Islamic law in the news; Almost Wikipedia; The Penguin and the Leviathan

islawmix: content and context for Islamic law in the news

Tuesday, October 4, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live.

Recent years have seen an uptick in coverage of Islamic law (shar??a) in American news media, policy, and academic circles—typically producing more questions than answers. What are the rules that dictate how Muslims in America conduct themselves? How do or should our legal institutions respond? When reporting on issues involving Muslims, how can journalists or academics distinguish individual preference or culture from Islamic law? What available, authoritative resources can best inform interested readers, from the casual to the scholarly? In short, Islamic law now seems to matter for issues of American law and policy; and it has long been a subject ripe for comparative law. But there is no reliable source of information on just what Islamic law is. Depending on the source, definitions of it can be vague, confusing, and even contradictory. islawmix aims to fill the information gap in this important area. In this talk, we will walk through “why islawmix” and explore how islawmix aims to accomplish the rather ambitious task of providing accessible resources for parsing such complex information and developing resources for the aggregation and contextualization of significant trends in Islamic law. Intisar A. Rabb is on the law faculty at Boston College Law School—where she teaches comparative Islamic law and legal history, advanced constitutional law, and criminal law—and is a faculty affiliate in research at Harvard Law School in the Islamic Legal Studies Program. Umbreen Bhatti is a co-founder of islawmix and a lawyer with experience in civil rights and constitutional law. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Almost Wikipedia: What Eight Collaborative Encyclopedia Projects Reveal About Mechanisms of Collective Action

Tuesday, October 11, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live.

From Benjamin Mako Hill: I'm going to present some preliminary findings from a qualitative, inductive, case-study based analysis of 8 early projects to create online collaborative encyclopedias. It's quite likely that the only project in my dataset that you've heard of is Wikipedia. I'm am still finishing interviews but I'm hoping I can use feedback from the group to help frame the work going forward. My initial results are based on data from 8 projects -- the full population -- in the form of interviews of the projects' founders and extensive archival data. My findings are a set of propositions focused on suggesting why Wikipedia succeeded in attracting contributors while the other projects did so less effectively. In a follow-up project, I'm hoping to test these in a quantitative dataset I've been building. The project is part of a larger research project that attempts to use failure cases to understand why some attempts at online collective action are successful while most never take off. Benjamin Mako Hill is an scholar, activist, and consultant working on issues of technology and society. He is currently a researcher and PhD Candidate in a joint program between the MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Media Lab, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and a Research Fellow at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest

Tuesday, October 18, 6:00PM, Harvard Law School.

Harvard Professor Yochai Benkler (The Wealth of Networks) is one of the world’s top thinkers on cooperative structures. In his new book, The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest, he uses evidence from neuroscience, economics, sociology, biology, and real-world examples to break down the myth of self-interest and replace it with a model of cooperation in our businesses, our government, and our lives. Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. (Photo via Joi) RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Digital Public Library of America Plenary Meeting

Friday, October 21, All Day, National Archives, Washington, DC.

The first Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Plenary Meeting, convened by the DPLA Secretariat at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and hosted by The National Archives in Washington, DC, will bring together a wide range of stakeholders in a broad, open forum to present the history of and vision for the DPLA effort, to showcase the best ideas and models submitted to the Beta Sprint (an open call for code and concepts defining how the DPLA should operate), and to create multiple points of entry for public participation in the work of the DPLA. Registration Required. more information on our website>

Zeynep Tufekci on Social Media and Dynamics of Collective Action under Authoritarian Regimes

What role did the new media ecology play in the ouster of long-standing dictators in Egypt and Tunisia as well as the continuing unrest across the region? In this talk Zeynep Tufekci — assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill at the School of Information and Library Science — examines how the new media ecology, composed of satellite TVs, social media and cell phones, upsets the erstwhile stable dynamics of repression under “durable authoritarianism.” video/audio on our website>

Radio Berkman 183: The Cooperation

Are human beings — as consultants, researchers, and the authors of business books have thought for years — fundamentally motivated by self interest? Or is there a deeper cooperative instinct that drives us to work? Those are the questions that fuel Yochai Benkler‘s investigation in The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest. In it Benkler challenges the rather embarrassing idea that people are primarily selfish by citing examples — from collective farming to neuroscience to the world’s richest corporations — demonstrating that people are a lot more cooperative than they get credit for. Benkler spoke with David Weinberger about his new book for this week’s Radio Berkman. video/audio on our website>

Cathy Davidson on How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn

Although we email, blog, tweet, and text as if by instinct, too many of us toil in schools and workplaces designed for the last century, not the one in which we live. Using cutting-edge research on the brain and learning Cathy N. Davidson — former Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University and co-founder of HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) — shows how the phenomenon of “attention blindness” shapes our lives, and how it has led to one of the greatest problems of our historical moment, and suggests ways we can take control, based on her book Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn. video/audio on our website>