Bob Gorrell Editorial Cartoon

(if the link ceases to exist I may put the cartoon up just for the sake of it)
(I've cross-posted this at kubernetes and will be updating it from there)

This Thursday, we're meeting not at 2 but at 3, and downstairs. You'll do course evals, and then we'll pop up to the cluster where you can meet with me to chat about the progress you've made on your projects and/or to work on them.

However, I, like Jen, have several questions about the limits that Drucker seems to set forth in defining this field. Jen asks whether or not this field is defining a new episteme, and I think that Henry's post alludes to this same question in a certain way. Are we actually seeing a new way of knowing or does this harken to ideas of remediation?

Also, I am wondering if the radical subjectivity that Drucker privileges is the only way to approach the concepts of graphesis. Is subjectivity an inherent part of graphesis? Is the purpose of graphesis to provide meaning or context (or both)? This question stems in part from Drucker's example of using "complex temporalities in humanities documents and research" (20). In some ways, those are the artifacts she and Nowviskie are using, and as such one might make an argument that they can be viewed as objects if our goal in the graph is to demonstrate a context into which ideas are spoken instead of parsing meanings.

Finally, I'm curious about her theoretical discussion of the act of interpretation and the creation of knowledge (18) in relation to our previous reading from Greg Urban on Metaculture. Urban's discussion of alpha, beta, and omega cultures has prompted me to wonder about the ways that Drucker describes the knowledge production through the interaction between reader and text. Take a text, let's say Barthes' The Rustle of Language. As I read this book (alpha), I am engaged in an interpretive--meaning making--act. My interpretation (beta) then becomes viable, but only in relation to the alpha. If it turns to something new (omega) then it becomes a new alpha. But if Drucker is concerned with disrupting the assumptions that come attached with alphas, this would create a headache for me. She writes, "Representations are always premised on abstract conceptual schemes--or models--that shape any individual expression within constraints and patterns of thought--even as that realization provides a crucial insight for breaking through existing habits" (20). The situation, then, shapes the expression (a la Bitzer's "The Rhetorical Situation" or Foucault's discourses). However, if that's the case, who gets to claim what meaning should be inserted once we break through? Instead, I think that graphesis could be a very productive tool that demonstrates the discourses, those culturally received ideologies, that shape situations, but I get the sense that Drucker is headed the opposite direction. So I guess my response to Jen's musings would be that it's not a new episteme in the way that we generally thing of new epistemes, as an original or authentic, but it certainly can and does shift our focus to different ways of expressing, and thus interpretting/interrogating, our ideological constructs.

. . .create a critical framework within which the forms that are generally used for the presentation of information can be understood and read as culturally coded expressions of knowledge with their own epistemological assumptions and historical lineage. (2)

What is really neat about this is that her method and analyses throughout the article seem to be incorporating structuralism as well as post structural modes of analysis. This is a move that has been lacking in the humanities because, as she states, often our analyses focus on a single aspect with in the production of the text (e.g. the creative context, the receptive context, the form of the text) rather than the multiple layers of meaning and context which produce The Text in its entirety.

Rather than seeing the form as the mere tool or invisible transmitter of meaning, in graphesis, the form becomes just as much a part of the meaning as the conditions in which the text ways produced. (I am thinking of Derek's post here – the way we read and make meaning is largely influenced by how the text is formatted on the page, in the book, by our bedside table, etc.) So for Drucker, graphesis is a way to begin to find a method to speak of all of these intricate moments of meaning making as a whole. Or at least make them visible by stripping or changing the mostly invisible formatting choices we currently use. I like this. It seems productive.

But, my question about this article still remains. Can graphesis mark an epistemic shift? Can it show us something new that we have yet to see more than traditional textual forms? I am not sure. When I visited Kartoo this week, I was struck by how much sense its visualization of my topic (immigration) made. Much more than goggle scattershot hit ranking method of information. Taking in context, geography, state practices, advocacy groups, and then laying out how these connected with one another made all the sense in the world to me. It is like work that I try to do with information when I need to sort it. So, is graphesis (at least in this scenario) thinking for me or validating my own presumptions? Or perhaps I would have never connected those particular dots? So I see how Kartoo was giving me a new way of knowing information, but can I say that it shifts how I know completely? Hmmmm . . . still not sure on that one.

