mistersquid: a digital fiction

The two areas which have absorbed my attentions for the last two months (outside the shambles that passes for my personal life) has been my teaching and my writing. This entry is about the writing part of my life, research in particular. That is, I don't want to say something about the content of my studies but about the technological processes I’ve applied to my writing workflow.

At the present moment, the cutting edge of what is variously referred to as humanities computing seems to be happening in information distrubution and the library sciences. I subscribe to a few weblogs by people well-known and well-regarded in the field of humanities computing and am dismayed by the fact that almost none of the topics discussed registers in the working experience of my colleagues here in the trenches of an English Department in the Midwest. There is almost zero connection between what humanites computing folk are doing and what real-life scholars in my branch of humanities are doing. I'm also surprised that social networking seems to be the next big thing in humanities computing. Call me a Luddite.

The disconnect between the concerns of cutting edge humanities computing and plain ol' everyday scholars is undoubtedly due to the esoteric nature of some of the technologies studied by the digital jet set (e.g. server-based technologies to facilitate the interrelation of information across databases) and the fact that the dominant model of humanities scholarship does not stand to greatly improve through the application of advanced computing techniques. When reading and understanding the intricacies of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus is an important stage in the development of a scholarly career, surplus petaflops for reorganizing semantic database structures seems a bit wide of the mark.

In fact, I’m somewhat in astonished awe at the recent push for supercomputing in the humanties. Don’t get me wrong; I think that supercomputing power applied to humanties-oriented applications will yield innumerable treasures, helping scholars discover as-yet-unimaginable correspondences between word frequencies, textual representation, and aesthetic structure. Even so, I’m fairly convinced almost none of it will be useful to humanities scholars except in the way that infrared remote controls are useful to Joe Sixpack as the spinoff technology of aerospace research. Naturally, I'm prepared to be wrong, but my present guess is that the work information researchers in the humanites at present do will be more readily adaptible to work done by governmental agencies building databases that contain large chunks of natural languge data than to the work of scholars trying to understand the linkages between the failure to carry of an Equal Rights Amendment and misogynistic representation in 1970s television sitcoms, for example.

Given the seductiveness of the multi-million dollar technological gadgets and widgets being thrown at our best and brightest humanites computing specialists, more attention needs to be paid by us less-capable cyberfolk to the state of everyday computing in the humanities. You know, the day-in-day-out interaction we have with the tools that comprise our fundamental humanist computing tool set. This area of research is so boring that it doesn't deserve so distinguishing a name as "humanities computing." In fact, it's so dull I am going to call this area banalities computing, the computing of the everyday, the pedestrian, the humdrum, the actual lived-in-front-of-keyboard-monitor-and-mouse experience you and I have every single day of our scholarly and pedagogical lives.

Yeah, I'm pretty pissed that computing in 2008 is nowhere near as sexy as Neuromancer promised it would be.

Most of us use a "word processor." We read email, use Blackboard, save to USB thumb drives, and place stickies beneath our keyboards. At least since McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy, we have understood that the tools and techniques we use to conduct our research are not distinct from the modes of scholarship in which we are engaged, whatever that means. I think it means that our scholarship is not only shaped by our ideological investments and professional aspirations. Our scholarship is also unavoidably (and irrevocably) conditioned by our computing banalities, by the day-in-day-out, for example, of being forced to use the EBSCOHost web frontend to get information out of the MLA International database. If anything sucks, the EBSCOHost web interface surely does. I guess the bright side is that at least it sucks hard.

I’ll end by saying that in the coming months, I will offer descriptions of (as opposed to screeds against) what I perceive to be my lived share of banalities computing. As of this writing, I intend to produce a series of hands-on tutorials and demonstrations about my workflow with the primary aim of stimulating the generation of ideas about how computing can be made more effective for humanities scholars who are not computer programmers but who are somewhat technically adept (persistence is a workable substitute).

A few things to keep in mind, especially if you decide to follow along.

