Midnight Foil: Batts are Burning!

February 26, 2010 at 12:43 pm · Filed under gadfly

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How to approach a stranger in London

February 25, 2010 at 9:34 am · Filed under gadfly

Thanks to Alexis B for the link

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In Tasmania…

December 21, 2009 at 11:20 pm · Filed under gadfly

OK, sorry that I have been a slow blogger of late but I am in Tasmania and the Internet connection that I have is not that swift. Normal viewing will resume shortly.

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Last day at King’s College London…

September 16, 2009 at 8:15 pm · Filed under gadfly

It crept up a lot quicker than I expected, but it is my last day at King’s College London tomorrow.  It was a enriching and worldly experience, full of dramas and triumphs and highs and lows and new experiences. The world got a hell of a lot bigger and through King’s, I discovered something special about London, its institutions, and its people, whist hopefully discovering something special about my self. London is a wild social labyrinth full of dead-ends, choices with no choice, and potentially lethal social structures that test the limits of any reasonable education. A hardened blinkered conservatism tried to enter my soul, but I resisted it and took no prisoners.
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Don’t be too cautious young man

September 9, 2009 at 9:38 pm · Filed under gadfly

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He’s simple, he’s stupid, he’s the pilot

September 8, 2009 at 1:48 pm · Filed under gadfly

Adrift again 2000 man
You lost your maps, you lost your plans
Did you hear him yell: “Land damn it land” ?
You say you can’t, well I hope you can
I hope you can

How’s it goin’ 2000 man
Welcome back to solid ground my friend
I heard all your controls were jammed
Well it’s just nice to have you back again

But I guess they still don’t understand
And they can never understand
And they said go find 2000 man
And they said tell him we’ve got new plans
But instead I’m here to tell you, friend

I believe they want you to give in

Are you giving in 2000 man?
Are you giving in 2000 man?
Are you giving in 2000 man?
Are you giving in 2000 man?
Are you giving in 2000 man?
Are you giving in 2000 man?

Did you love this world
And did this world not love you
Did you love this world
And did this world not love you
Did you love this world
And did this world not love you

Are you giving in 2000 man?
Are you giving in 2000 man?

Are you giving in 2000 man?
Are you giving in 2000 man?
Are you giving in 2000 man?
Are you giving in 2000 man?
Don’t give in 2000 man

(one of my favourite post dot-com era bands: GRANDADDY, from the Album THE SOPHTWARE SLUMP (2000), what a wonderful song! The album is about some of the illusions built around technology during that period. The band lived near Silicon Valley in California).

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Getting there!

May 30, 2009 at 4:55 am · Filed under gadfly

35 countries but who is counting?

• View my profile
• Create your own travel map or travel blog
• Travel Info at TripAdvisor

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The beauty of Science

May 25, 2009 at 8:08 pm · Filed under gadfly, video

This movie (thanks to James C for the link), made my long-weekend. It is all about context;  placing reductive observations about the world in a greater context so as to add to their beauty. You could also apply this to social and cultural phenomena; being able to place fellow humans in a empathetic cultural contexts, beyond the reductive world of consumer choice and taste. The beauty of the Digital Humanities is that the digital exits within the beauty of the human condition.

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Tree house party!

May 8, 2009 at 9:17 pm · Filed under gadfly

This weekend I am off to Berlin to visit my old friend Emu (yes, his real name and he isn’t even Australian). He has just built a tree house for his son to live in and he is having a party to celebrate. What better reason to go to Berlin!

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Anti-intellectualism: Causes

May 1, 2009 at 2:08 pm · Filed under gadfly

I found this in an unlikely source. A spiritual site. It is the paragraph on ‘pragmatism’ (or at least practicality) that caught my eye. It is not that there is anything wrong with ‘pragmatism’; pragmatism is needed to address all sorts of work related tasks. But pragmatism is rarely ideological neutral. It is what pragmatists position as the ‘impractical’ or ‘useless’ that is problematic. In the Digital Humanities there is en element of pragmatism, but this pragmatism must never position as ‘useless’ the very humanistic values, cognitive capacities, criticism, and reflection that are at the very core of the Digital Humanities. In other words, the field must never be dominated by pragmatists. We need more that one hand clapping.

(Orsom Wells ‘ The trial’. Modern corporate conformity through ‘practicality’ is one form of Anti-intellectualism).

