- Transmission Model of Communication – David Chandler critiques Shannon and Weaver's model as it has been used in common culture. Not merely mostly harmless. "In short, the transmissive model is of little direct value to social science research into human communication, and its endurance in popular discussion is a real liability. Its reductive influence has implications not only for the commonsense understanding of communication in general, but also for specific forms of communication such as speaking and listening, writing and reading, watching television and so on. In education, it represents a similarly transmissive model of teaching and learning. And in perception in general, it reflects the naive 'realist' notion that meanings exist in the world awaiting only decoding by the passive spectator. In all these contexts, such a model underestimates the creativity of the act of interpretation." – (communication Dh erhetoric )
- The Martian: Allegory of Whose Lives Matter – – (none)
- Dear parents: Let your kids use open source software – Written for parents. A tiny guide and apologia for FOSS. – (foss open_source linux tech_writing )
- Afraid someone will steal your idea? – "No genius. No mystique. Only work. Don't buy into the genius mystique. It is a mirage. Maybe there are geniuses out there, but you can't go assuming that you're one. That's like living as if you're going to win the lottery on a regular basis. No, the value comes from the work and no one's going to do more of it than you." – (open_source openaccess IP authorship )
- Language Log » School grammar, round two – Continuing loving it to death, our hero turns to implementation. English Depts are driven too much by literature and suffer from a lack of training in analytical methods so we might place the study of grammar elsewhere: "But at least in the U.S., my suggestion would be to turn away from English departments, and pursue a plan based on an alliance of linguists with people in computer science, psychology, statistics, medicine, law, sociology, business, etc., who increasingly see linguistic analysis (e.g. in the form of "text mining" or "text analytics") as an interesting object of study in itself, and as a means to enable research on other (applied or fundamental) topics. This alliance — which eventually might even include some people from Digital Humanities — is a plausible basis for college-level courses in "grammar" as practical text analysis." With this, we need a change in marketing The English Major, away from Book Club and towards theory in practice (aka analytic methods, study of text, NLP). It'll take a generation, – (DH linguistics grammar )