ClustrMaps offers a mapping service for hits on your blog or site. It shows a small map with bubbles where your visitors are coming from. This service is apparently free for sites with fewer than 2,500 visitors a day, but they are not allowing any new registrations. Why do I want one more when I can’t get a free map?
CiteULike: Social Networks and Collective Action
CiteULike has been evolving nicely as place for social networking around bibliographic references. It sounds dry, but look at a reference like Social Networks and Collective Action: A Theory of the Critical Mass. III. One can click on a link to generate a TouchGraph of the article in a network of related articles.
McMaster University Libraries: Transforming our Future
McMaster University Libraries: Transforming our Future is a blog by a Transformation Team of librarians at McMaster (the university I teach at) around the (long overdue) transformation of our library. It’s great to see organizations like our library opening up their thinking to their clients. Open administration – where groups negotiating change expose their thinking to their stakeholders – is a trend that should be encouraged.
It’s interesting that both the Transformation Team and the Chief Librarian Jeff Trzeciak’s blog are on wordpress.com rather than on McMaster servers.
Live coding: Impromptu
Live coding is coding as performance. Matt alerted me to a Impromptu which is a programming language designed for sound coding performances. There is a gallery of sound performances and code at the site to give an idea of what the live coders might be typing to get what effects.
Live coding would seem to be connected to realtime coding competitions like live coda when the coding challenge is performative and the competition environment can be witnessed as a performance.
Pedagogically I wonder if live coding is more effective than write-compile-run coding. Certain languages like Ruby have live coding environments that let you type commands and see the results immediately. What is different here is the idea of language created for live coding in a performative context.
Second Life Activities
I’ve noticed a number of interesting activities that are using Second Life as their virtual site. The Infinite Mind in Second Life is a web page about interviews with people like John Maeda and Kurt Vonnegut that were broadcast (took place?) in Second Life. (You can see photos and read agout it also at The Infinite Mind blog.)
CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion is a law class about argument outside of court and on the net. The class is by Harvard prof Charles Nesson and his daughter Rebecca Nesson. There is a trailer video that explains the class and how you can join through Second Life. There is an interesting moment when you shift from the video of Nesson to video of his avatar in a recreation of the same space.
Note how video is the way virtual encounters are being documented.
Thanks to Johnny for the Infinite Minds link and Peter for the Harvard link.
Microformats like hCard
Geoffrey Martin Rockwell
McMaster University
1280 Main St. W.
Hamilton, Ontario, L8S 4M2
Canada
(905) 525-9140
This hCard created with the hCard creator.
hCard Creator is a form for automatically creating an hCard microformat. Microformats are a neat idea I just stumbled on for “simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.” (See About microformats.)
Derrida: “The Word Processor”
A new freeing up of the flow can both let through anything at all, and also give air to critical possibilities that used to be limited or inhibited by the old mechanisms of legitimation – which are also, in their own way, word-processing mechanisms. (p. 32)
Paper Machine by Jacques Derrida and translated by Rachel Bowlby has an essay on “The Word Processor” that is one of the better discussions of how word processing is changing writing. Some quotes:
“But when we write ‘by hand’ we are not in the time before technology; there is already instrumentality, regular reproduction, mechanical iterability. So it is not legitimate to contrast writing by hand and ‘mechanical’ writing, like a pretechnological craft as opposed to technology.” (p. 20)
The machine remains a signal of separation, of severance, the official sign of emancipation and departure for the public sphere.” (p. 20)
As you know, the computer maintains the hallucination of an interlocutor (anonymous or otherwise), of another ‘subject’ (spontaneous and autonomous, automatic) who can occupy more than one place and play plenty of roles: face to face for one, but also withdrawn; in front of us, for another, but also invisible and faceless behind its screeen. Like a hidden god who’s half asleep, clever at hiding himself even when right opposite you. (p. 22)
With pens and typewriters, you think you know how it works, how ‘it responds.’ Whereas with computers, even if people know how to use them up to a point, they rarely know, intuitively and without thinking — at any rate, I don’t know — how the internal demon of the apparatus operates. … We know how to use them and what they are for, without knowing what goes on with them, in them, on their side; and this might give us plenty to think about with regard to our relationshi with technology today – to the historical newness of this experience. (p. 23)
Is it really new to use technologies without understanding?
For Derrida the age of the book is passing.
This is not the end but we are probably moving to another regime of conservation, commemoration, reproduction, and celebration. A great age is coming to an end.
For us, that can be frightening. We have to mourn what has been our fetish. (p. 31)
I like the French term for word processor, “traitement de texts” – seems more accurate to what is happening.
Meditation on Electronic Tools
A tool would have a handle with grooves to hold tight. It’s easy to swing into place.
It would have an inhuman steel end. An end unlike my soft flesh. Perhaps the nail dead at the end of the digit.
A tool scratches out its world. A tool outreaches, extends the hand in sight, and where it doesn’t fit (so often), it scrapes a groove. It claws what it can afford.
And when it’s finished there’s a pop, a clunk, a ping, and a burr to be swept away. When it’s left, the palm is open to stroke the surface of the craft. A satisfaction puts the tool away.
So few parts of the world fit this tool, other than my hand. Perhaps they are not made for work but for the stroking, the holding, and the gripping turn.
Which is why I need so many of them, within reach, laid out in frames, carried in bags, on belts, and ready-at-hand and unforseen.
Then, I’ll pause in the workshop and not do anthing at all. I’ll hold these tools in my mind which is not how to use them.
Images all from the TAPoR portal and TAPoRware.
Interactive Matter
The Interactive Matter or iMatter project, of which I am one of the co-principal investigators (with Lynn Hughes) has a new web site. The iMatter blog
that we are using to keep track of our meetings has also been moved to Word Press and redesigned.
Ask E.T.: Sparklines: theory and practice
(Sparkline of US deficit over time) Sparklines: theory and practice is a thread in Edward Tufte’s Ask E.T. forum (which is a great place to follow discussions on design issues.) The thread starts with images of some pages from Tufte’s new book, Beautiful Evidence (2006) on sparklines which are defined as “intense, simple, word-sized graphics”. The sparkline at the beginning of this entry is from the Sparkline PHP Graphing Library. Another source of sparkline tools is Bissantz sparkline tools. Thanks to Shawn for this link.
So how can sparklines be woven into text anlysis environments? Small distribution graphs could be included with lists of word or KWIC displays in tools like the TAPoRware tools.