Work

Posts and discussion about my work.

Jupyter BOAT

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Detail of medieval illustrated manuscript marginalia of four rats holding oars in an open wooden boat resting on some water on top of page ornamentation with an image of the planet Jupiter in the sky.

Collage of "Hubble Spies Spooky Shadow on Jupiter's Giant Eye (color)" by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, licensed via CC BY 2.0 and a detail of marginalia of rats in a boat from Pontifical of Guillaume Durand, page 162, circa 1367 from Ms. 143 in the collection of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, which has no known copyright and considered to be in the public domain.

You may have seen the publication of BOAT, the bulk open attribution tool, that used a spreadsheet to enable you to generate open attribution/licensing statements for any collection of works. I’m now releasing another version of BOAT, that does exactly the same thing, but using a computational notebook instead of a spreadsheet to generate well-formed open attribution/licensing statements from a list of basic information about a collection of works.

Bulk Open Attribution Tool (BOAT) 1.0 (now 1.4)

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Detail of medieval illustrated manuscript marginalia of four rats holding oars in an open wooden boat resting on water on top of some page ornamentation.

Detail of marginalia of rats in a boat from Pontifical of Guillaume Durand, page 162, circa 1367 from Ms. 143 in the collection of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, which has no known copyright and considered to be in the public domain.

When you are sharing your own creations openly or looking to credit other open works properly and want to create good licensing or attribution statements, what if you have more than one work that you want to create license or attribution statements for? I offer BOAT as an example spreadsheet that anyone can copy and modify to turn their own list of open works into well-structured license/attribution statements.

Father’s Day, Juneteenth 2022

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Detail from an illustration of a dark gray bull bleeding on its face with red muletas stuck in its back looking at a green butterfly who is asking: Are you OK? with a bright yellow background. Are you OK? by Belén González (Matitafore) is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

"Are You OK?" by Belén González (Matitafore) is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Today two US holidays coincide: Juneteenth — long a commemoration of the 19th-century emancipation of enslaved African Americans that was not made an official US federal holiday until last year in 2021 — and Father’s Day — a more recent celebration started in the early 20th century, though recognized as a US federal holiday in … Read more

Marketing Hypothesis

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Man in red sweater holding a notebook with overlaid text saying "My notebook lives with me."

I’m incredibly excited—and deeply honored—to be joining the team at Hypothesis, the organization behind the capabilities that enable everyone to take digital notes, everywhere. At Hypothesis, I’ll be leading marketing: telling the stories that engage people to add a new layer to the web.

Buttons that activate Hypothesis.

If you haven’t seen Hypothesis before, look in the upper right corner of my blog and you’ll see buttons that let you create and add to your own digital notebook of annotated links. For your further travels, the easiest way to use Hypothesis everywhere is with our Chrome browser extension.

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Post-Fact Fictions: Let’s Get REAL About Information Literacy

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Graphic showing overlapping petals labelled information literacy, data literacy, statistical literacy, critical reasoning, visual literacy, technology literacy.

Literacy Rainbow (6/6) by Justin Grimes licensed CC BY-SA.

Read more posts about Renewable Experiential & Applied Learning (REAL)

I’m still thinking about the 2016 US election and what it means for the people, ideas and future I care about. One thing that is clear to me is that understanding and participating in such an election calls on all of us—regardless of our point of view—to increase our information literacy and use it to inform our critical reasoning. How’s your statistical and data literacy doing?

Folks are saying we now live in a “post fact” world, but I recognize that “facts” have always been generated within cultural, political, economic, and social contexts. If anything, we are drowning in facts, not sailing away from them. To survive, we need to get better at understanding how facts are now made, circulated, and given value.

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