Two More Thoughts on Comparative Ontology

April 16th, 2009 admin

Fol­low­ing up on my last two posts (here and here), I thought I’d flesh out a lit­tle more what I mean by Com­par­a­tive Ontol­ogy — and, at this point, maybe I need a han­dle for the con­cept, like CO or “comp-ont.”

First thought:  I imag­ine that a comp-ont vocab­u­lary could be accom­plished in two ways: (1) by just using exist­ing vocab­u­lary def­i­n­i­tion lan­guages (RDFS and OWL) to cre­ate a new vocab­u­lary, or (2) by cre­at­ing a new vocab­u­lary def­i­n­i­tion lan­guage using, say, Rod­ney Needham’s cod­i­fi­ca­tion of Eng­lish Struc­tural­ism in  Sym­bolic Clas­si­fi­ca­tion.

As an exam­ple of type 1, one might deploy the implicit ontol­ogy of Kautilya’s Arthashas­tra (with maybe a lit­tle of Machiavelli’s Prince thrown in) using OWL to cre­ate an “Enemy of an Enemy” (EOAE) vocab­u­lary. This would be a use­ful vocab­u­lary for describ­ing polit­i­cal agents, link­ing them through the neg­a­tive tran­si­tive logic of polit­i­cal alliance for­ma­tion, with the result that you could actu­ally pre­dict or sug­gest alliances that don’t yet exist. I can imag­ine this vocab­u­lary describ­ing peo­ple (politi­cians, pun­dits, etc.), ideas, insti­tu­tions, etc., and applied to daily news sources.

As an exam­ple of type 2, my ques­tion would be whether con­structs like anal­ogy or metonymy could be con­structed on top of set the­ory (OWL) or if it would require a whole new sys­tem (and there­fore logic of inference.)

Sec­ond thought:  It strikes me that one way to bring home the value of comp-ont is to view it in the con­text of knowl­edge man­age­ment (KM).  Clearly there is a strong con­nec­tion between KM and ontol­ogy (and the seman­tic web and linked data).  But within KM, it is clear that ontolo­gies can’t just be log­i­cal.  Ontolo­gies must be prac­ti­cal, and intel­li­gi­ble to the peo­ple in an orga­ni­za­tion who engage in ontology-mediated knowl­edge trans­fer.  They must serve the pur­pose of medi­at­ing between indi­vid­ual and col­lec­tive mem­ory.  But this is pre­cisely what the great onto­log­i­cal sys­tems from the ethno­graphic record pro­vide — from Aus­tralian totemic sys­tems to Mayan cal­en­dars.  Viewed from the per­spec­tive of social mem­ory, then, it makes a great deal of sense to build KM ontolo­gies on gen­eral prin­ci­ples adduced from anthro­po­log­i­cal exam­ples, and described in terms of struc­tural­ism.

Tweet This Post

Posted in Comparative Ontology, theory | No Comments »

Comparative Ontology (ii)

April 14th, 2009 admin

So, I make the claim in my pre­vi­ous post on Com­par­a­tive Ontol­ogy that com­par­a­tivsim will help us make bet­ter ontolo­gies and tools for using them. I real­ize I did not actu­ally make that case. Let me try to do that now, although, to be hon­est, I view the claim as an inter­est­ing direc­tion to fol­low (i.e. a hunch), not an estab­lished fact.

My argu­ment is pretty sim­ple. The Seman­tic Web, as every­one knonws, has a big prob­lem — in order for it to suc­ceed, pro­duc­ers of web con­tent have to mark up texts using RDF, with its long URIs and arcane vocab­u­lar­ies.  Most folks think this is a deal killer.  In addi­tion, many agree with Shirky’s claim that ontol­ogy is over­rated in the first place.   (The meme even makes an appear­ance in Michael Wesch’s viral “The Machine is Us/Using Us.”)

I hold out hope, though.  I think tools can be cre­ated to make the data entry part  a lot easier–withness Dru­pal 6.  I also think con­tent cre­ators show a remark­able ten­dency to use tags, enter meta­data, and engage in oth­er­wise tedious SEO tech­niques if they know that they will get some­thing out of it.  This ten­dency is espe­cially strong among dig­i­tal humani­tists, dig­i­tal librar­i­ans, and other cre­ators and cura­tors of dig­i­tal col­lec­tions.  (Think of the time peo­ple have put into TEI!) Right now, they don’t see a lot a ROI from using RDF.  But that is chang­ing, and faster than many think.

As is often remarked, it’s a clas­sic chicken and egg argu­ment.  But such prob­lems are actu­ally lib­er­at­ing, since you can inter­vene at any point in the cycle and have an effect.  One junc­ture in the cycle is in the design of vocabularies.

The prob­lem now is that vocab­u­lar­ies and ontolo­gies are just not sticky enough, and I think a big rea­son for this is that they are writ­ten from the per­spec­tive of sym­bolic logic and set the­ory.  These frame­works, though com­pre­hen­sive, are not human (enough).  On the other hand, there is a whole tra­di­tion of describ­ing cog­ni­tive sys­tems called struc­tural­ism, which has the advan­tage of being empir­i­cally grounded in the long­stand­ing com­par­a­tive study of cul­ture.  It stands to rea­son that if we cre­ated vocab­u­lar­ies using more “human” constructs–such as anal­ogy, metonymy, etc.–and vocab­u­lar­ies that rec­og­nized the role of verbs in pred­i­cates, then we might be able to pro­duce more sticky ontologies.

It also opens a way to har­vest the latent ethno­graphic data con­tained in folksonomies.

But I’ll leave it at that for now.

