Theoreti.ca – Page 145 – Research notes taken on subjects around multimedia, electronic texts, and computer games.

Spreading the load – volunteer computing

Martin Mueller and James Chartrand both pointed me to an article in the Economist on volunteer computing, Spreading the load. The article nicely covers a number of projects that enlist volunteers over the web, like those I noted in Tagging Games. They don’t really distinguish the projects like BOINC that enlist volunteer processing from the ones like BOSSA (and the Mechanical Turk) that enlist volunteer human contributions, and perhaps there isn’t such a difference. It is always a human volunteering some combination of their time and computing to a larger project.

What Martin has suggested is that we think about how humanities computing projects might be enabled by distributed skill support. Could we enlist volunteer taggers for electronic texts with the right set up? Would we need to make it a game like ESP to check tagging choices against each other? The only example I can think of in the humanities is the Suda On Line (SOL), a project where volunteers are translating the Suda, “Byzantine encyclopedia known as the Suda, a 10th century CE compilation of material on ancient literature, history, and biography.” (From the SOL About page.) Can that infrastructure be generalized to a translating and enrichment engine for language, literature, history and philosophy?

The End of the Netscape Era

Stories like this one from CNET, Is this the end of Netscape?, are saying that AOL won’t support Netscape past February. See BBC News and Tom Drapeau’s blog entry announcing this.

Netscape Navigator was created by Marc Andreessen (after he co-authored Mosaic at the NCSA) and released in 1994. When Netscape went public in 1995 marks the beginning of the dot-com bubble. AOL bought Netscape in 1998 for billions of dollars. What were they thinking?

GUESS: The Graph Exploration System

I came across a very nice visualization by Fairyring (Stephanie Hendrick, a student at the HumLab) after finding that she had been experimenting with TAPoR visualizations and posting them to her Flickr account. In her comments she said she had used the visualization system, GUESS: The Graph Exploration System.

Tagging Games

Peter O pointed me to a new phenomenon on the web that I’ve been meaning to blog for a while. That is the leveraging of human players for tasks that can’t be easily automated. Perhaps the best example is the ESP Game. The online game is described in “How to Play”:

The ESP Game is a two-player game. Each time you play you are randomly paired with another player whose identity you don’t know. You can’t communicate with your partner, and the only thing you have in common with them is that you can both see the same image. The goal is to guess what your partner is typing on each image. Once you both type the same word(s), you get a new image.

The game (and its Google Image Labeler spin-off) leverages fun to get image tagging done. Remember when we thought computer image recognition would do that? Now we are using online games to make it fun for humans to do what we do best – instant complex judgements about the visual. If you get enough people playing we could make serious inroads into tagging the visual web.

What is impressive about ESP is what a simple and powerful idea it is and this is Luis von Ahn‘s second sweet contribution, the first one being CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA.

While it isn’t quite as clean, a generalized version of the idea of people power is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. The idea is that people can,

Complete simple tasks that people do better than computers. And, get paid for it. Learn more.

Choose from thousands of tasks, control when you work, and decide how much you earn.

Developers can register tasks, people can work on HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) and get paid for the work, and Amazon can become the largest labour market for small tasks.

netzspannung.org | Archive | Archive Interfaces

Image of Semantic Map

netzspannung.org is a German new media group with an archive of “media art, projects from IT research, and lectures on media theory as well as on aesthetics and art history.” They have a number of interfaces to this archive, for an explanation see, Archive Interfaces. The most interesting is the Java Semantic Map (see picture above.)

netzspannung.org is an Internet platform for artistic production, media projects, and intermedia research. As an interface between media art, media technology and society, it functions as an information pool for artists, designers, computer scientists and cultural scientists. Headed by Â» Monika Fleischmann and Â» Wolfgang Strauss, at the Â» MARS Exploratory Media Lab, interdisciplinary teams of architects, artists, designers, computer scientists, art and media scientists are developing and producing tools and interfaces, artistic projects and events at the interface between art and research. All developments and productions are realised in the context of national and international projects.

See The Semantic Map Interface for more on their Java Web Start archive browser.