1. I use OS X. I understand other operating systems exist, but they are not part of my banalities computing experience.
2. I use closed source software.
3. I use open source software.
4. I am not responsible for any harm or damage that may occur to your data, your hardware, your livelihood, your loved ones, or your reputation should you try anything described on this website.
5. I suck as a computer programmer and am open to suggestions.
6. Unless you give me money, I will not fix your computer.
7. And even then.
8. Heck, forget the computer. Just give me money.
9. Thanks.

posted at 10:09 PM |Comments (1)

Bloggers hate when a blogger whose blog they have to look down their cultured noses to see gets a low six-figure book advance.

posted at 8:38 AM |Comments (3)

While the Fed works overtime to ensure that shareholders of publicly traded companies don't lose their seasonal homes in Telluride, CO, and the weekend pickmeups in Martha's Vineyard, working class Americans set up shanty towns in Los Angeles, CA, home of Disneyland, Hollywood, and the culture industry whose "promise [. . .] is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu" (Horkheimer and Adorno 1230).

While the number of foreclosure victims living in this makeshift town are in the minority, all of the people in this shanty town are products of forces more complex and larger than themselves. It's stunning how the United States fails to respond to the needs of these people and how quickly it acts to protect the luxuries of the wealthy.

posted at 8:05 AM |Comments (1)

I know why Jill Bolte Taylor's presentation, her "stroke of insight," is "universally considered the best" presentation of the TED conference held annually in Monterey, California. Taylor's message, her testimony, has deep implications for our shared existence. When you watch it, you will understand that the video is not about suffering and recuperation, not about medical science and technical insight. It's about something very, very different, something more important even than the air we breathe.

posted at 6:53 AM |Comments (0)

I am praying some of the information in a New York Times article regarding pacemakers (implantable cardioverter-defibrillators, or ICDs) is in error, is fabricated, is untrue, is a lie or a dream. How can it be that

Can such a device actually have been approved by the governmental bodies who regulate the medical device industry? Did a group of sentient beings actually decide it was OK to connect a pacemaker to the Internet so doctors could surf the status of patients' pacemakers?

My incredulity is like a burning light that's driving me insane.

posted at 6:53 AM |Comments (1)

Some white people think colonizing mass culture as "what they like" is equivalent to reading a barometer of cultural hegemony. Congratulations.1

posted at 7:10 AM |Comments (2)

I received my first batch of student papers this calendar year, which means I am encountering the Microsoft .docx format for the first time. The Microsoft Word 2008 .docx forrmat is incompatible with earlier versions of Word which shouldn't really matter since the .docx format is XML. However, opening a .docx file in a text editor reveals this

Calling that XML is like calling hamburger tofu.1 The innards of the .docx formart are binary. I defy anyone to copy-and-paste the text content of a .docx file into a new file without using Microsoft Word. XML is supposed to be human-readable to facilitate precisely such interchange. I couldn't even write a PERL script to convert that mess.2

Ideally (and in practice until Microsoft got around to making an XML DTD of their own), XML files are human-readable, like so:

That's XML.

I don't use Microsoft software except for document compatibility with publishers, colleagues, and students.

Upgrading to Microsoft Office 2008 would cost me out-of-pocket something in the neighborhood of $20 (US). Not much money. On the other hand, Microsoft has removed Visual Basic from Office 2008 for Mac OS, and this means the custom macros I use (colored text and automated insertion as I explain in the "understanding comments" document I provide my students) would not be available to me. It's not just that there is no incentive for me to upgrade; there is disincentive.

Mac users are up in arms about the crippling of Office 2008 for Mac OS. I'm frankly surprised MacWorld gave Word 2008 higher than two out of five. This seems to be of a piece with Microsoft's failures of late, including the ongoing debacle of Vista which Randall Stross covers in today's New York Times, thirteen months after Vista was released.

Furthermore, it is imperative that documents created by a publicly-funded institution such as Ohio University (where I presently teach) be accessible to people who use non-proprietary software. All documents produced by public institutions of higher education should be in open formats, formats other than Microsoft's which have never been open. The pressure Microsoft is placing upon users of older versions of Microsoft Word, upon institutions of higher learning, and upon taxpayer-funded government bodies should be the last warning anyone needs before abandoning closed formats.

