Reporter’s Notebook: Highlights from the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association

Historian Arrested for JaywalkingAccording to Reporter’s Notebook: Highlights from the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association a lifetime member of the AHA was knocked down and arrested for jaywalking in Atlanta. Others were stopped and warned.

No one seems to be suggesting this was a move to intimidate historians. This AP story suggests the policeman was not on duty but was hired by the Hilton Hotel to “direct pedestrians to use crosswalks”. Is it normal for hotels hosting conferences to hire off-duty police to discourage jaywalking?

Geoffrey Rockwell on Facebook

So I got a Facebook account. (See Geoffrey Rockwell.) I’m not sure how to use it as a professor – do students really want their profs in their space?

For a good biography of Facebook see the profile by Sid Yadav from Augst 25, 2006 on Mashable.com:

Facebook is the second largest social network on the web, behind only MySpace in terms of traffic. Primarily focused on high school to college students, Facebook has been gaining market share, and more significantly a supportive user base. Since their launch in February 2004, they’ve been able to obtain over 8 million users in the U.S. alone and expand worldwide to 7 other English-speaking countries, with more to follow.

Lowood: The Hard Work of Software History

Thanks to Matt K who pointed me to this essay about the history and historiorgraphy of software, The Hard Work of Software History. Henry Lowood documents the problems with studying the history of software including the problems of preserving software for study.

A new twist in the Silicon Valley Project has been the acquisition of software in various forms, accompanied by research projects that seek to tell the story of the Silicon Valley in its own medium. In the first instance, the libraries have acquired materials such as data tapes from Engelbart’s ARC projeects, hard-disk images along with collections of personal papers such as those of Jef Raskin and Mark Weiser, e-mail archives, … Each of these formats requires special strategies for evaluating, recovering, stabilizing, possibly reformatting, and indexing content. In some cases, the strategies do not yet exist … (p. 17)

The main problem is the medium of study. “Traditional models of access focused on the service desk and reading room as means of mediating complex systems of indexing and identification of materials, as well as supervised reading, fall apart in delivery contexts shaped by computer hardware and virtual libraries of born-digital materials.” (p. 18) The practices of historians are also formed by the medium of their archives. Software is used not read, and software archives are more likely to look like the historical woodworking shop at Williamsburg where tools are tried in traditional practices than library reading rooms.

This article cites two others that are important, Weiser’s The Computer for the 21st Century from Scientific American (1991) which talks about “ubiquitous computing”; and Kittler’s There Is No Software from C-Theory: Theory, Technical, Culture 32 (Oct. 1995). Lowood ends by countering Kittler to the effect that “Kittler’s admonition that ‘there is no software’ provides little relief to archivists and librarians who discover that there is more of it than they can handle.” (p. 20)

Academic conference to study James Bond

An Academic conference to study James Bond – just what we need to unpack this problematic emblem of masculinity. According to the UPI Newstrack,

Alain Brassart, from France’s University of Lille, said he will explain at the conference, scheduled for later this month, how “the archaic virility of Bond, a personality at once reactionary and rebellious, courteous and misogynist, was able to seduce audiences in the 1960s and today.”

Thanks to Joanne for this after I told her I was buying the boxes of Bond movies in order to study how to do presentations properly … you know … the bad guys always reveal their evil plot in a magnificent presentation well beyond PowerPoint.

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.

Zone of Influence

Zones of Influence IconZone of Influence is a new game studies blog by Matthew Kirschenbaum who has been writing about the digital humanities and electronic literature. The blog brings boardgames, which I used to play a lot, back into focus as important to game studies.

The blog is also a space where I can combine my interest in boardgames (especially board wargames) as a hobbyist and enthusiast with my academic interests in games, simulation, and technologies of representation.

Innovation in Information Technology

Innovation in ITThe 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—the interaction between university research, industry research, and product development—is amply evident. (Chapter 1)