Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 214
January 14, 2014
Organizers of the Petition Against Mass Surveillance: Eva Menasse
*Born in 1970 in Vienna, Eva Menasse is an Austrian journalist and novelist living in Berlin. She covered the court trial of Holocaust denier David Irving as a journalist, and was the winner of the 2013 Heinrich Boll Prize for literature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Menasse
http://www.popmatters.com/review/vienna-by-eva-menasse/
http://www.goethe.de/ins/au/lp/prj/bkm/rev/aut/men/enindex.htm
“Menasse is a wonderfully gifted writer, very well served by this lively and idiomatic English version. In essence, “Vienna” is a collection of anecdotes swaying back and forth between past and present. But such is Menasse’s skill that the structure of her novel is all-but-seamless: it seems the most natural thing in the world to tell that family history in this manner.
“The characters are vivid and memorable, none more so perhaps than Aunt Gustl, the narrator’s great-aunt, a convert to Catholicism who had managed to trap a dim-witted but impeccably Aryan husband, “Dolly”, into her all-embracing grip. Her attempt to save her equally dim-witted son Nandl, Vienna’s least accomplished forger of cheques, at a time when she claims to be on her death-bed, is one of the many moments of high comedy in this remarkable book. Gustl tries (unsuccessfully as it turns out) to bully an influential public servant into quashing the prosecution against Nandl by giving him an expensive box of chocolates. Of course expected to succeed, for, as the narrator remarks, “in Vienna, more than anywhere else, corruption is quite often the result of extreme embarrassment.” Her failure sends her scurrying back to her bed.
“Many other memorable characters move effortlessly over the surface of this accomplished novel. There are football stars and blackmarketeers, Nazi sympathisers and communists, eternally squabbling members of a tennis club and a large, noisy family which, for all its peculiarity, is bursting with life and vigour. Menasse’s narrative embraces worlds far removed from Vienna: wartime England and a tuberculosis sanatorium in Canada and also the jungles of Burma where two British soldiers are killed by tins of pineapple dropped from a supply plane. Vienna is one of the funniest books to have come my way for many years. Yet, despite its lightness, grace and irony, the book often came close to bringing tears to my eyes….”
Organizers of the Petition Against Mass Surveillance: Juli Zeh
*Juli Zeh is a lawyer in Leipzig who turned to thriller writing, wanders through the Balkans with a dog, and has a punk band. Oh, and she writes some dystopian sci-fi, too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juli_Zeh
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/may/18/germany-pirate-party-political-gap
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-method-by-juli-zeh-7800875.html
http://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/centre-study-contemporary-womens-writing/languages/german/juli-zeh
“Zeh’s socially critical view can be found in all her works. In her travel prose Die Stille ist ein Geräusch [Even Silence is a Noise] she describes her journey to the bomb-shattered post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina– only accompanied by her dog Othello. As in her other works, it shows her powers of observation, and her language is rich in metaphor and wit.
“The novel published in 2004, Spieltrieb [Gaming Instinct] tells the story of two young students – Ada and Alev – who blackmail their teacher Smutek.
“Starting very calmly the novel ends – after an act of violence – disturbingly. Zeh questioned ideas of good and evil when writing about ‘immorality and its consequences and [this novel] questions the continued validity of traditional principles and values and poses one of the most significant questions of our time: who today can say what is good and what is evil, and how can they know?’
“The Novel Schilf (2007) was published in 2010 in English translation with two different titles, originally with Havrill Sacker as Dark Matter, and with Nan A. Talese as In Free Fall.
“Her latest novel Corpus Delicti is a dystopian novel about a society that takes over control of the health of its citizens. When Mia’s brother commits suicide in prison, she loses faith in the system which controls everybody’s health. Standing up against the system, she refuses to obey the law. During her trial she is prepared to die a martyr’s death, but it turns out that she is being tricked. There can be similarities drawn to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and also Kafka’s Der Prozeß [The Trial].
