Epistemographer

The two categories that I’m thinking a lot about are amateur identity and commons-based peer production. Both have enjoyed increasing cultural prominence over the past several years, and their emergence has been very much framed in revolutionary rhetoric.
I’ll begin with a simple declaration: I want to very much separate the categories of “amateur” and “commons-based [...]

originally published in a slightly-abridged fashion earlier this year in Annals of the History of Computing, IEEE, Vol. 27, No. 2. (2005), pp. 96-96

Earlier this year, O’Reilly Publishing introduced a new quarterly publication called Make. Addressing his readers, editor and publisher Dale Dougherty wrote, “More than mere consumers of technology, we are makers, adapting technology […]

As you might have already seen, Jason Kottke’s decided to make a go of blogging as his primary form of income. It’s definitely not going “pro” exactly, but it’s something different than what he’s been doing, and his choice actually ties in with some ideas about amateurs and professionals that I’ve been fleshing out lately [...]

I’ve spent the past few weeks working on and off with others at the Center on a grant application to the IMLS. We’re proposing to build a package of interfaces and extensions to Firefox that will in essence stick our Scrapbook and Scribe programs into the browser itself (where more and more research is done).

With [...]

Something interesting and a little bit amazing happened tonight. Around noon on Saturday, Jeralyn at Talk Left posted a plea for help (short version: her computer was dying, and she needed a new one to continue blogging from the road). Among others, Atrios linked to her request around 8 pm. Between then and the time [...]