As we’ve been reminded again recently, in case we somehow forgot, the “facts” of news reporting are not actually neutral. Just plain data is part of a political context, too. For example, New York City counts homeless people, in an annual pavement-pounding overnight effort. But the city – despite its technocratic, data-driven mayor – has … Read more Who Does Your Data?
Call for Chapters Piracy: Leakages From Modernity Edited by Martin Fredriksson (Linköping University) and James Arvanitakis (University of Western Sydney) Published by Litwin Books We are inviting proposals for chapters for an anthology on Piracy planned to be published by the end of 2012. ‘Piracy’ is a concept that seems everywhere in the contemporary world. … Read more Call for Chapters: Piracy: Leakages from Modernity
We have often pointed out here that privacy in Facebook is not primarily a matter of controlling what you share with your friends, as Facebook likes to say it is, but what data Facebook has about you that it can sell or otherwise make available to its business partners. Here is a great link that … Read more Facebook’s Data Pool
Caroline Nappo sent a link to this New York Times story to the Library History Round Table email list: What’s a Presidential Library to Do? SIMI VALLEY, Calif. — When Republicans gathered at the Ronald Reagan Library and Museum here for the presidential debate last week, the backdrop was an overhauled exhibition on the Reagan … Read more The Reagan Presidential Library and the Nixon Presidential Library
Call for Manuscripts for Special issue of Multicultural Review Libraries as a public good in 21st century multicultural societies: Policy and the politics of literacy, libraries and librarianship Guest Editors: Curtis Brewer, Anne McMahan Grant (Clemson University) When it comes to recent national budget discussions, funding for library services has come up short. For example, … Read more Call for Manuscripts for Special issue of Multicultural Review
I was in Cambridge, MA last weekend for MiT7: unstable platforms: the promise and peril of transition. This conference is put on every two years jointly by MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program and the MIT Communication Forum. The conference is concerned with new media and new communication technologies and their broad implications. Presenters came to … Read more Thoughts on MiT7
No comment on this other than to say that Koofers is incredibly slimy, and it rankles me that they seem to be getting some tacit support from legitimate institutions. Here is a post by my friend Nicole Pagowsky on how Koofers ripped off one of her student papers and posted it to their for-profit site … Read more Koofers – stealing students’ work to help other students cheat
MiT7 was a great conference – intimate, warm, stimulating, interdisciplinary, and cutting-edge. There were some brilliant minds at work. I plan to post a few comments on the conference later. For now, here are links to podcasts from the three topical plenary sessions: Media in Transition 7: Unstable Platforms Archives and Cultural Memory Power and … Read more MiT7 podcasts
Media in Transition 7 (MiT 7), a small conference at MIT, is starting Friday and running ’till Sunday. I will be there; if you will be there too please say hello. Anyone wanting to follow the Twitter hash tag can look for #mit7.
No comment about this or predictions about where the case may be headed or whether there will be broader implications for privacy down the road, except to say to anyone out there who uses an email account set up by a public university: Best to keep as much as possible on your own private email … Read more Professors’ email may be public
I haven’t been posting much, but I do have some links to share: By Steve Coll, in the New York Review of Books: The Internet: For Better or for Worse, a review of two books skeptical of the idea of the internet as a force for liberation. By Richard Dorment, also in the NYRB: What … Read more Some links for you…
I am not personally diving into the discussion of Judge Chin’s decision on the Google Settlement, because I am too war-weary of fighting it out with other librarians on issues where I feel like a lone dissenter, but I will go as far as to say that I like this post on the topic by … Read more Smart commentary on Judge Chin’s decision
Folks at the Progressive Librarians Guild have put the full text of back issues of their journal, Progressive Librarian, online. Coverage goes back to issue number one, from 1990. I was on the editorial board of Progressive Librarian for a number of years, and consider them an important venue for library literature that works to … Read more Progressive Librarian in full text
Many large institutions, such as universities, are beginning to contract their email services out to Google. At the university where I work, we are in the process of switching our accounts over to Google now. All of our students, faculty, and staff will access their university email accounts through a Google interface. In order to … Read more Institutions are switching to Gmail, but are they discussing the fine print?
Beyond Article 19: Libraries and Social and Cultural Rights Editors: Julie Biando Edwards and Stephan P. Edwards Price: $28.00 Published: October 2010 ISBN: 978-1-936117-19-2 Printed on acid-free paper Beyond Article 19: Libraries and Social and Cultural Rights addresses the subject of libraries and cultural rights, a topic that has received relatively little attention in the … Read more Beyond Article 19: Libraries and Social and Cultural Rights
The 1980s began the “give ’em what they want” era of library collection development, when it became irredeemably elitist for librarians to think they occupy some kind of teaching role as selectors and reference librarians for their communities. In 2010, the war of the populist cultural conservatives against the latté sipping liberal elitists is wearing … Read more Brief note on libraries and elitism
Richard J. Cox of the University of Pittsburgh i-School has posted a review of Michael Bugeja and Daniela Dimitrova’s Vanishing Act: The Erosion of Online Footnotes and Implications for Scholarship in the Digital Age to the group blog “What SIS Faculty Are Reading. (Full disclosure: Dr. Cox is the author of two books for Litwin … Read more Richard J. Cox reviews Vanishing Act
I just bought a Motorola Droid, which is Verizon’s Android-based smart phone, Android being Google’s OS for mobile devices. Its integration with Google gives me a lot of “power” to integrate my online tools with my mobile device, which is very satisfying. I experience it as empowering, and my attention is focused on learning what … Read more The Power of Google is Power
Notice that I am not using the word “ontology.” I’ll get into why later, but if you’ve read any Heidegger you can guess… Hope Olson, Sandy Berman, and many others who have done work based on theirs, have shown how classification systems tend not to represent all users well. Hope Olson has described the problem … Read more Quick note on taxonomic transparency
Call for Papers *Politics, Libraries and Culture: Historical Perspectives* *Library History Round Table (LHRT) Research Forum, June 2010* * * The Library History Round Table (LHRT) of the American Library Association (ALA) seeks papers for its Research Forum at the 2010 ALA Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., June 24-29, 2010. The theme of the Forum … Read more Call for Papers – Politics, Libraries and Culture: Historical Perspectives