Tweet This Post

Posted in Comparative Ontology, theory | 1 Comment »

Comparative Ontology

April 14th, 2009 admin

The Seman­tic Web has pop­u­lar­ized the con­cept of ontol­ogy. The usual def­i­n­i­tion one sees for the term is Gruber’s “spec­i­fi­ca­tion of a con­cep­tu­al­iza­tion” (Gru­ber 1993). The def­i­n­i­tion could use some unpack­ing. Essen­tially, it refers to the idea that the terms used by AI agents should be defined by ref­er­ence to a shared schema which clas­si­fies those terms. The shared schema, or spec­i­fi­ca­tion, sim­ply defines how terms are related to each other in a graph. More than a sim­ple data model, where the rela­tion­ships between enti­ties or objects are not explic­itly defined, an ontol­ogy also names the pos­si­ble rela­tion­ships between terms. So, instead of just hav­ing “address” as a field of the entity “per­son,” an ontol­ogy will explic­ity assert that a per­son has an address. So verbs (which are often buried in “pred­i­cates”) are an impor­tant part of ontolo­gies. In fact, one way to think of an ontol­ogy is to call it a data model with verbs. (Sort of.)

Ontolo­gies are use­ful for pro­gram­ming agents, which are just pro­grams that con­sume and pro­duce infor­ma­tion on their own. (I call them infophages.) So, when you pro­gram an agent to respond to a term, you have the agent’s pro­gram refer to an ontol­ogy to dis­am­biguate the term among syn­onyms, and to make log­i­cal infer­ences about the term. For exam­ple, if the agent encoun­ters the term “Socrates,” it will be found to be spec­i­fied as a mem­ber of the class “Human” and since “Human” will have the prop­erty “is Mor­tal,” the agent can trans­fer the prop­erty to “Socrates” too. (Truth, or valid­ity, is just trace­abil­ity within a ref­er­ence graph.)

Or, if the agent encoun­ters the word “Madonna,” and that term is for­mally spec­i­fied as part of an ontol­ogy (say, by using Tim Berners-Lee’s URI method), the agent will be able to trace its class to either “Pop Singers” or “Reli­gious Fig­ures” or “Chris­t­ian Iconog­ra­phy” or whatever.

Sometimes–often–ontologies are described as if they pro­vide “mean­ing” for agents. Even the term Seman­tic Web implies this. When intro­duced to novices, the Seman­tic Web is often intro­duced as bring­ing “mean­ing” to the web. I find this expla­na­tion mis­lead­ing at best. Mean­ing is much to too impor­tant of a word to describe what is going on here, which is sim­ply a layer of clas­si­fi­ca­tion being added to what would other wise be a list of terms. Ontolo­gies are just sys­tems of clas­si­fi­ca­tion for terms, a second-order set of terms that (1) increases the prob­a­bil­ity that an agent can process a term in a way that users will expect, and (2) adds a layer of con­nec­tiv­ity, above the raw ver­biage on the web, that decre­ses the aver­age dis­tance, or degress of sep­a­ra­tion, between any two terms.

So, ontolo­gies have two prop­er­ties that make them use­ful and, as I want to argue, use­fully viewed from a com­par­a­tive per­spec­tive. First, they intro­duce verbs into the mix of data mod­el­ling. Sec­ond, they are just sys­tems of clas­si­fi­ca­tion–like Aus­tralian totemic sys­tems, Mayan cal­en­dars, and West­ern philo­soph­i­cal ontolo­gies such as Aristotle’s and Leibniz’s.

Com­par­a­tivism will help us cre­ate bet­ter ontolo­gies, and bet­ter sys­tems for using ontolo­gies, in two ways.

First, com­par­a­tivism can train our atten­tion on the great rab­bit war­ren of words and mean­ings that lies at the heart of the osten­si­bly neat world of triples–I refer to the pred­i­cates. Although the nouns that com­prise the vocab­u­lar­ies for sub­jects and objects in RDF can be neatly spec­i­fied as ana­lytic tax­onomies of terms, pred­i­cates are sub­ject to no such rules, and can con­tain within them­selves whole sen­tences. Unlike the nouns, pred­i­cates mask a great deal of what Kant would call “syn­thetic judge­ments.” I pro­pose a soci­olin­guis­tic approach to the use of verbs embed­ded in the pred­i­cate sys­tems of linked data vocab­u­lar­ies that will pro­vide a bet­ter basis for craft­ing predicates.

Sec­ond, com­par­a­tivsm can help us move beyond set theory–useful as it is–to con­sider other total­iz­ing schemes for orga­niz­ing ideas, such as those described by anthro­pol­o­gists. I men­tioned totemic sys­tems, cal­en­dars, and West­ern ontolo­gies. But there are many oth­ers to con­sider. What is more, anthro­pol­o­gists have done a great deal to describe, clas­sify, inter­pret, and even explain these. Such an approach would be grounded in the fol­low­ing works, all of which define or grow out of the struc­tural­ist tra­di­tion within anthropology:

1. Emile Durkheim and Mar­cel Mauss, 1903, Prim­i­tive Classification.
2. Louis Dumont, 1966, Homo Hier­ar­chi­cus.
3. Michel Fou­cault, 1966, The Order of Things.
4. Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1968, The Sav­age Mind.
5. Vic­tor Tut­ner, 1969, The Rit­ual Process: Struc­ture and Anti-Structure.
   
6. Mary Dou­glas, 1970, Nat­ural Sym­bols.
7. Pierre Bour­dieu, 1977 [1972], Out­line of a The­ory of Prac­tice.
8. Alfred Gell, 1975, Meta­mor­pho­sis of the Cas­sowaries.
9. Rod­ney Need­ham, 1975, Poly­thetic Classification.
10. Edmund Leach, 1976, Cul­ture and Communication.
11. Mar­shall Sahlins, 1978, Cul­ture and Prac­ti­cal Rea­son.
12. Jad­ran Mim­ica, 1988, Inti­ma­tions of Infin­ity.

And so forth.

