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
RSS Web feeds are obviously cool, but what can we do with them?
Here is an article with some ideas: Yahoo! News – Enthusiasts Call Web Feed Next Big Thing. From the perspective of text analysis, these are feeds of raw text with which to play. TAPoR needs to think of how to provide accessible tools for these.
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?
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.
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.
How can we visualize the evolution of documents?
Here is a cool IBM project, history flow that shows flow over time of source code. Neat.
Who pays for spam?
The recipient argues this essay from the ACM pointed out to me by Matt (see his comment to an earlier post.) ACM Queue – The Economics of Spam – How did we end up with recipients paying the price? The short way to put it is that cost of writing to someone has gone dramatically down while the cost of reading has not gone down (as much.)
Another way to look at this is through games like “a href=”http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/PRISDIL.html”>The Prisoner’s Dilemma which are used to examine cooperation. While many people will choose to cooperate there are always those who will try to maximize their gains by defecting – spammers have defected from a massive game of cooperation called the Internet. Given a large enough pool of players you will always get defectors, especially if the cooperators can’t quite and go play with others. In the early years the Internet had a culture of cooperation and trust, as any new project has. Now defectors are changing it.
As Matt points out, spammers are acting rationally – they are trying to make money through advertising. Their defection may change e-mail when we give up on the current model, but in the meantime it is the recipients who pay.
Continue reading Economics of Spam
Want a guide to online reviews, essays, opinions and criticism?
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a site that gathers them at Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate. Lots of stuff and a motto “Veritas Odit Moras” – “Truth Hates Delay”. (And Knowledge Hates Haste.)
Can we solve the spam problem?
Sorting e-mail friends from foes: Identifying networks of mutual friends helps filter out spam is another project that uses networks of friends to filter mail. This project, in effect, acknowledges that we may have to give up on the anonymous and democratic Internet and go back to other types of networks to decide who we correspond with.
What do I mean by this? Another post.
Can we bypass censorship on the Internet?
The story was that the Internet was designed to bypass censorship (in the sense of reroute around disruptions) and that the technology was therefore inherently democratic. Now we worry this won’t stay true as we discover that countries can censor the net and commercial interests (RIAA) can scare beharior. We are discovering what political activists have always known, you can’t count on systems by themselves – you have to pay attention to achieve values. The Freenet Project (thanks to Matt for this) is an example of paying attention – building the human and technical network to support redundant distribution of information.
My memory of Freenet was of something different – local free internet ISPs in the days when there were few affordable options for those outside the university – hmmm is this the same org morphed?
Anyway, they are doing what James Chartrand and I imagined and called the Beacon project. (As always, if you have a good idea that just helps you recognize that someone else had it before.)
Continue reading Freenet Project