Day of DH

Today for Day of DH I thought it worthwhile to write an actual blog post for the first time in many months.  Like others who have switched over to short format postings on platforms such as Twitter, most of my blogging activities have been suspended in recent years, although I still write for DML Central and a few other places.  Since becoming Director of the Culture, Art, and Technology program at UC San Diego during a time of devoting myself largely to conventional print publications, it has been difficult to find time for even one posting despite having written over a thousand such entries in previous years.

Of course, blogging has been important for expressing solidarity with a distinctive kind of digital politics, even if -- as Geert Lovink points out -- so often that politics only merits a "zero comments" response.  On Wednesday, Lovink presented a talk about "Wikileaks beyond Julian Assange" at UC Irvine, which raised a number of interesting questions about how anonymity and celebrity function as part of particular algorithmic rhetorics.  The talk also reminded me why I continue to argue for more "hacktivism" in the digital humanities, as I do so here in the Debates in the Digital Humanities collection.

Lovink noted that Wikileaks was made possible by the confluence of the decreasing costs of maintaining a megabyte of data and the increasing strength of technologies for anonymous encryption, such as those documented by Andy Greenberg in This Machine Kills Secrets.  However, Lovink argued that Assange had fallen prey to the "hacker as hero as trap," and that photo ops with Lady Gaga Issue detracted from online advocacy desperately needed for the pending court case against famed Wikileaks informant Bradley Manning.   Although Harvard Professor Yochai Benkler may make the argument for leniency publicly in "The Dangerous Logic of the Bradley Manning Case," what Lovink calls the "global fallout" of this particularly Wikileaks case, primarily involving the release of diplomatic cables, has been featured in news coverage in India, Zimbabwe, and many other countries.  (To understand the narrative of stakeholders, Lovink recommended Wikileaks: The Secret Life of a Superpower from the BBC.)

Like any Internet meme Wikileaks has spawned many imitators.  As Lovink observed, websites with leaked documents now range from the Al Jazeera-sponsored The Palestine Papers to Porn Wikleaks, which is devoted to providing the real names of actors in adult films located from an HIV/AIDS testing database, to the GuttenPlag Wiki that locates plagiarized passages in the dissertations of German political leaders.   Some links are now defunct among Lovink's list of copycats, such as the now defunct Murdoch Leaks website.  Yet, as Lovink also pointed out, the work of Wikleaks continues with The Syria Files, even after the defection of Daniel Domscheit-Berg.  Wikileaks also clearly inspired The Afghanistan Papers, Balkan Leaks, and Global Leaks.

Although Lovink appreciated the aesthetic gesture of works like "Delivery for Mr. Assange," he was concerned that the narrative of the cyber-outlaw obfuscated the work of coalition building and the importance of how Wikileaks once functioned in a larger ecology of free software and online activism.  For example the temporary allegiance between Wikileaks and Anonymous,  Lovink argued, indicated that tensions between journalism (the supposed mission of Wikileaks) and activism (the supposed mission of Anonymous) and that leaking information and mining information to leak could involve two very different kinds of user practices.

Having taught a course on Digital Journalism, I know that major news stories often depend on affiliations with media organizations that are well-financed enough to fund lawsuits that force information to be released.  With media conglomeration and free culture norms weakening newspapers and broadcast news, investigative journalism is rapidly becoming defunded, so anonymous submission of leaked material becomes the only way to break big stories.

What does this have to do with the digital humanities?  Large corpora of documents that are not carefully curated -- such as those on leak sites -- invite intrepid digital humanists to do creative data mining, and

Of Whistle-Blowers and Figureheads

This week the face of Mark Zuckerberg is beginning to grace newsstands on the TIME cover for the 2010 Person of the Year. Yet many have questioned the choice of someone with relatively little policy influence, even if the supporting article describes Zuckerberg being visited by FBI chief Mueller in his Silicon Valley offices.

In particular, supporters of WikiLeaks founder Julia Assange are deluging the news magazine's website with complaints that their hero (or anti-hero), the infamous high-profile Australian-born whistle-blower known for leaking diplomatic cables from the U.S. government, is being snubbed by the mainstream press.

To TIME's credit, they did grant Assange the honor of being a chief "runner-up" to Zuckerberg's coverboy status. However, in the article that acknowledges Assange's influence, the introductory rhetoric is striking.

On Dec. 9, 2006, an unsolicited e-mail arrived for Daniel Ellsberg, the whistle-blower of Vietnam War renown. The return address said only "WikiLeaks," and the signature at bottom, "WL." In the orotund prose of a manifesto, the message invited Ellsberg to become the public face of a project "to place a new star in the firmament of man." Ellsberg knew nothing of the group, which had yet to make its debut. Nor had he heard of its leader, a then 35-year-old Australian named Julian Assange, best known in his own circles as a teenage hacker turned "cypherpunk" — a prolific coder with visions of technology as a tool for political change.

