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.

"We Were Really Bad about Telling the World about It"

When the United States boasted about being the world leader in data transparency and gifting its expertise to Great Britain, I expressed my skepticism here. The session at the Gov 2.0 Expo on "Four Perspectives on data.gov.uk" seemed designed to confirm my suspicions definitely, as speakers reminded audience members that they were often first in what they called a kind of "arms race" for which nation would have the greatest government transparency. As Dominic Campbell of wearefuturegov.com pointed out, despite leading the way in the competition to launch Gov 2.0 initiatives, "we were really bad about telling the world about it for a while." He also argued that the transparency efforts of Data.gov.uk were civil service driven rather than politically driven, as such efforts were in the U.S.

Several speakers on this panel organized by Tim Berners-Lee noted the oddity of the particular political moment in great Britain now that the "new marriage" of the Conservative and the Liberal Democratic parties had begun after years of Labor party rule. They noted that the Conservative Party had actually issued a Technology Manifesto, although "her majesty's shrinking budget" was also changing the technology scene.

Chris Thorpe of The Guardian noted that in March 9, 2006, Charles Arthur called upon the government to "free our data" long before the Obama administration took office. He also pointed to the success of the initiative Rewired State, which appeared three years later. Also worthy of note were data visualizations like the Voter Power Index and GIS projects like a map of cycling blackspots, although Thorpe explained that he had personal interest in developing a simple API for schools.

Into the Gulf

The Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Map allows users to add YouTube videos of the unfolding disaster or Twitter postings describing the scene to a map with environmental information. It's an interesting example of digital rhetoric that combines GIS with social media data to personalize the consequences of the spill.

Stick Figures without Happy Faces

This fake social advertising campaign from Cleanternet.org, which provides a tongue-in-cheek plug for Internet-blocking technologies, uses an infographics style that has also begun to appear in real public service announcements. It is the product of designer Alexander Lehmann, who blogs here. In addition to commercial digital art for films like District 9, Lehmann also does less politically tinged motion graphics and typography films.

Check out his other online "campaigns," such as "You are a Terrorist," which makes the case for ubiquitous surveillance.

Thanks for Ren Reynolds for the link!

Untangling Afghanistan

Since I have an entire chapter in the Virtualpolitik book about PowerPoint, which specifically addresses the function of this new digital genre in military culture, I was interested to see "We Have Met the Enemy and He is PowerPoint" in the New York Times.

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.

“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”

In General McMaster’s view, PowerPoint’s worst offense is not a chart like the spaghetti graphic, which was first uncovered by NBC’s Richard Engel, but rigid lists of bullet points (in, say, a presentation on a conflict’s causes) that take no account of interconnected political, economic and ethnic forces. “If you divorce war from all of that, it becomes a targeting exercise,” General McMaster said.

Commanders say that behind all the PowerPoint jokes are serious concerns that the program stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making. Not least, it ties up junior officers — referred to as PowerPoint Rangers — in the daily preparation of slides, be it for a Joint Staff meeting in Washington or for a platoon leader’s pre-mission combat briefing in a remote pocket of Afghanistan.

Last year when a military Web site, Company Command, asked an Army platoon leader in Iraq, Lt. Sam Nuxoll, how he spent most of his time, he responded, “Making PowerPoint slides.” When pressed, he said he was serious.

“I have to make a storyboard complete with digital pictures, diagrams and text summaries on just about anything that happens,” Lieutenant Nuxoll told the Web site. “Conduct a key leader engagement? Make a storyboard. Award a microgrant? Make a storyboard.”

Despite such tales, “death by PowerPoint,” the phrase used to described the numbing sensation that accompanies a 30-slide briefing, seems here to stay. The program, which first went on sale in 1987 and was acquired by Microsoft soon afterward, is deeply embedded in a military culture that has come to rely on PowerPoint’s hierarchical ordering of a confused world.

“There’s a lot of PowerPoint backlash, but I don’t see it going away anytime soon,” said Capt. Crispin Burke, an Army operations officer at Fort Drum, N.Y., who under the name Starbuck wrote an essay about PowerPoint on the Web site Small Wars Journal that cited Lieutenant Nuxoll’s comment.

