The Apostrophe: When they’re gone, theyre gone

Image of Street Sign without Apostrophe

Today’s Edmonton Journal reprinted a great article on the apostrophe following the widely reported decision of the Birmingham city council to stop using apostrophes in signs to save money (and not have do deal with pedants). The article, titled When theyre gone, well all be struggling with English traces some of the issues around the use of this “tadpole-shaped bundle of trouble.” It is worth pointing out that apostrophes are important to humanities computing. They are used, among other things, to mark absence. As the etymology of apostrophe suggests, they point away from the text, like a link, to something missing or passed over (in the sense that you don’t pronounce the missing sylable.) I’m less interested in the controversy over punctuation reform as what we can learn from punctuation about markup and the digital representation of text.

  • Punctuation is both part of the text and about the text. An apostrophe likewise is both part of the string of characters that we could call the text and yet points to something missing that the reader can fill in. This being of it and about it is what is difficult about the textual ontology of markup. See Markup: Buzzetti and Renear.
  • There is, as with most punctuation, a rhetorical dimension to the apostrophe. The word also refers to an exclamatory figure of speech when a speaker turns away and addresses some other imaginary audience often introduced by “O”. For example when Juliet turns away and addresses Romeo in Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene 2, “O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?” Likewise markup is apostrophic in that it typically addresses the machine rather than the reader. The tags of the anchor element in HTML, for example, are hidden from the reader and provide instruction for the machine should the reader click on the anchored text.
  • The single quotation mark on typewriters and early computers (7-bit ASCII) is one of the most overloaded characters. It is used for all sorts of different things from the single quotation mark, to the apostrophe, to the acute accent. Likewise markup overloads certain characters with special meaning through the general strategy of the escape character. The left angle bracket < gets loaded with a new function in XML markup languages: it serves not as a visible character, but as the mark that sets certain text aside to be interpreted differently as code. The text between angle brackets is turned aside to be interpreted by the machine. That we have escape characters or punctuation like an apostrophe that can turn the interpretation is somehow a important to computing and digital representation. That most keyboards have an Escape key indicates how important is the possibility of escape. It is the key to the possibility of interruption of the machine.

The apostrophe could be the punctuation mark of an escape that always was. It turns us away from using text to appreciate what is gone. They’re gone because they are always escaped. Theyre gone because they were never here.

Singularity University: Exponential Silliness 2.0?

Ray Kurzweil, who has been predicting “spiritual machines” (AI) for a while now, has been appointed Chancellor of the Singularity University. The Singularity University is based at the Nasa Ames and supported by Google (and Moses Znaimer, another visionary wannabe.) It’s mission is to focus on exponential advances leading to singularities where you get a paradigm shift. The Overview describes the aims of the University thus:

Singularity University aims to assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity’s grand challenges.

The University thus seems dedicated to a particular, and questionable view of technological development which looks to a future of dramatic paradigm shifts triggered by these singularities. For example, the goal of the Academic Track “Future Studies & Forecasting” is “cultivating the student’s ‘exponential intuition’ — the ability to fully grasp the magnitude of possible outcomes likely to arise in specific domains.” No room here for modesty or skepticism.

The University is not really a University. It is more of an institute funded by commercial partners and providing intensive programs to graduate students and, importantly, executives. I’m surprised NASA is supporting it and legitimating something that seems a mix of science and science fiction – maybe they have too much room at their Ames campus and need some paying tenants. Perhaps in California such future speculation doesn’t seem so silly. I guess we will have to wait until about 2045 when the intelligence singularity is supposed to happen and see.

But what is the Singularity? The Wikipedia article on Technological Singularity quotes I. J. Good as describing the “intelligence explosion” that would constitute the singularity thus:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.

The key for an intelligence singularity (as opposed to other types) is the recursive effect of the feedback loop when a machine is smart enough to improve itself. That is when we go from change (whether accelerating exponentially or not) to the independent evolution of intelligent machines. That is when they won’t need us to get better and we could become redundant. Such dramatic shifts are what the Singularity University prepares paying executives for and trains graduate students to accelerate.

It is easy to make fun of these ideas, but we need to be careful that we don’t end up confidently predicting that they can’t happen. Kurzweil is no fool and he bases his prediction on extrapolations of Moore’s law. Futurology will always be risky, but everyone has to do it to some degree. For that matter there do seem to be moments of accelerating technological change leading to dramatic paradigm shifts so we shouldn’t be so sure Kurzweil is wrong about the next one. I should add that I like the proposed interdisciplinarity of the Singularity University – the idea is that dramatic change or new knowledge can come from ideas that cross disciplines. This second organizing principle of the University has legs in this time of new and shifting disciplines. We need experiments like this. I just wish the Singularity University had had the courage to include academic tracks with the potential for critical engagement with the idea of an intelligence singularity. Why not a “History and Philosophy of Futurology” track that can call into question the very named premise of the University? After all, a real university should be built on an openness of mind we would call intelligence, not dogmatic certainty in a prediction.

Digital Humanities Observatory of Ireland

DHO Logo

I am today at the Digital Humanities Observatory in Dublin Ireland. The DHO provides research and teaching standardization, consultation, outreach, training, and services to digital humanists in Ireland.

The Digital Humanities Observatory (DHO) is an all-island digital humanities collaboratory working with Humanities Serving Irish Society (HSIS), national, European, and international partners to further e-scholarship. The DHO is a knowledge resource providing outreach and education on a broad range of digital humanities topics. It provides data management, curation, and discovery services supporting the long-term access to, and greater exploitation of, digital resources in the creation of new models, methodologies and paradigms for 21st century scholarship.

