The Flaneur is one of my favourite figures, in particular in the writing of Walter Benjamin whom I discovered as an undergraduate. I was, and am, interested in the Flaneur as he is a useful device for exploring a city, for thinking about how urban life changed during the industrial revolution and beyond it – and because of the idea that walking with a tortoise as a fashionably slow accessory/pet one could discover the pace…
Maren Deepwell Posts
It’s the second week of the course ‘Learn to Code for Data Analysis‘ and we have started making graphs! Alongside my course participation on FutureLearn I am posting a short summary of my experience on my blog (you can read also my post from Week 1). I found this week a lot quicker to get started, partly because I am now more familiar with the course structure but also because the Anaconda interface I am…
It’s the first week of the course ‘Learn to Code for Data Analysis‘ and I have just completed all required steps – so this short post is a quick reflection on my experience so far and it’s been a great week! Once I got stuck in there were a couple of things that work extremely well for me: first, using the course instructions on the Futurelearn platform together with the Jupyter notebook and exercise data…
I am using thing no. 7 (Twitter) and thing no.8 (Facebook) of #23things to note some reflections on how I use social media. This is about my individual professional or personal use, rather than any organisational perspective. So, starting with Facebook, I find I have little to share. I am a reluctant Facebook user, strictly using it for personal relationships with far flung friends and for keeping in touch. Reviewing my Facebook timeline since I joined…
This week on the #23things course that I am participating in together with my colleagues I read an article on diversity, described thus: Can computers be racist? Big data, inequality, and discrimination– An excellent article, including video of a lecture given by Dr. Latanya Sweeney, on how big data can perpetuate and exacerbate existing systems of racism, discrimination, and inequality (see this week’s full text here) I found the article really stimulating not least because I…
This talk is for the FELTAG 2016 conference taking place on 28 September 2016 in London. Having given plenty of talks about FELTAG in the past few years, I have been pondering what I really want to say to my audience in twenty minutes. Part of being the opening keynote is that you get to speak first and help set the tone for the day, but looking at the agenda of what’s to follow, it…