Gravity & Literature

Random Access Hilarity

2006-12-18T11:39:00.000-05:00

For those of you engaged on a never-ending quest for additional blogs to read, I recommend this. The latest there leads on to a further link and asks a question that I thought would be of interest to our group here--it has to do with algorithms, randomness, and the question of authorship.

Also Nietzsche and Family Circus.

*Addendum*

Here's a permanent link to that post.

alliterates

2006-12-15T17:01:00.000-05:00

here is the link

A couplet for Johnson

2006-12-12T17:34:00.000-05:00

Kick at the rock, Sam Johnson, break your bones:
But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.
~Richard Wilbur (1921- )

That is all.

Discussion Board Archive

2006-12-12T14:16:00.000-05:00

I've added a link where we can start transferring discussion board comments here.

Feedback Mountain

2006-12-10T23:25:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine sent me a link. It was sent to him by someone else, and so on. I didn't see the joke until he pointed it out--I should mention, perhaps, that he's gay. He found it quite hysterical.

I, of course, cautiously shared the laugh and immediately thought of how the page functioned as a feedback loop--and I wondered if the resulting "joke" constituted some kind of emergence.

It certainly reflects Amazon.com's belief that you are what you buy, and that so is everyone else, unless we are to believe that the feature is being tinkered with by programmers who are being told to push certain products.

Tell me what you think:

Go to Amazon.com. Search for "Philips-Norelco-BG2020-Mens-Bodygroom." Scroll down to the "Customers who bought this item also bought" section. Think about it. Respond here.

More Thoughts on "Lateral Reading"

2006-12-10T18:04:00.000-05:00

I've been trying to come up with a definition of what I mean by "lateral reading" as it applies to the digital age and decided to through it out here to see if anyone wanted to dive in and help figure it out.

Imagine that reading on the internet is like using a giant bookwheel, only using multiple windows for different texts. So, let's say we're reading a copy of Northanger Abbey online. So here is an excerpt of the text:

Catherine's feelings, as she got into the carriage, were in a very unsettled state; divided between regret for the loss of one great pleasure, and the hope of soon enjoying another, almost its equal in degree, however unlike in kind. She could not think the Tilneys had acted quite well by her, in so readily giving up their engagement, without sending her any message of excuse. It was now but an hour later than the time fixed on for the beginning of their walk; and, in spite of what she had heard of the prodigious accumulation of dirt in the course of that hour, she could not from her own observation help thinking that they might have gone with very little inconvenience. To feel herself slighted by them was very painful. On the other hand, the delight of exploring an edifice like Udolpho, as her fancy represented Blaize Castle to be, was such a counterpoise of good as might console her for almost anything.

They passed briskly down Pulteney Street, and through Laura Place, without the exchange of many words. Thorpe talked to his horse, and she meditated, by turns, on broken promises and broken arches, phaetons and false hangings, Tilneys and trap-doors.

Now instead of just reading by scrolling down and clicking on "Next," what if the page looked like this?

Catherine's feelings, as she got into the carriage, were in a very unsettled state; divided between regret for the loss of one great pleasure, and the hope of soon enjoying another, almost its equal in degree, however unlike in kind. She could not think the Tilneys had acted quite well by her, in so readily giving up their engagement, without sending her any message of excuse. It was now but an hour later than the time fixed on for the beginning of their walk; and, in spite of what she had heard of the prodigious accumulation of dirt in the course of that hour, she could not from her own observation help thinking that they might have gone with very little inconvenience. To feel herself slighted by them was very painful. On the other hand, the delight of exploring an edifice like Udolpho, as her fancy represented Blaize Castle to be, was such a counterpoise of good as might console her for almost anything.

They passed briskly down Pulteney Street, and through Laura Place, without the exchange of many words. Thorpe talked to his horse, and she meditated, by turns, on broken promises and broken arches, phaetons and false hangings, Tilneys and trap-doors.

This is of course a very rough example of that kind of reading, but you begin to see the possibilities. On different sites the same text may have different keywords highlighted and different kinds of links. Reading is non-linear, and "close reading" is something entirely different.

Sense? Nonsense? You guys tell me.

Like Lost, but more relevant?

2006-12-08T15:28:00.000-05:00

In keeping with our various themes of Lost, networking, games, connections, feedback, and all sorts of other things I can only ever hope to understand partially--

I came across this in the blog of another friend of mine (to which I will not link):

http://www.lost.eu/e120

The site explains it all. I'm not "playing" the game, but it seeks to establish itself as having the most users ever--7 million. I believe we were talking about feedback loop user-based "games" last night, and with the title of this one I couldn't resist posting it.

