Code in the News

Volkswagen’s Diesel Fraud Makes Critic of Secret Code a Prophet

The code in automobiles is tightly protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Last year, several groups sought to have the code made available for “good-faith testing, identifying, disclosing and fixing of malfunctions, security flaws or vulnerabilities,” as Alex Davies reported last week in Wired.
A group of automobile manufacturers said that opening the code to scrutiny could create “serious threats to safety and security.” And two months ago, the E.P.A. said it, too, opposed such a move because people might try to reprogram their cars to beat emission rules.

Karen Barad on Apparatuses

[Niels] Bohr argues that classical physics seriously underestimates and undercounts the contribution that apparatuses make. Apparatuses are not mere instruments serving as a system of lenses that magnify and focus our attention on the object world, rather they are laborers that help constitute and are an integral part of the phenomena being investigated. Furthermore, apparatuses do not simply detect differences that are already in place; rather they contribute to the production and reconfiguring of difference. The failure to take proper account of the role of apparatuses in the production of phenomena seriously compromises the objectivity of the investigation. Accounting for apparatuses means attending to specific practices of differentiating and the marks on bodies they produce. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 2007, 232.
Screen Shot 2015-09-22 at 9.54.13 AMScreen Shot 2015-09-22 at 9.54.25 AM

Data Project Posts from the 2014 Praxis Class

Hi All,

If you would like to see posts that students in last year’s Praxis course made in connection with the dataset assignment, please look at the posts tagged “dataset” and “data project.”

If you’d like to look through the blog as a whole (used in both the Fall and Spring semesters), please visit http://cuny.is/dhpraxis14. And here is the 2013-2014 class archive, which included a great series of lectures. Perhaps we can talk next week about the different shapes this class has taken over the three-year period of its existence. In the first year, we brought in many guest speakers, but in response to student feedback, we have curtailed that over the past two years.

2 Things

Debate2TypeToken2
1) We’ve adjusted the calendar, switching Nov. 9 and Nov. 16 (the readings remain the same, just the topic changed).

2) I love the Language Log blog and today they introduced me to a neologism that seemed relevant to our current readings: “rhetoricometry — methods that let you analyze political discourse without having to listen to it or read it.” I wonder if Sample call this facile or difficult thinking?

@AcademicsSay

We’ll talk about scholarly communication all semester, and on Thursday specifically about Kirschenbaum’s argument that DH is in part “a populist term, self-identified and self-perpetuating through the algorithmic structures of contemporary social media,” but here’s a recent example of how it works in practice: the author of the popular parody Twitter account “Shit Academics Say” (@AcademicsSay) recently outed himself and described the reasons why he created the account. He even shares his graduate school syllabus on “Digital and Social Media in Higher Education.”

@AcademicsSay: The Story Behind a Social-Media Experiment: http://chronicle.com/article/AcademicsSay-The-Story/231195/

Welcome to the Digital Praxis Seminar!

We’re excited to begin this new year of work in the digital praxis seminar. Please use the blog to post your thoughts as we work through our course readings. Share resources, link out to conversations, comment on compelling (or frustrating) passages in our readings. Above all, please post comments on the work of fellow classmates.