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.

Installing and Using ProvConvert on OSX

I have just gone back to earlier work where I am using ProvConvert to visualise a PROV graph. I have had issues with installing and using it before so have been really wary of it. Until I came across Soiland Reye’s excellent blog post on the subject. As I am using openJDK through Homebrew on […]

Refreshing the blog

This is slightly more as an aide memoire than a post but Mark Carrigan has written a useful post on about academic blogging on the Post-Pandemic University blog, Academic blogging – both/and rather than either/or. The note towards discussing research that is already written or planned is the part that resonates. I suspect that, like […]

An Experimental Philosophy of Technology

Philosophy and Technology has an interesting article on the idea of Experimental Philosophy of Technology or Techxphi, by Steven R. Kraaijeveld. The argument seems to focus mainly on developing the ethical side. It seems like a way of testing various intuitions and assumptions and might be an area to keep an eye on to see […]

AudioVisual edition of Digital Humanities Quarterly

The preview version of the latest Digital Humanities Quarterly is out and is an AudioVisual Data in DH special edition.

Towards a playful approach

It has been a while since I posted and one hopes to get back to it in due course. I was leafing through some unread emails and came across the link to this reflection by Geoffrey Rockwell on Stéfan Sinclair, Celebrating Stéfan Sinclair: A Dialogue from 2007. The thing that really struck me was the […]

Media literacy as failure?

Will Partin has written a post on the QAnon media literacy, What if modern conspiracy theorists are altogether too media literate?. A long-ish read that is well worth it, it reminded me of Whitney Phillips’s talk at the Digital Methods Initiative Winter school in 2019 and her contentions about media literacy. It raises challenging questions […]

MediaStreams and Media Methods

I have been digging into Web Audio a little more deeply to scratch some itches and came across the Media Streams API. I have been thinking about how it can be used to get the browser to interact with streams and how JavaScript can be used to delve into them at a programmatic level. This […]

Re-purposing A-frame?

Currently having a nose around the a-frame design tool as a way of designing some scenes. I have a vague idea of what I want to see and hear but I am looking at what existing tools offer. Does reading the documentation become a way of testing the tool and becoming a way of thinking […]

A testing time…

Recently, I have had to begin patching a project that I was using. Having found and downloaded the source code from its version control, I looked for the documentation. Not finding any, I started a Jupyter notebook to work out what the methods were and to make notes on the progress. Although that let me […]

Technological literacy and critical thinking

Going through some older newsletters, I came across this brief interview with Tim O’Reilly, The unwavering optimism of Tim O’Reilly, on Infoworld. Whilst his optimism that “[h]aving technical literacy is on the same level as being good at reading, writing, and speaking”, there seems to be a question of how and what is taught and […]