So Tell Us, Jeeves...
Ask Jeeves is reputedly more versatile than most search engines, with the sometimes fallible ability to answer natural-language queries. Anyone who has used AJ often will appreciate the satire behind FNwire's "Interview with the Search Engine". A journalist held a natural-language conversation with Jeeves and attempted to decipher its imperturbable replies. Jeeves' feedback gets bizarre, and reminded us of early Hollywood robots that can't make head or tail of plain speech. We posed the same first question to Jeeves and received the same response as FNwire, but some of the other questions led to different answers, which if you know how Jeeves works (see NSD 6.13) is not a surprise. We have a long way to go together, the Jeeveses of this world and we, before man and machine really understand each other.
notes on Heim's Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (Henry Jackman) (Heim's book is QA76.9 .H85 H45 --see Heim's web site for more)
Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies
Netizens: on the history and impact of Usenet and the Internet (Hauben and Hauben)
Chips in the brain and symbiosis (Open University Futures Observatory)
Cybernetics, Time-sharing, Human-Computer Symbiosis and On-line Communities : The Pioneering Vision for the Global Computer Network by Ronda Hauben
meme : (pron. 'meem') A contagious idea that replicates like a virus, passed on from mind to mind. Memes function the same way genes and viruses do, propagating through communication networks and face-to-face contact between people. The root of the word "memetics," a field of study which postulates that the meme is the basic unit of cultural evolution. Examples of memes include melodies, icons, fashion statements and phrases.
19 April
On Thinking
Machines (about Alan Turing, from Science Week)
12 April
So many possible directions... I want to encourage class members to make
their own paths in the resources, construct their own syntheses of
disparate materials. The goal is to engage in RESEARCH in a new way, with
log files and open process, focusing on developing ways to go about
finding
information --using a broad array of resources, keeping track of what's
found and what differnce it makes, developing personal skills.
Among the tacks people might take:
Bringing Design to Software (edited by Terry Winograd --SCI LIB QA76.76.D47 B745 1996)
Just found that you can browse back issues of Wired, from the very first edition. March 1993. The Well is listed as hot in their Tired/Wired list. Interesting to see this go from the hacker-hipster niche to the big-money mainstream in such a short time. Can you make one of your computer course students do a project on this?
Include is today's attempt to keep track as I start to unpack the box into which I've been putting stuff for a good year, whenever I thought it might be useful as eventual stimulus material for the course.
www.livinginternet.com seems like a pretty comprehensive history site, as close to a virtual textbook as one could wish (in Science this week)
7 April
A brief history
of HTML
6 April
The Web,
Hypertext and History: A Critical Introduction
Craig Bellamy
30 March
schedule of classes, to be elaborated
29 March 2000
Our greatest problem is the surfeit of information, of topics, of
perspectives. "Computers" is all but intractable as a subject of study,
yet that's the goal we've set ourselves: to make sense of where we are,
how we got here, where we're going with the most central technology
of our time. If we can tackle this subject, then anything else
should be (relatively) a piece of cake. At the very least, our ways of
tackling this sprawling subject should be transferrable to other
things we take on in the future.
A big part of the problem is the rapidity with which things change: from week to week a lot happens, and some of it turns out to be really important a month or a year later... but while it's happening, its significance is less than obvious. The sheer scale of change is another element. Dan Gillmor noted (in an interview on this morning's NPR Morning Edition show) that there's no precedent, "nothing in human experience to account for a 100,000 times change in anything" in a matter of 30-40 years (what we now see in data transferspeeds and in processor speed). And then there's the granularity of the data we have to work with: getting a broad perspective involves integrating a lot of detail, and moving back and forth in time and in conceptual space. It also involves processing a LOT of disparate information, reading a lot of stuff in multiple media (several forms of paper, electronic text, other electronic forms...), and developing SOME sort of a way to save and link and organize what we find. Some of that needs to be invented, and some is a matter of skills to be acquired by practise. It's certainly a different matter than following the exposition in a textbook, or a series of lectures by somebody who is "expert"... most of the questions are pretty much open, and nobody is an authority on a broad range of them --technical or social or psychological. There's an enormous amount of opinion about what's important, what's factual, what's ephemeral: this is hotly-contested cultural territory. But it's certainly true that computers have become powerful communication machines (that's really the essence of the process we've seen in the Nerds films), meanwhile burrowing out of sight as well and becoming essential to all sorts of aspects of modern life.
These facts make this realm all the more interesting, because there's so much out there and so much being written all the time that the investigator is forced to consider what people say without the conventional academic comforts that define authority (e.g., Jacob Nielsen's predictions for the web in 2000 are worth considering, even if one has no idea who he is or with what authority he speaks. Or, to put it more generally, "on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog"). Plenty of nut theories, but some of them eventually turn out to be at least prescient. And I'd argue that it's a worthwhile experience to try to make sense of a rapidly-growing frontier, that the skills one develops are applicable to calmer backwaters of academe too.