Episode 41 – Interview With Stan Katz
30 April, 20094 comments
While Tom was out on paternity leave, Dan and Mills took the opportunity to interview Stan Katz (Princeton University). For those who don’t know Stan, he is the past president of the American Council of Learned Societies, an accomplished legal historian and Vice President for Research of the American Historical Association, and a lifetime Chicago Cubs fan. Stan is also, in many ways, one of the fathers of digital humanities. In the interview he discusses the past, the present, and the future of digital humanities from a perspective few can offer. We also ripped our way through the news of the past two weeks, including the incredible news that spending time on Facebook can lower your grades. Who knew?
Other links mentioned on the podcast:
Crowdsourcing on Twitter
The Twitter Revolution That Wasn’t
Running time: 48:15
Download the .mp3
Categorized under digital humanities, Facebook, social networking, Twitter
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Mills Kelly
brad : 8th May, 2009
Re: the possibility that China will block Twitter
Twitter coverage tends to focus on the short messages and the social relationships, and ignores the significance of the underlying technological structure, which has huge significance for these sorts of controls. If China wanted to block Facebook, it would be quite easy, because Facebook is a website.
Twitter, however, is not a website. It is a cloud of desktop apps, browser apps, phone apps, secondary websites, IM clients, and SMS – all connected through a promiscuously open API and cloud storage. Unless Twitter itself cooperated by blocking Chinese IP addresses, it would be extraordinarily difficult for China to block Twitter, without also blocking the entire s3.amazon.com subdomain. They might be able to deter usage by blocking the Twitter.com website and the primary download sites for the most popular apps, but they wouldn’t be able to stop secondary access through peer-to-peer or temporary mirrors.
Controlling social networks will become even more challenging when we get PAST Twitter and move onto systems that are even further decoupled from the traditional “one-app one-website” model of the WWW, as we will with tools like BrdFdr (Birdfeeder) and Laconica. This is the truly revolutionary significance of Twitter (not microblogging, TweetCongress, or THE_REAL_SHAQ).
Sean Kheraj : 23rd June, 2009
Thanks for putting together such a consistently great podcast. This is really a wonderful model for other historians and humanities researchers.
Regarding your discussion (and past discussions) about copyright, I wanted to bring your attention to a new project at the Network in Canadian History & Environment called “Notes on Knowledge Mobilisation”. I have recently started editing this page and devloping this project in order to bring attention to issues of copyright, open-access, and scholarly publishing to the Canadian environmental history community.
You can find this project at http://niche.uwo.ca/digital-infrastructure/knowmob
You can also listen to our podcast at http://niche.uwo.ca/naturespast
Caroline Bordinaro : 21st August, 2009
Librarians routinely assist faculty, researchers, graduate students, and (increasingly) undergraduates craft and refine their research projects. In fact, on many campuses, the subject specialist librarian is the go-to person in this area. Librarians have at least kept up with, if not been on the cutting edge of, the latest digital technologies for the production and dissemination of information. No need to imagine who will do this – your campus librarian is ready to help.
Tom Jean : 23rd May, 2011
Congrats that you managed to interview Stan Katz. He is an awesome guy and was also involved in the Michael Jackson Child Molestation case as an expert.