Category: Markup and Text Representation

National Consultation on Access to Scientific Research Data

The National Consultation on Access to Scientific Research Data produced a final report (PDF is here) calling for a national research data “archive” called Data Canada. This report has a deja vu feel about it as I was on the National Data Archive Consultation (SSHRC and then National Archive project) that produced a Needs Assessment Report (PDF) in 2001 and then a Final Report (PDF) in 2002. Nothing happened as a result of these, so I think SSHRC is now working with the sciences and health to make the case across the disciplines. Why do we need the sciences to make our case?

We recommend the creation of a task force, dubbed Data Force, to prepare a full national implementation strategy, and mount a pilot project to show the value and impact of multi-person and multidisciplinary access to research data. Once such a national strategy is broadly supported and has obtained appropriate funding commitments, we propose the establishment of a dedicated national infrastructure, tentatively called Data Canada, to assume overall leadership in the development and execution of a strategic plan. The plan would encompass and presumably extend the NCASRD‚Äôs recommendations. (p. 3 of the “Executive Summary”)

TiddlyWiki

Shawn recently introduced me to TiddlyWiki, which Stéfan Sinclair has also blogged. It is a web page (with over 5000 lines of code) that acts as a wiki if you have write priviledges to the file. It is an extremely smart and simple tool that I don\’t really think of as a wiki since it really is more like a web page application for private and local use. You can use it to keep notes on your local computer just by saving an empty page.

I have the feeling there is a principle to technologies like TiddlyWiki – simple objects that are both application and data, documents that carry the smarts needed so you don\’t need a separate application (well actually you do need a browser.) Reminds me of the document-centric view of OpenDoc that Apple tried unsuccessfully to promote. What other TiddlyWiki like doc/apps can we imagine:

  • A Curriculum Vitae that one can add items to and reorganize in different views.
  • A Bibliography that lets you maintain references and then export them.
  • A Analyze Me TiddlyWiki that lets you paste in data (or text) to study and then lets you run analysis on it to get results that become part of the document

Unicode 5.0.0 is almost out

Unicode 5 CoverUnicode 5.0.0 is about to be released by the Unicode Consortium.

For those of you who don’t know about Unicode, it “provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no mater what the language.” (My emphasis) In other words it replaces ASCII as the standard for character encoding to support multilingual computing across platforms.

For more information see What is Unicode? or Useful Resources.

I also note that the Unicode site has a Chronology Of Unicode Version 1.0 along with information about contributors/members over time. Xerox, for example, seems to have been a major player in the early years, but is no longer a member. I also note that there are two governments that are institutional members, India and Pakistan (they joined a year apart) and one university, Berkeley. What a strange trio of institutional members.

Microformats like hCard

Geoffrey Martin Rockwell

McMaster University
1280 Main St. W.

Hamilton, Ontario, L8S 4M2
Canada

(905) 525-9140

This hCard created with the hCard creator.

hCard Creator is a form for automatically creating an hCard microformat. Microformats are a neat idea I just stumbled on for “simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.” (See About microformats.)

Derrida: “The Word Processor”

A new freeing up of the flow can both let through anything at all, and also give air to critical possibilities that used to be limited or inhibited by the old mechanisms of legitimation – which are also, in their own way, word-processing mechanisms. (p. 32)

Paper Machine by Jacques Derrida and translated by Rachel Bowlby has an essay on “The Word Processor” that is one of the better discussions of how word processing is changing writing. Some quotes:

“But when we write ‘by hand’ we are not in the time before technology; there is already instrumentality, regular reproduction, mechanical iterability. So it is not legitimate to contrast writing by hand and ‘mechanical’ writing, like a pretechnological craft as opposed to technology.” (p. 20)

The machine remains a signal of separation, of severance, the official sign of emancipation and departure for the public sphere.” (p. 20)

As you know, the computer maintains the hallucination of an interlocutor (anonymous or otherwise), of another ‘subject’ (spontaneous and autonomous, automatic) who can occupy more than one place and play plenty of roles: face to face for one, but also withdrawn; in front of us, for another, but also invisible and faceless behind its screeen. Like a hidden god who’s half asleep, clever at hiding himself even when right opposite you. (p. 22)

With pens and typewriters, you think you know how it works, how ‘it responds.’ Whereas with computers, even if people know how to use them up to a point, they rarely know, intuitively and without thinking — at any rate, I don’t know — how the internal demon of the apparatus operates. … We know how to use them and what they are for, without knowing what goes on with them, in them, on their side; and this might give us plenty to think about with regard to our relationshi with technology today – to the historical newness of this experience. (p. 23)

Is it really new to use technologies without understanding?

For Derrida the age of the book is passing.

This is not the end but we are probably moving to another regime of conservation, commemoration, reproduction, and celebration. A great age is coming to an end.

For us, that can be frightening. We have to mourn what has been our fetish. (p. 31)

I like the French term for word processor, “traitement de texts” – seems more accurate to what is happening.

DadaDodo: Exterminate All Rational Thought

DadaDodo is a text generator or “travesty generator” like Dissociated Press. The code is available and unlike programs that randomly cut up text it “it scans bodies of text, and builds a probability tree expressing how frequently word B tends to occur after word A, and various other statistics; then it generates sentences based on those probabilities.” DadaDodo is described by its creator Jamie Zawinski thus:

DadaDodo is a program that analyses texts for word probabilities, and then generates random sentences based on that. Sometimes these sentences are nonsense; but sometimes they cut right through to the heart of the matter, and reveal hidden meanings.

Zawinski’s page has a “cut up” look with downloadable code and interesting links, many of which are no longer active, alas. The effect of DadaDodo are hard to interpret without knowing what the corpus is that it starts with. I am tempted to create a TAPoRware version so that it can be used on existing web pages.

Bemer and the History of Computing

The History of Computing Project is another collection of timelines and biographies sponsored by computer museums in Holland, Poland and elsewhere. There are some gaps, like the empty biography of Bill Atkinson and a history of Apple that is “withdrawn for revision”. It is, however, cleanly designed, and covers a lot.

Some of the information is useful like the biography of Bob Bemer who contributed the ESCape key and worked on ASCII, among other things, at IBM. (See CNN – 1963: The debut of ASCII – July 6, 1999 or the archive of Bob Bemer‘s personal site – he has passed away
.) Thanks to Matt for this.