Epistemographer

It happened again. Atrios posted a plea for donations to cover the cost of a new laptop (apparently, something involving a cat and a glass of wine rendered his less than healthy), and within three hours, he not only has enough donations to cover the cost of the coputer, but somebody had also bought him the thing outright off of his Amazon wishlist.

I swear, we’re only just beginning to see the power of individual tipping on a massively distributed scale. Read the comments on Atrios’ posts…they’re really interesting from a sociological standpoint in getting at why people chose to donate.

On a campus like Cornell’s, you’d like to think that it would be relatively easy to get a wireless internet connection up and running. Unfortunately, the campus wireless network is a patchwork of balkanized zones, with one overarching initiative linking some of them, but which doesn’t cover any of the buildings in which the Science & Technology Studies department lives and works.

To get a wireless connection on the seventh floor of Clark Hall (where this conference is), I had to go to a small room in the basement and plead with some network admins to add my MAC address to the list for their special, standalone wireless access point. Pain in the butt, but I’m online now.

Vie Alex Pang…

I so want one.

One of the things I love about my current project is reading projections of the future and corporate announcements from decades ago. Just ran across this one, from the Sept/Oct 1978 issue of The Videophile’s Newsletter:

“[The] Economist Magazine, from England, reports that Phillips is working on a flat-screen TV that will project a 3-D picture, hopes to market same by 1981. A mini-computer is said to control the picture and no special glasses are needed to view it.”

As I’m piecing together the first chapter of my dissertation (on enthusiastic hobbyists and the user communities that they formed around the VCR and other technologies in the late 1970’s/early 1980’s), I’m struck by how much easier it is to get ahold of information from certain sources than others. With a DSL line, a computer and a Cornell network ID, I have at my fingertips access to essentially every newspaper/magazine article published in the past two decades (via Lexis/Nexis), and articles from many academic journals from the same time period.

Of course, note that I said “…the past two decades.” Earlier today, for example, I wanted to quickly grab an article published in 1972. No dice.

I’ve run up against this before – a consequence of doing a lot of research on the 1970’s and 1980’s is that my work sits right on the threshhold of when things started to be digitized, meaning that sometimes it’s really easy for me to find things online, and sometimes I need to hit the archives. While that’s not so much of a logistical problem (so long as I’m near a convenient library that will let me use their collections), I’ve got to admit that digitized sources are much more user-friendly. Think of the cost in time and effort of that trip into the archives, wading through paper indices or, even worse, having to scan through months of a given newspaper on microfiche just to find one article.

Now, as historians are trained more and more in the use of digital archives, it seems likely that the accessibility of sources is going to become more and more of a factor in their research. That’s not to say that the next generation of historians will be “sloppy” or “lazy”…rather, I’m thinking that historians may increasingly be trained in the use of certain tools, and that fact that some sources aren’t accessible via those tools will change the kind of history that is done, sort of a “digital divide” within the literature (both primary and secondary).

Right now, this divide is just an issue for those of us who are working on recent history, but considering the number of initiatives I’ve seen in digital archiving, it may become more and more relevant.

UPDATE: So that my advisors don’t panic… (more…)

By Ruben Bolling, via Tom Tomorrow:

No writing recently, in large part because I haven’t been online very much lately. Came to a conclusion as I was driving up to Ithaca with Jenny last Wednesday that I need to rein in my online grazing, and I’ve noticed that as I’m reading blogs less and less, I’m feeling less of an urge to write here. I’m still mentally composing posts, just not feeling as much of an urge to bother writing them up at my computer. Reading blogs reinforces my desire to write in my own blog, and the opposite holds as well. Which leads me to two very interesting research questions that might be asked:

1. How many blog links are to other blogs, as opposed to external sites. In other words, how incestuous are the links within the blog community, as opposed to other online forms?

2. Do more frequent/higher volume bloggers tend to post more external (to the blog community) links, or more links to what other people are saying? Or is there no correlation at all?

Another interesting point that I’ve been noting lately is that the less I’m plugged in on a persistent basis, the less I feel like blogging. When I’m in Brooklyn, sitting at my desk with my Wi-Fi up and running, I feel a much stronger urge to write here than I do when I’m grabbing my e-mail on the go, running from city to city or meeting to meeting. On one hand, it’s a question of time, but there’s more to it than that – it’s as if I ease in and out of acquired habits based on my context (in particular, the peristence of my Internet connection).

Okay, this has to stop. Seriously. Every time I sit down at my computer, I find myself compulsively clicking through the list of about four dozen blogs in my “Favorites” menu (most of which I still need to add to the blogroll on the right). Moreover, when I do finally start working, I’m interrupted every so often with a vaguely OCD-ish need to check every blog to see if anybody’s posted anything new (and as much as I hate the dude’s politics most of the time, Glenn Reynolds’ posting frequency doesn’t help matters).

The problem seems to be that my daily internet reading is no longer limited to newspapers/magazines, which generally work on a daily news cycle at most (yeah, I know that online newspapers update through the day – hell, I worked at one – but we’re not talking about a constant stream of new material). Instead, I’m stuck with a bunch of blogs, updated frequently and at unpredictible schedules by lots of people whose writing and opinions I like and admire. I already know that I have compulsive tendencies when it comes to news (witness my near-pathological media consumption post-September 11th), and the whole blogosphere thing isn’t helping one bit.

Any suggestions/comments/12-step programs for dealing with this? Today I discovered that Trillian has an RSS plugin, which is only going to make things worse…

I just had this exchange with a computer:

19. Is it small? No.
18. Can it be painted? No.
17. Can it be washed? Yes.
16. Is it multicolored? No.
15. Can you get information by using it? No.
14. Is it heavier than a pound of butter? No.
13. Do you carry it in your pocket? No.
12. Do you use it at work? Yes.
11. Can you smell it? No.
10. Does it have a hole in it? No.
9. Is it comforting? Yes.
8. Would you find it in an office? Yes.
7. Is it soft? Yes.
6. Does it come in a pack? No.
5. Does it get wet? Irrelevant.
4. Is it a common household object? Yes.
3. Does it have a hard outer shell? No.
2. Would you find it on a farm? Yes.
1. It is classified as Other.

Now, looking at the questions above, how in the hell did it triangulate in on the correct guess: “I am guessing that it is a pair of pants?” I’m thoroughly impressed. Try it out yourself…

Check out Tribe.net…seems like a substantially more sophisticated network-driven service, far more flexible than Friendster, and more useful for those of us looking to do more than just meet people to date (for example, soon-to-be-job-hunting me)…sign up, and add me as a friend…