Archive: The Gnovis Blog
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Enlarged to Show Texture: Should Fashion Magazines Be Forced to Disclose Photographic Manipulation?
I have a distinct memory from my first year of immigrating to America involving cereal boxes. I remember looking at the bowls on the front filled with monster sized cereal and feeling completely confused when, upon opening the box, I would inevitably discover a much smaller version. We didn’t have cereal in Russia, nor did we have advertising, and the discrepancy remained a mystery until I learned to read English well enough to understand the “Enlarged to show texture” disclaimer.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Wrapup: "T" is for Technology, "t" is for thesis
On gnovis…
In her debut post on gnovis, Venessa Miemis wrote about the potential impacts of social media and geospatial technology on social change: “Local level real-time mapping is making the world a seemingly smaller, more transparent and manageable place. The information it provides, like any map of value, helps us understand the patterns and relationships within our surroundings and gives clues about what action to take to achieve desired results.”
For the rest of the week, busy thesis writers began to introspect on how their projects related to CCT, and each other.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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26 theses and the only common denominator is the colon
Let’s play a game! You tell me your thesis topics and I’ll figure out what you guys study at CCT!
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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How My Thesis Relates to Anything, Anywhere
This is what I’m writing my thesis about. Well, not these huts exactly but the Civil War re-enactors who inhabit them. I know right, what the hell am I doing in a technology program with people studying things like free culture and media markets? Funny you should ask…
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Mapping the Geospatial World: A Tool for Social Change
It’s part of human nature to label, classify, and quantify the world around us. We feel empowered when we’re able to create structure and meaning out of our surroundings. Maps have been used for thousands of years to that end; enabling us to plot a course, make informed decisions of paths to take, and decide which trajectory will give us desired results. In today’s modern culture, digital media has taken mapping to a whole new level, giving us the ability to visualize our world in 3D, and on a global scale.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Wrapup: Digital Stories, Academic Freedom, A Twitter Smackdown, and the End of News
In lieu of our usual comprehensive weekly wrapup, I’d like to use the first part of this post to call out some of the recent non-blog activity at gnovis, specifically the launch of our website’s new multimedia section , featuring some of CCTs explorations in non-traditional academic research. Currently, the section includes 10 projects, mostly “Digital Stories” produced for Dr Michael Coventry’s classes.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Amateurization is Journalism's Achilles' Heel
After having recent conversations with friends in the newspaper business and reading Akoto Ofori-Atta’s latest gnovis blog on the predicament of magazines, it reminded me of a lingering fear and, what I believe, an imminent reality: the demise of the profession I spent four years studying — and shelled out thousands of dollars to study — will fall to the hands of millions of amateurs spouting off inane stories, inaccuracies and highly subjective information.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Academic Freedom vs. Resource Allocation: The state of Georgia and Queer Theory
Today, an article came across my Facebook news feed about Georgia legislators trying to stop the funding of research areas deemed “unnecessary”, such as Queer theory. The argument is framed as an economic one – the lawmakers are tired of “spending state dollars on close studies of oral sex and male prostitution.” Some who commented on the article interpreted it as a religiously, rather than an economically driven action, even though there is almost nothing to suggest that in the language of the legislature. Others brought up the issue of academic freedom. So, is this an attempt to spread a particular religious agenda couched in economic terms? Or, is it an economic argument to be taken at face value? And is it an ideologically motivated attack on academic freedom, or is resource allocation part of the state’s job?
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Twittering My Presence
It is a question as old as the fail whale itself: Why do we Twitter? Yesterday, the Valley Wag asked this question in a scathing critique of the usefulness of this service. Earlier this month, David Pogue of The New York Times in his for-the-masses review described it as a “time drain” and “one of those ego things.” Yes, it is the season for critiquing Twitter.Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Blog Wrap Up: Photography, Print Media, and the Power of Pink Panties
This weeks bloggers focus on the economy, emotional reactions to mediated experiences, and of course, social media.
Category: The Gnovis Blog