The audacity of the e-mail kept Ellsberg reading. WikiLeaks aimed at nothing less than the decline and fall of oppression by organized exposure of its secrets. "Governance by conspiracy and fear," the author wrote, depended on concealment. "We have come to the conclusion that fomenting a world wide movement of mass leaking is the most cost effective political intervention." So fanciful did the proposal appear that Ellsberg saw only two ways to read it, he told TIME: as either "a little ploy by the CIA or NSA to draw in leaks" or "a very naive venture to think that they can really get away with it." Ellsberg made no reply.

The reader of TIME meets Assange as a stealthy and anonymous e-mail writer meriting some screen attention but no reply. In contrast, Zuckerberg is introduced as a corporate CEO leading a large meeting. In the Zuckerberg article we are told that his success and that of his company Facebook represents the fact that both the Sixties and the anonymous and subversive hacker ethic that supposedly grew out of that decade are over and that Internet culture has moved on to embrace bourgeois values and corporate consumerism. In contrast, the Assange piece begins with a quintessential Vietnam-era whistle-blower and his introduction to his cyberpunk hacker successor.

Not the least of Assange's achievements is a technological one. WikiLeaks brought to life what one of its early advisers described as "a recurring idea in hacker culture — a digital safe haven that is anonymous, massively collaborative and highly resistant to attack or penetration by intelligence services." Redundant hardware and Web servers span international borders. Participants in its design say WikiLeaks has made novel use of an alphabet soup of existing geek tools, such as mutually anonymous file sharing, decoy ciphering to flood eavesdroppers with empty data, and encryption of files in transit and in storage.

Although Assange and WikiLeaks are all over the newspapers, not a lot has been printed about WikiLeaks in the academic literature yet, since publishing cycles at university presses often lag far behind current events. I wrote about WikiLeaks in the chapter on whistle-blowers in the Virtualpolitik book, and for a long time since then I have argued that the dialectic between the disembodied evidence of a site like WikiLeaks and the embodied testimony of the eyewitness, epitomized by Witness, both function in Internet discourses about human rights, global justice, and civil society in the transnational domains of cyberspace.

Other websites obscure the ethos of the whistle-blower to protect the anonymity of sources that provide whistle-blowing documents and emphasize collective intelligence over individual credibility. However, the multiple authorship structure that such sites often deploy poses risks in representing a number of personal agendas and rhetorical motivations simultaneously. Furthermore, online disclosure of some kinds of whistleblowing documents—such as the contents of secret police files from the Stasi in the former East Germany—is not considered to be feasible because of significant privacy concerns about disclosure; victims or unrelated parties could have highly confidential personal information revealed on the Internet.

For example, the website Wikileaks was temporarily closed down by a judge’s order after it published records that seemed to indicate that a bank in the Cayman Islands was involved in possible tax evasion and money laundering. A representative from the bank complained to the news media of possible “harm from the widespread dissemination of private and confidential banking information, including account numbers, personal identification numbers, account transactions and history, and account balances,” which could cause “identity theft and electronic theft of account balances” after a “disgruntled employee” posted the documents.35 However, the Electronic Frontier Foundation was ultimately successful in a legal challenge to the judge’s shutdown of the entire site via the internet service provider that was hosting the Wikileaks.org domain, which an editorial in the New York Times compared to “shutting down a newspaper because of objections to one article.”36 Other documents on the multilingual and multinational Wikileaks site include official information about U.S. federal guidelines for the treatment of detainees in terrorism cases, materials about corruption in Kenya and Bermuda, and the numbering systems used for NATO equipment. 37 The site interface used the familiar tabs of “article,” “discussion,” and “history” from Wikipedia, along with a tab for “view source.”

Soon after Wikileaks was launched in December 2006, it inspired a watchdog group
that often wrote critically about the site and the hundreds of thousands of documents
that it published online. WikiLeak.org characterized itself as a “discussion blog about
the ethical and technical issues” of the Wikileaks project. This site apparently maintained a certain amount of critical distance from its object of study, because it described itself as “not yet affiliated with the secretive and media manipulative” wiki for “mass document leaking.”38 However, during the legal troubles that Wikileaks faced and its highly publicized forced blackout in the United States, the once-critical WikiLeak.org blog listed the domain names of mirror sites for the whistle-blowing original to help visitors find documents, relevant articles, and position papers that the Wikileaks.org had site made available.

Since writing these paragraphs for a book that appeared in May 2009, obviously a lot has changed in the public profile of WikiLeaks. A visit to the site shows Assange's face on the banner, while before its masthead emphasized the site's lack of a figurehead. Then again, we now see Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wale's visage pleading for support on almost entry we open. Compare Wale's upturned face and hopeful expression to Assange's conspiratorial gaze.

