I actually quite enjoyed reading Matt Honan’s articles (here and here) for Wire magazine. They were both very informative and I thought they were a great cautionary tale for relying too heavily on passwords and other website security to protect you. It was really interesting that the hackers didn’t seem to be at all interested in Honan’s credit […]
Archive for September, 2012
Sep 26 2012
Useful? Yes. Ethical? Probably not.
The Brigham Young University’s Time Magazine Corpus website is amazing. Suddenly, every issue of Time since 1923 is at your fingertips, accessible on a relatively easy to use website. You can see which nouns or verbs have increased or decreased in a specific time period, see changes in the English language itself, even see how […]
Sep 24 2012
Owning the Past: Copyright Law
I will admit, when I saw the topic for this week’s blog I shuddered a little. I’ve had classes dealing with copyright law before and it’s always such a tangled subject. Having read a lot about copyright and patent lawsuits, I know that this is a difficult subject to tackle and I can imagine that […]
Sep 16 2012
How Much Can You Trust Wikipedia?
Like many students, I love Wikipedia. Yes, I know that there can be terrible inaccuracies in their articles but it’s always a great jumping-off point, especially if you’re unfamiliar with your research topic. It’s also a great go-to for quick trivia bits and things outside of the classroom (I, for one, really like to look […]
Sep 12 2012
Digital History Scavenger Hunt
1) An op-ed on a labor dispute involving public school teachers from before 1970 To find this I first went to ProQuest and simply typed in “1970 public schools+labor dispute” and came up with 0 results. I then just searched “public school labor dispute” and got 20884 results. I narrowed down the search by specifying that […]
Sep 09 2012
The Moon Landing in Digital Newspapers
I really enjoy the fact that so many older issues of newspapers are now digitized and accessible to us. My New England-based family has read both The New York Times and The Boston Globe religiously since before I can remember and I think it’s really extraordinary that I can go back and read the same articles that […]
Sep 03 2012
T.H Nelson on File Structure
T.H Nelson begins his paper, Complex Information Processing: A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the Indeterminate, by stating that the use of a computer for personal reasons is very different than the use of a computer for business reasons. He references Vannevar Bush’s Memex, which we read about last week, to explain that […]