Archive for June, 2010

DH/Networking Explorations 1

Following My Own Advice

For years now I have been encouraging students, both beginning and advanced, to keep a journal of their activities as one way of breaking down the barrier to getting writing done. I have especially encouraged graduate students working on their dissertations to try it. And I have done this while only being an intermittent practitioner myself. (I confess that this is in part one of the great advantages of having a spouse who practices the same profession: one is free to do much of the daily review over the dinner table. The pret-a-ecouter audience is great, but it disengages one important dimension of the process: writing.)

And so, John Anderson, if you are reading this post, here is me doing what I said, an account of trying my hand at textual analysis.

The Onus

At the end of last year I was invited to participate in an NEH seminar on “Networks and Networking in the Humanities” which will be hosted by UCLA’s Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics later this summer. Earlier this year the participants received a list of homework assignments: two books to read, a technical paper or two, and the production of an edge list.

The books have been interesting. (More on each one in separate posts.) The technical paper was at the border of my ken, but I followed chunks of it. The production of the edge list, a list of links in a network, has been the hardest task. Of course, part of it was nomenclature. “Edge list” through for a loop, new as I am to networkese, but I grokked it with the help of the assigned reading — and a variety of web reading. (Thank you, intarwebs.)

But there was another dimension to the edge list assignment that was stymying me: the data. Yes, I have the emergent data from the boat book, but I don’t feel entirely comfortable rushing to produce more data for the sake of the seminar if it means rushing certain dimensions of the research and I don’t quite have a grip on all the data I already have in a way that I am comfortable pouring it into a new paradigm of analysis and modeling. (Like some mental version of Twister.)

And so I needed a data set with which I could work that would allow me to do the kind of analysis that I hoped network theories and models would make possible. In particular I am interested in applying these paradigms to ethnographic contexts where we need to understand how individuals make their way through the world using the ready-made mentifacts that we sometimes call folklore as “equipment for living.”

What I think that means is that I want to understand how individuals within a given group (a social graph, if you will) draw from a repertoire (network) of forms (stories, legends, anecdotes, jokes, etc.) which themselves variously reflect and refract a network of ideas (ideology) dispersed (variably) throughout the group.

Or, as folklorist Henry Glassie once put it: “Culture is made up of ideas, society of people.” But ideas just don’t bounce around peoples’ heads and they don’t exist out in the world, at least very often, unencapsulated. Ideas and values are usually embedded in the things we say and do.¹ We keep these things around, these stories and explanations, because they resonate with our values and beliefs. At the same time, the forms not only give shape to the ideas but also shape them.

This dynamic interaction has been the focus of folklore studies for the past century. For the last forty years, studies of culture and language have taken an ethnographic turn, sometimes called “performance” and sometimes called “ethnomethodology,” which has focused on the important role that individuals play in the intertextual network of forms (and thus the ideological network embedded within them).

I am one of those performance-oriented scholars. Performance studies has produced a wide range of profound micro-level studies of folklore in action. In the last decade or so, there has begun to be an attempt to build back toward the philological framework from which the performance orientation sprang and against which it initially pushed back. It’s time to fold these things together, and I think network theories offer one possibility for doing so.

The Data

If not my own data, then what other corpus? I wanted to work with materials that I knew fairly well. I began to build a database of Louisiana folklore in print, focusing especially on tales and legends, but the amount of time to get a large enough corpus digitized and into the database, even using OCR software, quickly loomed too large. A great project, but one that could easily take up an entire summer, not the limited time I had to get something up and usable in order to begin to complete the seminar assignment — which I was late fulfilling anyway.

I did, however, initiate some conversations that may yet produce a foundation for such a database, contacting authors of several texts for electronic copies of their manuscripts to facilitate data entry. (The metadata is entirely a separate matter for now.)

