The Charms of Wikipedia

The Charms of Wikipedia is a charming review essay about editing the Wikipedia by Nicholson Baker in the New York Review of Books (Volume 55, Number 4 · March 20, 2008). In the review essay he talks John Broughton’s Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, which is just that – a manual for editing the Wikipedia. Baker talks about trying to rescue articles proposed for deletion and concludes with,

My advice to anyone who is curious about becoming a contributor—and who is better than I am at keeping his or her contributional compulsions under control—is to get Broughton’s Missing Manual and start adding, creating, rescuing. I think I’m done for the time being. But I have a secret hope. Someone recently proposed a Wikimorgue—a bin of broken dreams where all rejects could still be read, as long as they weren’t libelous or otherwise illegal. Like other middens, it would have much to tell us over time. We could call it the Deletopedia.

This reminds me of another story about the Wikipedia and its founder, Larry Wales. It turns out that Wales has been dating the bizarre Canadian conservative Rachel Marsden (infamous in Canada for a harassment case with her SFU swim coach.) Wales apparently broke up with her on the Wikipedia and she is retaliating by selling his T-shirt on E-Bay. See the Globe and Mail story, Ms. Marsden’s cyberspace breakup: tit-for-tat-for-T-shirt by Siri Agrell, March 4, 2008. There is a longer article with links to the relevant materials from Fox, titled, Wikipedia Founder’s Fling With Columnist Ends in Nasty Public Breakup. There is some question as to whether he was using his position to sanitize her Wikipedia entry.

High Resolution Visualization

Image of Monitor
In a previous post I wrote about a High Performance Visualization project. We got the chance to try the visualization on a Toshiba high resolution monitor (something like 5000 X 2500). Above you can see a picture I took with my Blackberry.

What can we do with high resolution displays? What would we show and how could we interact with them? I take it for granted that we won’t just blow up existing visualizations.

Obama and the Long Tail fo Politics

I went to a talk by David Theo Goldberg who also heads up the UCHRI (University of California Humanities Research Institute). His talk wasn’t about networked politics, but he repeatedly mentioned flash mobs as a new political phenomenon and then he went on to praise the long blog entry Barack Obama and The Long Tail of Politics by Isaac Garcia of Central Desktop, the company whose wiki-like collaboration software was used by Obama to organize California. The blog entry is one of the best explanations of the Obama phenomenon I’ve come across.

High Performance Visualization

Screen shot of visualizationI’m working with the folks at our local HPC consortium, SHARCNET on imagining how we could visualize texts with high resolution displays, 3D displays, and cluster computing. The project, temporarily called The Big See has generated an interested beta version. You can see a video on the process running and images from the final visualization here, Version Beta 2.

One of the unanticipated insights from this project is that the process of building the 3D model, which I will call the *animation*, is as interesting as the final visual model. From the very first version you could see the text flowing up and the high frequency words jostling each other for position. Words would start high and then slide clockwise around. Collocations build up as it goes. We don’t have the animation right, but I think we are on to something. You can see Version B2 as an MP4 animation here.

Now we will start playing with the parameters – colours, transparency, and weight of lines.

New universities and new presidents

Compare the announcement of KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology) KAUST’s Unique Vision to John Maeda’s vision for the Rhode Island School of Design, risd’s next president. KAUST will be a new university with a large endowment that is for graduate students only. RISD is a design school that has just hired one of the leaders in design and technology away from MIT’s Media Lab. They are both exciting developments, but different in so many ways. Here is part of the vision of the new president of KAUST:

to conduct high impact research unconstrained by disciplinary boundaries, to create a new ecosystem for research unfettered by organizational strictures, and to build meaningful partnerships across communities, cultures and continents. (President’s Acceptance Message)

Thanks to Alex for the KAUST link and to Shawn for the RISD link.

SET 26

Image of GROCK

SET 26 is a Swiss design company that sells furniture shaped like letters from the Roman alphabet. Each letter costs about 1,500 Euros and has doors that open revealing shelves. They have a Konfigurator so you can see any combination of 5 letters in the available colours (like the GROCK above.)

I read about this in a strange online Facsimile Magazine while reading a reproduction of a 1970 Time Life Books’ Nature/Science Annual article on “Art’s New Ally – Science.” The article documents a number of technological arts projects including the Experiments in Arts and Technology (E.A.T.) cooperative founded by Billy Klüver and Robert Rauschenberg.

The High Concept

ETC LogoCarnegie Mellon is going global with their Masters in Entertainment Technology program. They have a campus in Adelaide, Australia and are adding new ones in Japan and Singapore. The High Concept is project based learning where people from an arts or technology background learn to work together and deepen their understanding of entertainment technology. It has the virtue of weaving arts and computing students together rather than segregating them.

The “high concept” behind both the Entertainment Technology Center and the Masters in Entertainment Technology degree is that we are based on the principle of having technologists and non-technologists work together on projects that produce artifacts that are intended to entertain, inform, inspire, or otherwise affect an audience/guest/player/participant. The masters degree is focused on extensive semester-long project courses. This focus allows us to tackle the much larger challenge of effectively bringing together students and researchers from different disciplines.

We do not intend to take artists and turn them into engineers, or vice-versa. While some students will be able to achieve mastery in both areas, it is not our intention to have our students master “the other side.” Instead, we intend for a typical student in this program to enter with mastery/training in a specific area and spend his or her two years at Carnegie Mellon learning the vocabulary, values, and working patterns of the other culture.

Is global programs simultaneously offered in different regions an answer to distance education? After all it is cheaper for instructors to move than students. Could faculty find they are part of multi-university programs instead of affiliated with one university?

The site also has a good list of similar programs elsewhere, which I think is generous. More programs should be honest about the alternatives.

Human Beans: Provocative Design

Human Beans: Family Project Fictional Package

Human Beans is a provocative design group that I read about in a great article “Unstated Contributions – How Artistic Inquiry Can Inform Interdisciplinary Research” by Chris Rust in International Journal of Design (vol. 1, no. 3, 2007.) Rust cites Human Beans as an example of designers experimenting with fictional products (like the Family Project) as a form of conceptual art. Their information page says,

Human Beans create provocative concepts.

We make fictional products by hacking commercial culture and we design new services by working with real people

Our aim is to challenge assumptions and point in new directions, we diffuse our thinking through spam, the press, shop shelves and exhibitions.

Rust’s article gives examples of a number of ways that creative practices can intersect with research without becoming research. Artists can generate a world within which researchers can understand and pose questions for methodological research. Artists can provoke questions. Artists can re-present knowledge in more communicative ways. Above all, for Rust, the contribution of the artist is not the explicit propositional knowledge that can be reviewed and tested. The contribution of an artist is something that the audience has to interpret and complete. It isn’t art if an artist studies the use of their work and tries to plan its interpretation to constrain a particular thesis. I should add that Rust seems to have been involved in the UK discussions around what we call research/creation here in Canada.