Searching for "civil"

the intellectual dark web

Nuance: A Love Story. My affair with the intellectual dark web

Meghan Daum Aug 24 https://medium.com/s/greatescape/nuance-a-love-story-ae6a14991059

the standard set of middle-class Democratic Party values: Public safety nets were a force for good, corporate greed was a real threat, civil and reproductive rights were paramount.

I remember how good it felt to stand with my friends in our matching college sweatshirts shouting “never again!” and “my body, my choice!”

(hey, why shouldn’t Sarah Palin call herself a feminist?) brought angry letters from liberals as well as conservatives.

We would all go to the mat for women’s rights, gay rights, or pretty much any rights other than gun rights. We lived, for the most part, in big cities in blue states.

When Barack Obama came into the picture, we loved him with the delirium of crushed-out teenagers, perhaps less for his policies than for being the kind of person who also listens to NPR. We loved Hillary Clinton with the fraught resignation of a daughter’s love for her mother. We loved her even if we didn’t like her. We were liberals, after all. We were family.

Words like “mansplaining” and “gaslighting” were suddenly in heavy rotation, often invoked with such elasticity as to render them nearly meaningless. Similarly, the term “woke,” which originated in black activism, was being now used to draw a bright line between those on the right side of things and those on the wrong side of things.

From the Black Guys on Bloggingheads, YouTube’s algorithms bounced me along a path of similarly unapologetic thought criminals: the neuroscientist Sam Harris and his Waking Up podcast; Christina Hoff Sommers, aka “The Factual Feminist”; the comedian turned YouTube interviewer Dave Rubin; the counter-extremist activist Maajid Nawaz; and a cantankerous and then little-known Canadian psychology professor named Jordan Peterson, who railed against authoritarianism on both the left and right but reserved special disdain for postmodernism, which he believed was eroding rational thought on campuses and elsewhere.

the sudden national obsession with female endangerment on college campuses struck me much the same way it had in the early 1990s: well-intended but ultimately infantilizing to women and essentially unfeminist.

Weinstein and his wife, the evolutionary biologist Heather Heying, who also taught at Evergreen, would eventually leave the school and go on to become core members of the “intellectual dark web.”

Weinstein talked about intellectual “feebleness” in academia and in the media, about the demise of nuance, about still considering himself a progressive despite his feeling that the far left was no better at offering practical solutions to the world’s problems than the far right.

an American Enterprise Institute video of Sommers, the Factual Feminist, in conversation with the scholar and social critic Camille Paglia — “My generation fought for the freedom for women to risk getting raped!” I watched yet another video in which Paglia sat by herself and expounded volcanically about the patriarchal history of art (she was all for it).

the brothers sat down together for a two-hour, 47-minute interview on theRubin Report,

James Baldwin’s line, “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually

Jordan Peterson Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos, is a sort of New and Improved Testament for the purpose-lacking young person (often but not always male) for whom tough-love directives like “clean up your room!” go down a lot easier when dispensed with a Jungian, evo-psych panache.

Quillette, a new online magazine that billed itself as “a platform for free thought”

the more honest we are about what we think, the more we’re alone with our thoughts. Just as you can’t fight Trumpism with tribalism, you can’t fight tribalism with a tribe.

Mapping 1968

Mapping 1968, Conflict and Change

An Opportunity for Interdisciplinary Research 

When:  Friday, September 28, 8:30am-3:00pm
Where: Wilson Research Collaboration Studio, Wilson Library
Cost: Free; advanced registration is required

1968 was one of the most turbulent years of the 20th century.  2018 marks the 50th anniversary of that year’s landmark political, social and cultural events–events that continue to influence our world today.

Focusing on the importance of this 50 year anniversary we are calling out to all faculty, staff, students, and community partners to participate the workshop ‘Mapping 1968, Conflict and Change’. This all-day event is designed to bring people together into working groups based on common themes.  Bring your talent and curiosity to apply an interdisciplinary approach to further explore the spatial context of these historic and/or current events. Learn new skills on mapping techniques that can be applied to any time in history. To compliment the expertise that you bring to the workshop, working groups will also have the support of library, mapping, and data science experts to help gather, create, and organize the spatial components of a given topic.

