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April 2006April 01, 2006In my blog class we had to read Burrough's Bryon Gysin's Cut-Up Method. What's more natural to implement directly this method, uh? So everybody got their scissors and glue and had fun, I guess. "It is experimental in the sense of being something to do".
Well here are the works of art:
Keywords: burroughs, class, cut up, event, gysin, text generator, workshop Posted by camille.pb | 22 comment(s) April 04, 2006JODI's -A- ProjectWednesday 22 March | 18.00 - 19.30 hrs; Location: Collegezaal, Overblaak 85, Rotterdam; Free, all welcome. JODI, Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans present work-in-progress on a new project for Rotterdam:
The Navigator(TM) writes a message on the map.(Walk-a-Letter) (Bike-a-Word) (Drive-a-Book) (Swim-a-Smiley :) The trajectories form sentences in time. (Blue follows Black) How long does it take for an anonymous scooter to drive a legible word? The map of Rotterdam can display a thousand storyboards. (This way#Red - Walk#Green) How to read/write this book while in motion. (Roadmovie-Between the Lines- Passagenwerk) A:"Drive slowly to your work-Turn Right". A long text to go on a mobile screen. (GPSaccounting-Time) Numbers in the White Pages® of public transport. (La Linea-Bookmark/ Landmark- Latitude:Longitude)
The irregular citygrid shapes a trembling %Local fontstyle. Through the urgent handwriting (follow my footsteps) a text appears. (Ink on wheels) WHOIS writing/driving the city and WHEREAMI in the story (Alphaville-Storyville-Dogville) Can Pattern recognition on these unreadable maps help me find directions? How to unscramble Haiku-maps? Am i on a journey in a message? An age long mess of roadworks, the Library of the street (Order-Dialect-Slang- Obscene- SMS) To read your line, call this website anytime. Find a secret trace in the shopping crowd. The irregular "structure" of streets (SOS), and its access resolution, determines how/where the writing layout takes place. (Map-layers vs alined page) Start-a-thread. JODI (http://www.jodi.org/) are the current Research Fellow in Media Design Research. Once completed, -A- Project will be available for use online. The lecture is presented by Media Design Research, Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy Hogeschool Rotterdam. Posted by jo at March 9, 2006 11:37 AM; orginal post here: http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/002208.html no more info for now. not online. Keywords: data, jodi, reblog, visualization Posted by camille.pb | 8 comment(s) April 11, 2006Last minute news. Tomorrow (April 11th - today is 10th, don't believe this blog time configuration) I am going to be a guest blogger in a blog live performance by Al Larsen. I don't know exactly what is going to happen but while he presents his blog and his modes of navigations i am supposed to be linked to and pop up and present my own blog. Al Larsen's blog, Warm Not Cold, got some great sound pieces that are an "attempt to confuse syllables with beats, machine-voice with spoken word, text with score." http://www.propertyistheft.com/warmnotcold/  My intervention will be related my blog's tomorrow's last post, which is going to come into existence about tonight. In an attempt to confuse text with text. This is part of two-day exhibition/performance event organised by Trebor Scholz & Tom Leonardth's "Data, Death and Desire" class (Media Study Dept. @ Suny Buffalo) that relates to the sociable technologies: "Net3" might be a proposition for counter-attacking the control-based technologies of the Internet2 network.
Quick schedule for tomorrow (today's too late I guess): - David Hohusen: workshop on creating comic images using gaming systems - Jonathan Burrow + Tom Peters + Parker English: "Socially Networked Video", a choose-your-own-adventure piece u sing a web tool that allows the artists to compose and distribute live streaming video of the a udience - Brian Diesel: "The Enveloop", a discussion on mediated social environments - Al Larsen: "Warm Not Cold", a performance comprising music, spoken and video (and human links!).
