stunlaw

Understanding Digital Humanities Edited by David M. Berry (Palgrave Macmillan)

2012-01-08T14:33:00.000-08:00

Should be out any day soon...

Introduction: Understanding the Digital Humanities; David M. Berry
An Interpretation of Digital Humanities; L.Evans & S.Rees
How We Think: Transforming Power and Digital Technologies; N. Katherine Hayles
Digital Methods: Five Challenges; B.Rieder & T.Röhle
Archives in Media Theory: Material Media Archaeology and Digital Humanities; Jussi Parikka
Canonicalism and the Computational Turn; Caroline Bassett
The Esthetics of Hidden Things; S.Dexter
The Meaning and the Mining of Legal Texts; M.Hildebrandt
Have the Humanities Always been Digital? For an Understanding of the 'Digital Humanities' in the Context of Originary Technicity; F.Frabetti
Present, Not Voting: Digital Humanities in the Panopticon; M.Terras
Analysis Tool or Research Methodology: Is There an Epistemology for Patterns?; D.Dixon
Do Computers Dream of Cinema? Film Data for Computer Analysis and Visualization; A.Heftberger
The Feminist Critique: Mapping Controversy in Wikipedia; M.Currie
How to See One Million Images? A Computational Methodology for Visual Culture and Media Research; Lev Manovich
Cultures of Formalization: Towards an Encounter Between Humanities and Computing; J.van Zundert, A.Antonijevic, A.Beaulieu, K.van Dalen-Oskam, D.Zeldenrust & T.Andrews
Trans-disciplinarity and Digital Humanity: Lessons Learned from Developing Text Mining Tools for Textual Analysis; Y.Lin

Index

The Gigantic

2011-12-01T18:46:00.000-08:00

We now live in a world where the very size of the real-time stream begins to exceed capacities to understand or make any sense of the sheer flow of data, and Twitter which currently handles 250 million tweets per day, or 1.25 billion per week, is a great example of this (Totsis 2011). Ways of thinking about the real-time stream as a totality are needed to help think through the implications of this data rich world and provide a contribution towards a cognitive map. For this reason I think that Heidegger's notion of the concept of the 'gigantic' that he introduces in Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) might prove to be useful. For Heidegger, the gigantic represents a new moment whereby the very impossibility of understanding the extremeness of small and large sizes as calculability becomes itself a change in quality. As he argues in 'The Age of the World Picture':

A sign of this event is that everywhere and in the most varied forms and disguises the gigantic is making its appearance. In so doing, it evidences itself simultaneously in the tendency toward the increasingly small. We have only to think of numbers in atomic physics. The gigantic presses forward in a form that actually seems to make it disappear – in the annihilation of great distances by the airplane, in the setting before us of foreign and remote worlds in their everydayness, which is produced at random through radio by a flick of the hand. Yet we think too superficially if we suppose that the gigantic is only the endlessly extended emptiness of the purely quantitative. We think too little if we find that the gigantic, in the form of continual not-ever-having-been-here-yet, originates only in a blind mania for exaggerating and excelling (Appendix 12) (Heidegger 1977: 135).

And as Livingston (2003) further explains:

At first, the ‘gigantic’ simply means the unlimited processes of quantification and assumptions of quantifiability that make possible modern technological means of expression and control. But when understood in a broader historical perspective, the ground of the ‘gigantic’ is not just the absence of limits on the process of quantification, but a fundamental aspect or feature of quantity itself (Livingston 2003: 332-333).

Here the gigantic is understood as the very possibility of quality being derivational from quantity itself. Thus the kinds of quantitative possibilities for human existence are measured, calculated, listed, captured, pure data itself as being:

But as soon as machination is in turn grasped being-historically, the gigantic reveals itself as ‘something’ else. It is no longer the re-presentable objectness of an unlimited quantification but rather quantity as quality. Quality is meant here as the basic character of the quale, of the what, of the ownmost, of be-ing itself (Heidegger 1999: 94).

The gigantic then becomes the mark of the age of the real-time stream inasmuch as the gigantic becomes the 'greatness' of this moment. We therefore increasingly use this notion of gigantism as a means of assessing the very importance of things within our everyday experience, not, that is, that the specific value itself has any particular or important meaning, but rather that the sheer impossibility of conceiving of the number (whether large or small) becomes a kind of sublime of unrepresentability. A mere mood or feeling that is associated with the gigantic then becomes something that we routinely consider to be a way to understand meaningful difference.

The gigantic is rather that through which the quantitative becomes a special quality and thus a remarkable kind of greatness. Each historical age is not only great in a distinctive way in contrast to others; it also has, in each instance, its own concept of greatness. But as soon as the gigantic in planning and calculating and adjusting and making secure shifts over out of the quantitative and becomes a special quality, then what is gigantic, and what can seemingly always be calculated completely, becomes, precisely through this, incalculable. This becoming incalculable remains the invisible shadow that is cast around all things everywhere when man has been transformed into subiectum and the world into picture (Appendix 13) (Heidegger 1977: 135).

Heidegger helpfully lists the forms of the gigantic:

1. The gigantism of the slowing down of history (from the staying away of essential decisions all the way to lack of history) in the semblance of speed and steer ability of "historical" [historisch] development and its anticipation.
2. The gigantism of the publicness as summation of everything homogeneous in favour of concealing the destruction and undermining of any passion for essential gathering.
3. The gigantism of the claim to naturalness in the semblance of what is self-evident and "logical"; the question-worthiness of being is placed totally outside questioning.
4. The gigantism of the diminution of beings in the whole in favour of the semblance of boundless extending of the same by virtue of unconditioned controllability. The single thing that is impossible is the word and representation of "impossible" (Heidegger 1999: 311).

Thus that we live in a flow of real-time information that exceeds our capacities to understand or follow it – for example when we have followed enough people such that our stream in Twitter is too fast to parse – is the kind of affect that I think the notion of the gigantic points towards. This is not a feeling of being overwhelmed or being in a situation of losing control, rather it is a feeling of pure will-to-power, as it were, experiencing the gigantic as a manifestation of yourself. Equally, the flows of data both into and out of your life then become a marker of your gigantism, the subjectivity of the stream is constituted by the flow of data through which a moment of curation take place, but a curation of gigantism, not a reduction as such, but a wholeness or comprehensiveness of coverage. Each of us then becomes our own gigantic in as much as we increasingly generate data flows into and out of the networks of social life mediated through software and code.

In the culture of the modern subject who would master the world according to the logic of representation and through the technologies grounded in such a logic, which seem to overcome the very limits of space and time, the mystery of transcendence can indeed seem to "appear" only through its sheer absence. Such a culture, then, would appear to be a culture of absolute immanence or even "total presence," a culture de-mystified by a subject who, most notably in the technologies of all-consuming light and image, seems to comprehend all (Carlson 2003).

This is a total presence in the real-time stream, presented through such real-time streaming technologies as Twitter, Facebook (especially through their Ticker), the Jawbone Up, and the concept of frictionless sharing that Facebook has advocated (MacMannus 2011). This is a world in which the sheer gigantic incalculability of the calculable becomes an experience beyond the mere technical process or possibility of data collection, transmission, and transformation. Indeed, it becomes the very moment when one is caught within the mystery of the sheer unrepresentability, or perhaps better, comprehensibility of our own streams of data generated and flowing through these new forms of social network. Made manifest, perhaps though digital technology, but also pointing towards the other unencoded that remains outside of these networks, as plasma or the region, and from which this data is drawn.

But Heidegger offers the suggestion that within the gigantic there is opened a shadow in the form of a moment of possible transcendentalism, perhaps even a new form of sacred, that points to the possible reconfiguration of previous marginal practices or a reconfiguration of things. This, I want to suggest, opens up new possibilities for a human subjectivity that can undertake the practices of listening and harkening to that which lies behind the rushing sound of the real-time streams and their shadows.

By means of this shadow the modern world extends itself out into a space withdrawn from representation, and so lends to the incalculable the determinateness peculiar to it, as well as a historical uniqueness. This shadow, however, points to something else, which it is denied to us of today to know. But man will never be able to experience and ponder this that is denied so long as he dawdles about in the mere negating of the age. The flight into tradition, out of a combination of humility and presumption, can bring about nothing in itself other than self-deception and blindness in relation to the historical moment... Man will know, i.e., carefully safeguard into its truth, that which is incalculable, only in creative questioning and shaping out of the power of genuine reflection. Reflection transports the man of the future into that "between" in which he belongs to Being but remains a stranger amid that which is (Heidegger 1977: 136).

Bibliography

Carlson, T. (2003) Locating the Mystical Subject, in Kessler, M. and Sheppard, C. (eds.) Mystics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, accessed 02/12/2011, http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/projects/ct3/docs/LocatingtheMysticalSubject.doc.

Heidegger, M. (1977 [1938]) The Age of the World Picture, in The Question Concerning Technology and other Essays, New York: Harper Perennial, pp115-154.

Heidegger, M. (1999) Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), Indiana: Indiana University Press.

Livingston, P. (2003) Thinking and Being: Heidegger and Wittgenstein on Machination and Lived-Experience, Inquiry, 46, 324–345.

MacManus, R. (2011) The Pros & Cons of Frictionless Sharing, ReadWriteWeb, accessed 02/12/2011, http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/frictionless_sharing_pros_cons.php

Totsis, A. (2011) Twitter Is At 250 Million Tweets Per Day, iOS 5 Integration Made Signups Increase 3x, TechCrunch, accessed 02/12/2011, http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/17/twitter-is-at-250-million-tweets-per-day/

The World of Computationality: Flickering Objects and Streaming-beings

2011-11-01T05:33:00.000-07:00

Accepting that the Worldhood of the World allows us to encounter anything at all (Heidegger 1977). What would be the structural features of a world of computationality understood as an alternative mode of revealing in contrast to the challenging-forth of technicity? For Heidegger electricity was the paradigmatic metaphor for technicity, both in terms of its generation through the challenging-forth of nature, through coal, oil, hydropower, etc. and in terms of the switching systems that were required to route both production, distribution and consumption of the electricity itself. He saw this switiching capacity as a process of ordering by ‘ordering beings’ where:

Everywhere everything is ordered to standby, to be immediately on hand, indeed, to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering (Heidegger 1977).

Here I want to suggest that technicity isn’t sufficient to describe the contemporary mode of revealing through computationality. Indeed, challenging forth is better understood, as indeed Heidegger concedes, as a modern technology, and indeed I would argue not necessarily applicable to the kinds of postmodern technologies, such as the computer, that increasingly permeate our everyday life. In computationality, then, the paradigmatic metaphor I want to use is real-time streaming technologies and the data flows, processual stream-based engines and media interfaces that embody them. This is to stop thinking about the digital as something static and object-like and instead consider its 'trajectories'. Here I am thinking about the way in which scripts function to create loops and branching, albeit highly complex forms, and create a stable 'representation', which we often think of as an digital 'object'. Under the screen surface, however, there is a constant stream of processing, a movement and trajectory, a series of lines that are being followed and computed. Something like Twitter suggests the kind of real-time experiential technology that I am thinking about and the difficulty of studying something unfolding in this manner, let alone archiving or researching, without an eye on its processual nature encourages serious category errors.[1] The aim of this article is to begin to develop some of the ideas outlined in The Philosophy of Software through a phenomenology of computation (Berry 2011). In the following table, for example, I want to explore how we might think about this different mode of existence of a highly softwarized streaming ontology.

	Technicity (modern technology)	Computationality (postmodern technology)
Mode of Revealing	Challenging-forth (Gestell)	Streaming-forth
Paradigmatic Equipment	Technical devices, machines.	Computational devices, computers, processors.
Goals (projects)	1. Unlocking, transforming, storing, distributing, and switching about Standing Reserve (Bestand). 2. Efficiency.	1. Trajectories, Processing information, Algorithmic transformation (aggregation, reduction, calculation), as data reserve. 2. Computability.
Identities (roles)	Ordering-beings	Streaming-beings
Paradigmatic Epistemology	Engineer, Time-motion studies, Methods-Time Measurement (MTM), instrumental rationality	Design, Information theory, graph theory, data visualisation, communicative rationality

Within Gestell every subject/object is a story of challenging-forth. This is related to a structural map, or ground-plan, which describes a priori what the essences of particular beings are, however this is not innate, rather drawn from the grounding of intelligibility. As Heidegger explains:

As a destining, it banishes man into that kind of revealing that is an ordering. Where this ordering holds sway, it drives out every other possibility of revealing (Heidegger 1977).

Thus challenging-forth turns everything into resources, creating a world of objects and equipment on standby ready to be used in larger aggregates. For Heidegger there is a totalizing character of challenging-forth which forces it to attempt to apply the principle of efficiency to other marginal practices, and hence with it the danger of becoming the last possible mode of revealing.

The coming to presence of technology threatens revealing, threatens it within the possibility that all revealing will be consumed in ordering and that everything will present itself only in the unconcealedness of standing reserve (Heidegger 1977).

In contrast, I want to suggest that computationality is distinct from challenging-forth as technicity, inasmuch as it is a streaming-forth. One aspect of this is that streaming-forth generates second-order information and data from the world which is itself seen increasingly as flow. This collected information is then subject to further processing and algorithmic transformation, feedback thus becomes part of the ecology of computationality. Additionally, computational devices not only withdraw – indeed mechanical devices such as car engines clearly also withdraw – rather that computational devices both withdraw and are constantly pressing to be present-at-hand in alternation. They are in a curious middle state, this I call ‘unready-to-hand’ drawing on Heidegger's notion of conspicuousness. Breakdowns, such as these, serve an extremely important cognitive function revealing to us the nature of our practices and equipment by bringing them ‘present-at-hand’ to our attention. However, the present-at-hand in computationality is of extremely limited duration, but also repeated in random ways, we could think of this as a stream of unreadiness-to-hand, specific to this mode of revealing. It is only when a breakdown occurs that we become aware of the fact that ‘things’ in our world exist not as the result of individual acts of cognition but through out active participation in a domain of discourse and mutual concern. We can think of this specific computational breakdown in two different ways:

Something intrinsic to the computational means that computational devices (and entities that contain computational devices) are constantly moving in and out of this unready-to-hand state.
Perhaps due to the loose coupling between interface and underlying code, this causes the pseudo-state of unreadyness-to-hand.

Anyway, it is clear from the history of computing that computers do not, nor have ever, been able to run themselves. They are constantly suffering from breakdowns, bugs, errors and crashes. Well-engineered physical machines do not suffer this constant breakdown. You could think of it as an oscillation, perhaps due to the underlying fragility of the nature of code, that means it is always on the constant verge of breakdown (again car engines do not act like this, once they are working they are working, generally speaking). Software and code is thus always calling to us from a position of unreadiness-to-hand. Software programmers have a lovely term for what I am getting at when they say that code throws an exception, which causes the machine to pause and wait for further instruction or execute an alternative method, or if no such instruction is available or forthcoming, it is said that code is unable to catch the exception and it crashes in someway (sometimes gracefully and at other times catastrophically).

Therefore it is not that computational equipment is different from equipment in other modes of revealing. Nor that there are special forms of computational equipment that have a ‘third mode' or somehow stand middle between presence and absence. Rather, computational devices appear to have the rather novel feature/bug of oscillating rapidly between Vorhandenheit/Zuhandenheit. Or perhaps better, constantly becoming ready-to-hand/unready-to-hand in quick alternation. And by quick this can be happening in microseconds, milliseconds, or seconds, repeatedly in quick succession. This aspect of breakdown has been acknowledged as an issue within human-computer design and is seen as one of pressing concern to be ‘fixed’ or made invisible to the computational device user (Winograd and Flores 1987). Although in previous accounts attention has not been paid to the rapidity of the oscillations that I am drawing attention to here.

Hence within computationality absence and presence are being experienced in this very specific and very curious way enabled by computational devices. This quantitative micro/milli/second oscillations between modes translate into an odd mediated pseudo-mode which is, perhaps, qualitatively experienced as 'uncanny' and which might analytically be referred to as 'radically unready-to-hand' or ‘flickering objects'.[2] This is part of the specificity of the phenomenological experience that I am gesturing towards in computationality as a mode of revealing in contrast to technicity.

We used to think that this feature/bug of computational systems was due to the immaturity of the disciplines and methods, but after 40 years of writing code/software we still suffer from the same problems (indeed called the software crisis in the 1960s). Code is now bigger than a single human being can understand. Thus, in a running system, and in escaping our comprehension, it inevitably has aporia and liminal areas that mean we cannot truly control or even understand its operation.

We might expect that the kinds of things that show up as equipment, goals, and identities would be specific to computationality. Firstly, the equipment would be more autonomous of human control and have delegated agency within its software/code structures. This might mean that in a similar way to the principle of physis which governed the Greek world, things might ‘whoosh’ up unexpectedly in a manner which was a bursting bringing-forth (Dreyfus 2004). Of course, in this sense they are computationally bringing themselves forth with hidden potential, but the surface effect is interestingly comparable. These new kinds of enchanted objects would both bring to present-at-hand themselves, but also bring forth other objects. This would have the interesting effect of causing the user to think about the object creating this kind of ‘flickering object’, which passed between readiness-to-hand and present-at-hand. Secondly, the kinds of goals and projects that people have would be expressed within a computational structure, perhaps real-time streams that are procedural, algorithmic, modular, and quantitatively expressed. Thirdly, the identities or roles that people would have would enable them to take a stand on themselves that would be computational. Self-tracking, life-hacking type monitoring might therefore be turned into a continuous self-reflexive lifestream.

What is the style of the computational world?

It is deeply algorithmic in nature, surface driven, haptic, and information-centric. The use of conversational interfaces, such as Apple Siri, is a useful harbinger of this computational future. Here, the user must be disciplined not to be conversational, but rather to be computationally conversational. Many millions of dollars of research money have been spent in an attempt to get computers to understand users' conversational language, this has mostly been a failure. However, it is clear that with a certain limited grammatical and syntactical model of the world, combined with a certain amount of ‘personality’ the conversational interface can present a good enough working interface. This is good enough in as much as it can capture a limited conversational plane, but also teach the user how to talk to these enchanted objects in a particular style. Where here 'style' is taken to refer to the set of practices considered skilful within a particular mode of revealing.

This style is imperative, based around particular notions of quasi-subjects and quasi-objects, not in a ‘real’ everyday sense, but rather as entities that have various kinds of relational and contextual properties. For example, a particular contact in an address book has a series of properties by virtue of being in the address book, namely they become tagged as quasi-subjective having mobility and locative properties. Also they perform within a web of relations between objects and other quasi-subjects, for example having relationships (e.g. wife, spouse, child, daughter) with other quasi-subjects, location (e.g. home, work), and a face (e.g. through photo recognition). One might say that quasi-subjects and quasi-objects are formed within relational networks that are now modelled in graph theory and performed computationally. Thus the modernist subject of technicity becomes a postmodernist quasi-subject of computationality. A mode of revealing as a set of real-time computational data points producing this computational quasi-subject: the streaming-being.

Notes

[1] The archiving of software and code and digital media more generally is currently being actively engaged with in fields such as software studies, critical code studies, digital humanities and new media. There is often a temptation to think of the software as a discrete 'object' or package, forgetting that software and code are extremely networked and cannot function when taken away from this software ecology. Here, I am thinking of the platform that supports the software/code, such as the particular hardware, software, operating system, network connections, etc. It is certainly clear that currently emulated environments leave a lot to be desired when interacting with previous software and code. Unlike books which are relatively self-contained objects (Foucault notwithstanding) software/code is not readable in the same manner. Merely storing the software, and here I am thinking particularly about the executable binary, will not be enough to access, read, execute and explore the package. But neither is storing the source-code, which requires particular compilers, platforms and processes to reanimate it. In some instances one can imagine that the entire totality of technical society would need to be stored to adequately reanimate software/code – for example highly networked software, like zombie botnets, cascading database systems, networked gaming systems, massively parallel virtual worlds, etc. which runs through and across the internet might be an example of this. Perhaps in the future we will have to be content with accepting that the only way to archive some software systems will be to leave them running in a domesticated virtual scene captured temporally and looped in eternity. The longer the loop of code/ecology, the better the ability for future historians to explore and understand their use and meaning.
[2] I have also referred to these previously as 'fractured objects'.

Bibliography

Berry, D. M. (2011) The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age, London: Palgrave.

Dreyfus, H. (2004) Being and Power: Heidegger and Foucault, accessed 29/10/11, http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/html/paper_being.html

Heidegger, M. (1977) The Question Concerning Technology and other Essays, London: Harper & Row.

Winograd, T. and Flores, F. (1987) Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design, London: Addison Wesley.

New Book: Understanding Digital Humanities

2011-09-20T12:24:00.000-07:00

The application of new computational techniques and visualisation technologies in the Arts & Humanities are resulting in fresh approaches and methodologies for the study of new and traditional corpora. This 'computational turn' takes the methods and techniques from computer science to create innovative means of close and distant reading. This edited book aims to discuss the implications and applications of what has been called Digital Humanities and the questions raised when using algorithmic techniques. Within this field there are important debates about the contrast between narrative versus database, pattern-matching versus hermeneutics, and the statistical paradigm versus the data mining paradigm. Additionally, new forms of collaboration within the Arts and Humanities are raised through modular Arts and Humanities research teams and new organisational structures (e.g. Big Humanities), together with techniques for collaborating in an interdisciplinary way with other disciplines (e.g. hard interdisciplinarity versus soft interdisciplinarity). This book draws from key researchers in the field to give a comprehensive introduction to some of the key debates and questions.

