DH

Thoughts on the HCIL symposium

2012-05-27T07:11:52Z

Last week I attended the 29th annual symposium at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland. The HCIL is famous for a little thing known as the treemap, created by the founder of the lab, Ben Shneiderman. It's famous for lots of other visualizations and people too, but it's best known for the treemap.

The annual symposium is put on by the lab to showcase it's latest and greatest research. I sometimes forget that HCIL focuses on things other than visualization, so I had to sit, confused, through a few talks before I realized they weren't about visualization ("Where's the viz?" I was thinking). I won't fault them for not being all about dataviz; the Social Network Analysis Strategies for Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse by lab Director, Jen Golbeck, was thoroughly entertaining and insightful work regarding social networks.

HCIL is very kind and generous in that it puts all of its 25+ years of papers and talks online, and many of its projects are open source. You can also go to each individual's page (faculty/student) to find every talk and paper they've completed.

My favorite talks were:

Event Flow by the hilarious Megan Monroe
Reflections of Ourselves: Sensing and Feedback to Inform Everyday Human Behavior by Jon Froehlich
Automatic translation of 2D textbook figures into 3D tactile models for blind students in STEM education by Tom Yeh (make a shorter title, Tom!)
PairFinder: Identifying and Measuring Temporal Associations from Temporal Event Sequences by Hsueh-Chien Cheng
TreeVersity: Interactive Visualization for Comparing two Trees using Topology and Node Value Differences by John Alexis Guerra-Gomez
Motif Simplification by Cody Dunne (which I'll be reviewing in detail tomorrow).

The work coming out of HCIL is inspirational as well as practical. The lab clearly works from the premise that they can have a direct impact on everyday lives in a very meaningful way.

I also have to give a shout out to Justin Grimes, PhD candidate, for giving me a great tour, long walk, and fantastic discussion on the quantified self, quantified babies, and outdated medical devices.

Williams, Mita: Love of the Creative Commons People

2012-05-26T23:35:00Z

Some weeks ago, I was part of a panel dedicated to "Scholarly Communications and Digital Technologies" at my university's annual Campus Technology Day. My colleague Dave Johnson gave an introduction to the ideas behind Open Access while my other colleague (and Associate Dean of the Library) Joan Dalton described some of the local efforts that our library is engaged in that support Open Access work. My contribution to the panel was to introduce the audience to The Creative Commons.

When I first started crafting my slides for the event, I had this idea that I was going to create a presentation made exclusively from the unaltered slides from other people's presentations dedicated to the Creative Commons (and in the Creative Commons, of course) but I was fast approaching my deadline and wasn't able to craft a tight and cohesive enough presentation from the slides that I had found. So I made re-use of some of Karin Dalziel's slides (thank you Karin) and added my own screenshots and text to illustrate the rest of the presentation.

I started my talk by introducing The Creative Commons as something that could be useful to anyone in the audience, regardless of whether they were an educator, a student, a technologist, or writer, musician or artist. I gave the briefest of histories of the Creative Commons and that history lesson led to a short field guide to the various types of Creative Commons licences that exist. That was followed by a two-stop tour of where one can find Creative Commons work. I then added a caveat that while Creative Commons is great for most works, it might not be so good for things like data which some folk think need a altogether different kind of license. I also demonstrated that I wasn't a completely uncritical person as I presented gentle criticism of the Creative Commons license framework for being a little too complicated. I then ended my talk with the claim that Creative Commons is still pretty great when obscurity is a bigger threat than piracy - which is the case for most of us.

After my talk was done, I thought I had given a good presentation. That is, until moments later when two comments from the audience made me realize that perhaps I had emphasized the wrong ideas in my talk.

The first comment was from a professor who said that that she found the Creative Commons very interesting but very different from what she normally tells her students, which is "don't copy". At that moment, I realized that I should have spent more time talking about attribution because clearly this idea had gotten lost. Luckily Joan rescued me by giving a very good answer that made it very clear that copying in this context did not mean plagiarism because Creative Commons work require attribution and of course, we at the library encourage the attribution of sources.

[As an aside, I think this exchange suggests that there is an important relationship between attribution and open licensing. Imagine if every Open Access paper had a clear designation of it's open license status that could be machine readable, just like Creative Commons licenses tend to be. Now imagine if these designations also contained citation information. Hmmm...]

The second comment from the audience that may have been intentionally flippant; the comment came from a man who said that my presentation reminded him of a book that he, himself, had stolen from a library years ago... a book called Steal This Book. My response to this comment was not exactly measured. I told him, "No. They not the same at all. Copying is not stealing." In fact, I added that Nina Paley has made a very nice video that puts this very point into song: if have a book and I copy that book, then we both have books, and how is that theft?

