Digital Humanities the Next Big Thing at the MLA

Brainstorm - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Clearly, the merger of literature and technology is no longer the obsession of a few hobbyists, though too many are still working in the academic equivalent of their parents' basements.
Digital literacy is going to be as essential as information literacy and critical thinking. And English departments can have an important role to play in fostering those new skills. Or -- if we overstress traditionalism and resist innovation because it's more comfortable -- we can cede that ground to other departments such as communications and computer science, making ourselves even less relevant and supportable than we presently are.

Is it the bandwagon of fear, opportunity, or commitment. Sounds like all those New Year's resolutions one can't help but reading now--full of optimism, determined to make the future better, but as Pannapacker points out lacking much of the skilled people to bring about the transition.

We are all digital immigrants now.

Interview | Danah Boyd: 'People looked at me like I was an alien' | Technology | The Guardian

But there's one cliche in particular that annoys Danah Boyd: the "digital native".
"There's nothing native about young people's engagement with technology," she says, adamantly.
The Microsoft researcher, who has made a career from studying the way younger people use the web, doesn't think much of the widely held assumption that children are innately better at coping with the web or negotiating the hurdles of digital life. Instead, she suggests, they're pretty much like everyone else.
"Young people are learning, they're learning about the social world around them," she says. "The social world around them today has mediated technologies, thus in order to learn about the social world they're learning about the mediated technologies..."

When you think about it, it makes sense. Why would they be different? Perhaps young people spend more time in the online world, and perhaps they are more invested in it, but they still have to figure out the rules, same as everyone else.

Social Networks and Anti-Social Power

How dictators watch us on the web « Prospect Magazine
by Evgeny Morozov

Social networking, then, has inadvertently made it easier to gather intelligence about activist networks. Even a tiny security flaw in the settings of one Facebook profile can compromise the security of many others. A study by two MIT students, reported in September, showed it is possible to predict a person’s sexual orientation by analysing their Facebook friends; bad news for those in regions where homosexuality carries the threat of beatings and prison. And many authoritarian regimes are turning to data-mining companies to help them identify troublemakers. TRS Technologies in China is one such company. It boasts that “thanks to our technology, the work of ten internet cops can now be done by just one.”

The technologies that allow freedom also allow control. This all makes perfect sense, sadly. Everything can be hacked, by any side. But the growing theme for all social network users--wherever they are--is the creeping (or galloping) loss of freedom and loss of anonymity.

A whole Library of Congress, eh?

Books of The Times - In ‘Googled,’ Ken Auletta Explores Company’s Inner Workings - Review - NYTimes.com

Google has become such a household term that its name has morphed into a verb. “Its index contained one trillion Web pages in 2008,” Mr. Auletta writes, “and according to Brin, every four hours Google indexed the equivalent of the entire Library of Congress.”

The NYT provides a link to other articles about the Library of Congress, but not to a definition of the unit--neither, presumably did Brin. The unit is frequently an abstraction based on the number of books in the library. Michael Hart's calculation is that a library of congress equals about 13 terabytes. But Matt Raymond writing in the Library of Congress blog, notes that

we can as of this moment say that the approximate amount of our collections that are digitized and freely and publicly available on the Internet is about 74 terabytes. We can also say that we have about 15.3 million digital items online.

Perhaps Mr. Brin or other people who throw around this unit of measurement, should be more specific.

Ken Auletta's cut last chapter from his book on Google

Ken Auletta : Media Maxims