The answer to my question didn’t come to me until I was in Providence, Rhode Island for the sixth, and final, Project Bamboo planning workshop. I don’t know if somebody said something or suggested something, but I struck upon the idea of using Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men as the basis for the seminar assignment and for my own initial explorations into the various software tools that are available. I was reasonably hopeful that somewhere, someone would have digitized the text, and I was right: the text is not in Project Gutenberg, nor in the Oxford Text Archive, but at the University of Virginia’s American Studies’ hypertext collection. There I found a hypertext version of Mules and Men put together by Laura Grand-Jean in 2001.

I am not yet at a point where I could deploy a bash script to wget or curl or something else the pages I needed, but since I decided to focus on only the folktales section of the book, the book’s first half, it wasn’t too much of a task to click on each page and then copy the text and paste it into a plain text document in my text editor, Textmate. For reference, I also copied and pasted the HTML in hopes that it might prove useful for getting certain kinds of texts out. That is, I had hopes of figuring out how to tell a piece of software to pull everything out between <blockquote> tags. Unfortunately, Grand-Jean had used some non-standard <table> markup to handle the long blockquotes. I thought about doing some fancy find and replace work with regular expressions, but in the end I decided I would rather work with the plain text, which would also encourage (force) me to re-read the text. The latter proved useful as I came across some long texts embedded in dialogue that were worth including in the extracted corpus.

(The plain text version of Part One of Mules and Men can be found both on Scribd as well as on GitHub — forked critical editions of texts is an interesting idea, no? It weighs in at 55,798 words in 2,127 lines — somewhere along the way I’ll put up some stats on word counts for block quoted text, quoted text, narrative text, etc.)

And Now for Some Software

So I’ve got a digitized text. An ethnographic text.² That will give me people and forms, and I’m reasonably familiar with the kinds of speech communities involved that I can take a crack at ideas. Now I hope to use software to begin to discern those patterns more clearly. (And to produce that edge list.)

The first thing I try is SEASR’s Meandre. Meandre is really something like a software suite, consisting of server and client software, both of which you install and run locally. The server software syncs with the component and workflow repositories at SEASR HQ which are then made available to you through the workbench.

As a quick glance at the UI reveals, it’s not exactly user friendly. Then again, none of this software really is. The good folks running the seminar have provided us with links to useful software: Network Workbench, Wordij, and Pajek (which is, sigh, Windows-only). I am still working my way through these various packages, but I have to say that so far my best results have been using IBM’s Many Eyes.

The poet William Carlos Williams once advised in “A Sort of Song” to: “Let the snake wait under / his weed / and the writing / be of words, slow and quick, sharp / to strike, quiet to wait, / sleepless. / — through metaphor to reconcile / the people and the stones. / Compose. (No ideas / but in things) / Invent! / Saxifrage is my flower that splits / the rocks.” His famous urging to himself and other poets to find the ideas that already surrounded them in the world echoes the anthropological project of the twentieth century: to find the intelligence and beauty in the always already peopled world of the everyday. (My apologies to Williams for eliminating his line breaks but my software, PHP Markdown Extra, wasn’t handling a poem within a footnote at all well.) ↩
To be sure, I’m fully aware of the potential problems of Hurston’s text. For a fuller discussion, see my essay in African American Review (JSTOR). ↩

586 days ago / Tagged: digital, exploration, humanities, network 0

Pro Photographer’s Workflow

Chase Jarvis is the author of the popular Best Camera blog and book. (His argument is/was the best camera is the one you have with you, and so the book is a collection of photographs taken with his iPhone camera. The subtext is that one should focus on such abilities as composition, lighting, and framing rather than worry about the gear/gadgets in your hand.)

Also on his website is a nice video that details his workflow. Jarvis is a professional photographer with not only a serious staff who accompany him everywhere but also a pretty serious collection of gear. Essentially, he runs all his images and video through Aperture and onto hard drives — Adobe, are you paying attention? Video! — the hard drives escalate from portable drives in the field, to small RAID drives in hotel rooms, to a serious XServe set up back at his office/studio.

The takeaway here? Backup, backup, backup. And an important corollary is many, many copies in diverse locations. (Offsite, offsite, offsite.)