Yikes. What a way to end my talk.

Of course I meant to say, "if I have a book that was placed in the Creative Commons or was in Public Domain and I copy that book..." but I didn't. And I didn't get a chance to correct myself because everyone's time was up the audience had to leave to move on to their next session.

Which is one reason why I am writing this post.

I am also writing this all down for all for those of you who might be making your own upcoming presentation on the Creative Commons (and thus have stumbled upon this post). I want to remind you to spend time some time talking about attribution and watch out 'cause there are many people who have associated the word copying with something bad.

All the more reason why I think Nina Paley is on to something when she says that we need to emphasize not licenses and permissions when we talk about copying...

We need to talk about love:

Copying is an act of love. Please copy and share.

5 Hidden Skills for Big Data Scientists

2012-05-27T01:24:38Z

1. Be Clear: Is Your Problem Really A Big Data Problem?

There are many big data problems out there requiring huge compute scale, innovations in computation paradigms, vast storage space and so on. But just because your data takes up lots of disc space does not mean that you have a big data problem. Firstly, your data may be encoded in an inefficient format. XML, for example, can be incredible verbose (all those close tags and human readable text). Secondly, if your data changes over time it may change very slowly indicating that monitoring the difference between data sets is more important that importing complete data sets. Thirdly, you may be processing your information on a legacy architecture designed for low power CPUs or cores. Architecture should be data driven, meaning that you need to deeply understand the informational aspects of your data and not just the size of the data as it comes to you on disc.

2. Communicating About Your Data

Often, in large organization (I work for Microsoft and have worked at IBM in the past), the product requirements for data deliverables are high level. For example: we need these variables to be 99% accurate. This simplistic view of data - that a level of quality can be delivered in a specified time frame - is ignorant of the highly opportunistic nature of processes that improve the quality of data. Consequently, a data scientist needs to aggressively manage the communication about projects which transform and improve data sets. Do as much research as possible to minimize unknowns, but don't sign contracts that involve both time and quality metrics!

3. Invest in Interactive Analytics, not Reporting

When you construct reports about your data products, you are answering a fixed set of questions. This is useful for monitoring, but it doesn't provide a way to get at the unknown unknowns. It is only through interactions with data (often called slicing and dicing) that pockets of interest (problems and opportunities) are discovered. Rich, interactive tools may be perceived as a low priority and never quite got to. Avoid this peril!

4. Understand the Role and Quality of Human Evaluations of Data

When trying to determine how good your data product is, it is often the case that we employ an array of human judges to evaluate a sample of the data. The higher up the management chain you go, you tend to find a higher degree of respect for human judgement. There are many studies, however, that show that human judgements are not always as good as they are cracked up to be. In many cases, machines can do better than humans, they just tend to make different types of errors. On deeper inspection, human errors can be traced to the structure of incentives around the judgement process. Innovate in methods to compare data sets that help distinguish their relative quality without necessarily the expense of human assessment.

5. Spend Time on the Plumbing

How does data get in to your system? How does it flow? Are you sure every bit of information got in? With large scale data loading and processing systems, one doesn't one a small number of failures to tip over the entire run. However, silently failing components can cause big headaches down the line when you are reporting your summary findings. Make sure there are no leaks in your pipeline!

newsletter: month four

2012-05-27T01:35:41Z

Dear Nico,

Happy four months, baby! Let’s talk about health. It’s possibly the most important thing we have, you and I. So your Mother’s Day gift to me of a bad sinus cold, though astonishingly thoughtful given your young age, might have been… a little misguided.

Getting rid of a cold when you can’t sleep it off is HARD. For the first time ever, I lamented not having a full-time co-parent, someone who had signed on for the germs in advance. Both of us being sick, I couldn’t bring myself to ask any of our friends and loved ones to come and be with you while I slept; I wouldn’t have wished this cold on anyone, and nothing was dire, just hard and sleepy and discontent.

We did it, though. We got rid of it. It took a sick day (note to self: next time, take two) and a lot of early bedtime, but we’re healthy once again. Let’s try to stay that way, please.

Taken by Molly Tomlinson at Somerville Open Studios, May 5

It’s WARM! It’s SPRING! You are sleeping longer stretches. Oh, the incomparable joy of it! I credit a combination of warm weather and the breastmilk-in-the-nose trick I remembered to try. Worked like a charm to relieve your congestion. This stuff is magic. Let’s hope I don’t forget it when you get your first pinkeye.

