Paint it Science!

Translating thoughts into something awesome.

[paintitscience]

Texte sind Karten

This is just a short post I found while tidying up my folders. When I started working on my thesis in 2011 I had a discussion with a geographer who opposed the argument that maps can be considered texts. I then created a booklet with some examples that put together several parallels that one wouldn´t usually think about. Like with most words, once you start asking to many questions sense is loosing grip. Today I would probably do it differently, but that´s the beauty of science: there is always progress.

Anyway, click here to enter the album.

[paintitscience]

Remembering Unity

I use the cause of the day to reopen my blog after one year of absence. Paternity leave kept me focussed on different things, but there is no reason to let it get dusted more than necessary.

On the 9th of October 1989 about 70,000 people gathered to demonstrate against the policy of the GDR government. Demonstrations in this context had started already in September, however on the 9th of October the number of participants exploded in comparison to prior demonstrations preventing an underrepresented police force to intervene. This way the protest march was able to walk round the city ring road, which encouraged more people to join the protest and express their disagreement with the regime.

This kind of stories tend to turn into a pop-clishé at the latest once they are used to celebrate/stage political or cultural progress. I believethe institutionalization of “remembrance interventions” to be the nail in the coffin of a polyvocal narrative. Since 2009 the Leipzig Tourism and Marketing Ltd. organizes the so called “Festival of Lights”, an event that drags thousands to the city and “reenact” the Monday demonstrations (only difference: supported by political actors and an obvious relation to city-marketing [raising suspicions of "Revolutions-Folklore"]). Leipzig has also monuments that are explicitely dedicated to remember the Monday demonstrations: the “Liberty Bell” on the central Augustplatz and the monument to the peaceful revolution at the St. Nicholas Church. Beside this there has been a discussion to install a “Monument to Freedom and Unity” close to the old town for about 5 years. Only recently I found out that the process has been put on hold due to a lack of support from the population of Leipzig.

Time to rummage around my drawer and look for an idea that I sketched up as potential (fun) proposition in late 2009 when I was still a student in Leipzig. At that time there was few knowledge about the regulatory framework of the future competition, so I passed some evening hours to think about a concept and nail it down. Later on – most likely as a result of the fiasco at the competition of the Monument to Unity in Berlin few months earlier - the competition was closed to acknowledged artists and architects and there was no sense in working on a serious portfolio for my proposition. Unfortunately it seems that I lost the final drawing since I only found some early sketches (if I find the rest later, I will update the post [and will probably do better photographs...ehem]). Anyway, I want to share them on the occasion of the day. I still think the idea is sort of fun, even though I realize that it is certainly not the right form and concept for a monument with national airs and graces.

The whole idea is pretty simple: There are two U-formed blocks with a size of about 4m heigh and length that are directed to each other and installed on rails (1). In both blocks the letters WI and HR are low-cut on the front and rear side. Looking at the side wall this shows the word WIHR (4). Now WIHR doesn´t mean anything in german: it´s basically the contraction of the german words “wir” (we) and “ihr” (you). The appearance of the word “WIHR” and its underlying différance are intended to provoke or even distrurb. In normal position the letters IHR are slightly illuminated , so that the contraction is attenuated for the benefit of “you”. Now, people can come and push the block towards each other until both U´s are intertwined (2). If they manage to do so, the blocks will only show “WIR” and the whole word gets illuminated (3). This is explained on a floor slab in front of the monument.

The catch behind the idea was, that due to the size of the blocks you need between 5 to 10 people to move both blocks into the right position. The people who do this together do not need to know each others. When visitors come to see the monument they might feel the desire to see how it works and “play” with the monument. They can join forces with other visitors or even ask random people to help them out. Beside the need to cooperate with others, the blocks won´t stay united but move back in their original position after a certain period (I thought about 30 minutes).

My idea based on the assumption that identities are made up by individuals and their creation is based on the effort and behaviour of them as a whole. The monument was meant to show that unity isn´t a question of political decision but in fact a transient product of people who are willing to act or work together. It needs a permanent feedback by the people or else becomes a thing of the past. A permanent struggle for unity can be carried out almost effortlessly if people are excited and cooperative, but it can also be tough and eventually annoying so people decide to go seperate ways. This way I hoped to keep the monument more or less agnostic to the question whether the German (re)unification was positive or negative. This way the valuation remains literally in the hands of the people.

In some way, I think the current proposal for the Berlin Monument to Freedom and Unity uses a comparable narrative (even though more elegant and subtle than my approach) so I am not too sad, that I couldn´t even propose my idea. I am also unsure whether I had supported the idea of having a monument at all. To me the argument that there are already monuments in Leipzig to remember the 9th of October is pretty convincing. Let´s see how the situation will be treated in the next years.

[paintitscience]

A scientist's memory

Kids ALWAYS beat you in the card game #Concentration. This version for scientists helps you to never loose again.

  When I came up with the idea for the Memox I started to build things out of cardboard. This is my latest creation. I made it as a present for a friend who is a chemist. It is variation of the card game Concentration a.k.a Memory a.k.a. Memomatch featuring pairs of Tripeptides made of the three Amino acids Serine, Alanine and Phenylalanine.

Generally it may be a good present for all those smart PhDs who become outsmarted by their children. I will probably produce more if I find some time, so tell me if you are interested.

[paintitscience]

every thing is language!

The Bow and the Lyre is a beautiful book with inspiring content for everyone interested in #sciart. Here is my visualization.

“Man´s world is full of meaning. It tolerates ambiguity, contradiction, madness, or confusion, but not lack of meaning. The very silence is populated by signs. Thus, the arrangement of buildings and their proportions respond to a certain intention. There is no lack of meaning – in fact, the opposite is true – in the vertical thrust of the Gothic, the tense balance of the Greek temple, the roundness of the Buddhist stupa or the erotic vegetation that covers the walls of the sanctuaries of Orissa. All is language.”

Paz, Octavio (2013) The Bow and the Lyre: The Poem. The Poetic Revelation. Poetry and History.

  It´s sort of a weired thought that everything in the world of us social beings is language. I mean seriously everything. Like a city: people, architecture, infrastructure…

Streets for instance. Think about it: Isn´t it a somewhat scary idea to walk past a deadly current by inches? But that´s exactly what happens when you wait at a traffic light. Cars could easily hit us, but we learned to read the stream, we learned how to behave to not get carried away in the roaring noise of big city traffic.

