The File On H.: Ismail Kadare

I’ve been meaning for years to blog about Ismail Kadare’s The File On H.. This short book is, I believe, Kadare’s response to the naive views about orality and primitive societies of people like Lord and Parry. Kadare apparently met them at a conference and there is no doubt that the book is some sort of literary response to their study of oral storytelling in the Balkans. The authors of the Wikipedia entry on the book seem to feel that Kadare was trying to alert us to the Albanian oral traditions that Lord and Parry ignored for the Serbo-Croatian ones. I think he was making fun of American academics trying to recover some noble and original orality and also trying to show that there is a continuity between oral storytelling and the constant spying on people of a police state.

<Spoiler Alert>Technology, this time magnetic tape recording, plays an important part in the plot. The two academics bring this new type of machine to Albania to record the local rhapsodes. A jealous Serbian monk stirs up trouble and the recordings get shredded. Ironically, while the two academics have nothing to left when they leave Albania, one of them has caught the bug and been infected with orality. They may not have recordings, but they have learned to do it. Which is the more useful?

The Battle for Control — What People Who Worry About the Internet Are Really Worried About

From Humanist a pointer to a great blog essay by Kent Anderson about The Battle for Control — What People Who Worry About the Internet Are Really Worried About. The essay starts by talking about all arguments for an against the internet making us smarter or stupider. He quotes Adam Gopnick’s nice essay “The Information; How the Internet gets inside us” in the New Yorker that divides us into three groups,

. . . the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers. The Never-Betters believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic. . . . The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that . . . books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don’t. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others.

Kent then turns historical looking at both the infoglut trope over time and then, in an original move, he looks at what some of the originators of the Internet thought it would be. He ends by concluding that it is really about control,

We may argue again and again whether the Internet is changing our brains, elevating us, lowering us, making us smarter, or making us stupid. But at the end of the day, it seems the real argument is about control — who has it, who shares it, and who wants it.

Lancashire: Literary Alzheimer’s

In the category of things I meant to blog some time ago is Ian Lancashire and Graeme Hirst’s research into Agatha Christie’s Alzheimer’s-related dementia which was written up by the New York Times in their list of notable ideas for 2009. The write up is by Amanda Fortini, see Literary Alzheimer’s – The Ninth Annual Year in Ideas – Magazine. There is a longer article about this research by Judy Stoffman in the Insight section of the Toronto Star, An Agatha Christie mystery: Is Alzheimer’s on the page? (Jan. 23, 2010)

Lancashire’s specialty is the esoteric field of neuro-cognitive literary theory – in his words “what science says about the creative process versus what authors report about how they create their books.” He started to apply computer analysis to literary texts in 1982.

Ian Lancashire has links to the poster that first got attention and to a paper on his home page. He has also just published a book, Forgetful Muses; Reading the Author in the Text that develops his neuro-cognitive literary theory.

NYT: Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software

The New York Times has an article about commercial text analysis systems by John Markoff, Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software (March 5, 2011, A1 in New York Edition; March 4 online). He describes how companies are building systems that can analyze the immense amounts of documents shared in lawsuits. Traditionally an army of people would comb through the documents, “Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, “e-discovery” software can analyze docuemnts in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost.”

Some programs go beyond just finding documents with relevant terms at computer speeds. They can extract relevant concepts — like documents relevant to social protest in the Middle East — even in the absence of specific terms, and deduce patterns of behavior that would have eluded lawyers examining millions of documents.

There is a nice graphic to accompany the article here. Markoff mentions companies like Blackstone Discovery and Cataphora. He also argues that the availability of a large email archive from Enron has made it possible for teams to experiment on a real dataset.

HuCon 2011: Current Graduate Research in Humanities Computing

Next week is HuCon 2011, our graduate research conference at the University of Alberta for humanities computing. See HuCon 2011: Current Graduate Research in Humanities Computing for more.

The keynotes will be Ray Siemens from Victoria and MilenaRadzikowska from Mount Royal. It is a one day conference that is catered. Come and see what the next generation of graduate students is doing.

Alberts: On Becoming a Digital Humanist

This week I was invited to give a number of talks at the University of North Dakota. Dr. Crystal Alberts organized the talks (along with others). At UND I spoke on:

  • Incorporating the digital in the humanities. This talk was about incorporating the digital into humanities teaching.
  • Supporting the Digital Humanities. This talk was for librarians and discussed mostly how libraries can support our work.
  • Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities. This talk was delivered by videoconference and went out to a larger state audience discussing cyberinfrastructure in North Dakota.

Crystal has a nice long blog post on participation and inclusion the digital humanities. The post,On Becoming a Digital Humanist talks about Steve Ramsay’s MLA comments and what I wrote on inclusion.

Simon Norfolk: Supercomputers

From Humanist I found Simon Norfolk’s web site which includes a photographic series on “The Supercomputers: ‘I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that” (click enter, then click the title of the collection and then click photographs.)

The photographs pick out details of HPC installations that are visually arresting. They are without people as if these spaces were silent. In reality when you are in these spaces (at least the computer rooms I’ve been in) they are noisy with cooling systems and there are people nursing the beasts.