The emphasis on the way graphics function within a system of mediated exchanges with human users brings information design closer to its cousin, interface design. A language of usability, rather than compositional form, has appeared in parallel with the growth of graphical user interfaces and the realization that their design principles give the lie to the static nature of print artifacts (16).

Knowledge management (more specifically, knowledge mining) struggles with this front/end back representation when it attempts to address obscure data that resides in anything but a keyworded artifact. But as Ty has noted in some of his past posts, commercial search tools (Google, Yahoo, etc.) aren’t very good at or capable of extracting context from an artifact. Graphesis may be an opportunity to reconsider how our computer systems can function more like humans; assimilating and contextualizing large amounts of information by reading simple search result statements.

I recently read about a company that developed a “phonetic search engine” that can process the basic units of speech that comprise phonemes. Instead of trying to analyze entire words, the engine can search audio recordings 50 times faster than text-to-speech systems by match specific units of speech. Is there an extension of this concept to graphics and images, or does the fundamental subjectivity of images make this difficult?

Drucker notes the limits of Boolean search logic, which I think are actually less popular today (I think we’ve discussed this in class). How cool would it be to look at an artifact a an expression of language, “… whereby [the] encoded expression provokes a response for cognitive processing (3)” – where our search engines understand syntax and semantics?

A second, lesser known case is that of Ramón y Cajal. Cajal’s meticulous technical illustrations of networks of neurons “led to the conclusion that the basic units of the nervous system were represented by individual cellular elements (which Waldeyer christened as "neurons" in 1891). This conclusion is the modern basic principle of the organization of the nervous system.” (Marina Bentivoglio, “Life and Discoveries of Santiago Ramón y Cajal”)

I think we were teetering last week toward one of Drucker’s key points in our discussion of social function and the human elements of networks. When we map a network, the knowledge we construct is a function of the visual artifact rather than a simple representation of “what is already known in a graphical form” (20). This points to a theme we have visited several times, that the network diagram derives its meaning from a certain degree of reductionism, for instance by defining a single characteristic (safety, knowledge, access, engagement, as in Cross et al.) transecting a given moment of time, or by homogenizing the character of the nodes, as in Watts’ mathematical models. The result is a partial insight into patterns of human activity from which certain limited inferences can be drawn.

Finally, I puzzled over the theoretical flavor of Drucker’s writing. While the scholarship in one sense seems exhaustive, the epistemological agenda Drucker is working has been much more richly elaborated in poststructuralist theory and elsewhere (e.g., Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature) for quite a while, yet Drucker only skirts the marches of lit crit and language theory. For instance, had I been trying to make her distinction between “model” and “representation,” I would have felt much more beholden to Peirce’s distinction between symbolic and iconic signs, which is only mentioned parenthetically. And McGann is cited to stand in for a piece I recall as Barthes’ essay “The Work of the Text” (which, if memory serves me, argues that the “text” is a virtual production, a system of signification that emerges between the signifiers and the reader, who does the work of production). When it comes to radical subjectivity, Drucker points toward quantum mechanics before Continental theory. There seems to be a politics of choice here. As scholars closer to the English department than physics or design, what are we to make of this?

The first is Friendship and Educational Choice: Peer Influence and Planning for the Future by Rachel Brooks. The author investigates how friends influence each other when making education decisions. Just reading the front and back flaps of Brooks's text makes me wonder about peer pressure and whether it can be used as a force for good in a writing classroom. Are there such studies?

The second book is Democratizing Innovation by Eric Von Hippel. I think this book will be of immediate interest to anyone studying the open source movement and innovation management. Von Hippel seeks to "explain how innovation by users provides a very necessary complement to and feedstock for manufacturer innovation" (2). If Von Hippel's predictions are accurate, I wonder if we will see an increase in usability studies by manufacturers or even a rise in SNA studies. Von Hippel has a CC version of the text available for download: Democratizing Innovation. He also has some of his other papers available for download if you're interested. Although, I haven't linked to his homepage because it looks awful on my iBook (the text is running off the page).