“The main question Zeh puts forward is that of personal freedom and which rights state and legislature are allowed to have. In Autumn 2009 she went on tour with the German alternative band Slut. They composed several songs based on her book, and even published it as a CD. About the same time she published the political essay Angriff auf die Freiheit [Assault on Liberty: The Obsession with National Security] together with Ilija Trojanow. They strongly criticize the fact that personal freedom is in danger because the state observes its citizens via internet, CCTV cameras etc. People are made to believe that it is for their own good and is necessary after the events of 9/11.
“In 2008, Zeh made a formal complaint to the German Interior Minister about the infringement of the constitutional right to privacy posed by the introduction of biometric passports. Juli Zeh was awarded the Gerty-Spies-Prize for her political commitment and her socially critical writing.”
Organizers of the Petition Against Mass Surveillance: Iliya Trojanow
*Iliya Trojanow (left) and his fellow Petition organizer Juli Zeh.
*Writers often have quite odd biographies, but this Trojanow guy is something special: a Bulgarian German novelist who writes in German about Kenya, India, Saudi Arabia and South Africa. Oh, and sometimes Trojanow writes science fiction.
*Obviously the NSA, Homeland Security and/or State Department didn’t make many friends in literature when they decided to freak out about Trojanow’s much-stamped passport.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilija_Trojanow
“Life
“Trojanow was born in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1965. In 1971 his family fled Bulgaria through Yugoslavia and Italy to Germany, where they received political asylum. In 1972 the family travelled on to Kenya, where Ilija’s father had obtained a job as engineer. With one interruption from 1977–1981, Ilija Trojanow lived in Nairobi until 1984, and attended a German-language school.
“After a stay in Paris, he studied law and ethnology at Munich University from 1985 to 1989. He interrupted these studies to found Kyrill-und-Method-Verlag in 1989, and after that Marino-Verlag in 1992, both of which specialised in African literature. In 1999 Trojanow moved to Mumbai and became intensely involved with Indian life and culture. He has lived in Cape Town, returned to Germany (Mainz), and then to Austria, where he currently resides in Vienna.
“In the 1990s Trojanow wrote several non-fiction and travel books about Africa, published an anthology of contemporary African literature and translated African authors into German. His first novel, “Die Welt ist groß und Rettung lauert überall”, appeared in 1996. In it he recounts his family’s experiences as political refugees and asylum seekers. After that appeared the science fiction novel “Autopol”, created on the Internet as a “novel in progress,” “Hundezeiten”, a travel account of a visit to his Bulgarian homeland, and books dealing with his experiences in India. His reportage “Zu den heiligen Quellen des Islam” describes a pilgrimage to Mecca.
“Since 2002 Ilija Trojanow has been member of the PEN centre of the Federal Republic of Germany. Among other awards he received the Bertelsmann Literature Prize at the Ingeborg Bachmann competition in Klagenfurt in 1995, the Marburg Literature Prize in 1996, the Thomas Valentin Prize in 1997, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize in 2000 and the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in the category of fiction for his novel “Der Weltensammler” (The Collector of Worlds) in 2006.
“In 2013 Trojanow had criticized the National Security Agency (NSA).
“In 2013, he was denied entry into the USA for undisclosed reasons. He planned to attend a scholar’s conference there.”
****************************************************
http://www.authorsforpeace.com/1/post/2013/10/nsa-scandal-usa-denies-iliya-trojanow-entry.html
Don’t Cross this Line
by Priya Basil
First published: Authors for Peace, 4th October 2013
You’re invited to a conference in Denver. You’re issued a US visa. You’re checking in for the American Airlines flight to the US when the airline personnel tell you that due to “Border Crossing Security” they’re required to inform American authorities of your presence at the airport. You’re then advised that your entry to the US has been refused. You are not allowed to board the flight and are told to go back home.
This was the experience of Iliya Trojanow on Monday 30th September 2013 as he tried to fly from Brazil to Miami. Mr. Trojanow, a Bulgarian German writer, has long been critical about surveillance in general and has recently been very outspoken about the NSA scandal. Many, including the PEN American Center, fear that he was excluded on ideological grounds.
