Tag Archives: Facebook

May 17, 2013, 3:00 pm

Weekend Reading: The DH Summer Edition

The semester is over! Grades have been turned in, the weather is beautiful, possibilities are endless. It’s the perfect time to think about beginning summer projects, and to read up on the digital humanities, one of our favorite fields at ProfHacker. My links in this week’s Weekend Reading focus on some interesting developments in race, ethnicity and literary studies within the digital humanities, social media, and some literary inspiration for beginning your new summer project.

In “Famous Authors’ Handwritten Outlines for Great Works of Literature,” Emily Temple gives her readers some inspiration in showing you how famous authors planned out their novels (which may inspire you to check out Amy Cavendar’s review of Scapple, a terrific new mindmapping app): “Writing a novel (or a story, for that matter) is confusing work. There are just so many characters running all over…

February 20, 2013, 8:00 am

Facebooking the Past

By Prof. Hacker

[Lucinda Matthews-Jones is a lecturer in history at Liverpool John Moore (UK), where she teaches nineteenth-century British History. Details of her research can be found on her academia.edu profile. She also blogs and co-edits the Journal of Victorian Culture: www.victorianculture.com. She tweets from @luciejones83.--@JBJ]

Digital databases have provided scholars with new ways to access source material. Have we been quick enough to extend these benefits to our students? As a history lecturer, I am keen to encourage students to get their hands dirty by exploring a number of different kinds of primary source databases. Just before Christmas, I decided that I wanted to use digital sources in a different way. I wanted my students not just to find source material but also to use it, digitally, in ways that showed their understanding of lecture…

June 14, 2012, 11:00 am

Checking Your Facebook Privacy (Again)

By Brian Croxall

Last spring, I wrote a post outlining six steps for checking your Facebook privacy. These steps were developed during workshops that I had been teaching faculty and students at Emory on creating an academic web presence. While I (and most everyone here at ProfHacker) would suggest that sharing your work and being find-able on the web can have a salutory effect on your career (especially when you’re on the job market), not everyone feels that way–and especially about Facebook, where you likely have connected with friends and family who aren’t related to your daily work.

One of the tricky things about managing your Facebook privacy is that there are so many different choices to make. The service allows you granular control over almost everything you’re willing to share, but that also means you’re going have to make many, many choices. The other thing that is tricky about…

September 6, 2011, 3:00 pm

From the Archives: Being Social

By Natalie Houston

The start of the fall academic term often means meeting new people and refreshing your connection with colleagues, friends, and acquaintances. Although many of those meetings and conversations might take place in the hallways and coffeeshops of your campus, others might be entirely digital in nature. The timing, methods, and significance of interpersonal interaction continually change along with our uses of technology.

Define Your Boundaries

How you choose to set boundaries on the kinds of communication you have with colleagues and students will ultimately be a personal decision, albeit shaped by campus policy (on office hours or the use of email) and departmental culture (some departments expect your attendance at frequent social events, and others don’t).

Because the language of social media (following and friending) tends to blur boundaries, it’s very important that…

August 25, 2011, 11:00 am

New Facebook Privacy Controls

By George Williams

Here at ProfHacker, we’ve done our best to keep up with the various Facebook privacy changes as they have taken place on our watch. Julie wrote two posts in 2009: “Managing Facebook Privacy Settings” and “Managing Facebook Privacy Settings (round 2).” Earlier this year, Brian provided us with “Six Steps for Checking Your Facebook Privacy.”

Facebook reports that it has over 750 million users, and–to put it mildly–that represents an enormous amount of information being shared online. Are you sure you know who gets to access the information you post? The social networking service hasn’t exactly been free from criticism over the choices it has made with regard to user privacy.

Well, as the New York Times reported on Tuesday, Facebook has introduced a new set of what they say are easier-to-use controls for users’ privacy. Before, users had to click their way to a specific “Privacy…

August 15, 2011, 11:00 am

Kindle.Amazon.Com: Social Kindling

By Erin E. Templeton

A little over a week ago, I received a curious message from Amazon.com. I was confused at first because I had not placed an order, and unlike many other retailers, Amazon doesn’t send me random “sale-mail.” My uncertainty grew when I opened the message to learn that one of my Twitter followers was now following me on Kindle. Following me on Kindle? Huh?

Many of us at ProfHacker are fans of the e-reader. Kindles and Nooks have made appearances on both of our Holiday Gift Guides (2009 and 2010). Amy has written about Calibre, as have I). I am a Kindle devotee and have been for years. In fact, over the two plus years that I have been “Kindling,” I have sworn allegiance to my electronic love both in ProfHacker (see “Kindling the Classroom ?” and elsewhere). The device (I use a second generation Kindle 2) has changed my life for the better. For example, despite the…

July 11, 2011, 8:00 am

Introducing Google+

By Brian Croxall

Almost two weeks ago, Google caught most everyone off guard by suddenly introducing a new social network, Google+. Google+ isn’t the search giant’s first foray into social networking. There was last year’s Buzz, which really put a bee in everyone’s bonnet with a privacy snafu on its first day. There’s Orkut, which is relatively unknown in North America and Europe, but is among the top-visited websites in Brazil and India. And there’s Google Friend Connect…which I hadn’t even heard of until I started writing this post.

With no major problems in its first 13 days—except for the difficulty of securing an invite to the service during its “field trial”—Google+ appears to be the company’s best entry into social networking thus far. If you’ve used any social network—but especially Facebook—the basics of Google+ will seem very familiar. You add people that you know to your circles…