Skip to main content

Home/ Groups/ Writing about Literature in the Digital Age
Rss Feed
Sort By: Most Recent | Popular Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Weiye Loh

Victorian Literature, Statistically Analyzed With New Process - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...04victorian.html

Literature Statistics Content Analysis

shared by Weiye Loh on 04 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • A decline in references to “God,” “Christian” and “universal” is consonant with the conventional view that the 19th century was a time of rising secularism and skepticism.
  • Yet large searches can also challenge some pet theories of close reading, he said: for example, that the Victorians were obsessed with the nature and origins of evil. As it turns out, books with the word “evil” in the title bumped along near the bottom of the graph, accounting for less than 0.1 percent — a thousandth — of those published during the Victorian era.
  • As Mr. Cohen is quick to acknowledge, the meaning of those numbers is anything but clear. Perhaps authors didn’t like to use the word “evil” in the title; perhaps there were other, more common synonyms; perhaps the context points to another subject altogether.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Ms. Martin at Princeton knows firsthand how electronic searches can unearth both obscure texts and dead ends. She has spent the last 10 years compiling a list of books, newspaper and journal articles about the technical aspects of poetry. She recalled finding a sudden explosion of the words “syntax” and “prosody” in 1832, suggesting a spirited debate about poetic structure. But it turned out that Dr. Syntax and Prosody were the names of two racehorses.
  • Weiye Loh on 04 Dec 10
     
    A decline in references to "God," "Christian" and "universal" is consonant with the conventional view that the 19th century was a time of rising secularism and skepticism.
Weiye Loh

Victorian Literature, Statistically Analyzed With New Process - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...04victorian.html

Literature Statistics Content Analysis

shared by Weiye Loh on 04 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • The titles of every British book published in English in and around the 19th century — 1,681,161, to be exact — are being electronically scoured for key words and phrases that might offer fresh insight into the minds of the Victorians.
  • This research, which has only recently become possible, thanks to a new generation of powerful digital tools and databases, represents one of the many ways that technology is transforming the study of literature, philosophy and other humanistic fields that haven’t necessarily embraced large-scale quantitative analysis.
  • There is also anxiety, however, about the potential of electronic tools to reduce literature and history to a series of numbers, squeezing out important subjects that cannot be easily quantified.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Some scholars are wary of the control an enterprise like Google can exert over digital information. Google’s plan to create a voluminous online library and store has raised alarms about a potential monopoly over digital books and the hefty pricing that might follow. But Jon Orwant, the engineering manager for Google Books, Magazines and Patents, said the plan was to make collections and searching tools available to libraries and scholars free. “That’s something we absolutely will do, and no, it’s not going to cost anything,” he said.
  • Mr. Houghton sought to capture what he called a “general sense” of how middle- and upper-class Victorians thought, partly by closely reading scores of texts written during the era and methodically counting how many times certain words appeared. The increasing use of “hope,” “light” and “sunlight,” for instance, was interpreted as a sign of the Victorians’ increasing optimism.
Weiye Loh

Do writers need paper? « Prospect Magazine - 0 views

www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/...books-electronic-publishing

ebooks

shared by Weiye Loh on 27 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • The digitisation of the reading experience itself is the least radical aspect of this process. Although a minority of titles offer sounds and images, most e-books ape their paper counterparts. Even on an advanced device like the iPad, the best reading applications emphasise clarity and clutter-free text. What’s truly new is the shift in power that the emerging order represents.
  • Weiye Loh on 27 Oct 10
     
    Do writers need paper?
Weiye Loh

Balderdash: Stephen Fry on English, and Pedantry - 0 views

gssq.blogspot.com/...y-on-english-and-pedantry.html

Language Pedantry

shared by Weiye Loh on 27 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Those once fashionable Frenchies designated them are Langue, language as an idea, and parole, language as utterance...
  • The structuralists: one of their number, perhaps the best known, Roland Barthes, liked to use two words jouissance and plaisir. Le plaisir du texte. The pleasure of the text. Those who think structuralism spelt or spelled death to conscious art and such bourgeois comforts as style, accomplishment and enjoyment might be surprised that the pleasure of the text, the jouissance, the juicy joy of language, was important to Roland and his followers. Only to a dullard is language a means of communication and nothing more. It would be like saying sex is a means of reproduction and no more and food a means of fuelling and no more.
  • What is considered "correct" language works very much like how Scientific theories get in vogue. When there's a Kuhnian paradigm shift - voilà, what was once wrong becomes right, and vice versa. That said, outside of the usual hunting grounds of pedants (who Fry is decrying), grammar has functions outside of being correct for the sake of being correct.
  • Weiye Loh on 27 Oct 10
     