UPDATE: check out some pics of the performance here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sasha_miike/sets/720575941078758 and also an excerpt of me reading during the event: http://www.vimeo.com/clip=63691 Keywords: al larsen, event, net 3, paris hilton, performance, sociable technologies, social software, web 2.0 Posted by camille.pb | 267 comment(s) This is part of my investigation on the literary machines, or robot poets, or, better said, robot-aided poetry machines. I have tested a few, among which Mac Travesty, which is a very simple one. It works with a text input of your choice. It first analyzes this text according to the sorting parameters that you have chosen, and then it "travestites" it according to an order of character/letter pre-determined. It roughly scrambles a text thanks to a stochastic process determined by statistical constraints, mainly. This process, based on statistic randomness, is interesting to the extent that it anticipates what comes next. It then digs out structures of language and performs them on the foreground. A web version of the Travesty is available here: http://www.eskimo.com/%7Erstarr/poormfa/travesty.html (you have to write down a little more than a 3 words sentence in the webform to get some elaborate result). What I use is the Mac Travesty machine that is downloadable here: http://hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/HyperArchive/Abstracts/text/ (Mac only, obviously). I like the description they make of it: "MacTravesty tabulates the frequencies of character sequences in a text. The cryptologist will find it a handy tool for finding the number of characters, bigrams and trigrams in a text. Students of language will enjoy the random prose created from the analysis. This tiny program will run on any Macintosh." Anyway I was wondering how one can make an interesting use of these poetry machines, and I mean "interesting" by a mean to capture attention and hold it for a significant while greater than the usual "clicking time" on the Internet. The random factor of these machines are said to create a "modernist" poetry effect (cf. my posts on Jim Carpenter here http://elgg.net/camillepb/weblog/7811.html and here http://elgg.net/camillepb/weblog/10405.html), so I wouldn't really see the use to process a text that is already literature-saturated. Jackson MacLow has done that (between others) with his scrambling of a Virginia Woolf's novel, and it's just boring-boring. So I had 2 hypothesis for performing the process in an interesting way: - if one submits to the machine speeches that are supposed to be "public": court reports or testimonies, newspaper articles, political speeches. Mainly because the amount of jargon rhetoric there is higher than anywhere else. The stochastic scrambling disturbs the given structure and make it crazy, not because of randomness, but because it allows a different way to read, more critical, what's already there: all the figures of speech and idiosyncratic twists come out and play! - if one uses this machine to filter out narrative type discourses. I mean, the narrative is really based on sequentiality, and this machine scramble any ideas of semantic sequence and replaces it with a statistical and non-semantical sequencing order. What becomes the story then? Luckily, I found a source text that allowed me to play on both level. See next post on Paris Hilton Slander Lawsuit (http://elgg.net/camillepb/weblog/11716.html). I truly think that the boredom of text-generators comes from the fact that the source texts are not carefully chosen. Usually, poets use them to process texts, or databases, that are supposed to have a high poetic value (choice of a certain vocabulary for instance). The machine performance has a strong chance to act as a redundant tool for the data/text, while processing meaning through word manipulation, playing with the arbitrary of word combination. Poetry is often presented has a non-order (or disruptive order) text process (I mean linguistically, semantically, but also politically), and that's what the text-generators do too. I think it's better that these machines precisely work on order-based speeches (text that simulate the construction of an order, not its disruption). It doesn't mean much to disrupt the disruptive. Regarding this last use, I recommend checking out these parody poetry-generators instead of serious ones: - Broken Poem Generator - Biomorph Poem Generator Regarding the use I prefer, I recommend, once again, Christophe Bruno (see this post http://elgg.net/camillepb/weblog/9357.html, and this post http://elgg.net/camillepb/weblog/9359.html). Keywords: