Theoreti.ca – Page 137 – Research notes taken on subjects around multimedia, electronic texts, and computer games.

Now, Analyze That: An Experiment in Text Analysis

StÃ©fan Sinclair and I have just finished writing up an essay from an extreme text analysis session, Now, Analyze That. It is first of all a short essay comparing Obama and Wright’s recent speeches on race. The essay reports on what we found in a two day experiment using our own tools and it has interactive handles woven in that let you recapitulate our experiment.

The essay was written in order to find a way of write interpretative essays that are based on computer-assisted text analysis and exhibit their evidence appropriately without ending up being all about the tools. We are striving for a rhetoric that doesn’t hide text analysis methods and tools, but is still about interpretation. Having both taught text analysis we have both found that there are few examples of short accessible essays about something other than text analysis that still show how text analysis can help. The analysis either colonizes the interpretation or it is hidden and hard for students and others to recapitulate. Our experiments are therefore attempts to write such essays and document the process from conception (coming up with what we want to analyze) to online publication.

Doing the analysis in a pair where one of did the analysis and one documented and directed was a discovery for me. You really do learn more when you work in a pair and force yourself to take roles. I’m intrigued at how agile programming practices can be applied to humanities research.

This essay comes out of our second experiment. The first wasn’t finished because we didn’t devote enough time together to it (we really need about two days and that doesn’t include writing up the essay.) There will be more experiments as the practice of working together has proven a very useful way to test the TAPoR Portal and think through how tools can support research all the way through the life of a project, from conceptualization to publication. I suspect as we try different experiments we will be changing the portal and the tools. too often tools are designed for the exploratory stage of research instead of the whole cycle right to where you write an essay.

You can, of course, actually use the same tools we used on the essay itself. At the bottom of the left-hand column there is an Analysis Tool bar that gives you tools that will run on the page itself.

Kriegspiel: Debord Game

Image from Game

The New Yorker (May 5, 2008, pages 25-6) has a nice short story “War Games” in Talk of the Town about a computer game Kriegspiel based on a game that Guy Debord designed in 1977. The game, “Le Jeu De La Guerre” was published first in a limited edition with metal pieces and then in 1987 it was mass produced. The game has a board of 25 X 20 squares and each side has basic military pieces that can be played according to rules designed to simulate war. The computer implementation, which can be downloaded for free, is by Radical Software Group (RSG) which is associated with NYU.

The New Yorker story talks about how the estate of Debord has been sending cease-and-desist letters to the RSG folk, which is ironic since debord objected to copyright. Debord is author of The Society of Spectacle.

Conference ’08 – ConfTool Pro – BrowseSessions

SDH Logo The 2008 Congress programme for SDH-SEMI is up. It looks like the conference on June 2nd and 3rd will be good. I will be giving a couple of papers and participating in panels:

1.2.1 “Building Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities in Canada” with Ray Siemens and Michael Eberle-Sinatra
1.3.2 “A Big Bridge: High Performance Computing and the Humanities” with Hugh Couchman
2.4.1 “Into Something Rich and Strange: The Digital Humanities in the Humanities” with Ray Siemens, Harvey Quamen, and Stan Ruecker

Farewell McMaster

Picture of Andrew and Geoffrey

With regrets I’m leaving McMaster and going to the University of Alberta. McMaster threw a wonderful farewell party on Monday. Dean Crosta spoke, Andrew Mactavish gave a moving speech, Liss Platt talked, StÃ©fan Sinclair played Alberta tunes and I was presented with a plaque that will go up on the wall of Togo Salmon Hall where previous digital humanities people at Mac have been recognized. See a small photo set of pictures taken by StÃ©fan here on Flickr.

RSS Feed Screen Saver

Screen Shot

I just noticed that Mac OS X has a RSS feed screensaver that shows headlines in spiraling columns. When you see an item you want to read you press a key and it opens the item. It is an interesting example of live text visualization. You can see it on YouTube – RSS Feed on my Screen saver.

Quartz Composer Screen Shot

The RSS Screensaver seems to be built in a visual programming language for the Mac called Quartz Composer. From the documentation and discussions online it sounds like something one can play with easily (when I have the time.)

What would an academic screen saver look like?

