JISC will launch a report on Web 2 in Higher Education next Tuesday 12 May (that I will attend). I also draw attention to a case-study report published on the JISC web site last year that claims ‘The features most associated with a Web 2.0 approach (rate, comment, upload, blog and send to friend) were commonly described with reference to social networking or e-commerce sites and were largely considered non-academic and therefore inappropriate for the Pre-Raphaelite online resource’ (link). In other words, building a virtual community is a very labour intensive and difficult task in HE and almost impossible if there is not at least some attempt at a community building strategy. A virtual community needs a strong sense of community through a coherent and interesting concept, a belief that the labour that the user is contributing to the site is meaningful and consequential, and some sort of reward system. There is no rigid method for making a community site work, but it does take a strategy to grow and foster the community but the one that develops may not always be the one that was imagined in the first instance.

If your local newspaper shuts down, what will take the place of its coverage? Perhaps a package of information about your neighborhood, or even your block, assembled by a computer.  

Minh Uong/The New York Times

A number of Web start-up companies are creating so-called hyperlocal news sites that let people zoom in on what is happening closest to them, often without involving traditional journalists.

The sites, like EveryBlock, Outside.in, Placeblogger and Patch, collect links to articles and blogs and often supplement them with data from local governments and other sources. They might let a visitor know about an arrest a block away, the sale of a home down the street and reviews of nearby restaurants (link NY Times)

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(Google’s data centre)

Another excellent report from some excellent US scholars. But I wish that I had more time to properly interrogate the ideas and claims I often read in these Digital Humanities documents ( but if I may be a bold and superficial blogger, there are some recurring themes in numerous of these documents). ‘Data driven’ scholarship is closely linked to science, meaning that it is the imposition of the scientific method upon the humanities. This means that the intellectual paradigm of ‘data-driven’ scholarship is empirical, positivist, and rational. From a progressive humanistic perspective, these are very old-fashioned ideas perpetuated by elite schools in elite Universities (repeat after me 27 times young man!). In some ways the tools don’t matter; it is the intellectual underpinnings of the so-called claim of ‘scholarly transformations’ that do. The ‘humanities’ have numerous so-called ‘intellectual transformations’ but few if any of them has anything to do with empirical and positivist thought. Sorry, the humanities is not ‘big science’. The human condition is not all together rational. There is a massive tension here; we must never be driven by scientific nor engineering dreams; we must be driven by the values we place in our own intellectual traditions. These tools matter, but only in the context of the latter.

As documented in Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, we are witnessing an extraordinary moment in cultural history when the humanities and social sciences are undergoing a foundational transformation. Tools are one essential element of this transformation, along with access to cultural data in digital form. The need to “develop and maintain open standards and robust tools” was one of eight key recommendations in the ACLS report, inspired by the NSF’s 2003 Atkins report on cyberinfrastructure.[Unsworth et al., Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, American Council of Learned Societies, 2006] (link).

The intensified use of the Internet by civil society groups and governments for political purposes has left many questions unexplained�especially in terms of the Internet’s effects upon deliberative democratic processes. The Internet was first imagined as a means to revitalize deliberative processes. However, poor design and lack of usability research meant that many ambitions went largely unrealized. With a new wave of Internet technologies, ‘deliberative design’ has become even more important to stem what many claim is a trend towards political fragmentation and disaggregation. In a time of ‘information abundance’ mounting political communication online may also undermine collectivist, deliberative democratic processes, distinct from the ambition to renew these processes. There is therefore a pressing need to design Internet technologies that serve deliberative democracy, rather than unwittingly undermine it (link)

http://siepr.stanford.edu/programs/OpenSoftware_David/Economy-of-Regard_8+_OWLS.pdf

The Federal Liberal Party appears to be snubbing MySpace, after the social network publicly criticised the Liberals’ response to its new Impact political channel.

The channel – which MySpace says facilitates direct communication between politicians, non-profit organisations and voters – officially launched last Thursday, with profiles for 20 individual politicians.

