The Googlization of…Palaeography??? (Medieval Studies in the Age of Big Data / Bruce Holsinger

On one level, of course, Google Handwrite is designed around the same basic technology that tablets and other hand-helds have been using for a while (remember those first-generation Palm Pilots?). There’s also a big difference between writing with a pen and scribbling with a fingertip. What distinguishes Google Handwrite from its predecessors, though, is massification. Unlike an individual device that learns the idiosyncrasies of its owner’s handwriting, Google Handwrite has the capability to learn the idiosyncrasies of everyone’s handwriting, and thus the potential to use that crowd-sourced knowledge to translate previously written documents scanned by users.
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How the internet became a closed shop

A borderless frontier has morphed into a set of gated communities, writes Asher Moses.

A LITTLE over a decade ago, just before the masses discovered the digital universe, the internet was a borderless new frontier: a terra nullius to be populated by individuals, groups and programmers as they saw fit. There were few rules and no boundaries. Freedom and open standards, sharing information for the greater good was the ethos.

Today, the open internet we once knew is fracturing into a series of gated communities or fiefdoms controlled by giants like Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and to a lesser extent Microsoft. A billion-dollar battle conducted in walled cities where companies try to lock our consumption into their vision of the internet. It has left some lamenting the ''web we lost''.

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data.gov

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THE DATA SHOW

Data. We’re awash in it, we make it, we save it, computers crunch it at an unprecedented rate. Radiolab’s Jad Abumrad talks with Brooke about how data inform us and can lead us astray.
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“Culture” in the Science Fictional Universe of “Big Data” / Robert Albro

The turn to “big data” represents a potentially exciting set of developments along multiple frontiers of advanced supercomputing, new software tools, other information collection technologies such as GIS, database management systems, and massive data sets, such as the exponentially expanding corpus of information generated by Web 2.0 social media. Government funding has followed a corporate lead, where in recent years the likes of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon have turned a pursuit of “big data” into a major business proposition focused on gathering increasingly nuanced information aboutconsumer behavior to better service and target customers. Making sense of the implications of all this will preoccupy us for some time.
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