We will miss the annular solar eclipse coming up on May 20 — we are too far east and the sun will already have set — but NASA’s map tells you if you are in the right place at the right time.
work
22
Mar 12
Hitchcock on happiness. A clear horizon. Indeed. What troubles me is how much can clutter one’s view of the horizon.
20
Mar 12
Meetings in the Library
I am meeting with several groups in the library today, and I thought it would be handy to have a variety of links to share with them:
- The Open Knowledge Foundation has an amazing list of projects.
- The same goes for the Public Knowledge Project.
- Project Bamboo is also beginning to bloom.
17
Mar 12
I’m watching my daughter and t…
I’m watching my daughter and two friends build a trap for leprechauns. Some good Louisiana girls right there. If it moves, trap it.
15
Mar 12
Watch the jet stream tonight, …
Watch the jet stream tonight, live, thanks to NASA: http://t.co/bHj9Rx3s
12
Mar 12
Alan Lomax on The Colbert Report
The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive
12
Mar 12
Plague Doctors
I am reading Jeffrey Carver’s Eternity’s End, which features a version of The Flying Dutchman legend in it. (A bit too obviously — really, the allusion would have sufficed without constantly being told, “Hey, it’s a Flying Dutchman … in space!) A recent experiment in using a writing prompt had me re-writing Sherlock Holmes with the narrator, Watson, being an AI. I find myself fascinated by these kinds of revisions, and so I can’t help but wonder what one could do with the image and idea of plague doctors:
Paul_Fürst,_Der_Doctor_Schnabel_von_Rom_(Holländer_version)
12
Mar 12
→ Another Rich Guy Wants to Fix Education
I agree that education needs some improving, but can we also admit that education isn’t the fault of all our social woes? At some point, we need to take responsibility for ourselves. I know teachers could do a lot more in the classroom if they had the backing, if not also the encouragement, of parents. Smaller class sizes would help this a lot. It makes everything a lot more personal.
12
Mar 12
Henry Miller on Writing
- Work on one thing at a time until finished.
- Start no more new books, add no more new material to ‘Black Spring.’
- Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
- Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
- When you can’t create you can work.
- Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
- Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
- Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
- Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
- Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
- Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.
Thanks, Brain Pickings.
12
Mar 12
The Importance of Feedback for Creativity
Bret Victor focused his recent presentation at CUSEC on what he calls “inventing on principle.” Much of the early part of his presentation is fantastic walkthrough of a coding environment he has developed which allows programmers to see the result of code changes immediately and even interactively — in fact, what’s most fascinating is how his initial impulse to “close up” the feedback loop between the writing of code and its compilation actually led him to innovate the environment in really amazing ways.
His principle: “creators need to be able to see what they are doing.” It seems pretty straightforward, but realizing it, say, in how we might teach better, is harder. I’m especially struck by the importance of the tight feedback loop that Victor emphasizes and a recent conversation I had with Sarah Spell about things happening in UL’s Industrial Design department.
11
Mar 12
McCarty’s Guide to Digital Humanities
Somewhat edited. I imagine it might serve as a building block for a list of my own making. More importantly, it serves as a decent lens onto what one of the major figures in the field considers “central.”
Articles, books, edited collections
- McCarty, Willard. 2005. Humanities Computing. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
- McGann, Jerome, ed. 2010. Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come. Houston TX: Connexions. cnx.org/content/col11199/latest/
- Schreibman, Susan, Ray Siemens and John Unsworth, eds. 2004. A Companion to Digital Humanities. Oxford: Blackwell. www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/.
- Williams, Raymond. 2003/1974. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. Ed. Ederyn Williams. London: Routledge.
Journals
- Digital Humanities Quarterly (digitalhumanities.org/dhq/)
- Literary and Linguistic Computing (llc.oxfordjournals.org/)
Conversations
- Humanist (www.digitalhumanities.org/humanist/)
- Blogs & Twitter: google for “blogs digital humanities”; “twitter digital humanities” or substitute the name of your primary discipline. Many fellow students and scholars are eager to help. Talk to them.
Guides &c
Experiment by googling for whatever subject-area interests you, e.g. “digital history”; for courses, e.g. “digital humanities syllabus”.
