Rumble Strips

The new social network?

2011-06-28T20:36:00.000+01:00

Google have today announced that they are launching a new product, Google+, which according to their blog, seems to have several separate compartments, and to give the user greater flexibility as far as privacy management is concerned. The videos are a little bit basic, but I like the idea of circles, and the circle look reminds me slightly of the very intuitive Prezi. ReadWriteWeb and Wired have more information. The product is only being tested by a number of chosen users for the moment; the others (like me) will have to wait their turn to give it a go.

Blogging, way too personal

2011-02-18T18:04:00.000Z

It's been a long time. Early in December, I submitted my thesis. The words still ring very strangely, even though I repeat them every day. I submitted my thesis. And I stopped writing. No emails, no Christmas cards, no blog posts, no journal entries, none of my beloved lists of things to do, things I might do some day, things that would be nice to do even though I know I never will. No lists. No words. I have not really started writing again, although my fingers still know how to type, they go straight to the right keys if I let them.

Right now, I am in limbo, thesis submitted but viva still to come, wishing for new things but hoping for a proper ending to old ones.

And then there's this blog, which has been as sporadic as they come, and which I would like to resurrect now. I have been thinking about blogging quite a lot since I submitted my thesis, and I have been thinking about my own blogging. Stephanie wrote a very thoughtful post a while back, which echoes many of my thoughts and feelings. I too need the personal in my blogging, and yet this was to be a research blog, or a blog about blogging and blogging research; the personal seeps in, but when it does, the blog stalls. I may find a happy medium between the personal blogs which I read and love, and the research blogs which inspire me. I may start writing again soon, words may find their way back to me. In the mean time, I know I love Stephanie's tag for some of her posts: "Way too personal". I think I will adopt it, and use it often.

THE DIGITAL STORY OF THE NATIVITY

2010-12-17T16:17:00.000Z

Holidays?

2010-07-05T10:08:00.000+01:00

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1338

Book Club - my review

2010-06-06T11:52:00.000+01:00

Let The Great World Spin is a collage of stories, or a patchwork maybe, but all the stories and lives intersect, they are linked by the man on the wire who draws the eyes to an epicentre of New York, and also links the stories of then with the stories of now.

What drew me in immediately was the mastery and craft of the writer, the moments of breathtaking lucidity, when the words suddenly mean so much more than they seem to at first:

Rather, it was the manshape that held them there, their necks craned, torn between the promise of doom and the disappointment of the ordinary. (Page 1)

From the beginning, the wire and the man who tower over New York are introduced, and on page 6 a time yet to come is foreseen, when bodies fell from those towers:

“many of the watchers realized with a shiver that no matter what they said, they really wanted to witness a great fall, see someone arc downward all that distance, to disappear from the sight line, flail, smash to the ground…

The book’s structure is clever and works very well: each story is introduced as a chapter (book) Book one starts in

Ireland

with the Corrigan brothers. Book 2 introduces Claire, who has lost a son in the Vietnam war (echoes of Iraq and

Afghanistan

. In Claire’s story, the present and the past are weaved throughout the day.

Each time, with each story, the background is set, but when it comes to the characters, the reader is surprised, never more than with Claire’s story; this rich, educated, feminist woman who lives on Park Avenue is expecting a group of friends, and while the reader at first expects a group of intellectuals or ladies who lunch, grief is what happens.

Whereas the book, and the plot are ostensibly about a day in New York, about lives drawn together by chance or fate, and also about a day much later in New York, when lives were also drawn together by fate, I also read many other things in the story.

There was a theme of fitting in, or not fitting in. Corrigan, the pure of heart, tries to fit in with the poor and the lost, cannot fit in with the brothers of his order. The Irish who do and don’t fit in New York, the two white men who stand out in the projects, Claire who doesn’t fit in to the group of women, she is too rich, too different. And yet all of them fit in New York, are part of that city on that day.

It’s a story about memory, memories, and memories not yet lived – the end of the book brings us to the present time, and whereas it is no “happy ever after” ending, there is a release and resolution of sorts. There are memories within the book, from the occasional narrator (Corrigan’s brother):

“I can still after all these years sit in the museum of those afternoons and recall the light spilling over the carpet.”

There are memories from grieving mothers who meet to remember and tell the stories of their dead sons.

The book is about death and memory: there are echoes of deaths in the twin towers and memories of that day now embedded in a day that came before, it is about death and the power of stories .

“Photographs keep the dead alive, the girl had said. Not true. So much more than photographs. So much more. “

about death and grief:

“The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backwards.”

The book is also about family:: Corrigan and his brother, Claire and her son, the mothers and their sons, Gloria and the girls she fosters, who are also the daughters of one of the main characters, and Jazzlyn and Tillie, the mother-and-daughter prostitutes.

Family is like water – it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream.

The book is about God, religion, and moral dilemmas. Corrigan’s brother remembers a myth he once heard about 36 hidden saints and the hidden saint, the forgotten one:

“Corrigan had lost his line with God: he bore the sorrows on his own, the story of stories.”

It’s a book about life, death, love, grief, family, redemption, and New York. There is so much there, so much to talk about, that as a book club read, it would demand a long conversation, about the characters, the story, the writing, the themes, and this is a conversation that I hope we may have if our book club members meet in person

It is one of the best books I read this year, and my friends and family can expect it as a present if they haven’t read it yet…. And if this review is all over the place, it’s because I’m away and wrote it from notes I had taken, and I will end it with a quote which I loved:

“he said something strange about words being good for saying what things are, but sometimes they don’t function for what things aren’t.”

Book Club - Lily's review

2010-06-06T09:24:00.000+01:00

Lily was homeless/blogless this week, so this is her temporary abode, and her review is below:

Thanks to Cathy for taking in this temporarily homeless blogger. Middle son is to sort out my blog but problem is I haven't yet reached top spot on his 'to do' list. His moving to San Francisco for the summer and small things like finding an apartment and lots of work are currently higher on the pecking order than sorting his mum's online home. :) He assures me he will soon get me sorted so I will be back in action shortly. I'm looking forward to returning to blogging.

Back to the job in hand - A review of 'Let The Great World Spin' by Colum McCann.

I really enjoyed this book. It's quite a long read, and I don't know if it was just me being busy, thus taking up and putting down a number of times, but I found it took me a little bit to get to the stage where I was really enjoying it. It was very worth persisting though.

Colum McCann wove the story around an event which occurred in August 1974 where Philippe Petit walked a tightrope between the World Trade Centre towers. McCann very cleverly created a great work of fiction around this event.

The story is told through eleven characters in New York City; Corrigan, an Irish monk working in the Bronx with a group of prostitutes including Tillie and her daughter Jazzlyn, herself a mother of two small girls; Claire, wife of Solomen, a judge, who lives on Park Avenue; Lara an artist with drug and husband problems; Gloria mother of three sons lost in the Vietnam war. And more. In McCann's story, the tightrope walker remains anonymous and unrelated to the characters in the story.

Each subsequent focus on a character brings the whole story along with the thread of the tightrope walker (or should that be the rope of the ...!) weaving it together.

I liked McCann's writing style. His revealing of plot line is very clever. Very quietly he adds in the outcome of the court case brought against the tightrope walker through Adelita wondering about Corrigan's reaction to the outcome of Tillie's versus the latter's case, both cases being heard on the same day.

McCann could create very credible female characters. He showed great empathy with the female form. One could really sense Claire's loss and loneliness in her pent-house apartment. Yet life as a hooker down in the Bronx was equally credible. He could describe Claire not wanting to let Gloria go on the day of the meet-up and Gloria's need to get away.

The tightrope walker almost acted as a metaphor throughout the book, people's trying to achieve balance in their lives, dealing with death in Vietnam, dealing with guilt from causing a car accident, dealing with the loss of a loved one in that car accident ...

All except the final chapter of the book are set around the few days in August 1974. The final chapter jumps thirty two years to 2006. McCann in my estimation ended the book well.

In conclusion, the construction of this story is very different and very refreshing. I'd definitely recommend this book.

Edtech10 Keynote speech liveblogged

2010-05-21T09:50:00.000+01:00

(crossposted from DCU_ILP blog)

This is a live blogging post, as I am taking note while listening to the keynote speech at the EdTech conference in Athlone. Jane Hart is talking about new ways of learning.

5 categories for learning

- formal structured learning (being taught or trained in a formal situation)

- personal directed learning (finding things out for yourself/by yourself)

- group directed learning (working with a team to solve pbs)

- introorganisational learning (everybody working and learning together)

- serendipitous learning (acquiring knowledge without realising ) - social media as a means of erendipitous learning.

Social learning successful when peopel change the way they approach learning. New toolset + new skillset + new mindset

1. Formal learning with Twitter

tool for conference - see Jane's blog post

tool for synchronous learning - see Thursday afternoons on Twitter, #lrnchat .

jane created the 140 university, where she tweets texts and supporting resource every week on interesting subjects - showing what can be taught in 140 characters.

live streams over Twitter (see a school in Devon with a small holding with a #pigcam.) on Twitcam, paired with a live chat.(now archived)

Formal contexts: several models:

- added on

- embedded

- collaborative - content cocreated by learners.

New tools happening, involving students.

Moving from creating content to co-creating - User generated content is acceptable and valuable (student generated content)

Needed: design skills and facilitation skills. Move from passive to active and participative learning.

Personal directed learning: finding out things for yourself is a very important part of learning.

Everything I do (online) is learning and working

Teaching is not the only way to learn. We must create learner autonomy. See Dan Pink, Drive

Individuals can solve their own learning needs, must help them moving towards autonomy, and some skills may need to be learnt (learning skills)

- Grou p directed learning

people together solving their own problems (learning pbs, business)

Group tweet - private way of using tweets

brainstorming and mindmapping tools. Helping groups address their learning needs. People need to learn collaborative skills

- Intraorganisation learning.

How the whole organisation can learn from one another. Use of private tools. (Yama)

You can't manage informal learning. - emergence of collaboration platforms ( see elgg - free opensource collaboration platform) Needs to be downloaded and put on a server. Private secure wall. Often being used alongside Moodle, for social or collaborative activities.

Disruptive innovation needs new mindsets. See Jane's website

Social networks, South Park style

2010-04-11T12:06:00.000+01:00

How to live your life

2010-04-09T09:25:00.000+01:00

On his blog, Neil Gaiman has posted a trailer for his book Instructions , with wonderful illustrations by Charles Vess.

It is the essence of fairytales.

There is great advice:

Remember that giants sleep too soundly

That witches are often betrayed by their appetite

Dragons have one soft spot somewhere always

And also, this:

Trust dreams, trust your heart and trust your story

The Big Blogging Book Club - first review

2010-04-04T12:00:00.000+01:00

A few weeks ago, Lily launched the idea of a blogging book club, and I jumped in, delighted to have a reason for reading. Not that I don’t read. I read lots and lots and lots of books, and articles, and blogs, but all this reading doesn’t leave much time for current fiction, and I tend to go straight for my favourites, the crime novels, or young adults fiction. I had however been aware of the book chosen for this month, A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini. The cover itself is striking, all in shades of yellow and orange, with the outline of a woman walking on high heels on uneven terrain.

