Humanities Computing

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.

Another article on the Wikidata development.

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

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.

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.

This is a web site of a friend I used to work with, and thought it was a nice example of designing a web site for a professional portfolio as well as including personal interests and links.

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.

This is an article that responds to some of the issues brought up last class (March 20) about employers asking for facebook passwords.

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.