Literature does not have to be political, but writers sometimes must be. Where and in what circumstances we do this determines the level of risk it entails, yet throughout history writers have asserted their freedom to speak even knowing a huge personal cost might be exacted. Those of us writing in countries like the UK and Germany would like to believe we can reasonably express our opinion on anything without threat to our person or livelihood. Iliya Trojanow’s experience shows this is not the case. It is shocking that a political expression of outrage made in democratic Western Europe can result in barred entry to America, the country whose national anthem proclaims it as “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” The exclusion of Mr. Trojanow suggests the opposite for it is a repressive and cowardly act. Every country has a right to police its borders, none should have the right to stop someone crossing them just because he or she disagrees with those in power.
There are times when writers have to step beyond their work and make clear what it is they stand for. Since the revelations from Edward Snowden we have entered one of these times. Writers in Germany understood this quickly. In a matter of weeks, an open letter to Chancellor Merkel from the novelist Juli Zeh was signed by German authors, including Mr. Trojanow, and registered as a public petition on change.org. On Wednesday 18th September, I joined in as Zeh and twenty other writers marched on the Chancellery to hand over more than 67,000 signatures collected for the petition, and to demand a more satisfactory response from Merkel. No doubt Germany’s experience with the Gestapo and the Stasi has made citizens especially wary of the implications of surveillance. Nevertheless, the concern comes not just because of the historical precedent, but from an acute fear of what indiscriminate mass spying on every facet of civilian life means right here, right now. Sometimes the present is its own best messenger.
The messages are unambiguous: we are being spied on and if we protest against this we may be stopped without good cause during the innocuous, ordinary course of our lives. When innocent people are treated this way, there’s only one reason for it – to scare them. When writers are singled out it’s an attempt to silence them. This appears to be the aim of the UK and US authorities respectively with the detention of David Miranda and the debarment of Iliya Trojanow. It is an aim that I sincerely hope will fail. Yet I know and understand the human tendency to caution where one’s own interests may be adversely affected.
Many people, including writers, rely on being able to travel back and forth easily between the US and the rest of the world. Therefore, after the Trojanow case, many more people may think twice about signing petitions or vocalizing their concerns about the NSA. The thing to remember is, you may need America, but America also needs you. Our world now is dependent on exchange between countries, whether of people, resources, culture or ideas. The US cannot exclude everyone who disagrees with its policies. That’s why more of us have to protest. We must act as ‘Border Control Security’ for our own privacy and freedoms. Writers, important harbours of free expression, should be ready to lead the way. America needs to see that there are lines even it cannot cross.
********************************************************************************************
PEN Letter Protesting Exclusion
of Ilija Trojanov from the U.S.:
PEN Letter Protesting Exclusion of Ilija Trojanov from the U.S.
PUBLISHED ON OCTOBER 1, 2013
On September 30, 2013, German PEN member Ilija Trojanov, a Bulgarian-German writer, was denied permission to board a flight from Brazil to the United States. PEN American Center fears that he was excluded on ideological grounds, and sent the following letter to the Department of State and Department of Homeland Security.
October 1, 2013
The Honorable John Kerry
Secretary of State
U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street, NW
Washington, DC 20520
Acting Secretary Rand Beers
Department of Homeland Security
U.S. Department of Homeland Security
Washington, DC 20528
Dear Secretary Kerry and Acting Secretary Beers:
We are writing on behalf of the 3,350 professional writers who are members of PEN American Center to express our profound concern over reports that Bulgarian-German writer and PEN member Ilija Trojanov was recently denied entry to the United States.
According to reports, on Monday, September 30, 2013, Mr. Trojanov was checking in for an American Airlines flight from Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, to Miami, for a connection to Denver, Colorado, when one of the airline personnel told him that due to “Border Crossing Security” she was required to inform American authorities of his presence at the airport. He was then refused entry on the flight and told he had to fly back to Germany.
We understand that he was denied a visa earlier this year, but on a second attempt and with the support of an American university he was finally granted a visa that would have allowed him to attend a conference of the German Studies association in Denver; he has also been invited by the Goethe-Institut to participate in a New Literature from Europe festival in New York in November. Mr. Trojanov was en route to the German Studies conference when he was refused permission to board his flight on Monday and instead returned to Germany.
