Critical Making and DIY zine

I have just come across Garnet Hertz’s ‘zine, Two Terms: Critical Making + D.I.Y, on his Concept Labs website. Still reading at the moment but the move to making as part of research is a theme that resonates.


Post-theory?

Posted as a reference, this Guardian article on the idea of post-theory science based in Anderson’s end of theory in big data but also with machine learning makes some valid points. Bernard Stiegler’s Automated Society (Polity, 2016) covers some of the same area but from a Humanist perspective.


Distant listening of Green Day

I am not sure world needs this but it exists. The YouTube video, every green day song playing at the same time, and it turns Nicholas Cook’s concept of distant listening (2013) into a reality. I am not a huge Green Day fan – some bits good, some not – and found it hard to […]


Causation, Correlation, and Method

Another short post but John Naughton’s latest column in the Observer is another one for book marking, Yes, DeepMind crunches the numbers – but is it really a magic bullet? . The computational achievements are there but the underlying question about how one understands it still need the scientific method. I might argue that, in […]


The Cost of Electric Cars…

Another short bookmark post but this time about the mining of raw metals currently required for electric cars and the various economics therein. I am reminded of a chapter in Kate Crawford’s Anatomy of AI about lithium mining and Natasha Bernal’s article about lithium mining race in Cornwall. The recent work on phones has sparked […]


Tappigraphy as method?

I am bookmarking this as no doubt if I have time, I will forget the piece. A useful, if slightly unnerving, article about tappigraphy in the Observer, The dawn of tappigraphy. It raises important issues of ethics and privacy, but raises questions in my mind about responses. Hmmm…


Signal the Unheard City at the Resonate Festival

The text here is the rough copy of the Unheard City presentation at the Sampling Sounds of Coventry’s Future at Common Ground as part of the Resonate Festival. The project is supported by The University of Warwick Institute for Engagement and the WIE City of Culture Programme and the Warwick-Monash Alliance Catalyst Project Creating the […]


Introducing…

I am looking towards writing up now and finishing the thesis. I realise that I have not really discussed it. Rather I have had my head down in it. One of the challenges that seems to be rearing its head is writing a decent introduction. I am currently drawing from advice from the Your Thesis […]


A City of Things

More of a short note but Richard Coyne touched on cities a few days ago in his post, Cities as media, and Shannon Mattern’s earlier book, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media. I have the new one somewhere but the idea of smart cities existing since classical and earlier […]


Critical Computation and Teaching

An article on the Verge, File Not Found, about issues in teaching computational skills resonates slightly. The User Interaction abstractions have made, in many cases, for sleek and shiny interfaces that hide the complexities of the software underneath. Lost a file? On a Mac, spotlight can find it. Need to use an app, just touch […]