Talking to the Digital Natives

The words "digital natives" have been falling out of favor with Internet researchers. It is even a term that has even achieved disrepute at the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, where the phrase was once regularly sprinkled in reports. To me, as I've explained, the words have sounded very much like nails on a chalkboard for a long time. I hate the way it calls up noble savages, natural competencies, and exotic others who feel content will maintaining a sharp generational divide in society. That's why the use of the phrase "digital natives" three times in the "Transparency Begins at Home" talk of the State Department's Richard Boly marred an otherwise good talk about in-house tools that diplomats are using to improve preparation and communication in a field with frequent dislocation and turnover by design.

In providing history of this federal department, he explained how in 1995 an e-mail could take two hours just to travel from one floor to another. Although "teaching diplomats how to type" proved to be a minor obstacle, the State Department had faced a number of other major obstacles in adopting new communications technologies, because of their dependence upon outdated Wang terminals at the dawn of the Microsoft Windows era.

As an example of one of the group's efforts to promote institutional memory, Boly pointed to Communities@State, which serves as the umbrella for a range of collaboratively oriented blogs from Afghan Strategic Communication to Japan Economic Scope. He also discussed Diplopedia and Deskipedia as part of their eDiplomacy initiatives, which focus on "knowledge management within the organization" rather than public diplomacy aimed abroad. As he explained, wikis often seemed particularly natural platforms for his agency's employees, because "there is a strong culture of editing in the State Department."

One of the most daring projects he discussed was "The Sounding Board," which serves as an "ideation tool" to encourage professional diplomats to make personal suggestions as individuals with first and last names who are assumed to be equal. The submissions come in unweighted without regard to job title, and then these suggestions can be voted either up or down by other participants. In this way Boly explained how an article on military training in Diplopedia emerged from a request for more formal training in military norms.

It is worth noting that Boly used the Prezi presentation tool. As a sign of his interest in software alternatives, it was a particularly significant choice, given that few at the conference chose any PowerPoint alternatives. For other examples of this particular form of digital rhetoric that I have observed on the conference circuit, see postings here and here.

He closed with a discussion on his department's efforts to "crowdsource" after the Haiti earthquake using SMS messaging and geolocation data with an Ushahidi program based in Tufts University.

The World's Most Expensive Newspaper

In 2006 technology writer Clive Thompson wrote an article about "Open Source Spying" for The New York Times. At the Gov 2.0 Expo panel with the same title and some of the same informants, many lamented that little had improved when it came to the use of collaborative technologies to speed and streamline information gathering.

For example, Lewis Shepherd talking frankly about the "glacial pace" of change in the intelligence community despite the enormous amount of taxpayer dollars invested. In generating threat reports or what has been called "the world's most expensive newspaper," the many writers and analysts working in the intelligence community are failing much like actual journalists are to adapt to technological change. When a questioner in the audience complained of being presented with a panel of white men to represent change, Lewis quipped that "we express our frustration, Caucasian or not." (Later several noted that many of the senior leadership positions in the intelligence community were occupied by women, a fact that my own interactions with these government agencies has confirmed.)

Chris Rasmussen described the efforts of those who worked on Intellipedia and Intellipublia, but complained of resistance from a "finished intel 3-ring binder culture" in the federal government. He also complained of the "it's always Nigeria" problem in which technical tools are never tested with high-risk, high-value intelligence operations, because of anxieties about "stopping the mail" and disrupting existing systems with established workflows that never have a down season like that experienced by the IRS. The "product-centered" approach invariably supported what invariably became for Rasmussen a "theological argument" in which invoking the soldier for patriotic purposes and his close engagement in the field obfuscated the advantages of aggregation at a distance by drawing on multiple sources.

Matthew Burton joined the chorus to express his frustration with censorship of the dissemination of new organizational ideas by public affairs people who don't want to see policy debated in the pages of Federal Computer Week. He also noted that analysts with ideas about collaborative technologies were often reduced to finding "microwave towers all day long" rather than using systems like Intelink to make change.

During the Q and A for the session there were questions about the other meaning that "open source spying" could have in a world in which much intelligence could be gathered from the open web in a world with sixty million Twitter users. I didn't take Rasmussen's advice to "put 'Facebook' and 'OPSEC'" in the title of a blog posting in order to garner a million hits.

The Eye of the Crosshairs

This is difficult viewing, which is prefaced by two and a half minutes of text. The video comes from the U.S. military and shows the shooting of two Reuters employees and two Iraqi children in a van that has come to rescue them.

In the Virtualpolitik book I wrote about the WikiLeaks website, which is now hosting a site exclusively devoted to the shootings, Collateral Murder. For more about the incident, see coverage here on Bag News Notes.

Scout and About

The digital rhetoric of the Boy Scouts of America merit badge webpage has moved away from the traditional books and booklets conventionally associated with advancement in scouting and has now embraced the wiki form.