Also, it's a student project, apparently, so I feel a sense of kinship. Let us all know what the braver of you find out...

What's in a name

2006-12-04T20:12:00.000-05:00

Just as a matter of interest, a google search for "Cliff Siskin" now turns up this blog as the seventh listing. "Clifford Siskin" not so much.

Can Blogger and Wiki Save the World?

2006-12-04T14:50:00.000-05:00

Illustrations by Lisa Strausfeld and James Nick Sears/Pentagram

These images represent terrorist attacks and some of the actors, weapons and targets linked to them. The physical relationship of the items suggests the level of connection.

Here's something interesting from the Times Magazine yesterday. How does one utilize open-source information sharing in an environment that demands secrecy?

Intelligence hoarding presented one set of problems, but pouring it into a common ocean, Meyerrose realized soon after moving into his office, is not the answer either. “Intelligence is about looking for needles in haystacks, and we can’t just keep putting more hay on the stack,” he said. What the agencies needed was a way to take the thousands of disparate, unorganized pieces of intel they generate every day and somehow divine which are the most importan

Intelligence heads wanted to try to find some new answers to this problem. So the C.I.A. set up a competition, later taken over by the D.N.I., called the Galileo Awards: any employee at any intelligence agency could submit an essay describing a new idea to improve information sharing, and the best ones would win a prize. The first essay selected was by Calvin Andrus, chief technology officer of the Center for Mission Innovation at the C.I.A. In his essay, “The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community,” Andrus posed a deceptively simple question: How did the Internet become so useful in helping people find information?
Andrus argued that the real power of the Internet comes from the boom in self-publishing: everyday people surging online to impart their thoughts and views. He was particularly intrigued by Wikipedia, the “reader-authored” encyclopedia, where anyone can edit an entry or create a new one without seeking permission from Wikipedia’s owners. This open-door policy, as Andrus noted, allows Wikipedia to cover new subjects quickly. The day of the London terrorist bombings, Andrus visited Wikipedia and noticed that barely minutes after the attacks, someone had posted a page describing them. Over the next hour, other contributors — some physically in London, with access to on-the-spot details — began adding more information and correcting inaccurate news reports. “You could just sit there and hit refresh, refresh, refresh, and get a sort of ticker-tape experience,” Andrus told me. What most impressed Andrus was Wikipedia’s self-governing nature. No central editor decreed what subjects would be covered. Individuals simply wrote pages on subjects that interested them — and then like-minded readers would add new facts or fix errors. Blogs, Andrus noted, had the same effect: they leveraged the wisdom of the crowd. When a blogger finds an interesting tidbit of news, he posts a link to it, along with a bit of commentary. Then other bloggers find that link and, if they agree it’s an interesting news item, post their own links pointing to it. This produces a cascade effect. Whatever the first blogger pointed toward can quickly amass so many links pointing in its direction that it rockets to worldwide notoriety in a matter of hours.
Spies, Andrus theorized, could take advantage of these rapid, self-organizing effects. If analysts and agents were encouraged to post personal blogs and wikis on Intelink — linking to their favorite analyst reports or the news bulletins they considered important — then mob intelligence would take over. In the traditional cold-war spy bureaucracy, an analyst’s report lived or died by the whims of the hierarchy. If he was in the right place on the totem pole, his report on Soviet missiles could be pushed up higher; if a supervisor chose to ignore it, the report essentially vanished. Blogs and wikis, in contrast, work democratically. Pieces of intel would receive attention merely because other analysts found them interesting. This grass-roots process, Andrus argued, suited the modern intelligence challenge of sifting through thousands of disparate clues: if a fact or observation struck a chord with enough analysts, it would snowball into popularity, no matter what their supervisors thought.

What do you think folks? Too good to be true? Part of the problem is that blog networking seems engineered to expose rather than conceal.

Media

2006-11-30T21:59:00.000-05:00

Continuing in the vein of whether or not the format influences the way we read--

I've been reading Helgerson and Stallybras on Jonson's authorial self-fashioning. Both make the point (as did some of Jonson's contemporaries) that Jonson's 1616 Works elevated his plays above the status of, well, plays. By bringing them out in a folio (sixteen years before Shakespeare's plays would appear in one), Jonson separated himself, or sought to separate himself, from the "lowness" of the fair and the theatre. So: same "text" (though not really, of course, but for the most part), different medium, different status.