Ilija Trojanov was born in Bulgaria in 1965 but in 1971 fled the country with his parents via Yugoslavia and Italy, and obtained political asylum in Germany. He is the author of more than 20 books, including Angriff auf die Freiheit (Attack on Freedom), a polemic on surveillance that he co-wrote with Juli Zeh and published in 2009. We understand that in July he penned an open letter, along with Juli Zeh, calling on German Chancellor Angela Merkel to respond to the NSA’s surveillance program. Absent any other explanation, it is hard not to read the refusal to allow Mr. Trojanov into the United States as the most recent example in a long line of cases where writers have been barred from visiting this country because they possess, and express, disfavored political positions and views.
A member of the German PEN Center, Mr. Trojanov is at least the third member of one of our international affiliates who has been barred from entering the United States since September 2001. As you may know, we have protested these and other cases of ideological exclusion and were plaintiffs in alawsuit challenging the exclusion of Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan. We were encouraged when Professor Ramadan was granted a visa waiver in 2010; that same year, State Department Legal Advisor Harold Koh issued a letter pledging that, in assessing whether to grant visas to writers and scholars, the State Department would “give significant and sympathetic weight to the fact that the primary purpose of the visa applicant’s travel will be to assume a university teaching post, to fulfill speaking engagements, to attend academic conferences, or for similar expressive or educational activities.” It was our hope that these developments signaled a shift in policy away from ideologically-based exclusions and an end to incidents like the one Mr. Trojanov experienced yesterday.
Mr. Trojanov is a respected colleague who has done nothing but express his views both in Germany and abroad, a right protected by international law and enshrined and cherished in our own Constitution. Denying him entry to the United States sends the wrong message about our country’s commitment to this core First Amendment value at a time when this administration is working to repair the damage that a number of post-9/11 policies have done to the United States’ standing as an international leader in protecting and promoting fundamental rights.
We therefore respectfully request that your offices conduct thorough reviews of the decision to deny Mr. Trojanov entry to the United States and take action to renew his visa immediately.
Sincerely,
Peter Godwin, President
Larry Siems
Director, Freedom to Write and International Programs
- See more at: http://www.pen.org/letter/pen-letter-...
A video press conference by the organizers of the Petition Against Mass Surveillance
*Most of it is in German, because, uh, they’re mostly German writers and it’s occurring within Germany, or course. Some of them do choose to speak in English.
*That’s who they are and what they look like.
Geht Auch Anders: Pressekonferenz #stopwatchingus
American translator Isabel Fargo Cole writes about her role in the Petition Against Mass Surveillance
Writers against Mass Surveillance: An International Grassroots Protest
By Isabel Fargo Cole
One month ago today, the anti-surveillance appeal “A Stand for Democracy in the Digital Age” was launched; it has since has been signed by more than 195,000 people on Change.org. Initiated by a small group of European writers and one American translator, it began with a manifesto signed by nearly 600 prominent writers from 83 countries—including six Nobel laureates—and was publicly launched on December 10, 2013.
For me, the American translator, the past two months have been a hectic and exhilarating time. I live in Berlin, where the repercussions of Edward Snowden’s revelations are keenly felt. The ever-fraught “German-American friendship” has been tested by an issue about which Germans are especially sensitive. Still coping with the legacy of two dictatorships and the Cold War, Germans have been passionately discussing privacy and surveillance for decades, and German media coverage of the NSA scandal has been especially critical and sophisticated.
In July 2013, German novelist Juli Zeh wrote an open letter to Angela Merkel protesting her tepid reaction to the NSA affair and demanding that she do more to protect German citizens from surveillance. It was signed by more than sixty other prominent writers—one of the largest joint actions by German intellectuals in years — and subsequently garnered nearly 80,000 more signatures as a petition on Change.org.
The signatures were presented in a “March on the Chancellery” on September 18, shortly before the German election, but Merkel declined to receive the writers, and German concerns about surveillance were ultimately not enough to decide the election against her. (Just a few weeks later — to the schadenfreude of Angela Merkel’s critics — debate was revived by the revelation that Merkel’s cell phone had been tapped by the NSA.)
