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A Good Time to Check Your Social Media Privacy Settings


Over at the New York Times “Bits” blog, Nick Bilton reminds us that we should review “who has access to [our] social accounts” from time to time. Services like Twitter, Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn often invite us to link certain services to our accounts, for reasons that vary from making it easier to update multiple accounts at once to being able to authenticate our identity for a third-party service. It’s all too easy to forget just how many of those third-party services have been granted a…

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Open Thread Wednesday: Trying Something New This Semester? How’s it Going?

Journal article in Ukrainian

This semester, I’m teaching a survey course in Western political thought that I’ve taught for several years. I decided to try something new in the course this time around, though. Rather than focusing exclusively on the classic texts themselves, I’m also having students engage one contemporary piece of scholarship related to each of the major texts we read.

I wasn’t at all sure how this would go. When I conducted my midterm evaluation with my students, though, I was pleased to learn that they l…

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Back to (GTD) Basics: The Two-Minute Rule

two yellow birds

When you’re deciding what needs to be done next on a project, or in response to an email, or about that flashing light on your car’s dashboard, how do you decide if it’s something to do right away or something to put on your list for later? Do you have a bunch of emails sitting your inbox that you keep meaning to respond to but you haven’t managed to get around to them yet? The two-minute rule might help.

In Getting Things Done, David Allen’s now-classic productivity guide, he offered the “two-…

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Join the Global Women Write In #GWWI on Wikipedia Tomorrow!

global women write in logoDespite being open to anyone to edit, Wikipedia has been criticized for its gender gap. To help remedy this, Postcolonial Digital Humanities is organizing a Global Women Write-In (#GWWI) on Wikipedia all-day tomorrow on March 18! 

Why Global Women? 

 If you’ve ever tried doing a Wikipedia search for important women theorists around the world, you might be surprised to note how short the entries are, particularly on their work and their ideas (for example: Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Gayatri Spivak,…

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Researching the Recent Past Online

statues at internet archive[This is a guest post by Dan Royles, a lecturer at the University of Angers in western France, where he teaches American Studies and English as a foreign language. He's previously written on "Digital Workflows for the Archives" for ProfHacker. You can find him online at danroyles.com, or follow him on Twitter at @danroyles.--@JBJ]

When I was writing my dissertation on African American AIDS activism, I ran into the problem that plagues many historians of the recent past: lack of archival sources….

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Weekend Reading: Pi(e) Edition

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Happy Pi(e) Day, ProfHackers! If you are wondering about Pi Day, check out this piece on Slate.

Before you celebrate Pi(e) day too enthusiastically, however, you might check out this piece on Salon, which lists 5 reasons behind the obesity epidemic in the United States. Hint: none of them are french fries.

As many of you have undoubtedly already heard, Amazon announced yesterday that they will be raising the price of their Prime membership from $79 to $99 on April 17. GigaOM reports this news a…

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Toward a Better Charging Cable

tangled cables

For all the ubiquity of wireless devices on and around college campuses, cables are still a necessary evil. Brian has offered tricks for taming behind-the-desk cables before, and George has plugged velcro cable ties, which I have developed a new appreciation for this year.

Phone chargers present a slightly different challenge than, for example, the power brick for your router. For one thing, you probable move it more. And if you live or work with others, probably other people also need to power…

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On Taking the Train

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I will start by acknowledging two things:

  1. This post is distinctively American, in that I will wax on about train travel as if it’s a discovery rather than an obvious fact about how people traverse the world

  2. The suggestion at the heart of this post is far more feasible for those who live along the East Coast corridor or other pockets of the US with extensive train networks, though I’m learning that Amtrak’s network is more extensive than I realized only a few years ago. When I lived in Green…

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A Failure a Week

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Here at ProfHacker, we’re always looking at new things to try. The options can be overwhelming, and as Michelle Moravec noted in her look at digital humanities tools, sometimes it’s hard to know what to invest time in. Last week, Mark Danger Chen tweeted a link to a post by Adriel Wallick: “Make many games, learn many things.” The approach comes from an article on Gamasutra by Rami Ismail on making “A Game A Week.” The method is more about getting moving than creating anything “good”–on…

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Weekend Reading: Is it Spring Yet? Edition

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Happy Friday ProfHackers!

Perhaps the biggest news of the week: The Getty Museum has opened up it’s digital content. Here’s the original announcement. Digital Trends reports on the announcement as well.

Also unveiled this week is a new project by our friends at the Roy Rosenweig Center for New Media: History of the National Mall. Here is the announcement and project description.

Earlier this week, the college board announced that in 2016 the SAT will get, in the words of a Miami Herald reporter…

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