Iteracy: Reading, Writing and Running Code

2011-09-16T07:59:00.000-07:00

Mark Marino posed a very interesting question on Twitter yesterday, asking:

Who has a good alternative to "literacy" when it comes to programming or reading code? (Marino, 2011).

It is something that I have been thinking about too with the concept of digital Bildung and computationality (see Berry 2011). However, I would like to suggest that iteracy might serve as the name for the specific skills used for understanding code and algorithmic culture – as indeed literacy (understanding texts) and numeracy (understanding numbers) do in a similar context. That is, iteracy is specifically the practice or being able to read and write code, rather than the more extensive notion of digital Bildung (see Berry 2011: 20-26).

In short, Bildung is still a key idea in the digital university, not as a subject trained in a vocational fashion to perform instrumental labour, nor as a subject skilled in a national literary culture, but rather as subject that can unify the information that society is now producing at increasing rates, and which understands new methods and practices of critical reading (code, data visualisation, patterns, narrative) and is subject to new methods of pedagogy to facilitate it (Berry 2011: 168).

So digital Bildung would include the practices of iteracy and would build on them to facilitate a broader humanistic or critical education. Here, then, iteracy is defined broadly as communicative competence in reading, writing and executing computer code.

Iteration itself, is a term used in computing to refer to the repetition of a command, code fragment, process, function, etc. Understanding iteration is a crucial skill for developing programming skills as it is a means of re-using existing processes (looping structures). But also, iteration itself, combined with constant improvements, is a key way of developing software/code (very much associated with agile programming, for instance). An example of iteration in C++ code is:

int loop = 1;
while (loop <= 10)
{
cout << "Iteration #" << loop << endl;
loop++;
}

Here though I want to broaden the meaning of iteracy beyond mere looping structures in programming code. What skills, then, might be associated with this notion of iteracy?[1]

Computational Thinking: being able to devise and understand the way in which computational systems work to be able to read and write the code associated with them. For example abstraction, pipelining, hashing, sorting, etc. (see Wing 2011).
Algorithms: understanding the specifically algorithmic nature of computational work, e.g. recessions, iteration, discretisation, etc.
Reading and Writing Code: practices in reading/writing code require new skills to enable the reader/programmer to make sense of and develop code in terms of modularity, data, encapsulation, naming, commentary, loops, recursion, etc.[2]
Learning programming languages: understanding one or more concrete programming languages to enable the student to develop a comparative dimension to hone skills of iteracy, e.g. procedural, functional, object-oriented, etc.
Aesthetics of Code: developing skills related to appreciating the aesthetic dimension of code, here I am thinking of 'beautiful code' and 'elegance' as key concepts (see Oram and Wilson 2007).
Data and Models: understanding the significance and importance of data, information and knowledge and their relationships to models in computational thinking.
*Critical Code Studies: critical approaches to the study of computer source code. Marino argues: 'that we no longer speak of the code as a text in metaphorical terms, but that we begin to analyze and explicate code as a text, as a sign system with its own rhetoric, as verbal communication that possesses significance in excess of its functional utility... In effect, [Marino proposes] that we can read and explicate code the way we might explicate a work of literature in a new field of inquiry' (Marino 2006).[3]
*Software Studies: critical approaches to the study of software (as compiled source code), particularly large-scale systems such as operating systems, applications, and games. Alternatively this also includes the use of software to study other things, like culture (see Manovich 2008), which Manovich calls Cultural Analytics (Williford 2011). It might also entail the study of the use of software historically (see Ensmenger 2010).

I therefore see iteracy as developing the ability to reason critically and communicate using discourse to discuss, critique and study the medium of computer code[4]. Although I have kept critical code studies and software studies within the domain of iteracy I am tempted to place these approaches within the broader definition of digital Bildung, more specifically as methods and approaches related to critical inquiry of computationality (Berry 2011) or the information society more generally (hence the 'scare stars'). For example, Douglass (2007) poses the question:

So how do Software Studies and Critical Code Studies relate... Both are larger critical perspectives (on software and source code, respectively) that aim at a deeper understanding of digital, computational art and culture. How do they relate to each other? That is a thornier question, and perhaps unproductive at this early stage in the game when each term is a flag to rally round rather than a nation with well-defined borders. Each could arguably be defined as a subfield of the other, although I suspect what we have here is a classic Venn diagram arrangement with a high degree of potential overlap. The question will be easier to resolve when we move from proposed themes to formal definitions of methodologies. If software studies is centered around the phenomena of computation, and critical code studies is centered on the ephemera of uncompiled source, what are the distinctions (and hence advantages) that each perspective offers the other? (Douglass 2007).

This is an interesting question which I don't propose to answer here, but both critical code studies and software studies draw on the kinds of skills I identify above as iteracy (and we could even accept that they recursively draw upon themselves too if I leave them in the definition). Nonetheless, I do think that iteracy has some heuristic advantages over terms like 'code literacy', 'digital literacy', 'information literacy', and so forth. Especially the connotations that iteracy has with iteration, a key part of how code functions and is read and written.

One last thought: although I make the link between iteracy and looping/repetition, I think it is probably more accurate to think of iteration not as a circle but as a spiral. That is, that learning builds on previous learning and skills in a virtuous upward spiral that develops competence and capabilities.[5]

Notes

[1] These are offered as a first draft of the kinds of skills iteracy might require. They remain very much a work in progress.

[2] Of course computers read and write code too. We could therefore say that non-human entities have delegated iteracy.

[3] Here I am bracketing the question over the boundaries between software studies and critical code studies but Douglass attempted a definition as '[f]or simplicity in these examples I’m imagining “the domain of software” as “computation, its penumbra as pre-computation, post-computation, imagined computation, representations of computation” and so-forth. “Code,” in the sense Mark uses it in his writings on Critical Code Studies, are something like “human-readable and writeable representations relating to software.”' (Douglass 2007). Whist being fully aware of the difficulties of these definitions and acknowledging that they are still under contestation, this has some heuristic value in appreciating the general positions of the two camps.

[4] There is an interesting question about whether we can read code without any recourse to notions of computation. Personally I do not see any reason why code cannot be read as a self-standing or even historical text. Reading within the horizon of the program itself might be very productive, particularly for large scale systems that are extremely self-referential and intertextual.
[5] Naturally this reminds me of Hegel's notion of History as a spiral. It also is evocative of notions of dialectics as a means of learning and education.

Bibliography

Berry, D. M. (2011a) The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Douglass, J. (2007) Joining the Software Studies Initiative at UCSD, accessed 16 Sept 2011, http://writerresponsetheory.org/wordpress/2007/12/04/joining-the-software-studies-initiative-at-ucsd/

Ensmenger, N. L. (2010) Computer Boys Take Over, Cambridge: MIT Press.

Marino, M. C. (2006) Critical Code Studies, Electronic Book Review, accessed 16 Sept 2011, http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/codology

Marino, M. C. (2011) Who has a good alternative to "literacy", marcmarino, Twitter, Sept 15 2011, accessed 16 Sept 2011, https://twitter.com/markcmarino/status/114448471813144578

Manovich, L. (2008) Software Takes Command, accessed 16 Sept 2011, http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2008/11/softbook.html

Oram, A. and Wilson, G. (2007) Beautiful Code. London: O’Reilly.

Williford, J. (2011) Graphing Culture, Humanities Magazine, March/April 2011, accessed 16 Sept 2011, http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2011-03/Graphing.html

Wing, J. (2011) Research Notebook: Computational Thinking—What and Why?, accessed 16 Sept 2011, http://link.cs.cmu.edu/article.php?a=600

Messianic Media: Notes on the Real-Time Stream

2011-09-12T06:48:00.000-07:00

Realtime streams draw from the advantages of the processual nature of code/software to create a rapidly updating data-flow form that provides an ecology of real-time updates. An example of the real-time stream is the Twitter platform.

A stream is a dynamic flow of information (e.g. multi-modal media content). They are instantiated and enabled by code/software and a networked environment (see Berry 2011a). They are increasing part of the digital media ecology including:

notification streams (what you should know, @mentions)
activity streams (what are people doing?)
news and media streams (news and reporting, financial data, etc.)
‘pure’ or branded streams (recognised entities, human and non-human)
aggregated or ‘mixed’ streams (streams of streams)

Importantly, the real-time stream is not just an empirical object; it also serves as a technological imaginary, and as such points the direction of travel for new computational devices and experiences. Of course, the 'real-time' itself is a mediated construct, created in software and managed through careful processing and presentational cues for the user. After all, the mere passing through computation creates some latency, or data lag, that marks it as already in the past before the user receives it as a feedback loop.

A feedback loop involves four distinct stages. First comes the data: A behavior must be measured, captured, and stored. This is the evidence stage. Second, the information must be relayed to the individual, not in the raw-data form in which it was captured but in a context that makes it emotionally resonant. This is the relevance stage. But even compelling information is useless if we don’t know what to make of it, so we need a third stage: consequence. The information must illuminate one or more paths ahead. And finally, the fourth stage: action. There must be a clear moment when the individual can recalibrate a behavior, make a choice, and act. Then that action is measured, and the feedback loop can run once more, every action stimulating new behaviors that inch us closer to our goals (Goetz 2011).

This imaginary of everyday life, a feedback loop within and through streams of data is predicated on the use of technical devices that allow us to manage and rely on these streaming feeds. This combined with an increasing social dimension to the web, with social media, online messaging and new forms of social interaction, allows behaviour to be modified in reaction to the streams of data received. However, the technologies to facilitate the use of these streams are currently under construction and open to intervention before they become concretised into specific forms. We can ask questions about how participative we want this stream-based ecology to be, how filtered and shaped to we want it, who should be the curators, and who we can we trust to do this.

Cognitively, it is argued that streams are also suited to a type of reading called ‘distant reading’ as opposed to the ‘close reading’ of the humanities (Berry 2011a; Moretti 2007). This ‘close reading’ created a certain type of subject: narrativised, linear, what McLuhan called ‘typographic man’. At present there is a paradoxical relationship between the close reading of current taught reading practices and the distant reading required for algorithmic approaches to information. To illustrate, books are a great example of a media form that uses typographic devices for aiding cognition for ‘close’ reading: chapters, paragraphs, serif fonts, avoiding textual 'rivers' and white space. Most notably these were instantiated into professional typographic practices that are themselves now under stress from computational algorithmic approaches to typesetting and production. Close reading devices required a deep sense of awareness in relation to the the reader as a particular subject: autonomous, linear, narrativised and capable of feats of memory and cognitive processing. Devices were associated with a constellation of practices that were surrounded around the concept of the author (see Berry 2011b).

The future envisaged by the corporations, like Google, that want to tell you what you should be doing next (Jenkins 2010), presents knowledge as a real-time stream, creating/curating what they call ‘augmented humanity’. As Hayles (1999) states:

Modern humans are capable of more sophisticated cognition than cavemen not because moderns are smarter... but because they have constructed smarter environments in which to work (Hayles 1999: 289).

In a real-time stream ecology, the notion of the human is one that is radically different to the 'deep attention' of previous ages. Indeed, the user will be constantly bombarded with data from a thousand (million) different places, all in real-time, and requiring the complementary technology to manage and comprehend this data flow to avoid information overload. This, Hayles (2007) argues, will require 'hyper attention'. Additionally this has an affective dimension as the user is expected to desire the real-time stream, both to be in it, to follow it, and to participate in it, and where the user opts out, the technical devices are being developed to manage this too through curation, filtering and notification systems. Of course, this desiring subject is therefore then expected to pay for these streaming experiences, or even, perhaps, for better filtering, curation, and notification streams as the raw data flow will be incomprehensible without them.

Search, discovery and experimentation requires computational devices to manage the relationship with the flow of data and allows the user to step into and out of a number of different streams in an intuitive and natural way. This is because the web becomes,

A stream. A real time, flowing, dynamic stream of information — that we as users and participants can dip in and out of and whether we participate in them or simply observe we are [...] a part of this flow. Stowe Boyd talks about this as the web as flow: “the first glimmers of a web that isn’t about pages and browsers” (Borthwick 2009).

Of course, the user becomes a source of data too, essentially a real-time stream themselves, feeding their own narrative data stream into the cloud, which is itself analysed, aggregated, and fed back to the user and other users as patterns of data. This real-time computational feedback mechanism will create many new possibilities for computational products and services able to leverage the masses of data in interesting and useful ways. This might allow the systems being designed to auto-curate user-chosen streams, to suggest alternatives and to structure user choices in particular ways (using stream transformers, aggregation and augmentation). In some senses then this algorithmic process is the real-time construction of a person's possible 'futures' or their 'futurity', the idea, even, that eventually the curation systems will know 'you' better than you know yourself. This means that the user is 'made' as a part of the system, that is, importantly the user does not ontologically precede the real-time streams, rather the system is a socio-technical network which:

is not connecting identities which are already there, but a network that configures ontologies. The agents, their dimensions and what they are and do, all depend on the morphology of the relations in which they are involved (Callon 1998).

Nevertheless, it seems clear that distant reading of streams will become increasingly important. These are skills that at present are neither normal practice for individuals, nor do we see strong system interfaces for managing this mediation yet. This distant reading will be, by definition, somewhat cognitively intense, strengthening the notion of a ‘now’ and intensifying temporal perception. This is a cognitive style reminiscent of a Husserlian ‘comet’ subjectivity, with a strong sense of self in the present, but which tails away into history. It would also require a self that is strongly coupled to technology which facilitates the possibility of managing a stream-like subjectivity in the first place. Indeed, today memory, history, cognition and self-presentation are all increasingly being mediated through computational devices and it is inevitable that to manage the additional real-time streams data flows new forms of software-enabled systems will be called for.

Above we gestured already towards the softwarization of 'close reading' and the changing structure of a ‘preferred reader’ or subject position towards one that is increasingly algorithmic (of course, this could be a human or non-human reader). Indeed it is suggestive that as a result of these moves to real-time streams that we will see the move from a linear model of narrative, exemplified by books, to a ‘dashboard of a calculation interface’ and ‘navigational platforms’, exemplified by new forms of software platforms. Indeed, these platforms, and here we are thinking of a screenic interface such as the iPad, allow the ‘reader’ to use the hand-and-eye in haptic interfaces to develop interactive exploratory approaches towards knowledge/information and ‘discovery’. This could, of course, still enable humanitistic notions of ‘close reading’ but the preferred reading style would increasingly be ‘distant reading’. Partially, or completely, mediated through computational code-based devices. Non-linear, fragmentary, partial and pattern-matching software taking in real-time streams and presenting to the user a mode of cognition that is hyper attention based coupled with real-time navigational tools.

Lastly, more tentatively we would like to suggest an interesting paradox connected with the real-time stream, in that it encourages a comportment towards futurity. This, following Derrida, we would call ‘Messianic’ (a structure of experience rather than a religion) (Derrida 1994: 211), connecting the real-time stream to an expectation or an opening towards an entirely ungraspable and unknown other, a 'waiting without horizon of expectation' (Derrida 1994: 211). As Derrida writes:

Awaiting without horizon of the wait, awaiting what one does not expect yet or any longer, hospitality without reserve, welcoming salutation accorded in advance to the absolute surprise of the arrivant from whom or from which one will not ask anything in return and who or which will not be asked to commit to the domestic contracts of any welcoming power (family, state, nation, territory, native soil or blood, language, culture in general, even humanity), just opening which renounces any right to property, any right in general, messianic opening to what is coming, that is, to the event that cannot be awaited as such, or recognized in advance therefore, to the event as the foreigner itself, to her or to him for whom one must leave an empty place, always, in memory of the hope—and this is the very place of spectrality (Derrida 1994: 81).

The Messianic refers to a structure of existence that involves waiting. Waiting even in activity, and a ceaseless openness towards a future that can never be circumscribed by the horizons of significance that we inevitably bring to bear upon the possible future.

Derrida, like Benjamin, situates the messianic in a moment of hesitation. For Benjamin, that moment is one of "danger"; the past flashes up before disappearing forever. For Derrida, it is a moment of haunting; the spectral other makes its visitation in the disjunction between presence and absence, life and death, matter and spirit, that conditions representation. Although the messianic "trembles on the edge" of this event, we cannot anticipate its arrival. Because the arrival is never contingent upon any specific occurrence, the messianic hesitation "does not paralyze any decision, any affirmation, any responsibility. On the contrary, it grants them their elementary condition" (Specters 213). The moment of hesitation - the spectral moment - enables us to act as though the impossible might be possible, however limited the opportunities for radical change may appear to be in our everyday experiences. The global communications networks, although often invasive and dangerously reductive, also serve as privileged sites of messianic possibility precisely because of their accelerated virtualization (Tripp 2005).

This futurity raises important questions about the autonomy of the human agent, coupled as it is with the auto-curation of the stream processing not just providing information to but actively constructing, directing and even creating the socio-cognitive conditions for the subjectivity of the real-time stream, algorithmic humanity. A subject with a comportment towards awaiting which forgets and makes present. Or as Derrida suggests:

It obliges us more than ever to think the virtualization of space and time, the possibility of virtual events whose movement and speed prohibit us more than ever (more and otherwise than ever, for this is not absolutely and thoroughly new) from opposing presence to its representation. "real time" to "deferred time," effectivity to its simulacrum, the living to the non-living, in short, the living to the living-dead of its ghosts (Derrida 1994: 212).

Bibliography

Berry, D. M. (2011a) The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Berry, D. M. (2011b) The Computational Turn: Thinking about the Digital Humanities, Culture Machine, Special Issue on The Digital Humanities and Beyond, vol. 12, accessed 12/09/2011, http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/440/470

Borthwick, J. (2009) Distribution … now, accessed 12/09/2011, http://www.borthwick.com/weblog/2009/05/13/699/

Callon, M. (1998) Introduction: Embeddedness of Economic Markets in Economics, The Laws of the Markets, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, pp.1-57.

Derrida, J. (1994) Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, Trans. Peggy Kamuf, London: Routledge.

Goetz, T. (2011) Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops, Wired, accessed 12/09/2011, http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/06/ff_feedbackloop/

Hayles, N. K. (2007) Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes, Profession, 13, pp. 187-199.

Moretti, F. (2007) Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, London, Verso.

Tripp, S. (2005) From Utopianism to Weak Messianism: Electronic Culture’s Spectral Moment, Electronic Book Review, accessed 12/09/2011, http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/technocapitalism/dot-edu

New Book: Critical Theory and the Digital

2011-08-04T05:42:00.000-07:00

New book, Critical Theory and the Digital, coming in 2012 on Continuum.

Digital Shakespeare Monday 16 May 2011, Workshop and Talks, Swansea University

2011-05-07T03:58:00.000-07:00

Digital Shakespeare
Monday 16 May 2011

Workshop and Talks

SWANSEA UNIVERSITY
4th floor SmallTalk Room, Faraday Building

Organised by Dr. David M. Berry and Dr. Tom Cheesman

Few dispute that digital technology is fundamentally changing the way in which we engage in the research process. Indeed, it is becoming more and more evident that research is increasingly being mediated through digital technology. Many argue that this mediation is slowly beginning to change what it means to undertake research, affecting both the epistemologies and ontologies that underlie a research programme (sometimes conceptualised as 'close' versus 'distant' reading, see Moretti 2000). Of course, this development is variable depending on disciplines and research agenda, with some more reliant on digital technology than others, but it is rare to find an academic today who had no access to digital technology as part of the research activity and there remains fewer means for the non-digital scholar to undertake research in the modern university (see JAH 2008). Not to mention the ubiquity of email, Google searches and bibliographic databases which become increasingly crucial as more of the worlds libraries are scanned and placed online. These, of course, also produce their own specific problems, such as huge quantities of articles, texts and data suddenly available at the researcher's fingertips, indeed, "It is now quite clear that historians will have to grapple with abundance, not scarcity. Several million books have been digitized...and nearly every day we are confronted with a new digital historical resource of almost unimaginable size" (JAH 2008).

In this workshop we will look at how we might use the new digital tools of text aggregation, processing and information or data visualisation to provide the ways of looking at and thinking about Shakespeare. From making data patterns, to narrativising through algorithms and visualisation we aim to examine how these approaches and methods can assist in undertaking humanities research into textual materials.