MeritBadge.org has many of the aspects of a standard wiki, where encyclopedic institutional authority and NPOV policies sometimes run afoul of the very structure of open access and user-generated content, whether it is a legitimate contributor lamely promising to deliver a better vector graphics image just as soon as he (or she) figures out the software or a spammer introducing "game power leveling and game gold" into the page for "helping scouts advance."

General Wiki

Given the importance of field manuals as an arbiter of army doctrine, there has been a remarkable development in how this official discourse may be generated. During the Bush administration the "capstone doctrine" represented by more than 500 different guides included controversial new provisions about interrogation or counterterrorism. "Care to Write Army Doctrine? With ID, Log On" in the New York Times describes a new plan to use wiki technology to

In July, in a sharp break from tradition, the Army began encouraging its personnel — from the privates to the generals — to go online and collaboratively rewrite seven of the field manuals that give instructions on all aspects of Army life.

Unlike the institutional authorship that a traditional field manual presents, the system will allow no anonymous edits, so the individuals who contribute content will have public identities.

Close reading of the article shows that it is only a test program and that very little editing has taken place in the six week's since the program's launch. In light of army personnel's anxieties about potentially displeasing superiors, it is not surprising that soldiers have been reluctant to try to rewrite the rules.

A Blot on Your Record

In today's New York Times, an article called "Has Wikipedia Created a Rorschach Cheat Sheet?" asks if the popular collectively authored online encyclopedia may be giving away the trade secrets of psychologists and psychiatrists and thus risk contaminating test results that are supposed to measure authentic impulses and unrehearsed associations. This anxiety about releasing trade secrets to the public is actually not particularly new: at the time of Diderot's encyclopedia members of guilds fretted that generations of professional knowledge and years of training in the apprenticeship system might be threatened by the publication's detailed diagrams of equipment and descriptions of specialized practices.

Ready or Not, Here Digital Publishing Comes

I've been thinking about the reflections of two Facebook friends, who have been writing about the relationship between scholarship and the Internet and the fact that the practices of digital publishing are already here among people who read and write books about computational culture, with or without the participation of academic presses.

In "Anderson's Wiki-versy," Siva Vaidhyanathan writes about the borrowings of Wired editor Chris Anderson to create parts of Free: The Future of a Radical Price, which were revealed on a blog for the Virginia Quarterly Review. Vaidhyanathan is less concerned about what he calls another "moral panic" about textual poaching than he is about the fact that mainstream books that are cited by academics are becoming even less likely to contain notes as publishers embrace models that cut costs and appeal to the greatest common denominator in the reading public.

Ian Bogost takes a different approach in "Digital Objects: Speculative Realism and Digital Media," where he argues that it is the blog rather than the wiki that characterizes the main mode of thoughtful writing practice today. Bogost explains how philosopher Graham Harman takes part in lively philosophical exchanges online and how Google books and Amazon.com also serve as a kind of citation index to see who else out there might also be involved in the scholarly conversation.

If I am Ever Elected to Public Office, I Promise Not to Put "Ph.D." after My Name on My Website

I'll begin with two disclaimers.

1) I am a media scholar. Media scholars do not like Leland Yee. Yee has a long history of pushing for more regulation of the videogame industry by touting his credentials as a child psychologist, despite the fact that an important Harvard study refutes Yee's assumptions and such regulation has been used to stifle political dissent in places like Italy. (Of course, I do love the fact that Yee boasts of being named "Person of the Year" by Game Politics in his official bio when the "honor" represents a similar rhetorical move to TIME naming Hitler "Man of the Year" in 1939.)

2) I teach at the University of California. University of California faculty have even less reason to like Leland Yee, especially now that he is backing legislation that has been described as the "bad idea of the week" to strip the UC system of its traditional autonomy. An unattributed official statement posted online titled "Putting UC under Legislature's control is a non-starter" makes the case bluntly:

It is absurd that Senator Yee and his co-sponsors want to rewrite the California Constitution to strip the university of its historic autonomy and place it under direct control of the state Legislature.

Given the current $25 billion hole in the state budget and the political paralysis that chronically plagues Sacramento, tossing a 10-campus public research university that is the pride of California and the envy of the world into the Sacramento mix should be a non-starter.

Let's be clear: UC is working. At a time when it has become popular to mock California, the university survives as one of the state's great success stories. It has thrived under the system of autonomous governance, led by the Regents, that was so wisely written into the Constitution by our pioneers.

California might have trouble marketing its bonds in the current fiscal crisis, but UC has a AA1/AA rating. The state budget may have fallen over a cliff, but UC has managed its resources prudently in a tough environment. It has been able to preserve its world class status -- a thrumming engine of educational opportunity, scientific advance and economic stimulus -- even as it has absorbed a steady onslaught of cuts dictated from Sacramento.

Even with pinched budgets, UC still can attract top leaders to its 10 campuses and five medical centers, and can do so despite the easily verified fact that we compensate them well below the national average for comparable institutions.

