Alchemical Musings

Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired published a provocative essay last week that really caught me off-guard:

The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete

I have been writing lately about the effects that technology is having on epistemology, namely, what is knowable and how we go about knowing.

But, I’ve arrived at very different conclusions than Anderson. I think that our methods for gathering evidence to support a hypothesis is changing - radically - but I certainly do not think that the scientific method (or attitude or stance, as Piet Hut sometimes puts it) is obsolete. Evolving, for sure, but I hope not in the direction that Anderson claims. Intriguingly, Kevin Kelly - who originally launched Wired, wrote an essay on the future of science that think is much more thoughtful and prescient.

A cursory examination of the comments posted on his essay make me wonder if he hasn’t floated a straw man argument, just to be provocative. But after a few conversations with friends and colleges this week, I believe there is something important and scary in his perspective.

My thinking here is greatly informed by a book I am reading this summer by Bruno Latour - The Politics of Nature. In this book, Latour struggles to reconcile the perennial tensions between nature and democracy, science and politics, facts and values, and ultimately, objectivity and subjectivity. He critiques the veneration of facts as the penultimate authority - reminding us to always consider who gathered those facts and why. His argument is far more nuanced and complex, but I really see its re-enactment in the veneration of data Anderson naively concedes.

We must acknowledge that data itself is nothing more than a mediation with reality - and we shouldn’t confuse data with reality itself.  There are many good rebuttals appearing in the comments, but none that I have read point out that Anderson’s characterization denies the politics of instrumentation and data collection - the concepts and constructs that underlie the data, never mind the importance of stories and explanations in our politics and justifications.

This understanding is basic to the psychology of perception as well as the philosophy of science - there is no observation without pre-existing concepts and constructs - the buckets of data we are collecting (and, at least for now, some data is not being collected) are being stored according to organizational schemes - schemes created by humans.

Data isn’t sacred, and its folly to regard it as such. We need our models and the explicit self-awareness that we created them within a particular historical context and theoretical paradigm.

In the wise words of my mentor/advisor, Frank Moretti:

The problem with statistical analysis in the hands of many is that they expect the statiistics to yeild the truth and this leads into the mistake “reporting their findings” in a theory-deprived context. Whenever you are dealing with the human sciences, whether the information is statistical, visual or otherwise, you still have to build a meaningful narrative that requires that you have a point of view that has either overt or covert theoretical assumptions. Without that you are in danger of reporting your views in what Marcuse calls opreational language, a language derived from the tools of discovery rather a serious point of view.

Filed by jonah at 12:50 am under epistemology, fire
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Last week I went back to ‘ol Nassau and attended the annual New Media Consortium conference, held this year at my alma mater.

The conference was very engaging, especially since I don’t think I have ever attended an event geared specifically towards the kind of work we do at CCNMTL. Typically, whether its developer, librarian, technorati, activist, or academically oriented, our work shares aspects with other attendees, but usually not a similar overarching mission. I was reminded how special our organization’s niche is - we should take pride in our projects and values. I also gained a better understanding of how privileged our situation is.

While no two university’s I have ever encountered share the same organizational structure, many now support groups whose primary mission is helping the faculty use new media & technology purposefully. I was astounded at the constraints, and corresponding resourcefulness, these groups exhibit. Most of them have a much smaller staff than ours, and very few actually develop custom software. A Wordpress or Mediawiki plugin is about as complicated as many of them can attempt. And yet, they forge ahead, scraping together whatever tools they can wrap their minds around - and in the era of mashups, the possibilities are growing daily.

It is interesting to contrast this resourcefulness with corporate, and even non-profit, technical efforts I have been involved with. Many of these groups have gourmet taste in technology, and initiatives are often paralyzed until the right tools are developed. The educators show how far a healthy culture of use can go in trumping system constraints.

Overall, many groups are still working with the faculty to get beyond the allure of the media, and demand a greater educational return than “mere” excitement and motivation. Critical engagement must go beyond supplemental materials, as it is decidely difficult to follow through on the promise of a demonstrated educational value. There were many projects that clearly helped the students feel good about their learning, but it is incredibly hard to design a curriculum where these new media objects become a central component in a student’s analysis. In our work we try, and occasionally succeed, to help push the faculty to design assignments where the new media elements are an integral part of the critical analysis - where the learners deeply engage with the media, and bring these elements into play as evidence in support of an argument.

