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Tag: sports

March Madness

The Men’s NCAA basketball tournament, better known as March Madness, is about to begin. I thought about writing a thoughtful piece on sports and the university, but, perhaps due to lack of sleep or being on a research trip and working all day (yes I’m trying to rationalize a short post this week), I decided against it (maybe I’ll get my act together for the start of football season). Millions of Americans fill out brackets and enter office/family/friend pools. Personally, I will going to spend probably an hour making picks for several different entries later tonight. Now when you have…

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Mapping the NBA

Deadspin: You all know the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game. Some of you may even be familiar with the Erdős number, which uses authorship of math papers to measure the “collaborative distance” between a person and the mathematician Paul Erdős. I applied this same type of thinking to sports and went looking for the Center of the NBA Universe. You can also play around with the project

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Kobe Bryant and the Digital Humanities

A very entertaining post by Cameron Blevins: In both the statistical movement in basketball and the digital turn in the humanities, new approaches allow for new questions. Henry Abbott and others have not “proven” that Kobe Bryant shouldn’t take the last shot of a game, but they have raised important questions: would Bryant’s team be better served by using him as a decoy? More broadly, is the long-standing convention of putting the ball into the hands of your best player in an isolation situation at the end of the game even a good idea? Using digital methodologies in the humanities…

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