Atomizing the discourse
The Open Knowledge Foundation Blog is introducing the project Debategraph today. Debategraph describes itself like this:
Our goal is to make the best arguments on all sides of any public debate freely available to all and continuously open to challenge and improvement by all.
ItâEUR(TM)s a little bit sad and more over dangerous for political discourse and open debate to see âEURoecomplex, multi-dimensional problemsâEUR as you describe it broken down into a small set of prejudices (as in the case of âEURoeIllegalâEUR Migration to the USA). ThatâEUR(TM)s a problem which I found underestimated in general with Open Data. Data appear to be facts, because the contexts of them are blackboxed either in a machine like in Nature Sciences or in Methods like in Humanities and so on. In this sense Data always is somehow affirmative. They have a message which is alwas the message of its creator. There are many situations in which this is not problematically but when it comes to political discourse it is, as seen in the example above. The question why someone raises an argument, who raises it, in which situation, with which interests is a generic part of political debates which canâEUR(TM)t be represented in the approach of Debategraph.
by Niels-Oliver Walkowski
on the 2. Juli 2010, 11:18 o'clock 1 Comment
How to get rid of Facebook – the next try
Everyone is talking about Facebook’s privacy settings. In fact the way how Social Networks and Facebook treat the topic of privacy set a general discussion about data protection in motion. One can’t be surprised by the way both sides take a stand. With this in mind Facebooks founder Mark Zuckerberg mentioned some month ago that privacy is a concept of the past and that people of today love to share their personal information without restriction. He argued that social norms are changing and that it’s no longer in people’s interest to hide these information by default. Of course social norms and values are changing. But nevertheless continue reading »
by Niels-Oliver Walkowski
on the 23. Mai 2010, 18:52 o'clock 1 Comment
Workshop “Modelling Virtual Research Environments for the Humanities”
Gerade bin ich vom Workshop “Modelling Virtual Research Environments for the Humanities” des Internationalen Kollegs Morphomata der Universität Köln zurückgekommen. Dort ging es an ein 1 1/2 Tagen um Tools und Infrastrukturen, die den Forschungsalltag von Geisteswissenschaftlern unterstützen sollen. Bis auf den Vortrag von Paul Wouters, der am ersten Abend als unterhaltsamer Key Speaker auftrat, und Torsten Reimer, der die kürzlich vom JISC veröffentlichte Studie Virtual research environment collaborative landscape study vorstellte, präsentierten die Vortragenden konkrete Projekte continue reading »
by Niels-Oliver Walkowski
on the 22. April 2010, 14:28 o'clock 1 Comment
The Social of Social Media in Science
In the last few years discussions in the Digital Humanities and eScience community are more and more focusing on the concepts developed in discussions about Social Web or Web 2.0. This means the âEURoediscoveryâEUR of not only the modeling, structuring and processing of scientific content but the area of interaction and communication in which this content is generated for the question how the digital spaces can affect and serve in the scientific field.
That this âEURoediscoveryâEUR is a quiet fresh one is demonstrated by the way in which the players are acting within the discussion and how Web 2.0 is perceived as a Social Media. We are all small utopists impressed by what is going on there, reactivating our longlife dreams with the hope they might become true this time (another argumentation about the âEURoefreshnessâEUR of Social Media in Science was continue reading »
by Niels-Oliver Walkowski
on the 11. April 2010, 17:09 o'clock 2 Comments