These aspirations place the bar quite high, and often require faculty to develop an radically new teaching style. Additionally, none of us learned this way, though we all seem to be convinced these new styles are superior to the ways we were taught. Consequently, there is a great deal of experimentation and research involved in educational technology. It was really great having these kinds of conversations all weekend long - sharing and exchanging perspectives with the others grappling with similar concerns.

Some of the highlights I learned about included:

• Sun’s Wonderland Virtual World - a free-software, enterprise/education-ready virtual world environment, with more of a professional emphasis than Second Life. Of Sun’s 34k employees, 50% or more work remotely or from home on any given day, so collaboration tools are very important for them. The environment supports authentication, allows for any X window to be shared w/in the world, and even has telephony bridging, so users without a client can call in.
• Emerson’s NEA funded Digital Lyceum Project where New Media scholars Eric Gordon, John Freeman, and Aubree Lawrence are investigating the orchestration of attention during a live event. Research like this could help the backchannel transition from distracting to essential - its fun to imagine being able to cite or reference the flurry of associations, chats, and google jockeying that flow by in the stream of consciousness that live events have become.
• The John Lennon Educational Tour Bus - Wow. Imagine this media studio on wheels pulling up to your school when you were a kid. Three hipster musician/media-mavens tour the country on this bus, sponsored and outfitted by the likes of Apple and Sony - they are rock stars without the responsibility of performing. Students on the bus come aboard without any specific skills, and leave with something they made that day. The bus sports two fully outfitted media workstations, instruments, and even a green room. Buses like this represent an incredible amount of potential, helping students understand they can produce as easily as consume.

I hope in the years to come the bus incorporates a few more Media Fluency lessons (think: MacArthur’s Digital Learning Initiative, John Broughton’s Pop Resources and David Buckingham’s Journal of Learning and Media) at touchstone moments (”Ah! so all media produced incorporates the producers perspective”), a few more lessons on the ethics of sharing (”Hey, how do I share my media with the world, and let others remix it?”), and offer concrete strategies for continuity after the bus pulls away (”I get it - all media is produced on magic buses”)…

Many NMC’ers have drank deeply at the fountain of Second Life kool-aid, and I glimpsed more variations on the educational potential of Virtual Worlds. I didn’t hear too many people riffing on the centrality of realistic memories the environment offers, so this is an idea I certainly need to develop further. I am immensely grateful to the Play As Being community for introducing me to these experiences in a very meaningful context.

Finally, I spent lots of time reminiscing about my undergraduate years. My colleges and I cracked secret codes, narrowly averted an attack by a giant tiger, revisited the Princeton Record Exchange (where I spent $20 and came home w/ 6 cds), and lamented the campus’ new density - a building has sprung up in almost every open space I remember.

Phew.

Filed by jonah at 12:24 am under epistemology, nmc2008, playasbeing, water
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Well, summer vacation is finally upon me - now I only need to work fulltime.

My first year in my PhD program I found myself thinking alot about methods. Not all that surprising, given that one day I will have to defend my methods along with my ideas, but a pretty abstract space to be preoccupied with, nonetheless.

This spring I wrote a paper about all the techniques that the Social Sciences really need to be borrowing from industry and the hard sciences:

• The Bionic Social Scientist: Human Sciences and Emerging Ways of Knowing

where I basically finally cashed the promisary note I scribbled 2 years ago. While it was an effort to write, looking back I am glad this now exists, and I really do understand the argument much better than when I started writing it. This is reassuring, since I keenly aware of how difficult it is to capture people’s attention, and much of my writing will likely go unread.  (I think this peice goes well w/ the Fall’s Out of Thin Air: Metaphor, Imagination, and Design in Communications Studies).

Along the way I also created a little lesson plan around Nirvana’s Lithium & The Abilify Commercial for the Teach, Think, Play weekend workshop with David Buckingham. And, I presented the ZyprexaKills Campaign (slides, paper) in London at the Politics: Web 2.0 confernce.

Phew!

Filed by jonah at 12:06 am under earth, epistemology
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It’s been a few weeks since I first started experimenting with the Play As Being practice, and ventured into Second Life. I continue to appreciate the performative brilliance of utilizing Second Life as a means to study the nature of consciousness, being, and reality. I am starting to imagine a metaphysical syllabus that incorporates virtual world immersion as an instrument for laying bare the everyday assumptions we make about consensual reality.

