Human Media

May 14th, 2012

A recent, and very disturbing, ad-campaign pretended that homeless people were wifi hotspots. It was a gag, but they were paid to wear t-shirts that said “I’m [insert name], I’m a 4G hotspot.” What to do with vagrant, impoverished populations? I know, turn them into mobile transponders and pay them! It solves two problems at once! In the process of course it signals one of the most dehumanizing gestures I’ve seen in a long time. Sorry to break out the Heidegger here, but can there be a more literal example of his idea of people becoming a “standing reserve” at the hands of technology?

Of course, I couldn’t resist a little historical comparison. Here’s another image of a person who has become a medium. She is the mobile bookseller, a hotspot of yore.

 

Posted in Bodies, Digitization, Gadgets | No Comments »

The Humanities and the Public

May 8th, 2012

An event the other night at McGill called “The Public Digital Humanities” was indicative of much recent concern about the “relevance” or public mission of the humanities today (see for example the new initiative 4Humanities or the new book series by Iowa, “Humanities and Public Life”). Publicness, it seems, is the solution du jour for the longstanding sense of crisis facing the humanities.

I’ve written something on this over at our new CiteLab, but I thought it was worth revisiting here in a different context. My concerns about the appeal to publicness as a solution to what ails the humanities are two-fold: not only does it not really answer the question “what for” (being “public” or just “publishing” strike me as not terribly persuasive missions, especially since we have been doing this all along). It also rests on a fantasy of immediacy, that research can be public, open, accessible, and therefore instantly consumable. This seems to distort the unique nature of humanistic inquiry, which is anything but immediate. It takes time, both to produce and to digest. It requires long years of training. If we want something more immediate, then we are saying we do not want the kind of thinking that belongs to the humanities.

I think it is important to free ourselves from myths of access and immediacy these days and be more forthright about the different nature of what it is we do. We don’t need to be hermetic or a counter-public, the other traditional way of thinking about the humanities (the myth of the ivory tower — whither ivory?). But I do think we need to preserve our asynchrony as one of the most important features of the nature of humanistic knowledge. Humanistic knowledge is relevant because it is highly mediated to the everyday. It stands between different social poles and publics, tangential but never entirely  subsumable by more commercial forms of circulation.

And I think the value of looking at the problem in this way is that it helps to unify academic inquiry more broadly. It preserves a common mission to the university as a distinct social instutition — it serves the public by not being entirely of the public. I realize that this is a politically complicated message, but it is crucial. Otherwise we begin the descent towards a radically different way of working, which will look either like the popular press or corporate R&D that tries to solve today’s problems at the expense of tomorrow’s. Our timelines are different and that difference is our value.

This last point is also important as we think about the technologies of humanistic inquiry. If digital forms of reading might be very good at helping our work become more timely, books are important because of their untimeliness. They preserve this sense of what I’m calling “quasi-publicness.” They are available, but slightly out of sync. I think our investment in digital humanities needs to preserve some of this sense of public mediacy (and the technologies that make it possible), rather than just appeal to publicness itself.

Posted in Digital Humanities, Humanities, The Time of Books | No Comments »

Readathons

May 2nd, 2012

My son’s school is holding its annual Lecturothon today, where every student in the school has to read for five straight hours (I’m guessing there are breaks). They use it to raise money  and to make a statement about the value of sustained reading. He brings a sleeping bag, a stuffed animal, a pillow, and as many books as his backpack can fit.

This year he is in second grade and he borrowed an older friend’s series called “Passepeur” — they’re like those choose-your-own-adventures of my day, but much cooler (and much more gruesome). I’ve never seen something non-electronic that has grabbed his attention like that (except of course his hockey-book of stickers). The combination of adventure, choice, and searching through the book was just what he was looking for. There is something very active about it that obviously connects more with his brain right now than the more passive reading of a straight story. Like all parents, my first question was, is the “passepeur” a passport to more video games or to reading more generally? Parents with older kids tell me it’s the latter, so I’m psyched that he’s found something bibliographic that really engrosses his attention. It’s a nice reminder that reading is very much about chance, surprise, and quest.

And then I found this in my own reading today, from Rousseau: “It is from my earliest reading that I date the unbroken consciousness of my own existence.” Go lecturothon.

Posted in E-Readers, Education, Reading | No Comments »

Booksi

April 29th, 2012

Media recycling has achieved a new degree of absurdity with Booksi. Designed by Richard Neely, these are charging docks for iPods/phones that are recycled books.

What a fate: you were a book and now you’re a stand for the smart phone’s ass.

 

Posted in Art Books, E-Readers, Nostalgia | No Comments »

Vestiges of Media

April 25th, 2012

My friend Ina Ferris has been thinking a lot lately about the relationship between books and remnants — the way books were integral during the nineteenth century to think about how cultural forms and practices persist past their time. The book was itself already seen as a vestige during the Romantic period, in the form of manuscript books or so-called “black-letter books.” In this most book-saturated of eras, the book also stood for a sign of a remainder, of being out of sync. It’s one of the ways I’ve been thinking more and more about how Romanticism was not just about learning to “dream in books,” but also the beginning of the imagination of the book’s own end.

