January 2010 - Air-L - lists.aoir.org

Hitler , Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the fading legitimacy of academic institutions
by Antonio A. Casilli 24 Jan '10

24 Jan '10

...yet another piece on the Critical Commons video - hopefully this one won't start an interminable thread ;) Read the entire post at http://www.bodyspacesociety.eu/2010/01/23/hitler-claude-levi-strauss-and-th… ---- "Another day, another Hitler parody video. This one (courtesy of http://criticalcommons.org) is a rant about the rise of digital scholarship [snip]. The German dictator, now reborn as a grotesque Internet meme, highlights the existing cultural divide between the up-and-coming Internet-savvy « junior » scholars and the ageing generation of paper-intensive, book-prone professors and researchers. Bitterly, he claims academic teaching is « a dying profession » [snip] « We were great once », cries Hitler, voicing the disappointment of old time academics. « A proud institution. We controlled knowledge: we told everyone what and how to think. Now () we spend our time propping up our fading legitimacy ». The turning point in the video seems to be when, with trembling hand, the Führer removes his glasses and hisses: « Anyone who has ever consulted the Wikipedia, leave the room, now! ». There, a line is drawn between traditional scientific institutions and digital ones. The online encyclopedia, for better or for worse, epitomizes the spirit of open knowledge that is slowly digging a ditch around academic ivory towers. A personal anecdote might help further develop this point. On November 3rd, 2009, 3:34 PM, via a French mailing list, I received an email from the president of the EHESS, the academic institution I happen to work for. The email stated that, aged 100, « our colleague, Claude Lévi-Strauss » died. Assuming that the news was first hand, appealing to the larger public and coming from a reliable source, I decided to put it on Wikipedia France. So I edited the page Claude Lévi-Strauss introducing the date of decease. I usually contribute to the English-speaking part of Wikipedia, so this time I didnt bother logging in. I was assuming my IP address (I was writing from my office) would somehow vouch for me. This move ended up backfiring. As soon as I clicked on Save changes, a message popped up on my screen warning that my IP address was recognized as one of the EHESS and was thus considered suspicious. An editor would have to validate my changes. And the editor did not: he or she dismissed the piece of information as unsubstantiated and the edit didnt even hit the revision history log. The « appeal to authority » (me writing from the very same institution where Claude Lévi-Strauss had taught) didnt seem to count. Of course the page was eventually modified soon afterwards by somebody who made the correct link to the newswire of the Agence France Press. [snip] The academic ex-cathedra (in this case we might say the « ex-IP address ») attitude is questioned, in a healthful and productive way. Unfortunately, too often it is replaced by a media-ridden viral logic as a new source of intelligence. What is at stake here is not only the status of academics today as intellectual authorities, but the way objective knowledge is validated. Again, the Claude Lévi-Stauss article in Wikipedia is a good example. As of today, no clear consensus has been reached on the exact date of his death somewhere between October 30th and November 3rd. Who do we trust? Insiders are, in this case unreliable, because they are colleagues of the deceased anthropologist, academics used since their prime to « hide » knowledge from the populace. Outsiders, are probably not close enough to Lévi-Strausss friends and family, but are more reliable as to the way they collect information, as well as to the way they deliver it. They log in, modify the page without messing up with the code, explain the edits they introduced, take part to the conversation, and so on. [snip] Both the Hitler parody and the Claude Lévi-Strauss Wikipedia anecdote point towards a reconfiguration of the « two cultures » controversy as outlined by C. P. Snow. If, back in the 1950s, the cultural divide put natural sciences and humanities on the opposite sides of the knowledge spectrum, nowadays with government and industry increasing demand for transdisciplinary research this intellectual chasm is progressively replaced by a technological one". [snip] ---- Read more > http://www.bodyspacesociety.eu/ Cheers, -- Antonio A. Casilli Centre Edgar Morin Institut Interdisciplinaire d'Anthropologie du Contemporain (UMR8177 CNRS/EHESS) 22, rue d'Athènes 75009 - Paris France

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CFP: FDG 2010: The 5th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games
by Yusuf Pisan 23 Jan '10

23 Jan '10

Only 2 weeks (that is only 300 some hours) left to the paper deadline!!! FDG 2010: The 5th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games 19-21 June 2010, at Asilomar Conference Grounds, Monterey, California. http://fdg2010.org/ *** Paper and Poster Submission: 5 Feb 2010 *** Doctoral Consortium Submission: 12 Feb 2010 Submit your paper to general conference or to a specific theme area. 1) Artificial Intelligence 2) Computer Science and Games Education 3) Game Design 4) Game Studies 5) Graphics and Interfaces 6) Infrastructure (Databases, Networks, Security) 7) Learning in Games FDG is an ACM in-cooperation conference. All accepted papers will be included in the ACM Digital Library. FDG is kindly supported by Microsoft. Keynote Speakers: * James Gee, author of "What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy" * Markus Gross, director of Disney Research Zurich * Jane McGonigal, creator of games to impact the real-world including Cruel 2 B Kind, and I Love Bees * ... and more keynotes to be announced .... Come and join us at Asilomar. It will be fun! Yusuf -- A/Professor Yusuf Pisan Games Studio Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology University of Technology, Sydney http://staff.it.uts.edu.au/~ypisan/ http://games.it.uts.edu.au/ Skype: ypisan