Tweet This Post

Posted in Comparative Ontology, theory | No Comments »

“Foundational” Texts in the Digital Humanities">“Foundational” Texts in the Digital Humanities

April 10th, 2009 admin “Foundational” Texts in the Digital Humanities&rft.aulast=&rft.aufirst=&rft.subject=digital scholarship&rft.source=The Transducer&rft.date=2009-04-10&rft.type=&rft.format=text&rft.identifier=http://transducer.ontoligent.com/?p=250&rft.language=English">

Recently, Matt Kirschen­baum, Eng­lish Pro­fes­sor at Mary­land, Asso­ciate Direc­tor of the Mary­land Inis­ti­tute for Tech­nol­ogy in the Human­i­ties, and author of Mech­a­nisms, tweeted a request for “absolutely foun­da­tional” arti­cles or chap­ters for “an intro­duc­tion to the dig­i­tal human­i­ties.”  The fol­low­ing is my list, in chrono­log­i­cal order.

1. Van­nevar Bush, 1945, “As We May Think.”
2. Claude Shan­non, 1948, “A Math­e­mat­i­cal The­ory of Communication.”
3. Nor­bert Wiener, 1954, “Orga­ni­za­tion is the Message.”
4. Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1955, “The Struc­tural Study of Myth.”
5. Ben­jamin Colby, 1966, “Cul­ture Pat­terns in Narrative.”
6. Gre­gory Bate­son, 1967, “Style, Grace, and Infor­ma­tion in Prim­i­tive Art.”
7. Rod­ney Need­ham, 1975, “Poly­thetic Classification.” *
8. Jean-François Lyotard, 1979, The Post­mdern Condition.
9. Ted Nel­son, 1980, Lit­er­ary Machines.
10. Wal­ter Ong, 1982, Oral­ity and Lit­er­acy.
11. Lucy Such­man, 1988, “Rep­re­sent­ing Prac­tice in Cog­ni­tive Science.” *
12. Dou­glas Adams, 1990. Hyper­land. *
13. Diana Forsythe, 1993, “The Con­struc­tion of Work in Arti­fi­cial Intelligence.” *
14. Steven Bird and Mark Liber­man, 1999, “Anno­ta­tion graphs as a frame­work for mul­ti­di­men­sional lin­guis­tic data analysis.”
15. Lev Manovich, 2001, “Data­base as Sym­bolic Form.”
16. John Unsworth, 2001, “Knowl­edge Rep­re­sen­ta­tion in Human­i­ties Computing.”
17. Stephen Ram­sey, 2005, “In Praise of Pattern.”
18. Tim Berners-Lee, 2006, “Linked Data–Design Issues.”

* These were added after the orig­i­nal post.  I reserve the write to amend and anno­tate this list at any time …

Here are a few qualifiers.

Num­ber one, I don’t think there are, strictly speak­ing, any foun­da­tional texts in the dig­i­tal human­i­ties.  Not in the way that physics can claim Newton’s Prin­cipia or biol­ogy Darwin’s Ori­gin.  I am not sure if this sit­u­a­tion is due to the (peren­nial) infancy of the field–if, indeed, it is a field.  (I think of it more as a cross-displinary method­ol­ogy.)  More­over, my say­ing so cer­tainly isn’t due to any dis­taste on my part for the con­cept of a canon.  Instead, there are, roughly cor­re­spond­ing to the pre– and post-war era of the pre­vi­ous cen­tury, a num­ber of loosely related essays that adum­brate a set of ideas which sub­se­quent gen­er­a­tions of peo­ple who call them­selves dig­i­tal human­ists have been unpack­ing.  The lat­ter have pro­duced a num­ber of essays which the majori­toy of dig­i­tal human­ists will have read, and these may be called foun­da­tional, in the sense of a shared dis­course.   Fair enough.   But none of these texts can claim the sta­tus of hav­ing defined a method or a domain that we can, in ret­ro­spect, claim as dis­tinctly con­cern­ing the dig­i­tal human­i­ties. Also–and here I will be controversial–I believe that this par­tic­u­lar cor­pus has had the effect of pro­duc­ing, though the hyer­co­her­ence that can affect small “thought col­lec­tives” (Fleck),  a rather nar­row set of con­cerns which have put the field into a groove from which it would do well to extri­cate itself.

Num­ber two, since I con­sider the dig­i­tal human­i­ties to be at once crit­i­cal and prac­ti­cal, these texts come from both angles, one set con­cerned with method, the other with his­tor­i­cal context.

Num­ber three, parts of this list are, as you’ll quickly see, pretty spe­cific to me, and my back­ground as an Amer­i­can cul­tural anthro­pol­o­gist with strong Eng­lish and French influ­ences.  These are texts that have been foun­da­tional to my con­cep­tion of the dig­i­tal human­i­ties, and which have made a dif­fer­ence to my way of think­ing about tex­tu­al­ity, dig­i­tal tex­tu­al­ity, and what hap­pens to text when it becomes dig­i­tal.  But it is not entirely idio­syn­cratic.  In its defense, I would argue that the dig­i­tal human­i­ties is more closely tied with the struc­tural­ism of the 1950s and 60s  than is usu­ally recognized–and indeed, more than struc­tural­ists are pre­pared to admit.  (There is an impor­tant chap­ter of intel­lec­tual his­tory that needs to be writ­ten here, con­cern­ing the close but rel­a­tively hid­den rela­tion­ship between struc­tural­ism and the “cyber­netic moment.”)  More­over, the anthro­po­log­i­cal angle is always worth push­ing, inso­far as the dis­ci­pline, before its reflex­ive self-implosion in the 1980s and 90s, bequeathed the cul­ture con­cept on which the realign­ment of the human­i­ties and itner­pre­tive social sci­ences has been con­structed.  From an anthropologist’s view, the wild suc­cess of cul­tural stud­ies and cul­tural his­tory has the sad sweet­ness, the  tristes tropiques,  that attends the simul­ta­ne­ous death and birth of cultures.

