Award Season

At the Gov 2.0 Expo, Clay Johnson of the Sunlight Foundation, an organization devoted to political transparency, explained how Sunlight Labs has sponsored two design contest in successive years. Last year the group encouraged programmers and artists to create mash-ups using data that Sunlight had harvested, and this year sponsorship focused on software applications derived from government data on data.gov. Johnson showed a gallery of winners from Apps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge. He apologized for displaying non-interactive versions of the winning web content with his screenshots in his "static" electronic slideshow.

The winner for redesign of a government website went not to one of my Foley winners, but to a heavily used but not-so-bad-to-begin-with website: IRS.gov. The Redesign of IRS.gov from We Are a Good Company emphasized the rhetorical presentation of the website. As they put it, "The IRS presence on the web could be a powerful tool to educate people about their taxes, helping the average American understand how and why they pay taxes."


For best visual explanation of a complex process, the laurels went to How Our Laws Are Made. Johnson also explained how his own idea for an explanation of Senate rules only got one entry, albeit a praise-worthy one.

The motion graphics and dynamic typography project Cool Kids at the White House, which shows who has meetings with whom, was built with Adobe Flex, which I have also used in my own work. But I was a bit surprised to hear Johnson apologizing to Adobe, because his provocative manifesto Adobe is Bad for Open Government, which he defended on air, raised a number of excellent issues about openness and readability.

You can read more about this year's winners and runners-up here. Johnson also announced the new Design for America contest, which encourages developers to exploit content at Recovery.gov, USASpending.gov, and a number of other data sources.

Looking in the Medicine Cabinet

One of the most interesting projects that I heard about at the Gov 2.0 Expo was being developed by David Hale of the U.S. National Library of Medicine. You can see one of the slideshows he developed about so-called "Medicine 2.0" here and an interview with Hale here, in which he explains Pillbox, a pill identification program and patient safety initiative supported by the National Institutes of Health. The project had to deal with a number of challenges, given the thousands of pills on the market in the huge prescription medicine dataset, but they are already considering a number of different kinds of potential applications, although the system can not yet be used by poison control officials or drug enforcement officers, because the website was still a prototype. Nonetheless, Hale described a day in which citizens may be able to use smartphones to shoot digital photos of the seven-day pillboxes of overmedicated relatives and get a complete set of warning labels and cautionary materials about possible drug interactions.

American Indian Giver

From a digital rhetoric perspective, I am not quite sure about the tone of "They Gave Us The Beatles, We Gave Them Data.gov," Vivek Kundra's entry on the White House blog about new online transparency initiatives being launched by the British Government.

Although the closing paragraph makes the point that the "Federal Government does not have a monopoly on the best ideas," since all are "part of an increasingly complex network of communities, ideas, and information" in the digital age, there is a certain condescending tone that seems inappropriate, given how the UK has actually led the U.S. in a number of state-run digital initiatives for digitization, remix culture, and citizen participation.

As in the U.S., the British version at data.gov.uk has an Apps Page, where third-party sites are encouraged to use information from government databases in applications for searchable databases, mapping, mobile phones, and other kinds of mash-ups. Visitors can rate these sites, but like the "tool catalog" in the US version, relatively few bother to weigh in.

One could argue that the Brits bring more transparency to such rating systems by allowing text comments, where viewers can note system crashes and price discrepancies at sites like Mouseprice, which uses land registry information from the government to compare home prices in specific neighborhoods, an important part of establishing "comps" as well as of fostering violations of certain commandments against covetousness.

School for Scandal

As I think about how digital rhetoric plays and important role in understanding contemporary American politics and in civic education, it is interesting to see curricula that integrate digital literacy with an analysis of the institutions of government. My older son's AP U.S. Government teacher RoseAnn Salumbides has students contrast the image that they get of policy makers from news wrap-up shows on televisions with data from third party sources like OpenSecrets.org and FactCheck.org.


Of course, as these two screen shots show, these sites have their own visual and verbal rhetorics with logos, stock images, and color schemes that send particular messages about how their authority is constituted.

Alberto, the Musical

Data visualizations have played with how the phrase "I don't recall" becomes a motif in congressional hearings. Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales used the phrase several times, as this YouTube remix with a classical music cantata makes clear.

Thanks to Allen Glazier for the links.

Bar None

You can try out Personas for yourself. As an admitted self-Googler, I might argue that the software seems to pick up less of the activism and blogging than other aggregators do, and that it shows institutional investment and coherent narratives about social roles much more. (Click to enlarge.)