While I am learning something about myself as I project my identity into my avatar (its almost impossible not to, as veteran SL’ers will attest), I am also learning more about this world, and its seductive attraction. Lots of Second Lifers believe that Second Life is just as real as Real Life (which, for mystics might just mean that both are illusory), but I lean more towards the cautious opinion that Second Life is a mirror, albeit one with a great deal of depth.

Mirrors are quite magical and wonderful (7 years of altered luck, and all that). They can be used to see far and deep — think reflecting telescopes or the michaelson-morely experiments — but they have also trapped a fair share of narcissuses in their alluring reflections. So does SL represent the vanity of vanities? Maybe not, but considering that the energy consumption of a typical SL avatar now exceeds the energy consumption of an average real world brazillian, it is important that folks consider their time in SL well spent.

One upside of my recent journeys is that I now appreciate the research going on in this area much better. Here are two pieces from the Chronicle of Higher Ed reporting on research going on at Stanford’s Virtual Human Interactions Lab:

• What Happens in a Virtual World Has a Real World Impact
  
• Digital Avatars Make the Best Teachers

The claim that a user’s avatar imprints so strongly on their psyche is much easier for me to understand after spending some time in Second Life. I would have been far more skeptical of these findings if I hadn’t experienced the power of this medium first hand.

These findings and experiences really helped me imagine the potential impact of projects like Virtual Guantanamo (which I haven’t personally visited yet). I can say, that when I stumbled across the Virtual World Trade Center I found the location distinctly eerie and spooky. Apparently I’m not alone, as the virtual storefronts on the groundfloor are vacant here too. And, as I learned recently at a symposium at the Fashion Institute of Technology, SL is an ideal environment for teaching fashion and design. While SL has its share of casinos and lap dances, places like Rieul’s Zen Garden and the Interfaith Gardens show a real diversity of interest, consistent with the proposition of SL as a mirror.

As for the core experiment, sprinkling the pixie dust of reflection and contemplation throughout my day, I continue to be impressed by how malleable my awareness can be. In Pema’s words: “repetition is a powerful thing.” Over the past few weeks I have also enjoyed poking holes in reality while at the movies and travelling to foreign countries. Ideas we have been repeating and playing with regularly in Dakini’s lovely Rieul teahouse.

Filed by jonah at 12:15 am under earth, epistemology, ethics, playasbeing, water
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I haven’t posted much here lately, but I have been writing. I just finished my first semester as a doctoral student in the Journalism school and completed a flurry of term papers.

These two are from my pro-seminar with Michael Schudson, a class meant to introduce us to the history of the field and the faculty in the program. Our final assignment was to identify gaps in the field, which is a tough one, as all non-existence proofs are — especially in an interdisciplinary field, there will always be a fringe element occupying the gap.

People in the class interpreted the assignment in two ways — some chose to identify gaps, while other actually went out and tried to fill some. I took the opportunity to begin to pre-emptively answer the question I am sure to be challenged with in the years ahead - the ever-daunting methodolgical quetsion — what on earth am I doing and how am I am doing it?

Out of Thin Air: Metaphor, Imagination, and Design in Communication Studies

(and this was the midterm paper which got me thinking in this direction Transcending Tradition: America and the Philosophers of Communication).

I also took a wonderful class this semester at the New School taught by Paolo Carpignano (The Political Economy of Media - here is the syllabus). The class was all about the shifting relations between fabrication and communication, or more colloquially, work and play. We opened with Marx and Arendt and closed with Benkler and boyd. I took the opportunity to capture some of my experiences working on the Plone project before they fade from memory.

Fabricating Freedom: Free Software Developers at Work and Play

I am really glad to be done with the semester and am looking forward to a few weeks of “just” working full time!

Filed by jonah at 1:11 am under air, earth, epistemology, metaphysics
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This week I saw a presentation given by a member of the Yahoo!/Berkeley research team.

At the talk, Dr. Naaman demoed this unassuming tool that his group has been working on:

TagMaps (live demo, description)

I am really glad I went to the talk, since the demo helped me understand how sophisticated this tool really is. I had a definite ah-ha moment learning about all the new flavors of semantic information soon to be mined from the massive amounts of memories we are collectively recording.

During the talk I was reminded of this recent essay on Evolution and the Wisdom of the Crowds which explains how counter-intuitive these emergent properties are to our everyday experience. But, this seemingly teleological construction of semantic knowledge naturally emerges from a rich enough system, as the flickr research demonstrates.

