I have been reading Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist (Atria / One Signal Publishers, 2025), which is an interesting trip into the work of Spotify playlists. I got it on a hunch and it plays out very well against the previous Spotify book that I […]
I was reading You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song (McDonald, 2024) today while doing some initial research for an overview paper. I had high hopes for it, but found that it was very one dimensional. Questions about culture and algorithms are largely pushed to one side and limited to a few things with […]
I was recently re-reading Paula Bialski’s Middle Tech (Bialski, 2024), an ethnographic account of her time at a German software company that explores culture of Good Enough in software. It is an engaging book that seemingly moves against the Move Fast and Break Things culture, but I am wondering if it holds water there as […]
David Berry’s Stunlaw blog has a series of interesting posts that are building to something very useful as well as through provoking. The one that I want to focus is the recent one on Porosity and Computation. The term porosity comes from the Naples essay by Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis (Benjamin and L?cis, 1925) […]
Social Audio is a new term to me in this guise. I enjoyed Brian Cantrill’s talk, Social Audio as a Vector For Engineering Wisdom, about Oxide’s use: https://youtu.be/W8qiDhlFVCE. I do like the idea for multiple voices in a meeting and sharing information. I do wonder if this is amenable to digital methods and combining the […]
I am parking this here as an example of shared standards between Google and Apple (TechCrunch). Android have announced a feature to identify tracking devices with a view to creating a shared specification at some point. The idea of shared specifications has appeared before but it is something that is worth tracking for now as […]
The API apocalypse (if we’re feeling melodramatic) is causing some issues for Digital Methods. I enjoyed David Peirce’s article on the Verge today, asking where everyone will meet now. This is going to be challenging question going fowards. Recently, I have been looking at Mastodon and the Fediverse as perhaps the final set of APIs […]
A recent experiment, which will be discussed in due course, has taken me back to thinking about parallel computing in Python using the multiprocessing library. This also reminds me of a conversation that I had with David De Roure as we walked to a seminar after some experiments using Raspberry Pi (2 and 3) boards […]
We live in interesting times in terms of social media. I am preparing to teach social media APIs this coming term. Last year, we were caught by the Ukraine invasion and this year, we are wondering how Twitter is going to react, or even if it will last. The Nature article on Twitter and science […]
Like many people, I have been having a look at Mastodon for use and research. As I am currently updating my labs for next term, I thought that I’d have a slightly deeper look using R (the labs’ language) and the rtoot package. It is only a sketch but the existing work seems promising for […]
