i’m going through my moleskine and adding notes and ideas that have yet to be graced with digital identity. i’ve been retrodating them to represent their rightful place in the flow of my thoughts, but they’re not all dated, so i just guess.
this one relates to the “shut up and get in gear” kinds of thoughts that i’m presently having, so i figured i ’bout as well just post it anew.
i think we were talking about guy kawasaki’s presentation guidelines in the art of the start

——

i hate cookbooks for creativity, but sure, there are key points that can be made and learned from, and in some sense, each of us has to distill our own set of guidelines that we believe in.
but it’s really the culling of them that makes it work for us; it’s the trial and error that leads to the decisions.
does that mean that we can’t pull an eliza dolittle and give someone a formula that makes them lightyears better?
no.
but we shouldn’t be looking for henry higgins to bring us to the next level.
we should be diving in, making mistakes, keeping our eyes open, taking ownership of our own development.

summary of cogsci thoughts on knowledge – knowledge inside, knowledge outside – sets up question of what it means to know and where we get our knowledge (good example of providing snapshot, addressing issues, and pointing out what Won’t be covered to cut off “well, what about…?” threads, as discussed in capstone class the other day. there are also a lot of little charts, well-sprinkled jokes, and a clear interest in the material.)
summary of issues of knowledge inequality
linguistic inequality on the internet
http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=20882&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
summary: most of the internet is in english, and material in other languages is often limited in scope and potentially directed at tourists, not native speakers -> the knowledge divide is perpetuated and even furthered by the lack of linguistic representation online.
solutions

• teach everyone english
• find a way to make people write more things in other languages (would still not allow for everyone to read the same stuff)
• translate!!

//what barriers would still exist even if the linguistic barrier is reduced or eliminated?
//isn’t it still worthwhile to tackle?

translation can’t be centered at the word level because there are just too many possibilities in some languages (amharic is often given as an example) for english words. the mapping is nowhere near one-to-one. translations would be shitty.
translations should instead occur morphologically, at the sentence level.
how do we do that?
it’s quite hard.
we have to teach it.
developed a quecha -> spanish system using the sentence examples given in a dictionary. it doeesn’t work that well, but there are not that many sentences, and it shows promise.
we could use a wiki. maybe.

relationships between morphemes can’t be the whole enchilada, there are also factors relating to linguistic categories, but there wasn’t time to cover that in the presentation.

/*
i don’t understand all the descriptions of how it would work, but it’s an interesting topic
coming from the angle of someone who is more concerned with the work of developing technology that helps people express themselves on their own terms, not only linguistically, but culturally, artistically, technically, whatever, it feels a bit premature, or something. not really premature, i guess, but optimistic? something like – if only information was readable in lots of languages, people would read it and we would read what they write and everything would be hunky dory. i don’t buy that.
wait up… he’s talking about these questions, perhaps.
*/

“Qualms about machine translation”
-it doesn’t work (yet)
-there are encoding problems for character sets that could make it impossible to represent things in these languages even if they were translated (progress is being made here)
-it’s labor intensive
-requires large amounts of data

Basic rebuttal – ok, but it’s still a good thing to do, and we don’t have any proof that we Can’t do it, so we’re going to keep trying anyway

mike talks a bit about wikipedia, and about how their goals are very much in line with these goals, and they spend a lot of time working on translation questions. allying with them could progress things forward by leaps and bounds.
people raise some interesting questions about the inherent biases in the idea of wanting to put all this information online. the internet, and wikipedia, and these translation tools, are all products of the dominant culture that is also responsible for the preponderance of english online. should we presume that it’s a good thing to bring other languages into the mix? john paolillo brings up the point that, right now, languages serve as “firewalls” that particular memes have to break through before ideas are transferred between cultures, and asks whether that might not be a good thing. if everything were automatically translated into every languages, could potentiall harmful memes spread virally in ways that haven’t been possible before? and if we have languages that only have a very small written pool of knowledge, doesn’t that say something about their culture other than just that they are “ignorant”? will the value of the fact that only a few things would be natively recorded somehow diluted by giving them copies of newsweek in their native tongue? are we asserting the values of our culture in irrevocable ways even as we try to be inclusive? isn’t it condescending to act as if the greatest goal of other languages should be an interoperability with english?
the discussion of these issues is unresolved. time ends. people seem split on the matter. but mike seems to be sticking by the idea that it’s true that there are a lot of complexities to the issue, and it’s true that some things are worrisome, but it’s also worrisome that the people who Want access and who have things to say are hindered by these linguistic barriers, and this technology seems like a good that is worth further pursuit. i think it’s hard to argue with that. it is interesting work, and he clearly cares about it deeply. may we all be so blessed.