Part of the artist's statement reads as follows:

In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates the computer's uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.

More about this piece by Aaron Zinman can be found here. Thanks to Jenny Cool for the link.

Stop Motion and Other Oxymorons

Contemporary stop motion animation designed for the small screen -- unlike the works of Ray Harryhausen or Henry Selick -- reminds the viewer that persistence of vision is an optical illusion generated by a series of discrete images.

Stimulating Conversation

Stimulus Watch allows constituents who might be critical of President Barack Obama's package of massive government spending to view funded projects right in their own proverbial backyards with a database that facilitates taxpayer access to a state-by-state list of initiatives. As this tutorial video explains, the site also supports Internet voting, editing of a wiki with NPOV policies, reposting of content to Digg and Facebook, and commenting.

Diaglamming Sentences

Almost as soon as the State of the Union address ended, there were a number of data mash-ups of the words in his oration. With tag cloud software that shows the relative frequency of a given word, one can peruse Obama's address to Congress or Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal's Republican response.

Other kinds of visualizations have also become popular like NPR's Obama Tracker, which also produced an inauguration widget.

MSNBC offers an interesting video interface that works with the transcript of the speech to encourage viewers to clip and embed particular sections from the speech into other Web 2.0 applications.

Love for Dot-Gov

For ten years I've written about the rhetoric of government websites, so it is exciting to see that this month many others are discussing what was once considered to be an arcane issue for e-government policy wonks and Internet cranks unworthy of critical reflection or public interest.

For example, writer Douglas McGray points out in an article on "iGov" in the Atlantic that government websites like USASpending.gov are supporting new technologies that allow software developers to create new applications that represent data from the public record that in the past would have merely been only aggregated into government reports in what he calls "unwieldy PDF format and binders" that relatively few citizens would access. He begins by discussing the iBart trip planner for mobile devices that was created by two young entrepeneurs.

What does any of this have to do with the federal budget? Well, USAspending.gov might look like any other government Web site, but its API—that’s Application Programming Interface—allows access to the site’s raw data in an open, standard file format, similar to a transit feed. (“Wow,” Moore said. “That’s really powerful.”) Enterprising programmers, researchers, bloggers, or watchdogs like the Sunlight Foundation or Govtrack can grab that data and slice it, dice it, chart it, graph it, map it, or mash it up with new feeds.

However, based on putting Bank of America into one of its search engines, the USASpending.gov system doesn't seem to account for current bailout dollars, although it does include loans from agencies like FEMA in its calculations of how this specific bank has gained from taxpayer largesse.

I Heard It Through the Grapevine (and through Harris Ranch Too!)

As someone who used to drive this route from Los Angeles to Northern California on a monthly basis in the era before widespread ubiquitous computing technologies, it is interesting to see this frenetic image of the journey north assembled from film clips and posts to the microblogging site Twitter. Link via Hustler of Culture

Rising to the Occasion

Anyone who teaches rhetoric for a living has to appreciate these forty inspirational speeches in two minutes. Link via Julie Platt.

Class Project

The book Database Aesthetics may seem like an unlikely work of criticism to be grounded firmly in pedagogy, but Victoria Vesna's introduction and opening essay clearly signal a concern with how collaboration and interdisciplinary approaches to scholarly and artistic inquiry are stimulated by the teaching situation and the role of database technologies in providing effective and relevant instruction. Examples she cites range from the medical knowledge on display at the Visual Human Project to Vesna's own work on a graduate seminar collaborating with statistician Mark Hansen. Vesna and Hansen explain some of the rationales and methods of the course in video linked to this site. For more about Database Aesthetics, check out the website for Vesna's book.

I'll Show You Yours If You'll Show Me Mine

There is a remarkable large database detailing the base salaries of public employees of the State of California that has been published by the Sacramento Bee. This database, which discloses the salaries of those in the governor's office does not seem to include Arnold Schwarzenegger himself. However, it does seem to include me and all my faculty colleagues in the U.C. System and lists base salaries from last year. My own feelings about inclusion are complicated: I feel that this is "private" information about myself and yet I understand the obligation to disclose the details of a budget that is heavily based on compensating public employees.

It is interesting that those in the Cal State system of second-tier institutions of higher education don't seem to be included in this database. The newspaper has already responded to union complaints from other quarters about disclosure of this information, since this type of data obviously has a lot of rhetorical power for people from many different job titles.

