John Naughton’s article on ChatGPT, The ChatGPT bot is causing panic now – but it’ll soon be as mundane a tool as Excel, inspired me to use it as the theme for the Digital Methods labs that I teach. It also seems sane that such tools will become part of the everyday. So far, it […]
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 […]
A line in Beatrice Forman’s article, The soothing, slightly sinister world of productivity hacks, jumped out at me. While discussing various ways of being productive, she nods to a (now deleted) post to replace reading books and articles with Instagram and notes versions, rather than engaging with the 2-300 pages of a book. I had […]
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 […]
I was recently asked to give a talk on Introducing Python for the Reproducible, Interpretable, Open, Transparent Science club (RIOTS). This gave me a chance to go back to an earlier lecture given at the Digital Humanities Oxford Summer School and to refresh the material. I do like giving these talks with a live example […]
Elizabeth Gibney’s Nature article, Could machine learning fuel a reproducibility crisis in science?, is an intriguing exploration about reproducibility in disciplines that use Machine Learning with a particular focus on computational reproducibility. The challenges of training data from the same period or even including data in both training and evaluation data, or data leakage, are […]
Digital Humanities Quarterly has a special issue on Minimal Computing. Roopika Risam and Alex Gil;s introduction neatly frames the challenges that the subject raises but Quinn Dombrowski’s article, Minimizing Computing Maximizes Labor, excavates what it really means to develop with minimal computing. It is an issue that I have been thinking about recently after various […]
Peter Forberg’s paper, Critical Design as Theory, Experiment, and Data: A Sociologically-Informed Approach to Visualizing Networks of Loss, on Digital Humanities Quarterly is an intriguing read that I will come back to in the near future as I do some reading catch up. It develops David Berry and Anders Fagerjord’s call for a Critical Digital […]
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.
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 […]
