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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

A motion strategy plays an important role in supporting autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) movement. Many studies have been conducted to improve the motion frameworks in terms of its robustness, safety and performance. Most of them worked on the prior known maps scenario where the area information was collected by Global Positioning System (GPS) and satellite cameras. Even though the scheme can provide high quality map, the computation of motion planning remains dependent on the communication signal. In the rural areas such as forests and mountains, where communication signal does not perform well, unclear and noisy terrain maps can be generated and lead to mission failure. Therefore, it is significant that an alternative framework to enhance autonomous UAV motion performance in these certain conditions should be developed. Our work focuses on developing a high performance path planner for autonomous UAV motion when communication signal does not work well in rural areas. The search mission problem in forest terrain has been implemented in 3D simulation as an evaluation. By conducting a simulation process repeatedly with different test cases for positions, time constraints, flight speed (3-11 m/s) and flight range, our path planning framework can achieve completeness between 90-100% and better performance compared to others.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/ielx7/6287639/6514899/09748136.pdf

Online Path Planning Framework for UAV in Rural Areas

N + 1:: A Plea for Cross-Domain Data in the Digital Humanities

Designed as a hybrid practical/philosophical discussion, this essay reflects on the development of Liu's ''Voice of the Shuttle: Web Page for Humanities Research'' in light of what it means to ''globalize the humanities'' in an era when it is the postindustrial global corporation (self-dubbed the ''learning organization'') that sets the paradigm of ''knowledge.'' What does it mean to remain an academic research site when knowledge is increasingly corporate and global? Can the distinctive humanities paradigm of knowledge-- at once historical and interdisciplinary--offer a viable alternative to the equally distinctive anti-historical interdisciplinarity of ''global knowledge'' in ''workplace 2000?'' Can humanistic knowledge, that is, be an alternative global knowledge that refuses the high, old way of universalism to imagine a new localized universalism (field by field, culture by culture, history by history) able at once to collaborate and critique World, Inc.? To ask such questions and at least begin upon...

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Globalizing the Humanities:: ''Voice of the Shuttle: Web Page for Humanities Research''

L'article busca demostrar que les humanitats digitals nomes poden ser explicades i compreses si tenim en compte que la problematica subjacent es la identitat no sols de les humanitats digitals, sino tambe de les humanitats en general. Tant en el que prometen com en l’amenaca que suposen, les humanitats digitals exerceixen de simulacre d’una manera futura de treballar i estudiar les humanitats que desitja incloure alguns valors de la societat contemporania sobre allo digital, sense perdre la seva essencia en favor d’altres dominis del coneixement que s’han tornat digitals per a reivindicar-se en aquesta societat. Mitjancant l’analisi pas a pas d’un projecte real, l'article explora com la questio de la significacio de les humanitats digitals reflecteix tant un problema especific de les humanitats digitals com la crisi encara major de la importancia i la significacio de les humanitats d’avui dia.

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Qué significación tienen las humanidades digitales para las humanidades

We enter the great, white dome and gather in the reception theater. Computer-coordinated slide projectors whir to life to tell us in a rapid montage of images and voices the Story. ‘‘A success story, a driving power, a dynamic tycoon, the envy of Wall Street, a world-record-breaking pilot, the toast of the nation: a man who could make things happen,’’ the voices recite. ‘‘Who was this man? Howard Hughes. His mission: to build the world’s largest airplane. . . .’’ The story draws to a close; the screen rises slowly; we walk through the space of the screen to see—alone in its black, reflecting pool—the Plane.

Alan Liu

Papers

Online Path Planning Framework for UAV in Rural Areas

N + 1:: A Plea for Cross-Domain Data in the Digital Humanities

Globalizing the Humanities:: ''Voice of the Shuttle: Web Page for Humanities Research''

Qué significación tienen las humanidades digitales para las humanidades

Remembering the Spruce Goose: Historicism, Postmodernism, Romanticism