The actual functioning of this kind of transparency in the workplace has yet to be entirely seen, but it does seem like interesting data to be visualized in other ways that get beyond pull-down menus and text boxes. Perhaps California state employee Lev Manovich of Culturevis, who is also in the database, could also take a crack at a better aesthetic presentation. It also might be interesting to map such data against other kinds of visualizations, such as the organizational hierarchies by which universities are structured.

Paper Trail

The American Public Media radio show Marketplace ran a story today, "MBA schools take new tack in studies," that argues that through digitization and networked communication business students are being encouraged to examine larger data sets than the traditional case study approach allows.

By using databases of documents and online news stories about companies in fiscal trouble, such as Enron or Bear Stearns, faculty are using the web to simulate encountering financial records, public relations materials, and press coverage without a pre-set narrative. Yale's Dean of the School of Management Joel Podolny discusses this "raw case method" in which materials are delivered online to facilitate criticism and collaboration and draws analogies with Wikipedia to explain the project. Podolny also claims that rights issues involving the electronic reproduction of these documents should be seen as relatively clear-cut, because the principles of fair use would apply, given the explicitly educational context, although the school is involved in a collaboration with the Wall Street Journal for the project.

Podolny explains more about this initiative here. As an example, this sample case about the FCC spectrum auction should be of interest to digital rights advocates.

Orders of Magnitude

I have a friend, cosmologist Ned Wright, who studies the universe. He teaches a graduate course in astrophysics at UCLA called "Order of Magnitude." As I understand it, the point of the class is to have the student who is assigned a problem not reach an actual definitive numerical solution, as laypeople might expect experts to do, but merely approach the correct "order of magnitude" for the situation involved. After all, when you are studying the universe, knowing the right order of magnitude can be the critical piece of information.

This kind of thinking may be more common in the sciences than in the humanities, but today's expansive talk about "Cultural Analytics" by Lev Manovich was designed to address these kinds of questions of scale as they apply to the millions of objects of study of interest to those in the humanities. Like Franco Moretti, Alan Liu, Todd Presner, and other faculty on California campuses, Manovich has become associated with ambitious plans for data visualization that involve multiple times, places, texts, and artifacts. Although he didn't get to it in his disquisition on "crazy ideas," he has also been affiliated with the Blue Brain project in Lausanne, which has been working on elaborate brain simulations that give researchers over thirty million synapses with which to experiment.

Manovich established his ethos with the largely undergraduate audience by citing his own social networking credentials, which he said included a presence on Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr. Laptop-bearing students were soon checking out his various online personae as he talked. He frequently situated social media in relationship to discursive exchanges, such as the "conversation around" "production, reception, distribution, remixing, uploading, and downloading" and the need for an "intelligent discussion about cultural production."

Although he's a major figure in the field, in the past I've criticized Manovich for discounting the importance of the rhetorical in software studies, particularly in one regrettable passage on page seventy-seven in the otherwise excellent The Language of New Media. But Manovich has clearly come a long way on the subject since the book's initial publication in 2001, as evidenced by his inclusion in the Software Studies group of Ian Bogost, known for his theories of "procedural rhetoric," and Michael Mateas, who recently gave a talk about the relationship of "code machines and rhetorical machines."

Manovich sketched out what he had seen of a "culture mediated by software" since the end of the Cold War in 1990. Along with the rise of user-generated content, he drew attention to a
"shift in production tools" as designers and editors across the globe embraced common proprietary software packages such as Final Cut Pro, Flash, After Effects, Maya and 3D Studio MAX.

Rather than be "interested in particular masterpieces" of our era, Manovich argued that we should be interpreting the emergent software techniques "as a kind of language" like "Chinese or English in the 10th century." He described himself as intellectually engaged with such "global cultural flows and patterns" as a way to understand what affects our imagination. Scholars, he insisted, should be doing more than just "using intuitions," which -- in the case of more traditional film faculty -- might be based on nothing more than arbitrary "subscriptions to Netflicks" from which one can "try to make some theories." He reminded his audience that "none of us have the physical ability to see" more than ".0001 percent of what is produced." Thus, Manovich asked, "How can we have an intelligent conversation about contemporary cultural production?"

(For another perspective on the problem of the mathematical sublime in digital research, see this talk by Jeffrey Bardzell, which argues that there are limits to the relevance of number-crunching in interpretive fields.)

