Passerini: Autobiography of a Generation

I have just finished Luisa Passerini‘s Autobiography of a Generation: Italy 1968, an extraordinary history of the half generation before me. Born in 59 I, like others who grew up in the late 70s, inherited, but didn’t participate in the political and cultural events of the 60s. We were the (half) generation after the movement of the counter culture. Reading Passerini has me thinking about what it was like following – how I benefited from the freedoms moved without experiencing what it was to be part of a movement. She follows those involved in 68 in Italy and the “diaspora” of directions they took from joining mainstream unions to the violence of terrorism. It seems the only real movements (as opposed to factions) to follow 68 were the feminist movement (and the US the gay/lesbian movement) – both movements that men could only support not move within.

Is it surprising that many of my generation of me would turn to computing? Computing had … still has, the transcendent rhetoric of a liberation movement along with the occaisional indulgence of drug culture. Computing offered a movement – a being part of something unique in history (or out of history). In addition it offered a certainty – things work or not, code runs or not – that the critical and ironic politics after 68 could not. Passerini comments on how many of the movers in 68 ended up in media criticism – their training in resisting traditional media and pamphleting prepared them to be critical and creative. I think a similar phenomenon happended over here – the experience of being pilloried in the press led many to become aware of mediation and to then become interested in the possibilities of computer mediation.
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CHASS: NCSA and Illinois

CHASS – The Center for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. This Center is an interesting partnership between the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications – the folks that brought you Mosaic) and the University of Illinois. It has the potential, given the partners, to do some interesting stuff with HPC and digital humanities. I am of the belief that we have the most complex data sets and problems for HPC, but need to collaborate with the supercomputing folks to imagine how to tackle the problems.

Public Relations and Blogs

On Wednesday (November 30th) I participated in a panel organized by the Canadian Public Relations Society, Toronto titled “Wake Up and Smell the Blogs!”. I was the token academic on the panel chaired by Michael O’Connor Clarke whose personal blog is Uninstalled.

The focus was mostly on how to use blogs in public relations and how to get attention from journalists. Jack Kapica of the Globe and Mark Evans of the National Post, both have good blogs on the tech industry. Kapika’s is hosted by the Globe, Evans’ is not hosted by the Post. What does that say? John Oxley from Microsoft (see Canadian IT Managers) talked about Microsoft supporting bloggin by employees. There is a lot of anxiety about letting personal blogs loose and not being able to control the message of an organization, and he explained how Microsoft is trying to use blogs to provide a more personal and transparent face. Rick Segale (who used to work for Microsoft and is now a venture capitalist) spoke forcefully about the virtues of blogging and the need for passion.

I realized by the end that I am a very different blogger than the other panel members. I have a freedom to say what I want that most in industry (and yes, the media is an industry) do not. I also don’t have justify what I write in terms of attention – this blog doesn’t need to be read widely to be worth it. Finally, I realized, again, how blogging is not about the technology, it is about voice and engagement. It is a sign that web technologies are maturing when things like RSS and XML are not really the issue, it what you do with them and how they are hidden.
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Historical Visualizations

Matt Jensen of NewsBlip has pointed me to work he and others are doing on historical visualization. See, for example, the technical report on Semantic Timelines that he wrote. Historical Visualizations, by David Staley in the JAHC: Journal of the Association for History and Computing (vol. III, no. 3, Nov. 2000) surveys the ways visualization is used in history from concepts to timelines.
Another similar project is the Temporal Modelling project led by Johanna Drucker. She and Bethany Nowviskie have been working on visual forms of knowledge production. See their Prototype Designs for a temporal vocabulary which I blogged earlier at 3D Timelines.

TagTagger

Judith sent me a link to Tag Tagger which proposes to develop a system for tracking and tagging tags. The proposal is a joke by The Silent Penguin (“Making a dent – somewhere”), but one which points to the infinite regress of information. Tags and links become information at which point they too need to be tagged and linked … see Technorati Tags. (No joke is too funny to be implemented.)

Which reminds to write about Tags, known to the rest of us as “keywords” or “subjects”. In some usability work we are doing on the TAPoR portal we found our users had no idea what “tags” were. Obviously they are not digi-literate enough.

CS Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia

The Guardian has a thoughtful article about CS Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia, titled His dark materials after Philip Pullman’s trilogy. Why Alison Lurie titled the article about Lewis after Pullman’s trilogy is a bit of a mystery; yes, Pullman is quoted on the controversies around Lewis’s sexism, racism and “muscular” Christian propaganda, but is Lurie suggesting Pullman (another Oxford fantasy writer) has special authority? Or it is just a good title for a story on the a series we loved as kids and now find distasteful for their incoherence and racism. See also Pullman attacks Narnia film plans on Pullman’s critique and The Narnia Skirmishes on the controversy around the release of the Disney version.
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flowerGarden

flowerGarden by greg judelman is a “web-baed software application, produced in Flash, for real-time soica network and conversation visualization.” It produces a TextArc like visualization of people in conversation and concepts they discussed. Judelman uses a flower of petals for people in a way that makes the visualization look like a garden of words with flowers blossoming. This is thanks to Bethany Nowviskie.