Reblog: the truth is in the back and forth

An interesting experiment by James Bridle.  Article as posted by Bob Stein on IF:book:


the truth is in the back and forth: "
James Bridle (designer and programmer of the Institute's Golden Notebook project in 2008) just published the complete history of the Wikipedia article on the Iraq War.

James writes on his blog: This particular book--or rather, set of books--is every edit made to a single Wikipedia article, The Iraq War, during the five years between the article's inception in December 2004 and November 2009, a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages. It amounts to twelve volumes: the size of a single old-style encyclopaedia. It contains arguments over numbers, differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes 'Saddam Hussein was a dickhead'.
As early as 2006, i wrote in if:book that the truth in Wikipedia articles lay in the edits, rather than the surface article:
In a traditional encyclopedia, experts write articles that are permanently encased in authoritative editions. The writing and editing goes on behind the scenes, effectively hiding the process that produces the published article. The standalone nature of print encyclopedias also means that any discussion about articles is essentially private and hidden from collective view. The Wikipedia is a quite different sort of publication, which frankly needs to be read in a new way. Jaron focuses on the 'finished piece', ie. the latest version of a Wikipedia article. In fact what is most illuminative is the back-and-forth that occurs between a topic's many author/editors. I think there is a lot to be learned by studying the points of dissent; indeed the 'truth' is likely to be found in the interstices, where different points of view collide. Network-authored works need to be read in a new way that allows one to focus on the process as well as the end product.
Four years later, we don't yet have the tools that would let people read Wikipedia articles in 'a new way' but hopefully Bridle's very impressive experiment with this one article will spur efforts to develop new tools for reading online works which are constantly being changed and edited.

"

Reblog: Gamer Dreams

Interesting if contentious research highlighted by Jamie Madigan at psychology of games:


Gamer Dreams: "
Do hardcore gamers have more bizarre but less threatening dreams than non-gamers? One of the things I love about academics is that if you chain a million of them to a million graduate students, then one of them –by pure chance alone– will study a question like that. For example, I’ve been reading about a research program by psychologists Jayne Gackenbach and Beena Kuruvilla about the ways in which the dreams of hardcore gamers differ from non-gamers.
Curious as this is, it’s actually not that off the wall if you do some digging. Research suggests that people, especially adolescents, use violent and/or scary media as a way to practice dealing with life’s comparatively mundane but nonetheless stressful situations. The theory goes that games (and other media like comics, movies, or books) give us a safe place to either become a little desensitized to anxiety-provoking ideas, or to develop cognitive strategies for coping with them. It’s like play fighting, but for your brain.
In fact, this is exactly the kind of thing that one of the studies by Gakenbach and Kuruvilla¹ looked at, except that they examined how our mind may do this mental preparation for real-world threats during our dreams. Termed “threat simulation theory” the idea is that our minds create dreams to simulate aspects of those threats so that we can practice dealing with them and be better prepared for the real deal in real life. So if we’re worried about crime, we may dream about our house getting broken into.

A typical gamer at rest.

Gakenbach and Kuruvilla figured that like dreams, video games, are fake realities into which we project ourselves. This is particularly true with highly immersive games where players start to feel like they are spatially present in the game world. The researchers hypothesized that intense gaming sessions can fill the role traditionally handled by scary and threatening dreams, and with lowered needs to practice dealing with real-life anxiety, there will be fewer threat simulation dreams.
And, lo and behold, when they studied the data from surveys asking participants to recount their dreams and game playing habits, Gackenback and Kuruvilla found that this was generally true. With regards to people’s dreams, the survey measured whether or not there was a threatening event, what it was like, who the target of the threat was, how severe it was, whether or not the dreamer was participating in the threat, and the dreamer’s reaction. In short, hardcore gamers² still had violent and threatening dreams –no surprise, since we often dream about what we encounter while waking, and for hardcore gamers that often includes video game violence– but they reported being less frightened by the dreams and were much less likely to characterize them as “nightmares.” Even more interestingly, this was especially true of those who played lots of first-person shooters.
But is that the only way that gamers dream differently? Nope. In a subsequent study,³ the same researchers also looked at how likely hardcore gamers were to have really bizarre dreams. And honestly, what I found most fascinating about this study was how they conceptualized bizarreness as consisting of three factors:

• Incongruity or mismatching features of dream images
• Uncertain or explicit vagueness of dream images
• Discontinuity or sudden appearance, disappearance, or transformation of dream images

Anyway, the researchers figured that since we see so many really weird things in our video games during our waking hours, that weirdness must seep through into our dreams. Turns out they were right. Upon analyzing more data from surveys asking participants to describe their dreams and gaming habits, the Gackenback et al. found that gamers tended to have dreams with more vague and incongruent content, especially as it related to people and places.
Again, maybe not surprising, but the authors have some interesting theories as to why this is the case, beyond the obvious explanation that we tend to dream about what we see while awake the day before. For example, the more bizarre dreams may happen because gamers’ minds may be conditioned to be open to and even expect unorthodox relationships between concepts and things. This jives with other research showing that playing video games may enhance nonverbal problem solving, especially as it relates to spatial reasoning. Additionally, greater creativity (which also requires one to “get” unorthodox relationships among different things) has been shown to greater dream bizarreness. So hardcore gamers, as a group, may be conditioned to be more creative and better at certain types of problem solving relative to casual gamers or non-gamers. Because …we have really weird dreams. Or rather, we have the weird dreams because of those other things.
At any rate, it’s an interesting line of research, if a little niche.⁴ Now, go to bed –you’ve got some really weird but strangely non-threatening dreams to get to.
Footnotes:

1. Gackenbach, J. & Kuruvilla, B. (2008). The Relationship Between Video Game Play and Threat Simulation Dreams. Dreaming, 18 (4), 236-256.
2. The researchers actually called them “High End Gamers” but that label seems weird to me, like we’re luxury goods.
3. Gackenback, J., Kuruvilla, B. & Dopko, R. (2009). Video Game Play and Dream Bizarreness. Dreaming, 19 (4), 218-231.
4. Says the guy who has a blog about the psychology of video games.

