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James Sumner Profile picture
@JamesBSumner
Jul 7, 2020 • 12 tweets • 7 min read • Read on X
#HistSciFest Note that ALL of the Crowdcast sessions are recorded and available afterwards at the links on the Festival website!

Mine, for instance: crowdcast.io/e/tour-of-the-… (which I will now have to watch back with teeth clenched through the bits that went wrong)
The recording also includes the live chat (keep trying to scrolling back and it'll slowly bring in earlier posts), in which several people have kindly provided links, clarifications, and personal recollections... Image
Thanks in particular to @bhgross144, who not only joined the chat but provided this really nice livetweet thread:
And thanks to twitter.com/TechbyAfrikans for the pointer to Anna Everett's 2009 book "Digital Diaspora" as a useful step in developing a more representatively global history of the Internet: sunypress.edu/p-4722-digital…
...@TechByAfrikans is also in the #HistSciFest session "Future directions" on Friday, alongside @ManCHSTM's own @Iqrathebookworm and other interesting researchers. (This session's details appeared quite recently: check it out if you haven't seen it) bshsfestival.org.uk/index.php/prog…
A couple of other suggestions:

Dinesh Sharma on the longer-term history of India's IT industry mitpress.mit.edu/books/outsourc…

Jenna Burrell's 2012 STS study (which can be read at a historical remove) on cybercafés in Ghana mitpress.mit.edu/books/invisibl…
and the various 2010s studies on mobile telephony across Africa (notably the Cameroonian work supported by Leiden and the Science Museum) surveyed in this edited volume: core.ac.uk/download/pdf/1… Image
If you want to watch Hyperland (featuring ACTUAL TOM BAKER IN A CUMMERBUND), it's on YouTube but also in slightly higher quality here: vimeo.com/72501076
Also from the Crowdcast chat: @curatorconnelly points out that there's a replica of Doug Englebart's mouse prototype, as mentioned by Ted Nelson in Hyperland, in the @sciencemuseum collections: collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co8359… ImageImage
^Engelbart (it's wrong in the video). Sorry, Doug.
The Otter auto-transcription interestingly – though perhaps not surprisingly, to those who follow how these things work – can spell Doug Engelbart's name perfectly well, and yet has me getting "horribly distracted by the disappearance of my feet." [feed] Image
#HistSciFest Here's the Nerve Centre as it was set up to do the Internet event. Note the mobile phone on a Magic Arm, which served as my makeshift beer-camera using the IP Webcam app.

(Not pictured, the tablet PC seen in the beer-camera view, as I'm using it to take the photo) Image

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More from @JamesBSumner

James Sumner Profile picture
Sep 28, 2020
Quick thread about corridors and contagion.

I've been hearing about how things played out in a UoM teaching building – one of the big ones with not-so-big corridors – around the middle of last week. If the report (second-hand, I should say) is right, there was no distancing:
students were crowded into the corridors as normal, unable to get out of each other's immediate vicinity for minutes on end. I don't have info on level of masking but this is obviously not good.

My point is that it's unavoidable, if you run mass on-campus activities at all.
UoM has a detailed Covid safety protocol which took a lot of effort by a lot of people, and I don't doubt a case could be made that the problem here is due to some number of students and/or other folk not following that protocol.

I disagree. These approaches just don't scale.
Read 26 tweets
James Sumner Profile picture
Sep 25, 2020
I once asked a mystic who dwelt atop a mountain what the secret of a contented life was, and the mystic replied: "Act as though your actions might get written up in the news media if they obviously make for good headlines". I wonder what he meant by that.
thetab.com/uk/leeds/2020/… Image
MMU, likewise, more or less writing its own negative press at the moment:
There's a certain inevitable interplay of cause and effect in these situations, which some of us can see, and some of us can't.

A surprising number of the people who can't see it turn out to be making high-level decisions at universities.
Read 4 tweets
James Sumner Profile picture
Sep 21, 2020
Puddle off, I'm not going to read anything you run if you insist on running it with a stock photo like that. Image
Not even 100% sure this man is a real masked hacker, given he fell for the old "Now give us your signature, which we will put on file" ruse. motionarray.com/stock-photos/p… Image
There's a whole series of these, of course, some of them with more advanced hackers who know to sit facing the screens instead of directly away from them on the other side of the room.

Look, this one's writing a dangerous malware: Image
Read 16 tweets
James Sumner Profile picture
Sep 18, 2020
Yup (thread up and down). Full transparency is in everyone's interest.

By which I mean: it should go without saying that it's morally the right thing to do, but it's equally the best course from a standpoint of pure greed, assuming the future lasts longer than about two weeks.
See also this. I'm just not sure "We got three months' worth of money by endangering and misleading the people we rely on for further money" is going to turn out to have been a strategic masterstroke.
The sector, having adopted a really bad set of priorities, is now catastrophically failing to serve even those priorities, let alone any of the ones you'd want:
Read 4 tweets
James Sumner Profile picture
Sep 16, 2020
This is in a problematic degree more fun than the actually quite important and necessary emails I should be writing ImageImage
Too niche? ImageImage
Anybody *not* got Threads on the brain at the moment...? ImageImage
Read 5 tweets
James Sumner Profile picture
Sep 15, 2020
In sum:
• a meaningful Brexit by definition requires either militarised border in Ireland or NI/GB split
• May's solution: unspecified magic, or, failing that, NI/GB split
• Johnson's solution: promise NI/GB split anyway, then claim that's ridiculous and therefore not binding.
With helpful diagrams: flipchartfairytales.wordpress.com/2020/09/14/bri…
An old favourite returns.

Can't help but notice that where previous series tended to predict non-chaos outcomes, this one... doesn't.

I still find it soothing to look at, simply because it's an orderly diagram, but you may find the Tube map preferable.
Read 4 tweets

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