Is it possible to propose a software canon? To enumerate great works of software that are deeply influential—that changed the nature of the code that followed? Canons emerge over time, as certain works gain in critical appreciation. But software is mutable stuff, quick to obsolesce. Only banks, governments, and your parents run the same programs…
“Government 2.0 involves direct citizen engagement in conversations about government services and public policy through open access to public sector information and new Internet based technologies. It also encapsulates a way of working that is underpinned by collaboration, openness and engagement”[1] Back ground and context The Political Issues Analysis System (PIAS) project (view report .pdf)—in…
Thanks a million to the University of North Texas’s Spencer Keralis for inviting me to come speak at Digital Frontiers, a great conference in Northern Texas! I’m having an excellent time. Here’s the talk I gave today. Around springtime, when universities are making offers for jobs that start in the fall, I tend to get…
Today in the Parsons “Design for This Century” lecture course — a class that’s required of all first-year Transdisciplinary Design, Design + Technology, and Design Studies students — I’ll be talking about infrastructure. This presentation will later become a chapter in Jentery Sayers’s The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, forthcoming 2016….We’ll start off with…
In truth, we don’t know how many Victorian gags have been preserved in the British Library’s digital collections. Type the word ‘jokes’ into the British Newspaper Archive or the JISC Historical Texts collection and you’ll find a handful of them fairly quickly. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many more…
In scientometrics, altmetrics are seen as an interesting possibility for measuring the broad impact of research. Whereas citation counts allow the measurement of the impact of research on research itself, an important role in the measurement of the impact of research on other parts of society is ascribed to altmetrics. The present study investigates the…
Over the past few years we’ve seen an increasing number of projects that take the phrase ‘human-computer interaction’ literally (or perhaps turning HCI into human-computer integration), organising tasks done by people and by computers into a unified system. One of the most obvious benefits of crowdsourcing on digital platforms has been the ability to coordinate…
There is only one car on the track at Silverstone, the prestigious home of British motor racing. The yellow Ford Focus begins its third lap around the circuit. The engine’s constant drone is the only thing breaking the silence surrounding the place. This may be a video game simulation, but there are no win or…
According to these reviews from a popular apartment-sharing site, I am someone who is “nice” and “respectful” in person. Perhaps a more substantive question — for my future as an academic and scholar — might be what kind of a person I appear to be online. “Respectful” and “nice” can actually be contentious terms, I…
Every day, people from around the world upload photos to share on a range of social media sites and web applications. The results are astounding; collections of billions of digital photographs are now stored and managed by several companies and organizations. In this context, Yahoo Labs recently announced that they were making a data set…