Archive for the ‘ etherealised ’ Category
Image: Kitchener Railway Station, Canada, Summer 2011
The purpose of human communication is to make us forget the meaningless context in which we are completely alone and incommunicado, that is, the world in which we are condemned to solitary confinement and death: the world of “nature”.
Vilem Flusser, Writings.
The Digital Methods course consists of seven units with digital research protocols, specially developed tools, tutorials as well as sample projects. In particular this course is dedicated to how else links, Websites, engines and other digital objects and spaces may be studied, if methods were to follow the medium, as opposed to importing standard methods from the social sciences more generally, including surveys, interviews and observation.
by Arnold Kim
Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported in passing that Apple was experimenting with “a new way of charging” the 2012 iPhone. Like our readers, our thoughts instantly went to some sort of wireless charging mechanism. Of course, wireless charging isnt a new technology though the current implementations of it have been somewhat limited. The original Palm Pre launched with an induction charger which allows users to charge their device when it is laid on a special charging mat. The disadvantages of such inductive chargers is the need for near physical contact in order for the power to be transferred as well as heat/power limitations.
via Apples Interest in WiTricity Wireless Charging – Mac Rumors.
.. McLuhan’s Mechanical Bride, and already an integration of products: the WA cigarette advertisement on the left.
Google is trying once again a big break into the already cramped field of social media with Google plus, after a not so buzzy Google Buzz and a rather small wavy Google Wave. This time again, Google allows users to get into the Beta site under viral invitations only: each member has 15 invitations to send, who can send 15 more, …. The site was down for most of the day even for those who did get an invitation, yet several demos have participated to creating a real interest in what might become a real competitor to Facebook. Twitter is filled with posts about it as most of these bloggers want in and are asking for an invitation.
Surely, this new social platform will be talked about. Hopefully for the good reasons since Google has been trying to become a key player in this trend for a while now. Google Wave was promising in many ways, but somehow nothing was friendly about it. I’ve tried ! And I was just hoping that the veterans of Wave could have gotten an invitation first on this one !
One practical problem is that communications technologies themselves are documented to a far lesser extent or are far less accessible than their contents vide the manner in which the intelligence services have remained, despite their frequently decisive role in wars to quote the last head of the Wehrmacht intelligence service, “the Cinderella of military-historical research” 1
via CTheory.net.
Spatial visualization, again. Lexipedia allows users to visualize conceptual networks created with loosely associated expressions and words. The website’s slogan, “where words have meaning,” illustrates how meaning is seen as weaving through relations between signs and their location in a given network of signification rather than ontologically.
bienvenue :: Lexipedia – Where words have meaning.
There are many other interactive tools and softwares for typographic conceptual networks: Thinkmap (a visual Thesaurus) and Doodle Buzz, among others. The snapshot below shows the kind of results one might expect from using Doodle Buzz. In the conceptors’ own account, Doodle Buzz is a new way to approach information, a “quiet chaos” way. The entropy of the information age is indeed more Doodlian than Googlian in many respects and the web has very little to do with linearity. Doodle Buzz is McLuhan’s CounterBlast on steroids, a fascinating hyperbrowser.
A new technology getting old, on my way to work. Oxford St., Cambridge, MA.
The un-archive, in the words of Zielinski, media archaelogist:
“Le temps est compté. Nous devons enfin commencer à prendre au sérieux les objectivations volumineuses du passé pour les rendre exploitables par le futur. Le terme >archos< nest pas seulement lorigine, mais aussi, encore et toujours, le guide. L’idée de l’an-archive contient celle de continuer passionnément à collectionner et à découvrir sans savoir où tout cela nous mène. »
via Siegfried Zielinski.
Google’s scribes have been incredibly busy digitizing books over the last few years. There are now so many books that stating the latest statistics would be impertinent: much like the free storage space of a gmail account, the books are joining the virtual library at a very, very fast pace. Social sciences have been sitting on the Google fence here, somewhat fascinated with the new possibilities of the medium, but also concerned with its limits and potential downsides (the fate and future of the book being a primary concern for many of us bibliophiles). In any cases, the digitization of books radically changed research methods: a concept or an author, or a term, can now be tracked in minutes within an entire book. The traditional index has been transmuted into another, literal index: CTRL-F.
It was simply a question of time before we could track the rise and fall of concepts through the entire Google books library. With this browsing technology, a new field, bordering quantitative research, has emerged: Culturomics.
Researchers have created a powerful new approach to scholarship, using approximately 4 percent of all books ever published as a digital “fossil record” of human culture. By tracking the frequency with which words appear in books over time, scholars can now precisely quantify a wide variety of cultural and historical trends.
The Google Books NGram Viewer allows search through the whole library and displays the trend results (…no results for “culturomics”). The evident problem is the size of the archive itself: what we browse remains a chosen, selected, 4%. However, for those inclined to locate conceptual trends, this tool will constitute a great point of departure, rather than an end to itself, much like bibliometric analyses.
via Oh, the humanity | Harvard Gazette.
See also Steven Pinker’s website.