In a daytime telephone conversation, he estimated that he spent an hour each day making PowerPoint slides. In an initial e-mail message responding to the request for an interview, he wrote, “I would be free tonight, but unfortunately, I work kind of late (sadly enough, making PPT slides).”

The lead example in the New York Times piece is a slide about military strategy in Afghanistan that was shown to General Stanely McChrystal, who opined that "when we understand that slide, we'll have won the war."

The slide in question was actually developed by the PA Consulting Group. Not addressed in the NYT article is the role of global consulting firms that specialize in a mix of IT, strategic planning, and public relations in shaping new digital genres and cater to the U.S. military, which I also write about in the first and second chapters of the Virtualpolitik book. I also argue in the third chapter of the book that military culture is also attracted to virtual reality simulations, because they offer a similar sense that reality can be controlled and ordered by computational media.

The Guardian's Datablog has challenged its readers to see if they can "do any better" in representing such complex information with a more elegant solution. They reference Julian Bolger's reading of the graphic in his Global Security Blog, which delivers the following witty opinion and caveat about informational distraction.

The diagram has an undeniable beauty. Done the right way (embroidered perhaps) it would make a lovely wallhanging and an ideal gift for the foreign policy-maker in your life. But it is a bit of a red herring.

Map Flap

Okay. I really want to save the Los Angeles Times. I really do. Look, I have even tried to give them some polite suggestions for how they could save themselves. As much as I love having a wealth of material to blog about when it comes to the Los Angeles Times and its profound stupidity about Internet journalism, I really do think my hometown should have a decent newspaper, and I care about the fourth estate in the digital age.

But when it comes to "interactive content" I can't help but think that the LA Times is hopeless, truly hopeless. The most recent example I can point to is the paper's "Homicide Report," which takes the form of an interactive map, in which readers can browse photos of murder victims, check out the history of murder near their zip code, or activate pinpointed spots of crime scenes on the map. For really morbid crime enthusiasts, you can also browse by "age, gender, cause, day of the week, jurisdiction, neighborhood, race/ethnicity, circumstance or crime scene."

The LA Times has had some prior history with map-based initiatives. Mapping LA Neighborhoods became a laughingstock among geographers and cartographers. They also published a map of local pot dispensaries called -- I kid you not -- "Where's the weed?," which may have been in questionable taste. After criticizing the accuracy of the LAPD's crime map, the newspaper launched a crime map of their own.

But once you drill down into the information, you can see how truly terrible their homicide map is. Beyond its lowest common denominator ghoulishness, it indicates an utter misunderstanding of either interactivity or user-generated content. It makes sexual predator maps look good by comparison. Let's click on one of the photos in the gallery of death -- one of Ryan Gonzalez -- to see some of its weaknesses.

The reader is invited to tweet the posting on Twitter or share it on Facebook, because really that's what everyone wants to do with a murder story. Right? The citizen policing/neighborhood watch/social surveillance/public shaming aspect of the site gets even more complicated when you look down the page to where the reader is encouraged to "share a memory" about the deceased, who in this case was killed after intervening in a law enforcement officer's messy dispute, one which would seem to invite some actual investigative journalism by the paper that is sadly lacking.

Of course, asking for reader comments on a crime story is often asking for trouble, whether it is a rape case or a knife fight. All kinds of agendas come into play in which moderating public comment can be ethically tricky. In this case, however, the reader asks a pithy question that one would have hoped that the writer would have asked, even if the tone has less of the somber decorum that characterizes most online memorials that developed out of "memory gardens" and other forms of remembrance in cyberspace.

Wait, so he was holding a gun, grabbing the marshal AND punching him at the same time? Amazing he could do those three things at once, yet not get one round off before the marshal draws, aims AND fires a half dozen times. Nice investigation by both the LAPD and the LA Times.

