Researching Information Art - Tami Sutcliffe

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/points/stories/DN-loehicks_08edi.ART1.State.Edition1.4377497.html

“At MiT5, the most recent in MIT’s series of Media in Transition conferences, Dr. Thomas Pettitt of the University of Southern Denmark theorized that participatory cultures signal the imminent closing of what he called “the Guttenberg parenthesis.”

According to that theory, we are witnessing a return to the cultural norms that prevailed before the advent of mechanically printed texts. In those oral and folk cultures, practices such as adaptation, appropriation and recombining – what hip-hop calls “sampling” – were not only accepted but lauded. The printing press brought a new regime, in which individual printed works were held to be utterly unique and an author’s ownership sacrosanct. But now, according to theorists such as Dr. Pettitt, new digital technologies are spinning the wheel back to its pre-Guttenberg position (closing the parenthesis), and cultural production will be understood once again as a dynamic, collective process rather than the work of a single lonely genius, laboring alone in a garret.”  — from “Harry Potter Obsession” by Victoria Loe Hicks in the Dallas Morning News July 8 2007.

= = = = = =

“Dr. Henry Jenkins, director of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program, describes the conjunction of canon (Ms. Rowling’s books) and fanon (the fandom’s creative output). The latter comprises not only thousands of fan Web sites in a host of languages, but innumerable blogs, podcasts, MySpace pages, YouTube entries, academic conferences, fan conventions and other activities devoted to all things Potter.

Merely as repositories of promotional material generated by the official Potter franchise – press releases and other news tidbits, printed articles, publicity photos, video clips, etc. – the major fan sites’ archives would fill Hogwarts’ Great Hall.

But what’s truly jaw-dropping is the sheer mass and variety of fan-generated content: essays and forums analyzing the books’ most minute details, endless plot speculation, multiple genres of fanfic (fan-written fiction employing Ms. Rowling’s characters), fan art, manips (manipulations of images via Photoshop and similar programs), music videos that combine photos and film clips into original narratives accompanied by appropriate pop tunes, filks (humorous song lyrics about the characters, set to pop tunes) and original wizard rock (yes, according to www.wizrocklepdia.com, there are more than 200 wizard rock bands, from Aberforth Dumbledore and the Nannies to the Wonky Cross).

With the exception of wizard rock, most types of content – fanfic or filks, for instance – are staples of late 20th-century fan culture, dating back at least as far as the original Star Trek. But Dr. Jenkins, who has parsed the meaning of the digitally enhanced Potter fandom more closely than any other scholar, sees in it a prime example of an emerging “participatory culture.” In such a culture, Dr. Jenkins blogged, “what might traditionally be understood as media producers and consumers are transformed into participants who are expected to interact with each other according to a new set of rules which none of us fully understands.” — from “Harry Potter Obsession” by Victoria Loe Hicks in the Dallas Morning News July 8 2007.

Relationships between visual information and visual art:

Is visual art a specialized kind of information,
which can be manipulated using the tools of formation science?
What are the defining informational characteristics
of visual art, if this is the case?

Or does visual information act as the raw material of art, the essence which combines with media and action to yeild expression? Do the traditional divisions of information as a raw material support this idea of art-making?

How often does a piece of pure information become valued as art?
What are the steps leading to this valuation?
How would we define “pure”?

Does art ever “decay” away from cultural artifact into raw information, losing whatever artistic meaning was previously associated with it? What causes this decay?

Are there layers of meaning which visual art must have to contain value?
Can the same thing be said of visual information?

1. Art as database vs art as narrative

2. Traditional distinction between professional and amateur image maker

3. The creative influence of database logic on art structure.

“The facts are dead, long live the facts. It seems simple enough: The job of science is to observe, describe, and explain the natural world through hypothesis and experimentation. A scientist will say, “I think this explanation is the reason for this observation, and I propose this experiment to test it.” But the statement doesn’t begin to convey the job at hand. Theories, hypotheses, laws, the scientific method — even facts themselves — dangle from the natural sciences like so many tree branches. How do the various parts fit together?”

from Feb07 Edutopia 

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities,  but in the expert’s there are few. - Shunryu Suzuki

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he had imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
~ Henry David Thoreau

Schatz, S. (2006). Improving Performance Support Systems through Information Retrieval Evaluation. Journal of Interactive Learning Research. 17 (4), pp. 407-423. Chesapeake, VA: AACE.