Organizations
Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (www.digitalhumanities.org)
Updates
- Cohen, Dan and Scheinfeldt, Tom. Hacking the Academy. (University of Michigan Press, 2011) [web; print forthcoming]
- Gold, Matthew K. *Debates in the Digital Humanities *(University of Minnesota Press, 2012)
- Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. Planned Obsolescence (NYU Press, 2011)
- Kirschenbaum, Matthew. *Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination *(MIT Press, 2007)
- Nowviskie, Bethany.* alt-academy*. (MediaCommons, 2011) [web]
- Ramsay, Steve. Reading Machines: Towards an Algorithmic Criticism (University of Illinois Press, 2011)
Forthcoming titles to look out for:
- David Berry’s Understanding Digital Humanities (Palgrave, 2012)
- Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago UP, 2012)
- Matthew Jockers, *Macroanalysis: Methods for Digital Literary History *(Illinois, forthcoming).
10
Mar 12
Open Data Commons
Open Data Commons “is the home of a set of legal tools to help you provide and use Open Data.” They have a lovely write-up of why open data matters:
Why bother about openness and licensing for data? After all they don’t matter in themselves: what we really care about are things like the progress of human knowledge or the freedom to understand and share.
However, open data is crucial to progress on these more fundamental items. It’s crucial because open data is so much easier to break-up and recombine, to use and reuse. We therefore want people to have incentives to make their data open and for open data to be easily usable and reusable — i.e. for open data to form a ‘commons’.
8
Mar 12
The Elusive Big Idea
Neal Gabler’s essay on “The Elusive Big Ideas” (Link to NYT) has been sitting on my desk for a while now, and I think I am going to link to it in my folklore theory seminar. I’m not sure I buy all his arguments: that we are a society that prefers knowing to thinking, but there is enough provocation in it, I think, to get a discussion started:
It is no secret, especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy. While we continue to make giant technological advances, we may be the first generation to have turned back the epochal clock — to have gone backward intellectually from advanced modes of thinking into old modes of belief. But post-Enlightenment and post-idea, while related, are not exactly the same.
Post-Enlightenment refers to a style of thinking that no longer deploys the techniques of rational thought. Post-idea refers to thinking that is no longer done, regardless of the style.
The post-idea world has been a long time coming, and many factors have contributed to it. There is the retreat in universities from the real world, and an encouragement of and reward for the narrowest specialization rather than for daring — for tending potted plants rather than planting forests.
8
Mar 12
A Louisiana Ghost Story
I love these e-mails:
Even if you’re a non-believer you need to read this!
This happened about 6 months ago on Louisiana Hwy 57, just outside of Dulac, a little town in the bayou country of Louisiana, and while it sounds like an Alfred Hitchcock tale, it’s real.
An Ohio businessman, Saul Rubins, abandoned his disabled vehicle on the side of the road, and attempted to hitchhike. The night was pitch dark in the middle of a thunderstorm. Time passed slowly and no cars went by. It was raining so hard he could hardlysee his hand in front of his face.
Suddenly, through the sheets of rain, he saw a car moving slowly, approaching and appearing ghostlike in the rain. It slowly and silently crept toward him and stopped. Desperately needing a ride, Saul jumped in the car and closed the door. Only then did he realize that there was no one behind the wheel and no sound of an engine to be heard over the rain.
Again the car crept silently forward and Saul was terrified, too scared to think of jumping out and running.. He saw that the car was approaching a sharp curve and, still too scared to jump out, he started to pray and beg for his life; he was sure the ghost car would go off the road and into the bayou and he would then drown!
But just before the curve, a shadowy hand appeared at the driver’s window, reached in and turned the steering wheel, guiding the car safely around the bend. Then, just as silently, the hand disappeared through the window and Saul was alone again.
Paralyzed with fear, Saul watched the hand reappear every time they reached a curve. Finally, scared nearly to death, Saul had all he could take, jumped out of the car, and ran to town..
Wet and in shock, he went into Schmoopy’s. Voice quavering, he ordered two cups of coffee, black, and then told everybody about his supernatural experience. The room became silent and everybody got goose bumps when they realized Saul was telling the truth and was not just some drunk. About 30 minutes later two Cajuns, dripping wet, walked into Schmoopy’s and one says to the other, “Look, Boudreaux, ders dat idiot what rode in our car when we wuz pushin’ it in da rain!!!”