Multimedia Theory – Page 7

Where is the Semantic Web?

Where is the Semantic Web? In the face of Web 2.0 hype, the semantic web meme seems to be struggling. Tim Berners-Lee, in the slides from a 2003 talk says there is “no such thing” as a killer-app for the semantic web, that “its the integration, stupid!” (slide 7 of 35.) The problem is that mashups are giving users usable integration now. The difference is that mashups are usually based around one large content portal like Flickr that then little sattelite tools feed off. The semantic web was a much more democratic idea of integration.

Google’s Peter Norvig is quoted in Google exec challenges Berners-Lee saying that there are three problems with the semantic web:

Incompetence: users don’t know how to use HTML in a standard way let alone RDF.
Competition: companies that are in a leadership position don’t like to use open standards that could benefit others, they like to control the standards to their advantage.
Trust: too many people try to trick systems to change the visibility of their pages (selling Viagra.)

In a 2006 Guardian report, Spread the word, and join it up, SA Mathieson quotes Berners-Lee to the effect that they (semantic web folk) haven’t shown useful stuff. The web of TBL was a case of less is more (compared to SGML and other hypertext systems), the semantic web may lose out to all the creative mashups that are less standardized and more useful.

Web Mining for Research

What’s Web Mining for Research is a white paper I wrote on the TADA wiki trying to define an emerging research practice that draws on the web as evidence of human behaviour. I’m not happy with the phrase, but it hard to know what to call it. Text mining refers to mining large text databases, not the web. Web mining means all sorts of things. What stands out for me as important is that we have in the Web a massive body of evidence for philosophical and cultural analysis, something we haven’t had before. While a chance in evidence may seem trivial, the resulting change in research practices is not.

Web Mining for Research

Web Mining for Research is a white paper I’ve just written to get my ideas down about how we should be using the Web as evidence not just for social science research, but in the humanities. Digital humanities is more than studying old wine in new digital bottles – the challenge is to do humanities research using the digital as evidence. For me the challenge is how to rethink philosophy now that we can mine concepts in their sites, to paraphrase Ian Hacking.

NT2 | Nouvelles technologies, nouvelles textualit?©s.

NT2 Logo NT2 | Nouvelles technologies, nouvelles textualit?©s is a lab directed by Bertrand Gervais at UQAM that “promotes the study, reading, creation, and archiving of new forms of texts and hypermedia works.” (My translation from the French.) They have an excellent news blog, Activit?©s, that comments on cyberculture and research. Here are the questions they are asking:

Quel est le statut du texte litt?©raire, de l‚Äôart, du cin?©ma sur Internet? Quel est le statut de toute ?ìuvre, ?† l‚Äôheure de l‚Äô?©cran reli?© et de ses technologies? ?Ä quel type de mat?©rialit?© sommes-nous convi?©s? ?Ä quelles formes de lecture, de spectature, d‚Äôinterpr?©tation? (Pr?©sentation)

Edward Tufte: Beautiful Evidence

Edward Tufte’ Beautiful Evidence is the latest in a series of impressive books about visualization and design. I can’t help thinking that this time he has overstretched himself.

First, he doesn’t really tackle the “beautiful” in the title. What is the difference between beautiful evidence and informative evidence? What makes evidence beautiful and is that different from informative? Underlying this is a question about the difference between design and art, which I think he has chosen to ignore as I can’t find it discussed in the book. He is, however, aware of it – here is a quote from a long (PDF) interview in Technical Communication Quarterly:

Beautiful Evidence follows a growing concern in my work: assessing the quality of evidence and of finding out the truth. The other side is that sometimes displays of evidence have, as a byproduct, extraordinary beauty. I mean beautiful here in two senses: aesthetic or pretty but also amazing, wonderful, powerful, never before seen. In emphasizing evidential quality and beauty, I also want to move the practices of analytical design far away from the practices of propaganda, marketing, graphic design, and commercial art. (Page 450)

Second, the book reads like a collection of essays. He has put the The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint and an essay on sparklines in the book, even though they don’t quite fit. Finally, the book ends with plates of his sculpture which seem to be an ad for his sculpture and only loosely connected to evidence.

MLA Report on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure

The MLA has released the report of the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion. The Executive Summary reports,

Even more troubling is the state of evaluation for digital scholarship, now an extensively used resource for scholars across the humanities: 40.8% of departments in doctorate-granting institutions report no experience evaluating refereed articles in electronic format, and 65.7% report no experience evaluating monographs in electronic format. (p. 3)

The 4th recommendation is that,

Departments and institutions should recognize the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media, whether by individuals or in collaboration, and create procedures for evaluating these forms of scholarship. (p. 3)

Bravo! As Scott Jaschik puts it in a story on Rethinking Tenure – And Much More in Inside Higher Ed, departments should

Accept “the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media,” ending the assumption that print is necessarily better. (And to the extent that some professors and departments don’t know how to evaluate quality in new media, “the onus is on the department” to learn, not on the scholar using new media, Stanton said.)

