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Todd Suomela

For Google, Everything Is a Popularity Contest - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...531762

knowledge academic representation citation-analysis bibliometrics popularity

shared by Todd Suomela on 27 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • PageRank and Classic Papers reveal Google’s theory of knowledge: What is worth knowing is what best relates to what is already known to be worth knowing. Given a system that construes value by something’s visibility, be it academic paper or web page, the valuable resources are always the ones closest to those that already proved their value.Google enjoys the benefits of this reasoning as much as anyone. When Google tells people that it has found the most lasting scholarly articles on a subject, for example, the public is likely believe that story because they also believe Google tends to find the right answers.
  • It’s as if Google, the company that promised to organize and make accessible the world’s information, has done the opposite. Almost anything can be posted, published, or sold online today, but most of it cannot be seen. Instead, information remains hidden, penalized for having failed to be sufficiently connected to other, more popular information. But to think differently is so uncommon, the idea of doing so might not even arise—for shoppers and citizens as much as for scholars. All information is universally accessible, but some information is more universally accessible than others.
Matt Gardzina

Physics Professor Gains Popularity on YouTube | St. Lawrence University - 0 views

www.stlawu.edu/...essor-gains-popularity-youtube

flipped classroom flipping video education physics

shared by Matt Gardzina on 30 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • Matt Gardzina on 30 Jul 13
     
    Professor of Physics Daniel W. Koon has created his own YouTube channel to host videos of his scientific demonstrations. Since then, his channel has received more than 100,000 viewers from the U.S., South Korea, India, and the U.K., and currently has more than 50 subscribers.
jatolbert

Does Digital Scholarship Have a Future? | EDUCAUSE - 1 views

er.educause.edu/...ital-scholarship-have-a-future

shared by jatolbert on 01 May 17 - No Cached
  • Although the phrase sometimes refers to issues surrounding copyright and open access and sometimes to scholarship analyzing the online world, digital scholarship—emanating, perhaps, from digital humanities—most frequently describes discipline-based scholarship produced with digital tools and presented in digital form.
    • jatolbert
      jatolbert on 01 May 17
       
      A couple of points. First, there's no reason to assume that DS comes from DH. "Digital" was a term and concept before DH claimed it. Second, I would suggest that DS can be produced with digital tools OR presented digitally OR both. It isn't necessarily always both. I did digital scholarship that was both printed in a conventional journal and published online. Semantic difference, but still important.
  • Though the recent popularity of the phrase digital scholarship reflects impressive interdisciplinary ambition and coherence, two crucial elements remain in short supply in the emerging field. First, the number of scholars willing to commit themselves and their careers to digital scholarship has not kept pace with institutional opportunities. Second, today few scholars are trying, as they did earlier in the web's history, to reimagine the form as well as the substance of scholarship. In some ways, scholarly innovation has been domesticated, with the very ubiquity of the web bringing a lowered sense of excitement, possibility, and urgency. These two deficiencies form a reinforcing cycle: the diminished sense of possibility weakens the incentive for scholars to take risks, and the unwillingness to take risks limits the impact and excitement generated by boldly innovative projects.
    • jatolbert
      jatolbert on 01 May 17
       
      I'm not sure about any of this. There's plenty of innovation happening. Also, galloping towards innovation for its own sake, without considering the specific needs of scholars, seems like a mistake.
  • Digital scholarship, reimagined in bolder ways, is cost-effective, a smart return on investment. By radically extending the audience for a work of scholarship, by reaching students of many ages and backgrounds, by building the identity of the host institution, by attracting and keeping excellent faculty and students, by creating bonds between faculty and the library, and by advancing knowledge across many otherwise disparate disciplines, innovative digital scholarship makes sense.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Yet, other aspects of the changing digital environment may not be encouraging digital scholarship. The large and highly visible investments being made in MOOCs, for example, lead some faculty to equate technology with the diminution of hard-won traditions of teaching and scholarship. Using new capacities in bandwidth, MOOCs extend well-established patterns of large lectures to audiences otherwise out of the hearing range of those lectures. Unlike digital scholarship, however, MOOCs make no claim to creating new disciplinary knowledge, to advancing the scholarly conversation, to unifying research and teaching.
    • jatolbert
      jatolbert on 01 May 17
       
      I don't see why any of this is necessarily a problem--unless you reject the notion of lectures as useful pedagogical forms entirely
  • In other words, digital scholarship may have greater impact if it takes fuller advantage of the digital medium and innovates more aggressively. Digital books and digital articles that mimic their print counterparts may be efficient, but they do not expand our imagination of what scholarship could be in an era of boundlessness, an era of ubiquity. They do not imagine other forms in which scholarship might live in a time when our audiences can be far more vast and varied than in previous generations. They do not challenge us to think about keeping alive the best traditions of the academy by adapting those traditions to the possibilities of our own time. They do not encourage new kinds of writing, of seeing, of explaining. And we need all those things.
    • jatolbert
      jatolbert on 01 May 17
       
