Dynamic graph drawing is another neat application on jibble.org. The Java applet (source available as GPL) builds a graph of your sentences as you dialog with an Eliza like bot. I previously blogged the Social Shakespeare Pie Spy tool, grockwel: Research Notes: Visualizing Social Networks. Paul Mutton is building a neat collection of tools and his site is well designed.
This comes courtesy of StÈfan Sinclair.
LOCKSS: Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe
LOCKSS is a project from Stanford that has built an open system for archiving digital collections, especially e-journals by caching lots of copies. Besides a great name, they have an idea that is timely as governments look for ways to archive digital data without creating huge new units. It seems to me we need some variants on this that are aimed less at a library model and more for individual peer-to-peer archiving for artists/writers. (See the specs for the Beacon idea at grockwel: Research Notes: Freenet Project.)
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GRID Computing
Wired 12.04: The God Particle and the Grid is an article by Richard Martin on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and how it will be feeding terabytes of data every run that will be processed by a global computation network. Isn’t this what the ARPANET was imagined for originally? How can we adapt this model to arts computing?
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What is the GRID?
What is the Grid? is a deceptively simple web site that combines streaming video clips answering questions around “What is the GRID?” The answers are short clips of experts in the field. The design effectively gives you a map of faces that have popup questions which launch the video windows. What they don’t allow me to do is run two clips at the same time (in dialogue).
DeLillo: Cosmopolis
“Even the word computer sounds backward and dumb.”
Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis is a short novel about the hyper of information and getting across New York for a haircut. The hero is a billionaire currency trader driving in a wired car across town. Staff drop in and talk to him, demonstrations slow him down, and leaves his info-limo when he sees his elusive wife. All this time he is loosing his (and his wife’s) fortune on the Yen until he comes unhinged and stalks his death.
The novel read like a short story – compressed around an event and mood. While it was not well reviewed (see Cosmopolis Media Watch), I thought it better than Underworld. It is almost science/speculative fiction – about a life that is all information and lust. At the end it was better than Gibson’s Pattern Recognitions. Eric, the hero, is not even sure if there is a pattern (other than his asymetric prostrate) that he is betting so much on.
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Swedish Patterns
Swedish Patterns is another image experiment using DIVs to place thumbnails on a screen that scrolls sideways. These are some of the pictures I took in Sweden that have patterns in them.
C-Level: Waco Resurrection
c-level is an artists (and others) cooperative in LA that hosts projects like Endgames: Waco Resurrection. waco resurrection is a computer game and performance that explores the siege at Waco, Texas. I haven’t experienced it, but from the images and QT video it looks like a powerful example of gaming in an art/provocation context. Comments from those who have seen it appreciated!
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John Willinski: Public Knowledge Project
This last weekend I was at the Humanities Computing Summer Institute organized by Ray Siemens at the University of Victoria. I heard a great lecture by John Willinski at UBC on the Public Knowledge Project. This project is developing an open source e-journal tool that allows you to manage the review process and publication. They also have a conference tool. This is worth supporting!
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Chris Ashley: Look, See
sally mckay suggested this artist’s blog, Look, See. What I like about Look, See (among other things) are the html art – simple works written with tables with coloured cells. (See his discussion of these at Visual Problems and Solutions.
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Matt Sharpe: Who is Jesse?
Who is Jesse Abbingale? is a blog-like hypertext fiction work by a student of mine here at McMaster. He nicely uses the online narrative of a blog to tell a story with some graphical pages woven in. Check it out!