*   *   *

Tweet This Post

Posted in digital scholarship | 8 Comments »

Transduction

April 5th, 2009 admin

I call this blog the “trans­ducer” in honor of an idea that I want to cul­ti­vate and expand into a frame­work for a philo­soph­i­cal anthro­pol­ogy I have been ges­tat­ing since my under­grad­u­ate days, when I spent most of my cycles try­ing to process Chris­tian­ity, cap­i­tal­ism, Dar­win­ism, Marx­ism, and physics. I now believe the con­cept of trans­duc­tion is the, or a, key to under­stand­ing the rela­tion­ship between mean­ing and causal­ity, mime­sis and muta­tion, the fun­da­men­tal onto­log­i­cal dual­ism that philo­soph­i­cal monism can never seem to dis­pense with except by peri­odic calls to burn the books of the­olo­gians and meta­physi­cians.   (This is an enlight­ened tra­di­tion that includes Hume, Ayers, and now any num­ber of New Human­ists who have no time for this sort of nonsense.)

The the­ory of trans­duc­tion, as I want to develop it, is a pos­si­bil­ity opened up by Shannon’s the­ory of infor­ma­tion (so-called). In focus­ing on this con­cept, I am inspired by the at this point under­val­ued work of Roy Rap­pa­port and by the bril­liantly mud­dled works of Gre­gory Bate­son, to whom every­thing interesing I read nowa­days con­cern­ing teach­ing, learn­ing and tech­nol­ogy is more a less a footnote.

Trans­duc­tion is the trans­fer of infor­ma­tion that attends every trans­fer of energy.  For exam­ple, in any mechan­i­cal inter­ac­tion, energy is trans­ferred from one body to another.  But infor­ma­tion also passes: the amount of energy trans­ferred, the direc­tion of move­ment, the fre­quency of the event if it is repeated, the time of the event, etc.  Mea­sur­able indi­ca­tors such as veloc­ity and posi­tion are part of the infor­ma­tion that inheres in the event.

Trans­duc­tion is most appar­ent — and use­ful — when energy is con­verted from one form to another.  A well-known exam­ple is the trans­duc­tion that occurs when mechan­i­cal energy is con­verted into elec­tri­cal energy through a phono­graphic nee­dle designed to opti­mize the atten­dant trans­fer of infor­ma­tion.  The nee­dle is part of a larger sys­tem of trans­duc­tion: sound waves are trans­duced by a micro­phone, which are trans­duced into a record­ing medium, which is then trans­duced back into elec­tric­ity, which trans­duces the sound through the mechan­i­cal vibra­tion of a speaker.

The the­ory of trans­duc­tion fol­lows from the hypoth­e­sis that every­thing (and every­one) acts as a nee­dle in a vast econ­omy or ecol­ogy of sig­nal trans­mis­sion.  We are all trans­duc­ers made of count­less trans­duc­ers, and we are prob­a­bly ele­ments of larger trans­duc­tiv­i­ties, such as the eco­nomic sys­tem and so forth.  And we are con­stantly trans­mit­ting and trans­duc­ing sig­nals which “con­tain” mes­sages.   Here it becomes inter­est­ing — where do the mes­sages come from? Do we cre­ate mes­sages?  If so, how?  Are there really mes­sages, or is it sig­nals (traces, dif­férance) all the way down?

Pop quiz: How many nee­dles dance in the head of an angel? (Angels, of course, are God’s mes­sen­gers, Judeo-Christian ver­sions of Her­mes and Mer­cury.  McLuhan had some­thing to say about angels as well.)

The term trans­duc­tion, of coruse, has been appro­pri­ated by genet­ics, where it refers to a process in which DNA is trans­ferred from one bac­terium to another by a virus, or where for­eign DNA is intro­duced into another cell through a virus.   This too is trans­duc­tion in the sense that I mean it — that is, it’s not just a seman­tic appro­pri­a­tion.  But it intro­duces the notion of medi­ated trans­duc­tion by means of an agent — in this case, a virus.  In this case, the virus plays the role of the wax record (to keep the anal­ogy sim­ple) in the sequence of trans­duc­tions I described above.

What is inter­est­ing about viral trans­duc­tion is that it pro­vides an exam­ple of how sim­ple, unmedi­ated trans­duc­tion pro­duces com­plex, medi­ated trans­duc­tion.  If, as I posit above, the uni­verse is a vast sys­tem of trans­duc­tion, then, appar­ently, ele­ments of that sys­tem evolve and emerge to play roles in that sys­tem.  The virus seems a clear case of this, evolv­ing only to per­form that trans­duc­tive work of a cell-based, bio­log­i­cal sys­tem, which itself emerged through trans­duc­tive reproduction.

And this is another con­cept that seems describ­able in terms of trans­duc­tion — repro­duc­tion.  For what is trans­duc­tion but the repro­duc­tion of infor­ma­tion?  But always an incom­plete repro­duc­tion, as not all infor­ma­tion passes through.  As Bate­son famously wrote, infor­ma­tion is any dif­fer­ence that makes a dif­fer­ence.  That is, only infor­ma­tion that sur­vives trans­duc­tion is infor­ma­tion.  So, trans­duc­tion is a kind of repro­duc­tion, but it is also always a mis­pri­sion, a cre­ative misreading.

An inter­est­ing con­se­quence of the the­ory of trans­duc­tion is that you can’t mea­sure trans­duc­tion with­out intro­duc­ing more of it, and there­fore becom­ing sub­ject to Bateson’s law (you only get dif­fer­ences that make a dif­fer­ence).  This fact nor­mally doesn’t bother us, but it really comes out in rel­a­tiv­ity the­ory, where Ein­stein shows that time is, in a very real sense, the meaus­re­ment of time.

