Posts from — April 2009

[From SocProf Supports William I. Robinson | The Global Sociology Blog]

As do I.

It amazes me that this sort of thing goes on. It is quite worrisome in terms of academic freedom, not that we necessarily have any more freedom than others as academics, but that we are supposed to be able to speak and share knowledge… make comparisons that may make people uncomfortable. Knowedge does that…. makes people uncomfortable.

Digital Archives That Disappear
April 22, 2009
As digital archives have become more important and more popular, there are varying schools of thought among scholars about how best to guarantee that they will be around for good. Some think that the best possibility is for the creators of the archives — people generally with some passion for the topic — to keep control. Others favor acquisition, thinking that larger entities provide more security and resources for the long run.

[From News: Digital Archives That Disappear - Inside Higher Ed ]

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I remember when people were horrified that google bought dejanews and when dejanews started archiving and keeping usenet, which was before fairly ephemeral. Those were horrific days for many people because something would be preserved and controlled by someone else that was never intended to be that way.

We’ve been facing problems with digital archives for ages and private digital archives are a huge problem for researchers, costs aside… The question of copyright, etc. is key and often misplaced, in the new form of the digital material. In any case, the discussion above points to some of the new problems of digital archives.

Cult author JG Ballard dies at 78

[From BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Cult author JG Ballard dies at 78]
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he was one of my favorite authors. he always had interesting critiques. i used to have his books in my office and home and generally spread about. I’ve read most of his fiction, though not all of his autobiographical fiction.

Tragedy Remembered – and Forgotten: The Politics of Memory and Technology

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brent’s keynote, its related to a few paper’s we’ve been working on.

balloons alight

Originally uploaded by buridan

this was shot just after the race started

Qimo is a desktop operating system designed for kids. Based on the open source Ubuntu Linux desktop, Qimo comes pre-installed with educational games for children aged 3 and up.

Qimo’s interface has been designed to be intuitive and easy to use, providing large icons for all installed games, so that even the youngest users have no trouble selecting the activity they want.

[From Qimo 4 Kids | What is Qimo? ]

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This looks pretty simple. Perfectly for a few of my friends and colleagues, sure… it is for kids, but who isn’t a kid?

The Center for Digital Discourse and Culture is pleased to announce our Front Pages Collection, an archive of newspaper coverage of the April 16 tragedy. The hundreds of front pages posted on this site were given to the Center by a thoughtful individual in the aftermath of the shootings. Together, they capture a wide variety of responses to, and representations of, the events and aftermath of April 16 from around the world. The collection is organized by geographic location. It can be accessed at: http://april16archive.org/frontpages/

I’ll be going to Kassel in June, originally i had planned to go Glasgow(triple helix) to Kassel (Interpretive Policy Analysis) to Cologne (E-social science), Glasgow and Cologne accepted my papers as posters, which I don’t like, though I can see why someone might do that. So I’m bowing out of those conferences, I’m not a poster guy at all, but I’ve gotten my IPA conference booking approved and underway. I have been to this conference once before and I think that I benefitted greatly from the experience. I’m looking forward to this years conference also. Kassel looks like an interesting town and I have friends up the road an hour or so, so I’ll likely see them too.