So this was my first book club read, and it turns out you don’t read in the same way when it is just for pleasure and when you feel you have to talk about the book. My technique this time, totally unplanned and unprepared, was to read, think about it as I was reading, close the book and note down my thoughts and feelings about the book. Then, let it rest for a week or two, and write a blog post. Not necessarily the best way to approach the task, as it turns out, because all that remained was a resounding “bof”, which is the French for “I can’t say I like this, I am a bit underwhelmed, it’s not that I hated it, it was just very disappointing”. This is generally used in relation to a new dish you have prepared and which does not meet your family’s unreasonably high standards, or a film that everyone has seen and loved and that does not get a seal of approval from your film-buff brother, much to your annoyance.

A Thousand Splendid Suns. It is the story of two women and a country, and therein I think lies the problem; this is a very ambitious project, spanning decades of history, from war lords to Russian invasion to mujahedeens to Talibans to Americans, and the history part is very interesting. The stories, however, do not match this ambitious task, and I felt that they could not carry the historical aspect.

The stories are told in several parts, each concentrating on one of the women. Mariam is born the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy man in a country town, and her mother lives alone with her, in a clearing near a village, bitter and lonely, slowly sinking into deep depression. The first part of the book is dedicated to her early story, and to be honest, I felt that was the best part of the book, nearly a stand-alone novella, until the time when her father’s wives give her away to an older man from Kabul. The other story belongs to Laila, a much younger woman whom we first meet as a young girl in the neighbourhood where Mariam lives with the mean and violent Rasheed. The child has a sweetheart, Tariq, who has lost a leg on a landmine. Her family is torn by the war, her brothers go to fight with Massoud, which plunges her mother into a deep depression (yes, I know, this seems to be what happens to mothers here). Having lost everything, pregnant with Tariq’s child, Laila accepts to become the second wife of the mean and violent Rasheed. I won’t give away the end, but it seems to me to condone and validate the arrival of the American army and in a way, the western way of life.

But, to be honest, this is not what bothered me about the book. Nor did the plot, although I sometimes felt that a less heavy-handed approach would have better highlighted the plight of women in Afghanistan. My problem was with the characters. I did not empathize with any of them, not for one minute; the voice of the narrator put a distance between the reader and the character of the women, I felt I was watching them from afar, and that they were one-dimensional, they lacked depth, as if they were silhouettes of women on a background of a world in turmoil.

Their plight seemed caused by that turmoil, but also by the very bad mothers they had. And in a book about the plight of women, there was a distinct lack of strong female character. When I closed the book, I felt that, like the country where it was set, the book did not think much of women.

If I hadn’t read it for a bookclub, this is a book I would have finished, mostly because it is set in

Afghanistan

. At the end, I probably would have wished I had read a very good documentary piece on the life of women in Kabul, with the voices of real women coming through, talking about their daily life, anxieties and fears, but also aspirations and daily struggles.

Over to Lily, Irish Mammy, JBBC, MagnumLady, Edie, SmurfetteJen, Catherine, Lorna, and Marian. They may have very different views!

Happy St Patrick's Day....

2010-03-17T16:48:00.002Z

spam jam

2010-02-26T09:32:00.000Z

A look into my spam box has revealed a higher than usual number of messages; this had happened before, and the trickle of emails had become a flood, in a long-deleted email account. This time, most are extremely boring emails, alerting me to PHARMACY DISCOUNT! or kindly informing me that I have received a present. Some of them are intriguing, and the juxtaposition of improbable names and badly worded first sentences makes for something nearly poetic, like Alease Aenerud - be in vanguard of loving mastery.
I am not the only one to find some strange charm to those: Lizzie Hunter doesn't just delete the messages; she reclaims them, and makes art with spam one-liners. I like it...

Eggs, flour and milk

2010-02-02T10:59:00.000Z

What do eggs, flour and milk have to do with religion? Quite a lot, it seems. Today, February 2nd is the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple. Few people know that. In France, very few people know that, and yet, everyone from Paris to Marseille and from Lyon to Bordeaux will be celebrating by making crepes for la Chandeleur.

February 16th will then be Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday, and pancakes will be eaten in Ireland and the UK. The cultures are different, the religions not necessarily exactly the same, but the recipes are very very close. The French crepe recipe calls for sugar to be added to the batter, as well as a flavouring, either orange water or some type of brandy. It is also thinner than its Irish cousin, and is served with sugar. Irish and UK pancakes are rolled, but crepes are often folded in four, in the shape of a triangle.

We will eat crepes for the Chandeleur, pancakes for pancake Tuesday, and maybe also the smaller and thicker American pancakes with maple syrup for breakfast.

This year, I will...

2010-01-04T16:47:00.000Z

It's a cold cold start to the year, with ice and snow and snowy ice and icy snow. We played the game of the new year resolutions on the first day of the year, but I have given up resolutions this year.

I looked to the internets for some good ideas, and I found this site, which makes new year resolutions for you, but I haven't yet found any site which will keep them. I chose a few of those generated resolutions.. an easy one:

an apposite one...

And one I doctored a little...

Google in a red hat, riding on a sleigh?

2009-12-14T10:17:00.001Z

Yesterday, I posted this video on my Facebook page. It is a different kind of Christmas song, and my eldest daughter will be spending this Christmas in Sydney, presumably drinking white wine in the sun...

This morning, Google had decided to grant me my wish. My iGoogle page tells me the weather here in Dublin, and in places where my friends and family happen to live. This was Dublin this morning

35 degrees next Thursday... Time to put the white wine in the cooler...

Jeu de main , jeu de ...

2009-11-20T17:44:00.000Z

For this week, no cake of indeterminate nationality or affiliation. After Thierry Henry handled a ball which cost Ireland its place in the world cup, and in the midst of an Internet storm of huge proportions, this game arrived in my inbox, sent by some well-meaning friends. You can move Henry's arm and hand to score as many goals as you want, and help France to qualify...

Thierry Henry - Jeu de main - Le jeu !

Posted using ShareThis

Of soccer and flags

2009-11-13T15:12:00.000Z

Because of the impending ~~doom~~ match tomorrow, and the vexing problem of my double allegiance, this post on Cake Wrecks just seemed so perfect.

How (not to) write a thesis (part 9,742)

2009-11-11T10:45:00.001Z

I have written. I am writing. I will write. I have to write. I must write. More. More often. Faster. Better.

I must not let my thinking turn into daydreaming.

(from todays PhD Comics: Brain Saver)

I all else fail, I can always follow Laurie's lead and use the Academic Sentence generator. It's an easy game - pick four words from the drop-down lists, and the generator creates your next sentence. Will you find those in my thesis?

The emergence of praxis may be parsed as the construction of agency.

The emergence of process carries with it the construction of power/knowledge.

Back to work. And I must remember not use the word emergence.

Google monster

2009-11-05T16:59:00.001Z

Here he is again, the Google monster in today's Google doodle - brought to you by Sesame Street's 40th birthday!

Me, I google

2009-11-05T15:11:00.000Z

Sesame Street has a famous googler in Cookie Monster, and I'm not surprised. The word Google is very attractive to children; my youngest son had a little stuffed monkey which he called Google, and Google went everywhere with us. Google is now hidden behind books, Playstation games and Warhammer figures, but it is still there, watching my little one grow into a teenager...

A technological sense of humour

2009-10-15T10:31:00.001+01:00

Some relents of Hal today in my RSS reader. DCU's president wrote a blog entry on celebrities' "autobiographies", fame and popular culture. The entry was filed under "culture" and "society". It was tagged with "autobiography", "popular culture" and the names of two of the celebrities in question, Jordan and Britney Spears. Only a wicked sense of humour on the part of some blogging technology imp could explain the automatically generated links: nothing about culture, be it popular or not, nothing on autobiography or life writing. No, the blogging imp created links to Jordan's family photographs and "naughty hottie photos"! And then, as an afterthought, although a puzzling one, a link to Obama's back to school speech. Are the imp and the president(s) suggesting Jordan should go back to school?

Blogging teens

2009-10-01T10:03:00.000+01:00

Tommy has created a secondary school blog directory, as a way of highlighting blogs written in Ireland by young people. He has already listed a few of them. From my research, it certainly seems to be true that blogging starts later, in university. However, there are also quite a number of young people blogging on platforms like LiveJournal, and who may prefer to stay outside the blogging mainstream, using their blogs or journals as a means of communicating with online or offline friends, either about the minutiae of their lives or about some special interests, like gaming or fan fiction.

Irish young people did not join in the big blogging craze which spread amongst their european counterparts, notably in France where the Skyblog platform became an oblogatory rite of passage for teenagers. Its format however was very similar to that of social network sites to come, and young people eventually migrated to Facebook in France, MySpace or Bebo in the UK, and Bebo in Ireland. And interestingly, the blogging facility on social network sites like Bebo was rarely if ever used, or solely for quizzes and memes. At the same time however, a small yet consistant number of young people in Ireland started blogs initially on Diaryland, and then increasingly on LiveJournal, which has a dual role of blogging platform , but includes social network site facilities, like lists of friends and interests. It is also home to some very active communities of interest, notably for fan fiction writers and readers.

Yet I must say that, like Tommy, I would love to see more young Irish people create blogs within the mainstream blogging community, and make their voices heard on issues which concern them, or simply tell their stories. I would also love to read more blogs from older people, and hear their stories as well. We need more voices, more stories which will create a patchwork of narratives, making for a more inclusive blogging community.

Love in time of social media

2009-09-29T18:29:00.005+01:00

How Facebook and blogs are changing relations between boys and girls...

From the always excellent xkcd

Read like a pirate

2009-09-19T17:51:00.004+01:00

Pirate day ahoy? How do pirates read, and how do they talk about their readings? It seems that LibraryThing knows a thing or two about them:

A French Downfall

2009-09-18T12:06:00.000+01:00

The Downfall remixes have been going for more than a year. In 2008, Wired estimated that hundreds had been created. This week, a new remix was published in France, dealing with the incident of the racist comments from the Interior Minister, Brice Hortefeux.

The minister was attending a summer meeting in Seignosse, a small town in the Landes area. He was introduced to a young man from North African background, and is filmed saying: "Quand il y en a un ça va. C'est quand il y en a beaucoup qu'il y a des problèmes." ("It's ok when there's only one; if there are many more, then you've got problems"). The video was published by the online edition of Le Monde, and it seems that many commentators criticized the unregulated internet,and the president of the UMP group, Jean François Cope, called for a public debate on "internet and freedom". In the meantime, both the original video and now the downfall remix are gathering a growing audience...

