From the monthly archives:

June 2010

Is the Internet Remaking Us? Part II

29 June 2010
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Does the Internet make us smarter or dumber?
@smalljones dug up the following news articles in response to a discussion on this topic that will be held in our department this Friday afternoon. It is pure coincidence that the topic of the discussion is whether or not the Internet is remaking us — a topic [...]

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Is the Internet Remaking Us?

29 June 2010
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“We wonder, as the sum of all our knowledge and memories is uploaded, converted into bits, tagged and indexed, are we sacrificing what makes us human? Or evolving what it means to be human?” Jordan Clarke asks in his animation below, entitled Internet. The tagline for the animation is that it is “a visual metaphor [...]

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Data Envisioned as Flowing through a Cityscape

28 June 2010
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Or, should I say, a cityscape envisioned as data?
The animation below is called Data; it was created by Carine Bigot (@c4rin3). It shows data flowing through the streets of a city, with an accompanying futuristic soundtrack. As you watch the animation you will see the data flow from above and around the “buildings”, as [...]

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Visualization of the Metadata Universe

22 June 2010
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Jenn Riley, who is currently the Metadata Librarian with the Indiana University Digital Library Program, sent out a post to the DC-General mailing list yesterday, announcing the release of the wonderful visualization of the metadata universe. I will let her words speak for her; I have included the text of her email below. This resource [...]

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The Humanities Take on Data Mining via Google Books

22 June 2010
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The Humanities are “Going Google”, according to Marc Parry of The Chronicle, in a piece he wrote a few weeks ago.
The gist of the article is that some Humanities scholars are very interested in data mining the texts scanned in for the Google Books Project.
Why do they want to use Big Data mining techniques [...]

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The Multiple Aspects of Data Science

21 June 2010
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Earlier this month, Nathan Yau at FlowingData posted Mike Loukides‘ analysis of data science from O’Reilly Radar. I finally found some time to read it.
I really enjoyed the post. The author entitled it, “What is data science?“, and covered the various aspects of the newbie field, primarily from a commercial point of view. He examined: [...]

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Multitaskers Still Unable to Multitask Well

21 June 2010
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Matt Richtel at The New York Times wrote a piece a couple of weeks ago called, “Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price“. He profiled the Campbell family, who live outside of San Francisco, to demonstrate the toll the constant barrage of data via smartphones, computers, and the iPad, takes on both individuals and [...]

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