EMAC6300

The intersection of science and communications, with some improv. Actor Alan Alda wants to help train scientists to communicate to a wider audience.

Smartphones are going against one of the long-held rules in portable electronics, that smaller is better. Year by year, computers, storage devices and music players have shed size and weight. And for decades, it has been happening with cellphones, too.

Selfiecity investigates selfies using a mix of theoretic, artistic and quantitative methods: We present our findings about the demographics of people taking selfies, their poses and expressions. Rich media visualizations (imageplots) assemble thousands of photos to reveal interesting patterns. The interactive selfiexploratory allows you to navigate the whole set of 3200 photos. Finally, theoretical essays discuss selfies in the history of photography, the functions of images in social media, and methods and dataset.

Here's Scalzi's other blog post about the "Straight White Male" it is also mentioned in the article I mentioned in my earlier post. They are both very compelling.

I was searching for this blog post because it is mentioned in our reading, Nakamura, "Queer female of color: The highest difficulty setting there is? Gaming rhetoric as gender capital." I found it on my FB feed a while back, and remembered it and had to share. My friend posted it, and there were such comments like "it's so sad and true," and "I cried," etc. It did get a lot of hits and went viral, I'd say at least on FB. :)

A useful graphic

The best social media guides often come directly from the websites, especially for strategic communications endeavors.

This post is written for a specific audience, but the tips, suggestions and tools for infographics can be used for any subject area.

A new paper out of MIT's Center for Civic Media uses Media Cloud and other tools to map how the story of Trayvon Marton's death was told -- and evolved.

This is really interesting. I also like that the tool is available for anyone to use. I'm going to add it to the tools list in #digitaltext

More on journalism, codes and algorithms

How reporting and reverse engineering could build a bet to understand the code that influences us

Mosaic, a new science site that's affixing a Creative Commons license to its long-form writings

What kind of stories can artists, designers and writers tell when teamed up with data scientists and coders?

Looky who I found...Ms. Ito herself! I'm totally using this for my paper!

The contestant is reflecting a cultural shift: "Now everything can be measured, quantified and reduced to statistical probabilities" The march of big data on a beloved game show.