After my maps of public transportation distribution in Chicago and Paris got a bit of publicity, people started asking for more. Here, I try to consider issues of population density as well as the role of buses.
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[This post is a slightly enhanced version of an email I sent to the Humanist mailing list today in response to this message asking about the value of GIS curriculum in scholarship. Here, I begin by quoting the relevant parts of the original post] At my university, a vice president has been arguing that there [...]
A rectilinear map of the Amtrak system that makes the US look like a giant subway? If anyone in my family read anything I put online, I would presently write things like “this would be a great holiday present for me, you know!” Actually… the map …
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“If you have no clear idea of what you want to replace the state with, you have no right to subtract/withdraw from the state. Instead of taking a distance from the state, the true task should be to make the state itself work in a non-statal mode. The…
“By 1930 in the Soviet Union it was a different story. It was not that Marxist economics could not be quantitative but that it should not be quantitative. Stalin believed twinning mathematics and Marxist economics made it “the most reactionary bran…
“GIS indeed represents power to most audiences: it stands for funding and research grants, jobs, information, student enrollments, mesmerizing images on the computer screen, best solutions and locations, and the power to convince. This power derives …
“A networked, weak-tie world is good at things like helping Wall Streeters get phones back from teen-age girls.” – Malcolm Gladwell manages to write an article that isn’t completely annoying or simplistic, though it’s a little of both. This dia…
This xkcd comic from Monday has been forwarded around a bit. My own reaction was heavily influenced by @sepoy’s comment that maybe JFK was talking about the “global south (po folk)” avant la lettre. I think it’s funny that JFK could have merged the idea of the “Global South” with the literal southern hemisphere. Randall [...]
[A lot of the below is meandering toward what I suspect is a rather obvious conclusion to hardened veterans of the digital humanities. Since I'm not one of those, my own shoes needed to walk the mile. Of what transpires below, what might be new is, quickly, how while there is a call for digital [...]
Continue reading about Image vs. Text (also quant. vs. qual.)
Should a foreign language requirement for a literary studies PhD be fulfillable by a machine language? Or maybe even by a methods course (like a course in statistics, GIS, or some other competence in computational technology)? These questions have been on my mind since I flew back Sunday morning from an energizing time at lovely [...]
Continue reading about Learning a language: human vs. machine
