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Category Archives: Information Technology and Information Literacy
Is Tuolumne Worth It? Information Regimes Old and New
I’m posting this from Yosemite National Park, where I’ve been for a few days. The waterfalls this year are unusually spectacular due to extremely heavy snowfall in the Sierra Nevada over the winter. I was especially keen to show my … Continue reading
The Return of the Phantom Time Menace
Read enough forum threads across a wide enough range of websites and you ought to become fairly expert in predicting the range and distribution of responses and even of anticipating where you’re likely to fall in that picture yourself, should … Continue reading
Posted in Digital Humanities, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Production of History
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How I Talk About Searching, Discovery and Research in Courses
I recently boiled down some of the advice I try to give students about how to carry out searches and formulate research questions, which I’ll reproduce here. I start with the basic insight that I’ve picked up from Swarthmore’s library … Continue reading
Wait, Who Has Sinister Connections to Insiders That Influence Their Reporting?
There’s a second story buried inside the story of events in Egypt and Tunisia. It’s the story of how mainstream American journalists find themselves perpetually staring at a magic mirror, telling themselves that they are the fairest of them all. … Continue reading
Posted in Blogging, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Politics
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Viruses? Assassination? Arming Insurgents? How Could That Go Wrong?
You don’t have to be paranoid or a conspiracy freak to think that re-engineering the technology at the heart of digital communications so that it can be legally wiretapped is a bad idea. Drearily, this is another example of how … Continue reading
A Lord Byron in Every Cyberpot
I’m interested in seeing the film Catfish after reading A.O. Scott’s review. Still, Scott’s references to familiar examples of online deception coupled with his welcome awareness that literary and cultural fraud is an old and established part of American life … Continue reading
Island at the Top of King Solomon’s Mines
Re-reading King Solomon’s Mines for today’s class, I was suddenly struck powerfully by a sort of deja vu. Not about the novel itself, since I’ve read it quite a few times, both for courses and otherwise. Nor even about the … Continue reading
Posted in Information Technology and Information Literacy, Popular Culture
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If All the Other Kids Jumped Off a Bridge…
I have surrendered to Twitter.
Posted in Blogging, Digital Humanities, Information Technology and Information Literacy
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Looking Backwards
In a few weeks, I’m going to be talking about how searching as an act changes when the digitized texts you’re searching through are either highly specialized in their content or are from a distinctly different era of rhetoric and … Continue reading
The Temperament of Serpents
I went surf fishing in Delaware for the first time this summer. My previous experience had been limited to freshwater fishing, mostly for trout, some with a spinning reel using lures and bait, some fly-fishing. So I spent some time … Continue reading