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Alan Liu @ UMCP

Sunday, April 30th, 2006

Alan Liu spoke last Friday in McKeldin about the ELO’s Preservation, Archiving, and Dissemination Initiative (PAD) and the Transliteracies project at the University of California.

The in medias res structure of the discourse about handling electronic work born digitally fascinates me. Liu, like everyone else, has to face diverse audiences from different professions and address detailed/complex issues of theory and practice that go to the heart of the scholarly enterprise.

The novice rhetorican in me was fascinated by his having to face simultaneously the tasks of advocating the position of ELO (an organization of early adopters who want their work preserved) as well as the demand to speak of detailed technical standards of other disciplines (METS, RDF, OWL, and OAIS). Discussion of the preservation of electronic records has a history of over thirty years among a small professional group of archivists, a history of ten to fifteen years from some of ELO’s number, and both groups are working dilligently to lower the boom of intellectucal and physical control over dynamic objects no more stable than ephemera in many circumstances. These dual(+) demands on the rhetor are like the dual demands on receptive media and interpreters’ schemas to allow for two-way communication visually and textually (IF you can separate them). Inscriptions are by definition (deeply?) coded performances producing a schismogenesis: the rhetor must be singly focused in dynamically diverse landscapes.

The rhetorical challenges of digital humanities scholars was certainly not his purpose for speaking. He addressed “smart” and “dumb” constraints of the current matrix of tools to achieve scholarly control of “texts”. One constraint is that the meta data standards above do not adequately describe the behaviors of texts produced in Flash or XHTML, for example.

The focus on description as a path toward control (better control) has me thinking. One must begin somewhere, certainly. In my archives experience, the nexus of arrangement, description, preservation, and access as a simultaneous process applied to relatively more stable objects has limited application here. The different parts of each of those areas are in different stages of development. Hopefully, those who can will build test libraries, special collections, and archives (NOT the same thing!) and conduct longitudinal studies that will begin to speak to the scope/scale of future inscriptions.

I guess Transcriptions will have to be another post! [I hope to post on Jospeh Tabbi’s remarks as well, btw.]

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1.8″ Hard Drives

Friday, April 28th, 2006

Since 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.

…

The 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.

1faf

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Electronic Literature Links

Wednesday, April 26th, 2006

The Electronic Literature Organization and its Directory.

Eastgate Systems.

Adventure.

IF today.

David Knoebel’s Click Poetry.

My boyfriend came back from the war.

Heavy Industries (”Dakota” and others).

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Coming Up

Wednesday, April 19th, 2006

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“Data Made Flesh”? Computer Codes and Human Language

Tuesday, April 18th, 2006

In a 1998 interview conducted by IEEE Software shortly after she published “Close to the Machine,” Ellen Ullman comments:

We have always wanted to rationalize the process of writing software, to have it share the great advances in process engineering that have taken place in manufacturing. We like to talk about software as if it were hardware: we call it a “build”; we talk about “components” and “assemblies.” But there is a real heart of chaos in all this. Human beings just do not think and operate like machines, and the ways of human knowledge and understanding do not translate easily or quickly into computer code. That’s why most programmers are so wired: there’s something obsessional about having to translate the rush of thought into line-by-line statements” (Of Machines, Methods, and Madness, IEEE Software, May/June 1998)

I am inclined to agree with Ullman that there is a fundamental (and perhaps irreconcilable) difference between how machines and humans think. But the question remains: if there is such a profound difference between human and machine, why do we continue to conceptualize the computer in human terms?

In his chapter entitled “It Looks Like You’re Writing a Letter,” Matthew Fuller argues that: “To be effective, human-machine integration required that people and machines be comprehended in similar terms so that human-machine systems could be engineered to maximize performance of both kinds of components” (Fuller 148). How were these similarities established? At the most basic level of computer language, the difference is most transparent, for clearly, we do not think in ones and zeros. Where do the similarities with humans and human language begin? Code seems to resemble natural language, but not in a directly translatable correspondence.

