One of the books I read on vacation was Historical Ontology by Ian Hacking, who I met once or twice when I was a grad student at U of T. (Neither of us understood what the other was up to, but that’s another story.)
While Hacking doesn’t do the philosophy of computing, he does philosophy of ideas, especially mathematical and scientific ideas. Historical ontology (or “dynamic nominalism”) is the name for his style of reasoning that he acknowledges is from Foucault.
His work is important to the philosophy of computing in a number of ways. First, he describes a style of historical analysis that we need to practice on the concepts of computing. It is looking at thick concepts and their instruments. Second, his historical ontology is the critical mirror to the simulation view of computing. The simulation view is that you understand by simulating objects or modelling virtually. Object oriented programming is a deeper version of this – programming is the defining of objects and behaviours, a description of a possible world – historical ontology is the analysis of such possible worlds. Object making vs object understanding.
Thus what he says about how we invent things (or construct them) has an explicit application to computing. In some science cases he argues that we invent physical things; for example when we create a new element that was potentially there, but doesn’t exist in nature. He pushes this further to a paradoxical view to the effect that as we invent (or develop) the concepts for things we, in effect, bring them into existence (as something to be thought about.)
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Feel Good Anyway
Feel Good Anyway, besides have a great name, develops some interesting interactive works, identity systems, and posters. They have a kids animation look that works well in Flash. I think the kids look has some connection to J.otto Seibold. (See jotto.com.)
I discovered one of their works at receiver. Vodaphone, that funds reciever magazine as an idea forum, commissions neat interactives for the cover screens like the one from J.otto and a neat one from HORT.
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Levinson, Cellphone
Paul Levinson’s, Cellphone; The Story of the World’s Most Mobile Medium and How It Has Transformed Everything! is a breezy book on the mobile phone that raises interesting points without doing much else. For example, it doesn’t systematically tell you the story of the development of the cellphone or tell us about the market for cellphones. The book has a good annotated bibliography.
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Wired Styles
Two stories in Wired News A Matter of (Wired News) Style and It’s Just the ‘internet’ Now are about the style guidelines of Wired and changes. Tom Long, the author of both and the Wired News’ copy chief, set standards that have an effect. That the internet and web are now lower case says something about their perception as generic rather than named entities. The e-mail article, however, is more interesting, because Tony talks about the shift in style as the web became commercial, main stream and then dropped. Style reflects attitude and community. This is courtesy of StÈfan Sinclair.
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Toronto FIS Academic Plan
In a previous blog on Information Studies at the University of Toronto, Information Studies, I looked at the Chartreuse paper created by the dean there. Now that has been developed into an academic plan, see Faculty of Information Studies home page and the FIS Academic Plan. Note the three major thrusts of their proposal and the way they plan to model an electronic university for the rest of U of T. Will anyone listen when they do?
McLuhan’s Way
The Globe and Mail reports that a Street named after ‘rogue scholar’ McLuhan
was designated in a celebration yesterday. A portion of St. Joseph’s street in St. Michael’s college was named, Marshall McLuhan Way. Now we need a median so we can say, “the median is the way of the message.”
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Ancaster Woods
Three pictures from the woods in Ancaster in June.
Budapest Open Access Initiative
The Budapest Open Access Initiative meeting in 2002 was the start of the open access movement according to Jean Claude Guedon. For something to qualify as open access it has to be licensed to the user in an open fashion and it must be archived. (See the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing or my previous entry on the Berlin Declaration..) The Creative Commons organization founded in 2001 provides language for open access licenses.
Classic Texts on Computer Science
Classical Computer Science Texts is a list by Jason Kottke of online classics. As he notes, not one is authored by a woman. I particularly like Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years which reminds me of my Slow Code manifesto.
Maisonneuve
maisonneuve :: eclectic curiosity is a newish (starting in the Winter of 2002) magazine that tries to be like the New Yorker or Harpers. This is the second such magazine in Canada along with The Walrus Magazine. The MediaScout is their blog that comments on the national media every day.
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