Enough about illness, let’s talk about the adorable. There’s plenty of that. Take the sounds of you sucking on your entire fist in the back seat of the car. Or your extra-fuzzy, velvety head with a lot more hair than last month. Or the way you’re discovering toys—just yesterday Michel reported that you have learned to crinkle the wings of the little stuffed bee.

Speaking of Michel, you have the best caretakers. Three of them, over the four days a week that you’re in “daycare.” You love going to Vanessa’s and hanging out with her and tiny Alex, who is only a month older than you. (I can’t wait until you two start entertaining each other, hopefully in a few months.) You love going to Carolyn’s, who has been packing and unpacking moving boxes and has all the smiles in the world for you. And Michel’s, well. There’s a grownup AND a six-year-old AND a teenager AND a huuuuuge dog who are all fond of you. Pici the great dane, easily seven times your size, likes to lick your hands.

I haven’t even mentioned all our other friends besides the weekday caretakers. I hope that hanging out with all these different people will mean no separation anxiety. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just avoid that altogether?

Your hand-eye coordination is improving. Fingers are tricky to get control of, but darned if you’re not tryin’. A favorite exercise is holding on to my shirt as I put you in the carrier: you’ve discovered that you can keep yourself from falling over to the side. The power! The control! It’s heady.

You’ve definitively found your toes, and are studiously working on holding on to them. Watching you do this, it occurred to me that it’s quite an advanced skill: you have to control your arm and your leg at the same time. I imagine this can get frustrating. But you’re pretty chill about it, and we’ve been talking about practicing.

You’re definitely practicing. Given your increasing love for mouthing everything, most especially your own fingers and my forearm when I’m changing your diapers, it’s only a matter of time until you bring those feet all the way up to your mouth.

Most of your exploration is accompanied these days by a sort of aaaaaohhhhhh. Sounds are fun, even if they’re all vowels so far. An accidental consonant here and there doesn’t count for syllables, but it is cute to practically hear your brain gears turning.

Some of the most entertaining things in the world are: practicing your standing, supported, on top of a grownup’s belly; Baby in the Mirror; the doorway bouncer (you can hang out in that thing for half an hour); having your belly, feet, hands or head nibbled; having me sing to you. Gosh, baby, I hope you continue to be as appreciative an audience as you’re being these days. It may be the best ego trip I’ve ever had.

Speaking of feelings, yours might be growing even faster than your body, which is damn impressive given that during the days when I’m at work you’re eating all the milk I can pump and then some. Thank goodness we had a reserve; it’s depleted enough that I’ve brought the pump home so that hopefully we can build it back up a little. You feel huge to me, though the internet tells me that your weight is average for your age. So when you have FEELINGS, well. It’s a good thing we have a fierce cuddling relationship.

Today, on your four-month birthday, we went out to lunch at a Chinese buffet with babushka, Vlad, and a bunch of their friends—mostly to celebrate my mom’s and a friend’s birthdays now that everyone’s back in town from various travels. You charmed everyone, men and women. I’m told you do this about a hundred percent of the time, no matter where you go. Hang on to your gregariousness, my love. It alone won’t get you many places, but it sure helps to genuinely like other people, and have them like you back.

I like you so much that sometimes, when I have to choose a quiet bedtime for you over an evening with friends, I feel that the consolation prize is way worth it.

Love,
-Mama

(pix)

From Boethius to John Dee: More Scientific Manuscripts Published

2012-05-26T23:01:00Z

One of the pleasures of working with old books is that it offers fascinating insight into the lives of past generations. Take Harley MS 647, for instance, one of the scientific manuscripts recently uploaded to our Digitised Manuscripts site. Wouldn't we love to know more about the Anglo-Saxon scribe who added his name at the end of this book, noting that he had "corrected and repaired" it? Did Geruvigus live at St Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury, to whom this volume later belonged? Was he tasked with correcting the book by the abbot, or did he undertake this at his own initiative? How long was he active as a scribe, and what was his fate?

The scribal invocation 'Ista proprio sudore nomina uno quoque propria. Ego indignus sacerdos et monachus nomine Geruvigus repperi ac scripsi. Pax legentibus': England, 11th century (London, British Library, MS Harley 647, f. 21v).

Many of the scientific manuscripts in the British Library's Harley collection have been digitised and recatalogued thanks to the generosity of William and Judy Bollinger. Here is a list of new additions to the website, featuring books made in England, Flanders, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy and Spain, and ranging in date from the 9th to the 17th centuries. These volumes include works by Boethius, Cicero, Isidore of Seville, John Dee and Thomas Hobbes, among others. Maybe you will discover among them other personalities such as Geruvigus, staring out at us from the pages of these manuscripts.

