Commentary

You must change your graduate program!

Andrew Piper

We can either change in substantive ways or pretend to do something else while actually continuing to do the same things we’ve always done. The MLA report looks a lot like the latter and no doubt so will most of the responses to it.

Twilight of an Idol: College, Purpose, and Zombies

Brianne Alcala

College has come to bear an impossible burden, both individually and socially. Its most confident advocates treat it like a stand-alone ethical resource, capable of funding and guiding the self- transformations of America's elite.

Deans Care About Books

Brianne Alcala

By clinging to the idea that that humanities and humanistic social science scholarship must take the form of a print book, scholars and deans threaten the future of university presses and erode their ability to evaluate and distribute high-quality scholarship.

Algorithms Rule

Brianne Alcala

We are living in an age of algorithmic authority. Algorithms filter our music choices, track our purchasing decisions, find our airline tickets, and help us withdraw money from an ATM. They are ubiquitous. They are forming who we are and who we want to become. But we are only beginning to ask about our algorithmic selves.

Living With Ferguson

These representative acts of public judgment were meaningful in ways that transcend the unjust system. The world was watching and that was significant.

Virtual Assembly and the Legal Limits of Digital Dualism

Brianne Alcala

The virtual dimensions of assembly may yield insights for how we understand more traditional assemblies and the legal protections that we assign to them.

The Author in the Age of Digital Distribution

Brianne Alcala

Twitter, Racism, and the “Safe” Campus

Brianne Alcala

What is the proper context for even citing a tweet, let alone understanding the import or effects of 140 characters delivered as part of a longer, partially public, partially private exchange?

Big Data, Small Data, and the Ethics of Scale

Brianne Alcala

If we think of Facebook and Google and the computations in which we are enmeshed merely as information-processing machines, we concede our world to one end of the scale, a world of abstracted big data and all powerful algorithms. We forget that the internet, like any technology, is both a material infrastructure and something we do.

So Who Edits Google?

Brianne Alcala

We are only now beginning to understand why the unstated norms that shape the design and use of computational algorithms need to be made more explicit—and therefore subject to critical public debate. For now, Google and Facebook don't have mastheads or editorial pages. The names of the people who make judgments about what an algorithm does are hidden. All we have is the veneer of mechanical neutrality and the invocation of an objectivity that operates beyond the human.

John Searle and the Threat of Artificial Intelligence

It is at the point of this speculative possibility that Searle’s argument becomes both more interesting and more problematic, for it probes—somewhat indirectly, but powerfully nonetheless—the significance of the “artificial,” a category under which we can put both “art,” “artifice,” and certainly “technology.”

Here Comes the Potentiated Self

Brianne Alcala

Raising the self to a higher power is grounded not in the liberating promises of technology but in the more mundane pursuit of excellent habits. Sometimes data can help. But only with coaches and teachers skilled enough to help us make sense of it, and help us learn how to practice.

Universitybot Responds: Gang Rape as "Sexual Misconduct"

Brianne Alcala

Sullivan's statement was a missive from the bureaucratic bowels of an accounting machine. It was surely manufactured by public relations specialists and lawyers whose interests are simply fiduciary, concerned only with legal liability and potential fundraising.