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  1. alyssarae

    Mitchell McInnis, “Conversation with a Dead Man: Foucault on Facebook and Confession”

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    Turning from panopticism (which I’m still unsure is a word) toward Foucault’s confessional, I look at Mitchell McInnis’ blog post from Hoboeye.com, which seems to be a possibly-temporarily-defunct online publication about wandering. I annotate this because the beginning raises an interesting lens for thinking about Facebook–a similar lens to the one I am thinking through–though it […]
  2. alyssarae

    Electronic Scholarly Editions: Using Electronic Maps to Explore Willa Cather’s Life and Works

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    Looking around a few different electronic scholarly editions of authors’ works this week, I came across the Geographic Chronology project, which maps American author Willa Cather’s life and travels, in order to think about how they relate to her writing. Willa Cather, known widely for  O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and The Song of the Lark, according to Wikipedia, […]
  3. alyssarae

    Crowdsourcing, Undergraduates, and Digital Humanities Projects

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    Originally posted on Rebecca Frost Davis:
    Crowdsourcing could be a silver bullet for integrating digital humanities methods into the undergraduate curriculum.  Why? “Crowd” by flickr user James Cridland Crowdsourcing means getting the general public to do tasks. Jeff Howe explains the phenomenon in “The Rise of Crowdsourcing” (Wired Magazine, June 2006) by analogy with outsourcing. …
  4. alyssarae

    James Boyle, “Foucault in Cyberspace: Surveillance, Sovereignty, and Hardwired Censors”

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    Jeez, I thought the last article I read was too old. This 1997 article applies a somewhat Foucauldian framework to thinking about the “Holy Trinity” of the internet in its adolescence–three ideas which have had a profound impact and may be seen as foundational to today’s internet culture: “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around […]
  5. alyssarae

    Andrew Hope, “Panopticism, Play and the Resistance of Surveillance: Case Studies of the Observation of Student Internet Use in UK Schools”

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    This 2005 article is based on a study of UK post-primary schools: the researcher observed and interviewed students, teachers, and staff about methods of monitoring what students do on school computers and students’ resistance of these methods. He begins by establishing a framework based on Bentham’s panopticon, which, importantly, works via the prisoners’ perception, but […]
  6. alyssarae

    Google Ngrams

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    Thank you, Google! This is such a neat tool, and if I had a project that involved more intensive big data-type research, this would be amazing. Google Ngrams allows you to enter search terms, and then it graphs the occurrences of those terms across all of Google Books’ holdings. For now, I played around on […]
  7. alyssarae

    Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture

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    I only read the intro to this book, because who has time to read more?, but Lessig sets up an interesting argument here. He begins with two stories: that of the Wright brothers and the subsequent Supreme Court case in with the Causby brothers challenged airlines’ rights to trespass in their “property”–the airspace above their […]
  8. alyssarae

    Foucault, Surveillance, etc: Planning

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    I need to go out into the world and do some reading, but for now, for the Daily Create assignment, I’ll lay out a plan for attacking this thing. 1. Gonna do some reading–I have my crazy to-do list calendar. All that dark green is time I’ll be spending reading so that I can coherently […]
  9. alyssarae

    What is Creative Commons?

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    Today we’re gonna learn about Creative Commons. I had a general idea of what this term meant before–something about granting license to use or not use creative works online in certain ways. So, a quick Google search brings me to Wikipedia which brings the details into focus: Creative Commons is a non-profit which developed and […]
  10. alyssarae

    Foucault, Surveillance, and the Digital Confessional

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    That’s a tentative title, of course.   For my final project for English in the Digital Age, for the sake of this blog and all of you, my lovely followers, and for the sake of knowledge and communities of critical thought, I will be developing a critical, multimedia essay reading social media through a Foucauldian […]
  11. alyssarae

    Review of Dave Eggers’ The Circle

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    Just finished. I’m still reflecting, and I don’t often write reviews of books right after I finish them–gotta let it marinate. This one is certainly still marinating. But, if I don’t force myself to write it now, I don’t know if I’ll care enough to when I’m five days out. Overall, I like it much […]
  12. alyssarae

    Groupthink Moral Absolutism

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    ‘Okay, with that kind of thing, one of two things will eventually happen. First, we’ll realize that whatever behavior we’re talking about is so widespread and harmless that it needn’t be secret. If we demystify it, if we admit that it’s something we all do, then it loses its power to shock. We move toward […]
  13. alyssarae

    Some thoughts on e- versus physical books

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    Reading a physical book means I highlight differently. Reading a physical book means I can’t just drag my finger over a moment that fascinates me. Instead, I have to unsettle myself, find my pen, underline, attempt to annotate legibly, and maybe flip to the front of the book for a sticky tab. Reading a physical […]
  14. alyssarae

    Thinking about aphorisms and The Circle


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    I found this passage that seems relevant in Suzy Anger’s Victorian Interpretation, in which she quotes George Eliot in The Mill on the Floss: All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive repugnance to the men of maxims because such people early discern that the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by […]
  15. alyssarae

    All that happens must be known

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    The Circle by Dave Eggers is a dystopian story of a young woman, Mae, who gets a job at the premier, most widely-used, wealthiest technology company (monopoly), The Circle, which seems to have so much power, and penetrates people of the developed world’s lives so deeply, that it becomes like an oppressive government, like that […]
  16. alyssarae

    Farman, “The Myth of the Disconnected Life”

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    It’s really lovely to read something that isn’t griping about damn-kids-these-days, always-plugged-in. Farman lays out the claims of those who argue we are disconnected from experience and others because of the pervasiveness of technology, then brilliantly tells the history of this crisis (reminds me of the regularly-occurring crises of writing!), going all the way back […]

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