To clarify what you are looking at here, no humans tuned or trained the system to teach it which are the significant landmarks in these regions. The representation is computed using the aggregate processing of many, many tags. These tags are starting to provide enough information to disambiguate different senses of a word (based on the adjacent tags that are also present). Patterns are also discernible from the spatial-temporal information on these photos, and yearly events (e.g. BYOBW) have been detected and recognized by the system. Formerly unanswerable questions, like “What are the boundaries of the Lower East Side?”, now have a fuzzy answer of a sort, in the form of collective voting.

While the UI work here is neat, it pales in comparison to this Jaw-dropping Photosynth demo presented at TED this year (though it does beat the pants of the current UI of pink dots on a map which forces you to paginate over all the matching pictures in batches of 20). The widget is even available as web service which you can feed your own data into.

But, the real work here is going on behind the scenes. It’s being published and presented in CS contexts, just in case anyone thought this “social media” stuff was for just for kids.

How flickr helps us make sense of the world: context and content in community-contributed media collections

There is certainly lots to digest here. It’s one thing for an algorithm to decide on the most representative photographs of the Brooklyn Bridge essentially based on popularity (though its a shame that avat-garde art photos will be automatically marginalized through this technique), but its quite another to imagine other important areas of discourse being regressed to the mean - its an odd sort of leveling effect that is likely another manifestation of Jaron Laniers’ Digital Maoism.

The presenter did note that social media designers do need to anticipate feedback effects, as when they launch a new tool and users adjust to the new conditions and modify their behavior accordingly (or begin to “game” the system to take advantage of it).

We are a long way from 1960’s AI and its conviction that the world is best modeled and represented as a series of explicit propositions.

Filed by jonah at 6:19 pm under air, epistemology
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Literally. See my post on The Plone Blog:

Plone University

Filed by jonah at 1:09 am under epistemology, water
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Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it. — E.B. White

I don’t want to spoil the punchline of this Onion story, Woman Overjoyed By Giant Uterine Parasite, but let’s just say that there is nothing like the power of irony to drive a stake through the distinction between empirical observations and value judgements.

This is really the best argument I have come across to explain what’s wrong with the psychiatric medical model. It’s not that mental conditions aren’t correlated with changes in biochemistry or neural brain state. Its the value judgment that is implied in labeling the phenomena an illness. And this little Onion article does a great job of conveying that.

It’s got me wondering what other naturally occurring conditions can be explained/judged in more than one way?

Filed by jonah at 11:44 pm under epistemology, ethics, fire
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The state of health coverage in the U.S. is absolutely appalling. Consider the recent incident involving Blue Cross/Blue Sheild that my friend at Interprete has had to endure, at great expense of her time and patience - Blue Cross, Blue Shield Chronicles. The notion that a latent condition is a preexisting one is preposterous - it’s like saying you were fated to have this condition, so it was pre-existing.

The citizen journalism angle to this story is interesting too. It is quite remarkable how powerful google alerts can be in the hands of a PR rep or an investigative journalist, and how a mouse can roar in a way that demands a response (let’s hope that we can help insure a positive one).

Subversive tactics which emply tools like Google alerts and ad-words style targeted advertising potentially refute Sunstein’s argument in republic.com about disjoint sets of users in cyberspace. His argument basically discounts the ability to spam for your cause and the value in tracking all communications around a particular issue or theme and confronting opposing viewpoints where they occur.

Filed by jonah at 8:31 pm under epistemology, ethics, fire
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My visits to the Informedia lab have consistently generated futuristic ideas (and corresponding posts), and my trip this spring was no exception.

This time I was thinking alot about what kinds of schemas will be employed after their prototype moves beyond watching grandma? When this kind of a system is inevitably rigged up to a school or a prison, or fed raw streams from live surveillance cameras?

My money is on the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, an instrument that is arguably becoming the de-facto catalog for the full range of human behavior and experience.

In some respects, this progression parallels the notion that nobody dies of old age anymore - they die of heart failure, cancer, or other diseases. And, as the title of this post cheerily states, we are all dying, we are all sick, and we are all crazy.

As crazy as it sounds, the DSM is poised to become the lens through which we interpret all of human behavior. Given its breadth of coverage, I challenge anyone to find me a normal, healthy individual. It’s ambition reminds me of William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, except in our generation, the full range of human experience has been radically pathologized.

BTW - the folks who brought us Sexual Orientation Disorder are hard at work on V 5.0 of this catalog - and there is a call out for diagnosis suggestions.

Filed by jonah at 12:18 am under air, epistemology
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