Programme

11.30-12.00 Registration (4th floor SmallTalk Room, Faraday Building)

12 noon: Introduction and Welcome (David Berry)

12.15-12.50: The Swansea VVV Project: Visualising Version Variation (Tom Cheesman)

13.00-13.45: Understanding through Visualisation (Stephan Thiel, Potsdam)

13.45-14.00: Coffee Break

14.00-14.30: Shakespeare in Arabic (Sameh Hanna, Salford)

14.30-15.00: Visualising Textual Corpora (Geng Zhao, Swansea University)

15.15-16.15: Computational Information Design (Stephan Thiel, Potsdam)

16.15: Reflections on the workshop (Tom Cheesman, Robert S. Laramee)

16.45: Ends

There is no charge for the workshop but as space is limited please email d.m.berry@Swansea.ac.uk if you are interested in attending.

http://www.delightedbeauty.org/

Funded by the Research Institute for Arts and Humanities (RIAH)

Tabs, Pads and Boards: Why Apple et al will make a HDTV

2011-04-18T07:29:00.000-07:00

Xerox Palo Alto Researchers using Tabs, Pads and Boards (Weiser 1991)

There are many discussions across the internet about why Apple will not make a HDTV, ranging from simple cost, likely small return on investment, competitive environment, difficulty in innovating, long replacement cycles, and perceived customer lack of interest (Arment 2011, Dixon 2011, Hughes 2011, Lisagor 2011, cf. McCracken 2011). However, the majority of these articles make the fundamental mistake of treating a stand-alone product as a self-standing revenue stream, rather than considering it within the growing ecology of media appliances that Apple has been building. At the reception end of the very impressive Apple vertical media system Apple has, surprisingly, a rather poor product line. There are computers (laptop and desktop), which aren't ideal for watching mass media like films, iPads, which whilst very innovative are uncomfortable to hold for the duration of a television programme or film, iPhones and iPods, which whilst handy out-and-about are unlikely to be used to consume mass time-based media, suffering, as they do, from the same issue as the iPad.1 Therefore that leaves only the television, that much maligned representative of 20th Century media as the key communal access point into the new media environment, and clearly Apple currently doesn't manufacture or sell one.

Of course, they do make the so-called 'AppleTV', a television-add-on product that connects to an existing TV HDMI port. But I believe this is a transitional product that allows wide-spread testing of the value of a strategic technical innovation in HDTV, representing the beginning of the development of a protocol that enables this to take place through its AirPlay technology (see Gillmor 2011). As it stands AppleTV is a curious media-receiver for the television, supplying some computational intelligence into a dumb output device and pointing to the possibilities of streaming media. This, in itself, raises the question: is the television of the 20th Century still fit for purpose?

First, we should note that something has fundamentally changed in the media landscape. Foremost to this are the rise of computational media, and the ubiquity of the computer microprocessor. This has led to a rapid tsunami of disruptive change across the traditional media sector as media have become increasingly computational in form and function. Strangely, this has caught the traditional media completely by surprise even as it revolutionised the production and distribution mechanisms for media content and which they took advantage of to reduce their costs (Kiss 2011). At the heart of this transformation lies the magic of software/code which has enabled media to flow increasingly rapidly between various devices, spaces and places (Berry 2011), and which the traditional media has viewed with great suspicion and attempted to prevent through a mixture of law, digital rights management and sheer bloody-mindedness. The music industry missed the change in customers behaviour when they no longer wanted to purchase lumps of expensive plastic to play on clunky music players, and this has been followed by a similar change in television and film consumption. As Steve Jobs observed in 2010,

The way that we market movies is undergoing a radical shift. It used to be that you spent a fortune on advertising on TV running your trailers. But now you can advertise on the Web….When we went to the music companies, we said “who is your customer?” And they said, “Best Buy, Tower”…their distribution partners. But that wasn’t their customer. They needed to recognize who their true customer was….So what changed in the music business was not the back end, but the front end. The way that you market to the consumer….The film industry needs to embrace that. And it needs to let people watch the content they want to watch, when they want to watch it and where they want to watch it (Jobs quoted in Paczkowski 2010, emphasis added).

The key here is that it is the front-end that is suddenly under pressure from the massive changes bought forward by the rapid increase in processing ability, software/code and storage. The television and film industry isn't quite sure who their customer is anymore, and they are pretty certain it is not the kinds of people that rip their films and programmes and stream them around their houses. But these new technologies, that are now cheap enough to build into so-called smart televisions, are about to make everyone interested in real-time streaming information and data. The media industry also do not understand the new ways in which people want to consume their media both across and through devices – starting on one and finishing on another.

Indeed, we are on the cusp of a fundamental redefinition of what the television screen is: no longer the dumb output device that sits at the end of a uni-directional cable so that a corporation can sell your attention to the advertising industry. Simultaneously it is clear that the personal computer is also in the middle of a pretty fundamental shift itself, with Jobs memorably describing desktop computers as 'going to be like trucks' (Fried 2010). The success of the iPad, and other new tablet-like devices, shows that what people want to be able to do with their media will become increasing important in both differentiating computational products, but also in structuring the technology and media industries.2

However, momentous as these changes appear to be, they were heralded by research undertaken at the Xerox Palo Alto research centre in the 1990s. There researchers were given the space and time to think about how we might use technologies to augment the work (and play) that we undertake in our everyday lives. More importantly they questioned the 'personal' in the personal computer and wondered if,

The arcane aura that surrounds personal computers is not just a "user interface" problem. My colleagues and I at PARC think that the idea of a "personal" computer itself is misplaced, and that the vision of laptop machines, dynabooks and "knowledge navigators" is only a transitional step toward achieving the real potential of information technology. Such machines cannot truly make computing an integral, invisible part of the way people live their lives. Therefore we are trying to conceive a new way of thinking about computers in the world, one that takes into account the natural human environment and allows the computers themselves to vanish into the background (Weiser 1991: 78).

Drawing on substantial theoretical and empirical research they highlighted the importance of a technology falling into the background of the activity that the user wanted to undertake. This they christened ubiquitous computing. Clearly, key to this is that the technical device or object should be merely a surface interface to the underlying task that a user wished to accomplish, whether playing a film, sending a letter, reading a book or so forth. For this to be less a problem of using the computer, with its arcane and clunky keyboard interface, and more a problem of accessing the media directly they argued,

Such a disappearance is a fundamental consequence not of technology, but of human psychology. Whenever people learn something sufficiently well, they cease to be aware of it. When you look at a street sign, for example, you absorb its information without consciously performing the act of reading.. Computer scientist, economist, and Nobelist Herb Simon calls this phenomenon "compiling"; philosopher Michael Polanyi calls it the "tacit dimension"; psychologist TK Gibson calls it "visual invariants"; philosophers Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger call it "the horizon" and the "ready-to-hand", John Seely Brown at PARC calls it the "periphery". All say, in essence, that only when things disappear in this way are we freed to use them without thinking and so to focus beyond them on new goals (Weiser 1991: 78).

Through a number of refinements and empirical experiments they settled on range of device categories that seemed to be needed to negotiate a computational media landscape, dividing them into three classes: tabs, pads, and boards: tabs are 'inch-scale machines that approximate active Post-It notes', pads are 'foot-scale ones that behave something like a sheet of paper (or a book or a magazine)', and boards are 'yard-scale displays that are the equivalent of a blackboard or bulletin board' (Weiser 1991: 80). It does not take much imagination to see that Apple's strategy has followed the Xerox research to a remarkable degree, except for one glaring exception (cf. Ozzie (2009) where he outlines Microsoft's 'three screens and a cloud definition'):3

Tabs: iPhone, iPod
Pads: iPad, Macbook Air,
Boards: ?

Again, it is critical that the Xerox team saw computation as a distributed system, not a self-contained device. That is, that they understood the importance of the network for computational media. This immediately transformed the kinds of information that each of these classes of technical device was able to use and transmit to others, and most importantly these devices were programmed to understand the importance of the real-time stream, above and beyond that of historical data and media. Indeed, they even referred to 'liveboards':

Liveboards can also be used as bulletin boards. There is already too much data for people to read and comprehend all of it, and so Marvin Theimer and David Nichols at PARC have built a prototype system that attunes its public information to the people reading it. Their "scoreboard" requires little or no interaction from the user other than to look... (Weiser 1991: 86).

Twitter (Gruber 2008)

Again, it is striking how contemporary the problems and solutions are that the Xerox team are gesturing towards. We are today entering a rapidly changing computational ecology being structured around the concept of the real-time stream (Berry 2011). Currently, most tools created to deal with the real-time stream have favoured temporality as a means of both representing and presenting the data, such as with Twitter, where the real-time stream tends to be viewed as a rapidly changing flow of information down a page (see image). However, this kind of representation is actually rather poor when you want to negotiate the information is contains, it needs, in other words, to allow the transformation of time-axis manipulation which Friedrich Kittler theorised as that '[which] shift[s] the chronological order of time to the parallel order of space – and spaces are things that can principally be restructured – [thus] written media become elementary forms that not only allow temporal order to be stored but also to be manipulated and reversed' (Krämer 2006).

This requires a large surface area that allows information to be moved around, recombined and re-presented in different ways. It also enables the juxtaposition, rotation, reversal and visualisation of data in interesting new ways. As Latour (1986) points out,

on paper, hybrids can be created that mix drawings from many sources. Perspective is not interesting because it provides realistic pictures ; on the other hand, it is interesting because it creates complete hybrids : nature seen as fiction, and fiction seen as nature, with all the elements made so homogeneous in space that it is now possible to reshuffle them like a pack of cards.

For the Xerox scientists this space could be created by the use of large screens that they called 'boards'. These boards allowed the user to project, send, manipulate, write on and generally visualise different forms of media on a collaborative, multiply authored, multiply viewable space in a communal environment. They explained:

Yard-size displays (boards) serve a number of purposes: in the home, video screens and bulletin boards; in the office, bulletin boards, whiteboards or flip charts. A board might also serve as an electronic bookcase from which one might download texts to a pad or tab. For the time being, however, the ability to pull out a book and place it comfortably on one's lap remains one of the many attractions of paper. Similar objections apply to using a board as a desktop; people will have to get used to using pads and tabs on a desk as an adjunct to computer screens before taking embodied virtuality even further... Boards built by Richard Bruce and Scott Elrod at PARC currently measure about 40 by 60 inches and display 1024x768 black-and-white pixels. To manipulate the display, users pick up a piece of wireless electronic "chalk" that can work either in contact with the surface or from a distance. Some researchers, using themselves and their colleagues as guinea pigs, can hold electronically mediated meetings or engage in other forms of collaboration around a liveboard. Others use the boards as testbeds for improved display hardware, new "chalk" and interactive software (Weiser 1991: 85).

We are already seeing the beginning of experiments in these new ways of spatialising the real-time stream, such as Pulse, Flipboard and Showyou on a pad device, but with the greater size of a television screen, or board, new ways to present, negotiate and visualise media will become increasingly possible. However, the Xerox engineers cautioned:

The technology required for ubiquitous computing comes in three parts: cheap, low-power computers that include equally convenient displays, a network that ties them all together, and software systems implementing ubiquitous applications (Weiser 1991: 85).

Clearly, the first two have been available for a while, with tablets and smart phones able to leverage their computational power to provide very convincing interfaces to the media environment, and networks built around WiFi, now starting to enable the transmission of real-time streams of data and media that allow live viewing and interaction. However, until now the software systems that would enable this ubiquitous interaction of different devices both of and in the media network have been slow to be developed because of the reluctance, previously mentioned, of the traditional media to give up their profitable transmission monopolies.

With AirPlay, however, Apple, has created a real-time streaming system that combined with technologies like iTunes Home Sharing, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr and so forth requires only the terminal output device, the board, to complete the vertical media infrastructure and consumption network (cf. Gerrish 2011 who argues the HDMI interface ports will be the key site of media competition). Haptic, networked, smart and communal, this would complete the ubiquitous computing trinity that Xerox dreamed of over twenty years ago, and points the way towards both the real-time streams and the online media clouds that allows a whole new digital media ecology to blossom and grow.4

Notes

1. Other problems remain with tab and pad type devices most noticeably the current tethered reliance on the PC, see Gruber (2011) for an interesting discussion of this.
2. Here one can only note the remarkable new self-definition of Apple that Steve Jobs introduced in a keynote in 2010 where he stated that Apple lay between liberal arts and technology, and which he reiterated again in 2011 stating: 'it's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough. That it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing' (see Macworld 2011).
3. 'I don't think it's – they'll be totally cloud-based in the realm, in the – let me back up. There's kind of a – in order to get things going across the company you need meetings, you need to say things, say them again, and say them again. So we say three screens and a cloud, three screens and a cloud, three screens and a cloud, throughout the company. And what that means is everything we deliver, from a user experience perspective, will be – will have some aspect of its value delivered across the PC class of device, the phone class of device, and the TV class of device. Every one of them will have something, and all will be connected to the cloud. That will bring them all together' (Ozzie 2009).
4. This is how Apple describe airplay: 'You have great HD videos on your iPad and some friends on your couch. Or you’re in the middle of an epic action scene that could use a little more screen. Just tap the AirPlay icon on your iPad and see it on your HDTV. Make sure your iPad and Apple TV are connected to the same Wi-Fi network, and the AirPlay icon appears automatically' (Apple 2011).

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Thoughts on Augmented Computational Inequality

2011-03-07T05:01:00.000-08:00

When thinking about the profound changes introduced by digital technology at a social, economic and political level, it is interesting to see recent arguments being made in terms of two elites battling out for supremacy over who is able to 'control' culture and serve as the gatekeepers to it (see Jarvis 2011, Anderson 2011). Here I want to think of them as two camps, on the one side we have what I call the moderns, represented by writers like Nick Carr (2011) and Matthew Crawford (2010), and in the postmodern camp writers like Jeff Jarvis (2011) and Clay Shirky (2010). Indeed it is in this vein that Jeff Jarvis criticises what he calls the The distraction trope, the idea that technology is undermining our ability to think deeply without being sidetracked (see Agger 2009, Freedland 2011). In a similar way to the enlightenment thinkers who pitched the moderns against the old, Jarvis argues:

And isn’t really their fear, the old authors, that they are being replaced? Control in culture is shifting (Jarvis 2011).

In this argument, Jarvis attacks 'modern' writers like Nick Carr (2010) and Jonathan Freedland (2011), who worry about the changes that digital technology introduce into our lives as we are increasingly living non-linear lives. Indeed, the shift could be understood as one from the modernist subject, unified, coherent, linear, reflexive to a postmodern subject, fragmented, incoherent, non-linear, and increasingly real-time (see Berry 2011). Jarvis believes that the moderns' arguments essentially boil down to an attempt to hold back culture and technology so that an old elite remain in power. These 'old' elites are not the traditionalists that the original moderns attacked. Indeed, those traditionalists supported religion, the King and the old hierarchies of status and power.

Rather it is the moderns themselves that the postmoderns have no time for. These moderns are the middle class who have benefited from the Humboldtian ideals, the bourgeois who have monopolised the media, the universities, and the professional class more generally over the past century.

For the German Idealists, like Humboldt, culture was the sum of all knowledge that is studied, as well as the cultivation and development of one’s character as a result of that study. Indeed, Humboldt proposed the founding of a new university, the University of Berlin, as a mediator between national culture and the nation-state. Under the project of ‘culture’, the university would be required to undertake both research and teaching, respectively the production and dissemination of knowledge. The modern idea of a university, therefore, allowed it to become the preeminent institution that unified ethnic tradition and statist rationality by the production of an educated cultured individual (Berry 2011: 19).

These new 'old' moderns are the formerly privileged minority who were educated in a national culture and shared in a cultural milieu that they believed that was rightfully theirs. This cultural education gave them not only the power of discourse more generally, but also real power, in terms of preparation through elite schools and universities in traditionally humanities education to become the masters. These are described as the kinds of people that used to read novels like Tolstoy's War and Peace (see Carr 2010) – although it is doubtful that they ever did. As Carr (2008) argues,

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it” (Carr 2008).

Of course, it was never a problem for the working class to have staccato minds and to suffer the consequences of the shallowness of thinking bought by poor education and little access to high culture. These moderns now express their concern that they too may be losing their cognitive powers in a technology infused society. Indeed, their fears sometimes sound rather like a paranoia over a potential loss of the self,

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle (Carr 2008).

This is identified as a loss being suffered by the 'literary types' (Carr 2008), the cultural elite who previously were able to monopolise the deep thinking in a society. Naturally, this cultural elite also considered themselves the natural leaders of a society too. In Britain we tend to think of Oxbridge educated politicians like David Cameron, George Osbourne, Nick Clegg, and Ed Milliband who currently monopolise political power – although it is doubtful that we think of them as deep thinkers.[1] They were certainly educated in the belief that certain kinds of knowledge, usually humanities knowledge, was for 'some humans', an elite that could understand and protect it (Fuller 2010). For the postmoderns, on the other hand, the world has already shifted beyond the moderns' control, Holt (2011) explains:

‘No one reads War and Peace,’ responds Clay Shirky, a digital-media scholar at New York University. ‘The reading public has increasingly decided that Tolstoy’s sacred work isn’t actually worth the time it takes to read it.’ (Woody Allen solved that problem by taking a speed-reading course and then reading War and Peace in one sitting. ‘It was about Russia,’ he said afterwards.) The only reason we used to read big long novels before the advent of the internet was because we were living in an information-impoverished environment. Our ‘pleasure cycles’ are now tied to the web, the literary critic Sam Anderson claimed in a 2009 cover story in New York magazine, ‘In Defense of Distraction’. ‘It’s too late,’ he declared, ‘to just retreat to a quieter time’ (Holt 2011).

The new barbarians at the gates are increasingly led by techno-libertarians who declare that technology is profoundly disruptive of old powers, status and knowledge. Indeed, David Clark (1991) famously declared what has become one of the guiding principles of the IETF,

In many ways, the IETF runs on the beliefs of its participants. One of the "founding beliefs" is embodied in an early quote about the IETF from David Clark: "We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code". (Hoffman 2010).

The postmoderns, themselves generally educated in technology, business, technology law, and the physical sciences, see themselves pitted against an old guard that they see as increasingly defending an unsustainable position. For them knowledge can now be freely mediated through digital technology, and the moderns, as guardians of culture and history, are out-of-date, defunct and obsolete. This is, of course, revolutionary talk, and is reminiscent of the original premise of the social sciences that argued for 'all humans' rather than a privileged subset (see Fuller 2010). Indeed, one could argue that the universalisation of their claims to democratic access to knowledge is crucial for their political project. All the bulwarks of the modern empire, the university, the state, the large-scale corporation and even the culturally sophisticated educated elite are threatened with being dismantled by a new techno-social apparatus being built by the postmoderns.[2]

However, the arguments of the postmoderns have an important and critical flaw – they are blind to the problems created by economic inequality. The moderns dealt with this political economic problem by educating a minority of the population that would be involved in the social reproduction of knowledge but were crucially committed to the wider 'public good'. The postmoderns, on the other hand, call for the market alone to right the wrongs of class, status and hierarchy without any countervailing means of correcting for areas where the market produces problems, so-called 'market-failure'.[3] For the moderns, the state can be used as a tool to correct the wrongs of the market and offer solutions through the use of various kinds of intervention, for example to help prevent inequality, to regenerate an area or to correct lack of investment by the private sector.

Within the terms of the postmodern imaginary, however, the state is itself identified as part of the problem, having been to closely entwined with the logic of the moderns. The only solution is transparency and 'openness', a dose of sunlight being applied to all areas of social life. Usually in the form of private wealth channelled through philanthropy linked to a calculative instrumental rationality, such as demonstrated by the Gates Foundation.

"In this case, 40 superwealthy people want to decide what their money will be used for," Peter Krämer, a Hamburg shipping magnate and philanthropist, told the German magazine Der Spiegel. "That runs counter to the democratically legitimate state. In the end, the billionaires are indulging in hobbies that might be in the common good, but are very personal" (Bruinius 2010).

Thus, the postmoderns see the world divided starkly between those who work hard, and those who do not (usually in hidden areas away from the glare of cleansing technology); for those that work hard will inherit the riches, but for those who do not, then a technological solution will be found to solve this problem, usually in the form of league tables, targets, incentive structures and monitoring. Lyotard clearly identified this postmodern mindset where,

Knowledge becomes a force of production it also becomes both a tool and object of economic and political power. Knowledge...is already... a major...stake in the worldwide competition for power. It is conceivable that nation-states will one day ﬁght for control of information, just as they battled of over territory, and... control of access to and exploitation of raw materials and cheap labour. A new ﬁeld is opened for industrial and commercial strategies on the one hand, and political and military strategies on the other. (Lyotard 1984: 5)

The result of this new circuit of power and knowledge is that knowledge is now connected directly to wealth. Indeed, the underlying problem is that ‘truth’ is increasingly tied to expenditure and power, for the pursuit of knowledge is now tied to the use of advanced and, on the whole, expensive technologies. Power is connected to expenditure, for there can be no technology without investment just as there can be no investment without technology. But further to this, in an era of augmented technology then those who can afford it will have bought the cognitive capabilities that certain technologies allow. In other words, it is not that writers such as Nick Carr are losing their ability to think, rather they do not earn enough money to buy the right kind of technology to think with. Google, amongst others, looks forward to a new age of 'augmented humanity'

Monetizing “augmented humanity” will require large existing businesses that depend on the economics of scarcity to change to the “economics of ubiquity,” Schmidt said, where greater distribution means more profits. He cited the (long-expected) successful monetization of YouTube as an example. “Augmented humanity” will introduce lots of “healthy debate” about privacy and sharing personal information, and it will be empowering for everybody, not just the elite, Schmidt said (Gannes 2010).

