Group items tagged

The website of Humanity+ which advocates ethical uses of technology to further humanity.

This short article begins the discussion of what role the Digital Humanities will play when Google comes out with glasses that have cameras built in that will enable "real-time geolocation, facial recognition software, the journaling and storing in the cache and third-party's servers of everywhere you go and see whilst wearing the glasses." He questions how we can use these gadgets to our benefit while still protecting human rights and freedom of speech.

I really like the black-and-white photo in this article that shows the group of people wearing 3D glasses--that's exactly the visual I had in my head while reading this article. It's kind of unsettling to think that that image could become an everyday reality in the not-so-distant future.

This is an interesting article about how "the digital humanities is really an insurgent humanities," and how this is a revolution of sharing ideas that, "affirms the value of the open, the infinite, the expansive [and] the democratization of culture and scholarship.""

For those like me interested in the ramifications of gender, human rights and social policy this is an excellent place to look into. Carol Cohn, one of the foremost gender and warfare scholars is associated with this consortium.

My last day teaching was Friday and already they're trying to make it so I can't come back :( Though, I've seen computer poetry and I'm not sold on the idea that computers can gauge quality...

Consider Mcluhan's concept that electronic media creates a construct of the human nervous system. Here you'll see it in its literal form as the mapped out Internet.

This is a completely pointless website that kind of made me laugh. I'm one of those people of 50% of the time uses "Google" as a verb ("Just Google it") and who 50% of the time still asks an actual human being the question first but inevitably gets: "Well, did you Google it?" So...this isn't an article. But still kind of funny. Digital technology is certainly changing our language: Just Google it, Wiki it, I friended her the other day, when I was Pinning, I wish I had a "Like" button right now!, and so on...

Considering how often we look at TED talks, I thought it might be worth including this fake TED talk used as a clip for the new Ridley Scott movie, Prometheus. I know this probably looks a little like getting off track, but I thought it was interesting that the author claims that humans have become gods through their acts of technological creation (in his case, "cyberkinetic individuals). Science fiction often does a great job extrapolating certain ideas or issues, and I think in some ways we can find links to the issue and use of Wikipedia in which we can freely take place in the act of creation or manipulation of a text and even the meaning behind the entries we change. Obviously this is not necessarily created in our own image the way a cyborg would be, but it is still using McLuhan's idea of the extension of man into the cyber world. The question we're left with here though, is whether or not we deserve the moniker of "creator" if we create anonymously.

I thought this was an interesting article after looking at the corpus last week that used books online. There is great discussion of how computers and machines will enable us to look at literary texts in entirely new ways.

Interesting in terms of McLuhan and discussions last class.

Looks at "responsive design" and navigation menus. And if you couldn't already tell, I've fallen behind in my Webmonkey reading and am now bombing the Humanities Computing group with any article that I think is interesting and/or semi-relevant. I'll stop soon.

Finally (and what will appear first), all this talk about digital technology and web design pulls up an equal impulse in me to talk about other skill sets that get undervalued in an information economy. I read this a bit ago and enjoyed it. There also seems to be a trend currently that is leading us toward a sort of steam punk utopia where we will have a mixture of high and low technology. For more on the philosophical argument being put forward in this article, I highly recommend Shop Class as Soulcraft and The Mind at Work. To see some indications of the trend I'm talking about watch How It's Made (which tends to skew toward human components of the production process and is based in a tactile fetish of understanding modes of production since you do not learn how to make things ... or really how things are made) and check out all the books on craft skills, cooking, and carpentry that are exploding all over Amazon with noticeably nostalgic titles. Speaking of which, did the knitting craze end or am I just not around 50 people that have recently taken up knitting anymore?

Oh! Also add to the "evidence" list farming/gardening and the back to earth books ... and psychologically the zombie and (to a lesser extent) virus craze in movies, books, games, etc.

Paul Conneally describes the future of humanitarianism in a hyper-connected world. The idea of re-typing and transforming texts to tweets to websites and digital maps in disaster situations etc. seems like an act of uncreative writing--something that is, in a way, re-presenting information while at the same time creating a profound new piece of writing.

Ted talk on the culturnomics/ngram project. According to Bonnie: "I think this TedTalk does a really good job of summarizing what the ngram article was all about and adds a little interest as well."