Here's what I'm doing.

For the first time in the five years I have required students to submit papers electronically, I will disallow Microsoft Word documents. Starting with Spring quarter 2008, I will require submissions to be in RTF only.

posted at 1:16 PM |Comments (1)

Apparently, iPhone applications will only allowed to run one at a time and never in the background. Whenever a user leaves an application to answer the phone or to open a new application, the last application has to quit.1

While this will likely go some way to making sure iPhones are stable, it seems to me some of the more interesting uses of iPhone are prevented by this limitation. For example, jailbreakers have successfully installed and run Apache on the iPhone. Apache really only makes sense as an always-on background application. Not that the iPhone would make the fastest or best web server, but the ability to deploy a web server (or a server of any type) that was truly mobile (and small enough to conceal) would profoundly affect certain aspects of Internet computing, perhaps to the point of bringing new ones into being.

I understand jailbreaking will never end, but if one wants the support of official APIs using an iPhone as a server will require the dedication of an iPhone to that service. This seems, to me, a serious lack of foresight on Apple's part. The iPhone represents, to my mind, the way forward for ubiquitous mobile computing, but Apple at present doesn't seem to want the iPhone to take on this role.

I guess the jailbreakers will have to show Apple the way.

posted at 6:03 AM |Comments (0)

Ohio is the jam car of progressive American politics, and I wish it would just get out of the way.

posted at 10:29 PM |Comments (0)

This YouTube video reminds me both of David Blair's Wax: or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees and Chris Marker's San Soleil as well as Jaron Lanier's musings regarding post-symbolic communication.1 It's a powerful video with two parts, both of which aim to educate normal people about the language used by autistics.

Baggs's computer-generated speech makes the point that normal persons would be skeptical that an autistic could produce such analysis in "our language."

posted at 6:24 AM |Comments (1)

Microfilm was a terrible technology from the word “go.” Today, it's become just a little bit worse.

posted at 9:48 AM |Comments (0)

Almost everyone has experienced a sense of increased power after acquiring a piece of new technology or learning a new skill. The acquisition of new capabilities through learning or artifacts are ways in which people (organisms) may extend the ranges of their influence, the extents of their bodily power. An individual's effectiveness can be multiplied by equipping that individual with postcongenital instruments.

The perception of such augmentation often manifests as excitement, joy, curiosity, and self-confidence. They are the feelings which people experience when learning how to knit, understanding a new language, or acquiring a new tool. For example, when I was a child, I remember how excited I was when I got my first ten-speed bicycle. Ten-speed bicycles were several degrees of complexity over a single-gear coaster brake bicycle. They enabled cyclists (cyborgs) to change the ratio between torque and power as occasion demanded. The decoupling of acceleration and deceleration in the form of handbrakes allowed for greater control over balance while turning etc. and so on.

The giddiness I experienced when I got my first ten-speed bicycle was about being able to move my corporeal self in ways that were more efficient than was possible with a single-gear bicycle. The technology was fundamentally about moving my body, about moving meat and bone, flesh and sinew.

Miguel DeLanda considers the augmentation of individual capability when he writes

It isn't too difficult to see how moving one's body, one's flesh and bone, from one location to another enables one to enter new assemblages, whether going to party on the other side of town, riding from one's house in the suburbs to the tidepool down the coast, etc. What is less obvious is how the acquisition of new skills provides access to assemblages whose materiality is less visible to the eye. For example, deploying a content management system to automate the generation of article summaries, summaries monitored by various pieces of software whose output is consulted by, say, a group of students.

Some people are (I am) drawn to tools and information that provide access to new assemblages, to novel informatic and corporeal strata. This kind of activity—the acquisition and development of material which increase the range of one's influence—is distinct from the acquisition and arrangment of data available in strata already familar.

posted at 8:57 AM |Comments (0)