Category: Open Source & Open Web

  • Equitable Inequity in Design Justice: A Review of Sasha Costanza-Chock’s “Design Values: Hard-Coding Liberation?”

    Equitable Inequity in Design Justice: A Review of Sasha Costanza-Chock’s “Design Values: Hard-Coding Liberation?”

    In Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Building the Worlds We Need, Sasha Costanza-Chock explores how current universalist design processes and principles are based on principles of exclusion, connects design to issues of collective liberation of marginalized communities and ecological conservation, and discusses how design may be used to advance those issues and dismantle structural inequality.  […]

  • HASTAC and the Problem of Social Networks

    HASTAC and the Problem of Social Networks

    Note: This blog post represents the beginning of an important conversation we intended to have at the HASTAC 2020 conference, as it is central to HASTAC’s concept of hindsight, foresight, and insight in considering ourselves as a network. Although that conference has unfortunately been canceled, we still hope to have this discussion. We welcome comments […]

  • Modularity and Meaning

    Modularity is the second design principle for an Ecological Age.  With separate connected devices for separate functions, like a pen for writing, a watch for monitoring, and even clothing for communication, screen-free technology is automatically modular.  Decentralized functions are easier to understand, but harder to standardize.  They need different knowledge and materials.     Different information, […]

  • Scholar Spotlight: Martin Perez Comisso

    Scholar Spotlight: Martin Perez Comisso

    Hi! I’m Martín, a Chilean third-year Ph.D. student at Arizona State University. My program has the most extended name that I know for a degree, called “Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology,” which is based on science and technology studies (STS) but goes above and beyond that field. In the next questions, I […]

  • Who Asks Computer Programming Questions Online?

    Who Asks Computer Programming Questions Online?

    To distract myself from finals I took some public data about computer programming and it’s most popular forum and modified a web application so that you can look at user demographics and their question and answer forum habits: https://magic-passive.glitch.me/ In May, Stack OverFlow released their 2019 Developer survey to the public. Stack OverFlow is a question and […]

  • Kindness, Culture, and Caring: The Open Science Way

    Kindness, Culture, and Caring: The Open Science Way

    Artwork by Kelvy Bird: https://www.kelvybird.com/ “So it’s kind of like if your house catches on fire. The bad news is there is no fire brigade. The good news is random people apparate from nowhere, put out the fire and leave without expecting payment or praise. …I was trying to think of the right model to describe […]

  • How To Code in Python 3 eBook Publication: A Year Later

    How To Code in Python 3 eBook Publication: A Year Later

    Just over a year ago, on February 1, 2018, DigitalOcean released the collection of my Creative Commons-licensed Python tutorials as a free and open access eBook, How To Code in Python 3. Since then, the eBook has been downloaded 80,000 times to date and is available directly through DigitalOcean, Google Books and CUNY’s Manifold repository. […]

  • How To Become a Technical Writer, for Academics

    How To Become a Technical Writer, for Academics

    I completed my PhD in Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2017 and am currently working on the Community team (composed of technical writers and technical editors) at the cloud computing company DigitalOcean. I joined the tech industry while I was ABD and completed my dissertation while […]

  • HASTAC—“The Ethical Social Network”

    HASTAC—“The Ethical Social Network”

    We at HASTAC were honored recently to be featured in an article in Inside Higher Ed by technology journalist Lindsay McKenzie, “The Ethical Social Network” (April 2, 2018). The article discusses HASTAC’s origins in 2002 as one of the world’s “oldest academic social networks” and its commitments to user privacy and transparency—particularly in contrast to […]

  • Developing a Digital Scholarly and Professional Identity

    Developing a Digital Scholarly and Professional Identity

    Below is the approximate transcript of the presentation I delivered as part of the MLA 2018 panel 739. Going Public: How and Why to Develop a Digital Scholarly Identity on January 7, 2018 in New York City. I’m Lisa Tagliaferri, I have a PhD in Comparative Literature and Renaissance Studies from the Graduate Center, CUNY, […]