Submitted by Michael Widner on Feb 15, 2010, 11:49 AM

Bibliopedia will be an open research-enabling platform designed to unify the many disparate, closed silos of scholarly information that are available today but remain difficult and time-consuming to employ. Too often, much of a researcher’s effort is spent simply bringing together all of the available information on a particular subject. What is more, a common complaint of Google Books, Google Scholar, WorldCat and other digital research tools is the fact that their automatic parsers have errors in their metadata that they do not allow subject matter experts to repair.

Submitted by Michael Widner on Nov 04, 2009, 01:37 PM

Collaboration is one of the concepts frequently discussed among those in the humanities and those studying social networking. How do we facilitate it? What tools make it effective? What cognitive models should we use? How can the drive for it inform pedagogy? These and many other questions we explore on a regular basis with the assumption that collaboration is likely to create new, useful knowledge, is a necessary skill for our students to learn, and is probably the direction toward which current technological tools are driving us, so we need to understand it. Nevertheless, one place where collaboration is rarely, if ever seen, is in the conventional research done by humanities scholars.

Submitted by Michael Widner on Oct 05, 2009, 01:57 PM

Even though I just argued that we should pay attention to technology beyond social media and computers, I can't pass this one up. A man was recently arrested for tweeting the locations of police to G-20 protesters. If you read the Huffington Post, you may already know this, but this Ars Technica post (and the New York Times piece it links to) provides significantly more detail. Eliot Madison, the self-described anarchist in question, was apparently using a police scanner to warn protesters about which areas to avoid:

Submitted by Michael Widner on Oct 04, 2009, 02:59 PM

The lawnmower, technology so humble (Charlotte: near the ground) we've demoted it to mere tool. But, technology it is, clearing not only fields and lawns but space for wondering why we use it at all.

Submitted by Michael Widner on Sep 26, 2009, 09:55 AM

ReadWriteWeb takes to task a recent USA Today article by Jon Swartz that warns against the dangers of the real-time web. Marshall Kirkpatrick, the lead writer for RWW, humorously compares the USA Today article to Reefer Madness, the 1936 film that has become something of a cult classic for its hyperbolic depiction of the evils of marijuana use.

Submitted by Michael Widner on Sep 11, 2009, 11:01 AM

ReadWriteWeb, a site that covers technology news, social media, and the business of technology (among other topics), has a new post up that seeks to explain how Facebook was able to beat Myspace to become the dominant social media site. Dana Oshiro, the post's author, argues that rather than the aesthetic difference causing the migration, it was primarily the introduction of Facebook Connect that ushered in the current era of Facebook ubiquity.

Submitted by Michael Widner on Sep 08, 2009, 01:41 PM

Although much of what we discuss here at HASTAC tends to revolve around our own research interests and work at the university-level, in this post I'm going to discuss computing for kids. Since I have a young child myself, who will soon turn four, I have been investigating educational software lately and have found a wealth of resources. There are several different Linux distributions designed with school children in mind. For those of you not familiar with Linux and its very large (and ever-growing) ecosystem of different flavors, allow me a brief explanation.

Submitted by Michael Widner on May 14, 2009, 09:58 PM
I came across two items of interest recently, both treating the ways in which we communicate with students. It looks like online office hours are catching on. Stanford now has professors holding office hours on F

Submitted by Michael Widner on Feb 22, 2009, 11:42 AM
The discussion happening in the "What's Going On in Digital Humanities?" forum has made me wonder, why doesn't HASTAC provide a pedagogy wiki that outlines effective ways to use technology in the classroom?

Submitted by Michael Widner on Feb 16, 2009, 11:05 AM
For the past month or so, I have been collecting links to articles discussing Facebook. Most of them, as you might expect, discuss the privacy issue the site raises. After all, the value in the site comes precisely from the relative openness it requires from its users. The more you update and share, the more ?friends? you add, the more interesting the site becomes and the more comments you receive from others. While most people are, I think, relatively aware that the site involves a degree of sharing that is not compatible with absolute privacy, there are a number of nuances raised by the articles I've read that we may not be immediately aware of and which I would like to examine. I also have a very few words to say on another favorite topic of privacy advocates: the future of privacy itself