generative art, mac travesty, poetry machine, poetry value, random, semantics, statistics, stochastic, text generator Posted by camille.pb | 34 comment(s) While shamelessly looking for gossip on the internet, I came across the Paris Hilton's trial. She was sued for making defamatory statements about her fiance's ex-girlfriend (involving a very funny fight in a London night club - look out on the Internet for full story). This trial report is as good as a theatre play, with language situations as absurd as could be in Godot, and with a Hilton playing rhetoric and ingenuity very convincingly. Well, what interested me was that reading that text implied as much pleasure as a literature piece, and I wanted to use the text for a text-generator experimentation (see previous post). It was also a way to tackle a critique of intentionality conceived by literary semiotics: that a figural paradigm of speech can be found at all level of a text, unifying the text under the significance, high symptom of semiosis and literary aesthetics. Here, that's more or less what's happening, but it is not a literary text (i.e. no literary intentionality). I thought it would be funny to work on a gossip text in a textual analysis perspective. I thought about performing a literary study on it (like in front of a class for instance), and maybe I'll do it at some point, but for now I just wanted to use it to create another text (a new pom!) I processed the text through the Mac Travesty generator to come up with a piece. First I edited the trial report, retrieving all passages that were coming out as paradigms of narrative-report and descriptive report - involving the use of pronouns as as referring to persons and events in the most vague way possible. Also I did edit out names of people and places to reinforce this vagueness. I wanted to see what would be the effect on the event basis that is supposed to be the skeleton of the text. Then I choose, among these excerpts, the passages where Hilton's style of speaking was the most redundant, repetitive and confused: these exemplify the fact that the paradigm (vagueness of pronouns) do concentrate their effect on high stylistic moments. These passages I processed through Mac Travesty. !*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*! Here is the result: i was with my fiance, and i go to europe every summer, and we were just there with his family. when we arrived, it was empty. we were the first people there. it was probably 11:30 or 12:00. sometime around midnight, like around that area. we went to the restaurant, i don't know, one of these restaurants. so then from there to dinner and then we went straight to the club. i had been there on monday, tuesday and wednesday. it is the only good club in london, so we go there every night. it's just -- i don't really remember. i know it has -- i didn't pay attention actually. i don't know. he was just like, "oh, my god, she's insane. i can't believe she showed up at this party. everyone here hates her. " and then everyone kept coming up to us and saying, "oh my god, she is psycho. she keeps staring at you guys." we were scared, so we left. i just -- i don't know. when i meet someone -- you know, i'm not jealous of anyone. i am very happy with my life, and i just wanted to be nice and show, like, it was cool. i knew she hated me, but i wanted her to like me. i was just, like, "hi, nice to meet you." i was just trying to be nice. i was just to meet trying trying to meet trying trying to meet you." i was just, "hi, "hi, like, like, "hi, nice to meet to meet you." i was just, nice trying trying trying to meet trying trying to meet trying to meet you." i was just, like, like, "hi, nice. i was just, like, nice nice to be nice. because if you are nice to someone, then they can't talk bad about you. like, they'll feel bad saying bad things about you. so i thought maybe if i was nice, then she would stop talking bad about me. i said to try to kill the story. like, basically, don't let anyone know about this, but in case anyone does call, because i thought for sure their people were going to call and try to do a whole thing with it, so i was, like, in case anyone does, just try to either kill the story or just say you know what, they were at a club and she basically told her she was ugly and old. i just thought it was crazy. i didn't even know. it was just funny. we were all sitting there reading the magazine and laughing. it was just crazy how far fetched the whole story was. i have no idea. i can't -- i don't -- it was just like reading. i read shit all the time. i don't count how many times.
