This opinionated guide exists to provide both novice and expert Python developers a best-practice handbook to the installation, configuration, and usage of Python on a daily basis.

Visualizing and analyzing social networks is a challenging problem that has been receiving growing attention. An important first step, before analysis can begin, is ensuring that the data is accurate. A common data quality problem is that the data may inadvertently contain several distinct references to the same underlying entity; the process of reconciling these references is called entity resolution. D-Dupe is an interactive tool that combines data mining algorithms for entity resolution with a task-specific network visualization. Users cope with complexity of cleaning large networks by focusing on a small subnetwork containing a potential duplicate pair. The subnetwork highlights relationships in the social network, making the common relationships easy to visually identify. D-Dupe users resolve ambiguities either by merging nodes or by marking them distinct. The entity resolution process is iterative: as pairs of nodes are resolved, additional duplicates may be revealed; therefore, resolution decisions are often chained together. We give examples of how users can flexibly apply sequences of actions to produce a high quality entity resolution result.

Sunset over the quad

High performance, high class web development for Node.js.

Source code for the O'Reilly book of the same name.

The piece had two aims, namely to advocate for the addition of computational methods to our critical repertoire and to give a sample of recent computational work of the sort I find useful. I mention these goals up front because I think some of Rosen’s criticisms follow from the failure (mine, to be sure) to specify exactly what my essay was and was not doing and arguing. So to be clear: it was an argument for methodological expansion, especially for those of us working with contemporary sources, and a high-level synopsis of the results of that expansion.

Wilkens neglects other equally pressing problems with the computational practices he advocates—limitations that reveal themselves in the very analysis he proffers as a sample of the kind of scholarship such practices might enable. Two problems with Wilkens’s method strike me as most urgent. First and most glaringly, he inadvertently demonstrates how easily data may be misinterpreted to serve conclusions that are sought by the analyst. And second, though he and others doing similar work purport to offer analysis of neutral data sets—say, all the fiction published in a given year—by working with existing bibliographies they perpetuate the selection criteria that governed the initial compilation. Doing so artificially reifies bodies of texts that might in fact be far more heterogeneous and unruly.

A short illustration of the underlying problem of literary and cultural abundance, a quick tour of several techniques that we might use to expand our analytical repertoire so as to deal with that problem more effectively, and, finally, a consideration of the substantial challenges these methods face in the short-to-medium term.

This course gives you an opportunity to combine the hands-on production of multimodal scholarly communications with critical approaches to literature, new media, and digital culture. Here, by “multimodal,” I mean a material communication that demands more than one form of perception (e.g., distant reading, casual listening, scanning, or close watching) through more than one medium (e.g., audio, electronic text, image, video, or a database). With this definition in mind, throughout the term we will ask how creating knowledge through algorithms, networked environments, graphical expressions, and dynamic texts influences the theory and practice of literary studies. In so doing, we will intertwine three primary threads in digital literary studies (DLS): (1) the legacies of electronic literature (where DLS implies studying literature that is “digital-born”), (2) computational approaches to literary criticism (where DLS implies using digital technologies to interpret literature and/or compose scholarly communications), and (3) critical frameworks for computational culture (where DLS implies examining the recursive relationships between digital technologies and cultural assumptions, practices, and formations).

Optional readings for Robert Wilensky's CS 294-3: Distributed Information Management course at UC Berkeley.

Readings for Robert Wilensky's CS 294-3: Distributed Information Management course at UC Berkeley.

Lecture notes for Robert Wilensky's CS 294-3: Distributed Information Management course at UC Berkeley.

The purpose of this course is to examine ongoing research issues related to digital documents. As suggested by the title, major themes include information representation, information presentation, information linking, and information interoperation. Implicit in these issues are also issue of collaborative use of information, i.e., how networks of information using users can be greater than the same of their parts.

The goal of the course is to lay the foundation for further evolution of networked digital document systems. The ideal student is one with lots of initiative, who enjoys learning together with students from different disciplines, and is excited by the prospect of identifying the important questions to ask, and by the opportunity to shape the directions of an incipient technology.