Other exam­ples of trans­duc­tion include walk­ing and leav­ing foot­prints, the impres­sion on a wooden sur­face left by thrown rock, the decay­ing of car­bon 14, set­tle­ment pat­terns left by the inhab­i­tants of pop­u­la­tion cen­ters, the Van Eck “phreak­ing” described in Stephenson’s Crypto­nom­i­con, bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion of geno­types, learn­ing, etc.  Yes, evo­lu­tion and learn­ing, what Bate­son wrote about mostly.  The con­cept is recur­sive in the sense that trans­duc­tive ele­ments can form trans­duc­tive sys­tems which are in turn transductive.

Ulti­mately, if all this is true or coher­ent, we, as language-using humans, are vastly com­plex trans­duc­ers of sig­nals that go way, way, back, pick­ing up cos­mic, genetic, cul­tural, and social sig­nals as we go through life, as way­far­ers (to use Walker Percy’s use of Augustine’s image).

And this is how I view blog­ging .  The Inter­net is prob­a­bly the first human insti­tu­tion (and it is an insti­tu­tion, more than it is a “tech­nol­ogy,” what­ever that means) built explic­itly on the prin­ci­ples of trans­duc­tion.   We are each trans­duc­ers of the mes­sages that pass through our “post,” to use Lyotard’s image.  It’s a good image, one that recalls Pynchon’s image of the Pony Express in The Cry­ing of Lot 49 and Melville’s image of mail in Bartleby.  For, from the per­spec­tive of trans­duc­tion, what worse hell can be imag­ined than the dead let­ter office?

Tweet This Post

Posted in theory | No Comments »

Data Determinism

March 20th, 2009 admin

[Note: this is a post from a now defunct blog. I’m repub­lish­ing it because of this recent arti­cle about Google, “Google designer leaves, blam­ing data-centrism”. It is not a defense of what appears to be Google’s data fetishism (but who can blame them?); it just got me thinkin’ …]

I want to say that the usual prac­tice of begin­ning with the user inter­face, as the arti­fact that guides the con­ver­sa­tion between clients and devel­op­ers, is wrong. It looks good and sounds right: The client will be using the inter­face, right? The code is a black box that ought to be sub­ject to intense refac­tor­ing, right?

True all, but we also know that the stack of appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment rests on the data­base layer, moves into the var­i­ous lay­ers of code and so-called busi­ness logic, and ends with the user inter­face. The layer that has the most effect on what is pos­si­ble to code or dis­play down­stream is the data­base layer. That is, what you choose as a data­base for­mat and model will con­strain what you can do on the pre­sen­ta­tion end, whereas pre­sen­ta­tion tech­nolo­gies rarely have effects in the oppo­site direc­tion (a pos­si­ble excep­tion is Flash before Flex). This stack holds even if you’re not using MVC; it’s more or less encoded in the way our cur­rent soft­ware tools work. For exam­ple, even if you code in pure JavaScript, your stack is going to begin with JSON or XML or the DOM, and end with CSS.

Call this view “data deter­min­ism.” As such, it prob­a­bly suf­fers from the same crit­i­cisms that have been lev­eled at other forms of deter­min­ism, such as his­tor­i­cal mate­ri­al­ism, which holds that infra­struc­tre (work behav­iors, tech­nolo­gies, etc.) deter­mine super­struc­tire (reli­gious beliefs, laws, etc.). I’ll accept that, if you (the critic) accept that the data level at least con­strains the other lev­els, and that the other lev­els, to have an effect, must be able to mod­ify the data level. Well, then, there’s the rub: once the data model is writ­ten, it doesn’t get changed a whole lot. The web design­ers don’t have a lot to talk to the DBAs about, and the two groups rarely know how to have a con­ver­sa­tion. In fact, with enter­prise data­bases, you get the tail-wagging-the-dog effect: “We can’t do that because the data­base only accepts this kind of data.” So there.

Any­way, I believe that the con­ver­sa­tion with clients should begin with the data model, using per­haps sim­pli­fied E-R dia­grams, but ulti­mately get­ting at a kind of ontol­ogy. What are the salient cat­e­gories and rela­tions and processes that describe the domain in ques­tion? This is a con­ver­sa­tion that clients can have with devel­op­ers, and usu­ally it is a great con­ver­sa­tion, and not con­strained by an arbi­trary visual arti­fact that can direct con­ver­sa­tion along a false groove.

A cou­ple of prin­ci­ples fol­low from data determinism:

1. The require­ments process should be pre­ceded (replaced?) by an ontology-discovery process. And the proper method to use here is ethnography.
2. The data­base should be designed with flex­i­bil­ity in mind. I pre­fer very sim­ple seman­tic web struc­tures (triples, graphs, etc.) that can be fil­tered by more spe­cific ontol­ogy lay­ers. This process I want to dis­cuss in another post or two.
3. After this is in place, then the dis­cus­sion should move to the level of visual arti­facts, such as inter­faces. Both the client and devel­oper will have a bet­ter idea of what is possible.

This is essen­tially a cod­i­fi­ca­tion of the appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment process I’ve devel­oped with clients in acad­e­mia, where I have devel­oped sev­eral web-based appli­ca­tions for human­i­ties com­put­ing projects.

---

Look­ing back at this post, I see that it has sig­nif­i­cance for two things that cur­rently occupy my mind: Edpunk and the RAW DATA NOW move­ment (both, inter­est­ingly, rep­re­sented by folks at UMW …)

1. Data deter­min­ism pro­vides an under-the-hood ratio­nale for Edupunk: Enter­prise apps tend to hide data and the data­base, reify­ing it into a nat­ural, immutable con­di­tion that inter­faces and behav­iors have to con­form to. Think of Black­board. Also con­sider that it was over the data model that they took Desire2learn to court.

