Humanities Computing

An article addressing how twitter can actually be damaging to use in a crisis.

Evan Williams, CEO of twitter, discusses how users influenced the evolution of twitter.

Johanna Blakely discusses gender and social media in relation to demographics and women's popular use of social media.

"Kony2012," an activist movement aimed at arresting Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony, has recently harnessed the power of social media (especially Facebook and Twitter) to spread its message. This is just one of the articles I've found that examines the role of social media in modern-day activism.

"Adopted by the NCTE Executive Committee, February 15, 2008 Literacy has always been a collection of cultural and communicative practices shared among members of particular groups. As society and technology change, so does literacy. Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies."

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.

Rapleaf: a way of gathering/pulling and managing user reputation. Targeted to websites that want to gather information about customer demographics, it's one example of how profiling works integrally to web 2.0.

This short clip shows some pretty wild concepts of where computer and touch screen technology may be going in the near future, including the magnets and holograms.

We talked about "digital badges" in class a few weeks ago. This article explains how a competition, "Badges for Lifelong Learning," could allow digital badges to become legitimate evidence of non-traditional, "DIY" learners' skills and knowledge. Digital badges come into the picture because these individuals won't have a degree to show for their work.

Great article highlighting reasons why individuals suffering from eating disorders respond so well to blogs.

Cool spatial/pictorial layout.

Cool super-minimal no-style website.

Apocalypse of mediocrity or community of readers as writers? And who decides what counts as boring?

Article on the use of milblogs and other Web 2.0 technology in the military.

Interesting article on the use of social media to inform residents about Mexico's cartel violence.

Another resource for thinking about design.

The changing privacy policy for Google came up in last class (I think Dibs mentioned it), and I thought this was an interesting article that talks about how difficult it is to navigate around the changes.

This is a page off the official website of Tim Berners-Lee, and here he explains the Semantic Web, which involves "using the WWW infrastructure to create a global, decentralized, weblike mesh of machine-processable knowledge."

Even though Dibs is right in saying that erasing your history does not essentially change anything, if you want to access a utopian fantasy, this could be helpful.

This blurb is from the BBC: The new privacy policy is rolling out around the world on 1 March Changes made by Google to its privacy policy are in breach of European law, the EU's justice commissioner has said. Viviane Reding told the BBC that authorities found that "transparency rules have not been applied".