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In Two Bits, Christopher M. Kelty investigates the history and cultural significance of Free Software, revealing the people and practices that have transformed not only software but also music, film, science, and education. Free Software is a set of practices devoted to the collaborative creation of software source code that is made openly and freely available through an unconventional use of copyright law. Kelty explains how these specific practices have reoriented the relations of power around the creation, dissemination, and authorization of all kinds of knowledge. He also makes an important contribution to discussions of public spheres and social imaginaries by demonstrating how Free Software is a recursive publica public organized around the ability to build, modify, and maintain the very infrastructure that gives it life in the first place.Drawing on ethnographic research that took him from an Internet healthcare start-up company in Boston to media labs in Berlin to young entrepreneurs in Bangalore, Kelty describes the technologies and the moral vision that bind together hackers, geeks, lawyers, and other Free Software advocates. In each case, he shows how their practices and way of life include not only the sharing of software source code but also ways of conceptualizing openness, writing copyright licenses, coordinating collaboration, and proselytizing. By exploring in detail how these practices came together as the Free Software movement from the 1970s to the 1990s, Kelty also considers how it is possible to understand the new movements emerging from Free Software: projects such as Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that creates copyright licenses, and Connexions, a project to create an online scholarly textbook commons.

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Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software

In this article, I inquire into Facebook’s development as a platform by situating it within the transformation of social network sites into social media platforms. I explore this shift with a histo...

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The Platformization of the Web: Making Web Data Platform Ready

This work provides an analysis of the ways that new media are experienced and studied as the subjects of history, using the examples of early recorded sound and digital networks. In "Always Already New", Lisa Gitelman explores the newness of new media while she asks what it means to do media history. Using the examples of early recorded sound and digital networks, Gitelman challenges readers to think about the ways that media work as the simultaneous subjects and instruments of historical inquiry. Presenting original case studies of Edison's first phonographs and the Pentagon's first distributed digital network, the ARPANET, Gitelman points suggestively toward similarities that underlie the cultural definition of records (phonographic and not) at the end of the nineteenth century and the definition of documents (digital and not) at the end of the twentieth. As a result, "Always Already New" speaks to present concerns about the humanities as much as to the emergent field of new media studies. Records and documents are kernels of humanistic thought, after all, part of and party to the cultural impulse to preserve and interpret. Gitelman's argument suggests inventive contexts for "humanities computing" while also offering a new perspective on such traditional humanities disciplines as literary history. Making extensive use of archival sources, Gitelman describes the ways in which recorded sound and digitally networked text each emerged as local anomalies that were yet deeply embedded within the reigning logic of public life and public memory. In the end, Gitelman turns to the World Wide Web and asks how the history of the Web is already being told, how the Web might also resist history, and how using the Web might be producing the conditions of its own historicity.

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Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture

In literary theory, the philosophy of law, and the sociology of knowledge, no issue has been more central to current debate than the status of our interpretations. Do they rest on a ground of rationality or are they subjective impositions of a merely personal point of view? In \"Doing What Comes Naturally,\" Stanley Fish refuses the dilemma posed by this question and argues that while we can never separate our judgments from the contexts in which they are made, those judgments are nevertheless authoritative and even, in the only way that matters, objective. He thus rejects both the demand for an ahistorical foundation, and the conclusion that in the absence of such a foundation we reside in an indeterminate world. In a succession of provocative and wide-ranging chapters, Fish explores the implications of his position for our understanding of legal, literary, and psychoanalytic interpretation, the nature of professional and institutional culture, and the place of reason in a world that is rhetorical through and through.

Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies

In this paper, we propose an efficient method for constructing a model which predicts the angle of a beam reflected by a reflectarray. The method includes an effective calculation method for preprocessing phase data and a design of a suitable deep learning model. We use the vibration displacement data instead of phase data with feature scaling. We claim that the numerical value of vibration displacement data is more meaningful than original numerical values of phase data. Referring to the transformer model originally proposed in natural language processing, we propose a simple network mechanism, the Hadamard product self-attention mechanism, for regression analysis of reflectarray antenna. We compare the results of experiments on the proposed method to the models with fully-connect neural network and Convolutional Neural Network, respectively. The experiment results show that methods and mechanism proposed by this research have a significant improvement in the accuracy of predicting the reflection angle, and the model convergence speed is also faster. The model can be applied to design a reflectarray to meet the requirements of a given pair of incoming and outgoing beam angles.

Effective Construction of a Reflection Angle Prediction Model for Reflectarrays Using the Hadamard Product Self-Attention Mechanism

Author(s): Bulger, Monica E; Murphy, Jessica C; Scheible, Jeff; Lagresa, Elizabeth; Liu, Alan | Abstract: In his experimental seminar, “Literature: Cross-Disciplinary Models of Literary Interpretation,” Alan Liu asked students to form groups around topics of their choosing and perform analyses using digital tools on their materials. Our group represented four different disciplines and therefore formed around digital tools, rather than content. Each of us took a tool in which we were to become “expert,” and applied that tool to everyone's prepared data. We found that a research focus can form around a set of digital tools even if the objects are not uniform. In this chapter, we discuss how we applied technology to our research goals and collaborative work. We address the main goals of our collaboration, as they emerged through our work together: to explore implications of using digital textual analysis methods on a variety of texts; to uncover possibilities in our datasets through experimentation with different tools; and to recognize the possibility for cross-disciplinary use of the methods we tested. We observed that the tools trend toward certain forms of interpretation and we examine how these trends affect the types of collaboration and analysis possible, but also how they can be re-purposed for alternative approaches. The most important lesson our collaborative experience taught us is that working together both pushed us and liberated us to experiment with our data and methods. In fact, much like our visualizations provide a big picture view of the texts we study, the multidisciplinary nature of our process forced us to step back and view our research at a macro-level. Although our collaboration began as a class project, playing together with technologies led each of us to new and significant understandings of our texts.

Alan Liu

Papers

Effective Construction of a Reflection Angle Prediction Model for Reflectarrays Using the Hadamard Product Self-Attention Mechanism

Interdisciplinary Knowledge Work: Digital Textual Analysis Tools and Their Collaboration Affordances

Translitteraties : le big bang de la lecture en ligne