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those inequalities in the networked world are: the lack of digital and media literacies; critical thinking and communication skills in order to navigate and evaluate data online; an information and knowledge gap; and collaboration and participatory inequalities.
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We are already experiencing the way that the old, pre-digital divides are now labeled as new types of divides in the social Web context, such as the connectivity inequalities – high-speed wireless for those who can afford it and second-class wireless for poor and rural Americans have been recently mentioned as a “new digital divide“.
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today, while basic connectivity remains an important issue, there's a new digital divide emerging; a digital skills gap. We may have a large number of households that have great connectitivity, but they use it for "notworking" - surfing, downloading and social-network-idling - instead of as a key part of their intellectual life and citizenship.
Probably no one who reads Leonardo publications needs to be convinced of the centrality of software for modern art, culture, or academia. Yet, outside these circles, I think there is demand for such books as David Berry’s The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age. At times, software studies still gets some of the crowd squirming in their seats in academic conferences, and either slightly worried or bemused reactions from representatives of more established academic disciplines. Surely code cannot be read and written like Shakespeare, appreciated the way you do Milton or object of such cult as Austen – or the cinephilic attachment in film studies to certain genres and films? However, despite being a newcomer, software studies may not turn into another media studies, which continuously is ridiculed in the UK by the media (the irony) and politicians as a lesser discipline; software (studies) still has that aura of being closer to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects so adored by current policy makers. Yet, as Berry shows, software studies is a good way of smuggling in (my words, not Berry’s) the good ol’ humanities’ way of critically and inventively investigating philosophical and social contexts in which code is executed and executes the world. This is not to implicitly say that STEM is uninventive, and that arts and humanities are the only experimental disciplines – but it is true that we need a stronger articulation of how we can sustain some of the better heritages of arts and humanities topics.
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In the midst of the enthusiasm for the epistemologies offered by science or, for instance, the digital humanities --which too is still to me looking for its singular potential-- such books that establish continuums between traditions of philosophy and traditions of writing/reading software are exciting. Berry actually offers digital humanities as one context for this mode of theoretisation. Berry gives a quick intro to some of the background assumptions of digital humanities and visions of it as part of the future post-disciplinary universities where access to knowledge is enabled so that it is “disregarding and bypassing traditional gatekeepers of knowledge in the state, the universities and the market” (20)/ Yet, quite many would be quick to point out that in the midst of P2P enthusiasms, etc., quite a lot of reverse is happening, too, and in the midst of the public funding crisis universities are actually even more now clutching to the IP they own and use as productive force (knowledge, teaching, research). This political economic side to universities in the digital age is not so much addressed by Berry, who, however, is not unfamiliar to political economy of code (as his previous book, Copy Rip Burn, demonstrated).
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What Berry wants to propose in the midst of the subchapter on digital humanities is to use Heidegger to think about the current university environment and relations between computation and philosophy. To quote Berry: “I want to argue that there remains a location for the possibility of philosophy to explicitly question the ontological understanding of what the computational is in regard to the positive sciences. Computationality might then be understood as ontotheology, creating new ontological ‘epoch’ as a new historical constellation of intelligibility” (27). This task of assembling philosophy and computation in common key is worthwhile elaborating, indeed, even if it does not extend its critique at some of the digital humanities itself becoming a positive science, and if the place of philosophy itself is being marginalized in current university environment (not only in the UK). A positive evaluation would say that this is the task and possibility of philosophy becoming embedded in Computer Science – but institutionally, we know that it does not work that easily and, instead, university managers looking at profitability are hardly enthusiastic about adding a bit of time consuming Sein und Zeit and Was heißt Denken? to their intro to computing classes.
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For starters, the digital humanities more frequently adopt rather than invent their tools. This is a complicated issue, related to the lack product development and deployment experience in general among humanists, and their lack of computational and design abilities in particular. (By contrast, most scholars of physics or biology learn to program computers, whether in FORTRAN or MatLab or with even more advanced and flexible tools.) As a result, digital humanities projects risk letting existing technologies dictate the terms of their work. In some cases, adopting existing technology is appropriate. But in other cases, the technologies themselves make tacit, low-level assumptions that can't be seen in the light of day. While humanists can collaborate or hire staff or otherwise accomplish technical novelty, it's often at a remove, not completely understood by its proponents. The results risk reversing the intended purpose of the humanities as public spies: taking whatever works from the outside world un- or under-questioned.
