Uncategorized

Hacking: WYSIWYG

~ devo3000

Two weeks ago I noted that someone had recently tried to get into my WordPress server. My firewall traced the query back to an IP in China, though I don’t have the ability to figure out where it originated from initially. I linked it to news of escalating activity from abroad; it seems that attempts to get into academic networks are sharply on the rise.

Then a week ago my server collapsed under what seemed to be a DDOS attack. I tried to restart it several times, but everytime I got the server back up it was swamped with traffic. I’ve spent a good eight hours now launching a new server and migrating over content from a backup. Most of my posts are back, but I lost the last year’s worth of images. I’ve only been able to recreate or restore about half.

It’s all kind of creepy. And it may be beyond my capacity to try and stay on top of escalating security problems on a private blog. Apparently there’s a botnet that’s been hacking WordPress servers generally for the last several months. I like having my own site; I like the ability to post whatever content I want and try out different kinds of server technologies; my Omeka-based class last year depended on this capacity. But the bar is getting higher.

Machine Grading

~ devo3000

A friend of mine drew my attention to the NYTimes’ recent article on advanced in essay-grading software. It’s technology that will raise hackles at campuses around the country. The claim is that such programs are becoming sophisticated enough to grade college-level writing. Of course, their effectiveness is widely debated. The article helpfully includes a link to a study by Les Perelman which critiques the data being used to support such claims (he argues that sample size problems, confusion between distinct kinds of essays and grading systems, and loose assertions undermine the argument). The software is getting better, but it still doesn’t look like it can quite replicate the scores produced by human graders.

But such criticism is an argument at the margins. There is now clearly room for debate on both sides. Machines are comparable on standardized tests. The long-term trajectory is evident: if machines are roughly as effective as a force of part-time human graders, standardized tests will end up using the software to save money. They’ll keep some humans in the loop cross checking and validating, but the key incentives all point in the direction of greater automization. The reductive structures and simplistic arguments which we train students to replicate for these tests has laid the groundwork. We’ve already whittled essay writing into an algorithm.
Continue reading →

ICR2012: Zombies, Climate Change, and the End of the Two Cultures

~ devo3000

Just got back from ICR 2012 in Tempe, AZ. Huge thanks to Ron Broglio and Mark Lussier for hosting (and to my friend Michael Gamer for organizing my panel). I made some new friends and had a hell of a time — too much fun, really. If you’re interested, I’ve put the talk I gave up here.

But I wanted to quickly jot down some take-aways. First, climate events had a much larger impact on the Romantic period than I’d understood — perhaps even helping catalyze the French Revolution. Second, in an era of climate worries and Zombie apocalypse obsessions, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man may end up having a larger influence than Frankenstein:

Finally, the marvelous Marilyn Gaull gave a talk on Romantic science that was an inspiring opener. Her main point: that the “two cultures” are never so far apart as they seem. But as I was mulling it over later, I realized that institutionally, it feels like the two culture divide is collapsing. At universities, the humanities and sciences are increasingly fighting a joint rear-guard action against the expansion of professional schools into their curriculum. After mulling this over with some others at the conference, I’m pretty sure this trend isn’t particular to the schools I’ve worked at.

AP Testing and Public Education

~ devo3000

Now that I’m back in Philly, I’ve spent a part of this morning luxuriously catching up on my RSS feed over a cup of Stump Town coffee (thanks Kristen and Chad!). I see Stanley Fish has a second column up about DH (neither aggravating nor extraordinarily illuminating), and there was some kind of primary in New Hampshire.

But what caught my eye was a Chronicle op-ed by Michael Mendillo, astronomy prof. at BU, on why we should kill the AP testing program:

Offering credit beyond the accomplishment itself (simply because it was not easy to do) is a terrible lesson to give to students. I believe this notion of value-added has led to another version of getting more bang for the buck: the fantastic pressure put on students to get more than “just a bachelor’s degree” for their four years of tuition. Double-majors, multiple minors, and combined bachelor’s/master’s degree programs are becoming so mandatory for the best students that enrichment courses are simply not an option. Is that really the optimal way to achieve an educated citizenry?

Short answer: yes. After all, why should we offer separate degrees? Shouldn’t the quality of the effort be what matters? You could extend this line of thinking to get rid of the distinction between the B.A. & B.S., combine “magna” “suma” and plain-old “cum” laude honors, fold the M.D. into the D.O. — you can see where I’m going. The Ph.D. I was conferred for all that additional work beyond the M.A. didn’t feel like a terrible lesson. Continue reading →

Speculations on Fashion as Information Technology, or, Bellbottoms as a Series of Tubes

~ devo3000

Recently I’ve been enjoying an online discussion of the decline in fashion innovation. As Kurt Anderson observes, the visual innovation of mainstream American dress is far less pronounced when comparing someone from 1991 to someone in 2011, that 1971:1991, or 1951:1971. This violates our expectations for the forms of accelerating cultural development we sometimes ascribe to the twenty-first century. Anderson:

Now try to spot the big, obvious, defining differences between 2012 and 1992. Movies and literature and music have never changed less over a 20-year period. Lady Gaga has replaced Madonna, Adele has replaced Mariah Carey—both distinctions without a real difference—and Jay-Z and Wilco are still Jay-Z and Wilco. Except for certain details (no Google searches, no e-mail, no cell phones), ambitious fiction from 20 years ago (Doug Coupland’s Generation X, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow) is in no way dated, and the sensibility and style of Joan Didion’s books from even 20 years before that seem plausibly circa-2012.

But as Tyler Cowen and Alan Jacobs respond, there’s a big caveat to Anderson’s argument, since it explicitly excludes technology. Cowen notes that we still see innovation in information-dependent technologies:

Today the areas of major breakthrough innovation are writing, computer games, television, photography (less restricted to the last decade exclusively) and the personal stream. Let’s hope TV can keep it up, and architecture counts partially.

I think it’s fair to say that innovation in each of these areas has been driven by the proliferation of new and powerful technologies, from the impact of social media, the internet, and attendent cultural forms on the novel, to the power of new scripting and rendering technologies in architecture.

Yet I think this discussion just misses the more basic insight, which is that fashion, as a channel for communication, is an information technology. Continue reading →

First Post

~ devo3000

At the suggestion of a new-found friend and digital humanities compatriot (Matt Wilkins), I’m starting up a blog to keep track of my d.h. work, reading, and reflections. Over the next week or so, I’ll catch the blog up on the various projects I’ve been fiddling with over the past year, and suggest some of the avenues I’ll be pursuing. My goals are two-fold; to make the work (and the code associated with it) available to other researchers, and to hash out that work in a less formal environment. We’ll just have to see where all of this leads.