To solve the problem, Manovich said that he had coined the term "cultural analytics" three years ago. Unlike conventionally "small data sets" used in the Humanities, such as "classical Hollywood cinema" and "Italian Renaissance," he suggested that we should be looking across genres, cultures, traditions, disciplines, and types of subject matter with very large samples in mind. He argued that the Humanities should follow the lead of "linguistics, economics, life sciences, and genetics" and be working closely with "huge amounts of data."

During his talk, he launched into a series of examples, illustrations, anecdotes, hypotheses, mock-ups, and prototypes, many of which were derived from his enviable jet-setting lifestyle as an arbiter of academic taste. (Unfortunately, not all of us can get away with wearing black leather to work, although -- as this blurry image shows -- Manovich apparently does.) For example, he asserted that a country like Japan "had culture as its most important export." And he showed a slide of a map of fashion weeks that already had covered the globe in 2005 to illustrate the concept of "global culture space."

In Manovich's vision of the world, it seems that "everybody has access to the same cultural software." Moreover, the mobile students that he meets across the globe might be "working in any other city" when they grow up. Of course, Manuel Castells has argued that there are still certain kinds of more subtle "digital divides" with which to contend, particularly between "the interacting" and "the interacted upon." As someone who studies digital rhetoric, I have noticed that 3D models, animations, simulations, and games have significant rhetorical force as means of persuasion in the public sphere. There are many genres that incorporate these cultural imaginaries.

For example, the software package Maya may be used to create digital film effects, buttress a scholarly argument in archeology or evolutionary biology, provide an illustration of the testimony of an expert witness in a courtroom, reenact a violent altercation in news coverage, elaborate a proposal for urban development, churn out gimmicky graphics in advertising and corporate promotion, provide hyperreal imagery for satire or political rhetoric, and build CGI environments for spectacle, deliberation, and pedagogy. Yet I've watched relatively sophisticated designers and computer users open Maya on their desktops as novices, and for them it might not be easy as autodidacts to "drive it around" for the first time without crashing into a few things while they are at it. Thus, even less computer-literate citizens are unlikely to be able to assess how this software creates artifacts of visual culture that may be constrained (or enabled) by certain features. The way that proprietary software may manifest certain architectures of control is worth attending to, as is the fact that young designers in the United States -- even those on U.C. campuses -- often don't have access to machines with these programs because such training is relegated to vocational institutions.

Manovich opined that the "humanities is the one area that isn’t globalized," and he noted that professors of English rarely come from India and China unlike the faculty in other disciplines. Speaking metaphorically, he talked about this circulation of information as being "like a new ecology" in which "cultural ideas spread like viruses." In contrast, he noted, "When I was growing up in the Soviet Union," one needed "access to a special library" even to read the works of Freud.

Manovich observed that "social activities leave digital traces" and that while a cellular telephone provider like Verizon may "only keep this information so they can bill you," many other kinds of data about communicative actions are being tracked for many possible purposes. Because "all this information is digital," it is possible to see the "digital shadow" that constitutes having a "public persona" with a "cultural identity." As he also noted, artists can use similar software to provide an alternative to corporate-controlled tools for data visualizations. (For more on this concept from another source, see "disruptive technologist" Virgil Griffith's work on "amateur data mining.") To illustrate Manovich's point about how these digital traces can be assembled into a "trend history," he showed a sample result screen from Blogpulse live that included "diaries" and "memes" along with "sports" and "politics" as a categories with which to understand our current fluctuating economy of attention or "mindshare."

Manovich also argued that one could no longer visit a few cultural capitals to know what might be happening in painting or architecture, because of the presence of young artists and designers who are "hungry for knowledge" in places around the world, such as Singapore and Mexico City. As opposed to the argument in Thomas Friedman's popular 2000 book, The World is Flat, Manovich is making what he called an "Inverted World" argument in which speaking English, using the same software, having access to the Internet, and being able to fly on discount airlines (which he admitted may be an era that is ending) means that "the margins are taking over the center." He noted that the U.S. is now far behind many other countries in its broadband access, and that whole countries -- such as Estonia and Singapore -- have free wireless, which he attributed to the fact that there are "thirty-five and forty-year-old decision makers" rather than "elite cultural institutions run by seventy-year-olds."