A tidbit within all this is the file naming convention they use:

year/project/day/camera/shot

Example:

20100630_ProjectHere_1_S900123.Cr2

586 days ago / Tagged: assetmanagement, data, photography, workflow 0

Console Message of the Day

Apparently sometimes the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, or at least what it is deprecating:

6/25/10 12:26   
AppleScript Editor[3795]    
*** WARNING: Method selectedRowEnumerator in class NSOutlineView is deprecated. 
It will be removed in a future release and should no longer be used.

I came across this while trying to debug my Meandre installation. (More on that later.)

591 days ago / Tagged: apple, irony 0

Knowledge for All

The University of Prince Edward Island cancelled their subscription to Web of Science:

This is to inform the UPEI campus community that we have not renewed our subscription to ISI’s Web of Science database (WoS). We realize this is a key research database for many of you and we have taken steps to ensure access to appropriate alternative resources, as well as the WoS back‑files. Late last year we received notification that our subscription price was going to increase by 120%. A number of factors went into the decision not to renew:

‑ a challenging fiscal climate means that we are unlikely to see an increase to Library budgets;
‑ any subscription increase in these challenging times is difficult, but an increase of 120% is simply not acceptable;
‑ we would have been forced to sign a 3‑year agreement, with additional increases in each of the 3 years;
‑ a weaker Canadian dollar would have a significant impact on our subscription costs;
‑ accommodating this level of increase lends credence to the vendors’ business practices and we felt it important to make a statement against these practices (see http://chronicle.com/article/U‑of‑California‑Tries‑Just/65823/ for a recent decision at UC).

UPEI is also leading an effort to create a free and open index to the world’s scholarly literature called “Knowledge For All”. This proposal is currently being sent to various Canadian and international library consortia in an effort to gain support for the project. One goal of Knowledge For All is to ensure that scholars and members of the broader public are no longer disenfranchised by a broken system of scholarly communication. We will provide the campus community with updates on this effort.

It’s interesting to note that it may very well be the smaller universities that make some of these shifts, perhaps clumsily, first because they usually are closer to the economic trends than the majors. I think such is also the case with my own university.

591 days ago / Tagged: scholarship, web 0

Regex Part Something

I am working on cleaning up a bunch of HTML files that have needless links in them. This is the regex that worked:

<a(/?[^\>]+\>)

The idea was to select everything from the opening of the link <a and to continue to the close of the open tag — thus it didn’t matter to me whether what followed the a was href or name or anything else. I essentially was stripping the links out. I stripped out the close tag, </a>, in a second pass through the documents. (I used a text editor, Textmate, which allows me to search and replace throughout an entire directory.)

594 days ago 0

PB6 Day 2

Advisory (and Apology): This post is finally going up early Wednesday afternoon. A tiring flight back — we sat in an un-air-conditioned aircraft on the ground in Atlanta for half an hour — combined with a delightful series of Father’s Day activities delayed my finishing the post. (Oh, and a cold I caught at some point still tugs at the corners of my ability to focus.)

I’m writing this summary in Boston’s Logan Airport. It’s the Saturday morning after the second and final day of Project Bamboo’s sixth, and final, planning workshop. The Bamboo Technology Program is well under way, and I believe, the proposal will be submitted to Mellon some time soon.

The piece that remains is the social component — perhaps ironic given our current era’s focus on social graphs — and it seems the hardest one to get right. Bamboo’s innovation is not to build tech nor is it to build a community: there have been plenty of efforts to do both. But never has anyone aspired to build both together.

And so the second day was focused on building the consortium that will, at first, seek to support the technology program, and be the dialogic partner that will ensure that technologies support theories and methodologies and that, in turn, reveal that make new theories and methodologies possible.

Our task for the day was a set of interconnected steps: determine the scope of the three working groups that will be the consortium’s first working social units, enumerate three deliverables for each WG, and describe how the WG will form.

The three working groups are:

the Consortium WG, which is to establish the organizational and leadership structure as well as define membership dimensions and benefits,
the Community Outreach WG, which is to develop and initiate a variety of communications efforts to reach out to interested parties and orgs both within campuses as well as across campuses, and
the Bamboo Labs WG, which is to outline the nature of how individual labs and centers can be involved in BTP initiatives as well as what seed grants and fellowships might look like.