The course will cover some fundamental technologies, but also examine ongoing (and continually evolving) attempts to bring such technologies into common use. The course will comprise weekly readings, lectures followed by discussion of papers and issues, and occasional guest lectures. Students will work on assignments and a course project, which they will report on in class toward the end of the semester.

Ideally, student projects will advance the state of the art of "network-centric" digital documents.

I'm beginning to see that some parts of the Web we take for granted are not what actually defines it. The Web is not HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It's not DOM, SVG, WebGL, PNG, or Flash. The Web is really just HTTP over TCP/IP. What gets transported over HTTP does not define the Web.

There is, however, one other characteristic that does define the Web, and that is the humble hyperlink. Links are a feature of HTML, but they are not limited to HTML. Links are the connections that give the Web its name, and links are the biggest thing missing from native platforms.

My definition of the Web then is resources loaded over the Internet using HTTP and then displayed in a hyperlink-capable client.

Microformats, RDFa and microdata all enable consumers to extract data from HTML pages. This data may be embedded within enhanced search engine results, exposed to users through browser extensions, aggregated across websites or used by scripts running within those HTML pages.

This guide aims to help publishers and consumers of HTML data use it well. With several syntaxes and vocabularies to choose from, it provides guidance about how to decide which meets the publisher's or consumer's needs. It discusses when it is necessary to mix syntaxes and vocabularies and how to publish and consume data that uses multiple formats. It describes how to create vocabularies that can be used in multiple syntaxes and general best practices about the publication and consumption of HTML data.

In this 70-minute Node.js tutorial, you’ll learn to install, use, and understand Node by building a real-time geographical tracking system (live demo). We start with simple servers, static requests, and dynamically-generated content and then we explore persistent connections and client-side scripting.

The aim of this document is to get you started with developing applications with Node.js, teaching you everything you need to know about "advanced" JavaScript along the way. It goes way beyond your typical "Hello World" tutorial.

Eloquent JavaScript is a book providing an introduction to the JavaScript programming language and programming in general.

his courses focuses on understanding the Web as an information system, and how to use it for information management for personal and shared information. The Web is an open and constantly evolving system which can make it hard to understand how the different parts of the landscape fit together. This course provides students with an overview of the Web as a whole, and how the individual parts it together. We briefly look at topics such as Web design and Web programming, but this course is not exclusively designed to teach HTML or JavaScript. Instead, we look at the bigger picture and how and when to use these and other technologies. The Web already is and will remain a central part in many information-related activities for a long time to come, and this course provides students with the understanding and skills to better navigate and use the landscape of Web information, Web technologies, Web tools, and common Web patterns.

I will convert your Excel data into one of several web-friendly formats, including HTML, JSON and XML.

1 - Find the set of architecture properties of key interest[1]
2 - Formulate an active approach to defining our an architecture that
induces these properties[2]
3 - Then, using the collective knowledge of already existing styles [3]
4 - Develop a style that meets the needs of the identified problem domain

This process is the actual topic of Fielding's dissertation. "REST" is
just his example "step 4" from above.

Despite the Web's great success as a technology and the significant amount of computing infrastructure on which it is built, it remains, as an entity, surprisingly unstudied. here, we look at some of the technical and social challenges that must be overcome to model the Web as a whole, keep it growing, and understand its continuing social impact. A systems approach, in the sense of “systems biology,” is needed if we are to be able to understand and engineer the future Web.

The primary goal of this tutorial to close the gap between the high-level concept of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), and the question of how to implement such an architecture once services have been identified. Colloquially, it is often assumed that services in a Web-oriented are implemented as Web services, and these are often exclusively perceived as using the SOAP stack of protocols. Our goal is to describe that Web services can also use other technologies, such as RESTful implementations on top of HTTP. Furthermore, we will explain how a disciplined process can lead from the business level, which is mainly about identifying services on an abstract level, to an IT architecture, and that it is important to not impose architectural constraints (such as defining service in a function-oriented way rather than in a resource-oriented way) too early in the process.

The primary activity of the TAG is to develop Architectural Recommendations. The TAG findings listed below document fundamental principles that should be adhered to by all Web components. The TAG expects to include these findings in the TAG's Architectural Recommendations, to be published according to the requirements of the W3C Recommendation Track process.