Open access academic books

2009-09-10T09:39:00.000+01:00

Open Humanities Press has announced the launch of a new series of open access books, which will be available free of charge as electronic books and as reasonably priced paperbacks. The series include Critical Climate Change, edited by Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook, Global Conversations, edited by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Liquid Books, edited by Clare Birchall and Gary Hall, New Metaphysics, edited by Graham Harman and Bruno Latour, and Unidentified Theoretical Objects, edited by Wlad Godzich. From their press release:

NEW OPEN ACCESS MONOGRAPHS SERIES - Open Humanities Press (OHP), in conjunction with the University of Michigan Library’s Scholarly Publishing Office (SPO), is pleased to announce the following forthcoming open access series in critical and cultural theory: New Metaphysics (ed. Graham Harman and Bruno Latour), Critical Climate Change (ed. Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook), Global Conversations (ed. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o), Unidentified Theoretical Objects (ed. Wlad Godzich), and Liquid Books (ed. Clare Birchall and Gary Hall).
In a unique collaboration, the scholars of the Open Humanities Press are partnering with the University of Michigan Library’s Scholarly Publishing Office to launch five new OA book series, edited by senior members of OHP’s editorial board. All of the books will be freely available in full-text, digital editions and as reasonably-priced paperbacks.
“This is a tremendously exciting development for humanities publishing” said Barbara Cohen, Director of HumaniTech and a Steering Group member of OHP. “For faculty and libraries to work directly together to address the monographs crisis in this way makes perfect sense. It is a savvy solution to a long-standing problem of access whose effects have been having a major impact on scholarship worldwide.”
“We are delighted the scholars of OHP approached us to support their innovative vision” said Maria Bonn, Director of SPO. “We are enthusiastically supportive of what they are trying to accomplish, and excited about the opportunities our collaboration offers for rethinking existing models of scholarly publishing.”
All books published by OHP in conjunction with SPO will go through the highest standards of editorial vetting and peer review that will be managed by OHP’s series editors and board, which contains some of the most well-respected names in literary criticism and cultural studies including Alain Badiou, Chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, Donna Haraway, Professor of the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies, UC Santa Cruz, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation, UC Irvine, Gayatri Spivak, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University, Peter Suber, Open Access Project Director for Public Knowledge and Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, and Stephen Greenblatt, Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University.

Tech support flowchart

2009-08-25T17:07:00.002+01:00

From xkcd, a guide to any tech problem:

About communities

2009-08-22T10:15:00.000+01:00

This is one I will order today: Digital Habitats, byEtienne Wenger, Nancy White and John D. Smith is now out, and can be ordered here.

Technology has changed what it means for communities to “be together.” Digital tools are now part of most communities’ habitats. This book develops a new literacy and language to describe the practice of stewarding technology for communities. Whether you want to ground your technology stewardship in theory and deepen your practice, whether you are a community leader or sponsor who wants to understand how communities and technology intersect, or whether you just want practical advice, this is the book for you.

Sligo to Dublin with Julia

2009-08-06T09:35:00.003+01:00

The 5 o'clock train from Sligo to Dublin takes three hours, stopping at every small town and village along the way to pick up improbable passengers. On one occasion at least, it was carrying a gaggle of 50something women joyfully drinking white wine out of plastic cups on their way back from an overnight trip, and a group of young Sligo men carrying sports bags, as well as carrier bags full of beer cans for the long trip ahead. I had obviously not chosen a quiet carriage, and my plan of reading Julie Inness' " Privacy Intimacy and Isolation" seemed to be rather ill-advised.

Luckily, I was prepared for such an eventuality: a few hours earlier, I had ducked out of the pouring rain in Sligo, and rushed into a shop which advertised SCHOOLBOOKS!, assuming they might also be agreeable to selling books not intended for school. They were. But not much. I didn't want to read classics, or long, intense novels. I needed a book for the train, just in case, and preferably a thriller, to distract me from the guilt of not reading Something for the Thesis. I was also in a rush, so I picked up one of the first books I saw, Julie and Julia - presumably about friendship, not too long, and on special offer.

It wasn't a thriller, and it wasn't about friendship. It was about food, French cookery books, and blogs. It tells the story of the Julie/Julia project, which happened in 2002/2003, when Julie Powell, a temping secretary in a government agency, decided to navigate the murky waters of her 30th year by cooking every single recipe in a book of French cookery by Julia Child. She also decided to blog the project, at a time when blogs where more text and less pictures. It is a very enjoyable standalone book, doesn't feel at all like a blog on paper, but at times, it made me feel sorry I hadn't known the blog during the project, and hadn't been able to experience the day by day narrative. The project, incidentally, went from blog to book to film. Julie Powell now has a new blog, by the way. And a new book. And Julia Child's cookery book was reedited, with Meryl Streep on the cover.

Books, bells and kindles

2009-07-25T10:24:00.000+01:00

I don't have a Kindle. Some do and like it, but it seems that the acquisition and use of the device can be problematic in Ireland. Amazon uk sell a Sony reader for those without a US credit card and address. Of course, the idea of bringing a lot of books on holidays without hurting your back or paying for overweight luggage is engaging, but I like to write on my books. I even - horror of horrors - tend to print articles from eJournals so that I can highlight, underline, and write in the margins. Also, I don't think I would like to wake up one morning and find the book that I'm reading has disappeared from my desk. As others noted, it is also somewhat ironic that, among the books deleted, were Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm. The most startling fact though, is how unaware we are of powers outside our control, even over objects which we feel belong to us:

The worst thing about this story isn't Amazon's conduct; it's the company's technical capabilities. Now we know that Amazon can delete anything it wants from your electronic reader. That's an awesome power, and Amazon's justification in this instance is beside the point. As our media libraries get converted to 1's and 0's, we are at risk of losing what we take for granted today: full ownership of our book and music and movie collections. (Farhad Manjoo in Slate)

Cyberbullying, cyberharassment and the Megan Meier case

2009-07-04T11:24:00.000+01:00

Lori Drew was acquitted last week of charges against her in the cyberbullying case referring to the suicide of Megan Meier. Drew had created a fake account, pretended to be a young boy on MySpace, befriending Megan Meier and subsequently attacked her online. The government argument it seems, was that Drew has violated the terms of service of MySpace, and that this was equivalent to hacking, which the judge refuted, arguing that this was tantamount to letting MySpace or other service providers decide on what was a crime.

More interestingly, as reported by NetFamily News, the Progress and Freedom Foundation blog makes reference to a report which differentiates between issues which are generally covered by the all-encompassing term of "cyberbullying":

They dfiiferentiate between cyberbullying, defined as kid-on-kid abuse online, Cyberharassment , defined as people of all ages using the internet for abusive purposes, and Adult-on-kid cyberharassment, which would refer to the Megan Meier case more particularly.

2009-06-02T11:52:00.002+01:00

Next Thursday, in the National Library, Gerry McKiernan, from Iowa State University, will be giving a lecture on scholarship in the 21st century:

Lecture: The paradigms they are a-changin' - the future of research and scholarship
Thursday 4 June at 1.00pm
Admission free; booking is not required

Young people and technology

2009-05-28T10:17:00.003+01:00

Interesting post on a Channel 4 blog, on a report that they have commissioned to study young people and technology; interestingly as well, they have extended the traditional "adolescent" age to include young adults up to 24 years old, which seems to be a growing trend, both in commercial and academic research. The results are not surprising to anyone who has been watching young people's practices with technology, but it is nice to have some figures as well. Most young people own on average 8 devices, televisions, DVD players, MP3, phones, laptops, digital cameras. They see technology as a means to communicate above anything else, to the point of sometimes texting a friend who is physically beside them at the time (more polite than whispering in their ear some comment about what is happening, I'd say). The first thing they do when they get home is to turn on their PC or laptop, as they feel that they don't spend enough time with their friends. As for media, they want to be able to talk about it (and do, with MSN and/or mobile phones on when they watch television), and they want to be able to interact and, more importantly I think, they want to be able to play with the content.

Humanities journal search

2009-05-25T12:44:00.001+01:00

Fr those who don’t have access to online libraries in universities, and for those who do , there is a new search engine, Jurn, which works with Google as a background (I know that’s not the technical explanation), techie stuff here. It searches a huge database of free academic journals or journals with substantial free content, in the arts and humanities disciplines. There is also a directory, with links to journals.

Ghosts in the machine

2009-05-22T08:57:00.003+01:00

Cambridge University researchers have recently completed a study/experiment on deleting photos from various SNS or blogging sites, with mixed success. Whereas the picture cannot be seen any more on your Faceboo/Bebo/MySpace/LiveJournal, it would seem that in the depths of some server somewhere, your photos live their ghostly lives in limbo. If you need something more scientific than "ghostly lives in limbo", the very technical explanation is here.

Just a few words

2009-05-18T16:02:00.002+01:00

Twice today, people have remarked that my blog looks very sad and neglected. I know. Same story as my friends, my diary. Words are not as plentiful as one might think, and I am using them all for my chapters. They are being torn from me, very slowly and painfully. I don't even twitter, and that doesn't use up many words. Less words.

A long time ago, I read an issue of Wired about very short fiction. Shorter than Twitter, shorter than a haiku. In short, it is best illustrated by the first attempt at the genre by Hemingway:

"For sale: baby shoes, never used."

Here are a few more by famous - or less famous - people:

Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so. - Joss Whedon

Longed for him. Got him. Shit. - Margaret Atwood

Wasted day. Wasted life. Dessert, please. - Steven Meretzky

It’s behind you! Hurry before it - Rockne S. O’Bannon

In 2006, SMITH magazine organised a contest of six-word memoirs, which then became a book, and t-shirts, and a website again where anyone can leave life-stories told in six words. Some are well-crafted, others more therapeutic maybe, reminiscent of PostSecrets.

Or I could try Twitterature. Some of it seems similar to SMS novels in Japan, a short message serialization of a work of fiction. Some are standalone, just very short stories, like the 140 character Twisters created by Arjunbasu. I like this one:

They will not ask for directions. Because they are men. And so their planned wild weekend becomes two days of contemplation at the monestary

Flutter: The New Twitter

2009-04-05T15:05:00.001+01:00

Better, shorter, quicker than Twitter ? Also funnier.

Of maps and books

2009-03-25T12:01:00.006Z

There is something about maps that grabs the imagination. I love strange maps, I love games with maps, I have always loved poring over maps of the world and dreaming of roads, villages, cities, and how people live. And as I was looking for a book (and I love books even more than I love maps...), I sat mesmerised, watching people buying books all over the world with the Book Depository map...

WWW @ 20

2009-03-13T12:44:00.004Z

Twenty years ago today, I'm not sure what I was doing. I know I was working part-time, and that I spent a lot of time playing with my two little girls. What I wasn't doing, was sitting in front of a laptop, accessing far-away libraries and journals, and reading today's paper. But twenty years ago today (give or take), Tim Berners-Lee, the mind behind the web, was setting us all on the path to a new way of life. Today, in CERN, they are celebrating.

