Justifications for the digitally expanded library that go beyond the functional or budgetary to include some sort of social vision almost all evince an obsession with a technological—even ahistorical—future and, in addition, an ideal of ‘service’ conceived in terms of blinkered populism. There is an odd linguistic resonance between the prophets of fascism and the proponents of digital preservation and access. For Leo Lowenthal, book-burning by authoritarian and totalitarian societies was a ‘mad attempt to found anew the history of the world, to devise a new creation myth, the genealogy of a new history of salvation, which disowns, destroys and erases all that precedes a new arbitrary calendar’. [18] The logic of contemporary ‘universal libraries’ such as Google Books appears antithetical to such an ideological agenda. But mapped onto the digitization of all the world’s information is the ideology of the information age, which figures itself as a radical break from the past—a paradigm shift of unseen proportions and the very stuff of a future social organization that is horizontal, open, flexible and democratic. The internet and the set of metaphors and practices that have grown up within and around it—the very conviction that this environment is absolutely new—contain a similar urge ‘to found anew the history of the world’, and offer ‘a new history of salvation’.

Instead, Piper and Wellmon offer data, or rather the idea of it. "The university is a technology," they write. "Let’s treat it like one." One can call any institution one likes — a town hall, an AA meeting, a tri-county soccer league — a "technology," though it’s not clear what’s gained.

All of these scholars are well aware of the value of numbers. Numbers allow for abstract picturing of groups, societies, and cities. They regularize anomalies and exceptions, and allow us access to invisible worlds, social and physical alike. Numbers support distributed cognition and collective intelligence. Both are desperately needed in a world damaged by human stupidity. But quantification in its many forms now operates within a complex metrics culture — a contradictory and contested battleground, as these three books explain. Together, they offer an understory that we could call metrics noir.

It is this techno-utopian vision that Piper and Wellmon are peddling; and like all lefty versions of technological salvation, it promises liberation from confining structures like states, universities, disciplines, departments, canons — in short, from the academy. At the moment of liberation, opacity, patrimony, favoritism, patronage, hegemony and all those bad things will have been cast off like shadows and veils and succeeded by the blessed condition of transparency.

First came the debacle of the high-priced "Ada" algorithm, the control center of Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated operation. Next ESPN wonk Nate Silver, after flubbing the 2016 election forecast, defended his numbers by claiming that he was not more wrong than every other statistical predictor since 1968. Finally, consider the kerfuffle over Cambridge Analytica, the British company whose "psychographics" method of data modeling and "emotion analysis" claimed to be the Trump camp’s secret weapon — until skeptics recalled that Ted Cruz and Ben Carson had employed their services as well. The dream that algorithmic computation might reveal the secrets of complex social and cultural processes has suffered a very public and embarrassing results crisis. These setbacks have also led to some soul-searching in the university, prompting a closer look at the digital humanities

While almost all historians said they used library-supported databases, online archives or digital cameras, fewer than one in five said that they used more advanced digital tools such as text mining or statistical analysis software. Most historians said that they only adopted digital tools when they found there was no other way to resolve an issue in their research.

Spanier’s CIA medal, and a similar FBI award a year later, symbolized a reconciliation between the intelligence services and the academy. The relationship has come full circle: from chumminess in the 1940s and 1950s, to animosity during the Vietnam War and civil-rights era, and back to cooperation after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Their unequal partnership, though, tilts toward the government. U.S. intelligence seized on the renewed goodwill, and the red carpet rolled out by Spanier and other university administrators, to expand not only its public presence on campus but also covert operations and sponsoring of secret research. Federal encroachment on academic prerogatives has met only token resistance.

The two cultures are antithetical: Academe is open and international, while intelligence services are clandestine and nationalistic. Still, after Islamic-fundamentalist terrorists toppled the World Trade Center, colleges became part of the national security apparatus. The new recruiting booths at meetings of academic associations were one telling indicator. The CIA began exhibiting at the annual convention of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in 2004, as did the FBI and National Security Agency around the same time. Since 2011 the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the NSA have participated on a panel at the Modern Language Association convention titled "Using Your Language Proficiency and Cultural Expertise in a Federal Government Career."

There has been a rising bipartisan clamor, meanwhile, for new regulation of a tech industry that, amid a historic surge in wealth and power over the past decade, has largely had its way in Washington despite concerns raised by critics about its behavior. [...] “There is no question that the idea that Silicon Valley is the darling of our markets and of our society — that sentiment is definitely turning,” said Tim O’Reilly, an adviser to tech executives and chief executive of the influential Silicon Valley-based publisher O’Reilly Media.

