In their book Big Data, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier use the film Minority Report as a speculative lens to envision a society where decisions are driven by predictive algorithms drawing from a database of personal information. In a chapter titled “Risks”, they warn that “as troubling as the ability of business and government to…
Blog
Criticism in a field which is not one
Last week, a classmate namedropped Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in class discussion and I had a bit of a fangirl moment. I’m not going to lie – Sedgwick’s article on paranoid vs reparative reading was a big influence on one of my term papers last year and continued to influence me while developing my major research…
Accessibility of Information: IT, Academics, and the Internet
We’ve all heard the stereotypes about the IT… not the tech department, but the Ivory Tower of academia. Even the name connotes its pristine and precious nature, its rarity, it’s high-and-mighty nature (not to mention its whiteness sourced from colonial oppression and illegal trade). Its halls, hallowed. Its customs, arcane. Its usefulness to the world,…
Love, literary canons, and gatekeeping behaviour
Canonical texts are beloved. Assembling the literary output of (what amounted to mostly dead, mostly white, mostly male) authors and examining their themes, their tropes, their references to politics and art history and so on, is what made English departments in the Western world historically great – their ability to take texts and relate their…
On Facebook and Privacy (from the archives!)
Note: whoa, I found this post from November 2014 sitting in my drafts pile! Am publishing it now because it’s an interesting retrospective on my thought process at the time. I’m not this cynical about the voting process – or at least, on most days I’m not. Just an FYI for those friendly folks I…
PRIVATE – KEEP OUT: On digital / writing platforms and internet security
In one of my courses this semester (“introduction to digital humanities”) we are asked to make biweekly blog posts to “think aloud”, rant, engage in debate, etc. Several of my classmates balked at this (citing issues of security and privacy, mostly), and others were excited, especially with regards to the ease and informality of web…