They are having a party, which will be open to all as a webcast:

It will consist of short presentations from Web veterans, a keynote speech from Tim Berners-Lee with a demonstration of the original browser, and a series of presentations from people that Tim believes are doing exciting things with the Web today.
Although the event is by invitation only, everyone will be able to follow the event:
The celebration will be webcast (streamed both by CERN and the French newschannel lci.fr from 14:00 CET).

Happy Birthday, World Wide Web!

(picture: free clipart from Webweaver)

Things I like about academia

2009-03-09T16:16:00.002Z

There is a serious, academic journal called Journal of Happiness Studies. And amongst the fascinating articles (easy to lose track of time and of your own studies), I found this one, on narrative identity, written by Jack Bauer.

Best job in the world, the vote

2009-03-03T22:11:00.002Z

For the Best Job in the World, it's too late for me. However, 50 applicants have been shortlisted, and among them is George, and Irish guy from co. Meath. 10 applicants will be chosen by Tourism Queensland, and one will be chosen by popular vote. They will then go to Queensland for an interview and a chance at The Best Job in the World. All applicants have created a 1 minute video, and votes are open for another 21 days. The rest of us can dream of sunny islands.

Tools for research

2009-01-15T13:46:00.004Z

Google are stopping development on Google Notebook, which I had used for a long time. I liked the fact that I could integrate all my tools for research on my Google page. Recently though, I had switched my organising from Notebook and Delicious to Evernote, which is much more visual and versatile. I even transferred my Delicious bookmarks to a folder there, and things are much clearer.

Here is a good post on how to use Evernote for students.

Job seeks blogger

2009-01-13T14:02:00.003Z

It seems that a blogger somewhere could get the best job in the world.

Hamilton Island are looking for a blogger who will live on the island for six months and promote it on a blog, for a salary of $150,000. Not surprisingly, they expect a great response, and thousands of applications before the Feb. 22 deadline.

I could think of worse ways to wait out the recession...

Secrets and blogs

2009-01-12T00:49:00.006Z

It is no secret, I read Post Secrets on sunday afternoons. Two secrets that I noticed where secrets about reading blogs, as if it was somehow forbidden. These are lurking secrets, and somehow it seems to the writers that they have knowingly invaded someone else's privacy. They read in secret, and then, anonymously admit their secret. Sins and confessions of the internet...

The sins of writing are more straightforward. In the immortal words of Dr. House : "everybody lies".

Slow start to the year

2009-01-07T17:13:00.001Z

The year is now starting in earnest. The first day of January isn't real, it's still too much part of the holiday season, with unfinished boxes of chocolates and crackers lost and found on the tree, friends and family calling and wishes exchanged.

Now it's back to work, and also back to blogging. But maybe differently.

When I look at the blogs in my RSS reader, it seems that they come in two categories: some are updated daily, or at least several times a week, and posts are short and to the point. Others are slower to update, and then longer entries are posted. One reason could be the hard discipline it is to keep a daily blog and fit the writing into a long list of other activities. If blogging is a hobby, it can be a time-consuming one; if it fits into a professional activity, it may be relegated to the "things I do when I am less busy". And then, they twitter. Or maybe they Twitter.

Last month, when Christmas was still a list of presents in my notebook, I met Damien to get some background on Irish blogs for The Introduction. He mentionned that a lot of community building and communication goes on behind the blog page, on Twitter. These micro-blogged short messages are more manageable, and somehow also feel more personal, similar as they are to our mobile text messages.

At the other end of blogging, is the slow blogging movement, which has its roots in the concept behind the slow food movement. I came across it first in an article from the New York Times, which led me to bgblogging. The posts there are thoughtful and peaceful, they take time to establish a context and paint a picture before delving into more intellectual matters. They mix the personal and the public, the artistic and the academic. It must take time to write them, and it takes time to read them.

I try to consider the transitional spaces between old practices and new, old literacies and new, old treasures and new.(bgblogging)

Making art is A Good Thing, and blogging can and should sometimes be a means to that end regardless of its many other affordances. (ruminate)

The reflexive use of the blog and the concerted effort at slowing the pace of blogging and of living reminded me of Nancy White's slow community movement.

And now that I am back at my desk, and frustrated by the slow pace of my writing, I think that maybe I should accept that pace, and see the PhD process as slow thought, slow scholarship.

AoIR 10.0, Milwaukee

2008-11-19T17:33:00.003Z

After a great conference in Copenhagen last October, The Call for Papers for AoIR 10.0 has been released:

Call for Papers

Internet Research 10.0 - Internet: Critical

The 10th Annual International and Interdisciplinary Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR)

October 7-11, 2009
Hilton Milwaukee City Center
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA

As the Internet has become an increasingly ubiquitous and mundane medium, the analytical shortcomings of the division between the online and the offline have become evident. Shifting the focus to the fundamental intermeshing of online and offline spaces, networks, economies, politics, locations, agencies, and ethics, Internet: Critical invites scholars to consider material frameworks, infrastructures, and exchanges as enabling constraints in terms of online phenomena.

Furthermore, the conference invites considerations of Internet research as a critical practice and theory, its intellectual histories, investments, and social reverberations. How do we, as Internet researchers, connect our work to social concerns or cultural developments both local and global, and what kinds of agency may we exercise in the process? What kinds of redefinitions of the political (in terms of networks, micropolitics, participation, lifestyles, resistant or critical practices) are necessary when conceptualizing Internet cultures within the current geopolitical and geotechnological climate?

To this end, we call for papers, panel proposals, and presentations from any discipline, methodology, and community, and from conjunctions of multiple disciplines, methodologies and academic communities that address the conference themes, including papers that intersect and/or interconnect the following:

* critical moments, elements, practices
* critical theories, methods, constructs
* critical voices, histories, texts
* critical networks, junctures, spaces
* critical technologies, artifacts, failures
* critical ethics, interventions, alternatives.

Sessions at the conference will be established that specifically address the conference themes, and we welcome innovative, exciting, and unexpected takes on those themes. We also welcome submissions on topics that address social, cultural, political, legal, aesthetic, economic, and/or philosophical aspects of the Internet beyond the conference themes. In all cases, we welcome disciplinary and interdisciplinary submissions as well as international collaborations from both AoIR and non-AoIR members.

SUBMISSIONS
We seek proposals for several different kinds of contributions. We welcome proposals for traditional academic conference PAPERS and we also welcome proposals for ROUNDTABLE SESSIONS that will focus on discussion and interaction among conference delegates, as well as organized PANEL PROPOSALS that present a coherent group of papers on a single theme.

DEADLINES
Call for Papers Released: 17 November 2008
Submissions Due: 1 February 2009
Notification: 15 March 2009

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS
All papers and presentations in this session will be evaluated in a standard blind peer review.
Format

* PAPERS (individual or multi-author) - submit abstract of 600-800 words
* FULL PAPERS (OPTIONAL): For submitters requiring peer review of full papers, manuscripts of up to 8,000 words will be accepted for review. These will be reviewed and judged separately from abstract submissions
* PANEL PROPOSALS - submit a 600-800 word description of the panel theme, plus 250-500 word abstract for each paper or presentation
* ROUNDTABLE PROPOSALS - submit a statement indicating the nature of the roundtable discussion and interaction

Papers, presentations and panels will be selected from the submitted proposals on the basis of multiple blind peer review, coordinated and overseen by the Program Chair. Each individual is invited to submit a proposal for 1 paper or 1 presentation. A person may also propose a panel session, which may include a second paper that they are presenting. An individual may also submit a roundtable proposal. You may be listed as co-author on additional papers as long as you are not presenting them.

PUBLICATION OF PAPERS
Selected papers from the conference will be published in a special issue of the journal Information, Communication & Society, edited by Caroline Haythornwaite and Lori Kendall. Authors selected for submission for this issue will be contacted prior to the conference.

All papers submitted to the conference system will be available to AoIR members after the conference.

PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS
On October 7, 2009, there will be a limited number of pre-conference workshops which will provide participants with in-depth, hands-on and/or creative opportunities. We invite proposals for these pre-conference workshops. Local presenters are encouraged to propose workshops that will invite visiting researchers into their labs or studios or locales. Proposals should be no more than 1000 words, and should clearly outline the purpose, methodology, structure, costs, equipment and minimal attendance required, as well as explaining its relevance to the conference as a whole. Proposals will be accepted if they demonstrate that the workshop will add significantly to the overall program in terms of thematic depth, hands on experience, or local opportunities for scholarly or artistic connections. These proposals and all inquiries regarding pre-conference proposals should be submitted as soon as possible to both the Conference Chair and Program Chair and no later than March 31, 2009.

CONTACT INFORMATION

* Program Chair: Susanna Paasonen, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
* Conference Co-Chairs and Coordinators: Elizabeth Buchanan, Michael Zimmer, UW-Milwaukee School of Information Studies and Center for Information Policy Research; Steve Jones, University of Illinois-Chicago

Love in a time of emoticons

2008-11-13T09:34:00.000Z

Writing in the margins

2008-11-11T08:46:00.006Z

An interesting project started yesterday at the Institute for the Future of the Book: a close reading of Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook by seven women, who will conduct a conversation in the margins.

This was very intriguing for someone who spends her life writing in margins of books (but only in pencil, only as a murmured comment, which can be retracted easily should the book pass on to another reader). The comments on the Golden Notebook are in a way similar to comments on a blog post, except that they belong to the text because of their position in the same screen:

The question they are trying to answer is the following:

What do you hope to learn?
We don’t yet understand how to model a complex conversation in the web’s two-dimensional environment and we’re hoping this experiment will help us learn some of what we need to do to make this sort of collaboration as successful as possible.

They also note that

Good conversations are messy, non-linear and complicated. The comment area, a chronological scrolling field just isn’t robust enough to follow a conversation among an infinite number of participants. Seven may even be too many.

Real conversations are not very common in comments sections of blogs, and they usually include the blog post as conversation starter, and the blogger as an integral part of the conversation. Their conversations will be about the text, but without the input and guidance of the author of the text, and as such will be very interesting to watch.

Interesting too that they should choose Doris Lessing, who famously warned against the ïnanities"of the Internet in her Nobel prize acceptance speech:

we never thought to ask, How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by this internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc.

Bibliographies

2008-10-28T11:10:00.002Z

A very interesting bibliography, commissioned by LiveJournal, is published online by Alice Marwick. Whereas a number of articles refer specifically to LiveJournal, most of them are interesting reading for blogging in general. It can of course be used in conjunction with danah boyd's bibliography of research on social network sites in order to get a a broader picture of youth online and their various practices.

How many euro in a trillion???

2008-10-13T12:20:00.004+01:00

Counting in millions, billions and trillions is not easy for one who still can't recite her time tables. Add in some translation and cultural differences, and it becomes impossible. I never knew a French trillion had nothing to do with an English or American trillion. I never had to worry about it before either, but it seems that if the Americans lose a trillion, they lose a thousand billions, but if the French were to lose a trillion, they would lose a billion billions. All I can think about is Scrooge McDuck diving into his money...

