Month: January 2009

we need parental leave AND breast pumps

There’s a fabulous article by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker about the history of breastfeeding and of breast pumps. Did you know that Linneus had first categorised humans as Quadrupedia: four-footed beasts, until his wife was breastfeeding their baby a few […]

heading out of the gutenberg parenthesis

I gave a talk for local librarians on Wednesday, which ended up being about the idea that the age of print was but a short blip in the history of human culture, the Gutenberg Parenthesis, as Tom Pettitt and others have called […]

danah boyd’s dissertation is online

After a well-earned vacation, danah boyd has returned to blogging and has posted her dissertation Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics online. danah is a pioneering scholar of social networking sites, a she-really-only-JUST-got-her-PhD!? kind of researcher who has […]

ada lovelace day

I’m looking forward to Ada Lovelace Day, on March 24. Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer, having written software for Babbage’s Analytical Machine in the 1840s. The machine was never built, so the software never ran, and she died young, but […]

computational journalism

I just heard about a fabulously interesting seminar at Infomedia on Computational Journalism – they’re planning on starting up a project about the use of software that gathers, computes and re-presents data in an editorial context, things like Washington Post’s Faces of […]

first day back at work

This morning started unlike every other morning of the last nine months. Sure, I woke up, showered and fed Jessica, but then I ate an amazing breakfast Scott cooked for us (Dutch apple pancake baked in our new cast iron skillet – […]