Connecting the Dots

There have been other Google infographics films like this before that address how the search engine company may have a conspiratorial interest in violating user's privacy. This one made with graphics by Patrick Clair, which was written by Elmo Keep and Jon Casimir, was recently featured on Osocio. This video includes information about Google's newer efforts in mobile communication, Eric Schmidt's recent comments, and litigation in the last few years.



http://osocio.org/message/dont_be_evil/

A Force More Powerful

In the wake of the powerful earthquake that has rocked Chile, a nation known for Internet savvy government policies and a population fond of social network sites, it may not be surprising to the development of the simple Google-powered "Person Finder" widget, which can be easily embedded in the sites of others. Unlike similar websites developed after the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, this site uses a minimalist aesthetic of a largely white-space frame. Google admits, however, that the site could also be used by commercial spammers and other bad actors: "All data entered will be available to the public and viewable and usable by anyone. Google does not review or verify the accuracy of this data."

In the wake of the disaster many turned to the NOAA Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, which is laden with graphic content and maps, tabs, and risk diagrams.

Clear and Present Danger

An interesting post from Ian Bogost that questions some of the assumptions of the information aesthetics crowd. Since this is one of the ten trends that I've been following in digital humanities initiatives, I'll certainly be thinking about it as I revise the piece for the LEA almanac.

Fat of the Land

There may be some irony in launching online initiatives to tackle obesity in the United States, given how digital culture and time in front of a computer screen certainly burns fewer calories than many other activities. Nonetheless, the White House is publicizing "Making Moves for a Healthier Generation" and the launch of a new website at letsmove.gov.

Before, I have complained about the proliferation of domain names with .gov URLs in the Obama administration, such as MakingHomeAffordable.gov or FoodSafetyWorkingGroup.gov or AStrongMiddleClass.gov, since I worry about divorcing the online content of the virtual state from specific federal agencies that have a commitment to maintaining and updating information access.

Nonetheless, as Anne Burdick points out, the site does point viewers to the USDA's new Food Environment Atlas, which shows how "food deserts" make healthy eating in certain regions and neighborhoods a challenge. It is a point also made in Ian Bogost's game Fatworld, which shows the relationship between class, geography, and weight.

Personality Type

Check out "My Evolution of Type Taste from Grade School to the Present." Unfortunately, I never really got beyond my Garamond/Helvetica phase.

Flash Nation

South Korea has become well-known in digital art circles thanks to the work of Young-Hae Chang / Heavy Industries in Flash. The Design Firm LavaNine has also created an appealing Flash introduction for the National Digital Library of Korea.

Digital Make-Over

Today, Sunlight Labs, one of the groups thinking about issues of transparency and online access to information from government records, asks its readership "What do you think of USA.gov?"

The USA.gov site is supposed to provide the master navigation for those seeking information from and about the federal government, but -- as the lab's posting from a year ago about "Rethinking usa.gov" indicates -- it was desperately in need of a make-over to improve its Bush-era incarnation. They raised a number of criticisms with which I am in hearty agreement, particularly about the foregrounding of idiotic content from so called "kids pages" and the market segmentation that it assumes, which can make its portal architecture illogical. Designer Ali Felski admits that "any personalization of a site would clearly have security and privacy concerns," but I am surprised that the Sunlight people aren't reminding people that USA.gov has also had an active role in tryint to dismantle a longstanding anti-cookie policy, which could be particularly troubling, given the Obama's administration's use of Google products and how third-party commercial interests could gain access to citizens' personal data about web surfing habits without their knowledge.

The official call from the Obama administration for feedback on the site is here, which is equipped with a Digg-style thumbs up/down feature, but few commentators at this point seem to be addressing actual user design issues. The search engine certainly is better at providing results, but it is still almost as bad as it used to be for people in crisis as it was in the days when one couldn't find resources if you were a witness to human trafficking. Getting to repositories of online forms or useful FAQs assumes a lot of web literacy and would be very difficult for non-native speakers of English. I don't think personalization would help this problem and might discourage whistle-blowers and others in need of information about their rights and available services.

Battle Plan

The culturvis photostream now is publishing representations of videogame play to promote a new form of documentary evidence in game studies.