To learn more and to register for the workshop, go here

Workshop sponsors: Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS), U-Spatial, Liberal Arts Technologies & Innovation Services (LATIS), Digital Arts, Science & Humanities (DASH), and UMN Libraries.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5114403-early-thematic-mapping-in-the-history-of-cartography – symbolization methods, cartographers and statisticians.

Kevin Ehrman-Solberg ehrma046@umn.edu PPT on Mapping Prejudice. https://www.mappingprejudice.org/

Henneping County scanned the deeds, OCR, Python script to search. Data in an open source. covenant data. Local historian found microfishes, the language from the initial data. e.g. eugenics flavor: arian, truncate.

covenance: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/convenance

Dan Milz. Public Affairs. geo-referencing, teaching a class environmental planning, spatial analysis, dmilz@umn.edu @dcmlz

Chris ancient historian. The Tale of Mediterranean, City: Mapping the history of Premodern Carthage and Tunis.
College of Liberal Arts

from archives to special resources. archaeological data into GIS layers. ESRI https://www.esri.com/en-us/home how interactive is ESRI.

mapping for 6 months. finding the maps in the archeological and history reports was time consuming. once that data was sorted out, exciting.

Kate Carlson, U-Spatial Story Maps, An Intro

patters, we wouldn’t see if we did not bring it up spatially. interactivity and data visualization, digital humanities

making an argument, asking questions, crowdsourcing, archival and resources accessibility, civitates orbis terrarum http://historic-cities.huji.ac.il/mapmakers/braun_hogenberg.html

storymaps.arcgis.com/en/gallery https://storymaps.arcgis.com/en/gallery/#s=0  cloud-based mapping software. ArcGIS Online. organizational account for the U, 600 users. over 700 storymaps creates within the U, some of them are not active, share all kind of data: archive data on spreadsheet, but also a whole set of data within the software; so add the data or use the ArcGIS data and use templates. web maps into the storymap app, Living Atlas: curated set of data: hunderd sets of data, from sat images, to different contents. 846 layers of data, imagery, besides org account, one can create maps within the free account with limited access. data browser to use my own data – Data Enrichment to characterized my data. census data from 2018 and before,
make plan, create a storyboard, writing for the web, short and precise (not as writing for a journal), cartographic style, copyright, citing the materials, choosing the right map scale for each page. online learning materials, some only thru org account ESRI academy has course catalogue. Mapping 101, Dekstop GIS 101, Collector 101, Imagery 101, SQL 101, Story Maps 101,

Awards for UMN undergrad and grad students, $1000

history, anthropology, political science,

Melinda, Kernik, Spatial Data Curator kerni016@umn.edu Jenny McBurney jmcburney@umn.edu

z.umn.edu/1968resources https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1QpdYKA1Rgzd_Nsd4Rr8ed1cJDAX1zeG7J3exRO6BHV0/edit#slide=id.g436145dc5b_0_23

data2.nhgis.org/main

University Digital COnservancy

civil rights information from the U (migrants blog)

DASH Digital Arts, Sciences and Humanities. text mining data visualization,

data repository for the U (DRUM)

DASH director, https://dash.umn.edu/. Ben Wiggins 

Jennifer Gunn
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The “Mapping 1968, Conflict and Change” planning committee is very pleased with the amount of interest and the wonderful attendance at Friday’s gathering. Thank you for attending and actively participating in this interdisciplinary workshop!
To re-cap and learn more on your thoughts and expectations of the workshop we would be grateful if you can take a few moments to complete the workshop evaluation.   Please complete the evaluation even if you were unable to attend last Friday, there are questions regarding continued communication and the possibility for future events of this kind.
 
Below is a list of presented workshop resources:
Best Regards-
Kate

U-Spatial | Spatial Technology Consultant
Research Computing, Office of the Vice President for Research
University of Minnesota
Office Address
Blegen Hall 420
Mailing Address
Geography
Room 414 SocSci
7163A

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more on GIS in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=GIS

social media strategies

Try these new social media strategies

Christopher Elliott

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/try-new-social-media-strategies-christopher-elliott/

Research suggests more consumers are turning to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, to contact companies — whether the companies are ready or not.