Harley MS 79 Albertus Magnus, De mineralibus et lapidibus (England and Italy, 14th-15th century)

Harley MS 270 Matthaeus Platearius (attrib.), Liber de simplici medicina (England, 12th-13th century)

Harley MS 321 Scientific miscellany (England, c. 1387)

Harley MS 531 Miscellaneous texts on astronomy, astrology and meteorology (England, 1272-1474)

Harley MS 532 Miscellany including John Dee, Epilogismus calculi diurnus planetarum tum longitudinis (England, 16th-17th century)

The opening page of John Dee's Epilogismus calculi diurnus planetarum tum longitudinis: England, late-16th century (London, British Library, MS Harley 532, f. 122v).

Harley MS 546 Medical miscellany (Ireland, 1459)

Harley MS 647 Collection of astronomical and astrological texts (France, c. 820)

Detail of the constellation of Orion, in a copy of Cicero's Aratea with extracts from Hyginus, Astronomica: Northern France, c. 820 (London, British Library, MS Harley 647, f. 8r).

Harley MS 937 Physician's folding almanac (England, c. 1430-1431)

Harley MS 1737 Boethius, De institutione arithmetica (?France, 12th century)

Harley MS 1914 Yūhannā ibn Sarābiyūn (Serapion the Elder), Breviarium medicinae (Italy, 14th century)

Harley MS 2320 Miscellany of treatises relating to prognostication, astrology and braiding (England, 15th century)

A lunar prognostication in verse: England, 15th century (London, British Library, MS Harley 2320, f. 31r).

Harley MS 2506 Collection of astronomical and astrological treatises (France, c. 990-1000)

Harley MS 2579 Miscellany including Macer Floridus, De viribus herbarum (Italy, 15th century)

Harley MS 3099 Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae and De natura rerum (Flanders, 12th century)

Detail from Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae: Munsterbilsen, 12th century (London, British Library, MS Harley 3099, f. 1v).

Harley MS 3140 Articella (France, c. 1300)

Harley MS 3199 Collection of computistical and musical texts (France or England, 12th-14th century)

Harley MS 3234 Alanus ab Insula, De planctu naturae (Italy, 15th century)

Harley MS 3244 Bestiary (England, 13th century)

A dog with a shepherd, dogs hunting a stag and a rabbit, and a dog identifying a murderer and howling by its dead master, in a bestiary: England, 13th century (London, British Library, MS Harley 3244, f. 45r).

Harley MS 3263 Jean du Temps of Blois, Organon Astronomicon ex hypothesibus Copernici extractum (France, 16th century)

Harley MS 3271 Collection of grammatical and computistical texts (England, 11th century): see The Tribal Hidage Online

Harley MS 3394 Andres de Vega, Fabrica Horologa Universal (Spain, 1627)

Harley MS 3360 Thomas Hobbes, A Minute or first Draught of the Optiques (France, 1646): see Thomas Hobbes on Optics Online

Harley MS 3414 Theophrastus, De historia plantarum (Germany, 15th century)

‘The Demise of Guys’: How video games and porn are ruining a generation

2012-05-26T22:06:39Z

CNN has a story on ‘The Demise of Guys’: How video games and porn are ruining a generation. The book is The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It and it is by retired Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan. The book builds on a TED Talk that argues that:

The statistics show that guys are underachieving.
Guys are shyer than before. Few guys know how to talk to women.
Guys prefer homosocial situations which Zimbardo calls Social Intensity Syndrome.
All this is caused by computer games and internet porn.

“Boys’ brains are being digitally rewired for change, novelty, excitement and constant arousal. That means they’re totally out of sync in traditional classes, which are analog, static, interactively passive.” (Zimbardo)

Compare this to Hanna Rosin: New data on the rise of women who argues that “the global economy is becoming a place where women are more successful than men.” She argues that there has been a hollowing out of the middle-class jobs men held for service jobs that women do better. Could the shift from a manufacturing to a service economy be responsible for the “demise of guys?”

Schneider, Karen G: ALA Annual 2012: Anodyne in Anaheim

2012-05-26T20:42:48Z

It’s almost time for the March of the Librarians! Friday at ALA starts with an ol’ pal picking me up at SNA and then heading out for a road trip to see libraries (or at least, given area traffic, “library”). I’m thinking West Hollywood, even though it’s an hour from the airport. Recommendations welcome.

As always, my schedule has some dueling appointments, overlap, gaps, and things I should probably be doing but don’t remember. I conclude my term as interim GLBTRT secretary after this conference and then swing into ALA Councilor responsibilities as of Midwinter 2013, so I’ve blocked out some time at this conference for getting reacquainted, as I can’t make the Saturday orientation for new and returning councilors.