Stacking Boxes

The rationale for the "Billion Dollar Gram" on Information Is Beautiful is explained by its creator as an attempt to make comparative judgments possible at extremely large orders of economic magnitude, which speaks to some of the same issues of "scale" that Lev Manovich has argued are essential for digital humanists to grapple with as well. The design statement that accompanies the image reads as follows:

This image arose out of a frustration with the reporting of billion dollar amounts in the media. That is, they’re reported as self-evident facts, when, in fact, they’re mind-boggling and near incomprehensible without context. But they can start to be understood visually and relatively, IMHO.

(This is one of the first images I created for my book. So a lot of the figures are from 2006/07. I’ve also visually cheated slightly here and there to make everything fit)

I hoping this will be a “living image” that I’ll keep updating all the time. So if you find any interesting, juicy or eye-popping billions, please comment below (with a source). Let’s see how high we can make this image!

Waste (Not) Want (Not)

My colleague Julia Lupton has talked about design in connection with women, who serve as what she calls "the foot-soldiers in the new economy." This video from Bergen Norway's Röyksopp done by French motion graphics firm H5 depicts the heroine's patterns of consumption, desire, and participation in the networked workforce with a series of information graphics.

The High of the Beholder: Nowcasting IV

Todd Presner introduced his talk on "Google Earth?" by characterizing it as a "somewhat more cultural studies art-historical approach" than the work of his predecessors Trevor Paglen and Benjamin Bratton at the Nowcasting conference. He began by noting how a single company is attempting to present both a definitive "interface to the world’s digital information" and a definitive "interface to the earth (or Google’s representation of it)." In looking at the search box, Presner noted several recent innovation 1) accommodation for an infinitely long string of characters rather than the fifty character queries of old, 2) much faster searches, and 3) repopulation of the input window with an emphasis on American corporations and pop culture.

I had seen Presner talk about Google Earth before, but the current version of the talk includes analysis of a much more polymorphously perverse Google, even though his argument builds on the same 1968 NASA photo from spaceof Earth rising and the image of the 1969 Stewart Brand
Whole Earth Catalog, which has been a touchstone at the conference, to contemplate the implications of a Heideggerian Weltbild, the world as picture. He argued that Google involves "many different perceptual habits" and then offered a list of ten areas of inquiry: 1) the Apollonian desire to see as spectator, 2) the wish to fly like a bird, 3) the titilation of travel without leaving home, much like like the colonial panoptic viewing habits of panorama viewers in London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna who experienced an imperial construction, 4) the fascination with aerial bombardment, 5) computer aided navigation of the kind described by Lev Manovich in the Language of New Media mediation, 6) the experience of the postmodern space of the digital, 7) the treatment of reality as spectacle, which normalizes viewing habits like photography, 8) the will for the cartographic fantasy of a completely mapped world, as Borges imagines, 9) the potential for the Situationist method of detournement, which reinstantiates the Dionysian in Google's Appolonian vision, and 10) a set of spatial practices, such as those described by De Certeau, which may include memorializing lived experiences of walking.

He showed how what were once flat digital maps had been enhanced with photorealistic 3D models in Berlin to begin his argument about how control, surveillance, and a videogame eye informs the design of these simulations that Presner argued were intimately tied to the emotions of war. Much as film had been in an earlier era, he claimed that Google was tied to Cold War and the eyeless vision of the combat flight simulator. But he also showed images of the Kaiser panorama, reproduced above, where women could look at Cario or Rome and a panorama that allowed the viewer to enter the globe itself. He also discussed the contemporary art practice of Jeffry Shaw and Bill Viola. After showing the montage images of Earth bathed in sunlight, which he described as a "managed and sanitized environment," he noted that we can overlay "remediation within a remediation," thanks to a number of new street view tools and data bubblies in Google, and explore "a panorama within a virtual globe"

He then turned to discussing the Hypercities project that he has headed for the past few years, where spatial practice can also serve as a "project of memory" in which "new media peels back layers of time," although there is "no promise of recreation or accurate representation" in his cartographic history of representations of the city that allows users to annotate and hemix content in these stacked representations of the urban environment. Although Denis Wood, author of The Power of Maps, has presented the argument that a traditional map never grows or develops, Presner contested this claim by asserting that "missing voices can be returned to particular locations . He also showed a Hypercities map of recent street demonstrations in Tehran, which showed "writerly maps" and "countermapping" at work. This student, who had also worked with Johanna Drucker, had created 819 annotations and was seriously engaged with the curation of data. In closing, Presner acknowledged the work on media archeology done by audience member Erkki Huhtamo.