The city is full of these rules, conventions, and meanings. They areeverywhere. If we don´t know how to communicate properly, we may easily run into problems — or into a car driving by. Just as we might run into problems if we speak in a language noone else understands (or wants to understand).

Language like our material world sets limits, but it has its flexible moments, even though changing things is not always economic. Now, structural change — in language as in the material world — needs to be reflexted critically. It effects us (and even more often: “the others”) directly. Yet, change provides space for creativity.

So let´s go out, invent, construct, create! New words, new projects, new worlds.

[paintitscience]

Code: Art, Tool, Language

Codes are everywhere: in computer programs as in (any other) social contexts. In this article I try to handle my reflections of a programming crash course for humanists with Python and to explore the aesthetical, pragmatic and linguistic dimension of codes.

Code aesthetics

Are video games art? You bet they are. At least that´s what Paola Antonelli writes when announcing that the Museum of Modern Arts acquired 14 classic games as part of their general art selection in November last year. With upcoming games like Beyond: Two Souls there can´t be any doubt that computer games became not only part of mainstream culture but also of mainstream art.  Interestingly enough, the decision to select those 14 games was taken not only due to the aesthetic experience but also to rather exceptional aspects “from the elegance of the code to the design of the player´s behaviour“.

To look at code from an aesthetic point of view may be unusual for a “classical” understanding of art, although it is in any way new to programmers. In his blog Jeff Atwords quoted an interview with Wayne Ratliff printed in 1986´s “Programmers at work“. Here, Ratliff provides a clear link  between coding and fine arts:

So I like to make an analogy between writing code and sculpting a clay figure. You start with a lump of clay and then you scrape away, add more clay, then scrape away again. And every now and then you decide that a leg doesn’t look right, so you tear it off and put a new one on. There’s a lot of interaction.

Of course, when it comes to definitions of art, approaches tend be quite diverse: Masterpieces of art can be incredibly innovative or incredibly useful – or both. Ratliff focuses on the economic aspect – code balance – and so does Jeff Atwards when he writes:

The aesthetics of your code is purely an internal implementation detail. How you place your squigglies won’t affect users in the slightest. (…)If you’re structuring your code to be accurate, consistent, readable, and maintainable, your application will work better– because it’s balanced.

We´ll come back to that aspect later.

Codes – materialized ideas

Codes or even sections of codes (like functions) are materialized ideas. They are not only like tools, they are tools.  They serve to produce something or to get something done – like a hammer, a language  or a violin. All tools are equally products – the stone axe as one very basic tool is produced by the use of other stones.  All tools and the use of tools have a history, they become part of a greater  history of tools and they differ from human history in one  important aspect:  A humans life is limited but tools and tool practices like any other idea can be translated, elaborated and used by the next generation.

The development of tools may not be linear but we can draw lines between tools. Which brings us to the difference between a hammer and a code snippet: It simply needs more tools to produce code than to produce a violin, or differently: the degree of specialization in the case of code is higher than in the case of a violin.

Alienation by specialization – object oriented structures and division of labour

As Matt Ridley states we are not anymore able to produce the tools that we use, not even simple ones as a pencil – we need the help/work of others. Hence, the work of others has grown together with our daily life with the result that processes of production become less and less visible. This way the specialization causes a certain alienation from products as the totality of all processes involved. In most cases we are not able to keep track of the process of production – even in cases of products we consume regularly. We only know the tip of the iceberg: price and characteristic of the outcome. We outsource basic processes and use their results as tools in the development of new products. The effect of forgetting about those basic processes seem to be a crucial strategy to create free space for more specialisation. Basic processes are still important to us but with an increasing fragmentation they become slight ideas, black boxes, stereotypes.

Some weeks ago I took part in the 2013 DARIAH-DE International Digital Humanities Summer School learning some Python coding and our instructors Mike Kestemont and Lars Wieneke came up with Steve Jobs answer to the question what object-oriented software is (Rolling Stones Interview 1994, reprint 2011):

Objects are like people. They’re living, breathing things that have knowledge inside them about how to do things and have memory inside them so they can remember things. And rather than interacting with them at a very low level, you interact with them at a very high level of abstraction, like we’re doing right here.

Here’s an example: If I’m your laundry object, you can give me your dirty clothes and send me a message that says, “Can you get my clothes laundered, please.” I happen to know where the best laundry place in San Francisco is. And I speak English, and I have dollars in my pockets. So I go out and hail a taxicab and tell the driver to take me to this place in San Francisco. I go get your clothes laundered, I jump back in the cab, I get back here. I give you your clean clothes and say, “Here are your clean clothes.”

You have no idea how I did that. You have no knowledge of the laundry place. Maybe you speak French, and you can’t even hail a taxi. You can’t pay for one, you don’t have dollars in your pocket. Yet I knew how to do all of that. And you didn’t have to know any of it. All that complexity was hidden inside of me, and we were able to interact at a very high level of abstraction. That’s what objects are. They encapsulate complexity, and the interfaces to that complexity are high level.

The cool thing about object-oriented software – adapted from Jobs – is that we don´t have to know anything about certain processes because we can pass them to other subjects who can do them better. The example of laundry that needs to be washed is more than a metaphor: What Jobs outlines is object-oriented programming as the continuation of the division of labour: production divides into a vast amount of tasks handled by different actors and it works thanks to a high level of specialization in our society. A process can only be divided into many tasks if the communication between the parts works out well. That´s the reason why in complex production processes management plays such an important role. Here is where we come back to the appeal by Jeff Atwards for an accurate, consistent, readable, and maintainable / balanced code:  The abstraction of complex tasks allows us to split it into minor functions, but only a well documented and readable code enables others to get involved. And only agreement on ways of interaction between the actors involved in the process keep the process going.

