Biased

If more of us were this creative and this ambitious the academy would be a happier, smarter, more relevant place.

Acoustic Incunabula

Via the Salt Box: a 20-second recording of authentic Victorian street sounds. Part of The Sound Archive at the British Library. Somehow this short clip, with its anonymous voices, clip clopping, and white noise demonstrates the miraculous power of recorded sound more effectively than most anything else I can imagine.

Also available at the link above are sound effects from a “17th century battle,” which is fascinating, but I’m not clear on the recording technology that would have been in place in the 1600s; the catalog entry muddles the matter further by describing the item as 17-19th century, which is a rather wide latitude . . . still, I have to assume it’s authentic (I mean, the British Library is one of those sites I’d tell my students to trust).

Update (in response to my query as posted in the comments):

Charles Babbage Institute / Iterations

During my recent visit to the English department at the University of Minnesota I had a chance to spend some time at the Charles Babbage Institute. The CBI collects papers, correspondence, manuals, technical reports, and other forms of documentation from the history and material culture of computing. They do not collect hardware, nor do they seek to preserve data and software.

The William Blake Archive has its project records on deposit at CBI.

While I was there I chatted with one of the archivists, Elisabeth Kaplan, and also had a chance to examine some primary source material: a technical manual describing a library automation system for the RAMAC 305 (first IBM hard drive) and a white paper on storage technologies ca. 1955. Interestingly, the cathode ray tube (known to most of us as the basis of monitor display technology) was once a storage device.

CBI is also home to Iterations, a peer-reviewed journal of software history, and the Software History Dictionary—both resources I suspect I’ll be coming back to.

Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences

From John Unsworth, via the Humanist list:

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

[This is a Good Thing.]

The Charge to the Commission

As scholars in the humanities and social sciences use digital tools and
technologies with increasing sophistication and innovation, they are
transforming their practices of collaboration and communication. New forms
of scholarship, criticism, and creativity proliferate in arts and letters
and in the social sciences, resulting in significant new works accessible
and meaningful only in digital form. Many technology-driven projects in
these areas have become enormously complex and at the same time
indispensable for teaching and research.

For their part, scientists and engineers no longer see digital technologies
merely as tools enhancing established research methodologies, but as a
force creating environments that enable the creation of new knowledge. The
recent National Science Foundation report, “Revolutionizing Science and
Engineering through Cyberinfrastructure,” argues for large-scale
investments across all disciplines to develop the shared technology
infrastructure that will support ever-greater capacities. Those capacities
would include the development and deployment of new tools; the rapid
adoption of best practices; interoperability; the ability to invoke
services over the network; secure sharing of facilities; long-term storage
of and access to important data; and ready availability of expertise and
assistance.

The needs of humanists and scientists converge in this emerging
cyberinfrastructure. As the importance of technology-enabled innovation
grows across all fields, scholars are increasingly dependent on
sophisticated systems for the creation, curation, and preservation of
information. They are also dependent on a policy, economic, and legal
environment that encourages appropriate and unimpeded access to both
digital information and digital tools. It is crucial for the humanities and
the social sciences to join scientists and engineers in defining and
building this infrastructure so that it meets the needs and incorporates
the contributions of humanists and social scientists.

ACLS is sponsoring a national commission to investigate and report on these
issues. The Commission will operate throughout 2004, and is charged to:

I. Describe and analyze the current state of humanities and social science
cyberinfrastructure

II. Articulate the requirements and the potential contributions of the
humanities and the social sciences in developing a cyberinfrastructure for
information, teaching, and research

III. Recommend areas of emphasis and coordination for the various agencies
and institutions, public and private, that contribute to the development of
this cyberinfrastructure

Among the questions to be explored in pursuing these three goals are:

I. Describe and analyze the current state of humanities and social science
cyberinfrastructure.

1. What can be generalized from the already significant digital projects in
the humanities and social sciences? Which humanities and social science
communities are most active and why? Of those that are not, which might
soon, easily and/or profitably, engage more deeply with digital technology?
How have those scholars developed computing applications to accomplish
their scholarly and expressive goals? Where have they failed to do so, and
what can be learned from those failures?

