Category Archives: Open Knowledge

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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?

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.

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. […]

Science or digital culture?

I have been following a conversation on Twitter following a New York Times opinion piece about humanism: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/08/opinion/oh-the-humanities.html I agree with Douthat that anti-scientific sentiment in the humanities has more in common than it wants to admit with Christian humanism (and w Leavis, for that matter). I just don’t think that’s the path forward. I […]

Social Reading

There is an interesting Twitter thread about the upcoming Trump / Putin summit in Helsinki. Leah McElrath has picked up one of Trump’s tweets and is using what appears to be a hybrid methodology to read it. I am still deciphering it in my head and unpicking the various parts but some of this is […]

Data as Narrative in Museum objects

I went to the Narrative as Data < > Data as Narrative workshop at Sussex Humanities Laboratory run by Alex Butterworth. Not having attended a hack for a while I wasn’t sure what to expect. After some time, I got involved with a hack on some museum data ina group that included Lisa Gee and […]

Jane Austen’s word choices

A Facebook friend had a link to an NY Times piece on Jane Austen’s word choices. Using Franco Moretti’s techniques, it begins showing how Digital Humanities can be useful. There are one of two of his books that I am waiting for before I can get into the pros and cons but I do have […]