• The ‘Dark Side’ of the Enlightenment

    “The Alchemist in Search of the Philosopher’s Stone,” by Joseph Wright, 1771 Dan Edelstein, a Stanford French professor, has been exploring an aspect of the Age of Enlightenment that is less familiar to most, the so-called “dark side” of the enlightenment. He described the differentiating factors. “The prevailing understanding of the enlightenment is one in…

  • Stop Internet Censorship…

    An add from that wonderful crew Getup.org.au. They are waging a campaign against internet censorship in Australia.

  • Building Social Media Infrastructure to Engage Publics

    An interesting new report from the Centre for Social Media at American University is Washington DC. This field report traces how a committed group of volunteers harnessed the micro-blogging tool Twitter to create innovative public media 2.0 experiments—first to actively engage users to report on their voting experiences in the 2008 U.S. election, and then…

  • A vision of Britain through time

    Another fantastic resource from the JISC. The JISC-funded A Vision of Britain Through Time website launches today, giving access, often for the first time, to over two centuries’ worth of facts, figures, surveys, maps, election results and travel writing showing how 15,000 UK places have changed. The changing story of Britain’s towns and villages can…

  • OpenTech ’09

    http://www.ukuug.org/events/opentech2009/ I attended the OpenTech ’09 forum on Saturday; organised by the UK Unix Users Group and friends at the University of London Union (ULU). For those interested in the social and political aspects of computing; this is an excellent forum to discuss new modes of political communication, privacy, advocacy and other issues that arise…

  • Leaping Hurdles: Planning IT Provision for Researchers

    I recently attended a workshop sponsored by the Joint information Systems Committee (JISC) that presented some of the findings from the JISC funded community engagement and virtual research environments (VRE) projects. The three community engagement projects presented were the engage project (engaging researchers with e-infrastructure), the e-uptake project (enabling uptake of e-Infrastructure Services), and the…