Rifkin: Deep Play

In a column in today’s Globe and Mail, Doug Saunders critiqued Jeremy Rifkin for ignoring the hidden immigrant labour upon which a European life of “deep play” is built. Intrigued, I went looking for what “deep play” is, and here is an interview that defines it, Claiming Our Primary Role in Our Society and Global Economy; An Interview with Jeremy Rifkin. Deep play is all the meaningful activities we engage in from art, religion to culture. It’s what we work to make time for? Is it play? Is it deep?
Continue reading Rifkin: Deep Play

h2g2: BBC’s unconventional Guide to Life, the Universe and Everything

The BBC took over, in 2001, the h2g2 server which is the site for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It is a community generated encyclopedia with an attitude. This Douglas Adams inspired reference tool is where I found a page about l33t speak.
Continue reading h2g2: BBC’s unconventional Guide to Life, the Universe and Everything

The next thing in internet search?

Matt Patey pointed out to me a story in the Economist.com computer section with the title, From factoids to facts, Aug 26th, 2004. The story is about “Ask MSR” (MSR = Microsoft Research) a search engine that tries to answer factual questions using information on web pages through text manipulation.

WHAT is the next stage in the evolution of internet search engines? AltaVista demonstrated that indexing the entire world wide web was feasible. Google’s success stems from its uncanny ability to sort useful web pages from dross. But the real prize will surely go to whoever can use the web to deliver a straight answer to a straight question. And Eric Brill, a researcher at Microsoft, intends that his firm will be the first to do that.

Text analysis in bulk – it just goes to show that the internet and web are really just large concording projects.

timeline+25: Ars Electronica

timeline+25 is a project of the Ars Electronica Festival starting tomorrow in Linz, Austria. Wired News has a story on the festival with intriguing pictures here.
Ars Electronica is now 25 years – probably the most important art and technology show in the world. The Linz centre has a “futurelab” (that can’t be visited), an archive, they put on the festival, and have a museum with activities. Their web site has an interesting approach where you identify what you want to do with them (learn, visit, contribute, cooperate …) and they show how to engage.

WORDCOUNT

fuck sex granulation love the shit god

WORDCOUNT and its companion QUERYCOUNT are two text-art experiments by Jonathan Harris of Number27. (StÈfan Sinclair pointed this out.) WORDCOUNT uses the Britich National Corpus to present an interactive Flash view of all the words sorted by frequency (thus “The” starts the list of 86800 words.) QUERYCOUNT tracks the words people ask to see in the WORDCOUNT list, not surprisingly starting with “fuck” and “sex”, but followed (when I checked) by “granulation”. (There must be some group repeatedly asking for “granulation” or a bug for that to show up so high.) What does the list of words we look for (quoted at the start of this entry) say about us?
Continue reading WORDCOUNT

I Love You rev.eng: Viruses as Art

Wired News: Exhibit Features Viruses as Art is a story about an art exhibit about and with viruses that is being mounted at Brown. It was first presented in 2002 in Germany and has been updated. The Wired story (by Michelle Delio, Aug. 27, 2004) has images and screen dumps. Many of the works seems to play off the “I Love You” virus, called the “computer virus family’s first media stars” by curator Franziska Nori.

Visitors to the exhibit will get a close-up view of the trouble a malicious virus writer can cause. One section of the show, dubbed "The Zoo," will feature a dozen non-networked terminals that visitors can infect with an assortment of viruses in order to observe what malware does.

This is from Matt Patey.
Continue reading I Love You rev.eng: Viruses as Art

HC Summit, Illinois: Trip Report

This weekend I have been at a summit around humanities computing at the University of Illinois that was organized by John Unsworth, Orville Vernon Burton and the folks at the NCSA.
One difference between HC in the US on the one hand and HC in Canada and Europe on the other, is that in the US there hasn’t been a national organization that could help organize the various centres for the purpose of presenting ideas to national funding agencies. (Perhaps the ACH once functioned that way, but now it is international.) One set of questions we discussed was the need, the scope, and the activities a national (US) gathering. I also got a quick tour through a number of NCSA initiatives of interest to humanities computing. The following are some of those of interest.
Continue reading HC Summit, Illinois: Trip Report