TagTagger

Judith sent me a link to Tag Tagger which proposes to develop a system for tracking and tagging tags. The proposal is a joke by The Silent Penguin (“Making a dent – somewhere”), but one which points to the infinite regress of information. Tags and links become information at which point they too need to be tagged and linked … see Technorati Tags. (No joke is too funny to be implemented.)

Which reminds to write about Tags, known to the rest of us as “keywords” or “subjects”. In some usability work we are doing on the TAPoR portal we found our users had no idea what “tags” were. Obviously they are not digi-literate enough.

CS Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia

The Guardian has a thoughtful article about CS Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia, titled His dark materials after Philip Pullman’s trilogy. Why Alison Lurie titled the article about Lewis after Pullman’s trilogy is a bit of a mystery; yes, Pullman is quoted on the controversies around Lewis’s sexism, racism and “muscular” Christian propaganda, but is Lurie suggesting Pullman (another Oxford fantasy writer) has special authority? Or it is just a good title for a story on the a series we loved as kids and now find distasteful for their incoherence and racism. See also Pullman attacks Narnia film plans on Pullman’s critique and The Narnia Skirmishes on the controversy around the release of the Disney version.
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flowerGarden

flowerGarden by greg judelman is a “web-baed software application, produced in Flash, for real-time soica network and conversation visualization.” It produces a TextArc like visualization of people in conversation and concepts they discussed. Judelman uses a flower of petals for people in a way that makes the visualization look like a garden of words with flowers blossoming. This is thanks to Bethany Nowviskie.

TagCloud

TagCloud is both a way of showing word or tag frequency and tool for content analysis. TagCloud.com has a tool that I think will give you a tagcloud for placing in your blog. The words are sized by importance and link to lists or related entries. A cool idea of content analysis interface that provides a dynamic folksonomy.

TagCloud.com links to a good article on Folksonomy in the Wikipedia.

Web Crawler: Nutch

Nutch is “open source web-search software. It builds on Lucene Java, adding web-specifics, such as a crawler, a link-graph database, parsers for HTML and other document formats, etc.” There is a Nutch Wiki with links to news, presentations and articles on it.

Nutch is basically a open Google-like engine that indexes an intranet (or the web) and gives you search capability. This sort of tool could be useful if there were ways to adapt it to discipline specific crawling.

Coté: the Dispositif

My colleague Mark Coté is working with an interesting idea borrowed from Foucaut, the “dispositif”. He has a short paper/abstract in the Proceedings of the GENEALOGIES DE LA BIOPOLITIQUE. He defines dispositif as,

The dispositif’s something literally “lost in translation” with English-language interlocutors’ a grid of intelligibility; a heterogeneous ensemble of discursive and nondiscursive elements that come together in response to an urgent need, a combinatory machine that allows us to ‘see’ and ‘speak’ and in the process producing not ‘ideology’ but their own ‘truths’. (Coté, Mark, “The Soft Revolution”,
Conference Proceedings : Genealogies of Biopolitics, Oct. 18, 2005)

How is a dispositif a machine? How is it different from a tool? Does it give us a way of understanding the limitations of tools?
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High Performance Computing in the Humanities

High Performance Computing and Grid Computing are two terms used to describe new approaches to the use of computing in research, primarily in the sciences and engineering. These terms refer to trends at the high end of research computing where often unique systems are put together to solve computationally complex problems faster. Supercomputing, as it used to be called, is focused both on certain grand challenge problems like protein folding and weather modeling where computation can make difference, but is also concerned with computation and processing speed in and of themselves, developing new ways of solving problems quickly through parallel processing on grids and clusters of often off-the-shelf PCs.

Why is this of interest to literary and linguistic research? What is literary about quest for computational speed?
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Harrison: Light

Light by the British author M. John Harrison is a dark and sometimes violent meditation on how we encounter the incomprehensible. Three strands follow the protagonists weaving the novel.The three twisted characters, including one who brutally murders women to escape his fate, never meet but are responding in different ways to a massive trench of alien artefacts that cannot be understood, just pirated. One of the best of that strain of dark Brit sci-fi/fantasy that includes Ian M. Banks and China Mieville.

There is a decent interview with Harrison at, m. john harrison interview – for zone-sf.com.