Jonson wanted master-poet status--laureateship. The Alchemist could get him there--or nearer there--but not if he left it on the stage.

More Crossposting

2006-11-28T21:05:00.000-05:00

This post is in reference to another post (entitled "Crossposting") that was posted quite some time ago. I would have just commented on it, but I feared that it wouldn't be recognized as easily as a new post.

I first read "Crossposting" shortly after it was submitted and I was immediately intrigued by the experiment. Like Bickerstaff explained, it would be virtually impossible (or at least incredibly difficult) to perform such an experiment, but we have to admit that the results would be quite interesting. How would dated criticism that has been“re-written” be received by the academy today?

While we let that question marinate in our minds, I wanted to suggest something that came to my mind when thinking about the re-writing of old texts. It is something that I want to call genre translation. What if instead of re-writing texts/articles/posts in terms of slight variations--such as changing the style, vernacular, author tag, etc.--we do a complete translation of form? By this I mean a complete rewriting that goes beyond vernacular, syntax, author tag, etc. Instead, how would we read texts (especially academic texts) if we translated them into a completely different form like poetry? You may recall Cliff Siskin's point on how we might read Pope's Essay on Man differently if we strictly read the prose-formatted version used on manybooks.net rather than the original. In other words, I want to question (as Bickerstaff did) how form affects our reading of content. More importantly, does form affect the truth-value of what is said? Is something more or less truthful based on the form in which it is written? If the same statements and ideas that are expressed in a journal article are also expressed on a blog, such as this, will the truth-value of the content be lowered simply because a blog is not an acceptable form of knowledge circulation in the academy? Or, is this issue perhaps simply a matter of what forms are taken more seriously than others.

Another reason for my use of the term "translation" is becaue it brings to the surface issues like meaning transfer--is content truly the same once it's been translated? If we say no, then perhaps form is inextricably linked to content in a way that produces a singular meaning and, thus, any changes in form would alter that meaning. Thoughts?

Fun New Link

2006-11-26T12:55:00.000-05:00

David Pogue over at the Times has a techie blog with some fun stuff on it. I found this post particularly interesting.

My son, now in fourth grade, has been learning about global warming at school. I knew that the idea bothered him, but at least in class, the issue was sensitively introduced, with an emphasis on what avenues of hope there might be to avoid a crisis.

But one day, a classmate had mentioned “An Inconvenient Truth.” That night, sitting at the computer, my son pulled up the trailer for that movie.

By the time its 30 seconds were over, the poor kid was sobbing. All of those stark, before-and-after images of melting ice caps and lakes drying up shook him to the core.

This is interesting because it goes back to our ong0ing discussion in class about "reality" versus "virtual reality." Kids are such a great example for this because that line between real and image is still so very nebulous.

Anyway there's more gadgety stuff over there for all you tech geeks.

9 Billion-Year-Old ‘Dark Energy’ Reported

2006-11-17T16:47:00.000-05:00

see the link here

Sci-Fi and New Worlds

2006-11-11T19:49:00.000-05:00

Salon has a good piece on Battlestar Galactica this weekend. For those of you who have yet to drink the BSG Kool-aid, the mini series and both the first and second seasons are available on DVD.

The Salon piece gives a pretty good rundown of the premise of the show and its topical relevancy in terms of themes of war and government rule. For our purposes, what is one of the most fascinating things about the show is the negotiation between technology and humanity. Initially the show displays a typical human versus robots dynamic complicated by the fact that the robots are now human-like. As the show progresses, the question of the robots' (or Cylons' rather) humanity becomes more and more complex. Invention, first conceived as something sinister and destructive, becomes the means of a sort of inorganic human evolution.

Another premise of the show, the post-apocalyptic world a pretty familiar trope in the scifi world, evolves from mere survival to exploration. Left without hope the remnant of the Cobalt inhabitants, turn to religious tracts and old myths, setting sights on the legendary planet Earth. Space exploration is thus transformed into something more mystical than scientific. The dynamic between religion and science is for my money one of the more fascinating aspects of the show. The humans are polytheistic while the Cylons are monotheistic. Abortion ceases to be an ideological issue and becomes one of human survival.