In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Kittler writes: “In the founding days of media technology…everything centered on links between flesh and machine” (Kittler 74). Thus the first technologies were reconstructions of the body: the phonograph as an ear, the camera as an eye, the typewriter as a hand (Kittler 74). Can we add computer as brain or body? What do the chosen metaphors used to describe computers tell us about how we define what it means to be “human”? We speak of viruses and bugs, as if these were actual living threats to the body of the computer, not the results of human error or malevolence. And, even when we are fully aware that the language used to describe computers are imperfect metaphors, we have all felt like Jerome McGann at times: “I wish my machine were alive. I would like to kill it” (McGann 92).

I, for one, don’t usually think exclusively in if/then clauses except as part of a larger thought process. There are always other, sometimes unnamable, factors that play into any decision or action. By way of example (which I realize may seem silly, but I think works in this case), the following reflects my daily thought process while (trying to) train my puppy:

If my dog comes when I call him, then I will give him a treat.
If my dog does not come when I call him, then I will not give him a treat.
If my dog runs in the opposite direction when I call him, then I will be angry and I will not give him a treat and I will be frustrated that I wasted money on a puppy training class that did not achieve anything.
If I beat my dog, then I will be charged with animal abuse.

Even though this line of thinking is comprised entirely of if/then statements, there are clearly additional forces at work. Emotional: perhaps I was already frustrated or angry before I began the training session. Are emotions the cause or the effect in this case? Financial: regrets over money ill-spent tie into larger concerns that every graduate student deals with—how to pay for food, rent, etc. Social control: there are limits imposed on what we can and cannot do, although I should make it clear that I do NOT actually beat my dog.

Perhaps it is simply that programming languages serve a purely functional purpose, whereas human language can be used in many different ways, both pragmatic and otherwise. Or perhaps it is that computer code only refers to itself, while human language can refer to any number of physical, abstract, and/or nonsensical things and ideas. Human language exists within a social context, a constantly changing web of associations, referents, and nuances. It is fraught with ambiguity and subject to varying degrees of misunderstanding, misperception, and bias. I don’t as yet know how to answer all these questions, but in raising them, I hope to eventually get at the real issue I plan to address in my final paper: how have our understanding of language and “meaning” changed in an information-based computerized culture”?

Works Cited:
Fuller,Matthew. “It Looks Like You’re Writing a Letter” Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software.. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2003.
Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stabford, Stanford UP, 1999.
McGahn, Jerome J. The Textual Condition. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991. (88-98)
Ullman, Ellen (interview). “Of Machines, Methods, and Madness.” IEEE Software, May/June 1998.

Posted in Response Papers 265a | 2 Comments »

Rhetoric, Collaboration, and Digital Transmission of the Visual

Monday, April 17th, 2006

Hello Everyone,

I’ll be working from PowerPoint slides, paper handouts, and some books during my presentation. I’m going to list the bulk of the topics I want to cover below:

Graphesis

  • Visual expression and knowledge production
  • Imagery combined with text, mathematics, and statistics
  • The image as a “read” medium
  • Interaction between reader and image

The major points I want to explore from the Johanna Drucker piece are the ways visual expressions are read, how science utilizes the visual through diagrams, and a little bit about the Graphical User Interface.

Take a look at the following web pages for some examples of optical illusions. I intend to showcase them to show how the brain interprets and adds in information that is not inherent in the medium it is reading:

http://www.sapdesignguild.org/resources/optical_illusions/index.html

http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~mattd/Cmabrigde/

Question: So is this just a neat trick? Or is there something going on here about the interpretation of an image and how similar it is to the interpretation of text?

Next, we have some examples of images used for scientific discourse:

http://science.unep.org/posters.asp

http://www.periodictables.com/

Question: In the commercial world, the push toward clever formatting and visual rhetoric is exponentially increasing. How far can charts and formatting go (i.e. can we consider them to be part of the content or just an accessory to the content)?

Now take a look at your computer screen. Yes you. Scan your eyes around the contour of your monitor and then take a look at all the icons and buttons you use to navigate your internet browser. Notice how images are made interactive.

Question: Even the simplest of tasks on a computer requires a combination of textual and visual interaction, such as typing and using the mouse. Think back to the early days of DOS (a pure text system). Why does the Graphic User Interface (GUIs) maintain such widespread appeal? Can we think of any areas where the GUI has not caught on?