The dual influence of design and social theory on Informatics in Norway and Scandinavia

• “critical computing”
• “Aarhus”
• informatics as CS in europe? but how different is it? how much more political? (and how different between countries – erik the elder says Very)
• is that what i see informatics as? a politically aware CS? and does political awareness translate into design? -> making statements about how things should *change* [write more about this]
• do i think this should happen in all fields, or is there something particular about computing? [write more about this]
• the potential impact?
• OOP as an outgrowth of of political/critical computing?
• modeling that more fully reflects the full social worldview of the program – users included
• more transparent – leads to easier discussion and greater opportunities for participation
• (erik taking an OOP approach to capstone? -> chunks of the program, not just the algorithm)
• scandinavian object orientation vs. US approach
• US = entity relationships, scandinavian = something else?

—-

• HISP – Health Information Systems Project: globally distributed, FLOSS, participatory, not always computerized, actor-network theory, Foucalt

—-
Summary of sorts:

• OO as a way of weighing all of the players and influences, or at least motivated by that desire
• identifying the parts that influence the whole as a means of better understanding how to direct the impact of the system

• are there any composition tools that allow you to write music pretty much in the reverse style of karaoke revolution? you just move something up and down to indicate relative pitch, and don’t have to understand the notes you’re playing?
  that could be pretty awesome.
  in some ways, i guess it’s limestick.
• cars where you can download horsepower just when you need it? but since there is a physical requirement of the engine in order to utilize that energy, you are still paying, in some sense, for the capability right off the bat, right? i mean, it can’t give you more shocks, or a new air conditioner, if you don’t have them in the beginning. at least not yet.
  so we have to use them enough, on a rental basis, to justify the initial cost.
  that seems brilliant in a potentially evil way, because sure we would.
• ok now, how natural is design? i think i give it more points here than others…

• it’s worth noting that there are different kinds of physical places just as there are different kinds of virtual places. there are things like “town” “country” “home” “party” “star” – notions of place with different contexts and different resolutions. so maybe i shouldn’t write off the physical metaphors as quickly just because Bob don’t cut it.
  I like the idea of creating a ‘landscape.’
  I think we need some sort of persistent sesnse of place if the digital world is going to fully intertwine with the physical.
• right now one obstacle to higher education is the specialized training that is required to get to a point where you can make sense of information. i want more people to have better tools to see more information in more meaningful ways in daily life.
• :) Ben Schneiderman’s head expanded quickly (reaction to infovis mapping of the infovis literature)
• names and titles, even buzzy keywords, don’t seem that helpful to me when people are first starting to figure out how their thoughts and ideas relate to what’s already out there.
  what is?
• key points
• implications
• ‘respect’ given? – response from community
• dynamic visualization is powerful. computers allow visualizations to be much more dynamic than paper visualizations, so levels and variables can be navigable rather than having to be captured from the outset. this seems to be a really important part of computer imagination as applied to visualization
• current infovis doesn’t always take the connections between the information and the physical world into account…
  ?that’s not quite the best way of saying it…
  it doesn’t acknowledge that we are contructing and information space out of erik’s digital material?

• each thing can have multiple representations (and multiple levels of resolution) in the bit pool. Me, my hair, my dna, my body of work, pictures of me… that’s why the interesting challenge to me is connecting the pieces together
• is SLIS the place to focus on organization or is there a place for that within HCI? I feel compelled to think the latter, but I’m not sure why. I guess I think you can’t think about pure IS without thinking about interaction implications. I don’t really think about information the way that geologists think about rocks – as things that are out there doing stuff that’s interesting whether we know it or not. And maybe that’s a trap. Information is something that we are realizing actually exists – has properties that need to be understood before we can maximize our interactions with it. But I think that there’s something unique about it because the only thing it really does is structure human communication, so, unlike rocks, we can’t really take people out of the picture. Can we?

• i’m here, in many ways, because of the fact that erik comes out and says that ‘theory is a tool’, and he wants us to really grok the implications of that
• understanding a material opens up opportunities for design. is our urge to understand actually somewhat motivating our urge to design? i think so. in the way that what we really want is security, control. By understanding what we’re up against, we know how to be in control of it, even if all we do then is let it be. But that’s really pretty radical, in a way, eh? All of our noble aspirations really just boil down to us wanting to be warm, fed, and safefor ourselves and our children.
  Actually, that’s not radical at all (except perhaps in the Bill and Ted sense)
• OK, so i’m a thinker, and i want to encourage others to follow suit, but what are the opportunities and dangers of pursuing a reflective life within academia vs. pursuing one from the outside?
  There is a more institutionalized system of acknowledgement and support within academia, but there is a concomitant danger of sacrificing integrity out of a response to that, and not just out of cowardice and insecurity. Natural desires for community play a role, and that has benefits, too. There are definitely things that we can’t learn about ourselves without seeing our reflection in others. But it’s not like the choice is academia vs. monasticism. There are people to talk to and interact with everywhere, and they all bring unique perspectives. So what do we get from choosing to surround ourselves with academics vs. the ‘real world’?
  *stereotype alert*