Surveying the surveys

2008-10-06T12:23:00.004+01:00

The best, most informative and relevant survey has just been posted on Language Log. It is well worth copying and pasting:

Do you believe the world has gone survey mad and that nearly all surveys done are a gigantic waste of time?	__ strongly agree __ sort of agree __ utterly undecided __ hardly care __ sort of disagree __ strongly disagree
Do you think surveys asking for people's opinions about the way things are, rather than verifiable things they have done, are an even more extreme form of stupidity, resulting in nonsense like "43% of employees believe managers may be snooping on them" being passed off as news or even social science?	__ strongly agree __ sort of agree __ utterly undecided __ hardly care __ sort of disagree __ strongly disagree

Does it sometimes occur to you to just refuse to do any more surveys until the morons who make them up show some signs of getting their act together?	__ strongly agree __ sort of agree __ utterly undecided __ hardly care __ sort of disagree __ strongly disagree
Do you sometimes suspect certain surveys of having commercial motivations that are not fully disclosed until later?	__ strongly agree __ sort of agree __ utterly undecided __ hardly care __ sort of disagree __ strongly disagree
Is your home fully carpeted throughout with high-quality fitted carpets that you would not want to replace even if one of Language Log's commercial partners was able to offer you an extremely good-value product?	__ strongly agree __ sort of agree __ utterly undecided __ hardly care __ sort of disagree __ strongly disagree
What do you believe are the reasons why the form of the question sometimes has no discernible relation to the selection of possible answers the format provides, when even the most elementary linguistic consideration would immediately highlight the incompatibility?	__ strongly agree __ sort of agree __ utterly undecided __ hardly care __ sort of disagree __ strongly disagree

One Web Day

2008-09-22T11:37:00.003+01:00

Today is One Web Day, and amongst other things, people have been invited to submit their stories here, stories of how the Internet has changed their lives.

I got connected in 1999 when we were living in Paris, and have since made many friends, met some of them , read hundreds of blogs, and embarked on a PhD in digital humanities. Researching without the help and ease of Internet search engines and online journals seems nearly impossible at this stage. I do vaguely remember researching for a Master's degrees aeons ago, and spending inordinate amounts of time in the National Library, hunched over microfilms. Now, I have my trusted and beloved blue laptop, and Internet connections whereever I want to work, and instant access to any resource I need. I also have access to many many procrastination tools, but I have leant to use them sparingly...

Writing in the rain

2008-09-06T16:52:00.004+01:00

Incredibly enough, there seems to be a number of people as obsessed with notebooks as I am. There is one site dedicated to finding the perfect black notebook, and they have some very covetable items reviewed... The Rhodia webnotebook is on my shopping list for my trip to Paris in October.

And here is a review of notebooks, and do I want that one!!!

At last, a notebook for the shower! The shower, where my best thesis ideas come to me, and I'm always afraid they will vanish when the water is turned off. The site that sells them also sells all-weather pens, for the shower or the Irish summer... Maybe I should invest...

I google you, you google me...

2008-08-28T12:09:00.002+01:00

Not only is google a verb, and probably a noun very soon in a blog near you (how many googles did you get?), now it is also a song...

The lyrics are below, taken from the Author Himself, in the comments of a blog.

I Google you
late at night when I don’t know what to do
I find photos
you’ve forgotten
you were in
put up by your friends

I Google you
when the day is done and everything is through
I read your journal
that you kept
that month in France
I’ve watched you dance

And I’m pleased your name is practically unique
it’s only you and
a would-be PhD in Chesapeake
who writes papers on
the structure of the sun
I’ve read each one

I know that I
should let you fade
but there’s that box
and there’s your name
somehow it never makes the pain
grow less or fade or disappear
I think that I should save my soul and
I should crawl back in my hole
But it’s too easy just to fold
and type your name again
I fear
I google you
Whenever I’m alone and feeling blue
And each scrap of information
That I gather
says you’ve got somebody new
And it really shouldn’t matter
ought to blow up my computer
but instead….
I google you

Neil Gaiman

Countdown

2008-08-19T10:12:00.002+01:00

I have minimized the Google reader window on my personalised page, I check my email once a day, I ignore links sent to me. I code, and I write. I certainly do not burst bubbles, no matter how satisfying the sound. And Spider Solitaire? I leave it to its lonely life.

The return of the non-digital natives

2008-07-02T17:52:00.003+01:00

A New MySpace Generation

Posted using ShareThis

Blogging

2008-06-30T11:54:00.002+01:00

Jill Walker Rettberg is a trailblazer in matters of blogging; she blogged throughout her PhD process, wrote numerous papers and now her new book, Blogging, is out. Description from the publisher' s site:

Blogging has profoundly influenced not only the nature of the internet today, but also the nature of modern communication, despite being a genre invented less than a decade ago. This book-length study of a now everyday phenomenon provides a close look at blogging while placing it in a historical, theoretical and contemporary context. Scholars, students and bloggers will find a lively survey of blogging that contextualises blogs in terms of critical theory and the history of digital media. Authored by a scholar-blogger, the book is packed with examples that show how blogging and related genres are changing media and communication. It gives definitions and explains how blogs work, shows how blogs relate to the historical development of publishing and communication and looks at the ways blogs structure social networks and at how social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook incorporate blogging in their design. Specific kinds of blogs discussed include political blogs, citizen journalism, confessional blogs and commercial blogs.

Privacy, reputation and data mining

2008-06-29T17:32:00.002+01:00

Friday morning, bright and early at the Darklight festival, I attended the symposium on privacy on the Internet, which started with a presentation by Daniel Solove. The presentation was entertaining and informative, and made legal matters sound interesting and simple, which I would say is no simple feast. As Daithi points out in his thorough report on the symposium, the presentation was drawn from the Solove's book The Future of Reputation, which can be read online free of charge (isn't that nice...) However, like Niall, I would have liked to have heard more about his new book on privacy.

On the whole, I noticed three strands of thought at the symposium, which I felt would have benefited from being treated separately. One was the concept of permanence of data and text on the Internet, linked also to new social practices, and maybe the emergence of a different conceptualisation of privacy by a new generation. A second strand was gossip, or non authorised information published by private people (bloggers/social network users) on other people or organizations; in this case, there were some suggestions as to a legal solution. The third strand, data mining, was introduced by Caroline Campbell and visibly touched a chord with the audience.

At the heart of the debate was the question raised by Solove of a change in the concept of privacy, and of the necessity for a definition of that concept, which is currently seen in binary terms, public as opposed to private, the home as opposed to the public space. Listening to Solove and some of his examples of possible loss of privacy, such as the digital picture of someone buying some item in a pharmacy, it struck me that this binary concept is very much a city concept. Life in a village implies a different expectations of privacy; you know the chemist, who knows your mother/father/neighbour. To some extent, this can be extended to life in Ireland, where the 6 levels of separation are naturally reduced. And this of course is also reflected in the metaphor of the global village and could be linked to ideas of tribal interaction suggested by Steve Boyd: "I maintain that we are returning to ways of interaction that are ancient, pre-industrial."

Moreover, this binary aspect is too simplistic, although the digital world seems to have inherited it to a certain extent. Social network sites in general only make a distinction between public and private profiles/pages/blogs. In this matter, LiveJournal has a very sophisticated approach to privacy issues, with the possibility of several privacy settings, from public to completely private, with various access to various posts possible for pre-set groupings of friends/acquaintances.

The discussion was lively and interesting, revolving mainly on the use of personal data by corporations , commercial entities, even governments, all represented by the ubiquitous "they". "They know what you are doing online"... the spectre of Big Brother was hovering, conjured by Amazon's recommendations and Google ads. While this aspect of privacy - or lack thereof - was both fascinating and slightly creepy, I would also have liked a discussion on "we are them", as suggested by a member of the audience.

To be continued, I hope.

Weather clock

2008-06-26T10:58:00.003+01:00

On my Google page, I keep track of my family, not unlike Mrs Weasley. I do not, however, measure the danger they are in - which should be minimal, what with them not being wizzards and fighting the Dark Lord and all that. I do not either own one of Microsoft's family tracker clocks. No, I track the weather in their adoptive cities. Why do I torture myself so?

Aer Lingus discovers Canada?

2008-06-25T10:09:00.003+01:00

From Strange Maps, and originally from this blog, a very very strange map, even to those not familiar with North America.

It comes from the inflight magazine on an Aer Lingus flight from the United States to Dublin. Lindsay Watt has comments on the geographical "inaccuracies", I just worry that if I fly Aer Lingus in America, I might not end up in the country I wanted... Portland seems to have moved North East of Quebec, and Rochester and Burlington have acquired a lot of empty land. A lot. Very empty. And if Aer Lingus fly to Canada, where do you end up? Greenland anyone?

Ice cream, flash mobs, and the police

2008-06-12T09:46:00.002+01:00

Followed from Ewan McIntosh's great blog, this link to a blog post about a flashmob in Belarus. I came across these flashmob events a while ago, and have seen some that were organized in Ireland and in France; the difference here is that the police seemed to be monitoring the online organization and arrested some of the people involved. For eating ice-cream?

txt is gr8 4 u?

2008-05-23T11:30:00.002+01:00

David Crystal is a prolific writer, and his Language and the Internet was my bible when I was writing my Master's dissertation. He has written a new book on texting, Txtng: The Gr8 Db8 , which will be published in July, and here is the Amazon blurb:

This book takes a long hard look at the text-messaging phenomenon and its effects on literacy, language, and society. Young people who seem to spend much of their time texting sometimes appear unable or unwilling to write much else. Media outrage has ensued. "It is bleak, bald, sad shorthand," writes a commentator in the UK Guardian. "It masks dyslexia, poor spelling, and mental laziness." Exam answers using textese and reports that examiners find them acceptable have led to headlines in the tabloids and leaders in the qualities. Do young people text as much as people think? Do adults? Does texting spell the end of literacy? Is there a panic in the media? David Crystal looks at the evidence. He investigates how texting began and who uses it, why and what for. He shows how to interpret its mix of pictograms, logograms, abbreviations, symbols, and wordplay, and how it works in different languages.He explores the ways similar devices have been used in different eras and discovers that the texting system of conveying sounds and meaning goes back a long way, all the way in fact to the origins of writing - and he concludes that far from hindering literacy, texting may turn out to help it.

There is an article on his research here, and Prof. Crystal is quoted as saying: "The panic about texting and its effects on language is totally misplaced." I'll be looking forward to reading the book, on a sunny day in July...

Chocolate community

2008-05-22T12:50:00.003+01:00

Nancy White writes a very interesting blog on community, networks, blogging, but today, she sends us to this report on a study in the UK where they are looking for participants - they want women who will agree to eat chocolate every day. All I can say is, show me the chocolate...

