Are you partial to absurd lists? So is Time Magazine! This bastion of old media has been developing a “World’s Most Influential” franchise over the past few years, addressing or cultivating some mysterious need to rank Vladimir Putin against Miley Cyrus on a fuzzy scale of “influence.” You can watch a Time editor fumble for …
It’s late January, another semester is gearing up, and yet once more I’m preparing another round of Lit Hum — must be time for Stanley Fish to say something risible about the humanities. Last year around this time, Fish reveled in the inutility of it all: “To the question “of what use are the humanities?”, …
How did you experience the American Century? Much of it, for me, was framed through Life Magazine. It was always a pleasure to leaf through Life’s photos in issues collected by my grandparents — vibrant, propagandistic, king-sized. TV news killed the big tent photo circus off, and frozen pop images of America shrank and segregated …
Who is this woman, and why is she crying? This photo, from a collection of early news photos housed at the Library of Congress, is part of an experiment that has that venerable institution dipping a toe into the Web 2.0 waters. Compare the photo on LC’s own website, versus on Flickr. By publishing some …
With some notable exceptions, the willingness of English Departments to seriously engage with current communication technology has advanced “one funeral at a time,” to quote one voice in the wilderness. Denial, nostalgia, tenure pressure: all part of the tweedy sluggishness. Meantime the hungry sheep look up and are not fed. But I’ve found a video …
From its earliest days, the promise of the Semantic Web has been to bring networked computers closer to the forms and priorities of human inquiry. This promise depends on mark-up language that gives data some structure, and frameworks that bring such structure into recognizable relationships. As a May 2001 Scientific American piece by Tim Berners-Lee …
It’s taken long enough, but Clayfox has shaken off summer dreams to engage with a little edu-distopia, 2007-style. Michael L. Wesch, the Kansas State University anthropology prof who brought the YouTube-fueled world a much-referenced little primer on Web 2.0 some time back, has had his students produce a new video, this one a decidedly grim …