An open source port of Macro SNOBOL4 (The original Bell Telephone Labs implementation, written in SIL macros).
Supports full SNOBOL4 language plus SPITBOL, Blocks and other extensions.

Snobol3 Language Implementation in Java (2005)

A decade ago, whatever the reality, very few of us thought of tech as a driver of things that were wrong about the larger political economy. We knew about wage stagnation. Growing wealth inequality was getting more attention. But tech didn’t have anything to do with that. They were just smallish companies with no smokestacks making cool things out in Silicon Valley and outside Seattle. As I’ve noted in a few recent posts, there’s a growing body of policy literature and research which argues that monopolies really are causing many of these ills. It’s not just people being dissatisfied with poor economic prospects and lashing out at what’s big. Nor is this the end of it. You’ll notice that I haven’t even discussed what may be Big Tech’s biggest reptuational black eye: privacy or the lack thereof. Tech is also driving artificial intelligence research which may put countless people out of work. Again, my point here isn’t to litigate the various arguments and claims at play here but only to note the emerging sea change in public perceptions. It’s a vast difference and I suspect it – it being the public opposition to and backlash against Big Tech and other monopolies – will bulk very large in our politics in the coming years.

The blinding rise of Donald Trump over the past year has masked another major trend in American politics: the palpable, and perhaps permanent, turn against the tech industry. The new corporate leviathans that used to be seen as bright new avatars of American innovation are increasingly portrayed as sinister new centers of unaccountable power, a transformation likely to have major consequences for the industry and for American politics.

Unlike industry influence in medicine, however, the phenomenon of company-affiliated teachers has received little scrutiny. Twitter alone is rife with educators broadcasting their company-bestowed titles. “If medical experts started saying, ‘I’m a Google Certified Doctor’ or ‘I’m a Pfizer Distinguished Nurse,’ people would be up in arms,” said Douglas A. Levin, president of EdTech Strategies, a consulting firm. [...] Some academic medical centers now prohibit their doctors from giving industry-sponsored speeches. And some drug companies have stopped giving doctors swag. But there has been little public discussion about the ramifications of similar tech industry cultivation of teachers.

Racket's standard unit testing library

Within the past week, two well-known and well-established coding bootcamps have announced they’ll be closing their doors: Dev Bootcamp, owned by Kaplan Inc., and The Iron Yard, owned by the Apollo Education Group (parent company of the University of Phoenix).

The tech giant Google has paid academics up to hundreds of thousands of dollars to research topics that support the company’s business practices, according to an investigation by The Wall Street Journal, based on data compiled by the Campaign for Accountability, an advocacy group that has received funding from companies that compete with Google. The newspaper reported that Google at times compiled “wish lists” of academic studies, complete with titles and abstracts, and then searched for academics who were game to write the papers. In many cases, the Journal reported, the authors of the papers failed to disclose that they had received funding from Google. Those studies included research suggesting that collecting user data was a fair trade for the services Google provides or that it hadn’t competed unfairly against market rivals. The article also states that Google has provided the research to lawmakers, and sometimes covered travel costs for professors to meet government officials.

Paying Professors: Inside Google’s Academic Influence Campaign. Company pays grants of $5,000 to $400,000 for research supporting business practices that face regulatory scrutiny; a ‘wish list’ of topics.

The rise of Code.org coincides with a larger tech-industry push to remake American primary and secondary schools with computers and learning apps, a market estimated to reach $21 billion by 2020.

Scala REPL

Racket / How to Design Programs Teachpacks (libraries)

Node ES6 module syntax

Editor plugin providing live JS evaluation

Debugging Node in Chrome Devtools via Electron

An embedded editor for Clojure

The Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities is suspended until further notice. Applications to the Certificate program are not being accepted at present. However, current students will be able to complete the Certificate.

Last month, Brooks Sterritt introduced the gathering "What [in the World] Was Postmodernism?" edited by David Ciccoricco and myself. In this collection, authors have addressed the frailty of the term "postmodernism". Some of this term's antecedents have been identified and recaptured, and the idea of postmodernism as an epoch or movement has been placed under scrutiny. For EBR's editorial team, this particular gathering of essays marks "the official unofficial end" of postmodernism.

I’ll be honest, I was surprised by this year’s submission numbers. This will be the first ADHO conference held in North America since it was held in Nebraska in 2013, and I expected an influx of submissions from people who haven’t been able to travel off the continent for interim events. I expected the biggest submission pool yet. What we see, instead, are fewer submissions than Kraków last year: 608 in all. The low number of submissions to Sydney was expected, given it was the first conference held outside Europe or North America, but this year’s numbers suggests the DH Hype Machine might be cooling somewhat, after five years of rapid growth. We need some more years and some more DH-Hype-Machine Indicators to be sure, but I reckon things are slowing down.