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Furthermore, this process of development creates a vicious circle of conflict and loathing. As lower faculties, humanists often see their work outside the logic of technological improvement or efficiency. As I argued in part 1 of this essay, usefulness should not be anathema to the humanities. But since predictable usefulness is still commonly held in disregard, creating and deploying digital humanities tools explicitly involves servicing an instrumental end. This creates cognitive dissonance, as it causes the lower faculties appear to be act according to the logic of the higher faculties. And that dissonance results in anxiety and conflict.
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Over the past several months researchers at the Stanford Security Lab have been developing a platform for measuring dynamic web content. One of our chief applications is a system for automated enforcement of Do Not Track by detecting the myriad forms of third-party tracking, including cookies, HTML5 storage, fingerprinting, and much more. While the software isn't quite polished enough for public release, we're eager to share some unexpected early results on the advertising ecosystem. Please bear in mind that these are preliminary findings from experimental software; our primary aims at this stage are developing the platform and validating the approach to third-party tracking detection. Many thanks to Jovanni Hernandez and Akshay Jagadeesh for their invaluable research assistance.
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We manually identified tracking cookies (cookies that appeared to contain a unique identifier or substantially unique information) and how they were altered throughout each test. A spreadsheet of results is available. Please email if you would like a copy of the data we logged while testing a particular company's content.
A huge industry has been created responding to the perceived social malady, the "Digital Divide". This paper examines the concepts and strategies underlying the notion of the Digital Divide and concludes that it is little more than a marketing campaign for Internet service providers. The paper goes on to present an alternative approach — that of "effective use" — drawn from community informatics theory which recognizes that the Internet is not simply a source of information, but also a fundamental tool in the new digital economy.
We need distant reading, Moretti argues, because its opposite, close reading, can’t uncover the true scope and nature of literature. Let’s say you pick up a copy of “Jude the Obscure,” become obsessed with Victorian fiction and somehow manage to make your way through all 200-odd books generally considered part of that canon. Moretti would say: So what? As many as 60,000 other novels were published in 19th-century England — to mention nothing of other times and places. You might know your George Eliot from your George Meredith, but you won’t have learned anything meaningful about literature, because your sample size is absurdly small. Since no feasible amount of reading can fix that, what’s called for is a change not in scale but in strategy. To understand literature, Moretti argues, we must stop reading books.
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Lit Lab tackles literary problems by scientific means: hypothesis-testing, computational modeling, quantitative analysis. Similar efforts are currently proliferating under the broad rubric of “digital humanities,” but Moretti’s approach is among the more radical. He advocates what he terms “distant reading”: understanding literature not by studying particular texts, but by aggregating and analyzing massive amounts of data.
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People recognize, say, Gothic literature based on castles, revenants, brooding atmospheres, and the greater frequency of words like “tremble” and “ruin.” Computers recognize Gothic literature based on the greater frequency of words like . . . “the.” Now, that’s interesting. It suggests that genres “possess distinctive features at every possible scale of analysis.” More important for the Lit Lab, it suggests that there are formal aspects of literature that people, unaided, cannot detect.
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If you want real long-term backups of digitized ebooks, then look no further than dead tree. At least, that's the consensus of the Internet Archive project, which has announced an incredibly ambitious plan to store one physical copy of every published book in the world.
Experiments in Technology and Pedagogy
as part of MobilityShifts: an International Future of Learning Summit | #mobilityshifts
The LUMIX FX77, released last Friday, has a "beauty re-touch" function that will whiten your teeth, increase the translucency of your skin, remove dark eye circles, make your face look smaller and even magnify the size of your eyes.
For the final touch, it will apply rouge, lipstick and even eye shadow.
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To quote, "most noteworthy was the shift in e-mail usage, particularly among young people. Total Web-based e-mail use was down eight percent last year, led by a walloping 59 percent drop among 12 to 17 year olds."
I must reemphasize, the data is only for Web-based e-mail usage (think Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, etc.) and that's an important distinction. A decline is a decline, but this certainly doesn't fully cover how e-mail is consumed in today's digital world.
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Mark Zuckerberg offered this at the Facebook Messaging announcement:
"High school kids don't use e-mail, they use SMS a lot. People want lighter weight things like SMS and IM to message each other."
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