Political Correctness and Academic Punking
Political correctness is hot once again. Donald Trump is beating the drum against political correctness in his speeches and I suddenly feel like I was back in college. I was a freshman at Yale...
View ArticleRethinking Internet Addiction
When I first read the news reports about internet addiction in the early and mid-2000s I dismissed the idea. How, I thought, could anyone be addicted to the internet? Again in the mid-2000s I started...
View ArticleLibraries, Data, and Collectionism
So I’ve been thinking about a way to describe the enthusiasm about big data that has captured the business, government, and academic worlds over the past decade. I will admit up front that the rapid...
View ArticleZen and the Art of Science Popularization
I remember reading a stack of popular physics books back in the 1980s and 1990s that proposed a connection between quantum physics and Eastern philosophy. For example, The Tao of Physics by Fritjof...
View ArticleAnniversaries, atomic and otherwise
So my memory for myself and history must be sagging because I completely forgot about the 70th anniversary of the atomic bomb being dropped by the United States on Japan on August 6, 1945. I read a...
View ArticleThe Social Sciences and Scale
The following are some preliminary thoughts on scale, epistemology, the social/human sciences, and philosophy spurred by some recent reading on the web. A recent article raised the question about the...
View ArticleCitizen Science and Open Data
I spoke on a panel last week about citizen science and open data. The panel was one of the events put on by the University of Alberta library for Open Access week. I went first so my presentation...
View ArticleOn loops, feedback, and other symbology
A recent article at Aeon magazine proposed that one of the master symbols of twentieth century biology, the double-helix structure of DNA, should be replaced by the symbol of a feedback loop. Jamie...
View ArticleInformation ecologies in another context
This post is a partial response to a post at the CLIR blog on information ecology and morality by Timothy Norris. In 1999 Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O’Day published the book Information Ecologies: Using...
View ArticleDeath of a Library Search Box
I’ve been thinking about how libraries can become better at serving researchers and expert users, especially through their front pages. A recent news item from the University of Tennessee library...
View ArticleJohn Unsworth at CLIR Camp plus Libraries and Scholars Interacting Over Time
John Unsworth spoke at the CLIR-DLF postdoctoral camp last week. I thought he presented some interesting ideas about the emerging cross-connections between libraries and publishers, as well as some...
View ArticleWhy is Popper so popular?
There is a disconnect between the philosophy of science as it is practiced by philosophers and the philosophy of science as it is interpreted by scientists. I think this difference is the main reason...
View ArticleA Flash of Mortality
A few hours ago I learned that Iain Banks, one of my favorite SF authors over the last twenty years, has been diagnosed with cancer. I was in the middle of writing up some of my research on citizen...
View ArticleFacebook and Me and You and Society and Value
I’m conflicted about Facebook. I would have been an eager supporter of a social network like Facebook ten years ago. I dreamed of a computer program that would show you everyone’s interests, what books...
View ArticleHow did you become interested in social science?
We were talking in class yesterday about how each of us became interested in social science, specifically sociology. What kind of articles did we admire or remember? A few people mentioned some...
View ArticleCandles, Faraday, and Teaching
I’m giving a guest lecture to a STEM class in about two weeks. I plan to talk about my research into citizen science. One of the questions I want to get the students thinking about is what makes...
View ArticleComps – the experience of grad school
I participated in a panel with some fellow third-year grad students in CCI this afternoon. We talked about our experiences with comprehensive exams, mostly to students who haven’t finished them or are...
View ArticleEntrepreneurs, Labor, and Citizen Science
Venkatesh Rao, the blogger at ribbonfarm has written a three-part series “Entrepreneurs are the new labor” for Forbes. His basic argument is that entrepreneurs are becoming a new labor class. Twenty...
View ArticleThe Rhetoric of C. Wright Mills
Reading The Power Elite is a joy. Mills writes with clarity, verve, and emotion. He clearly feels that something is out of kilter in American society and that social science can help to understand the...
View ArticleC. Wright Mills and the Past of Elite Theory
I’m digging a further into elite theory and uncovering a rich history of material that makes me feel both inadequate and intensely interested in learning more. I’m currently working my way through The...
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