Image of Semantic Map

WorldCat Identities: Publication Timelines

Publication Timeline Image

WorldCat Identities is a experimental project by the OCLC that connects to their WorldCat catalogue of libary holdings. Identities presents you with a cloud of authors (identities):

Word Cloud Image

If you click on an author you get publication information about the author, including a publication timeline like the one for Marx above. You can also connect to WorldCat and find a copy of the book near you by giving a postal code, for example.

Texto Digital: a-writings

Humanist posted an announcement for a new issue of the Brazilian journal Text Digital that includes some interesting animated experiments (like the image above) including a series a-writing by Gerard Dalmon. The address “To the reader” starts with,

To weave, write and inscribe thoughts on the digital medium is the purpose of this journal that reaches its fifth number with a somewhat different content. It is the first time we publish an issue with more creative than theoretic interventions.

Fluxus Portal

Diagram of Fluxus

I was down in Chicago for the MLA convention and visited the Art Institute of Chicago. Besides the spectacular collection, they had a small display of materials related to Fluxus – a conceptual art group of the 1960s that is still going (depending on who you believe.) Fluxus was influenced by John Cage and included artists like Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono, and Nam June Pack. Fluxus believed in “intermedia” – the confrontation of media. The Wikipedia entry summarizes their philosophy:

Fluxus is an attitude. It is not a movement or a style.
Fluxus is intermedia. Fluxus creators like to see what happens when different media intersect. They use found & everyday objects, sounds, images, and texts to create new combinations of objects, sounds, images, and texts.
Fluxus works are simple. The art is small, the texts are short, and the performances are brief.
Fluxus is fun. Humour has always been an important element in Fluxus.

I picked up a strange book by a Fluxus poet, Emmet Williams, A Flexible History of Fluxus Facts & Fictions that contains digitally remastered kunstfibels or art inventions. It is a inventive history of Fluxus that is itself annotated art, but also, as Williams explains, a primer (another sense of “fibel”.) For a contemporary sense of Fluxus see theÂ Fluxus Portal from which the diagram above comes. Diagramming their history and influences is one feature of the exhibit that attracted me. Fluxus founder Macunias was diagramming the flow of their history back in 1966. See Visualising Art History.

Ian Hacking: analogue bodies and digital minds

The Cartesian vision fulfilled: analogue bodies and digital minds is an essay in Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (2005, v. 30, n. 2) by Ian Hacking that first argues that despite the dislike for the Cartesian mind-body split in philosophy there is a degree to which Western culture is acting as if the body was analogue and the mind digital. Our metaphors, our representations, our sciences are Cartesian. Medicine treats the body as a messy mechanism, cognitive science treats the mind like a computer. Here is the abstract:

Current intellectual wisdom, abetted by philosophers of all stripes, teaches that the Cartesian philosophy is both wrong and dead. This wisdom will be overtaken by events. Present and future technologies – ranging from organ transplants to information coding – will increasingly make us revert to Descartes’s picture of two absolutely distinct types of domains, the mental and the physical, which nevertheless constantly interact. We as humans are constituted in both domains, and also must inhabit them. This is less a matter of facts – for what a person is, is never simply a matter of fact – than of how we will come to conceive of ourselves in the light of the facts that will press in upon us.

What is impressive and distracting about the essay (and what makes it accessible) is that he takes us on a tour of contemporary media culture from Japanese entertainment robots, manga, to Stelarc. It is only at the end that he makes his second move, which is to declare, without giving us a similar tour, that the representation of the mind as digital is “dated”.

Minds, on the other hand, we represent as information processors. And in this age we represent the processing of information by sequences of binary digital operations. Here I am less confident of the metaphor, which I find a bit dated. (p. 164)

He concludes by talking about Antonio Damasio’s theory which is that, “A human being is a neurologically nested triad of mind, brain and body.” (p. 165) The science that is showing the importance of the body to emotion and emotion to mind “leaves the digital mind in the dust.” (p. 165) Hardly. I find it hard to believe that science will give up on trying to formally model the mind as a method for testing hypotheses and understanding.