2. Data detem­i­nism also helps explain why data, among all the things we call “infor­ma­tion,” needs to be free (in spite of the fact that it appar­ently does not want to be). RAW DATA NOW, as Tim Berners-Lee recently exhorted the auidence at TED. Because if it deter­mines every­thing, we need to have access to it — raw, and with­out undue medi­a­tion by nice-looking inter­faces or toothy EULAs.

Tweet This Post

Posted in theory | 5 Comments »

What Edupunk has become

March 19th, 2009 admin

Look­ing at this bit of the SXSW panel on Edupunk, I have this to say:

It seems that Edupunk really has become about anar­chy, just as Gard­ner feared, at least in the minds of many.  Downes’ social club the­ory of edu­ca­tion is just the sort of point­less pop­ulist angst that punk exploited, and which dif­fers, I would argue, from the more authen­tic (in quotes) Clash-like music, where one gets a sense of hope.  I’m not sure where it comes from, but it’s there, and it’s also not call­ing for destruc­tion.  I think it’s this: the Clash knew the lim­its of the medium — rouse but do not pre­scribe, but also do not pro­scribe.   After all, we’re just a band. Leave social change for others.

I am afraid that Downes comes off as a typ­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tive of a now com­mon­place mil­lenar­i­an­ism among instruc­tional tech­nol­o­gists, at least at con­fer­ences — where the Las Vegas prin­ci­ple seems to apply (“What hap­pens at ELI stays at ELI”).  It’s a cargo cult.

Jim Groom is no mil­lenar­ian.  For him, the essence of Edupunk is not in its anar­chism, but in its com­mu­ni­tarin­ism, if I may impose that word upon him — the relo­ca­tion of decision-making and cre­ativ­ity in the hands of fac­ulty, stu­dents, and tech­nol­o­gists, and not in the hands of cor­po­rate busi­ness mod­els that may appear to be log­i­cal and nec­es­sary from an admin­is­tra­tive point of view, but which are in fact nei­ther.   This does not at all mean Kill the Uni­ver­sity, as Downes very clearly argues.  It means, Let’s not go down this slip­pery slope that cer­tain kinds of soft­ware seem to be push­ing us.  That’s pretty much it (which is a lot).

Iron­i­cally, Downes’ approach puts edu­ca­tion much more in the hands of anony­mous cen­tral­iza­tion, for with­out the res­i­den­tial cam­pus, there is no medi­at­ing insti­tu­tion between Google or the Cana­dian gov­ern­ment and the indi­vid­ual. Downes com­mits the clas­sic fal­lacy of rad­i­cally indi­vid­u­al­is­tic polit­i­cal thought — the destruc­tion of sup­pos­edly oppres­sive insti­tu­tions like col­leges, fam­i­lies, etc. only cre­ates the social con­di­tions of anomie and total­i­tar­i­an­ism. Good luck with that.

Edupunk, for me, is really all about what Gard­ner and Jim,  like McCart­ney and Lennon, had going at the very begin­ning.  A dis­cus­sion about what sort of lead­er­ship is appro­pri­ate to aca­d­e­mic tech­nol­ogy, given this new mil­lieux of tech­nol­ogy.  What do we teach our stu­dents and fac­ulty, both crit­i­cally and prac­ti­cally?  We need to recover this thread; from what I can see, the SXSW panel did not achieve this.

Tweet This Post

Posted in Edupunk Reading Group, teching and learning | 7 Comments »

Edupunk, Technology, and Leadership

March 17th, 2009 admin

I want to give my two cents on Edupunk,  a wildy suc­cess­ful term coined by Jim Groom (Mary Wash­ing­ton)  to describe a style of aca­d­e­mic tech­nol­ogy sup­port that (1) eschews Cen­tral IT and its depen­dency on scal­able but clunky and ulti­mately bor­ing and pos­si­bly evil appli­ca­tions, such as Black­board, and (2) instead favors help­ing fac­ulty use more open, flex­i­ble, ele­gant, inter­est­ing, and avail­able tech­nolo­gies from the open source and Web 2.0 spaces, such as Word­Press.  In coin­ing the term, Jim gave mean­ing and focus to a real trend and ten­sion that has been with us for some time, but which remained uncat­alyzed for being unnamed.  Nam­ing is pow­er­ful magic and we would do well to pay atten­tion to it when it suc­ceeds as well as it has in this case.

A lot has already been said about Edupunk and the range of ideas it con­notes.  In addi­tion to the press that fol­lowed the coin­ing of the term (includ­ing the New York Times), Jim has pro­duced a play­ful but seri­ous Bat­tle Royale video series in which Jim and his for­mer col­league Gard­ner Camp­bell (now at Bay­lor) debate the appro­pri­ate­ness and effec­tive­ness of the term to advance goals they both share.   (The topic was also the sub­ject of a recent panel at SXSW 2009, but I have not lis­tened to that yet.)  After lis­ten­ing to these clips, though, I can’t help but think that the core idea has been weighed down by the con­sid­er­able seman­tic load of the term “punk,” for bet­ter and for worse.  So I thought I would take a stab at res­cu­ing the idea from the word, if that’s at all pos­si­ble.  (I have no idea if this is cool with Jim.)  Not that the debate between Gard­ner and Jim is reducible to mere seman­tics; they do have impor­tant dif­fer­ences of opin­ion on edu­ca­tional tech­nol­ogy that go beyond the debate in question.