So "how do you tell the stories," Manovich asked, when there are no longer "a small number of capitals and schools"? He continued this line of inquiry by asking the following questions:

Can we create quantitative measures of cultural innovations? Can we have real-time detailed interactive maps of global cultural production, consumption, remix, and collaborations?
Can we visualize flows of cultural ideas, images, and trends? Can we visually represent how cultural and lifestyle preferences – whether for music, forms, designs, or products -- gradually change over time?

After lobbing out these questions, he asked if it were possible to use interactive graphics to "predict future development" as well. As he said, the humanities tends to be occupied with "interpreting the past," which "doesn’t make for a dynamic field." He argued that humanities scholars could be "prototyping the future" in ways that would be much more ambitious than the kind of marketing model currently in use to sell commercial products such as Lexus cars. According to Manovich, "the joint availability of large cultural data sets" that is growing exponentially and being facilitated by the digitization efforts of museums and libraries makes it possible to treat "culture as data" and study "social media that can be mined and visualized."

To introduce the work that he was doing with the HIPerWall, he emphasized the concept of "situational awareness." He pointed out the irony that there were "innovative solutions for command centers" for security and for the military that capitalized on new computer interfaces, and yet history lectures were little more than a matter of showing "two slides and then two more slides." He argued that this technology could be used for more than visualizing obvious needs like "global patterns of global warming or economics" by being applied to a kind of "real time traffic display" for cultural production.

He pointed to the work of researchers working with anime music videos, commonly knowns as AMVs, and suggested that computer vision software would be able to manage the hundreds of thousands of videos and identify ones that are "statistically improbable" through descriptions and markers. The data aggregated could include fan-creators, places of origin, video lengths, years of composition, and even original authors, although this marker of initial intellectual property ownership also raised the issue of potential copyright policing by multinational media conglomerates, which could prove to be repressive to the very cultural production being studied.

Manovich indicated that the model of history promulgated by important thinkers such as Foucault and Kuhn frequently presented cultural production over time in terms of breaks and radical reconfigurations. Inspired by the example of calculus, he also argued that it was important to be able to visualize continuous functions as well, such as how "hip hop becomes techno."

In his HIPerWall slides, Manovich was careful to resist overemphasizing either high or low culture. For example, in one visualization, the object of study seen in close-up was a twin photograph of similar postmodern dual skyscrapers in different cities; in another image he showed contrasting "vernacular architecture" from Mexico city and paid tribute to the cultural contributions of favelas and shantytowns. Unlike Jane Jacobs, who dismissed "pervert parks," such as the one in Philadelphia, Manovich indicated that he wanted to include cultural production that leaves "no glamorous traces in public squares," which may include the work of "sex services" and "servants," as well as social service agencies. Further on in his lecture, he discussed how Amazon.com could be mined for "books about the Iraq war" to show "different genres" and "connections between different books."

At one point, Manovich also showed a citation matrix derived from the Web of Science in which different colors represented different disciplines. As he wryly commented, "people in the humanities don’t talk to anyone." He also displayed how this distribution could be visualized in terms of different countries. From this example, he suggested a kind of "art project" that looked at "influences" rather than producing a paper with clear citations. What he suggested was what he called "relationship maps" that showed a "response to particular aesthetic or cultural teachers," which could encompass oppositional patterns, images, metaphors, camera moves, and types of characters in computer games. As Manovich implied, such influence maps might free humanities scholars from the simple-minded periodicity that goes from "early" manifestations of a given phenomena to the cultural product in "decline."

He concluded by looking at his own undergraduate teaching and the ways that students in one class can work on visualizing data sets created by students in a previous class. To build from more simple stages to an eventual “global educational platform,” Manovich used freely available tools at Many Eyes for starters. He also showed how students mapped "connections between subcultures" that visualized how "people connected through cultural brands" that could be sliced according to "casual" or "trendy" orientations.

As an academic married to a designer, I think that I know what Manovich means when he talks about the million or so people who serve as "cultural producers" on this planet, since even my teenager creates street art and mixes beats in ways that have involved mentoring from professionals at Cal Arts and the Grammy Foundation. By having some sense of the connections between members of this distributed population, however, I wonder how much this kind of first-stage mapping can reveal of the often substantive covert connections between persons and even between their ideas.

