With regrets I’m leaving McMaster and going to the University of Alberta. McMaster threw a wonderful farewell party on Monday. Dean Crosta spoke, Andrew Mactavish gave a moving speech, Liss Platt talked, Stéfan Sinclair played Alberta tunes and I was presented with a plaque that will go up on the wall of Togo Salmon Hall where previous digital humanities people at Mac have been recognized. See a small photo set of pictures taken by Stéfan here on Flickr.
Matthew Hurst of Microsoft’s Live Labs (and apparently co-creator of BlogPulse) has a smart blog, Data Mining. See for example, his post on The Future of News which has some useful “thought starters”. (Confession: I’m a Google News junkie.) See also his Mapping The Blogosphere from which I took the image above.
Tired of getting unsolicted phone calls? Michael Geist has set up a web site, iOptOut to allow people to opt out of organizations that are exempted from the do-not-call registry. The site lets you specifically ask exempted organizations to not call you. We need more useful social sites like this.
Michael Geist explains iOptOut thus on his (excellent) blog:
I began to develop the site soon after the do-not-call bill became law. The premise is simple – under the law, exempted organizations (which include charities, political parties, polling companies, newspapers, and companies with a prior business relationship) are permitted to make unsolicited telephone calls despite the inclusion of a number in the do-not-call registry. However, organizations must remove numbers from their lists if specifically requested to do so.
Some of you may have noticed another voice on theoreti.ca. Guy Parkinson is now blogging here. Guy and I studied philosophy together at the University of Toronto and met in a Plato class. He is the New Media Technical Director for Brandworks a Toronto advertising and new media company.
The New York Times has a story by Norimitsu Onishi,
Thumbs Race as Japan’s Best Sellers Go Cellular – New York Times, about how novels written in snippets on cell phones and posted to special blogs and then published in print were five of the top ten best-selling novels.
The boom appeared to have been fueled by a development having nothing to do with culture or novels but by cellphone companies’ decision to offer unlimited transmission of packet data, like text-messaging, as part of flat monthly rates. The largest provider, Docomo, began offering this service in mid-2004.
I wonder if the serialization over time builds anticipation and sales? Does writing them on a cell phone change the prose?
Clay Spinuzzi has a blog, Spinuzzi, that was recommended on Humanist. His recent posting a long thoughtful reflections on methodology, especially as applied to rhetoric and writing research. He comments on Composing Research by Cindy Johanek which critiques the ostensibly anectdotal methods of many researchers in rhetoric and communication.
Another blog that Shawn Day pointed me to is William J. Turkel’s Digital History Hacks. He writes longer posts on topics like What’s the Opposite of Big History? He is comfortable with programming and hardware design.
Welcome to theoreti.ca, or the new version of grockwel: Research Notes. Why the change? Well … it was time to upgrade and it was time to bring my research and personal pages together in one place. Thanks to Shawn for all the work figuring out how to move a blog that has been going since 2003 – images and all. Please redirect your links and RSS readers here.
In the next month geoffreyrockwell.com will also be moved here and the interface coordinating.
We Feel Fine is “an exploration of human emotion, in six movements” that harvests recent blog posts for “I feel” or “I am feeling” and then stores information for visualization. There is an applet where you can look for “men who are abiding”. Thanks to Guy for this.
I’ve been experimenting with Flock – The Social Web Browser. It to have integrated support for social network sites like Flickr and Facebook. The interface is confusing, perhaps because of everything it is trying to do, or my not getting it. Some of things it does are:
Edware Vanhoutte, who has done some of the best work on the history of humanities computing (though much is not yet published), has started a blog. In his first entry, The Mind Tool: Edward Vanhoutte’s Blog, he summarizes early text books that were used to teach humanities computing. It would be interesting to look at how these 70s and 80s books conceive of the computer and how they differ from the 50s and 60s work like that of Booth.