This was a talk given March 3, 2010 for Gary Marchionini's Video Information seminar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science.

“Daily,” Bilig wrote, “the nation is indicated, or ‘flagged’, in the lives of its citizenry.”  Focusing less on a waving flag than on “the flag hanging unnoticed on the public building,” Billig insisted, is necessary to really understanding how “the embodied habits of social life” reproduce nations in everyday contexts.

Reading Billig’s book after the explosion of the internet and the later advent of Web 2.0, I got to thinking about its continued relevance in digital environments. 

Before his talk last week as part of the Duke Provost's Lecture Series, I had the opportunity to conduct a brief interview with Professor Jonathan Zittrain.

It is completely right to say that ‘children’ determine the next generation

At the end of February, I attended and presented at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900. Over the course of three days I was fortunate to see a number of excellent panels, three of which I have given summaries of in the post.

The problem with Facebook  or Twitter is that they encourage people to give away their most valuable data set – the stories of their lives. Digital Storymakers is a cooperative social network site that returns the economic power of information to the people that own it.

The responsibility of technical authority does begin to question what ethical, social, and professional surveillance is acceptable in response to ICT technology in the workplace. Surveillance in the work place is not necessarily new; it has long been around in the form of corporate policy, collective behavior and social traditions.

how can we make search algorithms more transparent, interactive, or engaging?

Artist Nicholas Knouf and I are teaching a 7 week lab course for the Finger Lakes Film Festival this year on the theme of Open Space.

The paper can be found in the DAC publication proceedings (with images):

http://escholarship.org/uc/search?entity=ace_dac09_humanist 

Just another quick announcement for the next installment in the "What does digital scholarship do?" HASTAC Scholars series at the University of Washington:

On Monday, March 8th at 3:30 p.m, Meghan Trainor (Center for Digital Art & Experimental Media (DXARTS)) will be facilitating our next meeting, on "Digital Fabrication and the Database: 3D Printing Metadata Models in Digital Research," which is open to the public at the Simpson Center for the Humanities.  Below is a description of what to expect, and here is the flier (in PNG).  Looking forward!