In other words, will only collaboration be visualized in Manovich's cultural analytics? What about competition, which also serves as an important creative engine, particularly in battling niche technologies? Even seemingly counterproductive dynamics like pecking orders and petty rivalries are important in artistic and activist communities and large bureaucratic organizations alike. Furthermore, should Manovich's Web of Science visualization eventually include less obviously institutional forms of relatedness and tag individuals who are spouses, ex-lovers, childhood friends, and classmates to help novices with navigating the social landscape of public intellectuals?

Finally, what about software that doesn't just represent how social actors are related but fundamentally determines the nature of their relationship? Right now we might not think much about how the algorithms of social bookmarking and social networking sites may connect cultural producers, but in the future this might actually be important. For example, what is my kinship to the conference chair and editor of scholarly publications that I happened to have dated at sixteen during the punk rock era with whom I reestablished contact after the Amazon.com algorithm suggested that I should be interested in his work on cyberspace? In many ways, the latter connection of the marketing logic of the online bookseller is much more important to us in our present collegial (and platonic) relationship than the former tie. And what about Alice Robison to whom I am closely related in Facebook genealogy, although we have never met in person? See my blog posting and her blog response to see the nature of our kinship and how the interface design of the social networking site brought us together.

This talk also concluded Peter Krapp's Software Culture lecture series at U.C. Irvine, which was covered here, here, here, here, and here. Regular readers in the lay population can now look forward to summer and three months without conferences or talks during which I can provide more coverage of public displays of affection, taxpayer-funded cartoon characters, awards for really bad government websites, and even information about the erstwhile subject of this blog: institutions as digital media makers, such as universities and government agencies, who must simultaneously serve as regulators and content-creators.

The Great Display Wall of China

In the "Event Webs" panel that followed, which was moderated by Bonnie Nardi, there was a terrific presentation by Ruth Mostern of U.C. Merced about the challenges of representing history with new digital tools. As a practitioner and partner in software development, she emphasized one of the major problems at issue: "How do we think about history, so that it works with a database?" She also showed Google maps to illustrate how spatial representations that use computer-mediated communication technologies tend to be much more sophisticated than temporal representations.

I particularly liked the fact that she was interested in ideology, politics, and state power in understanding how reconfigurations of historical events and geography take place. Her own research area has to do with space and place in China, where she showed how even seemingly discrete map markers could morph over time in relationship to other locales.

To demonstrate the kinds of "genre trouble" created by this work by digital historians, she showed examples of both "Digital Gazetteers" and "Historical Atlases" as preliminary models. She argued that ironically some of the best data representation of history is being done by law enforcement agencies that are creating crime mapping projects such as Instant Atlas and CopLink, which provides "geotemporal" visualization to locate perpetrators. However there are academic institutions also working on the problem of modeling discrete events, such as the Temporal Modeling Project at the University of Virginia or a number of initiatives at the Berkeley iSchool. I particularly liked the idea for a demo of SemTime, described at NewsBlip, for how various historical actors learned about Watergate that could encompass two different versions of time and the meaningfulness of events. Unfortunately, time limitations prevented Mostern from showing much of GapMinder or the SIMILE earthquake USGS mash-up.

Mostern claimed that the biggest constraint currently inhibiting this kind of scholarly work was the difficulty of having computers represent causality. As she pointed out with a diagram of the sequence for how to stop at a stoplight, the formal logic of Spatial Ontology Theory is far too cumbersome for more complex historical events and inadequate for the interpretive work of the historian with causality, narrative, agency, perspective, memory, emotional relationships, and themes. Although she did acknowledge that it might be possible, given our "socially authored world," for a computer to one day model a "Palestinian-authored world" and an "Israeli-authored world."

During the question-and-answer session, I was glad to see fellow panelist Lewis Lancaster of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative bring up the work of Judea Pearl of UCLA. In addition to maintaining the Causality Blog, Pearl is known for his sophisticated work with Bayesian statistics to model causal relationships. (To learn more about this subject, you can also use "belief nets" or "belief networks" as keywords.) To her credit, Mostern was certainly aware of the importance of network graphs and pointed to the work of Lothar Krempel and papers such as "Diffusion Dynamics in an Historical Network" as very influential on her thinking.

Reality Engines

Yesterday's "Event Webs" conference orchestrated by Ramesh Jain promised to explore how the notion of "events" shape "human understanding of history, science, culture, and even personal experience" but pose particular kinds of representational challenges that are also relevant to Jain's areas of research in computer vision, multimedia information systems, or experiential environments. If you've written code, the language about "objects" and "events" that dominated the conference would have probably been quite familiar, although it was often used in ways that challenged the analogy between human cognition and the computer.

