S15 Awakening the Digital Imagination
New Media Seminar for Virginia Tech faculty, staff and graduate students
This week I read Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” featuring Turing’s arguments against resistance to the idea of thinking machines, as well as his predictions for what digital computers of the future would be able to do. These days, many humans still have the same objections as those Turing argued against. We find thinking machines […]
I am not a numbers person, but reading Alan Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (NMR), and watching The Imitation Game has me thinking about numbers, what they mean, and what we make of them. The excerpt in the New Media Reader was first published in 1950 and teems with binaries. Turing’s original conception of the […]
Reading: “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” by Alan Turing. Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy 59(236):433-360. October 1950. (one reprint is here by a quick Google search). Computer scientist majors will learn about the famous Turing Machine in any introductory Theory of Computation class. They might get a cursory mention of the “Imitation Game,” the subject of […]
I’ve just finished reading Vannevar Bush’s 1945 article in the Atlantic Monthly, “As We May Think,” which makes some prescient predictions about the future of computing, science and industry in the wake of the massively destructive bombs brought to life during World War II by some of the brightest scientists of that generation. A great many […]
The Internet has created opportunities and perils. We have mountains of data, but few individuals can tackle the mountains with anything better than a sand shovel. These reams of data are enticing for social scientists such as myself—with whole chat rooms of strangers to interview, millions of comment threads to assess, we have seemingly unlimited new avenues to […]
This is the first post for a New Media Seminar that I am participating in at Virginia Tech. The main site for this seminar includes comments on weekly readings. Seminar Twitter Hashtag: #vtnmss15. Reading: “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush, Atlantic Monthly, 176(1):101-108. (July 1945). Many of the passages in Vannevar Bush’s article As We […]
We’ve been thinking through the “Awakening” of the Digital Imagination all semester, and today the New Media Seminar concludes with Scott McCloud’s “Time Frames” and Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s proposal for the HTTP protocol that created the World Wide Web. Now that the Web is in it’s twenty-fifth year I wonder how we might think about […]
At the end of an evening of tinkering — fiddling, exploring and stirring — tired and scattered, but invigorated by newly-made connections and the promise of more coherence tomorrow, I offer these modified nuggets-cum-stepping stones from the learning webs of Ivan Illich to those of the 21st-Century connected course. 1) From the introduction to De-Schooling […]
