If life had an interface: Stranger than Fiction

Part of a still from Stranger Than FictionI just found that someone has posted on YouTube the introduction to the movie Stranger than Fiction where, with Emma Thomson’s voice narrating, we see Will Farrell’s accountant character’s life surveyed with an overlay of explanatory graphics. I’m not sure what to call the graphics – they sometimes look like a visualization of what Crick (the character) thinks about as he walks and counts. They sometimes seem to document aspects of Crick’s life, like how many items he puts in the dishwasher each night or how he ties his tie. They behave like augmented reality information graphics meant to add information for the viewer, but information that has the character of the character.

According to information aesthetics the infographics were developed by the MK12 Tactical Design and Research Bureau. Now if life had an interface, I’d like it to be stranger than fiction.

Steve.Museum: Social Tagging Tool

Graphic Steve LogoSteve is an open source social tagging tool that lets you publish a collection and collect tags. It is developed by museum folk for research into tagging of cultural objects. It seems to me to be an adaptation of the reCAPTCHA idea or Google’s image tagging game.

Our current research project, “T3: Text, Tags, Trust,” a partnership with the University of Maryland’s School, is funded, in part, by a National Leadership Grant for Research from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Sciences. Results of a recently-completed IMLS research project, “Researching Social Tagging and Folksonomy in the Art Museum,” are presented in the Research section of this website. Data collected at http://tagger.steve.museum provides a testbed for researching our hypotheses about social tagging.

See the Research section of the site for research results and a dataset for experimentation.

Thanks to Megan for this.

Philosophy 366: Student digital ethnography

Derek, Kat and Yosuke in my Philosophy 366, Computers and Culture class voluntarily put together a short video summarizing a survey they took of the classes use of computing. See Philosophy 366 Ethnography. I like the variety of ways they showed the information from having characters talking in WOW to other students holding sheets of paper. I can’t put my finger on it, but there is more information in the video than just the summary information on the cards. Short videos are becoming an argumentative form.

RFCs: How the Internet Got Its Rules

Stephen D. Crocker has written an Op-Ed on How the Internet Got Its Rules (April 6, 2009) about the Request for Comments or R.F.C.’s of the Internet. He looks back on writing the first R.F.C. 40 years ago as a student assigned to write up notes from a meeting. He chose the to call it a R.F.C. because:

What was supposed to be a simple chore turned out to be a nerve-racking project. Our intent was only to encourage others to chime in, but I worried we might sound as though we were making official decisions or asserting authority. In my mind, I was inciting the wrath of some prestigious professor at some phantom East Coast establishment. I was actually losing sleep over the whole thing, and when I finally tackled my first memo, which dealt with basic communication between two computers, it was in the wee hours of the morning.

Calling them R.F.C.’s set the tone for the consensual culture.

The early R.F.C.’s ranged from grand visions to mundane details, although the latter quickly became the most common. Less important than the content of those first documents was that they were available free of charge and anyone could write one. Instead of authority-based decision-making, we relied on a process we called “rough consensus and running code.” Everyone was welcome to propose ideas, and if enough people liked it and used it, the design became a standard.

Another feature was layering for independence that allowed people to build new technologies on older ones without asking permission.

Thanks to Dan Cohen on Twitter for this.

NY Times: Is This the Future of the Digital Book?

Christian V. pointed me to a New York Times story on Is This the Future of the Digital Book? (Brad Stone, April 4, 2009).

Wattpad, based in Toronto, is among several start-ups soliciting the work of unpublished authors, giving them a route around the big book companies and then distributing their writing on the Web and on mobile phones. Wattpad draws its revenue from advertising and, for now at least, does not pay the authors.

Smart phones now have larger and brighter screens so it is possible people will use them to read, but I’m not yet convinced. Will weaving multimedia into the book save it?

PressThink: Rosen’s Flying Seminar In The Future of News

I blogged before about Clay Shirky’s Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. Guy P. pointed me to a really good summary of positions on the issue of what’s happening to newspapers, see Clay Shirky’s colleague Jay Rosen on PressThink: Rosen’s Flying Seminar In The Future of News. I should also gather in my blog entry on the New Yorker article, The News Business: Out of Print which is a good introduction to the issue.