Boot the world: Social Coding

In his article “Programming as theory building” Peter Naur (1985) promotes the idea that programming is basically about developing an idea of how things in the world (that is: in the program) are supposed to be. Naur explains that programmers soon run into performance issues if the persons involved won´t follow the logic of the code. Likewise we may easily run into mayor latency troubles  if we want to take part in a certain social processes but don´t come to an arrangement with prevalent social codes. There is a strongly regulative and political aspect in the design of an algorithm, a function or a social code: If we assume we can get a product in the supermarket without paying – maybe because that´s the way we think things are supposed to be – we may easily become debugged by the local police. Codes constitute systems of legality that structure bad and good arguments. Like legal knowledge and practice, codes are not only based on reality, they also produce and form it. Codes like every other tool can turn us from subjects into objects of a specific action. This is neither necessarily good nor bad, but it can become nasty and even dangerous if there is no way questioning or changing it.

This said, it seems that it is only closed code (in social terms: rules that can´t be changed by you as an actor) that we have to be aware of. Of course, in case of closed codes the users cannot judge or change the rules, but can he/she in Open source? One can argue that a proper coder is able to read, evaluate and criticise Open source code, but from a pragmatic perspective we should to ask whether a critic down to the roots is still possible in a highly specialised environment and – more important – if the critic is compatible with mainstream discourse: Quite comparable to science, some users are able to double-check the correctness of information, references or raw data but even if we are able to do so, we tend to skip double-checking if we find the data credible – and that is nothing less than object-oriented thinking. Recent plagiarism scandals show us a) that institutions meant to control the code of a complex hypertext like a thesis fail because of a lack of time, knowledge or commitment and b) that it´s always worth digging in structures that seem to work efficiently.

In the end, coding was linguistic from the beginning. But beside looking at it from an aesthetic and pragmatic perspective, it´s worth to think about algorithms in a foucauldian sense as a discourse with all its interrelations between knowledge and power. The more complex it gets the more we loose track of the side-effect of our coding.

[paintitscience]

How to write your own history

Have you ever considered to write an #autobiography? I didn´t – but I wrote it without thinking much about it. Read this article on how you can become your personal historian.

Like most of us, I keep mementos and store them provided that I find some space. Since my parents didn´t force me to take my personal stuff out of their home when I began my studies I kept most of the souvenirs of my childhood at their place. In fact, even afterwards I stored stuff I couldn´t keep at my parents when I moved from one flat to another. It usually ended up in some brown box in the attic. Those boxes grew over years and it was sort of a running gag that I planned to organize it when I visited my parents cause I never really did. Guess what, the day came and I finally took the time to go through all these boxes and encounter my past.

As Aleida Assmann writes, there are two types of memory: storage memory and functional memory. Storage memory is a general archive items that are formally organized. Functional memory contains only a small selection of the items in the archive, brought to a specific order and meant to communicate a specific message. Assmann compares the relation between storage memory and functional memory to the archive and the exhibition space of a museum: The exhibition hall only features a small ammount of the pieces found in the archive. The exhibition focuses on some elements and cut out others. There are mechanisms of selection and exclusions, there are curatorial decisions and, of course, a permanent lack of space. Assmann here refers to cultures of remembrance, but if you think about it twice it may as well be about cleaning up your mess from a houndred years ago.

What did I actually do when going through my mementos? Basically I did three things:

1. Looking through stuff 2. Selecting stuff 3. Organizing stuff

Interestingly, this are not only the main mechanisms in politics of remembrance but also of writing a (hi)story. The work I did can tgerefore also be understood as writing my biography – though without having the intention to publish it. Yet there are two important differences between a common autobiography and the autobiography we create when administrating our personal belongings:

Firstly, a common autobiography is mostly linear and completed in some sense. The collection of mementos is rather chaotic and first and foremost unfinished: when we look at it we know that we may not keep a great part of it the next time or at least keep it in a different way. That is to me the great charm of this type of autobiography: they keep a hint of flexibility and the chance for future explorations. It is therefore good to have not only well organized narratives but also space to rummage for new stories.

Secondly, we already write plain, readable and mostly linear narratives e.g. in diaries and photo albums. But those formats have usually the great disadvantage that they are strictly 2D. It is often hard  to combine objects and narrative. However, unique objects play an important part in telling history, not only in museums. We can organize memories in written text but most 3D objects don´t fit into an album.

In the end (that is after hours behind piles of mementos and future garbage), I came to the conclusion that a combination of boxes and folders would be the best solution to write my personal history. Alas I wasn´t really satisfied with the outcome: Some boxes were too big, some to small, some were just too far away from stuff that I put into a folder. Given this situation I came up with an idea that I am planning to build as soon as I find some time: the Memox. It´s a kind of box museum that provides enough space to organize things AND keep them shuffled. I´ll see how much it will cost me and then you can place your orders

.

[paintitscience]

History as omission and patchwork

I just arrived back from Villigst where I gave a Seminar on fading in & fading out in historical narratives. As it was fun listening to the reflections on how history works, I came up with my own short version of what history is, that is history as omission and patchwork. Beside a stop-motion approach to the flexibility of narratives this are my notes:

  Translation

Whenever we mediate something, it is translated based on our understanding and based on the understanding of the medium we translate into. In both cases we can also call this understanding properties of the mediums. The properties of a human is different to the properties of a paper which is different to the properties of a computer. For us, history begins with us as a medium. Our perception is the first border between us and our surroundings: it is the translation of whatever happens in and around us into our mind as a medium. We translate it again when we use language to send a message elsewhere.

When we tell history we translate our perception of the past into a new medium. The complexity of initial events is not only given overtones by our perception and language but also reduced to the properties of the new medium.  Before we think of history as omission and patchwork we should thus start to think of history as translation. 2 The translation or rather the medium changes the form of the message and by that its sense. Told history is different to history on paper.

Discrimination

In structuralist thought, discrimination is a principle, fundamental to all languages. Our understanding develops by recognizing, creating, changing or adopting differences. Languages work(!) because they allow us to identify, group and order objects and in this way make use of them. Or the other way round: the way we make use of objects is reflected in our use of  language. In history e.g. we usually deal with a lot of  collective forms that bridge spatial and temporal heterogenity: the Romans, the Greeks, the Renaissance. But also rather usual forms like the parliament, Berlin, or the human are the result of discrimination. The use of language decides on who and what can become distinguished part of a story and what drowns in collective terms.