This implies new gatekeepers to the centres of knowledge in the information age are given by technologies, cognitive and data-processing algorithms, data visualisation tools and high-tech companies. Providing you have the money you will have access, and not just access, as we increasingly rely on computational devices to process this raw data and information. Thinking itself, outsourced into cognitive technical devices will supply the means to understand and process the raw information given by access. For Lyotard the only way to fight this corporate and military enclosure of knowledge is clear: ‘The line to follow for computerization to take . . . is, in principle, quite simple: give the public free access to the memory and databanks’ (Lyotard 1984: 67). However, it is clear that access itself will not be enough, it is not that we live in an information age, rather it is that we live in a computational age, and computation costs time and money, something which is unequally distributed throughout the population.

Indeed, the consequences of this computational inequality is that the richer you are the faster you will think, the wider the knowledge you can pay to access, and the better your analysis. This is a not a computational divide between the computational-haves and the computational-have-nots, but the reduction of all knowledge to the result of an algorithm. The postmodern rich won't just think they are better, indeed they won't necessarily be educated to a higher level at all, rather they will just have the better cognitive-support technology that allows them to do so. Knowledge is therefore recast to be computable, discrete, connected, in a real-time flow and even shallow – if by shallow we mean that knowledge exists on a plane of immanence rather than hierarchically ordered with transcendental knowledge at the peak.

To build this new world order the existing gatekeepers of knowledge need to be bought to heel to enable the computational systems to scour the world's knowledge bases to prepare it for this new augmented age.[4] Knowledge and information will be the fuel of this new capitalism. Indeed, Lyotard was right in calling for the databanks to be opened, but he might not have realised that they would contain too much information for any single human-being to understand without access to the unequally distributed computational technology and know-how. We might therefore paraphrase Lyotard and say that the line is, perhaps, in principle, quite simple: give the public free access to the algorithms and code.

Notes

[1] "Consider the social pedigree of the leading lights on both front benches today. Cameron, Clegg and Osborne went to private schools whose fees are more than the average annual wage. More than a third of the current Commons was privately educated, three percentage points up on that elected in 2005, reversing a downward trend over several generations... The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, went to Oxford from affluent north London, graduated in philosophy, politics and economics — or PPE, an apprenticeship scheme for budding pols — and was soon working for Gordon Brown. The defeated David Miliband went to the same Oxford college (Corpus Christi), also did PPE and was soon advising Tony Blair... The shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, is another Oxford man, who also graduated in — yes— PPE and also ended up working for Brown. At Oxford he met his future wife (and current shadow home secretary) Yvette Cooper, which should not be a surprise, because she too was reading PPE" (Neil 2011).
[2] If this reminds you of the statements of Julian Assange and Wikileaks, it should. They draw from a similar vein for their critique: ''Its not only in Vietnam where secrecy, malfeasance and unequal access have eaten into the first requirement of foresight ("truth and lots of it")." (Assange 2006).
[3] Although a nascent universalisation is suggested by the notion of the 'common' as used by movements like the Creative Commons and open source software groups (see Berry 2008).
[4] This in part explains the attack on the universities current monopoly on knowledge by both the state and the information techno-capitalists. It also show why the state is under such pressure to release its own reservoirs of information in the form of the open access movement, with notable examples being the US data.gov and the UK data.gov.uk. For a good example of this see the Cape Town Open Education Declaration.

Bibliography

Agger, M. (2009) Heidegger and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Slate, accessed 6/3/2011, http://www.slate.com/id/2218650/

Andreson, K. (2011) The Battle for Control — What People Who Worry About the Internet Are Really Worried About, accessed 6/3/2011, http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2011/03/02/the-battle-for-control-what-people-who-worry-about-the-internet-are-really-worried-about/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ScholarlyKitchen+%28The+Scholarly+Kitchen%29

Assange, J. (2006) Of Potholes and Foresight: The Road to Hanoi, Counterpunch, accessed 6/3/2011, http://www.counterpunch.org/assange12052006.html

Berry, D. M. (2008) Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source, London: Pluto Press.

Berry, D. M. (2011) The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bruinius, H. (2010) Can Warren Buffett and Bill Gates save the world?, Christian Science Monitor, accessed 6/3/2011, http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Guide-to-Giving/2010/1120/Can-Warren-Buffett-and-Bill-Gates-save-the-world

Carr, N. (2008) Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains, The Atlantic Magazine, July/August 2008, accessed 6/3/2011, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/

Carr, N. (2010) The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember, London: Atlantic Books.

Clark, D. (1992) A Cloudy Crystal Ball -- Visions of the Future, Presentation given at the 24th Internet Engineering Task Force, accessed 6/3/2011, http://ietf.org/proceedings/prior29/IETF24.pdf

Crawford, M. (2010) The Case for Working with Your Hands: or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good, London: Viking.

Fuller, S. (2010) ‘Humanity: The Always Ready – or Never to be – Object of the Social Sciences?’, in Bonwel, J. W. (ed.), The Social Sciences and Democracy, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Shirky, C. (2010) Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, London: Allen Lane

The Ontology of Twitter

2011-02-13T09:57:00.000-08:00

One of the problems we have when thinking about the new real-time media streams, like Twitter and Facebook, is that our metaphors are usually based on old media forms (e.g. television or radio, or even, in some descriptions a cocktail party). For example, thinking about Twitter as television means that there is a tendency to think in terms of channels, programming, a passive audience and interactivity limited to selecting the channel to watch. It is no surprise that YouTube borrowed this 'comfortable' metaphor to explain to users what it was. These metaphors can therefore stifle how we understand a new media platform, and perhaps even shape the way it is further used. Here, I want to argue that if we are to understand the medium of Twitter, then we should try to look at the properties that are particular to it as it currently stands:

It is a real-time medium.
Information flows through it, if you miss it then the information passes by (although look at Google's response in the creation of Google Replay).
It is based around an interest graph (things people find interesting rather than friends or colleagues) (Barnett 2010).
It is very flexible, even with the 140 character restriction the content of a tweet is textual and can, due to being able to support urls, point to any other form of media (e.g web/photos/video).
The entire tweet (as a JSON data entity) can carry location data, user data and other contextual data that makes it extremely powerful.
It has little memory, right now you can only retrieve the most recent 3,200 tweets per person (Haines 2011). However, Twitter does pass over its entire archive of public Tweets to the Library of Congress[1] for storage and research after six months for internal library use, for non-commercial research, public display by the library itself, and preservation (Twitter 2010).[2]
Twitter has a client/server structure. Should Twitter go down, then so does the ability to share on the network.[3]

These qualities seem to point to a medium, or platform, that is extremely similar in some respects to a newswire system or news agency data feed, such as provided by Reuters or Bloomberg. These are extremely fast data transmission systems usually built around a proprietary data protocol generally for transmitting real-time news, data and financial market information, for example Thomson Reuters uses RDF (Reuters Data Feed). These data feeds themselves are extremely low latency, in Reuters case financial, text, and numeric data takes less than an average of half a millisecond to move through the system (Quinton 2005). These are, in effect, the mature versions of the system of stock ticker introduced in the late 19th Century:[4]

The stock ticker was invented in 1867 by Edward A. Calahan, an engineer associated with the American Telegraph Company. It was a printing telegraph with two independent type-wheels, placed under a glass bell jar (to keep off dust) and powered by a battery (Jenkins et al., 1989: 153). The wheels were mounted face-to-face on two shafts and revolved under the action of an electromagnet. The first wheel had the letters of the alphabet on it; the second wheel had figures, fractions and some letters. The inked wheels printed on a paper tape divided into two strips: the security’s name was printed on the upper strip and the price quote on the lower one, beneath the name (Preda 2005: 755).

The stock ticker produced a constant flow of information that was sent by telegraph around the country about news and price movements on the stock exchange. The telegraph, of course, was also used to send personal messages as well as stock information. Indeed, Schott (2009) speculated that tweeting using the Telegraphic codes from 1891 might catch on again as an entire system of message codes had been developed to squeeze meaning into the 150 character telegraph limit:

The 140-character limit of Twitter posts was guided by the 160-character limit established by the developers of SMS. However, there is nothing new about new technology imposing restrictions on articulation. During the late 19th-century telegraphy boom, some carriers charged extra for words longer than 15 characters and for messages longer than 10 words. Thus, the cheapest telegram was often limited to 150 characters (Schott 2009).

With the growth of stock exchanges, the stock ticker companies developed a client/server structure with price changes being transmitted back to the centre, which were then resent out to the provincial exchanges. For the users of the ticker service, unlike the telegraph, the stock ticker printed its message out as a continual unfolding stream of information on paper which could be read by anyone:

The flow of price variations visualized the results of ongoing conversational exchanges, and disassociated their results from the individual authority of the participants in those conversations. At the same time, the flow linked the results to each other, made the ties that bound them visible as the tape unfolded, and made the market in its turn visible as an abstract, faceless, yet very lively whole. All the felicity conditions that made the speech act valid (intonation, attitude, look, wording, pitch of voice, and so on) were blanked out. Authority and credibility was transferred from the broker’s person to the machine. The flow of figures and letters on the ticker tape became an appresentation (Husserl 1977 [1912]: 112, 124–25)... In other words, perception (of price rhythms) and representation (of floor transactions) fused together (Preda 2005: 763).

This 'blanking out' of the speech act is, of course, very familiar to users of Twitter. This medium, due to its reliance on 140 character messages ensures a terse blank text that tends towards the factual and news-like message. It is interesting to note that a great majority of tweets have actually been found to be only around 40 characters long (Ayman 2010, cf Hubspot 2009). It is, perhaps, little wonder that the news organisations have adapted to using it so easily.[5] The other aspect is how users have taken to Twitter and Facebook in such a remarkable way, perhaps even more so with the growth of mobile app versions of the services. The similarity of ticker users becoming entranced by the information on the stock tickers to contemporary users of Twitter and Facebook, who also stop and stare at their screens and seemingly fall into a trance, is striking:

In his reminiscences, Richard D. Wyckoff (1934a: 37), a stock operator and pioneer of chart analysis, wrote that in 1905 friends of his could sit and watch the tape for an hour and a half without any interruption. Wyckoff himself had trained hard so that he could watch the ticker tape for up to an hour. He remembered how in 1907 James R. Keene, the financial speculator, fell into a ‘ticker trance’:

I used to stand facing him, my left elbow on his ticker while talking to him. He would hold the tape in his left hand and his eye-glasses in his right as he listened to me, then on went the glasses astride his nose as he bent close to the tape in a scrutiny of the length that had passed meanwhile. I might be talking at the moment his eye began to pick up the tape again, but until he finished he was a person in a trance. If, reading the tape, he observed something that stimulated his mental machinery, I might go on talking indefinitely; he wouldn’t get a word of it .... He appeared to absorb a certain length of tape, and to devote to its analysis a specified interval, measured by paces. Sometimes he returned to the ribbon for another examination, followed by more pacing. (Wyckoff, 1930: 148, quoted in Preda 2005: 766)

This 'Twitter trance', or attentiveness to the temporality of Twitter, disciplines the user to keeping ahead of the stream and by being 'in the stream' the user has to develop a temporal awareness fitted and co-constructed by this technical device (or agencement),[6] whether delivered via the browser or an app on a mobile phone. Again, the similarities to the stock ticker are remarkable:

The stress on observation and attentiveness fitted in very well with the overall discourse of the ‘science of financial markets’, so popular in late 19th century. It required of investors precisely those qualities preached by manuals: attention, vigilance and constant observation of financial transactions and of price variations. For the investor, it is only reasonable to follow the market movements and to try to be efficient (Preda 2005: 773).

The time presented by Twitter, in particular, is a constant real-time flow, which is modulated by the activity of the users on the stream. Time is referred to in the past tense, with even the most recent tweet having happened a few seconds ago, and marked as such to the user. Each tweet placed within its temporal box, neatly segmented in a structured textual format by the other tweets in the constant flow of time represented by technical time (see the the raw Twitter public timeline here as JSON data).[7] As Preda (2005) described with the stock ticker,

a ragged temporal structure was replaced by a smooth one, with the consequence that price variations became visualizations of market transactions and objects of symbolic interpretation. The ticker made market exchanges visible as they happened, disentangled them from local conversations, and transformed them into something that is both abstract and visible in several forms to everybody at once. They are visible in the flow of names and prices on the paper strip, but also in the financial charts, which are nowadays also produced in real time. The quality of price data changed: instead of multiple, discontinuous, heterogeneous and unsystematically recorded prices, we now have single, continuous, homogeneous, nearly real-time price variations (Preda 2005: 776).

Indeed, we could argue that the quality of media conversations are changing: instead of multiple, discontinuous, heterogeneous and unsystematic conversations, we now have single, continuous, homogeneous, nearly real-time updates of news, stories, lives, events and activities, all streamed through a common format that is distributed in real-time around the world. This, I think, helps us to think about the way in which a particular limited platform of data transmission has become a mass media and in doing so is preparing/teaching users to cope with real-time streams of information, a key requirement for the kinds of services and technologies that are currently being developed in Silicon Valley. Thus, perhaps we should think of Twitter less as a radio, or as television, but rather as a Ticker, granted one that contains information other than stock prices (although it does that too). Twitter as a Ticker also reinforces its sense of temporality as a constant set of 'ticks' that move around the world, and are connected to the activities and tweets of the users that use the service.[8]

Notes

[1] The Library has been collecting materials from the web since it began harvesting congressional and presidential campaign websites in 2000. Today they hold more than 167 terabytes of web-based information, including legal blogs, websites of candidates for national office, and websites of Members of Congress (Raymond 2010).

[2] Starting 10/10/2010, Twitter began transferring all public tweets to the Library of Congress for archiving. Tweets that are 24 weeks old (6 months) or older will be saved forever, and the user will no longer be able to delete them. By using the hashtag #NoLOC.org, the user will continue to use Twitter like normal, but when the tweet turns 23 weeks old, it is deleted automatically (NoLOC 2011).

[3] In contrast to Diaspora, for example, which is a distributed social networking service, providing a decentralized alternative to social network services like Twitter and Facebook.

[4] Two years before the introduction of the ticker in NewYork City, there was a short-lived attempt to introduce an alternative technology in Paris, called the pantelegraph (Preda, 2003). This technology, however, was quickly abandoned and was never used on financial exchanges other than the Paris Bourse (Preda 2005: 777, fn 2).

[5] In places like China, the character restriction plays out different as the Chinese script allows quite long message (on Sina Microblog, for example as Twitter is banned in China). This means that newspapers and corporations are increasingly using Sina Microblog (sometimes referred to as Sina Weibo) as a means of distributed communications.
[6] 'Agencement is a common French word with the senses of either “arrangement,” “fitting” or “fixing” and is used in French in as many contexts as those words are used in English: one would speak of the arrangement of parts of a body or machine; one might talk of fixing (fitting or affixing) two or more parts together; and one might use the term for both the act of fixing and the arrangement itself, as in the fixtures and fittings of a building or shop, or the parts of a machine.' (Phillips 2006).
[7] 'It should be noted here that in the USA and in Britain, at the time of the ticker’s invention, several efforts were under way to develop machines for making speech visible. On the one hand, there were attempts at developing technical devices for the deaf, connected to the method of lip-reading. The people involved in these attempts were also involved in the development of better telegraphic devices and tried their hand (though unsuccessfully) at a telegraphic machine fitted for financial transactions. Alexander Graham Bell’s father was among those making such efforts' (Preda 2005: 777, fn 8). It would be interesting to have a Twitter to speech 'radio' with an automated text to speech system (see VoiceForge).
[8] It is also an interesting observation that in a similar way in which stock tickers, data feeds and financial markets are visualised, there are also many competing Twitter visualisation systems, including Visibletweets.com, tweepskey.com, Twitter StreamGraphs, isparade.jp, toriseye.quodis.com, revisit, twistori, MentionMap.

Bibliography

Ayman (2010) How many characters do you tweet?, accessed 13/02/2011 http://www.ayman-naaman.net/2010/04/21/how-many-characters-do-you-tweet/

Barnett, E. (2010) Twitter building 'interest graph' to target users, The Telegraph, accessed 13/02/2011 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/8016062/Twitter-building-interest-graph-to-target-users.html

Haines, T. (2011) How long does Twitter keep tweets?, Quora, accessed 13/02/2011 http://www.quora.com/How-long-does-Twitter-keep-tweets

Hubspot (2009) State of the Twittersphere, June 2009, accessed 13/02/2011 http://blog.hubspot.com/Portals/249/sotwitter09.pdf

NoLOC (2011) #NoLOC.org: Keep Your Tweets From Being Archived Forever, accessed 13/02/2011 http://noloc.org/

Phillips, J. (2006) Deleuze and Guattari, accessed 13/02/2011 http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/deleuzeandguattari.htm

Preda, A. (2005) Socio-Technical Agency in Financial Markets: The Case of the Stock Ticker, Social Studies of Science, October 2006 vol. 36 no. 5 753-782.

Quinton, L. (2005) RDF Direct Schedule Revealed, accessed 13/02/2011 http://db.riskwaters.com/public/showPage.html?page=427560

Raymond, M. (2010) How Tweet It Is!: Library Acquires Entire Twitter Archive, accessed 13/02/2011 http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2010/04/how-tweet-it-is-library-acquires-entire-twitter-archive/

Schott, B. (2009) Twittergraphy, The New York Times, accessed 13/02/2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/03/opinion/03schott.html?_r=1

Twitter (2010) Tweet Preservation, accessed 13/02/2011 http://blog.twitter.com/2010/04/tweet-preservation.html

Real-Time Streams and the @Cloud

2011-01-23T10:55:00.000-08:00

Heraclitus says, doesn't he, that all things move on and nothing stands still, and comparing things to the stream of a river he said that you cannot step twice into the same stream (Plato, in Cratylus 402A)

The Internet, and the services that it offers, have traditionally been a rather static affair. However, there is evidence that we are beginning to see a shift in the way in which we use the web, and also how the web uses us. This is known as the growth of the so-called ‘real-time web’ and represents the introduction of a software system that operates in real-time in terms of multiple sources of data fed through millions of data streams into computers, mobiles, and technical devices more generally.[1] Utilising Web 2.0 technologies, and with the mobility of new devices and their locative functionality, they can provide useful data to the user on the move. Additionally, these devices are not mere ‘consumers’ of the data provided, they also generate data themselves, about their location, their status and their usage. Further, they provide data on data, sending this back to servers on private data stream channels to be aggregated and analysed (such as clickstreams). As the web space begins to fill with these devices and services that have the facility to feedback information and exchange data in real-time we see the experience of the web begin to change, that is,

1. The web is transitioning from mere interactivity to a more dynamic, real-time web where read-write functions are heading towards balanced synchronicity. The real-time web... is the next logical step in the Internet’s evolution.

2. The complete disaggregation of the web in parallel with the slow decline of the destination web.

3. More and more people are publishing more and more “social objects” and sharing them online. That data deluge is creating a new kind of search opportunity (Malik 2009).

The way we have traditionally thought about the Internet has been in terms of pages, but we are about to see this changing to the concept of ‘streams’ (see Berry 2011). In essence, the change represents a move from a notion of information retrieval, where a user would attend to a particular machine to extract data as and when it was required, to an ecology of data streams that forms an intensive information environment. This notion of living within streams of data is predicated on the use of technical devices that allow us to manage and rely on the streaming feeds. Thus,

Once again, the Internet is shifting before our eyes. Information is increasingly being distributed and presented in real-time streams instead of dedicated Web pages. The shift is palpable, even if it is only in its early stages... The stream is winding its way throughout the Web and organizing it by nowness (Schonfeld 2009).

Importantly, the real-time stream is not just an empirical object; it also serves as a technological imaginary, and as such points the direction of travel for new computational devices and experiences (indeed, it encourages the consumption of devices and media). In the world of the real-time stream, it is argued that the user will be constantly bombarded with data from a thousand (million) different places, all in real-time, and that without the complementary technology to manage and comprehend the data she would drown in information overload (see Datasift for an example of a real-time social media filtering engine). But importantly, the user will also increasingly desire the real-time stream, both to be in it, to follow it, and to participate in it, and where the user wishes to opt out, the technical devices are being developed to manage this too. For example:

To avoid the speed of a multiply authored follow stream, especially where they might number in the hundreds or thousands of people you follow, instead you might choose to watch the @mention stream instead. This only shows Tweets that directly mention your username, substantially cutting down the amount of information moving past and relying on the social graph, i.e. other people in your network of friends, to filter the data for you. That is, the @mention stream becomes a collectively authored stream of information presented for you to read (Berry 2011).

Gillmor (2011) calls this the @mention Cloud, and I think that the idea of a space or 'Cloud' which is a holding location for real-time streams is really interesting. Clouds, as in cloud-computing, are normally understood as location independent data-centres that are controlled and owned by data warehousing companies and which provide data, software and even processing power to client computer systems.[2] But clouds can also refer to statistical clusters, where elements are grouped around an anchor, in this case a particular username, or @mention. With his notion of the @mention cloud, Gillmor gestures towards an important part of the problem with following and understanding real-time streams, and that is the relevance and quality of the information they contain. And they do hold important information, its just difficult sometimes to find, extract and order it (for example, see the curation of real-time data streams in crises or Brand management with SwiftRiver). Indeed, one of the problems is that they transcend organisational boundaries and move quickly between different topics and knowledges.

