Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media

James Fallows has written a good article in the latest The Atlantic on Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media. He sets up the standard argument that the old ways of consuming news from a small number of serious outlets brought us together and ensured that there was serious news. Now that everyone can choose their own news things have changed. Fallows talks with the editor of Gawker about what works on the Internet. Gawker gives its audience what they want, not what serious people think they want. Fallows ends up by making his peace with how things have changed hoping that new forms will evolve.

But perhaps this apparently late stage is actually an early stage, in the collective drive and willingness to devise new means of explaining the world and in the individual ability to investigate, weigh, and interpret the ever richer supply of information available to us. Recall the uprisings in Iran and Egypt. Recall the response to the tsunami in Indonesia and the earthquake in Haiti. My understanding of technological and political history makes me think it is still early. Also, there is no point in thinking anything else.

The Management Myth

Wandering through The Atlantic I came across an article I loved back when I first read it. The Management Myth by Matthew Stewart (June 2006) has a subtitle that says it all, “Most of Management Theory is Inane …” Stewart compares philosophy to business degrees and comes to the conclusion that philosophy should take over.

The recognition that management theory is a sadly neglected subdiscipline of philosophy began with an experience of déjà vu. As I plowed through my shelfload of bad management books, I beheld a discipline that consists mainly of unverifiable propositions and cryptic anecdotes, is rarely if ever held accountable, and produces an inordinate number of catastrophically bad writers. It was all too familiar. There are, however, at least two crucial differences between philosophers and their wayward cousins. The first and most important is that philosophers are much better at knowing what they don’t know. The second is money. In a sense, management theory is what happens to philosophers when you pay them too much.

Infomous Clouds

I was on The Atlantic site and noticed a neat visualization badge by Infomous. It is a variant on the usual word cloud that draws lines between related words and puts simple cloud circles around related words. As you can see it doesn’t always get the clouds right. On the left you have Japan connected to protesters and protesters connected to Syria. There is not, however, any connection between Japan and Syria except that protests are happening in both.

If you get an account Infomous lets you make your own clouds.

Update: Pablo Funes from Icosystem Corp sends this email comment on the post:

We use Mark Newman’s algorithm for network communities to identify clusters of news. In your example, Japan and Syria are both connected to “protesters” and therefore share the same cluster even though there are no news articles that bear on both Japan and Syria (so there is no direct connection between both terms). One could argue, with this example at least, that there is a worldwide series of events that have been unfolding over the last few months, with public protests as the visible common feature (Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and so on) which makes the connection “countries where protests are happening” a relevant one. And yet, it is true that sometimes the connection is not relevant at all, as it happens when generic words, such as “video” or “said” for example, are shared across news stories.

Our Appinions-based clouds rely on sophisticated semantic analysis provided by Appinions.com (see http://www.infomous.com/site/events/JapanNuclear/). Here, topics are connected because they are discussed by the same web user in the same posting. We use the same algorithm to identify clusters in this network. You can turn off clustering by unchecking “groups” on the bottom toolbar.

Gamification: Ditching reality for a game isn’t as fun as it sounds

From Kevin a discussion of Gamification from Slate Magazine. The article by Heather Chaplin, Gamification: Ditching reality for a game isn’t as fun as it sounds (Tuesday, March 29, 2011) discusses Jane McGonigal’s book Reality Is Broken among other things. Chaplin makes the point that gamification isn’t really that fun and that it is hardly likely to help with the serious ways reality is broken.

Converting the Virtual Economy into Development Potential

From Boing Boing I came across this report: Converting the Virtual Economy into Development Potential is a very interesting report on gold farming, microwork and cherry blossoming. The report describes the economics and value chain of these activities. It discusses some of the ethical issues, but is focused on how these activities could provide good work for developing countries.

NFB: Out My Window

Joyce pointed me to a National Film Board (NFB) interactive work, Out My Window: Interactive Views from the Global Highrise. The work, directed by Katerina Cizek documents the lives of people in apartments through their apartments. For each apartment there is a 360 degree view that you can pan around (sort of like QuickTime VR.) Certain things can be clicked on to hear and see short documentaries with the voice of the dweller. These delicate stories are very effective at giving us a view of apartment life around the world.

Beware Social Media’s Surprising Dark Side, Scholars Warn CEO’s

Jeffrey R. Young has an article in the Technology section of The Chronicle of Higher Education enjoining us to Beware Social Media’s Surprising Dark Side, Scholars Warn CEO’s (March 20, 2011). The article is about a South by Southwest Interactive conference that brought together researchers and industry.

One of the big trends is using crowdsourcing or micropayments to get work done for free or very little. Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law professor warned that this could be exploitative.

Mr. Zittrain began his argument against crowdsourcing with the story of the Mechanical Turk, a machine in the 18th century that was said to play chess as well as a human. But the contraption was a showy fraud; a man hidden inside moved the arms of a turban-wearing mannequin. Amazon, the online shopping giant, now offers a crowdsourcing service it calls Mechanical Turk, which lets anyone, for a fee, commission unseen hands to work on tasks like proofreading documents or identifying artists in musical recordings.

The similarity of crowdsourcing to a man shoved inside a box means the practice isn’t exactly worker-friendly, the professor argued. “In fact, it’s an actual digital sweatshop,” he said of the many sites that use the approach.

Fees paid for crowdsourced tasks are usually so meager that they could not possibly earn participants a living wage, Mr. Zittrain argued. He is familiar with one group drawn to the services: poor graduate students seeking spending money.

I wonder if anyone has proposed a code of ethics for crowdsourcing? Thanks to Megan for sending this to me.

A Vision Of Digital Humanities In Ireland

I just got back from a conference in Ireland titled, A Vision Of Digital Humanities In Ireland (this link is to my conference report). The conference was preceded by the announcement and unveiling of DHO Discover. Shawn Day (in photo above) demonstrated the new discovery tool that brings together metadata about 6000 objects across different digital collections in Ireland. The conference was a capstone event for the Digital Humanities Observatory which is now coming to an end.

Topicmarks – summarize your text documents in minutes

Thanks to Shawn Day’s Day of DH I learned aboutTopicmarks – summarize your text documents in minutes. It is a commercial version of a basic text analysis tool for summarizing readings. They emphasize how much time you spend not reading the whole document analyzed. It reminds me of a playful name we had for a prototype recommendation engine, “Write My Paper”. Look at the screen shot – some of the features they have that we had in TAPoR:

  • Ability to paste text, use an URL, or upload a text
  • Summarizer that combines different tool results
  • Cooking metaphor (we have recipes)

To be honest, TopicMarks deserves points for a simple and clear interface and clear results. They don’t try to do everything. They are also clear on why you would use this (to save time reading.)