2. What new intellectual strategies, critical methods, and creative
practices are emerging in response to technical applications in the
humanities? To what extent are disciplines in the humanities transforming
themselves through the use of computing and networking technologies? What
are the implications of that transformation?

3. What organizations and structures have empowered or impeded the digital
humanities? What are examples of successful and durable collaboration
between technologists and humanities scholars? Where and how are people
being trained to support and engage in such collaborations? What has been
the role of libraries, archives, and publishers in these projects?

II. Articulate the requirements and the potential contributions of the
humanities and the social sciences in developing a national
cyberinfrastructure for information, teaching, and research.

1. What are the “grand challenge” problems for the humanities and social
sciences in the coming decade? Are they tractable to computation? Do they
require cyberinfrastructure in some other way?

2. What technological developments can we predict that will have special
impact in the humanities and social sciences in the near future?

3. Which are the most important functionalities necessary for new research
and development in cyberinfrastructure generally? What kinds of humanities
or social science problems are theoretically difficult or expressively
complex, or challenge our ability to formulate a computable problem in some
other way? What kinds of humanities or social science problems are
computationally intensive, require especially high bandwidth, or present
resource challenges in other ways?

4. What are the barriers that confront humanities and social science users
who wish to take advantage of state-of-the-art computational, storage,
networking, and visualization resources in their research? What can be done
to remove these barriers?

5. What impact will the availability of high-performance infrastructure
have on enabling cross-disciplinary research? What will high-performance
infrastructure mean for the broader social impact of humanities and social
sciences?

6. What can be done to improve education and outreach activities in the
computer-science and engineering community to broaden access to high-end
computing? How can computing expertise in the humanities and social
sciences themselves be increased?

III. Recommend areas of emphasis and coordination for the various agencies
and institutions, public and private, that contribute to the development of
humanities cyberinfrastructure.

1. What investments in cyberinfrastructure are likely to have the greatest
impact on scholarship in the humanities and social sciences?

2. What research infrastructure should be coupled with cyberinfrastructure?

3. How can private and public funding agencies coordinate their efforts and
cooperate with universities, research libraries, disciplinary
organizations, and others to maximize the benefits of cyberinfrastructure
for the humanities and social sciences?

4. How should new investments in infrastructure and technologies be
administered so as to include the humanities?

The Scope of Work and Method

Over the course of 2004, the commission will investigate the questions
raised above, and others as they become relevant, by:

• inviting expert testimony in public meetings, in writing, or in personal
  interviews;
• examining and documenting ongoing practices and projects;
• administering a web-based survey;
• reading broadly in recent literature on scholarly publishing, libraries
  and archives, intellectual property, and other relevant topics;
• consulting with foundations and funding agencies.

The commission will hold a number of public forums designed to encourage
thoughtful, wide-ranging reflection among stakeholder communities:

1. Monday, April 27th (at the annual meeting of the Research Libraries
Group)
2. Saturday, May 22nd, Chicago
3. Saturday, June 19th, New York
4. Saturday, August 21st, Berkeley
5. Saturday, September 18th, Los Angeles
6. Saturday, October 9th, Houston
7. Tuesday, October 26th, Baltimore (at the Digital Library Federation’s
Fall Forum)

The Commission expects to publish its findings and recommendations early in
2005.