Donna Stanton chaired the MLA task force and provided the briefing for the quote.

Thanks to Judith for pointing me to this.

Changing competencies in the new media environment | TLT Symposium

Changing competencies in the new media environment is a summary of a presentation by Henry Jenkins at MIT. It lists the Classic and New competencies needed by youth. The list is refreshing – it doesn’t list all sorts of technical and business skills. It includes, Play, Simulation, Judgement and Negotiation, among other things.

The PDF of a long paper Jenkins wrote for the MacArthur foundation Digital Media and Learning project expands on this, see Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century.

Derrida: “The Word Processor”

A new freeing up of the flow can both let through anything at all, and also give air to critical possibilities that used to be limited or inhibited by the old mechanisms of legitimation – which are also, in their own way, word-processing mechanisms. (p. 32)

Paper Machine by Jacques Derrida and translated by Rachel Bowlby has an essay on “The Word Processor” that is one of the better discussions of how word processing is changing writing. Some quotes:

“But when we write ‘by hand’ we are not in the time before technology; there is already instrumentality, regular reproduction, mechanical iterability. So it is not legitimate to contrast writing by hand and ‘mechanical’ writing, like a pretechnological craft as opposed to technology.” (p. 20)

The machine remains a signal of separation, of severance, the official sign of emancipation and departure for the public sphere.” (p. 20)

As you know, the computer maintains the hallucination of an interlocutor (anonymous or otherwise), of another ‘subject’ (spontaneous and autonomous, automatic) who can occupy more than one place and play plenty of roles: face to face for one, but also withdrawn; in front of us, for another, but also invisible and faceless behind its screeen. Like a hidden god who’s half asleep, clever at hiding himself even when right opposite you. (p. 22)

With pens and typewriters, you think you know how it works, how ‘it responds.’ Whereas with computers, even if people know how to use them up to a point, they rarely know, intuitively and without thinking — at any rate, I don’t know — how the internal demon of the apparatus operates. … We know how to use them and what they are for, without knowing what goes on with them, in them, on their side; and this might give us plenty to think about with regard to our relationshi with technology today – to the historical newness of this experience. (p. 23)

Is it really new to use technologies without understanding?

For Derrida the age of the book is passing.

This is not the end but we are probably moving to another regime of conservation, commemoration, reproduction, and celebration. A great age is coming to an end.

For us, that can be frightening. We have to mourn what has been our fetish. (p. 31)

I like the French term for word processor, “traitement de texts” – seems more accurate to what is happening.

Meditation on Electronic Tools

A tool would have a handle with grooves to hold tight. It’s easy to swing into place.

It would have an inhuman steel end. An end unlike my soft flesh. Perhaps the nail dead at the end of the digit.

A tool scratches out its world. A tool outreaches, extends the hand in sight, and where it doesn’t fit (so often), it scrapes a groove. It claws what it can afford.

And when it’s finished there’s a pop, a clunk, a ping, and a burr to be swept away. When it’s left, the palm is open to stroke the surface of the craft. A satisfaction puts the tool away.

So few parts of the world fit this tool, other than my hand. Perhaps they are not made for work but for the stroking, the holding, and the gripping turn.

Which is why I need so many of them, within reach, laid out in frames, carried in bags, on belts, and ready-at-hand and unforseen.

Then, I’ll pause in the workshop and not do anthing at all. I’ll hold these tools in my mind which is not how to use them.

Images all from the TAPoR portal and TAPoRware.

RAMAC and Interactivity: Pictorial History of Media Technology

Pictorial History of Media Technology is a slide show history of computing and media, especially video technology. It is on a site dedicated to “Capacitance Electronic Discs or CED’s, a consumer video format on grooved vinyl discs that was marketed by RCA in the 1980’s.” The slide show has pictures of the IBM 305 RAMAC Computer with what was the first disk drive in production. What’s so important about the RAMAC?

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in a blog entry on An Excerpt from Mechanisms, Professor RAMAC and in an article for Text Technology, Extreme Inscription: Towards a Grammatology of the Hard Drive, argues that,

Magnetic disk media, more specifically the hard disk drive, was to become that technology and, as much as bitmapped-GUIs and the mouse, usher in a new era of interactive, real-time computing.

Krischenbaum is right that interactivity wouldn’t be possible without random access memory and he takes this in an interesting direction around inscription. I look forward to his book.