Oh internet, you are so generous. I nervously post a messy, holey, unraveled idea like that (see previous post) and you take me seriously! You write me orderly, considered responses and send me links to things I’ve never seen before and I begin to understand a bit more of what it is I’m wanting. You always did that and I am ashamed to be still surprised. Because of you, I am starting to understand how my long ago, initial, uncertain impulse to venture an unfinished thought online was the embryo of this idea of a collaborative, inductive investigation of big sloppy messes of data. I will remember that in general the embarrassment with which I post is in direct proportion to the kindness and generosity of the responses. Thanks, fellas.

All of this started because we all keep talking about the democratization of information, but taken to it’s logical end, it can’t be. Information is no more democratic than money. Shareable information is valuable when it is not shared. Once it finds it’s level, we’re all in the same position relative to one another we were to begin with; though we’ve likely all shifted some against the physical world (probably not in a good way). I thought and thought about that and gradually fell into the frame of mind that makes showering and eating futile because one only gets dirty and hungry again.

But then it occurred to me that when information loses it’s value, it loses it’s menace as well. And it sounds like a little thing, but that was the moment I realized that maybe the important thing is not information itself or the possibility of highly specific answers, but the questions we can ask of it. We want to be able to inquire in a way that doesn’t lose meaning amidst the wash of data.

Rebecca Solnit, from A Field Guide to Getting Lost:

The important thing is not that Elijah might show up someday. The important thing is that the doors are left open in the dark every year.

I leaped out of bed because my head was buzzing and wouldn’t stop, so here goes:⁰¹

By definition the semantic web needs ontologies, right?⁰² and those are defined by shared vocabularies, but shared vocabularies aren’t static. They don’t emerge instantly and once they do, they change constantly… Language, not just vocabulary—syntax too, is one of the great intentional and accidental ways in which whole swaths of people are disenfranchised. A controlled vocabulary can potentially silence and isolate thinkers who relate ideas differently or are not fluent in the language defined by the dominant culture. In the case of objects, the concession to the dominant culture matters less than it does around ideas. Does it matter for raw data? Probably. If only for findability.

In the real world, and in the world I want to inhabit, there’s no such thing as a standard connection between data, documents, people, and ideas. (I mean for bigger, nonspecialized systems. Obviously the shared vocabularies that emerge around individual object and document types within specialized systems are very useful.) But when I consider giant quivering blobs of raw data, I want to be able to grab the blobs I’m looking for, smash them together, and let the computer do its computerly work—look for the mathematical patterns invisible to me because of my looping, sliding, sideway crabwalking mind; and then I will use my messy human mind to determine the meaning in those patterns.

For example, I want to be able to grab historical economic data from the 1930’s on a county in rural Mississippi, present day epigenomic data from people born in the same county after 1970 (Fine, this is happening in the future), data on the dental health and daily personal habits of those people, and data on the population of fish in Mississippi rivers between the 1930s and now. I don’t need the computer to make sense of all that, just to give me mathematical patterns. I think everyone may be focusing on answering questions when we ought really to be supporting the asking itself.

Obviously the tricky part is making the tools that allow people to work with data that way, to make those mad demands, to perform those kind of intuitive, inductive searches… Inductive search. I’m not sure how else to describe that sort of inquiry. (I wonder if it already means something else. Too sleepy to research it.) There are several discrete parts to that scenario: finding the blobs of data, which is where dense tagging makes sense, handing it over to the computer⁰³, studying the patterns, and starting again with a slightly more nuanced question based on the results of the last inquiry.

So that’s an exciting example for raw data, but the same thing simply doesn’t work for ideas or objects (or does it?). Kate Ray, (who made a nifty short documentary giving a very general idea of the Semantic web) says some relationships, such as manufacturing, are certainly static and ought to be defined, and I can’t help thinking the reason the definition of the relationship between those two objects or airplane parts is presently consistent and tidy is because it is not sitting out in the open, growing a crazy fuzz of lesser lines connecting each physical piece to some abstract idea in a particularly personal and idiosyncratic way. (I’m deliberately misreading a bit here, but this would be the time and place.) If for some reason I stumble upon this imaginary object, this recognizable chunk of an airplane, right this very second, I will relate it, in this order to: the long delirious burning blue, the firebombing of Dresden, a Martin Margiela flight suit on a guy I met at a work party some ten years ago, the painful vintage red heels I wore to the same party, ebay, rain, walking tours in England, the rest cure, incarceration, lead levels, and handcuffs, labor pain, qi, inner ankes… I’ll stop, but the point is, it may be possible to ask a machine to make sense of that stuff of mine (maybe it’s even me.) But, that odd, kinked chain will be totally different ten minutes from now and unrecognizable by tomorrow morning. (I just reread that list thirty seconds later and it’s already wildly different.) What does that mean?