Commission Members:

Paul Courant
Provost & Professor of Economics
University of Michigan

Sarah Fraser
Associate Professor and Chair
Art History, Northwestern University

Mike Goodchild
Director, Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science
Professor, Geography
University of California, Santa Barbara

Margaret Hedstrom
Associate Professor, School of Information
University of Michigan

Charles Henry
Vice President and Chief Information Officer
Rice University

Peter B. Kaufman
Director of Strategic Initiatives, Innodata Isogen
President, Intelligent Television

Jerome McGann
John Stewart Bryan Professor
English, University of Virginia

Roy Rosenzweig
Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor
History, George Mason University

John Unsworth (Chair)
Dean and Professor
Grad School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Bruce Zuckerman
Professor, School of Religion
Director, Archaeological Research Collection
University of Southern California

Advisors to the Commission:

Dan Atkins
Professor, School of Information
Director, Alliance for Community Technology
University of Michigan

James Herbert
Senior NSF/NEH Advisor
National Science Foundation

Clifford Lynch, Director
Coalition for Networked Information

Deanna Marcum
Associate Librarian for Library Services
Library of Congress

Harold Short
Director, Center for Computing in the Humanities
King’s College, London

Steve Wheatley
Vice-President, American Council of Learned Societies

Senior Editor:

Abby Smith
Director of Programs
Council on Library and Information Resources
Washington, DC

Make Your Own Bayeux Tapestry

Via Ed in my Digital Studies class:

Make Your Own Bayeux Tapestry.

States I've Visited

Via Liz, except I’m not as well travelled so I’ve restricted myself to the USA.

Airports where I’ve changed planes certainly don’t count, and I’ve also omitted states I’ve only driven through on the way to somewhere else. As you can see I’ve done pretty well in the eastern half of the country, but west of the big muddy it’s all a wash—except for California’s golden shores (and across the Pacific, Hawai’i).

What's Needed (IMHO)

Willard McCarty asks the question on the Humanist list:

A question that resurfaces from time to time is, “what needs to be done in humanities computing?” I’d like to ask that question again, if for no other reason than insights and the populations that have them change. If, say, you could direct a large group of competent people to go forth and accomplish a number of tasks, or you could persuade everyone to adopt a particular way of working that would have benefit to many, what tasks or new habits would you list?

Here’s what I think (I sent a version to Humanist in response):

I would like to see the humanities computing community able to document some specific instances of new knowledge that have been created as a direct result of access to text analysis or digital resources. By this I don’t just mean generic statements like, “with the advent of the Blake Archive I can compare images from dozens of different illuminated books.” I also don’t mean linguistic computing, where the successes are well known and publicized. But for those working in text anaylsis, electronic editing, digital libraries, and related fields: are we able to point to actual cases where a problem has been solved, a question has been answered, received wisdom has been overturned, or new things have been learned?

As measured by published scholarship.

In the same way we can point to new knowledge that has come from the use of the Hinman collator or the scanning electron microscope.

Positivistic? Maybe, but it strikes me that that we’ve done a very good job of articulating the ways in which humanities computing is capable of raising questions; time to see whether we’re also any good at answering them?

Chief Archivist of US Stepping Down

As reported in Government Computer News:

After almost nine years as archivist of the United States, John Carlin will step down as soon as the Senate confirms Allen Weinstein, President Bush’s choice to become the ninth archivist.

“Prior to the announcement, there was no consultation with professional organizations of archivists or historians,” the [Society of American Archivists] noted in a statement this month. “This is the first time since the National Archives and Records Administration was established as an independent agency that the process of nominating an archivist of the United States has not been open for public discussion and input.”

Full story here.

Some Assembly Required

Check out this stunning 3-D computer model of an early twentieth century battleship. (Don’t miss the actual 3-D images here.) 37 MB, 257,000 polygons, over 22,000 discrete objects. This is a home hobbyist’s work, not something created by a studio.

Infrastructure

The servers are down.

The elevators are slow.

The traffic’s too heavy.

The budget’s been bled.

At least we still have good water pressure.

Email Woes Redux

Update: University mail service has been out most of the day [Thursday, 4/15]. If you have time-sensitive business please resend to my alternate address: matthew “dot” kirschenbaum “at” verizon “dot” net

[Originally posted 4/10]: University IT is reporting that some mail either sent or delivered between 8:00 PM EST, Wednesday, April 7 and 8:00 AM EST Thursday, April 8 may have been lost. In addition, there have been chronic slow-downs on the system for the past week. If you’ve sent me important mail in the last few days, or are expecting to receive mail back from me (and have not), please contact me or resend. Better safe than sorry. Thanks.

