Cradled in Caricature

Steve Bell, The Guardian (21 May 2013)

Wed, 22 May 2013 08:51:00 +0100

Steve Bell, The Guardian (21 May 2013)

.@Neuro_Skeptic 'Visualizing the Connectome' (12 May 2013)

Tue, 14 May 2013 14:12:34 +0100

.@Neuro_Skeptic 'Visualizing the Connectome' (12 May 2013):

Sage words… “In my view, the study of connections has been dominated by images, more than any other branch of neuroscience. It’s rarely easy to say where ‘method’ or ‘analysis’ ends and ‘visualization’ begins.

This is not a bad thing – connectivity is spatial, by definition, and to understand space is to visualize it. But it does mean that in the connectome, there is always a danger of valuing aesthetics over accuracy, beauty above brains.”

Andrew Prescott, Digital Riffs: Small Worlds and Big Tents (5 May 2013)

Fri, 10 May 2013 19:19:58 +0100

Andrew Prescott, Digital Riffs: Small Worlds and Big Tents (5 May 2013):

“DH began in Italy (if we see Roberto Busa as its founding father). Much of the most exciting and innovative work in DH has taken place in Europe through figures such as Manfred Thaller, Jan Christoph Meister, Lou Burnard, Espen Ore or Claudine Moulin. Initiatives such as openedition.org, substantially supported by French government research organisations, or the comprehensive digitisation projects undertaken in the Netherlands show a maturity of infrastructure beyond much to be seen in the United States (where the Digital Public Library of America seems to be relying on a piecemeal voluntary effort rather than the comprehensive and systematic state-funded interventions of various European governments). Yet, for all its internationalist, interdisciplinary and collaborationist pretensions, much of the available literature on DH is dominated by internal North American debates, driven by MLA. Matthew Gold’s recent Debates in the Digital Humanities consisted chiefly of very parochial North American discussions – as far as I can see, only two contributors (Patrik Svensson and Willard McCarty) held posts in universities outside North America. The contents of Gold’s book are dominated by the kind of agendas being generated from within MLA, and suggest that there is a danger that DH will become annexed to the vacuous and anal preoccupations of the MLA.

I think this is possibly the true dark side of the Digital Humanities – that there is a risk that DH becomes one of the means by which an Anglophone globalization of world culture is implemented.”

.@abbymullen, 'network visualizations' @HASTACScholars (17/4/13)

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 13:04:00 +0100

.@abbymullen, 'network visualizations' @HASTACScholars (17/4/13):

“Though network analysis can provide us with ideas about how things are connected, they can’t tell us why. And that’s where traditional archival historical work comes back into play. Using this network visualization as a jumping-off point, we can then go into the archives to discover what made these two papers so strongly connected. Distant reading has to give way to close reading at some point to figure out causation.”

Excellent source flow chart by @mhbeals. If the majority of your...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 14:02:00 +0100

Excellent source flow chart by @mhbeals. If the majority of your research is ‘no’, ‘no’, ‘no’, ‘no’ and ‘no’, please try harder. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The Editors, 'Pacing Scholarly Conversations', Journal of Digital Humanities 2:1 (Winter 2012)

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 12:18:27 +0100

The Editors, 'Pacing Scholarly Conversations', Journal of Digital Humanities 2:1 (Winter 2012):

“The advancement of scholarship relies on the timely communication of questions, methods, results, and reflections. The iterative publications Digital Humanities Now and the Journal of Digital Humanities are intended to facilitate this process. DHNow surfaces and distributes the conversations weekly in order to invite participation and feedback. The Journal of Digital Humanities then identifies the conversations that need a stable landing on which to pause and reflect before continuing onward.”

A model of scholarly communication that I personally am very much enjoying.

David Weinberger on the medium is the message is the transmitter...

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 10:46:41 +0100

David Weinberger on the medium is the message is the transmitter is the receiver.

'Feature: Are universities as open as they should be?', THE (4 April 2013)

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 09:43:19 +0100

'Feature: Are universities as open as they should be?', THE (4 April 2013):

“The demand for transparent data to operate as a kind of substitute for knowledge or truth is part of a culture of ‘immediacy’,” [Thomas Docherty, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Warwick] thinks, which is “anathema to knowledge, and to education, both of which require time, delay, and the mediations of thinking.”