In these cases it is always interesting to see what the media make of this project – see €28 m observatory to digitize history.

I’m not sure where the term “observatory” comes from, but it is cropping up as a new term for centers. Actually, it suggests the opposite of a centralizing centre; an observatory looks out and presumably supports rather than centralizes.

The Journal of Urban Typography

Image
The Journal of Urban Typography is a project like the Dictionary of Words in the Wild that “is dedicated to the documentation and study of signs, word fragments, and typography created with utilitarian intent in urban environments.” Many of the images are beautiful – the author of the site calls it a journal but it is more of an art book. The interface is intriguing as if it were a bunch of polaroids. You can dismiss some and rearrange them. This is built on Tumblr, an online blogging or service that you can adapt to collecting different types of things. Thanks to Peter O for this.

Vice President Al Gore

Icon of ComputerPeter O sent me a link to the original 1994 web page for Vice President Al Gore kept by NARA, the National Archives and Records Administration (of the USA.) What is amusing is that this copy of Gore’s page looks really dated and positions him as a pioneer of the Internet:

Vice President Gore, having first coined the term “information superhighway” 17 years ago, is the recognized public leader in the development of the National Information Infrastructure (NII).

Not quite the same as saying he invented it. To see the page Gore’s page linked from go to the White House page. Many of the links work, though not Clinton’s page.

Federation: The Brief to Government on Technology

The Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (known as the Federation) has some interesting briefs for government up on its site. One brief, the Submission to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology: Regarding Mobilizing Science and Technology to Canada’s Advantage (PDF 65KB) April 2008 is a response to the federal government’s science and technology strategy, Mobilizing Science and Technology to Canada’s Advantage. The response, authored by Noreen Golfman, President of the Federation, points out how the humanities and social sciences, “have long contributed in direct and meaningful ways to the achievement of the priorities of the government. The Federation believes that our research contributions are invaluable not only to the economy and the science and technology strategy but also to the cultural and political prosperity of Canada.” (p. 1)

The argument in the response starts with “Creativity and communication are at the heart of our disciplines in humanities and social sciences” and then moves on to show how creativity and communication play out in three “advantages” called for:

  • entrepreneurial advantage
  • knowledge advantage
  • people advantage

It is always strange to read documents that are not about advancing knowledge for everyone, but achieving national advantage. Didn’t they get the “nationalism is out” memo? Of course, that is the game of national policy and I’m sure the academic games appear just as dated from the outside. (“Didn’t they get the idealism is out memo?”) Golfman tries to engage the policy on its own terms and show how the social sciences and humanities are important to the advantages sought. Where I disagree with Golfman is about creativity. I don’t think we actually do a very good job in the humanities and social sciences developing creativity. The arts, especially when practiced, do a much better job. We probably do a better job at “critical” than “creative.” At least that what we tell each other.

Interestingly the response mentions TAPoR at the University of Toronto and IBM under “entrepreneurial advantage” on page 3. TAPoR is one of two examples of projects that have partnered with companies to everyone’s advantage. One of the ways that projects like TAPoR engage creativity and communition is through a particular type of thinking through technology that involves developing technologically rich objects as part of our practices. We don’t just read and critique, we design and craft as they might in the arts. But lets not forget what is important,

The end game is as much about a better Canada as it is about a more economically competitive
Canada. (p. 1)

EMiC: Editing Modernism in Canada

EMiC] Editing Modernism in Canada is a neat project that was funded by SSHRC as a Strategic Cluster. Dean Irvine at Dalhousie leads it and the idea is to produce “critically edited texts by modernist Canadian authors”, especially those out of print. It has a nice link to learning in that one reason for editing modernist Canadian texts is to make them available for teaching and learning. Deeper than that, however, is what seems to be an apprentice model of involving (graduate) students in editing. The network of partnerships is impressive too.

DAEDALUS PROJECT: MMORPG Research, Cyberculture, MMORPG Psychology

A student in my Computers and Culture class drew our attention to the DAEDALUS PROJECT which is led by Nick Yee at PARC. The Daedalus Project is a blog about MMORG research with longish entries written like short articles that are gathered into issues. There is also The Daedalus Gateway that organizes the articles in a more thematic fashion.

Graph from Daedalus

The articles are fascinating. The graph immediately above was taken from a study on Game Choices that looks at what sorts of characters players choose.

Many of the articles on The Daedalus Project are based on voluntary surveys (see his methodology). It is impressive that Yee is getting between 2000 and 4000 respondents and there is something to be learned by how he returns results, informs people of the survey and so on. I feel that The Daedalus Project represents some sort of new paradigm that crosses method, publication, and outreach.

Rebooting Computing Manifesto

On the subject of manifestos, one of my students pointed me to a project Peter Denning is leading that has a Rebooting Computing Manifesto. The project is sponsored by the National Science Foundation (of the USA) and is aimed at trying to reinvigorate computer science in the face of dramatic drops in enrollment.

It is a time of challenges for the computing field. We are tired of hearing that a computing professional is little more than a program coder or a system administrator; or that a college or graduate education is unnecessary; or that entering the computing field is a social death. We are dismayed that K-12 students, especially girls, have such a negative perception of computing. We are alarmed by reports that the innovation rate in our field has been declining and that enrollments in our degree programs have dropped 50% since 2001. Instead of the solo voice of the programmer, we would like to hear from the choir of mathematicians, engineers,and scientists who make up the bulk of our field.

I like how this is articulated as a challenge. I also like the can-do approach of gathering and coming up with ideas.