The World Wide Web uses relatively simple technologies with sufficient scalability, efficiency and utility that they have resulted in a remarkable information space of interrelated resources, growing across languages, cultures, and media. In an effort to preserve these properties of the information space as the technologies evolve, this architecture document discusses the core design components of the Web. They are identification of resources, representation of resource state, and the protocols that support the interaction between agents and resources in the space. We relate core design components, constraints, and good practices to the principles and properties they support.

HTML5 is more a movement (or maybe it's more appropriate to call it a brand) than it is a technology. it says more power to the browser and mostly means more power to the browser as a programming platform. given this focus of HTML5, it is surprisingly hard to find a good place where all the APIs under development are listed. this page is an attempt to collect that information in one place.

At a first glance there might appear to be an obvious alignment and overlap between the approaches prescribed by REST and Linked Data. On more detailed inspection divergences in scope and applicability present themselves, and for some aspects, incompatibility. In this paper we investigate these similarities and differences and suggest the coupling is worthy of a third look: in combination as a exible environment in which the developer can focus on domain driven applications.

The term “Linked Data” refers to a set of best practices for publishing and connecting structured data on the Web. These best practices have been adopted by an increasing number of data providers over the last three years, leading to the creation of a global data space containing billions of assertions— the Web of Data. In this article, the authors present the concept and technical principles of Linked Data, and situate these within the broader context of related technological developments. They describe progress to date in publishing Linked Data on the Web, review applications that have been developed to exploit the Web of Data, and map out a research agenda for the Linked Data community as it moves forward.

Presentation from Cesare Pautasso and Erik Wilde.

• There are two distinct relationships between names and things. Reference is different from access. The architecture of the Web determines access, but has no direct influence on reference
• Reference can be established by ostention or by description. Description is inherently ambiguous; ostention can be done only to accessible entities.
• Therefore, references to non-accessible entities - the vast majority of references - must be by description, and hence must be ambiguous.
• Reference to accessible entities still differs from access. Establishing reference by ostention requires naming conventions. Access is one form of ostention.

HTTP URIs, in the web architecture, have been used to denote documents -- "web pages" informally, or "information resources" more formally. However, with the growth of the Semantic Web, which uses URIs to denote anything at all, the urge to use and practice of using HTTP URIs for arbitrary things grew steadily. The W3C Technical Architecture group eventually decided to resolve the architectural problem that if an HTTP response code of 200 (a successful retrieval) was given, that indicated that the URI indeed was for an information resource, but with no such response, or with a different code, no such assumption could be made. This compromise resolved the issue, leaving a consistent architecture.

I believe that this solution enables people to name arbitrary
resources using the "http" namespace without any dependence on
fragment vs non-fragment URIs, while at the same time providing
a mechanism whereby information can be supplied via the 303
redirect without leading to ambiguous interpretation of such
information as being a representation of the resource (rather,
the redirection points to a different resource in the same way
as an external link from one resource to the other).

I didn't have this thought out a few years ago. It has only been in actually building a relatively formal system on top of the web infrastructure that I have had to clarify these concepts my own mind. I am forced to conclude that modeling the HTTP part of the web as a web of abstract documents if the only way to go which is practical and, by the philosophical underpinnings of the WWW, tenable.

history has shown that the HTTP protocol is a very flexible protocol and that not all implementations need to follow the example provided by Fielding in order to meet the needs of users. for example, RPC over HTTP works just fine for many cases; esp. those that do not require system stability on the scale of years/decades.

however, the more important it is for the solution to continue to operate (and evolve) over an extended period of time, the more useful are the additional constraints Fielding identified in his example and the more important it is to optimize for run-time stability over ease/speed of initial implementation.

URLs can be used to identify abstract concepts or other things that do not exist directly on the Web.  This is sensible, but it means that the same URL might be used in conjunction with four different (but related) things: a name, a concept, a Web location or a document instance.  Somehow, we need conventions for denoting these four different uses.  Two approaches are available: different names or different context.  The "different names" approach requires new URI schemes or conventions; the "different context" approach requires syntactic conventions for indicating the intended context.