    Stephen Fry on English, and Pedantry
Weiye Loh

Lingua Franca | Is Bad Writing Necessary? - 0 views

linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/...writing.html

Writings Postmodernism Critical Theory

shared by Weiye Loh on 24 Oct 10 - Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 24 Oct 10
     
    IS BAD WRITING NECESSARY? George Orwell, Theodor Adorno, and the Politics of Literature BY JAMES MILLER
Weiye Loh

- Clarity Is King -- Eric Adler on Postmodernists' Limpid Bursts - New Partis... - 0 views

www.newpartisan.com/...tmodernists-limpid-bursts.html

Postmodernism Writings

shared by Weiye Loh on 24 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 24 Oct 10
     
    Clarity Is King -- Eric Adler on Postmodernists' Limpid Bursts 05.7.2004
Weiye Loh

A `Bad Writer' Bites Back - 0 views

pantherfile.uwm.edu/...butler.htm

Academic Writing Postmodernism

shared by Weiye Loh on 24 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • The journal, Philosophy and Literature, has offered itself as the arbiter of good prose and accused some of us of bad writing by awarding us "prizes."
  • The targets, however, have been restricted to scholars on the left whose work focuses on topics like sexuality, race, nationalism and the workings of capitalism -- a point the news media ignored. Still, the whole exercise hints at a serious question about the relation of language and politics: why are some of the most trenchant social criticisms often expressed through difficult and demanding language?
  • scholars in the humanities should be able to clarify how their work informs and illuminates everyday life. Equally, however, such scholars are obliged to question common sense, interrogate its tacit presumptions and provoke new ways of looking at a familiar world.
  • Weiye Loh on 24 Oct 10
     
    A `Bad Writer' Bites Back By JUDITH BUTLER
Weiye Loh

YouTube - Stephen Fry Kinetic Typography - Language - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

Language Pedantry

shared by Weiye Loh on 21 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 21 Oct 10
     
    Stephen Fry Kinetic Typography - Language
Audrey B

On Electronic Civil Disobedience - 1 views

www.thing.net/oecd.html

Mexican War Electronic Civil Disobedience ECD Thoreau

shared by Audrey B on 17 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Audrey B on 17 Jun 10
     
    Thoreau and ECD
Krista S

Report: Mafia Wars, Farmville Creator Scammed Player - 1 views

www.thebostonchannel.com/...detail.html

shared by Krista S on 16 Jun 10 - Cached
  • The man who created some of the most popular social networking games on Facebook is admitting he "did every horrible thing in the book just to get revenues," according to Consumerist.com.
  • Some of the spam ends up as malware and adware installed on your computer that can be impossible to remove. Others leave players with a monthly $9.99 credit card charge that they may not even be aware they subscribed to.
Krista S

The Importance of Internet Activity Choices to Salient Relationships - 0 views

www.springerlink.com/...u0t4v57w86848063

online escapism

shared by Krista S on 16 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Multiple regression analyses indicated that Internet activity choice influenced later relationship quality in both best friendships and romantic relationships. Using instant messaging (ICQ) was positively associated with most aspects of romantic relationship and best friendship quality. In contrast, visiting chat rooms was negatively related to best friendship quality. Using the Internet to play games and for general entertainment predicted decreases in relationship quality with best friends and with romantic partners. These findings reflect the important and complex functions of online socialization for the development and maintenance of relationships in adolescence.
Krista S