Understanding Comics

  • The interchangeability of words and images
  • Resemblance and meaning (representation and abstraction)
  • Words and images combined

I will be bringing several comic books to class as examples of the medium and how textual space and visual space are combined. If you don’t mind using Amazon.com, you can check them out here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/159362011X/sr=8-1/qid=1145253981/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-2973529-5751229?%5Fencoding=UTF8

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1563890828/002-2973529-5751229?v=glance&n=283155

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1593074441/sr=8-1/qid=1145253993/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-2973529-5751229?%5Fencoding=UTF8

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1593072287/sr=8-14/qid=1145254007/ref=sr_1_14/002-2973529-5751229?%5Fencoding=UTF8

Question: We see comic books as a collaborative effort between image and textual space. As the humanities trends toward interdisciplinary projects, how does the collaboration of word and picture change the definition of “a canonical text”?

Graphicality

  • The technical aspects of imagery
  • Publishing images and the difficulties therein
  • Storing and transmitting images compared to text
  • Intellectual institutions and their approach to the textuality of imagery

When we talk about the publication of an image nowadays, I think about how an image is supposed to be indexed and searchable on the Internet (that may be a bit of a stretch for others). I wanted to mention the difficulties the internet and computers face when dealing with images versus to dealing with text. Images require metadata and additional storage (several times more than text).

Visit the Blake Archive and think about the storage, bandwidth, and indexing requirements that go into the project:

http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/

Question: As storage capacities, broad-band capabilities, and digital on-demand publishing expand, are pictures still problems? Will digitization redefine the visual, or do continuous problems (such as indexing) keep images problematic?

There’s plenty of additional topics to discuss, but this post is already getting long. I will leave you with quotes:

“If you take a bunch of ignorance and mix it with PowerPoint charts, you get Weasel Knowledge. Weasel Knowledge is to actual knowledge what a painting of a diamond is to an actual diamond. For every type of ignorance, there is some theoretical amount of formatting that will make it look brilliant. The specific technique is beyond the scope of this book, but it involves fonts.”
– Scott Adams, Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel

“Graphesis is defined as the field of knowledge production embodied in visual expressions.”
“[V]isual imagery becomes more stable and more useful when interpreted in combination with a linguistic gloss or statistical base.
“No image is self-evident.”
“Books and graphics, after all, are interfaces through which readers interact with a document to produce a text.”
– All Quotes from Johanna Drucker, Graphesis: Visual knowledge production and representation

“I can read an entire comic book without really looking at the art. This is a process that horrifies Gabriel - imagine his eyes growing wider as, with each swift turn of the page, his craft is obliterated. By contrast, my cohort holds strong opinions on the topic of visual stimuli. I imagine this is part of the reason we’re able to maintain our chaste union: like the gods of old, we keep to our dominions.”
– Jerry Holkins, Penny-Arcade

“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts?
No, the whole is not greater than the sum, the whole is different than the sum. The whole is a new person. The whole is a different entity. And it has written a different book.
…
[P]artly because the act of collaborating gives you a specific audience. A lot of the time when you’re writing your audience is either you or some kind of notion of the reader. The joy of collaboration is it’s no longer you and it’s no longer the reader…”
– Neil Gaiman, Hanging Out with the Dream King

“The man’s words in panel 7 have no particular meaning. He’s just trying to get Batuo’s attention, and while some people might understand him, the main thing he’s trying to convey is hostility. Since it works, it may be a type of incantation.”
–Masamune Shirow, Ghost in the Shell

“We all started out like this, didn’t we? Using words and images interchangeably. It didn’t really matter which we used, so long as it worked.”
“By the early 1800’s, western art and writing had drifted about as far apart as was possible. One was obsessed with resemblance, light and color, all things visible…the other rich in invisible treasures, senses, emotions, spirituality, philosophy…”
– Quotes by Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics

“In one of its deeply rooted forms, this antivisual tradition identifies reality with ideas in language and associates pictures with excess and the ornamentation or distortion of reality, and thus with entertainment, fantasy, and luxury.”
“To make Blake consumable, his sponsors had first to make him legible.”
– Quotes by Morris Eaves, Graphicality

“Consider first the image. It attracts and holds the eye, perhaps because its configuration is precisely what a viewer’s verbal powers of description are already prepared to capture.”
— Shiff Richard, Puppet and Test Pattern

“As so often happens, what had begun as an attempt to represent aspects of an underlying reality had gradually come to be accepted as constituting the reality itself.”
– Bruce Hunt, Lines of Force, Swirls of Ether

See you Tuesday,
Will

2a0a

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Networks’ Products and Waste

Saturday, April 15th, 2006

Hello All,
This response paper deals with some of the issues I am grappling with for my paper. I’m not sure if it makes sense. There are definitely some theoretica and practicall issues to work out, but I figured what the hell.

