The Wikipedia has a cool book source lookup tool that I just noticed. If you have a book with the ISBN of “9780304349616” you can create a link like this, The Cassell guide to punctuation which goes to “http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Booksources&isbn=9780304349616”. This opens a page where you can find the book in most accessible card catalogues like Toronto Public Library. The system lets Wikipedia references be followed to local libraries where you could get the book. I should get into the habit of tagging references online this way.
Category: Blogs and Blogging Culture
Wikipedia Issues
Can we trust the Wikipedia? The Guardian Unlimited (among others) has a story, Read me first: Oh, what a tangled web we weave when we practise to deceive (Seth Finkelstein, Mar. 8, 2007) about the latest Wikipedia scandal. A Wikipedia administrator who been posing as a tenured religion professor turns out to be a 24-year old with no advanced degrees. What is worse ,is that Wikipedia has hired him and has been promoting this administrator, suggesting him as someone for a New Yorker article that now has an editor’s disclaimer,
At the time of publication, neither we nor Wikipedia knew Essjay’s real name. Essjay’s entire Wikipedia life was conducted with only a user name; anonymity is common for Wikipedia admin-istrators and contributors, and he says that he feared personal retribution from those he had ruled against online. Essjay now says that his real name is Ryan Jordan, that he is twenty-four and holds no advanced degrees, and that he has never taught. He was recently hired by Wikia—a for-profit company affiliated with Wikipedia—as a “community manager”; he continues to hold his Wikipedia positions.
So what are the ethical issues and what does this mean for the quality of Wikipedia content? On the second question, an Editorial: Wikipedia with caution (Mar. 8, 2007, by Editorial Board) by the The Stanford Daily strikes the right note for me.
Most university-level students should be able to discern between Wikipedia and more reliable online sources like government databases and online periodicals. To be fair, some of Wikipedia’s entries are specific enough to be extremely valuable in studying or researching, but others are shallow, short, and occasionally completely inaccurate.
On the moral issue there is a tension between anonymity, which many people need online to perform their chosen roles, and deception. It could be argued that to preserve anonymity a Wikipedia administrator under the spotlight might have to mislead critics, but Essjay went too far, he tried to build his reputation through deception.
Ning: Andreessen gets into social networking
The Globe and Mail has a story, Andreessen gets into social networking, on Ning, a “platform” for creating your own social network. It’s like an open FaceBook that lets you create a network for your family or for a class. You can create private or public networks; the public ones are visible and you can join them. You can pay Ning to make money off ads and for other services. Andreessen is, of course, the famous founder of Netscape. (So this is what he is up to now.)
Ning has a nice simple interface for choosing what you want on the portal. You drag the modules you want to the different columns. It lets you see what you can have and lets you arrange what you want.
Blogito, Ergo Sum
ThinkGeek has a T-shirt with the blog version of the “cogito” that Joanne thinks should be mine. See Blogito, Ergo Sum. I suspect it should be “Facebookito, Ergo Sum.”
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.”
NT2 | Nouvelles technologies, nouvelles textualit?©s.
NT2 | Nouvelles technologies, nouvelles textualit?©s is a lab directed by Bertrand Gervais at UQAM that “promotes the study, reading, creation, and archiving of new forms of texts and hypermedia works.” (My translation from the French.) They have an excellent news blog, Activit?©s, that comments on cyberculture and research. Here are the questions they are asking:
Quel est le statut du texte litt?©raire, de l‚Äôart, du cin?©ma sur Internet? Quel est le statut de toute ?ìuvre, ?† l‚Äôheure de l‚Äô?©cran reli?© et de ses technologies? ?Ä quel type de mat?©rialit?© sommes-nous convi?©s? ?Ä quelles formes de lecture, de spectature, d‚Äôinterpr?©tation? (Pr?©sentation)
Deus In Machina | Exploring Religion and Technology in Comparative Perspective
This weekend I attended parts of a conference called Deus in Machina | Exploring Religion and Technology in Comparative Perspective that was organized by Jeremy Stolow. The conference started with a great paper by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimlett, “Social Sofware and Contemporary Jewish Life” that dealt ways in which new social networking tools are being used to reach out to youth. She talked about the The Open Source Judaism Project and other projects that are supported by ?û?¶?™ ¬ª MATZAT.
Stephen Ramsay has a Blog
Stephen Ramsay, who I first met at the University of Virginia, has now started a blog which should be worth following as Steve is doing great work in text analysis and data mining.
Sparklines: Bella consults
Bella consults is a blog which purports to be “musings of the office dog at Bissantz” which I blogged earlier on the subject. So far (as of Friday, Dec. 15th) it is a great summary of what to do and not do with sparklines.
Bella is a Labrador that appears at different ages in a composite picture that Edward Tufte reproduces in Beautiful Evidence (page 43.) Tufte reproduces the image to show how one can create visualizations that combine multiple images where the “measurement labels are place directly in the photograph where they belong” instead of forcing the reader to decode labels. Tufte says everyone should use “Bella reporting standards”. Bella’s blog is presumably a meditation on her standards.
Thanks to Roland Zimmermann for pointing this out to me and also pointing me to his short essays Bissantz ponders.
Analysis Tool Bar
We have developed a TAPoRware Analysis Tool Bar that can be embedded in any web page. You will find it floating in the upper right of this page. The tool bar code can be placed in a blog or wiki and edited. See our documentation.