Humanities Computing

A simple and straightforward guide.

A nice breakdown between Facebook and, my favorite online space, Tumblr.

Questions of names and online identity come up in this article, which talks about how Google Plus has changed its policy of requiring people to use their real names when registering for accounts.

Although geared toward corporate websites, I found this useful.

Is taking from Wikipedia plagiarism? This French author cut and paste freely. This is interesting since it's such a constant argument with students in 101 and 102.

Interesting process of Wikipedia's response to really poorly done political commentary on its site.

A little late in the game, but the wording here is really interesting because the censorship of bloggers by the Chinese government includes works with imagined information. In addition, they specifically cut off the comments option. We have a direct moment here where the 2.0 and call and response of online writing is considered poisonous to government action, even if the work is a fictional piece. The most important thing to note here is that China is now requiring all microbloggers to use their real names. We talked about how useful a tracked name can be, but in this case practicality loses over privacy.

Another shrouding tactic is to use the search engine DuckDuckGo, which distinguishes itself with a "We do not track or bubble you!" policy. Bubbling is the filtering of search results based on your search history. (Bubbling also means you are less likely to see opposing points of view or be exposed to something fresh and new.) *I don't particularly care about my privacy (nothing to hide and honestly don't care whose watching), but I do care about the information being fed to me through search engines. I pride myself on doing all the research I can before supporting or criticizing a position. If google is simply feeding me what I want to hear, how do I know I have the full story? This seems like a particularly nefarious form of censorship--one that makes sense in an age of "truthiness" and pandering to ignorance. Bad google. No bubbles.

Eek. Could be enlightening?

EnemyGraph, a Facebook app that lets you list your enemies. Silly or necessary? 

The idea behind this is to allow for an experience closer to that we have in the "real world." The comments section offers some interesting counterpoints to Terry's arguments.

A really cool website that documents color trends in 'the world's most fashionable cities.' Perhaps we can use patterns for color/theme ideas as creative fodder for our sites (even if an American city is not featured here).

A writer for Facebook (wow, that seems like such a weird way of putting it) explains the rationale behind the site's language and features such as the "Like" button. We can connect this to the patterns in Designing Social Interfaces.

A few rhetorical strategies.

CSS Regions will give us new options for text flow on a page.

At first I wasn't sure if this would relate to any of our discussions/readings/principles of design, but I think a lot of us in class are Mac users. A prophesy with any validity or not, it's something to think about for future investments.

The McLuhan understanding of technology as an extension of ourselves immediately came to mind when I saw the first image here. Also, if this thing had camera capabilities (the ability to Skype, say) we could reasonably apply ideas of autoamputation.

New project called Wikidata aims to automate some aspects of Wikipedia.

Another article on the Wikidata development.

This is the latest on the Google/Viacom copyright issue over videos on youtube.