The @mention stream, found on services like Twitter, allow your social graph (that is the group of people you follow) to act as a kind of social filter, only drawing your attention to the things that they think are important, often called the interest-graph. To attempt to follow the raw data stream from Twitter (which they call the firehose) would be impossible as the dataflow is just too fast, indeed, according to ComScore, there were over 25 billion tweets in 2010 alone (Jeavons 2011). Interestingly, there are now so-called Data Resellers like Gnip, that offer subsets of the firehose, called halfhose (50% of data stream), decahose (10% of data stream) and Spritzer (1-2% of data stream). Therefore information management becomes an increasingly important concern in order to keep some form of relationship with the flow of data that doesn’t halt the flow, but rather allows the user or organisation to step into and out of a number of different streams in an intuitive and useful way. This is because the web becomes,

A stream. A real time, flowing, dynamic stream of information — that we as users and participants can dip in and out of and whether we participate in them or simply observe we are [...] a part of this flow. Stowe Boyd talks about this as the web as flow: “the first glimmers of a web that isn’t about pages and browsers” (Borthwick 2009).

Of course, real-time streams and clouds could also enable the emergence of what is being called "cloud jacking" and "cloud hijacking" (Cohen 2009), and we might even envision dark-streams and dark-clouds, indeed we could think of Wikileaks as a dark-cloud itself. We could imagine that these dark-clouds absorb data, rather like a black-hole absorbs light, and into which we are unable to perform search or discovery, that is they remain opaque to us. Within certain industries this kind of dark cloud system could be useful for anonymising streams, or creating aggregations or search results without revealing the dark algorithms that drive them (Google page rank could be thought of as a dark algorithm), unsurprisingly in the finance sector there is the emergence of a similar concept called dark pools.[3]

However, the key question remains: how might we transform an @mention stream from its diachronic state, as a fast moving stream, into a frozen place of immanence, that is a synchronic state. This can be understood as the ability to use cloud-computing to freeze statistical @mention clouds, which I want to call the @Cloud.[4] The reason is, that as the real-time streams currently stand they become increasingly difficult to manipulate, refer to, or even connect and compare. The @Cloud would therefore need to implement the function that Kittler argues is intrinsic to all digital media, that is Time Axis Manipulation,[5]

[which] shift[s] the chronological order of time to the parallel order of space – and spaces are things that can principally be restructured – [thus] written media become elementary forms that not only allow temporal order to be stored but also to be manipulated and reversed (Krämer 2006).

I also want to suggest that the @Cloud would preferably combine the features of computational search (exemplified by Google) and the social graph (exemplified by Facebook or Twitter). The key is to be able to translate multiple fast moving streams of information, that is a time-based medium, into a space-based medium. Providing the interface for temporality through storage, this is the essence of the @Cloud. But the @Cloud, is not merely a storage Cloud itself, as it allows multiple stream-like access points back into the information that it has collected, you have forwarded to it, or friends in your social graph have suggested (we could call these @streams). The @Cloud would, therefore, allow the replaying of the streams, the rewinding or fast-forwarding of the data, and even the move to a different dimension to view the information from above, below, or even comparatively against other data (anyone who has read Flatland will understand what I am suggesting here).

We can think of the @Cloud as a sink, into which we can pour various information, both diachronic (i.e. moving data streams that continue to flow into it) and synchronic (e.g. email, books, PDFs, photos, websites, URLs, etc).[6] But it is more than just a cloud-based storage service or data-locker.[7] The @Cloud can then act as a meta-interface with multiple dimensions into a datascape that is rapidly changing, including real-time streaming of itself (see Rao 2009, Gillmore 2011). This is, of course, not just RSS, which is information syndication, as it brings to bear the advantages of the social graph and even what we might call the thing-graph (i.e. the collection of devices, and things, that you have connected together through this @Cloud itself). Thus, one could watch one's own @streams from @clouds, including media-streams, photo-streams, @mention streams, and @reading streams. Each stream could potentially be connected to the others, and relations, ideas and concepts from each stream could interact and provoke combinations, questions and narratives that might not be apparent in isolation.

Indeed, thinking of the @Cloud as an interface might be the best way of understand it, a highly visual experience for viewing complex time-based media, in a number of computationally and social-media assisted ways. Treating all information in the @Cloud as a potential stream (frozen/dried streams), rather than a collection of discrete objects, which can then be re-streamed using a number of different search/tagged criteria, would also open up new narrative modes of interpretation (certainly Qwiki demonstrates one way of reconceptualising search as a streamed media experience, and Apple iPhoto 9 with its 'Faces' and 'Places' function shows another). We could also imagine viewing one's @Cloud through filters such as heat-maps, wordle-type visualisations, location, people, places or even through versioning systems which highlight change within data streams.[8] Importantly, we could also share portions of our @clouds, creating new @tropospheres that others could explore.[9]

Notes

[1] Programming these new real-time services will pose particular problems as they will require computer code to remediate static web services to distributed computational devices. They also required the kind of distributed computing power that is able to respond, process and communicate through networks.

[2] The Ecologist argues that "[c]alling this vague collection of ‘other’ computers a ‘cloud’ evokes a vaporous world of weightless websites, but that would be misleading. In truth, The Cloud consists of dataprocessing warehouses the size of football fields, strung together by fat cables and inside which air-conditioning fans cool rows of computing servers 24 hours a day. Far from being weightless, the expanding digital cloud is really an enormous necklace of steel, silicon and concrete." (Ecologist 2008)

[3] Whilst within data circles there has been a move to the language of streams and clouds, within the finance sector there has been a corresponding rise in the use of the language of so-called dark pools, these are "trading venues that match buyers and sellers anonymously. [Which by] concealing their identity, as well as the number of shares bought or sold, dark pools help institutional investors avoid price movements as the wider market reacts to their trades." (Economist 2009)

[4] We might think of the @cloud as a platform for streaming services. Completely customisable to user requirements in terms of search criteria and relevance.

[5] The "means of time axis manipulation are only possible when the things that occupy a place in time and space are not only seen as singular events but as reproducible data. Such production sites of data are ‘discourse networks’. Discourse networks are media in the broader sense: they form networks of technological and institutional elements." (Krämer 2006)

[6] The idea of collating email into an @cloud that can then be streamed back out, perhaps in a short format, translates the static nature of email into a dynamic streaming format. I can imagine that an @stream for email would be extremely useful.

[7] Streaming media from an @cloud into custom @streams, such as photo-streams may be part of the investment Apple is making into huge data centres.

[8] Services that help to filter the real-time streams include peer-scoring like Klout and PeerIndex that calculate your 'authority' in relation to other users of real-time services. Datasift, for example allows you to combine this reputational data with geo-location, 'sentiment', and lots of other filters to perform search and discovery on the Twitter realtime data stream. This could be used for crisis-tracking, brand tracking/management, or other forms of rapid data discovery. Datasift even has rules such as 'no swearing' which enables the automatic bowdlerisation of Twitter, or patterns of text like ISBN codes.

[9] Salman Rushdie in Haroun and the Sea Of Stories has a wonderful passage that describes something similar to the @cloud, that is a living stream of narratives and temporalities: "Haroun looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different color, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity; and [the Water Genie] explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each colored strand represented and contained a single tale. Different parts of the Ocean contained different sorts of stories, and as all the stories that had ever been told and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest library in the universe. And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories; so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive." (Rushdie, quoted in Rumsey 2009).

Digital Humanities: First, Second and Third Wave

2011-01-14T09:47:00.000-08:00

Few dispute that digital technology is fundamentally changing the way in which we engage in the research process. Indeed, it is becoming more and more evident that research is increasingly being mediated through digital technology. Many argue that this mediation is slowly beginning to change what it means to undertake research, affecting both the epistemologies and ontologies that underlie a research programme (sometimes conceptualised as 'close' versus 'distant' reading, see Moretti 2000).¹ Of course, this development is variable depending on disciplines and research agenda, with some more reliant on digital technology than others, but it is rare to find an academic today who had no access to digital technology as part of the research activity. Library catalogues are now probably the minimum way in which an academic can access books and research articles without the use of a computer, but with card indexes dying a slow and certain death (Baker 1996, 2001) there remains fewer means for the non-digital scholar to undertake research in the modern university (see JAH 2008). Not to mention the ubiquity of email, Google searches and bibliographic databases which become increasingly crucial as more of the worlds libraries are scanned and placed online. These, of course, also produce their own specific problems, such as huge quantities of articles, texts and data suddenly available at the researcher's fingertips:

It is now quite clear that historians will have to grapple with abundance, not scarcity. Several million books have been digitized by Google and the Open Content Alliance in the last two years, with millions more on the way shortly; the Library of Congress has scanned and made available online millions of images and documents from its collection; ProQuest has digitized millions of pages of newspapers, and nearly every day we are confronted with a new digital historical resource of almost unimaginable size (JAH 2008).

Whilst some decry the loss of the skills and techniques of older research traditions which relied heavily on close reading, others have warmly embraced what has come to be called the digital humanities, and has been strongly associated with the use of computational methods to assist the humanities scholar (Schreibman et al 2008; Schnapp and Presner 2009; Presner 2010; Hayles 2011).

The digital humanities themselves have had a rather interesting history, starting out as ‘computing in the humanities’, or ‘humanities computing’, the early days were very often seen as a technical support role to the work of the ‘real’ humanities scholars who would drive the projects. This was the application of the computer to the disciplines of the humanities, what has been described as treating the ‘machine’s efficiency as a servant’ rather than ‘its participant enabling of criticism’ (McCarty 2009). As Hayles explains, changing to the term ‘“Digital Humanities” was meant to signal that the field had emerged from the low-prestige status of a support service into a genuinely intellectual endeavour with its own professional practices, rigorous standards, and exciting theoretical explorations’ (Hayles 2011). Ironically, as the projects became bigger, more complex, and developed computational techniques as an intrinsic part of the research process, technically proficient researchers increasingly saw the computational as part and parcel of what it is to do research in the humanities itself. That is, computational technology has become the very condition of possibility required in order to think about many of the questions raised in the humanities today. For example, Schnapp and Presner (2009), in the Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0, explained that,

The first wave of digital humanities work was quantitative, mobilizing the search and retrieval powers of the database, automating corpus linguistics, stacking hypercards into critical arrays. The second wave is qualitative, interpretive, experiential, emotive, generative in character. It harnesses digital toolkits in the service of the Humanities’ core methodological strengths: attention to complexity, medium specificity, historical context, analytical depth, critique and interpretation (Schnapp and Presner 2009, original emphasis).

Presner (2010) further argues that,

the first wave of Digital Humanities scholarship in the late 1990s and early 2000s tended to focus on large-scale digitization projects and the establishment of technological infrastructure, [while] the current second wave of Digital Humanities—what can be called “Digital Humanities 2.0”—is deeply generative, creating the environments and tools for producing, curating, and interacting with knowledge that is “born digital” and lives in various digital contexts. While the first wave of Digital Humanities concentrated, perhaps somewhat narrowly, on text analysis (such as classification systems, mark-up, text encoding, and scholarly editing) within established disciplines, Digital Humanities 2.0 introduces entirely new disciplinary paradigms, convergent fields, hybrid methodologies, and even new publication models that are often not derived from or limited to print culture (Presner 2010: 6).

The question of quite how the digital humanities undertake their research, and whether the notions of first and second wave digital humanities captures the current state of different working practices and methods in the digital humanities remains contested. However these can be useful analytical concepts for thinking through the changes in digital humanities. We might, however, observe the following, first-wave digital humanities was the building of infrastructure in the studying of humanities texts through digital repositories, text markup, etc. Whereas second-wave digital humanities expands the notional limits of the archive to include digital works and so bring to bear the humanities own methodological toolkits to look at born digital materials, such as electronic literature (e-lit), interactive fiction (IF), web-based artefacts, and so forth.

Indeed, I think that we need to further explore both first and second wave digital humanities, but also start to map out a tentative path for a third wave of digital humanities, concentrated focus around the underlying computationality of the forms held within a computational medium (I call this the computational turn in the Arts and Humanities, see Berry 2011).² That is, looking at the digital component of digital humanities in light of its medium specificity, as a way of thinking about how medial changes produce epistemic ones. This approach draws from recent work in digital humanities but also the specifics of general computability made available by specific platforms (Fuller, M. 2008; Manovich 2008; Montfort and Bogost 2009; Berry 2011). Therefore, I tentatively raise the idea that neither first, nor second-wave digital humanities really problematized what Lakatos (1980) would have called the ‘hard-core’ of the humanities, the unspoken assumptions and ontological foundations that support the ‘normal’ print-based research that humanities scholars undertake on an everyday basis (although see Presner 2010 who includes some discussion of this in his definition of digital humanities 2.0). The use of digital technologies can also problematise where disciplinary boundaries have been drawn in the past, especially considering the tendency of the digital to dissolve traditional institutional structures.³ Indeed, we could say that third-wave digital humanities points the way in which digital technology highlights the anomalies generated in a humanities research project and which leads to a questioning of the assumptions implicit in such research, e.g. close reading, canon formation, periodization, liberal humanism, etc. We are, as Presner (2010: 10) argues, ‘at the beginning of a shift in standards governing permissible problems, concepts, and explanations, and also in the midst of a transformation of the institutional and conceptual conditions of possibility for the generation, transmission, accessibility, and preservation of knowledge.’

As I argue elsewhere,

What I would like to suggest is that instead we are beginning to see the cultural importance of the digital as the unifying idea of the university. Initially [changes in technology] has tended to be associated with notions such as information literacy and digital literacy... [but] we should be thinking about what reading and writing actually should mean in a computational age. This is to argue for critical understanding of the literature of the digital, and... [the] shared digital culture through a form of digital Bildung. Here I am not calling for a return to the humanities of the past...‘for some humans’, but rather to a liberal arts that is ‘for all humans’ (see Fuller 2010). [T]his is to call for the development of a digital intellect as opposed to a digital intelligence... [Here] as Hofstadter (1963) argues, Intellect... is the critical, creative, and contemplative side of mind. Whereas intelligence seeks to grasp, manipulate, re-order, adjust, intellect examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criticizes, imagines. Intelligence will seize the immediate meaning in a situation and evaluate it. Intellect evaluates evaluations, and looks for the meanings of situations as a whole... Intellect [is] a unique manifestation of human dignity (Berry 2011: 20).⁴

Thus, there is an undeniable cultural dimension to computation and the medial affordances of software. This connection points to the importance of engaging with and understanding computer code, indeed, computer code can serve as an index of culture more generally (imagine digital humanities mapping different programming languages to the cultural possibilities and practices that it affords, e.g. HTML to cyberculture, AJAX to social media, etc.), not to mention mapping 'editing' software to new forms of film narrative, music, and art more generally, or cultural criticism via the digital humanities. As Liu (2011) argues:

In the digital humanities, cultural criticism–in both its interpretive and advocacy modes–has been noticeably absent by comparison with the mainstream humanities or, even more strikingly, with “new media studies” (populated as the latter is by net critics, tactical media critics, hacktivists, and so on). We digital humanists develop tools, data, metadata, and archives critically; and we have also developed critical positions on the nature of such resources (e.g., disputing whether computational methods are best used for truth-finding or, as Lisa Samuels and Jerome McGann put it, “deformation”). But rarely do we extend the issues involved into the register of society, economics, politics, or culture (Liu 2011).

This means that we could further ask the question: what is culture, politics and the economy after it has been ‘softwarized’? (Manovich 2008:41). That is not to say that humanities scholars, digital or otherwise, must be able to code or 'build' (cf. Ramsay 2011). Rather, that understanding the digital is in some sense also connected to understanding of code through study of the medial changes that it affords, that is, a hermeneutics of code (see Clinamen 2011, Sample 2011) or critical approaches to software itself (Manovich 2008, Berry 2011).⁵ One example, facilitated by software and code, is the emergence of the real-time stream of data, as opposed to the static knowledge objects humanities have traditionally been focussed upon, e.g. books and papers (see Flanders 2009). These include geolocation, real-time databases, Twitter, social media, SMS novels, and countless other processual and rapidly changing digital forms (including, of course, the Internet itself, which is becoming increasingly stream-like).

These streams are real-time and it is this aspect that is important because they deliver liveness, or ‘nowness’ to the users and contributors. Many technologists argue that we are currently undergoing a transition from a ‘slow web to a fast-moving stream... And as this happens we are shifting our attention from the past to the present, and our “now” is getting shorter’. Today, we live and work among a multitude of data streams of varying lengths, modulations, qualities, quantities and granularities. The new streams constitute a new kind of public, one that is ephemeral and constantly changing, but which modulates and reports a kind of reflexive aggregate of what we might think of as a stream-based publicness – which we might therefore call riparian-publicity (Berry 2011: 144).⁶

New methods and approaches, such as data visualisation, will be needed to track and understand these new streaming knowledge forms both in terms of pattern and narrative. Of course, there are also many existing humanities approaches that could also provide real value by application to these digital forms (both screenic and non-screenic).⁷ I also think that this could be a resourceful way of understanding cultural production more generally, for example, digital typesetting transformed the print newspaper industry, and eBook and eInk technologies are likely to do so again (the iPad and Kindle are ultimately devices to access real-time streaming culture). Not to mention how digital streams are infusing society, economics and politics. Therefore, I think that we should be taking the computational turn seriously as a key research question for the humanities (and the social sciences), and it is one that becomes increasingly difficult to avoid.

Notes

¹ As Moretti 2007) points out, the traditional humanities focuses on a "minimal fraction of the literary field...[a] canon of two hundred novels, for instance, sounds very large for nineteenth-century Britain (and is much larger than the current one), but is still less than one per cent of the novels that were actually published: twenty thousand, thirty, more, no one really knows—and close reading won’t help here, a novel a day every day of the year would take a century or so... And it's not even a matter of time, but of method: a field this large cannot be understood by stitching together separate bits of knowledge about individual cases, because it isn't a sum of individual cases: it's a collective system, that should be grasped as such, as a whole" (Moretti 2007: 3-4).

² What isn't captured with the notion of 'waves' is the complimentary simultaneity of the approaches. Layers might be a better term. Indeed, layers would indicate that their interaction and inter-relations are crucial to understanding the digital humanities.

³ For example as Liu (2003) argues, "[o]ne of the main tasks of those establishing programs in humanities technology, I suggest, is to use IT to refund and reorganize humanities work with the ultimate goal not of instituting, as it were, Humanities, Inc., but of giving the humanities the freedom and resources to imagine humanities scholarship anew in relation both to academic and business molds. The relation between narrow research communities and broad student audiences, for example, need not be the same as that between business producers and consumers. But unless the existing organizational paradigms for humanities work are supplemented by new models (e.g., laboratory- or studio-like environments in which faculty mix with graduate and undergraduate students in production work, or new research units intermixing faculty from the humanities, arts, sciences, engineering, and social sciences), it will become increasingly difficult to embed the particular knowledge of the humanities within the general economy of knowledge work." (Liu 2003: 8)

⁴ If software and code become the condition of possibility for unifying the multiple knowledges now produced in the university, then the ability to think oneself, taught by rote learning of methods, calculation, equations, readings, canons, processes, etc, might become less important. Although there might be less need for an individual ability to perform these mental feats or, perhaps, even recall the entire canon ourselves due to its size and scope, using technical devices, in conjunction with collaborative methods of working and studying, would enable a cognitively supported method instead. The internalisation of particular practices that have been instilled for hundreds of years in children and students would need to be rethought, and in doing so the commonality of thinking qua thinking produced by this pedagogy would also change. It would be a radical decentring in some ways, as the Humboldtian subject filled with culture and a certain notion of rationality, would no longer exist, rather, the computational subject would know where to recall culture as and when it was needed in conjunction with computationally available others, a just-in-time cultural subject, perhaps, to feed into a certain form of connected computationally supported thinking through and visualised presentation. Rather than a method of thinking with eyes and hand, we would have a method of thinking with eyes and screen (Berry 2011).

⁵ Currently digital humanities and software studies or critical code studies tend to be rather separate, but there is, of course, the potential for exchange of ideas and concepts in terms of their respective theoretical and empirical approaches.

⁶ A good example of riparian publicity is the use of @mention streams on Twitter. To avoid the speed of a multiply authored follow stream, especially where they might number in the hundreds or thousands of people you follow, instead you might choose to watch the @mention stream instead. This only shows Tweets that directly mention your username, substantially cutting down the amount of information moving past and relying on the social graph, i.e. other people in your network of friends, to filter the data for you. That is, the @mention stream becomes a collectively authored stream of information presented for you to read.

