This week's follow-up post comes after the blogging question for the coming week, so don't forget to look for that post beneath this one.
Lecture slides are posted in the usual place, and embedded here:
The painting we discussed was Joseph Wright's An Experiment on a Bird in an Air-Pump (1768). Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer offer an important reading of this painting in their foundational book on the history of science, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (Princeton University Press, 1985).
The video for the invisible gorilla experiment -- actually it should be called the "unnoticed gorilla' or something like that; that the gorilla is visible is precisely the point -- may be found here: http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/ . See also this NPR story on a recent study involving radiologists shown human tissue slides with gorilla images added to them: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/02/11/171409656/why-even-radiologists-can-miss-a-gorilla-hiding-in-plain-sight
We also discussed a couple of social experiments that went sideways in illuminating ways. Our primary topic was Stanley Milgram's infamous experiment on obedience to authority figures. This New York Times story revisits the experiments decades later, and links to some interesting pictures taken during the original experiments: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/health/research/01mind.html?_r=0. I also brought up the yet more infamous Stanford Prison Experiment. When all of you become well-funded information researchers, please don't do stuff like this.
Finally, if you're looking for a fun, subtle, and insightful critique of experimentation gone wrong, you could do worse than the video game Portal and its excellent sequel (which we'll be examining in some detail in Future of the Book soon). Taken together, they offer one of the most intelligent and subversive critiques of instrumental research methods I've encountered; it just happens to be in the form of a video game. (One written, I'm sure, by someone well-versed in Milgram and the associated history of 20th-century research cultures.) Just don't read a synopsis ahead of time -- you want to play these games with no foreknowledge. There are no invisible gorillas, but there may or may not be cake.
Lecture slides are posted in the usual place, and embedded here:
The painting we discussed was Joseph Wright's An Experiment on a Bird in an Air-Pump (1768). Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer offer an important reading of this painting in their foundational book on the history of science, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (Princeton University Press, 1985).
The video for the invisible gorilla experiment -- actually it should be called the "unnoticed gorilla' or something like that; that the gorilla is visible is precisely the point -- may be found here: http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/ . See also this NPR story on a recent study involving radiologists shown human tissue slides with gorilla images added to them: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/02/11/171409656/why-even-radiologists-can-miss-a-gorilla-hiding-in-plain-sight
We also discussed a couple of social experiments that went sideways in illuminating ways. Our primary topic was Stanley Milgram's infamous experiment on obedience to authority figures. This New York Times story revisits the experiments decades later, and links to some interesting pictures taken during the original experiments: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/health/research/01mind.html?_r=0. I also brought up the yet more infamous Stanford Prison Experiment. When all of you become well-funded information researchers, please don't do stuff like this.
Finally, if you're looking for a fun, subtle, and insightful critique of experimentation gone wrong, you could do worse than the video game Portal and its excellent sequel (which we'll be examining in some detail in Future of the Book soon). Taken together, they offer one of the most intelligent and subversive critiques of instrumental research methods I've encountered; it just happens to be in the form of a video game. (One written, I'm sure, by someone well-versed in Milgram and the associated history of 20th-century research cultures.) Just don't read a synopsis ahead of time -- you want to play these games with no foreknowledge. There are no invisible gorillas, but there may or may not be cake.