This document analyzes the definition of "resource" in RFC2396 [1] in an attempt to understand it.  It notes ten questions or points of confusion (labeled QUESTION1 - QUESTION10) that I encountered.
 
WARNING: This analysis is painfully detailed, and somewhat rambling (sorry!), reflecting my thought process as I (honestly) attempted to understand the definition.  It is only recommended to those who believe that the definition is clear, and want to see evidence to the contrary.

To be a full-fledged format on the Web, you need to support links -- something sorely missing in JSON, which many have noticed lately.

In fact, too many; everybody seems to be piling on with their own take on how a link should look in JSON. Rather than adding to the pile (just yet), I thought I'd look around a bit first.

ql.io is a declarative, evented, data-retrieval and aggregation gateway for quickly consuming HTTP APIs. ql.io re-uses concepts and syntax from SQL and JSON to create an imperative style language. Scripts written in this language can make HTTP requests to retrieve data, perform joins between API responses, project responses, or even make requests in a loop.

REST is the architectural style of the Web, and closely related to REST is the concept of a HTTP API. A HTTP API is a programmer-oriented interface to a specific service, and is known by other names such as a RESTful service contract, resource-oriented architecture, or a URI Space.

I say closely related because most HTTP APIs do not comply with the uniform interface constraint in it's strictest sense, which would demand that the interface be "standard" - or in practice: Consistent enough between different services that clients and services can obtain significant network effects. I won't dwell on this!

One thing we know is that these APIs will change, so what can we do at a technical level to deal with these changes as they occur?

There are a number of different ways to deal with media types when designing a RESTful HTTP system.

The search engine of 1931: a short video about Emanuel Goldberg (in German) #mediaarchaeology #subtitlesplease

RequestBin lets you create a URL that will collect requests made to it, then let you inspect them in a human-friendly way. Use RequestBin to see what your HTTP client is sending or to look at webhook requests.

The subjects covered in this document are large and complex, and there is a risk of growing to become unwieldy. The scope of the document is limited, though: to summarize the design considerations important for creating W3C specifications that enable stable standards for the Web, in a way that the Web standards community can discuss issues and altenatives with a common framework, and the evolution of the Web not hindered by interoperability concerns.

One of the important aspects of the Web that is, unlike many other communication applications, there is a broad community of Web developers: designers, programmers, individuals, software engineers, who create instances or strings intended for use in the languages of the Web. Because of the breadth of users as well as large numbers of implementations, the evolution and standadization of the Web has been different from the evolution of most previous communication standards. The history of the evolution of the web is messy: "browser wars", "best viewed by", widespread misunderstanding, slow standards. If we understand better the way in which the Web evolves, we can facilitate the development of useful standards.

Yes We Scan! Start a national effort to digitize all public government information:

The development and widespread use of Internet technologies and platforms that are grouped under the labels “Web 2.0” and “social media” have led to celebratory accounts of their potential as tools to unleash human creativity. A “creativity consensus” has emerged that describes a vision of creative production via these new platforms as universal, democratic, communal, non-commercial, and revolutionary. The avant-garde of Web 2.0 creativity are said to be young, web-savvy media makers: a new generation that has embraced new technology and is upending old notions of creativity and related cultural practices. This dissertation challenges these views through an ethnographic investigation of deviantART, the self-described “world’s largest online art community.” The dissertation demonstrates how conflicting ideals of art, creativity, and the web, when put into practice, shaped the site as ideological and technical infrastructure for creative practice and the formation of members’ creative identities. In their use of the site, participants in deviantART actively, and at times contentiously, engaged with historical tensions concerning both art and the web. The dissertation explores tensions emerging around three sets of concerns: (1) gaining artistic recognition through visibility, popularity, or quality; (2) demonstrating artistic “seriousness” in relation to ways of improving at art; and (3) controlling and circulating work through the concepts of property, “sharing,” and “theft.” The dissertation argues that rather than upending Romantic conceptions of art and creativity, the web uneasily accommodates multiple conflicting ideologies. Intersecting with tensions in art are tensions around the web and its overlapping corporate, commercial, and communal uses. deviantART brought together a diverse set of art worlds and creative practices via a seemingly conventional set of interfaces, features, and functionality. In turn, participants on the site helped manifest, reproduce, and transform these tensions in art practice and web use. These findings illustrate flaws in conventional accounts of creativity in a world with the web—accounts that fail to recognize the active, contested, and ongoing work underlying the mutual production of creative practice and the web.