A recent exhibit in Montreal got me thinking more about this issue of media remains. It was designed by the group, Atomic3, and was called “Éclats de verre.” In it they constructed a field of colored panes of glass in the heart of the city that were meant to symbolize a giant shattered stained-glass window reorganized into an immersive maze and visual spectacle. It was their way of thinking about the very strong religious roots of the city (there is still a giant cross with lights atop the mountain in the middle of the city for those not familiar with it). For me, it was a nice way of thinking about vestiges of mediation, the way forms of communing with others at a distance persist well past their widespread functionality — or perhaps the way they assume different, more dispersed functions.

Shattered glass seemed like a nice metaphor to think about what happens to technologies over time, far better than narratives of birth and death.

© Atomic3

Posted in Archivalization, Gadgets, Nostalgia, The Time of Books | No Comments »

The Price of Books

April 22nd, 2012

A debate on the debate of e-book pricing at the NY Times. The back and forth relates to the suit against Apple and the publishers, essentially on behalf of Amazon. Leveling a monopoly to ensure a monopoly is a nice sign of the times we live in. So is the fact that a proprietary platform might win out in the ebook wars. Imagine if one company had the universal rights to the medium of the book. How this will serve readers is a mystery to me.

Posted in Digitization, E-Readers, Publishing | No Comments »

The Long Goodbye

April 17th, 2012

A hilarious parody at The Morning News by editor Michael Erard about a growing new online genre, the “why I quit Facebook (or Twitter or email)” post (example here). You can see right away where the problem lies — writing on a blog about leaving Facebook seems to turn the electronic dog only in circles. Needing to tell people that you’re leaving is part of the problem of social media like Facebook, not its conclusion. Writing about it in a book — the equally popular why social media are bad for you books — doesn’t really seem like much of a solution either.

There is of course a long precedent for this. At the end of the eighteenth-century, as my colleague Mark Algee-Hewitt has shown, it was incredibly popular to talk about the problems of print media — in print. Once again, you can see the problem. Talking about why something is bad in the very medium you are critiquing only adds to the problem you are talking about — which of course is good for you if you are trying to make money from what you are talking about. The commercialization of writing in the eighteenth century was one of the primary reasons why it became so logical to speak in such illogical ways.

For me, all of this raises the question of how we say goodbye to media. How can you speak about leaving something or giving something up in the medium that you are giving up? How do we let go of certain kinds of mediation in our lives? Erard provides a brilliant answer: the point is not the fake departures, but the estrangement of return. Reactivating your Facebook account, no less than giving up books for a while, “is like coming back to your country after a month in a foreign land, and it makes one feel that the whole reason for leaving is to make the place seem strange again.”

Instead of the on-and-on of social media or the permanently-off of the technological exile, we need more ways of facilitating temporary closure, something like the pleasure of putting a book down and picking it up again at a later date.

Posted in Nostalgia, Print, Social Media | 4 Comments »

Books and Belief

April 10th, 2012

I spent this Sunday at an Easter service and was thinking about the relationship between books and belief. My daughter pointed at someone from the choir and asked if he was an angel. I said no. She asked how he knew all the words to the service. I said that was a long story. But the short answer was: books. Not in the sense of reading and memorizing, but in the sense of, How do we all know this story 2,000 years after it happened? I’m one of those people who is consistently enthralled by the fact that stories persist. Maybe it’s because culture seems so perishable these days, but I have a weakness for duration.

Books of course are not the only way that stories survive a long time. Indeed, they can be a way of killing off the cultural relevance of something as it migrates onto the page and away from social rituals. Religious services are interesting because of the way they mix books with other ritualistic practices — the way belief is a function of a particular kind of reading, that of reading aloud, which blends into song, procession, and in some services, dance.

Every time I’m in a setting where something has been repeated for so many years I can’t resist running the thought experiment of whether electronic media will make such durability harder. It’s an old cliché (books stable, electronics volatile), but the point is not that it’s true, but what if it were true, what if we could make it happen? What would it be like to live in a world without such absurdly durable social practices? What would it be like to inhabit a culture where forms and practices only lasted a generation or two? Would it be liberating or incredibly sad? Can there be belief without time?

Part of the debate about the future of books and reading is about this issue of time, cultural memory, and belief. Like many others, I worry that new forms of mediation will make cultural persistence less reliable than it has been in the past and also less common. I worry about the answer to my daughter’s question: how does he know all the words? How will we know the words that have come before us? Will electronic forms be as reliable as the printed book, not only in preserving these things, but also in making them come alive, making them available for belief?

And then I wonder why I’m so wedded to history, to a sense of meaning located in the sum total of all that human beings have thought and made. Is there some desire there, some quest to know one’s species? It’s an interesting swerve of belief — not as the lever that allows you to believe in something beyond yourself (the divine), but as that which makes it possible to believe in the value of your own presence, which, like books, seems somewhat fragile these days.