There seems to have been a lot written about how technology and networks have been utilized within social, political, industrial movements to the extent that such formations are reshaping the structure of society itself. Some examples of this have been economic globalization whereby a product is created through multiple sites of production across the globe. There have been social movements like disparate groups protesting against the WTO in Seattle that utilized the internet and cell phone technology to not only plan the protests but also arrange the movements of protesters throughout the city. There is of course also the specter of terrorist networks whose use of technology and network organization to produce violence and fear is a germane topic in this day and age. All of these examples and numerous studies dealing with them are centered around what is intentionally produced by these networks and technologies. In other words there is a clear and conscious intentionality between the media, the subject network and the object produced or made transparent through that network. This is in fact one of the powers of the network and technology; it brings together far ranging elements to create a singular but often complex object. However, this is not all that such networks and such technologies produce.
What I want to suggest is something seemingly obvious. Media and the network formations they give rise to, always produce something in excess of their intended object. Language of course operates in the same fashion. Just as in language, what is in excess of the intended object is also essential to it. However, despite this importance the excess is often waste or even pollution. If the age of mechanical production produced and still produces by-products that are dangerous and unhealthy then the same may be true of the so-called information age. In a consumer culture this waste operates as the foundation from which value is created and abstracted. Now waste and pollution are themselves value laden terms and today’s waste is tomorrow’s gold mine. However, in order to affect this transformation from waste to gold, media must be applied to it such as technology and network formations. This process of application is what creates value. From this then it can be concluded that the production of networks operates on multiple valences producing both intended objects and waste. The waste then may become raw material for production as those same networks take it up as the object of its intention. Part of the efficiency of networks is that they produce both the object and the raw material for further production.
The examples mentioned in the first paragraph deal with human beings connected to one another through technology. This means organizing human beings into a singular force. People become reduced to a singular mass. Plurality is sacrificed for singularity. Memento is an example that might help illustrate this process. The narrator knows that there are numerous selves the poles of which he establishes as the potato chip eater and the enlightened one. All of these selves are organized for a singular purpose, namely revenge. All of the selves are engaged only in the moment. There is no transcendant consciousness. What is learned by each self is inscribed, and the inscriptions draw the selves together toward that singular purpose. The experience of the past moments are forgotten even though the inscription of those experiences are what drives singular pursuit of revenge. The selves of the networked protests, industrial production, or terrorists organizations operate in a similar fashion where multiplicity is drawn into a singularity.
It may seem like I am talking about two separate issues but I’ll try to draw them together now. To recap; there are two sets of tensions which I have been dealing with in relation to media, technology, and networks namely, multiplicity/singularity and product/waste. To an extant these tensions correspond to one another. Singularity is matched with product, and multiplicity is matched with waste. The arrow of correspondence works in both directions. A singularity allows the intentional production of a coherent object, but it also true that through creating a coherent object that the singularity comes into being. What is left over or perhaps erased like Earl’s memory in Memento is the multiplicity of selves. The waste is in the traces of the former selves that have not yet been recycled back into the network. The second date on the bell loses meaning. The absence of the watch has no history. These traces have are left overs, rendered meaningless while Earl sits in the back of the car. They have yet to be recycled into the clear objective of revenge. However, just as these traces of the multiple selves become by-products of the act of revenge they will also instigate the beginning of the process over again countless times as the movie intimates.
Memento offers a somewhat clear metaphor for the process I am trying to describe here. What is important is that value is only located in the singularity while the multiplicity is only the lack that must be turned into something valuable. In his essay entitled “The End of Temporality” Frederic Jameson says that, in the wake of existentialism, contemporary society is not dealing with death and finite existence but rather the spectacle of an “immense multitude of others” (709). Perhaps it has been media rather than existentialism that has revealed or perhaps created this spectacle, but the prioritization of media over philosophy is not my point here. What does seem important is the way in which this immense multitude is not only revealed but also devalued as both the raw material and waste products of networks and media. Now I would not make the statement that this is the inherent tendency of all modern media and network society, but it is important that the intended object of production whether it be social change or a laptop computer is not all that is produced. Where media also asserts its influence is in the excess of production, the objects that are either rendered secondary to the intended object or are the waste resulting from the production of those objects. It is the contradiction of some network formations that in the same instance of celebrating the disparate elements that form the network, those same elements are devalued so the singular object can rise in status and take priority.