In early October, Ilija Trojanov, a politically-outspoken German writer who had collaborated with Juli Zeh on a book about surveillance, was denied a visa to enter the US to attend a German Studies conference. The case became a cause célèbre; the US offered no explanation for his visa problems, leading to speculation that the true reason was Trojanov’s criticism of the NSA.
One way or the other, for many it was an especially crass example of something that has rankled with America’s friends abroad: our unwelcoming and often arbitrary treatment of foreign visitors in the post-9/11 era. For me, embarrassed to see my country reduced to Soviet-style tactics, it gave the impetus to finally contact the anti-surveillance writers’ initiative to see if I could contribute to a German-American dialogue on the issue.
Quickly a new organizing group crystallized: Zeh and Trojanov, joined by Josef Haslinger (President of the German PEN Center); Austrian writer Eva Menasse; Janne Teller from Denmark; British, Berlin-based Priya Basil; and me. The focus became international; early on we decided to move beyond Trojanov’s individual case (under pressure from the PEN American Center and others, he was ultimately granted a visa), and make a broader, international statement against surveillance. It would be a more universal version of the summer’s “open letter,” signed by writers around the world.
In drafting the manifesto, we purposely avoided singling out any specific state or spying program — not only to respect sensitivities and avoid, as far as possible, the misuse of our statement for political ends, but from the conviction that the problem of state and corporate surveillance knows no national boundaries.
Then we set about the main task: gathering writers’ signatures. Our aim was to keep the project under wraps until we could go public with an impressive list of signatories, and so we had to work discreetly, through personal networks and web research. It was astonishing how many prominent writers around the world could be reached through the “six degrees of separation” principle. And Words without Borders proved an invaluable resource for identifying writers from smaller countries when we found that our list had gaps; I contacted many of them directly via their websites. We often reflected on the “irony” of the fact that our campaign against internet surveillance was unfolding almost entirely in the digital realm — though several of the initiators knew each other personally, we communicated entirely by e-mail, and our “digital gang” of seven didn’t meet face to face until the press launch on December 10. It was a reminder of how empowering digital communication can be — and how important it is to keep it that way.
Another irony lay in the necessity of approaching hundreds of total strangers, writers, no less, who are notoriously jealous of their privacy. But the response was overwhelmingly positive, even more so as the campaign snowballed. Never in our wildest dreams would we have imagined that we would reach, much less surpass the mark of 500 signatures, or win over six Nobel laureates — Orhan Pamuk, J.M. Coetzee, Elfriede Jelinek, Günter Grass, Tomas Tranströmer, and Nadine Gorimer. Most rewarding of all, perhaps, is the great range of voices, bringing home the dizzying diversity of the world’s literatures, and the personal messages of concern and encouragement we received.
On December 10, 2013, the appeal appeared simultaneously in the major newspapers of more than 30 countries — including the Guardian and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung — as the initiative was launched with a press conference in Berlin. The international media response has been immense, though unfortunately muted in the U.S.
However, we enjoy the support of the PEN American Center, and in the new year will explore ways of taking the project further. In the meantime, the petition can be signed by all on Change.org, and our list of writer signatories is being continually updated on Priya Basil’s Authors for Peace website.
For me the crowning touch came from cartoonist Art Spiegelman, who signed in inimitable fashion.
We’re deeply grateful to all who have supported our initiative and offered their encouragements and criticism. And as the surveillance debate shows no sign of waning, we look forward to what the new year will bring.
Published Jan 10, 2014 Copyright 2014 Isabel Fargo Cole
Read more: http://wordswithoutborders.org/dispat...
January 4, 2014
Web Semantics: American Dialect Society 2013 Words of the Year
*Neologism trackers.
“Nominations are in for the American Dialect Society 2013 Words of the Year
“The American Dialect Society vote for the Word of the Year is happening at the LSA in Minneapolis. The shortlist has been announced and the final vote will be held at 5:30 p.m., Friday, January 3rd (US Central Time). The nominees for various categories can be downloaded here [PDF]. Below, we’ve listed the different categories, the shortlisted words, and our favourites. We’ll update this post with winners when they’re announced.