During the Obama years, Silicon Valley came to see itself as the economic and social engine of a new digital century. Smartphones and social networks became as important to world business as oil and the automobile, and Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft rose to become some of the most prosperous and valuable companies on the planet. Mr. Obama, who rode many of these digital tools to the presidency, was accommodative of their rise; his administration broadly deferred to the tech industry in a way that bordered on coziness, and many of his former lieutenants have decamped to positions in tech. Mr. Trump’s win promises to rip apart that relationship. [...] Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft offered no immediate comment about Mr. Trump’s win, or how the new administration’s stated policy goals would affect their businesses. But it seems clear that a shift is in the offing. Leaders of these behemoths have long spoken in ambitious, gauzy sentimentalities about a broadly progressive future. Their goals weren’t simply financial but, they said, philosophical and democratic — they wanted to make money, sure, but they also wanted to make the world a better place, to offer a kind of social justice through code. Theirs was a tomorrow powered by software instead of factories, and offering a kind of radical connectivity that they promised would lead to widespread peace and prosperity.
The deeper worry is that tech is out of step with the national and global mood, and failed to recognize the social and economic anxieties roiling the nation — many of them hastened by the products the industry devises.

Many kinds of management erode trust, including ‘line management’ and ‘performance management’. Neither has any place in our university, and where they currently operate, we will abolish them.

...the idea or ideal of objective observation, like that of complete data sets (in effect, inspecting every swan before concluding anything about the color of swans), has been effectively challenged by a century of empirical and theoretical work in the history, sociology, and philosophy of science. Jockers is not alone among contemporary literary scholars in his enthusiasm for, but rather old-fashioned view of, “science.” (The persistent singular suggests a dubious conception of these heterogeneous practices as something programmatic and monolithic.) For all the talk of “paradigm shifts” among digital humanists, literary Darwinists, and advocates of cognitive cultural studies, the notion of science to which they appeal tends to be fundamentally pre-Kuhnian.

Unlike last year, however, administrators and faculty members aren’t as certain that investments in and use of educational technology in the classroom have led to significantly improved student outcomes. Last year, the first time these questions were asked, faculty members said by a roughly two-to-one margin that gains in student outcomes justified colleges’ spending on ed tech. This year, faculty members are more evenly divided: 57 percent said yes, 43 percent no. A majority of faculty members (70 percent) still believe technology in the classroom has led to improved student outcomes, but most of them describe the gains as slight rather than significant. Still, the proportion of faculty members who said ed tech hasn’t improved student outcomes at all this year ticked up a few percentage points, rising to 30 percent from 25 percent last year. The decline is more pronounced among administrators. They, like faculty members, also believe ed tech has improved student outcomes (87 percent gave that response), but far fewer of them this year said the gains have been significant (15 percent this year, 35 percent last year).

CUCFA's definition of "public" reflects national and international trends that have been slower to develop in California than elsewhere. One is deprivatization. I first heard this term used to describe current changes in Poland's university system, but deprivatization is implicit in the Free College movement launched in U.S. politics by Bernie Sanders. The premise is that people can analyze the effects of privatization, and, if found negative, can lower tuition rather than raise it, raise public funding rather than lower it, reduce student debt rather than increase it, and expand research cost coverage rather than shrink it. Where there's a will there's a way, and the way here is particularly obvious.

A second trend is postmanagerialism--or so I'll call it here. Large private and public organizations now operate under widespread cynicism about their good will and effectiveness. Decreasing proportions of U.S. residents think corporations are on their side. Something similar is happening to public universities, some of which, like UC and CUNY, have tripped themselves up in a series of scandals that shed doubt on their devotion to public service. You don't have to be familiar with the literature about learning organizations to believe that the low-information professor and the cognitively isolated senior manager each undermine universities. Universities need smarter human systems that we have now, and strong shared governance can help bring that about.

A third trend the CUCFA statement reflects is the demand for epistemological diversity, driven in large part by academics working in the global South. Societies are both internally diverse and quite different from each other, and need their university research to reflect variable demands--say for non-GMO pest-resistant crops, or for democratic theory that does not assume constitutional unity or a common language. University diversity has, in recent decades, been undermined by audit culture, which norms universities towards "best practices" represented by the institutions that dominate global rankings, whose template is Anglo-American. As part of its normal operation, audit introduces quantitative management practices that make collaborative governance seem unnecessary: a manager doesn't need to know her faculty and departments and make complex judgments based in large part on informal knowledge, but just have research output measures, impact factors, and rankings of departments and faculty members. Such metrics make personal interactions seem superfluous, and intellectual diversity unnecessary. Such standardization is now being contested and is likely gradually to be pushed aside.

