It takes a digital humanist to make this kind of argument. I don’t mean to invoke the turf-fencing debate about what the digital humanities means, I mean to honor a question that forces us to remind ourselves that we are the Eloi, the pampered elite whose world of comfort exists only because of the toil…
Yes, editors and publishers perform a professional service, and will be able to do it more efficiently than the government, but the cost is passed along to libraries who have to buy the databases instead of the monographs that are still required for academe. What if all PhD students had to take a class where…
The content is great, but I’m really blogging this because I’m tickled by the writing. Kickstarter is off-the-showroom polished in this regard – the web pages are clean without being sparse, sharp without being oblique, informative without being overwhelming. It feels like french-kissing a Nicholas Felton chart while Edward Tufte snaps photos for his personal…
“We take pictures of the clothes on a doll that stands in the shop, and then create the human appearance with a program on [a] computer,” he said. —Clothing Giant H&M Defends ‘Perfect’ Virtual Models – ABC News. Similar:Quick visit to see my mother and siblings.Students are trusting software like this to do their work.A…
Apple just released an update of its very nice iBooks. The Kindle still is my preferred ereader for personal reasons, but I prefer to teach with iBooks. Last year when I taught a literature survey, I experimented with asking students to use out-of-copyright free etexts, and to annotate them in iBooks. The fact that iBooks…
Kodak Brownie and Instamatic cameras were once staples of family vacations and holidays — remember the “open me first” Christmas ad campaigns? But it may not be long before a generation of Americans grows up without ever having laid hands on a Kodak product. That’s a huge comedown for a brand that was once as…
Qantas on Tuesday invited users of the micro-blogging site to enter a “Qantas Luxury” competition, asking people to describe their “dream luxury in-flight experience” and possibly win a pair of Qantas first-class pyjamas and a toiletries kit. The timing of the PR exercise was questionable, coming just a day after Qantas and its unions broke…
Now, we’ve shown that Facebook promotes captive content on its network ahead of content on the web, prohibits users from bringing open content into their network, warns users not to visit web content, and places obstacles in front of visits to web sites even if they’ve embraced Facebook’s technologies and registered in Facebook’s centralized database…
As you are probably aware, you cannot side-load or run any Google app that requires a login on the Kindle Fire. That means no Gmail, Google+, Google Voice (I need to text my peeps) or Google Docs. I should have carefully researched the Amazon app store before I bought the Kindle Fire. I falsely assumed…
Blogging this so I can find it again for a future freshman writing course. (It’s too late in the term to introduce a new text, but this could spark some good discussion.) Advertisements for laundry products often feature women, but new commercials from Tide feature a stay-at-home dad. He’s shown throughout the ads folding a…
As the producers noted in an apology announcement, Rand’s work extols “a society driven by rational self-interest.” On the back of the film’s retail DVD and Blu-ray however, the movie’s synopsis contradictorily states “AYN RAND’s timeless novel of courage and self-sacrifice comes to life…’” via ‘Atlas Shrugged’ film producers replacing 100,000 DVD’s after mischaracterizing Ayn…
Flash became a dominant desktop platform by allowing developers to code interactive games, create animated advertisements and deliver video to any browser that had the plugin installed, without having to take into account the particulars of any given browser. However, with the development of Javascript, CSS, and HTML5, which has native support for video, many…
Designed exclusively for Amazon Prime subscribers who own a Kindle (sorry, iPad users – the Kindle App alone will not suffice), the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library allows consumers to borrow one book per month without any due dates. Amazon can only offer this option because the books are digital; the company isn’t loaning consumers much…
The problem is that Google is killing off the current crop of social functions from Reader – and in doing so, they’re fundamentally altering the way most of us use Reader, and in the process they’re sending a huge archive of curated posts and shares and comments down into the void. And this is a…
[J]ournals ceased being a means of communication a long time ago – more than 20 years ago for sure. New research would be unveiled in seminars, circulated as NBER Working Papers, long before anything showed up in a journal. Whole literatures could flourish, mature, and grow decadent before the first article got properly published…. The…
“It’s always the end of the world,” said Russell Grandinetti, one of Amazon’s top executives. “You could set your watch on it arriving.” He pointed out, though, that the landscape was in some ways changing for the first time since Gutenberg invented the modern book nearly 600 years ago. “The only really necessary people in…
Big, sad news in the world of big (sad) journalism. One of Rupert Murdoch’s most senior European executives has resigned following Guardian inquiries about a circulation scam at News Corporation’s flagship newspaper, the Wall Street Journal. The Guardian found evidence that the Journal had been channelling money through European companies in order to secretly buy…
Before you start answering questions from a telephone solicitor, you must “qualify” the company as a potential prospect for a law suit. If, during the introductory pitch, the telemarketer indicates that they are working for a non-profit firm, or a survey company, hang up immediately. They are not subject to the law and are a…
All of Apple’s iDevices — the iPod, iPhone and iPad — use operating systems that deny the user access to their workings. Users cannot install programs themselves; they are downloaded from Apple’s servers, which Apple controls and curates, choosing at its whim what can and can’t be distributed, and where anything can be censored with…
Dr. McCarver calls herself a doctor because she returned to school to earn a doctorate last year, one of thousands of nurses doing the same recently. Doctorates are popping up all over the health professions, and the result is a quiet battle over not only the title “doctor,” but also the money, power and prestige…