[This post is the text of my final essay for UNL’s Digital Humanities Seminar.] Not Looking Backwards: Understanding New Technology’s Transformative Power and its limitations For every study decrying technology’s negative societal impacts,1 a study detailing how it reinforces and improves society exists.2 The debate over digital technology is not whether or not it is changing society, but rather whether these changes are good or bad for society. A prolific writer on humans’ interactions with computer technology, Sherry Turkle addresses this issue in both Life on the Screen: Identity in the Internet Age and Alone Together: Why We Expect More…
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[In lieu of readings for the final class meeting of UNL’s Digital Humanities Seminar. Each student was to give a brief presentation on the digital humanities in their field.] As a field built around places, urban history has always been cognizant of space. Beginning with Phil Ethington’s Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge digital urban history has used the digital medium’s visual power to explore space. As an early digital history project, Ethington modeled the digital medium’s visual power for spatial analysis. Building on his Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge, Ethington developed HyperCities,…
Leave a Comment[This post is a reading reflection written for UNL’s Digital Humanities Seminar. This week’s reading was Tim Wu’s The Master Switch.] Tim Wu contextualizes the Internet in communication technology’s long history of optimism. Like Lawrence Lessig and Evgeny Morozov, Wu suggests the free and open Internet may not always remain that way. With increasingly powerful companies such as Facebook, which virtually operates as an online ID card now, and Google, which has amassed an absurd amount of information on which many people daily rely, the Internet does run the risk of bowing to private corporate interests. Even if the Internet…
Leave a Comment[This mostly serious look at the four stages of DH reflect my own journey in learning about the digital humanities/digital history. The experiences of others may vary and I reserve the right to add stages at a later date.] Practical-ist You see DH as another way to make yourself stand out as a job applicant. While not really knowing what DH means or how to go about practicing DH, there is curiosity. What you should do if you are a practical-ist: Learn more about DH. Some good starting places are Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig’s Digital History, Stephen Ramsay’s On…
3 Comments[Brian goes to a dark place after reading Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom and Jaron Lanier’s “Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism” for UNL’s Digital Humanities Seminar.] Evgeny Morozov examines the Internet’s relation to authoritarian states, arguing there is a Western misconception, rooted in the Cold War, that the Internet, and information systems more broadly, create political change. This “cyber-utopianism,” as Morozov dubs it, assumes that the Internet inherently favors democracy and works against oppressive governments. Morozov warns that cyber-utopianists, combined with a misguided strategy he calls “Internet-centrism” creates the “Net…
One Comment[This post is a reading reflection written for UNL’s Digital Humanities Seminar. This week’s reading was Lawrence Lessig’s Code Version 2.0.] Facebook and Google have a hand most businesses and nearly every person’s lives. Seeing the interplay of commerce and the law is not a difficult task for a reader in 2011. While code and commerce are clearly connected to a number of issues of interest to scholars on a personal level including free speech and privacy, most valuable to academics is Lessig’s evaluation of intellectual property. The obvious examples for digital humanists are Creative Commons, which Lessig says has…
Leave a Comment[In lieu of readings this week, our digital humanities seminar chose sections of Writing History in the Digital Age on which to comment during their open peer review stage. You can find my contributions under my name here, or when you read through the two essays on which I commented (I have a feeling these links may not be permanent so my apologies if future people find them to be broken).] Open peer review is a great layer of scholarly discussion that should be added to, not replace, current practices of peer review. Peer review’s current practices of total secrecy…
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