I'm of the mind that BSG is one in a series of sci-fi or comic book-type shows that effectively uses the "New Worlds" approach to explore ideas in a quirky yet intelligent way. Buffy is probably the best example of this. Joss Whedon was especially adept at putting pressure on the good-evil dynamic in new and interesting ways.

More on Buffy next time. Meanwhile it might be worth your while to Netflix BSG episodes or download them from itunes.

More thoughts on Lost

2006-11-03T19:44:00.000-05:00

So, I followed the link to the EW commentary on Lost--great pick up on the ties between writing, telepathy, and gravity. Going with that thought, while books allow the author to speak telepathically to the reader, the reader has no opportunity to respond through the same medium. Blogging, on the other hand, seems to allow the telepathy to go both ways (writer<-->reader instead of writer-->reader). Even though other types of writing (i.e. letters) allow for action at a distance, blogging offers something unique: accesibility to everyone with internet access (while at the same time maintaining the reader's privacy as they read) AND the opportunity to have a telepathic conversation (so to speak). I took that for granted before your post, Bickerstaff!

Love the Lost tie-in.

Lost is ahead of our curve

2006-11-01T23:28:00.000-05:00

For fans of the show, you know that last week's episode brought us a rabbit with an "8" written on it. For fans of the class, you know that last week brought us a lot of conversation about action at a distance.

These two things are tied up nicely--if superficially--by EW's resident Lost analyst. Don't judge me too harshly--i only know about this guy because there's a link to the page from CNN. Anyway, check it: http://www.ew.com/ew/article/commentary/0,6115,1553147_3_0_,00.html.

In the article, the author notes that the eight-bunny is a reference to a piece by Stephen King (whose work is repeatedly referenced by the show) called "On Writing." When asked what writing is, the article says, King replies, "telepathy." And if that ain't action at a distance, then I don't know what is. Indeed, the article goes on to suggest that the island is all about fostering Enlightenment. Which we might have gathered from the host of 18th century character-names running about (Locke, Rousseau, Hume).

The show, this blog, and class this week have dovetailed rather nicely. Too nicely, in fact. Hmmm...

Crossposting

2006-10-29T12:39:00.000-05:00

I'm ever so slightly tempted to run an experiment in here, but if I tell you what I'm up to, I will have ruined it. But part of the fun of the thing would cetainly be talking about it, so I'm in a bind. As I haven't really thought it through all the way--the experiment, I mean--and as I'm not sure what exactly it would prove, anyway, it might be more worthwhile to ask the group to theorize actively rather than participate unknowingly.

Yes. Yes, it wouldn't have worked anyway. We're too small a group.

Given the number of forums we have to work in, I thought it might be interesting to post the "same" content multiple times with very slight variations-be they in terms of style, author tag, etc. I would like to have seen if the post got different responses based on those variations. Do we "read" differently in a blog than we do in a blackboard discussion group? Does one sentence structure engender a different response in the reader that leads to a written reply, where another sentence structure does not? Some of this is obviously just about rhetoric, but I want to stitch it into chaos theory. If the change of a preposition, a clause, some other relatively minor aspect of grammar is the flapping of a butterfly's wings, what grand theory of criticism, what school of thought rains in Tokyo next month? Would it really make a difference at all?

There are rules about research into criticism. Find out what's current! If it's older than six years (or some such), it's too old to use, unless, perhaps, it's a seminal text that you just HAVE to know in order to function at all. I don't really agree with this, and I don't particularly practice it, and I'm not really sure how many do, but it seems to loom large in the minds of some of our peers. What if we went back to every piece of criticism written in from 1900 to 1970, and rewrote them? Not added to them, necessarily, or picked up where they left off, but simply rewrote them, in our own words, in a different vernacular, even in a different language (this gets us into a form/content issue--whether or not you can divorce style from substance). If it were possible for all the ideas contained in the criticism of the 20th century to remain the same, but to have them re-presented today as if we were starting over, what would the changes be to the course of criticism? I have to think the emergence would be different, though I'm not sure what the difference would look like. I also have no idea what level of variation there would have to be in order to start the ball rolling.