Selection

While it seems difficult to describe the properties of a certain medium we can at least state that all mediums are limited spatially and/or temporally. A book may have 200 or even 2000 pages, most likely not many more and it will certainly not have an endless amount of pages even if you read it on your Kindle. Whatever we want to say in a book: we need to say it on these pages. We need to reduce, to simplify and usually we anticipate the language of the readers so they wont be entirely confused about the content. However, we must not think of omission as a neccesary deficit but rather as a rhetoric device of giving sense to whatever we want to communicate. The fact that mediums are limited allows a valuation of content. By selection and exclusion history emphasizes and debases its content.

Connection

To present a narrative is to claim a senseful link between all presented elements. If we talk about the history of Germany we 1. assume that there is one Germany 2. that it has history and 3. that this history can be told – all this without having started to read the story. By connecting story elements narrators make sense. But while history is patchwork, we can´t  just cobble together whatever we like: Stories become history by being plausible (if we are able to retrace causalities) or by being familiar (if they resemble rhetoric devices we already know from elsewhere).  Whether a story becomes part of a greater patchwork is determined by its connectivity and suitability towards other narratives.

Notes:

For further reflection on that issue check Simone Lässig (2012) Translations in History – History as Translation? Reflections on an Analytical Concept and a Research Topic for Historians. Geschichte und Gesellschaft 38 (2012), 2. ↩

For further reflection on that issue check Simone Lässig (2012) Translations in History – History as Translation? Reflections on an Analytical Concept and a Research Topic for Historians. Geschichte und Gesellschaft 38 (2012), 2. ↩

[paintitscience]

World pt. 2 - Forms

This is the second part of my considerations on #observation s and forms (I wrote “words” before, but forms fits much better). Let´s see where we end up.

Link to part 1

While observation most likely precedes difference in the early months of a beings life, we can argue that after having learned a language difference in form of words, signs, symbols is equally structuring our observation. We tend to think of our language as a nearly universal medium (mostly people exclude emotions but that´s a different story) to describe the world. Languages are tools and as every tool they only serve specific purposes. To communicate in a language fluently means to be able to work with the world in ONE specific way –  excluding many other ways of interacting with the world.

Language as obstacle

The way we learned to understand the world and the way we put it into symbols/words can not only be very helpful but also prove to be an obstacle in the way we experience the world.

This is where riddles emerge. Let´s take this example:

A father and his son are in an automobile. They have an accident. The father is killed, and the son is rushed to the hospital. A surgeon is called in to perform an intricate operation. When the operation is successfully completed, the surgeon looks at the boy’s face for the first time and says, “I can operate, that’s my son!” How could that be?

The most logical answer in this case is usually not the first to come to our mind: The surgeon is a woman. She is the boy’s mother. The word surgeon tricks us, because its cultural meaning is closely connected to male persons. In effect, this is described by Marshall McLuhan´s “The medium is the message” cause it means in this case nothing less than that language as medium we use to describe the world is (or better: constructs) a world itself. If we consider language to be – using the words of Roman Jakobson – a primary modelling system, the world we observe and analyse by using language cannot be more than just a model.

Saving the world

Now that we found out about the probably not so satisfying fact that language can be obstructive to understand the world in a certain way, we should also know about the other (appearently positive) side of the coin: the use of words as preformed concepts can save us from forgetting our observations, at least the ones we are able to reflect and pronounce explicitely. That is because observations we can put into words can become active part of our own lifetime-narrative. Insofar, learning the use of signs, symbols and words can enable and enhance the way we memorize the world. We can find this idea in Ryszard Kapuścinski´s travel diary “Travel with Heredotus”:

I understood that every distinct geographic universe has its own mystery and that one can decipher it only by learning the local language. Without it, this universe will remain impenetrable and unknowable, even if one were to spend entire years in it. I noticed, too, the relationship between naming and being, because I realized upon my return to the hotel that in town I had seen only that which I was able to name: for example, I remembered the acacia tree, but not the tree standing next to it, whose name I did not know. I understood, in short, that the more words I knew, the richer, fuller, and more variegated would be the world that opened before me, and which I could capture.

Languages make us shrink

Languages usually appear only useful to us when we are able to use them and we can only use them if there are other individuals speaking “our” language. But as with everything: more individuals means also more points of views, more  opinions, thus more diversity also with respect to the definition of meaning. The fact that we are able to communicate is a consequence of compromises: we accept and take certain definitions as granted without insisting too much on our own point of view. In other situations we might reject a certain way of communicating (“don´t do/say that”) and by that try to change the way others look at or interact with the world. Anyway, in most situations we don´t bother debating definitions and just use “our” language. This is when words happen to be self-evident. We could thus argue that the more we feel satisfied with our language the less we become explorers of the world.

[paintitscience]

World pt.1 - Observation

What was first? #Chicken or #egg? I try to reconsider the problem for the case of #observation and #forms. Part 1

A fancy question: What is the world? We can find an apparently simple answer in the Tractatus Logico-philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein claims “The world is all that is the case” which is clearified in proposition 1.12 “The world is the totality of facts, not of things.”  Reality, therefore, is an effect of observation and language the medium in which the observation becomes sharable and thus part of a reality.

Observation and the way we observe, not reality, become the most relevant factor to whatever we understand as “the world” because by observing and focussing we actually create things. That said, we might think that it is probably not the best to start with the world, or as Luhmann writes:

»Die Theorie beginnt (…) nicht mit einer Einheit, mit einer Kosmologie, mit einem Weltbegriff, mit einem Seinsbegriff oder dergleichen, sie beginnt mit einer Differenz.« [Theory doesn´t start with unity, with cosmology, with a conception of "world", with a conception of "being" and suchlike. It starts with a difference.]

Continued in part 2.

[paintitscience]

Laughing is not getting it

Can #laughing be an indicator of our #rationality? Read this article for some thoughts on #jokes.

When I was preparing my final exam in polish linguistics I had to memorize definitions of rhetorical devices. That was sort of strange (considering that it was a final exam) and in retrospect not very useful (as I don´t remember any of these definitions anymore). In the list of devices we were supposed to learn there was one that was only mentioned in a sentence without being defined: joke. So I wrote the following short definition on my own:

joke: sudden (unexpected) twist of a semantic scheme

One of the reasons why I still remember this definition but none of the others is probably the way it was useful for me to better understand social phenomena. Taking the defintion above seriously, humor can be considered to be in two senses at the edge of our rationality:

1. Jokes need to be new, you can´t really tell a joke twice. Very similar to a quiz but less interactive, they seem to have the function to point at the limit of our understanding. Thus, a good joke is one that is sophisticated enough to surprise us. Jokes need to be smarter than we are. To be outsmarted is one aspect that makes us laugh.