Because my mind is not naturally drawn to abstract organizational matters, I decided to join the consortium group. (Sometimes you have to work against your own grain. I can only hope I didn’t impair the group’s functioning in doing so.)

The first thing we decided was that social openness had to be a working principle, working in tandem with technological openness to make it as easy and as welcoming as possible for individuals and organizations to explore Bamboo’s communities and technologies. To do that, we engaged in some semantic re-jiggering, if you’ll allow me to use that term here, in order to open up membership. To do this, we converted the proposed Partner tier into Executive Partner and the proposed Member tier into Contributing Partner. The result matrix then becomes:

Tier	Commitment	Benefits
Executive Partner	$20,000+ cash $100,000+ in-kind	Strong presence on governing board Ability to influence technologies and standards that will determine course of digital humanities
Contributing Partner	$4,000+ cash $19,000+ in-kind	Presence on governing board Ability to vote on board members and other important decisions Ability to be first to adopt new technologies and repositories
Member	$250 – $500 cash	Access to technologies and repositories
World/User

That’s a very quick sketch done as an HTML table, and so forgive me if it doesn’t reveal the fact that there are gradations within the tiers as well as the host of benefits and other matters we discussed. I think the point we were trying to make is that what Bamboo is looking for is people’s time: we want partners to invest time and we want members and potential members and users to invest time as well.

The working groups went through several iterations, and it became clear that, well, clarity is key. Clarity achieved through communication, both internally and externally. But by this point in the day, we needed to begin to wrap up and to have some concrete tasks to achieve. My sense is that the BTP has such tasks and deadlines: I fear that the BOP, or the Bamboo Organizational Program — the social side of Bamboo, er, the consortium — did not quite get there. My hope is that there will be a lot of post-workshop communication and activity.

I volunteered to co-chair the website development working group, which got broken out because it needs to get done and it needs to happen outside the scope of the Community Outreach WG in order to get done.

597 days ago / Tagged: projectbamboo 0

Project Bamboo Workshop 6, Day 1

It’s the end of the first day of Project Bamboo’s Workshop 6, which represents an opportunity for the larger (arguably still emergent) community to shape a response to the new context, which is, as I understand it, a function of the Mellon Foundation’s merging of the Research in Technology program with the Scholarly Communications program.

In the interval between this change in context and the workshop itself, the core PB team has worked with a group of universities who early on had identified themselves as likely partner level contributors to whatever it is we’re building. That has resulted in the Bamboo Technology Project.

The goal of the BTP is to identify “strategic areas of work” within which they can plan and, in the case of Phase I projects, build something — because across the board any number of us agree that it’s time for Bamboo to make something, to have an identifiable product that we can show to colleagues and administrators and others that reveals the potential profit in universities and other organizations collaborating in an open way to build services, software, and standards for knowledge creation and distribution. The list of partners is impressive. (I will list them in an update to this post.) The four major areas of work to be completed in Phase I are: work spaces, scholarly web services, collections interoperability, and corpora space. (Phase I is to last eighteen months, as is Phase II to follow.) The first three areas already have some pieces in place that the BTP hopes to build upon and, at the same time, begin to draw together into the kind of whole that is the promise of Bamboo.

For work spaces, there is HubZero and an ECM (Enterprise Content Management System) which will be the foundations for further work.

For scholarly web services, the partner institutions will be able to draw upon a number of projects, including, but not limited to, PhiloLogic, Perseus, CLARIN, SEASR, and Prosopography. (Links to follow.) Most of these services offer some or all of what are becoming the usual analytical tools for textual scholars: document mapping, concordance, collocation, frequency, etc. Collection interoperability will focus on metadata interchange.

The one area of work that will not be built but will be subject to planning in Phase I is corpora space, which is going to focus on the production of five or so white papers as well as identifying some high priority/profile corpora that can be targeted for a project. (I would like this to be a folklore corpus, of course.)