Rather than rely on an untenable defense of state governance in comparison to UC governance, Yee has issued a list of bullet points outlining his gripes with the UC system. Many of them have already been addressed without amending the state constitution by other legislation, as he himself admits. But there are some assertions that probably use selective data to capitalize on loaded issues, such as "the University conducts research on teen smoking cessation funded by the tobacco industry," which misrepresents what seems to be an exceptional case in the full context of millions of dollars done to promote anti-smoking research at UC.

Given the fact that UC salaries are part of a searchable public database maintained by the Sacramento Bee, his hyperbolic claims about the UC system's less-than-perfect transparency seem overstated. I couldn't help but notice that Yee seems to draw a much higher salary than any of the media scholars that I typed into the system.

Faced with threatened cuts and the prospect of a legislative takeover, UC President Mark Yudof has chosen a more tactful approach than the one in the "non-starter" press release. At UC for California, constitutuents can use an online form to write to legislators. UC for California is also using Facebook and Twitter to spread the word.

Naturally, Yee is no stranger to social media, since he has a Facebook page of his own and a Twitter feed. There is also a Reform the UC Facebook page at which there is lively debate about the legislation.

If anything, his office has been too busy maintaining his social reputation on the web. According to Leland Yee's Wikipedia entry, "On September 4, 2007 it was revealed using WikiScanner that IP addresses registered to computers in the California Senate office had made changes to its Wikipedia entry favoring Leland Yee.^[14] It was reported that they removed the 1992 shoplifting allegations and the video game controversies sections."

There's some amazing discussion about the Yee Wikipedia incident on this talk page, where a staffer insists that the editing could have been done by "lowly student interns" without the consent of the office, but others describe it as suspiciously "word for word" copy from his official website complete with grammatically illogical statements about parents' rights.

Kudos to Virtualpolitik pal Virgil Griffith for inventing the WikiScanner, which has generated so much online amusement for Yee's critics.

Update: To give his office credit, it's good to see that Yee doesn't delete critical comments from his Facebook wall and does have a staffer doing non-robotic rebuttals on both Twitter and Facebook.

Wikipedia Journalism

I've written before about the problem of what I call "Facebook journalism" and the fact that many newspaper reporters may be putting the print media in even greater jeopardy by relying on Internet surfing rather than talking to their actual subjects in person, so that newspapers become less likely to do investigative reporting than some online sources.

Now Ian Bogost has pointed out an article called "Irish student hoaxes world's media with fake quote," which seems to show how what could be called "Wikipedia journalism" could distort the historical record. After French composer Mauricel Jarre died, twenty-two-year-old Shane Fitzgerald seeded Jarre's Wikipedia entry, with a sappy false quotation that would be tempting for hack obituary writers to cite: "Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear." Sure enough, a number of newspapers, including The Guardian, printed the quotation in their coverage of Jarre's death and didn't uncover the true source until Fitzgerald himself announced his deception. This kind of exploit could be even more destabilizing to truth claims the more that recursion comes into play, since a false Wikipedia fact could be cited in a newspaper story, and then the newspaper story could be used to source the so-called fact.

Fitzgerald said he had waited in part to test whether news organizations or the public would smoke out the quote's lack of provenance. He said he was troubled that none did.

And he warned that a truly malicious hoaxer could have evaded Wikipedia's own informal policing by getting a newspaper to pick up a false piece of information -- as happened when his quote made its first of three appearances -- and then use those newspaper reports as a credible footnote for the bogus quote.

In "Wikipedia, Obits and Faking" a writer for the Washington post argues that this tendancy to not list sources is part of the obituary genre's emphasis on fluent narrative:

Colleagues of mine at the obit desk feel too much attribution ruins the flow of the story. At what point to readers want a good uninterrupted tale, and at what point do they need to know where the information is coming from?

Fitzgerald explains in an opinion piece in Irish Times how he hit upon the idea of an improvised research project while faced with "the arduous task of writing yet another essay on social science’s current fad – globalisation."

Ironically, the Wikipedia entry of Jarre's son Jean Michel Jarre is now slated for a radical revision to redres other kinds of sloppiness in the information presented about the junior Jarre's life and work as a composer. Fitzgerald himself has been added to Wikipedia, although the site's editors are apparently already considering deletion of his entry.

Meanwhile Microsoft is trying to challenge Wikipedia's dominance in market share.

Big Trouble in Little Cyberspace

I have a colleague currently suffering with a case of "PPP," otherwise known as the "penis posting problem," which occasionally afflicts those who use wikis as a course management tool, when students abuse their login privileges to display phallic images that show that the teacher's authority is being tested. It has even happened to critical luminaries in digital scholarship, such as Alan Liu, who once had an outbreak of PPP related to an animated gif of a looping male crotch that zoomed through its infinite pelvic regress from a link on a class wiki page.

