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Today was the first day of the Hacking as a Way of Knowing e-waste fabrication workshop. Above you can see the text from a fax thermal printer roll projected onto a wall. (At least I think that’s what it is.) Below is an Arduino connected to a a speaker. Stéfan has working on taking a RSS feed and triggering events so we can connect stuff to it to create cool stuff.

We got talking about why fabrication is taking off. Turkel has his lab. Matt Ratto at the Univerity of Toronto has a lab (with a great name – CriticalMaking.com. Some of the reasons are:

• There is a growing amount of electronic waste visible and available to be repurposed (and reminding us of how much we waste.)
• As manufacturing moves out of North America we respond by exploring micro and personal manufacturing through fabrication. It is possible that this is the future of manufacturing here.
• As manufacturing becomes so complex that we can’t imagine how everyday things are made, fabrication gives us a way of thinking about the making of what’s around us. It allows us to reappropriate the everyday.
• The costs of fabrication (tools and materials) have dropped to the point where it is a viable hobby. What will fabrication look like when it is not longer only for those with skills?
• We have what I call an “Ikea” effect where the labour and costs for certain items is shifting. Ikea moved part of assembly (the end assembly that takes relatively little skill) to the buyer by creating smarter hardware. They shifted engineering smarts to joining technology that could be used by anyone. Fabrication benefits from a shift in smarts so that assembly can doable.

Clickstream Data Yields High-Resolution Maps of Science is an article that presents an interesting view of the interdisciplinary relationships between the humanities and social sciences, on the one hand, and the sciences on the other. The article used “clickstream” data or usage data collected at various scholarly portals that show not citation links but connections in the activities of the users.

The resulting model was visualized as a journal network that outlines the relationships between various scientific domains and clarifies the connection of the social sciences and humanities to the natural sciences.

They describe the visual appearance of the visualization (above) thus,

To provide a visual frame of reference, we summarize the overall visual appearance of the map of science in Fig. 5 in terms of a wheel metaphor. The wheel’s hub consists of a large inner cluster of tightly
connected social sciences and humanities journals (white, yellow and gray). Domain classifications for the journals in this cluster include international studies, Asian studies, religion, music, architecture and design, classical studies, archeology, psychology, anthropology, education, philosophy, statistics, sociology, economics, and finance. The wheel’s outer rim results from a myriad of connections in M’ between journals in the natural sciences (red, green, blue). In clockwise order, starting at 1PM, the rim contains physics, chemistry, biology, brain research, health care and clinical trials journals. Finally, the wheel’s spokes are given by connections in M’ that point from journals in the central hub to the outer rim.

This article came out of work funded by Mellon at the MESUR project.

My colleague Stan Ruecker has been create short online movies of humanities computing software tools he is involved in like the Mandala Browser and the Digital Profiles rich prospect browser. These are in the tradition of videos like A Vision of Students Today from the Digital Ethnography folk. There is also the TEI Encoding of Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues. Neat idea – we should get more comfortable with YouTube as a way of conveying ideas.

A couple months ago I stumbled on an intriguing connection. Monty Norman who is credited with the theme song for James Bond apparently adapted it from the score for Bad Sign, Good Sign, a tune that he had written for an ill-fated stage version of Naipal’s “A House for Mr Biswas.” See Monty Norman – The first man of James Bond music. That the James Bond theme song turns out to be based on a song meant to be sung by Mr Biswas is some sort of post-colonial irony.

Here are the lyrics to Bad Sign, Good Sign start,

I-I was born with this unlu-ucky sneeze and what is wo-orse I came into the the wo-orld the wrong way round. Pundits all agree that I-I’m the reason why…

Ray Siemens and friends have put up a TEI Encoding of Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues on YouTube as “socio-cultural representation” of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) to counter the various videos of Tei, a popular Korean signer. There is a blog on the widget hosted by the ETCL at Victoria which explains the origins and authorship of the video.

I came across a story that Kane Kramer, and English inventor, invented the digital audio player and patented it in 1979 though he lost the patent. Here is an interview with the Guardian.

No. I like the iPod, but it feels a bit unfair to have to buy one. I could show you my drawings from 1979-82 and there is an iPod – same size, shape. It feels like mine.

Kane apparently testified for Apple when they were being sued by others.

I just noticed that Mac OS X has a RSS feed screensaver that shows headlines in spiraling columns. When you see an item you want to read you press a key and it opens the item. It is an interesting example of live text visualization. You can see it on YouTube – RSS Feed on my Screen saver.

The RSS Screensaver seems to be built in a visual programming language for the Mac called Quartz Composer. From the documentation and discussions online it sounds like something one can play with easily (when I have the time.)

What would an academic screen saver look like?

I’m working with the folks at our local HPC consortium, SHARCNET on imagining how we could visualize texts with high resolution displays, 3D displays, and cluster computing. The project, temporarily called The Big See has generated an interested beta version. You can see a video on the process running and images from the final visualization here, Version Beta 2.

One of the unanticipated insights from this project is that the process of building the 3D model, which I will call the *animation*, is as interesting as the final visual model. From the very first version you could see the text flowing up and the high frequency words jostling each other for position. Words would start high and then slide clockwise around. Collocations build up as it goes. We don’t have the animation right, but I think we are on to something. You can see Version B2 as an MP4 animation here.

Now we will start playing with the parameters – colours, transparency, and weight of lines.

I was asking myself how if I could use a PDA or iPod for presentations instead of a laptop and came across some articles like HOW-TO: Put PowerPoint on your iPod Photo from Engadget. The idea is that you export your presentation as a series of photos which can then be played out as video to a monitor or video project. (Note that they don’t go out as data.)

I was wondering about this reading about the now discontinued Margi Presenter-To-Go that works with the Palm line. They provide cables and stuff so you can run a data projector from a Palm PDA with enough memory. Alas they have given up on this. Will an iPod Touch version come along?

In the category of cool technology for your iPod has to be the Griffin Technology: iKaraoke. This microphone and iPod connector can be used to sing along to your favorite tunes. It apparantly “isolates the lead vocal track, then fades it, giving your voice room to make that favorite tune yours.”

Even better, they have software, the TunePrompter, that you can download and use to create a video with the lyrics syncronized to the tune. The free (and beta) software then creates a video for uploading to the iPod to work with the iKaraoke.

Very neat, even if I hate karaoke.