2. Jokes are in the realm of the strange, a small borderland between the normal/profane and the taboo/sacred. Stories are not funny for themselves. The opinion on (so called) jokes may vary between “This is a good joke”, “That is a bad joke” and “How is that a joke?”. Then, if we call a story a joke it marks our relation between the normal, the unnormal and the abnormal. There are no political incorrect jokes, there are only political incorrect individuals. Thus, confirming a common humor implies the creation or confirmation of a social consciousness, that is a group.

When being asked, most people would be like “uhm, nah, I never remember any jokes”. But actually our life is full of jokes and funny stories without being referred to as such. The notable differences lies in the explicity and implicity respectively. Jokes that start with “Do you know this one?” explicitely establishes a tension, the expecation of a punch line. They order “prepare for something funny!” This jokes works like a quiz as the listener will watch out for the punch line and hopefully won´t get it because otherwise the joke busts. Implicit jokes cause tension out of nowhere, they don´t have to be that witty, they “just” need to disturb the protocol without being too much of a disturbance while being clear about the intentionality.

Some time after I passed the linguistics exam I developed a new definition of jokes or rather accepting a joke:

Laughing is, when you don´t get it.

The best example I can think of to apply this definition is the process of learning languages:

When we learn a 2nd language the learning process often develops from form to meaning: Not being able to focus on the meaning of the new language (because we quite literally don´t understand) we tend to focus on the (at first hand) meaningless sounds and symbols. Sounds we are not used to hear and that we can‘t relate to meaning can be quite funny and even disturbing – especially when they mix up with sounds that have meaning in our own language and are at best taboo (false friends can be pretty mean). They become much less funny as soon as we learn their meaning and use it self-confidently. The tons of subtitled Hitlers from “The Downfall” are only funny for those who DON´T understand german. As a german native you need to switch off the sound to enjoy the parody as much as possible.

Laughing at something rare or odd is caused by our incapacity to understand it as normal. Finding something strange is neither bad nor good – it can reach from laughing at funny cat videos to mobbing an outlaw. However, through the process of learning and studying our perspectives on the rare and strange things may change, normalize them and mix up our sense of  humor.

Thankfully, we don´t need to be scared to become a crosspatch: With a certain knowledge some jokes may become obsolete, but then new ones arise, particularly in sectors of specialized knowledge. Potential proof for this thesis we may find the popularity of sitcoms like “IT-crowd“, “Scrubs” or “Big-Bang Theory“.

Btw. Why is 6 afraid of 7? Because 7 8 9.

[paintitscience]

Notebooks & the Aesthetics of Science

How aesthetic is your science? Some thoughts about the #aesthetics of #science and #notebook s. (post or write about your notebook if you like)

Lately, I don´t find a lot of time to paint anything new, so I decided to post a short article on notebooks & the aesthetics of science. There is a quote I found some time ago in an article in the LA Times by K.C. Cole (redirected from here) that I liked very much. It says:

In physics, truth and beauty often walk hand in hand. Physicists describe theories as “ugly” or “beautiful,” talk about ideas that “smell” or “feel” right. Often, aesthetic judgments lead to discoveries: as in Einstein’s theory of gravity and Paul A.M. Dirac’s discovery of antimatter. Aesthetics, French physicist Henri Poincare said, is a “delicate sieve” that sorts the true from the misleading. Or as Dirac famously put it: “It is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment.”

Thinking about the quote I realized that doing science to me is and was quite often about aesthethics. Blank paper inspires me and I like to have good thoughts organized and well written with the right pen. I never felt the same with typing. Sometimes I need an empty desk to start off with my work, it´s not just procrastination (at least sometimes). My notebooks were always the kind of object where all the strings pulled together. As for many people the notebook was to me the core of my creative work without being much of a scientific tool. I don´t remember reading my notebooks, it was more the thought that things are in there and that I could come back to it, if I wished. I had a sort of obsession to keep it (more or less) clean from messy thoughts and ugly visualizations. Sometimes I started a new one before having filled even 10% in the last one, just because I felt it was leeding nowhere.

This, of course, I´d consider far from rational, but the more I think about it, the less I can imagine my scientific work to lack of a certain (and rather undefined) beauty. Here, I post the photos of a notebook I used for quite a while during my studies. I´m not too proud about the look, but I like how it changed with the time (outside and inside). If you want to share pictures of your notebooks, you´re very welcome to do so.

  P.S. Today I was desperately trying to find the right words to write my thesis, thus I guess it´s no coincidence that I write about aesthetics

[paintitscience]

My Keys // Les meves claus

When I got to know the work of catalan visual artist Joan Brossa i Cuerva some years ago he became to me one of the most inspiring artists. I actually don´t know much about his life´s work (especially when it comes to theatre and cabaret) but I really enjoyed to “read” his visual poems where literal and visual language are entirely blended. For Brossa the poem is image and the image is poem without any hierarchy. At the same time visual poetry wasn´t to Brossa about the picture. More pragmatic, he considered them as a “service to communication” (“La poesia visual no és dibuix, ni pintura, és un servei a la comunicació”). Visual poems are able to unlock spheres of communication that are usually inaccessible when we use text or image seperated from each other. Keys have played an important role in many of Brossa´s visual poems. Some you can see here. As I was always amazed by semiotics I adopted one of his pieces (Clau) and mixed it into something new.

[paintitscience]

Change & Permanence

Change & Permanence – a Walk around Science 2.0 by Lucas Frederik Garske

Lucas Frederik Garske is a research associate and member of the “digital humanities and educationial media research” cluster at the Georg-Eckert-Institute for International Textbook Research. He blogs on paintitscience.com.

Disclaimer: This blog wasn´t designed for long texts. If you find it hard to read the article on this template there is a small “print friendly” button at the bottom of the article that should make it easier for you to read (unfortunately the print friendly version doesn´t support footnotes).

Credits to Tom for cleaning the mess up.

Source: Paul Harris (1996) HYPER-LEX: A Technographical Dictionary.

