Digital Books
Monday, May 15th, 2006There is an article in the New York Times about Google Book Search. You need to register to access the article, but the discussion is quite interesting.
Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category
Good Morning, UMCP! - with Scott McCloud
Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006We’ve been enjoying pretty heady and thoughtful presentations at MITH this week. In less than an hour Scott McCloud will speak again at the University of Maryland in SQH1120, but this morning he took questions from facutly and students at MITH.
Conversation ranged widely including the following topics: the relation among comics, film, games, and the computer; mimetic strengths and weaknesses from the “general reader’s” perspective; the culture, visual, information, “literacy” that supports or challenges production of messages for either informational or aesthetic purposes; the role and nature of escape in popular (American?) culture; among other topics (superheros on the sidelines, etc).
What I took away from the experience was, again perhaps like my take on Dr. Liu’s presentation and rhetoric, is very much my own. Somehow, technology has brought back the idea of skill and craft in a culture that has for more than 50 years (and how many wars now?) turned its back on cultures of manufacture. Comics are a skill, a craft, one as worthy as applied chemistry. I’m not taught to apply for graduate school in the humanities by communicating my ideas graphically, but linguistically — and that cultural bias has some consequences that go beyond the crevices of theory, which I think we explored a bit in conversation. Digital humanities, nay scholarship more and more and more, is becoming a guild of women and men of diverse being and purposes who hone their skills with the tools available to them.
Waking up, as a complete outsider in games and comics (and perhaps even Digital Humanities, who’s in there anyway?) is a process, and I need my coffee. The range of issues here is exciting. I can’t wait to hear how Mr. McCloud addresses computers more specifically in just a few minutes. I wish I could blog live from the ENGL Department lecture hall. A fantasy for another day.
1.8″ Hard Drives
Friday, April 28th, 2006Since I know you like Hard drives so much, Matt, and because the technology is of interest to me in my seminar paper, I’m posting this link on some hard drive innovations currently in production:
“1.8″ Hard Drives: Small is Beautiful” from Tom’s Hardware
Of interest in the article’s conclusion:
However, we need to make one thing unmistakably clear: the hard drive is still the main performance bottleneck in many application scenarios, and on all existing PC types. Whether you start Windows, launch applications or flip through large digital photos, you will always experience a delay due to the hard drive.
…
20b3The bottom line is that there is an essential tradeoff between performance and physical characteristics. If you want an ultraportable PC using a 1.8″ drive, you will forfeit performance. There is nothing that can change this right now, but ultraportable notebooks, UMPCs and smallest-form-factor solutions will lose their 1.8″ drive handicaps in the near future.
Coming Up
Monday, April 10th, 2006
Immutable Mobiles
Saturday, March 25th, 2006Here is a link to a section of Latour’s website. It deals with an art exhibit he helped put together in 2002. Specifically he talks about images in art, science and religion which may be useful in a discussion about inscriptions. Pay special attention to his presentation on iconoclash, a slide show that deals with cascading images and inscriptions. You can also browse the rest of his website if you’re curious. Enjoy.
Hello Everyone,
Hope everyone had a good spring break. Here is some information for my presentation on Tuesday.
There are two main issues I would like to take up concerning Latour. In their response papers both Jess and Will touch on the paradox of inscriptions which seem to be both fleeting and permanent. This seems to be a reoccurring theme in class. One of the key elements in Latour’s immutable mobile is stability. Does this model offer any explanations for the permanence or lack of permanence for inscriptions? Can we read newer types of inscriptions as containing the accumulation of previous levels? For examples of ways to think about new types of inscriptions here is a link to a site designed by M.A. Syverson at the University of Texas at Austin. The actual URL will be posted below. It deals with some of these issues and directly engages Latour. I think it has some short comings so we can talk about that as well. Also at stake in this issue of stability is of course time and space manipulation. This is something else I would like to take up.
The other issue that seems to be at stake in Latour’s work is modeling. I would like to discuss the Gorman piece in relation to the strengths and weaknesses of Latour’s model. In relation to this I am including some quotes from Willard McCarty below that also touch upon this topic
That it’s for now but I’ll be adding some more info by Monday. Thanks.
Pete Sinnott
Syverson: http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~syverson/talks/cccc01/exampleprojects.html
Quotes
“The cascade of fourth, fifth, and nth order inscriptions will never stop, especially if the population, computers, and the profession of demography, statistics and economics, and the Census Bureau all grow together. In all cases the nth order inscriptions will now stand for nth-1 order paper forms exactly as these in turn stood for the level just below” (Latour, 234).
“Most of the difficulties we have in understanding science and technology proceeds from our belief that space and time exist independently as an unshakeable frame of reference inside which events and place would occur. This belief makes it impossible to understand how different spaces and different times may be produced inside the networks built to mobilise, cummulate, and recombine the world” (Latour, 228).
“Watching the graph paper slowly emerging out of the physiograph, we understand that we are at junction of two worlds: a paper world that we have just left and one of instruments that we are just entering. A hybrid is produced at the interface: a raw image, to be used later in an article, that is emerging from an instrument” (Latour, 65).
“What is behind a scientific text? Inscriptions. How are these inscriptions obtained? By setting up instruments. This other world just beneath the text is invisible as long as there is no controversy” (Latour, 69).
“The new inscription device brought the living objects to their desks with one crucial change: the irreversible flow of time was now synoptically presented to their eyes. It had in effect become a space on which, once again, rulers, geometry and elementary mathematics could be applied” (Latour, 230).
“All the distinctions one could wish to make between domains (economics, politics, science, technology, law) are less important than the unique movement that makes all of these domains conspire towards the same goal: a cycle of accumulation that allows a point to become a centre by acting at a distance on many other points” (Latour, 222).
“But although sacred the plans were only the start. Once you got out there on the site everything was different. No matter how carefully done, the plans could not foresee the variables” (Grenvill, qtd in McCarty, 1).
“Two effects of computing make the distinction between ‘idea’ or other sort of mental construct on the one hand, and on the other ‘model’ in the sense we require: first the demand for computational tractability, i.e. complete explicitness and absolute consistency; second, the manipulability that a computational representation provides” (McCarty, 3).
“There are in general two ways in which a model may violate expectations and so surprise us: either by a success we cannot explain, e.g. finding an occurrence where it should not be; or by a likewise inexplicable failure, e.g. finding one where it is otherwise clearly present. In both cases modeling succeeds intellectually when it results in failure iether directly with the model itself or indirectly through ideas it shows to be inadequate. This failure, in the sense of expectations violated, is as we will see fundamental to modeling” (McCarty, 4).