“Social media is the future of customer service,” says Anna Yates, a content marketer for The Social Reach, a digital marketing agency. “Not only are consumers turning to social media more and more to learn about products and services, but new tools are available to make customer service faster, easier, and smarter.”

the three Ps — be patient, persistent, and polite. Companies tend to flip into “crisis” mode when you send angry messages that threaten lawsuits, bodily harm, or the end of civilization.

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more on social media strategies in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=social+media+strategies

Churchill and the Greek resistance

How Churchill broke the Greek Resistance

How Winston Churchill and the British government attacked the Greek Resistance and sowed the seeds of civil war.

in December 1944: Nazi troops were still resisting the Allies, which were making slow progress in Italy and being pushed back in the Ardennes faced with the Wehrmacht’s final counter-offensive. Yet the “bands” here targeted by Churchill were not groups of collaborators, but the partisans of the great National Liberation Front (EAM), which had for three years mounted mass resistance against the German occupiers.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the eastern Mediterranean had been the center of a rivalry between Britain and Russia. The Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 having put an end to the latter country’s ambitions in the region, in the early 1940s, Greece was under unchallenged British influence. In this context, the country was of some strategic importance.
during the Quadrant Conference with Roosevelt in Quebec (August 17-24, 1943), Churchill saw his last hopes of an Allied landing in Greece vanish. Meanwhile, the Red Army’s advance beyond the USSR’s own frontiers was no longer in doubt. Churchill now took matters directly in hand, despite his advisers’ reticence, blocking off any possibility of negotiation and sending the EAM delegates home. At the same time, in a note to his high command, he drafted what would later become the MANNA plan: namely, to send an expeditionary corps to Greece after the German troops’ withdrawal.
The EAM-ELAS nonetheless succeeded in liberating a large part of the country. It established popular institutions which formed a counter-state. The worries among the British peaked in March 1944, when a “government of the mountains” was created that organized elections. Conversely, this approach awakened the enthusiasm of the Greek armed forces in Egypt, who immediately demanded that the Resistance be included in the exile government. Churchill replied with pitiless repression. He had “rebellious” elements deported to camps in Africa, and set up a praetorian guard prepared to return to Greece with the King and the British troops upon Liberation.
Everything was set for the application of the MANNA plan, which had been prepared the previous year. The victorious Red Army offensive in Bulgaria in September 1944 forced the Wehrmacht to withdraw from Greece, under attack from ELAS partisans. It was after this retreat that the British expeditionary corps arrived, accompanied by Papandreou and Scobie. Establishing themselves in the capital on October 18, the two men demanded that ELAS lay down its weapons, even as they rejected the disarming of the praetorian guard that had been formed in Egypt and, conveniently enough, transferred to Athens in early November.
December 3, 1944, saw a monster demonstration in Syntagma Square to demand Papandreou’s resignation and the constitution of a new government. The massacre that followed — the police opened fire on unarmed civilians, leaving over twenty dead and more than a hundred wounded — triggered the insurrection of the people of Athens. This was the pretext that Churchill had sought in order to be able to break the Resistance.
While the ELAS was still present across the rest of Greece’s territory, its leaders dreaded imposing new trials on an exhausted and famished population: 1,770 villages had been burned, more than a million people did not have a roof over their heads, and grain production had fallen by 40 percent. Meanwhile, the Allies’ aid only reached those who collaborated with them. With the Varkiza accord signed on February 12, 1945, the ELAS agreed unilaterally to give up its weapons. At the same time at Yalta, Churchill, together with Roosevelt and Stalin, solemnly proclaimed “the right of all peoples in liberated Europe to choose their own form of government.”
In breaking the Greek Resistance, the British had precipitated a civil war that would last — in open or latent forms — for some thirty years, with a brief lull between 1963 and 1965. It would only end with the fall of the colonels’ dictatorship in 1974. This “coup in Athens” reminds us that through its history, modern Greece has only enjoyed a very limited sovereignty.