Keywords: event, mac travestite, paradigms, paris hilton, poetry, semiotics, text generator, text processing Posted by camille.pb | 3 comment(s) April 12, 2006Josh Strauss (of Kitchen Distribution: http://plantarchy.us/post_moot.jpg) and me on a mission from Buffalo to Oxford, Ohio, to bring a little fun, video and poetry to this festival.  p o s t _ m o o t a convocation of unorthodox cultural and poetic practices April 14-16. 2006 performances, discussions, screenings, papers and book launches (h u n d r e d s / Slack Buddha, Plantarchy, tnwk (the books chapters 6-7), Some Assembly Required) http://plantarchy.us/post_moot.html PARTICIPANTS Michael Basinski _ Brian Marina Brown _ Peter Castaldo _ Rachel Chase _ cris cheek _ Steph Elstrow _ K. Lorraine Graham _ Alan Golding _ Kevin R. Hollo _ L.A. Howe _ William R. Howe _ Jackie Kari_Justin Katko _ Claire Keys_Steven Paul Lansky _ Kirsten Lavers _ Mel Nichols _ Tom Orange _ CamillePaloque-Bergès _ Nicole Proctor _ Jim Reiss_ Linda Russo _ Jessica Smith _ Rachel Smith _ Rod Smith _ Joshua Strauss _ TNWK _ Rodrigo Toscano _ Keith Tuma _ Mark Wallace _ Leigh Waltz _ Tyrone Williams _ Aaren Yandrich _ Jason Zeh _ Posted by camille.pb | 7 comment(s) April 15, 2006Some pics and videos of Al Larsen's blog performance at the Net>3 event are linked in this entry: http://elgg.net/camillepb/weblog/11709.html
Keywords: al larsen, blog, event, marc bolhan, performance Posted by camille.pb | 4 comment(s) April 19, 2006I haven't started yet to think about writing a report on the Post-Moot festival (http://elgg.net/camillepb/weblog/11798.html) or even post my photos, but some people have already intensely worked at it. UPDATE: I posted my pics on my flickr: http://flickr.com/photos/sasha_miike/sets/720575941263807
From Tom Orange's "Heuriskein" blog: - Post-Moot Statements: a blurb that he prepared and read the first day of the festival as an interruption/intervention called "provocation" in between 2 presentations: http://heuriskein.blogspot.com/2006/04/post-moot-statements.html - Post-Moot Pictures: http://heuriskein.blogspot.com/2006/04/post-moot-pictures.html - (extensive) Report part 1: http://heuriskein.blogspot.com/2006/04/post-moot-report-part-one.html - (extensive) Report part 2: http://heuriskein.blogspot.com/2006/04/post-moot-report-part-two.html
Posted by camille.pb | 2 comment(s) April 20, 2006Rust Belt Books, Allen St, Buffalo NY
Live Text, Video, & Book Launches
Coupons≠Coupons - http://couponscoupons.blogspot.com Keywords: buffalo, chapbooks, coupons, event, joshua strauss, justin katko, performance, poetry, reading, rust belt books Posted by camille.pb | 0 comment(s) April 26, 2006Josh's videos on Plantarchy: http://www.plantarchy.us/strauss.html ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Brian M. Brown <brownbm@muohio.edu> Date: Apr 25, 2006 4:29 PM Subject: Re: Joshua Strauss' Masterpiece Theatre To: HY-ART@listserv.muohio.edu Yo, When are we gonna be able to see the video footage of Josh's: "I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOwI AM FRAMing me F raming You RIght NOwI AM FRAMing me FramingYou RIght NOwI AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOwI AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOwI AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOwI AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOwI AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing m e Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw I AM FRAMing me Framing You RIght NOw" Piece? Brian M. Brown Keywords: event, joshua strauss, mail, network, performance, plantarchy, poetry, video Posted by camille.pb | 1 comment(s) The last day of Post-Moot, we had an intimate reading in one of the salons of the School of Interdisciplinary Studies. One teacher had assigned his students to come and listen to that reading session. I recorded the "Pigs" reading by Keith Tuma while watching this row of strange bored girls taking I-don't-know-what-kind-of notes:
Video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDgnBTww4Y0
Gif here: http://static.flickr.com/48/131976519_3e71e488c1_o.gif Bonus!! The Making Of of the gif!! I am doing this in the car back to Buffalo while Justin is singing in his headphones connected to the amplifier:
Video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cm5WqI4iXp0 Posted by camille.pb | 566 comment(s) April 27, 2006 Today in class I present two essays in Trebor Scholz's class on Technologies for Collaboration (SUNY Buffalo) Reading notes are here. Outline is under this sentence. 1/ on e-democracy: "Bowling Together: Online Public Engagement in Policy Deliberation"by Stepehen Coleman & John Gotze [update/reblog: check out this scary post on e-democracy voting tools - on the networked_performance blog] )()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()( Supplemental material. &&&&&&&&&& Wikipedia has an intricate system of rules that most of its users have no idea of. Here are some starters:
