The Pool: Float Your Ideas

Pool ProcessThe Pool is a networked collaboration environment that presents a visualization of proposed projects distributed by approval and recognition. The idea is that people can propose ideas, approaches to ideas, release implementations of the approaches and then reviews. I guess that as ideas mature they will migrate from the lower left to upper rights. It only works on selected browsers.

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. (From “learn more” -> “purpose”)

GAM3R 7H30RY

GAM3R 7H30RY 1.1 is a networked book in progress by McKenzie Wark. It is hosted by The Institute for the Future of the Book as a “thinking out loud” project. They have an interesting interface for creating a structured book (chapters with paragraphs as cards). There is a syndicated version, search, comment area and documentation on the interface. I’m not sure why they didn’t use a wiki with plug ins and will have to think about what is missing from wikis other than a stack of cards look.

Digital Humanities 2006

I’m at the Digital Humanities 2006 conference this week. With Marcel O’Gorman and Rafael Fajardo, I participated in a session on Why the Digital Humanities Need the Digital Arts:

Why the Digital Humanities Need the Digital Arts
Marcel O’Gorman, Humanities Research or Digital Art?
Geoffrey Rockwell, Interactive Matter in the Arts and Humanities
Rafael Fajardo, Videogames and Critical Practice: case studies and a potential future for digital humanities

Marcel gave a great talk going from a discussion of his installation Spleen House to theorizing about design through Derrida. Rafael showed interesting games he and his students have developed that mimic games like Frogger but are about crossing the Mexican/US border.

McClelland and Stewart Ltd: Catalogue

bksecrets.jpgI just finished The Book of Secrets by M. G. Vassanji who spoke at our convocation this June. A layered book about, as the title suggests, the secrets carried in journals, notes, and archives.

it is a magic bottle, this book, full of captured spirits; … Yes, we should steal this book, if we could, take back our souls, our secrets from him. …

Because it has no end, this book, it ingests us and carries us with it, and so it grows. (p. 1-2)

Vassanji uses the novel to take back East Africa from the colonial stories, to tell about the English as if they were the natives seen through the eyes of the Indian shopkeepers, teachers and later immigrants.

Vassanji, M. G., The Book of Secrets, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1994.

Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive

I just came across a peculiar dictionary, the Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive. It is a dictionary of words of Indian (and other) origin that would have been used by the English in India. It is a dictionary of the Raj and traderoutes that is full of surprises. It is a work of its time, published just at the end of the 19th century. The title, “Hobson-Johnson” is an example of the colloquial terms covered:

HOBSON-JOBSON , s. A native festal excitement; a tamƒÅsha (see TUMASHA); but especially the Moharram ceremonies. This phrase may be taken as a typical one of the most highly assimilated class of Anglo-Indian argot, and we have ventured to borrow from it a concise alternative title for this Glossary. It is peculiar to the British soldier and his surroundings, with whom it probably originated, and with whom it is by no means obsolete, as we once supposed. My friend Major John Trotter tells me that he has repeatedly heard it used by British soldiers in the Punjab; and has heard it also from a regimental Moonshee. It is in fact an Anglo-Saxon version of the wailings of the Mahommedans as they beat their breasts in the procession of the Moharram — “YƒÅ Hasan! YƒÅ Hosain!’

Alas they don’t have the word “dylok” – supposed to be an Indian-East-African version of “dialogue” – used for variety shows and drama.
Update: I just discovered that this is “back-ended” by The ARTFL Project.

Lanier: Digital Maoism

Edge has an essay by VR visionary Jaron Lanier called Digital Maoism about how wikis and other forms of social networking are just replacing one elite with a collective.

No, the problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it’s been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it’s now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn’t make it any less dangerous.

Thanks to Mark for pointing this out.

Mandala Browser

My colleague StÈfan Sinclair has recently set up a site for the Mandala: Rich Prospect Browser text visualization project that he leads. The current prototype was programmed in Flash, but he is reimplementing it in Java. It is one of the more original ideas for visualization that I have seen in a while and builds on Stan Ruecker’s ideas for rich prospect browsing where you can see some representation of the whole of your evidence (the prospect) while manipulating the details. StÈfan has also been working with ideas of direct manipulation of that whole. In Mandala you create dimensions based on criteria (author = X, Y, or Z) that act as attractors.

Dieselpoint Search and Navigation

Dieselpoint has Search & Navigation Software and services for large-scale document management. They have a good SWF demo of how their technology can be integrated into a portal, see Portal Demo. They claim to have an innovative way of “using the attributes of a data set to build menus that allow a user to browse in an intelligent way.” (See Faceted Navigation – Guided Navigation) It looks like they license their Java code for others to integrate into other products too.