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more on history in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=history

free speech and privacy

IT’S THE (DEMOCRACY-POISONING) GOLDEN AGE OF FREE SPEECH

Jan 16, 2018

https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-tech-turmoil-new-censorship/

My note: the author uses the 1960 military junta in Turkey as an example. Here it is the 2014 “modern” ideological fight of increasingly becoming dictatorial Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan against his citizens by shutting off Twitter: http://time.com/33393/turkey-recep-tayyip-erdogan-twitter/
Here is more on civil disobedience and social media: https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=civil+disobedience

until recently, broadcasting and publishing were difficult and expensive affairs, their infrastructures riddled with bottlenecks and concentrated in a few hands.

When protests broke out in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, a single livestreamer named Mustafa Hussein reportedly garnered an audience comparable in size to CNN’s for a short while. If a Bosnian Croat war criminal drinks poison in a courtroom, all of Twitter knows about it in minutes.

In today’s networked environment, when anyone can broadcast live or post their thoughts to a social network, it would seem that censorship ought to be impossible. This should be the golden age of free speech.

And sure, it is a golden age of free speech—if you can believe your lying eyes. Is that footage you’re watching real? Was it really filmed where and when it says it was? Is it being shared by alt-right trolls or a swarm of Russian bots?
My note: see the ability to create fake audio and video footage:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2017/07/15/fake-news-and-video/

HERE’S HOW THIS golden age of speech actually works: In the 21st century, the capacity to spread ideas and reach an audience is no longer limited by access to expensive, centralized broadcasting infrastructure. It’s limited instead by one’s ability to garner and distribute attention. And right now, the flow of the world’s attention is structured, to a vast and overwhelming degree, by just a few digital platforms: Facebook, Google (which owns YouTube), and, to a lesser extent, Twitter.

at their core, their business is mundane: They’re ad brokers

They use massive surveillance of our behavior, online and off, to generate increasingly accurate, automated predictions of what advertisements we are most susceptible to and what content will keep us clicking, tapping, and scrolling down a bottomless feed.

in reality, posts are targeted and delivered privately, screen by screen by screen. Today’s phantom public sphere has been fragmented and submerged into billions of individual capillaries. Yes, mass discourse has become far easier for everyone to participate in—but it has simultaneously become a set of private conversations happening behind your back. Behind everyone’s backs.

It’s important to realize that, in using these dark posts, the Trump campaign wasn’t deviantly weaponizing an innocent tool. It was simply using Facebook exactly as it was designed to be used. The campaign did it cheaply, with Facebook staffers assisting right there in the office, as the tech company does for most large advertisers and political campaigns.

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more on privacy in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=privacy

more on free speech in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=free+speech

weaponizing the web RT hybrid war

Fake news and botnets: how Russia weaponised the web

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/dec/02/fake-news-botnets-how-russia-weaponised-the-web-cyber-attack-estonia

The digital attack that brought Estonia to a standstill 10 years ago was the first shot in a cyberwar that has been raging between Moscow and the west ever since

It began at exactly 10pm on 26 April, 2007, when a Russian-speaking mob began rioting in the streets of Tallinn, the capital city of Estonia, killing one person and wounding dozens of others. That incident resonates powerfully in some of the recent conflicts in the US. In 2007, the Estonian government had announced that a bronze statue of a heroic second world war Soviet soldier was to be removed from a central city square. For ethnic Estonians, the statue had less to do with the war than with the Soviet occupation that followed it, which lasted until independence in 1991. For the country’s Russian-speaking minority – 25% of Estonia’s 1.3 million people – the removal of the memorial was another sign of ethnic discrimination.

That evening, Jaan Priisalu – a former risk manager for Estonia’s largest bank, Hansabank, who was working closely with the government on its cybersecurity infrastructure – was at home in Tallinn with his girlfriend when his phone rang. On the line was Hillar Aarelaid, the chief of Estonia’s cybercrime police.

“It’s going down,” Aarelaid declared. Alongside the street fighting, reports of digital attacks were beginning to filter in. The websites of the parliament, major universities, and national newspapers were crashing. Priisalu and Aarelaid had suspected something like this could happen one day. A digital attack on Estoniahad begun.