Since most students regard the prospect of their futures carefully, sometimes excessively so, this kind of juvenile territory marking by students who challenge an institution's authority is probably the least of the potential problems raised by calls for electronic portfolios, where students have the ability to archive work from their college experience and create a public profile for potential employers and admissions officers at graduate and professional schools.

Although organizations like the Conference on College Composition and Communication have attempted to articulate common principles and practices for using portfolios in the context of writing instruction and philanthropic organizations promoting "integrative learning," such as the Carnegie Foundation, would like to see cumulative approaches in education given more stature, students, faculty, administrators, corporate employers, educational policy experts, privacy advocates, and politicians concerned with institutional accountability may all have different ideas about what an ideal electronic portfolio for a college student should be.

E-portfolio expert Kathleen Yancey participated in a colloquy called "A Rose is (not) a Rose is (not) a Rose: Diversity in Electronic Portfolio Aims, Models, and Outcomes" and a series of meetings at U.C. Irvine today. She argued that stakeholders often have very differing agendas for why they would want to see work digitally archived, and far too often they leave out opportunities for the author to provide critical reflection and the social component of peer feedback on the process.

At U.C. Irvine, faculty and staff are considering the K-20 Minnesota model, after the state signed an agreement with developers there. I plan to take part in one of the pilot programs this year with the participation of students who have won Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program prizes in the freshman year. (See here and here for past winners.)

To demonstrate the range of possible genres, she provided four models to stimulate discussion among the working group: 1) Career Portfolio: Math, 2) English Education Program Portfolio, 3) Self-Designed Major: Bio, Psych, Health and Illness, and 4) LSU Communication Certificate Portfolio: Architecture. She noted that a range of purposes could be served depending on the central definition emphasized among collection, selection, reflection, projection, development, diversity, communication, and evaluation.

She also argued that it was important to understand the Realpolitik of university culture and accept that some merely want a data collection system. She encouraged realism about the importance of branding in these kinds of efforts as well. And she tried to break stereotypes that students were necessarily visual learners, even though she considered concept mapping important, particularly if students were to represent how their different learning experiences fit together and design a web navigation system that reproduces those linkages.

Perhaps some of her most interesting observations about the topic had to do with how such portfolios function in medical education in conjunction with what is called "critical incident theory," a term that originated in aviation when stakeholders reinvented the genre of the traditional accident report. The field of risk communication often gets little attention from those who think about how discourse functions in the academy, but in real world settings collective deliberation about preventability and what is constituted as normal can be extremely important in everything from finance to foreign policy.

The Bad Office E-Mailer

Today's story about microbiologist and suspected domestic terrorist Bruce Ivins in the New York Times, "Troubled Life of an Anthrax Suspect" also paints a portrait of a bad netizen who sends unwelcome e-mail from multiple accounts, becomes obstreperous in Wikipedia edit wars, and assumes several harassing Internet identities. As the article makes clear, the documents that the Department of Justice has posted on its official website about what it calls the "Amerithrax" case involve unauthorodox online behavior that was revealed by FBI search warrants from companies like AOL and MSN who complied. For example, this dossier explains how Ivins was obsessed with the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority and placed unsubstantiated accusations under the name "Jimmy Flathead" into the group's Wikipedia entry, including the claim that in 1997, "three DePauw Kappa actives were found to have hazed three pledges by burning them with cigarettes and forcing them to consume alcoholic beverages," according to the editing logs for the site. One female recipient of his creepy e-mails boasting of his work at one of the military's biodefenses lab noted cues in the attached photographs that made her suspicious of his conduct as a fellow scientist.

A Journal That Assigns Cliff Notes

Speaking of the relationship between Wikipedia and the academy, in "Journal requires peer-reviewed Wikipedia entry to publish," the megablog ars technica reports that the peer-reviewed journal RNA Biology asks contributors to compose a Wikipedia entry to summarize and complement their scholarly research for more specialized audiences. Although the journal's current guidelines for authors do not seem to indicate the existence of this provision, a recent article in Nature explains how the process will work, since Wikipedia is explicitly not a venue for original research.

Do You Have Blackbeard in a Can?

Cathy Davidson of HASTAC points out a clever hoax perpetuated by a class at George Mason University in "Edward Owens, Pirate and Hoax: Shiver Me Timbers!" Apparently some bloggers were taken in by the story of "The Last American Pirate," particularly when students were playing along with stories of "finds" like the last will and testament of Owens. I particularly like the earnest peer reviewer who expressed the following disingenuous statements about the will:

This is AMAZING!! I wish I had found something like this for my paper. Most of my information for my paper is coming from interviews from people in the area. Which I think would be something helpful for your paper. If you need more help talk to the people in the area.

In addition to spreading the Owens narrative through blogs and person-to-person social media contacts, the group also concocted a Wikipedia entry about the fictional Edward Owens, which has now been corrected to reveal the hoax.