I very much appreciate all the suggestions for my work on Council. The big issues do seem to be ebooks, ebooks, and ebooks.

Friday June 22

11-5 Road trip!

4:00pm – 5:15pm Opening General Session, Rebecca MacKinnon

Possible dinner

Saturday June 23

8-10 a.m. GLBTRT Steering Committee I, Hyatt Regency Orange County – HYATT – Garden 1

10:30 – noon GLBTRT All Committees’ Meeting Anaheim Marriott – MAR-Grand Salon G-H

1 pm – 3 pm: Exhibits

3:30pm – 5:00pm ALA Council / Executive Board / Membership Information Session Anaheim Marriott Platinum 1-6

6 – 8 pm LIAL11 Reunion dinner

Sunday, June 24, 2012

8-10 am Publisher’s focus group; “A Very Nice Breakfast” at the Anaheim Hilton. CH organizing.

9:00am – 12:00pm ALA Council I Anaheim Marriott Platinum 1-6

10:30am to 12:00pm OCLC: Our Digital Future Hilton Anaheim, Huntington Room (n.b. I owe you all a post about DPLA West)

1:30pm – 3:30pm LITA Top Tech Trends, Anaheim Convention Center, Ballroom A

4:00 pm – 5:30 pm The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Research, Digital Scholarship and Implications for Libraries (LITA President’s Program)

6:00 – 8:00pm GLBTRT Social Tortilla Jo’s, 1510 – Disneyland Drive, Bldg A

Monday June 25

9:30 Breakfast with SK

10:30 – 2:00pm Stonewall Book Awards Brunch Anaheim Marriott – MAR – Grand Salon A-D

Yet more exhibits

5:30 – 7 Battledecks!

Tuesday June 26

9 – 11:00am GLBTRT Steering Committee II Anaheim Convention Center – ACC – 212A

Bookmark to:

Almost Ready for Prime Time

2012-05-25T13:00:03Z

We now have two versions of a demos up and ready to run. Both allow a user to pull data from the witness files, containing manuscript transcriptions, select texts to compare, run the texts through a version of CollateX, then present the results as an alignment table (a “synopsis” in or “partitur” in some text-critical dialects), and as a text with apparatus.

The second of these is still buggy (and the cause of both a couple of late nights night and the lateness of this post (for which I apologize heartily to the nice people at MITH)), but it does a couple of additional things:

Prioritization. While the ability to generate all sorts of different apparatus is a desideratum, at present what we can do is choose the order in which results are presented, and, in the case of presenting a text with apparatus, the first text chosen becomes the base text for comparison.
Tokenizing. I am now able to tokenize in two steps. First with “rich” tokens that retain data about the individual words (e.g., abbreviations, which should be compared based on their expanded text rather than on the abbreviation as written), as well as other data in the text (page breaks, etc). From there we can create “regularized” tokens. For now I have regularized the tokens by removing all yods and waws. Additional candidates might include dealing with prepositions that are sometimes but not always attached in medieval Mishnah manuscripts (shel, e.g.), final aleph/heh, and final nun/mem. “Simple” tokens are passed to Collatex (or, we allow Collatex to process “rich” tokens) and the resulting collation output is merged with the rich tokens.
Presentation. Because the “rich” tokens retain information about the witness, it is possible to generate a “text-with-apparatus” in which the base text can be presented with formatting and contextual information that may be useful to the reader. (Disclaimer: Here is a big bug: The XSLT that joins the two lists of tokens inserts the non-words (page breaks etc.) in a position that is offset by one location. Any suggestions?)

Next up: modifying the demo to present multi-column synopses, and linking in Talmudic and Commentary citations.

Hayim Lapin is Robert H. Smith Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor in the Department of History at the University of Maryland. He currently is completing a faculty fellowship at MITH. This post originally appeared at Digital Mishnah on May 24th, 2012.

“Legacy”: The use and abuse of a term

2012-05-26T21:10:07Z

The word “legacy” crops up a lot in discussions about innovation in cyberspace, so it was good to find thoughtful essay about it by Stephen Page, current CEO of Faber & Faber, the eminent publishing house of which TS Eliot was famously a Director.

In any revolution, language matters. One powerful word in the digital revolution is “legacy”. There is a conscious attempt to employ the word pejoratively, to suggest that existing media businesses – publishers, in the case of books – are going to fail to make the leap to a new world.In common usage, the first meaning of legacy is an inheritance, or something handed down from the past. A second meaning, more specific and recent, denotes technological obsolescence, or dramatic business-model shift. These two meanings have been fused to imply inevitable irrelevance for those with history, especially in media. This is a sleight of hand that would be sloppy if it wasn’t so considered.