There are other projects and plans within the BTP, but much of the morning was focused on determining the kind of consortium that would, during this transitional period, support the BTP projects. This is, of course, the reverse of Bamboo’s ultimate goal, but I think it rightly puts resources and imaginations in motion. A number of organizations have stuck with the planning process now for two years, and we will, I think, continue to stick with it because we believe in the greater good that Bamboo seeks to serve. What we need are tangibles to show to others to concretize our participation and to act as an incentive for others to join.

Once more firmly established, Bamboo can do a lot of good, if it can negotiate the somewhat crowded waters of already existing as well as emerging organizations, coalitions, and other consortia with similar goals and/or visions. E.g., CHCI, CenterNet, and now CHAIN. Part of what I think Chad Kainz was struggling to articulate in trying to develop an organizational structure for Bamboo was to make as many people and institutions feel included as is humanly possible. (In all honesty, humanists and their organizations can be a fairly territorial lot, as contradictory as that seems to the rhetoric that we so often deploy.)

One of the things it could do, that was the focus of our table’s conversation not once but twice during the day, is the development of a federated researcher/user identification system for the humanities. Think Thomson-Reuters’ ResearcherID but open source and run by the collaboration of member organizations — and even non-member organizations. Throw in DOIs for publications, projects, datasets, tools, and workflows and you have not only a very powerful, and searchable, data stream but one that fits within every organization’s already existing workflows of annual reports and assessments and every individual scholar’s workflows of vita maintenance. And it would be a natural component/connection to institutional repositories. (I will link to the small presentation I pulled together for my colleagues at UL-Lafayette in an update.)

UPDATE: The document is here.

There was a lot more that happened today. Some of it can be gleaned from Chad and David’s slide decks, which I hope they make available later, and some of it can be found in the planning documents, which may be available on the Bamboo website. For now, I will leave off my summary of the day here.

599 days ago / Tagged: humanities, projectbamboo 0

Strandbeests

This one minute video produced by BMW is a nice introduction to the work of Theo Janssen who is both an engineer and an artist. He builds kinetic sculptures that “live” on the Danish Strand beach. They capture their energy from the wind and use it to live on the dynamic strip of land between the sea itself and the dry sand of the beach. At the end of the video, the Youtube UI presents you with a host of other possible selections. Click around or you can visit Janssen’s website Strandbeest.

602 days ago / Tagged: art, engineering 0

Images of the Week

A collection of images from this week’s news and events:

Japanese Spacecraft Ikaros Deploys it Solar Sail

The Japanese Spacecraft Ikaros Successfully Deployed Its Solar Sail

The Last NASA Space Shuttle Lifted Off

John Howe's Imagining of "Lord of the Rings"

John Howe’s Imagining of the Opening Events in “The Lord of the Rings” — for some reason this image just captured my imagination. I think it’s the combination of the gathering storm in the far background, the sunlit valley in the middle, and the wizard’s urgent strides in the foreground. Few painters these days work all three grounds like the Dutch Masters once did. And I have long loved the work of Brueghel et al.

605 days ago / Tagged: imagination, space 0

Ruskin on Privileging Certain Forms of Imagination

In his 1857 lecture on “Influence of Imagination in Architecture” to members of the Architectural Association, John Ruskin noted:

If we see an old woman spinning at the fireside, and distributing her thread dexterously from the distaff, we respect her for her manipulation — if we ask her how much she expects to make in a year, and she answers quickly, we respect her for her calculation — if she is watching at the same time that none of her grandchildren fall into the fire, we respect her for her observation — yet for all this she may still be a commonplace old woman enough. But if she is all the time telling a fairy tale out of her head, we praise her for her imagination, and say, she must be a rather remarkable old woman.

From The Two Paths (George Allen edition of 1906), page 136.

608 days ago / Tagged: makers, quotation 0

Reading Ruskin

During one of my business trips to London in the late nineties I picked up two books by Ruskin. Bother were published by George Allen of 156 Charing Cross Road. I gave one of the books to Henry Glassie as a thank you for being my dissertation director. I kept the other book, which is entitled “The Two Paths.” I have picked it up now and again and read here and there, but as I focus more seriously on getting “The Makers of Things” written I thought what better way to start the enterprise than to read Ruskin?

