Media and News – Page 15

The Never-Before-Told Story of the World’s First Computer Art

The Atlantic has a story about The Never-Before-Told Story of the World’s First Computer Art (It’s a Sexy Dame). The image (see above) was apparently created by an IBM programmer for the SAGE system and was used as a diagnostic.

According to Tipton, the program that displayed the pin-up image was a diagnostic that tested data flow between the two SAGE computers on site (referred to as the A and B computers). At the end of every shift, as one computer was about to go offline and switch over to the other, the active machine would begin transferring flight and intercept data to the standby machine so there could be a seamless switch over.

Two switching consoles on site were used to handle this process. After running the diagnostic, Tipton describes, if the pin-up displayed correctly on the screen, then data was being transferred between the A and B computers correctly. If the image displayed improperly, then the technicians immediately knew there was a problem.

This reminds me of the story of Lena and the use of her image. Why were so many early images drawn from porn? Does this say something about the male culture of computing in those years that it was cool/acceptable to use pin up pictures when you needed a graphic image?

Thanks to @manovich for this.

Big Buzz about Big Data: Does it really have to be analyzed.

The Guardian has a story by John Burn-Murdoch on how Study: less than 1% of the world’s data is analysed, over 80% is unprotected.

This Guardian article reports on a Digital Universe Study that reports that the “global data supply reached 2.8 zettabytes (ZB) in 2012” and that “just 0.5% of this is used for analysis”. The industry study emphasizes that the promise of “Big Data” is in its analysis,

First, while the portion of the digital universe holding potential analytic value is growing, only a tiny fraction of territory has been explored. IDC estimates that by 2020, as much as 33% of the digital universe will contain information that might be valuable if analyzed, compared with 25% today. This untapped value could be found in patterns in social media usage, correlations in scientific data from discrete studies, medical information intersected with sociological data, faces in security footage, and so on. However, even with a generous estimate, the amount of information in the digital universe that is “tagged” accounts for only about 3% of the digital universe in 2012, and that which is analyzed is half a percent of the digital universe. Herein is the promise of “Big Data” technology — the extraction of value from the large untapped pools of data in the digital universe. (p. 3)

I can’t help wondering if industry studies aren’t trying to stampede us to thinking that there is lots of money to be made in analytics. These studies often seem to come from the entities that benefit from investment into analytics. What if the value of Big Data turns out to be in getting people to buy into analytical tools and services (or be left behind.) Has there been any critical analysis (as opposed to anecdotal evidence) of whether analytics really do warrant the effort? A good article I came across on the need for analytical criticism is Trevor Butterworth’s Goodbye Anecdotes! The Age of Big Data Demands Real Criticsm. He starts with,

Every day, we produce 2.5 exabytes of information, the analysis of which will, supposedly, make us healthier, wiser, and above all, wealthier—although it’s all a bit fuzzy as to what, exactly, we’re supposed to do with 2.5 exabytes of data—or how we’re supposed to do whatever it is that we’re supposed to do with it, given that Big Data requires a lot more than a shiny MacBook Pro to run any kind of analysis.

Of course the Digital Universe Study is not only about the opportunities for analytics. It also points out:

That data security is going to become more and more of a problem
That more and more data is coming from emerging markets
That we could get a lot more useful analysis done if there was more metadata (tagging), especially at the source. They are calling for more intelligence in the gathering devices – the surveillance cameras, for example. They could add metadata at the point of capture like time, place, and then stuff like whether there are faces.
That the promising types of data that could generate value start with surveillance and medical data.

Reading about Big Data I also begin to wonder what it is. Fortunately IDC (who are behind the Digital Universe Study have a definition,

Last year, Big Data became a big topic across nearly every area of IT. IDC defines Big Data technologies as a new generation of technologies and architectures, designed to economically extract value from very large volumes of a wide variety of data by enabling high-velocity capture, discovery, and/or analysis. There are three main characteristics of Big Data: the data itself, the analytics of the data, and the presentation of the results of the analytics. Then there are the products and services that can be wrapped around one or all of these Big Data elements. (p. 9)

Big Data is not really about data at all. It is about technologies and services. It is about the opportunity that comes with “a big topic across nearly every area of IT.” Big Data is more like Big Buzz. Now we know what follows Web 2.0 (and it was never going to be Web 3.0.)

For a more academic and interesting perspective on Big Data I recommend (following Butterworth) Martin Hilbert’s “How much information is there in the ‘information society’?” (Significance, 9:4, 8-12, 2012.) One of the more interesting points he makes is the growing importance of text,

Despite the general percep- tion that the digital age is synonymous with the proliferation of media-rich audio and videos, we find that text and still images cap- ture a larger share of the world’s technological memories than they did before4. In the early 1990s, video represented more than 80% of the world’s information stock (mainly stored in analogue VHS cassettes) and audio almost 15% (on audio cassettes and vinyl records). By 2007, the share of video in the world’s storage devices had decreased to 60% and the share of audio to merely 5%, while text increased from less than 1% to a staggering 20% (boosted by the vast amounts of alphanumerical content on internet servers, hard disks and databases.) The multimedia age actually turns out to be an alphanumeric text age, which is good news if you want to make life easy for search engines. (p. 9)

One of the points that Hilbert makes that would support the importance of analytics is that our capacity to store data is catching up with the amount of data broadcast and communicated. In other words we are getting closer to being able to be able store most of what is broadcast and communicated. Even more dramatic is the growth in computation. In short available computation is growing faster than storage and storage faster than transmission. With excess comes experimentation and with excess computation and storage, why not experiment with what is communicated. We are, after all, all humanists who are interested primarily ourselves. The opportunity to study ourselves in real time is too tempting to give up. There may be little commercial value in the Big Reflection, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t the Big Temptation. The Delphic oracle told us to Know Thyself and now we can in a new new way. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the value in Big Data is in our narcissism. The services that will do well are those that feed our Big Desire to know more and more (recently) ourselves both individually and collectively. Privacy will be trumped by the desire for analytic celebrity where you become you own spectacle.

