Internet Culture and Technology – Page 29

Web Mining for Research

Web Mining for Research is a white paper I’ve just written to get my ideas down about how we should be using the Web as evidence not just for social science research, but in the humanities. Digital humanities is more than studying old wine in new digital bottles – the challenge is to do humanities research using the digital as evidence. For me the challenge is how to rethink philosophy now that we can mine concepts in their sites, to paraphrase Ian Hacking.

Facebook Ethics

As I’ve been getting invited to become the “friend” of students and colleagues on FaceBook (I now have 91 friends) I have been reflecting on the ethics of representation on Facebook. The Silhouette has a story about the Unlucky seven Community Advisors who were fired after pictures showed up on FaceBook with them drinking while on duty. Inside Higher Ed has a story, Dental Pain at Marquette about a student disciplined for blog entries that didn’t fit the code of ethics. This raises the question of whether universities are developing their student codes to provide guidance about how to behave on the web. The closest I can find (after a quick Google search) is a very reasonable guide from the University of South Carolina, titled, Let’s face it. The guide suggests that students:

Keep information that can identify you secret
Post pictures that “flatter” rather than embarassing pictures that you wouldn’t want parents to see
Show respect in wall posts
Join the right groups – think about how they reflect on you

The other side of the equation is what should parents and profs do when we come across inappropriate material on FaceBook. I feel a little like I am eavesdropping on private conversations and should back out. To paraphrase the Marquette Dental School’s ethicist quoted in the Inside Higher Ed article, “It’s FaceBook. It is what it is and we shouldn’t take it out of context.”

Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy: The Greatest Generation Gap Since Rock and Roll

Now here’s an interesting idea. Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy: The Greatest Generation Gap Since Rock and Roll, by Emily Nussbaum, is the lead article in New York Magazine (Feb. 12, 2007 issue) and it’s about the new generation gap between our students and us. They have no problems smearing themselves all over the web, we worry about our privacy.

More young people are putting more personal information out in public than any older person ever would and yet they seem mysteriously healthy and normal, save for an entirely different definition of privacy. From their perspective, it’s the extreme caution of the earlier generation that’s the narcissistic thing. Or, as Kitty put it to me, “Why not? What’s the worst that’s going to happen? Twenty years down the road, someone’s gonna find your picture? Just make sure it’s a great picture.”

We worry about how their life stories (and pictures of them on Facebook drinking) will be misused. They assume people will understand the context and understand them better. Perhaps if everyone is doing it they will be private in the crowd. Or they will realize their parents and profs are getting into Facebook and move off.

Many Eyes

Many Eyes is an IBM site for shared visualization and discovery. If you get an account you can upload data sets and then try different visualization tools on them. Others can create visualizations from your dataset and/or can leave comments on a visualization. See for example this visualization of bible names.

Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to “democratize” visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis. Jump right to our visualizations now, take a tour, or read on for a leisurely explanation of the project. (From About Many Eyes)

What is interesting is the “democratic” nature of the site – a sort of Flickr for visualization.

Thanks to Judith for pointing me to this.

Computer History Museum – Selling the Computer Revolution – Marketing Brochures in the Collection

Computer History Museum – Selling the Computer Revolution – Marketing Brochures in the Collection is a magnificent site that makes available brochures and manuals from their collection. These include the Apple – 1 Operation Manual. The cover images alone make an interesting study.

There are many ways to study the history of a technological topic. One of the most neglected, though also the most revealing, is to look at the advertising materials companies have produced to promote their products. In a technical field such as computing, buying decisions, as expressed in such materials, are often based on a complex blend of ‚Äòatmospheric‚Äô messages focusing on status, and highly-detailed technical information about the product itself. (From the Overview)

iPhone: Is it magic?

Mike Elgan has an article on iPhone: 20 things we don’t know (Jan. 12, 2007) in Digit a magazine about “the future of digital design”. In particular I agree with his questions about the touch screen interface and virtual keyboard – will it be responsive enough for Blackberry users who do push e-mail?

One way of asking about the iPhone is to think about the Newton PDA which was also supposed to be a magical reinvention of personal computing. Like the iPhone, and unlike the iPod, it tried to do lots of things and as a result didn’t do anything well. The Palm Pilot got the PDA market right by doing fewer things very well and in a small enough package to fit in your pocket. As pretty and desirable as the iPhone is, I worry that it will be a delicate and fat phone; a slow and poor Internet device; and an expensive iPod with little memory.

That said, it will shakeup the cell phone business. If it doesn’t take off, someone else will get the need for new designs and digital integration right.

Update: Shawn pointed me to an article Apple Ushers in Era of the Fluid UI by Om Malik. Malik correctly, I think, identifies the fluid interface as the important innovation.

Scholarpedia

Scholarpedia is an alternative to the Wikipedia. It is peer reviewed anonymously. It seems to have been seeded by the Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience, Encyclopedia of Dynamical Systems and Encyclopedia of Computational Intelligence. Will it fly as an alternative?

Thanks to Judith for this.

Innovation in Information Technology

The 2001 report from the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council (of the National Academies of the USA), Innovation in Information Technology, has interesting charts about how key technologies like the Internet benefited from government research support. See Figure 1. The report introduces the Figure thus,

Figure 1 illustrates some of the many cases in which fundamental research in IT, conducted in industry and universities, led 10 to 15 years later to the introduction of entirely new product categories that became billion-dollar industries. It also illustrates the complex interplay between industry, universities, and government. The flow of ideas and people‚Äîthe interaction between university research, industry research, and product development‚Äîis amply evident. (Chapter 1)

Our Lives in Digital Times

Our Lives in Digital Times is a report just out from Statistics Canada. A summary is available from The Daily of Friday, November 10, 2006.

The 23 page study reports:

The paperless
office is the office that never happened, with consumption of paper at an all-time high and the business of transporting paper thriving. Professional travel has most likely increased during a period when the Internet and videoconferencing
technology were taking-off, and; e-commerce sales do not justify recent fears of negative consequences on retail employment and real estate.

The paper further demonstrates that some of the key outcomes of ICTs are manifested in changing behavioural patterns, including communication and spending patterns. People have never communicated more, something exemplified by the explosion in international calling and the massive amounts of e-mails and other electronic communications. (“Abstract”, p. 4)

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are not having the predicted effects of erasing distance, creating a paperless office, ending retail, or finishing off surface mail.

The paperless society, the end of mail, the end of traditional retail and numerous other such proclamations have all been grossly exaggerated with quantification at this point in time proving them faulty.more wrong. This conventional wisdom came crashing down from the very early stages of opening up the markets. (p. 11)

Instead ICTs are enabling talk – “people communicate more than ever and their patterns of associations are wider” (p. 17). ICTs are not helping us withdraw, they are letting us spread out (sometimes too thin.)

It is interesting to note that “This paper represents a new direction in Information Society research and analysis, in an attempt to begin to address the socio-economic outcomes and impacts of ICT.” (“Note to readers”, p. 6)