According to James, Surowiecki, there are “precise conditions under which crowds do better than experts — it depends on there being a diversity of opinion, independence, decentralization, and a way to derive a collective decision — but almost as soon as he published it, “the wisdom of crowds” was used to refer to everything from … Continue reading Crowds good? . . . Yes, so long as, and then . . .
“There were certainly facts before the start of the nineteenth century; it was a fact that the ocean was salty even before humans first tasted it, and it was a fact that polio is caused by a virus even before we had discovered viruses. But only recently have facts emerged as the general foundation of knowledge and the … Continue reading Thoughts on David Weinberger’s Too Big To Know
“In the remainder of this book we will follow a train of thought that begins with the hypothesis—for which there is increasing evidence—that in a networked world, knowledge lives not in books or in heads but in the network itself. It’s not that the network is a super-brain or is going to become conscious. It’s … Continue reading The book, the screen, or both?
“At last thought has a medium that helps it past the limitations of physical books that brought us to think of long-form thought as the highest and most natural shape knowledge could assume.” (pp.96) I am not an expert on authorship, readership, or book history, nor have I sufficiently read or am familiar with David … Continue reading Re: Book Shaped Thought
The smartest person in the room is not the person standing at the front lecturing us, and it is not the collective wisdom of those in the room. The smartest person in the room is the room itself: the network that joins people and ideas in the room, and connects to those outside of it.” … Continue reading Comments on “Too Big To Know” by Benjamin Ignac
As we end our fourth class meeting on January 22nd, we are nearing the end of the first two weeks of this introduction to digital humanities: that is, we have been in the introduction of an introduction. So what does it mean to get started — or to get started with getting started? We’ve actually already traversed a number of different entry points as we push off from land into the yet-to-be-mapped regions where — maybe? — “there be [digital?] dragons.” The New York Times’ 2010/2011 “Humanities 2.0” series by Patricia Cohen offered examples of what kinds of projects and…