So, the core mean­ing of the term Edupunk derives from a rather straigh­for­ward anal­ogy Jim draws between this style of aca­d­e­mic tech­nol­ogy and the late 1970s punk move­ment in music asso­ci­ated with groups like the Clash (his exam­ple).  Just as the Clash had a raw fresh­ness and energy in con­trast to the bloated, for­mu­laic, and empty music of Bill­board 100 bands at the time, apps like Word­Press and Dru­pal stand in con­trast to the bloated and mind-numbing soft­ware that we often (but not always) get from the cor­po­rate sec­tor, at least in the case of edu­ca­tional tech­nol­ogy.  The anal­ogy works at a lit­eral level since the suc­cess of bands like the Clash had a lot to do with their avoid­ance of Big Music pro­duc­tion stu­dios and pro­duc­ers in favor of cheaper tech­nolo­gies in avail­able spaces like garages and base­ments. [Update: garage music is an exam­ple of the long tail of pro­duc­tion being enabled by the com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of the means of music pro­duc­tion that took place in the 1970s.]

When you look at the anal­ogy in this way, the term garage band, or some vari­ant of it, turns out to be a bet­ter anal­ogy than punk proper for what Jim is get­ting at.  As a Clash song goes, they were a “garage band” from “garage land.”  The image of a garage band — and think of early Devo or the Mod­ern Lovers here — evokes the DIY ethos Jim refers to while avoid­ing analo­gies to bands like the Sex Pis­tols, who were cyn­i­cally man­u­fac­tured and mar­keted from the start. I have a hard time think­ing of Dru­pal, for exam­ple, in the same space as the Sex Pis­tols.  I have a less hard time com­par­ing the soft­ware to the sound of, say, Joy Divi­sion.  There is an ele­gant sim­plic­ity to both that, pre­sum­ably, derives from their being devel­oped with­out the encum­brances of a beau­racracy and Big Leadership.

The anal­ogy to the garage band music rather than punk per se avoids Gard­ner Campbell’s apt crit­i­cism about punk in the strict sense, that it was a divi­sive and cyn­cial move­ment with­out any real con­cern for change (one thinks of the Ramone’s I’m Against It or Richard Hell and the Voidoid’s Blank Gen­er­a­tion), and there­fore serves as a bad model for the hard work of craft­ing a trans­for­ma­tional aca­d­e­mic tech­nol­ogy prac­tice.  But I sup­pose the nor­man “garage” does not lend itself to phrase coin­ing the way the saxon-sounding “punk” does.

And the word “punk” does have an impor­tant con­nec­tion to the open source soft­ware cul­ture that Jim val­orizes: there is a direct blood­line of descent that goes from punk (music) to cyber­punk (lit­er­a­ture) to the hack­er­dom (tech­nol­ogy) that pro­duced Perl, Linux, and PHP.  It’s a con­nec­tion that is evi­dent from the aes­thet­ics of open source soft­ware before it became suc­cess­ful and co-opted (not nec­es­sar­ily for worse) by the web-inflated soft­ware indus­try.  Just look at the cov­ers ot 2600 and The Perl Jour­nal from 1990s.

So, although I think Gard­ner is cor­rect about not want­ing to salute this par­tic­u­lar flag because of its guilt by asso­ci­a­tion with the Johnny Rot­ten school of anti-leadership, I think Jim was (is) onto some­thing very impor­tant that needs fur­ther unpack­ing, even after the hype curve sub­sides.  Iron­i­cally, I think the set of issues he cat­alyzed with the term have pre­cisely to do with lead­er­ship and its con­nec­tion to teach­ing and tech­nol­ogy, where Gard­ner rightly shifts the debate. But more on that later.

Tweet This Post

Posted in Edupunk Reading Group, Uncategorized, teching and learning, theory | 7 Comments »

What I want in a “notebook” app

February 18th, 2009 admin

With the demise of Google Note­book, I’ve been look­ing for a replace­ment.  There are many suit­ors, but none fit the bill — not that GN did either. I need some­thing that enables the fol­low­ing workflow:

1. Cap­ture and tag ele­ments of web pages into notes, com­plete with source meta­data.
2. Orga­nize notes into col­lec­tions (e.g. note­books) with sec­tions.
3. Move notes around, within and between note­books and sec­tions. 
4. Add more notes, not linked to web pages, dur­ing this process.
5. Export note­books into other media, such as a web page or a Google Doc for pub­li­ca­tion or fur­ther editing.

Basi­cally, the app needs to fol­low the work­flow of doing research on the web and cre­at­ing doc­u­ments from the col­lected notes.

Google Note­book had most of this, but was clu­unky.  Zoho Note­book doesn’t let you move notes from one note­book to another, or even between sec­tions of a note­book.  It also has very lim­ited export options and behaves more like a slide show tool than a note tak­ing app.  Diigo doesn’t orga­nize col­lected notes into note­books; they are just asso­ci­ated with the source web page.  Ever­note looks like it is designed to replace sticky notes as mem­ory aids, not index cards as research tools.  Zotero behaves too much like a ref­er­ence manager.

As far as I know, there’s noth­ing like what I need or want.  So I will have to make it at some point.

Tweet This Post

Posted in proposal | No Comments »

A Chiasmus Model of Syllabus Design

February 5th, 2009 admin

One of the things I like to do when design­ing a course is to view the syl­labus as a kind of plot or out­line of a story.  The story may end up as the basis of a book, but mainly it pro­vides struc­ture to the expe­ri­ence of the stu­dents tak­ing the course.  Struc­ture at this level is impor­tant because it pro­vides a cog­ni­tive scaf­fold­ing for stu­dents when they are try­ing to ingest the con­tent of the course as a whole.

Now, in gen­eral, there are two cog­ni­tive mod­els one may use to present mate­r­ial to stu­dents in a way that max­i­mizes the abil­ity of the stu­dents to retain the infor­ma­tion: the his­tor­i­cal and the log­i­cal (or per­haps “struc­tural”).  The sci­ences, of course, tend to be log­i­cal, for obvi­ous rea­sons — ideas build on them­selves in a way that requires going from the sim­ple to the com­plex.  (Some­times this order matches his­tor­i­cal devel­op­ment, but not nec­es­sar­ily; often the work of sim­pli­fi­ca­tion occurs late in the stage of the devel­op­ment of a the­ory.)  The human­i­ties, on the other hand, tend to be his­tor­i­cal, or some vari­ant thereof (such as reverse chrono­log­i­cal order.)  The human sci­ences tend to be some­where in the mid­dle, which raises the point of this blog entry.