Anti-intellectualism – Causes

Anti-intellectual beliefs can come from a variety of sources. These include:

Anti-intellectualism – Religion

Although most religions have rich intellectual traditions, many often rely on arguments from authorities that are not independently verifiable, along with a somewhat common tendency to reject secular critical traditions. Evangelical or fundamentalist forms of religious beliefs can be a source of anti-intellectual statements, though not all such groups are anti-intellectual and many pride themselves on their intellectual traditions. Syncretistic or mystical varieties of religious beliefs may also struggle with the definitions and distinctions of theology. Some religions have doctrines that affirm statements about natural or human history, the provenance of sacred texts, and other matters that may be investigated by outside scholarship; this can give rise to conflict. In a different cultural field, when bohemianism and romanticism become major factors in the fine arts, religious believers may believe these trends to be subversive of morality and call for censorship. This has been a fairly common theme in socio-cultural trends in the Americas and Europe since the time of the Reformation, as an example. However this is not a sign of anti-intellectualism. It is a sign of moral conservatism, which is distinctly different from anti-intellectualism, though the two concepts may be allied in some cases.

Anti-intellectualism – Corporate culture

Corporate culture in modern times has demonstrated a general preference for ‘pragmatism’, and this is an occasional source of hostility toward learning. The idea here is that education is a costly and useless distraction from the more important business of making money. Reading and writing are solitary ventures, and according to this viewpoint these activities do little to make a person more affable or conventional, and does not foster an aptitude for marketing or acumen for investment in profitable ventures. It is feared that intellectuals may acquire ethical and political ideas that may impede business or make its practices distasteful. This viewpoint tends to be commonly found in populations that utilise capitalism as their form of economic activity. Scientific and technological learning may be given a grudging respect; but the arts, literature, philosophy, and similar cultural pursuits are all considered a waste of time at best and subversive at worst. Those who pursue them are supposed to inhabit an ‘ivory tower’ of academia, full of grand plans whose practice is seen as impossibly flawed by their critics.

According to this view, education should be a sort of apprenticeship, rather than being done on the model of classical education based on Greek and Latin grammar and literature. The educational philosophy of John Dewey, founded on these assumptions, has had some influence on education in the USA, although it must be said that Dewey was also a philosopher and an atheist – two qualities guaranteed to raise suspicions among anti-intellectuals.

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RIP Chrysler

April 30, 2009 at 10:32 am · Filed under gadfly

When I was a Kid in Tasmania my mother owned a mission brown Chrysler Valiant VIP. It was as big as a whale. In the back seat it had pull down trays and spot lights like an aeroplane. It had a huge roaring motor that drank fuel like there was no tomorrow. My mother would drive this great boat at hight speeds around the winding roads of Tasmania making me want to vomit in the back. We lived in a house next to the beach with a steep drive-way and when it rained, the whale would struggle to make it to the top. Once when we were trying to put our horse Jetta into the horse trailer, Jetta reared up and kicked the beloved VIP in the door. The dent was repaired but my mother continued to talk about it for years. My mother dated the car-sales man who sold her the VIP. His name was Rox. I liked him a lot. He always brought me Coke and chips and arrived in the newest, flashiest Chryslers. He would park his cars on top of the drive near the neighbours legendary Chrysler V8 Charger. The VIP remained with us for a few years but was eventually replaced by a pissy little green Mitsubishi.

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‘I believe in the genital organs of great men and women…’

April 20, 2009 at 2:38 pm · Filed under gadfly

The sad death of a great humanist. RIP JG Ballard. (Thanks to Gabriel B for the link)

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Look at this *ing hipster!

April 18, 2009 at 2:41 pm · Filed under gadfly

Ok, who says blogging has to be serious? (thanks to Mary-Anne Breeze (Mez), facebook).

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Pirate Bay…

April 18, 2009 at 1:48 pm · Filed under creative commons, gadfly, open access, open source, politics, web2.0

“It is the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are morons and you should sodomise yourself with retractable batons’ Pirate Bay (from the guardian).

Although the author of this blog does not condone the use of police batons for sexual pleasure, the author does believe that Copyright legislation, especially as it manifests itself in the US, does not support artistic endeavours, cultural nor technical innovation.  The balances are all wrong. I particularly recommend the work of Stanford’s Laurence Lessig and the Creative Commons initiative.

Many artists, including my good friend Andrew Garton, advocate the use of Creative Commons as an alternative means to combat the innovation lock-down of corporate bully boys.

And although this history is somewhat simplified (and US centric); do a search on the history of FM radio online.  This tragic history has many parallels with the history of file swapping (link).

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We are the Tools in the Digital Humanities

April 16, 2009 at 3:28 pm · Filed under digital humanities, e-science, eresearch, gadfly, humanities computing

A certain style of technologist often thinks there is a short term practical solution to the numerous grand challenges that the disciplines that constitute the humanities face and that computerisation is necessarily the simple solution to many of them. The Digital Humanities is fundamentally about people; we are the tools in the Digital Humanities.

We are expensive to produce, a bit hard to find on occasions, not quite measurable in terms of our ‘evidence of value’, critical, speculative and reflective and engage with the contradictions of the human condition (and we are the messengers;  not the problem). On occasions the answers we produce aren’t the ones that want to be heard. Nor do we always fit neatly within our institutional structures whose boundaries are increasingly blurred by the very tools we produce.

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