As the conference came full circle, Peter Lunenfeld stepped to the podium again to warn attendees that now things may take a "hegemonic turn," as he makes an argument for "unimedia not multimedia that would open with a reference to Siegfried Zelinski before detailing the four stages of modernism.

Lunenfeld identified his typology as follows:

1) heroic modernism, represented by the Bauhaus, Russian Constructivism, Eisenstein, and furnishings from the Rietveld Schröder House that I had visited with my niece this summer
2) high modernism of the "you buy it" variety, which could be seen in a 1967 ad for Helvetica as "the face all print men are talking about" or the Jackson Pollack they aspire to hang in their homes.
3) postmodernism, which he described as "like porn, you know it when you see it," whether it is the Piazza d'Italia in New Orleans soon a ruin or the Walker Evans photo adopted by Sherrie Levine as a statement about appropriation and feminism.
4) unimodernism, which could take the same Evans-Levine photo and process it with Photoshop, so that an image of a young Depression-era girl might demonstrate the "material case for the evolution of an information aesthetic that requires a new discussion."

For Lunenfeld the computer functions "as culture machine" in which even eBay can be seen "as the new archive." He followed with a number of examlpes of informationalism and complex, which includes I/O/D Web Stalker, Radiohead's "House of Cards" motion tracking video with multiple reposts on YouTube, the software that created the Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim and the Disney Concert Hall as 21st century signifiers, and Liz Larner's Untitled 2001, which uses commingling hues on a number of animation keyframes that were colored by custom car-painters in East LA in ways quite different from the finish fetish group of the sixties.

Rather than early, high, or post, we produce and consume a unimodernism, our moment is unimodern in the sense that it makes modernism in all its variants, universal via networks and broadband, uniform in their effect if not affect, and unitary as existing as strings of code

For Lunenfeld, the FIGURE/ground distinction is changing with our "ability to shift point of view" and see two things, since "toggle" is almost as central a computer command as "undo" in contemporary life. From a 1900 machine art (making the machine central to the vision) to a 2000 information aesthetic (looking at the ground of culture), he also credited a "punk aesthetic" that "will come back in 7 months."

In this "archive fever" to which "we have just adapted," not only do we check information sources constantly, but also we iteratively pull visual references. As Lunenfeld asked, "What would the imagery be like if we did this conference ten years ago?" (He assumed that all presenters had used Google image search.) This change in "photography and truth value" can be measured as a "moment in time" in which the experience has moved "from being a marvel to cliché." If the first half of the 20th century was cinematic in reframing the way we look at life, and the second half embraced television and its all-at-onceness, now we have the "computer with culture" for "transcultural bricolage" in which "it all becomes ground." Different artistic producers may exploit the "reconfiguration of individual parts" as "an economic necessitym, such as Quentin Tarantino, Rm Koolhaas, Takashi Murakami, and Martha Stewart who can DIY her own Wii cake with what can be called "sticky media" rather than "teflon media." For him, the question is about "how what we download contributes to what we upload." With "unimedia as the result" and "unimodernism as the aspiration," Lunenfeld pointed out how much larger a world that we live in than the world of Rauschenberg, De Kooning, and Jasper Johns, who lived in close proximity. According to Lunenfeld, this video on YouTube showed how "tiny this world is and how different our world is" with our "vastness of connection to accessible culture."

Please Don't Pee on the Seats or Storm the Café : Nowcasting III

The image above from a guerrilla artist who changed a Los Angeles freeway sign to make its directions more legible wasn't mentioned by Julila Lupton in her talk about vernacular signage, "Signs and Misdemeanors," which started with this fabulous image of Tytus Andronikus and ended with the argument that when it came to education, "the design question and the writing question is the same question," as "more and more people are expected to write."