Vector Futures

I’ve had a few requests for the full version of the talk I mention in the post below. Here it is.

Samples

Geoff Rockwell links to this excellent history of “Lenna”, a Playboy bunny whose pixelated likeness became something of a global baseline for image compression. Call it algorithmic objectification.

This kind of documentary reconstruction of the history of a digital object is my bread and butter. Here’s something I wrote a little while back on another famous image:

This image, an artifact of our age, is named SAMPLE.JPG and comes loaded with all Windows-based operating systems. If you use a WinTel machine you already have your own copy.

The first of these two paradigms is photorealism, images typically delivered in raster or bitmap formats and represented here by the body of the athlete; the second and slightly older of the two paradigms are mathematically constructed images, delivered in vector formats and represented here by the same stark grid lines that have been the wire-frame support for some of our most influential imaginings of cyberspace.

The rest of the paper (which I gave at the 2002 MLA) goes on to detail the implications of the rise of vector image formats (notably Flash) for the current archival paradigm in digital humanities.

timetraveler_00

Went with Kari to see a performance of timetraveler_00 out at GMU last night, a “live movie” staged by Professor Kirby Malone’s Cyburbia Productions. time_traveler_00 is an adaptation of the story of John Titor, an entity who appeared on the net for six months in 2000-2001 claiming to be a time traveler from the year 2036—sent to retrieve (of all things) an old IBM model 5100 needed to reverse-engineer aspects of the UNIX operating system and prevent a global computer crash!

Sound like bunk? Well, maybe so, but that’s not really the point. According to Malone in the Washington Post, “We don’t care if it’s real or true. We care what it means—the poetic truth and the way it gives us an avenue to critique our culture in a constructive way.” And, as was repeatedly pointed out during the performance, time travellers—time travel, incidentally, is a proven possibility under what we know of quantum physics—are never believed anyway. I mean, under what circumstances would you believe someone claiming to be from 2036? The Titor materials scattered around the net include detailed schematics and photographs of the putative time travel equipment, including one parituclarly eerie snap representing itself as an artifact from 2035 (“It shows my instructor beaming a handheld laser outside the vehicle during operation. The beam is being bent by the gravitational field produced outside the vehicle by the distortion unit. The beam is visible through smoke that is coming from his cigar”).

Much more emerges, including details of Titor’s world—a post-apocalyptic agrarian society that forms after a civil war in the US that culimates in a global thermonuclear exchange. The civil war is framed as a town and country divide, gentlemen farmers with guns resisting an increasingly authoritarian federal government. This aspect of the narrative was the least compelling to me, and is downplayed in Malone’s version of events; the Titor materials on the Web are more heavily inflected by the dogma of the American militia movement.

And what’s a live movie you ask? A multimedia production combining live action performance and music with extensive CGI. Theater for a new generation, as Malone conceives it. Or call it a cyberpunk rock opera. Whatever it is it’s quite a spectacle, the actors and the CGI often blending seamlessly.

Most interesting to me about the John Titor material—which I hadn’t heard of before the show—is the way in which a set of born-digital objects becomes the basis for subsequent interpretation and art-making in the “real world.”

The network informing an analog imaginary.

We’ll be seeing more of that I expect.

In the meantime (so to speak) I understand time_traveler_00 is going to be going on tour. The performances were outstanding, so I certainly recommend it.

Thurston Moore in NYT

On Kurt Cobain:

When Kurt died, a lot of the capitalized froth of alternative rock fizzled. Mainstream rock lost its kingpin group, an unlikely one imbued with avant-garde genius, and contemporary rock became harder and meaner, more aggressive and dumbed down and sexist. Rage and aggression were elements for Kurt to play with as an artist, but he was profoundly gentle and intelligent. He was sincere in his distaste for bullyboy music — always pronouncing his love for queer culture, feminism and the punk rock do-it-yourself ideal. Most people who adapt punk as a lifestyle represent these ideals, but with one of the finest rock voices ever heard, Kurt got to represent them to an attentive world. Whatever contact he made was really his most valued success.