T-REX: TADA Research Evaluation Exchange

StÃ©fan Sinclair of TADA has put together an exciting evaluation exchange competition, T-REX | TADA Research Evaluation Exchange. This came out of discussions with Steve Downie about MIREX (Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange) and our discussions with the SHARCNET folk and then DHQ. The initial idea is to have a competition for ideas for tools for TAPoR, but then to migrate to a community evaluation exchange where we agree on challenges and then compare and evaluate different solutions. We hope this will be a way to move tool development forward and get recognition for it.

Thanks to Open Sky Solutions for supporting it.

Dialogue – Published by SSHRC/PubliÃ© par le CRSH

Having written a book on dialogue, (Defining Dialogue) I’m always intrigued when others call for dialogue or name some initiative dialogue.

Well, SSHRC has just published the second issue of its online e-newsletter, Dialogue and I’m going to rise to the bait.

Here goes. What is interesting about things named “dialogue” is that they are usually so named because “dialogue” is supposed to be good. In fact, it may be the last good left in an intellectual climate where there are no certainties or grounds to stand on. All that is left is some form of interaction, and dialogue is the good form of interaction (as opposed to gossiping, bickering, or fighting.)

The problem with this is that the models we have inherited for dialogue in the humanities, from Plato to Heidegger, are not quite so comfortable. This is seen especially in Plato where usually one of the interlocutors leaves unenlightened and irritated with Socrates. Dialogue is rarely good for those in it. The dialogues of Plato are aggressive, they portray posturing and misunderstanding, and they are designed to be interesting to those listening in, not the interlocutors.

So … what sort of dialogue then is SSHRC’s newsletter? Is it a scrappy Socratic tussle in front of us? No, it is a gracious praising of researchers who got grants! Is it SSHRC the gadfly engaging people who claim to know something so as to show them (and us) that they (and we) know nothing? No, SSHRC wouldn’t dare. Is it SSHRC engaging us with questions that force us to think about what we know. No, there is only a call for comments, which is about as interactive as asking what I did for my summer vacation.

In short, SSHRC has published another Dialogue that is innocent of the history or theories of dialogue. What Dialogue really is for SSHRC is public relations or advertising. Perhaps it is what Socrates taught in Aristophanes’ Clouds? Why shouldn’t SSHRC be honest and call it something like “Braggadocio“?

To be fair ,there is a sense in which what Dialogue does is document the activities of the humanities and social sciences. These activities have been called a conversation by Michael Oakeshott; in that sense Dialogue is not a dialogue with us or with anyone, but a record of great moments in the Canadian academic conversation.

As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an enquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves. (Oakeshott, The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind, p. 11)

If you are interested I have a copy of my thesis about dialogue, from which the book evolved, here in PDFs of the chapters. Read it and you too can get cranky when people propose dialogue.

Interactive Matter

The Interactive Matter group that I and Lynn Hughes lead met this Monday and Tuesday, May 5th and 6th, 2008, to talk about theories and methodologies of interactivity. A series of excellent short papers were presented on Monday that surveyed the literature and practices of research into interactivity. Some of the presenters were Chris Salter, Sara Diamon, Ron Wakkary, Cindy Poremba, StÃ©fan Sinclair, Liss Platt, Shirley Madill, Susan Brown, Glen Lowry, and Jutta Treviranus. (I’m sure I missing someone.) I’m still processing this, but some of the highlights for me were:

Interactivity matters because it is such broad term that is used as if we understand it. There is the material dimension of interactivity, the ethical and social matters around interactivity, and the issues that matter.
It is time now for the digital arts and humanities to recover interactivity from scientific approaches like HCI, computer science and software engineering. While they yield interesting insights into cognition, efficiency and the engineering of interactivity – we want to look at hwo interactivity is embodied, how it has human contexts, how it has histories, and how it is imagined. That is what the arts and humanities can contribute.
We are interested in much more than the interactive work. We are interested in its history of production and design. We are interested in its context and reception. We are interested in how it might evolve over time and be maintained, preserved, exhibited again, or disappear.
We are interested in practices that approach interactivity not as something to be observed and critiques, but something that is learned through interaction. We imagine practices that bridge the practices of discovery of art, design and the humanities.

Personalized Online Electronic Text Services (POETS)

I just came across a group at the Kyoto Notre Dame University who are building small text utilities called, Personalized Online Electronic Text Services (POETS). They have a nice English Vocabulary Assistant (EVA) WordNet 3.0 Vocabulary Helper which takes a word, looks it up in WordNet and gives you an exhaustive entry. They also have a Eva Text Analysis service that will, for example, link all words in a text except for stop words, to the Vocabulary Helper entry.