The Listening Post

The Listening Post is a networked installation that culls text from online and displays them and synthesizes them.
This looks anticipates a project on the sonification of text that I am working on with Bill Farkas who has developed some cool sonification systems.

txtkit – Visual Text Mining

txtkit – Visual Text Mining Tool is a Mac OS 10.3 networked application that lets you visualize and interact with texts through a command line interface and visualizations. The visualizations, if I understand them, weave the text and user behaviour together with information about other users. It produces some of the most beautiful visualizations I have seen for a while.

See also their Related Links.

Error Correction

In a paper I gave in Georgia I picked up on a comment by Negroponte in Being Digital to the effect that error correction is one of the fundamental advantages of digital (vs analog) data. Automatic error correction makes lossless copying and transmission possible. Digital Revolution (III) – Error Correction Codes is the third in a set of Feature Column essays on the “Digital Revolution.” (The other two are on Barcodes and Compression Codes and Technologies.)
To exaggerate, we can say that error correction makes computing possible. Without error correction we could not automate computing reliably enough to use it outside the lab. Something as simple as moving data off a hard-drive across the bus to the CPU can only happen at high speeds and repeatedly if we can build systems that guarantee what-was-sent-is-what-was-got.
There are exceptions, and here is where it can get interesting. Certain types of data can still be useful when corrupted, for example images, audio, video and text – namely media data – while others if corrupted become useless. Data that is meant for output to a human for interpretation needs less error correction (and can be compressed using lossy compression) while still remaining usable. Could such media have a surplus of information from which we can correct for loss that is the analog equivalent to symbolic error correction?
Another way to put this is that there is always noise. Data is susceptible to noise when transmitted, when stored, and when copied.
Continue reading Error Correction

Interactivity and Augmentation

The Computer as Tool: From Interaction To Augmentation is an excellent paper that nicely maps the tensions between interaction and augmentation paradigms of the computer. Chris Dent, who drew my attention to his paper in a comment on a previous entry on Tool and Technology, makes a comparison that I hadn’t thought of between interactivity and the augmentation/tool model of a computer. I guess I think (thought) of interactivity as part of the augmentation tradition while Dent quotes Suchman (Plans and Situated Actions) to the effect that computers when considered interactive are being treated as social objects like servants.

Characterizing the computer as an intentional interactive artifact lays the groundwork for several problems with computer use: it grants inappropriate power to the computer in the relationship between user and computer; it creates inappropriate expectations of the computer while at the same time lowering expectations of computer use; it lowers productivity.

One can see the problem with interactivity through Suchman’s characterization of interactive systems as reactive, linguistic and internally opaque. See my paper on interactivity, Turing’s Reaction where I explore interactivity and dialogue, but don’t take the next step and contrast it with augmentation.
Continue reading Interactivity and Augmentation