In Donald Hoffman's talk about the neurological properties of "objects and events," he tried to debunk what he called "the camera theory of vision." Instead he argued that vision operated by what he characterized as a “reality engine” in which a massive array of as many as one hundred trillion parallel processors in the human brain. Hoffman showed a number of optical illusions and examples of change blindness to demonstrate the fact that the recognition of objects and events actually use different pathways in the cerebrum. He argued that the idea that our perceptions give us an accurate view of the "truth" or "reality" of the world is a mistake, even on evolutionary grounds.

Using another computational metaphor from the field in which you can never have "good, fast, and cheap," he argued that “the truth is expensive” and that to get an adequate representation of the relevant information in their environments, animals developed what he called "species-specific hacks" involving space, time, objects, colors, and events -- none of which are aspects of reality. Hoffman described how he had been using computer models to explore "evolutionary game theory" to match up truth-seeing animals against "quick hack animals," in a highbrow version of the popular meme kitten war perhaps. In Hoffman's match-ups, the truth-seeing animals always lost.

Hoffman also emphasized the promise and limitations of what he called a "User Interrface Theory" of perception. He compared our mechanisms for understanding reality to a Windows desktop in which "an interface is there to hide the truth" because users don't want to see the intricacies of how the software actually works. As Hoffman put it, "It is useful, because it is not true." This didn't mean that people should disregard their perceptions, because one should not step in front of a speeding train any more than one should drag an icon with a valuable electronic file containing one's thesis into the waste basket on one's desktop. This distinction between "taking something seriously" and "taking it literally" was also picked up in the subsequent talk by Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar of religion Jack Miles. In the question-and-answer session, participants tried to relate these "cognitive layers" to the advent of language and particular technologies in human history.

Given the discussion about interfaces, it was appropriate to see Lev Manovich in the audience, given his classic work on the subject in The Language of New Media, who brought up the problem of how to represent history not only as breaks and events but also as continuous changes or "continuous functions." During lunch, I got to see a preview of Manovich's talk on "cultural analytics: tracking and visualizing global cultural patterns," which tries to suggest some answers to his central question: "how can we track "global digital culture" (or cultures), with its billions of cultural objects, and hundreds of millions of contributors?" He showed different kinds of gorgeous webs, maps, and layered representations that would allow the user to drill down to see specific artifacts. Sample objects of study from different kinds of transnational communities of influence could include scientific papers, design portfolios, and nightclub architecture. Cynic that I am, I argued that it might also be important to represent reaction and disagreement as well as more easy-t0-represent patterns of influence. His blog, databeautiful, is also worth checking out for anyone interested in thinking about how data representation and data mining could be used outside of computer science.

Photograph courtesy of Peter Krapp.

The Care and Feeding of a Flickr Account

The online photo-sharing service Flickr makes claims to a particular kind of public rhetoric by using the trope of the "photostream" to establish some of the norms of the user community. It's a metaphor that suggests metonymy, a chain of related items but it also draws upon the associations we tend to make with small rivers and therefore suggests the organic, the ephemeral, and the subjective.

In one help forum, when a new Flickr user asked for a definition of the term "photostream" by others, this was the response from Wooble:

Organization based on anything other than order of upload is done through sets, collections, tagging, and, for those who hate the photostream metaphor an insist on trying to swim against the current, lying to the system about when photos were uploaded to make the stream appear out of order. This is about as frustrating as trying to make the water in a real stream flow out of order. It's best to just go with the flow.

As if to illustrate his point about the futility of trying to develop classification schemes for images, among Wooble's most recent contributions to his photostream, alongside the more conventional family pictures that might be associated with the traditional sharing practices of those in social networks, was this photograph of ice in a glass. Of course, it's a kind of statement about temporality, this ice, since Flickr is as much about the moment that is frozen as it is about the moment that flows.

In any case, the idea that Flickr is about discrete moments of perception is certainly part of its appeal. For example, I've been known to use it to post photographs of cell phone trees that I chance upon or to map minibars of the world. Futhermore, Flickr encourages people to post photographs that are outside of genres such as "family album" or "travelogue," which often could be described as genre pictures or still lifes. Julian Bleecker's photostream includes a Pepsi cap embedded in concrete cracks or a freshly squeezed lemon.

