Axel Bohmann 
Today, I want to introduce a cool tool I have recently discovered: Google Fusion Tables. The basic idea is simple but powerful: the program will take any spreadsheet it is given, look for geolocation information in it, and display the individual items in the sheet on a map.
Read moreCool Tools: Interactive Mapping with Google Fusion Tables
At the beginning of this semester, I gave a little lab-internal introduction to audio recording and editing. Since then, a number of people have asked me to share the materials from this workshop or come to their class and get their students going on podcast projects.
As of this week, on Twitter you can no longer “favorite” tweets. Instead, you “like” them, a change in language that is visually represented by a move away from the little clickable star icon at the bottom of a tweet to a little heart that turns bright red if you click it.
As with any change on Twitter, this one is causing a major uproar across the social network. And indeed, there are a lot of reasons to be upset, even for casual users of the platform — but even more so when thinking about Twitter’s affordances for activists.
Read moreTwitter’s Open Heart Surgery: More Than Just Cosmetic
So, you might have heard that Taco Bell’s marketing strategy is “on cleek.” (If you get what’s funny about this, read right on; if not: their marketing genius is appropriating and obviously butchering the expression on fleek, derived from African American English and recently popularized on social media.)
It’s easy – and entirely appropriate – to ridicule a corporate exec’s desperate attempts to sound hip and “with it.” But this little episode reveals aspects of linguistic and cultural appropriation that aren’t as easily laughed away.
Read moreAfrican American English, Appropriation and Corporate Culture Killers
In a recent blog post, I talked about the opportunities Twitter offers for tracing processes by which the cultural mainstream appropriates African American English linguistic practices, often for gains in material as well as cultural capital. In that post, I focused on the how of the critique without going into much detail about why critique is necessary.
Recently, I have been receiving lots of love letters from Python, full of emotional language like the following:
Do a Google image search for terms like ‘tweeting’ or ‘people using Twitter’ and look through the results. Notice anything? Unless Google personalizes your search way differently from mine (and anyone I’ve asked), you’ll see a lot of images of the following type: a phone or tablet displaying some form of Twitter client, held by a hand or pair of hands. Very often, the perspective of the image asks us to imagine that hand as our own.