Let’s deal with technological obsolescence. Media businesses are not technology businesses, but they can be particularly affected by technology shifts. I run a so-called legacy publishing house, Faber & Faber. Most of our business is based on licensing copyrights from writers and pursuing every avenue to find readers and create value for those writers. We are agnostic about how we do this. For our first 80 years, we could only do it through print formats (books); now we can do it through books, ebooks, online learning (through our Academy courses), digital publishing (such as the Waste Land app) and the web. Technology shifts have tended to result in greater opportunity, not less.

Implicit, I suppose, in the pejorative use of the term legacy is that we at Faber, like other publishers, don’t get it – “it” being the new economy, the new rules. There is something in this, of course. It’s harder to transform an existing business into one with a new culture and cost structure than to start afresh. Any existing business, no matter what old-world strength it has, will fail if it is not bold enough to attack its own DNA where necessary. The ailing photography firm Eastman Kodak is widely cited as a recent example of this phenomenon. But this is business failure due to cultural stasis. There is nothing inevitable in failure for existing businesses, but they have particular issues to figure out: simply adhering to old business practices will lead to failure. Failure will not be because of technology, but through failure to react to technology. In fact, it could be regarded as squandering the opportunity of a beneficial legacy.

He’s right about the two meanings. A legacy can be a source of mindless complacency — the kind of mindset one finds in the trust-fund Sloanes who hang out in Belgravia and Chelsea. But it can also be a source of strength — as in the case of Faber, who seem to me to be approaching the challenges of digital technology with imagination and vision. For example, the wonderful Waste Land App produced by my friend Max Whitby and his colleagues at TouchPress required access to the Eliot papers and rights held by Faber. So they used their ‘legacy’ to add value to a digital product in a distinctive and valuable way.

But others legatees in the publishing (and other content industries) have viewed their inheritances in different and less imaginative ways. Think, for example, of the way Stephen Joyce has relentlessly used his control of the Joyce estate to prevent imaginative uses of his grandfather’s works. (Mercifully, Ulysses is now finally out of copyright and therefore beyond Stephen’s baleful reach, which is what has enabled TouchPress to embark on an imaginative App based around a new translation that will come out later this year.). Or of the way some legatees have viewed their inheritances as guarantees that the digital revolution will never threaten their hold on a market.

Still, Mr Page is right: “legacy” is too often used as a term of patronising abuse by tech evangelists who think that they have “the future in their bones” (as C.P. Snow put it in his famous Rede Lecture all those years ago.)

Public universities are now moving to the open access model

2012-05-26T19:54:42Z

Public universities are now moving to the open access model for faculty research: The UCSF Academic Senate has voted to make electronic versions of current and future scientific articles freely available to the public, helping to reverse decades of practice on the part of medical and scientific journal publishers to restrict access to research results.

I love typography. And I have always wanted to create a font.

2012-05-26T19:42:24Z

I love typography. And I have always wanted to create a font.

The Lives of Harry Lime

2012-05-26T19:39:38Z

The Lives of Harry Lime is available on Archive.org. Produced by the BBC, I believe, Orson Wells reprised the role of Harry Lime from his 1949 adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel The Third Man. The film is a personal favorite of mine — along with The Gray Fox and Local Hero — and I look [...]

Happy Towel Day! The BBC hosts a Hitchhiker’s Guide game

2012-05-26T15:00:00Z

Happy Towel Day! The BBC hosts a Hitchhiker’s Guide game (Warning: Flash).

A new publication about Marx and Communication, edited by C. Fuchs & Vincent Mosco, 29 articles, 500+ pages: Marx is back – The importance of Marxist theory and research for Critical Communication Studies today

2012-05-26T19:26:31Z

Fuchs, Christian and Vincent Mosco, eds. 2012. Marx is back – The importance of Marxist theory and research for Critical Communication Studies today. tripleC – Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society 10 (2): 127-632. Download entire issue.

