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Category Archives: Ideas
Interactive documentary and the wild, wired world
Bear 71 isn’t your grandfather’s grizzly. She knows the name of the drug that tranquilized her, knows too about Zoloft and Viagra, knows that her radio collar broadcasts in the VHF range. She can tell you that a rubber bullet … Continue reading
Posted in Ideas, Uncategorized
Tagged Banff, bear, data, grizzly, interactive documentary, Marlin Perkins, National Film Board of Canada, natural history, NFB, Richard Attenburrough, science, sensors
1 Comment
Touch, lag, and the haptic uncanny
Verisimilitude doesn’t happen only in space, but in time as well. That’s the takeaway from this Microsoft Research video about recent work in the effect of reducing the lag time of touch-interactive interfaces. The effect of lag, which becomes especially … Continue reading
Posted in Ideas
Tagged 3D, lag, Microsoft Research, tangible objects, teaching with things, uncanny
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Twitter, NPR’s Morning Edition, and Dreams of Flatland
In a bit of ragged analysis of the social geography of Twitter this morning, NPR’s Morning Edition demonstrated the survival of hidebound, “a-and-then-the-ring-around-it“-era prejudices about the nature of social media and the Web. Host Steve Inskeep interviewed Shankar Vedantam, who … Continue reading
Posted in Ideas
Tagged geography, imagined community, mainstream media, Morning Edition, NPR, social networks, Steve Inskeep, Twitter
4 Comments
The Cryoscope: using networking materiality to tactilize the weather
I love the possibilities suggested by the “Cryoscope,” a project cooked up by R.I.T. industrial-design student Rob Godshaw: Godshaw’s gadget picks up the temperature forecast by zip code and reproduces it within a gorgeous aluminum block; you touch it to … Continue reading
Posted in Ideas
Tagged Arduino, haptic interface, networked materiality, sensors, tactility, temperature, weather
2 Comments
Cooking up some dishes in the Library Test Kitchen
Bibliotheca II, alias “son of Bibliotheca” (last semester’s seminar/studio jointly run by Jeffrey Schnapp and John Palfrey), has now been launched with the help of Ann Whiteside (chief librarian at the Loeb Design Library), Jeff Goldenson (Law Library Innovation Lab), … Continue reading
Posted in Ideas, News
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Tweet withheld: (mis)understanding censorship on the Internet
Since Twitter announced its Country Withheld Content policy last Thursday, fear and outrage have spread at tweetspeed across the blogosphere and the connected media, with Reporters Without Borders director Olivier Basille firing off an open letter to Twitter’s chairman Jack … Continue reading
Posted in Ideas, Uncategorized
Tagged activism, censorship, dissent, Orwell, Twitter, Zeynep Tufekci
3 Comments
Typecasting the digital humanities
The carnival of digital-humanities metacommentary takes a curious and compelling turn in Daniel Anderson‘s Waves, a screencasting remix of blog posts using captured keystrokes and cut-and-paste, text autocomplete, and a collage of videos. The piece features (very much inter alia) … Continue reading
Posted in Ideas
Tagged Amanda French, Daniel Andreson, DH, digital composition, digital humanities, documentary, remix, screencasting, Stanley Fish
1 Comment
DH baby steps and generative verse
In the midst of making my own initial forays into Python, I was fiddling around last night with a simple exercise: to make a script that grabs lines containing a given word from a source text and spits them into … Continue reading
Posted in Ideas
Tagged DH, digital humanities, generative art, python, quartorzain, script, Shakespeare, sonnet
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At Nieman Lab: iPad, textbooks, and chimerical interactivity
I’ve just written a piece For Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Laboratory about the education-themed event Apple held yesterday at the Guggenheim Museum, where company execs debuted new textbook functionality for the iPad. In the Nieman post I argue that while Apple’s … Continue reading
Going dark: SOPA, Wikipedia, and expressive absence
The ostensible anti-piracy bills debated by Congress bear the hallmarks of an archaic politics: an atavism encoded in their very names, which combine duplicitous simplicity with the kind of doublespeak that flourished in the late twentieth century. SOPA is the … Continue reading