“The Russian theory of war allows you to defeat the enemy without ever having to touch him,” says Peter Pomerantsev, author of Nothing is True and Everything is Possible. “Estonia was an early experiment in that theory.”

Since then, Russia has only developed, and codified, these strategies. The techniques pioneered in Estonia are known as the “Gerasimov doctrine,” named after Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff of the Russian military. In 2013, Gerasimov published an article in the Russian journal Military-Industrial Courier, articulating the strategy of what is now called “hybrid” or “nonlinear” warfare. “The lines between war and peace are blurred,” he wrote. New forms of antagonism, as seen in 2010’s Arab spring and the “colour revolutions” of the early 2000s, could transform a “perfectly thriving state, in a matter of months, and even days, into an arena of fierce armed conflict”.

Russia has deployed these strategies around the globe. Its 2008 war with Georgia, another former Soviet republic, relied on a mix of both conventional and cyber-attacks, as did the 2014 invasion of Crimea. Both began with civil unrest sparked via digital and social media – followed by tanks. Finland and Sweden have experienced near-constant Russian information operations. Russian hacks and social media operations have also occurred during recent elections in Holland, Germany, and France. Most recently, Spain’s leading daily, El País, reported on Russian meddling in the Catalonian independence referendum. Russian-supported hackers had allegedly worked with separatist groups, presumably with a mind to further undermining the EU in the wake of the Brexit vote.

The Kremlin has used the same strategies against its own people. Domestically, history books, school lessons, and media are manipulated, while laws are passed blocking foreign access to the Russian population’s online data from foreign companies – an essential resource in today’s global information-sharing culture. According to British military researcher Keir Giles, author of Nato’s Handbook of Russian Information Warfare, the Russian government, or actors that it supports, has even captured the social media accounts of celebrities in order to spread provocative messages under their names but without their knowledge. The goal, both at home and abroad, is to sever outside lines of communication so that people get their information only through controlled channels.

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24-hour Putin people: my week watching Kremlin ‘propaganda channel’ RT

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/nov/29/24-hour-putin-people-my-week-watching-kremlin-propaganda-channel-rt-russia-today

 Wednesday 29 November 2017 

According to its detractors, RT is Vladimir Putin’s global disinformation service, countering one version of the truth with another in a bid to undermine the whole notion of empirical truth. And yet influential people from all walks of public life appear on it, or take its money. You can’t criticise RT’s standards, they say, if you don’t watch it. So I watched it. For a week.

Suchet, the son of former ITV newsreader John Suchet and the nephew of actor David Suchet, has been working for RT since 2009. The offspring of well-known people feature often on RT. Sophie Shevardnadze, who presents Sophie & Co, is the granddaughter of former Georgian president and Soviet foreign minister Eduard ShevardnadzeTyrel Ventura, who presents Watching the Hawks on RT America, is the son of wrestler-turned-politician Jesse Ventura. His co-host is Oliver Stone’s son Sean.

My note; so this is why Oliver Stone in his “documentary” went gentle on Putin, so his son can have a job. #Nepotism #FakeNews

RT’s stated mission is to offer an “alternative perspective on major global events”, but the world according to RT is often downright surreal.

Peter Pomerantsev, author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, about Putin’s Russia, and now a senior visiting fellow in global affairs at the London School of Economics, was in Moscow working in television when Russia Today first started hiring graduates from Britain and the US. “The people were really bright, they were being paid well,” he says. But they soon found they were being ordered to change their copy, or instructed how to cover certain stories to reflect well on the Kremlin. “Everyone had their own moment when they first twigged that this wasn’t like the BBC,” he says. “That, actually, this is being dictated from above.” The coverage of Russia’s war with Georgia in 2008 was a lightbulb moment for many, he says. They quit.

