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.

I was fatly pregnant, a few days before my due date, and V and I were madly trying to get our kitchen to a stopping point. We’d just had some cabinetry installed (because after the work we did on this building back in the day of subzero temperatures, lead paint, asbestos, antediluvian linoleum adhesive, frostbite, and strange smells, we’ll be damned if we are going to do any more construction work. By we, I mostly mean me. I, I will be damned if I am going take trowel in hand and apply myself for backbreaking hours only to produce work I’d make anyone else rip out. For example, I know quality concrete work, and mine is not it. These days if I can’t afford to have someone do it right I will live years with it not done at all. Exhibit A: persistent hole in the floor which will eventually contain stairs leading to the basement, but probably not for many years.) and we were trying to do something or other to it that probably involved V simultaneously adjusting the drawers with a screwdriver and wiring for new ceiling lamps and me lumbering around pushing things back and forth excitedly and mopping my brow. Things got more and more frenzied until V, like many imminent first time fathers, met with an accident. He sliced his finger open and bled all over the new kitchen. Because I am the (self-educated) doctor of the house, I decided he needed stitches, and because I was concerned I’d pick up some foul incarnation of MRSA or leprosy in the emergency room right before having a baby, I decided we should call my father first. My father, who despite (or because of) penning fancy medical textbooks and having various degrees from sundry venerable institutions, has always enjoyed a bit of domestic surgery, setting broken bones, spaying pets, stitching on us, and hooking us up to IVs as necessary when we were kids; said to tell the patient to lie down and try not to bleed so much. He gave him fifteen minutes to stop bleeding, and when the patient did not comply, gave him another. Then he gave me directions for stitching the finger up with either thread or SuperGlue. I chose the latter and bounced down to the corner bodega for it, where the owner was a bit surprised to see me out alone with my girth at that hour. Anyhow it turns out that if the edges of the wound are clean, you just squeeze them together and draw a line of sutures perpendicular to the cut. You have to use a real amount of glue and hold it closed for a while, but it works perfectly. The patient sometimes still complains that he has no feeling on one side of that finger, but I point out that no one would have brought him beer in the emergency room, and he concedes that yes, that’s so.

Okay fellas, I have this idea for a little film. I keep thinking about the generative thing-a-ma-jings I was making with Context Free and beginning to play with in Processing last year during the days I still had to hold A for every single nap he took. (That would be nearly nine months, I say, coyly displaying my stigmata.) They were just static images, but with the changes from one rendering to the next, each began to anthropomorphize until I felt like I was looking at a documentary series of strange little beasts responding to something mysterious taking place just outside the frame. I was thinking the other day about how I’d like to include one of those little guys as a character in a film. Or maybe, more accurately, over a film. While the film would be fixed, the creature would have a defined “personality” in that he’d respond to certain cues within it, but like a child, his responses under identical circumstances wouldn’t necessarily be the same. The composite would be different every time the movie is played.

I don’t know the details yet. Would I model the entire set so that the creature could really and truly inhabit the same space as the children? (Oh yeah, my idea for the story-let involves little kids, who have some of that quality of unpredictability themselves.) Or maybe his world could just be superimposed over the whole thing, which is probably a bit closer to what I am imagining.

This started as I was sleepily thinking about Merce Cunningham and the brilliance of all those separate compositions crashing together to create these moments of meaning that can’t help being intensely personal for the viewer because they’re perfectly random, and mixing it all up with the little dust creatures in My Neighbor Totoro and realizing that even though I can recall all sorts of things I did when I was two or three years old, I can’t ever wrap my adult mind around my childish reasons for doing them. I thought to myself that for children there is this other parallel world where everything has a significance we adults can as little picture as we can another dimension…

I’ve got the perfect setting and dozens of tiny details and scenes written, though the story doesn’t hang together yet. It’s okay. I think I could work on the creature concurrently.

All right, who’s on board, kids? There’s no way I can corral this beast all by myself.

~

Fine, I grant that Mister Four Hour Work Week probably has some worthwhile things to say. (People I respect keep claiming he does, though people I respect have also read Eckert Tolle, whom I was compelled to chuck in the dirty diaper bucket early in our acquaintance.) But really, the man gets rich off our pathetic desire to contemplate getting rich instead of working. He’s like the lottery and malt liquor. It undermines his credibility. Maybe you People I Respect could just relay to me the worthwhile things he has to say without letting me know where they came from.

I’ve been looking at lot at handwritten type as I work on the first set of aphorisms posters in three to seven minute increments. (They are about half done. I will post them here as high resolution downloads when they are fresh from the oven and I’ve sampled the print versions myself.)

Another fine Twitter toy. Try some onomonopiea!