new cultures of writing

(Not) Just a group of college students exploring the new technology of literature.

85 notes &

In less than a decade, Wikipedia has grown from a frequently ridiculed experiment to one of the world’s most popular websites. The online encyclopedia has reached near-ubiquity among Internet users and is often invoked as a synecdoche for user-generated content communities, crowdsourcing, peer production, and Web 2.0. As such, it is hardly surprising that a number of high-impact statistics demonstrating the project’s unexpected success are frequently mentioned in the public sphere. As of April 2012, there have been 528 million edits made to the English-language version and a total of 1.29 billion edits across all language versions. Other commentators describe the project in terms of its article content, not the amount of work put into those articles, and such figures are equally daunting: 19 million encyclopedia articles contain 8 billion words in 270 languages, and the English-language Wikipedia alone has 3.9 million articles containing 2.5 billion words.

While most of these and other statistics are backed up by a substantial amount of empirical research, estimations of the total number of labor-hours contributed to Wikipedia are one notable exception. However, this has not stopped champions of the project from stating with more and less certainty that Wikipedia is one of the largest projects in human history…

…[A] well-documented and often-repeated labor hour estimation is that of the Empire State Building, which took 3,000 laborers a total of 7 million labor-hours to construct. Figures for the construction of the Channel Tunnel report a total 170 million labor-hours, while estimations of the Great Pyramid at Giza range from 880 million to 3.5 billion labor-hours. The first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was written and published by 3 employees authoring 24 pages a week for 100 weeks, which is around 12,000 labor-hours assuming 40 hour work week…

…Summing the duration of all continuous editing sessions and single edit sessions, we identified 41,018,804 total labor-hours expended in the English-language version of Wikipedia… Extrapolating to all language version of Wikipedia based on the total number of edits made to each project, we estimate that 61,706,883 total labor-hours have been contributed in edit sessions for non-English language Wikipedias, for a total of 102,673,683 total labor-hours to all Wikipedia versions.

R. Stuart Geiger and Aaron Halfaker, Using Edit Sessions to Measure Participation in Wikipedia (PDF).

FJP: That’s approximately 11,720 years of peer production. 

(via futurejournalismproject)

0 notes &

Thought I might share a little Girl Talk (also known as Gregg Gillis), whose music we touched on yesterday.

I thought that we might have been getting away from the problem at hand a little bit.  Art is inherently imitative and has been since we’ve had art, and I don’t think that’s what Keen is worrying about.  Keen might have a problem with Girl Talk, but here is a spot where I’ll say it: Grace, you are right, I think he’s overreaching a bit.  Musicians have been sampling since long before Web 2.0 - its common practice, so long as the finished product is an artistic work all its own, which I would argue Girl Talk is.  But our whole debate seemed to me to be more about figuring out what art is as opposed to whether or not copyright is a good thing at all.

I need coffee.  More later, perhaps.

(Source: Spotify)

0 notes &

A New Kind of Cut-Up

So, an old friend of mine who teaches film studies sent me this article, and it struck me how appropriate it would be for our class.  In case you need a reason to read it:

Lindsey Lohan.  Paul Schrader.  Bret Easton Ellis.  ”The Canyons.”  It’s an underdog kind of a movie, deeply post-modern, and as Schrader says it’s “cinema for the post theatrical era.”  What ever would Mr. Walter say?

http://www.indiewire.com/article/paul_schrader

0 notes &

A Fake Facebook wedding : The New Yorker This news story reminded me of the question…”How gullible are you? ” It is so interesting to me that people actually do such things, but I guess that is the “evil” that exists because of how people chose to use technology.  I have heard of people finding love on line, but never going so far as to trick someone to come to their fake wedding.  

A Fake Facebook wedding : The New Yorker

This news story reminded me of the question…”How gullible are you? ” It is so interesting to me that people actually do such things, but I guess that is the “evil” that exists because of how people chose to use technology.  I have heard of people finding love on line, but never going so far as to trick someone to come to their fake wedding.  

2,198 notes &

betterbooktitles:

Banned Books Week, Day #2 on Better Book Titles

Check out “How Not to Read” (the Better Book Titles book!)

My personal favorite is the title for Of Mice and Men. Tumblr makes it easier to know what books are really about without actually reading them.

The internet in general makes it easier to “cheat” on reading with sites like Sparknotes. That should make things interesting for the English ed majors in the class. Maybe we can learn to use these pictures or Sparknotes as a supplement to the reading so students don’t use it as a replacement. 

932 notes &

akutemei: I fully support this quote and I think that it applies to this course because often students are forced to read so much that we take advantage of the fact that we actually have the ability to read.  I think this is so sad.  I think that this quote can also be connected to technology because in today’s world we have so many different forms of technology and additional ways to communicate that we are beginning to take advantage of these advancements.  Every new technological discoveries and new forms of communications are a valuable resource for our society.  We should be thankful for all of these new technologies as ways to expand our horizons. 

akutemei:

I fully support this quote and I think that it applies to this course because often students are forced to read so much that we take advantage of the fact that we actually have the ability to read.  I think this is so sad.  I think that this quote can also be connected to technology because in today’s world we have so many different forms of technology and additional ways to communicate that we are beginning to take advantage of these advancements.  Every new technological discoveries and new forms of communications are a valuable resource for our society.  We should be thankful for all of these new technologies as ways to expand our horizons.