adventures in digital humanities

tyrants tremble, media cartels disintegrate, and collaborative castles rise in the air

sure thing bro. Weinberger is careful to assign the above titular mentality to a caricature of technodeterminism, or technological optimism. Through that statement, among others, he carefully positions himself as a techno-realist. It seems from “Too Big to Know,” however, that the internet and the new ecology of knowledge it is creating is so potent … Continue reading tyrants tremble, media cartels disintegrate, and collaborative castles rise in the air

Tearing Down Skyscrapers for Interstate Highways

In reading the second half of Too Big to Know, one very important message shone bright – that the nature of science is changing, and so, our outlets for science must change with it. I believe that, with the formation of the scientific internet, that major scientific print publications must switch to the web or … Continue reading Tearing Down Skyscrapers for Interstate Highways

The Bigger Picture

In David Weinberger’s Too Big To Know, he further discusses the largely disputed topic about having knowledge creation and circulation being based upon networked and open systems. Scientists, and scholars in general, really have no issues coming about with new factual information, but it’s the issue of connecting those newfound facts together. Bernard K. Forscher … Continue reading The Bigger Picture

Final Blog Post on Too Big to Know.

“What we’ve discussed so far in this book should lead us to hypothesize that scientific knowledge is taking on properties of its new, becoming, like the network in which it lives: (1) huge, (2) less hierarchical, (3) more continuously public, (4) less centrally filtered, (5) more open to differences, and (6) hyperlinked.” Weinberger (153) Chapter … Continue reading Final Blog Post on Too Big to Know.

Changes in Knowledge Creation

When I was younger, I had a junior encyclopedia set. Everything presented in the set was knowledge that was agreed upon by whoever published the set. The books included all of what the authors deemed necessary and excluded everything thought to be unworthy of publication. The information in that set was the truth, and that was end … Continue reading Changes in Knowledge Creation

up, up my friends! or the tables turned. or, what can your computer teach you about poetry?

As we discussed text-mining and textual analysis earlier this semester and considered what kinds of new frameworks can be generated through digital methods, one of the examples we looked at is a wordset generated by Ted Underwood, of “words that are consistently more common in works by William Wordwoth than in other poets from 1780 to 1850.” The odds of a single scholar deriving this list are likely slim to none (and slim just left town), and even an extensive team of scholars managing this feat without computational power is highly unlikely. In visualizing the list Underwood used Wordle’s graphic…

Wordsworth Word Cloud Inspired Poem

Remember that word cloud that Dr. Pandora handed out? Well, I’m not sure if any of you wrote a poem (except one fellow student), but I encourage you to post it here if you did. Hope you enjoy what I’ve written. (Untitled) Meadow breath hanging over verdant ground’s belly, in valley collapsing, slow, with … Continue reading Wordsworth Word Cloud Inspired Poem

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