'Advocacy: How to hasten open access', Nature (28 March 2013)

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 16:50:31 +0000

'Advocacy: How to hasten open access', Nature (28 March 2013):

Alma Swan: “…Good policy doesn’t refer to ‘gold’ open access as ‘author pays’ or ‘paid for’, because 66% of open-access journals do not charge. It uses the proper definition: journals that make their content immediately and freely available on the Internet. It doesn’t call ‘green’ open access ‘embargoed access’, because 60% of the time it is not. It defines it as literature that is made open access directly by the author, usually through a repository. It doesn’t assume that green open access harms publishers, because evidence shows that it does not…”

Trevor Owens, 'Born Digital Folklore and the Vernacular Web: An Interview with Robert Glenn Howard' (22 Feb 2013)

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 15:10:47 +0000

Trevor Owens, 'Born Digital Folklore and the Vernacular Web: An Interview with Robert Glenn Howard' (22 Feb 2013):

‘…Trevor: Right now you have the benefit of directly looking for source material for your work on the open web. Given your perspective, what kinds of online content do you think is the most critical for cultural heritage organizations to preserve for folklorists of the future to study this moment in history?

Rob: Wow. That is a great question; and a really hard one for me. Its funny, but back in the ‘90s most people weren’t really thinking “How can we archive this Internet stuff?” It seemed like it would always be there; but its clear now that as much as stuff stays online for a long time, it also so rapidly changes that our Internet of today looks completely different from the Internet of 1999. I am really happy I saved hundreds and hundreds of full websites I was doing work on way back then. I still get editors complaining that a website I have cited in an article or something no longer works. Well—yes! It’s the Internet! It changes! That’s why its cool! So there are certainly lots of great digital art pieces out there; and that should be saved—and it probably will be. But what of the everyday art? Like so much folklore of the past, its not so much what we save—but how richly we save it, I think. While its great to have hundreds of photoshops, to have a collection of all the top memes, to collect chain emails, archive that classic ASCII art, but what makes archives from the past most valuable, is the fully contextualized examples we have: not just everybody’s tweets (Though that is a fantastic thing!), but groups of people tweeting together, their biographies, their feelings about each other, the things they do other than tweet—those contextual details are what make particular archives stand out; and those are the things that will be hardest to recover. We will have lots of examples of video mashups from YouTube in 2013, but how many will we have with fully contextualized comments, interviews with participants, and documentation of which Facebook profiles posted which videos on their walls, and so on? That richness is what I think is hardest and most valuable…’

See Something? Cite Something.

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 12:25:29 +0000

See Something? Cite Something.

The Poppletonian (7 March 2013)

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 12:50:47 +0000

The Poppletonian (7 March 2013):

Back to the grindstone

“We’ve nothing whatsoever to be ashamed of in Media and Cultural Studies.”

That was the forthright response of departmental head Professor Gordon Lapping to the revelation that postgraduate teachers in his department were among the 30 per cent of such teachers who, according to a National Union of Students survey, are paid below the national minimum wage of £6.19 an hour.

“The truth of the matter”, he told our reporter Keith Ponting (30), “is that our departmental postgraduate teachers have had no formal training whatsoever. Neither have they ever received any advice from academic staff, had any feedback from their module lecturers, taken part in any meaningful discussion about course content, or enjoyed any representation at all on the departmental board. And in addition they’ve been required to either teach or lose their bursaries, and to do so without ever having any sort of formal contract.

“Quite honestly,” he concluded, “it’s something of a shock to learn that such a bottom-of-the range, jobbing, downtrodden, ill-informed set of people are earning anything at all, let alone the equivalent for a full hour’s work of a pint and a half of lager.”

Google Glass

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 15:29:48 +0000

‘The key experiential question of Google Glass isn’t what it’s like to wear them, it’s what it’s like to be around someone else who’s wearing them.’

RT @melissaterras RT @paleofuture: The [Terrifying] Google Glass feature no one is talking about http://t.co/wOhFzIu2r1 via @timothy_barnes

Link to Tweet:
https://twitter.com/melissaterras/status/307411178240475136

'Letter: The Shit We're In', LRB (21 Feb 2013)

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 07:54:42 +0000

'Letter: The Shit We're In', LRB (21 Feb 2013):

But given that we are printing money, which contributes to inflation, is there not a case that the government is engineering inflation so as to hit its targets for spending cuts?