Personally I think this will strengthen public broadcasting and their news capacity. No one in the USA thinks publicly funded broadcasting as an alternative because they don’t have it, but here in Canada the CBC does a great job, at least on the radio, and in the UK (where they are well funded) they do an even better job with an international service. For example, watching Generation Kill you will notice the Marines are listening to the BBC for their news! (Yes, I know it is fiction, but it is based fairly closely on the experiences of an embedded Rolling Stone reporter.)

H. P. Luhn, KWIC and the Concordance

We all know that the Google display comes indirectly from the Concordance, but I have found in Luhn’s 1966 “Keyword-in-Context Index for Technical Literature (Kwic Index)” the explicit recognition of the link and the reason for drawing on the concordance.

the significance of such single keywords could, in most instances, be determined only by referring to the statement from which the keyword had been chosen. This somewhat tedious procedure may be alleviated to a significant degree by listing selected keywords together with surrounding words that act as modifiers pointing up the more specific sense in which a keyword has been applied. This method of indexing words is well established in the process of compiling concordances of important works of literature of the past. The added degree of information conveyed by such keyword-in-context indexes, or “KWIC Indexes” for short, can readily be provided by automatic processing. (p. 161)

The problem for Luhn is that simply retrieving words doesn’t give you a sense of their use. His solution, first shown in the late 1950s, was to provide some context (hence “keyword-in-context”) so that readers can disambiguate themselves and make decisions about which index items to follow. It is from the KWIC that we ultimately get the concordance features of the Google display, though it should be noted that Luhn was proposing KWIC as a way of printing automatically generated literature indexes where the kewwords were in the titles. In this quote Luhn explicitly acknowledges that this is a method well established in concordances.

There is also a link between Luhn and Father Busa. According to Black, quoted in Marguerite Fischer, “The Kwic Index Concept: A Retrospective View”,

the Pontifical Faculty of Philosophy in Milan decided that they would make an analytical index and concordance to the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, and approached IBM about the possibility of having the operations performed on Data Processing. Experience gained in this project contributed towards the development of the KWIC Index. (This is a quote on page 123 from Black, J. D., 1962, “The Keyword: Its Use in Abstracting, Indexing, and Retrieving Information”.)

From the concordance to KWIC through to Google?

For some historical notes on Luhn see, H. P. Luhn and Automatic Indexing.

Drucker: Blind Spots

Johanna Drucker has an essay in the Chronicle about how humanists should be involved developing their work environments, Blind Spots. She has a nice phrase for the attitude by some scholars that someone else should do the work of developing the knowledge environment of the future – she calls it the “hand-waving magic wand approach to the future”. She concludes here essay,

Unless scholars in the humanities help design and model the environments in which they will work, they will not be able to use them. Tools developed for PlayStation and PowerPoint, Word, and Excel will be as appropriate to our intellectual labors as a Playskool workbench is to the chores of a real plumber. I once bought a very beautiful portable Olivetti typewriter because an artist friend of mine said it was so elegantly designed that it had been immediately put into the Museum of Modern Art collection. The problem? It wasn’t designed for typing. Any keyboardist with any skill at all constantly clogged its keys. A thing of beauty, it was a pain forever. I finally threw it from the fourth-floor tower of Wurster Hall at the University of California at Berkeley. Try doing that with the interface to your university library. Now reflect on who is responsible for getting it to work as an environment that supports scholarship.

We face a critical juncture. Leaving it to “them” is unfair, wrongheaded, and irresponsible. Them is us.

Johanna’s essay is addressed to scholars reminding us that we need to take responsibility for working things out. There is, however, another audience that needs to be addressed and that is the audience that believes that humanists aren’t the right people to be involved in designing infrastructure. The argument would be that there are professional software engineers who are trained to design portals for communities – they should be given the job so we don’t end up reinventing the wheel or doing a poor job. Obviously the answer lies in a creative design collaboration and humanists with computing development experience can play a crucial role in the mix, but how do we build such teams?