Digital art and happiness

2008-05-02T08:17:00.003+01:00

Yesterday, on May 1st, 76 people loved you, 20 people loved him and 14 people loved her. Some more people loved a photograph or a picture, and a few even loved their job... over 2000 took pictures of something they loved, and the first page shows an abundance of blue and yellow in those photos. It is all part of an art project, Lovelines , which is linked to a commercial venture, and funded by a company who make mints. This is part of their statement:

Through large scale blog analysis, Lovelines illuminates the topography of the emotional landscape between love and hate, as experienced by countless normal humans keeping personal online journals.

The artists have already created a similar (and much bigger) project, We Feel Fine , which started in 2005 and makes art from data mining. If you open it on the menu at the top, you can select a country, an age group, a feeling, and see a ballet of colourful little balls bouncing around your screen, each one representing a sentence from a blog, each sentence evoking a feeling. I tried happiness for Ireland, and got a lot of negatives, but on January 5th, 2007, a 29 year old woman in Malahide was happy, and blogging about it.

Procrastinate? Moi?

2008-04-09T16:07:00.002+01:00

A little geeky game from Wired. Strangely enough, it is not interactive, you actually have to write down your answers on the side of your ~~theoretical framework draft chapter~~ notebook, and then check the answers at the bottom of the page. Like you used to do if you ever took those really insightful personality tests in women's magazines (not that I ever would...) Anyway, pen and paper or not, it seems I need a hobby. As if a hobby would help!

Sunday readings

2008-04-06T14:10:00.004+01:00

On Sundays, while some read the Sunday Times or the Observer, or the Sunday Independent, I turn on my laptop and read the Sunday Secrets. Sometimes I pretend it is very interesting from a multimodal point of view (and it is); people making art with pen and paper, pictures and scissors, or with their computer, and sending their postcards by mail, snail mail, so that they end up on a web site. They tell their secret, some may be innermost secrets, of the kind that wake you up at night and eat you during the day, some may be invented, but most of them speak to people, anonymously. And people seem to respond, emailing the owner of the site. And hundreds turn up at the talks he gives in universities, linked to Facebook groups. Multimedia. Multimodal. But the truth - the secret - is that I read them every Sunday like I look at people in buses and train stations and airports, and imagine their life. We all become Miss Marple, peeping from behind her curtain - or our screens.

The world according to newspapers

2008-03-29T09:52:00.005Z

This is a very interesting map,courtesy of Nicolas Kayser-Bril.

And this is the blogosphere:

A French presidential cyber-spy?

2008-03-18T17:09:00.002Z

It seems that the French blogosphere is buzzing today, with the news that the French president Nicolas Sarkozy has appointed a young and supposedly brilliant 25 year old to be his cyber-eye, and keep a finger on the pulse of the French blogosphere , at least for news of the president and rumours about the president and videos of the president insulting a citizen. It also seems that it only took a few hours for bloggers to create a Facebook group on the young recruit, called "Nicolas Princen est sexy"...

Memes and books

2008-03-14T16:01:00.003Z

I have been looking at memes recently, in the context of my study, for they flourish in LiveJournal and in blogs in general. These are the modern, digital memes, some of them the equivalent of the old chain letters. The word itself was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, and he defines it as a "unit of cultural transmission". Susan Blackmore explains:

Memes are habits, skills, songs, stories, or any other kind of information that is copied from person to person.

Henry Jenkins and his colleagues have been doing the 1,2,3 challenge, a sort of literary meme:

Look up page 123 in the nearest book

Look for the fifth sentence

Then post the three sentences that follow that fifth sentence on page 123.

In my memory, it was only one sentence, but three will give a better idea of the book you are reading (maybe the meme was thus amended by academics). On my desk, amongst others:

"But when the private individual and private life entered literature (in the Hellenistic era) these problems inevitably were bound to arise. A contradiction developed between the public nature of the literary form and the private nature of its content. The process of working out private genres began. (M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination)

This seems incredibly relevant to today's discussions on the shifting concepts of public and private on the Internet, and most particularly in personal blogs.

"However, such interpenetration does not necessarily mean that the two are combined. The transparency of blogging, especially when the authors are identified by name, leads to an unusual collapsing of the public and private sphere, a regression to rural life and concentric social circles. The very elements of blogging that make it most valuable - a networked audience, open conversation, low barriers to entry, and transparency - are also most threatening to established strictures of academic behavior." (Alexander Halavais, Scholarly Blogging: Moving toward the visible college, in Uses of Blogs)

There seems to be a theme here...

and then...

"Why can't we just hide?"

"Someone might find you."

"You have an answer for everything."

(Robert Crais, The Watchman)

Bebo, AOL and what's hot

2008-03-13T16:20:00.005Z

I see in The Guardian today that Bebo has been bought by AOL for $850m. The Guardian are talking of Bebo "riding the second dot com wave", and Jemima Kiss has worked out that deal works out at $38 per Beboer... It would seem my home is worth $76 to Bebo, then.

Nothing about the money, or AOL on the Bebo front page. What's hot today on Bebo is the All-for-Nots ("The band that will conquer the world wide web...unless they run out of gas.") It's all about music, and videos, and your Bebo skins , but a press release is to be found in the press section:

"Bebo is the perfect complement to AOL's personal communications network and puts us in a leading position in social media," said Randy Falco, Chairman and CEO, AOL. "What drew us to Bebo was its substantial and fast-growing worldwide user-base, its vision of a truly social web, and the monetization opportunities that leverage Platform-A across our combined global audience. This positions us to offer advertisers even greater reach and marketers significant insights into the desires and needs of consumers."

Today, surprisingly enough, the advertiser on the front page was the University of Liverpool, for their online masters course.

Back to the marketplace...

How not to write a thesis . Part 71

2008-03-11T11:03:00.002Z

Oooh, I shouldn't be here, I should be in chapter 3, subchapter 2, in fact I should be writing 3.2.2 but what can you do?

The Little one was sick. I got a call from the school, Madam, your Little One is not feeling well, please come and collect him. And so it goes. First of all, a pale face and downturned mouth ... "I have a sore throat and a sore head and a sore tummy and I don't feel well and I don't want anything to eat." WHAT? You don't want anything to eat? Come here, my little one, the best thermometer in the world, a kiss against a forehead, does not lie. Tis a virus, a nasty one, a sore throaty one, a fevery one, one where you get up every two hours during the night to inform your mother of your plight. So we administer Calpol (although not every two hours, having read both the leaflet and the very scary blog post on paracetamol overdoses) , hot drinks and honey, and cuddles galore.

And in the morning, you are still poorly, but well enough to force down some hot chocolate and toast with honey while you watch National Geographic's endless documentaries on tigers, pigs, dogs, crocodiles, lions... and your poor mother tries to keep her eyes open and her brain on lofty matters to cram in her thesis.

The said chapter, chapter 3, the bane of my life, now proudly owns 4000 words!!! I know, we are still far from the required 9000 before next Thursday, but hey, a few more sleepless nights and I'll be able to type drivel like noone before.

Onwards to the kitchen and a cup of coffee, and hopefully inspiration thereafter. Or a documentary on wild hogs. Whatever.

Elastic time

2008-03-09T17:22:00.004Z

Daithí's post today reminded me once again of the bi-annual mental block that grips me when we have to change time. Every year, twice a year, my brain freezes as I try to comprehend whether we lose or gain time as the clock goes backwards or forwards. This year, I won't even try, because time is all in your mind, or so says the New York Times:

the time we experience bears little relation to time as read on a clock. The brain creates its own time, and it is this inner time, not clock time, that guides our actions. In the space of an hour, we can accomplish a great deal — or very little.

The time related to my thesis seems to expand and shrink at a furious rate. Thursday and Friday, time had shrunk, and the output was great. Today, time is slow slow slow, and the output - nonexistent. I could calculate a word to hour ratio and correlate it with the internal clock that speeds or slows down time. If I could add or multiply, or divide, or whatever it is that has to be done for calculating ratios. Or if I had time to learn basic maths and then progress to genius level maths, and then I could also study the time expansion technique that is procrastination. Or I could go back to writing.

It didn't even take 30 minutes

2008-03-05T17:19:00.002Z

And no, I am not wasting time or procrastinating. I have typed 3 pages and written another 3 in my notebooks. I am keeping an eye on the deadline, and it is looming.

30 minutes

2008-03-03T09:59:00.002Z

I went to the Irish blog awards on Saturday, and to the Tea Party beforehand. Both were attended by very nice people, and many new blogs will have to be read henceforth. I had already added this to my reader, for the times when I actually have time to try out new recipes. Grannymar and Grandad won the personal blog award, and they made a dashing couple on the podium.

I also got a lesson in time management from Grandad, who blogs for 30 minutes (or was it an hour and 30 minutes?) in the morning, then writes (he got a book deal, you see...) and then works at his other job. And makes time for a 2 hours nap in the afternoon. It got me to wonder if this was not the answer to my writing problem. Maybe if I start the day with a blog post, and time myself for this (30 minutes would have to do), then the words might flow on the thesis front...

He also mistook me for Kathy Foley, whose name is so similar to mine, but she has a K and no W; she also has a different take on blogs and blogging. Reading this column, once more I am startled at the different meanings for the word blog, and its constant linking to conventional media. As Haydn points out, it seems that "influential" bloggers are journalists. Other bloggers who make the transition into print media are those with the fabled "book deal". However, this book deal often sees the death of the blog in its glorious vitality, one must presume in order to keep some material for the publishers. This has not happened to Twenty Major, the recipient of the Best Blog award, whose blog is still vibrant and funny and ... a blog (I must confess that I have not read his book, and thus cannot compare it to the posts).

The conventional media tend to overlook the vast majority of blogs, which are personal blogs. However, academics and academic bloggers tend to concentrate on those, rather than on journalistic blogs, except maybe in the field of media studies. What fascinates me in blogs and blogging is the emergence of a new form of communication rather than a new form of publishing, and the blogs I prefer to read are snippets of life.

Footprints on the web

2008-03-01T09:18:00.002Z

While looking for books on multimodality, I kept encountering the name of Ron Scollon; because I am curious, and it is Saturday, I looked around a little more, and found his website, and a fascinating web-essay entitled Footprints.

A web-essay?

This is how he defines it:

A web-essay is a way of thinking by playing with images and making networked connections. Mostly those connections are made by the way images are placed on the screen and then glued together with some words.(...)

Writing from the top to the bottom of writing tablets fits with a linear line of argumentation. Where people don't write they don't often do that; they tell stories in a chronological storyline to achieve suspense in their listeners; or they try to persuade their listeners by getting them excited and worked up.

The whole essay deserves much more time than I could give it this morning, it is a fascinating read to which I will come back again and again.

Different takes on the same talk...

2008-02-23T19:24:00.002Z

When I came back from the seminar on Friday, I typed up my notes, and then decided to make them into a post. When, out of curiosity, I went looking for news reports on the seminar, this is what I found at Breaking news:

Parents warned about children's internet use
22/02/2008 - 13:48:59

Parents were warned today to monitor their children’s use of the internet and protect them from online predators.