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more on Russian bots, trolls:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2017/11/22/bots-trolls-and-fake-news/

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more on state propaganda in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2017/11/21/china-of-xi/

Timothy Garton Ash Germany

It’s the Kultur, Stupid

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/12/07/germany-alt-right-kultur-stupid/
http://librev.com/index.php/2013-03-30-08-56-39/discussion/politics/3333-it-s-the-kultur-stupid
Book reviews [and more]
“The reason we are inundated by culturally alien [kulturfremden] peoples such as Arabs, Sinti and Roma etc. is the systematic destruction of civil society as a possible counterweight to the enemies-of-the-constitution by whom we are ruled. These pigs are nothing other than puppets of the victor powers of the Second World War….” Thus begins a 2013 personal e-mail from Alice Weidel, who in this autumn’s pivotal German election was one of two designated “leading candidates” of the Alternative für Deutschland (hereafter AfD or the Alternative). The chief “pig” and “puppet” was, of course, Angela Merkel.
Xenophobic right-wing nationalism—in Germany of all places? The very fact that observers express surprise indicates how much Germany has changed since 1945. These days, we expect more of Germany than of ourselves. For, seen from one point of view, this is just Germany partaking in the populist normality of our time, as manifested in the Brexit vote in Britain, Marine le Pen’s Front National in France, Geert Wilders’s blond beastliness in the Netherlands, the right-wing nationalist-populist government in Poland, and Trumpery in the US.
Like all contemporary populisms, the German version exhibits both generic and specific features. In common with other populisms, it denounces the current elites (Alteliten in AfD-speak) and established parties (Altparteien) while speaking in the name of the Volk, a word that, with its double meaning of people and ethno-culturally defined nation, actually best captures what Trump and Le Pen mean when they say “the people.”
Like other populists, Germany’s attack the mainstream media (Lügenpresse, the “lying press”) while making effective use of social media. On the eve of the election, the Alternative had some 362,000 Facebook followers, compared with the Social Democrats’ 169,000 and just 154,000 for Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
Tiresomely familiar to any observer of Trump, Brexit, or Wilders is the demagogic appeal to emotions while playing fast and loose with facts. In Amann’s account, the predominant emotion here is Angst. 
For eight of the last twelve years, Germany has been governed by a so-called Grand Coalition of Christian Democrats—Merkel’s CDU in a loveless parliamentary marriage with the more conservative Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU)—and Social Democrats. This has impelled disgruntled voters toward the smaller parties and the extremes. The effect has been reinforced by Merkel’s woolly centrist version of Margaret Thatcher’s TINA (There Is No Alternative), perfectly captured in the German word alternativlos (without alternatives). It’s no accident that this protest party is called the Alternative.
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my note: an excellent fictional depiction of the rise of AfD in the second season of Berlin Station: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5191110/

Charles Taylor

Taylor, C. (2017). Our evolving agenda. Philosophy & Social Criticism43(3), 274-275. doi:10.1177/0191453716680433

 Neo-Kantian ethics, for its part, tends to separate issues of the good life from what it considers the central questions of justice.

The reigning neo-liberal ideology, and the order it lauds, is meant to produce a maximization of wealth, and hence of means to fulfil our goals, without asking in what ways our frenetic attempts to increase GNP run counter to some of our most important goals: solidarity, the ability to discern and pursue a truly meaningful and fulfilling life, in keeping with our endowment and inclinations. We are either induced to neglect these in favour of playing our part in increasing GNP and/or we never pause to consider questions about what kind of life is best for us and, above all, what we owe to each other in this department

One of the central issues that arises in this context is that of democracy. After 1945, and then 1989, and then again in 2011 with the Arab Spring, we had the sense that democracy was on the march in history. But not only have many of the new departures been disappointing – Russia, Turkey, Egypt – but democracy is beginning to decay in its historic heartlands, where it has been operative for more than a century.

Inequalities are growing; in fact, democracy has been sacrificed to the supposed path of more rapid growth, as defined by neo-liberalism. This has led to a sense of impotence among non-elites, which has meant a drop in electoral participation, which in turn increases the power of money in politics, which leads to an intensified sense of impotence, and so on.

Taylor, C. (1998, October). The Dynamics of Democratic Exclusion. Journal of Democracy. p. 143.

Liberal democracy is a great philosophy of inclusion. It is rule of the people, by the people, and for the people, and today the “people” is taken to mean everybody, without the unspoken restrictions that formerly excluded peasants, women, or slaves. Contemporary liberal democracy offers the spectacle of the most inclusive politics in human history. Yet there is also something in the dynamic of democracy that pushes toward exclusion. This was allowed full rein in earlier democracies, as among the ancient republics, but today is a cause of great malaise.

