Spam Research

What do we know about spam?

This report (PDF) is from graduate students at the Helsinki University of Technology on P2P and Spam. The Spam papers are at the end. Great stuff.

Research/Creation

Is research as practices in the humanities compatible with artistic creation? This question is important as more and more humanities researchers are disseminating their research through creative works (as opposed to publications) and more and more artists are conducting serious research in creation. The line between fine art and art history has been bypassed as we have artists working with engineers on new materials. See Arts and Humanities Research Board – Homepage.

Here is my take on how to judge a work as research creation (to use SSHRC’s phrase).
Continue reading Research/Creation

Ethics and Art

Now that we have a tri-council ethics policy for social science, humanities, science, engineering and mediacal researchers, what about art research/creation? Art Ethics is a site that links to a number of ethical guidelines for art practice.

This is a new problem, especially in interactive art that can aggregate and re-present information about viewers. Below is my first take on this.
Continue reading Ethics and Art

Speed Reader

Rob of isagen and I were talking about different types of visualization and sonification of texts. One idea is to have a sonification of a text where keywords are whispered from different directions. A text would be processed into a short sonoric summary. Rob has build scrollers that show the news scrolling by in a window as a way of allowing the user to keep an eye on a (changing) text. I came across this Speed Reader that does something like this here.

What if one ran a process that summarized a text and the summary (a list of frequency sorted words) was then played back through such a reader?

Expose Your Texts

How can tools like TAPoRware interact with texts elsewhere?

They will only work if e-text projects explose their texts for analytical tools elsewhere. Many e-text project either let you browse html (which is sometimes generated from XML) or they bundle a customized search environment with the texts. Setting aside issues of intellectual property, there is a problem with bundling in that it forces the researcher to use the bundled tool for analysis. While it is useful for new users of a resource to be able to use customized search tools to familiarize themselves with a corpus, the bundled tool can become a limitation if it does not support original analysis. Research involves the asking of new questions which can involve the using new methods. Bundled tool/text combinations where the text is not exposed in an open and documented fashion limit our capacity to use new methods and ask new questions. Therefore: Expose your texts.

Here is a PowerPoint outline of a talk I gave on the subject: Download file.

TAPoRware and Hyperlistes

Can text analysis tools like TAPoRware be adapted for special collections?

Here is an experiment with TAPoRware and the Hyperlistes project: Tapor XML Tools Demo. We created a special interface in html so that TAPoRware tools could operate on Hyperliste texts without having to fill in the URLs. We also created as special backend shim programme that calls the others. In theory we want to be able to do this without touching TAPoRware – all the work should happen in the html so that it can be done elsewhere.