0. From Web 2.0 to Science 2.0

Talking about Science 2.0 is much more than adopting a fancy and successful concept: What we are faced with is a change of communication in which the web plays an important and decisive role. The internet has always been more telephone than radio, more exchange than information. The change on the web we commonly refer to as Web 2.0 is specifically concerned with interaction and collaboration. As science is embedded in communication processes, it is part of this change. Obviously it wouldn’t make much sense to talk about collaborative or interactive science, as science has always been based on tools and infrastructure that imply interaction and communication (paragraph I). While it seems easy to address ongoing changes, it’s worth reflecting not only on flow but also permanence of current developments (paragraph II). I will argue that instead of claiming paradigm change based on technology we should rather demystify our terminology and focus on the continuity we are facing in 2.0 culture (paragraph III). I propose to describe the most relevant change in science as a shift from invention towards perpetual β-Science as elaborated in paragraph IV.

I. Changing conditions: tools & infrastructure 

Science is an activity that takes place. The underlying metaphor of spatiality was highlighted by Karl Schlögel for the case of history. 10 However, let’s start to reconsider science in a broader sense by reflecting on the conditions under which science is done.

For some forms of science you don’t need much more than a piece of paper, a pen and some time. For other science you need a particle accelerator or a giant server farm. Different tools imply and allow for different types of science. In order to trace back conditionality in science it seems useful to start with the development of tools rather than with abstract thoughts on scientific paradigms or attitudes.

Let’s think of tools as resources that help us do whatever we do when we say we do science. 11 A tool does not have to be a material thing, it can equally be an inspiring discusssion, a useful theory or a set of good conditions at your work place. On the other hand, material things play an important role as well: think of certain IT equipment, a specialist library right on one’s doorstep or simply the money to finance your research. The use of tools was and still is strongly related to spatiality, however, not in the sense of distance but rather in the sense of infrastructure and communication. 12 Infrastructure can be considered as a workshop that provides us with the neccesary tools to take our research to a different level. 13 Yet, since not everyone has access to every workshop, we must shed some light on the accessability of tools and infrastructure. Most obviously, access to tools is restricted legally and economically, but it is also influenced by certain research standards and traditions. 14

A tradition of “stable” references, has excluded and is still excluding a great part of “dynamic” scientific activity generated on the web. Information and sources seem much harder to control and archive and they appear less credible in terms of content and authorship (especially Wikipedia, the nightmare of many teachers and scholars). For a long time, blog entries and online discussions were neglected in “serious” scientific discourse. This is mirrored by the fact that only recently the quotation of electronic sources, especially blogs and podcasts, was addressed by well-respected style guides like the MLA Style Manual (2008) or the Chicago Manual of Style (2010). The work of major platforms like scienceblogs, hypotheses or SciLogs contributed to the reputation of “web science”. On the other hand, certain web phenomena and practices have helped highlight the fragility and instability of traditional research, with users harnessing software and collaborative platforms to detect plagiarism. We can also observe how new projects are working creatively on the lack of control and assessment of information in digital media. Hypothes.is to me is one of the most interesting and ambitious projects in this context.

However, most restrictions imposed by tradition are much less sophisticated and simply based on a lack of practice. The fact that tools are technically ABLE TO make things easier, more efficient or more sustainable does not mean that they will effectively do so. Rather than adopting and learning how to use new tools, users need to discover and appreciate them first. Without an intrinsic need for change, the discovery of new potential stays with online pioneers (nerds?) willing to take risk – that is, to invest time. This includes time to get comfortable with live collaboraton in documents (Google Docs, Zoho), new correspondence technology (instant messaging, Videoconferencing, Wave/Rizzoma) or new techniques of data treatment (Data Mining, Visualization, Coding).

II. Has anything changed? 

But how profound is the change from Science 1.0 to Science 2.0? I will use the example of hypertext to argue that in most cases the term Web 2.0 bottles old wine in new wineskins. While this might sound provocatively negative it can also be interpreted positively as a discovery of old treasures. Innovation is often flawed or challenged by the theory that there are no profoundly new ideas, but merely translations, remixes, revamps.

I remember one of my project members commenting that one shouldn’t be too optimistic about the acceptance of Web 2.0 features in science. He argued that in the late 90s there was a big fuss about hypertext and everyone predicted that in the future there will only be hypertext, which – in his opinion – turned out to be a rash statement. One can argue that the prediction was in fact wrong, however, for a different reason: Even though strongly connected to infrastructures like Wikipedia, hypertext can be traced back to the first uses of reference systems like indices, quotations or footnotes centuries ago. So in fact, long before hyperlinks and Wikipedia became part of our vocabulary, science was strongly based on hypertextual structures. 15 In particular, the fact that researchers usually refer to other researchers in the middle of their work contradicts the assertion that scientific texts are usualy organized in a strictly linear and categorical way.

Of course, references and feedback on the web work much faster and discussions have a structure that allow for flexible responses. What changed are certain habits we integrated into the way we are communicating. Iconic and deictic use of language on the web have become more popular and common. Obviously, we are dealing with a new technology. However, rather than enabeling us to do things differently, new technology makes us look at old practices from a new perspective. As Manuel Lima pointed out on his speech at the Royal Society of Arts (with amazing visual support from Andrew Park), we are currently undergoing a shift from categorical thinking towards thinking in networks. Beyond statements and causes we are becoming more inteterested in connections and relations. Network-based scientific communities and scientific blogging may be seen as a practical implementation of how we do science differently – but they are merely a translation of practices we had before (e.g. publishing an article in a journal & discussing the issue on a conference). In the end, the medium is the message and new media do not substitute older ones: A letter is not an email and an email is not a text message – you feel it as you write it. But you speed up communication a lot when the channel is less important and you can focus on content.

The fact that new technologies most likely won’t create anything essentially new doesn’t mean they aren’t worth playing around with. Quite the contrary, by experimenting with new media we continuously update scientific language. This may raise questions that can only be answered with those new tools. That alone, of course, does not imply that the results are generally better or more precise, but they might be potentially more suitable to present problems.

