iSIC is a neat research project into the sonnification of network traffic. The system makes music out of live activity on your network (or some other complex system) so that you can attend to the system without staring at a screen. When the music changes you hear the change. This project is led by William Farkas, a friend and neighbor, who teaches at Sheridan. Very neat. Listen to the music it produces.
Katz: Music and Technology
I am supervising a graduate reading course on Music Technology with Sean Luyk. He is blogging his notes. An interesting recent work is Mark Katz’s Capturing Sound which maps the changes to music as recording technologies were introduced starting with the phonograph.
Dialogue of the Dead and Games
What is the relationship between gesture and dialogue? Paul Boussac and Jack Sidnell of the Toronto Semiotic Society organized a two day symposium titled, Semiotics And Pragmatics of Gesture, Conversation and Dialogue. I gave a talk with the pretentious (but actually relevant) title, Dialogues of the Dead: Reanimated Interaction in Computer Games in which I tried to show that the same concerns found in dialogue theory from Plato on around the way we animate disreputable characters are feeding the public anxieties around computer games. It is Dr. Frankenstein’s problem all over, if we animate the dead we need to take responsibility for them. I was trying to find a way to engage in an ethical discussion of interaction which combines gesture and conversation.
Continue reading Dialogue of the Dead and Games
Western Union Telegram
Western Union, who have a long history providing telegraph services have discontinued the telegram as of January 27th.
Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage.
The Globe and Mail carried a story today about this that I can’t find on their site. They changed their name to “Western Union” when they connected the Western (US) lines with the Eastern lines.
It can be argued that the conjunction of the telegraph and the daily newspaper had a more dramatic effect on global information than any other technology, including the internet. With these two readers, for the first time, would know more about world news than about their neighbors.
WuffWuffWare: Analyze Text
WuffWuffWare (yes, I’m serious) has a small text annotation tool for the Mac called, AnalyzeText. It sounds like you can use it like a highlighting and annotating tool, but it also has a concordancer built in. But does it roll over when told to the way my dog does? Tha’s about all the text analysis my dog Leo does.
This is thanks to Alex.
Need for Speed in Toronto
Another tragedy that is being tied to computer games. On Thursday one of two teenagers racing their parent’s Merc T-boned a taxi driver killing him … days before he would become a Canadian citizen. The Globe carried it on the front page with a photo and diagram, see A Canadian dream cut short.
One of games in the EA series, The Need for Speed was in the crashed Merc.
The video game police found in the car allows players to select custom-made cars to race in urban traffic, Det. Lobsinger said.
“You have this game that’s all about fast cars and racing through city streets. It’s actually really ironic,” he said.
Is there a causal connection, or is it just irony?
External Cognition: How do Graphical Representations Work?
Likewise , as we argued in describing the resemblance fallacy , making assumptions that the internal representation is a mental model or image-like may simply give the illusion of solving the processing-internal representation-external representation riddle. (p. 209)
Do we understand how visualizations work, if at all? Work on visualization seems to be premised on the intuition that “a picture is worth a thousand words”. External Cognition: How do Graphical Representations Work? (PDF) by Scaife and Rogers (Int . J . Human – Computer Studies (1996) 45 , 185 – 213) is a metastudy that questions what we really know.
Continue reading External Cognition: How do Graphical Representations Work?
GarbageScout
Interesting uses of Google Maps are cropping up all over. Vanessa sent me a note about GarbageScout.com. For those in New York it shows the location and images of interesting garbage that you might want to recycle. Contributors can e-mail a photo to GarbageScout with information about the location of the goods.
Phylotaxis: Science and Culture
How to visualize news? Phylotaxis by Jonathan Harris (who also did 10X10) is blog/news visualizer designed for Seed: Science is Culture magazine. I think I am going to start a Jonathan Harris fan club – all of his work is perfect in its simplicity and effectiveness.
Poetic Research
The notion of poetic research emerges from a questioning of practice (design) which tries to locate parts of its creative drive so that it may be brought through in regard to research. The poetic in research can be seen as an attempt to develop a technicity of the “hunch”.
Can a tradition of reflecting on “poesis” (poetics – or the making of art) help us understand research/creation? Drew Paulin, reading my entry on Research/Creation, Again pointed me to a paper by Terence Rosenberg titled, “‘The Reservoir’: Towards a Poetic Model of Research in Design”. What is interesting is how for design students the challenge can be how to weave the creative into research projects, rather than the other way around. Further, a poetic model is, to some extent, always about creative practices, whatever else it is. The practice is part of the object of research/creation. (There is much else to reflect on too in this essay.)