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.)

1st Game Design Workshop, Mar 11 – Vadim Bulitko – Picasa Web Albums

As part of research we are doing in GRAND we decided we need a lot more experience designing games. Garry and Patrick ran our 1st Game Design Game (Workshop) on Saturday. (The link takes you to pictures Vadim Bulitko took – thanks Vadim.)

Patrick and Garry developed a meta-game (a game about games) where each team had to pick a card or two from each of three piles (who, when/where, and why). The cards then formed the constraints within which we had to design a game. Later we had to pick two more cards which constrained what sort of game it would be and how we were to present it.

The team I was on picked Who=Non-human, Where=Is Poor, and Uses a Microphone. We came up with a game that was so good that we are now busy patenting it. Above all we had fun making costumes and props.

Digging Into Data: Second Round Announced

The second round of the Digging Into Data has just been announced and they now have one more country (the Netherlands) and eight international funders. (You can see the SSHRC Announcement here.)

The Digging Into Data challenge is an international grant program that funds groups that have teams in at least two countries so it is good that they are expanding the countries participating. What is even more extraordinary is that they have one adjudication process across all the funders (rather than an adjudication process where each national team has to apply to their own country’s program – which never works.)

I was part of one of the groups that got funding in the first round with the Criminal Intent project. I’ve found the collaboration very fruitful so I’m glad they are supporting this for another round.

The File On H.: Ismail Kadare

I’ve been meaning for years to blog about Ismail Kadare’s The File On H.. This short book is, I believe, Kadare’s response to the naive views about orality and primitive societies of people like Lord and Parry. Kadare apparently met them at a conference and there is no doubt that the book is some sort of literary response to their study of oral storytelling in the Balkans. The authors of the Wikipedia entry on the book seem to feel that Kadare was trying to alert us to the Albanian oral traditions that Lord and Parry ignored for the Serbo-Croatian ones. I think he was making fun of American academics trying to recover some noble and original orality and also trying to show that there is a continuity between oral storytelling and the constant spying on people of a police state.

<Spoiler Alert>Technology, this time magnetic tape recording, plays an important part in the plot. The two academics bring this new type of machine to Albania to record the local rhapsodes. A jealous Serbian monk stirs up trouble and the recordings get shredded. Ironically, while the two academics have nothing to left when they leave Albania, one of them has caught the bug and been infected with orality. They may not have recordings, but they have learned to do it. Which is the more useful?

The Battle for Control — What People Who Worry About the Internet Are Really Worried About

From Humanist a pointer to a great blog essay by Kent Anderson about The Battle for Control — What People Who Worry About the Internet Are Really Worried About. The essay starts by talking about all arguments for an against the internet making us smarter or stupider. He quotes Adam Gopnick’s nice essay “The Information; How the Internet gets inside us” in the New Yorker that divides us into three groups,

. . . the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers. The Never-Betters believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic. . . . The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that . . . books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don’t. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others.

Kent then turns historical looking at both the infoglut trope over time and then, in an original move, he looks at what some of the originators of the Internet thought it would be. He ends by concluding that it is really about control,

We may argue again and again whether the Internet is changing our brains, elevating us, lowering us, making us smarter, or making us stupid. But at the end of the day, it seems the real argument is about control — who has it, who shares it, and who wants it.

Lancashire: Literary Alzheimer’s

In the category of things I meant to blog some time ago is Ian Lancashire and Graeme Hirst’s research into Agatha Christie’s Alzheimer’s-related dementia which was written up by the New York Times in their list of notable ideas for 2009. The write up is by Amanda Fortini, see Literary Alzheimer’s – The Ninth Annual Year in Ideas – Magazine. There is a longer article about this research by Judy Stoffman in the Insight section of the Toronto Star, An Agatha Christie mystery: Is Alzheimer’s on the page? (Jan. 23, 2010)

Lancashire’s specialty is the esoteric field of neuro-cognitive literary theory – in his words “what science says about the creative process versus what authors report about how they create their books.” He started to apply computer analysis to literary texts in 1982.

Ian Lancashire has links to the poster that first got attention and to a paper on his home page. He has also just published a book, Forgetful Muses; Reading the Author in the Text that develops his neuro-cognitive literary theory.