We can build a computer system that could generate a surprising event, and we can build a computer system that would recognize it. When Mary Lou Maher said these words at the Media Systems gathering at UC Santa Cruz, she wasn’t talking about hypothetical systems working in sterile domains like block stacking. She was talking […]
Random, fortuitous, haphazard, undirected, unplanned, and most importantly, unpredictable. There are already many ways to discover great content that you know you like, but how do you find things that you cannot begin to describe? The majority of researchers begin their search for content using a general purpose search engine (Ithaka S+R | Jisc | […]
The reason why the Science article deserves a vocal and energetic response from those of us working on open access publishing is Science‘s reputation as a journal and the visibility and online traffic it has. One cannot but interrogate the author’s and his editor’s motivations to publish what comes across as a biased and ‘non-scientific’ […]
As we Praxis Program fellows embark on just what exactly we want our version of the Ivanhoe Game to accomplish we’ve been doing some “research” – good old fashion game playing. However, I’ve noticed a sense of frustration within our play, or perhaps it is just me that becomes a bit frustrated with the games […]
In a recent blog post for the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, Ben Alpers argues that iBooks Author is not very well suited for humanities learning. I have written before about problems with iBooks Author’s Terms of Service, but Alpers critiques the program’s authoring tools, arguing that its bias towards the presentation of “concepts and […]
In this review, we feature Mike Skocko, a visual-arts educator at Valhalla High School in California. We had first heard of Mike through an esteemed recommendation from Adobe’s Tacy Trowbridge on Mike’s awesome gamification initiatives. Listen to Mike’s story below to learn about the questing system he adopted into his visual-art class to deliver curriculum in […]
Today, some 20 years after its first formulation, there is little question of the validity of Jerome McGann’s core and repeated argument: that we humanities scholars and publics stand before the vast, near-wholesale digital transformation of our various and shared cultural inheritance. This transformation – more properly, these remediations – are fully underway. They open new avenues for the work of the […]
I’ve primarily delivered a version of this talk to digital humanities or plain old humanities or language and literature crowds (my own background being in English). Often times it evolves into a joint effort for the panelists to argue for the importance of injecting critical race/class/gender/queerness/ability into dh, but today, my goal is not to […]
In 2012 I started supervising an English undergraduate dissertation: this was a online digital edition and it was my first experience of supervising a student’s digital project. What follows is a joint blog post of two parts – one from me and the other from Jess MacCarthy (the student) – that reflects upon our experiences. […]
In this video from the Media Systems gathering at UC Santa Cruz, Alex McDowell — one of the most influential designers in the world today — talks about how computational media are transforming storytelling. We are moving from the linear, auteur-oriented storytelling model of the printing press and industrialized film production to a collaborative, non-linear […]