‘John Lanchester states that government spending, according to figures given by the Office for Budget Responsibility or OBR, will rise from £674.3 billion in 2012-13 to £765.5 in 2017-18 (LRB, 3 January). What Lanchester fails to point out is that these are nominal figures and do not allow for inflation. If we deflate the nominal spending by the consumer price index (as used by the OBR), we get a fall in real government spending from £690.9 billion in 2011-12 to £652.6 billion in 2017-18. Instead of rising by £74.6 billion over the six years, expenditure falls by £38.3 billion.

Chris Edwards, University of East Anglia, George Irvin, School of Oriental and African Studies, Howard Reed, Landman Economics, Colchester’

Trevor Owens, 'Small Pieces Loosely Kludged: Peer Review and Publication in Math Scholarly Communication' (4 Feb 2013)

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 15:34:30 +0000

Trevor Owens, 'Small Pieces Loosely Kludged: Peer Review and Publication in Math Scholarly Communication' (4 Feb 2013):

‘The fact that arXiv, SSRN and sites like RePEc and a few other disciplinary networks emerged for sharing scholarship in draft form and that nothing like them has taken off in the humanities is an indictment of the humanities. How come Mathematicians, Astronomers, Economists and a range of other fields could just set up places to share their work and humanists haven’t? As you can see from the Math situation, if a scholarly community just shifts to sharing pre-prints and everybody does it then it basically doesn’t matter what publishers want to do in terms of open access. This is to say that scholars have no one but themselves and their peers to point to if they don’t like how scholarly communication works. As the math case shows, we can patch our scholarly communication system one kludge at a time and end up with a system that embraces broad open access and rapid dissemination and retains merit badges for quality.’

By @tommorris and HT lots of people today… To quote...

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 12:13:15 +0000

By @tommorris and HT lots of people today…

To quote Tom:

‘I present: Marriage Bingo. If you are going to watch the Parliamentary debate on the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill, you too can play along at home with the bingo card. Keep your eyes peeled for backbench Tories saying utterly horrible, bigoted, homophobic things (which aren’t bigoted or homophobic because they say they aren’t bigoted or homophobic, and it makes you a ghastly free-speech-suppressing Nazi to call someone a bigot).
Anyway, if you get to cross all the boxes, you get a wonderful prize: the realisation that even though Parliament may be on the verge of legalising same-sex marriage, it’s still filled with a lot of horrible, vicious, out-of-touch, homophobic arseholes. And they get to write our legislation. Democracy is truly wonderful.’

Stuart Shieber, 'Why open access is better for scholarly societies' (29 January 2013)

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 09:34:00 +0000

Stuart Shieber, 'Why open access is better for scholarly societies' (29 January 2013):

‘Recall the basic truths about the subscription market. Journals are complements, not substitutes. There’s limited market competition. The product being sold is a monopolistic good. Pricing is controlled at the bundle level.’

The Poppletonian (24 January 2013)

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 09:12:28 +0000

The Poppletonian (24 January 2013):

‘“Bugger me.”

That was how Dave, an MA student in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies, responded to the news that he had been named Poppleton’s “Top Teacher” in the annual staff awards.

According to a member of the judging panel, Dave’s success was based on three considerations: the number of hours of undergraduate teaching for which he is responsible, the seniority of the teachers he has replaced and the breadth of topics he is required to cover.

So not only did Dave teach for 27 hours a week, he also taught in place of such distinguished academics as Professor Lapping, Dr Quintock and Dr Piercemuller, and covered a range of cultural studies topics that included acculturation, anti-essentialism, Baudrillard, Judith Butler, intertextuality, Angela McRobbie, performativity, queer theory, symbolic order and Raymond Williams.

Dave was unable to attend the ceremony because of teaching commitments, but Professor Lapping, who accepted the award on his behalf, told the audience that without Dave’s consistently underpaid help it would have been impossible for senior staff in his department to devote themselves wholeheartedly to fabricating the impact section of their submissions to the research excellence framework.’

Modern Toss, The Guardian (2 February 2013) < nailed it.

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 08:46:00 +0000

Modern Toss, The Guardian (2 February 2013) < nailed it.

Steve Bell, ‘If…’, The Guardian (28 January...

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 14:23:43 +0000

Steve Bell, ‘If…’, The Guardian (28 January 2013)