Theoreti.ca – Page 112 – Research notes taken on subjects around multimedia, electronic texts, and computer games.

Informatica Umanistica: Interrupting Digitization

Informatica Umanistica has just published a paper of mine on digitization titled, “Interrupting Digitalizatin and Thinking about Text”. The article starts,

One of the memes of new media is that the form of communication determines the content. As McLuhan puts it the medium is the message, and therefore, as we digitize the evidence of human culture from the Roman forum to Hamlet we inaugurate not just a new edition of our knowledge, but a new knowing and with it a new way of thinking. This paper will not engage the question of technological determinism, instead it will assume that the enthusiasts are right and ask then what is digitization? or what is the message of the digital form? Asking such questions is an interruption in the rush to digitize everything; imagine the scanner has broken down for a moment letting us pause and ask if we really understand the digital, if we understand what is gained and lost, and if we understand the possibilities before us or how we are constrained.

Peter Baskerville, Worth of Children and Women

Peter Baskerville spoke today on “Worth of Children and Women: Life Insurance in Early Twentieth Century Canada” as part of the CIRCA Colloquium. He talked about changes in perceptions regarding children in the early 20th century. They went from being perceived as economic assets (you can send you kids to work) to being seen as worthwhile in and of themselves (you can enjoy them as children.) He looked at census data about insurance as the Canadian census up till 1921 asked questions about who had insurance. Insurance gives you a sense of what people valued. I’m amazed how much one can infer from census data along with contextualization.

Peter found a startling number of children (1 in 10) were insured and for kids under 15 there was no difference between the percentage of boys and girls. When asking why, he noticed that French Catholics were far more likely to insure their kids than other ethno/religious groups. French Catholic kids under the age of 10 are statistically the most likely to die, which may be due to the fact that French Catholic mothers stopped breast-feeding earliest which meant that kids were switching to water or non-pasteurized milk younger. This would suggest that parents were insuring kids to be able to pay of burial costs. Burial fees were also a source of income for RC parish priests so they had pragmatic reasons to encourage parishioners to take out insurance.

He also thinks that insurance is symbolically important. It shows the regendering of the public sphere as women value themselves through insurance.

A Rant on Excellence

The recent issue of the CAUT Bulletin has a great article by Elizabeth Hodgson titled A Rant on Excellence. She rightly noticed how “supersaturated” excellence has become in the academy. We all pretend we want to be excellent or world-class, but realistically we are just good enough.

These incidents suggest to me, as a literary critic, that “excellence” (with its cognate “world-class”) has become a supersaturated term like “patriot” or “family values,” a word that means both everything and nothing. This word “excellence” seems to have acquired both an indefinable and yet profound value to senior administrators, as if they know what it means, and what it looks like, as if its value is immeasurable and its attainment all-important — and therefore as if anything or anyone not excellent is therefore worthless.

Hodgson concludes with the effects of the cult of excellence which include the proliferation of measurements of excellence which have the effect of turning us towards measurable activities. The measurable activities that prove we are excellent ironically distract us from what we are good at and therefore make us less than excellent.

I would like to see a study of university mission statements and the effect of excellence-talk on them.

Kids consume media as a full-time job—many getting overtime

ars technica has a good summary of the Kaiser Family Foundation Report: Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8-18-Year-Olds. Their story, Kids consume media as a full-time job—many getting overtime (Chris Foresman, Jan. 21, 2010) ends with some good news,

The report notes that kids spend less time reading magazines or newspapers, though online reading has supplanted that to some degree. However, the average time spent reading books has stayed relatively steady, at about an hour per day. Only the heaviest of media users reported increases in poor grades or low levels of personal contentment. And it seems parents that are active about placing restrictions on media use have kids that consume significantly less media than kids without restrictions. Leaving the TV off, limiting hours of TV, video game, or computer use, and having rules about types of content all help curb media use. One final bit of good news: kids on average spent almost two hours a day engaged in physical activity, up slightly from five years ago.

The bad news is that media consumption is becoming a full time job for kids taking up all the time they are asleep or at school. Is there anything other than media consumption?

Whatever happened to Second Life? | Analysis | Features | PC Pro

Willard, on Humanist, asked about an article titled, Whatever happened to Second Life? ,

Does this decline in popularity matter? What, do you suppose, does it tell us about VR techniques generally?

According to the article Linden Labs is making more money than ever,

Money is, of course, what makes the world go around – even the virtual ones. So has the Second Life economy suffered the same nervous breakdown as the real-world markets over the past year or so? Amazingly, it appears not.

Linden Labs claims Second Life has turned over more than $1 billion in its six-year history. Nor is it slowing down; quite the opposite in fact. Linden claims the in-world economy grew by a staggering 94% year-on-year from Q2 2008 to Q2 2009.

It sounds like it may be sex that is making money for Linden Labs.

Another answer to the question Willard poses about VR is that now we have tools like the OpenSimulator which allows us to build and adapt virtual worlds on our own server. OpenSimulator is compatible with the Second Life client, but we can customize it to do different things, for example, we can turn it into an authoring environment for an Augmented Reality Game platform. Place your items in virtual space and they show up in the corresponding real space.

There is a discussion about SL and this story at iDC https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2010-January/004138.html . In particular. Simon Biggs points to a report on education and SL (PDF) he wrote.

The General Inquirer

Reading John B. Smith’s “Computer Criticism”, (Style: Vol. XII, No. 4) I came a reference to a content analysis program called the The General Inquirer from the 1960s. This program still has a following and has been rewritten in Java. See the Inquirer Home Page. There is a web version where you can try it here (DO NOT USE A LARGE TEXT).

The General Inquirer “maps” a text to a thesaurus of categories, disambiguating on the way. The web page about How the General Inquirer is used describes what it does thus:

The General Inquirer is basically a mapping tool. It maps each text file with counts on dictionary-supplied categories. The currently distributed version combines the “Harvard IV-4” dictionary content-analysis categories, the “Lasswell” dictionary content-analysis categories, and five categories based on the social cognition work of Semin and Fiedler, making for 182 categories in all. Each category is a list of words and word senses. A category such as “self references” may contain only a dozen entries, mostly pronouns. Currently, the category “negative” is our largest with 2291 entries. Users can also add additional categories of any size.

As they say later on, their categories were developed for “social-science content-analysis research applications” and not for other uses like literary study. The original developer published a book on the tool in 1966:

Philip J. Stone, The General Inquirer: A Computer Approach to Content Analysis. (Cambridge: M. I. T. Press, 1966).

The Chess Master and the Computer – The New York Review of Books

Humanist pointed me to a review in The New York Review of Books by Garry Kasparov titled “The Chess Master and the Computer” (Volume 57, Number 2; February 11, 2010) that reflects on how computing has been applied to chess. We all know that Kasparov was beaten by Deep Blue in 1997, but then what?

One followup experiment that Kasparov mentions was a “freestyle” competition sponsored by the chess site Playchess.com where teams of humans and computers could compete against each other.

The teams of human plus machine dominated even the strongest computers. The chess machine Hydra, which is a chess-specific supercomputer like Deep Blue, was no match for a strong human player using a relatively weak laptop. Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer was overwhelming.

The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and “coaching” their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.

I find it interesting that it is a hybrid of human machine that played best not pure AI. This is Engelbart’s augmentation outperforming experts or AIs.