Thankfully, the Independent had taken a different view, and concentrated on the danger caused by unscrupulous employers checking up on prospective employees on Bebo or Facebook. Which is a much more real danger, and could cause a lot of young people to regret having posted some funny pictures...

Make IT secure - panel on social network sites

2008-02-23T19:18:00.001Z

In the Conrad hotel on Friday morning. Audrey Conlon, chairwoman of the Internet Advisory Board, John Carr, an international expert on social networking and advisor to the UK government , Bebo chief safety officer Dr Rachel O’Connell, Cormac Callanan, Hotline.ie director, and a 5^th year student who had presented a project on Bebo at the Young Scientist exhibition were all gathered to make up a panel discussing safety issues on social network sites. Theirs was a refreshing take on social network sites and young people, far from the now all too prevalent media hype on the dangers lurking beneath their seemingly murky waters…

Rachel O’Connell started by pointing out that from an education point of view, the skills obtained by interacting on social network sites such as Bebo actually match the skills required for third level education and later for the workplace. Their studies show that the average Bebo user has 17 friends and spends 40 minutes per day on the site.

John Carr added that the upside of social network sites far outweights the downside, and that the arrival of new technology has always been met by anxiety, be it the printed book or the telephone. He stated again that young people can be incredibly creative on their SN pages, but that parents are perplexed by a medium that they do not know or understand. The young student reflected on the constantly negative output from the media, which concentrates on “bad things” that she or her friends had never encountered. The panel’s opinion was summarized by Cormac Callanan, who said that there was no question of “getting rid of social networks” as some emails to the Internet Advisory Board had requested. The panel again and again insisted on the need for educating the young people to security matters, but also for educating the parents. Unfortunately, the seminar was very poorly attended by parents, maybe because of the early hour, when parents would often be required to see younger children off to school, or maybe a lack of publicity. Representatives of parents’associations were however present, and were told that parents had to see their input as an additional item in the repertoire of parenting, while drawing on the crucial parental role: listen and help.

The media favourite, the paedophile, also warranted a quick mention: according to John Carr, the police in England have reported that IM is much more dangerous than social networks in that regard, due mainly to its one-to-one characteristics. Communication on social networks is permanent and public, and thus much less likely to attract that type of behaviour.

Cormac Callanan then raised the issue of data retaining, and incidents were recounted of employers checking the social network pages of potential employees, as well as a widely reported incident in the UK where the admission office for Cambridge University confessed to using Facebook profiles to decide between applications. The panel felt that this should be forbidden by law.

Age verification seemed to many to be the “silver bullet” that would satisfy parents and make them feel more secure. Cormac Callanan however pointed out that if it could be done, it could be hacked.

Questions were raised on unsuitable content in advertising, and on up and coming sites for much younger children with a definite commercial slant, such as Club Penguin (linked to Disney) or Cartoon Doll Emporium.

Frozen Grand Central

2008-02-19T16:58:00.001Z

This must have been amazing to witness... Do they do those Improv things in Ireland?

The adolescent , the blog, the newspaper site and the viral phenomenon

2008-02-17T19:53:00.005Z

Max is going to travel for his gap year, he’s going to India and Thailand and is going to blog his experience and adventures. Nothing unusual there, he is one of many young people who keep in touch with friends through social network sites, or if they like to write, through their blogs. But Max’s father is a travel writer, knows people, and the Travel Editor of the Guardian offers a blog space on the paper’s website. Max’s one and only post deals with his preparations and feelings about his impending travels. It is a first post, so no “voice” there as yet, just an attempt at irony (the editor will later call it “tongue in cheek”) There ensues a flurry of negative and inflammatory comments, criticizing the blog, the site, and the perceived nepotism.

It all started in the blog section of the Guardian online, as a travel blog. 475 comments later, the comments box was closed. The story was of course picked up by numerous blogs, in the UK and also here in Ireland, on Present Tense. The snowball effect also saw a Facebook group and YouTube video posts. The Travel Editor then published an online response, where commenters congregated again, joined at one stage by Max’s father who remonstrated with them. Another Guardian blogger then wrote a post, very critical of mob rule and Internet culture. At the same time, a Wikipedia entry on nepotism was amended to include Max, and finally, an article in the Guardian arrived in the news feeds, with the title “Hate mail hell of a gap-year blogger”.

Whereas several elements are intertwined in this digital incident, the heart of it seems to be a semantic problem. What is a blog? Was Max a blogger? What did the readers expect a blog to be? Susan Herring pointed out that a blog can be many things, and that this new genre includes sub-genres. Various award schemes, such as the Weblog Awards, the Bloggers' Choice Awards, or the Irish blog awards differentiate between various sub-genres, often sorting categories in terms of content (business blogs, technology blogs, food blogs, music blogs, gossip blogs, health blogs, parenting blogs etc.) or in terms of bloggers (celebrity blog, blog by a journalist), and they tend to keep one category for personal blog, or diary. In these terms, and in the eyes of other bloggers, then Max would have been a blogger, simply because he was writing a blog. Yet, to the readers of the Guardian blogs, this was not so evident. In the comments, several complained that the young man was “given” a blog, when other would have been more deserving, thus giving the same meaning to “blog” and “column”:

how come Max has managed to get his own blog to write about the same thing that thousands do each year? Did he win a competition as a Young Travel Writer?

Who commissioned this tripe?

Why does our society only grant a voice to those with nothing to say?

This reaction introduces the notion of space as well as semantics. For the commenters, “you gave him a blog” means: you gave him a job, made him a professional blogger, paid him, and gave him instant access to readership, which “ordinary” or amateur bloggers have to build themselves, through their writing, networking, linking, and commenting. Is space – or platform - so important? A newspaper site is not a neutral space. Some comments imply that it belongs to the readers.

Seriously, is this guy's holiday really worthy of a blog advertised on the main page of the website? Have you nothing better to put on your website.

this is pure and simple hideous! guardian listen to your readers, get rid of Max!

Please step down and give someone with talent a chance to tell us about something interesting. You are wasting valuable bandwidth.

I would buy the guardian but will reconsider now

I used to buy the Guardian once in a while, I won't now.

I have, until now, been a regular reader of the Guardian Online website. However, following reading this contribution I will no longer visiting Guardian online.

I will not be reading this page again, and am re-considering my Guardian subscription altogether.

The blog, and most particularly personal diary style blog, is a more private space, belonging first of all to the blogger. Whenever commenting wars happen, or trolls come trolling, most commenters interject that the blog is the blogger’s space, and that whoever does not like the tone can go and read somewhere else.

What is happening in the comments box is also very interesting because it is very far from the community building element of non-professional blogs, where readers tend to gather around the blogger, or as a community of practice linked by the content of the blog (music, art, craft…) Here is the gathering of a crowd instead, and they are united in anger against… against a lot. From their texts, they are against the blogger, although they claim it is more against what he represents:

a generation,

How is a nineteen year old, white, public school boy with a penchant for stubble going to get a head in life unless he has a weblog about his already-paid-for round-the-world trip?

Max's father would've been better served buying him a premium livejournal account so he could wax cliched to his friends and family

we don't hate you because you're young, we just mock you because you're crap. It's not your fault, of course, you're just too young to know how truly crap this particular crap is, at every level.

a social class,

Moneyed youngster goes travelling to the usual places to get drunk and meet girls?

before you take up your place at Oxbridge (or wherever), why don't you leave your family's Highgate mansion FOR GOOD, cut yourself off from your father's allowance,

nepotism

who's son is max then? terrible terrible terrible, shame on you guardian

So then...Max Gogarty (son of Guardian travel writer) goes off to Thailand with his own blog. Did he earn this through a combination of natural talent and hard work? Or did Daddy fix him up? Nepotism at its worst. At least the Guardian have made public what we all know is far too widespread in Media.

They are also and mainly raging against power: the power of the social class associated with the writer, the power of the media, the power of the editor to erase comments, the power of the Guardian to hire who they want irrespective of what the readers consider as talent (or lack thereof).

Quick links

2008-02-13T16:10:00.002Z

As I was rushing through my RSS reader, this caught my attention:

Sue Thomas posts after the first day of the Tools for Change conference that she is attending, and this is what I picked out:

"Abram had said content isn't king in the new media world, no, context is king. No, said Rushkoff, contact is king."

I like the three Cs, content, context and contact as representing blogs.

And I found myself ordering Rushkoff's book Screenagers, the last one I tell myself, for I cannot keep reading if I want to finish Teh Thesis before the end of the year.

New friends

2008-01-18T09:18:00.000Z

Ignacio A. Conner, Liza J. Diggs and Esther W. Lutz all think they could help me gain more in size day by day. Let me tell you, Ignacio, Liza and Esther, that first of all, I do not need anybody’s help to gain more in size, I am quite capable of doing that myself, and simply by looking longingly at a slice of bread. Secondly, the idea is to LOSE weight, not gain it. Unless you think I might be a man, and you are not talking about my weight. Sadly, I will never know, as I have deleted all your emails without reading them, as well as those of your friends Carolyn M. Cooke, Carly M. Lujan and Olen Z. Stanton. (Olen???? Z.????) At least, Pearly Staples and Candace Colbert had names matching their wares, sounding a little like those “what is your porn star name?”quizzes where you need to match the name of your first pet to the name of the street you used to live in. Ferdinand B. Gamble had an interesting proposition: to increase my pen!s (pen’s? with a badly placed apo’strophy?) without surgery. Dear Ferdinand, I never ever use surgery on my pens. Pencil parers on my pencils, that’s all. Call me old fashioned. And yes, I was briefly tempted by Marion’s suggestion that I should say YES to my new super abilities, but I wasn’t sure if she meant ability to write a thesis… so I deleted everything, and will go back to my normal abilities, whatever they are.

So it is goodbye, Ferdinand, Ignacio, Carly and Olen. Although your names are cool and our friendship might have brought meaning and happiness to my life, I have severed the link and deleted the email account.

And even more mockery

2008-01-16T12:31:00.000Z

This is mockery of the highest order. I had hardly pressed the publish button on the previous post, and had gone to the Amazon mothership, not the UK one, in search of another book. This is what they tactfully suggested:

I am speechless. The signs have been sent to me. I'm off to the library, my laptop under my arm, and will only come out when the chapter is written. Or I get thin. Whichever comes first...

Mockery

2008-01-16T12:13:00.000Z

The Internet is mocking me. It is throwing my faithful following right back in my face, even though I have patiently explored, read, pondered various aspects of its communicative elements.

I was reading a very interesting article on fan fiction, by Angela Thomas. And decided to investigate one of the authors she cites. So off to DCU library online. Nothing. TCD maybe? Nope. So, onwards to Amazon. Dear Amazon, saviour of the reader of little-known books in Ireland, please tell me all about Technological Literacy. And what does it answer?

Your search "technological literacy luke" did not match any products.

That was disappointing, but acceptable. Then came the mockery, nay the taunting. Instead of technological literacy, this Internet fiend suggested I read these:

"Cook Yourself Thin": The Delicious Way to Drop a Dress Size Paperback by Harry Eastwood

Ha! Like I have time to cook, let alone cook thin stuff...

