Why bother with the Arts and Humanities?
There are a number of calls for arts and humanities education emerging from the popular press and famous novellists. Un journaliste dans le pays des deux solitudes : A Challenge to the Social Sciences and Humanities by Graham Fraser of the Toronto Star is an interesting example because he cites a similar call by his father in the 50s. Does anything change?
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How can we analyze a topic through the web?
twURL: Research Outlet and Integration is a site for a tool that lets people analyze 1000s of URLs from a search. It produces graphs, statistics, and summaries. twURLed World is a site where people can put their summaries on topics. (See the previous blog entry here on Ullman’s The Bug – an example.)
Continue reading twURL – Web Analysis
Salon 21st | The dumbing-down of programming is an essay by Ellen Ullman on Salon on way wizards and interfaces hide the machine from us. It is a meditation on why Linux is so attractive. The interesting part is when Ullman discovers the history of DOS-Basic in the stripping away of Windows.
Continue reading Layers of Computing
Can programming and debugging be made interesting in fiction?
The culture of computing often is hard to represent in other media. Films about hackers always have trouble conveying the excitement of using a terminal (typing and recieving text.) Only with VR could visual representations of information be developed to aide the richness of a movie. But now there are serious novelists weaving computing culture into novels. Powers, Coupland, and Ullman.
These writers are both drawing tropes from computing that they can develop in real (fictional worlds) and commenting on the culture of computing which has had such a hold on our imagination.
Ullman’s The Bug is an example of literature that draws themes from the details of computing (malloc – memory allocation, core dump, Game of Life) rather than mock them.
See Techno-culture ala Ellen Ullman (Update 2003, The Bug) (twURLed World Description) for links.
Continue reading Ellen Ullman, The Bug
Can we offer services off a server for html form fields?
JSpell HTML JavaScript Based Spell Checker is a commercial product that offers spell checking. It is nicely done (try the demo.) The model could be used for interactive tagging or analysis. Hmmm… have to think some more about this.
What can we do with visualization?
evl :: electronic visualization laboratory are pioneers in this field having invented the “cave” and other visualization technologies.
What is text on a computer?
A brief introduction to code pages and Unicode is a good overview of code and text.
The point is that on the computer there are just sequences of binary digits. The data doesn’t include the information needed to decode the sequences. (Even the sequencing is coded.) To get recognizable text one needs a lookup table that maps code points to abstract characters and from there to glyphs that look right. To get text you need a system with enough variety to handle the characters you want – it is the difference between the codes that makes text – something the poststructuralists realized at a different register.
Continue reading The Difference of Code Points
What theories have been developed around the statistical study of literature?
sysbib97 is a bibliography of around various strands of literary theory including Bordieu’s Theory of the Literary Field (champ littÈraire.)
Continue reading Bibliography on Bordieu’s Theory of the Literary Theory
Can we study literature by numbers?
The Center for the Study of the Novel is led by Franco Moretti who believes we should quantify and visualize novels or corpora. Sounds like he would love TAPoR.
Do we read by just looking at the first and last letter of a word and its length?
Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey: visual word recognition is a blog entry with responses on this subject. It is complete with examples of texts with the middle letters of words scrambled. The idea that the order of the middle letters doesn’t matter is something between an urban legend and the subject of psychology tests.
Continue reading Visual Word Recognition