Author Archives: iain_emsley

I am a developer in the Janet web team as well as occasionally working on some Open Source projects. The views expressed on this blog are mine alone and are not to be taken as a position or comment by Janet.

Ethics and Experimental Humanities

Just catching up with some reading as a bit of a break from other things and saw this article on Ethical Issues and Experimental Humanities on the Talking Humanities blog. Linking to it as a post it for later but it links to a few things that I have been thinking about.

Memory as Signal

Benjamin N Jacobsen’s article in New Media and Society, When is the right time to remember?: Social media memories, temporality and the kairologic, explores the concerns of memory in socio-technical systems like Twitter and Facebook. The one thing that strikes me is the idea that the window that is used. Maybe it is a result […]

Strava, segments, and tracking

A few years ago, Strava visualised the GPS co-ordinates in their data and displayed the locations of secret bases. A change of privacy settings later and, apparently, all was secret again. The Guardian has just run a story on using segments and GPS locations to show individuals within the bases through re-purposing the segment function. […]

Sonification, Schemas and Microdata

In an ongoing experiment, I am playing around with representing sonification in HTML to enable sharing it within a webpage, focusing on the Event and AudioObject schemas. Following some currently unpublished thesis work, I was curious about trying to model the thing that I was writing about and putting it into the mark-up to allow […]

Notes on recent blogs

A post on Slashdot pointed me towards the post, High-Performance Mobile System-on-Chip Clusters, on the ACM blog. Posting here as a sticky note for a potential project. However I am also aware that this might become part of the notes graveyard, Notes apps are where ideas go to die. And that’s good. https://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/259098-high-performance-mobile-system-on-chip-clusters/fulltext https://reproof.app/blog/notes-apps-help-us-forget.

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 […]