“The Two Paths” is particularly interesting, I think, because it is subtitled: “Being Lectures on Art and Its Application to Decoration and Manufacture.” Close to my topic, and here was Ruskin thinking, and talking about it, in lectures delivered in 1858-1859.

I’m happily reading along when I came across this happy character:

I liked him so much I have decided to make him my mascot for the time being. (I am fairly certain he must be in the public domain by now.)

Ruskin rules!

608 days ago / Tagged: jlo, reading 0

Webkit Demos

Apple has a page of demonstrations that emphasize the full possibilities of HTML5. As others have noted, it’s not strictly HTML5, as a number of these features are a function of WebKit. To make matters a bit more complicated, Apple’s version of WebKit is a bit more robust, in terms of cutting edge functionality, than Google’s — and I assume other browsers built on WebKit. That said, kudos to Apple for building there browser on top of an open source project and for making all their developments open source as well. That some of these cool new possibilities only work in Safari should goad other browser providers, especially — and obviously — those also using WebKit, to step up. This is the way to make the functionality of the web move forward.

608 days ago / Tagged: html5, web 0

Study Dreams

I have to admit: I never thought my new study would come together as quickly or as nicely as it has. When I glimpsed the space when we first toured the house, I was immediately taken with it, but I came to worry about both its size and how bright it is. Would it be too small, too cramped a space for thinking and writing? Would it be too bright to see a computer screen? Would all that sunlight make it too warm? How could I ever make the space feel like my own?

The images in the Flickr set reveal, I think, that my concerns have largely been allayed.

A quick glance at the image above as well as the images in the set reveal that the space is indeed small: approximately eight feet wide by eight feet deep. The potential crampedness is offset by the vaulted ceiling which culminates in a four foot square skylight and by the six foot square sliding glass door that, thanks to the faked mullions, reads more like a window.

If those two windows weren’t enough, there is also a three foot square window over a room air conditioning unit that I hope not to use, both because it would blow right on me and because those things consume electricity like beasts. It will be interesting to see if I can pull that off because with so much sunlight coming in, the room does warm up considerably, and, because the room was an addition to the house, there is no direct connection to the house’s central air conditioning. Instead, I have both the dining room windows, that once opened to the outside, opened with a fan blowing cool air into the space. I have also discovered the pleasure, just this afternoon, of lying with my back on the cool marble tiled floor with my head propped up on a few pillows. I did so while reading Ruskin’s “The Two Paths.” It seemed fitting.

The bench on the righthand side of the room as you enter was made by my father while he was in college and is a version of an Eames piece, which, I think, was itself inspired by one designed by George Nelson in 1946. (Anyone who knows furniture history please feel free to correct me.) I’ve covered it with a Tibetan rug which was a present from my mother and which makes it work perfectly well as a divan.

The book case on the lefthand side of the room was built over the course of last week. It is all that remains of my attempt to build a wall of book cases for our new living room. In the end, a lack of decent tools and the incredible head and humidity that has descended upon Louisiana so early this summer defeated me. We have purchased a basic set of cases from a local unfinished furniture store and I bolted together these two pieces which were to be the “towers” that flanked the original design. (See the scan of the original drawing.) The case is overbuilt, but it was the best I could do in order to achieve the functionality I wanted, given my state of mind. The vertical edges will shortly be covered by a decorative strip and the top will receive a pit of crown molding and a bit of other frippery. The bottom will get a heavier piece of millwork that I found in the new garage and is just enough to supply my needs.

609 days ago / Tagged: home, study 0

Privacy is a right.

Privacy is, of course, an evolving social compact. In the modern era, we have enjoyed, thanks both to economics as well as philosophies and policies keeping pace as best they can with the changing economic context, an expansion of privacy. More of us than ever before live comfortable lives with an increased sense, and scope, of what we consider private. Much of our notions of privacy have to do with the spaces within which we interact with others. Thus, we have the notion that our front yards are more public than our back yards, if we have such a thing, because one is more viewable from the clearly public space of the street than the other. Our living rooms are more public spaces than our bedrooms, a fact we emphasize by putting the living rooms between the front door and our bedrooms.