⁷ See Montfort (2004) where he argues, "When scholars consider electronic literature, the screen is often portrayed as an essential aspect of all creative and communicative computing — a fixture, perhaps even a basis, for new media. The screen is relatively new on the scene, however. Early interaction with computers happened largely on paper: on paper tape, on punchcards, and on print terminals and teletypewriters, with their scroll-like supplies of continuous paper for printing output and input both... By looking back to early new media and examining the role of paper... we can correct the 'screen essentialist' assumption about computing and understand better the materiality of the computer text. While our understanding of 'materiality' may not be limited to the physical substance on which the text appears, that substance is certainly part of a work's material nature, so it makes sense to comment on that substance." (Montfort 2004, emphasis added).

Bibliography

Baker, N. (1996) The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber, New York: Random House.

Baker, N. (2001) Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, New York: Random House.

Berry, D. M. (2011) The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Clinamen (2011) The Procedural Rhetorics of the Obama Campaign, retrieved 15/1/2011 from http://clinamen.jamesjbrownjr.net/2011/01/15/the-procedural-rhetorics-of-the-obama-campaign/

Flanders, J. (2009) The Productive Unease of 21st-century Digital Scholarship, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Summer 2009, Volume 3 Number 3, retrieved 10/10/2010 from http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/3/000055/000055.html

Fuller, M. (2008) Software Studies \ A Lexicon, London: MIT Press.

Fuller, S. (2010) Humanity: The Always Already – or Never to be – Object of the Social Sciences?, in Bouwel, J. W. (ed.) The Social Sciences and Democracy, London: Palgrave.

Hayles, N. K. (2011) How We Think: Transforming Power and Digital Technologies, in Berry, D. M. (ed.) Understanding the Digital Humanities, London: Palgrave.

JAH (2008) Interchange: The Promise of Digital History, The Journal of American History, retrieved 12/12/2010 from http://www.journalofamericanhistory.org/issues/952/interchange/index.html

Lakatos, I. (1980) Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Liu. A. (2003) The Humanities: A Technical Profession, retrieved 15/12/2010 from http://www.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/ayliu/research/talks/2003mla/liu_talk.pdf

Liu, A. (2011) Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities, retrieved 15/1/2011 from http://liu.english.ucsb.edu/where-is-cultural-criticism-in-the-digital-humanities/

Manovich, L. (2008) Software Takes Commons, retrieved 1/12/2010 from http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2008/11/softbook.html

McCarty, W. (2009) Attending from and to the machine, retrieved 18/09/2010 from http://staff.cch.kcl.ac.uk/~wmccarty/essays/McCarty,%20Inaugural.pdf

Montfort, Nick. (2004) Continuous Paper: The Early Materiality and Workings of Electronic Literature, retrieved 16/1/2011 from http://nickm.com/writing/essays/continuous_paper_mla.html

Montfort, N. and Bogost, I. (2009) Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, London: MIT Press.

Moretti, F. (2000) Conjectures on World Literature, retrieved 20/10/2010 from http://www.newleftreview.org/A2094

Moretti, F. (2007) Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, London, Verso.

Ramsay, S. (2011) On Building, retrieved 15/1/11 from http://lenz.unl.edu/wordpress/?p=340

Sample, M. (2011) Criminal Code: The Procedural Logic of Crime in Videogames, retrieved 15/1/2011 from http://www.samplereality.com/2011/01/14/criminal-code-the-procedural-logic-of-crime-in-videogames/

Schnapp, J. and Presner, P. (2009) Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0, retrieved 14/10/2010 from http://www.humanitiesblast.com/manifesto/Manifesto_V2.pdf

Schreibman, S., Siemans, R., and Unsworth, J. (2008) A Companion to Digital Humanities, London: Wiley-Blackwell.

Kittler, Optical Media

2010-10-03T06:59:00.000-07:00

Kittler writing about the difference between a focus on the medium, as opposed to the media content:

To put it plainly: in contrast to certain collegues in media studies, who first wrote about French novels before discovering French cinema and thus only see the task before them today as publishing one book after another about the theory and practice of literary adaptations – in contrast to such cheap modernizations of the philological craft, it is important to understand which historical forms of literature created the conditions that enabled their adaptation in the first place. Without such a concept, it remains inexplicable why certain novels by Alexandre Dumas, like The Three Musketeers, have been adapted for film hundreds of times, while old European literature, from Ovid's Metamorphoses to weighty baroque tomes, were simple non-starters for film... It is possible... to conclude from the visually hallucinatory ability that literature acquired around 1800 that a historically changed mode of perception had entered everyday life. As we know, after a preliminary shock Europeans and North Americans learned very quickly and easily how to decode film sequences. They realized that film edits did not represent breaks in the narrative and that close-ups did not represent heads severed from bodies. (Kittler, Optical Media, pp108)

The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age

2010-08-13T09:26:00.001-07:00

My new book is due out on Palgrave Macmillan, called The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age. The cover might look like the above...

If you don't know what writing is, you may think it is not especially difficult...

2010-08-04T06:04:00.000-07:00

“If you don't know what writing is, you may think it is not especially difficult.... Let me tell you that it is an arduous task: it destroys your eyesight, bends your spine, squeezes your stomach and your sides, pinches your lower back and makes your whole body ache.... Like the sailor arriving at the port, so the writer rejoices on arriving at the last line. De gratias semper”

Colophon of a 12th-century Beatus manuscript from Silos

Anyone in the middle of writing a book will strongly agree with the sentiments of this quote!

Brilliant tip when writing a book with Word Mac 2008

2010-07-02T14:09:00.000-07:00

If like me you are in the middle of editing a huge word document, in my case a book of 70,000 words, then you are jumping all over the place and it is driving you mad. Word does not seem particularly helpful here and you keep losing place of where you are. Especially if you are editing anything academic where you keep needing to go to the bibliography to enter references as you edit the text.

Well with a bit of luck I discovered that if you click the weird little circle (called 'Select Browse Object' in Microsoftese) on the scroll bars (between the double up/down arrows) you can set the double arrows to jump to headings you have declared. Simply by setting the chapter headings to be Heading 1, including the bibliography, you can now zip around the document very quickly to move things and edit, etc. I tried using the bookmark function but it so poorly implemented that it doesn't even compare to this browsing style..

Update: Even better tips include editing the preferences to turn off the fonts (so that they are not rendered which slows down the computer), and turn off the automatic word count, which also slows the computer to a crawl...

Remote and Ineffectual Don

2010-03-18T14:41:00.000-07:00

A. N. L. Munby

Remote and ineffectual Don,

Where have you gone, where have you gone?

Don in scarlet, Don in tails,

Don in advertising Daily Mails,

Don in Office, Don in power,

Don talking on the Woman's Hour,

Don knocking up a constitution,

Don with ideas on prostitution,

Don who is permanently plussed,

Don floating an Investment Trust,

Don judging jive at barbecue,

Don dressing down the E.T.U.,

Don architecturally brash,

Don not afraid to have a bash,

Don with Bentley, Don with Rolls,

Don organising Gallop Polls,

Don back from Russia, off to Rome,

Don on the Third, the Light, the Home,

Don recently ennobled Peer,

Don Minister, Don Brigadier,

Don brassy, Don belligerent,

Don tipping off for ten per cent,

Don christian-naming with the Stars,

Don talking loud in public bars,

Remote and ineffectual Don,

Where have you gone, where have you gone?

Thoughts on re-reading Hilaire Belloc's famous Lines to a Don. by A. N. L. Munby.

quoted in Rose, J. and Ziman, J. (1964) Camford Observed. Gollancz.

The Computational Turn Reviews

2010-03-17T13:27:00.000-07:00

Interesting short reviews of the Computational Turn workshop that recently took place in Swansea..

http://www.paulhazel.com/2010/03/17/the-computational-turn/

http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/2010/03/13/katherine-hayles-keynote-address-at-the-computational-turn/

http://alfalablog.huygensinstituut.nl/?p=387

Workshop: The Computational Turn

2010-03-07T09:14:00.000-08:00

Workshop: The Computational Turn

SWANSEA UNIVERSITY

9TH MARCH 2010

Keynote: N. Katherine Hayles (Professor of Literature at Duke University).

Keynote: Lev Manovich (Professor, Visual Arts Department, UCSD).

The application of new computational techniques and visualisation technologies in the Arts & Humanities are resulting in new approaches and methodologies for the study of traditional and new corpora of Arts and Humanities materials, sometimes called the Digital Humanities. This new 'computational turn' takes the methods and techniques from computer science to create new ways of distant and close readings of texts (e.g. Moretti). This one-day workshop aims to discuss the implications and applications of what Lev Manovich has called 'Cultural Analytics' and the question of finding patterns using algorthmic techniques. Some of the most startling approaches transform understandings of texts by use of network analysis (e.g. graph theory), database/XML encodings (which flatten structures), or merely provide new quantitative techniques for looking at various media forms, such as media and film, and (re)presenting them visually, aurally or haptically. Within this field there are important debates about the contrast between narrative against database techniques, pattern-matching versus hermeneutic reading, and the statistical paradigm (using a sample) versus the data mining paradigm. Additionally, new forms of collaboration within the Arts and Humanities are emerging which use team-based approaches as opposed to the traditional lone-scholar. This requires the ability to create and manage modular Arts and Humanities research teams through the organisational structures provided by technology and digital communications (e.g. Big Humanities), together with techniques for collaborating in an interdisciplinary way with other disciplines such as computer science (e.g. hard interdisciplinarity versus soft interdisciplinarity).

Papers are encouraged in the following areas:

- Distant versus Close Reading

- Database Structure versus Argument

- Data mining/Text mining/Patterns

- Pattern as a new epistemological object

- Hermeneutics and the Data Stream

- Geospatial techniques

- Big Humanities

- Digital Humanities versus Traditional Humanities

- Tool Building

- Free Culture/Open Source Arts and Humanities

- Collaboration, Assemblages and Alliances

- Language and Code (software studies)

- Information visualization in the Humanities

- Philosophical and theoretical reflections on the computational turn

Workshop Organised by Dr David M. Berry d.m.berry@swansea.ac.uk,

Department of Political and Cultural Studies, Swansea University.

Conference Coordinator: Sian Rees

Assistance on the day is being supplied by students on the MA Digital Media.

Funded by:

The Computational Turn

2009-12-20T16:00:00.000-08:00

The Computational Turn in Arts and Humanities

SWANSEA UNIVERSITY
9TH MARCH 2010

Organised by David M. Berry, Department of Political and Cultural Studies, Swansea University.
d.m.berry@swansea.ac.uk

Keynote: N. Katherine Hayles (Professor of Literature at Duke University)

Keynote: Other Invitees to be confirmed.

The application of new computational techniques and visualisation technologies in the Arts & Humanities are resulting in new approaches and methodologies for the study of traditional and new corpuses of Arts and Humanities materials. This new 'computational turn' takes the methods and techniques from computer science to create new ways of distant and close readings of texts (e.g. Moretti). This one-day workshop aims to discuss the implications and applications of what Lev Manovich has called 'Cultural Analytics' and the question of finding patterns using algorthmic techniques. Some of the most startling approaches transform understandings of texts by use of network analysis (e.g. graph theory), database/XML encodings (which flatten structures), or merely provide new quantitative techniques for looking at various media forms, such as media and film, and (re)presenting them visually, aurally or haptically. Within this field there are important debates about the contrast between narrative against database techniques, pattern-matching versus hermeneutic reading, and the statistical paradigm (using a sample) versus the data mining paradigm. Additionally, new forms of collaboration within the Arts and Humanities are emerging which use team-based approaches as opposed to the traditional lone-scholar. This requires the ability to create and manage modular Arts and Humanities research teams through the organisational structures provided by technology and digital communications (e.g. Big Humanities), together with techniques for collaborating in an interdisciplinary way with other disciplines such as computer science (e.g. hard interdisciplinarity versus soft interdisciplinarity).

Papers are encouraged in the following areas:

- Distant versus Close Reading
- Database Structure versus Argument
- Data mining/Text mining/Patterns
- Pattern as a new epistemological object
- Hermeneutics and the Data Stream
- Geospatial techniques
- Big Humanities
- Digital Humanities versus Traditional Humanities
- Tool Building
- Free Culture/Open Source Arts and Humanities
- Collaboration, Assemblages and Alliances
- Language and Code (software studies)

- Information visualization in Humanities
- Philosophical and theoretical reflections on the computational turn

Participation Requirements

Workshop participants are requested to submit a position paper (2000-5000 words) about the computational turn in Arts and Humanities, philosophical/theoretical reflections on the computational turn, research focus or research questions related to computational approaches, proposals for academic practice with algorithmic/visualisation techniques, proposals for new research methods with regard to Arts and Humanities or specific case studies (if applicable) and findings to date. Position papers will be published in a workshop PDF and website for discussion and some of the participants will be invited to present their paper at the workshop.

Deadline for Position papers: February 10, 2010
Submit papers to: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=tct2010

Workshop funded by The Callaghan Centre for the Study of Conflict, Power, Empire, and The Research Institute in the Arts and Humanities (RIAH) at Swansea University.

References

Clement, Tanya E. (2008) ‘A thing not beginning and not ending’: using digital tools to distant-read Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans. Literary and Linguistic Computing. 23.3 (2008): 361.

Clement, Tanya, Steger, Sara, Unsworth, John, Uszkalo, Kirsten (2008) How Not to Read a Million Books. Retrieved 10/11/09 from http://www3.isrl.illinois.edu/~unsworth/hownot2read.html

Council on Library and Information Resources and The National Endowment for the Humanities (2009) Working Together or Apart: Promoting the Next Generation of Digital Scholarship. Retrieved 10/11/09 from http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub145/pub145.pdf

Hayles, N. Katherine (2009) RFID: Human Agency and Meaning in Information-Intensive Environments. Theory, Culture and Society 26.2/3 (2009): 1-24.

Hayles, N. Katherine (2009) How We Think: The Transforming Power of Digital Technologies. Retrieved 10/11/09 from http://hdl.handle.net/1853/27680

Kittler, Fredrich (1997) Literature, Media, Information Systems. London: Routledge.

Krakauer, David C. (2007) The Quest for Patterns in Meta-History. Santa Fe Institute Bulletin. Winter 2007. Retrieved 10/11/09 from http://www.intelros.ru/pdf/SFI_Bulletin/Quest.pdf

Latour, Bruno (2007) Reassembling the Social. London: Oxford University Press.

Manovich, Lev (2002) The Language of New Media. MIT Press.

Manovich, Lev (2007) White paper: Cultural Analytics: Analysis and Visualizations of Large Cultural Data Sets, May 2007. Retrieved 10/11/09 from http://softwarestudies.com/cultural_analytics/cultural_analytics_2008.doc

McLemee, Scott (2006) Literature to Infinity. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved 10/11/09 from http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee193

Moretti, Franco (2005) Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. London: Verso.

Robinson, Peter (2006) Electronic Textual Editing: The Canterbury Tales and other Medieval Texts. Electronic Textual Editing. Modern Language Association of America. Retrieved 10/11/09 from http://www.tei-c.org/About/Archive_new/ETE/Preview/robinson.xml

Schreibman, Susan, Siemens, Ray & Unsworth, John (2007) A Companion to Digital Humanities. London: WileyBlackwell.

Filesoup

2009-08-05T01:25:00.000-07:00

Among the concerns was the news that the goods seized during the operation were no longer being held by police, but had instead been handed over to the Federation Against Copyright Theft (Fact), an accredited private group that often assists law enforcement with inquiries in such cases.

taken from the BBC news story is a worrying development. FACT is clearly setting itself up as a quasi-police body and I hope the Police have enough sense to do something about it.

Copy, Rip, Burn: Reviewed in THE

2009-02-15T03:56:00.000-08:00

Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source

12 February 2009

The production of non-proprietary software, more commonly known as free/libre and open-source software (FLOSS), has taken parts of the academic, activist and governmental world by storm. It has not only forced an intellectual reassessment of theories of human nature and creativity that help justify the expansion of intellectual property regimes, but it has also inspired academics, journalists and activists to craft similar endeavours.

David Berry, mindful of these developments, has written a persuasive account on the politics of copyleft and open source. Copy, Rip, Burn stands apart from its cohort because of its overtly critical bent. Berry offers a rich discursive analysis of FLOSS, but also situates it within the backdrop of capitalist forces that ultimately blunt, he argues, its radical potential. Within this general frame, he also builds - and this is the intellectual heart of his book - a typology drawn from the Roman legal system, which he uses to explode the binaries between private/public and property/commons commonly used to describe FLOSS. Given Berry's fresh intellectual contribution, this book is a must-read for any scholar or activist interested either in FLOSS or the general politics of IP regulation.

read more here...

Damian Green Arrest - Letter to my MP.

2008-12-24T09:07:00.000-08:00

Below is a letter I sent to my MP regarding the constitutionally important issue of Damian Green's arrest by the Metropolitan Police. I have finally received a letter from the Home Office - which essentially states it cannot comment about an ongoing police investigation (no surprise there then). More disappointing was the fact that my MP, Alan Williams, didn't bother to comment directly on the affair or appear interested in taking up the issue within the institution of Parliament (he merely forwarded the letter to the Home Office). He stands down at the next election and I will be interested to see if his replacement shows more interest in representing constituents concerns *within* Parliament.

Friday 28 November 2008

Dear Alan Williams MP,

I write to express my concern that Metropolitan Police officers, namely
members of its counter-terrorism command, arrested and searched the
offices of an acting MP, Damian Green. More worryingly I wish to
express dismay that it appears that they searched his office within the
Parliamentary Estate. I think it is unacceptable that police officers
submit any MP to this kind of search without clear reference to
Parliament. This is essentially that State interfering directly within
the workings of Parliament and as such shows that the police are
developing a worrying disregard for the sanctity and preeminence of
Parliamentary privilege. It is reported that Speaker Michael Martin
had authorised the search, if this is so, then I would expect you as my
MP to call for his resignation and for a full inquiry into the way in
which this matter was handled. More so considering the justification
was an obscure and little-used offence under common law 'aiding and
abetting, counselling or procuring misconduct in a public office'.

I am even more surprised and shocked that members of the Government
were not informed in advance of the decision of the police to conduct
this inquiry (more so when the police are required to enter Parliament
to search for information).

Parliamentary privilege exists to safeguard our democratic rights from
incursions from either the State, the Monarchy or any other threat to
our democracy. Parliament must assert itself and ensure that any search
or activity by the police or security services within its boundaries
are carefully monitored and subject to the authority of Parliament in
the last instance. Increasingly the rights of Parliament appear to be
considered anarchonistic or out-dated by too many members of the
security services or the police. In fact, it appears that this is also
the opinion of too many of the sitting parliamentarians. It is about
time for the dogmatic slumbers of MPs to be disturbed and Parliament to
take a severe and critical look at the attitudes towards Parliament by
government and State institutions, such as the police.

I hope that you will raise this matter in Parliament and with the Home
Office.

Yours sincerely,

David Berry

Lawrence Lessig Calls For New Great Depression :-)

2008-12-12T04:28:00.000-08:00

Brilliantly mad piece by Lawrence Lessig. I wonder, if Lawrence Lessig is revealing his early republican tendencies here?

It reminds one of Andrew Mellon (Treasury secretary 1921-1931): "Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate...People will work harder, live more moral lives".

This is the language of neoliberal/Ayn Randian economics that got us into this mess. It didn't work in 1929 and it won't work now. Even Greenspan admits that his Randian ideology has a flaw.

Its a good time to reread The Great Crash of 1929 by J K Galbraith and make sure we don't make the same mistakes again.

Time for Lessig to stop hanging out with the Objectivists with their weird right-wing ideas for Creative Commons.

If you haven't already, I suggest reading Paul Krugman's excellent piece in the New York Review of Books. And this and this important article.

Swansea Open Edutainment Declaration

2008-06-13T03:56:00.001-07:00

Objectivists, Entrepreneurs, Web Gurus, Corporates and Libertarians Launch Campaign to Transform Education, Call for Free, Adaptable Learning Materials Online

Swansea, January 23rd, 2008—A coalition of edutainers, foundations, free-market capitalists, adult-entertainment providers, corporates and internet "pioneers" today urged governments and publishers to make publicly-funded educational materials available freely over the internet so that it could be sucked up into huge corporate-funded databases.

The Swansea Open Edutainment Declaration, launched today, is part of a dynamic effort to make learning and teaching materials available to everyone online, regardless of income or geographic location. Providing resources for bundling, advertising, service-based income and free-market exchange it encourages teachers and students around
the world to join a growing movement and pay to use the web to share, remix and translate classroom materials to make educators' labour cheaper more pliable, and more easily replaced if they happen to disagree.

"Open edutainment allows every person on earth to access and contribute to the vast pool of knowledge on the web," said rich person Jimmy Walls, Objectivist and founder of Wikipodia, and one of the auteurs of the Declaration. "Everyone has something to 'teach' and everyone has something to 'learn'."

According to the Declaration, corporations, web gurus and internet pioneers would benefit if publishers and governments made publicly- funded educational materials freely available online. This will give entrepreneurs unlimited access to high quality, constantly improving course materials, just as Wikipodia has done in the world of reference materials.

