Bruno Latour on the missing materials in materialism
Steven Shaviro pulled a delightful quote from Bruno Latour’s recent book Enquête sur les modes d’existence. Une anthropologie des Modernes, which will be published in English next month as An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. I haven’t yet read the book in either language, but I’m reposting this quote in a QFT sort of vein.… read more
Three reviews as three lenses through which to approach and appreciate an unusual videogame.
Originally published at Gamasutra One: Nil Person Videogames are narcissistic. They are about you, even when they put you in someone else’s shoes. You are a space marine among hell spawn. You are a mafioso just released from prison. You are a bear with a bird in your backpack. You are a Tebowing Tim Tebow. We may think we play… read more
The rhetoric of "The Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age"
The Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age is a new document authored and signed by twelve scholars, technologists, and entrepreneurs including Duke professor and author Cathy Davidson, organizational technologist John Seely Brown, and Udacity CEO Sebastian Thrun. It’s been making the rounds among those of us interested in such topics, also receiving coverage at The… read more
Reviews, Links, Code, and Discussion
Some links to discussion about 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10. One of the common ways to interact with the idea seems to be writing and posting re-implementations of the program in other languages and environments. Geeta Dayal’s review of the book in Slate. Discussion on Reddit r/Programming, including a hilarious Enterprise Java version. A discussion at Stack Overflow stemming… read more
A whole book about a single line of code. By ten authors.
This book is available in digital or physical format. Buy from Amazon This book takes a single line of code—the extremely concise BASIC program for the Commodore 64 inscribed in the title—and uses it as a lens through which to consider the phenomenon of creative computing and the way computer programs exist in culture.The authors of this collaboratively written book… read more
On MLA Job Leaks
Today the Chronicle of Higher Education reports on MLA Job Leaks, an unauthorized, “rogue” website that is republishing the Modern Language Association (MLA) Job Information List (JIL). Currently university departments have to pay to list jobs, and job seekers have to be members of the MLA or the related Association of Departments of English (ADE) or the Association of Departments… read more
The office work of research
Partly responding to my recent post on ideas versus their commercialization among writers and intellectuals, I came across this excellent and tragic paragraph on the state of intellectual work in this post: â??Meanwhile, academic life is becoming an increasingly ordinary affair, a job in which you hurry from task to task in an attempt to satisfy the demands of your… read more
A quick image litanizer
You may be familiar with my Latour Litanizer, a simple example of what I call “carpentry” in Alien Phenomenology. It uses Wikipedia’s API to assemble randomized lists of objects of the sort I refer to as “Latour Litanies.” If you’ve read Alien Phenomenology, you may also remember a related example, that of the “image toy” I made to add some… read more
On massiveness, students, and flipped classrooms
The annual Computing Research Association conference is taking place this week at Snowbird in Utah, and one of today’s plenaries is about online eduction and Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs). Reading the description of the session, I noticed two common positions on MOOCs that I think are rhetorically effective yet misleading. The “massive” numbers of “students” Citing enormous enrollment numbers… read more
Some responses to the Alien Phenomenology reading group
Following the discussion of chapter 1, Darius Kazemi has posted discussion notes for chapters 2 and 3 of Alien Phenomenology—Ontography and Metaphorism, respectively. I thought I’d make a few comments on the topics discussed there. Time Time is discussed as a particularly mind-bending topic in OOO. AP doesn’t offer a theory of time; the conversation chez Darius is about meanwhile… read more