In a course I am design­ing now — the Anthro­pol­ogy of the Infor­ma­tion Soci­ety — I found myself being unable to decide between the two.  An his­tor­i­cal approach would be easy, and in fact I have used it in the past.  But I think it is a bit plod­ding: begin with the Cyber­netic moment, in both the com­mer­cial and aca­d­e­mic spheres, and march one’s way through to the cur­rent posthu­man­ist era of the web and com­mer­cial­ized cyber­space.  Addi­tion­ally, one eas­ily falls into the traps of tele­ol­ogy and the ever-dreaded meta­nar­ra­tive (the fear of which is itself part of what we are study­ing).  On the other hand, a purely struc­tural approach — say, along the lines of a tra­di­tional ethnog­ra­phy, where var­i­ous insti­tu­tions are stud­ied in suc­ces­sion (reli­gion, pol­i­tics, eco­nom­ics, kin­ship and the fam­ily, etc.) has it’s prob­lems too: such divi­sions, although not as arti­fi­cial as some may argue, nonethe­less they pre­vent an organic under­stand­ing of their rela­tions — in anthro­pol­ogy espe­cially, one wants to talk about reli­gion, pol­i­tics and eco­nom­ics at the same time.

My solu­tion has been to adopt a rhetor­i­cal device that seems to com­bine the his­tor­i­cal (that is, the sequen­tial) with the struc­tural into what might be thought of as a tem­po­ral struc­ture: the fig­ure of chi­as­mus.   We know this as the famil­iar pat­tern A B B’ A’, as in the following:

“Love is the irre­sistible desire to be desired irresistibly .”

Rhetori­cians and poets have though the ages used this device to struc­ture units of dis­course from sim­ple one or two-liners (like this exam­ple) to entire poems and sto­ries, such as Chre­tien de Troye’s Lancelot.  The sub­ti­tle of The Hob­bit expresses this logic: “There and Back Again.”

Chi­as­mus at the larger units of dis­course (such as a course) is use­ful, I think, because it pro­vides a tem­po­ral, his­tor­i­cal frame that is easy to fol­low, but which, by the dou­bling back that defines its char­ac­ter, exposes struc­ture as well.  I think this is best pre­sented by example.

In my course, I expect to dis­cuss the role of the com­puter as both a sym­bol and arti­fact that both struc­tures and is struc­tured by the social insti­tu­tions in which it is embed­ded.  The major insti­tu­tions in play are the polit­i­cal and the eco­nomic, along with a more dif­fuse and per­va­sive one I call ide­ol­ogy, which includes reli­gious and onto­log­i­cal beliefs of all kinds (fol­low­ing the think­ing of many anthro­pol­o­gists, such as Mary Dou­glas and Louis Dumont).    Now to present this, I could, as I men­tion above, pro­ceed his­tor­i­cally or struc­turally.  His­tor­i­cally, I could begin with the dif­fu­sion of the com­puter, or com­put­er­i­za­tion, as ide­ol­ogy in the 1950s, where the ideas of infor­ma­tion, com­mu­ni­ca­tion and con­trol dom­i­nate the human and bio­log­i­cal sci­ences, and even anthro­pol­ogy itself.  I could then move onto the 1960s and 1970s and the rise of information-driven economies and eco­nomic orga­ni­za­tions (such as, notably, inter­na­tional cor­po­ra­tions).  Finally, I could con­clude with the effects on the polit­i­cal sphere (rights, pri­vacy, com­mu­nity) with the emer­gence of the blo­gos­phere and the rise of yet another model of the sur­veil­lance state.

The prob­lem with this approach, though, is that it doesn’t pro­vide an oppor­tu­nity to show the effects of each phase on the pre­vi­ously dis­cussed lev­els — what hap­pens to the sym­bol­ics of the com­puter as it becomes more overtly enmeshed in the dynam­ics of polit­i­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion?  Also, the suc­ces­sion of ide­ol­ogy, eco­nom­ics, and pol­i­tics, which I had not noticed upon first teach­ing the course, raises the larger ques­tion of how these  social dimen­sions are related.  I do not want to imply a sim­ple causal hier­ar­chy in which ideas influ­ence infra­struc­ture which in turn con­strains pol­i­tics.  At the largest level, there is a struc­tural point to be made about these dimen­sions, which argues for dis­cussing them in iso­la­tion from their his­tor­i­cal sequence.

This is where chi­as­mus comes in:  I plan to orga­nize the course in the fol­low­ing manner:

1. Intro­duc­tion
   1. Ide­ol­ogy
      1. Eco­nom­ics
         1. Pol­i­tics
         2. Pol­i­tics
      2. Eco­nom­ics
   2. Ide­ol­ogy
2. Con­clu­sion

WIth this struc­ture, I can march my way through his­tory, and then dou­ble back and make the struc­tural points that are really the point of the course, link­ing eco­nom­ics, pol­i­tics and ide­ol­ogy together as a con­flicted yet organic whole.  And notice how each dimen­sion is struc­turally priv­i­leged: Ide­ol­ogy encom­passes, whereas the polit­i­cal is at the cen­ter; and eco­nom­ics medi­ates and bridges.

Any­way, the struc­ture has already proved use­ful in orga­niz­ing my thoughts and mate­ri­als, regard­less of the mer­its of my argu­ments for it

[Note: this is a repub­lish­ing of an entry I wrote for Dickinson’s local blog on teach­ing and learn­ing.]

Tweet This Post

Posted in hack, teching and learning | No Comments »