But how do we define privacy within the so-called “virtual” space of the internet? We have come to regard certain information about ourselves as private. Sure, there have always been unscrupulous efforts or acts that revealed our privacy was more tenuous than we would like to believe, but usually those acts have been met with outrage.

Some enterprises or pundits have, in what has always struck me as a power grab, declared that “privacy is obsolete.” Give it up, they tell us. Give it up and we shall be set free. Don’t believe it.

More insidious has been the efforts of some enterprises — and here I am thinking directly of Facebook, but also of that stupid website where you share your credit card purchases and perhaps even, in some sense, GDGT — to whittle ever so slowly on our privacy expectations or, perhaps worse, to bargain with us. There gambit is simple: give up some of your privacy and in return you get … all the coolness that is “social media.” That would include a sense of community, of connectedness that was one of the promises of the internet (but not the only one).

But to return to a better definition of community than the one that gets slogged around the interwebs, what you get isn’t “community” but “association” as Max Weber made so clear at the beginning of the twentieth century. Communities are made up of the people who are around you because they are your neighbors or your family. They may or may not be “like” you in some larger sense. In fact, they often are so unlike you that they drive you crazy. Associations, however, are voluntary groupings of individuals who come together around some abstract sense of togetherness. This could be Methodists or it could be Masons. Ham radio operators were perhaps the first to use an information technology to seek out other like-minded individuals who never knew in person.

Yes, Facebook does offer you a bit of the real version of community, but it does so with an eye to mapping you, your friends, and your relationships. It is the kind of data that organizations, both private and public, salivate at the thought of getting.

And most of us have gladly given up our privacy in order to have this sense of community, of connectedness.

And it was convenient to do so. We could have built our own infrastructure to transport our ideas, but here was somebody else with the light rail system already set up. They weren’t charging money, only asking us to give up a little bit of our privacy here, and a little bit there, and suddenly, once we were on the train and enjoying the ride, they announced, “oh, you have no privacy, unless you ask for it.”

Nonsense.

And so I am deactivating my Facebook account. Not deleting it, because I want to keep my name, but deactivating it.

613 days ago / Tagged: web 0

Excuse the Interruption: We Moved

Please excuse the recent interruption in posts. We have just completed our move to the new house. I am, in fact, posting this from my new study, which is a small space on the first floor but which offers me an incredible amount of natural light: there is a six foot by six foot sliding glass door, a three foot by three foot window, and a four foot by four foot skylight.

Which is to say, be careful what you wish for. I’m a little worried that there might be too much light to work on a computer in this space, and so it could very well be that The Makers of Things will be written this summer by hand and later typed. The marble and brick floors of the new house almost demand that the old ways, the old materials, are better.

Beyond the confines of my small, but well-lit study, the house affords our little family more room for everyone. Yung-Hsing also has her own study, which is twice mine is size but will also serve as a guest room. It will be the perfect place for her to work in the coming year while she enjoys a sabbatical to finish her book. On the same floor as her study is our daughter’s bedroom as well as a sizable landing which has become our daughter’s play area — she has quickly occupied the 12 by 20 space with an array of toys.

Downstairs we have a living area of perhaps the same square footage as the old house but its square shape, as opposed to the longish rectangle of the old living room, actually makes it feel a bit smaller at times. It doesn’t help that books remain in boxes for the time being, while we await more book shelves. (More on the bookshelf-building adventure elsewhere.) But we now have a separate dining area, and a breakfast area that is not in the middle of the kitchen. The kitchen itself is a bit smaller, but a nice sized pantry and a separate laundry room make it feel like we have gained more than we have lost.

I will post images of the new space, perhaps paired with some “before” images,” as things fall more into place.

If you need our new address, just drop me an e-mail at myfullname at gmail dot com. (I trust everyone will know what to substitute for myfullname?)

614 days ago / Tagged: home, house 0