I'd like to connect up with something Jen said in Chris's post, "I guess the question(s) becomes (at least for me) how can we begin to make the shift from knowledge as commodity to knowledge as communal through SNA or the web or our classrooms?"

This work is making clear the large degree to which people learn how to do their work not from impersonal sources of information but through interactions with other people

This bumps up against an essay by Amy KM Hawkins, that I just ran across at Kairos: Bytes and Sites: Ethnography as Writing Pedagogy in a Digital Age; specifically, When ethnography and technology meet.

What do you think?

Perhaps the most dramatically overlooked graphical forms in the humanities are the most familiar: books, pages of print, letterforms, and all the structures of textual and paratextual apparatus. The graphical features of texts are generally regarded as trivial, except by students of bibliography, book history, or design. But basic codes for reading are graphically structured. (10)

One among the many clear, cogent points offered by Johanna Drucker in "Graphesis" is that as readers of conventionally formatted, paper-bound texts we're already accustomed to recognizing and apprehending meaning by way of graphical features. To a degree, the comprehensibility of the text is immediately gauged by its adherence to given graphical organization schemes. Readers generally anticipate and perhaps even rely on some stylistic consistency in graphical patterns. Grievances against conventions—whether violations of margin spaces, fonts, paragraphing as indicated by tabbed indentation, punctuation, and horizontal, left-to-right lines of characters—stand to perturb readers, and in this sense, a few simple graphical conventions are the mainstay of fixed texts (well, yeah, and fluid texts in various interfaces). Because I've experienced a subtle shift in the way I approach such graphical conventions with students over the past few years, I appreciate that Drucker acknowledges the way such "basic codes" are commonly perceived as "trivial." The distinctions between fixed texts and fluid texts, between intertial forces and accelerative forces all seem to coalesce in this rather simple-seeming matter—the graphical design of texts (broadly construed) and the design's relationship to meaning, the experience of the texts, etc.

Scientific Conference Falls for Gibberish Prank.

At one point in my small-time career as a writer for a start-up software company, I authored a frustrated e-mal based on notes I had taken at a meeting of the minds. The e-mail largely consisted of strings of buzz words and catch phrases (very similar to those Collin parodied so nicely for us in class). I got called before the CEO (who was also President and Chairman of the Board) to explain, not because he was offended, but because he wanted to know what I meant. I told him I had no idea, but that this was the way we were talking to one another.

As I recall, Cross et al. were concerned with knowing what other people's knowledge is to determine whether or not they will be helpful to us in solving our problems. I'm more interested here in whether or not I have enough knowledge of a problem to identify it and state it stuch that I can figure out whether or not someone else's knowledge will be required. It seems to me that a lot of what goes on is somewhat red herring-ish as we go about problematizing things. In other words, when we look for problems, we will find them, but are they really problems?

I have a friend, and I think I've mentioned this somewhere before, who frequently winds up with two drinks in his hands. Invariably someone quips about his drinking problem (two hands; one mouth). My friend invariably replies, "It not a drinking problem, it's a drinking opportunity" and proceeds to down one of the beverages.

Well, I think I've digressed far enough from the point, but I do find the linked article above interested for the very fact that we try our best to normalize things, to make some sense out of them or bring them back to our own grids of intelligibility. As such, gibberish spit out by computer makes perfect sense, particularly when we are in an environment that breeds fear of not knowing answers, and thus fear of asking questions.

A profound confusion about the nature of sociality, which was partly brought about by recent use of the term ‘social network’ by Albert Laszlo-Barabasi and Mark Buchanan in the popular science world, and Clay Shirky and others in the social software world. These authors build on the definition of the social network as ‘a map of the relationships between individuals” ... The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They’re not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object.

Through our reading, I find I’m fixated at a discussion back in Watts (224) where he explains “threshold rules.” These are rules of individual decision-making, concerned with the threshold at which a person (node) in the network responds.

The actual position of an individual’s threshold depends on precisely to what extent that individual cares about future payoffs versus short-term gain from acting selfishly, and also how much influence he or she perceives themselves as having. It’s possible for individuals to have such a high threshold that they never contribute, no matter what other people do, or such a low threshold that they always contribute. (225)

Not only that, but the input that can go into a choice to