Wikipedia is not the place for original research such as "new" theories. Wikipedia is not a primary source. Specific factual content is not the question. Wikipedia is a secondary source (one that analyzes, assimilates, evaluates, interprets, and/or synthesizes primary sources) or tertiary source (one that generalizes existing research or secondary sources of a specific subject under consideration). A Wikipedia entry is a report not an essay. Wikisource: free wiki library of source texts &&&&&&&&&&& Also a critical perspective: "The Great Failure of Wikipedia" . Some notes from the latter article: Wikipedia is participating to the first wave of the coming "information war". It is the symbol for a growing will of control on the Internet that is channeled by addiction making social softwares; in that context, editing or vandalizing is the same expression of that addictive will to intervene and control information. Wikipedia promotes an utopian and humanistic mode of cooperation, but is actually using actively bots and flags for edit alerts and immediate censoring action. Any edit becomes suspicious. This automated suspicion is the seed for an authoritative micro-society. Wikipedi is definitely a system, thus it involves "politics", in spite of its claims for "Neutrality" (NPOV: Neutral Point of View policy - has an entry to itself). These politics involve an internal language/code that is known only by the administrators and imposed on users (especially "newbies") as warrants for final cuts. This higly contradicts Jimbo Wales' supposedly philosophy for openness, trust and non-intervention. examples of page conflicts/control: G. W. Bush: an entry that is vandalized 80% of the day; Brian Peppers: the "not notable" case. examples of internal language/adminsitrators code: WP:NOT ; WP:BEANS ; WP:OFFICE --> used as control legitimation, a special pass that allows you to edit/delete without giving any reasons (internal wikipedia hierarchised rights). )()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()( Keywords: collaboration, cooperation, e-democracy, essays, event, network, online, presentation, reblog, social software, summary, wikipedia Posted by camille.pb | 3 comment(s) April 29, 2006On April 27, 2006, there a was a little conference sponsored by the Humanities Institute University and the English dept. of SUNY Buffalo: Stephen Ramsay, professor in the English dept. in the University of Georgia (http://cantor.english.uga.edu/cocoon/home/cantor.html), was talking about "Computerized Criticisms with Humans". He presented his programming methods for analyzing literary texts: when statistics analysis becomes tool for interpretation.  Ramsay's perspective was a shift from Jerome McGann's stance: "Computing in humanities is about imagining what we don't know", into a more hermeneutical stance: computing in the humanities might be the act of re-imagining what we already know (the general scope of anamnesis: the platonic art of remembering). Ramsay establishes frequency of words use lists for literary interpretation purpose. One example was a text-analysis of a novel by Virginia Woolf were the main six characters are speaking in a stylistically united way. The intelligence of the analysis is less to determine the frequency of words used than to sort out the vocabulary that is non-shared: it doesn't matter if the character uses a word 1 or 10 times, the question is to know that if the word belongs to his semantic world. The analytic algorithm that Ramsay promotes works on the small scale of vocabulary, not on syntax. His programs focus on low-level features (words, vocabulary). Ramsay points out that the distribution of words in a text does not match empirical patterns, and that it can be therefore frustrating to handle. In order to interpret these operations (the making of lists), we need to forget about believing our senses. He took the example of Faulkner: his texts seem like a jungle, in terms of vocabulary and syntax richness, but actually when you generate lists, you find out that his texts are less rich in vocabulary than more straightforward, "simple" texts. The main question that was asked was about the relationship between the notion of fact and the lists generated by the text-analysis program. Are these lists factual? A first answer  would be that the computer generates objective facts and we interpret them subjectively. But the real problem regards the act of interpretation itself: the existence of the occurrences may be factual, but their meaning are not. In that sense computers can only be considered as tools for an interpretative method: nothing new, nothing innovative; a very patient scholar could make the same work by establishing tables and lists on a paper. Computer then is just a tool that is used to be faster and more accurate. The