“You very rarely get a glimpse into the reader’s mind,” David Levithan of Scholastic Books says. “With a printed book, there’s no such thing as an analytic. You can’t tell which pages are dog-eared.” A new piece at the Wall Street Journal by Alexandra Alter about how publishers are finally getting …
I recently attended the Digital Humanities section of the annual Canadian academic Congress. Ian Lancashire of the University of Toronto was on my panel and he gave a very moving paper on the correlation between language decline in writers and the onset of alzheimers. His most famous paper on this …
A neat piece in the Chicago Tribune by Chris Borelli on the pleasures of reading on public transit. As Borelli writes, one reason for this is the way reading on trains, planes, buses, and subways allows you to be alone in public. There is something deeply pleasurable about being immersed …
So many deaths. I’m thinking of starting a site called “Deathwatch” that monitors the discourse of death around cultural phenomena. This time a review of Lori Andrews’ I Know Who You Are and Saw What You Did (great title btw) which is about social networking and “the death of privacy.” …
The President of SSHRC, historian Chad Gaffield, gave a talk last night at McGill about the role of digital humanities in changing the nature of scholarship. It was a talk probably more appropriate to funders and politicians but one of the recurring themes was the idea of “access.” It is …
A great twitter caper reported at the Daily News’ books blog. Apparently, someone began posting under the name @CriticMichiko making fun of some of the renowned NY Times book critic, Michiko Kakutani’s verbal ticks. Then someone else (or the same person) began posting under a new name @ActualNYTMK to ask the …
A recent piece in The Awl on the new website, Is Anyone Up?, offers the latest ethnographic account from the grizzly frontiers of internet privacy. The site reposts nude photographs from social networking sites and has a huge following. If you end up there because someone posted something about you …
A haunting recent piece in the Times by Hasan M. Elahi, an associate professor at Maryland, who was picked-up by the FBI while traveling after Sept. 11th. Elahi recounts his interrogation (very bureaucratic, no scary stuff), but also his impulse to share everything in response to the questioning. Elahi eventually …
A really nice piece by Jeffrey Rosen on a new case coming before the US Supreme Court. The particular issue in question is whether law enforcement can track people using GPS devices without a warrant. The bigger issue is the question of public anonymity — the way we are online, …
Learned a new word today. Sock puppets refer to fake online personae that are used to try to manipulate conversations on social media networks. Needless to say a new player in the business is the U.S. military. Like the old fashioned broadcast forum, Voice of America, which was broadcast on …