RDUES: WebCorp: The Web as Corpus

The Research and Development Unit for English Studies (RDUES) of UCE of Birmingham has a tool WebCorp: The Web as Corpus which searches google for a term and then goes to the top 199 documents Google identifies and searches them. It takes a while and works like our Googlizer, but produces more verbose results. It produces a concordance organized by document with links to a full word frequency list for the doc. The advanced search form has some interesting features, including the ability to point it at other engines.

UCE Birmingham is strange place from the web. UCE stands for “University of Central England” and you have to go deep to the At A Glance : History Of UCE Birmingham to find this out. (There’s no point explaining it to outsiders anywhere on the web page.) They seem to have been formed out of all the little colleges, polytechnics and schools in the area in 1992.

Variable Media Network

Variable MediaThe Variable Media Network is joint project by the Guggenheim Museum and the Daniel Langlois Foundation to look at models for preserving “performance, conceptual art, installations and, of course, artwork incorporating technological elements or relying on structures or networks that are themselves very unstable.” The project has online case studies and has published a edited book, Permanence Through Change.

This concept (variable media) suggests considering the description of works independently of the media used to create them. Rather than list a work’s physical components, the variable media approach is to understand the work’s behavioural characteristics and intrinsic effects. (Variable Media Concept as developed by Jon Ippolito, quoted on Fondation Daniel Langlois page.)

The idea if preserving variation and behaviour instead of stable media makes sense as a strategy for documenting interactive works, even beyond new media art, like computer games and electronic literature.

General Idea

General Idea

One of my favorite conceptual art groups, General Idea has a web site. General Idea was a Toronto based collaborative of three artists who put together installations, performances, boutiques, and manifestos. From ARTFORUM on FILE MEGAZINE:

the three began working under another signature rubric, “Miss General Idea.” A 1971 altered photograph, which they called their “artist’s conception,” figures her as a transvestite, rubber-outfitted version of Hugo Ball at Cabaret Voltaire. Miss General Idea functioned as the group’s muse, and General Idea hosted a series of Miss General Idea beauty pageants that set out in countercultural fashion “to (capture) glamour without falling into it.” (Art in America, March 2005)

Two of the three have since died, only AA Bronson is still alive and working.

Digital Art Museum

The “Digital Art Museum has an ambitious aim – to be the source for history on the digital arts. They have an interesting set of essay links and information about the early history of digital arts.

Digital Art Museum aims to become the world’s leading online resource for the history and practice of digital fine art.

It exhibits the work of leading Artists in this field since 1956. [DAM] is an on-line museum with a comprehensive exhibition of Digital Art supported by a wide range of background information including biographies, articles, a bibliography and interviews.

Tagliamonte: Instant messaging linguistics study

Instant messaging is not a spoiler of syntax in youth, U of T study suggests (Victoria Ahearn, Canadian Press, August 1, 2006) is a news story that is circulating about a study that Sali Tagliamonte and a student conducted about instant messaging. The good news is that we needn’t worry about IM.

Here’s a word to the wise (AWTTW): Instant messaging (IM), which is often riddled with acronyms like LOL (laugh out loud) and TTYL (talk to you later), is not the spoiler of syntax that some think it is but rather “an expansive new linguistic renaissance,” suggests a new study from the University of Toronto.

Here is the conclusion of an abstract submitted to the New Ways of Analyzing Variation conference in October of 2005:

These findings challenge the deleterious perceptions of IM and suggest that they have been over-blown in the media. Instead, IM is vibrant new medium of communication with its own unique style
(see also Herring 2003, 2004). We will elaborate an argument that IM is an illuminating reflection of
the dynamic ongoing, normal processes of linguistic change that are currently underway in the English
language. Moreover, we will suggest that it may well provide a ‘bellwether of future [socio linguistic]
trends’ (Schiano et al. 2002).

See OMG, its so PC! Instant Messaging and Teen Language.

Bemer and the History of Computing

The History of Computing Project is another collection of timelines and biographies sponsored by computer museums in Holland, Poland and elsewhere. There are some gaps, like the empty biography of Bill Atkinson and a history of Apple that is “withdrawn for revision”. It is, however, cleanly designed, and covers a lot.

Some of the information is useful like the biography of Bob Bemer who contributed the ESCape key and worked on ASCII, among other things, at IBM. (See CNN – 1963: The debut of ASCII – July 6, 1999 or the archive of Bob Bemer‘s personal site – he has passed away
.) Thanks to Matt for this.

RefViz: Bibliographic Visualization

RefViz Screen Image RefViz is a visualization tool from Thomson Researchsoft (who also publish EndNote and ProCite). RefViz lets you visualize “galaxies” of bibliographic references showing clusters of references by keywords. It also has a matrix view where you can see how keywords correlate.

Save time and learn more about what is happening in the literature with RefViz. With this powerful text analysis and visualization software program, you get an intuitive framework for exploring reference collections based on content. (From the Product Info page.)