Grounding Networks
Great critique by +David Berry on the occasion of a review of three publications which tell the utopic story of networks. It emphasizes that the idea of networks remains a model (or I would argue an epistem) to approach to reality in showing its limitations, black boxes and hidden power structures. Coming more from Networks as a Culture Technique for the organization of social space, software development etc. from a Science Theory point of view on could continue to head to a direction Berry touches at the end of his review saying:
the network as an explanatory approach offers a particularly enticing view of society for those who want to argue for a break or discontinuity with what has gone before.
This point illustrates the strategic use of the network metaphor in discourse. Nevertheless within scientific discourse (actor network theory) for example the network can have repressive function withdrawing somebody the control over his discursive object. Implementing the network perspective for a special object complicates the use of this object as a whole. As there is no metaphysic answer to what is a whole and what is compound (Wittgenstein) but only a situative pragmatic the notion of strategy as argumentative strategy appears again. There is nothing out there which is more a network than it is monolithic. How we treat it only reflects our discursive and strategic goals.
The Poverty of Networks. The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007, pp. 515, ISBN 0 300 12577 1, pbk £11.99 Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open …
by Niels-Oliver Walkowski
on the 14. Januar 2012, 14:36 o'clock Leave a comment
Digital Humanities, e-Science, Research Objects, OAI-ORE
As pointed out in the short introduction to this blog some weeks ago the blog will be the core of a demonstrator to an evaluation and adaption of what I call the Aggregating Research Representation approach for the so called Arts and Humanities. Not invented by the OAI-ORE 1 model but increasingly promoted by it the idea to extend the entities of publication within science led to different realizations of what van de Sompel describes as Compound Information Objects 2. The goal is not only to publish an article in the end of a research process summarizing the results but additionally the whole package of material and information which supported this research process like Data, Algorithms, Stuff Information and so on. There are two main ideological patterns by which these ideas are driven: a) to guarantee transparency of research in the way that people can follow up and question the process behind a conclusion presented in a text. b) to offer the possibility of reuse in the way that other people can transfer parts of others work to their own research context without the need to start from the scratch. Therefor the concept of Aggregating Research Representations is continue reading »
by Niels-Oliver Walkowski
on the 11. November 2011, 10:07 o'clock Leave a comment
Call for a new approach in Digital Humanities
In his interesting new Blog Post David M. Berry gives a nice new model of the development of Digital Humanities from Computing Humanites over Digital Humanities to somewhat he calls Digital Humanities 3.0. Whether it is an adequate term to describe what he is looking for, because of its marketing like speech and its notion of a linear progress, the concept behind it is a fascinating one. It’s a demand for a more reflexive approach in the Digital Humanities, the attempt to raise questions how the digital, the software, the computional change our methods, our way we interact with material, our concept of truth and last but not least our epistemology. Consequently he argues for a ‘Computational Turn’. In this perspective Digital Humanities began as a support for analog research and research methods stepping forward to a field where humanities core qualities were transformed into tools to interact with now born digital content in a ‘humanities way’ (reflexive, qualitative …) to point out now that this transformation process isn’t a one way movement. What Berry demand isn’t new in its media reflexive position and has a long tradition in Media Theory and a performative sidekick in netcritics and hacktivism as he mentioned himself. Identifying that this perspective is astonishing absent in Digital Humanities it would be an interesting discussion to clarify what a computational turn could mean contrasting to classical media theory and where the connections are. Moreover identifying the connections to other theories with same perspectives could produce a profile of what are the main questions for the Digital Humanities followed by such a perspective. For example Derrida’s concepts of trail and postponement are really interesting approaches to discuss what Berry calls the “Streaming Internet”. At least there is still a practical problem consisting in the heterogeneous backgrounds of people acting within the Digital Humanities and the still contingent discussion of what Digital Humanities should be. Grounding this issue there is still an opposition of humanities orientated computer specialists and humanities researchers with computional capacities within the field focusing on there backgorundperspecitves. This often leads to infertile discussions and a lot of misunderstanding. So a question for the computational turn would also be how it should be spelled out to make the communication about it possible.
by Niels-Oliver Walkowski
on the 15. Februar 2011, 10:51 o'clock 1 Comment
Regarding automatic inferencing
As an reply to the OKF Blog entriy about machine reasoning I want to outline some personal concerns. The problem of automatic inference is not the lack of context which could be compensated as you have demonstrated. It is the fact that context from the perspective of the rdf statement or an inference machine is in many cases indescribable. Not because there is an ontology missing but because there are many possible contexts imaginable. A very simple phenomena of this problem is the ambiguity of many words. The more abstract the concept continue reading »
by Niels-Oliver Walkowski
on the 4. August 2010, 09:16 o'clock Leave a comment
Atomizing the discourse
The Open Knowledge Foundation Blog is introducing the project Debategraph today. Debategraph describes itself like this:
Our goal is to make the best arguments on all sides of any public debate freely available to all and continuously open to challenge and improvement by all.
ItâEUR(TM)s a little bit sad and more over dangerous for political discourse and open debate to see âEURoecomplex, multi-dimensional problemsâEUR as you describe it broken down into a small set of prejudices (as in the case of âEURoeIllegalâEUR Migration to the USA). ThatâEUR(TM)s a problem which I found underestimated in general with Open Data. Data appear to be facts, because the contexts of them are blackboxed either in a machine like in Nature Sciences or in Methods like in Humanities and so on. In this sense Data always is somehow affirmative. They have a message which is alwas the message of its creator. There are many situations in which this is not problematically but when it comes to political discourse it is, as seen in the example above. The question why someone raises an argument, who raises it, in which situation, with which interests is a generic part of political debates which canâEUR(TM)t be represented in the approach of Debategraph.
by Niels-Oliver Walkowski
on the 2. Juli 2010, 11:18 o'clock 1 Comment