Open Access (OA) is the movement to make academic research available without charge, typically via digital networks. Like many cyberlibertarian causes OA is roundly celebrated by advocates from across the political spectrum. Yet like many of those causes, OA’s lack of clear grounding in an identifiable political framework means that it may well not only fail to serve the political goals of some of its supporters, and may in fact work against them. In particular, OA is difficult to reconcile with Marxist accounts of labor, and on its face appears not to advance but to actively mitigate against achievement of Marxist goals for the emancipation of labor. In part this stems from a widespread misunderstanding of Marx’s own attitude toward intellectual work, which to Marx was not categorically different from other forms of labor, though was in danger of becoming so precisely through the denial of the value of the end products of intellectual work. This dynamic is particularly visible in the humanities, where OA advocacy routinely includes disparagement of academic labor, and of the value produced by that labor.

Until now, the search has been undertaken by literary critics, who sought to use philological techniques and stylistic analysis to compare Ferrante’s work with that of several of the writers proposed as candidates. A decade ago, at the request of Italian writer Luigi Galella, a team of physicists and mathematicians at La Sapienza University in Rome analyzed Ferrante’s books with special text analysis software. They concluded that there was a “high probability” that the books were written by Starnone, Raja’s husband. Along with him, speculation in the Italian press about “possible Ferrantes” has long centered around Raja, the co-owners of Edizioni e/o, Ferri and Ozzola, several other Italian writers, as well as Ferrante’s American translator, Ann Goldstein. A final addition to the list was Marcella Marmo, a professor of modern history at the Federico II University of Naples, who was named by Dante scholar Marco Santagata on the basis of linguistic parallels between her writing and Ferrante’s and because of a connection with the Scuola Normale, the elite university in Pisa where both Lenù, the main character in the Quartet, and Marmo studied.

But none of these theories have been backed by concrete evidence. By contrast, the new financial information leads directly to Raja, while leaving open the possibility of some kind of unofficial collaboration with her husband, the writer Starnone.

The New York Times R&D Lab, a groundbreaking department of applied creative technology that helped one of the great institutions of journalism see how it could thrive amidst a changing media ecosystem, died Monday in New York City. It was eleven years old.

Yes, the civic tech movement should be shelved. It has run its course. The models of hack nights and civic apps and techno-determinist solutions have proven ineffective.

The dominant social movements of the last five years have next to nothing to do with civic tech. Black Lives Matter, the rise of racist Trumpian political ideas, marriage equity—they owe nothing to civic tech.

These forces used consumer-grade technology like Twitter and Facebook to drive their agendas while civic tech people are checking in code to Github.

We will come to terms with our history, that our collective privilege allowed us to ignore and possibly displace other movements while we were building apps.

So where does that leave computer-generated games? For Cook, No Man’s Sky marks the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. “I think the aesthetic of big numbers is dead.”

HyperTerm plugins, themes, and resources

Chomsky rejects outright Knight’s notion that government funding had any influence whatsoever on his thinking or his behavior. "His main point is based on a total misunderstanding of public funding of research," Chomsky writes. "MIT in those years was about 90 percent funded by the Pentagon. There was precisely zero pressure."

[T]he answer is, no, I don’t do digital humanities. To me the role of the digital is as an object of historical and theoretical analysis. [...] [P]rimarily, in terms of my own research, it’s really as an object of critical, historical, and theoretical analysis. [...] I really think the question of mediation is a much more interesting and capacious question than the question of the digital itself. I think the question of the digital in terms of historical, critical, and theoretical analysis is a subset of the question of mediation.

Welcome to Milton High School, where fear is a teacher’s best tool and every student is a soldier in the war on terror. A struggling public school outside the nation’s capital, Milton sat squarely at the center of two trends: growing fear of resurgent terrorism and mounting pressure to run schools as job training sites. In response, the school established a specialized Homeland Security program. A Curriculum of Fear takes us into Milton for a day-to-day look at how such a program works, what it means to students and staff, and what it says about the militarization of U.S. public schools and, more broadly, the state of public education in this country. Nicole Nguyen guides us through a curriculum of national security–themed classes, electives, and internships designed through public-private partnerships with major defense contractors like Northrop Grumman and federal agencies like the NSA. She introduces us to students in the process of becoming a corps of “diverse workers” for the national security industry, learning to be “vigilant” citizens; and she shows us the everyday realities of a program intended to improve the school, revitalize the community, and eliminate the achievement gap. With reference to critical work on school militarization, neoliberal school reform, the impact of the global war on terror on everyday life, and the political uses of fear, A Curriculum of Fear maps the contexts that gave rise to Milton’s Homeland Security program and its popularity. Ultimately, as the first ethnography of such a program, the book provides a disturbing close encounter with the new normal imposed by the global war on terror—a school at once under siege and actively preparing for the siege itself.

