Sunday, November 21, 2010
4Humanities Digital Humanities Initiative
4Humanities, a site for Humanities Advocacy, created by an international community of digital humanities scholars and educators to assist in advocacy for the humanities. Founding members include Paul Arthur, Edward Ayers, Craig Bellamy, Cathy N. Davidson, Patrick Durusau, David Theo Goldberg, Tim Hitchcock, Lorna Hughes, Alan Liu, Andrew Prescott, Stephen Ramsay, Geoffrey Rockwell, Lisa Spiro, Melissa Terras, and William G. Thomas, III.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Monday, November 15, 2010
The Social Network
Just saw Fincher's The Social Network...are the misogyny and racism descriptive? documenary? or the bias of Fincher and Sorkin? I didn't read The Accidental Billionaire, but now feel that I should. Some younger reviewers are saying that it is the representational revenge of old media (film, and people my age) on new media (Facebook, and twentysomethings). A simpler question I have for us is, do we explore networks together? or do we take up topics of mutual interest and use the network as it stands right now, to strengthen our connections?
Saturday, November 13, 2010
humanities network discussion
After our meeting this past week, I thought it would be a good idea to ask a few questions of each other that would allow us to develop some common interests and intellectual enterprises while using simple social media tools to facilitate our discussions. First of all, I must admit that I haven't seen the new film, The Social Network yet, but from what I have heard, it offers of sobering view of the origins of social media, and for this reason, does not participate in simple-minded boosterism of what has become an extremely profitable and ambiguous way of allowing and/or coercing people to be connected on for profit social media platforms.
That said, there are many positive aspects of the networks, open and closed that I would like to emphasize. For one, they allow for a kind of less formal, less censored dialogue on issues that matter to us. The barriers to entry in discussions depend simply on the nature of your contributions to the networked discussions. Professional credentials and institutional prestige matter very little when a real group of networked and likeminded people get together to discuss the issues that matter to them. Let me give you an example: I follow FC Barcelona very closely. On one of the Barcelona blogs, a young fan contributes links, insights and some times simple phatic statements. She is in high school. The quality of her contributions has given her "authority" and status in the group that she wouldn't get as a teenage fan of a Spanish/Catalan team elsewhere.
Participation of this sort is highly irregular, entirely voluntary and often unpredictable in good ways and bad. It has been empowering in recent years for countless groups of people who have found their way to using corporate sponsored social media tools to find audiences and communities. I hope I am not being overly simplistic here. You probably all know this.
One of the most important books about networks as a form of economic organization is by Yochai Benkler and it can be downloaded as a pdf here . Perhaps we should start by discussing this book's basic tenets. Evan Watkins at UC Davis gave a wonderful paper comparing Benkler's The Wealth of Networks with Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Perhaps we can ask him to give a presentation to us when we all meet at Davis. I don't think tech training would be as interesting or as useful as having some one who has thought very hard about these issues discuss them with us.
The network is only as rich as the contributions to it. Benkler describes a Utopian world, where the network provides the conditions of knowledge sharing and democratic processes that overcome bureaucratic hierarchy and professional protectionism. Whether we believe that networks are in fact a new form of political/economic organization, we might consider our own practices as a group in light of networks theories such as Benkler's. This is the tip of iceberg. There are many other sources on this very issue that we could consult.
So when "we" as an exclusive and closed group say that we are going to decide which are the 10 out of 600 publications by UC faculty that are the "most" important, this means we are operating less like a network than a conventional professional review board: I would urge us to think about the displacement of judgment and the technoliberatory promises of the networked world. If UCOP likes networks, simply because it sounds new and innovative, we should like networks because they allow us to share, discuss and vet decisions and knowledge in unpredictable and productive ways.
What I hope doesn't happen is that the Humanities Network exists only as a branding fiction, and that the really positive things about networks get lost in our attempts to chase the chimera of the "new." I also don't believe that we should allow ourselves, as David Theo Goldberg put it, to put carts before horses and forget what the Humanities are as we pursue tech tools to enhance our research missions and collaborations.
I have found eblogger very easy to use. If you have a gmail address, you can be a blog author. I am also a bit wary of using blos at UCI, a tool our office of technology has put into place. Proprietary issues abound there, and in fact eblogger seems to be a more neutral tool for our purposes.
If you have any issues about authoring, posting or commenting, or if you find eblogger unwieldy, please let me know. This is an experiment, and one that can be only as good as we make it.
That said, there are many positive aspects of the networks, open and closed that I would like to emphasize. For one, they allow for a kind of less formal, less censored dialogue on issues that matter to us. The barriers to entry in discussions depend simply on the nature of your contributions to the networked discussions. Professional credentials and institutional prestige matter very little when a real group of networked and likeminded people get together to discuss the issues that matter to them. Let me give you an example: I follow FC Barcelona very closely. On one of the Barcelona blogs, a young fan contributes links, insights and some times simple phatic statements. She is in high school. The quality of her contributions has given her "authority" and status in the group that she wouldn't get as a teenage fan of a Spanish/Catalan team elsewhere.
Participation of this sort is highly irregular, entirely voluntary and often unpredictable in good ways and bad. It has been empowering in recent years for countless groups of people who have found their way to using corporate sponsored social media tools to find audiences and communities. I hope I am not being overly simplistic here. You probably all know this.
One of the most important books about networks as a form of economic organization is by Yochai Benkler and it can be downloaded as a pdf here . Perhaps we should start by discussing this book's basic tenets. Evan Watkins at UC Davis gave a wonderful paper comparing Benkler's The Wealth of Networks with Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Perhaps we can ask him to give a presentation to us when we all meet at Davis. I don't think tech training would be as interesting or as useful as having some one who has thought very hard about these issues discuss them with us.
The network is only as rich as the contributions to it. Benkler describes a Utopian world, where the network provides the conditions of knowledge sharing and democratic processes that overcome bureaucratic hierarchy and professional protectionism. Whether we believe that networks are in fact a new form of political/economic organization, we might consider our own practices as a group in light of networks theories such as Benkler's. This is the tip of iceberg. There are many other sources on this very issue that we could consult.
So when "we" as an exclusive and closed group say that we are going to decide which are the 10 out of 600 publications by UC faculty that are the "most" important, this means we are operating less like a network than a conventional professional review board: I would urge us to think about the displacement of judgment and the technoliberatory promises of the networked world. If UCOP likes networks, simply because it sounds new and innovative, we should like networks because they allow us to share, discuss and vet decisions and knowledge in unpredictable and productive ways.
What I hope doesn't happen is that the Humanities Network exists only as a branding fiction, and that the really positive things about networks get lost in our attempts to chase the chimera of the "new." I also don't believe that we should allow ourselves, as David Theo Goldberg put it, to put carts before horses and forget what the Humanities are as we pursue tech tools to enhance our research missions and collaborations.
I have found eblogger very easy to use. If you have a gmail address, you can be a blog author. I am also a bit wary of using blos at UCI, a tool our office of technology has put into place. Proprietary issues abound there, and in fact eblogger seems to be a more neutral tool for our purposes.
If you have any issues about authoring, posting or commenting, or if you find eblogger unwieldy, please let me know. This is an experiment, and one that can be only as good as we make it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)