TagCloud is both a way of showing word or tag frequency and tool for content analysis. TagCloud.com has a tool that I think will give you a tagcloud for placing in your blog. The words are sized by importance and link to lists or related entries. A cool idea of content analysis interface that provides a dynamic folksonomy.
TagCloud.com links to a good article on Folksonomy in the Wikipedia.
Nutch is “open source web-search software. It builds on Lucene Java, adding web-specifics, such as a crawler, a link-graph database, parsers for HTML and other document formats, etc.” There is a Nutch Wiki with links to news, presentations and articles on it.
Nutch is basically a open Google-like engine that indexes an intranet (or the web) and gives you search capability. This sort of tool could be useful if there were ways to adapt it to discipline specific crawling.
My colleague Mark Coté is working with an interesting idea borrowed from Foucaut, the “dispositif”. He has a short paper/abstract in the Proceedings of the GENEALOGIES DE LA BIOPOLITIQUE. He defines dispositif as,
The dispositif’s something literally “lost in translation” with English-language interlocutors’ a grid of intelligibility; a heterogeneous ensemble of discursive and nondiscursive elements that come together in response to an urgent need, a combinatory machine that allows us to ‘see’ and ‘speak’ and in the process producing not ‘ideology’ but their own ‘truths’. (Coté, Mark, “The Soft Revolution”,
Conference Proceedings : Genealogies of Biopolitics, Oct. 18, 2005)
How is a dispositif a machine? How is it different from a tool? Does it give us a way of understanding the limitations of tools?
Continue reading Coté: the Dispositif
High Performance Computing and Grid Computing are two terms used to describe new approaches to the use of computing in research, primarily in the sciences and engineering. These terms refer to trends at the high end of research computing where often unique systems are put together to solve computationally complex problems faster. Supercomputing, as it used to be called, is focused both on certain grand challenge problems like protein folding and weather modeling where computation can make difference, but is also concerned with computation and processing speed in and of themselves, developing new ways of solving problems quickly through parallel processing on grids and clusters of often off-the-shelf PCs.
Why is this of interest to literary and linguistic research? What is literary about quest for computational speed?
Continue reading High Performance Computing in the Humanities
Light by the British author M. John Harrison is a dark and sometimes violent meditation on how we encounter the incomprehensible. Three strands follow the protagonists weaving the novel.The three twisted characters, including one who brutally murders women to escape his fate, never meet but are responding in different ways to a massive trench of alien artefacts that cannot be understood, just pirated. One of the best of that strain of dark Brit sci-fi/fantasy that includes Ian M. Banks and China Mieville.
There is a decent interview with Harrison at, m. john harrison interview – for zone-sf.com.
Mona Lisa Overdrive is the last in the sprawl trinity that made William Gibson famous. It follows Neuromancer and Count Zero. Like his other novels it plays with reality and virtual reality or “cyberspace” (the word Gibson coined.) The title character is vintage Gibson, a smart street girl who is picked up and altered to look like a star so that her body can be used in a kidnapping. In the end Mona Lisa replaces the star when she goes virtual (into the aleph, a biochip holding the/a world) and then takes off to meet another distant alien AI she might marry(?). It is a very old form of swapped reality, the peasant and king trading places. There are other ways Gibson plays with the varieties of altered reality. One character, the young daughter of a Japanese ganster, has a digital ghost only she can see who comforts and advises her. Another character builds robotic sculpture to exorcise his penal ghosts. Gibson is reminding of all the virtualities, including that enigmatic painted smile by Leonardo.
Continue reading Gibson: Mona Lisa Overdrive
The New York Times has an article on the growth in university computer game programs titled, Video Games Are Their Major, So Don’t Call Them Slackers (Seth Schiesel, Nov. 22, 2005.) This is part of a series on the training of artists across disciplines.
Traditionalists in both education and the video game industry pooh-pooh the trend, calling it a bald bid by colleges to cash in on a fad. But others believe that video games – which already rival movie tickets in sales – are poised to become one of the dominant media of the new century.
Certainly, the burgeoning game industry is famished for new talent. And now, universities are stocked with both students and young faculty members who grew up with joystick in hand. And some educators say that studying games will soon seem no less fanciful than going to film school or examining the cultural impact of television.
Wireless browsing in classes has mixed benefits, CU research finds (Bill Steele, Cornell Chronicle) reports on a study of wireless use at Cornell in 2000. The study isn’t conclusive, but its clear a lot of students are using wireles to chat, surf, and do other tasks. Not that we didn’t do the same, but with paper.
This link came from an article in Slate Goes to College – A week of articles about higher education. Of interest is also the article about Attack of the Career-Killing Blogs – When academics post online, do they risk their jobs? By Robert S. Boynton.
But if educators were unsure what to do for undergraduates, the implications for graduate education were clear enough: The drive to ever greater research-based specialization was on. Over the past two decades in particular, universities have further reorganized themselves to emphasize research, especially scientific research. This has meant adopting the superstar model of faculty recruitment (which generally includes an enticing package of high salaries, research funding, and reduced teaching). It has also meant the creation of research centers, stocked with graduate and postgraduate students, as sites often equal in importance to the disciplinary departments, and more important than departments for their capacity to attract external research funding. The rapidly growing research specialization of the university has had the effect of making the content of undergraduate majors themselves more and more specialized and research-based.
America’s Top University – Does college need to be reformed? By Stanley N. Katz is the opening article in a series, Slate Goes to College – A week of articles about higher education.
We all know the problem, but we don’t really want to do anything about it. We like our research perks and we don’t want to end up back teaching enourmous classes which we know are not about learning so much as processing.
The solutions are obvious, but they mean redesigning universities, not just fiddling with curricula. The solutions are:
This is madness. Ideas aren’t things. They’re much more valuable than that. Intellectual property – treating some ideas as if they were in some circumstances things that can be owned and traded – is itself no more than an idea that can be copied, modified and improved. It is this process of freely copying them and changing them that has given us the world of material abundance in which we live. If our ideas of intellectual property are wrong, we must change them, improve them and return them to their original purpose. When intellectual property rules diminish the supply of new ideas, they steal from all of us.
Thanks to Slash.dot I came across this Guardian article on intellectual property, Owning ideas (Andrew Brown, Nov. 19, 2005). The article provides different examples from software to genomics. One of the examples the article provides is Microsoft patenting XML related technology for packaging objects into XML, see Microsoft slammed over XML patent – ZDNet UK News.
Can we patent the idea of intellectual property? Or the process of frivolous patenting of business practices?
Continue reading The Maddness of Intellectual Property