"

Reblog: New Journal Primes You for ppg256

Over at Post Position Nick Montfort writes:


New Journal Primes You for ppg256: 
"Emerging Langauge Practices is a new journal based at SUNY Buffalo (poetic hotbed and host of the next E-Poetry) and founded by Loss Pequeño Glazier, Sarah JM Kolberg, and A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz. Issue one is a real accomplishment.
There are eye-catching creative projects by mIEKAL aND & Liaizon Wakest and by Lawrence Upton and John Levack Drever. There are also pieces by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries and Molleindustria. (We can only hope for further industrialization of this sort and more of these compelling productions in future issues.) The issue also includes a piece by Abraham Parangi, Giselle Beiguelman’s mobile tagging, Sandy Baldwin’s plaintive piece “** PLEASE REPLY MY BELOVED **,” and Jorge Luis Antonio’s wide-ranging article on digital poetry.
The item that particularly caught my eye, though, was this article by Mark Marino: “The ppg256 Perl Primer: The Poetry of Techneculture.” Marino is an officer of the Electronic Literature Organization with me and a current collaborator of mine, although he completed this article before joining me on our current project. The discussion he developed for the first issue of ELP is really in-depth. Marino not only considers the workings and connotations of my ppg256 series of poetry generators, and considers related code and literary traditions from Perl Golf to the Oulipo – he also considers other programs that interest me and that I’ve discussed publicly in various contexts, sometimes with collaborators. And, he connects the coding traditions relevant to ppg256 to technical practices in boy culture and (via needlework) girl culture.
In one section near the beginning of the article, Mark relates a line of BASIC that I posted on his Critical Code Studies forum and notes (partly in jest, I think) the following:

I cannot include the full discussion here (over 5000 words) because as Montfort told me over the phone (in jest, I think), he is planning a book-length anthology of readings about the program.

Well, that’s more or less the project Mark and I, along with several others, are now embarked upon. However, we’re writing this book in a single voice rather than collecting articles about the program. More on that before too long; for now, go and enjoy the new Emerging Language Practices.
"

Reblog: The Geotagger's World Atlas #1: New York

The Geotaggers' World Atlas #1: New York, originally uploaded by Eric Fischer.


These beautiful, ephemeral maps by Eric Fisher are well worth a look.

Some Rough Notes - On reading Alexander Halavais’ "The Hyperlink as Organizing Principle"

I have just finished reading Alexander Halavais' article "The Hyperlink as Organising Principle" published in the recent collection edited by Turrow and Tsui The Hyperlinked Society. (The collection is most certainly worth a look and, as an added bonus, the full text is available free on line.) Halavais' essay offers an insightful account of the nature of the hyperlink and its influence in determining the structure of networked space, opening with the provocative question: "What does a hyperlink mean?" Halavais notes that "this meaning is neither unitary nor stable" before turning to the crux of his argument:

As hyperlink networks become more easily manipulated and reach farther into our social and physical lives, we will have a continuing need to understand the hyperlink as more than a way of automatically requesting documents from a Web server. (39)

The article functions as an exploration of this need rather than offering answers to the questions it poses. Originally Halavais offers a short history of the hyperlink, offering citation as a precursor, and using that as a springboard into his discussion. Halavais considers the meaning of a hyperlink as entirely dependent on the greater context it is in, the nodes it connects or the use it is put to. I would argue to the contrary - I think there is a case to be made for the hyperlink itself as the carrier of some meaning, be that as an add-on / mediator / determining factor to the more central and significant meanings of its greater context and use. This is what my research centers on: the hyperlink as site of signification in its own right. Even more applicable to my own research is his statement further on suggesting that

the ultimate trajectory of hyperlinks may indeed be invisibility, the blue-underlined text merging with light switches and voice commands to become one of a superset of links. (52)

I find this concept, the shift towards invisibility of the link, fascinating. In the past I have argued that hyperlinks necessarily need to be self revealing constructs in order to function. That while the link is naturalised and even disguised the user still needs to be made aware of its artifice to be able to make use of it – therefore links are concurrently masking and revealing their presence in order to create meaning. Halavias gestures towards this when he says that

as the hyperlink becomes more ubiquitous, it is also layered with more meaning. (52)

The article concludes rather abruptly, and I found myself wishing that Halavais had pursued some of his suggestions and allusions in greater detail. His final statement is a re-iteration of the need for a developed understanding of hyperlinks:

In understanding what a hyperlink means, we need to look at what a hyperlink does. Over time, it has come to do more and more. At present, it stands as the basic element of organization for the Web, and as more and more of our lives are conducted through the Web, it becomes increasingly important that we understand how hyperlinked structures are formed and change. (53)

Overall the article is very useful, well written and easily accessible it opens many areas for debate and future study, consistently pointing to the need for a more nuanced view of the hyperlink. A need I feel cannot be overemphasised.