Webilus.com :: le meilleur des images du web is a French web site that gathers images and visualizations of the web and computing culture. The image above, for example, compares e-mail collaboration to wiki collaboration showing how much more work it is to use e-mail.
The site is a blog curated by Frédéric COZIC and it has a widget you can install to see the most recent images on your blog.
Digitize This Book! by Gary Hall is an interesting book at the intersection of cultural studies and humanities computing. The book seems to be addressed mostly to the cultural studies crowd arguing that “do cultural studies writers, thinkers, and practitioners not also need to experiment with ways of being ‘militant’ in a positive, innovative, creative, and constructive fashion in their own situations, institutions, and places of work?” (p. 206) The book is a sustained defense of the Cultural Studies e-Archive (CSeARCH) and other computing projects that Hall has initiated. He is trying to make space in cultural studies for projects we would recognize as humanities computing projects. To do this he argues against “transcendental politics” which assume a commitment to a particular political analysis in order to open room for actions, like starting an open archive, that cannot be demonstrated a-priori to be in support of capitalism or not. He ends the book with,
A fixed, pure and incorruptible institution could only be a violent, transcendental, totalizing, and totalitarian fantasy. One could even argue, after Derrida, that it is precisely the structurally open and undecidable nature of the situation – the fact that an institution or archive can be used to facilitate the forces of capitalism and globalization – that gives it ethical and political force. (p. 214)
Now I tend to shudder when I read phrases like “the forces of capitalism”, partly because I don’t understand the tradition of thought that takes such things as givens, but I don’t, as many colleagues do, believe we should therefore shun cultural studies or other forms of post-modern thought. Hall is interested in something important and that is the ethics and politics of digital work. To avoid discussing the ethics and politics of what we do in the university or as developers of digital works is to ascribe to a naive and unexamined ethic. Many avoid politics because the discourse has been politicized by second rate cultural studies folk who think shaming others for not being militant is a form of engagement. Hall is trying to open room for a form of politics beyond politics (or hyperpolitics) where we can act without knowing for sure what the consequences of our actions will be. That is the heart of ethics for me, acting (or not, which in turn is a form of acting) in the face of insufficient knowledge or ability. We always do things without being sure, ethics is knowing that and trying to deal thoughtfully with the ignorance.
Part of what I am saying here, then, is that certain forms, practices, and performances of new media – including many of those associated with open-access publishing and archiving – make us aware that we can no longer assume that we unproblematically know what the “political” is, or what sorts of interventions count as political. (p. 196)
Hall in his actions (like CSeARCH and the Open Humanities Press) and in his writing is trying to reach out to those in open access circles and in computing circles. We who are too buried in the techne should reach back.
You can find earlier versions of sections on CSeARCH like The Cultural Studies E-Archive Project (Original Pirate Copy), but, ironically, I can’t, find a copy of Digitize This Book!. No one has bothered to digitize it, no doubt due to the copyright notice as the beginning (p. iv) that states,
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. (p. iv)
Is there a contradiction between the injunction of the title (“Digitize This Book!”) and the copyright notice? What is the status of a title when it comes to rights? Should I digitize the book?
To be fair to Hall, the chapters of his previous book, Culture In Bits are available on CSeARCH and I assume he will make Digitize This Book! also available after a suitable interval. Perhaps someone knows him and can update me or point me to a digitized version already open.
Note: since writing this someone passed on a note to Gary Hall who kindly pointed me to online copies of other chapters. See my more recent blog entry with the links.
Hall makes an interesting move at the beginning of the book to position open access as a middle way for the university between the commercialization of the university and the (impossible elitist) return to whatever it is we think we were doing in the humanities in the good old days. I find it interesting that Hall believes “cultural studies has for some time now arguably been the means by which the university thinks about itself …” (p. 13). I’ve seen no evidence of this – cultural studies to me seems to want to position itself as outside the university critiquing it in the Socratic gadfly tradition rather than taking a role acknowledged by the university. It would probably come as a surprise to most university administrators that cultural studies is doing this for them and somehow represents the university’s institutionalized reflection. And therein lies the promise of Hall’s book – that there is type of creative activity we can all engage in, through which we can imagine the university by modeling it. We don’t need approval to set up open works. We can use the technology to become a way for the university to think about itself.
Peter O sent me a link to the original 1994 web page for Vice President Al Gore kept by NARA, the National Archives and Records Administration (of the USA.) What is amusing is that this copy of Gore’s page looks really dated and positions him as a pioneer of the Internet:
Vice President Gore, having first coined the term “information superhighway” 17 years ago, is the recognized public leader in the development of the National Information Infrastructure (NII).
