heaviest of media users reported increases in poor grades or low levels of personal contentment. And it seems parents that are active about placing restrictions on media use have kids that consume significantly less media than kids without restrictions. Leaving the TV off, limiting hours of TV, video game, or computer use, and having rules about types of content all help curb media use. One final bit of good news: kids on average spent almost two hours a day engaged in physical activity, up slightly from five years ago.

The bad news is that media consumption is becoming a full time job for kids taking up all the time they are asleep or at school. Is there anything other than media consumption?

Darnton: The Library in the New Age

Robert Darnton has a new book out The Case for Books and it touches on the issue of “google and the future of the book” (and the library.) There is an essay by Darnton in The New York Review of Books (v. 55, n. 10, June 12, 2008) that covers some of the ground. The essay is titled, “The Library in the New Age” and it argues,

Meanwhile, I say: shore up the library. Stock it with printed matter. Reinforce its reading rooms. But don't think of it as a warehouse or a museum. While dispensing books, most research libraries operate as nerve centers for transmitting electronic impulses. They acquire data sets, maintain digital repositories, provide access to e-journals, and orchestrate information systems that reach deep into laboratories as well as studies. Many of them are sharing their intellectual wealth with the rest of the world by permitting Google to digitize their printed collections. Therefore, I also say: long live Google, but don't count on it living long enough to replace that venerable building with the Corinthian columns. As a citadel of learning and as a platform for adventure on the Internet, the research library still deserves to stand at the center of the campus, preserving the past and accumulating energy for the future.

ISP Quarrel Partitions Internet: Wired.com

Wired.com has an interesting story about how an ISP Quarrel Partitions Internet. Cogent Communications, a US-based ISP shut down all connection with a Swedish ISP, Telia that made it impossible for Cogent customers to reach Telia customers on the Internet and vice-versa. And we thought the Internet was designed to bypass blockage! It turns out certain ISPs can arbitrarily block interconnection when in commercial disputes. They can do this by de-peering to disconnect from another ISP and then packet filtering of those packets that work their way through other channels.

This raises questions about the standard story of the Internet that presents packet-switching as a technology that makes it impossible for the Internet to be censored. As we have discovered under the general rubric of net neutrality, the ISPs now have the technology to block, slow, and filter packets (and have done so.) Thanks to Nancy for this.

Peter Nicholson: The Changing Nature of Intellectual Authority.doc – Powered by Google Docs

Peter Nicholson of the Council of Canadian Academies has an interesting paper that he has given on The Changing Nature of Intellectual Authority. His thesis is:

People today are much less prepared to defer to the experts. But at the same time, we are being swamped with data and information – a glut that cries out for analysis and summary. So there’s a dilemma. Who to turn to? Increasingly the answer is – Well, to ourselves of course, as individuals empowered by a world wide web that has rapidly evolved into a social medium. More specifically, it is a medium that today supports massively distributed collaboration on a global scale that – we can only hope – will help us make sense of it all.

He talks about the “decline of deference” to traditional authorities (from the church to academic experts) and talks about it taking place recently. I suspect its been happening since the enlightenment began and might be a general feature of modernity and improved communication (and democratic institutions.) What is new is the ability of the many to replace authority with a distributed or networked authority. People now believe things are true if they have been negotiated by a community. Something is true enough if it won’t get you in trouble because your crowd has authorized the truth. Most of the time such negotiated truth is fine (with enough eyeballs someone will point out a flaw), but other times the community misses something and is satisfied with not-quite-good-enough.

SlightlyMorbid: Emergency notification system

Not long ago I blogged about death and your online identity. Now I’ve come across a service called SlightlyMorbid which will send prepared messages to contacts when they are contacted by a trusted party. It is a sort of dead-man’s switch for a bunch of last emails to your online friends who wouldn’t otherwise hear of your death. Great name for a service, though.