Smart and articulate throughout.

Grockwel

Geoffrey Rockwell has a blog. I’ve known Geoff for a number of years, and he’s one of the smartest guys around—works on everything from text analysis to video games.

Playing With Our Food

Don’t have time for a longer meditation right now, but I’ve been meaning to link to this delectable post from Maciej Ceglowski. Here’s a taste:

For as long as there has been writing, there have been cabalists eager to quantify, rearrange, and play with texts to reveal hidden inner meanings. The humanities have an understandable suspicion of such textual games, and a less understandable reluctance to explore the many worlds that fast computers and the mass digitization of texts are opening up. But as natural language programming techniques improve, the humanities are going to have to come to terms with computers, whether they like it or not. We geeks are going to eat all of their favorite books.

"My Tables, My Tables; Meet it is I Set it Downe!"

For someone whose field is “digital studies” I seem to be spending a lot of time with old books lately. Just a week after our letterpress course, Kari and I had the great treat of an up close look at some of the Blakes from the Lessing J. Rosenwald collection at the Library of Congress. (Kari had arranged a showing for her class from GMU—so I also finally got to meet some of these cool students she’s been talking about all semester.) The Rosenwald collection at the LC is the single largest gathering of Blakes in the US; I had looked at some of them a number of years ago, back when I was project manager for the William Blake Archive. Things have changed. Back then, I got my readers’ card and simply requested the Blakes I wanted to look at as though they were any other book (I vividly remember a teenager—he couldn’t have been more than sixteen, clearly working at the Library as an after school job and wearing a pair of Walkman headphones—come bopping out of the stacks with The Marriage of Heaven and Hell tucked under his arm). This time around the collection’s chief curator, Daniel Desimone—wonderfully well-informed about Blake himself—did all of the handling. We looked at copies of There is No Natural Religion, the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Europe, America, the Book of Urizen, and Blake’s illustrations to Young’s Night Thoughts. As always when I see real Blakes I’m reminded of what even the gorgeous, high-resolution, painstakingly color-corredted images in the Archive cannot capture: their scale for one thing, when held by a human hand; the smell of the old paper and ink; the flecks of gold Blake added to the coloration in some of his later copies; the rich, velvety texture of the thickly layered inks and watercolors.

None of this, however, is to bemoan the failures of digital repersentation; critics of the Archive, for example, never tire of reminding us that these images are finally only representations, not substitutions for the “real thing.” Well, duh. The mistake is to think that even our very close up look at the real thing wasn’t also mediated: the LC is a public repository, yes, but we got our showing because Kari was a credentialled scholar with a more-than-casual reason for requesting to see them (and because Mr. Desimone is obviously the kind of curator who delights in sharing the incomparable items in his charge—not necessarily the norm in the library and museum world). Still, unlike my earlier visit to the collection, this time we couldn’t handle the books ourselves (and just to be clear: thank goodness for that!). So we saw only those pages Mr. Desimone elected to show us (though he was happy to take requests), and only for the length of time he held them under our nose. Truth be told, I’m not sure I can conceive of what truly unmediated access would look like. Owning your own Blake, to have and to hold? Well, where did you get the money to buy it?

Update: George suggests the character who eats a Blake in Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon. Hmm.

Anyway, as if that wasn’t enough, we then got to hear Peter Stallybrass and Roger Chartier address the Washington Area Group for Print Culture Studies on writing tables (erasable writing surfaces once used to jot down this and that in the course of a day; sort of an early modern PDA. Thus Prince Hamlet: “My Tables, My Tables; Meet it is I Set it Downe!”) Their article will be out in Shakespeare Quarterly this fall, and it’s very rich indeed.