computer cannot fail, but the validity of the interpretations are still not validated. So the question of factuality should be abandoned: Ramsay says that we don't ask if artifacts are facts, it is not the point. The point then regards the making of the programs themselves, the "primitive operations" that are the algorithms: the point is, what does it mean to apply a specific equation to a text? In that sense, machines are instantiations of our own patterns of interpretations: that's why Ramsay advocates text-analysis in the field of what is called "human computation". The research is never objective, but always oriented. It applies predictive models to the text. The text becomes marked with a double interpretation: the conceptual frame in which it is submitted to a semantic analysis that is supposed to make sense, and the fact that it is forced to sort out lists that should confirm that semantic approach. The list of markers are the very keys to the marking. Up to that point, Ramsay didn't say anything revolutionary. He just restated about computing tools what we know about epistemological environments that determine the orientation of our knowledge. Once again, what do we gain from that? In the anamnesis process, what does it mean to use the computer to confirm what we already know? Ramsay then starting to talk about the possibility for an experimental method conducted in that frame: the algorithmic generation of rules is a constructed ruleset; but this ruleset might prompt the researcher to look at other places and look at the text differently.  The applied ruleset conclusions doesn't always match the literary history classification. He took the example of a genre classification text-analysis processed on the Shakespeare plays, that came up with the conclusions that Romeo and Juliet and Othello were not tragedies but comedies. Ramsay was excited by this because it contradicted the official classification, but matched some non official claims that had been made by researchers since a long time. Then the next question could be: when you got hold of a system of classification, when you tested it on the text, you should ask yourself what underlies this system? Computing for humanities is therefore a way to (re)discover some underlying process that we didn't know about (but that existed in "reality"?). Ramsay, at some point, said how exciting it was to discover "Ovidian tendencies" in authors that didn't seem to be in the tradition of Ovide at first sight. Ramsay has formulated this research experiments in an essay entitled "Databases" (online at http://www.digitalhumanities.org/Essays/) : "Relational databases in humanistic study are, not so much pre-interpretive mechanisms as para-interpretive formations". Relational databases is the model he is developing "to remove some of the complexities and idiosyncrasies of real-world data in order that the technical and conceptual details of database design might more readily emerge". It is para-interpretive is the sense that the programmer/researcher is interested not in the confirmation of what he knows (verification of paradigms) but in the testing of the paradigm for other means than what it was formulated for. The Nora Project (www.noraproject.org) aims at opening the digital archives of literary works to programmers, in order to conduct more experiments like that. For now, it is extremely difficult to do so, mostly for intellectual property reasons, and the people of the digital archives are reluctant to go into that way. But for Ramsay and the Nora Project, programmers can build "intelligent machines" to search texts in a different way. In the field of humanities, claims Ramsay, "ignoring mathematics is a crime!" This method of analysis is interesting to Ramsay because we don't fully grasp the meaning of it, and that is why it is such a potential. We know what a book is, we know what an essay is, but we still don't know what a computer-aided literary research is. I would say, at that point of the argument, that how these text-analysis tools are implemented in literary research is, in Ramsay's perspective, only reassuring the interpretive paradigm that is dominant in the Humanities. So I think it is wrong to claim how much potential it is if it is only used to reproduce conservative research (it does have some potential, it's true, but maybe not in that way?). "Whether it is the historian attempting to locate the causes of a military conflict, the literary critic teasing out the implications of a metaphor, or the art historian tracing the development of an artist's style, humanistic inquiry reveals itself as an activity fundamentally dependent upon the location or a pattern. Dealing with patterns necessarily implies the cultivation of certain habits of seeing; as one critic has averred, 'Recognizing a pattern implies remaining open to gatherings, groupings, clusters, repetitions, and