Speaking as an advocate for DIY practices that teach non-professionals to use "tools responsibly," Lupton argued that "the design cat is out of the design bag," and digital humanists would have to adjust. Perhaps her most Twittered line was that "it’s never to early to talk to your children about kerning," but a talk that began with a discussion of the difference between spring-loaded and open-ended toilet paper holders had some serious messages, despite her facetious answer to the question about "Why do Americans prefer that spring loaded model?" with an explanation of their willingness "to sacrifice security for liberty."

Next, she gave a number of other examples from her new book Design Your Life, which included inquiries into where baby carrots came from and why bras don’t fit, along with the observation that bra-wearers were "underrepresented at the conference." She explained that the book also contained some substantive advice that could be of value to digital humanists about third places and creativity theory, living with paper, and the art of procrastination, even if their "generalist approach to design" was aimed at women as the "footsoldiers in the new economy," who might be more included in their explanation of typeface design with their chosen examples of Dunkin Donuts vs. Tootsie Roll. She also said that the book was encouraging writing practices, specifically those that produced manifestos, and she showed the manifesto about design that she wrote with her sister Ellen Lupton, which asserted that design is thinking, design making, public, private, garbage, saving the world, communication, craft, technology, etc. (She drew comparisons to Anne Burdick's work on design as speculative and provocational the day before.)

Then she transitioned to a section on signage and how people must work in or navigate through public spaces, which in one of her sister's paintings was labeled with a "Yes -But" clause. She described a project with UCI graduate student Arden Stern about "how to do informal signage better" or "how to hang signs so they don’t ruin the world." As illustration, she showed several examples a few yards away from where the Nowcasting conference was taking place that direct potential visitors to the "photo classroom" and "photo lab." As a sign of a serious sign-makeover, she told how her sister had redone some ALL CAPS scotch-taped two-page signage in restroom with an elegant framed sign that preserved some of the original vitriol by ending with an instruction to "please don’t pee on the toilet seats" but phrased its instructions in verbiage far more genteel. (I too have always been interested in such signage, particularly signs in little Saigon that instruct new immigrants not to squat on the toilet seets, and I also have noted the gendered labor politics that is implicit in their messages, much like signs that ask people in office kitchens to wash their own dishes.)

As Lupton opined, "Ellen’s theory is that no one will take the signs down," given the "power of graphic design," but she also pointed to some more difficult examples of appropriation and improvised signage, as in the case of the work of Cardon Copy in redoing signs for cleaning ladies, regardless of the impositions and assumptions of class superiority in doing design for the working classes. She even cautioned that design could create a false sense of authority, as it did for those who placed trust in Erich Kofmel of the Sussex Centre for the Individual and Society. Although design might provide spit and polish to a University of California in crisis, it might also legitimize phishing and identity theft with design element. She cited Daniel Pink on "emotionally intelligent" signage and argued that even a trash can can serve as a message board. (For more on attempts to control waste with persuasive technologies and architectures of control, see the Design with Intent blog from Virtualpolitik friend Dan Lockton.)

In answering questions, Lupton reiterated that design literacy had to be built into general education to encourage people to think about how to contribute to public sphere with rhetorics that are "verbal and visual and thoroughly digital." Lev Manovich noted that there were certain assumptions about class and status in minimalism and white space that raised "social obligations," and Anne Burdick talked about the difference between little “d” design vs. Big “D” design and taste regimes, as Lupton talked about how as director of the Humanities Core Course at UC Irvine, they taught students to understand the Bauhaus as a socialist movement, albeit one with a continuing relationship to vernacular design. The last word was had by Lorraine Wild, who asked about the domestic worker's new signage, "Does she want to be a heavy metal cleaning lady or is she only cleaning churches?" The interventionist aesthetic involved in taking over the "implied expression in typography" by another party was to Wild questionable at best on Cardon Copy's part.

