Murals and patronage

JR’s stitched mural, covered in The Guardian, of San Francisco is a great piece of art and social history, covering various strata of a fast changing city.

Using a mobile studio, he took hundreds of photos and stitched them into one image. Lynne and Marc Benioff of Salesforce are one of the financial backers raising questions about patronage that I approach in a forthcoming paper. Yes the mural is a great snapshot of a city but who owns the photo and the images? Who pays for the rendering and matching processes?

Born digital culture allows for some interesting readings and creations but equally provokes critical questions. Who funds such projects and why? How has the image been remediated? How can we begin to read such a work and its various states?

May 31, 2019 – 8:52 am | By iain_emsley | Posted in Arts Funding | Tagged | Comments (0)

Oblique Strategies

I came across Brandon Walsh’s Thirteen Oblique Strategies for Digital Humanities. This needs some further details but an initial thought is that it offers a way to think about DH and how it can be considered for students. One to come back and reflect on.

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May 9, 2019 – 8:28 am | By iain_emsley | Posted in Open Knowledge | Comments (0)

Quiet reflections on lab cultures

I have been following the feministlabs hashtag on Twitter to watch the What is a Feminist Lab? symposium. Rich would be an understatement so far from what I have seen and it is still going… The Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR) lab linked to their publication on author order, Equity in Author Order, […]

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April 18, 2019 – 10:42 am | By iain_emsley | Posted in Open Knowledge | Comments (0)

New models in the news feed algorithm?

Facebook announced changes to the News Feed yesterday, Remove, Reduce, Inform: New Steps to Manage Problematic Content, to enhance their “Remove, Reduce, Inform” strategy. The Facebook strategy appears to be adding more buttons with information to posts and images and tackling groups. I find the former part interesting as the platform appears to be struggling […]

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April 11, 2019 – 8:31 am | By iain_emsley | Posted in Open Knowledge | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Learning to say no

At the end of last year, I went through a period of saying yes to things. Endless things and exciting events. All the things. In theory, it created a small writing pipeline that would build towards a future chapter. Then I got acceptances and the deadlines started arriving. Bear in mind that I was doing […]

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March 5, 2019 – 12:39 pm | By iain_emsley | Posted in Open Knowledge | Comments (0)

eLife announce a reproducible article

Post almost as a bookmark, executable documents have been at the back of my mind for a little bit. Probably since WSSPE4. eLife have written a blog post, “Introducing eLife’s first computationally reproducible article“, about their new Reproducible Document Stack (RDS) that I found intriguing and thought provoking. It is sparking many thoughts, some of […]

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February 27, 2019 – 5:07 pm | By iain_emsley | Posted in Open Knowledge, Programming | Comments (0)

Musings on GPT2 and think about culture

The Guardian had an interesting story, ‘New AI fake text generator maybe too dangerous to release‘, about OpenAI’s GPT2 algorithm. I spent some of today watching social media streams linking to the paper. I do find it intriguing that some of this relies heavily on training on large amounts of data, some 40GB in size, […]

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February 15, 2019 – 6:28 pm | By iain_emsley | Posted in Open Knowledge | Tagged | Comments (0)

Reducing how we feel?

Intriguing read on the nature of emotions and machine learning, Silicon Valley Thinks Everyone Feels the Same Six Emotions. The sub-heading says much but I do think that there are critical questions about how we interact with these machines to create meaning but how long before we react in the same way as the attention economy?

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January 20, 2019 – 9:28 pm | By iain_emsley | Posted in Open Knowledge | Comments (0)

Travelling to the Orpheus

Having posted on recent travels, I am glad to write that I have had a recent acceptance. I am going to the Simulation and Computer Experimentation in Music and Sound Art at the Orpheus Institute in Ghent in March. The programme is forthcoming but I am excited to go there and talk.

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January 19, 2019 – 5:44 pm | By iain_emsley | Posted in Open Knowledge | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Travels

January is being a busy month. I went to the Digital Methods Institute Winter School in Amsterdam and did some work on the ALEX (Algorithms Exposed) strand using the Facebook Tracking Exposed tool. I may write more once my part of the report is written. This week was partially spent at the Machine Feeling workshop. […]

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January 19, 2019 – 5:39 pm | By iain_emsley | Posted in Open Knowledge | Comments (1)