Not quite the same as saying he invented it. To see the page Gore’s page linked from go to the White House page. Many of the links work, though not Clinton’s page.
I attended Workshop 3 of Project Bamboo in Tucson Arizona this week. I think I’m beginning to understand it, though understanding what Bamboo is was one of the favorite subjects of conversation of the meeting (so I’m conscious that . There is a deliberate ambiguity to the project since they are trying to listen to the community in order to become what we want rather than what we suspect. Some of my takeaway thoughts:
The Cornell Web Lab is an interesting example of a high performance computing project in the humanities and social sciences. As they say,
The Web Laboratory is a joint project of Cornell University and the Internet Archive to provide data and computing tools for research about the Web and the information on the Web.
In a paper on the project, A Research Library Based on the Historical Collections of the Internet Archive, William Arms and colleagues point out that the data challenge of the social sciences (and humanities) is that the data is poorly structured and there is a lot of it. The Internet Archive is a case in point; as of 2006 they had 5 to 6 petabytes of data of web pages. While it is amazing that we have such archives in computer (and human) readable form, it is hard to do anything with that much. The Web Lab approach is to provide HPC basic services for extracting subsets of the whole that can then be used by other tools.
Saturday’s Globe and Mail had a full page on The Big Ideas of 2009. The listed five, three of which have to do with information technology and two with biology.
These ideas seem to be about the body and space with the possible exception of the 5th which is not really a big idea so much as a correction. I would like to suggest a different list around time:
This list was generated scientifically. I took the text of the Globe story (edited it down to just the titles, text and authors), ran it through the TAPoRware List Words (with a stop word list), and then took the sequence of high frequency words in the order they appeared and broke it into phrases (without deleting any). This is a technique I learned from David Hoover who performed it at the Face of Text conference. It is surprising how often you can find suggestive phrases in a frequency sorted word list. I will let you interpret this oracle, but remember that you read “Second Time” here first. This list is what the Globe author’s really meant for 2009.
As an aside, I should say that the reason I am blogging this today (January 9th) is because Saturday’s paper (January 3rd) was delivered to our house today. I didn’t confuse things as we were travelling Saturday and the paper was cancelled until Monday. When we called the circulation desk they told us other people in Edmonton had had the wrong papers delivered. Here is the note I sent the editors this morning:
 I would like to thank the Globe and Mail for delivering Saturday’s (Jan. 3rd) paper to my house today (Jan. 9th.) As the Globe knows, we are behind in Edmonton and need the chance to catch up with all the timeless opinions gathered. It was particularly kind of the Globe since I hadn’t read Saturday’s edition as I was traveling. I managed to get half way through the paper before realizing that I was reading old news.
I do want to take issue with your list of 5 burgeoning ideas (A 10). Two of “the big ideas” have to do with the compression of space (“The 3-D Revolution” and “The Age of Avatars”) but you neglected the big ideas in the compression of time. I would suggest that the really big idea is the “New News” otherwise known as nNews or iNews. What matters in this day of personalization is what news is new to the individual avatar, and what time they are in (like the burgeoning age of avatars.) In Second Life my avatar wants second news, and today you delivered.
What I don’t understand is why we got Saturday’s paper while others apparently got Monday’s. (This is according to the kind and real human at the circulation desk who told us others got their New News too, but a different edition.) How did you know I was exactly 6 days behind?
If one were to ask what cultural practices are incompatible with information technology you would come up with something like UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage. ICH is the culture that isn’t material like books, paintings, sculpture and buildings. It is the folk practices and oral traditions. ICH is defined in Article 2 of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (Paris, 17 October 2003),
For the purposes of this Convention,
1. The “intangible cultural heritage” means the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills – as well as the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated therewith – that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage. This intangible cultural heritage, transmitted from generation to generation, is constantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their environment, their interaction with nature and their history, and provides them with a sense of identity and continuity, thus promoting respect for cultural diversity and human creativity. For the purposes of this Convention, consideration will be given solely to such intangible cultural heritage as is compatible with existing international human rights instruments, as well as with the requirements of mutual respect among communities, groups and individuals, and of sustainable development.
2. The “intangible cultural heritage”, as defined in paragraph 1 above, is manifested inter alia in the following domains:
(a) oral traditions and expressions, including language as a vehicle of the intangible cultural heritage;
(b) performing arts;
(c) social practices, rituals and festive events;
(d) knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe;
(e) traditional craftsmanship.