The basic mode of legitimation of democratic states implies that they are founded on popular sovereignty. Now, for the people to be sovereign, it needs to form an entity and have a personality. This need can be expressed in the following way: The people is supposed to rule; this means that its members make up a decision-making unit, a body that takes joint decisions through a consensus, or at least a majority vote, of agents who are deemed equal and autonomous. It is not “democratic” for some citizens to be under the control of others. This might facilitate decision making, but it is not democratically legitimate.

In other words, a modern democratic state demands a “people” with a strong collective identity. Democracy obliges us to show much more solidarity and much more commitment to one another in our joint political project than was demanded by the hierarchical and authoritarian societies of yesteryear.

Thinkers in the civic humanist tradition, from Aristotle through Hannah Arendt, have noted that free societies require a higher level of commitment and participation than despotic or authoritarian ones. Citizens have to do for themselves, as it were, what the rulers would otherwise do for them. But this will happen only if these citizens feel a strong bond of identification with their political community, and hence with their fellow citizens.

successive waves of immigrants were perceived by many U.S. citizens of longer standing as a threat to democracy and the American way of life. This was the fate of the Irish beginning in the 1840s, and later in the century of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. And of course, the long-established black population, when it was given citizen rights for the first time after the Civil War, was effectively excluded from voting through much of the Old South up until the civil rights legislation of the 1960s.

Multiculturalism and Postmodernism

For although conservatives often lump “postmodernists” and “multiculturalists” together with “liberals,” nothing could be less fair. In fact, the “postmodernists” themselves attack the unfortunate liberals with much greater gusto than they direct against the conser-vatives.

the two do have something in common, and so the targets partly converge. The discourse of the victim-accuser is ultimately rooted in certain philosophical sources that the postmodernists share with procedural liberalism—in particular, a commitment to negative liberty and/or a hostility to the Herder-Humboldt model of the associative bond. That is why policies framed in the language of “postmodernism” usually share certain properties with the policies of their procedural liberal enemies.

The struggle to redefine our political life in order to counteract the dangers and temptations of democratic exclusion will only intensify in the next century (My note: 21st century). There are no easy solutions, no universal formulas for success in this struggle. But at least we can try to avoid falling into the shadow or illusory ways of thinking. This means, first, that we must understand the drive to exclusion (as well as the vocation of inclusion) that democratic politics contains; and second, that we must fight free of some of the powerful philosophical illusions of our age. This essay is an attempt to push our thought a little ahead in both these directions.

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Taylor, C., & And, O. (1994). Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition.

 

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Taylor, C. A. (1996). Theorizing Practice and Practicing Theory: Toward a Constructive Analysis of Scientific Rhetorics. Communication Theory (10503293)6(4), 374-387.

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Taylor, C., & Jennings, I. (2005). The Immanent Counter-Enlightenment: Christianity and Morality. South African Journal Of Philosophy24(3), 224-239.

a passage from Paul Bénichou’s fa mous work Mo rales du grand siècle: ‘Hu man kind re presses its mis ery when ever it can; and at the same time for gets that hu mil i at ing mo ral ity by which it had con demned life, and in do ing so had made a vir tue of ne ces sity.2 ’ In this ver sion, the la tent hu man ist mo ral ity suc ceeds in es tab – lish ing it self, and in so do ing helps to throw the theo log i cal-as cetic code onto the scrap heap. On this view, it is as if the hu man ist mo ral ity had al ways been there, wait ing for the chance to over throw its op pres sive pre de ces sor.

