How to communicate the dangers of nuclear waste to future civilizations.

Reading Umberto Eco’s The Search for the Perfect Language I came across a discussion Thomas Sebeok’s work for the U.S. Office of Nuclear Waste Management on “Communication Measures To Bridge Ten Millennia.” Sebeok was commissioned to figure out how to warn people about nuclear waste in 10,000 years. How do you design a warning system that can survive for tens of thousands of years? He proposed an artificial folklore with a priestly caste to maintain superstitions about the site. He ended up recommending

that information be launched and artificially passed on into the short-term and long-term future with the sup- plementary aid of folkloristic devices, in particular a combination of an artificially created and nurtured ritual-and-legend. …

The legend-and-ritual, as now envisaged, would be tantamount to laying a “false trail”, meaning that the uninitiated will be steered away from the hazardous site for reasons other than the scientific knowledge of the possibility of radiation and its implications; essentially, the reason would be accumulated superstition to shun a certain area permanently. (p. 24)

Slate Magazine has a great story on the issue of Atomic Priesthoods, Thorn Landscapes, and Munchian Pictograms: How to communicate the dangers of nuclear waste to future civilizations by Juliet Lapidos (Nov. 16, 2009.) She surveys some of the interesting ideas like “Menacing Earthworks” that would warn people off, and talks about a 1993 SANDIA report titled, “Expert Judgment on Markers To Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion Into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.”

TRAFFIC: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980

Gordon Lebredt Get Hold Of This Space 1974

Go see the TRAFFIC: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980 exhibit at the Art Gallery of Alberta. It is a dense exhibit with hundreds of works and relevant documentation. It is organized by cities (a room for Halifax, one for Montreal …) and seems carefully researched. You will find yourself bewildered and amused at the variety of conceptual art projects executed in Canada. You will notice that everything was done back then with typewriters, video and tape recorders. The colors look bleached the way old and cheap photographs are. The aging of all those postcards and paper forms dates the works as if they were brought out of the attic or from the back of the family station wagon left in the sun.

This show was developed by a number of museums (from Vancouver to Halifax) and is touring those museums. You can read about the show when it was in Toronto. Or you can read about it in Magenta.

Locacious: Audio Walking Tours

Peigi sent me a link to Locacious a great new iPhone app that lets you create walking tours. (Location + Loquacious = Locacious … Get it?) The walking tours are made up of locations with an image, text (links), and audio. Historians are using it to author urban history tours like “Jane Jacobs in Greenwich Village; The Flatiron District.” the app is free, but you apparently have to pay to upload your tour so that others can access it.

Note: the Locacious app seems to have been retired. See iOSnoops entry.

Old Bailey Trials Are Tabulated for Scholars Online

The New York Times now has an article on the Criminal Intent project I was part of. See, Old Bailey Trials Are Tabulated for Scholars Online. They quote a historian who is sceptical of the results of mining, though he appreciates the resource.

“The Old Bailey Online project has done a great service in making those sources widely (and costlessly) available,” Mr. Langbein wrote in an e-mail. But he complained that the claims about data mining have “a breathless quality: ‘you can expect big things from us,’ but as yet it’s all method and no results.” He said that the new findings belittle the work of a generation of scholars who focused on the 18th century as the turning point in the evolution of the criminal justice system.

Alas, he seems didn’t read our report, but the summary in the Chronicle. It is easy to use cute phrases like “breathless quality”, but is he right? Time will tell, but I think the historians on our team have backed up the results found with mining and they never belittled the work of previous scholars – we saw ourselves building on it.

What can mining do? I think mining can give you a big picture so that you see the forest rather than trees in a way that no one could before. Conclusions about the shape of the forest have to be checked against other evidence, but the results of mining is evidence that is not breathless even if it takes your breath away. As Bill Turkel put it,

Mr. Turkel, who developed some of the digital tools, said that data mining reveals unexpected trends and connections that no one would have thought to look for before. Previous scholars “tended to cherry-pick anecdotes without having a sense that it was possible to measure all of that text and treat the whole archive as a single unit,” he said.

Of course, if you then leverage traditional evidence to buttress your argument then the mining is forgotten or trivialized.

The Garden of Error and Decay

The Garden of Error and Decay is a real-time visualization of disasters mentioned in Twitter and other feeds. The text about the interactive says “this innovative moving image format is something like a real-time data driven narrative. This project is not a film, not a game, and not a nonlinear interactive story.” The visualization uses pictograms that represent the type of disaster. You can see the original twitter text.

Thanks to Scott for this.