Licensing
'Blog Posts' Category
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I Have Never Been Blogging
June 4, 2010Looking at the latest stream of posts in my RSS reader from Graham Harman’s blog, I realize that I’ve been holding the wrong attitude about blogging.
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Perils of Keyword-Based Bibliometrics: ISI’s ’1990 Effect’
February 5, 2010Have you done historical bibliometric analysis of a scientific field or topic area and found that there is a massive increase in research articles after 1990? Are you using ISI’s Web of Science and searching by topic or keyword? If so, don’t make the same mistake I did: these results aren’t because of some sea change or paradigm shift, but rather result from a poorly-documented shift in how ISI began indexing articles after 1990.
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Capital ‘I’ for Internet?
December 3, 2009I’ve been doing a lot of work on virtual ethnography lately, and I was reading a recently-published book titled “Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method” edited by Annette Markham and Nancy Baym. What was most interesting was the following footnote on the first page of the introduction, in which the authors argue that “Internet” should not be capitalized:
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FAS Virtual Worlds Almanac: A Semantic Structured Wiki
September 5, 2008As some of you might know, I work part-time at the Federation of American Scientists. Most of what I do has involved the creation of a wiki for virtual worlds, and I am proud to say that it is ready for the world. It is not simply a wiki, but a structured semantic wiki. This means that when you edit a page on a virtual world, you get a customizable form instead of a massive textbox. Check it out!
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WebCite: An On-Demand Internet Archive
August 26, 2008As someone who studies Internet culture, one of my biggest problems is “link rot,” or broken links. I’m a big fan of the Internet Archive, but they are usually six to eight months behind on even the most popular sites. I also applaud sites like Wikipedia for providing stable version histories so that I can point to a specific revision of a page. However, for all other websites, the only option is self-archiving, which is technically difficult and fraught with problems. What I have found incredibly useful is WebCite, a free webpage archiving service that fills in this gap.
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Virtual Worlds in 1996: The More Things Change…
August 13, 2008I came across this 1996 review published in Entertainment Weekly of The Palace, Worldsaway, and Worlds Chat. These were the first graphical chat programs, a genre which became virtual worlds a half-decade later. The entire article is fascinating from a historical perspective, but the last paragraph in particular shows us how some things really do stay the same:
You may also notice that nobody’s talking, at least out loud. Like all chat software, WC lets you send private messages, but it also enables you to talk in private groups, so there’s no real impetus for public discourse. Besides, most here have one thing on their minds, and it ain’t badminton. The typical experience is stumbling into a room, seeing two avatars nose to nose over in the corner, and realizing — just as at any cocktail party — that three’s a crowd. Bizarre? Sure. Sick? Maybe. A sign of modern alienation? Unquestionably. Yet in a way it’s a relief to know that even in this newest of mediums, there’s a place for the oldest of urges.
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Technology in the Classroom: A Response to Arthur Bochner
August 9, 2008I was reading through Spectra, the monthly publication of the National Communication Association. The president of the NCA, Arthur Bochner, wrote an extended column about “Things That Boggle My Mind” which focused on his general disgust of students today and especially about the student use of technology in the classroom:
As I scan the room, I see that more than half the students have laptops on their desks. Just as many chat obtrusively on their cell phones, while checking their e-mail or sports scores… I feel uncomfortable in this space. It’s not “my space.”
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Google Search for “Phenomenology of Spirit” Suggests “Nebraska State Flower”
August 2, 2008As you may know, Google often thinks it knows what you are looking for better than you do. It will suggest different search queries and display them underneath the top three results for your original query. So I did a simple Google search for “Phenomenology of Spirit,” an 1807 book written by German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel today and found a very interesting suggestion.
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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Attribution-ShareAlike
July 24, 2008Content on my website and my Flickr account has been licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license for a while. I was pretty proud of myself. But then I got to thinking: why don’t I choose Attribution-ShareAlike? Obviously, it was product of two kneejerk reactions: I don’t want someone else to make money off my stuff, and I don’t want someone messing with my stuff.
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User-Generated Content as an Ethical Relation
June 15, 2008It is 12:16 AM on a Sunday night, and I just spent this wonderful weekend inside, working on a paper. I am tired and just want to go to bed, but I am – for some reason – here, typing. I have not updated this site in over a week and feel some obligation to write a new post. Why? Obviously this would make sense if this site had a large number of readers, or even a few dedicated ones I knew enjoyed my random musings. In that case, I would be fulfilling some sort of obligation to a group of humans, something I don’t really have a problem with. However, to the best of my knowledge, there are no humans for whom this is being written. Instead, the main impetus to my post is initiated by an obligation to the software upon which this site runs.