I have arrived

It's been quite a while since I updated this blog, so here's a rapid review.

I've completed a draft for my dissertation chapter on Thomas Pynchon.

I've got a messy first half of an introductory chapter too, but I'm trying hard not to think about just how much revision that's going to need.

All of this has snapped into close focus with the end of the academic year and my presence this week at the University of Maryland for Digital Humanities Conference 2009. After months of solitude interrupted mainly (if regularly) by the dogs, I find myself surrounded by people thinking about the same questions I've been wrestling with. Cool!

I'll be presenting on Thursday and panel-hopping for the rest of the time. I'm also looking forward to meeting and re-meeting luminaries of my Twitter and podcast world.

The Future of Collaborative Culture?

[I'm cross-posting this from Open Culture--it seemed apropos to my academic pursuits as well...]

I just heard Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, speaking at Stanford Law School today. Wales is working on some new projects that he hopes will harness the community-driven collaboration of Wikipedia. He’s already had some success in branching out from the encyclopedia idea with Wikia, which is a “wiki farm” compiling information on a variety of different subjects (some of the most successful so far relate to video games).

What Wales spoke about today, however, is a new collaborative search project. The concept is still in its early stages, it seems, but the idea would be to harness the intelligence and dedication of human beings to produce search results significantly better than Google’s. This raises a few questions:

Is Google broken? It’s amazing what Google pulls up, but maybe we’ve all gotten so good at working with an imperfect system that we just tune out the spam and misinterpretations that still crop up.

Is a collaborative social model the appropriate solution to this problem? People are good at compiling encyclopedias, but they may not be good at emulating search rank algorithms. Also, Google is powered by millions of servers in dozens of data centers over the world managing petabytes of information. In other words, this may be a technology+money business, not a people+transparency business.

These issues aside, Wikipedia is one of the most amazing things to come out of the whole Internet experiment, so I’m excited to see what Wales comes up with. Has search become a basic service? Would it work better as an open-source system?

The Politics of Presence

I've been invited to contribute to The Politics of Presence, a multi-day, multi-continental conference experience put together by new media scholars, archaeologists, and more. I'm going to give a brief PowerPoint version of a paper I worked last quarter on terrorism and new media.

Terrorism is an interesting subject because it tends to fall through the academic cracks. This has led to a fragmented professional discourse that tends to get lost between international affairs, psychology, law and politics. Thus the old saw that there are as more theories of terrorism than there are theorists.

My take is that terrorism is essentially a communicative action: without a public to terrorize and a mass medium to dominate, there's no point. So how do new, collaborative media change that equation? How do we deal with terrorism online? Come by tomorrow to find out.

Scholarly Web 2.0?

We just had a great speaker at the Literary Studies and the Digital Library Workshop--Dan Cohen came to discuss the Zotero project, a new web research tool specifically geared toward scholars. To describe it boringly, Zotero is a plugin for Firefox 2.0. But what it really does is give you an easy way to accumulate all of your del.icio.us links, bibliographic citations, Amazon books, etc into one annotatable database that lives on your computer. No more losing your Google Docs or battling with EndNote! No more wrestling with incredibly long library catalog URLs! That, at least, is the dream.

It seems like Cohen's team has done a lot of amazing things already, and Zotero automatically recognizes many kinds of XML in the pages you browse (like the author and title of the book you're looking at on Amazon, for example). Then when you drag and drop that tab into the Firefox applet, you have a record that already includes the citation information you would have to type in for other reference programs. At least I think this is what it does now--I only installed it this afternoon.

I'll report back with an update on how well Zotero works, and whether Cohen excommunicates me from the Church of the Semantic Web after I tell him I screwed up recording his talk today. You have to push the record button twice, and it looks like it's recording after the first push. Not intuitive.

How Fred Writes

I'm about to sit in on a talk in the series How I Write at the Stanford Writing Center. Tonight's speaker is Fred Turner, who wrote a great book on the emergence of the digital counterculture in the 1960s and beyond.

I'm particularly interested in what he has to say about his writing process since he also lived a life in journalism before returning to grad school and academia. His time in journalism was much more serious and successful...but I'm hoping the experience will still translate.

Oh, wow: I just discovered that the "How I Write" website has an amazing archive of audio and video! Very neat.