I would like to conclude this torturous trip with one last example. Approximately a year ago, there was a push to allow cell phone use in airplanes. On one side telecommunication companies and business travel associations vocally supported the proposal for obvious reasons. On the other side, consumers and the Flight Attendant Union among others lined up against it. A final decision has not been reached as numerous delays for safety and marketing studies have been undertaken. One of the interesting aspects of this controversy is the repetition of an identical narrative among people opposing the plan. Somewhat predictably, people recount the fear of sitting in a middle a seat with a person on a cell phone on each side of them. One person is talking about unseemly details of their health and/or sex life and the other person is going on and on about mundane business affairs. The person in the middle is isolated, bombarded with countless other voices. Their presence is not acknowledged. Not only are they outside any given network they are made to experience that outside painfully through the half conversations going on everywhere around them. The narrative usually ends in a case of what Flight Attendants are starting to call “air rage”. The half conversations experienced by this person are a different kind of data flow than for the person talking on the cell phone even though it is made of the same material. It is both produced and rendered valuable only through the cell phone or more accurately the cell phones networked together. When John Paul Sartre had one of his characters in the play No Exit proclaim “Hell is other people!” he was not thinking of airplanes and cell phones, but this is exactly what the narrative of the person in the middle seat seems to be saying. The multitude of others is articulated and structured as so much invasive waste. This multitude is the waste of data flows occurring through networks. The cell phone even while connecting one person to another, isolates that person from many more. As well as whatever is being produced through that phone call, the by product is always the half conversation experienced frustratingly by others. Avital Ronell claims that the telephone always asks a question that must be answered. It creates an intentionality toward an object that cannot be ignored. If this was true before the ubiquity of cell phones, then the mobilization of the question that must be answered in every space and time only intensifies it. But the intended object is not the only one produced. The half conversations overheard in restaurants, subways, as well as airplanes are experienced as a devalued multitude of others that exist beyond the network and media which turn make sense of it by driving towards the singularity of an intended object.
I have been using the terms media, networks, and technology somewhat interchangeably. This is not because all of these ideas are equivalent but rather it is difficult to determine where one begins and another ends. It is also difficult if not impossible to establish a chain or sequence of determination between these elements. However, any real investigation would have to be designate historical context to use these terms intelligibly. Until then, their conflation only betrays a theoretical weakness.

1a2d

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Dreaming of “Skin”

Thursday, April 13th, 2006

Although this is normally outside of what I would usually do, I have to share with you all a dream I had last night. I dreamt I became one of Shelley Jackson’s words! I got the word tattooed on the inside of my wrist, but….I could not read what the word was. I do not know the alphabet in which it was written.

Towards the end of the dream, the word began to fade: I had been tricked. The tattoo artist used some new, special disappearing ink.

That’s about it. I hope you all get a little laugh out of it. Enjoy the upcoming weekend.

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Coming Up

Monday, April 10th, 2006

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Storage & Mellon Grants

Wednesday, April 5th, 2006

This small notice was published in Archival Outlook, the Society of American Archivists (http://www.archivists.org/) newsletter to members.

Harvard to Develop Global Digital Format Registry

The Harvard University Library has received a grant of $600,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the development of a registry of authoritative information about digital formats. The two-year project will result in a new Global Digital Format Registry (GDFR), which will become a key international infrastructure component for the digital preservation programs of libraries, archives, and other institutions with the responsibility for keeping digital resources viable over time. For current information and updates on GDFR, visit http://hul.harvard.edu/gdfr.

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