Academic blogging has become an increasingly popular form, but key questions still remain over whether blog posts should feature more prominently in formal academic discourse. Jenny Davis clarifies the pros and cons of blog citation and sees the remaining ambiguity as indicative of a changing professional landscape. The wider scholarly community must learn how to grapple with […]
Research collaboration now involves significant online communication. But sending files back and forth between collaborators creates redundancy of effort, causes unnecessary delays and, many times, leaves people frustrated with the whole idea of collaboration. Luckily, there are many web-based collaborative writing tools aimed at the general public or specifically at academic writers to help. Christof […]
In fact, I would argue that our struggles about the definition of “authorship” in a research context are in fact evidence that the concept itself is outmoded. In the days when most projects were concevied of and carried out by a single person who then wrote up the reports by himself (pronoun being used advisedly), […]
Over the last year I’ve spent many hours going through dissertations on electronic literature, entering information about them and the creative works they cite into the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base so that I could visualize the networks of works. The final paper is now published in the July 2014 issue of the Electronic book review: […]
1. Facebook and Engineering the Public by Zeynep Tufekci There’s been a lot of brouhaha about a recent Facebook study in which Facebook altered the news feed of 689,000 of its users to see if moods were “contagious.” There has huge discussion of its ethics, and another one on its publication. There’s also the argument […]
Visualizing Algorithms The power of the unaided mind is highly overrated… Without external aids, memory, thought, and reasoning are all constrained. But human intelligence is highly flexible and adaptive, superb at inventing procedures and objects that overcome its own limits. The real powers come from devising external aids that enhance cognitive abilities. How have we […]
There have been “dramatic changes in the status of digital forensics within LAMs (Libraries, Archives and Museums) in just a few years”. This is a conclusion of a wide ranging white paper released by the BitCurator Project: From Bitstreams to Heritage: Putting Digital Forensics into Practice in Collecting Institutions. The BitCurator project is funded by the […]
When most people think of “folklore,” they tend to think of fairy tales and urban legends. Trevor Blank thinks of photoshopped memes and dark humor. Folklorist Trevor J. Blank is an assistant professor of communication at the State University of New York at Potsdam, where he researches the hybridization of folk culture in the digital […]
On BoingBoing today, Cory Doctorow writes: “The Creative Commons-licensed version of The Internet’s Own Boy, Brian Knappenberger’s documentary about Aaron Swartz, is now available on the Internet Archive, which is especially useful for people outside of the US, who aren’t able to pay to see it online…. The Internet Archive makes the movie available to […]
A man walks into a museum. He shares a story. He creates a visual representation of his story. He puts it on the wall. How do you measure the value of that experience? Two years ago, we mounted one of our most successful participatory exhibits ever at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History: […]