Fuchs, Christian and Vicent Mosco. 2012. Introduction: Marx is back – The importance of Marxist theory and research for Critical Communication Studies today. tripleC – Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society 10 (2): 127-140. PDF
Fuchs, Christian. 2012. Towards Marxian Internet Studies. tripleC – Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society 10 (2): 392-412. PDF

Table of Contents

Introduction: Marx is Back – The Importance of Marxist Theory and Research for Critical Communication Studies Today
Christian Fuchs, Vincent Mosco

Cultural Work as a Site of Struggle: Freelancers and Exploitation
Nicole S. Cohen

Understanding Accumulation: The Relevance of Marx’s Theory of Primitive Accumulation in Media and Communication Studies
Mattias Ekman

How Less Alienation Creates More Exploitation? Audience Labour on Social Network Sites.
Eran Fisher

Against Commodification: The University, Cognitive Capitalism and Emergent Technologies
Richard Hall, Bernd Stahl

“Means of Communication as Means of Production” Revisited
William Henning James Hebblewhite

The Communication of Capital: Digital Media and the Logic of Acceleration
Vincent R. Manzerolle, Atle Mikkola Kjøsen

Communication and Symbolic Capitalism. Rethinking Marxist Communication Theory in the Light of the Information Society
George Pleios

The Network’s Blindspot: Exclusion, Exploitation and Marx’s Process-Relational Ontology
Robert Prey

A Note on the Ongoing Processes of Commodification: From the Audience Commodity to the Social Factory
Jernej Prodnik

The Internet and “Frictionless Capitalism”
Jens Schröter

Digital Marx: Toward a Political Economy of Distributed Media
Andreas Wittel

Marxist Theory in Critical Transitions: The Democratization of the Media in Post-Neoliberal Argentina
Pablo Castagno

Missing Marx: The Place of Marx in Current Communication Research and the Place of Communication in Marx’s Work
İrfan Erdogan

Towards Marxian Internet Studies
Christian Fuchs

Did Somebody Say Neoliberalism? On the Uses and Limitations of a Critical Concept in Media and Communication Studies
Christian Garland, Stephen Harper

The Coolness of Capitalism Today
Jim McGuigan

Dialectical Method and the Critical Political Economy of Culture
Brice Nixon

“Feminism” as Ideology: Sarah Palin’s Anti-feminist Feminism and Ideology Critique
Michelle Rodino-Colocino

Systemic Propaganda as Ideology and Productive Exchange
Gerald Sussman

‘A Workers’ Inquiry 2.0’: An Ethnographic Method for the Study of Produsage in Social Media Contexts
Brian Brown, Anabel Quan-Haase

The Pastoral Power of Technology. Rethinking Alienation in Digital Culture
Katarina Giritli Nygren, Katarina L Gidlund

Social Media, Mediation and the Arab Revolutions
Miriyam Aouragh

21st Century Socialism: Making a State for Revolution
Lee Artz

Updating Marx’s Concept of Alternatives
Peter Ludes

Marx is Back, But Which One? On Knowledge Labour and Media Practice
Vincent Mosco

The Enclosure and Alienation of Academic Publishing: Lessons for the Professoriate
Wilhelm Peekhaus

The Problem of Privacy in Capitalism and the Alternative Social Networking Site Diaspora*
Sebastian Sevignani

Marx As Journalist: Revisiting The Free Speech Debate
Padmaja Shaw

Buffett Says Free News Unsustainable

2012-05-26T19:03:36Z

Bloomberg has a story that Warren Buffett Says Free News Unsustainable, May Add More Papers. The days of expecting news online to be free to access may be coming to an end. We may find more and more news behind paywalls of the sort the New York Times brought in where you only get so many free articles a month.

Buffett believes that local papers with a “community focus” can make a profit as they are often the only source for community news. There will always be free alternatives for national or international news, but community newspapers often don’t have free alternatives.

This bodes well for journalism which has suffered recently which in turn has, I believe, created a democracy gap as the fifth estate loses its ability to monitor the others. Bloggers don’t reliably replace investigative journalism that profits from reporting on government and industry.

HASTAC: Humanities Physical Computing Research Group

2012-05-26T17:38:17Z

HASTAC’s spring newsletter reports on the ETCL-sponsored Humanities Physical Computing Research Group. Engaged in practice-based inquiry, the group is using Arduino microcontrollers and programming to answer the following research questions: How does building circuits inform more screen-oriented modes of research and composition? How does programming shape our perceptions of writing and argumentation? What kinds of small-scale collaborations and learning climates are demanded by maker workshops? And what are the cultural and materialist histories of such gatherings?

May 28: The Social Edition of the Devonshire MS at Congress

2012-05-26T14:20:36Z

Social Tools and the Future of Collaborative Editing: The Devonshire Manuscript

On May 28 Constance Crompton and Ray Siemens will speak on the social edition project at two meetings at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. At the Society for Digital Humanities they will address social editing methods and the future of textual scholarship and at the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures they will discuss inter-project collaboration and best practices for visualizing credit.