Then Benjamin Bratton gave a remarkable talk "On the Design and Designation of Cosmoppolitics: Geoscapes, Coogle Caliphate, Mumbai" about the "modern ethos of disclosure, transparency, and enlightenment" and the "emergence of information visualization as an adaptation to data abundance" as the Google suite of mapping and geospatial visualization tools played such a central role in the attacks by terrorists on Mumbai. He questioned the "rationalized images of the world" of "cosmograms and cosmomedia" and the status of Kant’s central human universals and his vision of a globalizing governance and the conditions of cogmopolitan assemblage might be understood in the environment of digitally enabled jihad. The talk was punctuated with gorgeous slides that included the Legoland Capitol dome, time clocks in automated distribution points, older maps of the world, and soldiers in KISS make-up, along with an understanding of contemporary thinkers that ranged from Bruno Latour to Jean-Luc Nancy to Jacques Rancière.

One of the recurrange images in his talk showed various forms of geographies dictated by concentric rings that ranged from Robert Smithson's geoscape to late medieval visions of the world with Jerusalem at the center. He noted how the "fragile pairing of geography and law: and "territory and projection" could be seen in th terrorist attacks in Mumbai and the militarism of the urban landscape of the city. When cities lose ability to triage conflict, he argued, terrorist incursions that serve as an "attack on habits and inhabitants" complicate questions about how a global city with mobile mapping functions. He observed that the terrorists used Google earth and maps, along with cell phones and sim cards, to exploit "situational awarenss." He connected their geospatial understandings with Photoshopped images that "plant the flag of Islam in Washington, Tel Aviv."

For Bratton, this was a "designed moment" of "righteous sacred geography." Thus at a design conference, he wanted to bring in difficult questions about terrorist acts, because it was "iimportant to engage at the register of design." For the attackers, the geography of the partition of Kasmir necessitated another kind of geoscape as they participated in a "shifting landscape of shifting landscapes" that was "not an empty arrangement but conceptual assemblage" that was "secular and geographic."

Bratton asserted that the "public sphere is spherical only to the extent that it lacks topological perspective" and that these "armed smart mobs" represented "irregular and asymmetrical" combat, as "armed Versace knock-off wearing tourists" perpetrating actions that were more like an amok than a Klauswitzian contest of rational equals. In tracing the "trail of geographic events, Bratton noted that the news agencies also used Google Earth and that the very software problematizes certain aspects of the "open, objective, materialist, dialogic" Friedman-esque view of the world.

Perhaps Bratton's most contentious assertion was that jihadist Islam and the "representation of the earth as circle . . . onto and into which history might work" is not entirely alien to Google itself if this "remapping of the Caliphate" could be applied to the products and practices perpetuated by the Mountain View, California company in which "our modernity is always already also theirs." In thinking about a "politico theological urban design practice" and the "spatial imaginaries of Jihad and Google" contained in "computational geospace" involving both sub and super state agents, Bratton argued that it was "less about what is seen than what is not seen," as Google effects its transnational ends. As evidence he pointed to the "territorial and naval incursion" represented by the plan for floating Google data centers that harness tidal and wind energy, along with cooling the cooling powers of the sea, which create uncharted possibilities for the jurisdictional and legal control of data as the territory of the cloud enters international waters. (Another illustration of his thesis was offered in a photo of a Sun data center in a shipping container.)

Bratton argued that digital humanists must engage with the "political information built into hardware" that "no law passed can undo," if it involves the polity of an Intel chip. For him, it was a question of "accidental technologies and political design" in which there was "design for the effect and affect" and a codependence of "functioning infrastructure and decorative camouflage" in the cameras and cross signals that were now part of the integrated posture of the global city. The monopoly on legitimate violence and the monopoly of legitimate citizenship once held by the state was being challenged by Google, in that Bratton could imagine a "Google citizenship" built on rational actor microeconomics. He closed by quoting Paul Virilio and offering a reminder that just as technologies create accidents, accidents create technologies.

Drinking from the Firehose: Nowcasting I

At the Nowcasting conference gets underway, I find myself reminded of how Jeremy Douglass talked about how one of Lev Manovich's students was working with data streaming in from lookbook.nu. He compared this opportunity for real-time analysis to "drinking from the firehose." There was a lot of drinking from the firehose in the day's presentation.