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Re: [Air-L] the case for critical commons
by jeremy hunsinger 23 Jan '10

23 Jan '10

The same way people ignore the 40 million people going hungry in the united states each day? I'm not a psychologist, but I'm pretty sure I saw people not get up and throw up during Avatar 3d, when there was a genocide perpetrated on screen. As I indicated, some people might not be ideal for this meme, audiences differ. However, if you are going to read the meme, you should try to do it justice within its own genre, that is my basic argument. If you take it out of that genre and read it as hitler and evil, that's your choice, but I think you have to agree that it is not the only choice in reading it, and given that, and over 100 other examples of the same meme that are available, i think I've clearly argued that you shouldn't read it as such. That won't prevent you from doing so, but then i'd just say.. you aren't doing justice to the current text, you are trying to make a new text, which is fine, you can do that, but if you critique the old text based on your new text, it would be sort of like critiquing the Papa Smurf based on Joseph Stalin. Also note, my prior statement about nihilism in regard to the appreciation of this. On Jan 23, 2010, at 1:17 PM, Steve Eskow wrote: > Jeremy, when one sees a picture of Hitler, or a body hanging from a rope, or bodies in a pile in Haiti, what is the "right emotional arc"? And if someone overlays such pictures with humorous commentary, how does one learn to suspend that initial nausea? > > Perhaps your memetic analysis fails to ground itself in a distinction between the workings of logic and the impact and evocations of image. > > One obvious difference, of course, is in the history of the relationship between image and viewer. One young viewer sees in the picture of Hitler a figure from his history book. An older viewer sees in Hitler the image of his mother dead in Buchenwald, and this second viewer has much difficulty in approaching the "right emotional arc." > > Steve E. > > > That is: for some of us a picture of Hitler or of a lynching or a rape cannot be transformed by memetics into humor. > > > > Steve Eskow > >

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Re: [Air-L] the case for critical commons
by jeremy hunsinger 23 Jan '10

23 Jan '10

I can understand that Steve, I also understand that people can suspend belief and think critically. I didn't say they should forgo their Hitler knowledge, all i said was that it wasn't the key part for this analysis or understanding, that the same effect could have been obtained with other figures, even nonsensical ones, so long at they provided the right emotional arc. I understand what Christian is saying, but we disagree fundamentally on what is important in this detournement. For instance, let me point to another classic detournement... 'Can Dialectics Break Bricks' One could argue that the movie there is significant, the narrative, the characters, etc. but I think there again, the argument is wrong, because the importance of the movie there is its staged emotions and violence and how again that relates to the words. just because we can bring more contexts into something, doesn't mean they matter for that thing, because the clip is defined by much more than the audience's knowledge, and once we are aware of the whole history and context of the clip, that it is a meme, that it is playing off a clear tradition, that there are many examples doing the same thing similarly, then we can start to say what it is. I think when you do that, you realize that the Nazi's and their politics fall out, and if you were to make an argument and publish it relying on the analogies of nazi's and evil, you should be prepared to have that paper rejected, though you could send it somewhere and get it published, but the basis of the rejection would probably be... 'author unfamiliar with object of study'. a length of wood is just a length of wood unless it is standing in a bucket labeled shovel handles, then it stands a fair chance of being a shovel handle, but it cold just be a 2x4, but try to use it as a shovel handle and voila... On Jan 22, 2010, at 11:05 PM, Steve Eskow wrote: > <<The clip has nothing to do with Nazi's or evil or censorship. >> > > Jeremy, can you not understand that for many people a picture of Hitler evokes other pictures--of bodies stacked in orderly rows, of emaciated Jews, of the death of loved ones in war---and that you cannot summon the language and logic of memes to tell such people that they should not see such images? > > That is: for some of us a picture of Hitler or of a lynching or a rape cannot be transformed by memetics into humor. > > Steve Eskow

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ADT > Australasian Digital Theses Program
by gerrymck 23 Jan '10