responding to the internal and external relations they set up'. Of all technologies in use among computing humanists, databases are perhaps the most well suited to facilitating and exploiting such openness". ("Databases") I am not sure if what has been described in this quote can be qualified as openness, if you stay in the frame of pattern recognition. To me, it is staying in a strict structuralist environment that may not be really efficient to deal with information &/or literature today. This work is applied as a strict tool for classification and investigation in that classification field. These works seem to be in Manovich's perspective of the database as a cultural form, an experience frame. But the conception of the database according to Manovich underlies one of the principles of New Media objects and environments: variability. A new media object exists in different versions that are potentially infinite: it is not a material thing but a given, a data, that says nothing by itself, but needs to be customized, personalized (Manovich compares this process to the post-industrial "production on demand" and "just in time" orders). What is important in Manovich's stance is that the model of research he presents derives from the theory of prototypes rather than the notion of paradigm. The theory of prototypes is developed from the wittgensteinian theory on "resemblance families" (I am translating from the French, I am not sure about the accuracy of the expression): in a family, a number of relatives share some common features, but none of the relatives can have all the features. In the same way, in a natural language, the meaning of words is not originated in a logical definition but in the proximity with a certain prototype.  The idea of prototype allows to think about the evolution of meaning within the frame of historical changes. The variability principles exemplifies how, historically, changes in media technologies are correlated with social change. New Media objects and processes tend to advocate for variability because they try to build (for utopian or commercial reasons) a world where everything wants to be unique (a choice among a myriad) - but where everything actually points out to ideological prototypes, imposed models for living. They tend to hide their pre-programmed side: the fact that a database, for instance, is not only a multiple entry choice structure, a many-to-many relationship model, but a grid of interpretation itself, a reduction of choices in the objects of interest. We should not conclude that all databases are an oppressive structures because of that, but it is important to remember that relational models such as database are deeply conventional. Within the New Media environment, there is a general philosophy of the "open choice" and customization that should not be taken for granted (Personalize your Google! Make up your own poem!). There is no unmarked "openness". Then the question is: what do you think about the very convention that is implemented in the database you are using in the humanities environment? Ramsay emphasizes the idea of paradigm, which, contrary to the notion of prototype, tend to essentialize relational models. The paradigm is a (vertical) choice made on a linear (horizontal) structure of information (syntagm). For literary Structuralists such as Michael Riffaterre, text analysis consists in finding a paradigm for reading, extracting a choice that is considered significant and applying it to the intentionality of writing. It helps hierarchizing the textual phenomenon (from the referential, syntagmatic, mimetic level to the significant, paradigmatic, semiotic level). The interpretive reading levels the text into what's worth and what's not. This is what puzzles me. In that sense, the paradigm priority appears as to me as a very predictive (and arbitrary) model within the conventional frame of prototypes. It seems to me that studying prototypes, before jumping into the "significance" of paradigms, could be a little useful in the literary/critic environment. Because the prototype doesn't exclude anything, it is a node of relations, constantly redefined by context. It might help to question of the arbitrary of relations and ask: why do you want to sort out of literary studies all the authors with Ovidian tendencies? It questions the choice that is left unquestioned by the paradigmatic interpretation. Keywords: code, computing, data, databases, diagrams, event, humanities, Lev Manovich, Stephen Ramsay, text-analysis, text-generator Posted by camille.pb | 1 comment(s) April 30, 2006
A quote from the just released Phd thesis of Brian Kim Stefans that can be found here (http://www.arras.net/bks_kluge_thesis_disk/) Keywords: aesthetics, brian kim stefans, brown, data, database, phd, poetry, text generator Posted by camille.pb | 20 comment(s) |
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