I will write about this later, but I will just note this for the moment: Wolfram Alpha is not just not ready for prime time. It is an intellectual travesty. The idea of jumping from concepts to numbers without any attention to how the numbers are produced and how they can or can’t be compared … Read more Wolfram Alpha: Bad Idea!!
John Buschman sent a link out this morning to this article by Chris Dede in the current EDUCAUSE Review, “A Seismic Shift in Epistemology. The article examines the deep changes in the meaning of knowledge in the academy and elsewhere that are being effected by new technologies, with a focus on Wikipedia and other Web … Read more A Seismic Shift in Epistemology
MIT has posted podcasts from the five plenary sessions at Media in Transition 6, at the Comparative Media Studies program’s podcast page. The plenary sessions were on “Archives and History,” “New Media, Civic Media,” “Institutional Perspectives on Storage,” “The Future of Publishing,” and “Summary Perspectives.” I think these plenary sessions were the best part of … Read more Media in Transition 6 – Podcasts
I attended Media in Transition 6: Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission in Cambridge, MA, April 24-26. (Follow that link for a summary of what the conference was about.) Here are my thoughts about the conference after returning home. Of primary interest to me, coming from Duluth, MN, where it was below freezing yesterday, was … Read more Media in Transition 6… Reactions…
“Exploring the Ethical Implications of Technological Change through the Thought of Walter Ong and Other Media Theorists” That’s the title of my paper for the conference coming up this weekend in Boston, Media in Transition 6: Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission. The paper is not the greatest thing I’ve ever written, but it is … Read more Exploring the Ethical Implications of Media Technology Through the Thought of Walter Ong
This is going to be my obnoxious post for the year, the kind of post I write periodically that leads to ugly Google results on my name. There are things that I sometimes need to say that I know a lot of people won’t like. Helps me maintain a sense of integrity, I guess. Like … Read more Library 2.0 talk enters backwardation
Library of Walls: The Library of Congress and the Contradictions of Information Society Author: Samuel Gerald Collins Price: $32.00 Published: April 2009 ISBN: 978-0-9802004-2-3 Printed on acid-free paper “The experience [of reading this book] was something akin to watching a reality show featuring Jorge Luis Borges, Marshall McLuhan, Michel Foucault, Lewis Mumford, and Paul Virilio … Read more New from Litwin Books: Library of Walls
LIBREAS – Library Ideas is a LIS journal out of Germany that publishes articles in German and English. The Call for Papers for the next issue is out. Issue #15 of LIBREAS is going to be all about semiotics. If you’ll look at the CFP you’ll see that the issue has a rather narrow focus … Read more CFP – Semiotics and LIS… A whole issue of LIBREAS on it…
The details of the upcoming Media in Transition 6 conference have been posted to the web. On the site you can now find the full program and abstracts of all the papers being presented. Full papers are being added as they come in. This conference, which has no fee for registration, is going to be … Read more Media in Transition 6 conference details
Since the second half of last year I’ve been reading a lot of financial news, where the major theme of the financial crisis is the “crisis of trust” – banks not wanting to take the risk of extending credit to counterparties. But we’ve been living through a worsening crisis of trust in another sense for … Read more The Other Crisis of Trust (and a question about what it means for Info Lit)
From Polders to Postmodernism: A Concise History of Archival Theory Author: John Ridener Price: $22.00 Published: February 2009 ISBN: 978-0-9802004-5-4 Printed on acid-free paper From Polders to Postmodernism is a broad ranging history of the conception and development of the theories that have guided archivists in their work from the late 19th through the early … Read more From Polders to Postmodernism: A Concise History of Archival Theory
Media in Transition 6: stone and papyrus, storage and transmission International Conference April 24-26, 2009 Massachusetts Institute of Technology CALL FOR PAPERS (MIT site) In his seminal essay “The Bias of Communication” Harold Innis distinguishes between time-based and space-based media. Time-based media such as stone or clay, Innis agues, can be seen as durable, while … Read more Call for papers: Media in Transition 6: stone and papyrus, storage and transmission
Canadian Association for Information Science: Call for Papers The Canadian Association for Information Science invites abstract submissions for its 37th Annual Conference, to be held May 28-30, 2009 at Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, as part of the 2009 Congress of the Canadian Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Deadline for proposals is January … Read more Call for Papers: Mapping the 21st Century Information Landscape: Borders, Bridges and Byways
CALL FOR PAPERS The Society for Textual Scholarship Fourteenth Biennial International Interdisciplinary Conference March 18-21, 2009, New York University Program Co-Chairs: Andrew Stauffer, Boston University [astauff@bu.edu]; John Young, Marshall University [youngj@marshall.edu] Deadline for Proposals: October 31, 2008 The Program Chairs invite the submission of full panels or individual papers devoted to interdisciplinary discussion of current … Read more Call for Papers: The Society for Textual Scholarship
Call for Papers Digital Labour: Workers, Authors, Citizens. A conference hosted by the Digital Labour Group (DLG), Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario, October 16-18, 2009, London, Ontario, Canada. ‘Digital Labour: Workers, Authors, Citizens’ addresses the implications of digital labour as they are emerging in practice, politics, policy, and theoretical enquiry. … Read more Call for Papers: Digital Labour: Workers, Authors, Citizens
Simson Garfinkel has an article in the new issue of MIT’s Technology Review about Wikipedia, arguing that it is creating troubling implications for the way we view reality: Wikipedia and the Meaning of Truth: Why the online encyclopedia’s epistemology should worry those who care about traditional notions of accuracy. In a sense this article is … Read more Wikipedia and what we mean by truth
Over time, Radical Reference moved from being simply an experimental virtual reference service for political radicals to being an activist organization sharing the same space as PLG and SRRT, but offering a different flavor and a different set of political ideas. Its primary activity, however, remains what it was when the group was originally formed … Read more A question for Radical Reference
Puzzle Me, Puzzle You: “My Account” “Your Account” Which is it? The autonomous liberal subject wants to know. Whichever it is, it’s somebody’s account – mine, yours, Jacques Lacan Jr.’s, the Egg Man’s, the Walrus’s – and the password is not to be shared. I want to ponder it but I think I’ll just Be … Read more Whose space?
Interpreting the Digital Human (video in Realplayer format) This is a video of a presentation by Rafael Capurro, head of the Interntational Center of Information Ethics. Capurro was the Senior Information Ethics Fellow in 2007-08 at Center for Information Policy Research (CIPR) at the School of Information Studies at UW Milwaukee. This video is of … Read more Rafael Capurro: Interpreting the Digital Human (video)
We hear a lot about Radical Trust, with the emphasis being on trusting users (of systems, websites, etc.) to guide organizations. I have tried to sound a skeptical note at times, pointing out that something called “groupthink” is the danger when you decide to trust the wisdom of crowds. I’ve always most admired people whose … Read more Interface agents and human control