“MOST USEFUL
“because: introducing a noun or noun phrase (e.g., “because reasons,” “because Internet”)
selfie: a photo taken of oneself, typically with smartphone and shared on social media
slash: used as a coordinating conjunction to mean “or” or “and/or” (e.g., “come and visit slash stay”)
strug(gle) bus: metaphor for a difficult situation, as in “I’m riding the struggle bus.”
Superlinguo pick: we’re big fans of because and slash, but we can’t go past selfie as a local Aussie innovation. We don’t think people are going to stop taking photos of themselves any time soon.
“MOST CREATIVE
bitcoin: an anonymous, decentralized, digital, encrypted currency and payment system
catfish: to misrepresent oneself online, especially as part of a romantic deception
doge: an Internet meme with intentionally ungrammatical exclamations over an image of a dog (typically the Shiba Inu breed)
robo sapiens: a class of robots with human-like intelligence
Superlinguo pick: We’ve already declared our fondness for doge. Much creative, so win.
MOST UNNECESSARY
cronut: a croissant-doughnut hybrid
sharknado: a tornado full of sharks, as featured in the Syfy Channel movie of that name
stack-ranking: a method of ranking employees on a primitive curve (used and abandoned by Microsoft)
Superlinguo pick: Sharknado for pure absurdity – but may go on living in -nado becoming a somewhat productive suffix.
“MOST OUTRAGEOUS
fatberg: large deposit of fat, grease, and solid sewage found in London sewers
revenge porn: vindictive posting of sexually explicit pictures of someone without consent
s(c)hmeat: (blend of sheet + meat): meat product grown in a lab
thigh gap: a space between the thighs, taken by some as a sign of attractivness (also box gap)
underbutt: the underside of buttocks, made visible by certain shorts or underwear
Superlinguo pick: These are all outrageous, but fatberg for the utterly disgusting imagery, or revenge porn for the complete lack of regard for another person.
“MOST EUPHEMISTIC
demised: laid off from employment (used by the bank HSBC)
least untruthful: involving the smallest necessary lie (used by intelligence director James Clapper)
slimdown: reinterpretation of “shutdown” used on Fox News site
Superlinguo pick: Least untruthful wins for subtle slime.
“MOST LIKELY TO SUCCEED
binge-watch: to consume vast quantities of visual entertainment in one sitting
drone: (trans. verb) to target with a drone, typically in a lethal drone strike
glasshole: a person made oblivious by wearing Google Glass, a head-mounted computer
Obamacare: term for the Affordable Care Act that has moved from pejorative to matter-of-fact shorthand
Superlinguo pick: binge-watch has already found a comfortable home in our vocab. It’s already succeeded as far as we’re concerned.
“LEAST LIKELY TO SUCCEED
birthmas: a simultaneous celebration of a birthday and Christmas
Harlem Shake: a video meme featuring comic, convulsive dancing accompanied by excerpt of the song “Harlem Shake” by the DJ Baauer
Thanksgivukkah: confluence of Thanksgiving and the first day of Hanukkah that will not be repeated for another 70,000 years
Superlinguo pick: Thanksgivukkah – we’re not going to need that one for the next 70 millennia.
“MOST PRODUCTIVE (new category)
but
-coin: (from bitcoin) type of cryptocurrency (peercoin, namecoin, dogecoin)
-(el)fie: (from selfie) type of self-portrait (drelfie ‘drunk selfie,’ twofie ‘selfie with two people’)
-shaming: (from slut-shaming) type of public humiliation (fat-shaming, pet-shaming)
-splaining: (from mansplaining) type of condescending explanation (whitesplaining, journosplaining)
-spo: (from thinspo) type of photo or video montage intended to inspire viewers to lose weight or stay fit (fitspo, sportspo)
Superlinguo pick: I just read about Coinye (Kanye’s own cryptocurrency), and of course there’s dogecoin – it looks like -coin really was the productive suffix of late 2013. Having said that, for me there was more of 2013 taken up with -splaining.
“WORD OF THE YEAR
Nominations to be made at final meeting.
Superlinguo pick: Selfie dominated many discussions this year, and is one of the words that is likely to remain in use. For me though there is something disgusting and self-indulgent about cronut that sums up the year 2013.”
