Joanne, my hard cover muse, lends me books that win prizes (or almost win.) Veronica by Mary Gaitskill is one of the most brutal she’s lent me. Insight like Gaitskill’s into the slow death of women with AIDS is hard to put down. Like hepatitis it taints the Saturday you read the book. It frays the couch you lie on (yes, I know I should take off my shoes.)
Cinematography of Anh Hung Tran
Can a camera caress water? Anh Hung Tran is a Vietnamese director whose slow delicate movies seem less stories than excuses to collect drops of leaves. I’ve now seen M?i du du xanh – L’odeur de la papaye verte (1993) (English is “The Scent of Green Papaya”) and Vertical Ray of the Sun (2000). In both the camera dwells on the textures of everyday life. Both take place in the outdoor kitchens where the women cook and wash in the many basins that seem to populate Tran’s movies. At times the camera moves across surfaces just to caress the painted wood as if we aren’t important, but our homes are fine landscapes for the closeup eye.
Could one build a site for moving textures? A Flickr for clips.
Spelling with Flickr
Spell with Flickr is a neat site that will spell out words using pictures of letters from Flickr. It is by Erik F. Kastner and comes with code to use in your site. This is thanks to Matt.
Breadth of Text
The call for papers for the next CaSTA conference has been posted. See CaSTA 2006: Breadth of Text – A Joint Computer Science and Humanities Computing Conference. This year the conference will be at the University of New Brunswick and will be a joint conference with Computer Science.
The Submission deadline is March 15th. A PDF of the Call can be Downloaded Here.
Juxta
Juxta has just been released. This is an application for comparing and collating multiple witnesses to a single text. It is open source and has an elegant and clean interface. It was developed at the University of Virginia by Applied Resarch in Patacriticism with funding awarded to Jerome McGann from Mellon.
iSIC: Sonnification of network traffic
iSIC is a neat research project into the sonnification of network traffic. The system makes music out of live activity on your network (or some other complex system) so that you can attend to the system without staring at a screen. When the music changes you hear the change. This project is led by William Farkas, a friend and neighbor, who teaches at Sheridan. Very neat. Listen to the music it produces.
Katz: Music and Technology
I am supervising a graduate reading course on Music Technology with Sean Luyk. He is blogging his notes. An interesting recent work is Mark Katz’s Capturing Sound which maps the changes to music as recording technologies were introduced starting with the phonograph.
Dialogue of the Dead and Games
What is the relationship between gesture and dialogue? Paul Boussac and Jack Sidnell of the Toronto Semiotic Society organized a two day symposium titled, Semiotics And Pragmatics of Gesture, Conversation and Dialogue. I gave a talk with the pretentious (but actually relevant) title, Dialogues of the Dead: Reanimated Interaction in Computer Games in which I tried to show that the same concerns found in dialogue theory from Plato on around the way we animate disreputable characters are feeding the public anxieties around computer games. It is Dr. Frankenstein’s problem all over, if we animate the dead we need to take responsibility for them. I was trying to find a way to engage in an ethical discussion of interaction which combines gesture and conversation.
Continue reading Dialogue of the Dead and Games
Western Union Telegram
Western Union, who have a long history providing telegraph services have discontinued the telegram as of January 27th.
Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage.
The Globe and Mail carried a story today about this that I can’t find on their site. They changed their name to “Western Union” when they connected the Western (US) lines with the Eastern lines.
It can be argued that the conjunction of the telegraph and the daily newspaper had a more dramatic effect on global information than any other technology, including the internet. With these two readers, for the first time, would know more about world news than about their neighbors.
WuffWuffWare: Analyze Text
WuffWuffWare (yes, I’m serious) has a small text annotation tool for the Mac called, AnalyzeText. It sounds like you can use it like a highlighting and annotating tool, but it also has a concordancer built in. But does it roll over when told to the way my dog does? Tha’s about all the text analysis my dog Leo does.
This is thanks to Alex.