The re la tion ship was something like the fol low ing: As long as one lived in the en – chanted world, where the weather-bells chimed, one felt one self to be in a world full of threats, vul ner a ble to black magic in all its forms. In this world God was for most be liev ers the source of a pos i tive power, which was able to de feat the pow ers of evil. God was the chief source of coun ter-, or white, magic. He was the fi nal guar an tor that good would tri umph in this world of man i fold spir its and pow ers. For those com pletely ab sorbed in this world, it was prac ti cally im pos si ble not to be – lieve in God. Not to be lieve would mean de vot ing one self to the devil. A small mi nor – ity of truly re mark able – or per haps truly des per ate – peo ple did in deed do this. But for the vast ma jor ity there was no ques tion whether one be lieved in God or not – the pos i – tive force was as real a fact as the threats it coun ter acted. The ques tion of be lief was a ques tion of trust and mem ber ship rather than one of the ac cep tance of par tic u lar doc – trines. In this sense they were closer to the con text of the gos pels.

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more on philosophy in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=philosophy

digital humanities

7 Things You Should Know About Digital Humanities

Published:   Briefs, Case Studies, Papers, Reports  

https://library.educause.edu/resources/2017/11/7-things-you-should-know-about-digital-humanities

Lippincott, J., Spiro, L., Rugg, A., Sipher, J., & Well, C. (2017). Seven Things You Should Know About Digital Humanities (ELI 7 Things You Should Know). Retrieved from https://library.educause.edu/~/media/files/library/2017/11/eli7150.pdf

definition

The term “digital humanities” can refer to research and instruction that is about information technology or that uses IT. By applying technologies in new ways, the tools and methodologies of digital humanities open new avenues of inquiry and scholarly production. Digital humanities applies computational capabilities to humanistic questions, offering new pathways for scholars to conduct research and to create and publish scholarship. Digital humanities provides promising new channels for learners and will continue to influence the ways in which we think about and evolve technology toward better and more humanistic ends.

As defined by Johanna Drucker and colleagues at UCLA, the digital humanities is “work at the intersection of digital technology and humanities disciplines.” An EDUCAUSE/CNI working group framed the digital humanities as “the application and/or development of digital tools and resources to enable researchers to address questions and perform new types of analyses in the humanities disciplines,” and the NEH Office of Digital Humanities says digital humanities “explore how to harness new technology for thumanities research as well as those that study digital culture from a humanistic perspective.” Beyond blending the digital with the humanities, there is an intentionality about combining the two that defines it.

digital humanities can include

  • creating digital texts or data sets;
  • cleaning, organizing, and tagging those data sets;
  • applying computer-based methodologies to analyze them;
  • and making claims and creating visualizations that explain new findings from those analyses.

Scholars might reflect on

  • how the digital form of the data is organized,
  • how analysis is conducted/reproduced, and
  • how claims visualized in digital form may embody assumptions or biases.

Digital humanities can enrich pedagogy as well, such as when a student uses visualized data to study voter patterns or conducts data-driven analyses of works of literature.

Digital humanities usually involves work by teams in collaborative spaces or centers. Team members might include

  • researchers and faculty from multiple disciplines,
  • graduate students,
  • librarians,
  • instructional technologists,
  • data scientists and preservation experts,
  • technologists with expertise in critical computing and computing methods, and undergraduates

projects:

downsides

  • some disciplinary associations, including the Modern Language Association and the American Historical Association, have developed guidelines for evaluating digital proj- ects, many institutions have yet to define how work in digital humanities fits into considerations for tenure and promotion
  • Because large projects are often developed with external funding that is not readily replaced by institutional funds when the grant ends sustainability is a concern. Doing digital humanities well requires access to expertise in methodologies and tools such as GIS, mod- eling, programming, and data visualization that can be expensive for a single institution to obtain
  • Resistance to learning new tech- nologies can be another roadblock, as can the propensity of many humanists to resist working in teams. While some institutions have recognized the need for institutional infrastructure (computation and storage, equipment, software, and expertise), many have not yet incorporated such support into ongoing budgets.

Opportunities for undergraduate involvement in research, provid ing students with workplace skills such as data management, visualization, coding, and modeling. Digital humanities provides new insights into policy-making in areas such as social media, demo- graphics, and new means of engaging with popular culture and understanding past cultures. Evolution in this area will continue to build connections between the humanities and other disci- plines, cross-pollinating research and education in areas like med- icine and environmental studies. Insights about digital humanities itself will drive innovation in pedagogy and expand our conceptualization of classrooms and labs

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more on digital humanities in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=digital+humanities

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