Websites like Kickstarter, PledgeBank, and Spot.Us provide a way for the public to crowdfund creative research projects, but crowdfunding has not yet been largely adopted by the research community. This lack of adoption may seem surprising since crowdfunding promises to allow anyone from anywhere to directly contribute money towards any kind of research project, and this ostensibly would help researchers, especially those trying to research questions that interest the public. However, given the current mechanisms for crowdfunding, this lack of general adoption may be a blessing in disguise. There are some serious concerns about whether crowdfunding mechanisms, as they are currently designed, are appropriate for funding research grants. In this article, I hope to examine some of these concerns and offer some suggestions about how to address them.
Republican House Whip Eric Cantor recently launched an online political campaign, YouCut,
for people to vote on federal budget cuts. According to an interview with Fox News anchor, Gretchen Van Susteren, Cantor promises to propose the budget cut with the most votes for “an up-or-down vote on the House floor the following week.” Cantor’s YouCut website claims that YouCut “allows you to vote, both online and on your cell phone, on spending cuts that you want to see the House enact.” If this is true, then YouCut would be an enormous advancement for participatory budgeting and direct democracy in America. But it’s not true because while YouCut is somewhat participatory, it is not democratic. YouCut is not designed for you to make decisions about what to cut; it’s designed for Eric Cantor and the Republican Party elite to decide what to cut. In other words, YouCut is really TheyCut.
In his paper, Design and the Construction of Publics, Carl DiSalvo develops tactics for how designers could construct publics in accordance with John Dewey’s conception of a public. According to DiSalvo, the Deweyen public, as articulated in Dewey’s book,The Public and Its Problems,
is not something that has been and always will be. It is neither universal nor an abstraction. Rather, for Dewey, the public is a specifiable and discernible entity that is inextricable from its conditions of origin. More precisely, for Dewey, the public is an entity brought into being through issues for the purpose of contending with these issues in their current state and in anticipation of the future consequences of these issues. (DiSalvo, p.49)
DiSalvo emphasizes that Deweyan publics are “situated” around experienced issues, “multiple”, and “not exclusive to a particular class or social milieu” (DiSalvo, p.50)
He identifies two characteristic tactics for constructing a Deweyan public, namely tracing and projecting. Read more »
In autumn, I will begin my doctoral studies at the University of Michigan School of Information as a STIET Fellow. This is a great opportunity for me to research how democratic media – media that structurally and procedurally incorporates democratic principles such as inclusiveness, transparency, and equal power sharing – influences microeconomic behavior. It gives me an opportunity to research some basic questions about the economic efficiency of democratic culture, and how to improve it. Read more »
In the news media, you hear a lot of talk about whether or not the Democrats will be able to carry out health care reform, and whether the Republicans will be able to stop them, but very little coverage describes any specific problem of the U.S. healthcare system in detail. Almost no one talks about how the relationship between socio-economic class and health insurance coverage. So I spent several hours compiling public data from the U.S. Census Bureau into a spreadsheet. In particular, I gathered 2006, 2007, and 2008 data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplements of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. From this data, I created the following visualization of how health insurance coverage is directly related to family income:
The Y-axis represents the percentage of people within a family income level that lack insurance. For example, in 2008, 46.30% of Americans with no family income had no health insurance. It looks like the more money you have, the more likely you will be insured, and the less money you have, the less likely you will be insured. Read more »
Using data from the National Science Foundation, I created some simple curvilinear graphs to examine the male to female ratios of sociology degrees. During the early 1990s, females started earning more doctorates in sociology than males. Why? Did males stop pursuing PhDs in sociology in favor of other academic disciplines? Or was there an influx of female graduate students from the undergraduate ranks?
During the early 1990's females started to receive more doctorates in sociology than males.
Today, I finished my first day of THATCamp 2009. I went to the Annotation session and presented the Image Annotation plugin for Omeka. I also participated in the Text Mining session, where historians were supposed to discuss their text mining needs with the computer scientists. I was really impressed with the SEASR project and hope to create an Omeka plugin that can use it to extract and classify time terms from the metadata of Omeka items. In this way, Omeka items can be temporally indexed and plotted on a timeline.