Internet Use and Child Development - 0 views

www.ifets.info/...17.pdf

shared by Krista S on 16 Jun 10 - No Cached
  • Krista S on 16 Jun 10
     
    In the context of middle class families, elements in the techno-subsystem (e.g., Internet access) may not necessarily facilitate child cognitive development; effective use of those elements, highly dependent upon parent behavior, may promote development. For example, Cho and Cheon (2005) surveyed families and found that parents' perceived control, obtained through shared web activities and family cohesion, reduced children's exposure to negative Internet content. Using the Internet at home to learn was reported in 65 cases, to play was reported in 57 cases, to browse in 35 cases, and to communicate in 27 cases. Fuchs and Wößmann (2005) inferred, having controlled for socioeconomic status, "a negative relationship between home computer availability and academic achievement, but a positive relationship between home computer use for Internet communication" (p. 581). DeBell and Chapman (2006) concluded that Internet use promotes cognitive development in children, "specifically in the area of visual intelligence, where certain computer activities -- particularly games -- may enhance the ability to monitor several visual stimuli at once, to read diagrams, recognize icons, and visualize spatial relationships" (p. 3). Van Deventer and White (2002) observed proficient 10- and 11-year-old video gamers and noted extremely high levels of self-monitoring, pattern recognition, and visual memory. In a comprehensive review of the literature of the time (when interactive digital games were relatively unsophisticated), Subrahmanyam, Kraut, Greenfield, and Gross (2000) concluded that "children who play computer games can improve their visual intelligence" (p. 128). It should be noted, however, that playing video games has also been linked to childhood distractibility, over-arousal, hostility, and aggression (Anderson, Gentile, & Buckley, 2007; Funk, Chan, Brouwer, & Curtiss, 2006).
Krista S

Facebook Users Average 7 hrs a Month in January as Digital Universe Expands | Nielsen Wire - 0 views

blog.nielsen.com/...ry-as-digital-universe-expands

shared by Krista S on 16 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Top 10 Parent Companies/Divisions for January 2010 (U.S., Home and Work) Rank Parent Unique Audience (000) Time Per Person (hh:mm:ss) MOM UA % Change MOM Time % Change 1 Google 162,536 2:05:19 4.4% -11.7% 2 Microsoft 143,893 1:57:58 5.9% -4.1% 3 Yahoo! 138,850 2:28:33 6.6% -15.8% 4 Facebook 116,329 7:01:41 5.8% 9.7% 5 AOL LLC 87,629 2:14:12 -0.8% -7.5% 6 News Corp. Online 83,540 1:10:56 4.2% -9.4% 7 InterActiveCorp 75,433 0:14:16 5.4% -9.3% 8 Amazon 70,942 0:25:23 -4.7% -28.4% 9 eBay 68,909 1:18:41 1.4% -5.8% 10 Apple Computer 68,877 1:18:58 7.9% -10.0%
Krista S

The Rumors Are True: We Spend More And More Time Online - 0 views

techcrunch.com/...harris-interactive-poll

shared by Krista S on 16 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Survey results published by Harris Interactive suggest that adult Internet users are now spending an average of 13 hours a week online. About 14% spends 24 or more hours a week online, while 20% of adult Internet users are online for only two hours or less a week.
Krista S

Industry Statistics - Worldwide Internet users grow their time spent online - Internet ... - 0 views

www.internetretailer.com/...s-grow-their-time-spent-online

shared by Krista S on 16 Jun 10 - Cached
  • December 13, 2002
  • U.S. consumers were online the next longest times, spending 12 hours, 6 minutes on the Internet
Krista S

Average Net user now online 13 hours per week | Digital Media - CNET News - 0 views

news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10421016-93.html

shared by Krista S on 16 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Those who surf the Net spend an average of 13 hours per week online, but that figure varies widely. Twenty percent are online for two hours or less a week, while 14 percent are there for 24 hours or more.
  • The age group that spent the most time online per week: 30- to 39-year-olds, at 18 hours.
Audrey B

