qual-software archives - February 2000: Codes and headaches and things of that nature

Links to text analysis software - by Harald Klein

Latest issue of Kairos!

http://www.bsu.edu/classes/prince/eng101/Night/index.htm

What the breezeman wants to check out.

THE COMPUTER UNDERGROUND AND POST-MODERNISM

The computer underground is a culture of persons who call
computer bulletin board systems (BBSs, or just "boards"), and
share the interests fostered by the BBS. In conceptualizing the
computer underground as a distinct culture, we draw from Geertz's
(1973: 5) definition of culture as a system of meanings that give
significance to shared behaviors that must be interpreted from
the perspective of those engaged in them. A culture provides not
only the "systems of standards for perceiving, believing, evalu-
ating, and acting" (Goodenough, 1981: 110), but includes the
rules and symbols of interpretation and discourse for partici-
pants:

In crude relief, culture can be understood as a set of
solutions devised by a group of people to meet specific
problems posed by situations they face in com-
mon. . . This notion of culture as a living, historical
product of group problem

kuro5hin.org || technology and culture, from the trenches
I am the technology coordinator/network administrator at a high visibility public high school in the capital city of a southern state. Because of the visibility of my position, I found myself last week in a meeting with the Governor, the State Superintendent of Education and several representatives of the local military base's IT program. We were there to discuss how we are going to improve Technology Education statewide. All involved want to make sure our next generation has: a) the IT skills to find a decent job, and b) the IT employers in state to hire them. They all seemed quite sincere about wanting to do something, if less sure about what exactly needs to be done
Now I have been told to write an email with suggestions of some avenues to explore. If you had the opportunity to write this email yourself, what would you suggest?

Word of the day: panopticophobia

From Kathy F. on the now defunct ACW list.

"If you write for God, you will reach many people and bring them joy. If you write for people, you may make some money and you may give someone a little joy and you may make a noise in the world for a little while. If you write for yourself, you can read what you yourself have written and after ten minutes you will be so disgusted you will wish you were dead."

-- Thomas Merton

Narrative Psychology: Cultural Psychology and Anthropology

Designing a Wired Life
Once upon a time, Western culture associated information technology with an old and powerful story about the future. The future, according to this story, lies in rationality, and the task of the engineer is to discover optimally rational social arrangements in a scientific manner and then impose them upon the world. This picture was already fashionable in the early 19th century through the works of Henri de Saint-Simon (Hayek 1952), and it remained vigorous until the end of the Cold War (Lilienfeld 1978). Information technology grew up in the midst of this project of social rationalization, and the main tradition of computer system design is still organized around a cycle of studying existing work ractices, rationalizing them, and either automating them altogether or using technology to impose a rational order on them.