• The beauty of Science

    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,…

  • What is technological determinism?

    Technological determinism is circulated, maintained, and advanced within the pre-existing hierarchies in the world in which we live. Determinism has its own political agendas, its own rules, its own contexts and hierarchies and antagonisms to an imagined ‘other’. Determinism utilises a proprietary language and culture and although it cloaks itself in ideas of inter-disciplinary, deterministic…

  • Private Sheriffs in Cyberspace: Jonathan Zittrain OII Event: London, 19th May 2009

    On Tuesday evening I attended an Oxford Internet Institute sponsored lecture by Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Harvard Law School, Co-Founder and Faculty Director, Berkman Centre for Internet & Society (at the salubrious legal offices of Wragge and Co). Zittrain talked about regulation on-line by major Internet players such as Facebook and Apple and asserted that…

  • Manual Castells at London School of Economics 9 July

    The acclaimed author of the Rise of Network Society, Professor Manual Castells  will be speaking at LSE on 9th July and launching his new book ‘Communication Power’.  I can’t wait for this one; I have wanted to hear Castells speak for years.  As a PhD candidate in the late ’90s, Castells changed how I though…

  • New forms of doctorate

    I attended an ESRC funded seminar today and organised by the Landsdown Centre for Electronic Arts on new forms of doctorates. This was the third seminar in the series. As someone who undertook a practice based PhD some years back (that admittedly was not altogether a totally a rewarding institutional experience), I found the seminar…

  • Digital Classicist/ICS Work in Progress Seminar, Summer 2009

    This years Digital Classics seminar is due to begin on June 5. The classics field is one of the most active in the Digital Humanities and this years seminar has attracted many international speakers discussing diverse topics from Herodotus, to Philology, to agent-based modelling. For those historians and academics who are not particularly strong in…