      Somewhat melodramatic. What kind of innovation does he want, exactly? And what doesn't he like about the formats he mentions here? He lists things that scholars do, suggests they need to change, but makes no compelling case re: WHY they need to change.
  • Interpretation must be an integral and explicit part of the fundamental architecture of new efforts. Insisting that colleges and universities broaden their standards and definitions of scholarship to make room for digital scholarship is necessary, but it is only a partial answer. To be recognized and rewarded as scholarship in the traditional sense, digital scholarship must do the work we have long expected scholarship to do: contribute, in a meaningful and enduring way, to an identifiable collective and cumulative enterprise.
  • By way of example, the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond is attempting to build one model of what this new scholarship might look like. The lab combines various elements of proven strategies while also breaking new ground. With the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the historians Robert K. Nelson and Scott Nesbit and their colleagues are creating a digital atlas of American history. The first instantiation of the atlas, Visualizing Emancipation, will soon be followed by an amplified, annotated, and animated digital edition of The Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, first published in 1932. Over the next three years, chapters of original and dynamic maps and interpretations will focus on key aspects of the American experience since the nation's founding. The digital atlas will allow scholars to see patterns we have never been able to envision before while at the same time it will make available to teachers of all levels visualizations of crucial processes in American history.
    • jatolbert
      jatolbert on 01 May 17
       
      This one example doesn't seem all that innovative--story maps, etc. have been around a long time. Also, what he's doing is still basically a repackaging of print scholarship. It could be useful, but it's not nearly as radical as he seems to think.
  • Does Digital Scholarship Have a Future?
    • jatolbert
      jatolbert on 01 May 17
       
      A problematic think piece about digital scholarship in general. Has some useful definitions. Unfortunately Ayers is doing a lot of hand-wringing over what he sees as the lack of meaningful innovation in digital scholarship. It's not at all clear, though, what he means by this. He argues that what innovation has happened isn't sufficient, then gives an example of a project--a digital atlas of American history--that he seems to think is radically different, but isn't in any way I can discern from his description.
Todd Suomela

Who Framed Augmented Reality? | Johannah King-Slutzky - 0 views

thebaffler.com/...augmented-reality-king-slutzky

augmented-reality animation history cartoon sts technology technology-cycles

shared by Todd Suomela on 16 May 17 - No Cached
  • The human/drawing interaction trope that Zuckerberg is rebranding as Facebook’s own innovation even predates animated cartoons. One type of scrapbook, the paper dollhouse, played with the appeal of mixing real-life and an invented world. It was most popular from 1875-1920, and over forty years its form remained consistent: A dollhouse unfolded theatrically to create illusions of progress and depth.
  • Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur is generally considered the first animated cartoon ever, and it made use of the same trope of mixing reality and man-made art when it premiered all the way back in 1914. McCay was a cartoonist famous for the Freudian, surrealist comic Little Nemo in Slumberland, which was published in weekly instalments in the New York Herald and New York American—though its material is more frequently compared to Bosch than to Garfield. McCay, already two hits deep into his career in the first decade of the twentieth century, purportedly decided to animate a comic strip in 1909 on a dare from friends griping about his daunting productivity. Following a brief stint with an animated Nemo, McCay developed Gertie the Dinosaur, an amiable brontosaurus with a stoner grin, and took her on a vaudeville roadshow across America.
  • LAST MONTH Facebook premiered its vision for the future at its development conference, F8. The camera-app technology Mark Zuckerberg calls augmented reality (or AR) borrows heavily from the social network Snapchat, which enables users to layer animated digital content onto photos on the fly. On stage, Zuckerberg promoted this collaging as social media’s first steps toward modish virtual screen manipulations. “This will allow us to create all kinds of things that were only available in the digital world,” Zuckerberg bubbled effusively. “We’re going to interact with them and explore them together.” Taken in, USA Today repeated this claim to innovation, elaborating on the digital mogul’s Jules Verne-like promise: “We will wander not one, but two worlds—the physical and the digital,” For my part, I was particularly delighted by Facebook’s proposal to animate bowls of cereal with marauding cartoon sharks, savoring, perhaps, the insouciant violence I associate with childhood adventure.
jatolbert