Society for Digital Humanities/ Société pour l’étude des médias interactifs

The Production and Dissemination of Scholarly Texts

1:30pm - 3:00pm, 202 Regina St, R271

1. Building Editions, Building Community: Preparing the Social Edition

Constance Crompton, Ray Siemens, and the Devonshire MS Editorial Group (University of Victoria)

2. Radical Yet Sustainable—A Dilemma for Online Academic Publishing?

Lynne Alexandrova (University of Toronto)

3. Open-Sourcing the Collaborative Scholarly Edition

Alex Garnett (University of Victoria), John Willinsky (Stanford University), Ray Siemens (University of Victoria)

The Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures/ L’Association des littératures canadiennes et québécoise

Resituating Literary Scholarship: Collaboration and the Digital Spectrum

4:00pm - 5:30pm, Dr. Alvin Woods Building, 2-108

1. Making Space: Collaborative Technologies and the Rearticulation of Canadian Cultural Memory”

Erin Wunker (Dalhousie University)

2. Tools, Texts, and Teams: Scholarly Collaboration in the Canadian Context

Constance Crompton, Ray Siemens, and the Devonshire MS Editorial Group (University of Victoria)

3. All Together Now? Online Scholarly Infrastructure, Engagement and Community Building

Susan Brown (Universities of Guelph and Alberta)

In a changing scholarly landscape the integration of social tools into the electronic scholarly edition pushes the boundaries of editorial authority through collective interpretation, review, and production. To test how traditional and citizen scholars can share their best practices using existing social knowledge environments, Raymond Siemens and the Devonshire MS Editorial Group have led the development of a social edition of a sixteenth-century courtly miscellany, The Devonshire Manuscript . An international advisory group, working collaboratively through Iter Gateway’s social media infrastructure at the University of Toronto, has reviewed both the edition and the methodologies that underpin it. In conjunction with their publishing partners, Iter and Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, the Devonshire MS Editorial Group will be releasing print and digital versions of the edition in fall 2012.

An evolving version of The Devonshire Manuscript is available in Wikibooks at bitly.com/DevonMS .

poem: Winged Purposes, by dean young

2012-05-26T16:01:09Z

Winged Purposes
Dean Young

Fly from me does all I would have stay,

the blossoms did not stay, stayed not the frost

in the yellow grass. Every leash snapped,

every contract void, and flying in the crows

lingers but a moment in the graveyard oaks

yet inside me it never stops so I can’t tell

who is chasing, who chased, I can sleep

into afternoon and still wake soaring.

So out come the bats, down spiral swifts

into the chimneys, Hey, I’m real, say the dream-

figments then are gone like breath-prints

on a window, handwriting in snow. Whatever

I hold however flies apart, the children skip

into the park come out middle-aged

with children of their own. Your laugh

over the phone, will it ever answer me again?

Too much flying, photons perforating us,

voices hurtling into outer space, Whitman

out past Neptune, Dickinson retreating

yet getting brighter. Remember running

barefoot across hot sand into the sea’s

hovering, remember my hand as we darted

against the holiday Broadway throng,

catching your train just as it was leaving?

Hey, it’s real, your face like a comet,

horses coming from the field for morning

oats, insects hitting a screen, the message

nearly impossible to read, obscured by light

because carried by Mercury: I love you,

I’m coming. Sure, what fluttered is now gone,

maybe a smudge left, maybe a delicate under-

feather only then that too, yes, rained away.

And when the flying is flown and the heart’s

a useless sliver in a glacier and the gown

hangs still as meat in a locker and eyesight

is dashed-down glass and the mouth rust-

stoppered, will some twinge still pass between us,

still some fledgling pledge?

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When the Data hits the Fan!: A New Approach to Measuring Impact for Digitised Resources

2012-05-26T05:23:06Z

When the Data hits the Fan!: A New Approach to Measuring Impact for Digitised Resources:

This article talks a lot about Social Impact Assessment, which may or may not be useful for medieval digitization projects, but it contain a few things that might be useful when considering assessments (which everyone should). For example:

Intended and unintended consequences
Different types of impact: audience, economic, innovation
Different types of benchmarks: time, money, skills
Desired outcome: business, academic, etc.

"So here we are in 2012, the Year of Code, and we should all be learning to code! Shouldn’t we?..."

2012-05-26T04:21:08Z

“So here we are in 2012, the Year of Code, and we should all be learning to code! Shouldn’t we? Especially if we belong to this community known as Digital Humanities, a field that is endlessly wrestling with its self-definition.”

- Coding and collaboration - Digital Byzantinist

Unless you’re a real believer in do-it-yourself, the answer is certainly not. There are lots of really good professional ciders out there, and that means that while you may have to pay that coder, your project will also be completed much faster, cleaner, more complete and better for the end user.

Unless, of course, you really like learning logic-based languages …