Or else:

A Quiet Belief in Angels [New Ed] Paperback by R.J. Ellory

Why exactly would I need to believe in angels? And why now? Something to do with the chapter that is not yet written? Or the very un-thin cooking? What exactly is Teh Internet trying to tell me????

Severe lack of sanity

2008-01-15T15:25:00.001Z

Because my life was boring and I had so much time on my hands, what with a thesis to write and a moutain of laundry of Everest proportions, as well as four offsprings of various ages all living (and eating) at home, this is what I chose to bring into my life before Christmas:

Fear of failure - writer's block

2008-01-14T16:05:00.000Z

Writing is very much on my mind this January. I did not write a list of resolutions for the new year, not even a list of wishes, as one overshadows the rest: write. Write the thesis, once and for all. Write all the bits and pieces already written here and there into coherent pieces. Write chapters from introduction to conclusion. Write, at some stage before the end of December, two little words: The End.

But writing is hard. It's hard to start writing, let alone stick at it; today I came across this interview with Markus Zusak, who wrote The Book Thief (another book I could read if I had written more, and thus had more time to devote to reading for pleasure). And this warmed my heart a little:

"some of what I feel are the best ideas in it came to me when I was working away for apparently no result. Failure has been my best friend as a writer. It tests you, to see if you have what it takes to see it through."

I hope I do.

The long silence, broken

2008-01-13T22:44:00.000Z

This has been a time of total writers' block. No paper, no chapter, no diary, no blog entry, nothing that involved typing. And then, slowly, after the dreadful Christmas break spent in bed, sick as a parrot or a dog or suchlike, the blood started flowing again in the fingers. Reading, typing reading notes, the beginnings of a chapter, and now, inspired by something in my RSS reader, a very short entry, heralding the new year.

Because this image is so tempting and covetable, that I had to insert it. Blog and tea, mad hatter or not, I'd love to go there!

Procrastination flow chart

2007-11-23T13:30:00.000Z

For procrastinators everywhere, from someone who must surely be the ultimate procrastinator. I bow to him/her, whoever they are...

PowerPoint pointers

2007-11-22T09:36:00.000Z

I have often slept through PP presentations, but have also seen some which I really admired. A real find on Jess's blog, this Powerpoint presentation to end all boring Powerpoint presentations.

| View | Upload your own

2 wishes for the future

2007-11-14T13:03:00.000Z

It seems that for Science Week, bloggers are being encouraged to reflect on science, past, present and future. Damien Mulley posted today's question, and two entries already covered the Star Trek transporter and Giant Fighting Robots. The question was "what invention would you like to see in the future?"; that was not enough for me. I need an "s" on that invention, and none of that altruistic stuff about saving the world. I want the future to be all about me. First invention (and please invent quick!!!): a calory-annihilating machine, so that I can eat this and this, and not even think of a WeightWatchers meeting. Once this is done, my svelte self wants a self-cleaning house; close the door in the morning, and when you come home, no dust, no disgusting scummy lines in the shower/bath, no crumbs on the table, no puddle where your ten year old spillt the bowl of coco pops and "forgot" to clean it. If noone can invent either of those, then, can I please become like Samantha?

Blogging in and out of the classroom

2007-11-13T09:59:00.000Z

The day after I found the reluctant blogger, Stephanie posted an entry on the blog opera she had attended, created from 100 blog entries from students at the University of Umeå . Talk about blogs in the classroom! The themes, it would seem, are drawn from diary-style blogs, dealing with
"teen-age angst, love and snow mobile racing". The production seems to be very interesting, including technology and music, and venturing into audience participation by SMS. I'll take her word for it, for unfortunately for us, the production is in Swedish. Umeå is the home of Humlab, where I attended a workshop last year, and I was so impressed - and slightly jealous of this wonderful space dedicated to transdisciplinary digital humanities.

I used to find I was always at a loss when faced with the question: A Phd? In what? Hemmm... Well.... After seeing Humlab, and meeting very interesting Internet researchers last month in Vancouver, I now answer : in digital humanities. And that usually is the end of the questions.

Blogging in the classroom?

2007-11-09T09:18:00.001Z

Looking up references and searching for an article by N. Baym on qualitative research, I came upon a blog, obviously part of a class exercise, with a revealing
title: Forced blog, and a similarly revealing pseudonym: reluctant blogger. THe blog itself is simply a series of class essays,seemingly on cyberculture, at a rate of one a week. Some thoughts were forced to the surface: why study cyberculture/Internet if you are so unwilling to participate? And on another level, why have blogs as a tool and only use them as a memory? It seems a sad underutilisation of the medium, and also a strange lesson to forgo the communicative element. If all that is needed is a publishing/sharing tool, why not Google docs or similar? However, the reluctance of some students to engage with technology and with alternative teaching methods should not be underestimated either, it is a learning curve, and for some, a steep one. I would very much like to see an example of class blogs being used to their full potential...

Google procrastination

2007-11-08T14:59:00.000Z

On YouTube, a quick search for Google secrets revealed 2 850 results. Of course, I felt compelled to peruse some of them, and then, naturally, to try out their "secrets". That part was extremely disappointing, as most "secrets" seem to have disappeared. No more Google loco if you click on "I'm feeling lucky". The Easter bunny is still there, but I soon lost patience with the game, and failed to put any eggs in his basket. Besides, Christmas is coming, what good is an Easter bunny among the jingling bells and shiny reindeer?

This little exercise did prove one thing: I am not the only procrastinator on earth.

Back to writing.

Bad language and good lectures

2007-10-11T10:26:00.001+01:00

Tuesday night saw me rush into the city centre, abandoning the comfort of my Northside home to venture within the hallowed walls of Trinity. The Very Big Sister is now a student there; I was joining her for her idea – and mine – of a good night: a Steven Pinker lecture.

The lecture was a presentation of his new book, The Stuff of Thought. It deals with the way in which theories of time, space, matter and causality inform the way we speak. The last part of the speech dealt with swearing. It started with a picture of Bono, whose acceptance speech ‘this is fucking brilliant’’ inspired an amendment to House Resolution 3687, The Clean Airwaves Act:

A BILL

To amend section 1464 of title 18, United States Code, to provide for the punishment of certain profane broadcasts, and for other purposes.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That section 1464 of title 18, United States Code, is amended--

(1) by inserting `(a)' before `Whoever'; and

(2) by adding at the end the following:

`(b) As used in this section, the term `profane', used with respect to language, includes the words `shit', `piss', `fuck', `cunt', `asshole', and the phrases `cock sucker', `mother fucker', and `ass hole', compound use (including hyphenated compounds) of such words and phrases with each other or with other words or phrases, and other grammatical forms of such words and phrases (including verb, adjective, gerund, participle, and infinitive forms).'.

Pinker pointed out that, unfortunately for the House, Bono’s “fucking” is in fact an adverb, and as such, not covered by the amendment. Maybe they should employ linguists when they draft the amendment to the amendment.

He identified five categories for swearing:

- dysphemistic swearing (using a taboo word instead of a socially acceptable one)

- abusive swearing

- idiomatic swearing

- emphatic swearing

- cathartic swearing

An interesting point about cathartic swearing – the words we use when we burn our hand on the iron as we desperately try to look presentable even though we are already 10 minutes late – is that it is conventional. You have to learn which word to use in which circumstance, and different words are use in different contexts in different languages. Words I (and even my mother) use regularly as we bump our way through the day would be unthinkable in English. Those I use in English I would never consider in French.

So the book is now beside me, and will be read in the long flight to Vancouver.

No happy endings in sight

2007-10-08T18:00:00.000+01:00

A few days ago, a post from Fatmammycat had startled me, but did not actually surprise me . It seemed a new-ish foundation was campaigning to have sad endings banned in children's literature. It appalled me - children love sad endings when they read them from a safe place, and it is one of the main aims of children's literature to let children experience. I was again reminded of this today in my reading of Oittinen's Translating for Children.

As long as there have been children's books, they have been censored by adults, either at the publicaation or at the translation stage, or when they are read aloud. For instance, if we as parents do not want our children to be afraid, we simply do not read "frightening" stories to them (stories we as adults find too frightening for our children). Yet in this way we may be denying the child's right to be frightened.

My favourite book as a small child involved a goat being killed and eaten by the wolf after a long a bloody battle that lasted all night. My own children always loved sad or scary books, and some still do...

However, it now appears that the foundation does not exist, and the whole press campaign was an elaborate hoax to promote Lemony Snicket books...

Mom's overture

2007-10-01T09:46:00.001+01:00

This is me, everyday, except I say it all in French.

2007-09-19T22:25:00.000+01:00

Found this picture on TechEBlog.

For the amusement of the Big Brother, who lives plugged in to his iPod...

A free book on a Monday morning

2007-09-17T09:44:00.000+01:00

Monday morning, the sun is shining, and I open my Google reader. Mark Thwaite from the Book Depository has announced the winners of his Friday giveaway and I won Gods Behaving Badly. I must admit I don't know anything about the author or the book, but the comments (It is a bit 50's romantic comedy but obviously written by a scholar and is a rewarding read. It helps (but not necessary)to have an knowledge or interest in Greek mythology to enjoy this very modern tale for open minded readers who are looking for something new and fun) and the mention of Jasper Fforde's First Among Sequels in the suggestions made me pick it. And I love picking up a book at random and discovering it, like I did with Fforde's Thursday Next series.

Good start to the week...

The ultimate silver blogger

2007-09-01T12:13:00.000+01:00

A few days ago, I was heartened by an article on women online, and now I discover that the ultimate silver blogger is also a woman. María Amelia López was born in Muxía, in Spain, in 1911. As she writes on her blog, A mis 95 años / 95 years old blogger:

My name is Amelia and I was born in Muxía (A Coruña - Spain) on December the 23rd of 1911. Today it's my birthday and my grandson, who is very stingy, gave me a blog.

She now has a readership that could be the envy of any A-lister, and she has recently gone on holidays to Brazil. Her pet hate? Retirement homes, where she says people are drugged to keep them quiet, and they are never offered the opportunity to use the Internet. The Guardian quotes some of her blog posts, including this piece of advice, valid I think for old and young alike:

"There is nothing better than exercising the brain."

Am I being watched?

2007-08-29T18:01:00.000+01:00

I love these little animals, and was thrilled when their creator allowed me to publish one on my blog. One of many many Pas si bêtes....

Women and silver surfers first

2007-08-23T09:37:00.000+01:00

An article in the Guardian today gives the results of a UK survey on social use of the Internet, and lo and behold, it’s a women’s world now, at least for the 25 to 49 age bracket – I’m in there somewhere, and there is hope for the future as well: the silver surfer is now also spending more time online than your average teenager. Bebo, this staple of Irish life, has now extended its realm to Britain, where it has overtaken Facebook. And these were the facts for today. Back to qualitative work.