Ordinary discourse recognizes several different kinds of things as possible objects of definition, and it recognizes several kinds of activity as defining a thing. To give a few examples, we speak of a commission as defining the boundary between two nations; of the Supreme Court as defining, through its rulings, “person” and “citizen”; of a chemist as discovering the definition of gold, and the lexicographer, that of ‘cool’; of a participant in a debate as defining the point at issue; and of a mathematician as laying down the definition of “group.” Different kinds of things are objects of definition here: boundary, legal status, substance, word, thesis, and abstract kind. Moreover, the different definitions do not all have the same goal: the boundary commission may aim to achieve precision; the Supreme Court, fairness; the chemist and the lexicographer, accuracy; the debater, clarity; and the mathematician, fecundity. The standards by which definitions are judged are thus liable to vary from case to case. The different definitions can perhaps be subsumed under the Aristotelian formula that a definition gives the essence of a thing. But this only highlights the fact that “to give the essence of a thing” is not a unitary kind of activity.

Metaphor is a poetically or rhetorically ambitious use of words, a figurative as opposed to literal use. It has attracted more philosophical interest and provoked more philosophical controversy than any of the other traditionally recognized figures of speech.

This book features a collection of essays by Donald Davidson that explore the relations between language and the world, speaker intention and linguistic meaning, language and mind, mind and body, mind and world, and mind and other minds. Davidson’s underlying thesis is that we are acquainted directly with the world, that thought emerges through interpersonal communication in a shared material world, and that language depends on communication. He also finds interconnections between his views and those of major philosophers of the past.

“Who gives a crap about some imbecile?” — The 1%

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP) (ISSN 2161-0002) was founded in 1995 as a non-profit organization to provide open access to detailed, scholarly information on key topics and philosophers in all areas of philosophy. The Encyclopedia receives no funding, and operates through the volunteer work of the editors, which consists of editors, authors, volunteers, and technical advisers. At present the IEP is visited by over 500,000 persons per month.

Most of the articles in The IEP are original contributions by specialized philosophers; these are identifiable by the author’s name at the foot of the article. Others are temporary, or “proto articles,” and have largely been adapted from older sources. They are identifiable by the inclusion of the initials “IEP” at the close and will in time be replaced by original articles.

Hairpinlegs.com is a Columbus Ohio based, custom metal fabrication shop specializing in furniture and architectural products for residential and commercial clients.

"Caught in a Dream" by Jesus Couldn't Drum is my new jam. Listen: #thisismyjam

Good explanation of just one horrible thing about #SOPA:

Imagine a data set with hundreds of variables, which may contain important, undiscovered relationships. There are tens of thousands of variable pairs—far too many to examine manually. If you do not already know what kinds of relationships to search for, how do you efficiently identify the important ones?

Nominalism comes in at least two varieties. In one of them it is the rejection of abstract objects; in the other it is the rejection of universals. Philosophers have often found it necessary to postulate either abstract objects or universals. And so Nominalism in one form or another has played a significant role in the metaphysical debate since at least the Middle Ages, when versions of the second variety of Nominalism were introduced. The two varieties of Nominalism are independent from each other and either can be consistently held without the other. However both varieties share some common motivations and arguments. This entry surveys nominalistic theories of both varieties.