Open edutainment makes the link between teaching, learning and the capitalist culture of the Internet. It includes creating and sharing materials used in teaching as well as new private-sector approaches to learning where people create and shape "knowledge" together. These new practices promise to provide students with edutainment materials that are individually tailored to their learning style encouraging the growth of an individualist and consumerist notion of education. There are already over 100,000 such open edutainment resources available on the Internet. Of course, the rich people will still continue to get first class "traditional" education at expensive private schools and Ivy-League universities, these open edutainent resources are meant for the plebs who, let's face it can't concentrate for more than five seconds and so find it easier to have their teaching delivered via shoot-em-up video-game, or in super-small bite-sized chunks that don't challenge them. This also handily makes them into the ideal 21st Century consumers of web-content, downloadable iPod-games and shiny
and sparkly facebook applications.

The Declaration is the result of a meeting of 1 open edutainment leader in Swansea, Wales, organized late last year by the Capitalist Society Institute and the Shuttleworthless Foundation. Participants identified key strategies for developing privatised education. They encourage others to join and sign the Declaration.

"Open sourcing edutainment doesn't just make learning more accessible, it makes more money and people do it for free so we don't need to pay employees or pesky teachers," said really rich Linux Entrepreneur Mack Shuttletree, "Linux is succeeding and generating huge profits exactly because of this sort of adaptability. The same kind of success is possible for open edutainment."

Open edutainment is of particular relevance in developing and emerging economies, creating the potential for the swamping them with US influenced "affordable" textbooks and learning materials supplied on One Laptop per Child (OLPC), expensive gadgets and the Internet. It opens the door to a small elite class to use the labour of local content producers likely to create more diverse offerings than large multinational publishing houses. Of course, then the large multinational publishing houses are freely able to use it.

The Declaration has already been translated into over one language and the growing list of signatories includes: lots of rich people, some people you have never heard of, the usual suspects and, of course, our dear leader Lawrence Lessig.

To read or sign the Swansea Open Edutainment Declaration, please
visit: http://www.swanseadeclaration.org.

Whiter than white...

2007-10-29T02:16:00.001-07:00

A rendition of the improvements that we would see to the Swansea City Council building.

Of course, this is only a photoshopped projection, but I think it
gives an idea of the difference.

Second Life and Conference Participation...

2007-06-26T04:30:00.000-07:00

From discussion with users of Second Life, particularly during the iCommons iSummit in Croatia a few weeks ago, it is interesting to note that the participants who weren't there in RL felt more inclusion when they attended in SL. Although I must admit to finding the whole thing very disconcerting - particularly when I appeared within SL asking a question and my colleagues in SL spotted me and emailed photos..

The entire iCommons was very state-of-the-art with regard to SL and was simultaneously broadcast within the virtual environment. Together with questions in the conference being taken from both RL and SL and put to the speakers. The SL attendees that I have talked to all argued that the event felt more 'inclusive' than a mere video stream online.

Although there is much to SL that is problematic, events such as these raise interesting questions about widening participation and challenging our notions of what it is to 'attend' or 'witness' an event. Certainly when one thinks of a spectrum of participatory media, I think the SL is certainly much better than the monological online media either as youtube feeds or webstreams.

Media Studies 2.0

2007-05-31T08:53:00.000-07:00

Whilst O'Loughlin offers an interesting position on a presentation by William Merrin I think he unfortunately misses the major argument of Merrin's paper; namely a methodological examination of the key categories that have been used in media studies to date, particularly since its cultural studies turn. In essense, this is the 'natural' division of study based on the medium (TV, Film, Radio) and secondly a privileging of the audience as the key category of research focus. Merrin rightly calls attention to research that unproblematically relies on unreflexive definitions of media (both as a technology and a medium) and researchers who then carry these definitions over into their quasi-ethnographic studies without attention to the way in which they privilege a particular division of the media sensorium (Lakatosh would have called this the hard core of a research programme). Unfortunately these 'old' media studies categories (which Merrin argues are Media Studies 1.0) whilst successful in a pre-digital age may become a fetter on our ability to understand media if we do not pay attention to profound changes in media. Additionally these media studies categories have been liberally borrowed by other disciplines, such as sociology and political science, where they are often used equally unproblematically in their own research programmes. Think, for example, of the way in which democracy and political representation is increasingly re-presented through new digital technologies and the difficulties of political scientists to understand this mediation within their own disciplinary categories - and indeed their own flight into ethnography as a response.

I think that it is widely accepted that the growth in digital technologies is transforming our experience of media by allowing recombinant and hybrid forms of media to populate our mediascape. So much so that it is arguable (and indeed empirically verifiable) that our previous divisions of mediums are collapsing into a single 'supermedium', namely computer code. As such the old media become the content of the new media and in doing so are transformed - think of the way in which Raymond William's concept of 'flow' in television is interrupted and fragmented when placed in a new media setting like Youtube. So I think that Merrin's intervention is both timely (with the growth of digital technologies) and welcome. We do need to continually rethink our disciplinary categories and question the way in which changes in mediation shift our perception of the world (and I would hasten to add, so should other disciplines).

Where I would raise a concern, however, is in a too strongly drawn line between a Media Studies 1.0, and a Media Studies 2.0. Clearly this division can be read as a major shift or discontinuity which is, I think, rather overstated. There is much in old media scholarly work that is excellent and should serve as an exemplar for new media research, and I would not agree that old media research is made obsolete by digital technologies - although read in this new context it can be transformed. Nonetheless all media scholars need to be attentive to the huge changes in media that are taking place, and rather than an eclipse of the 'old', we should begin a discussion over how we can approach research that is sensitive to a new post-broadcast digital world.

I would also disagree with the claim that the *most* valuable work on new media is being done outside of media studies, although clearly there is a large quantity of useful research being produced which media studies should be alert to, some is laughably simplistic. Indeed, I see Merrin as calling for the kind of cross-disciplinary work between Media Studies and other disciplines that allow us to broaden and deepen our knowledge of 'new' media and begin a conversation to move all of our scholarly work forward.

In sum, then, Merrin is arguing for a paradigm shift within Media Studies to take account of these larger changes bought about by new digital technology and to re-focus efforts on understanding media in light of this. I would agree with his call to rethink our categories of study and I would argue that we should link it to Roger Silverstone's 'double articulation' as a foundation for innovative new approaches to understanding media.

Conservatives 2.0

2007-04-05T05:48:00.000-07:00

– Trine Bjørkmann Andreassen & David M. Berry**

What is real and what is mere representation, copy or facsimile? Pertinent questions for a philosopher, you might think, but in the media age in which we conduct our politics today it is becoming equally important for us to think about. Political parties across Europe (and particularly in Britain) are busy digesting and learning the media management techniques of the Labour Party PR machine, and particularly the uncontested familiarity and consummate skill in manipulating the media shown of Tony Blair, the Labour party leader and current British Prime Minister. From managing headlines, directing the new agenda, and getting the message ‘out’ in the way in which they want it to be reported by the mainstream press the enduring achievement of this government seems to have been that they fully understood how the media worked and could then be manipulated. But, when one looks closely at Blair and his attempts to leverage the media to stay ‘on-message’ it becomes increasingly obvious that he is ‘old’ media, besotted with an age of mass circulation, mass opinion and the views of the (wo)man-on-the-street.

In a certain sense, the success of Labour in 1997 was due to the years they spent in the political wilderness, banished there by the success of an aggressive and PR supported conservative party (Maurice Saatchi often credited with some of the best political campaigns ever run). Helped by the press, who eagerly bought the ‘narrative’ of a loony-left Labour party, completely lost in a theoretical and out-of-date socialist legacy, appearing divided at conferences and unable to respond to the changes that had taken place in the press in terms of new technology in the newsroom and the breaking of the print unions (Fleet Street was a memory rather than a functioning location for the production of news). It was, therefore, not surprising, that strategists and ambitious young politicians in the Labour Party realised that the key to getting back to power was dealing with the problems raised by the public profile of Labour, particularly its perceived weaknesses (witness the Clause IV debate on the nationalization of British industry) and presenting a more progressive modern in-touch media image. They soon came to the conclusion that rather than leave the press to its own devices (idle hands and journalism being dangerously linked) they could overload the press with information and policy announcements which gave the impression of change and movement in government and more importantly didn’t give journalists pause for breath to see what the government was actually doing. That is to say, they created the simulacra of a major political shift through the media image, whilst arguably trying to put into practice the kinds of policies that a Labour government would want to institute (e.g. fighting child poverty, rebuilding the welfare state, and mild redistributive tax policies).

Times change, however, and today we live in a completely different media ecology to that of 1997. Then managing the media meant dealing with the reality of the mass market machines of Fleet Street and Television news. The Internet, or rather the popular manifestation of it as the Web, had only recently been created in 1994 and had yet to move beyond a rather small elite user group. Until now the Internet had not really played a decisive and important part in political life, and without the recent speed increases in terms of broadband together with the growth in storage capacity online, it probably still wouldn’t. Now we have online video storage of remarkable flexibility and, more importantly, the bandwidth to watch it, as anyone who has visited any of the video sharing websites across the Internet will have discovered. Together with this, new technologies such as blogging (the online diary writing which has taken the Internet by storm)[i] and Wikis (collaborative writing technologies for websites)[ii] there are a whole new world of media forms that are yet to show how they might change the saturated media landscape.

So it is surprising that the media-aware Labour Party has not made a move to reign in this new media, in fact it has studiously ignored or remained rather ignorant of its possibilities[iii]. Instead, the old-fashioned stodgy British Conservative party seems to have jumped on the new media bandwagon and actively leapfrogged the old media approach of Labour[iv]. Moving straight into the new media world of Internet video diaries, or videoblogs[v], Web 2.0 and grassroots narrowcasting[vi]. In fact it is telling to what extent Labour have missed the entire new media juggernaut – the blogging community, for example, being decidedly off-message[vii].

The Conservative party leader, David Cameron, announced his website webcameron.org.uk, as the Tory party's ‘secret new weapon’ on September 29th 2006, coinciding with the annual party conference (Cameron's first as leader), The site is modeled on the popular video hosting and social networking site YouTube[viii], which boast over 100 million video downloads every single day. Cameron's videoblog features low quality 'amateur' videos and a simple design that is built around Cameron speaking to the camera about key issues. Noticeably uncut, unedited and with a documentary aesthetic the videos give Cameron: (1) a channel to communicate directly with an audience bypassing the traditional gatekeepers of the mass media; (2) an ability to comment quickly on breaking news items; and (3) the opportunity to put his position forward without having to pander to the soundbite news agenda. It also allows the Conservatives to score a very important coup in regard to appearing forward-looking and innovative in connecting with a new technology literate audience often made up of very young and media literate individuals.

The videos themselves are reminiscent of other video material posted to YouTube by users; short (mostly 3 minutes long), low quality due to bandwidth restrictions and containing potentially embarrassing copyright infringements[ix] – mainly talking heads of Cameron giving information about where he is, what he is doing or his intentions for the party/website/country. The hand held camera (‘a bit shaky and wobbly’), rough edits and lack of title sequences, music or credits gives some resonance to the idea of it being a webcam recording, though it seems fairly obvious that Cameron in fact has someone working for him to produce these videos. In fact, the raw feel of the videos is part of the presentation of self that is carefully stage-managed by the site and which gives the whole performance a radical and innovative Web 2.0 feel.

The first video on webcameron, Introduction to webcameron, was posted on the 29 Sept 2006 and lasted one minute ten seconds[x]. It received quite a lot of press in the UK and elsewhere, and serves as a good example of how Cameron is attempting to use new media as a away to both engage with the public, and – perhaps more tellingly - differentiate himself from the Labour party. The video follows him from room to room in his Notting Hill home. His discourses are ‘interrupted’ by his children and he participates in everyday chores such as washing up whilst on camera. The amateur feel of the recording; hand held, minimal editing and diegetic sound and light, can be seen as an attempt to give the videos a mark of authenticity. Cameron speaks indirectly about the new media, even taking on national institutions like the BBC:

I want to tell you what the Conservative party is doing, what we're up to, give you behind-the-scenes access so you can actually see what policies we're developing, the things that we are doing, and have that direct link ... watch out BBC, ITV, Channel 4, we're the new competition. We're a bit shaky and wobbly, but this is one of the ways we want to communicate with people properly about what the Conservative party stands for. (Cameron, Introduction to webcameron, 29 Sept 2006, one minute ten seconds)

Another video titled responding to comments (one minute one second) shows Cameron personally responding to comments left by viewers, on his own laptop with the caption: ‘the most boring video of a politician ever? You asked for it!’ emphasizing the extent to which Cameron is taking an active interest in respondents and comments on his blog. What is most remarkable about this video is the amount of time video recording the actual answering of blog posts via the keyboard (although this does betray the lack of typing skills of the Conservative leader).

However one of the most interesting videos is titled After the speech, discussing Webcameron (two minutes and forty seconds) where Cameron talks about the importance of the videoblogging to the Conservatives with Sam Roake, revealingly titled Head of Web Campaigning for the Conservative Party. At the first cut in the video (one minute twenty-five seconds), after Cameron has talked about how he feels about his first conference speech, he turns to Roake to discuss the details of the site – who explains that many of the key Web 2.0 technologies (e.g. RSS syndication of the news and the ability to comment on the contents by users are actually disabled at the time of recording) the technical nature of which seems to flummox Cameron a little. Again at the next cut (two minutes four seconds) Roake talks about the problem of user commenting and allowing people to communicate via this mechanism, here again revealingly Cameron misunderstands, believing that Roake is asking him to respond to comments, but promises to give his time to ‘make the site interactive’. Although demonstrating that the strategy is still at an embryonic stage and that Cameron, although clearly new to the technologies being discussed, senses that this offer opportunities for his party that he may well be the only leader (of any party) that is in a position to monopolise the advantages from. Although the road to Web 2.0 may not be as smooth as Cameron might like as one posting to his site complains:

I can't help noticing that Mr Cameron, thus far, has not responded to the people wishing him a happy birthday. In fact he's not responded to any of us or any of our comments at all since Tuesday 3rd October when he name-checked a couple of people whose posts were at that point on the front page of the Open Blog in a bid to reassure us that this site WAS interactive. ---- We're doing our bit, we're watching his party political broadcasts on "David's Blog" and we're talking about the issues important to us. I am now asking, is Mr Cameron going to "put aside time in his diary" for us, as he promised, or does one have to pay ££thousands to have a meal with him before he pays attention? (Posted by mary123 on Tuesday, 10 October 2006 11:26:15)

It is perhaps not surprising that the leader of the opposition should not find time to respond to comments on his website, when he has a party to run, ‘old media’ appearances to make and a future election campaign to plan. Some might even argue that if he did find time for this he wouldn’t be doing enough elsewhere. But if the goal of webcameron was to create close ties with a community of users, and raise the profile of the Conservatives as a forward-looking party then it has arguably already placed the Conservatives apart from Labour, and indeed given Cameron a much more connected and in-touch (new) media image.

So what exactly are the advantages of these ad hoc video posts from the Leader of the Opposition? Well, with webcameron, the Conservative party are seen to be embracing new media and, more specifically, taking on the values of Web 2.0, social networking and the whole Internet revolution. The Conservatives, and David Cameron in particular, look fresh, up to date and in touch with today’s technically sophisticated audiences – it could even be seen as a radical branding exercise of David Cameron as a sellable leader (it is interesting to note the lack of links or identification with the Conservative party on the webcameron website, for example)[xi]. But is this enough to capture the voters? Well, only time will tell, and the Conservatives have yet to identify any policies to match their new found interest in technology and environmentalism. Nonetheless it is a promising start, and radical in as much as webcameron is taking risks in bypassing the well-presented heavily edited PR videos of the traditional party media output. In fact, it is to the credit of Cameron that he has experimented with new media in a relatively open and innovative way. Whether the Conservatives 2.0 project will generate as much excitement as the Web 2.0 phenomena on which it is partly based remains to be seen, but we suspect that if the Conservatives continue with this experiment, the difference between the increasingly presidential distance of the Tony Blair’s media image and David Cameron’s one-to-one washing-up chats may mark a turn towards electoral success for the British Conservative Party.

** originally published as: Andreassen, T. B. & Berry, D M. (2006). Conservatives 2.0. Minerva. Norway. Nr 08 2006. pp 92-95

Weblinks

http://www.conservatives.com
http://www.webcameron.org.uk
http://www.youtube.com

Endnotes

[i] Pew Internet & American Life Project estimates there are now 12 million American bloggers and 57 million adults reading them.
[ii] The most famous wiki is Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia project – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
[iii] Although Labour MP Tom Watson has (according to his website) has been blogging since March 2003, see http://www.tom-watson.co.uk/archives/2003/03/first_post.html and Lord Soely of Hammersmith since October 2003, see http://clivesoleymp.typepad.com/clive_soley_mp/2003/10/first_entry.html
[iv] See Hyde, M (2006) Does anyone care whether David Cameron's children have finished their cornflakes? Guardian Online, Tuesday October 3, 2006. Retrieved October 6th 2006 from http://politics.guardian.co.uk/conservatives/comment/0,,1886197,00.html
[v] Videoblogs are a hybrid form of video distribution and personal blogging. The weblog can be traced back as early as 1997, the term coined by John Barger and later shortened to ‘blog’ by Peter Merholz on his blog peterme.com in April 1999. With the rise in free online storage, mass distribution via the Internet and the democratisation of cheap media production tools, video was in early 2000 added to a number of blogs, to create what has been termed videoblogs (A contested term, living alongside vlog and video podcast to name a couple). With the increase in video hosting sites such as YouTube, Blip, Revver (and very recently the Norwegian Bubblare.no).
[vi] Web 2.0 is the name given to the current surge of innovative ‘social networking’ technologies that encourage people to communicate and work together over the Internet. Web 2.0, as opposed to Web 1.0 (early internet, email and web browsing), comprises of sites that allow users to collaborate and share information online within a single platform, sites that "get better" the more people use it through their ability to create networks through an "architecture of participation" (O'Reilly, October 2001).
[vii] See http://5thnovember.blogspot.com/ for an example of this.
[viii] See www.youtube.com. Youtube was also recently bought out by Google for $1 Billion.
[ix] Allowing anyone to upload videos onto a site is potentially a violation of copyright and YouTube is filled with copyrighted material, for example episodes of the DailyShow, the Colbert Report, movie trailers, music videos and snippets from news reports, soaps, and features. As of November 2nd 2006, Webcameron already has two clips of copyrighted material on the site, a snippet from a David Letterman show discussing George W. Bush (Top ten moments, two minutes ten seconds) and a clip from the film Brief Encounters (Wild horses wouldn't drag me away from England, forty seconds).
[x] One the Cameron website there are other videos older than the ‘Introduction to webcameron’ video but they were actually from another website http://dcindia06.blogspot.com/ which was the first foray into Blogging by David Cameron.
[xi] The replacement of the Thatcherite hand of freedom logo of the ‘old’ Conservatives by the ‘new’ Conservative’s green tree logo certainly seems like a masterstroke in representing the Conservatives as environmentally conscious and different from their past.

Terrorism, Rhetoric and Political Ambition

2006-08-10T05:09:00.000-07:00

It is the 10th August 2006 and yet again another 'terrorist threat', yet again panic, confusion and ill-thought out security measures by the authorities. Does the government still not understand that it is the *threat* of a terror action that is aimed to cause maximum inconvenience and panic that is the aim, rather than any particular 'successful' action? You certainly wouldn't think so to judge from their ham-fisted and overblown reactions everytime a 'new' terror threat is found.

And yet again we have another populist Home Secretary, yet another string of rhetoric and confused thinking about the Human Rights legislation and yet more promised 'anti-terror' legislation. And, naturally, anybody who raises a critical voice or question is denounced as threatening the entire nation - and one thought one was living in a *democratic* nation!

I am rather concerned that the government has realised that secretly protecting the public through counterterrorism operations does not win it any brownie points. Rather, they now believe that PR management of announcing their 'successful' counter-terrorism operation is much better politically as it will scare the public witless into supporting the Labour government and their introduction of more bad legislation. Someone needs to be addressing this problem, as these continual attempts to legitimate legislation through fear is a very dangerous and undemocratic
road to travel down. I for one, have become increasingly disenchanted by the illiberal tone of the Labour government which puts political point scoring at a premium even in so-called emergencies - witness Reid's comment on the opposition parties.

The BBC even quotes the Police as stating that an attack is *not* thought to be imminent. So why on earth is the government acting like it is. Why the panic at Heathrow and the overblown security measures.

It is time for cool heads and critical reasoning by our elected representatives - who unfortunately are unable to voice any concerns as the UK Parliament remains in recess.

Sun and Open DRM

2006-03-24T04:30:00.000-08:00

Lessig seems very naive to me here. The DRM instead of being embedded
is merely transferred to a rights server. Thus the client, although
open-source open-standards blah blah blah can only unlock the
presumably encrypted content using a key linked to the meta-DRM data
in the file. So how is this helping fair-use? How does this guarantee
an 'ecology for creativity'? It just means that DRM can be
implemented on open-source systems unproblematically and opens the
door to truly ubiquitous DRM-everywhere.