Electronic Civil Disobedience and the World Wide Web of Hacktivism: - 1 views

switch.sjsu.edu/stefan

Civil Disobedience Hacktivism World Wide Web Direct Action Politics

shared by Audrey B on 01 Jun 10 - Cached
  • In the spring of 1998, a young British hacker known as "JF" accessed about 300 web sites and placed anti-nuclear text and imagery. He entered, changed and added HTML code. At that point it was the biggest political hack of its kind. Since then, and increasingly over the course of the year, there were numerous reports of web sites being accessed and altered with political content.
  • By no means was 1998 the first year of the browser wars, but it was the year when electronic civil disobedience and hacktivism came to the fore, evidenced by a front page New York Times article on the subject by the end of October. Since then the subject has continued to move through the media sphere.
  • computerized activism, grassroots infowar, electronic civil disobedience, politicized hacking, and resistance to future war
  • ...47 more annotations...
  • these five portals seem to provide a useful starting point for a more in-depth, yet to come, examination of the convergence of activism, art, and computer-based communication and media.
  • PeaceNet enabled - really for the first time - political activists to communicate with one another across international borders with relative ease and speed.
  • The international role of email communication, coupled to varying degrees with the use of the Fax machine, was highlighted in both the struggles of pro-democracy Chinese students and in broader trans-national movements that lead to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
  • the role of international email communication in linking together the world.
  • an overarching dominant paradigm that privileges discourse, dialogue, discussion and open and free access.
  • So the first portal of Computerized Activism is important for understanding the roots of today’s extraparliamentarian,
  • Computerized activism, defined more purely as the use of the Internet infrastructure as a means for activists to communicate with one another, across international borders or not, is less threatening to power than the other types of uses we see emerging in which the Internet infrastructure is not only a means toward or a site for communication, but the Internet infrastructure itself becomes an object or site for action.
    • Audrey B
      Audrey B on 01 Jun 10
       
      Twitter, YouTube, other forms of social networking that provide communication within the Internet infrastructure to become an "object or site for action"...
  • Infowar here refers to a war of words, a propaganda war. Grassroots infowar is the first step, the first move away from the Internet as just a site for communication and the beginning of the transformation from word to deed.
  • emerge fully cognizant they are on a global stage, telepresent across borders, in many locations simultaneously.
  • a desire to push words towards action. Internet media forms become vehicles for inciting action as opposed to simply describing or reporting.
  • war of words
  • war of words
  • war of words
  • lists, newsgroups, discussion lists, and web sites
  • A primary distinction, then, between earlier forms of computerized activism and forms of grassroots infowar is in the degree of intensity. Coupled with that is the degree to which the participants are noticed and seen as a force.
  • in grassroots infowar comes the desire to incite action and the ability to do so at a global scale.
  • Within a matter of days there were protests and actions at Mexican consulates and embassies all over the world
  • At the end of 1997, news of the Acteal massacre in Chiapas, in which 45 indigenous people were killed, quickly spread through global pro-Zapatista Internet networks.
  • following there has been a shift, the beginning of the move toward accepting the Internet infrastructure as both a channel for communication and a site for action.
    • Audrey B
      Audrey B on 01 Jun 10
       