January 3, 2014
Design Fiction: Near Future Design process by Artisopensource
*That’s pretty awesome, eh? It reads like Near Future Laboratory was taken over by Bruno Munari.
*Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico have been really busy lately.
(…)
Process
We have formalised a process to perform Near Future Design.
Here are its steps:
▪ Define topic areas of interest
▪ during each cycle/project we define the topics of areas of interest which form our research domain;
▪ these can be contiguous, complementary or contextual, providing continuity, but also the possibility to expand the observation to the indirect aspects of transformation to human societies brought on by our object of research;
▪ the output of this stage is a visual representation of the research domain, along with its extended documentation;
▪ The Future World Map
▪ the map aims to collect information about what is perceived as “possible”, “impossible”, “desired”, “feasible”, “preferred” and “envisioned”;
▪ it has two main areas, regarding the state of the arts and technologies, and the anthropological, ethnographic, psychological and emotional analysis of relevant cultures, communities, groups, organisations and individuals;
▪ the part of the map that takes into account the state of the arts and technologies mainly deals with technical issues concerning the advancement of technologies, the data and information about the relevant contexts, the description of trends and tendencies;
▪ the part of the map that takes into account the anthropological, ethnographic, psychological and emotional analysis deals with the collection of evidence about the ways that human societies shape themselves in the referenced contexts, describing approaches, strategies, tactics, rituals, relationships, networks, emotional expressions, gestures, economies, dynamics, ecosystems and their balances, both in their current state and in their transformation;
▪ in all sections, information is provided for the background information, the socio-technical settings, the possible actors and stakeholders, and providing an expanded context for the stories that are about to be told;
▪ the output of this stage is a visual map, a report and an extensive knowledge base, which can assume different forms, depending on the context and circumstances;
▪ The Story Setup
▪ it is the incipit of the story;
▪ it describes in general terms the future scenarios which we aim to describe, at the same time limiting the scope to explicitly exclude certain areas which will not be examined, and opening up to the domains which will be part of the research;
▪ its output is under the form of a narrative, expressed in visual and textual terms;
▪ The Concept(s)
▪ each possible future examined is described with conceptual (often abstract or diagrammatic sketches) as well as with a draft narrative which highlights its main modalities and which sets up the development of the actual storytelling;
▪ The Story Functions
▪ each story is designed according to a formalised schema (usually the three-acts of Setup, Conflict and Resolution), to provide consistent, solid narratives;
▪ for each story, the basic story functions are created, highlighting the kernel of each narrative, which describe in growing detail the “stories of the chosen future”;
▪ multiple stories can be created for each concept, even following different paths among the identified possibilities;
▪ the output of this stage consists of the list of kernel events for each story, as well as a diagrammatic representation of their relations and of the relations running among the different (and alternative) storylines that are being developed;
▪ The Event Maps
▪ each story is expanded into an Event Map;
▪ each Event Map is a diagram in which the main parts of the stories are grouped into circles, starting from the kernel functions (the main phases of each story) as well as some additional events which might be added to balance the story logic;
▪ satellite events, alternative paths and time-based items are added to the Map to create context, and to enhance the world-building characteristics of this stage;
▪ each story described in this way constitutes a world, giving a full sense of context and of credibility;
▪ the output of this stage is constituted by the Event Maps diagrams and by their documentation sets;
▪ The Story Maps
▪ the Event Maps are transformed into sketches;
▪ the representation in sketch form increases granularity and makes them more concrete;
▪ this phase allows for some iteration with the previous ones, as its concreteness gives immediate evidence about the balance of the stories and about the necessity to re-factor them at one of the previous stages;
▪ the output of this stage is constituted by the sketches and by their documentation;
▪ The Design Fictions
▪ Simulacra
▪ the objective of this phase is to create a simulacrum, a credible, possibly functional, “prototype from the near future” (a pre-totype), through product design and communication design, working across different media;
▪ the objective is “world building”, creating not only “the object” (or service, or idea, or …) but also to create the world around it, for its credibility;
▪ we answer the questions “What would be the world like, if there was object X? What would be in it? How would people behave?”, and we try to implement as much as we can about the answer using different media;
▪ the final result should create a state of “suspended (dis)belief” in which it is impossible (or at least somewhat difficult) to decide if the “object” is real or fake, as there are multiple clues and evidences that point to its existence;
▪ the simulacrum (and its state of suspended dis-belief) is the tool which we use to “shift the perception of the possible”, and to start the global dialogue around the possibility of the transformation of human societies, thus triggering the performative dimension of Near Future Design;
▪ Transmedia Narratives
▪ the output of the Design Fiction phase, thus, is constituted by a set of Transmedia Narratives implementing the simulacrum for the story;
▪ the Transmedia Narrative is a multi-modal storytelling technique which is able to move and combine the effects of multiple media, from physical objects, to websites, urban interventions and more.