If anything this is the killer-app for wide ranging DRM systems as
now even free software/open-source will not stand in the way of DRM
implementation as the kernel of encryption/decryption has been moved
away from the client and placed safely within the boundaries of the
corporation licensing. It just seems to me like a public/private key
encryption system (similar to email) that allows the content industry
to convince open-source developers to get onboard.

I suppose the devil is in the detail, so the question is what stands
in the way of the open-source developers taking the now decrypted
content and just saving it off as an MP3 or whatever? Certainly the
level of invasion of privacy by this system which licenses to the
user identity and continually watches how they 'consume' content is a
bit weird.

I would be very interested to hear what other techies, experts and so
on think about this development.

IPR and DRM

2006-03-24T04:23:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday 14th March 2006 I attended the Westminster Media eForum on IPR and DRM and unfortunately it was packed to the gills with silken-voiced lobbyists who drowned a lot of the debate droning on with comments like "I welcome the speaker's contribution to the wide-ranging leadership he has given over the use of Digital Rights Management meta-data distribution MI3P protocols and the MWLI and GRID over the past few years".... Like who actually speaks like that? Weird... Bill Thompson made a good intervention when he pointed this out on a panel at one point..

The news though is starting to leak out (PR out?) and one of the strangest speeches came from Derek Wyatt MP who asked the question "Who could be trusted with the DRM debate?", now I was expecting maybe Parliament, or perhaps a democratic discussion amongst citizens, but he actually recommended the British Library and the Oxford Internet Institute. Neither of which is exactly democratic, nor, let's face it, geared up to holding any form of democratic debate due to the lack of their legitimacy... So I was puzzled as to how when:

(a) The British Library is now talking in a weird Blairite public-private collaboration language (PFI/private partnerships etc etc) and seems pro-copyright.
(b) The OII is pretty much privately funded by non-governmental foundations and corporations (£10 Million from the Shirley Foundation, CISCO, Microsoft et al)

We can expect them to avoid being held to ransom by private interests? Are these really the places to trust to put the citizen before economic logics? I am personally rather sceptical. Although I think that academics and public institutions can have a lot of input into this process, we need to make sure that Parliament is setting the terms of the debate and perhaps a Select Committee is a better home for the inquiry?

Certainly when one sees that the recent Gower inquiry is already assuming a position (i.e. copyright good) it limits the extent to which it can think out of the box. I would like to see Parliament asking whether DRM's should be legally constrained to prevent some of the more extreme activities (such as limiting rights they have no right to limit) and to ensure that we do allow a de facto privatisation of copyright law...

Here is some news about the event..

And here is a great discussion i've been having with Gabriella Coleman, Samir Chopra and Scott Dexter

Performing Rights Society: What do they really think of us?

2006-03-17T12:15:00.000-08:00

I was very suprised to read today in the MCPS/PRS magazine, 'M', (circulated to 44000 PRS members and publishers) that Estelle Morris (former Minister for the Arts and Education Secretary) now ennobled as Baroness Morris of Yardley has accepted a job as director the PRS board. It seems strange that one of her last acts as Minister was to authorise officials to engage in discussions with the music industry with a view to setting up a music council... and now she is part of the music industry (Brass 2006: 18).


The lack of a coherent voice has also meant that the [music] industry's most pressing issue has not always been adequately confronted. While a minister, Lady Morris heard anxious words from within the industry about copyright law, copyright enforcement and about how dramatic changes in the environment weren't being addressed, but people within government were telling her that they had the issue under control (Brass 2006: 21).

The Intellectual Property Rights Forum, which she jointly chaired in 2004, helped alert government to the urgency of the copyright challenge, as well as helping to overcome a climate of mistrust around this crucial issue. There was a lot of fear. People from the industry feared that this body was going to persuade the industry to give up its copyright without the consumer paying... (Brass 2006: 21)

The article also discusses the Creative Partnerships that are meant to bring education and ideas about creativity into schools:


Creative Partnerships have been the greatest success in doing this. If you can bring the wild creativity and risk-taking that there is in the music sector [sic] into schools, kids love it. That's how they'll learn about the music industry, about copyright, to respect someone else's ideas and know they have to pay for them, because they've been working after school or on Saturday mornings or in the holidays with Joe Bloggs who earns his living on the basis of selling his creative ideas (Brass 2006: 21).

So how happy are you to know that your children are being incorrectly told that you have to pay for other people's 'ideas' and that the music industry is such a saint in regard to respecting the copyrights of musicians and songwriters... Perhaps the schoolchildren and students would be better off reading Steve Albini when it comes to the 'risk-taking' of the music sector:


Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed (Albini 1994).

The complete PRS board is listed here.

Her bio is here.

References:

Albini, Steve. (1994). The Problem with Music. Retreived 17/03/06 from http://www.negativland.com/albini.html

Brass, Richard. (2006). What do they really think of us?. In M: MCPS/PRS Members Music Magazine. March 2006. Issue 19

On Reading Foucault's Order of Things

2006-02-24T07:15:00.000-08:00

Until the end of the sixteenth century, the locus of meaning lay within the world and through a process of commentary and decoding signs it was thought that we might understand what was written by God. Language was seen not just within the sphere of text and learning but also diffusely distributed within the world of things, inscribing and marking all objects within the sensible world (Foucault, 2002). The theatre of life, or the mirror of nature was reflected in the signs and symbols that made possible knowledge of visible and invisible things, and controlled how they might be represented. Each object within the world had a mark that could make us aware of these things, that could tell us its use, what it was for and its relationships to other things, including humanity. There were visible marks for the invisible analogies, meanings and uses that were located beneath the surface of directly perceived reality. The world was a world of resemblance, similitude and codes and it could only be a world of signs, as Paracelsus said:


It is not God's will that what he creates for man's benefit and what he has given us should remain hidden... And eventhough he has hidden certain things, he has allowed nothing to remain without exterior and visible signs in the form of special marks – just as a man who has buried a hoard of treasure marks the spot that he may find it again. (Foucault, 2002: 29)

Knowledge was uncovered and founded by the unearthing and deciphering of the symbols that were distributed in the world, the signatures that were inscribed within. Rather than look at the bark of plants you were required to go to their marks. These symbols and signs were required in order to uncover the basic episteme of understanding that was bound within a system of resemblance. 'This is why the face of the world is covered with blazons, with characters, with ciphers and obscure words – with hieroglyphics' (Foucault, 2002: 30).

This system of thought used three variables that could be used to check the veracity of a sign. First, the certainty of the relation: a sign that remained constant was one that could be trusted for its accuracy (e.g. breathing could be used to denote life). Second, the type of relation: a part of the whole could be used to denote the whole itself (e.g. a rosy glow could denote a heathy individual) or the sign might be distinct from the whole (e.g. changes in the seaweed could denote the weather). Third, the origin of the sign: it could therefore be natural (e.g. a mirror's reflection and therefore denotation of reality) or part of a convention shared between men (e.g. a word may signify a particular idea amongst a group).

But this was a system of knowledge that was being replaced. The erudition that once could read nature and books as part of a single text was replaced by a field of knowledge which was constructed not around resemblance but identities and differences. The reading of signs and signatures was relegated to the realm of fantasy, to a world that had not yet attained the age of reason (Foucault, 2002:57). In its place was installed the steady march of reason, of rationality, through ordering and measurement of the natural world (Toulmin, 1992). No longer were signs and language located in the world, stamped onto things since the beginning of time. Truth was instead to be found in 'evident and distinct perception' (Foucault, 2002: 62), words could attempt to translate this truth if possible, but they were not the mark of truth itself.

GPL v3

2006-02-10T07:53:00.000-08:00

The current problems with the upgrade from GPLv2 to GPLv3 and the arguments between Torvalds and Stallman were exactly the kind of problem I was forecasting in a paper that I gave at the AHRB copyright conference where the purported benefits of commons-based peer production are destroyed if that commons is but a simulacra of a commons (see also Libre Commons for a similar critique).

The privatisation of a distributed collective project (i.e. ownership of copyright being dispersed through a community) will eventually run into problems when the project requires unpicking to move on for whatever reason. I think that Stallman is making some important and critical moves in the protection of the Free Software 'commons' by GPLv3 which Torvalds completely fails to understand or care about. Somehow the FSF need to address the fragmentation possible by license upgrades to prevent a balkanisation when threats to the integrity of the FSF commons are made (i.e. through DRM). This may well be an unforeseen and unintended consequence of the all-conquering power of the GPL copyleft clause that Moglen was so delighted about. I suggest that they think carefully about the future move to GPLv4 whilst drafting, as well as considering legacy code. Otherwise we'll all be going through this again in a few years.

In any case, Torvalds has for a long time tried to portray a 'sensible' or common-sense approach whilst harbouring a great dislike for Stallman (which I think sometimes verges on the pathological) but here the question really needs to be asked as to whether he is acting for the good of the community of Linux developers or to win some petty battle. One reason for suspicion is that he speaks as if he is king of the castle, and doesn't so far, seem to interested in the democratic voice of all the developers.

Copyhold

2005-12-08T04:47:00.000-08:00

Copyhold has its origin in mediaeval England. Copyhold was tenure of land according to the custom of the manor, the "title deeds" being a copy of the record of the manor court. In other words, under customary law under a moral economy.

Copyholds were gradually enfranchised (turned into ordinary holdings of land—either freehold or 999-year leasehold) during the 19th century. Legislation in the 1920s finally extinguished the last of them.

Here we wish to reinvigorate the concept of Copyhold by using it as a basis of a new right of access to use and modify information and knowledge which does not rely on copyright, licences or such like. Thus it would be Sui Generis, a form of property-right which gives moral rights to the creator (as author) but crucially no restriction no copies or distribution.

It would be analagous to holding the moral rights in a piece of work (so that you as creator would be attributed) but allow the equivalent of public domain (Res Nullis) use of the work.

The Multitude and Politics

2005-09-06T04:23:00.000-07:00

Mouffe makes the damaging claim that there is no political within the work of Hardt & Negri. She argues that the unitary nature of a political concept such as the multitude indicates a consensus which precludes politics. However, drawing from Deleuze & Guattari it is possible to refute this claim by pointing towards a new conception of the political around 'rhizomatic' praxis. This is a decentred and highly mobile form of political communicative action that is multiple and non-unitary.

Guattari argues that 'molecular revolution' is always on the fringes of a 'molar' structure. A proliferation of fringe groups, minorities and autonomist movements. These for Guattari constitute 'fighting fronts' that offer resistance to the 'plane of organisaton' of a state. Deleuze and Guattari talk about the radical political organisation of the creation of 'nomadic' war machines (i.e. aggressive, mobile, decentred organisations). Additionally the information technology revolution is pressed into the service of political communication.

But one question that does arise, and Mouffe highlights, is whether this form of politics is antagonistic (i.e. friend/enemy) or agonistic (i.e. we/they).

And therefore what effect does this have on the possibility of the political.

Some suggestions for Art Projects

2005-08-25T09:37:00.000-07:00

1. Subalternity - Can artists raise the issue of subalternity as a positive project through some narrative/photographic/film/writing. Questions of representation, voice and testimonial from postcolonial as well as western societies.

2. Police Actions - Capturing the movement from a 'state of democracy' to a 'state of war' in our societies (e.g. pictures of police carrying guns in the uk, parliament with a 'ring of steel', surveillence etc)

3. Property - Multinationals are increasingly controlling and owning public space. How can we understand, communicate this? e.g. http://onthecommons.org/node/643

4. Time - Why are western conceptions of time (i.e. liner, scientific, structured) taking away alternative realities? Capturing non-liner time, e.g. subaltern people, stories, mythic, lyrical tales, the excluded etc. Can we create our own aesthetic of time in this project?

5. Postmodern Subjectivities - The factories are closing but new factories are opening. What do they look like, lets capture the emerge of new forms of worker (e.g. call-centre, creative, freelance, poor).

6. Nature - Nature is being reconfigured intensively as a resource to be exploited (e.g. genetic modification, intensive farming) but also as a commodity (i.e. paying to 'visit' nature) or even as economic resource (e.g. The Amazon Rainforest as a 'carbon bank'). What is beauty, and how is it being reconfigured into distilled photoshop super-real nature that makes us somehow disappointed with the 'real' nature we perceive and live everyday.

Creativity, Property and Hegel

2005-06-16T11:33:00.000-07:00

Stunlaw has become somewhat fascinated by a Hegelian idea of the arguments about creativity and ownership in intellectual property being a fetishisation. In other words, there is a creeping subjectification of objects and an objectification of subjects, through the association of the ownership (or creations) of intellectual property with its owner. Understanding subjectivity as ownership would result in a diminished conception of the individual as it fails to realise that property rights are only necessary to instantiate a legal system capable of recognising legal subjects. Human flourishing, which includes creativity and production, is reliant on intersubjective recognition, in other words, subjects interacting and able to perform rights, duties and obligations to each other (love, friendship, comradeship etc). Rather than a Kantian 'Kingdom of Ends' we instead become a kingdom of objects.

For Kant, an object is defined as something which cannot become a subject, in other words it has no will or subjectivity. Thus, only objects may be subject to property (both things and non-things) and gain their status through their identification as objects by subjects, which is necessarily intersubjective for Kant and Hegel. Therefore property is an intersubjective relationship mediated by property, in other words, each subject takes part in intersubjective moments in order to achieve subjectivity. Through each subject recognising each other in order to facilitate the transfer of objects by contract and exchange, the shared desire the exploit objects results in intersubjective recognition and not treating others as objects themselves (which would break the categorical imperative).

However, for Hegel it is the Abstract Right of property to establish the empty form of subjectivity, rather than personality itself which is actually added as 'content' by the spheres of morality and ethics. The subject is therefore empty and its essence is negativity. Property is therefore necessary to create the form of subjectivity by allowing a borderline created through the activity of intersubjective activity; it forms an empty and formal notion of subjectivity. In a similar way to the use of Lacan by his metaphor of the mask to explain subjectivity, Zizek argues 'this nothingness behind the mask is the very absolute negativity...[which] is the subject par excellence, not a limited object opposed to the force of subjectivity!' (Zizek 1994, The Metastasis of Enjoyment)

This legal subject is appearance with nothing behind it, or for Hegel, there is no noumenon underlying phenomenon. Property is thus a regime with the goal of creating subjectivity through intersubjective recognition. By the recognition of (1) possession, the ability to exclude others from its use, and thus to differentiate between subjects; (2) enjoyment, the ability to make use of the object as the subject wishes, the object is submitted to the will of the subject; and (3) alienation, the recognition by others that a specific object belongs to a specific subject (thus counter-intuitively only when it is taken away, through say selling it is it recognised as having belonged to that subject).

Thus, we should not look to property to understand the notion of creativity as it is only for the production of subjectivity as Abstract Right. It is therefore necessary but not sufficient for creativity to take place. However, it should be added that the level of property rights advocated by Hegel would be only those that allowed the generation of subjectivity as legal subject (which is a limited and preliminary form) and must not undermine the more advanced spheres of morality and ethics. This thin legal right is therefore a guarantee of subjectivity and forms the basis of intersubjective recognition as having the form of subjectivity.

Stunlaw will investigate creativity and Hegel further at a later date.

Derrida and Code

2005-06-13T12:06:00.000-07:00

Stunlaw is taking a reading of Derrida and trying to think about what dissemination (or differance) might mean in regards to undertaking an analysis of a free software or open source project. For example, code is interpreted through machines, it is a mechanical series of processes applied to a given number of inputs to generate an output. Now clearly the context of use of the software will be interpretatively flexible (i.e. a particular algorithm may have different meanings/usage in different contexts) however the algorithm manifested within code has a certain obduracy across a particular community.

For example, 'consensus and running code' is used to describe the IETF decision making processes. But to what extent does the code itself as an obdurate pattern of processes have any form of solidity and concreteness. The compiler is extremely unflexible when it comes to the contruction of a binary version of the code, and the processing that is undertaken should have a one-to-one relationship to the source (bugs allowing). Does this mean that the text of a source file has a lack of interpretative flexibility within the limited community of developers in a particular programming language. And if so, does that raise interesting questions vis a vis cultural incommensurability of concepts and ideas. Can code somehow bridge that gap between languages by its very limited concreteness and need to be tied into a particular system usage.

Does this mean that when it comes to the inter-cultural transmission of data-based processes there is a metaspace of conceptual and interpretative understanding that lies in parallel to everyday life languages. And can these shared spaces that are opened up within computer technologies (albiet restricted, complex and instrumentally oriented towards particular techne) offer an aesthetic dimension? For these collections of source code have a certain rationality and application that allows a certain degree of consensus about their execution (if only agreed between say a compiler and the programmer or a community of developers).

There does seem to be a certain hermeneutic closure at work in code. Maybe this is due to a certain reliance on propositional logic, or its being as (in effect) the abstract representation of mechanical and repetitive operations within a digital machine. But nonetheless, its abilility to encode (perhaps overcode) appearance (whether literary, artistic, musical or otherwise) is an interesting bifurcation of knowledge between a container and the content. A modernist project of separation.

Can we therefore write poetry in code? Or perhaps, is code a form of poetics? It seems an interestingly Heideggerian project of the aesthetic and the real joined at a profound level. Code as the glue between appearance and reality, virtuality and the real; code as the access to reality; or code as reality. In the age of digital reproduction, code is an essential tool in the construction of our shared space of understanding and being. Can the code underlying this construction affect us through its' form (perhaps an object-oriented approach carries an ontology and epistomology that is unconsciously realised in us as subjects of code).

Hegel, Human Rights and Intellectual Property

2005-06-10T09:40:00.000-07:00

Some thoughts related to the question of human rights, moral rights and intellectual property that Stunlaw has been thinking about recently.

Following Hegel in believing that outside of the state there cannot be 'freedom' as 'freedom' requires laws in order to create a 'state of freedom' in the first place:

1. Therefore copyrights as such are instantiated within positive law and it can only be in relation to them that we can have any rights at all. Thus, the state grants certain rights within intellectual property and can set these rights however long or short as it wishes. This is, though, subject to political contestation whereby we as citizens are able to argue and politically come to some agreement about a suitable length.

2. A liberal democratic state is predicated on the principle of a public sphere that gives access to information that can be used in this contestation. Additionally, creativity requires a certain ability to reuse and re-invigorate old works.

3. Property rights and democratic political rights are therefore clearly here in direct contradiction. This can only be resolved through certain necessary exception to the intellectual property rights (such as fair-usage) and term-limits. This is why we see such concern with these issues by classical scholars such as Locke, Jefferson etc.

4. The value of intellectual property is increasing due to our greater reliance on information and knowledge (and entertainment) and therefore there is a general obfuscation of the difference between the physical and immaterial property in order to make the discursive case that they are the same (when clearly they are not - (i.e. non-rivalrous, infinitely reproducible, zero/near-zero marginal cost etc etc). This is to make as much money as possible from ownership.

5. Therefore the difficulty is magnified when you realise that it is multinational corporations that are particularly benefiting from these intellectual property rights, and that to a certain extent, our interest in political contestation of their property rights is anathema to their wishing to make as much profit as possible. They therefore seek to show that copyrights are 'good' for democracy by the roundabout way of demonstrating the quantitative number of products they make and downplaying the qualitative mediocrity/sameness of much of it.

6. We therefore have the spectacularly interesting situation that in effect multinational corporations are acting contra to the very basis of democratic political rights by seeking to own extensive rights to information, knowledge and so on. This is an extremely interesting contradiction in the 'mode of communication'.

However, the basis of the argument is extremely difficult to get across as people are now simply making the assumption that copyright IS property. Additionally Governments are listening very keenly to the multinationals and to the US (which since it become a net exporter of intellectual property has suddenly changed its stance vis a vis full-on protection - it only signed the Berne convention in 1989 for example).

So to cut a long answer short, are human rights can be a way of arguing out of IP? Well, possibly through an argument about access to knowledge etc. However, the difficulty is "what is knowledge?" - i.e. American judges are very keen to try to keep a distinction between information and entertainment and this is something the corporations play on. Are they the same thing? Where is the borderline etc.

Plus, when you are a government concerned about globalisation, threats of job losses, tax losses etc etc. The talk about new clean sunrise industries, 21st century production and the creative/networked/knowledge economy and the discourse of the information society sounds very interesting indeed. Something that costs very little (i.e. legislation to strengthen IP), can be sold to voters (who wants to work in a factory afterall) and looks like the leaders are actually forward thinking and at the cutting edge (i.e. the UK talk from the DCMS about the 'creative' economy).

It is difficult to argue against something that seems to promise so much. Especially when the content industry can put prices on everything (i.e. politicians like hard numbers) whereas the anti-IP people talk about issues like access, democracy and freedom of expression, that to be fair it is difficult to cost in the same way and its hard to see at first glance why they might be affected. Also, frankly the content industry is winning the battle to persuade people that IP and physical property are the same thing.

But anyway, the other question raised is whether moral rights could be used as a defence against copyright terms etc. Well, it seems the answer is not in the short-term as moral rights cause all sorts of problems for the sharing of information themselves (i.e. paternity, integrity) and they might actually serve to strengthen the case for property rights (i.e. by a kind of Hegelian argument that your work is a part of your personality or self).