III. The Scientist as Songwriter vs. the Scientist as DJ 

Let’s come back to the idea that scientists use and produce instruments to do their work and that those tools are resources that help us do whatever we do when we say we do science. This means that everything and everyone can become a tool for science and if we’re lucky we or our work becomes a tool in someone elses work. This makes science an ongoing process of working with and working on tools. We can’t help falling back to science done by others in the past, we are standing on the shoulders of giants. But there is a problem with the idiom: While it makes things way easier to think of the history of science as the history of great men and great inventions we tend to forget about the simple fact that things come hardly out of nowhere (at least – as a physicist might note – in most cases) and that the concept of authorship might be reasonable in a practical sense (reference & archive), but in the end it is implausible if the work is not only(!) done by individuals but in fact by many individuals. Sticking with the image of giants, we would probably agree with the image of the Leviathan depicted on Thomas Hobbes’ famous title – a giant imagined and made up of many.

The so-called “death of the author” (Barthes, Foucault and – with less theory – Twain) predates current phenomena like the flux of massive data induced by search engines like the Web of Knowledge and Google Scholar or digitilization, but today it becomes more relevant than ever. How are we treating these new circumstances? One metaphorical approach could be changing our understanding of the scientist more and more from songwriter to DJ. While at first sight this might appear as a devaluation of the scientist it is rather a revaluation of the DJ: the work of the DJ does not only consist in playing records of others, s_he draws up narratives, samples old bits of pieces and finally turns them into something new (check this speech by DJ Spooky on Remix Culture). The DJ is creating and inventing but the relations betwen his_her work and the work of others is more visible than it is in the case of the person that claims to be the creator of his_her own ideas. S_he is more node than author, more conclusion of successful practices than lone standing monument. The metaphor enables us to rethink authorship without discrediting creation as the essential part of our scientific work. It also gives way to reconsidering mixing and merging as eclecticism that doesn’t need to end up in a blended, unrecognizable and indecipherable melange. More than ever we are able to locate ourself in the network of knowledge that we are working in.

Authorship played and still plays an important role in our society and in science, culturally and legally, but we can argue that authorship is merely the consequence of cutting off the remixing process that has been done to finish the creative process. 16 Certainly, by using references we already confess the hypertextual condition of our work, but still the own work is crucial to what we are doing. There might be a slight chance that the way we locate ourselfs in the work we do will change in the future. Referring to knowledge could transform from pointing to the work of certain authors to the identification and construction of networks of their ideas. If the humanities take the direction that has already anticipated by web technology we will see more collaborative projects and networks of researchers but also the decrease of the authors relevance in scientific work.

IV. Summing things up: (Perpetual) β-Science

The production of science can learn from software releasing strategies commonly practiced in web 2.0 environments. One is the shift from a teleological release process towards a cyclical one. In their frequently quoted article “What is Web 2.0” Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle prognosed the “End of the Software Release Cycle” (traditionally proceeding from PreAlpha taking Alpha, Beta, RC to the Final Release). O’Reilly and Battelle argued that in Web 2.0 not products but operations must become a core competence and users are treated as co-developers. Instead of proceeding from Beta to Final, products stick in a perpetual Beta process, were they are continuously elaborated. A short look on current web 2.0 products show that perpetual beta is already the most frequent case even if release terminology still recurs to Alpha, Beta, Final.

Now, learning from changes on the web does not necessarily imply the end of the publication release cycle, but it definitely challenges the idea of the “final release”. Publication traditions still support the idea of the “stable version” as the main medium to perform science. In many disciplines, especially in Historiography, the monography is still a kind of gold standard. And yes, there are good arguments to produce grand narratives of science instead of short articles depending on whatever you work on. But β-Science does not mean a retreat from greater to smaller narratives but a turn towards more hybrid ones. Indeed, Wikipedia is a good example for hybrid narratives that are equally gigantic. 17 It reads much different than a book but it is technically capable to do the same. 18

We can understand β-Science as a fundamental acceptance of “science in progress”, hybrid narratives and the increased use of “bits and pieces” as valuable parts in collaborative productions. β-Science is a habit, thus part of our socialization. A mundane and certainly not very philosophical illustration for the different forms of socialization is the existence of “Let me google this for you” (you don’t know what is? click here or – less infantile – here). Lmgtfy is symptomatic for a peer group where stupid questions actually do exist, namely when you can answer them on your own – via search engines/Google. There is a gap between those who are using and experimenting with digital tools constantly to work with their questions and problems and those who primarily fall back upon non-digital sources of knowledge. As far as I see this gap is going to be closed as time goes by. Until then it’s worth discussing it critically.

Notes:

Karl Schlögel (2003) Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit. Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik. München/Wien, p. 70. ↩

This means we can call things “good tools” only in retrospect. ↩

 We can see this relation between communication and spatial movement in the use of language. e.g. in polish the term for transport is synonymous with the term for communication (“komunikacja”). ↩

As more or less every tool is based on other tools (check out this talk by Matt Ridley), infrastructure is equally a set of tools and a tool itself depending on how you look at it: e.g. a computer can be considered as tool in a greater research infrastructre, but can also be considered as infrastructure for certain programms running on the computer. Technology on the web don’t make the distinction between the one and the other obsolent but brings them closely together ↩

Of course, both dimensions, traditional and economical, are closely related to each other as we see e.g. in the development of third party funded science. ↩

As far as I can see the term was introduced in the middle of the 20th century. I came up with the poem Cent mille milliards de poèmes by Raymond Queneau published in 1961 as a really interesting example of hypertext you should check out if you didn’t know about it. ↩

In fact recent scandals like Helene Hegemann’s Axolotl Roadkill or Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg’s thesis have been so scandalous in their corresponding peer groups because they covered the remix work done while pretending not to have remixed at all. ↩

There is a live Wikipedia article on the “Longest Wikipedia Article” on the english Wikipedia, currently (05/30/2013) the “List of United States counties and county-equivalents” (617,113 bytes) being the longest one. Most of the longest articles are actually tables but in some cases they resemble tables of contents as you find them commonly in every book. ↩

 At least like most books. I remember reading a book from the “Choose your own adventure” series in my childhood which was maybe one of the earliest hypertext structures I came into contact with. ↩

Karl Schlögel (2003) Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit. Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik. München/Wien, p. 70. ↩

This means we can call things “good tools” only in retrospect. ↩

 We can see this relation between communication and spatial movement in the use of language. e.g. in polish the term for transport is synonymous with the term for communication (“komunikacja”). ↩

