Group items tagged

This 'conversation' by Patrick Murray-John is about the tension caused by collaborating with people of different focuses and specialties (more hack; less yack). He challenges the thought that technology has invaded the humanities. he believes that it is the other way around, owing to the detail to structure of the digital representation. He argues that explicating code as you would a dissertation is a great approach because the code does contribute to how people will perceive and process the information on the page. He compares user interface to kids learning to analyze literary text. The question many students ask ("Why can't we just read it? Why does it have to be work?") should not be questions posed about the interface. He believes that users should not be able to view or deal with the inner workings of the application.

Alan Turing is written about in this article and praised for his pioneering efforts in the technology we see around us today. He set in motion that breaking of coding information to help spur on what we know today and information technology. He also had strong beliefs in the theory that technology could become intelligent.

Blogger Dan Cohen discusses how Google is good for history. Historians are simply a group of people who dig through information from the past, put it all together as possible facts or theories, and then share. Cohen then teases Google for a bit when bringing attention to the hand scans that can be occasionally found in Google Books. Their is a question of quality and direction.

In his blog, Dan Cohen decided to revisit a topic that was cover in the Chronicle of Higher Education. This data-mining related article discusses the issues with educational testing and growing technology in the humanities field. Devices that can browse an entire database of knowledge pin pointing specific facts. This device is then compared to the relationship between the calculator and math to this device and history. Just as the calculator has made memorizing certain mathematical principles pointless in testing, this device is said to make multiple choice test irrelevant for history. Similarly, cell phones, pdas, and tablets have been able to fill this gap already.