Of course, given how real-life classes are using blogs and wikis in collective intelligence projects that showcase the work of student historians, such as the Keywords for American Cultural Studies project, this hoax could be read in a number of ways, not all of them flattering to Web 2.0 teaching. The course had one of my favorite catalog titles,"Lying about the Past," taught by T. Mills Kelly, author of edwired.

The Open Mailbox

Virtualpolitik friend James Kotecki needs to work on his French, but he has some good ideas to share with Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin about choosing an appropriate screen name, after she came under fire for using a personal e-mail account to conduct some of Alaska's state business. Palin was targeted by hackers who posted messages on Wikileaks.org, as Scientific American's "Hackers hit Palin, expose the dangers of using personal e-mail to conduct business" describes. The hackers were apparently veterans of another exploit involving private data from the Church of Scientology. Many of the screen shots that depict a combination of work and life ephemera can be accessed from this page.

Barack Obama Bake-A-Rama

This weekened Moveon.org sponsored Hungry for Change, a series of local bake sales to promote fundraising for presidential candidate Barack Obama that combined traditional home economics with digital grassroots politics. Those interested in attending a bake sale in their neighborhood could use a geographic finder on the website, much as one might search for a local screening of a film.

My colleague Julia Lupton -- who frequently talks about connections between DIY content-creation and computer-mediated knowledge-sharing and product-distribution -- hosted an Obama Bake Sale of her own. Her reflections on the event are here. It's interesting to see how Lupton's daughter appropriated and remixed this Shepard Fairey print, which was available as a digital file online, and created a painting, which was then imprinted on cakes and t-shirts through new forms of distributed printing technologies.

I went to a more local Obama bake sale hosted by friends Susan Gautsch and Ava Arndt. (Ava writes about travel and urbanism in the Eighteenth Century context but is also interested in how her research on trust and credibility in that time period may relate to "Democracy 2.0" movements of the contemporary era. ) This Venice group created a wiki to coordinate donations of baked goods and volunteer labor and shared branding techniques with the Irvine contingent.

What's interesting to me is how both groups chose to eschew the cookie-cutter templates for invitations and plans for staging the event. Moveon.org provided online kits to hosts and encouraged them to use their institutionally sanctioned strategies and markers of authority. I'm sure that the Obama team in turn was also anxious about the efforts of this technically independent PAC, since who knows if cannabis activists might decide to sell some extra special brownies to their customers.

These regulations reminded me of how we once hosted a Democratic party event in our home for the Clinton campaign, the point of which -- as we understood it initially -- was supposed to be having neighbors and friends in to watch the debate. In the pre-World Wide Web era that sounded like a good idea, but we were appalled when the official kit arrived in the mail with suggestions for ridiculous menus (a champagne and lobster brunch) and exorbitant fees to be charged to attendees that violated our sense of hospitality. (And, okay, we were also miffed that the Party wouldn't supply Robert Clinton as our official representative, so we didn't have a humorous celebrity draw.)

We ended up ignoring all the guidelines and hosting a pizza party with no suggested donations or requirement of party affiliation, since we didn't want to snub Republicans who might want to come and watch the TV that we had borrowed for the event. For branding, Mel digitally printed giant Photoshopped images of Clinton and Dole with cauliflower ears and black eyes as if the two candidates had been duking it out more than verbally. Of course, we ended up being one of the top fund-raisers, even for the affluent Westside.

Update: Ava and Julia have written an essay about their experiences here.

It's My Party, and I'll Blog If I Want To

Given the momentous events of yesterday's decision to seat half the delegates from Michigan and Florida, which riled supporters of the campaign of Hillary Clinton, it is interesting to note that the official website of the Democratic Party says relatively little about the decision, its deliberative process, and the protests that took place. The party itself posted a relatively bland news release and didn't include any images or video from the often contentious meeting. At this critical time, the site's blog has also been relatively quiet, supposedly because -- as they explain -- "the tech department is going to be doing some tweaking under the hood."


On their site, the party also proudly announced the creation of McCainpedia with articles on topics such as "Uninsured," "Negative Campaigning," and "Earmarks." However, McCainpedia is a highly centralized information source, unlike the kind of distributed knowledge promulgated by the better known and similarly named "Wikipedia." In their defense on the "About" page, the authors of the site point to the fact that they also offer partybuilder, a more open set of tools in which "Democrats are entrusted to build the space and the Party." They also argue that although they "debated whether or not to let the public edit articles," they ultimately opted to make it closed since to "allow people to edit would have meant at least some degree of unreliability and a constant threat of vandalism."

Although it has relatively little other multimedia, with the obvious exception of campaign commercials, the site does promote FlipperTV, "tracking video for the DNC." Chairman Howard Dean explains the rationale for showing their opponent on the campaign trail as follows: "The idea behind FlipperTV is simple: let the American people hear directly from the Republican candidates unscripted and in their own words, and let them decide if they want four more years of Bush's failed policies or a Democrat who will bring change to the White House. This video will come directly from the campaign trail, letting voters see who they truly are, not who their campaigns want them to be."