As more or less every tool is based on other tools (check out this talk by Matt Ridley), infrastructure is equally a set of tools and a tool itself depending on how you look at it: e.g. a computer can be considered as tool in a greater research infrastructre, but can also be considered as infrastructure for certain programms running on the computer. Technology on the web don’t make the distinction between the one and the other obsolent but brings them closely together ↩

Of course, both dimensions, traditional and economical, are closely related to each other as we see e.g. in the development of third party funded science. ↩

As far as I can see the term was introduced in the middle of the 20th century. I came up with the poem Cent mille milliards de poèmes by Raymond Queneau published in 1961 as a really interesting example of hypertext you should check out if you didn’t know about it. ↩

In fact recent scandals like Helene Hegemann’s Axolotl Roadkill or Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg’s thesis have been so scandalous in their corresponding peer groups because they covered the remix work done while pretending not to have remixed at all. ↩

There is a live Wikipedia article on the “Longest Wikipedia Article” on the english Wikipedia, currently (05/30/2013) the “List of United States counties and county-equivalents” (617,113 bytes) being the longest one. Most of the longest articles are actually tables but in some cases they resemble tables of contents as you find them commonly in every book. ↩

 At least like most books. I remember reading a book from the “Choose your own adventure” series in my childhood which was maybe one of the earliest hypertext structures I came into contact with. ↩

[paintitscience]

Emancipation

#Emancipation is commonly described as a sort of #resistance of a political minority or disenfranchised group. As Chantal Mouffe points out for the case of feminism it “should not be understood as a struggle for realizing the equality of a definable empirical group with a common essence and identity, women, but rather as  a struggle against the multiple forms  in which the category ‘women’ is constructed in subordination” (543). Emancipation only concerns excluded groups and insofar needs to differentiate this group from other ones. However, following Mouffes argument, the emancipation of the subject implies the neccesity of the dissolution of the category. The process doesn’t end here, though, but leads into the identification of new subject positions that are systematically excluded.

This idea of emancipation is closely related to a  “radical democratic project”  which views “the common good as a ‘vanishing point’, something to which we must constantly refer when we are acting as citizens, but that can never be reached“ as “there will always be a ‘constitutive outside” (541).

Source: Chantal Mouffe (1997): Feminism, Citizenship, and Radical Democratic Politics. In: Diana T. Meyers (Ed.): Feminist social thought. A reader. New York, NY: Routledge, S. 532–546.

[paintitscience]

Emancipation

#Emancipation is commonly described as a sort of #resistance of a political minority or disenfranchised group. As Chantal Mouffe points out for the case of feminism it “should not be understood as a struggle for realizing the equality of a definable empirical group with a common essence and identity, women, but rather as  a struggle against the multiple forms  in which the category ‘women’ is constructed in subordination” (543). Emancipation only concerns excluded groups and insofar needs to differentiate this group from other ones. However, following Mouffes argument, the emancipation of the subject implies the neccesity of the dissolution of the category. The process doesn’t end here, though, but leads into the identification of new subject positions that are systematically excluded.

This idea of emancipation is closely related to a  “radical democratic project”  which views “the common good as a ‘vanishing point’, something to which we must constantly refer when we are acting as citizens, but that can never be reached“ as “there will always be a ‘constitutive outside” (541).

Source: Chantal Mouffe (1997): Feminism, Citizenship, and Radical Democratic Politics. In: Diana T. Meyers (Ed.): Feminist social thought. A reader. New York, NY: Routledge, S. 532–546.

[paintitscience]

Sorry, I´m not the author no.2

There´s a quote from Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain´s biography that has become a quite “viral” catchphrase and is usually represented in it´s short form “There is no such thing as a new idea”. To me it always felt sort of ironic to pin Twain´s name under the formulated idea, because it somehow contradicted itself. Appearently it seems easier to adapt the idea that MOST ideas are not genuine than that there are NO genuine ideas at all – as Twain writes. The death of the author as also proclaimed by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault has caused polemic debates and commited reviews up to the present (I recommend this article which partly inspired me to work on the Twain quote). Twain discussed this issue as a matter of copyright infringement which clearly points to the economic relevance originality has in society. People tend to wonder why they should pay for a product if the person who is handing over something to me is not the owner of it. Does the creator become a duplicator?

If there are no original ideas, then the author does not create but merely remixes, reverberates and samples the ideas that have been floating around him_her. The author is not dead, but caught in a web. He_she didn´t disappear but became quite visible as a node within a network of similar ideas.

My first approach was a visualization of  Twain as a hub between other “celebrities”. I used Wikipedia to get some of his “famous” relations and relations of these relations. I came up with a small Boys Club which appears to emphazise the relevance of other “authoritative beings. I wasn´t so happy with that and drew this solution.

Source: Albert Bigelow Paine (2004) Mark Twain: A Biography. Volume III, Part 1: 1900-1907, p. 103.

[paintitscience]

Sorry, I´m not the author no.1

There´s a quote from Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain´s biography that has become a quite “viral” catchphrase and is usually represented in it´s short form “There is no such thing as a new idea”. To me it always felt sort of ironic to pin Twain´s name under the formulated idea, because it somehow contradicted itself. Appearently it seems easier to adapt the idea that MOST ideas are not genuine than that there are NO genuine ideas at all – as Twain writes. The death of the author as also proclaimed by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault has caused polemic debates and commited reviews up to the present (I recommend this article which partly inspired me to work on the Twain quote). Twain discussed this issue as a matter of copyright infringement which clearly points to the economic relevance originality has in society. People tend to wonder why they should pay for a product if the person who is handing over something to me is not the owner of it. Does the creator become a duplicator?

If there are no original ideas, then the author does not create but merely remixes, reverberates and samples the ideas that have been floating around him_her. The author is not dead, but caught in a web. He_she didn´t disappear but became quite visible as a node within a network of similar ideas.

My first approach was a visualization of  Twain as a hub between other “celebrities”. I used Wikipedia to get several of his “famous” relations and relations of these relations. I came up with a small Boys Club which appears to emphazise the relevance of other “authoritative” beings. I wasn´t so happy with that and drew a new solution you can find here.

  Source: Albert Bigelow Paine (2004) Mark Twain: A Biography. Volume III, Part 1: 1900-1907, p. 103.