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digital.media.philosophy

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The evolution of visual effects in three minutes. Visually interesting, but the music is a little pathetic for my taste.

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What is a photocopier? Seems like a simple question, but it's not quite as simple to answer as on might think... At least for the guy interrogated in this video. However, no matter how ridiculous this appears to be it points to an interesting question: What exactly constitutes a specific technology?

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Lawrence Lessig: “Architecting Innovation”

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Talk by Cynthia Dwork @ Berkman Center for Internet & Society on the problems of anonymizing large data sets and the idea of differential privacy.

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I don’t know if the book by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Neil Cukieris on big data is worth a read but the video of their book launch event is definitely worth watching.

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Datenkritik als Kritikkritik?!

I blogged some preliminary thoughts on the issue of data critique.

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Back then when our past still was the future. Found: BnF

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Retro war gestern. Heute ist Erinnerungsedition...

Oder, was passiert, wenn Produktstrategen und sonstige Marketingexperten dem Schlagwort "Erinnerungskultur" begegnen.

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Open Access explained by Ph.D. Comics.

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Error! Auch Bücher - die traditionellen auf Papier gedruckten - sind heutzutage stets irgendwie digital. Die Spuren hiervon werden zumeist gut verwischt. Aber nicht immer…

Quelle: Lewandowski, Dirk, „Query Understanding”, in:  Ders. (Hrsg.), Handbuch Internet-Suchmaschinen 2: Neue Entwicklungen in der Web-Suche, Heidelberg: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft 2011, S. 55-75, 61.

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Recently the Zeit Magazin published this map showing the distribution of male and female forenames in German town names. It shows that male names appear more commonly in the names of towns. At least that is what it is supposed to prove. But looking at it more closely I couldn't shake off the feeling of unease. There seems to be something very wrong with this visualization.

It is obviously based on the idea that character patterns of names, like H-E-I-D-E, have to stand for names. Yet, what if the same character string is used as a term that stands for a specific kind of landscape, like H-E-I-D-E (heathland) again. The magic word here is homonyms and it is just the beginning. Another questionable decision of the creator of this map is that he (or she) doesn't care very much for compound nouns such as Frankenthal. Of course this town name contains the male forename Frank, but what is "enthal" supposed to mean in this context? Frankenthal might as well be treated as a compound of "Franken" and "thal" and as a result not refer to a name but to a region. Assumed that it wasn't supposed to be about real names but about character patterns of names the visualization raises even more questions. Think of the Name "Alf" in Alfeld. Why is this pattern a name but not the "alf" in Bleialf, Saalfeld, Thalfang, Valfitz, ...?

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Christoph Engemann: "What is in a name? Identity-Regimes from 1500 to the 2000s", 27.12.2011 @ 28c3.

The Powerpoint of the worthwhile talk is available for download as pdf. His main focus is on the media history of Identity-Regimes but the bottom line of his talk is the assumption: "To govern is to address". With this conclusion five theses or - as you will - general observations go along: 

Naming and identity regimes emerge in economic, military, colonial, social-welfare, migratory contexts.

Names are not a matter of choice, they are mandatory in any modern nation state.

The reference of the law ist he body. (Problem: Gap between the body and the document).

Identity is duplication – controlled duplication with registers. (Identity regimes are means of monopolizing the registers).

Identity systems are media systems changing as media change.

There is not much to criticize about the historic narrative he develops, yet in regard to digital culture the examples mentioned seem to be a little biased towards governmental Identity-Regimes. But of course, there was not enough time to dwell deeper into the pressing questions of contemporary digital culture. This leaves me wondering what might be the right balance between historical background and analysis of present day developments in media historic/media theoretic talks?

[batmanrunningawayfromshit]

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In the spirit of the last post. Batman and Robin running away and away and away...

More cool runnings can be found on this Tumblr as well as the source .psd file to let them run from even more sh***

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"Animated GIFs: The Birth of a Medium" a short documentary

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danah boyd: "Teen Privacy Strategies in Networked Publics", June 10, 2011 @ Harvard University.

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Craig Dietrich's talk "When Relational Isn't Enough: Software Architectures for Scholarly Production" at the Critical Code Studies conference 2010. His argument seems to be:

1. Wordpress is not intrinsically good - especially when used for scholarly production (I can agree to this!) 2. Wordpress runs on MySQL which is a relational database. (Dead-on!) 3. Wordpress is too limited because it makes use of a relational database. (OK, OK, I would agree that relational database technologies have serious shortcomings and shouldn't be treated as the Swiss army knife of data processing, but it seems to me that Dietrich is jumping to his conclusion. Why? Because the alternative he proposed to relational databases are Semantic Web technologies which are not at all incommensurable to the structure and logic of relational databases.)