Conference organizer Peter Lunenfeld introduced the conference with an epigraph from Rivka Galchen who despairs of the possibility of discovering "the state of things as they presently are, let alone to predict the future," because it poses a "problem so computationally complex that to solve it even approximately would require a thousand crays working in tandem?" Galchen recommends that we "forget about forecasting; even nowcasting is near impossible." As Lunenfeld points out, "Nowcasting" has become a subeject of interest for the collaborative art group TEH as well.

Lunenfeld also showed Bruce Mau's famous napkin sketch, reproduced above, to explain how design have become an über-category for discourse in the digital humanities. As he presents the digital humanities, it is also a long list of modifiers that include "collaborative," "networked," "interactive," "rhizomatic," "locative," "productive," "active," "intertextual," "hybridizing," and "generative." Furloughs at UCLA notwithstanding, he asserted that it was a "great moment to be a humanist," since "not everything is the digital humanities. But the digital humanities are about everything." He also foregrounded the idea of the "designed humanities," which will also be a theme in the upcoming HASTAC@DAC panel, to encourage participants to think about "what ways can our thinking about everything from the hierarchies of reading to the affordances of interaction" could be understood in the context of the prior century of design to grasp how it might "inform the next century."

Next up was Anne Burdick, who introduced herself by noting that some of her interests in the intersections between electronic literature, corpus linguistics, and media theory and associated practices of "marginalia and remix" had already been previewed at the Media in Transition Conference. She noted that her "mix of analog and digital" in her body of work indicates a form of research, so that her role as a designer was not as service provider but as a colleague doing research in her own field with an aim "not to generate a commercially successful product but to engage in questions" regarding the unique materiality of different media types.

Burdick has worked closely with Lunenfeld in the MIT Press Mediawork series, where she worked on the design for N. Katherine Hayles' Writing Machines in which the "severed body part" of the "technotext" allows for the "interweaving of Kate the Critic and original source material" by fostering a visual rhetoric of "cutting and pasting" and lexicon mapping. The webtake on the Hayles' text was done by Erik Loyer, which whom I worked closely in this summer's NEH-Vectors seminar on "Broadening the Digital Humanities." Burdick had presented to the Vectors group, which also included Hayles, as did Johanna Drucker who was later in the day's program.

She also showed materials from The New Ecology of Things, which rethinks the "essayistic home of the book" and previews the coming era of "vooks" with video/print interfaces, even if the text might be dated by the fact that the M-codes imbedded in the book for pervasive computing purposes no longer function.

Burdick also inspired me to add the Fackel Gate, which is not built through proprietary software and grappled with the design challenge of having "to work in a single browser window" and "replicate information from books on a shelf." Fackel's text also needs a "dictionary of perjorative terms" in order to understand the function of his language by reading his criticism through entries such as "artist" and "historian."

In closing, Burdick suggested a number of ways that design enriches the digital humanities through elucidating structural logics, rhetorical schema, narrative hierarchies and presenting analysis that might "visually interpret, remap or reframe, and reveal patterns." She also argued that the speculative function of design was also important because it is "propositional, cast into the future, provocative, optimistic, inventive, asks 'what if.'" Her closing video, A New Ecology of Bookmarks, created by two media design shows a hypothetical bookmark that allows for filtering, interpretation, and cutting and pasting into a new composition to show a "potentially transformative communication tool." In the Q&A, in response to Drucker, she explained that academic presses had little money for user testing, even of the kind that Peter Lunenfeld said might be helpful when readers complain that magazine paper is too slick, since "people want to write on it." Burdick also reiterated that the "project is not necessarily to make something that works" but to consider the notion of "writing space" as Jay Bolter describes it.

Time Marches On

This beautiful image from the Flickr stream of the Software Studies Cultural Analytics Project shows how the covers of TIME magazine can be graphed over time.

The x axis is time, the y axis is a composite dimension of brightness, hue, and saturation measures that were automatically extracted from the images.

The graph shows the complicated transition from black and white to color printing and indicates some basic design trends in various eras of the publication.

Given the valences of TIME magazine covers in the history of American political rhetoric, it is an interesting set of images to digitize and data mine.