Are books a safeguard against giving-up on the human?

Posted in Bodies, E-Readers, Humanities, Nostalgia, Reading, The Time of Books | No Comments »

All A are not B

April 5th, 2012

An excellent new event put on by Triple Canopy on the aesthetic dimensions of the “diagram.” As they write:

Approaching the diagram in such a way—as an epistemological figure—means questioning the nature of relationships between things and how we perceive them, and how we understand our own subjectivity in relation to that process.

The event is tied to the launch of a new book, Materialität der Diagramme, but is part of a range of new work addressing the place of the diagram as both an aesthetic and epistemological object in cultural history (think of the work of John Bender in English or Matthias Bauer in German or Frederik Stjernfeldt’s Diagrammatology).

What interests me is the way the history of reading is bound up with the history of looking at diagrams. Diagrams are important to books, even as we can consider some aspects of books to be diagrammatic (like an index or table of contents or even the page at some level with its structural elements of page numbers, running headers, and chapter heads). As I’ve begun to do more and more work on my topologies of literature project — on things that are explicitly visual — I’ve come to realize how important the diagram is to the history of textual analysis. What kinds of critical reading does the translation of linguistic information into visual form make available? What are the biases of this kind of representation, what gets lost?

As we move more and more into digital projects that translate texts into new forms, the history of diagrammatical thought (as opposed to the purely grammatical kind) will be increasingly important. The structure of the shape of reason — the aesthetics encoded in thinking — will become more pronounced. I think for some this proves unsettling (a reversal of the comfortable hierarchy of word over image (or number)). For me, I find it very exciting as it tries to bring together these different forms of reasoning — how the visual, the linguistic, and the numerical interconnect under the larger heading of “reading.”

 

Posted in Art Books, Quantification, The Space of Books, Topologies, Visualization | 1 Comment »

Artificial Creativity

March 25th, 2012

A very interesting interview at Spark with Michael Cook, a PhD student at Imperial College in the UK. It concerns the question of “artificial creativity,” which is basically artifical intelligence (A.I.) moving into the arts.

One of the most difficult issues surrounding this field, I think, is the way it raises the so what? bar even higher. It’s one thing to imagine the value of computers being “intelligent,” i.e. doing things for us so that we don’t have to do them and can concentrate on other things. But what good does it do for a computer to be “creative”? Is it to make them feel better about themselves? Or for us to feel better about them?

Certainly one of the values of artificial creativity is that it raises questions about the nature of human creativity. What good is creativity for in general? Are “creative” things (not just created things, let’s call them the arts for short) made for their recipients or their creators? Having computers create stuff for us to enjoy means we’re outsourcing the process of creativity at some level to our machines. It overprivileges reception over production. (You might actually think it’s cute for a computer to feel creative, in which case there is an ethics to artificial creativity.) In emphasizing the value of automating creation, we undervalue both the process of making something and the reception of that process that is partially based on our sense of, our communing with, another person’s creativity. When I read W.G. Sebald, to take just one example, I am not just enjoying what he has written. I am thinking about what it means for another person to have written this, that someone, both similar and different from me, has been able to think and write in this way. The arts bind us to each other in a very species-specific way.

But you could also say artificial creativity is valuable because it privileges a different type of creativity. Creating through A.I. is a way of creating creativity, but doing so in a different vein, one that can be based on features that humans do not have access to. In most cases, this means incorporating large amounts of information, or computation. We usually think of this as a means of devaluing the human (we’re not calculators! we love to say).  But when an artist creates a painting, a composer a piece of music, or a writer a work of literature, they are each in their own way drawing on massive amounts of information, both experiential but also from the history of those individual arts. Our brains are amazing at integrating things, but there are of course limits to what we can take in, remember, and combine. Is there a value to being able to incorporate more into this act of synthesis that might be important to artistic thinking? Or is the point of art the excellence of the synthesis itself and not how much detail went into it? At the very least, we can see how talking about artificial creativity puts us squarely in the middle of debates about art itself.

And thenthere is the co-producer answer. The A.I. debate is a red-herring in this sense because it presupposes autonomy as opposed to cohabitation. We create computers that then create something, and in the process, we seem to forget that we created the computers (and the rules according to which they operate, or the rules that allow them to create their own rules, etc.). It seems to me that the real value of this kind of computational process — whether it is of the creative or intelligent kind — is that it aids us in doing things. There is a companionship to artificial intelligence/creativity. In this way, it is important for us to remember the artificiality of artificial creativity and not pretend like there is a naturalism out there where there isn’t one. Artificial creativity is just that: artificial. It’s a means, not an end.

Finally, as I write in my book, one of the most important values of these experiments in artificial thinking is the way they allow us to think about thought. In modeling, in failing, we learn more about how we succeed. I’ve always found this process to be incredibly beautiful.

 

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Bodies, Digital Humanities, Quantification | 6 Comments »

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