How America Went Haywire - The Atlantic - 2 views

www.theatlantic.com/...534231

shared by jatolbert on 14 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • We all have hunches we can’t prove and superstitions that make no sense. Some of my best friends are very religious, and others believe in dubious conspiracy theories
    • jatolbert
      jatolbert on 14 Aug 17
       
      Don't like how he's equating religion with irrationality.
  • anything-goes relativism
    • jatolbert
      jatolbert on 14 Aug 17
       
      This bears explaining
  • Much more than the other billion or so people in the developed world, we Americans believe—really believe—in the supernatural and the miraculous, in Satan on Earth, in reports of recent trips to and from heaven, and in a story of life’s instantaneous creation several thousand years ago.
    • jatolbert
      jatolbert on 14 Aug 17
       
      Disagree on a number of levels. But mostly I object to his repeated claims that belief in these things is stupid/irrational.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • By my reckoning, the solidly reality-based are a minority, maybe a third of us but almost certainly fewer than half.
    • jatolbert
      jatolbert on 14 Aug 17
       
      What in the world does he mean by this? Who (besides himself) does he view as "reality-based"?
  • Remarkably, the same fraction, or maybe less, believes that the Bible consists mainly of legends and fables—the same proportion that believes U.S. officials were complicit in the 9/11 attacks.
    • jatolbert
      jatolbert on 14 Aug 17
       
      Misusing the genre term "legend"
  • Of course, various fantasy constituencies overlap and feed one another—for instance, belief in extraterrestrial visitation and abduction can lead to belief in vast government cover-ups, which can lead to belief in still more wide-ranging plots and cabals, which can jibe with a belief in an impending Armageddon.
    • jatolbert
      jatolbert on 14 Aug 17
       
      What does he mean by "lead to"? There's a causal factor between disparate beliefs? Where's his proof? His "truth" is truth by fiat, which is as bad as the other truths he attacks.
  • that there is some ‘public’ that shares a notion of reality, a concept of reason, and a set of criteria by which claims to reason and rationality are judged,
    • jatolbert
      jatolbert on 14 Aug 17
       
      Now he's just pissing me off.
  • merican moxie has always come in two types. We have our wilder, faster, looser side: We’re overexcited gamblers with a weakness for stories too good to be true. But we also have the virtues embodied by the Puritans and their secular descendants: steadiness, hard work, frugality, sobriety, and common sense.
    • jatolbert
      jatolbert on 14 Aug 17
       
      There is no such thing as national types or traits. This is a step away from eugenics.
  • We invented the fantasy-industrial complex; almost nowhere outside poor or otherwise miserable countries are flamboyant supernatural beliefs so central to the identities of so many people.
    • jatolbert
      jatolbert on 14 Aug 17
       
      And now he's just being an outright bigot. Also, I doubt this claim about which countries have prevalent supernatural beliefs is even close to accurate.
  • national traits
  • Essentially everything that became known as New Age was invented, developed, or popularized at the Esalen Institute.
    • jatolbert
      jatolbert on 14 Aug 17
       
      This is, in fact, overstatement.
  • Reality itself is a purely social construction, a tableau of useful or wishful myths that members of a society or tribe have been persuaded to believe.
    • jatolbert
      jatolbert on 14 Aug 17
       
      doesn't understand constructivism
  • perceptions
  • Over in anthropology, where the exotic magical beliefs of traditional cultures were a main subject, the new paradigm took over completely—don’t judge, don’t disbelieve, don’t point your professorial finger
    • jatolbert
      jatolbert on 14 Aug 17
       
      Fury.
  • the idea that nothing is any more correct or true than anything else
    • jatolbert
      jatolbert on 14 Aug 17
       
      This is not what relativism is.
    • jatolbert
      jatolbert on 14 Aug 17
       
      False equivalencies, unclear links, and general unsubstantiated grouchiness. This guy is an idiot.
  • Exciting falsehoods tend to do well in the perpetual referenda, and become self-validating. A search for almost any “alternative” theory or belief seems to generate more links to true believers’ pages and sites than to legitimate or skeptical ones, and those tend to dominate the first few pages of results. For instance, beginning in the ’90s, conspiracists decided that contrails, the skinny clouds of water vapor that form around jet-engine exhaust, were composed of exotic chemicals, part of a secret government scheme to test weapons or poison citizens or mitigate climate change—and renamed them chemtrails. When I Googled chemtrails proof, the first seven results offered so-called evidence of the nonexistent conspiracy. When I searched for government extraterrestrial cover-up, only one result in the first three pages didn’t link to an article endorsing a conspiracy theory.
    • jatolbert
      jatolbert on 14 Aug 17
       
      This is just stupid. He SEARCHED for terms that validate these claims-- "proof; cover-up"--so of COURSE the majority of results were from the perspective of belief.
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