The actual shaky-cam videos are sometimes hard to watch. I suppose it is rhetorically interesting to see the protests outside, which is sometimes all the coverage that FlipperTV offers of McCain, but the poor sound and video quality may be perceived by some swing voters as an unfair tactic, particularly if there is not "gotcha" Macaca-like moment to go viral.

The Hive Archive

The final roundtable session of the Social Computing Workshop was introduced by Nancy Van House of U.C. Berkeley who has been working on the archeology of the Presidio with her students but has faced pedagogical challenges on the project because her graduate students proved not to be sophisticated "digital natives" when faced with the laundry list of tool literacies that were necessary to do the work: Macs, Google docs, digital cameras, Nokia N95 cameraphones, GPS, GIS, Flickr, Piknik, Bluetooth, video, digital audio recorders, Sophie, the Sophie reader, and Wordpress blogging. She even admitted learning that her own expert personal archiving practices were flawed from the research of Cathy Marshall and her advice about backing up data. Yet these "reputation mechanisms" also have promise in stimulating academic research and teaching. For example, she showed an interesting slide of a reconstruction of an archaeological site being excavated in Turkey that had been visualized in Second Life.

Although Van House lamented that there was "no business model for free and open information" and that our relative "autonomy as academics" made it hard to understand market pressures, Citizendium's Larry Sanger presented a much more optimistic narrative of the near future. He predicted that by 2020 or 2030 there would be "enormous amounts of free and credible content." Although the credibility problem may not be completely solved and one might have to pay a fee to get books, he listed on the blackboard all the cultural valuables that were being digitized: books, journals, encyclopedias, and archives. Although he conceded that it would continue to be true that the Internet would be "mostly crap, since that’s what people are interested in, just like television," he thought that the fact that people are increasingly likely to "expect information to be free" would make the development of a vast online research archive inevitable.

In response, some in the audience questioned whether it was really possible to make value judgments about "good" and "bad" content, since -- as Tad Hirsch noted -- political ideology and repressive government could play a role in suppressing certain important kinds of cultural imaginaries. However, Sanger defended his point and further asserted that "neutrality was not about relativism but about tolerance." As the conversation progressed Alan Liu showed some tricky case studies, such as the obvious bias in the articles on "The Theory of Evolution," "The Earth," and other scientific subjects in Conservapedia and the Wikipedia lockdown of the article on Muhammed because it contained images of the prophet that offended some Islamic readers. As further caution, William Warner opined that too many sources of interest to humanities scholars would still be barred from this utopian archive because of copyright restrictions on music and video.

Street Cred

The UC Santa Barbara Social Computing Workshop convened today for a wide ranging discussion about technologies that "can be defined as the deployment of network communication systems for the purpose of allowing communities of people to interact within particular domains of knowledge for one or more goals." Led by digital pioneer Alan Liu, who launched the Voice of the Shuttle, the sessions of the day were intended to get beyond merely defending traditional academic gate-keeping and aspired to more creative brainstorming activities that looked toward the future as well as back to the past.

Credibility was perhaps the most obvious theme for many of the attendees. Several of the suggested readings designed to foster discussion related to UCSB's MacArthur-funded project about Credibility Online, which is headed up by Miriam Metzger and Andrew Flanigan, who contributed a lot to the discussion. During sessions, Metzger talked about how we "manage mulitple bounded identities," the problems with umbrella terms like "credibility" and "social computing," and the importance of being able to "visualize disagreement."

Pre-workshop suggested readings had included "The Hidden Order of Wikipedia," "Digital Media and Youth: Unparalleled Opportunity and Unprecedented Responsibility," "The New Metrics of Scholarly Authority," and a range of other articles and links. My only criticism of these reference points might be that too often they emphasized receptive rather than productive literacy. From my own anecdotal experiences I might suggest that assessing credibility and content-creation are often related activities and that initiatives for information literacy and distributed digital media production should not be separated in ways that they often are. In connection with this concern, Kathy Im of the MacArthur Foundation pointed me to the work of the University of Michigan's Soo Rieh, who is testing the hypothesis that forms of Internet participation and judgment may be related.

The other big agenda item involved constructive criticism of the campus's IGERT Proposal for a Social Computing Research Training program. Many attendees at the conference cautioned that this kind of interdisciplinary research program can fall prey to excessive rationalism and formalism, especially if the orientation of the inquiry focuses exclusively on online behaviors that are obviously purposive. For example, some called for inclusion of emotional considerations, meme-sharing, and the formation of collective identities on the principle that "expressive" practices should not be relegated to "entertainment." They also urged incorporation of the study of virtual worlds, ubiquitous computing, and games in the proposal, since social computing is already much more than use of the World Wide Web. Audience members also noted the disiciplinary absences of philosophy and ethnography in the current draft of the project.

(More photos of the social computing group being social are here.)