Wikipedia Will Limit Changes on Articles About Living People

Although Wikipedia has prevented anonymous users from creating new articles for several years now, the new flagging system crosses a psychological Rubicon. It will divide Wikipedia’s contributors into two classes — experienced, trusted editors, and everyone else — altering Wikipedia’s implicit notion that everyone has an equal right to edit entries. That right was never…

The Incredible Vanishing Book

Many professors will spend countless hours putting together elaborate and voluminous course packets of photocopies for classroom use (I used to be one of them). And now, it is more frequent for technologically minded teachers to file-share large numbers of PDFs through password protected sites on campus. This is so wrong it hurts. We are…

Men at Forty

Men at fortyLearn to close softlyThe doors to rooms they will not beComing back to. At rest on a stair landing,They feel it movingBeneath them now like the deck of a ship,Though the swell is gentle. And deep in mirrorsThey rediscoverThe face of the boy as he practises tyingHis father’s tie there in secret And…

Is Wikipedia Becoming a Respectable Academic Source?

Last year a colleague in the English department described a conversation in which a friend revealed a dirty little secret: “I use Wikipedia all the time for my research–but I certainly wouldn’t cite it.”  This got me wondering: How many humanities and social sciences researchers are discussing, using, and citing Wikipedia? — Lisa Spiro When…

Malwebolence

The headline writer was having an off day, but the content — a thoughtful examination of the trolling subculture — is excellent. NYT Magazine. In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word “troll” to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups.…

Mourning the Internet Famous: Randy Pausch's Distributed Funeral

Interesting observations on the internet’s response to the death of Randy (“The Last Lecture”) Pausch. You interacted with Randy through a little box embedded in a webpage. Your headphones piped his voice clear and strong into the center of your brain, almost as if some deep part of your own mind was delivering his nuggets…

Hypertext '08: Session 4: Hypertext, Culture, and Communication

Chair: Mark Bernstein (Eastgate Systems, USA) Information Flows and Social Capital in Weblogs: A Case Study in the Brazilian Blogosphere (Long Paper) Raquel Recuero Qualitative study. Perception is that bloggers are just wasting time, but people have strong personal reasons for blogging. Went quickly through the obligatory background slide… I wonder that this audience might…

reMIX: Interactive Fiction

Structure, Sign, and Play An Interactive Fiction by Jason Helms and Jacques Derrida “There seems to be a voice reverberating around you, but whether its origin is above or below, you are unsure. It speaks in a heavy french accent: “Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be…