Abstract

This study examines existent and new methods for evaluating the success of information retrieval systems. The theory underlying current methods is not robust enough to allow testing retrieval using different meta-tagging schemas. Traditional measures rely on judgments of whether a document is relevant to a particular question. A good system returns all the relevant documents and no extraneous documents. There is a rich literature questioning the efficacy of relevance judgments. Such questions as, Relevant to whom? When? and To what purpose? are not well-answered in traditional theory. In this study, two new measures (Spink’s Information Need and Cooper’s Utility) are used in evaluating two search tools (tag-based and text-based), comparing these new measures with traditional measures and each other. The open-source Swish text-based search engine and a self-constructed tag-based search tool were used. Thirty-four educators searched for information using both search engines and evaluated the information retrieved by each. Construct measures, derived by multiplying each of the three measures (traditional, information need, and utility) by a rating of satisfaction were compared using two way analysis of variance. This study specifically analyzes small information systems. The design concepts would be untenable for large systems. Results indicated that there was a significant correlation between the three measures, indicating that the new measures provide an equivalent method of evaluating systems and have some significant advantages, which include not requiring relevance judgments and the ability to use the measures in situ.

• Envisioning Information by Edward R. Tufte
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte
• Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative by Edward R. Tufte

How do scientific visual images which are not generally considered fine art (DNA trees, crystal diagrams, sonar charts) sometimes acquire aesthetic value outside of their specific scientific community?  In particular,  what happens when online scientific information changes into fine art? What are the economic, political and aesthetic forces behind such a change? When does this redefinition occur? What are the distinctive components of art and information in this case? What is the history of informational images acquiring aesthetic value?

Links to online images that seem to be morphing from scientific information into visual art: http://homepages.waymark.net/~bikechic/infoarts.html

When it is combined with portraiture, geometric composition and performance art, like here:

http://www.danwade.com/emoticon/statement.html

“What we do when we think we know what we are doing.”

-from Jones, J. G., & Bronack, S. C. (in press). Rethinking cognition, representations, and processes in 3D online social learning environments. In D. Gibson, C. Aldrich & M. Prensky (Eds.), Games and Simulations in Online Learning (Vol. 2, pp. 107-147). Hershey, PA: Idea Group.

The infinite variety of misinformation, from mild interpretation errors to intentional lies, forms a measurable layer of the information environment. How can we classify and describe the numerous varieties of information that are not correct?

Obviously, conscious intent to deceive is a baseline variable, but- what else?
If “social constructionism” is the process used to uncover the ways in which individuals and groups participate in the creation of their perceived reality,  including the ways social phenomena are created, institutionalized, and made into tradition by humans, what is the name of the process which occurs when the perceived reality does not mesh with the facts?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_Society

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_denial 

The circuitry of primary visual cortex organizes the visual scene encoded by the retinae into spatially organized “maps” of features: a map of visual space, a map of ocular dominance (eye-specific information), a map of the orientations (angles) of lines…

http://www.cnbc.cmu.edu/faculty/crowley.shtml 

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/maps/

The Library of Congress partnerships with the American Congress on Surveying and Mapping (ACSM) explores cartography, surveying, and geographic information systems

Technical solutions: Wisdom of the crowds: Scientific publishers should let their online readers become reviewers.http://www.nature.com/nature/peerreview/debate/nature04992.html

noun(NOO-muh-noh-UL-truh-MY-kruh-SKOP-ik-SIL-i-koh-VOL-kay-no-koh-NEE-o-sis, nyoo-):

A lung disease caused by inhaling fine particles of silica.

