Author Archives: Timothy Burke

Digital Search I: Google Poisons the Well

Posted on October 13, 2009 by Timothy Burke

I am apparently not the only person who feels a bit bait-and-switched by the state of Google’s digitization projects after the settlement. So much so that Sergey Brin himself has sallied forth to defend the current terms in the New … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Books, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Intellectual Property | 6 Comments

Pile-On

Posted on October 9, 2009 by Timothy Burke

I just have to say it. President Obama? It kind of says something about the world in general (as well as the past Administration) at this moment if default statesmanship carried out within ordinary interstate institutions seems like a major … Continue reading →

Posted in Politics | 1 Comment

From Gourmet to the Daily Gazette

Posted on October 8, 2009 by Timothy Burke

I was reminded for the first time in years of the existence of Gourmet magazine a few weeks ago when a foodie colleague of mine started talking about some recipes she’d made from it recently. I used to subscribe to … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Blogging, Food, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Swarthmore | 6 Comments

Less-Convergent Culture

Posted on October 7, 2009 by Timothy Burke

I’m broadly sympathetic to celebrating the power and range of audience productions of culture and to Henry Jenkins‘ arguments about convergence culture and about reading the total range of textual production around a cultural property. Sometimes Jenkins gets carried away: … Continue reading →

Posted in Popular Culture | 7 Comments

Course Zero

Posted on October 6, 2009 by Timothy Burke

There’s an interesting article at Inside Higher Education about the new breed of peer-to-peer style sites for collecting student notes and course materials, officially for the purposes of providing study aids. In reality, at least some of the sites in … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Intellectual Property, Swarthmore | 4 Comments

One Man’s Moose

Posted on October 5, 2009 by Timothy Burke

There was a sort of mini-meme earlier this month circulating around left and liberal blogs, a response in a thread at digg.com satirizing conservative hostility to government by calling attention to all the high-quality services provided by government that we … Continue reading →

Posted in Politics | 8 Comments

Effect Size (Again)

Posted on October 2, 2009 by Timothy Burke

Deirdre McCloskey’s great little pamphlet The Secret Sins of Economics, which you can read in expanded form in her books The Cult of Statistical Significance and If You’re So Smart, argues that one of the two “secret sins” mentioned in … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Popular Culture | 4 Comments

Student Blogging as Transparency and Education

Posted on October 2, 2009 by Timothy Burke

There’s an interesting piece in the NY Times today about colleges that encourage student blogging as a method of disseminating information about the culture of campus life to prospective students and other outsiders. MIT, unsurprisingly, is the institution with the … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Blogging, Swarthmore | 4 Comments

The Rules of the Game

Posted on October 1, 2009 by Timothy Burke

Someone asked me in email last week what I thought of James O’Keefe’s video expose of ACORN, specifically whether I thought it was unfair or distorted because O’Keefe wasn’t showing all of the videos where ACORN staff didn’t rise to … Continue reading →

Posted in Blogging, Politics | 7 Comments

I Had to Burn the Park to the Ground to Clean It

Posted on October 1, 2009 by Timothy Burke

So my daughter and I were playing Scribblenauts for the first time last night. Based on our experience, I think it’s one of those rare digital games that people who don’t often play or like games will like. (As well … Continue reading →

Posted in Games and Gaming | 4 Comments