Abstract: The popularization of the digital humanities and the return to formalism are overdetermined by the perceived crises in the humanities. On the one hand, the new formalism harks back to a professionalizing strategy begun by the New Critics with John Crowe Ransom’s “Criticism, Inc.,” drawing strength from close reading’s original polemic against industrialism. On the other hand, the digital humanities reimagine professional labor in ways that seemingly approximate postindustrial norms. These contradictory but inextricably related visions of professional futures restage a conflict between literature and data, reading and making, that has been misrecognized as a conflict between literature and history. Approaching these tensions by way of historicist critique can illuminate the extent to which the debate between literature and data will define critical practice in the twenty-first century. (AK)

Arrays are ``second-class citizens'' in C. Related to the fact that arrays can't be assigned is the fact that they can't be returned by functions, either; that is, there is no such type as ``function returning array of ...''. In this chapter we'll study three workarounds, three ways to implement a function which attempts to return a string (that is, an array of char) or an array of some other type.

Documentation of intrinsic procedures

I first want to challenge the originality of these forms of "skimming the surface" and to develop the irony, suggested by my opening, that surfaces have been a longer term concern and that various theoretical gestures had already engaged with anti-critique.

My point of attack concerns Latour's rehabilitation of matter, primarily in the form of objects, posed against materialism — which is to say posed against broadly Marxist currents that insist on the role of the economic, on the ensemble of social and historical relations, as crucial to the analysis of literature.

Like Michigan, the UNC Press is seeing concerning numbers about ebook sales and use. The press has offered digital editions of its books for almost a decade, and the usage analytics are “not looking great, to be honest,” Sherer said.

[N]eoliberalism has two meanings. Of course it has many more than two meanings, but it has two important, current, distinct, somewhat related meanings, and they get invoked in close enough proximity to each other so as to sometimes cause serious confusion. (The correct title for this post should really be “‘Neoliberalism’ Has (at Least) Two Meanings,” but the simpler version sounds better.) The existence of these two meanings may even explain some of the denials that the term means anything at all.

As postcriticism grows, we should critically assess its promise and perils. Our assessment should take seriously Felski’s claim that being postcritical needn’t require abandoning critique. And if postcritics are indeed neither “uncritical” nor “anticritical,” they will welcome such scrutiny. But to be open to criticism requires being open to the possibility that the critics might be right. Our best arguments may compel us to reject or demand more of the postcritical project.

As I started using Fortran, I found a number of references online, but none were completely satisfactory to me. Being familiar with C/C++, though, there was little comparison with features in C. For instance, are the logical and/or operators short-circuiting, as they are in C? (Not really.) Is “if ( 1 )” valid? (It is not.) I also found many of the online examples to be poorly formatted and hard to read. Minimally, code should be lowercase, not shouting in uppercase, and indented. Some documents listed things like intrinsic functions with little or no explanation. I really needed an online quick reference to check on legal and recommended syntax. I also find that writing a guide is a great way to learn all the subtleties of a language. Hence this guide.

I used to be jealous of C because they had the inline-if and I believed that Fortran did not. Fortunately for us, Fortran added this inline-if into the 1995 standard. Unfortunately, they chose the most random of intrinsic function names I have ever heard of: merge.

Commodore 64 KERNAL functions

This article attempts to give a sort of ‘orientation tour’ for people whose previous programming background is in high (ish) level languages such as Java or Python, and who now find that they need or want to learn C. C is quite different, at a fundamental level, from languages like Java and Python. However, well-known books on C (such as the venerable Kernighan & Ritchie) tend to have been written before Java and Python changed everyone's expectations of a programming language, so they might well not stop to explain the fundamental differences in outlook before getting into the nitty-gritty language details. Someone with experience of higher-level languages might therefore suffer a certain amount of culture shock when picking up such a book. My aim is to help prevent that, by warning about the culture shocks in advance.

If DH had been called computational literary studies — if what they wanted to do was study large corpuses and databases of literature — I don’t think we would be having this discussion. Digital humanists have created this problem for themselves — do they fit into a department or don’t they? I would really like to see DH move away from the idea that it covers all of the humanities — which I think is false — and parcel itself out into disciplinary studies.