deuxlits

my dream spring quarter

Originally uploaded by cupcup

here are my books on tap for next quarter. i imagine this being the syllabus for my dream class about anthropologies of open source and development. anyone want to start a reading group with me?

the vietnamese government has recently decided to crack down on bloggers. following the release of a government circular laying out the new official stipulations for blogging. much like anywhere else, the rubber hits the road not so much in the articulation of law but more in its implementation. so this alone doesn’t necessarily surprise me. what’s interesting about this is the underlying metaphors that frame the justification of these legislative controls. speech in blogs has been cast as a damaging kind of communication that diseases a cultural body. these so-called offensive blog are described as “black blogs” and are somehow contrary to vietnamese customs and habits. i also read somewhere that south korea intends to move in a similar direction and the kind of language they used to justify these measures entailed some kind of perilous “infodemic.” does anyone know where this term “infodemic” comes from? who originated it? i’m just a bit confused about this disease metaphor and information. i suppose what’s most fasinating for me is that these disease are interna, that they originate from within rather than being brought from some external force. has anyone else seen this metaphor in other places?

dong ngo over at cnet has been blogging about technology in vietnam lately and recently blogged about dating and the new digilanguage of love: emoticons. now, my vietnamese is just so-so i will admit. and while i grew up speaking vietnamese, i was born in the states and am only now just learning how to read and write properly. so this blog post was a nice schooling session into a world that i’m barely tapping into.

he writes in his post:

“Though most Yahoo IM emoticons are designed to mean something that’s widely understood, there are some that are interpreted here entirely differently from what they are originally designed to mean.
For example, the “time out” smiley (formed by :-t characters) is used by some to actually mean “I am going to hammer you on the head”. The “talk to the hand” and “bring it on” smileys (formed by =; and >:/ , respectively) are sometimes used to mean “bye bye.” And the “not worthy” sign ^:)^ is used to mean “po’ tay”, which is a trendy not-in-the-dictionary Vietnamese way to say “You are too much, I give up.”"

for me it was interesting to see how emoticons become appropriated and assigned new meanings. is something in the visual display of the emoticon that gives it new meaning in the vietnamese context? something as seemingly minute as a simple emoticon has a new kind of life as it moves from english to the vietnamese. it makes me wonder what other kinds of reinterpretations of emoticons exist in other languages. or what is an emoticon in chinese? does it work in the same way?

Somehow during finals week, I managed to find some time to work on some fun stuff! Along with Mark Hansen, Sasank Reddy, Jerry Mascia, and Alberto Pepe, we came up with TwitFlick for the Webbys. It pulls real-time feeds from both Flickr and Twitter to create micro-narratives that represent the current digital pulse. Digital Kitchen worked on the visualization. Peep it!

Musical Tesla Coils playing Mario Bros

Holy cow, here’s a short video of two tesla coils programmed to play the mario brother’s theme song.

so my old stomping grounds, ISKME is looking for a research assistant/associate. they’ve been busy working on really interesting projects in open content and more generally information practices in education and learning. they’re based in beautiful half moon bay and i highly encourage those of you who are interested is issues of education, digital information, and open access to apply. you can see the full ad here.

so i have been in montreal for the past couple of days, attending 4S. i have to say that this is a wonderful conference. i’ve met some wonderful people and have had some awesome conversations with faculty and other grad students. the highlight so far has been my conversation with susan leigh star on interrelationships and opportunities between designers and social scientists. also, she gave me a 10 minute breakdown of boundary objects which really inspired a lot of new thinking

it’s been a horrifically stimulating experience with several themes coming up. to no surprise issues of open source, participation, collaboration, and sharing have been some cross cutting themes. this in and of itself is of no surprise, however there have been real variations in the approaches that people take to this issue. what’s been particularly interesting is the critiques of web 2.0 issues and most of them have focused primarily on questions of privacy and surveillance. i don’t know if this is a particularly north american POV, however i was surprised by the lack of critiques from a political economy perspective in terms of labor and ownership, which was an overriding theme from the new network theory conference back in july.

my panel on forgetting went well. julie cohen did a fanstasic job of summing up and responding to all of our presentations. in case you were wondering, mine was trying to frame the debate on sex offender in terms of a convergence between cultures of data capture and surveillance. i identified several themes in light of this convergence and tried to establish corollaries from a forgetting  perspective. regardless, this project is still in development stages and hopefully will be more flushed out as the months progress.

alright. to fulfill this month of canadia-mania, i’m off to aoir in vancouver!

i will be heading to amsterdam at the end of this week and was wondering if anyone had tips for the week that i will be there. i hear that marijuana is legal there. heh. joking aside, i’d like to check out galleries, cute neighborhoods for people watching, interesting buildings, fun bike routes, yummy places to eat…you know the travel drill. i will also be giving a talk with leah on linking and network theory at the new network theory conference, so wish me luck! public speaking makes me feel awkward and incompetent.