Comic Book on Google Chrome

Drawing of BrowserThe blog, Google Blogoscoped has a scan of Scott McCloud’s comic book to explain the new Google Browser called Chrome, see Google on Google Chrome – comic book or Google’s version. It is interesting that Google used the comic book format to explain what is special about Chrome (see Scott’s FAQ), but Chrome itself, and how it is being presented, is also important. A few random thoughts:

  • The comic presents Chrome as designed for running applications. This strikes me as an Andreessen move where you alert Microsoft to the fact that you want to make a browser that replaces the OS thereby making Windows unnecessary and Microsoft poorer. Maybe Google will fare better than Netscape.
  • Google is simplifying the interface to the browser. It will be interesting to see if their tab-oriented interface will work. Perhaps the comic book is to explain to people who like snazzy interfaces why a simple browser is better even if you can’t see the improvements in features.
  • I like their idea of the OMNIBOX – a location box and Google search box with autocompletion all in one. Google is really pushing the idea of a single field into which you can type anything and you get some sort of intelligent response. Will we eventually get an AI box of sorts that tries to respond to natural language (or, to be more exact, the emergent Googlese that we all learn to type using Googles Omnibox.) Is this the route to the natural language interface of pre-GUI days when we though typing text was the way to interact with the computer? Is this the return of the command line?

Supercomputing: World Community Grid

I got an announcement about a A Workshop on Humanities Applications for the World Community Grid (WCG) being hosted by IBM. The WCG is a volunteer grid that uses the BOINC platform and is “powered” by IBM. These volunteer projects fascinate me – they are not our father’s computing where the danger was computers getting smarter than us and taking over and the paradigm was AI. Now the symbiosis of humans and computing is on a social scale – grids of processors and teams of people. Here is what the WCG says about their project:

World Community Grid’s mission is to create the largest public computing grid benefiting humanity. Our work is built on the belief that technological innovation combined with visionary scientific research and large-scale volunteerism can change our world for the better. Our success depends on individuals – like you – collectively contributing their unused computer time to this not-for-profit endeavor.

What sorts of humanities problems could we run on a grid like this? Do humanities projects “benefit humanity” or is medicine (curing cancer) the last human research left? My instinct tells me we could do internet mining for concepts where we gather, clean and analyze large numbers of documents on concepts like “dialogue”. Perhaps someone wants to submit a proposal with me.

Reassembling the Disassembled Book

Image of Pages being Scanned

There is a nice collection of essays on CH Working Papers on Reassembling the Disassembled Book. These are some of the papers that were presented under that theme at the Society for Digital Humanities meeting in 2007 in Saskatchewan which I blogged before. One paper I was pleased to read because it went by too quickly at the conference is Richard Cunningham’s Dis-Covering the Early Modern Book: An Experiment in Humanities Computing. This paper describes and theorizes a one day experiment Richard and others tried in taking apart an early modern book, scanning it, and reassembling as a electronic book. I love these “what can you do in a day experiments.”

Bad enough we had all agreed, before gathering in Victoria, to disassemble one book; in the end we discovered we would need to dismantle two books to achieve our representational goals. This need to use (or perhaps more appropriately abuse) two books rather than one was a direct result of the planning we undertook prior to entering the ETCL. We began with the basic idea of digitizing an early modern book and defining the project so that it could be completed in a single day. The opportunity for this project came in the form of a selection of early modern books that had been rescued from the discount bins of a couple of London’s antiquarian book stores. (Richard Cunningham, Dis-Covering the Early Modern Book: An Experiment in Humanities Computing)

There are links in the paper to a number of videos and images, including a long video that shows them cutting the pages. Not unlike my Text in the Machine series of photos, but for a far more important purpose.

New York Times: The Lessons From the Kindles Success

Well, I was wrong. I thought the Kindle, like other attempts at e-books would be a failure. According a New York Times story by Saul Hansell (Aug. 12, 2008), The Lessons From the Kindles Success argues that while the market of readers may be small, there seem to be a enough readers who read a lot and want the convenience of loading it up on a device. I suspect the ease of use is also a feature.

It seems that Amazon.com’s Kindle is not the flop that many predicted when the e-book reader debuted last year. Citibank’s Mark Mahaney has just doubled his forecast of Kindle sales for the year to 380,000. He figures that Amazon’s sales of Kindle hardware and software will hit $1 billion by 2010.

Cyberattack on Georgia

The New York Times has a disturbing story, Before the Gunfire, Cyberattacks that suggests the Russians may have practiced cyberattack techniques against Georgia before the surface attack in what is the first case of a “known cyberattack had coincided with a shooting war.”

the attacks against Georgia’s Internet infrastructure began as early as July 20, with coordinated barrages of millions of requests — known as distributed denial of service, or D.D.O.S., attacks — that overloaded and effectively shut down Georgian servers.

Georgia, however, doesn’t seem to have noticed as they don’t have that many internet sites and don’t use it much in everyday life/business. One wonders how a successful shutdown of the Internet in Canada would affect us … what would break down?

Dictionary of Words in the Wild: Over 3000

Wild Words

The Dictionary of Words in the Wild now has over 3000 images and almost 4000 unique words.

I’ve just finished 4 days hiking in the wilds of the northern shore of Lake Superior (Pukaskwa National Park) on one of the most spectacular back country hiking trails I know of. What struck me in the woods an on the shores of Superior was that there are no words in the wild unless scratched on a tree or rock. The only words I saw were all the logos on our clothing, tent, sleeping bags and so on. It really isn’t wild if there are words.

New Version of TAPoR Portal

We have upgraded the TAPoR Portal to version 1.1 (the Dundas version.) The upgrades include:

  • French language skin has been rewritten.
  • You can now enter a text that is just a bibliographic reference which doesn’t link to a full text and the system will handle it.
  • The Research Log now hides the results to make it easier to load and navigate.
  • Security and interface upgrades.

Seminar: The writer and the society of communication

Domenico Fiormonte drew my attention to an interesting seminar coming up next week in Valencia at the Menéndez Pelayo International University (UIMP) on Editando al autor. El escritor en la sociedad de la communicación (PDF). The seminar brings together editors, authors, new media researchers and philologists on the subject of the writer in a society of communication.

Domenico has an interesting web site Digital Variants which makes available various the writings (and variants) of various contemporary Italian and Spanish authors. On the Digital Variants site they are experimenting with systems of frames to allow readers to compare variants. Here is one example of a Vincenzo Cerami Variants Machine
created by Mario Macciocca.