It is understood the Prime Minister, John Howard, refused to create his own profile page because he did not want to lend his identity to a commercial organisation. (link)

This Wiki presents a structured list of departments, centres, institutes and other institutional forms that variously instantiate humanities computing. For each entry a link is provided to the relevant site on the WWW and a brief description given. This list represents an ongoing attempt to derive a basic typology from a complex variety of activities and so to provide institutional models for the field. Despite the fact that national academic conventions vary quite widely and cultural differences make comparisons difficult if not hazardous, no attempt has been made here to account for them. The intention is not to define what is happening in the field world-wide, rather it is to provoke discussion leading either to consensus or at least to an improved understanding of the conditions under which computing humanists work. Constructive criticisms and clarifications are not merely welcome, they are to the point.

Friday, April 13, 2007, 6:30 � 8:30 p.m.
The New School, Theresa Lang Community and Student Center
55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor
New York City
Admission: $8, free for all students, New School faculty, staff, and alumni with valid ID

This evening at the Vera List Center for Art & Politics will discuss the potential of sociable media such as weblogs and social networking sites to democratize society through emerging cultures of broad participation.

danah boyd will argue four points. 1) Networked publics are changing the way public life is organized. 2) Our understandings of public/private are being radically altered 3) Participation in public life is critical to the functioning of democracy. 4) We have destroyed youths’ access to unmediated public life. Why are we now destroying their access to mediated public life? What consequences does this have for democracy?

Trebor Scholz will present the paradox of affective immaterial labor. Content generated by networked publics was the main reason for the fact that the top ten sites on the World Wide Web accounted for most Internet traffic last year. Community is the commodity, worth billions. The very few get even richer building on the backs of the immaterial labor of very very many. Net publics comment, tag, rank, forward, read, subscribe, re-post, link, moderate, remix, share, collaborate, favorite, write. They flirt, work, play, chat, gossip, discuss, learn and by doing so they gain much: the pleasure of creation, knowledge, micro-fame, a “home,” friendships, and dates. They share their life experiences and archive their memories while context-providing businesses get value from their attention, time, and uploaded content. Scholz will argue against this naturalized “factory without walls” and will demand for net publics to control their own contributions.

Ethan Zuckerman will present his work on issues of media and the developing world, especially citizen media, and the technical, legal, speech, and digital divide issues that go alongside it. Starting out with a critique of cyberutopianism, Zuckerman will address citizen media and activism in developing nations, their potential for democratic change, the
ways that governments (and sometimes corporations) are pushing back on their ability to democratize.

About the Panelists:

danah boyd is a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley and a fellow at the USC Annenberg Center for Communications. Her dissertation focuses on how American youth engage in networked publics like MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Xanga, etc. In particular, she is interested in how teens formulate a presentation of self and negotiate socialization in mediated contexts amidst invisible audiences. This work is funded by the MacArthur Foundation as part of a broader grant on digital youth and informal learning.
http://www.zephoria.org/

Trebor Scholz is a media theorist, artist, and activist who is interested in the economics of sociable media and networked social life in relation to politics and education. As founder of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (iDC), he contributed essays to several books, journals, and periodicals and co-edited “The Art of Free Cooperation” (forthcoming). He is currently professor and researcher in the Department of Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo and research fellow at the Hochschule fuer Kunst und Gestaltung, Zurich (Switzerland).
http://collectivate.net/journalisms

Ethan Zuckerman is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. His research focuses on the distribution of attention in mainstream and new media, and on the use of technology for international development. With Rebecca MacKinnon, he leads a project called “Global Voices” which focuses on using weblogs around the world to close gaps in mainstream media coverage. In 2000, Ethan founded Geekcorps, a technology volunteer corps that sends IT specialists to work on projects in developing nations, with a focus on West Africa.
http://ethanzuckerman.com/

* This event is presented on occasion of the Vera List Center�s program cycle on �The Public Domain.�

When http, html and URIs were invented, the World Wide Web took its shape. With the technology provided here, we extend the Web to audio-visual data: Annodex, cmml and temporal URIs allow the creation of Webs of Videos. They also enable Web search engines to crawl and index audio-visual content. Just apply anything you know from the Web to audio-visual content – that’s Annodex (link).