      channel for communication=computerized activism. a Site for action= grassroots infowar...Combining the two leads to Electronic Civil Disobedience
  • tactics of trespass and blockade from these earlier social movements and are experimentally applying them to the Internet.
  • A typical civil disobedience tactic has been for a group of people to physically blockade, with their bodies, the entranceways of an opponent's office or building or to physically occupy an opponent's office -- to have a sit-in.
  • utilizes virtual blockades and virtual sit-ins
  • an ECD actor can participate in virtual blockades and sit-ins from home, from work, from the university, or from other points of access to the Net.
  • a theoretical exploration of how to move protests from the streets onto the Internet.
  • street protest, on-the-ground disruptions and disturbance of urban infrastructure and they hypothesize how such practices can be applied to the Internet infrastructure
  • after the 1997 Acteal Massacre in Chiapas, there was a shift toward a more hybrid position that views the Internet infrastructure as both a means for communication and a site for direct action.
  • Electronic Civil Disobedience is the first transgression, making Politicized Hacking the second transgression and Resistance to Future War the third.
  • The realization and legitimization of the Internet infrastructure as a site for word and deed opens up new possibilities for Net politics, especially for those already predisposed to extraparliamentarian and direct action social movement tactics.
  • In early 1998 a small group calling themselves the Electronic Disturbance Theater had been watching other people experimenting with early forms of virtual sit-ins. The group then created software called FloodNet and on a number of occasions has invited mass participation in its virtual sit-ins against the Mexican government.
  • FloodNet to direct a "symbolic gesture" against an opponent's web site.
  • it launched a three-pronged FloodNet disturbance against web sites of the Mexican presidency, the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, and the Pentagon, to demonstrate international support for the Zapatistas, against the Mexican government, against the U.S. military, and against a symbol of international capital.
  • hacks into Mexican government web sites where political messages have been added to those sites.
  • the young British hacker named "JF" who hacked into around 300 web sites world wide and placed anti-nuclear imagery and text. This method has been tried by a number of groups.
  • while ECD actors don’t hide their names, operating freely and above board, most political hacks are done by people who wish to remain anonymous. It is also likely political hacks are done by individuals rather than by specific groups.
  • As already stated there are critiques aimed at the effectiveness and the appropriateness of cyber-protests. In terms of effectiveness, three closely related types of questions have appeared regarding political, tactical, and technical effectiveness. Concerning appropriateness there are ethical questions, that may be also considered as political questions, and of course there are legal questions. Some of the legal concerns raise issues of enforceability and prosecuteability.
  • Are these methods of computerized activism effective?
  • If the desired goal of hacktivism is to draw attention to particular issues by engaging in actions that are unusual and will attract some degree of media coverage, then effectiveness can be seen as being high.
  • Rather hacktivism appears to be a means to augment or supplement existing organizing efforts, a way to make some noise and focus attention.
  • a period of expansion, rather than contraction.
  • To judge blocking a web site, or clogging the pipelines leading up to a web site, is to take an ethical position. If the judgement goes against such activity, such an ethical position is likely to be derived from an ethical code that values free and open access to information.
  • While it is true that some forms of hacktivity are fairly easy to see as being outside the bounds of law - such as entering into systems to destroy data - there are other forms that are more ambiguous and hover much closer to the boundary between the legal and the illegal. Coupled with this ambiguity are other factors that tend to cloud the enforceability or prosecuteability of particular hacktivist offenses. Jurisdictional factors are key here. The nature of cyberspace is extraterritorial. People can easily act across geographic political borders, as those borders do not show themselves in the terrain. Law enforcement is still bound to particular geographic zones. So there is a conflict between the new capabilities of political actors and the old system to which the law is still attached. This is already beginning to change and legal frameworks, at the international level, will be mapped on to cyberspace.
  • It seems that hacktivity has met and will meet resistance from many quarters. It doesn't seem as if opposition to hacktivist ideas and practices falls along particular ideological lines either.
  • hacktivism represents a spectrum of possibilities that exists in some combination of word and deed.
  • What remains unclear about hacktivism emerges when we start to ask questions like: what does this mean and where is this going?
    • Audrey B
      Audrey B on 01 Jun 10
       
      Twitter. At 3:30 people log/hack on to Twitter and form blockades so that Iranians can voice their beliefs and feelings towards the government in 140 characters. People are also hacking and creating proxy sites that allow Iranians to get online.
  • Theorizing about grassroots or bottom-up Information Warfare doesn't nearly get as much attention as the dominant models and as a consequence there is not much written on the subject. 11 The case of the global pro-Zapatista networks of solidarity and resistance offers a point of departure for further examination of grassroots infowar. One feature of Zapatista experience over the course of the last 5 years is that it has been a war of words, as opposed to a prolonged military conflict. This is not to say there isn't a strong Mexican military presence in the state of Chiapas. Quite the contrary is true. But fighting technically ended on January 12, 1994 and since then there has been a ceasefire and numerous attempts at negotiation.12 What scholars, activists, and journalists, on both the left and the right, have said is that the Zapatistas owe their survival at this point largely to a war of words. This war of words, in part, is the propaganda war that has been successfully unleashed by Zapatista leaders like Subcommandante Marcos as well as non-Zapatista supporters throughout Mexico and the world. Such propaganda and rhetoric has, of course, been transmitted through more traditional mass communication means, like through the newspaper La Jornada. 13 But quite a substantial component of this war of words has taken place on the Internet. Since January 1, 1994 there has been an explosion of the Zapatista Internet presence in the forms of email Cc:
  • Because of the more secret, private, low key, and anonymous nature of the politicized hacks, this type of activity expresses a different kind of politics. It is not the politics of mobilization, nor the politics that requires mass participation. This is said not to pass judgement, but to illuminate that there are several important forms of direct action Net politics already being shaped.
  • hackers' desires to make information free.
  • Audrey B on 01 Jun 10
     
    Concrete article for paper
« First ‹ Previous 261 - 280 of 366 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page