In fact, the time axis is the fascinating and puzzling thing to me about graphs of personal data such as Facebooks’s social graph or hunch’s taste graph. Facebook obviously fails to make sense of the time axis, given how poorly it represents the real weight a user places on her personal relationships. I wonder how or whether hunch takes time into account. When I answer their questions I am often acutely aware that my answer was or will be different one day or one year or ten years out in either direction. It’s the same thing that has always made me squirm about Cosmo quizzes and the Meyers Briggs test. I want to make a three dimensional graph of lumpy, crazy, mismatched, ongoing, relentless data that just won’t stay still, any more than the brains and bodies of the humans creating the data do. And then I want to demand things of it.

The Archigram Archive is finally online. It’s be-yew-tiful. BLDGBLOG has a good entry on how it all looks from here in the future.

Yuko Shimizu’s sketch blog. Lovely illustrations with charming and ingenious depictions of her process.

Confederate History Month.

John Pawson’s House of Stone. Not sure why the recycledness of the granite is the headline though.

An installation by Kit Webster. The best moment of the video is when someone wanders between the screens and it looks suddenly magical instead of just digital.

There’s no one like the Racialicious-ers for elucidating complex systems of power. Thanks for thinking so much about children, Peterson et al.

Excellent essay on the state of e-readers.

Generative drawings by Tim Hodkinson (via Data is Nature)

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A while ago, we were out of town for ten days and hired a neighbor’s kid to pet-sit for us. (This is a boring story, but pretend I am MimiSmartypants for a sec and can render a bus ride riveting.) We left specific directions about what to do each day. He’s a nerdy eighteen, a bit of a homebody who’d done some pet-sitting for us in the past, though in retrospect, I think his father supervised on those occasions. We didn’t expect any problems. However when we got home the cats were skinny and insane with hunger and the house was torn to shreds and smelled much worse than a barn. Judging by the unused food on the counter and empty water bowls, the kid must have come once to pick up the cash, and not bothered to return. I was livid. It took all my self control not to cross the street to break his face or at least demand he return the cash. However, it’s not good politics to quarrel with neighbors, and since the cats yet live and his father is a nice guy, I decided to let it go. I expected never to see the kid again, but oddly enough when I saw him and his father the other day he, saluted me politely and asked how I was, all limpid eyed and innocent. He was totally unashamed; in fact, appeared unaware that he’d done anything wrong. It’s not an act. He’s not clever or devious enough. But it’s shocking and confusing and I keep on being shocked and confused every time I encounter him. What does it mean? Does he have lead poisoning, amnesia, softening of the brain, a sociopathic tapeworm, terminal idiocy? And how could he be too stupid to throw away all the food he didn’t feed the animals? Did he really think we wouldn’t notice the piles of uneaten food or their stiff little starved bodies? Every time I see him, I scrutinize him carefully, but nothing; he’s totally blank.

~

I couldn’t sleep between two and five am last night so I read all about Elizabeth I, and pored over her portraits for a while until I fell asleep and dreamed about a triptych called the Pelican, the Phoenix, and the Rabbit-Horse.

~

I’m not sure piles of links here make much sense for anyone besides me. I still need a place to keep the special ones, but Twitter really takes the place of old timey link blogs. There is a constant flow of stimulating stuff. As I use it more, I find myself visiting link blogs less and being more attracted to journal and essay sites. There’s a generosity to that kind of communication. It feels personal, a gift given at some risk… Formspring seems to focus both the sweetness and risks of personal writing. People answer questions they ought to ignore. They engage questioners who ask things they have no right to… Is this something like the Japanese concept of amae? I can’t quite understand amae any more than I can comfortably intuit the correct moments for formal or informal you in a romance language; but in the best cases on Formspring there’s something both sweet and sinister in the presumption of the questioners which corresponds to a surprising generosity and indulgence on the part of the person responding. In the worst cases, the person answering becomes complicit in her own harassment by choosing to respond. (When I first started reading about the crazy harassment going on among young teens, I assumed respondents did not have the ability to accept or reject questions. They do, but choose not to.)  Now all the grown ups are asking ourselves why.⁰¹ However, I think adults misunderstand how truly passive the act of reply is. All that typing throws us. We assume it is an active response, while in reality a silent refusal requires a far more commanding and adult sense of self. I wonder if some of these kids are unconsciously waiting for explicit grown-up permission to take up the kind of space a refusal entails? It would be counter to the fundamental emphasis on compliance that grown up American culture demands of children. It’s impossible to require children to both obey our demands and defy everyone else’s… The other thing I wonder is what larger purpose this cycle serves. I have this sudden picture of an imaginary aggregate of this particular flavor of interactions among this particular age group as a little cog busily turning away within a larger cultural machine. What is that machine and why does it demand such a thing? What are we cranking out?