Bots of Conviction/Twitterbot workshop
R
- Date/Time
- 03/20/2015 (All Day)
- Description
- It has been estimated that over 60% of all Internet traffic comes from bots, small automated programs that index websites, edit Wikipedia entries, spam users, hack captchas, and other assorted tasks, both mundane and nefarious. A Twitterbot is a program used to produce automated posts on Twitter, or to automatically follow Twitter users. Dr. Mark Sample, Associate Professor of Digital Studies at Davidson College, is considered a cutting-edge digital humanities scholar whose work - influenced by the field’s hack-and-yack approach - regularly employs critical making as part of his scholarship of engagement. In this talk, Dr. Sample argued for a different kind of bot: bots of conviction, executable programs that publicly engage in civic or scholarly concerns. Here’s a link to a New Yorker piece on Twitterbots that mentions Sample’s work: http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-rise-of-twitter-bots. NOTABLES: 14 workshop attendees; 38 discussion attendees.This event was co-sponsored with Academic Affairs, the Department of Communications and Theater Arts, the English Department, the Honors College, and Student Engagement and Enrollment Services.