"The end of linear writing is indeed the end of the book. . .that is why, beginning to write without the line, one begins also to reread past writing according to a different organization of space"

http://mcel.pacificu.edu/history/jahcI1/Call/space.html
"Hypertext, after all, is writing which can be read nonsequentially, in an infinite variety of ways. And as Derrida suggests, this type of writing implies a new idea of space."

er all, is writing which can be read nonsequentially, in an infinite variety of ways. And as Derrida suggests, this type of writing implies a new idea of space. text, after all, is writing which can be read nonsequentially, in an infinite variety of ways. And as Derrida suggests, this type of writing implies a new idea of space.

http://www.w3.org/2004/OWL/ 

RDF and OWL are Semantic Web standards that provide a framework for asset management, enterprise integration and the sharing and reuse of data on the Web. A. OWL is a Web Ontology language. Where earlier languages have been used to develop tools and ontologies for specific user communities (particularly in the sciences and in company-specific e-commerce applications), they were not defined to be compatible with the architecture of the World Wide Web in general, and the Semantic Web in particular.

"One major shift research has called attention to is the dramatic increase in the image-to-word ratio in documents of all kinds (Horn 1998). Many publications that in the past might have used one illustration per article now have one illustration per page. Thus the sheer volume of visual elements has changed. But that is not all. In my characterization of visual language, I focus attention on the tight integration of words and visual elements, whereas in the old document paradigm, words and images are separated. Images were referred to as figures and often did not even appear on the page on which they were discussed. That practice is changing; more and more, words and images are coming together.

Also underway is ìthe Great Sorting Out of the Functions of Words and Images When They Are Tightly Integrated.î In the Sorting Out, we study what words do best and what it is that the visual elements do best when the two are tightly integrated; that is, we are developing the functional semantics of visual language. It turns out that we need a whole set of new guidelines and rules for understanding this tight integration, principles that are quite different from those used when words and images operate separately (Horn 1998). As we understand this integration more and more comprehensively and deeply, we apparently increase the integration of our own words and images. This has happened in my own work on the analysis of the words and images in diagrams: they have become more integrated. The functional semantics of visual language can now be extended to fully effect the tight integration of visual elements and words."

http://www.stanford.edu/~rhorn/a/topic/vl%26id/artclInfoDesignChapter.html

http://www.cs.unt.edu/~rada/papers/mihalcea.aaaiss06.pdf

"What are the sources of happiness and sadness in everyday
life? In this paper, we employ ‘linguistic ethnography’ to
seek out where happiness lies in our everyday lives by
considering a corpus of blogposts from the LiveJournal
community annotated with happy and sad moods. By
analyzing this corpus, we derive lists of happy and sad
words and phrases annotated by their ‘happiness factor.’
Various semantic analyses performed with this wordlist
reveal the happiness trajectory of a 24-day (3am and 9-10p
are most happy), and a 7-day week (Wednesdays are
saddest), and compare the socialness and humancenteredness
of happy descriptions versus sad descriptions.
We evaluate our corpus-based approach in a classification
task and contrast our wordlist with emotionally-annotated
wordlists produced by experimental focus groups. Having
located happiness temporally and semantically within this
corpus of everyday life, the paper concludes by offering a
corpus-inspired livable recipe for happiness1. "

http://portal.acm.org/cacm/current/

Twenty years ago Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores published a
controversial book about system design that doubted artificial
intelligence would ever show signs of true intelligence. The book,
Understanding Computer and Cognitions: A New Foundation for
Design, sent the AI community reeling while giving wings to a new
perspective that emphasized language rather than symbols for
prompting computer action.

Today the Winograd/Flores work is recognized as a
groundbreaking textbook on system design, and the Language-
Action Perspective (LAP) movement it inspired continues to guide
design practices using human communication and human nature at
its core. This month's special section honors the 20th anniversary
of LAP by presenting a group of articles focusing on its practical
contributions and its ever-growing relevance. Every contributor to
this project was asked to reveal something unexpected they
discovered from using LAP and the value that discovery offers
computing professionals. We hope you find their discoveries
insightful.

The gathering was the monthly meeting of "Dorkbot," a loose forum for the exchange of creative technological ideas that is developing a cult following around the world.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060422/ap_on_hi_te/dorkbots 

"Writing systems may look very different, but they all use the same basic building blocks of familiar natural shapes. The letters we use can be viewed as a mirror of the features of the natural world, from trees and mountains to meandering streams and urban cityscapes.The shapes of letters are not dictated by the ease of writing them, economy of pen strokes and so on, but their underlying familiarity and the ease of recognising them."

More…

(bel-LET-ruh) noun - Literary works valued for their aesthetic qualities rather than information or instruction.