Archive

Strange Bedfellows: Digital Humanities, Internet Art, and the Weird Internet

I’m here at MITH today, and I want­ed to talk a lit­tle bit about dig­i­tal human­i­ties from my posi­tion as an inter­est­ed out­sider. I’ve always kept a fin­ger in acad­e­mia, at first through game stud­ies and peo­ple study­ing video games, and more recent­ly through elec­tron­ic lit­er­a­ture and those fields. I’m not going to go into a what is it?” debate because I know every­one who’s in dig­i­tal human­i­ties is very tired of those, but we know when we see it, right?

Bot Activism Through Tools Instead of Content

So what I did was I made a pret­ty pow­er­ful anti-harassment tool, and I’m kind of leery of… It’s one of those things that like I, I feel weird about it because I don’t have a tremen­dous use for it myself, but I know that oth­er peo­ple do. And I’ve talked to peo­ple about this, and I sort of made the deci­sion not to put it on Github or be pub­lic about it for main­ly the rea­son that I think Twitter is kind of weird with harass­ment, and I think they’re weird with block­ing, and I think they have a strange track record of mak­ing the tools that are use­ful to peo­ple who are try­ing to pro­tect them­selves and be safer sort of weird­ly hard­er to access and kind of obscure.

@congressedits: Politics + Wikipedia + Twitter = ?

I think there’s a set of bizarre indi­vid­u­als in the Capitol build­ing that once they real­ized that @congressedits was there and had a lot of fol­low­ers, they were adding these crazy things to Wikipedia. So in this case somebody’s say­ing Rumsfeld was an alien lizard.