23 Jan '10

Colleagues/ Open Access To Dissertations / Theses From Oz+ /Gerry The aim of the [Australasian Digital Theses] ADT program is to establish a distributed database of digital versions of theses produced by the postgraduate research students at Australian universities. The theses will be available worldwide via the web. The ideal behind the program is to provide access to, and promote Australian research to the international community. The initial project was funded by an Australian Research Council (ARC) - Research Infrastructure Equipment and Facilities (RIEF) Scheme grant (1997/1998). The ADT concept was an initiative of 7 Australian universities (listed below) in association with the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL). The ADT model was developed by the 7 original project partners during 1998-1999. The program was then opened up to all CAUL members (all Australian universities) in July 2000. The original 7 partners will continue to guide and advise the national group in their role as the ADT Steering Committee. The original ADT membership group: University of New South Wales (lead institution) University of Melbourne University of Queensland University of Sydney Australian National University Curtin University of Technology Griffith University ADT Program Overview The ADT program is designed to improve access to, and enhance transfer of, the research information contained in theses by providing a full text version available from the desktop via the web. The retrieval is enhanced by the inclusion of metadata tags in the documents which are given a higher weighting by the more sophisticated search engines. It is also designed to provide a new model for deposit and archiving of theses that takes into account the tools and technologies that students are now using to prepare their theses. The program has two major components, digitisation of theses as part of the deposit process and the digitisation of a selected number of frequently requested existing theses. As each University is responsible for maintaining an archival copy of the theses of their own institution, each participant in the program will mount their own theses on a server located in their respective institution. The participants will use the same database configuration, standards and metadata system to ensure compatibility. The document format will be Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF) ensuring that the data is independent of the platform on which it is created. Adobe PDF ensures that a high quality printed version can be provided if needed. Acrobat is relatively easy to use, with a high quality free reader readily available. PDF has also become an electronic publishing standard. Access To The Search Page / News & Projects / Archive / Etc. Available At [ http://tinyurl.com/y8m4lv7 ] !!! Thanks To / Natalya Godbold / PhD Candidate / Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences / University of Technology, Sydney / For The HeadsUp !!! Enjoy ! /Gerry Gerry McKiernan Associate Professor Science and Technology Librarian Iowa State University Library Ames IA 50011 Follow Me On Twitter > http://twitter.com/GMcKBlogs >>> "The Future Is Mobile" >>>

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the case for critical commons
by jeremy hunsinger 22 Jan '10

22 Jan '10

in case you've not seen this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VREJV--VHSw Jeremy Hunsinger Center for Digital Discourse and Culture Virginia Tech Information Ethics Fellow Center for Information Policy Research Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. --Pablo Picasso

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virtual revolution documentary
by jeremy hunsinger 22 Jan '10

22 Jan '10

One of our members and my coeditor of a forthcoming special issue on Learning in Virtual Worlds, Aleks Krotoski has been working on this TV documentary about the internet revolution that will be shown starting next week, Jan. 30 on bbc2 . http://www.bbc.co.uk/digitalrevolution/ is the url of the website. sneak peak is here: http://gizmodo.com/5453788/sneak-peek-of-new-bbc-documentary-the-virtual-re… I thought some of you might be interested if you'd not already discovered it via twitter or facebook or.... I think Aleks and her colleagues took on quite a task with this production and from what I've seen above, it is quite excellent in raising both awareness and raising questions, they should be congratulated. I'm sure everyone will find something to critique in it, which makes it even better in my mind:) Thanks to Aleks and her colleagues:) Jeremy Hunsinger Center for Digital Discourse and Culture Virginia Tech Information Ethics Fellow Center for Information Policy Research Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. --Pablo Picasso

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Fwd: [Sigdl-l] WSIS Forum 2010 open consultation: Call for participation
by jeremy hunsinger 22 Jan '10