This could be good news for the humanities. I’m tempted to announce that this will be the century of the BIG BIG HUMAN. With Big Reflection we will turn on ourselves and consume more and more about ourselves. The humanities could claim that we are the disciplines that reflect on the human and analytics are just another practice for doing so, but to do so we might have to look at what is written in us or start writing in DNA.

In 2007, the DNA in the 60 trillion cells of one single human body would have stored more information than all of our technological devices together. (Hilbert, p. 11)

Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics

Open Book Publishers has just published Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics online. Stéfan Sinclair and I have two chapters in the collection, one on “Acculturation and the Digital Humanities Community” and one on “Teaching Computer-Assisted Text Analysis.”

The Acculturation chapter sets out the ways in which we try to train students by involving them in project teams rather than only through courses. This approach I learned watching Jerome McGann and Johanna Drucker at the University of Virginia. My goal has always to be able to create the sort of project culture they did (and now the Scholar’s Lab continues.)

The editor Brett D. Hirsch deserves a lot of credit for gently seeing this through.

GAME THEORY in the NYTimes

Just in time for Christmas, the New York Times has started an interesting ArtsBeat Blog called GAME THEORY. It is interesting that this multi-authored blog is in the “Arts Beat” area as opposed to under the Technology tab where most of the game stories are. Game Theory seems to want to take a broader view of games and culture as the second post on Caring About Make-Believe Body Counts illustrates. This post starts by addressing the other blog columnists (as if this were a dialogue) and then starts with Wayne LaPierre’s speech about how to deal with the Connecticut school killings that blames, among other things, violent games. The column then looks at the discourse around violence in games including voices within the gaming industry that were critical of ultraviolence.

Those familiar with games who debate the medium’s violence now commonly assume that games may have become too violent. But they don’t assume that games should be free of violence. That is because of fake violence’s relationship with interactivity, which is a defining element of video games.

Stephen Totilo ends the column with his list of the best games of 2012 which includes Super Hexagon, Letterpress, Journey, Dys4ia, and Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask.

As I mentioned above, the blog column has a dialogical side with authors addressing each other. It also brings culture and game culture together which reminds me of McLuhan who argued that games reflect society providing a form of catharsis. This column promises to theorize culture through the lens of games rather than just theorize games.

Short Guide To Evaluation Of Digital Work

The Journal of Digital Humanities has republished my Short Guide to Evaluation of Digital Work as part of an issue on Closing the Evaluation Gap (Vol. 1, No. 4). I first wrote the piece for my wiki and you can find the old version here. It is far more useful bundled with the other articles in this issue od JDH.

The JDH is a welcome experiment in peer-reviewed republication. One thing they do is to select content that has been published in other forms (blogs, online essays and so on) and then edit it for recombination in a thematic issue. The JDH builds on the neat Digital Humanities Now that showcases neat stuff on the web. Both are projects of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. The CHNM deserved credit for thinking through what we can do with the openness of the web.

Save Library and Archives Canada

The Canadian Association of University Teachers has a campaign to Save Library and Archives Canada from the “Badly conceived restructuring, a redefinition of its mandate, and financial cutbacks (that) are undermining LAC’s ability to acquire, preserve and make publicly available Canada’s full documentary heritage.” The issue is not just cuts, but how LAC is dealing with the cuts.

Daniel Caron, Library and Archivist of Canada, has announced that “the new environment is totally decentralized and our monopoly as stewards of the national documentary heritage is over.”

LAC will be decentralizing a large portion of its collections to both public and private institutions. LAC documents refer to this voluntary group of “memory institutions” as a “coalition of the willing.”

Go to the site now, read up on the issues, and consider taking action!

Buffett Says Free News Unsustainable

Bloomberg has a story that Warren Buffett Says Free News Unsustainable, May Add More Papers. The days of expecting news online to be free to access may be coming to an end. We may find more and more news behind paywalls of the sort the New York Times brought in where you only get so many free articles a month.

Buffett believes that local papers with a “community focus” can make a profit as they are often the only source for community news. There will always be free alternatives for national or international news, but community newspapers often don’t have free alternatives.

This bodes well for journalism which has suffered recently which in turn has, I believe, created a democracy gap as the fifth estate loses its ability to monitor the others. Bloggers don’t reliably replace investigative journalism that profits from reporting on government and industry.

On Graduate Education in the Humanities, by a Graduate Student in the Humanities

Lindsay Thomas, the hard working blogger for 4Humanities has written an excellent piece On Graduate Education in the Humanities, by a Graduate Student in the Humanities. She talks about how hard it is to complete quickly when you are making ends meet by TAing and teaching constantly. She talks about the “casualization” of academic labor.

I would add to her essay that we need to think about expanding outcomes for graduate students. We design graduate programs to produce junior faculty (or casual labor who hang on in hopes of getting full-time faculty jobs.) What we don’t do is to design programs so that they prepare people for knowledge work outside the academy. This is not rocket science, there are all sorts of ways to do it and digital humanities programs could take the lead as our student acquire skills of broader relevance. But, as Lindsay points out, if you start changing or adding to graduate programs you can just extend the time to completion and students might end up no better off.