I've been thinking about this because of a picture that I saw this morning posted by John Aboud called "Peacock on my sidewalk." People often use Flickr for this kind of confluence of the usual and the unusual. If only you could have a kind of Flickr for audio clips, for snatches of interesting conversation, but ambient sound is usually gone before it can be recorded.

Because Flickr makes Creative Commons' licenses easily available, its images are also frequently repurposed for other kinds of rhetorical productions, including those that could be described as database-driven or representative of a database aesthetics, the theorizing of which is often associated with the work of Lev Manovich. PROJEK IAGHT(tm) uses images from Google and Flickr with search terms like "graffiti, body art, party, hiphop, kromp, iaght, DJ, breakdance, skateboard," and there is Blaise Aguera y Arcas's famed demo of Notre Dame images.

Spreadable Not Sticky

That's right. That's me filming Mimi Ito filming Mark Marino filming Henry Jenkins in the ultimate document of digital media recursiveness.

By virtue of the annual conferences about digital culture that I attend, it seems that I see MIT's Henry Jenkins keynoting several times a year, as I did here and here. But the DIY Video Summit was unusual in that we actually had an extended face-to-face conversation over dinner. Rather than rehearse some of my reservations about his theses in Convergence Culture, while sharing a table with Mark Marino, we three chatted informally about our common tasks as educators. No matter what our differences in theoretical positions or relationships to institutional authority, as a trio we shared many of the same concerns about how best to connect students' social media practices to academic literacy and to negotiate new roles outside of conventional scholarly criticism as bloggers and makers of other forms of digital media.

Jenkins, of course, has been an extraordinarily productive academic blogger, despite a travel schedule that moves him between time zones about as often as I change my shoes. It was nice to get a chance to say in person how I admired how he had made his blog a useful primary source to other researchers, by posting detailed interviews, often with creators who don't otherwise document the rationales for their work. Although it is a solo blog, Jenkins maintains a remarkably dialogic tone. In other words, it's not merely a set of meditations; it's also a series of conversations.

This conference was one in which Jenkins spent a lot of time contextualizing his newer stance as a ”critical utopian,” who has begun to express some skepticism about simplistic equations of participatory culture with Web 2.0. For starters, Jenkins resists such popular terms "meme" and "viral," because he argues that they deny human agency. And rather than talk about the "stickiness" of new media, which suggests that users are merely trapped in the digital form of a roach motel, Jenkins has embraced the term "spreadable" to describe the dissemination of content by members of online communities.

Taking a page from Stephen Duncombe in imagining new forms of activism, Jenkins also described the lifecycle of the famed snowman of the CNN/YouTube debates, with whom Mitt Romney famously said he would refuse to debate. He noted that the "posterchild" snowman borrowed much of its slapstick style from DIY TV original Mr Bill, who ended up serving as a post-Katrina advocate for change on environmental issues. (You can check out Mr. Bill defending the value of the natural history of New Orleans and Louisiana's swamps for yourself.) Thus, what could be called Mr. Bill 2.0, Billiam the Snowman, created by Minnesota brothers Nathan and Greg Hamel, who were fans of the Saturday Night Live original, appropriated Romney's own phrase, "Lighten Up Slightly" to respond to the candidate's jibes.

Like many at the conference, Jenkins also pointed out the limitations of older "digital divide" models that focus solely on access to hardware. He argued that there were three continuing areas of concern when it came to DIY media-making: 1) the "participation gap" that involved social skills and cultural competencies, 2) "majoritarian" structures that constituted user validation in the crudest quantitative terms, and 3) "hater talk" that inhibits participation from the most diverse possible audience. Although he described himself as "agnostic" on the question of whether the platforms for DIY videos should be profit or nonprofit, he did describe the challenge as "to imagine WeTube and not YouTube."

Jenkins and I have had some interesting exchanges recently about applying Lev Manovich's "database aesthetics" to YouTube and the possibility that this aesthetics functions alongside the "vaudeville aesthetics" that Jenkins has described. During the plenary panel, Jenkins pointed out that when Republican presidential contender Rudoph Giuliani objected to fellow candidate Joe Biden’s characterization of his presidential campaign message as “a noun, a verb and 9/11,” anti-Giuliani users of digital tools promptly created a number of mashups that consisted of nothing but selections from the database of Giuliani's references to the event.

For more political database art, you can check out the State of the Union Parsing Tool, this hypertext of The President's Address on Iraq, or a zillion mashups of State of the Union Addresses up to 2007.