Note: the process is derived from the work of Storienteering, from which we have captured and modified the approach to story building, and onto which we have integrated our own version of Design Fictions, Transmedia Narratives, the idea and important role of the Simulacra, and, in the setup phases, the anthropological/ethnographical approach in the definition of the Future World Map, which becomes a Near Future World Map….
Web Semantics: Language as vector space mathematics
*Makes one wonder what it would sound like to simply speak vector space mathematics aloud, rather than bothering with human language.
“Computer science is changing the nature of the translation of words and sentences from one language to another. Anybody who has tried BabelFish or Google Translate will know that they provide useful translation services but ones that are far from perfect.
“The basic idea is to compare a corpus of words in one language with the same corpus of words translated into another. Words and phrases that share similar statistical properties are considered equivalent.
“The problem, of course, is that the initial translations rely on dictionaries that have to be compiled by human experts and this takes significant time and effort.
“Now Tomas Mikolov and a couple of pals at Google in Mountain View have developed a technique that automatically generates dictionaries and phrase tables that convert one language into another.
“The new technique does not rely on versions of the same document in different languages. Instead, it uses data mining techniques to model the structure of a single language and then compares this to the structure of another language.
” ‘This method makes little assumption about the languages, so it can be used to extend and refine dictionaries and translation tables for any language pairs,’ they say.
“The new approach is relatively straightforward. It relies on the notion that every language must describe a similar set of ideas, so the words that do this must also be similar. (((That’s some “notion,” eh Plato?))) For example, most languages will have words for common animals such as cat, dog, cow and so on. And these words are probably used in the same way in sentences such as “a cat is an animal that is smaller than a dog.”
“The same is true of numbers. The image above shows the vector representations of the numbers one to five in English and Spanish and demonstrates how similar they are.
“This is an important clue. The new trick is to represent an entire language using the relationship between its words. The set of all the relationships, the so-called “language space”, can be thought of as a set of vectors that each point from one word to another. And in recent years, linguists have discovered that it is possible to handle these vectors mathematically. For example, the operation ‘king’ – ‘man’ + ‘woman’ results in a vector that is similar to ‘queen’.
“It turns out that different languages share many similarities in this vector space. That means the process of converting one language into another is equivalent to finding the transformation that converts one vector space into the other.
“This turns the problem of translation from one of linguistics into one of mathematics. So the problem for the Google team is to find a way of accurately mapping one vector space onto the other. For this they use a small bilingual dictionary compiled by human experts–comparing same corpus of words in two different languages gives them a ready-made linear transformation that does the trick.
“Having identified this mapping, it is then a simple matter to apply it to the bigger language spaces. Mikolov and co say it works remarkably well. “Despite its simplicity, our method is surprisingly effective: we can achieve almost 90% precision@5 for translation of words between English and Spanish,” they say.
“The method can be used to extend and refine existing dictionaries, and even to spot mistakes in them. Indeed, the Google team do exactly that with an English-Czech dictionary, finding numerous mistakes.
“Finally, the team point out that since the technique makes few assumptions about the languages themselves, it can be used on argots that are entirely unrelated. So while Spanish and English have a common Indo-European history, Mikolov and co show that the new technique also works just as well for pairs of languages that are less closely related, such as English and Vietnamese….”
January 2, 2014
Not enough graphics in the blog lately.
*Lookin’ mighty gray around here lately. No color except for the popup ads.
*These are pretty good, eh?
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