My students seem increasingly confused by the difference between journal title vs. article title

Sometimes students will submit bibliography entries that repeat both titles — either the journal or the article.  I assume they are using an online citation generator and I assume they’re not bothering to check its output.  What I had previously thought of as a random careless error now seems evidence of a paradigm shift. I’ve been teaching on the assumption that students are more familiar with the concept of a…

Dennis G. Jerz | Associate Professor of English -- New Media Journalism, Seton Hill University | jerz.setonhill.edu Logo

In January 2000, I was blogging about dancing paperclips, the transience of literary judgement, “bafflegab,” and a planned B&N/Microsoft online bookstore

In January 2000, I was blogging about Dancing paperclips and telemarketers A “100 best novels” list published in 1899 Updike’s prequel to Hamlet The “bafflegab” jargon generator “Bookseller Barnes & Noble is teaming with Microsoft to build a new online e-book store.” (but the link is dead)

Over time, Google has made paid ads harder to spot

  In 2007, Google changed the long-standing shaded background indicating the ads section of the page from blue to yellow. In 2008, it then briefly tried a green background before reverting back to yellow. Google continued to test variations of background colors including bright blue and a light violet. In 2010, violet officially replaced the yellow, but only lasted about a year before yellow reappeared in 2011. In 2013, Google…

Outline of a female executive assistant seated at the front desk of a retro office, with a smiling male executive in a business suit waiting for her to finish her phone call so he can ask her something.

How 15 minutes I spent with a laptop in 1991 created 2 FT jobs and a promotion

In a section of my dissertation, I dove into office gender politics of in the late 1940s, in order to explore just what Arthur Miller’s original audiences would have thought about the wire recorder that appears in Death of a Salesman. In the play, Willy Loman’s boss Howard thinks of the wire recorder as a domestic plaything, but at the time it was marketed as more reliable for taking dictation…

How Artists on Twitter Tricked Spammy T-Shirt Stores Into Admitting Their Automated Art Theft

Yesterday, an artist on Twitter named Nana ran an experiment to test a theory. Their suspicion was that bots were actively looking on Twitter for phrases like “I want this on a shirt” or “This needs to be a t-shirt,” automatically scraping the quoted images, and instantly selling them without permission as print-on-demand t-shirts. Dozens of Nana’s followers replied, and a few hours later, a Twitter bot replied with a link…