At the moment, I just returned from Wikimania 2008, at the Library of Alexandria, Egypt. I was presenting “Conceptions and Misconceptions Academics Hold About Wikipedia,” which is on this site. I also blogged my notes about the various presentations, which are under the page “Wikimania 2008″ on the top header bar.
I am now going back to writing a paper for my class on Wikipedia and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit whenever I get a chance. I’ll give a short excerpt:
Can a historical account of what Wikipedia (or more specifically, the Wikipedian Community) has become and what commitments it has come to see as authoritative (its normative facticity) be written such that it simultaneously adheres to and justifies those norms? The Hegelian answer is that the only way to know if such an activity is possible is to do it. Yet how should we even begin such a journey?
I’m also working full time, 20 hours a week at the front desk of my department and 25 at the Federation of American Scientists. I’m working on a wiki on virtual worlds for FAS, as well as some intellectual property issues for some of their other projects.
Books I’m currently reading (for my paper):
- In the Spirit of Hegel by Robert Solomon
- The Unity of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Systematic Interpretation by Jon Stewart
- Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology by Slavoj Zizek
- Hegel’s Dialectic by Terry Pinkard
- Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason by Terry Pinkard
- The Phenomenology of Spirit by G.W.F. Hegel
Books in my reading queue are (in no particular order):
- The Sublime Object of Ideology by Slavoj Zizek
- Protocol by Alexander Galloway
- Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology by Michel Foucault (his doctoral thesis, the first English translation will be published at the end of July)
- What is History by E.H. Carr
- The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek (which I’ve been told is Europe’s Catch 22)