This is just so much alternate history/alternate future stuff, but I've never really thought about it outside the context of Dolorians and flux capacitors. So that would have been my experiment, here--to try to find the minimum variation necessary to get a one or a zero--a response or no response to a post. Of course, the other variables are too numerous to account for and control. I wouldn't even know where to begin. So it has to stay a thought exercise--and probably not much of one.

david deutch

2006-10-20T16:43:00.000-04:00

David Deutsch's Many Worlds

and his new homepage

An experiment

2006-10-15T17:19:00.000-04:00

This is old news, but since it came out of NYU and still seems relevant, here are some links:

"Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity"

"A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies"

Alan Sokal's links

A response: "What the Sokal Hoax Ought to Teach Us"

On one of the early days of class, someone said—this isn’t verbatim, but it’s close because I jotted down a note—that science doesn’t describe the real, it just provides repeatable results. I don’t bring this up to launch an argument against its meaning because, though I wholeheartedly disagree, what really struck me was the way it sounds as a view of the humanities on science. The Sokal controversy overall seems to speak to this, and it convinces me even more of the relevance and importance of our work in class. While I have issues with both the “experiment” itself and the responses it garnered, I definitely believe it urges disciplinary self-awareness and interdisciplinary respect, which are important no matter what side of the fence you stand on with regard to the definition, goals, and limits of science.

S.J.

2006-10-13T06:50:00.000-04:00

While browsing the Stephen Johnson site, I also found these two interesting things:

I find this first one interesting because it treats the computer/internet like a real world, particularly the title.

and

The review of the second one is discusses content (form could be implied because of capabilities, i.e. their complex because they can be) and popular assumptions. If only he could save the big mac.

Gravity & Literature

2006-10-12T16:55:00.000-04:00

Ahhh - I am so technically adept I failed to include the zooming link. Here it is:

http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/

Zooooom

2006-10-12T16:17:00.000-04:00

Prof. Siskin mentioned Steven Johnson's phrase "zoomed out" in class a couple of weeks back. Well, here's a link to his blog, which itself contains a link to his recent New York Times magazine article entitled "The long Zoom." The piece is about the new game from the creator of Sim City, called "Spore." The game expands on the world-configuring theme of the Sim games, but stretches this principle across a number of levels of reality (hence the "zooming" between levels of emergent order). Players begin by forming single cell orgainsms, then move on to designing increasingly complex creatures, societies, worlds, universes, etc. The exciting element of the game is the way in which players do not simply design the creatures, worlds, societies, etc, but configure their parameters and manage their interactions within a dynamic environment. In fact, players don't actually build their worlds at all - they grow them.

So, in biology (and its simulation within "Spore") the orders of zoomed magnitude go something like: cell > organ > organism > species > genus > ecosystem > planet > galaxy > universe, etc, etc until you reach the mind of God (who may or may not play dice).

What about the orders of zoomed magnitude for literary or cultural studies? Maybe something like: line/phrase (I don't know of many articles that analyze a single word, but I have read plenty that spend considerable amounts of interpretive energy on single lines - "To be, or not to be ...", "April is the cruelest month ...") > text (the romantic ideology of the organic whole) > genre (series of texts in synchronic and diachronic groupings) > social, historical and political contexts (the constellation of historical forces that are woven in and out of those organic (w)holes) > traditons and cultures (the sum total of texts included within the Norton Anthology, or Western Civ. 101, or The Great Books, etc, etc) > the history of writing (from hieroglyphics, to cuneiform, to scribal cultures, to manuscript cultures, to print cultures, to digital cultures) > the evolution of language within homo sapiens (maybe stretching it a little now).

Happy zooming!

567

2006-10-11T19:15:00.000-04:00

Dearest Lenora,

Please link to me:
http://5sixseven.blogspot.com/

Why?

2006-10-11T06:43:00.000-04:00

The search for "Literature" yields about 486,000,000 on google.

The search for "Science" yields about 1,560,000,000 -- more than three times the amount.

More sites on Science Look like this:
http://www.space.com/
http://www.sciencemag.org/

While those of literature:
http://www.literature.org/
http://www.bibliomania.com/

Is our discipline not challenging its modes of exploration? Why do we not make as much use of the internet as we can? If we fail to engage in the most used form of communication and knowledge, an ever-growing form for education, what will happen to Literature? While Science is creating websites that push into the future, why do we mostly create sites that map the past? Why don't we network as much? Create RSS feeds? Allow users to bookmark us through new tools like "del.icio.us"? Create email lists? Online discussion groups that actual go somewhere?

rules or dynamics?

2006-10-09T15:15:00.000-04:00

Are we going to set up the rules--what we should have, and how--or just let it go, and then see the self-shaping and self-limiting dynamics as part of the emergent to deal with?