Humanities Computing

After class I was looking to find some background information on Julian Assange, mainly because I know very little about his negative reputation. Here is an interesting blog emphasizing the impact of reputational crisis, which is really interesting, especially considering that this information is even available from this university to the public.

How e-mail users are using ZigMail to sort through spam.

The Obama administration is banning hundreds of thousands of federal employees from calling up the WikiLeaks site on government computers because the leaked material is still formally regarded as classified. The Library of Congress tonight joined the education department, the commerce department and other government agencies in confirming that the ban is in place.

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.

And we know we couldn't avoid adding the thoughts of Michael Scott on the use of Wikipedia. Obviously, some of our sources seem to take a more genuine approach at propagating the veracity of Wikipedia, but the Office's use of Michael Scott as a supporter does represent people's general fear of the quality of contributor on the site.

I had to share this because it's just too funny but also seems to make an interesting critique on the problems with fact checking and collaborative and anonymous contributions to an encyclopedia. It also seems to make a commentary on how we establish relevancy by adding items (including ourselves) to these kinds of encyclopedias.

This is a google book that discusses some of the same things I mentioned in my post regarding the use of wikipedia and other networks and how that shapes our ideas of freedom.

This is an article that discusses the views of professional historians regarding wikipedia. I think it makes a number of interesting claims both regarding the management or historical data and wikipedia's role in promoting a particular historical paradigm.

This a brief look at combining some linguistic approaches to the content of wikipedia and asking questions about the shaping of the meaning of words.

I apologize for all of the posts about WikiLeaks, but I'm fascinated by Assange's views of his work. One minute I feel like he's a hero and that these leaks really can open the masses' eyes to political corruption and scandal, but the next minutes I feel like he's playing with fire and am fearful of the consequences of uncovering these documents.

This article (which mentions the Manning situation that is the focus of the video I posted earlier today) outlines the pros and cons of prosecuting Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief and founder of WikiLeaks, for publishing and disseminating thousands of classified State Department cables on his site. The First Amendment is at the crux of this debate: "How do you draft a law that targets WikiLeaks but leaves intact our system of press freedoms?"

This is an interesting video about the young army private, Bradley Manning, who willingly passed restricted military information about the Afghan and Iraq Wars as well as over 250,000 U.S. State Department cables to WikiLeaks. Manning had access to all of this information because of his position as a low-level intelligence analyst with the military in Iraq.

NPR discusses how the use of social media has brought the Treyvon Martin case into national spotlight.

Bogost on gamification.

I'd like to say that this has implications for Bogost's book, but really it's just awesome.

Artist uses webcam feed and gps focused on Fifth Avenue NYC to create corresponding cars in Frogger game. So where does the real car end and the Frogger smashing begin...?

Black boxes: not just for airplanes anymore... And these should actually be black.

Bogost on "the new aesthetic." The focus is the tumblr blog "the new aesthetic" which focuses on "the otherness of computer vision." New or no?

This is the article I referenced in class regarding exercise....

Jonah Lehrer's argument sounds a bit like it was re-purposed from Goldsmith...uncreatively?