The statistician and political polling analyst Nate Silver discusses his career — from student journalist to baseball prognosticator to the creator of FiveThirtyEight.com.
Podcast: Gregory Crane, “Automated Methods, Human Understanding, and Digital Libraries of Babel”
“If we have addressed physical access to images of textual sources, we are a long way from providing the intellectual access necessary to understand the written sources that we see.”
Podcast: “Convergence Journalism? Emerging Documentary and Multimedia Forms of News”
Convergence journalism — combining aspects of newspapers, documentary film and digital video are — a notable feature of today’s on-line journalism.
Podcast: Marcella Szablewicz, “Nostalgia for a Not-So-Distant Youth: Digital Games and Affect in Urban China”
Are games the imagined utopia they are made out to be in these nostalgic accounts or might these affective attachments prove to be a form of “cruel optimism”?
Podcast: A Conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates
“One of the things people say is the humanities tend to be easier than the sciences. But practicing the humanities is not easy at all.”
Podcast: Al Filreis, “Teaching Modern & Contemporary American Poetry to 36k”
Al Filreis has taught his “ModPo” course at Penn for years; in Fall 2012 he offered a 10-week version of the course online, via Coursera.
Podcast: Mark Turner, “Minding the News”
Research on the cognitive underpinnings of network news, with an emphasis on blended joint attention, story-telling, counterfactuality, and hypotheticals.
