A while back, an XBox made its way into our household. I’ve never been much of a gamer myself: my main use of the XBox is watching catch-up TV while doing things like blogging, crocheting, and messing around on Facebook. For me TV is a background activity and I don’t generally have the patience to … Continue reading
Category Archives: Technology & Society
Caitiewrites at Mozfest 2013: a Storify Journey
I was lucky enough to go to Mozilla Festival for the first time over the weekend. I experimented with Storify for the first time also, capturing my notes and photos for the festival here. Here’s a sample of what you can find on my Storify of Mozilla Festival 2013! Much more detail over there, organized … Continue reading
Blog for Little Miss Geek: Humanities Students Make Great Geeks
The lovely folks over at Little Miss Geek, who run an initiative designed to inspire more women and girls to get into technical careers, allowed me to write a post for them on why humanities students make great geeks. Digital technology pervades all aspects of our lives and careers, a trend that looks like it’s … Continue reading
Seams: Private and Public in Digital Lives
Last Tuesday night I was fortunate enough to hear Genevieve Bell, anthropologist, future-thinker, and director of Intel Corporation’s Interaction and Experience Research, speak. It was a really compelling talk with lots of big thoughts. There was a small one I wanted to pick up on, though: in a discussion about seamless technology integration, Bell told … Continue reading
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread, and Code
“A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread–and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness– Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!” Quatrain XII, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, 5th ed. (trans. Edward FitzGerald) On the first Tuesday of every month, Victualler in Wapping hosts a wine tasting of organic, biodynamic … Continue reading
Global Moves Word Cloud
These are word clouds based on my book Global Moves! Designed with Wordle, they’re not just keywords arranged in a pretty pattern: they also provide a visual representation of the frequency of terms in the text. I wasn’t really surprised by the results but some things came out much more clearly than I expected–and other … Continue reading
Doing the Robot: Dancing with Xbox
So last night I went around to my friends’ house and we all played this game I’m pretty sure is called ‘Xbox Dance Like That Uncle at the Wedding’. Now, I always score really low at XDLTUW, which usually elicits extra laughter because I have a PhD in that sort of thing. And I might … Continue reading
Algo-rhythm
I went to a céilidh recently. In contemporary terminology, a céilidh is a gathering for people wishing to partake in traditional Scottish dancing (or Irish, if spelled céilí). However, I am told by Wikipedia that the term originally referred to any kind of social gathering, not necessarily involving dancing. There’s a parallel in belly dance … Continue reading
Sounds Like It to Me: Am I a Woman in Tech?
While I was at yet another Women in Technology event last night (this one called “Tech Shouldn’t be a Boys’ Club”, a panel discussion aimed at getting women interested in Entrepreneur First), I was struck again by how many women either don’t think they have the chops to be in technology or (like me) are … Continue reading
The Data Dance: Women in Technology, and Information Visualisation
In a move that is known technically as Continuous Professional Development, but which I prefer to call Learning About Some New Stuff I Find Quite Interesting, I recently went on a QlikView Developer course. This is to help me move beyond building pretty (and pretty useful) little objects in the user interface which people see … Continue reading