The history of this convention is rooted in finding ways to preserve heritage that, not being material, can’t be preserved through physical preservation or representation. It is therefore concerned with preserving that which resists technologies of information.
I came across this on the site of Tenores di Bitti “Mialinu Pira”, a voice group signing in the pastoral oral tradition of Sardinia that has been added to the Intangible Heritage list (as of 2008). As the UNESCO site puts it,
Canto a tenore has developed within the pastoral culture of Sardinia. It represents a form of polyphonic singing performed by a group of four men using four different voices called bassu, contra, boche and mesu boche. One of its characteristics is the deep and guttural timbre of the bassu and contra voices. It is performed standing in a close circle. The solo singers chants a piece of prose or a poem while the other voices form an accompanying chorus.
What is interesting is that this group is named after an Italian anthropologist, Michelangelo “Mialinu” Pira whose best known book, La rivolta dell’oggetto: antropologia della Sardegna (The revolt of the object: an anthropology of Sardinia) is partly about the effects of technology on pastoral culture. (The book is online.)
We will know the digital culture partly by what it is not, and UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage are a bureaucratic process for defining that which is oral, practices, and local.
The Pool is a project from the University of Maine new media group, Still Water who also developed ThoughtMesh. It is a collaboration between faculty and students that provides a visual space where ideas can be described (intent), approached and released. (The metaphor is fishing and releasing.) It encourages sharing, rating, and redevelopment of ideas. The have pools for code and art.
The Pool offers a very different message. This online environment is an experiment in sharing art, text, and code–not just sharing digital files themselves, but sharing the process of making them. In place of the single-artist, single-artwork paradigm favored by the overwhelming majority of studio art programs and collection management systems, The Pool stimulates and documents collaboration in a variety of forms, including multi-author, asynchronous, and cross-medium projects. (learn more -> purpose)
The Chronicle of Higher Education in New-Media Scholars’ Place in ‘the Pool’ Could Lead to Tenure (Andrea L. Foster, May 30, 2008, Volume 54, Issue 38, Page A10) discusses The Pool as an alternative form of peer review for getting tenure, which rather misses the point for me. What impresses me about this is the collaboration between students and faculty in experimentation around structured collaboration. The Pool could dry up, and some of the code pools seem rather poorly stocked, but that wouldn’t detract from what seems like thoughtful and sustained experimentation with social collaboration. The wiki, Flickr, Facebook and blog models of Web 2.0 social knowledge dominate our thinking about what is possible. The Pool reminds me that we don’t have to adapt successful models, there is room for new ideas. Catch this and release it.
Poking around the MacArthur Foundation site I found an interesting recent study on Teens, Video Games and Civics by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The full report has too much to summarize in a blog entry. Here is their list of “Summary Findings at a Glance”:
This study brought in the Mills College Civic Engagement Research Group (CERG) who have released a White Paper on The Civic Potential of Video Games (PDF) which discusses the social and civic aspects of gaming. One interesting result (also found in the Pew summary) is that it seems that teens who play games socially in person “are more likely to be civically and politically engaged than teens who play games primarily alone.” (p. 18) Online gaming seems to be “a weak form of social interaction” (p. 20) compared to in person social gaming. Another finding that contradicts the accepted (parental) wisdom that gaming is bad for youth is that,
The stereotype of the antisocial gamer is not reflected in our data. Youth who play games frequently are just as civically and politically active as those who play games infrequently. (p. 24)
The Globe and Mail had a story today on Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be Luddites by Patrick White (Nov. 25, 2008) that reports on a MacArthur Foundation funded study on, Living and Learning with New Media. This study looked at how youth participate in “the new media ecology.” (p. 1 of the PDF Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project.) The report describes the “always on” connectivity of youth and their “friendshi-driven” practices. I was intrigued by the description of a subset who “geek out.”
Some youth “geek out†and dive into a topic or talent. Contrary to popular images, geeking out is highly social and engaged, although usually not driven primarily by local friendships. Youth turn instead to specialized knowledge groups of both teens and adults from around the country or world, with the goal of improving their craft and gaining reputation among expert peers. While adults participate, they are not automatically the resident experts by virtue of their age. Geeking out in many respects erases the traditional markers of status and authority. (p. 2 of the Two Page Summary)
The Digital Youth Project led by Mizuko Ito brought together researchers at USC and Berkeley. They have a book forthcoming from MIT Press called Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out: Living and Learning with New Media that is online at the site.