Biologists, historians, lawyers, art historians, and literary critics all voice arguments in the critical dialogue about what constitutes evidence in research and scholarship. They examine not only the constitution and "blurring" of disciplinary boundaries, but also the configuration of the fact-evidence distinctions made in different disciplines and historical moments; the relative function of such concepts as "self-evidence," "experience," "test," "testimony," and "textuality" in varied academic discourses; and the way "rules of evidence" are themselves products of historical developments. The essays and rejoinders are by Terry Castle, Lorraine Daston, Carlo Ginzburg, Ian Hacking, Mark Kelman, R. C. Lewontin, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Mary Poovey, Donald Preziosi, Simon Schaffer, Joan W. Scott, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Barbara Herrnstein Smith. The critical responses are by Lauren Berlant, James Chandler, Jean Comaroff, Arnold I. Davidson, Harry D. harootunian, Elizabeth Helsinger, Thomas C. Holt, Francoise Meltzer, Robert J. Richards, Lawrence Rothfield, Joel Snyder, Cass R. Sunstein, and William Wimsatt.

Bootstrap is a toolkit from Twitter designed to kickstart development of webapps and sites.
It includes base CSS and HTML for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, and more.

Great, clear example of text mining using Wordseer.

All special characters can be typed using Option+key or Shift+Option+key. In some cases (like accents) the following character is modified rather than typing a character immediately.

Michael Mahemoff discusses how HTML5 can be used to create single page web apps offering advice to create a better user experience, built-in accessibility and better SEO results.

This special section of Profession addresses the evaluation of digital scholarship in the humanities, an issue that has been discussed both within the digital humanities community and at symposia on the future of scholarly publishing, in university departments’ and deans’ offices, at professional conferences, and in scholarly journals as well as mainstream media.

Event coreference is an important and complicated task in cascaded event template extraction and other natural language processing tasks. Despite its importance, it was merely discussed in previous studies. In this paper, we present a globally optimized coreference resolution system dedicated to various sophisticated event coreference phenomena. Seven resolvers for both event and object coreference cases are utilized, which include three new resolvers for event coreference resolution. Three enhancements are further proposed at both mention pair detection and chain formation levels. First, the object coreference resolvers are used to effectively reduce the false positive cases for event coreference. Second, A revised instance selection scheme is proposed to improve link level mention-pair model performances. Last but not least, an efficient and globally optimized graph partitioning model is employed for coreference chain formation using spectral partitioning which allows the incorporation of pronoun coreference information. The three techniques contribute to a significant improvement of 8.54% in B 3 F-score for event coreference resolution on OntoNotes 2.0 corpus.

This plugin will allow you to use tools that were built to interact with Solr with ElasticSearch.

"what really threatens the archaic powers that be… is collective social practices independent of state and market"

This document represents a summary of the outcomes from a workshop on persistent identifiers, hosted by JISC on 3 February 2010.

How have I never heard of Daphne Oram or Oramics before? #soundart

How have I never heard of Daphne Oram or Oramics before? #soundart

Why, for example, are philosophers housed in philosophy departments? Should groups of two or three philosophers be placed in departments across campus, to draw out the philosophic aspects of chemistry, economics, and business? Why is there no "lab" or "field" component for philosophy courses? Given the transformative nature of contemporary science and technology, in areas from synthetic biology to nanotechnology to climate change, are there opportunities for philosophic research--and employment--within the public and private sectors? Why are we not training philosophers to work at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the National Park Service, and a similar set of places across the private sector?

Remember that students are sensitive about their writing in a way that they aren’t about, say, a test. Be ready for students to take your feedback personally, even if you are careful to point out (as you should) that you are commenting on the paper, not on the student.

It is now almost two decades since the Web has been invented. Initially motivated by the need to exchange documents between computer systems, the Web evolved rapidly, reshaped the notion of information systems, and changed our social interactions and cultural development. Decentralization and openness were fundamental design principles in the Web Architecture and enabled the creation of large, community-driven information spaces such as Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap. In recent years, people and organizations began to adopt these architectural principles for publishing data on the Web, resulting in efforts such as Open Government Data or Linked Data.
This course will examine technologies for building data-centric information systems on the World Wide Web, discuss the social and policy context from which they arose, show the practical applications of such systems, and go into cross-cutting issues in this context. Course work involves lectures and readings, and weekly homework assignments. In addition, there will be a semester-long project in which the students should demonstrate their expertise in building data-centric Web information systems.

News flash: The Economist thinks "American universities need to be more businesslike":

How to hard reset the Samsung Intercept with step by step instructions.