22 Jan '10

Begin forwarded message: > From: Puna Das <puna_05(a)yahoo.co.in> > Date: January 22, 2010 12:36:38 AM EST > To: WSIS <wsis-l(a)infoserv.inist.fr>, diglib(a)infoserv.inist.fr, rscao-l(a)infoserv.inist.fr, infolit-l(a)infoserv.inist.fr > Cc: ica-l(a)mailman.srv.ualberta.ca, sigkm-l(a)asis.org, Web2ForDev <web2fordev(a)dgroups.org>, ecollaboration(a)dgroups.org, sigdl-l(a)asis.org > Subject: [Sigdl-l] WSIS Forum 2010 open consultation: Call for participation > > WSIS Forum 2010 open consultation: Call for participation > > 18-01-2010 (Paris) > > UNESCO, together with ITU, UNCTAD and UNDP, is organizing an open consultation for the upcoming World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Forum 2010. All individuals, networks and organizations interested in this issue are invited to participate in the three-fold process, consisting of an online discussion, a questionnaire and a review meeting. > 2010 is a turning point towards the achievement of the WSIS goals by 2015. This year's Forum, which will be held in Geneva (Switzerland) from 10 to 14 May 2010, is an important opportunity to review the progress made in the WSIS implementation during the last five years and to reconsider strategies for the remaining five years. > > Following the outcomes of the 2009 WSIS Action Line Facilitators Meeting on 22 May 2009, as well as several exchanges among WSIS stakeholders, an open consultation, focusing on the themes of the 2010 Forum, has been set up. > > The process will be carried out in three phases: > * An online multi-stakeholder consultation is taking place on the online WSIS Community platform until 24 January. Stakeholders are invited to express and exchange their ideas in order to generate possible themes and potential speakers for the 2010 Forum. To join this discussion, please click here http://www.wsis-community.org/pg/announcements/view/15586 . > * Stakeholders can also submit their official contributions, by 5 February, through an online questionnaire [ http://www.itu.int/wsis/implementation/2010/forum/geneva/questionnaire/inde… ] or by sending a query to: wsis[at]itu.int. > * All submitted comments will be examined during the Final Review Meeting, which will take place at the ITU Headquarters in Geneva on 10 February. To register for this meeting please click here http://www.itu.int/wsis/implementation/2010/forum/geneva/registrationconsul… . Remote participation will also be possible via webcast, the link to which will shortly be available on the Forum's website http://www.itu.int/wsis/implementation/2010/forum/geneva/ . > > The WSIS Forum builds upon the tradition of the annual WSIS May meetings. The 2009 Forum attracted more than 400 participants representing governments, civil society/NGOs, private sector and intergovernmental organizations from around the world. The new format of the 2010 meeting is the result of last year's open consultations with all WSIS stakeholders. > > Detailed information on the preparatory process is available on the official website of the WSIS Forum 2010. Please take the opportunity to co-shape the agenda of the Forum with your ideas. > > Source: > http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=29434&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECT… > > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > Anup Kumar Das > New Delhi, India > http://anupkumardas.blogspot.com/ > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > > > The INTERNET now has a personality. YOURS! See your Yahoo! Homepage. http://in.yahoo.com/ > _______________________________________________ > Sigdl-l mailing list > Sigdl-l(a)asis.org > http://mail.asis.org/mailman/listinfo/sigdl-l

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yet another mindmap tool
by jeremy hunsinger 21 Jan '10

21 Jan '10

http://vue.tufts.edu/index.cfm this looks interesting and it integrates with zotero i'm told. some of you might find it worthwhile Jeremy Hunsinger Center for Digital Discourse and Culture Virginia Tech Information Ethics Fellow, Center for Information Policy Research, School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee http://wiki.tmttlt.com http://www.tmttlt.com Whoever ceases to be a student has never been a student. -George Iles

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EThOS: Free Downloads Of UK Dissertations/Theses From The British Library
by gerrymck 21 Jan '10

21 Jan '10

Colleagues/ Earlier today (On My Big 60 ooohhhhhh) [:-)] > I (re)discovered EThOS, the database of UK dissertations and theses provided by the British Library > [I saw a demo of a prototype [?] of the service by the developers [?] at a conference in England in 2008] Among other services, EThOS allows one to search / select / and in some/many cases download the full-text of items of interest FREE of charge! "The aim of EThOS is: •To offer a 'single point of access' where researchers the world over can access ALL theses produced by UK Higher Education •To support Higher Education Institutions through the transition from print to e-theses •To help UK Higher Education Institutions expand available content by digitising paper theses •To demonstrate the quality of UK research and help attract students and research investment into UK HE\ To achieve this, EThOS offers a coherent and consistent interface by implementing a central 'hub' comprising an e-store and a digitisation suite at The British Library site in Boston Spa, Yorkshire. The hub automatically harvests e-theses from Institutional Repositories and digitises paper theses from participating institutions to offer the single point of access. Many UK institutions support Open Access to their theses, so download of their digital and digitised theses is free to the researcher. A small number of participating institutions may not be able to offer Open Access and in this case the researcher may have to pay for the digitisation. Where a thesis must be digitised before supply, you can expect a short delay. However, you will be informed when the thesis is ready for collection and you can then log on to the system and download it. EThOS can only offer the theses of participating institutions. While we expect a large number of institutions to take part, we cannot supply from an institutions which chooses not to. In this case, you should approach the institution's library directly to gain access to a thesis." >>> "Search across 250,000+ theses for free and order full text quickly and easily" <<< Links To EThOS And Its About / FAQs / News / Etc >>> Available At [ http://tinyurl.com/yeedpp2 ] Enjoy ! /Gerry Gerry McKiernan Associate Professor Science and Technology Librarian Iowa State University Library Ames IA 50011 Follow Me On Twitter > http://twitter.com/GMcKBlogs >>> "The Future Is Mobile" >>>

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